Under Thirty Page
WILkT SHOULD WE FIGHT FOR ?-I
By FRANK SINGLETON [The writer, who was President of the Cambridge Union last year and has just taken his degree, is 291 ASCOTSMAN answers one question by asking another. This question : What should I fight for ? evokes, as soon as asked, a splutter of accompanying question marks. Is What should I fight for ? the same as What would I fight for ? Would I fight at all ? Is the real question not more likely at the moment to be—What shall I fight against ? And why fight at all if any fighting means, as appears possible, the end of everything that makes living worth while ?
When the pacifist answers : I should not, and would not, fight for, or against, anything, he enjoys the intellectual satisfaction of as near an approach to a logically defensible and consistent attitude as is possible. Most other answers are, to varying degrees, unreasonable, illogical, inconsistent. Yet one is encouraged to formulate an answer because when we are asked to fight it will be illogical and inconsistent human beings who will be asked, and by our actions we shall respond, after the fashion of our kind, in a way which will be only partly reasonable and logical.
It is, moreover, worth everybody's while to answer it, because no fighting will ever again be the concern of only a section of the community. Since the French Revolution, war in Europe has ceased to be the exercise by soldiers of their profession and has become the destiny of the whole of the nation involved, and when the whole nation is at war it can only prosecute that war at the price of.national instead of merely professional discipline and unity. The whole nation must somehow achieve the devotion and singleness of purpose of Mohammed's army : " an obedient people, trained to every hardship but that of independent thought?'
The question is everybody's concern, and the answer that nearly everybody would make would be : I would fight in order to have no more fighting. The fact that other people said it before makes only more bitter our need to say it again. All agree upon the end. The subsequent divisions occur over the means to achieve it.
If we fight it should be then to bring about—and in the contemporary chaos the words seem fatuous if not ironic— a new world order. Whether it be through the League of Nations, or through some more successful organisation, only the hope of achieving world-peace will animate again all those who are today so bewildered and weary that they are turning aside not only from the attempt to achieve a new order but from any attempt even to understand the how and the why of the present situation.
" Vain thy onset ! all stands fast. Thou thyself must break at last "
they reply to those who still dare talk and work today for a new world order. The answer to that defeatism is still what it was when Arnold gave it.
" Charge once more, then, and be dumb ! Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall."
The new world order is the first line of defence. It 'would be idle to deny that at the moment the line is broken and the defence routed. But the fight is not on that account wholly lost and we fall back on the second line of defence. We should fight for some alliance of nations who would be prepared to take one step beyond the present chaos of lawless individualism and agree to recognise among themselves some of the principles—such as third party judgement, collective security, commercial reciprocity—on which international justice and progress might eventually be founded. That is the second line of defence and it is a compromise. Even the limited ideal it represents would be menaced if such an alliance became a mere aspiration towards good, or a perpetu- ation of all that is bad in the present system by hardening it into two rigid divisions. Any such renewed, modified league of nations must meet its opponents on the only terms they understand—by the exercise of force and greater power. It must be successful. And at the same time it must be prepared to change and be modified—and, in short, to talk to the dictators.
Finally we should fight in the end for the last line of defence, the citadel, the strange bewildering amalgam of values represented by the word England. Practically all divisions of opinion in the country at the moment are over the question of where we begin fighting for England. Pre- sumably some time before anybody's armies are landing on our shores. Our frontier is the Rhine, said Lord Baldwin— and the frontier now is overrun. At present Czechoslovakia stands like a skittle, that by its fall may bring down a whole row in which we are one. Is to fight for England the same as to fight for Czechoslovakia ? Austria went and no blow was struck. Czechoslovakia hovers and from day to day it is impossible to prophesy what will happen. And beyond ? Do we fight for England by defending the Ukraine or the oil- fields of Roumania ?
It is a strange irony that today it is the Communists who are the most animated patriots. Patriotism, so far as it is represented by fighting for England, is of the deepest dye on the extreme Left and shades off in the opposite direction. It is the Conservatives whom one hears pointing out that even if the Mediterranean is closed to us and the Suez Canal too vulnerable for us to defend, there is always the route round the Cape, and Cape Town is even now embarking on the process of building itself out into the sea at the foot of Table Mountain.
I should fight for England because—imperfect as it may be, compounded of injustice and genuine achievement, of dis- parity of wealth and active reforming liberalism, it yet contains within itself the seeds of greater possibilities. Thrown into relief by contrasting political systems which suit some of our contemporaries, England is changing and progressing, and we may fight to preserve the possibility of that progress. I should fight for the better England that could emerge out of our present heritage. But I should be fighting against some outsider who was in danger of imposing an alien scheme of values, rather than fighting to impose the English political philosophy and social values on someone else.
The arguments given above seem objective and impersonal. But differing personal convictions will count for little in war. No country can fight unless it is undivided, and when the question of actual fighting arises most of us will fight because we are told to. War is an instrument of policy, and the real answer to the question : What should we fight for ? is to embark on a discussion of foreign policy. I think our foreign policy of the last ten years has been one of the main factors in bringing about the present state of danger. As a result we cannot suddenly apply the alternative policy of international collective security, but are forced back on a day-to-day opportunism to preserve peace at all costs. How to do that and then put into operation a more en- lightened foreign policy is a task so delicate and difficult that all of us might despair at the prospect. But since English foreign policy traditionally rests on an informed public opinion, it is the task that faces all of us who strive to answer the question of what we should fight for.
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