London Letter
HISTORY,"
so the saying goes, "never repeats itself." Nevertheless
there will always be support for the I-Have-Been-Here-Before theory from
others besides J.
B.
Priestley; and it is certain that to many of us the war
so far is little more than a phoney echo, a dream flash-back, in which we
seem to have jolted over the track and landed in the groove we ploughed
twenty-five years ago. Of course, we tell ourselves, this is real. It is a new
war. It may go on for years. But still the air of hallucination persists;
the pattern is too familiar, too trite, to pass as new. We study the sequence
of events, the official statements, the music-hall jokes and the popular
songs, the moralising of intellectuals, the appeals to Justice and to God–
and oh, yes,
yes,
without a doubt we Have Been HERE Before! As for those
of us who are not beyond ripe military age, have we ever been anywhere
else? Is not the complete war-cycle the one major public event that has
dominated our lives?
If
I look hack to my earliest recollections I find these random things:
the stoning of
dachshunds
in the streets, my brother and I searching for
souvenir hits of shrapnel after an air-raid, my mother in a queue all morn–
ing for a few potatoes, a neighbour home with shell-shock crawling under
our table and screaming during a night raid. And then the dazzling day
when I was given money to buy a large flag for my bicycle, because the
war wall over and the Union Jack was the winner. From that moment we
seemed to ignore the war for a time; perhaps it is because I was still a
child, but the war certainly passed out of our consciousness until the
debunking began. And then we became ashamed of our hatred, we ques–
tioned the reputations of generals and statesmen, we dwelt upon the horrors
of war and denied the glories. The great reaction came, as it comes in the
body after long tension and shock.
If
any one thing can stand as a symbol
of that period it is Remarque's
All Quiet On The Western Front.
We read
it, we saw it filmed, we made the title a catchword, and we began to feel
that the ordinary simple German was just another decent chap like our–
selves caught up in a universal madness.
Next to Remarque's hook, in this museum of memories, I place the
golden fountain-pen with which the Kellogg Pact was signed. We now had
Mars by the short hairs. We outlawed War. We were never going to fall
for that dope again. Pacifism appeared as a solid political movement, and
the Peace Pledge was signed by millions with alacrity and contrition, in
the manner of penitent boozers signing onto the water-wagon while the
hang-over persists. History can scarcely show a greater orgy of good
intentions than we had during that epoch of Conferences. We hunted the
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