The building of the New England is still in progress. The melting-pot is full. Years will elapse before the finished product leaves the crucible. The process of transition, however, has made enormous strides. Adversity is a wonderful reorganizer. The physiognomy of things long held unchangeable is altered almost beyond recognition. It is a better England already, as well as a new one. Above all, Democracy has not failed in the supreme test. The spectacle of three million men, uncoerced, responsive and responsible to no law but their own conscience, marching out to death and glory that England may live, is a sublime picture, which will blot out and overshadow much of the bungling and many of the disasters and excrescences of the past.
If I have seemed to dwell with insistence and even cynicism upon "British calm" amid the thunders, let me here and now subscribe unqualifiedly to the view that it remains, when all is said and done, a magnificent achievement second only to the demonstration of Voluntaryism as a Democracy's first line of defense. Britannia will continue to rule the waves mainly because she was calm when they surged about her most angrily.
CHAPTER XXII
QUO VADIS?
October, 1915. The eighty-third day of the second year of war. A woman, writing in The Times, suggests that England adopt as her national prayer, "God help us win this war." King George V, emerging at length from the No Man's Land of Constitutional Irresponsibility, appeals, stirringly, "to my people" to save the sinking bark of Voluntary military service. It is the calm before the Conscription storm. The Sovereign discourses upon "the grave moment in the struggle" and calls for "men of all classes to come forward and take their share in the fight in order that another may not inherit the free Empire which their ancestors and mine have built." The King hints at "the darkest moment" which, from time immemorial, "has ever produced in men of our race the sternest resolve."
Britain's horizon is clouded, wherever one looks. No forced optimism can blink iron facts. In the East, Russia is paralyzed for months to come, even if not "crushed." Her fortresses, "deemed impregnable," writes Lloyd-George in the preface of his compiled war speeches, "are falling like sand castles before the resistless tide of Teutonic invasion." The "steam-roller" must go into winter quarters. In the West, the great Anglo-French offensive in Artois and the Champagne punctures the German front and advances the Allied lines two or three miles. The German losses are her severest of the war--140,000, so the French say, including vast heaps of dead, whole regiments of maimed and at least 25,000 prisoners and 145 field-guns. But the victory, substantial and promising as it is, has been dearly bought. The Germans claim that the preliminary seventy-two-hour bombardment represented an expenditure of 65,000,000 shells--mostly of American production, so allege the "inspired" war-correspondents at German headquarters, with sneering references to "blood-smeared dollars." The Allies' casualties are not tabulated. They are only known to be cruelly heavy. Englishmen fear there has been another Neuve Chapelle. Joffre and French have demonstrated that the German front is not quite impenetrable. But the enemy, on his part, has shown that for the Allies to "break through" in the West is a task fraught with peril and toll sickening to contemplate.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief at the Dardanelles, has been recalled "to report." Another British general, unnamed, is dismissed for having led an army into a shambles at Suvla Bay. The campaign in Gallipoli is a tacitly acknowledged failure. General Sir Charles Monro is hurried to Turkey to succeed Hamilton and retrieve the fortunes of an expedition which has already cost 100,000 casualties, a trio of battleships, a transport full of troops, and heart-breaking incalculable. There are ugly rumors that the Allies, facing the inevitable, are about to abandon the ill-starred Dardanelles venture, and try their luck elsewhere. Against the German-led Turks twelve miles of precarious "front" with a back to the sea is all Anglo-Colonial-French valor has been able to achieve. But misfortune has dogged the Allies in fields remote from the actual theaters of war. While Germanic-Turko armies have been wrecking their military hopes East, West and Near East, Allied diplomacy has been disastrously foiled in the pivotal Balkans. Bulgaria, deemed friendly, though venal, openly goes over to the enemy. Sir Edward Grey, like his fellow-idol, Kitchener, is under withering fire. He is charged with permitting Berlin to score a victory which might have been London's if British diplomacy had been characterized by less tentativeness of policy and greater impetuosity of deed. It seems the old story--"too late." "Have we a Foreign Office?" bitterly asks Fleet Street. But the cup of disappointment is not full even yet. Greece, too, is recreant. She mobilizes, supposedly as a pro-Ally counterstroke to the pro-German Bulgarian menace, for is not the King of the Hellenes bound by solemn treaty to join Peter of Serbia in the eventuality of attack by Ferdinand of Sofia? But Downing Street failed to reckon with King "Tino" of Athens and his Hohenzollern consort, the Kaiser's favorite sister, Sophia. Premier Venizelos, the Allies' hope, is forced to resign. Greece remains "neutral," between German Charybdis and English Scylla, as King Constantine himself describes his plight. She shuts her eyes to the nebulous Allied expeditionary force landed at Salonica and "rushed" precipitately at the eleventh hour to the relief of the Serbs, who are even now threatened with annihilation between the German-Austrians on the north and west, and the back-stabbing Bulgars on the east. Belgrade falls. Uskub is captured. The Salonica line to Nish is cut. Germany's "road to Constantinople" is open. The Kaiser can get there now before the Allies. Diplomacy grasps at a last straw. Cyprus, annexed from Turkey by Britain early in the war, is offered to Greece if she will fling her army into the breach. In Athens, it appears, dictates of self-preservation govern. Revealing a highly-developed Missourian trait, Greece asks to be "shown." By active operations against the Germanic Powers and Bulgaria, assisted by mere promises of more Allied reinforcements via Salonica or the driblets already sent, Greece fears to share Belgium and Serbia's fate. If the Allies will send 400,000 troops to the Balkans--or about twice as many as have been pounding fruitlessly at the Dardanelles--Greece might change her mind. The suggestion inspires little enthusiasm in England. Kitchener and French can doubtless spare the men. But the equipment of another huge British army for operations in the Near East in time to turn the tables is a taller order. Meantime Mackensen and Gallwitz batter their way across the Serbian ranges. In London there are anxious doubts whether there will even be any Serbian army to "relieve" by the time the Allies place an effective rescuing expedition in the decisive theater. Serbia begins to look uncomfortably like another Belgium--Salonica like ill-starred Antwerp. Blunder and procrastination were ever the parents of disaster.
So much for the military and political situation, which even the Truth-Hiders begin to see in its true colors. But if things were "messed" abroad--in the West and in the Near East--muddle and bungle were even more rampant at home. Take the Zeppelins. They first visited these shores in January, 1915. In October Press and Parliament commenced for the first time seriously to investigate the adequacy of Britain's "aerial defenses," with the result that chaotic demoralization and systemless go-as-you-please were found to prevail. Sir Percy Scott, the country's greatest gunnery expert, had been in charge of London's defenses against the sky-pirates, but it appeared that his guns were ineffective, his gunners untrained for the highly specialized feat of hitting mile-high targets flying in the dark, and things in general unorganized and more or less futile. The Press Bureau condescendingly parted with an abstract story of the latest and most disastrous raid of all over "the London area." People derived lively satisfaction from its disclosure that the metropolis was "cool" and unafraid under fire. Only a few courageous "alarmists" read the signs of the times aright and demand that some life and efficiency forthwith be injected into the "anti-aircraft" department, lest, when Count Zeppelin's range-finding practise cruises across London are finished, an armada of German airships sail across the Channel and reduce the heart of the Empire, ever calm, to a smoking ash-heap before Sir Percy Scotts' defense is perfected. There was anxious talk of bringing over "expert gunners" from France--in October, after nearly ten months and after twenty-five Zeppelin raids over English territory!
The while the elephant-hided Censorship, as if Britannia's troubles were not all-sufficient, insisted upon making itself more of an international laughing-stock and object of world contempt than ever. It censored Kipling's Recessional in a battle-story from France. It deleted a quotation from Browning in another narrative from the front. It cut out a famous war correspondent's tribute to the bravery of the enemy. It eliminated a reference to Chatham, England's greatest War Minister, because it confused him with the famous British naval base from which he took his title. It refused to let out a single notch in the muzzle it has attached even to the benevolently neutral American Press, as represented by its accredited and notoriously Anglophile correspondents in England. It reveled in concealment, deception and grotesqueness, though concealing nothing from the enemy and everything from England, deceiving exclusively the British public, and making nobody grotesque except its egregious self. Calls for the light at home, ridicule and criticism from abroad, alike left the Censor unmoved. The sparrows cried from the housetops in ever more insistent accents that all was not well with England, but the Censorship, magnificently blind even to the Royal pronouncement that Britons unfailingly respond when the hour is dark, maintained imperiously that what it was well for the country to know was for it, and it alone, to decide. If the British public were a transgressor, its way could not have been harder.
Came Mr. Montagu, the Financial Secretary of the Treasury, the reputed "budget genius" of the Government. Britons must be prepared, he told them, "during the year ahead, to disgorge to the State not less than one-half of their entire income, either in the form of taxes or loans." Lord Reading's borrowing commission to America was still on the water, the ink on its $500,000,000 "credit loan" in New York not yet dry. "I estimate our expenditure for the year," said Mr. McKenna, the Finance Minister, in the House of Commons, at "seven billions, nine hundred fifty million dollars" (only he spoke in pounds). "As our total estimated revenue, inclusive of new taxes, is one billion, five hundred twenty-five million dollars, the deficit for the year will be six billion, four hundred twenty-five million dollars. We have now to contemplate a Navy costing for the current year $950,000,000, an Army costing $3,575,000,000, and external advances to our Allies (Russia, France, Italy, Serbia and Belgium) amounting to $2,115,000,000."