Through War & Peace

(5 of 12)

too-late scale of attack. Churchill got the blame. He was fired from the Admiralty in May 1915 and six months later was dropped from the cabinet. For the next six months he saw trench warfare at firsthand as a lieutenant colonel in France. After Lloyd George became Prime Minister, he called Churchill back to head the Munitions Ministry in 1917. There Churchill presided over the amazingly successful production machinery that Lloyd George himself had set up. This all-out industrial mobilization (including nationalized factories) was to have consequences which neither Churchill nor Lloyd George foresaw. In all countries the prodigies of wartime achievement by national governments left a deep impression in which socialism and the welfare state later flourished. In 1933 New Dealers justified themselves, not with the tenets of orthodox socialism but with the slogan, "Let's fight the depression as we fought the war."

Churchill as mobilizer of two great national defense efforts unwittingly contributed more than all the Fabians to the triumph of the socialist state.

A Bacillus & a Moralist.

The greatest triumph of the all-powerful national socialist state came in 1917. Russian authority was broken less by an upsurge from below than by a rotting away at the top. The Czar and a large part of his court were so incompetent that the monk, Rasputin, a greasy sexual athlete, exercised more influence between 1912 and 1916 than any man in Russia. The confused, divided and frivolous Russian aristocracy had no idea of what was about to hit them. The Czar's last Premier, Count Golitsyn, said that he took the job in order "to have one more pleasant memory."

The Germans sent Lenin back to Russia ("like a plague bacillus," said Churchill) to help the Revolution along. On Nov. 7 Lenin walked on to the platform of the Supreme Soviet, after removing his wig, and said: "We will now proceed to construct the proletarian socialist society."

The U.S. entry into the war far overbalanced the Russian defection. At first, Wilson (and the American people) had blamed both sides, assuming their own moral superiority to all of the combatants. When he did decide to go to war, Wilson announced his objectives on moral grounds: to re-establish international law upon the seas from which Allied and neutral ships were being driven by German submarines and "to make the world safe for democracy."

Mrs. Edith Wharton, the novelist, remembered Nov. n, 1918: "Through the deep, expectant hush we heard, one after another, all the bells of Paris calling to each other . . . We had fared so long on the thin diet of hope deferred that for a moment or two our hearts wavered and doubted. Then like the bells, they swelled to bursting, and we knew the war was over." Out of the mud came the men who had sung of Madelon and Mademoiselle from Armentieres and of how far it was to Tipperary. They thought they had made the world safe for democracy. They, and all the world, turned to Woodrow Wilson; he would make real the dream of peace.

He failed. Nationalism, which had been one of the great progressive forces of the 19th Century, had grown to the point where nations would not limit their sovereignty, even in the hope of escaping war. And Wilson himself dwelt in a self-righteous personal isolation unbecoming to a champion of collective