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Volume II
England's Effort
Letters To An American Friend
[Illustration: Spring-time in the North Sea--Snow on a British
Battleship.]
_The War On All Fronts_
England's Effort
Letters To An American Friend
By Mrs. Humphry Ward
With A Preface By Joseph H. Choate
Illustrated
New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1918
Copyright, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Preface
HAS ENGLAND DONE ALL SHE COULD?
That is the question which Mrs. Ward, replying to some doubts and queries
of an American friend, has undertaken to answer in this series of letters,
and every one who reads them will admit that her answer is as complete and
triumphant as it is thrilling. Nobody but a woman, an Englishwoman of warm
heart, strong brain, and vivid power of observation, could possibly have
written these letters which reflect the very soul of England since this
wicked and cruel war began. She has unfolded and interpreted to us, as no
one else, I think, has even attempted to do, the development and absolute
transformation of English men and women, which, has enabled them, living
and dying, to secure for their proud nation under God that "new birth of
freedom" which Lincoln at Gettysburg prophesied for his own countrymen.
Really the cause is the same, to secure the selfsame thing, "that
government of the people, by the people, and for the people may not perish
from the earth";--and if any American wishes to know how this has been
accomplished, he must read these letters, which were written expressly for
our enlightenment.
Mrs. Ward had marvellous qualifications for this patriotic task. The
granddaughter of Doctor Arnold and the niece of Matthew Arnold, from
childhood up she has been as deeply interested in politics and in public
affairs as she has been in literature, by which she has attained such
world-wide fame, and next to English politics, in American politics and
American opinion. She has been a staunch believer in the greatness of
America's future, and has maintained close friendship with leaders of
public thought on both sides of the water. Her only son is a member of
Parliament, and is fighting in the war, just as all the able-bodied men
she knows are doing.
She has received from the English government special opportunities of
seeing what England has been doing in the war, and has been allowed to go
with her daughter where few English men and no other women have been
allowed to go, to see the very heart of England's preparedness. She has
visited, since the war began, the British fleet, the very key of the whole
situation, without whose unmatched power and ever-increasing strength the
Allies at the outset must have succumbed. She has watched, always under
the protection and guidance of that wonderful new Minister of Munitions,
Lloyd George, the vast activity of that ministry throughout the country,
and finally in a motor tour of five hundred miles, through the zone of the
English armies in France, she has seen with her own eyes, that marvellous
organization of everything that goes to make and support a great army,
which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her
fighting line. She has witnessed within three-quarters of a mile of the
fighting line, with a gas helmet at hand, ready to put on, a German
counter attack after a successful English advance something which no
other woman, except herself and her daughter, who accompanied her, has
ever had the opportunity to see.
Mrs. Ward admits that at the beginning England was unprepared, which
itself demonstrated that as a Nation she never wished for war with
Germany, and never expected it. Her countrymen had no faith in Lord
Roberts's ten-year-long agitation for universal national service, based on
the portentous growth of the German army and navy. She never knew of any
hatred of Germany in the country. On the contrary, she realized what
England and all the rest of the world owed to Germany in so many ways.
England was not absolutely unprepared in the sense that the United States
is unprepared, even for self-defence from external attack, but except for
the fleet and her little expeditionary force, England had neither men nor
equipment equal to the fighting of a great Continental war.
The wholly unexpected news of the invasion of Belgium aroused the whole
country to realize that war on a scale never known before had come, and,
as the firing upon Fort Sumter awakened America, convinced England that
she must fight to the death for her liberties, unready as she was;--but
Mr. Balfour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, says that, since the war
began, she has added one million to the tonnage of her navy, and has
doubled its personnel, and is adding more every day.
In the matter of munitions the story that Mrs. Ward tells is wonderful,
almost beyond belief. Much had been done in the first eight months of the
war, in the building of munition shops, and the ordering of vast
quantities from abroad, before the second battle of Ypres, in April, 1915,
which led to the formation of the new Coalition Ministry, including a
wholly new department, the Ministry of Munitions, with Mr. Lloyd George at
its head.
From that time to this the work has been colossal, and almost incredible,
and without serious collision with the working classes. Vast new buildings
have been erected all over England, and a huge staff, running into
thousands, set in action. The new Minister has set out with determination
to get the thing done at whatever cost, and to remove all obstacles that
he found in his way. The Government has absolutely taken control of the
whole work of the creation of munitions and the regulation of workmen,
employed in it by whatever employers, and everything and everybody has had
to submit to his imperious will, and the greatest change of all has been
the employment of women on a vast scale to do the work that only men had
ever done before. France had set about it immediately after the battle of
the Marne, and allowed no Frenchman to remain idle who could do such work.
Mrs. Ward does not fail to do full justice to the working men of Great
Britain, and shows that besides the hundreds of thousands that they have
sent to the fighting line, a million and a half remained at work in the
shops, creating munitions with the aid of skilled experts and the
astonishing help of the women, who never before had expected to have
anything to do with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns.
The old ways were laid aside, old distinctions of class and sex
forgotten, and all worked with a common and indomitable will for the
saving of the country.
To give a single instance, what was a few months ago a smiling pasture is
now found covered with vast buildings, in which these manufactures are
carried on by thirty-five hundred working people, of whom a large
proportion are women. I love to quote a single sentence from the utterance
of her companion on a visit to this establishment: "As to the women, they
are saving the country. They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten
and a half, or, with overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The
Government are insisting on one Sunday, or two Sundays a month off. I
don't say they aren't right, but the women resent it. 'We're not tired,'
they say. And look at them! They are not tired."
This unheard-of spectacle of great engineering establishments filled with
women, all hard at work, is a sure proof of the undying purpose of the
whole English race. They are mostly young and comely, and their beauty of
form and feature is only enhanced by their enthusiasm for their labors,
and at the same time it has increased the ardor and intensity of their
fellow workmen. Mrs. Ward found four thousand women to five thousand men
engaged in this nation-saving labor, in a single establishment. They know
that they are setting the skilled laborers free for work which women
cannot do, and the unskilled in large numbers free for the army.
Every building, as well as every man and woman, that could be put to the
work, has been availed of, and the results have been incredible. Another
instance she gives of special interest: "An old warehouse, bought, so to
speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small
workshop for shell production, employing between three and four hundred
girls with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled
labor going. These girls are working on the eight-hours' shift system;
working so well that a not uncommon wage among them, on piece-work, of
course, runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a week," and all
the time they are at work they remember that they are doing common service
with their husbands, and sweethearts, and sons, and brothers, who are
perilling their lives in the trenches.
None of this distinguished writer's romances compare in vivid description
and heart-inspiring eloquence with these accounts that she gives of what
she has seen with her own eyes of the resurrection of England.
It is not for me to anticipate her startling and thrilling narratives on
this subject. She takes for her text what Mr. Lloyd George said in his
speech in the House of Commons on reviewing his new department: "Unless we
quicken our movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which
so much gallant blood has flowed," and Mr. Asquith's serious words in
December: "We cannot go on," said he, "depending upon foreign countries
for our munitions. We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and
the cost is too great. We must make them ourselves."
Mrs. Ward dwells with keen insight upon the difficulties met with among
the trade-unions and labor people, and successfully overcome, and explains
in full what they call over there the work of the Dilution Commissioners,
which is a wholly new phrase for us, and she gives this clear definition:
"Dilution means, of course, that under the sharp analysis of necessity,
much engineering work, generally reckoned as 'skilled' work, and reserved
to 'skilled' workmen by a number of union regulations, is seen to be
capable of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted
out from the others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or
semiskilled worker. By so dividing them up and using superior labor with
economy, only where it is really necessary, it can be made to go
infinitely further, and the inferior, or untrained, labor can then be
brought into work where nobody supposed it could be used; where, in fact,
it never has been used." This novel experiment, together with the equally
novel employment of women in such work, soon proved a triumphant success,
and the women proved themselves able to do the work of men, some of it
even better. There were, of course, difficulties at first, but the
mischief, whatever it was, was quickly cured, and in one factory that Mrs.
Ward names, "men and women soon began to do their best. The output of the
factory, which had been planned for four thousand shells a week, ran up to
twenty thousand, and everything has gone smoothly since."
The adaptation of firms and factories, already existing, the control of
which was taken by the Government, was wonderful, but the national
shell-factories, founded, financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions,
are more wonderful still, and give us many new ideas about government
ownership in an emergency, which we may sometimes have to think of more
seriously. The speed, the efficiency, the success of the new system have
been marvellous, so that in the short space of a year the demands of Mr.
Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been satisfied, and England will depend
no more upon foreign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition,
but will be able not only to manufacture all she can use herself, but to
help to supply her Allies.
In one department of labor, it is a very startling thing to learn that "in
a single fuse factory, what they call the danger buildings, mostly women
are employed. About five hundred women are found at work in one of these
factories on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and
filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which is really dangerous, like
detonator work." It is the insertion in the shell of the little pellet
which gives it its death-dealing power, that is so risky, but the women do
not shrink from even this. In the largest fuse shop known, quite new,
fourteen hundred girls, in one shift, are at work.
"An endless spectacle of gun-carriages, naval turrets, torpedo-tubes, army
railway-carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making
shops, gauge shops, seems to be going on forever, and in the tool-making
shops the output has risen from forty-four thousand to three million a
year." The vastness of the work, and the incessant and enormous
multiplication of all the products for war must be as overwhelming as it
is monotonous. And then there were the huge shipyards, which before the
war were capable of the berth of twenty ships at once, from the largest
battleship downward, and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour's word
for it, have since the beginning of the war added a million tons to the
navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid journeys had not time to stop and inspect
these, to our very great regret, for her description of them would have
been most instructive.
She declares from actual observation that in the Clyde district, in whose
populous centre some threats of disquiet have existed, the work done by
thousands and tens of thousands of workmen since the beginning of the war,
especially in the great shipyards, and done with the heartiest and most
self-sacrificing good-will, has been simply invaluable to the nation, and
will never be forgotten, and the invasion of women there has, perhaps,
been more startling to the workmen than anywhere else. Where not a single
woman was employed in the works and factories before the war, except in
textiles, "there will soon be fifteen thousand of them in the munition
workshops alone, and that will not be the end."
Wherever she goes, Mrs. Ward's eyes are wide open. From her own home,
which is in the midst of one of the most patriotic regions of the realm,
she can witness the perpetual activity which has come about in preparation
for the war in all its varied phases and branches; everything and
everybody is in vigorous motion, both there and in all the counties of
England which she has visited. Great camps in every direction for the
shelter and training of recruits, all coming and going, all marching and
countermarching, training and drilling everywhere, and as fast as the
citizen is converted into a soldier, he is bound for the seat of war with
all the equipments that war requires, tramping everywhere, tramp, tramp,
along the land; tramp, tramp, along the sea, until the new supports, all
ready for vital service, reach their destination on French soil.
Mrs. Ward has made a careful study of the effect of the novel introduction
of women into all these works of men, especially in the munition
factories, and dwells with great significance upon the rapidity of the
women's piece-work and the mingling of classes, where educated and refined
girls work side by side and very happily with those of an humbler type.
What Mrs. Ward well calls "the common spirit" inspires them all, and holds
them all in just and equal relations. At every step she is startled by the
vastness of the work and the immense hand that women have in it, finding
one shop turning out about four thousand shrapnel and four thousand
high-explosive shells per week, heavy shell work all, which they thought
at first they must furnish men to lift in and out of the machines, but
"the women thrust the men aside in five minutes." Surely this new
education of women, of these girls and women who are to become the mothers
of the next generation, must have a most inspiring and exalting effect
upon the days to come. War may be postponed for whole generations, but
England will never fail to be ready for it as a necessary part of the
education of the race.
It is quite evident that this war is breaking down the barriers that have
heretofore been impassable, not only between men and women, but between
the various classes of society, and that it cannot possibly end without
bringing these more closely together, all working to the same end in a
more perfect harmony, and that the result of it must be that England will
hereafter be an even more perfect democracy than it has been up to this
time.
France! Glorious France! The conduct of whose government and people in the
war seems to have been absolutely perfect, has at last reached a wonderful
result after her hundred years of agonies and revolutions. We hear from
France no complaints, no internal dissensions, but all the people, mankind
and womankind, working together, each in its proper sphere, to the one
common end, the salvation of the State. I trust that we shall never
forget all that the world and we, especially, owe to France. She is adding
to our obligations now by fighting our battles for us.
And now with her daughter under the special protection and guidance of the
war office, this distinguished woman followed the khaki-clad soldiers of
England, now numbered by millions, across the channel, and everything was
thrown freely open to her. She soon found out what the great supply bases,
on which the British army in France rests, really mean, made up of the
Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, Railroad, Motor, and Transport,
and she found it a deeply interesting study, "whose work has involved the
labor of some of the best brains in the army," and she learned the
organizing power that has gone to make the career of the English army in
France possible.
There was the immense dock, and its vast storehouse, the largest in the
world, "built three years before the war, partly, it is said, by German
money, to house the growing cotton trade of the port, but now it houses a
large proportion of the food of the British army," a building half a mile
long, bounded on one side by the docks, where the ships discharge the
stores and the men, and on the other by the railway lines where the trains
are perpetually loading for the front. On the quays ships of all nations,
except Germany, are pouring out their stores, and on the other side the
trucks that are going to the front are loading with the supplies that are
wanted for every regiment in the service. Her eyes light upon one wired in
space, labelled "Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage,"
where, while medical necessaries are housed elsewhere, are "the dainties,
the special foods, the easing appliances of all kinds," which are to make
life bearable to the wounded men, and she stops to think how the shade of
Florence Nightingale would have paused at this spot.
The huge sheds of Army Ordnance are filled with everything that a soldier
does not eat, all metal stores, whatever, and the men who work in them are
housed in one of the longest sheds in tiers of bunks from floor to
ceiling, and then there are the repairing sheds and workshops, established
near by, and that is the most wonderful thing of the whole to my
mind--never done before in connection with an army in the field. Trainsful
of articles to be repaired come down from the front every day, and almost
every imaginable article that the men at the front can use, from guns to
boots, comes here to be repaired, or if found beyond repair, to be sent to
Yorkshire for shoddy. The marvellous thing is that, as soon as they are
received, they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and returned
to their owners at the front, a vast work in itself. The boot and uniform
sheds alone, where again she finds five hundred French women and girls,
and the harness-making room are doing an enormous work. The Colonel in
charge began work with one hundred and forty men, and is now employing
more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of
pounds a week to the British government.
Recreation and amusement are supplied in near locality for the waiting
soldiers and, although the snow is more than ankle-deep, they visit such
places as recreation rooms and cinema theaters, and on a neighboring hill
great troops of men are going through some of the last refinements of
drill before they start for the front. Here are trenches of all kinds and
patterns, in which the men may practise, planned according to the latest
experience brought from the front. "The instructors are all men returned
from the front, and the new recruits, trained up to this last point, would
not be patient of any other teachers."
Having thus seen all that one day could afford them at the very base of
the great army, our visitors make their way in closed motors through the
snow, passing scores of motor lorries, and other wagons, stuck in the
snow-drifts. They stop for the night at a pleasant hotel full of
officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communication, and a
few of the mothers and sisters of the poor wounded in the neighboring
hospitals, who have come over to nurse them.
Every gun, every particle of munition, clothing, and equipment, and
whatever else is necessary, including the food of the armies, every horse,
every vehicle, has to be brought across the British channel, to maintain
and reinforce the ever-growing British army, and the ever-daily increasing
congestion at all the ports makes it more and more difficult every day to
receive, disembark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of men and the
masses of material, and all the time there are thousands of troops passing
through, thousands in the hospitals, and thousands at work on the docks
and storehouses. Everything tending to Tommy Atkins's comfort is supplied,
including again palatial cinemas and concerts, all of which results in
excellent behavior and the best of relations between the British soldier
and the French inhabitants. At the docks armies of laborers and lines of
ships discharging men, horses, timber, rations, fodder, coal, coke,
petrol, and the same at the storehouses and depots.
The visitors spend a long Sunday morning in the motor transport depot, and
it gave a good illustration of the complete system of discipline and
organization that prevailed everywhere. This depot began, said the Colonel
in charge, on the 13th of August, 1914, "with a few balls of string and a
bag of nails." Its present staff is about five hundred. All the drivers of
twenty thousand motor vehicles are tested here, and the depot exhibits
three hundred and fifty different types of vehicles, and in round figures,
one hundred thousand separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and
arranged in this same depot. The Sunday morning began with a simple
service in the Young Men's Christian Association hut, at which five
hundred motor-drivers attended, about half of the whole number in the
station.
The same day they explored endless camps and the wards of a Red Cross
hospital. It was impossible to take in everything at once, and our ladies
retired at night, bewildered by mingled impressions of "human energy,
human intelligence, human suffering," but full of pride and exultation at
the efficiency of their country and of the good relations of their
soldiers with the French. They carried with them as a last impression of
the day the picture of a canteen worked day and night in three shifts by a
heroic band of women close by the railway station, full of soldiers just
departing for the front, young, gay and full of spirits; then came the
train to take the soldiers off for the fighting line, and the women, left
behind, set up the song, already familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home
fires burning till the boys come home."
In the village where they stopped, some forty miles from the actual front,
a special messenger from the general headquarters brings the amazing news
that General Headquarters invites Mrs. Ward and her daughter for two days,
and will send a motor for them, if they accept, which, of course, they did
upon the instant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mysteries of
the front, its camps, its men, and its hospitals, that they were to see
with their own eyes to-morrow.
The remainder of the day before they are to start for the front suffices
for the visit to a camp set down in one of the pleasantest spots in
France, a favorite haunt of French artists before the war, now occupied by
a British reinforcement camp, the trees having all been cut away, by long
lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training grounds,
to which we have already referred.
I must copy the bare catalogue of what this vast camp contained: "Sleeping
and mess quarters for those belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals
with twenty-one thousand beds" (and this shows now what it was to be near
the front); "rifle ranges; training camps; a vast laundry, worked by
French women under British organization, which washes for all the
hospitals thirty thousand pieces a day; recreation huts of every possible
kind; a cinema theatre seating eight hundred men, with performances twice
a day; nurses clubs; officers clubs; a supply depot for food; an ordnance
depot for everything that is not food; railroad sidings on which every
kind of man and thing can go out and come in without interruption; a
convalescents' depot of two thousand patients; and a convalescent horse
depot of two thousand horses; all this in one camp, established since last
April."
Ah! But the deepest impression left on the minds of our ladies is of the
terrible sufferings in the hospitals, of the smiling endurance with which
they were borne, of the timely skill, pity, and devotion of the doctors
and nurses, taking care of the twenty thousand wounded. Realizing the
sympathy of America with all these scenes and sufferings, they do not fail
to note the hospitals organized by the Universities of Chicago and of
Harvard, staffed by American sisters and doctors, each providing
thirty-four doctors and eighty nurses, and dealing with a thousand
patients, and a convalescent depot of two thousand beds. Every day the
ambulance train comes in, and splendid hospital ships are taking the
brave wounded back to England for home and rest.
And now came the day in which they were to motor forty miles to be the
guests of the G.H.Q. Soon they seemed to be in the midst of the battle,
"our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and
more broken up by shell holes." The British lines are just beyond,
cottages close by, and the German lines just in front of a wood near them,
three-quarters of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than any
woman, even a nurse, had been in this war, to the actual fighting on the
English line, and the cup of impressions was full. They actually saw the
brave boys whom they had passed an hour before, sitting in the fields
waiting for orders, now marching into the trenches to take their turn
there--they knew that they were marching into the jaws of death, but they
walked as quietly and as cheerfully as if they were going to a parade, the
guns crashing close by them all the time. The firing being too hot for the
women, the captain in charge of them was relieved when they elected to
turn back.
The next day, their second as guests of G.H.Q., as they came down from
breakfast, our ladies were surprised to find the motor at the door, a
simple lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready for them to use,
for the captain greeted them in the best of spirits with the news that a
very successful action had been fought that morning, "we had taken back
some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Canal that we lost, a little while ago,
and captured about two hundred prisoners; and if we go off at once we
shall be in time to see the German counter attack." The one impossible
thing for any woman ever to have hoped to see!
Somehow or other they very quickly got to the very post of danger. Soon
they got close to the Tower of Ypres, which Mrs. Ward well describes as
"mute witness of a crime that beyond the reparation of our own day,
history will revenge through years to come." Then the English guns spoke,
and they watched and saw the columns of white smoke rising from the German
lines as the shells burst. The German lines are right in sight, and soon
their shells begin to burst on the English trenches. The German counter
attack is on. All the famous sites of the early part of the war are then
in sight, but all they can fully see is the bursting German shells, as
from moment to moment they explode.
In her final letter Mrs. Ward shows other great efforts which Great
Britain has made since the war began; that the taxes imposed for the
support of the war and cheerfully borne demand a fourth part of his income
from every well-to-do citizen; that five hundred million sterling, or
twenty-five hundred million dollars have been already lent by Britain to
her allies, a colossal portion of her income; that she has spent at the
yearly rate of three thousand million dollars on the army, a thousand
million dollars on the navy, while the munition department is costing
about four hundred million sterling, and is employing close upon two
million workers, one-tenth, I think, women; that the export trade of the
country, in spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at this moment
greater than it was in the corresponding months of 1913; she has raised an
army of four millions of men, and will get all she wants.
What is more precious than all the rest, besides the vast amount of
treasure that she has lavished upon the war, besides the rich mansions in
all parts of the land that she has devoted to the uses of the sick and the
wounded, she has given thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of her
choicest youth, who have willingly surrendered their lives for the great
cause; young men of the noblest pedigree, without number, by their lives
and deaths have attested their right to be regarded as the flower of the
British youth; the professional classes and the universities have emptied
their halls so that the men of Oxford and Cambridge might take their
places with the rest, and offer up their lives as willing sacrifices, and
all the men of England of every degree have joined with them and been
welcomed as brothers in the ranks for the great sacrifice. The rank and
file, who are fighting and dying for England, are fighting in the same
spirit as their leaders and falling by the hundred thousand for the
nation's salvation. How exactly Emerson's noble verse fits them:
"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
The youth replies, 'I can!'"
No one who reads this book can doubt for a moment, I think, that ENGLAND
HAS DONE ALL SHE COULD, has put forth efforts worthy of her history and of
her great traditions, that her national spirit is invincible, her national
resources inexhaustible, and that her irresistible will to conquer and to
rescue freedom and civilization for all the world from this terrible
contest, is absolutely sure to win.
All America is vastly indebted to Mrs. Ward for her triumphant success in
proving that England has done her best and for making this great story so
clear.
In this introduction, too hastily prepared for want of time, which is
really little better than a synopsis of the book itself, I have not
hesitated to use her own language from beginning to end, as the clearest
by which to express and condense her narrative, and with occasional
indications by quotation marks.
I still believe absolutely that nine-tenths of my countrymen are in
earnest sympathy with the Allies and are confident of their final and
complete success.
JOSEPH H. CHOATE.
NEW YORK, May 19th, 1916.
Author's Foreword
This little book was the outcome of an urgent call from America sent by
various friends whose whole sympathy is with the Allies. I have done my
best to meet it, in four strenuous months, during which the British
Government has given me every possible facility. But such work has to be
done rapidly, and despatched rapidly. I beg my friends, and England's
friends, beyond the Atlantic, to excuse its defects. I can honestly say,
however, that I have done my best to get at the facts, and that everything
which is here put forward rests upon independent enquiry, so far as the
limit of time allowed.
The title has caused me much trouble! Will any son of gallant Scotland, or
loyalist Ireland, or of those great Dominions, whose share in the war has
knit them closer than ever to the Mother Country--should he come across
this little book--forgive me that I have finally chosen "England" to stand
for us all? "Gott strafe England!" has been the German cry of hate. I have
given what I conceive to be "England's" reply. "Britain"--"Great Britain"
are words that for all their profound political significance have still
to be steeped a good deal longer in life and literature before they stir
the same fibres in us as the old national names. And "England" as the seat
of British Government has, it is admitted, a representative and inclusive
force. Perhaps my real reason is still simpler. Let any one try the
alternatives which suggest themselves, and see how they roll--or do not
roll--from the tongue. He or she will, I think, soon be reconciled to
"England's Effort"!
MARY A. WARD.
* * * * *
NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
There has been added to this edition an epilogue in the shape of a seventh
letter, bringing the story up to August 16, including munitions, finance,
the battle of Jutland, and the Somme offensive.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Spring-time in the North Sea--Snow on a British
Battleship _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Marines drilling on the quarterdeck of a British Battleship 24
Fifteen-inch guns on a British Battleship 25
A forest of shells in a corner of one of England's
great shell filling factories 86
A light railway bringing up ammunition 87
One of the wards of a base hospital, visited by the King 132
A Howitzer in the act of firing 133
ENGLAND'S EFFORT
I
Dear H.
Your letter has found me in the midst of work quite unconnected with this
hideous war in which for the last eighteen months we in England have lived
and moved and had our being. My literary profession, indeed, has been to
me, as to others, since August 4th, 1914, something to be interposed for a
short time, day by day, between a mind tormented and obsessed by the
spectacle of war and the terrible reality it could not otherwise forget.
To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a while in memories of life as
it was long, long before the war--there was refreshment and renewal in
that! Once--last spring--I tried to base a novel on a striking war
incident which had come my way. Impossible! The zest and pleasure which
for any story-teller goes with the first shaping of a story died away at
the very beginning. For the day's respite had gone. The little "wind-warm"
space had disappeared. Life and thought were all given up, without mercy
or relief, to the fever and nightmare of the war. I fell back upon my
early recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago--and it was like
rain in the desert. So that, in the course of months it had become a habit
with me never to _write_ about the war; and outside the hours of writing
to think and talk of nothing else.
But your letter suddenly roused in me a desire to write about the war. It
was partly I think because what you wrote summed up and drove home other
criticisms and appeals of the same kind. I had been putting them
mechanically aside as not having any special reference to me; but in
reality they had haunted me. And now you make a personal appeal. You say
that England at the present moment is misunderstood, and even hardly
judged in America, and that even those great newspapers of yours that are
most friendly to the Allies are often melancholy reading for those with
English sympathies. Our mistakes--real and supposed--loom so large. We are
thought to be not taking the war seriously--even now. Drunkenness,
strikes, difficulties in recruiting the new armies, the losses of the
Dardanelles expedition, the failure to save Serbia and Montenegro, tales
of luxurious expenditure in the private life of rich and poor, and of
waste or incompetence in military administration--these are made much of,
even by our friends, who grieve, while our enemies mock. You say the
French case has been on the whole much better presented in America than
the English case; and you compare the international situation with those
months in 1863 when it was necessary for the Lincoln Government to make
strenuous efforts to influence and affect English opinion, which in the
case of our upper classes and too many of our leading men was unfavourable
or sceptical towards the North. You who know something of the vastness of
the English effort--you urge upon me that English writers whose work and
names are familiar to the American public are bound to speak for their
country, bound to try and make Americans feel what we here feel through
every nerve--that cumulative force of a great nation, which has been slow
to rouse, and is now immovably--irrevocably--set upon its purpose. "Tell
me," you say in effect, "what in your belief is the real spirit of your
people--of your men in the field and at sea, of your workmen and employers
at home, your women, your factory workers, your soldiers' wives, your
women of the richer and educated classes, your landowners and politicians.
Are you yet fully awake--yet fully in earnest, in this crisis of England's
fate? 'Weary Titan' that she is, with her age-long history behind her, and
her vast responsibilities by sea and land, is she shouldering her load in
this incredible war, as she must shoulder it; as her friends--the friends
of liberty throughout the world--pray that she may shoulder it?"
Yes!--I must answer your questions--to the best of my power. I am no
practised journalist--the days of my last articles for _The Pall Mall_
under the "John Morley" of those days are thirty odd years behind me! But
I have some qualifications. Ever since--more than half a century ago--I
paid my first childish visit to the House of Commons, and heard Mr.
Roebuck, the "Tear 'em" of _Punch's_ cartoon, make his violent appeal to
the English Government to recognise the belligerency of the South, it
would be almost true to say that politics and affairs have been no less
interesting to me than literature; and next to English politics, American
politics and American opinion; partly because of my early association with
men like W.E. Forster, stanch believers, even when Gladstone and John
Russell wavered, in the greatness of the American future and the justice
of the Northern cause--and partly because of the warm and deep impression
left upon me and mine by your successive Ambassadors in London, by Mr.
Lowell above all, by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John Hays, the Choates
and the Bayards--no less than by the many intimate friendships with
Americans from different worlds which my books have brought me since 1888.
During the last thirty years, also, I have had many friends--and some
kinsmen--among the leaders of English politics, and in both political
parties. At the present moment my only son is a member of the English
House of Commons, and a soldier fighting in the war. All my younger
kinsfolk are fighting; the sons of all my friends are fighting; and their
daughters are nursing as members of Voluntary Aid Detachments--(marvellous
what the girl V.A.D.'s, as England affectionately calls them, have done
since the beginning of the war!)--or working week-end shifts to relieve
munition workers, or replacing men of military age in the public offices
and banks. I live in one of the Home Counties, within five miles of one of
the military camps. The small towns near us are crowded with soldiers;
the roads are full of marching infantry, of artillery-trains and
supply-wagons. Our village has sent practically all its able-bodied men of
military age to the front; the few that remain are "attested" and only
waiting to be called up. A great movement, in which this household is
engaged, is now beginning to put women on the land, and so replace the
agricultural labourers who have gone either into the armies or the
munition factories. And meanwhile all the elderly men and women of the
countryside are sitting on War Committees, or working for the Red Cross.
Our lives are penetrated by the war; our thoughts are never free from it.
But in trying to answer your questions I have gone far beyond my own
normal experience. I asked the English Government to give me some special
opportunities of seeing what Great Britain is doing in the war, and in
matters connected with the war, and they have given them ungrudgingly. I
have been allowed to go, through the snow-storms of this bitter winter,
to the far north and visit the Fleet, in those distant waters where it
keeps guard night and day over England. I have spent some weeks in the
Midlands and the north watching the vast new activity of the Ministry of
Munitions throughout the country; and finally in a motor tour of some five
hundred miles through the zone of the English armies in France, I have
been a spectator not only of that marvellous organisation in northwestern
France, of supplies, reinforcements, training camps and hospitals, which
England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her fighting
line, but I have been--on the first of two days--within less than a mile
of the fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a Flemish
hill--with a gas helmet close at hand! I have been able to watch a German
counter attack, after a successful English advance, and have seen the guns
flashing from the English lines, and the shell-bursts on the German
trenches along the Messines ridge; while in the far distance, a black and
jagged ghost, the tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fitfully through
the mists--bearing mute witness before God and man.
For a woman--a marvellous experience! I hope later on in these letters to
describe some of its details, and some of the thoughts awakened by them in
a woman's mind. But let me here keep to the main point raised by your
question--_the effort of England_. During these two months of strenuous
looking and thinking, of conversation with soldiers and sailors and
munition workers, of long days spent in the great supply bases across the
Channel, or of motoring through the snowy roads of Normandy and Picardy, I
have naturally realised that effort far more vividly than ever before. It
seems to me--it must seem to any one who has seriously attempted to gauge
it--amazing, colossal. "What country has ever raised over sixty per cent
of its total recruitable strength, for service beyond the seas in a few
months?" asks one of our younger historians; and that a country not
invaded, protected by the sea, and by a supreme fleet; a country,
moreover, without any form of compulsory military service, in which
soldiering and the soldier have been rather unpopular than popular, a
country in love with peace, and with no intention or expectation of going
to war with any one?
II
For there we come to the root of everything--the _unpreparedness of
England_--and what it meant. It meant simply that as a nation we never
wished for war with Germany, and, as a nation, we never expected it. Our
Governments, of course, contained men who saw more or less plainly the
dangers ahead, and had spent years of effort in trying to avoid them. On
several occasions, during the last twenty years, as we all remember, a
wave of sudden anxiety as to German aims and intentions had spread through
the thinking portion of the nation--in connection with South Africa, with
Morocco, with the Balkans. But it had always died away again. We know now
that Germany was not yet ready! Meanwhile fruitless efforts were made by
successive English Governments to limit armaments, to promote arbitration,
and extend the scope of the Hague Tribunal. In vain. Germany would have
none of them. Year by year, in a world of peace her battle-navy grew. "For
what can it be intended but to attack England?" said the alarmist. But how
few of us believed them! Our Tariff Reformers protested against the
encroachments of German trade; but, outside a handful of persons who
seemed to most of us fanatics, the emphasis lay always on care for our own
people, and not on hostility to Germany. Those who warned us passionately
that Germany meant to provoke a struggle, that the struggle must come,
were very little heeded. Nobody slept the worse at night for their
harangues. Lord Roberts's agitation for National Service, based on the
portentous growth of the German Army and Navy, made comparatively little
way. I speak from personal experience of a large Parliamentary division.
"Did you foresee it?" I said to one of the ablest and most rising men in
the Navy a fortnight ago. He thought a little. "I always felt there might
be a clash over some colonial question--a quarrel about black men. But a
war between the white nations over a European question--that Germany would
force such a war--no, that I never believed!" Nor did any of us--except
those few--those very few persons, who Cassandra-like, saw the coming
horror plainly, and spoke to a deaf country.
"There was _no_ hatred of Germany in this country"--I quote a Cabinet
Minister. "Even in those parts of the country which had most reason to
feel the trade rivalry of Germany, there was no thought of war, no wish
for war!" It came upon England like one of those sudden spates through
mountain clefts in spring, that fall with havoc on the plains beneath.
After such days of wrestling for European peace as have left their
indelible mark upon every member of the English Cabinet which declared
war on August 4th, 1914, we fought because we must, because, in Luther's
words, we "could no other."
What is the proof of this--the proof which history will accept as
final--against the vain and lying pleas of Germany?
Nothing less than the whole history of the past eighteen
months!--beginning with that initial lack of realisation, and those
harassing difficulties of organisation with which we are now so often and
so ignorantly reproached. At the word "Belgium" on August 4th, practically
the whole English nation fell into line. We felt no doubts--we knew what
we had to do. But the problem was how to do it. Outside the Navy and the
Expeditionary Force, both of them ready to the last gun and button, we had
neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a Continental war, and
we knew it. The fact is more than our justification--it is our glory. If
we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week
after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane
men have behaved as we did in the years before the war?--233,000 men on
active service--and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany's
millions!--with arsenals and equipment to match. Is it any wonder that the
country--our untouched, uninvaded country--safe as it believed itself to
be under the protection of its invincible Navy, was, in some sections of
our population at any rate, slow to realise the enormous task to
which--for the faith of treaties' sake, for self-defence's sake--it was
committed?