Night Watch
1
IF A visitor attempted a picture of England now, somehow to give the truth of it, what could he do? I do not know, but I can feel sorry for him. If he knew us in past years well enough to be at his ease here, so much the worse for him.
He would be found speculating, I fancy, at the end of a week with us, whether all he saw and heard had a significance undivulged; whether there was a secret England, not yet disclosed; and whether he would live long enough to find it. With luck he might remember, to his enlightenment and solace, that that is the way revolutions always are.
Yet there certainly are some things in our background simple enough to be sure of; he could take them without question as substantial. They are as firmly fixed as his own belief that evil is not good. He would find everywhere, even among the younger men whose lot is the worst hazards of battle, no doubt whatever that to begin war is an insane act, with corruption to follow.
And yet that armed conflict with the ideas Germany loosed over the world was fated. The doom of this generation, and of the traditions in which it was born, was an article of Nazi faith. The gun had to be taken, unless we all agreed to have our brains evaporated.
Nor will a visitor have to ask twice whether it is known in England that Japan exists, though the chances are he will not hear Singapore mentioned. We find that word not easy to say. But Australasia exists; and then again, China is a word that means here what Russia means, and the man who speaks grudgingly of Russia is suspected by most of us to be a warped fellow, if not a probable enemy. Still, the fire is not out next door yet; the party wall remains red-hot. Though a visitor to London, whatever his doubt or his previous suspicion, asks no question about that; the smoke gets up his nose. Contact with a harsh fact is a persuasive argument.
An American, strolling about London, glad to see its streets again, seeking familiar haunts that have either vanished or are unrecognizable, probably gets the impression that the British metropolis, despite the defeat of Hitler’s flying legions, is occupied by an invading army after all. It is a cosmopolitan army, to be sure, but in the main American. It must surprise him that Londoners are either unaware of this clear confirmation of Goebbels’s prophecy of American dominion over the British, or else are taking the occupation as their proper share in the reordering of mankind’s business. In truth, it does not matter which. It is too late to scare us with that stuff.
We are in the mood to accept anything, if it means fellowship; any dispensation, from men of understanding, to get release from a nightmare which has lasted ten years. The continuance of Valkyries and other ugly monsters of Teutonic aberration becomes boring and exhausting. Nor can we help speculating still, in a quiet spell, about the destiny of those trainloads of Jewish infants moved out of France long ago, without identification papers. To where, and to what? Black instances like that occur to us of something unnamable at large, and enough of them in number and hideous implication to reduce the Newgate Calendar to the mild reports of a philanthropic society; so we know what must be done, and that our men are doing it.
It is not surprising that an American should fail to find his London. I cannot find mine, and have given up hope — if hope is the right word — of seeing it again. It has gone. There is only a simulacrum to warn one that cities, like men, suffer change, and are mortal. Though we did not know it, because its presence apparently was as constant as the morning train, our accustomed city has been a view dissolving since 1914. A city is but the shadows cast by men’s thoughts, which are subject to time and the sun. What informs London now? Out of what desires will its future towers grow?
One can only say that the fine ideas in various charters, policies, and agreements, subscribed to by presidents and premiers, and in this promising plan and the other, are not gayly blossoming in London’s vacant lots, and make no bright eyes in the daily hurry along the pavements. If you mention these spacious notions in the presence of young people, as assurance of future good, and compensation for sacrifice, the usual response is a faint smile and a cold silence. They do not altogether believe. This is a disillusioned generation.
T. E. Lawrence voiced their doubt for them in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “When we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took from us our victory, and remade it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly, and made their peace.”
That skepticism shows also in sporadic labor troubles. Though miners and shipwrights are not unsocial, they have bitter memories. Everybody knows that brutishness is cruel in the space separating combines and mergers from their workers, and that war never does much to turn it to comeliness. It really is not higher wages these workers want, though that is what they ask for; they want faith h in the golden words of statesmen, which have been known to prove spurious.
Is this year’s coinage of bright currency also of base metal? They cannot be sure that the alchemy of politics will not again turn precious words into dross. All they do know is that, while laboring to drive Germany back into her place, with Japan to follow, — no light task, — they see at home influential men, no longer afraid that Hitler will soon cross the Channel, coming out boldly into daylight and, to prove that fear has left them, freely talking from the dark of the mind with the emphasis of the industrial captains of the 1840’s, when laissez faire was the soothing remedy prescribed for the natural outcome of commercial and industrial anarchy.
This cynicism over the good intent of statesmen, a common human failing, is no more than hope finally disenchanted long ago by that government of “businessmen” — for so they called themselves — which secured control at Westminster when the last war ended, and, through ignorance, lost the peace as soon as it was won. Many of them are still busy with us. The threat of invasion, which had looked as black as Doomsday, has passed. Now war workers and others, able to breathe freely, have a chance to reflect in the wearying and anxious fifth year of war. They are considering a little of history. This history is so recent that it is commonplace with most of the men in the fighting forces. And the conclusion to which many of them have come is simply that this war will be lost, despite victory, if commonwealth is allowed to remain a rhetorical flourish in exhortations before battle.
2
I SHOULD call that good news. It is creative understanding, but recently gained. It is a virtue latent in society. Nobody knows what will come of it, but something will come of it. We are also aware that the release of this power, one way or another, is in the hands of Winston Churchill. He is the national figure who has our destiny in his charge as surely now as in the days of Dunkirk. He is a leader in war who was at once unanimously acclaimed by the British. In extremity, his voice was known, for it sounded from the hearts of the people. It was our fortune to have a great person to express us.
Yet we are still perplexed by the fact that, having been given the glad franchise of the folk, he should afterwards have accepted as a crowning honor the headship of the party group which had rejected him a few months before the explosions began, and was largely responsible for the disadvantageous conditions in which we entered battle. This may mean no more, of course, than that he is a magnanimous man, as well as a leader of courage, fidelity, and vision, whose quickening spirit did most to avert catastrophe. Though we feel this certainty, we shall never free ourselves from the black dubiety engendered long ago by a famous Business Government. That must be reckoned with as are the fatal rocks marked conspicuously in a mariner’s chart.
We maintain the hope, however, that our leader is affected not only by our gratitude, which will not fail, but by a personal intuition that human memory is not always the shallow thing some of his important associates may desire that it should ever be. It is very certain that, if the British could find it in them to face Hitler when he was triumphant and they had no help, they will have no fear, should further conflict be forced on them, of those special interests at home now recovering heart since they see they may continue to use their countinghouses without seeking leave of Berlin.
I doubt that Winston Churchill would look upon the confines and outlook of a countinghouse as a makeshift for the kind of stately pleasure dome that Kubla Khan decreed. He has never lent his name to the countinghouses, or sought fame there, though he could easily have found it. We are not certain that he knows enough of modern economics to be fully aware of those international cartels which have turned the old furious dispute over socialism or private enterprise into moonshine. He is not acquisitive, and perhaps fails in full sympathy for men who are. He paints when at leisure, and is satisfied with a job or two about the house and garden.
These simple preferences are always of importance when we have to judge how a man may consider a supplication. But once out in the open, with a purpose, he is just as bold and imaginative an adventurer as an Elizabethan, as Sidney or Raleigh. When he was young, there being no new lands to discover in uncharted seas, no Low Countries or Spanish Main, and no dangerous intrigues in the court of an unmarried, exacting, and subtle queen of genius, he took to electoral contests, as the next best thing. Let it be said that they were sufficiently exciting, for the franchise then was wide, and the red flag was already conspicuous and audacious; indeed, politics were ruder and fiercer then than now.
He fought his elections, as you would guess, always in happy abandon of what his party wanted him to do, and usually he won. He prefers danger in circumstance, and makes it if it is not already there. After the Boer War, which was fairly brief, with no other similar entertainment in prospect, nothing was left for him but the clangor and dust of party politics. And they were tumultuous enough for even a reckless adventurer, as I can be a witness. I was one to enjoy opposing him.
Sidney and Raleigh, as we know, were soldiers who were also men of letters in the humanistic tradition, as was usual with courtly Elizabethan adventurers. Churchill is like them in that. We may doubt that he finds some modern books, praised in select, intellectual circles, and said to show a signal advance in apprehension, much to his mind. He may have read them, wondered briefly and simply what all the fuss is about, and then, as easement for the labor of the day, turned to the Bible — to the Old Testament — to find words prognostic of the morrow. Though St. Paul had a manner for backsliders, the fearful, and the weak-kneed, that Churchill must surely approve. Those noble epistles, written to carry a cause new and good, had the right fructifying and expanding qualities, and show the way English prose should move when furthering a high purpose.
A grave parade of words, however stately, never endears a man to the multitude. Royal purple is admired from a distance. It is not homespun. But our Premier is apt to pause, in the midst of his eloquence, when the comic spirit takes him. Humor, being thrifty of words, concludes the matter with a laugh. These inconsequential flashes do more than keep an audience expectant: they reveal a fellow mortal. A turn of fun shows not only balance, but an understanding of the variety of life in its infinity. While we were still watching for bargeloads of German troops and tanks to nose up our beaches, I remember a broadcast speech of his which at one point gave some of his listeners at home a chill, and then grim amusement. He had reminded us of what we must expect, — and it was nothing for comfort, — and then suddenly addressed a few words to Hitler: “We are still waiting for that invasion — and so are the fishes.”
But if it is supposed that the challenge and resonance of his war speeches and writings are his best accomplishment, and you turn to his work on Marlborough, you meet Sarah, the duke’s wife. When she enters the narrative she takes your attention. She is a character, and possessive, and you are glad to see her come into the story again after the pages have been long occupied by bivouacs and battle lines. Evidently the chronicler of Marlborough enjoys the play of a generous and wayward spirit in homely affairs as much as the spectacle of regiments moving through smoke to a decisive event. Humanity and its destiny engage him more, I think, than all the laws and the precedents.
I don’t suppose that sense of kinship would have helped us greatly but for this war. He would not clearly have seen what to do. Like the Elizabethans, he must act as well as write, or he is frustrated. Movement unites his diverse gifts. And where was choice for action in a fenced and parceled earth? Even his own party in Parliament feared his reserve of force, and kept him out of office. He might never have risen to his mark but for the astonishment and indignation the eruption of Germany roused in him.
That was his release. He was alarmed. The menace to the best traditional motives for human effort restored to him his youth. Nations were breaking, and their accustomed standards and landmarks, as old as history, were disappearing while men stood dismayed. The bonds of civility were going, for law and good faith were losing hold in an insurrection of the uncouth and malevolent. Governments were usurped by armed bullies, and no rescue was possible without leaders of vision and energy with a simple faith in the intrinsic kindness of hapless humanity. There it was once more, most unbelievably, a world open for adventure, discovery, and settlement.
3
WHAT would be victory to us now, unless it is but the prelude? It would not be worth having. It could not justify its cost in life and labor. The world we knew has gone. That is the outstanding fact of our day, and we are beginning dimly to see it. To understand all it implies will test the quality of our knowledge, and the worth of our souls. (Let us speak of the forgotten soul again; we need not be ashamed of it.) We see our earth even darker than it was when the early navigators were barely aware of a western continent. It is darker because, while we are proud to know nearly as much as Lucifer knew, — and he was arrogant through knowledge, so the legend goes, — before he came an awful drop, we have no more lucidity with it than about enough to get us through this perilous pass. And then? Then we shall be in the open, with evil wreckage to be cleared, and communities to be re-established, we are not sure how. We only surmise that in all the vast library of political and social science there is not enough light to serve as a hand torch, as we search out a lasting base for a new society.
What do the ruin and sorrow about us mean except that, whatever else informed our activities in the past, it was not common sense? May it now be supposed at last that the advice to do to others as we would have them do to us is worth trying, after all? Certainly our equipment for this new adventure, which may prove man’s final effort to get nearer a true course, is adequate. We feel that. The mechanical aids of the explorers in the past to learn their whereabouts, to find their position and set a course into the unknown, cannot help us.
The kingdom we would find has no geographical marks. It is not described in books, and is unknown in those vast regions of influence apportioned among industrial monarehs in their secret cartels for controlling us. It is useless to seek it in this august authority or that. We cannot leave the discovery of it to our leaders. It is not here, and not there. We can only look within. It is amazing that this should be found at all strange in a society of Christian men. What, can’t we see our civilization is perishing? And do we not know, in this hour, of the reason why it should die?
Each of us must choose, and stand by his choice at all hazards. What choice will Winston Churchill make? His responsibility, when this passage is made, will be graver than ever before rested on an English Prime Minister. Nothing like it. has happened before in our history. We cannot believe be will attempt to turn our faces backward. It would be better for London to be as ancient Memphis, than that we should go back to the injustice, the inequity, and the social cruelty that ultimately were the cause of this world revolution.
The spirit of man, and his peaceful possession of the gifts of sun and earth, and the need he feels at times to learn of an origin and purpose never yet revealed, are of first importance. Unless these are secured, the rest turns to corruption. The speed, output, and profit of numberless revolving wheels, and of oil, iron and coal, and uncounted ships, and of ever increasing cities, are not comparable. They come afterward. What is the choice we have? Of life, or death.
The critics and philosophers are still trying to confuse us over the distinction between the dream and the business, between the romantic and the real — as if reality did not transcend the most exorbitant fancies of the fabulists; and but for that I should call Churchill a romanticist. He wonders over the mystery of existence. If a traveler finds himself alone in the Parthenon as the sun sets, or happens all unexpectant into Toledo Cathedral, he knows in a moment there is something in the striving of man which has never yet found full release in poetry or art, though now and again it sounds in music like a brief escape of harmony from a world not this.
And so Churchill, in a way now old-fashioned, has made his humble submission to the suggestions and the values the masters have learned from Greece and Palestine. Art, we have been assured by some recent experts, should be amoral; at its highest it should be quite clear of human attributes. It is no good turning to the amoral for light on our affairs. Anyhow, we have had enough of inhumanity. As for economics, what has morality, we are asked severely, to do with that department of science? I myself think that economics without morality is the east wind for empty bellies, and a cause of dry rot in good juicy brains.
Should evidence for this be needed, look around. Read your newspaper. You see at a glance that political economy cannot be kept out of the headlines, and so must occasion emotional response. Daily in antiphon these headlines cry out in hatred of communism or in praise of communion. May it be mentioned, therefore, that this fierce debate is nothing new? It was not occasioned by Russia. Indeed, it is as old as the difference between rich and poor, or between fair play and foul. There is no compulsion on a student to begin with Marx.
The English tradition in the humanities is at least as old as Utopia, which was first published in Louvain in 1516, under the editorship of Erasmus, a friend of Sir Thomas More. That wise and witty book, unique in the library of political science because to read it is a pleasure, ought to be in the hands of all who have authority over our destiny. Dean Swift, whose virility is never questioned, once called the noble, gentle, and courageous author of Utopia “the person of the greatest virtue that this age has ever produced.”
4
A WORD which is now scaring timid people everywhere had no terror for Sir Thomas, who, however, had the heart to oppose without fuss his lusty monarch, Henry VIII, with the inevitable result. The word pictured for him not a reign of terror, but of peace. Though it makes us nervous, the word has its origin in no more than the idea of mutual trust. It was understood by Adam and Eve. It did not scatter the early Christians, but held them in a brotherhood which withstood the Roman Empire. By what are we alarmed?
It is men and women that matter, and their welfare, first and always. Fellowship is above possessions, and transcends frontiers. We cannot doubt that Churchill has read Utopia, and it would be improper to suggest that he regards that masterpiece as no more than the origin of an epithet to dismiss a dream of impossible good. The New Testament could be dismissed for the same reason, and the churches all shut, or else turned into unfrequented museums where useless but curious sermons from mounts and elsewhere could be preserved from worms and dust under glass.
How shall we choose?
Nobody clearly knows yet, in Washington, MosCOW, or London. That is why miners and others are restless, and young soldiers write home puzzled over so queer a matter as the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, asking what it means, and whether or not they are to overcome or establish Fascism. Is it right for generals and admirals to be politicians, they ask, but not privates and sailors? So it is not surprising that the Russians can match our doubts of Moscow with a dubious thought or two about us. When I met two American friends in London of late, who were eager to learn how things are with us, these indirections and hesitations were about all I could pass on.
I discovered, while with them, that my chief concern was to assure them that when the English show uneasiness over Americans, it is because we are well aware that, without their weight and good will, what ought to be done will never be done. After victory, if each of the victorious powers should seek its own, we shall have but an uneasy leisure to count our losses, suspect all things, and wait for the next war while air-transport corporations quarrel over rights, claims, and privileges. And who would enjoy that prospect? It would be but waiting in the dark, listening for the drone of oncoming bombers.
They are the reasons, though there are others, why a Londoner cannot by daylight find his accustomed city. By day the capital is provisional. The opinions of his neighbors are eddying and veering. Only at night, in loneliness, does his place reappear. It is the abode again of thought and memory. It is populous with ghosts. Affection, driven in by the loud demands, and by the sights and sounds of war, comes out in the twilight with the shadows of what is immemorial and dedicated.
London’s streets, after the hour of black-out, are of the past, but continue on as ever to what youth may achieve where all is unnamed and unformed. All good things are possible. It is not dark. The stars are out; for again at night over London, after years of absence, the stars have come back to look at us. They are no longer put out by the lower bold glare of our activities, which are, after all, more inscrutable, more terrifying, than the faint glimmer of the Pleiades. Reality and the heavens are nearer to us at night. Assurance returns in loneliness, and it gives the latest news of the hour the importance already of scattered relics that have but small relation to what is for the future, latent in the quality of our fellows. Have we not ourselves witnessed the heights to which our youth can rise? Who would dare attempt to limit the virtue in that?
From an outlook in central London in the hour when, dark and brooding, the city is waiting silently for the next call in war, for the searchlights to go up and the guns to shake us, there our own place is again. We have it still. Its black parapets and towers are uplifted among the glittering constellations, coeval with eternity. It is a strangely beautiful London to a watcher whose duty is on the ramparts at night, as mysterious as a city of Eastern fable. Old Samarkand was like this. It is antiquity in continuity. You might think it irrevocably set in the past, remote from a new day; but, looking out over it the other night, trying to get my bearings, I could not find the star I sought. At that point over there it should have been, and at that moment. Was I mistaken in my outlook, or had a star failed me? Yet as I watched, quite still, puzzled and uncertain of myself, doubting the very aspect of the heavens, there suddenly the bright star was. It had been hidden briefly by something mundane. The earth was shouldering into the east. We were on our way.