The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  From the worst frenzies of hatred and fear and their corrupt reaction the young Napoleon rescued Revolutionary France. He ended the persecution of party by party, annulled the proscription of religion and stemmed the ugly internal flow of blood. Yet, though as a result he shattered France's enemies, the fatal flaw in

  1 " An army supported by an invincible navy possess a strength which is out of all proportion to its size."—G. F. R. Henderson, The Science of War, 26.

  the Revolution remained: that human reason was divine and that the sum total of human reason, as expressed either by the majority vote of an assembly or by some other man-made device for testing the aggregate will, was divine too. Having seen the divinity of majority rule culminate in the Terror, France substituted the rule of a single national representative. But the belief persisted that the aggregate reason of the nation and, therefore, of its representative, was above moral law.

  The folly of this assumption lay in the failure to see that, though human reason may partake of the divine, human nature, through which reason has to operate, is perpetually vitiated by faults of passion and selfishness which blind and distort it. Napoleon, like Robespierre and the Terrorists before him and Hitler and Mussolini since, came to believe that what he wanted as a fallible man was synonymous with the promptings of his divine and infallible reason: in other words, that he was not liable to error. He not only supposed that what he wanted was right but that he was bound— so long as he wanted it enough—to get it. The greater his triumphs, the more deeply he fell into this insane error.

  In the course of a century of misplaced endeavour that industrious, intelligent but obtusely pedantic race, the northern Germans, built a similar thesis around a study of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The Prussian general and historian, Clausewitz, basing his judgment on Napoleon's practice, applied to the new national States of the nineteenth century the maxim that a nation can achieve whatever it fights for irrespective of the morality of its object. The extent of his blindness is illustrated by a sentence of one of his pupils, Field-Marshal Von der Goltz. " The statesman who, knowing his instrument to be ready and seeing war inevitable, hesitates to strike first is guilty of a crime against his country." But what, one asks, recalling August, 1914, if the blow outrages the conscience of mankind and rouses in opponents spiritual forces more tenacious than the " will to victory " of the aggressor? For this is what the practice of Von der Goltz's text achieved when the German General Staff marched into Belgium in defiance of treaty obligations and human decency. And the result was not the triumph of Germany but her eclipse. She was indeed stabbed in the back, as Hitler said, but not by profiteers and defeatists in 1918 but by her own statesmen in 1914. It is not the first impact which decides wars but the last. It is not the United States which will suffer most from Japanese treachery at Pearl Harbour but the people of Japan. It is not Poland and Norway, Holland, Belgium and Russia which will be the final victims of Hitler's conceptions of blitzkrieg but the people of Germany.

  For what Clausewitz failed to see was that the qualities needed to achieve victory derive from moral laws which exist independently of human will and lust. A self-centred man or nation, however efficient in the short run, must fail in the long, for its balance is in the wrong place. The England of Pitt and Wellington rested on a juster and more enduring base than the France of Robespierre and Napoleon. The Great Nation, whose military and totalitarian virtues Clausewitz held out as an example to his countrymen, was defeated in the end by a nation with a far smaller population. He overlooked the more enduring strength of a people who subordinated self-will to the decencies of the human conscience. It never seemed to occur to him that there were any such decencies.

  For in the light of our own apocalyptic experience, we can see that Britain's supreme asset was the innate respect of her people for moral law. Despite many shortcomings, neither they nor their leaders were capable of substituting for the rule of individual conscience the monstrous abstractions of the aggregate mind. Incapable of Napoleon's activity and genius, they were equally incapable of his immorality and ultimately insane mistakes. For initial complacency, refusal to plan ahead, mental and moral laziness they paid dear. Unhampered by Irish resentment, the evils of unregulated enclosure and industrialism and the greed and sloth that battened on the Slave Trade, they might have defeated the armed Jacobin in 1799 or even earlier. But as, learning from reverses, they corrected their grosser mistakes, two things emerged: the slowly growing moral stature of Britain and the dwindling strength of France. An infidel dictator might act as though he were above moral law and therefore infallible; a Christian people could not. Acknowledging

  " Laws that lay under heaven's ban All principles of action that transcend The sacred limits of humanity ",

  they waged war in conformity with the dictates of the individual conscience and individual common sense. Theirs was that saving humility and wisdom called by the Hebrew seers " the fear of the Lord " and by the old Greeks justice. " Upon the morality of Britain' wrote Coleridge, " depends the safety of Britain." Not only her safety, he might have added, but the triumph of her cause.