A wounded man, entitled to his discharge, would return
to the trenches with a grim determination to find the Hun who had
wounded him and pay him out for it.
It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or
out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a
whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of
what war is. I doubt whether it was as high as our proportion of
higher mathematicians. But there can be no doubt that it was
prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively ignorant and
childish. Remember that these people had to be stimulated to make
the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this could not be
done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess, and a
comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice at
last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following
general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was
supporting, "If I had known all that in 1914, they would never
have got me into khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why
it had been necessary to stuff him with a romance that any
diplomatist would have laughed at. Thus the natural confusion of
ignorance was increased by a deliberately propagated confusion of
nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense, which at last
overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war before
we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German
army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made
the very serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing
that no sane European State could afford to do.
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