All these things had happened, and yet London was unshaken. She had been "a bit uneasy," my English friends conceded, in the days and nights when the fate of Paris and Sir John French's army seemed to be in doubt, and the U9's feat had "cost us three obsolete boats," but the Germans were checked now, and the worst was over. Churchill was sending a British naval expedition to Belgium to save Antwerp, and what was the use of worrying, anyhow? Kitchener's army was filling up with recruits by the thousand, and England's motto was "Business as Usual."
Yea, verily, Britain was pursuing the even tenor of her imperturbable way. The Savoy, at supper after theater, glittered with all its old-time flare. The tables were thronged in the same old way with gaily-clad women, romping chorus-girls, monocled "nuts" with hair plastered straight back, opulent stock-brokers, theatrical celebrities and all the other familiar people about town. The band interpolated Tipperary a little oftener between rag-time one-steps and fox-trots, and lordlings and other bloods in khaki gave a new tinge to the picture, but otherwise it was night-time London "as usual." The theaters and music-halls were full. At Murray's and the Four Hundred--those dens of revelry called "night clubs," invented for law-respecting English who can afford five guineas a year for the privilege of wining, supping and dancing after the Acts of Parliament send ordinary people to bed--you could hardly wedge your way in. At the Carlton or the Piccadilly, or for the matter of that at any other popular resort in all London, you found yourself lucky to locate a single unpreempted place. Wherever you went or turned, whomever you saw, it was dear old London "as usual." If you were an impulsive, excitable, sentimental American and thought you were mildly rebuking your British friends when you ventured to wonder at the extraordinary naturalness of life in the West End, or at Walton Heath golf links, or at Chelsea football grounds, or at the Newmarket race-course, you found yourself unconsciously paying a tribute to "British character." For John Bull, far from being ashamed of adhering religiously to peace-time activities, was positively proud of the exhibition of "reserve" and "poise" and "calmness" which he was now giving. People talked about the war, of course. They hardly mentioned anything else. But if you had the patience to listen to their airy, fairy converse, you soon gathered that they spoke of it exclusively as something about which no self-respecting Englishman or woman purposed for a solitary moment to get indecorously agitated. There were even people who confessed that the war was beginning to "bore" them.
As for myself, I had a go at British acquaintances from two entirely different standpoints. In the first place, fresh from America, where the war had burnt into people's minds as deeply almost as if it were their own destiny which was at stake, I was still filled with the energizing atmosphere omnipresent there. I remembered how even our puny war with Spain had gripped the nation's thought and concentrated it to the exclusion of all else. I could not, for the life of me, understand how Englishmen, with the history of the preceding eight weeks before them, could still look upon "business as usual" as the desideratum for which the moment insistently called. I knew, I thought, how Americans would feel and act at such an hour; and as I had in my time dozed through many after-dinner speeches about the "kindred ideals" and "identical habits of thought" which so indissolubly bound the English-speaking nations, I ventured to marvel, and even at times to swear, at the spectacle of national nonchalance which Britain at the beginning of October, 1914, so resolutely presented. It was magnificent, but it was not war.
In the second place, I was conscious, with the knowledge and conviction of a long-time eye-witness, of both the visible and the dormant strength of Germany. I had written literally reams, during the preceding eight years, about Teuton preparations on land, in the air and on the sea. I had discussed the German War Party, its leaders and its literature, its aspirations and its plans, till I often grew weary of the task, not so much because pacifist critics in England pilloried me as a war-monger and an alarmist, but because there was a monotony in that sort of news about Germany which strained even the patience of those whose duty it was to report it. When Englishmen now told me, as so many of them did, that they would "muddle through this show," as they had "muddled through" in South Africa and on all the other occasions in Britain's martial past, I grew sick at heart. I knew, as everybody who had lived in Germany between 1904 and 1914 and kept his ears and eyes open knew, that "muddling through" would never beat the Germans, even if it had finally overcome the Boers. I knew, and anybody really acquainted with the Germans knew, that they would not be vanquished so long as there was a man or a mark with which to fight. I knew that nothing short of the supreme effort which the British Empire and its Allies could put forth would suffice to overcome the most highly-organized and efficiently patriotic people which had ever gone to war. I knew that the German General Staff and the other war-makers of the Fatherland had long reckoned, in the emergency of a struggle with England, on the very thing of which my eyes were now witness--British reluctance to shake off the shackles of ease and comfort and buckle down, a nation in arms, to the inconvenient and grim realities of war. Of these things I thought, and the reflection was disquieting, as I saw the mad whirl of light, frivolity and care-free joy which the Savoy at supper-time, plainly epitomizing London life at the moment, presented night after night. "Business as usual!" It was small comfort my English friends provided, when, remonstrating with me for my foolish solicitude, they assured me that my misgivings were misplaced because I was hopelessly ignorant of "the British character."
England, it was obvious, was like the manager of "Luna Park" in Berlin. She was afraid the war might become "a bit conspicuous," and was, moreover, determined that it should not. I remember well the crushing rebuke administered to me by a Britisher of international renown when I intruded my view of all these things. I had offered, in a desire to hold the mirror up to Nature and let Londoners see how they looked to foreigners at so transcendent a moment in their national existence, to produce a little article entitled "What an American Thinks of the English in War-Time." I even went to the length of putting my thoughts on paper and submitting the manuscript. I did so with considerable confidence, because the celebrity in question is a notorious "Wake Up, England!" man. But he returned my masterpiece with a look and gesture mingling pity and contempt for my wretched unfamiliarity with "the British character."
"My dear Wile," he explained, "you do not understand us. You forget that this war is not an American World's Championship baseball series. You mustn't try to foist transatlantic brass-band methods on us. It is not the British way."
Lest I convey the impression that I had advocated rousing the British lion from his slumbers by wild and woolly western methods palpably unsuited to his stoical temperament, let me make haste to explain that I was pleading for nothing but a system which would, spectacularly if necessary, do something to let the British public at least know that they had a war on their hands, and popularize it. A great contingent of Indian troops, led by Maharajahs and Rajputs, Maliks, Rajahs and Jams, had arrived in Europe, tarried in England and been slipped, in the dead of a Channel night, across to France. An entire army from Canada was encamped on Salisbury Plain, and no one had seen a sign of it except an occasional detachment of boisterous subalterns, many with a pronounced "American accent," who had kicked up a row in some Leicester Square music-hall the night before. The Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square was desecrated with recruiting circus-bills which would have delighted the heart of Barnum, and every taxicab wind-shield in town beseeched passers-by to "enlist for the duration of the war." But why, I had had the temerity to inquire in my little "Wake Up, England!" homily, which was rejected because it revealed no insight into "British character," were not the turbaned Gurkhas and the swarthy Sikhs and the brown men from Punjab and Beluchistan brought to London-town and paraded up and down the Strand and the Embankment, for all the metropolis to have a priceless object-lesson in Imperial patriotism? Why was Kitchener allowed to intern the young giants in khaki from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia in the hidden recesses of the provinces, instead of giving Londoners a glimpse of Colonial love of mother country in the flesh? It was due to the Indians and to the Canadians themselves, no less than to London, I argued, that opportunity should be provided to pay homage to the men who had crossed the seas to fight for Motherland. Non-British though I am, I felt morally certain that even my Hoosier bosom would swell with emotion in the presence of so ocular a demonstration of Britain's Imperial solidarity in the day of trial. But my suggestions were rejected as unbecomingly boisterous in their intent, good enough for the Polo Grounds or Madison Square Garden, but grotesquely out of place in England. If carried out, you see, they would inevitably have made the war "a bit conspicuous."
Kitchener's army
That the war was almost invisibly hidden, as far as the daily life of the people was concerned, was primarily due to the bureaucratic and autocratic methods of the censorship. Bureaucracy and autocracy in Germany, for instance, have their redeeming qualities. They are usually highly efficient, and their arrogance and high-handedness are tolerated because accompanied by a maximum of practical effectiveness. When England established her war censorship, she went over to bureaucracy and autocracy, as made in Germany, but lamentably lacking in the saving graces of the system as there exemplified. In vain the Press, now muzzled almost as effectually as if the Magna Charta and free speech had never existed, stormed and fumed against the tyranny of the "Press Bureau," the innocuous title chosen for the Juggernaut which, before six months had passed, was to grind British journalistic liberties into the dust. It was discovered that the "Bureau" was staffed for the most part by amiable gentlemen no longer fit for active duty in the army and navy, who, having patriotically offered their services to King and country, had been pitchforked indiscriminately into billets which clothed them with more real influence on the war than if they had commanded armies or fleets. It became painfully apparent that news of the war was being suppressed, mutilated and generally mismanaged either by military men who knew nothing of journalism, or by journalists who were profoundly ignorant of military matters--for the official censor caused it to be announced, in self-defense, that he had associated with the Bureau in an advisory capacity a couple of eminent ex-editors.