"The bloodthirsty German devils!" said Blaine, the erstwhile apostle of internationalism and the socialistic brotherhood of man. "By God, the Admiralty and the War Office ought to swing for this! Here are we taxed out of house and home to support their wretched armies and navies, and German soldiers marching on London, they say, with never a sign of a hand raised to oppose 'em—damn them! Nice time you choose to talk of leaving. By God, Mordan, you may be leaving from against a wall with a bullet through your head, next thing you know. These German devils don't wear kid gloves, I fancy. They're not like our tin-pot army. Army!—we haven't got one—lot of gold-laced puppets!"
That was how Clement Blaine was moved by the news. Last week: "Bloated armaments," "huge battalions of idle men eating the heart out of the nation through its revenues." This week, we had no army, and because of it the Admiralty and the War Office ought to "swing." In Blaine's ravings I had my foretaste of public opinion on the crisis.
On the previous day I had listened to a prominent Member of Parliament urging that our children should be preserved from the contamination of contact with those who taught the practice of the "hellish art" of shooting.
The leading daily papers of this Monday morning admitted the central fact that England had been invaded during Saturday night, and even allowed readers to assume that portions of the eastern counties were then occupied by "foreign" troops. But they used the word "raid" in place of "invasion," and generally qualified it with such a word as "futile." The general tone was that a Power with whom we had believed ourselves to be upon friendly terms had been guilty of rash and provocative action toward us, which it would speedily be made to regret. It was an insult, which would be promptly avenged; full atonement for which would be demanded and obtained at once. It was even suggested that some tragic misunderstanding would be found to lie at the root of the whole business; and in any case, things were to be set right without delay. One journal, the Standard, did go so far as to say that the British public was likely to be forced now into learning at great cost a lesson which had been offered daily as a free gift since the opening of the century, and as steadily repudiated or ignored.
"Two things it should teach England," said this journal; "never to invite insult and contempt by a repetition of Sunday's Disarmament Demonstration or enunciation of its fallacious and dangerous teaching; and the necessity for paying instant heed to the warnings of the advocates of universal military training for purposes of home defence."
But at that time the nicknames of the "The Imperialist Banner" and "The Patriotic Pulpit," applied by various writers and others to this great newspaper, were scornful names, applied with opprobrious intent; and London was still full of people whose only comment upon this sufficiently badly-needed warning would be: "Oh, of course, the Standard!"
But the policy of reticence, though I have no doubt that it did save London from some terrible scenes of panic, was not to be tenable for many hours. Within half an hour of noon special editions of a halfpenny morning paper, and an evening paper belonging to the same proprietors, were issued simultaneously with a full, sensational, and quite unreserved statement of all the news obtainable from East Anglia. A number of motor-cyclists had been employed in the quest of intelligence, and one item of the news they had to tell was that Colchester had offered resistance to the invaders, and as a result had been shelled and burned to the ground. A number of volunteers and other civilians had been found bearing arms, and had been tried by drum-head court martial and shot within the hour, by order of the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces.
Another sensational item was a copy of a proclamation issued by the German Commander-in-Chief. This proclamation was dated from Ipswich, and I think it struck more terror into the people than any other single item of intelligence published during that eventful day. It was headed with the Imperial German Arms, and announced the establishment of German military jurisdiction in England. It announced that the penalty of immediate death would be inflicted without any exception upon any British subject not wearing and being entitled to wear British military uniform who should be found:
1. Taking arms against the invaders.
2. Misleading German troops.