Chapter 3

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.

IV

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!"

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.

II

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.