CHAPTER XIII
THE POLITICS OF PEACE
Meanwhile we must consider the politics of peace, for peace is a political and not a military problem. Amongst the truths that history teaches with a conclusiveness which cannot be questioned is that a peace made by military victors in the spirit of military victors is no peace at all. To-day we are deluded by such catch-penny phrases as "a premature peace," "no patched-up peace," and so on. They are quite meaningless and very delusive. They imply the doctrine, which I have said history proves to be wrong and mischievous, that war can make peace. You can punish a nation by war, you can devastate it, you can rob it of its territory and impose an indemnity to cripple it in the future, but you cannot in this way make peace. Never can any nation have a more complete victory over another than Germany had over France when the Franco - German War ended, and never was peace more patently "patched-up" or more clearly vitiated by the qualities of inconclusiveness than the Peace of Frankfurt in May 1871. France and Germany lived in a state of armed truce from 1871 to 1914, and the whole of Europe knew it. The shadow, the fears, the disturbance of the imminent war perturbed Europe throughout the whole generation; it determined European diplomacy; it defeated every attempt to arrive at settled agreement; it created the Alliance of the Central Powers and the Entente between the surrounding nations; finally, it merged itself in the causes of this war.
The blindness of a people at war believing that absolute military victory is the only way to peace characterizes all wars. It is now more than an arguable proposition that we could have made a better peace in 1800 than we did fifteen years later. The Treaty of Paris which ended the Crimean War in 1856 was considered by Queen Victoria as "rather premature" and was opposed by Palmerston. As a matter of fact, it could have been secured in 1855. Mr. J. A. Farrer, writing in the Manchester Guardian, says, after a survey of the seven great wars of the last two centuries to which this country has been a party:—
When one thinks of the countless millions of lives that have been sacrificed in these former wars by their needless prolongation, for some insignificant aim, or for some party purpose of the time, one is inclined to execrate the memory of those who, in their rejection of premature peaces, effected belated ones which added so unnecessarily to the world's sufferings. It is not a premature peace that we have to fear so much as a belated one; for the balance of history is on the side of those who in former wars favoured what seemed a premature peace, not on the side of those who prolonged those wars for no result that justified their continuance.
When a war breaks out it drives with its terrible force the peoples of all the belligerent nations into what is called the patriotic camp. They all believe they are right. Then some measure of calm comes. The first pain of death and suffering is sobering. They all feel hatred of the slaughter and are disturbed by the privations. That also begins to pass, however. People get accustomed to death both at home and on the field, and suffering becomes habitual. By that time the military pressure has begun to show itself, and through the mists we can see how the battle sways and which side is likely to be beaten. The victor is unwilling to stay his hand; the conquered fights to remove disgrace. Then the military end comes. The cannons can fire no more, and the vanquished nation, sullen, angry, and resentful, like poor, unhappy Queen Mary, nurses its grievance in its heart and begins to study revenge. Civilization and the pacific purposes of the peoples have been defeated. Militarism, beaten on the field, retires into the hearts of the people as into a sanctuary. That is the course of all national wars, and the failure of all statesmen hitherto is that they have allowed that full course to be run.
It seems absurd, but it is true, that the future peace depends, not on the victor but on the vanquished. It is not the amount of military success but that of military defeat which determines whether the nations are to settle down. It is because this is true that victors so often make a mess of things and undo the military results of war by the political consequences. By assuming that the victors can settle things, we forget that the essential problem is to get the vanquished to accept things.
A simple truth recognized by all military writers, but turned by them to imperfect use, is always obscured in the minds of people during a war. It is that war is an incident in political policy, like a spurt in the course of a race.1 1"In one word, the art of war in its highest point of view is policy. War is only a part of political intercourse, therefore by no means an independent thing in itself."—Clausewitz. When it is over, the political policy goes on again, and the value of the war is determined by whether it has aided or hindered the policy. This truth must be hammered at and hammered at. If this war does not end militarism and the menace of force, the object of the British people in accepting it will have been betrayed.
So I return to the political question. When, in that evolution of popular feeling during a war, has war reached its maximum political effect? Evidently somewhere about the middle, just at the time when the crowds are being urged to shout that they will have no inconclusive peace.
Students of Clausewitz will remember that in a finely impressive passage in his book On War, he insists that the military leaders should always keep before them the art of forcing the people of the enemy nation into a frame of mind which induces them to submit. That pregnant idea is much wider in its common sense than Clausewitz saw. It means that the statesmen as well as the generals of the belligerent nations should study the minds of their enemies, for a willingness to submit arises, not from the fear and the sacrifice of war but from mental and moral opinions as well. This justifies—nay, indeed it necessitates the demand of such bodies as the Union of Democratic Control that statesmen should make their intentions clear, not only in order that the peoples at war should understand what they are fighting for and what they are fighting against, but also that the statesmen themselves may have the ends they think the war is to serve definitely before them, and so prevent the war from entering upon a stage when every new military success only drives the political goal farther and farther off. If the rulers who conduct wars really mean to establish peace permanently in the end, war and diplomacy together must be inspired by the Clausewitz idea, and the object of waging war must be to produce in the minds of the peoples such attitudes as incline them to accept peace. A war which ends in unwilling submission, or which leaves as an inheritance fresh causes of war, is not ended at all. For the "end" of a war is not military victory but peace. The military mind assumes, as a matter of fact, that war can never end, but the civil mind makes no such assumption. That is why the military mind thinks only of "absolute" victory in terms of military success, whereas the civil mind ought to think of it in terms of political success. To-day we are sacrificing political success and ultimate peace to military success. For it is clear that the political climax does not coincide with the military climax, the former coming when weariness without resentment is at its maximum, the latter when defeat is absolute and humiliation is deepest.
From this point of view the Army is an instrument in the hands of the men responsible for political policy, and that is why we must apply a maxim of the militarists themselves in a wider and truer way than they apply it. Clausewitz wrote that "the first, the grandest, and most decisive act of judgment which the statesman and general exercises" is to understand precisely what the object of war is, and not "wish to make of it something which, by the nature of its relations, it is impossible for it to be." The statesman of any capacity and judgment ought to know when the war has secured him his political object, and then immediately put his political forces into action and so win his purpose. That is exactly what our statesmen never do and what the men at present at the head of affairs are declining to do. Be they Conservative or Liberal, militarist Labour or Socialist, they belong to the old order who see in the triumph and the support of force the conditions of peace. They are where the Congress of Vienna and the Conferences of Paris and Frankfurt were. And yet upon the ending of this war politically, and upon that alone, depends the future peace of Europe.
Let us assume that the problem to-day is Germany, and that it centres round the question whether the German military mind is to dominate the policy of that country, and so maintain in Europe a sense of insecurity that has to be temporarily allayed by armaments. How is Europe to get guarantees against this? No sane man would suggest that the Government of Germany can be controlled by any combination of Powers in occupation of Berlin. Sooner or later we have to trust ourselves and Europe to the will and policy of a self-governing Germany. When the best and the worst have been done, Germany will still have it in her power to stir up strife and fear or accept peace. How will military operations affect that will and policy? If Germany is left in the frame of mind in which France was in 1871, obviously the effect upon Europe will be bad. But if Germany is not to be left where France was, equally obviously we must show our trust in her self-governing capacity at the earliest practicable time. To force the popular will of Germany into the arms of militarism is to defeat the very purpose for which we engaged in the war. To end this war with the peoples not on speaking terms is to sacrifice for no gain the thousands of our men left to sleep in Belgium and France, because such an end would not only give militarism a new lease of power but would increase its grip on the throat of civilization.
I believe that the people of Germany now, if released from the strain of the war and the necessity of presenting a united front to the enemy, would end the dominance of militarism, would remove its menace from Europe, and would enter into the coöperation of States which will have to be established if Europe is to be saved from destruction, and I further believe they will be less inclined to that after another year of war. Writing thus, I am no pro-German. I am a pro-European. To me Germany is a problem just as capitalism is a problem, and unless that problem is faced in an atmosphere of scientific rationality it will never be solved at all. Atrocities and brutalities are not only the means by which militarism fights, but those by which it perpetuates itself. They rouse, quite rightly, whirl winds of moral indignation, and, alas I under these whirlwinds reason is uprooted. How often do we find in life that a man whose cause is just and whose indignation is altogether worthy is swept to ruin and ineffectiveness by the fury of his moral indignation overwhelming his rational judgment I Our lunatic asylums, and the wildernesses where our Ishmaels are, are full of such wrecks of good but injured men. From the people gush bountiful springs of pure feeling, but these springs water the weedy fields cultivated by their rulers. I want the crimes committed by Germans punished; if it can be proved that crimes have been committed against Germany, I want them punished too. If we could get the various peoples into that frame of mind we could have peace, but only in that way.
As to programmes,1 1I do not consider these in detail, but content myself with referring my readers to such books as Towards a Lasting Settlement, by C. R. Buxton and others. George Allen & Unwin, 2s. 6d. net. I do not believe they present much difficulty provided they are considered by the peoples themselves. The restoration of Belgium, the rehabilitation of France, the settlement of the Balkans, the re-establishment of a Polish autonomy, outlets for Germany these and kindred questions are so agreed upon really in the hearts of the people that no Conference representative of the people could fail to settle them, or could quarrel about the principles upon which they ought to be settled the recognition of nationality and self-government, the inviolability of properly sanctioned treaties, the desirability of arbitration, the convenience of a Council of the nations.
The evil is that all these questions will be approached when the time comes by men who will assume the possibility of further wars, men who will have enmity brooding in their hearts and who will be in a position to play with nations as their stakes, by men who have not freed themselves from a dependence upon militarism as the only guarantee of national security.
Unless the old order of diplomacy and international policy is swept off the stage by the fury of this war, democracy and militarism will be left at hand-grips upon it and Europe will be doomed to the curse of an armed truce. We have suffered much these past two years. A whole generation of men has been obliterated. National wealth, so much needed to enrich the starved lives of our people, has been wasted. A burden of debt unsurpassed in the history of mankind has been accumulated. Problems of terrible import in the State and the workshop have been created. Is this all to go for naught? Is it "Ichabod" that we are writing on the gateways of the future? Is it "Failure" that the next generation will have to carve on the widely scattered graves of this?
These views may for the moment be unpopular. But they are Truth. They are gathered from the waysides of the past. From them, and from them alone, can we build worthy and abiding monuments upon the graves of the men who have fallen, and to build these monuments no sacrifice imposed upon us by the bitter passions of the moment is too great for us cheerfully to bear.