ABSTRACT
The British Commonwealth is again at war, again with Germany, and again in defence of freedom. To most of us, and especially to those who are old enough to remember the last war, this mere fact of repetition must seem the most shocking feature of the whole catastrophe. Only twenty years ago we emerged victorious from a test of strength and endurance far greater than any previous war had imposed on those who fought it. We had lost the flower of our generation. We had dissipated a large part of the wealth accumulated in long years of peace by the skill and labour of our peoples. Our society had suffered injuries, moral as well as economic, which it would take a long time to repair. But for all that there was one deep source of consolation. Most of us believed that the triumph of freedom was final, that the world had indeed been made ‘safe for democracy’, that the ‘war to end war’ had ended war. There were few of us, it is safe to say, who did not think, when the bells rang out for the armistice, that there could never be another big-scale war. And, if that were so, our sacrifices had at any rate not been useless. We had bought at a terrible price the chance of making a better and more prosperous world. And then the chance was frittered away. In less than a generation the same ordeal has to be endured again; and, though, of course, the main fault lies with the enemies of freedom, its champions must bear their share of blame. Future historians of this age will marvel at the manner in which the victors of 1918, equipped as they then were with irresistible power on land and sea and
in the air, allowed the course of international affairs so to develop as to make it possible within so short a time for their defeated and disarmed antagonist, not merely to challenge the peace settlement they had imposed, but to force them into another desperate fight for their existence. It may be left to those historians to unravel the complex of idealism and selfishness, of good intentions and bad judgment, of illusion and inertia, which accounts for our and our allies’ share of responsibility for this catastrophe. This is not the time to define and apportion the blame. All that matters now about our conduct in the last twenty years is the first and simplest lesson to be learned from its result. We start this war knowing that it will not be enough to win it. The fruits of victory must be secured. That lesson does not need teaching twice. [ … ] The discussion of the peace settlement, it is true, must be provisional. We
cannot forecast the situation in which it will be made, and we must not forget, as we are sometimes tempted to do, that it is not only we who will make it. It will be the work of our allies also in the first place; in its final form it ought to be the work of the whole civilised world. Let us keep those provisos in mind in considering the main conditions of the settlement we mean to make as far as it lies with us to make it. The first is clear. The Nazi régime must be overthrown. Il faut en finir. The
second is equally clear. This war [ … ] is one of a series of German wars; it is the second German war with Britain, the third with France. There must not be another if we can help it. Germany must be made incapable of challenging the rule of law and liberty again, for as far ahead as we can see. This, it need hardly be said, is far the more difficult of those two conditions to establish or at least to maintain for any length of time. Herr Hitler and his colleagues can be removed by force if it is strong enough, just as Wilhelm II was removed by force. But force could not root out Prussianism from the German mind, and it cannot root out Nazism which, as has been observed, is only Prussianism in more brutal shape. That can only be done by the Germans themselves, and, however we may try to help them do it, they will not find it easy. The tenacity of the Prussian tradition from the days of Frederick the Great is sometimes overlooked. It is not only the making of five wars in eighty years: it is the ready ear accorded for more time than that to a long series of militaristic writers and teachers from the patriots of the early nineteenth century on through Treitschke to the author of Mein Kampf. Is there something in the German make-up that cannot be brought into harmony with the spirit of the Western world? Or is it only the accidents of German history that are to blame? Are the Germans so difficult to live with only because, to use the current phrase, they are politically immature? If so, the outlook is more encouraging. There is a liberal tradition, too, in Germany, though it has always been weaker than its foe. Twice liberal governments have been established, for the separate states some ninety years ago, for the whole of the Reich the other day; and, though they did not live long, it is something that they lived at all. Those liberal forces, moreover, have been driven into a far
more open breach with Nazism than they were with Prussianism. There were no patriotic German émigrés in 1914. With such conflicting facts before him no thoughtful man will dare to prophesy what sort of ideas will dominate the German mind when the war is over or ten or twenty years later. But on this question as on others uncertainty is no excuse for doing nothing. Plainly we must do what we can to make it possible for Germans, especially young Germans, to conceive their national destiny in terms of international co-operation rather than of conflict. ‘It is no part of our policy’, said Mr. Chamberlain on October 12, ‘to exclude from her rightful place in Europe a Germany which will live in amity and confidence with other nations’. That leads us to the third condition of a settlement, namely, that the peace
must be a just peace. It must do justice not only to the Germans’ victims, to the Czechs and the Poles, but to the Germans themselves. That means a peace which, if circumstances permit, can be negotiated with a liberal German Government; a peace which a fair-minded German admits in his heart to be fair, so fair that it cannot be successfully caricatured as a ‘second Versailles’. Secondly – and this is even more important – it must be a peace which at least the great majority of the neutral peoples can approve. For it will need more for its maintenance than the strength and resolution of those peoples who are now fighting for freedom. It will be essentially related to the wider settlement which alone can make freedom safe; and no such settlement is conceivable without the co-operation of all the freedom-loving peoples of the world. [ … ] It is with the determination, then, as far as in us lies, to win the ‘after-war’
to-morrow that we brace ourselves to win the war to-day. We do not know how long it will last or how much suffering it will inflict, but that we shall endure to the end there can be no question. Never before has a war been fought on so great an issue. It is for much more than our peace, our safety, our prosperity, that we are fighting: it is difficult indeed to realise how much more. Mankind is at a crisis of its destiny. It has long been recognised that the material power given to men by modern science was in danger of outstripping their moral power to use it right. That danger has materialised in Germany with terrible results. In the last resort we are fighting to save the human civilization, which we have been so long and slowly trying to build up, from suffering the same inhuman fate.
