[image]King George V.Englishmen excuse, rather than blame, the King. They point out, in his extenuation, that George's is a gentle, self-effacing nature little fitted for the soul-stirring era in the midst of which Fate decreed that his reign should fall. They cast no aspersions on his rugged patriotism or even on his kingly zeal. They believe that, according to his lights, he exercises faithfully what he considers to be his prerogatives. They feel, they tell you, that it is not his fault that he remains the only man in the Kingdom who still wears a Prince Albert coat. His is, somehow, not the magnetic influence which, if it were that of Edward VII, would still be condemning Englishmen to cling to that ancient robe. They explain that it is his psychic misfortune, rather than a failing, that nobody thinks it worth while to emulate him by taking the pledge "for the duration of the war" and drinking barley-water. Edward VII's abstemious decree would have blotted the liquor trade out of existence, because in the lap of his example sat militant loyalty. The "old King's" wish was law.Perhaps--I do not know--George V is wiser than men think. Perhaps he is not being kept in cotton-wool by his Victorian private secretary. Perhaps he is not yielding as supinely as many people imagine to the inflexible mandates of constitutionalism. Perhaps he has his ear closer to the ground than his contemporaries realize, and with it hears the far-off but unmistakable rumbles of the limitlessly democratized Britain which is already emerging from the crucible of war. Perhaps injustice is done to him by those who accuse him of not rising more vigorously to the opportunities of his Empire's hour of destiny. May he not be fitting himself still to sit the throne in that coming day when Britain will perhaps want even a more constitutional ruler than ermine and the crown now rest upon?CHAPTER XVIIYOUR KING AND COUNTRY WANT YOU"Luna Park," in Berlin, once had an English manager and an American "publicity agent." In pursuit of his lime-light duties the transatlantic hustler, who had been engaged because he was such, reported to the manager one day that he had accomplished a feat on which he had been plodding for weeks. The owners of a building which commanded the most prominent view in Berlin had finally consented to let "Luna Park" affix a gigantic electric flash-light sign to the roof."It will be the greatest thing of the kind ever seen in Germany," exclaimed the enthusiast from the U.S.A. "They'll allow us to have 'Luna Park' in letters twenty feet high across a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot front, and you'll be able to see 'em a mile away!"He expected his British superior fairly to jump for joy. But this is what he said:"Quite so. But don't you think that will be a bit conspicuous?"When I returned to London on September 24, after four short, strenuous weeks in the United States, I found Englishmen dominated seemingly by a genuine fear that the war might become "a bit conspicuous." It was true that stupendous things had happened in the interval. Namur, "the impregnable," had melted before the merciless German 42's like the other Belgian fortresses. Brussels was in the enemy's hands, unscotched, thanks to the intervention of the American Minister, Brand Whitlock, and through it were passing apparently endless streams of gray-clad Germans bound for Antwerp and the sea. France had been overrun, regardless of the cost in Teuton blood, Lille and the industrial provinces were securely held, and, although the Crown Prince and von Kluck had been gloriously repulsed in their frenzied dash on Paris, the capital had all but resounded to the clatter of Uhlan hoofs, and Bordeaux was still regarded a far safer seat of Government. England herself had lived through hours of anxious crisis blacker than any within the memory of the living generation. At Mons, as official reports disclosed, the gallant little British army narrowly escaped annihilation. As it was, it lost hideously in killed and wounded. Gaping holes had been ripped in the ranks of famous regiments, and the Expeditionary Force, within six weeks of its landing, was already sadly mangled. Sir John French stirred the nation with his dispatch on the retreat from Mons and told how his army, though hurriedly concentrated by rail only two days before, had tenaciously withstood, in the dogged British way, the combined attack of five crack German corps. In the subsequent fighting which beat the Germans on the Marne and saved Paris, British soldiers, battered and battle-scarred as they were, had done even more than their share. Two days before arrival in Liverpool theCampaniawireless--I returned to England in the same veteran hulk which had taken me to America in August--brought the dread tidings of the submarining of cruisersAboukir, CressyandHoguein the Channel by theU9andWeddigen, with cruelly heavy sacrifice of British lives.All these things had happened, and yet London was unshaken. She had been "a bit uneasy," my English friends conceded, in the days and nights when the fate of Paris and Sir John French's army seemed to be in doubt, and theU9'sfeat had "cost us three obsolete boats," but the Germans were checked now, and the worst was over. Churchill was sending a British naval expedition to Belgium to save Antwerp, and what was the use of worrying, anyhow? Kitchener's army was filling up with recruits by the thousand, and England's motto was "Business as Usual."Yea, verily, Britain was pursuing the even tenor of her imperturbable way. The Savoy, at supper after theater, glittered with all its old-time flare. The tables were thronged in the same old way with gaily-clad women, romping chorus-girls, monocled "nuts" with hair plastered straight back, opulent stock-brokers, theatrical celebrities and all the other familiar people about town. The band interpolatedTipperarya little oftener between rag-time one-steps and fox-trots, and lordlings and other bloods in khaki gave a new tinge to the picture, but otherwise it was night-time London "as usual." The theaters and music-halls were full. At Murray's and the Four Hundred--those dens of revelry called "night clubs," invented for law-respecting English who can afford five guineas a year for the privilege of wining, supping and dancing after the Acts of Parliament send ordinary people to bed--you could hardly wedge your way in. At the Carlton or the Piccadilly, or for the matter of that at any other popular resort in all London, you found yourself lucky to locate a single unpreempted place. Wherever you went or turned, whomever you saw, it was dear old London "as usual." If you were an impulsive, excitable, sentimental American and thought you were mildly rebuking your British friends when you ventured to wonder at the extraordinary naturalness of life in the West End, or at Walton Heath golf links, or at Chelsea football grounds, or at the Newmarket race-course, you found yourself unconsciously paying a tribute to "British character." For John Bull, far from being ashamed of adhering religiously to peace-time activities, was positively proud of the exhibition of "reserve" and "poise" and "calmness" which he was now giving. People talked about the war, of course. They hardly mentioned anything else. But if you had the patience to listen to their airy, fairy converse, you soon gathered that they spoke of it exclusively as something about which no self-respecting Englishman or woman purposed for a solitary moment to get indecorously agitated. There were even people who confessed that the war was beginning to "bore" them.As for myself, I had a go at British acquaintances from two entirely different standpoints. In the first place, fresh from America, where the war had burnt into people's minds as deeply almost as if it were their own destiny which was at stake, I was still filled with the energizing atmosphere omnipresent there. I remembered how even our puny war with Spain had gripped the nation's thought and concentrated it to the exclusion of all else. I could not, for the life of me, understand how Englishmen, with the history of the preceding eight weeks before them, could still look upon "business as usual" as the desideratum for which the moment insistently called. I knew, I thought, how Americans would feel and act at such an hour; and as I had in my time dozed through many after-dinner speeches about the "kindred ideals" and "identical habits of thought" which so indissolubly bound the English-speaking nations, I ventured to marvel, and even at times to swear, at the spectacle of national nonchalance which Britain at the beginning of October, 1914, so resolutely presented. It was magnificent, but it was not war.In the second place, I was conscious, with the knowledge and conviction of a long-time eye-witness, of both the visible and the dormant strength of Germany. I had written literally reams, during the preceding eight years, about Teuton preparations on land, in the air and on the sea. I had discussed the German War Party, its leaders and its literature, its aspirations and its plans, till I often grew weary of the task, not so much because pacifist critics in England pilloried me as a war-monger and an alarmist, but because there was a monotony in that sort of news about Germany which strained even the patience of those whose duty it was to report it. When Englishmen now told me, as so many of them did, that they would "muddle through this show," as they had "muddled through" in South Africa and on all the other occasions in Britain's martial past, I grew sick at heart. I knew, as everybody who had lived in Germany between 1904 and 1914 and kept his ears and eyes open knew, that "muddling through" would never beat the Germans, even if it had finally overcome the Boers. I knew, and anybody really acquainted with the Germans knew, that they would not be vanquished so long as there was a man or a mark with which to fight. I knew that nothing short of the supreme effort which the British Empire and its Allies could put forth would suffice to overcome the most highly-organized and efficiently patriotic people which had ever gone to war. I knew that the German General Staff and the other war-makers of the Fatherland had long reckoned, in the emergency of a struggle with England, on the very thing of which my eyes were now witness--British reluctance to shake off the shackles of ease and comfort and buckle down, a nation in arms, to the inconvenient and grim realities of war. Of these things I thought, and the reflection was disquieting, as I saw the mad whirl of light, frivolity and care-free joy which the Savoy at supper-time, plainly epitomizing London life at the moment, presented night after night. "Business as usual!" It was small comfort my English friends provided, when, remonstrating with me for my foolish solicitude, they assured me that my misgivings were misplaced because I was hopelessly ignorant of "the British character."England, it was obvious, was like the manager of "Luna Park" in Berlin. She was afraid the war might become "a bit conspicuous," and was, moreover, determined that it should not. I remember well the crushing rebuke administered to me by a Britisher of international renown when I intruded my view of all these things. I had offered, in a desire to hold the mirror up to Nature and let Londoners see how they looked to foreigners at so transcendent a moment in their national existence, to produce a little article entitled "What an American Thinks of the English in War-Time." I even went to the length of putting my thoughts on paper and submitting the manuscript. I did so with considerable confidence, because the celebrity in question is a notorious "Wake Up, England!" man. But he returned my masterpiece with a look and gesture mingling pity and contempt for my wretched unfamiliarity with "the British character.""My dear Wile," he explained, "you do not understand us. You forget that this war is not an American World's Championship baseball series. You mustn't try to foist transatlantic brass-band methods on us. It is not the British way."Lest I convey the impression that I had advocated rousing the British lion from his slumbers by wild and woolly western methods palpably unsuited to his stoical temperament, let me make haste to explain that I was pleading for nothing but a system which would, spectacularly if necessary, do something to let the British public at least know that they had a war on their hands, and popularize it. A great contingent of Indian troops, led by Maharajahs and Rajputs, Maliks, Rajahs and Jams, had arrived in Europe, tarried in England and been slipped, in the dead of a Channel night, across to France. An entire army from Canada was encamped on Salisbury Plain, and no one had seen a sign of it except an occasional detachment of boisterous subalterns, many with a pronounced "American accent," who had kicked up a row in some Leicester Square music-hall the night before. The Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square was desecrated with recruiting circus-bills which would have delighted the heart of Barnum, and every taxicab wind-shield in town beseeched passers-by to "enlist for the duration of the war." But why, I had had the temerity to inquire in my little "Wake Up, England!" homily, which was rejected because it revealed no insight into "British character," were not the turbaned Gurkhas and the swarthy Sikhs and the brown men from Punjab and Beluchistan brought to London-town and paraded up and down the Strand and the Embankment, for all the metropolis to have a priceless object-lesson in Imperial patriotism? Why was Kitchener allowed to intern the young giants in khaki from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia in the hidden recesses of the provinces, instead of giving Londoners a glimpse of Colonial love of mother country in the flesh? It was due to the Indians and to the Canadians themselves, no less than to London, I argued, that opportunity should be provided to pay homage to the men who had crossed the seas to fight for Motherland. Non-British though I am, I felt morally certain that even my Hoosier bosom would swell with emotion in the presence of so ocular a demonstration of Britain's Imperial solidarity in the day of trial. But my suggestions were rejected as unbecomingly boisterous in their intent, good enough for the Polo Grounds or Madison Square Garden, but grotesquely out of place in England. If carried out, you see, they would inevitably have made the war "a bit conspicuous."[image]Kitchener's armyThat the war was almost invisibly hidden, as far as the daily life of the people was concerned, was primarily due to the bureaucratic and autocratic methods of the censorship. Bureaucracy and autocracy in Germany, for instance, have their redeeming qualities. They are usually highly efficient, and their arrogance and high-handedness are tolerated because accompanied by a maximum of practical effectiveness. When England established her war censorship, she went over to bureaucracy and autocracy, as made in Germany, but lamentably lacking in the saving graces of the system as there exemplified. In vain the Press, now muzzled almost as effectually as if the Magna Charta and free speech had never existed, stormed and fumed against the tyranny of the "Press Bureau," the innocuous title chosen for the Juggernaut which, before six months had passed, was to grind British journalistic liberties into the dust. It was discovered that the "Bureau" was staffed for the most part by amiable gentlemen no longer fit for active duty in the army and navy, who, having patriotically offered their services to King and country, had been pitchforked indiscriminately into billets which clothed them with more real influence on the war than if they had commanded armies or fleets. It became painfully apparent that news of the war was being suppressed, mutilated and generally mismanaged either by military men who knew nothing of journalism, or by journalists who were profoundly ignorant of military matters--for the official censor caused it to be announced, in self-defense, that he had associated with the Bureau in an advisory capacity a couple of eminent ex-editors.Just who was responsible for annihilating the elementary rights of the British Press never became quite clear. Some blamed Kitchener. His hostility to journalists and journalism was notorious, though "With Kitchener to Khartoum," by the most distinguished special correspondent of our time, the late G. W. Steevens, who died inThe Daily Mail'sservice during the South African war, probably did as much to give "K." a reputation as anything which England's War Minister ever did in the field. Others said Joffre was the man who had put the lid on. Whoever laid down the law saw that it was relentlessly enforced. Petitions, protests, cajolings, threats, complaints, abuse--all were in vain. The antics of the "Press Bureau" became more exasperating and inexplicable from day to day. Also more domineering, if common report could be believed, for presently Fleet Street heard that "K." had intimated to a mighty newspaper magnate that if the latter did not mend his ways, and abate his insistence, "K." had the power, and would not shrink from using it, to incarcerate even a peer of the realm in the Tower and turn his entire "plant" into junk. That dire threat, I imagine, was just one of the myriad of chatterbox rumors with which the air in England, all through the war, fairly sizzled. At any rate, it failed utterly to curb the stormy petrel to terrorize whom it was said to have been uttered, for his onslaughts on the censorship grew, instead of diminishing, in intensity as the "war in the dark" proceeded.But it was in its treatment of news destined for the United States that the Press Bureau most convincingly revealed its lack of imagination. Here was Germany leaving no stone unturned to take American sympathy by storm. The Bernstorff-Dernburg-Münsterberg campaign was in full blast. Von Wiegand in Berlin was interviewing the Crown Prince and Princess, von Tirpitz and von Bernhardi, Zeppelin, Hindenburg and Falkenhayn, and only narrowly escaped interviewing the Kaiser himself. American correspondents arriving in Germany were received with open arms, and had but to ask, in order to receive. Sometimes they received without asking. They could see anybody and go anywhere. That was German efficiency--and imagination--at work. The Germans realized that we are a newspaper-reading community. They knew that the best way in the world to win American newspapers' and American newspapermen's sympathy is to give them news. So they did it. When the German Crown Prince told the correspondent of the United Press that he would "love" to see American baseball, that he longed to hunt big game in Alaska, and that Jack London was his favorite author, he broke a lance for the Fatherland's cause in the United States that a four-hundred-fifty-paged "unhuman" British White Paper could never hope to equal. Somebody with an imagination--probably Bernstorff--had put a flea in Berlin's ear, and the result was open-house for American journalists for the duration of the war.What was happening in London? There were plenty of American newspapermen on the ground, not only special correspondents who had come over to join the British army in the field, like Will Irwin, "Bell" Shepherd, Alexander Powell, Arthur Ruhl, or Frederick Palmer, to name only a few of them, but resident London correspondents who had lived in England a dozen years, like Edward Price Bell of theChicago Daily News, Ernest Marshall of theNew York Times, or James M. Tuohy of theNew York World, who were well known to the British authorities as men of judgment, integrity and responsibility. But resident or newcomer, nothing but inconsequential facilities or the cold shoulder awaited them when they went to the Press Bureau, cap in hand, to ask even the most rudimentary professional courtesies for themselves or their papers. Quite apart from the indignities thus heaped on American correspondents, the Press Bureau, when it suppressed or butchered their dispatches, left pitiably out of account the susceptibilities of the great neutral news-devouring community which these men represented. Therein lay the real infamy. Think of it. Here was Great Britain and her Government confessedly anxious for American moral support in the war, and something more than that, and yet a subordinate department seemed clothed with authority to flout, exasperate and bully the agency directly responsible for the production of public sentiment in the United States. I call it a tremendous tribute to the sincerity and depth of our loyalty to the Allies' cause that we never for a moment allowed it to waver, even in the face of the British Press Bureau's arrant provocation. The American Press, asking for bread in England, received a stone. That it accepted it, and went on playing the Allies' game, has been one of the miracles of the war, for which these British Isles have reason to be profoundly grateful.[image]5 Questions to those who employ male servantsInherent imperturbability and unimaginative censorship thus combined in the early weeks of the war, on the one hand to minimize popular conceptions of the struggle's magnitude in England, and on the other to smother enthusiasm for it. You can not fully realize the immensity of the task if you are not permitted by your overlords to see it in its true proportions. You can certainly not become ecstatic about it if they insist on having it painted in exclusively drab, routine and joy-killing tints, when they are not covering it up altogether. Yet British patriotism was triumphing over all these natural and artificial handicaps. Kitchener was not only calling for five hundred thousand volunteers, but intimated that he would soon be asking for another five hundred thousand. He was getting them. London and the provinces were now plastered with recruiting posters, calling in compelling language for soldiers. "Your King and Country Need You!" Thus ran the most direct and frank appeal. By the tens of thousands men answered it. The desecrating bill-board which we know in America is an unknown excrescence in the British Isles, but, for the purposes of advertising for men for "Kitchener's Army," practically every vacant space in the Kingdom was now turned into a hoarding. The base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square was splashed red, white and blue, black and yellow, green and orange, and every other shade capable of lending distinction to an eye-arresting poster. The great hotels and theaters, banks, government offices, and even churches, turned their walls and windows over to Kitchener's advertising department for recruiting-bills, and occasionally themselves put up huge signs across their most imposing facades with such legends as:TO ARMS! RALLY ROUND THE FLAG!TO ARMS! YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!TO ARMS! ENLIST AT ONCE FOR THE WAR ONLY!orTO-DAY, YOUNG MAN, YOU ARE NEEDEDTO FIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S DEFENSE!FALL IN! JOIN THE ARMY AT ONCE!orMEN OF BRITAIN, UPHOLD YOUR COUNTRY'SHONOR AND LIBERTY! SERVE WITHYOUR FRIENDS!or you would read what the King had said:"NO PRICE CAN BE TOO HIGH WHENHONOR AND LIBERTY ARE AT STAKE."Even the fences of the parks, the windows and sides of the omnibuses and the wind-shields of the taxicabs reminded men every hour of the day and night that "Your King and Country Need You."I recall, with amusement, how "scandalized" some Americans were at England's resort to "circus methods" to manufacture an army. I remember that pert (and extremely pretty) young Chicago newspaper-woman who, having come over from Paris which had not needed to advertise for an army, because France had one, was mortified beyond words to find London screaming with "Your-King-and-Country-Need-You" sign literature. She was so stirred by this "undignified exhibition" that she sat down before she had been in town forty-eight hours and dashed off to her paper just what she thought about "degenerate Britain." She was convinced that a nation so "hopelessly unpatriotic" that it had to advertise for defenders was "doomed." Her erudite observations made a deep impression on her editors, who, in a learned editorial asked gravely whether the British Empire was "reaching the Diocletian period of the Romans."[image]4 Questions to the Women of EnglandAs a matter of fact, Kitchener's project to advertise for an army was the one ray of imagination, and a boundlessly encouraging one, which the War Office had so far revealed. It showed even more imagination in entrusting the technique of the scheme to a professional, Mr. Hedley F. Le Bas, who, besides bringing to the task the expert knowledge of a publisher, had once been a trooper in the 15th Hussars, and knew and loved the army. Mr. Le Bas modestly disclaims credit for originating the plan to create an army of millions by advertisement. He says that the Duke of Wellington beat him to it. A hundred years ago, when England was at grips with the oppressor of that day, a poster appeal for soldiers was issued, which isprima facieevidence that advertising is not a modern invention. Only a few Englishmen, and probably still fewer Americans, are aware that even in Napoleonic times advertising for an army wasde rigueur, and as the invitation to "The Warriors of Manchester" was, to a certain extent, the spiritual inspiration of Kitchener's remarkable recruit-getting campaign, I make no apologies, despite its raciness, for reproducing on the following page a document of genuinely historical value.The methods to which the American Democracy has resorted to secure soldiers for her wars were also in the minds of Lord Kitchener and Mr. Le Bas. Indeed, the practises of President Lincoln, in respect of raising armies, were the model to which the British Government from the start determined to adhere. It was discovered that Lincoln and Seward had not shrunk from appealing to the men of the North from the hoardings and through the newspapers, while the advertisements of the United States army and navy during the Spanish-American War were a modern example of recruiting measures in a country where the absence of conscription compels a Government, in the hour of emergency, to scrape an army together by hook or crook. Then the constant advertising by our War and Navy departments, even in peace-times, proved that there must be efficacy in asking men to serve their country in posters, magazines or newspaper-columns in which they were also being persuasively urged to buy automobiles, "quality" clothes or shaving-sticks. Kitchener's "advertising campaign" was destined, before the war was old, to be the target of bitter attack, but the skill, persistence and comprehensiveness with which it was prosecuted played an immense rôle in the creation of the greatest volunteer army in history. It opened a new epoch in advertising and clothed that art with a distinction which will never be taken from it. The seal of an Empire has been placed on the maxim that it pays to advertise.[image]To the Warriors of Manchester.By the end of October, after three months of war, the muster of the British Empire was in full progress. Complacency and nonchalance in London were still wretchedly wide-spread, but the call of the Motherland for soldiers was echoing around the world. Wherever Britons were domiciled, it was answered. It penetrated into far-off British Columbia, where young Englishmen, comfortably settled in new existences, abandoned them unhesitatingly. It was heard in even more distant climes, like Australia, New Zealand and Africa, where adventurous spirits who had crossed the seas to seek their fortunes in lands of promise were now dominated by no other ambition than to "do their bit" for King and country. Even emigrated Irishmen, long irreconcilable, were electrified by John Redmond's clarion message, and they, too, turned their faces homeward. By the ides of November whole shiploads of repatriated Britons, returning from the four points of the compass, reached the island shores, fired by one consuming purpose.These home-coming patriots were not only rendering valiant service by placing their lives at the King's disposal, but they were demonstrating, along with native-born Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians and Indians, that one of Germany's fondest dreams was the hollowest of fantasies. I had been familiar for years with a German political literature based on the roseate theory that, once Great Britain was embroiled in a great European war, her world-wide Empire would crack and tumble like a house of cards in a holocaust. Had not Sir Wilfred Laurier on a famous occasion declared that Canada would never be "drawn into the vortex of European militarism"? Were not the Boers thirsting restlessly for revenge and the hour of deliverance from the British yoke? Were not Republican sentiments notoriously rife in Australia and New Zealand, and would not Labor Governments in those remote regions seize eagerly on coveted opportunity to snap the silken cords which bound them to England, and declare their independence? Would not India, the enslaved Empire of the vassal Rajahs, leap at the throat of an England preoccupied in Europe and drive the tyrant into the sea? These were the thoughts which were discussed by Teuton political seers as something more than things which Germany merely desired and hoped for. They were treated as axiomatic certainties. The rally round the Union Jack by the Britons of Australia and New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, Nova Scotia and Jamaica, Barbadoes and Ceylon, British Guiana and Mauritius, Newfoundland and New Brunswick, was Germany's great illusion. When the "conquered Boers" under Botha, the "alienated Irish" under Redmond, the "rebellious Indians" under maharajahs and princes, even the "downtrodden" black Basutos, Barotses, Masai and Maoris of Africa and Australasia under their native chieftains, announced that they, too, were ready to bleed for the Empire, Germany's awakening was rude and complete. London might be callous, pleasure-loving and unperturbed. But the Empire was alive both to the peril and the duty of the hour, and when it vowed to face the one and absolve the other an oath was sworn which spelled British invincibility.CHAPTER XVIIIWAR IN THE DARKIt is November, 1914. Britain is waking, but is far from awake. Nearly everybody and everything are proud to be "as usual." The Fleet has been able to secure but one action with the Germans--Beatty's smashing blow at the Kaiser's cruiser squadron in the bight of Heligoland. A great trophy of the engagement is in hand--Admiral von Tirpitz' son, watch-officer in the Mainz, a prisoner in Wales. For a month and more the war has been raging furiously in the west all the way from the Alps to the North Sea. Antwerp is taken, after a farce-comedy attempt at relief by levies of raw British naval reserves. Joffre is at sanguinary grips with the "Boches" in the Aisne country. The twelve or fifteen miles of British front in the northernmost corner of France and that patch of Flanders not yet in the enemy's hands is the scene of ceaseless, desperate combat. Jellicoe's dreadnoughts and destroyers take part at intervals in the grim battle for the channel coast. Ostend has fallen.The German objective farthest west is now clear. The Berlin newspapers head-line the tidings from Flanders "the Road to Calais." Major Moraht in theTageblattacknowledges that the campaign for the base from which Napoleon essayed to invade England is "a matter of life or death" for the Germans. Sir John French and the remnant of Belgium's little army steel themselves for a stone-wall defense. Again and again they keep the frenzied enemy at bay. Have you ever seen Harvard holding the Yale eleven on the five-yard line three minutes before the call of time in the last half, with dark gathering so fast that you could hardly distinguish crimson from blue? Do you remember Yale's ferocious first, second, third, yet always vain, attempts to batter and plunge her way through Harvard's concrete, immobile phalanx? If you do, and if your red-blooded heart has tingled at some such spectacle of young American bulldoggedness, which can be seen West as well as East, in the North and in the South, just as commonly as in the New Haven bowl, you will be able to visualize, infinitesimally, the titanic grapple around Dixmude, Ypres and the Yser in the bloody days and hellish nights of October and November, 1914. "The Watch in the Mud" was the way German military critics paraphrased their national anthem, to describe the situation in Flanders, for the Belgians had now flooded the region contiguous to the Yser Canal, and the Kaiser's legions, in their breathless thrust for Calais, were fighting in mire and slush to their boot-tops. More than one company ofFeldgrauerwas ingloriously drowned.The British were engaged in precisely the operation for which their temperament best fits them--"holding." The German attack rocked against them remorselessly, giving neither assailant nor defender rest or quarter. But the bulldog "held." He was mauled unconscionably and bled profusely. Thousands upon thousands of his teeth were knocked out, and he was half-blind, and limped. Yet he "held." Winter had come. Men lived in trenches which had been merely water-logged ditches, but were now frozen into rock. The German eagle, hammered, of course, no less cruelly than the bulldog, was still screaming and clawing, in his mad desire to cleave a way to Calais. But, mangled and scarred as he was, the bulldog barked "No!" He had set his squatty bow-legs, disjointed though they were, squarely across "the Road to Calais." There he intended to stay. It could be traversed, that road, only through a welter of blood which, regardless as German commanders are of the cost when they set themselves an objective, gave the General Staff at Berlin furiously to ponder.I have already intimated that Britain all this tempestuous while was rubbing her eyes, but was only partially open-eyed. It was not altogether Britain's fault. The immutable Censorship still gave the public no real glimmer of the history-making struggle going on almost within ear-shot of the chalk-cliffs of Dover. Throughout the entire month of October, four weeks as crammed with death and glory as in all England's martial history, Sir John French was permitted to take the public into his confidence but on one single occasion--and that, a dispatch dealing with operations six weeks old! For its news of the heroic deeds and Spartan sufferings of the greatest army it ever sent abroad, the British Empire was compelled to depend on stilted Frenchcommuniquesand the fantastic or irrelevant narratives of an official "eye-witness at British Headquarters," who was allowed to bamboozle the nation for months before his flow of mediocrity and piffle was choked off by disgruntled public opinion. England was fighting her greatest war in Cimmerian darkness. Casualty lists, terrible in their regularity and magnitude, kept on coming, but of the coincident imperishable triumphs of British sacrifice and courage, not a word. One'sIllustrated London NewsandSphereprinted depressing double-pages weekly, filled with pictures of England's masculine flower killed in action "somewhere in France" or "somewhere in Flanders." But of the manner in which their precious lives had been laid down, of the price they had made the Germans pay for them, not a syllable. If by accident some correspondent or newspaper secured the account of an engagement, which ventured so much as to hint with some picturesqueness of detail how Englishmen were dying, the Press Bureau guillotine came down on the narrative with a crash which taught the offender to mend his ways for the future.Under the circumstances it was not surprising to hear well-founded reports that recruiting was falling off. In the clubs men said that Kitchener's "first half-million" was in hand, but that men for the second five hundred thousand, for which the War Office had now called, were holding back to a disappointing, and even disquieting, degree. Meantime the popular ballad of the hour was, appropriately, Paul Rubens' "Your King and Country Want You"--"a women's recruiting song," as its sub-title runs. Its opening verse and chorus tell their own story:We've watched you playing cricketAnd every kind of game.At football, golf and polo,You men have made your name.But now your country calls youTo play your part in war,And no matter what befalls you,We shall love you all the more.So, come and join the forcesAs your fathers did before.CHORUSOh! We don't want to lose you,But we think you ought to go.For your King and your CountryBoth need you so!We shall want you, and miss you,But with all our might and mainWe shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you,When you come back again!These words, in prosaic type, look banal. Their appeal seems trite. Yet rendered to plaintive melody by such an operatic artist as little Maggie Teyte, they went straight to men's hearts. They must have sent thousands upon thousands of cricketers, footballers, golfers and poloists--that is a classification which takes in pretty nearly all Englishmen--into khaki and training-camps. But the growing insistence with which the walls and windows of Old England were plastered with recruiting posters--even entire front pages of newspapers were now employed to advertise that "Your King and Country Need You"--indicated that Kitchener's army was not being built up yet by the desired leaps and bounds. Obviously the war needed some other kind of advertising than even the accomplished Mr. Le Bas could give it. It was not strange that the enthusiasm of Englishmen, cheated of the chance to know what was really going on at the front, was beginning to find expression in other directions.[image]Greeting the Kaiser (in helmet) the day he declared Germany "in a state of war," July 31st, 1914.It was not magnificent, for example, but it was natural, that Englishmen should, in all the circumstances, reveal a very materialistic passion to "capture Germany's trade." Denied the opportunity of "enthusing" over events at the seat of war, they proceeded to dedicate themselves energetically to the task of eliminating the Germans as a factor in the markets of the world. A profound book on the subject appeared--The War on German Trade, with the sub-titles of "Ammunition for Civilians" and "Hints for a Plan of Campaign." My old friend, Sidney Whitman, the distinguished author ofImperial Germany, dignified it with a preface. England had not entered upon the war "in a commercial spirit or with a commercial purpose," he said, "yet it behooves her to seize and hold fast the ripe fruit which has dropped into Englishmen's lap--as a first incident in the clash of nations." The volume had frankly been published, explained Whitman, "with the purpose of stimulating the English manufacturer and the English trader to seize the opportunities thrust upon them by the war."Then, as the Censorship, as callous to criticism and abuse as if it were a sphinx, still insisted that Englishmen must fight and die in the dark, as far as their kith and kin were concerned, patriotism at home found vent in a crusade against the Germans still at large on British soil. They numbered thousands. They were a distinct and undeniable danger. In days of peace they spied patriotically and flagrantly, thanks to John Bull's easy-going, guileless toleration of the stranger within his gate. Personally I never believed that the German waiters and barbers in the Savoy or the Carlton, and their myriad ofconfrèreselsewhere in the country, were the advance guard of the German army of invasion in disguise. Nor did I imagine (as I actually made a very British friend once seriously believe) that Appenrodt's restaurants in the Strand and Piccadilly were in reality masked commissariat-stations of the Kaiser's General Staff. Nor could even so persuasive an authority as William Le Queux, author ofGerman Spies in England, convince me that every German resident who kept homing-pigeons, owned a country-place near the East Coast suitable for wireless, or got drunk on the Kaiser's birthday in the Gambrinus restaurant in Glasshouse Street, was a paid member of the Berlin secret-service. Most of these stories made me smile as broadly as the "star" rumor of the war--the story that seventy thousand armed Russians had been "actually seen" by Heaven knows how many veracious Britons sneaking across England from Newcastle to Southampton, on their stealthy way from Archangel to the Western allied front.Yet it was palpably not the hour for German subjects, any number of them of military age and ardor, to be at large in England. So Britain, in a tardy manifestation of self-preservation, began to arrest and intern the Kaiser's hapless subjects, who hitherto had suffered no impairment of their liberties except detention in the country, compulsory visits to the police, and restriction of movement (except by special permission) to an area five miles from their domicile. The German is far too much of a patriot to be trusted to do as he pleases in a country with which his Fatherland is at war. He never forgets that he is a Germanfirst, and a stock-broker earning commissions in London, a barber taking English tips, or a waiter spilling English soup, afterward. It is alwaysDeutschland, Deutschland über Alleswith him. He may not have made a profession or habit of writing home to Berlin or Hamburg, Cologne or Breslau, Kiel or Wilhelmshaven, what he noted of interest at Aldershot, Portsmouth, Dover, Woolwich, or Sheerness, or what his English friends might from time to time tell him of interest at the Admiralty or the War Office. But it was "bomb-sure," as the Teuton idiom rather appropriately puts it, that if ever a British state secret fell into Herr Apfelbaum's hands on the Stock Exchange, or into Johann's in the "hair-dressing saloon" of the Ritz, or into Gustav's at the grillroom of the Piccadilly, that morsel would sooner or later find its way to Germany. When one considered that Englishmen of the highest class--one even said the King had a German valet!--were attended night and day, in their homes, their clubs, their offices and their favorite "American bars," hotels, grillrooms, cafés and restaurants by Germans, with eyes to see and ears to hear, it was small wonder that an irresistible cry was sent up before the winter of war had advanced very far, that these "enemy aliens" should not be merely ticketed, labeled and superficially watched, but placed behind barbed-wire, with British sentries on guard. And so it came to pass that Mr. McKenna, Home Secretary, whose reluctance to intern the Germans gossip absurdly ascribed to his "German connections," finally ordered "the enemy in our midst" to be rounded up. Not all of them were at first taken. Thousands remained at liberty. The British are a patient and a trusting clan.It was not only the acknowledged German subject in Great Britain who was the object of the anti-Teuton crusade. The naturalized German, in many cases the holder for years of a certificate of British citizenship, was made to feel the blight of the wave of passion sweeping over the country. Naturalized Germans have won in England wealth and eminence outstripping even the heights to which they have climbed in the United States. In the preceding reign they were the bosom companions of the Sovereign. King Edward's intimate circle contained the Cologne financier, Sir Ernest Cassel, and another Prussian native, Sir Felix Semon, was His Majesty's Physician Extraordinary. In the "City," London's Wall Street, German financiers almost dominated the picture. Baron Schroeder (naturalized only within a few hours of the outbreak of the war) was so great a power that citizenship was practically thrust upon him as a measure of vital British self-protection. Sir Edgar Speyer, like Cassel a member of the King's Privy Council, and a Baronet besides, was not only a City magnate, but controlled London's vast system of surface and underground traction lines, including the omnibus service; yet his English counting-house was a branch of a parent establishment in Frankfort-On-Main. These were a few of the outstanding names among the "Germans" in high place in England. They by no means exhausted the list. Domiciled in this country for years, they had, while openly maintaining sentimental relations with their Fatherland, played no inconspicuous rôle in British affairs, economic and political. Any number of naturalized Germans were married to British women and were fathers of British-born families. Scores of their sons were already wearing King George's khaki in Kitchener's army. Sir Ernest Cassel had given five thousand pounds to the Prince of Wales' National Relief Fund. Yet rumor shortly afterward had him locked up in a traitor's cell in the Tower of London! No matter how acclimatized these naturalized Germans had become, no matter how long they had been British subjects--in many cases their title to that distinction was half a century old--they found themselves under a ban. They were not physically maltreated. Their windows were not broken. Men did not spit in their faces. They were permitted (like the rest of the British) to do "business as usual," except the stock-brokers, who were invited to keep off 'Change. But they were a marked class. If they ventured to visit clubs in Pall Mall or St. James Street, to which they had paid dues for years, they were confronted with notices reading:
[image]King George V.
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King George V.
Englishmen excuse, rather than blame, the King. They point out, in his extenuation, that George's is a gentle, self-effacing nature little fitted for the soul-stirring era in the midst of which Fate decreed that his reign should fall. They cast no aspersions on his rugged patriotism or even on his kingly zeal. They believe that, according to his lights, he exercises faithfully what he considers to be his prerogatives. They feel, they tell you, that it is not his fault that he remains the only man in the Kingdom who still wears a Prince Albert coat. His is, somehow, not the magnetic influence which, if it were that of Edward VII, would still be condemning Englishmen to cling to that ancient robe. They explain that it is his psychic misfortune, rather than a failing, that nobody thinks it worth while to emulate him by taking the pledge "for the duration of the war" and drinking barley-water. Edward VII's abstemious decree would have blotted the liquor trade out of existence, because in the lap of his example sat militant loyalty. The "old King's" wish was law.
Perhaps--I do not know--George V is wiser than men think. Perhaps he is not being kept in cotton-wool by his Victorian private secretary. Perhaps he is not yielding as supinely as many people imagine to the inflexible mandates of constitutionalism. Perhaps he has his ear closer to the ground than his contemporaries realize, and with it hears the far-off but unmistakable rumbles of the limitlessly democratized Britain which is already emerging from the crucible of war. Perhaps injustice is done to him by those who accuse him of not rising more vigorously to the opportunities of his Empire's hour of destiny. May he not be fitting himself still to sit the throne in that coming day when Britain will perhaps want even a more constitutional ruler than ermine and the crown now rest upon?
CHAPTER XVII
YOUR KING AND COUNTRY WANT YOU
"Luna Park," in Berlin, once had an English manager and an American "publicity agent." In pursuit of his lime-light duties the transatlantic hustler, who had been engaged because he was such, reported to the manager one day that he had accomplished a feat on which he had been plodding for weeks. The owners of a building which commanded the most prominent view in Berlin had finally consented to let "Luna Park" affix a gigantic electric flash-light sign to the roof.
"It will be the greatest thing of the kind ever seen in Germany," exclaimed the enthusiast from the U.S.A. "They'll allow us to have 'Luna Park' in letters twenty feet high across a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot front, and you'll be able to see 'em a mile away!"
He expected his British superior fairly to jump for joy. But this is what he said:
"Quite so. But don't you think that will be a bit conspicuous?"
When I returned to London on September 24, after four short, strenuous weeks in the United States, I found Englishmen dominated seemingly by a genuine fear that the war might become "a bit conspicuous." It was true that stupendous things had happened in the interval. Namur, "the impregnable," had melted before the merciless German 42's like the other Belgian fortresses. Brussels was in the enemy's hands, unscotched, thanks to the intervention of the American Minister, Brand Whitlock, and through it were passing apparently endless streams of gray-clad Germans bound for Antwerp and the sea. France had been overrun, regardless of the cost in Teuton blood, Lille and the industrial provinces were securely held, and, although the Crown Prince and von Kluck had been gloriously repulsed in their frenzied dash on Paris, the capital had all but resounded to the clatter of Uhlan hoofs, and Bordeaux was still regarded a far safer seat of Government. England herself had lived through hours of anxious crisis blacker than any within the memory of the living generation. At Mons, as official reports disclosed, the gallant little British army narrowly escaped annihilation. As it was, it lost hideously in killed and wounded. Gaping holes had been ripped in the ranks of famous regiments, and the Expeditionary Force, within six weeks of its landing, was already sadly mangled. Sir John French stirred the nation with his dispatch on the retreat from Mons and told how his army, though hurriedly concentrated by rail only two days before, had tenaciously withstood, in the dogged British way, the combined attack of five crack German corps. In the subsequent fighting which beat the Germans on the Marne and saved Paris, British soldiers, battered and battle-scarred as they were, had done even more than their share. Two days before arrival in Liverpool theCampaniawireless--I returned to England in the same veteran hulk which had taken me to America in August--brought the dread tidings of the submarining of cruisersAboukir, CressyandHoguein the Channel by theU9andWeddigen, with cruelly heavy sacrifice of British lives.
All these things had happened, and yet London was unshaken. She had been "a bit uneasy," my English friends conceded, in the days and nights when the fate of Paris and Sir John French's army seemed to be in doubt, and theU9'sfeat had "cost us three obsolete boats," but the Germans were checked now, and the worst was over. Churchill was sending a British naval expedition to Belgium to save Antwerp, and what was the use of worrying, anyhow? Kitchener's army was filling up with recruits by the thousand, and England's motto was "Business as Usual."
Yea, verily, Britain was pursuing the even tenor of her imperturbable way. The Savoy, at supper after theater, glittered with all its old-time flare. The tables were thronged in the same old way with gaily-clad women, romping chorus-girls, monocled "nuts" with hair plastered straight back, opulent stock-brokers, theatrical celebrities and all the other familiar people about town. The band interpolatedTipperarya little oftener between rag-time one-steps and fox-trots, and lordlings and other bloods in khaki gave a new tinge to the picture, but otherwise it was night-time London "as usual." The theaters and music-halls were full. At Murray's and the Four Hundred--those dens of revelry called "night clubs," invented for law-respecting English who can afford five guineas a year for the privilege of wining, supping and dancing after the Acts of Parliament send ordinary people to bed--you could hardly wedge your way in. At the Carlton or the Piccadilly, or for the matter of that at any other popular resort in all London, you found yourself lucky to locate a single unpreempted place. Wherever you went or turned, whomever you saw, it was dear old London "as usual." If you were an impulsive, excitable, sentimental American and thought you were mildly rebuking your British friends when you ventured to wonder at the extraordinary naturalness of life in the West End, or at Walton Heath golf links, or at Chelsea football grounds, or at the Newmarket race-course, you found yourself unconsciously paying a tribute to "British character." For John Bull, far from being ashamed of adhering religiously to peace-time activities, was positively proud of the exhibition of "reserve" and "poise" and "calmness" which he was now giving. People talked about the war, of course. They hardly mentioned anything else. But if you had the patience to listen to their airy, fairy converse, you soon gathered that they spoke of it exclusively as something about which no self-respecting Englishman or woman purposed for a solitary moment to get indecorously agitated. There were even people who confessed that the war was beginning to "bore" them.
As for myself, I had a go at British acquaintances from two entirely different standpoints. In the first place, fresh from America, where the war had burnt into people's minds as deeply almost as if it were their own destiny which was at stake, I was still filled with the energizing atmosphere omnipresent there. I remembered how even our puny war with Spain had gripped the nation's thought and concentrated it to the exclusion of all else. I could not, for the life of me, understand how Englishmen, with the history of the preceding eight weeks before them, could still look upon "business as usual" as the desideratum for which the moment insistently called. I knew, I thought, how Americans would feel and act at such an hour; and as I had in my time dozed through many after-dinner speeches about the "kindred ideals" and "identical habits of thought" which so indissolubly bound the English-speaking nations, I ventured to marvel, and even at times to swear, at the spectacle of national nonchalance which Britain at the beginning of October, 1914, so resolutely presented. It was magnificent, but it was not war.
In the second place, I was conscious, with the knowledge and conviction of a long-time eye-witness, of both the visible and the dormant strength of Germany. I had written literally reams, during the preceding eight years, about Teuton preparations on land, in the air and on the sea. I had discussed the German War Party, its leaders and its literature, its aspirations and its plans, till I often grew weary of the task, not so much because pacifist critics in England pilloried me as a war-monger and an alarmist, but because there was a monotony in that sort of news about Germany which strained even the patience of those whose duty it was to report it. When Englishmen now told me, as so many of them did, that they would "muddle through this show," as they had "muddled through" in South Africa and on all the other occasions in Britain's martial past, I grew sick at heart. I knew, as everybody who had lived in Germany between 1904 and 1914 and kept his ears and eyes open knew, that "muddling through" would never beat the Germans, even if it had finally overcome the Boers. I knew, and anybody really acquainted with the Germans knew, that they would not be vanquished so long as there was a man or a mark with which to fight. I knew that nothing short of the supreme effort which the British Empire and its Allies could put forth would suffice to overcome the most highly-organized and efficiently patriotic people which had ever gone to war. I knew that the German General Staff and the other war-makers of the Fatherland had long reckoned, in the emergency of a struggle with England, on the very thing of which my eyes were now witness--British reluctance to shake off the shackles of ease and comfort and buckle down, a nation in arms, to the inconvenient and grim realities of war. Of these things I thought, and the reflection was disquieting, as I saw the mad whirl of light, frivolity and care-free joy which the Savoy at supper-time, plainly epitomizing London life at the moment, presented night after night. "Business as usual!" It was small comfort my English friends provided, when, remonstrating with me for my foolish solicitude, they assured me that my misgivings were misplaced because I was hopelessly ignorant of "the British character."
England, it was obvious, was like the manager of "Luna Park" in Berlin. She was afraid the war might become "a bit conspicuous," and was, moreover, determined that it should not. I remember well the crushing rebuke administered to me by a Britisher of international renown when I intruded my view of all these things. I had offered, in a desire to hold the mirror up to Nature and let Londoners see how they looked to foreigners at so transcendent a moment in their national existence, to produce a little article entitled "What an American Thinks of the English in War-Time." I even went to the length of putting my thoughts on paper and submitting the manuscript. I did so with considerable confidence, because the celebrity in question is a notorious "Wake Up, England!" man. But he returned my masterpiece with a look and gesture mingling pity and contempt for my wretched unfamiliarity with "the British character."
"My dear Wile," he explained, "you do not understand us. You forget that this war is not an American World's Championship baseball series. You mustn't try to foist transatlantic brass-band methods on us. It is not the British way."
Lest I convey the impression that I had advocated rousing the British lion from his slumbers by wild and woolly western methods palpably unsuited to his stoical temperament, let me make haste to explain that I was pleading for nothing but a system which would, spectacularly if necessary, do something to let the British public at least know that they had a war on their hands, and popularize it. A great contingent of Indian troops, led by Maharajahs and Rajputs, Maliks, Rajahs and Jams, had arrived in Europe, tarried in England and been slipped, in the dead of a Channel night, across to France. An entire army from Canada was encamped on Salisbury Plain, and no one had seen a sign of it except an occasional detachment of boisterous subalterns, many with a pronounced "American accent," who had kicked up a row in some Leicester Square music-hall the night before. The Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square was desecrated with recruiting circus-bills which would have delighted the heart of Barnum, and every taxicab wind-shield in town beseeched passers-by to "enlist for the duration of the war." But why, I had had the temerity to inquire in my little "Wake Up, England!" homily, which was rejected because it revealed no insight into "British character," were not the turbaned Gurkhas and the swarthy Sikhs and the brown men from Punjab and Beluchistan brought to London-town and paraded up and down the Strand and the Embankment, for all the metropolis to have a priceless object-lesson in Imperial patriotism? Why was Kitchener allowed to intern the young giants in khaki from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia in the hidden recesses of the provinces, instead of giving Londoners a glimpse of Colonial love of mother country in the flesh? It was due to the Indians and to the Canadians themselves, no less than to London, I argued, that opportunity should be provided to pay homage to the men who had crossed the seas to fight for Motherland. Non-British though I am, I felt morally certain that even my Hoosier bosom would swell with emotion in the presence of so ocular a demonstration of Britain's Imperial solidarity in the day of trial. But my suggestions were rejected as unbecomingly boisterous in their intent, good enough for the Polo Grounds or Madison Square Garden, but grotesquely out of place in England. If carried out, you see, they would inevitably have made the war "a bit conspicuous."
[image]Kitchener's army
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Kitchener's army
That the war was almost invisibly hidden, as far as the daily life of the people was concerned, was primarily due to the bureaucratic and autocratic methods of the censorship. Bureaucracy and autocracy in Germany, for instance, have their redeeming qualities. They are usually highly efficient, and their arrogance and high-handedness are tolerated because accompanied by a maximum of practical effectiveness. When England established her war censorship, she went over to bureaucracy and autocracy, as made in Germany, but lamentably lacking in the saving graces of the system as there exemplified. In vain the Press, now muzzled almost as effectually as if the Magna Charta and free speech had never existed, stormed and fumed against the tyranny of the "Press Bureau," the innocuous title chosen for the Juggernaut which, before six months had passed, was to grind British journalistic liberties into the dust. It was discovered that the "Bureau" was staffed for the most part by amiable gentlemen no longer fit for active duty in the army and navy, who, having patriotically offered their services to King and country, had been pitchforked indiscriminately into billets which clothed them with more real influence on the war than if they had commanded armies or fleets. It became painfully apparent that news of the war was being suppressed, mutilated and generally mismanaged either by military men who knew nothing of journalism, or by journalists who were profoundly ignorant of military matters--for the official censor caused it to be announced, in self-defense, that he had associated with the Bureau in an advisory capacity a couple of eminent ex-editors.
Just who was responsible for annihilating the elementary rights of the British Press never became quite clear. Some blamed Kitchener. His hostility to journalists and journalism was notorious, though "With Kitchener to Khartoum," by the most distinguished special correspondent of our time, the late G. W. Steevens, who died inThe Daily Mail'sservice during the South African war, probably did as much to give "K." a reputation as anything which England's War Minister ever did in the field. Others said Joffre was the man who had put the lid on. Whoever laid down the law saw that it was relentlessly enforced. Petitions, protests, cajolings, threats, complaints, abuse--all were in vain. The antics of the "Press Bureau" became more exasperating and inexplicable from day to day. Also more domineering, if common report could be believed, for presently Fleet Street heard that "K." had intimated to a mighty newspaper magnate that if the latter did not mend his ways, and abate his insistence, "K." had the power, and would not shrink from using it, to incarcerate even a peer of the realm in the Tower and turn his entire "plant" into junk. That dire threat, I imagine, was just one of the myriad of chatterbox rumors with which the air in England, all through the war, fairly sizzled. At any rate, it failed utterly to curb the stormy petrel to terrorize whom it was said to have been uttered, for his onslaughts on the censorship grew, instead of diminishing, in intensity as the "war in the dark" proceeded.
But it was in its treatment of news destined for the United States that the Press Bureau most convincingly revealed its lack of imagination. Here was Germany leaving no stone unturned to take American sympathy by storm. The Bernstorff-Dernburg-Münsterberg campaign was in full blast. Von Wiegand in Berlin was interviewing the Crown Prince and Princess, von Tirpitz and von Bernhardi, Zeppelin, Hindenburg and Falkenhayn, and only narrowly escaped interviewing the Kaiser himself. American correspondents arriving in Germany were received with open arms, and had but to ask, in order to receive. Sometimes they received without asking. They could see anybody and go anywhere. That was German efficiency--and imagination--at work. The Germans realized that we are a newspaper-reading community. They knew that the best way in the world to win American newspapers' and American newspapermen's sympathy is to give them news. So they did it. When the German Crown Prince told the correspondent of the United Press that he would "love" to see American baseball, that he longed to hunt big game in Alaska, and that Jack London was his favorite author, he broke a lance for the Fatherland's cause in the United States that a four-hundred-fifty-paged "unhuman" British White Paper could never hope to equal. Somebody with an imagination--probably Bernstorff--had put a flea in Berlin's ear, and the result was open-house for American journalists for the duration of the war.
What was happening in London? There were plenty of American newspapermen on the ground, not only special correspondents who had come over to join the British army in the field, like Will Irwin, "Bell" Shepherd, Alexander Powell, Arthur Ruhl, or Frederick Palmer, to name only a few of them, but resident London correspondents who had lived in England a dozen years, like Edward Price Bell of theChicago Daily News, Ernest Marshall of theNew York Times, or James M. Tuohy of theNew York World, who were well known to the British authorities as men of judgment, integrity and responsibility. But resident or newcomer, nothing but inconsequential facilities or the cold shoulder awaited them when they went to the Press Bureau, cap in hand, to ask even the most rudimentary professional courtesies for themselves or their papers. Quite apart from the indignities thus heaped on American correspondents, the Press Bureau, when it suppressed or butchered their dispatches, left pitiably out of account the susceptibilities of the great neutral news-devouring community which these men represented. Therein lay the real infamy. Think of it. Here was Great Britain and her Government confessedly anxious for American moral support in the war, and something more than that, and yet a subordinate department seemed clothed with authority to flout, exasperate and bully the agency directly responsible for the production of public sentiment in the United States. I call it a tremendous tribute to the sincerity and depth of our loyalty to the Allies' cause that we never for a moment allowed it to waver, even in the face of the British Press Bureau's arrant provocation. The American Press, asking for bread in England, received a stone. That it accepted it, and went on playing the Allies' game, has been one of the miracles of the war, for which these British Isles have reason to be profoundly grateful.
[image]5 Questions to those who employ male servants
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5 Questions to those who employ male servants
Inherent imperturbability and unimaginative censorship thus combined in the early weeks of the war, on the one hand to minimize popular conceptions of the struggle's magnitude in England, and on the other to smother enthusiasm for it. You can not fully realize the immensity of the task if you are not permitted by your overlords to see it in its true proportions. You can certainly not become ecstatic about it if they insist on having it painted in exclusively drab, routine and joy-killing tints, when they are not covering it up altogether. Yet British patriotism was triumphing over all these natural and artificial handicaps. Kitchener was not only calling for five hundred thousand volunteers, but intimated that he would soon be asking for another five hundred thousand. He was getting them. London and the provinces were now plastered with recruiting posters, calling in compelling language for soldiers. "Your King and Country Need You!" Thus ran the most direct and frank appeal. By the tens of thousands men answered it. The desecrating bill-board which we know in America is an unknown excrescence in the British Isles, but, for the purposes of advertising for men for "Kitchener's Army," practically every vacant space in the Kingdom was now turned into a hoarding. The base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square was splashed red, white and blue, black and yellow, green and orange, and every other shade capable of lending distinction to an eye-arresting poster. The great hotels and theaters, banks, government offices, and even churches, turned their walls and windows over to Kitchener's advertising department for recruiting-bills, and occasionally themselves put up huge signs across their most imposing facades with such legends as:
TO ARMS! RALLY ROUND THE FLAG!TO ARMS! YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!TO ARMS! ENLIST AT ONCE FOR THE WAR ONLY!
or
TO-DAY, YOUNG MAN, YOU ARE NEEDEDTO FIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S DEFENSE!FALL IN! JOIN THE ARMY AT ONCE!
or
MEN OF BRITAIN, UPHOLD YOUR COUNTRY'SHONOR AND LIBERTY! SERVE WITHYOUR FRIENDS!
or you would read what the King had said:
"NO PRICE CAN BE TOO HIGH WHENHONOR AND LIBERTY ARE AT STAKE."
Even the fences of the parks, the windows and sides of the omnibuses and the wind-shields of the taxicabs reminded men every hour of the day and night that "Your King and Country Need You."
I recall, with amusement, how "scandalized" some Americans were at England's resort to "circus methods" to manufacture an army. I remember that pert (and extremely pretty) young Chicago newspaper-woman who, having come over from Paris which had not needed to advertise for an army, because France had one, was mortified beyond words to find London screaming with "Your-King-and-Country-Need-You" sign literature. She was so stirred by this "undignified exhibition" that she sat down before she had been in town forty-eight hours and dashed off to her paper just what she thought about "degenerate Britain." She was convinced that a nation so "hopelessly unpatriotic" that it had to advertise for defenders was "doomed." Her erudite observations made a deep impression on her editors, who, in a learned editorial asked gravely whether the British Empire was "reaching the Diocletian period of the Romans."
[image]4 Questions to the Women of England
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4 Questions to the Women of England
As a matter of fact, Kitchener's project to advertise for an army was the one ray of imagination, and a boundlessly encouraging one, which the War Office had so far revealed. It showed even more imagination in entrusting the technique of the scheme to a professional, Mr. Hedley F. Le Bas, who, besides bringing to the task the expert knowledge of a publisher, had once been a trooper in the 15th Hussars, and knew and loved the army. Mr. Le Bas modestly disclaims credit for originating the plan to create an army of millions by advertisement. He says that the Duke of Wellington beat him to it. A hundred years ago, when England was at grips with the oppressor of that day, a poster appeal for soldiers was issued, which isprima facieevidence that advertising is not a modern invention. Only a few Englishmen, and probably still fewer Americans, are aware that even in Napoleonic times advertising for an army wasde rigueur, and as the invitation to "The Warriors of Manchester" was, to a certain extent, the spiritual inspiration of Kitchener's remarkable recruit-getting campaign, I make no apologies, despite its raciness, for reproducing on the following page a document of genuinely historical value.
The methods to which the American Democracy has resorted to secure soldiers for her wars were also in the minds of Lord Kitchener and Mr. Le Bas. Indeed, the practises of President Lincoln, in respect of raising armies, were the model to which the British Government from the start determined to adhere. It was discovered that Lincoln and Seward had not shrunk from appealing to the men of the North from the hoardings and through the newspapers, while the advertisements of the United States army and navy during the Spanish-American War were a modern example of recruiting measures in a country where the absence of conscription compels a Government, in the hour of emergency, to scrape an army together by hook or crook. Then the constant advertising by our War and Navy departments, even in peace-times, proved that there must be efficacy in asking men to serve their country in posters, magazines or newspaper-columns in which they were also being persuasively urged to buy automobiles, "quality" clothes or shaving-sticks. Kitchener's "advertising campaign" was destined, before the war was old, to be the target of bitter attack, but the skill, persistence and comprehensiveness with which it was prosecuted played an immense rôle in the creation of the greatest volunteer army in history. It opened a new epoch in advertising and clothed that art with a distinction which will never be taken from it. The seal of an Empire has been placed on the maxim that it pays to advertise.
[image]To the Warriors of Manchester.
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To the Warriors of Manchester.
By the end of October, after three months of war, the muster of the British Empire was in full progress. Complacency and nonchalance in London were still wretchedly wide-spread, but the call of the Motherland for soldiers was echoing around the world. Wherever Britons were domiciled, it was answered. It penetrated into far-off British Columbia, where young Englishmen, comfortably settled in new existences, abandoned them unhesitatingly. It was heard in even more distant climes, like Australia, New Zealand and Africa, where adventurous spirits who had crossed the seas to seek their fortunes in lands of promise were now dominated by no other ambition than to "do their bit" for King and country. Even emigrated Irishmen, long irreconcilable, were electrified by John Redmond's clarion message, and they, too, turned their faces homeward. By the ides of November whole shiploads of repatriated Britons, returning from the four points of the compass, reached the island shores, fired by one consuming purpose.
These home-coming patriots were not only rendering valiant service by placing their lives at the King's disposal, but they were demonstrating, along with native-born Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians and Indians, that one of Germany's fondest dreams was the hollowest of fantasies. I had been familiar for years with a German political literature based on the roseate theory that, once Great Britain was embroiled in a great European war, her world-wide Empire would crack and tumble like a house of cards in a holocaust. Had not Sir Wilfred Laurier on a famous occasion declared that Canada would never be "drawn into the vortex of European militarism"? Were not the Boers thirsting restlessly for revenge and the hour of deliverance from the British yoke? Were not Republican sentiments notoriously rife in Australia and New Zealand, and would not Labor Governments in those remote regions seize eagerly on coveted opportunity to snap the silken cords which bound them to England, and declare their independence? Would not India, the enslaved Empire of the vassal Rajahs, leap at the throat of an England preoccupied in Europe and drive the tyrant into the sea? These were the thoughts which were discussed by Teuton political seers as something more than things which Germany merely desired and hoped for. They were treated as axiomatic certainties. The rally round the Union Jack by the Britons of Australia and New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, Nova Scotia and Jamaica, Barbadoes and Ceylon, British Guiana and Mauritius, Newfoundland and New Brunswick, was Germany's great illusion. When the "conquered Boers" under Botha, the "alienated Irish" under Redmond, the "rebellious Indians" under maharajahs and princes, even the "downtrodden" black Basutos, Barotses, Masai and Maoris of Africa and Australasia under their native chieftains, announced that they, too, were ready to bleed for the Empire, Germany's awakening was rude and complete. London might be callous, pleasure-loving and unperturbed. But the Empire was alive both to the peril and the duty of the hour, and when it vowed to face the one and absolve the other an oath was sworn which spelled British invincibility.
CHAPTER XVIII
WAR IN THE DARK
It is November, 1914. Britain is waking, but is far from awake. Nearly everybody and everything are proud to be "as usual." The Fleet has been able to secure but one action with the Germans--Beatty's smashing blow at the Kaiser's cruiser squadron in the bight of Heligoland. A great trophy of the engagement is in hand--Admiral von Tirpitz' son, watch-officer in the Mainz, a prisoner in Wales. For a month and more the war has been raging furiously in the west all the way from the Alps to the North Sea. Antwerp is taken, after a farce-comedy attempt at relief by levies of raw British naval reserves. Joffre is at sanguinary grips with the "Boches" in the Aisne country. The twelve or fifteen miles of British front in the northernmost corner of France and that patch of Flanders not yet in the enemy's hands is the scene of ceaseless, desperate combat. Jellicoe's dreadnoughts and destroyers take part at intervals in the grim battle for the channel coast. Ostend has fallen.
The German objective farthest west is now clear. The Berlin newspapers head-line the tidings from Flanders "the Road to Calais." Major Moraht in theTageblattacknowledges that the campaign for the base from which Napoleon essayed to invade England is "a matter of life or death" for the Germans. Sir John French and the remnant of Belgium's little army steel themselves for a stone-wall defense. Again and again they keep the frenzied enemy at bay. Have you ever seen Harvard holding the Yale eleven on the five-yard line three minutes before the call of time in the last half, with dark gathering so fast that you could hardly distinguish crimson from blue? Do you remember Yale's ferocious first, second, third, yet always vain, attempts to batter and plunge her way through Harvard's concrete, immobile phalanx? If you do, and if your red-blooded heart has tingled at some such spectacle of young American bulldoggedness, which can be seen West as well as East, in the North and in the South, just as commonly as in the New Haven bowl, you will be able to visualize, infinitesimally, the titanic grapple around Dixmude, Ypres and the Yser in the bloody days and hellish nights of October and November, 1914. "The Watch in the Mud" was the way German military critics paraphrased their national anthem, to describe the situation in Flanders, for the Belgians had now flooded the region contiguous to the Yser Canal, and the Kaiser's legions, in their breathless thrust for Calais, were fighting in mire and slush to their boot-tops. More than one company ofFeldgrauerwas ingloriously drowned.
The British were engaged in precisely the operation for which their temperament best fits them--"holding." The German attack rocked against them remorselessly, giving neither assailant nor defender rest or quarter. But the bulldog "held." He was mauled unconscionably and bled profusely. Thousands upon thousands of his teeth were knocked out, and he was half-blind, and limped. Yet he "held." Winter had come. Men lived in trenches which had been merely water-logged ditches, but were now frozen into rock. The German eagle, hammered, of course, no less cruelly than the bulldog, was still screaming and clawing, in his mad desire to cleave a way to Calais. But, mangled and scarred as he was, the bulldog barked "No!" He had set his squatty bow-legs, disjointed though they were, squarely across "the Road to Calais." There he intended to stay. It could be traversed, that road, only through a welter of blood which, regardless as German commanders are of the cost when they set themselves an objective, gave the General Staff at Berlin furiously to ponder.
I have already intimated that Britain all this tempestuous while was rubbing her eyes, but was only partially open-eyed. It was not altogether Britain's fault. The immutable Censorship still gave the public no real glimmer of the history-making struggle going on almost within ear-shot of the chalk-cliffs of Dover. Throughout the entire month of October, four weeks as crammed with death and glory as in all England's martial history, Sir John French was permitted to take the public into his confidence but on one single occasion--and that, a dispatch dealing with operations six weeks old! For its news of the heroic deeds and Spartan sufferings of the greatest army it ever sent abroad, the British Empire was compelled to depend on stilted Frenchcommuniquesand the fantastic or irrelevant narratives of an official "eye-witness at British Headquarters," who was allowed to bamboozle the nation for months before his flow of mediocrity and piffle was choked off by disgruntled public opinion. England was fighting her greatest war in Cimmerian darkness. Casualty lists, terrible in their regularity and magnitude, kept on coming, but of the coincident imperishable triumphs of British sacrifice and courage, not a word. One'sIllustrated London NewsandSphereprinted depressing double-pages weekly, filled with pictures of England's masculine flower killed in action "somewhere in France" or "somewhere in Flanders." But of the manner in which their precious lives had been laid down, of the price they had made the Germans pay for them, not a syllable. If by accident some correspondent or newspaper secured the account of an engagement, which ventured so much as to hint with some picturesqueness of detail how Englishmen were dying, the Press Bureau guillotine came down on the narrative with a crash which taught the offender to mend his ways for the future.
Under the circumstances it was not surprising to hear well-founded reports that recruiting was falling off. In the clubs men said that Kitchener's "first half-million" was in hand, but that men for the second five hundred thousand, for which the War Office had now called, were holding back to a disappointing, and even disquieting, degree. Meantime the popular ballad of the hour was, appropriately, Paul Rubens' "Your King and Country Want You"--"a women's recruiting song," as its sub-title runs. Its opening verse and chorus tell their own story:
We've watched you playing cricketAnd every kind of game.At football, golf and polo,You men have made your name.But now your country calls youTo play your part in war,And no matter what befalls you,We shall love you all the more.So, come and join the forcesAs your fathers did before.CHORUSOh! We don't want to lose you,But we think you ought to go.For your King and your CountryBoth need you so!We shall want you, and miss you,But with all our might and mainWe shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you,When you come back again!
We've watched you playing cricketAnd every kind of game.At football, golf and polo,You men have made your name.But now your country calls youTo play your part in war,And no matter what befalls you,We shall love you all the more.So, come and join the forcesAs your fathers did before.CHORUSOh! We don't want to lose you,But we think you ought to go.For your King and your CountryBoth need you so!We shall want you, and miss you,But with all our might and mainWe shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you,When you come back again!
We've watched you playing cricket
And every kind of game.
And every kind of game.
At football, golf and polo,
You men have made your name.
You men have made your name.
But now your country calls you
To play your part in war,
To play your part in war,
And no matter what befalls you,
We shall love you all the more.
We shall love you all the more.
So, come and join the forces
As your fathers did before.
As your fathers did before.
CHORUS
Oh! We don't want to lose you,
But we think you ought to go.
But we think you ought to go.
For your King and your Country
Both need you so!
Both need you so!
We shall want you, and miss you,
But with all our might and main
But with all our might and main
We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you,
When you come back again!
When you come back again!
These words, in prosaic type, look banal. Their appeal seems trite. Yet rendered to plaintive melody by such an operatic artist as little Maggie Teyte, they went straight to men's hearts. They must have sent thousands upon thousands of cricketers, footballers, golfers and poloists--that is a classification which takes in pretty nearly all Englishmen--into khaki and training-camps. But the growing insistence with which the walls and windows of Old England were plastered with recruiting posters--even entire front pages of newspapers were now employed to advertise that "Your King and Country Need You"--indicated that Kitchener's army was not being built up yet by the desired leaps and bounds. Obviously the war needed some other kind of advertising than even the accomplished Mr. Le Bas could give it. It was not strange that the enthusiasm of Englishmen, cheated of the chance to know what was really going on at the front, was beginning to find expression in other directions.
[image]Greeting the Kaiser (in helmet) the day he declared Germany "in a state of war," July 31st, 1914.
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Greeting the Kaiser (in helmet) the day he declared Germany "in a state of war," July 31st, 1914.
It was not magnificent, for example, but it was natural, that Englishmen should, in all the circumstances, reveal a very materialistic passion to "capture Germany's trade." Denied the opportunity of "enthusing" over events at the seat of war, they proceeded to dedicate themselves energetically to the task of eliminating the Germans as a factor in the markets of the world. A profound book on the subject appeared--The War on German Trade, with the sub-titles of "Ammunition for Civilians" and "Hints for a Plan of Campaign." My old friend, Sidney Whitman, the distinguished author ofImperial Germany, dignified it with a preface. England had not entered upon the war "in a commercial spirit or with a commercial purpose," he said, "yet it behooves her to seize and hold fast the ripe fruit which has dropped into Englishmen's lap--as a first incident in the clash of nations." The volume had frankly been published, explained Whitman, "with the purpose of stimulating the English manufacturer and the English trader to seize the opportunities thrust upon them by the war."
Then, as the Censorship, as callous to criticism and abuse as if it were a sphinx, still insisted that Englishmen must fight and die in the dark, as far as their kith and kin were concerned, patriotism at home found vent in a crusade against the Germans still at large on British soil. They numbered thousands. They were a distinct and undeniable danger. In days of peace they spied patriotically and flagrantly, thanks to John Bull's easy-going, guileless toleration of the stranger within his gate. Personally I never believed that the German waiters and barbers in the Savoy or the Carlton, and their myriad ofconfrèreselsewhere in the country, were the advance guard of the German army of invasion in disguise. Nor did I imagine (as I actually made a very British friend once seriously believe) that Appenrodt's restaurants in the Strand and Piccadilly were in reality masked commissariat-stations of the Kaiser's General Staff. Nor could even so persuasive an authority as William Le Queux, author ofGerman Spies in England, convince me that every German resident who kept homing-pigeons, owned a country-place near the East Coast suitable for wireless, or got drunk on the Kaiser's birthday in the Gambrinus restaurant in Glasshouse Street, was a paid member of the Berlin secret-service. Most of these stories made me smile as broadly as the "star" rumor of the war--the story that seventy thousand armed Russians had been "actually seen" by Heaven knows how many veracious Britons sneaking across England from Newcastle to Southampton, on their stealthy way from Archangel to the Western allied front.
Yet it was palpably not the hour for German subjects, any number of them of military age and ardor, to be at large in England. So Britain, in a tardy manifestation of self-preservation, began to arrest and intern the Kaiser's hapless subjects, who hitherto had suffered no impairment of their liberties except detention in the country, compulsory visits to the police, and restriction of movement (except by special permission) to an area five miles from their domicile. The German is far too much of a patriot to be trusted to do as he pleases in a country with which his Fatherland is at war. He never forgets that he is a Germanfirst, and a stock-broker earning commissions in London, a barber taking English tips, or a waiter spilling English soup, afterward. It is alwaysDeutschland, Deutschland über Alleswith him. He may not have made a profession or habit of writing home to Berlin or Hamburg, Cologne or Breslau, Kiel or Wilhelmshaven, what he noted of interest at Aldershot, Portsmouth, Dover, Woolwich, or Sheerness, or what his English friends might from time to time tell him of interest at the Admiralty or the War Office. But it was "bomb-sure," as the Teuton idiom rather appropriately puts it, that if ever a British state secret fell into Herr Apfelbaum's hands on the Stock Exchange, or into Johann's in the "hair-dressing saloon" of the Ritz, or into Gustav's at the grillroom of the Piccadilly, that morsel would sooner or later find its way to Germany. When one considered that Englishmen of the highest class--one even said the King had a German valet!--were attended night and day, in their homes, their clubs, their offices and their favorite "American bars," hotels, grillrooms, cafés and restaurants by Germans, with eyes to see and ears to hear, it was small wonder that an irresistible cry was sent up before the winter of war had advanced very far, that these "enemy aliens" should not be merely ticketed, labeled and superficially watched, but placed behind barbed-wire, with British sentries on guard. And so it came to pass that Mr. McKenna, Home Secretary, whose reluctance to intern the Germans gossip absurdly ascribed to his "German connections," finally ordered "the enemy in our midst" to be rounded up. Not all of them were at first taken. Thousands remained at liberty. The British are a patient and a trusting clan.
It was not only the acknowledged German subject in Great Britain who was the object of the anti-Teuton crusade. The naturalized German, in many cases the holder for years of a certificate of British citizenship, was made to feel the blight of the wave of passion sweeping over the country. Naturalized Germans have won in England wealth and eminence outstripping even the heights to which they have climbed in the United States. In the preceding reign they were the bosom companions of the Sovereign. King Edward's intimate circle contained the Cologne financier, Sir Ernest Cassel, and another Prussian native, Sir Felix Semon, was His Majesty's Physician Extraordinary. In the "City," London's Wall Street, German financiers almost dominated the picture. Baron Schroeder (naturalized only within a few hours of the outbreak of the war) was so great a power that citizenship was practically thrust upon him as a measure of vital British self-protection. Sir Edgar Speyer, like Cassel a member of the King's Privy Council, and a Baronet besides, was not only a City magnate, but controlled London's vast system of surface and underground traction lines, including the omnibus service; yet his English counting-house was a branch of a parent establishment in Frankfort-On-Main. These were a few of the outstanding names among the "Germans" in high place in England. They by no means exhausted the list. Domiciled in this country for years, they had, while openly maintaining sentimental relations with their Fatherland, played no inconspicuous rôle in British affairs, economic and political. Any number of naturalized Germans were married to British women and were fathers of British-born families. Scores of their sons were already wearing King George's khaki in Kitchener's army. Sir Ernest Cassel had given five thousand pounds to the Prince of Wales' National Relief Fund. Yet rumor shortly afterward had him locked up in a traitor's cell in the Tower of London! No matter how acclimatized these naturalized Germans had become, no matter how long they had been British subjects--in many cases their title to that distinction was half a century old--they found themselves under a ban. They were not physically maltreated. Their windows were not broken. Men did not spit in their faces. They were permitted (like the rest of the British) to do "business as usual," except the stock-brokers, who were invited to keep off 'Change. But they were a marked class. If they ventured to visit clubs in Pall Mall or St. James Street, to which they had paid dues for years, they were confronted with notices reading: