George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

Little Minds and Big Battles
Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public
feeling during the war unless they bear constantly in mind
that the war in its entire magnitude did not exist for the
average civilian. He could not conceive even a battle, much
less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing but a
suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a
series of bayonet fights between German champions and
English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond most of
us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a
railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any
effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombard-
ments of Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies,
and the battle of Jutland a mere ballad. The words “after
thorough artillery preparation” in the news from the front
meant nothing to us; but when our seaside trippers learned
that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end marine
hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his
egg-cup, their wrath and horror knew no bounds. They de-
clared that this would put a new spirit into the army; and
had no suspicion that the soldiers in the trenches roared with
laughter over it for days, and told each other that it would
do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the
army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was
pathetic. A man would work at home regardless of the call
“to make the world safe for democracy.” His brother would
be killed at the front. Immediately he would throw up his
work and take up the war as a family blood feud against the
Germans. Sometimes it was comic. A wounded man, en-
titled to his discharge, would return to the trenches with a
grim determination to find the Hun who had wounded him
and pay him out for it.
It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki
or out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a
whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge
of what war is. I doubt whether it was as high as our propor-
tion of higher mathematicians. But there can be no doubt

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GB Shaw
that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively
ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to
be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war,
and that this could not be done by appeals to a knowledge
which they did not possess, and a comprehension of which
they were incapable. When the armistice at last set me free
to tell the truth about the war at the following general elec-
tion, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was supporting,
“If I had known all that in 1914, they would never have got
me into khaki.” And that, of course, was precisely why it
had been necessary to stuff him with a romance that any
diplomatist would have laughed at. Thus the natural confu-
sion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately propagated
confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic non-
sense, which at last overreached itself and made it impos-
sible to stop the war before we had not only achieved the
triumph of vanquishing the German army and thereby over-
throwing its militarist monarchy, but made the very serious
mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing that no sane
European State could afford to do.