Part 5

For that final clash--that Armageddon that all think must come, our sailors wait, not despising their enemy, knowing very well that they--the Fleet--are the pivot of the situation, that without the British Navy, not all the valour of the Allies in France or Russia could win the war, and that with it, Germany's hope of victory is vain. While the Navy lives, England lives, and Germany's vision of a world governed by the ruthless will of the scientific soldier is doomed.

Meanwhile, what has Germany been doing in her shipyards all this time? No one knows, but my hosts are well aware that we shall know some day.

As to England--here is Mr. Balfour moving the Naval Estimates in the House of Commons--the "token votes" which tell nothing that should not be told. But since the war began, says the First Lord, we have added "one million" to the tonnage of the Navy, and we have doubled its personnel. We are adding more every day; for the Admiralty are always "wanting more." We are quite conscious of our defects--in the Air Service first and foremost. But they will be supplied. There is a mighty movement afoot in the workshops of England--an effort which, when all drawbacks are allowed for, has behind it a free people's will.

In my next letter I propose to take you through some of these workshops. "We get the most extraordinary letters from America," writes one of my correspondents, a steel manufacturer in the Midlands. "What do they think we are about?" An American letter is quoted. "So you are still, in England, taking the war lying down?"

Are we? Let us see.

Dear H.

In this second letter I am to try and prove to you that England is not taking the war "lying down."

Let me then give you some account--an eye-witness's account--of what there is now to be seen by the ordinary intelligent observer in the "Munition Areas," as the public has learned to call them, of England and Scotland. That great spectacle, as it exists to-day--so inspiring in what it immediately suggests of human energy and human ingenuity, so appalling in its wider implications--testifies, in the first instance, to the fierce stiffening of England's resolve to win the war, and to win it at a lessened cost in life and suffering to our men in the field, which ran through the nation, after the second Battle of Ypres, towards the close of April, 1915. That battle, together with the disagreement between Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty, had, as we all know, momentous consequences. The two events brought the national dissatisfaction and disappointment with the general course of the spring fighting to a head. By May 19th the Ministry which had declared the war and so far conducted it, had disappeared; a National or Coalition Ministry, drawn from the leading men of both parties, reigned in its stead. The statement made by Mr. Asquith, as late, alack, as April 20, 1915, that there was "no truth in the statement" that our efforts at the front "were being crippled or at any rate hampered" by want of ammunition, was seen almost immediately, in the bitter light of events, to be due to some fatal misconceptions, or misjudgments, on the part of those informing the Prime Minister, which the nation in its own interests and those of its allies, could only peremptorily sweep away. A new Ministry was created--the Ministry of Munitions, and Mr. Lloyd George was placed at its head.

The work that Mr. Lloyd George and his Ministry--now employing vast new buildings, and a staff running into thousands--have done since June, 1915, is nothing less than colossal. Much no doubt had been done earlier for which the new Ministry has perhaps unjustly got the credit, and not all has been smooth sailing since. One hears, of course, criticism and complaints. What vast and effective stir, for a great end, was ever made in the world without them?

Mr. Lloyd George has incurred a certain amount of unpopularity among the working classes, who formerly adored him. In my belief he has incurred it for the country's sake, and those sections of the working class who have smarted under his criticisms most bitterly will forgive him when the time comes. In his passionate determination to get the thing done, he has sometimes let his theme--of the national need, and the insignificance of all things else in comparison with it--carry him into a vehemence which the workmen have resented, and which foreign or neutral countries have misunderstood.

He found in his path, which was also the nation's path, three great foes--drunkenness, the old envenomed quarrel between employer and employed, and that deep-rooted industrial conservatism of England, which shows itself on the one hand in the trade-union customs and restrictions of the working class, built up, as they hold, through long years, for the protection of their own standards of life, and, on the other, in the slowness of many of the smaller English employers (I am astonished, however, at the notable exceptions everywhere!) to realise new needs and processes, and to adapt themselves to them. Could any one have made such an omelet without breaking a great many eggs? Is it wonderful that the employers have sometimes felt themselves unbearably hustled, sometimes misunderstood, and at other times annoyed, or worried by what seems to them the red tape of the new Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of forms and inquiries?

Men accustomed to conduct their own businesses with the usual independence of regulation have been obliged to submit to regulation. Workmen accustomed to defend certain methods of work and certain customs of their trade as matters of life and death have had to see them jeopardised or swept away. The restoration of these methods and customs is solemnly promised them after the war; but meanwhile they become the servants of a public department almost as much under orders as the soldier himself. They are asked to admit unskilled men to the skilled processes over which they have long kept so jealous a guard; above all, they are asked to assent wholesale to the employment of women in trades where women have never been employed before, where it is obvious that their introduction taps an immense reservoir of new labour, and equally obvious that, once let in, they are not going to be easily or wholly dislodged.

Of course, there has been friction and difficulty; nor is it all yet at an end. In the few danger-spots of the country, where heads are hottest, where thousands of the men of most natural weight and influence are away fighting, and where among a small minority hatred of the capitalist deadens national feeling and obscures the national danger, there have been anxious moments during the winter; there may possibly be some anxious moments again.

But, after all, how little it amounts to in comparison with the enormous achievement! It took us nine months to realise what France--which, remember, is a Continental nation under conscription--had realised after the Battle of the Marne, when she set every hand in the country to work at munitions that could be set to work. With us, whose villages were unravaged, whose normal life was untouched, realisation was inevitably slower. Again we were unprepared, and again, as in the case of the Army itself, we may plead that we have "improvised the impossible." "No nation," says Mr. Buchan, "can be adequately prepared, unless, like Germany, it intends war; and Britain, like France paid the penalty of her honest desire for peace!"

Moreover, we had our Navy to work for, without which the cause of the Allies would have gone under, must have gone under, at the first shock of Germany. What the workmen of England did in the first year of the war in her docks and shipyards, history will tell some day.

"What's wrong with the men!" cried a Glasgow employer indignantly to me, one evening as, quite unknown the one to the other, we were nearing one of the towns on the Clyde. "What was done on the Clyde, in the first months of the war, should never be forgotten by this country. Working from six to nine every day till they dropped with fatigue--and Sundays, too--drinking just to keep themselves going--too tired to eat or sleep--that's what it was--I saw it!"

I, too, have seen that utter fatigue stamped on a certain percentage of faces through the Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the Clyde--fatigue which is yet indomitable, which never gives way. How fresh, beside that look, are the faces of the women, for whom workshop life is new! In its presence one forgets all hostile criticism, all talk of strikes and drink, of trade-union difficulties, and the endless worries of the employers.

The English workman is not tractable material--far from it--and he is not imaginative; except in the persons of some of his chosen leaders, he has never seen a ruined French or Flemish village, and he was slow to realise the bitterness of that silence of the guns on the front, when ammunition runs short, and lives must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of thousands to the fighting line; there are a million and a half of him now working at munitions, and it is he, in a comradeship with the brain workers, the scientific intelligence of the nation, closer than any he has yet known, and lately, with the new and astonishing help of women--it is he, after all, who is "delivering the goods," he who is now piling the great arsenals and private works with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns, he who is working night and day in the shipyards, he who is teaching the rising army of women their work, and making new and firm friends, through the national emergency, whether in the trenches or the workshops, with other classes and types in the nation, hitherto little known to him, to whom he, too, is perhaps a revelation.

There will be a new wind blowing through England when this war is done. Not only will the scientific intelligence, the general education, and the industrial plant of the nation have gained enormously from this huge impetus of war; but men and women, employers and employed, shaken perforce out of their old grooves, will look at each other surely with new eyes, in a world which has not been steeped for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in common griefs and a common passion of will.

All over England, then, the same quadruple process has now been going on for months:

The steady enlargement of existing armament and munition works, national or private.

The transformation of a host of other engineering businesses into munition works.

The co-ordination of a vast number of small workshops dealing with the innumerable metal industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make them feed the larger engineering works, with all those minor parts of the gun or shell, which such shops had the power to make.

The putting up of entirely new workshops--National Workshops--directly controlled by the new Ministry, under the Munitions Acts.

Let me take you through a few typical scenes.

It was on February 1st, the day after the Zeppelin raid of January 31st, that I left a house in the north where I had been seeing one of the country-house convalescent hospitals, to which Englishwomen and English wealth are giving themselves everywhere without stint, and made my way by train, through a dark and murky afternoon, towards a Midland town. The news of the raid was so far vague. The newspapers of the morning gave no names or details. I was not aware that I was passing through towns where women and children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the windows of a train broken, in order that the German public might be fed on ridiculous lies about the destruction of Liverpool docks and the wrecking of "English industry." "English industry lies in ruins," said the Hamburger Nachrichten complacently. Marvellous paper! Just after reading its remarks, I was driving down the streets of the great industrial centre I had come to see--a town which the murderers of the night before would have been glad indeed to hit. As it was, "English industry" seemed tolerably active amid its "ruins." The clumsy falsehoods of the German official reports and the German newspapers affect me strangely! It is not so much their lack of truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense, which is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all our grumbling, we are at bottom a nation of optimists, and apt to see things as we wish. But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past--the "sinking" of the Lion, the "capture" of Fort Vaux, or the "bombardment" of Liverpool docks--is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if nothing else, forbids--the instinct of an old people with an old and humourous literature. These leading articles of the Hamburger Nachrichten, the sermons of German pastors, and those amazing manifestoes of German professors, flying straight in the face of historic documents--"scraps of paper"--which are there, none the less, to all time--for us, these things are only not comic because, to the spiritual eye, they are written in blood. But to return to the "ruins," and this "English industry" which during the last six months has taken on so grim an aspect for Germany.

My guide, an official of the Ministry, stops the motor, and we turn down a newly made road, leading towards a mass of spreading building on the left.

"A year ago," says my companion--"this was all green fields. Now the company is employing, instead of 3,500 work-people, about three times the number, of whom a large proportion are women. Its output has been quadrupled, and the experiment of introducing women has been a complete success."