The Big Push, by Gardner

[p023] The Big Push. By Brian Gardner. Cassell & Co., Ltd., 21s. On neither side of World War I were generals or politicians prepared for the problems of imperialist war. They doomed to ghastly suffering millions among the lower ranks of all the armies, as well as their civilian fellows in factories and on farms at home. So much the historians and novelists explained in the 1920s. Mr Gardner has reproduced so much, attractively, with apt irony as well as spine-chilling detail. But perhaps just because this book comes out in 1961 and not in 1928, it 61 seems to harp nauseatingly on the corruption of corpes in France and careerists in Whitehall. For when the workers and soldiers saw no useful purpose in the slaughter, they began to lose con- fidence in their rulers. The writers of 35 years ago could not forbear to underline the positive reactions of the soldiers and workers, their war- weariness, their search for explana- tions and solutions, their radicaliza- tion and efforts at meeting and fraternization. All this was clearly seen as the forerunner of working- class political progress in the 1920s. But today far from explaining more consistently the political processes of World War I (which after all did bear fruit in the Russian Revolution, the Weimar Republic, the League of Nations and the first Labour Govern- ment), such writers as Mr. Gardner do not yet stand even on the level of the last generation but one. In the 1920s Lenin’s writings on the war were still being read. Trotsky’s ‘The Bolsheviks and World Peace’ was widely sold among Left-wingers, because it explained not merely the corruption but the class-character of the war and the leaders. For the Gaitskell of 1916 (Arthur Henderson) used the mass agony ina reformist way, to call for a more efficient war, and for more efficient war propaganda. In Berlin the German equivalent of our Fabians, the Right wing of Social Democracy, humbly offered the same advice to the war lords. But where did ‘more efficient methods of defence’ lead us in 1939- 45? To the Labour-supported coalition which let Bomber Harris undertake the total destruction of German working-class housing, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how much more efficient have the generals and Fabians made us? We now have napalm bombs and Polaris. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, saw in war weariness and in class struggle behind the lines, not a sabotage of a national war effort but the practical working out of a solution of the mass agony, recogniz- ing that the main enemy is in our own country and that the imperialist war must be turned into civil war. What a fine thing it is that people today want to study these experiences! When you return ‘ The Big Push’ to the library, make them get you

[p024] 62 Arnold Zweig’s great German war novels, ‘The Case of Sergeant Grischa’ and ‘The Crowning of a King’. J.A. ‘Jingo’ Marzist