Similar explosions were happening in England. Bodies of men broke camp at Folkestone and other camps, demonstrated before town halls, demanded to speak with mayors, generals, any old fellows who were in authority, and refused to embark for France until they had definite pledges that they would receive demobilization papers without delay. Whitehall, the sacred portals of the War Office, the holy ground of the Horse Guards’ Parade, were invaded by bodies of men who had commandeered ambulances and lorries and had made long journeys from their depots. They, too, demanded demobilization. They refused to be drafted out for service to India, Egypt, Archangel, or anywhere. They had “done their bit,” according to their contract. It was for the War Office to fulfil its pledges. “Justice” was the word on their lips, and it was a word which put the wind up (as soldiers say) any staff-officers and officials who had not studied the laws of justice as they concern private soldiers, and who had dealt with them after the armistice and after the peace as they had dealt with them before—as numbers, counters to be shifted here and there according to the needs of the High Command. What was this strange word “justice” on soldiers’ lips? … Red tape squirmed and writhed about the business of demobilization. Orders were made, communicated to the men, canceled even at the railway gates. Promises were made and broken. Conscripts were drafted off to India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Archangel, against their will and contrary to pledge. Men on far fronts, years absent from their wives and homes, were left to stay there, fever-stricken, yearning for home, despairing. And while the old war was not yet cold in its grave we prepared for a new war against Bolshevik Russia, arranging for the spending of more millions, the sacrifice of more boys of ours, not openly, with the consent of the people, but on the sly, with a fine art of camouflage.
The purpose of the new war seemed to many men who had fought for “liberty” an outrage against the “self-determination of peoples” which had been the fundamental promise of the League of Nations, and a blatant hypocrisy on the part of a nation which denied self-government to Ireland. The ostensible object of our intervention in Russia was to liberate the Russian masses from “the bloody tyranny of the Bolsheviks,” but this ardor for the liberty of Russia had not been manifest during the reign of Czardom and grand dukes when there were massacres of mobs in Moscow, bloody Sundays in St. Petersburg, pogroms in Riga, floggings of men and girls in many prisons, and when free speech, liberal ideas, and democratic uprisings had been smashed by Cossack knout and by the torture of Siberian exile.
Anyhow, many people believed that it was none of our business to suppress the Russian Revolution or to punish the leaders of it, and it was suspected by British workingmen that the real motive behind our action was not a noble enthusiasm for liberty, but an endeavor to establish a reactionary government in Russia in order to crush a philosophy of life more dangerous to the old order in Europe than high explosives, and to get back the gold that had been poured into Russia by England and France. By a strange paradox of history, French journalists, forgetting their own Revolution, the cruelties of Robespierre and Marat, the September Massacres, the torture of Marie Antoinette in the Tuileries, the guillotining of many fair women of France, and after 1870 the terrors of the Commune, were most horrified by the anarchy in Russia, and most fierce in denunciation of the bloody struggle by which a people made mad by long oppression and infernal tyrannies strove to gain the liberties of life.
Thousands of British soldiers newly come from war in France were sullenly determined that they would not be dragged off to the new adventure. They were not alone. As Lord Rothermere pointed out, a French regiment mutinied on hearing a mere unfounded report that it was being sent to the Black Sea. The United States and Japan were withdrawing. Only a few of our men, disillusioned by the ways of peace, missing the old comradeship of the ranks, restless, purposeless, not happy at home, seeing no prospect of good employment, said: “Hell! … Why not the army again, and Archangel, or any old where?” and volunteered for Mr. Winston Churchill’s little war.
After the trouble of demobilization came peace pageants and celebrations and flag-wavings. But all was not right with the spirit of the men who came back. Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again, looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone to business in the peaceful days before the August of ’14. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to queer moods, queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many of them were easily moved to passion when they lost control of themselves. Many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening. For some time, while they drew their unemployment pensions, they did not make any effort to get work for the future. They said: “That can wait. I’ve done my bit. The country can keep me for a while. I helped to save it … Let’s go to the movies.” They were listless when not excited by some “show.” Something seemed to have snapped in them; their willpower. A
