The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

But note how all the machinery of Press control and war-time colleges of propaganda prepared the public mind for the extremely difficult task of the settlement and Treaty-making that lay before it. (It was a task in which everything indicated that, unless great care were taken, public judgment would be so swamped in passion that a workable peace would be impossible.) The more tribal and barbaric aspect of the conception of collective responsibility was fortified by the intensive and deliberate exploitation of atrocities during the years of the War. The atrocities were not just an incident of war-time news: the principal emotions of the struggle came to centre around them. Millions whom the obscure political debate behind the conflict left entirely cold, were profoundly moved by these stories of cruelty and barbarity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was among those who urged their systematic exploitation on that ground, in a Christmas communication to the Times.[88] With reference to stories of German cruelty, he said:—

‘Hate has its uses in war, as the Germans have long discovered. It steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do. So much do they feel this that Germans are constrained to invent all sorts of reasons for hatred against us, who have, in truth, never injured them in any way save that history and geography both place us before them and their ambitions. To nourish hatred they invent every lie against us, and so they attain a certain national solidity....

‘The bestiality of the German nation has given us a driving power which we are not using, and which would be very valuable in this stage of the war. Scatter the facts. Put them in red-hot fashion. Do not preach to the solid south, who need no conversion, but spread the propaganda wherever there are signs of any intrigue—on the Tyne, the Clyde, in the Midlands, above all in Ireland, and French Canada. Let us pay no attention to platitudinous Bishops or gloomy Deans or any other superior people, who preach against retaliation or whole-hearted warfare. We have to win, and we can only win by keeping up the spirit of resolution of our own people.’

Particularly does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle urge that the munition workers—who were, it will be remembered, largely woman—be stimulated by accounts of atrocities:

‘The munition workers have many small vexations to endure, and their nerves get sadly frayed. They need strong elemental emotions to carry them on. Let pictures be made of this and other incidents. Let them be hung in every shop. Let them be distributed thickly in the Sinn Fein districts of Ireland, and in the hot-beds of Socialism and Pacifism in England and Scotland. The Irishman has always been of a most chivalrous nature.’

It is possible that Sinn Fein has now taken to heart this counsel as to the use that may be made of cruelties committed by the enemy in war.

Now there is no reason to doubt the truth of atrocities, whether they concern the horrible ill-treatment of prisoners in war-time of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes, or the burning alive of negro women in peace time in Texas and Alabama, or the flogging of women in India, or reprisals by British soldiers in Ireland, or by Red Russians against White and White against Red. Every story may be true. And if each side told the whole truth, instead of a part of it, these atrocities would help us towards an understanding of this complex nature of ours. But we never do tell the whole truth. Always in war-time does each side leave out two things essential to the truth: the good done by the enemy and the evil done by ourselves. If that elementary condition of truth were fulfilled, these pictures of cruelty, bestiality, obscenity, rape, sadism, sheer ferocity, might possibly tell us this: ‘There is the primeval tiger in us; man’s history—and especially the history of his wars—is full of these warnings of the depths to which he can descend. Those ten thousand men and women of pure English stock gloating over the helpless prisoners whom they are slowly roasting alive, are not normally savages.[89] Most of them are kindly and decent folk. These stories of the September massacres of the Terror no more prove French nature to be depraved than the history of the Inquisition, or of Ireland or India, proves Spanish or British nature to be depraved.’

But the truth is never so told. It was not so told during the War. Day after day, month after month, we got these selected stories. In the Press, in the cinemas, in Church services, they were related to us. The message the atrocity carried was not: here is a picture of what human nature is capable of; let us be on our guard that nothing similar marks our history. That was neither the intention nor the result of propaganda. It said in effect and was intended to say:—

‘This lecherous brute abusing a woman is a picture of Germany. All Germans are like that; and no people but Germans are like that. That sort of thing never happens in other armies; cruelty, vengeance, and blood-lust are unknown in the Allied forces. That is why we are at war. Remember this at the peace table.’

That falsehood was conveyed by what the Press and the cinema systematically left out. While they told us of every vile thing done by the enemy, they told us of not one act of kindness or mercy among all those hundred million during the years of war.