A threat directed towards the whole herd is the intensest stimulus to these potentialities, and the individual reacts towards it in the most vigorous way.[15] The first response is a thrill of alarm which {143} passes through the herd from one member to another with magic rapidity. It puts him on the alert, sets him looking for guidance, prepares him to receive commands, but above all draws him to the herd in the first instinctive concentration against the enemy. In the presence of this stimulus even such partial and temporary isolation as was possible without it becomes intolerable. The physical presence of the herd, the actual contact and recognition of its members, becomes indispensable. This is no mere functionless desire, for re-embodiment in the herd at once fortifies courage and fills the individual with moral power, enthusiasm, and fortitude. The meaning that mere physical contact with his fellows still has for man is conclusively shown in the use that has been made of attacks in close formation in the German armies. It is perfectly clear that a densely crowded formation has psychological advantages in the face of danger, which enable quite ordinary beings to perform what are in fact prodigies of valour. Even undisciplined civil mobs have, on occasion, proved wonderfully valorous, though their absence of unity often causes their enterprise to alternate with panic. A disciplined mob—if one may use that word merely as a physical expression, without any derogatory meaning—has been shown in this war on innumerable occasions to be capable of facing dangers the facing of which by isolated individuals would be feats of fabulous bravery. {144}
[15] War in itself is by no means necessarily a maximal stimulus to herd instinct if it does not involve a definite threat to the whole herd. This fact is well shown in the course of the South African War of 1899–1901. This war was not and was not regarded as capable of becoming a direct threat to the life of the nation. There was consequently no marked moral concentration of the people, no massive energizing of the Government by a homogeneous nation, and therefore the conduct of the war was in general languid, timid, and pessimistic. The morale of the people was as a whole bad; there was an exaggerated hunger for good news, and an excessive satisfaction in it; an exaggerated pessimism was excited by bad news, and public fortitude was shaken by casualties which we should now regard as insignificant. Correspondingly the activity and vitality of rumour were enormously less than they have been in the present war. The weaker stimulus is betrayed throughout the whole series of events by the weakness of all the characteristic gregarious responses.
The psychological significance of the enormous activity of rumour in this war is fairly plain. That rumours spread readily and are tenacious of life is evidence of the sensitiveness to herd opinion which is so characteristic of the social instinct. The gravity of a threat to the herd is shown by nothing better than by the activity of rumour. The strong stimulus to herd instinct produces the characteristic response in the individual of a maximal sensitiveness to his fellows—to their presence or absence, their alarms and braveries, and in no less degree to their opinions. With the establishment of this state of mind the spread and survival of rumours become inevitable, and will vary directly with the seriousness of the external danger. Into the actual genesis of the individual rumours and the meaning of their tendency to take a stereotyped form we cannot enter here.
The potency of rumour in bearing down rational scepticism displays unmistakably the importance of the instinctive processes on which it rests. It is also one of the many evidences that homogeneity within the herd is a deeply rooted necessity for gregarious animals and is elaborately provided for by characteristics of the gregarious mind.
The establishment of homogeneity in the herd is the basis of morale. From homogeneity proceed moral power, enthusiasm, courage, endurance, enterprise, and all the virtues of the warrior. The peace of mind, happiness, and energy of the soldier come from his feeling himself to be a member in a body solidly united for a single purpose. The impulse towards unity that was so pronounced and universal at the beginning of the war was, then, a true and sound instinctive movement of defence. It was prepared to sacrifice all social distinctions and local prejudices if it could liberate by doing so Nature’s inexhaustible stores of moral power for the defence {145} of the herd. Naturally enough its significance was misunderstood, and a great deal of its beneficent magic was wasted by the good intentions which man is so touchingly ready to accept as a substitute for knowledge. Even the functional value of unity was, and still is, for the most part ignored. We are told to weariness that the great objection to disunion is that it encourages the enemy. According to this view, apparent disunion is as serious as real; whereas it must be perfectly obvious that anything which leads our enemy to under-estimate our strength, as does the belief that we are disunited when we are not, is of much more service to us than is neutralized by any more or less visionary disservice we do ourselves by fortifying his morale. The morale of a nation at war proceeds from within itself, and the mere pharisaism and conceit that come from the contemplation of another’s misfortunes are of no moral value. Modern civilians in general are much too self-conscious to conduct the grave tragedy of war with the high, preoccupied composure it demands. They are apt to think too much of what sort of a figure they are making before the world, to waste energy in superfluous explanations of themselves, in flustered and voluble attempts to make friends with bystanders, in posing to the enemy, and imagining they can seriously influence him by grimaces and gesticulations. As a matter of fact, it must be confessed that if such manœuvres could be conducted with a deliberate and purposeful levity which few would now have the fortitude to employ, there would be a certain satisfaction to be obtained in this particular war by the knowledge of our adversary conscientiously, perhaps a little heavily, and with immense resources of learning “investigating our psychology” upon materials of a wholly fantastic kind. Such a design, however, is very far from being the intention of {146} our interpreters to the world, and as long as they cannot keep the earnest and hysterical note out of their exposition it were much better for us that they were totally dumb.
To the psychologist it is plain that the seriousness of disunion is the discouragement to ourselves it necessarily involves. In this lies its single and its immense importance. Every note of disunion is a loss of moral power of incalculable influence; every evidence of union is an equally incalculable gain of moral power. Both halves of this statement deserve consideration, but the latter is incomparably the more important. If disunion were the more potent influence, a great deal might be done for national morale by the forcible control of opinion and expression. That, however, could yield nothing positive, and we must rely upon voluntary unity as the only source of all the higher developments of moral power.
It was towards this object that we dimly groped when we felt in the early weeks of the war the impulses of friendliness, tolerance, and goodwill towards our fellow-citizens, and the readiness to sacrifice what privileges the social system had endowed us with in order to enjoy the power which a perfect homogeneity of the herd would have given us.
A very small amount of conscious, authoritative direction at that time, a very little actual sacrifice of privilege at that psychological moment, a series of small, carefully selected concessions none of which need have been actually subversive of prescriptive right, a slight relaxation in the vast inhumanity of the social machine would have given the needed readjustment out of which a true national homogeneity would necessarily have grown.
The psychological moment was allowed to pass, and the country was spared the shock of seeing its {147} moral strength, which should of course be left to luck, fortified by the hand of science. The history of England during the first fourteen months of the war was thus left to pursue its characteristically English course. The social system of class segregation soon repented of its momentary softness and resumed its customary rigidity. More than that, it decided that, far from the war being a special occasion which should penetrate with a transforming influence the whole of society from top to bottom, as the common people were at first inclined to think, the proper pose before the enemy was to be that it made no difference at all. We were to continue imperturbably with the conduct of our business, and to awe the Continent with a supreme exhibition of British phlegm. The national consciousness of the working-man was to be stimulated by his continuing to supply us with our dividends, and ours by continuing to receive them. It is not necessary to pursue the history of this new substitute for unity. It is open to doubt whether our enemies were greatly appalled by the spectacle, or more so than our friends; it is certain that the stimulant supplied to the working-man proved to be inadequate and had to be supplemented by others. . . .
The problem of the function of the common citizen in war was of course left unsolved. It was accepted that if a man were unfit for service and not a skilled worker, he himself was a mere dead weight, and his intense longing for direct service, of however humble a kind, a by-product of which the State could make no use.