WHICH shall it be? We may set about the answer in either of two reciprocal ways. Throughout this story from the very beginning the same choice of aspects has confronted us, We can ask, can the species as a whole achieve this tremendous feat of adaptation demanded of us? Or we can turn to the individual samples we have selected for examination and.ask whether, with such material, there is any hope of arresting the blazing catastrophe that now detonates about us? If there is hope, however faint it may be, in Edward Albert Tewler, then there is that much hope for the world. If world revolution is not latent and credible in his circle, in his offspring and outcome, in the reactions he evokes and the chain of consequence he transmits, then is it equally impossible and incredible of his species as a whole.
Our double answer must end in a note of interrogation.
Let us tell first of all, as simply and plainly as possible, the behaviour of our hero during the world conflagration, and then swing our attention round to the battling ideas and interpretations in which that behaviour was framed and shaped. We have to deal faithfully with the traditions and wisdom of the human past, the divinities, the mighty reputations, the vast long-unquestioned assumptions by which the Tewler mind has been enslaved and stultified. If the Tewlers are timid and disingenuous fools by education and enslavement rather than by birth, there may be hope for them. There may be salvation for them yet, without the intervention of a quite impossible saviour.
As the storm broke, Edward Albert’s first reaction was an extreme indisposition to take any part in it whatever.
At the outset we had to tell of the marked reluctance of Edward Albert to live at all. The normal human being is born against its will. It has to be thrust and lugged into this chilly and disconcerting universe. Edward Albert, you will remember, took twenty-three hours. The first noise he made was a cackle of protest. We have told with all necessary particularity of his cowering childhood and the slow appearance in him of an urge of revolt and self-assertion. Even as a child he was not purely fear and submission. He could put out his tongue at caged lions; he could feel a stir of scepticism about the All-seeing God. Lust broke through a net of dread and religious uglification to the squalid satisfactions we have detailed. Something could rebel in him.
The education he received was cramping and old-fashioned even for his time. But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. “All that has been changed,” cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of wilful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness and self-protective illusion.
The opening phase of world catastrophe took Edward Albert completely by surprise.
A slogan that dominated the English world at that time was “Safety First.” In his childhood, Edward Albert remembered there had been a card with that inscription upon the mantelshelf of his mother’s living-room, but that had been a chance anticipation. He could not remember how it had got there or what became of it. The Safety First phase in British history came later, and it was largely due to an organised campaign on the part of the Insurance companies, transport services, and all the great damages-paying corporations, to train the public not to incur damage. It spread through the whole social body; it intensified the respectful feudal tradition that you cannot be too careful if you want to avoid trouble; it infected and dominated the administration of the country; it became the national motto. Dieu et mon Droit was felt to be an old-fashioned piece of swagger that might easily get us into difficulties. So that when at last Mr Neville Chamberlain gave up appeasement, in a fit of exasperation at the unendurable mockery of his umbrella, and declared war, Edward Albert, in common with a very considerable number of his comfortable independent fellow — citizens, made no attempt whatever to join in the fray. He concentrated his thoughts very largely on the discreet husbanding of his investments and whatever safe forms of tax evasion could be discovered.
Throughout the later months of 1939 Tewler England and Tewler France did not so much wage war as evade it. They potted at the enemy from behind the Maginot line and left Poland to its fate. They watched Russia readjust its frontiers in preparation for the inevitable struggle against the common enemy with profound disapproval. That Prince of Tewlers, the young King of the Belgians, obstinately refused to prepare a common front against the gathering onslaught. He was neutral, master in his own country, he insisted, and nothing could happen to him. He uttered a squeal for help when his frontier collapsed upon him and vanished from the scene, and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will never restore a Europe that will have any r61e for him again. The military science of France and England required that when an army is outflanked it should either retreat headlong or surrender. When confronted by a pincer-like movement, a soldier and a gentleman abandons his men and material and bolts home, ascribing his defeat to the decadent morals of the time. The British tradition then was a Day of Prayer, But wars are won by ungentlemanly persons who break the recognised rules of war and swear freely. The reaction of Almighty Providence to these Anglican praying bouts was ambiguous. The English and French strategists got themselves soundly licked by tanks, planes and this professional horror of nippers, and they were rather scandalised by the obstinacy of their men who insisted upon going on fighting until disaster took on an appearance of glorious retreat. Goebbels had only to say “Envelopment” or “Penetration”, and the confidence of the American and English military experts ran out at their heels. Pétain surrendered France. Until that happened Morningside Prospect had seemed a whole world away from bloodshed and violence. But the French collapse sent a shock through the villas. Newspapers fluttered at the garden gates and men sat in the golf club house with grave faces and stopped to talk war upon the tees. The Prospect had felt very stout-hearted about the U-boat sinkings and the German sea raiders. Its confidence in our navy was uncritical and complete. It gloried vicariously when the ship-saving instincts of the Admiralty were outraged by the Ajax and the Achilles, and Nelson came down from his aloofness in Trafalgar Square to revive the traditions of mutinous infighting. Morningside had never believed that our island frontiers could be scaled. And then came a positive air invasion of Britain. This scared and impressed the Prospect very badly, and it was only a year later that a belated but well-written pamphlet told them and the world all about the Battle of Britain. What was more obvious was that air raids were increasing at a great pace and that the Battle of the Atlantic was affecting the grocers’ bills. There had been black-out regulations in operation after November 1939, but the Prospect had never taken them very seriously until the autumnal raids of 1940. Then the mutual watchfulness of the neighbours was stimulated to the pitch of acerbity. Mr Copper of Caxton, in spite of his mature years, almost had a fight with a young fool on leave who was actually smoking a cigarette! outside one of the Celestial Prospect villas, and he followed this up by a denunciatory visit to the Brighthampton Police. The Brighthampton Police asked Mr Copper if he couldn’t perhaps do something to help, instead of just giving trouble,
Mr Copper was before all things a clear-headed man.
“It’s come to a point when people like us have got to look after things a bit,” he said to Mr Pildington. “We ought to have some sort of Vigilantes about.”
Mr Pildington thought there ought to be a Committee of Public Safety. “There’s people,” he said, “been coming up air raid nights and sleeping out on the links. It isn’t safe. It isn’t — orderly. We ought to call a meeting.” In a week the idea was well in hand. There was a suggestion that either Sir Humbert Compostella or Lord Foundry, formerly Sir Adrian von Stahlheim, be made chairman............