SOURCE: “Wilfred Trotter's Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War,” in The Quarterly Review, No. 546, October, 1940, pp. 206-14.

[Warner compares Germany and England in the light of Trotter's social theories.]

‘The moral is to the physical,’ so the oft repeated adage runs, ‘as three to one.’ It may be true; as true as the fact that such preponderance is and has always been ours against the Germany of Hitler; but precisely where is the fullness of this strength may not always be apparent. Moral preponderance is, in this country, assumed; but friends sometimes need solid reason why they should believe our cause superior, and the answer is—shortly and simply—that the English Commonwealth of Nations has reached a higher level biologically than the forces ranged against it. This fact was demonstrated during the last world conflict in a thesis whose validity has never been seriously challenged, and to which Freud himself paid qualified tribute. It was written by a great and too little known Englishman, Wilfred Trotter.

It is indeed arguable that the two most significant works in English provoked by the last upheaval were written by a surgeon and a civil servant: Wilfred Trotter's The Herd Instinct in Peace and War and John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Though they have no other connection, both books were the work of highly trained intelligences working on themes which admitted of forecast. Time has done everything to justify Mr Keynes; while Wilfred Trotter, though his ideas have met with argument, some of it cogent, lived to see his work become a classic, and would no doubt have been gratified at the appearance of a fresh impression not long after the outbreak of another German war.

The Herd Instinct has so much to tell us of German mentality that even for those who cannot accept its ideas in their entirety, it must still have immense value at a time when knowledge may indeed be life.

Here a biographical note may be intruded. Wilfred Trotter, Serjeant Surgeon to the King from 1932-38 and the only surgeon of his generation to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, died in November 1939. A medical journal recently published a posthumous paper on the black-out, which, imposed with unnecessary severity, he regarded as a panic measure; while two months before his death he contributed a long letter to the press which, though full of wise thought, attracted little attention. In it, reviewing the international situation, he emphasised, in a way which then needed doing, the immense advantages possessed by the Democracies; he stressed the ‘internecine’ seriousness of the war and he added the very necessary caution that ‘really effective thinking is the most difficult of all human activities … and is more urgently needed in this war than anything else.’

While these may seem self-evident truths, they are too often overlooked, while ‘thinking’ is a function citizens are generally encouraged to leave to their rulers. Trotter added that one of our tasks must be ‘to study and exploit the advantages of contending with an enemy who has certain well-marked mental limitations, and to undertake a really serious campaign against enemy morale in supplement to the rather innocent machinations that have hitherto passed as such.’ The key to these limitations Trotter himself gave in his treatise; and if various schools of psychologists during the decades since its appearance have provided counterblasts, Trotter's answer is that, empirically, history proved him right last time in almost every particular of prophecy.

Trotter's ideas are, in fact, better worth re-examination to-day than at any period since the last war. In his own words: ‘really deep understanding of the nature and sources of national morale must be at least as important a source of strength as the technical knowledge of the military engineer and the maker of cannon.’ Recognition of this fact is the raison d’être of Dr Goebbels and of his opponents on our own side.

Necessarily to the limits of an article, an examination of Trotter's work must confine itself to that part which has immediate bearing on the present conflict. As a whole, his essay examines the quality in man of gregariousness; the types of herd (aggressive, protective, and socialised) represented in existing human society; and the advantages or drawbacks of each. In a later section he concentrates upon two nations, then as now opposed, German and English. He exemplifies the German nation as a pattern of the aggressive or wolf-herd, and the English as the socialised herd, one whose nature makes some approach to that of the beehive. Such a theory, even built up as carefully and tentatively as by Trotter, has limitations, but his examination of the mentality of the two nations enumerates qualities which exist to-day as strongly as ever. Some of them indeed seem to have been emphasised by the passage of time.

‘Germany,’ he wrote in 1915, and as he might have done to-day, ‘has abundantly distinguished this country as her typical foe—an instinctive judgment not without value.’ ‘The adversaries in the present war,’ he added in a letter after the outbreak of September 1939, ‘are separated not by mere political disagreement but by differences in their attitude towards life which practically amount to incompatible types of civilisation.’ One of them, the German, in discovering ‘the necessity and value of conscious direction of the social unit’ brought to birth ‘an epoch-making event,’ though it has been ‘incomplete, and it has not been accompanied by the corresponding knowledge of man and his natural history which alone could have given it full fertility and permanent value.’ If this remark be true of the Empire once ruled by the Kaiser, it is equally true of the Germany ruled by Hitler.

‘Germany in some ways resembles a son who has been educated at home,’ says Trotter, ‘and has taken up the responsibilities of the adult and become bound by them without ever tasting the free intercourse of the school and university. She has never tasted the heady liquor of political liberty.’ Her post-war revolution and her political martyrs seem at the moment to have borne no fruit; the lessons they might have taught have been altogether expunged. She has returned in spirit to the days when she could look back on three brief, successive, and successful wars, and to them she has recently added the conquest, with almost childish ease, of one great and several less great countries. Her former ruinous conflict with the western Powers has left in the memory of her government no lasting impression but bitterness; while her leaders no longer admit her even to have been defeated. The full details of the concluding stages of the last war mark one more paragraph in the book of historical truth upon which German eyes are no longer allowed to light, much less to dwell.

Instead, her citizens are encouraged to focus upon ‘heroic’ aspects of her early evolution, those which show ‘in the most perfect form the lupine type of society in action.’ Though such a society was ‘physically brave beyond belief,’ it ‘made a religion of violence and brutality’ and, says Trotter, its inherent weakness is ‘the very limited scope of interest it provides for active and progressive minds, added to the fact that it is an anachronism.’ Hitler has indeed ‘put back the clock’ when it is recognised that the socialised herd, its biological antagonist, ‘alone can satisfy the moral as well as the intellectual desires of modern man.’

Superficially and against weak antagonists all is in favour of the wolf. The socialised herd is ‘perplexed by a multitudinous confusion of voices and ideals; its necessary development of altruism gives the society it produces an aspect of sentimentality and flabbiness.’ Of such an aspect the Germans have made the world fully aware through their propaganda, and events in some at least of the democratic countries have provided no effective challenge. All Nazi literature shrieks the idea of democratic degeneracy, and it should prove to be the major failure of the Germans that it was their own attitude which created first cohesion and ultimately great strength in their principal opponent. The beehive is not innately hostile, but it is a terrible enemy. Never, perhaps, has this cohesion come so near to being too late; nor can the socialised herd permit itself the delusion that it is naturally invincible. To that, the fate of civilised Scandinavia should be a sufficient answer. Yet once cohesion is secured, backed by strong and organised force, moral force begins to tip the scales, and the real weaknesses in the unsocialised herd are revealed. Principal among them is rigidity.

It was the rigidity of former German society which Trotter saw as a driving force towards outside aggression. This rigidity the Nazi party claim to have banished for ever. But a second's thought will reveal that what they have actually done is to substitute one sort for another, in precisely the Russian manner. Party leaders and secret police have taken the place of the aristocracy, and in Mr Harold Nicolson's phrase—Germany is now ruled from the corporals' instead of from the officers' mess. The lupine quality remains unaltered. Under the spell of the ‘glory of combat and conquest,’ with ‘force as the touchstone of right,’ the German is fired with the ‘warrior spirit’—that supremely boring characteristic so absent on the surface in our own redoubtable armies. ‘All the immense power of suggestion at the disposal of an organised state’ fosters its ends, a power which has been incalculably reinforced since the last war by the invention of wireless.

‘The functional value of herd instinct in the wolf,’ says Trotter, ‘is to make the pack irresistible in attacking and perpetually aggressive in spirit. The individual must, therefore, be specially sensitive to the leadership of the herd.’ This leadership must make him ‘do things, however difficult, however dangerous, even however senseless, and must make him yield an absolute, immediate, and slavish obedience.’ It follows that: ‘he will believe the pack to be impregnable and irresistible, just and good, and will readily ascribe to it any other attribute which may take his fancy, however ludicrously inappropriate.’ Given constant attack and action, the power of the wolf-pack, ably led, must necessarily be enormous: ‘How far it can be maintained in inactivity and mere defence is another matter,’ adds Trotter. The whole history of the present war shows that Hitler is unlikely ever to put his people to a prolonged test of patience.

The German nation, says Trotter, ‘has no sense of public opinion outside the pack. … It is easily aroused to rage by external criticism, and when it finds its paroxysms make it ridiculous to the spectator it cannot profit by the information but becomes, if possible, more angry.’ Secretly envious of good opinion, the German has ‘a principal thesis that altruism is, for the purposes of the statesman, non-existent, or if it exists is an evidence of degeneracy and a source of weakness.’

Such lack of insight is, argues Trotter, ‘one of the chief disadvantages of the aggressive as compared with the socialised type of gregariousness.’ Diplomatically, it has led German statesmen into a succession of situations which, though superficially ‘successful,’ are in essence so grotesque that it is difficult to believe such a series could continue. After facing England at arms in 1914, consequent upon the violation of Belgium, a precisely similar move by Germany against Poland brought the two nations once more into opposition. Hitler has always professed that he had no wish to fight this country. It may be true: if so, then, although he has learnt much about the art of war, he has learnt nothing about the nation he once professed to admire. Otherwise he would never have placed Germany vis-à-vis England in precisely the same position as did the Kaiser.

For in each case, in 1914 and 1939, reasonable insight would have saved Germany from a struggle which she has said she did not seek. Germany, in a former as in the present decade, ‘allowed herself to accept opinions of England's strength, moral and physical, which were pleasant rather than true,’ while at the same time she has irritated this country with such insistent purpose as to make it ‘certain that sooner or later England would recognise her implacable enemy, though, inarticulate as usual, she might not say much about it.’

Even internally the lupine character suggests itself by ‘an atmosphere of fierce competition, of ruthless scandalmongering and espionage.’ Tact, moreover, is a quality for which the German has so little use that he ‘is not unwilling that a certain amount of discontent and restiveness’ in a conquered province ‘should give him opportunities of forcibly exercising his dominion and resuscitating the glories of conquest.’

His parrot cries and his Hymns of Hate, comic to a nation which takes its songs from the music-hall and is at best a poor hater, are necessary stimuli to the ‘due degree of aggressive rage’ against a nation who is an enemy essentially of her own making. How little Germany has changed, despite her impressive new facade, is shown by the fact that she retains all her old tricks: deception of her own people, lying abroad, trickery even to her friends, and a new repertoire of anti-British songs, sung with a solemnity which in any other country would be incredible.

The wolf-herd is, argues Trotter, a biological anachronism of whose ultimate fate there cannot be much doubt. The socialised herds have ‘merely to maintain their resistance, to do which they have certain psychological advantages, and they must win.’ Their advantages demand separate enumeration and are tremendous, though socialised leadership has in the past been mainly through the people upwards, rather than the reverse. Yet a measure of leadership—such as we now have—is essential to crystallise resolution, since it is necessary to present something more than a solid front to the aggressor, something more than mere resistance. The function of our leaders at the present time should indeed be to assume something of the fierceness—the same fierceness—of the aggressive herd, since no other attitude can be understood and respected by the Germans. Yet in the long run it is the democratic people, not their leaders, who win their wars, and if leadership adds to our strength in this time of our greatest trial, it will be but an extra instrument among those we already possess. The spirit of the hive has, of its own power, struggled through to victory before, and would do so again, since it has never yet known defeat except when self-divided. If well led and well organised, its increased potentiality must be incalculable. Mere numbers no longer become relevant to the result of the struggle. It is will and cohesion which count.

Trotter's analysis of the quiddity of the English has been quoted too little, and has never been bettered. Of this country he says: ‘In the unbroken security of her land, for near a thousand years, she has leisurely, perhaps lazily, and with infinite slowness pursued her path towards a social integration of an ever closer and deeper kind. She has stolidly, even stupidly, and always in a grossly practical spirit, held herself to the task of shaping a society in which free men could live and yet be citizens. She has had no theory of herself, no consciousness of her destiny, no will to power.’

As for her Empire which, giving the lie to the cynics and the pessimists, has supported her so magnificently not once but twice within thirty years, she seems to have built it casually. ‘She has allowed an empire to be won for her by her restless younger sons, has shown no gratification in their conquests, and so far from thrilling with the exultation of the conqueror, has always at the earliest moment set her new dominions at work upon the problem in which her wholly unromantic absorption has never relaxed.’

Of actual social conditions in this country, the author's verdict is harsh. Time would have modified it: but he could say with truth during the last war that England's ‘society is irregular, disorganised, inco-ordinate, split into classes at war with one another, weighted at one end with poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease, weighted at the other end by ignorance, prejudice, and corpulent self-satisfaction. Nevertheless her patience is no more shaken by what she is lectured upon as failure than was her composure by what she was assured was imperial success.’

Of England's absent-mindedness and unconscious greatness he writes: ‘Nations may model themselves on her expedients and found the architecture of their liberty on the tabernacles she has set up by the wayside to rest in for a night—she will continue on her road unconscious of herself or her greatness, absent-mindedly polite to genius, pleasantly tickled by prophets with very loud voices, but apt to go to sleep under sermons, too awkward to boast or bluster, too composed to seem strong, too dull to be flattered, too patient to be flurried, and withal inflexibly practical and indifferent to dreams.’ The anxious months since Dunkirk seem to have made this vision of England apparent to a great part of the world, and we may, without undue self-satisfaction, be glad of it.

Lastly is this country's equally inflexible will to peace. In one of the finest of all Trotter's passages he writes: ‘There can be no doubt at all that the ordinary consciousness of the vast majority of citizens of this country was intensely averse from the idea of war. Can we suppose, however, that the deep, still spirit of the hive that whispers unrecognised in us all had failed to note that strange, gesticulating object across the North Sea?’ (Trotter spoke of the Kaiser, but his words apply still more richly to his black successor.) ‘In its vast, simple memory would come up other objects that had gone on like that. It would remember a mailed fist that had been flourished across the Bay of Biscay three hundred years ago; a little man in shining armour who had strutted threateningly on the other shore of the Channel; and the other little man who had stood there among his armies, and rattled his sabre in the scabbard. It had marked them all down in their time, and it remembered the old vocabulary. It would turn wearily and a little impatiently to this new portent over the North Sea. … Wise with the experience of a thousand years, it would know when to strike.’

At a time when peace may be under discussion, Trotter warns us against too easy a treaty. It may be hazarded that he would argue that the failure to implement Versailles, for all the faults of that settlement, brought the present crisis upon us. In the event of a German defeat, he says, ‘proof of failure adequate to convince a people of the socialised type might be quite inadequate to convince a people of the lupine type, in whom, from the nature of the case, mental resistibleness is so much more impenetrable. If she is allowed to escape under conditions which in any way can be sophisticated into a victory or, at any rate, not a defeat, Germany will continue to hate us as she continued to hate her victim (of 1870) France.’

Though hard, these are true words, and it will be the proper task of statesmen—harder than the winning of any battle—to sow the seeds of a new and liberal outlook in the German people, one which will enable them to assimilate a lesson to which they are strangers—‘the benign use of power.’ It will be hard not merely because the German has a thick skull, and education in anything which requires altruistic thought must come hard to him, but owing to our own inevitable exhaustion. In itself, fighting is of little interest to the socialised herd, which has struggled upwards towards finding a more creative end to its existence; and it is in this detachment, even lassitude, that danger lies. It is not, indeed, sufficient to endure and to emerge at last victorious. The socialised herd cannot afford to relax until it has reorganised the world nearer to its own pattern.