“You were asking if people in England were talking the same kind of rot,” Hornbeck reminded me.
Then we sat silent as he pieced together this amazing election and rehearsed the battle-cries on which it had been won. As he read, I saw O’Rane rising slowly and facing north with one hand outstretched for an instant towards the bleeding and exhausted world on the far side of our sheltering mountains: from Denmark to Italy, from Ireland to Siberia, two continents were still fighting for life because one man, nearly five years before, had flung bombs at another.
“It’ll take years to undo this,” he muttered.
Hornbeck read remorselessly on.
“The Germans themselves couldn’t improve on it,” he commented at the end.
“But we can! We must!,” O’Rane cried. “In Heaven’s name . . . We went into this to secure the rights of small nations to a free existence; no one seems to care whether the big nations have a free existence or not! Could France and England follow out their destinies in the days when we lived under the shadow of this war? Can they do it now, when Europe is being sown with dragon’s teeth?”
None answered him; but, as I waded later through the rhetoric of the election, I felt something of the helplessness that came over me four and a half years earlier, when one telegram after another shewed us that peace was slipping momentarily farther from our reach. The old dispensation could not avert war and could not make war; was this the third panel of my triptych and should we have to admit that the old dispensation could not make peace?
We should all of us, I suppose, have been less thrown off our balance, if we had been given the least warning how the election was being conducted. Writing four years afterwards, I seem to be claiming an exceptional wisdom for our criticism at this time: section by section, the electorate that backed the 1918 coalition has withdrawn its support, though my old liberal colleagues made no sign of protest at the time. Little by little, the government itself swallowed its own rash words. The wildest fire-eater says now what Hornbeck and Laurence, O’Rane and I—a sufficiently heterogeneous group!—were saying in the last days of December four years ago. Our views were an accident of geography, for we were living in a political vacuum; an accident of history, too, for in our serious moments we based our expectations on the settlement of Vienna, believing that we in our generation were neither less magnanimous nor more insane than the contemporaries of Castlereagh.
“If this is to be the atmosphere of the peace conference . . .” Hornbeck muttered.
“These,” I reminded O’Rane, “are the people you’re going to educate up to a civic conscience.”