66
PARTISAN REVIEW
opportunity is being missed of helping people to make a better society
and find better places for themselves in it.
The depressing part of the company of the unskilled English working
man is his terrific disillusion. The good qualities of the people I
am
with
lies in what they are and in their situation, not in what they think and
believe. They are kind, because being very close to misfortune themselves,
it is easy for them to sympathise with it in others. But, given the oppor·
tunity, on principle each one is entirely out for himself, and says so
repeatedly all day long.
But this disillusion goes further than the working classes in England
today. In spite of the talk about Reconstruction, there is no tangible grasp
of what will be possible at the end of the war. Few people can think that
we are fighting for a better society, and those few who do are strangely
out of touch, people inflated by their own importance, people who make a
living out of having exalted ideas (you can still make a small income this
way). It is not their fault, it is the fault of a society that either
grind~
you in the machine or else pushes you right outside it, so that the intellec·
tuals. the people who, after all, have many right ideas, are very
is~lated.
Perhap& 1t is difficult to pick out the bits from this morass of destruc·
tion. But I have tried to show that
if
the bits here are grim and dusty, they
are not yet deformed by cruelty and vindictiveness. One of the most cheer·
ing things to my mind, is that on the other side, the bits have got
untidy.
Only someone who has lived (as I have) in Germany for some years can
realise what it must mean to the Germans to have turned the whole conti·
nent of Europe into an enormous Ireland at the time of the worst troubles
there. However many machines the Germans have, they must, to retain
confidence
in
themselves, govern in a neat and orderly manner.
If
they
have opponents, they must be neatly stored away in concentration camps.
That disorders should go on in spite of repression and shooting squads;
that is-well, isn't it very like the Weimar Republic at the time when the
Nazis were reducing Germany to disorder, and at the same time produc·
ing martyrs?
So we live through this grimmest phase of the war, feeling that Rus·
sia is fighting our battles, that we can do very little to help, and dreading
the result
if
we
ca~not
help still further. The New Order has proved
that
it cannot govern, the boil of the German armies has burst, but no one
knows how long the disorder can continue, or how much poisonous matter
the boil still contains. But, despite the importance of machines, we may
be coming to a stage when the men in the machines count. It may be that
Hitler is making a mistake in thinking that mechanical superiority is
all
that matters, that human losses are irrelevant and that machines can
be
replaced. In that case, our own morale, and what we have to offer in
the
way of Reconstruction and new ideas will become enormously important
