Chapter 2
In the village where they stopped, some forty miles from the actual front, a special messenger from the general headquarters brings the amazing news that General Headquarters invites Mrs. Ward and her daughter for two days, and will send a motor for them, if they accept, which, of course, they did upon the instant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mysteries of the front, its camps, its men, and its hospitals, that they were to see with their own eyes to-morrow.
The remainder of the day before they are to start for the front suffices for the visit to a camp set down in one of the pleasantest spots in France, a favorite haunt of French artists before the war, now occupied by a British reinforcement camp, the trees having all been cut away, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training grounds, to which we have already referred.
I must copy the bare catalogue of what this vast camp contained: "Sleeping and mess quarters for those belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals with twenty-one thousand beds" (and this shows now what it was to be near the front); "rifle ranges; training camps; a vast laundry, worked by French women under British organization, which washes for all the hospitals thirty thousand pieces a day; recreation huts of every possible kind; a cinema theatre seating eight hundred men, with performances twice a day; nurses clubs; officers clubs; a supply depot for food; an ordnance depot for everything that is not food; railroad sidings on which every kind of man and thing can go out and come in without interruption; a convalescents' depot of two thousand patients; and a convalescent horse depot of two thousand horses; all this in one camp, established since last April."
Ah! But the deepest impression left on the minds of our ladies is of the terrible sufferings in the hospitals, of the smiling endurance with which they were borne, of the timely skill, pity, and devotion of the doctors and nurses, taking care of the twenty thousand wounded. Realizing the sympathy of America with all these scenes and sufferings, they do not fail to note the hospitals organized by the Universities of Chicago and of Harvard, staffed by American sisters and doctors, each providing thirty-four doctors and eighty nurses, and dealing with a thousand patients, and a convalescent depot of two thousand beds. Every day the ambulance train comes in, and splendid hospital ships are taking the brave wounded back to England for home and rest.
And now came the day in which they were to motor forty miles to be the guests of the G.H.Q. Soon they seemed to be in the midst of the battle, "our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and more broken up by shell holes." The British lines are just beyond, cottages close by, and the German lines just in front of a wood near them, three-quarters of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than any woman, even a nurse, had been in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of impressions was full. They actually saw the brave boys whom they had passed an hour before, sitting in the fields waiting for orders, now marching into the trenches to take their turn there--they knew that they were marching into the jaws of death, but they walked as quietly and as cheerfully as if they were going to a parade, the guns crashing close by them all the time. The firing being too hot for the women, the captain in charge of them was relieved when they elected to turn back.
The next day, their second as guests of G.H.Q., as they came down from breakfast, our ladies were surprised to find the motor at the door, a simple lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready for them to use, for the captain greeted them in the best of spirits with the news that a very successful action had been fought that morning, "we had taken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Canal that we lost, a little while ago, and captured about two hundred prisoners; and if we go off at once we shall be in time to see the German counter attack." The one impossible thing for any woman ever to have hoped to see!
Somehow or other they very quickly got to the very post of danger. Soon they got close to the Tower of Ypres, which Mrs. Ward well describes as "mute witness of a crime that beyond the reparation of our own day, history will revenge through years to come." Then the English guns spoke, and they watched and saw the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as the shells burst. The German lines are right in sight, and soon their shells begin to burst on the English trenches. The German counter attack is on. All the famous sites of the early part of the war are then in sight, but all they can fully see is the bursting German shells, as from moment to moment they explode.
In her final letter Mrs. Ward shows other great efforts which Great Britain has made since the war began; that the taxes imposed for the support of the war and cheerfully borne demand a fourth part of his income from every well-to-do citizen; that five hundred million sterling, or twenty-five hundred million dollars have been already lent by Britain to her allies, a colossal portion of her income; that she has spent at the yearly rate of three thousand million dollars on the army, a thousand million dollars on the navy, while the munition department is costing about four hundred million sterling, and is employing close upon two million workers, one-tenth, I think, women; that the export trade of the country, in spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at this moment greater than it was in the corresponding months of 1913; she has raised an army of four millions of men, and will get all she wants.
What is more precious than all the rest, besides the vast amount of treasure that she has lavished upon the war, besides the rich mansions in all parts of the land that she has devoted to the uses of the sick and the wounded, she has given thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of her choicest youth, who have willingly surrendered their lives for the great cause; young men of the noblest pedigree, without number, by their lives and deaths have attested their right to be regarded as the flower of the British youth; the professional classes and the universities have emptied their halls so that the men of Oxford and Cambridge might take their places with the rest, and offer up their lives as willing sacrifices, and all the men of England of every degree have joined with them and been welcomed as brothers in the ranks for the great sacrifice. The rank and file, who are fighting and dying for England, are fighting in the same spirit as their leaders and falling by the hundred thousand for the nation's salvation. How exactly Emerson's noble verse fits them:
"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth replies, 'I can!'"
No one who reads this book can doubt for a moment, I think, that ENGLAND HAS DONE ALL SHE COULD, has put forth efforts worthy of her history and of her great traditions, that her national spirit is invincible, her national resources inexhaustible, and that her irresistible will to conquer and to rescue freedom and civilization for all the world from this terrible contest, is absolutely sure to win.
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
I
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?
II
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?