Rome was not built in a day, but England has been made over in a year. Personal liberty is gone. A free press no longer exists. Extravagance is "bad form." Economy has become respectable. Dukes' sons and cooks' sons are "pals." Drunkenness is disappearing. Conscription looms on the horizon. The Irish are loyal. Suffragettes are making shells and bandaging wounds instead of smashing windows and going to jail. Pride is humbled, though not crushed. Still ringed by Kipling's "leaden seas," Britain is no longer an island, for Zeppelins have maimed and killed and wrecked in the heart of London. Tolerance is a lost art. British have learned to hate. The link-boy has come back into his own; the streets at night, that Admiral Sir Percy Scott, defender of London by air, may blind the "sky-Huns," recall the gloom of the Cimmerian Regency. Though Waterloo was won a hundred years ago, a terror worse than the Napoleonic scourge has overtaken the descendants of Nelson and Wellington. Britannia rules the waves, but the blood of a half million of her best sons fertilizes the soil of France, Belgium, Turkey, Serbia and Africa; and the flow is far from checked. The "shopkeeper of the world" has become a nation in arms. Only one phase of its multifarious life, immutable as the sphinx, has survived the crucible of war in pristine glory--British calm. Ships may sink, men may fall, bombs may annihilate and treasure be sapped, but British imperturbability, like Time itself, pursues the even tenor of its way, Himalayan in its imperviousness.
Assuredly it has been for no lack of cause that England has ridden the sea of Armageddon without capsizing. Squalls, typhoons, storms and barometric disturbances of every form of violence have beset her from the outset of the voyage. But though there has been tempest, there is no shipwreck. She enters upon another lap of a seemingly endless journey, battered indeed, but keel down and full steam ahead. It is still night. Stokers and crew, nor even the captains and commodores, are not a completely united band, but their differences concern only the methods of cleaving through darkness to the port, to gain which, at any cost, all are grimly determined. Failure to reach the waters of their desire as soon as the unthinking majority hoped and believed would be possible has sobered the vision and intensified the resolve of crew and commanders alike. It has not reconciled their antagonisms, but it is making surer than ever that they will land their craft in the appointed harbor, though the damnations of all the powers of destruction are buffeted against her in the attempt.
My name for Armageddon is the War of Miscalculations, for it is a title which indicts every belligerent without exception. The Germans expected their army to be in Paris by the end of September, 1914. The English and the French reckoned that Russian Cossacks would be hacking souvenirs from the sepulchral statues in the Berlin Sieges-Allee about the same time. The British thought that Jellicoe would starve the Germans. Von Tirpitz imagined that U-boats would paralyze Britain's life-line. The British pounded vainly at the Dardanelles for nine months, and when they couldn't get Calais the Germans started out to crush Serbia. Sir Edward Grey thought Bulgaria and Greece were only waiting like ripe fruit to drop into the Allies' lap and cry for marching orders. He was about as near right as the German political professors who always assured William II that India, Egypt, Canada, South Africa and Australia were itching to revolt when the Motherland was immersed in a vast European war. The great war has been a rude awakening for all concerned. In addition to killing its millions of men and squandering its billions of money, it has annihilated theories, expectations, plans and aspirations so cruelly that the "war expert" has become a deathless laughing-stock. If "experts" have learned anything from the war, they will henceforth prefer history to prophecy.
"Business as Usual"--life generally in the old rut, in other words--was adopted by Britons as their war motto. Truly did a politician of renown exclaim a year later that no unhappier, because no more unfortunate, maxim was ever foisted upon or accepted by a patriotic people. The nation made no inconsiderable attempt to convert "Business as Usual" from an aphorism into an actuality. Seven or eight months of unrealized objectives had to pass over English men and women's resolute heads before they began even to doubt the efficacy of the complacent principle they had laid down for themselves. But the mills of Mars, like those of his colleagues, keep on grinding, and England was to learn that, while invasion had not seared her soil as it had scotched that of all her European allies, war yet had terrors capable of burning into the soul, saddening the homes and despoiling the pockets of even an unravished land.
I fix the date when Great Britain began to face the iron logic of events with sterner realization and to doubt the efficacy of "muddle" for purposes of war as May, 1915. In the two preceding months there had been a series of episodes of more climacteric magnitude than was apparent at the moment of their occurrence. In March Sir John French's army made a vigorous attempt to break through the German lines, and the much-heralded "victory" of Neuve Chapelle resulted. Thousands of British soldiers, and half a hundred Americans fighting in the Canadian contingent, died gallantly in an action which, when its terrible cost was eventually counted, could not be catalogued as anything but a glorious failure. In April two affairs of purely German origin were recorded, each predestined to leave a deep impress on the British public mind: the employment of poison gas by the enemy in sanguinary engagements around Ypres, and the flinging of thirty-nine British officers, captives in Germany, into felons' cells by way of "reprisal" for the segregation in England of captured German submarine crews.
Because the truth about Neuve Chapelle remained suppressed for many weeks, attention was bestowed to an overshadowing degree on the gas and officer-imprisonment episodes. Hitherto the universal demand in England was that, no matter how the Germans waged war, Englishmen must continue to fight "like gentlemen." Suggestions that the hour had long since arrived for an eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth warfare were rejected in almost every quarter as "un-English" and, therefore, undebatable. The Kaiser's soldateska might rape, pillage, loot and murder, but British troops must battle "in the old-fashioned way"--with clean hands. Tirpitz's bluejackets might practise the tactics of pirates, but Britannia's sailors would continue to respect the high traditions of their calling. Men went so far as to asseverate that it were better that Britain should be beaten than win by "German methods." Sir Edward Clarke, the leader of the bar, protesting against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's proposal that Zeppelin murders could only be checked by British air reprisals against defenseless German communities, wrote to The Times: "It may be our misfortune to be defeated in this war, but it will be our own fault if we are disgraced." Yet British "fighting blood" seemed at length stirred to a boil by asphyxiating-gas and "Hate" measures against British officer-captives. A wave of holy rage swept over the country. Those who had advocated the use of kid gloves against an enemy which fought with brass knuckles and poison found their views sensibly less popular. Britain was waking at last to the realization which even the Belgian atrocities, "Zeppelin murder" and the "Scarborough baby-killers" had not fully aroused--that her high-minded "sporting ethics" were lamentably out of place in war with a foe which believed in ruthless "Frightfulness." The Tommies who died horrible deaths from the effects of German poison gas and the officers who languished in burglars' cells because martyrs in a worthy cause--their anguish convinced England almost against her will that the German was the most ferocious, pitiless and unconscionable enemy who had ever engaged in the noble calling of arms.
While this healthy conviction was soaking into Britain's sluggish consciousness, the crowning infamy of the Lusitania massacre was committed. The cup of indignation, already full to the brim, now overflowed. Demand for vengeance, in the form of a campaign against the Germans to be waged with resolution and force more destructive than any previous effort, was universal. There must be no more temporizing, no more half measures, no more vacillation and procrastination. Recruiting enjoyed a fresh spurt, a response to the lurid posters headed "Remember the Lusitania!" and reproducing the verdict of the Queenstown coroner's jury
"that this appalling crime was contrary to international law and the conventions of all civilized nations, and we therefore charge the officers of the said submarine, the Emperor and Government of Germany, under whose orders they acted, with the crime of wilful and wholesale murder before the tribunal of the civilized world."
"It is your duty," the poster added, "to take up the Sword of Justice to avenge this devil's work. ENLIST TO-DAY!"
The Lusitania horror unchained the mob spirit from Land's End to John o' Groat. Uninterned Germans, who were still at large in their thousands, were the victims of rioters' fury in London and the big provincial towns, and the Home Office was forced by irate public opinion to place barbed-wire around all the "enemy aliens" not already in captivity. Simultaneously the demand went forth that the pampering of German prisoners of war in palatial manor-houses like Dorington Hall should give way to rigor more suitable for men condemned henceforth to be known as Huns. The Lusitania's aftermath was accompanied by ample proof that the bulldog was no longer curled up on the hearth-rug as unconcernedly as he had been throughout the winter and spring. He was showing his teeth, and he was snarling. He meant business now. There had been enough of Queensbury rules, Hurlingham ethics and Crystal Palace niceties in dealing with the Germans. They had served notice to Humanity that it had no laws which the German army and navy felt bound to respect. Englishmen said to themselves: "So be it." Then they rolled up their sleeves.