G.B. SHAW ON THE WAR

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2358, 14 January 1915, Page 8

G.B. SHAW ON THE WAR

SMART SAYINGS WHICH HAVE MADE HIM , UNPOPULAR We have had it from the cable news that- George Bernard Shaw has been writing things which have riled the English. We publish some of hin recent statements—typical Shavian sentiments —which will satisfy most New Zealanders that tho English have good reason to be angry. When the German fire-eaters drank to The Day (of Armageddon) they were ,*o ths day bf. which our Navy League fire-eaters had first said "It's bound to come." Therefore, let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian Wolf and the British. Lamb, the Prussian Machiavelli and the English Evangelist. We cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog breed, and then suddenly pose as gazelles. No. When Europe and America come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for, America is concerned in it as much as.we are), they will not deal with us as,the lovable and innocent .victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly pugnacious and inveterably snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one another for forty years, with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and aro now rolling over with their teeth in oue another's throats, aro to bo tamed into trusty watchdogs of tho peace of the world. lam sorry to spoil the saintly image with a halo which the British Jingo journalist sees just now when he looks in the glass; but it must be done if we ate to behave reasonably in the imminent day of reckoning. Britain's Duty. None the less, Mr. Shaw throws the immediate responsibility for the war chiefly on Austria and Germany: The ultimatum to Servia was the escapade of a dotard; a worse crime than the assassination that provoked it. . . . Peace was really on the cards; and the sane game was to play for it. Instead, Germany flew at France's throat, and by incidentally invading Belgium gave us :the excuse . our Militarists wanted to attack her with the full sympathy of the: nation. , What, then, was England to do? -Now comes the question, in what position did this Tesult of a mad theory and a hopelessly incompetent applica-tion-of it on the part of Potsdam place our own Government? It left us quite clearly in the position of the responsible policeman of the west. There was nobody else in Europe strong enough to chain "the mad dog." "It was evidently," says Mr. Shaw, "England or nobody. There was no alternative.' Mr. Shaw, like Mr.' Wells, regards the present war as a war on war:— We are supporting .the war as a war on war, on military coercion, on domineering, on bullying, on brute force, on military law, on caste insolence, on what Mrs. Fawcett called insensate devilry (only to find the papers explaining apologetically that she,- as a lady, had of course been alluding to war made by foreigners, not by England). Some oi us, remembering the things we have ourselves said and done, may doubt whether Satan can cast out Satan; but as the job is not exactly one for an unfallen angel, we may as well let him have a try. Hegemony of Peace. As for the settlement of the war, it must lead to a Hegemony of Peace:— In the West I see no insuperable obstacle to a Treaty of Peace in the largest sense. This war: has smoothed the way to it. . . . We cannot smash or disable' Germany, however completely we may defeat her, because we can do that only by killing her women,' and it is trifling to pretend that we are capable of any such villainy. Even to embarrass her financially by looting her would recoil on ourselves, ua she is olio of our commercial customers and one of our most frequently visited neighbours. . . . We and France have to live with Germany after the war, and the sooner we make up our mind to do it generously the better. The word after the 'fight must be sans ranoune, for without peace between France, Germany, and England there can be no peace in the world! One of the most characteristically Shavian passages in this witty and provocative thesis is that in which the Kaiser is pictured as the theatrical figurehead of Prussian militarism: — It is frightful to think of the powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands of this Peter Pan, and appalling as the results of that criminal levity have been, yet, beine by no means free from his romantic follies myself, I do not feel harshly towards Peter, who, after all, kept the peace for over twentysix years. In the end his talk and his games of soldiers in preparation for a toy conquest of the world frightened his neighbours into a league against him, and that league has now caught him in just such a trap as his strategists were laying for his neighbours.