stantly in mind that the war in its entire
magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive
even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing
but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of
bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity
of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the
dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce
any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of
Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation"
in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside
trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end
marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup,
their wrath and horror knew no bounds. They declared that this would put
a new spirit into the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in
the trenches roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other
that it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the
army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. A man
would work at home regardless of the call "to make the world safe for
democracy." His brother would be killed at the front. Immediately he
would throw up his work and take up the war as a family blood feud
against the Germans. Sometimes it was comic. A wounded man, entitled to
his discharge, would return to the trenches with a grim determination to
find the Hun who had wounded him and pay him out for it.
It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out
of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the
light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. I doubt
whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians.
But there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the
comparatively ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to
be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this
could not be done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess,
and a comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice
at last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following
general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was supporting,
"If I had known all that in 1
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