ENGLAND'S EFFORT With a Preface by THE EARL OF ROSEBERY, K.G. ENGLAND'S EFFORT Per damna, per caedes, ab ipso Dticit opes animumque ferro. , ENGLAND'S EFFORT Six Letters to an American Friend BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD WITH A PREFACE BY THE EARL OF ROSEBERY, K.G. LONDON SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1916 All right t reserved PREFACE I am bidden to write a preface to this little book, though it is impossible, I think, to add any interest to these vivid and helpful letters. By writing them, Mrs. Humphry Ward has struck an effective blow for our country. What she writes is, of course, sure to find readers. But literary charm is not the purpose of this book, though it lends an incidental attraction. It is intended to inform the mind of Americans as to the efforts and sacrifices of Great Britain in this war. As to these, American opinion is, in some quarters at any rate, said to be not fully informed, and sometimes wholly misinformed. It would appear, indeed, that the branch of organisation in which for a time we were least successful was that of presenting our case to neutral States ; and yet the moral importance of this operation can scarcely be exaggerated. The Prussians, as consummately prepared for war as we were unprepared, have not neglected this branch of business, and have carried it out with their usual unscrupulousness. vi PREFACE The consummate preparation of Prussia for this war is, indeed, at the base of all argu- ment as to its authors. It is of no use then, as Mrs. Ward points out, for their Chancellors and pamphleteers to assert that a perfidious Albion engineered this war for its own base, and it may be added, inscrutable purposes. For the one simple incontrovertible proof of our innocence is that we were wholly unpre- pared for such a conflict, while Germany was armed to the teeth and prepared in every detail of organisation. It is not for the Army of 150,000 to scheme war against the Army of millions. Our exertions have been since the war began ; and from that point of view alone they are superhuman. Why were we not prepared ? In the first place because our Government could not be persuaded of the imminence of the danger. But above all, because democracies never prepare for war. There are always prophets to preach that civilisation has put an end to such a barbarous method of settling disputes, and multitudes to be tickled by so agreeable a doctrine. There are always politicians anxious to postpone military to more popular forms of expenditure. PREFACE vii These letters then are primarily intended to make known to those Americans who are disposed to think of us as laggards the gigantic and unparalleled efforts which we are making in this gigantic and unparalleled war. To the American public we feel that we have a right to appeal. We do not presume to measure or criticise the attitude of the Govern- ment of the United States and its anxiety to keep clear of the hideous conflagration. But none the less do we feel that we may claim the sympathy of the disinterested American people for the unselfish but heroic part that our nation is playing in defence of the liberties of the world. For let none mistake. If Prussian ideals should be victorious in this conflict it means the definite abasement of Europe, and an infamous invasion of freedom and public law which would not be restricted to the old world. To mention only one case, it is clear that Prussian supremacy would imply a constant and imminent danger from the ' hyphenated ' Americans who preserve Prussian sympathies and methods in the bosom of the Great Republic, methods which have already been abundantly manifest in plot and outrage. viii PREFACE It is better not to dwell on this aspect of the case, for it does not immediately con- cern us. We stand foursquare to the world, and appeal with confidence to all impartial opinion. There Prussia has not a friend. She has indeed purchased Bulgaria, which owes everything to Russia. But elsewhere the condemnation has been signal and severe, nowhere more so than in the United States. The juries of civilisation have everywhere pronounced her guilty, even in cases where fear of sharing the fate of Belgium might enjoin silence. But it is not merely to America that these letters should appeal. Among neutral and even allied Powers there is much ignorance as to the part that our country is playing ; ignorance which these letters in their scope and power should dispel. I know of friendly and intelligent critics among our allies who believe that we have only put 200,000 men into the field. If that were true, that would mean that we have done exactly what was expected of us at the outset. But, as Mrs. Ward reminds us on the authority of the Prime Minister, we have raised five millions of men in arms. And yet that is only a PREFACE ix part of our contribution. We have raised by votes of credit £2,382,000,000 during the war. We are spending nearly five millions a day. We have advanced at least five hundred millions sterling to our Allies, and are daily advancing more. We are supplying them with munitions to an extraordinary extent. Without these advances, we are authoritatively told, the war could not be carried on. More than all, our vast Armada, silent and ubiquitous, remains the vigilant guardian of the seas. And it has already fulfilled the supreme task of all. It cannot indeed protect every part of every ocean against murderous and relentless piracy. But it has secured the food supply of Great Britain and her Allies. It is well that all the populations concerned should realise this. Surely these facts speak for themselves. A supreme fleet, five millions of men in arms ; a million and a half of men and a quarter of a million of women turning out munitions ; a daily expenditure approaching five millions ; a debt which is piling up so formidably that by next March at its present rate it will have reached the almost incalculable figure of £3,440,000,000 ; these are not a trivial effort x PREFACE for a population of some forty millions (for the purpose of this computation we are not counting the Dominions). May we not indeed say more, that the history of the world produces nothing com- parable ? Just as there is no parallel to an Empire which, though scattered and world- wide, acts as a unit in this struggle. These figures record a prodigious sacrifice. We do not grudge it in a war for liberty and existence. But we cannot understand how in face of these facts we can be suspected of not doing our part. How long indeed could the war be carried on without us ? It is not merely Americans or neutrals who will do well to ponder these figures. Many among our Allies imagine that they are bearing the brunt and that we are watching the war without material inconvenience or giving material support. The well-informed know better. I think that some misappre- hension has been caused by recent discussions about attested married men, which may have caused the grotesque impression that our married men have hitherto been excluded from service. But it is well that those who do not know should realise the herculean PREFACE xi exertions of Great Britain. Nay, there are some among our own people to whom Mrs. Ward's facts may come as a surprise. One further question arises which is poignant enough : what has Great Britain obtained in return for these tremendous sacri- fices ? The bitter question of Marullus occurs : What conquest brings he home ? What tributaries follow him to Rome ? The answer is not yet quite what we should wish it to be. We have given full powers, a blank cheque, the best of our men. Our material acquisitions, so far, are outside Europe, won with admirable valour and skill. Our Fleet holds the sea, and the German flag has been driven from it. The heroism of our soldiers and sailors, the stubborn tenacity which in the first act of the war saved the situation, the chivalrous humanity and un- sullied honour we have opposed to rank barbarism : — these may seem little in a debit and credit account, but they make us proud. As for the ultimate victory no soldier allows even a momentary doubt. And we at home set our teeth doggedly and wait with con- fidence for the inevitable end, though not xii PREFACE unmindful of the daily sacrifice involved by- delay. There is another consideration which vitally concerns all of us in the Empire, but especially those within these islands. What is to be the outcome of this war as regards our own future ? We are enveloped in a mist of war which bites into our bones. We strain our eyes to penetrate it and to see what lies beyond. Is it a settled gloom or the grey haze which precedes the dawn and the sunrise ? What effect will this war with its heroism abroad and its sacrifice at home have on ourselves ? We seem justified in thinking that we shall have found ourselves. Glorious as our race has been in the past we may look forward to something nobler still. We see our warriors returning to us a new nation, raised by the stress and anguish of warfare to higher conceptions of duty, citizen- ship and patriotism. They will have proved themselves fitted for great things, they will be encompassed with glory and honour, they will lead the country. Comrades in arms of all ranks and classes, they will be united by memories of sublime endurance, they will feel a new fellowship, and the PREFACE xiii nation will be braced to face its future in a new spirit. May we not hope, indeed, that all of us, combatants or non-combatants, may rise to a higher level, and that out of the sorrows, distresses and bereavements of the war we may find higher ideals and a closer union ? And what of the Empire ? If this oppor- tunity of making imperial relations more intimate and businesslike be lost, we deserve that it should never recur. But it will not be lost. Lastly we may ask a question which concerns all mankind. Will this terrible convulsion when it has subsided bequeath war or peace as its heritage ? In any case one would think there must be a generation of exhaustion. But will that generation bestir itself to find some guarantee against the recurrence of the curse or will it silently pile up armaments for hoarded vengeance ? That is the question on which depends the future of the human race. ROSEBERY. May 1916 AUTHOR'S NOTE These letters are the fruit first of all of an urgent call from America, and then of three months' travelling, thinking, and writing. They have had necessarily to be written in haste. But I may certainly plead that all the care that was possible has been given to them — short of delays that would have made them useless. The title has caused me much trouble ! Will any son of gallant Scotland, or loyalist Ireland, or of those great Dominions, whose share in the war has knit them closer than ever to the Mother-Country — should he come across this little book — forgive me that I have finally chosen ' England ' to stand for us all ? ' Gott strafe England ! ' has been the German cry of hate. I have given what I conceive to be 'England's' reply. 'Britain' — 'Great Britain* are words that for all their profound political significance have still to be steeped a good deal longer in life and literature before they stir the same fibres in us as the old national names. And ' England ' as the seat of British Government has, it is admitted, a representative and inclusive force. Perhaps my real reason is still simpler. Let any- one try the alternatives which suggest themselves, and see how they roll — or do not roll — from the tongue. He or she will, I think, soon be recon- ciled to ' England's Effort ' ! XV ENGLAND'S EFFOBT LETTERS TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND No. 1. March 1916. (i) Dear H. — Your letter has found me in the midst of work quite unconnected with this hideous war in which tor the last eighteen months we in England have lived and moved and had our being. My literary profession, indeed, has been to me, as to others, since August 4th, 1914, something to be interposed for a short time, day by day, between a mind tormented and obsessed by the spectacle of war, and the terrible reality it could not other- wise forget. To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a while in memories of life as it was long, long before the war — there was refresh- ment and renewal in that ! Once, — last spring— I tried to base a novel on a striking war incident which had come my way. Impossible ! The zest and pleasure which for B 2 ENGLAND'S EFFORT any story-teller goes with the first shaping of a story, died away, at the very beginning. For the day's respite had gone. The little ' wind-warm space ' had disappeared. Life and thought were all given up, without mercy or relief, to the fever and nightmare of the war. I fell back upon my early recollections of Oxford thirty or forty years ago — and it was like rain in the desert. So that, in the course of months it had become a habit with me never to write about the war ; and outside the hours of writing to think and talk of nothing else. But your letter suddenly roused in me a desire to write about the war. It was partly, I think, because what you wrote summed up and drove home other criticisms and appeals of the same kind. I had been putting them mechanically aside as not having any special reference to me ; but in reality they had haunted me. And now you make a personal appeal. You say that England at the present moment is misunderstood, and even hardly judged, in America, and that even those great newspapers of yours that are most friendly to the Allies are often melancholy reading for those with English sympathies. Our ENGLAND'S EFFORT 3 mistakes — real and supposed — loom so large. We are thought to be not taking the war seriously, even now. Drunkenness, strikes, difficulties in recruiting the new armies, the losses of the Dardanelles expedition, the failure to save Serbia and Montenegro, tales of luxurious expenditure in the private life of rich and poor, and of waste or incompetence in military administration — these are made much of, even by our friends, who grieve, while our enemies mock. You say the French case has been on the whole much better presented in America than the English case ; and you compare the international situation with those months in 1863 when it was neces- sary for the Lincoln Government to make strenuous efforts to influence and affect English opinion, which in the case of our upper classes and too many of our leading men was unfavourable or sceptical towards the North. You who know something of the vastness of the English effort — you urge upon me that English writers whose work and name are familiar to the American public are bouud to speak for their country, bound to try and make Americans feel what we here feel through every nerve — that cumulative force of a great B2 4 ENGLAND'S EFFORT nation, which has been slow to rouse, and is now immoveably, irrevocably, set upon its purpose. ' Tell me,' you say in effect, ' what in your belief is the real spirit of your people — of your men in the field, and at sea, of your workmen and employers at home, your women, your factory workers, your soldiers' wives, your women of the richer and educated classes, your landowners and politicians. Are you yet fully awake — yet fully in earnest, in this crisis of England's fate ? " Weary Titan " that she is, with her age-long history behind her, and her vast responsibilities by sea and land, is she shouldering her load in this in- credible war, as she must shoulder it ; as her friends — the friends of liberty throughout the world — pray that she may shoulder it ? ' Yes ! — I must answer your questions, to the best of my power. I am no practised journalist ; the days of my few articles in the old Saturday Review or the old Pall Mall are thirty odd years behind me ! But I have some qualifications. Ever since, more than half a century ago, I paid my first childish visit to the House of Commons, and heard Mr. Roebuck, the ' Tear 'em ' of Punch's car- toon, make his violent appeal to the English ENGLAND'S EFFORT 5 Government to recognise the belligerency of the South, it would be almost true to say that politics and affairs have been no less interest- ing to me than books ; and next to English politics, American politics and American opinion ; partly because of my early associa- tion with men like W. E. Forster, stanch believers, even when Gladstone and John Russell wavered, in the greatness of the American future and the justice of the Union cause ; and partly because of the warm and deep impression left upon me and mine by your successive Ambassadors in London, by Mr. Lowell above all, by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John Hays, the Choates, and the Bayards, no less than by the many intimate friendships with Americans from different worlds which my books have brought me since 1888. During the last thirty years, also, I have had many friends — and some kinsmen — among the leaders of English politics, and in both political parties. At the present moment my only son is a member of the English House of Commons, and a soldier fighting in the war. All my younger kinsfolk are fighting ; the sons of all my friends are fighting; and their daughters are nursing as 6 ENGLAND'S EFFORT members of Voluntary Aid Detachments — (marvellous what the girl V.A.D.s, as Eng- land affectionately calls them, have done since the beginning of the war !) — or working week-end shifts to relieve munition workers, or replacing men of military age in the public offices and banks. I live in one of the Home Counties, within five miles of one of the mili- tary camps. The small towns near us are crowded with soldiers ; the roads are full of marching infantry, of artillery trains and supply wagons. Our village has sent practi- cally all its able-bodied men of military age to the Front ; the few that remain are ' attested ' and only waiting to be called up. A great movement, in which this household is engaged, is now beginning, to put women on the land, and so replace the agricultural labourers who have gone either into the armies or the muni- tion factories. And meanwhile all the elderly men and women of the country-side are sitting on War Committees, or working for the Red Cross. Our lives are penetrated by the war ; our thoughts are never free from it. But in trying to answer your questions I have gone* far beyond my own normal ex- perience. I asked the English Government ENGLAND'S EFFORT 7 to give me some special opportunities of seeing what Great Britain is doing in the war, and in matters connected with the war, and they have given them ungrudgingly. I have been allowed to go, through the snowstorms of this bitter winter from which we have at last emerged, to the far north and visit the Fleet, in those distant waters where it keeps guard night and day over England. I have spent some weeks in the Midlands and the north, watching the vast new activity of the Ministry of Munitions throughout the country ; and finally, in a motor tour of some 500 miles through the zone of the English armies in France, I have not only been a spectator of that marvellous organisation in North-western France, of supplies, reinforcements, training camps and hospitals, which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her fighting line, but I have been — on the first of two days — within less than a mile of the fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a Flemish hill — with a gas helmet close at hand ! — I have been able to watch a German counter- attack, after a successful English advance, and have seen the guns flashing from the English lines, and the shell-bursts on the 8 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT German trenches along the Messines ridge ; while in the far distance, a black and jagged ghost, the tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fitfully through the mists — bearing mute witness before God and man. For a woman — a marvellous experience ! I hope later on in these letters to describe some of its details, and some of the thoughts awakened by them in a woman's mind. But let me here keep to the main point raised by your question — the effort of England. During these two months of strenuous looking and thinking, of conversation with soldiers and sailors and munition-workers, of long days spent in the great supply-bases across the Channel, or of motoring through the snowy roads of Normandy and Picardy, I have naturally realised that effort far more vividly than ever before. It seems to me — it must seem to anyone who has seriously attempted to gauge it — amazing, colossal. ' What country has ever raised over sixty per cent, of its total recruitable strength, for service bevond the seas in a few months ? ' asks one of our younger historians — and that a country, not invaded, protected by the sea, and by a supreme fleet ; a country, ENGLAND'S EFFORT 9 moreover, without any form of compulsory military service, in which soldiering and the soldier have been rather unpopular than popular ; a country in love with peace, and with no intention or expectation of going to war with anyone ? (") For there we come to the root of everything — the unpreparedness of England — and what it meant. It meant simply that as a nation we never wished for war with Germanv, and, as a nation, we never expected it. Our Govern- ments of course contained men who saw more or less plainly the dangers ahead, and had spent years of effort in trying to avoid them. On several occasions, during the last twenty years, as we all remember, a wave of sudden anxiety as to German aims and intentions had spread through the thinking portion of the nation — in connection with South Africa, with Morocco, with the Balkans. But it had always died away again. We know now that Germany was not yet ready ! Mean- while fruitless efforts were made by successive English Governments to limit armaments, to promote arbitration, and extend the scope 10 ENGLAND'S EFFORT of the Hague Tribunal. In vain. Germany would have none of them. Year by year, in a world of peace, her battle navy grew. ' For what can it be intended but to attack Eng- land ? ' said the alarmists. But how few of us believed them ! Our Tariff Reformers pro- tested against the encroachments of German trade ; but, outside a handful of persons who seemed to most of us fanatics, the emphasis lay always on care for our own people, and not on hostility to Germany. Those, indeed, who warned us passionately that Germany meant to provoke a struggle, that the struggle must come, were very little heeded. Nobody slept the worse at night for their harangues. Lord Roberts's agitation for National Service, based on the portentous growth of the German army and navy, made comparatively little way. I speak from personal experience of a large Parliamentary division. ' Did you fore- see it ? ' — I said to one of the ablest and most rising men in the Navy a few weeks ago. He thought a little. ' I always felt there might be a clash over some Colonial question — a quarrel about black men. But a war between the white 'nations over a European question — that Germany would force such a war — no, ENGLAND'S EFFORT 11 that I never believed ! ' Nor did any of us — except those few, those very few persons who, Cassandra-like, saw the coming horror plainly, and spoke to a deaf country. ' There was no hatred of Germany in this country ' — I quote a Cabinet Minister. ' Even in those parts of the country which had most reason to feel the trade rivalry of Germany, there was no thought of war, no wish for war.' It came upon England like one of those sudden spates through mountain clefts in spring, that fall with havoc on the plains beneath. After such days of wrestling for European peace as have left their indelible mark upon every member of the English Cabinet which declared war on August 4th, 1914, we fought because we must, because, in Luther's words, we ' could no other.' What is the proof of this ? — the proof which history will accept as final ? — against the vain and lying pleas of Germany ? Nothing less than the whole historv of the past eighteen months ! — beginning with that initial lack of realisation, and those harassing difficulties of organisation with which we are now so often and so ignorantly reproached. At the word ' Belgium ' on August 4th, 12 ENGLAND'S EFFORT practically the whole English nation fell into line. We felt no doubts — we knew what we had to do. But the problem was how to do it. Outside the Navy and the Expeditionary Force, both of them ready to the last gun and button, we had neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a Continental war, and we knew it. The fact is more than our justification — it is our glory. If we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane men have behaved as we did in the years before the war ? 233,000 men on active service — and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany's millions ! — with arsenals and equipment to match. Is it any wonder that the country — our untouched, uninvaded country — safe as it believed itself to be, under the protection of its invincible Navy, was, in some sections of our population at any rate, slow to realise the enormous task to which, for the faith of treaties' sake, for self-defence' sake, it was committed ? And y^et — was it after all so slow ? The day after war was declared the Prime Minister asked Parliament to authorise the addition of ENGLAND'S EFFORT 13 half a million men to the Army and a first war credit of a hundred millions of money (five hundred million dollars). The first hundred thousand men came rolling up into the great military centres within a few days. By September 4th nearly 300,000 fresh men had enlisted — by Christmas, half a million. By May, a million men had been added to the new Armies ; by September 1915 Sir John French alone had under his command close on a million men on the lines in France and Flanders, and in December 1915 the addition of another million men to the Army was voted by Parliament, bringing up the British mili- tary strength to approximately four millions, excluding Colonials. And what of the Do- minions ? By November 1915, Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces more than equal to the whole of that original Expedi- tionary Force, that ' contemptible little army ' which, broken and strained as it was by the sheer weight and fierceness of the German advance, yet held the gates of the Channel till England could fling her fresh troops into the field, and France — admirable France ! — had recovered from the first on- slaught of her terrible and ruthless enemy. 14 ENGLAND'S EFFORT In one of my later letters, I hope to give some particulars of this first rush of men, gathered from those who witnessed it and took part in it. One remarkable point in connec- tion with it is that those districts most heavily employed in munition-making and coal-min- ing, the two industries absolutely indispensable to our Army and Navy, have also sent the largest supply of men to the fighting-line — take, for instance, Newcastle and the Clyde. Of course there have been anxious episodes in the great development. Was your own vast levy in the Civil War without them ? And for the last half million men, we have had to resort, as Lincoln resorted, to a modified form of compulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first camp and billeting organisation of the enormous forces raised. But when all is said, did we not, in the language of a French observer, ' improvise the impossible ' ? — and have we not good reason to be proud ? — not with any foolish vain-glory, but with the sober and resolute pride of a great nation, conscious of its past, determined to correct its mistakes, and looking open-eyed and fearless towards the future ? ENGLAND'S EFFORT 15 Then as to munitions : — in many ways, as you will perhaps say, and as I agree, a tragic story. If we had possessed last spring the ammunition, both for ourselves and our Allies, that we now possess, the war would have gone differently. Drunkenness, trade union diffi- culties, a small — very small — revolutionary element among our workpeople — all these have made trouble. But the real cause of our shortage lay in the fact that no one, outside Germany, realised till far into the war what the ammunition needs — the absolutely unpre- cedented needs — of this struggle were going to be. It was the second battle of Ypres at the end of April last year which burnt them into the English mind. We paid for the grim knowledge in thousands of our noblest lives. But since then ? In a later letter I propose to draw some picture in detail of the really marvellous move- ment which since last July, under the impulse given by Mr. Lloyd George, has covered England with new munition factories, and added enormously to the producing power of the old and famous firms ; has drawn in an army of women, now reckoned at something near a quarter of a million ; and is at this 16 ENGLAND'S EFFORT moment not only providing amply for our own armies, but is helping those of the Allies, against those final days of settlement with Germany which we believe to be now steadily approaching. American industry and enter- prise have helped us substantially in this field of munitions. We are gratefully conscious of it. But England is now fast overtaking her own needs. More of this presently. Meanwhile to the military and equipment effort of the country, you have to add the financial effort — something like fifteen hundred millions sterling {seven thousand five hundred millions of dollars) already expended on the war ; the organising effort, exemplified in the wonderful ' back of the army ' in France, which I hope to describe to you ; and the vast hospital system, with all its scientific adjuncts, and its constantly advancing efficiency. And at the foundation of it all, the human and personal effort ! — the lives given for England, the blood so generously shed for her ; the homes that have sacrificed their all ; our ' gulden lads ' from all quarters and classes, whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien dust that ' is for ever England,' since they ENGLAND'S EFFORT 17 sleep there and hallow it ; our mothers who mourn the death or the wreck of the splendid sons they reared ; our widowed wives and fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel which only very slowly our people have come to feel as in very deed their owm. At first we thought most often and most vividly of Bel- gium, of the broken treaty, and of France, so wantonly attacked ; whose people no English man or woman could ever have looked in the face again, had we forsaken her. Then came the hammer blows that forged our will — Lou- vain, Aerschot, Rheims, the air-raids on our defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our women and children, the Bryce report, the Lusitania, the execution of Edith Cavell — the whole stupefying revelation of the German hatred and greed towards this country, and of the qualities latent in the German character. Noiv we know that it is they, or we ; since they willed it so. And this old, illogical, unready country is only j ust arriving at its full strength, only just fully conscious of the sternness of its own resolve, only just putting out its full powers, as the German power is weakening, and the omens are changing — both in East and West. G 18 ENGLAND'S EFFORT (in) No ! — the effort of England during the past eighteen months in spite of all temporary ebbs and difficulties, in spite of that chorus of self- blame in which the English nation delights, has been one of the great things in the history of our country. We have * improvised the impossible ' in every direction — but one. In one point, indeed, there has been no improvisation. Nothing was trusted to chance. What is it that alone has secured us the time to make the effort we have made ? It was in the middle of February that, by permission of the Admiralty, I found myself driving towards a certain pier in a harbour opening on the North Sea. The Commodore of a Cruiser Squadron was to send his boat for me, and I was to lunch with him on board his flagship. I duly passed the distrustful sentry on the road leading to the pier, arrived at the pier-head, and descended from the motor which had brought me. The morning was mistily sunny, and the pier strangely deserted. Where was the boat ? — where was my friend who had hoped to come for me himself ? No signs of either. The few old ENGLAND'S EFFORT 19 sailors employed about the pier looked at me in astonishment, and shook their heads when I enquired. Commodore 's boat was not there ; no boat had been in that morning from the ships. I took the Commodore's letter from my hand-bag, to assure myself I had not been dreaming, and re-read it in perplexity. No dates could be clearer — no directions more precise. Suddenly I perceive one tall naval officer on the pier. ' Can you help me, Sir ? ' And I hand him the Commodore's letter. He looks at me — and at the letter. His face twinkles with repressed laughter ; and I laugh too, beginning to understand ! ' Very sorry,' says the charming young man — ' but I think I can assure you there will be no boat, and it is no use your waiting. Commodore X went to sea last night ! ' I thanked him, and we laughed together. Then I walked up the pier a little way, seeing a movement in the mist. A sailor came up to me. ' They all went to sea last night,' he said in my ear ; ' and there are the slow ones coming back ! ' And out of the mist came the black shapes of warships, moving majesti- cally up the harbour — one might have fancied, with a kind of injured dignity, because their 02 20 ENGLAND'S EFFORT unreasonable fellows had been faster and bad gone further afield than they. I walked back to my motor, disappointed indeed, and yet exulting ! It was good to realise personally, through this small incident, the mobility and ever-readiness of the Fleet ; the absolute insignificance — non-existence even — of any civilian or shore interest, for the Navv at its work. It was not till a week later that I received an amusing and mysterious line from Commodore X, the most courteous of men. (IV) By the time it reached me, however, I was on the shores of a harbour in the far north, ' visiting the Fleet ' indeed, and on the invita- tion of England's most famous sailor. Let me be quite modest about it. Not for me the rough waters, or the thunderous gun-practice — Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides ' — which I see described in the letters of the Russian or American journalists who have been allowed to visit the Grand Fleet. There had been some talk, I understand, of sending me out in a destroyer ; it was mercifully ENGLAND'S EFFORT 21 abandoned. All the same, T must firmly put on record that mine was ' a visit to the Fleet,' by Admiralty permission, for the purpose of these letters to you, and through you to the American public, and that I seem to have been so far the only woman who, for news- paper ends, has been allowed to penetrate those mysterious northern limits where I spent two wonderful days. It was indeed a wintry visit. The whole land was covered with snow. The train could hardly drag itself through the choked Highland defiles ; and it was hours behind its time when we arrived at a long-expected station, and a Vice- Admiral looking at me with friendly, keen eyes came to the carriage to greet me. ' My boat shall meet you at the pier with my Flag Lieutenant to-morrow morning. You will pick me up at the Flagship, and I will take you round the Fleet. You will lunch with me, I hope, afterwards.' I tried to show my grate- ful sense both of the interest and the humour of the situation ! My kind visitor disappeared, and the train carried me on a few miles farther to my destination for the night. And here I take a few words from a journal written at the time : — 22 ENGLAND'S EFFORT ' It is nearly dawn. A red light in the north-east is coming up over the snowy hills. The water, steely grey — the tide rising. What strange moving bodies are those, scudding along over the dim surface, like the ghosts of seaplanes ? Dense flocks of duck apparently, rising and falling along the shallows of the shore. Now they are gone. Nothing moves. The morning is calm, and the water still. And on it lie, first a cruiser squadron, and then a line of Dreadnoughts stretching out of sight. No lights anywhere, except the green lights on a hospital ship far away. The great ships lie dark and silent, and I sit and watch them, in the cold dawn, thinking that but for them, and the multitude of their comrades that guard these seas and shores, England would be as Belgium or as Northern France, ravaged and destroyed by a barbarian enemy. My heart goes out to you, great ships, and you, gallant unwearied men, who keep your watch upon them ! That watch has been kept for generations. Never has there been such need for it as now.' . . . . . . But the day has risen, and the sun with it. As I leave the shore in the Vice- Admiral's boat, the sunlight comes dancing ENGLAND'S EFFOKT 23 over a low line of hill, lighting up the harbour, the mighty ships, with their guns, and, scattered out to sea along the distance, the destroyers, the trawlers, the mine-sweepers, the small auxiliary craft of all kinds — those * fringes of the Fleet ' — which Kipling has caught and photographed as none but he can. The barge stops beside the flagship, and the Admiral descends into it. What is the stamp, the peculiar stamp that these naval men bear ? — as of a force trained and disci- plined to its utmost capacity, and then held lightly in check, till wanted. You see it in so many of their faces, even in eyes hollow for want of sleep. It is always there — the same strength, the same self-control, the same humanity. Is it produced by the testing weight of responsibility, the silent sense of ever-present danger, both from the forces of nature and the enmity of man, the high scientific training, and last but not least that marvellous comradeship of the Navy, whether between officer and officer, or between officers and men, which is constantly present indeed in the Army, but is necessarily closer and more intimate here, in the confined world of the ship, where all live together day after day, and week 24 ENGLAND'S EFFORT after week, and where — if disaster comes — all may perish together ? But on this bright winter morning, as we pass under and round the ships, and as the Admiral points out what a landswoman can understand, in the equipment and the power of these famous monsters, with their pointing guns, there was for the moment no thought of the perils of the Navy, but only of the glory of it. And afterwards in the Admiral's pleasant drawing-room on board the flagship, with its gathering of naval officers, Admirals, Captains, Commanders, how good the talk was ! Not a shade of boasting — no mere abuse of Germany — rather a quiet regret for the days when German and English naval men were friends throughout the harbours of the world. ' Von Spee was a very good fellow — I knew him well — and his two sons who went down with him,' says an Admiral gently. ' I was at Kiel the month before the war. I know that many of their men must loathe the work they are set to do.' ' The point is,' says a younger man, broad-shouldered, with the strong face of a leader, ' that they are always fouling the seas, and we are always cleaning them up. Let the neutrals under- ENGLAND'S EFFORT 25 stand that ! It is not we who strew the open waters with mines for the slaughter of any- passing ship, and then call it "maintaining the freedom of the seas." And as to their general strategy, their Higher Command' — he throws back his head with a quiet laugh — and I listen to a rapid sketch of what the Germans might have done, have never done, and what it is now much too late to do, which I will not repeat. Type after type comes back to me — the courteous Flag Lieutenant, who is always looking after his Admiral, whether in these brief harbour rests, or in the clash and dark- ness of the high seas ; the Lieutenant-Com- manders whose destroyers are the watch-dogs, the ceaseless protectors, no less than the eyes and ears of the Fleet ; the Flag- Captain, who takes me through the great ship, with his vigilant, spare face, and his understanding, kindly talk about his men ; many of whom on this Thursday afternoon — the quasi-half-holi- day of the Fleet when in harbour — are snatch- ing an hour's sleep when and where they can. That sleep-abstinence of the Navy ! — sleep, controlled, measured out, reduced to a bare minimum, among thousands of men, that we 26 ENGLAND'S EFFOET on shore may sleep our fill — look at the signs of it, in the eyes both of these officers, and of the sailors crowding the ' liberty ' boats, which are just bringing them back from their short two hours' leave on shore. Another gathering, in the Captain's room, for tea. The talk turns on a certain popular play dealing with naval life, and a Commander describes how the manuscript of it had been brought to him, and how he had revelled in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. Two men in the play — friends — going into action — shake hands with each other ' with tears in their eyes.' A shout of derisive laughter goes up from the tea-table. But they admit ' talking shop ' off duty. ' That's the difference between us and the Army.' And what shop it is ! I listen to two young officers, both commanding destroyers, describ- ing — one, his adventures in dirty weather the night before, on patrol duty. ' My hat, I thought one moment the ship was on the rocks ! You couldn't see a yard for the snow — and the sea — beastly ! ' The other had been on one of Admiral Hood's monitors, when they suddenly loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, and the German army, ENGLAND'S EFFOET 27 marching along the coast road to Dunkirk and Calais, marched no more, but lay in broken fragments behind the dunes, or any shelter available, till the flooding of the dykes further south completed the hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns had begun. Then the talk ranges round the blockade, the difficulties and dangers of patrol work, the complaints of neutrals. ' America should understand us. Their blockade hit us hard enough in the Civil War. And we are righting for their ideals no less than our own. When has our naval supremacy ever hurt them ? Mayn't they be glad of it some day ? What about a fellow called Monroe ! ' — so it runs. Then its tone changes insensibly. From a few words dropped I realise with a start where these pleasantly chatting men had probably been only two or three days before, where they would probably be again on the morrow. Someone opens a map, and I listen to talk which in spite of its official reticence throws many a light on the vast range of England's naval power, and the number of her ships. ' Will they come out ? — when will they come out ? ' The question runs round the group. Someone tells a story of a German naval 28 ENGLAND'S EFFORT prisoner taken not long ago in the North Sea> and of his remark to his captors — ' Yes, we're beaten — we know that — but we'll make it hell for you before we give in ! ' For that final clash — that Armageddon that all think must come, our sailors wait, not despising their enemy, knowing very well that they — the Fleet — are the pivot of the situa- tion, that without the British Navy, not all the valour of the Allies in France or Russia could win the war, and that with it, Ger- many's hope of victory is vain. While the Navy lives, England lives, and Germany's vision of a world governed by the ruthless will of the scientific soldier is doomed. Meanwhile, what has Germany been doing in her shipyards all this time ? No one knows, but my hosts are well aware that we shall know some day. As to England — here is Mr. Balfour moving the Naval Estimates in the House of Commons — the ' token votes ' which tell nothing that should not be told. But since the war began, says the First Lord, we have added ' one million ' to the tonnage of the Navy, and we have doubled its personnel. We are adding more every day ; for the Admiralty are ENGLAND'S EFFORT 29 always ' wanting more.' We are quite conscious of our defects — in the Air Service first and foremost. But they will be supplied. There is a mighty movement afoot in the workshops of England — an effort which, when all drawbacks are allowed for, has behind it a free people's will. In my next letter I propose to take you through some of these workshops. ' We get the most extraordinary letters from America ' —writes one of my correspondents, a steel manufacturer in the Midlands, — ' What do they think we are about ? ' An American letter is quoted. ' So you are still, in England, taking the war lying down ? ' — Are we ? Let us see. No. 2. (i) In this second letter, I am to try and prove to you that England is not taking the war ' lying down.' Let me then give you some account — an eye-witness's account — of what there is now to be seen, by the ordinary intelligent ob- server, in the ' Munition Areas,' as the public has learnt to call them, of England and Scotland. That great spectacle, as it exists to-day, — so inspiring in what it immediately suggests of human energy and human in- genuity, so appalling in its wider implications — testifies, in the first instance, to the fierce stiffening of England's resolve to win the war, and to win it at a lessened cost in life and suffering to our men in the field, which ran through the nation, after the second battle of Ypres, towards the close of April 1915. That battle, together with the disagreement between Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty, had, as we all know, momentous consequences. The two events 30 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 31 brought to a head the national dissatisfaction and disappointment with the general course of the spring fighting. By May 19, the Ministry which had declared the war, and so far conducted it, had disappeared; a National or Coalition Ministry, drawn from the leading men of both parties, reigned in its stead. The statement made by Mr. Asquith, as late, alack, as April 20th, 1915, that there was ' no truth in the statement ' that our efforts at the Front ' were being crippled or at any rate hampered ' by want of ammuni- tion, was seen almost immediately, in the bitter light of events, to be due to some fatal misconceptions, or mis- judgments, on the part of those informing the Prime Minister, which the nation, in its own interests, and those of its Allies, could only peremptorily sweep away. A new Ministry was created — the Ministry of Munitions, and Mr. Lloyd George was placed at its head. The work done since June 1915 by Mr. Lloyd George and his Ministry — now employ- ing vast new buildings, and a staff running into thousands — is nothing less than colossal. Much, no doubt, had been done earlier for which the new Ministry has perhaps unjustly 32 ENGLAND'S EFFORT got the credit, and not all has been smooth sailing since. One hears, of course, criticism and complaints. What vast and effective stir, for a great end, was ever made in the world without them ? Mr. Lloyd George has incurred a certain amount of unpopularity among the working classes, who formerly adored him. In my belief he has incurred it for the country's sake, and those sections of the working class who have smarted under his criticisms most bitterly will forgive him when the time comes. In his passionate determination to get the thing done, he has sometimes let his theme — of the national need, and the insignificance of all things else in comparison with it — carry him into a vehe- mence which the workmen have resented, and which foreign or neutral countries have mis- understood. He found in his path, which was also the nation's path, three great foes : — drunkenness ; the old envenomed quarrel between employer and employed ; and that deep-rooted industrial conservatism of Eng- land, which shews itself, on the one hand, in the Trade Union customs and restrictions of the working class, built up, as they hold, through long years, for the protection of their ENGLAND'S EFFORT 33 own standards of life ; and on the other, in the slowness of many of the smaller English employers (I am astonished, however, at the notable exceptions everywhere !) to realise new needs and processes, and to adapt them- selves to them. Could anyone have made such an omelet without breaking a great many eggs ! Is it wonderful that the employers have sometimes felt themselves unbearably hustled, sometimes misunderstood, and at other times annoyed, or worried by what seems to them the red tape of the new Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of forms and enquiries ? Men accustomed to conduct their own businesses with the usual indepen- dence of regulation, have been obliged to submit to regulation. Workmen accustomed to defend certain methods of work and certain customs of their trade as matters of life and death, have had to see them jeopardised or swept away. The restoration of these methods and customs is solemnly promised them after the war ; but meanwhile they become the servants of a public department, almost as much under orders as the soldier himself. They are asked to admit unskilled men to the skilled processes over which they D 34 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT have long kept so jealous a guard ; above all they are asked to assent wholesale to the employment of women in trades where women have never been employed before, where it is obvious that their introduction taps an im- mense reservoir of new labour, and equally obvious that once let in, they are not going to be easily or wholly dislodged. Of course there has been friction and difficulty ; nor is it all yet at an end. In the few danger-spots of the country, where heads are hottest, where thousands of the men of most natural weight and influence are away fighting, and where among a small minority hatred of the capi- talist deadens national feeling, and obscures the national danger, there have been anxious moments during the winter ; there may possibly be some anxious moments again. But after all, how little it amounts to — in comparison with the enormous achievement ! It took us nine mouths to realise what France — which, remember, is a Continental nation under conscription — had realised after the Battle of the Marne, when she set everv hand in the country to work at munitions that could be set to work. With us, whose villages were unravaged, whose normal life was ENGLAND'S EFFORT 35 untouched, realisation was inevitably slower. Again we were unprepared, and again, as in the case of the Army itself, we may plead that we have ' improvised the impossible.' ' No nation,' says Mr. Buchan in his vivid ' History of the War,' ' can be adequately prepared, unless, like Germany, it intends war ; and Britain, like France, paid the penalty of her honest desire for peace.' Moreover, we had our Navy to work for, without which the cause of the Allies would have gone under, must have gone under, at the first shock of Germany. What the workmen of England did in the first year of the war in her docks and shipyards, history will tell some day. ' What's wrong with the men ! ' cried a Glasgow employer indignantly to me, one winter evening, as, quite unknown the one to the other, we were nearing one of the towns on the Clyde — 1 What was done on the Clyde, in the first months of the war, should never be forgotten by this country. Working from six to nine every day, till they dropped with fatigue — and Sundays too — drinking just to keep themselves going — too tired to eat or sleep — that's what it was — I saw it ! ' I too have seen that utter fatigue, stamped on a certain D 2 36 ENGLAND'S EFFORT percentage of faces, through the Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the Clyde — fatigue which is yet indomitable, which never gives way. How fresh, beside that look, are the faces of the women, for whom workshop life is new ! In its presence, one forgets all hostile criticism, all talk of strikes and drink, of trade union difficulties, and the endless worries of the employers. The English work- man is not tractable material — far from it, and he is not imaginative ; except in the persons of some of his chosen leaders, he has never seen a ruined French or Flemish village, and he was slow to realise the bitterness of that silence of the guns on the Front, when ammuni- tion runs short, and lives must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of thousands to the fighting line ; there are a million and a half of him now working at munitions ; and it is he, in a comradeship with the brain workers, the scientific intelligence of the nation, closer than any he has yet known, and lately, with the new and astonishing help of womeri — it is he, after all, who is ' delivering the goods,' he who is now piling the great arsenals and private works with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns, he who is ENGLAND'S EFFORT 37 working night and day in the shipyards, he who is teaching the rising army of women their work, and making new and firm friends, through the national emergency, whether in the trenches or the workshops, with other classes and types in the nation, hitherto little known to him, to whom he too is perhaps a revelation. There will be a new wind blowing through England when this war is done. Not only will the scientific intelligence, the general education, and the industrial plant of the nation have gained enormously from this huge impetus of war ; but men and women, employers and employed, shaken perforce out of their old grooves, will look at each other, surely, with new eyes, in a world which has not been steeped for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in common griefs and a common passion of will. (ii) All over England, then, the same quad- ruple process has now been going on for months. (1) The steady enlargement of existing armament and munition works, national or private. 38 ENGLAND'S EFFORT (2) The transformation of a host of other engineering businesses into munition works. (3) The co-ordination of a vast number of small workshops dealing with the innumerable metal industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make them feed the larger engineering works, with all those minor parts of the gun or shell, which such shops had the power to make. (4) The putting up of entirely new workshops — National Workshops — directly controlled by the new Ministry under the Munitions Acts. Let me take you through a few typical scenes. It was on February 1st, the day after the Zeppelin raid of January 31st, that I left a house in the north where I had been seeing one of the country-house convalescent hospitals, to which English women and Ens;lish wealth are giving themselves everywhere without stint ; and made my way by train, through a dark and murky afternoon, towards a midland town. The news of the raid was so far vague. The newspapers of the morning gave no ENGLAND'S EFFORT 39 names or details. I was not aware that I was passing through towns where women and children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the windows of a train broken, in order that the German public might be fed on ridiculous lies about the destruction of Liverpool docks, and the wreck- ing of ' English industry.' ' English industry lies in ruins,' said the Hamburger Nachrichten, complacently. Marvellous paper ! Just after reading its remarks, I was driving down the streets of the great industrial centre I had come to see — a town which the murderers of the night before would have been glad indeed to hit. As it was, ' Endish industry ' seemed tolerably active amid its ' ruins.' The clumsy falsehoods of the German official reports, and the German newspapers, affect me strangely ! It is not so much their lack of truth, as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense ; which is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all our grumbling, we are at bottom a nation of optimists, 40 ENGLAND'S EFFORT and apt to see things as we wish. But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past — the ' sinking ' of the Lion, the ' capture ' of Fort Vaux, or the ' bombardment ' of Liverpool docks — is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if nothing else, forbids — the instinct of an old people with an old and humorous literature. These leading articles of the Ham- burger Nachrichten, the sermons of German pastors, and those amazing manifestoes of German professors, flying straight in the face of historic documents, — ' scraps of paper ' — which are there, none the less, to all time : — for us, these things are only not comic because, to the spiritual eye, they are written in blood. But to return to the ' ruins,' and this ' English industry ' which during the last six months has taken on so grim an aspect for Germany. My guide, an official of the Ministry, stops the motor, and we turn down a newly made road, leading towards a mass of spreading building on the left. ' A year ago,' says my companion — ' this was all green fields. Now the company is employing, instead of 3500 workpeople, about three times the number, of whom a large proportion are ENGLAND'S EFFORT 41 women. Its output has been quadrupled, and the experiment of introducing women has been a complete success.' We pass up a fine oak staircase to the new offices, and I am soon listening to the report of the Works Superintendent. A spare, powerful man with the eyes of one in whom life burns fast, he leans, his hands in his pockets, against the wall of his office, talking easily and well. He himself has not had a day's holiday for ten months, never sleeping more than five and a half hours, with the telephone at his bed head, and waking to instant work, when the moment for waking comes. His view of his workmen is critical. It is the view of one consumed with ' realisation,' face to face with those who don't ' realise.' * But the raid will do a deal of good,' he says cheerfully. ' As to the women ! ' — he throws up his hands — ' they're saving the country. They don't mind what they do. Hours ? They work ten and a half, or with overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. At least that's what they'd like to do. The Government are in- sisting on one Sunday — or two Sundays — a month off. I don't say they're not right. But the women resent it. " W e're not tired ! " 42 ENGLAND'S EFFORT they say. And you look at them ! — they're not tired. If I go down to the shed and say — " Girls ! : — there's a bit of work the Government are pushing for — they say they must have — can you get it done ? " Why, they'll stay and get it done, and then pour out of the works, laughing and singing. I can tell you of a surgical dressing factory near here, where for nearly a year the women never had a holiday. They simply wouldn't take one. " And what'll our men at the front do, if we go holiday- making ? " Last night ' (the night of the raid) 1 the warning came to put out lights. We daren't send them home. They sat in the dark among the machines, singing " Keep the home fires burning " — " Tipperary " — and the like. I tell you, it made one a bit choky to hear them. They were thinking of their sweet- hearts and husbands, I'll be bound ! — not of themselves.' In another minute or two we were walking through the new workshops. Often as I have now seen this sight, so new to England, of a great engineering workshop, filled with women, it stirs me at the twentieth time little less than it did at first. These girls and women of the Midlands and the North are a young and ENGLAND'S EFFORT 43 comely race. Their slight or rounded figures, among the forest of machines, the fair or golden hair of so many of them, their grace of movement, bring a strange touch of beauty into a scene which has already its own spell. Etchers like Muirhead Bone, or Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art with these high workshops, their intricate dis- tances, the endless criss-cross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, shewing the many pretty heads, and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms, spaced in order, beside their furnaces or lathes, as far as the eye can reach, has added a new element — something flower- like — to all this flash of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it. For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine ! These girls — at hot haste — are making fuses, and cartridge-cases, by the hundred thousand, casting, pressing, drawing — and — in the special danger-buildings — filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive. There were about 4000 of them, to 5000 men, when I saw the shop, and their number has no doubt increased since ; for the latest 44 ENGLAND'S EFFORT figures shew that about 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every week. The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and co- operation of the men — without, that is, the surrender by the men of some of their most cherished trade customs — the whole move- ment would have been impossible. As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely dreamed a year ago ; and so far as this war is a war of machinery — and we all know what Germany's arsenals have done to make it so — its whole aspect is now changing for us. The ' eternal feminine ' has made one more startling in- cursion upon the normal web of things ! But on the ' dilution ' of labour, the burn- ing question of the hour, I shall have some- thing to say in my next letter. Let me here just record another visit of the same day to a small -arms factory of importance. Not many ENGLAND'S EFFORT 45 women here so far, though the number is increasing — but look at the expansion figures since last summer ! A large new factory- added, on a bare field ; 40,000 tons of excava- tion removed ; two miles of new shops, 60 feet wide, and four floors high ; the output in rifles quadrupled — and so on. We climbed to the top floor of the new buildings, and looked far and wide over the town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the national flags, marking ' con- trolled ' factories, i.e. factories still given over a year ago to one or other of the mis- cellaneous metal trades of the Midlands, and now making fuse or shell for England's armies, and under the control of the British Govern- ment. One had a sudden sharp sense of the town's corporate life, and of the spirit working in it everywhere for England's victory. Before we descend, we watch the testing of a particular gun. I was to hear its note on the actual battlefield a month later. An afternoon train takes me on to another great town, with some very ancient institu- tions, which have done very modern service in the war. I spent my evening in talking with my host, a steel-manufacturer identified with the life of the city, but serving also on one 46 ENGLAND'S EFFORT of the central Committees of the Ministry in London. Labour and politics, the chances of the war, America and American feeling to- wards us, the task of the new Minister of Munitions, the temper of English and Scotch workmen, the flux into which all manufac- turing conditions have been thrown by the war, and how far old landmarks can be restored after it — we talked hard on these and many other topics, till I must needs break it off — unwillingly — to get some sleep, and write some notes. (m) Next day took me deep into the very central current of ' England's effort ' — so far as this great phase of it, at any rate, is concerned. In this town, even more than in the city I had just left, one felt the throb of the nation's rising power, concentrated, orderly, deter- mined. Every single engineering business in a town of engineers was working for the war. Every manufacturer of any importance was doing his best for the Government, some in connection with the new Ministry, some with the Admiralty, some with the War Office. Aa for the leading firms of the city, the record of ENGLAND'S EFFORT 47 growth, of a mounting energy by day and night, was nothing short of bewildering. Take these few impressions of a long day, as they come back to me. First — a great steel warehouse, fall of raw steel of many sorts and kinds, bayonet steel, rifle steel, shell steel, stacked in every available corner, and against every possible wall ; all sold, every bit of it, and ready to be shipped — some to the Colonies, some to our Allies, — with peremptory orders coming in as to which the harassed head of the firm could only shake his head with a despairing ' impossible ! ' Then, some hours in a famous works, under the guidance of the managing director, one of those men — shrewd, indefatigable, humane — in whose company one learns what it is, in spite of all our supposed deficiencies, that makes the secret of England's industrial tenacity. An elderly Scotchman, very plainly marked by the labour and strain of the preced- ing eighteen months, but still steadily keeping his head and his temper, shewing the signs of an Evangelical tradition in his strong dislike for Sunday work, his evident care for his workpeople, men and women, and his just and sympathetic tone towards the labour 48 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT with which he has to deal : — such is my com- panion. He has a wonderful story to tell. ' In September 1914 we were called upon to manufacture a large extra number of field guns. We had neither buildings nor machi- nery for the order. However, we set to work. We took down seven dwelling-houses ; in three weeks we were whitewashing the walls of our new workshop, and laying in the machinery. My idea was to make so many guns. The Government asked for four times as many. So we took down more houses, and built another much larger shop. The work was finished in ten weeks. Five other large workshops were put up last year, all built at lightning speed, and everywhere additions have been made to the machinery in every department wherever it was possible to put machines.' As to their thousands of workmen, Mr. C. has no complaints to make. ' They have been steadily working anything from 60 to 80 hours per week ; the average is 64*29 hours per week, and the average time lost only 3 '51 per cent.' A little while ago, a certain Union put forward a claim for an advance in wages. ' We had to decline it ; ENGLAND'S EFFORT 49 but as the meeting came to an end, the Trade Union Secretary said — " Of course we are disappointed, and we shall no doubt return to the matter again. But whether you con- cede the advance of wages or not, our members will continue to do their level best, believing that they are not working for themselves alone, but helping the Government, and helping our soldiers to wage this war to a successful conclusion." ' And the managing director adds his belief that this is the spirit which prevails ' among the workpeople generally.' Before we plunge into the main works, however, my guide takes me to see a recent venture, organised since the war, in which he clearly takes a special interest. An old ware- house bought, so to speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for shell production — employ- ing between three and four hundred girls, with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labour going. These girls are working on the eight-hours' shift system ; and working so well that a not uncommon wage among them — on piece-work of course — runs to somewhere between two and three E 50 ENGLAND'S EFFORT pounds a week. ' But there is much more than money in it,' says the kind-faced woman- superintendent, as we step into her little office out of the noise, to talk a little. ' The girls are perfectly aware that they are " doing their bit " ; that they are standing by their men in the trenches.' This testimony, indeed, is universal. There is patriotism in this grim work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he or she is there for some useful purpose, connected with the war, and their expression seems to say — * Yes, we are all in it ! — we know very well what we are doing, and what a difference we are making. Go and tell our boys ! ' The interest of this workshop lay, of course, in the fact that it was a sample of innumerable others, as quickly organised, and as efficiently worked, now spreading over the Midlands and the North. As to the main Works belonging to the same great firm — such things have been often described ; but one sees them to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle which is one for the very life of England. Acres and acres of ground ! — covered by huge work- ENGLAND'S EFFORT 51 shops, new and old, by interlacing railway lines, and moving trolleys. Gone is all the vast miscellaneous engineering work of peace. The war has swallowed everything. I have a vision, first, of a great building, where huge naval guns are being lowered from the heating furnace above into the hardening oil tank below, or where in the depths of a great pit, with lights and men moving at the bottom, I see, as I stoop over the edge, a ' jacket ' being ' shrunk ' upon another similar monster, hang- ing perpendicularly below me. Close by are the forging- shops whence come the howitzers, and the great naval shells. Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot ingots, and drop them into the stamping presses. Man directs ; but one might think the tools themselves intelligent, like those golden automata of old that Hephaestus made, to run and wait upon the gods on Olympus. Down drops the punch. There is a burst of flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and out comes the shell or the howitzer, in the rough, nosed and hollowed, and ready for the turning. The men here are great, powerful fellows, blanched with heat and labour ; amid the flame and smoke of the forges one sees them as typical E 2 52 ENGLAND'S EFFORT figures in the national struggle, linked to those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and to those lines in Flanders and Picardy, where Britain holds her enemy at bay. Everywhere the same intensity of effort ; whether in the men or in those directing them. And what deli- cate and responsible processes ! In the next shop, with its rows of shining guns, I stop to look at a great gun apparently turning itself. No workman is visible for the moment. The process goes on automatically, the bright steel emerging under the tool that here too seems alive. Close to it is a man winding steel wire, or rather braid, on a 15-inch gun ; beyond again there are w r orkmen and inspectors, testing and gauging another similar giant. Look down this shining tube, and w T atch the gauging, now with calipers, now with a rubber device which takes the impression of the rifling, and reveals any defect. The gauging turns upon the ten-thousandth part of an inch, and any mistake or flaw may mean the lives of men. . . . We turn out into a pale sunshine. The morning work is over, and the men are troop- ing into the canteens for dinner — and we look in a moment, to see for ourselves how T good a ENGLAND'S EFFORT 53 meal it is. At luncheon, afterwards, in the Directors' offices, I am able to talk with the leading citizens of the great town. One of them writes some careful notes for me. Their report of labour conditions is excellent. ' No organised strikes, and few cessations of work to report. Overtime is being freely worked. Little or no drunkenness, and that at a time when the average earnings of many classes of workmen are two or three times above the normal level. The methods introduced in the twenty years before the war — conference and discussion — have practically settled all difficulties between employers and employed, in these parts, at any rate, during this time of England's trial.' After luncheon we diverge to pay another all too brief visit to a well-known firm. The Managing Director gives me some wonderful figures of a new Shell Factory they are just putting up. It was begun in September 1915. Since then 2000 tons of steel-work has been erected, and 200 out of 1200 machines required have been received and fixed. Four to five thousand hands will be ultimately employed. All the actual production off the machines will be done by women — and this 54 ENGLAND'S EFFORT although the works are intended for a heavy class of shell — 60-pound er High Explosive. Women are already shewing their capacity — helped by mechanical devices — to deal with this large type of shell ; and the workshop, when in full working order, is intended for an output of a million shell per annum. I drive on, overshadowed by these figures. ' Per annum. ' / — the little common words haunt the ear intolerably. Surely, before one more year is over, this horror under which we live will be lifted from Europe ! — Britain, a victorious Britain, will be at peace, and women's hands will have something else to do than making high explosive shell. But meanwhile, there is no other way. The country's call has gone out, clear and stern, and her daughters are coming in their thou- sands to meet it, from loom, and house, and shop. A little later, in a great board-room, I find the Munitions Committee gathered. Its func- tion of course is to help the new Ministry in organising the war-work of the town. In the case of the larger firms, the Committee has been chiefly busy in trying to replace labour withdrawn by the war. It has been getting ENGLAND'S EFFORT 55 skilled men back from the trenches, and advising the Ministry as to the ' badging ' of munition workers. It has itself, through its command of certain scientific workshops, been manufacturing gauges and testing materials. It has turned the electro-plate workshops of the town on to making steel helmets, and in general has been ' working in ' the smaller engineering concerns, so as to make them feed the larger ones. This process here as every- where is a very educating one. The shops employed on bicycle and ordinary motor work have as a rule little idea of the extreme accuracy required in munition work. The idea of working to the thousandth of an inch seems to them absurd ; but they have to learn to work to the ten-thousandth, and beyond. The war will leave behind it greatly raised standards of work in England ! — that everyone agrees. And I carry with me, as a last remem- brance of this great town and its activities, two recollections : — one of a University man doing some highly skilled work on a particu- larly fine gauge — ' If you ask me what I have been doing for the last few weeks, I can only tell you that I have been working like a nigger and have done nothing ! Patience ! — that's 56 ENGLAND'S EFFORT all there is to say.' And another — of a ' trans- formed ' shop of moderate size, where an active and able man, after giving up the whole of his ordinary business, has thrown himself into the provision, within his powers, of the most pressing war needs, as he came across them. In July last year, for instance, muni- tions work in many quarters was actually held up for want of gauges. Mr. D. made something like 10,000, to the great assistance of certain new Government shops. Then the Government asked for a particular kind of gun. Mr. D. undertook 1000, and has already delivered 400. Tools for shell-making are everywhere wanted, in the rush of the huge demand. Mr. D. has been making them dili- gently. This is just one example among hundreds of how a great industry is adapting itself to the fiery needs of war. But the winter dark has come, and I must catch my train. As I speed through a vast industrial district, I find in the evening papers hideous details of the Zeppelin raid, which give a peculiar passion and poignancy to my recollections of a crowded day, — and peculiar interest, also, to the talk of an able represen- tative of the Ministry of Munitions, who is ENGLAND'S EFFORT 57 travelling with me, and endeavouring to give me a connected view of the whole new organi- sation. As he speaks, my thoughts travel to the English battle line, to the trenches and casualty clearing-stations behind it, to distant Russia ; and I think of the Prime Minister's recent statement in Parliament — that the supply of munitions, for all its marvellous increase, is not yet equal to the demand. New shops, new workers, new efforts — England is producing them now unceasingly ; she must go on producing them. There must he no pause or slackening. There will be none. I am going now to see — after the Midlands — what the English and Scotch north is doing to swell the stream. And in my next letter there will be something to say about ' dilu- tion ' of labour, about wages, and drink, and some other burning topics of the moment No. 3. (0 It is now three months since Mr. Lloyd George made his startling speech, as Munitions Minister, in the House of Commons in which, as he wound up his review of his new depart- ment, he declared — ' unless we quicken our movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much gallant blood has flowed.' The passion of this peroration was like the fret of a river in flood chafing at some obstacle in its course. Generally speaking, the obstacle gives way. In this case Mr. George's obstacle had bjjgun to give way long before December 21st — the date of the speech. The flood had been pushing at it with increas- ing force since the foundation of the Ministry of Munitions in the preceding summer. But the crumbling process was not quick enough for Great Britain's needs, or for the energy of her Minister. Hence the outspoken speech of December 21st, supported by Mr. Asquith's grave words 58 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 59 of a few weeks later. ' We cannot go on ' — said the Prime Minister in effect — 'depending upon foreign countries for our munitions. We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and the cost is too great. We must make them ourselves.' ' Yes — and quicker ! ' — Mr. Lloyd George had already said, with a sharp emphasis, meant to ' hustle ' that portion of the nation which still required hustling ; over-painting his picture, no doubt, but with quite legitimate rhetoric, in order to produce his effect. The result of that fresh ' hustling ' three months ago has been the appointment of the Dilution Commissioners, a second Munitions Act amending the first, and a vast expansion all over the country of the organisation which had seemed so vast before. It was not till mid-winter, in the very midst of the new and already immense effort I have been describing, that the Minister of Munitions and those working with him convinced themselves that, without another resolute push, the barrier across the stream of the nation's will might still fatally hold it back. More and more men were wanted every week, — in the Army and the workshops — and there were not men to go 60 ENGLAND'S EFFORT round. The second push had to be given — it was given — and it still firmly persists. In the spring of 1915, the executives of the leading Trade Unions had promised the Government the relaxation of their trade rules for the period of the war. Many of the Trade Union leaders — Mr. Barnes, Mr. Hen- derson, Mr. Hodge and many others, have worked magnificently in this sense. And many Unions have been thoroughly loyal throughout their ranks to the pledge given in their name. The iron-moulders, the ship- wrights, the brass-workers may be specially mentioned. But in the trades mostly con- cerned with ammunition, there were certain places and areas where the men themselves, as distinct from their responsible leaders, offered a dogged, though often disguised resistance. Personally, as I have already said, I think that anyone at all accustomed to try and look at labour questions from the point of view of labour, will understand the men, while heartily sympathising with the Minister, who was determined to get ' the goods,' and has succeeded in getting them. Here, in talking of ' the men,' I except that small revolutionary element among them, to ENGLAND'S EFFORT 61 which I have once or twice referred, which has no country, and exists in all countries. And I except, too, instances which certainly are to be found, though rarely, of what one might call a purely mean and over-reaching temper on the part of workmen — taking advantage of the nation's need, as some of the less respon- sible employers have no doubt also taken advantage of it. But in general, it seems to me, there has been an honest struggle in the minds of thousands of workmen between what appears to them the necessary protection of their standards of life — laboriously attained through long effort — and the call of the war. And that the overwhelming majority of the workmen concerned with munitions should have patriotically and triumphantly decided this struggle as they have — under pressure, no doubt, but under no such pressure as exists in a conscripted, still more in an invaded, nation — may rank, I think, with the raising of our voluntary armies, as another striking chapter in the book of ' England's Effort.' In this chapter, then, ' Dilution ' will always take a leading place. What is ' dilution ' ? It means, of course, that under the sharp 62 ENGLAND'S EFFORT analysis of necessity, much engineering work, generally reckoned as ' skilled ' work, and reserved to ' skilled ' workmen, bv a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted out from the others as within the capacity of the unskilled or semi-skilled worker. By so dividing them up, and using the superior labour with economy, only where it is really necessary, it can be made to go infinitelv further ; and the inferior or un- trained labour can then be brought into work where nobody supposed it could be used, where, in fact, it never has been used. Obvious enough, perhaps ! But the idea had to be applied to living people — employers, many of whom shrank from reorganising their workshops and changing all their methods at a moment's notice ; and workmen, looking forward with consternation to being out- numbered, by ten to one, in their own work- shops, by women. When I was in the Mid- lands and the North, at the end of January and in early February, dilution was still an unsettled question in some of the most im- portant districts. One of the greatest employers in the country writes to me to-day ENGLAND'S EFFOET 63 (March 24) — ' Since January, we have passed through several critical moments, but, even- tually, the principle was accepted, and dilution is being introduced as fast as convenient. For this we have largely to thank an admirable Commission — (Sir Croydon Marks, Mr. Barnes and Mr. Shackleton) which was sent down to interview employers and employed. Their tact and acumen were remarkable. Speaking personally, I cannot kelp believing that there is a better understanding between masters and men now than has existed in my memory.' A great achievement that ! — for both employers and employed — for the Minister, also, who appointed the Commission, and thus set the huge stone rolling another leap upon its way. It will be readily seen how much depends also on the tact of the individual employer. That employer has constantly done best, who has called his men into council with him, and thrown himself on their patriotism and good sense. I take the following passage from an interesting report by a very shrewd observer, printed in one of the northern newspapers.* It describes an employer as saying — ' I was * Yorkshire Observer, February 1, 1916. 64 ENGLAND'S EFFORT told by the Ministry that I should have to double my output. Labour was scarce and I consulted a deputation of the men about it. I told them the problem and said I should be glad of suggestions. I told them that we should either have to get men or women, and I asked them for their co-operation, as there would be a great deal of teaching to be done. " Probably," I said, " you would like to find the men ? " They agreed to try. I gave them a week, and at the end of a week they came to me and said they would rather have women. I said to them — " Then you must all pull together." They gave me their word. Right from the beginning they have done their level best to help, and things have gone on perfectly.' On one occasion, a woman complained that the man directing her was 1 working against her.' ' I called the men's Committee together,' said the employer. ' I told them the facts, and they have dealt with the offender themselves.' The general system now followed in the shell factories as I have already described them, is to put so many skilled men in charge of so many lathes worked by women workers. Each skilled man, who teaches the women, ENGLAND'S EFFORT 65 sets the tools, and keeps the machines in running order, oversees eight, ten or more machines. But sometimes the comradeship is much closer. For instance — (I quote again the witness mentioned above) — in a machine tool shop, i.e. a shop for the making of tools used in shell production, one of the most highly skilled parts of the business, you may now see a man with a woman to help him, operating two lathes. If the woman falls into any difficulty, the man comes to help her. Both can earn more money than each could earn separately, and the skilled man who formerly worked the second lathe is released. In the same shop a woman watched a skilled man doing slot-drilling — ' a process in which thousandths of an inch matter ' — for a fort- night. Now she runs the machine herself by day, while the man works it on a night shift. One woman in this shop is ' able to do her own tool- setting.' The observer thinks she must be the only woman tool-setter in the country, and he drops the remark that her capacity and will may have something to do with the fact that she has a husband at the Front. Near by, as part of the same works, which are not specialised, but engaged in general F 66 ENGLAND'S EFFORT engineering, is a bomb shop staffed by women, which is now sending 3000 bombs a week to the trenches. Women are also doing gun- breech work of the most delicate and respon- sible kind under the guidance of a skilled overseer. One of the women at this work was formerly a charwoman ; she has never yet broken a tool. All over the works, indeed, the labour of women and unskilled men is being utilised in the same scientific way. Thus ' the area of the works has been doubled in a few months,' without the engagement of a single additional skilled man from outside. ' We have made the men take an interest in the women,' say the employers. ' That is the secret of our success. We care nothing at all about the money, we are all for the output. If the men think you are going to exploit women and cheapen the work, the scheme is crabbed right away.' I myself came across the effect of this suspicion in the minds of the workmen, in the case of a large Yorkshire shell factory, where the employers at once detected and slew it. This great workshop, formerly used for railway work, now employs some 1300 women, with a small staff of skilled men. The women work ENGLAND'S EFFORT 67 45 hours a week in 8 -hour shifts — the men 53 hours on 12-hour shifts. There is no diffi- culty whatever in obtaining a full supply of woman's labour — indeed the factory has now a waiting list of 500. Nor has there been any difficulty with the men in regard to the women's work. With the exception of two operations which are thought too heavy for them, all the machines are run by women. But when the factory began, the employers very soon detected that it was running below its possible output. There was a curious lack of briskness in the work — a curious constraint among the new workers. Yet the employers were certain that the women were keen, and their labour potentially efficient. They put their heads together, and posted up a notice in the factory to the effect that whatever might be the increase in the output of piece-work, the piece-work rate would not be altered. Instantly the atmosphere began to clear, the pace of the machines began to mount. It was a factory in which the work was new, the introduction of women was new, and the workers strange to each other, and for the most part strange to their employers. A small leaven of distrust on the part of the men F 2 68 ENGLAND'S EFFORT workers was enough, and the women were soon influenced. Luckily the mischief was as quickly scotched. Men and women began to do their best, the output of the factory — which had been planned for 14,000 shell a week — ran up to 30,000, and everything has gone smoothly since. Let me now, however, describe another effect of ' dilution ' — the employment of un- skilled men on operations hitherto included in skilled engineering. On the day after visiting the factory I have just described, my journey took me to another town close by, where my guide — a Director of one of the largest and best known steel and engineering works in the kingdom — shewed me a new shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, all ' medically unfit ' for the Army, and almost all drawn from the small trades and professions of the town, especially from those which had been hard hit by the war. Among those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing machines, a publican's assistant, clerks, shop assistants, three clergy ! — (these latter going home for their Sunday duty, and giving their wages to the Red Cross) — unemployed archi- tects, and the like. I cannot recall any shop ENGLAND'S EFFORT 69 which made a greater impression of energy — of a spirit behind the work, than this shop. In its inspecting room I found a graduate from Yale. ' I had to join in the fight ' — he said quietly — ' this was the best way I could think of.' And it was noticeable besides for some remarkable machines, which your country had also sent us. In other shell factories, a single lathe carries through one process, inter- minably repeated, sometimes two, possibly three. But here, with the exception of the fixing and drilling of the copper band, and a few minor operations, one lathe made the shell — cut, bored, roughed, turned, nosed and threaded it, so that it dropped out, all but the finished thing — minus, of course, the fuse. The steel pole introduced at the beginning of the process made nine shells, and the average time per shell was 23 minutes. No wonder that in the great warehouse adjoining the workshop one saw the shell heaps piling up in their tens of thousands — only to be rushed off week by week, incessantly, to the Front. The introduction of these machines had been largely the work of an able Irish manager, who described to me the intense anxiety with which he had watched their first putting up 70 ENGLAND'S EFFORT and testing, lest the vast expenditure incurred should have been in any degree thrown away. His cheerful looks and the shell warehouse told the sequel. When I next met him it was at a northern station in company with his Director. They were then apparently in search of new machinery. The workshop I had seen was being given over to women, and the men were moving on to heavier work. And this is the kind of process which is going on over the length and breadth of industrial England. So far, however, I have described the ex- pansion or adaptation of firms already existing. But the country is being rapidly covered with another and new type of workshop — the National Shell Factories — which are founded, financed and run by the Ministry of Munitions. The English Government is now by far the greatest engineering employer in the world. Let me take an illustration from a Yorkshire town — a town where this Government engi- neering is rapidly absorbing everything but the textile factories. A young and most com- petent Engineer officer is the Government head of the factory. The work was begun last July, by the help of borrowed lathes, in a building ENGLAND'S EFFORT 71 which had been used for painting railway carriages ; its first shell was completed last August. The staff last June was one. It is now about 200, and the employees number nearly 2500. A month after the first factory was opened, the Government asked for another — for larger shell. It was begun in August, and was in work in a few weeks. In September a still larger factory — for still larger shells — (how these demands illustrate the course of the war ! how they are them- selves illustrated by the history of Verdun!) was seen to be necessary. It was begun in September, and is now running. Almost all the machines used in the factory have been made in the town itself, and about 100 small firms, making shell-parts — Fuses, Primers, Gaines, etc. — have been grouped round the main firm, and are every day sending in their work to the factory to be tested, put together and delivered. No factory made a better impression upon me than this one. The large airy building with its cheerful lighting, the girls in their dark blue caps and overalls, their long and comely lines reminding one of some pro- cessional effect in a Florentine picture ; the 72 ENGLAND'S EFFORT high proportion of good looks — even of delicate beauty among them — the upper galleries, their tables piled with glittering brass work, amid which move the quick trained hands of women : — if one could have forgotten for a moment the meaning of it all, one might have applied to it Carlyle's description of a great school, as — ' a temple of industrious peace ' ! Some day perhaps this ' new industry ' — as our ancestors talked of a ' new learning ' — this swift, astonishing development of in- dustrial faculty among our people, especially among our women, will bear other and rich fruit for England under a cleared sky. It is impossible that it should pass by without effect — profound effect — upon our national life. But at present it has one meaning and one only — war ! Talk to these girls and women. This woman has lost her son — that woman her husband. This one has a brother home on leave, and is rejoicing in the return of her husband from the trenches, as a skilled man, indispensable to the shop ; another has friends in the places and among the people which suffered in the last Zeppelin raid. She speaks of it with tight lips. Was it she who chalked the inscription found by the Lady Superin- ENGLAND'S EFFORT 73 tendent on a lathe some nights ago ? — ' Done fourteen to-day. Beat that if you can, you devils / ' No ! — under this fast-spreading in- dustry, with its suggestion of good manage- ment and high wages, there is the beat of no ordinary impulse. Some feel it much more than others ; but, says the clever and kindly Superintendent I have already quoted — ' the majority are very decidedly working from the point of view of doing something for their country. ... A great many of the fuse- women are earning for the first time. . . . The more I see of them all, the better I like them.' And then follow some interesting comments on the relation of the more edu- cated and refined among them to the skilled mechanics — two national types that have perhaps never met in such close working contact before. One's thoughts begin to follow out some of the possible social results of this national movement. (n) But now the Midlands and the Yorkshire towns are behind me. The train hurries on through a sunny winter afternoon, and I look through some notes sent me by an expert on 74 ENGLAND'S EFFORT the great campaign. Some of them represent its ' humours.' Here is a perfectly true story, which shows an Englishman with ' a move on,' not unworthy of your side of the water. A father and a son, both men of tremendous energy, were the chiefs of a very large factory, which had been already extensively added to. The father lived in a house alongside the works. One day business took him into a neighbouring county, whilst the son came up to London on munition work. On the father's return he was astonished to see a furniture van removing the contents of his house. The son emerged. He had already signed a con- tract for a new factory on the site of his father's house ; the materials of the house were sold, and the furniture half gone. After the first shock, the father took it in character- istic Yorkshire fashion — wasting no words, and apparently proud of his son ! . . . Here we are at last, in the true North — crossing a river, with a climbing town beyond, its tiled roofs wreathed in smoke, through which the afternoon lights are play- ing. I am carried off to a friend's house. Some Directors of the great works I am come to see look in to make a kindly plan for the ENGLAND'S EFFORT 75 morrow, and in the evening, I find myself sitting next one of the most illustrious of modern inventors, with that touch of dream in manner and look, which so often goes with scientific discovery. The invention of this gentle and courteous man has affected every vessel of any size afloat, whether for war or trade, and the whole electrical development of the world. The fact was to be driven home even to my feminine ignorance of mechanics when, a fortnight later, the Captain of a Flagship and I were hanging over the huge shaft leading down to the engine-rooms of the super-Dreadnought, and my companion was explaining to me something of the driving power of the ship. But on this first meeting, how much I might have asked of the kind great man beside me, and was too preoccupied to ask ! May the opportunity be retrieved some day ! My head was really full of the over- whelming facts — whether of labour or of out- put, relating to this world-famous place, which were being discussed around me. I do not name the place, because the banishment of names, whether of persons or places, has been part of the plan of these articles. But one can no more disguise it by writing round it, 76 ENGLAND'S EFFORT than one could disguise Windsor Castle by any description that was not ridiculous. Many a German officer has walked through these works, I imagine, before the war, smoking his cigarette of peace with their Directors, and inwardly ruminating strange thoughts. If any such comes across these few lines, they will, I think, do England no harm. But here are some of the figures that can be given. The shop area of the ammunition shops alone has been increased eightfold since the outbreak of war. The total weight of shell delivered during 1915 was — in tons — fourteen times as much as that of 1914. The weight of shell delivered per week, as between December 1914 and December 1915, had risen nearly ten times. The number of workpeople, in these shops, men and women, had risen (a) as compared with the month in which war broke out, to a figure eight times as great ; (b) as compared with December 1914, to one be- tween three and four times as great. And over the whole vast enterprise — shipyards, gun-shops, ammunition shops, with all kinds of naval and other machinery used in war — the numbers of workpeople employed had increased since 1913 more than 200 per cent. ENGLAND'S EFFORT 77 They with their families equal the population of a great city — you may see a new town rising to meet their needs on the further side of the river. As to Dilution — it is now accepted by the men, who said when it was proposed to them — 'Why didn't you come to us six months ago ? ' and it is working wonders here as elsewhere. A particular portion of the breech mechanism of a gun used to take one hour and twenty minutes to make. On the dilution plan it is done on a capstan and takes six minutes. Where 500 women were employed before the war, there are now close on 9000, and there will be thousands more, requiring one skilled man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. In a great gun-carriage shop, ' what used to be done in two years is now done in one month.' In another, two tons of brass were used before the war ; a common figure now is twenty-one. A large milling-shop, now entirely worked by men, is to be given up immediately to women. And so on. ' Dilution,' it seems to me, is breaking down a number of labour conventions which no longer answer to the real conditions of the engineering trades. The pressure of the war is 78 ENGLAND'S EFFORT — one guesses — doing a real service to both employers and employed, by the simplification and overhauling it is everywhere bringing about. As to the problem of what is to be done with the women after the war, one may safely leave it to the future. It is probably bound up with that other problem of the great new workshops springing up everywhere, and the huge new plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid recovery of French trade after the war of 1870, and of the far more rapid rate — after forty years of machine and transport de- velopment — at which the industry of the Allied countries may possibly recover the ravages of the present war, when once peace is signed. In that recovery, how great a part may yet be played by these war workshops ! — trans- formed to the uses of peace ; by their crowds of workpeople, and by the hitherto unused intelligence they are everywhere evoking and training, among both men and women. As for the following day, my impressions, looking back, seem to be all a variant on a well-known Greek chorus, which hymns the amazing — the ' terrible ' — cleverness of Man ! Sea-faring, tillage, house-building, horse- taming, so muses Sophocles, two thousand ENGLAND'S EFFORT 79 three hundred years ago ; — how did man ever find them out ? ' Wonders are many, but the most wonderful thing is man ! Only against death has he no resource.'' Intelligence — and death ! They are written everywhere in these endless workshops, de- voted to the fiercest purposes of war. First of all we visit the ' danger buildings ' in the Fuse Factory, where mostly women are employed. About 500 women are at work here, on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which are dangerous. Detonator work, for instance. The Lady Superintendent selects for it specially steady and careful women or girls, who are paid at time and a quarter rate. Only about eight girls are allowed in each room. The girls here all wear — for protection — green muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curious ghastly look, that fits the occupation. For they are making small pellets for the charging of shells, out of a high explosive powder. Each girl uses a small copper ladle to take the powder out of a box before her and puts it into a press which stamps it into a tiny block, looking like ivory. She holds her hand over a 80 ENGLAND'S EFFOET little tray of water lest any of the powder should escape. What the explosive and death- dealing strength of it is, it does not do to think about. In another room a fresh group of girls are handling a black powder for another part of the detonator, and because of the irritant nature of the powder, are wearing white bandages round the nose and mouth. There is great competition for these rooms, the Superintendent says ! The girls in them work on two shifts of 10£ hours each, and would resent a change to a shorter shift. They have one hour for dinner, half an hour for tea, a cup of tea in the middle of the morning — and the whole of Saturdays free. To the eye of the ordinary visitor, at least, they show few signs of fatigue. After the Fuse Factory, we pass through the High Explosives Factory, where 250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling 18-pounder shell with high explo- sive. The brass cartridge case is being filled with cordite — bundles of what look like thin brown sticks ; and the shell itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly explosives we have seen prepared in the ' danger buildings.' The shell is fitted into ENGLAND'S EFFORT 81 the cartridge case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is now ready to be fired. I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed and about to go straight to the Front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first stage on their journey. I little thought then that I should see those boxes, or their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries behind the fighting lines in France, and that within a fortnight I should myself stand by and see one of those shells fired from a British gun, little more than a mile from Neuve Chapelle. But here are the women and girls trooping out to dinner. A sweet-faced Superintendent comes to talk to me. ' They are not so strong as the men,' she says, pointing to the long lines of girls — ' but what they lack in strength, they make up in patriotic spirit.' — I speak to two educated women, who turn out to be High School Mistresses from a town that has been several times visited by Zeppelins. ' We just felt we must come and help to kill Ger- mans,' they say quietly. ' All we mind is getting up at 5.30 every morning. Oh no ! — it is not too tiring.' Afterwards ? I remember one long pro- G 82 ENGLAND'S EFFORT cession of stately workshops, with their high windows, their floors crowded with machines, their roofs lined with cranes, the flame of the forges and the smoke of the fizzling steel lighting up the dark figures of groups of men, and the huge howitzer shells, red-hot, swinging in mid air. Near by, the same shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great lathes that rough and bore and finish them ; and among them shell for the Queen Elizabeth guns — the biggest shell made. This shop by good luck had been put up just as the war began. Its output of steel has increased from 80 tons a week to 1040. Then another huge fuse-shop, where 1400 girls in one shift are at work — said to be the largest fuse-shop known. And on the follow- ing morning, an endless spectacle of war-work — gun carriages, naval turrets, torpedo tubes, armoured railway carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops — and so on for ever. In the tool shops the output has risen from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a year ! And meanwhile I have not seen anything and shall not have time to see anything of the famous shipyards of the firm. But with ENGLAND'S EFFORT 83 regard to them, all that it is necessary to remember is that before the war they were capable of berthing twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward ; and we have Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what has happened since the war in the naval shipyards of this country. ' We have added a million tons to the Navy — and we have doubled its personnel^ And now in connection with these works let me record two final sayings : — One from a manager of a department : — ' We have a good many Socialists here, and they constantly give trouble. But the great majority of the men have done wonderfully. Some men have put in 100 hours a week since the war began. Some have not lost a minute since it began. The old hands have worked splendidly ! ' And another from one of the Directors : — ' I know of no drunkenness among our women . I don't remember ever having seen a drunken woman round here.' (m) Well ! I have almost said my say on munitions, though I could continue the story G 2 84 ENGLAND'S EFFORT much longer. But the wonder of it consists really in its vastness, in the steady develop- ment of a movement which will not end or slacken till the Allies are victorious. Except for the endless picturesqueness of the women's share in it, and the mechanical invention and adaptation going on everywhere, with which only a technical expert could deal, it is of course monotonous, and I might weary you. I will only — before asking you to cross the Channel with me to France — put down a few notes and impressions on the Clyde district, where, as our newspapers will have told you, there is at the present moment (March 29th) some serious labour trouble, with which the Government is dealing. Until further light is thrown upon its causes, comment is better postponed. But I have spoken quite frankly in these letters of ' danger spots,' where a type of international Socialism is to be found, affecting a small number of men, over whom the ideas of ' country ' and ' national honour ' seem to have no hold. Every country pos- sesses such men, and must guard itself against them. A nucleus of them exists in this populous and important district. How far their influence is helped among those who care ENGLAND'S EFFORT 85 nothing for their ideas, by any real or supposed grievances against the employers, by mis- understandings and misconceptions, by the sheer nervous fatigue and irritation of the men's long effort, or by those natural fears for the future of their Unions, to which I have once or twice referred, only one long familiar with the district could say. I can only point out here one or two interesting facts. In the first place, in this crowded countryside, where a small minority of dangerous extremists appear to have no care for their comrades in the trenches, the recruiting for the new armies — so I learn from one of the leading autho- rities — has been — ' taken on any basis what- ever — substantially higher than in any other district. The men came up magnificently.' That means that among those left behind, whatever disturbing and disintegrating forces exist in a great Labour centre have freer play than would normally have been the case. A certain amount of patriotic cream has been skimmed, and in some places the milk that remains must be thin. In the second place — you will remember the employer I quoted to you in a former letter — the work done here by thousands and thousands of workmen since 86 ENGLAND'S EFFORT the beginning of the war, especially in the great shipyards, and done with the heartiest and most self-sacrificing good will, has been simply invaluable to the nation, and England should never forget what the work means. ' Those who have nothing but criticism for the men,' writes an old resident on the Clyde, well acquainted with all the conditions of work there,/ ought to realise the exhausting conditions, of noise from the hammers, and heat from the molten metal, in which the men have worked their 50 to 100 hours a week, since August 1914. In some of these yards it is rare to find a " riveter " who is not deaf for life after 25, and sometimes earlier.' And finally, the invasion of women has perhaps been more startling to the work- men here than anywhere else. Not a single woman was employed in the works or factories of the district before the war, except in textiles. There will soon be 15,000 in the munition workshops, and that will not be the end. But Great Britain cannot afford — even in a single factory — to allow any trifling at this moment with the provision of guns, and the Government must — and will — act decisively. ENGLAND'S EFFORT 87 As to the drinking in this district of which so much has been said, and which is still far in excess of what it ought to be, I found many people hard put to it to explain why the restriction of hours which has worked so conspicuously well in other districts has had comparatively little effect here. Is it laxity of administration — or a certain ' cussedness ' in the Scotch character which resents any tightening of law ? One large employer with whom I discuss it believes it would suit the Scotch better to abolish all restrictions, and simply punish drunkenness much more severely. And above all ' Open all possible means of amusement on Sundays ! ' — especially the cinemas ! — a new and strange doctrine even now, in the ears of a country that holds the bones of John Knox. There seems indeed to be a terribly close connection between the dulness of the Scotch Sunday and the ob- stinacy of Scotch drinking ; and when one thinks of the heavy toil of the week, of the confinement of the workshops, and the strain of the work, one feels at any rate that here is a problem which is to be solved, not preached at ; and will be solved, some day, by nimbler and humaner wits than ours. 88 ENGLAND'S EFFORT In any case, the figures, gathered a month ago from those directly concerned, as to the general extension of the national effort here, could hardly be more striking. In normal times, the district, which is given up to Admiralty work, makes ships and guns, but has never made shells. The huge shell fac- tories springing up all over it are a wholly new creation. As usual, thev are filled with women, working under skilled male direction, and everywhere one found among managers and superintendents the same enthusiasm for the women's work. ' It's their honour they work on,' said one forewoman. ' That's why they stand it so well.' The average working week is fifty-four hours, but over- time may seriously lengthen the tale. Wages are high; canteens and rest rooms are being everywhere provided ; and the housing ques- tion is being tackled. The rapidity of the women's piece-work is astonishing, and the mingling of classes — the girls of education and refinement working quite happily with those of a much humbler type — runs without friction under the influence of a common spirit. This common spirit was well expressed by a girl who before she came to the factory was ENGLAND'S EFFORT 89 working a knitting machine. ' I like this better — because there's a purpose in it.' A frail-looking woman who was turning copper bands for shell said to me ' I never worked a machine before the war. I have done 912 in ten hours, but that tired me very much. I can do 500 or 600 quite easily.' On the same premises, after leaving the shell shops, we passed rapidly through gun- shops, where I again saw processes which had become almost familiar. ' The production of howitzers ' — said my guide — ' is the question of the day. We are making them with great rapidity — but the trouble is to get enough machines.' The next shop, devoted to 18- pounder field guns, was ' green fields fifteen months ago,' and the one adjoining it, a fine shed about 400 feet square, for howitzer work, was started in August last, on a site ' which was a bog with a burn running through it.' Soon, ' every foot of space will be filled with machines, and there will be 1200 people at work here, including 400 women. In the next shop we are turning out about 4000 shrapnel and 4000 high explosive shells per week. When we started women on what we thought this heavy shell, we provided men to 90 ENGLAND'S EFFORT help lift the shell in and out of the machines. The women thrust the men aside in five minutes ! ' Later on, as I was passing through a series of new workshops occupied with all kinds of army work and employing large numbers of women, I stopped to speak to a Belgian woman. ' Have you ever done machine work before ? ' ' No, Madame, never. Mais, c'est la guerre. II faut tuer les AUemands ! ' It was a quite passionless voice ; but one thought, with a shiver, of those names of eternal infamy — of Termonde — Aerschot — Dinant — Louvain. It was with this woman's words in my ears, that I set out on my last visit — to which they were the fitting prelude. The afternoon was darkening fast. The motor sped down a river valley, sodden with rain and melting snow, and after some miles we turn into a half- made road, leading to some new buildings, and a desolate space beyond. A sentry challenges us, and we produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide stretch of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250 acres are enclosed with barbed wire, and ENGLAND'S EFFORT 91 patrolled by sentries night and day. A number of small buildings— workshops, stores, etc. — are rising all over it. I am looking at what is to be the great ' filling ' factory of the district, where 9000 women, in addition to male workmen, will soon be employed in charging the shell coming from the new shell factories we have left behind us in the darkness. Strange and tragic scene ! Strange up- rising of women ! We regain the motor, and speed onwards, my secretary and I, through unknown roads far away from the city and its factories, to- wards the country house where we are to spend the night. In my memory there surge a thousand recollections of all that I have seen in the preceding fortnight. An England roused at last — rushing to factory, and lathe, to shipyard and forge, determined to meet and dominate her terrible enemy in the work- shop, as she has long since met and dominated him at sea, and will in time dominate him on land — that is how my country looks to me to-night. . . . The stars are coming out. Far away, over what seems like water with lights upon it, 92 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT there are dim snowy mountains — majestic — rising into the sky. The noise and clamour of the factories are all quiet in the night. Two thoughts remain with me — Britain's ships in the North Sea — Britain's soldiers in the trenches. And encircling and sustaining both, the justice of a great cause ; as these white Highland hills look down upon and encircle this valley. No. 4. (i) A million and a half of men — over a quarter of a million of women — working in some 4000 State-controlled workshops, for the supply of munitions of war, not only to our own troops, but to those of our Allies — the whole, in the main, a creation of six months' effort — this then is the astonishing spectacle, of some of the details of which, I have tried, as an eye-witness, to give you in my previous letters a rapid and imperfect sketch. But what of the men, the armies for which these munitions are being made and hurried to the fighting lines ? It was at Aldershot, a few days ago, that I listened to some details of the first rush of the new armies, given me by a member of the Head Quarters Staff who had been through it all. Aldershot in peace time held about 27,000 troops. Since the outbreak of war some million and a quarter of men have passed through Aldershot, coming in ceaselessly for training and equipment, and going out again to the theatres of war. In the first days and weeks of the war — during and 93 94 ENGLAND'S EFFORT after the marvellous precision and rapidity with which the Expeditionary Force was despatched to France — men poured in from all parts, from all businesses and occupations, rich and poor, north and south countrymen, English, Scotch, Irish and Welsh ; men from the Dominions, who had flung themselves into the first home-coming steamer, men from India, and men from the uttermost parts of Africa and Asia who had begged or worked their way home. They were magnificent material. They came with set faces, asking only for training, training, training ! — and ' what the peace soldier learns in six months ' — said my companion — ' they learnt in six weeks. We had neither uniforms, nor rifles, neither guns, nor horses for them. We did not know how to feed them or to house them. In front of the Headquarters at Aldershot, that Mecca of the soldier, where no one would dare to pass in ordinary times whose turn-out is not immaculate, the most extraordinary figures, in bowler hats and bits of uniform, passed unrebuked. We had to raid the neighbouring towns for food ; to send frantic embassies to London for bread and meat ; to turn out any sort of shed to house them. ENGLAND'S EFFORT 95 Luckily, it was summer weather ; otherwise I don't know what we should have done for blankets. But nobody " groused." Every- body worked, and there were many who felt it the time of their lives.' And yet England ' engineered the war ' ! England's hypocrisy and greed demanded the crushing of Germany — hence the lying ' ex- cuse ' of Belgium — that apparently is what all good Germans — except those who know better — believe ; what every German child is being taught. As I listen to my companion's story, I am reminded, however, of a puzzled remark which reached me lately, written just before Christmas last, by a German nurse in a Berlin hospital, who has English relations, friends of my own. ' We begin to wonder whether it really was England who caused the war — since you seem to be so dreadfully un- prepared ! ' So writes this sensible girl to one of her mother's kindred in England, in a letter which escaped the German censor. She might indeed wonder ! To have deliberately planned a Continental war with Germany, and Germany's eight million of soldiers, without men, guns, or ammunition beyond the require- ments of an Expeditionary Force of 160,000 96 ENGLAND'S EFFORT men, might well have become the State of Cloud Cuckoo Land. But the England of Chatham, Pitt, and Wellington has not generally been reckoned a nation of pure fools. The military camps of Great Britain tell the tale of our incredible venture. ' Great areas of land had to be cleared, levelled and drained ; barracks had to be built ; one camp alone used 42,000 railway truck loads of build- ing material.' There was no time to build new railways, and the existing roads were rapidly worn out. They were as steadily repaired, and on every side new camps sprang up around the parent camps of the country. The Surrey commons and woods, the Wiltshire downs, the Midland and Yorkshire heaths, the Buckinghamshire hills, have been every- where invaded — their old rural sanctities are gone. I walked in bewilderment the other day up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which when I knew it last was one kingdom of purple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. Barracks now form long streets upon its crest and sides ; practice-trenches, bombing-schools, the stuffed and dangling sacks for bayonet ENGLAND'S EFFORT 97 training, musketry ranges, and the rest are everywhere. Those happy children, whose wandering ground it once was, would know it no more. And this camp is only one of a series which spread far and wide round the Aldershot headquarters. Near my own home, a park and a wooded hill-side that two years ago were carefully guarded even from a neighbour's foot, are now occupied by a large town of military huts, which can be seen for miles round. And fifteen miles away, in a historic ' Chase ' where Catharine of Aragon lived while her trial was proceeding in a neighbouring town, a duke, bearing one of the great names of England, has himself built a camp housing 1200 men, for the recruits of his county regiments alone, and has equipped it with every necessary whether for the soldier's life or training. But everywhere — as I have already said — East, North, South and West, the English and Scotch roads are thronged with soldiers and horses, with trains of artillery waggons, and Army Service lorries, with men marching back from night attacks, or going out to scout and skirmish on the neighbouring commons, and through the most sacred game-preserves. H 98 ENGLAND'S EFFORT There are no more trespass-laws in England now — for the soldier. You point to our recruiting difficulties in Parliament. True enough. We have our recruiting difficulties still. Lord Derby has not apparently solved the riddle ; for riddle it is in a country of voluntary service, where none of the preparations necessary to fit conscription into ordinary life, with its obligations, have ever been made. The Government and the House of Commons are just now wrestling with it afresh, and public opinion seems to be hardening towards certain final measures that would have been impossible earlier in the war.* The call is still for men — more — and more men ! And given the conditions of this war, it is small wonder that England is restless till they are found. But amid the cross currents of criticism, I catch the voice of Mr. Walter Long, the most practical, the least boastful of men, in the House of Commons, a few nights ago : — Say what you like, blame, criticise, as you like, but ' what this country has done ''■'■ Since these lines were written the crisis in the Govern- ment, the Irish rising, and the withdrawal of the first Mili- tary Service Bill have happened in quick succession. The country is still waiting (April 28) for the last inevitable step. ENGLAND'S EFFORT 99 since August 1914 is an almost incredible story.' And so it is. And now let us follow some of these khaki- clad millions across the seas, and through the reinforcement camps, and the great supply- bases towards that fierce reality of war to which everything tends. (n) It was about the middle of February, after my return from the munition factories, that I received a programme from the War Office of a journey in France which I was to be allowed to make for the purpose of these letters. I remember being at first much dissatisfied with it. It included the names of three or four places well known to be the centres of English supply organisation in France. But it did not include any place in or near the actual fighting zone. To me, in my ignorance, the places named mainly represented the great array of finely equipped hospitals to be found everywhere in France in the rear of our armies, and I was inclined to say that I had no special knowledge of hospital work, and that one could see hospitals in England, with more leisure to feel and talk H2 100 ENGLAND'S EFFORT with the sufferers in them than a ten days' tour could give. A friendly Minister smiled when I presented this view. ' You had better accept. You will find it very different from what you suppose. The " back " of the Army includes everything.' He was more than right ! The conditions of travelling at the present moment, within the regions covered by the English military organisation in France, for a woman possessing a special War Office pass in addition to her ordinary passport, and under- stood to be on business which has the good will of the Government, though in no sense com- missioned by it, are made easy by the courtesy and kindness of everybody concerned. From the moment of landing on the French side my daughter and I passed into the charge of the military authorities. An officer accompanied us ; a War Office motor took us from place to place ; and everything that could be shown us in the short ten days of our tour was freely open to us. The trouble, indeed, that was taken to enable me to give some of the vivid- ness of personal seeing to these letters is but one of many proofs, I venture to think, of that warm natural wish in British minds that America should understand why we are fight- ENGLAND'S EFFORT 101 ing this war, and how we are fighting it. As to myself, I have written in complete freedom, affected only by the absolutely necessary re- strictions of the military censorship ; and I only hope I may be able to shew something — how- ever inadequately — of the work of men who have done a magnificent piece of organisation, far too little realised even in their own country. For in truth we in England know very little about our bases abroad, about what it means to supply the ever-growing needs of the English armies in France. The military world takes what has been done for granted ; the general English public knows next to nothing about it. But the details of the process, amazing to the mere spectator, are no less astonishing to the expert. ' It is a world of new problems, met by new solutions,' said such an expert, not an Englishman, discussing with me, after my return from France, the great supply bases abroad, and the work of the various Corps and Services connected with them — Army Service, Army Ordnance, Army Medical, Railway and Motor Transport. ' The British organisation in France, in support of your fighting line,' he added, 'will have a profound influence on the future of military 102 ENGLAND'S EFFORT education.' There can be no question that, during the past eighteen months, under the I.G.C. (Inspector- General of Communications) it has developed some of the best and keenest brains in the Army. Two days spent, under the guidance of the Base Commandant, or of an officer of his staff, among the docks and warehouses of a great French port, among the huts of its reinforce- ment camp, which contains more men than Aldershot before August 1914, or in its work- shops of the Army Ordnance Corps, gave me my first experience of the organising power that has gone to these departments of the war. The General in command of the base was there in the first weeks of the struggle, and during the great retreat. He retired with his staff to Nantes — leaving only a broken motor car behind him ! — just about the time that the French Government betook itself to Bordeaux. But in September he was back again, and the building-up process began, which has since known neither stop nor stay. That the commercial needs of a great French port should have been able to accommodate themselves as they have to the military needs of the British Army speaks loudly for the tact ENGLAND'S EFFORT 103 and good feeling on both sides. The task has not been at all times an easy one ; and I could not help thinking as we walked together through the crowded scene, that the tone and temper of the able man beside me — his admiration, simply expressed, yet evidently profound, for the French spirit in the war, and for the heroic unity. of the country through all ranks and classes, accounted for a great deal. In the presence of a goodwill so strong, diffi- culties disappear. Look now at this immense hangar or storehouse — the largest in the world — through which we are walking. It was completed three years before the war, partly it is said by German money, to house the growing cotton- trade of the port. It now houses a large proportion of the food of the British Army. The hangar is half a mile long, and is bounded on one side by the docks where the ships are discharging, and on the other by the railway lines where the trains are loading up for the front. You walk through avenues of bacon, through streets of biscuits and jam. On the quays just outside, ships from England, Canada, Norway, Argentina, Australia are pouring out their stores. Stand and watch 104 ENGLAND'S EFFORT the endless cranes at work, and think what English sea-power means ! And on the other side watch the packing of the trucks that are going to the Front, the order and perfection with which the requisitions, large and small, of every regiment are supplied. One thinks of the Crimean scandals. The ghost of Florence Nightingale seems to move beside us, watching contentedly what has come of all that long reforming labour, dealing with the health, the sanitation, the food and equipment of the soldier in which she played her part ; and one might fancy the great shade pausing specially beside the wired-in space labelled ' Medical Comforts,' and generally known as ' The Cage.' Medical necessaries are housed elsewhere ; but here are the dainties, the special foods, the easing appliances of all kinds, which are to make life bearable to many a sorely wounded man. As to the huge sheds of the Army Ordnance Department, which supply everything that the soldier doesn't eat, all metal stores, nails, horseshoes, oil-cans, barbed wire — by the ton — trenching-tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors, sandbags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, and the like — they are of ENGLAND'S EFFORT 105 course endless ; and the men who work in them are housed in one of the largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling. Perhaps the most interesting part of the Depot, to the outsider, are the repairing sheds and workshops established in a suburb of the town to which we drive on. For this is work that has never been done before in connection with an Army in the field. Day by day, trains-full of articles for repair come down from the Front. I happened to see a train of the kind later on, leaving a station close to the fighting line. Guns, rifles, range- finders, gun-carriages, harness, all torn and useless uniforms, tents, boots by the thousand, come to this base to be repaired, or to be sent home for transformation into ' shoddy ' to the Yorkshire towns. Nothing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s department. Field-glasses, periscopes, water-bottles, they arrive from the trenches with the same certainty as a wounded howitzer or machine- gun, and are returned as promptly. In one shed, my guide called my attention to shelves on which were a number of small objects in china and metal. ' They were found in kits left on the field ' he says gently. ' Wherever 106 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT we can identify the owner, such things are carefully returned to his people. These could not be identified.' I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse French pottery which some dead father had bought, at Poper- inghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the children at home. Near by were ' souvenirs,' bits of shell, of German equipment ; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a saint — and so on — every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden death — death in youth, at the height of life. The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under soldier-fore- men, are busy, the harness -mending room, and the engineering workshops might reassure those pessimists among us — especially of my own sex — who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful animal. Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and its steadily mounting efficiency. He began work with 140 men, he is now em- ploying more than a thousand, and his repair- ing sheds are saving thousands of pounds a week to the British Government. He makes all his own power, and has four or five power- ful dynamos at work. ENGLAND'S EFFORT 107 We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is difficult. Yet we do our best to defy the weather. We tramp through the deepening snow of the great camp which lines the slopes of the hills above the river and the town, visiting its huts, and recreation rooms, its cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an Infantry Base Depot who is to be our escort on the morrow. And on the last morning before we start, we mount to the plateau above the reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep, and the wind blows one of the sharpest blasts of the winter. Here are bodies of men going through some of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front ; here are trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting line. The instructors here, as at other training camps in France, are all men returned from the Front. The men to whom they have to give the final touch of training — men so near themselves to the real thing — are impatient of any other sort. As we stand beside the trenches under the bright sun and piercing wind, looking at the 108 ENGLAND'S EFFORT dark lines of British soldiers upon the snow, and listening to the explanations of a most keen and courteous officer, one's eyes wander, on the one side, over the great town and port, over the French coast and the distant sea, and on the other side, inland, over the beautiful French landscape with its farms and country houses. Everything one sees is steeped in history, a mingled history, in which England and France up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal share. Now again they are mingled here, all the old enmities buried in a comradeship that goes deeper far than they, a comradeship of the spirit, that will surely mould the life of both nations for years to come. How we grudged the snow and the low sweeping clouds and the closed motor, on our drive of the next day ! I remember little more of it than occasional glimpses of the tall cliffs that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty look at a fine church above a steeply built town, an army lorry stuck deep in the snow drifts, and finally the quays and ships of another Base port. Our escort, Colonel S., pilots us to a pleasant hotel full of officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communication, ENGLAND'S EFFORT 109 with a few poor wives and mothers among them who have come over to nurse their wounded in one or other of the innumerable hospitals of the Base. Before dinner, the General Commanding the Base had found me out, and I had told my story. ' Oh, we'll put some notes to- gether for you. We were up most of last night. I dare say we shall be up most of this. But a little more or less doesn't matter.' I pro- tested guiltily. But it is always the busiest men who shoulder the extra burdens ; and the notes duly reached me. From them, from the talk of others spending their last ounce of brain and energy in the service of the Base, and from the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and draw some general picture of what that service is. Suppose a British officer speaking : ' B-emember first that every man, every horse, every round of ammunition, every article of clothing and equipment, all the guns and vehicles and nearly all the food has to be brought across the English Channel to maintain and reinforce the ever-growing British Army which holds now so important a share of the fighting line in France. The ports of entry are already overtaxed by the civil and military 110 ENGLAND'S EFFORT needs of France herself. Imagine how diffi- cult it is — -and how the difficulty grows daily with the steady increase of the British Army — to receive, disembark, accommodate and for- ward the multitude of men, and the masses of material. You see the khaki in the French streets, the mingling everywhere of French and English, but the ordinary visitor can form no idea of the magnitude of this friendly invasion. There is no formal delimitation of areas or spaces, in docks, or town, or railways. But gradually the observer will realise that the town is honeycombed with the temporary locations of the British Army, which every- where speckle the map hanging in the office of the Garrison Quarter Master. And let him further visit the place, where the long lines of reinforcement, training, and hospital camps are installed on open ground, and Old England's mighty effort will scarcely hide itself from the least intelligent. Work, efficiency, economy — must be the watchwords of a Base. Its functions may not be magnificent — but they are war — and war is impossible unless they are rightly carried out. ' When we came back from the Loire in September, after our temporary retreat — the ENGLAND'S EFFORT 111 British personnel of this place grew from 1100 to 11,000 in a week. Now there are thousands of troops always passing through, thousands of men in hospital, thousands at work in the docks and storehouses. And let anyone who cares for horses go and look at the Remount Depot and the Veterinary Hospitals ! The whole treatment of horses in this war has been revolutionised. Look at the cheap ingenious stables, the comfort produced by the simplest means, the kind, quiet handling ; look at the Convalescent Horse Depots, the operating theatres, and the pharmacy stores in the Veterinary hospitals. ' As to the troops themselves, every regi- ment has its own lines for its own reinforce- ments. Good food, clean cooking, civilised dining-rooms, excellent sanitation — the Base provides them all. It provides too whatever else Tommy Atkins wants, and close at hand ; wet and dry canteens, libraries, recreation huts, tea and coffee huts, palatial cinemas, concerts. And what are the results ? Ex- cellent behaviour ; excellent relations between the British soldier and the French inhabitants ; absence of all serious crime. ; ' Then look at the docks. You will see there 112 ENGLAND'S EFFORT armies of labourers, and long lines of ships, discharging horses, timber, rations, fodder, coal, coke, petrol. Or at the stores and depots. It would take you days to get any idea of the huge quantities of stores, or of the new and ingenious means of space-economy, and quick distribution. As to the Works Department — camps and depots are put up "while you wait" by the R.E. Officers and unskilled military labour. Add to all this the armies of clerks, despatch riders and motor cyclists — and the immense hospital personnel : — then, if you can make any intelligible picture of it in your mind, you will have some idea of what Bases like these mean.' Pondering these notes, it seemed to me that the only way to get some kind of ' intelligible picture ' in two short days, was to examine something in detail, and the rest in general. Accordingly we spent a long Sunday morning in the Motor Transport Depot, which is the creation of Colonel B., and perhaps as good an example as one could find anywhere in France of the organising talent of the able British officer. The Depot opened in a theatre on August 13, 1914. ' It began,' says Colonel B., ' with a few balls of string and a bag of ENGLAND'S EFFORT 113 nails ! ' Its staff then consisted of 6 officers and 91 N.C.O.'s and men — its permanent staff at present is about 500. All the drivers of some 20,000 motor vehicles — nearly 40,000 men — are tested here, and, if necessary, instructed before going up to the fighting lines ; and the depot deals with 350 different types of vehicles. In round figures, 100,000 separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged in the depot. The system of records and accounts is extraordinarily perfect, and so ingenious that it seems to work itself. Meanwhile Colonel B.'s relations with his army of chauffeurs, of whom about 1000 are always housed on the premises, are exceedingly human and friendly, in spite of the strictness of the Army discipline. Most of his men who are not married, the Colonel tells me, have found a { friend ' in the town, one or other of its trimly dressed girls, with whom the English mechanic ' walks out,' on Sundays and holidays. There are many engagements, and, as I gather, no misconduct. Marriage is generally postponed till after the war, owing to the legal and other difficulties involved. But marriage there will be when peace comes. As to how the Englishman and i 114 ENGLAND'S EFFORT the French girl communicate, there are amus- ing speculations, but little exact knowledge. There can be small doubt, however, that a number of hybrid words perfectly understood by both sides are gradually coming into use, and if the war lasts much longer, a rough Esperanto will have grown up which may leave its mark on both languages. The word ' narpoo ' is a case in point. It is said to be originally a corruption of ' il rCy a "plus ' — the phrase which so often meets the Tommy foraging for eggs or milk or fruit. At present it means anything from ' done up ' to ' dead.' Here is an instance of it, told me by a Chaplain at the Front. He was billeted in a farm with a number of men and a sergeant. All the men, from the Chaplain to the youngest private, felt a keen sympathy and admiration for the women of the farm, who were both working the land and looking after their billetees, with wonderful pluck and energy. One evening the Chaplain, arriving at the open door of the farm, saw in the kitchen beyond it the daughter of the house who had just come in from farm work. She was looking at a pile of dirty plates and dishes, which had to be washed before supper, and she gave a sigh of ENGLAND'S EFFORT 115 fatigue. Suddenly in the back door on the other side of the kitchen appeared the sergeant. He looked at the girl, then at the dishes, then again at the girl. ' Fattigay ? ' he said cheer- fully, going up to her. ' Narpoo ? Give 'em me. Compree ? ' And before she could say a word, he had driven her away, and plunged into the work. The general relations, indeed, between our soldiers and the French population could not be better. General after General, both in the Bases and at the Front, dwelt on this point. A distinguished General commanding one of our Armies on the Line spoke to me of it with emphasis. ' The testimony is universal, and it is equally creditable to both sides.' The French civilian in town and country is, no doubt, profiting by the large demand and prompt payments of the British forces. But just as in the case of the women munition- workers, there is infinitely more in it than money. On the British part there is, in both officers and men, a burning sympathy for what France has suffered, whether from the out- rages of a brutal enemy, or from the inevitable hardships of war. The headquarters of the General I have mentioned were not more than 12 116 ENGLAND'S EFFORT fifteen or twenty miles from towns where unspeakable things were done by German soldiers — officers no less than men — in the first weeks of the struggle. With such deeds the French peasantry and small townsfolk, as they still remain in Picardy and Artois, can and do contrast, day by day, the temper, the courtesy, the humanity of the British soldier. Great Britain of course is a friend and ally ; and Germany is the enemy. But these French folk, these defenceless women and children know instinctively that the British Army, like their own, whether in its officers, or in its rank and file, is incapable, towards any non-combatant, of what the German Army has done repeatedly, officially, and still excuses and defends. The signs of this feeling for and sympathy with the French civils among our troops are many. Here is one slight but illuminating story told me by an eye-witness. She is one of a band of women under a noble chief, who, since very early in the war, have been running a canteen for soldiers, night and day, at the large railway-station of the very Base I have been describing, where trains are perpetually arriving from or departing to the Front. In ENGLAND'S EFFORT 117 the early days of the war, a refugee train arrived one afternoon full of helpless French folk, mainly of course women and children, and old people, turned out of their homes by the German advance. In general, the re- fugees were looked after by the French Red Cross, ' who did it admirably, going along the trains with hot drinks and food and clothing.' But on this occasion there were a number of small children and some of them got over- looked. In the hubbub, ' I found a raw young Scotchman, little more than a boy,' belonging to a Highland regiment, with six youngsters clinging to him, for whom he peremptorily demanded tea. ' He had tears in his eyes and his voice was all husky as he explained in homely Scotch how the bairns had been turned out of their homes — how he couldn't bear it — and he would give them tea.' A table was found. ' I provided the milk, and he paid for bread and butter and chocolate, and waited on and talked to the six little French people himself. Strange to say, they seemed to understand each other quite well.' (in) It was with this railway station canteen that my latest memories of the great Base are 118 ENGLAND'S EFFORT concerned. The afternoon of our second day at was spent in seeing a fine Red Cross hospital in the town, and then in walking or driving round the endless reinforcement and hospital camps in the open country. Every- where the same vigorous expanding organisa- tion, the same ceaselessly growing numbers, the same humanity and care in detail. ' How many years have we been at war ? ' one tends to ask oneself in bewilderment, as the spectacle unrolls itself. ' Is it possible that all this is the work of eighteen months ? ' And I am re- minded of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his German captive who asked his opinion about the duration of the war. ' I'll tell you what — it's the furrst five years that'll be the worrst ! ' We seem — in the Bases — to have slipped through them already ; measuring by any of the ordinary ratios of work to time. On my return home, a diplomat representing one of the neutral nations told me that the Military Secretary on his staff had been round the English Bases in France, and had come back with his ' eyes starting out of his head.' Having seen them myself, the phrase seemed to me quite natural. Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell, ENGLAND'S EFFORT 119 we turned towards the canteen at the railway station. We found it going on in an old goods' shed, simply fitted up with a long tea and coffee bar, tables and chairs, and some small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end to end with a crowd of soldiers, who after many hours of waiting, were just departing for the Front. The old shabby room, with its points of bright light, and its shadowy sides and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting for the moving throng of figures. Some men were crowding round the bar ; some were writing letters in haste to post before the train went off ; the piano was going, and a few, gathered round it, were singing the songs of the day, of which the choruses were sometimes taken up in the room. The men — drafts going up to different regiments on the line — appeared to me to come from many parts. The broad Yorkshire and Cumbrian speech, Scotch, the Cockney of the Home Counties, the Northum- berland burr, the tongues of Devon and Somerset — one seemed to hear them all in turn. The demands at the counter had slackened a little, and I was presently listening to some of the talk of the indefatigable helpers who work this thing night and day. One of 120 ENGLAND'S EFFORT them drew a picture of the Canadians, the indomitable fighters of Ypres and Loos, of their breathless energy and impatience of anything but the quickest pace of life, their appetites ! — half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, at threepence each, swallowed down in a moment of time ; then of the French-Canadians, their old-world French, their old-world Catholicism, simple and passionate. One of these last asked if there was any chance of his being sent to Egypt. ' Why are you so anxious to go to Egypt ? ' — ' Because it was there the Holy Family rested,' said the lad, shyly. The lady to whom he spoke described to him the tree and the Holy Well in St. Georgius, and he listened entranced. Sometimes a rough lot fill the canteen, drawn from the poorest class, perhaps, of an English seaport. They hustle for their food, shout at the helpers, and seem to have no notion that such words as ' please ' and ' thank you ' exist. After three or four hours of battling with such an apparently mannerless crew, one of the helpers saw them depart to the platform where their train was waiting for them, with very natural relief. But they were no sooner gone, when a ENGLAND'S EFFORT 121 Guardsman, with the manners, the stature, and the smartness of his kind, came back to the counter, and asked to speak to the lady in charge, of it. ' Those chaps, Miss, what have just gone out,' — he said apologetically — ■ ' have never been used to ladies, and they don't know what to say to them. So they asked me just to come in and say for them they were very much obliged for all the ladies' kindness, but they couldn't say it themselves.' The tired helper was suddenly too choky to answer. The message, the choice of the messenger, as one sure to do ' the right thing,' were both so touching. . . . . . But there was a sudden movement in the crowd. The train was up. We all surged out upon the platform, and I watched the embarkation— the endless train engulfing its hundreds of men. Just as I had seen the food and equipment trains going up from the first Base laden with everything necessary to replace the daily waste of the Army, so here was the train of human material, going up to replace the daily waste of men. After many hours of travelling, and perhaps some of rest, these young soldiers — how young most of them were ! — would find themselves face to 122 ENGLAND'S EFFORT face with the sharpest realities of war. I thought of what I had seen in the Red Cross Hospital that afternoon — ' what man has made of man' — the wreck of youth and strength, the hideous pain, the helpless disablement. But the station rang with laughter and talk. Someone in the canteen began to play 1 Keep the Home Fires burning ' — and the men in the train joined in, though not very heartily, for as one or two took care to tell me, laugh- ingly — ' That and " Tipperary " are awfully stale now ! ' A bright-faced lad discussed with D — how long the war would last — ' And shan't we miss it when it's done ! ' he said, with a jesting farewell to us, as he jumped into the train which had begun to move. Slowly, slowly it passed out of sight, amid waves of singing and the shouting of good-byes. . . . It was late that evening when after much talk with various officers I went up to my room to try and write, bewildered by a multi- tude of impressions. Impressions of human energy, human intelligence, human suffering. What England is doing in this country will leave, it seems to me, indelible marks upon the national character. I feel a natural pride, ENGLAND'S EFFORT 123 as I sit thinking over the day, in all this British efficiency and power, and a quick joy in the consciousness of our fellowship with France and hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun is still in its first intensity, and when I have read all that the evening news- papers contain about it there stirs in me a fresh and deeper realisation of the meaning of what I have been seeing. In these great Bases, in the marvellous railway organisation, in the handling of the vast motor transport in all its forms, in the feeding and equipment of the British Army, we have the scaffolding and preparation of war, which both in the French and English Armies have now reached a perfection undreamt of when the contest began. But the war itself — the deadly struggle of that distant line to which it all tends ? It is in the flash and roar of the guns, in the courage and endurance of the fighting man, that all this travail of brain and muscle speaks at last. At that courage and endurance, women, after all, can only guess — through whatever rending of their own hearts. But I was to come somewhat nearer to it than I thought then. The morrow brought surprise ! No. 5. (i) Our journey further north through the deep February snow was scarcely less striking as an illustration of Great Britain's constantly growing share in the war than the sight of the great supply Bases themselves. The first part of it indeed led over solitary uplands, where the chained wheels of the motor rocked in the snow, and our military chauffeur dared make no stop, for fear he should never be able to start again. All that seemed alive in the white landscape were the partridges — sometimes in great flocks — which scudded at our approach, or occasional groups of hares in the middle distance, holding winter parley. The road seemed interminably long and straight, and ours were almost the first tracks in it. The snow came down incessantly, and once or twice it looked as though we should be left stranded in the white wilderness. But after a third of the journey was over, the snow began to lessen and the roads to 124 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 125 clear. We dropped first into a sea -port town which offered much the same mingled scene of French and English, of English nurses, and French foilus, of unloading ships, and British soldiers, as the bases we had left, only on a smaller scale. And beyond the town we climbed again on to the high land, through a beautiful country of interwoven downs, and more plentiful habitation. Soon indeed the roads began to show the signs of war : — a village or small town, its picturesque market- place filled with a park of artillery waggons ; roads lined with motor lorries with the painted shell upon them that tells ammunition ; British artillerymen in khaki, bringing a band of horses out of a snow-bound farm ; closed motor-cars filled with officers hurrying past ; then an open car with King's Messengers, tall soldierly figures, looking in some astonish- ment at the two ladies, as they hurry by. And who or what is this horseman looming out of the sleet ? — like a figure from a piece of Indian or Persian embroidery ; turbaned and swarthy, his cloak swelling out round his handsome head and shoulders, the buildings of a Norman farm behind him ? ' There are a few Indian cavalry about here,' says our guide 126 ENGLAND'S EFFORT — ' they are billeted in the farms.' And presently the road is full of them. Their Eastern forms, their dark intent faces, pass strangely through the Norman landscape. Now we are only some forty miles from the line, and we presently reach another town containing an important headquarters, where we are to stop for luncheon. The inn at which we put up is like the song in Twelfth Night, 1 old and plain ' — and when lunch is done, our Colonel goes to pay an official call at Head- quarters, and my daughter and I make our way to the historic church of the town. The Colonel joins us here with another officer who brings the amazing news that G.H.Q. (General Headquarters) — that mysterious centre and brain of all things — invites us for two days ! If we accept, an officer will come for us on the morning of March 1st to our hotel in , and take us by motor, some forty miles, to the guest-house where G.H.Q. puts up its visitors. ' Accept ' ! Ah ! if one could only forget for a moment the human facts behind the absorbing interest and excitement of this journey, one might be content to feel only the stir of quickened pulses, of gratitude for a further opportunity so tremendous. As it ENGLAND'S EFFORT 127 was, I saw all the journey henceforward with new eyes because of that to which it was bringing us. On we sped through the French country- side, past a great forest lying black on the edge of the white horizon — (I open my map and find it marked Bois de Crecy !) — past another old town, with Agincourt a few miles to the east ; and so into a region of pine and sand that borders the sea. Darkness comes down and we miss our way. What are these lines of light among the pinewoods ? Another military and hospital camp, which we are to see on the morrow — so we discover at last. But we have overshot our goal, and must grope our way back through the pinewoods to the sea-shore where a little primitive hotel, built for the summer, with walls that seem to be made of brown paper, receives us. But we have motored far that day and greet it joyfully. ... The following morning we woke to a silvery sunlight, with, at last, some promise of spring over a land cleared of snow. The day was spent in going through a camp which has been set down in one of the pleasantest and healthiest spots of France, a favourite haunt 128 ENGLAND'S EFFORT of French artists before the War. Now the sandy slopes, whence the pines, alack, have been cut away, are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training- grounds, where, as at other bases, the newly arrived troops are put through their last instruction before going to the Front. As usual, the magnitude of what has been done in one short year filled one with amazement. Here is the bare catalogue. Infantry base depots, i.e. sleeping and mess quarters for thousands of men belonging to the new armies ; sixteen hospitals with 21,000 beds ; three rifle ranges ; two training camps ; a machine-gun training school ; a vast laundry worked by French women, under British organisation, which washes for all the hos- pitals, 30,000 pieces a day ; recreation huts of all types and kinds, official and voluntary ; a cinema theatre, seating 800 men, with performances twice a day ; nurses' clubs ; officers' clubs ; a supply depot for food ; an Ordnance depot for everything that is not food ; new sidings to the railway, where 1000 men can be entrained on the one side, while 1000 men are detraining on the other, or two ENGLAND'S EFFORT 129 full ambulance trains can come in and go out ; a convalescent depot of 2000 patients, and a convalescent horse depot of 2000 horses ! — etcetera. And this is the work accomplished since last April in one camp. Yet, as I look back upon it, my chief impression of that long day is an impression, first, of endless hospital huts and marquees with their rows of beds, in which the pale or flushed faces are generally ready — unless pain or weariness forbid — as a visitor ventures timidly near, to turn and smile in response to the few halting words of sympathy or enquiry which are all one can find to say ; and, next, of such a wealth of skill, and pity and devotion poured out upon this terrible human need, as makes one thank God for doctors and nurses, and bright-faced V.A.D.s. After all, one tremblingly asks oneself, in spite of the appal- ling facts of wounds, and death, and violence, in which the human world is now steeped, is it yet possible, is it yet true, that the ultimate thing — the final power behind the veil — to which at least this vast linked spectacle of suffering and tenderness, here in this great camp, testifies — is not Force, but Love ? Is this the mysterious message which seems to K 130 ENGLAND'S EFFORT breathe from these crowded wards — to make them just bearable ? Let me recollect the open door of an operating theatre, and a young officer, quite a boy, lying there with a bullet in his chest, which the surgeons were just about to try and extract. The fine pale features of the wounded man, the faces of the surgeon and the nurses, so intent and cheerfully absorbed, the shining surfaces and appliances of the white room — stamp themselves on memory. I recollect too one John S — , a very bad case, a private. ' Oh, you must come and see John S — ,' says one of the Sisters. ' We get all the little distractions we can for John.' 'Will he recover?' 'Well — we thought so — but ' — her face changes gravely — ' John himself seems to have made up his mind lately. He knows — but he never com- plains.' Knows what ? We go to see him, and he turns round philosophically from his tea. ' Oh, I'm all right — a bit tired — that's all.' And then a smile passes between him and his nurse. He has lost a leg, he has a deep wound in his back which won't heal, which is draining his life away — poor, poor John ENGLAND'S EFFORT 131 S — ! Close by is a short plain man with a look of fevered and patient endurance that haunts one now to think of. ' It's my eyes. I'm afraid they're getting worse. I was hit in the head, you see. Yes, the pain's bad — sometimes.' The nurse looks at him anxiously as we pass, and explains what is being tried to give relief. This devotion of the nurses — how can one ever say enough of it ! I recall the wrath of a medical officer in charge of a large hospital at Rouen — ' Why don't they give more Red Crosses to the working nurses ? They don't get half enough recognition. I have a nurse here who has been twelve months in the operating theatre. She ought to have a V.C. ! It's worth it.' And here is a dark- eyed young officer who had come from a distant colony to fight for England. I find him in an officers' hospital established not long after war broke out, in a former Casino where the huge Baccarat room has been turned into two large and splendid wards. He is courteously ready to talk about his wound, but much more ready to talk about his Sister. ' It's simply wonderjul what they do for us ! ' he says, all his face lighting up — K 2 132 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 'when I was worst there wasn't an hour in the day or night my Sister wasn't ready to try anything in the world to help me. But they're all like that.' Twenty thousand wounded ! — while every day the ambulance trains come and go from the Front, or to other bases — there to fill up one or other of the splendid hospital ships that take our brave fellows back to England, and home, and rest. And this city of hospitals, under its hard-pressed medical Chief, with all its wealth of scientific inven- tion, and pain-saving device, and unremitting care, with its wonderful health and recovery statistics, has been the growth of just twelve months. The mind thinking of it wavers backwards and forwards between the two impressions — the hideous havoc of war, on the one hand ; the power of the human brain, and the magical energies of human feeling on the other. (n) It was late on the 29th of February that we reached our next resting-place, to find a kind greeting from another Base-Commandant and final directions for our journey of the morrow. ENGLAND'S EFFORT 133 We put up at one of the old commercial inns of the town — (it is not easy to find hotel quarters of any kind just now, when every building at all suitable has been pressed into the hospital service) — and I found delight in watching the various types of French officers, naval and military, who came in to the table d'hdte, plunging as soon as they had thrown off their caps and cloaks, and while they waited for their consommS, into the papers with the latest news of Verdun. But we were too tired to try and talk ! The morning came quickly, and with it our escort from G.H.Q. We said good-bye to Colonel S. who had guided our journey so smoothly through all the fierce drawbacks of the weather, and made friends at once with our new guide, the staff officer who deals with the guests of G.H.Q. Never shall I forget that morning's journey! I find in my notes : — ' A beautiful drive — far more beautiful than I had expected ; over undulating country, with distant views of interlocking downs, and along typical French roads, tree- or forest-bordered, running straight as a line up hill and down hill, over upland and plain. One exquisite point of view especially comes 134 ENGLAND'S EFFORT back to me, where a road to the coast — that coast which the Germans so nearly reached ! — diverged upon our left, and all the lowlands westward came into sight. It was pure Turner : — the soft sunlight of the day, with its blue shadows, and pale blue sky ; the yellow chalk hills, still marked with streaks of snow ; the woods, purple and madder brown ; the distances aetherially blue ; and the villages, bare and unlovely, compared to the villages of Kent and Sussex, but expressing a strong, old, historic life, sprung from the soil, and one with it. The first distant glimpse, as we turned a hill-corner, of the old town which was our destination, — extraordinarily fine ! — its ancient church a towered mass of luminous grey under the sunshine, gathering the tiled roofs into one harmonious whole.' But we avoided the town itself and found ourselves presently descending an avenue of trees to the eighteenth-century chateau, which is used by G.H.Q. as a hostel for its guests — allied and neutral correspondents, military attaches, special missions and the like. In a few minutes I was standing, bewildered by the strangeness and the interest of it all, in a charming Louis -Quinze room, plain ENGLAND'S EFFOKT 135 and simple, in the true manner of the genuine French country house, but with graceful panelled walls, an old armoire of the date, windows wide open to the spring sun, and a half -wild garden outside. A femme de menage, much surprised to be waiting on two ladies, comes to look after us. And this is France ! — and we are only thirty miles from that fighting- line, which has drawn our English hearts to it, all these days ! A map is waiting for each of us downstairs, and we are told roughly where it is proposed to take us. A hurried lunch, and we are in the motor again, with Captain sitting in front. ' You have your passes ? ' he asks us, and we anxiously verify the new and precious papers that brought us from our last stage, and will have to be shewn on our way. We drive first to Arques, and Hazebrouck, then south-east. At a certain village we call at the Divisional Headquarters. The General comes out him- self, and proposes to guide us on — ' I will take you as near to the fighting line as I can.' On we went in two motors ; the General with mo, Captain and D. following. We passed through three villages and after the first we were within shell range of the German 136 ENGLAND'S EFFORT batteries ahead. But I cannot remember giving a thought to the fact, so absorbing to the unaccustomed eye were all the accumu- lating signs of the actual battle-line : the endless rows of motor lorries, either coming back from, or going up to the Front, now with food, now with ammunition ; reserve-trenches to right and left of the road ; a ' dump ' or food-station, whence carts filled from the heavy lorries go actually up to the trenches ; lines of artillery waggons, parks of ammuni- tion, or motor-ambulances, long lines of picketed horses, motor cyclists dashing past. In one village we saw a merry crowd in the little place gathered round a field kitchen whence came an excellent fragrance of good stew. A number of the men were wearing leeks in their ears for St. David's Day. ' You're Welsh then ? ' I said to one of the cooks — (by this time we had left the motor and were walking). ' I'm not ! ' said the little fellow, with a laughing look. ' It's St. Patrick's Day I'm waitin' for ! But I've no objection to givin' St. David a turn ! ' He opened his kitchen to show me the good things wing on, and as we moved away there came up a march- ing platoon of men from the trenches, who had ENGLAND'S EFFOKT 137 done their allotted time there, and were coming back to billets. The General went to greet them. ' Well, my boys ! — you could stick it all right ? ' It was good to see the lightening on the tired faces, and to watch the group disappear into the cheerful hubbub of the village. We walked on, and outside the village I heard the guns for the first time. We were now ' actually in the battle,' according to my companion, and a shell was quite possible though not probable. Again, I cannot remem- ber that the fact made any impression upon us. We were watching now parties of men at regular intervals, sitting waiting in the fields beside the road, with their rifles and kits on the grass near them. They were waiting for the signal to move up towards the firing-line as soon as the dusk was further advanced. ' We shall meet them later,' said the General — ' as we come back.' At the same moment he turned to address a young artillery officer in the road. ' Is your gun here ? ' ' Yes, sir, I was just going back to it.' He was asked to show us the way. As we followed I noticed the white puff of a shell, far ahead, over the flat ditch-lined fields ; a captive balloon was 138 ENGLAND'S EFFORT making observations about half a mile in front ; and an aeroplane passed over our heads. ' Ah, not a Bosche,' said Captain regretfully. ' But we brought a Bosche down here yesterday, just over this village — a splendid fight.' Meanwhile the artillery fire was quickening. We reached a ruined village from which all normal inhabitants had been long since cleared away. The shattered church was there, and I noticed a large crucifix quite intact still hanging on its chancel wall. A little further and the boyish artillery officer, our leader, who had been by this time joined by a comrade, turned and beckoned to the General. Presently we were creeping through seas of mud down into the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed that no aeroplane over- head could guess it. There it was — how many of its fellows I had seen in the Midland and northern workshops ! — its muzzle just shew- ing in the dark, and nine or ten high explo- sive shell lying on the bench in front of the breech. One is put in. We stand back a little, and a sergeant tells me to put my fingers in my ears and look straight at the gun. Then comes the shock — not so violent as I ENGLAND'S EFFORT 139 had expected — and the cartridge case drops out. The shell has sped on its way to the German trenches — with what result to human flesh and blood ? But one did not think of that — till afterwards. At the time, the excitement of the shot and of watching that little group of men in the darkness held all one's nerves gripped. In a few more minutes we were scrambling out again through the deep muddy trench leading to the dug-out, promising to come back to tea with the officers, in their billet, when our walk was done. Now indeed we were ' in the battle.' Our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and more broken up by shell-holes. ' Look at that group of trees to your left — beyond it is Neuve Chapelle,' said our guide. ' And you see those ruined cottages, straight ahead — and the wood behind ? ' He named a wood thrice famous in the history of the war ' Our lines are just beyond the cottages, and the German lines just in front of the wood.' ' How far are we from them ? ' ' Three-quarters of a mile.' It was discussed whether we should be taken zigzag through the fields to the entrance of 140 ENGLAND'S EFFORT the communication trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and Captain was evi- dently relieved when we elected to turn back. Shall I always regret that lost opportunity ? You did ask me to write something about ' the life of the soldiers in the trenches ' — and that was the nearest that any woman could personally have come to it ! But I doubt whether anything more — anything, at least, that was possible — could have deepened the whole effect. We had been already nearer than any woman, even a nurse, has been, in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line ; and the cup of impressions was full. As we turned back, I noticed a little ruined cottage, with a Red Cross flag floating. Our guide explained that it was a Field Dressing station. Some serious ' casualties ' had been brought there the night before, and had not yet been removed. It was not for us — who could not help — to ask to go in. But the thought of it pursued me as we walked on through the beautiful evening. A little further, we came across what, I think, moved me more than any- thing else in that crowded hour — those same companies of men we had seen sitting waiting in the fields, now marching quietly, spaced one ENGLAND'S EFFORT 141 behind the other, up to the trenches, to take their turn there. Every day I am accustomed to see bodies, small and large, of khaki-clad men, marching through these Hertfordshire lanes. But this was different. The bearing was erect and manly, the faces perfectly cheerful ; but there was the seriousness in them of men who knew well the work to which they were going. I caught a little quiet whistling sometimes, but no singing. We greeted them as they passed with a shy ' Good luck ! ' — and they smiled shyly back, sur- prised of course to see a couple of women on that road. But there was no shyness towards the General. It was very evident that the relations between him and them were as good as affection and confidence on both sides could make them. I still see the bright tea-table in that corner of a ruined farm, where our young officers presently greeted us ; the General marking our maps to make clear where we had actually been ; the Captain of the battery springing up to shew off his gramophone ; while the guns crashed at intervals close beside us — range-finding, probably — searching out a por- tion of the German line, under the direction 142 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT of some hidden observer with his telephone. It was over all too quickly. Time was up, and soon the motor was speeding us back towards the Divisional Headquarters. The General and I talked of war, and what could be done to stop it. A more practical religion, ' lifting mankind again ' ? — a new St. Francis, preach- ing the old things in new ways ? ' But in this war we had and we have no choice. We are fighting for civilisation, and freedom, and we must go on till we win.' (in) It was long before I closed my eyes in the pretty room of the old chateau, after an evening spent in talk with some officers of the Headquarters' Staff. When I woke in the dawn I little guessed what the day (March 2nd) was to bring forth, or what was already happening, thirty miles away on the firing line. Zelie, the femme de menage, brought us our breakfast to our room, coffee, and bread and eggs, and by half-past nine we were downstairs, booted and spurred, to find the motor at the door, a simple lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready ! ' We have had a very successful action this morning,' ENGLAND'S EFFOET 143 said Captain , evidently in the best of spirits. ' We have taken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines canal that we lost a little while ago, and captured about 200 prisoners. If we go off at once, we shall be in time to see the German counter-attack.' It was again fine, though not bright, and the distances far less clear. This time we struck north-east, passing first the sacred region of G.H.Q. itself, where we shewed our passes. Then after making our way through roads lined interminably, as on the previous day, Vith the splendid motor lorries laden with food and ammunition which have made such a new thing of the transport of this war, inter- spersed with rows of ambulances and limbered waggons, with flying-stations and horse lines, we climbed a hill to one of the finest positions in this northern land ; an old town, where Gaul and Roman, Frank and Fleming, English and French have clashed ; which looks out northward towards the Yser and Dunkirk, and east towards Ypres. Now, if the mists will only clear, we shall see Ypres ! But, alas, they lie heavy over the plain, and we descend the hill again without that vision. Now we are bound for Poperinghe, and must go 144 ENGLAND'S EFFORT warily, because there is a lively artillery action going on beyond Poperinghe, and it is neces- sary to find out what roads are being shelled. On the way we stop at an air station, to watch the aeroplanes rising and coming down, and at a point near Poperinghe we go over a casualty-clearing station — a collection of hospital huts, with store-houses and staff quarters — with the medical officer in charge. Here were women nurses, who are not allowed in the Field dressing-stations nearer the line. There were not many wounded, though they were coming in, and the Doctor was not for the moment very busy. We stood for a while on the threshold of a large ward, where we could not, I think, be seen. At the further end a serious case was being attended to by nurses and surgeons. Everything was pass- ing in silence ; and to me it was as if there came from the bowed heads of the distant group a tragic and wordless message. Then, as we moved lingeringly away, we saw three young officers all wounded, running up from the ambulance at the gate, which had just brought them, and disappearing into one of the wards. The first — a splendid kilted figure — had his head bound up, the others were apparently ENGLAND'S EFFORT 145 wounded in the arm. But they seemed to walk on air, and to be quite unconscious that anything was wrong with them. It had been a success, a great success, and they had been in it ! The ambulances were now arriving fast from the field dressing-stations close to the line ; we hurried away, and were soon driving through Poperinghe. Here and there was a house wrecked with shell fire. The little town indeed with its picturesque place is constantly shelled. But all the same, life seems to go on as usual. The Poperinghe boy, like his London brother, hangs on the back of carts ; his father and mother come to their door to watch what is going on, or to ask eagerly for news of the counter-attack ; and his little brothers and sisters go tripping to school, in short cloaks with the hoods drawn over their heads, as though no war existed. Here and in the country round, poor robbed Belgium is still at home on her own soil, and on the best of terms with the English Army, by which indeed this remnant of her prospers greatly. As I have already insisted, the relations everywhere between the British soldier and the French and Belgian populations L 146 ENGLAND'S EFFORT are among the British — or shall I say the Allied ? — triumphs of the war. In one street a company from a famous regiment, picked men all of them, comes swinging along, fresh from their baths — life and force in every movement — young Harrys with their beavers on. Then, a house where men have their gas-helmets tested — a very strict and necessary business ; and another, where an ex-Balliol tutor and Army Chaplain keeps open doors for the soldier in his hours of rest or amusement. But we go in search of a safe road to a neighbouring village, where some fresh passes have to be got. Each foot now of the way is crowded with the incidents and appurtenances of war, and war close at hand. An Australian trans- port base is pointed out, with a wholly Aus- tralian staff — ' Some of the men,' says our guide, ' are millionaires ' ; close by is an aeroplane descending unexpectedly in a field, and a crowd of men rushing to help ; and we turn away relieved to see the two aviators walking off unhurt. Meanwhile I notice a regular game of football going on at a dis- tance, and some carefully written names of by-paths — ' Hyde Park Corner ' — ' Piccadilly ' ENGLAND'S EFFORT 147 — ' Queen Mary's Road ' — and the like. The animation, the life of the scene are in- describable. At the next village, the road was crowded both with natives and soldiers to see the German prisoners brought in. Alack, we did not see them. Ambulances were passing and repassing, the slightly wounded men in cars open at the back, the more serious cases in closed cars ; and everywhere the same va- et-vient of lorries and waggons, of staff-cars and motor cyclists. It was not right for us to add to the congestion in the road. Moreover the hours were drawing on ; and the great sight was still to come. But to have watched those prisoners come in would have somehow rounded off the day ! (IV) Our new passes took us to the top of a hill well known to the few onlookers of which this war admits. The motor stopped at a point on the road where a picket was stationed, who examined our papers. Then came a stiff and muddy climb, past a dug-out, for protection in case of shelling, Captain carrying the three gas-helmets. At the top L2 148 ENGLAND'S EFFORT was a flat green space — three or four soldiers playing football on it ! — an old windmill, and farm buildings. We sheltered behind the great beams supporting the windmill, and looked out through them, north and east, over a wide landscape ; a plain bordered eastwards by low hills, every mile of it, almost, watered by British blood, and conse- crate to British dead. And as we reached the windmill, as though in sombre greeting, the floating mists on the near horizon seemed to part, and there rose from them a dark jagged tower, one side of it torn away. It was the tower of Ypres — mute victim ! — mute witness to a crime, that, beyond the reparations of our own day, history will avenge through years to come. A flash ! — another ! — from what appear to be the ruins at its base. It is the English guns speaking from the lines between us and Ypres ; and as we watch we see the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as the shells burst. There they are, the German lines — along the Messines ridge. We make them out quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain 's guidance. Their guns too are at work, and a couple of their shells are ENGLAND'S EFFORT 149 bursting on our trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and Dickebusche. Then — the rattle of our machine guns — as it seems, from somewhere close below us, and again, the boom of the artillery. The counter- action is in progress, and we watch what can be seen or guessed of it, in fascination. We are too far off to see what is actually happening between the opposing trenches, but one of the chief fields of past and present battle, scenes which our children and our children's children will go to visit, lie spread out before us. Half the famous sites of the earlier war can be dimly made out, between us and Ypres. In front of us is the gleam of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 60 is in that band of shadow ; a little further east the point where the Prussian Guard was mown down at the close of the first battle of Ypres ; further south the fields and woods made for ever famous by the charge of the Household Cavalry, by the deeds of the Worcesters, and the London Scottish, by all the splendid valour of that ' thin red line,' French and English, cavalry and in- fantry, which in the first battle of Ypres with- stood an enemy four times as strong, saved France, and thereby England, and thereby 150 ENGLAND'S EFFORT Europe. In that tract of ground over which we are looking lie more than 100,000 graves English and French ; and to it the hearts of two great nations will turn for all time. Then — if you try to pierce the northern haze beyond that ruined tower, you may follow in thought the course of the Yser westward to that Bel- gian coast where Admiral Hood's guns broke down and scattered the German march upon Dunkirk and Calais ; or if you turn south, you are looking over the Belfry of Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and Festubert, and all the fierce fighting ground round Souchez and the Labyrinth. Once English and French stood linked here in a common heroic defence. Now the English hold all this line firmly from the sea to the Somme ; while the French, with the eyes of the world upon them, are making history hour by hour at Verdun. So to this point we have followed one branch — the greatest — of England's effort ; and the mind, when eyes fail, pursues it afresh, from its beginnings, when we first stood to arms in August 1914, through what Mr. Buchan has finely called the ' rally of the Empire,' through the early rush and the rapid growth of the New Armies, through the ENGLAND'S EFFORT 151 strengthening of Egypt, the disaster of Galli- poli, the seizure of the German Colonies ; through all that vast upheaval at home which we have seen in the munition areas, through that steady and ever-growing organisation on the friendly French soil we have watched in the supply bases. Yet here, for us, it culminates ; and here, and in the North Sea, we can hardly doubt, — whatever may be the diversions in other fields — will be fought, for Great Britain, the decisive battles of the war. As I turn to those dim lines on the Messines ridge, I have come at last to sight of whither it all moves. There, in those trenches, is The Aggressor — the enemy who has wantonly broken the peace of Europe, who has befouled civilisation with deeds of lust and blood, between whom and the Allies there can be no peace, till the Allies' right arm dictates it. Every week, every day, the British armies grow, the British troops pour steadily across the Channel ; and to the effort of England and her Allies there will be no truce till the righteous end is won. But the shadows are coming down on the great spectacle, and with the sound of the guns still in our ears, we speed back through the 152 ENGLAND'S EFFORT crowded roads towards G.H.Q. One more scene — before the wonderful day is over. A message from an important Headquarters brings us to a halt there on our way back. The pleasant upper room in the old French house with its going and coming ; the interest of watching the Army Commander himself — strong, weather-beaten figure ! — as he stood receiving reports from his A.D.C.s, including the ' German wireless ' just picked up, on the fighting of the morning ; the happy bearing of the young officers, as they arrived in haste, one after another ; the appearance in the group of a second General, whose name will be for ever associated with some of the most brilliant deeds of the war ; and finally, the courtesy with which, at a first moment of leisure, on a day of action, a woman writer was received, merely for her errand's sake, as simply and kindly as though we had been all standing in Kensington or Belgravia : — these things remain engiaved on memory. The fine grizzled heads of the older men ; the radiant looks of the younger ; the talk — reticent, quietly confident, humane : — they are with me still. It was war, one aspect of it, seen from close by, and in undress. An ENGLAND'S EFFORT 153 Englishwoman left it behind her, prouder even than before that — Chatham's language was her mother tongue, And Wolfe's great name compatriot with her own.' Now all that I have to do is to take you, far away from the armies, into the homes whence our fighting men are drawn, and to shew you, if I can, very shortly, by a few instances, . what rich and poor are doing, as individuals, to feed the effort of Britain in this war. What of the young, of all classes and opportunities, who have laid down their lives in this war ? What of the families who reared them, the Schools and Universities who sent them forth — the com- rades who are making ready to carry on their work ? You ask me as to the spirit of the nation — the foundation of all else. Let us look into a few lives — a few typical lives, and see. No. 6. April 22nd. As I begin upon this final letter to you comes the news that the threatened split in the British Cabinet owing to the pro- posed introduction of general military service has been averted ; and that at a Secret Session to be held next Tuesday, April 25th, Ministers will, for the first time, lay before both Houses of Parliament full and complete information — much more full and complete, at any rate, than has yet been given — of the ' effort ' of Great Britain in this world war, what this country is doing in sea -power, in the provision of armies, in the lending of money to our Allies, in our own shipping service to them, and in our supply to them of munitions, coal, and other war material — including boots and clothing. If then, our own British Parliament will be for the first time fully apprised next Tuesday of what the nation has been doing, it is perhaps small wonder that you on your side of the Atlantic have not rightly understood the performance of a nation which has, collectively, the same 154 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 155 love of ' grousing ' as the individual British soldier shews in the trenches. Let me however go back and recapitulate a little. In the first of these letters, I tried, by a rapid ' vision ' of the Fleet, as I per- sonally saw an important section of it amid the snows of February, to point to the indis- pensable condition of this ' effort,' without which it could never have been made, without which it could not be maintained for a day, at the present moment. Since that visit of mine, the power of the Fleet, and the effect of the Fleet have strengthened week by week. The blockade of Germany is far more effective than it was three months ago ; the evidence of its growing stringency accumulates steadily, and at the same time the British Foreign Office has been anxiously trying, and evi- dently with much success, to minimise for neutrals its inevitable difficulties and incon- veniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. Asquith will explain next Tuesday, the expenditure on the war, not only on our own needs — but on those of our Allies, is colossal — terrifying. The most astonishing Budget of English history, demanding a fourth of his income from every well-to-do citizen, has been brought in since I began to write these letters, and quietly 156 ENGLAND'S EFFORT accepted. Five hundred millions sterling (2500 million dollars) have been already lent to our Allies. We are spending at the yearly rate of 600 millions sterling (3000 million dollars) on the Army ; 200 millions on the Navy, as compared with 40 millions in 1913 ; while the Munitions Department is costing about two-thirds as much (400 millions sterling) as the rest of the Army, and is em- ploying close upon two million workers, one- tenth of them women. The export trade of the country, in spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at the moment greater than it was in the corresponding months of 1913. As to what we have got for our money, Parliament has authorised an army of four million men, and it is on the question of the last half million that England's Effort now turns. Mr. Asquith will explain everything that has been done, and everything that still remains to do, in camera to Parliament next Tuesday. But do not, my dear friend, make any mistake ! England will get the men she wants ; and Labour will be in the end just as determined to get them as any other section of the community. Meanwhile, in France, while we seem, for the moment, to be in- active, we are in reality giving the French at ENGLAND'S EFFOET 157 Verdun just that support which they and General Joffre desire, and — it can scarcely be doubted — preparing great things on our own account. In spite of our failure in Gallipoli and the surrender at Kut of General Towns- hend's force, Egypt is no longer in danger of attack, if it ever has been ; our sea-power has brought a Russian force safely to Mar- seilles ; and the possibilities of British and Russian collaboration in the East are rapidly opening out. As to the great and complex war-machine we have been steadily building up on French soil, as I tried to shew in my fourth letter, whether in the supply bases, or in the war organisation along the ninety miles of front now held by the British armies, it would indeed astonish our dead heroes of the Retreat from Mons — could they come back to see it ! We are not satisfied with it yet — hence the unrest in Parliament and the Press ; we shall never be satisfied — till Germany has accepted the terms of the Allies. But those who know England best have no doubt whatever as to the temper of the nation which has so far ' improvised the impossible,' in the setting up of this machine, and means, in the end, to get out of it what it wants. 158 ENGLAND'S EFFORT The temper of the nation ? In this last letter let me take some samples of it. First — what have the rich been doing ? As to money, the figures of the income-tax, the death-duties, and the various war loans, are there to shew what they have contributed to the State. The Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and the St. John Ambulance Association has collected — though not of course from the rich only — close on four millions sterling (between 18 and 19 million dollars) and the Prince of Wales' Fund nearly 6 million (30 million dollars). The lavishness of English giving, indeed, in all directions, during the last two years, could hardly I think have been outdone. A few weeks ago, I walked with the Duke of Bedford through the training and reinforcement camp, about fifteen miles from my own home in the country, which he himself commands and which, at the outbreak of war, he himself built without waiting for public money or War-Office con- tractors, to house and train recruits for the various Bedfordshire regiments. The camp holds 1200 men, and is ranged in a park where the oaks — still standing — were considered too old by Oliver Cromwell's Commissioners to furnish timber for the English Navy. Besides ENGLAND'S EFFORT 159 ample barrack accommodation in comfortable huts, planned so as to satisfy every demand whether of health or convenience, all the opportunities that Aldershot offers, on a large scale, are here provided in miniature. The model trenches with the latest improvements in plan, revetting, gun-emplacements, sally- ports and the rest, spread through the sandy soil ; the musketry ranges, bombing and bayonet schools are of the most recent and efficient type. And the Duke takes a keen personal interest in every man in training, follows his progress in camp, sees him off to the Front, and very often receives him, when wounded, in the perfectly equipped hospital which the Duchess has established in Woburn Abbey itself. Here the old riding-school, tennis court and museum, which form a large building fronting the abbey, have been turned into wards as attractive as bright and simple colour, space, flowers, and exquisite cleanli- ness can make them. The Duchess is herself the Matron -in -charge, under the War Office, keeps all the records, is up at half -past five in the morning, and spends her day in the endless doing, thinking and contriving that such a hospital needs. Not very far away stands another beautiful country house rented 160 ENGLAND'S EFFORT by Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Eeid when they were in England. It also is a hospital, and its owner, Lord Lucas, not a rich man, has now given it irrevocably to the nation for the use of disabled soldiers, together with as much land as may suffice a farm colony chosen from among them. The beautiful hospital of 250 beds at Paignton, in Devonshire, run entirely by women of American birth now resident in Great Britain, without any financial aid from the British Government, was another large country house given to the service of the wounded by Mr. Singer. Lady Sheffield's hospital for twenty-five beds at Alderley Park is an example of how part of a country house with all its green and restful surroundings may be used for those who have suffered in the war ; and it has many fellows in all parts of England. Altogether about 700 country houses large and small have been offered to the War Office. But money and houses are the very least part of what the old families, the rich manu- facturers, or the educated class generally have offered to their country in this war. Demo- cracy has gone far with us, but it may still be said that the young heir to a great name, to estates with which his family has been con- ENGLAND'S EFFORT 161 nected for generations, and to that accumu- lated ' consideration,' to use a French word in a French sense, which such a position almost always carries with it — has a golden time in English life. Difficulties that check others fall away from him ; he is smiled upon for his kindred's sake before he makes friends for his own ; the world is over-kind to his virtues and blind to his faults ; he enters manhood indeed as ' one of our conquerors ' ; and it will cost him some trouble to throw away his advantages. Before the war such a youth was the common butt of the Socialist orator. He was the typical ' shirker ' and ' loafer,' while other men worked ; the parasite bred from the sweat of the poor ; the soft effeminate creature who had never faced the facts of life and never would. As to his soldiering — the common profession of so many of his kind — that was only another offence in the eyes of politicians like Mr. Keir Hardie. When the class war came, he would naturally be found shooting down the workmen ; but for any other war, an ignorant popinjay ! — incom- petent even at his own trade, and no match whatever for the scientific soldier of the Conti- nent. Those who knew anything of the Army M 162 ENGLAND'S EFFORT were well aware long before 1914 that this type of officer — if he still existed, as no doubt he had once existed — had become extraordi- narily rare ; that since the Boer War, the level of education in the Army, the standard of work demanded, the quality of the relations between officers and men had all steadily advanced. And with regard to the young men of the ' classes ' in general, those who had to do with them, at school and college, while fully alive to their weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which were more instinct than anything else, as to what stuff these easy- going, sport-loving fellows might prove to be made of, in case of emergency. Well, the emergency came. These youths of the classes, heirs to titles and estates, or just younger sons of the old squirearchy of Eng- land, so far as it still survives, went out in their hundreds with the old and famous regiments of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, and perished in their hundreds. Forty-seven eldest sons, heirs to English peerages, had fallen within a year of the outbreak of war ; among them the heirs to such famous houses as Longleat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby, and such names as Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, Douglas Pennant, Worsley, ENGLAND'S EFFORT 163 Hay, St. Aubyn, Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach ; together with men whose fathers have played prominent parts in the politics or finance of the last half-century. And the first ranks have been followed by what one might almost call a levee en masse of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassee, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever may be said hence- forward of these ' golden lads ' of ours, ' shirker ' and ' loafer ' they can never be called again. They have died too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted them too well for that ; and some of the working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have confessed it abundantly. And the professional classes — the intellec- tuals — everywhere the leading force of the nation — have done just as finely, and of course in far greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May, in the height of the summer term'; just at that moment when Oxford normally is at its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the ' flannelled fools,' who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe — if it ever M 2 164 ENGLAND'S EFFORT applied to them — with interest. For they had all disappeared. They were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to Baghdad. The colleges con- tained a few forlorn remnants — under age, or medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, shewed boats indeed, but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college, Somer- ville, had become a hospital. The Examina- tion Schools in the High Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever asso- ciated in the minds of Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were white tents full of wounded ; and I walked up and down that wide deserted lawn of St. John's, where Charles I. once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a despair- ing gesture, speaking of his pupils, ' So many are gone — so many ! — and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did. As blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power.' Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful natures, by the ENGLAND'S EFFORT 165 testimony of those who knew them best ; not delightful, perhaps, to those who did not love them, not just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge, July 31st, last year ; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier. Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of April 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and tragic joy of the ' fighting man ' in the spring which may be his last — in the night heavens — in the woodland trees : — The woodland trees that stand together, They stand to him each one a friend ; They gently speak in the windy weather ; They guide to valley and ridge's end. The kestrel hovering by day, And the little owls that call by night, Bid him be swift and keen as they, As keen of ear, as swift of sight. The blackbird sings to him, Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing, Sing well ; for you may not sing another ; Brother, sing,' 166 ENGLAND'S EFFORT In dreary doubtful waiting hours, Before the brazen frenzy starts, The horses show him nobler powers ; — patient eyes, courageous hearts ! And when the burning moment breaks, And all things else are out of mind, And only Joy of Battle takes Him by the throat and makes him blind. Through joy and blindness he shall know, Not caring much to know, that still Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so That it be not the Destined Will. The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings ; But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings. A young man of another type, inheriting from the Cecils on the one side, and from his grandfather, the first Lord Selborne, on the other, the best traditions of English Conserva- tism and English churchmanship — open-eyed, patriotic, devout — has been lost to the nation in Robert A. S. Palmer, the second son of Lord and Lady Selborne, affectionately known to an ardent circle of friends whose hopes were set on him, as ' Bobbie Palmer.' He has fallen in the Mesopotamian campaign ; and of him, as of William Glynne Charles Gladstone, the grandson and heir of England's great Liberal Minister, who fell in Flanders a year ago, it ENGLAND'S EFFORT 167 may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries said of Sir Philip Sidney, Honour and Fame are got about their graves, And there sit mourning of each other's loss. In one of his latest letters, quoted by a friend in a short biography, Robert Palmer wrote : — : Who isn't weary to death of the war ? I certainly have been, for over a year ; yes, and sorrowful almost unto death over it, at times, as you doubtless have too. But of one thing I am and always have been sure, that it is worth the cost, and any cost there is to come, to prevent Prussianism — which is Anti- Christ — controlling Europe.' The following eloquent passage written by an Oxford Fellow and Tutor, in a series of papers on the losses sustained by Oxford in the war, is understood to refer to Robert Palmer : — ' To-night the bell tolls in the brain [hand rediturus) over one of the noblest — if it be not a treason to discriminate — of all the dead one has known who have died for England. Graciousness was in all his goings and in all the workings of his mind. The music and gymnastic whereof Plato wrote, that should attune the body to harmony with the mind, and harmonise all the elements of the mind in 168 ENGLAND'S EFFORT a perfect unison, had done their work upon him. He seemed — at any rate, to the eyes of those who loved him, and they were many — to have the perfection of nature's endowment : beauty of mind knit to beauty of body, and all informed by a living spirit of affection, so that his presence was a benediction, and a matter for thanksgiving that God had made men after this manner. . . . His tutor had once written in his copy of the Vulgate : "Esto vir fortis et pugnemus pro populo nostro et pro civitate Dei nostri" He was strong; and he fought for both.' Another Oxford man, Gilbert Talbot, youngest son of the much-loved Bishop of Win- chester, will perhaps stand for many, in coming years, as the pre-eminent type of first youth, youth with all its treasure of life and promise unspent, poured out like spikenard in this war at the feet of England. Already assured at Oxford of a brilliant career in politics, a fine speaker, a hard worker, possessing by in- heritance the charm of two families always in the public eye and ear, and no less popular than famous, he had just landed in the United States when the war broke out. He was going round the world with a friend, youth and ambition high within him. He turned back without a moment's hesitation, though ENGLAND'S EFFORT 169 soldiering had never been at all attractive to him, and after his training went out to France. He was killed in Flanders in July last. Let me give the story of his identification after death on the battle-field, by his elder brother, an Army Chaplain, and ex-Balliol tutor, as Canon Scott Holland gave it in the Commonwealth : — ' The attack had failed. There was never any hope of its succeeding, for the machine guns of the Germans were still in full play, with their fire unimpaired. The body had to lie there where it had fallen. Only, his brother could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or unblessed. After a day and a half of anxious searching for exact details, he got to the nearest trench by the " murdered ' wood, which the shells had now smashed to pieces. There he found some shattered Somersets, who begged him to go no further. But he heard a voice within him bidding him risk it, and the call of the blood drove him on. Creeping out of the far end of the trench, as dusk fell, he crawled through the grass on hands and knees, in spite of shells and snipers, dropping flat on the ground as the flares shot up from the German trenches. And, at last, thirty yards away in the open ... he knew that he was 170 ENGLAND'S EFFORT close on what he sought. Two yards further, he found it. He could stroke with his hand the fair young head that he knew so well ; he could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, and the badge and the whistle. He could breathe a prayer of benediction . . . and then crawl back on his perilous way in the night, having done all that man could do for the brother whom he had loved so fondly ; and enabled, now, to tell those at home that Gilbert was dead indeed, but that he had died the death that a soldier would love to die, leaving his body the nearest of all who fell, to the trench that he had been told to take.' Again : — of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Oxford friend says — ' there were almost infinite possibilities in his future.' He was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of im- portance in the Foreign Office, refused it and went back to the Front — to die. But among the hundreds of memorial notices issued by the Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs and recurs, of unhesitating, uncalculated sacrifice. Older men, and younger men, Don, and undergraduate, lads of 19 and 20, and those who were already school-mastering, or prac- tising at the Bar, or in business, — they ENGLAND'S EFFORT 171 felt no doubts, they made no delays. Their country called ; and none failed in that great Adsum. Cambridge of course has the same story to tell. One takes the short pathetic bio- graphies almost at random from the ever lengthening record, contributed by the Colleges. Captain J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, was already director of an important steel works, engaged in Government business, when war broke out, and might have honourably claimed exemption. Instead he offered him- self at once on mobilisation, and went out with his battalion to France last spring. On the 15th of June at Festubert, he was killed in volunteering to bring what was left of a frightfully battered battalion out of action. ' What seems to me my duty as an officer,' he once wrote to a friend, ' is to carry my sword across the barriers of death clean and bright.' ' This,' says the friend, who writes the notice, ' he has done.' Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the forehead by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. His General and brother officers write — he was a very fine young officer. Everyone loved him. His men wonlcl do anything for him. . . .' 172 ENGLAND'S EFFORT and the sergeant of his machine-gun brigade says — ' Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I have lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and kind to me and us all.' Lieutenant Hamilton, aged 25, says in a last letter to his father — Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is going on. It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it all. Any moment one may be put out of action, but one does not worry. That quiet time alone with God at the Holy Communion was most comforting.' Immediately after writing these words, the writer fell in action. Captain Clarke, a famous Cambridge athlete, President of the C.U.A.C. — bled to death, according to one account, from a frightful wound received in the advance near Hooge on September 25th. His last recorded act — the traditional act of the dying soldier ! — was to give a drink from his flask to a wounded private. Of the general action of Cambridge men, the Master of Christ's writes — ' Nothing has been more splendid than the way the young fellows have come forward ; not only the athletes and the healthy, but in all cases the most unlikely men have rushed to the Front, and have done brilliantly. The mortality however has been ENGLAND'S EFFORT 173 appalling. In an ordinary way one loses one killed to eight or nine wounded, but in this war the number of Cambridge men killed and missing practically equals the number of wounded.' Of the effect upon the University an eye-witness says — ' . . . Eighty per cent, of the College rooms are vacant. Rows and rows of houses in Cambridge are to let. All the Junior Fellows are on service in one capacity or another, and a great many of the Seniors are working in Government Offices or taking school posts — so that the school education of the country may be carried on. Altogether, nearly 12,000 Cambridge men are serving ; 980 have been wounded, 780 have been killed, 92 are missing.' As to one's friends and kinsfolk, let me recall the two gallant grandsons of my dear old friend and publisher George Murray Smith, the original publisher of Jane Eyre, friend of Charlotte Bronte, and creator of the Dictionary of National Biography. The elder one, who had lately married, fought in the Household Cavalry all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in one of the early actions on the Flanders front. ' He led us all the way,' said one of his men afterwards. All the way ! — all through the immortal rearguard 174 ENGLAND'S EFFORT actions of August — only to fall, when the tide had turned, and the German onslaught on Paris had been finally broken ! ' In all my soldier- ing,' writes a brother officer, ' I have never seen a warmer feeling between men and their officer.' ' Was he not ' — asks a well-known Eton master, ' that tall, smiling, strong, gentle- mannered boy at White-Thomson's ? — pos- sessing an affectionate regard and feeling for others, which boys as boys, especially if strong and popular, don't always, or indeed often possess.' The poor wife and parents were un- certain as to his fate for many weeks, but he finally died of his wounds in a hospital behind the German lines. Then, little more than six months later came the second blow. Geoffrey, the younger brother, aged 19, fell on September 29th, near Vermelles. Nothing could be more touching than the letters from officers and men about this brave sweet-tempered boy. ' Poor old regiment ! ' writes the Colonel to the lad's father — ' we were badly knocked about and I brought out only three officers and 375 men, but they did magnificently, and it* was thanks to officers like your son, who put the honour of the regiment before all thought of fatigue or personal danger. Such a gallant lad ! We all loved him.' A private, the ENGLAND'S EFFORT 175 boy's soldier servant who fought with him, writes — ' I wish you could have seen him in that trench .... All the men say that he deserved the V.C. . . . I don't know if we are going back to those trenches any more, but if we do, I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in some quiet place. ... I cannot bear to think that I shall not be able to be with him any more.' But how they crowd upon the mind — the ' unreturning brave ' ! Take our friends and neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country. All round us the blows have fallen — again and again the only son — sometimes two brothers out of three — the most brilliant — the best beloved. And I see still the retreating figure of a dear nephew of my own — Christopher Selwyn — as he vanished under the trees waving his hand to us in March last. A boy made of England's best — who after two years in Canada, and at the begin- ning of what must have been a remarkable career, heard the call of the Mother-Country, and rushed home at once. He was transferred to an English regiment, and came to say good- bye to us in March. It was impossible to think of Christopher's coming to harm — such life and force, such wisdom and character also, 176 ENGLAND'S EFFORT in his strong handsome face, and thoughtful eyes ! We talked of the future of Canada ; not much of the war. Then he vanished ; and I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, near Bailleul, he went out with a listen- ing party between the trenches, was shot through both legs by a sniper and otherwise injured — was carried back to hospital, and after a few hours' vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had done his duty, and fearing nothing. ' Romance and melodrama ' — says Professor Gilbert Murray in one of the noblest and most moving utter- ances of the war — ' were once a memory — broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the past. We live no longer upon fragments and memories, we have entered ourselves upon an heroic age. As for me personally, there is one thought that is always with me — the thought that other men are dying for me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of them men whom I have taught and loved.' The orthodox Christian — ' will be familiar with that thought of One who loved you dying for you. I would like to say that now I seem to be familiar with the feeling that something innocent, something great, some- thing that loved me, is dying, and is dying ENGLAND'S EFFORT 177 daily for me. That is the sort of community we now are — a community in which one man dies for his brother ; and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger and quarrels we are brothers, who are ready to seal our brother- hood with blood. It is for us these men are dying — for the women, the old men, and the rejected men — and to preserve civilisation and the common life which we are keeping alive, or building.' So much for the richer and the educated class. As to the rank and file, the Tommies who are fighting and dying for England in precisely the same spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal world, I have seen them myself within a mile of the trenches, marching quietly up through the fall of the March evening to take their places in that line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or shell fire, is practi- cally invariable. Not the conscript soldiers of a military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce familiar from childhood ! Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, to whom it is all new, who at bottom, however firm their will, or wonder - N 178 ENGLAND'S EFFORT ful their courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome business. Yet as to their temper and demeanour on the battle-field, think of Anzac and Suvla, of the stubborn heroism of the retreat from Mons, of the three weeks' immortal fighting — one man to four ! — which we call the first battle of Ypres, of the splendid attack at Neuve Chapelle, ' when there was not room on the firing positions for all who burned to take part in the action, and one man would pull another down crying that it was his turn for a shot ' — when ' the wounded, even the desperately wounded, retired with, jokes on their lips, telling each other the wild incidents of the day.' A correspondent whose brilliant work shows a remarkable sympathy with and understanding of the British soldier, describes, as an eye-witness, the coming back of the survivors — men of the Royal Fusiliers, and the Northumberland Fusiliers — from a dash into the German line, through what seemed impregnable defences, near St. Eloi, on March 31st last. ' They were cheerful and proud men ... in a mud-stained kit that would shock the dirtiest of tramps, yet walking as jauntily as though it were St. James's Street. Some of them, indeed, could barely crawl for weariness,' but — ' they were wonderful to see ENGLAND'S EFFORT 179 — and not the foulest horrors of war can break such a spirit as I saw in the eyes of all those boys who were coming back from the fields of death.' To me too it was given to see that spirit in the eyes of our men — before the fight — within a mile of the firing line ; and — after the fight — in the exultant bearing of the young wounded officers whom we watched at the Casualty Clearing Station near Poperinghe. Day after day, week after week, indeed, the same spirit sustains the British Army, in that long battle-field, where apart from the special and conspicuous actions of the war, fighting never ceases, nor, with the fighting, wounds and death. In comparison with ' the ribbon of land 400 miles long ' where the Allies, on the West, stand face to face with the enemy, says another eye-witness, ' all the battle-fields of the world are no more than playgrounds.' We at home ' should think of it only with reverence, and speak of it with awe.' ' I do not find it easy,' writes a chaplain at the Front who knows his men and has shared all the dangers of their life, ' to give in- cidents and sayings. I could speak of the courage of the wounded brought in after battle. How many times has one heard them telling the doctor to attend to others N 2 180 ENGLAND'S EFFORT before themselves ! I could tell you of a very shy and nervous boy who, after an attack, dug, himself alone, with his entrenching tool, a little trench, under continuous fire, up which trench he afterwards crept backwards and forwards carrying ammunition to an advanced post ; or of another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under sniper's fire, and somehow built him a slight protection until night fell and rescue came. Such inci- dents are merely specimens of thousands which are never known. Indeed it is the heroism of all the men all the time which has left the most lasting impression on my mind after thirteen months at the war. No one can conceive the strain which the daily routine of trench life entails, unless one has been among the men. They never shew the slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do what they are told when and where they are told without questioning ; no matter what the conditions or dangers they come up smiling and cheery through it all — full of " grouse " perhaps, but that is the soldier's privilege ! ' . . . ' It is, I think, what we all are feeling, and are so proud of — this un- breakable spirit of self-sacrifice in the daily routine of trench warfare. We are proud of ENGLAND'S EFFORT 181 it because it is the highest of ail forms of self- sacrifice, for it is not the act of a moment when the blood is up, or the excitement of battle is at fever-heat — but it is demanded of the soldier day in and day out and shewn by him coolly and deliberately, day in and day out with death always at hand. We are proud of it too because it is so surely a sign of the magnificent " moral " of our troops — and moral is going to play a very leading part as the war pro- ceeds. . . . What is inspiring this splendid disregard of self is partly the certainty that the Cause is Right, partly it is a hidden joy of conscience which makes them know that they would be unhappy if they were not doing their bit — and partly (I am convinced of this too) it is a deepening faith' in their religion, and its Founder — the Man of Sorrows, Who suffered for men. A few days ago, I accompanied a woman official distributing some leaflets on behalf of a Government department in some visits to families living in a block of model dwellings somewhere in South London. We called on nine families. In every single case, the man of the family had gone, or was expecting to go, to the war, except in one case, where a man who out of pure patriotism and at great 182 ENGLAND'S EFFORT personal difficulty had joined the Volunteer Reserve at the outbreak of war, had strained his heart in trench digging, and was now medically unfit, to his own bitter disappoint- ment. There was some grumbling in the case of one young wife that her husband should be forced to go, before the single men whom she knew ; but in the main the temper that shewed itself bore witness both to the feeling and the intelligence that our people are bringing to bear on the war. One woman said her husband was a sergeant in a well- known regiment. He thought the world of his men, and whenever one was killed, he must be at the burying. ' He can't bear — you know ' — she added shyly — ' they should feel alone.'' She had three brothers-in-law ' out ' — one recently killed. One was an ambulance driver under the R.A.M.C. He had five small children, but had volunteered. ' He doesn't say much about the war, except that " Tommies are wonderful. Thev never com- plain." ' She notices a change in his character. He was always good to his wife and children — ' but now he's splendid ! ' The brother of another woman had been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the country and the people. When war broke out he ' felt he must fight for them.' ENGLAND'S EFFORT 183 He came home at once and enlisted. Another brother had been a stoker on a war- ship at the Dardanelles, and was in the famous landing of April 25. Bullets ' thick and fast like hail-storm. Terrible times collecting the dead. Her brother had worked hard forming burial parties. Was now probably going to the Tigris. Wrote jolly letters ! ' — Then there was the little woman born and bred in the Army, with all the pride of the Army — a familiar type. Husband a sergeant in the Guards — was gymnastic instructor at a northern town — and need not have gone to the war, but felt ' as a professional soldier ' he ought to go. Three brothers in the Army, one a little drummer-boy of sixteen badly wounded in the retreat from Mons. Her sailor brother had died — probably from exposure, in the North Sea. The most cheerful, plucky little creature ! ' We are Army people, and must expect to fight.' Well — you say you ' would like America to visualise the effort, the self-sacrifice of the English men and women who are deter- mined to see this war through.' There was I thought a surprising amount of cheerful effort, of understanding self-sacrifice, in those nine homes, where my companion's friendly talk 184 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT drew out the family facts without difficulty. And I am convinced that if I had spent days instead of hours in following her through the remaining tenements in these huge and popu- lous blocks the result would have been prac- tically the same. The nation is behind the war, and behind the Government ; solidly determined to win this war, and build a new world after it. As to the work of our women, I have described something of it in the munitions area, and if this letter were not already too long, I should like to dwell on much else — the army of maidens, for instance, who as V.A.D.s (members of Voluntary Aid Detach- ments), trained by the Red Cross, have come trooping from England's most luxurious or comfortable homes and are doing invaluable work in hundreds of hospitals ; to begin with, the most menial scrubbing and dish-washing, and by now, the more ambitious and honour- able — but not more indispensable — tasks of nursing itself. In this second year of the war the first army of V.A.D.s, now promoted, has everywhere been succeeded by a fresh levy, aglow with the same eagerness and the same devotion as the first. Or I could dwell on the women's hospitals — especially the ENGLAND'S EFFORT 185 remarkable hospital in Endell Street, entirely officered by women, where some hundreds of male patients accept the surgical and medical care of women doctors, and adapt themselves to the light and easy discipline maintained by the women of the staff, with entire con- fidence and grateful goodwill. To see a woman-dentist at work on a soldier's mouth, and a woman quartermaster presiding over her stores, and managing besides everything pertaining to the lighting, heating and drain- ing of the hospital, is one more sign of these changed and changing times. The work done by the Scottish Women's Hospital in Serbia will rank as one of the noblest among the minor episodes of the war. The magnificent work of British nurses, everywhere, I have already spoken of. And everywhere, too, among the camps in England and abroad, behind the fighting lines, or at the great railway stations here or in France, through which the troops pass backwards and for- wards, hundreds of women have been doing ardent yet disciplined service — giving long hours in crowded canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts to just those small kindly offices, which bring home to the British soldier, more effectively than many things more ambitious, what the 186 ENGLAND'S EFFORT British nation feels towards him. The war has put an end, so far as the richer class is concerned, to the busy idleness and all the costly make-believes of peace. No one gives ' dinner parties ' in the old sense any more ; the very word ' reception ' is dying out. The fashionable restaurants are full, but a great deal of the entertaining there consists of festas, arranged for the son or brother or friend, home from the Front on short leave, for whom nobody feels they can do enough ; and the pretty dresses of the women, the food and drink, the gaiety and chatter, are often, if one interprets them justly, but the symbols of feeling, sharp indeed, but patriotically — tenderly — hidden. Meanwhile the common experience is that the war is biting far deeper this year into ordinary life than it has done yet. Taxation has grown much heavier, and will be more and more severely felt. Yet very few grumble, and there is a general and determined cutting down of the trappings and appendages of life, which is to the good of us all. As to dress, there are foolish women in all classes, who still follow foolish fashions. But there is also a fashion in ' old clothes,' and a pride in wearing them. The high wages that employment in munition factories has brought ENGLAND'S EFFORT 187 to the women of the working class, shew themselves often no doubt in forms of spend- ing, that are extravagant or ugly. ' You should see the hats round here on a Saturday ! ' said the manager of a Midland factory. But I am bound to say he spoke of it proudly. The hats were for him a testimony to the wages paid by his firm ; and he would pro- bably have argued, on the girls' part, that after the long hours and hard work of the week, the hats were a perfectly legitimate ' fling,' and human nature must out. Cer- tainly the children of the workers are better fed and better clothed, which speaks so far well for the mothers ; and recent Govern- ment enquiries seem to shew that in spite of universal employment, and high wages, the drunkenness of the United Kingdom as a whole is markedly less, while at the same time — uncomfortable paradox ! — the amount of alcohol consumed is greater. Undoubtedly, there is a very warm and widespread feeling among us that in this war the women of the nation have done uncom- monly well ! You will remember a similar stir of grateful recognition in America after your War of Secession, connected with the part played in the nursing and sanitation of 188 ENGLAND'S EFFORT the war by the women of the Northern States. The feeling here may well have an important social and political influence when the war is over ; especially among the middle and upper classes. It may be counterbalanced to some extent in the industrial class, by the dis- turbance and anxiety caused in many trades, but especially in the engineering trades, by that great invasion of women I have tried to describe. But that the war will leave some deep mark on that long evolution of the share of women in our public life which began in the teeming middle years of the last century, is, I think, certain. May 2nd. —So I come to the end of the task you set me ! — with what gaps and omissions to look back upon, no one knows so well as myself. This letter starts on its way to you at a critical moment for your great country, when the issue between the United States and Germany is still unsettled. What will happen ? Will Germany give way ? If not, what sort of relations will shape themselves, and how quickly, between the Central Empires and America ? To express myself on this great matter is no part of my task ; although no English man or woman but will watch its development ENGLAND'S EFFORT 189 with a deep and passionate interest. What may be best for you, we cannot tell ; the military and political bearings of a breach between the United States and Germany on our own fortunes are by no means clear to us. But what we do want — in any case — is the sympathy, the moral support and co-opera- tion of your people. We have to thank you for a thousand generosities to our wounded ; we bless you — as comrades with you in that old Christendom which even this war shall not destroy — for what you have done in Belgium ; but we want you to understand the heart of England in this war, and not to be led away by the superficial difficulties and disputes that no great and free nation escapes in time of crisis. Sympathy with France — France, the invaded, the heroic — is easy for America — for us all. She is the great tragic figure of the war ; the whole world does her homage. We are not invaded ; and so less tragic, less appealing. But we are fighting the fight which is the fight of all free men everywhere ; against the wantonness of military power, against the spirit that tears up treaties and makes peaceful argument between nations impossible ; against a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings our civilisation to shame. 190 ENGLAND'S EFFORT We have a right to your sympathy — you who are the heirs of Washington and Lincoln, the trustees of liberty in the New World, as we, with France, are in the Old. You are concerned — you must be concerned — in the triumph of the ideals of ordered freedom and humane justice over the ideals of unbridled force and ruthless cruelty, as they have been revealed in this war, to the horror of mankind. The nation that can never to all time wash from its hands the guilt of the Belgium crime, the blood of the Lusitania victims, of the massacres of Louvain and Dinant, of Aerschot and Termonde, may some day deserve our pity. To-day it has to be met and conquered by a will stronger than its own, in the interests of civilisation itself. This last week, at the close of which I am despatching this final letter, has been a sombre week for England. It has seen the squalid Irish rising, with its seven days' orgy of fire and bloodshed in Dublin ; it has seen the surrender at Kut of General Townshend, and his starving men ; it has seen also a strong demonstration in Parliament of discontent with certain phases of the conduct of the war. And yet, how shall I convey to you the para- dox that we in England — our soldiers at the ENGLAND'S EFFORT 191 Front, and instructed opinion at home — have never been so certain of ultimate victory as we now are ? It is the big facts that matter : — the steady growth of British resources, in men and munitions, towards a maximum that we — and Russia — are only now approaching, while that of the Central Empires is past ; the deepening unity of an Empire which is being forged anew by danger and trial, and by the spirit of its sons all over the world — a unity against which the Irish outrage, paid for by German money, fiercely disavowed by the Nationalist leaders, and instantly effaced, as a mere demonstration, by the gallantry at the same moment of Irish soldiers in the battle-line, lifts its treacherous hand in vain ; the increasing and terrible pressure of the British blockade of Germany, equiva- lent, as someone has lately said, every twenty- four hours that it is maintained, to a success- ful action in the field ; the magnificent resist- ance of an indomitable France ; the mounting strength of a reorganised Russia. This island- State — let me repeat it with emphasis — was not prepared for, and had no expectation of a Continental war, such as we are now fighting. The fact cries aloud from the records of the struggle ; it will command the ear of history ; 192 ENGLAND'S EFFORT and it acquits us for ever from the guilt of the vast catastrophe. But Great Britain has no choice now but to fight to the end — and win. She knows it ; and those who count upon her wavering are living in a blind world. As to the difficulty of the task, as to our own failures and mistakes in learning how to achieve it — we have probably fewer illusions than those who criticise us. But we shall do it — or perish. May 5th. — Since the preceding lines were written, the ' Military Service Bill ' bringing to the Colours ' every British male subject ' between the ages of 18 and 41, except when legally exempted, has passed the House of Commons by an overwhelming majority, and will be law immediately. And the Prime Minister informed Parliament three days ago, that ' the total naval and military effort of the Em fire since the beginning of the war exceeds five million men.'' With these two facts, my Letters may fitly close. Those who are most familiar with England, our history, and the tempera- ment of our people, will best appreciate what they mean. Mary A. Ward. Spottiswoode, liallantyne <£ Co. Ltd., Printers, London, Colchester and Eton England. ^33 lib THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. utHHBOftflBBp I