If in the foregoing pages the Liberal party has come in for the larger share of criticism, the reason is, that during the ten critical years, while dangers were drawing to a head, a Liberal Government chanced to be in power. That things would have been managed better and more courageously had the unionists been in power may be doubted; and certainly it is no part of my present task to champion any such theory.
The special type of politician whose influence has wrought so much evil of late is no peculiar product of the Liberal party. He is the product of the party system in its corrupt decadence. You find him in the ranks of the Opposition as well as in those of the Ministerialists, just as you find good and true men in both. In this last lies our hope. In our present trouble good and true men have a chance of taking things into their own hands, which has been denied to them for many generations.
This book has been written to establish the Need for National Service, in order that the British Empire may maintain itself securely in the present {422} circumstances of the world. If this contention be true it is obvious that a corresponding Duty lies upon the whole nation to accept the burden of military service.
Neither need nor duty has ever been made clear to the British people by their leaders. Owing to the abuses of the party system, increasing steadily over a considerable period of years, a certain type of politician has been evolved, and has risen into great prominence—a type which does not trust the people, but only fears them. In order to maintain themselves and their parties in power, politicians of this type have darkened the eyes and drugged the spirit of the nation.
It is no part of the plan of this volume to offer criticisms upon the naval and military aspects of the present war, or upon the wisdom or unwisdom of the operations which have been undertaken by land and sea. All that need be said in this connection may be put into a very few words.
As we read and re-read British history we cannot but be impressed with the fact that our leading statesmen, misled by the very brilliancy of their intellectual endowments, have always been prone to two errors of policy, which the simpler mind of the soldier instinctively avoids. They have ever been too ready to conclude prematurely that a certain line of obstacles is so formidable that it cannot be forced; and they have also ever been too ready to accept the notion, that there must surely be some ingenious far way round, by which they may succeed in circumventing the infinite.
MAIN PRINCIPLE OF STRATEGY
The defect of brilliant brains is not necessarily a {423} want of courage—daring there has usually been in plenty—but they are apt to lack fortitude. They are apt to abandon the assault upon positions which are not really invulnerable, and to go off, chasing after attractive butterflies, until they fall into quagmires. Dispersion of effort has always been the besetting sin of British statesmen and the curse of British policy. There is no clearer example of this than the case of William Pitt the Younger, who went on picking up sugar islands all over the world, when he ought to have been giving his whole strength to beating Napoleon.
Very few obstacles are really insurmountable, and it is usually the shortest and the safest course to stick to what has been already begun. Especially is this the case when your resources in trained soldiers and munitions of war are painfully restricted. At the one point, where you have decided to attack, the motto is push hard; and at all others, where you may be compelled to defend yourselves, the motto is hold fast.
The peril of British war councils in the past has always been (and maybe still is) the tendency of ingenious argument to get the better of sound judgment. In the very opposite of this lies safety. We find the true type of high policy, as well as of successful campaigning, in the cool and patient inflexibility of Wellington, holding fast by one main idea, forcing his way over one obstacle after another which had been pronounced invincible—through walled cities; into the deep valleys of the Pyrenees; across the Bidassoa—till from the crests of the Great Rhune and the Little his soldiers looked down at last upon the plains of France.
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Our most urgent problem with regard to the present war, is how we may win it most thoroughly; but, in addition to this, there are two questions which have recently engaged a good deal of public attention. There is a Political question—what sort of European settlement is to take place after the war? And there is also a Criminal question—what sort of punishment shall be meted out, if crimes, contrary to the practice of war among civilised and humane states, have been committed by our antagonists?
I have not attempted to deal with either of these. They do not seem to be of extreme urgency; for unless, and until, we win the war it is somewhat idle to discuss the ultimate fate of Europe or the penalty of evil deeds. You cannot restore stolen property until you have recovered it, and you cannot punish a malefactor, nor is it very convenient even to try him, while he is still at large. If that be true, which was said of old by a great king—I do not make peace with barbarians but dictate the terms of their surrender—we are still a long way from that.
I have not occupied myself therefore with what are termed 'German atrocities.' So far as this matter is concerned, I am satisfied to let it rest for the present upon the German statement of intentions before war began,[1] and upon the proclamations which {425} have been issued subsequently, with the object of justifying their mode of operations by sea and land. The case against Germany on her own admission, is quite strong enough without opening a further inquisition under this heading.[2]
WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING ABOUT
It is essential, however, to realise the falsities and perversities upon which the great fabric of German policy is founded; for otherwise we shall never understand either the nature of the enemy with whom we are at present engaged, or the full extent of the danger by which, not only we, but civilisation itself is now threatened. It is essential that the whole British race should understand the nature of the evils against which they are fighting—the ambitions of Germany—the ruthless despotism of the Prussian system—the new theories of right and wrong which have been evolved by thinkers who have been paid, promoted, and inspired by the State, in order to sanctify the imperial policy of spoliation.
It is also essential for us to realise the nature of those things for which we are fighting—what we shall save and secure for our posterity in case of victory; what we stand to lose in event of defeat. The preservation or ruin of our inheritance, spiritual and material—the maintenance or overthrow of our {426} institutions, traditions, and ideas—the triumph, of these, or the supplanting of them by a wholly different order, which to our eyes wears the appearance of a vast machine under the control of savages—are the main issues of the present war. And when now at last, we face them squarely, we begin to wonder, why of late years, we have been wont to treat problems of national defence and imperial security with so much levity and indifference.
It is profitable to turn our eyes from the contemplation of German shortcomings inwards upon our own. If we have been guilty as a people during recent times of weakness, blindness, indolence, or cowardice, we should face these facts squarely, otherwise there is but a poor chance of arriving at better conditions. If we have refused to listen to unpleasant truths, and to exchange a drowsy and dangerous comfort against sacrifices which were necessary for security, it is foolish to lay the whole blame upon this or that public man, this or that government. For, after all, both public men and governments were our own creation; we chose them because we liked them; because it gave us pleasure and consolation to listen to their sayings; because their doings and their non-doings, their un-doings and their mis-doings were regarded with approval or indifference by the great bulk of our people.
It would be wise also to take to heart the lesson, plainly written across the record of the last nine months, that the present confusion of our political system is responsible, as much as anything—perhaps more than anything—for the depreciated currency of public character. The need is obvious for a Parliament and a Government chosen by the Empire, {427} responsible to the Empire, and charged with the security of the Empire, and with no other task.
CAUSES OF WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH
Why we are fighting at all is one of our problems; why we are finding it so hard to win is another. In what does the main strength of our enemies consist? And in what does our own chief weakness consist?
To say that our weakness is to be sought in our own vices, and the strength of our enemies in their virtues, is of course a commonplace. But one has only to open the average newspaper to realise the need for restating the obvious. For there the contrary doctrine is set forth daily and weekly with a lachrymose insistency—that our hands are weakened because we are so good; that the Germans fight at an enormous advantage because they are so wicked and unscrupulous.
But the things which we are finding hardest to overcome in our foes are not the immoral gibberings of professors, or the blundering cynicism of the German Foreign Office, or the methodical savagery of the General Staff, whether in Belgium or on the High Seas. These are sources of weakness and not of strength; and even at the present stage it is clear that, although they have inflicted immeasurable suffering, they have done the German cause much more harm than good.
Our real obstacles are the loyalty, the self-sacrifice, and the endurance of the German people.
The causes of British weakness are equally plain. Our indolence and factiousness; our foolish confidence in cleverness, manoeuvres, and debate for overcoming obstacles which lie altogether outside that region of human endeavour; our absorption as {428} thrilled spectators in the technical game of British politics[3]—these vices and others of a similar character, which, since the beginning of the war we have been struggling—like a man awakening from a nightmare—to shake off, are still our chief difficulties. It is a hard job to get rid of them, and we are not yet anything like halfway through with it.
It must be clear to every detached observer, that the moral strength of England in the present struggle—like that of France—does not lie in Government or Opposition, but in the spirit of the people; that this spirit has drawn but little support, in the case of either country, from the leadership and example of the politicians; and that there is little cause in either case to bless or praise them for the fidelity of their previous stewardship. In the case of France this national spirit was assured at the beginning; in our own case the process of awakening has proceeded much more slowly.
ILLUSIONS OF SUCCESS
It is essential to put certain notions out of our heads and certain other notions into them. From the beginning of the war, a large part of the press—acting, we are entitled to suppose, in patriotic obedience to the directions of the Press Bureau—has fostered ideas which do not correspond with the facts. Information has been doled out and presented in such a way as to destroy all sense of proportion in the public mind.
It is not an uncommon belief,[4] for example, that we with our Allies—ever since the first onset, when, {429} being virtuously unprepared, we were pushed back some little distance—have been doing much better than the Germans; that for months past our adversaries have been in a desperate plight—lacking ammunition, on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation, and thoroughly discouraged.
There is also a tendency to assume—despite Lord Kitchener's grave and repeated warnings to the contrary—that the war is drawing rapidly to a conclusion, and that, even if we may have to submit to some interruption of our usual summer holidays, at any rate we shall eat our Christmas dinners in an atmosphere of peace and goodwill.
The magnitude of the German victories, both in the East and West, during the earlier stages of the war, is not realised even now by the great majority of our fellow-countrymen; while the ruinous consequences of these victories to our Allies—the occupation of Belgium, of a large part of northern France, and of Western Poland—is dwelt on far too lightly. Nor is it understood by one man in a hundred, that up to the end of last year, British troops were never holding more than thirty miles, out of that line of nearly five hundred which winds, like a great snake, from Nieuport to the Swiss frontier. On the contrary, it is quite commonly believed that we have been doing our fair share of the fighting—or even more—by land as well as sea.
A misleading emphasis of type and comment, together with a dangerous selection of items of news, are responsible for these illusions; while the prevalence of these illusions is largely responsible for many of our labour difficulties.
Such dreams of inevitable and speedy victory {430} are no doubt very soothing to indolent and timid minds, but they do not make for a vigorous and resolute spirit in the nation, upon which, more than upon anything else, the winning of this war depends.
In some quarters there appears still to linger a ridiculous idea that we went into this war, out of pure chivalry, to defend Belgium.[5] We went into it to defend our own existence, and for no other reason. We made common cause with Allies who were menaced by th............