King George V.
Englishmen excuse, rather than blame, the King. They point out, in his extenuation, that George's is a gentle, self-effacing nature little fitted for the soul-stirring era in the midst of which Fate decreed that his reign should fall. They cast no aspersions on his rugged patriotism or even on his kingly zeal. They believe that, according to his lights, he exercises faithfully what he considers to be his prerogatives. They feel, they tell you, that it is not his fault that he remains the only man in the Kingdom who still wears a Prince Albert coat. His is, somehow, not the magnetic influence which, if it were that of Edward VII, would still be condemning Englishmen to cling to that ancient robe. They explain that it is his psychic misfortune, rather than a failing, that nobody thinks it worth while to emulate him by taking the pledge "for the duration of the war" and drinking barley-water. Edward VII's abstemious decree would have blotted the liquor trade out of existence, because in the lap of his example sat militant loyalty. The "old King's" wish was law.
Perhaps--I do not know--George V is wiser than men think. Perhaps he is not being kept in cotton-wool by his Victorian private secretary. Perhaps he is not yielding as supinely as many people imagine to the inflexible mandates of constitutionalism. Perhaps he has his ear closer to the ground than his contemporaries realize, and with it hears the far-off but unmistakable rumbles of the limitlessly democratized Britain which is already emerging from the crucible of war. Perhaps injustice is done to him by those who accuse him of not rising more vigorously to the opportunities of his Empire's hour of destiny. May he not be fitting himself still to sit the throne in that coming day when Britain will perhaps want even a more constitutional ruler than ermine and the crown now rest upon?
CHAPTER XVII
YOUR KING AND COUNTRY WANT YOU
"Luna Park," in Berlin, once had an English manager and an American "publicity agent." In pursuit of his lime-light duties the transatlantic hustler, who had been engaged because he was such, reported to the manager one day that he had accomplished a feat on which he had been plodding for weeks. The owners of a building which commanded the most prominent view in Berlin had finally consented to let "Luna Park" affix a gigantic electric flash-light sign to the roof.
"It will be the greatest thing of the kind ever seen in Germany," exclaimed the enthusiast from the U.S.A. "They'll allow us to have 'Luna Park' in letters twenty feet high across a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot front, and you'll be able to see 'em a mile away!"
He expected his British superior fairly to jump for joy. But this is what he said:
"Quite so. But don't you think that will be a bit conspicuous?"
When I returned to London on September 24, after four short, strenuous weeks in the United States, I found Englishmen dominated seemingly by a genuine fear that the war might become "a bit conspicuous." It was true that stupendous things had happened in the interval. Namur, "the impregnable," had melted before the merciless German 42's like the other Belgian fortresses. Brussels was in the enemy's hands, unscotched, thanks to the intervention of the American Minister, Brand Whitlock, and through it were passing apparently endless streams of gray-clad Germans bound for Antwerp and the sea. France had been overrun, regardless of the cost in Teuton blood, Lille and the industrial provinces were securely held, and, although the Crown Prince and von Kluck had been gloriously repulsed in their frenzied dash on Paris, the capital had all but resounded to the clatter of Uhlan hoofs, and Bordeaux was still regarded a far safer seat of Government. England herself had lived through hours of anxious crisis blacker than any within the memory of the living generation. At Mons, as official reports disclosed, the gallant little British army narrowly escaped annihilation. As it was, it lost hideously in killed and wounded. Gaping holes had been ripped in the ranks of famous regiments, and the Expeditionary Force, within six weeks of its landing, was already sadly mangled. Sir John French stirred the nation with his dispatch on the retreat from Mons and told how his army, though hurriedly concentrated by rail only two days before, had tenaciously withstood, in the dogged British way, the combined attack of five crack German corps. In the subsequent fighting which beat the Germans on the Marne and saved Paris, British soldiers, battered and battle-scarred as they were, had done even more than their share. Two days before arrival in Liverpool the Campania wireless--I returned to England in the same veteran hulk which had taken me to America in August--brought the dread tidings of the submarining of cruisers Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue in the Channel by the U9 and Weddigen, with cruelly heavy sacrifice of British lives.