making him feel perfectly safe when he would have been perfectly
helpless but for them.

I had often watched our own bluejackets at the same thing. They did
not grin--not when you were looking at them. Nor did the British.
Bluejackets are noted for their official politeness. I should like
to have heard their remarks--they have a gift for remarks--about
those invaders of their uniformed world in Scotch caps and other kinds
of caps and the different kind of clothes which tailors make for
civilians. Without any intention of eavesdropping, I did overhear one
asking another whence came these strange birds.

One knew the flagship by the admirals’ barges astern, as you know the
location of an army headquarters by its automobiles. It seemed in the
centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression. Where
its place would be in action is one of those secrets as important
to the enemy as the location of a general’s shell-proof shelter in
Flanders. Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other ship in
battle. If there is any one foolish question which one should not ask
it is this.

As one mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought one was
bound to think of another flagship in Portsmouth harbour, Nelson’s
_Victory_--at least, an American was. Probably an Englishman would
not indulge in such a commonplace. One would like to know how many
Englishmen had ever seen the old _Victory_. But, then, how many
Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?

It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a
first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not
leave any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself
as mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength--except in
the late fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France
a temporary lead on paper--ship after ship, through all the grades
of progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without
firing a shot in anger.

The _Victory_ was one landmark, or seamark, if you please, and this
flagship was another. Between the two were generations of officers and
men working through the change from stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes
and seaplanes, who had kept up to a standard of efficiency in view of
a test that never came. A year of war and still the test had not come,
for the old reason that England had superior strength. Her outnumbering
guns which had kept the peace of the seas still kept it.

All second nature to the Englishman this, as the defence of the immense
distances of the steppes to the Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall
and the Mississippi’s flow to the man in Kansas. But the American
kept thinking about it; and he wanted the Kansans to think about it,
too. A sentimentalist envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar Square,
with the one-armed figure turned toward the wireless skein on top of
the Admiralty Building when he went on board the flagship of Sir John
Jellicoe.

One first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago on the China coast, when
he was Chief of Staff to Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of
the Asiatic Squadron. Indeed, one was always hearing about Jellicoe.
He was the kind of man whom people talk about after they have met
him, which means personality. It was in China seas, you may remember,
that when a few British seamen were hard pressed in a fight that was
not ours that the phrase, “Blood is thicker than water,” sprang from
the lips of an American commander, who waited not on international
etiquette but went to the assistance of the British.

Nor will any one who was present in the summer of ’98 forget how Sir
Edward Chichester stood loyally by Admiral George Dewey, when the
German squadron was empire-fishing in the waters of Manila Bay, until
our Atlantic Fleet had won the battle of Santiago and Admiral Dewey
had received reinforcements and, east and west, we were able to look
after the Germans. The British bluejackets said that the rations of
frozen mutton from Australia which we sent alongside were excellent;
but the Germans were in no position to judge, as none was sent to them,
doubtless through an oversight in the detail of hospitality by one of
Admiral Dewey’s staff. No. Let us be officially correct. We happened to
run out of spare mutton after serving the British.

In the gallant effort of the Allied force of sailors to relieve the
legations against some hundreds of thousands of Boxers, Captain Bowman
McCalla and his Americans worked with Admiral Seymour and his Britons
in the most trying and picturesque thing of its kind in modern history.
McCalla, too, was always talking of Jellicoe, who was wounded on the
expedition; and Sir John’s face lighted at mention of McCalla’s name.
He recalled how McCalla had painted on the superstructure of the little
_Newark_ that saying of Farragut’s, “The best protection against an
enemy’s fire is a well-directed fire of your own”; which has been said
in other ways and cannot be said too often.

“We called McCalla Mr. Lead,” said Sir John; “he had been wounded so
many times and yet was able to hobble along and keep on fighting. I
corresponded regularly with him until his death.”

Beatty, too, was on that expedition; and he, too, was another
personality one kept hearing about. It seemed odd that two men, who
had played a part in work which was a soldier’s far from home, should
have become so conspicuous in the Great War. If on that day when,
with ammunition exhausted, all members of the expedition had given up
hope of ever returning alive, they had not accidentally come upon the
Shi-kou arsenal, one would not be commanding the Great Fleet and the
other its battle-cruiser squadron.

Before the war, I am told, when Admiralty lords and others who had the
decision to make were discussing who should command in case of war,
opinion ran something like this:

“Jellicoe! He has the brains!”

“Jellicoe! He has the health to endure the strain, with years enough
and not too many!”

“Jellicoe! He has the confidence of the service!”

The choice literally made itself. When any one is undertaking the
gravest responsibility which has been an Englishman’s for a hundred
years, that kind of a recommendation helps. He had the guns; he had
supreme command; he must deliver victory--such was England’s message
to him.

When I mentioned in a despatch that all that differentiated him from
the officers around him was the broader band of gold lace on his arm,
an English naval critic wanted to know if I expected to find him in
cloth of gold. No; nor in full dress with all his medals on, as I saw
him appear on the screen at a theatre in London.

Any general of high command must be surrounded by more pomp than an
admiral in time of action. A headquarters cannot have the simplicity
of the quarter-deck. The force which the general commands is not in
sight; the admiral’s is. You saw the commander and you saw what it was
that he commanded. Within the sweep of vision from the quarter-deck was
the terrific power which the man with the broad gold band on his arm
directed. At a signal from him it would move or it would stand still.
That command of Joshua’s if given by Sir John one thought might have
been obeyed.

One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred twelve-inch guns
and larger, which could carry a hundred tons and more of metal in a
single broadside for a distance of eighteen thousand yards! But do not
forget the little guns, bristling under the big guns like needles from
a cushion, which would keep off the torpedo assassins; or the light
cruisers, or the colliers, or the destroyers, or the 2,300 trawlers and
mine-layers, and what not, all under his direction. He had submarines,
too, double the number of the German. But with all the German
men-of-war in harbour, they had no targets. Where were they? One did
not ask questions that could not be answered. Waiting, as the whole
British fleet was waiting, for the Germans to show their heads, while
cruisers were abroad scouting the North Sea.

At the outset of the war the German fleet might have had one chance in
ten of getting a turn of fortune of its favour by an unexpected stroke
of strategy. This was the danger which Admiral Jellicoe had to guard
against. For in one sense, the Germans had the tactical offensive by
sea as well as by land; theirs the outward thrust from the centre. They
could choose when to come out of their harbour; when to strike. The
British had to keep watch all the time and be ready whenever the enemy
should come.

Thus, the British Grand Fleet was at sea in the early part of the war,
cruising here and there, begging for battle. Then it was that they
learned how to avoid the submarines and the mine-fields. Submarines
had played a greater part than expected, because Germany had chosen a
guerrilla naval warfare: to harass, to wound, to wear down. Doubtless
she hoped to reduce the number of British fighting units by attrition.

Weak England might be in plants for making arms for an army, but not
in ship-building. Here was her true genius. She was a maritime power;
Germany a land-power. Her part as an ally of France and Russia being to
command the sea, all demands of the Admiralty for material must take
precedence over demands of the War Office. At the end of the first year
she had increased her fighting power by sea to a still higher ratio of
preponderance over the Germans; in another year she would increase it
further.

Admiral von Tirpitz wanted nothing so much as to draw the British
fleet under the guns of Heligoland or into a mine-field and submarine
trap. But Sir John Jellicoe refused the bait. When he had completed his
precautions and his organisation to meet all new conditions, his fleet
need not go into the open. His Dreadnoughts could rest at anchor at a
base while his scouts kept in touch with all that was passing and his
auxiliaries and destroyers fought the submarines. Without a British
Dreadnought having fired a shot at a German Dreadnought, nowhere on the
face of the seas might a single vessel show the German flag except by
thrusting it above the water for a few minutes.

If von Tirpitz sent his fleet out he, too, might find himself in a
trap of mines and submarines. He was losing submarines and England was
building more. His naval force rather than Sir John’s was suffering
from attrition. The blockade was complete from Iceland to the North
Sea. While the world knew of the work of the armies, the care that
this task required, the hardships endured, the enormous expenditure of
energy, were all hidden behind that veil of secrecy which obviously
must be more closely drawn over naval than over army operations.

From this flagship the campaign was directed. One would think that many
offices and many clerks would be required. But the offices and the
clerks were at the Admiralty. Here was the execution. In a room perhaps
four feet by six was the wireless focus which received all the reports
and sent all the orders, with trim bluejackets at the keys. “Go!” and
“Come!” the messages were saying; they wasted no words. Officers of
the staff did their work in narrow space, yet seemed to have plenty of
room. Red tape is inflammable. There is no more place for it on board
a flagship prepared for action than for unnecessary woodwork.

At every turn the compression and the concentration of power were
like the guns and the decks cleared for action in their significant
directness of purpose. The system was planetary in its impressive
simplicity, the more striking as nothing that man has ever made is more
complicated or includes more kinds of machinery than a battleship. One
battleship was one unit, one chessman on the naval board.

Not all famous leaders are likeable, as every world traveller knows.
They all have the magnetism of force, which is quite another thing from
the magnetism of charm. What the public demands is that they shall win
victories, whether personally likeable or not. But if they are likeable
and simple and human in the bargain and a sailor besides--well, we
know what that means.

Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe is not a great man. It is not for a civilian
even to presume to judge. We have the word of those who ought to know,
however, that he is. I hope that he is, because I like to think that
great commanders need not necessarily appear formidable. Nelson refused
to be cast for the heavy part, and so did Farragut. It may be a sailor
characteristic. I predict that after this war is over, whatever honours
or titles they may bestow on him, the English are going to like Sir
John Jellicoe not alone for his service to the nation, but for himself.

Admiral Jellicoe is one with Captain Jellicoe, whose cheeriness even
when wounded kept up the spirits of the others on the Relief Expedition
of Boxer days. “He could do it, too!” one thought, having in mind
Sir David Beatty’s leap to the deck of a destroyer. Spare, of medium
height, ruddy, and fifty-seven. So much for the health qualification
which the Admiralty lords dwelt upon as important. After he had been
at sea for a year he seemed a human machine, much of the type of that
destroyer as a steel machine--a thirty-knot human machine, capable of
three hundred or five hundred revolutions, engines running smoothly,
with no waste energy, slipping over the waves and cutting through them;
a quick man, quick of movement, quick of comprehension and observation,
of speech and of thought, with a delightful self-possession--for there
are many kinds--which is instantly responsive with decision.

A telescope under his arm, too, as he received his guests. One
liked that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the
quarter-deck. One had a feeling that nothing could happen in all his
range of vision, stretching down the “avenues of Dreadnoughts” to the
light-cruiser squadron, and escape his attention. It hardly seems
possible that he was ever bored. Everything around him interests him.
Energy he has, electric energy in this electric age, this man chosen to
command the greatest war product of modern energy.

Fastened to the superstructure near the ladder to his quarters was a
new broom which South Africa had sent him. He was highly pleased with
that present; only the broom was von Tromp’s emblem, while Blake’s had
been the whip. Possibly the South African Dutchmen, now fighting on
England’s side, knew that he already had the whip and they wanted him
to have the Dutch broom, too.

He had been using both, and many other devices in his campaign against
von Tirpitz’ “_unter see_ boots,” which was illustrated by one of the
maps hung in his cabin. Quite different this from maps in a general’s
headquarters, with the front trenches and support and reserve trenches
and gun-positions marked in vari-coloured pencillings. Instantly a
submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John had word of it, and another
dot went down on the spot where it had been seen. In places the sea
looked like a pepper-box cover. Dots were plentiful outside the harbour
where we were; but well outside, like flies around sugar which they
could not reach.

Seeing Sir John among his admirals and guests one had a glimpse of the
life of a sort of mysterious, busy brotherhood. I was still searching
for an admiral with white hair. If there were none among these seniors,
then all must be on shore. Spirit, I think, that is the word; the
spirit of youth, of corps, of service, of the sea, of a ready, buoyant
definiteness--yes, spirit was the word to characterise them. Sir
John moved from one to another in his quick way, asking a question,
listening, giving a direction, his face smiling and expressive with a
sort of infectious confidence.

“He is the man!” said an admiral. I mean, several admirals and
captains said so. They seemed to like to say it. Whenever he
approached one noted an eagerness, a tightening of nerves. Natural
leadership expresses itself in many ways; Sir John gave it a sailor’s
attractiveness. But I learned that there was steel under his happy
smile; and they liked him for that, too. Watch out when he is not
smiling, and sometimes when he is smiling, they say.

For failure is never excused in that fleet, as more than one commander
knows. It is a luxury of consideration which the British nation cannot
afford by sea in time of war. The scene which one witnessed in the
cabin of the Dreadnought flagship could not have been unlike that of
Nelson and his young captains on the _Victory_, in the animation of
youth governed with only one thought under the one rule that you must
make good.

Splendid as the sight of the power which Sir John directed from his
quarter-deck while the ships lay still in their plotted moorings, it
paled beside that when the anchor chains began to rumble and, column
by column, they took on life slowly and majestically gaining speed one
after another turned toward the harbour’s entrance.

XXXI

SIMPLY HARD WORK

  England’s navy, the culmination of her brains and application--A
      perpetual war-footing--Pride of craft--The personnel behind
      the guns--Physique, health, conduct--Fate’s favourites in the
      trenches!--Gun practice--A miniature German Navy--The acme of
      efficiency--The British nation lives or dies with its navy--The
      prototype of our own Atlantic fleet.

Besides the simple word spirit, there is the simple word work. Take the
two together, mixing with them the proper quantity of intelligence, and
you have something finer than Dreadnoughts; for it builds Dreadnoughts,
or tunnels mountains, or wins victories.

In no organisation would it be so easy as in the navy to become slack.
If the public sees a naval review it knows that its ships can steam and
keep their formations; if it goes on board it knows that the ships are
clean--at least, the limited part of them which it sees. And it knows
that there are turrets and guns.

But how does it know that the armour of the turrets is good, or that
the guns will fire accurately? Indeed, all that it sees is the shell.
The rest must be taken on trust. A navy may look all right and be quite
bad. The nation gives a certain amount of money to build ships which
are taken in charge by officers and men who, shut off from public
observation, may do about as they please.

The result rests with their industry and responsibility. If they are
true to the character of the nation by and large that is all the
nation may expect; if they are better, then the nation has reason to be
grateful, Englishmen take more interest in their navy than Americans in
theirs. They give it the best that is in them and they expect the best
from it in return. Every youngster who hopes to be an officer knows
that the navy is no place for idling; every man who enlists knows that
he is in for no junket on a pleasure yacht. The British navy, I judged,
had a relatively large percentage of the brains and application of
Britain.

“It is not so different from what it was for ten years before the war,”
said one of the officers. “We did all the work we could stand then;
and whether cruising or lying in harbour, life is almost normal for us
to-day.”

The British fleet was always on a war footing. It must be. Lack of
naval preparation is more dangerous than lack of land preparation. It
is fatal. I know of officers who had had only a week’s leave in a year
in time of peace; their pay is less than our officers’. Patriotism kept
them up to the mark.

And another thing: Once a sailor, always a sailor, is an old saying;
but it has a new application in modern navies. They become fascinated
with the very drudgery of ship’s existence. They like their world,
which is their house and their shop. It has the attraction of a world
of priestcraft, with them alone understanding the ritual. Their drill
at the guns becomes the preparation for the great sport of target
practice, which beats any big game shooting when guns compete with
guns, with battle practice greater sport than target practice. Bringing
a ship into harbour well, holding her to her place in the formation,
roaming over the seas in a destroyer--all means eternal effort at the
mastery of material with the results positively demonstrated.

On one of the Dreadnoughts I saw a gun’s crew drilling with a dummy
six-inch, weight one hundred pounds.

“Isn’t that boy pretty young to handle that big shell?” an admiral
asked a junior officer.

“He doesn’t think so,” the officer replied. “We haven’t any one who
could handle it better. It would break his heart if we changed his
position.”

Not one of fifty German prisoners whom I had seen filing by over in
France was as sturdy as this youngster. In the ranks of an infantry
company of any army he would have been above the average of physique;
but among the rest of the gun’s crew he did appear slight. Need more be
said about the physical standard of the crews of the fighting ships of
the Grand Fleet?

One had an eye to more than guns and machinery and to more than the
character of the officers. He wanted to become better acquainted with
the personnel of the men behind the guns. They formed patches of blue
on the decks, as one looked around the fleet, against the background
of the dull, painted bulwarks of steel--the human element whose skill
gave the ships life--deep-chested, vigorous men in their prime, who
had the air of men grounded in their work by long experience. One noted
when an order was given out that it was obeyed quickly by one who knew
what he had to do because he had done it thousands of times.

There are all kinds of bluejackets, as there are all kinds of other
men. Before the war some took more than was good for them when on
shore; some took nothing stronger than tea; some enjoyed the sailor’s
privilege of growling; some had to be kept up to the mark sharply; an
occasional one might get rebellious against the merciless repetition of
drills.

The war imparted eagerness to all, the officers said. Infractions
of discipline ceased. Days pass without any one of the crew of a
Dreadnought having to be called up in default, I am told. And their
health? At first thought, one would say that life in the steel caves
of a Dreadnought would mean pasty complexions and flabby muscles. For
a year the crews had been the prisoners of that readiness which must
not lose a minute in putting to sea if von Tirpitz should ever try the
desperate gamble of battle.

After a turn in the trenches the soldiers can at least stretch their
legs in billets. A certain number of a ship’s company now and then get
a tramp on shore; not real leave, but a personally conducted outing
not far from the boats which will hurry them back to their stations
on signal. However, all that one needs to keep well is fresh air and
exercise. The blowers carry fresh air to every part of the ship; the
breezes which sweep the deck from the North Sea are fresh enough in
summer and a little too fresh in winter. There is exercise in the
regular drills, supplemented by setting-up exercises. The food is good
and no man drinks or eats what he ought not to, as he may on shore. So
there is the fact and the reason for the fact: the health of the men,
as well as their conduct, had never been so good.

“Perhaps we are not quite so clean as we were before the war,” said an
officer. “We wash decks only twice a week instead of every day. This
means that quarters are not so moist and the men have more freedom of
movement. We want them to have as much freedom as possible.”

Waiting, waiting, in such confinement for thirteen months; waiting for
battle! Think of the strain of it! The British temperament is well
fitted to undergo such a test, and particularly well fitted are these
sturdy seamen of mature years. An enemy may imagine them wearing down
their efficiency on the leash. They want a fight; naturally, they want
nothing quite so much. But they have the seaman’s philosophy. Old von
Tirpitz may come out and he may not. It is for him to do the worrying.
They sit tight. The men’s ardour is not imposed upon. Care is taken
that they should not be worked stale; for the marksman who puts a dozen
shots through the bull’s-eye had better not keep on firing, lest he
begin rimming it and get into bad habits.

Where an army officer has a change when he leaves the trench for his
billet, there is none for the naval officer, who, unlike the army
officer, is Spartan-bred to confinement. The army pays its daily toll
of casualties; it lies cramped in dugouts, not knowing what minute
extinction may come. The Grand Fleet has its usual comforts; it is safe
from submarines in a quiet harbour. Many naval officers spoke of this
contrast with deep feeling, as if fate were playing favourites, though
I have never heard an army officer mention it.

The army can give each day fresh proof of its courage in face of the
enemy. Courage! It takes on a new meaning with the Grand Fleet. The
individual element of gallantry merges into gallantry of the whole.
You have the very communism of courage. The thought is to keep a cool
head and do your part as a cog in the vast machine. Courage is as much
taken for granted as the breath of life. Thus, Cradock’s men, and von
Spee’s men, too, fought till they went down. It was according to the
programme laid out for each turret and each gun in a turret.

Smith, of the army, leads a bomb-throwing party from traverse to
traverse; Smith, of the navy, turns one lever at the right second. Army
gunners are improving their practice day by day against the enemy; all
the improving by navy gunners must be done before the battle. No sieges
in trenches; no attacks and counter-attacks: a decision within a few
hours--perhaps within an hour.

This partially explains the love of the navy for its work; its cheerful
repetition of the drills which seem such a wearisome business to
the civilian. The men know the reason of their drudgery. It is an
all-convincing bull’s-eye reason. Ping-ping! One heard the familiar
sound of subcalibre practice, which seems as out of proportion in a
fifteen-inch gun as a mouse squeak from an elephant whom you expect
to trumpet. As the result appears in subcalibre practice, so it is
practically bound to appear in target practice; as it appears in target
practice, so it is bound to appear in battle practice.

It was on the flagship that I saw a device which Sir John referred
to as the next best thing to having the Germans come out. He took as
much delight in it as the gun-pointers, who were firing at German
Dreadnoughts of the first line, as large as your thumb, which were
in front of a sort of hooded arrangement with the guns of a British
Dreadnought inside--the rest I censor myself before the regular censor
sees it. When we heard a report like that of a small target rifle
inside the arrangement a small red or a small white splash rose from
the metallic platter of a sea. Thus the whole German navy has been
pounded to pieces again and again. It is a great game. The gun-pointers
never tire of it and they think they know the reason as well as anybody
why von Tirpitz keeps his Dreadnoughts at home.

But elsewhere I saw some real firing; for ships must have their regular
target practice, war or no war. If those cruisers steaming across the
range had been sending six- or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have
preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas. Flashes from
turrets indistinguishable at a distance from the neutral-toned bodies
of the vessels and the shells struck, making great splashes just beyond
the target, which was where they ought to go.

A familiar scene, but with a new meaning when the time is one of war.
So far as my observation is worth anything, it was very good shooting,
indeed. One broadside would have put a destroyer out of business as
easily as a “Jack Johnson” does for a dugout; and it would have made a
cruiser of the same class as the one firing pretty groggy--this not
from any experience of being on a light cruiser or any desire to be on
one when it receives such a salute. But it seems to be waiting for the
Germans any time that they want it.

Oh, that towed square of canvas! It is the symbol of the object of all
building of guns, armour, and ships, all the nursing in dry dock, all
the admiral’s plans, all the parliamentary appropriations, all the
striving on board ship in man’s competition with man, crew with crew,
gun with gun, and ship with ship. One had in mind some vast factory
plant where every unit was efficiently organised; but that comparison
would not do. None will. The Grand Fleet is the Grand Fleet.

Ability gets its reward as in the competition of civil life. There
is no linear promotion indulgent to mediocrity and inferiority which
are satisfied to keep step and harassing to those whom nature and
application meant to lead. Armchairs and retirement for those whose
inclinations run that way; the captain’s bridge for those who are fit
to command. Officers’ records are the criterion when superiors come
to making promotions. But does not outside influence play a part? you
ask. If professional conscience is not enough to prevent this, another
thing appears to be: that the British nation lives or dies with its
navy. Besides, the British public has said to all and sundry outsiders:
“Hands off the navy!” All honour to the British public, much criticised
and often most displeased with its servants and itself, for keeping its
eye on that canvas square of cloth!

The language on board was the same as on our ships; the technical
phraseology practically the same; we had inherited British traditions.
But a man from Kansas and a man from Dorset live far apart. If they
have a good deal in common they rarely meet to learn that they have.
But seamen do meet and share a fraternity which is more than that of
the sea. Close one’s eyes to the difference in uniform, discount the
difference in accent, and one imagined that he might be with our North
Atlantic fleet.

The same sort of shop talk and banter in the wardroom, which trims
and polishes human edges; the same fellowship of a world apart.
Securely ready the British fleet waits. Enough drill and not too
much; occasional visits between ships; books and newspapers and a
light-hearted relaxation of scattered conversation in the mess. One
wardroom had a thirty-five-second record for getting past all the
pitfalls in the popular “Silver Bullet” game, if I remember correctly.

XXXII

HUNTING THE SUBMARINE

  Seaplanes afloat and on high--Diabolical bombs--Sighting a
      submarine--The chase--Submarine defences--Torpedo boats at
      home--The mine sweepers--Patience in the cold of the North Sea.

Seaplanes cut practice circles over the fleet and then flew away on
their errands, to be lost in the sky beyond the harbour entrance. With
their floats, they were like ducks when they came to rest on the water,
sturdy and a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army
planes, soaring to higher altitudes.

The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with
the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird at
rest after its engines stopped and a dead thing, it was lifted on board
its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.

On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious, one-time
popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it for its
mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades where people
had lounged during the voyage, and bombs in place of deck quoits and
dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course, one was shown the
different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators exhibit them with the
pride of a collector showing his porcelains. Every time they seem to me
to have grown larger and more diabolical. Where will aerial progress
end? Will the next war be fought by forces that dive and fly like fish
and birds?

“I’d like to drop that hundred-pounder onto a Zeppelin!” said one of
the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it.
Also Fritz, of the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man’s
wings above the water.

Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet to
another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An
aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel
much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic
ripple and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes
have located him they can tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it
is known that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight
of and seen again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and
the hunters, keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here
and there on the lookout for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes
altogether. It is a tireless game of hide-and-seek, like that of
gunnery at the front. Naval ingenuity has invented no end of methods
and no end of experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval
secrets, these. Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to
avoid.

Very thin the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its
machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or
a large cargo of explosive to dent that skin beyond repair. It being
in the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hunter know when he
has struck a mortal blow? If oil and bubbles come up for sometime in
one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then,
it does not require a nautical mind to realise that by casting about
on the bottom with a grapnel you will learn if an object with the bulk
and size of a submarine is there. Admirals accept no guesswork from the
hunters about their exploits; they must bring the brush to prove the
kill.

With Admiral Crawford I went to see the submarine defences of a
harbour. It reminded one of the old days of the drawbridge to the
castle, when a friend rode freely in and an enemy might try to swim the
moat and scale the walls if he pleased.

“Take care! There is a tide here!” the coxswain was warned, lest the
barge get into some of the troubles meant for Fritz. “A cunning fellow,
Fritz. We must give him no openings.”

The openings appear long enough to permit British craft, whether
trawlers, or flotillas, or cruisers, or battleships, to go and come.
Lying as close together as fish in a basket, I saw at one place a
number of torpedo boats home from a week at sea.

“Here to-day and gone to-morrow,” said an officer. “What a time they
had last winter! You know how cold the North Sea is--no, you cannot,
unless you have been out in a torpedo boat dancing the tango in the
teeth of that bitter wind, with the spray whipping up to the tops
of the smoke-stacks. In the dead of night they would come into this
pitch-dark harbour. How they found their way is past me. It’s a trick
of those young fellows, who command.”

Stationary they seemed now as the quay itself; but let a signal speak,
an alarm come, and they would soon be as alive as leaping porpoises.
The sport is to those who scout and hunt. But, again, do not forget
those who watch, those who keep the blockade, from the Channel to
Iceland, and those trawlers who plod over plotted sea-squares with the
regularity of mowing machines cutting a harvest, on their way back and
forth sweeping up mines. They were fishermen before the war and are
fishermen still. Night and day they keep at it. They come into the
harbours stiff with cold, thaw out, and return to hardships which would
make many a man prefer the trenches. Tributes to their patient courage,
which came from the heart, were heard on board the battleships.

“It is when we think of them,” said an officer, “that we are most eager
to have the German fleet come out, so that we can do our part.”

XXXIII

THE FLEET PUTS TO SEA

  The test of perfect motion--Is the fleet bottled by submarines?--
      The message arrives--The sea-march of dull-toned unadorned
      power--Destroyers in the van--The majestic procession of
      battleships--The secret in sheer hard work--The sea-lion on
      the hunt--The “old” Dreadnought--The exotic Turk--An hour and
      still passing--Irresistible power--Visualizing the whole globe,
      safe behind that fleet--Back in London--The Zeppelin’s pitiable
      target--Meaning of British dominion--A German comparison.

There is another test besides that of gun drills and target practice
which reflects the efficiency of individual ships, and the larger the
number of ships the more important it is. For the business of a fleet
is to go to sea. At anchor it is in garrison rather than on campaign,
an assembly of floating forts. Navies one has seen which seemed
excellent when in harbour, but when they started to get under way the
result was hardly reassuring. Some erring sister fouled her anchor
chain; another had engine room trouble; another lagged for some other
reason; there was fidgeting on the bridges. Then one asked, What if a
summons to battle had come?

Our own officers were authority enough for me that the British had no
superiors in any of the tests. But strange reports dodged in and out of
the alleys of pessimism in the company of German insistence that the
_Tiger_ and other ships which one saw afloat had been sunk. Was the
fleet really held prisoner by fear of submarines? If it could go and
come freely when it chose, the harbour was the place for it while it
waited. If not, then, indeed, the submarine had revolutionised naval
warfare. Admiral Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he
could ever go into action against von Tirpitz.

“Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!” I kept thinking
while I was with the fleet. “Oh, to see all those monsters on the move!”

A vain wish it seemed, but it came true. A message from the Admiralty
arrived while we were on the flagship. Admiral Jellicoe called his flag
secretary, spoke a word to him, which was passed in a twinkling from
flagship to squadron and division and ship. He made it as simple as
ordering his barge alongside, this sending of the Grand Fleet to sea.

From the bridge of a destroyer beyond the harbour entrance we saw it
go. I shall not attempt to describe the spectacle, which convinced
me that language is the vehicle for making small things seem great
and great things seem small. If you wish words invite splendid and
magnificent and overwhelming and all the reliable old friends to
come forth in glad apparel from the dictionary. Personally, I was
inarticulate at sight of that sea march of dull-toned, unadorned power.

First came the outriders of majesty, the destroyers; then the graceful
light cruisers. How many destroyers has the British navy? I am only
certain that it has not as many as it seems to have, which would mean
thousands. Trying to count them is like trying to count the bees in the
garden. You cannot keep your eye on the individual bees. You are bound
to count some twice, so busy are their manœuvres.

“Don’t you worry, great ladies!” one imagined the destroyers were
saying to the battleships. “We will clear the road. We will keep watch
against snipers and assassins.”

“And if any knocks are coming, we will take them for you, great
ladies!” said the cruisers. “If one of us went down, the loss would not
be great. Keep your big guns safe to beat other battleships into scrap.”

For you may be sure that Fritz was on the watch in the open. He always
is, like the highwayman hiding behind a hedge and envying people who
have comfortable beds. Probably from a distance he had a peek through
his periscope at the Grand Fleet before the approach of the policeman
destroyers made him duck beneath the water; and probably he tried
to count the number of ships and identify their classes in order to
take the information home to Kiel. Besides, he always has his fingers
crossed. He hopes that some day he may get a shot at something more
warlike than a merchant steamer or an auxiliary; only that prospect
becomes poorer as life for him grows harder. Except a miracle happened,
the steaming fleet, with its cordons of destroyers, is as safe from him
as from any other kind of fish.

The harbour which is the fleet’s home is landlocked by low hills. There
is an eclipse of the sun by the smoke from the ships getting under way;
streaming, soaring columns of smoke on the move rise above the skyline
from the funnels of the battleships before they appear in sight around
a bend. Indefinite masses as yet they are, under their night-black
plumes. Each ship seems too immense to respond to any will except its
own. There is something automatic in the regularity with which, one
after another, they take the bend, as if a stop watch had been held
on twenty thousand tons of steel for a second’s variation. As they
approach they become more distinct and, showing less smoke, there seems
less effort. Their motive-power seems inherent, perpetual.

There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make
a destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its
existence. It is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor
truck. They plough through it.

Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite safe.
An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track. Mast in
line with mast, they held the course with a majestic steadiness. Now
the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the same spot, as
if it were marked by the grooves of tires in a road, the others make
it. Any variation of speed between them would have been instantly
noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the distance between
bows and sterns did not change. A line of one length would do for each
interval so far as one could discern. It was difficult to think that
they were not attached to some taut moving cable under water. How could
such apparently unwieldy monsters, in such a slippery element as the
sea, be made to obey their masters with such fine precision?

The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine
room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in manœuvring
in all weathers, which are kept up with tireless practice.

Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that
this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is
the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus
you have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be
no cessation in the striving.

“Look at that!” exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. “They better try
another painting on her and see if they can’t do better.”

Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun’s rays,
strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought’s side
made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she seemed as
colossal to the eye as to the thought.

“But look, now!” said another officer. She was out of the patch and
seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea-haze.

“You can’t have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea,
I suppose!” muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride
that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even for a
moment.

The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for
the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags
at a review at Spithead the battleships seemed out of their element;
giants trying for a fairy’s part. Display is not for them. It ill
becomes them, as a pink ribbon on a bulldog. Irresistibly ploughing
their way they presented a picture of resolute utility--guns and
turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was visible on board. The
crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets, give the range, lay
the sights on the enemy’s ships, and the battle was on.

“There is the old Dreadnought,” said an officer.

The _old_ Dreadnought--all of ten years of age, the senile old thing!
What a mystery she was when she was building! The mystery accentuated
her celebrity--and almost forgotten now, while the _Queen Elizabeth_
and the _Warspite_ and others of their class with their fifteen-inch
guns would be in the public eye as the latest type till a new type
came. A parade of naval types was passing. One seemed to shade into the
other in harmonious effect.

But here was an outsider, whom one noted instantly as he studied those
rugged silhouettes of steel and counted guns. She had been a Turk.
As the Turks were going to have only one battleship, they were not
bothered about squadron homogeneity. They piled turret on turret,
twelve twelve-inch guns in exotic array. She was finished and the Turks
were already on board to take her home when the war began. But British
law requires that any foreign man-of-war building in English shipyards
may be taken over for her cost in case of war. So England kept the
ship, which the Turks, I understand, thought was hardly a sporting
thing to do.

One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts--even a
squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of
its might. Sixteen--twenty--twenty-four--it was the unending numbers
of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour
passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes behind the
wind screen of the destroyer’s bridge, only to look back and see more
Dreadnoughts going by. One had not realised that there were so many in
the harbour. He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror
who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.

The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea,
and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever;
still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King Edward
VII class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the
pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet
to come. One’s eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps march through
Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they had seen the
whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in
sea-power and in land-power, too.

The destroyer commander looked at his watch.

“Time!” he said. “I’ll put you on shore.”

He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the
engine room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an
hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at
twenty knots towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.

One’s imagination sped across seas where he had cruised into harbours
that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to
visualise the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and a
thumbmark in the centre of Europe. Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney,
Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San
Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them where
countless millions dwell were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.

Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with
its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual
freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and
as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city!
From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight’s play,
the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was
dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot was fired at
those sturdy men behind armour.

When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers
fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and
open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations
of von Tirpitz glorying in the torpedoing of a _Lusitania_ with the
quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of
conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-power
to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and
children would use that power if they had it.

XXXIV

MANY PICTURES

  The aviation grounds--Arabian Nights’ heroes and their magic
      carpets--Corps’ spirit--A chivalric custom--Billeting in
      French houses--Well-disciplined guests--Teaching the art of
      war--Picturesque tribesmen from India--Their loyalty--British
      justice--Matins and Angelus--Farming without men--The peasants
      win--Greeting the French troops--Sir John French on duty--
      “Inspecting and disinfecting”--The new “shilling a day” men--
      Albert Edward, the “willing prince”--Care of the wounded.

A single incident, an impression photographic in its swiftness, a
chance remark, may be more illuminating than a day’s experiences. One
does not need to go to the front for them. Sometimes they come to the
gateway of our château. They are pages at random out of a library of
overwhelming information.

One of the aviation grounds is not far away. Look skyward at almost any
hour of the day and you will see a plane, its propeller a roar or a hum
according to its altitude. Sometimes it is circling in practice; again,
it is off to the front. At break of day the planes appear; in the
gloaming they return to roost.

If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in
the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an
hour and may be at home for dinner without getting any dust on his
clothes or having to bother with military red tape at steamer gangways
or customs houses.

The airmen are a type, with certain marked characteristics. No nervous
man is wanted, and it is time for an aviator to take a rest at the
first sign of nerves. They seem shy and diffident, men of the kind
given to observation rather than to talking; men accustomed to using
their eyes and hands. It is difficult to realise that some quiet young
fellow, who is pointed out, has had so many hairbreadth escapes. What
tales, worthy of Arabian Nights’ heroes who are borne away on magic
carpets, they bring home, relating them as matter-of-factly as if they
had broken a shoelace.

Up in their seats, a whir of the motor, and they are off on another
adventure. They shy at mention of their names in print, for that is
not good for the spirit of corps of this newest branch in the service
of war. Anonymity is absolute. Everything is done by the corps for
the corps. Possibly because it is so young, because it started with
chosen men, the British Aviation Corps is unsurpassed; but partly it is
because of the British temperament, with that combination of coolness
and innate love of risk which the British manner sometimes belies.

Something of the old spirit of knighthood characterises air service. It
is individual work; its numbers are relatively few. I like one of the
aviation customs, not for its chivalry alone, but because it makes one
feel more kindly toward the Germans. If a German aviator has to descend
in the British lines, whether from motor trouble or because he is
winged by an anti-aircraft gun, a British aviator flies over the German
lines and drops a “message-bag” with long streamers telling whether the
unfortunate one is dead or alive, and the Germans do the same.

Some mornings ago I saw several young soldiers with notebooks going
about our village street. They were from the cadet school where
privates, from the trenches, take a course and return with chocolate
drops on their sleeve-bands as commissioned officers. This was a
course in billeting. For ours is not an army in tents, but one living
in French houses and barns. The pupils were learning how to carry out
this delicate task; for delicate it is. A stranger speaking another
language becomes the guest of the host for whom he is fighting. Mr.
Atkins receives only shelter; he supplies his own meals. His excess of
marmalade one sees yellowing the cheeks of the children in the family
where he is at home. Madame objects only to his efforts to cook in her
kitchen; womanlike, she would rather handle the pots and pans herself.

Tommy is thoroughly instructed in his duty as guest and under a
discipline that is merciless so far as conduct toward the population
goes; so the two get on better than French and English military
authorities feared that they might. Time has taught them to understand
each other and see that difference in race does not mean absence of
human qualities in common, though differently expressed. Many armies
I have seen, but never one better behaved than the British army in
France and Flanders in its respect for property and the rights of the
population.

And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we
hear the t-r-r-t of a machine gun at a machine-gun school about a mile
distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in
the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools within sound of
the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army in the midst of
war, with the teachers bringing their experience from the battle-line.

“Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass,” wrote a Sikh
soldier home, “and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land.”

Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gherwalis, the
brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey,
bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war. Aeroplanes
interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for drawing water.
They would watch that for hours.

Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge and
all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was
homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers or
the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is
the secret of the American’s nervous energy. It seemed to me that it
was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the
year, let alone fighting Germans.

Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us
came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought
on foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life
of true equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit
defiant of the weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward
the reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East
passed by, every one seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his
uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French barns.

One asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay into
resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders winter?
What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to fight for
England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans appeared occasional
white faces. These were the men; these the force.

The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they
did in that climate, but that they fought at all. What welcome summer
brought from their gleaming black eyes! July or August could not be too
hot for them. On a plateau one afternoon I saw them having a _gymkana_.
It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had few holidays,
indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who came from the
neighbourhood. Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days before the
British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen galloped across
the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the ground and impaling
tent pegs on their lances. The French peasants clapped their hands and
the British Indian officers said, “Good!” when the performer succeeded,
or, “Too bad!” when he failed.

If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they
said: “We try to be fair to the natives!” which means that they are
just and even-tempered. An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British
Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit but yet holds together
for that very reason. Imperial weight may have interfered with British
adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the
Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know how
to rule.

That church bell across the street from our château begins its clangour
at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old men to the
fields in harvest time. But its peals carrying across the farmlands are
softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in the evening. In
the morning its peal in their ears tells them that the day is long and
they have much to do before dark. After that thought I never complained
because it robbed me of my sleep. I felt ashamed not to be up and doing
myself, and worked with a better spirit.

“Will they do it?”

We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days
as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to
get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside
information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker
that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said
that France would go on fighting till the German was beaten, just as
the old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell
was clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question of
finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had more
money than they knew what to do with--as Europeans universally think,
only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the distribution--
and if they would loan the Allies some of their spare billions, Germany
was surely beaten.

A busy man the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading chestnut
tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing American reapers
and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly and saved the day. But
not all farmers felt that they could afford the charge. These kept
at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets of gold
waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble, and great
conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the stray stems
left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense bouquets of
wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or three loaves of the
_pain de ménage_ that the baker sold. So the peasants did it; they won;
and this was some compensation for the loss of Warsaw.

One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual. But
these were French troops in the British zone, _en route_ from somewhere
in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a person left in
any house in that village. Everybody was out, with affection glowing in
their eyes. For these were their own--their soldiers of France.

When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pass
you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it may
be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a glimpse of
a man with a square chin and a drooping white moustache, who is the
sole one among the hundreds of thousands at the British front who wears
the crossed batons of a field marshal.

It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander,
though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the
private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of
flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when the
trench line remains stationary. He goes here and there on inspections.
It is the only way that a modern leader may let his officers and men
know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a name signed to
reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew had a surprise when
resting in a field waiting for orders. They suddenly recognised in a
figure coming through an opening in a hedge the supreme head of the
army in France. There was no need of a call to attention. The effect
was like an electric shock, which sent every man to his place and made
his backbone a steel rod. Those crossed batons represented a dizzy
altitude to that battery which had just come out from England. Sir John
walked up and down, looking over men and guns after their nine months’
drill at home, and said, “Very good!” and was away to other inspections
where he might not necessarily say, “Very good!”

Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is
drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a short
speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform for the
speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was enough. It was
the end of such platforms erected for him.

“Inspections! They are second nature to us!” said a new army man. “We
were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected and inspected
out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the general’s own
fault if it isn’t found out. When a general is not inspecting, some man
from the medical corps is disinfecting.”

Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three
days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing
twenty men and one officer; for this is chalked on the door. Before
they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of
their voices is pleasant.

A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The
battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of those
officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This is the
limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on its arm. The sergeant
major was an old regular, the knowing backbone of the battalion, which
had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters and then how to
spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of those impressive red
caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore it went slowly up and
down the line, front and rear, examining rifles and equipment, while
the young officers and the old sergeant were hoping that Jones or Smith
hadn’t got some dust in his rifle-barrel at the last moment.

Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and labourers,
the new army is like the army of France, composed of all classes. One
evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a battalion quartered
in the village, who were seated beside the road. Both came from
Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the other an architect.
They were “bunkies,” pals, chums.

“When did you enlist?” I asked.

“In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was
our duty, then. But we’ve been a long time arriving.”

“How do you like it?”

“We are not yet masters of the language, we find,” said the
schoolmaster, “though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it.”

“I’m learning the gestures fast, though,” said the architect.

“The French are glad to see us,” said the schoolmaster. “They call us
the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming.
But now we are here, I think they will find that we can hold up our
end.”

They had the fresh complexions which come from healthy, outdoor work.
There was something engaging in their boyishness and their views. For
they had a wider range of interests than that professional soldier,
Mr. Atkins, these citizens who had taken up arms. They knew what
trench-fighting meant by work in practice trenches at home.

“Of course it will not be quite the same; theory and practice never
are,” said the schoolmaster.

“We ought to be well-grounded in the principles,” said the architect--
imagine the average Mr. Atkins talking in such language!--“and they
say that in a week or two of actual experience you will have mastered
the details that could not be taught in England. Then, too, having
shells burst around you will be strange at first. But I think our
battalion will give a good account of itself, sir. All the Bucks men
have!” There crept in the pride of regiment, of locality, which is so
characteristically Anglo-Saxon.

They change life at the front, these new army men. If a carpenter, a
lawyer, a sign-painter, an accountant, is wanted, you have only to
speak to a new army battalion commander and one is forthcoming--a
millionaire, too, for that matter, who gets his shilling a day for
serving his country. Their intelligence permitted the architect and
the schoolmaster to have no illusions about the character of the war
they had to face. The pity was that such a fine force as the new army,
which had not become trench stale, could not have a free space in which
to make a great turning movement, instead of having to go against that
solid battle-front from Switzerland to the North Sea.

We have heard enough--quite enough for most of us--about the German
Crown Prince. But there is also a prince with the British army in
France. No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in the
Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others when
you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk smoking a
briar-wood pipe. There are some officers who would rather not accompany
him on his walks, for he can go fast and far. He makes regular reports
of his observations, and he has opportunities for learning which
other subalterns lack, for he may have both the staff and the army
as personal instructors. Otherwise, his life is that of any other
subaltern; for there is an instrument called the British Constitution
which regulates many things. A little shy, very desirous to learn, is
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great Britain and
Ireland and the Empire of India. He might be called the willing prince.

This was one of the shells that hit--one of the hundred that hit. The
time was summer; the place, the La Bassée region. Probably the fighting
was all the harder here because it is so largely blind. When you cannot
see what an enemy is doing you keep on pumping shells into the area
which he occupies; you take no risks with him.

The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La Bassée
region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when promenading
in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the land is the
overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward and rows of
poplar trees along the level and a hedge, a grove, a cottage, or trees
and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts
timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That “hot corner”
is all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which
run back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while
shrapnel trims the hedges.

A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an _estaminet_ which
had escaped destruction by shells, and above the door was chalked some
lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the
wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded men.
Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and one a bandage
around his arm. They had been stunned, which was only natural when you
have been as close as they had to a shell-burst--a shell that made a
hit. The concussion was bound to have this effect.

A third man was the best illustration of shell destructiveness. Bullets
make only holes. Shells make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a
bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst wound
was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak, with a sort
of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had hit his leg
had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would have been
killed instantly. He was an illustration of how hard it is to kill a
man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them strike in
the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had whispered
the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten the German
shell, after all.

Returning by the same road by which we came a motor car ran swiftly
by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the
big painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where
the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier
boot-soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into
place at the _estaminet_ by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical
corps men.

Only one ambulance, dust-covered, of the colour of the road itself came
along, clear of any blast of shells; nothing at the front sends the
same chill down the spine as the thought of a man wounded by a shell
being hit a second time by a shell. It rarely happens, so prompt and so
shrewd is the work of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Before we reached the village the ambulance passed us on the way back
to the _estaminet_. Very soon after the shell-burst, a telephone bell
had rung down the line from the extreme front calling for an ambulance
and stating the number of men hit, so that everybody would know what
to prepare for. At the village, which was outside the immediate danger
zone, was another clearing station. Here the stretchers were taken into
a house--taken without a jolt by men who were specialists in handling
stretchers--for any redressing if necessary, before another ambulance
started them on a journey, with motor trucks and staff automobiles
giving right of way, to a spotless white hospital ship which would take
them home to England the next night.

It had been an incident of life at the front and of the organisation
of war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a
great city.

XXXV

BRITISH PROBLEMS

  The people behind an army--Military traditions--The “regulars” at
      Mons--Our ideas of conscription--British pride of regiment--
      Our West Point system--Sandhurst and the German system--Martial
      team-play an instinct--The gallant British Expeditionary Force--
      A perfect instrument--Mr. Thomas Atkins, hero--England after
      the Marne--Empire-wide problems--The first year wastage--
      Making a new army--Kitchener the man--Characteristics of the
      British--The last battle that counts--The recruiting--Free
      institutions versus a feudal socialistic organisation--“Putting
      their backs into it”--The British type persists--Freedom or
      “verboten” on every street corner?--England’s sturdiest blows
      yet to come.

Throughout the summer of 1915 the world was asking, What about the
new British army? Why was it not attacking at the opportune moment
when Germany was throwing her weight against Russia? A facile answer
is easy; indeed, facile answers are always easy. Unhappily, they
are rarely correct. None that was given in this instance was, to my
mind. They sought to put a finger on one definite cause; again, on an
individual or a set of individuals.

The reasons were manifold; as old as Waterloo, as fresh as the
last speech in Parliament. They were inherent in the Anglo-Saxon
race. Whoever raised a voice and said, This, or that, or you, are
responsible! should first have looked into his own mind and into the
history of his race and then into a mirror. Least of all should any
American have been puzzled by the delay.

“Oh, we should have done better than that--we are Americans!” I hear
my countrymen say. Perhaps we should. I hope so; I believe so. The
British public thought that they were going to do better; military men
were surprised that they did as well.

Along with laws and language we have inherited our military ideas from
England. In many qualities we are different--a distinct type; but
in nothing are we more like the British than in our attitude toward
the soldier and toward war. The character of any army reflects the
character of its people. An army is the fist; but the muscle, the
strength of the physical organism behind the blow in the long run
belong to the people. What they have prepared for in peace they receive
in war, which decides whether they have been living in the paradise of
a fool or of a wise man.

As a boy I was brought up to believe, as an inheritance of the American
Revolution, that one American could whip two Englishmen and five or
six of any other nationality, which made the feathers of the eagle
perched on the national escutcheon look glossy. It was a satisfying
sort of faith. Americans had never tried five or six of any first-class
fighting race; but that was not a thought which occurred to me. As we
had won victories over the English and the English had whipped the
French at Waterloo, the conclusion seemed obvious.

English boys, I understand, also had been brought up to believe that
one Englishman could whip five or six men of any other nationality,
but, I take it for granted, only two Americans. This clothed the
British lion with majesty, while the lower ratio of superiority over
Americans returned the compliment in kind from the sons of the lion to
the sons of the eagle.

After I began to read history for myself and to think as I read, I
found that when British and Americans had met, the generals on either
side were solicitous about having superior forces, and in case of odds
of two to one they made a “strategic retreat.” When either side was
beaten, the other always explained that he was overcome by superior
numbers, though perhaps the adversary had not more than ten or fifteen
per cent. advantage. Then I learned that the British had not whipped
five or six times their numbers on the Continent of Europe. The British
Expeditionary Force made as fine an effort to do so at Mons as was ever
attempted in history, but they did not succeed.

It was a regular army that fought at Mons. The only two first-class
nations which depend upon regulars to do their fighting are the British
and the American. This is the vital point of similarity which is the
practical manifestation of our military ideas. We have been the earth’s
spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other powerful
military nations. Before any other power could reach the United States
it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must overwhelm ours and
bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you say. That is the facile
word, so ready to the lips that we do not realise the wonder of it any
more than of the sun rising and setting.

When we want soldiers our plan still is to advertise for them. The
ways of our ancestors remain ours. We think that the volunteer must
necessarily make the best soldier because he offers his services; while
the conscript--rather a term of opprobrium to us--must be lukewarm.
It hardly occurs to us that some forms of persuasion may amount to
conscription, or that the volunteer, won by oratorical appeal to his
emotions or by social pressure, may suffer a reaction after enlistment
which will make him lukewarm also, particularly as he sees others, also
young and fit, hanging back. Nor does it occur to us that there may be
virtue in that fervour of national patriotism aroused by the command
that all must serve, which on the Continent in this war, has meant
universal exaltation to sacrifice. The life of Jones means as much to
him as the life of Smith does to him; and when the whole nation is
called to arms there ought to be no favourites in life-giving.

For the last hundred years, if we except the American Civil War, ours
have been comparatively little wars. The British regular army has
policed an empire and sent punitive expeditions against rebellious
tribes with paucity of numbers, in a work which the British so well
understand. Our little regular army took care of the Red Indians as
our frontier advanced from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. To put it
bluntly, we have hired some one to do our fighting for us.

Without ever seriously studying the business of soldiering, the average
Anglo-Saxon thought of himself as a potential soldier, taking his sense
of martial superiority largely from the work of the long-service,
severely drilled regular. Also, we used our fists rather than daggers
or duelling swords in personal encounters and, man to man, unequipped
with fire-arms or blades, the quality which is responsible for our
sturdy pioneering individualism gave us confidence in our physical
prowess.

Alas! modern wars are not fought with fists. A knock-kneed man who
knows how to use a machine gun and has one to use--which is also
quite important--could mow down all the leading heavy-weights of the
United States and England, with the latest champion leading the charge.

Now, this regular who won our little wars was not representative of
the people as a whole. He was the man “down on his luck,” who went to
the recruiting depot. Soldiering became his profession. He was in a
class, like priests and vagabonds. When you passed him in the street
you thought of him as a strange being, but one of the necessities of
national existence. It did not interest you to be a soldier; but as
there must be soldiers, you were glad that men who would be soldiers
were forthcoming.

When trouble broke, how you needed him! When the wires brought news of
his gallantry you accepted the deeds of this man whom you had paid as
the reflection of national courage, which thrilled you with a sense of
national superiority. To him, it was in the course of duty; what he
had been paid to do. He did not care about being called a hero; but it
pleased the public to make him one--this professional who fights for a
shilling a day in England and $17.50 a month in the United States.

Though when the campaign went well the public was ready to take the
credit as a personal tribute, when the campaign went illy they sought
a scapegoat, and the general, who might have been a hero, was sent to
the wilderness perhaps because those busy men in Congress or Parliament
thought that the army could do without that little appropriation which
was needed for some other purpose. The army had failed to deliver the
goods which it was paid to produce. The army was to blame, when, of
course, under free institutions the public was to blame, as the public
is master of the army and not the army of the public.

A first impression of the British army is always that of the regiment.
Pride of regiment sometimes appears almost more deep-seated than army
pride to the outsider. It has been so long a part of British martial
inheritance that it is bred in the blood. In the old days of small
armies and in the later days of small wars, while Europe was making
every man a soldier by conscription, regiment vying with regiment won
the battles of empire. The memory of the part each regiment played is
the inspiration of its present; its existence is inseparable from the
traditions of its long list of battle honours.

The British public loves to read of its Guards’ regiment and to watch
them in their brilliant uniforms at review. When a cadet comes out of
Sandhurst he names the regiment which he wishes to join, instead of
being ordered to a certain regiment, as in West Point. It rests with
the regimental commander whether or not he is accepted. Frequently the
young man of wealth or family serves in the Guards or another crack
regiment for a while and resigns, usually to enjoy the semi-leisurely
life which is the fortune of his inheritance.

Then there are the county line regiments, such as the Yorkshires, the
Kents, and the Durhams. In this war each county wanted to read about
its own regiments at the same time as about the Guards, just as Kansas
at home would want to read about the Kansas regiments and Georgians
about the Georgia regiments. The most trying feature of the censorship
to the British public was its refusal to allow the exploitation of
regiments. The staff was adamant on this point; for the staff was
thinking for the whole and of the interests of the whole. In the French
and the German armies, as in our regular army, the regiment was known
by a number.

The young man who lives in the big house on the hill, the son of the
man of wealth and power in the community, as a rule does not go to West
Point. None of the youth of our self-called aristocracy, which came up
the golden road in a generation past those in modest circumstances who
have generations of another sort back of them, think of going into the
First Cavalry or the First Infantry for a few years as a part of their
career. A few rich men’s sons enter our army, but only enough to prove
the rule by the exception. They do not regard the army as “the thing.”
It does not occur to them that they ought to do something for their
country. Rather, their country ought to do something for them.

But sink the plummet a little deeper and these are not our aristocracy
nor our ruling class, which is too numerous and too sound of thought
and principle for them to feel at home in their company. One boy,
however humble his origin, may go to West Point if he can pass the
competitive examination. Europe, particularly Germany, would not
approve of this; but we think it the best way. The average graduate of
the Point, whether the son of a doctor, a lawyer, or a farmer, sticks
to the army as his profession. We maintain West Point for the strict
business purpose of teaching young men how to train our army in time of
peace and to lead and direct it in time of action.

Our future officers enter West Point when they are two years younger
than is the average at Sandhurst; the course is four years compared
with two at Sandhurst. I should venture to say that West Point is the
harder grind; that the graduate of the Point has a more specifically
academic military training than the graduate of Sandhurst. This
is not saying that he may be any better in the performance of the
simple duties of a company officer. It is not a new criticism that
we train everybody at West Point to be a general, when many of the
students may never rise above the command of a battalion. However, it
is a significant fact that at the close of the Civil War every army
commander was a West Point man and so were most of the corps commanders.

The doors are open in the British army for a man to rise from the
ranks; not as wide as in our army, but open. The Chief of Staff of the
British Expeditionary Force, Sir William Robertson, was in the ranks
for ten years. No man not a West Pointer had a position equivalent in
importance to his at the close of the Civil War. His rise would have
been possible in no other European army.

But West Point sets the stamp on the American army and Sandhurst and
Woolwich, the engineering and artillery school, on the British army. At
the end of four years at West Point the men who survive the hard course
may be tried by courtmartial not for conduct unbecoming an officer, but
an officer and a gentleman. They are supposed, whatever their origin,
to have absorbed certain qualities, if they were not inborn, which are
not easily described but which we all recognise in any man. If they are
absent it is not the fault of West Point; and if a man cannot acquire
them there, then nature never meant them for him. From the time he
entered the school the government has paid his way; and he is cared for
until he dies, if he keeps step and avoids courtmartials.

His position in life is secure. His pay counting everything is better
than that of the average graduate of a university or a first-class
professional school, who practises a profession. Yet only three boys,
I remember, wanted to go to West Point from our congressional district
in my youth. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that we are not a
military people. From West Point they go out to the little army which
is to fight our wars; to the posts and the Philippines, and become a
world in themselves; an isolated caste in spite of themselves. I am
not at all certain that either the British or the American officer
works as hard as the German in time of peace. Neither has the practical
incentive nor the determined driver behind him.

For it takes a soldier Secretary of War to drive a soldier; for
example, Lord Kitchener. Those British officers, who applied themselves
in peace to the mastery of their profession and were not content with
the day’s routine requirements, had to play chess without chessmen;
practise manœuvres on a board rather than with brigades, divisions,
corps, and armies. They became the rallying points in the concourse of
untrained recruits.

German and French officers had the incentive and the chessmen. The
Great War could not take them by surprise. They took the road with a
machine whose parts had been long assembled. They had been trained
for big war; their ambition and intelligence were under the whip of a
definite anticipation.

A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff
work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become an
instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their
situation. This the Japanese also possess. It is the right material
ready to hand for the builder. Not that it is the kind of material
one admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine.
One had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and
the American press at the outset of the war to realise how vague was
the truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or
American--but not to the trained British staff.

So that little British Expeditionary Force, in ratio of number one
to twenty or thirty of the French army, crossed the Channel to help
save Belgium. Gallantry it had worthy of the brightest chapter in
the immortal history of its regiments from Quebec to Kandahar,
from Waterloo to South Africa, Guards and Hussars, Highlanders and
Lowlanders, kilts and breecks, Connaught Rangers and Royal Fusiliers,
Duke of Wellingtons and Prince of Wales’ Own, come again to Flanders.
The best blood of England was leading Tommy Atkins. Whatever British
aristocracy is or is not, it never forgets its duty to the England of
its fathers. It is never ingrate to its fortune. The time had come to
go out and die for England, if need be, and these officers went as
their ancestors had gone before them, as they would go to lectures at
Oxford, to the cricket field and the polo field, in outward phlegm, but
with a mighty passion in their hearts.

The Germans affected to despise this little army. It had not been
trained in the mass tactics which hurl columns of flesh forward to gain
tactical points that have been mauled by artillery fire. You do not
use mass tactics against Boers, nor against Afridis or Filipinos. It
is difficult to combine the two kinds of efficiency. Those who were on
the march to the relief of the Peking legations recall how the Germans
were as ill at ease in that kind of work as the American and British
were at home. It made us misjudge the Germans and the Germans misjudge
us when they thought of us as trying to make war on the Continent of
Europe. A small, mobile, regular army, formed to go over seas and march
long distances, was to fight in a war where millions were engaged
and a day’s march would cover an immense stretch of territory in
international calculations of gain and loss.

For its own purposes, the British Expeditionary Force was well-nigh a
perfect instrument. As quantity of ammunition was an important factor
in transport in the kind of campaign which it was prepared for, its
guns were the most accurate on a given point and its system of fire
adapted to that end; but the French system of fire, with plentiful
ammunition from near bases over fine roads, was better adapted for a
continental campaign.

To the last button that little army was prepared. Man for man and
regiment for regiment, I should say it was the best force that ever
fired a shot in Europe; this without regard to national character. As
England must make every regular soldier count and as she depended upon
the efficiency of the few rather than on numbers, she had trained her
men in musketry. No continental army could afford to allow its soldiers
to expend the amount of ammunition on the target range that the British
had expended. Only by practise can you learn how to shoot. This gives
the soldier confidence. He stays in his trench and keeps on shooting
because he knows that he can hit those advancing figures and that this
is his best protection. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that
the Germans ought to have got the British Expeditionary Force; and
the Germans were very surprised that they did not get it. With their
surprise developed a respect for British arms, reported by all visitors
to Germany.

Mr. Thomas Atkins, none other, is the hero of that retreat from Mons.
The first statue raised in London after the war ought to be of him.
If there had been five hundred thousand of him in Belgium at the end
of the second week in August, Brussels would now be under the Belgian
flag. Like many other good things in this world, including the French
army, there were not enough of him. Many a company on that retreat
simply got tired of retreating, though orders were to fall back. It dug
a trench and lay down and kept on firing--accurately, in the regular,
business-like way, reinforced by the “stick it” British character--
until killed or engulfed. This held back the flood long enough for the
remainder of the army to retire.

Not all the generalship emanated from generals. I like best that story
of the cross-roads where, with Germans pressing hard on all sides, two
columns in retreat fell in together, uncertain which way to go. With
confusion developing for want of instructions, a lone exhausted staff
officer who happened along took charge and standing at the junction
in the midst of shell-fire told every doubting unit what to do, with
one-two-three alacrity of decision. His work finished, he and his red
cap disappeared, and I never could find any one who knew who he was.

After the retreat and after the victory of the Marne, what was
England’s position? The average Englishman had thought that England’s
part in the alliance was to send a small army to France and to take
care of the German fleet. England’s fleet was her first consideration;
that must be served; France’s demand for rifles and supplies must be
attended to before the British demand; Serbia needed supplies; Russia
needed supplies; a rebellion threatened in South Africa; the Turks
threatened the invasion of Egypt. England had to spread her energy out
over a vast empire with an army that had barely escaped annihilation.
Every soldier who fought must be supplied over seas. German officers
put a man on a railroad train and he detrained near the front. Every
British soldier had to go aboard a train and then a ship and then
disembark from the ship and go aboard another train. Every article of
ordnance, engineering, medical supply, food supply, must be handled
four times, while in Germany they need be handled but twice. Any
railway traffic manager will understand what this means. Both the
British supply system and the medical corps were marvels.

Germany was stronger than the British public thought. Germany and
Austria could put at the front in the first six months of the war
practically double the number which the Allies could maintain. Russia
had multitudes to draw from in reserve, but the need was multitudes
at the front. There she was only as strong as the number she could
feed and equip. In the first year of the war England suffered 380,000
casualties on land, six times the number of bayonets that she had at
Mons. All this wastage must be met before she could begin to increase
her forces. The length of line on the Western front that she was
holding was not the criterion of her effort. The French who shared with
the British that terrible Ypres salient realised this.

Aside from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the same
as our National Guard and varied in equality in the same way. Native
Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical shell-fire
of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the place of
the British regulars, who were withdrawn for France. Every rifle that
England could bring to the assistance of the French in their heroic
stand was a rifle to the good.

Meanwhile, she was making her new army. For the first time since
Cromwell’s day, all classes in England were going to war. Making an
army out of the raw is like building a factory to be manned by expert
labour which you have to train. Let us even suppose that the factory is
ready and that the proprietor must mobilise his managers, overseers,
foremen, and labour from far and near--a force individually competent,
but which had never before worked together. It would require some time
to organise team-play, wouldn’t it? Particularly it would if you were
short of managers, overseers, and foremen. To express my meaning from
another angle in talking once with an English pottery manufacturer he
said:

“We do not train our labour in the pottery district. We breed it from
generation to generation.”

In Germany they have not only been training soldiers, but breeding them
from generation to generation. You may think that system is wrong. It
may be against your ideals. But in fighting against that system for
your ideals when war is violence and killing, you must have weapons
as effective as the enemy’s. You express only a part of Germany’s
preparedness by saying that the men who left the plough and the shop,
the factory and the office, became trained soldiers at the command of
the staff as soon as they were in uniform and had rifles. These men had
the instinct of military co-ordination bred in them and so had their
officers, while England had to take men from the plough and the shop,
the factory and the office, and equip them and teach them the rudiments
of soldiering before she could consider making them into an army.

It was one thing for the spirit of British manhood to rise to the
emergency. Another and even more important requisite went with it. If
my country ever faces such a crisis I hope that we also may have the
courage of wisdom which leaves an expert’s work to an expert. England
had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the confidence
of the nation through the long months of preparation, when there was
little to show except repetition of drills here and there on gloomy
winter days. It required a man with a big conception and patience and
authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense
of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military
people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and
vital details as he watched the new army forming.

“Are you learning to think in big numbers?” was Lord Kitchener’s
question to his generals.

Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded. Where the leaders?
Where the drillmasters for the new army? Old officers came out of
retirement, where they had become used to an easy life as a rule, to
twelve hours a day of hard application. “Dugouts” they were called.
Veteran non-commissioned officers had to drill new ones. It was
demonstrated that a good infantry soldier can be made in six months;
perhaps in three. But it takes seven months to build a rifle-plant;
many more months to make guns--and the navy must never be stinted.
Probably the English are slow; slow and thoroughgoing. They are good at
the finish, but not quick at the start. They are used to winning the
last battle, which they say is the one that counts. The complacency of
empire with a century’s power was a handicap, no doubt. We are inclined
to lean forward on our oars, they to lean back--which does not mean
that they cannot lean forward in an emergency or that they lack reserve
strength.

Public impatience was inevitable. It could not be kept silent; that is
the English of it--the American, too. We demand to know what is being
done. It was not silent in the Civil War. From the time that McClellan
started forming his new army until the Peninsula was six months, if I
remember rightly. Von Moltke, who built the German staff system, said
that the Civil War was a strife between two armed mobs; though I think
if he had brought his Prussians to Virginia a year later, in ’63, which
would have ended the Civil War there and then, he would have had an
interesting time before he returned to Berlin.

The British new army was not to face another new army, but the most
thoroughly organised military machine that the world has ever known.
Not only this, but the Germans, with a good start and their system
established, were not standing still and waiting for the British to
catch up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting
themselves to the new features of the war. They had been the world’s
arms-makers. With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic
organisation could make the most of their resources in men and material.

More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots, though
no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in France
or wherever they were needed over seas. If no magic could put rifles in
their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on the march,
the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching from day to
day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare was, shows at
least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we should have done
better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal treatment by the
government and the course set by Secretary Root means anything, our
staff ought to be better equipped for such a task than the English
were; this, too, only war can decide.

Whatsoever of pessimism appeared in the British press was telegraphed
to America. Pessimism was not permitted in the German press. Imagine
Germany holding control of the cable and allowing press despatches
from Germany to pass over it with the freedom that England allowed!
Imagine Germany having waited as long as England before making cotton
contraband! The British press demanded information from the government
which the German press would never have dared to ask. I have known an
American correspondent, fed out of hand in Germany and thankful for
anything that the fearful German war machine might vouchsafe, turning a
belligerent when he was in London for privileges which he would never
have thought of demanding in Berlin.

If an English ship were reported sunk, he believed it must be, despite
the government’s denial. Did he go to the Germans and demand that he
might publish the rumours of what had happened to the _Moltke_ in the
Gulf of Riga, or how many submarines Germany had really lost? Indeed,
he was unconsciously paying a compliment to British free institutions.
He expected more in England; it seemed a right to him, as it would
at home. Englishmen talked frankly to him about mistakes; he heard
all the gossip; and sometimes he concluded that England was in a bad
way. In Germany such talk was not allowed. Every German said that the
government was absolutely truthful; every German believed all of its
reports. But ask this critical American how he would like to live
under German rule, and then you found how anti-German he was at heart.
Nothing succeeds like success, and Germany was winning and telling no
one if she had any setbacks.

If there were a strike, the British press made the most of it for it
was big news. Pessimism is the Englishman’s natural way of arousing
himself to fresh energy. It is also against habit to be demonstrative
in his effort; so it is not easy to understand how much he is doing.
Then, pessimism brought recruits; it made the Englishman say, “I’ve
got to put my back into it!” Muddling there was and mistakes, such as
that of the method of attack at Gallipoli; but in the midst of all
this disspiriting pessimism, no Englishman thought of anything but of
putting his back into it more and more. Lord Kitchener had said that it
was to be a long war and evidently it must be. Of course, England’s
misfortune was in having the war catch her in the transition from an
old order of things to social reforms.

But if the war shows anything it is that basically English character
has not changed. She still has unconquerable, dogged persistence, and
her defects for this kind of war are not among the least admirable of
her traits to those who desire to live their own lives in their own
way, as the English-speaking people have done for five hundred years,
without having a _verboten_ sign on every street corner.

It is still the law that when a company of infantry marches through
London it must be escorted by a policeman. This means a good deal:
that civil power is superior to military power. It is a symbol of what
Englishmen have fought for with spades and pitchforks and what we
have fought Englishmen for. My own idea is that England is fighting
for it in this struggle; and starting unready against a foe which was
ready, as the free peoples always have, she was fighting for time and
experience before she could strike her sturdiest blows.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

End of Project Gutenberg's My Year of the Great War, by Frederick Palmer