The white pillars of the door,And he forced and forced and forcedTill down the golden hinges tore:And along the pavement sweet,Set with pearls and rubies bright,All his shining length he drew, –Till upon the altar whiteVomited his poison outOn the bread and on the wine.So I turned into a sty,And laid me down among the swine.8THE FIRST WARThe period from 1910 to 1914 was a time of transition. My life before 1910and my life after 1914 were as sharply separated as Faust’s life before andafter he met Mephistopheles. I underwent a process of rejuvenation, inaugur-ated by Ottoline Morrell and continued by the War. It may seem curious thatthe War should rejuvenate anybody, but in fact it shook me out of my preju-dices and made me think afresh on a number of fundamental questions. Italso provided me with a new kind of activity, for which I did not feel thestaleness that beset me whenever I tried to return to mathematical logic. Ihave therefore got into the habit of thinking of myself as a non-supernaturalFaust for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War.During the hot days at the end of July, I was at Cambridge, discussing thesituation with all and sundry. I found it impossible to believe that Europewould be so mad as to plunge into war, but I was persuaded that, if there waswar, England would be involved. I felt strongly that England ought to remainneutral, and I collected the signatures of a large number of professors andFellows to a statement which appeared in the Manchester Guardian to that e?ect.The day War was declared, almost all of them changed their minds. Lookingback, it seems extraordinary that one did not realise more clearly what wascoming. On Sunday, August 2nd, as mentioned in the earlier volume of thisautobiography, I met Keynes hurrying across the Great Court of Trinity toborrow his brother-in-law’s motor-bicycle to go up to London.1I presentlydiscovered that the Government had sent for him to give them ?nancialadvice. This made me realise the imminence of our participation in the War.On the Monday morning I decided to go to London. I lunched with theMorrells at Bedford Square, and found Ottoline entirely of my way of think-ing. She agreed with Philip’s determination to make a paci?st speech in theHouse. I went down to the House in the hope of hearing Sir Edward Grey’sfamous statement, but the crowd was too great, and I failed to get in. Ilearned, however, that Philip had duly made his speech. I spent the eveningwalking round the streets, especially in the neighbourhood of TrafalgarSquare, noticing cheering crowds, and making myself sensitive to the emo-tions of passers-by. During this and the following days I discovered to myamazement that average men and women were delighted at the prospect ofwar. I had fondly imagined, what most paci?sts contended, that wars wereforced upon a reluctant population by despotic and Machiavellian govern-ments. I had noticed during previous years how carefully Sir Edward Greylied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which hewas committing us to the support of France in the event of war. I na?velyimagined that when the public discovered how he had lied to them, theywould be annoyed; instead of which, they were grateful to him for havingspared them the moral responsibility.On the morning of August 4th, I walked with Ottoline up and down theempty streets behind the British Museum, where now there are Universitybuildings. We discussed the future in gloomy terms. When we spoke toothers of the evils we foresaw, they thought us mad; yet it turned out that wewere twittering optimists compared to the truth. On the evening of the 4th,after quarrelling with George Trevelyan along the whole length of the Strand,I attended the last meeting of a neutrality committee of which Graham Wallaswas chairman. During the meeting there was a loud clap of thunder, whichall the older members of the committee took to be a German bomb. Thisdissipated their last lingering feeling in favour of neutrality. The ?rst days ofthe War were to me utterly amazing. My best friends, such as the Whiteheads,were savagely warlike. Men like J. L. Hammond, who had been writing foryears against participation in a European War, were swept o? their feet byBelgium. As I had long known from a military friend at the Sta? College thatBelgium would inevitably be involved, I had not supposed important publi-cists so frivolous as to be ignorant on this vital matter. The Nation newspaperused to have a sta? luncheon every Tuesday, and I attended the luncheonon August 4th. I found Massingham, the editor, vehemently opposed to ourparticipation in the war. He welcomed enthusiastically my o?er to write forhis newspaper in that sense. Next day I got a letter from him, beginning:‘Today is not yesterday . . .’, and stating that his opinion had completelychanged. Nevertheless, he printed a long letter from me protesting againstthe War in his next issue.2What changed his opinion I do not know. I knowthat one of Asquith’s daughters saw him descending the steps of the GermanEmbassy late on the afternoon of August 4th, and I have some suspicion thathe was consequently warned of the unwisdom of a lack of patriotism in sucha crisis. For the ?rst year or so of the War he remained patriotic, but as timethe autobiography of bertrand russell 226went on he began to forget that he had ever been so. A few paci?st ??s,together with two or three sympathisers, began to have meetings at theMorrells’ house in Bedford Square. I used to attend these meetings, whichgave rise to the Union of Democratic Control. I was interested to observe thatmany of the paci?st politicians were more concerned with the questionwhich of them should lead the anti-war movement than with the actual workagainst the War. Nevertheless, they were all there was to work with, and I didmy best to think well of them.Meanwhile, I was living at the highest possible emotional tension.Although I did not foresee anything like the full disaster of the War, I foresawa great deal more than most people did. The prospect ?lled me with horror,but what ?lled me with even more horror was the fact that the anticipation ofcarnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. Ihad to revise my views on human nature. At that time I was wholly ignorantof psycho-analysis, but I arrived for myself at a view of human passions notunlike that of the psycho-analysts. I arrived at this view in an endeavour tounderstand popular feeling about the War. I had supposed until that time thatit was quite common for parents to love their children, but the War per-suaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people likedmoney better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they likeddestruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently lovedtruth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth topopularity. Gilbert Murray, who had been a close friend of mine since 1902,was a pro-Boer when I was not. I therefore naturally expected that hewould again be on the side of peace; yet he went out of his way to writeabout the wickedness of the Germans, and the superhuman virtue of SirEdward Grey. I became ?lled with despairing tenderness towards the youngmen who were to be slaughtered, and with rage against all the statesmen ofEurope. For several weeks I felt that if I should happen to meet Asquith orGrey I should be unable to refrain from murder. Gradually, however, thesepersonal feelings disappeared. They were swallowed up by the magnitude ofthe tragedy, and by the realisation of the popular forces which the statesmenmerely let loose.In the midst of this, I was myself tortured by patriotism. The successes ofthe Germans before the Battle of the Marne were horrible to me. I desired thedefeat of Germany as ardently as any retired colonel. Love of England is verynearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at sucha moment, I was making a very di?cult renunciation. Nevertheless, I neverhad a moment’s doubt as to what I must do. I have at times been paralysed byscepticism, at times I have been cynical, at other times indi?erent, but whenthe War came I felt as if I heard the voice of God. I knew that it was mybusiness to protest, however futile protest might be. My whole nature wasthe first war 227involved. As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerentnations sickened me. As a lover of civilisation, the return to barbarismappalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling, the massacre of theyoung wrung my heart. I hardly supposed that much good would come ofopposing the War, but I felt that for the honour of human nature those whowere not swept o? their feet should show that they stood ?rm. After seeingtroop trains departing from Waterloo, I used to have strange visions ofLondon as a place of unreality. I used in imagination to see the bridgescollapse and sink, and the whole great city vanish like a morning mist. Itsinhabitants began to seem like hallucinations, and I would wonder whetherthe world in which I thought I had lived was a mere product of my ownfebrile nightmares.3Such moods, however, were brief, and were put an endto by the need of work.Throughout the earlier phases of the War, Ottoline was a very great helpand strength to me. But for her, I should have been at ?rst completely solitary,but she never wavered either in her hatred of war, or in her refusal to acceptthe myths and falsehoods with which the world was inundated.I found a minor degree of comfort in the conversation of Santayana, whowas at Cambridge at that time. He was a neutral, and in any case he had notenough respect for the human race to care whether it destroyed itself or not.His calm, philosophical detachment, though I had no wish to imitate it, wassoothing to me. Just before the Battle of the Marne, when it looked as if theGermans must soon take Paris, he remarked in a dreamy tone of voice: ‘Ithink I must go over to Paris. My winter underclothes are there, and I shouldnot like the Germans to get them. I have also another, though less important,reason, which is that I have there a manuscript of a book on which I havebeen working for the last ten years, but I do not care so much about that asabout the underclothes.’ He did not, however, go to Paris, because the Battleof the Marne saved him the trouble. Instead, he remarked to me one day: ‘Iam going to Seville tomorrow because I wish to be in a place where peopledo not restrain their passions.’With the beginning of the October Term, I had to start again lecturing onmathematical logic, but I felt it a somewhat futile occupation. So I took toorganising a branch of the Union of Democratic Control among the dons, ofwhom at Trinity quite a number were at ?rst sympathetic. I also addressedmeetings of undergraduates who were quite willing to listen to me. Iremember in the course of a speech, saying: ‘It is all nonsense to pretend theGermans are wicked’, and to my surprise the whole room applauded. Butwith the sinking of the Lusitania, a ?ercer spirit began to prevail. It seemed tobe supposed that I was in some way responsible for this disaster. Of the donswho had belonged to the Union of Democratic Control, many had by thistime got commissions. Barnes (afterwards Bishop of Birmingham) left tothe autobiography of bertrand russell 228become Master of the Temple. The older dons got more and more hysterical,and I began to ?nd myself avoided at the high table.Every Christmas throughout the War I had a ?t of black despair, suchcomplete despair that I could do nothing except sit idle in my chair andwonder whether the human race served any purpose. At Christmas time in1914, by Ottoline’s advice, I found a way of making despair not unendurable.I took to visiting destitute Germans on behalf of a charitable committee toinvestigate their circumstances and to relieve their distress if they deserved it.In the course of this work, I came upon remarkable instances of kindness inthe middle of the fury of war. Not infrequently in the poor neighbourhoodslandladies, themselves poor, had allowed Germans to stay on without payingany rent, because they knew it was impossible for Germans to ?nd work. Thisproblem ceased to exist soon afterwards, as the Germans were all interned,but during the ?rst months of the War their condition was pitiable.One day in October 1914 I met T. S. Eliot in New Oxford Street. I did notknow he was in Europe, but I found he had come to England from Berlin. Inaturally asked him what he thought of the War. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘Ionly know that I am not a paci?st.’ That is to say, he considered any excusegood enough for homicide. I became great friends with him, and sub-sequently with his wife, whom he married early in 1915. As they weredesperately poor, I lent them one of the two bedrooms in my ?at, with theresult that I saw a great deal of them.4I was fond of them both, andendeavoured to help them in their troubles until I discovered that theirtroubles were what they enjoyed. I held some debentures nominally worth￡3,000, in an engineering ?rm, which during the War naturally took tomaking munitions. I was much puzzled in my conscience as to what to dowith these debentures, and at last I gave them to Eliot. Years afterwards, whenthe War was ?nished and he was no longer poor, he gave them back to me.During the summer of 1915 I wrote Principles of Social Reconstruction, or WhyMen Fight as it was called in America without my consent. I had had nointention of writing such a book, and it was totally unlike anything I hadpreviously written, but it came out in a spontaneous manner. In fact I did notdiscover what it was all about until I had ?nished it. It has a framework and aformula, but I only discovered both when I had written all except the ?rst andlast words. In it I suggested a philosophy of politics based upon the belief thatimpulse has more e?ect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives. Idivided impulses into two groups, the possessive and the creative, consideringthe best life that which is most built on creative impulses. I took, as examplesof embodiments of the possessive impulses, the State, war and poverty; andof the creative impulses, education, marriage and religion. Liberation of cre-ativeness, I was convinced, should be the principle of reform. I ?rst gave thebook as lectures, and then published it. To my surprise, it had an immediatethe first war 229success. I had written it with no expectation of its being read, merely as aprofession of faith, but it brought me in a great deal of money, and laid thefoundation for all my future earnings.These lectures were in certain ways connected with my short friendshipwith D. H. Lawrence. We both imagined that there was something importantto be said about the reform of human relations, and we did not at ?rst realisethat we took diametrically opposite views as to the kind of reform thatwas needed. My acquaintance with Lawrence was brief and hectic, lastingaltogether about a year. We were brought together by Ottoline, who admiredus both and made us think that we ought to admire each other. Paci?sm hadproduced in me a mood of bitter rebellion, and I found Lawrence equally fullof rebellion. This made us think, at ?rst, that there was a considerable meas-ure of agreement between us, and it was only gradually that we discoveredthat we di?ered from each other more than either di?ered from the Kaiser.There were in Lawrence at that time two attitudes to the war: on the onehand, he could not be whole-heartedly patriotic, because his wife wasGerman; but on the other hand, he had such a hatred of mankind that hetended to think both sides must be right in so far as they hated each other. AsI came to know these attitudes, I realised that neither was one with which Icould sympathise. Awareness of our di?erences, however, was gradual onboth sides, and at ?rst all went merry as a marriage bell. I invited him to visitme at Cambridge and introduced him to Keynes and a number of otherpeople. He hated them all with a passionate hatred and said they were ‘dead,dead, dead’. For a time I thought he might be right. I liked Lawrence’s ?re, Iliked the energy and passion of his feelings, I liked his belief that somethingvery fundamental was needed to put the world right. I agreed with him inthinking that politics could not be divorced from individual psychology. I felthim to be a man of a certain imaginative genius, and, at ?rst, when I feltinclined to disagree with him, I thought that perhaps his insight into humannature was deeper than mine. It was only gradually that I came to feel him apositive force for evil and that he came to have the same feeling about me.I was at this time preparing the course of lectures which was afterwardspublished as Principles of Social Reconstruction. He, also, wanted to lecture, and for atime it seemed possible that there might be some sort of loose collaborationbetween us. We exchanged a number of letters, of which mine are lost but hishave been published. In his letters the gradual awareness of the consciousnessof our fundamental disagreements can be traced. I was a ?rm believer indemocracy, whereas he had developed the whole philosophy of Fascismbefore the politicians had thought of it. ‘I don’t believe’, he wrote, ‘in demo-cratic control. I think the working man is ?t to elect governors or overseersfor his immediate circumstances, but for no more. You must utterly revise theelectorate. The working man shall elect superiors for the things that concernthe autobiography of bertrand russell 230him immediately, no more. From the other classes, as they rise, shall beelected the higher governors. The thing must culminate in one real head, asevery organic thing must – no foolish republic with foolish presidents, but anelected King, something like Julius Caesar.’ He, of course, in his imagination,supposed that when a dictatorship was established he would be the JuliusCaesar. This was part of the dream-like quality of all his thinking. He never lethimself bump into reality. He would go into long tirades about how onemust proclaim ‘the Truth’ to the multitude, and he seemed to have no doubtthat the multitude would listen. I asked him what method he was going toadopt. Would he put his political philosophy into a book? No: in our corruptsociety the written word is always a lie. Would he go into Hyde Park andproclaim ‘the Truth’ from a soap box? No: that would be far too dangerous(odd streaks of prudence emerged in him from time to time). Well, I said,what would you do? At this point he would change the subject.Gradually I discovered that he had no real wish to make the world better,but only to indulge in eloquent soliloquy about how bad it was. If anybodyoverheard the soliloquies, so much the better, but they were designed at mostto produce a little faithful band of disciples who could sit in the deserts ofNew Mexico and feel holy. All this was conveyed to me in the language of aFascist dictator as what I must preach, the ‘must’ having thirteen underlinings.His letters grew gradually more hostile. He wrote, ‘What’s the good ofliving as you do anyway? I don’t believe your lectures are good. They arenearly over, aren’t they? What’s the good of sticking in the damned ship andharanguing the merchant pilgrims in their own language? Why don’t youdrop overboard? Why don’t you clear out of the whole show? One must bean outlaw these days, not a teacher or preacher.’ This seemed to me mererhetoric. I was becoming more of an outlaw than he ever was and I could notquite see his ground of complaint against me. He phrased his complaint indi?erent ways at di?erent times. On another occasion he wrote: ‘Do stopworking and writing altogether and become a creature instead of a mechan-ical instrument. Do clear out of the whole social ship. Do for your verypride’s sake become a mere nothing, a mole, a creature that feels its way anddoesn’t think. Do for heavens sake be a baby, and not a savant any more. Don’tdo anything more – but for heavens sake begin to be – Start at the verybeginning and be a perfect baby: in the name of courage.‘Oh, and I want to ask you, when you make your will, do leave me enoughto live on. I want you to live for ever. But I want you to make me in some partyour heir.’The only di?culty with this programme was that if I adopted it I shouldhave nothing to leave.He had a mystical philosophy of ‘blood’ which I disliked. ‘There is’, hesaid, ‘another seat of consciousness than the brain and nerves. There is athe first war 231blood-consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mentalconsciousness. One lives, knows and has one’s being in the blood, withoutany reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life belonging to thedarkness. When I take a woman, then the blood-percept is supreme. Myblood-knowing is overwhelming. We should realise that we have a blood-being, a blood-consciousness, a blood-soul complete and apart from a mentaland nerve consciousness.’ This seemed to me frankly rubbish, and I rejectedit vehemently, though I did not then know that it led straight to Auschwitz.He always got into a fury if one suggested that anybody could possiblyhave kindly feelings towards anybody else, and when I objected to warbecause of the su?ering that it causes, he accused me of hypocrisy. ‘It isn’t inthe least true that you, your basic self, want ultimate peace. You are satisfyingin an indirect, false way your lust to jab and strike. Either satisfy it in a directand honourable way, saying “I hate you all, liars and swine, and am out to setupon you”, or stick to mathematics, where you can be true – But to come asthe angel of peace – no, I prefer Tirpitz a thousand times in that role.’I ?nd it di?cult now to understand the devastating e?ect that this letterhad upon me. I was inclined to believe that he had some insight denied tome, and when he said that my paci?sm was rooted in blood-lust I supposedhe must be right. For twenty-four hours I thought that I was not ?t to live andcontemplated suicide. But at the end of that time, a healthier reaction set in,and I decided to have done with such morbidness. When he said that I mustpreach his doctrines and not mine I rebelled, and told him to remember thathe was no longer a school-master and I was not his pupil. He had written ‘theenemy of all mankind you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not a hatred offalsehood which inspires you, it is the hatred of people of ?esh and blood, itis a perverted mental blood-lust. Why don’t you own it? Let us becomestrangers again. I think it is better.’ I thought so too. But he found a pleasurein denouncing me and continued for some months to write letters contain-ing su?cient friendliness to keep the correspondence alive. In the end, itfaded away without any dramatic termination.Lawrence, though most people did not realise it, was his wife’s mouth-piece. He had the eloquence, but she had the ideas. She used to spend part ofevery summer in a colony of Austrian Freudians at a time when psycho-analysis was little known in England. Somehow, she imbibed prematurely theideas afterwards developed by Mussolini and Hitler, and these ideas shetransmitted to Lawrence, shall we say, by blood-consciousness. Lawrence wasan essentially timid man who tried to conceal his timidity by bluster. His wifewas not timid, and her denunciations have the character of thunder, not ofbluster. Under her wing he felt comparatively safe. Like Marx, he had asnobbish pride in having married a German aristocrat, and in Lady Chatterleyhe dressed her up marvellously. His thought was a mass of self-deceptionthe autobiography of bertrand russell 232masquerading as stark realism. His descriptive powers were remarkable, buthis ideas cannot be too soon forgotten.What at ?rst attracted me to Lawrence was a certain dynamic quality and ahabit of challenging assumptions that one is apt to take for granted. I wasalready accustomed to being accused of undue slavery to reason, and Ithought perhaps that he could give me a vivifying dose of unreason. I did infact acquire a certain stimulus from him, and I think the book that I wrote inspite of his blasts of denunciation was better than it would have been if I hadnot known him.But this is not to say that there was anything good in his ideas. I do notthink in retrospect that they had any merit whatever. They were the ideas of asensitive would-be despot who got angry with the world because it wouldnot instantly obey. When he realised that other people existed, he hatedthem. But most of the time he lived in a solitary world of his own imaginings,peopled by phantoms as ?erce as he wished them to be. His excessiveemphasis on sex was due to the fact that in sex alone he was compelled toadmit that he was not the only human being in the universe. But it was sopainful that he conceived of sex relations as a perpetual ?ght in which each isattempting to destroy the other.The world between the wars was attracted to madness. Of this attractionNazism was the most emphatic expression. Lawrence was a suitable exponentof this cult of insanity. I am not sure whether the cold inhuman sanity ofStalin’s Kremlin was any improvement.5With the coming of 1916, the War took on a ?ercer form, and the positionof paci?sts at home became more di?cult. My relations with Asquith hadnever become unfriendly. He was an admirer of Ottoline’s before she married,and I used to meet him every now and then at Garsington, where she lived.Once when I had been bathing stark naked in a pond, I found him on thebank as I came out. The quality of dignity which should have characterised ameeting between the Prime Minister and a paci?st was somewhat lacking onthis occasion. But at any rate, I had the feeling that he was not likely to lockme up. At the time of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin, thirty-seven conscien-tious objectors were condemned to death and several of us went on a deputa-tion to Asquith to get their sentences reduced. Although he was just startingfor Dublin, he listened to us courteously, and took the necessary action. It hadbeen generally supposed, even by the Government, that conscientiousobjectors were not legally liable to the death penalty, but this turned out to bea mistake, and but for Asquith a number of them would have been shot.Lloyd George, however, was a tougher proposition. I went once withCli?ord Allen (chairman of the No Conscription Fellowship) and MissCatherine Marshall, to interview him about the conscientious objectors whowere being kept in prison. The only time that he could see us was at lunchthe first war 233at Walton Heath. I disliked having to receive his hospitality, but it seemedunavoidable. His manner to us was pleasant and easy, but he o?ered nosatisfaction of any kind. At the end, as we were leaving, I made him a speechof denunciation in an almost Biblical style, telling him his name wouldgo down to history with infamy. I had not the pleasure of meeting himthereafter.With the coming of conscription, I gave practically my whole time andenergies to the a?airs of the conscientious objectors. The No ConscriptionFellowship consisted entirely of men of military age, but it accepted womenand older men as associates. After all the original committee had gone toprison, a substitute committee was formed, of which I became the actingchairman. There was a great deal of work to do, partly in looking after theinterests of individuals, partly in keeping a watch upon the military authoritiesto see that they did not send conscientious objectors to France, for it was onlyafter they had been sent to France that they became liable to the death penalty.Then there was a great deal of speaking to be done up and down the country.I spent three weeks in the mining areas of Wales, speaking sometimes in halls,sometimes out-of-doors. I never had an interrupted meeting, and always