_May 3rd_, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--My last letter left me returning to our village
lodgings under the wing of G.H.Q. after a memorable day on the Somme
battle-fields. That night the talk at the Visitors' Château, during and
after a very simple dinner in an old panelled room, was particularly
interesting and animated. The morning's newspapers had just arrived from
England, with the official communiques of the morning. We were pushing
nearer and nearer to Bapaume; in the fighting of the preceding day we
had taken another 128 prisoners; and the King had sent his
congratulations to Sir Douglas Haig and the Army on the German
withdrawal under "the steady and persistent pressure" of the British
Army "from carefully prepared and strongly fortified positions--a
fitting sequel to the fine achievements of my Army last year in the
Battle of the Somme." There was also a report on the air-fighting and
air-losses of February--to which I will return.
It was, of course, already obvious that the German retreat on the Somme
was not--so far--going to yield us any very large captures of men or
guns. Prisoners were indeed collected every day, but there were no
"hauls" such as, little more than a month after this evening of March
3rd, were to mark the very different course of the Battle of Arras.
Discussion turned upon the pace of the German retreat and the possible
rate of our pursuit. "Don't forget," said an officer, "that they are
moving over good ground, while the pursuit has to move over bad
ground--roads with craters in them, ground so pitted with shell-holes
that you can scarcely drive a peg between them, demolished bridges,
villages that give scarcely any cover, and so on. The enemy has his guns
with him; ours have to be pushed up over the bad ground. His
machine-guns are always in picked and prepared positions; ours have to
be improvised."
And also--"Don't forget the weather!" said another. Every misty day--and
there were many in February--was very skilfully turned to account.
Whenever the weather conditions made it impossible to use the eyes of
our Air Service, men would say to each other on our side, "He'll go back
a lot to-day!--somewhere or other." But in spite of secrecy and fog, how
little respite we had given him! The enemy losses in casualties,
prisoners, and stores during February were certainly considerable; not
to speak of the major loss of all, that of the strongly fortified line
on which two years of the most arduous and ingenious labour that even
Germany can give had been lavished. "And almost everywhere," writes an
eye-witness, "he was hustled and harried much more than is generally
known." As you go eastward, for instance, across the evacuated ground
you notice everywhere signs of increasing haste and flurry, such as the
less complete felling of trees and telegraph posts. It was really a fine
performance for our infantry and our cavalry patrols, necessarily
unsupported by _anything like our full artillery strength,_ to keep up
the constant pressure they did on an enemy who enjoyed almost the full
protection of his. It was dreadful country to live and fight in after
the Germans had gone back over it, much worse than anything that troops
have to face after any ordinary capture of an enemy line.
The fact is that old axioms are being everywhere revised in the light of
this war. In former wars the extreme difficulty of a retreat in the face
of the enemy was taken for granted. But this war--I am trying to
summarise some first-hand opinion as it has reached me--has modified
this point of view considerably.
We know now that for any serious attack on an enemy who has plenty of
machine-guns and plenty of successive well-wired positions a great mass
of heavy and other artillery is absolutely indispensable. And over
ground deliberately wrecked and obstructed such artillery _must_ take
time to bring up. And yet--to repeat--how rapidly, how "persistently"
all difficulties considered, to use the King's adjective, has the
British Army pressed on the heels of the retreating enemy!
None of the officers with whom I talked believed that anything more
could have been done by us than was done. "If it had been we who were
retreating," writes one of them, "and the Germans who were pursuing, I
do not believe they would have pushed us so hard or caused us as much
loss, for all their pride in their staff work."
And it is, of course, evident from what has happened since I parted from
my hosts at the Château, that we have now amply succeeded during the
last few weeks in bringing the retreating enemy to bay. No more masked
withdrawals, no more skilful evasions, for either Hindenburg or his
armies! The victories of Easter week on and beyond the Vimy Ridge, and
the renewed British attack of the last few days--I am writing on May
1st--together with the magnificent French advance towards Laon and to
the east of Reims, have been so many fresh and crushing testimonies to
the vitality and gathering force of the Allied armies.
What is to be the issue we wait to see. But at least, after the winter
lull, it is once more joined; and with such an army as the War Office
and the nation together, during these three years, have fashioned to his
hand--so trained, so equipped, so fired with a common and inflexible
spirit--Sir Douglas Haig and his lieutenants will not fail the hopes of
Great Britain, of France--and of America!
At the beginning of March these last words could not have been added.
There was an American professor not far from me at dinner, and we
discussed the "blazing indiscretion" of Herr Zimmermann's Mexican
letter. But he knew no more than I. Only I remember with pleasure the
general tone of all the conversation about America that I either engaged
in or listened to at Headquarters just a month before the historic
meeting of Congress. It was one of intelligent sympathy with the
difficulties in your way, coupled with a quiet confidence that the call
of civilisation and humanity would very soon--and irrevocably--decide
the attitude of America towards the war.
* * * * *
The evening at the Château passed only too quickly, and we were sad to
say good-bye, though it left me still the prospect of further
conversation with some members of the Intelligence Staff on my return
journey from Paris and those points of the French line for which, thanks
to the courtesy of the French Headquarters, I was now bound.
The last night under the little schoolmistress's quiet roof amid the
deep stillness of the village was a wakeful one for me. The presence of
the New Armies, as of some vast, impersonal, and yet intensely living
thing, seemed to be all around me. First, as an organisation, as the
amazing product of English patriotic intelligence devoted to one sole
end--the defence of civilisation against the immoral attack of the
strongest military machine in the world. And then, so to speak, as a
moral entity, for my mind was full of the sights and sounds of the
preceding days, and the Army appeared to me, not only as the mighty
instrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for the
Empire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future.
How much I have heard of _training_ since my arrival in France! It is
not a word that has been so far representative of our English temper.
Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr.
Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty." It was, I suppose, this
assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing
before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military
Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that
looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier
and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a
reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.
But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general
British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something
greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to
"do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "the
nation in its collected and corporate character" controlling the
individual will in the name of an interest wider than that of
individuals.
What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in Great
Britain to-day--what we are about to witness in your own country--a
nation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that idea
submitting itself to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed from
all its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes;
accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain--death
itself--rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school,
resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposed
education is done, it can no more be the same as it was before than the
youth who has yielded himself loyally to the pounding and stretching of
any strenuous discipline, intellectual or physical.
Training--"askêsis"--with either death, or the loss of all that makes
honourable life, as the ultimate sanction behind the process, that is
the present preoccupation of this nation in arms. Even the football
games I saw going on in the course of our drive to Albert were all part
of this training. They are no mere amusement, though they are amusement.
They are part of the system by which men are persuaded--not driven--to
submit themselves to a scheme of careful physical training, even in
their times of rest; by which they find themselves so invigorated that
they end by demanding it.
As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war,
the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, the
special musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development of
aviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunners
abroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillery
the terror of the German army: a woman can only realise it with a
shudder, and find comfort in two beliefs. First, that the whole horrible
process of war has _not_ brutalised the British soldier--you remember
the Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!--that he still
remains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by the
ideal he willingly serves. Secondly, in the conviction that this
relentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chaining
up the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon the
world, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace,
and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things.
But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when Matthew
Arnold, talking with "the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire"
during the Crimean War, "when our want of soldiers was much felt and
some people were talking of conscription," was told by his companion
that "sooner than submit to conscription the population of that district
would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood life
underground." An illuminating passage, in more ways than one, by the
way, as contrasted with the present state of things!--since it both
shows the stubbornness of the British temper in defence of "doing as it
likes," when no spark of an ideal motive fires it; and also brings out
its equal stubbornness to-day in support of a cause which it feels to be
supreme over the individual interest and will.
But the stubbornness, the discipline, the sacrifice of the armies in the
field are not all we want. The stubbornness of the nation _at home_, of
the men and the women, is no less necessary to the great end. In these
early days of March every week's news was bringing home to England the
growing peril of the submarine attack. Would the married women, the
elder women of the nation, rise to the demand for personal thought and
saving, for _training_--in the matter of food--with the same eager
goodwill as thousands of the younger women had shown in meeting the
armies' demand for munitions? For the women heads of households have it
largely in their hands.
The answer at the beginning of March was matter for anxiety. It is still
matter for anxiety now--at the beginning of May.
Let us, however, return for a little to the Army. What would the
marvellous organisation which England has produced in three years avail
us, without the spirit in it,--the body, without the soul? All through
these days I have been conscious, in the responsible men I have been
meeting, of ideals of which no one talks, except when, on very rare
occasions, it happens to be in the day's work like anything else to talk
of ideals--but which are, in fact, omnipresent.
I find, for instance, among my War Office Notes, a short address given
in the ordinary course of duty by an unnamed commandant to his
officer-cadets. It appears here, in its natural place, just as part of
the whole; revealing for a moment the thoughts which constantly
underlie it.
"Believe me when I tell you that I have never found an officer who
worked who did not come through. Only ill-health and death stand in your
way. The former you can guard against in a great measure. The latter
comes to us all, and for a soldier, a soldier's death is the finest of
all. Fear of death does not exist for the man who has led a good and
honest life. You must discipline your bodies and your minds--your bodies
by keeping them healthy and strong, your minds by prayer and thought."
As to the relation between officers and men, that also is not talked
about much, except in its more practical and workaday aspects--the
interest taken by officers in the men's comfort and welfare, their
readiness to share in the men's games and amusements, and so on. And no
one pretends that the whole British Army is an army of "plaster saints,"
that every officer is the "little father" of his men, and all
relations ideal.
But what becomes evident, as one penetrates a little nearer to the great
organism, is a sense of passionate responsibility in all the finer minds
of the Army towards their men, a readiness to make any sacrifice for
them, a deep and abiding sense of their sufferings and dangers, of all
that they are giving to their country. How this comes out again and
again in the innumerable death-stories of British officers--those few
words that commemorate them in the daily newspapers! And how evident is
the profound response of the men to such a temper in their officers!
There is not a day's action in the field--I am but quoting the
eye-witnesses--that does not bring out such facts. Let a senior
officer--an "old and tried soldier"--speak. He is describing a walk over
a battlefield on the Ancre after one of our victories there
last November:
"It is a curious thing to walk over enemy trenches that I have watched
like a tiger for weeks and weeks. But what of the boys who took those
trenches, with their eleven rows of barbed wire in front of them? I
don't think I ever before to-day rated the British soldier at his proper
value. His sufferings in this weather are indescribable. When he is not
in the trenches his discomforts are enough to kill any ordinary mortal.
When he is in the trenches it is a mixture between the North Pole and
Hell. And yet when the moment comes he jumps up and charges at the
impossible--and conquers it! ... Some of the poor fellows who lay there
as they fell looked to me absolutely noble, and I thought of their
families who were aching for news of them and hoping against hope that
they would not be left unburied in their misery.
"All the loving and tender thoughts that are lavished on them are not
enough. There are no words to describe the large hearts of these men.
God bless 'em! And what of the French on whose soil they lie? Can they
ever forget the blood that is mingled with their own? I hope not. I
don't think England has ever had as much cause to be proud as she
has to-day."
Ah! such thoughts and feelings cut deep. They would be unbearable but
for the saving salt of humour in which this whole great gathering of
men, so to speak, moves suspended, as though in an atmosphere. It is
everywhere. Coarse or refined, it is the universal protection, whether
from the minor discomforts or the more frightful risks of war. Volumes
could be filled, have already been filled, with it--volumes to which
your American soldier when he gets to France in his thousands will add
considerably--pages all his own! I take this touch in passing from a
recent letter:
"A sergeant in my company [writes a young officer] was the other day
buried by a shell. He was dug out with difficulty. As he lay, not
seriously injured, but sputtering and choking, against the wall of the
trench, his C.O. came by. 'Well, So-and-so, awfully sorry! Can I do
anything for you?' 'Sir,' said the sergeant with dignity, still
struggling out of the mud, '_I want a separate peace_!'"
And here is another incident that has just come across me. Whether it is
Humour or Pathos I do not know. In this scene they are pretty close
together--the great Sisters!
A young flying officer, in a night attack, was hit by a shrapnel bullet
from below. He thought it had struck his leg, but was so absorbed in
dropping his bombs and bringing down his machine safely that, although
he was aware of a feeling of faintness, he thought no more of it till he
had landed in the aerodrome. Then it was discovered that his leg had
been shot away, was literally hanging by a shred of skin, and how he had
escaped bleeding to death nobody could quite understand. As it was, he
had dropped his bombs, and he insisted on making his report in hospital.
He recovered from the subsequent operation, and in hospital, some weeks
afterwards, his C.O. appeared, with the news of his recommendation for
the D.S.O. The boy, for he was little more, listened with eyes of amused
incredulity, opening wider and wider as the Colonel proceeded. When the
communication was over, and the C.O., attributing the young man's
silence to weakness or grateful emotion, had passed on, the nurse beside
the bed saw the patient bury his head in the pillow with a queer sound
of exasperation, and caught the words, "I call it _perfectly childish!_"
That an act so simple, so all in the bargain, should have earned the
D.S.O. seemed in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!
* * * * *
With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of
the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second
letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting
of our airmen behind the enemy lines.
"Many of them don't come back. What then? _They will have done their
job._"
The report which reaches the château on our last evening illustrates
this casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February,
60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were
"missing" or "brought down."
But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more
startling report--that for April--lies before me. "There has not been a
month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never
reached such a tremendous figure," says the _Times_. The record number
so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme
fighting--322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the
enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of
air-fights or by gun-fire." Of these, 369 were German--269 of them
brought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147;
the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.
It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme
importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few of
us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service,
realise at all the conditions of this fighting--its daring, its epic
range, its constant development!
All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as a
nerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first
flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace the
airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war
he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange
aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death
always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his
devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the
treacheries of the very air itself.
In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges,
pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of his
enemy, while the observer photographs, marks his map with every
gun-emplacement, railway station, dump of food or ammunition,
unconcerned by the flying shells or the strange dives and swoops of
the machine.
But apart from active fighting, take such a common experience as what is
called "a long reconnaissance." Pilot and observer receive their orders
to reconnoitre "thoroughly" a certain area. It may be winter, and the
cold at the height of many thousand feet may be formidable indeed. No
matter. The thing is done, and, after hours in the freezing air, the
machine makes for home; through a winter evening, perhaps, as we saw the
two splendid biplanes, near the northern section of the line, sailing
far above our heads into the sunset, that first day of our journey. The
reconnaissance is over, and here is the first-hand testimony of one who
has taken part in many, as to what it means in endurance and fatigue:
"Both pilot and observer are stiff with the cold. In winter it is often
necessary to help them out of the machine and attend to the chilled
parts of the body to avoid frost-bite. Their faces are drawn with the
continual strain. They are deaf from the roar of the engine. Their eyes
are bloodshot, and their whole bodies are racked with every imaginable
ache. For the next few hours they are good for nothing but rest, though
sleep is generally hard to get. But before turning in the observer must
make his report and hand it in to the proper quarter."
So much for the nights which are rather for observation than fighting,
though fighting constantly attends them. But the set battles in the air,
squadron with squadron, man with man, the bombers in the centre, the
fighting machines surrounding and protecting them, are becoming more
wonderful, more daring, more complicated every month. "You'll see"--I
recall once more the words of our Flight-Commander, spoken amid the
noise and movement of a score of practising machines, five weeks before
the battle of Arras--"when the great move begins _we shall get the
mastery again, as we did on the Somme._"
Ask the gunners in the batteries of the April advance, as they work
below the signalling planes; ask the infantry whom the gunners so
marvellously protect, as to the truth of the prophecy!
"Our casualties are _really_ light," writes an officer in reference to
some of the hot fighting of the past month. Thanks, apparently, to the
ever-growing precision of our artillery methods; which again depend on
aeroplane and balloon information. So it is that the flying forms in the
upper air become for the soldier below so many symbols of help and
protection. He is restless when they are not there. And let us remember
that aeroplanes were first used for artillery observation, not three
years ago, in the battle of Aisne, after the victory of the Marne.
But the night in the quiet village wears away. To-morrow we shall be
flying through the pleasant land of France, bound for Paris and
Lorraine. For I am turning now to a new task. On our own line I have
been trying to describe, for those who care to listen, the crowding
impressions left on a woman-witness by the huge development in the last
twelve months of the British military effort in France. But now, as I go
forward into this beautiful country, which I have loved next to my own
all my life, there are new purposes in my mind, and three memorable
words in my ears:
"_Reparation--Restitution--Guarantees!_"