“Hullo, hullo, hullo!It’s a different girl again!Different hair, different clothes,Different eyes, different nose....”
“Hullo, hullo, hullo!It’s a different girl again!Different hair, different clothes,Different eyes, different nose....”
“Hullo, hullo, hullo!It’s a different girl again!Different hair, different clothes,Different eyes, different nose....”
“Hullo, hullo, hullo!
It’s a different girl again!
Different hair, different clothes,
Different eyes, different nose....”
This affair had been kept a dead secret from press and public. It was a “glorious stunt” which had for its amiable object the introduction of all the prettiest girls of the theater world to all the smartest bloods of the universities and clubs. It was entitled the Butterfly Ball.
Certainly there were some astoundingly beautiful girls at this assembly, and not a few of them. The university boys were, for a time abashed by so much loveliness. But they brightened up, especially when the most famous sporting peer of England—Lord Lonsdale—led off the dance with a little girl dressed, rather naughtily, as a teetotum. By the time I left—a kind of Pierrot looking on at the gayety of life—there was a terrific battle in progress between groups of boys and girls, with little white rolls of bread as their ammunition. Not commendable. Not strictly virtuous, nor highly proper, but in its wildness there was the spirit of a youth which, afterward, was heroic in self-sacrifice.... So things happened in London before the war.
A series of articles appearing inThe Daily Mail, by Robert Blatchford, once a Socialist and still on the democratic side of political life, disturbed the sense of security in the average mind by a slight uneasiness. Not more than that, because the average mind had its inherited faith in our island inviolability and the power of the British Navy. There were articles entitled “Am Tag,” which is bad German, and they professed to reveal adetermination in the military and naval castes of Germany to destroy the British fleet, invade England, and smash the British Empire.
Some of the evidence brought forward seemed childish in its absurdity. There were not many facts to a wealth of rhetoric. But they created a newspaper sensation, and were pooh-poohed by the government, as we now know, with utter insincerity—for there were members of that government who knew far more than Blatchford how deep and widespread was German hostility to Great Britain, and how close Europe stood to a world war.
One fantastic little incident connected with those articles of Blatchford’s amused me considerably at the time, though afterward I thought of it as a strange prophecy.
I called on W. T. Stead one day in his office ofThe Review of Reviews, which afterward I was to edit for a year. It was just before lunch time, and Stead had an engagement with Spender ofThe Westminster Gazette. But he grabbed me by the arm, in his genial way, and said, “Listen to this for a minute, and tell me what you think of it.”
It appeared that he had been rather upset by Blatchford’s articles. He could not make up his mind whether they were all nonsense or had some truth at the back of them. He decided to consult the spirit world through “Julia,” his medium.
“We rang up old Bismarck, Von Moltke, and William II of Prussia. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘Is there going to be war between Germany and England?’”
The spirits of these distinguished Germans seemed uncertain. Bismarck saw a red mist approaching the coast of England. Von Moltke said the British fleet had better keep within certain degrees of latitude and longitude—which was kind of him! One of the trio—Iforget which—said there would be war between Germany and England. It would break out suddenly, without warning.
“When?” asked W. T. Stead.
A date was given.It was the month of August.The year was not named.
I laughed heartily at Stead’s anecdote, especially when he told me the effect this announcement had upon him. He was so disturbed that he went round to the Admiralty, interviewed Lord Fisher, who was a friend of his, and revealed the dread message that the German fleet was going to attack in August. (It was then May, 1912).
Fisher leaned back in his chair, smiled grimly, and said, “No such luck, my boy!”
In August of that year I was engaged in trouble which did not seem connected with Germany, though I am inclined to think now that German agents were watching it very closely—especially one German baron who posed as a journalist and was always reporting on industrial unrest in Great Britain, wherever it happened to break out. I had met him at Tonypandy, in Wales, during the miners’ riots down there, and I met him again in Liverpool, which was now in the throes of a serious strike.
It was the nearest thing to civil war I have seen in any English city. I have forgotten the origin of the strike—I think it began with the dockers—but it spread until the whole of the transport service was at a standstill, and the very scavengers left their work. The Mersey was crowded for weeks with shipping from all the ports of the world, laden with merchandise, some of it perishable, which no hands would touch. No porters worked in the railway goods yards, so that trains could not be unloaded. There was no fresh meat, and no milk for babes. Not a wheel turned in Liverpool. It was like a besieged city, and presently, in hot weather, began to stink in apestilential way, because of the refuse and muck left rotting in the streets and squares.
This refuse, among which dead rats lay, was so filthy in one of the best squares of Liverpool outside the hotel where I was staying, that a number of journalists, and myself, borrowed brooms, sallied out, swept up the rubbish heaps, and made bonfires of them, surrounded by a crowd of angry men who called us “scabs” and “blacklegs,” and threatened to “bash” us, if we did not stop work. We stuck to our job, and were rewarded by a clapping of hands from ladies and maidservants in the neighboring windows, so that our broomsticks seemed as heroic as the lances of chivalry.
Some bad things happened in Liverpool. The troops were stoned by mobs of men who were becoming sullen and savage. Shops were looted. I saw no less than forty tramcars overturned and smashed one afternoon in that sunny August, because they were being driven by men who had refused to strike.
On that afternoon I saw something of mob violence, which I should have thought incredible in England. A tramcar was going at a rapid pace, driven by a man who was in terror of his life because of a mob on each side of the road, threatening to stone him to death. Inside the car were three women and a baby. A fusillade of stones suddenly broke every window. Two of the women crouched below the window frames, and the third woman, with the baby, utterly terrified, came on to the platform outside, and prepared to jump. A stone struck her on the head, and she dropped the baby into the roadway, where it lay quite still. A gust of hoarse laughter rose from the mob, and not one man stirred to pick up the baby. Terrible, but true. It was left there until a woman ran out of a shop.... Wedged behind the men, but a witness of all that happened, I was conscious then of a cruelty lurking in the vicious elements of our greatcities which, before, I had not believed to exist in England of the twentieth century. If ever there were revolution in England, it would not be made with rose water.
The troops and police were patient and splendid in their discipline, despite great provocation at times. Now and again, when the mob started looting or stone throwing, the police made baton charges, which scattered crowds of young hooligans like chaff before them, and they thrashed those they caught without mercy. At such times I had to run like a hare, for there is no discrimination in treatment of the innocent.
One afternoon the troops were ordered to fire on a crowd which made an attempt to attack an escort of prisoners, and there was a small number of casualties. That night I had an exciting narrative to dictate over the telephone to the office ofThe Daily Chronicle. But, in the middle of it, the sub-editor, MacKenna, who was taking down my message, said, “Cut it short, old man! Something is happening to-night more important than a strike in Liverpool.The German fleet is out in the North Sea, and the British fleet is cleared for action!”
When I put down the telephone receiver, I felt a shiver go down my spine; and I thought of Stead’s preposterous story of war in August. Had it happened?
There was nothing in next day’s papers. Some iron censorship closed down on that story of the German fleet, true or false.... As we now know, it was true. The German fleet did go out on that night in August, but finding the British fleet prepared, they went back again. It was in August of another year that Germany put all to the great hazard.
The thoughts of the English people were not obsessed with the German menace. For the most part they knew nothing about it, apart from newspaper “scares,” whichthey pooh-poohed, and no member of the government, getting anxious now in secret conversations, took upon himself the duty of preparing the nation for a dreadful ordeal.
England was excited by two subjects of sensational interest and increasing passion—the mania of the militant suffragettes, and the raising of armed forces in Ireland, under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson, to resist Home Rule.
I saw a good deal of both those phases of political strife in England and Ireland. The suffragette movement kept me in a continual state of mental exasperation, owing to the excesses of the militant women on one side, and the stupidity and brutality of the opponents of women’s suffrage on the other. I became a convinced supporter of “Votes for Women,” partly because of theoretical justice which denied votes to women of intellect, education, and noble work, while giving it to the lowest, most ignorant, and most brutal ruffians in the country, partly because of a sporting admiration—in spite of intellectual disapproval—of cultured women who went willingly to prison for their faith, defied the police with all their muscular strength, risked the brutality of angry mobs (which was a great risk), and all with a gay, laughing courage which mocked at the arguments, anger, and ridicule of the average man.
Many of the methods of the “militants” were outrageous, and loosened, I think, some of the decent restraints of the social code, for which we had to pay later in a kind of sexual wildness of modern young women. But they were taunted into “direct action” by Cabinet Ministers, and exasperated by the deliberate falsity and betrayal of members of Parliament, who had pledged themselves at election time to support the demand of women for the suffrage, by constitutional methods.
A number of times I watched the endeavors of the“militants” to present a petition to the Prime Minister or invade the Houses of Parliament. Always it was the same scene. The deputation would march from the Caxton Hall through a narrow lane in the midst of a vast crowd, and then be scattered in a rough and tumble scrimmage when mounted police rode among them.
Often I saw a friend of mine walking by the side of these deputations, as a solitary bodyguard. It was H. W. Nevinson, the war correspondent, with his fine ruddy face and silvered hair, a paladin of woman suffrage as of all causes which took “liberty” for their watchword. The crowd was less patient of men sympathizers of militant women than with the women themselves, and Nevinson was roughly handled. At a great demonstration at the Albert Hall, he fought single-handed against a dozen men stewards who fell upon him, when he knocked down a man who had struck a woman a heavy blow. Nevinson, though over fifty at the time, could give a good account of himself, and some of those stewards had a tough time before they overpowered him and flung him out.
Round the Houses of Parliament, on those nights of attack, there were strong bodies of police who played games of catch-as-catch-can with little old ladies, frail young women, strong-armed and lithe-limbed girls who tried to break through their cordon. One little old cripple lady used to charge the police in a wheel chair. Others caught hold of the policemen’s whistle chains, and would not let go until they were escorted to the nearest police station. One night dozens of women chained and padlocked themselves to the railings of the House of Commons, and the police had to use axes to break their chains.
There was a truly frightful scene, which made me shiver, one night, when those “militants” refused to budge before the mounted police and seized hold of their bridles and stirrup-leathers. The horses, scared out of their witsby these clinging creatures, reared, and fell, but nothing would release the grip of those determined and reckless ladies, though some of them were bruised and bleeding.
The patience and good humor of the police were marvelous, but I was sorry to see that they made class distinctions in their behavior. They were certainly very brutal to a party of factory girls brought down from the North of England. I saw them driven into a narrow alley behind Westminster Hospital, and the police pulled their hair down, wound it round their throats, and flung them about unmercifully. It was not good to see.
I had several talks at the time with the two dominant leaders of the militant section, Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, and I was present at their trial, when they were indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot. Mrs. Pankhurst’s defense was one of the most remarkable speeches I have ever heard in a court of law, most eloquent, most moving, most emotional. Even the magistrate was moved to tears, but that did not prevent him from setting aside an unrepealed statute of Charles II (which allowed a deputation of not more than thirteen to present a petition, without let or hindrance, to the King’s ministers) and sentencing Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter to two years’ imprisonment.
I saw Christabel Pankhurst during the course of the trial, and she asked me whether I thought she would be condemned. I told her “Yes,” believing that she had the strength to hear the truth, and afterward, when she asked me how much I thought she would get, I said “Two years.” I had an idea from her previous record that she was ready for martyrdom at any cost, but to my surprise and dismay, she burst into tears. Her defense and cross-examination of witnesses were also marred by continual tears, so that it was painful to listen to her. Her spirit seemed quite broken, and she never took part again in any militant demonstrations, although she wasliberated a short time after the beginning of her imprisonment. She worked quietly at propaganda in Paris.
One nation watched the mania of the “wild, wild women” with a growing belief in England’s decadence, as it was watching the Irish affairs, and industrial unrest. German agents found plenty to write home about.
One day in 1913, I was asked by Robert Donald to call on a Canadian professor who had been engaged in “a statistical survey of Europe,” whatever that may mean, and might have some interesting information to give.
When he received me, I found him a little, mild-eyed man, with gold-rimmed spectacles, behind which I presently discovered the look of one obsessed by a knowledge of some terrific secret. That was after he had surprised me by declining to talk about statistics, and asking abruptly whether I was an honest young man and a good patriot. Upon my assuring him that I was regarded as respectable by my friends and was no traitor, he bade me shut the door and listen to something which he believed it to be his duty to tell, for England’s sake.
What he told me was decidedly alarming. In pursuit of his “statistical survey of Europe” on behalf of the Canadian and American governments, he had spent two years or so in Germany. He had been received in a courteous way by German professors, civil servants, and government officials, at whose dinner tables he had met German celebrities, and high officers of the German army. They had talked freely before him after some time, and there was revealed to him, among all these people, a bitter, instinctive, relentless, and jealous hatred of England. They made no secret that the dominant thought in their souls was the necessity and inevitability of a conflict with Great Britain, in order to destroy the nation which stood athwart their own destiny as their greatest commercial competitor, and as the one rival of their ownsea power, upon which the future of Germany was based. For that conflict they were preparing the mind of their own people by intensive propaganda and “speeding up” the output of their naval and military armament. “England,” said my little informant, “is menaced by the most fearful struggle in history, but seems utterly ignorant of this peril, which is coming close. Is there no one to warn her people, no one to open their eyes to this ghastly hatred across the North Sea, preparing stealthily for their destruction? Will you not tell the truth in your paper, as I now tell it to you?”
I told him it would be difficult to get such things published, and still more difficult to get them believed. I had considerable doubt myself whether he had not exaggerated the intensity of hatred in Germany, and, in any case, the possibility of their daring to challenge Great Britain, as long as our fleet maintained its strength and traditions. But I was disturbed. The little man’s words coincided with other warnings I had heard, from Lord Roberts, from visitors to Germany, from Robert Blatchford—to say nothing of W. T. Stead and his German “spooks.” ... Robert Donald, ofThe Daily Chronicle, laughed at my report of the conversation. “Utter rubbish!” was his opinion, and he refused to print a word.
“Go to Germany yourself,” he said, “and write a series of articles likely to promote friendship between our two peoples and undo the harm created by newspaper hate-doctors and jingoes. Find out what the mass of the German people think about this liar talk.”
So I went to Germany, with a number of introductions to prominent people and friends of England.
It was not the first time I had visited Germany, because the previous year, I think, I had been to Hamburg with a party of journalists, and we were received like princes, fêted sumptuously, and treated with an amazing display of public cordiality. There was private courtesy, too,most kind and amiable, and I always remember a young poet who took me to his house and introduced me to his beautiful young wife who, when I said good-by, gathered some roses from her garden, put them to her lips, and said, “Take these with my love to England.”
But something had happened in the spirit of Germany since that time. The first “friend of England” to whom I presented a letter of introduction was a newspaper editor in Düsseldorf, a man of liberal principles who had taken a great part in arranging an exchange of visits between German and British business men. He knew many of the Liberal politicians in England and could walk into the House of Commons more easily than I could.
He seemed to be rather flustered when I called upon him and explained the object of my visit, and he left me alone in his study for a while, on pretext of speaking to his wife. I think he wanted me to read his leading article, signed at the foot of the column, in a paper which he laid deliberately on his desk before me. I puzzled through its complicated argument in involved German, and through its fog of rhetoric there emerged a violent tirade against England.
When he came back, I tackled him on the subject.
“I understood that you were an advocate of friendly relations between our two peoples? That article doesn’t seem to me very friendly or helpful.”
He flushed a hot color, and said, “My views have undergone a change. England has behaved abominably.”
The particular abomination which he resented most deeply was the warning delivered by Lloyd George—of all people in England!—that Great Britain would support French interests in Morocco, and would not tolerate German aggression in that region. That was at the time of the Agadir incident. The British attitude in that affair, said the Düsseldorf editor, was a clear sign that Great Britain challenged the right of Germany to developand expand. That challenge could not be left unanswered. Either Germany must surrender her liberty and deny her imperial destiny, at the dictation of Britain, or show that her power was equal to her aspirations. That, anyhow, was the line of his argument, which we pursued at great length over pots of lager beer, in a restaurant where we dined together.
I encountered the same argument, and more violent hostility, from a high ecclesiastic in Berlin, who was a great friend of the Kaiser’s and formerly a professed lover of England. He was a tall, thin, handsome man, who spoke English perfectly, but was not very civil to me. Presently, as we talked of the relations between our two nations, he paced up and down the room with evident emotion, with suppressed rage, indeed, which broke at last through his restraint.
“English policy,” he said, “cuts directly across our legitimate German rights. England is trying to hem in Germany, to hamper her at every turn, to humiliate her in every part of the world, and to prevent her economic development. During recent days she has not hesitated to affront us very deeply and deliberately. It is intolerable!”
He spoke of an “inevitable war” with startling candor, and when I said something about the duty of all Christian men, especially of a priest like himself, to prevent such an unbelievable horror, he asked harshly whether I had come to insult him, and touched the bell for my dismissal.
Such conversations were alarming. Yet I did not believe that they represented the general opinion of the great mass of German people. I was only able to get glimpses here and there in Düsseldorf and Frankfort, Hanover, Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden of middle-class and working-class thought, but wherever I was able to test it in casual conversation with business men, railway porters, laborers, hotel waiters, and so on, with whom Iexchanged ideas in my very crude German, or their remarkably good English (in the case of commercial men and waiters), I found utter incredulity regarding the possibility of war between England and Germany, and a contempt of the sword-rattling and “shining armor” of the Kaiser and the military caste.
I was, for instance, in a company of commercial men atAbendessenin a hotel at Leipzig, when the topic of conversation was the Zabern affair, in which Lieutenant von Förstner had drawn his sword upon civilians—and a cripple—who had jeered at him for swaggering down the sidewalk like a popinjay. The Crown Prince had sent him a telegram of approbation for his defense of his uniform and caste. But, one and all, the commercial men with whom I sat expressed their loathing of this military arrogance, and were indignant with those who defended its absurdity. I remember the German who sat next to me had been a designer in a porcelain factory in the English potteries for many years. With him I talked quietly of the chance of war between England and Germany. “What is the real feeling of the ordinary folk in Germany?” I asked. He answered with what I am certain was absolute sincerity—though he was wrong, as history proved. He told me that, outside the military caste, there was no war feeling in Germany, and that the idea of a conflict with England was abhorrent and unbelievable to the German people. “If there were to be war with England,” he said, “we should weep at the greatest tragedy that could befall mankind.”
There were many people I met who held that view, without hypocrisy, and their sincerity at that time is not disproved because when the tocsin of war was sounded, the fever of hate took possession of them.
It was Edward Bernstein, the leader of the Socialists, who warned me of the instability of the pacifist faith professed by German democrats. “If war breaks out,”he said, “German Socialists will march as one man against any enemy of the Fatherland. Although theoretically they are against war, neither they nor any other Socialists have reached a plane of development which would give them the strength to resist loyalty to the Flag and the old code of patriotism, when once their nation was involved, right or wrong.”
I tried to get the ideas of German youth on the subject of war with England, and I had an excellent opportunity and an illuminating conversation with the students of Leipzig University. A group of these young men, who spoke excellent English, allowed me to question them, and were highly amused and interested.
“Do you hate England?” I asked.
There was a rousing chorus of “Yes!”
“Why do you hate England?”
One young man acted as spokesman for the others, who signified their assent from time to time. The first reason for hatred of England, he said, was because when a German boy was shown the map of the world and when he asked what all the red “splodges” on it signified, he was told that all that territory belonged to England. That aroused his natural envy. Later in life, said this young man, he understood by historical reading that England had built up the British Empire by a series of wars, explorations, and commercial adventures which gave her a just claim to possession. They had no quarrel with that. They recognized the strength and greatness of the English people in the past. But now they saw that England was no longer great. She was decadent and inefficient. Her day was done. They hated her now as a worn-out old monster who still tried to grab and hold, and prevent other races from developing their genius, but had no military power with which to defend their possessions. England was playing a game of bluff. Germany, conscious of her newborn greatness, her immenseindustrial genius, her vital strength, needing elbow room and free spaces of the earth, would not allow a degenerate people to stand across her path. Germany hated England for her arrogance, masking weakness, and her hypocritical professions of friendship, which concealed envy and fear.
All this was said, at greater length, with admirable good humor and no touch of personal discourtesy. But it made me thoughtful and uneasy. The boy was doubtless exaggerating a point of view, but if such talk were taking place in German universities, it boded no good for the peace of the world.
I returned to England, perplexed, and not convinced, one way or the other. As far as I could read the riddle of Germany, public opinion was divided by two opposing views. The military caste, the old Junker crowd, and their satellites, ecclesiastical and official, with, probably the Civil Service, were beating up the spirit of aggression, and playing for war. The great middle class, and the German people in the mass, desired only to get on with their work, to develop their commerce, and to enjoy a peaceful home life in increasing comfort. The question of future peace or war lay with the view which would prevail. I believed that, without unnecessary provocation on the part of England, rather with generous and friendly relations, the peaceful disposition of the German people would prevail over the military caste and its intensive propaganda....
I was wrong, and the articles I wrote in an analytical but friendly spirit were worse than useless, though I am still convinced that the German people as a whole did not want war, until their rulers persuaded them that the Fatherland was in danger, called to their patriotism, and let loose all the primitive emotions, sentiments, ideals, passions, and cruelties which stir the hearts of peoples, when war is declared.
After that visit to Germany, I went several times to Ireland, and although there seemed to be no link between these two missions, I am certain now that in the mind of German agents, politicians, and military strategists, the situation in Ireland was not left out of account in their estimate of war chances. With labor “unrest” from the Clyde to Tonypandy, with suffragette outrages revealing a weakness and lack of virility (from the German point of view) in English manhood, and with Ireland on the edge of civil war which would involve great numbers of British troops, England was losing her power of attack and defense. So as we know, German agents, like the Baron von Zedlitz, were writing home in their reports.
Sir Edward Carson, afterward Lord Carson, with F. E. Smith, afterward Lord Birkenhead (so does England reward her rebels!) were arranging a bloody civil war in Ireland, which, but for a Great War, would have spread to England, without let or hindrance from the British government.
When the Home Rule Bill, under Asquith’s premiership, was nearing its last stages, Carson raised an army of Ulstermen and invited every Protestant and Unionist to take a solemn oath in a holy league and covenant to resist Home Rule to the very death. I was an eyewitness of many remarkable and historic scenes when “King Carson,” as he was called in irony by Irish Home Rulers, inspected his troops, made a triumphal progress through Ulster, stirring up old fires of racial and religious hatred.
There was a good deal of play-acting about all this, and Carson was melodramatic in all his speeches and gestures, with a touch of Irving in the rendering of his pose as a grim and resolute patriot and leader of Protestant forces, but there was real passion behind it all, and the sincerity of fanaticism. If it came to the ordeal of battle, these young farmers and shopkeepers who paraded in battalions before Carson and hislieutenants, marching with good discipline, a strong and sturdy type of manhood, would fight with the courage and ruthlessness of men inspired by hatred and bigotry.
The British government pooh-poohed Carson’s “army” and described it as an unarmed rabble. But a very brief inquiry convinced me that large quantities of arms were being imported into Belfast and distributed through Ulster. There was hardly a pretense at secrecy, and the Great Western Railway authorities showed me boxes bearing large red labels with the word “Firearms” boldly printed thereon. The proprietor of one of the Belfast hotels led me down into his cellars and showed me cases of rifles stacked as high as the ceiling. He told me they came from Germany. I went round to the gunsmith shops, and I was told that they were selling cheap revolvers “like hot cakes.” There was hardly a man in Ulster who had not got a firearm of some kind or other. “It’s good for business,” said one of the gunsmiths, laughing candidly, “but one of these days the things will go off, and there will be the devil to pay. Why the British government allows it is beyond understanding.”
The British government did not acknowledge the truth of it. I made a detailed report of my investigations to Robert Donald, who passed it on to Winston Churchill, and his comment was the incredulous remark, “Gibbs has had his leg pulled.” But it was Churchill’s leg that was pulled, very badly, and he must have had a nasty shock when there were full descriptive reports of a gun-running exploit, done with perfect impunity, by the conspiracy of Ulster officers and leaders, military advisers, and men of all classes, down to the jarveys of the jaunting cars. Carson had armed his troops—with German rifles and ammunition.
In view of later history, there must have been some gentlemen of Ulster whose consciences were twinged by those dealings with Germany, and by allusions made inthe heat of political speeches to their preference for the German Emperor rather than a Home-rule House of Parliament in Dublin.
Religious fanaticism was at the back of it all in the minds of the rank and file. Catholic laborers were chased out of the shipyards by their Protestant fellow workers, and hardly a day passed without brutal assaults on them, as was proved by the list of patients in the hospitals suffering from bashed heads and bruised bodies. I saw with my own eyes gangs of Ulster Protestants fall upon Catholic citizens and kick them senseless. Needless to say, there was retaliation when the chance came, and woe betide any Ulsterman who ventured alone through the Catholic quarter.
The mediæval malignancy of this vendetta was revealed to me among a thousand other proofs by a draper’s assistant in a shop down the Royal Avenue. I was buying a collar stud or something, and recognizing me as an Englishman, he began to talk politics.
“If they try to put Home Rule over us,” he said, “I shall fight. I’m a pretty good shot, and if a Catholic shows his head, I’ll plug him.”
He pulled out a rifle, which he kept concealed behind some bundles of linen, and told me he spent his Saturday afternoons in target practice.
“What do you think of this? Good shooting, eh?”
He pulled out a handful of pennies and showed me how at so many paces (I forget the range) he had plugged the head of His Majesty, King George V. It seemed to me a queer way of proving his loyalty to the British crown and Constitution.
Carson’s way of loyalty was no less strange. By what method of logic this great lawyer could justify, as a proof of loyalty and patriotism, his raising of armed forces to resist an Act of Parliament passed by the King with the consent of the people, passes my simpleunderstanding. I can understand rebellion against the law and the Crown, for Liberty’s sake, or for passion’s sake, or for the destruction of civilization, or for the enforcement of any kind of villainy. But I cannot understand rebellion against the law and the Crown in order to prove one’s passionate loyalty to the law, and one’s ardent devotion to the King.
Nor can I understand how those who condemn the “direct action” of Labor in the way of general strikes and other methods of demanding “rights” (as Lords Carson and Birkenhead and Londonderry condemned such revolutionary threats), can uphold as splendid heroism the menace of bloody civil war by a minority which refused to accept the verdict of the government and peoples of Great Britain and Ireland.
Sir Edward Carson was an honest man, a great gentleman in his manner, a great lawyer in repute, but his blind bigotry, some dark passion in him, made him adopt a line of action which has caused much blood to flow in Ireland and made one of the blackest chapters in modern history. For it was the raising of the Ulster Volunteers which led to the raising of the Irish Republican Army, and the armed resistance to Home Rule which led to Sinn Fein, and a thousand murders. It might have led, and very nearly led to civil war in England as well as in Ireland. When the British Officers in the Curragh Camp refused to lead their troops to disarm Ulster, and resigned their commissions rather than fulfil such an order, the shadow of civil war crept rather close, and there were politicians in England who were ready to risk it, as when Winston Churchill raised the cry, “The Army versus the People.”
But another shadow was creeping over Europe, and fell with a chill horror upon the heart of England, when, as it were out of the blue sky of a summer in 1914, there came the menace of a war which would call many greatnations to arms, and deluge the fields of Europe in the blood of youth. Ireland—suffragettes—industrial unrest, how trivial and foolish even were such internal squabbles when civilization itself was challenged by this abomination!
In June of 1914—June!—there was a great banquet given in London to the editors of German newspapers, where I renewed acquaintance with a number of men whom I had met the previous year in Germany. Lord Burnham, ofThe Daily Telegraph, presided over the gathering, and made an eloquent speech, affirming the unbreakable ties of friendship between our two peoples. There were many eloquent speeches by other British journalists, expressing their admiration for German character, science, art, and social progress. A distinguished dramatic critic was emotional at the thought of the old kinship of the German and English peoples. The German editors responded with equal cordiality, with surpassing eloquence of admiration for English liberty, literature, and life. There was much handshaking, raising of glasses, drinking of toasts.... It was two months before August of 1914.
Fleet Street in the days before the declaration of war was like the nerve center of the nation’s psychology, and throbbed with all the emotions of fear, hysteria, incredulity, and patriotic fever, deadened at times by a kind of intellectual stupor, which took possession of her people.
It was self-convicted of stupendous ignorance. None of those leader writers, who for years had written with an immense assumption of knowledge, had revealed this imminence of the world conflict. Some of them had played a game of party politics with “the German menace,” and had used it as a stick for their political opponents.The Daily Mail, favoring a big navy, and more capital ships, had led the chorus of “We want eight and we won’t wait.”The Daily News, favoring disarmament, had denied the existence of any aggressive spirit in Germany. According to the political color of the newspapers, Liberal or Tory, the question of German relations had been written up by the leader writers and news had been carefully selected by the foreign news editors. But the public had never been given any clear or authoritative guidance; they had never been warned by the press as a whole, rising above the political game, that the very life of the nation was in jeopardy, and that all they had and were would be challenged to the death. Murder trials, suffragette raids, divorce court news, the social whirligig, the passionate folly in Ireland, had been the stuff with which the press had fed the public mind to the very eve of this crash into the abyss of horror.
Even now, when war was certain, the press said, “It isimpossible!” as indeed the nation did, in its little homes, because their imagination refused to admit the possibility of that monstrous cataclysm. And when war was declared, the press said, “It will be over in three months.” Indeed, men I knew in Fleet Street, old colleagues of mine, said, “It will be over in three weeks!” Their theory seemed to be that Germany had gone mad and that with England, France, and Russia attacking on all sides, she would collapse like a pricked bladder.
Looking back on that time, I find a little painful amusement in the thought of our immeasurable ignorance as to the meaning of modern warfare. We knew just nothing about its methods or machinery, nor about its immensity of range and destruction.
After the first shock and stupor, news editors began to get busy, as though this war were going to be like the South-African affair, remote, picturesque, and romantic. They appointed a number of correspondents to “cover” the various fronts. They engaged press photographers and cinema men. War correspondents of the old school, like Bennett Burleigh, H. W. Nevinson, and Frederick Villiers, called at the War Office for their credentials, collected their kit, and took riding exercise in the Park, believing that they would need horses in this war on the western front, as great generals—dear simple souls—believed that cavalry could ride through German trenches.
The War Office kept a little group of distinguished old-time war correspondents kicking their heels in waiting rooms of Whitehall, week after week, and month after month, always with the promise that wonderful arrangements would be made for them “shortly.” Meanwhile, and at the very outbreak of war, a score of younger journalists, without waiting for War Office credentials, and disobeying War Office orders, dashed over to France and Belgium, and plunged into the swirl and backwash of thisfrightful drama. Some of them had astounding and perilous adventures, in sheer ignorance, at first, of the hazards they took, but it was not long before they understood and knew, with a shock that changed their youthful levity of adventure into the gravity of men who have looked into the flames of hell, and the torture chamber of human agony. Henceforth, between them and those who had not seen, there was an impassable gulf of understanding....
Owing to the rigid refusal of the War Office, under Lord Kitchener’s orders, to give any official credentials to correspondents, the British press, as hungry for news as the British public whose little professional army had disappeared behind a deathlike silence, printed any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, any wild statement, rumor, fairy tale, or deliberate lie, which reached them from France or Belgium; and it must be admitted that the liars had a great time.
A vast amount of lying was done by newspaper men who accepted the official statements of French Ministers, hiding the frightful truth of the German advance. It was an elaboration of the Frenchcommuniquéswhich in the first weeks of the war were devoid of truth. But a great deal of imaginative lying was accomplished by young journalists, who at Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Ghent, or Paris, invented marvelous adventures of their own, exaggerated affairs of outposts into stupendous battles, and defeated the Germans time and time again in verbal victories, while the German war machine was driving like a knife into the hearts of Belgium and France.
Reading the English newspapers in those early days of the war, with their stories of starving Germany, their atrocity-mongering, their wild perversions of truth, a journalist proud of his profession must blush for shame at its degradation and insanity. Its excuse and defense lie in the psychological storm that the war created in thesoul of humanity, from which Fleet Street itself—very human—did not escape; in the natural agony of desire to find some reason for hopefulness; in the patriotic necessity of preventing despair from overwhelming popular opinion in the first shock of the enemy’s advance; and in the desperate anxiety of all men and women whose heritage and liberties were at stake, to get some glimpse behind the heavy shutters of secrecy that had been slammed down by military censorship.
I was one of those who did not wait for official permits, and plunged straightway into the vortex of the war game. In self-defense I must plead that I was not one of the liars! I did not manufacture atrocities, and had some temperamental difficulty in believing those that were true, because I believed in the decency of the common man, even in the decency of the German common man. I did not invent imaginary adventures, but found tragedy enough, and drama enough, in the things I saw, and the truth that I found. As I had two companions most of the time in those early days, whose honor is acknowledged by all who know them—H. M. Tomlinson and W. M. Massey—their evidence supported my own articles which, like theirs, revealed something to our people of the enormous history that was happening.
Strangely, as it now seems to me, I was appointed artist correspondent toThe Graphic, as I had been in the Bulgarian war, and I actually made some sketches of French mobilization and preparations for war, which were redrawn and published. But my old paper,The Daily Chronicle, desired my services and I changed over to them, and abandoned the pencil for the pen, withThe Graphic’sconsent, a few days after the declaration of war.
I had crossed over to Paris on the night the reservists had been called to the colors in England, although so far war had not been declared by England or France. Butthe fleet was cleared for action, and ready, and that night destroyers were out in the English Channel and their searchlights swept our packet boat, where groups of Frenchmen who had been clerks, hairdressers, and shop assistants in England were singing “The Marseillaise” with a kind of religious ecstasy, while in the saloon a party of Lancashire lads were getting fuddled and promising themselves “a good time” on a week-end trip to Paris, utterly unconscious of war and its realities.
InThe Daily Chronicleoffice in Paris, where I had done night duty so often, my friend and colleague, Henri Bourdin, was white to the lips with nervous emotion, and constantly answered telephonic inquiries from French journalists: “Is England coming in? Nothing official, eh? Is it certain England will come in? You think so? Name of God! why doesn’t England say the word?”
It was the consuming thought in all French minds. They were desperate for an answer to their questions. Because of the delay, Paris was suspicious, angry, ready for an outbreak of passion against the English tourists, who were besieging the railway stations, and against English journalists, who were in a fever of anxiety.
I saw the unforgetable scenes of mobilization in Paris, which made one’s very heart weep with the tragedy of those partings between men and women, who clung to each other and kissed for the last time—so many of them for the last time—and on the night of August 2nd I went with the first trainload of reservists to Belfort, Toul, and Nancy. All through the night, at every station in which the train stopped, there was the sound of marching men, and the song of “The Marseillaise”:
“Formez vos bataillons!”
The youth of France was trooping from the fields and workshops, not in ignorance of the sacrifice to which they were called, not light-heartedly, but with a simple andsplendid devotion to their country which now, in remembrance, after the years of massacre and of disillusion, still fills me with emotion....
I do not intend here to give a narrative of my own experiences of war. I have written them elsewhere, and what do they matter, anyhow, in those years when millions of men faced death daily and passed through an adventure of life beyond all power of imagination of civilized men? I will rather deal with the subject of the Press in war, and with the peculiar difficulties and work of the correspondents, especially in the early days.
For the first few months of the war we had no status whatever. Indeed, to be quite plain, we were outlaws, subject to immediate arrest (and often arrested) by any officer, French or British, who discovered us in the war zone. Kitchener refused to sanction the scheme, which had been fully prepared before the war, for the appointment of a small body of war correspondents whose honor and reputation were acknowledged, and gave orders that any journalist found in the field of war should be instantly expelled and have his passport canceled. The French were even more severe, and sent out stern orders from their General Headquarters for the arrest of any journalist found trespassing in the zone of war.
For some time, however, it was impossible to enforce these rules. The German advance through Belgium and Northern France was only a day or two, or an hour or two behind the stampede of vast populations in flight from the enemy. The roads were filled with these successive tides of refugees. The trains were stormed by panic-stricken folk, and even the troop trains found room in the corridors and on the roofs for swarms of civilians, men and women. Dressed in civilian clothes, unshaved and unwashed, like any of these people, how could a correspondent be distinguished or arrested? Who was going to bother about him? Even the spy mania whichseized France very quickly and feverishly did not create, for some time, a network of restriction close enough to catch us. I traveled for weeks in the war zone on a pass stamped by French headquarters, permitting me to receive the dailycommuniquéfrom the War Office in Paris. I had dozens of other passes andpermis de séjourfrom local authorities and police, which enabled me to travel with perfect facility, provided I was able to bluff the military guards at the railway stations, who were generally satisfied with those bunches of dirty passes and official-looking stamps. There was, too, a dual control in France, and a divergence of views regarding war correspondents. The civil authorities—prefects, mayors, and police—favored our presence, desired to let us know the suffering and heroism of their people, and welcomed us with every courtesy, because we were English and their allies. Often they turned a blind eye to military commands, or were ignorant of the orders against us.
Massey, Tomlinson, and I, working together in close comradeship, in those first weeks of war, traveled in Northern France and Belgium with what now seems to me an amazing freedom. We were caught up in the tide of flight from French and Belgian cities. We saw the retreat of the French army through Amiens, from which city we escaped only a short time before the entry of Von Kluck’s columns. We came into the midst of the British retreat at Creil, where Sir John French had set up his headquarters; mingled with the crowds of English and Scottish stragglers, French infantry and engineers, who were falling back on Paris, before the spearheads of the German invasion, with a world of tragedy behind them, yet with a faith in victory that was mysterious and sublime. We had no knowledge of the enemy’s whereabouts and set out in simple ignorance for towns already in German hands, or alighted at stations threatened with immediate capture. So it was at Beauvais, where wewere the only passengers in a train that pulled over a bridge where a cuirassier stood by bags of dynamite ready to blow it up, and where the last of the civilian population had trudged away from streets strewn with broken glass. Only by a strange spell of luck did we escape capture by the enemy, toward whose line we went, partly in ignorance of the enormous danger, partly with foolhardy deliberation, and always drugged with desire to see and know the worst or the best of this frightful drama.
We were often exhausted with fatigue. On the day we came into a deserted Paris, stricken with an agony of apprehension that the Germans would enter, I had to be carried to bed by Tomlinson and Massey, as helpless as a child. A few days later, Massey, a strong man till then, but now ashen-faced and weak, could not drag one leg after another. We had worn down our nervous strength to what seemed like the last strand, yet we went on again, in the wagons of troop trains, sleeping in corridors, the baggage rooms of railway stations, or carriages crammed with Frenchpoilus, who told narratives of war with a simplicity and realism that froze one’s blood.
We followed up the German retreat from the Marne, when the bodies of the dead were being buried in heaps and the fields were littered with the wreckage of battle, and then went north to Dunkirk, bombed every day by German aëroplanes, but crowded with Frenchfusiliers,marins, Arabs, British aviators of the Royal Navy, and Belgian refugees. Here I parted for a time with Massey and Tomlinson, and in a brief experience as a stretcher bearer with an ambulance column attached to the Belgian army, saw into the flaming heart of war, at Dixmude, Nieuport, and other places, where I became familiar with the sight of death, dirty with the blood of wounded men, and sick with the agony of this human shambles—a story which I have told in my book,The Soul of the War.
Other men, old friends of mine in Fleet Street, were having similar adventures, taking the same, or greater, hazards, dodging the military authorities with more or less luck. Hamilton Fyfe, then ofThe Daily Mailand now editor ofThe Daily Herald, was caught in a motor car by a patrol of German Uhlans, and only escaped becoming a prisoner of war by an amazing freak of fortune. George Curnock, also ofThe Daily Mail, was arrested by the French as a spy, and very nearly shot. A little group of correspondents—among them Ashmead Bartlett—were flung into theCherche Midiprison and treated for a time like common criminals. I happened to fall into conversation with a French officer, who had actually arrested them. He was strongly suspicious of me, and asked whether I knew these gentlemen, all of whose names he had in his pocket book. I admitted that I had heard of one or two of them by repute, and expected to be arrested on the spot. But this officer had been French master at an English public school and was anxious, for some reason, to get an uncensored letter to the head master. I told him I was going to England, and offered to take it.... I was not arrested that time.
Another adventurer was young Lucian Jones, son of the famous playwright, Henry Arthur Jones. He made frequent trips to the Belgian front and was one of the last to leave Antwerp after the siege, which was not a pleasant adventure when heavy shells smashed the houses on every side of him. As he made no disguise whatever of his profession and purpose, he was sent back to England and forbidden to show his face again. He took the next boat back, and was again arrested and flung into a dirty prison. His editor, who received word of his plight, sent a message to General Bridges, asking for his release, and obtained the brusque answer, “Let the fellow rot!”—only it was a stronger word than “fellow.”
One great difficulty we had in those days was to getour messages back to our newspapers. Sometimes we intrusted them to any chance acquaintance who was making his way to England. Several times we had to get back to the coast, in those terrible refugee trains, to bribe some purser on a cross-Channel steamer. When that became too dangerous—because it was strictly forbidden by the military and naval authorities—we made the journey to London, handed in our messages, and hurried back again the same day to France. The mental state of our newspaper colleagues exasperated us. They seemed to have no understanding whatever of what was happening on the other side, no conception of that world of agony. “Had a good time?” asked a sub-editor, hurrying along the corridor with proofs—and I wanted to choke him, because of his placid unconsciousness of the things that had seared my eyes and soul.
I could not bear to talk with men who still said, “It will be over in three months,” and who still believed that war was a rather jolly, romantic adventure, and that our little professional army was more than a match for the Germans who were arrant cowards and no better than sheep. In Fleet Street, at that time, there was no vision of what war meant to the women of France and Belgium, to the children of the refugees, to the mothers and fathers of the fighting men. It had not touched us closely in those first weeks of war.
My vexation was great one morning, after one of these journeys home, when I missed the train to Dover, and my good comrades Massey and Tomlinson—by just a minute. Perhaps I should never see them again. They would be lost in the vortex.
“Take a special train,” said my wife.
The idea startled me, not having the mentality or resources of a millionaire.
“It’s worth it,” said my wife, who is a woman of big ideas.
I turned to the station master, who was standing at the closed gates of the continental platform.
“How long would it take you to provide a special train?”
He smiled.
“No longer than it would take you to pay over the money.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-two pounds.”
I consulted my wife again with raised eyebrows, and she nodded.
I went into a little office, half undressed, and pulled out of my belt a pile of French gold pieces. By the time they had been counted and a receipt given—no more than three minutes—there was a train with an engine and three carriages, a driver and a guard, ready for me on the line to Dover. My small boy (as he was then) gazed in awe and admiration at the magic trick. I waved to him as the train went off with me. I was signaled all down the line, and in the stations we passed porters and officials stared and saluted as the train flashed by. Doubtless they thought I was a great general going to win the war! At Dover I was only one minute behind the express I had lost. Massey and Tomlinson were pacing the platform disconsolately at the loss of their comrade. They could not believe their eyes when I walked up and said “Hello!” So we went back to a new series of adventures.
I used with success, three times running, another method of getting my “dispatches” to Fleet Street. After the third time some intuition told me to change the plan. At that time, as all through the war, a number of King’s messengers—mostly men of high rank and reputation—traveled continually between British G.H.Q. and the War Office, with private documents from the Commander-in-Chief. Three times did I accost one of these officers—adifferent man each time—in an easy and confidential manner.
“Are you going back to Whitehall, Sir?”
“Yes. What can I do for you?”
“I shall be much obliged if you will put this letter in your bag, and deliver it at the War Office.”
“Certainly, my dear fellow!”
My letter was addressed toThe Daily Chronicle, care of the War Office, and, much to the surprise of my editor, was punctually delivered, by a War-Office messenger. But my intuition was right. After the third time the editor ofThe Daily Chroniclereceived word from the War Office that if Gibbs sent any more of his articles by King’s messenger, they would be destroyed.
The method of delivery became easier afterward, because the newspapers organized a series of their own couriers between England and France, and that system served until the whole courier service was rounded up and forbidden to set foot in France again.
It was amazing that my articles, and those of my fellow correspondents, were allowed to appear in the newspapers, in spite of military prohibition. But the press censorship, which had been set up by the government under the control of F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, was not under direct military authority, and was much more tolerant of correspondents who evaded military regulations. I wrote scores of columns during the first few months of the war, mostly of a descriptive character, and very few lines were blacked out by the censors. So far from being in the black books of the press censorship as established at that time, I was sent for by F. E. Smith, who thanked me for my narratives and promised to give personal attention to any future dispatches I might send. This was at the very time when Kitchener himself gave orders for my arrest, after reading a long article of mine from the Belgian front.
I was also received several times by Sir William Tyrrell, Secretary to the Foreign Office, who questioned me about my knowledge of the situation and begged me to call on him whenever I came back, although he knew that orders had been given to cancel my passport and that I was in the black book, for immediate arrest, at any port. It was Sir William Tyrrell, indeed, who, with great kindness provided me with a new passport after I had fallen into very hot water indeed.
It was F. E. Smith who read, approved, and even strengthened by a phrase or two, a sensational dispatch written by my friend Hamilton Fyfe and a colleague named Moore, which revealed for the first time to the British nation the terrible ordeal and sacrifice of the little Regular Army in the retreat from Mons. It was too sensational, perhaps, in its account of “broken divisions,” and “remnants of battalions”; and its tone was too tragic and despairing, so that there was one black Sunday in England which will never be forgotten by those who lived through it, because there seemed no hope for the British Army, or for France.
As it happened, Massey, Tomlinson, and I had covered the same ground as Fyfe and his companion, had seen the same things, and had agonized with the same apprehension. But owing largely, as I must honestly and heartily say, to the cool judgment and fine faith of Tomlinson, our deduction from those facts and the spirit of what we wrote was far more optimistic—and future history proved us to be right—so that they helped to restore confidence in England and Scotland, when they appeared on Monday morning, following Fyfe’s terrible dispatch.
But Fyfe did a great service to the nation and the Allies, by the truth he told, somewhat overcolored as it was. It awakened Great Britain from its false complacency. It revealed to the nation, for the first time, the awful truth that our little Regular Army, magnificentas it was, could not withstand the tremendous weight of the German advance on the left flank of the French, was not sufficient to turn the scales of victory in favor of France, and was in desperate need of reinforcements from the untrained manhood at home. It shook the spirit of England like an earthquake, and brought it face to face with the menace of its life and liberties. For if France went down, we should follow.... The recruiting booths were stormed by the young manhood of England and Scotland, who had not joined up because they had believed that myth: “The war will be over in three months.”
There was tremendous anger in the War Office at the publication of that article by Fyfe and Moore, and F. E. Smith, as the press censor, was severely compromised.
The truth was that the military mind was obsessed with the necessity of fighting this war—“our war” as the regulars called it—in the dark, while the nonmilitary mind knew that such a policy was impossible, and might be disastrous, in a war costing such a frightful sum of life, and putting such a strain upon the nation’s heart and spirit.
Looking back on my experiences as an unauthorized correspondent in that early part of the war, I must confess now that I was hardly justified in evading military law, and that I might have been found guilty, justly, of a serious crime against the Allied cause. By some frightful indiscretion (which I did not commit) I or any other of those correspondents might have endangered the position of our troops, or the French army, by giving information useful to the enemy.
The main fault, however, lay with the War Office, and especially with Lord Kitchener, whose imagination did not realize that this war could not be fought in the dark, as some little affair with Indian hillmen on the northwest frontier. The immense anxiety of the nation, with its army fighting behind the veil while the fate of civilizationhung in the balance, could not and would not be satisfied with the few lines of officialcommuniquéswhich told nothing and hid the truth....
Gradually the net was drawn tighter, until, in the first months of 1915, it was impossible for any correspondent to travel in the war zone without arrest. I had come home to get a change of kit, as my clothes were caked with blood and mud, after supporting wounded men in Belgium. It was then that I heard of Kitchener’s orders for my arrest and was greeted with surprise and apprehension by Robert Donald and the staff ofThe Daily Chronicle, who had sent over two messengers (who had never reached me) to warn me of my peril.
Next time I went to France I was provided with wonderful credentials as a special commissioner of the British Red Cross, with instructions to report on the hospital and medical needs of the army in the field. These documents were signed by illustrious names, and covered with red seals. I was satisfied they would pass me to any part of the front.... I was arrested before I left the boat at Havre and taken by two detectives to General Williams, the camp commander. He raged at me with an extreme violence of language, took possession of my passport and credentials, and put me under open arrest at the Hotel Tortoni, in charge of six detectives. Here I remained for ten days or so, unable to communicate my ignominious situation to the authorities of the Red Cross, upon whose authority I had come. Fortunately I became good friends with the detectives, who were excellent fellows, and with whom I used to have my meals. It was by the kindness of one of them that I was able to send through a message to the editor ofThe Daily Chronicle, and shortly afterward General Williams graciously permitted me to return to England.
It looked as though my career as a war correspondent had definitely closed. I had violated every regulation. Ihad personally angered Lord Kitchener. I was on the black books of the detectives at every port, and General Williams solemnly warned me that if I returned to France, I would be put up against a white wall, with unpleasant consequences.
Strange as it appears, the military authorities blotted out my sins when at last they appointed five official war correspondents with a recognized status in the British armies on the Western Front. No longer did I have to dodge staff officers, and disguise myself as a refugee. In khaki, with a green armlet denoting my service, I could face generals, and even the Commander-in-Chief himself, without a quiver, and with my four comrades was recognized as an officer and a gentleman, with some reservations.