MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON HAVE witnessed two victory celebrations and have read in
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sonic detail about a third. F-arh of them differs from the others in the extent and nature of the public expectation which was aroused. One would have supposed that after the fall of Bonaparte in 1814 the British people would have been stirred to a frenzy of personal jubilation and national pride. For more than twenty years Great Britain had almost without respite been at war with Revolu- tionary France ; she had seen Europe collapse again and again.under the blows dealt her by Napoleon's military genius ; for months on end she had lain under the menace of invasion and had held her breath in anxiety whenever the Channel winds blew from the east ; a whole generation had been brought up to regard Bonaparte as some daemonic phenomenon and even the stoutest minds looked upon him as a portent which was almost invincible. And then sud- denly, almost unexpectedly, the news came of the abdication at Fontainebleau ; there was at the time no reason at all to foresee the hundred days or the final necessity of Waterloo ; everything was over ; England had secured for herself another Empire, a future of unexampled prosperity, and a tremendous increase in prestige. Yet the pride and relief which were felt on that occasion were distorted and almost obscured .by party politics. The Whigs, who had been defeatist for so many years and who for so long had foretold disaster is the wages of incompetence, were enraged at the fact that a Tory Government and a Tory General had secured an overwhelming victory. The Tories were distressed and worried by what they • egarded as the Jacobin emotions of the Opposition and by the dislocation of the balance of power created by Russia's sudden emergence as a force in European affairs. And the public were more :oncerned with their dislike of the Prince Regent, their passion for the Tsar of Russia and their sympathy for the Princess of Wales and Princess Charlotte than with any wish to acclaim their own leaders who had given them this victory.
Such celebrations as oecurred took place, not when the news of Napoleon's abdication reached London at the end of April, but in the following June, when the Tsar of Russia, the King of Prussia and the Allied Generals paid their official visit to London. So great was the admiration and affection felt by the British public for the All-Russian Tsar, that the Prince Regent scarcely dared to appear in public for fear of counter-demonstrations. No British General, nor British Admiral, received anything like the applause which was accorded to the Cossack Platov or to the Prussian Bliicher. And when the Tsar, from the balcony of the Pulteney Hotel at No. 105, Piccadilly, responded to the shouts of the crowd with the wave of a dimpled hand, the Londoners hailed him as a prophet and a liberator, the sunshine of whose brilliance threw into heavy shadows the British sailors and soldiers who for fifteen years had fought and beaten Napoleon unaided and alone. At .night the whole of London blazed with illuminations ; the screen at Carlton House was lit by flares of scarlet and topaz interspersed between palm trees in tubs ; outside Lord Castlereagh's house in Berkeley Square was a vast transparency representing an enormous dove carrying an olive branch in its beak ; but the Londoners scarcely glanced at these symbols of national rejoicing ; they remained herded together outside the Pulteney Hotel, gazing upwards with adoring faces in the hope that once again the Tsar would appear upon the balcony. It is true that after Those first few nights of rapture and ecstasy the charm of the Tsar, his sister, his Generals, and his Ministers began to fade. The insults to which the Tsar publicly exposed the Prince Regent and his family produced a reaction ; his unpunctuality offended our sense of order, his frivolity our standards of conduct ; the people of London came to repent of their early enthusiasm for such ill-mannered foreigners, and thus when, on June 15, the Tsar drove to the Guildhall in a golden coach drawn by Hanoverian creams the cheers of the popula& had lost their early fervour.
* * * * In November, 1918, the celebrations were more immediate, more sponuineous and more national. We had worked late into the night
on November ro, and the telegrams which kept pouring in suggested that the Germans would reject the armistice terms presented to them by Marshal Foch. It seemed that further fighting and further casualties would occur before the German armies were 'brought to their knees. And thus when at the eleventh hour on November 'nth Lloyd George walked, out into Downing Street, his white hair fluttering in the wind, a piece of white paper fluttering in this hand, London went suddenly mad in an orgy derelict and aiot. Within an hour the streets were packed with yelling crowds, upon the bonnets of the buses and lorries young men and maidens were packed like flies, their voices already hoarse with jubilation, and that night in Piccadilly Circus the crowd swayed together-as one organic body, their thousand faces flickering in the flames of burning .taxi-cabs. We believed that night that all was over ; danger, anxiety,. restrictions had all been swept from us with the eleven strokes of a clock ; a future of unchallenged safety, 'prosperity and power seemed to stretch before us. The sufferings and efforts, of the past, the rewards and enjoyments of the future, founted together for us in a spurt of ecstacy. We were intoxicated by our achievenient and our oppor- tunity ; the bonfires glowed upon 'faces ardent with optimism. Never again shall we see' so simultaneous an orgy of confidence and joy.
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I am glad that I witnessed the night of November II, 1918, since it is a rare thing to see a whole city united in unreserved exhilaration. But I am even more glad to have witnessed in London the nights of May 7 and May 8, 1945. Our achievement this time has been even greater ; our opportunity is almost,frightening in its immensity. Our sobriety during the celebrations of last week must, I know, be to some extent attributed to material shortages, but no one who corn= pares the two celebrations of 1918 and 1945 can deny -the vast difference between them in public thought and feeling. To some extent, of course, the exuberance of our celebration was checked by the knowledge that further Far Eastern struggles were still to come. To some extent also (and this is to our credit) the blaze of triumph was dimmed by the fog of misery which hangs over Europe. There are those who contend that, having endured so many disillusions. we have entered the age of universal scepticism ; and that we are suffering today from the penalty of semi-education, namely distrust. It must be realised also that the sense of unchallengable power which we possessed in 1918 has lost something of its old certitude and that we are fully conscious of the economic and political com- plexities which lie ahead. But in the' demeanour of the crowds last week there was something more positive than scepticism, some- thing more hopeful than distrust. It was a tone of seriousness under all their. gaiety, a note of solemnity almost in their delight. Is it too optimistic to suppose that this is due to a vestry increased sense, in the mind of every citizen, of personal responsibility? I do not regard this optimism as a pathetic fallacy. It can be confirMed by comparing the level of public thoughtfulness, or sense, as manifested in this war and m the last. It is from this comparison that my optimism is derived.
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Let rite take one test, or illustration, of the increase in public reason, of the feeling of individual responsibility, between 1915 and 1940. In the second year of the last war the _public succumbed to a discreditable wave of spy-mania. In the second year of this war there was scarcely any witch-hunting at all. Yet in 1940 there existed far more justification for spy-mania than there ever existed in 1915. The danger of invasion was infinitely more immediate and contiguous; the example of the fifth column in occupied Europe was far more disturbing ; and the invention of the wireless had rendered secret communication with the enemy a much more feasible practice. Yet this time we behaved with commendable kindness no the alien, even to the enemy alien, in our midst. Such measures as were taken against them in 1940 (and they may have been essential) were governmental and not popular. The public of 1940, unlike the public of 1915, kept its head. Is it mere optimism to conclude that
it has this tirne,4 wiser head? ' •
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