THE LAST WAR.
Maurice Rowdon,
Villa Ida,
Ronchi,"
Massa Apuania,
ITALY.


The sloth and torpor of Europe after 1918, the utter
bankruptcy of its religion, gave rise to a second war which,
unlike the first, did not spare the civilian populations.
Hitler was the instrument of this war. He led a revolt
against a world where all sense of mystery seemed to, have
departed, where everything was a money-relation; - where
there were no longer unspoken loyalties between- people,
as betweén noblemen'and their retainers, and no longer
boom for prowess, instinct and courage. It seemed more
and more an ignominious world where everyone was grubbing
about for a better standard of living. This is what gave
Nazism its backward-1ooking, archaic appearance, as if it
were trying to revive artificially---1n a middle class
society---instinctive ties which no longer existed.
But
there was one activity that was not a bit artificial and
which alway 18 brought people to their feet, even at the
expénse of their pleasures: and.that was war, the fascinating
mystery of death. hanging over a whole continent. The
artifical society created by Hitler was only a preparation
for this.
wek
The sloth and money-obsession in Europe was such that
at last, had there not been a war, it might have become a
kind of hinakad Switzerland bloated with goods, where faces
grew more. and more abstract, the relations between people
more and more practical in a deadly way; where words like
crucifixion would have be come merely silly. Even the First
World War had failed to shake Europe out of its religious
bankruptcy, because it did not reach the civilian populations.
Had not war been his message, his raison
d'etre and his


dre'am, Hitler would have been the leader of a: Switzerland
play-acting a past century,.1 with spectacular uniforms and
mystical speeches. English audiences would have continued
to laugh at him in the cinemas; whereas, after 1940, they
stopped abruptly. He was never interested in peace; he
equated it with the sloth he had risen up in arms against. -
The middle classes were so easy to deal with, he once said,
because they would do-anything for peace. Even his own
sublects did not seém to realise what he was sayi ing. But.
neither his own subjects nor the rest- of Europe showed
anything more than a formal,hesitation when the time came
to murder, provided. they had the weapons to murder with.
It took only a few months, during the Maginot Line period,
lurn into
for the morals of sloth to bie his morals---the morals of
murder. For the latter grew fàt on the former. Thousands
upon thousands of people had their revenge in that war' for
the tedium---stripped'of dignity, Godless and- mechanical---
of their lives before.
Nazism was all the violence and anger and mystery of
old Europe up in arms against the paralysing orthodoxy of
a Godless Christendom.
It exaggerated.
It shouted abuse
and stamped its feet melodramatically. Garmany's madness
was that of a country swollen with metaphysics in a Europe
where metaphysics was fast coming to mean simply a failure
to make money. The more apathetid the rest of Europe,
the louder Hitler shouted.
He really governed the whole of Europe, if not the
world, between 1933 and 1945,
In the first year of'the
war there were articles in English newspapers asking
whether it was moral to bomb civilian populations. The
thought was horrifying to Germans, despite Hitler, as to
Englishmen and Americans. But not many months later the
massed raids on German cities began and thousands of women
and children were blown to pieces or burned to death.


was as if this were the destiny for which Europe as a
community had been waiting since the twenties.
Hitler was convinced that Europe would find its heroism
and dignity,in a war. He. was proved right.
The old upper
classes woke up from their melancholy dozing and produced
leaders again; working people forgot their strikes. and their
wage-packéts. Everybody was together again," in a community.
'Class hatreds---the most bitter pèrsonal hatreds of our epoch---
were almost laid asleep. Clean young gentlemen found that
they could drop bombs on people they had never seen without
turninga hair. People were jocular, 11vely and helpful.
The First World War was' a tedious mass murder of troops
on . a static line, day after day; it
a man in
was'killing
another trench---a man like yourself---for a reason you were
never really clear about. But this war was different.
People. really wanted to. fight. in. this one. Young' men in
Germany couid fight for. the -Third Reich, and if that sounded
silly to them they. could fight for the feeling that Hitler
had given Germany a bit of dignity in the rorld. . - And
people 11ke myself,. on the other side, could fight against
- the massacre of people by gas-chamber and furnacé, or
against a regime which answered the: words Christ or art with
a kick in the teeth.
Our consciences were. all involved.
"Those of us---English or French or German---who would have
made good conscientious objectors in: the First World War
made first-class. murderers in this one.
Hitler's énd was really a massive crucifixion in. Europe à
Again and again, particularly in the last year of the war,
he- contradicted his generals, and seemed simply to be
indifferént to the most obvious rules of strategy. It is
ridiculous to say he was fwrong' not to stop the war when
he saw he" was losing. He hadn't the slightest intérest in
society, éven in German society, as an end in itself. To say


that he was forced into war or went intoit in order to
solve a chronic unemployment probzem 1s completely to
misunderstand his intentions (as he. wrote and spoke them).
Full emplopment as an end in itself wasof not the slightest
interest to him, otherwise he would haveihad no quarrel
with half the people in England and France and Germany itselr
who càme out against him before the war,started. To sày
that hismotive was in the end a peaceful society is to say
that he agréed with the left-wing orthodoxies of the time
which he chiefly detested.
It 1s equally ridiculous to say that England and
America were fighting to rid the world: of a crimimal who
had somehow---history's most remarkable accident, and quite
gratuitous---got hold of the reins 'of power. Europe had
a dark necessity for Hitler, a fact which it has managed
to hide from itself by transferring all its war-guilt on
to Germany. .
Nazism was not a regime with certain grave blemishes,
nor was Hitler a man who made certain unfortunate mi stakes.
Nazism was, complete and whole in itself, and successful.
It was not an ideology, like class socialism.. It was a
fact: that is to say it did not look forward to an ideal
society in the future, nor did it consist of an abstract
body of doctrine. It was vested in Hitler's personal and -
mystical leadership; that was its essence. 4 And the
Thousand Year Reich was already there, in its first ye ears;
it did not depend .on some withering away of the State. For
héroism now, courage and spectacle now, were its ends; and
war was the only. means to those ends. Thus, practically
speaking, the Nazi_system was a society dedictade to the
task of maing war, as an.end in itself. Apalogies that
Hitler was after all a kindly person, or that the mass deaths
in the concentration camps were an accident of war, are


irrelevant to Nazism. They are only interesting as
expressions of guilt, on the part of those who supported
him.
The European war is quite different from the technical
war waged by America or the easterncommunisms. The
European waz is a metaphy: sical adventure connected with
A a
the renewal of the sense of wonder and mystery, and the
idea of a.fated crucifizion, changing the whole of a man's
future life. It is waged with the : same values as those *
which makie Europe's art. In'the end it is religious.. To,
see'the difference between the European war and the Technical
war one only has to compare the works of Juenger; Remarques,
Siegfried Sassoon, Malraux and Aldington, with a book 1ike
* The Naked and the Dead. The Red Badge- of Courage was still
in the European tradition, being the classical study of a
man's struggle against terror towards'heroism, and his
development from a helpless.pity, and self-pity, to a kind
of 'stoical awe and'compassionate sélflessness. All European
war-books of any depth are accounts of the Passion, full
of nostalgia for those brief. glimpses of mystery..
'If there be such a thing as ghostly revisitatiorof
this earth, and if ghosts can traverse. tame and choose their
ground, I would return to the Bois Francais sector as it was
: 'As I,stepped'over one. of the Germans an impulse made
me. lift him up from the
ditch, Propped against
mioreabie
the bank, his blond face was undisfagured, except by the mud a
Thich I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my ooat sleeve...
He didn't look to be more than eighteen.
Hoisting him a
little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and
remembered that this, was the first: time I'd ever touched
one of our' enemies with my hands.'
'For me, the idea of death made everything vivid and


valuable.'
'But 'I was rewarded by an intense memory of men whose
courage had shown me the power of the human spirit---that
spirit which could withstand the utmost assault.'
(Excerpts
from-Siegfried Sassoan's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer)
But. the war of. the: un-European societies is simply the
solution. by massed attacks, depending on a high degree of
research, of a. technical problem.
It has no value beyond
a practical value which can- be calculated on paper. It's
spiritual consequence es differ from man to man, and they. have
no unity, no communal or religious reference; they are
simply departures from the social or technical norm---mal-
adjustments. The books written about -these technical
battles are either sagas of heroism or "accounts of physical
degeneracy.
disçomfort and moral anganargayx The religidus end is
lacking..
In-t the European. war thère was * alway s .an erratic kind
of decorum, amounting sometimes toa kind of love, between
the two: sides; I have read of English soldiers in the first
war getting angry when Germans were abased in-conversation
at home, and I felt the same anger myself in the second war.
But the technical war is'merciless; there is no.shared
concept of the sacredness of the human creaturé. Prisoners
are treatéd well if it. suits policy; they are 'no longer
thought of as the,mystical enemy, but as units of barkeaining
power. r
Nazism, or indeed any Fascism,. was a kind. of conscious
philosophy of' the European war, "and therefore, being deliberate,
it was stripped of compassion. That was why Hitler talked
1ike a tortured and haunted man. He was absolutely
dedicated to the task of. murder, as Europe's. destiny. The
Thousand Year Reich was a dream witha touch of Halpurgis
Night in it.
Ruins were proper to it, not peaçeful


suburbia. This is what distinghished his socialism from
àll other forms, his dictatorship from that 'of the communists.
The Generals were astonished when he showed.a completé dis-
regard for the common logic of_strategy, because they had
never réalised that for him strategy was : simply. the servant
of a mystical destiny which had satisfactions far beyond those
of conquest. War was never for him a technical struggle
between two sides. It was essentially a my stery for him,
and---though we may not like - to use this word in connection
with a man who.looked to us like an embodiment of the devil---
it.was the Passion.
His struggle for. power was the climax of a religious
crisis. that had been developing in the Christian world. since
the eighteenth century, and of which the growth of. huge cities,
the establishment of an abstract uniformity of life and
bahaviour over formerly distinct. places each with its spirit,
and the:pursuit of special intellectual or. technical ends
instead of the old all-inclusive, or religious ones, were the
causes. Hitler broke open this uniformity by intellectually
infuriating people to fight each, other. For the intellect
was the last great, source of energy in the post-religious
world. :-And he called its deliberate incitement 'propaganda'.
The result was that almost every man went into the war with
a furious intellectual image before him of 'the enemy', and
this image made it possible for him. to shoot, disembowel,
rape, bomb or massacre on a'stupendous scale othér people who
were from much the same kind of peacéful suburbia as himself.
In the course of the war thousands of square miles of crops
were burned, millions of homes were pillaged, bombs were
dropped 'for'luck' on houses far' from industrial or military
targets. And all this was done by people whose personal
manners were probably more peaceable and subdued than
those of any previous generation in
Christendom. In order to


do it
/they had to believe in it, mentally. And this Hitler
taught. them to do. He succeeded in inciting to a kind of
madness not only his own subjects, not only the Lithuanians
and Ukrainians he put in charge of some of the concentration
camps and who were said to be the most recklessly brutal of
all, but every race, class and group in Europe, and after that
in the whole world.
It seemed written in the fate of Europe. Before the
war started educated young men went to Spain 'to fight
Fascism' and as often as not. seemed to go in order to kill
and risk being killed, in order to get the. smell and touch
and quickness of a real experience as opposed'to the unheroic.
tedium of their lives before, when they had been unmoved by
religious feelings.
Almost every book to have come out of
that civil war dwells with fascination on the simple details
of battle dmast as if they were ends in themselves, with the
political
inkniiaEkual attitudes as merely formal Justification. (1)
It was as if these young men said to themselves, 'At: last,
with these lice, this exposure to bitter cold, without
adequate food or clothing, these bullets and hand-grenades
and train-loads of wounded men, at last I feel real.
I can
feel the life in my body. My compassion is stirred, as well
as my hatred and love. I am functioning properly.
I aa am
not living, the death-life of a middle class youth...' And
that was the burden of Hitler's message to middle class
Europe: you aren't alive until you go to war', only muder
will bring you back to life.
(1) See' Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Part xi1, where
he drscribes his sensations when he was shot in the back of
the neck.


During the Thirties people's intellects became
increasingly enraged, and his propaganda' had à remarkably
quick success.. His'own people began seriously to believe
that 'non-Aryans' were by original nature inferior, but
this was nothing to the number of people outside Germany
who came to believe that 'the Germans' were by original
nature inferior. When the young men who went to Spain
found that the Falangists differed from the Republicans
only in the fact that they raised their fists in the salute
instead of the palmé of their hands, they were taken abakk :
they hana't realised, apparently, that, they were human
creatures too! - In other words, their contact with reality
was always through the brain. The 'Falangasts' were
simply an idea for them, as they themselves were simply an
idea for the Falangasts. George Orwell wanted. 'to kill a
Fascist'. Only slowly, and with pain and regret, did he
reali'se that this meant 'to kill.a human creature'.
Somehow
looked
- it hadn't tha
the same. Hitler excited this intellectual
obsessibeness to the point where hardly a worker or business
man or peasant was left untouched by.1t. The people who
crept beyond the forward -lines to have a look at 'a German', -
with awe, hearts beating fast, were the successors'of the
young men who peeped above a rampart to have a look at a -
'Falangist' or a 'Communist'.
Even pacifism he rendered frivolous.
In the First
World War it. seemed an intelligent enough attitude---you
Just didn't see why all these people should be killed.
But in this war your conscience was'held up to ransom.
Were you actually prepared to stand:by while millions upon
millions of people were slaughtened, on a strictly worked
out manufacturing basis, for the production of floor-felt,
soap andi artifical manure? Every moment you deliberàted
a: few more hundred died. To remain a pacifist you needed


to harden yourself intellectually, whkch was precisely what
the others---the murderers---were doing.
There was no way
out. - It. wash't enough to have an intellectual system.
Hitler broke through all that, in a world that was fast
coming to looklike a huge technical organisation.
Even
now we feel a kind of hushed awe and dread at the sound of
'his voice, touched perhaps with a vague yearning and nostalgia,
like domestic animals who raise their heads and listen to a
wild cry in the distance.
Only afterwards did we begin to reckon up what had
happened, and what our hands, as if disembodied from our
peaceable, social selves, had been made to do. Now, in
our period of recollection (rather quiet, however noisy our
technical inventions, and perhaps in inverse ratio to their
nokse), we are wondering again about the ends of life, beyond
power'and society. . The world is no longer commodities,
wage-packets and intellectual systems for the management of
men. Our religious past gives us all_the questions we ask,
but we are denied any of the firm answers. We are surround ed
again by mystery. Technical power has explained nothing.
Upwards of 16 million people died in the last war---most of
them in the most dreadful torture and pain---to keep that
mystery before us.


Kila Ida,
Rach: -
Muna Apnanis,
llaly.
Jeas MY Spusles,
uruld
pralep-l
unuld
cunder
Heu
bneam ter
oncesely
lamice Rusda


THE LAST WAR.
Maurice Rowdon,
Villa Ida,
Ronohi,
Massa Apuania,
ITALY.


The. sloth and torpor of Europe after 1918, the utter
bankruptcy of its religion, gave rise to a second war which,
unlike the first, did. not spare the civilian populations.
Hitler was the instrument of this war. He led a revolt
against a world where all sense of mystery se emed to have
departed, where everything was a money-relation; where
there were no longer unspoken loyalties between people,
as between noblemen and their retainers, and no longer
toom for prowess, instinct and courage. It seemed more
and more an ignominious world where everyone was grubbing
about for a better standard of living. This is what gave
Nazism_its backward-1ooking, archaic appearance, as if it
were trying to revive artificially---ina middle class
Bociety---instinotive ties which no longer existed. But
there was one activity that was not a bit artificial and
which alway S brought people to their feet, even at the
expense of their pleasures: and that was war, the fascinating
mystery of death hanging over a whole continent. The
artifical society oreated by Hitler was only a preparation
for this.
laa
The sloth and money-obseesion in Europe WAB such that
at last, had there not been a war, it might have become a-
kind of hamakal Switzerland bloated with goods, where faces
grew more and more abstraot, the relations between people
more and more practical in a deadly way; where words 1ike.
crucifixion would have become merely silly.. Even the First
World War had failed to shake Europe out of its religious
bankruptoy, because it did not reach. the civilian populations.
Had not war been his message, his raison d'etre and his


dream, Hitler would have been the leader of a Switzerland
play-acting a past century, with spectacular uniforms and
mystioal speeches. English audiences would have continued
to laugh at him in the cinemas; whereas, after 1940, they
stopped abruptly. He was never interested in peace; he
equated 1t with the sloth he had risen up in arms against.
The middle olasses were Bo. easy to deal,with, he once said,
because. they would do anything for peace. Even his own
subleots did not séem to realise what he was saying. But
neither his own subjects nor the rest of. Europe showed
anything more than a formal hesitation when the, time came
to murder, provided they had the weapons to murder with.
It took only a few months, during the Maginot Line period,
tam mlo
for the morals of sloth to bevene his morals---the morals of
murder. For the latter grew fat on the former.
Thousands
upon thousands of people had their revenge in that war for
the tedium---stripped of dignity, Godless and mechanical--
of their lives before.
Nazism was all -the: violence and anger and mystery of
.old Europe up' in arms against the paralysing orthodoxy of
a' Godless Christendom.
It exaggerated.
It shouted abuse
and stamped its feet melodramatioally.
Germany's madness
was that of a country swollen with metaphysics in a Europe
where metaphysics was fast coming to mean simply a failure
to make money. - The more apathetic the rest of Europe,
the louder Hitler shouted.
He. really governed the whole of Europe, if not the
world, between 1933 and 1945, In the first year of the
war there. were articles in English newspapers asking
whether it, was moral to bomb civilian populations. The
thought was horrifying to Germans, despite Hitler, as to
Englishmen and Americans. But not many months later the
massed raids on German cities began and thousands of women
and children were blown to pieces or burned to death.


was as if this were the destiny for which Europe as a
community had been waiting since the twenties.
Hitler was convinoed that Europe would find its héroism
and dignity in a war. He was proved right. The old upper
classes woke up' from their melancholy dozing and produced
leaders again; working people forgot their strikes and their
wage-packets. Everybody was together again, in a community.
Class hatreds---the most: bitter personal hatreds of our epoch---
were almost laid asleep. Clean young gentlemen found that
they could drop bombs on people they had .never seen without
turning a hair. People were jocular, lively and helpful.
The First World War was - a tedious mass murder of troops
on a static linè, day after day : it'was killing a. man in
another trénch---a man like yourself---for a reason y du were
never really clear about. But this war was different.
People really wanted to fight in this one. Young men in
Germany could fight for the Third Reich, and if that sounded.
silly. to them-they could fight for the feeling that Hitler
had given Germany a bit of dignity in the rorld. And
people like myself, on the other side, could fight against
the massaore of people by gas-chamber and furnace, or
against a regime which answered the words Christ or art with
a kick in the teeth.
Our consciences were all. involved.
Those of us---English or French or German---who would have
made good conscientious objectors in the First World War'
made first-class murderers in this one.
Hitler's end was really a massive crucifixion in Europe.
Again and again, partioularly in the last year of thé war,
he contradioted his generals, and seemed simply to. be
indifferent to the most obvious rules of strategy * It i8
ridiculous to Bay he was. (wrong' not to stop the war when
he saw he was losing. He hadn't the slightest interest in
society, even in German Bociety, as an end in itself. To Bay


that he was forced into war or went into it in order to
solve a chronic unemployment probtem 1s completely to
misunderstand his intentions (as he wrote and.spoke them).
Full emplogment as an end in itself was of not the slightest
interest to him, otherwise he would have had no quarrel
with half the people in England and France and Germany itself
who came out against him before the war started. To say
that his motive was in the enda peaceful society is to - say
that he agreed with the left-wing orthodoxies of the time
which he ohiefly detested.
It is equally ridiculous to say that England and
America were fighting to rid the world of a criminal who
had somehow---history's most remarkable accident, and quite
gratuitous---got holdof the reins of power. Europe had -
a dark necessity for Hitler, a fact whioh it has managed
to hide from itself by transferring all its var-guilt on
to Germany.
Nazism was not a régime with certain grave blemishes,
.nor was Hitler a man who made certain unfortunate mi stakes.
Nazism was complete and whole in itself, and successful.
It was not an ideology, like class socialism. It was a
faot: that is to say it did not look forward to an.ideal
society in the future, .nor did it consist of an abstract
body of doctrine.
It was vested in Hitler's personal and
mystical leadership; that was its éssenge - And the
Thousand Year Reich was already there, in its first years;
it did not depénd on some withering away of the State.
For
heroism now, courage. and spectaole now, were its ende; and
war was the only' - means to those ends. Thus, practically
speaking, the Nazi system was a. society dediotede to the
task of mkaing war, as an end in itself. Apalogies that
Hitler was after all a: kindly person, or that the mass deaths
in the ooncentration camps were an accident of war, are


irrelevant to Nazism.
They are only interesting as
expressions of guilt, on the part of- those who supported
him.
The European war is quite different from the technical
war waged by America or the eastern communisms. The
European war is a metaphysical adventure connected with
the renewal of the sense of wonder and mystery, and the
idea.of a fated orucifizion, changing the whole of a man's
future iife. It is waged with the same values as those
which maile Europe's art.. In the end it is religious. To
see the difference between : the European war and the Technical
war one only has. to compare the works of Juenger, Remarques,
Siegfried Sassoon, Malraux and Aldington, with a book like
The Naked and the Dead. The Red Badge of Courage was still
in the European tradition, being the classical study of a
man's struggle against terror towards heroism, and his -
development from a helpless pity, and self pity, to a kind
of: stoical awe and compassionate Belflessness. All European
war-books of any depth are accounts of the Passion, full
of nostalgia for those brief glimpses of mystery.
'If there be such a thing as ghostly revisitation of
this earth," and if ghosts can traverse tame and choose their
ground, I would return to the Bois Francais sector as it was
'As I stepped ov er one of the Germans an impulse made
me lift him up from the miereable ditch,
Propped against
the bank, his blond face was undisfagured, except by the mud
Dhich I wiped from his eyes apd mouth with my ooat Bleeve...
He didn't look to be more than eighteen.
Hoisting him a
little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and
remembered that this was the first time I'd ever touched
one of our enemies with my hands.'
'For me, thé idea of death made everything vivid and


valuable.'
'But I was rewarded by an intense memory of men whose
oourage had shown me the power of the human spirit---that
spirit whioh could withstand the utmost assault.'
(Excerpts
from Siegfried Sassoan's Memoirs of an Infantry officer)
But the war of the un-European societies is simply the
solution by massed attacks, depending on, a high degree of
research, of a technical problem. It has no valué beyond
a praotical value which oan be caloulated on paper.
Its
spiritual consequences differ from man to man, and they have
no unity, no odmmunal or religious reference; they are
simply departures from the social or technical norm---mal-
adjustments. The books written about these technical
battles are either sagas of heroism or accounts of phy sical
degeneracy.
discomfort and moral dagaaargagz The religious end is
lacking.
In the European war there wa's always an erratio kind
of decorum, amounting sometimes to a kind of love, between
the two sides; I have read of English soldiers in the first
war getting angry when Germans. were abused in conversation
at home,and I felt the same anger-myself in the'second war.
But the technical war is merciless; there is no shared
concept of the sacredness of the human oreature.
Prisoners
are treated well if it suits polioy; they are no longer
thought of. as the my stical enemy, but as units of barAeaining
power.
Nazism, or indeèd any Fascism, was a kind of conscious
philosophy of the European. war, and therefore, being deliberate,
it was stripped of compassion. That was why Hitler talked
like a tortured and haunted man. He was absolutely
dedicated to the task of murder, as Europe's destiny o The
Thousand Year Reich was. a dream with a touch of Ealpurgis
Night in it. Ruins were proper to it, not peaceful


suburbia.
This is what distinghished his socialism from
all other forms, his dictatorship from that of the communists.
The Generals were astonished when he showed a complete dis-
regard for the common logio of strategy, because they had
never realised that for him strategy was simply theservant
of a mystical destiny which had satisfactions far beyond those
of conquest. War was never for him a teohnical struggle
between two sides.
It was essentially a my stery for him,
and---though we may. not like to use this word in conneotion
with a man who looked to us like 'an embodiment of the devil---
it was,the Passion.
His struggle for power was the olinax of a religious
crisis that had been developing in the Christian world since
the eighteenth oentury, and of which the growth of huge cities,
the establishment of an abstract uniformity of life and
bahaviour over formerly distinot places each with its spirit,
and the pursuit of special intellectual or technical ends
instead of the old all-inclusive or religious ones, were the
causes. Hitler broke open this uniformity by intellectually
infuriating people to. fight each other. For the intellect
was the last great source of energy in the post-religious
world. And he called its deliberaté incitement 'propaganda'.
The result was that almost every man went into the war with
a furious intellectual image before him of 'the eneny', and
this image made it possible for him to shoot, disembowel,
rape, bomb or massaore - on a stupendous soale other people 'who
were from much the same kind of peaceful suburbia as himself.
In the oourse of the war thousands of square miles of orops
were burned, millions of homes were pillaged, bombs were
dropped 'for luck' on houses far from industrial or military
targets. And all this was done by people whose personal
manners were probably more peaceable and subdued than
those of any previous generation in Christendom. In order to


doi i
/they had to believe in, it, mentally. And this Hitler
taught them to do. He succeeded in inciting to a kind of
madness not only his own subjects, not only $he Lithuanians
and Ukrainians he put in charge of Bome of the concentration
camps and who were said to be the most recklessly brutal of
all, but every race,. olass and group in Europe, and after that
in the whole world.
It seemed written in the fate of Europe. Before the
war started educated young men went to Spain 'to fight
Fascism' and as often as not. seemed to go in order to kill
and risk being killed, in order to get the smell and touch
and quickness of a real experience as opposed to the unheroio
tedium of their lives before, when- they had been unmoved by
religious feelings. Almost every book to have come out of
that civil war dwells' with fascination on the simple details
of battle dment as 1f they were ends in themselves, with the
politioal
inknitaxana) attitudes as merely formal Justification. (1)
It. was as if these young men said to themselves, 'At last,
with these lice, this exposure to bitter cold, without
adequaté food or clothing, these bullets and hand-grenades
and train-loads of wounded men, at last I feel real. I can
feel the life in my body. My compassion is stirred, as well
as my hatred and love. I am fuhctioning, properly. I ax am
not living the death-life of a middle class youth...' And
that was the burden of Hitler's message to middle class
Europe: you aren't alive until you go to war, only muder
will bring you back to life.
(1) See Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Part x11; where
he drscribes his sensations when he was shot in the back of
the neok.


During the Thirties people's intellects became
increasingly enraged, and his propaganda' had a remarkably'
quick succe.ss. His own people began seriously to believe
that 'non-Aryans' were by original nature inferior, but
this. was nothing to the. number of people outside Germany
who came to believe that"the Germans' were by original
nature inferior. When the young men who went to Spain
found that the Falangists differed from the Republioans
only in the faot that they raised their fists in the salute
instead of the palms of their hands, they were taken abahk:
they hana't reallsed, apparently, that they were human
creatures too! In other words, their contact with reality
was always through the brain.
The 'Talangbats' were
simply an idea fort them, as they themselves were simply an
idea for the. Falangasts. George Orwell wanted 'to kill a
Fascist'. Only slowly, and with pain and regret, did he
realise that this meant 'to kill a human creature'.
Somehow
looked
it hadn't khn
the same. Hitler exoitéd this intelleatual
obsessibeness to the point where hardly a worker or business
man or peasant wàs left untouched by it. The people who
crept beyond the forward lines to have a look at 'a German',
with awe, hearts beating fast, were the Buoceseors of the
young men who peeped above a rampart to have a look at a
'Falangist' or a 'Communist"..
Even pacifism he rendered frivolous.
In the First
World War it seemed an intelligent enough attitude---you a
just didn't see why all thesa people should be killeds
But in this war your oonsciénce was held up to ransom.
Were - you. actually prepared to. stand by while millions upon
millions of péople were slaughtened, on a strictly worked
out manufacturing basis, for the produotion of floor-felt,
soap and artifical manure? Every moment you deliberated
a few more hundred died. To remain a pacifist you needed


to harden yourself intelleotually, whkoh r was precisely what
the others---the: murderers---were doing.
There was no way
out. It wasn't. ehough to have an intellectual system.
Hitler broke through all that, in a worid that was. fast
coming to look iike a huge technical organisation. Even
now we feel a kind of hushed awe and dread at the sound of
his voice, touched
with
perhaps
a 'vague yearning and nostalgia,
like domestic animals who raise their heade and listen to a
wild ory in the distanoe.
Only afterwards did we begin to reckon up. what had
happened, and what-our hands; as: if disembodied from our
peaoeable, sooial selves, had been made to. do. Now, in
our period of recollection (rather quiet, however noisy our
teohnioal inventions,' and perhaps in inverse ratio to their
notse), we are wondering again about. the ends of life, beyond -
power and soafety. The world is no longer commodities,
wage-packets and intelleotual systems for the management of
men. Our religious past gives us all the questions we ask,
but we are denied any of the firm answers. We are surrounded
again by nystery. Technical power has explained nothing.
Upwards of. 16 million people died in the last war---most of
them in the most dreadful torture and pain---to keep that
mystery before us.