IV
Sir Douglas Haig came to Cologne when we had been there a few days. On the grandiose bridge over the Rhine he made a short speech to a few of us. Most of it sounded as if the thing were a job he had got to get through with, and did not much care for. Perhaps the speech, like those of other great men who wisely hate making speeches, had been written for him by somebody else. But once he looked up from the paper and put in some words which I felt sure were his own; “I only hope that, now we have won, we shall not lose our heads as the Germans did after 1870. It has brought them to this.” He looked at the gigantic mounted statue of the Kaiser overhead, a thing crying out in its pride for fire from heaven to fall and consume it, and at the homely, squat British sentry moving below on his post. I think the speech was reported. But none of our foremen at home took any notice of it at all. They knew a trick worth two of Haig’s. They were as moonstruck as any victorious Prussian.
So we had failed—had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken youth, the dead friends, the women’s overshadowed lives at home, the agony, and bloody sweat—all had gone to darken the stains which most of us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled. They had believed that their country was backing them. They had thought, as they marched into Germany, “Now we shall show old Fritz how you treat a man when you’ve thrashed him.” They would let him into the English secret, the tip that the power and glory are not to the bully. As some of them looked at the melancholy performance which followed, our Press and our politicians parading at Paris in moral pickelhauben and doing the Prussianist goose-step by way of pas de triomphe, they could not but say in dismay to themselves: “This is our doing. We cannot wish the war unwon; and yet—if we had shirked, poor old England, for all we know, might not have come to this pass. So we come home draggle-tailed, sick of the mess that we were unwittingly helping to make when we tried to do well.”
XIV
Our Moderate Satanists
I
Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of the land. Then comes Professor Gilbert Murray, one of the few learned men who are able to make a thing clear to people not quite like themselves, and tells us all about it in a cheap, small book, easy to read. It seems that the Satanists, or the pick of the sect, were Bohemian Protestants at the start, and quite plain, poor men from the country.
“Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was the Lord’s, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the statement. That was the division of the world. On the one side God, Pope and Emperor, and the army of persecutors; on the other themselves, downtrodden and poor. …”
How easy to understand! In crude works of non-imagination the wicked, repente turpissimus, suddenly says, some fine morning, “Evil, be thou my good.” In life the conversion is slower. It is a gradual process of coming to feel that what has passed officially as true, right, and worshipful is so implicated in work manifestly dirty, and so easily made to serve the ends of the greedy, lazy, and cruel, that faith in its authenticity has to be given up as not to be squared with the facts of the world. From feeling this it is not a long step to the further surmise that the grand traditional foe of that old moral order of the world, now so severely discredited, may be less black than so lying an artist has painted him. Does he not, anyhow, stand at the opposite pole to that which has just proved itself base? He, too, perhaps, is some helpless butt of the slings and arrows of an enthroned barbarity tormenting the world. The legend about his condign fall from heaven may only be some propagandist lie—all we are suffered to hear about some early crime in the long, beastly annals of governmental misdoing. So thought trips, fairly lightly, along
