It was in these years of change and upheaval that the men of the vanished generation served their apprenticeship and came to first grips with life. Their fathers and grandfathers, seeing England riven by a new political dispensation, had acquiesced grudgingly in the transference of power without seeking to understand the aspirations of the newly emancipated millions and without striving to create a new and united community. The fact of social, economic and racial antagonism, impressed upon them as the legacy of the French revolution by a hundred years of riots, strikes and wars, came to be buttressed in the middle of the century by a biological doctrine which taught that antagonism of beast to beast and of man to man, of class to class and of creed to creed, of nation to nation and of hunger, cold and pestilence to all was an eternal and ineluctable decree of nature. It was easier to repeat half-comprehended phrases about a struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest than to attack the disorder which is the ineluctable and eternal result of antagonism.
After a hundred years of ill-will and dissension, a new generation arose to protest against the confusion of this endless antagonism. Impatience with disorder, hatred of ugliness and preoccupation with the government of man by man—a normal part of youth's mental equipment—were stimulated in the dawn of the twentieth century by the literary challenge of each year: in play after play Bernard Shaw was attacking some social abuse with the penetration of an old controversialist, the ferocity of a fanatic and the wit of an Irishman; in novel after novel H. G. Wells cried out on the slovenly thinking and spiritual laziness which barred beauty and order from life; and in play after play and novel after novel John Galsworthy pleaded for gentleness and explored with unanswerable questions the place where a civic conscience should have been. At no time since the days of the philosophes has literature been so much engrossed with the shortcomings of civilisation; at no time has it appealed so fervently nor experimented so widely. The waking dream of beauty was reinforced more than ever before by a sense of personal responsibility; and a higher proportion of the young men from twenty-two to twenty-seven were waiting only until they were equipped to undertake it. With a background of new ethical standards and of new political ideals, in an atmosphere of artistic experiment and of social revolt, amid a shifting social population and an unceasing redistribution of wealth, under the menace of war abroad and of revolution at home, they first measured their strength against the difficulties of the career that each had chosen.
Between 1909 and 1914 a few married; but, as the necessity for earning a living was their first concern in those days, the majority were for the present as much debarred from matrimony as from public life. A few went utterly to pieces, ranging in their downfall from the squalor of touting among their friends for insignificant loans to the supreme waste of suicide. One or two flashed meteorically to the highest plane of their professions. The rest followed an average course and in diplomacy or in the civil service, in the army or in holy orders, in commerce or at the bar, in medicine or in journalism worked with what patience they could muster through the unproductive years of early plodding. By 1914 the original fortunate three or four who had entered public life as soon as they came down from Oxford were reinforced by a dozen more who had made enough progress in five years to fight an election or at least to nurse a constituency; and five years were long enough to enable the rest to decide whether they had made wise choice of a career. Some of those who had been called to the bar now abandoned their wearisome inactivity in order to make a livelihood in the City; the young soldiers who had been sent into the army to be kept out of mischief now assumed that they had reached years of discretion and resigned their commissions; and any one who had obstinately cherished the ambition of a literary life might well, after five years, be deemed incurable.
It was the fate characteristic of nearly all that generation that, as their training neared completion, they were called away for ever from the work for which they had been trained and lost to the peaceful service of mankind. By 1914 their seniors had completed their apprenticeship and made their transition; though their uprooting was greater, they had at least found for a moment their place in the uncaring void. The apprenticeship of their juniors had not yet begun: they passed from school or university to their war-service, and the survivors postponed until the end of the war their practical preparation for civic life. This is not to say that one is to be envied more than another; in every country at the outbreak of every war, one generation is more violently dislocated than the rest; when all loss of life is waste of a nation's resources, it may be felt that the most grievous waste is among those who have completed their scholastic education and prepared themselves for work which they can never fulfil. "Childhood makes the instrument, youth tunes the strings, and early manhood plays the melody." The vanished generation never played upon the instrument; it was hardly tuned before it was struck to the ground, and music of another kind was heard.
It is useless to speculate how much the loss has cost humanity; to the men in the middle twenties at least as much as to the men of any age it was left to pay for the madness of the world and the crimes of its rulers. They were at the summit of their physical condition; their spirit and training carried them unfalteringly into the war; and, enrolling themselves in the first days, they supported the chief burden of a game in which the odds lengthened against them with every hour of immunity. A strange marching-song sent them to their death: strident and shrill cries of impatience with everything, revolt against everything; catches of crooning waltz and clattering rag-time to bring back memories and to twist hearts; the craving for excitement and the whimper of fretfulness; the sigh of a world in despair heard in the silent pause of mankind bewildered; all blended their notes to a thunder of confusion, banishing thought. The onlookers cried in rival tumult that this, at all events, would be the last war in history; and an echo of their consoling philosophy carried to the departing troops and, in the belief that this was a war to end war, furnished them at last with a ready explanation of their going.
A few perhaps wondered why war could only be ended by war and whether this was indeed the last war; hardly any one risked the odium of penetrating official propaganda in order to enquire why war had been made possible, though some liberals searched their hearts to discover how the historic peace-party of Great Britain, elected on other issues and periodically fed on professions of good-will, had been persuaded in a day to honour, by payment in flesh and blood, international obligations whose existence the government had more than once denied.
CHAPTER V
THE FRINGE OF POLITICS