AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

over and the long trench war had begun. The nurse, knowing that I had long
been incapable of really reading anything, gave me a copy of the paper at
random, as one gives a doll to a sick child. But I suddenly asserted in a loud
and clear voice that this was an old number dealing with the first attempt
before Nancy; and that I wanted all the numbers of the paper that had appeared
since the Battle of the Marne. My mind, such as it is, had suddenly become
perfectly clear; as clear as it is now. That also was something of a lesson in the
paradox of real things, so different from many modern and merely theatrical
things. Since then I have known that everything is not a slow and graduated
curve of evolution; but that there is in life and death an element of catastrophe
that carries something of the fear of miracle.
At my clear and reiterated request, they brought me the whole huge file of
the weekly paper; and I read it steadily through, understanding all the facts and
figures and diagrams and calculations, and studying them so closely that I
really felt at the end that I had not lost so very much of the general history of
the War. I found that the pamphlets I had written were already in circulation,
especially abroad; all the more successfully because in a sense secretly. My
old friend Masterman, in charge of one Propaganda Department, told me with
great pride that his enemies were complaining that no British propaganda was
being pushed in Spain or Sweden. At this he crowed aloud with glee; for it
meant that propaganda like mine was being absorbed without people even
knowing it was propaganda. And I myself saw my very bellicose essay called
“The Barbarism of Berlin” appearing as a quiet Spanish philosophical study
called “The Concept of Barbarism.” The fools who baited Masterman would
have published it with a Union Jack cover and a picture of the British Lion, so
that hardly one Spaniard would read it, and no Spaniard would believe it. It
was in matters of that sort that the rather subtle individuality of Masterman
was so superior to his political surroundings. In many respects, as I have
hinted, he suffered himself to sink too deeply into those surroundings. He
allowed himself to be used as a Party hack by Party leaders who were in every
way his inferiors. But all that dark humour that was deepest in him came out
again, as he grinned over this attack on his success as an intellectual smuggler.
But I am rather proud of the fact that if I wrote a little book called “The
Barbarism of Berlin,” I also wrote during the War a rather larger book called
The Crimes of England. For I was vividly convinced of the folly of England
merely playing the Pharisee in this moment of intense moral reality. I therefore
wrote a book actually making a list of the real sins of the British Empire in
modern history; and then pointing out that in every one of them, not only was
the German Empire far worse, but the worst tendencies of Britain had actually
been borrowed from Germany. It was a Pro-German policy, the support of the
Protestant hero in Prussia or the Protestant princes of Hanover, that had
involved us in our mortal quarrel with Ireland and in many worse things. All