5

In this story of Rud's career we are happily free to ignore the intricate controversies that centre about the riddle of what Right and Left or Red or Fascist or the "authoritarian" and the "democratic" state really signified at any particular time and place.

There is an immense literature on the subject, abundantly unread, but still being patiently added to by the erudite. This material is subjected to micro–photography, indexed and so put away out of danger, with so much more of the excessive material of this age of excessive record. It is doubtful if it will ever find any useful application. It goes on and on. It is like Christian theology; it is like the bubbling of salted snails in a pail.

The fact remains that by the fifth decade of the twentieth century there was still a sufficient air of alignment between the two factions for formal diplomacy, alliance and secret treaties to continue. On the one hand, the confused mentalities of the groups, classes and individuals in positions of authority and possession were all sufficiently apprehensive of an advancing rationalisation of human affairs which would call them to account, to be consolidated in a general defensive offensive against something called "Democracy" or "Leftism" or "Reds" or "The Devil"; while on the other a certain number of governments, the so–called "democracies", were less able to make head against the expression of the renascence of common–sense Radicalism and had to pay at least lip–service to the creative forces of the world. The profound and subtle ambiguity of Russia, a fanatical bureaucracy professing the supremacy of the proletariat, sprawled perplexingly, with its internecine feuds and recriminations, across this complex of human interpretations. And still imposed upon the whole fermenting mass were the old boundaries, the old Foreign Offices, the old military and naval traditions, doddering and yet dangerous, that had so astonishingly survived the Great War of 1914–1918.

With a futile sense of complete reassurance the official mind found itself at last definitely at war again. There were actual declarations of war quite like old times. "Who said war was over?" the old order demanded, scared but glad.

"Now we know where we are," they said, when as a matter of fact they knew less than ever where they were. The city crowds cheered, the armies went tanking forward, the expensive navies, according to the best naval traditions, hid from each other in remote inlets behind powerful booms, the bulletins lied even when there was no object in their lying, the planes roared overhead, the bombs crashed, the cities burst, people ran this way and that, clapped on silly gas masks and crowded out inadequate shelters until they were squashed or smashed or suffocated or starved, many millions of living, feeling, human beings were converted into red pulps and messes, and the Great War of the Ideologies moved on for a time, according to the best precedents, to no perceptible objective whatever. For the first six or seven months there was a tornado of battle. Everywhere one was at the front, so to speak, and the entire planet practically under fire. The tale of destruction is as monstrous as it is frightful; it baffled piety, it mocked heroics, philosophy refuses to entertain it, its records remain unread; only very old gentlemen who were in it con that history now for purposes of reminiscence; with a natural human callousness life has gone on and the dead past has buried its dead. Yet even at the time there was a certain amount of cheerfulness, a sense of adventure successfully surmounted, among those who survived. Many of those engaged in these conflicts were too excited to be distressed by their sufferings. Great accumulations of men and war material came into collision and remained in conflict for days and weeks with much slaughter and destruction; and the contemporary historian, trying, at any cost to the truth, to keep up his continuity with the past, called them "battles" and even explained what advantages were gained by them and how, in a technical sense, they decided this or that.

The land war ebbed before the first year was out. In the previous world war there had been a vast accumulation of material wealth to draw upon, and from the beginning to end the supply of men and material increased, to the universal amazement, as though there was no limit to human resources. But the War of the Ideologies followed quite a different course. It began almost at a maximum of equipment, and with populations incapable of much further effort and sacrifice. Armament deteriorated very rapidly at last; instead of the crescendo of 1914–18, there was a more and more perceptible diminuendo. Essential substances were giving out. Makeshift came into its own in the fighting line and famine spread behind it. And then came mutiny. The men of the dwindling air forces, urged to go up in less and less trustworthy machines, and the people in the overstrained munition factories, increasingly dangerous as skilled workers became rarer and material degenerated, passed from reluctance to sabotage and flat refusal.

The European "authoritarian" warships so far overcame the battle–shyness of their crews as to put to sea in order to sweep the Atlantic; and their allies, the Japanese, got across the Pacific to shell and partially destroy San Francisco, cover a futile landing at Panama and another at Valparaiso, round Cape Horn, effect a sort of junction with the authoritarians after the destruction of Gibraltar, and fight that confused series of heroic rearguard engagements known as the Battle of the South Atlantic. For nearly a week the battleships of the world, those magnificent pieces of lethal engineering, careered about the seas, greatly afflicted by aeroplanes and submarines, and a bent and battered remnant got back to shelter again. And there it became manifest to the horrified captains that that was where their men intended to remain until the war was over.

Naval strategy became more and more a business of concealing this reality from the opposite side. That last naval war was indeed much more like a panic in a contentious Mothers' Meeting with a wasps' nest upset and mice on the floor, than it was to any of the set naval conflicts of the past. It was monstrous and tragic but also it was intensely ridiculous. After the surviving warships had been tucked away again out of harm's way, the residue of admirals on both sides went ashore, launched into authorship, and after a prolonged campaign, produced the curves of that truncated conflict to fully demonstrated victories. Everybody who had not been drowned or blown out of the water and had escaped to tell the tale, discovered that he and his side had won. The more these gallant survivors wrote, the completer their victories became. There are people who still find an interest in these highly technical discussions.