YOUR KING AND COUNTRY WANT YOU
"Luna Park," in Berlin, once had an English manager and an American
"publicity agent." In pursuit of his lime-light duties the
transatlantic hustler, who had been engaged because he was such,
reported to the manager one day that he had accomplished a feat on which
he had been plodding for weeks. The owners of a building which
commanded the most prominent view in Berlin had finally consented to let
"Luna Park" affix a gigantic electric flash-light sign to the roof.
"It will be the greatest thing of the kind ever seen in Germany,"
exclaimed the enthusiast from the U.S.A. "They'll allow us to have
'Luna Park' in letters twenty feet high across a
one-hundred-and-fifty-foot front, and you'll be able to see 'em a mile
away!"
He expected his British superior fairly to jump for joy. But this is
what he said:
"Quite so. But don't you think that will be a bit conspicuous?"
When I returned to London on September 24, after four short, strenuous
weeks in the United States, I found Englishmen dominated seemingly by a
genuine fear that the war might become "a bit conspicuous." It was true
that stupendous things had happened in the interval. Namur, "the
impregnable," had melted before the merciless German 42's like the other
Belgian fortresses. Brussels was in the enemy's hands, unscotched,
thanks to the intervention of the American Minister, Brand Whitlock, and
through it were passing apparently endless streams of gray-clad Germans
bound for Antwerp and the sea. France had been overrun, regardless of
the cost in Teuton blood, Lille and the industrial provinces were
securely held, and, although the Crown Prince and von Kluck had been
gloriously repulsed in their frenzied dash on Paris, the capital had all
but resounded to the clatter of Uhlan hoofs, and Bordeaux was still
regarded a far safer seat of Government. England herself had lived
through hours of anxious crisis blacker than any within the memory of
the living generation. At Mons, as official reports disclosed, the
gallant little British army narrowly escaped annihilation. As it was,
it lost hideously in killed and wounded. Gaping holes had been ripped
in the ranks of famous regiments, and the Expeditionary Force, within
six weeks of its landing, was already sadly mangled. Sir John French
stirred the nation with his dispatch on the retreat from Mons and told
how his army, though hurriedly concentrated by rail only two days
before, had tenaciously withstood, in the dogged British way, the
combined attack of five crack German corps. In the subsequent fighting
which beat the Germans on the Marne and saved Paris, British soldiers,
battered and battle-scarred as they were, had done even more than their
share. Two days before arrival in Liverpool the _Campania_ wireless--I
returned to England in the same veteran hulk which had taken me to
America in August--brought the dread tidings of the submarining of
cruisers _Aboukir, Cressy_ and _Hogue_ in the Channel by the _U9_ and
_Weddigen_, with cruelly heavy sacrifice of British lives.
All these things had happened, and yet London was unshaken. She had
been "a bit uneasy," my English friends conceded, in the days and nights
when the fate of Paris and Sir John French's army seemed to be in doubt,
and the _U9's_ feat had "cost us three obsolete boats," but the Germans
were checked now, and the worst was over. Churchill was sending a
British naval expedition to Belgium to save Antwerp, and what was the
use of worrying, anyhow? Kitchener's army was filling up with recruits
by the thousand, and England's motto was "Business as Usual."
Yea, verily, Britain was pursuing the even tenor of her imperturbable
way. The Savoy, at supper after theater, glittered with all its
old-time flare. The tables were thronged in the same old way with
gaily-clad women, romping chorus-girls, monocled "nuts" with hair
plastered straight back, opulent stock-brokers, theatrical celebrities
and all the other familiar people about town. The band interpolated
_Tipperary_ a little oftener between rag-time one-steps and fox-trots,
and lordlings and other bloods in khaki gave a new tinge to the picture,
but otherwise it was night-time London "as usual." The theaters and
music-halls were full. At Murray's and the Four Hundred--those dens of
revelry called "night clubs," invented for law-respecting English who
can afford five guineas a year for the privilege of wining, supping and
dancing after the Acts of Parliament send ordinary people to bed--you
could hardly wedge your way in. At the Carlton or the Piccadilly, or
for the matter of that at any other popular resort in all London, you
found yourself lucky to locate a single unpreempted place. Wherever you
went or turned, whomever you saw, it was dear old London "as usual." If
you were an impulsive, excitable, sentimental American and thought you
were mildly rebuking your British friends when you ventured to wonder at
the extraordinary naturalness of life in the West End, or at Walton
Heath golf links, or at Chelsea football grounds, or at the Newmarket
race-course, you found yourself unconsciously paying a tribute to
"British character." For John Bull, far from being ashamed of adhering
religiously to peace-time activities, was positively proud of the
exhibition of "reserve" and "poise" and "calmness" which he was now
giving. People talked about the war, of course. They hardly mentioned
anything else. But if you had the patience to listen to their airy,
fairy converse, you soon gathered that they spoke of it exclusively as
something about which no self-respecting Englishman or woman purposed
for a solitary moment to get indecorously agitated. There were even
people who confessed that the war was beginning to "bore" them.
As for myself, I had a go at British acquaintances from two entirely
different standpoints. In the first place, fresh from America, where
the war had burnt into people's minds as deeply almost as if it were
their own destiny which was at stake, I was still filled with the
energizing atmosphere omnipresent there. I remembered how even our puny
war with Spain had gripped the nation's thought and concentrated it to
the exclusion of all else. I could not, for the life of me, understand
how Englishmen, with the history of the preceding eight weeks before
them, could still look upon "business as usual" as the desideratum for
which the moment insistently called. I knew, I thought, how Americans
would feel and act at such an hour; and as I had in my time dozed
through many after-dinner speeches about the "kindred ideals" and
"identical habits of thought" which so indissolubly bound the
English-speaking nations, I ventured to marvel, and even at times to
swear, at the spectacle of national nonchalance which Britain at the
beginning of October, 1914, so resolutely presented. It was
magnificent, but it was not war.
In the second place, I was conscious, with the knowledge and conviction
of a long-time eye-witness, of both the visible and the dormant strength
of Germany. I had written literally reams, during the preceding eight
years, about Teuton preparations on land, in the air and on the sea. I
had discussed the German War Party, its leaders and its literature, its
aspirations and its plans, till I often grew weary of the task, not so
much because pacifist critics in England pilloried me as a war-monger
and an alarmist, but because there was a monotony in that sort of news
about Germany which strained even the patience of those whose duty it
was to report it. When Englishmen now told me, as so many of them did,
that they would "muddle through this show," as they had "muddled
through" in South Africa and on all the other occasions in Britain's
martial past, I grew sick at heart. I knew, as everybody who had lived
in Germany between 1904 and 1914 and kept his ears and eyes open knew,
that "muddling through" would never beat the Germans, even if it had
finally overcome the Boers. I knew, and anybody really acquainted with
the Germans knew, that they would not be vanquished so long as there was
a man or a mark with which to fight. I knew that nothing short of the
supreme effort which the British Empire and its Allies could put forth
would suffice to overcome the most highly-organized and efficiently
patriotic people which had ever gone to war. I knew that the German
General Staff and the other war-makers of the Fatherland had long
reckoned, in the emergency of a struggle with England, on the very thing
of which my eyes were now witness--British reluctance to shake off the
shackles of ease and comfort and buckle down, a nation in arms, to the
inconvenient and grim realities of war. Of these things I thought, and
the reflection was disquieting, as I saw the mad whirl of light,
frivolity and care-free joy which the Savoy at supper-time, plainly
epitomizing London life at the moment, presented night after night.
"Business as usual!" It was small comfort my English friends provided,
when, remonstrating with me for my foolish solicitude, they assured me
that my misgivings were misplaced because I was hopelessly ignorant of
"the British character."
England, it was obvious, was like the manager of "Luna Park" in Berlin.
She was afraid the war might become "a bit conspicuous," and was,
moreover, determined that it should not. I remember well the crushing
rebuke administered to me by a Britisher of international renown when I
intruded my view of all these things. I had offered, in a desire to
hold the mirror up to Nature and let Londoners see how they looked to
foreigners at so transcendent a moment in their national existence, to
produce a little article entitled "What an American Thinks of the
English in War-Time." I even went to the length of putting my thoughts
on paper and submitting the manuscript. I did so with considerable
confidence, because the celebrity in question is a notorious "Wake Up,
England!" man. But he returned my masterpiece with a look and gesture
mingling pity and contempt for my wretched unfamiliarity with "the
British character."
"My dear Wile," he explained, "you do not understand us. You forget
that this war is not an American World's Championship baseball series.
You mustn't try to foist transatlantic brass-band methods on us. It is
not the British way."
Lest I convey the impression that I had advocated rousing the British
lion from his slumbers by wild and woolly western methods palpably
unsuited to his stoical temperament, let me make haste to explain that I
was pleading for nothing but a system which would, spectacularly if
necessary, do something to let the British public at least know that
they had a war on their hands, and popularize it. A great contingent of
Indian troops, led by Maharajahs and Rajputs, Maliks, Rajahs and Jams,
had arrived in Europe, tarried in England and been slipped, in the dead
of a Channel night, across to France. An entire army from Canada was
encamped on Salisbury Plain, and no one had seen a sign of it except an
occasional detachment of boisterous subalterns, many with a pronounced
"American accent," who had kicked up a row in some Leicester Square
music-hall the night before. The Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square
was desecrated with recruiting circus-bills which would have delighted
the heart of Barnum, and every taxicab wind-shield in town beseeched
passers-by to "enlist for the duration of the war." But why, I had had
the temerity to inquire in my little "Wake Up, England!" homily, which
was rejected because it revealed no insight into "British character,"
were not the turbaned Gurkhas and the swarthy Sikhs and the brown men
from Punjab and Beluchistan brought to London-town and paraded up and
down the Strand and the Embankment, for all the metropolis to have a
priceless object-lesson in Imperial patriotism? Why was Kitchener
allowed to intern the young giants in khaki from Ontario, Quebec,
Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia in the hidden recesses of the
provinces, instead of giving Londoners a glimpse of Colonial love of
mother country in the flesh? It was due to the Indians and to the
Canadians themselves, no less than to London, I argued, that opportunity
should be provided to pay homage to the men who had crossed the seas to
fight for Motherland. Non-British though I am, I felt morally certain
that even my Hoosier bosom would swell with emotion in the presence of
so ocular a demonstration of Britain's Imperial solidarity in the day of
trial. But my suggestions were rejected as unbecomingly boisterous in
their intent, good enough for the Polo Grounds or Madison Square Garden,
but grotesquely out of place in England. If carried out, you see, they
would inevitably have made the war "a bit conspicuous."
[Illustration: Kitchener's army]
That the war was almost invisibly hidden, as far as the daily life of
the people was concerned, was primarily due to the bureaucratic and
autocratic methods of the censorship. Bureaucracy and autocracy in
Germany, for instance, have their redeeming qualities. They are usually
highly efficient, and their arrogance and high-handedness are tolerated
because accompanied by a maximum of practical effectiveness. When
England established her war censorship, she went over to bureaucracy and
autocracy, as made in Germany, but lamentably lacking in the saving
graces of the system as there exemplified. In vain the Press, now
muzzled almost as effectually as if the Magna Charta and free speech had
never existed, stormed and fumed against the tyranny of the "Press
Bureau," the innocuous title chosen for the Juggernaut which, before six
months had passed, was to grind British journalistic liberties into the
dust. It was discovered that the "Bureau" was staffed for the most part
by amiable gentlemen no longer fit for active duty in the army and navy,
who, having patriotically offered their services to King and country,
had been pitchforked indiscriminately into billets which clothed them
with more real influence on the war than if they had commanded armies or
fleets. It became painfully apparent that news of the war was being
suppressed, mutilated and generally mismanaged either by military men
who knew nothing of journalism, or by journalists who were profoundly
ignorant of military matters--for the official censor caused it to be
announced, in self-defense, that he had associated with the Bureau in an
advisory capacity a couple of eminent ex-editors.
Just who was responsible for annihilating the elementary rights of the
British Press never became quite clear. Some blamed Kitchener. His
hostility to journalists and journalism was notorious, though "With
Kitchener to Khartoum," by the most distinguished special correspondent
of our time, the late G. W. Steevens, who died in _The Daily Mail's_
service during the South African war, probably did as much to give "K."
a reputation as anything which England's War Minister ever did in the
field. Others said Joffre was the man who had put the lid on. Whoever
laid down the law saw that it was relentlessly enforced. Petitions,
protests, cajolings, threats, complaints, abuse--all were in vain. The
antics of the "Press Bureau" became more exasperating and inexplicable
from day to day. Also more domineering, if common report could be
believed, for presently Fleet Street heard that "K." had intimated to a
mighty newspaper magnate that if the latter did not mend his ways, and
abate his insistence, "K." had the power, and would not shrink from
using it, to incarcerate even a peer of the realm in the Tower and turn
his entire "plant" into junk. That dire threat, I imagine, was just one
of the myriad of chatterbox rumors with which the air in England, all
through the war, fairly sizzled. At any rate, it failed utterly to curb
the stormy petrel to terrorize whom it was said to have been uttered,
for his onslaughts on the censorship grew, instead of diminishing, in
intensity as the "war in the dark" proceeded.
But it was in its treatment of news destined for the United States that
the Press Bureau most convincingly revealed its lack of imagination.
Here was Germany leaving no stone unturned to take American sympathy by
storm. The Bernstorff-Dernburg-Muensterberg campaign was in full blast.
Von Wiegand in Berlin was interviewing the Crown Prince and Princess,
von Tirpitz and von Bernhardi, Zeppelin, Hindenburg and Falkenhayn, and
only narrowly escaped interviewing the Kaiser himself. American
correspondents arriving in Germany were received with open arms, and had
but to ask, in order to receive. Sometimes they received without
asking. They could see anybody and go anywhere. That was German
efficiency--and imagination--at work. The Germans realized that we are
a newspaper-reading community. They knew that the best way in the world
to win American newspapers' and American newspapermen's sympathy is to
give them news. So they did it. When the German Crown Prince told the
correspondent of the United Press that he would "love" to see American
baseball, that he longed to hunt big game in Alaska, and that Jack
London was his favorite author, he broke a lance for the Fatherland's
cause in the United States that a four-hundred-fifty-paged "unhuman"
British White Paper could never hope to equal. Somebody with an
imagination--probably Bernstorff--had put a flea in Berlin's ear, and
the result was open-house for American journalists for the duration of
the war.
What was happening in London? There were plenty of American
newspapermen on the ground, not only special correspondents who had come
over to join the British army in the field, like Will Irwin, "Bell"
Shepherd, Alexander Powell, Arthur Ruhl, or Frederick Palmer, to name
only a few of them, but resident London correspondents who had lived in
England a dozen years, like Edward Price Bell of the _Chicago Daily
News_, Ernest Marshall of the _New York Times_, or James M. Tuohy of the
_New York World_, who were well known to the British authorities as men
of judgment, integrity and responsibility. But resident or newcomer,
nothing but inconsequential facilities or the cold shoulder awaited them
when they went to the Press Bureau, cap in hand, to ask even the most
rudimentary professional courtesies for themselves or their papers.
Quite apart from the indignities thus heaped on American correspondents,
the Press Bureau, when it suppressed or butchered their dispatches, left
pitiably out of account the susceptibilities of the great neutral
news-devouring community which these men represented. Therein lay the
real infamy. Think of it. Here was Great Britain and her Government
confessedly anxious for American moral support in the war, and something
more than that, and yet a subordinate department seemed clothed with
authority to flout, exasperate and bully the agency directly responsible
for the production of public sentiment in the United States. I call it
a tremendous tribute to the sincerity and depth of our loyalty to the
Allies' cause that we never for a moment allowed it to waver, even in
the face of the British Press Bureau's arrant provocation. The American
Press, asking for bread in England, received a stone. That it accepted
it, and went on playing the Allies' game, has been one of the miracles
of the war, for which these British Isles have reason to be profoundly
grateful.
[Illustration: 5 Questions to those who employ male servants]
Inherent imperturbability and unimaginative censorship thus combined in
the early weeks of the war, on the one hand to minimize popular
conceptions of the struggle's magnitude in England, and on the other to
smother enthusiasm for it. You can not fully realize the immensity of
the task if you are not permitted by your overlords to see it in its
true proportions. You can certainly not become ecstatic about it if
they insist on having it painted in exclusively drab, routine and
joy-killing tints, when they are not covering it up altogether. Yet
British patriotism was triumphing over all these natural and artificial
handicaps. Kitchener was not only calling for five hundred thousand
volunteers, but intimated that he would soon be asking for another five
hundred thousand. He was getting them. London and the provinces were
now plastered with recruiting posters, calling in compelling language
for soldiers. "Your King and Country Need You!" Thus ran the most
direct and frank appeal. By the tens of thousands men answered it. The
desecrating bill-board which we know in America is an unknown
excrescence in the British Isles, but, for the purposes of advertising
for men for "Kitchener's Army," practically every vacant space in the
Kingdom was now turned into a hoarding. The base of Nelson's Column in
Trafalgar Square was splashed red, white and blue, black and yellow,
green and orange, and every other shade capable of lending distinction
to an eye-arresting poster. The great hotels and theaters, banks,
government offices, and even churches, turned their walls and windows
over to Kitchener's advertising department for recruiting-bills, and
occasionally themselves put up huge signs across their most imposing
facades with such legends as:
TO ARMS! RALLY ROUND THE FLAG!
TO ARMS! YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!
TO ARMS! ENLIST AT ONCE FOR THE WAR ONLY!
or
TO-DAY, YOUNG MAN, YOU ARE NEEDED
TO FIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S DEFENSE!
FALL IN! JOIN THE ARMY AT ONCE!
or
MEN OF BRITAIN, UPHOLD YOUR COUNTRY'S
HONOR AND LIBERTY! SERVE WITH
YOUR FRIENDS!
or you would read what the King had said:
"NO PRICE CAN BE TOO HIGH WHEN
HONOR AND LIBERTY ARE AT STAKE."
Even the fences of the parks, the windows and sides of the omnibuses and
the wind-shields of the taxicabs reminded men every hour of the day and
night that "Your King and Country Need You."
I recall, with amusement, how "scandalized" some Americans were at
England's resort to "circus methods" to manufacture an army. I remember
that pert (and extremely pretty) young Chicago newspaper-woman who,
having come over from Paris which had not needed to advertise for an
army, because France had one, was mortified beyond words to find London
screaming with "Your-King-and-Country-Need-You" sign literature. She
was so stirred by this "undignified exhibition" that she sat down before
she had been in town forty-eight hours and dashed off to her paper just
what she thought about "degenerate Britain." She was convinced that a
nation so "hopelessly unpatriotic" that it had to advertise for
defenders was "doomed." Her erudite observations made a deep impression
on her editors, who, in a learned editorial asked gravely whether the
British Empire was "reaching the Diocletian period of the Romans."
[Illustration: 4 Questions to the Women of England]
As a matter of fact, Kitchener's project to advertise for an army was
the one ray of imagination, and a boundlessly encouraging one, which the
War Office had so far revealed. It showed even more imagination in
entrusting the technique of the scheme to a professional, Mr. Hedley F.
Le Bas, who, besides bringing to the task the expert knowledge of a
publisher, had once been a trooper in the 15th Hussars, and knew and
loved the army. Mr. Le Bas modestly disclaims credit for originating
the plan to create an army of millions by advertisement. He says that
the Duke of Wellington beat him to it. A hundred years ago, when
England was at grips with the oppressor of that day, a poster appeal for
soldiers was issued, which is _prima facie_ evidence that advertising is
not a modern invention. Only a few Englishmen, and probably still fewer
Americans, are aware that even in Napoleonic times advertising for an
army was _de rigueur_, and as the invitation to "The Warriors of
Manchester" was, to a certain extent, the spiritual inspiration of
Kitchener's remarkable recruit-getting campaign, I make no apologies,
despite its raciness, for reproducing on the following page a document
of genuinely historical value.
The methods to which the American Democracy has resorted to secure
soldiers for her wars were also in the minds of Lord Kitchener and Mr.
Le Bas. Indeed, the practises of President Lincoln, in respect of
raising armies, were the model to which the British Government from the
start determined to adhere. It was discovered that Lincoln and Seward
had not shrunk from appealing to the men of the North from the hoardings
and through the newspapers, while the advertisements of the United
States army and navy during the Spanish-American War were a modern
example of recruiting measures in a country where the absence of
conscription compels a Government, in the hour of emergency, to scrape
an army together by hook or crook. Then the constant advertising by our
War and Navy departments, even in peace-times, proved that there must be
efficacy in asking men to serve their country in posters, magazines or
newspaper-columns in which they were also being persuasively urged to
buy automobiles, "quality" clothes or shaving-sticks. Kitchener's
"advertising campaign" was destined, before the war was old, to be the
target of bitter attack, but the skill, persistence and
comprehensiveness with which it was prosecuted played an immense role in
the creation of the greatest volunteer army in history. It opened a new
epoch in advertising and clothed that art with a distinction which will
never be taken from it. The seal of an Empire has been placed on the
maxim that it pays to advertise.
[Illustration: To the Warriors of Manchester.]
By the end of October, after three months of war, the muster of the
British Empire was in full progress. Complacency and nonchalance in
London were still wretchedly wide-spread, but the call of the Motherland
for soldiers was echoing around the world. Wherever Britons were
domiciled, it was answered. It penetrated into far-off British
Columbia, where young Englishmen, comfortably settled in new existences,
abandoned them unhesitatingly. It was heard in even more distant
climes, like Australia, New Zealand and Africa, where adventurous
spirits who had crossed the seas to seek their fortunes in lands of
promise were now dominated by no other ambition than to "do their bit"
for King and country. Even emigrated Irishmen, long irreconcilable,
were electrified by John Redmond's clarion message, and they, too,
turned their faces homeward. By the ides of November whole shiploads of
repatriated Britons, returning from the four points of the compass,
reached the island shores, fired by one consuming purpose.
These home-coming patriots were not only rendering valiant service by
placing their lives at the King's disposal, but they were demonstrating,
along with native-born Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders,
Australians and Indians, that one of Germany's fondest dreams was the
hollowest of fantasies. I had been familiar for years with a German
political literature based on the roseate theory that, once Great
Britain was embroiled in a great European war, her world-wide Empire
would crack and tumble like a house of cards in a holocaust. Had not
Sir Wilfred Laurier on a famous occasion declared that Canada would
never be "drawn into the vortex of European militarism"? Were not the
Boers thirsting restlessly for revenge and the hour of deliverance from
the British yoke? Were not Republican sentiments notoriously rife in
Australia and New Zealand, and would not Labor Governments in those
remote regions seize eagerly on coveted opportunity to snap the silken
cords which bound them to England, and declare their independence? Would
not India, the enslaved Empire of the vassal Rajahs, leap at the throat
of an England preoccupied in Europe and drive the tyrant into the sea?
These were the thoughts which were discussed by Teuton political seers
as something more than things which Germany merely desired and hoped
for. They were treated as axiomatic certainties. The rally round the
Union Jack by the Britons of Australia and New Zealand, Canada and South
Africa, Nova Scotia and Jamaica, Barbadoes and Ceylon, British Guiana
and Mauritius, Newfoundland and New Brunswick, was Germany's great
illusion. When the "conquered Boers" under Botha, the "alienated Irish"
under Redmond, the "rebellious Indians" under maharajahs and princes,
even the "downtrodden" black Basutos, Barotses, Masai and Maoris of
Africa and Australasia under their native chieftains, announced that
they, too, were ready to bleed for the Empire, Germany's awakening was
rude and complete. London might be callous, pleasure-loving and
unperturbed. But the Empire was alive both to the peril and the duty of
the hour, and when it vowed to face the one and absolve the other an
oath was sworn which spelled British invincibility.