VOLUNTEERS AND PATRIOTS
I hold a strong brief for the English: For the English at home,
restrained, earnest, determined and unassuming; for the English in the
field, equally all of these things.
The British Army has borne attacks at La Bassée and Ypres, positions
so strategically difficult to hold that the Germans have concentrated
their assaults at these points. It has borne the horrors of the
retreat from Mons, when what the Kaiser called "General French's
contemptible little army" was forced back by oncoming hosts of many
times its number. It has fought, as the English will always fight,
with unequalled heroism but without heroics.
To-day, after many months of war, the British Army in the field is as
smart, in a military sense, as tidy--if it will forgive me the
word--as well ordered, as efficiently cared for, as the German Army
was in the beginning. Partly this is due to its splendid equipment.
Mostly it is due to that fetish of the British soldier wherever he may
be--personal neatness.
Behind the lines he is jaunty, cheerful, smart beyond belief. He hates
the trenches--not because they are dangerous or monotonous but because
it is difficult to take a bath in them. He is four days in the
trenches and four days out. On his days out he drills and marches, to
get back into condition after the forced inaction of the trenches. And
he gets his hair trimmed.
There is something about the appearance of the British soldier in the
field that got me by the throat. Perhaps because they are, in a sense,
my own people, speaking my tongue, looking at things from a view-point
that I could understand. That partly. But it was more than that.
These men and boys are volunteers, the very flower of England. They
march along the roads, heads well up, eyes ahead, thousands of them.
What a tragedy for the country that gives them up! Who will take their
places?--these splendid Scots with their picturesque kilts, their
bare, muscular knees, their great shoulders; the cheery Irish,
swaggering a bit and with a twinkle in their blue eyes; these tall
young English boys, showing race in every line; these dashing
Canadians, so impressive that their every appearance on a London
street was certain to set the crowds to cheering.
I saw them in London, and later on I saw them at the front. Still
later I saw them again, prostrate on the ground, in hospital trains,
on hospital ships. I saw mounds, too, marked with wooden crosses.
Volunteers and patriots! A race incapable of a mean thing, incapable
of a cruelty. A race of sportsmen, playing this horrible game of war
fairly, almost too honestly. A race, not of diplomats, but of
gentlemen.
"You will always be fools," said a captured German naval officer to
his English captors, "and we shall never be gentlemen!"
But they are not fools. It is that attitude toward the English that
may defeat Germany in the end.
Every man in the British Army to-day has counted the cost. He is there
because he elected to be there. He is going to stay by until the thing
is done, or he is. He says very little about it. He is uncomfortable
if any one else says anything about it. He is rather matter of fact,
indeed, and nonchalant as long as things are being done fairly. But
there is nothing calm about his attitude when his opponent hits below
the belt. It was a sense of fair play, as well as humanity, that made
England rise to the call of Belgium. It is England's sense of fair
play that makes her soldiers and sailors go white with fury at the
drowning of women and children and noncombatants; at the unprincipled
employment of such trickery in war as the use of asphyxiating gases,
or at the insulting and ill-treating of those of their army who have
been captured by the Germans. It is at the English, not at the French
or the Belgians, that Germany is striking in this war. Her whole
attitude shows it. British statesmen knew this from the beginning, but
the people were slow to believe it. But escaped prisoners have told
that they were discriminated against. I have talked with a British
officer who made a sensational escape from a German prison camp.
German soldiers have called across to the French trenches that it was
the English they were after.
In his official order to his troops to advance, the German Emperor
voiced the general sentiment.
"It is my Royal and Imperial Command that you concentrate your
energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and
that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my
soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and walk over
General French's contemptible little army.
"Headquarters,
"Aix-la-Chapelle, August 19th, 1914."
In the name of the dignity of great nations, compare that order with
Lord Kitchener's instructions to his troops, given at the same time.
"You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French
comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform
a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience.
Remember that the honour of the British Army depends on your
individual conduct. It will be your duty not only to set an example
of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire, but also to
maintain the most friendly relations with those whom you are helping
in this struggle.
"The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part,
take place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no
better service than in showing yourselves in France and Belgium in
the true character of a British soldier.
"Be invariably courteous, considerate, and kind. Never do anything
likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting
as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a welcome and to be
trusted; your conduct will justify that welcome and that trust. Your
duty cannot be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly
on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may
find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist
both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect
courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.
"Do your duty bravely,
"Fear God,
"Honour the King.
"(Signed), KITCHENER, Field Marshal,"