Thomas Hardy: The Dynasts.
I
On the morrow of the armistice the population of the emergency offices was sharply divided into those who wished to leave, but were required to stay, and those who wished to stay, but were required to leave. Though the raising of the blockade was almost automatic, the blockade departments took time to wind up; and the temporary officer was not infrequently demobilised several months before the temporary civil servant was released.
These days of transition were a time of endless comings and goings, of unexpected returns and abrupt departures. Men who were thought to be dead reappeared suddenly from East and West Africa, from Palestine and India, demanding news of their scattered and decimated friends; women who had been lost to view for nearly five years emerged from hospitals, offices and factories; and all of a stricken generation who had survived set themselves once more to make a career or a livelihood. By now they were in age nearer thirty-five than twenty-five, uprooted and unsettled by the war, with greater experience and smaller hope, more resignation and less resiliency. The time ahead of them was ten years shorter than when they came down from their universities; many had married and begotten children; they could not long afford to wait; their "common problem" was no longer
"to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,—but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to" their "means; a very different thing!"
By an oversight, excusable enough in hard-driven ministers who could not be expected to think of everything, no provision had been made by the government to secure that every soldier on leaving the army should be at least no worse off than when he joined it, at the risk of his life, to fight in defence of his country. Machinery was indeed erected for liberating first in order those for whom work was waiting; officers in search of employment were encouraged to submit themselves and their qualifications to a hastily constructed labour-exchange; the king and Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig invited all employers of labour to give preference to ex-service men; funds were collected, speeches were made; and, as it is always impolitic to foster a sense of grievance, even the grievance of hunger, in men who have been drilled to shoot and, in shooting, to hold their own lives cheaply, a system of temporary doles was instituted to bridge the interval until industrial conditions became normal, or, in less pretentious language, until something turned up. Admirable as were these remedies, the demobilized officers and men felt that the hands which had waved them forth to die were chill of touch when extended in welcome to those who had not died after all.
For two years the men who were once so deafeningly acclaimed as heroes that, for their own protection, less heroic but still appreciative patriots were forbidden to stand them drink have been advertising daily for any work that will keep them fed; in times of trade depression they have marched through the streets of London under banners inscribed with the device "WANTED IN 1914: NOT WANTED NOW"; and the passers-by feel that it is very sad (though, to be sure, some of these mendicants are impostors; and, of the unemployed, some are always unemployable), but that, if anything could be done, it would have been done long ago. While it would be foolish to minimise the difficulties of employers who are asked to replace tried men and women with unskilled soldiers, it may be submitted that the government which caused and the society which sanctioned such an upheaval as the late war are responsible for restoring order when war is at an end. If a civilian can within six months be turned into a soldier, the soldier can in little longer time be turned back into a civilian; as, during his military training, the state maintained him, so it should maintain him while he is being trained for civil work; as he was fed and clothed in camp, so he should be fed and clothed until he is needed in field or mine, office or shop. The voluntary organisations and patriotic appeals are being launched among the descendants of Nelson's countrymen; they have an opportunity of wiping out their great-grandfathers' disgrace. To suggest that the whole community is responsible for the men who have faced death on its behalf is to court the terrific imputation of "socialism"; yet war is the greatest possible socialisation of society, and it is not unreasonable to propose that public responsibility shall continue until the first dislocation of war has been corrected. By now hundreds of thousands have been found employment; but, so long as one suffers from want, the whole community is disgraced. The price of a woman's dress would keep him in affluence for half a year.
In the first weeks of demobilisation the problem was more difficult in that those who needed and wanted work needed and wanted a holiday first. The best-intentioned efforts to regulate or retard the flow of men from the army until there was a sure position for them outside it were met with desertion and mutiny till the sluices were opened wide and only sufficient troops retained to enforce the terms of the armistice. The countries which had been devastated by the war and those which were threatened with ruinous indemnities set to work at once to repair the damage and to build up their resources; England, which had endured as long a strain as any without having iron driven into her soul at the sight of her land laid waste or of her industries ruined, settled down to drowsy recuperation until the next crisis should rouse her with the threat of financial disaster, revolution or another war.
In those first months of peace there was much talk of "reconstruction,"[46] but the only thing reconstructed at this time was one part of the leisured, social life of the country. To some extent this was inevitable at a time when political interest was centred in Versailles and when a new House of Commons, filled with "hard-faced men who looked as though they had done well out of the war," chafed at the long-continued absence of the prime minister and tinkered with such unimportant legislation as was entrusted to the control of Mr. Bonar Law. In an atmosphere of suspense and unreality, the graver issues were postponed; and all energies were concentrated on creating a life as similar as possible to that which had been interrupted by the war and one in which the war could be forgotten. Foreign and domestic responsibilities, which in a democratic country are the concern of every adult man and woman, were lost to view in the preoccupation of a "Victory Ball" and of the first "peace Ascot." In 1919, for the first time since 1914, there were garden-parties at Buckingham Palace and a gala night at Covent Garden; the Derby was run; great balls were given in historic houses; entertaining and sport reached a perfection and profusion only inferior to 1914 standards in the number of those who, killed or maimed by four and a half years of war, were unable to attend. They, were they able to see the "reconstruction" of the country which they had redeemed and of the people whom they had reprieved, would have known at last what they had sacrificed everything to preserve.