stifling
confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there
any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a
multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material,
and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.
The old war of savage and barbaric nations did at least change
humanity, you assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique
and discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and
if successful you took their land and their women and perpetuated
and enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but the
color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship
of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last
of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English,
with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in
battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about
three thousand pounds per head—they could have bought the whole
of that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of that
sum—and except for a few substitutions of personalities, this
group of partially corrupt officials in the place of that, and so
forth, the permanent change was altogether insignificant. (But
an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide when at length
the Transvaal ceased to be a "nation.") Men went through the seat
of that war after it was all over, and found humanity unchanged,
except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of an
unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge
cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old
habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like
kraal, the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .
But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them,
through the mirage of the New Paper, in a light of mania. All my
adolescence from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that
monstrous resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the
songs and the waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and
the glorious heroism of De Wet—who ALWAYS got away; that was the
great point about the heroic De Wet—and it never occurred to us
that the total population we fought against was less than half the
number of those who lived cramped ignoble lives within the compass
of the Four Towns.
But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention
only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute
definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new
region of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great
Britain.
When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong
entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest
early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty
in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of
fact to their fathers.
Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of
almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had
neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve,
that most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our
affairs hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions
of three hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about
the globe, and here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six
millions, in a state of confusion no whit better than our own,
and the noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote books
and gave lectures, and generally in that time of world-dementia
pretended to be the national mind, were busy in both countries,
with a sort of infernal unanimity, exhorting—and not only exhorting
but successfully persuading—the two peoples to divert such small
common store of material, moral and intellectual energy as
confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there
any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a
multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material,
and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.
The old war of savage and barbaric nations did at least change
humanity, you assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique
and discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and
if successful you took their land and their women and perpetuated
and enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but the
color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship
of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last
of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English,
with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in
battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about
three thousand pounds per head—they could have bought the whole
of that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of that
sum—and except for a few substitutions of personalities, this
group of partially corrupt officials in the place of that, and so
forth, the permanent change was altogether insignificant. (But
an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide when at length
the Transvaal ceased to be a "nation.") Men went through the seat
of that war after it was all over, and found humanity unchanged,
except for a general impoverishment, and the convenience of an
unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge
cases—unchanged and resuming with a slight perplexity all its old
habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like
kraal, the white in his ugly ill-managed shanty. . .
But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them,
through the mirage of the New Paper, in a light of mania. All my
adolescence from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that
monstrous resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the
songs and the waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and
the glorious heroism of De Wet—who ALWAYS got away; that was the
great point about the heroic De Wet—and it never occurred to us
that the total population we fought against was less than half the
number of those who lived cramped ignoble lives within the compass
of the Four Towns.
But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention
only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute
definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new
region of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great
Britain.
When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong
entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest
early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty
in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of
fact to their fathers.
Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of
almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had
neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve,
that most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our
affairs hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions
of three hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about
the globe, and here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six
millions, in a state of confusion no whit better than our own,
and the noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote books
and gave lectures, and generally in that time of world-dementia
pretended to be the national mind, were busy in both countries,
with a sort of infernal unanimity, exhorting—and not only exhorting
but successfully persuading—the two peoples to divert such small
common store of material, moral and intellectual energy as
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