"If Germany threw up the sponge to-morrow!" George began one night, "what should we have gained? The flower of our manhood's been destroyed, we're smashed financially, the money market of the world has shifted to New York, and we shall spend the rest of our days paying the interest on our debt, trying to repair the damage.... I don't care to think of the labour troubles we're going to have when we try to get back to peace-time rates of wages or when the men find that their jobs have been done as well or better in their absence by women. And what's it all for? I get most infernally sceptical at times. As poor Beresford used to prove with chapter and verse, in every war of this kind there's always been a school of optimists to say that such a scourge will never be seen again. And it always is.... As for social or moral elevation, with the spirit of lynch-law and the methods of the press-gang.... It'll all be the same!"
"It can't be quite the same after so universal a shake-up," I objected.
George shook his head wisely.
"In the early days, when men of our class were enlisting as privates, even lately, when rankers were getting commissions, I used to think that some of our social angles would be rubbed off, but just you have five minutes' talk with an Old Army officer about the 'temporary gentlemen' in his battalion, who've been fighting side by side with him, mark you! While you're on the desert island, your Admirable Crichton may come to the top, but once get him back in London with a drawing-room and a servants' hall!... I agree in theory with people like Raney, who say we must get value for the lives we're spending, but I can't do it! Nobody can do it. The men out there who are paying the price want to forget about the whole thing, they'll come home at the end as they come home now on leave, to attend to their own affairs, to enjoy themselves, to make up for lost time and recapture the years they've wasted in the trenches. And the people who've never been out have forgotten all the old good resolutions; they're as tired of the war as the soldiers, tired of drudgery, discomfort, economising; they want to forget it and enjoy themselves and get back to the old life. Frankly, Stornaway, it still makes you sick to hear of the way our prisoners are treated and that sort of thing, but you don't any longer regard this war as a crusade, do you? There's too much eighteenth-century diplomacy about it, too many compensations, too much balance of power. It was one thing to send a forlorn hope to Belgium, one thing to say that the German military machine must be broken, but when it comes to conscribing men to coerce Greece or win Constantinople for Russia ... I wonder when the accursed things will end."
Bertrand roused himself to light a fresh cigar. From the angle at which he held it in his mouth, no less than from the way that he screwed up his eyes and peered into the shadows of the rafters, I prepared myself for a paradoxical and probably pretentious generalisation.
"I sometimes feel that war is the new expression of our national activity," he began. "Don't the Rolls-Royce people build only for the Government? Well, that's typical of a gigantic state-socialism which has grown up in a night; you can't build a house or buy a suit of clothes until war-needs have been satisfied. Production, transport, distribution have all been taken over; you've an army of controllers directing the machine; and in time we shall dress as we're told, eat the quantity of food we're allowed, move here and there, do this and that, as we're ordered. At one age we shall be drafted into the army, at another we shall be knocked on the head to save feeding; there'll be birth-rate bonuses amounting to state-subsidised polygamy.... Everything that a man did in the old days for his own benefit or amusement,—his daily task, his career, his material output, his accumulation of wealth, his pioneer-work in developing and improving the world, his family-life, even—will now be directed to feeding the war. I don't complain; we're united in a labour gang of forty million souls, and our job is to turn out a better war than Germany. I don't see where it's going to stop and I don't see who's going to stop it. Not the soldiers, because they're shot if they disobey an order; not the Government, because they're the Board of Directors."
"You'll only stop it by a general strike at home," George answered reflectively.
Bertrand spread out his hands with a gesture of sweet reasonableness.
"And who's going to carry through a general strike? The people with small fixed incomes can't make themselves heard, and, for all the rise in prices, your industrial wage-earner has never been so prosperous; besides, whenever prices become too high, the Government steps in and controls them, subsidises producers. Again, it's not pleasant to be told that your sons and brothers are being killed because you won't turn out shells."
George wriggled his shoulder-blades impatiently.