“HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF”
A STUDY IN WAR BREAD (Published in the “Pall-Mall Gazette”)
Complaints are rife and bitter concerning the tough, indigestible, and injurious mixture permitted to the taxpaying public as “war bread.” General condemnation of Government flour has been expressed at a meeting of the London Master Bakers’ Protection Society, where a resolution was passed asking for an interview with the Prime Minister to point out the “ineptitude” of the Ministry of Food. Thousands of us are of the same mind with the Master Bakers! Thousands of us affirm the “ineptitude” of which they speak. Thousands of us know that a more lamentable display of ignorance concerning the “things that matter” could hardly be seen between now and the next world. Furthermore, the Master Bakers (God bless them!) have actually declared that if the Bread Order is not revoked or amended they, to safeguard the health of consumers, will be compelled to take “drastic action.” Well done, Master Bakers! The sooner this drastic action is effected the better for many ailing, suffering human creatures. The faddists and health specialists may talk as they will, nothing can satisfy the appetite or suit the palate of the average man and woman so well and so safely as bread made with pure white flour. The raw germ of wheat, though in a sense nutritious, exercises a “very deleterious effect,” so say the bakers, on the colour and keeping qualities of the loaf. In many cases “war bread” causes internal hæmorrhage, to say nothing of fermentative dyspepsia and severe inflammation of the delicate coating of one’s interior mechanism, and it would be easy to compile a volume of statistics proving the poisonous effect produced by this coarse stuff on our soldiers in hospital who are slowly recovering from gunshot wounds or shell shock, and who are peculiarly sensitive to the quality of their food. The distinguished muddlers who are muddling with the grain and the “milling” thereof, seem to judge the fine and complex human organism as somewhat tougher than shoe-leather and less liable to injury than pig-iron. But they are not the first of their class by any means! There were muddlers before them, as senseless, as callous, and as deaf to reason as they—men who, like themselves, were “dressed in a little brief authority” during that terrific upheaval of which the very name is ominous—the great French Revolution. Here is what Carlyle writes of the bread trouble in those days:—
“Complaints there are that the food is spoiled and produces an effect on the intestines, as well as ‘a smarting in the thoat and palate,’ which a municipal proclamation warns you to disregard or even to consider as drastic—beneficial! But ... the Mayor of Saint Denis, so black was his bread, has, by a dyspeptic populace, been hanged on ‘La Lanterne’ there!”
“La Lanterne” is not a pleasant theme to dwell upon, and we may be deeply thankful that we have something nowadays less ferocious than such a form of settling disputes between the people and their rulers—the great trade unions and protection societies, consolidated bodies of reasoning and reasonable men, who can, when necessity calls, take concerted action against Sentimental Cant and wilful Ignorance. For, to quote Carlyle again, “Is not Cant the materia prima of the Devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, and abnominations body themselves, from which no true thing can come?” And are not the Master Bakers, as well as the Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union, conscious of this Cant somewhere? Whether in pacifism or food-controlling, matters little, so long as they can put an exterminating finger on the spot!
Ours is a land of cranks; we produce cranks as quickly as untended grass grows plantains. We have peace cranks, food cranks, health cranks; and, without doubt, plenty of these will dash wildly into the open with hysterical hymns of praise for the utterly detestable “war bread,” more vigorously possibly when they think their fellow-creatures are being made ill by it. But “let ’em gnash as can,” as the toothless old dame blandly observed after hearing a sermon on hell where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Happily deprived of all ability to “gnash,” hell offered no alarms for her. Similarly, those whose powers of digestion cannot tolerate “war bread” will support the screams of whole-meal faddists with equanimity, saying, “Let ’em masticate as can.” If “whole-meal” gives strength and sustenance with hæmorrhage, most of us will prefer to be a little less strong and well-nourished, without internal bleedings. The complaints of the bread sold in Paris during the fateful months preceding the French Revolution are precisely the same as now; but, whatever the rising tide of discontent may be, we have bulwarks against it in our own people’s organisations, which bind the members of every trade together against any possible injustice or tyranny. This Empire has cause to be thankful for its vast network of trade unions; they are in very truth a governing body whose weight and importance cannot be over-estimated. And so it may be that the Master Bakers will be the saviours of the country’s health, despite Food Controllers and their ideas of “milling.” We are losing enough life, Heaven knows, on the fields of battle; we do not want illness and the spread of disease at home. We can be sparing and careful of grain and precious with our “white flour,” but we need not debilitate or poison our people with food which they cannot digest or which in any way proves injurious to women and children. Waste is encouraged by the making of bread which the people dislike. They would rather throw it away than suffer illness—which is very natural. The Food Controller is safe from “La Lanterne” in these days; but everybody will be glad if the London Master Bakers’ Society will take the matter well in hand and see to it that we need not “live on the husks which the swine did eat.” The country will not starve because we prefer to be well on white flour rather than dyspeptic on brown!
“SHODDY CHIVALRY”
A NAVAL CHADBAND (Published in the “Pall-Mall Gazette”)
So now we know! No longer need we denounce the “submarine menace”; no longer need we (as the German Press suggests) “grow pallid with fear,” for we are in “brave and gallant hands!” “Brave and gallant” are the noble creatures who sink hospital ships; “brave and gallant” are the sharers of dividends in the corpse-fat factory; “brave and gallant” are the raiders who sought to intercept the Prime Minister on his way back from France across Channel in order to make short work of him and his escort—“brave and gallant” are they all! Our own Vice-Admiral at Dover implied as much when, with all the unctuousness of Dickens’s immortal Mr. Chadband, he laid a wreath of flowers on the coffin of one of the Hun raiders with the inscription: “To a brave and gallant enemy!” He spared no wreath and offered no tribute to any of the dead among our own bluejackets, whose “brave and gallant” conduct had succeeded in beating off and sinking the enemy’s ships; they were “only” British sailors. But for the dead Huns, this British Vice-Admiral publicly displayed the tenderness of a twin brother. One wonders what Nelson would have said to such an action? How does it accord with the Defence of the Realm? One can imagine the noble dust of the victor of Trafalgar stirring for very shame at such a lack of dignity at the very time when British ships are being wickedly sunk and British lives wickedly lost by the nefarious “brave and gallant” brutality of an enemy with whom honour is a mere straw. It may perhaps be easier now to understand the rumours that these “brave and gallant” Huns are allowed to work with our men in British docks, where they watch our ships loaded with millions of munitions, and count up our troops leaving for the front, and then, without doubt, communicate with their kinsmen of the submarines, letting them know the hour and moment of departure! No wonder that our ships are sunk! Such methods prepare the way for their sinking. No action is taken by the authorities to put a stop to the inroad of German labour in the docks alongside of the British—a state of things which, on the face of it, invites and encourages spying and treachery. Such scandals are “an offence that’s rank, And smells to Heaven”; and the powers in office who allow them to go on without check are nearly as guilty of the loss of torpedoed ships and lives as the Huns themselves. And when a British Vice-Admiral sets the hall-mark of “brave and gallant” on even a dead specimen of the most treacherous, inhuman, and barbaric foe his country has ever had to contend with, we can hardly wonder at anything except the amazing excess of patience, wellnigh lethargy, with which the British people tolerate such an exhibition of Chadbandism in the Navy. One is thankful for the plain speaking of Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, who, in the House of Lords, designated this action as one of “maudlin sentimentality and shoddy chivalry.” There spoke the sturdy seaman and loyal Britisher, untainted by the pro-German measles, which infect only the degenerates of our race. The Vice-Admiral at Dover, by his openly displayed admiration for the Hun, would seem to wish us to understand that he is something neither British nor of the sea—“neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring.” We can almost hear him soliloquising over the flower-strewn coffin of the “brave and gallant” Hun: “My friend, you are to me a pearl, you are to me a diamond, you are to me a gem, you are to me a jewel! And why, my friend? Are you a beast of the field? No. A bird of the air? No. A fish of the sea or river? No. You are a Hun, my friend! You are much worse than any beast of the field; more voracious than any bird of the air; more slippery than any fish of the sea or river! Oh, how glorious to be a Hun! And if I went forth as far as the Southampton Docks and there saw a ‘brave and gallant’ fellow-countryman of yours taking stock of troops and munitions, and I was to come back and call unto me Sir Edward Carson and say unto him, ‘Lo the docks are barred against Huns,’ would that be terewth?”
No; it would not be “terewth”—unless, as the original Chadband propounded, such terewth, or truth, were another form of deception. Until we have loyal men “above suspicion” in authority at home we shall never satisfy our Allies abroad. America will be unable to understand a British Vice-Admiral laying flowers on the coffin of an enemy whose intent was, without doubt, to sink and slay a valuable life on which much of Britain’s welfare depends, any more than she will understand the collection of a large sum of money for the assistance of Germans in England (more than £17,000) to which liberal subscriptions have been made by two German members of the Privy Council. As Mark Twain observed during his tour in Palestine, “Blessed if I believe a turtle can sing!”