It is with regard to the Great War as it is with regard to every set of campaigns in history; if you omit that which was not subject to any human will and intelligence, you omit nine tenths of the factors that make for the final result—and that is why every great captain has put his trust in Fortune and in a star, a destiny of his own. For great captains know what part Fortune plays in their trade.
I remember Boulanger saying, when I was a boy of nineteen: ‘_La guerre est une chose aléatoire._’ It was one of those enormous truisms which make one shake with laughter, and, coming from the lips of such a man, it was particularly comic; he, with the short stature which he owed to his Welsh blood, with his middle-aged hesitations, and his ludicrous incapacity for the rôle into which the popular anger against politicians had unnaturally thrust him, and his very natural disinclination, being what he was, to accept risk. I saw him in Portland Place, and it was there that I heard him discourse in such fashion. Young as I was, I hugely enjoyed the unconscious meiosis of such a phrase. Yes, indeed: _la guerre est une chose aléatoire!_ Would that this fortuitous character in it were confined to its immediate operations! But they stretch outward over a lifetime at least and, in some great effects, for much longer.
As I write this, it is more than ten years since the dice of that ‘_chose aléatoire_’ were thrown, and no one can even yet determine what interests in Europe have, upon the whole, most suffered; though (alas!) the larger lines of the result are already apparent.
Some day, I suppose—but a good time hence—one of the mob of witnesses to what went on in Paris between the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles will write us an amusing book full of truths, made up of anecdote without much comment. Or perhaps, better still, we shall have a highly readable book from the pen of a man who was not there. We had a glimpse of such possibilities from a witness in a few sentences of Mr. Keynes’, which were very illuminating; but Mr. Keynes’ book had not for its object an historical relation, but rather financial propaganda, so that the part dealing with the comedy of small men in big places was too short. If he had confined himself to the words and gestures of parliamentarians suddenly confronted with the task of diplomats, I think he would have produced something memorable. One or two other pens have dealt with that comic affair, but none sufficiently, nor at any length.
I was not myself present. I was continually between Paris and London, I had many friends and a few relations engaged, and I heard a mass of stories from many who were witnesses. Of that mass of stories, not a few sounded probable, and quite a reasonable number were vouched for by witnesses whom I could trust. I have had quoted to me, for instance, the excellent story of a Prime Minister pettishly complaining that he would not be bothered about the Dalmatian coast because they had not yet come to consider the Baltic. And the same man curiously moved a squat forefinger along the river Save upon the map, saying with a would-be-important smile, ‘Now here is the Upper Danube.’ Really in this I have some sympathy with the little fellow; for when I first went to school I always thought it a shame that the Save, running in a straight line with the lower Danube, should not carry the same name. I thought there was something irregular about the Danube taking its great bend past Budapest.
Then there was that other story of the indignant politician who, upon reading the French word ‘_demander_’ in a memorandum, indignantly protested against this insolent use of the word ‘demand.’
Poland was a subject of ceaseless blunders. One politician vaguely thought it a province of Russia; another was surprised to hear that Danzig had ever been a Polish town; and the same man was contented to express his simple conviction that it was no use setting up Poland again, seeing that such a state could never last.
That they should get mixed up about their figures is pardonable; there were more naughts than a man could count. Still, there is all the difference between one hundred and twenty-five milli_ard_ francs and one hundred and twenty-five milli_on_ francs: but I am assured it was not always easy for every member of the august group to carry the distinction clearly in his head, especially in the morning. Would that some more than human power had suddenly descended—or lacking such a Being, a corporal and four men—and taken the politicians forcibly into three rooms, put paper and pen before them and bade them write down, under heavy penalties, all they could remember of Europe! It would have been a pretty examination!
Now parliamentarians such as these are ridiculous, not only by the absurd disproportion between their nominal powers and their capacities, but more by their ambition—which swells out to bursting the little vessel containing it. They have not talent, save for intrigue against fellow politicians: they cannot speak or write, let alone _do_, anything worth hearing. None the less would you find, if you could take the tin lid off their hollow minds and look in, a froth of insane vanity, bred of years of speech-making; a more than kingly assurance bred of knowing no control and of immunity; and (what is astonishing in men of such calibre) ambition itself. A paltry ambition, to be sure: an ambition to fill the newspapers: but still, ambition.
Yet, if there is one thing I have noted more than another in the few men worthy of admiration in this our time (men worthy of admiration through their capacities as well as through their characters), it is the absence of ambition.
There could be no better commentary upon the days in which we live. For it is reasonable and normal that men of great capacity should have ambition to exercise it in government, in the ordering of their fellow men. It was a chief quality always looked for by our fathers in those who rose high, and were worthy so to rise; nor were they disappointed. Ambition of old was a mark of greatness. But to-day it is the mark of the capable man that ambition disgusts him. That mark is most notable in Mussolini. It is most notable in Foch. It was notable in most of the commanders of armies; in the admirals of fleets. It was most notable, of course, in the saintly eminence of Mercier. It was notable in almost every one I had the privilege to meet and watch during and after the struggle who had been capable of doing something great in that time.
It is not difficult to discover when you speak with Mussolini that his interest is in his job, not in his name. It is apparent to all that the great work of the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines is remote from all personal motive—and ambition is essentially personal. As for Foch, it is manifest, not only in his every gesture and expression, but in the life he has lived after saving Europe. But this novel feature, the absence of ambition in our greatest men to-day, goes further. It has been notable in our chief discoverers in physical science—all can bear witness to that; it is even becoming apparent in the best writers, though writers are among the vainest of mankind.
All men of real capacity in this our time seem to be agreed that the peculiar odour of modern success is a thing for a decent man to avoid. It is becoming a sort of habit of the mind throughout the West—that is, throughout civilised Europe to-day—in such few men as can do some great work, to do it silently and apart, and to disconnect it wholly from immediate renown.
Conversely, you will have monstrous advertisement surrounding the mere name of a man incompetent, and usually thoroughly dishonest as well, because he is athirst for publicity of the modern sort, and loves it, and because he is quite content to serve those lumps of wealth and vulgarity who, through their possession of the mob newspapers, can grant or withhold publicity.
Here is a situation thoroughly diseased: the spur of ambition withdrawn from those who can do. It cannot last. How it will be resolved I do not know, nor does any other man; but that it cannot last is apparent. The mere force of competition, the mere mathematics of the world will see to it that blaring incompetence shall not permanently wield even nominal power; and it holds more than nominal power to-day.
I was interested, among the many things I heard from the more advertised civilians of the Great War, to note two things: the first was a rooted conviction in the most advertised Parliament men that things and people foreign to their experience were inferior to them. We know, of course, that that is the natural instinct of the schoolboy, and of the very simple good person without experience; but the astonishing thing was to find it in men whom one would expect, in spite of their origins, to have become a little polished by long conversation with their fellows, a little trained by responsibility. Before the end of the conflict one would have thought that even your politician must acquire some judgment from so much vivid and informing experience. Not a bit of it! It went off him like so much water off a duck’s back, and you may hear him to-day, six years after the Armistice, peddling the same inanities as he peddled in 1913.