He had an answer for everything: often a wonderfully exasperating answer, formed in the conviction that it was as much his duty to face criticism as it was the soldiers’ to face bullets. Full of the appalling slaughter at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing, he mocked the outcry that arose in the spring of 1915 over the sinking of a popular Atlantic liner, the Lusitania. Here at last was something small enough – the killing of saloon passengers – for the public imagination to grasp. He heartily welcomed it, and the execution of Nurse Edith Cavell, for the effect it would produce on the United States, the moral centre of the neutral world. ‘I even found a grim satisfaction,’ he afterwards wrote, ‘very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants.’ During the first Zeppelin raids he advocated that movable metal arches should immediately be placed in school playgrounds so that children might know where to run when the Zeppelins came. But before this suggestion was implemented, people accused him of defeatism, goading him into recommending a judicious bombardment of London. ‘In fact if we had any sense we would bombard London ourselves, and demolish the Houses of Parliament and all the new government offices for aesthetic reasons just as we should demolish the slums for sanitary reasons.’
The most difficult long-term problem for Shaw was recruitment. There could be no denying that the Government’s painting of the war as a simple scene of knight errantry, with England as Lancelot-Galahad, Germany as the wicked giant and Belgium as the beautiful maiden, had been wonderfully popular. But after three months of war fever, recruitment had begun to fall off, and with it, Shaw claimed, the justification for keeping the nation in its fool’s paradise disappeared. ‘The recruiting got on its feet again,’ he wrote, once the War Office ‘withdrew the silliest of its placards, and faced the necessity for higher pay and better treatment of recruits’.
Shaw wanted to bring the same people up to the same guns equipped with a far better arsenal of attitudes, motives, opinions; to place them in the same trenches looking forward without detestation to the soldiers opposite, and looking back with scepticism at the politicians who had arranged this grotesque firing line. ‘The newspapers are so stupid that, simply because he’s Mr Shaw, they won’t report him – instead of running him as our leading patriot,’ wrote Lytton Strachey.
The newspapers did send their reporters to his speeches, but only to see him hissed and mobbed. The German press had already described him as being persecuted in London, fearful of assassination, and living under house arrest with sentries at his doors. The failure of his speeches to provoke mobbing – ‘reporters who were sent to see me torn limb from limb withdrew copyless’ – was partly due to the nature of his audiences which mingled ‘smart persons of the soulful type – Lady Diana [Manners] for example’ with clusters of prominent Fabians. They were, in short, very like theatre audiences, full of young people in bright clothes, for whom he gave excellent performances without benefit of reviews.
Most people did not know by now whether he was a pacifist or a conscriptionist – in fact he was neither. ‘It seems to me that all Socialists should advocate compulsory national service, both civil and military,’ he wrote. ‘But compulsory soldiering is another matter.’ It was agonizing to see the short, red-faced, Cecil Chesterton got up in khaki and looking as if he could camouflage himself ‘as a beetroot on a sack of potatoes by simply standing stock still’. Shaw himself would have cut a far sharper figure in uniform. In the first days of the war he had witnessed a company of volunteers come swinging along Gower Street and ‘to my utter scandal I was seized with a boyish impulse to join them’.
As a ‘superannuated person’ he felt the inappropriateness of urging young people to take up arms. He criticized the Derby Scheme, which was bullying and cajoling men into voluntary service, for its ‘appalling bad stage management’ as well as the perverted economic and emotional basis on which it was founded. ‘If the decision is to be Conscription, let it be faced, not as a temporary expedient,’ he wrote in the Daily News, ‘but as an advance in social organization.’ But the second Conscription Act, which became effective on 25 May 1916, a week before the Battle of Jutland, was an emergency measure, with little considered legal character. Every military authority now became a press gang. The superstition that all Britons were free was kept up by a clause in the Act which reserved the liberty of people to refuse service on conscientious grounds, but neither the qualifications nor the treatment of this category of exempt person were defined. The result was that conscientious objectors were in practice rancorously persecuted.
All over the country there were cases of ill usage and vindictive sentences: and though Shaw ‘should not have objected myself if I had been liable to serve’, he was greatly exercised by this widespread maltreatment. He intervened in the case of an employee in the Education Department of the London County Council who was sent for miscellaneous duties to a military barracks, because the decision meant that ‘public education is of no service to the country’. How could the Government reasonably claim that ‘to take an educated man of special literary talent and aptitude from the work of national education, and to set him to sweep barracks, dig latrines, or wait at table on an officers’ mess is to effect a stroke of national economy which will materially help to win the war’? He objected to the composer Rutland Boughton’s work being described as ‘not of the least national importance’. Despite all the musical entertainments for the troops it was as if military tribunals believed that fine art was frivolous and out of place in wartime, ‘and that all a man needs to be a complete Englishman is football in peace, fighting in war, and a formula about his duty to King and Country to save himself the trouble of thinking’. He appeared as a character witness at a court martial on behalf of Clarence Norman, a journalist whom he had employed to make verbatim reports of his speeches in shorthand and who was imprisoned for two and a half years for ignoring his call-up papers. And he used the cases of two other conscientious objectors of recognized integrity, Stephen Hobhouse and Clifford Allen, to demonstrate the common misuse of the Government’s legislation by military tribunals. ‘If Mr Hobhouse is imprisoned for a single hour,’ he wrote in Massingham’s Nation, ‘the law is broken and the good faith of the Government discredited.’
Shaw studied the evidence, took trouble to be legally exact, and chose each case with care. Repeated sentences for the same offence could with hard labour become sentences of death. A new crime had been created. ‘It is worth noticing that Quakers have been persecuted with the utmost ferocity,’ Shaw wrote, ‘whilst pugnacious objectors who simply objected to this particular war and openly declared that they would fight in a class war have been treated with comparative indulgence.’
He also gave sympathetic advice to one or two deserters, destroying the letters for their protection and writing confidentially so as not to undermine his own position as ‘an old advocate of compulsory service’. According to Rebecca West, he was like Swift rather than Shelley, and whatever he said, the effect of his words was to question rather than inspire the prosecution of the war. Watching him as he walked on to the platform and began speaking, she perceived that his virtue was getting thin with dilution. ‘The passing of middle age has wiped the aggressive strangeness from his face, by mitigating with silver the redness of his hair and the pirate twist of his eyebrows, and has revealed a predominant quality of noble and unhysteric sensitiveness,’ she wrote. ‘In public life there is not time for such sensitiveness... when he began to speak, and the Irish accent shivered over his musical voice like the wind over a lake, one perceived another reason why he should not enter into politics.’
But Shaw always worked against the grain of his natural sensitivity. ‘I go back to politics, religion & philosophy,’ he had written to Stella Campbell. ‘They give me frightful headaches, but satisfy my soul.’ He felt that he knew now ‘why Shakespeare and Swift were so bitter’ after the wars against
Philip II and Louis XIV. To overcome early bitterness he had removed himself from the intimate thing and forced his way into politics, but now felt uncertain of his place in public life: ‘I no longer have any confidence in my notions of what this generation needs to have said to it,’ he told Wells.
It seemed impossible to go on writing plays. In these days of clashing events, art could ‘only be carried by the deaf,’ Rebecca West acknowledged. ‘And the artist who, like Mr Shaw, abandons it, at least shows that he has good hearing and is listening to the world.’
But he wanted a world that listened to him. The Fabian Research Department had commissioned Leonard Woolf to investigate the causes of the war. Against a background of Bloomsburgian scepticism, Woolf records, ‘I did an immense amount of work on this.’ His conclusions were published in 1916 as a book, International Government, to which Shaw supplied an American Preface.
Leonard Woolf argued that the first step towards the prevention of war must be the creation, as part of international government, of a supranational authority. His examination of the minimum requirements for such a body and his description of its probable structure comprised the first detailed study for the League of Nations. Shaw wanted to amplify this project. ‘I find myself installed as a great prophet,’ he pointed out. But he was a prophet without disciples, disestablished, needing affirmations. Shaw’s League of Nations floats with its dreaming spires like an academy for supermen and superwomen, a sublime factory where Undershaft’s weapons are manufactured by a professor of Greek and his wife, charged with defending democracy from those who, seeking mob popularity, sacrifice the eternal to the temporal. It is a Palace of Revolution, shimmering across the wilderness where Shaw preached, in which international matters are taken from those whose outlook is formed by official habits and given over to the welfare of us all. Finally, this visionary League stands as a temple for Shaw’s paradoxes, his Abbey of Theleme, where all is magnificently opposed to the ordinary world.
4
Touring the Trenches
To a man who has produced a modern comedy, a campaign is child’s play.
‘Joy Riding at the Front’, Daily Chronicle (7 March 1917)
The ordinary world, over which crawled tanks, U-Boats and Zeppelins, appeared scarcely less fantastical than Shaw’s phalanstère. At the end of 1916 Lloyd George’s new War Cabinet rejected Germany’s peace proposals: but public opinion was veering more sympathetically towards ‘Dearest G.B.S. (who is splendid about the war)’ as Ellen Terry called him.
He had always found some supporters. Keir Hardie had ‘felt the thrill’ of his Common Sense and there had been the suggestion that a popular edition should be prepared by Arnold Bennett. When purged of the satirical absurdities readers accepted so literally, Bennett believed that Shaw’s writing, which contained ‘the most magnificent, brilliant, and convincing common sense that could possibly be uttered’, would inaugurate a period of open discussion. Nothing came of this plan, though Shaw himself endorsed it. ‘You, and I and Wells and Webb should be working together,’ he urged Bennett late in 1916. ‘...However, it can’t be helped – we must do the best we can ploughing our lonely back gardens.’ Shaw had looked for a coalition of the intelligentsia, believing it was the duty of representatives of art and literature in all countries to keep moral considerations above the nationalistic level of the war. But though these writers gained no authority beyond what each could separately extort by the persuasiveness of his or her pen, at least the atmosphere had eased. Both J. C. Squire and W. J. Locke had come up and shaken Shaw’s hand. Wells, too, having gone through ‘disillusionment about the beneficence of our war-making’, had reached conclusions similar to Shaw’s.
Adelphi Terrace had been damaged in an air raid; at Ayot St Lawrence an anti-aircraft station, with searchlights and soldiers’ sheds, was put up. Shaw continued, as in peacetime, to divide his weeks between the two places. The villagers suspected him of being a spy. After all, he had been there less than a dozen years. They knew his car and motor-bicycle well enough; they knew his dog Kim, ‘the village terror’: but they did not know what to make of his remarks about this ‘most maddening war’. Their suspicions began to blow away after the famous Hertfordshire Blizzard of 1915. ‘He came out and worked hard with the other menfolk for days on end, sawing up trees which had been torn up by their roots and lay blocking the road,’ one of them remembered.
It was the Zeppelin raids above all else that gave everyone a subject of conversation. One Zeppelin, after voyaging majestically over the Shaws’ house on its way to London, was shot down near Ayot on 1 October 1916. Next morning Shaw rode off through the rain to see the wreckage – two lumps of twisted metal framework in a watery field splashed over all day by happy crowds. ‘The police were in great feather,’ he reported, ‘as there is a strict cordon, which means you cant get in without paying.’ But admission was cheap and well worth the price. ‘I didnt half cheer, I tell you,’ Shaw heard one girl remark. Nineteen bodies lay in a barn at the edge of the field. ‘May I go in?’ asked one woman. ‘I would like to see a dead German.’
He had been enchanted by the sky-spectacle against the stars, with its magnificent orchestration. Having seen the Zeppelin fall like a burning newspaper, ‘with its human contents roasting for some minutes (it was frightfully slow)’, he had gone back to bed and was asleep in ten minutes. Reflecting on this, he confided to the Webbs: ‘One is so pleased at having seen the show that the destruction of a dozen people or so in hideous terror and torment does not count... Pretty lot of animals we are!’
Charlotte wrapped herself round with remoter preoccupations. She felt proud of her husband’s fame, but shared few of his interests; was wreathed in smiles, but seemed out of it all. To Virginia Woolf she appeared like a ‘fat white Persian cat’, which had rolled itself up on a cushion of Indian mysticism and gone to sleep. ‘When she got me alone she tried to convert me,’ Virginia wrote after a weekend together in the summer of 1916, ‘and lent me little books about the Seutras, which she had to hide from Mrs Webb.’ Unluckily for Charlotte, Beatrice Webb spied these little books beside her bed and nosed out their contents. ‘The thesis is that by continuous meditation, or self-hypnotism, you will rise above the self-conscious self and realize the “God Power” within you,’ Beatrice noted sceptically. Charlotte confided to Virginia Woolf that Beatrice, though a wonderful person, ‘had no idea of religion’. She reacted with irritation to Charlotte’s easy answers and (according to Virginia) ‘jeered at poor old Mrs Shaw’. But it was the spectacle of rich old Mrs Shaw that aggravated Beatrice – this woman whose decent restlessness had been stilled by a religious placidity removing her from ‘all efforts to make things better for those who are suffering from their heredity or environment’. Beatrice had felt sympathetic to Charlotte when she was suffering over her husband’s intrigue with Mrs Pat: what antagonized her now was Charlotte’s lack of suffering. It was exasperating to see her beaming with overflowing contentedness in the middle of this appalling war: she appeared so little inconvenienced by it all.
At the beginning of 1917 Shaw began a new diary. ‘I am going to try to keep it for a year,’ he noted, ‘as a sample slice of my life.’ Altogether he kept it for ten days, and the sample slice it cut from his Ayot routine shows why he did not prolong it. There was no time. Every morning he was hectically occupied pouring out his ‘intolerable opinions’ to readers of the Woman’s Dreadnought, Somerset County Gazette, and much of the American press. In the afternoons he and Charlotte would go into the garden where she sawed logs and he split them with a beetle and wedges. Sometimes he hurried through the village with his West Highland terrier; when he needed to go further he would set off for a spin and a spill on his motor-bike, and come rushing back to tighten nuts on the front wheel. At half-past four he allowed himself a cup of chocolate, while Charlotte drank tea. Then he would press on with his writing, often dealing with letters that Ann Elder had sent down from London. The second interval of the day – called din
ner – began at half-past seven: then he would read and end the evening singing and playing the piano – Strauss’s Elektra and Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Gounod’s songs, arias from Mozart and Wagner operas, and a good deal of miscellaneous Berlioz, Elgar and Schumann. Finally he would go up to Charlotte’s room to say good-night, and retire to his own bed with the Economic Journal.
Early that month he received an invitation from Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British army, to visit the Front. ‘Charlotte said I must go, as I ought to see this terrible thing for myself,’ he noted. ‘I grumbled that I should see nothing except a conventional round on which all the journalists are sent; but... my interest increased as the day went on.’ By the following week he had come to feel that he ‘was not free to refuse’.
In the blunted landscape, with its splintered trees, its signposts without villages, Shaw found some devastating material. Privately he confided to Lady Gregory that his week at the Front had been ‘a most demoralizing experience’. Publicly in the Daily Chronicle he reported: ‘I enjoyed myself enormously and continuously.’ Both statements contained truth, and were a shorthand for his translation of a demoralizing early life into a career of sustained and serious comedy. He set out to console those who had husbands, brothers, sons, friends in the trenches, or who were themselves in training for that ordeal, with a display of black entertainment. He confidently assured everyone that there was no inevitability at the Front of being killed. On the contrary, death was very uncertain: the gas was crazily blown in the wrong direction, the high explosives were so appallingly imprecise that the ‘Somme battlefield was very much safer than the Thames Embankment with its race of motors and trams’. The devastation was terrific yet many of the old towns had been badly in need of demolition. The cathedral at Arras looked finer as a ruin than when he had last seen it intact; the Little Square, too, had been most ‘handsomely knocked about’ and many old buildings, such as the Cloth Hall at Ypres, would gain a more beautiful existence in the memory than they had ever achieved in actuality.
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