"I will give the matter my personal attention!" Roy assured her. "So-long, and take care of yourself!"
CHAPTER XIII
ALBERT CLEGG
In the early summer of Nineteen-Seventeen Uncle Fred paid a prolonged visit to Netherby—ostensibly to renew family ties, in reality for reasons not altogether unconnected with air-raids on London.
For the moment the fortunes of the war were back in the melting pot. The Battle of the Somme had bundled Brother Boche right back to the Siegfried Line, and enemy morale on the Western Front was low. The British army, fortified by twelve months of conscription, was blundering forward in characteristic fashion upon many fronts. The navy had swelled to a size undreamed of by any, and known only to few. Over the British coast alone nearly three thousand vessels of all sorts and conditions were keeping watch. The "Q" boat, too, with its crazy crew of immortals, was abroad upon the face of the waters, and the hunter had become the hunted.
But there was much to be set down upon the contra side. The spring offensive of the French army, after a brilliant beginning, had faltered, then halted. There had been recriminations, inquiries, resignations; and Pétain, the saviour of Verdun, had succeeded the gallant Nivelle. To keep the enemy from benefiting by the sudden relaxation of pressure on the Chemin des Dames the British army had flung itself into the premature Battle of Arras, and once more the casualty lists had shot up.
At home, the talk was mainly of Gothas—the Zeppelin was entirely démodé—and ration cards. The war was costing us six million pounds a day. Income tax at six shillings in the pound was teaching the man of moderate means the meaning of war; super-tax and excess profits tax were subjecting the capitalistic waistcoat to a not unsalutary reduction. Labour—or rather what was left, now that all that was best and soundest in Labour was away fighting—was going on strike periodically and with invariable success for more adequate recognition of its efforts to furnish the sinews of war to its wasteful and unproductive brothers in the trenches.
In Russia the Empire, battered from without and all corroded within, had collapsed upon itself; and an earnest but unpractical gentleman named Kerensky was rapidly undermining what was left of Russian staying-power, and, with the enthusiastic assistance of the German General Staff, paving the way for those great twin brethren, Lenin and Trotsky. One jaw of the vice which had been crushing the Hun to death was relaxed for good.
Still, there was no weakening on the Western Front. The Messines Ridge had recently "gone up," with a bang which had warmed the heart of every schoolboy in that schoolboy army, the British Expeditionary Force. The Salient of Ypres, that graveyard of British soldiers and German hopes, stood more inviolate than ever. Bagdad had been captured: Palestine was being freed. And in France, down in the Vosges, within the great quadrilateral formed by Chaumont, Toul, Vittel, and Ligny-en-Barrois, huge cantonments were being run up, and roads and railways laid down, by long-legged, slim-hipped, slow-speaking, workmanlike young men from a vast continent overseas—the forerunners of an army of indefinite millions which had pledged itself to come and redress the final balance at no very distant date.
But all this did not prevent London from being an extremely uncomfortable, not to say unsafe, place of residence for a high official of the noble army of Bomb-Dodgers. Finally, after a Gotha raid over London in broad daylight one bright morning in July, in which fifty-seven people were killed, Uncle Fred decided that it was no longer either just or prudent to risk a valuable life further, and went to Netherby, where he succeeded without any difficulty whatever in outstaying his welcome by a considerable margin.