Mr. Britling Sees It Through

Peter Buitenhuis

As time wore on, writers and public alike knew the war would not soon end, and some of the most eager propagandists began to reflect more deeply. Among them was H. G. Wells, who had spent the early months of the war turning out article after article, mostly of a propagandistic nature. One of the most strident pieces he ever wrote-and one that returned to plague him in later years-was The War That Will End War, which he used as the title for a collection of his articles that he brought out early in 1915. That title became an ironic catch phrase for subsequent generations. Even at the time it raised some ridicule. G. K. Chesterton sagely remarked: "To tell a soldier defending his country that it is The War That Will End War is exactly like telling a workman, naturally rather reluctant to do his day's work that it is The Work That Will End Work."  But Wells the propagandist had in those early months of war entirely taken over from Wells the scientist and critic. "I was intensely indignant at the militarist drive in Germany," he admitted in his Autobiography and, as a convinced Republican. I saw in its onslaught the culminating expression of the monarchist idea. This said I in shrill jets of journalism is the logical outcome of your parades and uniforms! Now to fight the fighters." Shrillness is indeed the tone of The War That Will End War. There were to he no more Kaisers, no more Krupps, no more diplomacy after this war. It all sounds like a schoolboy released from school for the holidays.

 In The War That Will End War, Wells is obsessed with the importance of spreading his ideas. The King. the churches. and the press are not doing it. so somehody has to convince people that the business of the war is not killing men, who could be replaced, but killing ideas. In a doctrine later to be taken up and twisted by Goebbels and other Nazis, he writes: "The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the creation of others. It is to this propaganda that reasonable men must address themselves." And yet, underlying all this show of bravura is Wells's recurrent sense of nightmare. The pamphlet ends: "There have been moments in the last three weeks when life has been a waking nightmare, one of those frozen nightmares when, with salvation within one's reach, one cannot move, and the voice dies in one's throat."

H. G. Wells wrote many newspaper articles in support of the war effort in the course of the next year. He took a leading role in the pamphlet battle against pacifists and conscientious objectors. Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell were outraged by his unscrupulous attacks, and Clive Bell could not bear to meet Wells for years after the war. Wells also had a bitter row with Bernard Shaw over his pamphlet Common Sense about the War. On the other hand, as the campaign in Flanders settled into the stalemate of the trenches, his flood of articles and letters to the press began to bore him and he gradually lost his sense of certainty. He turned back to fiction as a means of conveying his ideas and emotions. Mr. Britling Sees It Through, published in 1916, was, he wrote in his Autobiography, an attempt to convey "not only the astonishment and the sense of tragic disillusionment in a civilized mind as the cruel facts of war rose steadily to dominate everything else in life, but also the passionate desire to find some immediate reassurance amidst that whirlwind of disaster."

 Mr. Britling Sees It Through is indeed a passionate book, perhaps the most deeply felt that Wells ever wrote. It found a large audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Lovat Dickson calls it 'demonstrably the most autobiographical of all his novels," and yet it brilliantly universalizes, in the creation of Mr. Britling, an intellectual, middle-class "little Briton," who sums up the thoughts and emotions felt by many of his kind in the opening months of the war. Matching's Easy, Britling's Georgian red-brick house, so like Wells's Easton Glebe, was also analogous to Shaw's Heartbreak House, an emblem of old England before the cataclysm of war.

The opening pages of the novel give a splendid picture of that leisured, secure England of June 1914, of long talks on shaven lawns, vigorous games, and prodigious meals. On the day of the assassination at Sarajevo, Britling says, " 'You see we live at the end of a series of secure generations in which none of the great things in life have changed materially. We've grown up with no sense of danger-that is to say, with no sense of responsibility. . . . All this-"Mr. Britling waved his arm comprehensively"-looks as though it was bound to go on steadily for ever. It seems incredible that the system could be smashed.' " The irresponsibility of his generation is later given metaphorical extension in Mr. Britling's remark that the English are 'everlasting children in an everlasting nursery."

 Mr. Britling's various activities as an artist, as an irresponsible driver, and as an adulterer symbolize the preoccupations of the Edwardian world, which are made to seem careless and self-indulgent. The opening of the book recapitulates the historic quarrel that Wells had had earlier with Henry James over the purpose of the novel. The war sharpened Wells's sense that the novel was something for use, not for the sake of art alone. The use of Mr. Britling Sees It Through was to clear the ground of the Victorian and Edwardian laxities which, Wells thought, had done so much to make the war possible. The most obvious symbol of that world was Claverings, the country house where imperious and incompetent members of the ruling class gather and make fatuous statements to each other. But Claverings is only part of a whole heedless society. Mr. Britling compares the even tenor of village life with the quick growth of preparations elsewhere to fight the war as reported in the newspapers: "It was a display in the sphere of thought and print immeasurably remote from the real green turf on which one walked, from the voice of the church bells . . . that sounded their ample caresses in one's ears from the clashing of the stags who were beginning to knock the velvet from their horns in the park, or the clatter of the butcher's cart and the respectful greetings of the butcher boy down the lane."' Even in the quiet activities of village life are the unperceived emblems of conflict and death, the rutting stags and the butcher's cart.

Sunk in his amours and concerns Mr. Britling has been unaware of the coming storm. The war wakes him up. and he goes through a series of visions and revisions about it. One of the earliest is the familiar one, best expressed by Edmund Gosse. that the war is somehow a cleansing draft, a reviver for a tired civilization. Such a mood leads Britling to the rapid writing of "And Now War Ends." But this facile view does not last long as the real nature of the war breaks in on Britling's consciousness. The immense German army sweeps down on France and Flanders, inflicts terrible defeats on the Allies, and supposedly commits unspeakable atrocities on the civilian population. The German people are shown to have a deep hatred for the English. Britling has thought that this is a war forced upon the world by the German ruling classes, but he is obliged to revise his views. His opinion of Germany as "a right pleasant people in a sunny land" cannot be reconciled with "the massacres at Dinant. the massacres at Louvain."'

Britling's involvement in the war becomes more immediate when his old aunt is killed in an air raid on a coastal town and he sees for the first time the real horror and stupidity of modern warfare. He becomes thirsty for vengeance. A different emotion takes over when, soon afterwards, his son enlists as a private, pretending that he is two years older than he is, and is soon one of the millions in the trenches. Wells's version of the war in Flanders is different from the one peddled by John Buchan. Britling becomes increasingly disillusioned with British leadership as his son writes him about what is going on at the front. After the failures in the Dardanelles and defeats and missed opportunities in Flanders, Britling concludes that the British staff work is poor and that all the amateurishness in the Army and the ruling class are coming home to roost. There is blundering, waste, incompetence, and a complete disdain for science and the imagination. The only minister who comes in for any praise from Mr. Britling is Winston Churchill.

As the stalemate drags on, Britling comes to be less and less sure of his moral grounds. He sees now that Germany is fighting with discipline, skill, patience, and steadfastness, with economy and science. On the other side, France is resolute, but Russia and England are careless, negligent, and uncertain. The war seems now essentially futile. A deep pessimism grips Britling's mind. He wonders whether the basis of life itself is evil.

 The crisis of the novel occurs when Britling's son is killed in action. Britling goes through a terrible, incommunicative period of loss and mourning before groping his way towards some kind of faith that can sustain him. He begins to dream of new world order, redraws the map, and plans means of eliminating wars forever. Soon afterwards, his former secretary is also reported killed. The secretary's young wife is inconsolable. She is convinced that there can be no God, or, if there is, he is like "some idiot who pulls off the wings of flies." Britling consoles her, assures her that there is some meaning in life, and, by his tinkering with a world atlas, persuades her that it is worth going on. He presents her with his God, not the outworn God of Christianity, but a brand new one, fit for the times, who can make sense of this strife-torn world. This is the God whom Wells promotes in God the Invisible King, his next book, "more like a senior N.C.O.," as Lovat Dickson has aptly put it, "able to commune with the Commanding Officer, but definitely representing the men."' Miraculously, at this point, the young ex-secretary appears, minus a hand. He has escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp.

 Then the German who had been tutor to Britling's sons is also reported killed. Britling sits down to frame a letter to the man's parents, in which he tries to justify and reconcile reality to 'these boys, these hopes, this war has killed."' He makes many false starts and revisions, and when he ends there is some doubt that he will ever send the letter. As he puts down the last, broken phrases and then thinks about the coming reign of God, dawn breaks and a distant worker 'whets his scythe." It is a suitably ambiguous ending for the novel, completed when the war was at its height, with no solution to its problems and horrors in view.

 Some things in Mr. Britling are far too pat, like the return of the ex-secretary on cue and the joining up of the American, Mr. Direck, in the Canadian army, which wins him the hand of the romantic heroine, Cicely. But these devices of plot are not of central importance to the working out of the main theme of the book-the evolution of a representative. intelligent mind in relation to the first two years of the war. Wells did not spare himself or his countrymen in the analysis of that mind. It is frequently childish or adolescent, veering rapidly from vacillation to resolution; it is often bombastic and self-deceiving. Yet that mind is always struggling towards a greater under standing of the self and the meaning of the war. Best of all. this is a mind shedding the habits and ideas of an outmoded world and grappling with the chaos and opportunities of the new.

Along the way, Wells is discarding some of his stereotypes in the attempt to see beyond the blind and sterile animosities of the war. Yet in the letter Britling writes to the parents of the dead German tutor of his sons, he expresses Well's continuing condemnation of Germany for almost solely starting the war and his sense that it must end in a complete Allied victory. At the same time. he still looks forward to a postwar world of reconciliation and kindness.

 Wells could continue to maintain such illusions because, in spite of his insights, he still had little idea of the nature of the war in Flanders. Robert Graves, on leave after seeing fierce fighting at the front in 1916, met Wells and records their unsatisfactory conversation. "At the Reform Club" Graves write "H. G. Wells, who was Mr. Britling in those days. and full of military optimism, talked without listening. He had just been taken for a 'Cook's Tour' to France. and staff conductors had shown him the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and influential neutrals were allowed to see. He described his experiences at length, and seemed unaware that I and Siegfried  Sassoon , who was with me, had also seen the sights.''  Nevertheless, Mr. Britling Sees It Through gave people in the United States and other nations a better understanding of the civilian view of the war than official propaganda.

From:  Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987), pp.120-24.