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By Ian Hay
THE LAST MILLION. How They Invaded France—and England.
ALL IN IT: K I CARRIES ON.
PIP: A ROMANCE OF YOUTH.
GETTING TOGETHER.
THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND.
SCALLY: THE STORY OF A PERFECT GENTLEMAN. With frontispiece.
A KNIGHT ON WHEELS.
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. Illustrated by Charles E. Brock.
A SAFETY MATCH. With frontispiece.
A MAN’S MAN. With frontispiece.
THE RIGHT STUFF. With frontispiece.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
THE LAST MILLION
The Last Million
How They Invaded France—and
England
BY
IAN HAY
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY IAN HAY BEITH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO THAT BORN FIGHTER AND MODERN CRUSADER
THE AMERICAN DOUGHBOY
CONTENTS
A WORD TO THE DEDICATEE ix
I. THE ARGONAUTS 1
II. SHIP’S COMPANY 10
III. THE LOWER DECK 21
IV. THE DANGER ZONE 29
V. TERRA INCOGNITA 36
VI. SOCIAL CUSTOMS OF THE ISLANDS 46
VII. THREE MUSKETEERS IN LONDON 58
VIII. THE PROMISED LAND 78
IX. THE EXILES 91
X. S.O.S. TO DILLPICKLE 104
XI. THE LINE 125
XII. CHASING MONOTONY 138
XIII. AN EXCURSION AND AN ALARUM 148
XIV. THE FOREST OF THE ARGONNE 164
XV. THE ELEVENTH HOUR 174
XVI. GALLIA VICTRIX 193
A WORD TO THE DEDICATEE
[_Note: The following is the substance of a little “Welcome” which
the author was requested to write to American soldiers and sailors
visiting England for the first time during the fateful days of 1918.
It was distributed upon the transports and in various American
centres in England. Its purpose is to set forth some of our national
peculiarities—and incidentally the author’s Confession of Faith. It has
no bearing upon the rest of the story, and may be skipped by the reader
without compunction._]
I. A WORD OF EXPLANATION
I write this welcome to you American soldiers and sailors because I know
America personally and therefore I know what the word “welcome” means.
And I see right away from the start that it is going to be a difficult
proposition for us over here to compete with America in that particular
industry. However, we mean to try, and we hope to succeed. Anyway, we
shall not fail from lack of good-will.
Having bid you welcome to our shores, I am next going to ask you to
remember just one thing.
We are very, very short-handed at present. During the past four years
the people of the British Isles have contributed to our common cause
more than six million soldiers and sailors. On a basis of population,
the purely British contribution to the forces of the British Empire
should have been seventy-six per cent. The actual contribution has been
eighty-four per cent; and when we come to casualties, not eighty-four
but eighty-six per cent of the total have been borne by those two
little islands, Great Britain and Ireland, which form the cradle of our
race. You can, therefore, imagine the strain upon our man-power. Every
man up to the age of fifty is now liable to be drafted. The rest of our
male population—roughly five millions—are engaged night and day in such
occupations as shipbuilding, coal-mining, munition-making, and making two
blades of corn grow where one grew before. They are assisted in every
department, even in the war zone, by hundreds and thousands of devoted
women.
So we ask you to remember that the England which you see is not England
as she was, and as she hopes to be again. You see England in overalls;
all her pretty clothes are put away for the duration. Some day we hope
once again to travel in trains where there is room to sit down; in motor
omnibuses and trolley cars for which you have not to wait in line. We
hope again to see our streets brightly lit, our houses freshly painted,
flower boxes glowing in every window, and fountains playing in Trafalgar
Square. We hope to see the city once again crowded with traffic as
thick as that on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, and the uncanny
silence of our present-day streets banished by the cheerful turmoil of
automobiles and taxis. And above all we hope to see the air-raid shelters
gone, and the hundreds of crippled men in hospital blue no longer visible
in our streets, and the long lines of motor ambulances, which assemble
every evening outside the stations to meet the hospital trains, swept
away forever.
That is the old London—London as we would have you see it—London as
we hope you will see it when you come back to us as holiday visitors.
Meanwhile, we know you will make allowances for us.
Also, you may not find us very hilarious. In some ways we are strangely
cheerful. For instance, you will see little mourning worn in public. That
is because, if black were worn by all those who were entitled to wear it,
you would see little else. Again, you will find our theatres packed night
after night by a noisy, cheerful throng. But these are not idle people,
nor are they the same people all the time. They are almost entirely
hard-worked folks enjoying a few days’ vacation. The majority of them are
soldiers on leave from the Front. Few of them will be here next week;
some of them will never see a play again. The play goes on and helps the
audience to forget for a while, but it is a different audience every time.
And you will hear little talk about the War. We prefer to talk of
almost anything else. Probably you will understand why. There is hardly
a house in this country which has not by this time made a personal
contribution to our cause. In each of these houses one of two trials is
being endured—bereavement, the lesser evil, or suspense, the greater. We
cannot, therefore, talk lightly of the War, and being determined not to
talk anxiously about it, we compromise—we do not talk about it at all.
We want you to know this. To know is to understand.
II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Meanwhile, let us ask for your impressions of our country. It is only
fair that we should be allowed to do this, for you know what happens to
visitors in the United States when the reporters get their hooks into
them.
So far as I have been able to gather, your impressions amount to
something like this:
There is no ice-water, no ice-cream, no soda-fountains, no pie. It is
hard to get the old familiar eats in our restaurants.
Our cities are planned in such a way that it is impossible to get to any
place without a map and compass.
Our traffic all keeps to the wrong side of the street.
Our public buildings are too low.
There are hardly any street-car lines in London.
Our railroad cars are like boxes, and our locomotives are the smallest
things on earth.
Our weather is composed of samples.
Our coinage system is a practical joke.
Nobody, whether in street, train or tube, ever enters in conversation
with you. If by any chance they do, they grouch all the time about the
Government and the general management of the country.
Let us take the eats and drinks first. There is no ice-water. I admit it.
I am sorry, but there it is. There never was much, but now that ammonia
is mostly commandeered for munition work, there is less than ever. As a
nation we do not miss it. In this country our difficulty is not to get
cool, but to keep warm. Besides, it is possible that our moist climate,
and the absence of steam-heat in our houses, saves us from that parched
feeling which I have so often experienced in the United States. Anyway,
that familiar figure of American domestic life, the iceman, is unknown
to us. We drink our water at ordinary temperature—what you would call
tepid—and we keep our meat in a stone cellar instead of the ice chest. As
for ice-cream and soda-fountains, we have never given ourselves over to
them very much. As a nation, we are hot-food eaters—that is, when we can
get anything to eat! We are living on strict war rations here, just as
you are beginning to do in the States. So you must forgive our apparent
want of hospitality.
III. THE LAND WE LIVE IN
Next, our cities. After your own straight, wide, methodically-numbered
streets and avenues, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the rest must seem
like a Chinese puzzle. I can only say in excuse that they have been there
a very long time, and the people who started in to build them did not
foresee that they would ever extend more than a few blocks. If Julius
Cæsar had known that London was ultimately going to cover an area of
seven hundred square miles, and house a population of seven and a half
millions, I dare say he would have made a more methodical beginning. But
Julius Cæsar never visited America, and the science of town-planning was
unknown to him.
The narrow, winding streets of London are not suited to trolley-car
lines. This fact has given us the unique London motor ’bus, driven with
incredible skill, and gay with advertisements. There are not so many
of these ’buses to-day as there might be, and such as there are are
desperately full. But—_c’est la guerre!_ Hundreds of our motor ’buses are
over in France now. You will meet them when you get there, doing their
bit—hurrying reënforcements to some hard-pressed point, or running from
the back areas to the railhead, conveying happy, muddy Tommies home on
leave.
And while we are discussing London, let me recommend you to make a point
of getting acquainted with the London policeman. He is a truly great man.
Watch him directing the traffic down in the City, or where Wellington
Street, on its way to Waterloo Bridge, crosses the Strand. He has no
semaphore, no whistle; but simply extends an arm, or turns his back,
and the traffic swings to right or left, or stops altogether. Foreign
cities, even New York, are not ashamed to send their police to London
to pick up hints on traffic control from the London “Bobby.” Watch him
handle an unruly crowd. He is unarmed, and though he carries a club, you
seldom see it. If you get lost, ask him to direct you, for he carries a
map of London inside his head. He is everybody’s friend. By the way, if
he wears a helmet he is one of the regular force. A flat cap is a sign
of a “Special”—that is, a business man who is giving his spare time, by
day or night, to take the place of those policemen who have joined the
Colours. But, “Regular” or “Special,” he is there to help you.
There are no skyscrapers in England. The fact is, London is no place for
skyscrapers. It was New York which set the fashion. That was because
Manhattan Island, with the Hudson on one side and the East River on the
other, is physically incapable of expansion, and so New York, being
unable to spread out, shot upwards. Moreover, New York is built on solid
rock—you ask the Subway contractors about that!—while the original London
was built on a marsh, and the marsh is there still. So it will not
support structures like the Woolworth Building.
Most of our national highways start from London. There is one, a Roman
road, called Watling Street, which starts from the Marble Arch and runs
almost as straight as a rod from London to Chester, nearly two hundred
miles; and it never changes its name after the first few miles, which are
called the Edgware Road. Another, the Great North Road, runs from London
to Edinburgh, and is four hundred miles long. One hundred years ago the
mail coaches thundered along that road night and day, and highwaymen
had their own particular pitches where no other highwaymen dreamed of
butting in. Five years ago that road was a running river of touring
automobiles. Now, strings of grey military motor lorries rumble up and
down its entire length. Perhaps you will ride on some of them.
London, easy-going London, has her short cuts, too. That is where she
differs from the methodical, rectangular, convenient cities of the United
States. She is full of cunning by-ways, and every street has a character
of its own. The Strand was called “The Strand” a thousand years ago,
because it _was_ a strand—a strip of beach which ran alongside the Thames
at the foot of a cliff (which has long since been smoothed and sloped
out of existence) and was submerged each high tide. The English fought a
great battle with Danish pirates near by, and to-day the dead Danes sleep
their last sleep in St. Clement Danes’ Church, right in the middle of the
Strand.
Charing Cross, again, is the last of a great chain of such Crosses,
stretching from London to Scotland, each a day’s march from the next.
They were set up at the end of the thirteenth century by King Edward
the First of England, to commemorate the last journey of his beloved
Queen—his _Chère Reine_—who died while accompanying him upon a campaign
against the Scots. At each stopping-place on his homeward journey the
King erected one of these crosses to mark the spot where the Queen’s body
lay that night. Many have perished, but you can still trace some of them
along the Great North Road—Neville’s Cross, Waltham Cross, and finally
_Chère Reine_ Cross, or Charing Cross. That strikes the imagination. So
do Aldgate, Aldersgate, Moorgate, London Wall, and other streets which go
back to the days when London really was a walled city.
But a walk around London repays itself. There is Cleopatra’s Needle
on the Embankment—the veteran among all monuments of the world, except
perhaps its sister in Central Park, New York. It was in existence fifteen
hundred years before Christ, in the city of Heliopolis. It looked down
upon the Palace and Court of Queen Cleopatra in Alexandria. After that
it lay prostrate in the sands of the Egyptian desert for another fifteen
hundred years. It was finally presented to the British Government by the
Khedive of Egypt. It was towed to England on a raft, and was nearly lost
during a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Recently, the Zeppelins have tried
dropping bombs on it, as you can see for yourself. But a mere bomb or two
is nothing to a veteran with a constitution like that.
In Warwickshire, around Stratford and the Forest of Arden, you will
find yourself in Shakespeare’s country. At Gerrard’s Cross William Penn
is buried. In the old days a watch was kept on the grave, as certain
patriotic Americans considered that the proper place for William Penn to
be buried was Pennsylvania, and tried to give practical effect to this
pious opinion.
Scotland, if you happen to find yourself there, is entirely different
from England. England is flat or undulating, and except in the
manufacturing districts, is given up mainly to cornfields and pasture
land. Scotland, especially in the north, is cut up into hills and glens.
Not such hills as you possess in Colorado, or Nevada, or the Northwest.
There is no Pike’s Peak, no Shasta, no Rainier. The highest mountain in
the British Isles—Ben Nevis—is only a little over four thousand feet
high, but naturally Scotsmen think a good deal of it.
Scotland is a great battle-ground. The Scot has always been fighting some
one. There was perpetual warfare upon the border from the earliest days.
The Romans, who were business men, built a wall right across England
from Newcastle to Carlisle, to keep the Scots out. They failed, as you
will find out for yourself, when you study a list of British Cabinet
Ministers; but you can see parts of the wall still. Later, there were
everlasting border raids, from one side or the other, maintained as a
tradition by the great families of that region—the Percys, the Douglases,
the Maxwells, the Elliotts. Besides this, various English kings tried to
conquer Scotland. Sometimes one side would win a battle, sometimes the
other, but no victory was lasting. At last, in 1707, the Act of Union
was passed, and Scotland and England came under one central Government.
Unfortunately, the Highlanders of the north were not consulted in the
arrangement, and they put up two rebellions of their own. Prince Charles
Edward, the last of the Stuarts, actually invaded England, and got as
far as Derby. He was defeated, but the rebellion smouldered on for years
among the Highland glens. The chain of forts along the Caledonian Canal
to-day—Fort George, Fort Augustus, Fort William, now peaceful holiday
resorts—is a reminder of that time. But those days are all over now, and
for nearly two centuries English and Scottish soldiers have fought side
by side all over the world. Ireland was united to England and Scotland
by a similar Act of Union in 1800. This event, as you may possibly have
heard, has provided a fruitful topic of conversation ever since.
IV. OUR CLIMATE
Then there is our weather. An Englishman never knows on going to work
in the morning whether to take a palm-leaf hat, or a fur overcoat, or a
diving-suit. The trouble is that our weather arrives too suddenly. We
are an island in the middle of the ocean, and most of our weather comes
in from the Atlantic, where there is no one to watch it. Our weather
prophets simply have to take a chance. That is all. With you it is
different. Your weather travels across a continent three thousand miles
wide. You can see it coming, and telegraph to the next State what to
expect.
So, if you are spending a day’s leave in London, and walk out of blazing
sunshine at one end of the street into a thunderstorm at the other—well,
have a heart, and put it down to the War. We will try to fix things for
you when peace comes. But we cannot promise. Anyway, in peace-time we can
always wear rubbers.
That is all about British weather.
V. OUR TRANSPORTATION
Then there are our railroads. These, like our boxed-in passenger coaches
and little four-wheel freight cars, tickle you to death, I know. The
compartment system is a national symptom. An Englishman loves one thing
above all others, and that is to get a railway compartment to himself.
Nobody knows why, but he does. Probably the craving arises from his
inability to converse easily with strangers. That inability is passing
away. I shall speak of it later. But the three-class system is a relic of
antiquity. Fifty years ago there were three grades of comfort in British
railroad travelling. You could have your family horse-coach lashed upon
an open railroad truck and attached to the train. You thus travelled in
your own carriage, or chaise. I do not know what happened to the horses.
This was the usual custom of the grand folk of those days. Or you could
travel by ordinary railway coaches, without cushions or windows. Or you
could pack yourself into an open freight truck, much as soldiers on the
Western Front are packed to-day, and so reach your destination with other
merchandise.
That has all gone now. Practically the only difference between first,
second, and third class in these days is a difference of price—which
means elbow-room. (Second class, by the way, has almost entirely died
out.) The three classes are almost equal in comfort, especially just
now, when the War has abolished nearly all dining-cars and sleepers. Our
sleeping-car system never amounted to much, anyway. The journeys were too
short to make it necessary for such as were travelling by night (and they
were comparatively few) to go to bed. The lordly Pullman car is almost
unknown here.
I said just now that we used to be proud of our railroads in time of
peace. We are doubly proud of them to-day in the stress of War. They
passed automatically into Government hands the day the War broke out, and
they have given our whole country a lesson in the art of carrying on.
Thousands of their employees are away in the trenches; hundreds of their
locomotives and freight cars are in France or Mesopotamia or Palestine,
enlisted for the duration. You will notice them when you get over, marked
R.O.D. (Railway Operating Department). They have all come from England.
Miles of tracks here have been torn up and conveyed bodily overseas.
There is little labour available to execute repairs, and none to build
new stock. There is a shortage of coal, a shortage of oil, and no paint.
Passenger services have been cut down by a half, and fares raised fifty
per cent; yet the traffic is still enormous, and the strain on the
depleted staffs is immense. But they manage somehow. Men who have long
earned their retirement remain in service, while boys and women do the
rest. Carry on!
VI. OUR GOPHER RUNS
Then comes our substitute for your Subway, and street-car system
generally. In London you will notice that there are two kinds of
Subway—the so-called Underground, or shallow transit, and the deep Tubes.
The system is so complicated, owing to the shape of London, that it
has been found impossible to have a one-price ticket such as prevails
everywhere in the United States.
The Underground is the oldest underground railroad in the world.
You probably gathered that for yourself the first time you saw
it. Twenty-five years ago its trains were drawn by ordinary steam
locomotives, which were supposed to consume their own smoke. Perhaps they
did, but it must have leaked out again somewhere.
The old Underground Railway of London got nearer to the ordinary
conception of hell than anything yet invented. Stations and trains were
lit by feeble gas or oil lamps; all glass was covered over with a film
of soot, and the brightest illumination was provided by the glow of the
locomotive furnaces as the train rumbled asthmatically into a station.
The atmosphere was a mixture of soot, smoke, sulphur, and poison gas.
The trains were on the box-compartment system, and small compartments
at that. The train usually waited two or three minutes in each station
(instead of ten seconds as now), and it required a full hour to travel
from King’s Cross to Charing Cross. It was impossible to see to read a
newspaper, so that passengers, to pass the time, used to rob, assault,
and occasionally murder one another. With the coming of electric traction
the old Underground was cleaned up and refurnished. At the same time, the
Tubes were constructed away down in the London clay, where there could
be no interference from oozy gravel, or gas mains, or sewers.
The chief trouble about the Tubes is that no one knows where they are.
Of course, every one knows where the _stations_ are. For instance, every
Londoner knows where Piccadilly Circus Station is—the surface station.
But where is the actual subterranean station? Or rather, where are the
two stations, because at this point two roads cross, and each has its
own subterranean station. Ah! They certainly are not where simple folk,
like you and me, would expect them to be—under Piccadilly Circus. If they
were, you would find them at the foot of the elevator. But that would be
too easy. It would make Londoners fat and lazy, leading the sedentary
life they do, to step straight into the train. So they have to walk about
a mile. Where to, no one knows. But there is a school of philosophers
which believes that a good many of the Tube stations have no subterranean
stations at all. One subterranean is shared jointly by several surface
stations. A short circular train ride is provided, just to furnish the
necessary illusion, and the passenger, having really walked to his
destination, steps out of the train well satisfied, and goes up the right
elevator under the impression that he has been carried there. That is
our Tube system as far as modern research has been able to fathom it. Of
course, an Englishman could never have thought out such a good practical
joke as these Tubes. The entire system was projected and constructed by
an American.
VII. OUR NATIONAL JOKE
But we have a sense of humour all the same. Our money system, like our
joint system of weights and measures, is, as you very properly observe,
a practical joke. It dates back to the time when an Englishman bought
his Sunday dinner with a pound of rock. It is bound to go soon, and make
way for the decimal system, just as inches and feet and yards are already
making way in this country for metres and centimetres. Meanwhile we have
got to put up with it.
The main points for an American to remember are—firstly, that a shilling
over here, despite war scarcity, will still buy rather more than a
quarter will buy in New York; and secondly, the necessity of keeping
clearly in mind the difference between a half-crown and a two-shilling
piece. Even taxi-drivers do not always know the difference. If you give
them half a crown they will frequently hand you change for a two-shilling
piece.
VIII. OURSELVES
Lastly, ourselves. This chapter is going to be the most difficult.
Last year I met an American soldier in London. He was one of the first
who had come over. I asked his impressions. He said:
“I have been in London three days, and not a soul has spoken to me.”
And therein was summed up the fundamental difference between our two
nations. In the United States people like to see one another and talk
to one another, and meet fresh people. If a stranger comes to town,
reporters interview him as he steps off the train. Americans prefer when
travelling to do so in open cars. At home their living-room doors are
usually left open. Every room stands open to every other. In their clubs
and hotels there are few private rooms. In their business houses the head
of the firm, the staff, and the clerks, frequently work together in one
great hall. If any partitions exist they are only table-high or they are
made of glass. Plenty of light, plenty of air, plenty of publicity. That
is America.
Now over here, somehow, we are different. I said before that an
Englishman’s ambition in life was to get a compartment to himself. That
principle, for good or ill prevails through all our habits. On the
railroad we travel in separate boxes. At home all our rooms have doors,
and we keep them shut. (This by the way, is chiefly in order to get warm,
for there is no central heating.) In most of our clubs there are rooms
where no one is allowed to speak. They are crowded with Englishmen. Only
a few years ago one never thought of dining in a restaurant except when
travelling. If he did, he always asked for a private room. If you dine at
Simpson’s in the Strand to-day you will still see a relic of the custom
in the curious boxed-in compartments which enclose some of the tables. In
our business houses the head of the department is concealed in one hutch,
the partners in another. The chief clerk has one too. The other clerks
may have to work in one room; but each clerk cherishes just one ambition,
and that is to rise high enough in the business to secure honourable
confinement in a hutch of his own.
For the same reason every Englishman keeps a fence round his garden—be
it castle or cottage garden—just to show that it is his garden and no
one else’s. And if you look into any old English parish church you will
see the same thing. Every family has its own pew; the humblest pew has
a door, and when the family gets inside the pew it shuts the door. Some
of the pews have curtains around them as well. The occupant can see the
minister, and the minister can see him. The rest of the congregation are
as invisible to him as he is to them. No one in the congregation resents
this at all. They are rather proud of the custom. It represents to them
only what is right and proper, the principle of a compartment to one’s
self.
And so a nation which has lived for centuries upon this plan is not a
nation which enters readily or easily into conversation outside its
own particular compartment. But how was I to explain or excuse such a
state of mind to my American soldier friend? Let me say right here that
this constrained behaviour does not arise from churlishness, or want of
good-will. Even the Germans admit that. A German philosopher once said,
with considerable truth for a German: “The Englishman is a cold friend,
but a good neighbour. He may shut himself up with his property, but he
will never dream of invading yours.” This statement is only partially
correct. The Englishman is one of the warmest-hearted and most hospitable
of men. But he is a bad starter—a bad starter in War, Love, Business,
and, above all, Conversation. Once get him started, and he refuses to
leave off. But you must start him first. And you are doing it.
The Englishman’s passion for his own compartment goes back a very, very
long way, right into the centuries. It goes back to the days when we
lived in tribes and every tribe kept to itself, and an Englishman’s
house was his castle—especially if the house were a one-room mud hut.
That makes us what we are to this day. Also we are cooped up in a small
island, and most of us have never left it. No Englishman ever speaks
to another Englishman if he can help it. This is partly the old tribal
instinct, partly laziness, and partly fear of a rebuff. Also, it may
involve explanations, and an Englishman would rather be scalped than
explain. So he saves trouble all round by burying himself in a newspaper
and saying nothing.
That by the way. But the main object of this little book is to make you
welcome to England, whoever you may be, and to show you why it is that
in our inarticulate and undemonstrative English way, we love our small
country just as you love your big continent.
“This fortress built by Nature by herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in a silver sea;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
That is how William Shakespeare felt about this “right little tight
little island” three hundred years ago, in days when our nation was
fighting for its life, neither for the first nor for the last time,
against overwhelmingly superior forces. And we hope that when you go
back safe and victorious, as we pray God you may, to your own beautiful
land, you will carry with you a little of that same feeling, and a real
understanding of the passionate sentiment that lies beneath it.
So we bid you welcome. And we ask you, our honoured guests, to do all
you can to get into close touch with the habits and point of view of our
country, both here and upon that battle-front whither you are bound, to
play your own splendid part in the Great Game.
We are never going back to the old days when Englishmen, Scotsmen,
Irishmen, Canadians, Australians, and Americans sat each in their
own compartment, and thanked God that they had it to themselves. We
English-speaking races have got together over this War. We have lost
terribly, but we are gaining much. We are rubbing shoulders in London,
and Paris, and countless other places, and we are rubbing the knobs
and the angles off one another, good and plenty. It is not always easy
or comfortable to have knobs rubbed off you, and the process sometimes
involves a little friction; but we must be prepared for that.
For instance, we all speak English, but we all pronounce it in different
ways. Well, why not? Hitherto we have been inclined to assume that the
other man was talking like that to annoy us. That is one of the knobs
that has to be rubbed off—intolerance of trivial matters of taste and
habit. To-day, under the most searching test in the world—the test of
comradeship in the face of battle and sudden death—we are acquiring a
profound respect for one another. When we have acquired just one other
thing—tolerance for one another’s point of view—we shall have laid the
foundation of an understanding which is going to hold us all up through
some difficult times hereafter. Getting this old world back on to a
peace basis, after the Kaiser has been put where he belongs, is going to
call for all our courage, sincerity, and loyalty to our common ideals.
When that period of Reconstruction comes—and it may come sooner than
we think—the first plank in its platform must be a solid understanding
between the two English-speaking races. They, at least, must speak with
one voice, or the whole fabric will fall to the ground.
Our two nations can never hope entirely to understand one another.
Neither can they expect always to see eye to eye. Their national
personalities are too robust. But to-day their sons are learning to know
the worst of one another and the best of one another and the invincible
humanity of one another. With that knowledge will come—if we have the
will—tolerance of one another’s point of view. We must get that. There
are thousands of reasons why, but to you, soldiers and sailors, I am only
going to mention one.
When the Victory comes, we shall enjoy its rewards. But all the while we
shall be conscious that we have not won these entirely by ourselves. We
shall in great measure have inherited them from men who have not lived
to enjoy the fruits of their own sacrifice—men whom we have left behind,
in France, Belgium, and Italy; in Asia and Africa; whose bones cover the
ocean floor—men who gave everything that the Cause might live. To these
we shall desire to raise a lasting memorial. We can best do that by
building up a fabric of understanding on the foundation which they laid,
so truly, with their own lives. If we do that—and only if we do that—our
Dead can sleep in peace; for they will know that what they died for was
worth while, and above all that we, their heritors, _have kept faith with
them_—
“… Famous men
From whose bays we borrow—
They that put aside To-day,
All the joys of their To-day,
And with toil of their To-day
Bought for us To-morrow.”
IAN HAY
London, July, 1918
The Last Million
CHAPTER ONE
THE ARGONAUTS
A ship is sailing on the sea—a tall ship, with several masts and an
imposing array of smokestacks. She is moving at a strictly processional
pace, with a certain air of professional boredom. In fact, the
disconsolate hissing of her steam escape-pipes intimates quite plainly
that she is accustomed to a livelier life than this. But a convoy belongs
to the straitest sect of Labour-Unionism: its pace is regulated to that
of the slowest performer; so ocean greyhounds in such company must
restrain themselves as best they may.
All around her steam other ships. They are striped, spotted, and
ringstraked as to their hulls, smokestacks, and spars in a manner highly
gratifying to that school of unappreciated geniuses, the Futurists,—or
Cubists, or Vorticists, or whatever the malady is called,—but
exasperating to the submerged Hun, endeavouring to calculate knottage and
obtain ranging-points through a perplexed periscope. On the outer fringe
of the flotilla fuss the sheep-dogs—the escorting warships.
If you seek to ascertain the nationality of our tall ship, by internal
evidence, you will probably begin by observing certain notices painted
up about the decks and cabins, requesting you to keep off the bridge,
or to refrain from throwing cigar-ends on the deck, or not to leave this
tap running. You will next observe that these notices are inscribed in
English, French, and another language. What language, it is impossible to
say, for some one has pasted a strip of blank paper over the inscription
in every case. But it is easy to guess. In the depths, here and there,
German is still spoken; but upon the face of the broad ocean it is a dead
language.
Talking of nationalities, you will further observe that these ships all
fly the Union Jack. But they are crowded with American soldiers. There
must be thousands of these soldiers. They swarm everywhere—bunched
on deck, peering through portholes, or plastering the rigging like
an overflow of mustard sauce, which in truth they are. They are
more than that. They are a portent. They are a symbol. They are a
testimonial—to the Kaiser; for has not that indefatigable bungler by his
own efforts brought about a long-overdue understanding between all the
English-speaking people in the world?
Above all, they are a direct answer to a particular challenge.
A few weeks ago the Men at the Top in Germany got together and held what
is known in military circles as a pow-wow. A condensed report of their
deliberations would have read something like this:
“Yes, Majesty, the Good Old German God is undoubtedly on the side of our
Army. Still, the fact remains that we have not yet achieved anything,
after three-and-a-half years of war, really worth while.… _Belgium_,
_Serbia_, _Roumania_, _Russia_? Yes, no doubt. Each of those countries
has now received the true reward of her stupidity and presumption; but
none of them ever offered any serious difficulty from a military point
of view, except Russia; and the credit for her collapse was due far more
to our internal agents than to our external military pressure.… No,
Hindenburg, I haven’t forgotten Tannenberg; but you haven’t done very
much _since_ then (except get gold nails knocked into yourself), and
what you have accomplished has been chiefly under—ahem!—_my_ direction.…
No, no, I am not really pinning orchids on myself—not yet, anyway. I
am merely trying to be candid and frank: in short, I am reminding you
that you are only a figurehead. You know what irreverent people call
you—‘General What-do-you-Say!’
“… Yes, Your Imperial Highness, your consummate generalship at Verdun
undoubtedly achieved an historic victory over the French; but you will
forgive me for pointing out that your casualties were at least twice as
numerous as theirs, and that the ground which you captured has since been
regained.… _Submarines_? My good Von Capelle, your submarines are as
obsolete as our late lamented friend Von Tirpitz. _Justify my statement?_
In a moment.… Yes, Majesty, the British Army failed utterly to break our
line at the Somme, but they and the French took seventy thousand of our
best troops prisoner, and we had to execute a ‘strategic’ retirement
which lost us about a thousand square miles of French soil. Not much of
a performance for the German Army—the _German Army_—to put up against a
mob of half-trained mercenaries! We managed to delude our people into the
belief that we had scored a great military triumph in so doing, but the
German nation, excellent though their discipline is, are not likely to
go on swallowing that stuff forever. _You_ know that, better than most,
Hertling! Bethmann-Hollweg knew it too: he was no match for Liebknecht,
although he did lock him up.…
“And what of the situation since the Somme? Haig is within ten miles
of Ostend, and has captured practically the whole of the Paschendaele
Ridge.… _The Eastern Front?_ Nothing matters in this war except the
_Western_ Front. What are we going to do about that?… _Your Majesty
will assume supreme command?_ Splendid!… _And break the Western Front?_
Colossal! That was just what I was about to suggest. Now for the plan of
campaign, which I do not doubt Your Majesty has already sketched out.…
Perhaps Your Majesty will permit Hindenburg and myself to remain here a
few moments longer, while you unfold it? We need not detain His Imperial
Highness the Crown Prince. He is the man of Action: his task will come
later. (_For Heaven’s sake, Von Hertling, get him out of here, or our two
military geniuses will be at loggerheads in five minutes!_)
“… And now, Majesty, you suggest—?… That is a superb plan; but it
appears to me—I mean, to Hindenburg—that you—we—are rating one of the
nations opposed to us too lightly.… Yes, Your Majesty, I know you
are going to stand no nonsense from them _after_ the War,—in fact,
you warned their Ambassador, most properly, if I may say so, to that
effect,—but would it not be a good move, just as a preliminary, to
stand no nonsense from them _during_ the War?… _Too far away? They
can’t get over?_ Well—here are the approximate numbers of the American
troops already in France. And there are a lot of them in England too.…
_Rather surprising?_ Yes. Indeed, quite a creditable feat for an
unwarlike nation. I shall show these figures to Von Capelle: it will
justify what I said about his submarines: in fact, it will annoy him
extremely. And there are more coming. They are pouring over faster
and faster. I shall tell him that too.… _But the Americans have had
no experience of intensive warfare? And they have fallen behind with
their constructive programme—aeroplanes and artillery?_ Quite so. And,
therefore, taking these facts into consideration, I—Hindenburg—Your
Majesty will doubtless decide that our only chance is to concentrate
in overwhelming strength, here and now, against _one_ of the two enemy
forces at present opposed to us, and destroy that force in detail before
the Americans can throw any considerable body of troops into the line.…
_Expensive?_ Undoubtedly.… _No one has ever succeeded during this War
in breaking a properly organized trenchline?_ Agreed; but only because
no one has yet been able or willing to pay the necessary price. The
British might have done it on the Somme, but Haig was too squeamish
about the lives of his men. British generals are handicapped in their
military dispositions by a public opinion which happily does not exist
in our enlightened Fatherland. I—Hin—Your Majesty can afford to do it.
With all these unemployed Divisions from the Russian Front, we can go
to the limit in the matter of casualties.… _How many?_ Well, I think we
can afford to lose a million men—say a million.… Yes, indeed, Majesty,
your heart must bleed at the prospect; but after all, it is for the
ultimate good of Humanity.… ‘_One cannot make omelettes without breaking
eggs?_’ Admirable! Your Majesty’s felicity of phrase shows no falling
off, I perceive. And yet the Americans talk of their Woodrow Wilson!
Besides, it will be a million less to make trouble for Us after the
War. Now, I suppose we are all agreed on the foe to be crushed?… _The
British?_ Naturally. The British! The time has come to drive them into
the sea. Haig has recently extended his line twenty-eight miles—rather
reluctantly, too. He has had to send troops to Italy, and he had heavy
casualties in Belgium last autumn. Twenty-seven thousand killed, in
fact. Still, without a supreme commander, you cannot blame the various
Allied leaders for ‘passing the buck’ to one another, as the Yankees say.
We can accumulate troops on his front—veterans from Russia—sufficient
to outnumber him by at least three to one. That should suffice, if we
stand by our decision about casualties. We will strike hard at his new
positions, before his artillery has had time to register thoroughly. We
will annihilate his front system of trenches by an intensive bombardment,
while our new long-range gas-shells take his rest-billets by surprise and
demoralize his Divisional and Corps Reserves. And I think, Majesty, that
we have been a little punctilious about things like the Red Cross. After
all, hospitals are a mere sentimental handicap to the efficient waging of
war. Our new bombing aeroplanes might be instructed to deal faithfully
with these, especially as the fool English have organized no preparation
for their defence. Yes, I—we—Your Majesty will drive the whole pack of
them into the sea this time! The French, isolated, can then be handled at
leisure; and with Calais, Boulogne, and Havre in our hands the Americans
will find that they have come too late. In fact, we can pick them off
as they arrive. Thus it is that Your Majesty, like Cæsar and Napoleon,
separates his enemies and then destroys them one by one.… _Divide et
Impera!_ Exactly! Most happily put, Your Majesty!”
* * * * *
And it was so—up to a point. Ludendorff’s plan was adopted. The necessary
concentration of troops was effected with admirable secrecy and
promptitude, and the parallel enterprises of sweeping the British Army
into the sea and expending a million German lives were duly inaugurated.
The latter undertaking succeeded better than the former: the line sagged
and wavered; it was pushed here and there; but it never broke. Still,
the strain was terrible, as news arrived of Monchy gone, Wytschaete
gone, Messines gone, Kemmel gone; of Bapaume, Albert, Armentières,
Bailleul, all gone—little hills and little towns all of them, but big
and precious in certain unimportant eyes because of their associations.
But the worst news never arrived. Instead, there came one morning the
tale of an all-day assault by the Hun, delivered in mass from Meteren
to Voormezeele, every wave of which had been broken and hurled back by
impregnable rocks of French and British infantry. So disastrous was the
failure of that tremendous lunge that the enemy drew off with his dead
and his shame for several weeks, and the non-stop run to Calais was
withdrawn from the time-table until further notice.
But the matter could not be left here. The Boche had laid a terrible
stake on the table, and was bound to redeem it or perish. Plainly he
would try again—maybe at some fresh point; but again. Already there
were mutterings of trouble on the French Front. That he would break the
line—the line which he had failed to break at Verdun in 1916, and at
Ypres in 1914—seemed incredible; but he might succeed in straining it
beyond the limits of perfect recovery; and if that happened, Ludendorff’s
boast that America would arrive too late might be justified.
Hence the present Armada. It is only one of many. Transports have been
crossing the Atlantic for months now, but never upon such a scale as
this. There are thousands of soldiers in this convoy alone—men physically
splendid, with nearly a year’s training behind them. They are going
over—Over There—in answer to the call. Russia has stepped out of the
scale, so America must step in at once if Prussianism is to kick the
beam. Here they are—a sight to quicken the pulse—the New World hastening
to redress the balance of the Old.
CHAPTER TWO
SHIP’S COMPANY
However, we have not reached our destination yet; which is just as
well, for at present we are fully occupied in assimilating our new
surroundings. To tell the truth, some of us have a good deal to
assimilate. There is young Boone Cruttenden, for instance.
Little more than a year ago he was preparing to settle down in his
ancestral home in Kentucky, there to prop the declining years of an
octogenarian parent, Colonel Harvey Cruttenden, known in far-back
Confederate days as one of General Sam Wheeler’s hardest-riding
disciples. But President Wilson had upset the plans of Boone Cruttenden
for all time, by inviting him and certain others to step forward and help
make the World Safe for Democracy. Boone was one of the first to accept
the invitation.
Several strenuous months at a training-camp of the Reserve Officers’
Training Corps followed, and in due course he found himself, with
a gilded metal strip on either shoulder, communicating his slender
knowledge of the art of war to drafted persons who possessed no knowledge
of the subject at all—just as thousands of other young men of the right
spirit were doing all over the country, and just as thousands of other
young men of similar spirit had been doing for more than three years in
another country three thousand miles away.
“It was something fierce at first,” he confided to Miss Frances Lane, a
United States Army nurse, proceeding, in company with ninety-nine others,
to a Base Hospital in France.
By rights Miss Lane and her companions should not have been taking
chances on a transport at all. She should have been crossing the Atlantic
in a stately white-painted hospital ship, with the Red Cross emblazoned
on its sides, immune by all the laws of God and Man from hostile attack.
But the Red Cross makes the Hun see red. Therefore it is found safer
in these days to adjust life-jackets over the splints and bandages of
wounded men and send them across the water, together with the indomitable
sisterhood which tends them, protected by something that makes a more
intelligible appeal to _Kultur_ than the mere symbol of Christianity.
“It was something fierce,” repeated Boone Cruttenden.
“Tell me!” commanded Miss Lane, with an air of authority which Boone
found extremely attractive.
“Well, in the training-camps the main proposition was to make the boys
understand what they were there for. They were full of enthusiasm, but
very few of them had taken any interest in the early part of the war,
and we were all a long way from Europe, anyhow. They were willing enough
to fight, but naturally they wanted to know what they were fighting for.
Even when we told them, they weren’t too wise. Two or three men of my
company could neither read nor write; another man knew the name of his
home town, but not the name of his State. The map of Europe was nothing
in his young life. Then, lots of them thought we were going to fight the
Yankees again, and whip them this time!”
Boone’s eyes flashed, and for a moment he forgot all about European
complications. He was his father’s son all through. But a certain tensity
in the atmosphere recalled him to realities.