THE NEW ENGLAND
Rome was not built in a day, but England has been made over in a year.
Personal liberty is gone. A free press no longer exists. Extravagance
is "bad form." Economy has become respectable. Dukes' sons and cooks'
sons are "pals." Drunkenness is disappearing. Conscription looms on
the horizon. The Irish are loyal. Suffragettes are making shells and
bandaging wounds instead of smashing windows and going to jail. Pride
is humbled, though not crushed. Still ringed by Kipling's "leaden
seas," Britain is no longer an island, for Zeppelins have maimed and
killed and wrecked in the heart of London. Tolerance is a lost art.
British have learned to hate. The link-boy has come back into his own;
the streets at night, that Admiral Sir Percy Scott, defender of London
by air, may blind the "sky-Huns," recall the gloom of the Cimmerian
Regency. Though Waterloo was won a hundred years ago, a terror worse
than the Napoleonic scourge has overtaken the descendants of Nelson and
Wellington. Britannia rules the waves, but the blood of a half million
of her best sons fertilizes the soil of France, Belgium, Turkey, Serbia
and Africa; and the flow is far from checked. The "shopkeeper of the
world" has become a nation in arms. Only one phase of its multifarious
life, immutable as the sphinx, has survived the crucible of war in
pristine glory--British calm. Ships may sink, men may fall, bombs may
annihilate and treasure be sapped, but British imperturbability, like
Time itself, pursues the even tenor of its way, Himalayan in its
imperviousness.
Assuredly it has been for no lack of cause that England has ridden the
sea of Armageddon without capsizing. Squalls, typhoons, storms and
barometric disturbances of every form of violence have beset her from
the outset of the voyage. But though there has been tempest, there is
no shipwreck. She enters upon another lap of a seemingly endless
journey, battered indeed, but keel down and full steam ahead. It is
still night. Stokers and crew, nor even the captains and commodores,
are not a completely united band, but their differences concern only the
methods of cleaving through darkness to the port, to gain which, at any
cost, all are grimly determined. Failure to reach the waters of their
desire as soon as the unthinking majority hoped and believed would be
possible has sobered the vision and intensified the resolve of crew and
commanders alike. It has not reconciled their antagonisms, but it is
making surer than ever that they will land their craft in the appointed
harbor, though the damnations of all the powers of destruction are
buffeted against her in the attempt.
My name for Armageddon is the War of Miscalculations, for it is a title
which indicts every belligerent without exception. The Germans expected
their army to be in Paris by the end of September, 1914. The English and
the French reckoned that Russian Cossacks would be hacking souvenirs
from the sepulchral statues in the Berlin _Sieges-Allee_ about the same
time. The British thought that Jellicoe would starve the Germans. Von
Tirpitz imagined that U-boats would paralyze Britain's life-line. The
British pounded vainly at the Dardanelles for nine months, and when they
couldn't get Calais the Germans started out to crush Serbia. Sir Edward
Grey thought Bulgaria and Greece were only waiting like ripe fruit to
drop into the Allies' lap and cry for marching orders. He was about as
near right as the German political professors who always assured William
II that India, Egypt, Canada, South Africa and Australia were itching to
revolt when the Motherland was immersed in a vast European war. The
great war has been a rude awakening for all concerned. In addition to
killing its millions of men and squandering its billions of money, it
has annihilated theories, expectations, plans and aspirations so cruelly
that the "war expert" has become a deathless laughing-stock. If
"experts" have learned anything from the war, they will henceforth
prefer history to prophecy.
"Business as Usual"--life generally in the old rut, in other words--was
adopted by Britons as their war motto. Truly did a politician of renown
exclaim a year later that no unhappier, because no more unfortunate,
maxim was ever foisted upon or accepted by a patriotic people. The
nation made no inconsiderable attempt to convert "Business as Usual"
from an aphorism into an actuality. Seven or eight months of unrealized
objectives had to pass over English men and women's resolute heads
before they began even to doubt the efficacy of the complacent principle
they had laid down for themselves. But the mills of Mars, like those of
his colleagues, keep on grinding, and England was to learn that, while
invasion had not seared her soil as it had scotched that of all her
European allies, war yet had terrors capable of burning into the soul,
saddening the homes and despoiling the pockets of even an unravished
land.
I fix the date when Great Britain began to face the iron logic of events
with sterner realization and to doubt the efficacy of "muddle" for
purposes of war as May, 1915. In the two preceding months there had
been a series of episodes of more climacteric magnitude than was
apparent at the moment of their occurrence. In March Sir John French's
army made a vigorous attempt to break through the German lines, and the
much-heralded "victory" of Neuve Chapelle resulted. Thousands of British
soldiers, and half a hundred Americans fighting in the Canadian
contingent, died gallantly in an action which, when its terrible cost
was eventually counted, could not be catalogued as anything but a
glorious failure. In April two affairs of purely German origin were
recorded, each predestined to leave a deep impress on the British public
mind: the employment of poison gas by the enemy in sanguinary
engagements around Ypres, and the flinging of thirty-nine British
officers, captives in Germany, into felons' cells by way of "reprisal"
for the segregation in England of captured German submarine crews.
Because the truth about Neuve Chapelle remained suppressed for many
weeks, attention was bestowed to an overshadowing degree on the gas and
officer-imprisonment episodes. Hitherto the universal demand in England
was that, no matter how the Germans waged war, Englishmen must continue
to fight "like gentlemen." Suggestions that the hour had long since
arrived for an eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth warfare were
rejected in almost every quarter as "un-English" and, therefore,
undebatable. The Kaiser's soldateska might rape, pillage, loot and
murder, but British troops must battle "in the old-fashioned way"--with
clean hands. Tirpitz's bluejackets might practise the tactics of
pirates, but Britannia's sailors would continue to respect the high
traditions of their calling. Men went so far as to asseverate that it
were better that Britain should be beaten than win by "German methods."
Sir Edward Clarke, the leader of the bar, protesting against Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle's proposal that Zeppelin murders could only be checked by
British air reprisals against defenseless German communities, wrote to
_The Times_: "It may be our misfortune to be defeated in this war, but
it will be our own fault if we are disgraced." Yet British "fighting
blood" seemed at length stirred to a boil by asphyxiating-gas and "Hate"
measures against British officer-captives. A wave of holy rage swept
over the country. Those who had advocated the use of kid gloves against
an enemy which fought with brass knuckles and poison found their views
sensibly less popular. Britain was waking at last to the realization
which even the Belgian atrocities, "Zeppelin murder" and the
"Scarborough baby-killers" had not fully aroused--that her high-minded
"sporting ethics" were lamentably out of place in war with a foe which
believed in ruthless "Frightfulness." The Tommies who died horrible
deaths from the effects of German poison gas and the officers who
languished in burglars' cells because martyrs in a worthy cause--their
anguish convinced England almost against her will that the German was
the most ferocious, pitiless and unconscionable enemy who had ever
engaged in the noble calling of arms.
While this healthy conviction was soaking into Britain's sluggish
consciousness, the crowning infamy of the _Lusitania_ massacre was
committed. The cup of indignation, already full to the brim, now
overflowed. Demand for vengeance, in the form of a campaign against the
Germans to be waged with resolution and force more destructive than any
previous effort, was universal. There must be no more temporizing, no
more half measures, no more vacillation and procrastination. Recruiting
enjoyed a fresh spurt, a response to the lurid posters headed "Remember
the _Lusitania_!" and reproducing the verdict of the Queenstown
coroner's jury
"that this appalling crime was contrary to international law and the
conventions of all civilized nations, and we therefore charge the
officers of the said submarine, the Emperor and Government of Germany,
under whose orders they acted, with the crime of wilful and wholesale
murder before the tribunal of the civilized world."
"It is your duty," the poster added, "to take up the Sword of Justice to
avenge this devil's work. ENLIST TO-DAY!"
The _Lusitania_ horror unchained the mob spirit from Land's End to John
o' Groat. Uninterned Germans, who were still at large in their
thousands, were the victims of rioters' fury in London and the big
provincial towns, and the Home Office was forced by irate public opinion
to place barbed-wire around all the "enemy aliens" not already in
captivity. Simultaneously the demand went forth that the pampering of
German prisoners of war in palatial manor-houses like Dorington Hall
should give way to rigor more suitable for men condemned henceforth to
be known as Huns. The _Lusitania's_ aftermath was accompanied by ample
proof that the bulldog was no longer curled up on the hearth-rug as
unconcernedly as he had been throughout the winter and spring. He was
showing his teeth, and he was snarling. He meant business now. There
had been enough of Queensbury rules, Hurlingham ethics and Crystal
Palace niceties in dealing with the Germans. They had served notice to
Humanity that it had no laws which the German army and navy felt bound
to respect. Englishmen said to themselves: "So be it." Then they
rolled up their sleeves.
Thus was Britain ringing with righteous wrath in the middle of May,
1915, when what I venture to dignify as _the turning-point of the war_
arrived: the exposure by Lord Northcliffe's newspapers of what was
henceforth to be known as "the shells tragedy." Northcliffe himself had
recently been the guest of Sir John French at the front. Still more
lately the military critic of _The Times_, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles
Repington, had visited British Field Headquarters under the same
auspices. There they were told the truth about Neuve Chapelle. It was
a simple story. The British army had essayed to smash through the
German lines, hopelessly short of the right kind of ammunition--high
explosive shells. Batteries of artillery, often on the threshold of
decisive victory, found themselves suddenly starved of the only sort of
shell which could possibly blast a way through the concrete and
barbed-wire of the enemy's entrenchments. What happened at Neuve
Chapelle--a terribly heavy loss of British life with nothing like
compensatory results--would inevitably happen again when the British
army was called upon to attack. It would simply be sentenced to death
and defeat. Sir John French had been provided with shrapnel which was
good enough to smash the Boers, but he was criminally ill-equipped with
the shells which alone were capable of demolishing the elaborate German
defensive arrangements and enabling the British infantry to advance with
a fighting chance of success. If the army was not to be condemned to
inglorious impotence or annihilation, it had to be provided forthwith
with high-explosive ammunition on an immense and unceasing scale. The
British Commander-in-Chief declined, in effect, to assume further
responsibility for the fate of the campaign in Flanders unless there was
sweeping and instant remedial action by the War Office.
On May 14 Lieutenant-Colonel Repington, in a dispatch to _The Times_
from "Northern France," which, like other news from the field, passed
the Censor at Headquarters before transmission to England, declared that
"the want of an unlimited supply of high explosive was a fatal bar to
our success." Describing an attack which had collapsed for the same
reason that the offensive at Neuve Chapelle had failed, Repington wrote:
"We found the enemy much more strongly posted than we expected. We had
not sufficient high explosive to level his parapets to the ground after
the French practice, and when our infantry gallantly stormed the
trenches, as they did in both attacks, they found a garrison undismayed,
many entanglements still intact, and maxims on all sides ready to pour
in streams of bullets. We could not maintain ourselves in the trenches
won, and our reserves were not thrown in because the conditions for
success in an assault were not present.
"The attacks were well planned and valiantly conducted. The infantry
did splendidly, but the conditions were too hard.
"On our side we have easily defeated all attacks on Ypres. The value of
German troops in the attack has greatly deteriorated, and we can deal
easily with them in the open. But until we are thoroughly equipped for
this trench warfare, we attack under grave disadvantages. The men are
in high spirits, taking their cue from the ever-confident and resolute
attitude of the Commander-in-Chief.
"If we can break through this hard outer crust of the German defenses,
we believe that we can scatter the German Armies, whose offensive causes
us no concern at all. But to break this hard crust we need more high
explosive, more heavy howitzers, and more men. This special form of
warfare has no precedent in history.
"It is certain that we can smash the German crust if we have the means.
So the means we must have, and as quickly as possible."
By way of illustrating what British guns could do, if sufficiently
numerous and adequately fed, Repington told how the French "by dint of
the expenditure of 276 rounds of high explosive per gun in one day,
leveled with the ground all the German defenses, except the villages."
He left no doubt that until Sir John French's artillery could attack
under similar conditions, British hopes of effective cooperation with
Joffre's army were futile. _The Times_ critic's plain-spoken
observations, which bore the unmistakable imprint of "inspiration" from
British Headquarters, startled the nation. They could hardly have been
more suggestive if the Commander-in-Chief himself had gone to the
country and proclaimed the facts. Indeed, if others had not promptly
done so, I have reason to believe that Sir John French would not have
shrunk from that very task. No one had so direct and personal a reason
for taking the bull by the horns, for if the British campaign were to
degenerate from futility into fiasco, the odium would necessarily fall
upon its field chieftain. History will hardly condemn him for resolving
that the blame should be placed where it belonged, if, as may well have
been the case, inspiration of the impending public exposure emanated
from him.
On May 21 Lord Northcliffe's _Daily Mail_--his critics are fond of
calling _The Times_ the "penny edition" of _The Daily Mail_--opened a
ruthless fire on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, as the
man directly responsible for the high-explosive famine which was
paralyzing British military effort. England was plastered with flaming
placards reading: "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder." With the journalistic
instinct for a catch-phrase, Northcliffe christened the situation "The
Shells Tragedy." He hammered home mercilessly the theory that England
must hold to accountability the man whom the country had entrusted with
practically autocratic control of the War Office. He insisted that
Kitchener could not take shelter behind a brilliant past. It was a bold
throw for the Bonaparte of British newspaperdom. He was not only
assailing the man whom he himself had helped to elevate to the War
Secretaryship; he was attacking the national idol. To the overwhelming
majority of Englishmen, as I have already pointed out, the name of
Kitchener spelled confidence. Next to the Fleet, he represented the
country's greatest war asset. Whenever Britons doubted whether the
course of events was leading to victory, they thought of the navy and of
Kitchener, and were of stout heart. Northcliffe knew and understood all
this--none better. But he said to himself that the relief of the shells
crisis was of vastly more moment than the prestige of a national idol;
that if the vital interests of the country demanded the dragging of
Kitchener from his pedestal, there must be no hesitation in performing
that unpleasant task. In an editorial article which stirred Great
Britain to its uttermost foundations, _The Daily Mail_ went full tilt to
the issue. It reminded Englishmen that Lord Kitchener loomed large in
the public eye primarily as an organizer of victory against the Sudanese
and as a man who had "helped" Lord Roberts in South Africa, though (it
recalled) there were men who knew Roberts' private opinions of
Kitchener's achievements in the Boer campaign. Kitchener had also been
Commander-in-Chief in India and, until the outbreak of war, was engaged
in the comparatively easy task of running the Egyptian machine, whose
wheels had been so well oiled by Lord Cromer. Northcliffe was well
aware that Kitchener, owing to his long absence in the East, where he
had spent the greater part of his life, was not in touch with the
democracy at home, nor had Lord Kitchener ever pretended to any such
knowledge. _The Daily Mail_ admitted all these things and declared
moreover that it was fair to Kitchener to say that he had been thrust at
a moment's notice into a position of immense difficulty. No longer in
his first youth, and more than twice the age of successful military
commanders of one hundred years ago, Kitchener had been put in charge of
the raising, drilling, clothing, equipping, arming, feeding and
_fighting_ of an army which had to be manufactured at a speed
unprecedented in the history of the world. Kitchener, though not
essentially a good organizer, was a man of enormous driving-power. His
talents in that respect had stood him in good stead so far in the war.
With the aid of a gigantic advertising campaign, he had accomplished
marvels in the direction of raising a volunteer army; but "the shells
tragedy" was thunderous proof that the Secretary for War had bitten off
more than he could chew. Unless things were to go from bad to worse,
the all-important question of providing munitions must be taken from
Kitchener's overburdened shoulders and transferred to those of men
better equipped in respect of time, temperament and training, to deal
with it. The Northcliffe revelations lost none of their sensationalism
in presence of Mr. Asquith's solemn assurances at Newcastle, barely
three weeks previous, that Britain's munition supply, as well as that of
her Allies, was entirely adequate.
If Northcliffe had suddenly proposed the abdication of the Sovereign, or
the demolition of St. Paul's Cathedral, or the proclamation of a
Republic, nothing could have been more cyclonic in its effect than _The
Daily Mail's_ imperious demand for the curtailment of Kitchener's
supreme authority at the War Office, because he had "blundered" with the
army's ammunition. At the Stock Exchange and on the Baltic (the shipping
mart) copies of all the Northcliffe papers were ceremoniously burnt.
Town councils held indignation meetings, to discuss the advisability of
banning them from the public reading-rooms. Super-patriots and
Hide-the-Truth zealots rushed to their newsdealers and canceled their
subscriptions to _The Times, The Daily Mail_ and other Northcliffe
organs. Rival publishers went so far as to suggest that Northcliffe and
his editorial staff should be lined up in front of a firing-squad and
shot for high treason. Wherever one went, one encountered the most
violent abuse of the journalist who had dared to sling mud at the great
soldier who was the incarnation of the nation's hopes and to write
"Failure" next to his magic name. _Punch_ epitomized national sentiment
in a cartoon showing John Bull patting Kitchener on the shoulder,
trampling a _Daily Mail_ under foot, and saying:
"If you need assurance, Sir, you may like to know that you have the
loyal support of all decent people in this country."
But Northcliffe, who possesses those valuable twin assets of the true
journalist, an elephantine hide and utter fearlessness, returned to the
attack, day after day. He never let up. The "shells tragedy," though
Liberal organs were reluctant to admit it, dealt the Asquith Liberal
Government a body blow. It was reeling from the effects of still
another revelation. Lord Fisher, "Fighting Jack," the First Lord of the
Admiralty, tendered his resignation. He refused longer to hold office
under the temperamental Mr. Winston Churchill or even under a government
to which that impetuous young statesman belonged. The public learned
that Fisher had not acquiesced whole-heartedly in Mr. Churchill's
schemes for limiting the Dardanelles campaign to a purely naval
operation. England was now seething with unrest. The political position
was chaotic. Acrimonious debate in Parliament on the shells question
was inevitable. For weeks previous there had been demands from many
quarters that the conduct of the war should be transferred from a purely
Party Government to the hands of a "National Cabinet" of all political
complexions. Mr. Asquith yielded to the inevitable. Before _The Daily
Mail's_ exposure of "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder" was a week old, the
reconstruction of the Cabinet into a "Coalition" Administration was in
full progress. Northcliffe's papers were still being burnt in public
places, but he had won a victory for England for which, as she lives,
she will yet come to acclaim his name. The completion of the Coalition
Ministry was announced on June 11. Lord Kitchener remained Secretary of
War, but a "Ministry of Munitions," which took shells and other sinews
of war out of Kitchener's hands, was created, and the "hustler" of the
Cabinet, Lloyd-George, was entrusted with its organization and
administration. Northcliffe had carried his point.
The war has not been prolific in England of "big men." Barring,
perhaps, Joffre and Hindenburg, it has produced none anywhere. But I
venture that far into the realm of prophecy to predict that the recorder
of the life and times of Great Britain in the crucible which was 1915
will pay no mean tribute to the newspaper proprietor who risked prestige
and power for the sake of that most prodigious of all tasks--stuffing
unpalatable truth down British throats. Northcliffe's actual methods in
the performance of the deed may have been debatable. His motives were
certainly beyond question, and they will, undoubtedly, appear in true
perspective in the impartial light of history. He is not offended when
people detect Napoleonic flashes in his impetuous eccentricities, and he
would be the last man in the world to deny that his brand of genius is
entirely devoid of defects, as it assuredly is not. Northcliffe has been
held up to public obloquy as hardly any man of his generation ever was
before him and has even been charged with being in "German pay." But he
has lived to see the ripening of the fruits of his sensational crusade:
the British munitions output has been quadrupled since the Stock
Exchange first burnt _The Daily Mail_. Lloyd-George, at the Ministry of
Munitions, has gathered round him the strongest company of business and
scientific brains that was ever applied to any Government department in
England. One million men and women, in more than two thousand
"controlled" establishments, are turning out days, nights and Sundays
the shells with which the British army, early or late, is going to
cleave its way to victory. In the great fighting around Loos at the end
of September, when the French and the British between them fired
65,000,000 shells in seventy-two hours, there was no shortage of the
wherewithal, the lack of which turned Neuve Chapelle into a "victory"
which Britain had been better without. A prodigious amount of high
explosive was necessary to wreck the Germans' first defensive lines in
Artois, but still the supply was not exhausted. When the cease-fire was
sounded, the British commanders found that they had on hand a great deal
more ammunition than they expected, and in certain departments there was
actually a greater quantity ready for the gunners at the end of the
struggle than at the beginning. Mr. Lloyd-George received and was
entitled to the chief glory for that splendid assurance that there would
be no more Neuve Chapelles. But I am sure that the little Welshman who
has accomplished the miracle of "speeding up" Britain would be the first
to acknowledge that _The Daily Mail_, though its circulation is 150,000
less than it was in May, can not be robbed of the honor that belongs to
it for having torn the scales from England's eyes on the "shells
tragedy."
Previous to the "shells tragedy," I do not think it will be possible for
even the friendliest chroniclers to record that, with the single
exception of the magnificent rush to arms of her upper and middle
classes, Great Britain had given a particularly flattering account of
herself in the searching test of war. I do not refer, of course, to the
accomplishments of the army and navy. British soldiers and sailors need
no encomium at my hands. The Trojan heroism of the army, despite its
lack of sweeping victory, will enrich military history for all time.
The silent effectiveness of the navy, with its vindication of Admiral
Mahan's theories, is the marvel of the war. I am referring to the
conduct of the British who have not been in the war as combatants--to
the moral psychic aspect of life in this country during the year of
travail. That is why I call the _Lusitania_ a blessing in disguise,
just as I sometimes felt that a landing of a German force on the British
coasts, had it only taken place soon enough, might have proved the most
practically beneficial tonic to the British war spirit which could have
been conceived. Something was needed to _bring the war home_ to
Englishmen. The _Lusitania_ partially served the purpose.
The renaissance set in with the dawn of summer. Events did not give
recruiting quite that "boom" which was expected, but the national
sobering process which ensued was more than a compensating factor.
Lloyd-George, inevitable and irrepressible, invented the doctrine that
"silver bullets" (money) and Germany's "potato-bread spirit" (economy)
were now as urgently necessary for Britain to win as high-explosives
with which to kill Germans. Only a few weeks before becoming "Shells
Minister" and while still Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd-George
introduced the second War Budget, which gave Britons a staggering idea
of what killing Germans meant in mere lucre. It was costing $15,000,000
a day then--in May--and the scale was crescendo, not diminuendo.
Lloyd-George declared that the nation's bills could not be met unless
the country went over, horse, foot and dragoon, to the Simple Life. The
Prime Minister seconded his appeal for the radical regeneration of
British life--a conversion from recklessness to Spartanism--with some
eloquent figures. In a "keynote speech" at Guildhall, Mr. Asquith
declared that "waste, on the part either of individuals or of classes,
which is always foolish and shortsighted, is in these times nothing
short of a national danger." The United Kingdom's annual income, the
Premier explained, was between $11,250,000,000 and $12,000,000,000.
Annual expenditure aggregated about $10,000,000,000. The country,
therefore, saved under normal conditions between $1,250,000,000 and
$2,000,000,000. But the necessities of "our seven wars" (in different
parts of the hemisphere) required Britons to save about two and a half
times what they customarily put away. They needed to store up
$5,000,000,000 instead of $2,000,000,000 a year. In other words, they
must reorganize their scheme and standards of living--and of
spending--so that they saved $50 for every $20 saved in the past. In no
other conceivable way, said the Prime Minister, could Great Britain
shoulder the burden of a struggle already costing her at the rate of
$5,475,000,000 a year. To ask the notoriously most extravagant people
in Europe--the returns from the United States are not in yet--to
"economize" on the Brobdingnagian lines which these figures conjured up
was a very tall order, indeed.
But the gassed Tommies back from the trenches and the widows and the
orphans manufactured by the _Lusitania_ and the impregnability of the
German lines were uppermost in England's mind, and she set her jaw to
the inevitable. The Simple Life did not find itself among friends in
the midst of a race which believes in a maximum of servants on a minimum
of income; whose very homes and kitchens are the paradise of wasters;
which venerates leisure, week-ends, "good addresses" and "parties";
which left the omnibuses to the crowd and scorned anything beneath the
rank of a taxi for the truly well-born; which would gladly go poor for a
week for the sake of a Saturday lunch at the Piccadilly grill and a
supper at the Savoy, with a theater and a music-hall between, and
Murray's afterward till dawn; which, while never ostentatious, was
addicted to luxury; which worshiped golf, football, bridge and
horse-racing like liberty itself, and which drank like sailors all.
But the ax of retrenchment was infinitely preferable to the sword of
Damocles. Lords and ladies, "gentry" and common folk, prepared to make
the best of it. Prohibition, mainly to enforce sobriety on the working
classes, was considered by the Government, but not for long, for there
was a mighty howl from the "trade" and from its bibulous votaries, who
in England include both sexes, all classes and nearly every age.
Restriction, not prohibition, was adopted as a compromise. In the
"munition areas" the saloons were closed at the hours when, in former
times, working men were most inclined to squander their wages on
debilitating ale and alcohol. Everywhere a "No-drinks-before-10-A.-M."
decree was promulgated, and, simultaneously, it became a misdemeanor for
a restaurant, saloon, hotel, bar or even a private club to dispense
liquor after ten o'clock at night. Clubland in Pall Mall, St. James's
and Piccadilly groaned, and there was gnashing of teeth among the "nuts"
(young bloods) and the ladies of the chorus. But people found they had
more money for bread and butter, potatoes, vegetables and meat, which
were costing semi-famine prices as it was, and there were fewer besot
wrecks of women in the Strand, and almost no intoxicated men in khaki.
War manifestly had its blessings, too. One met unfamiliar people in the
plebeian motor-buses, who at first wrapped their evening-coats
exclusively and close around them, for contact with the common clay was
still new and strange. It became positively fashionable to be a
cheese-parer. You were no longer considered "bad form" if you went
straight home from the theater, and confessed why. If my lady of
Mayfair did not close up her house in South Audley Street or Park Lane
altogether, to live in "chambers" or some cozy country cottage, which
was also cheap, she at least shut up the drawing-rooms, dispensed with a
maid or two, cut out the most expensive courses at her dinners, when she
gave any at all, and didn't mind if her guests turned up in day clothes.
The plutocratic peer who ordinarily maintained a "place" at the
seashore, an estate in Middlesex or Devon, and a town-house in Berkeley
Square had probably long ago handed over the "place" and the estate for
military hospital purposes--hardly a mansion or manor-house in England
to-day is devoted to any other use--and now retrenchment became for him
the order of the day in London, too. His stable of thoroughbreds almost
vanished in the early days of the war, for the needs of the cavalry and
the artillery were insatiable and undiscriminating, and now his _garage_
was down to a war basis--the most plebeian car he ever drove; the others
were in army service either in England or "somewhere in France."
Sackville Street and Albemarle Street, Bond Street and Regent Street,
where smart clothes and other expensive trinkets for men and women were
formerly sold, became deserted. Men's tailors displayed nothing but
khaki in their windows, and Paquin's, Redfern's and Worth's languished
as if England were famine-blighted. Society faded away as if pestilence
had swept Uppertendom into oblivion. Women of Britain's first families
were almost ashamed to be seen in anything more chic than the livery of
mourning, and by midsummer of 1915 black was pitiably fashionable and
omnipresent. "Entertaining" had been a lost art for months. "Going in
for it" now seemed and was sacrilege. Indulged at all, it was excusable
only if it had the extenuating excuse of having been arranged, and then
in the most modest of ways, for one's wounded or recuperating officer
friends, back from Hell or on the eve of going there--"somewhere in
France." It was war-time in England at last.
If I have seemed to emphasize that the reconstruction of British life,
after bitterly hard knocks on land and sea pounded some realization of
their task's magnitude into Englishmen's heads, went on chiefly in the
upper and upper-middle classes, it is precisely the impression I seek to
convey. It is they alone, to date, who have taken the full measure of
Britain's terrible emergency and acted accordingly. Even that statement
requires qualification, for the fools' paradise is not even to-day
inhabited exclusively by the benighted lower strata of the population.
Neuve Chapelle, asphyxiating gas and the _Lusitania_ had passed into
history a full month before, yet there lingers painfully in my memory
the recollection of a country-house week-end party broken up because
Englishwomen of "class" objected to hearing a fellow-guest venture the
opinion that dear old England would better "wake up" to the fact that
calm alone, mighty an asset as it was, could not "march to Berlin"
against an enemy like the Germans. These ladies were interesting as
types. Their name was legion, and many of them, as an Irishman might
say, were men. Common sense, prized of Anglo-Saxon virtues, and
tolerance, its twin sister, lost their old-time hold on many millions in
these isles during the war. The "Anti-German Union," which was founded
by well-meaning noblemen and noblewomen for the purpose of organizing
hate of the Teuton and all his works, perhaps set itself an unethical
goal, but the psychology at the bottom of the movement was wholesome; it
was all to the good, because it was sharpening the bulldog's teeth. It
committed uncouth excesses like sending interrupters to the German
Church service in Montpelier Place, forgetting that my esteemed friend,
the Reverend Mr. Williams, the Anglican chaplain in Berlin, was never
prevented from assembling his uninterned flock for worship at St.
George's in Montbijou-Platz. Far less excusable than the "Anti-German
Union's" super-patriotic eccentricities was the smug intolerance of
enormous numbers of British toward elementary questions of the war.
They would hear nothing of the Germans unless it was discreditable. I
would write in my "Germany Day by Day" column in _The Daily Mail_ that
there were growing indications (let us say) that the enemy was still at
fighting zenith--his stock of men, materials and provisions still far
from exhausted. The next day's post would invariably bring me
denunciatory letters from anonymous members of the public. I was
"pro-German." I was "a German agent." I was "playing the enemy's
game." Englishmen didn't "care to read the twaddle of a man who was
still so enamored of the Hun capital where he so long lived." And when
I wrote of American exasperation with British shipping practises in war,
an English patriot induced my editor to print a letter in retort,
"praying passionately for preservation from the candid friend." Other
correspondents did not confine their observations to supplication. They
were the high privates, these human ostriches, of the Grand Army of
Truth-Hiders, who, commanded by great editors in Fleet Street and ably
abetted by the Censorship, preferred palatable fiction to iron facts.
It is they who kept John Bull lulled in complacent slumber for most of
the first year of the war and are doing their diabolical best to
administer sleeping-powder even now.
Yet, by and large, the section of the British public which does its
thinking above its gaiter-tops was effectually roused from its dreams as
Armageddon's initial twelvemonth approached its finish. It was the
sub-stratum which could not be roused from the stupor of indifference.
The war had brought mourning and desolation to the upper-class homes of
England. The havoc wrought in the ranks of the peerage and other
dignities is poignantly summarized in the new _Debrett_. Ten per cent.
of the British officers who have died in the war were in the pages of
_Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage_, and in the
issue for 1916, just published, the War Roll of Honor of the dead
comprises eight hundred names. In it appear one member of the Royal
Family--Prince Maurice of Battenberg; six peers, sixteen baronets, six
knights, and seven members of Parliament, one hundred sixty-four knights
companion, ninety-five sons of peers, eighty-two sons of baronets, and
eighty-four sons of knights. Two successive heirs to the earldom of
Loudoun fell, and the death of Lord Worsdey affected the succession to
three separate peerages, the earldom of Yarborough and the baronies of
Fauconberg and Conyers. Succession has been unduly precipitated, or the
normal descent changed, in over one hundred instances by the casualties
of the war. The peer, the professional man, or the merchant, had had an
almost annihilating blow struck at his fortune. Things during the past
year had dealt these classes a vicious thrust. But working-class and
lower-class Britain were actually profiting from the war. Wages were
inordinately high--despite trade-unionism's unceasing clamor.
Unemployment no longer existed. There were no soup-kitchens along the
Embankment. The Salvation Army's poor-relief system was almost without
an excuse. Families of clerks and working men--many thousands of whom
were volunteers in Kitchener's armies--were, thanks to generous
separation allowances paid by the War Office, almost better off than in
the days when the bread-winner was at home. For the British proletariat
Mars seemed almost a savior. He had brought it unwonted prosperity.
The temper in which a vast portion of the "downtrodden" looked upon
their new-born affluence was that self-preservation, being the first law
of nature, insistently demanded nothing from them which would
precipitately evict them from Easy Street. The Grand Fleet protected
lower-class England from the only blow which could conceivably have
knocked sense into it--invasion. As that did not and could not occur,
Shepherd's Bush envisaged war not as an unmixed evil, but as something
better, somehow, than peace had ever been. It is all woefully at
loggerheads with Norman Angell's theories of the "devastating economic
influence of war." But the immutable fact is that working-class
Britain, despite the havoc the war has played with trade, incomes and
high finance generally, finds itself, despite even the higher cost of
living, at least on as prosperous a level as at any time in its
contemporary history. It may be a myopic view, but it explains, in my
judgment, much of the proletariat's amazing apathy toward the crucial
national emergency.
The building of the New England is still in progress. The melting-pot is
full. Years will elapse before the finished product leaves the
crucible. The process of transition, however, has made enormous
strides. Adversity is a wonderful reorganizer. The physiognomy of
things long held unchangeable is altered almost beyond recognition. It
is a better England already, as well as a new one. Above all, Democracy
has not failed in the supreme test. The spectacle of three million men,
uncoerced, responsive and responsible to no law but their own
conscience, marching out to death and glory that England may live, is a
sublime picture, which will blot out and overshadow much of the bungling
and many of the disasters and excrescences of the past.
If I have seemed to dwell with insistence and even cynicism upon
"British calm" amid the thunders, let me here and now subscribe
unqualifiedly to the view that it remains, when all is said and done, a
magnificent achievement second only to the demonstration of Voluntaryism
as a Democracy's first line of defense. Britannia will continue to rule
the waves mainly because she was calm when they surged about her most
angrily.