Prime Minister asked Parliament to authorise the addition of half a
million of men to the Army, and a first war credit of a hundred millions
of money (five hundred million dollars). The first hundred thousand men
came rolling up into the great military centres within a few days. By
September 4th nearly three hundred thousand fresh men had enlisted--by
Christmas half a million. By May, a million men had been added to the new
Armies; by September, 1915, Sir John French alone had under his command
close on a million men on the lines in France and Flanders, and in
December, 1915, the addition of another million men to the Army was voted
by Parliament, bringing up the British military strength to approximately
four millions, excluding Colonials. And what of the Dominions? By
November, 1915, Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces more than
equal to the whole of that original Expeditionary Force, that
"contemptible little army" which, broken and strained as it was by the
sheer weight and fierceness of the German advance, yet held the gates of
the Channel till England could fling her fresh troops into the field, and
France--admirable France!--had recovered from the first onslaught of her
terrible and ruthless enemy.
In one of my later letters I hope to give some particulars of this first
rush of men, gathered from those who witnessed it and took part in it.
One remarkable point in connection with it is that those districts most
heavily employed in munition-making and coal-mining, the two industries
absolutely indispensable to our Army and Navy, have also sent the largest
supply of men to the fighting line--take, for instance, Newcastle and the
Clyde. There have been anxious episodes, of course, in the great
development. Was your own vast levy in the Civil War without them? And for
the last half million men, we have had to resort, as Lincoln resorted, to
a modified form of compulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of
unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first camp and billeting
organization of the enormous forces raised. But when all is said, did we
not, in the language of a French observer "improvise the impossible"?--and
have we not good reason to be proud?--not with any foolish vainglory, but
with the sober and resolute pride of a great nation, conscious of its
past, determined to correct its mistakes, and looking open-eyed and
fearless towards the future?
Then as to munitions: in many ways, as you will perhaps say, and as I
agree, a tragic story. If we had possessed last spring the
ammunition--both for ourselves and our allies we now possess, the war
would have gone differently. Drunkenness, trade-union difficulties, a
small--very small--revolutionary element among our work people--all these
have made trouble. But the real cause of our shortage lay in the fact that
no one, outside Germany, realised till far into the war, what the
ammunition needs--the absolutely unprecedented needs--of this struggle
were going to be. It was the second Battle of Ypres at the end of April
last year which burnt them into the English mind. We paid for the grim
knowledge in thousands of our noblest lives. But since then?
In a later letter I propose to draw some picture in detail of the really
marvellous movement which since last July, under the impulse given by Mr.
Lloyd George, has covered England with new munition factories and added
enormously to the producing power of the old and famous firms, has drawn
in an army of women--now reckoned at something over a quarter of a
million--and is at this moment not only providing amply for our own
armies, but is helping those of the Allies against those final days of
settlement with Germany which we believe to be now steadily approaching.
American industry and enterprise have helped us substantially in this
field of munitions. We are gratefully conscious of it. But England is now
fast overtaking her own needs.
More of this presently. Meanwhile to the military and equipment effort of
the country, you have to add the financial effort--something like
$7,500,000,000, already expended on the war; the organising effort,
exemplified in the wonderful "back of the army" in France, which I hope to
describe to you; and the vast hospital system, with all its scientific
adjuncts, and its constantly advancing efficiency.
And at the foundation of it all--the human and personal effort!--the lives
given for England, the blood so generously shed for her, the homes that
have sacrificed their all, our "golden lads" from all quarters and
classes, whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien dust that "is for
ever England," since they sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who mourn
the death or the wreck of the splendid sons they reared; our widowed wives
and fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel which only very slowly our
people have come to feel as in very deed their own. At first we thought
most often and most vividly of Belgium, of the broken treaty, and of
France, so wantonly attacked, whose people no English man or woman could
ever have looked in the face again, had we forsaken her. Then came the
hammer blows that forged our will--Louvain, Aerschot, Rheims, the
air-raids on our defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our women and
children, the Bryce report, the _Lusitania_, the execution of Edith
Cavell--the whole stupefying revelation of the German hatred and greed
towards this country, and of the qualities latent in the German character.
Now we _know_--that it is they, or we--since they willed it so. And this
old, illogical, unready country is only just arriving at its full
strength, only just fully conscious of the sternness of its own resolve,
only just putting out its full powers, as the German power is weakening,
and the omens are changing--both in East and West.
III
No!--the effort of England during the past eighteen months in spite of all
temporary ebbs and difficulties, in spite of that chorus of self-blame in
which the English nation delights, has been one of the great things in the
history of our country. We have "improvised the impossible" in every
direction--_but one_.
In one point, indeed, there has been no improvisation. Nothing was
trusted to chance. What is it that alone has secured us the time to make
the effort we have made?
It is now about a month ago that, by permission of the Admiralty, I found
myself driving towards a certain pier in a harbour opening on the North
Sea. The Commodore of a Cruiser Squadron was to send his boat for me, and
I was to lunch with him on board his Flag-ship. I duly passed the
distrustful sentry on the road leading to the pier, arrived at the
pier-head and descended from the motor which had brought me. The morning
was mistily sunny, and the pier strangely deserted. Where was the boat?
Where was my friend who had hoped to come for me himself? No signs of
either. The few old sailors employed about the pier looked at me in
astonishment, and shook their heads when I inquired. Commodore ----'s boat
was not there; no boat had been in that morning from the ships. I took the
Commodore's letter from my hand-bag, to assure myself I had not been
dreaming, and reread it in perplexity. No dates could be clearer--no
directions more precise. Suddenly I perceive one tall naval officer on the
pier. "Can you help me, sir?" And I hand him the Commodore's letter. He
looks at me--and at the letter. His face twinkles with repressed laughter;
and I laugh, too, beginning to understand. "Very sorry," says the charming
young man, "but I think I can assure you there will be no boat, and it is
no use your waiting. Commodore ---- went to sea last night."
I thanked him, and we laughed together. Then I walked up the pier a little
way, seeing a movement in the mist. A sailor came up to me. "They all went
to sea last night," he said in my ear--"and there are the slow ones coming
back!" And out of the mist came the black shapes of war-ships, moving
majestically up the harbour--one might have fancied, with a kind of
injured dignity, because their unreasonable fellows had been faster and
had gone farther afield than they.
I walked back to my motor, disappointed indeed, and yet exulting.
It was good to realise personally through this small incident,
the mobility and ever-readiness of the Fleet--the absolute
insignificance--non-existence even--of any civilian or shore interest, for
the Navy at its work. It was not till a week later that I received an
amusing and mysterious line from Commodore ----, the most courteous of
men.
[Illustration: Marines Drilling on the Quarterdeck of a British
Battleship.]
[Illustration: Fifteen-inch Guns on a British Battleship.]
IV
By the time it reached me, however, I was on the shores of a harbour in
the far north "visiting the Fleet," indeed, and on the invitation of
England's most famous sailor. Let me be quite modest about it. Not for me
the rough waters, or the thunderous gun-practice--
"Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides"--
which I see described in the letters of the Russian or American
journalists who have been allowed to visit the Grand Fleet. There had
been some talk, I understand, of sending me out in a destroyer; it was
mercifully abandoned. All the same, I must firmly put on record that mine
was "a visit to the Fleet," by Admiralty permission, for the purpose of
these letters to you, and through you to the American public, and that I
seem to have been so far the only woman who, for newspaper ends, has been
allowed to penetrate those mysterious northern limits where I spent two
wonderful days.
It was, indeed, a wintry visit. The whole land was covered with snow. The
train could hardly drag itself through the choked Highland defiles; and it
was hours behind its time when we arrived at a long-expected station, and
a Vice-Admiral looking at me with friendly, keen eyes came to the carriage
to greet me. "My boat shall meet you at the pier with my Flag-Lieutenant
to-morrow morning. You will pick me up at the Flag-ship, and I will take
you round the Fleet. You will lunch with me, I hope, afterwards." I tried
to show my grateful sense both of the interest and the humour of the
situation. My kind visitor disappeared, and the train carried me on a few
miles farther to my destination for the night.
And here I take a few words from a journal written at the time:
It is nearly dawn. A red light in the northeast is coming up
over the snowy hills. The water, steely grey--the tide
rising. What strange moving bodies are those, scudding along
over the dim surface, like the ghosts of sea planes? Dense
flocks of duck apparently, rising and falling along the
shallows of the shore. Now they are gone. Nothing moves. The
morning is calm, and the water still. And on it lie, first a
cruiser squadron, and then a line of Dreadnoughts stretching
out of sight. No lights anywhere, except the green lights on
a hospital ship far away. The great ships lie dark and
silent, and I sit and watch them, in the cold dawn, thinking
that but for them, and the multitude of their comrades that
guard these seas and shores, England would be as Belgium or
as Northern France, ravaged and destroyed by a barbarian
enemy. My heart goes out to you, great ships, and you,
gallant unwearied men, who keep your watch upon them! That
watch has been kept for generations. Never has there been
such need for it as now....
But the day has risen, and the sun with it. As I leave the shore in the
Vice-Admiral's boat, the sunlight comes dancing over a low line of hill,
lighting up the harbour, the mighty ships, with their guns, and, scattered
out to sea along the distance, the destroyers, the trawlers, the
mine-sweepers, the small auxiliary craft of all kinds--those "fringes of
the fleet"--which Kipling has caught and photographed as none but he can.
The barge stops beside the Flag-ship, and the Admiral descends into it.
What is the stamp, the peculiar stamp that these naval men bear?--as of a
force trained and disciplined to its utmost capacity, and then held
lightly in check--till wanted. You see it in so many of their faces, even
in eyes hollow for want of sleep. It is always there--the same strength,
the same self-control, the same humanity. Is it produced by the testing
weight of responsibility, the silent sense of ever-present danger, both
from the forces of nature and the enmity of man, the high, scientific
training, and last but not least, that marvellous comradeship of the Navy,
whether between officer and officer, or between officers and men, which
is constantly present indeed in the Army, but is necessarily closer and
more intimate here, in the confined world of the ship, where all live
together day after day, and week after week, and where--if disaster
comes--all may perish together?
But on this bright winter morning, as we pass under and round the ships,
and the Admiral points out what a landswoman can understand, in the
equipment and the power of these famous monsters with their pointing guns,
there was for the moment no thought of the perils of the Navy, but only of
the glory of it. And afterwards in the Admiral's pleasant drawing-room on
board the Flag-ship, with its gathering of naval officers, Admirals,
Captains, Commanders, how good the talk was! Not a shade of boasting--no
mere abuse of Germany--rather a quiet regret for the days when German and
English naval men were friends throughout the harbours of the world. "Von
Spee was a very good fellow--I knew him well--and his two sons who went
down with him," says an Admiral gently. "I was at Kiel the month before
the war. I _know_ that many of their men must loathe the work they are set
to do." "The point is," says a younger man, broad--shouldered, with the
strong face of a leader, "that they are always fouling the seas, and we
are always cleaning them up. Let the neutrals understand that! It is not
we who strew the open waters with mines for the slaughter of any passing
ship, and then call it 'maintaining the freedom of the seas.' And as to
their general strategy, their Higher Command--" he throws back his head
with a quiet laugh--and I listen to a rapid sketch of what the Germans
_might_ have done, have never done, and what it is now much too late to
do, which I will not repeat.
Type after type comes back to me:--the courteous Flag-Lieutenant, who is
always looking after his Admiral, whether in these brief harbour rests, or
in the clash and darkness of the high seas--the Lieutenant-Commanders
whose destroyers are the watch-dogs, the ceaseless protectors, no less
than the eyes and ears of the Fleet--the Flag-Captain, who takes me
through the great ship, with his vigilant, spare face, and his
understanding, kindly talk about his men; many of whom on this Thursday
afternoon--the quasi half-holiday of the Fleet when in harbour--are
snatching an hour's sleep when and where they can. That sleep-abstinence
of the Navy--sleep, controlled, measured out, reduced to a bare minimum,
among thousands of men, that we on shore may sleep our fill--look at the
signs of it, in the eyes both of these officers, and of the sailors
crowding the "liberty" boats, which are just bringing them back from their
short two hours' leave on shore!
Another gathering, in the Captain's room, for tea. The talk turns on a
certain popular play dealing with naval life, and a Commander describes
how the manuscript of it had been brought to him, and how he had revelled
in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. Two men in the
play--friends--going into action--shake hands with each other "with tears
in their eyes." A shout of derisive laughter goes up from the tea-table.
But they admit "talking shop" off duty. "That's the difference between us
and the Army." And what shop it is! I listen to two young officers, both
commanding destroyers, describing--one, his adventures in dirty weather
the night before, on patrol duty. "My hat, I thought one moment the ship
was on the rocks! You couldn't see a yard for the snow--and the
sea--_beastly_!" The other had been on one of Admiral Hood's monitors,
when they suddenly loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, and the
German army marching along the coast road to Dunkirk and Calais marched no
more, but lay in broken fragments behind the dunes, or any shelter
available, till the flooding of the dikes farther south completed the
hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns had begun.
Then the talk ranges round the blockade, the difficulties and dangers of
patrol work, the complaints of neutrals. "America should understand us.
Their blockade hit us hard enough in the Civil War. And we are fighting
for their ideals no less than our own. When has our naval supremacy ever
hurt them? Mayn't they be glad of it some day? What about a fellow called
Monroe!"--so it runs. Then its tone changes insensibly. From a few words
dropped I realise with a start where these pleasantly chatting men had
probably been only two or three days before, where they would probably be
again on the morrow. Some one opens a map, and I listen to talk which, in
spite of its official reticence, throws many a light on the vast range of
England's naval power, and the number of her ships. "Will _they_ come out?
When will they come out?" The question runs round the group. Some one
tells a story of a German naval prisoner taken not long ago in the North
Sea, and of his remark to his captors: "Yes, we're beaten--we know
that--but we'll make it _hell_ for you before we give in!"
For that final clash--that Armageddon that all think must come, our
sailors wait, not despising their enemy, knowing very well that they--the
Fleet--are the pivot of the situation, that without the British Navy, not
all the valour of the Allies in France or Russia could win the war, and
that with it, Germany's hope of victory is vain. While the Navy lives,
England lives, and Germany's vision of a world governed by the ruthless
will of the scientific soldier is doomed.
Meanwhile, what has Germany been doing in her shipyards all this time? No
one knows, but my hosts are well aware that we shall know some day.
As to England--here is Mr. Balfour moving the Naval Estimates in the House
of Commons--the "token votes" which tell nothing that should not be told.
But since the war began, says the First Lord, we have added "one million"
to the tonnage of the Navy, and we have _doubled its personnel_. We are
adding more every day; for the Admiralty are always "wanting more." We are
quite conscious of our defects--in the Air Service first and foremost. But
they will be supplied. There is a mighty movement afoot in the workshops
of England--an effort which, when all drawbacks are allowed for, has
behind it a free people's will.
In my next letter I propose to take you through some of these workshops.
"We get the most extraordinary letters from America," writes one of my
correspondents, a steel manufacturer in the Midlands. "What do they think
we are about?" An American letter is quoted. "So you are still, in
England, taking the war lying down?"
Are we? Let us see.
II
Dear H.
In this second letter I am to try and prove to you that England is _not_
taking the war "lying down."
Let me then give you some account--an eye-witness's account--of what there
is now to be seen by the ordinary intelligent observer in the "Munition
Areas," as the public has learned to call them, of England and Scotland.
That great spectacle, as it exists to-day--so inspiring in what it
immediately suggests of human energy and human ingenuity, so appalling in
its wider implications--testifies, in the first instance, to the fierce
stiffening of England's resolve to win the war, and to win it at a
lessened cost in life and suffering to our men in the field, which ran
through the nation, after the second Battle of Ypres, towards the close of
April, 1915. That battle, together with the disagreement between Mr.
Winston Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty, had, as we all know,
momentous consequences. The two events brought the national
dissatisfaction and disappointment with the general course of the spring
fighting to a head. By May 19th the Ministry which had declared the war
and so far conducted it, had disappeared; a National or Coalition
Ministry, drawn from the leading men of both parties, reigned in its
stead. The statement made by Mr. Asquith, as late, alack, as April 20,
1915, that there was "no truth in the statement" that our efforts at the
front "were being crippled or at any rate hampered" by want of ammunition,
was seen almost immediately, in the bitter light of events, to be due to
some fatal misconceptions, or misjudgments, on the part of those informing
the Prime Minister, which the nation in its own interests and those of its
allies, could only peremptorily sweep away. A new Ministry was
created--the Ministry of Munitions, and Mr. Lloyd George was placed at its
head.
The work that Mr. Lloyd George and his Ministry--now employing vast new
buildings, and a staff running into thousands--have done since June, 1915,
is nothing less than colossal. Much no doubt had been done earlier for
which the new Ministry has perhaps unjustly got the credit, and not all
has been smooth sailing since. One hears, of course, criticism and
complaints. What vast and effective stir, for a great end, was ever made
in the world without them?
Mr. Lloyd George has incurred a certain amount of unpopularity among the
working classes, who formerly adored him. In my belief he has incurred it
for the country's sake, and those sections of the working class who have
smarted under his criticisms most bitterly will forgive him when the time
comes. In his passionate determination to _get the thing done_, he has
sometimes let his theme--of the national need, and the insignificance of
all things else in comparison with it--carry him into a vehemence which
the workmen have resented, and which foreign or neutral countries have
misunderstood.
He found in his path, which was also the nation's path, three great
foes--drunkenness, the old envenomed quarrel between employer and
employed, and that deep-rooted industrial conservatism of England, which
shows itself on the one hand in the trade-union customs and restrictions
of the working class, built up, as they hold, through long years, for the
protection of their own standards of life, and, on the other, in the
slowness of many of the smaller English employers (I am astonished,
however, at the notable exceptions everywhere!) to realise new needs and
processes, and to adapt themselves to them. Could any one have made such
an omelet without breaking a great many eggs? Is it wonderful that the
employers have sometimes felt themselves unbearably hustled, sometimes
misunderstood, and at other times annoyed, or worried by what seems to
them the red tape of the new Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of
forms and inquiries?
Men accustomed to conduct their own businesses with the usual independence
of regulation have been obliged to submit to regulation. Workmen
accustomed to defend certain methods of work and certain customs of their
trade as matters of life and death have had to see them jeopardised or
swept away. The restoration of these methods and customs is solemnly
promised them after the war; but meanwhile they become the servants of a
public department almost as much under orders as the soldier himself. They
are asked to admit unskilled men to the skilled processes over which they
have long kept so jealous a guard; above all, they are asked to assent
wholesale to the employment of women in trades where women have never been
employed before, where it is obvious that their introduction taps an
immense reservoir of new labour, and equally obvious that, once let in,
they are not going to be easily or wholly dislodged.
Of course, there has been friction and difficulty; nor is it all yet at
an end. In the few danger-spots of the country, where heads are hottest,
where thousands of the men of most natural weight and influence are away
fighting, and where among a small minority hatred of the capitalist
deadens national feeling and obscures the national danger, there have been
anxious moments during the winter; there may possibly be some anxious
moments again.
But, after all, how little it amounts to in comparison with the enormous
achievement! It took us nine months to realise what France--which,
remember, is a Continental nation under conscription--had realised after
the Battle of the Marne, when she set every hand in the country to work at
munitions that could be set to work. With us, whose villages were
unravaged, whose normal life was untouched, realisation was inevitably
slower. Again we were unprepared, and again, as in the case of the Army
itself, we may plead that we have "improvised the impossible." "No
nation," says Mr. Buchan, "can be adequately prepared, unless, like
Germany, it intends war; and Britain, like France paid the penalty of her
honest desire for peace!"