A Man of Parts (59 page)

Shaw had come to Easton directly from the Fabian Summer School where the orthodox line was still faith in disarmament, to be magically forced upon governments by co-ordinated General Strikes. ‘Sidney Webb refuses to believe that there is going to be a European war, on the grounds that it would be “too insane”,’ Shaw reported. ‘Well, so it is, but it’s going to happen. We might have seen it coming if we hadn’t been blackmailed to distraction by Carson and his gang.’

‘You don’t deny, I hope, that we are honour bound to get involved if Germany invades Belgium?’ he demanded.

‘We haven’t always been so scrupulous about national honour if expediency dictated otherwise,’ Shaw said. ‘The treaty in question was signed eighty years ago in an entirely different Europe, and there was no need for us to bind ourselves to defend Belgium in all circumstances. We were foolishly lured into the diplomatic game of treaties and guarantees and ultimatums that makes politicians feel so important.’

He took Shaw’s point, but his sardonic detachment seemed irresponsible. ‘Never mind that now!’ he cried. ‘If the Germans invade Belgium, they will invade us too. We must prepare to resist them. We must get out our shotguns and man the hedges and ditches. If Germany wins this war, it will be the end of civilisation as we know it.’

‘It may come to that whoever wins,’ Shaw said dourly.

While Shaw’s attitude seemed to be ‘a plague on all their houses’, he himself felt more and more possessed by a violent and very personal anti-German feeling. By provoking this war of uncontrollable scope and scale, Germany mocked his utopian hopes for mankind. He felt swelling within him a new conviction and a new sense of mission: German militarism had to be confronted and defeated at all costs.

The Shaws left the next day. After he had seen them off at the station he went to the post office and learned the latest news: Germany had declared war on France and, ignoring British warnings, demanded passage for its armies through Belgium. It was now inevitable that Britain would be drawn into the conflict. Rebecca sent a frantic wire saying she was ill, and feared for the unborn child. ‘I must go and see her,’ he said to Jane, who agreed at once. His knee was now mended, but he didn’t feel equal to a long and unfamiliar journey by car to Hunstanton, so he drove the relatively short distance to Bishop’s Stortford and left Gladys there, proceeding by train to his destination.

He found Rebecca in bed and in considerable distress, suffering abdominal pains. The doctor had been to see her and feared ‘complications’, as he cabled to Jane the next morning. She replied: ‘
I AM FULL OF MISERY AT YOUR TELEGRAM STOP IT ISN’T REBECCA HERSELF WHO IS IN DANGER IS IT STOP I TRY TO THINK THE MESSAGE MIGHT MEAN THE CHILD NOT HER STOP THIS IS HORRIBLE STOP GIVE HER MY DEAR LOVE IF YOU CAN STOP’.
Sitting at her bedside he read out this message to Rebecca, who was inclined to regard Jane as a vindictively jealous wife and make occasional remarks to that effect. ‘You see?’ he said, ‘Jane doesn’t hate you. She sends you her love.’ ‘But she says I might die. I think she unconsciously wants me to die,’ said Rebecca ungratefully. This telegram seemed to have the effect of making her determined to live, however, and when the doctor called again to examine her he took a more sanguine view of her symptoms and attributed them to indigestion. He also brought the news that Germany had invaded Belgium. Lettie, who had been summoned by Rebecca, arrived from London that afternoon confirming that Asquith had announced that Great Britain was at war with Germany.

‘I must get home,’ he said to Rebecca.

‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded. ‘I feel the baby may come at any moment.’

‘It’s not due yet.’

‘I know, but … it could be early. Why must you go?’

‘I have to write something about this war, for the
Daily Chronicle
,’ he said. He had a lucrative agreement with this paper to write on topical issues any time he felt inclined. ‘I can’t fight, but I can write, and I can only do that at home. I will leave you in Lettie’s safe hands.’ And against her protest he caught the last train from Hunstanton to Bishop’s Stortford.

It was dark by the time he alighted from the train, and he was grateful for the moonlight supplementing the weak beams of Gladys’s headlamps as he made his way back through the country lanes to Easton Glebe. Once he narrowly escaped ending up in a ditch as a fox running across the road made him swerve. He felt euphoric rather than nervous, however, and this unaccustomed night drive took on an epic quality in his imagination, as if he were the commander of an armoured car pursuing some urgent secret mission on the eve of battle. The die was cast. It was war – and he knew how it should be presented to the British people, and how to turn the apparent negation of all his hopes for mankind into a positive crusade.

It was past midnight by the time he rolled up outside the front door of Easton Glebe. Jane heard the throb of his engine and the crunch of his tyres on the gravel, and came downstairs in her dressing gown to let him in. She took him to the kitchen and gave him cocoa and a ham sandwich as they talked. ‘Poor dear, you must be exhausted,’ she said as he finished the sandwich and drained his mug. ‘Come to bed. Sleep in my room tonight. I want to be cuddled.’

‘No, I’m sorry, Jane. I must work.’

‘Work?’ she protested. ‘For heaven’s sake, H.G.! What work can you possibly have to do tonight?’

‘An article for the
Chronicle
,’ he said.

They parted with a kiss on the landing, and he went to his own bedroom with its alcove equipped for writing at night: a desk with a green shaded lamp, a spirit stove for boiling a kettle to make tea, a barrel of biscuits, and a bottle of whisky for a nightcap when he was finished. He took off his clothes and put on the comfortable sleeping-suit, rather like an overgrown baby’s garment, which he preferred to a dressing gown for these late-night writing sessions. He sat down at the desk, took a clean foolscap block from a drawer, and filled his fountain pen with blue-black ink.

He had already rehearsed the argument in his head on his journey from Hunstanton, and it did not take him very long to write it out. The awesome scale of the war which had suddenly engulfed Europe, and was bound to spread eventually to America in the west and as far as Japan in the east, was a measure of the prize which victory would bring: a permanent worldwide peace. For that reason it was a war which had to be won:

There can be no diplomatic settlement that will leave German Imperialism free to explain its failure to its people and start new preparations. We have to go on until we are absolutely done for, or until the Germans as a people know they are beaten, and are convinced they have had enough of war
.

We are fighting Germany. But we are fighting without any hatred of the German people. We do not intend to destroy either their freedom or their unity. But we have to destroy an evil system of government and the mental and material corruption that has got hold of the German imagination and taken possession of German life. We have to smash the Prussian Imperialism as thoroughly as Germany in 1871 smashed the rotten Imperialism of Napoleon III. And also we have to learn from the failure of that victory to avoid a vindictive triumph
.

This is already the vastest war in history. It is a war not of nations but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age
.

When he had finished the article, he poured himself two fingers of whisky and sipped it as he read through the draft, making occasional emendations. Then he wrote at the top of the first page in capital letters, ‘
THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR
’, turned out the lamp on the desk, felt his way to the bed, crawled under the covers, and fell into a deep sleep.

He was woken at eight o’clock by a servant with a telegram: ‘
BABY BOY BORN FIVE MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT THIS MORNING STOP MOTHER AND CHILD BOTH WELL STOP LETTIE
’.

‘Is there a reply, sir?’ said the housemaid. ‘The boy is waiting.’

What he wanted to say could not be passed under the inquisitive eyes of the Easton post office. ‘No reply – but here’s a sovereign for the boy.’

‘A sovereign, sir?’ The girl looked shocked, as well she might – it was more than a week’s wages for her.

‘I mean, a shilling,’ he said, smiling and shaking his head, and gave it to her. Later he wrote a letter to Rebecca:

I am radiant this morning. With difficulty I refrain from giving people large tips. I am so delighted that I have a manchild in the world – of yours. I will get the world tidy for him … I keep thinking of your dear, dear grave beloved face on your pillow and you and it. I do most tremendous love you, Panther
.

Jaguar

– ‘The War That Will End War …’ That didn’t enhance your reputation as a prophet
.

– Oh, don’t rub it in. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to eat those words. I didn’t mean it as a simple prediction – but as an aim. I said in that very first article that we might go under. I just wanted to emphasise what was at stake, why it was worth fighting the war to the death. And I said we must avoid a vindictive triumph if we won – good counsel which was ignored in the event, with disastrous consequences.

– But you ruled out a negotiated peace
.
‘
There can be no negotiated settlement
.’
That attitude, which was widely shared, led to a four-year war of attrition, mostly fought over the same narrow strip of territory, and the loss of millions of lives
.

– Nobody foresaw it would last so long. And that was mainly the fault of the military establishment, their total lack of imagination about tactics and weaponry. They could think of nothing except an artillery bombardment which was supposed to disable the enemy trenches, but more often than not failed to do so, followed by an infantry charge across no man’s land into a hail of machine-gun fire. I invented tanks – I mean the idea of them – in 1903, in a short story called ‘The Land Ironclads’, but nobody thought of making them until halfway through the war, and they weren’t really effective until it was nearly over.

– But your journalism at the beginning of the war brought you into alliance with every dyed-in-the-wool patriot and jingoist in the country. Didn’t that worry you?

– Not for some time. You know what it was like in England in the early months – a kind of hysteria gripped the country. The shock of finding ourselves at war was converted into a Crusade mentality. Bishops identified the Allied cause with Christianity. Men mobbed the recruiting offices to join up. Boys and middle-aged men falsified their ages to get into the army.

– And the Germans were demonised with stories, mostly faked, of atrocities committed in Belgium. Vesta Tilley sang ‘
We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go
’ at recruiting rallies, and children handed out white feathers to the men who didn’t immediately volunteer
.

– I never approved of the white feather business. My
Daily Chronicle
articles rode on a tide of popular feeling in which there was a lot of meretricious rubbish mixed up with idealism.

– It wasn’t just those articles, though, was it? There were letters to the papers. One to the
Times
,
for instance, calling for the civilian population to be armed to resist a German invasion
.
‘
Many men, and not a few women, will turn out to shoot Germans. And if the raiders are so badly advised as to try terror-striking reprisals on the Belgian pattern, we irregulars will, of course, massacre every German straggler we can put a gun to
.’

– I can’t defend that. It wasn’t really a practical suggestion, and the authorities just laughed at it. But I thought we should demonstrate to the world that the entire nation was committed to resisting German militarism. Very early in the war Charlie Masterman summoned a whole lot of writers to a meeting in Whitehall to ask what we could do to boost morale in the country. We were an oddly assorted bunch, but very distinguished – Robert Bridges, Henry Newbolt, Granville Barker, Barrie, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, Arnold of course, and me, and lots of others I can’t remember, some of them liberal, some conservative – and there was no way we would all agree on anything, so I suggested we should each act individually. As I did. In retrospect, some things I wrote in the heat of the moment were ill-judged.

– They lost you some friends: Violet Paget, for instance. She wrote about you, ‘
he enlisted at once for the Fleet Street front and bid us unsheath the Sword of Peace for the final extermination of Militarism
.’

– She never forgave me for supporting the war. Neither did the Bloomsbury group, but that didn’t bother me. I never had much time for them, or they for me.

– And Shaw?

– Ours was always a very combative friendship, punctuated with periods of outright hostility, of which that was certainly one. I attacked him for his
Common Sense about the War
pamphlet in November 1914, and similar stuff. He advised the soldiers on both sides to shoot their officers and go home. Of course that wasn’t common sense at all, it was a rhetorical flourish, which enraged public opinion. But basically he was right. The war was futile, and should have been stopped before it became unstoppable. It took me some time to see that. Some time and hundreds of thousands of casualties.