The Years of Endurance (72 page)

Even as they rejoiced at the peace they had made, they began to perceive instinctively that there was no peace. As is the way with a free country, the knowing few—and more especially those who were untrammelled by
office
and the still stronger bonds of loyalty and personal friendship—were the first to voice their protest at what Grenville called " unnecessary and degrading concessions," and Canning the " gross faults and omissions, the weakness and baseness and shuffling and stupidity of the Treaty." But there was something more than Party feeling in the growing wave of criticism. Even Pitt, still flawless in his support of his old protege, Addington, spoke strongly in favour of increased armaments at the very moment that the negotiations were being concluded. " I am inclined to hope everything that is good," he declared, " but I am bound to act as if I feared otherwise."

" Peace, Sir, in a week and war in a month! " was Malmesbury's reply to the Duke of York's request for the news when they met in the Park in March, 1802. When Addington spoke of " a genuine reconciliation between the two first nations of the world," Britain already knew in her heart that he lied. For there was no room for her free spirit to exist beside the imperious, despotic philosophy that breathed on the other side of the Channel.

The first to realise it after th
e dissentient Windhams and Gren
villes were the merchants whom Bonaparte had shut out of the Continent. If there had been no other failure in the Treaty, this omission would have sufficed to prove his bad faith and to ensure Britain's renewed hostility. For it robbed a trading people of
the
chief advantage they had promised themselves from the peace. Its effects, at first confined to the rich, were soon felt by the entire

nation, even by the ignorant multitude who had hailed the peace because it would bring cheap food and plenty.

A stronger Government, and one closer to the country's deeper feelings and historic destiny, would have known this from the first. Addington, ten years out of date, had mistaken war weariness for an expression of inability to wage war. As the sequal was to show, nothing could have been further from the truth. He misunderstood the character of his countrymen. He preceded them where in the mood of the moment they fancied they wanted to go, instead of steeling them to stand firm in the place dictated by their own unalterable temperament. So long as despotic power reigned on the Continent, something in the English heart forbade Englishmen to rest. It was a betrayal of that heart to let them think otherwise.

Yet it may have been inevitable. Lack of social unity and the failure of the governing class—so fit for rule in other ways—to give the nation guidance in the great internal revolution through which it was passing had weakened Britain's war effort. So long as there was any shadow of doubt as to the nature of the Revolution militant and the intentions of Bonaparte, the popular mind remained divided. The weak Administration of Addington was the expression and price of that division: nations get the Government their failings as well as their virtues earn.

Bonaparte, like Hitler after Munich, resolved Britain's dilemma. His actions—unmistakable in their intent—were to restore to the British people " popular enthusiasm, national unanimity and simplicity of object . . . attaching to the right objects and enlisting under their proper banners the scorn and hatred of slavery, the passion for freedom, the high thoughts and feelings "
¹
which were their birthright and which bound them to the great names of their own past: to Milton and Hampden, to Latimer, Falkland, and Sidney and the reeds at Runnymede. After the First Consul had betrayed the peace, had trodden down every remaining liberty in western Europe and, scorning his own promises, had insulted, threatened and cheated the only people save the Russians who had never flinched before him in the field, no Briton was ready to trust his word again or to believe that perjured France had anything better to offer mankind than had his own imperfect but dear

¹
Coleridge,
The
Friend,
Section
I,
Essay
10
.

country. The Peace of Amiens deserved the name of peace, wrote Coleridge, because it gave unanimity at home and reconciled Englishmen with one another. The young rebels of yesterday became the patriots of to-morrow, bringing to the embattled cause of freedom a passion and fire unknown in the earlier years of grim endurance. Henceforward the British people were to follow and deserve great leaders: Pitt and Fox, Nelson and Wellington, Col-lingwood, Moore and Cornwallis, Castlereagh, Perceval and Canning. In the final stage of their victorious struggle against despotism, Wordsworth and Scott were to be their poets, and Southey and Coleridge their philosophers,

EPILOGUE

Light Out of the Past

"
Y
et
now," said Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, " I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am." After nine years of harsh, unremitting war England had achieved parity with her adversary, made peace with her under a misconception and found, in the hour of making it, that there was no peace.

As always, she had started to fight at a disadvantage. Our ancestors in 1793 were as unprepared for war as we in 1939. They were handicapped by all the defects of their libertarian virtues and institutions: by Party divisions, long-ingrained commercial habits, Treasury pedantry and incorrigib
le amateurishness. Their politi
cians, being more used to compromises than decisions, were ill-fitted to choose between rival courses: to make that option of difficulties which Wolfe defined as the problem of war. Having far-flung commitments and inadequate forces, they were weak at every point and strong at none. They left the initiative to the enemy and were unable to regain it. Their one asset was their courage. In the face of repeated disappointment and disaster they showed, in common with the people they led, an astonishing resilience.

Such statesmen, like the British leaders of 1939, failed to grasp the strength and speed of the forces they had challenged. Facing men who were using a new dynamic of power to dominate the world, they put their trust in a victory based on financial resources. They forgot that the symbols of past commercial activity—favourable trade returns, accumulated bank balances and credits—could not avail on the battlefield. Economic like military strength is not the cause of human achievement but the result. It is not weapons which decide wars in the end but men, for it is men who make the weapons and then marshal and use them.

For all their apparent bankruptcy, the Jacobins enjoyed an enthusiasm and cohesion unknown to their opponents. They felt that they were fighting for a way of life which offered them and

their children a dignity and usefulness more in keeping with the eternal needs of human nature than the old dispensation. When, operating from interior lines under young and revolutionary leaders, they struck with concentrated force at the Allies' defensive cordons, the slow and confused
sitzkrieg
of the first year was succeeded by a lightning war of movement, terror and calamity. The monarchical States of the
ancien regime
proved no match in battle for the vigour and fanatic unity of Revolutionary France. They were routed by their own slackness, inefficiency and selfish divisions almost before a shot had been fired.

As in 1940, Britain was driven back to her last line of resistance, the sea. Her expeditionary force, deserted by its allies, was expelled from the Continent, the flanks of her trade routes exposed to attack and the ports of Western Europe closed to her ships. Her people suffered a food shortage as grave but far less equally borne than in the present war. Even her vaunted financial system came within a few hours of bankruptcy.

But those who thought that Britain was defeated were proved wrong. In adversity her real strength became apparent. It lay not in her gossamer web of trade and usury and amorphous commercial empire—as the Jacobins, like their Nazi prototypes, supposed— but in the character of her people. Against that rock the waves of conquest broke in vain. In the hour of danger our ancestors closed their ranks. They made many mistakes but they never bowed under the consequences. They learnt from
them
and went on.

By 1797 they had discovered where their strength resided. Forced by adverse circumstances to concentrate on the sea, they made the destruction of the enemy's naval power their first objective. In doing so they reaped the advantage geography and history had given them. They learnt what Raleigh and Pepys, Cromwell and Chatham had taught by precept and example: that an island Power wastes and dissipates its strength unless it controls the sea. Only by an absolute command of the ocean trade routes— such as to-day involves mastery of the air above as much as of the sea itself—could Britain secure her shores, obtain the sinews of war and sustain her allies. Without it her armies were mere immobilised spectators of Continental
battle
s like the
Culloden
on her shoal at the Nile.

By putting first things first this country, within eighteen months of the fall of her last ally and the naval mutinies that marked her nadir, established a command of the sea so complete that, so long as she retained it and fought on, defeat was impossible. Discarding seniority-encrusted Admirals who used sea-power as a defensive weapon till it all but broke in their hands, she evolved under younger and more daring leaders a new offensive technique. Cape St. Vincent, Camperdown, the Nile and Copenhagen not only saved her from destruction but placed an unborn century of human destiny in her hands. It was then decided that Pitt's—and Jeremy Bentham's—England and not France's New Order was to shape the human future. Henceforward the seas remained a ring of steel round the tyrant's conquests. He had to break it or perish.

But the colleagues of Pitt and Addington did not yet realise it. They had saved England; they had yet to learn how to save Europe. Though Nelson's glorious counter-attack and Russian victories awoke universal hopes of a second front, the army which Britain had raised behind the shelter of her fleets struck too late and too far from the main theatre of war to break an enemy acting on interior lines. Its troops were insufficiently trained in the new warfare and its commanders so oppressed by their own difficulties that they forgot those of their enemies. · Instead of pushing boldly on and snatching victory, they consolidated minor gains while the odds against them hardened. When a few months later Bonaparte smashed Austria at Marengo, Britain, having shot her bolt, remained a helpless spectator of events on land. By her sea offensive she had enclosed the armed Jacobin in a cage. She had still to find out how to enter it and destroy him.

Discouraged by that failure and the collapse for the second time of all her allies, Britain relaxed her stranglehold. When out of necessity she resumed it, she did so without seeing any rational way of destroying the titanic power she had challenged. Time had still to teach her that, so long as she kept the sea routes closed to the conqueror, his New Order was denied the means of enduring life, while her own growing industrial strength, freely nourished through those same watery channels, could become, like that of America to-day, a potent force for liberating Europe. She had still to learn, too, how a British army, based on the sea and enjoying perfect freedom of movement, could exert an influence out of all proportion to its size
¹
and could prove to an enslaved and restless Continent that the Grand Armee was not invincible.

Yet military prowess alone could scarcely have conquered Napoleon's France. It needed a human agency with its own superlative efficiency even to resist it. Only one with a greater spiritual force could break it. After Nelson's victories and the resumption of war Britain, having repaired her early defects and omissions, faced France at last on something approaching equal terms. The struggle then became a contest not merely between physical forces but between rival principles.

That of Jacobin and Napoleonic France had one ineradicable weakness. With all its immense vitality and military virtue and efficiency, it tended to worship itself. It lacked humility and therefore understanding of the laws that ultimately govern the universe. Even at the outset the Revolutionary effort was impaired by human failings. The besetting vices of the men who set out to build a new heaven and earth in a day were impatience and arrogance. The resulting lack of discipline brought them into trouble as soon as they encountered an orderly and cohesive people like the British. The fleets which put out of Brest and Toulon with wild boasts and unharnessed enthusiasms were no match for the patient, hard-trained men who sailed under the " meteor flag of England."

But the vitality which sprang from the new philosophy of freedom gave the French people the honesty and vigour
to correct these early faults.
They learnt the first lessons of the harsh school of war more quickly than their foes. They subjected themselves to discipline to achieve unity. Yet here again they fell into moral errors which impaired their victories. In their impatience for victory they condoned cruelty and injustice. Because of this, the Terror which united France ended by dividing her.