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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The War on All Fronts: England's Effort
+by Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The War on All Fronts: England's Effort
+       Letters to an American Friend
+
+Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+Commentator: Joseph H. Choate
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2005 [EBook #16089]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAR ON ALL FRONTS: ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Christine
+D and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's notes: Original spelling retained, original copyright
+information retained, italics are indicated by underscores.]
+
+
+Volume II
+
+England's Effort
+
+Letters To An American Friend
+
+[Illustration: Spring-time in the North Sea--Snow on a British
+Battleship.]
+
+
+
+
+_The War On All Fronts_
+
+
+England's Effort
+
+Letters To An American Friend
+
+By Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+With A Preface By Joseph H. Choate
+
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1918
+
+Copyright, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+HAS ENGLAND DONE ALL SHE COULD?
+
+
+That is the question which Mrs. Ward, replying to some doubts and queries
+of an American friend, has undertaken to answer in this series of letters,
+and every one who reads them will admit that her answer is as complete and
+triumphant as it is thrilling. Nobody but a woman, an Englishwoman of warm
+heart, strong brain, and vivid power of observation, could possibly have
+written these letters which reflect the very soul of England since this
+wicked and cruel war began. She has unfolded and interpreted to us, as no
+one else, I think, has even attempted to do, the development and absolute
+transformation of English men and women, which, has enabled them, living
+and dying, to secure for their proud nation under God that "new birth of
+freedom" which Lincoln at Gettysburg prophesied for his own countrymen.
+Really the cause is the same, to secure the selfsame thing, "that
+government of the people, by the people, and for the people may not perish
+from the earth";--and if any American wishes to know how this has been
+accomplished, he must read these letters, which were written expressly for
+our enlightenment.
+
+Mrs. Ward had marvellous qualifications for this patriotic task. The
+granddaughter of Doctor Arnold and the niece of Matthew Arnold, from
+childhood up she has been as deeply interested in politics and in public
+affairs as she has been in literature, by which she has attained such
+world-wide fame, and next to English politics, in American politics and
+American opinion. She has been a staunch believer in the greatness of
+America's future, and has maintained close friendship with leaders of
+public thought on both sides of the water. Her only son is a member of
+Parliament, and is fighting in the war, just as all the able-bodied men
+she knows are doing.
+
+She has received from the English government special opportunities of
+seeing what England has been doing in the war, and has been allowed to go
+with her daughter where few English men and no other women have been
+allowed to go, to see the very heart of England's preparedness. She has
+visited, since the war began, the British fleet, the very key of the whole
+situation, without whose unmatched power and ever-increasing strength the
+Allies at the outset must have succumbed. She has watched, always under
+the protection and guidance of that wonderful new Minister of Munitions,
+Lloyd George, the vast activity of that ministry throughout the country,
+and finally in a motor tour of five hundred miles, through the zone of the
+English armies in France, she has seen with her own eyes, that marvellous
+organization of everything that goes to make and support a great army,
+which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her
+fighting line. She has witnessed within three-quarters of a mile of the
+fighting line, with a gas helmet at hand, ready to put on, a German
+counter attack after a successful English advance something which no
+other woman, except herself and her daughter, who accompanied her, has
+ever had the opportunity to see.
+
+Mrs. Ward admits that at the beginning England was unprepared, which
+itself demonstrated that as a Nation she never wished for war with
+Germany, and never expected it. Her countrymen had no faith in Lord
+Roberts's ten-year-long agitation for universal national service, based on
+the portentous growth of the German army and navy. She never knew of any
+hatred of Germany in the country. On the contrary, she realized what
+England and all the rest of the world owed to Germany in so many ways.
+
+England was not absolutely unprepared in the sense that the United States
+is unprepared, even for self-defence from external attack, but except for
+the fleet and her little expeditionary force, England had neither men nor
+equipment equal to the fighting of a great Continental war.
+
+The wholly unexpected news of the invasion of Belgium aroused the whole
+country to realize that war on a scale never known before had come, and,
+as the firing upon Fort Sumter awakened America, convinced England that
+she must fight to the death for her liberties, unready as she was;--but
+Mr. Balfour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, says that, since the war
+began, she has added one million to the tonnage of her navy, and has
+doubled its personnel, and is adding more every day.
+
+In the matter of munitions the story that Mrs. Ward tells is wonderful,
+almost beyond belief. Much had been done in the first eight months of the
+war, in the building of munition shops, and the ordering of vast
+quantities from abroad, before the second battle of Ypres, in April, 1915,
+which led to the formation of the new Coalition Ministry, including a
+wholly new department, the Ministry of Munitions, with Mr. Lloyd George at
+its head.
+
+From that time to this the work has been colossal, and almost incredible,
+and without serious collision with the working classes. Vast new buildings
+have been erected all over England, and a huge staff, running into
+thousands, set in action. The new Minister has set out with determination
+to get the thing done at whatever cost, and to remove all obstacles that
+he found in his way. The Government has absolutely taken control of the
+whole work of the creation of munitions and the regulation of workmen,
+employed in it by whatever employers, and everything and everybody has had
+to submit to his imperious will, and the greatest change of all has been
+the employment of women on a vast scale to do the work that only men had
+ever done before. France had set about it immediately after the battle of
+the Marne, and allowed no Frenchman to remain idle who could do such work.
+
+Mrs. Ward does not fail to do full justice to the working men of Great
+Britain, and shows that besides the hundreds of thousands that they have
+sent to the fighting line, a million and a half remained at work in the
+shops, creating munitions with the aid of skilled experts and the
+astonishing help of the women, who never before had expected to have
+anything to do with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns.
+The old ways were laid aside, old distinctions of class and sex
+forgotten, and all worked with a common and indomitable will for the
+saving of the country.
+
+To give a single instance, what was a few months ago a smiling pasture is
+now found covered with vast buildings, in which these manufactures are
+carried on by thirty-five hundred working people, of whom a large
+proportion are women. I love to quote a single sentence from the utterance
+of her companion on a visit to this establishment: "As to the women, they
+are saving the country. They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten
+and a half, or, with overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The
+Government are insisting on one Sunday, or two Sundays a month off. I
+don't say they aren't right, but the women resent it. 'We're not tired,'
+they say. And look at them! They are not tired."
+
+This unheard-of spectacle of great engineering establishments filled with
+women, all hard at work, is a sure proof of the undying purpose of the
+whole English race. They are mostly young and comely, and their beauty of
+form and feature is only enhanced by their enthusiasm for their labors,
+and at the same time it has increased the ardor and intensity of their
+fellow workmen. Mrs. Ward found four thousand women to five thousand men
+engaged in this nation-saving labor, in a single establishment. They know
+that they are setting the skilled laborers free for work which women
+cannot do, and the unskilled in large numbers free for the army.
+
+Every building, as well as every man and woman, that could be put to the
+work, has been availed of, and the results have been incredible. Another
+instance she gives of special interest: "An old warehouse, bought, so to
+speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small
+workshop for shell production, employing between three and four hundred
+girls with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled
+labor going. These girls are working on the eight-hours' shift system;
+working so well that a not uncommon wage among them, on piece-work, of
+course, runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a week," and all
+the time they are at work they remember that they are doing common service
+with their husbands, and sweethearts, and sons, and brothers, who are
+perilling their lives in the trenches.
+
+None of this distinguished writer's romances compare in vivid description
+and heart-inspiring eloquence with these accounts that she gives of what
+she has seen with her own eyes of the resurrection of England.
+
+It is not for me to anticipate her startling and thrilling narratives on
+this subject. She takes for her text what Mr. Lloyd George said in his
+speech in the House of Commons on reviewing his new department: "Unless we
+quicken our movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which
+so much gallant blood has flowed," and Mr. Asquith's serious words in
+December: "We cannot go on," said he, "depending upon foreign countries
+for our munitions. We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and
+the cost is too great. We must make them ourselves."
+
+Mrs. Ward dwells with keen insight upon the difficulties met with among
+the trade-unions and labor people, and successfully overcome, and explains
+in full what they call over there the work of the Dilution Commissioners,
+which is a wholly new phrase for us, and she gives this clear definition:
+"Dilution means, of course, that under the sharp analysis of necessity,
+much engineering work, generally reckoned as 'skilled' work, and reserved
+to 'skilled' workmen by a number of union regulations, is seen to be
+capable of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted
+out from the others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or
+semiskilled worker. By so dividing them up and using superior labor with
+economy, only where it is really necessary, it can be made to go
+infinitely further, and the inferior, or untrained, labor can then be
+brought into work where nobody supposed it could be used; where, in fact,
+it never has been used." This novel experiment, together with the equally
+novel employment of women in such work, soon proved a triumphant success,
+and the women proved themselves able to do the work of men, some of it
+even better. There were, of course, difficulties at first, but the
+mischief, whatever it was, was quickly cured, and in one factory that Mrs.
+Ward names, "men and women soon began to do their best. The output of the
+factory, which had been planned for four thousand shells a week, ran up to
+twenty thousand, and everything has gone smoothly since."
+
+The adaptation of firms and factories, already existing, the control of
+which was taken by the Government, was wonderful, but the national
+shell-factories, founded, financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions,
+are more wonderful still, and give us many new ideas about government
+ownership in an emergency, which we may sometimes have to think of more
+seriously. The speed, the efficiency, the success of the new system have
+been marvellous, so that in the short space of a year the demands of Mr.
+Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been satisfied, and England will depend
+no more upon foreign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition,
+but will be able not only to manufacture all she can use herself, but to
+help to supply her Allies.
+
+In one department of labor, it is a very startling thing to learn that "in
+a single fuse factory, what they call the danger buildings, mostly women
+are employed. About five hundred women are found at work in one of these
+factories on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and
+filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which is really dangerous, like
+detonator work." It is the insertion in the shell of the little pellet
+which gives it its death-dealing power, that is so risky, but the women do
+not shrink from even this. In the largest fuse shop known, quite new,
+fourteen hundred girls, in one shift, are at work.
+
+"An endless spectacle of gun-carriages, naval turrets, torpedo-tubes, army
+railway-carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making
+shops, gauge shops, seems to be going on forever, and in the tool-making
+shops the output has risen from forty-four thousand to three million a
+year." The vastness of the work, and the incessant and enormous
+multiplication of all the products for war must be as overwhelming as it
+is monotonous. And then there were the huge shipyards, which before the
+war were capable of the berth of twenty ships at once, from the largest
+battleship downward, and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour's word
+for it, have since the beginning of the war added a million tons to the
+navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid journeys had not time to stop and inspect
+these, to our very great regret, for her description of them would have
+been most instructive.
+
+She declares from actual observation that in the Clyde district, in whose
+populous centre some threats of disquiet have existed, the work done by
+thousands and tens of thousands of workmen since the beginning of the war,
+especially in the great shipyards, and done with the heartiest and most
+self-sacrificing good-will, has been simply invaluable to the nation, and
+will never be forgotten, and the invasion of women there has, perhaps,
+been more startling to the workmen than anywhere else. Where not a single
+woman was employed in the works and factories before the war, except in
+textiles, "there will soon be fifteen thousand of them in the munition
+workshops alone, and that will not be the end."
+
+Wherever she goes, Mrs. Ward's eyes are wide open. From her own home,
+which is in the midst of one of the most patriotic regions of the realm,
+she can witness the perpetual activity which has come about in preparation
+for the war in all its varied phases and branches; everything and
+everybody is in vigorous motion, both there and in all the counties of
+England which she has visited. Great camps in every direction for the
+shelter and training of recruits, all coming and going, all marching and
+countermarching, training and drilling everywhere, and as fast as the
+citizen is converted into a soldier, he is bound for the seat of war with
+all the equipments that war requires, tramping everywhere, tramp, tramp,
+along the land; tramp, tramp, along the sea, until the new supports, all
+ready for vital service, reach their destination on French soil.
+
+Mrs. Ward has made a careful study of the effect of the novel introduction
+of women into all these works of men, especially in the munition
+factories, and dwells with great significance upon the rapidity of the
+women's piece-work and the mingling of classes, where educated and refined
+girls work side by side and very happily with those of an humbler type.
+What Mrs. Ward well calls "the common spirit" inspires them all, and holds
+them all in just and equal relations. At every step she is startled by the
+vastness of the work and the immense hand that women have in it, finding
+one shop turning out about four thousand shrapnel and four thousand
+high-explosive shells per week, heavy shell work all, which they thought
+at first they must furnish men to lift in and out of the machines, but
+"the women thrust the men aside in five minutes." Surely this new
+education of women, of these girls and women who are to become the mothers
+of the next generation, must have a most inspiring and exalting effect
+upon the days to come. War may be postponed for whole generations, but
+England will never fail to be ready for it as a necessary part of the
+education of the race.
+
+It is quite evident that this war is breaking down the barriers that have
+heretofore been impassable, not only between men and women, but between
+the various classes of society, and that it cannot possibly end without
+bringing these more closely together, all working to the same end in a
+more perfect harmony, and that the result of it must be that England will
+hereafter be an even more perfect democracy than it has been up to this
+time.
+
+France! Glorious France! The conduct of whose government and people in the
+war seems to have been absolutely perfect, has at last reached a wonderful
+result after her hundred years of agonies and revolutions. We hear from
+France no complaints, no internal dissensions, but all the people, mankind
+and womankind, working together, each in its proper sphere, to the one
+common end, the salvation of the State. I trust that we shall never
+forget all that the world and we, especially, owe to France. She is adding
+to our obligations now by fighting our battles for us.
+
+And now with her daughter under the special protection and guidance of the
+war office, this distinguished woman followed the khaki-clad soldiers of
+England, now numbered by millions, across the channel, and everything was
+thrown freely open to her. She soon found out what the great supply bases,
+on which the British army in France rests, really mean, made up of the
+Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, Railroad, Motor, and Transport,
+and she found it a deeply interesting study, "whose work has involved the
+labor of some of the best brains in the army," and she learned the
+organizing power that has gone to make the career of the English army in
+France possible.
+
+There was the immense dock, and its vast storehouse, the largest in the
+world, "built three years before the war, partly, it is said, by German
+money, to house the growing cotton trade of the port, but now it houses a
+large proportion of the food of the British army," a building half a mile
+long, bounded on one side by the docks, where the ships discharge the
+stores and the men, and on the other by the railway lines where the trains
+are perpetually loading for the front. On the quays ships of all nations,
+except Germany, are pouring out their stores, and on the other side the
+trucks that are going to the front are loading with the supplies that are
+wanted for every regiment in the service. Her eyes light upon one wired in
+space, labelled "Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage,"
+where, while medical necessaries are housed elsewhere, are "the dainties,
+the special foods, the easing appliances of all kinds," which are to make
+life bearable to the wounded men, and she stops to think how the shade of
+Florence Nightingale would have paused at this spot.
+
+The huge sheds of Army Ordnance are filled with everything that a soldier
+does not eat, all metal stores, whatever, and the men who work in them are
+housed in one of the longest sheds in tiers of bunks from floor to
+ceiling, and then there are the repairing sheds and workshops, established
+near by, and that is the most wonderful thing of the whole to my
+mind--never done before in connection with an army in the field. Trainsful
+of articles to be repaired come down from the front every day, and almost
+every imaginable article that the men at the front can use, from guns to
+boots, comes here to be repaired, or if found beyond repair, to be sent to
+Yorkshire for shoddy. The marvellous thing is that, as soon as they are
+received, they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and returned
+to their owners at the front, a vast work in itself. The boot and uniform
+sheds alone, where again she finds five hundred French women and girls,
+and the harness-making room are doing an enormous work. The Colonel in
+charge began work with one hundred and forty men, and is now employing
+more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of
+pounds a week to the British government.
+
+Recreation and amusement are supplied in near locality for the waiting
+soldiers and, although the snow is more than ankle-deep, they visit such
+places as recreation rooms and cinema theaters, and on a neighboring hill
+great troops of men are going through some of the last refinements of
+drill before they start for the front. Here are trenches of all kinds and
+patterns, in which the men may practise, planned according to the latest
+experience brought from the front. "The instructors are all men returned
+from the front, and the new recruits, trained up to this last point, would
+not be patient of any other teachers."
+
+Having thus seen all that one day could afford them at the very base of
+the great army, our visitors make their way in closed motors through the
+snow, passing scores of motor lorries, and other wagons, stuck in the
+snow-drifts. They stop for the night at a pleasant hotel full of
+officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communication, and a
+few of the mothers and sisters of the poor wounded in the neighboring
+hospitals, who have come over to nurse them.
+
+Every gun, every particle of munition, clothing, and equipment, and
+whatever else is necessary, including the food of the armies, every horse,
+every vehicle, has to be brought across the British channel, to maintain
+and reinforce the ever-growing British army, and the ever-daily increasing
+congestion at all the ports makes it more and more difficult every day to
+receive, disembark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of men and the
+masses of material, and all the time there are thousands of troops passing
+through, thousands in the hospitals, and thousands at work on the docks
+and storehouses. Everything tending to Tommy Atkins's comfort is supplied,
+including again palatial cinemas and concerts, all of which results in
+excellent behavior and the best of relations between the British soldier
+and the French inhabitants. At the docks armies of laborers and lines of
+ships discharging men, horses, timber, rations, fodder, coal, coke,
+petrol, and the same at the storehouses and depots.
+
+The visitors spend a long Sunday morning in the motor transport depot, and
+it gave a good illustration of the complete system of discipline and
+organization that prevailed everywhere. This depot began, said the Colonel
+in charge, on the 13th of August, 1914, "with a few balls of string and a
+bag of nails." Its present staff is about five hundred. All the drivers of
+twenty thousand motor vehicles are tested here, and the depot exhibits
+three hundred and fifty different types of vehicles, and in round figures,
+one hundred thousand separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and
+arranged in this same depot. The Sunday morning began with a simple
+service in the Young Men's Christian Association hut, at which five
+hundred motor-drivers attended, about half of the whole number in the
+station.
+
+The same day they explored endless camps and the wards of a Red Cross
+hospital. It was impossible to take in everything at once, and our ladies
+retired at night, bewildered by mingled impressions of "human energy,
+human intelligence, human suffering," but full of pride and exultation at
+the efficiency of their country and of the good relations of their
+soldiers with the French. They carried with them as a last impression of
+the day the picture of a canteen worked day and night in three shifts by a
+heroic band of women close by the railway station, full of soldiers just
+departing for the front, young, gay and full of spirits; then came the
+train to take the soldiers off for the fighting line, and the women, left
+behind, set up the song, already familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home
+fires burning till the boys come home."
+
+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?
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: Marines Drilling on the Quarterdeck of a British
+Battleship.]
+
+[Illustration: Fifteen-inch Guns on a British Battleship.]
+
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+
+II
+
+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."
+
+We pass up a fine oak staircase to the new offices, and I am soon
+listening to the report of the works superintendent. A spare, powerful man
+with the eyes of one in whom life burns fast, he leans, his hands in his
+pockets, against the wall of his office, talking easily and well. He
+himself has not had a day's holiday for ten months, never sleeping more
+than five and a half hours, with the telephone at his bedhead, and waking
+to instant work when the moment for waking comes. His view of his workmen
+is critical. It is the view of one consumed with "realisation," face to
+face with those who don't "realise." "But the raid will do a deal of
+good," he says cheerfully.
+
+"As to the women!"--he throws up his hands--"they're saving the country.
+They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten and a half or, with
+overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. At least, that's what
+they'd like to do. The Government are insisting on one Sunday--or two
+Sundays--a month off. I don't say they're not right. But the women resent
+it. '_We're_ not tired!' they say. And you look at them!--they're not
+tired.
+
+"If I go down to the shed and say: 'Girls!--there's a bit of work the
+Government are pushing for--they say they must have--can you get it done?'
+Why, they'll stay and get it done, and then pour out of the works,
+laughing and singing. I can tell you of a surgical-dressing factory near
+here, where for nearly a year the women never had a holiday. They simply
+wouldn't take one. 'And what'll our men at the front do, if we go
+holiday-making?'
+
+"Last night" (the night of the Zeppelin raid) "the warning came to put out
+lights. We daren't send them home. They sat in the dark among the
+machines, singing, 'Keep the home fires burning,' 'Tipperary,' and the
+like. I tell you, it made one a bit choky to hear them. They were thinking
+of their sweethearts and husbands I'll be bound!--not of themselves."
+
+In another minute or two we were walking through the new workshops. Often
+as I have now seen this sight, so new to England, of a great engineering
+workshop filled with women, it stirs me at the twentieth time little less
+than it did at first. These girls and women of the Midlands and the north,
+are a young and comely race. Their slight or rounded figures among the
+forest of machines, the fair or golden hair of so many of them, their
+grace of movement, bring a strange touch of beauty into a scene which has
+already its own spell.
+
+Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art
+with these high workshops, with their intricate distances and the endless
+crisscross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in
+of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, showing the many
+pretty heads and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms,
+spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes as far as the eye can
+reach, has added a new element--something flower-like, to all this flash
+of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it.
+
+For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine! These
+girls--at hot haste--are making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hundred
+thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, in the special
+danger-buildings, filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive. There
+were about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw the shop, and their
+number has no doubt increased since; for the latest figures show that
+about 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every
+week. The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and
+co-operation of the men--without, that is, the surrender by the men of
+some of their most cherished trade customs--the whole movement would have
+been impossible.
+
+As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the
+deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite
+indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the
+Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain
+has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely
+dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is a war of machinery--and we
+all know what Germany's arsenals have done to make it so--its whole aspect
+is now changing for us. The "eternal feminine" has made one more
+startling incursion upon the normal web of things!
+
+But on the "dilution" of labour, the burning question of the hour, I shall
+have something to say in my next letter. Let me record another visit of
+the same day to a small-arms factory of importance. Not many women here so
+far, though the number is increasing, but look at the expansion figures
+since last summer! A large, new factory added, on a bare field; 40,000
+tons of excavation removed, two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and
+four floors high, the output in rifles quadrupled, and so on.
+
+We climbed to the top floor of the new buildings and looked far and wide
+over the town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the national flags, marking
+"controlled" factories, i.e., factories still given over a year ago to
+one or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of the Midlands, and now
+making fuse or shell for England's Armies, and under the control of the
+British Government. One had a sudden sharp sense of the town's corporate
+life, and of the spirit working in it everywhere for England's victory.
+Before we descended, we watched the testing of a particular gun. I was to
+hear its note on the actual battle-field a month later.
+
+An afternoon train takes me on to another great town, with some very
+ancient institutions, which have done very modern service in the war. I
+spent my evening in talking with my host, a steel manufacturer identified
+with the life of the city, but serving also on one of the central
+committees of the Ministry in London. Labour and politics, the chances of
+the war, America and American feeling towards us, the task of the new
+Minister of Munitions, the temper of English and Scotch workmen, the flux
+into which all manufacturing conditions have been thrown by the war, and
+how far old landmarks can be restored after it--we talked hard on these
+and many other topics, till I must break it off--unwillingly!--to get some
+sleep and write some notes.
+
+Next day took me deep into the very central current of "England's
+Effort"--so far as this great phase of it at any rate is concerned. In
+this town, even more than in the city I had just left, one felt the throb
+of the nation's rising power, concentrated, orderly, determined. Every
+single engineering business in a town of engineers was working for the
+war. Every manufacturer of any importance was doing his best for the
+Government, some in connection with the new Ministry, some with the
+Admiralty, some with the War Office. As for the leading firms of the city,
+the record of growth, of a mounting energy by day and night, was nothing
+short of bewildering. Take these few impressions of a long day, as they
+come back to me.
+
+First, a great steel warehouse, full of raw steel of many sorts and kinds,
+bayonet steel, rifle steel, shell steel, stacked in every available corner
+and against every possible wall--all sold, every bit of it, and ready to
+be shipped--some to the Colonies, some to our Allies, with peremptory
+orders coming in as to which the harassed head of the firm could only
+shake his head with a despairing "impossible!"
+
+Then some hours in a famous works, under the guidance of the managing
+director, one of those men, shrewd, indefatigable, humane, in whose
+company one learns what it is, in spite of all our supposed deficiencies,
+that makes the secret of England's industrial tenacity. An elderly
+Scotchman, very plainly marked by the labour and strain of the preceding
+eighteen months, but still steadily keeping his head and his temper,
+showing the signs of an Evangelical tradition in his strong dislike for
+Sunday work, his evident care for his work-people--men and women--and his
+just and sympathetic tone towards the labour with which he has to
+deal--such is my companion.
+
+He has a wonderful story to tell: "In September, 1914, we were called upon
+to manufacture a large extra number of field-guns. We had neither
+buildings nor machinery for the order. However, we set to work. We took
+down seven dwelling-houses; in three weeks we were whitewashing the walls
+of our new workshop and laying in the machinery. My idea was to make so
+many guns. The Government asked for four times as many. So we took down
+more houses, and built another much larger shop. The work was finished in
+ten weeks. Five other large workshops were put up last year, all built
+with lightning speed, and everywhere additions have been made to the
+machinery in every department wherever it was possible to put machines."
+
+As to their thousands of workmen, Mr. C. has no complaints to make.
+
+"They have been steadily working anything from 60 to 80 hours per week;
+the average is 64.29 hours per week, and the average time lost only 3.51
+per cent. A little while ago, a certain union put forward a claim for an
+advance in wages. We had to decline it, but as the meeting came to an end,
+the trade-union secretary said:
+
+"'Of course, we are disappointed, and we shall no doubt return to the
+matter again. But whether you concede the advance of wages or not, our
+members will continue to do their level best, believing that they are not
+only working for themselves, but helping the Government and helping our
+soldiers to wage this war to a successful conclusion.'"
+
+And the manager adds his belief that this is the spirit which prevails
+"among the work-people generally."
+
+Before we plunge into the main works, however, my guide takes me to see a
+recent venture, organised since the war, in which he clearly takes a
+special interest. An old warehouse bought, so to speak, overnight, and
+equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for shell
+production--employing between three and four hundred girls, with the
+number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labour going.
+These girls are working on the eight hours' shift system; and working so
+well that a not uncommon wage among them--on piece-work, of course--runs
+to somewhere between two and three pounds a week.
+
+"But there is much more than money in it," says the kind-faced woman
+superintendent, as we step into her little office out of the noise, to
+talk a little. "The girls are perfectly aware that they are 'doing their
+bit,' that they are standing by their men in the trenches."
+
+This testimony indeed is universal. There is patriotism in this grim
+work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls
+and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he
+or she is there for some useful purpose connected with the war, and
+their expression seems to say: "Yes, we are all in it!--we know very
+well what _we_ are doing, and what a difference we are making. Go
+and tell our boys ..."
+
+The interest of this workshop lay, of course, in the fact that it was a
+sample of innumerable others, as quickly organised and as efficiently
+worked, now spreading over the Midlands and the north. As to the main
+works belonging to the same great firm, such things have been often
+described; but one sees them to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle
+which is one with the very life of England. Acres and acres of ground
+covered by huge workshops new and old, by interlacing railway lines and
+moving trolleys. Gone is all the vast miscellaneous engineering work of
+peace. The war has swallowed everything.
+
+I have a vision of a great building, where huge naval guns are being
+lowered from the annealing furnace above into the hardening oil-tank
+below, or where in the depths of a great pit, with lights and men moving
+at the bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket being shrunk upon
+another similar monster, hanging perpendicularly below me.
+
+Close by are the forging-shops whence come the howitzers and the huge
+naval shells. Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot ingots and
+drop them into the stamping presses. Man directs; but one might think the
+tools themselves intelligent, like those golden automata of old that
+Hephaestus made, to run and wait upon the gods of Olympus. Down drops the
+punch. There is a burst of flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and
+out comes the shell or the howitzer in the rough, nosed and hollowed, and
+ready for the turning.
+
+The men here are great, powerful fellows, blanched with heat and labour;
+amid the flame and smoke of the forges one sees them as typical figures in
+the national struggle, linked to those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and
+to those lines in Flanders and Picardy where Britain holds her enemy at
+bay. Everywhere the same intensity of effort, whether in the men or in
+those directing them. And what delicate and responsible processes!
+
+In the next shop, with its rows of shining guns, I stop to look at a great
+gun apparently turning itself. No workman is visible for the moment. The
+process goes on automatically, the bright steel emerging under the tool
+that here, too, seems alive. Close to it is a man winding steel wire, or
+rather braid, on a 15-inch gun; beyond again there are workmen and
+inspectors testing and gauging another similar giant. Look down this
+shining tube and watch the gauging, now with callipers, now with a rubber
+device which takes the impression of the rifling and reveals any defect.
+The gauging turns upon the ten-thousandth part of an inch, and any mistake
+or flaw may mean the lives of men....
+
+We turn out into a pale sunshine. The morning work is over, and the men
+are trooping into the canteens for dinner--and we look in a moment to see
+for ourselves how good a meal it is. At luncheon, afterwards, in the
+Directors' Offices, I am able to talk with the leading citizens of the
+great town.
+
+One of them writes some careful notes for me. Their report of labour
+conditions is excellent. "No organised strikes and few cessations of work
+to report. Overtime is being freely worked. Little or no drunkenness, and
+that at a time when the average earnings of many classes of workmen are
+two or three times above the normal level. The methods introduced in the
+twenty years before the war--conference and discussion--have practically
+settled all difficulties between employers and employed, in these parts at
+any rate, during this time of England's trial."
+
+After luncheon we diverge to pay another all too brief visit to a
+well-known firm. The managing director gives me some wonderful figures of
+a new shell factory they are just putting up. It was begun in September,
+1915. Since then 2,000 tons of steelwork has been erected, and 200 out of
+1,200 machines required have been received and fixed. Four thousand to
+5,000 hands will be ultimately employed.
+
+All the actual production off the machines _will be done by women_--and
+this, although the works are intended for a heavy class of shell,
+60-pounder high explosive. Women are already showing their
+capacity--helped by mechanical devices--to deal with this large type of
+shell; and the workshop when in full working order is intended for an
+output of a million shell per annum.
+
+I drive on, overshadowed by these figures. _"Per annum!"_ The little
+common words haunt the ear intolerably. Surely before one more year is
+over, this horror under which we live will be lifted from Europe! Britain,
+a victorious Britain, will be at peace, and women's hands will have
+something else to do than making high-explosive shell. But, meanwhile,
+there is no other way. The country's call has gone out, clear and stern,
+and her daughters are coming in their thousands to meet it, from loom and
+house and shop.
+
+A little later, in a great board-room, I find the Munitions Committee
+gathered. Its function, of course, is to help the new Ministry in
+organising the war work of the town. In the case of the larger firms, the
+committee has been chiefly busy in trying to replace labour withdrawn by
+the war. It has been getting skilled men back from the trenches, and
+advising the Ministry as to the "badging" of munition workers. It has
+itself, through its command of certain scientific workshops, been
+manufacturing gauges and testing materials.
+
+It has turned the electroplate workshops of the town on to making steel
+helmets, and in general has been "working in" the smaller engineering
+concerns so as to make them feed the larger ones. This process here, as
+everywhere, is a very educating one. The shops employed on bicycle and
+ordinary motor work have, as a rule, little idea of the extreme accuracy
+required in munition work. The idea of working to the thousandth of an
+inch seems to them absurd; but they have to learn to work to the
+ten-thousandth, and beyond! The war will leave behind it greatly raised
+standards of work in England!--that every one agrees.
+
+And I carry away with me as a last remembrance of this great town and its
+activities two recollections--one of a university man doing some highly
+skilled work on a particularly fine gauge: "If you ask me what I have
+been doing for the last few weeks, I can only tell you that I have been
+working like a nigger and have done nothing! Patience!--that's all there
+is to say." And another of a "transformed" shop of moderate size, where an
+active and able man, after giving up the whole of his ordinary business,
+has thrown himself into the provision, within his powers, of the most
+pressing war needs, as he came across them.
+
+In July last year, for instance, munitions work in many quarters was
+actually held up for want of gauges. Mr. D. made something like 10,000, to
+the great assistance of certain new Government shops. Then the Government
+asked for a particular kind of gun. Mr. D. undertook 1,000, and has
+already delivered 400. Tools for shell-making are _everywhere_ wanted in
+the rush of the huge demand. Mr. D. has been making them diligently. This
+is just one example among hundreds of how a great industry is adapting
+itself to the fiery needs of war.
+
+But the dark has come, and I must catch my train. As I speed through a
+vast industrial district I find in the evening papers hideous details of
+the Zeppelin raid, which give a peculiar passion and poignancy to my
+recollections of a crowded day--and peculiar interest, also, to the talk
+of an able representative of the Ministry of Munitions, who is travelling
+with me, and endeavouring to give me a connected view of the whole new
+organisation. As he speaks, my thoughts travel to the English battle-line,
+to the trenches and casualty clearing-stations behind it, to distant
+Russia; and I think of the Prime Minister's statement in Parliament--that
+the supply of munitions, for all its marvellous increase, is not yet equal
+to the demand. New shops, new workers, new efforts--England is producing
+them now unceasingly, she must go on producing them. There must be no
+pause or slackening. There will be none.
+
+I am going now to see--after the Midlands--what the English and Scotch
+north is doing to swell the stream. And in my next letter there will be
+plenty to say about "Dilution" of labour, about wages, and drink, and some
+other burning topics of the moment.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Dear H.
+
+It is now three months since Mr. Lloyd George made his startling speech,
+as Munitions Minister, in the House of Commons in which, as he wound up
+his review of his new department, he declared: "Unless we quicken our
+movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much
+gallant blood has flowed!" The passion of this peroration was like the
+fret of a river in flood chafing at some obstacle in its course. Generally
+speaking, the obstacle gives way. In this case Mr. George's obstacle had
+begun to give way long before December 21st--the date of the speech. The
+flood had been pushing at it with increasing force since the foundation of
+the Ministry of Munitions in the preceding summer. But the crumbling
+process was not quick enough for Great Britain's needs, or for the energy
+of her Minister.
+
+Hence the outspoken speech of December 21st, supported by Mr. Asquith's
+grave words of a few weeks later. "We cannot go on," said the Prime
+Minister in effect, "depending upon foreign countries for our munitions.
+We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and the cost is too
+great. We _must_ make them ourselves." "Yes--and _quicker_!" Mr. Lloyd
+George had already said, with a sharp emphasis, meant to "hustle" that
+portion of the nation which still required hustling; overpainting his
+picture, no doubt, but with quite legitimate rhetoric, in order to produce
+his effect.
+
+The result of that fresh "hustling" was the appointment of the Dilution
+Commissioners, a second Munitions Act amending the first, and a vast
+expansion all over the country of the organisation which had seemed so
+vast before. It was not till midwinter, in the very midst of the new and
+immense effort I have been describing, that the Minister of Munitions and
+those working with him convinced themselves that, without another resolute
+push, the barrier across the stream of the nation's will might still
+fatally hold it back. More and more men were wanted every week--in the
+Army and the workshops--and there were not men to go round. The second
+push had to be given--it was given--and it still firmly persists.
+
+In the spring of 1915, the executives of the leading trade-unions had
+promised the Government the relaxation of their trade rules for the period
+of the war. Many of the trade-union leaders--Mr. Barnes, Mr. Henderson,
+Mr. Hodge, and many others--have worked magnificently in this sense, and
+many unions have been thoroughly loyal throughout their ranks to the
+pledge given in their name. The iron-moulders, the shipwrights, the
+brassworkers may be specially mentioned. But in the trades mostly
+concerned with ammunition, there were certain places and areas where the
+men themselves, as distinct from their responsible leaders, offered a
+dogged, though often disguised resistance. Personally, I think that any
+one at all accustomed to try and look at labour questions from the point
+of view of labour will understand the men while heartily sympathising with
+the Minister, who was determined to get "the goods" and has succeeded in
+getting them. Here, in talking of "the men" I except that small
+revolutionary element among them which has no country, and exists in all
+countries. And I except, too, instances which certainly are to be found,
+though rarely, of what one might call a purely mean and overreaching
+temper on the part of workmen--taking advantage of the nation's need, as
+some of the less responsible employers have no doubt, also, taken
+advantage of it. But, in general, it seems to me, there has been an honest
+struggle in the minds of thousands of workmen between what appears to them
+the necessary protection of their standards of life--laboriously attained
+through long effort--and the call of the war. And that the overwhelming
+majority of the workmen concerned with munitions should have patriotically
+and triumphantly decided this struggle as they have--under pressure, no
+doubt, but under no such pressure as exists in a conscripted, still more
+in an invaded, nation--may rank, I think, when all is said, with the
+raising of our voluntary Armies as another striking chapter in the book of
+_England's Effort_.
+
+In this chapter, then, Dilution will always take a leading place.
+
+What is Dilution?
+
+It means, of course, that under the sharp analysis of necessity much
+engineering work, generally reckoned as "skilled" work, and reserved to
+"skilled" workmen, by a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable
+of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted out from
+the others as within the capacity of the unskilled or semiskilled worker.
+By so dividing them up, and using the superior labour with economy, only
+where it is really necessary, it can be made to go infinitely further; and
+the inferior or untrained labour can then be brought into work where
+nobody supposed it could be used, where, in fact, it never has been used.
+
+Obvious enough, perhaps. But the idea had to be applied in haste to living
+people--employers, many of whom shrank from reorganising their workshops
+and changing all their methods at a moment's notice; and workmen looking
+forward with consternation to being outnumbered, by ten to one, in their
+own workshops, by women. When I was in the Midlands and the North, at the
+end of January and in early February, Dilution was still an unsettled
+question in some of the most important districts. One of the greatest
+employers in the country writes to me to-day (March 24): "Since January,
+we have passed through several critical moments, but, eventually, the
+principle was accepted, and Dilution is being introduced as fast as
+convenient. For this we have largely to thank an admirable Commission (Sir
+Croydon Marks, Mr. Barnes, and Mr. Shackleton) which was sent down to
+interview employers and employed. Their tact and acumen were remarkable.
+Speaking personally, I cannot help believing that there is a better
+understanding between masters and men now than has existed in my memory."
+
+A great achievement that!--for both employers and employed--for the
+Minister also who appointed the Commission and thus set the huge stone
+rolling yet another leap upon its way.
+
+It will be readily seen how much depends also on the tact of the
+individual employer. That employer has constantly done best who has called
+his men into council with him, and thrown himself on their patriotism and
+good sense. I take the following passage from an interesting report by a
+very shrewd observer,[A] printed in one of the northern newspapers. It
+describes an employer as saying:
+
+     I was told by the Ministry that I should have to double my
+     output. Labour was scarce and I consulted a deputation of
+     the men about it. I told them the problem and said I should
+     be glad of suggestions. I told them that we should either
+     have to get men or women, and I asked them for their
+     co-operation, as there would be a great deal of teaching to
+     be done. "Probably," I said, "you would like to find the
+     men?" They agreed to try. I gave them a week, and at the end
+     of a week they came to me and said they would rather have
+     women. I said to them: "Then you must all pull together."
+     They gave me their word. Right from the beginning they have
+     done their level best to help, and things have gone on
+     perfectly. On one occasion, a woman complained that the man
+     directing her was "working against her." I called the men's
+     committee together, said the employer. I told them the
+     facts, and they have dealt with the offender themselves.
+
+[A] _Yorkshire Observer_, February 1, 1916.
+
+The general system now followed in the shell factories is to put so many
+skilled men in charge of so many lathes worked by women workers. Each
+skilled man, who teaches the women, sets the tools, and keeps the machines
+in running order, oversees eight, ten, or more machines. But sometimes the
+comradeship is much closer. For instance (I quote again the witness
+mentioned above), in a machine tool shop, i.e., a shop for the making of
+tools used in shell production, one of the most highly skilled parts of
+the business, you may now see a man, with a woman to help him, operating
+two lathes. If the woman falls into any difficulty the man comes to help
+her. Both can earn more money than each could earn separately, and the
+skilled man who formerly worked the second lathe is released. In the same
+shop a woman watched a skilled man doing slot-drilling--a process in which
+thousandths of an inch matter--for a fortnight. Now she runs the machine
+herself by day, while the man works it on the night shift. One woman in
+this shop is "able to do her own tool-setting." The observer thinks she
+must be the only woman tool-setter in the country, and he drops the remark
+that her capacity and will may have something to do with the fact that she
+has a husband at the front! Near by, as part of the same works, which are
+not specialised, but engaged in _general_ engineering, is a bomb shop
+staffed by women, which is now sending 3,000 bombs a week to the trenches.
+Women are also doing gun-breech work of the most delicate and responsible
+kind under the guidance of a skilled overseer. One of the women at this
+work was formerly a charwoman. She has never yet broken a tool. All over
+the works, indeed, the labour of women and unskilled men is being utilised
+in the same scientific way. Thus the area of the works has been doubled in
+a few months, without the engagement of a single additional skilled man
+from outside. "We have made the men take an interest in the women," say
+the employers. "That is the secret of our success. We care nothing at all
+about the money, we are all for the output. If the men think you are going
+to exploit women and cheapen the work, the scheme is crabbed right away."
+
+I myself came across the effect of this suspicion in the minds of the
+workmen in the case of a large Yorkshire shell factory, where the
+employers at once detected and slew it. This great workshop, formerly used
+for railway work, now employs some 1,300 women, with a small staff of
+skilled men. The women work forty-five hours a week in eight-hour
+shifts--the men fifty-three hours on twelve-hour shifts. There is no
+difficulty whatever in obtaining a full supply of women's labour--indeed,
+the factory has now a waiting-list of 500. Nor has there been any
+difficulty with the men in regard to the women's work. With the exception
+of two operations, which are thought too heavy for them, all the machines
+are run by women.
+
+But when the factory began, the employers very soon detected that it was
+running below its possible output. There was a curious lack of briskness
+in the work--a curious constraint among the new workers. Yet the employers
+were certain that the women were keen, and their labour potentially
+efficient. They put their heads together, and posted up a notice in the
+factory to the effect that whatever might be the increase in the output of
+piece-work, the piece-work rate would not be altered. Instantly the
+atmosphere began to clear, the pace of the machines began to mount.
+
+It was a factory in which the work was new, the introduction of women was
+new, and the workers strange to each other, and for the most part strange
+to their employers. A small leaven of distrust on the part of the men
+workers was enough, and the women were soon influenced. Luckily, the
+mischief was as quickly scotched. Men and women began to do their best,
+the output of the factory--which had been planned for 14,000 shells a
+week--ran up to 20,000, and everything has gone smoothly since.
+
+Let me now, however, describe another effect of Dilution--the employment
+of unskilled _men_ on operations hitherto included in skilled engineering.
+
+On the day after the factory I have just described, my journey took me to
+another town close by, where my guide--a Director of one of the largest
+and best-known steel and engineering works in the kingdom--showed me a new
+shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, all "medically unfit" for the
+Army, and almost all drawn from the small trades and professions of the
+town, especially from those which had been hard hit by the war. Among
+those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing-machines, a publican's
+assistant, clerks, shop assistants, three clergy--these latter going home
+for their Sunday duty, and giving their wages to the Red Cross--unemployed
+architects, and the like.
+
+I cannot recall any shop which made a greater impression of energy, of a
+spirit behind the work, than this shop. In its inspecting-room I found a
+graduate from Yale. "I had to join in the fight," he said quietly--"this
+was the best way I could think of." And it was noticeable besides for some
+remarkable machines, which your country had also sent us.
+
+In other shell factories a single lathe carries through one process,
+interminably repeated, sometimes two, possibly three. But here, with the
+exception of the fixing and drilling of the copper band, and a few minor
+operations, one lathe _made the shell_--cut, bored, roughed, turned,
+nosed, and threaded it, so that it dropped out, all but the finished
+thing--minus, of course, the fuse. The steel pole introduced at the
+beginning of the process made nine shells, and the average time per shell
+was twenty-three minutes. No wonder that in the great warehouse adjoining
+the workshop one saw the shell heaps piling up in their tens of
+thousands--only to be rushed off week by week, incessantly, to the front.
+The introduction of these machines had been largely the work of an able
+Irish manager, who described to me the intense anxiety with which he had
+watched their first putting up and testing, lest the vast expenditure
+incurred should have been in any degree thrown away. His cheerful looks
+and the shell warehouse told the sequel. When I next met him it was at a
+northern station in company with his Director. They were then apparently
+in search of new machinery! The workshop I had seen was being given over
+to women, and the men were moving on to heavier work. And this is the kind
+of process which is going on over the length and breadth of industrial
+England.
+
+So far, however, I have described the expansion or adaptation of firms
+already existing. But the country is now being covered with another and
+new type of workshop--the National Shell factories--which are founded,
+financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions. The English Government is
+now by far the greatest engineering employer in the world.
+
+Let me take an illustration from a Yorkshire town--a town where this
+Government engineering is rapidly absorbing everything but the textile
+factories. A young and most competent Engineer officer is the Government
+head of the factory. The work was begun last July, by the help of borrowed
+lathes, in a building which had been used for painting railway-carriages;
+its first shell was completed last August. The staff last June was 1. It
+is now about 200, and the employees nearly 2,500.
+
+A month after the first factory was opened, the Government asked for
+another--for larger shell. It was begun in August, and was in work in a
+few weeks. In September a still larger factory--for still larger
+shells--(how these demands illustrate the course of the war!--how they are
+themselves illustrated by the history of Verdun!) was seen to be
+necessary. It was begun in September, and is now running. Almost all the
+machines used in the factory have been made in the town itself, and about
+100 small firms, making shell parts--fuses primers, gaines, etc.--have
+been grouped round the main firm, and are every day sending in their work
+to the factory to be tested, put together, and delivered.
+
+No factory made a better impression upon me than this one. The large, airy
+building with its cheerful lighting; the girls in their dark-blue caps and
+overalls, their long and comely lines reminding one of some processional
+effect in a Florentine picture; the high proportion of good looks, even of
+delicate beauty, among them; the upper galleries with their tables piled
+with glittering brasswork, amid which move the quick, trained hands of
+the women--if one could have forgotten for a moment the meaning of it all,
+one might have applied to it Carlyle's description of a great school, as
+"a temple of industrious peace."
+
+Some day, perhaps, this "new industry"--as our ancestors talked of a "new
+learning"--this swift, astonishing development of industrial faculty among
+our people, especially among our women, will bear other and rich fruit for
+England under a cleared sky. It is impossible that it should pass by
+without effect, profound effect upon our national life. But at present it
+has one meaning and one only--_war_!
+
+Talk to these girls and women. This woman has lost her son--that one her
+husband. This one has a brother home on leave, and is rejoicing in the
+return of her husband from the trenches, as a skilled man, indispensable
+in the shop; another has friends in the places and among the people which
+suffered in the last Zeppelin raid. She speaks of it with tight lips. Was
+it she who chalked the inscription found by the Lady Superintendent on a
+lathe some nights ago--"_Done fourteen to-day. Beat that if you can, you
+devils_!"
+
+No!--under this fast-spreading industry, with its suggestion of good
+management and high wages, there is the beat of no ordinary impulse. Some
+feel it much more than others; but, says the clever and kindly
+Superintendent I have already quoted: "The majority are very decidedly
+working from the point of view of doing something for their country.... A
+great many of the fuse women are earning for the first time.... The more I
+see of them all, the better I like them." And then follow some interesting
+comments on the relation of the more educated and refined women among them
+to the skilled mechanics--two national types that have perhaps never met
+in such close working contact before. One's thoughts begin to follow out
+some of the possible social results of this national movement.
+
+[Illustration: A Forest of Shells in a Corner of One of England's Great
+Shell Filling Factories.]
+
+[Illustration: A Light Railway Bringing Up Ammunition.]
+
+
+II
+
+But now the Midlands and the Yorkshire towns are behind me. The train
+hurries on through a sunny afternoon, and I look through some notes sent
+me by an expert in the great campaign. Some of them represent its humours.
+Here is a perfectly true story, which shows an Englishman with "a move
+on," not unworthy of your side of the water.
+
+A father and son, both men of tremendous energy, were the chiefs of a very
+large factory, which had been already extensively added to. The father
+lived in a house alongside the works. One day business took him into the
+neighbouring county, whilst the son came up to London on munition work. On
+the father's return he was astonished to see a furniture van removing the
+contents of his house. The son emerged. He had already signed a contract
+for a new factory on the site of his father's house; the materials of the
+house were sold and the furniture half gone. After a first start, the
+father took it in true Yorkshire fashion--wasting no words, and
+apparently proud of his son!
+
+Here we are at last, in the true north--crossing a river, with a climbing
+town beyond, its tiled roofs wreathed in smoke, through which the
+afternoon lights are playing. I am carried off to a friend's house. Some
+directors of the great works I am come to see look in to make a kindly
+plan for the morrow, and in the evening, I find myself sitting next one of
+the most illustrious of modern inventors, with that touch of _dream_ in
+manner and look which so often goes with scientific discovery. The
+invention of this gentle and courteous man has affected every vessel of
+any size afloat, whether for war or trade, and the whole electrical
+development of the world. The fact was to be driven home even to my
+feminine ignorance of mechanics when, a fortnight later, the captain of a
+Flag-ship and I were hanging over the huge shaft leading down to the
+engine-rooms of the Super-dreadnought, and my companion was explaining to
+me something of the driving power of the ship. But on this first meeting,
+how much I might have asked of the kind, great man beside me, and was too
+preoccupied to ask! May the opportunity be retrieved some day! My head was
+really full of the overwhelming facts, whether of labour or of output,
+relating to this world-famous place, which were being discussed around me.
+I do not name the place, because the banishment of names, whether of
+persons or places, has been part of the plan of these articles. But one
+can no more disguise it by writing round it than one could disguise
+Windsor Castle by any description that was not ridiculous. Many a German
+officer has walked through these works, I imagine, before the war, smoking
+the cigarette of peace with their Directors, and inwardly ruminating
+strange thoughts. If any such comes across these few lines, what I have
+written will, I think, do England no harm.
+
+But here are some of the figures that can be given. The shop area of the
+ammunition shops alone has been increased _eightfold_ since the outbreak
+of war. The total weight of shell delivered during 1915 was--in
+tons--fourteen times as much as that of 1914. The weight of shell
+delivered per week, as between December, 1914, and December, 1915, has
+risen nearly ten times. The number of work-people, in these shops, men and
+women, had risen (a) as compared with the month in which war broke out, to
+a figure eight times as great; (b) as compared with December, 1914, to one
+between three and four times as great. And over the whole vast enterprise,
+shipyards, gun shops, ammunition shops, with all kinds of naval and other
+machinery used in war, the numbers of work-people employed had increased
+since 1913 more than 200 per cent. They, with their families, equal the
+population of a great city--you may see a new town rising to meet their
+needs on the farther side of the river.
+
+As to Dilution, it is now accepted by the men, who said when it was
+proposed to them: "Why didn't you come to us six months ago?"
+
+And it is working wonders here as elsewhere. For instance, a particular
+portion of the breech mechanism of a gun used to take one hour and twenty
+minutes to make. On the Dilution plan it is done on a capstan, and takes
+six minutes. Where 500 women were employed before the war, there are now
+close on 9,000, and there will be thousands more, requiring one skilled
+man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. In a great gun-carriage
+shop, "what used to be done in two years is now done in one month." In
+another, two tons of brass were used before the war; a common figure now
+is twenty-one. A large milling shop, now entirely worked by men, is to be
+given up immediately to women. And so on.
+
+Dilution, it seems to me, is breaking down a number of labour conventions
+which no longer answer to the real conditions of the engineering trades.
+The pressure of the war is doing a real service to both employers and
+employed by the simplification and overhauling it is everywhere bringing
+about.
+
+As to the problem of what is to be done with the women after the war, one
+may safely leave it to the future. It is probably bound up with that other
+problem of the great new workshops springing up everywhere, and the huge
+new plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid recovery of French trade
+after the war of 1870, and of the far more rapid rate--after forty years
+of machine and transport development, at which the industry of the Allied
+countries may possibly recover the ravages of the present war, when once
+peace is signed. In that recovery, how great a part may yet be played by
+these war workshops!--transformed to the uses of peace; by their crowds of
+work-people, and by the hitherto unused intelligence they are everywhere
+evoking and training among both men and women.
+
+As for the following day, my impressions, looking back, seem to be all a
+variant on a well-known Greek chorus, which hymns the amazing--the
+"terrible"--cleverness of Man! Seafaring, tillage, house-building,
+horse-taming, so muses Sophocles, two thousand three hundred years ago;
+how did man ever find them out? "Wonders are many, but the most wonderful
+thing is man! _Only against death has he no resource_."
+
+_Intelligence_--and _death_! They are written everywhere in these endless
+workshops, devoted to the fiercest purposes of war. First of all, we visit
+the "danger buildings" in the fuse factory, where mostly women are
+employed. About 500 women are at work here, on different processes
+connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine,
+some of which are dangerous. Detonator work, for instance. The Lady
+Superintendent selects for it specially steady and careful women or girls,
+who are paid at time-and-a-quarter rate. Only about eight girls are
+allowed in each room. The girls here all wear--for protection--green
+muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curious, ghastly look, that fits
+the occupation. For they are making small pellets for the charging of
+shells, out of a high-explosive powder. Each girl uses a small copper
+ladle to take the powder out of a box before her, and puts it into a
+press which stamps it into a tiny block, looking like ivory. She holds her
+hand over a little tray of water lest any of the powder should escape.
+What the explosive and death-dealing power of it is, it does not do to
+think about.
+
+In another room a fresh group of girls are handling a black powder for
+another part of the detonator, and because of the irritant nature of the
+powder, are wearing white bandages round the nose and mouth. There is
+great competition for these rooms, the Superintendent says! The girls in
+them work on two shifts of ten and one-half hours each, and would resent a
+change to a shorter shift. They have one hour for dinner, half an hour for
+tea, a cup of tea in the middle of the morning--and the whole of Saturdays
+free. To the eye of the ordinary visitor they show few signs of fatigue.
+
+After the fuse factory we pass through the high-explosive factory, where
+250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling
+18-pounder shell with high explosive. The brass cartridge-case is being
+filled with cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown sticks, and the
+shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly
+explosives we have seen prepared in the "danger buildings." The shell is
+fitted into the cartridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is
+now ready to be fired.
+
+I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed, and about to go straight to
+the front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first stage on
+their journey. I little thought then that I should see these boxes, or
+their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries behind the
+fighting lines in France, and that within a fortnight I should myself
+stand by and see one of those shells fired from a British gun, little more
+than a mile from Neuve Chapelle.
+
+But here are the women and girls trooping out to dinner. A sweet-faced
+Superintendent comes to talk to me. "They are not as strong as the men,"
+she says, pointing to the long lines of girls, "but what they lack in
+strength they make up in patriotic spirit." I speak to two educated women,
+who turn out to be High School mistresses from a town that has been
+several times visited by Zeppelins. "We just felt we must come and help to
+kill Germans," they say quietly. "All we mind is getting up at five-thirty
+every morning. Oh, no! it is not too tiring."
+
+Afterwards?--I remember one long procession of stately shops, with their
+high windows, their floors crowded with machines, their roofs lined with
+cranes, the flame of the forges, and the smoke of the fizzling steel
+lighting up the dark groups of men, the huge howitzer shells, red-hot,
+swinging in mid-air, and the same shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great
+lathes that rough and bore and finish them. Here are shell for the _Queen
+Elizabeth_ guns!--the biggest shell made. This shop had been put up by
+good luck just as the war began. Its output of steel has increased from
+80 tons a week to 1,040.
+
+Then another huge fuse shop, quite new, where 1,400 girls in one shift are
+at work--said to be the largest fuse shop known. And on the following
+morning, an endless spectacle of war work--gun-carriages, naval turrets,
+torpedo tubes, armed railway carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant
+ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops--and so on for ever. In the
+tool-making shops the output has risen from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a year!
+
+And meanwhile I have not seen anything, and shall not have time to see
+anything of the famous shipyards of the firm. But with regard to them, all
+that it is necessary to remember is that before the war they were capable
+of berthing twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward;
+and we have Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what has happened, since the
+war, in the naval shipyards of this country. "We have added _a million
+tons to the Navy--and we have doubled its personnel_."
+
+And now let me record two final sayings.
+
+One from a manager of a department:
+
+     We have a good many Socialists here, and they constantly
+     give trouble. But the great majority of the men have done
+     wonderfully! Some men have put in one hundred hours a week
+     since the war began. Some have not lost a minute since it
+     began. The old hands have worked _splendidly_.
+
+And another from one of the Directors:
+
+     I know of no drunkenness among our women. I don't remember
+     ever having seen a drunken woman round here.
+
+
+III
+
+I have almost said my say on munitions, though I could continue the story
+much longer. But the wonder of it consists really in its vastness, in the
+steady development of a movement which will not end or slacken till the
+Allies are victorious. Except for the endless picturesqueness of the
+women's share in it, and the mechanical invention and adaptation going on
+everywhere, with which only a technical expert could deal, it is of course
+monotonous, and I might weary you. I will only--before asking you to
+cross the Channel with me to France--put down a few notes and impressions
+on the Clyde district, where, as our newspapers will have told you, there
+is at the present moment (March 29th) some serious labour trouble, with
+which the Government is dealing. Until further light is thrown upon its
+causes, comment is better postponed. But I have spoken quite frankly in
+these letters of "danger spots," where a type of international Socialism
+is to be found--affecting a small number of men, over whom the ideas of
+"country" and "national honour" seem to have no hold. Every country
+possesses such men and must guard itself against them. A nucleus of them
+exists in this populous and important district. How far their influence
+is helped among those who care nothing for their ideas, by any real or
+supposed grievances against the employers, by misunderstandings and
+misconceptions, by the sheer nervous fatigue and irritation of the men's
+long effort, or by those natural fears for the future of their Unions,
+to which I have once or twice referred, only one long familiar with the
+district could say, I can only point out here one or two interesting
+facts. In the first place, in this crowded countryside, where a small
+minority of dangerous extremists appear to have no care for their
+comrades in the trenches, the recruiting for the new Armies--so I learn
+from one of the leading authorities--has been--"taken on any basis
+whatever--substantially higher than in any other district. The men came
+up magnificently." That means that among those left behind, whatever
+disturbing and disintegrating forces exist in a great Labour centre have
+freer play than would normally be the case. A certain amount of patriotic
+cream has been skimmed, and in some places the milk that remains must be
+thin. In the second place--(you will remember the employer I quoted to you
+in a former letter)--the work done here by thousands and thousands of
+workmen since the beginning of the war, especially in the great shipyards,
+and done with the heartiest and most self-sacrificing good-will, has been
+simply invaluable to the nation, and England remembers it well. And
+finally, the invasion of women has perhaps been more startling to the
+workmen here than anywhere else. Not a single woman was employed in the
+works or factories of the district before the war, except in textiles.
+There will soon be 15,000 in the munition workshops, and that will not be
+the end.
+
+But Great Britain cannot afford--even in a single factory--to allow any
+trifling at this moment with the provision of guns, and the Government
+must--and will--act decisively.
+
+As to the drinking in this district of which so much has been said, and
+which is still far in excess of what it ought to be, I found many people
+hard put to it to explain why the restriction of hours which has worked so
+conspicuously well in other districts has had comparatively little effect
+here. Is it defects of administration, or a certain "cussedness" in the
+Scotch character, which resents any tightening of law? One large employer
+with whom I discuss it, believes it would suit the Scotch better to
+abolish all restrictions, and simply punish drunkenness much more
+severely. And above all--"open all possible means of amusement on Sundays,
+especially the cinemas!"--a new and strange doctrine, even now, in the
+ears of a country that holds the bones of John Knox. There seems indeed to
+be a terribly close connection between the dulness of the Scotch Sunday
+and the obstinacy of Scotch drinking; and when one thinks of the heavy
+toil of the week, of the confinement of the workshops, and the strain of
+the work, one feels at any rate that here is a problem which is to be
+_solved_, not preached at; and will be solved, some day, by nimbler and
+humaner wits than ours.
+
+In any case, the figures, gathered a month ago from those directly
+concerned, as to the general extension of the national effort here, could
+hardly be more striking. In normal times, the district, which is given up
+to Admiralty work, makes ships and guns, but has never made shells. The
+huge shell factories springing up all over it are a wholly new creation.
+As usual, they are filled with women, working under skilled male
+direction, and everywhere one found among managers and superintendents the
+same enthusiasm for the women's work. "It's their honour they work on,"
+said one forewoman. "That's why they stand it so well." The average
+working week is fifty-four hours, but overtime may seriously lengthen the
+tale. Wages are high; canteens and rest-rooms are being everywhere
+provided; and the housing question is being tackled. The rapidity of the
+women's piece-work is astonishing, and the mingling of classes--girls of
+education and refinement working quite happily with those of a much
+humbler type--runs without friction under the influence of a common
+spirit. This common spirit was well expressed by a girl who before she
+came to the factory was working a knitting-machine. "I like this
+better--_because there's a purpose in it_." A sweet-faced woman who was
+turning copper bands for shell, said to me: "I never worked a machine
+before the war. I have done 912 in ten hours, but that tired me very much.
+I can do 500 or 600 quite easily."
+
+On the same premises, after leaving the shell shops, we passed rapidly
+through gun shops, where I saw again processes which had become almost
+familiar. "The production of howitzers," said my guide, "is the question
+of the day. We are making them with great rapidity--but the trouble is to
+get enough machines." The next shop, devoted to 18-pounder field-guns, was
+"green fields fifteen months ago," and the one adjoining it, a fine shed
+about 400 feet square, for howitzer work, was started in August last, on a
+site "which was a bog with a burn running through it." Soon "every foot of
+space will be filled with machines, and there will be 1,200 people at work
+here, including 400 women. In the next shop we are turning out about 4,000
+shrapnel and 4,000 high-explosive shells per week. When we started women
+on what we thought this heavy shell, we provided men to help lift the
+shell in and out of the machines. The women thrust the men aside in five
+minutes."
+
+Later on, as I was passing through a series of new workshops occupied with
+all kinds of army work and employing large numbers of women, I stopped to
+speak to a Belgian woman. "Have you ever done any machine work before?"
+"No, Madame, never--_Mais, c'est la guerre. Il faut tuer les Allemands_!"
+It was a quiet, passionless voice. But one thought, with a shiver, of
+those names of eternal infamy--of Termonde, Aerschot, Dinant, Louvain.
+
+It was with this woman's words in my ears that I set out on my last
+visit--to which they were the fitting prelude. The afternoon was darkening
+fast. The motor sped down a river valley, sodden with rain and melting
+snow, and after some miles we turn into a half-made road, leading to some
+new buildings, and a desolate space beyond. A sentry challenges us, and we
+produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide stretch
+of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250 acres
+are enclosed with barbed wire, and patrolled by sentries night and day. A
+number of small buildings, workshops, stores, etc., are rising all over
+it. I am looking at what is to be the great "filling" factory of the
+district, where 9,000 women, in addition to male workmen, will soon be
+employed in charging the shell coming from the new shell factories we have
+left behind in the darkness.
+
+Strange and tragic scene! Strange uprising of women!
+
+We regain the motor and speed onwards, my secretary and I, through unknown
+roads far away from the city and its factories towards the country house
+where we are to spend the night. In my memory there surge a thousand
+recollections of all that I have seen in the preceding fortnight. An
+England roused at last--rushing to factory, and lathe, to shipyard and
+forge, determined to meet and dominate her terrible enemy in the workshop,
+as she has long since met and dominated him at sea, and will in time
+dominate him on land--that is how my country looks to me to-night.
+
+... The stars are coming out. Far away, over what seems like water with
+lights upon it, there are dim snowy mountains--majestic--rising into the
+sky. The noise and clamour of the factories are all quiet in the night.
+Two thoughts remain with me--Britain's ships in the North Sea--Britain's
+soldiers in the trenches. And encircling and sustaining both the justice
+of a great cause--as these white Highland hills look down upon and
+encircle this valley.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Dear H.
+
+A million and a half of men--over a quarter of a million of women--working
+in some 4,000 State-controlled workshops for the supply of munitions of
+war, not only to our own troops, but to those of our allies--the whole, in
+the main, a creation of six months' effort--this is the astonishing
+spectacle of some of the details of which I have tried, as an eye-witness,
+to give you in my previous letters a rapid and imperfect sketch.
+
+But what of the men, the Armies, for which these munitions are being made
+and hurried to the fighting-lines? It was at Aldershot, a few days ago,
+that I listened to some details of the first rush of the new Armies, given
+me by a member of the Headquarters Staff who had been through it all.
+Aldershot in peace time held about 27,000 troops. Since the outbreak of
+war some million and a quarter of men have passed through the great camp,
+coming in ceaselessly for training and equipment, and going out again to
+the theatres of war.
+
+In the first days and weeks of the war--during and after the marvellous
+precision and rapidity with which the Expeditionary Force was despatched
+to France--men poured in from all parts, from all businesses and
+occupations; rich and poor, north and south country men, English, Scotch,
+Irish, and Welsh; men from the Dominions, who had flung themselves into
+the first home-coming steamer; men from India, and men from the uttermost
+parts of Africa and Asia who had begged or worked their way home. They
+were magnificent material. They came with set faces, asking only for
+training, training, training!--and "what the peace soldier learns in six
+months," said my companion, "they learnt in six weeks. We had neither
+uniforms nor rifles, neither guns nor horses for them. We did not know how
+to feed them or to house them. In front of the headquarters at Aldershot,
+that Mecca of the soldier, where no one would dare to pass in ordinary
+times whose turnout is not immaculate, the most extraordinary figures, in
+bowler hats and bits of uniform, passed unrebuked. We had to raid the
+neighbouring towns for food, to send frantic embassies to London for bread
+and meat; to turn out any sort of shed to house them. Luckily it was
+summer weather; otherwise I don't know what we should have done for
+blankets. But nobody 'groused.' Everybody worked, and there were many who
+felt it 'the time of their lives.'"
+
+And yet England "engineered the war!" England's hypocrisy and greed
+demanded the crushing of Germany--hence the lying "excuse" of
+Belgium--that apparently is what all good Germans--except those who know
+better--believe; what every German child is being taught. As I listen to
+my companion's story, I am reminded, however, of a puzzled remark which
+reached me lately, written just before Christmas last, by a German nurse
+in a Berlin hospital, who has English relations, friends of my own. "We
+begin to wonder whether it really was England who caused the war--since
+you seem to be so dreadfully unprepared!" So writes this sensible girl to
+one of her mother's kindred in England; in a letter which escaped the
+German censor. She might indeed wonder! To have deliberately planned a
+Continental war with Germany, and Germany's 8,000,000 of soldiers, without
+men, guns, or ammunition beyond the requirements of an Expeditionary Force
+of 160,000 men, might have well become the State of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. But
+the England of Raleigh, Chatham, Pitt, and Wellington has not generally
+been reckoned a nation of pure fools.
+
+The military camps of Great Britain tell the tale of our incredible
+venture. "Great areas of land had to be cleared, levelled, and drained;
+barracks had to be built; one camp alone used 42,000 railway truck-loads
+of building material." There was no time to build new railways, and the
+existing roads were rapidly worn out. They were as steadily repaired; and
+on every side new camps sprang up around the parent camps of the country.
+
+The Surrey commons and woods, the Wiltshire downs, the Midland and
+Yorkshire heaths, the Buckinghamshire hills have been everywhere
+invaded--their old rural sanctities are gone. I walked in bewilderment the
+other day up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which when I knew it
+last was one kingdom of purple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and
+scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. Barracks now form long streets upon
+its crest and sides; practise-trenches, bombing-schools, the stuffed and
+dangling sacks for bayonet training, musketry ranges, and the rest, are
+everywhere. Tennyson, whose wandering ground it once was, would know it no
+more. And this camp is only one of a series which spread far and wide
+round the Aldershot headquarters.
+
+Near my own home, a park and a wooded hillside, that two years ago were
+carefully guarded even from a neighbour's foot, are now occupied by a
+large town of military huts, which can be seen for miles round. And
+fifteen miles away, in a historic "chase" where Catharine of Aragon lived
+while her trial was proceeding in a neighbouring town, a duke, bearing one
+of the great names of England, has himself built a camp, housing 1,200
+men, for the recruits of his county regiments alone, and has equipped it
+with every necessary, whether for the soldier's life or training. But
+everywhere--East, North, South, and West--the English and Scotch roads are
+thronged with soldiers and horses, with trains of artillery wagons and
+Army Service lorries, with men marching back from night attacks or going
+out to scout and skirmish on the neighbouring commons and through the most
+sacred game--preserves. There are no more trespass laws in England--for
+the soldier.
+
+You point to our recruiting difficulties in Parliament. True enough. We
+have our recruiting difficulties still. Lord Derby has not apparently
+solved the riddle; for riddle it is, in a country of voluntary service,
+where none of the preparations necessary to fit conscription into ordinary
+life, with its obligations, have ever been made. The Government and the
+House of Commons are just now wrestling with it afresh, and public opinion
+seems to be hardening towards certain final measures that would have been
+impossible earlier in the war.[B] The call is still for men--more--and
+more--men! And given the conditions of this war, it is small wonder that
+England is restless till they are found. But amid the cross currents of
+criticism, I catch the voice of Mr. Walter Long, the most practical, the
+least boastful of men, in the House of Commons, a few nights ago: Say what
+you like, blame, criticise, as you like, but "what this country has done
+since August, 1914, is an almost incredible story." And so it is.
+
+And now let us follow some of these khaki-clad millions across the seas,
+through the reinforcement camps, and the great supply bases, towards that
+fierce reality of war to which everything tends.
+
+[B] Since these lines were written the crisis in the Government, the Irish
+rising, and the withdrawal of the military service bill have happened in
+quick succession. The country is still waiting (April 28th) for the last
+inevitable step.
+
+
+II
+
+It was about the middle of February, after my return from the munition
+factories, that I received a programme from the War Office of a journey in
+France, which I was to be allowed to make. I remember being at first much
+dissatisfied with it. It included the names of three or four places well
+known to be the centres of English supply organisation in France. But it
+did not include any place in or near the actual fighting zone. To me, in
+my ignorance, the places named mainly represented the great array of
+finely equipped hospitals to be found everywhere in France in the rear of
+our Armies; and I was inclined to say that I had no special knowledge of
+hospital work, and that one could see hospitals in England, with more
+leisure to feel and talk with the sufferers in them than a ten days' tour
+could give. A friendly Cabinet Minister smiled when I presented this view.
+"You had better accept. You will find it very different from what you
+suppose. The 'back' of the Army includes everything." He was more than
+right!
+
+The conditions of travelling at the present moment, within the region
+covered by the English military organisation in France, for a woman
+possessing a special War Office pass, in addition to her ordinary
+passport, and understood to be on business which has the good-will of the
+Government, though in no sense commissioned by it, are made easy by the
+courtesy and kindness of everybody concerned. From the moment of landing
+on the French side, my daughter and I passed into the charge of the
+military authorities. An officer accompanied us; a War Office motor took
+us from place to place; and everything that could be shown us in the short
+ten days of our tour was freely open to us. The trouble, indeed, that was
+taken to enable me to give some of the vividness of personal seeing to
+these letters is but one of many proofs, I venture to think, of that warm
+natural wish in British minds that America should understand why we are
+fighting this war, and how we are fighting it. As to myself, I have
+written in complete freedom, affected only by the absolutely necessary
+restrictions of the military censorship; and I only hope I may be able to
+show something, however inadequately, of the work of men who have done a
+magnificent piece of organisation, far too little realised even in their
+own country.
+
+For in truth we in England know very little about our bases abroad; about
+what it means to supply the ever-growing needs of the English Armies in
+France. The military world takes what has been done for granted; the
+general English public supposes that the Tommies, when their days in the
+home camps are done, get "somehow" conveyed to the front, being "somehow"
+equipped, fed, clothed, nursed, and mended, and sent on their way across
+France in interminable lines of trains. As to the details of the process,
+it rarely troubles its head. The fact is, however, that the work of the
+great supply bases abroad, of the various Corps and Services connected
+with them--Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, railway and motor
+transport--is a desperately interesting study; and during the past
+eighteen months, under the "I.G.C."--Inspector-General of
+Communications--has developed some of the best brains in the Army.
+
+Two days spent under the guidance of the Base Commandant or an officer of
+his staff among the docks and warehouses of a great French port, among the
+huts of its reinforcement camp, which contains more men than Aldershot
+before August, 1914, or in its workshops of the Army Ordnance Corps, gave
+me my first experience of the organising power that has gone to these
+departments of the war. The General in command of the base was there in
+the first weeks of the struggle and during the great retreat. He retired
+with his staff to Nantes--leaving only a broken motor-car behind
+him!--just about the time that the French Government betook itself to
+Bordeaux. But in September he was back again, and the building-up process
+began, which has since known neither stop nor stay. That the commercial
+needs of a great French port should have been able to accommodate
+themselves as they have to the military needs of the British Army speaks
+loudly for the tact and good feeling on both sides. The task has not been
+at all times an easy one; and I could not help thinking as we walked
+together through the crowded scene, that the tone and temper of the able
+man beside me--his admiration, simply expressed, yet evidently profound,
+for the French spirit in the war, and for the heroic unity of the country
+through all ranks and classes, accounted for a great deal. In the presence
+of a good-will so strong, difficulties disappear.
+
+Look now at this immense hangar or storehouse--the largest in the
+world--through which we are walking. It was completed three years before
+the war, partly, it is said, by German money, to house the growing
+cotton-trade of the port. It now houses a large proportion of the food of
+the British Army. The hangar is half a mile long, and is bounded on one
+side by the docks where the ships are discharging, and on the other by the
+railway lines where the trains are loading up for the front.
+
+You walk through avenues of bacon, through streets of biscuits and jam. On
+the quays just outside, ships from England, Canada, Norway, Argentina,
+Australia are pouring out their stores. Stand and watch the endless cranes
+at work, and think what English sea power means! And on the other side
+watch the packing of the trucks that are going to the front, the order and
+perfection with which the requisitions, large and small, of every regiment
+are supplied.
+
+One thinks of the Crimean scandals. The ghost of Florence Nightingale
+seems to move beside us, watching contentedly what has come of all that
+long-reforming labour, dealing with the health, the sanitation, the food
+and equipment of the soldier, in which she played her part; and one might
+fancy the great shade pausing specially beside the wired-in space labelled
+"Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage." Medical
+_necessaries_ are housed elsewhere; but here are the dainties, the special
+foods, the easing appliances of all kinds which are to make life bearable
+to many a sorely-wounded man.
+
+As to the huge sheds of the Army Ordnance, which supply everything that
+the soldier doesn't eat, all metal stores--nails, horseshoes, oil-cans,
+barbed wire--by the ton; trenching-tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors,
+sand-bags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, and the like--they are
+of course endless; and the men who work in them are housed in one of the
+largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling.
+
+Perhaps the most interesting part of the Depot to the outsider are the
+repairing sheds and workshops established in a suburb of the town to which
+we drive on. For this is work that has never been done before in
+connection with an army in the field. Day by day trains full of articles
+for repair come down from the front. I happened to see a train of the
+kind, later on, leaving a station close to the fighting line. Guns,
+rifles, range-finders, gun-carriages, harness, all torn and useless
+uniforms, tents, boots by the thousand, come to this base to be repaired,
+or to be sent home for transformation into "shoddy" to the Yorkshire
+towns. Nothing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s department.
+Field-glasses, periscopes, water-bottles, they arrive from the trenches
+with the same certainty as a wounded howitzer or machine-gun, and are
+returned as promptly.
+
+In one shed, my guide called my attention to shelves on which were a
+number of small objects in china and metal. "They were found in kits left
+on the field," he says gently. "Wherever we can identify the owner, such
+things are carefully returned to his people. These could not be
+identified."
+
+I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse French pottery, which some
+dead father had bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the
+children at home. Near by were "souvenirs"--bits of shell, of German
+equipment; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a
+saint--and so on--every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden
+death--death in youth, at the height of life.
+
+The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under
+soldier-foremen, are busy, the harness-mending room, and the engineering
+workshops might reassure those pessimists among us--especially of my own
+sex--who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful
+animal. Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and
+its steadily mounting efficiency. He began work with 140 men, he is now
+employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving
+thousands of pounds a week to the British Government. He makes all his own
+power, and has four or five powerful dynamos at work.
+
+We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is
+difficult. Yet we do our best to defy the weather. We tramp through the
+deepening snow of the great camp, which lines the slopes of the hills
+above the river and the town, visiting its huts and recreation-rooms, its
+Cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an
+Infantry Base Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow.
+
+But on the last morning before we start we mount to the plateau above the
+reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind blows one of the
+sharpest blasts of the winter. Here are bodies of men going through some
+of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front; here are
+trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and
+planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting line.
+The instructors here, as at other training-camps in France, are all men
+returned from the front. The men to whom they have to give the final touch
+of training--men so near themselves to the real thing--are impatient of
+any other sort.
+
+As we stand beside the trenches under the bright sun and piercing wind,
+looking at the dark lines of British soldiers on the snow, and listening
+to the explanations of a most keen and courteous officer, one's eyes
+wander, on the one side, over the great town and port, over the French
+coast and the distant sea, and on the other side, inland, over the
+beautiful French landscape with its farms and country houses. Everything
+one sees is steeped in history, a mingled history, in which England and
+France up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal share. Now again they
+are mingled here; all the old enmities buried in a comradeship that goes
+deeper far than they, a comradeship of the spirit that will surely mould
+the life of both nations for years to come.
+
+How we grudged the snow and the low-sweeping clouds and the closed motor,
+on our drive of the next day! I remember little more of it than occasional
+glimpses of the tall cliffs that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty
+look at a fine church above a steeply built town, an army lorry stuck deep
+in the snow-drifts, and finally the quays and ships of another base port.
+Our escort, Colonel S., pilots us to a pleasant hotel full of officers,
+mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communications, with a few poor
+wives and mothers among them who have come over to nurse their wounded in
+one or other of the innumerable hospitals of the base.
+
+Before dinner the general commanding the base had found me out and I had
+told my story.
+
+"Oh, we'll put some notes together for you. We were up most of last night.
+I dare say we shall be up most of this. But a little more or less doesn't
+matter." I protested most sincerely. But it is always the busiest men who
+shoulder the extra burdens; and the notes duly reached me. From them, from
+the talk of others spending their last ounce of brain and energy in the
+service of the base, and from the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and
+draw some general picture of what that service is: Suppose a British
+officer speaking:
+
+     Remember first that every man, every horse, every round of
+     ammunition, every article of clothing and equipment, all the
+     guns and vehicles, and nearly all the food have to be
+     brought across the English Channel to maintain and reinforce
+     the ever-growing British Army, which holds now so important
+     a share of the fighting line in France. The ports of entry
+     are already overtaxed by the civil and military needs of
+     France herself. Imagine how difficult it is--and how the
+     difficulty grows daily with the steady increase of the
+     British Army--to receive, disembark, accommodate, and
+     forward the multitude of men and the masses of material!
+
+     You see the khaki in the French streets, the mingling
+     everywhere of French and English; but the ordinary visitor
+     can form no idea of the magnitude of this friendly invasion.
+     There is no formal delimitation of areas or spaces, in
+     docks, or town, or railways. But gradually the observer will
+     realise that the town is honeycombed with the temporary
+     locations of the British Army, which everywhere speckle the
+     map hanging in the office of the Garrison Quartermaster. And
+     let him further visit the place where the long lines of
+     reinforcement, training and hospital camps are installed on
+     open ground, and old England's mighty effort will scarcely
+     hide itself from the least intelligent. _Work, efficiency,
+     economy_ must be the watchwords of a base. Its functions may
+     not be magnificent--_but they are war_--and war is
+     impossible unless they are rightly carried out.
+
+     When we came back from the Loire in September, after our
+     temporary retreat, the British _personnel_ at this place
+     grew from 1,100 to 11,000 in a week. Now there are thousands
+     of troops always passing through, thousands of men in
+     hospital, thousands at work in the docks and storehouses.
+     And let any one who cares for horses go and look at the
+     Remount Depot and the Veterinary Hospitals. The whole
+     treatment of horses in this war has been revolutionised.
+     Look at the cheap, ingenious stables, the comfort produced
+     by the simplest means, the kind quiet handling; look at the
+     Convalescent Horse Depots, the operating theatres, and the
+     pharmacy stores in the Veterinary Hospitals.
+
+     As to the troops themselves, every Regiment has its own
+     lines, for its own reinforcements. Good food, clean cooking,
+     civilised dining-rooms, excellent sanitation--the base
+     provides them all. It provides, too, whatever else Tommy
+     Atkins wants, and _close at hand_; wet and dry canteens,
+     libraries, recreation huts, tea and coffee huts, palatial
+     cinemas, concerts. And what are the results? Excellent
+     behaviour; excellent relations between the British soldier
+     and the French inhabitants; absence of all serious crime.
+
+     Then look at the docks. You will see there armies of
+     labourers, and long lines of ships discharging horses,
+     timber, rations, fodder, coal, coke, petrol. Or at the
+     stores and depots. It would take you days to get any idea of
+     the huge quantities of stores, or of the new and ingenious
+     means of space economy and quick distribution. As to the
+     Works Department--camps and depots are put up "while you
+     wait" by the R.E. officers and unskilled military labour.
+     Add to all this the armies of clerks, despatch riders, and
+     motor-cyclists--and the immense hospital _personnel_--then,
+     if you make any intelligible picture of it in your mind, you
+     will have some idea of what bases like these mean.
+
+Pondering these notes, it seemed to me that the only way to get some kind
+of "intelligible picture" in two short days was to examine something in
+detail, and the rest in general! Accordingly, we spent a long Sunday
+morning in the Motor Transport Depot, which is the creation of Colonel B.,
+and perhaps as good an example as one could find anywhere in France of the
+organising talent of the able British officer.
+
+The depot opened in a theatre on the 13th of August, 1914. "It began,"
+says Colonel B., "with a few balls of string and a bag of nails!" Its
+staff then consisted of 6 officers and 91 N.C.O.'s and men--its permanent
+staff at present is about 500. All the drivers of some 20,000 motor
+vehicles--nearly 40,000 men--are tested here and, if necessary, instructed
+before going up to the fighting lines; and the depot deals with 350
+different types of vehicles. In round figures 100,000 separate parts are
+now dealt with, stored, and arranged in the depot. The system of records
+and accounts is extraordinarily perfect, and so ingenious that it seems to
+work itself.
+
+Meanwhile Colonel B.'s relations with his army of chauffeurs, of whom
+about 1,000 are always housed on the premises, are exceedingly human and
+friendly in spite of the strictness of the army discipline. Most of his
+men who are not married, the Colonel tells me, have found a "friend," in
+the town, one or other of its trimly dressed girls, with whom the English
+mechanic "walks out," on Sundays and holidays. There are many engagements,
+and, as I gather, no misconduct. Marriage is generally postponed till
+after the war, owing to the legal and other difficulties involved. But
+marriage there will be when peace comes. As to how the Englishman and the
+French girl communicate, there are amusing speculations, but little exact
+knowledge. There can be small doubt, however, that a number of hybrid
+words perfectly understood by both sides are gradually coming into use,
+and if the war lasts much longer, a rough Esperanto will have grown up
+which may leave its mark on both languages. The word "narpoo" is a case in
+point. It is said to be originally a corruption of "_il n'y a plus_"--the
+phrase which so often meets the Tommy foraging for eggs or milk or fruit.
+At present it means anything from "done up" to "dead." Here is an instance
+of it, told me by a chaplain at the front. He was billeted in a farm with
+a number of men, and a sergeant. All the men, from the chaplain to the
+youngest private, felt a keen sympathy and admiration for the women of the
+farm, who were both working the land and looking after their billetees,
+with wonderful pluck and energy. One evening the chaplain arriving at the
+open door of the farm, saw in the kitchen beyond it the daughter of the
+house, who had just come in from farm work. She was looking at a pile of
+dirty plates and dishes which had to be washed before supper, and she gave
+a sigh of fatigue. Suddenly in the back door on the other side of the
+kitchen appeared the sergeant. He looked at the girl, then at the dishes,
+then again at the girl. "Fattigay?" he said cheerfully, going up to her.
+"Narpoo? Give 'em me. Compree?" And before she could say a word he had
+driven her away, and plunged into the work.
+
+The general relations, indeed, between our soldiers and the French
+population could not be better. General after General, both in the bases,
+and at the front dwelt on this point. A distinguished General commanding
+one of our armies on the line, spoke to me of it with emphasis. "The
+testimony is universal, and it is equally creditable to both sides." The
+French civilian in town and country is, no doubt, profiting by the large
+demand and prompt payments of the British forces. But just as in the case
+of the women munition workers, there is infinitely more in it than money.
+On the British part there is, in both officers and men, a burning sympathy
+for what France has suffered, whether from the outrages of a brutal
+enemy, or from the inevitable hardships of war. The headquarters of the
+General I have mentioned were not more than fifteen or twenty miles from
+towns where unspeakable things were done by German soldiers--officers no
+less than men--in the first weeks of the struggle. With such deeds the
+French peasantry and small townsfolk, as they still remain in Picardy and
+Artois, can and do contrast, day by day, the temper, the courtesy, the
+humanity of the British soldier. Great Britain, of course, is a friend and
+ally; and Germany is the enemy. But these French folk, these defenceless
+women and children, know instinctively that the British Army, like their
+own, whether in its officers, or in its rank and file, is incapable,
+toward any non-combatant, of what the German Army has done repeatedly,
+officially, and still excuses and defends.
+
+[Illustration: One of the Wards of a Base Hospital Visited by the King.]
+
+[Illustration: A Howitzer in the Act of Firing.]
+
+The signs of this feeling for and sympathy with the French _civils_, among
+our soldiers, are many. Here is one story, slight but illuminating, told
+me by an eye-witness. She is one of a band of women under a noble chief,
+who, since very early in the war, have been running a canteen for
+soldiers, night and day, at the large railway-station of the very base I
+have been describing, where trains are perpetually arriving from and
+departing to the front. In the early days of the war, a refugee train
+arrived one afternoon full of helpless French folk, mainly of course women
+and children, and old people, turned out of their homes by the German
+advance. In general, the refugees were looked after by the French Red
+Cross, "who did it admirably, going along the trains with hot drinks and
+food and clothing." But on this occasion there were a number of small
+children, and some of them got overlooked in the hubbub. "I found a raw
+young Scotchman, little more than a boy, from one of the Highland
+regiments," with six youngsters clinging to him, for whom he peremptorily
+demanded tea. "He had tears in his eyes, and his voice was all husky as he
+explained in homely Scotch how the bairns had been turned out of their
+homes--how he _couldn't_ bear it--and he would give them tea." A table
+was found. "I provided the milk, and he paid for bread and butter and
+chocolate, and waited on and talked to the six little French people
+himself. Strange to say, they seemed to understand each other quite well."
+
+
+III
+
+It was with this railway-station canteen that my latest memories of the
+great base are concerned. All the afternoon of our second day at ---- was
+spent in seeing a fine Red Cross hospital, and then in walking or driving
+round the endless reinforcement and hospital camps in the open country.
+Everywhere the same vigourous expanding organisation, the same ceaselessly
+growing numbers, the same humanity and care in detail. "How many years
+have we been at war?" one tends to ask oneself in bewilderment, as the
+spectacle unrolls itself. "Is it possible that all this is the work of
+eighteen months?" And I am reminded of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his
+German captive, who asked his opinion about the duration of the war. "I'll
+tell you what--it's the furrst five years that'll be the worst!" We
+seem--in the bases--to have slipped through them already, measuring by any
+of the ordinary ratios of work to time. On my return home, a diplomat
+representing one of the neutral nations, told me that the Military
+Secretary of his staff had been round the English bases in France, and had
+come back with his "eyes starting out of his head." Having seen them
+myself, the phrase seemed to me quite natural.
+
+Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell, we turned toward the
+canteen at the railway-station. We found it going on in an old goods'
+shed, simply fitted up with a long tea and coffee bar, tables and chairs;
+and in some small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end to end with a
+crowd of soldiers, who after many hours of waiting, were just departing
+for the front. The old shabby room, with its points of bright light, and
+its shadowy sides and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting for the
+moving throng of figures. Some men were crowding round the bar; some were
+writing letters in haste to post before the train went off; the piano was
+going, and a few, gathered round it, were singing the songs of the day, of
+which the choruses were sometimes taken up in the room. The men--drafts
+going up to different regiments on the line--appeared to me to come from
+many parts. The broad Yorkshire and Cumbrian speech, Scotch, the cockney
+of the Home Counties, the Northumberland burr, the tongues of Devon and
+Somerset--one seemed to hear them all in turn. The demands at the counter
+had slackened a little, and I was presently listening to some of the talk
+of the indefatigable helpers who work this thing night and day. One of
+them drew a picture of the Canadians, the indomitable fighters of Ypres
+and Loos, of their breathless energy, and impatience of anything but the
+quickest pace of life, their appetites!--half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, at
+_3d_ each, swallowed down in a moment of time; then of the
+French-Canadians, their Old World French, their old-world Catholicism,
+simple and passionate. One of these last asked if there was any chance of
+his being sent to Egypt. "Why are you so anxious to go to Egypt?" "Because
+it was there the Holy Family rested," said the lad shyly. The lady to whom
+he spoke described to him the tree and the Holy Well in St. Georgius, and
+he listened entranced.
+
+Sometimes a rough lot fill the canteen, drawn from the poorest class,
+perhaps, of an English seaport. They hustle for their food, shout at the
+helpers, and seem to have no notion that such words as "please" and "thank
+you" exist. After three or four hours of battling with such an apparently
+mannerless crew one of the helpers saw them depart to the platform where
+their train was waiting for them, with very natural relief. But they were
+no sooner gone, when a guardsman, with the manners, the stature, and the
+smartness of his kind, came back to the counter, and asked to speak to
+the lady in charge of it. "Those chaps, Miss, what have just gone out," he
+said apologetically, "have never been used to ladies, and they don't know
+what to say to them. So they asked me just to come in and say for them
+they were very much obliged for all the ladies' kindness, but they
+couldn't say it themselves." The tired helper was suddenly too choky to
+answer. The message, the choice of the messenger, as one sure to do "the
+right thing," were both so touching.
+
+But there was a sudden movement in the crowd. The train was up. We all
+surged out upon the platform, and I watched the embarkation--the endless
+train engulfing its hundreds of men. Just as I had seen the food and
+equipment trains going up from the first base laden with everything
+necessary to replace the daily waste of the army, so here was the train of
+human material, going up to replace the daily waste of _men_. After many
+hours of travelling, and perhaps some of rest, these young soldiers--how
+young most of them were!--would find themselves face to face with the
+sharpest realities of war. I thought of what I had seen in the Red Cross
+hospital that afternoon--"what man has made of man"--the wreck of youth
+and strength, the hideous pain, the helpless disablement.
+
+But the station rang with laughter and talk. Some one in the canteen began
+to play "Keep the Home Fires Burning"--and the men in the train joined in,
+though not very heartily, for as one or two took care to tell me,
+laughingly--"That and 'Tipperary' are awfully stale now!" A bright-faced
+lad discussed with D---- how long the war would last. "And _shan't_ we
+miss it when it's done!" he said, with a jesting farewell to us, as he
+jumped into the train which had begun to move. Slowly, slowly it passed
+out of sight, amid waves of singing and the shouting of good-byes....
+
+It was late that evening, when after much talk with various officers, I
+went up to my room to try and write, bewildered by a multitude of
+impressions--impressions of human energy, human intelligence, human
+suffering. What England is doing in this country will leave, it seems to
+me, indelible marks upon the national character. I feel a natural pride,
+as I sit thinking over the day, in all this British efficiency and power,
+and a quick joy in the consciousness of our fellowship with France, and
+hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun is still in its first intensity,
+and when I have read all that the evening newspapers contain about it,
+there stirs in me a fresh realisation of the meaning of what I have been
+seeing. In these great bases, in the marvellous railway organisation, in
+the handling of the vast motor transport in all its forms, in the feeding
+and equipment of the British Army, we have the scaffolding and preparation
+of war, which, both in the French and English Armies, have now reached a
+perfection undreamt of when the contest began. But the war itself--the
+deadly struggle of that distant line to which it all tends? It is in the
+flash and roar of the guns, in the courage and endurance of the fighting
+man, that all this travail of brain and muscle speaks at last. At that
+courage and endurance, women, after all, can only guess--through whatever
+rending of their own hearts.
+
+But I was to come somewhat nearer to it than I thought then. The morrow
+brought surprise.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Dear H.
+
+Our journey farther north through the deep February snow was scarcely less
+striking as an illustration of Great Britain's constantly growing share in
+the war than the sight of the great supply bases themselves. The first
+part of it, indeed, led over solitary uplands, where the chained wheels of
+the motor rocked in the snow, and our military chauffeur dared make no
+stop, for fear he should never be able to start again. All that seemed
+alive in the white landscape were the partridges--sometimes in great
+flocks--which scudded at our approach, or occasional groups of hares in
+the middle distance holding winter parley. The road seemed interminably
+long and straight, and ours were almost the first tracks in it. The snow
+came down incessantly, and once or twice it looked as though we should be
+left stranded in the white wilderness.
+
+But after a third of the journey was over, the snow began to lessen and
+the roads to clear. We dropped first into a seaport town which offered
+much the same mingled scene of French and English, of English nurses, and
+French _poilus_, of unloading ships, and British soldiers, as the bases we
+had left, only on a smaller scale. And beyond the town we climbed again on
+to the high land, through a beautiful country of interwoven downs, and
+more plentiful habitation. Soon, indeed, the roads began to show the signs
+of war--a village or small town, its picturesque market-place filled with
+a park of artillery wagons; roads lined with motor lorries with the
+painted shell upon them that tells ammunition; British artillerymen in
+khaki, bringing a band of horses out of a snow-bound farm; closed
+motor-cars filled with officers hurrying past; then an open car with
+King's Messengers, tall, soldierly figures, looking in some astonishment
+at the two ladies, as they hurry by. And who or what is this horseman
+looming out of the sleet--like a figure from a piece of Indian or Persian
+embroidery, turbaned and swarthy, his cloak swelling out round his
+handsome head and shoulders, the buildings of a Norman farm behind him?
+"There are a few Indian cavalry about here," says our guide--"they are
+billeted in the farms." And presently the road is full of them. Their
+Eastern forms, their dark, intent faces pass strangely through the Norman
+landscape.
+
+Now we are only some forty miles from the line, and we presently reach
+another town containing an important British Headquarters, where we are to
+stop for luncheon. The inn at which we put up is like the song in "Twelfth
+Night," "old and plain"--and when lunch is done, our Colonel goes to pay
+an official call at Headquarters, and my daughter and I make our way to
+the historic church of the town. The Colonel joins us here with another
+officer, who brings the amazing news that "G.H.Q."--General
+Headquarters--that mysterious centre and brain of all things--invites us
+for two days! If we accept, an officer will come for us on the morning of
+March 1st to our hotel in Boulogne and take us by motor, some forty miles,
+to the guest-house where G.H.Q. puts up its visitors. "_Accept!"_ Ah, if
+one could only forget for a moment the human facts behind the absorbing
+interest and excitement of this journey, one might be content to feel only
+the stir of quickened pulses, of gratitude for a further opportunity so
+tremendous.
+
+As it was, I saw all the journey henceforward with new eyes, because of
+that to which it was bringing us. On we sped, through the French
+countryside, past a great forest lying black on the edge of the white
+horizon--I open my map and find it marked Bois de Crecy!--past another old
+town, with Agincourt a few miles to the east, and so into a region of pine
+and sand that borders the sea. Darkness comes down, and we miss our way.
+What are these lines of light among the pine woods? Another military and
+hospital camp, which we are to see on the morrow--so we discover at last.
+But we have overshot our goal, and must grope our way back through the
+pine woods to the sea-shore, where a little primitive hotel, built for the
+summer, with walls that seem to be made of brown paper, receives us. But
+we have motored far that day, and greet it joyfully.
+
+The following morning we woke to a silvery sunlight, with, at last, some
+promise of spring over a land cleared of snow. The day was spent in going
+through a camp which has been set down in one of the pleasantest and
+healthiest spots of France, a favourite haunt of French artists before the
+war. Now the sandy slopes, whence the pines, alack, have been cut away,
+are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, by long lines of hospitals,
+by a convalescent depot, and by the training-grounds, where, as at other
+bases, the newly arrived troops are put through their last instruction
+before going to the front. As usual, the magnitude of what has been done
+in one short year filled one with amazement. Here is the bare catalogue:
+Infantry Base Depots, i.e. sleeping and mess quarters, for thousands of
+men belonging to the new armies; 16 hospitals with 21,000 beds, 3 rifle
+ranges; 2 training-camps; a machine-gun training-school; a vast laundry
+worked by Frenchwomen under British organisation, which washes for _all_
+the hospitals, 30,000 pieces a day; recreation huts of all types and
+kinds, official and voluntary; a Cinema theatre, seating 800 men, with
+performances twice a day; nurses' clubs; officers' clubs; a Supply Depot
+for food; an Ordnance Depot for everything that is not food; new sidings
+to the railway, where 1,000 men can be entrained on the one side, while
+1,000 men are detraining on the other; or two full ambulance trains can
+come in and go out; a Convalescent Depot of 2,000 patients, and a
+Convalescent Horse Depot of 2,000 horses, etcetera. And this is the work
+accomplished since last April in one camp.
+
+Yet, as I look back upon it, my chief impression of that long day is an
+impression, first, of endless hospital huts and marquees, with their rows
+of beds, in which the pale or flushed faces are generally ready--unless
+pain or weariness forbid--as a visitor ventures timidly near, to turn and
+smile in response to the few halting words of sympathy or inquiry which
+are all one can find to say; and, next, of such a wealth of skill, and
+pity, and devotion poured out upon this terrible human need, as makes one
+thank God for doctors, and nurses, and bright-faced V.A.D.'s. After all,
+one tremblingly asks oneself, in spite of the appalling facts of wounds,
+and death, and violence in which the human world is now steeped, is it yet
+possible, is it yet true, that the ultimate thing, the final power behind
+the veil--to which at least this vast linked spectacle of suffering and
+tenderness, here in this great camp, testifies--is _not_ Force, but Love?
+Is this the mysterious message which seems to breathe from these crowded
+wards--to make them _just_ bearable. Let me recollect the open door of an
+operating theatre, and a young officer, quite a boy, lying there with a
+bullet in his chest, which the surgeons were just about to try and
+extract. The fine, pale features of the wounded man, the faces of the
+surgeon and the nurses, so intent and cheerfully absorbed, the shining
+surfaces and appliances of the white room--stamp themselves on memory. I
+recollect, too, one John S----, a very bad case, a private. "Oh, you must
+come and see John S----," says one of the Sisters. "We get all the little
+distractions we can for John. Will he recover? Well, we thought
+so--but"--her face changes gravely--"John himself seems to have made up
+his mind lately. He knows--but he never complains." Knows what? We go to
+see him, and he turns round philosophically from his tea. "Oh, I'm all
+right--a bit tired--that's all." And then a smile passes between him and
+his nurse. He has lost a leg, he has a deep wound in his back which won't
+heal, which is draining his life away--poor, poor John S----! Close by is
+a short, plain man, with a look of fevered and patient endurance that
+haunts one now to think of. "It's my eyes. I'm afraid they're getting
+worse. I was hit in the head, you see. Yes, the pain's bad--sometimes."
+The nurse looks at him anxiously as we pass, and explains what is being
+tried to give relief.
+
+This devotion of the nurses--how can one ever say enough of it! I recall
+the wrath of a medical officer in charge of a large hospital at Rouen.
+"Why don't they give more Red Crosses to the _working nurses_? They don't
+get half enough recognition. I have a nurse here who has been twelve
+months in the operating theatre. She ought to have a V.C.!--It's worth
+it."
+
+And here is a dark-eyed young officer who had come from a distant colony
+to fight for England. I find him in an officer's hospital, established not
+long after the war broke out, in a former Casino, where the huge
+baccarat-room has been turned into two large and splendid wards. He is
+courteously ready to talk about his wound, but much more ready to talk
+about his Sister.
+
+"It's simply _wonderful_ what they do for us!" he says, all his face
+lighting up. "When I was worst there wasn't an hour in the day or night my
+Sister wasn't ready to try anything in the world to help me. But they're
+all like that."
+
+Let me here gratefully recall, also, the hospitals organised by the
+Universities of Chicago and Harvard, entirely staffed by American Sisters
+and Doctors, each of them providing 34 doctors and 80 nurses, and dealing
+with 1,040 patients. Harvard has maintained a general hospital with the
+British Force in France since July, 1915. The first passages and uniforms
+were paid for by the British Government, but the University has itself
+paid all passages, and provided all uniforms since the start; and it is
+proposed, I am told, to carry on this generous help indefinitely.
+
+Twenty thousand wounded!--while every day the ambulance trains come and go
+from the front, or to other bases--there to fill up one or other of the
+splendid hospital ships that take our brave fellows back to England, and
+home, and rest. And this city of hospitals, under its hard-pressed
+medical chief, with all its wealth of scientific invention, and painsaving
+device, and unremitting care, with its wonderful health and recovery
+statistics, has been the growth of just twelve months. The mind wavers
+between the two opposing images it suggests: war and its havoc on the one
+hand--the power of the human brain and the goodness of the human heart on
+the other.
+
+
+II
+
+It was late on the 29th of February that we reached our next
+resting-place, to find a kind greeting from another Base Commandant and
+final directions for our journey of the morrow. We put up at one of the
+old commercial inns of the town (it is not easy to find hotel quarters of
+any kind just now, when every building at all suitable has been pressed
+into the hospital service) and I found delight in watching the various
+types of French officers, naval and military, who came in to the _table
+d'hote_, plunging as soon as they had thrown off their caps and cloaks,
+and while they waited for their consomme, into the papers with the latest
+news of Verdun. But we were too tired to try and talk! The morning came
+quickly, and with it our escort from G.H.Q. We said good-bye to Colonel
+S., who had guided our journey so smoothly through all the fierce
+drawbacks of the weather, and made friends at once with our new guide,
+the staff-officer who deals with the guests of G.H.Q. Never shall I
+forget that morning's journey! I find in my notes: "A beautiful drive--far
+more beautiful than I had expected--over undulating country, with distant
+views of interlocking downs, and along typical French roads, tree or
+forest bordered, running straight as a line up-hill and down-hill,
+over upland and plain. One exquisite point of view especially comes
+back to me, where a road to the coast--that coast which the Germans
+so nearly reached!--diverged upon our left, and all the lowlands
+westward came into sight. It was pure Turner, the soft sunlight of
+the day, with its blue shadows, and pale-blue sky; the yellow chalk
+hills, still marked with streaks of snow; the woods, purple and madder
+brown, the distances ethereally blue; and the villages, bare and unlovely
+compared with the villages of Kent and Sussex, but expressing a strong
+old historic life, sprung from the soil, and one with it. The first
+distant glimpse, as we turned a hill-corner, of the old town which was
+our destination--extraordinarily fine!--its ancient church a towered
+mass of luminous grey under the sunshine, gathering the tiled roofs
+into one harmonious whole."
+
+But we avoided the town itself and found ourselves presently descending an
+avenue of trees to the eighteenth-century chateau, which is used by G.H.Q.
+as a hostel for its guests--allied and neutral correspondents, military
+attaches, special missions, and the like. In a few minutes I found myself
+standing bewildered by the strangeness and the interest of it all, in a
+charming Louis-Quinze room, plain and simple in the true manner of the
+genuine French country house, but with graceful panelled walls, an old
+_armoire_ of the date, windows wide open to the spring sun, and a
+half-wild garden outside. A _femme de menage_, much surprised to be
+waiting on two ladies, comes to look after us. And this is France!--and we
+are only thirty miles from that fighting line, which has drawn our English
+hearts to it all these days.
+
+A map is waiting for each of us down-stairs, and we are told, roughly,
+where it is proposed to take us. A hurried lunch, and we are in the motor
+again, with Captain ---- sitting in front. "You have your passes?" he asks
+us, and we anxiously verify the new and precious papers that brought us
+from our last stage, and will have to be shown on our way. We drive first
+to Arques, and Hazebrouck, then southeast. At a certain village we call at
+the Divisional Headquarters. The General comes out himself, and proposes
+to guide us on. "I will take you as near to the fighting line as I can."
+
+On we went, in two motors; the General with me, Captain ---- and D.
+following. We passed through three villages, and after the first we were
+within shell range of the German batteries ahead. But I cannot remember
+giving a thought to the fact, so absorbing to the unaccustomed eye were
+all the accumulating signs of the actual battle-line; the endless rows of
+motor-lorries, either coming back from, or going up to the front, now with
+food, now with ammunition, reserve trenches to right and left of the road;
+a "dump" or food-station, whence carts filled from the heavy lorries go
+actually up to the trenches, lines of artillery wagons, parks of
+ammunition, or motor-ambulances, long lines of picketed horses,
+motor-cyclists dashing past. In one village we saw a merry crowd in the
+little _place_ gathered round a field-kitchen whence came an excellent
+fragrance of good stew. A number of the men were wearing leeks in their
+ears for St. David's Day. "You're Welsh, then?" I said to one of the cooks
+(by this time we had left the motor and were walking). "I'm not!" said the
+little fellow, with a laughing look. "It's St. Patrick's Day I'm waitin'
+for! But I've no objection to givin' St. David a turn!"
+
+He opened his kitchen to show me the good things going on, and as we moved
+away there came up a marching platoon of men from the trenches, who had
+done their allotted time there and were coming back to billets. The
+General went to greet them. "Well, my boys, you could stick it all right?"
+It was good to see the lightening on the tired faces, and to watch the
+group disappear into the cheerful hubbub of the village.
+
+We walked on, and outside the village I heard the guns for the first time.
+We were now "actually in the battle," according to my companion, and a
+shell was quite possible, though not probable. Again, I can't remember
+that the fact made any impression upon us. We were watching now parties of
+men at regular intervals sitting waiting in the fields beside the road,
+with their rifles and kits on the grass near them. They were waiting for
+the signal to move up toward the firing line as soon as the dusk was
+further advanced. "We shall meet them later," said the General, "as we
+come back."
+
+At the same moment he turned to address a young artillery-officer in the
+road: "Is your gun near here?" "Yes, sir, I was just going back to it." He
+was asked to show us the way. As we followed I noticed the white puff of a
+shell, far ahead, over the flat, ditch-lined fields; a captive balloon was
+making observations about half a mile in front, and an aeroplane passed
+over our heads. "Ah, not a Boche," said Captain ---- regretfully, "but we
+brought a Boche down here yesterday, just over this village--a splendid
+fight."
+
+Meanwhile, the artillery fire was quickening. We reached a ruined village
+from which all normal inhabitants had been long since cleared away. The
+shattered church was there, and I noticed a large crucifix quite intact
+still hanging on its chancel wall. A little farther and the boyish
+artillery-officer, our leader, who had been by this time joined by a
+comrade, turned and beckoned to the General. Presently we were creeping
+through seas of mud down into the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed
+that no aeroplane overhead could guess it.
+
+There it was--how many of its fellows I had seen in the Midland and
+northern workshops!--its muzzle just showing in the dark, and nine or ten
+high-explosive shells lying on the bench in front of the breech. One is
+put in. We stand back a little, and a sergeant tells me to put my fingers
+in my ears and look straight at the gun. Then comes the shock--not so
+violent as I had expected--and the cartridge-case drops out. The shell has
+sped on its way to the German trenches--with what result to human flesh
+and blood? But I remember thinking very little of that--till afterwards.
+At the time, the excitement of the shot and of watching that little group
+of men in the darkness held all one's nerves gripped.
+
+In a few more minutes we were scrambling out again through the deep, muddy
+trench leading to the dugout, promising to come back to tea with the
+officers, in their billet, when our walk was done.
+
+Now indeed we were "in the battle"! Our own guns were thundering away
+behind us, and the road was more and more broken up by shell holes. "Look
+at that group of trees to your left--beyond it is Neuve Chapelle," said
+our guide. "And you see those ruined cottages, straight ahead, and the
+wood behind." He named a wood thrice famous in the history of the war.
+"Our lines are just beyond the cottages, and the German lines just in
+front of the wood. How far are we from them? Three-quarters of a mile." It
+was discussed whether we should be taken zigzag through the fields to the
+entrance of the communication-trench. But the firing was getting hotter,
+and Captain ---- was evidently relieved when we elected to turn back.
+Shall I always regret that lost opportunity? You did ask me to write
+something about "the life of the soldiers in the trenches"--and that was
+the nearest that any woman could personally have come to it! But I doubt
+whether anything more--anything, at least, that was possible--could have
+deepened the whole effect. We had been already nearer than any woman--even
+a nurse--has been, in this war, to the actual fighting on the English
+line, and the cup of impressions was full.
+
+As we turned back, I noticed a little ruined cottage, with a Red Cross
+flag floating. Our guide explained that it was a field dressing-station.
+It was not for us--who could not help--to ask to go in. But the thought of
+it--there were some badly wounded in it--pursued me as we walked on
+through the beautiful evening.
+
+A little farther we came across what I think moved me more than anything
+else in that crowded hour--those same companies of men we had seen sitting
+waiting in the fields, now marching quietly, spaced one behind the other,
+up to the trenches, to take their turn there. Every day I am accustomed to
+see bodies, small and large, of khaki-clad men, marching through these
+Hertfordshire lanes. But this was different. The bearing was erect and
+manly, the faces perfectly cheerful; but there was the seriousness in them
+of men who knew well the work to which they were going. I caught a little
+quiet whistling, sometimes, but no singing. We greeted them as they
+passed, with a shy "Good luck!" and they smiled shyly back, surprised, of
+course, to see a couple of women on that road. But there was no shyness
+towards the General. It was very evident that the relations between him
+and them were as good as affection and confidence on both sides could make
+them.
+
+I still see the bright tea-table in that corner of a ruined farm, where
+our young officers presently greeted us--the General marking our maps to
+make clear where he had actually been--the Captain of the battery
+springing up to show off his gramophone--while the guns crashed at
+intervals close beside us, range-finding, probably, searching out a
+portion of the German line, under the direction of some hidden observer
+with his telephone. It was over all too quickly. Time was up, and soon
+the motor was speeding back towards the Divisional Headquarters. The
+General and I talked of war, and what could be done to stop it. A more
+practical religion "lifting mankind again"?--a new St. Francis, preaching
+the old things in new ways? "But in this war we had and we have no choice.
+We are fighting for civilisation and freedom, and we must go on till we
+win."
+
+
+III
+
+It was long before I closed my eyes in the pretty room of the old chateau,
+after an evening spent in talk with some officers of the Headquarters
+Staff. When I woke in the dawn I little guessed what the day (March 2nd)
+was to bring forth, or what was already happening thirty miles away on the
+firing line. Zelie, the _femme de menage_, brought us our breakfast to our
+room, coffee and bread and eggs, and by half-past nine we were
+down-stairs, booted and spurred, to find the motor at the door, a simple
+lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready! "We have had a very
+successful action this morning," said Captain ----, evidently in the best
+of spirits. "We have taken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Canal
+that we lost a little while ago, and captured about 200 prisoners. If we
+go off at once, we shall be in time to see the German counter-attack."
+
+It was again fine, though not bright, and the distances far less clear.
+This time we struck northeast, passing first the sacred region of G.H.Q.
+itself, where we showed our passes. Then after making our way through
+roads lined interminably, as on the previous day, with the splendid
+motor-lorries laden with food and ammunition, which have made such a new
+thing of the transport of this war, interspersed with rows of ambulances
+and limbered wagons, with flying-stations and horse lines, we climbed a
+hill to one of the finest positions in this northern land; an old town,
+where Gaul and Roman, Frank and Fleming, English and French have clashed,
+which looks out northward towards the Yser and Dunkirk, and east towards
+Ypres. Now, if the mists will only clear, we shall see Ypres! But, alas,
+they lie heavy over the plain, and we descend the hill again without that
+vision. Now we are bound for Poperinghe, and must go warily, because there
+is a lively artillery action going on beyond Poperinghe, and it is
+necessary to find out what roads are being shelled.
+
+On the way we stop at an air-station, to watch the aeroplanes rising and
+coming down, and at a point near Poperinghe we go over a casualty-clearing
+station--a collection of hospital huts, with storehouses and staff
+quarters--with the medical officer in charge. Here were women nurses who
+are not allowed in the field dressing-stations nearer the line. There were
+not many wounded, though they were coming in, and the Doctor was not for
+the moment very busy.
+
+We stood on the threshold of a large ward, where we could not, I think, be
+seen. At the farther end a serious case was being attended by nurses and
+surgeons. Everything was passing in silence; and to me it was as if there
+came from the distant group a tragic message of suffering, possibly death.
+Then, as we passed lingeringly away, we saw three young officers, all
+wounded, _running_ up from the ambulance at the gate, which had just
+brought them, and disappearing into one of the wards. The first--a
+splendid kilted figure--had his head bound up; the others were apparently
+wounded in the arm. But they seemed to walk on air, and to be quite
+unconscious that anything was wrong with them. It had been a success, a
+great success, and they had been in it!
+
+The ambulances were now arriving fast from the field dressing-stations
+close to the line, and we hurried away, and were soon driving through
+Poperinghe. Here and there there was a house wrecked with shell-fire. The
+little town indeed with its picturesque _place_ is constantly shelled.
+But, all the same, life seems to go on as usual. The Poperinghe boy, like
+his London brother, hangs on the back of carts; his father and mother
+come to their door to watch what is going on, or to ask eagerly for news
+of the counter-attack; and his little brothers and sisters go tripping to
+school, in short cloaks with the hoods drawn over their heads, as though
+no war existed. Here and in the country round, poor robbed Belgium is
+still at home on her own soil, and on the best of terms with the English
+Army, by which, indeed, this remnant of her prospers greatly. As I have
+already insisted, the relations everywhere between the British soldier and
+the French and Belgian populations are among the British--or shall I say
+the Allied?--triumphs of the war.
+
+Farther on the road a company from a famous regiment, picked men all of
+them, comes swinging along, fresh from their baths!--life and force in
+every movement--young Harrys with their beavers on. Then, a house where
+men have their gas-helmets tested--a very strict and necessary business;
+and another, where an ex-Balliol tutor and Army Chaplain keeps open doors
+for the soldier in his hours of rest or amusement. But we go in search of
+a safe road to a neighbouring village, where some fresh passes have to be
+got. Each foot now of the way is crowded with the incidents and
+appurtenances of war, and war close at hand. An Australian transport base
+is pointed out, with a wholly Australian staff. "Some of the men," says
+our guide, "are millionaires." Close by is an aeroplane descending
+unexpectedly in a field, and a crowd of men rushing to help; and we turn
+away relieved to see the two aviators walking off unhurt. Meanwhile, I
+notice a regular game of football going on at a distance, and some
+carefully written names of bypaths--"Hyde Park Corner," "Piccadilly,"
+"Queen Mary's Road," and the like. The animation, the life of the scene
+are indescribable.
+
+At the next village the road was crowded both with natives and soldiers to
+see the German prisoners brought in. Alack! we did not see them.
+Ambulances were passing and re-passing, the slightly wounded men in cars
+open at the back, the more serious cases in closed cars, and everywhere
+the same _va et vient_ of lorries and wagons, of staff-cars and
+motor-cyclists. It was not right for us to add to the congestion in the
+road. Moreover, the hours were drawing on, and the great sight was still
+to come. But to have watched those prisoners come in would have somehow
+rounded off the day!
+
+
+IV
+
+Our new passes took us to the top of a hill well known to the few
+onlookers of which this war admits. The motor stopped at a point on the
+road where a picket was stationed, who examined our papers. Then came a
+stiff and muddy climb, past a dugout for protection in case of shelling,
+Captain ---- carrying the three gas-helmets. At the top was a flat green
+space--three or four soldiers playing football on it!--and an old
+windmill, and farm-buildings.
+
+We sheltered behind the great beams supporting the windmill, and looked
+out through them, north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain bordered
+eastward by low hills, every mile of it, almost, watered by British blood,
+and consecrate to British dead. As we reached the windmill, as though in
+sombre greeting, the floating mists on the near horizon seemed to part,
+and there rose from them a dark, jagged tower, one side of it torn away.
+It was the tower of Ypres--mute victim!--mute witness to a crime, that,
+beyond the reparations of our own day, history will avenge through years
+to come.
+
+A flash!--another!--from what appear to be the ruins at its base. It is
+the English guns speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; and as we
+watch we see the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as
+the shells burst. There they are, the German lines--along the Messines
+ridge. We make them out quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain
+----'s guidance. Their guns, too, are at work, and a couple of their
+shells are bursting on our trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and
+Dickebusche. Then the rattle of our machine-guns--as it seems from
+somewhere close below us, and again the boom of the artillery.
+
+The counter-action is in progress, and we watch what can be seen or
+guessed of it, in fascination. We are too far off to see what is actually
+happening between the opposing trenches, but one of the chief fields of
+past and present battle, scenes which our children and our children's
+children will go to visit, lie spread out before us. Half the famous sites
+of the earlier war can be dimly made out between us and Ypres. In front of
+us is the gleam of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 60 is in that
+band of shadow; a little farther east the point where the Prussian Guard
+was mown down at the close of the first Battle of Ypres; farther south the
+fields and woods made for ever famous by the charge of the Household
+Cavalry, by the deeds of the Worcesters, and the London Scottish, by all
+the splendid valour of that "thin red line," French and English, cavalry
+and infantry, which in the first Battle of Ypres withstood an enemy four
+times as strong, saved France, and thereby England, and thereby Europe. In
+that tract of ground over which we are looking lie more than 100,000
+graves, English and French; and to it the hearts of two great nations will
+turn for all time. Then if you try to pierce the northern haze, beyond
+that ruined tower, you may follow in imagination the course of the Yser
+westward to that Belgian coast where Admiral Hood's guns broke down and
+scattered the German march upon Dunkirk and Calais; or if you turn south
+you are looking over the Belfry of Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and
+Festubert, and all the fierce fighting-ground round Souchez and the
+Labyrinth. Once English and French stood linked here in a common heroic
+defence. Now the English hold all this line firmly from the sea to the
+Somme; while the French, with the eyes of the world upon them, are making
+history, hour by hour, at Verdun.
+
+So to this point we have followed one branch--the greatest--of England's
+effort; and the mind, when eyes fail, pursues it afresh from its
+beginnings when we first stood to arms in August, 1914, through what Mr.
+Buchan has finely called the "rally of the Empire," through the early rush
+and the rapid growth of the new armies, through the strengthening of
+Egypt, the disaster of Gallipoli, the seizure of the German Colonies;
+through all that vast upheaval at home which we have seen in the munition
+areas; through that steady, and ever-growing organisation on the friendly
+French soil we have watched in the supply bases. Yet here, for us, it
+culminates; and here and in the North Sea, we can hardly doubt--whatever
+may be the diversions in other fields--will be fought, for Great Britain,
+the decisive battles of the war. As I turn to those dim lines on the
+Messines ridge, I have come at last to sight of whither it all moves.
+There, in those trenches is _The Aggressor_--the enemy who has wantonly
+broken the peace of Europe, who has befouled civilisation with deeds of
+lust and blood, between whom and the Allies there can be no peace till the
+Allies' right arm dictates it. Every week, every day, the British Armies
+grow, the British troops pour steadily across the Channel, and to the
+effort of England and her Allies there will be no truce till the righteous
+end is won.
+
+But the shadows are coming down on the great scene, and with the sound of
+the guns still in our ears we speed back through the crowded roads to
+G.H.Q., and these wonderful days are over. Now, all that remains for me is
+to take you, far away from the armies, into the English homes whence the
+men fighting here are drawn, and to show you, if I can, very shortly, by a
+few instances, what rich and poor are doing as individuals to feed the
+effort of England in this war. What of the _young_, of all classes and
+opportunities, who have laid down their lives in this war? What of the
+mothers who reared them, the schools and universities which sent them
+forth?--the comrades who are making ready to carry on their work? You ask
+me as to the _spirit_ of the nation--the foundation of all else. Let us
+look into a few lives, a few typical lives and families, and see.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+_April 22nd_.
+
+Dear H.
+
+As I begin upon this final letter to you comes the news that the
+threatened split in the British Cabinet owing to the proposed introduction
+of general military service has been averted, and that at a Secret Session
+to be held next Tuesday, April 25th, Ministers will, for the first time,
+lay before both Houses of Parliament full and complete information--much
+more full and complete at any rate, than has yet been given--of the
+"effort" of Great Britain in this world war, what this country is doing in
+sea-power, in the provision of Armies, in the lending of money to our
+Allies, in our own shipping service to them, and in our supply to them of
+munitions, coal, and other war material--including boots and clothing. If,
+then, our own British Parliament will be for the first time fully apprised
+next Tuesday of what the nation has been doing, it is, perhaps, small
+wonder that you on your side of the Atlantic have not rightly understood
+the performance of a nation which has, collectively, the same love of
+"grousing" as the individual British soldier shows in the trenches.
+
+Let me, however, go back and recapitulate a little.
+
+In the first of these letters, I tried, by a rapid "vision" of the Fleet,
+as I personally saw an important section of it amid the snows of February,
+to point to the indispensable condition of this "effort," without which it
+could never have been made, without which it could not be maintained for a
+day, at the present moment. Since that visit of mine, the power of the
+Fleet and the effect of the Fleet have strengthened week by week. The
+blockade of Germany is far more effective than it was three months ago;
+the evidence of its growing stringency accumulates steadily, and at the
+same time the British Foreign Office has been anxiously trying, and
+evidently with much success, to minimise for neutrals its inevitable
+difficulties and inconveniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. Asquith will explain
+next Tuesday, the expenditure on the war, not only on our own needs but on
+those of our Allies is colossal--terrifying. The most astonishing Budget
+of English History, demanding a fourth of his income from every well-to-do
+citizen, has been brought in since I began to write these letters, and
+quietly accepted. Five hundred millions sterling ($2,500,000,000) have
+been already lent to our Allies. We are spending at the yearly rate of
+600,000,000 sterling ($3,000,000,000) on the Army; 200,000,000 on the Navy
+as compared with 40,000,000 in 1913; while the Munitions Department is
+costing about two-thirds as much (400,000,000 sterling) as the rest of the
+Army, and is employing close upon 2,000,000 workers, one-tenth of them
+women. The export trade of the country, in spite of submarines and lack of
+tonnage, is at the moment greater than it was in the corresponding months
+of 1913.
+
+As to what we have got for our money, Parliament has authorised an Army
+of 4,000,000 men, and it is on the question of the last half million that
+England's Effort now turns. Mr. Asquith will explain everything that has
+been done, and everything that still remains to do, _in camera_ to
+Parliament next Tuesday. But do not, my dear friend, make any mistake
+_England will get the men she wants_; and Labour will be in the end just
+as determined to get them as any other section of the Community.
+Meanwhile, abroad, while we seem, for the moment, in France to be
+inactive, we are in reality giving the French at Verdun just that support
+which they and General Joffre desire, and--it can scarcely be
+doubted--preparing great things on our own account. In spite of our
+failure in Gallipoli, and the anxious position of General Townshend's
+force, Egypt is no longer in danger of attack, if it ever has been; our
+sea-power has brought a Russian force safely to Marseilles; and the
+possibilities of British and Russian Collaboration in the East are
+rapidly opening out. As to the great and complex war-machine we have been
+steadily building up on French soil, as I tried to show in my fourth
+letter, whether in the supply bases, or in the war organisation along the
+ninety miles of front now held by the British Armies, it would indeed
+astonish those dead heroes of the Retreat from Mons--could they comes back
+to see it! We are not satisfied with it yet--hence the unrest in
+Parliament and the Press--we shall never be satisfied--till Germany has
+accepted the terms of the Allies. But those who know England best have no
+doubt whatever as to the temper of the nation which has so far "improvised
+the impossible," in the setting up of this machine, and means, in the end,
+_to get out of it what it wants_.
+
+The temper of the nation? In this last letter let me take some samples of
+it. First--what have the rich been doing? As to money, the figures of the
+income-tax, the death-duties, and the various war loans are there to show
+what they have contributed to the State. The Joint War Committee of the
+Red Cross and the St. John's Ambulance Association have collected--though
+not, of course, from the rich only--close on 4,000,000 sterling (between
+$18,000,000 and $19,000,000), and the Prince of Wales Fund nearly
+6,000,000 ($30,000,000). The lavishness of English giving, indeed, in all
+directions during the last two years, could hardly I think have been
+outdone. A few weeks ago I walked with the Duke of Bedford through the
+training and reinforcement camp, about fifteen miles from my own home in
+the country, which he himself commands and which, at the outbreak of war,
+he himself built without waiting for public money or War Office
+contractors, to house and train recruits for the various Bedfordshire
+regiments. The camp holds 1,200 men, and is ranged in a park where the
+oaks--still standing--were considered too old by Oliver Cromwell's
+Commissioners to furnish timber for the English Navy. Besides ample
+barrack accommodation in comfortable huts, planned so as to satisfy every
+demand whether of health or convenience, all the opportunities that
+Aldershot offers, on a large scale, are here provided in miniature. The
+model trenches with the latest improvements in plan, revetting,
+gun-emplacements, sally-ports, and the rest, spread through the sandy
+soil; the musketry ranges, bombing and bayonet schools are of the most
+recent and efficient type. And the Duke takes a keen personal interest in
+every man in training, follows his progress in camp, sees him off to the
+front, and very often receives him, when wounded, in the perfectly
+equipped hospital which the Duchess has established in Woburn Abbey
+itself. Here the old riding-school, tennis-court, and museum, which form a
+large building fronting the abbey, have been turned into wards as
+attractive as bright and simple colour, space, flowers, and exquisite
+cleanliness can make them. The Duchess is herself the Matron in charge,
+under the War Office, keeps all the records, is up at half past five in
+the morning, and spends her day in the endless doing, thinking, and
+contriving that such a hospital needs. Not very far away stands another
+beautiful country house, rented by Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid when they
+were in England. It also is a hospital, but its owner, Lord Lucas, not a
+rich man, has now given it irrevocably to the nation for the use of
+disabled soldiers, together with as much land as may suffice a farm colony
+chosen from among them. The beautiful hospital of 250 beds at Paignton, in
+North Devon, run entirely by women of American birth now resident in Great
+Britain, without any financial aid from the British Government, was
+another large country house given to the service of the wounded by Mr.
+Singer. Lady Sheffield's hospital for 25 beds at Alderley Park is an
+example of how part of a country house with all its green and restful
+surroundings may be used for those who have suffered in the war, and it
+has many fellows in all parts of England. Altogether about 700 country
+houses, large and small, have been offered to the War Office.
+
+But money and houses are the very least part of what the old families,
+the rich manufacturers, or the educated class generally have offered to
+their country in this war. Democracy has gone far with us, but it may
+still be said that the young heir to a great name, to estates with which
+his family has been connected for generations, and to the accumulated
+"consideration" to use a French word in a French sense, which such a
+position almost always carries with it--has a golden time in English
+life. Difficulties that check others fall away from him; he is smiled
+upon for his kindred's sake before he makes friends for his own; the
+world is overkind to his virtues and blind to his faults; he enters
+manhood indeed as "one of our conquerors"; and it will cost him some
+trouble to throw away his advantages. Before the war such a youth was
+the common butt of the Socialist orator. He was the typical "shirker"
+and "loafer," while other men worked; the parasite bred from the sweat
+of the poor; the soft, effeminate creature who had never faced the facts
+of life and never would. As to his soldiering--the common profession of
+so many of his kind--that was only another offence in the eyes of
+politicians like Mr. Keir Hardie. When the class war came, he would
+naturally he found shooting down the workmen; but for any other war, an
+ignorant popinjay!--incompetent even at his own trade, and no match
+whatever for the scientific soldier of the Continent.
+
+Those who knew anything of the Army were well aware long before 1914 that
+this type of officer--if he still existed, as no doubt he had once
+existed--had become extraordinarily rare; that since the Boer War, the
+level of education in the Army, the standard of work demanded, the quality
+of the relations between officers and men had all steadily advanced. And
+with regard to the young men of the "classes" in general, those who had to
+do with them, at school and college, while fully alive to their
+weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which were more instinct than
+anything else, as to what stuff these easy-going, sport-loving fellows
+might prove to be made of in case of emergency.
+
+Well, the emergency came. These youths of the classes, heirs to titles and
+estates, or just younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, so far as
+it still survives, went out in their hundreds, with the old and famous
+regiments of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, and perished in
+their hundreds. Forty-seven eldest sons, heirs to English peerages had
+fallen within a year of the outbreak of war--among them the heirs to such
+famous houses as Longleat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby--and the names of
+Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, Douglas Pennant, Worsley, Hay, St.
+Aubyn, Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach--together with men whose fathers
+have played prominent parts in the politics or finance of the last half
+century. And the first ranks have been followed by what one might almost
+call a _levee en masse_ of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt
+like water at Ypres and La Bassee, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever may be
+said henceforward of these "golden lads" of ours, "shirker" and "loafer"
+they can never he called again. They have died too lavishly, their men
+have loved and trusted them too well for that--and some of the
+working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have
+confessed it abundantly.
+
+And the professional classes--the intellectuals--everywhere the leading
+force of the nation--have done just as finely, and of course in far
+greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May--in the
+height of the summer term, just at that moment when Oxford normally is at
+its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets
+crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the
+"flannelled fools," who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe--if
+it ever applied to them--with interest. For they had all disappeared. They
+were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to
+Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants--under age, or
+medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, showed boats indeed,
+but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of
+Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college,
+Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High
+Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the
+fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associated in the minds of
+Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were
+white tents full of wounded. I walked up and down that wide, deserted lawn
+of St. John's, where Charles I once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old
+friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a
+despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are gone--so
+_many_!--and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did--as
+blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power."
+
+Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two
+Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the testimony of those
+who knew them best, not delightful to those who did not love them, not
+just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which
+life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge,
+July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier.
+Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be
+remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion
+of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of
+April, 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an
+exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and
+tragic joy of the "fighting man" in the spring, which may be his last--in
+the night heavens--in the woodland trees:
+
+                    "The woodland trees that stand together
+                      They stand to him each one a friend;
+                    They gently speak in the windy weather;
+                      They guide to valley and ridge's end.
+
+                    "The kestrel hovering by day
+                      And the little owls that call by night,
+                    Bid him be swift and keen as they
+                      As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
+
+                    "The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother,
+                      If this be the last song you shall sing,
+                    Sing well, for you may not sing another
+                      Brother, sing.'
+
+                    "In dreary, doubtful waiting hours,
+                      Before the brazen frenzy starts,
+                    The horses show him nobler powers;--
+                      O patient eyes, courageous hearts!
+
+                    "And when the burning moment breaks,
+                      And all things else are out of mind
+                    And only Joy of Battle takes
+                      Him by the throat and makes him blind
+
+                    "Through joy and blindness he shall know
+                      Not caring much to know, that still
+                    Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
+                      That it be not the Destined Will.
+
+                    "The thundering line of battle stands,
+                      And in the air Death moans and sings;
+                    But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
+                      And Night shall fold him in soft wings."
+
+A young man of another type, inheriting from the Cecils on the one side,
+and from his grandfather, the first Lord Selborne, on the other, the best
+traditions of English Conservatism and English churchmanship--open-eyed,
+patriotic, devout--has been lost to the nation in Robert A.S. Palmer, the
+second son of Lord and Lady Selborne, affectionately known to an ardent
+circle of friends whose hopes were set on him, as "Bobbie Palmer." He has
+fallen in the Mesopotamian campaign; and of him, as of William Henry
+Gladstone, the grandson and heir of England's great Liberal Minister, who
+fell in Flanders a year ago, it may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries
+said of Sir Philip Sidney,
+
+     Honour and Fame are got about their graves,
+     And there sit mourning of each other's loss.
+
+In one of his latest letters, quoted by a friend in a short biography,
+Robert Palmer wrote:--"Who isn't weary to death of the war? I certainly
+have been, for over a year; yes, and sorrowful almost unto death over it,
+at times, as you doubtless have too. But of one thing I am and always
+have been sure, that it is worth the cost and any cost there is to come,
+to prevent Prussianism--which is Anti-Christ--controlling Europe." The
+following eloquent passage written by an Oxford Fellow and Tutor, in a
+series of short papers on the losses sustained by Oxford in the war, is
+understood to refer to Mr. Palmer:--
+
+"To-night the bell tolls in the brain (_haud rediturus_) over one of the
+noblest--if it be not a treason to discriminate--of all the dead one has
+known who have died for England. Graciousness was in all his doings and in
+all the workings of his mind. The music and gymnastic whereof Plato wrote,
+that should attune the body to harmony with the mind, and harmonise all
+the elements of the mind in a perfect unison, had done their work upon
+him. He seemed--at any rate, to the eyes of those who loved him, and they
+were many--to have the perfection of nature's endowment: beauty of mind
+knit to beauty of body, and all informed by a living spirit of affection,
+so that his presence was a benediction, and a matter for thanksgiving
+that God had made men after this manner. So to speak of him is perhaps to
+idealise him; but one can only idealise that which suggests the ideal, and
+at the least he had a more perfect participation in the ideal than falls
+to the general lot of humanity."
+
+Such he was: and now he too is dead. From the work to which he had gone,
+thousands of miles away (a work of service, and of his Master's service),
+he had hastened back to England, and for England he has died. His tutor
+had once written in his copy of the Vulgate: "_Esto vir fortis, et
+pugnemus pro populo nostro et pro civitate Dei nostri_." He was strong;
+and he fought for both.
+
+Another Oxford man, Gilbert Talbot, a youngest son of the much-loved
+Bishop of Winchester, will perhaps stand for many, in coming years, as the
+pre-eminent type of first youth, youth with all its treasure of life and
+promise unspent, poured out like spikenard in this war at the feet of
+England. Already assured at Oxford of a brilliant career in politics, a
+fine speaker, a hard worker, possessing by inheritance the charm of two
+families, always in the public eye and ear, and no less popular than
+famous, he had just landed in the United States when the war broke out. He
+was going round the world with a friend, youth and ambition high within
+him. He turned back without a moment's hesitation, though soldiering had
+never been at all attractive to him, and after his training went out to
+France. He was killed in Flanders in July last. Let me give the story of
+his identification after death on the battle-field, by his elder brother,
+Neville, Army Chaplain, and ex-Balliol tutor, as Canon Scott Holland gave
+it in the _Commonwealth_:--
+
+"The attack had failed. There was never any hope of its succeeding, for
+the machine-guns of the Germans were still in full play, with their fire
+unimpaired. The body had to lie there where it had fallen. Only, his
+brother could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or unblessed. After a
+day and a half of anxious searching for exact details, he got to the
+nearest trench by the 'murdered' wood, which the shells had now smashed to
+pieces. There he found some shattered Somersets, who begged him to go no
+farther. But he heard a voice within him bidding him risk it, and the call
+of the blood drove him on. Creeping out of the far end of the trench, as
+dusk fell, he crawled through the grass on hands and knees, in spite of
+shells and snipers, dropping flat on the ground as the flares shot up from
+the German trenches. And, at last, thirty yards away in the open ... he
+knew that he was close on what he sought. Two yards farther, he found it.
+He could stroke with his hand the fair young head that he knew so well; he
+could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, and the badge and the whistle.
+He could breathe a prayer of benediction ... and then crawl back on his
+perilous way in the night, having done all that man could do for the
+brother whom he had loved so fondly; and enabled, now, to tell those at
+home that Gilbert was dead indeed, but that he had died the death that a
+soldier would love to die, leaving his body the nearest of all who fell,
+to the trench that he had been told to take."
+
+Again, of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Oxford
+friend says: "There were almost infinite possibilities in his future." He
+was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of
+importance in the Foreign Office, refused it, and went back to the
+front--to die. But among the hundreds of memorial notices issued by the
+Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs and recurs, of unhesitating,
+uncalculated sacrifice. Older men, and younger men, Don, and
+under-graduate, lads of nineteen and twenty, and those who were already
+school-mastering, or practising at the Bar, or in business, they felt no
+doubts, they made no delays. Their country called, and none failed in that
+great _Adsum_.
+
+Cambridge of course has the same story to tell. One takes the short,
+pathetic biographies almost at random from the ever-lengthening record,
+contributed by the colleges. Captain J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, was already
+Director of an important steel works, engaged in Government business when
+war broke out, and might have honourably claimed exemption. Instead he
+offered himself at once on mobilisation, and went out with his battalion
+to France last spring. On the 15th of June, at Festubert, he was killed in
+volunteering to bring what was left of a frightfully battered battalion
+out of action. "What seems to me my duty as an officer," he once wrote to
+a friend, "is to carry my sword across the barriers of death clean and
+bright." "This," says the friend who writes the notice, "he has done."
+Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in
+the forehead by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. His General and
+brother officers write:
+
+     _He was a very fine young officer.... Every one loved
+     him.... His men would do anything for him...._
+
+And the sergeant of his machine-gun brigade says:
+
+     _Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I
+     have lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and
+     kind to me and us all_.
+
+Lieutenant Hamilton, aged twenty-five, says in a last letter to his
+father:
+
+     _Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is
+     going on. It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it
+     all. Any moment one may be put out of action, but one does
+     not worry. That quiet time alone with God at the Holy
+     Communion was most comforting_.
+
+Immediately after writing these words, the writer fell in action. Captain
+Clarke, a famous Cambridge athlete, President of the C.U.A.C., bled to
+death--according to one account--from a frightful wound received in the
+advance near Hooge on September 25th. His last recorded act--the
+traditional act of the dying soldier!--was to give a drink from his flask
+to a wounded private. Of the general action of Cambridge men, the Master
+of Christ's writes: "Nothing has been more splendid than the way the young
+fellows have come forward; not only the athletes and the healthy, but in
+all cases the most unlikely men have rushed to the front, and have done
+brilliantly. The mortality, however, has been appalling. In an ordinary
+way one loses one killed to eight or nine wounded; but in this war the
+number of Cambridge men killed and missing practically equals the number
+of wounded." Of the effect upon the University an eye-witness says:
+"Eighty per cent of the College rooms are vacant. Rows and rows of houses
+in Cambridge are to let. All the Junior Fellows are on service in one
+capacity or another, and a great many of the Seniors are working in
+Government Offices or taking school posts"--so that the school education
+of the Country may be carried on. Altogether, nearly 12,000 Cambridge men
+are serving; 980 have been wounded; 780 have been killed; 92 are missing.
+
+As to one's friends and kinsfolk, let me recall the two gallant grandsons
+of my dear old friend and publisher, George Murray Smith, the original
+publisher of _Jane Eyre_, friend of Charlotte Bronte, and creator of the
+_Dictionary of National Biography_. The elder one, who had just married
+before going out, fought all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in
+one of the early actions on the Flanders front. "He led us all the way,"
+said one of his men afterwards. All the way!--All through the immortal
+rear-guard actions of August--only to fall, when the tide had turned, and
+the German onslaught on Paris had been finally broken! "In all my
+soldiering," writes a brother officer, "I have never seen a warmer feeling
+between men and their officer." "Was he not," asks a well-known Eton
+master, "that tall, smiling, strong, gentle-mannered boy at
+White-Thomson's?"--possessing an "affectionate regard and feeling for
+others which boys as boys, especially if strong and popular, don't always,
+or indeed often possess." The poor parents were uncertain as to his fate
+for many weeks, but he finally died of his wounds in a hospital behind the
+German lines. Then, little more than six months later came the second
+blow. Geoffrey, the younger brother, aged nineteen, fell on September
+29th, near Vermelles. Nothing could be more touching than the letters
+from officers and men about this brave, sweet-tempered boy. "Poor old
+regiment!" writes the Colonel to the lad's father--"we were badly knocked
+about, and I brought out only 3 officers and 375 men, but they did
+magnificently, and it was thanks to officers like your son, who put the
+honour of the regiment before all thought of fatigue or personal danger.
+Such a gallant lad! We all loved him." A private, the boy's
+soldier-servant, who fought with him, writes: "I wish you could have seen
+him in that trench.... All the men say that he deserved the V.C.... I
+don't know if we are going back to those trenches any more, but if we do,
+I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in some quiet place.... I
+cannot bear to think that I shall not be able to be with him any more."
+
+But how they crowd upon the mind--the "unreturning brave"! Take our
+friends and neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country. All round us
+the blows have fallen--again and again the only son--sometimes two
+brothers out of three--the most brilliant--the best beloved. And I see
+still the retreating figure of a dear nephew of my own, as he vanished
+under the trees waving his hand to us in March last. A boy made of
+England's best--who after two years in Canada, and at the beginning of
+what must have been a remarkable career, heard the call of the Mother
+Country, and rushed home at once. He was transferred to an English
+regiment, and came to say good-bye to us in March. It was impossible to
+think of Christopher's coming to harm--such life and force, such wisdom
+and character also, in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful eyes! We
+talked of the future of Canada--not much of the war. Then he vanished, and
+I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, near Bailleul, he went out
+with a listening party between the trenches, was shot through both legs by
+a sniper, and otherwise injured--carried back to hospital, and after a few
+hours' vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had
+done his duty and fearing nothing. "Romance and melodrama," says Professor
+Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest and most moving utterances of the
+war, "were once a memory--broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the
+past. We live no longer upon fragments and memories, we have entered
+ourselves upon an heroic age.... As for me personally, there is one
+thought that is always with me--the thought that other men are dying for
+me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of them men
+whom I have taught and loved." The orthodox Christian "will be familiar
+with that thought of One who loved you dying for you. I would like to say
+that now I seem to be familiar with the thought that something innocent,
+something great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying daily for
+me. That is the sort of community we now are--a community in which one man
+dies for his brother; and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger and
+quarrels, we _are_ brothers, who are ready to seal our brotherhood with
+blood. It is for us these men are dying--for the women, the old men, and
+the rejected men--and to preserve civilisation and the common life which
+we are keeping alive, or building."
+
+So much for the richer and the educated class. As to the rank and file,
+the Tommies who are fighting and dying for England in precisely the same
+spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal
+world, I have seen them myself within a mile of the trenches, marching
+quietly up through the fall of the March evening to take their places in
+that line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so
+many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or
+shell fire, is practically invariable. Not the conscript soldiers of a
+military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce
+familiar from childhood! Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, to
+whom it is all new, who at bottom, however firm their will, or wonderful
+their courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome business. "I do not
+find it easy," writes a chaplain at the front who knows his men and has
+shared all the dangers of their life--"to give incidents and sayings. I
+could speak of the courage of the wounded brought in after battle. How
+many times has one heard them telling the doctor to attend to others
+before themselves! I could tell you of a very shy and nervous boy who,
+after an attack, dug, himself alone, with his intrenching tool, a little
+trench, under continuous fire, up which trench he afterwards crept
+backwards and forwards carrying ammunition to an advanced post; or of
+another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under snipers'
+fire, and somehow built him a slight protection until night fell and
+rescue came. Such incidents are merely specimens of thousands which are
+never known. Indeed it is the heroism of _all_ the men _all_ the time
+which has left the most lasting impression on my mind after thirteen
+months at the war. No one can conceive the strain which the daily routine
+of trench life entails, unless one has been among the men. They never show
+the slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do what they are told when
+and where they are told without questioning; no matter what the conditions
+or dangers, they come up smiling and cheery through it all--full of
+'grouse,' perhaps, but that is the soldier's privilege!... It is, I think,
+what we all are feeling and are so proud of--this unbreakable spirit of
+self-sacrifice in the daily routine of trench warfare. We are proud of it
+because it is the highest of all forms of self-sacrifice, for it is not
+the act of a moment when the blood is up or the excitement of battle is at
+fever heat; but it is demanded of the soldier, day in and day out, and
+shown by him coolly and deliberately, day in and day out, with death
+always at hand. We are proud of it, too, because it is so surely a sign of
+the magnificent _'moral'_ of our troops--and _moral_ is going to play a
+very leading part as the war proceeds.... What is inspiring this splendid
+disregard of self is partly the certainty that the Cause is Right; partly,
+it is a hidden joy of conscience which makes them know that they would be
+unhappy if they were not doing their bit--and partly (I am convinced of
+this, too,) it is a deepening faith in the Founder of their Faith Whom so
+many appreciate and value as never before, because they realise that even
+He has not shirked that very mill of suffering through which they are now
+passing themselves."
+
+A few days ago, I accompanied a woman official distributing some leaflets
+on behalf of a Government department, in some visits to families living in
+a block of model dwellings somewhere in South London. We called on nine
+families. In every single case the man of the family had gone, or was
+expecting to go, to the war; except in one case, where a man who, out of
+pure patriotism and at great personal difficulty had joined the Volunteer
+Reserve at the outbreak of war, had strained his heart in trench-digging
+and was now medically unfit, to his own bitter disappointment. There was
+some grumbling in the case of one young wife that her husband should be
+forced to go before the single men whom she knew; but in the main the
+temper that showed itself bore witness both to the feeling and the
+intelligence that our people are bringing to bear on the war. One woman
+said her husband was a sergeant in a well-known regiment. He thought the
+world of his men, and whenever one was killed, he must be at the burying.
+"He can't bear, you know"--she added shyly--"they should feel alone." She
+had three brothers-in-law "out"--one recently killed. One was an ambulance
+driver under the R.A.M.C. He had five small children, but had volunteered.
+"He doesn't say much about the war, except that 'Tommies are wonderful.
+They never complain.'" She notices a change in his character. He was
+always good to his wife and children--"but now he's splendid!" The brother
+of another woman had been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the country and
+the people. When war broke out he "felt he must fight for them." He came
+home at once and enlisted. Another brother had been a stoker on a war-ship
+at the Dardanelles, and was in the famous landing of April 25. Bullets
+"thick and fast like hailstorm. Terrible times collecting the dead! Her
+brother had worked hard forming burial parties. Was now probably going to
+the Tigris. Wrote jolly letters!"
+
+Then there was the little woman born and bred in the Army, with all the
+pride of the Army--a familiar type. Husband a sergeant in the Guards--was
+gymnastic instructor at a northern town--and need not have gone to the
+war, but felt "as a professional soldier" he ought to go. Three brothers
+in the Army--one a little drummer-boy of sixteen, badly wounded in the
+retreat from Mons. Her sailor brother had died--probably from exposure, in
+the North Sea. The most cheerful, plucky little creature! "We are Army
+people, and must expect to fight."
+
+Well--you say you "would like America to visualise the effort, the
+self-sacrifice of the English men and women who are determined to see this
+war through." There was, I thought, a surprising amount of cheerful
+effort, of _understanding_ self-sacrifice in those nine homes, where my
+companion's friendly talk drew out the family facts without difficulty.
+And I am convinced that if I had spent days instead of hours in following
+her through the remaining tenements in these huge and populous blocks the
+result would have been practically the same. _The nation is behind the
+war, and behind the Government_--solidly determined to win this war, and
+build a new world after it.
+
+As to the work of our women, I have described something of it in the
+munitions area, and if this letter were not already too long, I should
+like to dwell on much else--the army of maidens, who, as V.A.D.'s (members
+of Voluntary Aid Detachments), trained by the Red Cross, have come
+trooping from England's most luxurious or comfortable homes, and are
+doing invaluable work in hundreds of hospitals; to begin with, the most
+menial scrubbing and dish-washing, and by now the more ambitious and
+honourable--but not more indispensable--tasks of nursing itself. In this
+second year of the war, the first army of V.A.D.'s, now promoted, has
+everywhere been succeeded by a fresh levy, aglow with the same eagerness
+and the same devotion as the first. Or I could dwell on the women's
+hospitals--especially the remarkable hospital in Endell Street, entirely
+officered by women; where some hundreds of male patients accept the
+surgical and medical care of women doctors, and adapt themselves to the
+light and easy discipline maintained by the women of the staff, with
+entire confidence and grateful good-will. To see a woman dentist at work
+on a soldier's mouth, and a woman quartermaster presiding over her stores,
+and managing, besides, everything pertaining to the lighting, heating, and
+draining of the hospital, is one more sign of these changed and changing
+times. The work done by the Scottish Women's Hospital in Serbia will rank
+as one of the noblest among the minor episodes of the war. The magnificent
+work of British nurses, everywhere, I have already spoken of. And
+everywhere, too, among the camps in England and abroad, behind the
+fighting lines, or at the great railway-stations here or in France,
+through which the troops pass backwards and forwards, hundreds of women
+have been doing ardent yet disciplined service--giving long hours in
+crowded canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts to just those small kindly offices,
+which bring home to the British soldier, more effectively than many things
+more ambitious, what the British nation feels towards him. The war has put
+an end, so far as the richer class is concerned, to the busy idleness and
+all the costly make-believes of peace. No one gives "dinner-parties" in
+the old sense any more; the very word "reception" is dying out. The high
+wages that munition-work has brought to the women of the working class,
+show themselves, no doubt, in some foolish dressing. "You should see the
+hats round here on a Saturday!" said the Manager of a Midland factory. But
+I am bound to say he spoke of it proudly. The hats were for him a
+testimony to the wages paid by his firm; and he would probably have
+argued, on the girls' part, that after the long hours and hard work of the
+week, the hats were a perfectly legitimate "fling," and human nature must
+out. Certainly the children of the workers are better fed and better
+clothed, which speaks so far well for the mothers; and recent Government
+inquiries seem to show that in spite of universal employment, and high
+wages, the drunkenness of the United Kingdom as a whole is markedly less,
+while at the same time--uncomfortable paradox!--the amount of alcohol
+consumed is greater. One hears stories of extravagance among those who
+have been making "war-profits," but they are less common this year than
+last; and as to my own experience, all my friends are wearing their old
+clothes, and the West End dressmakers, poor things, in view of a large
+section of the public which regards it as a crime "to buy anything new"
+are either shutting down till better days, or doing a greatly restricted
+business. Taxation has grown much heavier, and will be more and more
+severely felt. Yet very few grumble, and there is a general and determined
+cutting down of the trappings and appendages of life, which is to the good
+of us all.
+
+Undoubtedly, there is a very warm and wide-spread feeling among us that in
+this war the women of the nation have done uncommonly well! You will
+remember a similar stir of grateful recognition in America after your War
+of Secession, connected with the part played in the nursing and sanitation
+of the war by the women of the Northern States. The feeling here may well
+have an important social and political influence when the war is over;
+especially among the middle and upper classes. It may be counter-balanced
+to some extent in the industrial class, by the disturbance and anxiety
+caused in many trades, but especially in the engineering trades, by that
+great invasion of women I have tried to describe. But that the war will
+leave _some_ deep mark on that long evolution of the share of women in our
+public life, which began in the teeming middle years of the last century,
+is, I think, certain.
+
+_May 2nd._--So I come to the end of the task you set me!--with what gaps
+and omissions to look back upon, no one knows so well as myself. This
+letter starts on its way to you at a critical moment for your great
+country, when the issue between the United States and Germany is still
+unsettled. What will happen? Will Germany give way? If not, what sort of
+relations will shape themselves, and how quickly, between the Central
+Empires and America? To express myself on this great matter is no part of
+my task; although no English man or woman but will watch its development
+with a deep and passionate interest. What may be best for you, we cannot
+tell; the military and political bearings of a breach between the United
+States and Germany on our own fortunes are by no means clear to us. But
+what we _do_ want, in any case, is the sympathy, the moral support and
+co-operation of your people. We have to thank you for a thousand
+generosities to our wounded; we bless you--as comrades with you in that
+old Christendom which even this war shall not destroy--for what you have
+done in Belgium--but we want you to understand the heart of England in
+this war, and not to be led away by the superficial difficulties and
+disputes that no great and free nation escapes in time of crisis. Sympathy
+with France--France, the invaded, the heroic--is easy for America--for us
+all. She is the great tragic figure of the war--the whole world does her
+homage. We are not invaded--and so less tragic, less appealing. But we are
+fighting the fight which is the fight of all freemen everywhere--against
+the wantonness of military power, against the spirit that tears up
+treaties and makes peaceful agreement between nations impossible--against
+a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings our civilisation to shame. We
+have a right to your sympathy--you who are the heirs of Washington and
+Lincoln, the trustees of liberty in the New World as we, with France, are
+in the Old. You are concerned--you must be concerned--in the triumph of
+the ideals of ordered freedom and humane justice over the ideals of
+unbridled force and ruthless cruelty, as they have been revealed in this
+war, to the horror of mankind. The nation that can never, to all time,
+wash from its hands the guilt of the Belgium crime, the blood of the
+_Lusitania_ victims, of the massacres of Louvain and Dinant, of Aerschot
+and Termonde, may some day deserve our pity. To-day it has to be met and
+conquered by a will stronger than its own, in the interests of
+civilisation itself.
+
+This last week, at the close of which I am despatching this final letter,
+has been a sombre week for England. It has seen the squalid Irish rising,
+with its seven days' orgy of fire and bloodshed in Dublin; it has seen the
+surrender at Kut of General Townshend and his starving men; it has seen
+also a strong demonstration in Parliament of discontent with certain
+phases of the conduct of the war. And yet, how shall I convey to you the
+paradox that we in England--our soldiers at the front, and instructed
+opinion at home--have never been so certain of ultimate victory as we now
+are? It is the big facts that matter: the steady growth of British
+resources, in men and munitions, toward a maximum which we--and
+Russia--are only approaching, while that of the Central Empires is past;
+the deepening unity of an Empire which is being forged anew by danger and
+trial, and by the spirit of its sons all over the world--a unity against
+which the Irish outrage, paid for by German money, disavowed by all that
+is truly Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist, and instantly effaced, as a
+mere demonstration, by the gallantry at the same moment of Irish soldiers
+in the battle-line--lifts its treacherous hand in vain; the increasing and
+terrible pressure of the British blockade of Germany, equivalent, as some
+one has lately said, every twenty-four hours that it is maintained, to a
+successful action in the field; the magnificent resistance of an
+indomitable France; the mounting strength of a reorganised Russia. This
+island-state--let me repeat it with emphasis--was not prepared for, and
+had no expectation of a Continental war, such as we are now fighting. The
+fact cries aloud from the records of the struggle; it will command the ear
+of history; and it acquits us for ever from the guilt of the vast
+catastrophe. But Great Britain has no choice now but to fight to the
+end--and win. She knows it, and those who disparage her are living in a
+blind world. As to the difficulty of the task--as to our own failures and
+mistakes in learning how to achieve it--we have probably fewer illusions
+than those who criticise us. _But we shall do it--or perish_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_May 5th._--Since the preceding lines were written, the "Military Service
+Bill" bringing to the Colours "every British male subject" between the
+ages of 18 and 41, except when legally exempted, has passed the House of
+Commons by an overwhelming majority, and will be law immediately. And the
+Prime Minister informed Parliament three days ago, that "the total naval
+and military effort of the Empire since the beginning of the war exceeds
+five million men."
+
+With these two facts, these Letters may fitly close. Those who know
+England best, her history, and the temperament of her people, will best
+appreciate what they mean.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+AN EPILOGUE
+
+
+_August 16, 1916._
+
+I
+
+It is now three months since I finished the six preceding Letters, written
+in response to an urgent call from America; nor did I then anticipate any
+renewal of my work. But while a French translation of the six Letters has
+been passing through the Press, an appeal has been made to me from France
+to add an Epilogue, or supplementary Letter, briefly recapitulating the
+outstanding facts or events which in those three months have marked the
+British share in the war, and played their part in the immense
+transformation of the general outlook which has taken place during those
+months. Not an easy task! One thinks first of one's own inadequacy; and
+then remembers, as before, that one is a unit in a nation under orders. I
+must therefore do what I can. And perhaps other readers, also, of this
+little book, in America and England, as they look back over the
+ever-changing scene of the war, will not find this renewed attempt to
+summarise Britain's part in it as it has developed up to the present date
+(August 16, 1916) unwelcome. The outstanding facts of the last three
+months, as I see them, are, for Great Britain:--
+
+1. The immense increase in the output of British Munitions of War;
+
+2. The Naval Battle of Jutland;
+
+3. The Allied offensive on the Somme.
+
+The first and third of these events are, of course, so far as the latter
+concerns Great Britain, the natural and logical outcome of that "England's
+Effort" of which I tried--how imperfectly!--to give a connected account
+three months ago.
+
+At that time the ever-mounting British effort, though it had reached
+colossal dimensions, though everybody aware of it was full of a steadily
+growing confidence as to its final result, had still to be tested by those
+greater actions to which it was meant to lead. After the local failures at
+the Dardanelles, and in Mesopotamia, Great Britain was again, for a time,
+everywhere on the defensive, though it was a very vigorous and active
+defensive; and the magnificent stand made by the French at Verdun was not
+only covering France herself with glory, and kindling the hearts of all
+who love her throughout the world, but under its shield the new armies of
+Great Britain were still being steadily perfected, and wonderfully armed;
+time was being given to Russia for reorganisation and re-equipment, and
+time was all she wanted; while Germany, vainly dashing her strength in men
+and guns against the heights of Verdun, in the hope of provoking her
+enemies on the Western front to a premature offensive, doomed to
+exhaustion before it had achieved its end, was met by the iron resolve of
+both the French and British Governments, advised by the French and British
+Commanders in the field, to begin that offensive only at their own time
+and place, when the initiative was theirs, and everything was ready.
+
+But the scene has greatly altered. Let me take Munitions first. In
+February, it will be remembered by those who have read the preceding
+Letters, I was a visitor, by the kindness of the Ministry of Munitions,
+then in Mr. Lloyd George's hands, to a portion of the munitions field--in
+the Midlands, on the Tyne, and on the Clyde. At that moment, Great
+Britain, as far as armament was concerned, was in the mid-stream of a
+gigantic movement which had begun in the summer of 1915, set going by the
+kindling energy of Mr. Lloyd George, and seconded by the roused strength
+of a nation which was not the industrial pioneer of the whole modern world
+for nothing, however keenly others, during the last half-century, have
+pressed upon--or in some regions passed--her. Everywhere I found new
+workshops already filled with workers, a large proportion of them women,
+already turning out a mass of shell which would have seemed incredible to
+soldiers and civilians alike during the first months of the war; while the
+tale of howitzers, trench-mortars, machine-guns, and the rest, was running
+up week by week, in the vast extensions already added to the other works.
+But everywhere, too, I saw huge, empty workshops, waiting for their
+machines, or just setting them up; and everywhere the air was full of
+rumours of the new industrial forces--above all, of the armies of
+women--that were to be brought to bear. New towns were being built for
+them; their workplaces and their tools were being got ready for them, as
+in that vast filling factory--or rather town--on the Clyde which I
+described in my third Letter. But in many quarters they were not yet
+there; only one heard, as it were, the tramp of their advancing feet.
+
+But to-day! Those great empty workshops that I saw in February, in the
+making, or the furnishing, are now full of workers and machines; and
+thousands like them all over the country. Last night (Aug. 15), the new
+Minister of Munitions, Mr. Montagu, who, a few weeks ago, succeeded Mr.
+Lloyd George, now Minister for War, rendered an account of his department
+up to date, which amazed even the House of Commons, and will surely stir
+the minds of men throughout the British Empire with a just and reasonable
+pride. The "effete" and "degenerate" nation has roused herself indeed!
+
+Here is the bare resume of the Minister's statement:--
+
+     _Ammunition._--The British output of ammunition at the
+     beginning of the war was intended for an army of 200,000
+     men.
+
+     Naturally, the output rose steadily throughout the first
+     year of war.
+
+     _But_--the same output which in 1914-15 took 12 months to
+     produce could now be produced--
+
+     As to 18-pounder ammunition,              in 3 weeks
+       "   Field howitzer  "                   in 2 weeks
+       "   Medium gun and howitzer ammunition, in 11 days
+       "   Heavy shell,                        in 4 days
+
+     We are sending over to France _every week as_ much as the
+     whole pre-war stock of land service ammunition in the
+     country.
+
+As to _guns_, I would ask my readers to turn back to the second and third
+chapters in this little book, which show something of the human side and
+the daily detail of this great business, and then to look at this
+summary:--
+
+     _Every month, now_, we are turning out nearly twice as many
+     big guns as were in existence for land service--i.e., not
+     naval guns--when the Ministry of Munitions came into being
+     (June, 1915).
+
+     Between June, 1915, and June, 1916, the monthly output of
+     _heavy guns_ has increased _6-fold_--and the present output
+     will soon be doubled.
+
+     For every 100 _eighteen-pounders_ turned out in the first 10
+     months of the war, we are now turning out 500.
+
+     We are producing 18 times as many _machine-guns_.
+
+     Of _rifles_--the most difficult of all war material to
+     produce quickly in large quantities--our weekly home
+     production is now 3 times as great as it was a year ago. We
+     are supplying our Army overseas with rifles and machine-guns
+     entirely from home sources.
+
+     Of _small-arms ammunition_ our output is 3 times as great as
+     a year ago.
+
+     We are producing 66 times as much _high explosive_ as at the
+     beginning of 1915; and our output of _bombs_ is 33 times as
+     great as it was last year.
+
+At the same time, what is Great Britain doing _for her Allies_?
+
+     The loss of her Northern Provinces, absorbed by the German
+     invasion, has deprived France of three-quarters of her
+     steel. We are now sending to France _one-third of the whole
+     British production of shell-steel_.
+
+     We are also supplying the Allies with the _constituents of
+     high explosive_ in very large quantities, prepared by our
+     National factories.
+
+     We are sending to the Allies _millions of tons of coal and
+     coke every month_, large quantities of machinery, and 20 per
+     cent. of our whole production of machine tools
+     (indispensable to shell manufacture).
+
+     We are supplying Russia with millions of pairs of Army
+     boots.
+
+And in the matter of ammunition, we have not only enormously increased the
+quantity produced--we have greatly improved its quality. The testimony of
+the French experts--themselves masters in these arts of death--as conveyed
+through M. Thomas, is emphatic. The new British heavy guns are "admirably
+made"--"most accurate"--"most efficient."
+
+Meanwhile a whole series of chemical problems with regard to high
+explosives have been undertaken and solved by Lord Moulton's department.
+If it was ever true that science was neglected by the War Office, it is
+certainly true no longer; and the soldiers at the front, who have to make
+practical use of what our scientific chemists and our explosive factories
+at home are producing, are entirely satisfied.
+
+For that, as Mr. Montagu points out, is the sole and supreme test. How has
+the vast activity of the new Ministry of Munitions--an activity which the
+nation owes--let me repeat it--to the initiative, the compelling energy,
+of Mr. Lloyd George--affected our armies in the field?
+
+The final answer to that question is not yet. The Somme offensive is still
+hammering at the German gates; I shall presently give an outline of its
+course from its opening on July 1st down to the present. But meanwhile
+what can be said is this.
+
+The expenditure of ammunition which enabled us to sweep through the German
+first lines, in the opening days of this July, almost with ease, was
+colossal beyond all precedent. The total amount of heavy guns and
+ammunition manufactured by Great Britain in the first ten months of the
+war, from August, 1914, to June 1, 1915, would not have kept the British
+bombardment on the Somme going _for a single day_. That gives some idea of
+it.
+
+Can we keep it up? The German papers have been consoling themselves with
+the reflection that so huge an effort must have exhausted our supplies. On
+the contrary, says Mr. Montagu. _The output of the factories, week by
+week, now covers the expenditure in the field_. No fear now, that as at
+Loos, as at Neuve Chapelle, and as on a thousand other smaller occasions,
+British success in the field should be crippled and stopped by shortage of
+gun and shell!
+
+By whom has this result been brought about? By that army of British
+workmen--and workwomen--which Mr. Lloyd George in little more than one
+short year has mobilised throughout the country. The Ministry of Munitions
+is now employing _three millions and a half of workers_--(a year ago it
+was not much more than a million and a half)--of whom 400,000 _are
+women_; and the staff of the Ministry has grown from 3,000--the figure
+given in my earlier letters--to 5,000, just as that army of women, which
+has sprung as it were out of the earth at the call of the nation, has
+almost doubled since I wrote in April last. Well may the new Minister say
+that our toilers in factory and forge have had some share in the glorious
+recent victories of Russia, Italy, and France! Our men and our women have
+contributed to the re-equipment of those gallant armies of Russia, which,
+a month or six weeks earlier than they were expected to move, have broken
+up the Austrian front, and will soon be once more in Western Poland,
+perhaps in East Prussia! The Italian Army has drawn from our workshops and
+learnt from our experiments. The Serbian Army has been re-formed and
+re-fitted.
+
+Let us sum up. The Germans, with years of preparation behind them, made
+this war a war of machines. England, in that as in other matters, was
+taken by surprise. But our old and proud nation, which for generations
+led the machine industry of the world, as soon as it realised the
+challenge--and we were slow to realise it!--met it with an impatient and a
+fierce energy which is every month attaining a greater momentum and a more
+wonderful result. The apparently endless supply of munitions which now
+feeds the British front, and the _comparative_ lightness of the human cost
+at which the incredibly strong network of the German trenches on their
+whole first line system was battered into ruin, during the last days of
+June and the first days of July, 1916:--it is to effects like these that
+all that vast industrial effort throughout Great Britain, of which I saw
+and described a fragment three months ago, has now steadily and
+irresistibly brought us.
+
+
+II
+
+This then is perhaps the first point to notice in the landscape of the
+war, as we look back on the last three months. For on it everything else,
+Naval and Military, depends:--on the incredibly heightened output of
+British workshops, in all branches of war material, which has been
+attained since the summer of last year. In it, as I have just said, we see
+an _effect_ of a great cause--i.e., of the "effort" made by Great
+Britain, since the war broke out, to bring her military strength in men
+and munitions to a point, sufficient, in combination with the strength of
+her Allies, for victory over the Central Powers, who after long and
+deliberate preparation had wantonly broken the European peace. The
+"effort" was for us a new one, provoked by Germany, and it will have
+far-reaching civil consequences when the war is over.
+
+In the great Naval victory now known as the Battle of Jutland, on the
+other hand, we have a fresh demonstration on a greater scale than ever
+before, of that old, that root fact, without which indeed the success of
+the Allied effort in other directions would be impossible--i.e., _the
+overwhelming strength of the British Navy_, and its mastery of the Sea.
+
+In a few earlier pages of this book, I have described a visit which the
+British Admiralty allowed me to make in February last to a portion of the
+Fleet, then resting in a northern harbour. On that occasion, at the
+Vice-Admiral's luncheon-table, there sat beside me on my right, a tall
+spare man with the intent face of one to whom life has been a great arid
+strenuous adventure, accepted in no boyish mood, but rather in the spirit
+of the scientific explorer, pushing endlessly from one problem to the
+next, and passionate for all experience that either unveils the world, or
+tests himself. We talked of the war, and my projected journey. "I envy
+you!" he said, his face lighting up. "I would give anything to see our
+Army in the field." My neighbour was Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot,
+commanding the First Cruiser Squadron, who went down with his flagship
+_H.M.S. Defence_, in the Battle of Jutland, on the 31st of May last, while
+passing between the British and German fleets, under a very heavy fire.
+"It is probable," said Admiral Jellicoe's despatch, "that Sir Robert
+Arbuthnot, during his engagement with the enemy's light cruisers, and in
+his desire to complete their destruction, was not aware of the approach of
+the enemy's heavy ships, owing to the mist, until he found himself in
+close proximity to the main fleet, and before he could withdraw his ships,
+they were caught under a heavy fire and disabled." So, between the fleets
+of Germany and England, amid the mists of the May evening, and the storm
+and smoke of battle, my courteous neighbour of three months before found,
+with all his shipmates, that grave in the "unharvested sea" which England
+never forgets to honour, and from which no sailor shrinks. At the same
+luncheon-table were two other Admirals and many junior Officers, who took
+part in the same great action; and looking back upon it, and upon the
+notes which I embodied in my first Letter, I see more vividly than ever
+how every act and thought of those brave and practised men, among whom I
+passed those few--to me--memorable hours, were conditioned by an intense
+_expectation_, that trained prevision of what must come, which, in a
+special degree, both stirs and steadies the mind of the modern sailor.
+
+But one thing perhaps they had not foreseen--that by a combination of
+mishaps in the first reporting of the battle, the great action, which has
+really demonstrated, once and for all, the invincible supremacy of Great
+Britain at sea, which has reduced the German Fleet to months of impotence,
+put the invasion of these islands finally out of the question, and enabled
+the British blockade to be drawn round Germany with a yet closer and
+sterner hand, was made to appear, in the first announcements of it, almost
+a defeat. The news of our losses--our heavy losses--came first--came
+almost alone. The Admiralty, with the stern conscience of the British
+official mind, announced them as they came in--bluntly--with little or no
+qualification. A shock of alarm went through England! For what had we paid
+so sore a price? Was the return adequate, and not only to our safety, but
+to our prestige?
+
+There were a few hours when both Great Britain--outside the handful of men
+who knew--and her friends throughout the world, hung on the answer.
+Meanwhile the German lie, which converted a defeat for Germany into a
+"victory," got at least twenty-four hours' start, and the Imperial
+Chancellor made quick and sturdy use of it when he extracted a War Loan of
+L600,000,000 from a deluded and jubilant Reichstag. Then the news came in
+from one quarter after another of the six-mile battle-line, from one unit
+after another of the greatest sea-battle Britain had ever fought, and by
+the 3rd or 4th of June, England, drawing half-ironic breath over her own
+momentary misgiving, had realised the truth--first--that the German Fleet
+on the 31st had only escaped total destruction by the narrowest margin,
+and by the help of mist and darkness; secondly--that its losses were,
+relatively far greater, and in all probability, absolutely, greater than
+our own; thirdly--that after the British battle-fleet had severed the
+German navy from its base, the latter had been just able, under cover of
+darkness, to break round the British ships, and fly hard to shelter,
+pursued by our submarines and destroyers through the night, till it
+arrived at Wilhelmshaven a battered and broken host, incapable at least
+for months to come of any offensive action against Great Britain or her
+Allies. Impossible henceforth--for months to come--to send a German
+squadron sufficiently strong to harass Russia in the Baltic! Impossible to
+interfere successfully with the passage of Britain's new armies across the
+seas! Impossible to dream any longer of invading English coasts! The
+British Fleet holds the North Sea more strongly than it has ever held it;
+and behind the barbed wire defences of Wilhelmshaven or Heligoland the
+German Fleet has been nursing its wounds.
+
+Some ten weeks have passed, and as these results have become plain to all
+the world, the German lie, or what remained of it, has begun to droop,
+even in the country of its birth. "Do not let us suppose," says Captain
+Persius--the most honest of German naval critics, in a recent
+article--"that we have shaken the sea-power of England. That would be
+foolishness." While Mr. Balfour, the most measured, the most veracious of
+men, speaking only a few days ago to the representatives of the Dominion
+Parliaments, who have been visiting England, says quietly--"the growth of
+our Navy, since the outbreak of war, which has gone on, and which at this
+moment is still going on, is something of which I do not believe the
+general public has the slightest conception."
+
+For the general public has, indeed, but vague ideas of what is happening
+day by day and week by week in the great shipyards of the Clyde, the Tyne,
+and the Mersey. But there, all the same, the workmen--and workwomen--of
+Great Britain--(for women are taking an ever-increasing share in the
+lighter tasks of naval engineering)--are adding incessantly to the
+sea-power of this country, acquiescing in a Government control, a
+loosening of trade custom, a dilution and simplification of skilled
+labour, which could not have been dreamt of before the war. At the same
+time they are meeting the appeal of Ministers to give up or postpone the
+holidays they have so richly earned, for the sake of their sons and
+brothers in the trenches, with a dogged "aye, aye!" in which there is a
+note of profound understanding, of invincible and personal determination,
+but rarely heard in the early days of the war.
+
+
+III
+
+So much for the Workshops and the Navy. Now before I turn to the New
+Armies and the Somme offensive, let us look for a moment at the present
+facts of British War Finance. By April last, the date of my sixth Letter,
+we had raised 2,380 millions sterling, for the purposes of the war; we had
+lent 500 millions to our Allies, and we were spending about 5 millions a
+day on the war. According to a statement recently made by the Chancellor
+of the Exchequer (August 10), by March next our debt will have risen to
+3,440 millions sterling, 1,060 millions more than it stood at in March
+last; our advances to our Allies will have increased to 800 millions,
+while our daily war expenditure remains about the same.
+
+Mr. McKenna's tone in announcing these figures was extraordinarily
+cheerful. "We have every reason," he said, amid the applause of the House
+of Commons--"to be proud of the manner in which British credit has stood
+the strain." The truth is that by March next, at the present rate of
+expenditure, our total indebtedness (deducting the advances to our Allies)
+will almost exactly equal "one year's national income," i.e., the
+aggregate of the income of every person in the country. But if a man
+having an income of L5,000 a year, were to owe a total of L5,000, we
+should not consider his position very serious. "We shall collect a
+revenue in one year equal to 20 per cent. of the whole debt (i.e., 522
+millions sterling), and we shall be able to pay, _out of existing
+taxation_, the interest on the debt, and a considerable sinking-fund, and
+shall still have left a large margin _for the reduction of
+taxation_"--words which left a comfortable echo in the ears of the nation.
+Meanwhile British trade--based on British sea-power--has shown
+extraordinary buoyancy, the exports steadily increasing; so that the
+nation, in the final words of the Chancellor, feels "no doubt whatever
+that we shall be able to maintain our credit to the end of the war, _no
+matter how long it may last_."
+
+But do not let it be supposed that this huge revenue is being raised
+without sacrifice, _without effort_. It means--for the present--as I have
+already pointed out, the absorption by the State of five shillings in the
+pound from the income of every citizen, above a moderate minimum, and of a
+lesser but still heavy tax from those below that minimum; it means new
+and increased taxation in many directions; and, as a consequence, heavy
+increases in the cost of living; it means sharply diminished spending for
+large sections of our population, and serious pinching for our
+professional and middle classes.
+
+But the nation, as a whole, makes no lament. We look our taxes in the
+face, and we are beginning to learn how to save. We have our hearts fixed
+on the future; and we have counted the cost.
+
+The money then is no difficulty. Our resisting power, our prosperity even,
+under the blows of war, have been unexpectedly great.
+
+But what are we getting for our money?
+
+In the case of the Navy, the whole later course of the war, no less than
+the Battle of Jutland, has shown what the British Navy means to the cause
+of the Allies. It is as I have said, the root fact in the war; and in the
+end, it will be the determining fact; although, of itself, it cannot
+defeat Germany _as we must defeat her_; at any rate in any reasonable
+time.
+
+Then as to the Army. Take first of all the administrative side. To
+what--in the last four months--has come that wonderful system of
+organisation and supply I tried to sketch in my fourth Letter, largely in
+the words of some of the chief actors in it?
+
+Within the last fortnight, a skilled observer has been reporting to the
+British public his impressions of the "Army behind the Lines" in France,
+as I saw a portion of it last February, in the great British supply bases
+and hospital camps, on the lines of communication, and throughout the
+immense and varied activities covered by the British motor transport.
+
+"The Germans," says this recent eye-witness, "have persisted that, even if
+we could find the men, we could not make the machine, which they have been
+perfecting for forty years and more. But _it is here!_--operating with
+perfect smoothness; a machine, which in its mere mass and intricacy,
+almost staggers the imagination. One cannot speak of the details of the
+system for fear of saying something which should not be told; but it is
+stupendous in its proportion, dealing as it does with the methodical
+handling of the men in their hundreds of thousands, of all their equipment
+and supplies, food, miscellaneous baggage and ammunition, and with the
+endless trains of guns--guns--guns, and shells, by millions upon millions,
+all brought from England, and all here in their place, or moved from place
+to place with the rhythm of clock-work. One cannot convey any idea of it,
+nor grasp it in its entirety; but day by day the immensity of it grows on
+one, and one realises how trivial beside it has been anything that British
+military organisation has had to do in the past. That is the real miracle;
+not the mere millions of men, nor even their bravery, but this huge
+frictionless machine of which they are a part--this thing which Great
+Britain has put together here in the last twenty months."
+
+
+IV
+
+But just as in March my thoughts pressed eagerly forward, from the sight
+allowed me of the machine, to its uses on the battle-front, to that line
+of living and fighting men for which it exists--so now.
+
+Only, since I stood upon the hill near Poperinghe on March 2nd, that line
+of men has been indefinitely strengthened; and the main scene of battle is
+no longer the Ypres salient. Looking southward from the old windmill,
+whose supports sheltered us on that cold spring afternoon, I knew that,
+past Bailleul, and past Neuve Chapelle, I was looking straight toward
+Albert and the Somme, and I knew too that it was there that the British
+were taking over a new portion of the line,--so that we might be of _some_
+increased support--all that was then allowed us by the Allied Command!--to
+that incredible defence of Verdun, which was in all our minds and hearts.
+
+But what I could not know was that in that misty distance was
+hidden--four months away--a future movement, at which no one then guessed,
+outside the higher brains of the Army. The days went on. The tide of
+battle ebbed and flowed round Verdun. The Crown Prince hewed and hacked
+his way, with enormous loss to Germany, to points within three and four
+miles of the coveted town--fortress no longer. But there France stopped
+him--like the beast of prey that has caught its claws in the iron network
+it is trying to batter down, and cannot release them; and there he is
+still. Meanwhile, in June, seven to eight weeks before the expected
+moment, Brusiloff's attack broke loose, and the Austrian front began to
+crumble; just in time to bring the Italians welcome aid in the Trentino.
+
+And still from the Somme to the Yser, the Anglo-French forces waited; and
+still across the Channel poured British soldiers and British guns. In
+industrial England, the Whitsuntide holidays had been given up; and there
+were at any rate some people who knew that there would be no August
+holidays either. Leave and letters had been stopped. But there had been
+apparent signs, wrongly interpreted, before. The great Allied attack on
+the West--was it ready, _at last_?
+
+Then--with the 27th of June, along the whole British battle-front of 90
+miles, there sprang up a violent and continuous bombardment varied by
+incessant raids on the enemy lines. Those who witnessed that bombardment
+can hardly find words in which to describe it. "It was an extraordinary
+and a terrible spectacle," says a correspondent. "Within the dreadful zone
+the woods are leafless, chateau and farm and village, alike, mere heaps of
+ruins." Ah! _ce beau pays de France_--with all its rich and ancient
+civilisation--it is not French hearts alone that bleed for you! But it was
+the voice of deliverance, of vengeance, that was speaking in the guns
+which crashed incessantly day and night, while shells of all calibres
+rained--so many to the second--from every yard of the British front, on
+the German lines. The correspondents with the British Headquarters could
+only speculate with held breath, as to what was happening under that
+ghastly veil of smoke and fire on the horizon, and what our infantry would
+find when the artillery work was done, and the attack was launched.
+
+The 1st of July dawned, a beautiful summer morning, with light mists
+dispersing under the sun. Precisely to the moment, at 7.30 A.M., the
+Allied artillery lifted their guns, creating a dense _barrage_ of fire
+between the German front and its support trenches, while the British and
+French infantry sprang over their parapets and rushed to the attack of the
+German first line; the British on a front of some twenty-five miles, the
+French, on about ten miles, on both sides of the Somme. The English
+journalists, who, watch in hand, saw our men go, "knowing what it was they
+were going to, marvelled for the fiftieth time at the way in which British
+manhood has proved itself, in this most terrible of all wars."
+
+But though it was a grand, it was an anxious moment for those who had
+trained and shaped the New Armies of Britain. How would they bear
+themselves, these hundreds of thousands of British and Imperial
+volunteers, men, some of them, with the shortest possible training
+compatible with efficiency--against the famous troops of Germany--beside
+the veteran, the illustrious army of France?
+
+Four hours after the fighting began, Sir Douglas Haig telegraphed: "Attack
+launched north of River Somme this morning at 7.30 A.M. In conjunction
+with French, British troops have broken into German forward system of
+defences, on front of sixteen miles. Fighting is continuing. French attack
+on our immediate right proceeding equally satisfactorily." Twelve hours
+later, on the same day, when the summer night had fallen on the terrible
+battle-field, the British Commander-in-Chief added:--"Heavy fighting has
+continued all day between the rivers Somme and Ancre. On the right of our
+attack we have captured the German labyrinth of trenches on a front of
+seven miles to a depth of 1,000 yards, and have stormed and occupied the
+strongly fortified villages of Montauban and Mametz. In the centre on a
+front of four miles we have gained many strong points. North of the Ancre
+Valley the battle has been equally violent, and in this area we have been
+unable to retain portions of the ground gained in our first attacks, while
+other portions remain in our possession.... Up to date, 2,000 German
+prisoners have passed through our collecting stations. The large number of
+the enemy dead on the battle-field indicate that the German losses have
+been very severe."
+
+So much for the first day's news. On the following day Fricourt was
+captured; and the prisoners went up to 3,500, together with a quantity of
+war material. Meanwhile the French on the right had done brilliantly,
+capturing five villages, and 6,000 prisoners. The attack was well begun.
+
+And the New Armies?--"Kitchener's Men"? "Whatever we have imagined of our
+New Armies," says an eye-witness of the first day's battle, "they are
+better than we can have ever dared to hope. Nothing has in any case
+stopped them, except being killed." And a neutral who saw the attack on
+Mametz told the same eye-witness that he had seen most of the fighting in
+the world in recent years, and that he "did not believe a more gallant
+feat was ever performed in war." The story of the British advance was
+written "in the dead upon the ground, and in the positions as they stand."
+"Nothing which the Japanese did in the Russian War" was more entirely
+heroic.
+
+But let me carry on the story.
+
+On Tuesday, July 11th, Sir Douglas Haig reported: "After ten days and
+nights of continuous fighting our troops have completed the methodical
+capture of the whole of the enemy's first system of defence on a front of
+14,000 yards.
+
+"This system of defence consisted of numerous and continuous lines of
+foretrenches, support trenches and reserve trenches, extending to various
+depths of from 2,000 to 4,000 yards, and included five strongly fortified
+villages, numerous heavily wired and intrenched woods, and a large number
+of immensely strong redoubts."
+
+The villages captured were Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban, La Boiselle, and
+Contalmaison--the latter captured on July 10th, after particularly fierce
+fighting. Every observer dwells on "the immense strength of the German
+defences." "All the little villages and woods, each eminence and hollow,
+have been converted into a fortress as formidable as the character of the
+ground makes possible." The German has omitted nothing "that could protect
+him against such a day as this."
+
+Yet steadily, methodically, with many a pause for consolidation of the
+ground gained, and for the bringing up of the heavy guns, the British
+advance goes forward--toward Bapaume and Lille; while the French press
+brilliantly on toward Peronne--both movements aimed at the vital German
+communications through France and Belgium. Every step of ground, as the
+Allies gain it, "is wrecked with mines, torn with shell, and watered with
+the blood of brave men." The wood-fighting, amid the stripped and gaunt
+trunks rising from labyrinths of wire, is specially terrible; and below
+the ground everywhere are the deep pits and dugouts, which have not only
+sheltered the enemy from our fire, but concealed the machine-guns, which
+often when our men have passed over, emerge and take them in the rear. The
+German machine-guns seem to be endless; they are skilfully concealed, and
+worked with the utmost ability and courage.
+
+But nothing daunts the troops attacking day and night, in the name of
+patriotism, of liberty, of civilisation. Men from Yorkshire and
+Lancashire, from Northumberland, Westmoreland and Cumberland, the heart of
+England's sturdy north; men from Sussex and Kent, from Somerset and Devon;
+the Scotch regiments; the Ulster Division, once the Ulster Volunteers;
+the men of Munster and Connaught; the town-lads of Manchester; the youths
+of Cockney London:--all their names are in the great story. "There were no
+stragglers--none!" says an officer, describing in a kind of wonder one of
+the fierce wood-attacks. And these are not the seasoned troops of a
+Continental Army. They belong to regiments and corps which did not exist,
+except in name, eighteen months ago; they are units from the four-million
+army that Great Britain raised for this struggle, before she passed her
+Military Service Law. The "Old Army," the Expeditionary Force, which the
+nation owed to the organising genius of Lord Haldane and his General
+Staff, has passed away, passed into history, with the retreat from Mons,
+the first victory of Ypres, the saving of the Channel ports; but its
+spirit remains, and its traditions are firmly planted in the new
+attackers. I think of the men I saw in March, during that long and weary
+wait; of the desire--and the patience--in their eyes.
+
+And of patience they and the nations behind them will still have ample
+need. Since surprise on the Somme front was no longer possible, the great
+advance has gone surely indeed, but more slowly. On _July 14_, after delay
+caused by extraordinarily heavy rains, _the German second line was
+breached_, and their trenches carried, on a front of four miles and held
+against counter attacks. Longueval, the wood of Bazentin-le-Grand, and the
+village, Bazentin-le-Petit, were attacked and captured with an _elan_ that
+nothing could resist. "The enemy losses in guns," said the British
+Headquarters, "are now over 100. We have not lost one." On _July 17_,
+Ovillers was cleared, Waterlot Farm taken, and 1,500 more yards of the
+German line. The British had by now taken 11,000 prisoners, to a somewhat
+larger number taken by the French, 17 heavy guns, 37 field-guns, 30 trench
+howitzers, and 66 machine-guns. On Saturday night, _July 22-23_, the
+greater part of Pozieres, on the high ground toward Bapaume, was taken.
+"Shortly after midnight," wrote the official correspondent at
+Headquarters with the Australian Imperial Forces in France, "on the 23rd,
+by a splendid night attack, the Australians took the greater portion of
+Pozieres." The previous bombardment had been magnificent. "I had never
+before seen such a spectacle. A large sector of the horizon was lit up not
+by single flashes, but by a continuous band of quivering light." And under
+the protection of the guns, the Anzacs swept forward, passing over
+trenches, so entirely obliterated by shell-fire that they were often not
+recognised as trenches at all, till they were in the heart of the village.
+Then for two days they fought from house to house, and trench to trench;
+till on July 27th came the news--"The whole of the village of Pozieres is
+now in our hands." And the _Times_ correspondent writes "our establishment
+at Pozieres will probably be regarded historically as closing the second
+phase of the battle of the Somme."
+
+Since then (I write on August 16) three weeks have passed. The German
+Third Line has been entered at the Bois de Foureaux, the whole of Delville
+Wood has been carried; and in the combined advance of July 30th, the
+French swept on to Maurepas on the north of the Somme, and are closely
+threatening both Combles and Peronne, while we are attacking Thiepval on
+the left of our line and Guillemont on the right, and pushing forward,
+north of Pozieres, toward Bapaume. The whole of the great advance has been
+_a thrust up-hill_ from the valley floors of the Ancre and the Somme
+toward a low ridge running roughly east and west and commanding an
+important stretch of country and vital communications beyond. "It has in
+just four weeks of effort," writes Mr. Belloc--"accounted for some thirty
+thousand unwounded or slightly wounded prisoners; for much more than 100
+guns; for a belt of territory over five miles in its extreme breadth,
+and--what is much more important than any of these numerical and local
+calculations--it has proved itself capable of _continuous effort against
+all the concentration which the enemy has been able to bring against it._"
+
+But it has done yet more than this. It has welded the French and English
+Alliance--the wills and minds of the two nations--more closely than ever
+before; and it has tested the British war-machine--the new Armies and the
+new arms--as they have never yet been tested in this war. The result has
+set the heart of England aflame; even while we ponder those long, long
+casualty lists which represent the bitter price that British fathers and
+mothers, British wives and daughters have paid, and must still pay, for
+the only victory which will set up once again the reign of law and
+humanity in Europe. What the future has in store we cannot see yet in
+detail; but the inevitable end is clear at last. The man-power of Germany
+is failing, and with it the insolent confidence of her military caste; the
+man-power of the Allies, and the gun-power of the Allies, are rising
+steadily. Russia is well launched on her return way to Warsaw, to Cracow,
+to East Prussia. Italy, after the fall of Gorizia, is on the march for
+Trieste. The Turks are fleeing across the desert of Sinai; and the Allies
+at Salonika are taking the first steps toward Sofia.
+
+But it is in the "holy spirit of man" itself that the secret of the future
+lies. On the Somme battle-fields, thousands and thousands of young lives
+have been again laid down, that England--that France--may live. Here is a
+letter, written the day before his death in action, on July 1st, the
+opening day of the offensive, by a young English Officer.[C] One must read
+it, if one can, dry-eyed. Not tears, but a steeled will, a purer heart,
+are what it asks of those for whom the writer died:--
+
+     "I am writing this letter to you just before going into
+     action to-morrow morning about dawn.
+
+     "I am about to take part in the biggest battle that has yet
+     been fought in France, and one which ought to help to end
+     the war very quickly.
+
+     "I never felt more confident or cheerful in my life before,
+     and would not miss the attack for anything on earth. The men
+     are in splendid form, and every officer and man is more
+     happy and cheerful than I have ever seen them.
+
+     "I have just been playing a rag game of football in which
+     the umpire had a revolver and a whistle.
+
+     "My idea in writing this letter is in case I am one of the
+     'costs,' and get killed. I do not expect to be; but such
+     things have happened, and are always possible.
+
+     "It is impossible to fear death out here, when one is no
+     longer an individual, but a member of a regiment and of an
+     army. To be killed means nothing to me, and it is only you
+     who suffer for it; you really pay the cost.
+
+     "I have been looking at the stars, and thinking what an
+     immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing
+     the loss of, say, forty years of life is compared with them!
+     It seems scarcely worth talking about. Well, good-bye, you
+     darlings. Try not to worry about it, and remember that we
+     shall meet again really quite soon.
+
+     "This letter is going to be posted _if_...."
+
+The letter was posted. But its message of Death is also a message of
+Victory.
+
+MARY A. WARD.
+
+[C] Published in the _Times_.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The War on All Fronts: England's Effort
+by Mrs. Humphry Ward
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