I verily believe that without our chronicles the spirit of the nation would not have maintained its greatness of endeavor and sacrifice. There are some who hold that to be the worst accusation against us. They charge us with having bolstered up the spirit of hatred and made a quicker and a better peace impossible. I do not plead guilty to that, for, from first to last no word of hate slipped into my narrative, and my pictures of war did not hide the agony of reality nor the price of victory.
XXI
The coming of Peace, after four and a half years of a world in conflict, was as great a strain to the civilized mind as the outbreak of war. Indeed, I think it was more tragic in its effect upon the mentality and moral character of the peoples who had been strained to the uttermost.
The sudden relaxation left them limp, purposeless, and unstrung. A sense of the ghastly futility of the horrible massacre in Europe overwhelmed multitudes of men and women who had exerted the last vibration of spiritual energy for the sake of victory, now that all was over, and the cost was counted. The loss of the men they had loved seemed light and tolerable to the soul while the struggle continued and the spirit of sacrifice was still at fever heat, but in the coldness which settled upon the world after that fever was spent, and in homes which returned to normal ways of life, after the home-coming of the Armies, the absence of the breadwinner or the unforgotten son, was felt with a sharper and more dreadful anguish. A great sadness and spirit of disillusion overwhelmed the nations which had been victorious, even more than those defeated. What was this victory? What was its worth, with such visible tracks of ruin and death in all nations exhausted by the struggle?
As a journalist again, back to Fleet Street, in civil clothes, which felt strange after khaki and Sam Brown belts, I found that my new little assignment in life was to study the effects of the war which I had helped to record, and to analyze the character and state of European peoples, including my own, as they had been changed by that tremendous upheaval.
Fleet Street itself had changed during the war. In spite of the severity of the censorship under the Defense of the Realm Act, and the almost slavish obedience of the press to its dictates, the newspaper proprietors had risen in social rank and power, and newspaper offices which had once been the shabby tenements of social outcasts—the inhabitants of “Grub Street”—were now strewn with coronets and the insignia of nobility. Fleet Street had not only become respectable. It had become the highway to the House of Lords.
The Harmsworth family had become ennobled to all but the highest grade in the peerage, this side of Dukedom. As chief propagandist, the man I had first met as Sir Alfred Harmsworth (when General Booth forced me to my knees and prayed for him!) was now Viscount, with his brother Harold as Lord Rothermere. He aspired to the dictatorship of England through the power of the press, and, but for one slight miscalculation, would have been dictator.
That miscalculation was the growing disbelief of the British public in anything they read in the press. The false accounts of air raids (when the public knew the truth of their own losses), such incidents as the press campaign against Kitchener, and that ridiculous over-optimism, the wildly false assurances of military writers (I was not one of them) when things were going worst in the war, had undermined the faith of the nation in the honesty of their newspapers. Nevertheless, the power of men like Northcliffe was enormous in the political sphere, and Cabinet Ministers and members of Parliament acknowledged their claims.