So matters stood in India in the pre-war years. When Turkey was attacked by Italy in 1911 there was much sympathy in India for Turkey, since Turkey was looked upon as an Asiatic and Oriental power and, as such, had the goodwill of all Indians. Indian Muslims were especially affected, because they looked upon the Sultan of Turkey as the Caliph, or Kalifa, or head of Islam. In those days there had also been some talk, fathered by Sultan Abdul Hamid of Turkey, of Pan-Islamism. The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 agitated Indian Muslims even more, and as a gesture of friendship and goodwill a medical mission, called the Red Crescent Mission, went from India to give assistance to the Turkish wounded.
Soon after, the World War began, and Turkey became involved in it as an enemy of England. But that takes us to the war period, and I must stop here.
148
War 1914–18
March 31, 1933
What shall I write to you about this war, the World War, the Great War, as it is called, which for over four years devastated Europe and some parts of Asia and Africa, and wiped away millions of young men in their prime? War is not a pleasant subject to contemplate. It is an ugly thing, but often it is praised and painted in bright colours; and it is said that, like the fire which purifies precious metals, war purifies and strengthens indolent nations, grown soft and corrupt by too much ease and love of living. Instances of high courage and moving sacrifice are pointed out to us, as if war were the parent of these virtues.
I have tried to examine with you some of the causes of this war: how the greed of capitalistic industrial countries, the rivalries of imperialist Powers, clashed, and made conflict inevitable. How the leaders of industry in each of these countries wanted more and more opportunities and areas to exploit; how financiers wanted to make more money; how the makers of armaments wanted bigger profits. So these people plunged into the war, and, at their bidding, and that of elderly politicians representing them and their class, the youth of the nations rushed at each other’s throats. The vast majority of these young men, and the common people of all the countries concerned, knew nothing of these causes which had led to the war. They were really not concerned, and whether success came or failure, they stood to lose by it. It was a rich man’s game played with the lives of the people, and mostly of the young. But there could be no war unless the common people were prepared to fight. In all the Continental countries, as I have told you, there was conscription or compulsory service; in England it came later in the war. But even compulsion cannot force all the people in such a matter if they are really unwilling as a whole.
So elaborate efforts were made to whip up the enthusiasm and the love of country of the people in all the warring nations. Each party called the other the “aggressor”, and pretended to fight in self-defence only. Germany said that she was surrounded by a ring of enemies who were trying to strangle her. She accused Russia and France of taking the initiative in invading her. England based her action on a righteous defence of little Belgium, whose neutrality had been grossly violated by Germany. All the countries involved took up a self-righteous attitude and laid all the blame on the enemy. Each people was made to believe that their freedom was in danger and they must fight to defend it. The newspapers especially took a great part in creating this war atmosphere everywhere, which meant in effect bitter hatred of the people of the enemy countries.
So strong was this wave of hysteria that it swept everything before it. It was easy enough to rouse mass passions in the crowd; but even people of intellect and intelligence, men and women who were supposed to have a calm and equable temperament, thinkers, writers, professors, scientists—all of them, in all the countries involved, lost their balance and became filled with blood-lust and hatred of the enemy peoples. The clergymen, the men of religion, who are supposed to be men of peace, were as bloodthirsty, or even more so, than the others. Even pacifists and socialists lost their heads and forgot their principles. All—but not quite all. A tiny minority of people in each country refused to become hysterical, and would not allow themselves to be smitten by this war fever. They were jeered at and called cowards, and many were even sent to prison for refusal to do war service. Some of these were socialists, some were religious people, like the Quakers, who have conscientious objections to war. It has been truly said that when war breaks out nowadays the people involved go mad.
As soon as the war began, the governments of the various countries made it the excuse for suppressing truth and spreading all manner of lies. The personal liberties of the people were also suppressed. The other side was, of course, completely shut out. So that the people only got to know one side of the story, and that a greatly distorted and often completely false account. It was not difficult to fool the people in this way.
Even in peace-time narrow nationalist propaganda and the distortions of newspapers had fooled the people and prepared the ground for war. War itself had been glorified. In Germany, or rather in Prussia, this glorification of war became the definite philosophy of the rulers, from the Kaiser downwards. Learned books were written to justify it and to prove that war was a “biological necessity”—that is, it was necessary to human life and progress. The Kaiser received a lot of publicity because he was always posing rather crudely in the limelight. But similar ideas prevailed in military and other upper-class circles in England and other countries. Ruskin is one of the great writers of the nineteenth century in England. He is a favourite author of Gandhiji’s, and probably you have read some of his books. This man of undoubted nobility of mind has written in one of his books:
“I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of words, and strength of thought, in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war, and expired in peace.”
To show what a frank imperialist Ruskin was, I shall give you another quotation from him:
That is what she (England) must do or perish: she must found colonies . . . seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their first . . . aim is to advance the power of England by land or sea.
And one other quotation. This is from the book of an English officer who became a major-general in the British army. He points out that victory in war is almost impossible “except by deliberate falsehood, by acting a falsehood, or by prevarication”. According to him, any citizen who “refuses to adopt these measures . . . deliberately acts the part of a traitor to his comrades and subordinates” and “can only be termed a most despicable coward”. “Morality; immorality—what are such things to great nations when their fate is at stake?” A nation “must strike and strike again until its adversary receives its death-blow”. I wonder what Ruskin would have said to all this! Do not imagine, of course, that this is a fair specimen of the English mind, or that the Kaiser’s bombastic utterances represented the average German. But the misfortune is that people who think are so often in authority, and in war-time, almost invariably, they come to the front.
Usually such frank avowals are not made publicly, and war is made to put on a sanctimonious garb. So, while a tremendous massacre was going on over hundreds of miles of battle-front in Europe and elsewhere, fine high-sounding phrases were manufactured at home to justify the killing and delude the people. It was a war for freedom and honour; the “war to end war”; to make democracy safe; for self-determination, and the freedom of small nations, and so on. Meanwhile many of the financiers and industrialists and makers of war material, who sat at home, and patriotically used these fine phrases to induce the young to jump into the furnace of war, made vast profits and became millionaires.
Europe 1918
As the war went on from month to month and year to year, more and more countries were dragged into it. Both sides tried to win over neutrals by offering bribes secretly; any such public offer would have put an end to the high ideals and the fine phrases which were shouted from the house-tops. The power of England and France
to bribe was greater than that of Germany, and so most of the neutrals who joined the war came in on the Anglo-French-Russian side. Italy, the old ally of Germany, was won over by these Allies on their making a secret treaty promising her territory in Asia Minor and elsewhere. Another secret treaty promised Russia Constantinople. It was a pleasant task to divide up the world among themselves. These secret treaties were wholly opposed to the public statements of the statesmen of the Allies. Probably no one would have known of these treaties if the Russian Bolsheviks, when they seized power, had not published them.
Ultimately there were a dozen or more countries on the side of the Allies (I shall call the Anglo-French side the Allies for short). These were Britain and her empire, France, Russia, Italy, the United States of America, Belgium, Serbia, Japan, China, Rumania, Greece and Portugal. (There may be one or two more which I do not remember.) On the German side were Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria. The United States came into the war in the third year. Even leaving them out of consideration for the time, it is obvious that the resources of the Allies were far greater than those of the German side. They had more men, far more money, more factories to make arms and munitions, and, above all, they had command of the seas, which made it easy for them to draw upon the resources of the neutral world. Thus the Allies could get war material or food or borrow money from America because of this sea power. Germany and her allies were surrounded and hemmed in by their enemies; and Germany’s allies were weak countries which did not help much. They were often a drain on Germany and had to be propped up by her. So, practically, it was Germany alone against the greater part of the world in arms. It seems, from every point of view, a most unequal contest. And yet Germany held the world at bay for four years and repeatedly came near to victory. Year after year victory seemed to hang in the balance. It was an amazing effort for one nation, and it was only possible because of the magnificent military machine that Germany had built up. To the end, when Germany and her allies had been finally vanquished, the German army was still intact and much of it was on foreign territory.
On the side of the Allies the brunt of the fighting fell on the French army, and it was the French who, at tremendous cost of young lives, withstood the German military machine. England’s great contribution was the navy and sea power, and also diplomacy and propaganda. Germany, proud of her army, was singularly crude in her diplomacy with neutral countries and in her methods of propaganda. There is no doubt that of all countries during the war, England took the palm in the efficiency and thoroughness of her propaganda of falsehood and distorted fact. Russia and Italy and the other allied countries played a comparatively minor, and not a distinguished, role in the fighting. And yet the Russian losses were perhaps the greatest of all countries. The United States coming in towards the end, played the final decisive role in crushing Germany.
In the early months of the war there was great tension between England and America, and even war between them was mentioned. The friction was due to England’s interference with American shipping on the seas, which she suspected of carrying goods to Germany. But then the British propaganda machine got busy and made a special effort to win over America. The first thing taken in hand was atrocity propaganda, and horrible stories of what the German army had done in Belgium were circulated. “Frightfulness” of the German Hun or Boche this was called. A few of these stories had some basis in fact, such as the destruction of the university and library of Louvain, but most of them were pure inventions. There was one amazing story of a corpse factory which the Germans were said to run! And yet, such was the hatred of the enemy peoples for each other that they would believe anything.
You can form some idea of the vast scale on which British propaganda was carried on when I tell you that the British War Mission to America consisted of 500 officials and 10,000 assistants! This was official; besides this a tremendous amount of unofficial work was done. All methods, fair and foul, were adopted for this propaganda work. In Stockholm in Sweden the British officially started a kind of English music-hall, giving a variety entertainment, to win the goodwill of the Swedes!
This propaganda, as well as the German submarine activities, about which I shall tell you something later, went a long way in bringing America to the side of the Allies. But ultimately the decisive factor was money.
War is an expensive business, a terribly expensive business. It swallows up mountains of valuable material, and only has devastation to show for it. It stops most wealth-producing activities and concentrates people’s energy on destruction. Where was all this money to come from? To begin with, on the side of the Allies, only England and France could be considered well off. They paid not only their own share of the war expense, but also paid for their allies by lending money and material to them. After some time Paris gave way; its financial resources were exhausted. London then financed the Allied side of the war alone. By the end of the second year of the war London also gave way. So towards the end of 1916 both French and English credit was at an end. Then an English mission consisting of prominent statesmen went to America to beg for financial help. America agreed to lend money, and thenceforward it was American money that carried on the war on the side of the Allies. The debt of the Allies to America grew by leaps and bounds to amazing figures, and, as it grew, the big banks and the financiers in America, who had lent the money, became more and more interested in an Allied victory. If the Allies were defeated by Germany, what would happen to the vast sums that America had lent to them? The American banker’s pocket was touched, and he reacted accordingly. Sentiment in favour of America joining the Allies in the war was developed, and ultimately America did so.
We hear a great deal now about the American debt question, and the newspapers are full of it. This debt, which hangs like a millstone round the necks of England and France, and which they cannot pay, was piled up in the days of the war. If that money had not been forthcoming at the time, their credit would have collapsed completely, and perhaps America would not have joined them.
149
The Course of the War
April 1, 1933
When the war began, early in August 1914, all the world looked at Belgium and the northern frontier of France. The vast German armies were marching on and on, sweeping away all the obstructions that came in their path. For a short while they were stopped by little Belgium and, angered at this, they tried to frighten the Belgians by acts of terrorism, which formed the basis of the atrocity stories of the Allies. They went on towards Paris, and the French army seemed to roll up in front of them and the small British army was swept aside. Within a month of the outbreak of the war Paris seemed to be doomed, and the French Government actually prepared to take its offices and valuables south to Bordeaux. Some Germans thought that they had practically won the war. Matters stood thus on the western front (that is the French front) of the war at the end of August.
Meanwhile Russian troops were invading East Prussia, and an attempt was made somehow to distract German attention from the western front. In France and England great hopes were placed in the Russian “steam-roller”, as it was called, rolling on to Berlin. But the Russian soldiers were badly armed and their officers were thoroughly incompetent, and behind them was the Tsar’s corrupt government. Suddenly the Germans turned on them, and trapped a huge Russian army in the lakes and marshes of East Prussia, and destroyed it utterly. The Battle of Tannenburg is the name given to this tremendous German victory, and one of the chief generals associated with it was von Hindenburg, who became the President of the German Republic later.
It was a great victory, and yet indirectly it cost the German armies a great deal. In order to achieve it, and frightened a little by the Russian advance in the east, they had transferred some of their armies from the French side to the Russian. This had relieved the pressure on the western front somewhat, and the French army made a mighty effort to hurl back the invading Germans. At the Battle of the Marne, early in September 1914, they succeeded in pushing back the G
ermans about fifty miles. Paris was saved, and the French and the English had some breathing time.
Glimpses of World History Page 93