16
This ramifying group was extending its tentacles to associate itself with types of revolutionary activity that were either novel or had hitherto played a special disconnected role in human affairs. One of Bodisham's leading subdivisions within the great circle was the conception of a cosmopolitan pronunciamento. That would not be the Revolution but it would be an important factor in it. There is no revolution while armed forces remain loyal. Both he and Rud were alive to the truth that a few months' drill and a uniform do not make a mechanism of the common man, and now less than ever since warfare had been elaborated and diversified by an incessantly varying equipment. Rulers make wars, but soldiers, sailors, airmen and a complex of technicians carry them on and end in control.
The universal human question: "Why should I do this for that fellow when I might do it for myself?" was more alive than ever in the ranks of the armed and enrolled specialists throughout the world. There was a real psychological difference between the common man and the man in uniform during the eighteenth century, almost as different as the medieval distinctness of the man in armour, but conscription has undermined that antagonism. A small army is the ruler's weapon, but a great army becomes his master.
Bodisham produced voluminous instances of the revolutionary role of armies and fleets from the days of the successors of Alexander and the legion–made Caesars down to contemporary Germany; he was particularly erudite about Wallenstein and the condottieri, and about the political side of the Scotch and English armies during the seventeenth century. He invented a plausible history of the Janissaries and he quoted the parts played by the fleets of Turkey, Russia and Germany in reversing governments since 1900. There never had been a fleet, he insisted, without a mutter of mutiny.
Now a new fighting type, the airman, was appearing in the world, men necessarily of a wide geographical range, and all of them living under practically identical conditions. What could prevent their discovering that they had ideas in common, ideas that were totally different from the military traditions of the sovereign states that were so blandly assuming control of them.
"Even the Roman gladiators developed a solidarity of their own," said Bodisham. "The air is not really in the military tradition at all. It is something different and new. It refuses to lend itself to the soldier's tradition. It will develop its own tradition, quite across the old national boundaries." It was one of the less agreeable preoccupations of the military authorities in Britain and America, he pointed out, to keep "seditious" literature away from the "boys" upon the air grounds. "Which they don't," said Norvel, the Group propagandist. "Which they can't. The more you militarise a population, the less purely military the soldier becomes. The more he is amenable to common–sense propaganda."
They found two vividly contrasted organisers for the common–sense propaganda among the military forces of the State, in Reedly, a disgruntled military genius and expert, with a gathering animus against all constituted authority, based on some personal grievance of his own against what he called the "privileged set", and Bellacourt, a brilliant and quite disinterested aeronautical engineer, who had served on the government side in the Spanish Civil War and acquired an intense hatred of any kind of bombing. Both had great energy and organising ability, and neither was in complete harmony with the Rud–Bodisham–Chiffan–Steenhold gospel. But they co–operated on "parallel independent" lines. Bella–court was a slight, very fair, taciturn, slow–thinking man, but Reedly was a fine big figure of a soldier, built for a uniform and with a big Kitchener moustache. He was conscious of his abilities and impatient of what he thought to be inferior opinions. This disposition, rather than any particular act, had hampered his promotion. He came into the Group now as if he was leading in an army. He came in with the almost naked purpose of showing the authorities what a mistake they had made about him. He meant to use the Group. Rud knew he was taking a risk with him. It was to be remarked afterwards that Rud rarely interrupted Reedly while he was talking, and that he watched his man even when he was taking no part in the discussion.
Bellacourt, Rud realised early, was a man of one idea. He wanted to take the air right out of national jurisdiction altogether, and to make it a sort of separate world of transport by itself. He was clear that this new mode of locomotion was quite outside the current scheme of human life, but from that point his ideas were in a sort of luminous fog. He wanted to isolate the air just as Bendigo wanted to isolate the British Empire. He had, he said, been studying the problem of the air for years, but his "studying" had meant little more than writing and inducing others to write a stream of pamphlets advocating what he called an "International Air Force". By "international" he meant "cosmopolitan", but in those days "cosmopolitan", for some obscure literary reason, was regarded as a rude word, and "international" was always used instead. He did not discuss how or why any existing government was to be induced to abandon its control of its aviators and machines, and this omission prevented any but a few salaried secretaries, benevolent spinsters and the minor clergy from supporting his amiable proposals.
Bellacourt was a good airman and an inventive mechanician; he had fought and he had tried to carry out a scheme of air photography for the government side in the Spanish War, based on Crawford's work, but conditions had not been favourable to that. Before and after that experience he had played a considerable part, both as an experimentalist and as a financier, in the development of civil air transport. He was a man who did things rather than thought, and his political and social ideas had remained at an almost puerile level for years. "You just have to have an International Air Control", and that was as far as he had got. He really believed that existing governments might agree to abandon air war.
Then something happened, some sort of afflatus, and his mind took on a new power and energy. Perhaps in some pause in his activities he had read a book or listened to someone, but at any rate he discovered quite abruptly that the problem he had thought a simple one was complicated in a great number of ways he had disregarded, and particularly was it complicated by the fact that nobody with any power to carry out his suggestions showed the slightest disposition to do so. Once his mind was stirred he could be a man of great practical determination. He came round to Headquarters.
"I want a World Control of Aviation. Apparently that is impossible without a revolution and a World State. I gather your movement is out for that. Tell me about it." That was his simple introduction of himself to Rud and Bodisham.
Rud sat back observant and let Bodisham explain.
The only way to make the aviation of the world a common world interest, Bodisham explained, was to make every aviator in the air services you could possibly convert, a believer in a Common World Law and an opponent of nationalism. Bellacourt found this a hard saying, and sat with a frown of perplexity on his fair, not unhandsome face, one arm over the arm of his chair, resisting it.
"I thought one might have world peace without this Red stuff—simply through neutralising the air," he said, almost as if he complained of them.
Bodisham elaborated his arguments. He and Rud were not "Reds", he explained, and added under his breath, "Whatever Reds may be"…
Rud suggested that Bellacourt should go away for a week and discuss his problem with everybody he met, the more anti–Red the better. "You will find World Peace is only a single problem if you deal with it as a whole," he said. "Then it becomes one and ultimately indivisible. But you cannot deal with any part of it—air union or what not—as a thing in itself. If other things are not also going on at the same time, you will never get anywhere with that. That is no reason, of course, why you personally should not specialise absolutely upon the question of the air. But in co–operation. We want you with us. We want a man like you badly. We want an organiser of Common–sense and Common Humanity in the Air. Just as we want someone to create a parallel organisation in the shipping and in the war material industries. For any service or industry or function, the real necessity is the same. In each case you have to saturate the personnel with identical clear ideas of their individual responsibility. You have to free their minds from blind obedience. We want World–minded Airmen. There is no need for any politics at all for you, and no need for anyone to advocate this air solidarity of yours outside the air forces—and the schools and technical schools and factories that lead to the air. But all the same it will be in line with everything else we are doing."
Bellacourt came back at the end of his week.
"I believe you are right," said Bellacourt compactly. "I have thought it out. This air business is not to be done by itself. It has to be done. I will join you for the sake of that."
Rud took a curious interest in Bellacourt's simplicity and directness. It was something he had never met before to quite the same extent. He talked to Chiffan about it. "Do you think machines make men honest?" he said.
"They never take refuge in sentiment or rhetoric," said Chiffan, "and if you try and cheat them they pay you back right away. Whenever a machine goes wrong—it's you."
"Bellacourt seems to me a machine–made man."
"I never saw anyone less like a Robot."
"But Robots," said Rud, "were man–made machines. I never felt so sure I could trust anyone in my life—as Bellacourt."
"This to your oldest friend!"
"Bellacourt has no sense of humour," said Rud.