War and Pacifism BOOKS OF THE DAY

By JOHN SPARROW

" WHAT would I fight for ? " is a question which a number of

Englishmen, for obvious reasons, are asking themselves just now : several persons recently published their answers to it in the columns of The Spectator. To its author, no doubt, each seemed a reasonable, perhaps the only reasonable, answer ; yet all were different, and none was free from elabor- ate justificatory qualification :

` I would fight for the League; provided that . . ; I would fight for the Empire, so long as . . . ' ; I would fight against Communism, but not on the side of a Fascist state ' ; I would fight for such and such a cause, but only if it was sponsored by Sir Stafford Cripps.'

Mr. Sassoon's book makes that question seem unreal, and the answers to it academic. It reminds us that things do not, in practice, happen like that ; the international situation is not wheeled up to us like a tray of hors-d'oeurres at a restaurant, out of which we can select just that assortment of causes, that alignment of allies, which best suits our taste ; wars come ready-made, we are confronted with a conflict which is not of our choosing, and the simple question is " Will you fight ? " ' Even that question is not seriously propounded : those who answer it in the negative, however elaborate their intellectual justifications, are lucky if, like Mr. Sassoon, they are sent to nothing worse than a Mental Hospital.

Nor is a man's answer to the question " Will you fight ? " necessarily governed by the considerations which determine his answer to the question, " What would you fight for ? " Our attitude towards " the War," when war has been declared, is not always consistent with our attitude towards war. Mr. Sassoon did not believe that the War would secure the ends for which he was invited to take up arms ; he knew it for the " dirty swindle " that it was ; he was revolted by its horrors ; he was a "pacifist " ; yet he chose to fight.

No doctrinaire, whatever the nature of his doctrine, will share the feelings revealed by Mr. Sassoon's self-analysis. Yet it should do both pacifists and militarists good to try to under- stand his book. They will not find that they can dismiss it lightly, with their usual argumentum ad hominem, for Mr. Sassoon is brave, intelligent, sensitive : he possesses, in fact, just those qualities the presence of which prevents the militarist from accounting for him as a coward or a crank, and the pacifist from accounting for him as a boor or .a fool.

What then is the state of mind and feeling revealed by Sherston's Progress? At the close of the preceding volume of Mr. Sassoon's trilogy, he was left protesting against the War ; he tore off his M.C. ribbon and flung it into the River Mersey ; he refused to fight ; he demanded to be court- martialled. Sherston's Progress opens with his arrival at the shell-shock hospital to which the Government, at a loss how to deal with such behaviour, had consigned him. In the first part of the book he recalls what he thought and felt during his " convalescence " ; the second is chiefly concerned with hunting in Limerick—an interlude on his return journey ; the third consists of extracts from the diary which he kept when he got back to the War in Palestine and France.

Something impelled the pacifist inmate of Slateford Hospital to return to the fighting-line. It was not that he had come to think the War justifiable or worth while ; it was not, indeed, any intellectual conviction at all. It was simply, as he puts it,

" a sense of the unreality of my surroundings. Reality was on the other side of the Channel, surely. . . . Those men, so strangely isolated from ordinary comforts in the dark desolation of mur- derously-disputed trench-sectors, were more to the than all the despairing and war-weary civilians."

Sherston's Progress. By Siegfried Sassoon (Faber and Faber.

• • 7s. 6d.)

In one or two passages of his diary he reveals explicitly his state of mind :

" I should be returning to the War with no belief in what I was doing ; I should go through with it in a spirit of loneliness and detachment because there was no alternative. Going back was the only way out of an impossible situation. At the front I should at least find forgetfulness.. . . Better to be in the trenches with those. whose experience I had shared and understood than with this medley of civilians who, when one generalised about them intolerantly, seemed either being broken by the War or enriched and made important by it " ;

and again,

" why hadn't I stayed in France where I could at least escape from the War by being in it Out there I had never despised my existence as I did now."

But it was not only that noble kind of selfishness called self-respect that impelled him to go back ; plainly the chief reason why he found peace at the Front and nowhere else was because there he could most help those who most needed his help :

"May. 22nd. I am learning to understand soldiers and their ideas ; intelligent instruction of them teaches me a lot. But I find them very difficult to put on pater. " And in 'these days of hawthorn blossom and young leaves they seem like 'a part of the passing of the year. Autumn will bring many of them to oblivion. It is written that you should suffer without purpose and without. hope. But I will not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss,' wrote Duhamel. That is how I feel too ; but all I can do for theni is to try and obtain them fresh vegetables, with my own money, and teach them how to consolidate shell-holes, and tell them that the

soul of defence lies in offence ' ! " • .

Not, indeed, that the War brought completely the forget- fulness he sought ; passage after passage. reveals the intense suffering to which a sensitive spirit was subjected by being compelled constantly to witness the agonies of some of those around him, the indifference and the brutality of others ; con- scious, when a lull in activity made reflection possible (and inevitable), of the doom that overshadowed his companions, and having no counterbalancing belief in the justice or nobility of the conflict in which they were involved :

" June 14th, 1918. They see me in the daylight of my activities, when I must acquiesce in the evil that is war., But in.the darkness when am alone my soul rebels against what we are doing.

grey-eyed and sensible and shrewd ; Rowitt, dark-eyed and lover- like and thoughtful ; how• long have you to live—you in the Pleni- tude of youth, in your pride of being alive, your ignorance of 'life's narrowing and disillusioning road ?.. It may, be that I shall live to remember you as I remember all those others who were my companions for a while and whose names are no longer printed in the Army List. What can I do to defeat the injustice which claims you, perhaps, as victims, as it claimed those ghostly others ? Sitting here with my one candle I know that I can do nothing. ' Save his own soul he has no star ! ' " The moral—which Mr. Sassoon leaves implicit=is not, as might be supposed, in favour of a " defeatist " attitude concerning war. For if the fact nf a war may compel a reasonable person to take part in an activity which he loathes and reprobates, acting on an instinct which does not square with his normal intellectual convictions, that is I all the more reason for trying to prevent a war from ever

taking place; the fact that a war induces • large masses of ,g people so to act is one of its chief horrors. Sheraton's Progress has other qualities to recommend it : . the beauty of its descriptions of inanimate nature in Paleatine and in France, the quick eye of its author in describing people, the vividness

with which are recorded both the activity and the inaction which went to the making of a soldier's, life—these

Mr. Sassoonts preVious books have taught us, to expect ; but its chief Aral& lies in the living contrast which it presents between the pacifism which consists in a refusal

to " fight' and the pacifism consists in a hatred

. . . • < • of 'intr.