The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

MY DEAR MRS. WARD,—

The War has been, on the whole, well presented in America from the French side. We do not think justice has been done to the English side. I attribute this in part to the rather odd working of the censorship in hands not accustomed to the censorship. I wish that some writer like yourself could, in a series of articles, put vividly before our people what the English people are doing, what the actual life of the men in the trenches is, what is actually being done by the straight and decent capitalist, who is not concerned with making a profit, but with serving his country, and by the straight and decent labouring man, who is not thinking of striking for higher wages, but is trying to help his comrades in the trenches. What I would like our people to visualize is the effort, the resolution and the self-sacrifice of the English men and women who are determined to see this war through. Just at present England is in much the same strait that we were in in our Civil War toward the end of 1862, and during the opening months of 1863. That was the time when we needed to have our case put before the people of England—when men as diverse as Gladstone, Carlyle and the after-time Marquis of Salisbury were all strongly against us. There is not a human being more fitted to present this matter as it should be presented than you are. I do hope you will undertake the task.

Faithfully yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

The letter reached Mrs. Ward at Stocks on Monday, January 10, 1916, by the evening post. She felt at once that she must respond to such a call, though the manner of doing so was still dim to her. But she consulted her friends, C. F. G. Masterman and Sir Gilbert Parker, at “Wellington House” (at that time the Government Propaganda Department), and found that they took Mr. Roosevelt’s letter quite as seriously as she did herself. They showed her specimens of what the American papers were saying about England, her blunders, her slackers and her shirkers, till Mrs. Ward thrilled to the task and felt a longing to be up and at it. The next step was to see Sir Edward Grey (then Foreign Minister), to whom she had also sent a copy of the letter. He asked her to come to his house in Eccleston Square, whither accordingly she went early on January 20.

“They showed me into the dining-room,” she wrote to J. P. T., “and he came down to say that he had asked Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Arthur Nicolson to come too, and that they were upstairs. So then we went into his library sitting-room, a charming room full of books, and there were the other two. They all took Roosevelt’s letter very seriously, and there is no question but that I must do my best to carry it out. I simply felt after Edward Grey had spoken his mind that, money or no money, strength or fatigue, I was under orders and must just go on. I said that I should like to go to France, just for the sake of giving some life and colour to the articles—and that a novelist could not work from films, however good. They agreed.

‘‘And would you like to have a look at the Fleet?’ said Lord Robert.

‘I said that I had not ventured to suggest it, but that of course anything that gave picturesqueness and novelty—i.e. a woman being allowed to visit the Fleet—would help the articles.

‘I gave a little outline of what I proposed, beginning with the unpreparedness of England. On that Edward Grey spoke at some length—the utter absence of any wish for war in this country, or thought of war. Even those centres that had suffered most from German competition had never thought of war. No one wished for it. I thought of his long, long struggle for peace. It was pathetic to hear him talking so simply—with such complete conviction.

“I was rather more than half an hour with them. Sir Edward took me downstairs, said it was ‘good of me’ to be willing to undertake it, and I went off feeling the die was cast.”

A luncheon with Mr. Lloyd George—then Minister of Munitions—who gladly offered her every possible facility for seeing the great munition-centres that had by that time altered the face of England, and the plan for carrying out her task began to shape itself in her mind. A tour of ten days or so through the principal munition-works, ranging from Birmingham to the Clyde, then a dash to the Fleet, lying in the Firth of Cromarty, then south once more and across the Straits to see the “back of the Army” in France. It may be imagined what busy co-ordination of arrangements was necessary between the Ministry of Munitions, the Admiralty and the War Office, before all the details of the tour were settled, but by the aid of “Wellington House” all was hustled through in a short time, so that Mrs. Ward was off on her round of the great towns by January 31. To her, of course, the human interest of the scene was the all-important thing—the spectacle of the mixture of classes in the vast factories, the high-school mistresses, the parsons, the tailors’ and drapers’ assistants handling their machines as lovingly as the born engineers—the enormous sheds-full of women and girls of many diverse types working together with one common impulse, and protesting against the cutting down of their twelve hours’ day! She was taken everywhere and shown everything (accompanied this time by Miss Churcher), seeing in the space of ten days the munition-works at Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Darlington, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and the Clyde. Then she returned home for a few days, to fix her impressions in an ordered mass of notes, before leaving again on February 15 for the far north, armed with an Admiralty permit and an invitation from Sir John Jellicoe to spend a couple of nights in his house at Invergordon.