Part 14

A few days ago, I accompanied a woman official distributing some leaflets on behalf of a Government department, in some visits to families living in a block of model dwellings somewhere in South London. We called on nine families. In every single case the man of the family had gone, or was expecting to go, to the war; except in one case, where a man who, out of pure patriotism and at great personal difficulty had joined the Volunteer Reserve at the outbreak of war, had strained his heart in trench-digging and was now medically unfit, to his own bitter disappointment. There was some grumbling in the case of one young wife that her husband should be forced to go before the single men whom she knew; but in the main the temper that showed itself bore witness both to the feeling and the intelligence that our people are bringing to bear on the war. One woman said her husband was a sergeant in a well-known regiment. He thought the world of his men, and whenever one was killed, he must be at the burying. "He can't bear, you know"--she added shyly--"they should feel alone." She had three brothers-in-law "out"--one recently killed. One was an ambulance driver under the R.A.M.C. He had five small children, but had volunteered. "He doesn't say much about the war, except that 'Tommies are wonderful. They never complain.'" She notices a change in his character. He was always good to his wife and children--"but now he's splendid!" The brother of another woman had been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the country and the people. When war broke out he "felt he must fight for them." He came home at once and enlisted. Another brother had been a stoker on a war-ship at the Dardanelles, and was in the famous landing of April 25. Bullets "thick and fast like hailstorm. Terrible times collecting the dead! Her brother had worked hard forming burial parties. Was now probably going to the Tigris. Wrote jolly letters!"

Then there was the little woman born and bred in the Army, with all the pride of the Army--a familiar type. Husband a sergeant in the Guards--was gymnastic instructor at a northern town--and need not have gone to the war, but felt "as a professional soldier" he ought to go. Three brothers in the Army--one a little drummer-boy of sixteen, badly wounded in the retreat from Mons. Her sailor brother had died--probably from exposure, in the North Sea. The most cheerful, plucky little creature! "We are Army people, and must expect to fight."

Well--you say you "would like America to visualise the effort, the self-sacrifice of the English men and women who are determined to see this war through." There was, I thought, a surprising amount of cheerful effort, of understanding self-sacrifice in those nine homes, where my companion's friendly talk drew out the family facts without difficulty. And I am convinced that if I had spent days instead of hours in following her through the remaining tenements in these huge and populous blocks the result would have been practically the same. The nation is behind the war, and behind the Government--solidly determined to win this war, and build a new world after it.

As to the work of our women, I have described something of it in the munitions area, and if this letter were not already too long, I should like to dwell on much else--the army of maidens, who, as V.A.D.'s (members of Voluntary Aid Detachments), trained by the Red Cross, have come trooping from England's most luxurious or comfortable homes, and are doing invaluable work in hundreds of hospitals; to begin with, the most menial scrubbing and dish-washing, and by now the more ambitious and honourable--but not more indispensable--tasks of nursing itself. In this second year of the war, the first army of V.A.D.'s, now promoted, has everywhere been succeeded by a fresh levy, aglow with the same eagerness and the same devotion as the first. Or I could dwell on the women's hospitals--especially the remarkable hospital in Endell Street, entirely officered by women; where some hundreds of male patients accept the surgical and medical care of women doctors, and adapt themselves to the light and easy discipline maintained by the women of the staff, with entire confidence and grateful good-will. To see a woman dentist at work on a soldier's mouth, and a woman quartermaster presiding over her stores, and managing, besides, everything pertaining to the lighting, heating, and draining of the hospital, is one more sign of these changed and changing times. The work done by the Scottish Women's Hospital in Serbia will rank as one of the noblest among the minor episodes of the war. The magnificent work of British nurses, everywhere, I have already spoken of. And everywhere, too, among the camps in England and abroad, behind the fighting lines, or at the great railway-stations here or in France, through which the troops pass backwards and forwards, hundreds of women have been doing ardent yet disciplined service--giving long hours in crowded canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts to just those small kindly offices, which bring home to the British soldier, more effectively than many things more ambitious, what the British nation feels towards him. The war has put an end, so far as the richer class is concerned, to the busy idleness and all the costly make-believes of peace. No one gives "dinner-parties" in the old sense any more; the very word "reception" is dying out. The high wages that munition-work has brought to the women of the working class, show themselves, no doubt, in some foolish dressing. "You should see the hats round here on a Saturday!" said the Manager of a Midland factory. But I am bound to say he spoke of it proudly. The hats were for him a testimony to the wages paid by his firm; and he would probably have argued, on the girls' part, that after the long hours and hard work of the week, the hats were a perfectly legitimate "fling," and human nature must out. Certainly the children of the workers are better fed and better clothed, which speaks so far well for the mothers; and recent Government inquiries seem to show that in spite of universal employment, and high wages, the drunkenness of the United Kingdom as a whole is markedly less, while at the same time--uncomfortable paradox!--the amount of alcohol consumed is greater. One hears stories of extravagance among those who have been making "war-profits," but they are less common this year than last; and as to my own experience, all my friends are wearing their old clothes, and the West End dressmakers, poor things, in view of a large section of the public which regards it as a crime "to buy anything new" are either shutting down till better days, or doing a greatly restricted business. Taxation has grown much heavier, and will be more and more severely felt. Yet very few grumble, and there is a general and determined cutting down of the trappings and appendages of life, which is to the good of us all.

Undoubtedly, there is a very warm and wide-spread feeling among us that in this war the women of the nation have done uncommonly well! You will remember a similar stir of grateful recognition in America after your War of Secession, connected with the part played in the nursing and sanitation of the war by the women of the Northern States. The feeling here may well have an important social and political influence when the war is over; especially among the middle and upper classes. It may be counter-balanced to some extent in the industrial class, by the disturbance and anxiety caused in many trades, but especially in the engineering trades, by that great invasion of women I have tried to describe. But that the war will leave some deep mark on that long evolution of the share of women in our public life, which began in the teeming middle years of the last century, is, I think, certain.

May 2nd.--So I come to the end of the task you set me!--with what gaps and omissions to look back upon, no one knows so well as myself. This letter starts on its way to you at a critical moment for your great country, when the issue between the United States and Germany is still unsettled. What will happen? Will Germany give way? If not, what sort of relations will shape themselves, and how quickly, between the Central Empires and America? To express myself on this great matter is no part of my task; although no English man or woman but will watch its development with a deep and passionate interest. What may be best for you, we cannot tell; the military and political bearings of a breach between the United States and Germany on our own fortunes are by no means clear to us. But what we do want, in any case, is the sympathy, the moral support and co-operation of your people. We have to thank you for a thousand generosities to our wounded; we bless you--as comrades with you in that old Christendom which even this war shall not destroy--for what you have done in Belgium--but we want you to understand the heart of England in this war, and not to be led away by the superficial difficulties and disputes that no great and free nation escapes in time of crisis. Sympathy with France--France, the invaded, the heroic--is easy for America--for us all. She is the great tragic figure of the war--the whole world does her homage. We are not invaded--and so less tragic, less appealing. But we are fighting the fight which is the fight of all freemen everywhere--against the wantonness of military power, against the spirit that tears up treaties and makes peaceful agreement between nations impossible--against a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings our civilisation to shame. We have a right to your sympathy--you who are the heirs of Washington and Lincoln, the trustees of liberty in the New World as we, with France, are in the Old. You are concerned--you must be concerned--in the triumph of the ideals of ordered freedom and humane justice over the ideals of unbridled force and ruthless cruelty, as they have been revealed in this war, to the horror of mankind. The nation that can never, to all time, wash from its hands the guilt of the Belgium crime, the blood of the Lusitania victims, of the massacres of Louvain and Dinant, of Aerschot and Termonde, may some day deserve our pity. To-day it has to be met and conquered by a will stronger than its own, in the interests of civilisation itself.

This last week, at the close of which I am despatching this final letter, has been a sombre week for England. It has seen the squalid Irish rising, with its seven days' orgy of fire and bloodshed in Dublin; it has seen the surrender at Kut of General Townshend and his starving men; it has seen also a strong demonstration in Parliament of discontent with certain phases of the conduct of the war. And yet, how shall I convey to you the paradox that we in England--our soldiers at the front, and instructed opinion at home--have never been so certain of ultimate victory as we now are? It is the big facts that matter: the steady growth of British resources, in men and munitions, toward a maximum which we--and Russia--are only approaching, while that of the Central Empires is past; the deepening unity of an Empire which is being forged anew by danger and trial, and by the spirit of its sons all over the world--a unity against which the Irish outrage, paid for by German money, disavowed by all that is truly Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist, and instantly effaced, as a mere demonstration, by the gallantry at the same moment of Irish soldiers in the battle-line--lifts its treacherous hand in vain; the increasing and terrible pressure of the British blockade of Germany, equivalent, as some one has lately said, every twenty-four hours that it is maintained, to a successful action in the field; the magnificent resistance of an indomitable France; the mounting strength of a reorganised Russia. This island-state--let me repeat it with emphasis--was not prepared for, and had no expectation of a Continental war, such as we are now fighting. The fact cries aloud from the records of the struggle; it will command the ear of history; and it acquits us for ever from the guilt of the vast catastrophe. But Great Britain has no choice now but to fight to the end--and win. She knows it, and those who disparage her are living in a blind world. As to the difficulty of the task--as to our own failures and mistakes in learning how to achieve it--we have probably fewer illusions than those who criticise us. But we shall do it--or perish.

* * * * *

May 5th.--Since the preceding lines were written, the "Military Service Bill" bringing to the Colours "every British male subject" between the ages of 18 and 41, except when legally exempted, has passed the House of Commons by an overwhelming majority, and will be law immediately. And the Prime Minister informed Parliament three days ago, that "the total naval and military effort of the Empire since the beginning of the war exceeds five million men."

With these two facts, these Letters may fitly close. Those who know England best, her history, and the temperament of her people, will best appreciate what they mean.

VII

AN EPILOGUE

August 16, 1916.

It is now three months since I finished the six preceding Letters, written in response to an urgent call from America; nor did I then anticipate any renewal of my work. But while a French translation of the six Letters has been passing through the Press, an appeal has been made to me from France to add an Epilogue, or supplementary Letter, briefly recapitulating the outstanding facts or events which in those three months have marked the British share in the war, and played their part in the immense transformation of the general outlook which has taken place during those months. Not an easy task! One thinks first of one's own inadequacy; and then remembers, as before, that one is a unit in a nation under orders. I must therefore do what I can. And perhaps other readers, also, of this little book, in America and England, as they look back over the ever-changing scene of the war, will not find this renewed attempt to summarise Britain's part in it as it has developed up to the present date (August 16, 1916) unwelcome. The outstanding facts of the last three months, as I see them, are, for Great Britain:--

1. The immense increase in the output of British Munitions of War;

2. The Naval Battle of Jutland;

3. The Allied offensive on the Somme.

The first and third of these events are, of course, so far as the latter concerns Great Britain, the natural and logical outcome of that "England's Effort" of which I tried--how imperfectly!--to give a connected account three months ago.

At that time the ever-mounting British effort, though it had reached colossal dimensions, though everybody aware of it was full of a steadily growing confidence as to its final result, had still to be tested by those greater actions to which it was meant to lead. After the local failures at the Dardanelles, and in Mesopotamia, Great Britain was again, for a time, everywhere on the defensive, though it was a very vigorous and active defensive; and the magnificent stand made by the French at Verdun was not only covering France herself with glory, and kindling the hearts of all who love her throughout the world, but under its shield the new armies of Great Britain were still being steadily perfected, and wonderfully armed; time was being given to Russia for reorganisation and re-equipment, and time was all she wanted; while Germany, vainly dashing her strength in men and guns against the heights of Verdun, in the hope of provoking her enemies on the Western front to a premature offensive, doomed to exhaustion before it had achieved its end, was met by the iron resolve of both the French and British Governments, advised by the French and British Commanders in the field, to begin that offensive only at their own time and place, when the initiative was theirs, and everything was ready.

But the scene has greatly altered. Let me take Munitions first. In February, it will be remembered by those who have read the preceding Letters, I was a visitor, by the kindness of the Ministry of Munitions, then in Mr. Lloyd George's hands, to a portion of the munitions field--in the Midlands, on the Tyne, and on the Clyde. At that moment, Great Britain, as far as armament was concerned, was in the mid-stream of a gigantic movement which had begun in the summer of 1915, set going by the kindling energy of Mr. Lloyd George, and seconded by the roused strength of a nation which was not the industrial pioneer of the whole modern world for nothing, however keenly others, during the last half-century, have pressed upon--or in some regions passed--her. Everywhere I found new workshops already filled with workers, a large proportion of them women, already turning out a mass of shell which would have seemed incredible to soldiers and civilians alike during the first months of the war; while the tale of howitzers, trench-mortars, machine-guns, and the rest, was running up week by week, in the vast extensions already added to the other works. But everywhere, too, I saw huge, empty workshops, waiting for their machines, or just setting them up; and everywhere the air was full of rumours of the new industrial forces--above all, of the armies of women--that were to be brought to bear. New towns were being built for them; their workplaces and their tools were being got ready for them, as in that vast filling factory--or rather town--on the Clyde which I described in my third Letter. But in many quarters they were not yet there; only one heard, as it were, the tramp of their advancing feet.

But to-day! Those great empty workshops that I saw in February, in the making, or the furnishing, are now full of workers and machines; and thousands like them all over the country. Last night (Aug. 15), the new Minister of Munitions, Mr. Montagu, who, a few weeks ago, succeeded Mr. Lloyd George, now Minister for War, rendered an account of his department up to date, which amazed even the House of Commons, and will surely stir the minds of men throughout the British Empire with a just and reasonable pride. The "effete" and "degenerate" nation has roused herself indeed!

Here is the bare résumé of the Minister's statement:--

Ammunition.--The British output of ammunition at the beginning of the war was intended for an army of 200,000 men.

Naturally, the output rose steadily throughout the first year of war.

But--the same output which in 1914-15 took 12 months to produce could now be produced--

As to 18-pounder ammunition, in 3 weeks " Field howitzer " in 2 weeks " Medium gun and howitzer ammunition, in 11 days " Heavy shell, in 4 days

We are sending over to France every week as much as the whole pre-war stock of land service ammunition in the country.

As to guns, I would ask my readers to turn back to the second and third chapters in this little book, which show something of the human side and the daily detail of this great business, and then to look at this summary:--