Chapters 6 – 10, pp. 110 – 199.
Illustrations by Edgar Lander.
VI
The
Dark Shadow
1
The Sense of Doom
IT IS IN THE MINDS of the English people—this
dark shadow. It creeps into English gardens where there is beauty and should
be, if anywhere, a sense of peace. It sits like a spectre
at dinner tables where there is good company, and if one listens, as I do, one
is conscious, very soon, of this ghost which haunts the minds of men and women
who have been talking amusingly and lightheartedly until, inevitably—at least
in the company I keep—the talk drifts, or lurches suddenly, into an argument
which begins with fear and ends sometimes with a laugh in which despair is
lurking.
I do not exaggerate or overdramatise. This dark shadow is caused by the dreadful
apprehension that by some inescapable doom we are all marching, against our
will, towards another war more frightful than the last—not the war to end war
this time but the war to end civilisation. That
shadow lies brooding over our English scene and
darkening all our hopes.
What is the use of this
"prosperity" proclaimed triumphantly by the government and by the
Press (ignoring the distressed areas and other less pleasant aspects of English
life) if it is going to be ended, rather soon perhaps (if one can believe the
same newspapers), by hostile air raids from some enemy unnamed, unless Germany
is named, smashing up our densely populated centres
and spreading panic and death by poison gas and incendiary bombs? What is the
good of this great scheme of physical training—the outcome of King George's
Jubilee Fund—if youth is only to be made fit for the next shambles? What is the
good of that Ten Years' Plan for Childhood, advocated by Lady Astor and her
friends, if in one year, or two, or three—1940 is generally named as the fatal
year by the prophets of woe—these children will be vomiting in gas masks and
huddling in cellars which are by no means bombproof?
"I want to frighten people,"
said Mr Duff-Cooper, secretary for war, anxious to
speed up recruiting.
Well, he has been doing his best, but it
was hardly necessary. Mr Winston Churchill had done
rather well in that direction by speeches and articles revealing the rapid and
vast rearming of
Up in
"Why are we working on day and night
shifts? Somebody seems to know something. It don't
look good, apart from work and wages."
2
Ways of Escape
One Sunday afternoon in the spring of this
year I went into two old country houses where pleasant people live, typical,
perhaps, of English life at its best. One belonged to a young doctor who had
been hard driven by the influenza epidemic and does not get much rest, anyhow,
in a practice which extends to many villages. He
looked tired, I thought, but was amusing in his conversation as he stood six
inches below the old black beams which go across his ceiling. But presently,
when we drifted into a talk about psychology, he asked me a curious question.
"Do you think young people ought to
escape from this lunatic asylum called
"Where would they go to find a
sanctuary?" I answered by another question.
"What about
He was worrying about that "next
war", perhaps on account of his young wife, perhaps as a theoretical
question nagging at him as he made his rounds, helping new life into the world,
attending to children and young people who might be caught by the fire of
Moloch.
It was strange that in the second house I
went to that afternoon there were two women who started talking to me about
this fear in their minds. One of them was the hostess of a tea party to which a
group of young, or youngish, people had come. We talked at the end of the room
for a few minutes and presently she asked me a question very seriously.
"Do you think that it might be wise
for anyone to get out of this country while the going is good—that is, before
another war comes? I've almost given up hope of peace. I'm sorry for the young
people—this little crowd, for instance."
It was the same question that the young
doctor had put to me. Behind it was the same sense of impending conflict. They
were both looking for a way of escape while there might still be time. It was
rather startling. It was tragic as evidence of a state of mind creeping into
English thought as a deepening shadow. All over
Another lady in the same room spoke to me
in a quiet voice. She had a little scheme in which, she thought, I might be
interested. Her idea was that a village like the one in which she lived, and
many others not enormously far from
That fear again! That
dreadful apprehension of a coming war.
I spoke quietly, as she had done, so that
no one could hear in a room where there was a cheerful murmur of general
conversation and occasional laughter. It was a good old house which for many
generations had belonged to farming folk but now was filled with a company who skim the latest books, and listen to the
wireless, and are in touch with
"I refuse to believe that war is
coming," I said sturdily. "It seems to me a kind of acceptance of its
certainty if one arranges plans for air raids and gas masks for children. That
is a surrender of all hope. It's putting emphasis onto preparation and not onto
prevention. War mustn't happen."
She was the mother of young children,
though young looking herself and beautiful. Reynolds and Romney painted women
like her. She looked, I thought, very eighteenth century in a long low room
with old-fashioned furniture.
"Besides," I said, "there are
nine million people in
"It might be worth while saving some
of the children," she answered.
Somehow, I thought, we must kill this
fear lurking in so many minds. How tragic, how farcical, how damnable, that
with all our massed intelligence, all our science, all our victories of civilisation, the minds of women should be haunted by this spectre of approaching horror for the children they have
brought into the world! Gas masks for babies? The very devil wouldn't think of
such abomination.
3
The Failure of the League
It was the breakdown of the
They had pinned their faith to the
principles of Collective Security. When Mussolini broke all his pledges to the
League, refused arbitration, and massed his troops for attack against the
Ethiopians, it looked, for a little while, as though the League would exert its
authority and put into combined action its clauses of restraint against a
nation judged to be guilty of flagrant aggression against any member nation of
the League. By Article 16 of the Covenant sanctions were to be imposed on
Mr Anthony Eden, that elegant young man representing
the British government, rapped on the table of the League Council. He took a
strong line, supported by his government at home. When Mussolini sent troops to
There was one day when I felt forked
lightning in the air—an oppressive atmosphere. Other people were aware of it.
It was a day when we were within an hour
or two of war with
Collective Security had a wide-open gap.
Only military and naval force—that is, war—could stop the Italian army on its
voyage to
The British Lion had roared and everybody
was much impressed. Then it began to curl its whiskers and wag its tail.
British prestige had been high.
There was an outburst of passion in
"It is not
Mr Baldwin came running into
It was all very dramatic. The voice of
"You needn't pay any attention to
these alleged Italian victories," I was told by an air commodore in his
drawing room one day.
He had just flown over
"The Italians make a little advance
and then have to draw back. It will take them years to
penetrate that country where black tigers lie behind the rocks."
"The Italian claims to victory are
all bluff," said a young American in the same room. He had just spent six
months in
Less than two months afterwards the
Italian army entered
It was a "glorious victory" for
It was one cause of that shadow which had
long been in the minds of European peoples—the shadow of fear over many
frontiers which now deepened and darkened. It reached
4
Hitler's
This Italian adventure gave a shock to Mr Stanley Baldwin, not easily shocked into any galvanic
activity until something "really must be done"—and to his advisers in
the Admiralty, War Office, and Foreign Office. The government was beggared now
of all slogans for the public soul. It was no use talking any more about their
faith in the League. The League had been badly battered and had gone into dry
dock for repairs, if possible. The Disarmament Conference had dragged along its
weary way to death. No use reviving that, they thought, wrongly, as I venture
to think.
Another menace, which seemed to them more
dangerous than
Some of the new leaders in
It was a kind of woolly Wagnerism applied
to modern life. They exalted physical strength, instinct, force, against
intellectualism and all the code of European culture derived from the Christian
faith and the Renaissance. The old tribal law of
The German people were being drilled
intensively. They were being subjected to an intensive propaganda which blared
into their ears, and into their minds, ceaselessly, under the direction of that
human talking machine Herr Goebbels.
Worse still, to the outside world, German
youth seemed to like it! They did not resist this discipline. They gloried in
it.
Visitors to
The intensive rearmament of
"When is this war going to break
out?" asked American people of a friend of mine named Curtis Brown a few
months ago. They were staggered when he answered cheerfully: "There ain't going to be no war!"
The English Press does not share his
optimism. Every day for the past two years many newspapers in
this country have kept their readers' nerves on edge. Every crisis
becomes to them a new threat of a world war. Every analysis of the world
situation leads them to the conclusion that war is coming nearer. Their correspondents
in many countries emphasise these constantly arriving
dangers. Politicians repeat dolorously that the international situation is
"deteriorating."
It deteriorated very intensively when the
Spanish Civil War aroused passionate emotion on the Left and Right of all
political groups. Spain became the Tom Tiddler's
ground into which half-a-dozen nations poured aeroplanes,
tanks, all munitions of war, and volunteers, for a trial of strength between
Democracy, as it was called, and Fascism, as it was called, though in that
tragic arena of blood, and heroism, and murder, and mercilessness on both
sides—a disgrace to civilisation, an outrage against
all Christian chivalry—there were many parties and many groups—on both
sides—which were neither one nor the other.
Labour and the Communists and the Left Wing
intellectuals clamoured for intervention on the side
of the
Is it any wonder that in the early part
of this year when England spoke behind closed doors, in old houses, in small
flats, in college rooms, in little restaurants, in clubs, and in
bed-sitting-rooms, there was a sense of fear that another war might happen and
that we were drifting to a calamity which would be the death of civilisation and the ruin of the Western world?
5
Who Wants War?
A man spoke to me on the stairs of a
Twenty-odd years ago this man, who now
has grey hair and sad-looking eyes because he is disgusted with the state of
the world, was a young officer in a Scottish regiment, and while he stood
talking to me his mind went back to a day in 1914. That was after a melancholy
remark he had made because of the dark shadow which was on his mind.
"We are all marching towards war,"
he said. "Who can doubt it? There's no ill feeling against the Germans.
They have no ill feeling against us. But we are being dragged into a state of
things which can only lead to another conflict. Democracy has no power over its
own fate; there is no such thing as Democracy. It's at the mercy of those on
top."
It was then that his memory went back to
a day in 1914, at Christmas time, when there was a truce between the lines, and
his men and the Germans went out into no-man's land to bury their dead and
started talking to each other. It lasted for three days, that truce.
"Do you want to go on
fighting?" asked this Scottish officer of one of the German soldiers.
He answered with the title of an English
song:
"Home, Sweet Home! That's all I want."
They all wanted that, on both sides. If
it had been left to them they would have stopped killing each other. They had
no enmity at all. They hated the war. They could see no sense in it. It was the
men on top who were going on with the war.
"This rearmament of ours," said
my friend, who used to be a Liberal M.P., "is a sign that we have
surrendered the
"Why not accept Hitler's offer of a
Western Pact?" I asked. "Isn't that the first step to peace in
He didn't agree. He thought it would be
playing
"But what evidence have we," I asked, "that
He hated Fascism. He had no faith in
Hitler's sincerity. But he groaned over the bill of costs for British
rearmament and its enormous folly, as he thought it.
"Think of what all that money would
mean in social services and productive plans! We could create a paradise. Now I
despair."
There were others like him in every part
of
One optimist took tea with me, a charming
man whom I met at the council table of the
"I wish you would write an
article," he suggested, "about the point of view of the younger crowd
in every country, showing that none of them want war. It would be a great
service, and I am sure you could get a lot of material from different
countries. It's only the elder statesmen who have got this war complex."
I made a few mental reservations. It was
true that even the young Nazis of Germany don't want another war. But they
would march with the exaltation of self-sacrifice if Hitler called them. What
about the young Italians?
And yet I believe he is right—this
distinguished little lawyer, Sir John Stewart-Wallace by name—whose heart flows
with the milk of human kindness and whose eyes reveal a schoolboy humour, in spite of his dusty lawbooks
and his legal dryness. The young people of
6
An Exhibition of Modern Culture
I dropped into an exhibition arranged for
public edification by the municipal authorities of Kensington, where once I
used to live.
Now, when I walk through Kensington Gardens,
I think of those peaceful days of my young manhood when I used to play with a
small boy on the coast of that Sea of Adventure—the Round Pond—where thousands
of small boys have watched their craft go out on distant voyages from which, on
days of dead calm, they never came back. Those small boys grew up just in time,
some of them, for a world war in which they were wanted, and they, too, so many
of them, never came back.
Those ghost memories were in my head when
I went through
By taking the advice kindly provided by
the Home Office and passed on to the municipality of Kensington, it was
suggested that precautions against this uncomfortable possibility should be
taken in advance—today or tomorrow, if possible—and that by a few little
gadgets—bits of stick, brown paper, gluepots and the glazed paper on cigarette
boxes or chocolate boxes—Kensington families might avoid all disagreeable
consequences of mustard gas or other varieties of poison vapour.
There was a little crowd in the
exhibition, including old gentlemen of Kensington who were very much interested
in this show and seemed to approve of its purpose thoroughly—"The nation
wants waking up!" said one of them—and a number of ladies from Kensington
Gore, Holland Street and Campden Hill (I guessed) who
seemed to accept this chamber of horrors as complacently as they would go round
Harrods to see the latest fashions.
"Most interesting!" . . .
"It seems to me very necessary." . . .
"Now, isn't that a good idea?"
. . . "So simple too! Really I think we must do
something about it."
There were rooms of small size,
representing bathrooms and bedrooms, converted into antigas
chambers. Bits of stick had been tacked onto the doorways and round the
windows. Wet blankets, or cloth of some fibrous stuff,
made antigas curtains. The very latest types of gas
mask suitable for Kensington ladies were exhibited on the tables. Lists of articles
to be kept in a gasproof chamber before an expected,
or unexpected, air raid were printed on big cards. They included domestic and
sanitary utensils, a screen, drinking water, biscuits, toys
for the children, playing cards for the grownups, and other items which might
agreeably pass the time while the enemy was dropping bombs. It was really all
very charming, to those whose minds work that way.
In charge of the exhibit were some young
women in Red Cross uniforms. I ventured to speak to one.
"Don't you think it might be better
to prevent a war rather than go in for this kind of thing?"
"Excellent idea!" she answered
brightly. "How are you going to do it?"
"Doesn't this seem to you a
surrender of reason?" I asked this good-looking girl with very steady eyes
which looked frankly into mine.
"An acceptance of war, do you
mean?" she asked. "Yes. That's how it seems to me."
"There's only one kind of defence, really," she told me, looking over her
shoulder as though she might be overheard; "that's by retaliation. I
suppose if we're strong enough to retaliate we shan't be attacked. Isn't that
the best hope?"
"What's the good of all this
nonsense?" I asked. "Do you honestly think it's
any good at all?"
She was very honest.
"It might save a few. That's better
than saving none."
I wanted to have further conversation
with her. She reminded me of a girl I had known before the war and in the war,
a very brave young woman named Dorothy Feilding who
had helped the wounded lying on Belgian battlefields, quite regardless of her
own danger. This Red Cross girl would do the same kind of thing, I thought, in
the streets of
So this, I thought, as I wandered round
alone, is what we are coming to! What a beautiful revelation of the civilisation we have reached in this year of grace! What a
lovely introduction to life for young children who are to be instructed on the
wearing of gas masks, instead of reading fairy tales, and who are to be told
that in a year or two they may have to take their dolls into a blanketed room
to escape from a poisonous breath creeping through the streets, while millions,
who are unprepared, choke to death or are burnt and blistered! There will be
the crash of heavy bombs, destroying many houses and burying their inhabitants
under their ruins. There will be incendiary bombs, dear children, making
bonfires in the sky and roasting thousands of people in their flames. You see,
darling, the nasty Germans want their colonies back, but if you are very good,
and wear your gas masks nicely, and play in those comfy little rooms with their
cracks pasted up, our dear Lord will look after you, and possibly let you
remain alive and see the ruins afterwards. Won't that be nice?
Great God! I thought, going round that
exhibition in Kensington. So this is the best that mankind is doing with its
intelligence! This is the latest exhibition of our Brave New World! Without any
poison gas, I felt poisoned.
And a few days later I read a report
about these Home Office recommendations for air-raid precautions. It was by a
number of scientists at
The experimenters, who included two
women, converted four rooms—shop basement, villa dining room, council house
sitting room, modern bathroom—into gasproof rooms
according to the official handbook.
They found that gas penetrated bricks and
plaster, cracks covered with brown paper and mushed
paper, blocked-in fire-places and sealed doors.
In one room gas, which outside would kill
in two and a half minutes, would kill inside within ten.
In the bathroom—with steel-framed
windows, tiled walls, concrete floor—gas would penetrate and kill within four
hours.
Then they tested incendiary
bombs—classified as a greater danger than gas or high explosives—and found that
the sand-spreading advised was useless.
Welding thermit, a comparatively mild incendiary compound,
defied all such efforts, burned under water, through metal, through sand,
through floors.
"If we take a specimen raid of nine
bombers, each carrying a thousand small bombs, nine thousand could be dropped
on an area of two square miles.
"Allowing that in an urban area only
a fifth of these cause fires, that means 1,800 fires.
The danger of fires spreading over several blocks of buildings, making the
centre of the conflagration quite unapproachable by fire brigades, is obvious.
"On hearing the warning people will
rush to their gasproof rooms, and then when
incendiary bombs set fire to the upper parts of their dwellings they will
either run out and be caught by the gas or stay inside and be roasted alive.
"This is how they would act if they
follow the instructions of the Home Office."
Gas masks tested were found useless
against mustard gas and lewisite.
Protection for tiny children is shown to
be impossible, and the report pictures children, sealed up in containers,
screaming themselves into fits, with the mother trying to pump air to several
at once.
Would fathers and mothers protect
themselves and watch their children suffocate? they
ask.
The full absurdity of all this is shown
by a criticism of the Home Office advice: "Set aside a room in your house."
In
So 8,669,000 would find a gasproof room impossible.
As for evacuating big cities by train—a
few bombs on the termini would stop traffic for days.
We had better concentrate on stopping that next war if possible, for if it
comes, retaliation is no protection.
Those
Who Wear Wings
1
One of Our Air Pilots
I WENT to tea at a house in
It is like a country mansion with big
rooms and big open fireplaces where, in winter, logs are burning. In summer the
sun—if there is any sun—streams through the casement windows, and there is a
garden behind the house with a lawn smooth and large enough for croquet, which
the mistress of the house is pleased to play with her friends. Birds sing in
the bushes. Once, I swear, I heard a nightingale, though if one has listening
ears one hears very faintly the murmur of
At that tea table, round which we sat in
a homely way—there were some nice hot cakes thereon—I noticed two youngish men
whom I had met before. They were, as I knew, "those who mount with wings
as eagles." That is to say, they were pilots in the Royal Air Force.
There were some women at the table and
laughter touched our talk. It was all very pleasant and very comfortable. This,
I thought, is what civilisation means at its best: a
pleasant room, a cheerful company round a tea table, conversation which is
merry and open minded. One would not have to put a guard upon one's tongue, as
one has to in some countries nowadays, or be afraid to express one's ideas on
any subject which comes into one's mind. This was Liberty Hall.
One of the flying men sitting on my right
picked up some phrase of mine. I have forgotten what it was, but I have an idea
it was something about a recent visit I had paid to
"I suppose you know we're living in
a fool's paradise?" he asked, with a queer ironical smile. "This
country is in considerable danger, and nobody seems to know, and nobody cares a
damn!"
He said something like that and there was
an intensity in his voice which startled me, and a
look in his eyes which I could not misinterpret. It was the look of a man who
has something desperate on his mind.
"Don't you pay the slightest
attention to him," said my hostess. "He has been trying to frighten
me. If I believed a word of it I shouldn't be able to sleep a wink."
"No, no!" said the young
airman, laughing good-naturedly, but a little uneasily, perhaps. "I'm not
a scaremonger. But I hate eyewash and a false sense of security."
"Have another toasted bun,"
said the lady.
He had another toasted bun. The
conversation went round the table in a lighthearted way. But I knew that the
boy on my right was seething with something he knew and didn't like.
After tea four of us—all men—went into
another room where there was another fire. They were the two young flying men
and my host and myself. Three of us lit cigarettes.
"Did you see anything of what they
were doing in the air in
FLIRTING
WITH DEATH . . . .
I hadn't seen much of a technical kind.
But I had spent a little time at the Flughaven near
And I remembered a journey I had made
through
Lift Up Your
Eyes.
Our Future Is in the Air.
Help German Aviation.
In
The flying man threw away his cigarette
and spoke quietly but with a kind of restrained passion.
"
At that time it was distinctly
unpleasant. We were still at cross-purposes with Signor Mussolini. Our prestige
had fallen to a low ebb.
The flying man thought it abominable. The
"I'm not an alarmist," he went
on, "but I suppose you would agree that some damn silly accident might
happen, some combination of bandits might make trouble, or war might be forced
upon us to defend vital interests.
I hated to think so. It would be the end
of everything which we find good or endurable.
"If war happened," said my
flying friend, "it would come suddenly, perhaps without an ultimatum.
German bombers would appear over
He looked me in the eyes and said
something which made me feel rather cold, although the fire was still burning
on the big hearth.
"We have no defence
and no means of retaliation." I couldn't believe that and told him so.
"What about our expansion scheme?
The white paper! All this rearmament! Aren't we vastly increasing our fighting
force in the air?"
The young airman laughed bitterly.
"Official dope! The expansion scheme is mainly on paper. It's faked arithmetic, put out by the Air Ministry to keep
the nation lulled to sleep and ignorant of its appalling dangers. The higher
control of the Air Force are the cause of all this mess, and their main
preoccupation at the moment is to cover their past failures and deficiencies.
Their concealment of these facts can only be done by going on with concealment.
Men who have failed in the past—blind to the technical and tactical problems of
air-fighting—go from important to more important posts, and this line of
inefficiency continues without a break. Hopeless!"
He looked across at the other aviator.
"Am I exaggerating at all, do you
think?"
The other man shook his head.
"The painful
truth! Every experienced pilot
knows it perfectly well."
The boy who wanted to get these things
off his chest was silent for a little while and then sat forward in his chair.
"
He uttered another alarming sentence.
"Our Air Force can't strike a blow
of any kind at
The two air pilots went on talking.
2
A Grave Indictment
It was a terrible indictment which
afterwards I heard from other sources of information. The present situation
reveals that technically we haven't the aircraft, equipment or organisation which would give us the power we should need
in another war. There is an appalling dilution of skilled personnel by hastily
trained learners. Our biggest bombers have a short range, and are so slow
compared with aircraft possessed by other nations that they couldn't hope to
survive a long flight across hostile country, and do not possess the air
endurance, at any endurable speed, to permit of them operating from home bases
into a country as far away as Germany. The increase of the Air Force is based
on the production of machines of these old-fashioned, slowgoing
types of bombers.
"If we have a war forced upon us in
the next few years we shall be powerless to retaliate in the air."
My host looked very grave but kept
extraordinarily silent. I wondered about all this. I could hardly believe it.
Perhaps the man who did most of the talking was fanatical on some theory, or
disgruntled for some personal reason, or obsessed by the fear of a German
menace. There was no doubt in my mind about the last point. He had no faith in
German peace-mindedness. Me gave them about two
years—if that—before they strike. They were just playing for time, he thought.
We should have to play for longer time than that, and even then we should be no
match for
All this must be taken with heavy
discount, I thought. This flying man is exaggerating his case and not making
allowance for the government's plan of development. Anyhow,
I left the house where those two airmen
had been talking, and had a sense of dark doubt. I didn't believe in piling up
armaments as the way to peace. I was a
"We have no means of defence. Our Air Force is incapable of striking a blow
against
"What's the matter?" asked a
friend of mine whom I met on the way home. "You look as if you had heard
bad news. Worried about something?"
"Worried about human
stupidity," I answered. "This planet is not governed by intelligence.
We're all going stark raving mad again."
He was very much amused.
"We've never been sane," he
answered cheerfully.
3
There Is No Defence
I listened to a debate in defence in the House of Commons. Mr
Winston Churchill, the right honourable gentleman
below the gangway, as they called him, sat making notes while the talk went on.
Presently he stood up and attacked the government for delays in expanding the
Air Force. The government programme and pledges, he
said, had broken down completely. We had been promised parity with
As I listened to this debate I looked
down upon the members of the House and the two front-line benches where
ministers and ex-ministers sat in various attitudes of mild interest or mild
boredom. The government men and their supporters, with few exceptions, seemed
satisfied with Sir Thomas Inskip's report of
progress. There was no sense of national danger sufficient to disturb their
placidity of mind. They seemed to accept the inevitability of delay as though
there were lots of time ahead, anyhow. Churchill's portentous phrases were what
they expected from him but did not make them turn pale or hear from afar the
noise of wings over
All this had only touched lightly upon
the difficulties and delays in expanding our Air Force. But after that debate I
came into possession of facts—they seemed to me reliable—which revealed the
reasons why the young airman with whom I had taken tea one day had no touch of
breezy optimism but was gravely anxious. Those facts were given to me, I
suppose, because I might have the power of the pen to stir up the nation to a
sense of its unprotectedness in the air and to bring
pressure upon the government to awake from its stupor. Those who were my
informants acted, I am certain, from a high sense of duty to the nation and were ready to sacrifice their own careers that the truth
might be known. The whole truth is not yet known, though some of it was exposed
and admitted in another debate of the House on January 27 of this year.
Sir Thomas Inskip
acknowledged very frankly that the original plan calling for the provision of
71 new squadrons of 12 first-line aircraft in each squadron, making 124 in all,
had broken down in the timetable. Only 87 squadrons had so far been formed,
though he anticipated that 100 would be reached by the end of March of this
year. The remaining 24, "or at least 20," would be ready by July of
this year. But not all of them would be real squadrons but only skeletons of
one or more flight each, and Sir Thomas was not able to say that by that time
they would be brought up to their full complement.
Mr Churchill urged that there was an enormous
percentage of deficiency. If 124 squadrons were completed by March 31 it would
still not give us parity with German strength at that date, nor
anything like it. We had been solemnly promised that there should be parity. We
had not got it. We had no right, he said, to assume that any quarrel would
arise from
The debate put many cards on the table
which had been held back, but by no means all of them. Many of these had been
placed before the prime minister in a secret report by Mr
Churchill, who found himself in the position of having a mass of information of
an alarming character, as to lack of efficiency and failure in the very basis
of planning and design, which he could hardly publish to the world without the
revelation of secrets which might encourage potential enemies.
Curiously enough, I found myself in the
same position. I had notes of a very technical and secret character which
seemed to me too important to ignore or hold in my own knowledge. They were a
grave indictment of official complacency, official inefficiency, and of a most
distressing state of things in the Royal Air Force which would endanger the
lives of our young pilots in time of peace and lead to inevitable disaster
should there be war. But I could not bring myself to publish them in the Press
in a series of scare articles. I decided to put them into the hands of the man
who had taken up this subject and made himself the spokesman of the case for a
strong Air Force. That was Winston Churchill, who might care to have my notes,
though I might be "carrying coals to
Meanwhile, in many countries—Germany,
France, Italy, Russia, Japan, the United States—there was at the beginning of
this year a ceaseless endeavour to increase the
numbers of fighting aircraft, their range, their speed, the bomb-carrying
capacity, and the number of their trained pilots and crews. The Civil War in
manhood, womanhood and childhood in
But what alarmed me most about the
criticisms of our air efficiency was the awful thought that all this
intensification of armament, now being carried out by our government, may be
controlled by minds like those which were in charge of our war machine in 1914.
Those minds of cavalry officers, promoted to high command by social pull, good
looks and the camaraderie of a caste, were not exactly inspiring of confidence
among the men who were condemned to die in a World War. The official history of
the war does not break down the suspicion that they were unequal to the job in
hand. Is there any new assurance that the men who are now in high command—in
the Air Ministry, for instance—are of a different mental calibre
from those who were Brass Hats in
That is rather frightening.
VIII
The
Red Dream
1
A Russian Fairy Tale
ALTHOUGH in
I once tried to read that book and found
it very difficult and dreary. But other people who have actually read it—most
of those who worship at the shrine of Karl Marx have not read it—think it
wonderful. Professor Laski, for instance, thinks it
wonderful. I was dining opposite to him one night in a private party and he
made a statement which astonished me.
"Before I studied Marx," he
said to me across the table, "I could get no real basis of political and
economic philosophy, but I found his work extraordinarily stimulating, and it
gave me for the first time a sense of optimism."
I confessed that my unsuccessful endeavour to master Das
Kapital had left me with a sense of profound
gloom. For as far as I understood the main thesis of the author, it was that human
society was moving towards an inevitable class conflict, because under
Capitalism the poor were bound to get poorer and the rich richer until that
immense gap caused a break of the whole system which would be followed by the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
The old gentleman in the white whiskers
and a Father Christmas beard was the apostle of the Class War. That doesn't
seem to me a cause of joy. Yet one has only to look around one's own country,
and others, to see that, apparently, his prophecy has not come true. Here in
They have what seems to me a fairy tale
in their minds. It is untouched by reality or by the cold evidence of truth. It
has its origin in
I was struck by that one evening when I
was invited to dinner by a charming friend of mine who "threw a
party", as they say in the
Charming young men, I found them. One of
them had just written a book on
I did not intervene in this discussion.
My knowledge of Russia is becoming distant—as far back as the days when
twenty-five million people were starving (four and a half million died on the
Volga), when everyone in Russia was hungry, when millions were dying of typhus.
Perhaps things had improved since then. Some of these young men had been
recently to
Did they honestly think that the
condition of the Russian people was higher than in this country where they sat
at table talking freely? Did they believe that liberty was there—any kind of
free thought or free speech? Did they still believe that there was equality of
class and equality of reward? Had they not seen the well-dressed and well-fed kommissars at the Mariinsky
Theatre with their bourgeoise-looking women, and the
Russian peasants, or labourers in the timber camps,
not well dressed and not well fed, but miserable, and verminous,
and hungry? Why this admiration for the mechanisation
of Russian life—and the herding of peasants into collective farms, and the
crowding of the sky with bombing aeroplanes, and the
iron discipline of the ant heap? They used the words "Democracy" and
"
No doubt in
2
Intellectual "Reds"
At another party given by the same
charming young friend of mine I sat opposite a man who is known throughout the
English-speaking world as a fine scientist and thought-provoking brain. He
dreams in Latin and is delirious in Greek. Presently he began to talk about
Karl Marx, and the Russian revolution, and the creed of Communism. He seemed to
see something fine and noble in what to others, like myself,
appears to be a denial of intellectual liberty and the tyranny of Terror. This
scientist, by some trick of the brain, was able to ignore the agonies and cruelties
which have gone to make this Russian experiment of a new social system, or to
weigh them lightly in the balance compared with agonies and cruelties inflicted
on mankind by capitalism. He has persuaded himself that the results have
justified all that suffering—results which appear in that low-grade civilisation now existing in Russia, that discipline of
human ants, that tyranny of Cheka and Ogpu.
What is the mystery, or the secret
vision, which causes such a mind as this—it belongs to Professor Haldane—to worship at the shrine of Lenin and pay homage to
Stalin, that man of steel and blood? Professor Haldane
has the courage of his convictions. He went to
And yet Professor Jack Haldane has a fine brain, a gay humour,
and, I am certain, a kindly heart. Other brains not so high as his, but quite
intelligent—our little intellectuals—are seeing Red and dreaming Red, though
they have never read Karl Marx nor walked across the Red Square below the
Kremlin walls. They do not seem to know that Communism has been abandoned,
largely, in Soviet Russia, which now has inequality of class and wages, recognises private property and the right of inheritance,
and has established a corrupt and mean bureaucracy above a mass in human
bondage.
3
The Ardent Mind of Youth
This Red dream touches the ardent mind of
youth, here and there, in universities, training colleges, and
bed-sitting-rooms. Undergraduates of
One of them—the son of an old friend of
mine—honoured my wife and myself with a visit and was
good enough to take tea with us. He is a very handsome young man with dark
dreamy eyes in which at times there is a gentle smile. A poet, one would
TERROR
BY NIGHT
say at first glance. But we didn't talk of poetry
that afternoon. We talked of something more dangerous even than poetry. We talked
of Communism.
He is a very intellectual young man and
one of the leaders of the Extreme Left at
My wife and I gave the young man a fair
innings and listened with amiable consideration. He did not believe in
tolerance, he told us. Tolerance meant acquiescence in injustice—such as in the
distressed areas—and the cruelties of the Capitalist system, which of course,
he said, was beginning to break down everywhere. The younger people of his
crowd looked forward to the end of all that by direct action and the removal of
the old dead-heads. Old age, he thought, had been too long in power. It wasn't
their fault, of course, but their minds were incapable of moving forward and accepting
any other system than the one into which they had been born.
"Everybody over the age of
forty," said this humane young man, "ought
to be shot."
My wife and I glanced at each other. We
were, alas, over the age of forty.
"Their minds are too rigid," he
explained gently. "One has to realise that
nothing can be done in this country until that generation is safely dead. Then
we can get busy, shaping things differently. Of course there will have to be a
fight, anyhow. I am not one of those who believe that the system can be changed
without bloodshed. Vested interests, the defenders of Capital, the diehard type
of mind, the Fascist spirit, which is latent in snob minds, will have to be
defeated—and they won't surrender without a struggle. I shall live to see the
day when the barricades are up in
"Supposing," said my wife very
quietly, "that I happened to appear on the other side of your particular
barricade? What would you do?"
Our distinguished visitor—that charming
young man—took another piece of cake and flicked a crumb from his knee. "I
should shoot you," he said sadly but firmly.
It was an interesting conversation. I
wondered how many followers this young man had at
"It's quite all right," he said
in a kindly way. "You can't help it. You're one of the old Liberals, of
course. You belong to that era."
I belonged, in his mind, to the damned
dead past.
4
Impatience of the Younger Mind
These young intellectual Communists are
not to be taken too seriously, although they are influencing other minds,
especially if they become schoolmasters and writers after college days.
What is the lure to them in this creed
which, in every country where it works, leads to civil strife, murder and all
cruelties? Is it due to a twisted morality in their minds? Is it some subtle
poison of the brain? I think that among the younger intellectuals it is due to
generous instincts—hatred of injustice, pity for the underdog, impatience with
the slowness of social reform under parliamentary government, and disgust with
the insincerities of the political game.
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