A German spy who had been captured in Romford and brought to London, said that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in England had publicly announced to his men that the instructions received from their Imperial master were that the pride of the British people must be struck down to the dust; that the first blows must be crushing; that the British people were to be smitten with terror from which recovery should be impossible.
Be this as it may, the sacking of Colchester was a terrible business. A number of citizens had joined the shockingly small body of regulars in a gallant attempt at defence. The attempt was quite hopeless; the German superiority in numbers, discipline, metal, and material being quite overwhelming. But the German commander was greatly angered by the resistance offered, and, as soon as he ascertained that civilians had taken part in this, the town was first shelled and then stormed. It was surrounded by a cordon of cavalry, and—no prisoners were taken.
The town was burned to the ground, though many valuable stores were first removed from it; and those of the inhabitants who had not already fled were literally mown down in their native streets, without parley or quarter—men, women, and children being alike regarded as offenders against the edict forbidding any civilian British subject, upon pain of death, to offer any form of resistance to German troops. I myself spoke to a man in Knightsbridge that evening who had definite news that his nineteen-year-old daughter, a governess in the house of a Colchester doctor, was among those shot down in the streets of the town while endeavouring to make her escape with two children. The handful of British regulars had been shot or cut to pieces, and the barracks and stores taken over by the Germans.
As I left Constance Grey's flat that evening I passed a small baker's shop, before which an angry crowd was engaged in terrifying a small boy in a white apron, who was nervously endeavouring to put up the window shutters. I asked what the trouble was, and was told the baker had refused to sell his half-quartern loaves under sevenpence, or his quartern loaves under a shilling.
"It's agin the law, so it is," shouted an angry woman. "I'm a policeman's wife, an' I know what I'm talking about. I'll have the law of the nasty mean hound, so I will, with his shillin' for a fivepenny loaf, indeed!"
Long before this time, and while Britain still held on to a good proportion of her foreign trade, it had been estimated by statisticians that in the United Kingdom some ten to twelve million persons lived always upon the verge of hunger. But since then the manufacturers of protected countries, notably Germany and the United States, had, as was inevitable in the face of our childish clinging to what we miscalled "free" trade, crowded the British manufacturer out of practically every market in the world, except those of Canada. Those also must of necessity have been lost, but for the forbearing and enduring loyalty of the Canadian people, who, in spite of persistent rebuffs, continued to extend and to increase their fiscal preference for imports from the Mother-country.
But, immense as Canada's growth was even then, no one country could keep the manufacturers of Britain busy; and I believe I am right in saying that at this time the number of those who lived always on the verge of hunger had increased to at least fifteen millions. Cases innumerable there were in which manufacturers themselves had gone to swell the ranks of the unemployed and insufficiently employed; the monstrous legion of those who lived always close to the terrifying spectre of hunger.
If the spirit of Richard Cobden walked the earth at that time, even as his obsessions assuredly still cumbered it, it must have found food for bitter reflection in the hundreds of empty factories, grass-grown courtyards, and broken-windowed warehouses, which a single day's walk would show one in the north of England.
You may be sure I thought of those things as I walked away from that baker's shop in South Kensington. A journalist, even though he be only the assistant of a man like Blaine, is apt to see the conditions of life in his country fairly plainly, because he has a wider vision of them than most men. Into Fleet Street, each day brings an endless stream of "news items," not only from all parts of the world, but from every town and city in the kingdom. And your journalist, though he may have scant leisure for its digestion, absorbs the whole of this mass of intelligence each day in the process of conveying one-tenth part of it, in tabloid form, to the public.
If one assumes for the moment that only twelve million people in Great Britain were living on hunger's extreme edge at that time, the picture I had of the sullen, angry crowd outside the baker's shop remains a sufficiently sinister one. As a matter of fact, I believe that particular baker was a shade premature, or a penny or two excessive, in his advance of prices. But I know that by nightfall you could not have purchased a quartern loaf for elevenpence halfpenny within ten miles of Charing Cross. The Bakers' Society had issued its mandates broadcast. Shop-windows were stoned that night in south and east London; but twenty-four hours later the price of the quartern loaf was 1s. 3d., and a man offering 1s. 2d. would go empty away.