CHAPTER XI WATCHERS FOR THE DAWN
". . . If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk them on one turn of pitch and toss
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss ..."
Rudyard Kipling, "If."
I
On the 25th May a Coalition Government replaced the old Liberal Ministry under which I had served four years. A few people welcomed the change in hope that the direction of the war would be more vigorous and farsighted. Most of the men I met condemned the new departure, and the detached critics at the Club showed endless fertility in the inferences they drew and the tendencies they traced.
O'Rane had gone to Melton at the end of April, and my uncle and I, dropping back into our former mode of life, saw more of each other than when we had had a guest to entertain. The outbreak of war had infused a strong spirit of party loyalty into Bertrand, and, as the clouds of destructive criticism gathered round the doomed head of the Government, there was hardly a theory or rumour too extravagant for him to embrace. I remember his fiery indignation when the Coalition idea was first canvassed. At one moment the Opposition had broken the party truce and was being silenced by having its mouth filled with plunder: at another malcontent Liberal Ministers were clearing a way to the throne with the aid of assassins suborned from the enemy. The conspiracy—and as public nerves wore thin, conspiracies multiplied—in either case was worked out in minute and convincing detail with chapter and verse to support every count in the indictment. I find it unprofitable even to discuss his theory, because a generation must elapse before the essential diaries and memoirs are made public; and there will be enough guesswork and enough errors of recollection to correct even then. Also, I feel there will be a colourable pretext for revolution when the troops come home, if a hundredth part of the charges be proved to be based on truth.
Apart from the rank and file Liberals who felt the ground had been cut from under their feet, the commonest view was that the Coalition was a London journalistic triumph, desired of no man but foisted on the country by large headlines and hard leader-writing. Erckmann took me on one side in the smoking-room at the Club and laid his heart bare for my inspection. (His intricate and far-reaching business interests had somehow stopped short of newspaper proprietorship; and the 'Sentinel,' bantering him on his change of name, had harped with needless insistence on the wisdom of interning naturalized aliens.) In Erckmann's eyes, the Coalition was the latest thrill of a sensation-mongering Press. "These journalists aren't a Mudual Admiration Zociety, hein? They live by addág. Liberal Government no use: zed ub a Goalition. Goalition no good; zed ub a digdador, hein? Digdador no good, zed ub a Liberal Government. Always addág, addág. We're doo long-suffering, we English. If you pud one or doo edidors againsd a wall, pour encourager les audres, hein?"