The War on All Fronts: England's Effort / Letters to an American Friend

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

As to what we have got for our money, Parliament has authorised an Army of 4,000,000 men, and it is on the question of the last half million that England's Effort now turns. Mr. Asquith will explain everything that has been done, and everything that still remains to do, in camera to Parliament next Tuesday. But do not, my dear friend, make any mistake England will get the men she wants; and Labour will be in the end just as determined to get them as any other section of the Community. Meanwhile, abroad, while we seem, for the moment, in France to be inactive, we are in reality giving the French at Verdun just that support which they and General Joffre desire, and—it can scarcely be doubted—preparing great things on our own account. In spite of our failure in Gallipoli, and the anxious position of General Townshend's force, Egypt is no longer in danger of attack, if it ever has been; our sea-power has brought a Russian force safely to Marseilles; and the possibilities of British and Russian Collaboration in the East are rapidly opening out. As to the great and complex war-machine we have been steadily building up on French soil, as I tried to show in my fourth letter, whether in the supply bases, or in the war organisation along the ninety miles of front now held by the British Armies, it would indeed astonish those dead heroes of the Retreat from Mons—could they comes back to see it! We are not satisfied with it yet—hence the unrest in Parliament and the Press—we shall never be satisfied—till Germany has accepted the terms of the Allies. But those who know England best have no doubt whatever as to the temper of the nation which has so far "improvised the impossible," in the setting up of this machine, and means, in the end, to get out of it what it wants.

The temper of the nation? In this last letter let me take some samples of it. First—what have the rich been doing? As to money, the figures of the income-tax, the death-duties, and the various war loans are there to show what they have contributed to the State. The Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and the St. John's Ambulance Association have collected—though not, of course, from the rich only—close on 4,000,000 sterling (between $18,000,000 and $19,000,000), and the Prince of Wales Fund nearly 6,000,000 ($30,000,000). The lavishness of English giving, indeed, in all directions during the last two years, could hardly I think have been outdone. A few weeks ago I walked with the Duke of Bedford through the training and reinforcement camp, about fifteen miles from my own home in the country, which he himself commands and which, at the outbreak of war, he himself built without waiting for public money or War Office contractors, to house and train recruits for the various Bedfordshire regiments. The camp holds 1,200 men, and is ranged in a park where the oaks—still standing—were considered too old by Oliver Cromwell's Commissioners to furnish timber for the English Navy. Besides ample barrack accommodation in comfortable huts, planned so as to satisfy every demand whether of health or convenience, all the opportunities that Aldershot offers, on a large scale, are here provided in miniature. The model trenches with the latest improvements in plan, revetting, gun-emplacements, sally-ports, and the rest, spread through the sandy soil; the musketry ranges, bombing and bayonet schools are of the most recent and efficient type. And the Duke takes a keen personal interest in every man in training, follows his progress in camp, sees him off to the front, and very often receives him, when wounded, in the perfectly equipped hospital which the Duchess has established in Woburn Abbey itself. Here the old riding-school, tennis-court, and museum, which form a large building fronting the abbey, have been turned into wards as attractive as bright and simple colour, space, flowers, and exquisite cleanliness can make them. The Duchess is herself the Matron in charge, under the War Office, keeps all the records, is up at half past five in the morning, and spends her day in the endless doing, thinking, and contriving that such a hospital needs. Not very far away stands another beautiful country house, rented by Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid when they were in England. It also is a hospital, but its owner, Lord Lucas, not a rich man, has now given it irrevocably to the nation for the use of disabled soldiers, together with as much land as may suffice a farm colony chosen from among them. The beautiful hospital of 250 beds at Paignton, in North Devon, run entirely by women of American birth now resident in Great Britain, without any financial aid from the British Government, was another large country house given to the service of the wounded by Mr. Singer. Lady Sheffield's hospital for 25 beds at Alderley Park is an example of how part of a country house with all its green and restful surroundings may be used for those who have suffered in the war, and it has many fellows in all parts of England. Altogether about 700 country houses, large and small, have been offered to the War Office.

But money and houses are the very least part of what the old families, the rich manufacturers, or the educated class generally have offered to their country in this war. Democracy has gone far with us, but it may still be said that the young heir to a great name, to estates with which his family has been connected for generations, and to the accumulated "consideration" to use a French word in a French sense, which such a position almost always carries with it—has a golden time in English life. Difficulties that check others fall away from him; he is smiled upon for his kindred's sake before he makes friends for his own; the world is overkind to his virtues and blind to his faults; he enters manhood indeed as "one of our conquerors"; and it will cost him some trouble to throw away his advantages. Before the war such a youth was the common butt of the Socialist orator. He was the typical "shirker" and "loafer," while other men worked; the parasite bred from the sweat of the poor; the soft, effeminate creature who had never faced the facts of life and never would. As to his soldiering—the common profession of so many of his kind—that was only another offence in the eyes of politicians like Mr. Keir Hardie. When the class war came, he would naturally he found shooting down the workmen; but for any other war, an ignorant popinjay!—incompetent even at his own trade, and no match whatever for the scientific soldier of the Continent.

Those who knew anything of the Army were well aware long before 1914 that this type of officer—if he still existed, as no doubt he had once existed—had become extraordinarily rare; that since the Boer War, the level of education in the Army, the standard of work demanded, the quality of the relations between officers and men had all steadily advanced. And with regard to the young men of the "classes" in general, those who had to do with them, at school and college, while fully alive to their weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which were more instinct than anything else, as to what stuff these easy-going, sport-loving fellows might prove to be made of in case of emergency.

Well, the emergency came. These youths of the classes, heirs to titles and estates, or just younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, so far as it still survives, went out in their hundreds, with the old and famous regiments of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, and perished in their hundreds. Forty-seven eldest sons, heirs to English peerages had fallen within a year of the outbreak of war—among them the heirs to such famous houses as Longleat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby—and the names of Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, Douglas Pennant, Worsley, Hay, St. Aubyn, Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach—together with men whose fathers have played prominent parts in the politics or finance of the last half century. And the first ranks have been followed by what one might almost call a levée en masse of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassée, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever may be said henceforward of these "golden lads" of ours, "shirker" and "loafer" they can never he called again. They have died too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted them too well for that—and some of the working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have confessed it abundantly.

And the professional classes—the intellectuals—everywhere the leading force of the nation—have done just as finely, and of course in far greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May—in the height of the summer term, just at that moment when Oxford normally is at its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the "flannelled fools," who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe—if it ever applied to them—with interest. For they had all disappeared. They were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants—under age, or medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, showed boats indeed, but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college, Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associated in the minds of Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were white tents full of wounded. I walked up and down that wide, deserted lawn of St. John's, where Charles I once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are gone—so many!—and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did—as blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power."

Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the testimony of those who knew them best, not delightful to those who did not love them, not just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge, July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier. Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of April, 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and tragic joy of the "fighting man" in the spring, which may be his last—in the night heavens—in the woodland trees:

"The woodland trees that stand together
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridge's end.

"The kestrel hovering by day
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

"The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another
Brother, sing.'