George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

The Long Arm of War
The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war
was called influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence
or not was made doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in
places remote from the battlefields, notably on the west coast
of North America and in India. But the moral pestilence,
which was unquestionably a war pestilence, reproduced this
phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever
would have raged most furiously in the countries actually
under fire, and that the others would be more reasonable.
Belgium and Flanders, where over large districts literally not
one stone was left upon another as the opposed armies drove
each other back and forward over it after terrific preliminary
bombardments, might have been pardoned for relieving their
feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their shoul-
ders and saying, “C’est la guerre.” England, inviolate for so
many centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads
had long ceased to be more credible than a return of the
Flood, could hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet
when she knew at last what it was to hide in cellars and un-
derground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst

---

14
Heartbreak House
bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distrib-
uted shrapnel on friend and foe alike until certain shop win-
dows in London, formerly full of fashionable hats, were filled
with steel helmets. Slain and mutilated women and children,
and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a good deal of vio-
lent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go
down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of
America where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the
war fever went beyond all sense and reason. In European
Courts there was vindictive illegality: in American Courts
there was raving lunacy. It is not for me to chronicle the
extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do that.
I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England,
with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in
the air as unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tight-
ening hearts studying the phases of the moon in London in
their bearing on the chances whether our houses would be
standing or ourselves alive next morning, the newspaper ac-
counts of the sentences American Courts were passing on
young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions
which were being uttered amid thundering applause before
huge audiences in England, and the more private records of
the methods by which the American War Loans were raised,
were so amazing that they put the guns and the possibilities
of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.