It now remained for her to put into shape the impressions gathered in these five breathless weeks, and this she did during some forty-five days of work at very high pressure, putting what she had to say into the form of “Letters to an American Friend.” The Letters were sent hot to the Press on the American side as quickly as Mrs. Ward could mail them, appearing in a number of newspapers controlled by one of the great “Syndicates”; then Scribner’s published them in book form at the end of May, with a preface by Mr. Choate. Here, with a little more leisure for revision, the little book, under the title of England’s Effort, came out on June 8, incidentally giving to Mrs. Ward the pleasant opportunity of a renewal of her old acquaintance with Lord Rosebery, whom she had invited to write a preface to it. She went over, full of doubt, to Mentmore one May afternoon, having heard that he was there, “quite alone” (as she wrote to M. Chevrillon), “driving about in a high mid-Victorian phaeton, with a postilion!” Knowing that he was never strong, she fully expected a refusal, but found instead that he had already done what she asked, being deeply moved by the proofs that she had sent him. She was much touched, and the friendship was cemented, a few days later, by a return visit that he paid to Stocks, all in its May green, when he could not contain himself on the beauty of the place, or the incomparable advantages it possessed over “such a British Museum as Mentmore!”
England’s Effort reached a dejected world in the nick of time. Our national habit of “grousing” in public, and of hanging our dirty linen on every possible clothes-line, had naturally disposed both ourselves and the outer world to under-estimate our vast achievements. This little book set us right both with the home front and with our foreign critics. It penetrated into every corner of the world and was translated into every civilized language, while Mrs. Ward constantly received letters about it, not only from friends, but from total strangers—from dwellers in Mexico, South America, Japan, Australia and India, not to mention France and Italy, thanking her for her immense service, and expressing astonishment at the facts that she had brought to light. The Preussische Jahrbücher reviewed it with great respect; the Japanese Ambassador, Viscount Chinda, was urgently recommended by King George to read it, and afterwards contributed a preface to the Japanese edition. And, as Principal Heberden of Brasenose reported to her, the burden of comment among his friends always ended with the feeling that “the most remarkable fact about the book is Mrs. Humphry Ward’s own astonishing effort. Certainly the nation owes her much, for no other author could have attracted so much attention in America.” A year later, it was asserted by many Americans, with every accent of conviction, that but for England’s Effort and the public opinion that it stirred, President Wilson might have delayed still longer than he did in bringing America in.
In all the business arrangements made for the “little book” in America, Mrs. Ward had had the constant help and support of her beloved cousin, Fred Whitridge, while in England not only the publication, but the voluminous arrangements for translation, were in the hands of Reginald Smith. By a cruel stroke of fate, both these devoted friends were taken from her in the same week—the last week of December, 1916—and Mrs. Ward was left to carry on as best she might, without “the tender humour and the fire of sense” in the “good eyes” of the one, or the wisdom, strength and kindness that had always been her portion in so rich a measure from the other. To Mrs. Smith (herself the daughter of George Murray Smith), she wrote after the funeral of “Mr. Reginald”:
“I watched in Oxford Street, till the car had passed northwards out of sight, and said good-bye with tears to that good man and faithful friend it bore away.... Your husband has been to me shelter and comfort, advice and help, through many years. I feel as if a great tree had fallen under whose boughs I had sheltered....”
Never was the writing of books the same joy to Mrs. Ward after this. Other publishers arose with whom she established, as was her wont, good and friendly relations, but with the death of Reginald Smith it was as if a veil had descended between her and this chief solace of her declining years.
Already, in the autumn of 1916, Mrs. Ward was thinking—in consultation with Wellington House—of a possible return to France, mainly in order, this time, to visit some of the regions behind the French front which had suffered most cruelly in 1914. She wished to bring home to the English-speaking world, which was apt to forget such things, some of the undying wrongs of France. M. Chevrillon obtained for her the ear of the French War Office, and meanwhile Mrs. Ward applied once more to Sir Edward Grey and to General Charteris, head of the British Intelligence Department in France (with whom she had made friends on her first journey) for permission to spend another two or three days behind the British front. Here, however, the difficulty arose that since Mrs. Ward’s first visit, some other ladies, reading England’s Effort, had been clamorous for the same privileges, so that the much-tried War Office had been obliged to lay down a rigid rule against the admission of “any more ladies,” as Sir Edward Grey wrote, “within the military zone of the British Armies.” Sir Edward did not think that any exception could be made, but not so General Charteris. On November 9, Lord Onslow, then serving in the War Office, wrote to Mrs. Ward that:
‘General Charteris fully recognizes the valuable effect which your first book produced upon the public, and would consequently expect similar results from a further work of yours. He is, therefore, disposed to do everything in his power to assist you, and he thinks it possible that perhaps an exception to the general rule might be made on public grounds. But it would have to be clearly understood that in the event of your being allowed to go, it would not constitute a precedent as regards any other ladies.”
Permits, in the form of “Adjutant-General’s Passes,” were therefore issued to Mrs. Ward and her daughter for a visit to the British Military Zone from February 28 to March 4, 1917. They crossed direct to Boulogne, and were the guests of General Headquarters from the moment that they set foot in France.
Since their last visit, the Battle of the Somme had come and gone, and the German Army was in the act of retreating across that tortured belt of territory to the safe shelter of the Hindenburg Line, there to resist our pressure for another year. But, in these weeks of early spring, the elation of movement had gripped our Army; the Boche was in retreat; this must, this should be the deciding year! Mrs. Ward’s letters from the war zone are full of this spirit of hopefulness; not yet had Russia crumbled in pieces, not yet had the strength of the shortened German line revealed itself. Once more she was sent on two memorable days, from the Visitors’ Château at Agincourt, to points of vital interest on our line, first through St. Pol, Divion and Ranchicourt, to the wooded slope of the Bois de Bouvigny, whence she could gaze across at the Vimy Ridge, not yet stormed by the Canadians; then, on the second day, to the very centre of the Somme battlefield, where she stood in the midst of the world’s uttermost scene of desolation. Of the Bois de Bouvigny, Dorothy’s narrative, written down the same night, gives the following picture:
‘The car bumped slowly along a very rough track into the heart of the wood, and stopped when it could go no farther. We got out and walked on till soon we came to an open piece of grass-land, a rectangular wedge, as it were, driven from the eastern edge of the hill into the heart of the wood. We walked across it, facing east, and saw it was pitted with shell-holes, mostly old—but not all. In particular, one very large one had fresh moist earth cast up all round it. Captain Fowler [their guide] asked Captain Bell a question about it, lightly, yet with a significant appui in his tone—but the young man laughed off the question and implied that the Boches had grown tired of troubling that particular place. Meanwhile, the firing of our own guns behind and to the side of us was becoming more frequent, the noise greater. Just ahead, and to the right, the ground sloped to a valley, which we could not see, and where we were told lay Ablain St. Nazaire and Carençy. From this direction came the short, abrupt, but quite formidable reports of trench-mortars. Over against us, and slightly to the right, three or four ridges and folds of hill lay clearly distinguishable—of which the middle back was the famous Vimy Ridge, partly held to this day by the Germans. Captain Bell, however, would not let us advance quite to the edge of the plateau, so that we never saw exactly how the ground dropped to the lower ground, neither did we see the crucifix of Notre Dame de Lorette at the end of the spur. All this bit had been the scene of terrific fighting in 1915, when it still formed part of the French line; it had been a fight at close quarters in the beautiful wood that closed in the open ground on which we stood, and we were told that many bodies of poor French soldiers still lay unburied in the wood. We turned soon to recross the bare space again, and as we did so, fresh guns of our own opened fire, and once more I heard that long-drawn scream of the shells over our heads that I got to know last year.”