8 
LAND & WATER 
September 20, 1917 
features in an attitude which so many have found inexplicable. 
Men of the highest cultivation and of. considerable influence 
through their writings, actually believed that a conflict of this 
kind, ended by the salvation of the Central Powers and their 
remaining strong and organised for war, would have for its 
fruit the old conditions of European peace ! 
I have said that this change of opinion was confined to a 
small minority. The armies .were quite ignorant of it, and 
acted as though it did not exist. The great mass of the people 
remained with a sound instinct, as determined as they had been 
throughout the whole previous forty months of the struggle. 
But the seed was sown, and especially among the articulate 
minority among the warring nations it bore fruit and spread. 
I am here at a point where a tracing of historical causes is 
at fault. Why the Governments concerned allowed it to 
spread. The e.xact channels by which its activity was con- 
veyed ; the form of its final success — all these are impossible 
to trace. All we know is that during the winter period 
(months of exceptional strain compared with the warmer 
months and of necessarily diminished activity in warfare) 
what had been the confined error of a few — though these few- 
were powerful — grew into a very considerable body of 
opinion. 
Here again we cannot say, any more than we can say in 
thecaseof any other great movement of humanity, how large 
was the body which, at the end of the movement, had this 
spirit. It is probable that it remained the spirit only of a 
minority, though of a large minority, even w hen it finally 
achieved its purpose. 
The Peace of Berne 
Whatever the causes developing this false opinion may have 
been, it achieved a strength sufficient to impose at first a public 
parley, next a partial truce upon certain portions of the va- 
rious fronts, next a formal interruption of hostilities, and 
lastly that monument of vanity, which every succeeding 
generation has always cited as the type of an empty document 
— the Peace of Berne. 
We all know the terms of that document if only becaus; 
it is the butt of everyone who contrasts reality with fine 
phrases. One may truthfully say that this tremendous epoch 
in the story of our race contains two classical points. First, 
the military point of the Marne, to which I have already 
alluded, the second the philosophical or political point of the 
Peace of Berne. 
If paper declaration could do what alone conviction and 
action can accomplish, the Peace of Berne would have been the 
foundation of a new and completely happy era. If un- 
punished crime could disappear without consequence, and if 
the prime laws of human morals were other than they arc, 
this instrument might have been cited (as nearly all its con- 
temporaries would at first cite it) for the great creative act of 
European history-, inaugurating a new world. 
Its first principle, stated immediately after the preamble, 
was universal disarmament : Its next the universal liberty 
of Government established upon the popular will. Frontiers, 
no matter how complex or geographically impossible, were 
to be established after a most elaborate consultation of 
resident populations, not only by numbers, but by interests 
and classes as well and occupations as well. 
Indeed, we note with curiosity the thoroughness of the 
mtellectual work put into this piece of composition, and we 
half admire the industry which must have gone to the defining 
even of the least among its innumerable details ! 
Nothing was lacking. Tlic freely elected conventions that 
were to settle every problem from the fundamental one of 
proletariat discontent to the no less fundamental religious 
debates which had di\-ided Europe, was weighed and the 
scheme of its settlement announced. 
It failed more thoroughly and. if we may use the word in .so 
awful a connection, more comically than any one of the 
thousand similar, though lesser. exi)eriments which history 
can show, and the reason of this necessary failure should have 
been clear enough one would think, even to the intellectuals 
who were responsible for its actual wording. There was no 
one to carry it out. 
The great war had established precedents of murderous 
offence by sea and land, the authors of which had suffered no 
punishment. It had taught in its conclusion one of those 
practical moral lessons which have a real power over the 
mind of men very different from the presumed power of docu- 
ments-^thc moral lesson that high material organisation, 
preparedness and a determination to achicNe had proved 
in trial by battle the sole guarantees of success in human 
effort, no matter how vile their users. 
It had left Europe convinced by practical example that 
w"^ ^ ^' ""^^'""^ ^ ^'"^'^y prepared material 
A recluse of the time, bitterly opposed to this impotent 
conclusion, wrote to a friend in a letter which has come down 
to us, an inverted religious phrase, whicli sums tip the dis- 
illusion of that moment. " There is no God to judge the 
nations." livery conflicting interest in Europe, from those of 
possessors and non-pcjssessrfrs to those of clerical and anti- 
clerical, every conflicting necessity of race, opinion, philosophy 
and tradition had learned to depend upon that very factor 
which had been eliminated by the empty words written down 
in the reception room of the Swiss Parliament House. 
Arms in some form or another became the only appeal. 
An armament of one form or another became the universal 
test and the universal effort. 
Manifestly in' such a chaos (the inexorable result of a moral 
falsehood), the old civilisation was doomed. 
At first — for a ver^' few months— men lived under the 
illusion that the compact could be kept. Then within two 
years began the rc-armament (first of the smaller States) 
under a disguised form. In the attempt at combined action 
against these, the intimation was difficult to frame, the 
process slow and the wholly .artificial alliance of those whc 
were yet strong was accompanied by a very real subterranean 
intrigue on the part of each for the support of these new small 
forces. 
The crisis passed ; but uneasiness remained. 
The next few years were filled with alarms. At the first 
talk of differences, ports were closed, the elaborate and now 
fully developed system of passports was made even more 
stringent, an army of secret police, spies and counter spies in 
each country w'ere set to work, the press w-as censored, and 
the magistrates instructed to strike terror. Worse than this, 
every such rumour destroyed, especially in nations dependent 
on import, the stability of the markets. 
It was not long before the various designs for covering 
what was really a new armament came to the surface and were 
first tolerated, then denied, then accepted. Before those 
who had left the ranks of the great war were middle aged, 
fully organised competitive armaments upon such a scale as 
the past had never seen, were pulling yet lower the rapidly 
declining economic forces of the European States. Had the 
problem been confined to international rivalry, some sort of 
tragic solution might have come at last in the conquest of all 
by one, and in the survival of the victor as master of the 
European field. But even this was not permitted. Humanity 
had learned its lesson that force was the remedy, and that 
evil sufficiently armed could always survive, that the crusading 
spirit was an emotion that could be worn down, and that any 
appetite sufficiently strong could make a bid for power. 
Much the greatest unresolved strain of the time had been 
the permanent quarrel in the industrial countries between 
the possessors and the dispossessed. Each armed. The 
armament was secret and imperfect, but it was equal upon 
either side. 
Inevitable Ruin 
There had remained from the great war this permanent 
impression upon the mind of the masses in the great towns ; 
that they had been sent into a slaughter which had proved 
useless, that they had sacrificed all for nothing. Someone- 
must be struck for so abominable a disappointment. A 
motive of that kind added to a necessary antagonism between 
wealth and poverty was the motive power of what followed. 
The issue of the' civil wars which were local, various, and 
turgid, we cannot follow upon any general scheme ; so con- 
fused is the chaos and so dark was that very rapid material 
decline of which we have spoken. The first great famine 
(it is significant to note), the first famine in which so many 
died that the records are imperfect, took place not forty years 
after the signing^ of the Peace of Berne, and at a time when 
very many irien still lived who had fought through the great 
war and suffered its final disappointment and the futility of 
its conclusion. 
The first to be sacrificed in the turmoils which had filled 
tliose forty years were, as invariably happens, not the scoundrels 
but the blatiicless fools amofig those who had laboured for an 
illusoiy peace. Their fatfc was a mixture of resentment against 
deception arid of another much stronger element, which is the 
anger of tht populace against assumed superiority. 
There is a Curious little phrase, emanating we know not 
whence. b«t' preserved to us after all these hundreds of years 
by the chaVite' survival of a piece of lead (mixed with some 
alloy) v-hich' it is bcl'ie\-ed,--was used in those days in the art 
of what was calle* printing. The letters are those used in 
England, and experts ascribe it to the earlier days of the great 
conflict. It is evidently' the title or foreword of some work, 
and the words run : 
" TAe War that will end War." 
H. Belloc. 
