George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

War Delirium
Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in
the field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly
understand the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both
went through this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in
the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splen-
did talent and visions of a dawning millennium, crowned
him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. I do not know
whether anyone really kept his head completely except those
who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at
first hand. I should not have kept my own (as far as I did
keep it) if I had not at once understood that as a scribe and
speaker I too was under the most serious public obligation
to keep my grip on realities; but this did not save me from a
considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of course
some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all
political and general matters lying outside their little circle
of interest. But the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad,
the main symptom being a conviction that the whole order
of nature had been reversed. All foods, he felt, must now be
adulterated. All schools must be closed. No advertisements
must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions must
appear and be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must
be stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. All
pretences about fine art and culture and the like must be
flung off as an intolerable affectation; and the picture galler-
ies and museums and schools at once occupied by war work-
ers. The British Museum itself was saved only by a hair’s
breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much more which
would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be established
by one conclusive instance of the general craziness. Men were
seized with the illusion that they could win the war by giv-
ing away money. And they not only subscribed millions to
Funds of all sorts with no discoverable object, and to ridicu-

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12
Heartbreak House
lous voluntary organizations for doing what was plainly the
business of the civil and military authorities, but actually
handed out money to any thief in the street who had the
presence of mind to pretend that he (or she) was “collecting”
it for the annihilation of the enemy. Swindlers were
emboldened to take offices; label themselves Anti-Enemy
Leagues; and simply pocket the money that was heaped on
them. Attractively dressed young women found that they
had nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in
hand, and live gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed
before, as a first sign of returning sanity, the police swept an
Anti-Enemy secretary into prison pour encourages les autres,
and the passionate penny collecting of the Flag Days was
brought under some sort of regulation.