The Assault Part 18

Because the truth about Neuve Chapelle remained suppressed for many weeks, attention was bestowed to an overshadowing degree on the gas and officer-imprisonment episodes. Hitherto the universal demand in England was that, no matter how the Germans waged war, Englishmen must continue to fight "like gentlemen." Suggestions that the hour had long since arrived for an eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth warfare were rejected in almost every quarter as "un-English" and, therefore, undebatable. The Kaiser's soldateska might rape, pillage, loot and murder, but British troops must battle "in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way"--with clean hands. Tirpitz's bluejackets might practise the tactics of pirates, but Britannia's sailors would continue to respect the high traditions of their calling. Men went so far as to a.s.severate that it were better that Britain should be beaten than win by "German methods."

Sir Edward Clarke, the leader of the bar, protesting against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's proposal that Zeppelin murders could only be checked by British air reprisals against defenseless German communities, wrote to _The Times_: "It may be our misfortune to be defeated in this war, but it will be our own fault if we are disgraced." Yet British "fighting blood" seemed at length stirred to a boil by asphyxiating-gas and "Hate"

measures against British officer-captives. A wave of holy rage swept over the country. Those who had advocated the use of kid gloves against an enemy which fought with bra.s.s knuckles and poison found their views sensibly less popular. Britain was waking at last to the realization which even the Belgian atrocities, "Zeppelin murder" and the "Scarborough baby-killers" had not fully aroused--that her high-minded "sporting ethics" were lamentably out of place in war with a foe which believed in ruthless "Frightfulness." The Tommies who died horrible deaths from the effects of German poison gas and the officers who languished in burglars' cells because martyrs in a worthy cause--their anguish convinced England almost against her will that the German was the most ferocious, pitiless and unconscionable enemy who had ever engaged in the n.o.ble calling of arms.

While this healthy conviction was soaking into Britain's sluggish consciousness, the crowning infamy of the _Lusitania_ ma.s.sacre was committed. The cup of indignation, already full to the brim, now overflowed. Demand for vengeance, in the form of a campaign against the Germans to be waged with resolution and force more destructive than any previous effort, was universal. There must be no more temporizing, no more half measures, no more vacillation and procrastination. Recruiting enjoyed a fresh spurt, a response to the lurid posters headed "Remember the _Lusitania_!" and reproducing the verdict of the Queenstown coroner's jury

"that this appalling crime was contrary to international law and the conventions of all civilized nations, and we therefore charge the officers of the said submarine, the Emperor and Government of Germany, under whose orders they acted, with the crime of wilful and wholesale murder before the tribunal of the civilized world."

"It is your duty," the poster added, "to take up the Sword of Justice to avenge this devil's work. ENLIST TO-DAY!"

The _Lusitania_ horror unchained the mob spirit from Land's End to John o' Groat. Uninterned Germans, who were still at large in their thousands, were the victims of rioters' fury in London and the big provincial towns, and the Home Office was forced by irate public opinion to place barbed-wire around all the "enemy aliens" not already in captivity. Simultaneously the demand went forth that the pampering of German prisoners of war in palatial manor-houses like Dorington Hall should give way to rigor more suitable for men condemned henceforth to be known as Huns. The _Lusitania's_ aftermath was accompanied by ample proof that the bulldog was no longer curled up on the hearth-rug as unconcernedly as he had been throughout the winter and spring. He was showing his teeth, and he was snarling. He meant business now. There had been enough of Queensbury rules, Hurlingham ethics and Crystal Palace niceties in dealing with the Germans. They had served notice to Humanity that it had no laws which the German army and navy felt bound to respect. Englishmen said to themselves: "So be it." Then they rolled up their sleeves.

Thus was Britain ringing with righteous wrath in the middle of May, 1915, when what I venture to dignify as _the turning-point of the war_ arrived: the exposure by Lord Northcliffe's newspapers of what was henceforth to be known as "the sh.e.l.ls tragedy." Northcliffe himself had recently been the guest of Sir John French at the front. Still more lately the military critic of _The Times_, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Repington, had visited British Field Headquarters under the same auspices. There they were told the truth about Neuve Chapelle. It was a simple story. The British army had essayed to smash through the German lines, hopelessly short of the right kind of ammunition--high explosive sh.e.l.ls. Batteries of artillery, often on the threshold of decisive victory, found themselves suddenly starved of the only sort of sh.e.l.l which could possibly blast a way through the concrete and barbed-wire of the enemy's entrenchments. What happened at Neuve Chapelle--a terribly heavy loss of British life with nothing like compensatory results--would inevitably happen again when the British army was called upon to attack. It would simply be sentenced to death and defeat. Sir John French had been provided with shrapnel which was good enough to smash the Boers, but he was criminally ill-equipped with the sh.e.l.ls which alone were capable of demolis.h.i.+ng the elaborate German defensive arrangements and enabling the British infantry to advance with a fighting chance of success. If the army was not to be condemned to inglorious impotence or annihilation, it had to be provided forthwith with high-explosive ammunition on an immense and unceasing scale. The British Commander-in-Chief declined, in effect, to a.s.sume further responsibility for the fate of the campaign in Flanders unless there was sweeping and instant remedial action by the War Office.

On May 14 Lieutenant-Colonel Repington, in a dispatch to _The Times_ from "Northern France," which, like other news from the field, pa.s.sed the Censor at Headquarters before transmission to England, declared that "the want of an unlimited supply of high explosive was a fatal bar to our success." Describing an attack which had collapsed for the same reason that the offensive at Neuve Chapelle had failed, Repington wrote:

"We found the enemy much more strongly posted than we expected. We had not sufficient high explosive to level his parapets to the ground after the French practice, and when our infantry gallantly stormed the trenches, as they did in both attacks, they found a garrison undismayed, many entanglements still intact, and maxims on all sides ready to pour in streams of bullets. We could not maintain ourselves in the trenches won, and our reserves were not thrown in because the conditions for success in an a.s.sault were not present.

"The attacks were well planned and valiantly conducted. The infantry did splendidly, but the conditions were too hard.

"On our side we have easily defeated all attacks on Ypres. The value of German troops in the attack has greatly deteriorated, and we can deal easily with them in the open. But until we are thoroughly equipped for this trench warfare, we attack under grave disadvantages. The men are in high spirits, taking their cue from the ever-confident and resolute att.i.tude of the Commander-in-Chief.

"If we can break through this hard outer crust of the German defenses, we believe that we can scatter the German Armies, whose offensive causes us no concern at all. But to break this hard crust we need more high explosive, more heavy howitzers, and more men. This special form of warfare has no precedent in history.

"It is certain that we can smash the German crust if we have the means.

So the means we must have, and as quickly as possible."

By way of ill.u.s.trating what British guns could do, if sufficiently numerous and adequately fed, Repington told how the French "by dint of the expenditure of 276 rounds of high explosive per gun in one day, leveled with the ground all the German defenses, except the villages."

He left no doubt that until Sir John French's artillery could attack under similar conditions, British hopes of effective cooperation with Joffre's army were futile. _The Times_ critic's plain-spoken observations, which bore the unmistakable imprint of "inspiration" from British Headquarters, startled the nation. They could hardly have been more suggestive if the Commander-in-Chief himself had gone to the country and proclaimed the facts. Indeed, if others had not promptly done so, I have reason to believe that Sir John French would not have shrunk from that very task. No one had so direct and personal a reason for taking the bull by the horns, for if the British campaign were to degenerate from futility into fiasco, the odium would necessarily fall upon its field chieftain. History will hardly condemn him for resolving that the blame should be placed where it belonged, if, as may well have been the case, inspiration of the impending public exposure emanated from him.

On May 21 Lord Northcliffe's _Daily Mail_--his critics are fond of calling _The Times_ the "penny edition" of _The Daily Mail_--opened a ruthless fire on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, as the man directly responsible for the high-explosive famine which was paralyzing British military effort. England was plastered with flaming placards reading: "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder." With the journalistic instinct for a catch-phrase, Northcliffe christened the situation "The Sh.e.l.ls Tragedy." He hammered home mercilessly the theory that England must hold to accountability the man whom the country had entrusted with practically autocratic control of the War Office. He insisted that Kitchener could not take shelter behind a brilliant past. It was a bold throw for the Bonaparte of British newspaperdom. He was not only a.s.sailing the man whom he himself had helped to elevate to the War Secretarys.h.i.+p; he was attacking the national idol. To the overwhelming majority of Englishmen, as I have already pointed out, the name of Kitchener spelled confidence. Next to the Fleet, he represented the country's greatest war a.s.set. Whenever Britons doubted whether the course of events was leading to victory, they thought of the navy and of Kitchener, and were of stout heart. Northcliffe knew and understood all this--none better. But he said to himself that the relief of the sh.e.l.ls crisis was of vastly more moment than the prestige of a national idol; that if the vital interests of the country demanded the dragging of Kitchener from his pedestal, there must be no hesitation in performing that unpleasant task. In an editorial article which stirred Great Britain to its uttermost foundations, _The Daily Mail_ went full tilt to the issue. It reminded Englishmen that Lord Kitchener loomed large in the public eye primarily as an organizer of victory against the Sudanese and as a man who had "helped" Lord Roberts in South Africa, though (it recalled) there were men who knew Roberts' private opinions of Kitchener's achievements in the Boer campaign. Kitchener had also been Commander-in-Chief in India and, until the outbreak of war, was engaged in the comparatively easy task of running the Egyptian machine, whose wheels had been so well oiled by Lord Cromer. Northcliffe was well aware that Kitchener, owing to his long absence in the East, where he had spent the greater part of his life, was not in touch with the democracy at home, nor had Lord Kitchener ever pretended to any such knowledge. _The Daily Mail_ admitted all these things and declared moreover that it was fair to Kitchener to say that he had been thrust at a moment's notice into a position of immense difficulty. No longer in his first youth, and more than twice the age of successful military commanders of one hundred years ago, Kitchener had been put in charge of the raising, drilling, clothing, equipping, arming, feeding and _fighting_ of an army which had to be manufactured at a speed unprecedented in the history of the world. Kitchener, though not essentially a good organizer, was a man of enormous driving-power. His talents in that respect had stood him in good stead so far in the war.

With the aid of a gigantic advertising campaign, he had accomplished marvels in the direction of raising a volunteer army; but "the sh.e.l.ls tragedy" was thunderous proof that the Secretary for War had bitten off more than he could chew. Unless things were to go from bad to worse, the all-important question of providing munitions must be taken from Kitchener's overburdened shoulders and transferred to those of men better equipped in respect of time, temperament and training, to deal with it. The Northcliffe revelations lost none of their sensationalism in presence of Mr. Asquith's solemn a.s.surances at Newcastle, barely three weeks previous, that Britain's munition supply, as well as that of her Allies, was entirely adequate.

If Northcliffe had suddenly proposed the abdication of the Sovereign, or the demolition of St. Paul's Cathedral, or the proclamation of a Republic, nothing could have been more cyclonic in its effect than _The Daily Mail's_ imperious demand for the curtailment of Kitchener's supreme authority at the War Office, because he had "blundered" with the army's ammunition. At the Stock Exchange and on the Baltic (the s.h.i.+pping mart) copies of all the Northcliffe papers were ceremoniously burnt.

Town councils held indignation meetings, to discuss the advisability of banning them from the public reading-rooms. Super-patriots and Hide-the-Truth zealots rushed to their newsdealers and canceled their subscriptions to _The Times, The Daily Mail_ and other Northcliffe organs. Rival publishers went so far as to suggest that Northcliffe and his editorial staff should be lined up in front of a firing-squad and shot for high treason. Wherever one went, one encountered the most violent abuse of the journalist who had dared to sling mud at the great soldier who was the incarnation of the nation's hopes and to write "Failure" next to his magic name. _Punch_ epitomized national sentiment in a cartoon showing John Bull patting Kitchener on the shoulder, trampling a _Daily Mail_ under foot, and saying:

"If you need a.s.surance, Sir, you may like to know that you have the loyal support of all decent people in this country."

But Northcliffe, who possesses those valuable twin a.s.sets of the true journalist, an elephantine hide and utter fearlessness, returned to the attack, day after day. He never let up. The "sh.e.l.ls tragedy," though Liberal organs were reluctant to admit it, dealt the Asquith Liberal Government a body blow. It was reeling from the effects of still another revelation. Lord Fisher, "Fighting Jack," the First Lord of the Admiralty, tendered his resignation. He refused longer to hold office under the temperamental Mr. Winston Churchill or even under a government to which that impetuous young statesman belonged. The public learned that Fisher had not acquiesced whole-heartedly in Mr. Churchill's schemes for limiting the Dardanelles campaign to a purely naval operation. England was now seething with unrest. The political position was chaotic. Acrimonious debate in Parliament on the sh.e.l.ls question was inevitable. For weeks previous there had been demands from many quarters that the conduct of the war should be transferred from a purely Party Government to the hands of a "National Cabinet" of all political complexions. Mr. Asquith yielded to the inevitable. Before _The Daily Mail's_ exposure of "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder" was a week old, the reconstruction of the Cabinet into a "Coalition" Administration was in full progress. Northcliffe's papers were still being burnt in public places, but he had won a victory for England for which, as she lives, she will yet come to acclaim his name. The completion of the Coalition Ministry was announced on June 11. Lord Kitchener remained Secretary of War, but a "Ministry of Munitions," which took sh.e.l.ls and other sinews of war out of Kitchener's hands, was created, and the "hustler" of the Cabinet, Lloyd-George, was entrusted with its organization and administration. Northcliffe had carried his point.

The war has not been prolific in England of "big men." Barring, perhaps, Joffre and Hindenburg, it has produced none anywhere. But I venture that far into the realm of prophecy to predict that the recorder of the life and times of Great Britain in the crucible which was 1915 will pay no mean tribute to the newspaper proprietor who risked prestige and power for the sake of that most prodigious of all tasks--stuffing unpalatable truth down British throats. Northcliffe's actual methods in the performance of the deed may have been debatable. His motives were certainly beyond question, and they will, undoubtedly, appear in true perspective in the impartial light of history. He is not offended when people detect Napoleonic flashes in his impetuous eccentricities, and he would be the last man in the world to deny that his brand of genius is entirely devoid of defects, as it a.s.suredly is not. Northcliffe has been held up to public obloquy as hardly any man of his generation ever was before him and has even been charged with being in "German pay." But he has lived to see the ripening of the fruits of his sensational crusade: the British munitions output has been quadrupled since the Stock Exchange first burnt _The Daily Mail_. Lloyd-George, at the Ministry of Munitions, has gathered round him the strongest company of business and scientific brains that was ever applied to any Government department in England. One million men and women, in more than two thousand "controlled" establishments, are turning out days, nights and Sundays the sh.e.l.ls with which the British army, early or late, is going to cleave its way to victory. In the great fighting around Loos at the end of September, when the French and the British between them fired 65,000,000 sh.e.l.ls in seventy-two hours, there was no shortage of the wherewithal, the lack of which turned Neuve Chapelle into a "victory"

which Britain had been better without. A prodigious amount of high explosive was necessary to wreck the Germans' first defensive lines in Artois, but still the supply was not exhausted. When the cease-fire was sounded, the British commanders found that they had on hand a great deal more ammunition than they expected, and in certain departments there was actually a greater quant.i.ty ready for the gunners at the end of the struggle than at the beginning. Mr. Lloyd-George received and was ent.i.tled to the chief glory for that splendid a.s.surance that there would be no more Neuve Chapelles. But I am sure that the little Welshman who has accomplished the miracle of "speeding up" Britain would be the first to acknowledge that _The Daily Mail_, though its circulation is 150,000 less than it was in May, can not be robbed of the honor that belongs to it for having torn the scales from England's eyes on the "sh.e.l.ls tragedy."

Previous to the "sh.e.l.ls tragedy," I do not think it will be possible for even the friendliest chroniclers to record that, with the single exception of the magnificent rush to arms of her upper and middle cla.s.ses, Great Britain had given a particularly flattering account of herself in the searching test of war. I do not refer, of course, to the accomplishments of the army and navy. British soldiers and sailors need no encomium at my hands. The Trojan heroism of the army, despite its lack of sweeping victory, will enrich military history for all time.

The silent effectiveness of the navy, with its vindication of Admiral Mahan's theories, is the marvel of the war. I am referring to the conduct of the British who have not been in the war as combatants--to the moral psychic aspect of life in this country during the year of travail. That is why I call the _Lusitania_ a blessing in disguise, just as I sometimes felt that a landing of a German force on the British coasts, had it only taken place soon enough, might have proved the most practically beneficial tonic to the British war spirit which could have been conceived. Something was needed to _bring the war home_ to Englishmen. The _Lusitania_ partially served the purpose.

The renaissance set in with the dawn of summer. Events did not give recruiting quite that "boom" which was expected, but the national sobering process which ensued was more than a compensating factor.

Lloyd-George, inevitable and irrepressible, invented the doctrine that "silver bullets" (money) and Germany's "potato-bread spirit" (economy) were now as urgently necessary for Britain to win as high-explosives with which to kill Germans. Only a few weeks before becoming "Sh.e.l.ls Minister" and while still Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd-George introduced the second War Budget, which gave Britons a staggering idea of what killing Germans meant in mere lucre. It was costing $15,000,000 a day then--in May--and the scale was crescendo, not diminuendo.

Lloyd-George declared that the nation's bills could not be met unless the country went over, horse, foot and dragoon, to the Simple Life. The Prime Minister seconded his appeal for the radical regeneration of British life--a conversion from recklessness to Spartanism--with some eloquent figures. In a "keynote speech" at Guildhall, Mr. Asquith declared that "waste, on the part either of individuals or of cla.s.ses, which is always foolish and shortsighted, is in these times nothing short of a national danger." The United Kingdom's annual income, the Premier explained, was between $11,250,000,000 and $12,000,000,000.

Annual expenditure aggregated about $10,000,000,000. The country, therefore, saved under normal conditions between $1,250,000,000 and $2,000,000,000. But the necessities of "our seven wars" (in different parts of the hemisphere) required Britons to save about two and a half times what they customarily put away. They needed to store up $5,000,000,000 instead of $2,000,000,000 a year. In other words, they must reorganize their scheme and standards of living--and of spending--so that they saved $50 for every $20 saved in the past. In no other conceivable way, said the Prime Minister, could Great Britain shoulder the burden of a struggle already costing her at the rate of $5,475,000,000 a year. To ask the notoriously most extravagant people in Europe--the returns from the United States are not in yet--to "economize" on the Brobdingnagian lines which these figures conjured up was a very tall order, indeed.

But the ga.s.sed Tommies back from the trenches and the widows and the orphans manufactured by the _Lusitania_ and the impregnability of the German lines were uppermost in England's mind, and she set her jaw to the inevitable. The Simple Life did not find itself among friends in the midst of a race which believes in a maximum of servants on a minimum of income; whose very homes and kitchens are the paradise of wasters; which venerates leisure, week-ends, "good addresses" and "parties"; which left the omnibuses to the crowd and scorned anything beneath the rank of a taxi for the truly well-born; which would gladly go poor for a week for the sake of a Sat.u.r.day lunch at the Piccadilly grill and a supper at the Savoy, with a theater and a music-hall between, and Murray's afterward till dawn; which, while never ostentatious, was addicted to luxury; which wors.h.i.+ped golf, football, bridge and horse-racing like liberty itself, and which drank like sailors all.

But the ax of retrenchment was infinitely preferable to the sword of Damocles. Lords and ladies, "gentry" and common folk, prepared to make the best of it. Prohibition, mainly to enforce sobriety on the working cla.s.ses, was considered by the Government, but not for long, for there was a mighty howl from the "trade" and from its bibulous votaries, who in England include both s.e.xes, all cla.s.ses and nearly every age.

Restriction, not prohibition, was adopted as a compromise. In the "munition areas" the saloons were closed at the hours when, in former times, working men were most inclined to squander their wages on debilitating ale and alcohol. Everywhere a "No-drinks-before-10-A.-M."

decree was promulgated, and, simultaneously, it became a misdemeanor for a restaurant, saloon, hotel, bar or even a private club to dispense liquor after ten o'clock at night. Clubland in Pall Mall, St. James's and Piccadilly groaned, and there was gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth among the "nuts"

(young bloods) and the ladies of the chorus. But people found they had more money for bread and b.u.t.ter, potatoes, vegetables and meat, which were costing semi-famine prices as it was, and there were fewer besot wrecks of women in the Strand, and almost no intoxicated men in khaki.

War manifestly had its blessings, too. One met unfamiliar people in the plebeian motor-buses, who at first wrapped their evening-coats exclusively and close around them, for contact with the common clay was still new and strange. It became positively fas.h.i.+onable to be a cheese-parer. You were no longer considered "bad form" if you went straight home from the theater, and confessed why. If my lady of Mayfair did not close up her house in South Audley Street or Park Lane altogether, to live in "chambers" or some cozy country cottage, which was also cheap, she at least shut up the drawing-rooms, dispensed with a maid or two, cut out the most expensive courses at her dinners, when she gave any at all, and didn't mind if her guests turned up in day clothes.

The plutocratic peer who ordinarily maintained a "place" at the seash.o.r.e, an estate in Middles.e.x or Devon, and a town-house in Berkeley Square had probably long ago handed over the "place" and the estate for military hospital purposes--hardly a mansion or manor-house in England to-day is devoted to any other use--and now retrenchment became for him the order of the day in London, too. His stable of thoroughbreds almost vanished in the early days of the war, for the needs of the cavalry and the artillery were insatiable and undiscriminating, and now his _garage_ was down to a war basis--the most plebeian car he ever drove; the others were in army service either in England or "somewhere in France."

Sackville Street and Albemarle Street, Bond Street and Regent Street, where smart clothes and other expensive trinkets for men and women were formerly sold, became deserted. Men's tailors displayed nothing but khaki in their windows, and Paquin's, Redfern's and Worth's languished as if England were famine-blighted. Society faded away as if pestilence had swept Uppertendom into oblivion. Women of Britain's first families were almost ashamed to be seen in anything more chic than the livery of mourning, and by midsummer of 1915 black was pitiably fas.h.i.+onable and omnipresent. "Entertaining" had been a lost art for months. "Going in for it" now seemed and was sacrilege. Indulged at all, it was excusable only if it had the extenuating excuse of having been arranged, and then in the most modest of ways, for one's wounded or recuperating officer friends, back from h.e.l.l or on the eve of going there--"somewhere in France." It was war-time in England at last.

If I have seemed to emphasize that the reconstruction of British life, after bitterly hard knocks on land and sea pounded some realization of their task's magnitude into Englishmen's heads, went on chiefly in the upper and upper-middle cla.s.ses, it is precisely the impression I seek to convey. It is they alone, to date, who have taken the full measure of Britain's terrible emergency and acted accordingly. Even that statement requires qualification, for the fools' paradise is not even to-day inhabited exclusively by the benighted lower strata of the population.

Neuve Chapelle, asphyxiating gas and the _Lusitania_ had pa.s.sed into history a full month before, yet there lingers painfully in my memory the recollection of a country-house week-end party broken up because Englishwomen of "cla.s.s" objected to hearing a fellow-guest venture the opinion that dear old England would better "wake up" to the fact that calm alone, mighty an a.s.set as it was, could not "march to Berlin"

against an enemy like the Germans. These ladies were interesting as types. Their name was legion, and many of them, as an Irishman might say, were men. Common sense, prized of Anglo-Saxon virtues, and tolerance, its twin sister, lost their old-time hold on many millions in these isles during the war. The "Anti-German Union," which was founded by well-meaning n.o.blemen and n.o.blewomen for the purpose of organizing hate of the Teuton and all his works, perhaps set itself an unethical goal, but the psychology at the bottom of the movement was wholesome; it was all to the good, because it was sharpening the bulldog's teeth. It committed uncouth excesses like sending interrupters to the German Church service in Montpelier Place, forgetting that my esteemed friend, the Reverend Mr. Williams, the Anglican chaplain in Berlin, was never prevented from a.s.sembling his uninterned flock for wors.h.i.+p at St.

George's in Montbijou-Platz. Far less excusable than the "Anti-German Union's" super-patriotic eccentricities was the smug intolerance of enormous numbers of British toward elementary questions of the war.

They would hear nothing of the Germans unless it was discreditable. I would write in my "Germany Day by Day" column in _The Daily Mail_ that there were growing indications (let us say) that the enemy was still at fighting zenith--his stock of men, materials and provisions still far from exhausted. The next day's post would invariably bring me denunciatory letters from anonymous members of the public. I was "pro-German." I was "a German agent." I was "playing the enemy's game." Englishmen didn't "care to read the twaddle of a man who was still so enamored of the Hun capital where he so long lived." And when I wrote of American exasperation with British s.h.i.+pping practises in war, an English patriot induced my editor to print a letter in retort, "praying pa.s.sionately for preservation from the candid friend." Other correspondents did not confine their observations to supplication. They were the high privates, these human ostriches, of the Grand Army of Truth-Hiders, who, commanded by great editors in Fleet Street and ably abetted by the Censors.h.i.+p, preferred palatable fiction to iron facts.

It is they who kept John Bull lulled in complacent slumber for most of the first year of the war and are doing their diabolical best to administer sleeping-powder even now.

Yet, by and large, the section of the British public which does its thinking above its gaiter-tops was effectually roused from its dreams as Armageddon's initial twelvemonth approached its finish. It was the sub-stratum which could not be roused from the stupor of indifference.

The war had brought mourning and desolation to the upper-cla.s.s homes of England. The havoc wrought in the ranks of the peerage and other dignities is poignantly summarized in the new _Debrett_. Ten per cent.

of the British officers who have died in the war were in the pages of _Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage_, and in the issue for 1916, just published, the War Roll of Honor of the dead comprises eight hundred names. In it appear one member of the Royal Family--Prince Maurice of Battenberg; six peers, sixteen baronets, six knights, and seven members of Parliament, one hundred sixty-four knights companion, ninety-five sons of peers, eighty-two sons of baronets, and eighty-four sons of knights. Two successive heirs to the earldom of Loudoun fell, and the death of Lord Worsdey affected the succession to three separate peerages, the earldom of Yarborough and the baronies of Fauconberg and Conyers. Succession has been unduly precipitated, or the normal descent changed, in over one hundred instances by the casualties of the war. The peer, the professional man, or the merchant, had had an almost annihilating blow struck at his fortune. Things during the past year had dealt these cla.s.ses a vicious thrust. But working-cla.s.s and lower-cla.s.s Britain were actually profiting from the war. Wages were inordinately high--despite trade-unionism's unceasing clamor.

Unemployment no longer existed. There were no soup-kitchens along the Embankment. The Salvation Army's poor-relief system was almost without an excuse. Families of clerks and working men--many thousands of whom were volunteers in Kitchener's armies--were, thanks to generous separation allowances paid by the War Office, almost better off than in the days when the bread-winner was at home. For the British proletariat Mars seemed almost a savior. He had brought it unwonted prosperity.

The temper in which a vast portion of the "downtrodden" looked upon their new-born affluence was that self-preservation, being the first law of nature, insistently demanded nothing from them which would precipitately evict them from Easy Street. The Grand Fleet protected lower-cla.s.s England from the only blow which could conceivably have knocked sense into it--invasion. As that did not and could not occur, Shepherd's Bush envisaged war not as an unmixed evil, but as something better, somehow, than peace had ever been. It is all woefully at loggerheads with Norman Angell's theories of the "devastating economic influence of war." But the immutable fact is that working-cla.s.s Britain, despite the havoc the war has played with trade, incomes and high finance generally, finds itself, despite even the higher cost of living, at least on as prosperous a level as at any time in its contemporary history. It may be a myopic view, but it explains, in my judgment, much of the proletariat's amazing apathy toward the crucial national emergency.

The building of the New England is still in progress. The melting-pot is full. Years will elapse before the finished product leaves the crucible. The process of transition, however, has made enormous strides. Adversity is a wonderful reorganizer. The physiognomy of things long held unchangeable is altered almost beyond recognition. It is a better England already, as well as a new one. Above all, Democracy has not failed in the supreme test. The spectacle of three million men, uncoerced, responsive and responsible to no law but their own conscience, marching out to death and glory that England may live, is a sublime picture, which will blot out and overshadow much of the bungling and many of the disasters and excrescences of the past.

If I have seemed to dwell with insistence and even cynicism upon "British calm" amid the thunders, let me here and now subscribe unqualifiedly to the view that it remains, when all is said and done, a magnificent achievement second only to the demonstration of Voluntaryism as a Democracy's first line of defense. Britannia will continue to rule the waves mainly because she was calm when they surged about her most angrily.

CHAPTER XXII

QUO VADIS?

October, 1915. The eighty-third day of the second year of war. A woman, writing in _The Times_, suggests that England adopt as her national prayer, "G.o.d help us win this war." King George V, emerging at length from the No Man's Land of Const.i.tutional Irresponsibility, appeals, stirringly, "to my people" to save the sinking bark of Voluntary military service. It is the calm before the Conscription storm. The Sovereign discourses upon "the grave moment in the struggle"

and calls for "men of all cla.s.ses to come forward and take their share in the fight in order that another may not inherit the free Empire which their ancestors and mine have built." The King hints at "the darkest moment" which, from time immemorial, "has ever produced in men of our race the sternest resolve."

Britain's horizon is clouded, wherever one looks. No forced optimism can blink iron facts. In the East, Russia is paralyzed for months to come, even if not "crushed." Her fortresses, "deemed impregnable," writes Lloyd-George in the preface of his compiled war speeches, "are falling like sand castles before the resistless tide of Teutonic invasion." The "steam-roller" must go into winter quarters. In the West, the great Anglo-French offensive in Artois and the Champagne punctures the German front and advances the Allied lines two or three miles. The German losses are her severest of the war--140,000, so the French say, including vast heaps of dead, whole regiments of maimed and at least 25,000 prisoners and 145 field-guns. But the victory, substantial and promising as it is, has been dearly bought. The Germans claim that the preliminary seventy-two-hour bombardment represented an expenditure of 65,000,000 sh.e.l.ls--mostly of American production, so allege the "inspired" war-correspondents at German headquarters, with sneering references to "blood-smeared dollars." The Allies' casualties are not tabulated. They are only known to be cruelly heavy. Englishmen fear there has been another Neuve Chapelle. Joffre and French have demonstrated that the German front is not quite impenetrable. But the enemy, on his part, has shown that for the Allies to "break through" in the West is a task fraught with peril and toll sickening to contemplate.

General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief at the Dardanelles, has been recalled "to report." Another British general, unnamed, is dismissed for having led an army into a shambles at Suvla Bay. The campaign in Gallipoli is a tacitly acknowledged failure. General Sir Charles Monro is hurried to Turkey to succeed Hamilton and retrieve the fortunes of an expedition which has already cost 100,000 casualties, a trio of battles.h.i.+ps, a transport full of troops, and heart-breaking incalculable. There are ugly rumors that the Allies, facing the inevitable, are about to abandon the ill-starred Dardanelles venture, and try their luck elsewhere. Against the German-led Turks twelve miles of precarious "front" with a back to the sea is all Anglo-Colonial-French valor has been able to achieve. But misfortune has dogged the Allies in fields remote from the actual theaters of war.