Part 3

All America is vastly indebted to Mrs. Ward for her triumphant success in proving that England has done her best and for making this great story so clear.

In this introduction, too hastily prepared for want of time, which is really little better than a synopsis of the book itself, I have not hesitated to use her own language from beginning to end, as the clearest by which to express and condense her narrative, and with occasional indications by quotation marks.

I still believe absolutely that nine-tenths of my countrymen are in earnest sympathy with the Allies and are confident of their final and complete success.

JOSEPH H. CHOATE.

NEW YORK, May 19th, 1916.

Author's Foreword

This little book was the outcome of an urgent call from America sent by various friends whose whole sympathy is with the Allies. I have done my best to meet it, in four strenuous months, during which the British Government has given me every possible facility. But such work has to be done rapidly, and despatched rapidly. I beg my friends, and England's friends, beyond the Atlantic, to excuse its defects. I can honestly say, however, that I have done my best to get at the facts, and that everything which is here put forward rests upon independent enquiry, so far as the limit of time allowed.

The title has caused me much trouble! Will any son of gallant Scotland, or loyalist Ireland, or of those great Dominions, whose share in the war has knit them closer than ever to the Mother Country--should he come across this little book--forgive me that I have finally chosen "England" to stand for us all? "Gott strafe England!" has been the German cry of hate. I have given what I conceive to be "England's" reply. "Britain"--"Great Britain" are words that for all their profound political significance have still to be steeped a good deal longer in life and literature before they stir the same fibres in us as the old national names. And "England" as the seat of British Government has, it is admitted, a representative and inclusive force. Perhaps my real reason is still simpler. Let any one try the alternatives which suggest themselves, and see how they roll--or do not roll--from the tongue. He or she will, I think, soon be reconciled to "England's Effort"!

MARY A. WARD.

* * * * *

NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

There has been added to this edition an epilogue in the shape of a seventh letter, bringing the story up to August 16, including munitions, finance, the battle of Jutland, and the Somme offensive.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Spring-time in the North Sea--Snow on a British Battleship Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Marines drilling on the quarterdeck of a British Battleship 24

Fifteen-inch guns on a British Battleship 25

A forest of shells in a corner of one of England's great shell filling factories 86

A light railway bringing up ammunition 87

One of the wards of a base hospital, visited by the King 132

A Howitzer in the act of firing 133

ENGLAND'S EFFORT

Dear H.

Your letter has found me in the midst of work quite unconnected with this hideous war in which for the last eighteen months we in England have lived and moved and had our being. My literary profession, indeed, has been to me, as to others, since August 4th, 1914, something to be interposed for a short time, day by day, between a mind tormented and obsessed by the spectacle of war and the terrible reality it could not otherwise forget. To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a while in memories of life as it was long, long before the war--there was refreshment and renewal in that! Once--last spring--I tried to base a novel on a striking war incident which had come my way. Impossible! The zest and pleasure which for any story-teller goes with the first shaping of a story died away at the very beginning. For the day's respite had gone. The little "wind-warm" space had disappeared. Life and thought were all given up, without mercy or relief, to the fever and nightmare of the war. I fell back upon my early recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago--and it was like rain in the desert. So that, in the course of months it had become a habit with me never to write about the war; and outside the hours of writing to think and talk of nothing else.

But your letter suddenly roused in me a desire to write about the war. It was partly I think because what you wrote summed up and drove home other criticisms and appeals of the same kind. I had been putting them mechanically aside as not having any special reference to me; but in reality they had haunted me. And now you make a personal appeal. You say that England at the present moment is misunderstood, and even hardly judged in America, and that even those great newspapers of yours that are most friendly to the Allies are often melancholy reading for those with English sympathies. Our mistakes--real and supposed--loom so large. We are thought to be not taking the war seriously--even now. Drunkenness, strikes, difficulties in recruiting the new armies, the losses of the Dardanelles expedition, the failure to save Serbia and Montenegro, tales of luxurious expenditure in the private life of rich and poor, and of waste or incompetence in military administration--these are made much of, even by our friends, who grieve, while our enemies mock. You say the French case has been on the whole much better presented in America than the English case; and you compare the international situation with those months in 1863 when it was necessary for the Lincoln Government to make strenuous efforts to influence and affect English opinion, which in the case of our upper classes and too many of our leading men was unfavourable or sceptical towards the North. You who know something of the vastness of the English effort--you urge upon me that English writers whose work and names are familiar to the American public are bound to speak for their country, bound to try and make Americans feel what we here feel through every nerve--that cumulative force of a great nation, which has been slow to rouse, and is now immovably--irrevocably--set upon its purpose. "Tell me," you say in effect, "what in your belief is the real spirit of your people--of your men in the field and at sea, of your workmen and employers at home, your women, your factory workers, your soldiers' wives, your women of the richer and educated classes, your landowners and politicians. Are you yet fully awake--yet fully in earnest, in this crisis of England's fate? 'Weary Titan' that she is, with her age-long history behind her, and her vast responsibilities by sea and land, is she shouldering her load in this incredible war, as she must shoulder it; as her friends--the friends of liberty throughout the world--pray that she may shoulder it?"

Yes!--I must answer your questions--to the best of my power. I am no practised journalist--the days of my last articles for The Pall Mall under the "John Morley" of those days are thirty odd years behind me! But I have some qualifications. Ever since--more than half a century ago--I paid my first childish visit to the House of Commons, and heard Mr. Roebuck, the "Tear 'em" of Punch's cartoon, make his violent appeal to the English Government to recognise the belligerency of the South, it would be almost true to say that politics and affairs have been no less interesting to me than literature; and next to English politics, American politics and American opinion; partly because of my early association with men like W.E. Forster, stanch believers, even when Gladstone and John Russell wavered, in the greatness of the American future and the justice of the Northern cause--and partly because of the warm and deep impression left upon me and mine by your successive Ambassadors in London, by Mr. Lowell above all, by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John Hays, the Choates and the Bayards--no less than by the many intimate friendships with Americans from different worlds which my books have brought me since 1888. During the last thirty years, also, I have had many friends--and some kinsmen--among the leaders of English politics, and in both political parties. At the present moment my only son is a member of the English House of Commons, and a soldier fighting in the war. All my younger kinsfolk are fighting; the sons of all my friends are fighting; and their daughters are nursing as members of Voluntary Aid Detachments--(marvellous what the girl V.A.D.'s, as England affectionately calls them, have done since the beginning of the war!)--or working week-end shifts to relieve munition workers, or replacing men of military age in the public offices and banks. I live in one of the Home Counties, within five miles of one of the military camps. The small towns near us are crowded with soldiers; the roads are full of marching infantry, of artillery-trains and supply-wagons. Our village has sent practically all its able-bodied men of military age to the front; the few that remain are "attested" and only waiting to be called up. A great movement, in which this household is engaged, is now beginning to put women on the land, and so replace the agricultural labourers who have gone either into the armies or the munition factories. And meanwhile all the elderly men and women of the countryside are sitting on War Committees, or working for the Red Cross. Our lives are penetrated by the war; our thoughts are never free from it.

But in trying to answer your questions I have gone far beyond my own normal experience. I asked the English Government to give me some special opportunities of seeing what Great Britain is doing in the war, and in matters connected with the war, and they have given them ungrudgingly. I have been allowed to go, through the snow-storms of this bitter winter, to the far north and visit the Fleet, in those distant waters where it keeps guard night and day over England. I have spent some weeks in the Midlands and the north watching the vast new activity of the Ministry of Munitions throughout the country; and finally in a motor tour of some five hundred miles through the zone of the English armies in France, I have been a spectator not only of that marvellous organisation in northwestern France, of supplies, reinforcements, training camps and hospitals, which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her fighting line, but I have been--on the first of two days--within less than a mile of the fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a Flemish hill--with a gas helmet close at hand! I have been able to watch a German counter attack, after a successful English advance, and have seen the guns flashing from the English lines, and the shell-bursts on the German trenches along the Messines ridge; while in the far distance, a black and jagged ghost, the tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fitfully through the mists--bearing mute witness before God and man.

For a woman--a marvellous experience! I hope later on in these letters to describe some of its details, and some of the thoughts awakened by them in a woman's mind. But let me here keep to the main point raised by your question--the effort of England. During these two months of strenuous looking and thinking, of conversation with soldiers and sailors and munition workers, of long days spent in the great supply bases across the Channel, or of motoring through the snowy roads of Normandy and Picardy, I have naturally realised that effort far more vividly than ever before. It seems to me--it must seem to any one who has seriously attempted to gauge it--amazing, colossal. "What country has ever raised over sixty per cent of its total recruitable strength, for service beyond the seas in a few months?" asks one of our younger historians; and that a country not invaded, protected by the sea, and by a supreme fleet; a country, moreover, without any form of compulsory military service, in which soldiering and the soldier have been rather unpopular than popular, a country in love with peace, and with no intention or expectation of going to war with any one?