Days to Remember: The British Empire in the Great War

by John Buchan; Sir Henry John Newbolt

The navy, in August 1914, had 145,000 officers and men and a tonnage of 2,500,000. Four years later the figures were 450,000 men and 8,000,000 tons. In one month in the year 1918 British warships travelled 1,000,000 sea miles in home waters alone, and in the same period auxiliary vessels travelled 6,000,000 miles, or 250 times the circuit of the globe. During the war the British navy transported 20,000,000 men, of whom only 2,700 were lost by enemy action; 2,000,000 horses and mules, 25,000,000 tons of explosives, 51,000,000 tons of oil and fuel, and 130,000,000 tons of food and other materials. All this was done while fighting a constant warfare against enemy submarines.

The work of the British people at home in supplying munitions was one of the main factors in the enemy's defeat. The Ministry of Munitions was formed in June 1915, and soon became the largest of the Government departments, controlling the iron, steel, engineering, and chemical trades, and employing 2,500,000 men and 1,000,000 women. Over 10,000 firms worked for it, and Government factories increased from three in 1914 to 200 in 1918. In 1918 the figure of the first year of war in the production of certain classes of ammunition was multiplied four hundred times, and in the production of guns forty times. During the Battle of the Somme in 1916, Britain issued every week to her armies in France an amount of ammunition equal to the entire stock available for her land service at the outbreak of war; and during the last battles of 1918 the volume of shells fired was more than double that expended in the Battle of the Somme. All the railways of Britain were taken over by the State, and from October 1916 materials for thousands of miles of track, over 1,000 locomotives, and many thousands of wagons were shipped to various theatres of war, in spite of the fact that more than 170,000 railwaymen had been released for service with the army.

FIELD-MARSHAL EARL KITCHENER.

The business of an army in the field is not merely to fight, or rather, its chief task, fighting, is only possible if there is a first-class organization behind the lines. How brilliant and complete that organization was towards the close of the struggle would take a volume to expound. In France, for example, the British Army had its own Forestry Department, and produced from French forests over 2,000,000 tons of timber. It was its own farmer, and in 1918 it saved the crops of 18,000 French acres, harvesting them at night. It did its own tailoring and boot-making. It did all its mending of every kind, and it saved broken and derelict material to be remade in the factories at home. It did its own catering, and there never was a war in which men and horses were better fed—a remarkable feat when we remember that provision had to be made for men of different races and tastes—curry for the Indians, nut-oil for the Chinese, and coffee for the American soldiers. It did its own banking, insurance, and printing. Its transport service was a miracle. In 1914 the Expeditionary Force landed in France with 40,000 horses and a few hundred lorries, while its railway transport was managed by the French. In 1918 it ran its own railways, and it had 500,000 horses and mules, 33,500 lorries, 1,400 tractors, and 15,800 motor-cars. It did the business of almost all the trades on earth, and did it with exactness, economy, and an amazing flexibility, so that whenever a new call was necessitated by the strategy of the generals, it was fully and promptly met.

The war was therefore a united effort of the whole British people. In Cromwell's day the start of one battle was delayed because it got mixed up with a fox hunt. Even in the Napoleonic wars there were thousands of families in England which lived remote from the struggle, and readers of Jane Austen's novels would not gather from their placid narrative that her country was involved in a European campaign. But between 1914 and 1918 every aspect of national life and every branch of national thought was organized for the purposes of the war. Hospitals sprang up in every town and in hundreds of country districts. Articles of food were controlled to release shipping for war purposes. The country enormously increased its own food supply, and some 4,000,000 acres of pasture were brought under tillage. The whole nation was rationed, so that rich and poor alike shared in the sacrifice. Schoolboys spent their holidays working on the land, and the women of Britain, in munition factories, in land work, and in a thousand other employments, made noble contribution to the common cause. In 1918 there were at least 1,500,000 more women working than before the war, and the tasks on which they were engaged were those which had hitherto been regarded as work which could only be performed by men.

PART VI.

VICTORY.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE LAST DAY.