QUO VADIS?
October, 1915. The eighty-third day of the second year of war. A
woman, writing in _The Times_, suggests that England adopt as her
national prayer, "God help us win this war." King George V, emerging at
length from the No Man's Land of Constitutional Irresponsibility,
appeals, stirringly, "to my people" to save the sinking bark of
Voluntary military service. It is the calm before the Conscription
storm. The Sovereign discourses upon "the grave moment in the struggle"
and calls for "men of all classes to come forward and take their share
in the fight in order that another may not inherit the free Empire which
their ancestors and mine have built." The King hints at "the darkest
moment" which, from time immemorial, "has ever produced in men of our
race the sternest resolve."
Britain's horizon is clouded, wherever one looks. No forced optimism can
blink iron facts. In the East, Russia is paralyzed for months to come,
even if not "crushed." Her fortresses, "deemed impregnable," writes
Lloyd-George in the preface of his compiled war speeches, "are falling
like sand castles before the resistless tide of Teutonic invasion." The
"steam-roller" must go into winter quarters. In the West, the great
Anglo-French offensive in Artois and the Champagne punctures the German
front and advances the Allied lines two or three miles. The German
losses are her severest of the war--140,000, so the French say,
including vast heaps of dead, whole regiments of maimed and at least
25,000 prisoners and 145 field-guns. But the victory, substantial and
promising as it is, has been dearly bought. The Germans claim that the
preliminary seventy-two-hour bombardment represented an expenditure of
65,000,000 shells--mostly of American production, so allege the
"inspired" war-correspondents at German headquarters, with sneering
references to "blood-smeared dollars." The Allies' casualties are not
tabulated. They are only known to be cruelly heavy. Englishmen fear
there has been another Neuve Chapelle. Joffre and French have
demonstrated that the German front is not quite impenetrable. But the
enemy, on his part, has shown that for the Allies to "break through" in
the West is a task fraught with peril and toll sickening to contemplate.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief at the Dardanelles, has
been recalled "to report." Another British general, unnamed, is
dismissed for having led an army into a shambles at Suvla Bay. The
campaign in Gallipoli is a tacitly acknowledged failure. General Sir
Charles Monro is hurried to Turkey to succeed Hamilton and retrieve the
fortunes of an expedition which has already cost 100,000 casualties, a
trio of battleships, a transport full of troops, and heart-breaking
incalculable. There are ugly rumors that the Allies, facing the
inevitable, are about to abandon the ill-starred Dardanelles venture,
and try their luck elsewhere. Against the German-led Turks twelve miles
of precarious "front" with a back to the sea is all
Anglo-Colonial-French valor has been able to achieve. But misfortune has
dogged the Allies in fields remote from the actual theaters of war.
While Germanic-Turko armies have been wrecking their military hopes
East, West and Near East, Allied diplomacy has been disastrously foiled
in the pivotal Balkans. Bulgaria, deemed friendly, though venal, openly
goes over to the enemy. Sir Edward Grey, like his fellow-idol,
Kitchener, is under withering fire. He is charged with permitting
Berlin to score a victory which might have been London's if British
diplomacy had been characterized by less tentativeness of policy and
greater impetuosity of deed. It seems the old story--"too late." "Have
we a Foreign Office?" bitterly asks Fleet Street. But the cup of
disappointment is not full even yet. Greece, too, is recreant. She
mobilizes, supposedly as a pro-Ally counterstroke to the pro-German
Bulgarian menace, for is not the King of the Hellenes bound by solemn
treaty to join Peter of Serbia in the eventuality of attack by Ferdinand
of Sofia? But Downing Street failed to reckon with King "Tino" of
Athens and his Hohenzollern consort, the Kaiser's favorite sister,
Sophia. Premier Venizelos, the Allies' hope, is forced to resign.
Greece remains "neutral," between German Charybdis and English Scylla,
as King Constantine himself describes his plight. She shuts her eyes to
the nebulous Allied expeditionary force landed at Salonica and "rushed"
precipitately at the eleventh hour to the relief of the Serbs, who are
even now threatened with annihilation between the German-Austrians on
the north and west, and the back-stabbing Bulgars on the east. Belgrade
falls. Uskub is captured. The Salonica line to Nish is cut. Germany's
"road to Constantinople" is open. The Kaiser can get there now before
the Allies. Diplomacy grasps at a last straw. Cyprus, annexed from
Turkey by Britain early in the war, is offered to Greece if she will
fling her army into the breach. In Athens, it appears, dictates of
self-preservation govern. Revealing a highly-developed Missourian
trait, Greece asks to be "shown." By active operations against the
Germanic Powers and Bulgaria, assisted by mere promises of more Allied
reinforcements via Salonica or the driblets already sent, Greece fears
to share Belgium and Serbia's fate. If the Allies will send 400,000
troops to the Balkans--or about twice as many as have been pounding
fruitlessly at the Dardanelles--Greece might change her mind. The
suggestion inspires little enthusiasm in England. Kitchener and French
can doubtless spare the men. But the equipment of another huge British
army for operations in the Near East in time to turn the tables is a
taller order. Meantime Mackensen and Gallwitz batter their way across
the Serbian ranges. In London there are anxious doubts whether there
will even be any Serbian army to "relieve" by the time the Allies place
an effective rescuing expedition in the decisive theater. Serbia begins
to look uncomfortably like another Belgium--Salonica like ill-starred
Antwerp. Blunder and procrastination were ever the parents of disaster.
So much for the military and political situation, which even the
Truth-Hiders begin to see in its true colors. But if things were
"messed" abroad--in the West and in the Near East--muddle and bungle
were even more rampant at home. Take the Zeppelins. They first visited
these shores in January, 1915. In October Press and Parliament
commenced for the first time seriously to investigate the adequacy of
Britain's "aerial defenses," with the result that chaotic demoralization
and systemless go-as-you-please were found to prevail. Sir Percy Scott,
the country's greatest gunnery expert, had been in charge of London's
defenses against the sky-pirates, but it appeared that his guns were
ineffective, his gunners untrained for the highly specialized feat of
hitting mile-high targets flying in the dark, and things in general
unorganized and more or less futile. The Press Bureau condescendingly
parted with an abstract story of the latest and most disastrous raid of
all over "the London area." People derived lively satisfaction from its
disclosure that the metropolis was "cool" and unafraid under fire. Only
a few courageous "alarmists" read the signs of the times aright and
demand that some life and efficiency forthwith be injected into the
"anti-aircraft" department, lest, when Count Zeppelin's range-finding
practise cruises across London are finished, an armada of German
airships sail across the Channel and reduce the heart of the Empire,
ever calm, to a smoking ash-heap before Sir Percy Scotts' defense is
perfected. There was anxious talk of bringing over "expert gunners"
from France--in October, after nearly ten months and after twenty-five
Zeppelin raids over English territory!
The while the elephant-hided Censorship, as if Britannia's troubles were
not all-sufficient, insisted upon making itself more of an international
laughing-stock and object of world contempt than ever. It censored
Kipling's _Recessional_ in a battle-story from France. It deleted a
quotation from Browning in another narrative from the front. It cut out
a famous war correspondent's tribute to the bravery of the enemy. It
eliminated a reference to Chatham, England's greatest War Minister,
because it confused him with the famous British naval base from which he
took his title. It refused to let out a single notch in the muzzle it
has attached even to the benevolently neutral American Press, as
represented by its accredited and notoriously Anglophile correspondents
in England. It reveled in concealment, deception and grotesqueness,
though concealing nothing from the enemy and everything from England,
deceiving exclusively the British public, and making nobody grotesque
except its egregious self. Calls for the light at home, ridicule and
criticism from abroad, alike left the Censor unmoved. The sparrows
cried from the housetops in ever more insistent accents that all was not
well with England, but the Censorship, magnificently blind even to the
Royal pronouncement that Britons unfailingly respond when the hour is
dark, maintained imperiously that what it was well for the country to
know was for it, and it alone, to decide. If the British public were a
transgressor, its way could not have been harder.
Came Mr. Montagu, the Financial Secretary of the Treasury, the reputed
"budget genius" of the Government. Britons must be prepared, he told
them, "during the year ahead, to disgorge to the State _not less than
one-half of their entire income_, either in the form of taxes or loans."
Lord Reading's borrowing commission to America was still on the water,
the ink on its $500,000,000 "credit loan" in New York not yet dry. "I
estimate our expenditure for the year," said Mr. McKenna, the Finance
Minister, in the House of Commons, at "seven billions, nine hundred
fifty million dollars" (only he spoke in pounds). "As our total
estimated revenue, inclusive of new taxes, is one billion, five hundred
twenty-five million dollars, the deficit for the year will be six
billion, four hundred twenty-five million dollars. We have now to
contemplate a Navy costing for the current year $950,000,000, an Army
costing $3,575,000,000, and external advances to our Allies (Russia,
France, Italy, Serbia and Belgium) amounting to $2,115,000,000."
Then the merciless Chancellor of the Exchequer acquainted Parliament
with his scheme for raising a part of this Brobdingnagian revenue. Free
trade must be partially shelved. There will be a revenue tariff on
"luxury" imports. Income-tax in 1916 will be forty per cent. higher and
will amount altogether to about fifty cents on every five dollars
earned. Even the man with $650 a year will pay, while "plutocrats" with
incomes above that figure will be mulcted even more relentlessly. He of
$25,000 will pay $5,150, and nabobs with $50,000, $100,000 and $500,000
per annum (England has several in the latter category) will contribute,
respectively, $12,650, $30,150 and $170,150. War is hell. No wonder a
parliamentary wag, on the day Mr. McKenna introduced "Conscription of
Wealth," interrupted with a merry "Why don't you take it all?"
Up to December, 1915, the Government had asked Parliamentary sanction
for war credits aggregating $6,500,000,000. But even this staggering
total (the war was now costing $25,000,000 a day) was planned to carry
the campaign only up to the middle of November. The $500,000,000 loan
transaction in the United States only produced funds to be spent there,
and it was but half of what was asked. It only indirectly relieves the
situation at home. Allowing for the deficit carried over from last
year, the latest budget proposes taxes amounting to $1,525,000,000 and
loans aggregating $6,425,000,000 for the fiscal year 1915-16. But even
the most patriotic experts in Threadneedle Street acknowledge the utter
impossibility of raising $6,425,000,000 of genuine money by public loan
in Britain per year. They reluctantly predict that the Government will
soon be driven to extend its use of fictitious money and paper--on the
excoriated German model. The war has already eaten toward the bottom of
the stockings and the strong-boxes of Britain where American securities
are stored.
As the financier not only of her own colossal requirements in the war,
but as banker for her allies, England's money necessities are thus seen
to be no less urgent than her need of men and munitions. They comprise,
these three M's, the trilogy on which the existence of the Empire now
depends. British performances in respect to the cash sinews of war have
truly been on a monumental scale. History shows no parallel for the
achievement of raising at home in loans and Treasury bills over
$5,500,000,000 without abandonment of the gold standard and without
resort to inconvertible paper, and yet keeping British credit at an
altitude which gives hard-headed Uncle Sam no pause in taking John
Bull's I-O-U for another half billion. It is an imperishable tribute to
the stamina, prestige, wealth and commercial fabric of the British
Empire and to the enterprise and ingenuity of the merchants,
manufacturers, shippers, bankers and traders who have made their islands
the center of the world's exchanges and London the money-market of the
universe.
[Illustration: Lord Northcliffe]
But magnificent as has been the past, the financial future can not be
viewed except with anxiety. Indebtedness has been piled up sky-high--out
of every twenty-five dollars spent since the war began, at least twenty
dollars has been borrowed. That was possible because of the superlative
excellence of British credit. "Our credit is now almost everything,"
explains _The Economist_. "It comes next to the Navy, and the two can
not be dissociated. For if either suffer, our food supplies would be in
danger. In one sense, credit is at the mercy of the Government and of
the Treasury, for a great false step of policy or continuance in a false
course would bring disaster. The responsibility of the Prime Minister
and of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and of the Cabinet, as a whole,
is prodigious. Whatever else we do, we must maintain our financial
equilibrium. With that and the command of the seas, we can not be
defeated."
Manifestly Britain's economic problem is almost the darkest spot on her
overclouded war horizon--the problem of meeting rising obligations out
of falling revenue. The Empire suffers from no lack of men; its
physical resources are well-nigh inexhaustible. If patriotism does not
send them to the trenches of their own free will in adequate numbers,
they will be "fetched." There is no longer any question of shortage of
munitions. England's own vast industrial plant, as well as that of
France, is now occupied almost exclusively in the production of
man-killing merchandise for the Allies and is turning it out at high
pressure. To the manufacturing equipment of England and France are
harnessed, in addition, German bombs and German-incited strikes to the
contrary notwithstanding, the limitless productive facilities of the
United States and Canada. Britain's one and only nightmare is money,
and its corollary aspects, exchange and credit.
No estimate has so far appeared which fixes the 1916 deficit which
England will have to meet at less than $7,000,000,000, based on a total
war cost for the calendar year of $9,000,000,000. How to grapple with
the gigantic task conjured up by such a prospect is not engaging popular
attention to any marked degree, though upon its solution depends,
primarily, Britain's ability to conquer in this war of exhaustion. With
the palpable impossibility of raising the wind at home by successive new
public loans; with the necessity to invoke such heroic measures as
borrowing $500,000,000 in America to bolster up sterling exchange and
keep British credit "intact"; with Englishmen sacrificing their enormous
holdings of American securities for the same pious purpose; with the
British industrial plant so preoccupied with munitions that it can
neither, in accordance with tradition, pay for British imports with
British exports nor increase British revenue by the same token; with
national expenditure advancing by gigantic leaps and national income
restricted as it never was before; with all these immutable conditions
staring at Englishmen, it is no wonder that those of them who think, as
distinguished from those who merely hurrah, contemplate what looms ahead
with anxious concern.
But admittedly grave as the future is, it is by no means hopeless.
Britain's plight is not "desperate," as the Germans, seeking to hide
their own, are so fond of making believe. Even the misgivings of
Englishmen themselves regarding their economic situation would be
promptly and legitimately resolved into confidence if the community as a
whole could be induced to pull itself together and look facts in the
face. In its incorrigible disinclination to do so alone lies danger.
The British Empire is not bankrupt. It can hardly ever become so. A
recent estimate assessed the income of the Empire, including India, at
something over the fabulous sum of $20,000,000,000! It may be
embarrassed--it is unquestionably that already--just as the richest of
men frequently are, in the midst of titanic transactions which have
outrun their calculations. But embarrassment seldom eventuates in ruin,
either for men or nations, if they come to grips with it betimes. Thus,
disaster can only follow tribulation in the case of Britain if her
people, preferring to wallow in happy-go-lucky nonchalance and drift,
postpone until too late those sagacious, clean-sweep measures of
reorganization and retrenchment which alone, in the opinion of competent
judges, can save the situation.
In the preceding chapter I told of the introduction of the Simple Life,
of the dawn of the Economy Era in war-time England; but it would be
hyperbole to intimate that it has been inaugurated on anything but a
superficial scale. Luxury and self-indulgence are still rife. To vast
numbers of people, in the classes as well as the masses, the war, far
from oppressing them, has brought positive affluence, and with their new
riches they have gone in for spending instead of saving. Spartanism in
Britain remains a good deal of a theory; it has not become a condition.
While Germany, shut off by land and sea, contrives to remain at fighting
zenith without her customary imports of $2,500,000,000 a year (she calls
Jellicoe's blockade a blessing in disguise because it has compelled her
to spend at home what she used to pay out abroad), England's imports of
such articles as oranges, cocoa, tea, coffee, tobacco, cheese, rice,
meats, pepper and onions have heavily exceeded her importations of the
same articles in corresponding peace periods.[1] The Prime Minister
tells the country that "victory seems likely to incline to the side
which can arm itself the best and stay the longest." Mr. Asquith
declares that "that is what we meant to do." But until, for instance,
Englishmen realize that by abstaining from tobacco for a year,
$40,000,000 of money would be available for the smoke of battle; that if
every man, woman and child in the Kingdom puts away 25 cents a week, a
new treasure of $600,000,000 could be piled up for war; and that unless
waste, extravagance and slothful habits generally are banished, by duke
and by docker, as if they were leprous disease, Mr. Asquith's brave
words will remain a hollow aspiration. They alone will not enable
England to "stay the longest" in the world's most destructive endurance
competition.
[1] There are ugly rumors that Produce Exchange patriots who burnt _The
Daily Mail_ for exposing the "shells tragedy" are the importers of these
excessively large stores and are selling them to "Holland"--and other
"neutrals" adjacent to Germany at exorbitant profits.
It is not change of governments, but ruthless change of system, which
England requires. She has relegated a vast deal since the cleansing
process set in, in August a year ago, but the scrap-heap clamors for
more. It cries most insistently of all for obliteration of the fetish
that politicians, lawyers and other amateurs are fit to conduct a
government engaged in the most terrible combat of human history.
Napoleon once said that a nation of lions led by a stag would be beaten
by a nation of stags led by a lion. Britons claim to be a nation of
lions. They contemplate the first year of the war and ask if they are
to continue to be led along the path of disaster by stags. The
Truth-Hiders quote Lincoln and deprecate "swapping horses while crossing
a stream." Lord Willoughy de Broke effectually disposes of this "plea
for incompetence in office" by telling the House of Lords that "whether
such a course should be adopted depends on what sort of a horse a man
has beneath him. If the horse is standing in the middle of the stream
and seems as if he were going to lie down, the best thing is to get
another." Englishmen admit that war like this demands wholesale
reconstruction of national life, yet their government has substituted
spasmodic patchwork for reconstruction. Instead of bold tearing-down
and rebuilding, there has been nibbling and tinkering, and even then,
too late. The people have waited for marching orders in countless
directions, but the Government band has played nothing but a hesitation
waltz. Take the drink evil, Britain's most malignant ulcer. Russia is
not commonly looked to for economic or social inspiration, yet even she
has wrestled with drink in a manner which puts England to shame. While
the Czar was banishing vodka absolutely for the pestilence that it was,
England's governors, fearful of Labor and "the trade" alike, temporized
and enacted makeshifts which materially ameliorated the liquor menace
without throttling its power for evil. They have made "treating" a
misdemeanor, closed the saloons, both public and private, at 10 P.M.,
and restricted the hours when drink may be sold in London and the
industrial districts. But clubmen, artisans and soldiers can get drunk
to their heart's content as of yore. They have had only to rearrange
their bibulous hours. Take the air defense muddle. "I, for one," wrote
a Briton in October, protesting against the prevailing theory that the
call of the hour, in the midst of the Zeppelin peril was "coolness," "am
tired of being complimented on the calmness with which I behave in the
presence of danger. It is no comfort to me that my death, if it occurs,
will have no military importance. I want to be congratulated not on the
stoicism with which I go to my funeral, but on my share in a system of
government which affords effective protection to my country."
Nothing could better stigmatize the epidemic of Self-Sufficiency which,
in the writer's deliberate judgment, is primarily responsible for
British failures in the war thus far. _There has been too much
congratulation and self-congratulation on the sang-froid with which John
Bull can take punishment_. He is a mighty gladiator, but cheery comfort
from his seconds between rounds has failed on many an occasion to
prevent a champion pugilist from being knocked out. It is not that
England is _incapable_ of defeating Germany. It is that she seems
_unwilling_ to do so by throwing into the balance every atom of strength
for which that prodigious task calls. For at least a decade before 1914
Britain's political ostriches, disarmament-mongers, professional
pacifists and pro-Germans declined to recognize the German danger even
when it was approaching with strides so brazen that almost the blind
could see. They preferred the "valor of ignorance," thought Ballin and
Harnack instead of Tirpitz and Bernhardi typified Modern Germany,
continued to revel in the bliss of contemptuous self-confidence, and
attempted to parley with a tiger which was crouching for the attack. I
enter a modest claim to have done my own little share for eight years in
the futile work of arousing Britain to the Teuton peril. I refer merely
to my work at Berlin, in reporting military and naval
developments--"Germany laid all her cards on the table," as Admiral von
Tirpitz once said to me. When the crash came, Englishmen pinned their
faith to their history. They were no match for "forty years of
preparations," of course; but they always "started late" and "muddled
through" their wars. The Crimea began in terror and ended in triumph.
The South African affair was the same sort of thing. War with Germany
would be no different. The race which had finished off Napoleon need
have no qualms in tackling his pinchbeck successor. Britons admit that
a year of war has dissipated nearly all their comfortable illusions, but
signs are still wanting that there is nation-wide, deep-seated
realization of the immensity of the ordeal and the dimensions of the
sacrifices yet to be faced. On December 8, 1915, when the war was
sixteen months old, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford wrote this letter to
_The Times_:
"We are at present in a complex tangle of muddle and mismanagement. Our
military campaigns are being conducted without any objective or plan.
Policy only has been considered.
"In war a policy has to be enforced by the Navy and Army. The War
Staffs have not been consulted as to whether they had the means in men
and material for enforcing the different policies inaugurated by the
Cabinet. Individuals have been consulted; combined opinion of War
Staffs has not been sought. The result is disaster in nearly every
direction.
"We have not taken full advantage of our mastery of the sea. In every
department we observe doubt, hesitation, and procrastination. War
requires quick decisions and prompt actions. The question of supplying
recruits for the Army has been postponed once, and apparently may be
postponed again. Unless a decision is come to immediately we shall be a
year before the recruits joined under any new scheme can possibly be
ready to take the field.
"The public is sick of the policy conveyed in the sentence 'Wait and
see.' The danger to the Empire becomes more apparent every day. The
country is waiting for a strong, clear lead. Our present methods will
prolong the war indefinitely. If we continue hesitating without making
up our minds on any single question connected with the war, we shall
plunge straight into disaster."
I, too, shall be a pessimist about England's chances to win the war only
so long as she neglects to _go to war_. Mere command of the sea, it has
been amply demonstrated, can not crush Germany. It can sorely
inconvenience her and compel her to live on the ration basis, but it can
not force what King George has called "a highly organized enemy"
prematurely to make peace. When England has staked her all, I shall turn
blithe optimist, for I believe that nothing else in the world can
overthrow her savagely efficient antagonist. Germany has staked her
_all_. Until England does likewise, they will not fight on even terms.
When England, like Germany, has relentlessly marshaled every tithe of
her national strength for war, subordinated all else to that purpose,
harnessed to the chariot of Mars every conceivable resource at her
command, pulverized caste distinctions, banned politics and politicians,
and made the war and the winning of it the only thing the nation eats
for, works for, dreams of, or wastes thought upon--then I shall feel
constrained to feel assured that victory will perch, however distant the
hour, on Liberty's and not on Tyranny's banners. The Anglo-German
endurance test--into which the war will eventually resolve itself--can
have but one issue. Germans know that. Their analytical mind long ago
taught them that the dormant resources of the British Empire, _once
mobilized_, would be invincible. But what is happening is precisely
what the Germans counted upon: the irresolute British habit of mind, the
"too late" system, the century-old cult of comfort and ease, the
"Splendid Isolation" school of thought, which, when the hour of trial
came, might be relied upon to cripple the effort to convert latent
potentialities into an inconquerable organism. History will have names
for all these things. It will call them Belgium, Serbia, Dardanelles
and Salonica.
The British people must triumph over themselves before they can break
the Germans. Their inexhaustible moral and material assets must be
commandeered and husbanded, if they are to accomplish their manifest
destiny, and not merely be bragged about in the clubs of Pall Mall and
the ostrich-farms of Fleet Street. If the world-wide realm on which the
sun never sets can produce armies calculable only in millions, as it
most assuredly is able to do, let them come forth, or be brought forth.
If the wealth of the United Kingdom, India and the dominions oversea
represents riches unmatched, as it does, let it be lavished exclusively
on war, and not squandered in any other single direction. If common
sense is the proudest of Anglo-Saxon virtues, let it prevail and sweep
away governments which value votes more than men's lives and abolish a
Censorship which treats Britons as if they were half-witted. If there
must be calm at all costs, let it be the calm of high-pressure effort,
and not the coolness of impotent resignation or casual performance. If
faith must be placed in the efficacy of "attrition," let the process of
"bleeding Germany white" be hastened by British achievements afield,
lest "attrition," when the flags are furled, find the victor as
emaciated as the vanquished.
I forget neither Germany's wrecked military hopes and economic
disintegration, nor the magnitude of Britain's service and
accomplishment thus far. I regret only, along with England's other
well-wishers, that her sacrifices have not resulted, as they so richly
deserved to, in advancing the British cause farther toward the goal. I
can not help thinking that, in many respects, it is wasted achievement,
for the object which England and her Allies have set themselves is not
merely the pinioning of Germany to fronts in Russia, France, Belgium and
Greece beyond which she can not thrust herself. I am not unmindful of
the glorious response of Britain's noblest sons, who sleep by their
gallant thousands in the blood-manured soil of France, Belgium, Turkey
and the Balkans, nor of the Trojan spirit in which the women of the
Empire are giving their best and bravest, and weeping not. I mourn only
because death and suffering leave triumph still so remote. The
remorselessness with which the Reaper has stalked through the great
families and homes of England is saddening, yet inspiring, evidence that
the heart of Britain is sound. The immortal deeds of the Grenfells and
the O'Learys and of all the one hundred thirty who have won Victoria
Crosses are only the outstanding tokens of undying British heroism. But
if sacrifice is not to continue to be cruelly in vain, there must be
relentless regeneration of the purely material governance of British
life, even more destructible of tradition and institutions than anything
which has gone before. Of bulldog British determination to fight to a
finish and to win there is no shadow of doubt. There is no Briton
worthy of the name not ready to be beggared to that end. The sublimity
of the cause for which England is bleeding is a more ennobling incentive
than ever, for it has come to comprehend life or death for herself, as
well as the liberation of Belgium. Spirituality has forfeited none of
its pristine efficacy as an asset in war and bulwark in stress, but in
our machine-gun era it must be backed by scientific efficiency and
patriotism of deed before there can be imposed upon Germany that peace
which is essential not only to British security, but to the world's
happiness.
FINIS