Part 4

A disabled soldier was selling papers in Kingsway, London. He was proud of his military record and the character his colonel gave him. He was trying to compound for a pension; he thought he would settle for £50. “Mind you,” said he “there is not a better character in London than mine, and I shall get the £50. Then I shall have a month’s booze.” “What, with that fine character of yours?” a gentleman said to him. “Yes,” said the man, “when I came home, and could leave the hospital, there was £50 due to me, and I had a regular booze.”

_Facts known to the Author_

A soldier with twelve years’ clean record in the Army was sentenced for felony after being made drunk by his friends.

_Police Records of Southport, January 9, 1915_

No Government has ever received more warnings than the three war Governments have received concerning drink. There is no room for them here, but we may call a few witnesses such as cannot be ignored by a nation looking forward to the day when millions of men will be home again.

A house in Westminster reeked with filth and drink and drunken overseas soldiers, “and it would be better,” said the Crown Solicitor, “if power were given to the police to sweep such places off the earth.”

_Westminster Police Records, Aug. 1916_

A sapper seaman was found dead at the quay. Another seaman said his friend had seven drinks. They left the publichouse arm-in-arm, and went to the quay. There he saw a corporal, who was boatswain for the night, and was drunk. Leaving the sapper, he got the corporal into the boat, and went back for his friend, but the sapper had disappeared.

The lieutenant: “The deceased was one of the quietest boys who had ever been on the ship, and one of the best oarsmen. The whole trouble was that it was pay day.”

The Coroner: “Prohibition during the war would be a blessing to all. It seems to be a very rotten state of affairs.”

The foreman: “Drink.”

The lieutenant: “Prohibition would be the best thing.”

The Coroner: “This poor man, unfortunately, is one of many.”

_Facts in “Western Daily Mercury,” January 8, 1917_

A publican at Dover was fined £20 for selling a bottle of whisky to a sailor. The Admiral said drink undermined the efficiency of the patrol vessels, and those who supplied it directly assisted the enemy, and might be the cause of the loss of very many lives.

_Police Records of Dover, October 6, 1916_

A private in the Northumberland Fusiliers, aged 23, was charged with burglary while drunk. His father and three brothers were in the Army. He took part in the battle of Loos, was wounded at Salonika, and was recommended for distinction for helping to save a wounded officer.

During the whole of Christmas leave he was drinking, made drunk by his friends who were probably proud of his having held part of a trench against a German bombing party. His captain described him as a good soldier in peace, and brave in action—a man whose disgrace would be felt by the regiment.

Mr. Justice Rowlatt said everyone was hoping for the time when millions of brave men would come home after facing incredible dangers, and we must look forward almost with terror to having these men exposed to drink and its temptations. What would be the state of the country in such a case unless we could make a clean sweep of drink? We should have to face this question over and over again, and the sooner we faced it the better.

_Records of Derbyshire Assizes, February 1917_

Whoever allowed soldiers or sailors to drink to excess, said the Mayor of Tynemouth, should be tried by court-martial for treason. He would be recreant in his duty to God, to himself, and to the citizens, if he did not call attention to the brutalising of so many townspeople and the callous conduct of the “waster” element in the drink trade. He had no quarrel with those who conducted their business properly.

_Facts in Tynemouth papers, February, 1915_

The Aldershot command appealed for the closing of half the publichouses, to save the men from temptation when the troops are demobilised and return with their pockets full of money.

_Record of Workingham Licensing Sessions, 1917_

The _Army and Navy Gazette_, in an article disapproving of the Prohibition Campaign, issues a terrible warning which should be printed on the door of the room in which the Army Council meets. These are its words:

“It is on record that towards the end of the siege of Sebastopol rum was made too regular an issue, with the result that almost every soldier who survived to return home became a drunkard.”

The siege of Sebastopol lasted less than a year, and that is the work of the rum issue for a few months. If rum does that in months, what will it do in years?

Into the Firing Line

Lord Kitchener is dead, but there are two things that are with us still—that rare little note that he gave to his men as they went out, warning them of drink; and that infamous note sent out by a drink firm in London, begging our people to send out drink to our men. They can guarantee it right up to the firing line, they say, and even when our shells could not get there through drink, drink seems to have found its way. It can get on to transports when the Ministry of Munitions is waiting urgently for shipping space; it can commandeer our vans and horses and trains when these mean life or death to us; it seems to get past any regulation; it goes about with the power of a king, doing its work where it will.

It is regrettable that our troops at the Front cannot get more British Beer.

Managing Director of Allsopps, July 14, 1916

Dear Sir, In answer to your inquiry, the only limitation in the size of cases consigned to officers in the Expeditionary Force is that they must not exceed 1 cwt.

We can guarantee delivery right into the front trenches. The cases are handed over at Southampton to the Military Forwarding Officer, and the A.S.C. see them right through. We are shipping hundreds of cases weekly. Yours faithfully,

_Letter from a Wine and Spirit firm in London_

So drink finds its way to the front, to weaken our troops, with all their matchless heroism. Let us call the witnesses who have seen the work it does.

Soldiers at the front, tried for drunkenness, have declared that they have received drink from home. Men sometimes receive flasks in the trenches. They are exhausted, the stimulant revives them for a minute or two, and the harm is done. “And then (says Col. Crozier) they get about two years’ hard labour.”

_Letter from Colonel Crozier, commanding 9th Royal Irish Rifles_

As a result of a Court-martial investigating charges of excessive drinking among the officers of a regiment at the Front, the Army Council removed the commanding officer from his post.

_Records of Court-martials, 1916_

In the torrid climate of Mesopotamia, in defiance of all military medical history, rum was issued to the men instead of food and sterile water, and the presence of cholera, dysentery and other diseases, was attributed to this by Sir Victor Horsley. “Our gross failures and stupidity,” he said, “are in my opinion due to whisky affecting the intellectual organs and clearness of our leaders. They do not realise that alcohol in small doses acts as a brake on the brain.”

_Facts in a letter from Sir Victor Horsley, May 13, 1916_

Battalion Headquarters—colonel and chaplain present. Enter Adjutant: “The rum ration is due tonight, sir; am I to distribute it?” The colonel (nobly and in a voice audible all over the trench): “No! Damn the rum! To hell with the rum!”

_Chaplain’s letter in “Alliance News,” June 1916_

At a court-martial in Newcastle, a sergeant-major, charged with misappropriating funds of the sergeant’s mess, pleaded that during this period a resolution of the mess had come into effect, providing free drinks during Christmas and the New Year.

_Facts in “Daily News,” April 17, 1916_

“In the Flying Services one has seen more than one good man go to the dogs through drink, or become fat and flabby and useless through just the excess of alcohol which falls short of taking to drink in the usual acceptance of the term. More men take to drink because of the ‘have another’ custom than because they like or need alcohol, and simple Prohibition would stop all this nonsense straight away. This kindly note is not the outpouring of a teetotal fanatic, for I suppose I have paid in my time rather more than my share of the nation’s drink-bill; it is merely a perfectly sound argument in favour of increasing the nation’s efficiency at the expense of its chief bad habit.”

_The Editor of “The Aeroplane”_

A lieutenant in the trenches, knowing that the rum ration made him cold, threw his rum on the ground. His captain saw him, and threatened to report him. “You do, sir,” said the lieutenant, “and I will report you for being drunk on duty.”

_Facts in possession of the Author_

A seaman serving on a ship in Cork Harbour died from alcohol. Found drunk and unknown, he was put on a stretcher and died.

_Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 9, 1915_

“Over three-quarters of the court-martials I have had anything to do with are due directly or indirectly to drunkenness. Many thousands of competent N.C.O.s and soldiers have been punished, and become useless to the nation during their punishment, as a result of drink.

“I have never been a teetotaler, and have rather opposed the radical temperance agitation, but am now changing my views as I see our success over here hampered and our progress towards victory retarded so obviously by drink.”

_Letter from a Lieut.-Colonel at the Front, seen by the Author_

The captain of a British merchant ship, drunk on the bridge, ordered his chief gunner to fire 50 rounds of shell at nothing. The gunner fired four rounds to appease him. Going through the Mediterranean, the drunken captain ordered his gunner to fire at a British hospital ship, and the incident led to a struggle for life, which ended in the captain’s being put in irons, tried, and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

_Record of Devon Assizes, Exeter, February 2, 1917_

An officer was left in charge of a British ship. Mad with drink, he went among the men and shot one dead. He is now in an asylum.

_Case reported to the Admiralty_

The crew of a Dutch ship arriving in the Tyne was placed under a naval guard after a drunken riot in which three were killed.

_Facts in “Daily News,” September 14, 1915_

The captain of a Norwegian barque mysteriously disappeared, and the vessel arrived in port from the North Sea. The mate, who had been drinking heavily, was seen, with a hammer in his hand, with the captain in a corner, bleeding from wounds about the head.

_Facts in “Daily News,” April 8, 1916_

A seaman ashore in Glasgow, “wild with drink and passion,” was terribly wounded in a quarrel in a public-house, and died the same night. A youth of 19 was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

_Records of Edinburgh High Court, Dec. 1916_

A barge-loader at West India Docks died from alcohol, and three other men were removed in an ambulance after drinking rum.

_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” May 9, 1916_

Orders were given on a steamer for the boats to be swung out in readiness for submarines. The first and second officer, having been drinking, could not do their duty.

_Records of Liverpool Marine Board, April 13, 1917_

The jury returned a verdict of murder against a youth of 19 who, after drinking one night, went on to his ship and killed the second officer.

_Records of Hull Coroner, April 24, 1917_

A drunken captain in command of a drifter landed with an armed party on the Isle of Man. He posted the men on the quay, and gave them orders to allow no one to pass. Declaring he would shoot every person who came within reach, he fired twice, and threatened to kill two police officers.

_Facts in “Times,” October 6, 1916_

Such is the work of drink wherever it finds a soldier to entrap—the drink the Navy carries free from Southampton to the trenches; and from America comes the news, as this page is being written, that the Army and the Navy of our Western Ally, like the Army and the Navy of our Eastern Ally, are to be under Total Prohibition.

Will some Member of Parliament please ask

=how much bread is destroyed each week to make beer for German internment camps in this country?=

Drink and the Red Cross

If the full story could ever be told of the national tragedy of drink and the war there would be no more ghastly chapter than that which would tell how drink fought the Red Cross; how, without pity, it hindered the work of mercy that is the general consolation of the world in days like these.

We are coming to a famine not only in food, but in doctors. The death-roll has been heavy beyond all parallel; the strain on the medical services has been almost too great to be borne, and we look anxiously round to know where the doctors and nurses will come from. With Prohibition the problem would be largely solved, for the ordinary burden of life would be largely lifted from our doctors and hospitals, and thousands of men and women would be free to give themselves to the war instead of mending up and patching up the sordid effects of drink. A rich brewer gave a donation for extending a hospital. “Ah! but we should not have to extend if he would shut up his public-houses,” said a doctor.

It is easy to see how drink is telling all the time against our doctors, our nurses, and our hospitals everywhere. Let us call a few witnesses.

Somebody gave a glass of neat whisky to two wounded men at a garden party in Tottenham. Both were drunk when the brake came to take them home, and one died on the way.

_Facts in “Sheffield Telegraph,” September 3, 1915_

Three wounded soldiers at Oxford were overcome by four bottles of rum smuggled into the hospital by visitors, and one of the men died.

_Records of Oxford Coroner, January 1916_

A wounded soldier asked for two hours’ leave, came back in four hours drunk with whisky, and died after a terrible night in the hospital.

_Facts in “Daily Mail”_

Two limbless soldiers were found helplessly drunk on the pavement at Brighton. A publican was fined £20.

_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” November 25, 1916_

A wounded soldier, mentioned in despatches, was charged with causing the death of a soldier with whom he had been drinking. Reeling under a heavy blow, the injured man was helped to bed, but when the bugle sounded in the morning he was dead.

_Facts in “Daily Mail,” December 21, 1915_

A soldier, aged 29, with a gunshot wound in his arm, died from alcohol at Oxford. One Sunday night he and two other wounded soldiers consumed four bottles of rum brought into the hospital.

_Records of Oxford Coroner, January 10, 1916_

Three soldiers in hospital uniform were found lying helplessly drunk on the tramlines of Sheffield. Two were back from the Dardanelles.

_Facts in “Sheffield Star,” March 2, 1916_

Seamen on a ship bringing wounded to England from Boulogne were so drunk that they interfered with the stretcher bearers, and one fell across a wounded soldier lying on deck.

_Police Records of Southampton, May 14, 1915_

There was a paralysed and helpless man who was found hopelessly drunk in hospital after his friends had visited him.

_Statement by Lieut.-Col. Sir Alfred Pearce Gould_

An officer who has trained hundreds of men for the ambulance corps declared that a large percentage of wounded are in a very nervous condition, in which alcohol means collapse and almost certain death.

_Quoted in “Daily Mail”_

Lying helpless at a London station, moaning on the ground in drunken delirium, was a lad in hospital blue who had, in truth, been wounded by his friends. Drink was taking him again through the worst of his experiences, and his mental pain was pitiable to see.

_Facts in the “Globe,” January, 1917_

Two drunken soldiers from Gallipoli made what a doctor described as the most savage attack he ever saw on a civilian. They held a young man’s head against a wall and pounded him unmercifully.

_Facts in “Daily News,” August 19, 1916_

A party of soldiers were seriously injured in a struggle to arrest a drunken private at Pontefract. The publican called on the men in his taproom to rescue the private, but the sergeants drove them off.

_Facts in “Daily News,” October 5, 1914_

A sergeant of a Welsh regiment, invited to drink by friends in Waterloo Road, was picked up as he lay senseless, his pulse beating feebly, his eyes wide open, and his body starving with cold.

_Facts in “Daily News,” February 14, 1916_

A drunken man rushed from a publichouse and kicked a soldier unconscious. The military police, chasing the man, were stoned. Four soldiers were injured, one having his head cut open, and the military were ordered to clear the place with fixed bayonets.

_Facts in “Daily News,” August 11, 1915_

The medical officer in charge of the Mental Block of a large military hospital said to the Colonel: “I have the worst job of all, and it is through Drink, Drink, Drink! Men recover fairly soon from shell shock, but officers, especially the younger ones, who habitually take wines and spirits, are subject to relapses every few days. It is awful!”

_Facts in “National Temperance Quarterly,” May 1917_

Of the thirty war hospitals in Hertfordshire, with 8000 men passing through them in the first thirty months of the war, there is not one that has not had trouble with drink.

_Facts known to the Author_

A doctor from a Canadian hospital said a large percentage of their troops had had to be sent back to Canada rendered permanently insane through the action of alcohol.

_Facts in “Daily News,” October 31, 1916_

One terrible truth remains to be told of the crime of drink against the Red Cross. The most blessed thing in all the world today is alcohol, for it makes chloroform and ether, which soothe the pain of men. We cannot get enough of either of these consoling drugs, yet we go on wasting precious food to make more alcohol _to add to the sum of misery and pain_.

Will some Member of Parliament please ask

=whether the bread ration applies equally to all; or if it may be exceeded if the excess is drunk instead of being eaten?=

and

=how many brewers’ vats have been imported this year on ships which had no room for urgent munitions of war?=

Stabbing the Army in the Back

All the world is learning now that the drink trade is the great confederate of venereal disease. It leads a man into temptation, destroys his power of resistance, and retards his chances of recovery.

We can never know the truth about the extent of this disease, about the way in which the liquor trade, by breaking down tens of thousands of our men, has stabbed the Army in the back. But the number of soldiers incapacitated by this disease through drink is enormously greater than the number incapacitated by the most subtle or dramatic stroke devised by the German staff.

The lost man-power of the Army through this disease must be equal to the whole of the original British Expeditionary Force. The Government has given us figures for the Army at home last year, and they are 43 per 1,000—or over 100,000 cases for an army of 2,500,000 men. There were 7,000 cases in one Canadian camp alone.

Here are the black facts revealed in a debate in Parliament on April 23, 1917, when two distinguished Army officers, speaking with great restraint, sought to open the eyes of the nation to this plague fostered in our camps by drink:

“During the war we have had admitted into the hospitals of England over 70,000 cases of gonorrhœa, over 20,000 cases of syphilis, and over 6000 cases of another disease somewhat similar. I am quite openly prepared to state that of these 20,000 cases of syphilis you do not get much work out of them under two and a half years. I know from what I have seen of the modern conditions of this War that you may absolutely wipe them out, except for a few handfuls.

“When you come to the great mass of casualties under this head ... the figures mean that you have =a Division constantly out of action=. If you have anything like 70,000 men enfeebled, you find that you suffer to that extent also. It is not only that you lose the men, and not only the men who are partially cured are suffering for many months to come, but their chances of recovery from wounds are not nearly so good.

“I know of a hospital for venereal cases which it was found necessary to expand from its normal accommodation for 500 or 600 up to 2,000 cases, and they are continually full. It is a British hospital in France. A figure I should like to submit to challenge is that during the course of the war between 40,000 and 50,000 cases of syphilis have passed through our hospitals in France. When you come to gonorrhœa, the figure given me which covers that is between 150,000 and 200,000 cases.”

_Captain Guest in Parliament, April 23, 1917_

“Every Canadian soldier who comes to this country arrives here not only a first-class specimen of a fine soldier, but as clean-limbed and as clean a man as the Creator Himself could create. The fact that in one only of the three Canadian camps in this country 7,000 of these clean Canadian boys went through the hospital for venereal disease in fourteen months is not only a great discredit to any Government in this country but has an effect in Canada which I can assure the House does not make for a better feeling with the Home Country, and does not make for what we all desire—Imperial Unity.”

_Colonel Sir Hamar Greenwood in Parliament, April 23, 1917_

Those are unchallenged statements made in the House of Commons itself; they stand as a terrible indictment of this disease, and it is not to be denied that this evil could never have reached its present frightful proportions if Parliament had followed the King. Let us look at a few examples of the ravages of this vice allied so closely to the public-house.

It is not possible to tell the whole truth about drink; the language in which it must be written would be offensive in a civilised country. It must be said, simply, that soldiers in England have been court-martialled for having been influenced by drink to commit unspeakable offences against animals.

_Facts in Records of Court-Martials_

A special constable in a harlot-haunted district in London describes how these harpies carry off lonely soldiers to their rooms, make them drunk, and finally innoculate them, as likely as not, with disease. Is it not possible to hold in check these women who prey upon and poison our soldiers? asks Sir Conan Doyle.

_Letter in the “Times”_

One of the hot-beds of venereal disease to which drink leads our soldiers, was kept by an Austrian woman in Lambeth, who was receiving 15_s._ a week from the Austrian Government in April 1916, and used to lure our soldiers when weakened by drink. All the men seen to enter this house were either soldiers or sailors.

_Police Records of Lambeth_

A soldier from the Front with £18 was taken by a married woman to her home, where he was found after a drunken bout with eight women, all drunk. The woman’s children were terribly neglected.

_Police Records of St. Helens, November 30, 1915_