While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

With the second battle of the Marne even a civilian knew that it was a matter of months or weeks before the Germans capitulated. Casualties would still be recorded; agony would be endured, uncertainty would continue; there might be a final berserk outburst on sea and land, but ultimately the German government would sue for peace. No one was surprised when the "fourteen points" were flashed on the sky from Washington; no one was surprised when the Germans saw in the west the grey, hopeless light which was yet the only light that they could ever hope to see. Capitulations poured in until some of the onlookers, in the spirit of Horace Walpole, searched eagerly through their papers of a morning to see which new enemy had surrendered.

And yet, when the maroons burst the stillness of London at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, all were surprised; not by the fact of peace but by the imponderable significance of peace. Did this ear-splitting salvo mean one last raid by every aeroplane in the German fleet, an auto-da-fé which should at least achieve that, when peace was negotiated, it would be elsewhere than in the smoking, brain-splashed ruins of a shattered London? In late afterthought, with an air of discovery and a dread of revealing emotion, every one decided that the Germans must have accepted the armistice terms.

Ten minutes later the government departments were belched forth on holiday. Along the Processional Avenue moved slowly a double line of cars and taxis, packed inside and out and above with atoms of a vast concourse infected by a lust for moving from any one place to any other. Beyond this, no one knew what to do. The king had already spoken from a window of Buckingham Palace. Superficially it was all a little boring; and, below the deliberately suave, unemotional surface, all knew that the day was so tremendous that none dared look at it yet. A child-typist from a Government-office hut rushed into the Mall, white-faced, bareheaded and delirious. "The war's over! Now daddy'll come home!" By her side a woman winced and looked, groping after sympathy, for someone who, like herself, knew that the armistice had come too late. Throughout the world there were houses in which the glory of peace would be turned to mourning by news of a son who had been killed in the last few hours of fighting: the roll of honour is not yet complete; and, more than two years after the armistice, there are still men in the blue jackets and trousers of their hospital.

III

With the armistice another chapter would seem to open; but, in spite of the tangible fact of victory which should have divided all that came before from all that came after, the abrupt transition to peace was effected in the psychological atmosphere produced by the last months of war. Had this not been so, there would have been no purpose in making more than a passing reference to the war insanity which followed the dread and despair of the March offensive; unhappily for the peace of the world and for all hopes of a universal spirit, the Versailles conference was inspired by frenzied memories of the mad election of December 1918 and the mad election translated into actuality and crystallised that mood of madness whereof a mental pathologist would have said that epidemic hysteria was abroad, others—in the words of an old chronicler—that "Christ and His angels slept."

Public degradation in England has scored many good totals; in the vulgar abuse showered upon O'Connell, in the salacious persecution of Stead, in periodic waves of insensate arrogance, cruelty, ignorance and injustice; the English have had their South African war, their yellow labour and their persecution of conscientious objectors to remind the world that, whatever their pretensions, they are still human. The personal experience of the oldest and the historical reading of the most erudite would have difficulty in finding a greater collective degradation than was reached in the public attitude, during the last months of the war, to what is known as the "Pemberton-Billing case."

The slightest reference may unprison the foul gases of that trial; it is best to regard it as the necessary result of a nervous and physical strain too great to be borne. Day after day, in an English court of law, before a British jury and the senior judge of the King's Bench Division there was recited a tale of intrigue and debauchery from which the librettist of a melodrama would have turned away in unbelief and the alienist in disgust. Honoured names were introduced as pegs for the charge of treason and sexual perversion; the educational influence of the press was exerted to secure that a hundred thousand villages should be made acquainted with the bewildering nomenclature of infamous vices. When the original newspaper charges were met with a countercharge of criminal libel, the direction of the judge and the intelligence of a British jury resulted in a verdict of "Not Guilty." And there was cheering in court and in the street. And some people believed that, as the prisoner had been acquitted, the charges must be true. After three years we can look back on judge and jury, prisoner and public with less disgust than pity; to the psychologist the Pemberton-Billing trial is a reminder that he must be on his guard whenever he hears stereotyped phrases about the political instinct, the justice and sanity, still more the chivalry of the English. Not even as a political manœuvre was it successful.

The "low intelligence and high credulity"[45] of a public which, periodically and in the last resort, is entrusted with an imperial mission among several hundred millions of people may be measured by the belief accorded to a single allegation. In the course of the trial frequent reference was made to a "black book," then romantically entrusted to the blackmailing custody of Prince Wilhelm of Wied, in which were recorded the names of at least 47,000 people who occupied some prominent position in English society and who lay, by reason of their vices, at the mercy of the first enemy who threatened them. Any one whose work has taken him among books, any one who has had occasion to consult a card-index, would know that it requires a bulky catalogue to print, even in "brilliant," 47,000 names with enough crimesheet to each to ensure that its bearer could be hushed or drummed out of public life. The book, whatever its size, was filled with matter so confidential that, when a taste of its contents was to be offered to an officer who was conveniently dead before the case came to trial, it had to be carried beyond the reach of spies and eavesdroppers and laid bare under the sky of the English countryside; there was no room, there was no open space in London where its guilty secrets could be revealed. The limits of a novelist's daring are more quickly reached than those of a jury's simple faith.

This case, with its startling blend of melodrama and pruriency, wounded and injured in greater or lesser degree everyone whose name the learned judge tolerantly allowed to be mentioned. That, perhaps, was the fortune of law as administered, with all the responsibility and decorum attaching to his great office, by Mr. Justice Darling. What was said really does not matter so much as that thousands of people believed it to be true. By this test, if it were indeed ever needed, a big part of the British public shewed itself to be as ignorant, suspicious, cruel and base-minded as any big part of any other public, including that which had persecuted Dreyfus—to the righteous indignation of the equitable English. And, though perhaps the ignorance and suspicion, the base-mindedness and cruelty were the after-result of fear, from which the Englishman suffers as much as any one else, the public temper at the time of the Pemberton-Billing trial—not wholly unlike the temper of a mob in a southern state when a negro is being lynched—survived when fear had been laid to rest: ignorance and suspicion, fear, revenge and greed provided the atmosphere of the conference in which the statesmen of the world met together to contrive a peace which should end war.

It was in the power of the prime minister to allay these evil passions or to stimulate them. With the unbounded prestige that attaches to the head of any government still in office at the end of a long war, he could have united all parties in his struggle for a great and durable peace not less certainly than he had united them in his prosecution of the war; as they had responded to every demand in war, so they would have made every sacrifice for peace; as he had curbed their impatience and lightened their despondency, so he could check their greed and set an ideal before their eyes. Mr. Lloyd George saw the light and turned his back upon it. With all an old demagogue's art in playing on popular passion, he outbid the wildest and outdid the most sanguinary: the cry for indemnities and the howl for revenge were drowned in his own shouted promise that England should have her fill of blood and gold if she would but return him to power.