wfofa' s0p 'fya&efe 
 
THE ONLY LIFE STORY EVER 
 
 PUBLISHED OF HIS MAJESTY'S 
 
 SECRETARY OF STATE FOR 
 
 FOREIGN AFFAIRS, 
 
 SIR EDWARD GREY, K,6, 
 
 A really interesting and informative biography 
 of the man, as sportsman and statesman, by one 
 who writes from an intimate knowledge of his 
 subject. 
 
 Sir Edward Grey is, and always has been, 
 somewhat of an enigma, for, in spite of his great 
 abilities and exalted position, owing to his innate 
 hatred of publicity and his intense natural 
 reserve, less is known of the man himself than 
 of any other prominent personage. 
 
 Of unparalleled interest to every student of 
 present-day politics, it will also appeal strongly 
 to the General Public as a vivid life-story of one 
 of the greatest and most noteworthy of living 
 Englishmen. 
 
 Crown 8vo, Cloth, 2/6 Net. 
 
 Plate Sunk Photogravure Portrait Frontispiece. 
 
 Post Free (Inland) 2/9, from GEORGE NEWNE5, Ltd., 
 
 8-1 1, Southampton Street, Strand, London, W.C., 
 
 or can be ordered through any Bookseller or Bookstall 
 
 in Town or Country. 
 
WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
WORKSHOPS OF 
 DESTRUCTION 
 
 BY 
 
 HAROLD BEGBIE 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE NEWNES, LTD. 
 SOUTHAMPTON-STREET, STRAND, W.C, 
 
?~. A \ 
 
 
 'H-ZNTS 
 
To 
 
 Of all my friends I know not one 
 
 In tone, in form, in hue, 
 So quite unlike a frothing Hun, 
 
 My brilliant friend, as you. 
 
 And there you sit by Britain's sword, 
 
 And lend to dreadful strife 
 A mind that from its youth adored 
 
 The lovely things of life. 
 
 But all our chiefs I saw in France, 
 
 Great servants of the King, 
 Had something of your gentle glance, 
 
 And just your modest ring. 
 
 Then let us hope Strength does not need 
 To last thro' storm and stress, 
 
 The tantrums of a child, the creed 
 Of Hate and Frightfulness. 
 
 I love to think, as with the tides 
 
 Down old Whitehall I pass, 
 No eagle on your desk presides, 
 But flowers in a glass. 
 
 866884 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I PAGE 
 
 THE TASK AHEAD : AN INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BRITISH WAY 2O 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 AT THE BASE 32 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME 43 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 REPAIRS 53 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE ANGELS 63 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 SEEKERS 73 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE MEHMANDAR 8l 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF 'FRANCE 89 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE WRECKAGE OF WAR 97 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 A WAYSIDE DISCUSSION I<>7 
 
 POSTSCRIPT .Il8 
 
11 What would happen ... if the moral effort of humanity 
 should turn in its tracks at the moment of attaining its 
 goal, and if some diabolical contrivance should cause it 
 to produce the mechanisation of spirit instead of the 
 spiritualisation of matter ? There was a people predestined 
 to try the experiment .... 
 
 ". . . the moral forces, which were to submit to the forces 
 of matter by their side, suddenly revealed themselves as 
 creators of material force. A simple idea, the heroic con- 
 ception which a small people had formed of its honour, 
 enabled it to make head against a powerful empire. At 
 the cry of outraged justice we saw, moreover, in a nation 
 which till then had trusted in its fleet, one million, two 
 millions of soldiers suddenly rise from the earth. A yet 
 greater miracle : in a nation thought to be mortally divided 
 against itself all became brothers in the space of a day. 
 From that moment the issue of the conflict was not open 
 to doubt. On the one side there was force spread out on 
 the surface ; on the other there was force in the depths. 
 On one side, mechanism, the manufactured article which 
 cannot repair its own injuries ; on the other, life, the power 
 of creation which makes and re-makes itself at every 
 instant." 
 
 HENRI BERGSON. 
 
WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The Task Ahead : An Introduction 
 
 You will have noticed in all the recent utterances 
 of the Kaiser, his statesmen, and his emissaries, and 
 in all the propaganda articles of the chief newspapers 
 of the German Empire with the honourable excep- 
 tion of Herr Harden 's journal that this war is 
 declared to be a war forced upon Germany. 
 
 Now, this is not merely a ridiculous point of view ; 
 it is the abandonment by the Kaiser and by the entire 
 German nation of any title to respect which they 
 might have presented at the bar of history. 
 
 Consider how formidable and perhaps how eternal 
 a figure the German Kaiser might have been in the 
 eyes of posterity. For he would most certainly have 
 fascinated the ages and absorbed the attention of his- 
 torians had he but frankly proclaimed from the very 
 outset of the war that manifest fact which unimportant 
 German professors have proclaimed, in sadly transi- 
 
io WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 tory works, for the last fifteen or twenty years. But 
 instead of bestriding the world in the robe of Alex- 
 ander or Napoleon, this little German Kaiser sidles 
 his way into the attention of mankind clothed in the 
 contemptible garments of a Pecksniff or a Chadband. 
 "The Day " comes, but not the Man. Instead of truth, 
 he has chosen hypocrisy. Instead of bringing down 
 his foot, he has turned up his eyes. The mailed fist, 
 hammering on the iron gates of destiny, unclenches 
 to disclose a thimble and a pea. He does not thunder ; 
 he snivels. 
 
 We could find a defence for the German War Lord, 
 and at least a philosophical justification for the in- 
 human brutalities of the German armies, if from the 
 very outset of the war the actual and staring truth 
 had been unequivocally proclaimed from Berlin. For 
 is it not a magnificent ambition to desire the conquest 
 of the world, and a magnificent faith to believe one- 
 self capable of that conquest ? The truth of Germany 
 strikes me as one of the finest things in history ; it is 
 the lie of Germany which makes her despicable and 
 odious. The truth of Germany is Germany's faith in 
 her character, Germany's faith in her strength, Ger- 
 many's faith in her power to conquer the world, and 
 in her ability to exercise overlordship. But this truly 
 superb truth of Germany is hidden up and covered 
 
THE TASK AHEAD 11 
 
 over as a guilty and a shameful thing by the little 
 Kaiser, while he hastily springs to his feet and whines 
 to the world the lie which will be his everlasting dis- 
 grace and the main cause of his eternal ridicule. 
 
 Let us look for a moment at the fair truth of Ger- 
 many, since it will help us more than anything else to 
 prepare ourselves for the future conduct of this terrific 
 war and to face its consequences. 
 
 The German believes in despotism. He despises 
 the idea of democracy. But his scheme of govern- 
 ment is in many particulars more Socialistic than the 
 Governments of democratic countries. Everything is 
 done by an aristocratic despotism to increase the 
 physical and intellectual efficiency of the German 
 democracy. Government looks after that democracy 
 with a grandmotherly care, a stockbreeding anxiety, 
 and a scientific persistency of purpose. It may be 
 said that the whole system of German government 
 aims at the greatest efficiency of the greatest number 
 of its citizens. It is so entirely different from our 
 system of laissez-faire, of individualism, and wasteful 
 brawling between political parties, of which we are 
 so proud, that only a few people in England perceive 
 the Socialistic character and tremendous efficiency of 
 German despotism. 
 
 With their contempt for the accidental and make- 
 
12 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 shift character of democratic systems, the Germans 
 naturally nourish a supreme faith in their own aristo- 
 cratic system ; and they have many and very tangible 
 proofs of its exceeding virtue. They see that a mighty 
 democracy can be organised, drilled, and disciplined 
 into a state of perfect efficiency, both for war and 
 industry; and they see that this democracy can like- 
 wise be organised, drilled, and disciplined into such a 
 condition of absolute loyalty, contentment, and 
 patriotism that it will fight to the death, singing songs 
 of the Fatherland, to hold its own against the enmity 
 of a world in arms. They have degraded discipline till 
 it breeds docility. What more natural, then, than the 
 desire for empire and the passion for conquest ? Sur- 
 rounded by nations whose various forms of govern- 
 ment it heartily despises, keeping itself hard and 
 vigorous, subduing in all things the individual will 
 to the safety of the commonwealth, and growing with 
 amazing rapidity in material prosperity what more 
 natural than the policy to strike down its threatening 
 enemies one by one, and set up in the centre of Europe 
 a benevolent despotism which it honestly believes 
 would advantage the whole world? 
 
 This is the truth, and at least it is magnificent. 
 Do not let us be led into the fog of delusion by the 
 easy garrulity of those who mock the German for 
 
THE TASK AHEAD 13 
 
 his bombastic utterance and dub him mad for his 
 ambition. The German offends all people of good 
 breeding and saddens all people conscious of the 
 spiritual life; but as an animal, as a man who relies 
 on brain-cunning and arm's strength, he is as fine 
 a creature as the world has seen. Try to be rid of 
 prejudices in your mind; try to forget his dreadful 
 manners, his distressing deportment, his complete 
 failure to make himself a gentleman ; and endeavour 
 to see him as animal man, as a creature using his 
 brain, as a mortal set on mortal efficiency, as a being 
 to whom the science of life, rather than the beauty 
 and graces of life, is, not a passion, but a definite 
 objective : see him thus, and you must admit that 
 this modern German is one of the mightiest figures 
 that has yet appeared on the world's stage. 
 
 His megalomania is justified by his virtues. He 
 alone of all the peoples on earth has so organised a 
 highly intelligent democracy that it has become not 
 only the efficient but the willing weapon of aristo- 
 cratic despotism. And but for the accidents of diplo- 
 macy, I can see no reason for doubting the feasibility 
 of the German dream. If England had remained 
 neutral, France would certainly have fallen before 
 the German sword. Belgium and Holland, obviously, 
 must have submitted to the War Lord. And after 
 
i 4 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 Russia, England. There is really no reason for accus- 
 ing the German of madness. His supreme mistake 
 was the mistake of his diplomacy. With England 
 neutral, Germany. might have come very near to world- 
 mastery in fifty years. 
 
 This ambition, although it shocks our sense of 
 humanity, is at any rate a great and a magnificent 
 ambition. Napoleon had sunk into insignificance 
 before the Kaiser if the Kaiser had possessed the 
 courage of his purpose and had announced with all 
 the moral fervour of which he is capable his deter- 
 mination to conquer the world for the good of the 
 world. No more formidable figure could have been 
 imagined in the pages of history. Men would have 
 spoken of him for ever as the ancient Greeks spoke 
 of their gods. The whole world, even did it continue 
 to bow the knee before Christ, would for ever have 
 raised eyes of admiration to this colossal Emperor. 
 
 But behold the destructive power of a lie ! Instead 
 of a figure at once magnificent and terrible, at once 
 majestic and awful, we can scarcely prevent ourselves 
 from laughter, and laughter of the most bitter and 
 contemptuous kind, as we contemplate this Colossus 
 shrunk and diminished to the wriggling exiguousness 
 of a cheat, a liar, and a hypocrite. By his attempt to 
 hoodwink the world, the German Kaiser has covered 
 
THE TASK AHEAD 15 
 
 himself with everlasting obloquy. For ever after, so 
 long as the world lasts, men will look upon him with 
 amusement and disdain, seeing him as the minnow 
 that would blow the horn of Triton, the frog that 
 would puff itself to the proportions of the ox, the 
 Tappertit who would wear the sovran mantle of Jove. 
 Moreover, it will be impossible for any historian of 
 consequence, any historian of European reputation, 
 to defend this gamin strutting on the stilts of Alex- 
 ander against a definite charge of lying and hypocrisy. 
 What a fate for an Emperor ! What an end to world- 
 conquest ! The documents are already on the table, 
 and the documents that come from Berlin to maintain 
 the German cause are marked with the emendations, 
 evasions, and suppressions of the practised cheat and 
 the shameless forger. William II., standing for the 
 great German nation, is proved by the overwhelming 
 and authentic facts of the case to be, first, a small man 
 and no hero, and, second, to be a charlatan and a 
 shabby charlatan at that. One wonders if he never 
 shudders at the thought of his place in history. 
 
 It is this failure of the Kaiser to realise his destiny 
 which betrays to us the chink in Germany's shining 
 armour. In spite of his thoroughness, in everything 
 he attempts the German is almost but not quite. 
 Germany falls into ruin because the tricks of the bag- 
 
16 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 man have corrupted the original ferocity of the Hun. 
 The German wants to be frightful, and has all the 
 capacity to be frightful; but in a corner of his 
 Berseker conscience there hides a sneaking fear of 
 what his victims will say about him. He sets out to 
 conquer the world, but ends in grotesque effort to 
 diddle the world. He is almost a fury, but becomes 
 before he has finished a worm writhing on a hook. 
 At one moment he holds mankind at gaze by his in- 
 comparable valour and reckless brutality ; at the next, 
 he stirs the disgust of men by his unctuous hypocrisy. 
 If he could have lived up to the spirit of that ferocious 
 phrase of his about hacking a way through Belgium, 
 how tremendous for the world might have been the 
 consequences, how immortal his greatness throughout 
 the ages; but what can men say of him when at the 
 very moment which sees him checked in this heroic 
 process of hacking through, he begins at once to whine 
 a lie, to falsify documents, and to froth at the mouth 
 with hymns of hate ? You cannot be both Nero and 
 Uriah Heep. You cannot hunt with the Hun and 
 squat with the Quietist. But the German thinks he 
 can do anything. He is convinced that he can be in 
 two minds. He would be an eagle but he must be 
 also a peacock. 
 
 Where lies the chief fallacy in the German soul? 
 
THE TASK AHEAD 17 
 
 It is Egoism developed beyond the reach both 
 of self-criticism and ridicule. One sees it, I think, 
 clear, vulgar, and horribly offensive, in the Kaiser's 
 baffling piety. He is quite unable to perceive the 
 incongruity of his attempt to follow Christ on a gun- 
 carriage. When a man rather loudly calls himself a 
 disciple of Christ and proclaims himself in the same 
 breath a War Lord, when the whole life of this pray- 
 ing and preaching man is devoted with a staggering 
 immodesty to shaking his mailed fist in the face of 
 other nations and to the perfecting of the most terrible 
 machinery of destruction the world has ever known, 
 and when he does not see that this character and work 
 of his life is not merely incongruous with and in- 
 appropriate to the religion of Christ, but absolutely its 
 most satanic and iniquitous antithesis, must we not 
 conclude that there is that in his brain which does not 
 go with perfect sanity ? The Kaiser is mad, but only 
 mad with an intense egoism beyond the reach of 
 humour. And thus it is with the entire German 
 people. They are simple, virtuous, and gentle in their 
 homes ; but never was Jew more contemptuous of other 
 peoples than the Germans of other nations. They 
 speak of their Kultur, but announce themselves as 
 Huns to the rest of mankind. And they cannot see 
 that this horrible attitude towards other nations is 
 
 B 2 
 
i8 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 destructive of their own homekeeping virtues. They 
 do not realise that Culture is universal and that they 
 are merely a part of the human race. They worship 
 no Infinite and Everlasting God, but follow a tribal 
 deity whose massacres of other nations are the main 
 dogmas of their faith and the sole reason of their 
 worship. They are parochial, petty, provincial, and 
 narrow. They are excellent, but excellent in a 
 suburban villa. In a word, their patriotism is their 
 prison. Possessed of virtues which should endear 
 them to all the world, these people have grown to be 
 the most loathed and despised of the nations. "It is 
 not this or that particular point," Professor Eucken 
 himself has said, "that has put us at discord with our 
 opponents; but our whole national and political 
 entity has become an offence to them." And it has 
 become an offence to other nations because of the 
 intolerable affront of German Egoism. Glory has 
 come to these strange people, but it has failed to 
 ennoble them. They have made themselves a great 
 Power, but no nation wishes to be their friend, and 
 no people will trust their word. They are amiable 
 only to themselves because they love only themselves. 
 They are hated by all because they hate all. And 
 they remain provincial even with an empire which 
 threatens the world because they are self-satisfied. 
 
THE TASK AHEAD 19 
 
 "It will always be the same," a German officer said 
 to a British officer; "you will always be fools, and 
 we shall never be gentlemen." 
 
 Let us be certain of this, that before so vast, 
 tremendous, and close-welded a Power as the German 
 Empire topples to its ruin, the world must endure even 
 more suffering than has yet agonised the heart of 
 existence. If at the last Germany has just that 
 sufficiency of truth left in her to tear off the mask of 
 assaulted innocence, if she turns upon her assailants 
 in the fury of the knowledge of a burked and 
 frustrated ambition, let us be sure that she will fight 
 and plot and conspire with all the violence of madness 
 and all the venomous cunning of vindictive spite, to 
 bring down with her in this ruinous fall the whole 
 temple of civilisation. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 The British Way 
 
 OUT of sound of the great guns the wheels of the 
 machinery of war are turning smoothly, silently, 
 relentlessly, day and night, week after week, month 
 after month, without ceasing and without violence. 
 
 Very perfect is this mechanism of death so per- 
 fect, indeed, that one loses all sense of its purpose. It 
 is only by an effort, and in solitude, that one realises 
 the awful meaning of those grinding wheels. As one 
 stands beside the workers, who are cheerful and proud 
 of their manifest efficiency, the smooth whirr of the 
 wheels ministers to national pride, purring of the 
 British gift for management, the British way of 
 doing things. Only when one is alone does it flash 
 into the mind that all this perfection of organisation 
 is directed to the work of destruction that it signifies 
 the mowing down of beautiful forests, the trampling 
 into mud of gentle pastures, the smashing of villages 
 
THE BRITISH WAY 21 
 
 and towns, the wounding and killing of human bodies, 
 the crushing of love, the widowing of women, the 
 spear of anguish in the hearts of children, the arrest 
 of life. 
 
 Less real even than this is the muddied soldier 
 with his rifle at his shoulder, his finger on the trigger, 
 his feet in slush, the wind cutting at his face, the 
 snow beating on his eyes, the roar of the guns crash- 
 ing over his head. He, the poor actual combatant, 
 seems a person of no real importance in this tre- 
 mendous conflict. One does not merely think little 
 about him ; one forgets him. It is here in these 
 British workshops of destruction, here in these French 
 ports, along these French rivers, and on these French 
 roads now swarming with the British, it is here one 
 feels that the real war is being waged, that the real 
 and ultimate issue is moving to decision. So wonder- 
 ful is this mechanism of destruction, and so vast the 
 area over which it has now spread itself, that one is 
 almost immediately conscious on landing in France 
 of a quite new and wholly unrealised aspect of war. 
 Fighting is a small thing, so it seems, in comparison 
 with the management of the fighters. 
 
 It is said over and over again that this is a war of 
 attrition. It is not said sufficiently often that it is a 
 war of business, a war which will be won by good 
 
22 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 management. In England I used to read the news- 
 papers for news from the trenches ; I used to discuss 
 with the military expert questions of strategy; never 
 once did I attempt to visualise the business side of 
 war, never once did it definitely occur to me that this 
 business side of war is of decisive importance. And 
 now, in France, I scarcely glance at the various 
 communiques. I meet men fresh from the trenches 
 and ask them hardly a question. All my attention is 
 absorbed by these workshops these places in France 
 where the British managers of war have planted them- 
 selves and where the wheels of destruction are re- 
 volving night and day with a precision, a silence, and 
 a monotony which almost stun the mind. 
 
 To realise this side of war you must first of all 
 possess yourself of the fact that the tiny place in the 
 fighting line now occupied by the British troops is a 
 place also exceeding tiny in relation to the parts of 
 France in which the British managers of war have 
 pitched their camp. This is to say that without even 
 once hearing the rattle of rifles or the thunder of 
 artillery you may motor for days and days through 
 France and see so many Britons on the roads and 
 in the towns and villages that you might be pardoned 
 for thinking yourself still in the British Isles. We 
 occupy so thoroughly and so efficiently this enormous 
 
THE BRITISH WAY 23 
 
 area of France that some not very imaginative Ger- 
 mans, it is said, are attempting to create suspicion and 
 jealousy in the minds of the French as touching our 
 ultimate purpose. 
 
 "You will never get rid of these English," said a 
 German to a Frenchman; "they will stick to your 
 ports, they will hold your towns, they will refuse to 
 go when the war is over ; you will see ! " To which 
 the acute Frenchman made answer, "But I thought 
 you were going to win ? " 
 
 It is the thoroughness of our occupation which has 
 made this accusation possible ; and it is our thorough- 
 ness in this respect which seems to me the surest 
 sign of our victory. Until I came to France and 
 saw what the British have done and are still doing 
 at each base and along all the lines of communica- 
 tion, I had never formed in my mind a clear notion 
 of our main national characteristic. I have travelled 
 through India, and have admired the British way 
 of governing that vast Empire to the best advantage 
 of its various peoples; I have travelled through 
 Canada, and have seen how the British way of doing 
 things makes for liberty and progress ; but until I 
 saw here in France how, out of nothing and in the 
 flight of a few weeks, the British have set up a most 
 perfect machinery of war, and are now, without undue 
 
24 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 stress and certainly without the smallest apprehen- 
 sion of the final result, preparing for the mightiest 
 advance of British troops known to our history, I 
 really had no clear notion of what I call our main 
 national characteristic the genius for good manage- 
 ment, the genius for doing things of enormous magni- 
 tude without fuss, without boastfulness, without any 
 serious mistake. 
 
 Let me tell you before I proceed to describe what 
 I have seen of this management of war how the 
 wheels of destruction run side by side with the wheels 
 of mercy and salvation. At a certain British base, 
 where I called upon the Brigadier-General in com- 
 mand, when our conversation was at an end, he 
 opened a door, passed through a room where his 
 typist was tapping the keys of a typewriter, and 
 entered another room where another typist was also 
 hard at work, and where an officer was speaking 
 through the telephone. This officer, to whom the 
 General presented me, was a Colonel of the Royal 
 Army Medical Corps, the officer in local command 
 of the health of the troops, the hospitals, the con- 
 valescent camps, and all the medical side of the war. 
 As we talked together the sound of the two type- 
 writers clashed against each other the one carrying 
 the General's orders, the other the orders of the 
 
THE BRITISH WAY 25 
 
 Colonel ; and the two men facing each other, smiling 
 and talking as companions in arms, were men engaged 
 in tasks absolutely opposed to each other, the one 
 seeking how he might perfect the work of destruc- 
 tion, the other how he might perfect the work of 
 mercy and salvation. Next door to each other, then, 
 these two men work at their posts. The one is sending 
 men as swiftly as possible to the fighting line; the 
 other bringing wounded men back as gently as pos- 
 sible to the hospitals. The one is busy seeing that 
 every man who arrives from England is perfectly 
 equipped with the weapons of destruction; the other 
 that every man who comes down from the fighting 
 line is relieved of pain and made whole as swiftly as 
 science and human care can accomplish. All day 
 the typewriters of these two men are clacking next 
 door to each other. 
 
 And then, side by side with the immense machinery, 
 there are very small but very wonderful little engines 
 of kindness humming a music all their own. One 
 meets here and there ladies who work night and day 
 to provide arriving and departing troops with coffee 
 and food, societies like the Young Men's Christian 
 Association and the Salvation Army, who labour to 
 ease the hardships of our soldiers in various ways, 
 and then there are the chaplains working always 
 
26 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 with heroic devotion ; so that while the mind is 
 tremendously impressed by War Office organisation, 
 it is continually conscious of refreshment and relief 
 in encounters with people inspired by feelings of the 
 purest humanity. 
 
 But I really do not know whether these self- 
 sacrificing workers and the officers of the R.A.M.C. 
 are one whit more humane in their natures than the 
 British soldiers wholly engaged in the work of 
 destruction. I said something to an officer about wars 
 in the future. He exclaimed immediately: "Do you 
 think, after this, that anyone will ever take a war 
 on again?" and his face expressed the liveliest 
 horror. They say to you, "It's a beastly business, 
 but we've got to go through with it." The other day 
 a doctor felt in with a British soldier whose blood 
 was maddened by what he had seen of German treat- 
 ment of our wounded men. "Do you know what I 
 mean to do," he demanded, "when I come across one 
 of their wounded? I mean to put my boot in his 
 ugly face." The doctor replied: "No, you won't; 
 it's not in your nature. I'll tell you what you will 
 do you'll give him a drink out of your water- 
 bottle." To which the soldier, after a pause in which 
 he searched the doctor's face, made grumbling and 
 regretful answer: "Well, maybe I shall." 
 
THE BRITISH WAY 27 
 
 And it is most necessary to remember that the 
 heads of the British Army working so triumphantly 
 at the back of the trenches are very certain that their 
 work of destruction is consecrated by the spirit of 
 freedom, justice, and righteousness. They are cheer- 
 ful and gallant-hearted, not because they love war, 
 but because they are destroying the enemy of peace. 
 I have not met one man in authority who spoke of 
 this war with the language of bluster and the swagger 
 of a swashbuckler. For the most part they are men 
 of silence and reserve, quiet men, modest, thoughtful, 
 and gentle-mannered. I have been struck again and 
 again by the gentleness of these men who are 
 organising a wholesale destruction of life with an 
 efficiency that at once thrills and appals. And when 
 one talks to them, one finds that they are convinced 
 of the justice of their cause, that they are out to 
 destroy, only to preserve what is infinitely precious 
 to them : that the German to the British officer is 
 everything dreadful, everything offensive, everything 
 inimical and perilous. The cheerfulness which char- 
 acterises their work comes from this conviction in 
 their minds, and they labour with real enthusiasm, 
 absolutely rejoicing in their toil, because to beat 
 Germany is to defeat the enemy of the human race. 
 
 Therefore, in all I have to say, and in particular 
 
28 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 concerning the eternal contrast between the work of 
 the soldier and the work of the surgeon, let it be 
 always borne in mind that the soldier is really and 
 definitely inspired by the glorious idea of justice. I 
 have never heard one of them speak of German 
 atrocities ; I have never heard one of them question 
 the right of the German to make war in any way 
 which he thinks may get him the victory ; but quietly 
 and with an unexpressed delight, not often saying a 
 word on the subject, they give one the feeling that 
 their work is a joy to them because it has right and 
 justice on its side. 
 
 This spirit of cheerfulness manifests itself every- 
 where, but not in the manner of which we heard so 
 much at the beginning of the war. You do not now 
 see a British soldier minus buttons and badges; no 
 cries of "Vive PAngleterre ! " ring through the streets 
 of cities; in certain places you might think that our 
 presence in France was almost resented. A French 
 lady, not unnaturally annoyed by the rather noisy 
 behaviour of some British soldiers on the quays at 
 Boulogne, said to them somewhat sharply, "You 
 seem to think that this town belongs to you." "No, 
 ma'am, we don't think that," replied a man of the 
 Army Service Corps; "but what we do think is this 
 that if it wasn't for us it wouldn't belong to you." 
 
THE BRITISH WAY 29 
 
 It is worth while noticing this slight and occasional 
 difference of opinion between some French people 
 and ourselves. There is not, of course, the least 
 danger in the matter, but it is something to be 
 acknowledged and dealt with in a spirit of friendly 
 candour. 
 
 Now, it is the very perfection of our organisation 
 which has occasioned this trouble. You have only 
 to reflect for a moment to realise that the handling 
 of vast numbers of men in a foreign country, if it is 
 thoroughly done, must of necessity prove a formid- 
 able obstacle to the commercial and domestic life of 
 that country. We occupy ports, and the shipping of 
 our ally is thrown out of gear. We demand so many 
 trains a day, and the railway traffic of our ally is 
 seriously interrupted. We need buildings, we need 
 land ; and, although we pay handsomely for these 
 things, still the general life of our neighbours is at 
 least inconvenienced by these constant and growing 
 demands. Then there are minor troubles. Young 
 officers not yet inspired by the traditions of the British 
 Army are apt, quite unintentionally, to offend people 
 by their manners; or the numerous unpaid workers 
 attached to the Army, swarming into teashops and 
 taking possession of those places, are somewhat of an 
 irritation to French ladies who enter with their parcels 
 
30 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 and find no place where they can sit. Some of these 
 French people say that we are making war too 
 luxuriously, that if we did not feed our soldiers so 
 absurdly well we should not need so many docks, so 
 many trains, so many workers to look after them ; 
 and they argue that if their trade is not fostered and 
 developed, for which docks and railways are essential, 
 their ability to pay for the war will be seriously 
 crippled. 
 
 Against this perfectly rational and entirely fair 
 criticism of a few individual French people we must 
 set the British point of view. The British authorities 
 say that the numbers of men which they can place in 
 the field must be governed by the dock and railway 
 facilities which the French can place at their disposal ; 
 that having their own way of conducting a war, which, 
 if a lavish way, is at any rate a masterfully efficient 
 way, they cannot make it in another way which does 
 not seem to them likely to be so efficient. They regret 
 the inconvenience caused to French trade, they do 
 their very utmost to restrict that inconvenience to a 
 minimum ; but the chief thought in their minds is, 
 and must be, how best to help drive the Germans out 
 of France, how soonest to make an end of this horrible 
 war which Has interrupted not only French trade, but 
 the trade of the whole world. 
 
THE BRITISH WAY 31 
 
 In the chapters which follow the reader will make 
 acquaintance with the marvellous efficiency of British 
 organisation, and will therefore readily understand 
 how occasionally inconvenient our presence in France 
 must be to the French commercial classes. We must 
 all sympathise with France in this difficulty, and all 
 do our very best to smooth away the rough edges of 
 the inconvenience. At the same time France will 
 honour and respect us the more if we continue to 
 wage war in our own deadly way, and to insist on 
 those facilities which are necessary to its prosecution. 
 That our soldiers have handled this part of their 
 business so ably, so thoughtfully, and so diplo- 
 matically is one of the feathers they are entitled to 
 wear in their caps, is one admirable achievement to 
 their credit. 
 
 It is more difficult to make war in the country of 
 an ally than in the country of an enemy. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 At the Base 
 
 FRANCE, who has made such great sacrifices in this 
 war, looks on with astonishment as the British pile 
 up on French soil their preparations for an absolute 
 victory. 
 
 Imagine to yourself what it must mean to France, 
 whose four or five million soldiers are drawn from 
 every class, whose ordnance workers are toiling night 
 and day for the same wage as the soldiers, to wit, a 
 halfpenny a day, whose trade is almost at a standstill, 
 whose loss in the flower of her manhood is already 
 incalculable that young manhood so full of beautiful 
 promise, which was devoted to sport, fair living, and 
 the simple pleasures of a clean domestic life imagine 
 to yourself what it must mean to this romantic, heroic, 
 and self-sacrificing France, not only to watch our 
 prodigal preparations for war, but to hear that the 
 rich workmen of Great Britain threaten to strike for 
 an extra farthing an hour. 
 
AT THE BASE 33 
 
 We cannot, of course, change our way of doing 
 things to ease the feelings of the French, but it is 
 truly of the highest importance that we should 
 recognise the magnificent spirit of France, and seek 
 by every means in our power to share her sorrows, 
 and, so far as we can, to shoulder her burdens. In 
 this book; which attempts to describe the British way 
 of doing things, I shall not be able to repress the 
 enthusiasm which the preparations of our War Office 
 have created in my mind; and I must be honest and 
 say that the British way of doing things seems to me, 
 on the whole, better than the French way of doing 
 things ; but I beg the reader to carry in his mind the 
 thought which is now never absent from my own, that 
 in comparison with the tremendous sacrifices of our 
 faithful and heroic friends the French, our sacrifices, 
 great and terrible as they are, must appear in the eyes 
 of a just man as the branch to the bough or as the 
 little finger to the whole hand. We are both fighting, 
 remember, the one for the other. But for us Germany 
 would have driven her sword into the very heart of 
 France ; and but for the French, Germany would now 
 be threatening our whole commerce from the coasts 
 of France. We are not fighting for the French more 
 than the French are fighting for us. It is for us as 
 great a matter that Germany should be driven out of 
 
 C 2 
 
34 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 France as it is for France that Germany should be 
 hurled out of Belgium. Never should an Englishman 
 think for a single moment that he has made sacrifices 
 for France. It is only a geographical accident that 
 has made France the field of battle, and it is this 
 accident which causes her such inexpressible anguish 
 and sets us free we, who are Germany's chief enemy 
 to pursue our normal life. 
 
 This said, let me endeavour to bring before the 
 reader's eye, if only in blurred outline, something of 
 the marvels of our British workshops of destruction 
 here in France. 
 
 To begin with, the most notable characteristic of 
 our work is the air of permanency which marks it so 
 decisively that a crazy German might almost be par- 
 doned for hinting that we intend to remain in the 
 country. There is nothing in this work which is 
 makeshift or sloven. Take, for example, the docks. 
 Our ships enter the ports of France, make fast along- 
 side the quays, and by the aid of derrick and crane 
 discharge with extraordinary quickness the cargoes 
 brought from England. These various goods are 
 loaded into motor lorries, trucks, Indian mule carts, 
 and are trundled away, some direct to the front and 
 some to sheds in the docks. In one case, at a certain 
 port I motored through a French hangar which was 
 
AT THE BASE 35 
 
 three-quarters of a mile long, and it was piled from 
 floor to ceiling with provisions for our troops. But 
 the accommodation of these French docks is not 
 sufficient for the British War Office. The food and 
 clothing of our soldiers must be preserved from the 
 risks of the open air, not a trenching tool or a bundle 
 of forage must be left on the quayside under a 
 tarpaulin ; and so we are building in every direction 
 storing sheds of corrugated iron large, solid and 
 lasting sheds which are the admiration of the 
 French. 
 
 You will get some idea of the immense work which 
 is being carried on behind the firing line when you 
 learn that something like two thousand tons of goods 
 are sent every day from the base depots to the front. 
 This enormous weight of goods comes almost entirely 
 from England, for we are not buying in France even 
 so perishable a necessity as milk. Vast stores, then, 
 are brought from England and loaded into sheds at 
 the base depots. All day by motor-lorry and railway 
 trucks supplies for the troops are sent out from these 
 base depots to stores as near as possible to the firing 
 line. And just as reserves are accumulated in the 
 docks, so reserves are accumulated near the front, 
 since an accident to the railways might cut off the 
 fighting soldiers' supplies. On one occasion there was 
 
36 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 a delay on the railways of thirty-six hours, but not 
 only did the soldier at the front get all his food 
 and ammunition, but he did not even have to 
 draw on the reserves I have mentioned; regimental 
 stores were sufficient for his need. Everything 
 goes by clockwork. There is not room for an 
 accident. 
 
 Work such as this calls for a very considerable 
 body of workers, and accommodation has to be found 
 for the workers as well as for the stores. The Army 
 has been equal to this task. I have seen few things 
 more cunning and adventurous than the trick by 
 which a huge bare shed in one of the docks has been 
 converted into a model lodging-house. With a few 
 battens this masterly trick has been accomplished. 
 You enter the shed and look down a long central aisle, 
 battened on either side almost to the girders of the 
 roof, giving the effect of pens in a poultry show. 
 Through openings in these battens you enter large 
 cubicles, with bunks one above the other like the 
 berths in a ship's cabin. Over this, by a pent-house 
 method, reached by a staircase of battens, is a bal- 
 cony off which the whole plan below is repeated. 
 This one shed on the docks, by the method thus 
 employed, is made to house most comfortably over 
 a. thousand workers ; and from end to end, arid from 
 
AT THE BASE 37 
 
 floor to ceiling, it is kept most rigorously fresh and 
 clean. A detail of Army thoroughness is the grenade 
 at every few paces for the extinguishing of fire. 
 And the whole of it is to be coated first with an 
 insect-proof solution, and after with a fire-proof 
 paint. 
 
 To stand on the quayside, with a great company 
 of British and Indian soldiers, watching the ships 
 discharge their cargoes all of them unloaded almost 
 entirely by British labour is to realise more than 
 any table of figures can express the really tremendous 
 business of conducting a modern war on British lines. 
 You see, for example, endless carcasses of animals 
 sewn up in cloth swinging from the ends of cranes and 
 rattling down on the cobbles of the docks; farther 
 along, the cranes are loading the quays with tins of 
 biscuits, cases of groceries, boxes of grapes for the 
 hospitals, and cases of brandy and rum ; farther along 
 still you see high in the air, dangling from the end 
 of a crane, and looking absurdly small, a motor lorry 
 or a motor-car ; and farther along still there are cases 
 of rifles, ammunition, the parts of heavy guns, 
 saddlery, and uniforms. The British and the Indian 
 soldiers, the last with wrappings over their turbans 
 and bits of cloth like soiled towels round their necks, 
 assist an army of dock labourers to clear away all 
 
38 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 these various things from the quays, and bear them 
 off to the sheds. And as you make a tour of these 
 sheds, filled with every conceivable kind of provision, 
 all in brand-new boxes of white deal, and all arranged 
 with the most perfect precision and neatness, you are 
 tempted to wonder whether this war is not a Titanic 
 festivity, a picnic of luxury, abundance, and super- 
 fluity. But you come presently to a shed filled from 
 end to end with many of these same luxurious things 
 broken up, smashed, muddied, and infectious these 
 same things brought back from the trenches and 
 accumulated here as part of the Army's scheme, part 
 of the British way of doing things. 
 
 It is not easy to describe the sadness of this par- 
 ticular shed. Its atmosphere has something of the 
 depression of a cheap lodging-house, but the silence 
 of it is like no other silence that I know a silence at 
 once dead and living, dead with the sense of the end 
 of things and living with the sense of eternal mourn- 
 ing. You walk warily, for the poor tattered khaki 
 piled up in enormous heaps is not merely covered 
 with mud and slush from the trenches, but it has not 
 yet been passed through the process of purification. 
 Imagine the effect made by this silent shed of ruin 
 and decay when I tell you that it is 150 yards long 
 and 50 yards wide, and when you consider that it is 
 
AT THE BASE 39 
 
 crowded in every part, and stacked high up almost 
 to the roof with such things, each in their separate 
 heaps, as blankets, stirrup-irons, bayonets, web- 
 beltings, haversacks, boots, trousers, tunics, head- 
 gear, saddles, bits, horse-shoes, bridles, and trenching 
 tools all of them marked with the signs of ruin. In 
 a heap of dank tunics I saw a broken piece of Army 
 biscuit, crumbling at one corner, spotted with mud at 
 another. 
 
 All this vast rubbish-heap is in charge of a few 
 men who pick the things over and decide what can 
 be repaired and what must be sold or destroyed. 
 There is little waste, and many of the things now 
 piled in confusion will emerge from the process of 
 repair almost as good as new. The first impression 
 made by this storehouse of ruin is one of quite 
 irreparable disaster, but on close examination one 
 discovers that many of the things gathered together 
 under this sombre roof witness more to the careless- 
 ness of the British soldier than to the ravages 
 of war. All the same, one is glad to be out of 
 that shed, breathing once more the fresh air of the 
 sea. 
 
 I was taken to a workshop where the engines of 
 our aeroplanes are repaired. It was Sunday, and the 
 young officer in charge, a fresh-faced boy, explained 
 
40 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 to me that the men were just then knocking off work 
 to make ready for church parade. He left me for a 
 few moments in charge of a sergeant-major. This 
 sergeant-major, in pointing out a propeller which had 
 been sent down from the front for repair, said to me : 
 "If one of the blades is the least bit out of the true, 
 it causes what we call propeller flutter, and spoils 
 everything." 
 
 It occurred to me that this whole war, with its 
 devastation, agony, and everlasting loss to the human 
 race, might be described as one vast propeller flutter, 
 shaking the earth, loosening the foundations of 
 society, and spoiling everything, just because, and 
 only because, the science of life is out of the true. 
 To go through the workshops of destruction, to see 
 the beauty and orderliness of the organisation, to 
 discuss the business of war with ardent and cheerful 
 British officers, to hear the smooth-spinning wheels 
 purring their music of an absolute efficiency this is 
 to be carried away by admiration and enthusiasm ; 
 but to go into the repairing sheds, to look upon the 
 debris of the army, and to visit the hospitals, this is 
 to hate war and to realise with a most acute sharpness 
 of perception that of all things urgent and necessary 
 to human life truth is the most urgent and the most 
 necessary. 
 
AT THE BASE 41 
 
 This war, as I think can be shown later on, is likely 
 to bring more problems and confusions to humanity 
 than most people have yet contemplated. And it 
 will certainly come again, smiting death and ruin on 
 every side, unless the democracies of the world make 
 up their minds to have done with all false doctrines 
 and fond delusions, fixing their eyes upon truth, and 
 determining themselves to order the affairs of this 
 earth in accordance with right reason and the Will 
 of God. But until I come to that halt in my travels, 
 let me leave in the mind of the reader the sense of 
 admiration for the work of the British War Office, 
 which, working here in a foreign country, has so 
 organised the business of destruction that from all 
 the ports which they occupy on the French coast right 
 up to the snow-bound and water-logged trenches, 
 where our soldiers endure with a sublime cheerful- 
 ness the hardships and horror of modern war, not 
 one momentary hitch, not one even temporary 
 dislocation occurs in the smooth working of 
 supplies. 
 
 These generals and colonels and majors and cap- 
 tains whom one encounters all over France, in spite 
 of the scarlet bands round their caps and the ribbons 
 on their breasts, are not so much fighting men as 
 business men and business men of remarkable 
 
42 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 ability. In Whitehall, no doubt, sit the two or three 
 directing minds of this tremendous organisation, 
 but how insoluble would be the difficulties of those 
 two or three but for the devotion and ability of 
 soldiers on the quays of France and all along the 
 wind-torn, rain-drenched lines of our communications. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Making Ourselves at Home 
 
 NOTHING that I have seen, after motoring all 
 through the considerable section of France which 
 serves as the base of the British Army, suggests the 
 early accounts which we read in our newspapers of 
 Thomas Atkins's popularity with the French. 
 
 The day has certainly gone by when our troops 
 marched minus buttons and badges through a living 
 avenue of "glad faces, the welkin ringing with shouts 
 of "Vive 1'Angleterre ! " the hands of hospitality 
 extended on either side with wine and fruit and 
 flowers. Mr. Atkins has so successfully established 
 himself as Monsieur Atkins that no Frenchman now 
 would dream of feeling even curious about him. One 
 sees him in the towns and villages where our camps 
 are pitched, wandering about as forlorn as any French 
 foot-soldier, a cigarette leaning downwards from loose 
 lips, an expression of settled boredom on his face, a 
 
 43 
 
44 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 rather distressing carelessness in the matter of his 
 general appearance. The fact is that among the 
 Normans with whom he chiefly lives there are shrewd 
 people who cannot resist the temptation to make a few 
 sous of extra profit out of the British legions. Thomas 
 Atkins, having discovered that he has been charged 
 more than the usual price for the articles he buys 
 from shopkeeper and camp hawker, is in a mood of 
 some disgust with life. The rest of France, when 
 you tell them of this matter, exclaim angrily, "Ah, 
 those Normans they are terrible ! " and Thomas 
 Atkins, learning to be as sharp as those who prey 
 upon him, dismisses these people in one swooping 
 and inclusive judgment which lends itself neither to 
 print nor to translation. He is not making friends 
 with his immediate neighbours; that at least is cer- 
 tain. And the rest of France, which loves Thomas 
 Atkins, does not blame him. 
 
 Strangely enough, this separation extends, but only 
 from the cause of a different language, to the French 
 Army. I have seen very little evidence of our alliance, 
 of our entente cordiale, in the case of French and 
 British soldiers; indeed, the officers and the men of 
 both armies appear to be as separate from each other 
 as the coasts of the two countries. One enters the 
 lounge of an hotel, and finds British officers sitting 
 
MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME 45 
 
 together and French officers sitting together; they 
 pass each other, except in places like Paris, without 
 greeting or salute. They glance at each other for a 
 moment as they come in or go out, and there the 
 matter ends ; one sees nothing of friendship, not even 
 of acquaintance. 
 
 I suppose the two peoples are now so accustomed 
 to each other that curiosity is no longer possible, 
 while real interest is frustrated by the inconvenience 
 of a different language. But one could wish that 
 there was a greater effort on both sides to improve 
 acquaintance, and a more sustained endeavour to 
 maintain the pleasant courtesies which ought to exist 
 between two amiable nations allied in arms. 
 
 But Thomas Atkins, spreading himself over France, 
 is a strange and notable figure. The good-natured 
 French will forgive him, I am sure, for thinking that 
 his way of doing things is much better than theirs, 
 although this fixed idea of his inspires him with an 
 almost gigantesque disdain for everything French. If 
 you will believe it, he has taken to "showing off" 
 before the French, putting such back into his British 
 work that it is a perfect wonder to behold what he 
 has achieved. Dumped down on a Slough of Despond, 
 perched high up above a French city, and swept on 
 every side by tempest, snow, hail, and rain, it has 
 
4 6 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 not sufficed Thomas Atkins merely to pitch a tent 
 and light a pipe, it has not sufficed him to do just what 
 his officers tell him and nothing more; no, he has 
 looked about him, and, to show these Frenchmen 
 what he is made of, has raised in these desolate places 
 monuments to his British nature monuments of 
 order, homeliness, comfort, and even beauty. 
 
 All the camps I have seen- express this spirit, and 
 are marked also by that appearance of permanence 
 which characterises, as I have already remarked, the 
 work of our soldiers in the docks. You will find in 
 every camp excellently made roads, where, only a few 
 weeks ago, was nothing but mud; and these roads, 
 edged in many cases by white flints, are very often 
 planted on either side with hedges, and shrubs, and 
 trees. Enter one of these enormous camps, which 
 you might justly expect to be the most desolate dwell- 
 ing on the face of the earth, and you find that tents 
 and huts are lighted by electricity, that water has 
 been laid on, that shower-baths are erected, that 
 recreation rooms are bright with pictures and decora- 
 tions, that excellent kitchens are preparing meals fit 
 for an alderman, that the mess huts are large and 
 comfortable, that spaces are set apart for football and 
 games in short, that the whole thing is as settled as 
 Aldershot and as orderly as Shorncliffe. Wherever 
 
MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME 47 
 
 I have been, and I have seen many thousands of men 
 in these numerous and huge camps, I have found 
 trees, shrubs, and even flowers; in one case Thomas 
 Atkins had converted the draining trench outside a 
 tent into a pond, and on either side of the pond had 
 made himself a rockery green with little plants. 
 
 One thing, perhaps, is enough to show you how 
 thoughtfully our men have engineered these camps. 
 It was seen in a certain case that carts and motor- 
 lorries were tearing a road to pieces, a road which 
 wound inconveniently from the town to the camp on 
 the cliff-like hilltop. The British looked about them, 
 and in a few days a funicular railway ran straight 
 from the base of the hill to the camp on top. This 
 single instance of thoroughness and ingenuity is only 
 typical of the general thoroughness and ingenuity 
 which characterise all the work of the British in 
 France. 
 
 You may imagine some of the difficulties of these 
 improvised camps when you remember that sanitation 
 has to be provided not only for thousands of men 
 but for thousands of horses as well. The manner in 
 which these difficulties have been handled is beyond 
 praise, and already provision is being made to guard 
 against the least danger from flies when the summer 
 comes. You discover as you go along that the British 
 
 D 
 
48 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 Army is not merely administered by very able men 
 but watched over most carefully by studious men of 
 science. 
 
 To walk through these innumerable camps is to 
 be impressed by a hundred details, but to realise the 
 great extent of them it is necessary to motor away 
 to some convenient distance for seeing them spread 
 out in their entirety upon the face of the country. It 
 is only then that you begin to comprehend the magni- 
 tude of the Army's achievement seeing these huge 
 British encampments as vast townships of wood and 
 canvas, the fields about them occupied by thousands 
 of men and horses, light railways and tram-lines 
 serving their needs, roads lighted by electricity 
 running through them, and hosts of men returning in 
 all directions from their drills. 
 
 But it is not only in camp and in town that you 
 find Thomas Atkins established in France. One day 
 I was motoring through a blinding snowstorm fifteen 
 miles from the last town, when a little stumpy figure 
 in a long cloak descended from a vehicle in the dis- 
 tance and stood with arms extended in the road. 
 When we pulled up we discovered that the vehicle 
 was a motor-lorry, and that fhe man in the road was 
 a British soldier. He grinned at us, and said in 
 cheerful Cockney : " Have you got a can of petrol 
 
MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME 49 
 
 you could spare us ? Blest if I haven't used the last 
 blooming drop in the tank" and he laughed as if 
 he had made an excellent joke. But this man was 
 only one of many hundreds of British soldiers I have 
 encountered in a fortnight of almost ceaseless motor- 
 ing through these parts of France. You find 
 them in villages and little towns, you find them on 
 the roads, you see them leaning out of the carriages 
 of passing trains, and you encounter them in desolate 
 fields and on isolated hilltops. And as you come 
 across them in this fashion you wonder how it is the 
 Army contrives to keep its hold upon them all, supply- 
 ing their needs, and turning their presence in France 
 to the advantage of those invisible thousands of heroic 
 men who are holding up the armies of Germany in 
 trenches far away from these peaceful, happy fields, 
 where the French peasants are ploughing and the 
 French priest is teaching the children the religion of 
 Galilee. 
 
 Again and again it is borne in upon the mind that 
 the actual fighting is only a detail of War Office 
 organisation. You find, for instance, in one town 
 alone, and a town far away from the firing-line, 5,000 
 men permanently employed in the work of organisa- 
 tion. The British Army has its own telephone ser- 
 vice and its own post-office. There are clerks and 
 
 D 2 
 
50 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 servants to be looked after, as well as men with 
 rifles. And the area covered by the British Army 
 behind the trenches is almost a country in 
 itself. 
 
 No wonder, then, that you meet Thomas Atkins 
 everywhere, and that wherever you come across him 
 he is hard at work. He has lost, I think, something 
 of the smartness which characterises him at home ; he 
 has acquired, perhaps, something of the slouch and 
 slackness of the French soldiers which so effectually 
 disguise their extraordinary fighting qualities; he is 
 no longer the close-cropped, spick-and-span, upright, 
 and swift-walking Tommy Atkins of the London 
 streets. Nevertheless, with his long hair, his un- 
 shaven chin, his unbuttoned tunic, and his cap at the 
 back of his head, he is a worker of miracles, a brave 
 man, and in the depths of his British heart a quiet, 
 unperturbed, and considerate gentleman. Not once 
 in all my journeyings have I seen a British private 
 soldier in the very least intoxicated. I shall tell 
 you in the next chapter how he behaves in hospital, 
 and what his medical officers and great civil surgeons 
 from England say about his moral qualities; for the 
 present we must leave him wandering over the roads 
 of France and making the best of winter quarters in 
 the country of an ally whose language he has not 
 
MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME 51 
 
 acquired and whose way of doing things does not in- 
 spire him with envy. 
 
 As one detail of Army organisation, let me tell you 
 that at the headquarters of every British base in 
 France a staff of men is required to deal with claims 
 made by the country people against our troops. A 
 farmer will say, for example, that the goats of an 
 Indian regiment have so fouled a particular field that 
 it will be impossible to sow cabbages in that region for 
 three years ; or the landlord of a house which we have 
 converted into a hospital will claim damages for the 
 improvements we have made in his property ; and 
 then there are innumerable assertions of injury done 
 by British motor-cars to wagons, carts, barrows, pigs, 
 sheep, and poultry. All these claims for compensa- 
 tion have to be examined at the headquarters of the 
 Base Commandant, and it needs a sharp lawyer to 
 deal with some of the claimants. 
 
 But all Frenchmen are not Normans, and all 
 Normans are not avaricious; moreover Normandy, 
 bear in mind, has not been stricken by war. From 
 Paris to the trenches you will hear little but generous 
 admiration expressed for the British soldier, and many 
 acts of exquisite tenderness and beautiful sympathy 
 are performed in secret by the people of those towns 
 and villages towards our British dead. Marseilles, 
 
52 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 too, loves the British soldier and has a very great 
 respect for the Indians, whose behaviour is beyond 
 praise. In Normandy, too, you find the Base Com- 
 mandant and the local Mayor working together with 
 the greatest amity. France, who holds eleven-twelfths 
 of the fighting-line, and whose Army now is un- 
 doubtedly the finest Army she has ever placed in the 
 field, knows and acknowledges the value of the British 
 soldier. And the British soldier, when once he shakes 
 off the tedium of camp-life, and forgets that he has 
 been "had " by clever hawkers, becomes a worthy and 
 a contented brother of the valorous French. If you 
 would know the martial qualities of the French soldier, 
 ask the British soldier who has fought by his side. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 Repairs 
 
 THEY opened a door, and I saw a man lying on the 
 operating table, orderlies and nurses at his side, the 
 surgeon at work upon his body. He lowered a news- 
 paper which he was reading and smiled at me. 
 An anaesthetic injected into his spine had destroyed 
 his capacity to feel pain. 
 
 A soldier lying in bed with a thick bandage over 
 his head greeted me with a cheerful, almost a con- 
 ceited, smile. He is a show case, and has reason to 
 be proud of the simple fact that he is still alive. For 
 six bullets had buried themselves in his head, and 
 two of those bullets still remain there. Later, they 
 showed me an X-ray photograph of the man's head. 
 I saw the two bullets, black in the haze of the head's 
 outline, one at the base of the skull, the other half an 
 inch below the eye. He feels no pain. 
 War is horrible, devilish, and unutterably loath- 
 
 53 
 
54 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 some, but I speak sober truth when I say that you see 
 nothing of these abominations in a hospital. A 
 military hospital is definitely one of the workshops of 
 destruction, for it js a place where the bodies of men 
 are repaired in order that they may go back as sharply 
 as possible to the fighting line; but the feelings of 
 humanity are too much for the full rigour of military 
 necessities, and the broken bodies of men are patched 
 up with a certain tenderness and with an absolute 
 enthusiasm for success on the part of the repairers, 
 whether they are ever likely to fight again or not. 
 Thus it fortunes that a military hospital is a kind and 
 restful place, breathing no atmosphere of war, gentle 
 with the presence of women, and bright, hopeful 
 stimulating with all the admirable delight of the 
 doctors in the work of their science. 
 
 I was sitting one night in the lounge of a hotel with 
 an eminent surgeon and an eminent bacteriologist. 
 Both of them wore khaki, for they have given their 
 services to the nation, but both are men of science 
 belonging to civil life. All round us, on every side in 
 the lounge of this hotel, were officers of the British 
 Army, some of them elderly men, some of them boys 
 of twb-and-twenty, the place buzzing with the sound 
 of their voices. The bacteriologist, glancing about 
 him, said to the surgeon, "Here we are, you and 
 
REPAIRS 55 
 
 I, whose business it is to save life, in the midst 
 of men whose business it is to destroy life." 
 And a few minutes later the surgeon, as fine a man 
 as you could wish to meet, was describing to us the 
 funeral of a personal friend of his, a brave General 
 whose life he had once saved by an operation and who 
 had recently fallen a victim to a German bullet. He 
 described how the mourners grouped themselves 
 round the spade's fresh work in the earth, how the 
 soldiers really rested on their reversed arms for they 
 loved the dead man and then he said that, as the 
 simple words of the burial service sounded like a 
 strange music in the open air, the ripple of German 
 musketry was a continuous obbligato, and at every 15 
 seconds the shattering bang of the heavy guns tore 
 the grey air into ribbons, thundering even across the 
 homage of the Last Post. The bacteriologist asked 
 him: "What were you thinking of all that time?" 
 The surgeon lifted his head and replied quickly and 
 with restrained energy: "I was wishing all the time 
 that my son was on my knee, that he might have seen 
 it, that I might have told him what it meant." Then 
 he added : "The boy is seven years old; at six weeks 
 of age his name was put down for the Grenadier 
 Guards; his grandfather won a V.C. He would have 
 understood." 
 
56 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 So you see that even these men whose business it is 
 to save life have their enthusiasm for war. This 
 surgeon detests war with all the passion of his 
 idealistic nature : he abhors it as much as any rational 
 man whose soul is absorbed in the work of peace 
 societies; but when all that he holds to be of sovran 
 urgency to mankind is at stake liberty, righteous 
 dealing, and faith in the pledged word then he can 
 conceive of no higher glory, no plainer duty, no 
 deeper ecstasy than to be a fighter. " I must get back 
 to the trenches," he said to me; and added, "Where 
 else can a man wish to be at this time ? " 
 
 If you would feel proud of your country, listen to 
 a man like this who has looked the hideous havoc of 
 destruction in the face, who has actually lifted with his 
 delicate, sensitive hands, the shivering limbs and 
 broken bodies of our soldiers, and who has given him- 
 self heart and soul to the work of the military hospitals 
 forsaking in England a practice probably unique in 
 the world and a home in which he finds a supreme 
 happiness listen to him while he talks about our 
 wounded men, and watch his eyes as he describes their 
 superb courage. It is because of that superb courage, 
 that unbreakable fortitude of our simple British 
 soldier, that he cannot rest away from the trenches. 
 To be there with his wonderful hands, to be there with 
 
REPAIRS 57 
 
 his unerring brain, to be there with all the strength of 
 his wholesome body and all the devotion of his human 
 soul, has now for him become the very breath of 
 his nostrils. His eyes shine as he describes to you, 
 speaking quickly and incisively, the endurance of the 
 British soldier and his cheerful patience under pain. 
 "There is nobody like him, nobody in the world," he 
 says, with an emphasis that really rings with spiritual 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 A doctor of the R.A.M.C., smoking his pipe 
 through the wards of his hospital, his hands in his 
 trousers' pockets, the ends of his jacket sticking out 
 in front of him, said to me with the cheerful assur- 
 ance of a very long acquaintance with soldier-men, 
 "Tommy can bear anything, because he is a fatalist. 
 It is his attitude towards life. It is his religion and 
 philosophy. Whatever happens well, it was bound 
 to happen. No use to squeak. Grouse if you will, 
 but don't whine. Things are what they are because 
 they had to be just so. That's the British soldier." 
 On every side of us, in every ward through which we 
 passed, were men from the trenches, their sad eyes 
 watching us as we walked along, their faces pale and 
 thin, their heads or their limbs bandaged, in some 
 cases their naked swollen feet exposed for the pain 
 of "a trench foot" cannot support a covering, how- 
 
58 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 ever light. In one bed was a man very dreadfully 
 yellow, whose face became contorted and whose head 
 rolled on his pillow as we passed. I spoke about 
 him to the doctor. " He is doing splendidly," was the 
 answer. " Three weeks ago we thought we should 
 lose him, but he'll get on all right." The man was 
 suffering frightfully, but his teeth were set and no 
 sound came from his lips. 
 
 These Army hospitals are places which inspire one 
 with a very just admiration for the work of the 
 R.A.M.C. I do not say, for I am not qualified to 
 make any assertion on the subject, that the R.A.M.C. 
 is as perfect from a doctor's point of view as it might 
 be, or as science may yet make it in the near future; 
 but at least one may say with confidence that as an 
 example of organisation its work in France is probably 
 without an equal in the world. Take, for example, 
 the hospital to which I have just referred. It was a 
 sugar-shed on the side of a French dock. In a few 
 days, with the aid of carpenter and whitewasher, this 
 sugar-shed was converted into as comfortable and 
 complete a hospital as you could wish to find in 
 London. There are operating theatres; a room for 
 examination by X-rays; mess and recreation rooms 
 for the orderlies; and wards capable of receiving 
 many hundreds of patients. And you find flowers 
 
REPAIRS 59 
 
 in these wards, and there are scarlet blankets on the 
 beds, scarlet screens at the doors, electric light over- 
 head, excellent stoves, and, best of all, devoted, bright- 
 faced nurses, willing to lay down their lives for 
 Thomas Atkins. 
 
 In other parts of this same town you find that the 
 Casino, hotels, and private houses have been con- 
 verted into hospitals ; and leaving this town you find 
 that in the camps there are hospitals of tents or huts, 
 all comfortable, all cheerful, and all administered by 
 men and women who count no labour for the wounded 
 soldier too great a call upon their strength. The 
 great surgeon of whom I have spoken came from 
 England with a prejudice against tents, his mind all 
 but made up in favour of wooden huts; but he tells 
 me that he is now converted to the view of the 
 R.A.M.C., which is also the wounded soldier's view. 
 And so you find these hospital tents everywhere you 
 go large and splendid tents opening one into another 
 and warmed with stoves, lighted by electricity, and 
 bright enough with the decorations which doctors, 
 nurses, and patients contrive to place there. 
 
 This must be said in favour of the R.A.M.C. : not 
 only have they organised their most difficult work 
 with a quite extraordinary ability, and not only have 
 their doctors and surgeons been successful, but they 
 
6o WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 have gratefully accepted, and with no feeling of 
 umbrage at all, the services of those very eminent 
 doctors and surgeons in civil life who are in France 
 to help them. I was visiting a camp one day, and was 
 invited to attend a lecture by Sir Almroth Wright on 
 bacteriology, organised by Sir Berkeley Moynihan, 
 which was to be attended by doctors of the R.A.M.C., 
 with one of the most distinguished men of science in 
 Paris taking part in the subsequent discussion. 
 Think of it a lecture on bacteriology in a British 
 camp in France, in the midst of tKe most dreadful war 
 ever known to history ! And this is but one example 
 of the cordial co-operation which exists between the 
 civil and military. Sir Berkeley Moynihan has played 
 the most noble and useful part in this co-operation, a 
 service for which the whole nation can never be 
 sufficiently grateful; and from every Army doctor I 
 spoke to on the subject I heard nothing but expres- 
 sions of appreciation for his quite magnificent work. 
 I think there are few things more interesting in this 
 war than the intense eagerness with which surgical 
 science seeks to repair the hideous devastation of 
 military science. And the fact that great surgeons 
 of civil life have come to the aid of the R.A.M.C., 
 whose surgeons, naturally, cannot have anything like 
 the experience of their civil brethren, is a sign that 
 
REPAIRS 61 
 
 however long this war may last, and however terrible 
 may be its devastation, wounded soldiers will at least 
 find themselves succoured by the merciful hands of 
 the highest science. 
 
 It is a curious thing, and one worth knowing, that 
 the soldier wounded in the trenches very seldom 
 experiences pain. There are doctors ready to give him 
 morphia at once, but it is hardly ever necessary. He 
 is borne on a stretcher to a first-aid post, examined 
 and bandaged, and then transferred by ambulance to 
 the nearest hospital. Here the examination is more 
 careful, and if necessary an operation is performed; 
 but as a rule the wounded man waits for full treatment 
 until he is comfortably bedded in one of the base 
 hospitals. 
 
 In the base hospital he lives like a prince, receives 
 the most delicate and gentle treatment, and as soon 
 as he is well enough goes to a convalescent camp, 
 where he has nothing to do but get perfectly well. 
 
 How complete the contrast between trench and 
 hospital 1 Not a man in the hospital will hang back 
 when he is ordered to the front, not one of them 
 will sham to be kept where he is ; but for pity's sake 
 do not expect them to be glad to go back. A foolish 
 woman said to a wounded soldier: "Of course, you 
 are longing to be back in the trenches?" To which 
 
62 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 the man made answer, wearily turning his face to 
 the wall, "Ask your common sense, lady." No, it is 
 not in human nature that any man on this earth should 
 wish to be back in the trenches; he would be an 
 abortion of the human race, a monster of humanity 
 who could wish to go back to that agonising inferno. 
 But it is just because they so hate to go back, and 
 do go back, their whole nature revolting from it, that 
 the soldier is a man whose courage quickens the blood 
 and thrills us with an admiration that almost rushes 
 to the verge of worship. 
 
 Let this truth be known. Don't spread fantastic 
 stories of a false and stagey heroism which deceive 
 nobody. Is it not a call to every man in England 
 that the wounded soldier, with his body repaired, his 
 memory quick with the love and kindness of the 
 hospital, and his whole nature clamorous for home, 
 once more takes up his rifle, once more bids good-bye 
 to those he loves, and once more sets off to face the 
 German shells in Flanders? 
 
 Whether it be fatalism or whether it be a dull 
 obedience to orders, let us do reverence to it, for the 
 wounded man who goes back to that duty has in his 
 heart at least something of the shadow of the courage 
 of the Incarnation. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 The Angels 
 
 A GENERAL said to me, "I was clean against the 
 franchise for women before the war; but if a woman 
 was to ask me now to support that movement I should 
 not be able to find it in my conscience to refuse. 
 Women's work out here has been magnificent. I 
 don't mean merely their courage and devotion ; I 
 mean their discipline, their common sense, their 
 organisation. Take the Matron-in-Chief of the Army. 
 She's perfectly splendid, she's wonderful, she's 
 she's well, she's a soldier ! " 
 
 That was his highest praise, and the lady's 
 apotheosis. He went on to say, "If she were made 
 Quartermaster-General, she'd w r ork it, she'd run the 
 whole Army ; and she'd never get flustered, never 
 make a mistake. The woman's a genius. We 
 couldn't get on without her. And yet, if she went 
 away, I'm pretty certain another woman would be 
 
 63 
 
64 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 found to fill her place. Oh, they're wonderful. The 
 whole thing has been an eye-opener for me. Women ! 
 they're angels." 
 
 What most impressed me in the organisation of 
 our British nurses was the entire ^absence of that 
 picnic spirit not altogether absent from, sometimes 
 very distressingly conspicuous in, other quarters. 
 One of our Dominions, for instance, has sent a con- 
 tingent of nurses who wear a uniform which would 
 be agreeable enough in a revue at a music-hall one 
 might call it a feminine caricature of a staff-officer's 
 home-service uniform and it is truly a painful sight 
 to see a body of these inappropriate ladies breathing 
 the gaiety of their high-heeled spirits upon the smoke- 
 laden atmosphere of a hotel lounge, surrounded by 
 some of the officers of their own troops in attitudes 
 which one associates with the sequestered twilights of 
 a ball-room. French people talk about things of this 
 kind, and I heard some very unpleasant, I hope they 
 may have been untrue, remarks concerning a par- 
 ticular batch of these ladies. But I do not mention 
 this matter to censure other people, only to emphasise 
 the point I wish to make concerning our own people. 
 You never see our British nurses in a situation which 
 suggests philandering. Their uniform has nothing 
 about it of the comic opera. They always appear to 
 
THE ANGELS 65 
 
 have business on hand, serious, intellectual, and im- 
 portant business ; and they are to be seen in great 
 numbers going about this business in a manner which 
 convinces one of their unquestioning allegiance to 
 military discipline. 
 
 Their devotion to Tommy Atkins is typical of their 
 whole spirit. While they admire him enormously, 
 their attitude is mainly indulgent and maternal. That 
 is to say, these bright, clever, and superior creatures 
 regard Tommy Atkins as a child, and treat him as a 
 child a marvellously brave, admirable, and heroic 
 child, but still a child. He must be an exceedingly 
 green recruit who dares to tell one of these nurses 
 an exaggerated story of the trenches such a story 
 as figures in the letters of Thomas Atkins to 
 his less critical wife or his entirely uncritical 
 mother. 
 
 "No sooner had we landed," wrote one Tommy 
 from a peaceful British base, "than a German shell 
 burst smack in the middle of us, taking the head 
 clean off the man next to me, just as he was lighting 
 his pipe." He was asked why he wrote such non- 
 sense, and he replied that unless there was something 
 spicy in his letters they wouldn't be read. 
 
 But the nurse knows the really superb side of 
 Tommy Atkins better perhaps than anyone else con- 
 
 E 2 
 
66 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 nected with the Army. One day I was visiting a 
 hospital close to the sea, and entered a ward where 
 a soldier badly wounded in the back was undergoing 
 the painful ordeal of a dressing. It was so intensely 
 cold that morning, so bitterly and piercingly cold, 
 that I kept my coat on as I walked through the wards. 
 And this soldier, who never whimpered or groaned, 
 his forehead and cheeks drenched with sweat, said to 
 the nurse at the end of the dressing, mopping the 
 sweat away and breathing hard, "Ain't it just hot in 
 here ! " 
 
 But the courage of women is as great as the courage 
 of the soldier. An Englishman was telling me about 
 "that one frightful night" .at Ypres, when German 
 shells rained without cessation hour after hour upon 
 the already battered town. "At last," he said, "the 
 order was given for the French nuns to leave the 
 wounded and retire to Poperinghe. They begged 
 the authorities to be allowed to stay, some of them 
 indeed refused to go; but in the end they were 
 marched out of the hospital and shepherded to 
 Poperinghe, about six miles away. Two of those 
 nuns, directly they were left alone at Poperinghe, 
 started off and tramped back through the rain and 
 the darkness to Ypres, where the shells were still 
 falling with the most horrible racket you can imagine." 
 
THE ANGELS 67 
 
 He paused for a moment, then added, a And the men 
 they were nursing were Germans." 
 
 I suppose that one may get used to terrible things, 
 even the most terrible, but it must certainly demand 
 a high order of courage to face with brightness and 
 gentleness the quite damnable havoc made in human 
 bodies by modern weapons of destruction. As a rule, 
 no doubt, wounds are not ugly things to see. I 
 looked at places where a bullet or a fragment of 
 shrapnel had pierced human flesh, and there was 
 nothing more to see in most cases than what one may 
 see every day among the casualties of a nursery a 
 few pink scratches, and a little reddish spot. 
 
 But now and then dreadful sights have to be looked 
 upon, and dreadful wounds have to be handled. I 
 heard of a Frenchman whose face was almost entirely 
 blown away, and whose wife hitherto she had 
 adored him was unable to support the sight of his 
 disfigurement. She said she could not live with him, 
 that it would drive her mad. What a tragedy, and 
 what a starting-point for an inquiry into the nature 
 of love ! You worship a child, you say that your 
 love is entirely spiritual, that your soul is not in- 
 fluenced by any physical considerations; but let that 
 child be so ravaged and grotesqued by accident that 
 you cannot bear to look upon it, cannot endure to be 
 
68 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 near it, though the spirit is uninjured and remains 
 the same, and what becomes of your love? These 
 Army nurses look on dreadful things and remain at 
 their posts gentle, tender, and benignant. They 
 endure tremendous strains. They are not only brave 
 and obedient ; they are cheerful and contented. They 
 are soldiers. 
 
 There are other women besides nurses working for 
 the Army behind the firing line. I like particularly 
 to think of those ladies who without fee or reward, 
 and without anybody in England knowing of their 
 toil, give themselves up entirely to clerical work in 
 stuffy offices. 
 
 I called upon Colonel Barron in Paris, who is 
 keeping a record and collecting statistics concerning 
 sickness and wounds. This remarkable man, in 
 private life a doctor in Ascot, has not only made the 
 most complete record of sickness and wounds ever 
 known in any war, but every day brings his amazing 
 record right up to date. With the aid of a few 
 singularly graphic diagrams drawn by himself, and 
 likely to be of lasting interest to medical science, he 
 can show you exactly what is happening to every 
 unit in the British Army how many cases of "trench 
 feet," frost-bite, dysentery, respiratory diseases, and 
 wounds, day by day. 
 
THE ANGELS 69 
 
 When you have seen these pictures and mastered 
 these figures, you are conducted to a large room where 
 ladies are working at a table, and where a huge 
 number of alphabetical book-files are stored on shelves 
 round the wall. These ladies are voluntary workers, 
 and their work is dull and it is incessant, and they 
 sit there from morning to evening filling up cards 
 with particulars from the front and filing these cards 
 in the books on the shelves. It is, of course, the very 
 absence of heroism from this work which makes it 
 heroic. 
 
 Then you find ladies at the docks and railway 
 stations who wait upon every ship and every train 
 with coffee-stalls. 
 
 One of these ladies, Mrs. Sidney Pitt, likes to have 
 flowers on her stall, and to give the soldiers their 
 coffee in mugs which have some pretensions to 
 beauty. But she finds that our absent-minded beggar 
 very often goes off with her pretty mugs, and 
 although this ingratitude distresses her for pretty 
 mugs are expensive and hard to come by you never 
 once hear her say a harsh word about Tommy Atkins. 
 
 One morning I was watching a regiment depart by 
 a luggage-train for the front when Mrs. Pitt came 
 along between the lines, holding up one of her mugs 
 and asking if men in the vans had taken such a thing 
 
7 o WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 away with them. "Any of these mugs in there?" 
 she asked ; and the men in the doorway of the luggage 
 van answered, "No, ma'am." Then to the next van, 
 "Any mugs in there?" "No, lady." Then to the 
 next. "Any mugs in there? " To which a particularly 
 lugubrious Tommy in the doorway made doleful 
 answer, "We're all mugs in here, lady." Mrs. Pitt 
 laughed so happily at this jest that I think she was 
 almost glad of the loss which occasioned it. 
 
 The Miss Fieldings, who are doing useful work 
 in this way, tell me that the hard toil of cutting up 
 hunks of bread and butter for many hundreds of men 
 never blunts the keen edge of their pleasure. It is 
 not easy to get up in the dead of night to meet a 
 troopship or a train, and sometimes when a rush is 
 on, it is very nearly maddening to serve hundreds of 
 cups of coffee, hundreds of pieces of bread and butter, 
 and to give change for French and English money 
 into impatient hands thrusting out from every side 
 in the one crowded direction. Nevertheless, the joy 
 of the work exceeds all its trials. And these ladies 
 are not likely to forsake their post, the humble coffee- 
 stall, till the war is over. 
 
 At the beginning of hostilities a number of rather 
 excited ladies took possession of the best hotels at 
 base depots and endeavoured to revive the Mount 
 
THE ANGELS 71 
 
 Nelson tradition of the South African War. This 
 unpleasant state of things is now, practically speak- 
 ing, finished and done with. A few ladies who might 
 perhaps be better employed at home, still take up 
 rooms at hotels which real workers would be grateful 
 for; but they are of no serious inconvenience to the 
 Army, which ignores them, and there is certainly no 
 atmosphere of scandal. 
 
 On the other hand, some ladies have done perfectly 
 admirable work in the way of helping officers of the 
 R.A.M.C. with their hospitals. I think it is Lady 
 Algernon Gordon-Lennox who has been so loyal and 
 generous a friend to the hospital at Boulogne in 
 charge of Major Norrington. 
 
 When all is said, however, about these voluntary 
 workers, one comes back with an ever-increasing ad- 
 miration to the British hospital nurse, who is the good 
 angel of Tommy Atkins, and the spirit of love break- 
 ing up and shining through the wrack of hate, 
 murder, and destruction. 
 
 You can have no idea until you see it for yourself 
 how the presence of these bright-faced women makes 
 a beauty of the hospital ward, and quite transfigures 
 all the inexpressible horror of carnage. 
 
 The little lamp lighted by Florence Nightingale is 
 now being carried by thousands of brave delicate 
 
72 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 hands into the darkness of suffering and death. The 
 soul of womanhood moves like a caressing wind 
 through the pest-house of man's brutality. One goes 
 into a military hospital prepared to be horrified, 
 shocked, and dreadfully shaken; but one comes out 
 feeling that the end of our blunderings is at hand, 
 and that the spirit of women is destined to close one 
 era of man's history with the healing hand of restora- 
 tion, and to open another with the hand which science 
 has blest and love has sanctified. 
 
 How the heart of the wounded man yearns and 
 cries out for the touch of a woman's hand ! And 
 what a heaven may be made of hell by a little 
 mothering ! 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 Seekers 
 
 BEFORE starting for France I called upon Lord 
 Robert Cecil at the offices of the Red Cross Society 
 in Pall Mall. While I was waiting in his outer office 
 an elderly man entered the room, approached one of 
 the ladies seated at a writing-table, and said to her : 
 " I have come to see if you can tell me anything about 
 an officer reported as Missing. I have made many 
 inquiries elsewhere, but can get no news of him. 
 People tell me that perhaps you may be able to assist 
 me ; I shall be exceedingly grateful if you can." 
 
 It was a very touching thing to see this old man's 
 calm and to listen to the restraint of his voice. One 
 felt that in a long search for his son he had lost all 
 quickness of emotion, and was now numb, heavy, 
 hopeless a man performing a sad duty rather than 
 a father passionately anxious to find his child. 
 
 The lady asked the officer's name, initials, and 
 regiment. She made a note of these facts, and pro- 
 
 73 
 
74 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 mised to prosecute immediate inquiries. The old 
 gentleman thanked her, and was about to withdraw, 
 when she said : " It is just possible we may have 
 information about him already," and, so saying, she 
 opened a book on her table, turned to a page, and 
 
 then exclaimed: "Yes, here he is, Major , of 
 
 the ; he has just arrived at the Hospital in 
 
 Hampstead. Would you like me to ring them up and 
 inquire how he is?" 
 
 Well, one could have burst into tears, or jumped 
 up and embraced that old gentleman and laughed 
 with a great delight in his joy. . . . 
 
 Thus, before setting foot in France, coincidence 
 gave me a telling instance of the work now being 
 performed by that branch of the Red Cross Society 
 which Lord Robert Cecil brought into existence after 
 the guns had fired and the Germans had hacked their 
 way through the heart of Belgium. 
 
 In the early days of the war Lord Robert lost a 
 young nephew, an officer in the Brigade of Guards, 
 and soon after news of the death arrived he set out 
 for France with the mother of the boy to discover his 
 grave. He found in Paris an English clergyman 
 who had already begun the work of seeking, a Mr. 
 Briggs, and in conjunction with this hard-working 
 and enthusiastic clergyman he inaugurated that 
 
THE SEEKERS 75 
 
 branch of the Red Cross Society which now seeks 
 not only for the graves of our dead, but to discover 
 the whereabouts of missing men. 
 
 Among the workers of this branch is Lord Elphin- 
 stone, who has given up the healthful and natural 
 delights of a sportsman's existence to cultivate the 
 difficult task of a sedentary life, sitting for long hours 
 in a Paris office before a table littered with the most 
 tragic letters it is possible for a man to read. It was 
 not until I talked with Lord Elphinstone in his Paris 
 office that the infinite and widespread misery of war 
 came heavily home to my heart ; and before I entered 
 that office I had walked through most of our hospitals 
 in France. 
 
 Those letters which crowd Lord Elphinstone's 
 table, could they be published, and could they be read 
 by the War Lord, would bring home to his soul more 
 terribly than the shambles of a battlefield such a sense 
 of his guilt that life henceforth would be intolerable to 
 his conscience. For these letters, in most part the 
 letters of women, show as nothing else can show how 
 far, how far indeed, the heavy guns throw their shells 
 crashing through the roof of love, shattering the 
 walls of home, smashing the possessions of peace into 
 splinters, and rending, tearing, breaking the hearts of 
 women and children. 
 
 A battlefield is only the outline of War. Fill it up 
 
76 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 with agonising anxiety, with burning prayers, with 
 maddening sleeplessness, with tears and sobs and 
 groans ; fill it up with the heart's capacity for utmost 
 grief and sharpest pain ; fill it up with suffering, the 
 suffering of women and children, till the outline is as 
 pitted with these things as a map of London is pitted 
 with names, and then you may have some idea, some 
 faint idea, of the range of a heavy gun and the flight 
 of a bullet. 
 
 A General in France told me how he went to search 
 for the body of a dead officer. I shall never forget 
 his description. He said that he arrived some hours 
 after nightfall at the little village church where the 
 body was said to be, and that in the glimmering dusk 
 of the chapel he had to pick his way between the 
 bodies of slain men stretched upon the stone floor, 
 walking with the greatest care to avoid treading upon 
 them. " I saw War then," he said, " War which some 
 men glory in ; I saw it stiff and cold ; I saw it white 
 and silent ; it was more terrible than a battle." 
 
 But more terrible even than this is a story told to 
 me by Lord Elphinstone and Mr. Briggs. They set 
 out one day from Paris to discover the grave of four 
 young officers. Inquiries led them to a wood, and in 
 this wood they came upon a mound, with a tree hard 
 by bearing the pencilled inscription in German on a 
 square from which the bark had been cut : " In this 
 
THE SEEKERS 77 
 
 place twenty British soldiers are buried." The two 
 Englishmen sent for some peasants and the grave was 
 opened. Instead of twenty bodies, they disinterred 
 ninety-eight, and it was not until ninety-four had 
 been removed that they came upon the bodies they 
 sought the last four bodies in that awful grave. And 
 those were the bodies of young men for whom life had 
 been beautiful and kind from childhood. 
 
 Lord Elphinstone, as many people know, is a man 
 of iron nerve who has always sought the wild places 
 of the earth rather than the tamed and handselled, a 
 man, too, who has faced death dozens of times and 
 who has seen things and endured things which tend 
 to harden sensibility; but he told me that to this day 
 the memory of that disinterment haunts his nerves 
 and he would rather be rid of that memory than 
 anything else in his soul. Nevertheless, he is far 
 more oppressed, far more stricken, if one may use the 
 word of so brave a man, by the letters he has to read 
 in his Paris office than by any sight he has seen on 
 the battlefields of France. 
 
 Lord Elphinstone and Mr. Briggs are only two of 
 many workers, both men and women, who give their 
 services to the Red Cross Society. Among these 
 workers there are a few picturesque and rather florid 
 figures, who cultivate what they believe to be a 
 military manner, and who rush hither and thither 
 
y8 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 with a good deal of commotion as if they thought the 
 whole fortunes of War depended upon the constant 
 activity of the pores of their skin. Then there is a 
 certain number of men wearing the brass button 
 of the Red Cross Society whose particular business 
 seems to consist in a rather extended continuity 
 of loose ends. But these people, although here and 
 there they exist in numbers sufficient to make a 
 slightly troubled impression on the observer, are, 
 in relation to the whole body of Red Cross workers, 
 whose service is beyond praise, but as a grain of 
 sand. Nevertheless it would be a good thing, I 
 venture to think, if the War Office required every 
 man employed in Red Cross work to wear the white 
 linen band on his sleeve, so that where any great 
 number of not very active Red Cross volunteers are 
 congregated a stranger would be saved from the 
 impression of a British Army inclined to loaf. 
 
 This said, one can have nothing but praise, and 
 praise of the highest, for those splendid men and 
 women who have given up their homes and all the 
 benefits of British civilisation to serve the Army in its 
 humblest needs. A man like Mr. Kennerley Rum- 
 ford, for example, to whom life at home offers every 
 conceivable blessing, is to be found driving a car 
 through snowstorm and driving rain, content, even 
 though occasionally homesick, to be doing at least 
 
THE SEEKERS 79 
 
 something for the soldier. And in all the offices of 
 the Red Cross Society, wherever you go in France, 
 you find ladies burdening themselves with the most 
 dull and mechanical desk-work from morning to 
 night, because they have heard the call from the 
 trenches. 
 
 Manifold is the work of the Red Cross Society, 
 and it would take a volume to tell the whole tale of 
 it; but what branch of work, if we except the healing 
 of surgeon and nurse, can compare with that branch, 
 sprung from Lord Robert Cecil's reverence for death, 
 which seeks by day and by night to relieve the wide- 
 spread agony of men and women at home ? Think 
 for a moment what it must mean for a father, a 
 mother, or a wife, to read that a man in whose life 
 their own existence is so inextricably w r oven and inter- 
 woven that the very beat of the heart is as the beat of 
 their own, think what it must be for them to hear 
 one day that this man is Missing, and to hang all the 
 tense and vibrant anxiety of their devotion on the 
 single thread that not yet is he reported Killed. What 
 a thing is War, when behind the firing line, that is 
 to say, behind all the most hideous havoc ever made 
 by destruction, you find men and women seeking for 
 the sake of those broken-hearted people at home to 
 discover whether A is dead and where the poor empty 
 body of B has been laid. 
 
 F 
 
8o WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 Is it not as if behind a tidal wave of flame risen 
 from the very core of hell's furnaces there followed a 
 squadron of the heavenly host, whose faces shine with 
 the beauty of the grace of God? And I think this 
 can be most truly said of those members of the Red 
 Cross Society whose simple work keeps them 
 prisoners in the monotonous routine of office work. 
 I have seen such goodness and peace on the faces of 
 these unknown women as would make an atheist at 
 least wish, if only for a moment, to believe in the 
 angels. 
 
 How exquisite and beautiful, too, is the compassion 
 created by this hell's work of war in the hearts of 
 the most humble. Do you know that in little French 
 villages behind the firing line, the inhabitants make 
 coffins for our dead, dig graves for them, and mark 
 the graves with the Christian's cross, even though 
 they are so poor and so beset by war that they have 
 little food for themselves and their children ? They 
 ask no reward and they expect no praise; but for 
 the workers of the Red Cross, seeking news of the 
 Missing, their homage to our dead would perhaps 
 never have been known. 
 
 Let us constantly think of these French people in 
 the days ahead. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 The Mehmandar 
 
 ONE of the most picturesque appointments made in 
 this war is that of Sir Walter Lawrence, of Indian 
 and Cashmere fame, to an office which I take to be en- 
 tirely original, certainly the very first of its kind in 
 Europe. To the whole of the Indian contingent in 
 France Sir Walter is known as the Mehmandar, 
 which is to say that every Indian soldier fighting for 
 the British Empire in Europe recognises in this able 
 and distinguished Englishman a personal repre- 
 sentation of the King-Emperor, and sees in him the 
 Majesty, the Power, the Authority and the Father- 
 hood of the Great White Emperor. 
 
 It witnesses to the intelligent sympathy of our co- 
 operation with the Indian peoples in the government 
 of their great country that such an appointment as 
 this should have been made in the early days of the 
 war. It shows that we understand the heart of the 
 Indian. All the world is aware that we understand 
 the art of government, that we excel in the work of 
 
82 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 managing peoples, and that with the ingenuity of our 
 engineers and the authority of our governors we 
 enormously increase the material prosperity of those 
 races who are glad to live in the security and repose 
 of the Pax Britannica. But all the world, perhaps, 
 is not so well aware of that intimate, discerning, 
 and sympathetic knowledge of the hearts of the 
 people we thus work with, which has enabled us not 
 only to keep the peace among them, not only to 
 elevate and prosper them, but to win their individual 
 affection. 
 
 A stranger might think that the tall and bearded 
 Indian warrior, magnificently adorned, superbly 
 built, and of so martial and fierce an aspect as to seem 
 almost an incarnation of Prussian frightfulness, 
 \vould need nobody but his own British officers to 
 watch over him, nobody but the great British Field 
 Marshal to represent for him the King-Emperor. 
 Certainly such a stranger would be tempted to scout 
 the idea that this incomparable warrior required some- 
 one to represent for him the humanity of the King- 
 Emperor, someone to represent the kindness, 
 benevolence, sympathy, tenderness, affection, and 
 courtesy of that great monarch. But such, in truth, 
 is the case. These Indian troops, who are destined 
 when the sun shines and the ground hardens to fling 
 the German armies over the Rhine, and to fling them 
 
THE MEHMANDAR 83 
 
 with a rush, a fury, and a terror-striking valour such 
 as will haunt the Prussian soldier for the rest of his 
 days, are in their hearts as simple as children, and 
 like children cry out for the presence of their father 
 and mother. The word Mehmandar stands, among 
 other things, for the fatherhood and motherhood of 
 the King-Emperor, and these glorious Indian troops 
 not only see in Sir Walter Lawrence the representa- 
 tion of this august fatherhood and motherhood, but, 
 like children, they cry out for his presence, and would 
 have hini at hand in the hours of their suffering and 
 need. 
 
 So many foolish rumours have crept through 
 England about these Indian troops, and from 
 England, most unfortunately, have found their evil 
 way into the Indian lines, causing infinite pain and 
 doing incalculable harm, that it must serve a useful 
 purpose to make public, on the very highest authority, 
 the real truth of the matter. Which truth is this : 
 Because of the piercing cold, the merciless rain, and 
 the impossible condition of the land, our Indian 
 comrades did not at the outset fight with that match- 
 less audacity and that rejoicing verve which those 
 who know them best expected of them. They were 
 not only chilled to the marrow by an atrocious winter, 
 all the manhood of them as frozen to the bone as the 
 manhood of a European is wilted to the skin by 
 
84 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 extremest tropical heat in a waterless desert; they 
 were also suddenly introduced into a development of 
 scientific warfare which tries the nerves of the 
 hardest white man. The frightful din of the heavy 
 guns, the invisibility of the enemy, the hideous 
 helter-skelter havoc of a bombardment these things 
 puzzled, confused, and tortured the nerves of our 
 Indian soldiers. They said frankly that this was a 
 sahib's war. They paid tribute to the heart of the 
 white man. "Now we know how it is you hold 
 India ! " They tried manfully to be worthy of their 
 British officers, but they did not fight as well as we 
 expected them to fight. There is the truth. They 
 fought, and in some instances fought magnificently, 
 but they were pierced with sharpest cold, they were 
 sodden with unending rain, and, as a whole, they did 
 not fight as those who are proud to lead them ex- 
 pected them to fight. 
 
 But wait. You who have listened to rumour and 
 have passed that rumour on, reckless of the pain you 
 struck at childlike hearts, wait till the sun rides high 
 in a blue heaven and the bugles blow for the hurling 
 stroke. You will discover then that the Indian 
 troops are still in France, you will learn that every 
 man of them is a man indeed, and you will read in 
 your newspaper may it be with remorse and 
 contrition that the swords of India are as terrible as 
 
THE MEHMANDAR 85 
 
 the lightnings of the Lord. For the Indians are as 
 God made them, and, like tulips, cannot glow with the 
 inmost power of their natural being till the sun burns 
 the skin and the atmosphere beats with glittering 
 heat. But when the sun does shine, and when the 
 air does wink with heat, these passionate children of 
 the East, over whose smallest need the Mehmandar 
 now watches with the most exquisite and unwearying 
 sympathy, will prove to their Rajahs in India and to 
 the people of the British Isles that neither wounds nor 
 death can strike from their blood its essential loyalty 
 and its inherent valour. 
 
 One simple story will give you some idea of the 
 Indian's courage. An Englishman came to a corner 
 of a trench occupied by ten Indians during a fright- 
 ful bombardment by the German heavy guns. He 
 inquired how things went, and an Indian replied : 
 "Sahib, there are ten of us here; five are dead and 
 five are wounded; all is well." And even better than 
 this, I think, is the answer of a young Indian student 
 to the inquiry of an Englishman who found him in 
 mufti carrying a wounded hand in a sling. "I do 
 not care," he said, "to wear my uniform with so slight 
 a wound, for fear people should think I am malinger- 
 ing." Is there not in this answer, with its absence of 
 braggadocio, its complete freedom from the pardon- 
 able pride of a wounded man, a marvellous witness 
 
86 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 to the kind of courage which inspires the gallant, 
 sensitive, and dignified Indian? 
 
 I visited in France many hospitals filled with Indian 
 soldiers, and in not one single case did I encounter 
 complaint or cowardice. No doubt, as among the 
 soldiers of every army in the world, a more pro- 
 tracted examination would have discovered a few 
 instances of malingering; but the total impression 
 made by these rapid inspections and supported in 
 each case by the testimony of British doctors, was 
 one of quite splendid endurance and most admirable 
 patience. Sir Walter Lawrence visits these hospitals, 
 and in the various tongues of the wounded men talks 
 to them of their deeds, and in the name of the King- 
 Emperor speaks to them of their villages, their wives 
 and their children. "Ah ! " he said to one man, some- 
 what shaken by his wound, "how happy you will be 
 when you go back to your village, which I know 
 very well, and sit on your charpoy (a string bed) in 
 the shadow of a tree, while all the neighbours crow r d to 
 your side to hear the story of how you got this noble 
 wound." 
 
 It conveys some idea of the thoroughness of our 
 work in India, and of the immense need of a man 
 like Sir Walter Lawrence to watch over our Indian 
 troops in France, when it is borne in mind that in 
 such subsidiary matters as slaughter - houses, 
 
THE MEHMANDAR 87 
 
 crematoriums, and even the supply of butter, we 
 recognise the high importance of a most meticulous 
 care. We have thousands of Indian troops in France, 
 and these thousands of Indians are more separated 
 from each other in the rites of social life than we are 
 separated from the German diplomatist in the matter 
 of honesty and straight-dealing. To keep them 
 together, to keep them contented, to keep them in 
 those bonds which are essential to their self-respect 
 and religious convictions, is a business of the most 
 paramount importance. And this has been so well 
 recognised by the British Government and so skil- 
 fully ensured by Sir Walter Lawrence that from first 
 to last there has been not one single moment of 
 misgiving.* 
 
 The Indians are happy and contented. 
 
 Some day perhaps we may be told the full story of 
 the Mehmandar, a man who has given his whole 
 attention to the Indians, even while his own son is 
 fighting gallantly with the British Army, and to 
 whom the country owes a debt of gratitude hard to 
 compute. For not only does Sir Walter Lawrence 
 go in and out among the Indian camps, travelling 
 many wearisome miles for this purpose, and nci: only 
 
 * An Indian of a pariah class died in France, and no caste 
 Indian would bury him; it was left for an Anglican clergy- 
 man to perform the solemn rite of death. 
 
88 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 does he exact a very strict obedience to orders from 
 the British officers in charge of Indian hospitals, but 
 both in France and England he is to the Indian 
 troops the humanity and the encouragement of the 
 King-Emperor, sympathising with them in their 
 pain, cheering them to deeds of valour, and holding 
 up to their vision in an alien country the glory of 
 their race and the joy of their home-coming. And 
 he is one of those great sahibs who can hold such 
 discourse with the Indians as they respect and under- 
 stand a discourse as free from the patronising 
 arrogance of the despot as it is free from the unction of 
 the sentimentalist. Is it not, in the midst of the grey- 
 ness and desolation of this war, which has presented 
 to our vision throughout the winter months some such 
 dreary picture as the Dutch artists love to paint of a 
 long, uneventful, and melancholy road is it not like 
 a vivid and romantic touch of colour to know that 
 Lawrence Sahib, in the uniform of the British Army, 
 moves among the hosts of India, those great and 
 reckless warriors now encamped in France, saying to 
 each man in his own dialect, "I am your father and 
 your mother; let us talk of your village and your 
 
 children, and I will write to my friend, Sahib, 
 
 and tell him of your deeds, that all your people may 
 know of them " ? 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 The Spirit of France 
 
 IF it be possible I want to bring home to the minds 
 of those who do not yet appreciate what the French 
 nation is enduring in this war at least something of 
 that enormous debt which history will certainly place 
 at the door of civilisation in the name of France. 
 
 And to begin with let me remind the reader that 
 the French armies which first rushed to meet the 
 invader, which first bore the shock of his ruthless on- 
 set, and which were swept away like so much chaff 
 before a whirlwind of flame, consisted of the noblest 
 youth which has ever freshened the life of France with 
 hope and gladness. This beautiful youth of a glorious 
 nation had flung off the decadence of its heredity, had 
 broken with the destructive habits of its forefathers, 
 and had trodden underfoot the bad traditions of an 
 age which corrupted at least the great cities of France 
 with the seeds of death. A new France was born in 
 this youth. The pure air of nature was a delight to 
 
90 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 it, health and strength of body an exultation, vigorous 
 life a passion, and to marry and to rear many children 
 was a destiny which held for it not only the conscious 
 rewards of a virile patriotism, but the truest and most 
 lasting delights of human existence. When this war 
 set fire to the house of life, France was singing with 
 joy, her face glowing with the light of a new dawn. 
 A generation had come into being for whom life was 
 definitely good and over whom the glamour of a false 
 art and the '.enticements of a degenerate morality 
 exercised neither spell nor power. The whole of 
 France was looking forward, in the joy of this creative 
 spirit, to a boundless future. Never, I think, in the 
 history of nations had a people so apparently over- 
 civilised sprung at a single bound into the fullest, 
 gladdest, and most exuberant life. 
 
 The France, then, which is now holding up the 
 German armies over an immense frontier, is a France 
 which has seen the hope of life and the joy of exist- 
 ence slain before its very eyes. That wonderful, 
 vigorous, and beautiful youth is swept away, only 
 fragments of it remain, only a few of those battalions 
 of glad boys will re-form and march once more 
 against the invader. The children of France, such 
 children as she had never before seen playing in her 
 fields, are scattered or slain. She mourns, as no other 
 country can mourn, the promise of life. Her truest 
 
THE SPIRIT OF FRANCE 91 
 
 and most rightful heirs, her richest and most creative 
 inheritors, are buried in thousands of nameless graves. 
 And she still fights, she still faces the enemy, she still 
 intends to drive him from her soil; and in her heart, 
 with the grief which is unutterable, the lamentation 
 which is inexpressible, there is a determination, a 
 resolution, so silent, so calm, and so sacred that one 
 could almost kneel before it, as one kneels at an altar. 
 It is not until an Englishman visits France and 
 speaks with French people that he can apprehend 
 the full calamity of this war. In England we see 
 nothing which brings home to us the fact that war 
 is an interruption of life ; we are aware that there is a 
 war, and we feel that there is a slight difference in 
 the social air; but nothing we encounter reminds us 
 that war is a thing of death, that it arrests life, that 
 it sets a bleeding stop to the progress of human 
 existence. In France, on the other hand, one feels 
 that this war has laid violent hands upon life, and 
 is veritably throttling existence. And this feeling 
 does not arise from the sight of a paralysed com- 
 merce or from the mournful spectacle in the streets 
 of innumerable women invisible in flowing crepe; it 
 comes from the look in the people's faces and from 
 the tone of their voices. Here is a nation invaded 
 by the hosts of a mighty and a remorseless enemy, 
 a nation whose youth has been slaughtered or 
 
92 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 maimed, a nation to whom liberty is even more than 
 a religion a thing as essential to spiritual life as air 
 is to physical life a nation which knows, really 
 knows, that this war is a struggle to the death between 
 despotism and freedom. To know that, as France 
 knows it, is to be in earnest, and to be in earnest is to 
 acquire a certain look in the face, a certain tone in 
 the voice, such as one does not very frequently 
 encounter among the British people. How 
 many people in Britain definitely apprehend that 
 this is a fight to the death between liberty and 
 despotism ? 
 
 We have our own way of manifesting earnestness, 
 and our gallant soldiers in the fraction of the line 
 which they hold so stubbornly and so cheerfully, dis- 
 play that British earnestness in a manner which com- 
 mands the admiration of the French. "Are we 
 downhearted ? " cried a young soldier, on his way to 
 the front. "No," replied an old soldier, on his way 
 down from the front, "but you blooming soon will 
 be." That is the difference between the Englishman 
 in France and the Englishman at home, the difference 
 between the cock-a-hoop earnestness of inexperience, 
 and the dogged, dour, cynical, and bulldog earnest- 
 ness of experience. The earnestness of the French is 
 different from both of these. It is a highly intellec- 
 tual, rigorously logical, and exquisitely sensitive 
 
THE SPIRIT OF FRANCE 93 
 
 earnestness. The Frenchman in this war, compared 
 with the Englishman at home, is like a man under- 
 going an operation without anaesthetics. He knows. 
 He sees. He feels. He knows intellectually that 
 this is a war for veritable existence, he perceives very 
 clearly the immense issues involved, and he feels in 
 every fibre of his body the infinite cost of the victory 
 which he is determined to win. 
 
 Let us constantly remind ourselves that the French 
 armies are holding eleven-twelfths of the line, that 
 they enormously out-number our brave soldiers, and 
 that to feed and maintain these vast armies, to equip 
 hospitals, and to wage the war to a definite victory, 
 they must look for their revenue to a commerce thrown 
 clean out of gear, and to a nation dreadfully im- 
 poverished by death. And keeping this fact con- 
 stantly in our mind let us frankly and gratefully 
 acknowledge that France is fighting not only for her- 
 self, but for the highest and holiest causes of 
 humanity. I confess that I am carried away by ad- 
 miration when I look upon this indomitable and most 
 brilliant nation, and see it confronting, in all the 
 disabilities of democratic freedom, the terrible hosts of 
 efficient despotism. France has made many of the 
 most glorious contributions to liberty, but I think that 
 history will pronounce her victory over German 
 tyranny to be the greatest of all her glories. 
 
94 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 A boy in the French ranks fell asleep one night, 
 and his head moved till it rested on the knee of his 
 captain. The captain remained with his knee in a 
 cramped position till it was time for the advance. 
 Then, very gently, he stroked the head of the private 
 soldier, and said to him as the boy roused, "Come, 
 my child, it is time we did something for our country, 
 you and I." Such is the spirit of the French armies 
 the armies of democracy and it is this same spirit 
 of fraternity which pervades the French nation. I 
 was told of a young soldier who was brought into one 
 of the French hospitals very badly wounded, almost 
 at the point of death. He entreated the nurse to kiss 
 him. She said, "Come, come; we do not kiss our 
 patients ; you are too old to be kissed, my fine fellow." 
 But the boy drew her to him and whispered, "Kiss 
 me, kiss me for my mother," and he died happy in 
 the thought that his mother had kissed him before 
 the great darkness came. If you were to read the 
 letters of the French soldiers to their mothers and 
 sisters you would know what a quiver of agony and 
 what a thrill of pride run and vibrate through the 
 whole domestic life of France. 
 
 An Englishman in Paris said to me: "The most 
 moving sight in France is Mass at a cathedral or 
 church frequented by French troops. I was in a 
 cathedral a few Sundays ago, crammed from end to 
 
THE SPIRIT OF FRANCE 95 
 
 end with .soldiers in their old but beautiful .uniforms 
 of blue and red; the priest who preached wore no 
 surplice of any kind over his private's uniform, and 
 in the Mass, when the priest elevated the Host, 
 one saw that he was wearing the red trousers of 
 a French soldier under his vestments." He paused, 
 and then said to me, "Isn't it expressive of the 
 French spirit in this war that no fewer than 22,000 
 of their priests are fighting in the ranks of the 
 armies ? " 
 
 Against this freedom-loving people, this alert, in- 
 tellectual, and emotional people, come the drilled and 
 docile millions of the Prussian War Lord, whose 
 national existence would fall into ruin were the strong 
 hand of tyranny lifted but for a moment. France, 
 organised for peace and intellectual progress, is con- 
 fronted by Germany, organised for war and military 
 despotism. The French soldier cries to his nurse 
 that she should kiss him, and that cry, if it came to 
 the ear of the Bernhardis of Prussia, would only make 
 them spit with contempt. But France, utterly in- 
 efficient compared with the Germans, and tender- 
 hearted as a woman, nevertheless is inspired by the 
 very breath of liberty, and something runs through 
 her ranks not to be learned on a barrack-square, not 
 to be hammered into the souls of men by a drill- 
 sergeant; and she is now superior to the German 
 
 G 
 
96 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 armies, and will presently scatter her enemies. Free- 
 dom waxes; despotism wanes. 
 
 To the eye of the Englishman the French soldier 
 looks slack, untidy, and not very muscular ; but there 
 is that in his heart which our noble soldiers seldom 
 hear with quick and intelligent apprehension the 
 song of Liberty and the promise of Immortality. 
 Excellent judges affirm that while the German armies 
 of August would easily defeat the German armies of 
 to-day, the French armies of to-day would as easily 
 defeat the French armies of August. 
 
 There is a spirit in France which is invincible. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 The Wreckage of War 
 
 "Now," said I, "we shall really see something of 
 War." 
 
 We were approaching a town which had undergone 
 bombardment, a town shaken to bits, I had been told, 
 by German guns. We were in a part of France, too, 
 where trenches rippled far across the hedgeless fields 
 and where tangles of barbed wire were still standing 
 before these trenches. In spite of such signs of 
 battle, however, it was quite impossible to believe in 
 the presence of War. 
 
 The sun was shining from a broken circle of 
 turquoise sky, the swollen snow-white clouds sur- 
 rounding this broken circle of blue, gleaming, spark- 
 ling and burning with light. A faint mist, which was 
 like the breathing of the earth, softened the face of 
 the fields. The leafless woods on the undulating 
 hills, and the towers and spires of churches on the 
 horizon, melted into this gentle haze which here was 
 
 97 G 2 
 
98 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 dull like smoke and there bright, vibrant, and tender 
 with a gleam from heaven. Peasants were driving 
 their ploughs across the fields, the horses tugging 
 their feet out of the mud and stumbling forward 
 through the cold air with their flanks steaming, the 
 breath spirting from their nostrils. Magpies flashed 
 their black and white wings in the sun. Larks sang 
 from the central blue. Along the barbed wire before 
 the shallow trenches little brown birds were perched 
 like beech leaves hanging to a winter hedge. We 
 passed women who smiled at us, and children who 
 waved their hands and shouted a shrill greeting, as 
 our car flew by them at fifty miles an hour. 
 
 The goodness of the morning had got into the 
 blood of our chauffeur, and he let himself go with an 
 abandonment which sometimes took away our breath. 
 On one occasion he swept round a corner and only 
 by the breadth of an inch and the tick of a clock 
 averted collision with a motor-wagon as huge as a 
 furniture van. He turned his head and looked over his 
 shoulder with a satisfied smile. "You really mustn't 
 do that again," I said, as he boomed forward at forty 
 miles an hour ; " I saw my wife and children as plain 
 as daylight." Once more he turned his head. "Oh 
 it couldn't have been as bad as that," he said, in his 
 gentle voice; "or I should have seen mine." A little 
 later I leaned forward and shouted to him, "Don't you 
 
THE WRECKAGE OF WAR 99 
 
 think we might try thirty miles an hour for a change 
 just for a change ? " He looked over his shoulder. 
 " On a straight road ? " he asked reproachfully ; and 
 then with a charming smile but great firmness he 
 added, "Impossible!" 
 
 And when we arrived at towns where barriers and 
 soldiers guarded the entrance, this delightful chauffeur 
 took pleasure in keeping his car moving until the 
 front wheel almost touched the point of the soldiers' 
 bayonets. The fun of this operation lay in the fact 
 that the sentries were mostly corpulent and slightly 
 nervous middle-aged gentlemen, who wore their 
 wives' shawls round their necks, and whose eyes 
 started from their heads as they disputed our thunder- 
 ing way with bayonets that wavered with unmistak- 
 able alarm. They would rush out at sight of us 
 holding up their rifles and gesticulating wildly. "Oh 
 lor," our chauffeur would grumble, "here's some more 
 of 'em," and he made a lazy sign, without slackening 
 speed, that he saw the soldier and intended to 
 obey. Out of the guard house would tumble two or 
 three more of these old soldiers. The original sentry, 
 now almost dancing with alarm, would continue to 
 wave his rifle in the air, our chauffeur muttering con- 
 temptuously, "All right, all right, I see you." And 
 then suddenly he would take out the clutch, with 
 exceeding gentleness apply his brake, and approach 
 
ioo WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 the now terrified sentry at ten or twelve miles an hour. 
 To see this old soldier in the middle of the road, with 
 eyes half out of his head, his feet backing in the dust, 
 his bayonet lowered to pierce the tyre of the oncoming 
 wheel, was really a spectacle that fitted in with the 
 goodness of the beautiful day. And then we would 
 quite stop, and show our passes, the soldiers crowd- 
 ing round the car; and then we would exchange the 
 most pleasant courtesies, finally passing on our way 
 with good wishes of a jovial character, only the 
 middle-aged sentry with the muffler round his throat 
 finding it difficult to smile. 
 
 In such a spirit as this, and with a heartening 
 appetite for luncheon, we arrived at the town which 
 had been raked by German shells. I thought to 
 myself, We have been very happy this morning, too 
 happy for such evil times as these : the sight of this 
 town will sober us and purge our spirits of unsuit- 
 able joy. But almost the first thing we saw in this 
 town was a citizen with a little stall in the middle of 
 the street stacked with picture postcards of the bom- 
 bardment. He made signs for us to stop, approached 
 cap in hand, and over the side of the car, laughing, 
 jesting, and persuading, exhibited the worst possible 
 photographs he could muster of his own town's 
 sufferings. 
 
 And then we moved on to see the actual effects of 
 
THE WRECKAGE OF WAR 101 
 
 the shelling, rather surprised that shops were open, 
 women laughing in their doorways, chijdren playuig 
 in the streets, and men smoking their cigars and 
 drinking their beer in cafe's wjtb- .box, ttrees. c\t <he 
 doors. 
 
 The most curious impression made by what we saw 
 in this town was one of superstition. It seemed that 
 fate must have sat astride of each German shell as it 
 shrieked its way over the roofs. For we saw a little 
 house smashed into utter ruins while the little houses 
 on either side of it were utterly unscathed. It was 
 like a Passover. Why was this one house visited by 
 awful death, and those others on either side of it 
 untouched? Everywhere we went it was the same. 
 We saw houses with flowers in the windows, smoke 
 issuing from the chimneys, children sitting on the 
 doorsteps, and dogs stretching themselves in the sun- 
 light at their feet; and between these houses there 
 would be the shell of a house a crumbling wall, 
 gaping windows, no roof, the interior a pyramidal 
 rubbish heap of bricks and stones. 
 
 Whole quarters of this pretty town were untouched. 
 You could motor through miles of streets and see not 
 one tiny scar of war. But even in the humble quarter 
 which, for some reason that no doubt commended 
 itself to the brain of the Prussian superman, had been 
 horribly bombarded, you saw instead of the absolute 
 
102 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 destruction you had anticipated, partial ruin, lopsided 
 desolation, unequal death. The complete ruin of 
 some houses did not so much impress one as the com- 
 pkte- Immunity, of, s<o many others. If these others 
 had borne the least signs of terrific bombardment, 
 one would not have been so greatly impressed. But 
 the windows were not broken, the paint on the doors 
 was not blistered, the white-painted brick walls were 
 not even scorched. They were as happy habitations 
 for industrious humanity as any cottage in England. 
 And yet next door to them you saw that shell of a 
 house, with fire-places hanging in the air by a twisted 
 piece of rusty iron, wall-papers with little bunches of 
 pink flowers fluttering in strips which the wind blew 
 to right and left, the marks where chests of drawers 
 or washstand had stood visible on the walls, and in 
 the pile of bricks and stone on the ground charred 
 doors, broken rails with pegs, splinters of glass, and 
 fragments of crockery. 
 
 I heard a story which more than anything I saw 
 brought home to my mind the horrors of a bombard- 
 ment. In a certain town of France lived an old man 
 and his wife who had two sons. The old man's 
 ambition was to buy the house in which he lived, so 
 that he might hand it down to his sons. Quarter by 
 quarter, over a number of years, he paid an instal- 
 ment of the purchase money, stinting himself to make 
 
THE" WRECKAGE OF WAR 103 
 
 this provision for his children. The last quarter's 
 instalment was paid in September. The house was 
 his. The long exercise in self-denial was finished. 
 He could afford to live more easily and to rub his 
 hands without much dread of to-morrow, although 
 both his sons were fighting in the war. 
 
 Then the Germans began hacking their way 
 through France. The French Armies, driven back, 
 came pouring through this town, pressing on with 
 fury, their guns thundering in their rear, the shells'of 
 the Germans pursuing them. The French Armies 
 disappeared. The Germans came nearer, firing their 
 great shells. One of these shells found the house of 
 this old Frenchman and wiped it out of existence. He 
 was discovered by some Englishmen many weeks 
 afterwards sitting with his wife in the cellar of their 
 shattered home, a little oil-lamp making a yellow light 
 in the midst of this underground darkness, a loaf of 
 bread between them so hard that knife could not cut 
 it and fingers could not tear it. The lamp and the 
 bread represented all they possessed in the world. The 
 Englishmen endeavoured to comfort the old man. 
 But he spread his hands, shook his head, and 
 expostulated. Why should he hope? What was 
 there to hope for? Everything was gone. Nothing 
 remained but to wait for death. No. They would 
 sit there, he and his wife, and wait till death came. 
 
io 4 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 They did not even trouble to eat. Look at the loaf. 
 It was like a stone. 
 
 Not only was their home broken over their head. 
 News had reached them that the eldest son, for whom 
 chiefly this house had been bought with so long and 
 so devoted a self-sacrifice, was killed and buried on a 
 battlefield. The other son still lived so far as they 
 knew lived for the present ; but what can an old man 
 do at the end of his life when his house is a ruin and 
 his eldest son is dead? So they sat in the blackness 
 of the cellar, the old man and the old woman, with 
 that little lamp burning in the darkness, and the loaf 
 of stale bread between them, while the German War 
 Lord rushed hither and thither saying that God was 
 with him. 
 
 The sight of broken bridges and ruined houses does 
 not really help one to realise the hideousness of War. 
 To see a town that has suffered bombardment is like 
 reading a list of casualties. And just as reading a 
 list of casualties does not clutch the heart till suddenly 
 one sees the name of a man one knows very well, 
 so the sight of a stricken town does not affect one 
 with grief until some such individual story as that 
 which I have just told is related by those who have 
 witnessed the tragedy. 
 
 One little, humble, and domestic story makes War 
 more dreadfully abhorrent than the ruin of cathedrals 
 
THE WRECKAGE OF WAR 105 
 
 and the devastation of cities. To read that thousands 
 of soldiers have been killed scarcely stirs the surface 
 of feeling, but to look at the dead body of one 
 beautiful youth pierced by bayonet or bullet is to 
 make one's whole nature shudder with revulsion. La 
 Mere Sauvage, in Guy de Maupassant's story, was 
 like ' a mother to the four German soldiers quartered 
 on her house, railing against those who make war, 
 and loving these enemies as though they had been 
 sons of her own body ; but when news came that her 
 own boy had been killed by the Prussians, she 
 brought warm hay for the four Germans in her loft, 
 took the ladder from the trapdoor, piled a great fire, 
 and burned them while they slept. That is War. 
 It is humanity committing suicide. 
 
 How preposterous, how senseless, how damnable 
 is this thing called War ! The sudden anger of a 
 king or the dyspepsia of a minister pulls a trigger 
 which sets humanity tearing at its own throat. And 
 because a few men in a nation think that it should be 
 greater than another nation, or because this states- 
 man refuses to see the argument of that statesman, 
 little children are butchered, maidens are deflowered, 
 youth is hurled into death, and the grey hairs of old 
 men and women are brought down with sorrow to the 
 grave. War is not nation fighting nation, but 
 humanity breaking its own heart, humanity rending 
 
106 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 its own body, humanity tearing the God out of its 
 own soul that it may die in madness and despair. 
 
 The dripping car of Juggernaut passes on, the 
 bodies of slain youth are shovelled under the ground, 
 and birds perch on the blood-stained entanglements 
 of barbed wire, singing of Spring. 
 
 "After this War," quod she, "God send us peace." 
 
 I do not think that tourists who flock in organised 
 parties to the battlefields of France will see anything 
 to gratify their curiosity; I am quite sure they will 
 see nothing to thrill them. When the Devil of War 
 has passed over a country he leaves behind him 
 nothing ^more wonderful or dramatic than you may 
 see in your own dustbin. It is only in the hearts of 
 men and women that the real wreckage of war is pre- 
 served terrible to the Day of Judgment. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 A Wayside Discussion 
 
 ONE evening in the lounge of a French hotel, I 
 listened to a conversation, half playful and half 
 serious, between two remarkable men of science, who 
 have given their services to the British Army. Be- 
 cause this conversation in some measure prepares the 
 way for the concluding note of my little book I 
 shall endeavour to reproduce the gist of it, calling the 
 disputants, for the sake of convenience, the Idealist 
 and the Materialist. 
 
 The Idealist began by speaking of German 
 atrocities, condemning those acts of savagery with 
 the proud scorn of a moral mind. But the Materialist 
 interrupted him, and asked : " Do you really believe 
 those stories ? " 
 
 " Why should I not believe them ? " 
 
 "Because the evidence for them ought not to 
 satisfy a rational mind. It comes either from French 
 or Belgian sources. It is prejudiced evidence." 
 
io8 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 "But many cases have been the subject of judicial 
 inquiry." 
 
 "Come, come! French and Belgian inquiries." 
 
 After some more fencing on this matter, the Idealist 
 let fly and proved from German writings that atrocity 
 is regarded as a fair weapon, and is commended to 
 be used unsparingly when the existence of German 
 Kultur is at stake. What further need of witnesses ? 
 Why quibble about this and that story, he demanded, 
 when the policy of the Prussian is definitely an- 
 nounced as a policy of ruthless frightfulness ? 
 
 "And do you think," asked the Materialist, "that a 
 nation is not entitled to use any means whatever to 
 defend its existence? Of course it is. How one's 
 reason has been afflicted by the choleric indignation 
 of English newspapers over this business of German 
 atrocities ! They write of war as if it were an 
 academic discussion. A cathedral is knocked about, 
 and you might think it was the end of the world. A 
 number of civilians are shot, and, good Lord, the 
 heavens are falling ! What a fuss they made over 
 the violation of Belgian neutrality ! How prepos- 
 terous that was ! As if France and Germany were 
 two professors settling a dispute by a duel. As if 
 war were a boxing match at Olympia. Did you ever 
 hear such nonsense?" 
 
A WAYSIDE DISCUSSION 109 
 
 "Wait a moment," interrupted the Idealist. "Are 
 you arguing that treaties are not binding ? " 
 
 "Of course they aren't binding! Why, nothing 
 is binding when a nation is righting for its existence. 
 Scrap of paper ! Of course it was a scrap of paper. 
 Every treaty is a scrap of paper when it comes to 
 righting for national existence." 
 
 "Then you are not shocked by those atrocities?" 
 
 " I see no difference in the world between the killing 
 of civilians and the killing of soldiers. If the safety 
 of my country depended upon it, I would kill old 
 unarmed men, women, children the whole civilian 
 population. Nothing would stop me. Don't you see 
 that any nation worthy to be called a nation is con- 
 scious of a Kultur, and that for the sake of that 
 Kultur, either to spread it or to defend it from extir- 
 pation, a great people will arm, drill, and fight with- 
 out scruple of any kind ? War has nothing to do with 
 civilisation. It is a frank return to barbarism. While 
 war continues it is absurd and illogical to talk about 
 the conventions of civilisation. You don't stop to 
 consider how you are dressed when your house is on 
 fire. As soon as the sword is drawn, everything 
 goes. It is then solely a matter of force. A nation 
 that complains of the way war is waged against it 
 makes itself ridiculous. A nation at war has only one 
 
i io WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 business : to win that war, and to win it by any means 
 in its power." 
 
 "But there is such a thing as international law, and 
 unfortunately," said the Idealist, "we cannot alter in- 
 ternational law to please you." 
 
 "But that is just where you are mistaken !" re- 
 torted the Materialist, with a smile. 
 
 "You think we ought to alter the world to please 
 you?" 
 
 "Yes, if you like to put it in that way. I should 
 prefer to say, however, that the world is moving in 
 my direction. And I think you will have very good 
 proof of that fact before the war is over." 
 
 "Ah ! when the war is over," exclaimed the Idealist. 
 "Won't it seem to us all as if some immense load has 
 been lifted from the brain?" 
 
 "Don't you see," persisted the Materialist, "that 
 the Germans are fighting for their existence? and 
 don't you realise that just as a man fighting for his 
 life disregards the rules of the prize-ring, so a nation 
 in that position will stop at nothing, nothing at all, 
 to save its life ? The thing is obvious. Nor do I 
 condemn War. On the contrary, I believe that War 
 is absolutely necessary to the natural order. A nation 
 that is not prepared to fight for its essential virtue 
 is a perishing nation. And it deserves to die. For, 
 look about you, and see what really persists through 
 
A WAYSIDE DISCUSSION in 
 
 all the chances and changes of history. What is it 
 that endures? Morals change, laws change, and 
 knowledge goes forward from change to change, per- 
 meating everything. But two things endure. Two 
 things are eternal in nature force and character. 
 There may a man pin his faith force and character. 
 All progress is the advance of character, and character 
 can only advance while it has force to defend and 
 force to propagate its virtue. Take British character, 
 with its genius for government ; that character, so 
 valuable to civilisation, would have perished centuries 
 ago if our forefathers had not been fighting men. 
 Take German character, with its genius for organisa- 
 tion and laborious research; that character will be 
 either paralysed or destroyed if the Allies beat the 
 German nation to its knees and the German nation 
 abandons the sword. A great nation must always 
 have the sword in its hand. You will get no science, 
 no literature, no art, no spirit of quest and adventure, 
 from a tame people afraid to fight for its character. 
 The most glorious nations are conquering nations. 
 A nation cannot give anything to the world unless it 
 rejoices in life and is conscious of life as a blessing. 
 Force is a virtue, one of the eternal virtues, and a 
 mighty people will always use its full force to pro- 
 pagate its particular Kultur." 
 
 The Idealist said, "According to your own showing, 
 
 H 
 
ii2 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 it must always be to the high interest of other nations 
 to break and bind the strength of any one nation 
 whose strength threatens the whole world. This is 
 precisely what is now happening. But it would be 
 impossible for those other nations to break and bind 
 Germany unless they were severally loyal to the 
 treaties which hold them in alliance. Therefore, 
 treaties are something more than scraps of paper. 
 And, if you think, you will agree, I am pretty sure, 
 that the whole delicate organisation of human exist- 
 ence is only possible so long as individuals and 
 nations are bound by moral obligations. The system 
 of credit by which most of us live is a matter of faith. 
 But I take it that you never pay your bills ! Like 
 Sheridan, you don't believe in throwing good money 
 after bad debts. Your argument, my dear fellow, is 
 a throwing up of the sponge of civilisation. Your 
 entire thesis is the thesis of barbarism. I quite agree 
 with you that a great nation will always be ready to 
 fight for its particular Kultur, but I see beyond the 
 transitory convulsions of an imperfect diplomacy. I 
 see the possibility of an alliance between all the great 
 nations in the interests of general Kultur. This war, 
 with all its dreadfulness, is a drawing together of the 
 peoples. I know that there will be difficulties, grave 
 difficulties, in arriving at a final settlement; but I 
 have faith in the democracies of the world, and I think 
 
A WAYSIDE DISCUSSION 113 
 
 a settlement will be reached which will sheathe the 
 sword for perhaps fifty or a hundred years." 
 
 "Well, I'm relieved to know," said the Materialist, 
 "that at least you aren't expecting the Millennium 
 as a consequence of this war." And then, turning to 
 me, he said: "I hope you won't praise without 
 criticism what you have seen of the British Army in 
 France. Praise is a dangerous thing. In fact, no 
 man is worthy of praise. I make it a rule never to 
 deal out praise, and so far as is possible I avoid it 
 for myself ! How much harm has been done at home 
 by fulsome eulogy ! We ought to be heartily ashamed 
 of ourselves, instead of going about our business, as 
 I am sorry to say we do, with swollen heads. Nothing 
 is right with us. Our system of education is 
 ridiculous. Our working-classes are conceited, sel- 
 fish, and stupid. We have the most dull middle-class 
 in the world. And our aristocracy has nowadays 
 scarcely its manners to boast about. Who reads in 
 England ? Who cares about Culture ? Who is 
 enthusiastic about science ? Why don't you say these 
 things? You have seen the hospitals over here. 
 Well, they're good, fairly good; but they are not 
 what they ought to be. They ought to be better. 
 They can be made better. For heaven's sake, don't 
 tell people that these hospitals are excellent. What 
 you have to do is to convince the nation, so far as you 
 
 H 2 
 
ii 4 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 have any influence in this respect, that the need of the 
 hour, an urgent need, too, is intelligence. You have 
 seen something of the heads of departments in 
 London ; you know most of our national idols : well, 
 be honest, what do you think of them ? How many 
 of them have ever convinced you of anything that in 
 the least approaches real capacity, real intellectual 
 greatness ? What we have to do in England is to get 
 rid .of our idols, to subdue the official class, and to 
 put men of only first-rate ability in almost autocratic 
 control of our national machinery. We have done 
 well in this war, better than we could have expected ; 
 but you mustn't say so. Your business is to attack, 
 to criticise, to awaken. But I mistrust you. I have 
 the feeling that your tendency is to praise, to praise, 
 perhaps, because you think it will encourage official 
 England to do better. Believe me, this is a huge 
 mistake. Praise is mischief. No ! Criticise, criticise, 
 criticise. Awaken people in England to the fact that 
 out here two principles are at war the principle of 
 despotic efficiency and the principle of democratic 
 makeshift. And for God's sake awaken them to the 
 fact that Germany will stop at nothing to save her 
 existence. Give the lie to those ridiculous stories 
 about starving German soldiers, cowardly German 
 soldiers, ill-clothed and indifferently armed German 
 soldiers. The German soldiers are magnificent. In 
 
A WAYSIDE DISCUSSION 115 
 
 one day, against an inferno of artillery, they charged 
 no fewer than twenty-seven times, till the ground was 
 knee deep in their dead. And they charged each 
 time singing their national songs. They are superb 
 soldiers. And they are well fed, well clothed, and 
 well booted. Moreover, not one of them has the 
 smallest misgivings as to the issue of the war. Do 
 you think we can overthrow such a people as this, 
 whose territory, after all these months, has never been 
 profaned by an invader, if we rest satisfied with what 
 we already have done ? Believe me, there must be a 
 moral revolution in England before we can defeat 
 this great people. We must be rid of cant, rid of 
 self-satisfaction, rid of journalistic high-falutin'. 
 What we have to do, in one word, is this We must 
 be intelligent." 
 
 It was agreed between these two men that nothing 
 will be the same after the war. Life will be organised 
 with more definitive intelligence. There will be a 
 greater exercise of power, a new seriousness will 
 manifest itself, and democracy will abandon loose- 
 thinking acquiescence, and a dull indifference for a 
 determined effort to understand the conditions of 
 existence. 
 
 The Materialist made a mock of religion, and 
 attacked me for taking any interest in a matter which 
 was now finished and done with. He seemed to imply 
 
u6 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 that the Kaiser had prayed God out of existence, and 
 that the battalions of Christian Europe in slaying each 
 other had also slain very effectually "the Lamb of 
 God." He was almost savage in his irony over that 
 phrase. 
 
 "Everything will be changed," he said to me. 
 "It's no use for you to ask people to be reverent 
 towards the Infinite. Reverent towards the Infinite! 
 All that's dead and done for. The future belongs to 
 Science. There'll be no more wasted time and wasted 
 money in religious charity. We shan't bother to seek 
 the lost! We shan't shout when a drunkard or a 
 burglar is converted by a Hallelujah lass ! All that's 
 Victorian. We shall make men intelligent and 
 healthy by means of science; we shall educate and 
 train humanity; and the inefficient, the rotters, well, 
 instead of weeping over them we shall lock 'em up 
 and punish them. Make up your mind to these 
 changes. The war has got to be paid for, and in that 
 painful process of paying the human race is going 
 to be born again." 
 
 How much did he mean of all this? In the midst 
 of his thunder one could see the sun of his spirit still 
 shining, and the harder he attacked the thesis of Love 
 the more certain was the smile in the deeps of his 
 eyes. 
 
A WAYSIDE DISCUSSION 117 
 
 The Idealist said to me, "I'm quite sure you have 
 discovered the real psychology of our friend. " 
 
 And when the Idealist was out of hearing the 
 Materialist said to me, "That's the noblest fellow now 
 living." 
 
POSTSCRIPT 
 
 DOSTOEVSKY wrote to a friend from Dresden in 1870 
 concerning the Prussian system of education and 
 discipline as it was then manifesting itself against 
 France 1 : 
 
 "... It's a fine schooling whereby children are 
 harassed and tormented, as it were, by Attila's horde, 
 and even worse." 
 
 This mention of Attila in Germany's last war is 
 curious enough; but read what follows: 
 
 " I have myself read letters from German soldiers in 
 France to their parents (small business folk). Good 
 God, the things they have to tell ! O, how ill they 
 are, and how hungry ! But it would take too long to 
 relate. One more observation, though, I'll give you : 
 At first, one often heard people in the street singing 
 the ' Wacht am Rhein ' ; now, one never hears it at 
 all. By far the greatest excitement and pride exists 
 among the professors, doctors, and students; the 
 crowd are but little interested. Indeed, they are very 
 quiet. But the professors are extraordinarily arro- 
 gant. I encounter them every evening in the public 
 library. A very influential scholar with silver-white 
 
 1 Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Chatto & Windus). 
 
 zi8 
 
POSTSCRIPT 119 
 
 hair loudly exclaimed the day before yesterday, " Paris 
 must be bombarded ! " So that's the outcome of all 
 their learning. They may be very scholarly, but 
 they're frightfully limited ! Yet another observation : 
 All the populace here can read and write, but every 
 one of them is terribly unintelligent, obtuse, stubborn, 
 and devoid of any high ideals." 
 
 Compare with the German's own view of his Kultur 
 what Dostoevsky has to say of Russia's share in 
 universal progress : 
 
 " I am not quite sure that Danilevsky will dwell with 
 sufficient emphasis upon what is the inmost essence, 
 and the ultimate destiny, of the Russian nation : 
 namely, that Russia must reveal to the world her own 
 Russian Christ. . . . There lies, as I believe, the 
 inmost essence of our vast impending contribution to 
 civilisation, whereby we shall awaken the European 
 peoples; there lies the inmost core of our exuberant 
 and intense existence that is to be." 
 
 And elsewhere he gives us a glancing idea of the 
 Russian Christ : 
 
 " All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who 
 have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were un- 
 equal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one. 
 The beautiful is the ideal; but ideals, with us as in 
 civilised Europe, have long been wavering. There is 
 in the world only one figure of absolute beauty : 
 Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter 
 of course, an infinite marvel (the whole Gospel of St. 
 John is full of this thought : John sees the wonder of 
 
iao WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 the Incarnation, the visible apparition of the 
 Beautiful)." 
 
 Now compare this exquisite suggestion of a "vast 
 impending contribution to civilisation" with the Ger- 
 man's gospel of Blood and Iron, his ideal of a Super- 
 man and the boast of his self-satisfied Kultur. And 
 in making this comparison, reflect that if it is England 
 the German most hates, it is the Russian he most 
 despises. 
 
 As an indication of the very ugly and entirely un- 
 Christ-like spirit which animates the German people, 
 let the reader study a document published by Lieut.- 
 Colonel Kaden in the Lille War Gazette, a translation 
 of which has recently appeared in The Times. Such 
 a document, I venture to suggest, could not have been 
 written by any Russian, Frenchman, Belgian, Serbian, 
 Indian, or Briton. It is only a German brain that 
 could conceive such a thing, only a German conscience 
 that could publish it, only a German soul that could 
 see in it nothing incongruous either with Religion or 
 Kultur:- 
 
 FIRE. 
 
 As children many of us have played with it; some 
 of us have seen an outbreak of fire. First a small 
 tongue-like flame appears ; it grows into a devastating 
 fury of heat. We out here in the field have seen more 
 than enough of it. 
 
POSTSCRIPT 121 
 
 But there is also the fire of joy, of sacred 
 enthusiasm : It arose from sacrificial altars, from 
 mountain heights of Germany, and lit up the heavens 
 at the time of solstice and whenever the home 
 countries were in danger. This year fires of joy shall 
 flare from the Bismarck columns throughout the 
 length and breadth of Germany, for on April ist, 
 just one hundred years ago, our country's greatest 
 son was born. Let us celebrate this event in a manner 
 deep, far-reaching, and mighty ! 
 
 Blood and Iron ! 
 
 Let every German, man or woman, young or old, 
 find in his heart a Bismarck column, a pillar of fire, 
 now in these days of storm and stress. Let this fire, 
 enkindled in every German breast, be a fire of joy, of 
 holiest enthusiasm. But let it be terrible, unfettered, 
 let it carry horror and destruction ! Call it hate ! Let 
 no one come to you with "Love thine enemy ! " We 
 all have but one enemy, England! 
 
 How long have we wooed her almost to the point 
 of our own self-abasement. She would none of us, 
 so leave to her the apostles of peace, the "No War" 
 disciples. The time has passed when we would do 
 homage to everything English our cousins that 
 were ! 
 
 "God punish England ! ""May He punish her ! " 
 This is the greeting that now passes when Germans 
 meet. The fire of this righteous hate is all aglow. 
 
 You men of Germany from East and West, forced 
 to shed your blood in the defence of your homeland 
 through England's infamous envy and hatred of Ger- 
 many's progress, feed the flame that burns in your 
 souls. We have but one War-cry, "God punish 
 England ! " Hiss this to one another in the trenches, 
 
122 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 in the charge; hiss as it were the sound of licking 
 flames. Behold in every dead comrade a sacrifice 
 forced from you by this accursed people. Take ten- 
 fold vengance for each hero's death ! 
 
 You German people at home, feed this fire of 
 hate! 
 
 You mothers, engrave this in the heart of the babe 
 at your breast ! 
 
 You thousands of teachers to whom millions of 
 German children look up with eyes and hearts, teach 
 Hate, unquenchable Hate ! You homes of German 
 learning, pile up the fuel on this fire ! Tell the nation 
 that this hate is not un-German, that it is not poison 
 for our people. Write in letters of fire the name of 
 our bitterest enemy. You guardians of the truth, feed 
 this sacred Hate ! 
 
 You German fathers, lead your children up to the 
 high hills of our homeland, at their feet our dear 
 country bathed in sunshine. Your women and 
 children shall starve : ^ bestial, devilish conception. 
 England wills it ! Surely all that is in you rises 
 against such infamy ? 
 
 Listen to the ceaseless song of the German forest, 
 behold the fruitful fields like rolling seas, then will 
 your love for this wondrous land find the right words, 
 " Hate, unquenchable Hate ! Germany, Germany, 
 above all I " 
 
 Let it be inculcated in your children, and it will 
 grow like a landslide, irresistible, from generation to 
 generation. 
 
 You fathers, proclaim it aloud over the billowing 
 fields, that the toiling peasant below may hear you, 
 that the birds of the forest may fly away with the 
 message : into the land that echoes from German 
 
POSTSCRIPT 123 
 
 cliffs send it reverberating like the clanging of bells 
 from tower to tower throughout the countryside : 
 "Hate, Hate, the accursed English, Hate!" 
 
 You masters, carry the flame to your workshops : 
 axe and hammer will fall the heavier when arms are 
 nerved by this Hate. 
 
 You peasants, guard this flame, fan it anew in the 
 hearts of your toilers that the hand may rest heavy 
 on the plough that throws up the soil of our home- 
 land. 
 
 What CARTHAGE was to ROME, ENGLAND is to 
 GERMANY. 
 
 For ROME as for us it is a question of "to be or 
 not to be." 
 
 May our people find a faithful mentor like Cato. 
 His (Jeterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam for 
 us means 
 
 "GOD PUNISH ENGLAND." 
 
 You have only to read this dreadful if foolish ful- 
 mination but once to realise that the spirit of Ger- 
 many (for the spirit of this proclamation is universal 
 throughout the German Empire) is a menace to the 
 first principles of civilisation and the highest ideals 
 of humanity. Never before in history has mankind 
 been so threatened. If Germany triumphed, Absolute 
 Beauty would be a beggar on the face of the earth. 
 
 This war is an infinitely greater business than a 
 strife between nations; it is a wrestle to the death 
 between two moral principles which ever since the 
 dawn of human life have contended for the soul of 
 
124 WORKSHOPS OF DESTRUCTION 
 
 Man. It is but a coarse, crude, and bloody version of 
 that inward strife which tortures in silence and dark- 
 ness the spirit of Everyman. The term Central Powers 
 is an alias for Antichrist ; the term Grand Alliance a 
 synonym for Christianity. We are settling to-day 
 with shell and bayonet, not whether the human heart, 
 but whether human society is to be crushed under the 
 iron wheels of Caesarism, or still to nurse its uncon- 
 querable hope of Absolute Beauty. For although 
 everything will be different after this war, although 
 Religion itself will be so greatly changed that the 
 Christian of to-morrow will be as different from the 
 Christian of yesterday as the modern astronomer is 
 different from the ancient astrologer, still the eternal 
 drama of humanity will move forward from the 
 shadows of deceit into the light of reality, the soul of 
 individual man casting off more and more the barrack- 
 square discipline of a logical barbarism and stretching 
 out his arms into the liberty and light of an infinite 
 universe. Germany, we think, will fall ; but the other 
 nations will fall with her unless they feel with all their 
 heart and with all their mind and with all their soul 
 that "the beautiful is the ideal." 
 
 The spirit of man is indestructible ; it is only nations 
 that are mortal. 
 
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