It Might Have Happened To You

Coningsby Dawson

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You may feel inclined to dispute the assertion. You may even consider yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to you. "It could never have happened to me," you may argue. But it could.

CHAPTER XX-NEITHER PEACE NOR WAR

11-23 18:01

CHAPTER I-IT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO YOU

You had no control over the selection of your parents or the date and place of your birth. The advantages which saved you from having it happen to you were the merest accidents; they did not arise from your own inherent merit. It was your good luck to be born in America. No protest of yours could have prevented your being born in Central Europe. So, had it not been for the fortune of your birth, it might have happened to you.

But perhaps you think that though you had been born in Central Europe, the horrors of injustice and famine, described in these pages, would not have been shared by you. You would have risen above them; you would have been too astute, too far-sighted, too resourceful to be entrapped by them. Whoever else had gone under, you by your superior capacity for industry would have dug yourself out on top.

You wouldn't. Industry, astuteness, farsightedness, resourcefulness-none of these admirable qualities would have saved you. You must disabuse your mind of the prejudice that the starving peoples of the stricken countries are shiftless, unemployable, uncivilised, or in any way inferior to yourself. To tell the truth you are probably exactly the sort of person who, had you been born in Central Europe, would have gone to the bottom first. You belong to the middle or upper class. You are highly intelligent and specialised. You gain your living with your brains and not with your hands. If society were disrupted and temporarily bankrupt, so that the delicate mechanism of modern business ceased to function, your way of earning your living would no longer find a market. You would have to turn from working with your brains to working with your hands. Everyone in your class would be doing the same; there would not be enough manual labour to go round. You might have made investments in the days of your prosperity; but in the face of national insolvency your former thrift would not avail you. Your investments would be so much worthless paper, totally unnegotiable. You might have hoarded actual cash, the way the peasants do in their stockings. Even this reserve would soon be exhausted since, by reason of the depreciation in the currency, it would take a hundred times more money to purchase any service or commodity than it used. In starving Central Europe it is the doctors, professors, engineers, artists, musicians, business men, lawyers-the intellectual wealth of the nations, who have been the first to perish. The further they had dug themselves out of the pit of crude manual labour, where all labour starts, the more precipitous was their descent.

But perhaps you think that though these things might have happened to you, you would not have deserved them-not in the sense that Central Europe deserves them. Had you been an Austrian your moral fineness would have revolted against your countrymen's war of opportunism and aggression. Perhaps! But men act in crowds and the probabilities are against you. All the enemy peoples with whom I have conversed, have claimed as the ideals which urged them to fight precisely the same ideals for which we sacrificed and ultimately triumphed-liberty, justice, righteousness. Had their Governments not convinced them that their inheritance of freedom was in danger, they would not have risked their happiness in carnage. This at least is certain, whatever else is in doubt: the ordinary, home-loving citizen, whatever his nationality, only becomes a soldier and makes himself a target for shell-fire under the compulsion of a lofty motive. It was the bad fortune of the citizens of the Central Powers that their lofty motives were the offspring of lies-lies retailed to them as truth by the criminals and casuists who were their leaders. Had we been of their citizenship, should we have been more alert to discern the falsehood?

That I should write in this spirit, pleading for our late enemies, may cause a slight amazement in a public who have read my war-books. My reason-I will not say my excuse:-is that I have visited our late enemies' need and in the presence of human agony animosity dies. One ceases to question how far their suffering is the outcome of their folly; his sole desperation is to bind up their wounds-especially the wounds of their children. When witnessing death and starvation on the wholesale scale now prevailing in Europe, he forgets his austere self-righteousness and substitutes mercy for justice. "It might have happened to me," he says; "these women might have been my wife, my mother, my sisters, and these children, save for the grace of God, might have been my children."

One never believes that his own calamities are possible until they have happened. He thinks of himself proudly, as an individual immune from the contagion of adversity. It was so that the Russian aristocrats thought of themselves. If in the summer of 1914 the stranger of The Third Floor Back had mysteriously appeared at the Imperial Court in Petrograd and had announced, "Unless you have compassion and share with the outcast, the day will come when there will not be a peasant in Russia as forlorn as you," he would have been laughed ta scorn and sent into exile. Yet that day has come. In Warsaw you may see the princesses, the generals, the fops, the plutocrats, the law-givers of that resplendent Court, clothed in rags, their feet in sodden boots, waiting their turn in the breadline. After such a sight, no reversal of fortunes, however far-fetched, seems impossible. It might happen to anybody. It might happen to me or you. There is even a likelihood that it will happen unless we learn to have compassion. Central Europe will not die patiently of starvation indefinitely. Nations which civilisation has condemned to starve to death have nothing to lose by giving way to violence; they may have something to gain by it The more desperate their need becomes, the more likely they are to risk the gamble. They would at least get the satisfaction before they perished of making other nations, which had been heedless of their misery, as outcast as themselves. There lies the danger.

So, however fanciful it may seem to say in writing of Central Europe, "It might have happened to you," there is a grim possibility about the final statement, "It may happen yet."