The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Falling of the Thunderbolt
THE FALLING OF THE THUNDERBOLT
Into such an unpromising atmosphere, of
national hostility the war came down on us in
July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave
warnings few or none in this country were at
that moment giving a thought to it. On the
contrary, we were thinking of all manner of
immeasurably smaller things, for Great Britain,
although governing more than one-fifth of the
habitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity
for becoming absorbed in the affairs of its two
little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914,
when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform
covered all our horizon, although a thunder-cloud
that was to silence these big little guns had
already gathered in the sky.
Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had too long concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kind of surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be the dangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficult negotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely the chief of them is to know step by step by what means its representatives are controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in the Cabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke's assassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeled under the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable of comprehending the cause and the measure of it.
"What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God's name should we have to fight about it?" we thought. Or perhaps, "We've always been told that treaties between nations are safeguards of peace, but here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war."
So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days that it is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six members are said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historian of high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, and retired from their company. Another, who came from the working classes, is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings which any war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. A third, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believed to have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany to account. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as a pacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to a colleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declared merely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such an outcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before—leaving us a divided and, therefore, easily vanquished people.