CHAPTER XIV
THE WAR, 1914-1917—MRS. WARD’S FIRST TWO JOURNEYS TO FRANCE
MRS. WARD’S feeling about the Germans, before the thunderbolt of 1914, had been one of sincere respect and admiration for a nation of patient brain-workers who, she believed, were honest with the truth, and had delved farther into certain obscure fields of history in which she herself was deeply interested than any of their contemporaries. But her acquaintance with Germany was a book-acquaintance only. She had indeed paid one or two visits to the Rhine and to South Germany during her married life, and had been astonished to mark, in 1900, the growth of wealth and prosperity in the Rhine towns, due, she was told, to scientific protection and to the skilful use of the French indemnity. But she had no personal friendships with Germans, and her knowledge of their state of mind was derived only from books and newspapers and the reports of others. Still, these had become disquieting enough, as all the world remembers, between 1911 and 1914, but Mrs. Ward clung to the optimistic view that the hatred and envy of England, so apparent in German newspaper writing, was but the creed of a clique, and that the heart of the laborious and thrifty German people was still sound. In April, 1913, a delegation of German Professors came over to London to take part in a historical congress; Mrs. Ward willingly assisted in entertaining them, giving a large evening party in their honour at Grosvenor Place. Perhaps the atmosphere was already a little strained, but we mustered our forgotten German as best we might, and flattered ourselves at the end that things had not gone badly. Little more than a year afterwards the names of nearly all our guests were to be found in the manifesto of the ninety-three German Professors—the pronouncement which above all others in those grim days stirred Mrs. Ward’s indignation. She expressed her sense of the “bitter personal disillusionment which I, and so many Englishmen and Englishwomen, have suffered since this war began,” in a Preface which she wrote, in 1916, to the German edition of England’s Effort—an edition which was intended for circulation in German Switzerland, but found its way also, as we afterwards heard, to a good many centres within Germany itself:
‘We were lifelong lovers and admirers of a Germany which, it seems now, never really existed except in our dreams. In the article ‘A New Reformation,’ which I published in the Nineteenth Century in 1889, in answer to Mr. Gladstone’s critique of Robert Elsmere, and in many later utterances, I have rendered whole-hearted homage to that critical and philosophical Germany which I took to be the real Germany, and hailed as the home of liberal and humane ideas. And now! In that amazing manifesto of the German Professors at the opening of the War, there were names of men—that of Adolf Harnack, for instance—which had never been mentioned in English scholarly circles before August, 1914, except with sympathy and admiration, even by those who sharply differed from the views they represented. We held them to be servants of truth, incapable therefore of acquiescence in a tyrannous lie. We held them also to be scholars, incapable therefore of falsifying facts and ignoring documents in their own interest. But in that astonishing manifesto, not only was the cry of Belgium wholly repulsed, but those very men who had taught Europe to respect evidence and to deal scrupulously with documents, when it was a question of Classical antiquity, or early Christianity, now, when it was a question of justifying the crime of their country, of defending the Government of which they were the salaried officials, threw evidence and documents to the winds. How many of those who signed the professorial manifesto had ever read the British White Paper, and the French Yellow Book, or, if they had read them, had ever given to those damning records of Germany’s attack on Europe, and of the vain efforts of the Allies to hold her back, one fraction of that honest and impartial study of which a newly discovered Greek inscription, or a fragment of a lost Gospel, would have been certain at their hands?”
It was this feeling of the betrayal of high standards and ideals which had meant much to her in earlier life, coupled with the emergence of a native ferocity unguessed before (for we had not lived through 1870), that went so deep with Mrs. Ward. But there were at least no personal friendships to break. With France, on the other hand, her ties had, as we know, been close and intimate from the beginning, so that her heart went out to the trials and agonies of her French friends with a peculiar poignancy. M. Chevrillon, her principal correspondent, gave her in a series of letters, from November, 1914, onwards, a wonderful picture of the sufferings, the heroisms and the moods of France; she replied—to this lover of Meredith!—with her reading of the English scene:
“STOCKS,
”November 23, 1914.
‘We are indeed no less absorbed in the War than you. And yet, perhaps, there is not that unrelenting pressure on nerve and recollection in this country, ‘set in the silver sea’ and so far inviolate, which there must be for you, who have this cruel and powerful enemy at your gates and in your midst, and can never forget the fact for a moment. That, of course, is the explanation of the recent slackening of recruiting here. The classes to whom education and social life have taught imagination are miserable and shamed before these great football gatherings, which bring no recruits—‘but my people do not understand, and Israel doth not consider. They have eyes and see not; ears have they but they hear not.’ One little raid on the East Coast—a village burnt, a few hundred men killed on English soil—then indeed we should see an England in arms. Meanwhile, compared with any England we have ever seen, it is an England in arms. Every town of any size has its camp, the roads are full of soldiers, and they are billeted in our houses. No such sight, of course, has ever been seen in our day. And yet how quickly one accustoms oneself to it, and to all the other accompaniments of war! The new recruits are mostly excellent material. Dorothy and I motored over early one morning last week to Aston Clinton Park to see the King inspect a large gathering of recruits. It was a beautiful morning, with the misty Chilterns looking down upon the wide stretches of the park, and the bodies of drilling men. The King must have been up early, for he had inspected the camp at ten (thirty-five miles from London) and was in the park by eleven. There was no ceremony whatever, and only a few neighbours and children looking on. It had been elaborately announced that he would inspect troops that day in Norfolk! The men were only in the early stages, but they were mostly of fine physique—miners from Northumberland a great many of them. The difficulty is officers. They have to accept them now, either so young, or so elderly! And these well-to-do workmen of twenty-five or thirty don’t like being ordered about by lads of nineteen. But the lads of nineteen are shaping, too, very fast.
“We are so sorry for your poor niece, and for all the other sufferers you tell us of. I have five nephews fighting, and of course innumerable friends. Arnold is in Egypt with his Yeomanry. One dreads to open The Times, day after day. The most tragic loss I know so far is that of the Edward Cecils’ only boy—grandson of the late Lord Salisbury, and Admiral Maxse, the Beauchamp of Beauchamp’s Career. I saw him last as a delightful chattering boy of eleven—so clever, so handsome, just what Beauchamp might have been at his age! He was missing on September 2, and was only announced as killed two days ago.”
The first year and a half of the War was a time of great anxiety and strain for Mrs. Ward, both in the literary and the practical fields. Besides her unremitting literary work she pushed through, by means of the “Joint Advisory Committee,” an exhaustive inquiry into the working of the existing system of soldiers’ pensions and pressed certain recommendations, as a result, upon the War Office; she was confronted by a partial falling-off in the subscriptions to her Play Centres, and was obliged to introduce economies and curtailments which cost her much anxious thought; she converted the Settlement into a temporary hostel for Belgian Refugees; and, above all, she carried through, between October, 1914, and the summer of 1915, a complete reorganization of the Passmore Edwards Settlement, converting it from a men’s into a women’s settlement. There were many reasons, even apart from the growing pressure on men of military age to enlist in the New Armies, which had for some time made such a change desirable in the eyes of Mrs. Ward and of a majority of the Council; chief among these being the need for a body of trained voluntary workers to carry out, for St. Pancras, the mass of social legislation that had been passed since the foundation of the Settlement, and to take their part in the work of School Care Committees, Schools for Mothers and so forth. Male Residents, being occupied with their own work during the day, were not available for such things; but amongst women it was believed that a body possessing sufficient leisure and enthusiasm for social service to make a real mark in the life of the neighbourhood, would not be difficult to find. The change was not accomplished without strenuous opposition from the existing Warden and some of the Residents, but Mrs. Ward went methodically to work, getting the Council to appoint a Committee with powers to inquire and report. She found also that her old friend and supporter, the Duke of Bedford, was strongly in favour of the change, and would be ready to provide, for three years, about two-thirds of the annual sum required for the maintenance of a Women’s Settlement. This argument was decisive, and the Council finally adopted the Report of the Special Committee in May, 1915. Mrs. Ward had the happiness of seeing, during the remaining years of the War, her hopes for the usefulness of the new venture very largely fulfilled, under the able guidance of Miss Hilda Oakeley, who was appointed Warden of the Settlement in August, 1915.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Ward felt herself in danger of seeing her usual means of livelihood cut from beneath her feet during this first period of the War. For one result of the vast upheaval in our social conditions was that the circulation of all novels went down with a run, and it was not until the War had made a certain dismal routine of its own, in the needs of hospitals, munition-centres, soldiers’ and officers’ clubs and the like, that the national taste for the reading of fiction reasserted itself. Till then Mrs. Ward relied mainly on her American public, which was still untouched; but the pressure of work was never for an instant relaxed, and fortunately she still found her greatest solace and relief from present cares in the writing of books. “I never felt more inclined to spin tales, which is a great comfort,” she wrote in January, 1915, but as yet she could not face the thought of weaving the War into their fabric, and took refuge instead in the summer of that year in the making of a story of Oxford life, as she had known it in her youth—an occupation that gave her a quiet joy, providing a “wind-warm space” into which she could retreat from the horrors of the outer world. The compulsory retrenchments of the War years came also to her aid, in reducing the personnel employed at Stocks, while Stocks itself was usually let in the summer and Grosvenor Place in the winter; but still the struggle was an arduous one, leaving its mark upon her in the growing whiteness of her hair, the growing fragility and pallor of her look. Sleeplessness became an ever greater difficulty in these years, but on the other hand her old complaint in the right side had grown less troublesome, so that standing and walking were more possible than of old. Had it not been for this improvement she would have been physically incapable of carrying out the task laid upon her, swiftly and unexpectedly, in January, 1916, when Theodore Roosevelt wrote to her from Oyster Bay to beg her to tell America what England was doing in the War.
December 27, 1915.