I have read a lot of A.A. Milne’s work this year. I have read his autobiography, original plays and adaptations, a children’s book, articles from his days at Punch, even wartime poetry…I have not so much sampled his work as attacked it, attempting to conquer as much as I could as quickly as possible. It has been a delightful assault but none of it quite prepared me for Peace with Honour. It is shockingly different from the rest of his work and I think that it is his best book – certainly his most important.
Published in 1934, Peace with Honour is Milne’s plea for pacifism. None of his other books can come close to matching the passion with which he pleads his cause, his earnestness as he attempts to challenge his audience’s belief in the usefulness and inevitability of war. He had been a pacifist even before his experiences during the First World War but his time in France certainly brought home the pointless wastefulness of it all and the contrast between the sentimental attitudes in Britain towards the war and its soldiers and the horrifying reality influenced him greatly. As the 1930s began, with fascism and its accompanying militarism spreading in continental Europe, he wanted to challenge his reader’s notions about the purpose and value of war and ensure that the attitudes that had propelled them into the First World War were routed:
It is because I want everybody to think (as I do) that war is poison, and not (as so many think) an over-strong, extremely unpleasant medicine, that I am writing this book.
Milne argues clearly, intelligently and even amusingly in the best rhetorical tradition, laying out what he views as the obstructions to pacifism and then slicing through them with a blend of factual and emotional arguments. There is nothing particularly calm or cool about his writing: you have no doubt that this is a book he poured his soul into. It is literally a matter of life and death and it roused all his emotions. He knew his aim was idealistic and ambitious, that it would upset people and be next to impossible to implement universally, but he had to try. With the lives of future soldiers and civilians on his mind, with their deaths on his conscience, he had to try:
Nations fight in order to bring about the complete surrender of the conquered to the will of the conqueror. That surrender is obtained by deliberate ‘slaughter and ruin.’ The last war involved women and children and the accumulated wealth of civilisation in slaughter and ruin. The next war will involve them in a much greater slaughter and ruin. This seems to be a good reason for making the next war impossible. It does not seem to be a good reason for saying: ‘Can’t we agree to make the next war a nice war like the last war?’
Milne looks at the reasons nations go to war (material gain, honour, prestige, pride), the doubtful role of religion and morality, and, what seems to gall him most, the romantic conventions that surround war, even after the senseless slaughters of the First World War. People wishing to commemorate their fallen heroes at sanitized memorials, ignoring the lingering deaths and crippling disfigurements that moved far beyond the battlefields, rouse all his anger:
We know […] that, of the casualties of the last war, not all were killed on the battlefield; that hundreds and thousands died painfully of wounds – in bed; that hundreds of thousands died slowly of gas-poisoning or disease – in bed. Yet the sentimentalist, knowing this, still visualises death in war as something which comes cleanly and swiftly and mercifully, leaving its victim no more time for awareness than is necessary for a last message to his mother.
Milne is horrified that such thinking could have survived the war. That people can still find ways to justify war as noble when they know how ignobly soldiers died less than twenty years before shocks him. He has no time for the heroes these people speak of and no stomach for tributes to the glorious dead, who in death have been named as heroes through no act of bravery or impressive accomplishment, simply by virtue of their having died while in military service:
A man is indeed a hero if, longing for life, he accepts death of his own will. How many heroes do we commemorate each year? How many of the ‘immortal dead’ have deliberately died for their country?
Neither in its origins nor in its conduct is war heroic. Splendidly heroic deeds are done in war, but not by those responsible for its conduct, and not exclusively and inevitably by the dead. Of the ten million men who were killed in the last war, more than nine million had to fight whether they wanted to or not, and of these nine million some eight million did nothing heroic whatever before they were killed. They are no more ‘immortal’ than a linen-draper who is run over by a lorry; their deaths were no more ‘pleasant’ and ‘fitting’ than the death of a stockbroker in his bath.
Milne is adamant throughout the book that there is no such thing as a just cause for war. Ever. Oh, the irony. At the end of the book, Milne accuses the world’s leaders and opinion makers of lacking the imagination to envision a world where all the nations of the earth could agree to universal peace. But Milne also lacked imagination: he could not conceive of circumstances under which he would condone war and yet by the end of the 1930s, his hatred of Hitler was so intense that he was a full supporter of war.
What changed? When Milne wrote Peace with Honour, he was thinking of and fighting against the idea of war as a way to resolve an argument between two or more nations, usually over territory or resources or – worse – a matter of pride. These were wars where there was economic value at stake or emotional value but never anything of real worth – nothing that one could objectively judge as right or wrong. One nation wanted something another had and so they tried to take it. One nation wanted to appear stronger or become larger so they attacked another. An oppressed group wanted freedom so they fought their oppressor. Those were the only kinds of war the world knew and that was what Milne reacted against. These were not causes worth dying for and, more importantly, they were causes that could easily (if perhaps more slowly) be settled by diplomatic rather than violent means. If Hitler had just been another Napoleon, intent on creating an empire, I think Milne would have remained a pacifist. But Hitler wasn’t another Napoleon. For Milne, it became a battle of Good versus Evil.
Milne actually examines the rise of fascism here but his conclusions are very, very wrong. He believed that fascism by definition requires a war-like mentality of aggression and absolute obedience – true enough – but he thought that Hitler’s intention was more to unite and control his population than launch attacks on other countries. Instead, the only thing Milne was correct in thinking was that fascism in either Germany or Italy would not survive another European war:
…however completely Fascist leaders may seem to have forgotten the horrors of the last war, we may be sure that the supreme horror of war is vividly in their minds: the knowledge that those who lead their country to Armageddon have no chance of surviving defeat and but little hope of enjoying victory. Nothing is more certain in the uncertain future of Europe than that, if Fascist Germany or Fascist Italy is involved in the next war, it will not a Fascist Germany or a Fascist Italy which will come out of it. Even if (which is unlikely) civilisation survives that war; even if Germany is still a nation and Italy is still a nation; it is absolutely certain that there will be no Hitler, neither will there be any Mussolini, who will direct their destinies.
Knowing the violence with which Milne opposed Hitler, it was fascinating to read this and attempt to reconcile Milne’s passionate pacifism with his later Churchill-esque zeal for war. It is surprising how easy that is to do. He lays out his arguments so clearly, illustrates them with such approachable examples and analogies, that you are never in doubt as to what he believes and what he thinks is right and it is easy then to see how he could have viewed the war against Nazism as just.
There were so many other passages I wish I could have quoted but that is the kind of book this is. Milne’s arguments are extraordinarily well done, so passionate, so heart-felt and so well-written. It is an idealistic and overly hopeful book, especially in light of what was going on elsewhere in Europe at the time, but it is persuasive. If I could only pick one of Milne’s books to share with other readers, this would be it.
The Captive Reader 