Now It Can Be Told

by Philip Gibbs

When not put upon their defense by accusations against the whole Fatherland, the German people, as far as I could tell by talking with a few of them, and by those letters which fell into our hands, revolted in spirit against the monstrous futility and idiocy of the war, and were convinced in their souls that its origin lay in the greed and pride of the governing classes of all nations, who had used men's bodies as counters in a devil's game. That view was expressed in the signboards put above the parapet, “We're all fools: let's all go home”; and in that letter by the woman who wrote:

“For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones, the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very eyes... All soldiers—friend and foe—ought to throw down their weapons and go on strike, so that this war, which enslaves the people more than ever, may cease.”

It is that view, terrible in its simplicity, which may cause a more passionate revolution in Germany when the people awaken from their stupor. It was that view which led to the Russian Revolution and to Bolshevism. It is the suspicion which is creeping into the brains of British working-men and making them threaten to strike against any adventure of war, like that in Russia, which seems to them (unless proved otherwise) on behalf of the “gilded ones” and for the enslavement of the peoples.

Not to face that truth is to deny the passionate convictions of masses of men in Europe. That is one key to the heart of the revolutionary movement which is surging beneath the surface of our European state. It is a the belief of many brooding minds that almost as great as the direct guilt of the German war lords was the guilt of the whole political society of Europe, whose secret diplomacy (unrevealed to the peoples) was based upon hatred and fear and rivalry, in play for imperial power and the world's markets, as common folk play dominoes for penny points, and risking the lives of common folk in a gamble for enormous stakes of territory, imperial prestige, the personal vanity of politicians, the vast private gain of trusts and profiteers. To keep the living counters quiet, to make them jump into the pool of their own free will at the word “Go,” the statesmen, diplomats, trusts, and profiteers debauch the name of patriotism, raise the watchword of liberty, and play upon the ignorance of the mob easily, skillfully, by inciting them to race hatred, by inflaming the brute-passion in them, and by concocting a terrible mixture of false idealism and self-interest, so that simple minds quick to respond to sentiment, as well as those quick to hear the call of the beast, rally shoulder to shoulder and march to the battlegrounds under the spell of that potion. Some go with a noble sense of sacrifice, some with blood-lust in their hearts, most with the herd-instinct following the lead, little knowing that they are but the pawns of a game which is being played behind closed doors by the great gamblers in the courts and Foreign Offices, and committee-rooms, and counting-houses, of the political casinos in Europe.

I have heard the expression of this view from soldiers during the war and since the war, at street-corners, in tram-cars, and in conversations with railway men, mechanics, policemen, and others who were soldiers a year ago, or stay-at-homes, thinking hard over the meaning of the war. I am certain that millions of men are thinking these things, because I found the track of those common thoughts, crude, simple, dangerous, among Canadian soldiers crossing the Atlantic, in Canadian towns, and in the United States, as I had begun to see the trail of them far back in the early days of the war when I moved among French soldiers, Belgian soldiers, and our own men.

My own belief is not so simple as that. I do not divorce all peoples from their governments as victims of a subtle tyranny devised by statesmen and diplomats of diabolical cunning, and by financial magnates ready to exploit human life for greater gains. I see the evil which led to the crime of the war and to the crimes of the peace with deep-spread roots to the very foundation of human society. The fear of statesmen, upon which all international relations were based, was in the hearts of peoples. France was afraid of Germany and screwed up her military service, her war preparations, to the limit of national endurance, the majority of the people of France accepting the burden as inevitable and right. Because of her fear of Germany France made her alliance with Russian Czardom, her entente cordiale with Imperial England, and the French people poured their money into Russian loans as a life insurance against the German menace. French statesmen knew that their diplomacy was supported by the majority of the people by their ignorance as well as by their knowledge.

So it was in Germany. The spell-words of the German war lords expressed the popular sentiment of the German people, which was largely influenced by the fear of Russia in alliance with France, by fear and envy of the British Empire and England's sea-power, and by the faith that Germany must break through that hostile combination at all costs in order to fulfil the high destiny which was marked out for her, as she thought, by the genius and industry of her people. The greed of the “bloated aristocrats” was only on a bigger scale than the greed of the small shopkeepers. The desire to capture new markets belonged not only to statesmen, but to commercial travelers. The German peasant believed as much in the might of the German armies as Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The brutality of German generals was not worse than that of the Unteroffizier or the foreman of works.

In England there was no traditional hatred of Germany, but for some years distrust and suspicions, which had been vented in the newspapers, with taunts and challenges, stinging the pride of Germans and playing into the hands of the Junker caste.

Our war psychology was different from that of our allies because of our island position and our faith in seapower which had made us immune from the fear of invasion. It took some time to awaken the people to a sense of real peril and of personal menace to their hearths and homes. To the very end masses of English folk believed that we were fighting for the rescue of other peoples—Belgian, French, Serbian, Rumanian—and not for the continuance of our imperial power.

The official propaganda, the words and actions of British statesmen, did actually express the conscious and subconscious psychology of the multitude. The call to the old watchwords of national pride and imperial might thrilled the soul of a people of proud tradition in sea—battles and land-battles. Appeals for the rescue of “the little nations” struck old chords of chivalry and sentiment—though with a strange lack of logic and sincerity Irish demand for self-government was unheeded. Base passions as well as noble instincts were stirred easily. Greedy was the appetite of the mob for atrocity tales. The more revolting they were the quicker they were swallowed. The foul absurdity of the “corpse-factory” was not rejected any more than the tale of the “crucified Canadian” (disproved by our own G.H.Q.) or the cutting off of children's hands and women's breasts, for which I could find no evidence from the only British ambulances working in the districts where such horrors were reported. Spy-mania flourished in mean streets, German music was banned in English drawing-rooms. Preachers and professors denied any quality of virtue or genius to German poets, philosophers, scientists, or scholars. A critical weighing of evidence was regarded as pro-Germanism and lack of patriotism. Truth was delivered bound to passion. Hatred at home, inspired largely by feminine hysteria and official propaganda, reached such heights that when fighting-men came back on leave their refusal to say much against their enemy, their straightforward assertions that Fritz was not so black as he was painted, that he fought bravely, died gamely, and in the prison-camps was well-mannered, decent, industrious, good-natured, were heard with shocked silence by mothers and sisters who could only excuse this absence of hate on the score of war-weariness.