When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  This allows Lloyd George to hit his main motif, which is that the pike is about to consume the minnow. Wales, in effect, merges in the speech with Belgium, Serbia and the fraternity of small nations. Lloyd George’s description of Belgium as ‘peaceable, industrious, thrifty, hard-working, giving offence to no one’ is a description of the virtues the Welsh audience would itself have claimed. Defence of the little nations was a regular refrain in Lloyd George’s liberalism. The small nations must stand as one against this use of power. Britain gave an undertaking to Belgium to defend its honour, and that is the same, in effect, as our own honour, the honour of our own beloved small nation, Wales.

  That Treaty Bond was this: we called upon the belligerent Powers to respect that treaty. We called upon France; we called upon Germany … It is now the interest of Prussia to break the treaty, and she has done it. Well, why? She avowed it with cynical contempt for every principle of justice. She says treaties only bind you when it is to your interest to keep them. ‘What is a treaty?’ says the German Chancellor. ‘A scrap of paper.’ Have you any five-pound notes about you? I am not calling for them. Have you any of those neat little Treasury pound notes? If you have, burn them; they are only ‘scraps of paper’. What are they made of ? Rags. What are they worth? The whole credit of the British Empire. ‘Scraps of paper’ … Treaties are the currency of international statesmanship … This doctrine of the scrap of paper … that treaties only bind a nation as long as it is to its interest, goes to the root of public law. It is the straight road to barbarism and the whole machinery of civilisation will break down if this doctrine wins in this war. We are fighting against barbarism. But there is only one way of putting it right. If there are nations that say they will only respect treaties when it is to their interest to do so, we must make it to their interest to do so for the future.

  Two characteristics of Lloyd George mingle here in a brilliantly minted passage. It is funny and it is devastatingly direct. The two attributes create a sort of profundity. Lloyd George was influenced by the music hall and was by no means averse to its tricks. There was laughter in the Queen’s Hall when Lloyd George asked the audience if anyone had any money on them. A joke in a speech needs to pass two tests. It must, of course, be funny but there is another requirement. The joke should be relevant and, like screenwriters concealing a plot point with a gag, should contribute to the argument of the text. Here the joke passes both tests. The laughter is genuine at the thought that the chancellor might like to borrow a fiver, but the passage also propounds an important metaphor.

  Lloyd George came into this speech highly praised for his recent action in stabilising the monetary system. The currency, an international treaty; what are they but scraps of paper? The treaty is, says Lloyd George, a promissory note of a nation’s honour. France and Prussia had both pledged to protect the integrity of Belgium. The Prussians were now breaking the bond. See how much weight Lloyd George places on the memorable phrase ‘this doctrine of the scrap of paper’.

  He makes a profound point about the nature of the rule of law, which is that it can only function if its subjects comply. Enforcement of the law is costly and difficult and demands sacrifice. Germany is violating this defining norm of compliance, and that justifies Lloyd George’s stringent verdict: this is barbarism and it has to be countered. Look how far he has travelled in this section. From a joke about money, to the tokens of commerce, to the sacred obligation of honouring a treaty, the breach of which is barbarism which has to be turned back, even if the cost is war. By the conclusion, no one is left laughing.

  Belgium has been treated brutally, how brutally we shall not yet know. We know already too much. What has she done? Did she send an ultimatum to Germany? Did she challenge Germany? Was she preparing to make war on Germany? Had she ever inflicted any wrongs upon Germany which the Kaiser was bound to redress? She was one of the most unoffending little countries in Europe. She was peaceable, industrious, thrifty, hard-working, giving offence to no one … What is their crime? Their crime was that they trusted to the word of a Prussian King. I don’t know what the Kaiser hopes to achieve by this war. I have a shrewd idea of what he will get, but one thing is made certain, that no nation in future will ever commit that crime again. I am not going to enter into these tales. Many of them are untrue; war is a grim, ghastly business at best, and I am not going to say that all that has been said in the way of tales of outrage is true. I will go beyond that, and say that if you turn two millions of men forced, conscripted, and compelled and driven into the field, you will certainly get among them a certain number of men who will do things that the nation itself will be ashamed of. I am not depending on them. It is enough for me to have the story which the Germans themselves avow, admit, defend, proclaim. The burning and massacring, the shooting down of harmless people – why? Because, according to the Germans, they fired on German soldiers. What business had German soldiers there at all? Belgium was acting in pursuance of a most sacred right, the right to defend your own home.

  In a war speech, home is not the only front. Lloyd George is determined to convey resolution to his adversary. There is no concession, no implicit negotiation here. Lloyd George’s task of persuasion is the one that will confront Churchill, his friend and rival in rhetorical fireworks, twenty-six years later. For the moment, Lloyd George is the master. Contemporary accounts record the spell in which he held his audience bound. His voice was rich and resonant where Churchill’s was reedy. The notion that Churchill had a stutter is a myth, but he certainly had a lisp, which meant that he struggled with sibilant sounds. Churchill, though, had one big advantage: his wartime speeches enjoy world renown, while Lloyd George’s are largely lost to posterity. No one can outdo Churchill as a war speaker. Lloyd George at his best stands second-best, but we have no recordings of what he said. As Kenneth Morgan has put it: ‘Churchill spoke to history; Lloyd George spoke only to his listeners.’ The speech was covered in newspapers and distributed as a pamphlet. Far more people would have read than heard it, but the fact remains that Churchill had the wireless and Lloyd George didn’t.

  There is one more parallel between the two, which concerns the question of truth. Lloyd George judiciously refuses to swallow every story about the depravity of German soldiers. By acknowledging the likelihood of propaganda, he positions himself on higher moral ground. Yet the perilous circumstances of wartime mean there is something in the accusation that rhetoric skirts close to untruth. As Churchill will do in the House of Commons in 1940, Lloyd George is not giving a merely factual account of the status of the war effort. That would be too pessimistic for his purpose, which is to inspire confidence in ultimate victory. It is not untrue; but nor is it altogether true.

  Russia has a special regard for Serbia. She has a special interest in Serbia. Russians have shed their blood for Serbian independence many a time. Serbia is a member of her family, and she cannot see Serbia maltreated. Austria knew that. Germany knew that, and Germany turned round to Russia and said: ‘Here, I insist that you shall stand by with your arms folded whilst Austria is strangling to death your little brother. So lay your hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle Empire limb from limb.’ And he is doing it! That is the story of the little nations. The world owes much to little nations – and to little men. This theory of bigness – you must have a big empire and a big nation, and a big man – well, long legs have their advantage in a retreat. Frederick the Great chose his warriors for their height, and that tradition has become a policy in Germany. Germany applies that ideal to nations; she will only allow six-feet-two nations to stand in the ranks. But all the world owes much to the little five feet high nations. The greatest art of the world was the work of little nations. The most enduring literature of the world came from little nations. The greatest literature of England came from her when she was a nation of the size of Belgium fighting a great Empire. The heroic deeds that thrill humanity through generations were the deeds of little nations fighting for their freedom!r />
  Transcripts record the huge number of occasions on which this speech was interrupted by hisses, laughter, cheers, applause and shouts of hear, hear. Audiences then were more demonstrative than they would be now, and Lloyd George turns parts of the address into call and response. Standing alone to speak can be a lonely event; it is comforting to hear periodic appreciation. Applause also creates an atmosphere. The end of this section is a classic ‘clap line’, signalled even in Lloyd George’s script with an exclamation mark. Poor speakers try to rouse the audience with only a rising intonation and an increased volume at the end of a line, but the applause will only ever be resounding when the vocal trickery is deployed for an important, completed thought.

  Lloyd George’s mastery of technique is displayed by the way he conjures grave days in demotic vocabulary and strikingly familiar imagery. A vast body of research attests to the capacity of humans to recall mind-pictures much quicker than abstract arguments. A congruent image allows us to recall the argument for which it stands. Russia as a brother standing, with his arms folded, while his brother was attacked, will allow the audience to recall why passive quiescence is not possible. The diminutive Lloyd George – himself notoriously less than five feet tall – then goes into a comic riff that verges on the absurd, describing big countries as the ‘six foot two’ nations and the smaller nations as ‘the five feet high’ nations. It leads him to a paean to the great literary achievements of Britain and a convenient omission of the fact that, though Britain may have been a small nation in the days of Shakespeare, she did go on, within living memory of most people in the audience, to became the world’s biggest empire.

  Have you read the Kaiser’s speeches? If you have not a copy, I advise you to buy it; they will soon be out of print, and you won’t have any more of the same sort again. They are full of the clatter and bluster of German militarists – the mailed fist, the shining armour. Poor old mailed fist – its knuckles are getting a little bruised. Poor shining armour – the shine is being knocked out of it. But there is the same swagger and boastfulness running through the whole of the speeches … I do not believe he meant all these speeches. It was simply the martial straddle which he had acquired; but there were men around him who meant every word of it … You know the type of motorist, the terror of the roads, with a 60-h.p. car. He thinks the roads are made for him, and anybody who impedes the action of his car by a single mile is knocked down. The Prussian junker is the road-hog of Europe. Small nationalities in his way hurled to the roadside, bleeding and broken; women and children crushed under the wheels of his cruel car. Britain ordered out of his road. All I can say is this: if the old British spirit is alive in British hearts, that bully will be torn from his seat. Were he to win it would be the greatest catastrophe that has befallen democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance and its ascendancy. They think we cannot beat them. It will not be easy. It will be a long job. It will be a terrible war. But in the end we shall march through terror to triumph.

  It is a mark of how seriously Lloyd George is taking the enemy that he opts for mockery. The clatter and the bluster, the mailed fist with bruised knuckles. He can get away with this because the speech is tightly argued, rich with historical examples. However, this is an example of how even a skilled writer can get carried away. Suggesting that the Prussians are the road-hog of Europe sounds quaint to us now. In fact, this reference was the height of modernity at the time. The motor car was a recent introduction to the streets of European cities. Mr Toad had been born in 1908, in The Wind in the Willows. Five years before Lloyd George gave his speech a poster had greeted travellers into London with a lament for the loss of employment and a claim that the newfangled motors would kill ‘your children, dogs and chickens’ and ‘spoil your clothes with dust’. It was posted by the horse-and-cart lobby trying to stop the march of change. Lloyd George is therefore conjuring a fear of modernity, the idea that the Prussians are perverting the advance of science, using knowledge to illicit ends. It is, in other words, rather like Wagner’s music: less bad than it sounds.

  However, with that defence entered, it’s all too stretched. By the time Lloyd George imagines turfing the Prussian bully out of the seat of the car, we feel that it is running away from him, to adopt his own metaphor. It also fails to set the mood for what follows, which is the necessary chorus of any war speech – the regular reminder that we, the forces of good, will prevail. A driver being taken off the road does not prepare us for the greatest catastrophe faced by democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance.

  Those who have fallen have consecrated deaths. They have taken their part in the making of a new Europe, a new world. I can see signs of its coming in the glare of the battlefield. The people will gain more by this struggle in all lands than they comprehend at the present moment. It is true they will be rid of the menace to their freedom. But that is not all. There is something infinitely greater and more enduring which is emerging already out of this great conflict; a new patriotism, richer, nobler, more exalted than the old. I see a new recognition amongst all classes, high and low, shedding themselves of selfishness; a new recognition that the honour of a country does not depend merely on the maintenance of its glory in the stricken field, but in protecting its homes from distress as well. It is a new patriotism, it is bringing a new outlook for all classes. A great flood of luxury and of sloth which had submerged the land is receding, and a new Britain is appearing. We can see for the first time the fundamental things that matter in life and that have been obscured from our vision by the tropical growth of prosperity.

  The speaker at a time of war has two tasks: first to justify the war in the present; second to define the future it will be fought for. This is what Lloyd George does here. Because he is moving to his climax his terms are broad and imprecise. He could have drawn on his own record as a reforming chancellor of the exchequer: the nationalisation of the British welfare state began in 1911 with the work of Lloyd George in legislating for a state pension provision. He could have chosen to specify the land fit for heroes, as it was to become known, by drawing on his own reputation as a social reformer. It would risked bathos, though, to descend from the heights of war against a dangerous madman into the details of welfare benefits. Lloyd George instead trades on the assumed knowledge that his audience will know what he means. We see here the advantage of speaking to an audience whose level of political acquaintance is high.

  The passage is like the historic war speech in miniature. The trajectory of war rhetoric, from Pericles onwards, is all there. War costs lives, and the only way to honour the war dead, to make a just cause from their sacrifice, is to remake the world. Military victory is never alone enough. Democracies turn war into a war for the improvement of democracy, and not just its survival.

  May I tell you, in a simple parable, what I think this war is doing for us? I know a valley in North Wales, between the mountains and the sea – a beautiful valley, snug, comfortable, sheltered by the mountains from all the bitter blasts. It was very enervating, and I remember how the boys were in the habit of climbing the hills above the village to have a glimpse of the great mountains in the distance, and to be stimulated and freshened by the breezes which, came from the hilltops, and by the great spectacle of that great valley. We have been living in a sheltered valley for generations. We have been too comfortable, too indulgent, many, perhaps, too selfish. And the stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks of honour we had forgotten – duty and patriotism clad in glittering white: the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. We shall descend into the valleys again, but as long as the men and women of this generation last they will carry in their hearts the image of these great mountain peaks, whose foundations are unshaken though Europe rock and sway in the convulsions of a great war.

  This euphonious, flowing ending is what gains this speech a place in the anthologies. That and the fact that it is d
escribing a country on the threshold of war. The anthologies of great speeches are records of what was said on great occasions rather than necessarily the finest words ever spoken. Occasionally, the writing climbs to the moment. But even when it doesn’t, war speeches still matter. The poetry, as Wilfred Owen said, is in the pity. The gravity of the event warrants a certain elevation of style.

  Reading Lloyd George’s words a century after they were written sparks the thought that no politician would ever speak like this now. If anyone today referred to the ‘great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven’ they would be mocked for posting an application to be Poet Laureate. Yet at the time, Lloyd George was reproved for being too colloquial. Democratic politicians of recent years have responded to the universal franchise by speaking in less ornate fashion. Literary references are rare now, as the politician fears losing the audience by coming on too lofty. They should be braver; the audience may be able to bear a little more literature. ‘People are always surprising a hunger in themselves to be more serious,’ said Philip Larkin. Politicians should go high-brow. That is what Lloyd George does here, to great effect.

  Note the argument that comes from Cicero – that in a democracy comfort can slide into dangerous complacency – and the invigorating call to arms to make it good. These words are hardy perennials; the conflict between complacency and politics is ubiquitous. Here, conflict is, alas, not a metaphor.

  WOODROW WILSON

  Making the World Safe for Democracy

  Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress

  2 April 1917

  Like his contemporaries Lloyd George and Churchill, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was a student of oratory as well as a practitioner. Wilson’s ascent to high office owed more than that of any president until Ronald Reagan to his capacity for beautiful public speech, good humour and easy charm. His career stands, in retrospect, as an example of both the power of fine rhetoric and its obvious limits.