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PARTISAN REVIEW
report shows a considerable recrudescence of 1918 habits of thougnt.
Everyone expects not only that there will a ghastly muddle over demo–
bilization, but that mass unemployment will promptly return. No one
wants to remember that we shall have to keep living for years on a war–
time basis and that: the switch-over to peacetime production and the re–
capture of lost markets may entail as great an effort as the war itself.
Everyone wants, above all things, a rest. I overhear very little discussion
of the wider issues of the war, and I can't discern much popular interest
in the kind of peace we should impose on Germany. The newspapers of
the Right and Left are outdoing one another in demanding a vindictive
peace. Vansittart is now a back number ; indeed the more extreme of his
one-time followers have brought out a pamphlet denouncing him as pro–
German.
The Communists are using the slogan, "Make Germany Pay" (the
diehard Tory slogan of 1918 ) and branding as pro-Nazi anyone who
says either that we should make a generous peace or that publication of
reasonable peace-terms would hasten the German collapse. The peace–
terms that they and other Russophiles advocate are indeed simply a worse
version of the Versailles Treaty against which they yapped for twenty
years. Thus the dog returns to his vomit, or more exactly to somebody
else's vomit. But! once again, I can't see that ordinary people want any–
thing of the kind, and if past wars are any guide the troops will all come
home pro-German. The implications of the fact that the common people
are Russophile but don't want the sort of peace that the Russians are
demanding haven't yet sunk in, and leftwing journalists avoid discussing
them. The Soviet government now makes direct efforts to interfere with
the British press. I suppose that for sheer weariness and the instinct to
support Russia at all costs the man-in-the-street might be brought to ap–
prove of an unjust peace, but there would be a rapid pro-German reac–
tion, as last time.
There are a few social developments, which again take the same
directions as I reported before. Evening dress (i.e., for men) is gradually
reappearing. The distinction between first class and third class on the
railways is being enforced again. Two years ago it had practically lapsed.
Commercial advertisements, which I told you a year or so back were
rapidly disappearing, are definitely on the up-grade again, and make use
of the snobbery motif more boldly. The Home Guard still exists in as
great numbers as before, but is employed largely on the AA guns and
seems now to have no political colour of one kind or the other.
It
now
consists to a great extent of youths who are conscripted in at 16 or 17.
For boys younger than this there are various cadet corps and the Air
Training Corps, and even for young girls a uniformed formation named
vaguely the Girls' Training Corps. All this is something quite new in
English life, pre-military training having been practically confined to
the middle and upper classes before the war. Everything grows shah-
