Part 4

For there we come to the root of everything--the unpreparedness of England--and what it meant. It meant simply that as a nation we never wished for war with Germany, and, as a nation, we never expected it. Our Governments, of course, contained men who saw more or less plainly the dangers ahead, and had spent years of effort in trying to avoid them. On several occasions, during the last twenty years, as we all remember, a wave of sudden anxiety as to German aims and intentions had spread through the thinking portion of the nation--in connection with South Africa, with Morocco, with the Balkans. But it had always died away again. We know now that Germany was not yet ready! Meanwhile fruitless efforts were made by successive English Governments to limit armaments, to promote arbitration, and extend the scope of the Hague Tribunal. In vain. Germany would have none of them. Year by year, in a world of peace her battle-navy grew. "For what can it be intended but to attack England?" said the alarmist. But how few of us believed them! Our Tariff Reformers protested against the encroachments of German trade; but, outside a handful of persons who seemed to most of us fanatics, the emphasis lay always on care for our own people, and not on hostility to Germany. Those who warned us passionately that Germany meant to provoke a struggle, that the struggle must come, were very little heeded. Nobody slept the worse at night for their harangues. Lord Roberts's agitation for National Service, based on the portentous growth of the German Army and Navy, made comparatively little way. I speak from personal experience of a large Parliamentary division. "Did you foresee it?" I said to one of the ablest and most rising men in the Navy a fortnight ago. He thought a little. "I always felt there might be a clash over some colonial question--a quarrel about black men. But a war between the white nations over a European question--that Germany would force such a war--no, that I never believed!" Nor did any of us--except those few--those very few persons, who Cassandra-like, saw the coming horror plainly, and spoke to a deaf country.

"There was no hatred of Germany in this country"--I quote a Cabinet Minister. "Even in those parts of the country which had most reason to feel the trade rivalry of Germany, there was no thought of war, no wish for war!" It came upon England like one of those sudden spates through mountain clefts in spring, that fall with havoc on the plains beneath. After such days of wrestling for European peace as have left their indelible mark upon every member of the English Cabinet which declared war on August 4th, 1914, we fought because we must, because, in Luther's words, we "could no other."

What is the proof of this--the proof which history will accept as final--against the vain and lying pleas of Germany?

Nothing less than the whole history of the past eighteen months!--beginning with that initial lack of realisation, and those harassing difficulties of organisation with which we are now so often and so ignorantly reproached. At the word "Belgium" on August 4th, practically the whole English nation fell into line. We felt no doubts--we knew what we had to do. But the problem was how to do it. Outside the Navy and the Expeditionary Force, both of them ready to the last gun and button, we had neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a Continental war, and we knew it. The fact is more than our justification--it is our glory. If we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane men have behaved as we did in the years before the war?--233,000 men on active service--and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany's millions!--with arsenals and equipment to match. Is it any wonder that the country--our untouched, uninvaded country--safe as it believed itself to be under the protection of its invincible Navy, was, in some sections of our population at any rate, slow to realise the enormous task to which--for the faith of treaties' sake, for self-defence's sake--it was committed?

And yet--was it after all so slow? The day after war was declared the Prime Minister asked Parliament to authorise the addition of half a million of men to the Army, and a first war credit of a hundred millions of money (five hundred million dollars). The first hundred thousand men came rolling up into the great military centres within a few days. By September 4th nearly three hundred thousand fresh men had enlisted--by Christmas half a million. By May, a million men had been added to the new Armies; by September, 1915, Sir John French alone had under his command close on a million men on the lines in France and Flanders, and in December, 1915, the addition of another million men to the Army was voted by Parliament, bringing up the British military strength to approximately four millions, excluding Colonials. And what of the Dominions? By November, 1915, Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces more than equal to the whole of that original Expeditionary Force, that "contemptible little army" which, broken and strained as it was by the sheer weight and fierceness of the German advance, yet held the gates of the Channel till England could fling her fresh troops into the field, and France--admirable France!--had recovered from the first onslaught of her terrible and ruthless enemy.

In one of my later letters I hope to give some particulars of this first rush of men, gathered from those who witnessed it and took part in it. One remarkable point in connection with it is that those districts most heavily employed in munition-making and coal-mining, the two industries absolutely indispensable to our Army and Navy, have also sent the largest supply of men to the fighting line--take, for instance, Newcastle and the Clyde. There have been anxious episodes, of course, in the great development. Was your own vast levy in the Civil War without them? And for the last half million men, we have had to resort, as Lincoln resorted, to a modified form of compulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first camp and billeting organization of the enormous forces raised. But when all is said, did we not, in the language of a French observer "improvise the impossible"?--and have we not good reason to be proud?--not with any foolish vainglory, but with the sober and resolute pride of a great nation, conscious of its past, determined to correct its mistakes, and looking open-eyed and fearless towards the future?

Then as to munitions: in many ways, as you will perhaps say, and as I agree, a tragic story. If we had possessed last spring the ammunition--both for ourselves and our allies we now possess, the war would have gone differently. Drunkenness, trade-union difficulties, a small--very small--revolutionary element among our work people--all these have made trouble. But the real cause of our shortage lay in the fact that no one, outside Germany, realised till far into the war, what the ammunition needs--the absolutely unprecedented needs--of this struggle were going to be. It was the second Battle of Ypres at the end of April last year which burnt them into the English mind. We paid for the grim knowledge in thousands of our noblest lives. But since then?

In a later letter I propose to draw some picture in detail of the really marvellous movement which since last July, under the impulse given by Mr. Lloyd George, has covered England with new munition factories and added enormously to the producing power of the old and famous firms, has drawn in an army of women--now reckoned at something over a quarter of a million--and is at this moment not only providing amply for our own armies, but is helping those of the Allies against those final days of settlement with Germany which we believe to be now steadily approaching. American industry and enterprise have helped us substantially in this field of munitions. We are gratefully conscious of it. But England is now fast overtaking her own needs.

More of this presently. Meanwhile to the military and equipment effort of the country, you have to add the financial effort--something like $7,500,000,000, already expended on the war; the organising effort, exemplified in the wonderful "back of the army" in France, which I hope to describe to you; and the vast hospital system, with all its scientific adjuncts, and its constantly advancing efficiency.

And at the foundation of it all--the human and personal effort!--the lives given for England, the blood so generously shed for her, the homes that have sacrificed their all, our "golden lads" from all quarters and classes, whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien dust that "is for ever England," since they sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who mourn the death or the wreck of the splendid sons they reared; our widowed wives and fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel which only very slowly our people have come to feel as in very deed their own. At first we thought most often and most vividly of Belgium, of the broken treaty, and of France, so wantonly attacked, whose people no English man or woman could ever have looked in the face again, had we forsaken her. Then came the hammer blows that forged our will--Louvain, Aerschot, Rheims, the air-raids on our defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our women and children, the Bryce report, the Lusitania, the execution of Edith Cavell--the whole stupefying revelation of the German hatred and greed towards this country, and of the qualities latent in the German character. Now we know--that it is they, or we--since they willed it so. And this old, illogical, unready country is only just arriving at its full strength, only just fully conscious of the sternness of its own resolve, only just putting out its full powers, as the German power is weakening, and the omens are changing--both in East and West.

III

No!--the effort of England during the past eighteen months in spite of all temporary ebbs and difficulties, in spite of that chorus of self-blame in which the English nation delights, has been one of the great things in the history of our country. We have "improvised the impossible" in every direction--but one.

In one point, indeed, there has been no improvisation. Nothing was trusted to chance. What is it that alone has secured us the time to make the effort we have made?

It is now about a month ago that, by permission of the Admiralty, I found myself driving towards a certain pier in a harbour opening on the North Sea. The Commodore of a Cruiser Squadron was to send his boat for me, and I was to lunch with him on board his Flag-ship. I duly passed the distrustful sentry on the road leading to the pier, arrived at the pier-head and descended from the motor which had brought me. The morning was mistily sunny, and the pier strangely deserted. Where was the boat? Where was my friend who had hoped to come for me himself? No signs of either. The few old sailors employed about the pier looked at me in astonishment, and shook their heads when I inquired. Commodore ----'s boat was not there; no boat had been in that morning from the ships. I took the Commodore's letter from my hand-bag, to assure myself I had not been dreaming, and reread it in perplexity. No dates could be clearer--no directions more precise. Suddenly I perceive one tall naval officer on the pier. "Can you help me, sir?" And I hand him the Commodore's letter. He looks at me--and at the letter. His face twinkles with repressed laughter; and I laugh, too, beginning to understand. "Very sorry," says the charming young man, "but I think I can assure you there will be no boat, and it is no use your waiting. Commodore ---- went to sea last night."

I thanked him, and we laughed together. Then I walked up the pier a little way, seeing a movement in the mist. A sailor came up to me. "They all went to sea last night," he said in my ear--"and there are the slow ones coming back!" And out of the mist came the black shapes of war-ships, moving majestically up the harbour--one might have fancied, with a kind of injured dignity, because their unreasonable fellows had been faster and had gone farther afield than they.

I walked back to my motor, disappointed indeed, and yet exulting. It was good to realise personally through this small incident, the mobility and ever-readiness of the Fleet--the absolute insignificance--non-existence even--of any civilian or shore interest, for the Navy at its work. It was not till a week later that I received an amusing and mysterious line from Commodore ----, the most courteous of men.

By the time it reached me, however, I was on the shores of a harbour in the far north "visiting the Fleet," indeed, and on the invitation of England's most famous sailor. Let me be quite modest about it. Not for me the rough waters, or the thunderous gun-practice--

"Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides"--

which I see described in the letters of the Russian or American journalists who have been allowed to visit the Grand Fleet. There had been some talk, I understand, of sending me out in a destroyer; it was mercifully abandoned. All the same, I must firmly put on record that mine was "a visit to the Fleet," by Admiralty permission, for the purpose of these letters to you, and through you to the American public, and that I seem to have been so far the only woman who, for newspaper ends, has been allowed to penetrate those mysterious northern limits where I spent two wonderful days.

It was, indeed, a wintry visit. The whole land was covered with snow. The train could hardly drag itself through the choked Highland defiles; and it was hours behind its time when we arrived at a long-expected station, and a Vice-Admiral looking at me with friendly, keen eyes came to the carriage to greet me. "My boat shall meet you at the pier with my Flag-Lieutenant to-morrow morning. You will pick me up at the Flag-ship, and I will take you round the Fleet. You will lunch with me, I hope, afterwards." I tried to show my grateful sense both of the interest and the humour of the situation. My kind visitor disappeared, and the train carried me on a few miles farther to my destination for the night.

And here I take a few words from a journal written at the time:

It is nearly dawn. A red light in the northeast is coming up over the snowy hills. The water, steely grey--the tide rising. What strange moving bodies are those, scudding along over the dim surface, like the ghosts of sea planes? Dense flocks of duck apparently, rising and falling along the shallows of the shore. Now they are gone. Nothing moves. The morning is calm, and the water still. And on it lie, first a cruiser squadron, and then a line of Dreadnoughts stretching out of sight. No lights anywhere, except the green lights on a hospital ship far away. The great ships lie dark and silent, and I sit and watch them, in the cold dawn, thinking that but for them, and the multitude of their comrades that guard these seas and shores, England would be as Belgium or as Northern France, ravaged and destroyed by a barbarian enemy. My heart goes out to you, great ships, and you, gallant unwearied men, who keep your watch upon them! That watch has been kept for generations. Never has there been such need for it as now....

But the day has risen, and the sun with it. As I leave the shore in the Vice-Admiral's boat, the sunlight comes dancing over a low line of hill, lighting up the harbour, the mighty ships, with their guns, and, scattered out to sea along the distance, the destroyers, the trawlers, the mine-sweepers, the small auxiliary craft of all kinds--those "fringes of the fleet"--which Kipling has caught and photographed as none but he can.

The barge stops beside the Flag-ship, and the Admiral descends into it. What is the stamp, the peculiar stamp that these naval men bear?--as of a force trained and disciplined to its utmost capacity, and then held lightly in check--till wanted. You see it in so many of their faces, even in eyes hollow for want of sleep. It is always there--the same strength, the same self-control, the same humanity. Is it produced by the testing weight of responsibility, the silent sense of ever-present danger, both from the forces of nature and the enmity of man, the high, scientific training, and last but not least, that marvellous comradeship of the Navy, whether between officer and officer, or between officers and men, which is constantly present indeed in the Army, but is necessarily closer and more intimate here, in the confined world of the ship, where all live together day after day, and week after week, and where--if disaster comes--all may perish together?

But on this bright winter morning, as we pass under and round the ships, and the Admiral points out what a landswoman can understand, in the equipment and the power of these famous monsters with their pointing guns, there was for the moment no thought of the perils of the Navy, but only of the glory of it. And afterwards in the Admiral's pleasant drawing-room on board the Flag-ship, with its gathering of naval officers, Admirals, Captains, Commanders, how good the talk was! Not a shade of boasting--no mere abuse of Germany--rather a quiet regret for the days when German and English naval men were friends throughout the harbours of the world. "Von Spee was a very good fellow--I knew him well--and his two sons who went down with him," says an Admiral gently. "I was at Kiel the month before the war. I know that many of their men must loathe the work they are set to do." "The point is," says a younger man, broad--shouldered, with the strong face of a leader, "that they are always fouling the seas, and we are always cleaning them up. Let the neutrals understand that! It is not we who strew the open waters with mines for the slaughter of any passing ship, and then call it 'maintaining the freedom of the seas.' And as to their general strategy, their Higher Command--" he throws back his head with a quiet laugh--and I listen to a rapid sketch of what the Germans might have done, have never done, and what it is now much too late to do, which I will not repeat.

Type after type comes back to me:--the courteous Flag-Lieutenant, who is always looking after his Admiral, whether in these brief harbour rests, or in the clash and darkness of the high seas--the Lieutenant-Commanders whose destroyers are the watch-dogs, the ceaseless protectors, no less than the eyes and ears of the Fleet--the Flag-Captain, who takes me through the great ship, with his vigilant, spare face, and his understanding, kindly talk about his men; many of whom on this Thursday afternoon--the quasi half-holiday of the Fleet when in harbour--are snatching an hour's sleep when and where they can. That sleep-abstinence of the Navy--sleep, controlled, measured out, reduced to a bare minimum, among thousands of men, that we on shore may sleep our fill--look at the signs of it, in the eyes both of these officers, and of the sailors crowding the "liberty" boats, which are just bringing them back from their short two hours' leave on shore!

Another gathering, in the Captain's room, for tea. The talk turns on a certain popular play dealing with naval life, and a Commander describes how the manuscript of it had been brought to him, and how he had revelled in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. Two men in the play--friends--going into action--shake hands with each other "with tears in their eyes." A shout of derisive laughter goes up from the tea-table. But they admit "talking shop" off duty. "That's the difference between us and the Army." And what shop it is! I listen to two young officers, both commanding destroyers, describing--one, his adventures in dirty weather the night before, on patrol duty. "My hat, I thought one moment the ship was on the rocks! You couldn't see a yard for the snow--and the sea--beastly!" The other had been on one of Admiral Hood's monitors, when they suddenly loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, and the German army marching along the coast road to Dunkirk and Calais marched no more, but lay in broken fragments behind the dunes, or any shelter available, till the flooding of the dikes farther south completed the hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns had begun.

Then the talk ranges round the blockade, the difficulties and dangers of patrol work, the complaints of neutrals. "America should understand us. Their blockade hit us hard enough in the Civil War. And we are fighting for their ideals no less than our own. When has our naval supremacy ever hurt them? Mayn't they be glad of it some day? What about a fellow called Monroe!"--so it runs. Then its tone changes insensibly. From a few words dropped I realise with a start where these pleasantly chatting men had probably been only two or three days before, where they would probably be again on the morrow. Some one opens a map, and I listen to talk which, in spite of its official reticence, throws many a light on the vast range of England's naval power, and the number of her ships. "Will they come out? When will they come out?" The question runs round the group. Some one tells a story of a German naval prisoner taken not long ago in the North Sea, and of his remark to his captors: "Yes, we're beaten--we know that--but we'll make it hell for you before we give in!"