So it ended, with a kind of stupefaction in the minds of the soldiers. It was an enormous relief, followed by a kind of lassitude of body and spirit. Ended at last! Incredible! At the front on the day of armistice there was no wild exultation, except in a few messes here and there behind the lines. The men who had fought through it, or through enough of it to have been soaked in its dirt, were too tired to cheer or sing or shout because peace had come. Peace! What did that mean? Civilian life again? Impossible to readjust one’s mind to that. Impossible to go home and pick up the old threads of life as though this Thing had not happened. They were different men. Their minds had been seared by dreadful experience. Now that peace had come after that long strain something snapped in them.
Many of them had a curiously dead feeling at first. They thought back to all the things they had seen and done and suffered, and remembered the old comrades who had fallen on the way. Perhaps they were the lucky ones, those who lay dead, especially those who had died before disillusion and spiritual revolt against this infernal business. A war for civilisation?... Civilisation had been outraged by its universal crime. A war against militarism? Militarism had been enthroned in England and France. Liberty, free speech, truth itself, had been smashed by military orders and discipline over the bodies and souls of men. A war against the “Huns?” Poor old Fritz! Poor bloody old Fritz! Not such a bad sort after all, man for man and mass for mass. They had put up a wonderful fight. The glory of victory? Well, it had left the world in a mess of ruin, and the best had died. What would come out of this victory? What reward for the men who had fought, or for any nation? The profiteers had done very well out of war. The Generals had rows of ribbons on their breasts. Youth had perished; the finest and noblest. Civilisation had been saved? To Hell with a civilisation which had allowed this kind of thing! No, when peace came, there were millions of men who did not rejoice much, because they were sick and tired and all enthusiasm was dead within them. They were like convicts after long years of hard labour standing at the prison gates open to them with liberty and life beyond. What’s the good of life to men whose spirit has been sapped, or of liberty to men deprived of it so long they were almost afraid of it? Strange, conflicting emotions, hardly to be analysed, tore at men’s hearts on the night of armistice. Shipwrecked men do not cheer when the storm abates and the bodies of their dead comrades float behind them. Nor did our men along the front where it was very quiet that day after a bugle here and there sounded the “Cease fire!” and the guns were silenced at last. Peace!... Good God!
II.—THE UNCERTAIN PEACE
Ten years after.... The memory of the war days is fading from the mind of the world. The ten million dead lie in their graves, but life goes marching on. Self-preservation, vital interests, new and exciting problems, the human whirligig, are too absorbing for a continual hark-back to the thought of that mortality. We are no longer conscious of any gap in the ranks of youth, torn out by the machinery of destruction. We do not realise the loss of all that spirit, genius, activity and blood, except in private remembrance of some dead boy whose portrait in uniform stands on the mantelshelf. A new generation of youth has grown up since the beginning of the war. Boys of ten at that time of history are now twenty, and not much interested in that old tale. Girls who were twelve are now mothers of babes. The war! Bother the war! Let’s forget it and get on with life. In that youth is right. It is not in its nature nor in moral health to dwell on morbid memories. But it is hard on those whose service is forgotten—so soon. In England—ten years after—there are still 58,000 wounded soldiers in the hospitals—and in France great numbers more; but they are hidden away, as a painful secret of things that happened. Only now and again the sight of their hospital blue in some quiet country lane, near their hiding places, shocks one with a sharp stab of remorse. We had forgotten all that. We hate to be reminded of it.
Fading Memories
Even the men who fought through those years seldom speak of their experience. It is fading out of their own minds, though it seemed unforgettable. They are forgetting the names of the villages in France and Flanders where they were billeted, or where they fought, or where they passed a hundred times with their guns and transport under shell fire. Good heavens!—don’t you remember?—that place where the waggons were “pasted,” where the Sergeant-Major was blown to bits, where old Dick got his “Blighty” wound? No. Something has passed a sponge across those tablets of memory—things that happened afterwards. Now and again at Divisional banquets officers try to revive the spirit of those days and exchange yarns about trench warfare and days of battle. It is queer how they remember only the jokes, the laughable things, the comradeship, the thrill. The horror has passed.
Something else has passed; the comradeship itself, between officers and men, between all classes united for a time in common sacrifice and service, annihilating all differences of rank and social prejudice and wealth at the beginning of the war. It seemed then as though nothing could ever again build up those barriers of caste. The muddiest, dirtiest, commonest soldier from the slums or the factories or the fields was a hero before whom great ladies were eager to kneel in devotion and love, to cut away his blood-stained clothes, to dress his wounds. In the canteens the pretty ladies slaved like drudges to give cocoa or any comfort to “the boys” from the front. In the trenches or in ruins under shell fire young officers wrote home about their men: “They’re too splendid for words!... I am proud to command such a topping crowd.... They make me feel ashamed of things I used to think about the working man. There is nothing too good for them.” The British Government thought so too, and promised them great rewards—“homes for heroes,” good wages for good work, “a world safe for democracy.”
The Barriers of Class
Ten years after, the classes have fallen apart again. The old hostilities between Capital and Labour have been revived with increasing bitterness in many minds. The old barriers have been rebuilt in many countries. For a time, even in England, there was a revolutionary spirit among the men who had served, and a sense of fear and hostility against those who had said that nothing was too good for them. “Our heroes” became very quickly “those damned Socialists,” or those “dirty dogs” who are never satisfied, or those lazy scoundrels who would rather live on the “dole” than take an honest job. The men who had saved England were suspected of plotting for her overthrow, subsidised by Russian money and seduced by the propaganda of a secret society inspired by the spirit of Anti-Christ.
Ten years after the closing up of ranks, the surrender of self interest, and a spiritual union, England is again seething with strikes, industrial conflict, political passion, and class consciousness. There are still a million and a quarter unemployed officially registered in Great Britain, and half a million more not on the registers and worse off. Instead of “homes for heroes” the working people in the great cities are shamefully overcrowded. In the agricultural districts of England young men who fought in the Last Crusade and marched with Allenby to Jerusalem, or those boys who left their fields in ’14 for the dirty ditches in Flanders—for England’s sake—are getting twenty-five shillings a week, upon which a single man can hardly live and a married man must starve. And ten years after they poured out their blood and treasure without a grudge, without reservation, first in the field and last out of it, the old “quality” of England or their younger sons are selling up their old houses to pay taxes which are extinguishing them as a class, depriving them of their old power and prerogatives, and changing the social structure of the nation by an economic revolution which is almost accomplished. On both sides there is bitterness, a sense of injustice, and an utter disillusion with the results of victory.