by A. A. Milne
But there is another reason why any distinction made between aggressive and defensive preparations for war leaves no hope of peace. As I said in a previous chapter, no nation trusts the word of another nation. It is not surprising that statesmen should be cynical about the good faith of each other, when they have been given such abundant reason for cynicism. If there is one sin which brings its own punishment, it is the sin of lying. Truth is the supreme virtue, and it is because we have allowed politicians to neglect it at the call of a false patriotism that we have been burdened with this nightmare of war.
For it is the simple fact that no statesman, no general, has ever hesitated to lie if the good of the state seemed to demand it. When periodically there is an outcry against the sale of honours, every leader of every party blandly professes ignorance of such sale. They are lying; we know that they are lying; but it is not a matter of adverse comment. The convention is that their personal honour is untouched if the lies which they tell are in the interest of the state. When, in war, a general orders an attack which is repulsed with hideous losses, he announces that ‘all goes well with British arms’. It is a lie – but pro patria. ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more’, said Lovelace to his lady. Unfortunately no Patriot has ever addressed his country so.
This is traditional. Even in home politics, still more in international politics, the ordinary standards of honour have never applied. One could not imagine the craziest Patriot praying that his son should grow up ‘as honourable as England’. International politics is a morass of treachery, theft, broken promises, lies, evasions, bluff, trickiness, bullying, deliberate misunderstanding and shabby attempts to get an opponent into a false position. Our whole conception of national morality is different from our conception of private morality. Consider, as one trivial example of this difference, the war-debt between England and America. If this had been a debt contracted between two honourable men in analogous circumstances, the one would have been as insistent on paying it as the other would have been scornful of accepting payment. As it is, we have an excited discussion, every six months or so, as to whether England should, or should not, keep her word. Imagine a similar discussion in a family which considered its honour to be above reproach!
Now we cannot have it both ways. We cannot disregard truth and expect to be trusted. By its lack of candour in the past every nation has surrendered to its enemies the right of interpretation of its actions. For England to maintain a large navy and a large air-force: to asseverate that she is keeping them ‘solely for defensive purposes’: and to expect any other country to believe her is to exhibit an ingenuousness unworthy even of the nursery. Armaments in the hands of a foreign nation will always be aggressive armaments: partly because no faith is possible between statesmen who put their country above their honour; partly because, with the best faith in the world, there can never be agreement as to what is aggression and what defence.
– Put Out More Flags –
Nobody who heard on that September morning in 1939 the doleful voice of Neville Chamberlain, announcing that we were now at war with Germany, will ever forget it. A few, a very few, of those who heard it may have foreseen that the war would last nearly six years. Not one of them would have believed it possible that within two years of the end of it the fear of a new and more terrible war would be overshadowing the world.
I have been an ardent Pacifist since 1910, and still am. In my vocabulary a Pacifist is not the same as a Conscientious Objector. Nothing is gained by burying one’s head in the sand when war breaks out, and supposing that it will pass one by. On the contrary, as long as one is alive one is taking part in the war, willingly or unwillingly, actively or passively, as a force or as a deadweight: that is, one is helping either one’s country or the enemy. The only logical protest for a Conscientious Objector who refuses to take part is suicide; preferably at sea, so that the war effort shall not be interrupted by the need for burying the body.
A Pacifist, in my definition, is one who does not believe that war is ‘a legitimate extension of policy’ or ‘a biological necessity’ or ‘human nature’, and who does believe that its economic gains are illusory. So, since it results in the torture and death of innocent and harmless people, he is not only of opinion that it should be outlawed, but looks forward to a day when the whole world will share his opinion. Common sense and common decency, he tells himself, must surely prevail.
In 1910 Pacifism was derided. All the wars in the memory of Englishmen had taken place outside their country, and could be followed with the eager but impersonal interest with which we now follow the broadcast of a cricket match. It was true that a few soldiers got killed, but this was just an occupational risk, cheerfully to be accepted in return for the adventure and the glory promised. If the civilians did think about war in the abstract, they told themselves that it was bracing, like corporal punishment and cold baths; and that, since it had been going on for thousands of years, it would probably be wrong, and would certainly be impossible, to stop it now. So Pacifists were dismissed as idealists, cranks, and, as likely as not, vegetarians.
In 1920 nearly everybody in this country was a Pacifist in theory, and millions of them were Pacifists in practice: that is, they were trying and hoping, by means of the League of Nations, to make an end of war. This change of opinion was due, and due only, to the experience of a war much more terrible than any that they had known, and much nearer home; a war which had cast its shadow over nearly every family in the land.
By 1945 Pacifism was the accepted policy of the whole country. This was because, and only because, the destruction of so many lives, of so much beauty, in our own fortress, had blasted, for all and for ever, the old conventional beliefs.
But there were still a few in the world who believed that war could be used profitably for their own purposes. They were not to be found among the common people; nor in those countries whose Governments were chosen by the common people; but only in those countries where the common people are oppressed and silent, and where a few fools, a few criminals, can still falsify the conclusions of humanity. Fortunately for the rest of the world humanity now has the atom bomb, and on the subject of war the atom bomb will speak the last word.
The atom bomb is the final proof of what Norman Angell called the Great Illusion. He proved to the conviction of some of us in 1910 – a conviction which two World Wars have so enormously sustained and enlarged – the simple truth that a victorious war brings in no material dividends. This did not prove, of course, that there was nothing to be won by an aggressive war; for there are other gains in a Dictator’s mind than economic ones. But all the aesthetic pleasure of a triumphal victory march across Europe, Hammer and Sickle waving with the cohorts in the van, and Grand Inquisitors trotting up behind with the baggage-train, would be lost in the knowledge that there was no Moscow to return to, no Kremlin to give orders to its new puppets. Not only Moscow, not only the Kremlin would be gone, but the whole political structure which has kept the Russian people in slavery would be disrupted. Whatever illusion of victorious gain wars of the past may have presented to power-drunk autocrats, it is visible now, even to the fool and the criminal, that nothing is to be gained by a deliberately provoked atomic war.
Shortly before he died in 1895 Louis Pasteur was asked if he could see any way by which war could be abolished. He replied that there was only one way, but that this way was certain. War would abolish itself. It would become so devastating that it would become impossible. No doubt he was thinking of bacteriological war, but atomic war has got there first. It is because, and only because, the Kremlin sees no credit balance in an atomic war that it is so desperately anxious to ban the atom bomb. It wants to get back to the old kind of war, for which it has in full measure the material, the will, and the illusion of profit. It is peace from the determent of the atom bomb which is the sole object of its Peace Crusade. The strategics of the atom bomb are not that bombs in one place make up for a deficiency of tanks i
n another; nor that we are only safe so long as we have a superiority in them of x to one; nor that it is a retaliatory weapon as gas was in the last war, only to be used if the other side uses it first. The atom bomb is a weapon, not for victory in war, not for ‘pairing’ with the enemy in war, but to prevent war. To be prepared so to use it demands courage: the courage Samson showed when he pulled down the pillars of the temple. Samson sacrificed himself by making it perfectly clear now that the next war will be an atomic war: that, without regard to the atom bombs Russia may have, or her intention, or lack of intention, to use them, at the first movement of Communist troops against any country in the West, Moscow will be wiped out: we shall take the risk of sacrificing ourselves. It is a small risk compared with the certainty of war otherwise; a cheaply-bought risk for those of us who would far sooner die under an atom bomb than live under the Kremlin.
Unfortunately there are many good people, both in Britain and, more importantly, in America, who cannot bring themselves to accept the atom bomb as within the limits of what they call ‘legitimate warfare’. Perhaps because I became a Pacifist on impersonal grounds, before I had experienced the horrors or even the discomforts of war, I consider all war, from the wars of the Israelites onwards, to be horrible, and all weapons of war, from the sword and the club and the spear onwards, to be barbarous. Every distinction between weapons of war as legitimate and illegitimate, as acceptable by, or repugnant to, humanity, is one more admission that war itself is acceptable and legitimate, so long as it is conducted in some fashion hallowed by previous exercise. If war is to be abolished, it will not be abolished by pretending that one method of killing is pleasing to God, and another displeasing; by accepting gratefully 200 raids with ordinary bombs which kill 1,000 ‘civilians’ apiece, and exhibiting sanctimonious horror at one raid with an atomic bomb which kills the same number of ‘civilians’, and spares 20,000 airmen’s lives.
I put the civilians into inverted commas to show that they have not yet got into uniform. I have never understood why the death of a clerk, a ploughman or a poet calls for a greater compassion from man, and a severer condemnation from God, if he should still be wearing his ordinary clothes. The object of aggressive war (however wrong) is to impose the national will upon another nation by the destruction of so much of its resources, human and material, that it can defend itself no longer. The object of defensive war (however right) is to resist that imposition by an even greater destruction of the enemy’s resources, human and material. The human resources of a nation are every man, woman and child belonging to it. Yes, even children. Children in 1939 were young men and women in 1945, serving their country.
For war is hell, and it is not possible to contract out of all responsibility for hell by a high-minded disapproval of one particular mode of torture; nor would it be edifying to single out for disapproval the mode which particularly threatened oneself. A conscience which is outraged by the atom bomb should have been outraged long ago by war; for war has never made careful selection of its victims, nor been restrained by their number. A war to resist Communism would not be a game to be played under arbitrary rules, with certain approved weapons of a carefully limited range of destruction; it would be a life-and-death struggle, in which the West would only be engaged because it believed that there were higher values at stake than human lives.
Even the lives of its last man, woman and child. Even the lives of the enemy.
– In Summary –
Consider the last war.
Austria (to Servia): Stop it, or I’ll make you.
Russia (to Austria): Stop it, or I’ll make you.
Germany (to Russia): Stop it, or I’ll make you.
France (to Germany): Stop it, or I’ll make you.
Germany (to France): Stop saying stop it, or I’ll make you.
England (to Germany): Stop it, or I’ll make you.
This reads like something from a comic opera, but it is exactly what happened.
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About the Author
Alan Alexander Milne was born in London in 1882. He was educated at Westminster School and studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a regular contributor to Punch, and later assistant editor, before the interruption of active service in the First World War. A remarkably versatile writer, Milne went on to become a hugely successful and widely-known playwright, both in the West End and on Broadway, as well as an essayist, poet, novelist and – most famously – children’s author, as the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. He died in 1956 following a long illness.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a children’s novelist who won the Carnegie Medal for his first book Millions in 2004 and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for The Unforgotten Coat in 2013. Millions was made into a film by Danny Boyle, for whom Frank went on to work as the writer on the London Olympics Opening Ceremony, 2012. His other books include Framed (filmed by the BBC), Cosmic, The Astounding Broccoli Boy and Runaway Robot. His films include 24 Hour Party People, God on Trial, Hilary and Jackie, and Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017), about the lives of A. A. Milne and his family.
Copyright
Published in 2020
by Notting Hill Editions Ltd
Mirefoot, Burneside, Kendal LA8 9AB
Series design by FLOK Design, Berlin, Germany
Cover design by Plain Creative, Kendal
Typeset by CB editions, London
Printed and b
ound
by Memminger MedienCentrum, Memmingen, Germany
This selection of A.A. Milne’s articles was edited and arranged
by Roger Lewis
The essays and articles in this book have been reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of the Late Lesley Milne Limited from the following publications: Not That It Matters (1919); If I May (1920); Those Were the Days (1929); By Way of Introduction (1929); Peace with Honour (1934); War with Honour (1940); Year In, Year Out (1952)
Essays and articles by A. A. Milne Copyright © The Estate of the Late Lesley Milne Limited, 2020
The right of A.A. Milne to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1998
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Frank Cottrell-Boyce
The rights of Frank Cottrell-Boyce to be identified as the author of the introduction in this work have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1998
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978–1–912559–05–3
eISBN 978–1–912559–23–7
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