The Rev. R. Allen, a friend of many years’ standing, has been
good enough to send me a copy of the _London Quarterly Review_
for this month, and to draw my attention to the first article,
written by you on “How to Defend England.”
I am _delighted_ with the article itself, and with the very clear
and convincing way in which you have put forward the advantages
of military training and discipline for all our able-bodied young
men as affecting not only the position of Great Britain as a
World Power, but the individual moral and physical improvement of
the men of the nation.
But I am still more delighted that such an article should be
allowed to appear in a Journal published from the Wesleyan Book
Room. I am quite at one with you in believing that Nonconformists
are not one whit less patriotic than any other great religious
body, but that there is some misconception on their part in
regard to the aim and purpose of those who advocate universal
military training for Home Defence.
My hope is that such misconception may be removed and that every
Briton, whatever his position and whatever his sect, will realise
the necessity for taking the defence of his country seriously.
Such articles as yours will do much to effect this, and to open
the eyes of those who are now blind to England’s needs and
England’s dangers before it is too late.
Yours truly,
ROBERTS.
Other men as greatly concerned in great matters as Lord Roberts was
cannot always spare time to acknowledge and to show appreciation of
work for a good cause, which is brought directly to their notice.
Lord Roberts could find time, or perhaps I should say made time to
write graciously about work the doer or the author of which had done
nothing to bring that work under the Field-Marshal’s eye.
Thenceforward, no work of mine in the cause for National Defence was
allowed to pass unrecognised, once it came under the notice of Lord
Roberts--and not very much happened of which in some way or another
he did not come to hear.
He followed the doings even of the rank and file under his command,
and, like the great leader of men that he was, he thought none of
them too humble to be honoured and heartened before going into
battle, by a message from himself.
For instance, I was asked to give an address on National Defence to
a great gathering of men--some 1500 or more as it turned out--at
an Assault-at-Arms in the Kursaal at Worthing. Naturally I never
trespassed upon such a busy man’s time by writing to him, unless in
answer to a letter from himself, or unless I had something important
of which to speak. So as I had not heard from Lord Roberts for some
time, and had had no cause to write to him, I did not suppose he as
much as knew of the Worthing meeting. Yet in opening the proceedings,
the Mayor announced that he had just received a telegram from Lord
Roberts to the effect that he was delighted I was to be the speaker
that night, and warmly commending what I had to say to the attention
of the audience.
Such a message and from such a quarter, did more to assure me--an
entire stranger to my audience--a welcome and a friendly hearing than
I could otherwise have hoped to receive.
One “Lost Chord” in the way of an unread message from Lord Roberts I
often regret.
In the company of Mr. Neville P. Edwards, then an organising
secretary of the National Service League, I went as an Honorary
Helper of the League on three caravan tours in Kent and Sussex.
The last tour closed only a week or two before the outbreak of
war, and Lord Roberts, who followed our progress with the keenest
interest, sent us on several occasions by letter or by telegram
a special message to deliver in his name to our audiences. These
messages directly warned his fellow-countrymen of the imminence of
war and of the necessity for preparation. Remembering that in the
towns we often had an audience of one or two thousand, and even in
the villages, of some hundreds, there must be many persons who now
recall the weightiness and the gravity of the great soldier’s words.
And I venture to add that no one whose privilege it was to hear them
is likely ever to forget the equally grave, eloquent, and memorable
words which fell from the lips of Mr. Rudyard Kipling--who by his
single pen has done more to awaken the young manhood of the nation
to England’s needs than any other writer living or dead--when he
presided over one of our meetings. It seemed to me one of the ironies
of fate that in the very caravan from which Lord Roberts’ message
and Mr. Kipling’s words--both urgent warnings of imminent war--had
been delivered, I should a few weeks later set forth as an Honorary
Recruiting Officer in search of men to fight in the very war which
Lord Roberts and Mr. Kipling had so faithfully foretold.
Before taking the chair and introducing Mr. Edwards and myself to our
audience, Mr. Kipling said to me:
“I have just had a telegram from the Chief. He sent his thanks to
me for presiding at the meeting, and asks that I convey his thanks
to Edwards and to you. It is a very interesting and characteristic
message, and I will read it when making my closing remarks to the
meeting at the end.”
It so happened that the latter part of the meeting was a Lantern
Slide Lecture by Mr. Edwards. His last slide was a portrait of the
King, seeing which some one started “God Save the King,” and the
audience, taking this as ending the meeting, broke up, and so we lost
not only Lord Roberts’ telegram, but Mr. Kipling’s equally coveted
closing words.
In nothing that I attempted for the cause that was so near to his
heart, was Lord Roberts more keenly interested than in a controversy
in the spring and summer of 1914 between an opponent of National
Service, a very distinguished divine and scholar, and myself. My
opponent’s article was headed, “Why we cannot accept conscription,”
and mine “Why we support Lord Roberts.” To a reprint of the
controversy in booklet form, published immediately after the outbreak
of war, the Rev. John Telford, B.A., contributed an Editorial
Foreword, in which he said:
“This discussion of the question of national armaments aroused
extraordinary interest among a very wide circle of readers, as
it appeared in _The Magazine of the Wesleyan Methodist Church_
in March, April, May and June of this year. It also led to much
correspondence in other journals. No one then dreamed of the terrible
significance which events were to attach to the subject.... Here
are Mr. Kernahan’s words, printed last March, before any shadow had
fallen across the sun. He says: ‘I have studied the question at home
and abroad with as much closeness as was possible, and the more
closely I study it the more convinced I am that we are well within
the possibility of one of the most awful disasters that ever befell a
great nation.’ In the light of to-day that is a remarkably verified
warning.”
This controversy, on account of the importance attached to the issues
involved, Lord Roberts followed with exceptional interest. One
passage of arms between my opponent and myself I may be permitted to
quote, since it centres around Lord Roberts himself.
“Mr. Kernahan proves,” my critic wrote, “that his special hero,
Lord Roberts, is a truly Christian man. I would not question it for
a moment. And yet--so terrible a power has familiarity with war to
blind men’s eyes to its satanic wickedness--it was Lord Roberts who
uttered in our Free Trade Hall at Manchester the cynical sentence
about Germany’s right to strike when her hour came, which shocked
even convinced conscriptionists on his platform. I wonder whether
Lord Roberts approved of the way Germany struck when her hour came
in 1870! Strange indeed to hear a Christian man echoing the very
sentiments of Bismarck, who was so proud of the cunning lie by which
he tricked France into a disastrous war!”
My reply I venture to quote, since Lord Roberts was so good as to say
it exactly interpreted his views and his position.
“Lord Roberts,” I wrote, “claimed no such ‘right’ for any nation
wantonly and wickedly to force war upon another. He pointed out that
when one nation has decided, for reasons of her own (possibly because
she is ambitious and determined to play a great part in history), to
force a war upon another nation, which possibly may decide to resist,
if only because she is determined to hold to her own--the policy
is that adopted by Germany. That policy--as a student of history
as well as a soldier, Lord Roberts had to admit that it is often a
winning policy--is to strike at what has been called the selected
moment, or in other words, when she (Germany) is at her strongest,
and the nation which she wishes to overthrow is weak. It was because
Lord Roberts knew that this was and is Germany’s policy, and because
he wellnigh despairs sometimes at the criminal apathy of his
fellow-countrymen, and because he knows the consequences which must
almost inevitably follow, that he felt compelled, under a terrible
sense of responsibility, to speak out thus plainly. Had he, knowing
what he does of Germany’s ambitions, intentions, and strength, and
of England’s ignorance, weakness, and unpreparedness, elected to
maintain a cowardly and traitorous silence--then, and not till then,
would he be guilty of the ‘cynical’ and ‘satanic’ wickedness of which
my opponent speaks.... For the latter cannot deny that Germany has
not gone back in her ambition or in her strength since 1870. On the
contrary, she has gone on, not only in piling up an army which, as
Mr. Churchill warned the nation, is now four and a half millions in
number, but also in the most strenuous effort to create a vast Navy,
which she has said must be, shall be, greater than ours. With her
huge army she needs no Navy for defence. It is, as has been said, a
‘luxury’ and is meant for attack, whereas to us a Navy is a matter of
life and death. And my opponent knows that we have twice held out the
hand of friendship to Germany with proposals to stay this insane race
in armaments, and that her reply was more battleships, more soldiers,
more guns.”
I do not print this passage here to reopen an old controversy, but
because--though the details of Lord Roberts’ proposals will, in the
light of recent events, require considerable modification--the main
issues raised by him abide and must be reaffirmed. Here in England
we have short memories. It is possible that in the bewildering
happenings of the war and in the breathless interest with which, at
its end, the shifting of frontiers and the striking of great balances
will be watched, there is the danger, if only from reaction, that we
slackly fall back into our previous national inertia and national
apathy, and that the little puddles of party politics (dirty puddles
for the most part) once again matter more to us than to hold sacred
and inviolate the great Empire and these world-trusts which God has
seen well to commit to Britain’s charge.