WHAT PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WAR

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3003, 14 February 1917, Page 8

WHAT PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WAR

OR DO THEY REALLY THINK? MR; WELLS'S ANALYSIS OP BRITISH MINDS [Mr. H. G. Wells contributes to the London "Daily News" a striking analysis of the attitude of the British public's mind towards tho war. He wonders if we really do think about it at all.] All human, affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas of to-day are the realities of to-morrow. The real history of. mankind is tho history of how ideas have arisen, how they have taken possession of men's minds, how thev have struggled, altered, proliferated, decayed. There is nothing in this war at all hut a couflict of ideas, traditions, and mental habits. Tho German Will, clothed in conceptions of aggression and fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity of tho German mind and the confused protest of mankind. So that the'most permanently important thing in the tragic process of this war is the change of opinion that is going 011. What are people making of it ? Is itproducing any great common underIstandings, any fruitful unanimities? No doubt it is producing oiiormous' quantities of cerebration, but is it anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration? Wo aro told all sorts of things in answer to thatchings often without a scrap of evid&ice or probability to support them. It is, we aro assured, turning people to religion, making them moral and thoughtful. It is also, wo arc assured with equal confidence, turning them to despair and moral disaster. It will he followed by (1) a period of moral renascence, and (2) a debauch. It is going to make the workers (1) more and_ (2) less obedient and industrious. Tt is (1) inuring men to war and (2) filling them with a passionate resolve never to suffer war again. And so 011. I propose now to ask what is really happening in this matter? How is human opinion changing? I have oninions of my own, and tliey are bound to colour my discussion. The reader must allow for that, and as far as possible I will remind him where nccessary to make his allowance. To Visualise the Future.

Now, first, I would ask, is any rcallj continuous and thorough mental process going 011 at all about this war? I mean, is there ai\j- considerable number of people who are seeing it as a whole, taking it in as a whole, trying to get a general idea of it from which they can form directing conclusions for the future? Is there, any considerable number of people even trying to do that? At any rate, lot me point out, first, that there is quite, an enormous mass of people who—in spite of the fact that their minds are concentrated 011 aspects of this war, who are at present hearing, talking, experiencing little else than the war—are nevertheless neither doing nor trying to do anything that deserves to be called thinking about'it at all. They may even bo suffering quite terribly by it. But they are 110 more mastering its causes, reaI sons, conditions, and the possibility of its future prevention than a monkey that has been rescued in a scorchiug condition from the burning of a house will have mastered the problem of a fire. It is just happehing to.and about them. It may, for anything they have learnt about it, happen to them again. A vast majority of people are being swamped by the spectacular side of the business. It was very largely my fear of being so swamped myself that made me reluctant to go as a spectator to the front. I knew that my chances of being hit by a bullet were infinitesimal, bqt I was' extremely afraid of I being hit by some too vivid impression. I was afraid that I might see some horribly wounded man or some decayed dead body that would so scar my mem'ory and stamp such horror into me as to reduco me to a mere useless, gibbering, pacifist. Years ago my mind was onco darkened very bady for some weeks with a kind of fear and distrust of life through a sudden unexpected encounter one tranquil evening with a drowned body. But in this journey in Italy and France, although I have had glimpses of much death and seen many wounded men, I have had 110 really horrible impressions, at pll. That sido of the business has, I think, been over-, written. The thing that ii«unts mo most is tile impression of a prevalent relapse into extreme untidiness, of a universal discomfort, of fields and of ruined houses treated - disTegardfully. .... But that is not what concerns us now in this discussion. What concerns -us now is the fact that this war is producing spectacular effects so tremendous and incidents so strange, so remarkable, so vivid, that' the mind forgets both causes and/consequences, and simply sits down to stare.

The Zeppelin Raids. For example, there is this business of the Zeppelin raids in England. It is a supremely silly business; it is the most conclusive demonstration of the intellectual inferiority of the German to the Western European that it should ever have happened. There was the clearest a priori case against itlie gasbag. I remember the discussions ten or twelve years ago in which it was established to the satisfaction of every reasonable mail that ultimately the "heavier than air" machine (as we called then) must fly better than the gas-bag, and still more conclusively that no gas-bag was conceivable that could hope to liglit and defeat aeroplanes. Nevertheless, the German, with that dull faith of-his in mere "Will," persisted along his line. LTe knew instinctively that he could not produce aviators to meet' the Western European ; all his social instincts made him cling •to the idea of a great motherly, an almost sow-like bag of wind above him. At'an enormous waste of resources Germany has produced these futile monsters, that drift in tjie darkness over England promiscuously dropping bombs on fields and bouses. They are now meeting tile fate tliat was demonstrably certain ten years ago. If tbey foufid ns unready for them it is merely that we were unable to imagine so idiotic an enterprise would ever be seriously sustained and persisted in. We did not believe iu the probability of Zeppelin raids any more than we believed that Germany would force the world into war. It was a thing too silly to be belioved. But they came — to their certain fate. In the month after I returned from Prance and Italy no fewer than four of these fatuities were exploded and destroyed within thirty mile's of my Essex home. . .

There in chosen phrases you have the truth abriit these tilings. But now mark the perversion of thought due to spectacular eiTcct. I find over the Essex countryside, which has been more than a year and a half a highway for Zeppelins, a new and curious admiration for them that lias arisen out of these very _ disasters. Previously they were regarded with dislike' and a sort of distrust, as one might regard a sneaking neighbour who left his footsteps in one's garden at night. But the Zeppelins of Potter's Bar and. "Somewhere in Essex" .are heroic things. (The Guff ley one came down too quickly, and the fourth one, which en mo down for its crew to surrendor; is despised.) I have heard poopeoplo describe the two former with cos .shinning with enthusiasm. shining v-ith enthusiasm. "Firs';," they say. "you saw a little round roJ glow that spread. Thou you saw the whole-Zeppelin glowing. Oil, it was beautiful! Then it began to turn over and come down, aiuh it flamed, and pieces began to break away.

And then down it came, leaving flaming pieces all up the sky. At last it was a pillar of firo eight thousand feet high. . . . Everyone said 'Oooool' And then someone yuintcd out the' little aeroplane lit up by the flare—such, a leetlo thing up there in the night 1 It is the greatest thing I have ever seen, oil! the most wonderful—most wonderful."

There is a feeling that the Germans really must, after all, be u. splendid people, to provide such magnificent pyrotechnics. Some people in London the other day were pretending to be shocked by an American who boasted he had been in "two 'bully' bombardments," but lie was only saying what everyone feels moro or less. AVe are at a spectacle a spectacle—our grandchildren will envy. I understand now better the story of the man who stared at the sparks raining up from his own house as it burnt in the night, and whispered, "Lovely! lovely." The spectacular side of the war is really an enormous distraction from thought. Ajid against thought there also "fights the native indolence of the human mind. The human mind, it seems, was. originally developed to think about tile individualit thinks reluctantly about the species. It takes refuge from that sort of thing if it possibly can. And so the second preat preventive of clear thinking is lost.

The Tran'quilssing Platitude. The human mind is an instrument very easily fatigued. Only a lew exceptions go on thinking -restlessly—to the extreme exasperation _of their neighbours. The normal mind craves for decisions, oven wrong or false decisions rather than none. It clutches at comforting falsehoods. It loves to be told, "'Jliore, don't you worry. That'll be all right. That's settled." This war has come as 'an almost overwhelming challenge to mankind. To somo of us it seems as if it were the Splivnx proffering the alternative of its riddle, or death. Yet the very urgency of this challenge to think seems to paralyse the critical intelligence of very many people altogether. They will say, "This war is going topproducte t enormous changes in everything." They will then subside mentally lvitli n feeling of having covered the whole ground in a. thoroughly safe manner. Or they will adopt an air of critical aloofness. They will say. "How is it possible to forctell'what may happen in this tremendous sea of change?" And then, with an air of superior modesty, they will go on doing—whatever they feel inclined to do. Jlany others, a degree less simple in their methods,/will take some entirely partial aspect, arrive at somo guesswork decision upon that, and then behave as though,that met every question we have to face. Or they will make a sort oP admonitory forecast that is conditional upon the good behaviour of other people. "Unless the trade unions arc moro reasonable " they will say. Or, "Unless the shipping, interest is grappled with and controlled." Or, unless "England wakes ws-." And with that they seem to wash their hands of further responsibility for the future. Ono delightful form of put-off is the sage remark "Let us finish the war first, and then let us aslc wliat is going to happen after it." Ono likes to think of tlio beautiful blank day after the-signing" of peace when these wise minds swing round to pick up their deferred problems. ...

A Duty to Oneself. I submit that a man lias not dono his duty by himself as a rational creature imless_ he has formed an idea of what is going on, as one complicated process, until he has formed an idea sufficiently definite for him to make it the hasis of a further idea, which is his onpi relationship to that process. Ho" must have some notion of what the process is going to do to him, and some notion of what lie means to do,' if lie can, to the process. That is to say, he must not- only have an idea how the process is going, but also an idea how he wants it to go. It seems so natural and necessary for a human hrain to do this that it is hard to suppose that everyone has not more or less attempted it. But few people in Great Britain at any rate have the habit of franlc expression, and when people do ,not seem to have made out any of these things for themselves, there is a considerable element of sccretiveness and inoxpressiveness to.he allowed for, before we decide that they iiavc not m some sort of fashion done so. btill, after all ' allowances have been made, there remains a vast amount .ien\v-builfc and ready-made ' borrowed stuff, in most people's philosophies of-the war. The systems of authentic opinion 111 this world of thought about, the war are like comparatively rare tlnn veins of living mentality in a vast world of dead repetitions and echoed' suggestions. And th'at being the case, it is quite possible that history after the war, like history before the war, will not bo so much a display human will and purpose as a resultant of human vacillations, obstructions and inadvertencies. We shall still be in a drama; of blind forces following the line of least resistance. One of the people who is often spoken of as if he were doing .an enormous amount of concentrated thinking is "the" man in the trenches." We are told— ■ by gentlemen writing for the most part at home—of the most extraordinary things that are going on in those devoted "brains, how they are getting now views about tho duties,of labour, religion. morality, monarchy, and any other notions that the gentleman at home happens to fancy and wishes to push. iNow that is not at all the impression of the khaki mentality I havo reluctantly accepted as. correct-. For' the most part the man in khaki is up against a round of tedious immediate duties that forbid consecutive thought; lie is usually rather crowded and not very comfortable. He is bored. The real horror of modern war when all is said and 1 dono is the boredom. To get killed or woiuided may be unpleasant, but it is at any rate interesting; the real tragedy is in the desolated fields, tho desolated houses, tho desolated hours and days, the bored and desolated minds that hand behind the melee and just outside the melee, 'i'lio peculiar lliticss of the German crime is tho way the German war cant and its consequences have, seized upon and paralysed the mental movement of Western Europe. Before 1914 war was theoretically unpopular in every European country ; we thought of it as something tragic and dreadful. Now everyone knows by experience that it is something utterly dirty and detestable. We thought it was tile Nemean lion, and we' have found it is the Augean stable. But being bored by war and hating waiis quite unproductive unless you are ( thinking about its nature and causes so thoroughly that you will presently be able to take hold of .it and control it and end it. It is 110 good for everyone to say unanimously, "We will havo no more war" unless you have thought out how to avoid it, and mean to bring that end about. It is as if everyone said: "We will have 110 more catarrh," or "110 more flies," or "110 more east wind." And my point is that the immense sorrows at home in every European country and the vast boredom of tho combatants are probably not really producing any effective remedial mental action'at all. . and will not do so unless we get much m6re thoroughly to work upon the thinking-out process. In such talks as I _cnuld get with men close up to the. front I found, beyond this great boredom and attempts at distraction, onlv very specialised talk about changes in the future. Men were keen upon questions of Annv promotion, of the future of conscription, of the future of tho temporary officer, upon the education of boys in relation to Army needs, lint, the war itself was boa'rimi them all uyon its way. as unquestioned and uncontrolled ns if it woro tho planet 011 which thoy lived.