MARGINAL COMMENT
HAROLD NICOLSON By
LORD VANSITTART is the victim of his own sincerity. To an age which yearned for solace he prophesied danger ; to an age which longs for relaxation he preaches a continuance of effort. The good fairies have endowed him with high capacities and rich rewards. His career, if viewed only from the material side, forms an almost perfect pattern of success. The bright Etonian, who while still a boy produced a French play at the Odeon, passed rapidly through the lower stages of his diplomatic career. Tehran and Cairo, Stockholm and Paris, provided him with that .variation of experience which in most diplomatists blurs the edges of conviction. As Private Secretary to Lord Curzon, as Private Secretary to two Prime Ministers, he had occasion to learn that in high politics flexibility is a major constituent of success. He reached the summit of his profession and mixed on terms of intimacy with the rulers of the earth. Honours came to him ; the stars and ribands of the ceders of chivalry, the more warming distinction of academic degrees. These rewards were balanced and enhanced by wide personal popularity and by considerable literary achievement. He might, as so many distinguished public servants before him, have ceased from further strife and watched with dignity and ease the errors of his contemporaries and successors. But the wicked fairy, who had not been invited to the christening, pronounced her little curse. " This boy," she said, " will sec the truth and will msist on telling it." As a result, Lord Vansittart, as Diplomatic Adviser to the Government, found his advice disregarded and his warnings spurned. And when finally he "retired into public life" and told the truth to the people, he became the object of much misrepresentation and much unfair abuse. He has now recorded his experiences in a book which is published this week by Messrs. Hutchinson under the title Lessons of My Life (9s. 6d.). It is in fact, as the publishers assert, " a lively record."
* * * * I doubt whether Lord Vansittart was ever really attuned to Civil Service life. His taste for emphasis was always hampered by the mild mannerism of the departmental minute ; it was not enough for him to indicate truth, he wished to preach it ; nor did he ever acquire that solemn gladness with which the perfect civil servant suffers fools. Being possessed of a strong missionary spirit, he was galled by silence. " All my life," he writes, " political expression has been barred to me. After forty years of silence, broken only by rejected memoranda, I find the lawn of language thrown open." It must be admitted that Lord Vansittart has made the most of the lawn. It would seem from some phrases in this book that he has been startled, and even hurt, by the opposition which his message has aroused. There have been those, it is true, who in criticising Lord Vansittart's thesis appear to have thought of a number, doubled it, and then taken away the number they first thought of. He has been accused of wishing to exterminate the whole population of Germany and of providing Dr. Goebbels with the very material he most requires. I am not surprised that he should feel annoyed. Yet his emphatic manner, his use of sharp muscle-bound metaphors, his avoidance of cotton-wool and tissue- paper, his very conviction, do in fact render the exposition of his theory somewhat stark. The British public do not care for naked- ness ; they prefer that even their wolves should be dressed in sheep's clothing. And inevitably Lord Vansittart has been misunderstood. Yet is the theory which he expounds in fact so extreme, so vindictive or so unreasonable? I do not think so.
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His contention is that the democracies have never realised the German problem in correct proportions. During the last forty years we have lost our sense, of self-preservation and have sought to find security in terms other than those of our own strength. The consequent debilitation of the national will, the weakening of our confidence in ourselves, created a vacuum which was filled by German propaganda. The reality of the German menace was so horrible to contemplate that we sought to persuade ourselves that _it was we, and not they, who were at fault ; for if that were true, then we could retain some vestige of initiative, in that we might avert the danger by making amends. The central fact, however, was that for the last seventy-five years seventy-five per cent, of Germans desired to dominate Europe by attacking their neighbours. According to this theory the First German War was not, as many tried to make us believe, an accident due to preventable causes, but an inevitable stage in a deliberate process. To those who understood the origin and nature of that process, the Second German War was also inevitable. To them, German militarism war, a disease curable only by complete defeat in war. Nor is it prudent even today to suppose that there are " two Germanies," one bellicose and the other longing only for the blessings of civilian life. Fables regarding an underground move- ment of revolt in Germany- " belong to the realm of filmland." There is no " new -Germany " round the corner ; such a Germany can only be born of defeat and nurtured through years of patient control and education. Such, in its broad outline, is the theme of Lord Vansittart. Can anyone with any knowledge of German history since 1871, or of the German character, contend that it is wholly mistaken?
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I admit that it is an inconvenient theory, since it imposes upoft us many years of further effort and self-sacrifice. It would be far more comfortable to imagine that once the Nazi regime is abolished every German will become a little Goethe. I should not, however, state the problem in the extreme terms which Lord Vansittart uses. I do not believe that seventy-five per cent. of the Germans are incurably bellicose. It may be that I have been more fortunate than Lord Vansittart in my contacts with the Germans, and that my admiration for their great gifts and my liking for their many qualities puts me in a more optimistic frame of mind. But I do believe that in almost every German soul there are strange packets of envy and suspicion, and that these packets have been rendered venomous by the doctrine that there is some connexion between courage and domination, between virility and violence. I do believe that almost every German feels sincerely that fate has not accorded to the Fatherland that position of power and renown which her virtues merit. I do believe that their lack of confidence in their political capacity does tempt them to express their self-assertiveness in mili- tary terms ; and I do believe that their spiritual loneliness, coupled with their romantic conception of heroism, does lead them to find in battle a solace and release which is not needed or experienced by more civil countries. I abundantly agree with Lord Vansittart that any thought of " another Germany is but a vain imagining, and that so long as the. German armies can avoid complete defeat, the spirit of German militarism will, whatever mufti may be donned, persist through generations. Yet such thoughts do not depress me unduly, since the defeat of the German armies will this time be complete and resounding ; and upon the rock-foundation of that defeat we may, in fact, be able to create a civilian Germany.
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Nor is it, as Lord Vansittart would agree, defeat alone which will help us to educate them in civility. It will not be their armies alone which will be beaten ; we shall at the same time destroy the faith in violence which lurks in so many German souls. Most Germans combine with their pugnacious tendencies a pathetic desire to be liked. The burning hatred which they have aroused in all the world at first filled them with astonishment which may well merge into an orgy of self-pity. But it will end by filling them with doubt. For even the most Pomeranian grenadier, when he finds himself dis- liked from Narvik to Constanza, must ask himself whether in the long run conquest pays. So long as the German soldier believes that he can avoid, or has avoided, complete defeat, then these anxious questionings can easily be stilled ; but when disaster comes they will rise in hubbub clamour throughout the land. Lord Vansittart warns us against sentimental illusions, and in this he is doing a service ; but his message, if rightly apprehended, is in no sense a doctrine of destruction or despair.
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