"We found the enemy much more strongly posted than we expected. We had not sufficient high explosive to level his parapets to the ground after the French practice, and when our infantry gallantly stormed the trenches, as they did in both attacks, they found a garrison undismayed, many entanglements still intact, and maxims on all sides ready to pour in streams of bullets. We could not maintain ourselves in the trenches won, and our reserves were not thrown in because the conditions for success in an assault were not present."The attacks were well planned and valiantly conducted. The infantry did splendidly, but the conditions were too hard."On our side we have easily defeated all attacks on Ypres. The value of German troops in the attack has greatly deteriorated, and we can deal easily with them in the open. But until we are thoroughly equipped for this trench warfare, we attack under grave disadvantages. The men are in high spirits, taking their cue from the ever-confident and resolute attitude of the Commander-in-Chief."If we can break through this hard outer crust of the German defenses, we believe that we can scatter the German Armies, whose offensive causes us no concern at all. But to break this hard crust we need more high explosive, more heavy howitzers, and more men. This special form of warfare has no precedent in history."It is certain that we can smash the German crust if we have the means. So the means we must have, and as quickly as possible."By way of illustrating what British guns could do, if sufficiently numerous and adequately fed, Repington told how the French "by dint of the expenditure of 276 rounds of high explosive per gun in one day, leveled with the ground all the German defenses, except the villages." He left no doubt that until Sir John French's artillery could attack under similar conditions, British hopes of effective cooperation with Joffre's army were futile.The Timescritic's plain-spoken observations, which bore the unmistakable imprint of "inspiration" from British Headquarters, startled the nation. They could hardly have been more suggestive if the Commander-in-Chief himself had gone to the country and proclaimed the facts. Indeed, if others had not promptly done so, I have reason to believe that Sir John French would not have shrunk from that very task. No one had so direct and personal a reason for taking the bull by the horns, for if the British campaign were to degenerate from futility into fiasco, the odium would necessarily fall upon its field chieftain. History will hardly condemn him for resolving that the blame should be placed where it belonged, if, as may well have been the case, inspiration of the impending public exposure emanated from him.On May 21 Lord Northcliffe'sDaily Mail--his critics are fond of callingThe Timesthe "penny edition" ofThe Daily Mail--opened a ruthless fire on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, as the man directly responsible for the high-explosive famine which was paralyzing British military effort. England was plastered with flaming placards reading: "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder." With the journalistic instinct for a catch-phrase, Northcliffe christened the situation "The Shells Tragedy." He hammered home mercilessly the theory that England must hold to accountability the man whom the country had entrusted with practically autocratic control of the War Office. He insisted that Kitchener could not take shelter behind a brilliant past. It was a bold throw for the Bonaparte of British newspaperdom. He was not only assailing the man whom he himself had helped to elevate to the War Secretaryship; he was attacking the national idol. To the overwhelming majority of Englishmen, as I have already pointed out, the name of Kitchener spelled confidence. Next to the Fleet, he represented the country's greatest war asset. Whenever Britons doubted whether the course of events was leading to victory, they thought of the navy and of Kitchener, and were of stout heart. Northcliffe knew and understood all this--none better. But he said to himself that the relief of the shells crisis was of vastly more moment than the prestige of a national idol; that if the vital interests of the country demanded the dragging of Kitchener from his pedestal, there must be no hesitation in performing that unpleasant task. In an editorial article which stirred Great Britain to its uttermost foundations,The Daily Mailwent full tilt to the issue. It reminded Englishmen that Lord Kitchener loomed large in the public eye primarily as an organizer of victory against the Sudanese and as a man who had "helped" Lord Roberts in South Africa, though (it recalled) there were men who knew Roberts' private opinions of Kitchener's achievements in the Boer campaign. Kitchener had also been Commander-in-Chief in India and, until the outbreak of war, was engaged in the comparatively easy task of running the Egyptian machine, whose wheels had been so well oiled by Lord Cromer. Northcliffe was well aware that Kitchener, owing to his long absence in the East, where he had spent the greater part of his life, was not in touch with the democracy at home, nor had Lord Kitchener ever pretended to any such knowledge.The Daily Mailadmitted all these things and declared moreover that it was fair to Kitchener to say that he had been thrust at a moment's notice into a position of immense difficulty. No longer in his first youth, and more than twice the age of successful military commanders of one hundred years ago, Kitchener had been put in charge of the raising, drilling, clothing, equipping, arming, feeding andfightingof an army which had to be manufactured at a speed unprecedented in the history of the world. Kitchener, though not essentially a good organizer, was a man of enormous driving-power. His talents in that respect had stood him in good stead so far in the war. With the aid of a gigantic advertising campaign, he had accomplished marvels in the direction of raising a volunteer army; but "the shells tragedy" was thunderous proof that the Secretary for War had bitten off more than he could chew. Unless things were to go from bad to worse, the all-important question of providing munitions must be taken from Kitchener's overburdened shoulders and transferred to those of men better equipped in respect of time, temperament and training, to deal with it. The Northcliffe revelations lost none of their sensationalism in presence of Mr. Asquith's solemn assurances at Newcastle, barely three weeks previous, that Britain's munition supply, as well as that of her Allies, was entirely adequate.If Northcliffe had suddenly proposed the abdication of the Sovereign, or the demolition of St. Paul's Cathedral, or the proclamation of a Republic, nothing could have been more cyclonic in its effect thanThe Daily Mail'simperious demand for the curtailment of Kitchener's supreme authority at the War Office, because he had "blundered" with the army's ammunition. At the Stock Exchange and on the Baltic (the shipping mart) copies of all the Northcliffe papers were ceremoniously burnt. Town councils held indignation meetings, to discuss the advisability of banning them from the public reading-rooms. Super-patriots and Hide-the-Truth zealots rushed to their newsdealers and canceled their subscriptions toThe Times, The Daily Mailand other Northcliffe organs. Rival publishers went so far as to suggest that Northcliffe and his editorial staff should be lined up in front of a firing-squad and shot for high treason. Wherever one went, one encountered the most violent abuse of the journalist who had dared to sling mud at the great soldier who was the incarnation of the nation's hopes and to write "Failure" next to his magic name.Punchepitomized national sentiment in a cartoon showing John Bull patting Kitchener on the shoulder, trampling aDaily Mailunder foot, and saying:"If you need assurance, Sir, you may like to know that you have the loyal support of all decent people in this country."But Northcliffe, who possesses those valuable twin assets of the true journalist, an elephantine hide and utter fearlessness, returned to the attack, day after day. He never let up. The "shells tragedy," though Liberal organs were reluctant to admit it, dealt the Asquith Liberal Government a body blow. It was reeling from the effects of still another revelation. Lord Fisher, "Fighting Jack," the First Lord of the Admiralty, tendered his resignation. He refused longer to hold office under the temperamental Mr. Winston Churchill or even under a government to which that impetuous young statesman belonged. The public learned that Fisher had not acquiesced whole-heartedly in Mr. Churchill's schemes for limiting the Dardanelles campaign to a purely naval operation. England was now seething with unrest. The political position was chaotic. Acrimonious debate in Parliament on the shells question was inevitable. For weeks previous there had been demands from many quarters that the conduct of the war should be transferred from a purely Party Government to the hands of a "National Cabinet" of all political complexions. Mr. Asquith yielded to the inevitable. BeforeThe Daily Mail'sexposure of "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder" was a week old, the reconstruction of the Cabinet into a "Coalition" Administration was in full progress. Northcliffe's papers were still being burnt in public places, but he had won a victory for England for which, as she lives, she will yet come to acclaim his name. The completion of the Coalition Ministry was announced on June 11. Lord Kitchener remained Secretary of War, but a "Ministry of Munitions," which took shells and other sinews of war out of Kitchener's hands, was created, and the "hustler" of the Cabinet, Lloyd-George, was entrusted with its organization and administration. Northcliffe had carried his point.The war has not been prolific in England of "big men." Barring, perhaps, Joffre and Hindenburg, it has produced none anywhere. But I venture that far into the realm of prophecy to predict that the recorder of the life and times of Great Britain in the crucible which was 1915 will pay no mean tribute to the newspaper proprietor who risked prestige and power for the sake of that most prodigious of all tasks--stuffing unpalatable truth down British throats. Northcliffe's actual methods in the performance of the deed may have been debatable. His motives were certainly beyond question, and they will, undoubtedly, appear in true perspective in the impartial light of history. He is not offended when people detect Napoleonic flashes in his impetuous eccentricities, and he would be the last man in the world to deny that his brand of genius is entirely devoid of defects, as it assuredly is not. Northcliffe has been held up to public obloquy as hardly any man of his generation ever was before him and has even been charged with being in "German pay." But he has lived to see the ripening of the fruits of his sensational crusade: the British munitions output has been quadrupled since the Stock Exchange first burntThe Daily Mail. Lloyd-George, at the Ministry of Munitions, has gathered round him the strongest company of business and scientific brains that was ever applied to any Government department in England. One million men and women, in more than two thousand "controlled" establishments, are turning out days, nights and Sundays the shells with which the British army, early or late, is going to cleave its way to victory. In the great fighting around Loos at the end of September, when the French and the British between them fired 65,000,000 shells in seventy-two hours, there was no shortage of the wherewithal, the lack of which turned Neuve Chapelle into a "victory" which Britain had been better without. A prodigious amount of high explosive was necessary to wreck the Germans' first defensive lines in Artois, but still the supply was not exhausted. When the cease-fire was sounded, the British commanders found that they had on hand a great deal more ammunition than they expected, and in certain departments there was actually a greater quantity ready for the gunners at the end of the struggle than at the beginning. Mr. Lloyd-George received and was entitled to the chief glory for that splendid assurance that there would be no more Neuve Chapelles. But I am sure that the little Welshman who has accomplished the miracle of "speeding up" Britain would be the first to acknowledge thatThe Daily Mail, though its circulation is 150,000 less than it was in May, can not be robbed of the honor that belongs to it for having torn the scales from England's eyes on the "shells tragedy."Previous to the "shells tragedy," I do not think it will be possible for even the friendliest chroniclers to record that, with the single exception of the magnificent rush to arms of her upper and middle classes, Great Britain had given a particularly flattering account of herself in the searching test of war. I do not refer, of course, to the accomplishments of the army and navy. British soldiers and sailors need no encomium at my hands. The Trojan heroism of the army, despite its lack of sweeping victory, will enrich military history for all time. The silent effectiveness of the navy, with its vindication of Admiral Mahan's theories, is the marvel of the war. I am referring to the conduct of the British who have not been in the war as combatants--to the moral psychic aspect of life in this country during the year of travail. That is why I call theLusitaniaa blessing in disguise, just as I sometimes felt that a landing of a German force on the British coasts, had it only taken place soon enough, might have proved the most practically beneficial tonic to the British war spirit which could have been conceived. Something was needed tobring the war hometo Englishmen. TheLusitaniapartially served the purpose.The renaissance set in with the dawn of summer. Events did not give recruiting quite that "boom" which was expected, but the national sobering process which ensued was more than a compensating factor. Lloyd-George, inevitable and irrepressible, invented the doctrine that "silver bullets" (money) and Germany's "potato-bread spirit" (economy) were now as urgently necessary for Britain to win as high-explosives with which to kill Germans. Only a few weeks before becoming "Shells Minister" and while still Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd-George introduced the second War Budget, which gave Britons a staggering idea of what killing Germans meant in mere lucre. It was costing $15,000,000 a day then--in May--and the scale was crescendo, not diminuendo. Lloyd-George declared that the nation's bills could not be met unless the country went over, horse, foot and dragoon, to the Simple Life. The Prime Minister seconded his appeal for the radical regeneration of British life--a conversion from recklessness to Spartanism--with some eloquent figures. In a "keynote speech" at Guildhall, Mr. Asquith declared that "waste, on the part either of individuals or of classes, which is always foolish and shortsighted, is in these times nothing short of a national danger." The United Kingdom's annual income, the Premier explained, was between $11,250,000,000 and $12,000,000,000. Annual expenditure aggregated about $10,000,000,000. The country, therefore, saved under normal conditions between $1,250,000,000 and $2,000,000,000. But the necessities of "our seven wars" (in different parts of the hemisphere) required Britons to save about two and a half times what they customarily put away. They needed to store up $5,000,000,000 instead of $2,000,000,000 a year. In other words, they must reorganize their scheme and standards of living--and of spending--so that they saved $50 for every $20 saved in the past. In no other conceivable way, said the Prime Minister, could Great Britain shoulder the burden of a struggle already costing her at the rate of $5,475,000,000 a year. To ask the notoriously most extravagant people in Europe--the returns from the United States are not in yet--to "economize" on the Brobdingnagian lines which these figures conjured up was a very tall order, indeed.But the gassed Tommies back from the trenches and the widows and the orphans manufactured by theLusitaniaand the impregnability of the German lines were uppermost in England's mind, and she set her jaw to the inevitable. The Simple Life did not find itself among friends in the midst of a race which believes in a maximum of servants on a minimum of income; whose very homes and kitchens are the paradise of wasters; which venerates leisure, week-ends, "good addresses" and "parties"; which left the omnibuses to the crowd and scorned anything beneath the rank of a taxi for the truly well-born; which would gladly go poor for a week for the sake of a Saturday lunch at the Piccadilly grill and a supper at the Savoy, with a theater and a music-hall between, and Murray's afterward till dawn; which, while never ostentatious, was addicted to luxury; which worshiped golf, football, bridge and horse-racing like liberty itself, and which drank like sailors all.But the ax of retrenchment was infinitely preferable to the sword of Damocles. Lords and ladies, "gentry" and common folk, prepared to make the best of it. Prohibition, mainly to enforce sobriety on the working classes, was considered by the Government, but not for long, for there was a mighty howl from the "trade" and from its bibulous votaries, who in England include both sexes, all classes and nearly every age. Restriction, not prohibition, was adopted as a compromise. In the "munition areas" the saloons were closed at the hours when, in former times, working men were most inclined to squander their wages on debilitating ale and alcohol. Everywhere a "No-drinks-before-10-A.-M." decree was promulgated, and, simultaneously, it became a misdemeanor for a restaurant, saloon, hotel, bar or even a private club to dispense liquor after ten o'clock at night. Clubland in Pall Mall, St. James's and Piccadilly groaned, and there was gnashing of teeth among the "nuts" (young bloods) and the ladies of the chorus. But people found they had more money for bread and butter, potatoes, vegetables and meat, which were costing semi-famine prices as it was, and there were fewer besot wrecks of women in the Strand, and almost no intoxicated men in khaki. War manifestly had its blessings, too. One met unfamiliar people in the plebeian motor-buses, who at first wrapped their evening-coats exclusively and close around them, for contact with the common clay was still new and strange. It became positively fashionable to be a cheese-parer. You were no longer considered "bad form" if you went straight home from the theater, and confessed why. If my lady of Mayfair did not close up her house in South Audley Street or Park Lane altogether, to live in "chambers" or some cozy country cottage, which was also cheap, she at least shut up the drawing-rooms, dispensed with a maid or two, cut out the most expensive courses at her dinners, when she gave any at all, and didn't mind if her guests turned up in day clothes.The plutocratic peer who ordinarily maintained a "place" at the seashore, an estate in Middlesex or Devon, and a town-house in Berkeley Square had probably long ago handed over the "place" and the estate for military hospital purposes--hardly a mansion or manor-house in England to-day is devoted to any other use--and now retrenchment became for him the order of the day in London, too. His stable of thoroughbreds almost vanished in the early days of the war, for the needs of the cavalry and the artillery were insatiable and undiscriminating, and now hisgaragewas down to a war basis--the most plebeian car he ever drove; the others were in army service either in England or "somewhere in France." Sackville Street and Albemarle Street, Bond Street and Regent Street, where smart clothes and other expensive trinkets for men and women were formerly sold, became deserted. Men's tailors displayed nothing but khaki in their windows, and Paquin's, Redfern's and Worth's languished as if England were famine-blighted. Society faded away as if pestilence had swept Uppertendom into oblivion. Women of Britain's first families were almost ashamed to be seen in anything more chic than the livery of mourning, and by midsummer of 1915 black was pitiably fashionable and omnipresent. "Entertaining" had been a lost art for months. "Going in for it" now seemed and was sacrilege. Indulged at all, it was excusable only if it had the extenuating excuse of having been arranged, and then in the most modest of ways, for one's wounded or recuperating officer friends, back from Hell or on the eve of going there--"somewhere in France." It was war-time in England at last.If I have seemed to emphasize that the reconstruction of British life, after bitterly hard knocks on land and sea pounded some realization of their task's magnitude into Englishmen's heads, went on chiefly in the upper and upper-middle classes, it is precisely the impression I seek to convey. It is they alone, to date, who have taken the full measure of Britain's terrible emergency and acted accordingly. Even that statement requires qualification, for the fools' paradise is not even to-day inhabited exclusively by the benighted lower strata of the population. Neuve Chapelle, asphyxiating gas and theLusitaniahad passed into history a full month before, yet there lingers painfully in my memory the recollection of a country-house week-end party broken up because Englishwomen of "class" objected to hearing a fellow-guest venture the opinion that dear old England would better "wake up" to the fact that calm alone, mighty an asset as it was, could not "march to Berlin" against an enemy like the Germans. These ladies were interesting as types. Their name was legion, and many of them, as an Irishman might say, were men. Common sense, prized of Anglo-Saxon virtues, and tolerance, its twin sister, lost their old-time hold on many millions in these isles during the war. The "Anti-German Union," which was founded by well-meaning noblemen and noblewomen for the purpose of organizing hate of the Teuton and all his works, perhaps set itself an unethical goal, but the psychology at the bottom of the movement was wholesome; it was all to the good, because it was sharpening the bulldog's teeth. It committed uncouth excesses like sending interrupters to the German Church service in Montpelier Place, forgetting that my esteemed friend, the Reverend Mr. Williams, the Anglican chaplain in Berlin, was never prevented from assembling his uninterned flock for worship at St. George's in Montbijou-Platz. Far less excusable than the "Anti-German Union's" super-patriotic eccentricities was the smug intolerance of enormous numbers of British toward elementary questions of the war. They would hear nothing of the Germans unless it was discreditable. I would write in my "Germany Day by Day" column inThe Daily Mailthat there were growing indications (let us say) that the enemy was still at fighting zenith--his stock of men, materials and provisions still far from exhausted. The next day's post would invariably bring me denunciatory letters from anonymous members of the public. I was "pro-German." I was "a German agent." I was "playing the enemy's game." Englishmen didn't "care to read the twaddle of a man who was still so enamored of the Hun capital where he so long lived." And when I wrote of American exasperation with British shipping practises in war, an English patriot induced my editor to print a letter in retort, "praying passionately for preservation from the candid friend." Other correspondents did not confine their observations to supplication. They were the high privates, these human ostriches, of the Grand Army of Truth-Hiders, who, commanded by great editors in Fleet Street and ably abetted by the Censorship, preferred palatable fiction to iron facts. It is they who kept John Bull lulled in complacent slumber for most of the first year of the war and are doing their diabolical best to administer sleeping-powder even now.Yet, by and large, the section of the British public which does its thinking above its gaiter-tops was effectually roused from its dreams as Armageddon's initial twelvemonth approached its finish. It was the sub-stratum which could not be roused from the stupor of indifference. The war had brought mourning and desolation to the upper-class homes of England. The havoc wrought in the ranks of the peerage and other dignities is poignantly summarized in the newDebrett. Ten per cent. of the British officers who have died in the war were in the pages ofDebrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage, and in the issue for 1916, just published, the War Roll of Honor of the dead comprises eight hundred names. In it appear one member of the Royal Family--Prince Maurice of Battenberg; six peers, sixteen baronets, six knights, and seven members of Parliament, one hundred sixty-four knights companion, ninety-five sons of peers, eighty-two sons of baronets, and eighty-four sons of knights. Two successive heirs to the earldom of Loudoun fell, and the death of Lord Worsdey affected the succession to three separate peerages, the earldom of Yarborough and the baronies of Fauconberg and Conyers. Succession has been unduly precipitated, or the normal descent changed, in over one hundred instances by the casualties of the war. The peer, the professional man, or the merchant, had had an almost annihilating blow struck at his fortune. Things during the past year had dealt these classes a vicious thrust. But working-class and lower-class Britain were actually profiting from the war. Wages were inordinately high--despite trade-unionism's unceasing clamor. Unemployment no longer existed. There were no soup-kitchens along the Embankment. The Salvation Army's poor-relief system was almost without an excuse. Families of clerks and working men--many thousands of whom were volunteers in Kitchener's armies--were, thanks to generous separation allowances paid by the War Office, almost better off than in the days when the bread-winner was at home. For the British proletariat Mars seemed almost a savior. He had brought it unwonted prosperity. The temper in which a vast portion of the "downtrodden" looked upon their new-born affluence was that self-preservation, being the first law of nature, insistently demanded nothing from them which would precipitately evict them from Easy Street. The Grand Fleet protected lower-class England from the only blow which could conceivably have knocked sense into it--invasion. As that did not and could not occur, Shepherd's Bush envisaged war not as an unmixed evil, but as something better, somehow, than peace had ever been. It is all woefully at loggerheads with Norman Angell's theories of the "devastating economic influence of war." But the immutable fact is that working-class Britain, despite the havoc the war has played with trade, incomes and high finance generally, finds itself, despite even the higher cost of living, at least on as prosperous a level as at any time in its contemporary history. It may be a myopic view, but it explains, in my judgment, much of the proletariat's amazing apathy toward the crucial national emergency.The building of the New England is still in progress. The melting-pot is full. Years will elapse before the finished product leaves the crucible. The process of transition, however, has made enormous strides. Adversity is a wonderful reorganizer. The physiognomy of things long held unchangeable is altered almost beyond recognition. It is a better England already, as well as a new one. Above all, Democracy has not failed in the supreme test. The spectacle of three million men, uncoerced, responsive and responsible to no law but their own conscience, marching out to death and glory that England may live, is a sublime picture, which will blot out and overshadow much of the bungling and many of the disasters and excrescences of the past.If I have seemed to dwell with insistence and even cynicism upon "British calm" amid the thunders, let me here and now subscribe unqualifiedly to the view that it remains, when all is said and done, a magnificent achievement second only to the demonstration of Voluntaryism as a Democracy's first line of defense. Britannia will continue to rule the waves mainly because she was calm when they surged about her most angrily.CHAPTER XXIIQUO VADIS?October, 1915. The eighty-third day of the second year of war. A woman, writing inThe Times, suggests that England adopt as her national prayer, "God help us win this war." King George V, emerging at length from the No Man's Land of Constitutional Irresponsibility, appeals, stirringly, "to my people" to save the sinking bark of Voluntary military service. It is the calm before the Conscription storm. The Sovereign discourses upon "the grave moment in the struggle" and calls for "men of all classes to come forward and take their share in the fight in order that another may not inherit the free Empire which their ancestors and mine have built." The King hints at "the darkest moment" which, from time immemorial, "has ever produced in men of our race the sternest resolve."Britain's horizon is clouded, wherever one looks. No forced optimism can blink iron facts. In the East, Russia is paralyzed for months to come, even if not "crushed." Her fortresses, "deemed impregnable," writes Lloyd-George in the preface of his compiled war speeches, "are falling like sand castles before the resistless tide of Teutonic invasion." The "steam-roller" must go into winter quarters. In the West, the great Anglo-French offensive in Artois and the Champagne punctures the German front and advances the Allied lines two or three miles. The German losses are her severest of the war--140,000, so the French say, including vast heaps of dead, whole regiments of maimed and at least 25,000 prisoners and 145 field-guns. But the victory, substantial and promising as it is, has been dearly bought. The Germans claim that the preliminary seventy-two-hour bombardment represented an expenditure of 65,000,000 shells--mostly of American production, so allege the "inspired" war-correspondents at German headquarters, with sneering references to "blood-smeared dollars." The Allies' casualties are not tabulated. They are only known to be cruelly heavy. Englishmen fear there has been another Neuve Chapelle. Joffre and French have demonstrated that the German front is not quite impenetrable. But the enemy, on his part, has shown that for the Allies to "break through" in the West is a task fraught with peril and toll sickening to contemplate.General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief at the Dardanelles, has been recalled "to report." Another British general, unnamed, is dismissed for having led an army into a shambles at Suvla Bay. The campaign in Gallipoli is a tacitly acknowledged failure. General Sir Charles Monro is hurried to Turkey to succeed Hamilton and retrieve the fortunes of an expedition which has already cost 100,000 casualties, a trio of battleships, a transport full of troops, and heart-breaking incalculable. There are ugly rumors that the Allies, facing the inevitable, are about to abandon the ill-starred Dardanelles venture, and try their luck elsewhere. Against the German-led Turks twelve miles of precarious "front" with a back to the sea is all Anglo-Colonial-French valor has been able to achieve. But misfortune has dogged the Allies in fields remote from the actual theaters of war. While Germanic-Turko armies have been wrecking their military hopes East, West and Near East, Allied diplomacy has been disastrously foiled in the pivotal Balkans. Bulgaria, deemed friendly, though venal, openly goes over to the enemy. Sir Edward Grey, like his fellow-idol, Kitchener, is under withering fire. He is charged with permitting Berlin to score a victory which might have been London's if British diplomacy had been characterized by less tentativeness of policy and greater impetuosity of deed. It seems the old story--"too late." "Have we a Foreign Office?" bitterly asks Fleet Street. But the cup of disappointment is not full even yet. Greece, too, is recreant. She mobilizes, supposedly as a pro-Ally counterstroke to the pro-German Bulgarian menace, for is not the King of the Hellenes bound by solemn treaty to join Peter of Serbia in the eventuality of attack by Ferdinand of Sofia? But Downing Street failed to reckon with King "Tino" of Athens and his Hohenzollern consort, the Kaiser's favorite sister, Sophia. Premier Venizelos, the Allies' hope, is forced to resign. Greece remains "neutral," between German Charybdis and English Scylla, as King Constantine himself describes his plight. She shuts her eyes to the nebulous Allied expeditionary force landed at Salonica and "rushed" precipitately at the eleventh hour to the relief of the Serbs, who are even now threatened with annihilation between the German-Austrians on the north and west, and the back-stabbing Bulgars on the east. Belgrade falls. Uskub is captured. The Salonica line to Nish is cut. Germany's "road to Constantinople" is open. The Kaiser can get there now before the Allies. Diplomacy grasps at a last straw. Cyprus, annexed from Turkey by Britain early in the war, is offered to Greece if she will fling her army into the breach. In Athens, it appears, dictates of self-preservation govern. Revealing a highly-developed Missourian trait, Greece asks to be "shown." By active operations against the Germanic Powers and Bulgaria, assisted by mere promises of more Allied reinforcements via Salonica or the driblets already sent, Greece fears to share Belgium and Serbia's fate. If the Allies will send 400,000 troops to the Balkans--or about twice as many as have been pounding fruitlessly at the Dardanelles--Greece might change her mind. The suggestion inspires little enthusiasm in England. Kitchener and French can doubtless spare the men. But the equipment of another huge British army for operations in the Near East in time to turn the tables is a taller order. Meantime Mackensen and Gallwitz batter their way across the Serbian ranges. In London there are anxious doubts whether there will even be any Serbian army to "relieve" by the time the Allies place an effective rescuing expedition in the decisive theater. Serbia begins to look uncomfortably like another Belgium--Salonica like ill-starred Antwerp. Blunder and procrastination were ever the parents of disaster.So much for the military and political situation, which even the Truth-Hiders begin to see in its true colors. But if things were "messed" abroad--in the West and in the Near East--muddle and bungle were even more rampant at home. Take the Zeppelins. They first visited these shores in January, 1915. In October Press and Parliament commenced for the first time seriously to investigate the adequacy of Britain's "aerial defenses," with the result that chaotic demoralization and systemless go-as-you-please were found to prevail. Sir Percy Scott, the country's greatest gunnery expert, had been in charge of London's defenses against the sky-pirates, but it appeared that his guns were ineffective, his gunners untrained for the highly specialized feat of hitting mile-high targets flying in the dark, and things in general unorganized and more or less futile. The Press Bureau condescendingly parted with an abstract story of the latest and most disastrous raid of all over "the London area." People derived lively satisfaction from its disclosure that the metropolis was "cool" and unafraid under fire. Only a few courageous "alarmists" read the signs of the times aright and demand that some life and efficiency forthwith be injected into the "anti-aircraft" department, lest, when Count Zeppelin's range-finding practise cruises across London are finished, an armada of German airships sail across the Channel and reduce the heart of the Empire, ever calm, to a smoking ash-heap before Sir Percy Scotts' defense is perfected. There was anxious talk of bringing over "expert gunners" from France--in October, after nearly ten months and after twenty-five Zeppelin raids over English territory!The while the elephant-hided Censorship, as if Britannia's troubles were not all-sufficient, insisted upon making itself more of an international laughing-stock and object of world contempt than ever. It censored Kipling'sRecessionalin a battle-story from France. It deleted a quotation from Browning in another narrative from the front. It cut out a famous war correspondent's tribute to the bravery of the enemy. It eliminated a reference to Chatham, England's greatest War Minister, because it confused him with the famous British naval base from which he took his title. It refused to let out a single notch in the muzzle it has attached even to the benevolently neutral American Press, as represented by its accredited and notoriously Anglophile correspondents in England. It reveled in concealment, deception and grotesqueness, though concealing nothing from the enemy and everything from England, deceiving exclusively the British public, and making nobody grotesque except its egregious self. Calls for the light at home, ridicule and criticism from abroad, alike left the Censor unmoved. The sparrows cried from the housetops in ever more insistent accents that all was not well with England, but the Censorship, magnificently blind even to the Royal pronouncement that Britons unfailingly respond when the hour is dark, maintained imperiously that what it was well for the country to know was for it, and it alone, to decide. If the British public were a transgressor, its way could not have been harder.Came Mr. Montagu, the Financial Secretary of the Treasury, the reputed "budget genius" of the Government. Britons must be prepared, he told them, "during the year ahead, to disgorge to the Statenot less than one-half of their entire income, either in the form of taxes or loans." Lord Reading's borrowing commission to America was still on the water, the ink on its $500,000,000 "credit loan" in New York not yet dry. "I estimate our expenditure for the year," said Mr. McKenna, the Finance Minister, in the House of Commons, at "seven billions, nine hundred fifty million dollars" (only he spoke in pounds). "As our total estimated revenue, inclusive of new taxes, is one billion, five hundred twenty-five million dollars, the deficit for the year will be six billion, four hundred twenty-five million dollars. We have now to contemplate a Navy costing for the current year $950,000,000, an Army costing $3,575,000,000, and external advances to our Allies (Russia, France, Italy, Serbia and Belgium) amounting to $2,115,000,000."Then the merciless Chancellor of the Exchequer acquainted Parliament with his scheme for raising a part of this Brobdingnagian revenue. Free trade must be partially shelved. There will be a revenue tariff on "luxury" imports. Income-tax in 1916 will be forty per cent. higher and will amount altogether to about fifty cents on every five dollars earned. Even the man with $650 a year will pay, while "plutocrats" with incomes above that figure will be mulcted even more relentlessly. He of $25,000 will pay $5,150, and nabobs with $50,000, $100,000 and $500,000 per annum (England has several in the latter category) will contribute, respectively, $12,650, $30,150 and $170,150. War is hell. No wonder a parliamentary wag, on the day Mr. McKenna introduced "Conscription of Wealth," interrupted with a merry "Why don't you take it all?"Up to December, 1915, the Government had asked Parliamentary sanction for war credits aggregating $6,500,000,000. But even this staggering total (the war was now costing $25,000,000 a day) was planned to carry the campaign only up to the middle of November. The $500,000,000 loan transaction in the United States only produced funds to be spent there, and it was but half of what was asked. It only indirectly relieves the situation at home. Allowing for the deficit carried over from last year, the latest budget proposes taxes amounting to $1,525,000,000 and loans aggregating $6,425,000,000 for the fiscal year 1915-16. But even the most patriotic experts in Threadneedle Street acknowledge the utter impossibility of raising $6,425,000,000 of genuine money by public loan in Britain per year. They reluctantly predict that the Government will soon be driven to extend its use of fictitious money and paper--on the excoriated German model. The war has already eaten toward the bottom of the stockings and the strong-boxes of Britain where American securities are stored.As the financier not only of her own colossal requirements in the war, but as banker for her allies, England's money necessities are thus seen to be no less urgent than her need of men and munitions. They comprise, these three M's, the trilogy on which the existence of the Empire now depends. British performances in respect to the cash sinews of war have truly been on a monumental scale. History shows no parallel for the achievement of raising at home in loans and Treasury bills over $5,500,000,000 without abandonment of the gold standard and without resort to inconvertible paper, and yet keeping British credit at an altitude which gives hard-headed Uncle Sam no pause in taking John Bull's I-O-U for another half billion. It is an imperishable tribute to the stamina, prestige, wealth and commercial fabric of the British Empire and to the enterprise and ingenuity of the merchants, manufacturers, shippers, bankers and traders who have made their islands the center of the world's exchanges and London the money-market of the universe.[image]Lord NorthcliffeBut magnificent as has been the past, the financial future can not be viewed except with anxiety. Indebtedness has been piled up sky-high--out of every twenty-five dollars spent since the war began, at least twenty dollars has been borrowed. That was possible because of the superlative excellence of British credit. "Our credit is now almost everything," explainsThe Economist. "It comes next to the Navy, and the two can not be dissociated. For if either suffer, our food supplies would be in danger. In one sense, credit is at the mercy of the Government and of the Treasury, for a great false step of policy or continuance in a false course would bring disaster. The responsibility of the Prime Minister and of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and of the Cabinet, as a whole, is prodigious. Whatever else we do, we must maintain our financial equilibrium. With that and the command of the seas, we can not be defeated."Manifestly Britain's economic problem is almost the darkest spot on her overclouded war horizon--the problem of meeting rising obligations out of falling revenue. The Empire suffers from no lack of men; its physical resources are well-nigh inexhaustible. If patriotism does not send them to the trenches of their own free will in adequate numbers, they will be "fetched." There is no longer any question of shortage of munitions. England's own vast industrial plant, as well as that of France, is now occupied almost exclusively in the production of man-killing merchandise for the Allies and is turning it out at high pressure. To the manufacturing equipment of England and France are harnessed, in addition, German bombs and German-incited strikes to the contrary notwithstanding, the limitless productive facilities of the United States and Canada. Britain's one and only nightmare is money, and its corollary aspects, exchange and credit.No estimate has so far appeared which fixes the 1916 deficit which England will have to meet at less than $7,000,000,000, based on a total war cost for the calendar year of $9,000,000,000. How to grapple with the gigantic task conjured up by such a prospect is not engaging popular attention to any marked degree, though upon its solution depends, primarily, Britain's ability to conquer in this war of exhaustion. With the palpable impossibility of raising the wind at home by successive new public loans; with the necessity to invoke such heroic measures as borrowing $500,000,000 in America to bolster up sterling exchange and keep British credit "intact"; with Englishmen sacrificing their enormous holdings of American securities for the same pious purpose; with the British industrial plant so preoccupied with munitions that it can neither, in accordance with tradition, pay for British imports with British exports nor increase British revenue by the same token; with national expenditure advancing by gigantic leaps and national income restricted as it never was before; with all these immutable conditions staring at Englishmen, it is no wonder that those of them who think, as distinguished from those who merely hurrah, contemplate what looms ahead with anxious concern.But admittedly grave as the future is, it is by no means hopeless. Britain's plight is not "desperate," as the Germans, seeking to hide their own, are so fond of making believe. Even the misgivings of Englishmen themselves regarding their economic situation would be promptly and legitimately resolved into confidence if the community as a whole could be induced to pull itself together and look facts in the face. In its incorrigible disinclination to do so alone lies danger. The British Empire is not bankrupt. It can hardly ever become so. A recent estimate assessed the income of the Empire, including India, at something over the fabulous sum of $20,000,000,000! It may be embarrassed--it is unquestionably that already--just as the richest of men frequently are, in the midst of titanic transactions which have outrun their calculations. But embarrassment seldom eventuates in ruin, either for men or nations, if they come to grips with it betimes. Thus, disaster can only follow tribulation in the case of Britain if her people, preferring to wallow in happy-go-lucky nonchalance and drift, postpone until too late those sagacious, clean-sweep measures of reorganization and retrenchment which alone, in the opinion of competent judges, can save the situation.In the preceding chapter I told of the introduction of the Simple Life, of the dawn of the Economy Era in war-time England; but it would be hyperbole to intimate that it has been inaugurated on anything but a superficial scale. Luxury and self-indulgence are still rife. To vast numbers of people, in the classes as well as the masses, the war, far from oppressing them, has brought positive affluence, and with their new riches they have gone in for spending instead of saving. Spartanism in Britain remains a good deal of a theory; it has not become a condition. While Germany, shut off by land and sea, contrives to remain at fighting zenith without her customary imports of $2,500,000,000 a year (she calls Jellicoe's blockade a blessing in disguise because it has compelled her to spend at home what she used to pay out abroad), England's imports of such articles as oranges, cocoa, tea, coffee, tobacco, cheese, rice, meats, pepper and onions have heavily exceeded her importations of the same articles in corresponding peace periods.[1] The Prime Minister tells the country that "victory seems likely to incline to the side which can arm itself the best and stay the longest." Mr. Asquith declares that "that is what we meant to do." But until, for instance, Englishmen realize that by abstaining from tobacco for a year, $40,000,000 of money would be available for the smoke of battle; that if every man, woman and child in the Kingdom puts away 25 cents a week, a new treasure of $600,000,000 could be piled up for war; and that unless waste, extravagance and slothful habits generally are banished, by duke and by docker, as if they were leprous disease, Mr. Asquith's brave words will remain a hollow aspiration. They alone will not enable England to "stay the longest" in the world's most destructive endurance competition.
"We found the enemy much more strongly posted than we expected. We had not sufficient high explosive to level his parapets to the ground after the French practice, and when our infantry gallantly stormed the trenches, as they did in both attacks, they found a garrison undismayed, many entanglements still intact, and maxims on all sides ready to pour in streams of bullets. We could not maintain ourselves in the trenches won, and our reserves were not thrown in because the conditions for success in an assault were not present.
"The attacks were well planned and valiantly conducted. The infantry did splendidly, but the conditions were too hard.
"On our side we have easily defeated all attacks on Ypres. The value of German troops in the attack has greatly deteriorated, and we can deal easily with them in the open. But until we are thoroughly equipped for this trench warfare, we attack under grave disadvantages. The men are in high spirits, taking their cue from the ever-confident and resolute attitude of the Commander-in-Chief.
"If we can break through this hard outer crust of the German defenses, we believe that we can scatter the German Armies, whose offensive causes us no concern at all. But to break this hard crust we need more high explosive, more heavy howitzers, and more men. This special form of warfare has no precedent in history.
"It is certain that we can smash the German crust if we have the means. So the means we must have, and as quickly as possible."
By way of illustrating what British guns could do, if sufficiently numerous and adequately fed, Repington told how the French "by dint of the expenditure of 276 rounds of high explosive per gun in one day, leveled with the ground all the German defenses, except the villages." He left no doubt that until Sir John French's artillery could attack under similar conditions, British hopes of effective cooperation with Joffre's army were futile.The Timescritic's plain-spoken observations, which bore the unmistakable imprint of "inspiration" from British Headquarters, startled the nation. They could hardly have been more suggestive if the Commander-in-Chief himself had gone to the country and proclaimed the facts. Indeed, if others had not promptly done so, I have reason to believe that Sir John French would not have shrunk from that very task. No one had so direct and personal a reason for taking the bull by the horns, for if the British campaign were to degenerate from futility into fiasco, the odium would necessarily fall upon its field chieftain. History will hardly condemn him for resolving that the blame should be placed where it belonged, if, as may well have been the case, inspiration of the impending public exposure emanated from him.
On May 21 Lord Northcliffe'sDaily Mail--his critics are fond of callingThe Timesthe "penny edition" ofThe Daily Mail--opened a ruthless fire on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, as the man directly responsible for the high-explosive famine which was paralyzing British military effort. England was plastered with flaming placards reading: "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder." With the journalistic instinct for a catch-phrase, Northcliffe christened the situation "The Shells Tragedy." He hammered home mercilessly the theory that England must hold to accountability the man whom the country had entrusted with practically autocratic control of the War Office. He insisted that Kitchener could not take shelter behind a brilliant past. It was a bold throw for the Bonaparte of British newspaperdom. He was not only assailing the man whom he himself had helped to elevate to the War Secretaryship; he was attacking the national idol. To the overwhelming majority of Englishmen, as I have already pointed out, the name of Kitchener spelled confidence. Next to the Fleet, he represented the country's greatest war asset. Whenever Britons doubted whether the course of events was leading to victory, they thought of the navy and of Kitchener, and were of stout heart. Northcliffe knew and understood all this--none better. But he said to himself that the relief of the shells crisis was of vastly more moment than the prestige of a national idol; that if the vital interests of the country demanded the dragging of Kitchener from his pedestal, there must be no hesitation in performing that unpleasant task. In an editorial article which stirred Great Britain to its uttermost foundations,The Daily Mailwent full tilt to the issue. It reminded Englishmen that Lord Kitchener loomed large in the public eye primarily as an organizer of victory against the Sudanese and as a man who had "helped" Lord Roberts in South Africa, though (it recalled) there were men who knew Roberts' private opinions of Kitchener's achievements in the Boer campaign. Kitchener had also been Commander-in-Chief in India and, until the outbreak of war, was engaged in the comparatively easy task of running the Egyptian machine, whose wheels had been so well oiled by Lord Cromer. Northcliffe was well aware that Kitchener, owing to his long absence in the East, where he had spent the greater part of his life, was not in touch with the democracy at home, nor had Lord Kitchener ever pretended to any such knowledge.The Daily Mailadmitted all these things and declared moreover that it was fair to Kitchener to say that he had been thrust at a moment's notice into a position of immense difficulty. No longer in his first youth, and more than twice the age of successful military commanders of one hundred years ago, Kitchener had been put in charge of the raising, drilling, clothing, equipping, arming, feeding andfightingof an army which had to be manufactured at a speed unprecedented in the history of the world. Kitchener, though not essentially a good organizer, was a man of enormous driving-power. His talents in that respect had stood him in good stead so far in the war. With the aid of a gigantic advertising campaign, he had accomplished marvels in the direction of raising a volunteer army; but "the shells tragedy" was thunderous proof that the Secretary for War had bitten off more than he could chew. Unless things were to go from bad to worse, the all-important question of providing munitions must be taken from Kitchener's overburdened shoulders and transferred to those of men better equipped in respect of time, temperament and training, to deal with it. The Northcliffe revelations lost none of their sensationalism in presence of Mr. Asquith's solemn assurances at Newcastle, barely three weeks previous, that Britain's munition supply, as well as that of her Allies, was entirely adequate.
If Northcliffe had suddenly proposed the abdication of the Sovereign, or the demolition of St. Paul's Cathedral, or the proclamation of a Republic, nothing could have been more cyclonic in its effect thanThe Daily Mail'simperious demand for the curtailment of Kitchener's supreme authority at the War Office, because he had "blundered" with the army's ammunition. At the Stock Exchange and on the Baltic (the shipping mart) copies of all the Northcliffe papers were ceremoniously burnt. Town councils held indignation meetings, to discuss the advisability of banning them from the public reading-rooms. Super-patriots and Hide-the-Truth zealots rushed to their newsdealers and canceled their subscriptions toThe Times, The Daily Mailand other Northcliffe organs. Rival publishers went so far as to suggest that Northcliffe and his editorial staff should be lined up in front of a firing-squad and shot for high treason. Wherever one went, one encountered the most violent abuse of the journalist who had dared to sling mud at the great soldier who was the incarnation of the nation's hopes and to write "Failure" next to his magic name.Punchepitomized national sentiment in a cartoon showing John Bull patting Kitchener on the shoulder, trampling aDaily Mailunder foot, and saying:
"If you need assurance, Sir, you may like to know that you have the loyal support of all decent people in this country."
But Northcliffe, who possesses those valuable twin assets of the true journalist, an elephantine hide and utter fearlessness, returned to the attack, day after day. He never let up. The "shells tragedy," though Liberal organs were reluctant to admit it, dealt the Asquith Liberal Government a body blow. It was reeling from the effects of still another revelation. Lord Fisher, "Fighting Jack," the First Lord of the Admiralty, tendered his resignation. He refused longer to hold office under the temperamental Mr. Winston Churchill or even under a government to which that impetuous young statesman belonged. The public learned that Fisher had not acquiesced whole-heartedly in Mr. Churchill's schemes for limiting the Dardanelles campaign to a purely naval operation. England was now seething with unrest. The political position was chaotic. Acrimonious debate in Parliament on the shells question was inevitable. For weeks previous there had been demands from many quarters that the conduct of the war should be transferred from a purely Party Government to the hands of a "National Cabinet" of all political complexions. Mr. Asquith yielded to the inevitable. BeforeThe Daily Mail'sexposure of "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder" was a week old, the reconstruction of the Cabinet into a "Coalition" Administration was in full progress. Northcliffe's papers were still being burnt in public places, but he had won a victory for England for which, as she lives, she will yet come to acclaim his name. The completion of the Coalition Ministry was announced on June 11. Lord Kitchener remained Secretary of War, but a "Ministry of Munitions," which took shells and other sinews of war out of Kitchener's hands, was created, and the "hustler" of the Cabinet, Lloyd-George, was entrusted with its organization and administration. Northcliffe had carried his point.
The war has not been prolific in England of "big men." Barring, perhaps, Joffre and Hindenburg, it has produced none anywhere. But I venture that far into the realm of prophecy to predict that the recorder of the life and times of Great Britain in the crucible which was 1915 will pay no mean tribute to the newspaper proprietor who risked prestige and power for the sake of that most prodigious of all tasks--stuffing unpalatable truth down British throats. Northcliffe's actual methods in the performance of the deed may have been debatable. His motives were certainly beyond question, and they will, undoubtedly, appear in true perspective in the impartial light of history. He is not offended when people detect Napoleonic flashes in his impetuous eccentricities, and he would be the last man in the world to deny that his brand of genius is entirely devoid of defects, as it assuredly is not. Northcliffe has been held up to public obloquy as hardly any man of his generation ever was before him and has even been charged with being in "German pay." But he has lived to see the ripening of the fruits of his sensational crusade: the British munitions output has been quadrupled since the Stock Exchange first burntThe Daily Mail. Lloyd-George, at the Ministry of Munitions, has gathered round him the strongest company of business and scientific brains that was ever applied to any Government department in England. One million men and women, in more than two thousand "controlled" establishments, are turning out days, nights and Sundays the shells with which the British army, early or late, is going to cleave its way to victory. In the great fighting around Loos at the end of September, when the French and the British between them fired 65,000,000 shells in seventy-two hours, there was no shortage of the wherewithal, the lack of which turned Neuve Chapelle into a "victory" which Britain had been better without. A prodigious amount of high explosive was necessary to wreck the Germans' first defensive lines in Artois, but still the supply was not exhausted. When the cease-fire was sounded, the British commanders found that they had on hand a great deal more ammunition than they expected, and in certain departments there was actually a greater quantity ready for the gunners at the end of the struggle than at the beginning. Mr. Lloyd-George received and was entitled to the chief glory for that splendid assurance that there would be no more Neuve Chapelles. But I am sure that the little Welshman who has accomplished the miracle of "speeding up" Britain would be the first to acknowledge thatThe Daily Mail, though its circulation is 150,000 less than it was in May, can not be robbed of the honor that belongs to it for having torn the scales from England's eyes on the "shells tragedy."
Previous to the "shells tragedy," I do not think it will be possible for even the friendliest chroniclers to record that, with the single exception of the magnificent rush to arms of her upper and middle classes, Great Britain had given a particularly flattering account of herself in the searching test of war. I do not refer, of course, to the accomplishments of the army and navy. British soldiers and sailors need no encomium at my hands. The Trojan heroism of the army, despite its lack of sweeping victory, will enrich military history for all time. The silent effectiveness of the navy, with its vindication of Admiral Mahan's theories, is the marvel of the war. I am referring to the conduct of the British who have not been in the war as combatants--to the moral psychic aspect of life in this country during the year of travail. That is why I call theLusitaniaa blessing in disguise, just as I sometimes felt that a landing of a German force on the British coasts, had it only taken place soon enough, might have proved the most practically beneficial tonic to the British war spirit which could have been conceived. Something was needed tobring the war hometo Englishmen. TheLusitaniapartially served the purpose.
The renaissance set in with the dawn of summer. Events did not give recruiting quite that "boom" which was expected, but the national sobering process which ensued was more than a compensating factor. Lloyd-George, inevitable and irrepressible, invented the doctrine that "silver bullets" (money) and Germany's "potato-bread spirit" (economy) were now as urgently necessary for Britain to win as high-explosives with which to kill Germans. Only a few weeks before becoming "Shells Minister" and while still Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd-George introduced the second War Budget, which gave Britons a staggering idea of what killing Germans meant in mere lucre. It was costing $15,000,000 a day then--in May--and the scale was crescendo, not diminuendo. Lloyd-George declared that the nation's bills could not be met unless the country went over, horse, foot and dragoon, to the Simple Life. The Prime Minister seconded his appeal for the radical regeneration of British life--a conversion from recklessness to Spartanism--with some eloquent figures. In a "keynote speech" at Guildhall, Mr. Asquith declared that "waste, on the part either of individuals or of classes, which is always foolish and shortsighted, is in these times nothing short of a national danger." The United Kingdom's annual income, the Premier explained, was between $11,250,000,000 and $12,000,000,000. Annual expenditure aggregated about $10,000,000,000. The country, therefore, saved under normal conditions between $1,250,000,000 and $2,000,000,000. But the necessities of "our seven wars" (in different parts of the hemisphere) required Britons to save about two and a half times what they customarily put away. They needed to store up $5,000,000,000 instead of $2,000,000,000 a year. In other words, they must reorganize their scheme and standards of living--and of spending--so that they saved $50 for every $20 saved in the past. In no other conceivable way, said the Prime Minister, could Great Britain shoulder the burden of a struggle already costing her at the rate of $5,475,000,000 a year. To ask the notoriously most extravagant people in Europe--the returns from the United States are not in yet--to "economize" on the Brobdingnagian lines which these figures conjured up was a very tall order, indeed.
But the gassed Tommies back from the trenches and the widows and the orphans manufactured by theLusitaniaand the impregnability of the German lines were uppermost in England's mind, and she set her jaw to the inevitable. The Simple Life did not find itself among friends in the midst of a race which believes in a maximum of servants on a minimum of income; whose very homes and kitchens are the paradise of wasters; which venerates leisure, week-ends, "good addresses" and "parties"; which left the omnibuses to the crowd and scorned anything beneath the rank of a taxi for the truly well-born; which would gladly go poor for a week for the sake of a Saturday lunch at the Piccadilly grill and a supper at the Savoy, with a theater and a music-hall between, and Murray's afterward till dawn; which, while never ostentatious, was addicted to luxury; which worshiped golf, football, bridge and horse-racing like liberty itself, and which drank like sailors all.
But the ax of retrenchment was infinitely preferable to the sword of Damocles. Lords and ladies, "gentry" and common folk, prepared to make the best of it. Prohibition, mainly to enforce sobriety on the working classes, was considered by the Government, but not for long, for there was a mighty howl from the "trade" and from its bibulous votaries, who in England include both sexes, all classes and nearly every age. Restriction, not prohibition, was adopted as a compromise. In the "munition areas" the saloons were closed at the hours when, in former times, working men were most inclined to squander their wages on debilitating ale and alcohol. Everywhere a "No-drinks-before-10-A.-M." decree was promulgated, and, simultaneously, it became a misdemeanor for a restaurant, saloon, hotel, bar or even a private club to dispense liquor after ten o'clock at night. Clubland in Pall Mall, St. James's and Piccadilly groaned, and there was gnashing of teeth among the "nuts" (young bloods) and the ladies of the chorus. But people found they had more money for bread and butter, potatoes, vegetables and meat, which were costing semi-famine prices as it was, and there were fewer besot wrecks of women in the Strand, and almost no intoxicated men in khaki. War manifestly had its blessings, too. One met unfamiliar people in the plebeian motor-buses, who at first wrapped their evening-coats exclusively and close around them, for contact with the common clay was still new and strange. It became positively fashionable to be a cheese-parer. You were no longer considered "bad form" if you went straight home from the theater, and confessed why. If my lady of Mayfair did not close up her house in South Audley Street or Park Lane altogether, to live in "chambers" or some cozy country cottage, which was also cheap, she at least shut up the drawing-rooms, dispensed with a maid or two, cut out the most expensive courses at her dinners, when she gave any at all, and didn't mind if her guests turned up in day clothes.
The plutocratic peer who ordinarily maintained a "place" at the seashore, an estate in Middlesex or Devon, and a town-house in Berkeley Square had probably long ago handed over the "place" and the estate for military hospital purposes--hardly a mansion or manor-house in England to-day is devoted to any other use--and now retrenchment became for him the order of the day in London, too. His stable of thoroughbreds almost vanished in the early days of the war, for the needs of the cavalry and the artillery were insatiable and undiscriminating, and now hisgaragewas down to a war basis--the most plebeian car he ever drove; the others were in army service either in England or "somewhere in France." Sackville Street and Albemarle Street, Bond Street and Regent Street, where smart clothes and other expensive trinkets for men and women were formerly sold, became deserted. Men's tailors displayed nothing but khaki in their windows, and Paquin's, Redfern's and Worth's languished as if England were famine-blighted. Society faded away as if pestilence had swept Uppertendom into oblivion. Women of Britain's first families were almost ashamed to be seen in anything more chic than the livery of mourning, and by midsummer of 1915 black was pitiably fashionable and omnipresent. "Entertaining" had been a lost art for months. "Going in for it" now seemed and was sacrilege. Indulged at all, it was excusable only if it had the extenuating excuse of having been arranged, and then in the most modest of ways, for one's wounded or recuperating officer friends, back from Hell or on the eve of going there--"somewhere in France." It was war-time in England at last.
If I have seemed to emphasize that the reconstruction of British life, after bitterly hard knocks on land and sea pounded some realization of their task's magnitude into Englishmen's heads, went on chiefly in the upper and upper-middle classes, it is precisely the impression I seek to convey. It is they alone, to date, who have taken the full measure of Britain's terrible emergency and acted accordingly. Even that statement requires qualification, for the fools' paradise is not even to-day inhabited exclusively by the benighted lower strata of the population. Neuve Chapelle, asphyxiating gas and theLusitaniahad passed into history a full month before, yet there lingers painfully in my memory the recollection of a country-house week-end party broken up because Englishwomen of "class" objected to hearing a fellow-guest venture the opinion that dear old England would better "wake up" to the fact that calm alone, mighty an asset as it was, could not "march to Berlin" against an enemy like the Germans. These ladies were interesting as types. Their name was legion, and many of them, as an Irishman might say, were men. Common sense, prized of Anglo-Saxon virtues, and tolerance, its twin sister, lost their old-time hold on many millions in these isles during the war. The "Anti-German Union," which was founded by well-meaning noblemen and noblewomen for the purpose of organizing hate of the Teuton and all his works, perhaps set itself an unethical goal, but the psychology at the bottom of the movement was wholesome; it was all to the good, because it was sharpening the bulldog's teeth. It committed uncouth excesses like sending interrupters to the German Church service in Montpelier Place, forgetting that my esteemed friend, the Reverend Mr. Williams, the Anglican chaplain in Berlin, was never prevented from assembling his uninterned flock for worship at St. George's in Montbijou-Platz. Far less excusable than the "Anti-German Union's" super-patriotic eccentricities was the smug intolerance of enormous numbers of British toward elementary questions of the war. They would hear nothing of the Germans unless it was discreditable. I would write in my "Germany Day by Day" column inThe Daily Mailthat there were growing indications (let us say) that the enemy was still at fighting zenith--his stock of men, materials and provisions still far from exhausted. The next day's post would invariably bring me denunciatory letters from anonymous members of the public. I was "pro-German." I was "a German agent." I was "playing the enemy's game." Englishmen didn't "care to read the twaddle of a man who was still so enamored of the Hun capital where he so long lived." And when I wrote of American exasperation with British shipping practises in war, an English patriot induced my editor to print a letter in retort, "praying passionately for preservation from the candid friend." Other correspondents did not confine their observations to supplication. They were the high privates, these human ostriches, of the Grand Army of Truth-Hiders, who, commanded by great editors in Fleet Street and ably abetted by the Censorship, preferred palatable fiction to iron facts. It is they who kept John Bull lulled in complacent slumber for most of the first year of the war and are doing their diabolical best to administer sleeping-powder even now.
Yet, by and large, the section of the British public which does its thinking above its gaiter-tops was effectually roused from its dreams as Armageddon's initial twelvemonth approached its finish. It was the sub-stratum which could not be roused from the stupor of indifference. The war had brought mourning and desolation to the upper-class homes of England. The havoc wrought in the ranks of the peerage and other dignities is poignantly summarized in the newDebrett. Ten per cent. of the British officers who have died in the war were in the pages ofDebrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage, and in the issue for 1916, just published, the War Roll of Honor of the dead comprises eight hundred names. In it appear one member of the Royal Family--Prince Maurice of Battenberg; six peers, sixteen baronets, six knights, and seven members of Parliament, one hundred sixty-four knights companion, ninety-five sons of peers, eighty-two sons of baronets, and eighty-four sons of knights. Two successive heirs to the earldom of Loudoun fell, and the death of Lord Worsdey affected the succession to three separate peerages, the earldom of Yarborough and the baronies of Fauconberg and Conyers. Succession has been unduly precipitated, or the normal descent changed, in over one hundred instances by the casualties of the war. The peer, the professional man, or the merchant, had had an almost annihilating blow struck at his fortune. Things during the past year had dealt these classes a vicious thrust. But working-class and lower-class Britain were actually profiting from the war. Wages were inordinately high--despite trade-unionism's unceasing clamor. Unemployment no longer existed. There were no soup-kitchens along the Embankment. The Salvation Army's poor-relief system was almost without an excuse. Families of clerks and working men--many thousands of whom were volunteers in Kitchener's armies--were, thanks to generous separation allowances paid by the War Office, almost better off than in the days when the bread-winner was at home. For the British proletariat Mars seemed almost a savior. He had brought it unwonted prosperity. The temper in which a vast portion of the "downtrodden" looked upon their new-born affluence was that self-preservation, being the first law of nature, insistently demanded nothing from them which would precipitately evict them from Easy Street. The Grand Fleet protected lower-class England from the only blow which could conceivably have knocked sense into it--invasion. As that did not and could not occur, Shepherd's Bush envisaged war not as an unmixed evil, but as something better, somehow, than peace had ever been. It is all woefully at loggerheads with Norman Angell's theories of the "devastating economic influence of war." But the immutable fact is that working-class Britain, despite the havoc the war has played with trade, incomes and high finance generally, finds itself, despite even the higher cost of living, at least on as prosperous a level as at any time in its contemporary history. It may be a myopic view, but it explains, in my judgment, much of the proletariat's amazing apathy toward the crucial national emergency.
The building of the New England is still in progress. The melting-pot is full. Years will elapse before the finished product leaves the crucible. The process of transition, however, has made enormous strides. Adversity is a wonderful reorganizer. The physiognomy of things long held unchangeable is altered almost beyond recognition. It is a better England already, as well as a new one. Above all, Democracy has not failed in the supreme test. The spectacle of three million men, uncoerced, responsive and responsible to no law but their own conscience, marching out to death and glory that England may live, is a sublime picture, which will blot out and overshadow much of the bungling and many of the disasters and excrescences of the past.
If I have seemed to dwell with insistence and even cynicism upon "British calm" amid the thunders, let me here and now subscribe unqualifiedly to the view that it remains, when all is said and done, a magnificent achievement second only to the demonstration of Voluntaryism as a Democracy's first line of defense. Britannia will continue to rule the waves mainly because she was calm when they surged about her most angrily.
CHAPTER XXII
QUO VADIS?
October, 1915. The eighty-third day of the second year of war. A woman, writing inThe Times, suggests that England adopt as her national prayer, "God help us win this war." King George V, emerging at length from the No Man's Land of Constitutional Irresponsibility, appeals, stirringly, "to my people" to save the sinking bark of Voluntary military service. It is the calm before the Conscription storm. The Sovereign discourses upon "the grave moment in the struggle" and calls for "men of all classes to come forward and take their share in the fight in order that another may not inherit the free Empire which their ancestors and mine have built." The King hints at "the darkest moment" which, from time immemorial, "has ever produced in men of our race the sternest resolve."
Britain's horizon is clouded, wherever one looks. No forced optimism can blink iron facts. In the East, Russia is paralyzed for months to come, even if not "crushed." Her fortresses, "deemed impregnable," writes Lloyd-George in the preface of his compiled war speeches, "are falling like sand castles before the resistless tide of Teutonic invasion." The "steam-roller" must go into winter quarters. In the West, the great Anglo-French offensive in Artois and the Champagne punctures the German front and advances the Allied lines two or three miles. The German losses are her severest of the war--140,000, so the French say, including vast heaps of dead, whole regiments of maimed and at least 25,000 prisoners and 145 field-guns. But the victory, substantial and promising as it is, has been dearly bought. The Germans claim that the preliminary seventy-two-hour bombardment represented an expenditure of 65,000,000 shells--mostly of American production, so allege the "inspired" war-correspondents at German headquarters, with sneering references to "blood-smeared dollars." The Allies' casualties are not tabulated. They are only known to be cruelly heavy. Englishmen fear there has been another Neuve Chapelle. Joffre and French have demonstrated that the German front is not quite impenetrable. But the enemy, on his part, has shown that for the Allies to "break through" in the West is a task fraught with peril and toll sickening to contemplate.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief at the Dardanelles, has been recalled "to report." Another British general, unnamed, is dismissed for having led an army into a shambles at Suvla Bay. The campaign in Gallipoli is a tacitly acknowledged failure. General Sir Charles Monro is hurried to Turkey to succeed Hamilton and retrieve the fortunes of an expedition which has already cost 100,000 casualties, a trio of battleships, a transport full of troops, and heart-breaking incalculable. There are ugly rumors that the Allies, facing the inevitable, are about to abandon the ill-starred Dardanelles venture, and try their luck elsewhere. Against the German-led Turks twelve miles of precarious "front" with a back to the sea is all Anglo-Colonial-French valor has been able to achieve. But misfortune has dogged the Allies in fields remote from the actual theaters of war. While Germanic-Turko armies have been wrecking their military hopes East, West and Near East, Allied diplomacy has been disastrously foiled in the pivotal Balkans. Bulgaria, deemed friendly, though venal, openly goes over to the enemy. Sir Edward Grey, like his fellow-idol, Kitchener, is under withering fire. He is charged with permitting Berlin to score a victory which might have been London's if British diplomacy had been characterized by less tentativeness of policy and greater impetuosity of deed. It seems the old story--"too late." "Have we a Foreign Office?" bitterly asks Fleet Street. But the cup of disappointment is not full even yet. Greece, too, is recreant. She mobilizes, supposedly as a pro-Ally counterstroke to the pro-German Bulgarian menace, for is not the King of the Hellenes bound by solemn treaty to join Peter of Serbia in the eventuality of attack by Ferdinand of Sofia? But Downing Street failed to reckon with King "Tino" of Athens and his Hohenzollern consort, the Kaiser's favorite sister, Sophia. Premier Venizelos, the Allies' hope, is forced to resign. Greece remains "neutral," between German Charybdis and English Scylla, as King Constantine himself describes his plight. She shuts her eyes to the nebulous Allied expeditionary force landed at Salonica and "rushed" precipitately at the eleventh hour to the relief of the Serbs, who are even now threatened with annihilation between the German-Austrians on the north and west, and the back-stabbing Bulgars on the east. Belgrade falls. Uskub is captured. The Salonica line to Nish is cut. Germany's "road to Constantinople" is open. The Kaiser can get there now before the Allies. Diplomacy grasps at a last straw. Cyprus, annexed from Turkey by Britain early in the war, is offered to Greece if she will fling her army into the breach. In Athens, it appears, dictates of self-preservation govern. Revealing a highly-developed Missourian trait, Greece asks to be "shown." By active operations against the Germanic Powers and Bulgaria, assisted by mere promises of more Allied reinforcements via Salonica or the driblets already sent, Greece fears to share Belgium and Serbia's fate. If the Allies will send 400,000 troops to the Balkans--or about twice as many as have been pounding fruitlessly at the Dardanelles--Greece might change her mind. The suggestion inspires little enthusiasm in England. Kitchener and French can doubtless spare the men. But the equipment of another huge British army for operations in the Near East in time to turn the tables is a taller order. Meantime Mackensen and Gallwitz batter their way across the Serbian ranges. In London there are anxious doubts whether there will even be any Serbian army to "relieve" by the time the Allies place an effective rescuing expedition in the decisive theater. Serbia begins to look uncomfortably like another Belgium--Salonica like ill-starred Antwerp. Blunder and procrastination were ever the parents of disaster.
So much for the military and political situation, which even the Truth-Hiders begin to see in its true colors. But if things were "messed" abroad--in the West and in the Near East--muddle and bungle were even more rampant at home. Take the Zeppelins. They first visited these shores in January, 1915. In October Press and Parliament commenced for the first time seriously to investigate the adequacy of Britain's "aerial defenses," with the result that chaotic demoralization and systemless go-as-you-please were found to prevail. Sir Percy Scott, the country's greatest gunnery expert, had been in charge of London's defenses against the sky-pirates, but it appeared that his guns were ineffective, his gunners untrained for the highly specialized feat of hitting mile-high targets flying in the dark, and things in general unorganized and more or less futile. The Press Bureau condescendingly parted with an abstract story of the latest and most disastrous raid of all over "the London area." People derived lively satisfaction from its disclosure that the metropolis was "cool" and unafraid under fire. Only a few courageous "alarmists" read the signs of the times aright and demand that some life and efficiency forthwith be injected into the "anti-aircraft" department, lest, when Count Zeppelin's range-finding practise cruises across London are finished, an armada of German airships sail across the Channel and reduce the heart of the Empire, ever calm, to a smoking ash-heap before Sir Percy Scotts' defense is perfected. There was anxious talk of bringing over "expert gunners" from France--in October, after nearly ten months and after twenty-five Zeppelin raids over English territory!
The while the elephant-hided Censorship, as if Britannia's troubles were not all-sufficient, insisted upon making itself more of an international laughing-stock and object of world contempt than ever. It censored Kipling'sRecessionalin a battle-story from France. It deleted a quotation from Browning in another narrative from the front. It cut out a famous war correspondent's tribute to the bravery of the enemy. It eliminated a reference to Chatham, England's greatest War Minister, because it confused him with the famous British naval base from which he took his title. It refused to let out a single notch in the muzzle it has attached even to the benevolently neutral American Press, as represented by its accredited and notoriously Anglophile correspondents in England. It reveled in concealment, deception and grotesqueness, though concealing nothing from the enemy and everything from England, deceiving exclusively the British public, and making nobody grotesque except its egregious self. Calls for the light at home, ridicule and criticism from abroad, alike left the Censor unmoved. The sparrows cried from the housetops in ever more insistent accents that all was not well with England, but the Censorship, magnificently blind even to the Royal pronouncement that Britons unfailingly respond when the hour is dark, maintained imperiously that what it was well for the country to know was for it, and it alone, to decide. If the British public were a transgressor, its way could not have been harder.
Came Mr. Montagu, the Financial Secretary of the Treasury, the reputed "budget genius" of the Government. Britons must be prepared, he told them, "during the year ahead, to disgorge to the Statenot less than one-half of their entire income, either in the form of taxes or loans." Lord Reading's borrowing commission to America was still on the water, the ink on its $500,000,000 "credit loan" in New York not yet dry. "I estimate our expenditure for the year," said Mr. McKenna, the Finance Minister, in the House of Commons, at "seven billions, nine hundred fifty million dollars" (only he spoke in pounds). "As our total estimated revenue, inclusive of new taxes, is one billion, five hundred twenty-five million dollars, the deficit for the year will be six billion, four hundred twenty-five million dollars. We have now to contemplate a Navy costing for the current year $950,000,000, an Army costing $3,575,000,000, and external advances to our Allies (Russia, France, Italy, Serbia and Belgium) amounting to $2,115,000,000."
Then the merciless Chancellor of the Exchequer acquainted Parliament with his scheme for raising a part of this Brobdingnagian revenue. Free trade must be partially shelved. There will be a revenue tariff on "luxury" imports. Income-tax in 1916 will be forty per cent. higher and will amount altogether to about fifty cents on every five dollars earned. Even the man with $650 a year will pay, while "plutocrats" with incomes above that figure will be mulcted even more relentlessly. He of $25,000 will pay $5,150, and nabobs with $50,000, $100,000 and $500,000 per annum (England has several in the latter category) will contribute, respectively, $12,650, $30,150 and $170,150. War is hell. No wonder a parliamentary wag, on the day Mr. McKenna introduced "Conscription of Wealth," interrupted with a merry "Why don't you take it all?"
Up to December, 1915, the Government had asked Parliamentary sanction for war credits aggregating $6,500,000,000. But even this staggering total (the war was now costing $25,000,000 a day) was planned to carry the campaign only up to the middle of November. The $500,000,000 loan transaction in the United States only produced funds to be spent there, and it was but half of what was asked. It only indirectly relieves the situation at home. Allowing for the deficit carried over from last year, the latest budget proposes taxes amounting to $1,525,000,000 and loans aggregating $6,425,000,000 for the fiscal year 1915-16. But even the most patriotic experts in Threadneedle Street acknowledge the utter impossibility of raising $6,425,000,000 of genuine money by public loan in Britain per year. They reluctantly predict that the Government will soon be driven to extend its use of fictitious money and paper--on the excoriated German model. The war has already eaten toward the bottom of the stockings and the strong-boxes of Britain where American securities are stored.
As the financier not only of her own colossal requirements in the war, but as banker for her allies, England's money necessities are thus seen to be no less urgent than her need of men and munitions. They comprise, these three M's, the trilogy on which the existence of the Empire now depends. British performances in respect to the cash sinews of war have truly been on a monumental scale. History shows no parallel for the achievement of raising at home in loans and Treasury bills over $5,500,000,000 without abandonment of the gold standard and without resort to inconvertible paper, and yet keeping British credit at an altitude which gives hard-headed Uncle Sam no pause in taking John Bull's I-O-U for another half billion. It is an imperishable tribute to the stamina, prestige, wealth and commercial fabric of the British Empire and to the enterprise and ingenuity of the merchants, manufacturers, shippers, bankers and traders who have made their islands the center of the world's exchanges and London the money-market of the universe.
[image]Lord Northcliffe
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Lord Northcliffe
But magnificent as has been the past, the financial future can not be viewed except with anxiety. Indebtedness has been piled up sky-high--out of every twenty-five dollars spent since the war began, at least twenty dollars has been borrowed. That was possible because of the superlative excellence of British credit. "Our credit is now almost everything," explainsThe Economist. "It comes next to the Navy, and the two can not be dissociated. For if either suffer, our food supplies would be in danger. In one sense, credit is at the mercy of the Government and of the Treasury, for a great false step of policy or continuance in a false course would bring disaster. The responsibility of the Prime Minister and of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and of the Cabinet, as a whole, is prodigious. Whatever else we do, we must maintain our financial equilibrium. With that and the command of the seas, we can not be defeated."
Manifestly Britain's economic problem is almost the darkest spot on her overclouded war horizon--the problem of meeting rising obligations out of falling revenue. The Empire suffers from no lack of men; its physical resources are well-nigh inexhaustible. If patriotism does not send them to the trenches of their own free will in adequate numbers, they will be "fetched." There is no longer any question of shortage of munitions. England's own vast industrial plant, as well as that of France, is now occupied almost exclusively in the production of man-killing merchandise for the Allies and is turning it out at high pressure. To the manufacturing equipment of England and France are harnessed, in addition, German bombs and German-incited strikes to the contrary notwithstanding, the limitless productive facilities of the United States and Canada. Britain's one and only nightmare is money, and its corollary aspects, exchange and credit.
No estimate has so far appeared which fixes the 1916 deficit which England will have to meet at less than $7,000,000,000, based on a total war cost for the calendar year of $9,000,000,000. How to grapple with the gigantic task conjured up by such a prospect is not engaging popular attention to any marked degree, though upon its solution depends, primarily, Britain's ability to conquer in this war of exhaustion. With the palpable impossibility of raising the wind at home by successive new public loans; with the necessity to invoke such heroic measures as borrowing $500,000,000 in America to bolster up sterling exchange and keep British credit "intact"; with Englishmen sacrificing their enormous holdings of American securities for the same pious purpose; with the British industrial plant so preoccupied with munitions that it can neither, in accordance with tradition, pay for British imports with British exports nor increase British revenue by the same token; with national expenditure advancing by gigantic leaps and national income restricted as it never was before; with all these immutable conditions staring at Englishmen, it is no wonder that those of them who think, as distinguished from those who merely hurrah, contemplate what looms ahead with anxious concern.
But admittedly grave as the future is, it is by no means hopeless. Britain's plight is not "desperate," as the Germans, seeking to hide their own, are so fond of making believe. Even the misgivings of Englishmen themselves regarding their economic situation would be promptly and legitimately resolved into confidence if the community as a whole could be induced to pull itself together and look facts in the face. In its incorrigible disinclination to do so alone lies danger. The British Empire is not bankrupt. It can hardly ever become so. A recent estimate assessed the income of the Empire, including India, at something over the fabulous sum of $20,000,000,000! It may be embarrassed--it is unquestionably that already--just as the richest of men frequently are, in the midst of titanic transactions which have outrun their calculations. But embarrassment seldom eventuates in ruin, either for men or nations, if they come to grips with it betimes. Thus, disaster can only follow tribulation in the case of Britain if her people, preferring to wallow in happy-go-lucky nonchalance and drift, postpone until too late those sagacious, clean-sweep measures of reorganization and retrenchment which alone, in the opinion of competent judges, can save the situation.
In the preceding chapter I told of the introduction of the Simple Life, of the dawn of the Economy Era in war-time England; but it would be hyperbole to intimate that it has been inaugurated on anything but a superficial scale. Luxury and self-indulgence are still rife. To vast numbers of people, in the classes as well as the masses, the war, far from oppressing them, has brought positive affluence, and with their new riches they have gone in for spending instead of saving. Spartanism in Britain remains a good deal of a theory; it has not become a condition. While Germany, shut off by land and sea, contrives to remain at fighting zenith without her customary imports of $2,500,000,000 a year (she calls Jellicoe's blockade a blessing in disguise because it has compelled her to spend at home what she used to pay out abroad), England's imports of such articles as oranges, cocoa, tea, coffee, tobacco, cheese, rice, meats, pepper and onions have heavily exceeded her importations of the same articles in corresponding peace periods.[1] The Prime Minister tells the country that "victory seems likely to incline to the side which can arm itself the best and stay the longest." Mr. Asquith declares that "that is what we meant to do." But until, for instance, Englishmen realize that by abstaining from tobacco for a year, $40,000,000 of money would be available for the smoke of battle; that if every man, woman and child in the Kingdom puts away 25 cents a week, a new treasure of $600,000,000 could be piled up for war; and that unless waste, extravagance and slothful habits generally are banished, by duke and by docker, as if they were leprous disease, Mr. Asquith's brave words will remain a hollow aspiration. They alone will not enable England to "stay the longest" in the world's most destructive endurance competition.