THE FRINGE OF WAR
" ... In a few hours at most, as they well knew, perhaps a tenth
of them would have looked their last on the sun, and be a part
of foreign earth or dumb things that the tides push. Many of
them would have disappeared for ever from the knowledge of man,
blotted from the book of life none would know how--by a fall or
chance shot in the darkness, in the blast of a shell, or alone,
like a hurt beast, in some scrub or gully, far from comrades and
the English speech and the English singing. And perhaps a third
of them would be mangled, blinded or broken, lamed, made imbecile
or disfigured, with the colour and the taste of life taken from
them, so that they would never more move with comrades nor exult
in the sun. And those not taken thus would be under the ground,
sweating in the trench, carrying sandbags up the sap, dodging
death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death
seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury. But as they moved out
these things were but the end they asked, the reward they had come
for, the unseen cross upon the breast. All that they felt was a
gladness of exultation that their young courage was to be used.
They went like kings in a pageant to the imminent death. As they
passed from moorings to the man-of-war anchorage on their way to
the sea, their feeling that they had done with life and were going
out to something new welled up in those battalions; they cheered
and cheered till the harbour rang with cheering. As each ship
crammed with soldiers drew near the battleships, the men swung
their caps and cheered again, and the sailors answered, and the
noise of cheering swelled, and the men in the ships not yet moving
joined in, and the men ashore, till all the life in the harbour
was giving thanks that it could go to death rejoicing. All was
beautiful in the gladness of men about to die, but the most moving
thing was the greatness of their generous hearts...."
JOHN MASEFIELD: _Gallipoli_.
I
"For various reasons," wrote William Glynne Charles Gladstone to
General Sir Henry MacKinnon,[25] "I feel the time has come when I
ought to enlist in His Majesty's Army. Heaven knows, so far from
having the least inclination for military service, I dread it and
dislike it intensely; consistently with that I have no natural
aptitude for it, and what is more, no training of any sort. I have
never done a single minute's military training in my whole life,
I am a rank although not a very robust civilian; even my love of
shooting has somehow never led to my learning to shoot with a
rifle. I recall all that to your mind because I want to put it to
you that under these circumstances there is only one thing for
me to do, and that is to begin at the beginning and enlist as a
private. I am not prepared to face the possibility, however remote,
of being put in some post of responsibility without knowing the
ropes very well and from the beginning.... I have decided not to
enlist in any force which is confined to home defence, but one
which in its turn will be called upon to go to the front."
Had William Gladstone been elected spokesman of the men under
thirty, he could not have expressed their collective and individual
attitude to the war in apter terms than those which described his
own mingled sense of diffidence and duty. All who had loved and
followed him at Eton, at Oxford and at Westminster shared his
hatred for a war which arrested human progress and destroyed human
life, as they shared his ignorance of warfare and his dread of
assuming inexpert responsibility for the lives of other men; all,
or at least all who mattered, living or dead, offered themselves,
no less resolutely than he did, in the first hours of war for any
purpose to which the government might put them. The rank civilians
who were even less robust than he was laid siege to the doors of
any organisation that would make use of them and, with no more
training in their whole life than he had of military training,
enlisted as substitutes in place of those who were accepted for
the army. Before the government, with its counsel of "business as
usual," attempted to set going again the arrested pulse of the
national life, those who had time, energy or aptitude, how little
so ever, to place at the service of the community were already
absorbed in new work or awaiting a call to fresh duties.
Sheer inability to sit idle, no less than patriotism, urged them
to drive cars and ambulances, to raise funds and equip hospitals,
to take the places of their own clerks or gardeners and to toil at
the routine of a public office. Dependent on censored newspapers,
jejune letters and ill-informed gossip, England was an uneasy home
in the unfamiliar days when the whole world was first seething
with war. To men past middle-age the news-bills recalled the names
of places which they had forgotten since the time, forty-four
years earlier, when another German army was pouring into France;
would this onrush, all wondered, be as irresistible? Morning after
morning the converging black lines of the German advance raced
down the map, ever nearer to Paris; one Sunday the notorious
"Amiens despatch" prepared its readers for the news that the
entire expeditionary force had been encircled. Men, more men and
yet more men were the crying need; the order had gone forth and
volunteers were to be enrolled by the hundred thousand; but, until
they could be trained to an equality with the professional soldiers
of Germany, a veritable human breakwater was required to prevent
France from being submerged.
It is small wonder--the wish being parent to the thought--that
some accepted unhesitatingly from excited neighbours that twenty,
fifty, a hundred thousand Russians, secretly embarked at Arkangel
and disembarked at Aberdeen, were passing as secretly through
England to a southern port; letters from Scotland told of cars
commandeered to divide the stream between the east-coast route
and the west; the amateur strategist demonstrated with atlas and
encyclopædia that Arkangel could be kept ice-free until September;
and it was both pleasanter and easier to believe the man who
claimed to have spoken to the mysterious troops in Russian than to
enquire what facilities existed for transporting a single brigade
to the northern coast of Russia.[26]
At the same time, in London and in the country, impromptu local
committees of relief applied for unoccupied cottages and houses,
for furniture and bedding, for food and money to be distributed
among the Belgians who had sought asylum in England; in those
days, though the Englishman and the Belgian never pretended to
feel personal cordiality towards each other, the decision of King
Albert to uphold the neutrality of his country was ungrudgingly
voted one of the bravest political acts in history; the brief
defence of Liége was at least long and unexpected enough to hold
up the annihilating German advance for precious hours while the
British expeditionary force effected its union with the French
army; nothing, in consequence, was too good for the victims of
German treachery and of their own honour; and, until it became a
legitimate form of English humour to describe a Belgian refugee as
a Belgian atrocity, these dazed and ruined outcasts were received
with liberality and general kindness.
From them and from the press England learned a little of the
savagery which had been let loose in Belgium and North France:
murders, single and wholesale; raping, private and public;
mutilation worthy of a necrophile; burning and pillage. After
six years some memories may be dulled, the superior may affect
a toleration that they did not feel in those days; some of the
stories were exaggerated, and before the end every belligerent
had perpetrated a certain number of atrocities. Nevertheless, the
original charges were investigated by a commission working under
the chairmanship of Lord Bryce, who must be credited with some
knowledge of the rules that govern historical and legal evidence;
and, even if other armies followed a vile lead, it was the Germans
who set the example and enshrined "frightfulness" in their
war-book. There was no effective protest in Germany; and, though
the need for propaganda and apologetics has lessened, there has
been no recantation, no hint of repentance nor sign of grace. It is
not surprising that, among those who remember, the name of a German
stinks and the presence of a German is an outrage.
Until she appears bare-footed and draped in a sheet, Germany must
remain branded with the mark of bestiality: though peace has been
restored, though trade has been resumed, there can be no good-will
between humane, just-minded men and a barbarian nation which has
not repented of its misdeeds. It is not an excuse to say that
"frightfulness" was imposed from above, for the humblest private
has an inalienable right to disobey such an order and to gain his
soul at the loss of his life; frightfulness, so far from being
resisted, was applauded and spread by the women who mocked and
spat in the faces of enemy prisoners. Never has a nation been more
solid; never has the collective responsibility been heavier. As it
is at least conceivable that this will not prove to be the last
war, the present result of impenitence on the one side and of short
memory on the other is that, if ever there be another, it can be
begun in comfortable certainty that murder, rape, arson, pillage
and mutilation go unpunished and are a form of warfare for which
there is an unchallenged precedent.
The civil and military population of Germany has not made even
a coward's show of repentance by choosing scape-goats for the
burden of its sins; and repentance has not been forced upon it
from without. In the general election of 1918, Mr. Lloyd George
promised that the war criminals should be brought to trial; in 1921
we are still waiting to see them punished. Already the Kaiser has
one party claiming indulgence for him as the creature of his own
general staff, while another would leave him unpunished and even
untried for fear that apparent persecution might make a martyr of
him. But was not the Kaiser _Kriegsherr_? Is not the _Kriegsherr_
responsible for his own war-book? Is it not an offence against
humanity and even against the laws of nations to use a human screen
when advancing through hostile country? On that count alone he
should be hanged.
The fear of making martyrs is based on the misunderstanding of a
single historical example: Louis Napoleon fostered the Bonapartist
legend a quarter of a century after his uncle's death as a romantic
appeal against the unromantic dreariness of the Orleanist rule; it
is forgotten that the "martyrdom" of Napoleon I. bore no fruit
until the French, with their paradoxical blended love of logic and
sentiment, found themselves more than twenty years later under a
government which satisfied neither craving; it is forgotten that
Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the brave," was executed in a way
which shewed that French chivalry was dead, yet no one called
him martyr. The former German emperor, ruling by right divine,
strutting and phrase-making by the affliction of congenital
insanity, may be excused as the Emperor of the Sahara was excused,
or confined with his fellows in a criminal-lunatic asylum; if he
assert his sanity, then his place is on a cart and his fate a
noosed rope. Yet one more party, its sentiment stirred by the sight
of Count Hohenzollern chopping trees in a Dutch park, pleads that
in his downfall he is paying longer and heavier penalty than that
of instant and painless death; it may be suggested that inglorious
exile is a blessing unexpected and undeserved of the degenerate who
flitted across the frontier when the country that he had misruled
was in its death agony. The pantaloon of Europe gave up his
mumming when the game grew dangerous; with it he gave up his last
opportunity of ascending from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Where no imagination is required, the English are a kindly race
who find it easier and more congenial to forget than to inflict
punishment even when it is deserved, even when the criminal
unpunished becomes a model for future crime. Every murderer may
be sure of his petition for reprieve; in the excitement of the
present an Englishman will always forget the excitement of the
past, even when this shortness of memory leaves a debt unpaid. The
war is so long over, its later stages were so different from the
earlier that few now remember their obligation to Lord Kitchener
in those first months. It is for soldiers and statesmen to decide
whether he outlived his own usefulness, whether he reduced the War
Office to chaos, even whether the new armies would not have been
formed without the inspiration of his name; others may be grateful
to an imagination and a courage that led him to warn the country
that he was preparing for a three years' war, when the country was
wondering whether war on such a scale could possibly drag on after
Christmas. Those who were then living on the remote fringe of the
war may recall the indefinable sense of security which was brought
by the news that he had been appointed secretary of state for war.
More quickly forgotten than anything else in these days was the
nation's debt of gratitude to Lord Haldane for reorganising the
army and for preparing, in the expeditionary force, the finest
fighting weapon in recorded history. His admiration for Germany,
his visits to the Kaiser and his study of German methods led a
people which prided itself on its dogged common-sense to charge
him with treacherous German sympathies; political opponents,
eager enough before the party truce to discredit the ministry by
destroying one of its most prominent members, encouraged the belief
that Lord Haldane, while in temporary charge of the war office,
had obstructed the mobilisation of the expeditionary force; and
the man who had made the new model army was credited with designs
on the country which it saved. When once it is recognised that the
English, in their present credulity and ignorance, are unfit for
self-government, these aberrations become easily intelligible;
it is not so easy to understand or to justify the action of Lord
Haldane's colleagues who, for all their worthless moral support
and for all their entreaties that he should remain in the cabinet,
allowed him to be sacrificed to popular clamour without raising a
voice or stirring a finger to protect him publicly.[27]
These early impressions are perhaps the deeper for that there was
so little in those early days, before each man had taken up his
new work, to disturb a course of general reflection. When the
morning and evening papers had been read, there was nothing to do
but to brood over this spectacle of a world gone mad. Everywhere
in England there was the same chatter and speculation, the same
spy-rumours and epidemics of hoarding; the same competition in
war-economies and rivalry in war-services. Every day brought
news of new recruits to the army, the civil service and a score
of services no less unexpected, until, at the end of September,
one who was equally without training or aptitude for teaching
returned to Westminster with cap and gown, to become a temporary
schoolmaster.
II
There would be a smaller public-school literature if the privilege
of describing or criticising public schools were restricted to
those who had seen them from both the form-room and the common
room.[28] "Ian Hay" speaks somewhere of the schoolmaster's life
as being the worst paid and the most richly rewarded; and, if no
remuneration compensates the damage to nerves, temper and faith
when a man tries simultaneously to maintain order, to excite
interest and to impart instruction to fifty or sixty boys of
fourteen to seventeen, reward comes from contact with the minds
of boys first stirring to wakefulness and with the characters of
boys who, for all their mischief and resourcefulness of attack, are
lovable in their ingenuousness, their humour, their chivalry, their
conservatism, their strict and strictly-circumscribed honour.
And, if faith is sometimes tried, faith in public-school education
was justified in the years from 1914 to 1918. If it be granted
hypothetically that the war was won for England and, further, that
it was won by soldiers in the field rather than by ministers,
munition-makers, bankers and military correspondents, it was won by
the leadership of the officers and by the fighting quality of the
men; and the leaders were supplied first to the old army and then
to the new, for the first years of the war, almost wholly by the
public schools. When, at the end, the net was thrown more widely,
the quality of the officers deteriorated; though they lacked
nothing of courage, they could furnish no substitute for something
indefinable but recognisable--never so quickly recognised as by the
men they led--which only a public school provides.
Apart from its training in character, public-school education
was justified in that, if the aim of education be to teach a
man how to learn, the versatility of the old public-schoolboy
was a rare tribute to his education; and versatility is not
confined to knowing the commercial or even the scientific jargon
of half-a-dozen languages. Hardly a man was not in some degree
uprooted; and all took to their new work and to their new
responsibilities as lightheartedly as they would to a new game.
It is in this sense that the British may fairly claim to be an
imperial people: the empire, since the days of Warren Hastings
(an Old Westminster), has been administered by public-school boys
with public-school methods and the public-school tradition of
responsibility; if the empire disintegrate, it will be because the
time has come for the administration to pass into native hands or
because the work of the public schools abroad is stultified at
home. It was the public-schoolboy who officered the new armies, the
new civil service, the whole of a new nation organising itself for
war.
Though outward forms change little in a school so old as
Westminster, the war had brought a new spirit and a new vent for
enthusiasm: all but a handful were in the uniform of the officers'
training corps; most of the time out of school was given up to
parades and drills, shooting-practise, lectures and instruction in
map-reading; and war was the one subject that competed with the
narrower interests of the school.
Neither in 1914 nor ten years before the testing of war would an
unbiased observer have suggested that English public schools were
incapable of improvement; at both times, however, he might have
insisted that the improvement must come from the homes of the boys.
In effect, English parents try to get their sons, who are destined
for a controlling position in the life of the nation, educated
for half-a-dozen of their most critical years at a price which is
less than they would pay for an equal time at a moderate hotel.
The emoluments of a schoolmaster, as of a soldier or a clergyman,
would tempt no one who had the assurance or the contrivance to
support himself in commerce, in the civil service or at the bar;
and for that reason a fellow of All Souls is not commonly found in
the army, on the staff of a school or in holy orders. The vaunted
long holidays give a schoolmaster the leisure to keep his mind
fresh with travel; they do not supply the means. To marry on his
salary is to look forward to years of sordid economies, rewarded at
length by the grant of a house and of the right to make money as an
inn-keeper.
The establishment fees like those for tuition and board are so
insufficient that most schools are hampered for want of money
to build, to rebuild, to equip and to replenish; the sanitary
accommodation is usually inadequate and sometimes scandalous. This
cannot be remedied until parents are willing to pay more; and the
mental attitude of many parents is one of irresponsible relief at
getting rid of their sons for three-quarters of the year and, with
them, of the educational and moral problems that they have artfully
shelved until their sons reach school age. Between that which a
parent expects a boy to learn at school and that which the school
expects him to have learned at home, many unnecessary lessons are
taught and many necessary lessons are left untaught.
If, in care and training, a boy were regarded as not less important
than a race-horse, the public schools would need to ask nothing
more. An adequate payment for the responsibility of education
would attract the best scholars in the country and would enable
them to retire in affluence after ten years' service and before
their hearts were broken by routine. The schoolmaster could dictate
to the parent not less than a trainer dictates to an owner, and
in this way the gaps in public-school education might be filled;
if music, French and German were taught abroad during the school
holidays, if the rudiments of divinity and English had been
imparted at home in the first twelve years of a boy's life, if the
intellectual atmosphere in which a boy is brought up were less
fog-infested, the foundations on which the schoolmaster has to
build would be more secure.
Amateur and professional schoolmasters, temporary and permanent
civil servants, with those who were over age or unfit for the
army, met to the number of many thousands in these days on one
field of war activity which deserves a few words of commemoration.
To relieve the regular police, already depleted, in their normal
duties and to furnish an additional force to guard railway-bridges,
power-stations and similar vital parts from enemy attack, the
government authorized the enrolment of special constables; for
those who were engaged by day, a separate unit with distinctive
duties was established in the headquarters central detachment.
Divided into sections manned from the clubs and government
offices,[29] this detachment was entrusted with the task of
patrolling the grounds of Buckingham Palace nightly from 9.0 until
5.0; in addition, its members were required to report at Scotland
House at every alarm of air-raid or riot and to hold themselves
in readiness to be sent whithersoever required. Organised under a
commandant, inspectors, sub-inspectors and sergeants, arrayed in a
uniform of its own, equipped with truncheons, whistles, brassards
and torches and drilled--whenever it could be collected--in the
gardens of the Temple, the headquarters detachment watched and
waited through four years.
The spirit of the men was better than the use that was made of
them. It would be consoling to think that the mere existence
of such a force discouraged enemy agents from their work of
destruction; certainly moral influence was seldom backed by a
successful trial of strength; and, when the truncheons were
surrendered, very few had been drawn and fewer still blooded. Once
or twice, when German shops were being looted, the headquarters
detachment was sent to Limehouse or Shoreditch, there as a rule
to be mewed up in reserve at the local police-station while the
necessary work was done by the ordinary constables; once or twice
a cordon would be made round a shattered building or a fallen
aeroplane; but for the most part the detachment sat in Scotland
House from the summons until the dismissal or patrolled Buckingham
Palace gardens through the night, waiting for a conflict which
never took place. Before the end, each constable must have sat
in the guardroom for one or two hundred hours and patrolled the
grounds for one or two thousand miles; the biscuits and tobacco
that he consumed are to be reckoned by scores of pounds, the coffee
that he drank by tens of gallons; and, though some at least had
seen the sun rise more often in the summers before the war, none
ever fancied that he could see it with such weariness and loathing.
For men who were already overworked by day, the additional fatigue
was mistaken patriotism; and many dropped out before the armistice.
If, however, few members of the detachment can look back on their
service with much sense of pleasure or profit, some can at least
hold themselves indebted for new friendships.
III
The speed with which men threw themselves into unfamiliar work
during the war was only equalled by the speed with which they were
transferred from one kind of unfamiliar work to another; and to a
man who had as little knowledge of administration as of teaching
there was nothing surprising in the lightning conversion of an
amateur schoolmaster into an amateur civil servant.[30]
One serious gap in the history of the war remains to be filled by
a comprehensive account of the origin and growth of the temporary
departments. Their number is to be reckoned by the score, their
strength by scores of thousands; in function they ranged from
encouraging thrift and translating enemy newspapers to ordering
heavy artillery, commandeering ships and controlling the supply,
distribution and price of food. Some were vast expansions of a
sub-department in Foreign Office, Admiralty, Board of Trade or War
Office, others--like those of Food and Shipping--were created by a
minister out of a museum or hotel, a private telephone-exchange,
a code of instructions, a supply of official stationery and an
assortment of male and female clerks; some were set to function by
an old civil servant borrowed from another office or resuscitated
from retirement, others evolved their system by imitation or by the
light of nature. If in five years there was a heavy bill to pay
for overlapping and waste, for errors of judgement and blunders
in execution, for interdepartmental warfare and magnification of
private bishoprics, any one who saw the temporary civil service
from the inside may feel that it was yet light in relation to
the multiplicity of interests involved and to the amount of work
accomplished.
In its genesis and development, the Trade Clearing House of the
War Trade Department[31] was typical of most temporary offices.
On the outbreak of hostilities, the National Service League found
itself with premises, furniture, a staff and a number of at least
temporarily obsolete functions. For a time a special censorship
was established in connection with the Admiralty; one recruiting
officer scoured the clubs of London, another the colleges of Oxford
until a big and varied personnel had been collected; when more
hands were required, each of the original members would recruit
a friend, for whom he could vouch. As the work of the department
was concerned with every kind of export trade, no one was admitted
who could turn to private account any knowledge that came to him
in his official capacity; and, though military service was not yet
compulsory nor departmental exemption the desire of the gun-shy,
the recruiting for the office was almost entirely confined to men
who were over age or unfit.
The "department" had at first no official status; and, when a
report of its activities in censorship reached the home secretary,
he suggested that it should regularise itself if it wished to
escape heavy penalties for interfering with his majesty's mails.
At this time the Customs were thrown into difficulty and confusion
by the proclamation of the king in council, forbidding all trade
with the enemy: in the absence of records, investigation and an
intelligence department, it was impossible to say whether goods
cleared from London would ultimately reach enemy destination; and
the censors who were watching the cable and wireless operations
of Dutch and Scandinavian importers seemed the natural advisers
to approach. At this point the embryonic department, which had
risen from the ashes of the National Service League, joined with
a licensing delegation from the Customs to form the War Trade
Department and Trade Clearing House.
The formal executive authority lay with the Privy Council, but the
department was a joint administrative and advisory body, receiving
and transmitting information between War Office, Admiralty, Foreign
Office, Home Office, Scotland Yard, the new Censorships and,
indeed, any other department that would give or accept information
designed to strengthen the blockade, to check espionage at home and
the transmission of information abroad and to prevent trade with
the enemy. As the work became organised and the records increased,
there arose further duties of editing, compiling, summarising and
translating, too numerous and technical to be described here.
The staff was recruited from dons and barristers, men of letters
and stockbrokers, solicitors and merchants; but, until an
incapacitated officer was here and there drafted on light duty
to a government department, there was not one civil servant. The
independent tributes of Lord Emmott and, later, of Lord Robert
Cecil are the most convincing testimony that, even without the
guidance of those who had been trained in the civil service,
these temporary civil servants acquired its methods and imbibed
something of its tradition. Within a few days the raw newcomers
felt as if they had lived all their lives in a world of registries
and files, of minutes and memoranda, of "second-division clerks"
and messengers, as in a few days they were acclimatised to the
universal office equipment of trestle-tables and desk-telephones,
of card-indices and steel filing-cabinets, of "in" and "out" trays,
of rubber stamps and "urgent" labels. The work was done first in
congested corners of Central Buildings, Westminster, later in
Broadway House and later still in Lake Buildings, St. James' Park.
Everywhere the duties of the department expanded more quickly than
its accommodation; and, though it began with apparently sufficient
space in each new home, within a few weeks the big rooms were being
divided by temporary partitions and the small were being filled
with additional occupants.
As the civil service has undergone some slight modification in the
last hundred years, it is encouraging to find that there is also
a slight modification in the public estimate of it since Dickens
satirised the Circumlocution Office. As yet, justice has only been
done to it by ministers who recognise thankfully that it has no
rival in the world for intellectual ability, conscientiousness,
loyalty, honour and integrity. Recruited by a most searching
examination from the best brains of the Oxford and Cambridge type,
it receives fewer rewards and less payment than any other body
of men charged with equal responsibility. No "budget secret" has
ever leaked out, though it is in the power of a Treasury clerk
to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice; during the war no
man worked harder than the civil servant. Whether the "business
men" who were acclaimed and imported so eagerly contrived to run
their departments more cheaply can be answered by any tax-payer
who chooses to enquire; that they ran them more efficiently may
be doubted by any one who recalls the nightmare of confusion in
which, say, the Ministry of Munitions came to birth; that they ran
them with equal integrity may be challenged by small men who were
compelled to disclose to powerful competitors their organisation
and secret processes.
The temporary civil servant may be glad of his experience in a
public department for many reasons, of which not the least is that
it gave him some idea of the size and complexity of the government
machine; he might sympathise more with a business man's complaints
if in his correspondence with a government office the business
man were sufficiently businesslike to read what was written and
sufficiently intelligent to understand what he read.
From the first, the personnel of the War Trade Department was
remarkably varied and variedly remarkable. The chairman of the
Trade Clearing House, (Sir) Henry Penson was an Oxford economist;
the head of the Intelligence Section a translator.[32] In a
neighbouring room worked Alfred Sutro; in another, H. W. C. Davis,
of Balliol; in others again would be found a professor, a poet, a
publisher, a critic, a novelist and a historiographer royal.
Before the end of the war, the department had grown so big that few
could have known more than half of the men and women in it; during
the early days, when the machinery of the blockade had still to
be erected, a small and amazingly harmonious body, contributing
diverse experience from many countries and callings, established
a freemasonry with hard-driven men in other departments; there
was little obsolete routine; and other offices were not slow to
recognise sympathetically that an immense burden of work had to be
accomplished with few hands in a short time.
It has been said that the department changed its domicile several
times; it also changed its constitution and title. When Lord Robert
Cecil was appointed Minister of Blockade, the Trade Clearing House
severed its connection with Lord Emmott's War Trade Department and
became the War Trade Intelligence Department, under Lord Robert and
in conjunction with such blockade organisations as the Contraband
Committee and the Foreign Trade Department. At the end of the
war, its decomposing remains were buried under the Department of
Overseas Trade.
The task of preliminary organisation was not made easier by
the uncertainty into which all government offices were plunged
whenever a section of the press proclaimed that every department
was sheltering companies of potential recruits. This is not
the place to engage in a general discussion of the policy or
the morality of conscription as imposed, without reference to
the constituencies, on a country which, six years earlier, had
supported a liberal government in its contest with the House of
Lords. The constitutionalists may object that such a course made
mock of representative government; the idealist may feel that the
achievement of the voluntary system in the first eighteen months of
the war was the greatest in English history and that no victory is
worth a press-gang; and every critic who is not also a militarist
will wonder how the army, alone of the services which require to
draw from the limited common reservoir of man-power, is allowed to
say that it can fix no maximum but requires all the men that it can
get and then still more.
These are general reflections on compulsory service; and, as it
had been imposed before the summer of 1916, criticism was then
only relevant when directed to the method of its application.
If industry was kept in the same uncertainty as the government
service, it is amazing that industry was not destroyed. The first
principle of applied conscription seemed to be that there were no
principles: the system of one day was discarded the next; and no
permanent arrangement of work was secure from the risk that a man
exempted on Monday would be called up on Monday week. All men of
military age were periodically reviewed and subjected to medical
reexamination; apart from the waste of time to all concerned
and the occasional incivility of medical boards which attributed
physical defects to temperamental malice, no personal hardship was
involved at first, though, when the doctors were encouraged to pass
as fit for general service a man who had with difficulty qualified
for "sedentary duty at home," the civil service too often lost a
valuable worker in presenting to the army a confirmed invalid. The
hardship fell rather on those who were responsible for organising
the work without being sure who would be left to do it.
When once the machinery of the blockade was perfected, the chief
concern of the department was to improve and to economise in its
working. The year 1916 lacked the excitement of those earlier
months when the temporary organisations were playing a game,
picking up sides and inventing the rules as they went on; for one
amateur civil servant interest only revived with the adhesion of
America to the allies. On Easter-Eve, 1917, the department was
requested to choose a representative to join the diplomatic mission
which was being sent to Washington with Mr. Balfour at its head.
IV
The late war has been described a hundred thousand times as a
life-and-death struggle. While a soldier may engage in such a
struggle without allowing his reason to be overmastered by his
nerves, the civilian population at home, learning little and
understanding less, is always in some degree influenced by fear
in the formation of its opinions:[33] credit in excess of its
military deserts will be given to the power that joins the war on
the right side, while opprobrium in excess of its moral turpitude
will be poured on the power that joins the war on the wrong side or
omits to join it at all. Italy, which forsook the triple alliance
and ran away at Caporetto, is loaded with territorial rewards and
praised as a champion of civilisation, while Turkey, which had no
alliance to forsake and entered the war--like many another--for
what could be got out of it, is first vilified and then skinned
alive. It is the fortune of war: by throwing in its lot with the
enemy, the Turkish government embarrassed the allies and increased
their despondency; by throwing in its lot with the allies, the
Italian government relieved that embarrassment and lightened that
despondency.
The allies would have been strengthened beyond calculation
if, on the outbreak of war, the United States had upheld the
neutrality of Belgium by force of arms; or if, on the sinking of
the _Lusitania_, they had maintained by force of arms their own
prestige; or if, at any time before 1917 and on any pretext, they
had eased by military and naval assistance the strain under which
Great Britain was suffering. It is interesting and, unhappily, not
wholly academic to speculate what Great Britain would have done
or would do in the future if the government of a central or south
American republic appealed to the great powers for assistance in
repelling an unprovoked Japanese invasion; it is conceivable that
the notes in which President Wilson defended his neutrality from
1914 to 1917 would constitute a valuable precedent and model for a
British foreign secretary in defending his. The public in England
did not pause to sympathise with a people which aimed at keeping
itself free from the costly heritage of European politics, nor to
understand a country in which the interests of the Atlantic coast
were unintelligible on the coast of the Pacific and both were
different from the interests of the middle west. It did not even
pause to record or feel gratitude for the moral, financial and
charitable support of a big section of the United States.
From the day when President Wilson elected to stand aloof until
the day when he declared war, Great Britain, despairing of help,
gave herself over to sullen murmuring and periodical explosions.
That a nation would sooner swallow an indignity than sacrifice its
ideal of standing apart from all wars, that it should hope and work
for a peace in which the victor should not be able to leave the
vanquished only his eyes to weep with was unpalatable in a country
which was threatened with starvation at home and with defeat or
stalemate abroad. And no attempt was made to conceal this feeling
of distaste.
Nevertheless, no enthusiasm was too extravagant when at last
America abandoned her neutrality--and abandoned it on the
unidealistic ground of material self-protection. By the autumn
of 1916 the allies had reached their low-water mark. The summer
campaign on the Somme had cost more than half a million casualties
without breaking the German line; the Russian thrust in the
south had been repelled and the Russian armies flung back with
such violence that they required long leisure for recovery and
re-equipment, if indeed they were ever again to play an effective
part in the war; Servia, left to the undivided attention of
Austria, had been put out of action; and Roumania, entering the
war precipitously, was now almost expunged from the map of Europe;
if the French had succeeded at Verdun, they had failed everywhere
else; forgetting everything and learning nothing from the tragedy
of the Dardanelles, the British government had been persuaded
by the French to lock up another army in Salonica; the battle
of Jutland was still widely believed to have been the greatest
defeat in British naval history; Ireland was smouldering with a
half-extinguished half-revolution; and a wave of "defeatism" was
spreading through England and France until even the armies were
affected.
When the belligerents took stock before settling down to the
trench-warfare winter campaign of 1916-17, all must have felt that
the war had reached its climax. The general exhaustion was so
great that, even if hostilities had ceased, every country would
have been crippled; if hostilities continued, they would continue
on a scale of unlimited effort in which no reserve of strength
would any longer be husbanded. Set free on her eastern frontier,
Germany must mass all her resources in one last effort to break
through the western line; the allies must hold out till the attempt
had spent itself and then strike one last blow at a worn enemy;
Germany must in turn prevent the allies from holding out by cutting
their sea-communications. If unrestricted submarine warfare ranged
America on the side of the allies, it must have been felt that
either the war would be over before any effective help could be
given or else that, in the final, hopeless, death-grapple, a few
million soldiers more or less would not substantially change the
degree or character of Germany's defeat.
Many of those who meditate on the war from its climax in 1916
to its end in the Versailles conference may wonder whether they
did wisely in execrating and howling down any one who shewed the
courage to advocate peace before the sphere of war underwent its
last desperate expansion. The government stood by its policy of a
"knock-out blow"; the knock-out blow has been dealt. Is any one the
better for it? The fire-eaters who proclaimed that anything less
than the unconditional surrender of Germany would entail another
German war within a generation now proclaim with no more doubt or
qualification that Germany is preparing her revenge and has already
recovered more quickly than any other of the belligerents.[34]
The added two years of war, then, have not brought such security
as Rome enjoyed after the destruction of Carthage; the added
bitterness of those two years, on the other hand, has made more
difficult any good-will and any common effort to substitute a saner
and better system of international relationship.
Worst of all are the world-wide economic depression and political
unrest for which the protraction of the war was responsible. Had
negotiations been opened in 1916, the Russian revolution and its
consequences might well have been averted; Germany, Austria and
Turkey might have been left with stable governments and yet with
enough experience of modern warfare to discourage any taste for
further adventures; and Italy, France and Great Britain--in that
order--might have been saved from insolvency. The war, if ended at
that time, would have been ended without American help; and peace
would have been concluded without American intervention. This last
result might by now be a matter for regret if thereby the world
had been cheated of an equitable and permanent peace, such as
President Wilson sought to impose on the militarist party of the
Versailles conference; but it would perhaps have been better for
the terms to be drawn by M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George on
Carthaginian lines than for the world to be tantalised by a glimpse
of statesmanship that revealed the universal spirit and then to be
fobbed off with a compromise which embraced even the good faith of
England.
Of peace negotiations there was much talk in the last months of
1916; even the cabinet was alleged to have its peace-party; and,
though the first coalition fell for other reasons, its fall was
made possible by a vague general belief that one faction was
indifferent whether the war was won or lost and that, if the war
had to go on, it must be controlled by the faction which was most
vociferously identified with the policy of the knock-out blow.
Whether the most tentative offer was made to Germany or by Germany
has not been admitted; but informal communications were passing,
from the beginning of the war till the end, through unofficial
channels, and it would interest any one who is dissatisfied with
the present settlement to know whether the German government
refused or would have refused a peace in which Belgium, northern
France and Russia were evacuated and repaired, in which the authors
of all atrocities were surrendered for trial and in which there
were neither territorial acquisitions nor indemnities on either
side. For more than this the allies were not entitled to ask, when
the gamble of war was at its height; with less than this they could
not be content.
Returned to power for a second term of office in the November
elections of 1916, President Wilson made a final attempt to open
peace negotiations; but the unrestricted submarine campaign
frustrated his efforts and impelled him reluctantly to issue a
declaration of war: if the allies were defeated, as now seemed
more than possible, America lay exposed to any power with a fleet
in being. The United States engaged in the war independently and
without entering into alliance with any other power; but the
closest cooperation was expected and invited. To assist this
cooperation, the Foreign Office proposed that a representative
mission should be sent to Washington; and, when the United States
government received the proposal favourably, the mission was
assembled to discuss war-measures with the government of a country
at which the British public and press had been scoffing on the
ground that it was "too proud to fight."