Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines
Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy’s major works had been read aloud by Florence Keynes to her family, who had heard (even if they did not fully accept) the Russian seer’s message that violence is wicked, that all forms of state compulsion are criminal and that the aim of humankind should be to seek happiness by doing right. These ideals were out of kilter with wartime England. On 4 October 1915 Neville Keynes cancelled the household’s order for The Times, which he had read since he was a boy in Salisbury, because he was disgusted by its bellicosity under Northcliffe’s ownership. That day’s issue included a jubilant account of the futile massacre of the Australian Light Horse Brigade when it had charged against a long line of Turkish machine-guns in the Dardanelles campaign; an endorsement of the Bishop of London’s prudish campaign against night-clubs; and an editorial on the Battle of Loos which spoke of ‘the utmost cheerfulness’ prevailing among soldiers on the Western Front after 59,000 British soldiers had been killed. Perhaps most objectionable to Neville Keynes, who had not wanted Maynard to join the volunteer army corps at Eton, was the humbugging report of a London recruiting rally (which had singularly failed to excite many volunteers). There had been a booming oration on Shepherd’s Bush Green by an MP with the apt name of Sir William Bull, but the leading jingo MP, Horatio Bottomley, failed to speak having sprained his ankle alighting from a taxicab. ‘Everything was splendid,’ The Times reported. ‘There was plenty of popular music … The soldiers were in the pink of health and high spirits. Their bearing gave evidence of the contentment that comes when the call of duty has been responded to, and the virility and good humour imparted by military training.’28
In the opening phase of the war there had been a burst of genuinely voluntary enlistment by men seeking either to serve their country or to escape from their ruts into overseas adventures. This was followed by a period of voluntary enlistment under pressure of either public opinion or economic necessity. The army had more men than it could equip in 1915, but during that summer, as volunteers failed to meet the army’s manpower targets, a bombastic newspaper agitation was launched against an estimated 650,000 slackers, who supposedly were shirking their country’s call. The Earl of Derby, Director-General of Recruiting, announced in October 1915 a scheme whereby men of military age ‘attested’ (or registered) their willingness to serve when called up. However, a man’s decision to enlist in the army or navy still depended upon his sense of duty, his susceptibility to public opinion, and the attitude of his employer. The Derby scheme may have been intended to fail to meet its targets. Certainly, it incited agitators for compulsory military service rather than assuaging them.
In December 1915 the Cabinet was divided by a proposal to increase the army to seventy divisions by introducing conscription. Lloyd George, the newly appointed Minister of Munitions, was converted to conscription by his need to stop the unregulated, disruptive enlistment in the armed forces of skilled factory-workers, who were requisite for improving shell output. McKenna, who believed that seventy divisions were more than the country could afford, threatened to resign. Despite the resistance of McKenna, Walter Runciman and other Liberal ministers, the Military Service Act of January 1916 introduced conscription of all single men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one. Its achievements were mixed, for instead of catching the mooted 650,000 slackers, it produced 748,587 claims for exemption from miners, munitions workers, shipbuilders, farmworkers and others in protected jobs. Most of these claims were accepted as valid. A smaller category of men claiming conscientious objection to fighting were allowed to state their case before a local tribunal.
In total, during the war of 1914–18, there were 2.4 million volunteers in the United Kingdom and 2.5 million conscripts (although the nation contributed only 6 per cent of the total number of men mobilized on both sides). The issues of the war meant little to the majority of conscripts, who enlisted because they were scared to disobey the Military Service Act. That Act, combined with similar legislation in 1939–45 and the system of National Service whereby more than two million conscripts served in the armed forces between 1947 and 1963, meant that there had never been so many regimented citizens – ex-soldiers and ex-sailors – in English history as in the mid-twentieth century. The result was a divided manhood, with some of the population drilled, submissive to authority and intent on proving their virility by disciplined aggression, with others seething against deference, enforced uniformity and violence. Keynes and his friends anathematized this regimented, militarized culture in the making. They were not alone. Lord Sandhurst, son of an army commander-in-chief, himself formerly a Guards officer, Governor of Bombay and Under-Secretary of State for War, saw ‘the agitation for conscription headed by The Times and Daily Mail’ as an intrigue to topple Asquith as Prime Minister. If conscription comes, Sandhurst wrote in 1915, ‘it will be the first time I shall feel low about the war … the thing most to be dreaded, war or no war, is a military party’.29
‘Here all is worry and confusion, everyone deeply depressed,’ Keynes wrote from Whitehall to the literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell on 4 January 1916 – before quoting lines from Wordsworth’s poem ‘Andrew Jones’ about a thieving bully: ‘“I wish the press-gang or the drum / With its tantara sound would come” and deal with all these bloody men who enrage and humiliate us.’ He thought there was a chance that working-class protests might defeat the Military Service Act: ‘I do not see the intellectuals can do anything – but ply a feeble pen occasionally and feel miserable.’ He yearned ‘for a general strike and a real uprising’ against the political cowards who were submitting to newspaper bullying. In the meantime good people must ‘(a) intrigue to prevent a general election, which would bring the Jingos back absolute (b) keep all our spirits up (c) enflame the minds of everyone we meet’.30
‘The Government have decided on compulsory service for single men,’ Neville Keynes noted on 6 January. ‘Maynard talks of resigning his post at the Treasury, and we are very much worried about him.’ Maynard explained his position to his parents a week later: ‘Things drift on, & I shall stay now, I expect, until they begin to torture one of my friends.’ His friends demanded his resignation, and expected him to claim conscientious objection. However, he anticipated that Wilson would summon a peace conference and enforce a settlement, and felt loath to renounce the stimulation of his office life. ‘He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,’ reported Virginia Woolf. ‘He works only because he likes it.’ Moreover, his official position enabled him to help friends who had been summoned before conscientious-objection tribunals.31
In February 1916 Keynes received a certificate of exemption from military service on account of his Treasury duties. Nevertheless, five days later, he applied for exemption on grounds of conscientious objection, which suggests that he contemplated resignation in protest against militarist compulsion. When summoned to a tribunal scheduled for March he responded that he was too busy to attend. After his exemption had been renewed by the Treasury in August, he did not renew his application for exemption on grounds of conscientious objection – probably because his thoughts of resigning from the Treasury had been dispelled. Meanwhile, he had convinced his ex-boyfriends the painter Duncan Grant and the younger, more outdoorsy David ‘Bunny’ Garnett (later a novelist and literary editor) that their best hopes of exemption from military service lay in agricultural work. Grant rented a Suffolk landholding, where he and Garnett set up as fruit-farmers specializing in apples and blackberries. Keynes represented them both before the appeal tribunal at Ipswich. Appearing there with a locked bag bearing the royal cipher, he demanded that the cases be heard post-haste, as he had urgent matters of national importance pending at the Treasury.
‘The Treasury depresses me just now,’ Keynes told Grant in January 1917. ‘I am badly overworked, need a holiday, and am filled with perpetual contempt and detestation of the new Govt. I should like to get away from it all.’ Although McKenna assured him that peace must come soon, Keynes feared ‘that L.G. will spin things out to let him taste a good draught of blood this spring. Did you read his last speech? “The war is a road paved with gold and cemented with blood.” God curse him … I pray for the most absolute financial crash (and yet strive to prevent it – so that all I do is a contradiction with all I feel); but we always seem able to