by John Buchan
The case of Turkey was somewhat different, and her ascent to a self-conscious nationalism was the chief of post-War romances. In November 1918 she had seemed of all the enemy Powers to be the most thoroughly beaten and broken, and to lie helpless in the hands of the Allies. But the Turk was not dead, and he found his saviour in an Anatolian soldier, Mustapha Kemal, who had won fame at Gallipoli. The ill-inspired invitation to Greece, for which Britain was mainly responsible, to occupy the Smyrna area kindled the embers of Turkish patriotism. Kemal fell upon the Greeks and drove them into the sea; he led his armies to the Dardanelles, where a clash with British troops was only averted by the wisdom of the British commander; at Lausanne he obtained a wholesale revision of the Treaty of Sèvres.
Then he set himself to rebuild his country on the strong foundation of the Anatolian peasantry. He smashed the old unity of Islam and abolished the Caliphate, but he gave Turkey, the nation, a unity which she had never known before. She was now a republic under Kemal as dictator, and his first task was to secularise her, and, in a year or two, to clear away most remnants of traditionalism. Women were emancipated from their former bondage, education was revolutionised, the whole machine of finance and industry was recast. Kemal was not merely a domestic reformer; like Mussolini, he showed himself a wise international statesman. He made friends with Greece, exercised a soothing influence in the Balkans, intrigued no more with Russia but turned his eyes westward, and in 1932 brought his country into the League of Nations. There are few precedents in history for such a national resurrection.
The King. A recent portrait
IV
In fifteen years the prophets had been discomfited. So far from building up again — with differences — the old regime on the old principles which had been assumed to be elemental truths, all of Europe, save France and Britain, had struck camp and set out to discover new habitations. The War had been fought by the peoples rather than by leaders; now the leaders had emerged and the peoples put their fate into their hands. New monarchies had arisen on the ruins of the old, more arbitrary and absolute, and names like Führer and Duce and Ghazi carried a weightier spell than those of emperor and king. Never had personalities mattered so much, for Stalin was Russia; Mussolini, Italy; Kemal, Turkey; and Hitler, Germany. Democracy, which the War seemed to have glorified, was largely in ruins. Russia and Turkey had cut adrift from their pasts, but Italy sought to dignify her new creation by linking it to the glories of ancient Rome, and Germany had evolved a most unhistorical theory of an old Nordic culture to which she was returning. This last dream had an ominous connotation. For it may be read in Tacitus how into the sombre grove of the High God of the Teutons none might enter save with a chain round his neck, to show his subjection to the divinity. The old legend is a parable; those gods were tyrants, and their mandate was to enslave. A hundred years before Heine had prophesied that some day the Gods of the North would rise from their graves to the troubling of Europe.
This flight from democracy, this satiety with freedom, had been accelerated by the War, but it was not its product, for it had been long a-coming. Perhaps democracy had been too absolutely defined. Its principles had been treated as universal truths for all peoples at all times, when they could only be made to work under certain conditions. The mystical view of the State, as an “end in itself,” which must override the individual life, had been emphasised by the discipline of the War, but it was no new thing in the world. Mankind is always prone to deify the work of its hands, and to make a god of the authority it chooses, whether it be Holy Church, or Holy King, or Holy People. The reaction which might have been looked for after peace was nullified by the continued unsettlement of the world. Men were unwilling or unable to stand alone; they huddled into hordes for safety and warmth, and were glad to surrender their wills to whoever or whatever promised security. The ordinary citizen had lost that confidence in himself which is the only basis for democracy.
This instinct to crowd together might at first sight appear to offer some hope for a union of nations. But unfortunately the new internal integration of peoples was apt to be on a narrow chauvinist basis; the refuge they sought must be isolated, exclusive, a Border keep bristling with defences, and not an open law-abiding city to which all were welcome. During the fifteen years from its foundation the League of Nations passed through many vicissitudes. It did admirable work on the less controversial international questions, and it proved a god-send to the relics of the Dual Monarchy. But it was heavily handicapped by the absence of America, and by the withdrawal from it in later years of important States. Its machinery proved to be faulty, and too many of its members were half-hearted. When its authority was challenged, as at Corfu and in Manchukuo, it had no sanctions with which to enforce it. It did many good things, but the work was not spectacular and won it little prestige. The hubbub of conflicting nationalisms drowned its still, small voice of reason.
One of its major tasks was disarmament. The question was debated at many conferences, but was invariably blocked by national fears and jealousies and technical difficulties. In this matter the record of Britain was blameless, for she was not only the most vigorous supporter of a general disarmament, but she had herself disarmed beyond any other Power. The Kellogg Pact of 1928, which excluded war as a “legitimate instrument of policy,” could be no more than a declaration of pious opinion in the absence of a specific machinery to enforce it. More hopeful at the time seemed the Washington Conference of 1921, which limited the naval construction of Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France and Italy. This line was followed in numerous arbitration arrangements, and in regional and group pacts such as the Locarno treaties. These at any rate narrowed the possibilities of conflict, though to the peace universalist they seemed a dangerous return to the old system of alliances.
The comparative failure of internationalism was not due to the insensitiveness of any country to the cataclysmic effects of another war. The popular horror was deep-grained; indeed it is doubtful if at any time since the Armistice it would have been possible to mobilise any European nation for war without a certainty of revolution. Mr. Churchill’s solemn words were the general faith.
Manhood, . . . without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now — for one occasion only — his Master.
The difficulty lay in the vicious circle into which the debates inevitably moved. Fear produced armaments; that fear could only be allayed by a system of collective insurance with the proper sanctions; such a system involved interference with sovereign rights, which most States were not prepared to accept. Fear, a very real fear, was not strong enough to conquer national pride, a pride intensified by the movement towards new national disciplines and integrations. The most needful restoration of a people’s confidence quickened that people’s pride and lessened its fear. The true spirit of peace-making had not yet been generated, and the words of Bernard of Marlaix haunted many minds:
Pax erit omnibus unica, sed quibus? Immaculatis, Pectore mitibus, ordine stantibus, ore sacratis.
In such a flux of things Britain had a dual task. She had to interest herself in the difficulties of other nations, as a world-wide Empire which could not afford to be indifferent to any change in any part of the globe, as a principal belligerent and therefore a principal architect of peace, and as the one Power in the Old World which still stood firmly in the ancient ways. But with these heavy preoccupations she had also the duty of revising her own policy, which had suffered th
e full blast of the winds blowing from the outer spaces. Except for one brief moment after peace she caught no blink of the sun. For fifteen years she had to struggle in the mire of that dismal thaw which is the certain consequence of war.
CHAPTER II. THE CHANGING EMPIRE
The first British Empire ended with the loss of the American colonies, the second with the first shots of 1914. During the political interregnum of the war the third slowly came into being. Lord Rosebery in a famous passage has spoken of the Empire “growing as trees grow while men sleep,” but the phrase is only half the truth. The progress of any great and enduring thing is largely unconscious and secret, like the growth of a plant or the changes of the seasons. But in the making of the Empire there have been times when problems have had to be faced and solved, and steps of high importance voluntarily and consciously undertaken.
The War was such a season. In it the Empire may fairly be said to have come of age, and become an alliance of adult nations. It was a unit in 1914, as a unit it entered upon war, and as a unit it made peace; but its assistance in the field was wholly voluntary, its war effort spontaneous and not dictated. During those four years autonomy acquired a new meaning, for to the right of deciding on policy was added the willing acceptance of executive duties. Dominion prime ministers sat in London with British representatives as an Imperial War Cabinet. The Dominions as national entities signed the treaties of peace. The old dream of Imperial Federation had faded out of the air. The new circumstances required a more elastic constitution.
The overseas territory taken from Germany enlarged the area of certain of the Dominions and widely extended the direct responsibilities of Britain. The Dominions were members of the League of Nations from which the mandated authority sprang. For good or for ill they had been brought into the orbit of international affairs, and must have an international outlook of their own. At the same time their kinship with the Mother Country and with each other had become a closer thing, after four years of common sacrifice. The economic difficulties of the post-War world were felt by them scarcely less acutely than by Europe. They realised their common interest with Britain, and, as the political bonds slackened and disappeared, there was a general instinct that new ones must be fashioned, the ties of a working alliance which would enable the Empire in practical matters to speak and act together.
The King was King of Britain, but also Emperor of India, and Sovereign of all the Britains overseas. The Throne was the one binding link that survived. During the controversies that followed it remained, except in one case, the cherished centre of unity, around which union could grow. As such its value was beyond price, for it provided a steadfast foundation on which a new working mechanism could be constructed and a new theory of Empire developed.
I
The first problem was Ireland. Ever since the spirit of Elizabethan and Cromwellian intolerance began to die at the close of the eighteenth century the British people had been under two delusions. They imagined that Ireland was a country which had, though in an imperfect form, the same traditions and antecedents as Britain, and that the Irish were only backward cousins of their own. The profound differences of race and history were innocently forgotten. It is possible that in 1886 a chance was given us to make Ireland a part of the United Kingdom in something more than name, for there are moments in history when a bold act may seal up the past and swing a nation’s development into a new orbit. Be that as it may, the chance was not taken. The old sores festered, the old hostilities remained, and the unsettlement of the immediate pre-War world, her unfortunate position in British party politics, and a revival of interest in her native culture, fostered in Ireland, especially among her youth, a spirit which would be content with nothing short of national independence. This spirit was the more formidable since it disregarded the former methods of controversy and set to work to devise a new technique.
The solemnity of war might have turned the unrest into other channels, but official pedantry checked at birth the growth of a new sentiment. The consequence was that, while many thousands of Irishmen were fighting in the armies of the Empire, several bodies in Ireland were preparing on their own account for a different kind of war. The Easter Rising of 1916 revealed these hidden fires. That pitiful and heroic attempt of young idealists to enforce a creed, which was dearer to them than life, exasperated Britain, who could not understand why Ireland should try to weaken her hand in a war which was fought not for Britain but for civilisation, and who did not realise how alien the Irish vision was from her own. It was easily suppressed, but the aftermath was tragic; the barbarities were not all on one side, and the Government dabbled alternately in mercy and in severity. The result was an immense strengthening of Sinn Fein and Irish republicanism. Various later efforts at conciliation were fruitless, and the proposal to apply conscription in the spring of 1918 did not help matters. There remained little of the Irish character as Bede had drawn it twelve hundred years before, “a harmless people most friendly to the English.”
Peace came, but not to Ireland. In the election of November 1918 the old Nationalist leaders had gone, and the old Nationalist party disappeared. Sinn Fein won most of the Irish seats, and in January 1919 set up a parliament of its own in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic. Mr. Eamon de Valera, who had escaped from an English jail, became its President, its supporters armed, and the King’s writ ceased to run in Ireland. In 1920 a new version of the Home Rule Bill was passed, setting up parliaments in Dublin and Belfast. Ulster accepted the scheme, but South Ireland scornfully rejected it. From now on the issue was war, war between the levies of the Republic on the one side, and on the other the police, enlarged by the “Black and Tan” auxiliaries, and a part of the British army.
It was war, but, since it could not be conducted by the normal etiquette of war, it was also a reign of terror. In the first half of 1921 there were two governments in Ireland, and between these millstones were ground what Sir Henry Wilson used to call the “decent, quiet, peaceable people.” It was a grim and hideous time, for both forces were out of hand, and the spectacle was presented to the world of a great and civilised Power sanctioning reprisals in kind for the atrocities of banditti. Ministers were in an intolerable dilemma. They must either use their military strength to stamp out a rebellion of British citizens at Britain’s door, or they must admit that this was no rebellion, but a war of principles, and treat with the enemy. In the then temper of Britain and her Government the latter course meant a heavy sacrifice of pride.
The impasse was ended by the King. Now, as ever, it was the duty of the Throne to unravel the tangle into which people and Government had drifted. On June 22nd 1921, the Parliament of Northern Ireland having come into being in accordance with the act of the previous year, the King, in Belfast, made one of the most notable speeches of his life:
I could not have allowed myself to give Ireland by deputy alone my earnest prayers and good wishes in the new era which opens with this ceremony, and I have therefore come in person, as the Head of the Empire, to inaugurate this Parliament on Irish soil. . . .
The eyes of the whole Empire are on Ireland to-day — that Empire in which so many nations and races have come together in spite of ancient feuds, and in which new nations have come to birth within the lifetime of the youngest in this hall. I am emboldened by that thought to look beyond the sorrow and the anxiety which have clouded of late my vision of Irish affairs. I speak from a full heart when I pray that my coming to Ireland to-day may prove to be the first step towards an end of strife amongst her people, whatever their race or creed. In that hope I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill. It is my earnest desire that in Southern Ireland, too, there may ere long take place a parallel to what is now passing in this hall, that there a similar occasion may present itself and a similar ceremony be performed.
For this th
e Parliament of the United Kingdom has in the fullest manner provided the power; for this the Parliament of Ulster is pointing the way. The future lies in the hands of my Irish people themselves. May this historic gathering be the prelude of a day in which the Irish people, North and South, under one Parliament or two, as these Parliaments may themselves decide, shall work together in common love for Ireland upon the sure foundation of mutual justice and respect.
Such an appeal could not be disregarded. The Government, who had been gradually moving towards some scheme of Dominion Home Rule such as Mr. Asquith had long advocated, opened negotiations with the Irish leaders. The latter were now tending to divide into two camps; the realists, like Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, who wanted the substance of independence and were not inclined to quibble about forms; and the symbolists — the word is used in no contemptuous sense, for symbols are precious and potent things — who sought not Dominion status but independence with all the paraphernalia of independence, and to whom the oath of allegiance and the headship of the King were badges of servitude. It was a tragic irony that the stumbling-block should be the Sovereign who was the most earnest advocate of peace. The Conference in London lasted till December 6th, when a treaty was signed under which the Irish Free State came into being, with the status more or less of a self-governing Dominion. The result was a triumph for the diplomatic finesse of Mr. Lloyd George; it was a triumph of character, too, for the Conservative statesmen, like Lord Birkenhead and Sir Austen Chamberlain, who imperilled their careers, and for the Irish delegates, who imperilled their lives.
The Irish Parliament, Dail Eireann, passed the Treaty by a small majority, but Mr. de Valera and the austerer republicans went into opposition. He was not willing to accept the oath of allegiance; he held that Dominion status was unworthy of a nation which was an ancient kingdom and itself a mother country; his dream was of Ireland as a separate Power, not within the Empire, but externally allied to it for defence and foreign affairs. On this narrow margin the land was plunged for a year in civil war. It is the fashion of revolutions to devour their offspring, and Ireland’s was true to type. That unhappy country has been apt to discard or destroy her best. Arthur Griffith indeed died in his bed: but Michael Collins and, later, Kevin O’Higgins perished by violence; Sir Henry Wilson, always an Irishman first, was the victim of assassins on the doorstep of his London house; and Erskine Childers, than whom no revolution ever produced a nobler or purer spirit, was shot by the order of the new Irish Government. Mr. William Cosgrave, who succeeded Griffith as President, slowly broke the republican opposition till Mr. de Valera, defeated but unconverted, called off hostilities. Then for ten years he laboured to restore his country and patch up the economic fabric, and incidentally gave it once again a worthy part in imperial and international councils. The nations since the war have had two kinds of leaders: the rhapsodists who inflame and embolden, and the plain, homely realists who try to heal. In the latter class Mr. Cosgrave has had few superiors.
