statesmanship.'

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those

wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in

the market-place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave

International Situation' did not excite him very much. There had

been so many grave international situations in recent years.

This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly

attacking the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to

the help of the Slavs.

But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the

vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master

that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the

morrow to their mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve

of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His first

feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of

'hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation' were at an

end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely

provided for. But his relief was greatly modified when he found

that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and

carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised

depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but a cup

of cold water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one

was free to leave it.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE LAST WAR

Section I

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order,

it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow,

the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the

histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.

It must always be remembered that the political structure of the

world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the

collective intelligence. That is the central fact of that

history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in

political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had

been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of

procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had

been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous

enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts and

the indignities of representative parliamentary government,

coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other

directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences more and more

from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in

the twentieth century were following in the wake of the

ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services

of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth

century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world's

memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.

Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,

common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new

possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the

past.

Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the

boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception

of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some

one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and

Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human

imagination-it bored into the human brain like some grisly

parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent

impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted

its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection

passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and

centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages

were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this

obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the

infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning

refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the

tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and

counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as

it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their

state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and,

in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and

shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of

Europe and the world.

It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions

of men and women outside the world of these specialists

sympathised and agreed with their portentous activities. One

school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation,

but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive

responses to these suggestions of the belligerent schemer.

Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable

generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the

weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of

loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements

of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the

common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically

nothing in such education as he was given that was ever intended

to fit him for citizenship as such (that conception only

appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern State ideas),

and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his

vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and

national aggression.

For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily

patriotic when presently his battalion came up from the depot to

London, to entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children

and women and lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the

streets and rows hung with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a

real enthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The