John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  Firstly: that we are a decadent people, intent on sports and moneymaking, and without ideals or any sense of serving the state.

  The answer to that is that in England and Scotland alone five million four hundred thousand of our men enlisted as volunteers to fight for our ideals, without compulsion of any kind, while three million more who tried to enlist were rejected as too old, or physically unfit, or needed in other work. That was before we had conscription.

  Secondly: that we are a cowardly people, who let other people fight for us.

  The answer to that is that had we been a cowardly people we should not have gone to war; but we did; we came into this war and have lost in this war something like two and one-half millions of our best men killed, wounded and missing, and this without counting the losses of the men of our Colonies.

  Thirdly: that we are a mean people, who do not take our fair share in the war.

  The answer to that is, that we hold one-third of the line in France, much of the line in Italy, nearly all the line in Serbia, all the line in Palestine and Mesopotamia, and all the line on the vast colonial fronts in Africa. We supply or have supplied France, Italy, Serbia, Belgium, Roumania and Russia with millions of tons of equipment of all sorts, guns, shells, uniforms, boots and machines, in all amounting to 3,000 million dollars worth. We feed and clothe and always have fed and clothed since the war began the greater part of the population of Belgium and practically the whole of the population of Serbia. Besides our contributions of men and guns, we have immense hospital organizations working in Russia, in Italy, in Roumania, and with the French. We have had the greater part of the policing of the seas to do, and practically all the submarine hunting. The sea is not an easy place to patrol, and the submarine is not an easy thing to catch, but not much German trade has been done by sea since the war, and not many raiders have got through our guards and we have sunk (I believe) not less than ten times as many submarines as the enemy had at the beginning of the war. We have built ships to make our navy at least half as strong again as it was before the war. We have caused to be made and transported 25,000,000 tons of shells, and we have conveyed to and from different parts of the globe, as soldiers going and coming, well, sick or wounded, some 13,000,000 men. Our policing of the sea has been so done that we have lost by enemy action 2,700 of these 13,000,000 travelling soldiers.

  Then in money, we have spent on this war five billion five hundred million dollars, of which rather more than one fifth has been loaned or given to our Allies.

  People sometimes say a fourth lie about us: – that we are a grasping people who will profit by this war.

  Let me say this, that no one will profit from this war. We in Europe will be beggared by it for years to come; only we want the world to profit by it, by a change of heart, by an understanding among the nations, and by the knowledge which we in Europe needed this war to teach us, that human life is the precious thing on this earth, and that we are here truly linked man to man, and not divided up nation by nation. We are one body of humanity.

  There is a fifth lie, that we are a greedy people, who ask you Americans to starve, while we feast on white bread and other delicacies. The answer to that is, that no white bread has been made in England for at least eighteen months, and that there is no feasting there. There is no home in all that land that is not the sadder for this war.

  There is no need to lie about a nation any more than there is any need to lie about a man. The truth emerges above any lie.

  I know my nation’s faults as well as I know my own. They are the faults of a set and of a system. They are faults of head, they are not faults of heart. When I think of those faults I think of a long graveyard in France, a hundred miles long, where simple, good, kind, ignorant Englishmen by the thousand and the hundred thousand lie in every attitude of rest and agony, for ever and for ever and for ever. They did not know where Belgium is, nor what Germany is, nor even what England is. They were told that a great country had taken a little country by the throat, and that it was up to them to help, and they went out by the hundred and the hundred thousand, and by the million, on that word alone, and they stayed there, in the mud, to help that little country, till they were killed.

  I’ve been along many miles of that old line, and seen those graves, many of them not even marked, except by a bayonet, or a bit of packing case, and I’ve thought, as I went along, what epitaph could be put above that unending graveyard, and I could only think of one epitaph, “These men came here of their own free will to help their fellow men in trouble.”

  There comes the question, what is the war about? Each nation has its answer to that question, an answer that could be put into twenty words. But in each country, for many years before the war, millions of prejudices, and beliefs, and customs, and ignorances, and blindnesses, and memories, went to make the war. The question, what it is about, does not now so deeply matter, as the question, what the struggle is, now that it is in full swing.

  It is a struggle between two conceptions of life, the soldier’s and the civilian’s. Both conceptions have existed ever since the world began. Much may be said for both.

  The soldier says, in theory, “Men are not of much account; it is the man who matters. The man must have power over other men and be able to direct them as he chooses and punish them if they disobey; since men need a strong hand. A State can only be strong if it is so organized as to be obedient within and feared without. Every man within the State owes service to the State, he must be trained to defend it and fight for it. All men of a certain wealth and standing must be officers; the rest are and must be cannon-fodder. The citizens must have good roads fit for the movement of troops, adequate food and housing, a thorough military training and as much schooling as may be good for soldiers.” Punctuality, hard work, and cleanliness are made much of; merit of certain kinds is certain of its reward, the citizens are ticketed, looked after, used and pensioned. They are not encouraged to think for themselves nor permitted to break the regulations. Napoleon in France and T’chaka in Zululand both created soldier states in the last century.

  The civilian says, in effect, “It is true, that in case of need every man must be ready to fight for his State, and should be trained so that he may do so, but war is not a normal condition, it is an accident which may not occur, and the direction of the State by soldiers is apt to create a privileged class, who will enslave the remainder of the citizens for their own ends, which may be base and probably will be cruel, and which may and very likely will bring about that state of war which soldiers should prevent.” So that, in the civilian state, the army is made small, and interferences with personal liberty are bitterly resented and swiftly opposed. The occupation of the civilian state is generally commerce. Its relaxation or amusement is generally the adornment of the individual life, with the arts and sciences which enrich life and make it pleasant. The general feeling is, that men were not meant to be the slaves of other men nor of human systems; but to develop themselves in as loose, easy and pleasant an - organization as a nation can be without collapsing.

  Those are the two theories and ways of life, both have been tried and both will work, and both have left great marks in history.

  But in working, both are open to grave defects. No nation is perfect, and no system of living will suit all the people all the time; and these ways of life, if persisted in by any nation for three or four generations, intensify themselves, till, in the military state there is too much control and in the civilian state too little.

  In the civilian state, where much is left to the individual, much is left undone. Many individuals grow up to be highly educated, pleasant and agreeable men, but more grow up with the feeling that there is nothing to stop them from exploiting their fellow-citizens, and this they do quite as ruthlessly as any soldier, and with far less recompense. The soldier may drive his men, but he feeds, clothes and pensions them. The civilian may drive his men and scrap them as old tools when he has broken them. Very soon, in the civilian state
, individualism comes to a point in which the service of the State is left to those who care for that kind of thing. Those who do care for that kind of thing find that the fear of interference with liberty, which is the main passion in a civilian state, has prevented them from having any power. They can do neither good nor evil, and so they stagnate. They cease to attract the finer and more active kinds of mind. So that in a civilian state though you may find culture, politeness, niceness of feeling, enlightenment, and a wise protection of the individual against certain aggressions by King and State, and a great commerce, strongly protected, you may also find the man of action discountenanced, and the talker in power in his stead.

  In the military state, the soldier justifies himself to his subjects by some act which rids the State of a danger or enriches it with a piece of plunder, so that he is able to say, “You see, the Army saved you or enriched you. You see that you must have an Army.” When the army is enlarged, he attacks another State and enriches his own State still further; definitely enriches his officers with gifts of other people’s property and his surviving men with bits of other people’s lands, and at the same time increases his army by conscripting the conquered peoples.

  Presently he forgets that the State is anything except himself. He cries out that the State is himself, since he is the head of the Army and the Army is the State. He subordinates everything to the army. He tolerates schools only in so far as they teach military maxims, and women only because they produce cannon-fodder. He encourages bad manners in his officers, because he thinks that it teaches them to dominate; he preaches about duty and his own magnificence in his churches and schools, because he thinks that it teaches people to obey. And at last, when his entire State does obey, and all his officers have bad manners, and a desire to dominate everybody, he has in his hands a terrible instrument of destruction which may be launched anywhere at his caprice. He is that irresponsible autocratic power who has been the main cause of war for twenty centuries.

  But for the fact that all the power and blind obedience of a nation may be flung anywhere at the caprice of one man, there is much to be said for the military state. But that fact damns it, and the world has never allowed it to continue. The gunman who may be drunk or mad or savage at any minute is too dangerous to be allowed in the house. Rome, who had nobly held the idea of law, became that kind of State and fell. France, who had nobly held the idea of liberty, became that kind of State, and fell; and the savage Zulus, who made themselves a people and then an exterminating scourge also fell; and I feel that a grosser people, who have upheld neither law nor liberty, but have become exterminating scourges, will also fall. We civilian peoples, flouted, insulted, and taken unawares, are banded together to make that conception of life to fall.

  Last April I was in a dirty little town in France. On my right there was a ruined factory containing a pile of smashed sewing-machines, on my left there was a casualty clearing station, in what had once been a rather nice house. Just outside the hospital there was a little old French woman selling newspapers; and dozens of soldiers were buying newspapers and talking about the news. One of the soldiers shouted out, “Hooray, America has declared war,” and another, who was older and more thoughtful, said, “Thank God, now we may have a decent world again.”

  War in one way is very like Mrs. MacGregor.

  The poet Swinburne, when he was a young man, was very fond of impassioned conversation and of whisky. One night he met a friend, and suggested that the friend should come to his lodgings for a talk. On their way Swinburne bought a bottle of whisky and with an air of satanic cunning hid it in his tail pocket, and said, “I must be very careful; my landlady is a very troublesome woman.” When they reached the door Swinburne said, “We must go in very quietly; my landlady is a very troublesome woman.” They opened the door and crept in on tiptoe, and were just creeping upstairs, when a door opened and a stern voice said, “Is that you, Mr. Swinburrrrrne?” “Yes, Mrs. MacGregor,” said Swinburne. Then the voice said, “Whattan is yon wee bottle in yeir bit pocket, Mr. Swinburrrne?” “O,” said Swinburne, “it’s my cough-mixture, Mrs. MacGregor; I’m afraid I’ve caught cold.” “Cough-mixture me nae cough-mixture,” said Mrs. MacGregor; “yon is a bottle of whuskey. And ye’ll give it heer, Mr. Swinburrrne. Didn’t I promise yeir father ye shuld na touch the whuskey?” And she grabbed the bottle and disappeared, and Swinburne was left wringing his hands and saying, “She’s a very troublesome woman.”

  That is a light story, but it reminds me of the war. Many and many a gathering of friends has been interrupted by that savage goddess. All over Europe, quiet, gentle, ordinary men, who were going, as they thought, to the enjoyment of delight, have been seized upon and robbed by her, not only of material things, but of love and leisure and of life itself.

  There is a story of a young king of India, who became a leper whom no one could cure. An old man told him that if he went to a certain city and ate bread in a house where there was no sorrow, he would be cured. So he went to the city, and went into every house, but there was no house that had no sorrow, so he was not cured. “There was no house that had not one dead.”

  There is no house, poor or rich, in any of the countries now fighting in Europe that has not one dead, generally some quite young man.

  Many great minds have brooded over war; most of the great minds of the world have taken part in war, and some have tried to understand it. No great mind has ever looked upon it as a good thing, though they see that sometimes in life outrageous, devilish evil can be checked in no other way. To most of them, Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, it is nearly the last, greatest and completest evil that can come into human life.

  You all know how a fever comes upon the body. Poison must be introduced into it from outside, some living poison of germs; the body must be predisposed to nurture the poison; it must be a little overstrained, restless, tired, bored, cross, or out of sorts. The natural guards of the body must be unable to help. Then the poison germs take hold and the normal life of the man ceases. He becomes a raging incoherent maniac terrible to himself and a danger to all about him, till the poison is at its height and has worked itself out in death or recovery.

  Well, you will agree with me perhaps that war comes into the world, in much such a way. The body of a nation does not want it, though it may think about it often and much, the body of a nation is normally busy with its own life. Then, in times of overstrain, of restlessness, or of excitement, or even of busy and pleasant well-being, the poison is introduced, wilfully, by kings and their ministers, and the nation sickens.

  The symptoms are always the same. The infected nation becomes, first of all, arrogant. It gets what we call swelled-head. It thinks itself, possibly with reason, the finest nation in the world. As the poison takes hold and the germs multiply, this arrogance leads to a spiritual blindness to whatever may be good or right in any other nation in the world. This blindness leads to an indifference to whatever any other nation may do or care. This indifference leads to the bloody theory, that it is a duty to subjugate any other nation. And at this point, the poison boils over in the system, the nation involved runs up a temperature, and it passes rapidly from acts of injustice to some culminating act of impiety, such as cannot be permitted, and against which a protest has to be made by the outraged world.

  Then comes war, which goes on, like a fever, till the nation is dead or cured.

  That may not be how all wars begin, but that is how the greatest and longest and most evil wars have begun, in modern times. A nation has caught a fever, run up a temperature, gone mad and bitten, been a danger and a scourge to the world, and has gradually sickened itself out into exhaustion, peace and wisdom. Spain had such a fever three hundred years ago, when her motto was the proud boast, “The world does not suffice for us.” France had such a fever a century later. England had such a fever when she forced this country into the Rebellion.

  In all three countries, there was just that same irresponsible autocratic power to cult
ivate the fever for his own ends. And who held that power? The immense power and wealth of Spain were controlled by Philip the Second, one old, miserly, stubborn dotard, a sort of a religious mule. The immense and ordered power of France was controlled by Louis Quatorze, one little man who wore high-heeled shoes and an immense wig to give himself some air of greatness. Afterwards it was held by Napoleon, of whom the French now say that he was as great as any man can be without principles. And who held the power of England? The elderly, pear-headed, self-willed German, often mad and always stupid, who wondered how the apple got inside the dumpling. And working with him were the few, corrupt and evil families engaged in the enslavement of the English poor.

  Such were the four irresponsible autocrats who caused the greatest, longest and most evil wars of the past. But all the fever of their wars, multiplied ten-fold, would be as nothing to the fever of arrogance, blindness, wild and bloody thinking, and impious dealing, with which another irresponsible autocrat prepared the present war. No former autocrat took such pains to organize armed force, and to make the evil blood in his nation to run so hotly. No former autocrat had such skill or such clever servants to prepare and direct the outburst. And no former autocrat has reaped such a crop of bloodshed, massacre and destruction.

  I’m not here to abuse our present enemies. We are against them today, but we have been with them in the past and we shall have to be with them in the future, if there is to be any future. In this life, collections of men behave worse than individuals, and it is the thought, and the way of life and the irresponsible autocrat that make them behave worse, that are the evil things. This war might have been averted, but that that one irresponsible autocrat was afraid of democracy. Consider what he has let loose upon the world. Consider, too, what he has raised against him.