Confessions of Aleister Crowley

469 The dirty degenerate, whom I shall hereafter designate by the first personal pronoun, had the idea that the war was a serious matter. He thought that he had ideas and virility, and that his country needed him. The event indicates his fatuity. Descending the Jungfrau by the Rothsthal with a bruised toenail, for which it is not altogether fair to blame Messrs Dowie and Marshall, Bootmakers, West Strand, London, W.C., who are the best yet, and may be a pound or two on the wrong side of the ledger, which this advertisement should square, our degenerate, I mean I, went to Bern and asked the British Minister how to get home. The B. M. (which does not mean Blasted Mutt) did not know; he said it was impossible --- there might be a train in six weeks. Would Mr. Crowley write his name in a book to reserve a seat in that phantasmagoric train? Mr Crowley wrote it; the B. M. might be hard up one day and get a meal --- or an annuity --- by selling my autograph. But he didn't wait for the train. The "British Committee" --- headed by two gentlemen who sounded like a vaudeville combination, Mr Whitehead and Mr Waggett --- asked Mr Crowley what he would do. Mr Crowley would go to London; if there was a train, good; if not, he could walk and swim. Luck --- no, common sense! --- favoured him; while twenty thousand English, and thirty thousand American, millionaires were stuck in dirty Switzerland for months, because they hadn't the sense to take a train to Paris, unable to cash their drafts, and living on the charity of calculating thieves --- I refer to the Swiss hoteliers --- he walked down to the station and took the train to Paris, as aforesaid. I spent a week in Paris. I was amazed at the sang-froid of the people. They turned from peace to war as simply as a man turns over in his sleep. I arrived in London --- I found that Bernard Shaw had told the truth. Twenty years of cheap newspapers had turned the British from the most stolid to the most hysterical nation in Europe. According to them the German was a monster like a bogey in a nightmare, and it was useless to struggle against him. At the same time, he was a coward who did not dare to advance unless behind a screen of Belgian nuns. He had no discipline, no morale, nothing but a talent for rape, torture, petty theft. His first line troops had been annihilated to a man by les braves Belges, whom we had hitherto only considered as {742} persons who cut off the hands and feet of the innocent natives of the Congo basin. I was more than ever convinced that I was needed by my country, which is England, and to hell with everybody. In my excitement, I had the hallucination that England needed men. I found, on the contrary, that the guiding stars of England needed "business as usual". I was interrupted in my futile attempts to fight for my country as I had been interrupted in my attempts to climb the Alps, this time by an attack of phlebitis. I lay six weeks in bed, warned that the slightest movement might result in sudden death, and advised that in all probability I should never be able to climb a mountain again. The period of my illness covered September and most of October 1914. At that time any man who suggested the advisability of conscription was regarded as a traitor. Conscription was the very thing we were fighting. Austin Harrison said that we were fighting for our golf and our weekends, Raymond Radclyffe said with, as it seemed to me, somewhat more plausibility that if we beat the Germans, it showed that the amateur was better than the professional. From my sick bed I dictated an article called "Thorough" in allusion to the plan of the Earl of Strafford in the time of Charles the First. I said, "commandeer every man and every munition in the country." I said, "This is not a continental quarrel --- this is life and death for England. We don't want debates in the House of Commons, or even in Earlswood asylum. We want a dictator." No editor would publish it.