It was left to other hands to report in detail the speeches of the Prime Minister, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of War. Each uttered phrases of golden significance. Mr. Churchill was evidently still his ebullient self, although he had not yet fulfilled his promise of September that the German navy, if it remained in port and refused to come out, would be "dug out like a rat from a hole," nor had his now acknowledged personal responsibility for the fiasco of the Antwerp naval expedition perceptibly staled his infinite buoyancy. "Six, nine, twelve months hence," he declared, "you will begin to see the results that will spell the doom of Germany." I had never heard "Winston" speak before, but I understood now the charm of his personality and the attractiveness of an oratorical style made even more magnetic by the suggestion of a combined stammer and lisp. "In spite of its losses," he continued, "our Navy is now stronger, and stronger relatively to the foe, than it was on the declaration of war." Asquith read his speech, and Kitchener was about to do the same, but Churchill, youthful, vibrant, tense, spoke extemporaneously, and the consequent effect was indubitably the most striking of all the oratory of the night.
Lord Kitchener, in khaki and with a mourning band on his arm, was redolent of strength and impressiveness, but when he rose, clumsily adjusted a pair of huge horn-rimmed reading glasses, and began to chant his carefully-prepared "speech" in monotone from manuscript, he was far less convincing, and certainly not approximately so electrifying as Churchill. But he had messages of no less magnitude and cheer. "We may confidently rely on the ultimate success of the Allies in the west," he said simply. "But we want more men and still more men. We have now a million and a quarter in training."
But it was Asquith's peroration, at which my impressionistic sketch in The Daily Mail only hinted, which was the nugget of the night. Englishmen still repeat it as something which puts in more terse and concrete words than anybody else has clothed it the solemn spirit in which they have consecrated themselves to the task now trying the Empire's soul:
"It is going to be a long, drawn-out struggle. But we shall not sheathe the sword until Belgium recovers all, and more than all, she has sacrificed; until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression; until the rights of smaller nations are placed on an unassailable foundation; until the military domination of Prussia is finally destroyed."
It was in that incorrigible resolve that Britain entered upon the second calendar year of war, bleeding uncomplainingly, losing stoically, taking what came and ruing it not; determined as she lived, to keep on until her vow to herself was vindicated and her duty to civilization performed.
CHAPTER XIX
THE INTERNAL FOE
Britain's autumn of complacency faded unruffled into a winter and spring of lassitude and bungle. Nothing, no matter how ominous or catastrophic, seemed capable of rousing the nation to the immensity of its emergency. The Kingdom was aflame with recruiting posters, in ever increasingly lurid hues and language, but with amazingly little red-blooded interest in or enthusiasm for the war. If one commented on the oppressive and disconcerting nonchalance of the populace, one was called a "Dismal Jimmy," or a "professional whimperer" whose mind was poisoned by the "Northcliffe Press." If you remarked that indications were countless that the enemy was vastly more alive to the stupendousness of the moment than England seemed to be, you were set down for a "pro-German," and the patriot whose guest you were when you ventured that suggestion never invited you to dinner again. If you were an Englishman, you were simply snubbed henceforth. If you were a foreigner, your name may have been handed in to Scotland Yard as that of an "alien" worth watching. Whoever you were, or whatever your views, unless they represented unadulterated admiration of unshakable British calm, you were headed straight for a crushing rebuke. Retribution took the form of branding you either as pitiably ignorant of "British character" or not knowing history well enough to realize that the British are "slow starters" and "always muddle through somehow." You were advised to squander your qualms on a needier cause. The "boys of the bulldog breed" were "all right."
You wondered, if you were a blithering, neurotic American, for example, what would stir the British temperament into something faintly resembling ardor and emotion. Zeppelins came, despite Mr. Churchill's swagger that a horde of "aeroplane hornets" was ready to greet and sting them. They came periodically, leaving destruction in their wake, but the coast towns are one hundred fifty miles away from London, and nobody cared. They had demonstrated, it was true, that England was no longer an island, but "they can't reach London--that's one sure thing," and, "anyway, the time to worry about that was when they tried it." Was not the metropolis magnificently equipped with searchlights, even if the sky-pirates should attempt the impossible and try to pick their way up the Thames in the dark? Then, always, there were those "hornets," and "British coolness."
"Scarborough Shelled by German Cruisers!" So ran the newspaper posters in the streets at midday of December 16th, 1914, an announcement grim with historical import. For the first time in centuries the sacred shores of these sea-girt isles had felt the impact of bombardment. The raid extended far along the Yorkshire coast. Whitby and Hartlepool had been attacked--there were a hundred deaths in the latter alone. Material damage was extensive; homes, shops, hotels, churches, hospitals were struck and shattered. Yet England was "calm." It did not matter in the least that there was a list of seven hundred Britons dead and injured, or that the Kaiser's "Canal Fleet" apparently was able to risk a sortie in the North Sea. What mattered most was that the islanders still alive were unmoved and immovable. That the "baby-killers" by air and water had signally failed to "excite" or "frighten" the country was the circumstance which made incomparably the liveliest appeal to the imagination. Kitchener's astute recruiting advertisers shrieked "Remember Yarmouth!" (where the Zeppelins had been) and "Avenge Scarborough!" across the top of their newest posters, but West End London, where the seats of the mighty are, and where the opinion which gives tone to national thought is molded, remained Gibraltarian. A flock of British aeroplanes assailed Cuxhaven on Christmas Day by way of "reprisal" for the intermittent Zeppelin raids over English territory. The attack was not noteworthy in its results, but it gave a fresh fillip to British confidence that "everything was all right."