War and the Future | Page 4

keep me out of mischief in the war zone,
was insistent upon the way in which all Venetia was being opened up
by the new military roads; there has been scarcely a new road made in
Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar- bordered highways

through the land. M. Joseph Reinach, who was my companion upon the
French front, was equally impressed by the stirring up and exchange of
ideas in the villages due to the movement of the war. Charles Lamb's
story of the discovery of roast pork comes into one's head with an
effect of repartee. More than ideas are exchanged in the war zone, and
it is doubtful how far the sanitary precautions of the military authorities
avails against a considerable propaganda of disease. A more serious
argument for the good of war is that it evokes heroic qualities that it has
brought out almost incredible quantities of courage, devotion, and
individual romance that did not show in the suffocating peace time that
preceded the war. The reckless and beautiful zeal of the women in the
British and French munition factories, for example, the gaiety and
fearlessness of the common soldiers everywhere; these things have
always been there--like champagne sleeping in bottles in a cellar. But
was there any need to throw a bomb into the cellar?
I am reminded of a story, or rather of the idea for a story that I think I
must have read in that curious collection of fantasies and observations,
Hawthorne's /Note Book./ It was to be the story of a man who found
life dull and his circumstances altogether mediocre. He had loved his
wife, but now after all she seemed to be a very ordinary human being.
He had begun life with high hopes--and life was commonplace. He was
to grow fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some action,
some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do not
think the /Note Book/ was very clear. It was to carry him in such a
manner that he was to forget his wife. Then, when it was too late, he
was to see her at an upper window, stripped and firelit, a glorious thing
of light and loveliness and tragic intensity....
The elementary tales of the world are very few, and Hawthorne's story
and Lamb's story are, after all, only variations upon the same theme.
But can we poor human beings never realise our quality without
destruction?
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One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure to produce
great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders, Napoleons, Caesars. I

would indeed make that the essential thing in my reckoning of the war.
It is a drama without a hero; without countless incidental heroes no
doubt, but no star part. Even the Germans, with a national
predisposition for hero-cults and living still in an atmosphere of
Victorian humbug, can produce nothing better than that timber image,
Hindenburg.
It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes so much as that it has
produced heroism in a torrent. The great man of this war is the common
man. It becomes ridiculous to pick out particular names. There are too
many true stories of splendid acts in the past two years ever to be
properly set down. The V.C.'s and the palms do but indicate samples.
One would need an encyclopaedia, a row of volumes, of the
gloriousness of human impulses. The acts of the small men in this war
dwarf all the pretensions of the Great Man. Imperatively these
multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of effigies. When I was a
young man I imitated Swift and posed for cynicism; I will confess that
now at fifty and greatly helped by this war, I have fallen in love with
mankind.
But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand for the finest quality of
the Allies' war, I should I think choose the figure of General Joffre. He
is something new in history. He is leadership without vulgar ambition.
He is the extreme antithesis to the Imperial boomster of Berlin. He is as
it were the ordinary common sense of men, incarnate. He is the
antithesis of the effigy.
By great good luck I was able to see him. I was delayed in Paris on my
way to Italy, and my friend Captain Millet arranged for a visit to the
French front at Soissons and put me in charge of Lieutenant de Tessin,
whom I had met in England studying British social questions long
before this war. Afterwards Lieutenant de Tessin took me to the great
hotel--it still proclaims "/Restaurant/" in big black letters on the garden
wall-- which shelters the General Headquarters of France, and here I
was able to