LONDON LETTER
55
villainy on every occasion, until it became an impropriety to own a share
in an armament factory. The crusade against the 'Merchants Of Death'
was perhaps the climax. One remembers Mr. Roosevelt on the newsreel
reciting his slogan-'America Hates War.' It was the only hatred we
allowed ourselves, in those charitable days.
But why, in what should he a packet of 'news,' am I sending this cold
slice off yesterday's meat? It is, as you will recognise, the intellectual
background against which we-if we are on this side of forty-emerged.
We went to school with war. It is the one subject we know perfectly. It is
moreover the one disorder against which we have been powerfully vac·
cinated and dosed. We are, to borrow a Hollywood favourite,
allergic
to
war. We know every inch of the road already, we have completed that
particular round of illusion and disillusion. This, I believe, is the most
important factor to be understood in the present situation here. Just as the
body builds up resistances against a disease from which it has suffered, so
the human psyche recoils from the repetition of an unpleasant experience
which is still vivid in the memory. The emotions appropriate to a state of
warfare are in varying degrees aborted in us. Accordingly we advance
gingerly, keeping a sharp eye on that previous performance which so
haunts us. We are going to respect the truly conscientious objector this
time. Our bishops are more modest in their invitations to the Deity to take
sides. We are guarding ourselves against indiscriminate hatred of all Ger–
mans. We are determined to love our enemies, and to hate only their faults
and their Fiihrer. We forbid profiteering. We are, in fact, re-enacting
1914-1918 on model lines, with all our original errors repaired. And even
with such wholesale incorporation of all our idealisms, we still find it
difficult to concentrate our full moral dynamic upon the prosecution of the
war. There will he no Rupert Brooke this time; for this is the war that
Nobody Loves, the mutual bluff that failed, the collision that both sides
wanted to dodge.
And yet many of us can find compensations in it, for we are a singu–
larly docile and adaptable people. After the disasters of peace, after un–
employment and disenchantment, after the atrocity stories and the scram–
bling of war-correspondents to Spain, China, Abyssinia, it brings some
relief-almost a slackening of tension-to get out of the diminishing
audience and into the expanding serum. The old ghosts of 1914-18 are
familiar and comfortable, like a homecoming. We perfectly remember the
songs, the slang, the jokes, the passwords to that Home from Home. And
with it, no responsibilities of decision, no alternatives to consider, the
warm comradeship of men in danger, the excitement of personal hazards.
War at least is something that we can understand, its discomforts and
tragedies have an air of reasonableness. Where it maims, it leaves behind
it medals and the good respect of the neighbours. Unlike the privations of
peace, it does not mock our intelligence. In that way some of us take to it
as the more natural of two unnatural ways of life. And others have been
willing to believe that a great argosy of good deeds has been cut off from
