# Mr. Punch's History of the Great War/Epilogue

EPILOGUE
IT remains to trace in brief retrospect the record of "the months between"—a period of test and trial almost as severe as that of the War.
Having steadfastly declined the solution of a Peace without Victory, the Allies entered last November on the transitional period of Victory without Peace. The fighting was ended in the main theatres of war, the Kaiser and Crown Prince, discrowned and discredited, had sought refuge in exile, the great German War machine had been smashed, and demobilisation began at a rate which led to inevitable congestion and disappointment. The prosaic village blacksmith was not far out when, in reply to the vicar's pious hope that the time had come to beat our sword into a ploughshare, he observed, "Well, I don't know, sir. Speaking as a blacksmith of forty-five years' experience, I may tell you it can't be done." "The whole position is provisional," said the Times at the end of November. If Germany, Austria, and Russia were to be fed, how was it to be done without disregarding the prior claims of Serbia and Roumania? Even at home the food question still continued to agitate the public mind.
The General Election of December, 1918, which followed the dissolution of the longest Parliament since the days of Charles II., was a striking, if temporary proof, of the persistence of the rationing principle. It proved a triumph for the Coalition "Coupon" and for Mr. Lloyd George; the extremists and Pacificists were snowed under; Mr. Asquith was rejected and his followers reduced to a mere handful; Labour came back with an increased representation, though not as great as it desired or deserved. The triumph of the irreconcilables in Ireland was a foregone but sinister conclusion to their activities in the War, and an ominous prelude to their subsequent efforts to wreck the Peace. The pledges in regard to indemnities, the ​treatment of the Kaiser, and conscription so lavishly given by the Coalition Leaders caused no little misgiving at the time, and pledges, like curses, have an awkward way of coming home to roost. Mr. Punch's views on the Kaiser, expressed in his
"Don't you think we ought to hang the Kaiser, Mrs. 'Arris?"
"It ain't the Kaiser I'm worrying about—it's the bloke what interjuiced this war-bacon."
Christmas Epilogue, are worth recalling. Mr. Punch did not clamour for the death penalty, or wish to hand him over to the tender mercies of German Kultur. "The only fault he committed in German eyes is that he lost the War, and I wouldn't have him punished for the wrong offence—for something, indeed, which was our doing as much as his. No, I think I would just put him out of the way of doing further harm, in some distant penitentiary like the Devil's Island, and leave him to himself to think it all over; as Caponsacchi said of Guido in 'The Ring and the Book':
Not to die so much as slide out of life, Pushed by the general horror and common hate Low, lower—left o' the very edge of things."
Christmas, 1918, was more than "the Children's Truce." ​Our bugles had "sung truce," the war cloud had lifted, the invaded sky was once more free of "the grim geometry of Mars," and though very few households could celebrate the greatest of anniversaries with unbroken ranks, the mercy of
REUNITED
Strasbourg, December 8th, 1918.
reunion was granted to many homes. Yet Mr. Punch, in his Christmas musings on the solemn memory of the dead who gave us this hour, could not but realise the greatness of the task that lay before us if we were to make our country worthy of the men who fought and died for her. The War was over, but another had yet to be waged against poverty and sordid environment; against the disabilities of birth; against the abuse ​of wealth; against the mutual suspicions of Capital and Labour; against sloth, indifference, self-complacency, and short memories.
So the Old Year passed, the last of a terrible quinquennium, bringing grounds for thankfulness and hope along with the promise of unrest and upheaval: with Alsace-Lorraine reunited to France, with the British army holding its Watch on the Rhine, and with all eyes fixed on Paris, the scene of the Peace Conference, already invaded by an international army of delegates, experts, advisers, secretaries, typists, 500 American journalists, and President Wilson.
Great Expectations and their Tardy Fulfilment, thus in headline fashion might one summarise the story of 1919, with Peace, the world's desire, waiting for months outside the door of the Conference Chamber, with civil war in Germany, Berlin bombed by German airmen, and anarchy in Russia, and here at home impatience and discomfort, aggravated in the earlier months by strikes and influenza, the largely increased numbers of unemployed politicians, the weariest and dreariest of winter weather.
RECONSTRUCTION: A NEW YEAR'S TASK
​sort was that of the Sinn Fein prisoners, which gave rise to the rumour that the Lord Lieutenant had threatened that if they destroyed any more jails they would be rigorously released. Sinn Fein, which refused to fight Germany, had already begun to play at a new sort of war. Australia was preparing to welcome the homing transports sped with messages of Godspeed from the Motherland:
Rich reward your hearts shall hold, None less dear if long delayed, For with gifts of wattle-gold Shall your country's debt be paid; From her sunlight's golden store She shall heal your hurts of war.
Ere the mantling Channel's mist Dim your distant decks and spars, And your flag that victory kissed And Valhalla hung with stars— Crowd and watch our signal fly: "Gallant hearts, good-bye! Good-bye!"
THE 1919 MODEL
Mr. Punch: "They've given you a fine new machine, Mr. Premier, and you've got plenty of spirit, but look out for bumps."
"How was it you never let your mother know you'd won the V.C.?"
"It wasna ma turrn tae write."
not prepared to intervene in force, and they could not leave Russia to stew in her own hell-broth. Meanwhile the chief criminal, Germany, had begun to utter ad misericordiam appeals for the relaxation of the Armistice terms on the score of their cruelty; and Count Brockdorff-Rantzau gave us a fore-taste of his quality by declaring that "Germany cannot be treated as a second-rate nation."
ENGLAND EXPECTS
(With Mr. Punch's best hopes for the success of the National Industrial Conference.)
Both Lions (together): "Unaccustomed as I am to lie down with anything but a lamb, still, for the sake of the public good . . ."
​At home, though the rays of "sweet unrationed revelry" were still to come, and Dulce Domum could not yet be sung in every sense, February brought us some relief in the demobilisation of the pivotal pig. And the decision to hold a National Industrial Conference was of encouraging augury for the settlement of industrial strife on the basis of a full inquiry and frank statement of facts. In other walks of life reticence still has its charms, and even in February people had begun to ask who the General was who had threatened not to write a book about the War.
March, the mad month, remained true to type. Even Mr. Punch found it hard to preserve his equanimity:
O Month, before your final moon is set Much may have happened—anything, in fact; More than in any March that I have met (Last year excepted) fearful nerves are racked; Anarchy does with Russia what it likes; Paris is put conundrums very knotty; And here in England, with its talk of strikes, Men, like your own March hares, seem going dotty.
Abroad the ex-Kaiser was very busy sawing trees, possibly owing to an hallucination that they were German Generals.
At home the Government decided to release such of the Sinn Fein prisoners as had not already saved them the trouble, and a Coal Industry Commission was appointed on which no representative of the general public was invited to sit—that is to say, the patient, much enduring consumer, not the public which has all along sought to discount peace by premature whooping, jubilating, and Jazzing. For the Dove of Peace, though in strict training, seemed in danger of collapsing under the weight of the League of Nations' olive bough, to say nothing of other perils, notably the Bolshy-bird, a most obscene brand of vulture.
THE EASTER OFFERING
Mr. Lloyd George (fresh from Paris): "I don't say it's a perfect egg, but parts of it, as the saying is, are excellent."
​regard to indemnities as being to demand the largest amount that Germany could pay, but not to demand what we knew she couldn't pay. It would have saved him a great deal of trouble if at the General Election the Government spokesmen had insisted as much upon the second half of the policy as they did on the first. Earnest appeals for economy were made from the
OVERWEIGHTED
President Wilson: "Here's your olive branch. Now get busy."
Dove of Peace: "Of course, I want to please everybody, but isn't this a bit thick?"
Treasury Bench on the occasion of the debate on the Civil Service Estimates, now swollen to five times their pre-war magnitude, and were heartily applauded by the House. To show how thoroughly they had gone home, Mr. Adamson, the Labour Leader, immediately pressed for an increase in the salaries of Members of Parliament.
​On the Rhine the efforts of our army of occupation to present the stern and forbidding air supposed to mark our dealings with the inhabitants were proving a lamentable failure. You can't produce a really good imitation of a Hun without lots of practice. Gloating is entirely foreign to the nature of
HOW TO BRIGHTEN THE PERIOD OF REACTION
Mother (to son who has fought on most of the Fronts): "Don't you know what to do with yourself, George? Why don't you 'ave a walk down the road, dear?"
Father: "Ah, 'e ain't seen the corner where they pulled down Simmondses' fish-shop, 'as 'e, Ma?"
Thomas Atkins, and he could not pass a child yelling in the gutter without stooping to comfort it. At home his education was proceeding on different lines. The period of reaction had set in, and unwonted exertions were necessary to stimulate his interest. Such artless devices were, however, preferable to the pastime, already fashionable in more exalted circles, of kicking a total stranger round the room to the accompaniment of cymbals, a motor siren, and a frying pan.
​After a month of madness it was not to be wondered at that we should have a month of muzzling, though the enforcement of the order might have been profitably extended from dogs to journalists. The secrecy maintained by the Big Four—a phrase invented by America—the conflict of the idealists with the realists, and the temporary break-away of the Italian wrestler, Orlando, were bound to excite comment. But a shattered world could not be rebuilt in a day, with Bolshevist wolves prowling about the Temple of Peace, and the Dove at sea between the Ark and Archangel. The Covenant of the League of Nations, though in a diluted form, had at last taken shape, the Peace Machine had got a move on, and the Premier's spirited, if not very dignified, retaliation on the newspaper snipers led to an abatement of unnecessary hostilities, though the pastime of shooting policemen with comparative impunity still flourished in Ireland, and the numbers and cost of our "army of inoccupation" still continued to increase. Innumerable queries were made in Parliament on the subject of the unemployment dole, but the announcement that the Admiralty did not propose to perpetuate the title "Grand Fleet" for the principal squadron of His Majesty's Navy passed without comment. The Grand Fleet is now a part of the History that it did so much to make.
May and June were "hectic" months, in which the reaction from the fatigues and restraints of War found vent in an increased disinclination for work, encouraged by a tropical sun. These were the months of the resumption of cricket, the Victory Derby, the flood of honours, and the flying of the Atlantic, with a greater display of popular enthusiasm over the gallant airmen who failed in that feat than over the generals who had won the War. They were also the months of the duel between Mr. Smillie and the Dukes, the discovery of oil in Derbyshire, the privileged excursion into War polemics of Lord French, unrest in Egypt, renewed trouble with the police, and a shortage of beer, boots and clothes.
"END OF A PERFECT 'TAG.'"
​with the advent of the German delegates, more than ever riveted the gaze of an expectant world. To sign or not to sign, or, in the words of Wilhelm Shakespeare, Sein oder nicht sein: hier ist die Frage—that was the problem which from the moment of his famous opening speech Count Brockdorff-Rantzau was up against. But, as the days wore on, in spite of official impenitence and the double breach of the Armistice terms by the scuttling of the German war-ships at Scapa and the burning of the French flags at Berlin, the force of "fierce reluctant truculent delay" was spent against the steadily growing volume of national acquiescence, culminating in the decision of the Weimar Assembly, the tardy choice of new delegates, and the final scene in the Hall of Mirrors, haunted by the ghosts of 1871.
Writing at the moment of the Signature of Peace and in deep thankfulness for the relief it brings to a stricken world, Mr. Punch is too old to jazz for joy, but he is young enough to face the future with a reasoned optimism, born of a belief in his race and their heroic achievements in these great and terrible years. Victory took us by surprise; and we were less prepared for Peace at that moment than we had ever been for War. And just as in the first days of the fighting we went astray, running after the cry "Business as usual," so to-day we are making as bad a mistake when we run after "Pleasure as usual"—or rather more than usual. But we soon revised that early error, and we shall not waste much time about revising this. For though we lacked imagination then, and still lack it, we have the gift, perhaps even more useful if less showy, of commonsense. And when commonsense is found in natures that are honest and hearts that are clean, it may make mistakes, but not for long. No, the spirit which won the War is not going to fail us at this second call. Perhaps we have only been waiting for the actual coming of Peace to settle down to our new and greater task.
But let us never forget the debt, unpaid and unpayable, to our immortal dead and to the valiant survivors of the great conflict, to whom we owe freedom and security and the possibility of a better and cleaner world.
GHOSTS AT VERSAILLES