The Last Million: How They Invaded France—and England - 1

By Ian Hay

THE LAST MILLION. How They Invaded France—and England.

ALL IN IT: K I CARRIES ON.

PIP: A ROMANCE OF YOUTH.

GETTING TOGETHER.

THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND.

SCALLY: THE STORY OF A PERFECT GENTLEMAN. With frontispiece.

A KNIGHT ON WHEELS.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. Illustrated by Charles E. Brock.

A SAFETY MATCH. With frontispiece.

A MAN’S MAN. With frontispiece.

THE RIGHT STUFF. With frontispiece.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Boston and New York

THE LAST MILLION

The Last Million

How They Invaded France—and England

BY
IAN HAY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1919

TO
THAT BORN FIGHTER
AND
MODERN CRUSADER
THE AMERICAN DOUGHBOY

	A Word to the Dedicatee	[ix]
I.	The Argonauts	[1]
II.	Ship’s Company	[10]
III.	The Lower Deck	[21]
IV.	The Danger Zone	[29]
V.	Terra Incognita	[36]
VI.	Social Customs of the Islands	[46]
VII.	Three Musketeers in London	[58]
VIII.	The Promised Land	[78]
IX.	The Exiles	[91]
X.	S.O.S. to Dillpickle	[104]
XI.	The Line	[125]
XII.	Chasing Monotony	[138]
XIII.	An Excursion and an Alarum	[148]
XIV.	The Forest of the Argonne	[164]
XV.	The Eleventh Hour	[174]
XVI.	Gallia Victrix	[193]

A WORD TO THE DEDICATEE

[Note: The following is the substance of a little “Welcome” which the author was requested to write to American soldiers and sailors visiting England for the first time during the fateful days of 1918. It was distributed upon the transports and in various American centres in England. Its purpose is to set forth some of our national peculiarities—and incidentally the author’s Confession of Faith. It has no bearing upon the rest of the story, and may be skipped by the reader without compunction.]

I. A Word of Explanation

I write this welcome to you American soldiers and sailors because I know America personally and therefore I know what the word “welcome” means. And I see right away from the start that it is going to be a difficult proposition for us over here to compete with America in that particular industry. However, we mean to try, and we hope to succeed. Anyway, we shall not fail from lack of good-will.

Having bid you welcome to our shores, I am next going to ask you to remember just one thing.

We are very, very short-handed at present. During the past four years the people of the British Isles have contributed to our common cause more than six million soldiers and sailors. On a basis of population, the purely British contribution to the forces of the British Empire should have been seventy-six per cent. The actual contribution has been eighty-four per cent; and when we come to casualties, not eighty-four but eighty-six per cent of the total have been borne by those two little islands, Great Britain and Ireland, which form the cradle of our race. You can, therefore, imagine the strain upon our man-power. Every man up to the age of fifty is now liable to be drafted. The rest of our male population—roughly five millions—are engaged night and day in such occupations as shipbuilding, coal-mining, munition-making, and making two blades of corn grow where one grew before. They are assisted in every department, even in the war zone, by hundreds and thousands of devoted women.

So we ask you to remember that the England which you see is not England as she was, and as she hopes to be again. You see England in overalls; all her pretty clothes are put away for the duration. Some day we hope once again to travel in trains where there is room to sit down; in motor omnibuses and trolley cars for which you have not to wait in line. We hope again to see our streets brightly lit, our houses freshly painted, flower boxes glowing in every window, and fountains playing in Trafalgar Square. We hope to see the city once again crowded with traffic as thick as that on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, and the uncanny silence of our present-day streets banished by the cheerful turmoil of automobiles and taxis. And above all we hope to see the air-raid shelters gone, and the hundreds of crippled men in hospital blue no longer visible in our streets, and the long lines of motor ambulances, which assemble every evening outside the stations to meet the hospital trains, swept away forever.

That is the old London—London as we would have you see it—London as we hope you will see it when you come back to us as holiday visitors. Meanwhile, we know you will make allowances for us.

Also, you may not find us very hilarious. In some ways we are strangely cheerful. For instance, you will see little mourning worn in public. That is because, if black were worn by all those who were entitled to wear it, you would see little else. Again, you will find our theatres packed night after night by a noisy, cheerful throng. But these are not idle people, nor are they the same people all the time. They are almost entirely hard-worked folks enjoying a few days’ vacation. The majority of them are soldiers on leave from the Front. Few of them will be here next week; some of them will never see a play again. The play goes on and helps the audience to forget for a while, but it is a different audience every time.

And you will hear little talk about the War. We prefer to talk of almost anything else. Probably you will understand why. There is hardly a house in this country which has not by this time made a personal contribution to our cause. In each of these houses one of two trials is being endured—bereavement, the lesser evil, or suspense, the greater. We cannot, therefore, talk lightly of the War, and being determined not to talk anxiously about it, we compromise—we do not talk about it at all.

We want you to know this. To know is to understand.

II. First Impressions

Meanwhile, let us ask for your impressions of our country. It is only fair that we should be allowed to do this, for you know what happens to visitors in the United States when the reporters get their hooks into them.

So far as I have been able to gather, your impressions amount to something like this:

There is no ice-water, no ice-cream, no soda-fountains, no pie. It is hard to get the old familiar eats in our restaurants.

Our cities are planned in such a way that it is impossible to get to any place without a map and compass.

Our traffic all keeps to the wrong side of the street.

Our public buildings are too low.

There are hardly any street-car lines in London.

Our railroad cars are like boxes, and our locomotives are the smallest things on earth.

Our weather is composed of samples.

Our coinage system is a practical joke.

Nobody, whether in street, train or tube, ever enters in conversation with you. If by any chance they do, they grouch all the time about the Government and the general management of the country.

Let us take the eats and drinks first. There is no ice-water. I admit it. I am sorry, but there it is. There never was much, but now that ammonia is mostly commandeered for munition work, there is less than ever. As a nation we do not miss it. In this country our difficulty is not to get cool, but to keep warm. Besides, it is possible that our moist climate, and the absence of steam-heat in our houses, saves us from that parched feeling which I have so often experienced in the United States. Anyway, that familiar figure of American domestic life, the iceman, is unknown to us. We drink our water at ordinary temperature—what you would call tepid—and we keep our meat in a stone cellar instead of the ice chest. As for ice-cream and soda-fountains, we have never given ourselves over to them very much. As a nation, we are hot-food eaters—that is, when we can get anything to eat! We are living on strict war rations here, just as you are beginning to do in the States. So you must forgive our apparent want of hospitality.

III. The Land We live in

Next, our cities. After your own straight, wide, methodically-numbered streets and avenues, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the rest must seem like a Chinese puzzle. I can only say in excuse that they have been there a very long time, and the people who started in to build them did not foresee that they would ever extend more than a few blocks. If Julius Cæsar had known that London was ultimately going to cover an area of seven hundred square miles, and house a population of seven and a half millions, I dare say he would have made a more methodical beginning. But Julius Cæsar never visited America, and the science of town-planning was unknown to him.

The narrow, winding streets of London are not suited to trolley-car lines. This fact has given us the unique London motor ’bus, driven with incredible skill, and gay with advertisements. There are not so many of these ’buses to-day as there might be, and such as there are are desperately full. But—c’est la guerre! Hundreds of our motor ’buses are over in France now. You will meet them when you get there, doing their bit—hurrying reënforcements to some hard-pressed point, or running from the back areas to the railhead, conveying happy, muddy Tommies home on leave.

And while we are discussing London, let me recommend you to make a point of getting acquainted with the London policeman. He is a truly great man. Watch him directing the traffic down in the City, or where Wellington Street, on its way to Waterloo Bridge, crosses the Strand. He has no semaphore, no whistle; but simply extends an arm, or turns his back, and the traffic swings to right or left, or stops altogether. Foreign cities, even New York, are not ashamed to send their police to London to pick up hints on traffic control from the London “Bobby.” Watch him handle an unruly crowd. He is unarmed, and though he carries a club, you seldom see it. If you get lost, ask him to direct you, for he carries a map of London inside his head. He is everybody’s friend. By the way, if he wears a helmet he is one of the regular force. A flat cap is a sign of a “Special”—that is, a business man who is giving his spare time, by day or night, to take the place of those policemen who have joined the Colours. But, “Regular” or “Special,” he is there to help you.

There are no skyscrapers in England. The fact is, London is no place for skyscrapers. It was New York which set the fashion. That was because Manhattan Island, with the Hudson on one side and the East River on the other, is physically incapable of expansion, and so New York, being unable to spread out, shot upwards. Moreover, New York is built on solid rock—you ask the Subway contractors about that!—while the original London was built on a marsh, and the marsh is there still. So it will not support structures like the Woolworth Building.

Most of our national highways start from London. There is one, a Roman road, called Watling Street, which starts from the Marble Arch and runs almost as straight as a rod from London to Chester, nearly two hundred miles; and it never changes its name after the first few miles, which are called the Edgware Road. Another, the Great North Road, runs from London to Edinburgh, and is four hundred miles long. One hundred years ago the mail coaches thundered along that road night and day, and highwaymen had their own particular pitches where no other highwaymen dreamed of butting in. Five years ago that road was a running river of touring automobiles. Now, strings of grey military motor lorries rumble up and down its entire length. Perhaps you will ride on some of them.

London, easy-going London, has her short cuts, too. That is where she differs from the methodical, rectangular, convenient cities of the United States. She is full of cunning by-ways, and every street has a character of its own. The Strand was called “The Strand” a thousand years ago, because it was a strand—a strip of beach which ran alongside the Thames at the foot of a cliff (which has long since been smoothed and sloped out of existence) and was submerged each high tide. The English fought a great battle with Danish pirates near by, and to-day the dead Danes sleep their last sleep in St. Clement Danes’ Church, right in the middle of the Strand.

Charing Cross, again, is the last of a great chain of such Crosses, stretching from London to Scotland, each a day’s march from the next. They were set up at the end of the thirteenth century by King Edward the First of England, to commemorate the last journey of his beloved Queen—his Chère Reine—who died while accompanying him upon a campaign against the Scots. At each stopping-place on his homeward journey the King erected one of these crosses to mark the spot where the Queen’s body lay that night. Many have perished, but you can still trace some of them along the Great North Road—Neville’s Cross, Waltham Cross, and finally Chère Reine Cross, or Charing Cross. That strikes the imagination. So do Aldgate, Aldersgate, Moorgate, London Wall, and other streets which go back to the days when London really was a walled city.

But a walk around London repays itself. There is Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment—the veteran among all monuments of the world, except perhaps its sister in Central Park, New York. It was in existence fifteen hundred years before Christ, in the city of Heliopolis. It looked down upon the Palace and Court of Queen Cleopatra in Alexandria. After that it lay prostrate in the sands of the Egyptian desert for another fifteen hundred years. It was finally presented to the British Government by the Khedive of Egypt. It was towed to England on a raft, and was nearly lost during a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Recently, the Zeppelins have tried dropping bombs on it, as you can see for yourself. But a mere bomb or two is nothing to a veteran with a constitution like that.

In Warwickshire, around Stratford and the Forest of Arden, you will find yourself in Shakespeare’s country. At Gerrard’s Cross William Penn is buried. In the old days a watch was kept on the grave, as certain patriotic Americans considered that the proper place for William Penn to be buried was Pennsylvania, and tried to give practical effect to this pious opinion.

Scotland, if you happen to find yourself there, is entirely different from England. England is flat or undulating, and except in the manufacturing districts, is given up mainly to cornfields and pasture land. Scotland, especially in the north, is cut up into hills and glens. Not such hills as you possess in Colorado, or Nevada, or the Northwest. There is no Pike’s Peak, no Shasta, no Rainier. The highest mountain in the British Isles—Ben Nevis—is only a little over four thousand feet high, but naturally Scotsmen think a good deal of it.

Scotland is a great battle-ground. The Scot has always been fighting some one. There was perpetual warfare upon the border from the earliest days. The Romans, who were business men, built a wall right across England from Newcastle to Carlisle, to keep the Scots out. They failed, as you will find out for yourself, when you study a list of British Cabinet Ministers; but you can see parts of the wall still. Later, there were everlasting border raids, from one side or the other, maintained as a tradition by the great families of that region—the Percys, the Douglases, the Maxwells, the Elliotts. Besides this, various English kings tried to conquer Scotland. Sometimes one side would win a battle, sometimes the other, but no victory was lasting. At last, in 1707, the Act of Union was passed, and Scotland and England came under one central Government. Unfortunately, the Highlanders of the north were not consulted in the arrangement, and they put up two rebellions of their own. Prince Charles Edward, the last of the Stuarts, actually invaded England, and got as far as Derby. He was defeated, but the rebellion smouldered on for years among the Highland glens. The chain of forts along the Caledonian Canal to-day—Fort George, Fort Augustus, Fort William, now peaceful holiday resorts—is a reminder of that time. But those days are all over now, and for nearly two centuries English and Scottish soldiers have fought side by side all over the world. Ireland was united to England and Scotland by a similar Act of Union in 1800. This event, as you may possibly have heard, has provided a fruitful topic of conversation ever since.

IV. Our Climate

Then there is our weather. An Englishman never knows on going to work in the morning whether to take a palm-leaf hat, or a fur overcoat, or a diving-suit. The trouble is that our weather arrives too suddenly. We are an island in the middle of the ocean, and most of our weather comes in from the Atlantic, where there is no one to watch it. Our weather prophets simply have to take a chance. That is all. With you it is different. Your weather travels across a continent three thousand miles wide. You can see it coming, and telegraph to the next State what to expect.

So, if you are spending a day’s leave in London, and walk out of blazing sunshine at one end of the street into a thunderstorm at the other—well, have a heart, and put it down to the War. We will try to fix things for you when peace comes. But we cannot promise. Anyway, in peace-time we can always wear rubbers.

That is all about British weather.

V. Our Transportation

Then there are our railroads. These, like our boxed-in passenger coaches and little four-wheel freight cars, tickle you to death, I know. The compartment system is a national symptom. An Englishman loves one thing above all others, and that is to get a railway compartment to himself. Nobody knows why, but he does. Probably the craving arises from his inability to converse easily with strangers. That inability is passing away. I shall speak of it later. But the three-class system is a relic of antiquity. Fifty years ago there were three grades of comfort in British railroad travelling. You could have your family horse-coach lashed upon an open railroad truck and attached to the train. You thus travelled in your own carriage, or chaise. I do not know what happened to the horses. This was the usual custom of the grand folk of those days. Or you could travel by ordinary railway coaches, without cushions or windows. Or you could pack yourself into an open freight truck, much as soldiers on the Western Front are packed to-day, and so reach your destination with other merchandise.

That has all gone now. Practically the only difference between first, second, and third class in these days is a difference of price—which means elbow-room. (Second class, by the way, has almost entirely died out.) The three classes are almost equal in comfort, especially just now, when the War has abolished nearly all dining-cars and sleepers. Our sleeping-car system never amounted to much, anyway. The journeys were too short to make it necessary for such as were travelling by night (and they were comparatively few) to go to bed. The lordly Pullman car is almost unknown here.

I said just now that we used to be proud of our railroads in time of peace. We are doubly proud of them to-day in the stress of War. They passed automatically into Government hands the day the War broke out, and they have given our whole country a lesson in the art of carrying on. Thousands of their employees are away in the trenches; hundreds of their locomotives and freight cars are in France or Mesopotamia or Palestine, enlisted for the duration. You will notice them when you get over, marked R.O.D. (Railway Operating Department). They have all come from England. Miles of tracks here have been torn up and conveyed bodily overseas. There is little labour available to execute repairs, and none to build new stock. There is a shortage of coal, a shortage of oil, and no paint. Passenger services have been cut down by a half, and fares raised fifty per cent; yet the traffic is still enormous, and the strain on the depleted staffs is immense. But they manage somehow. Men who have long earned their retirement remain in service, while boys and women do the rest. Carry on!

VI. Our Gopher Runs

Then comes our substitute for your Subway, and street-car system generally. In London you will notice that there are two kinds of Subway—the so-called Underground, or shallow transit, and the deep Tubes. The system is so complicated, owing to the shape of London, that it has been found impossible to have a one-price ticket such as prevails everywhere in the United States.

The Underground is the oldest underground railroad in the world. You probably gathered that for yourself the first time you saw it. Twenty-five years ago its trains were drawn by ordinary steam locomotives, which were supposed to consume their own smoke. Perhaps they did, but it must have leaked out again somewhere.

The old Underground Railway of London got nearer to the ordinary conception of hell than anything yet invented. Stations and trains were lit by feeble gas or oil lamps; all glass was covered over with a film of soot, and the brightest illumination was provided by the glow of the locomotive furnaces as the train rumbled asthmatically into a station. The atmosphere was a mixture of soot, smoke, sulphur, and poison gas. The trains were on the box-compartment system, and small compartments at that. The train usually waited two or three minutes in each station (instead of ten seconds as now), and it required a full hour to travel from King’s Cross to Charing Cross. It was impossible to see to read a newspaper, so that passengers, to pass the time, used to rob, assault, and occasionally murder one another. With the coming of electric traction the old Underground was cleaned up and refurnished. At the same time, the Tubes were constructed away down in the London clay, where there could be no interference from oozy gravel, or gas mains, or sewers.

The chief trouble about the Tubes is that no one knows where they are. Of course, every one knows where the stations are. For instance, every Londoner knows where Piccadilly Circus Station is—the surface station. But where is the actual subterranean station? Or rather, where are the two stations, because at this point two roads cross, and each has its own subterranean station. Ah! They certainly are not where simple folk, like you and me, would expect them to be—under Piccadilly Circus. If they were, you would find them at the foot of the elevator. But that would be too easy. It would make Londoners fat and lazy, leading the sedentary life they do, to step straight into the train. So they have to walk about a mile. Where to, no one knows. But there is a school of philosophers which believes that a good many of the Tube stations have no subterranean stations at all. One subterranean is shared jointly by several surface stations. A short circular train ride is provided, just to furnish the necessary illusion, and the passenger, having really walked to his destination, steps out of the train well satisfied, and goes up the right elevator under the impression that he has been carried there. That is our Tube system as far as modern research has been able to fathom it. Of course, an Englishman could never have thought out such a good practical joke as these Tubes. The entire system was projected and constructed by an American.

VII. Our National Joke

But we have a sense of humour all the same. Our money system, like our joint system of weights and measures, is, as you very properly observe, a practical joke. It dates back to the time when an Englishman bought his Sunday dinner with a pound of rock. It is bound to go soon, and make way for the decimal system, just as inches and feet and yards are already making way in this country for metres and centimetres. Meanwhile we have got to put up with it.

The main points for an American to remember are—firstly, that a shilling over here, despite war scarcity, will still buy rather more than a quarter will buy in New York; and secondly, the necessity of keeping clearly in mind the difference between a half-crown and a two-shilling piece. Even taxi-drivers do not always know the difference. If you give them half a crown they will frequently hand you change for a two-shilling piece.

VIII. Ourselves

Lastly, ourselves. This chapter is going to be the most difficult.

Last year I met an American soldier in London. He was one of the first who had come over. I asked his impressions. He said:

“I have been in London three days, and not a soul has spoken to me.”

And therein was summed up the fundamental difference between our two nations. In the United States people like to see one another and talk to one another, and meet fresh people. If a stranger comes to town, reporters interview him as he steps off the train. Americans prefer when travelling to do so in open cars. At home their living-room doors are usually left open. Every room stands open to every other. In their clubs and hotels there are few private rooms. In their business houses the head of the firm, the staff, and the clerks, frequently work together in one great hall. If any partitions exist they are only table-high or they are made of glass. Plenty of light, plenty of air, plenty of publicity. That is America.

Now over here, somehow, we are different. I said before that an Englishman’s ambition in life was to get a compartment to himself. That principle, for good or ill prevails through all our habits. On the railroad we travel in separate boxes. At home all our rooms have doors, and we keep them shut. (This by the way, is chiefly in order to get warm, for there is no central heating.) In most of our clubs there are rooms where no one is allowed to speak. They are crowded with Englishmen. Only a few years ago one never thought of dining in a restaurant except when travelling. If he did, he always asked for a private room. If you dine at Simpson’s in the Strand to-day you will still see a relic of the custom in the curious boxed-in compartments which enclose some of the tables. In our business houses the head of the department is concealed in one hutch, the partners in another. The chief clerk has one too. The other clerks may have to work in one room; but each clerk cherishes just one ambition, and that is to rise high enough in the business to secure honourable confinement in a hutch of his own.

For the same reason every Englishman keeps a fence round his garden—be it castle or cottage garden—just to show that it is his garden and no one else’s. And if you look into any old English parish church you will see the same thing. Every family has its own pew; the humblest pew has a door, and when the family gets inside the pew it shuts the door. Some of the pews have curtains around them as well. The occupant can see the minister, and the minister can see him. The rest of the congregation are as invisible to him as he is to them. No one in the congregation resents this at all. They are rather proud of the custom. It represents to them only what is right and proper, the principle of a compartment to one’s self.

And so a nation which has lived for centuries upon this plan is not a nation which enters readily or easily into conversation outside its own particular compartment. But how was I to explain or excuse such a state of mind to my American soldier friend? Let me say right here that this constrained behaviour does not arise from churlishness, or want of good-will. Even the Germans admit that. A German philosopher once said, with considerable truth for a German: “The Englishman is a cold friend, but a good neighbour. He may shut himself up with his property, but he will never dream of invading yours.” This statement is only partially correct. The Englishman is one of the warmest-hearted and most hospitable of men. But he is a bad starter—a bad starter in War, Love, Business, and, above all, Conversation. Once get him started, and he refuses to leave off. But you must start him first. And you are doing it.

The Englishman’s passion for his own compartment goes back a very, very long way, right into the centuries. It goes back to the days when we lived in tribes and every tribe kept to itself, and an Englishman’s house was his castle—especially if the house were a one-room mud hut. That makes us what we are to this day. Also we are cooped up in a small island, and most of us have never left it. No Englishman ever speaks to another Englishman if he can help it. This is partly the old tribal instinct, partly laziness, and partly fear of a rebuff. Also, it may involve explanations, and an Englishman would rather be scalped than explain. So he saves trouble all round by burying himself in a newspaper and saying nothing.

That by the way. But the main object of this little book is to make you welcome to England, whoever you may be, and to show you why it is that in our inarticulate and undemonstrative English way, we love our small country just as you love your big continent.

“This fortress built by Nature by herself

Against infection and the hand of war;

This happy breed of men, this little world;

This precious stone set in a silver sea;

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

That is how William Shakespeare felt about this “right little tight little island” three hundred years ago, in days when our nation was fighting for its life, neither for the first nor for the last time, against overwhelmingly superior forces. And we hope that when you go back safe and victorious, as we pray God you may, to your own beautiful land, you will carry with you a little of that same feeling, and a real understanding of the passionate sentiment that lies beneath it.

So we bid you welcome. And we ask you, our honoured guests, to do all you can to get into close touch with the habits and point of view of our country, both here and upon that battle-front whither you are bound, to play your own splendid part in the Great Game.

We are never going back to the old days when Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Canadians, Australians, and Americans sat each in their own compartment, and thanked God that they had it to themselves. We English-speaking races have got together over this War. We have lost terribly, but we are gaining much. We are rubbing shoulders in London, and Paris, and countless other places, and we are rubbing the knobs and the angles off one another, good and plenty. It is not always easy or comfortable to have knobs rubbed off you, and the process sometimes involves a little friction; but we must be prepared for that.

For instance, we all speak English, but we all pronounce it in different ways. Well, why not? Hitherto we have been inclined to assume that the other man was talking like that to annoy us. That is one of the knobs that has to be rubbed off—intolerance of trivial matters of taste and habit. To-day, under the most searching test in the world—the test of comradeship in the face of battle and sudden death—we are acquiring a profound respect for one another. When we have acquired just one other thing—tolerance for one another’s point of view—we shall have laid the foundation of an understanding which is going to hold us all up through some difficult times hereafter. Getting this old world back on to a peace basis, after the Kaiser has been put where he belongs, is going to call for all our courage, sincerity, and loyalty to our common ideals. When that period of Reconstruction comes—and it may come sooner than we think—the first plank in its platform must be a solid understanding between the two English-speaking races. They, at least, must speak with one voice, or the whole fabric will fall to the ground.

Our two nations can never hope entirely to understand one another. Neither can they expect always to see eye to eye. Their national personalities are too robust. But to-day their sons are learning to know the worst of one another and the best of one another and the invincible humanity of one another. With that knowledge will come—if we have the will—tolerance of one another’s point of view. We must get that. There are thousands of reasons why, but to you, soldiers and sailors, I am only going to mention one.

When the Victory comes, we shall enjoy its rewards. But all the while we shall be conscious that we have not won these entirely by ourselves. We shall in great measure have inherited them from men who have not lived to enjoy the fruits of their own sacrifice—men whom we have left behind, in France, Belgium, and Italy; in Asia and Africa; whose bones cover the ocean floor—men who gave everything that the Cause might live. To these we shall desire to raise a lasting memorial. We can best do that by building up a fabric of understanding on the foundation which they laid, so truly, with their own lives. If we do that—and only if we do that—our Dead can sleep in peace; for they will know that what they died for was worth while, and above all that we, their heritors, have kept faith with them—

“… Famous men

From whose bays we borrow—

They that put aside To-day,

All the joys of their To-day,

And with toil of their To-day

Bought for us To-morrow.”

Ian Hay

London, July, 1918

CONTENTS