Tribune, 4 August 1944Apropos of
saturation bombing, a correspondent who disagreed with me very strongly added that he was
by no means a pacifist. He recognized, he said, that the Hun had got to be
beaten. He merely objected to the barbarous methods that we are now using.
Now, it seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs on
people than by calling them Huns. Obviously one does not want to inflict death
and wounds if it can he avoided, but I cannot feel that mere killing is all-important. We
shall all be dead in less than a hundred years, and most of us by the sordid horror known
as natural death. The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful
life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it
causes (the net effect of a war may even be to increase the productive capacity of the
world as a whole), nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred
and dishonesty. By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him.
But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them,
by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are
striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.
It is a matter of observation that the people least infected by
war hysteria are the fighting soldiers. Of all people they are the least inclined to hate
the enemy, to swallow lying propaganda or to demand a vindictive peace. Nearly all
soldiers and this applies even to professional soldiers in peace time have a
sane attitude towards war. They realize that it is disgusting, and that it may often be
necessary. This is harder for a civilian, because the soldiers detached attitude is
partly due to sheer exhaustion, to the sobering effects of danger, and to continuous
friction with his own military machine. The safe and well-fed civilian has more surplus
emotion, and he is apt to use it up in hating somebody or other the enemy if he is
a patriot, his own side if he is a pacifist. But the war mentality is something that can
be struggled against and overcome, just as the fear of bullets can be overcome. The
trouble is that neither the Peace Pledge Union nor the Never Again Society know the war
mentality when they see it. Meanwhile, the fact that in this war offensive nicknames like
Hun have not caught on with the big public seems to me a good omen.
What has always seemed to me one of the most shocking deeds of
the last war was one that did not aim at killing anyone on the contrary, it
probably saved a great many lives. Before launching their big attack at Caporetto, the
Germans flooded the Italian army with faked Socialist propaganda leaflets in
which it was alleged that the German soldiers were ready to shoot their officers and
fraternize with their Italian comrades etc., etc. Numbers of Italians were taken in, came
over to fraternize with the Germans, and were made prisoner and, I believe, jeered
at for their simple-mindedness. I have heard this defended as a highly intelligent and
humane way of making war which it is, if your sole aim is to save as many skins as
possible. And yet a trick like that damages the very roots of human solidarity in a way
that no mere act of violence could do.
I see that the railings are returning only wooden ones, it is true, but still
railings in one London square after another. So the lawful denizens of the squares
can make use of their treasured keys again, and the children of the poor can be kept out.
When the railings round the parks and squares were removed, the
object was partly to accumulate scrap-iron, but the removal was also felt to be a
democratic gesture. Many more green spaces were now open to the public, and you could stay
in the parks till all hours instead of being hounded out at closing times by grim-faced
keepers. It was also discovered that these railings were not only unnecessary but
hideously ugly. The parks were improved out of recognition by being laid open, acquiring a
friendly, almost rural look that they had never had before. And had the railings vanished
permanently, another improvement would probably have followed. The dreary shrubberies of
laurel and privet plants not suited to England and always dusty, at any rate in
London would probably have been grubbed up and replaced by flower beds. Like the
railings, they were merely put there to keep the populace out. However, the higher-ups
managed to avert this reform, like so many others, and everywhere the wooden palisades are
going up, regardless of the wastage of labour and timber.
When I was in the Home Guard we used to say that the bad sign
would be when flogging was introduced. That has not happened yet, I believe, but all minor
social symptoms point in the same direction. The worst sign of all and I should
expect this to happen almost immediately if the Tories win the General Election
will be the reappearance in the London streets of top-hats not worn by either
undertakers or bank messengers.
We hope to review before long and meanwhile I take the opportunity of drawing
attention to it an unusual book called Branch Street, by Marie Paneth. The
author is or was a voluntary worker at a childrens club, and her book reveals the
almost savage conditions in which some London children still grow up. It is not quite
clear, however, whether these conditions are to any extent worse as a result of the war. I
should like to read I suppose some such thing must exist somewhere, but I
dont know of it an authoritative account of the effect of the war on
children. Hundreds of thousands of town children have been evacuated to country districts,
many have had their schooling interrupted for months at a time, others have had terrifying
experiences with bombs (earlier in the war a little girl of eight, evacuated to a
Hertfordshire village, assured me that she had been bombed out seven times), others have
been sleeping in Tube shelters, sometimes for a year or so at a stretch. I would like to
know to what extent the town children have adapted themselves to country life
whether they have grown interested in birds and animals, or whether they simply pine to be
back among the picture houses and whether there has been any significant increase
in juvenile crime. The children described by Mrs Paneth sound almost like the gangs of
wild children who were a by-product of the Russian Revolution.
Back in the eighteenth century, when the India muslins were one of the wonders of the
world, an Indian king sent envoys to the court of Louis XV to negotiate a
trade agreement. He was aware that in Europe women wield great political influence, and
the envoys brought with them a bale of costly muslins, which they had been instructed to
present to Louiss mistress. Unfortunately their information was not up to date:
Louiss not very stable affections had veered, and the muslins were presented to a
mistress who had already been discarded. The mission was a failure, and the envoys were
decapitated when they got home.
I dont know whether this story has a moral, but when I see
the kind of people that our Foreign Office likes to get together with, I am often reminded
of it.