The Will to Suffer. In 1911 Churchill was appointed First Lord of the
Admiralty. He plunged wholeheartedly into the navy's fathomless sea of details,
visited every major naval installation in the British Isles and the
Mediterranean. "I could put my hand on anything that was wanted," he recalls.
He knew how to put the technicalities into memorable metaphors. In a 1914
debate on naval estimates, he told the House of Commons: "If you want a true
picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships, you must
not think of it as if it were two men in armor striking at each other with
heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two eggshells striking at each
other with hammers."
Churchill gives this picture of the summer of 1914: "The world on the
verge of its catastrophe was very brilliant. Nations and Empires crowned with
princes and potentates rose majestically on every side, lapped in the
accumulated treasures of the long peace. All were fitted and fastened--it
seemed securely--into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems
faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil
gaze...But there was a strange temper in the air...Almost one might think the
world wished to suffer..."
Danton v. Maxim. The world did not wish nor foresee the suffering of
1914-18. Blindly, the peoples acquiesced in the war. When on Aug. 4 the roll
was called in the German Reichstag, Socialists, who were supposed to be
pacifists and internationalists, voted war appropriations to the Kaiser. On
this day socialism and nationalism began their long, turbulent and unexpected
marriage; in the 20th Century's second quarter, the offspring of this union
were to dominate politics in Italy, Germany, Russia and even France, Britain,
and the U.S.
The generals of 1914 knew as little as the peoples about what lay ahead.
By a triumph of indoctrination, the French army, from marshal to private, was
imbued with the spirit of the offensive, which was just Danton's toujours de
l'audace expressed in human flesh. Bands playing, the French soldiers, fine
targets in red-and-blue uniforms, hurled themselves on the German lines in
Lorraine. Machine guns mowed them down. The New England-born inventor, Hiram
Maxim, had overruled Danton. The German generals were surprised, too. Their
Schlieffen plan, a wheel through Belgium toward Paris, was expected to knock
out France in six weeks. It swung short of the objective. Trenches were dug
from Switzerland to the sea, and a four-year siege of war which neither side
sought or foresaw developed.
Out of the horror and futility of the trenches was born a new feeling that
war in all circumstances is futile and evil. This pacifism suffused the minds
of a whole generation in the West; it was to ease the path for Hitler's and
Mussolini's early aggressions. The casualties of World War I trench warfare
(4,000,000 died on the Western Front) were only a part of the horror. The rats,
the lice, the slime were utter degradation to the most cleanly and comfortably
reared generation of men the world had ever known. Former wars had been fought
by professional soldiers or by men whose hazardous and squalid peacetime lives
almost equaled the hazards and squalor of war. The generation of World War I
thought that it had progressed beyond the old dangers. The pacifist poet,
Siegfried Sassoon, understood that the horror lay in a shocking contrast:
(Even Churchill, no pacifist, understood the revulsion to the trenches. In the
midst of a World War II blitz a friend spoke disparagingly of pacifism;
Churchill quoted pages of Sassoon to him.)
