George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

Plague on Both your Houses!
Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on
the foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshe-
vists may be buried in the ruins, their deaths will not save
the edifices. Unfortunately they can be built again. Like
Doubting Castle, they have been demolished many times by
successive Greathearts, and rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and
Presumption, by Feeble Mind and Much Afraid, and by all
the jurymen of Vanity Fair. Another generation of “second-
ary education” at our ancient public schools and the cheaper
institutions that ape them will be quite sufficient to keep the
two going until the next war. For the instruction of that gen-
eration I leave these pages as a record of what civilian life was
during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent.
Fortunately it was a very short war. It is true that the people
who thought it could not last more than six months were
very signally refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas Haig has
pointed out, its Waterloos lasted months instead of hours.
But there would have been nothing surprising in its lasting
thirty years. If it had not been for the fact that the blockade
achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe, which it

---

27
GB Shaw
could not possibly have done had Europe been properly or-
ganized for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted
until the belligerents were so tired of it that they could no
longer be compelled to compel themselves to go on with it.
Considering its magnitude, the war of 1914-18 will certainly
be classed as the shortest in history. The end came so sud-
denly that the combatant literally stumbled over it; and yet
it came a full year later than it should have come if the
belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to
face the situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to pro-
vide for the war she began, failed again to surrender before
she was dangerously exhausted. Her opponents, equally im-
provident, went as much too close to bankruptcy as Ger-
many to starvation. It was a bluff at which both were bluffed.
And, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful whether
Germany and Russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers;
for the victors are already busy fastening on themselves the
chains they have struck from the limbs of the vanquished.