We failed because we never took enough trouble to do so. Last time as a result of vast efforts and sacrifices we won victory. We must prepare for it in advance in the same way as we have prepared for war. They will have to be laid in our minds and wills. If the peace we hope to make is to be worthy of the men who are fighting to win it, its foundations will have to be laid now. Jacks has warned us that “the conditions for a good peace deteriorate with every day the war is prolonged And it may be prolonged a very long time. Civilian opinion will inevitably undergo the same imperceptible but unavoidable mental deterioration that twenty years ago culminated in the Khaki Election and the Treaty of Versailles.ĭr. But once the war becomes intensified, and the real horrors begin, our mood will change. At the time of writing these lines - four weeks before Christmas - it is still, for all our country’s stern resolution, sensible, reasonable and free from hate. That is why it is perhaps better to issue what I have written now instead of later when the auspices for publication might seem more favourable.įor opinion is never static. Had The Economic Consequences of the Peace been published before the Khaki 1918 Election - long enough before, that is, to affect the issue - we might not still be suffering those consequences today. But it did so after the Treaties and not before. Maynard Keynes wrote his famous book and all the thinking world read it. And though the mood of the more educated part of the community soon changed for the better, it could not do so in time to affect the views of the majority and the decisions of its representatives with whom the right of action lay. That of November 1918, despite the saner counsels of David Lloyd George, was summed up simply in the slogan, “Make the Huns Pay!” After all that men had suffered in those four terrible years it could scarcely have been otherwise. Living as we do under a democracy, whose processes will begin to operate again on the day that the sirens sound an armistice, our statesmen will have as before to frame their peace in conformity with the opinion of the hour. If it has not already been created, it will be too late then. For the hour of that decision - as momentous for mankind’s future as that of 1815 or 1919 may come soon or late, but when it does there will be no time for forming a sane public opinion. The very confidence Britain has in her victory makes such consideration the more urgent. And as I read, it struck me that the truth I had written and now thought of no service, might still be apposite and even necessary to a proper consideration of the issues we shall presently be called upon to decide. It was with this thought that I re-read the early chapters of my book - the story of how the Peace Treaties came to take the form they did and of their effect on the mind of a tortured Europe, of the famine and dread of revolution that formed their background, and of how inevitably everything that occurred, unbeknown to the British people, led imperceptibly but surely to the tragic shore we now inhabit. The price of that failure is the blood now being shed. When we have done so, we shall have to strive for other aims which the sword alone cannot win. We believe that, after whatever dangers and sufferings, we shall attain our war aims as we did before. The war which today seems permanent will one day come to an end. I laid my barely completed manuscript aside, as I thought for ever. Last August all that we had dreaded came to pass. We foresaw the calamity for we recalled the causes from which it sprang, but we were unable to avert it. I and those who thought like me were like men running downhill after a steam roller hoping to stay its course by propping matches against it. It was a presumptuous hope and, as the upshot has proved, a vain one.įor events outstripped me. But I hoped, sometimes against hope, that an historian’s relation of what had happened - almost inevitably as it now seems - might conceivably help to direct opinion in Britain and Germany, where the consequences and causes of those events had been in turn misunderstood, towards a calmer and less reproachful atmosphere in which the problems of Europe could be understood and later settled in peace. I knew that many would blame me for reminding them of what they preferred to forget. I did so with a full realisation that much that I had to relate ran counter to the prevailing view held both in this country and in Germany. I wrote it as an historian’s attempt to retell the story of those events - forgotten in the press and clamour of contemporary news - which after 1918 set the course of mankind for a second time down the fatal and ever-steepening incline towards a second Armageddon. THIS book, which is based upon a larger work now laid aside, was written before the war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |