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 levée en masse of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassée, 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 Brontë, 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.