THE HELMSMEN
"We don't want to fight,
But, by Jingo! if we do,
We've got the men,
We've got the ships,
And we've got the money, too!"
When during the dark hours of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 a London
music-hall comedian named McDermott popularized the chorus of a ditty
which has rung down the ages, he not only enriched the English language
with a new synonym for a war zealot--Jingo--but he epitomized British
faith in British invincibility and the basis on which it is founded.
McDermott's blustering ballad, the _Tipperary_ of its day, interpreted,
by a fate which seems strangely ironical in the light of current events,
Britain's determination to go to war to prevent the Bear from grabbing
Constantinople.
The song applied precisely to conditions in this country in midsummer,
1914. Englishmen "didn't want to fight"--abroad, at least, for they
were looking forward to cooling their belligerent ardor nearer home, in
Ireland. But when the violation of Belgium resolved all dissension in
the British Government on the question of intervention in a conflict
which, up to then, concerned purely the Dual and Triple Alliances, and
literally dragged Britain into the vortex in the name of both her honor
and interest, Englishmen did want to fight. Taking quick stock of their
resources, they felt assured, in McDermott's immortal words, that they
had "got the men, the ships, and the money, too." But men, ships and
money, vital as they are, are useless without leaders, and it was
natural that Britons' first thoughts, in the dawn of the Empire's
supreme emergency, should be concerned with the personnel of the
helmsmen. A super-crisis calls insistently for super-men, and in the
midst of an era which cynics call the age of mediocrities doubts were
not few that England might find herself fatally lacking in a plight as
stupendous as any Pitt, Nelson and Wellington had ever faced.
With their astonishing capacity to stifle domestic controversy and party
bickerings on the threshold of a foreign crisis, Englishmen decided that
the first essential was to repose implicit confidence in the existing
Government. Ireland, Labor, Suffragettes, Opposition, the four thorns
in the Asquith Administration's side, withdrew, leaving the cleavage
they once made so completely healed that hardly a scar remained. The
Liberal Cabinet, admittedly stale with nearly a decade of uninterrupted
power, might not contain all the talents of statesmanship essential for
the conduct of a struggle on whose issue hung Imperial existence. It
was a Government overweighted with "tired lawyers," consisting (with the
exception of Lord Kitchener) of exclusively professional politicians,
and even tinged in important directions (like Lord Haldane) with
confessed Germanophilism. It was a Government long and openly charged
by its foes with desiring office at any cost and placing the
perpetuation of its hold on the fleshpots before any other interest. It
was a Government which had avowedly temporized with the Irish yesterday
and the Labor Party to-day as the price of maintaining its Parliamentary
existence. It was finally a Government notoriously consisting of rival
internal factions best typified by the aristocratic Imperialism of Sir
Edward Grey on the one hand and on the other by the rugged and radical
Democracy of Mr. Lloyd-George. Yet the nation, in the presence of peril
palpably incalculable, relegated its criticisms, its doubts and its
carpings, and with one voice agreed that "Trust the Government!" must be
the slogan of the hour. The Anglo-Saxon spirit of Fair Play asserted
itself. The country said that the Asquith Administration must be given
a chance to exhibit its mettle. If it failed, there was always time for
a reckoning. The British Government of August, 1914, entered upon the
war clothed with a mandate as sweeping in its powers as formal
conferment of a Dictatorship could have been--a woof of national
confidence amounting to little short of _carte blanche_. John Bright
once said that a British Government is always annihilated by the war
which it is called upon to wage. But Englishmen wished Mr. Asquith's
Cabinet Godspeed, and by their unquestioning support of every measure it
proposed showed that their loyalty and trust were real and sincere.
Although the British Government (by which is meant only the Premier's
Administration) consists of twenty-one ministers of Cabinet rank, the
war regime, it was manifest from the start, would be confined to five
outstanding men combining the motive forces of the entire organization.
These five were the Prime Minister himself, the Foreign Secretary (Sir
Edward Grey), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Lloyd-George), the
First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. Winston Churchill), and the Secretary
for War (Lord Kitchener). Although the highest-salaried member of the
Cabinet, the Lord High Chancellor (Lord Haldane) drew ten thousand
pounds a year, and there were half-a-dozen others like the Home
Secretary, the Colonial Secretary, the Secretary for India and the
Presidents of the Board of Trade and Local Government Board whose
financial status (five thousand pounds a year), outranked the four
thousand five hundred pounds which Mr. Churchill received, the quintette
named, by reason of their posts and personalities, was the logical inner
Government to deal with the war. That brilliant English essayist and
biographer, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, even further delimited the numerical
dimensions of the _real_ War Government when he said that "if Mr.
Asquith is the brain of the Cabinet, Sir Edward Grey is its character
and Mr. Lloyd-George is its inspiration."
[Illustration: Herbert Henry Asquith.]
Herbert Henry Asquith, Yorkshireman by birth and barrister by
profession, has been Prime Minister for seven years, succeeding his late
Liberal chieftain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in 1908. Asquith, whom
Bannerman used to call "the sledge-hammer," because of his lucidity of
thought and expression, was sixty-three years old in September, 1915.
Although not a Pitt, nor even a Disraeli or Palmerston, the statesman
who looks like a Roman senator and is gifted with eloquence in keeping
was considered in many respects a Heaven-sent blessing in the
melting-pot era of British history, for as a purely steadying influence
he is probably without a peer in contemporary politics. As a politician
in the narrower sense of a party disciplinarian, manager and leader he
will rank with the craftiest names in his country's tortuous history.
British Liberalism has skated on perilous ice following the reaction
which swept the Conservative Party from power after the Boer War and
throughout the era of Democratic radicalism in which Great Britain has
meantime had its being. That Mr. Asquith's party is enabled to
celebrate ten years of sovereignty still strongly intrenched is by
general consent due to the astute generalship of its commander-in-chief.
Asquith is not commonly accused of imaginativeness. He is too typical a
British statesman for that. His temperament is devoid of the
adventurous, like that of the true intellectual, and he is
pathologically fonder of harking to public opinion than boldly leading
it. When he coined the "Wait and See" epigram during the Ulster crisis,
he gave utterance to a phrase which accurately epitomizes the
tentativeness so preponderant in his political career. British
procrastination and vacillation at vital periods of the war were
undoubtedly the reflex action of the Prime Minister's own low-speed
mental processes. Yet in the revolt of the Curragh Camp officers, that
strange curtain-raiser of the impending Ulster crisis, which threatened
to embroil these fair isles in another Cromwellian trial of strength
between Parliament and the army, Mr. Asquith, by a courageous stroke of
positive genius--his own assumption of the Secretaryship for War in
succession to the compromised Colonel Seely--resolved into tranquillity
and hope a situation more menacing to civil peace in England than living
Britons had ever before lived through. Beneath Mr. Asquith's polished
exterior, unemotional mask and sweet reasonableness Germany, mistaking
his for a peace-at-any-price nature, made one of the most egregious of
her numerous and glaring miscalculations.
Only the results of the Peace Conference will determine the true
ramifications of Sir Edward Grey's reputation. It was deservedly high
when the war began. No Foreign Secretary in Europe approached him in
stature, with the possible exception of Delcasse. He had long been
Germany's _bete noire_, being looked upon as the incarnation of the
British diplomatic policy of blocking German ambitions for a "place in
the sun" wherever and whenever they manifested themselves. As long
before as December, 1912, Professor Hans Delbrueck, the sanest of German
political professors, told me in a prophetic interview for _The Daily
Mail_ on "What Germany Wants" that unless England abandoned her policy
of "arbitrary opposition to legitimate German political aspirations; if
she had no inclination to meet us on that ground; if her interests
rather pointed to a perpetuation of the anything-to-beat-Germany policy,
so let it be. The Armageddon which must then, some day, ensue will not
be of our making." That was a fairly plain warning of coming events.
The Germans, as I have said, considered Sir Edward Grey anti-Germanism
personified. They regard him to-day as the "organizer of the war."
Taking an obviously short-sighted view, I used sometimes to think that
it would have been good politics for Britain to buy off Germany with a
_Trinkgeld_ (tip) of some sort. If Bismarck was right when he called the
Germans "a nation of house-servants," they could obviously have been
bribed. Delbrueck himself once confessed to me that Germany did not
_need_ more oversea territory; she only _hankered_ for it for
window-dressing purposes. She wanted as expensive millinery and
high-powered a car as her rich neighbor across the way. Colonies were
fashionable, and she had to have them. I occasionally thought that
England would be staving off trouble for herself by bribing avaricious
Germany with a coaling-station on some inconsequential trade-route or
even shutting the eye to some burglarious descent on territory or
concessions in Asia Minor or Central Africa. But such notions left the
German character, the Oliver Twist in it, fatally out of account. The
German is the most eager person in the world to covet a mile if given an
inch. Concessions to his rapacity would have meant purchasing turmoil
for the conceding party not eliminating it. British opposition to
Pan-Germanic designs, typified by Sir Edward Grey, was based on
thoroughgoing insight into the German nature and German ambitions,
epitomized for all time by Bernhardi when he said that nothing would
appease the Fatherland except World Power or downfall. Hush-money to
Germany in the shape of periodically new "places in the sun" would have
kept her quiet for spells. But the blackmailing process would have been
resumed. It is the German way. "Mr. Balfour tells us we must not
expect Englishmen to support our aims in the direction of territorial
expansion," said Delbrueck. "What remains then for us, except to
enforce the accomplishment of our purposes by strengthened armaments?"
Could avowal be plainer-spoken?
Sir Edward Grey is fifty-three years old and has been a childless
widower since 1906. He has been a Member of Parliament continuously
since he was twenty-three years of age. Though an Oxford graduate and
successful barrister, he is in no sense a scholar, and his experience of
foreign affairs up to his becoming Foreign Secretary in the
Campbell-Bannerman ministry in 1905 was confined to an
under-secretaryship of the Foreign Office in the preceding (Rosebery)
Government. Grey, who is also of the smooth-shaven Romanesque type of
statesman in external appearance, is an amazing example of natural
British aptitude for the higher politics, for he is not a linguist (he
speaks nothing but English) and except for a visit to France with the
present King a couple of years ago was said never to have been abroad in
his life. His hobbies are tennis, fly-fishing and birds. The only book
he ever wrote was a treatise on the piscatory art and he tramped through
the New Forest with Colonel Roosevelt talking ornithology all the way.
Yet a man has only to read the British White Paper--he need not, indeed,
do much except read Sir Edward Grey's dispatches to his ambassadors on
July 29, 1914--to realize that the Foreign Secretary is a statesman of
marvelous force and capacity to grapple with the essentials of a
situation. No state papers of modern times outrival Grey's diplomatic
correspondence on the eve of the war. They ought to insure him, as I
believe they will, immortality, no matter how the war ends. Sir Edward
Grey's speeches are like his dispatches--devoid of irrelevancy or
rhetorical claptrap and incisive in the highest degree. They ring
conviction and sincerity and their argument is usually unanswerable.
Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg's clumsy attempts to parry Grey's mid-bellum
dialectics have only brought out the latter in bolder relief. The war
has notoriously eaten into Grey's soul. Germany calls it guilty
remorse. Men who know are conscious that he labored for peace to the
last minute with unflagging enthusiasm. His industry during the war has
been intense, and his insistence upon looking at things for himself has
threatened more than once to cost him his eyesight. As it is,
intermittent relaxation has to be forced upon him by his colleagues and
his medical advisers. Sir Edward Grey's permanent disappearance from
Downing Street would rejoice Germany like a victorious battle. Grey has
been violently blamed for the failure of Britain's mid-war diplomacy,
especially in the Balkans. His own defense against charges of failure
in that region is likely to seem plausible in the light of history,
viz., that, unaccompanied by commensurate military successes, the
efforts of Allied diplomacy in the Near East were almost hopelessly
handicapped.
One night during the South African War a Radical M.P., advocating the
downtrodden brother Boer's cause at a mass-meeting in Birmingham,
received such a warm reception from the crowd that he had to flee for
his life through a back-door, disguised as a policeman. His name was
David Lloyd-George, whose present occupation is that of England's man of
the hour. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer when war broke out and
introduced the initial war budgets, earning thereby encomiums from the
financial community which for years before looked upon him as capital's
demagogic arch-foe. To-day, Minister of Munitions--the circumstances
under which he became such are treated in a subsequent
chapter--Lloyd-George comes far nearer being Britain's national hero
than any of his contemporaries. He is charged by his detractors with
the design to make himself Dictator. England could have a worse one.
If Lloyd-George were an American instead of a Welshman, he would have
been President of the United States by this time, or at least as close
to it as Bryan has ever been. There is in fact very little typically
British about him. He is emotional, for example, and he has an
imagination. His whole make-up is trans-atlantic, which is _Anglice_
for sensational. Picture, if you can, a strong solution of Booker
Washington (I mean, of course, only his eloquence), of flamboyant and
appealing Billy Sunday, of the Boy Orator of the Platte at his
silver-tongued best, and of our inimitable T. R. in his most rampageous
form, and you will have Lloyd-George in composite. It was because he is
all this that he was chosen for the "shells portfolio" in the
reconstructed Asquith cabinet.
[Illustration: Lloyd-George.]
He knew very little--probably nothing--about munitions seven months ago.
It could not have been very much before that when he probably thought
that guncotton was raw material for pajamas. But he is the prize
"enthuser" of the Kingdom, a master of the tedious art of welding drowsy
Britons into a race of real war-makers. All the ingredients for
supplying the army with the shells it needed were in existence; but they
needed organization. The manufacturers and their works needed
organization. The workmen needed organization. The public spirit
needed organization; and the whole business needed a Lloyd-George. It
got him ten months after it ought to have had him, but not too late.
Obviously the diminutive Welsh country lawyer who had brought about the
disestablishment of the State Church of Wales, imposed State Insurance
and Old Age Pensions on a reluctant Kingdom, assailed the vested
interests of the House of Lords and demolished them, was the man to
impress the country with the true meaning of the shells tragedy. He
took the stump, his natural element, for the purpose. He went to the
people, especially in the great industrial centers, and told them the
truth. He burned into their conscience--that was the only way to get
the stolid British to wake up to a real peril--that shells, shells, and
then shells, and nothing but shells, were required if Britain meant to
win the war.
The people listened to Lloyd-George. He has a way of making them listen
to him. They gave him their ear even in his pro-Boer days. They
listened to him when he (an ardent Baptist) cleared for action against
the Welsh Church. They listened to him even when he went down to
Limehouse and coined a new word, "to limehouse," meaning violent
political spell-binding, second cousin to demagogism, by the nature of
his impassioned appeals to the people to rise and slay the Lords. It
was inevitable that the country would listen to him in his newest and
greatest role as organizer of victory.
Lloyd-George's goal is undoubtedly the Premiership--the ambition of
every British politician. He has plenty of time to wait--he is only
fifty-two--and unfailing week-end golf keeps him as "fit" as a man
fifteen years his junior. Of Napoleonic stockiness of build, with a
wealth of wavy gray hair worn long, he is a figure which radiates
strength and power, though unimpressive of itself. He is a capital
"mixer." It is, indeed, his principal political asset. He is as much
at home laboring with a gang of recalcitrant miners at the pit-mouth--he
always goes straight to headquarters when he essays to settle a
strike--as he is on the floor of the House of Commons or as moderator at
a Baptist convention. He likes Americans and specializes in extending
hospitality to interesting ones. Unquestionably he has a strong hold on
our imaginations, as a man of his temperament, career and talent is
bound to have. An eminent Chicagoan visited London last summer, with
introductions which would have easily paved his way to the throne or any
other exalted British quarter. "Whom would you like to meet most of
all?" he was asked. "Lloyd-George," he said, with the intuitive sense
of a Yankee who only has time for the things worth while.
Winston Churchill, the son of an English father and an American mother,
is the Peck's Bad Boy of the British Government. His popularity has
been sadly dimmed since the war began, for he was looked upon as not
only the author of the grotesque naval "relief" expedition to
Antwerp--now either prisoners of war in Germany or interned in
Holland--but the culprit who was chiefly responsible for the far more
disastrous Dardanelles adventure. Another crime is charged against him,
hardly less serious than the two just named: his imperious
administration of the Admiralty drove from the First Sea Lordship the
man universally considered Britain's greatest sailor, Lord Fisher. All
agree, friend and foe, that to "Winston" was due in a very marked
degree, England's superb readiness at sea when war broke out, but it is
a matter of grave doubt whether even that superlative service to the
country will be looked upon as great enough to blanket his subsequent
and costly incompetencies. When the upheaval in the Asquith Cabinet came
about, in the spring of 1915, Churchill was nominally squelched by
interment in the harmless berth of the Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, most of whose official time is spent in licensing Justices of
the Peace and Notaries Public. That ennui hung heavily on his hands was
manifested by the announcement during the summer that Churchill had
taken up painting as a pastime.
I have said that "Winston" was nominally subjugated, for a petrel of his
peculiarly irrepressible storminess can only be wholly curbed by
annihilation. Asquith is far too sagacious a politician to risk
Churchill's complete eclipse in the Government of which he has always
been the most picturesque constituent. Churchill, too, aspires to the
Premier's toga, though a good many people fear that the defects of his
qualities will keep him, just as they kept his distinguished father,
Lord Randolph Churchill, from No. 10 Downing Street. But "Winston" is
far less dangerous to the Government as a friend than as a foe. His
chameleon political career justifies the fear that he would turn on his
old associates and party cronies the moment he conceived that advantage
to self was thereby obtainable. Obviously such a man is better in the
Cabinet than out of it, especially if he is of Winston Churchill's
undoubted personal charm, magnetism and resistless force.
Combining the best qualities of his dual ancestry, he makes a lively
appeal to the average heart. Aristocratic to the core, with the blood of
the Marlboroughs in his veins, and a snob of snobs in his personal
relations, it is an anomalous fact that Churchill is an endlessly
popular figure with the crowd. Whether it is his youth--he is only
forty-one, was a soldier of no mean renown at twenty-three, a Member of
Parliament at twenty-six, a Cabinet Minister at thirty-two and a force
in Imperial politics long before he was forty--or his impetuous
devil-may-care make-up, or his bombastic platform style, the masses like
him. He has only one serious rival, indeed, in their affections, and
that is Lloyd-George. He is remembered in war thus far not only for his
Antwerp and Dardanelles indiscretions, but for his equally unhappy
oratorical excesses, which are doomed, apparently, always to precede
some untoward naval or military event. Within thirty-six hours of
proclaiming at Liverpool (in September, 1914) that "if the German navy
does not come out and fight, we shall dig it out like rats from a hole,"
_U9_ sent the _Cressy, Hague_ and _Aboukir_ to the bottom. In the
spring of 1915, discussing the Dardanelles, Churchill blustered that "we
are within a very few miles of the greatest victory this war has seen,"
and a few weeks later Kitchener announced that twelve miles of
precarious front in Gallipoli were all there was to show for a campaign
which had already cost eighty-seven thousand casualties. When Churchill
prognosticates nowadays, the country trembles for what the next day will
bring forth. Yet he is a rash prophet who would predict that "Winston"
has run his course in British politics. He took manfully the
discomfiture of the Coalition reshuffle, and although his picture is no
longer cheered when it is flashed on the cinematograph screen the
shrewdest seers are certain that he will "come back."[1]
[1] Churchill resigned from the Cabinet in November, 1915, declaring
that he was a soldier--"and my regiment is in France." To it he said he
preferred to go rather than continue in a position of "well-paid
inactivity" at home. In a dramatic speech in the House of Commons, he
took political farewell of the country and, having pleaded "Not Guilty"
to the capital charges of responsibility for Antwerp and the
Dardanelles, left England unostentatiously for the trenches, as a major
of cavalry.
Lord Kitchener has always boasted that he scorned popularity. He has
need for his philosophical temperament to-day, for there is no manner of
doubt that his hold on the imaginations of his countrymen is less firm
than it was when the war began. "K.'s" dramatic appointment to the War
Office, in the earliest hours of the conflict, heartened the nation to
an extraordinary degree. Britain had no army, Englishmen said, but it
had Kitchener, who was a host in himself. His name alone was an asset
which bred indescribable confidence. Men recalled his dominant
traits--iron determination, strenuous application to duty, imperious
disregard of hide-bound methods and red tape, and, above all, his genius
for organization. They rejoiced to hear that he had accepted the War
Office, long cob-webbed with circumlocutory traditions and petticoat
influence, on the strict understanding that he was to be monarch of all
he surveyed--that he would not tolerate such party interference as
intrudes itself on departmental affairs in general. Immensely to the
popular taste, because it confirmed the masses' conception of "K.," was
the story that when he arrived at the War Office for the first time and
was told there was "no bed here, Sir," he commanded the affrighted and
astonished caretaker, then, "to put one in, as I am going to sleep
here." Britain said to herself that she indubitably possessed a match
for German Efficiency in her new Secretary for War, and all thought of
"losing" with such a man as the supreme chief of the military
establishment vanished from her mind.
[Illustration: Kitchener.]
Kitchener was never one of the war-will-be-over-by-Christmas crew. His
maiden speech as War Minister in the House of Lords informed the
country, bluntly, that he expected a three years' struggle. During the
winter an anecdote ascribed to the taciturn War Secretary's loquacious
sister gained currency, and passed from mouth to mouth. "When is the
war going to end?" she asked him. "I don't know when it's going to
end," he was said to have replied, "but it is going to begin in May."
It was in May, by the pitiless irony of Fate, that the War Office's
muddle of the ammunition supply was exposed.
Like all else in Britain--men, measures and institutions--the
arbitrament of time will be required to pass final judgment on
Kitchener's part in the war. In the principal field he was called upon
to plow--the raising of a huge army from out of the earth--he
accomplished marvels. No nation within fourteen months evolved from
practically nothing an organization of, roundly, three million soldiers.
It is not enough, for the actual requirements of the war call
insistently for more and more, yet "K.'s" recruiting achievement stands
forth without parallel in military history. It is certainly without
precedent of even approximate magnitude in the annals of a non-conscript
democracy. Lord Kitchener's accomplishments in other directions have
notoriously not kept pace with his successes as a recruiting-sergeant.
The shells affair can hardly fail to dim his reputation. The
deficiencies of the voluntary system can not be called a failure
directly chargeable to him, in that it has not brought forward men in
quantity commensurate with the developed necessities of the campaign.
Kitchener has hinted, but only that, that he is prepared to resort to
Conscription the moment he is convinced that Voluntaryism has collapsed.
But it does not seem unlikely that history may condemn him for clinging
to the voluntary principle too long and hesitating to make Englishmen do
their duty, instead of relying endlessly on their casual inclination to
perform it. Kitchener has ruled the British War Office practically as an
autocrat. He brooked no interference, even from the Cabinet. Viewed
from that standpoint, "K." can hardly be absolved from cardinal
responsibility for British military failures. Before the end of 1915
General Sir Ian Hamilton had disappeared from Gallipoli, Sir John French
returned from France, General Townshend retreated from Baghdad, and the
Allied "Relief" Expedition to Serbia had retired to Salonica, whence it
had set out less than ten weeks previous.