PAX BLOOMSBURIANA
By PETER FLEMING
SHRILL, staccato, but in London so pervasive that it is on the whole (like cicadas) rather soothing, the chitter- ing of the Stop-the-War Front makes itself heard. These wayward but recurrent notes represent one of the unexpected compensations of these days. I never tire of listening to them.
The Stop-the-War Front is not really a continuous front. Its sectors are manned by incongruous allies and are largely self-contained. " A thin yellow line of pacifism," as Mr. Harold Nicolson neatly put it in last week's Spectator," runs from the extreme right to the extreme left." But on the left it is thicker, and on the whole more yellow. Sir Oswald Mosley, on the right wing, cannot be said to be entrenched in depth. His shoddy claque is weak and too discredited to get or to deserve a hearing ; but at least he is at what he has always proclaimed to be his post. He has mobilised under the same banners to which he rallied his comic cohorts in September, 1938. On other people's walls, under cover of the black-out, his storm-troopers chalk slogans which leaven the fatuous with the consistent: "Mind Britain's Business," " Jewry Made This War."
The centre of the line appears to be held by politicians, either dim or formerly distinguished ; by people who habitually court those politicians ; by some rich women ; by bores ; and by a large number of people who, while not prepared to admit that anything that Mr. Chamberlain has done or could ever do might be wrong, appear nevertheless anxious to put an end to the state of war which Mr. Cham- berlain declared to exist between Britain and Germany quite a long time ago. The centre of the thin yellow line com- prises no elements more engaging than these loyal but fumble-witted oafs, these governesses to a governess. It is always a pleasure to flush one from the deep club armchairs.
We must pass over the pacifists, who hold (as it were) the advanced posts but to whom none of the mud will stick. Pacifism is a blameless and for all I know a noble creed. It is also a luxury easily afforded by a country which has not been successfully invaded for nearly a thousand years. The old gag about " Would you do nothing if you saw your sister being raped? " is still an easy one to answer here. (Nobody ever put this conundrum to the Chinese ; but the past two and a half years have produced results almost equally disastrous for their sisters and for their pacifism.) We come now, trudging through the well-intentioned slush, to the left of the line. Out on the extreme flank are the poor Communists, very terrible, facing both ways for all they are worth, demanding peace. " Stop this Imperialist War," they cry, and go as far as they decently can towards backing Germany, whose only outstanding demand is for her Empire. Anything—a tram service, a boar hunt, a general election—run by Russians is amusing ; but as yet the Communist, like the Nazi, party has had insufficient time to digest its own vomit, and its current policy merits the attention only of the curious or the unkind.
Much more repaying (as Baedeker would put it) is the attitude of the intellectual " Left "; of the Popular Front, the Progressive Thinkers, the Non-Participators in the Betrayal of Democracy. If in this sector the cause of Peace is as yet espoused in a slightly amateurish way, that is hardly surprising. The boys are new to the job ; they are following an unfamiliar line of country. They were happier, more impressive, in their former role, when they thought it a fine thing for mankind (but more particularly foreigners) to resist aggression: to resist it to the death, and if necessary on the most unfavour- able terms. In Spain, in China (and more fleetingly in Abyssinia) they praised without stint the heroism of men who had taken up arms in a just cause but with diminishing prospects of victory. To the bombs of Franco and the bayonets of Japan Bloomsbury never tired of baring (in print) its bosom. Barcelona starving? Never mind. They are fighting civilisation's battle. They will, they must, hold out. Mabel says their spirit is magnificent ; she was there for three days, you know. . . . " 2,000 Dead in Chung- king Raid." Terrible, isn't it? They've lost their ports, their railways, their capital, the Customs, and three million dead, or is it five? But they won't give in ; their spirit is magnificent. Did they ask you to sign that telegram to Chiang Kai-shek? They say the Chinese appreciate that sort of thing very much: moral support, you know. . . .
No wonder Bloomsbury hasn't quite got the hang of the Stop-the-War Front yet. A fire brigade manned exclusively by pyromaniacs must reckon with a technical hitch or two in the early stages. It is particularly hard luck on this plucky unit that Russia should have involved herself—how- ever discreetly—in the current conflagration. On the Left it has long been de rigueur to explain the Russians as Angels with Dirty Faces ; " beneath that rugged exterior there beats a heart of gold." One had, of course, to deplore certain aspects of the regime; but internationally how correct has Russia's conduct been, and anyhow look at all the things she says she stands for. . . .
Bloomsbury is a long way from Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia, where the U.S.S.R. has fulfilled Tsarist ambitions by taking over nearly two million square miles of Chinese territory. So a rude but not a fatal shock was dealt to the loyalties of the Left when the Red Army made its intrepid but relatively parochial incursion into Poland after the Polish .army had been put out of action. It appears to have been this shock, as much as anything else, which swung Blooms- bury into the Stop-the-War Front like a great wave of used bathwater. For in the first fortnight that terrifying bosom had been—as by a reflex action—bared once more.
There, anyhow, the intellectuals are, holding the thin yellow line at its thickest. It will be sad when time and experience have ironed out the splendour of their incon- sistencies. A year ago, when they protested against the dirty deal at Munich, they were called war-mongers. Justly incensed, they replied that they did not urge the Govern- ment to go to war over Czecho-Slovakia, but blamed it because England was too weak in arms to resist a German threat to the independence of a small European nation. No sooner do we stand up to Germany on just such an issue, having become strong enough to do so, than the intelligentsia begins to gibber about the futility of war and demands a Peace Conference. (Poland conveniently becomes, accord- ing to my local Labour candidate, " a semi-Fascist State.- There is, too, an elfin charm about the juxtaposition of Bloomsbury's two main tenets: (a) this war, once it really starts, is going to change the face of civilisation out of al: recognition and (b) the British Government should, without any further ado and with precision, indicate what the face of civilisation is going to look like when the war is over. A similar logic is evident in the contentions that (a) the Cabinet is a bunch of knaves and fools, but (b) if we only had the gumption to send one Cabinet Minister to Moscow all would speedily be well.
It is wrong, perhaps, to poke fun at those connoisseurs of patriotism in the Andalusians and the Szechwanese. But it is permissible to wonder why we find Bloomsbury shoulder to shoulder with the Wilhelmstrasse in suggesting a Peace Conference now, in deploring the outright rejection of Hitler's proffered hand, in drooling on about the horror and inconvenience of war. The Wilhelmstrasse's motives are not difficult to fathom ; Germany can't take it. And Blooms- bury's motives. . . ? I don't know enough about Pond Life to attempt the undoubtedly complex task of defining them. All one can say with certainty is (a) that Hitler desires a settlement or at least a truce, and (b) that Bloomsbury advocates a settle- ment or at least a truce. I know that Bloomsbury's terms are different from Hitler's terms (though both parties use almost identical arguments for stopping the war). If Hitler had gone all out and shown no disposition to say " Let's stop and talk," I doubt if it would ever have occurred to Bloomsbury to eat so many of its brave words, which makes it all the odder that the Left should now implore us to adopt—with a view to saving civilisation—the only course which holds out the hope of salvation to civilisation's arch- enemy.
Still, it's all very interesting.
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