Britain's Deadly Peril: Are We Told the Truth?

by William Le Queux

We are assured by the official inspirers of optimism that time is on the side of the Allies, and is working steadily against the Germans. In a sense, of course, this is true, but it is not the whole truth. I place not the slightest reliance upon the stories industriously circulated from German sources of Germany being short of food; all the evidence we can get from neutrals who have just returned from Germany condemns them in toto. The Germans are a methodical and far-seeing people, and no doubt they are very rightly looking ahead and prudently conserving their resources. But that there is any real scarcity of either food or munitions of war there is not a trace of reliable evidence, and those journals, one of which I have quoted, which delight to represent our enemy as being in a state of semi-starvation are doing a very bad service to our country. The Germans can unquestionably hold out for a very considerable time yet, and we are simply living in a fool's paradise if we try to persuade ourselves to the contrary. If it were true that Germany is really short of food, that our blockade was absolutely effective, and that no further supplies could reach the enemy until the next harvest, it might be true to say that time was on the side of the Allies. But supposing, as I believe, that the tales of food shortage have been deliberately spread by the Germans themselves with the very definite object of working upon the sympathies of the United States, what position are we in? Here, in truth, we come down to a position of the very deepest gravity. It is a position which affects the whole conduct and conclusion of the war, and which cannot fail to exercise the most vital influence over our future.

Speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet last November, Mr. Asquith said:

"We shall never sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until Belgium recovers in full measure all, and more than all, she has sacrificed; until France is adequately secure against the menace of aggression; until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed on an unassailable foundation; and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed."

Those noble words, in which the great soul of Britain is expressed in half a dozen lines, should be driven into the heart and brain of the Empire. For they are, indeed, a great and eloquent call to Britain to be up and doing. Four months later, Mr. Asquith repeated them in the House of Commons, adding:

"I hear sometimes whispers—they are hardly more than whispers—of possible terms of peace. Peace is the greatest of all blessings, but this is not the time to talk of peace. Those who do so, however excellent their intentions, are, in my judgment, the victims, I will not say of a wanton but a grievous self-delusion. The time to talk of peace is when the great purposes for which we and our Allies embarked upon this long and stormy voyage are within sight of accomplishment."

Every thinking man must realise the truth and force of what the Premier said. The question inevitably follows—are we acting with such swiftness and decision that we shall be in a position, before the opportunity has passed, to make those words good?

There is a steadily growing volume of opinion among men who are in a position to form a cool judgment that, partly for financial and partly for physical reasons, a second winter campaign cannot possibly be undertaken by any of the combatants engaged in the present struggle. If that view be well founded, it follows that peace on some terms or other will be concluded by October or November at the latest. We, more than any other nation, depend upon the issue of this war to make our existence, as a people and an Empire, safe for a hundred years to come. Have we so energetically pushed on the preparations that, by the time winter is upon us again, we shall, with the help of our gallant Allies, have dealt Germany such a series of crushing blows as to compel her to accept a peace which shall be satisfactory to us?

There, I believe, we have the question which it is vital for us to answer. If the answer is in the negative, I say, without hesitation, that time fights not with the Allies but with Germany. If, as many people think, this war must end somehow before the next winter, we must, by that time, either have crushed out the vicious system of Prussian militarism, or we must resign ourselves to a patched-up peace, which would be but a truce to prepare for a more terrible struggle to come. Despite our most heroic resolves, it is doubtful whether, under modern conditions of warfare, the money can be found for a very prolonged campaign.

I do not forget, of course, that the Allies have undertaken not to conclude a separate peace, and I have not the least doubt that the bargain will be loyally kept. But we cannot lose sight of the possibility that peace may come through the inability of the combatants to continue the war, which it is calculated will by the autumn have cost nine thousand millions of money. And we can take it for granted that the task of subduing a Germany driven to desperation, standing on the defensive, and fighting with the blind savagery of a cornered rat, is going to be a long and troublesome business. We are assured that the Allies can stand the financial strain better than Germany. Possibly; but the point is that no one knows just how much strain Germany can stand before she breaks, and in war it is only common prudence to prepare for the worst that can befall. This is precisely what we, most emphatically, are not doing to-day. Thanks to the reasons I have given—the chief of which is the unwarrantable official secrecy and the wholly unjustifiable "cooking" of the news—the British public is not yet fully aroused to the deadly peril in which the nation and the Empire stand.

The British people are, as they ever have been, slow of thought and slower of action. They need much rousing. And in the present war it is most emphatically true that the right way of rousing them has not been used. Smooth stories never yet fired British blood. Let an Englishman think things are going even tolerably well, and he is loth to disturb himself to make them go still better. But tell him a story of disaster, show him how his comrades fall and die in great fights against great odds: bring it home to his slow-working mind that he really has his back to the wall, and you fan at once into bright flame the smouldering pride of race and caste that has done, and will yet do, some of the greatest deeds that have rung in history. Is there, we may well ask, another race in the world that would have wrested such glory from the disaster at Mons? And the lads who fought the Germans to a standstill in the great retreat did so because the very deadliness of the peril that confronted them called out all that is greatest and noblest and most enduring in our national character.