Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

  The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is enhanced by the fact that modern industrial methods tend always to demand less muscular effort and therefore to leave people with more energy when their day's work is done. Many workers in the light industries are less truly manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes, habits, manners and outlook the working class and the middle class are drawing together. The unjust distinctions remain, but the real differences diminish. The old-style "proletarian"--collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by heavy labour--still exists, but he is constantly decreasing in numbers; he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas of the north of England.

  After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands could be "placed" in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case. Above all, it is not the case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap motor cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes--everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns--the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or Council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post,16 the radio and the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.

  This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war, it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

  Dear Doktor Goebbels--Your British Friends Are Feeding Fine!

  Daily Express, July 23, 1941

  The disappearing raspberry, the invisible egg, and the onions which can be smelled but not seen, are phenomena we are all familiar with. Only because of the deadly harm they are capable of doing to morale are these stale conjuring tricks worth mentioning.

  When an article is controlled in price it promptly disappears from the market. Now fruit, fish, eggs, and most vegetables cannot be kept for an indefinite time.

  If they suddenly disappear it is a safe bet that they are being sold on the Q.T. at an illegal price, and, in fact, any one with moneyed acquaintances knows very well that they are being sold.

  Eggs, for instance, are available in large quantities at 4d. each; I am informed that they always figure in the bill as "tinned peas."

  Petrol, also, seems easy enough to get if you can pay about twice the proper price for it.

  And apart from downright law-breaking, you have only to put your nose inside any smart hotel or restaurant to see the most obvious evasion of the spirit of the food regulations.

  The "one dish" rule, for instance, is habitually broken, but the infringement does not count, because the extra dish of meat or fish is renamed hors-d'oeuvres.

  In any event the fact that food eaten in restaurants is unrationed favours the man with a large income and abundant spare time. It would be easy for anyone with more than PS2,000 a year to live without ever using his ration book.

  But does this kind of thing really matter? And if so, why and how does it matter?

  It doesn't matter because of the extra material consumed. And since this fact is the favourite get-out of selfish people who buy under-the-counter raspberries and use up petrol in going to the races, it is necessary to admit it, and then put it in its place.

  The actual wastage of material by the wealthy is negligible because the wealthy consist of very few people.

  It is the common people, who are and must be the big consumers of all the commodities, who matter.

  If you took away all the extra meat, fish and sugar that find their way into the smart hotels, and divided them among the general population, no appreciable difference would be made.

  For that matter, if you taxed all large incomes out of existence, it still would not make much difference to the taxes the rest of us would have to pay.

  The common people receive most of the national income, just as they eat most of the food and wear out most of the clothes, because they constitute the enormous majority.

  The raspberries now disappearing down favoured throats in Harrogate and Torquay do not have much direct effect on the Battle of the Atlantic.

  Therefore, it is argued, what does it matter if there is a certain amount of minor unfairness? Since the food situation as a whole is hardly affected, why shouldn't half a million fortunate people have as good a time as circumstances permit?

  This argument is a complete fallacy, because it leaves out of account the effect of envy on morale, on the "we-are-all-in-it-together" feeling which is absolutely necessary in time of war.

  There is no way of making war without lowering the general standard of living. The essential act of war is to divert labour from consumption goods to armaments, which means that the common people must eat less, work longer hours, put up with fewer amusements.

  And why should they do so--at any rate, how can you expect them to do so--when they have before their eyes a small minority who are suffering no privations whatever?

  So long as it is known that the rarer kinds of food are habitually bootlegged, how can you ask people to cut down their milk consumption and be enthusiastic about oatmeal and potatoes?

  "War Socialism" can have an important moral effect even when it is of no importance statistically. The few shiploads of oranges that reached England recently are an example.

  I wonder how many of those oranges got to the children in the back streets of London. If they had been shared out equally it would only have been a question of one or two oranges apiece for the whole population.

  In terms of vitamins it would have made no difference whatever; but it would have given a meaning to the current talk about "equality of sacrifice."

  Experience shows that human beings can put up with nearly anything so long as they feel that they are being fairly treated.

  The Spanish Republicans put up with hardships which we as yet have hardly dreamed of. For the last year of the civil war the Republican Army was fighting almost without cigarettes: the soldiers put up with it because it was the same for all of them, general and private alike.

  And we c
an do the same, if necessary.

  If we are honest we must admit that, air raids apart, the civil population has not had to suffer much hardship--nothing compared with what we went through in 1918, for instance.

  It is later, in the moment of crisis, when it may be necessary suddenly to impose the most drastic restrictions of every kind, that our national solidarity will be tested.

  If we guard against that moment now, crack down on the Black Market, catch half a dozen food-hogs and petrol-wanglers and give them stiff enough sentences to frighten others of the same kind, prohibit the more blatant kinds of luxury, and, in general, prove that equality of sacrifice is not merely a phrase, we shall be all right.

  But at present--and you can test this statement by having a look round the grillroom of any smart hotel, should you succeed in getting past the commissionaires--Dr. Goebbels's endless gibes about "British plutocracy" are hardly needed.

  A few score thousand of idle and selfish people are doing his work for him unpaid.

  Looking Back on the Spanish War

  [1942?]

  i

  First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.

  It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish War I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front--the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militiawomen chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.

  One of the essential experiences of war is never to be able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish Civil War. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to recur: "Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army." Many other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.

  The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a "red" army any more than for a "white" one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.

  Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns, Garvins et hoc genus; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the "glory" of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. If there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a TrotskyFascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from "War is hell" to "War is glorious" not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the intelligentsia, who approved the "King and Country" declaration in 1935, shouted for a "firm line" against Germany in 1937, supported the People's Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.1

  As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be "pro-war" or "anti-war," but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused over the Spanish War they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican Army the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the New Statesman to see that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red army at this moment. We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of rentier capitalism have done to us.

  ii

  In connection with what I have just said, a footnote on atrocities.

  I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish Civil War. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present, there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment t
he situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday's proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.