WAR IN THE DARK
It is November, 1914. Britain is waking, but is far from awake. Nearly
everybody and everything are proud to be "as usual." The Fleet has been
able to secure but one action with the Germans--Beatty's smashing blow
at the Kaiser's cruiser squadron in the bight of Heligoland. A great
trophy of the engagement is in hand--Admiral von Tirpitz' son,
watch-officer in the Mainz, a prisoner in Wales. For a month and more
the war has been raging furiously in the west all the way from the Alps
to the North Sea. Antwerp is taken, after a farce-comedy attempt at
relief by levies of raw British naval reserves. Joffre is at sanguinary
grips with the "Boches" in the Aisne country. The twelve or fifteen
miles of British front in the northernmost corner of France and that
patch of Flanders not yet in the enemy's hands is the scene of
ceaseless, desperate combat. Jellicoe's dreadnoughts and destroyers
take part at intervals in the grim battle for the channel coast. Ostend
has fallen.
The German objective farthest west is now clear. The Berlin newspapers
head-line the tidings from Flanders "the Road to Calais." Major Moraht
in the _Tageblatt_ acknowledges that the campaign for the base from
which Napoleon essayed to invade England is "a matter of life or death"
for the Germans. Sir John French and the remnant of Belgium's little
army steel themselves for a stone-wall defense. Again and again they
keep the frenzied enemy at bay. Have you ever seen Harvard holding the
Yale eleven on the five-yard line three minutes before the call of time
in the last half, with dark gathering so fast that you could hardly
distinguish crimson from blue? Do you remember Yale's ferocious first,
second, third, yet always vain, attempts to batter and plunge her way
through Harvard's concrete, immobile phalanx? If you do, and if your
red-blooded heart has tingled at some such spectacle of young American
bulldoggedness, which can be seen West as well as East, in the North and
in the South, just as commonly as in the New Haven bowl, you will be
able to visualize, infinitesimally, the titanic grapple around Dixmude,
Ypres and the Yser in the bloody days and hellish nights of October and
November, 1914. "The Watch in the Mud" was the way German military
critics paraphrased their national anthem, to describe the situation in
Flanders, for the Belgians had now flooded the region contiguous to the
Yser Canal, and the Kaiser's legions, in their breathless thrust for
Calais, were fighting in mire and slush to their boot-tops. More than
one company of _Feldgrauer_ was ingloriously drowned.
The British were engaged in precisely the operation for which their
temperament best fits them--"holding." The German attack rocked against
them remorselessly, giving neither assailant nor defender rest or
quarter. But the bulldog "held." He was mauled unconscionably and bled
profusely. Thousands upon thousands of his teeth were knocked out, and
he was half-blind, and limped. Yet he "held." Winter had come. Men
lived in trenches which had been merely water-logged ditches, but were
now frozen into rock. The German eagle, hammered, of course, no less
cruelly than the bulldog, was still screaming and clawing, in his mad
desire to cleave a way to Calais. But, mangled and scarred as he was,
the bulldog barked "No!" He had set his squatty bow-legs, disjointed
though they were, squarely across "the Road to Calais." There he
intended to stay. It could be traversed, that road, only through a
welter of blood which, regardless as German commanders are of the cost
when they set themselves an objective, gave the General Staff at Berlin
furiously to ponder.
I have already intimated that Britain all this tempestuous while was
rubbing her eyes, but was only partially open-eyed. It was not
altogether Britain's fault. The immutable Censorship still gave the
public no real glimmer of the history-making struggle going on almost
within ear-shot of the chalk-cliffs of Dover. Throughout the entire
month of October, four weeks as crammed with death and glory as in all
England's martial history, Sir John French was permitted to take the
public into his confidence but on one single occasion--and that, a
dispatch dealing with operations six weeks old! For its news of the
heroic deeds and Spartan sufferings of the greatest army it ever sent
abroad, the British Empire was compelled to depend on stilted French
_communiques_ and the fantastic or irrelevant narratives of an official
"eye-witness at British Headquarters," who was allowed to bamboozle the
nation for months before his flow of mediocrity and piffle was choked
off by disgruntled public opinion. England was fighting her greatest war
in Cimmerian darkness. Casualty lists, terrible in their regularity and
magnitude, kept on coming, but of the coincident imperishable triumphs
of British sacrifice and courage, not a word. One's _Illustrated London
News_ and _Sphere_ printed depressing double-pages weekly, filled with
pictures of England's masculine flower killed in action "somewhere in
France" or "somewhere in Flanders." But of the manner in which their
precious lives had been laid down, of the price they had made the
Germans pay for them, not a syllable. If by accident some correspondent
or newspaper secured the account of an engagement, which ventured so
much as to hint with some picturesqueness of detail how Englishmen were
dying, the Press Bureau guillotine came down on the narrative with a
crash which taught the offender to mend his ways for the future.
Under the circumstances it was not surprising to hear well-founded
reports that recruiting was falling off. In the clubs men said that
Kitchener's "first half-million" was in hand, but that men for the
second five hundred thousand, for which the War Office had now called,
were holding back to a disappointing, and even disquieting, degree.
Meantime the popular ballad of the hour was, appropriately, Paul Rubens'
"Your King and Country Want You"--"a women's recruiting song," as its
sub-title runs. Its opening verse and chorus tell their own story:
We've watched you playing cricket
And every kind of game.
At football, golf and polo,
You men have made your name.
But now your country calls you
To play your part in war,
And no matter what befalls you,
We shall love you all the more.
So, come and join the forces
As your fathers did before.
CHORUS
Oh! We don't want to lose you,
But we think you ought to go.
For your King and your Country
Both need you so!
We shall want you, and miss you,
But with all our might and main
We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you,
When you come back again!
These words, in prosaic type, look banal. Their appeal seems trite.
Yet rendered to plaintive melody by such an operatic artist as little
Maggie Teyte, they went straight to men's hearts. They must have sent
thousands upon thousands of cricketers, footballers, golfers and
poloists--that is a classification which takes in pretty nearly all
Englishmen--into khaki and training-camps. But the growing insistence
with which the walls and windows of Old England were plastered with
recruiting posters--even entire front pages of newspapers were now
employed to advertise that "Your King and Country Need You"--indicated
that Kitchener's army was not being built up yet by the desired leaps
and bounds. Obviously the war needed some other kind of advertising
than even the accomplished Mr. Le Bas could give it. It was not strange
that the enthusiasm of Englishmen, cheated of the chance to know what
was really going on at the front, was beginning to find expression in
other directions.
[Illustration: Greeting the Kaiser (in helmet) the day he declared
Germany "in a state of war," July 31st, 1914.]
It was not magnificent, for example, but it was natural, that Englishmen
should, in all the circumstances, reveal a very materialistic passion to
"capture Germany's trade." Denied the opportunity of "enthusing" over
events at the seat of war, they proceeded to dedicate themselves
energetically to the task of eliminating the Germans as a factor in the
markets of the world. A profound book on the subject appeared--_The War
on German Trade_, with the sub-titles of "Ammunition for Civilians" and
"Hints for a Plan of Campaign." My old friend, Sidney Whitman, the
distinguished author of _Imperial Germany_, dignified it with a preface.
England had not entered upon the war "in a commercial spirit or with a
commercial purpose," he said, "yet it behooves her to seize and hold
fast the ripe fruit which has dropped into Englishmen's lap--as a first
incident in the clash of nations." The volume had frankly been
published, explained Whitman, "with the purpose of stimulating the
English manufacturer and the English trader to seize the opportunities
thrust upon them by the war."
Then, as the Censorship, as callous to criticism and abuse as if it were
a sphinx, still insisted that Englishmen must fight and die in the dark,
as far as their kith and kin were concerned, patriotism at home found
vent in a crusade against the Germans still at large on British soil.
They numbered thousands. They were a distinct and undeniable danger.
In days of peace they spied patriotically and flagrantly, thanks to John
Bull's easy-going, guileless toleration of the stranger within his gate.
Personally I never believed that the German waiters and barbers in the
Savoy or the Carlton, and their myriad of _confreres_ elsewhere in the
country, were the advance guard of the German army of invasion in
disguise. Nor did I imagine (as I actually made a very British friend
once seriously believe) that Appenrodt's restaurants in the Strand and
Piccadilly were in reality masked commissariat-stations of the Kaiser's
General Staff. Nor could even so persuasive an authority as William Le
Queux, author of _German Spies in England_, convince me that every
German resident who kept homing-pigeons, owned a country-place near the
East Coast suitable for wireless, or got drunk on the Kaiser's birthday
in the Gambrinus restaurant in Glasshouse Street, was a paid member of
the Berlin secret-service. Most of these stories made me smile as
broadly as the "star" rumor of the war--the story that seventy thousand
armed Russians had been "actually seen" by Heaven knows how many
veracious Britons sneaking across England from Newcastle to Southampton,
on their stealthy way from Archangel to the Western allied front.
Yet it was palpably not the hour for German subjects, any number of them
of military age and ardor, to be at large in England. So Britain, in a
tardy manifestation of self-preservation, began to arrest and intern the
Kaiser's hapless subjects, who hitherto had suffered no impairment of
their liberties except detention in the country, compulsory visits to
the police, and restriction of movement (except by special permission)
to an area five miles from their domicile. The German is far too much of
a patriot to be trusted to do as he pleases in a country with which his
Fatherland is at war. He never forgets that he is a German _first_, and
a stock-broker earning commissions in London, a barber taking English
tips, or a waiter spilling English soup, afterward. It is always
_Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ with him. He may not have made a
profession or habit of writing home to Berlin or Hamburg, Cologne or
Breslau, Kiel or Wilhelmshaven, what he noted of interest at Aldershot,
Portsmouth, Dover, Woolwich, or Sheerness, or what his English friends
might from time to time tell him of interest at the Admiralty or the War
Office. But it was "bomb-sure," as the Teuton idiom rather
appropriately puts it, that if ever a British state secret fell into
Herr Apfelbaum's hands on the Stock Exchange, or into Johann's in the
"hair-dressing saloon" of the Ritz, or into Gustav's at the grillroom of
the Piccadilly, that morsel would sooner or later find its way to
Germany. When one considered that Englishmen of the highest class--one
even said the King had a German valet!--were attended night and day, in
their homes, their clubs, their offices and their favorite "American
bars," hotels, grillrooms, cafes and restaurants by Germans, with eyes
to see and ears to hear, it was small wonder that an irresistible cry
was sent up before the winter of war had advanced very far, that these
"enemy aliens" should not be merely ticketed, labeled and superficially
watched, but placed behind barbed-wire, with British sentries on guard.
And so it came to pass that Mr. McKenna, Home Secretary, whose
reluctance to intern the Germans gossip absurdly ascribed to his "German
connections," finally ordered "the enemy in our midst" to be rounded up.
Not all of them were at first taken. Thousands remained at liberty.
The British are a patient and a trusting clan.
It was not only the acknowledged German subject in Great Britain who was
the object of the anti-Teuton crusade. The naturalized German, in many
cases the holder for years of a certificate of British citizenship, was
made to feel the blight of the wave of passion sweeping over the
country. Naturalized Germans have won in England wealth and eminence
outstripping even the heights to which they have climbed in the United
States. In the preceding reign they were the bosom companions of the
Sovereign. King Edward's intimate circle contained the Cologne
financier, Sir Ernest Cassel, and another Prussian native, Sir Felix
Semon, was His Majesty's Physician Extraordinary. In the "City,"
London's Wall Street, German financiers almost dominated the picture.
Baron Schroeder (naturalized only within a few hours of the outbreak of
the war) was so great a power that citizenship was practically thrust
upon him as a measure of vital British self-protection. Sir Edgar
Speyer, like Cassel a member of the King's Privy Council, and a Baronet
besides, was not only a City magnate, but controlled London's vast
system of surface and underground traction lines, including the omnibus
service; yet his English counting-house was a branch of a parent
establishment in Frankfort-On-Main. These were a few of the outstanding
names among the "Germans" in high place in England. They by no means
exhausted the list. Domiciled in this country for years, they had,
while openly maintaining sentimental relations with their Fatherland,
played no inconspicuous role in British affairs, economic and political.
Any number of naturalized Germans were married to British women and were
fathers of British-born families. Scores of their sons were already
wearing King George's khaki in Kitchener's army. Sir Ernest Cassel had
given five thousand pounds to the Prince of Wales' National Relief Fund.
Yet rumor shortly afterward had him locked up in a traitor's cell in the
Tower of London! No matter how acclimatized these naturalized Germans
had become, no matter how long they had been British subjects--in many
cases their title to that distinction was half a century old--they found
themselves under a ban. They were not physically maltreated. Their
windows were not broken. Men did not spit in their faces. They were
permitted (like the rest of the British) to do "business as usual,"
except the stock-brokers, who were invited to keep off 'Change. But they
were a marked class. If they ventured to visit clubs in Pall Mall or
St. James Street, to which they had paid dues for years, they were
confronted with notices reading:
+-------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Members of German or Austrian nationality |
| are requested, in their own interests, not |
| to frequent the club premises during the war, |
| and British members are asked not to |
| bring to the club any guests of enemy |
| nationality. |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------+
Or, if the naturalized German, no matter whether his boy had just fallen
at Ypres or not, went to his favorite golf-club of a Saturday or Sunday,
he received a greeting to the same effect. The virtue of tolerance, a
prized British quality, was vanishing from the face of these war-ridden
isles.
The anti-German fury in England claimed an early victim and a shining
mark--His Serene Highness Vice-Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, who,
as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, was practically in supreme control
of British strategy at sea. Prince Louis is a native-born Austrian, and
although he had been a naturalized British subject and attached to the
Royal Navy since 1868, and in 1884 married into the British Royal Family
by wedding his own cousin, Princess Victoria of Hesse, a grand-daughter
of Queen Victoria, a campaign inaugurated and mercilessly prosecuted by
the aristocratic _Morning Post_, led, on October 29, to the Prince's
resignation. Public opinion unreservedly approved the disappearance
from a post, from which it was not too much to say the destinies of the
Empire were controlled, of a man who was brother-in-law of Prince Henry
of Prussia, the Inspector-General of the German Navy, and of the Grand
Duke of Hesse, one of the Kaiser's federated allies. The same spirit of
"Safety First" which sent the German barbers and waiters to camps in
Frith Hill and the Isle of Man dispatched Vice-Admiral Prince Louis of
Battenberg into official oblivion. Nobody actually distrusted his
patriotism. But England was in no humor to run even remote risks. He
had to go. Satisfaction over Battenberg's retirement was only slightly
modified by a later revelation that it was Prince Louis himself, and not
Mr. Churchill, as universally supposed, who was chiefly responsible for
the mobilization of the British Fleet just before the outbreak of war in
consequence of having "commanded the ships to stand fast, instead of
demobilizing as ordered."
November was a month of kaleidoscopic sorrow and joy for the British.
It began in gloom, with Turkey's entry into the war and the inherent
menace to Egypt which that event denoted. Then came the great naval
action off Chili, with first blood to the Kaiser in the only regulation
stand-up battle in which British and German warships had so far met.
The sinking of Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock's flagship, the cruiser
_Good Hope_, and her companion, the _Monmouth_, by Admiral Count von
Spee's cruiser squadron, with the loss of one thousand four hundred
precious lives, was a bitter blow. Lord Charles Beresford, under whom
Cradock had once served, told me that his death was a more serious loss
to the British Fleet than a squadron of cruisers.
It was a depressing beginning for the First Sea Lordship of Lord
"Jackie" Fisher, who succeeded Prince Louis of Battenberg. Churchill
was still First Lord of the Admiralty--what we in the United States
should call Secretary of the Navy--but Fisher, as First Sea Lord, was in
practical control of everything connected with the actual activities of
the Fleet. The First Lord of the Admiralty's business is to get ships
for the navy. The First Sea Lord's task is to man, arm and fight them.
Fisher lost no time in angry remorse over Cradock's disaster. He set
about to repair it. He applied forthwith the "Fisher touch." He
ascertained that it was Rear-Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee,
Chief of the War Staff, who had been chiefly responsible for dispatching
Cradock's squadron to waters in which it would have to meet a German
force superior in both tonnage and gun-power. Whereupon Fisher ordered
Sturdee to place himself at the head of a squadron which was to find and
destroy von Spee, and not come back until it had done so. Sturdee
"delivered the goods" with neatness and dispatch. Almost a month later
to the day--it is a fortnight's journey from British waters to the
Southern Atlantic even for twenty-seven-knot battle-cruisers--he carried
out Fisher's imperious orders. On December 8 Cradock was gloriously
avenged. Von Spee in his flagship, the _Scharnhorst_, together with the
sister cruiser _Gneisenau_ and the smaller _Leipzig_, was sent to the
bottom off the Falkland Islands, and the remaining units in the German
squadron, the _Dresden_ and _Nuernberg_, were accounted for later.
Britain breathed easier. The bulldog breed in her navy was still to be
relied upon. Everybody instinctively felt that there was any number of
more Sturdees and ships and guns and sailors ready to do equally
invincible service for England if the Germans would but give them the
chance von Spee had offered at the Falklands.
Spirits which had drooped when Cradock was lost were revived ten days
later by the most welcome piece of naval news the British people had had
since the war began--the destruction of the Kaiser's champion
commerce-raider _Emden_ by the Australian cruiser _Sydney_ off the Cocos
Islands and the capture of her intrepid commander, Captain von Mueller,
and many of his crew. The _Emden_ sank seventeen ships and cargoes
worth eleven million dollars before her career was ended. But von
Mueller won universal renown and even popularity in Great Britain for
his daring, "sportsmanship" and gallantry to vanquished merchantmen.
Germans do not appreciate such a spirit, and do not deserve to be its
beneficiary--the utter lack of the sporting instinct in the Fatherland
is responsible for that unfortunate fact--yet if von Mueller had been
landed a prisoner of war in England and could have been paraded down
Pall Mall, he might have counted confidently on a welcome which
Englishmen customarily reserve for their own heroes. Here and there in
London protests were raised against the encomiums which almost every
newspaper, and for the matter of that almost every Englishman, uttered
in praise of von Muller's vindication of the nobility of the sea, but
the overwhelmingly prevalent opinion was that he had "played the game"
and, pirate though he was, deserved well of a race which still holds
high the traditions of the naval service.
Ever-changing and stirring were November's events--the capitulation of
Germany's prized Chinese colony of Kiau-Chau to the besieging Japanese;
Lord Roberts' tragic death in the field among the soldiers he loved so
well, the Indians who had come to Europe to fight Britain's battles; the
still victorious advance of the Russians in East Prussia, though
Hindenburg's smashing blow in the Tannenberg swamps had been delivered
many weeks before; the honorable acquittal of Rear-Admiral E. C. T.
Troubridge, commanding the Mediterranean cruiser squadron, on the charge
of having allowed the German cruisers _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ to slip
through his meshes into Constantinople--the Admiral had applied for a
court-martial, to clear himself of a grotesque accusation that a
relationship with the captain of the _Goeben_ had induced him to let the
Germans through. But all these things combined left no such indelible
impression on my mind as the Lord Mayor's dinner at the Guildhall in the
city of London on the night of November 9. That function, the
inauguration of the new chief magistrate, is celebrated in British
history as the annual occasion on which leaders of the State promulgate
some great new line of Governmental policy--a national keynote for the
year to come. The Guildhall dinner in the midst of Britain's greatest
war was sure to be of immemorial significance, and my heart beat high
with anticipation when Lord Northcliffe assigned me to attend it and
record an American's impressions of England's most august feast.
Guildhall was the scene of a famous flamboyancy by the Kaiser not so
many years ago, when he had talked about the comparatively firmer
consistency of blood compared to water and consecrated himself to the
cause of Anglo-German peace and friendship. I was keenly anxious to
hear what sort of sentiments would echo through the century-old
sanctuary of the City to-night, with men like Asquith, Balfour,
Kitchener, Churchill and Cambon, the French Ambassador, as the speakers.
I looked forward to an evening sure to be crowded with imperishable
memories. I was not disappointed. At midnight when it was all over, I
sat down to write "an American's impressions" for _The Daily Mail_, and
as they were exuberant with the freshness of mental sensations just
experienced and have not cooled in the sincerity of their utterance in
the long interval which has supervened, I make no apology for repeating
them herewith verbatim:
"When I became the joyful recipient of an invitation to attend last
night's Guildhall banquet I reveled in the prospect of a feast of
Bacchanalian pomp and pageantry. I expected to witness nothing much
except a Lord Mayor's 'show,' translated into Lucullian environment, a
riot of food, drink, cardinal robes, gold braid, gold chains, gold
sticks, wigs and the other trappings of mayoral magnificence. I came
away utterly disillusioned, for I had spent three hours in what will
live in my recollection as the Temple of British Dignity.
"Those stately Gothic walls, whose simple groups of statuary which tell
of Wellington and Nelson and Beckford; those amazingly non-panicky war
speeches of your Romanesque premier, your grim Kitchener, your--and
our--Winston Spencer Churchill, and your polished Balfour, all made me
feel that I was tarrying for the nonce within four walls which, if they
did not envelop all the great qualities of the British race, at least
typified and epitomized them.
"Guildhall is dignified by itself beyond my feeble hours of description.
I have never trod its historic floors before, but I have the
unmistakable impression that it has taken on fresh dignity to-day for
the words which were spoken in it yestereve. I was about to say, in the
idiom which springs more naturally to the lips of an American, 'for the
words which rang through it.' Words were not made to 'ring' through
Guildhall. They would be ludicrously out of place. An American
political spellbinder, no matter how silver-tongued, would pollute the
atmosphere of London's civic shrine. Its acoustic qualities, which I
should think were not faultless, are intended for exclusively such
oratory as put them to the test last night.
"Guildhall's tone is the tone of Mr. Asquith--'practicing the equanimity
of our forefathers, the fluctuating fortunes of a great war will drive
us neither into exaltation nor despondency.' I thought that striking
phrase of a brilliant peroration British character in composite. It was
more than that. It was Guildhallian. The cheers for the Premier, like
those for Balfour, Churchill and Kitchener, would have been more
vociferous in my country. But my country is not British. We are not
devoid of dignity, I hope, but we have no Guildhall."
It was left to other hands to report in detail the speeches of the Prime
Minister, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of War.
Each uttered phrases of golden significance. Mr. Churchill was
evidently still his ebullient self, although he had not yet fulfilled
his promise of September that the German navy, if it remained in port
and refused to come out, would be "dug out like a rat from a hole," nor
had his now acknowledged personal responsibility for the fiasco of the
Antwerp naval expedition perceptibly staled his infinite buoyancy.
"Six, nine, twelve months hence," he declared, "you will begin to see
the results that will spell the doom of Germany." I had never heard
"Winston" speak before, but I understood now the charm of his
personality and the attractiveness of an oratorical style made even more
magnetic by the suggestion of a combined stammer and lisp. "In spite of
its losses," he continued, "our Navy is now stronger, and stronger
relatively to the foe, than it was on the declaration of war." Asquith
read his speech, and Kitchener was about to do the same, but Churchill,
youthful, vibrant, tense, spoke extemporaneously, and the consequent
effect was indubitably the most striking of all the oratory of the
night.
Lord Kitchener, in khaki and with a mourning band on his arm, was
redolent of strength and impressiveness, but when he rose, clumsily
adjusted a pair of huge horn-rimmed reading glasses, and began to chant
his carefully-prepared "speech" in monotone from manuscript, he was far
less convincing, and certainly not approximately so electrifying as
Churchill. But he had messages of no less magnitude and cheer. "We may
confidently rely on the ultimate success of the Allies in the west," he
said simply. "But we want more men and still more men. We have now a
million and a quarter in training."
But it was Asquith's peroration, at which my impressionistic sketch in
_The Daily Mail_ only hinted, which was the nugget of the night.
Englishmen still repeat it as something which puts in more terse and
concrete words than anybody else has clothed it the solemn spirit in
which they have consecrated themselves to the task now trying the
Empire's soul:
"It is going to be a long, drawn-out struggle. But we shall not sheathe
the sword until Belgium recovers all, and more than all, she has
sacrificed; until France is adequately secured against the menace of
aggression; until the rights of smaller nations are placed on an
unassailable foundation; until the military domination of Prussia is
finally destroyed."
It was in that incorrigible resolve that Britain entered upon the second
calendar year of war, bleeding uncomplainingly, losing stoically, taking
what came and ruing it not; determined as she lived, to keep on until
her vow to herself was vindicated and her duty to civilization
performed.