CHAPTER XVTHE HELMSMEN"We don't want to fight,But, by Jingo! if we do,We've got the men,We've got the ships,And we've got the money, too!"When during the dark hours of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 a London music-hall comedian named McDermott popularized the chorus of a ditty which has rung down the ages, he not only enriched the English language with a new synonym for a war zealot--Jingo--but he epitomized British faith in British invincibility and the basis on which it is founded. McDermott's blustering ballad, theTipperaryof its day, interpreted, by a fate which seems strangely ironical in the light of current events, Britain's determination to go to war to prevent the Bear from grabbing Constantinople.The song applied precisely to conditions in this country in midsummer, 1914. Englishmen "didn't want to fight"--abroad, at least, for they were looking forward to cooling their belligerent ardor nearer home, in Ireland. But when the violation of Belgium resolved all dissension in the British Government on the question of intervention in a conflict which, up to then, concerned purely the Dual and Triple Alliances, and literally dragged Britain into the vortex in the name of both her honor and interest, Englishmen did want to fight. Taking quick stock of their resources, they felt assured, in McDermott's immortal words, that they had "got the men, the ships, and the money, too." But men, ships and money, vital as they are, are useless without leaders, and it was natural that Britons' first thoughts, in the dawn of the Empire's supreme emergency, should be concerned with the personnel of the helmsmen. A super-crisis calls insistently for super-men, and in the midst of an era which cynics call the age of mediocrities doubts were not few that England might find herself fatally lacking in a plight as stupendous as any Pitt, Nelson and Wellington had ever faced.With their astonishing capacity to stifle domestic controversy and party bickerings on the threshold of a foreign crisis, Englishmen decided that the first essential was to repose implicit confidence in the existing Government. Ireland, Labor, Suffragettes, Opposition, the four thorns in the Asquith Administration's side, withdrew, leaving the cleavage they once made so completely healed that hardly a scar remained. The Liberal Cabinet, admittedly stale with nearly a decade of uninterrupted power, might not contain all the talents of statesmanship essential for the conduct of a struggle on whose issue hung Imperial existence. It was a Government overweighted with "tired lawyers," consisting (with the exception of Lord Kitchener) of exclusively professional politicians, and even tinged in important directions (like Lord Haldane) with confessed Germanophilism. It was a Government long and openly charged by its foes with desiring office at any cost and placing the perpetuation of its hold on the fleshpots before any other interest. It was a Government which had avowedly temporized with the Irish yesterday and the Labor Party to-day as the price of maintaining its Parliamentary existence. It was finally a Government notoriously consisting of rival internal factions best typified by the aristocratic Imperialism of Sir Edward Grey on the one hand and on the other by the rugged and radical Democracy of Mr. Lloyd-George. Yet the nation, in the presence of peril palpably incalculable, relegated its criticisms, its doubts and its carpings, and with one voice agreed that "Trust the Government!" must be the slogan of the hour. The Anglo-Saxon spirit of Fair Play asserted itself. The country said that the Asquith Administration must be given a chance to exhibit its mettle. If it failed, there was always time for a reckoning. The British Government of August, 1914, entered upon the war clothed with a mandate as sweeping in its powers as formal conferment of a Dictatorship could have been--a woof of national confidence amounting to little short ofcarte blanche. John Bright once said that a British Government is always annihilated by the war which it is called upon to wage. But Englishmen wished Mr. Asquith's Cabinet Godspeed, and by their unquestioning support of every measure it proposed showed that their loyalty and trust were real and sincere.Although the British Government (by which is meant only the Premier's Administration) consists of twenty-one ministers of Cabinet rank, the war régime, it was manifest from the start, would be confined to five outstanding men combining the motive forces of the entire organization. These five were the Prime Minister himself, the Foreign Secretary (Sir Edward Grey), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Lloyd-George), the First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. Winston Churchill), and the Secretary for War (Lord Kitchener). Although the highest-salaried member of the Cabinet, the Lord High Chancellor (Lord Haldane) drew ten thousand pounds a year, and there were half-a-dozen others like the Home Secretary, the Colonial Secretary, the Secretary for India and the Presidents of the Board of Trade and Local Government Board whose financial status (five thousand pounds a year), outranked the four thousand five hundred pounds which Mr. Churchill received, the quintette named, by reason of their posts and personalities, was the logical inner Government to deal with the war. That brilliant English essayist and biographer, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, even further delimited the numerical dimensions of therealWar Government when he said that "if Mr. Asquith is the brain of the Cabinet, Sir Edward Grey is its character and Mr. Lloyd-George is its inspiration."[image]Herbert Henry Asquith.Herbert Henry Asquith, Yorkshireman by birth and barrister by profession, has been Prime Minister for seven years, succeeding his late Liberal chieftain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in 1908. Asquith, whom Bannerman used to call "the sledge-hammer," because of his lucidity of thought and expression, was sixty-three years old in September, 1915. Although not a Pitt, nor even a Disraeli or Palmerston, the statesman who looks like a Roman senator and is gifted with eloquence in keeping was considered in many respects a Heaven-sent blessing in the melting-pot era of British history, for as a purely steadying influence he is probably without a peer in contemporary politics. As a politician in the narrower sense of a party disciplinarian, manager and leader he will rank with the craftiest names in his country's tortuous history. British Liberalism has skated on perilous ice following the reaction which swept the Conservative Party from power after the Boer War and throughout the era of Democratic radicalism in which Great Britain has meantime had its being. That Mr. Asquith's party is enabled to celebrate ten years of sovereignty still strongly intrenched is by general consent due to the astute generalship of its commander-in-chief. Asquith is not commonly accused of imaginativeness. He is too typical a British statesman for that. His temperament is devoid of the adventurous, like that of the true intellectual, and he is pathologically fonder of harking to public opinion than boldly leading it. When he coined the "Wait and See" epigram during the Ulster crisis, he gave utterance to a phrase which accurately epitomizes the tentativeness so preponderant in his political career. British procrastination and vacillation at vital periods of the war were undoubtedly the reflex action of the Prime Minister's own low-speed mental processes. Yet in the revolt of the Curragh Camp officers, that strange curtain-raiser of the impending Ulster crisis, which threatened to embroil these fair isles in another Cromwellian trial of strength between Parliament and the army, Mr. Asquith, by a courageous stroke of positive genius--his own assumption of the Secretaryship for War in succession to the compromised Colonel Seely--resolved into tranquillity and hope a situation more menacing to civil peace in England than living Britons had ever before lived through. Beneath Mr. Asquith's polished exterior, unemotional mask and sweet reasonableness Germany, mistaking his for a peace-at-any-price nature, made one of the most egregious of her numerous and glaring miscalculations.Only the results of the Peace Conference will determine the true ramifications of Sir Edward Grey's reputation. It was deservedly high when the war began. No Foreign Secretary in Europe approached him in stature, with the possible exception of Delcassé. He had long been Germany'sbête noire, being looked upon as the incarnation of the British diplomatic policy of blocking German ambitions for a "place in the sun" wherever and whenever they manifested themselves. As long before as December, 1912, Professor Hans Delbrück, the sanest of German political professors, told me in a prophetic interview forThe Daily Mailon "What Germany Wants" that unless England abandoned her policy of "arbitrary opposition to legitimate German political aspirations; if she had no inclination to meet us on that ground; if her interests rather pointed to a perpetuation of the anything-to-beat-Germany policy, so let it be. The Armageddon which must then, some day, ensue will not be of our making." That was a fairly plain warning of coming events. The Germans, as I have said, considered Sir Edward Grey anti-Germanism personified. They regard him to-day as the "organizer of the war." Taking an obviously short-sighted view, I used sometimes to think that it would have been good politics for Britain to buy off Germany with aTrinkgeld(tip) of some sort. If Bismarck was right when he called the Germans "a nation of house-servants," they could obviously have been bribed. Delbrück himself once confessed to me that Germany did notneedmore oversea territory; she onlyhankeredfor it for window-dressing purposes. She wanted as expensive millinery and high-powered a car as her rich neighbor across the way. Colonies were fashionable, and she had to have them. I occasionally thought that England would be staving off trouble for herself by bribing avaricious Germany with a coaling-station on some inconsequential trade-route or even shutting the eye to some burglarious descent on territory or concessions in Asia Minor or Central Africa. But such notions left the German character, the Oliver Twist in it, fatally out of account. The German is the most eager person in the world to covet a mile if given an inch. Concessions to his rapacity would have meant purchasing turmoil for the conceding party not eliminating it. British opposition to Pan-Germanic designs, typified by Sir Edward Grey, was based on thoroughgoing insight into the German nature and German ambitions, epitomized for all time by Bernhardi when he said that nothing would appease the Fatherland except World Power or downfall. Hush-money to Germany in the shape of periodically new "places in the sun" would have kept her quiet for spells. But the blackmailing process would have been resumed. It is the German way. "Mr. Balfour tells us we must not expect Englishmen to support our aims in the direction of territorial expansion," said Delbrück. "What remains then for us, except to enforce the accomplishment of our purposes by strengthened armaments?" Could avowal be plainer-spoken?Sir Edward Grey is fifty-three years old and has been a childless widower since 1906. He has been a Member of Parliament continuously since he was twenty-three years of age. Though an Oxford graduate and successful barrister, he is in no sense a scholar, and his experience of foreign affairs up to his becoming Foreign Secretary in the Campbell-Bannerman ministry in 1905 was confined to an under-secretaryship of the Foreign Office in the preceding (Rosebery) Government. Grey, who is also of the smooth-shaven Romanesque type of statesman in external appearance, is an amazing example of natural British aptitude for the higher politics, for he is not a linguist (he speaks nothing but English) and except for a visit to France with the present King a couple of years ago was said never to have been abroad in his life. His hobbies are tennis, fly-fishing and birds. The only book he ever wrote was a treatise on the piscatory art and he tramped through the New Forest with Colonel Roosevelt talking ornithology all the way. Yet a man has only to read the British White Paper--he need not, indeed, do much except read Sir Edward Grey's dispatches to his ambassadors on July 29, 1914--to realize that the Foreign Secretary is a statesman of marvelous force and capacity to grapple with the essentials of a situation. No state papers of modern times outrival Grey's diplomatic correspondence on the eve of the war. They ought to insure him, as I believe they will, immortality, no matter how the war ends. Sir Edward Grey's speeches are like his dispatches--devoid of irrelevancy or rhetorical claptrap and incisive in the highest degree. They ring conviction and sincerity and their argument is usually unanswerable. Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg's clumsy attempts to parry Grey's mid-bellum dialectics have only brought out the latter in bolder relief. The war has notoriously eaten into Grey's soul. Germany calls it guilty remorse. Men who know are conscious that he labored for peace to the last minute with unflagging enthusiasm. His industry during the war has been intense, and his insistence upon looking at things for himself has threatened more than once to cost him his eyesight. As it is, intermittent relaxation has to be forced upon him by his colleagues and his medical advisers. Sir Edward Grey's permanent disappearance from Downing Street would rejoice Germany like a victorious battle. Grey has been violently blamed for the failure of Britain's mid-war diplomacy, especially in the Balkans. His own defense against charges of failure in that region is likely to seem plausible in the light of history, viz., that, unaccompanied by commensurate military successes, the efforts of Allied diplomacy in the Near East were almost hopelessly handicapped.One night during the South African War a Radical M.P., advocating the downtrodden brother Boer's cause at a mass-meeting in Birmingham, received such a warm reception from the crowd that he had to flee for his life through a back-door, disguised as a policeman. His name was David Lloyd-George, whose present occupation is that of England's man of the hour. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer when war broke out and introduced the initial war budgets, earning thereby encomiums from the financial community which for years before looked upon him as capital's demagogic arch-foe. To-day, Minister of Munitions--the circumstances under which he became such are treated in a subsequent chapter--Lloyd-George comes far nearer being Britain's national hero than any of his contemporaries. He is charged by his detractors with the design to make himself Dictator. England could have a worse one.If Lloyd-George were an American instead of a Welshman, he would have been President of the United States by this time, or at least as close to it as Bryan has ever been. There is in fact very little typically British about him. He is emotional, for example, and he has an imagination. His whole make-up is trans-atlantic, which isAnglicefor sensational. Picture, if you can, a strong solution of Booker Washington (I mean, of course, only his eloquence), of flamboyant and appealing Billy Sunday, of the Boy Orator of the Platte at his silver-tongued best, and of our inimitable T. R. in his most rampageous form, and you will have Lloyd-George in composite. It was because he is all this that he was chosen for the "shells portfolio" in the reconstructed Asquith cabinet.[image]Lloyd-George.He knew very little--probably nothing--about munitions seven months ago. It could not have been very much before that when he probably thought that guncotton was raw material for pajamas. But he is the prize "enthuser" of the Kingdom, a master of the tedious art of welding drowsy Britons into a race of real war-makers. All the ingredients for supplying the army with the shells it needed were in existence; but they needed organization. The manufacturers and their works needed organization. The workmen needed organization. The public spirit needed organization; and the whole business needed a Lloyd-George. It got him ten months after it ought to have had him, but not too late. Obviously the diminutive Welsh country lawyer who had brought about the disestablishment of the State Church of Wales, imposed State Insurance and Old Age Pensions on a reluctant Kingdom, assailed the vested interests of the House of Lords and demolished them, was the man to impress the country with the true meaning of the shells tragedy. He took the stump, his natural element, for the purpose. He went to the people, especially in the great industrial centers, and told them the truth. He burned into their conscience--that was the only way to get the stolid British to wake up to a real peril--that shells, shells, and then shells, and nothing but shells, were required if Britain meant to win the war.The people listened to Lloyd-George. He has a way of making them listen to him. They gave him their ear even in his pro-Boer days. They listened to him when he (an ardent Baptist) cleared for action against the Welsh Church. They listened to him even when he went down to Limehouse and coined a new word, "to limehouse," meaning violent political spell-binding, second cousin to demagogism, by the nature of his impassioned appeals to the people to rise and slay the Lords. It was inevitable that the country would listen to him in his newest and greatest rôle as organizer of victory.Lloyd-George's goal is undoubtedly the Premiership--the ambition of every British politician. He has plenty of time to wait--he is only fifty-two--and unfailing week-end golf keeps him as "fit" as a man fifteen years his junior. Of Napoleonic stockiness of build, with a wealth of wavy gray hair worn long, he is a figure which radiates strength and power, though unimpressive of itself. He is a capital "mixer." It is, indeed, his principal political asset. He is as much at home laboring with a gang of recalcitrant miners at the pit-mouth--he always goes straight to headquarters when he essays to settle a strike--as he is on the floor of the House of Commons or as moderator at a Baptist convention. He likes Americans and specializes in extending hospitality to interesting ones. Unquestionably he has a strong hold on our imaginations, as a man of his temperament, career and talent is bound to have. An eminent Chicagoan visited London last summer, with introductions which would have easily paved his way to the throne or any other exalted British quarter. "Whom would you like to meet most of all?" he was asked. "Lloyd-George," he said, with the intuitive sense of a Yankee who only has time for the things worth while.Winston Churchill, the son of an English father and an American mother, is the Peck's Bad Boy of the British Government. His popularity has been sadly dimmed since the war began, for he was looked upon as not only the author of the grotesque naval "relief" expedition to Antwerp--now either prisoners of war in Germany or interned in Holland--but the culprit who was chiefly responsible for the far more disastrous Dardanelles adventure. Another crime is charged against him, hardly less serious than the two just named: his imperious administration of the Admiralty drove from the First Sea Lordship the man universally considered Britain's greatest sailor, Lord Fisher. All agree, friend and foe, that to "Winston" was due in a very marked degree, England's superb readiness at sea when war broke out, but it is a matter of grave doubt whether even that superlative service to the country will be looked upon as great enough to blanket his subsequent and costly incompetencies. When the upheaval in the Asquith Cabinet came about, in the spring of 1915, Churchill was nominally squelched by interment in the harmless berth of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, most of whose official time is spent in licensing Justices of the Peace and Notaries Public. That ennui hung heavily on his hands was manifested by the announcement during the summer that Churchill had taken up painting as a pastime.I have said that "Winston" was nominally subjugated, for a petrel of his peculiarly irrepressible storminess can only be wholly curbed by annihilation. Asquith is far too sagacious a politician to risk Churchill's complete eclipse in the Government of which he has always been the most picturesque constituent. Churchill, too, aspires to the Premier's toga, though a good many people fear that the defects of his qualities will keep him, just as they kept his distinguished father, Lord Randolph Churchill, from No. 10 Downing Street. But "Winston" is far less dangerous to the Government as a friend than as a foe. His chameleon political career justifies the fear that he would turn on his old associates and party cronies the moment he conceived that advantage to self was thereby obtainable. Obviously such a man is better in the Cabinet than out of it, especially if he is of Winston Churchill's undoubted personal charm, magnetism and resistless force.Combining the best qualities of his dual ancestry, he makes a lively appeal to the average heart. Aristocratic to the core, with the blood of the Marlboroughs in his veins, and a snob of snobs in his personal relations, it is an anomalous fact that Churchill is an endlessly popular figure with the crowd. Whether it is his youth--he is only forty-one, was a soldier of no mean renown at twenty-three, a Member of Parliament at twenty-six, a Cabinet Minister at thirty-two and a force in Imperial politics long before he was forty--or his impetuous devil-may-care make-up, or his bombastic platform style, the masses like him. He has only one serious rival, indeed, in their affections, and that is Lloyd-George. He is remembered in war thus far not only for his Antwerp and Dardanelles indiscretions, but for his equally unhappy oratorical excesses, which are doomed, apparently, always to precede some untoward naval or military event. Within thirty-six hours of proclaiming at Liverpool (in September, 1914) that "if the German navy does not come out and fight, we shall dig it out like rats from a hole,"U9sent theCressy, HagueandAboukirto the bottom. In the spring of 1915, discussing the Dardanelles, Churchill blustered that "we are within a very few miles of the greatest victory this war has seen," and a few weeks later Kitchener announced that twelve miles of precarious front in Gallipoli were all there was to show for a campaign which had already cost eighty-seven thousand casualties. When Churchill prognosticates nowadays, the country trembles for what the next day will bring forth. Yet he is a rash prophet who would predict that "Winston" has run his course in British politics. He took manfully the discomfiture of the Coalition reshuffle, and although his picture is no longer cheered when it is flashed on the cinematograph screen the shrewdest seers are certain that he will "come back."[1][1] Churchill resigned from the Cabinet in November, 1915, declaring that he was a soldier--"and my regiment is in France." To it he said he preferred to go rather than continue in a position of "well-paid inactivity" at home. In a dramatic speech in the House of Commons, he took political farewell of the country and, having pleaded "Not Guilty" to the capital charges of responsibility for Antwerp and the Dardanelles, left England unostentatiously for the trenches, as a major of cavalry.Lord Kitchener has always boasted that he scorned popularity. He has need for his philosophical temperament to-day, for there is no manner of doubt that his hold on the imaginations of his countrymen is less firm than it was when the war began. "K.'s" dramatic appointment to the War Office, in the earliest hours of the conflict, heartened the nation to an extraordinary degree. Britain had no army, Englishmen said, but it had Kitchener, who was a host in himself. His name alone was an asset which bred indescribable confidence. Men recalled his dominant traits--iron determination, strenuous application to duty, imperious disregard of hide-bound methods and red tape, and, above all, his genius for organization. They rejoiced to hear that he had accepted the War Office, long cob-webbed with circumlocutory traditions and petticoat influence, on the strict understanding that he was to be monarch of all he surveyed--that he would not tolerate such party interference as intrudes itself on departmental affairs in general. Immensely to the popular taste, because it confirmed the masses' conception of "K.," was the story that when he arrived at the War Office for the first time and was told there was "no bed here, Sir," he commanded the affrighted and astonished caretaker, then, "to put one in, as I am going to sleep here." Britain said to herself that she indubitably possessed a match for German Efficiency in her new Secretary for War, and all thought of "losing" with such a man as the supreme chief of the military establishment vanished from her mind.[image]Kitchener.Kitchener was never one of the war-will-be-over-by-Christmas crew. His maiden speech as War Minister in the House of Lords informed the country, bluntly, that he expected a three years' struggle. During the winter an anecdote ascribed to the taciturn War Secretary's loquacious sister gained currency, and passed from mouth to mouth. "When is the war going to end?" she asked him. "I don't know when it's going to end," he was said to have replied, "but it is going to begin in May." It was in May, by the pitiless irony of Fate, that the War Office's muddle of the ammunition supply was exposed.Like all else in Britain--men, measures and institutions--the arbitrament of time will be required to pass final judgment on Kitchener's part in the war. In the principal field he was called upon to plow--the raising of a huge army from out of the earth--he accomplished marvels. No nation within fourteen months evolved from practically nothing an organization of, roundly, three million soldiers. It is not enough, for the actual requirements of the war call insistently for more and more, yet "K.'s" recruiting achievement stands forth without parallel in military history. It is certainly without precedent of even approximate magnitude in the annals of a non-conscript democracy. Lord Kitchener's accomplishments in other directions have notoriously not kept pace with his successes as a recruiting-sergeant. The shells affair can hardly fail to dim his reputation. The deficiencies of the voluntary system can not be called a failure directly chargeable to him, in that it has not brought forward men in quantity commensurate with the developed necessities of the campaign. Kitchener has hinted, but only that, that he is prepared to resort to Conscription the moment he is convinced that Voluntaryism has collapsed. But it does not seem unlikely that history may condemn him for clinging to the voluntary principle too long and hesitating to make Englishmen do their duty, instead of relying endlessly on their casual inclination to perform it. Kitchener has ruled the British War Office practically as an autocrat. He brooked no interference, even from the Cabinet. Viewed from that standpoint, "K." can hardly be absolved from cardinal responsibility for British military failures. Before the end of 1915 General Sir Ian Hamilton had disappeared from Gallipoli, Sir John French returned from France, General Townshend retreated from Baghdad, and the Allied "Relief" Expedition to Serbia had retired to Salonica, whence it had set out less than ten weeks previous.CHAPTER XVITHE GENERAL, THE ADMIRAL AND THE KINGThat Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in France and Flanders, an army which reduces to comparative insignificance the largest host ever marshaled by Napoleon, comes from fighting stock is plain enough from the fact that his only sister, Mrs. Despard, is a militant suffragette. She herself provides homely evidence that the appointment of her brother (whom she practically "brought up") to lead the British fight against the Germans on land realized a boyhood aspiration. "When we were children," Mrs. Despard relates, "the great province of Schleswig-Holstein was taken from Denmark by what was then Prussia. We were discussing the disgraceful incident of poor little Denmark losing the province, and a certain little boy, then ten or twelve years of age, strutted about and said: 'If I was only a man, I know what I'd do to them.' He was very indignant. That little boy is now commander of Britain's great army."It has been said that South Africa is the grave of British military reputations. Sir Redvers Buller's was buried there, and though those of Roberts and Kitchener emerged from the Boer War, the renown of Botha and Dewet admittedly outshone them. One British General at least was "made" by the three years' conflict with the Dutch Republics--Sir John French, the cavalryman who relieved Kimberley, and whose escutcheon during the sorry South African campaign was alone untarnished by blunder or reverse. As Kitchener was the logical choice for organizer of Britain's new armies, Sir John French was the natural selection for their field-commandership. French, following in paternal footsteps, began his fighting career in the navy, but he has been a soldier for the past forty-one years--he was sixty-three in September, 1915. A man whose entire manhood has been lived in the army, who knows it through and through, loves it passionately, has devoted himself to it with the zeal of a student, and fought in all its campaigns for nearly half a century, had an ideal claim upon its supreme honor in the hour of superlative crisis. Doubtless in the Government's mind when it entrusted "Jack" French with the command of the British Expeditionary Force was the reputation he had won in South Africa as a fighting field-general. Unquestionably the broad sweeping movements his cavalry divisions executed at Elandslaagte, Lombard's Kop, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Barberton were operations which contributed, perhaps, more than any other scheme of the brilliantly mismanaged Boer campaign finally to bring it to a victorious end. Neither the British nor the German General Staff realized in August, 1914, that Armageddon was going to develop into a trench or "positional" war, with little or no latitude for those grandiose tactical maneuvers which delighted the heart of Moltke and made a Sedan the ambition of every modern tactician. Yet Sir John French, whose military virtues include adaptability, if not imaginativeness, which is oftener born, than acquired, turned out to be ideally fitted for "spade warfare," in which the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and patience have displaced the more spectacular talents of daring and recklessness and those bold strokes of magnificent vastness known as Napoleonic. Bonaparte's scintillating genius, his predilection for the stupendous, would probably have counted for little amid such immobile conditions as the Allied armies have had to face in the West, just as the Germans' prized Moltke traditions in the same region have come to naught.[image]Sir John French.Military history will unquestionably accord the retreat of the British army from Mons a place among the finest achievements of all times. It was due to Sir John French's strategy that Berlin was cheated of that fiendishly coveted orgy of gloating over the "annihilation" of what the Kaiser is said to have called "the contemptible little British army." Since Mons and the Marne the British Field-Marshal's task has been to "hold" the enemy and to inspire his men to fulfil, unflinchingly, that prodigious, but comparatively inglorious, task. In the circumstances it was fortunate that a man of Sir John French's temperament was in charge. He knew how to "sit tight." Kinship with his soldiers has been his lifetime specialty. He is fond of sharing their joys and sorrows not in any stereotyped, dress-parade sense, but actually. He likes to move among them, and does so. His jaunty fighting bearing and unfailing good humor are a constant inspiration. Short and stocky, straight and energetic of movement, he looks every inch a soldier, and he has a soldier's habit of saying what he means, direct from the shoulder, whether it is a corporal, a staff officer, a brigadier or a Cabinet Minister to whom he is addressing himself.The Allied military arrangement conferred supreme authority on General Joffre, but the British Field Marshal's character and career were considered a joint guarantee that Sir John French would not be found lacking when called upon to do and dare greatly on his own account. It would be going too far to say that the war has covered French with glory. He would be the first to banish such a thought. Though Britons have fallen laurel-crowned on a score of fields in France and Flanders and irrigated the cock-pit which lies between the Alps and the Channel with as heroic blood as was ever spilled, the British offensives in the West have been little more than brilliant failures. Neuve Chapelle is an undying story of Anglo-Saxon gallantry, as was Ypres before it; but it was nothing else. The "big push" which England hoped had at last begun with the fighting in Artois and the Champagne at the end of September, 1915, turned out to be a victory of distressingly short life and little real effectiveness. Yet when Germany lost the war--when she failed to take Paris--the British army under Sir John French wrote history of which Englishmen will never be ashamed. Who it was that most effectually parried von Kluck and the Crown Prince's thrust at the French capital will probably, among generations of schoolboys yet unborn, be as fruitful a theme of argument as is the question who won Waterloo--Wellington or Blücher--but whatever the verdict of posterity the smashing of the Germans on the Marne reeked glory for all concerned, and Britain's share of it is a heritage which will survive with Blenheim, Balaclava, Kandahar and Khartoum.[1][1] Sir John French returned to England in December, 1915, relinquishing (at his own request, it was officially stated) the commandership-in-chief in France for the command of the Home Defense forces. King George conferred the dignity of a Viscountcy on the Field-Marshal.Another Sir John--Admiral Jellicoe--is commander-in-chief of the British navy. Events still to come must determine whether Anglo-Saxon history is to be enriched with another Nelson. But as far as human prescience could foretell, "Jack" Jellicoe was of all men in the British Fleet preordained by talent, temperament and training to be the admiral in whose keeping could safely be entrusted British destinies more priceless than those which were safeguarded at Trafalgar.Jellicoe was one of the godfathers of the dreadnought, having been summoned by Lord Fisher, the real author of that revolution in naval science, to support and carry into execution the all-big-gun ship idea. Fisher had years before associated young Captain Jellicoe with him as assistant director of naval ordnance, whereupon there ensued an intimacy which friends say will link their names together much as history associated St. Vincent and Nelson as the twin victors of Trafalgar--the one, the far-sighted planner of preparatory reforms; the other, the faithful executor of their purpose.Jellicoe resembles Sir John French in more than given name. Like him, he is of quite markedly small stature. Neither the Generalissimo or Admiralissimo of Britain in the Great War at all corresponds, physically, to the popular notion that the English are "big" men. Like French, again, Jellicoe is mild and gentle, a pair of conspicuously tight lips indicating poise, reserve force and self-confidence. The chieftain of the Grand Fleet--that is its official title and not an effusive expletive--did not make his first acquaintance with danger afloat when von Tirpitz' submarines began to make life a burden for British sailors. He has been snatched from the jaws of death on three separate occasions. In 1893 Jellicoe was commander of Sir George Tryon'sVictoria, when it was sent to its doom in the Mediterranean, and, although "below" in the ship-hospital with fever at the moment of the disaster, was miraculously rescued by a midshipman when he came to the surface more dead than alive after the vessel foundered. Seven years previous, as if Fate was keeping a protecting hand over him for some great hour, Jellicoe had an equally marvelous escape from drowning when a gig he was commanding off Gibraltar capsized and he was washed ashore. In the Boxer war of 1900, Jellicoe was flag captain to Admiral Seymour, the commander of the Allied expedition which marched from Tien-tsin to the relief of the Powers' legations in Pekin, and at the battle of Peitsang Jellicoe was struck by a Chinese bullet, incurring wounds which the flagship-surgeon considered fatal. Again Jellicoe was spared. A brother-officer tells a story of Jellicoe's agony on that occasion, which illuminates his capacity for facing the music, however doleful. He had asked how the advance to Pekin was proceeding. Told that everything was going satisfactorily, Jellicoe flashed back: "Tell me the truth, damn it. Don't lie!"The triumvirate which has accomplished that amazing, silent victory of the British Fleet in the war--the complete conquest of sea power without anything savoring of a decisive action in the open--consists of Lord Fisher, the creator of the dreadnought; Admiral Sir Percy Scott, the inventor of the central "fire control" system, and Sir John Jellicoe, to whose gunnery science and innovations in that all-important branch of naval warfare are ascribed, in large measure, the acknowledged preeminence of the British Fleet as a striking force. He had not been director of ordnance a year when the percentage of the navy's hits out of rounds fired increased from forty-two to more than seventy. "In other words," as a critic describes it, "Jellicoe enhanced by more than a third the fighting value of the British Fleet, and that without a keel being added to its composition."Jellicoe, who is fifty-six years old, has nothing but sailor blood in his veins. His father was a captain in the Fleet before him, and one of his kinsmen, Admiral Philip Patton, was Second Sea Lord in Nelson's time. Jellicoe is the incarnation of the spirit, traditions, practises and brain-force of the British navy of to-day. He has the not inconsiderable advantage of having had opportunity personally to take the measure of his German antagonists, for he has visited their country, where he made the acquaintance of von Tirpitz, Ingenohl, Pohl, Behncke, Holtzendorff, Prince Henry and all the other naval men of the Fatherland, and was even privileged to cruise over Berlin in a Zeppelin.England has heard little and seen nothing of Jellicoe during the war. The veil of mystery which envelops the Grand Fleet is seldom lifted. Not one Englishman in a million knows where the Fleet is, though all know that it is where it ought to be. A ten days' visit paid to the officers and men of the Armada by the Archbishop of York in the late summer of 1915 resulted in imparting to the nation the first glimmer of their life, of their indomitable watch and wait, which had been forthcoming."It is difficult for our sailormen," wrote the Archbishop, "to realize the value of their long-drawn vigil. Their one longing is to meet the German ships and sink them; and yet month after month the German ships decline the challenge. The men have little time or chance or perhaps inclination to read accounts in serious journals of the invaluable service which the Navy is fulfilling by simply keeping its watch; and naval officers do not make speeches to their men. I think, indeed I know, that it was a real encouragement to them to hear a voice from the land of their homes telling them of the debt their country owes them for the command of the seas--the safety of the ships carrying food and means of work to the people, supplies of men and munitions to the fields of battle--which is secured to us by the patient watching of the Fleet."Speaking of Admiral Jellicoe, the Archbishop said:"It was refreshing and exhilarating beyond words to find oneself in a world governed by a great tradition so strong that it has become an instinct of unity and mutual trust. But to the influence of this great tradition must be added the influence of a great personality. I can not refrain from saying here that I left the Grand Fleet sharing to the full the admiration, affection, and confidence which every officer and man within it feels for its Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Jellicoe. He reassuredly is the right man in the right place at the right time. His officers give him the most absolute trust and loyalty. When I spoke of him to his men I always felt that quick response which to a speaker is the sure sign that he has reached and touched the hearts of his hearers. The Commander-in-Chief--quiet, modest, courteous, alert, resolute, holding in firm control every part of his great fighting engine--has under his command not only the ships but the heart of his Fleet. He embodies and strengthens that comradeship of single-minded service which is the crowning honor of the Navy."More than once the criticism has been uttered in England itself that the Fleet has been conspicuously lacking in the "Nelson touch." Even Americans, friendly observers, have ventured to suggest that there seemed to be an absence of the Farragut or Dewey "to-hell-with-mines" spirit. Up to the end of the first year of war, Britons faced the fact that their "supreme navy" had lost seven battleships aggregating 97,600 tons (not counting a super-dreadnought reported by the foreign press to have been lost in the early months of the war, but which was a loss never "officially confirmed" in England), and ten cruisers aggregating 81,365 tons. Submarines, in that nerve-racking and troublous day before Scott and Jellicoe solved the problem of sinking "U boats" almost faster than German dockyards could launch substitutes, accomplished terrific havoc among the British merchant fleet, even though the sea commerce of these islands was never remotely in danger of being "paralyzed," as von Tirpitz and the minions of Frightfulness fondly planned.[image]Sir J. R. Jellicoe.Yet all this while, the British Fleet was tightening its grip upon the command of the sea to an extent which may now be described as absolute. The German flag, war ensign and merchant pennant, has been swept from the oceans as if it had never flown. Hamburg and Bremen, the Fatherland's prides, are as completely demolished, as far as their usefulness to Germany for war is concerned, as if they had been battered into smoking ruins. German mercantile trade simply no longer exists, except such of it as can be smuggled in tramps and ferries across the narrow reach of the Baltic between Pomerania and the Scandinavian ports. The Germanic Allies can import and export nothing oversea except by the grace of Jellicoe. Their deported propaganda chieftains or compromised ambassadors and attachés can not return to their homes in Europe from the United States without gracious "safe conduct" by the British Fleet. The toymakers of Nuremberg can not deliver a solitary tin soldier to an American Christmas tree unless Jellicoe says yes. Two score proud German liners, including the queen of them all, theVaterland, are rotting and rusting in United States harbors, ingloriously imprisoned by British naval power. In a dozen other ports throughout the world Hamburg and Bremen vessels tug at anchor--greyhounds enchained. Germany is banned from the oceans like an outlaw. Her people can eat and drink only on the ration basis. The British Fleet has done something else of which, it seemed to me, an American Presidential message might legitimately have made mention. It has enabled the people of the United States for many months to traverse the oceans in security.These are the immediate effects of British sea supremacy on the enemy, but even they are incommensurate with the advantages which accrue to Britain herself. A navy has three cardinal functions: to preserve its own shores from invasion; to maintain inviolate its country's oversea communications, including cables, food supply, passenger traffic and postal transportation; and, finally, to destroy the sea forces of the enemy. The first two of these functions have been fulfilled by the Grand Fleet, and at a cost in men and material, though not inconsiderable, which is infinitesimal, measured by the results attained. To absolve the third, and, of course, climacteric, function, Jellicoe and his men and his ironclads stand ready when the opportunity is given them--readier, by far, than when the war began. They have not lost a really vital fighting unit (supposing unconfirmed reports to the contrary to be unfounded). They have had a priceless experience of sea warfare under almost every conceivable condition. They are veterans of every essential contingency. There is hardly a terror, military or atmospheric, which they have not faced and surmounted. They have added to their battle efficiency by a great many new and powerful ships. Theirmoraleis unbroken.When the Kaiser's Canal Armada finally makes up its mind, as I believe that German public opinion will some day compel it to, to forsake the snug harbors of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven and the screen of Heligoland for the high sea, it will find that Jellicoe has up his iron sleeve a welcome, as to the issue of which no one in these islands is capable of cherishing the remotest doubt. History is barren of an instance of a Power defeated in war, who retained command of the sea. Were there no other considerations which spell the eventual, though probably not the early, frustration of Germany's ambition to master Europe and, as William II once sighed, to snatch the trident from Britannia's grasp, the vise-like grip of naval power which Jellicoe has wrested alone denotes that Armageddon can have but one ending, however long it be deferred.In this cursory review of the men at Britain's helm, the Sovereign is deliberately put at the end instead of the beginning. I mean to cast no impious slur upon George V in thus classifying his relative importance in the scheme of British war life, yet to rank him at the front of the captains of the State would be hyperbole as unpardonable in a chronicler as gratuitous defamation would be.To discuss the figure cut by England's King during the past year is a task which a foreigner approaches with diffidence. I should not dream of taking such liberties with their Britannic Majesties, for example, as my gifted friend and colleague, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, who recently diagnosed the Royal situation in England thus: "I have seen the King and Queen, and I know now why they call him George the Fifth; Mary's the other four-fifths." Whether this subtle tribute to the undoubtedly potent influence of the gracious Queen explains it or not, the indisputable fact remains that the part played by King George in the day of supreme British national trial has been a keen disappointment to a great many of his subjects. It is not a topic which they discuss at all in public, nor one upon which it is easy to extract their views even in private. But when an inquiring alien even of unmistakably sympathetic sentiment accomplishes the miracle of inducing a Briton to pour out his heart, he will secure evidence corroborative of an impression the foreigner has had from the start, if he has lived in England since August, 1914--that the monarchy, as such, has not given a wholly satisfactory account of itself. Men who are so utterly un-English as to be "quite" frank even suggest that King George's insistence not only upon enacting the "constitutional monarch," butoverplayingthat rôle, has not inconsiderably undermined the solidity of the Royal principle in numerous British hearts. They will tell you, if in communicative mood, that George has failed to rise to the majestic opportunities of the moment. They contrast his incorrigibly "constitutional" behavior with what they feel assured is the red-blooded lead King Edward would have given. They assert that the hour of Imperial peril, when national existence itself is at stake, has caused so many cherished shibboleths to go by the board, that the strait-jacket of "constitutional monarchy," which is another name for Irresponsibility, ought to go with them. In times of peace, say Englishmen, a conscientious figurehead on the throne is good enough. In times of war, they want a King. He need not be the blatant, ubiquitous limelight-chaser that the Kaiser is, but some of that royal dynamo's attributes, diluted with English seasoning, would not have been unwelcome to his people during the past year and a half. Britons, though, I repeat, they do not cry it out for the multitude to hear, are not edified by the spectacle of a sovereign who has sojourned with his army and fleet only in the most formal manner, whose war-time activities are confined to peripatetic visits to hospitals and convalescent homes, to inspections and reviews, and to distribution of Victoria Crosses and Distinguished Service medals at Buckingham Palace."The King," to whom Englishmen, before 10 P.M., still drink in reverential sincerity, and who rise in devout respect when they hear the anthem which beseeches Divine salvation for him, is an institution from which Britain felt it had a right to expect both lead and deed in a great war. She did not demand, or at least no conspicuous section of her has, that the King should take the field or the sea, and prance about in the saddle or on the quarter-deck, but they did hope, I think, for something more inspiring than nebulous constitutionalism. It was many months after thousands of other British mothers had sent their sons to death and glory that Queen Mary consented to the dispatch of the twenty-one-year-old Prince of Wales to the trenches. And Prince Albert, who is twenty, and was in the navy before the war, was never, as far as the public is informed, able to gratify his desire to return to active service afloat, but must cool his martial ardor in the inglorious capacity of an Admiralty messenger in London. Britons look across to Germany, Russia and Italy, even to Belgium and Serbia, and, contrasting the spectacle with "constitutionalism" in their own Royal household, acknowledge that theirs is not a thrilling picture.If you attempt to penetrate into what may strike you as a mystery, you will be told that the cause as far as King George is concerned, is twofold: first, his high-minded, even slavish, devotion to his conception of his constitutional limitations, and, secondly, his equally incorrigible shyness. Sarah Bernhardt, when King George and Queen Mary were in Paris a couple of years ago, was once summoned to the royal box of the Comédie Franchise for presentation to the British sovereigns. She explained to friends afterward that the King's modesty positively unnerved her. He was as bashful as a schoolgirl. I have been told that his manner in the presence even of his Ministers is almost deferential. He does not know the meaning of "mixing," an art in which his late father excelled. "The King and Queen are fond of lunching alone, and usually take their tea together," I read the other day in a "well-informed" society paper. Edward VII was fond of lunching with men of affairs. He did not heed the hoots of the aristocratic set, which was scandalized by his intimacy with tea-merchants and money kings, because through them he was accustomed to keep in touch with the human currents of his people's life and times. Edward would hardly have allowed even the Empire's greatest soldier (Englishmen explain) to call the new army "Kitchener's Army." It would have been called the "King's Army" and the King would have thrown his incalculably great moral influence into the breach in some more practical way than lending his photograph for recruiting advertisements. George V could have been England's finest recruiting sergeant. He preferred to remain a constitutional monarch.
CHAPTER XV
THE HELMSMEN
"We don't want to fight,But, by Jingo! if we do,We've got the men,We've got the ships,And we've got the money, too!"
"We don't want to fight,But, by Jingo! if we do,We've got the men,We've got the ships,And we've got the money, too!"
"We don't want to fight,
But, by Jingo! if we do,
We've got the men,
We've got the ships,
And we've got the money, too!"
When during the dark hours of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 a London music-hall comedian named McDermott popularized the chorus of a ditty which has rung down the ages, he not only enriched the English language with a new synonym for a war zealot--Jingo--but he epitomized British faith in British invincibility and the basis on which it is founded. McDermott's blustering ballad, theTipperaryof its day, interpreted, by a fate which seems strangely ironical in the light of current events, Britain's determination to go to war to prevent the Bear from grabbing Constantinople.
The song applied precisely to conditions in this country in midsummer, 1914. Englishmen "didn't want to fight"--abroad, at least, for they were looking forward to cooling their belligerent ardor nearer home, in Ireland. But when the violation of Belgium resolved all dissension in the British Government on the question of intervention in a conflict which, up to then, concerned purely the Dual and Triple Alliances, and literally dragged Britain into the vortex in the name of both her honor and interest, Englishmen did want to fight. Taking quick stock of their resources, they felt assured, in McDermott's immortal words, that they had "got the men, the ships, and the money, too." But men, ships and money, vital as they are, are useless without leaders, and it was natural that Britons' first thoughts, in the dawn of the Empire's supreme emergency, should be concerned with the personnel of the helmsmen. A super-crisis calls insistently for super-men, and in the midst of an era which cynics call the age of mediocrities doubts were not few that England might find herself fatally lacking in a plight as stupendous as any Pitt, Nelson and Wellington had ever faced.
With their astonishing capacity to stifle domestic controversy and party bickerings on the threshold of a foreign crisis, Englishmen decided that the first essential was to repose implicit confidence in the existing Government. Ireland, Labor, Suffragettes, Opposition, the four thorns in the Asquith Administration's side, withdrew, leaving the cleavage they once made so completely healed that hardly a scar remained. The Liberal Cabinet, admittedly stale with nearly a decade of uninterrupted power, might not contain all the talents of statesmanship essential for the conduct of a struggle on whose issue hung Imperial existence. It was a Government overweighted with "tired lawyers," consisting (with the exception of Lord Kitchener) of exclusively professional politicians, and even tinged in important directions (like Lord Haldane) with confessed Germanophilism. It was a Government long and openly charged by its foes with desiring office at any cost and placing the perpetuation of its hold on the fleshpots before any other interest. It was a Government which had avowedly temporized with the Irish yesterday and the Labor Party to-day as the price of maintaining its Parliamentary existence. It was finally a Government notoriously consisting of rival internal factions best typified by the aristocratic Imperialism of Sir Edward Grey on the one hand and on the other by the rugged and radical Democracy of Mr. Lloyd-George. Yet the nation, in the presence of peril palpably incalculable, relegated its criticisms, its doubts and its carpings, and with one voice agreed that "Trust the Government!" must be the slogan of the hour. The Anglo-Saxon spirit of Fair Play asserted itself. The country said that the Asquith Administration must be given a chance to exhibit its mettle. If it failed, there was always time for a reckoning. The British Government of August, 1914, entered upon the war clothed with a mandate as sweeping in its powers as formal conferment of a Dictatorship could have been--a woof of national confidence amounting to little short ofcarte blanche. John Bright once said that a British Government is always annihilated by the war which it is called upon to wage. But Englishmen wished Mr. Asquith's Cabinet Godspeed, and by their unquestioning support of every measure it proposed showed that their loyalty and trust were real and sincere.
Although the British Government (by which is meant only the Premier's Administration) consists of twenty-one ministers of Cabinet rank, the war régime, it was manifest from the start, would be confined to five outstanding men combining the motive forces of the entire organization. These five were the Prime Minister himself, the Foreign Secretary (Sir Edward Grey), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Lloyd-George), the First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. Winston Churchill), and the Secretary for War (Lord Kitchener). Although the highest-salaried member of the Cabinet, the Lord High Chancellor (Lord Haldane) drew ten thousand pounds a year, and there were half-a-dozen others like the Home Secretary, the Colonial Secretary, the Secretary for India and the Presidents of the Board of Trade and Local Government Board whose financial status (five thousand pounds a year), outranked the four thousand five hundred pounds which Mr. Churchill received, the quintette named, by reason of their posts and personalities, was the logical inner Government to deal with the war. That brilliant English essayist and biographer, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, even further delimited the numerical dimensions of therealWar Government when he said that "if Mr. Asquith is the brain of the Cabinet, Sir Edward Grey is its character and Mr. Lloyd-George is its inspiration."
[image]Herbert Henry Asquith.
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Herbert Henry Asquith.
Herbert Henry Asquith, Yorkshireman by birth and barrister by profession, has been Prime Minister for seven years, succeeding his late Liberal chieftain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in 1908. Asquith, whom Bannerman used to call "the sledge-hammer," because of his lucidity of thought and expression, was sixty-three years old in September, 1915. Although not a Pitt, nor even a Disraeli or Palmerston, the statesman who looks like a Roman senator and is gifted with eloquence in keeping was considered in many respects a Heaven-sent blessing in the melting-pot era of British history, for as a purely steadying influence he is probably without a peer in contemporary politics. As a politician in the narrower sense of a party disciplinarian, manager and leader he will rank with the craftiest names in his country's tortuous history. British Liberalism has skated on perilous ice following the reaction which swept the Conservative Party from power after the Boer War and throughout the era of Democratic radicalism in which Great Britain has meantime had its being. That Mr. Asquith's party is enabled to celebrate ten years of sovereignty still strongly intrenched is by general consent due to the astute generalship of its commander-in-chief. Asquith is not commonly accused of imaginativeness. He is too typical a British statesman for that. His temperament is devoid of the adventurous, like that of the true intellectual, and he is pathologically fonder of harking to public opinion than boldly leading it. When he coined the "Wait and See" epigram during the Ulster crisis, he gave utterance to a phrase which accurately epitomizes the tentativeness so preponderant in his political career. British procrastination and vacillation at vital periods of the war were undoubtedly the reflex action of the Prime Minister's own low-speed mental processes. Yet in the revolt of the Curragh Camp officers, that strange curtain-raiser of the impending Ulster crisis, which threatened to embroil these fair isles in another Cromwellian trial of strength between Parliament and the army, Mr. Asquith, by a courageous stroke of positive genius--his own assumption of the Secretaryship for War in succession to the compromised Colonel Seely--resolved into tranquillity and hope a situation more menacing to civil peace in England than living Britons had ever before lived through. Beneath Mr. Asquith's polished exterior, unemotional mask and sweet reasonableness Germany, mistaking his for a peace-at-any-price nature, made one of the most egregious of her numerous and glaring miscalculations.
Only the results of the Peace Conference will determine the true ramifications of Sir Edward Grey's reputation. It was deservedly high when the war began. No Foreign Secretary in Europe approached him in stature, with the possible exception of Delcassé. He had long been Germany'sbête noire, being looked upon as the incarnation of the British diplomatic policy of blocking German ambitions for a "place in the sun" wherever and whenever they manifested themselves. As long before as December, 1912, Professor Hans Delbrück, the sanest of German political professors, told me in a prophetic interview forThe Daily Mailon "What Germany Wants" that unless England abandoned her policy of "arbitrary opposition to legitimate German political aspirations; if she had no inclination to meet us on that ground; if her interests rather pointed to a perpetuation of the anything-to-beat-Germany policy, so let it be. The Armageddon which must then, some day, ensue will not be of our making." That was a fairly plain warning of coming events. The Germans, as I have said, considered Sir Edward Grey anti-Germanism personified. They regard him to-day as the "organizer of the war." Taking an obviously short-sighted view, I used sometimes to think that it would have been good politics for Britain to buy off Germany with aTrinkgeld(tip) of some sort. If Bismarck was right when he called the Germans "a nation of house-servants," they could obviously have been bribed. Delbrück himself once confessed to me that Germany did notneedmore oversea territory; she onlyhankeredfor it for window-dressing purposes. She wanted as expensive millinery and high-powered a car as her rich neighbor across the way. Colonies were fashionable, and she had to have them. I occasionally thought that England would be staving off trouble for herself by bribing avaricious Germany with a coaling-station on some inconsequential trade-route or even shutting the eye to some burglarious descent on territory or concessions in Asia Minor or Central Africa. But such notions left the German character, the Oliver Twist in it, fatally out of account. The German is the most eager person in the world to covet a mile if given an inch. Concessions to his rapacity would have meant purchasing turmoil for the conceding party not eliminating it. British opposition to Pan-Germanic designs, typified by Sir Edward Grey, was based on thoroughgoing insight into the German nature and German ambitions, epitomized for all time by Bernhardi when he said that nothing would appease the Fatherland except World Power or downfall. Hush-money to Germany in the shape of periodically new "places in the sun" would have kept her quiet for spells. But the blackmailing process would have been resumed. It is the German way. "Mr. Balfour tells us we must not expect Englishmen to support our aims in the direction of territorial expansion," said Delbrück. "What remains then for us, except to enforce the accomplishment of our purposes by strengthened armaments?" Could avowal be plainer-spoken?
Sir Edward Grey is fifty-three years old and has been a childless widower since 1906. He has been a Member of Parliament continuously since he was twenty-three years of age. Though an Oxford graduate and successful barrister, he is in no sense a scholar, and his experience of foreign affairs up to his becoming Foreign Secretary in the Campbell-Bannerman ministry in 1905 was confined to an under-secretaryship of the Foreign Office in the preceding (Rosebery) Government. Grey, who is also of the smooth-shaven Romanesque type of statesman in external appearance, is an amazing example of natural British aptitude for the higher politics, for he is not a linguist (he speaks nothing but English) and except for a visit to France with the present King a couple of years ago was said never to have been abroad in his life. His hobbies are tennis, fly-fishing and birds. The only book he ever wrote was a treatise on the piscatory art and he tramped through the New Forest with Colonel Roosevelt talking ornithology all the way. Yet a man has only to read the British White Paper--he need not, indeed, do much except read Sir Edward Grey's dispatches to his ambassadors on July 29, 1914--to realize that the Foreign Secretary is a statesman of marvelous force and capacity to grapple with the essentials of a situation. No state papers of modern times outrival Grey's diplomatic correspondence on the eve of the war. They ought to insure him, as I believe they will, immortality, no matter how the war ends. Sir Edward Grey's speeches are like his dispatches--devoid of irrelevancy or rhetorical claptrap and incisive in the highest degree. They ring conviction and sincerity and their argument is usually unanswerable. Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg's clumsy attempts to parry Grey's mid-bellum dialectics have only brought out the latter in bolder relief. The war has notoriously eaten into Grey's soul. Germany calls it guilty remorse. Men who know are conscious that he labored for peace to the last minute with unflagging enthusiasm. His industry during the war has been intense, and his insistence upon looking at things for himself has threatened more than once to cost him his eyesight. As it is, intermittent relaxation has to be forced upon him by his colleagues and his medical advisers. Sir Edward Grey's permanent disappearance from Downing Street would rejoice Germany like a victorious battle. Grey has been violently blamed for the failure of Britain's mid-war diplomacy, especially in the Balkans. His own defense against charges of failure in that region is likely to seem plausible in the light of history, viz., that, unaccompanied by commensurate military successes, the efforts of Allied diplomacy in the Near East were almost hopelessly handicapped.
One night during the South African War a Radical M.P., advocating the downtrodden brother Boer's cause at a mass-meeting in Birmingham, received such a warm reception from the crowd that he had to flee for his life through a back-door, disguised as a policeman. His name was David Lloyd-George, whose present occupation is that of England's man of the hour. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer when war broke out and introduced the initial war budgets, earning thereby encomiums from the financial community which for years before looked upon him as capital's demagogic arch-foe. To-day, Minister of Munitions--the circumstances under which he became such are treated in a subsequent chapter--Lloyd-George comes far nearer being Britain's national hero than any of his contemporaries. He is charged by his detractors with the design to make himself Dictator. England could have a worse one.
If Lloyd-George were an American instead of a Welshman, he would have been President of the United States by this time, or at least as close to it as Bryan has ever been. There is in fact very little typically British about him. He is emotional, for example, and he has an imagination. His whole make-up is trans-atlantic, which isAnglicefor sensational. Picture, if you can, a strong solution of Booker Washington (I mean, of course, only his eloquence), of flamboyant and appealing Billy Sunday, of the Boy Orator of the Platte at his silver-tongued best, and of our inimitable T. R. in his most rampageous form, and you will have Lloyd-George in composite. It was because he is all this that he was chosen for the "shells portfolio" in the reconstructed Asquith cabinet.
[image]Lloyd-George.
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Lloyd-George.
He knew very little--probably nothing--about munitions seven months ago. It could not have been very much before that when he probably thought that guncotton was raw material for pajamas. But he is the prize "enthuser" of the Kingdom, a master of the tedious art of welding drowsy Britons into a race of real war-makers. All the ingredients for supplying the army with the shells it needed were in existence; but they needed organization. The manufacturers and their works needed organization. The workmen needed organization. The public spirit needed organization; and the whole business needed a Lloyd-George. It got him ten months after it ought to have had him, but not too late. Obviously the diminutive Welsh country lawyer who had brought about the disestablishment of the State Church of Wales, imposed State Insurance and Old Age Pensions on a reluctant Kingdom, assailed the vested interests of the House of Lords and demolished them, was the man to impress the country with the true meaning of the shells tragedy. He took the stump, his natural element, for the purpose. He went to the people, especially in the great industrial centers, and told them the truth. He burned into their conscience--that was the only way to get the stolid British to wake up to a real peril--that shells, shells, and then shells, and nothing but shells, were required if Britain meant to win the war.
The people listened to Lloyd-George. He has a way of making them listen to him. They gave him their ear even in his pro-Boer days. They listened to him when he (an ardent Baptist) cleared for action against the Welsh Church. They listened to him even when he went down to Limehouse and coined a new word, "to limehouse," meaning violent political spell-binding, second cousin to demagogism, by the nature of his impassioned appeals to the people to rise and slay the Lords. It was inevitable that the country would listen to him in his newest and greatest rôle as organizer of victory.
Lloyd-George's goal is undoubtedly the Premiership--the ambition of every British politician. He has plenty of time to wait--he is only fifty-two--and unfailing week-end golf keeps him as "fit" as a man fifteen years his junior. Of Napoleonic stockiness of build, with a wealth of wavy gray hair worn long, he is a figure which radiates strength and power, though unimpressive of itself. He is a capital "mixer." It is, indeed, his principal political asset. He is as much at home laboring with a gang of recalcitrant miners at the pit-mouth--he always goes straight to headquarters when he essays to settle a strike--as he is on the floor of the House of Commons or as moderator at a Baptist convention. He likes Americans and specializes in extending hospitality to interesting ones. Unquestionably he has a strong hold on our imaginations, as a man of his temperament, career and talent is bound to have. An eminent Chicagoan visited London last summer, with introductions which would have easily paved his way to the throne or any other exalted British quarter. "Whom would you like to meet most of all?" he was asked. "Lloyd-George," he said, with the intuitive sense of a Yankee who only has time for the things worth while.
Winston Churchill, the son of an English father and an American mother, is the Peck's Bad Boy of the British Government. His popularity has been sadly dimmed since the war began, for he was looked upon as not only the author of the grotesque naval "relief" expedition to Antwerp--now either prisoners of war in Germany or interned in Holland--but the culprit who was chiefly responsible for the far more disastrous Dardanelles adventure. Another crime is charged against him, hardly less serious than the two just named: his imperious administration of the Admiralty drove from the First Sea Lordship the man universally considered Britain's greatest sailor, Lord Fisher. All agree, friend and foe, that to "Winston" was due in a very marked degree, England's superb readiness at sea when war broke out, but it is a matter of grave doubt whether even that superlative service to the country will be looked upon as great enough to blanket his subsequent and costly incompetencies. When the upheaval in the Asquith Cabinet came about, in the spring of 1915, Churchill was nominally squelched by interment in the harmless berth of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, most of whose official time is spent in licensing Justices of the Peace and Notaries Public. That ennui hung heavily on his hands was manifested by the announcement during the summer that Churchill had taken up painting as a pastime.
I have said that "Winston" was nominally subjugated, for a petrel of his peculiarly irrepressible storminess can only be wholly curbed by annihilation. Asquith is far too sagacious a politician to risk Churchill's complete eclipse in the Government of which he has always been the most picturesque constituent. Churchill, too, aspires to the Premier's toga, though a good many people fear that the defects of his qualities will keep him, just as they kept his distinguished father, Lord Randolph Churchill, from No. 10 Downing Street. But "Winston" is far less dangerous to the Government as a friend than as a foe. His chameleon political career justifies the fear that he would turn on his old associates and party cronies the moment he conceived that advantage to self was thereby obtainable. Obviously such a man is better in the Cabinet than out of it, especially if he is of Winston Churchill's undoubted personal charm, magnetism and resistless force.
Combining the best qualities of his dual ancestry, he makes a lively appeal to the average heart. Aristocratic to the core, with the blood of the Marlboroughs in his veins, and a snob of snobs in his personal relations, it is an anomalous fact that Churchill is an endlessly popular figure with the crowd. Whether it is his youth--he is only forty-one, was a soldier of no mean renown at twenty-three, a Member of Parliament at twenty-six, a Cabinet Minister at thirty-two and a force in Imperial politics long before he was forty--or his impetuous devil-may-care make-up, or his bombastic platform style, the masses like him. He has only one serious rival, indeed, in their affections, and that is Lloyd-George. He is remembered in war thus far not only for his Antwerp and Dardanelles indiscretions, but for his equally unhappy oratorical excesses, which are doomed, apparently, always to precede some untoward naval or military event. Within thirty-six hours of proclaiming at Liverpool (in September, 1914) that "if the German navy does not come out and fight, we shall dig it out like rats from a hole,"U9sent theCressy, HagueandAboukirto the bottom. In the spring of 1915, discussing the Dardanelles, Churchill blustered that "we are within a very few miles of the greatest victory this war has seen," and a few weeks later Kitchener announced that twelve miles of precarious front in Gallipoli were all there was to show for a campaign which had already cost eighty-seven thousand casualties. When Churchill prognosticates nowadays, the country trembles for what the next day will bring forth. Yet he is a rash prophet who would predict that "Winston" has run his course in British politics. He took manfully the discomfiture of the Coalition reshuffle, and although his picture is no longer cheered when it is flashed on the cinematograph screen the shrewdest seers are certain that he will "come back."[1]
[1] Churchill resigned from the Cabinet in November, 1915, declaring that he was a soldier--"and my regiment is in France." To it he said he preferred to go rather than continue in a position of "well-paid inactivity" at home. In a dramatic speech in the House of Commons, he took political farewell of the country and, having pleaded "Not Guilty" to the capital charges of responsibility for Antwerp and the Dardanelles, left England unostentatiously for the trenches, as a major of cavalry.
Lord Kitchener has always boasted that he scorned popularity. He has need for his philosophical temperament to-day, for there is no manner of doubt that his hold on the imaginations of his countrymen is less firm than it was when the war began. "K.'s" dramatic appointment to the War Office, in the earliest hours of the conflict, heartened the nation to an extraordinary degree. Britain had no army, Englishmen said, but it had Kitchener, who was a host in himself. His name alone was an asset which bred indescribable confidence. Men recalled his dominant traits--iron determination, strenuous application to duty, imperious disregard of hide-bound methods and red tape, and, above all, his genius for organization. They rejoiced to hear that he had accepted the War Office, long cob-webbed with circumlocutory traditions and petticoat influence, on the strict understanding that he was to be monarch of all he surveyed--that he would not tolerate such party interference as intrudes itself on departmental affairs in general. Immensely to the popular taste, because it confirmed the masses' conception of "K.," was the story that when he arrived at the War Office for the first time and was told there was "no bed here, Sir," he commanded the affrighted and astonished caretaker, then, "to put one in, as I am going to sleep here." Britain said to herself that she indubitably possessed a match for German Efficiency in her new Secretary for War, and all thought of "losing" with such a man as the supreme chief of the military establishment vanished from her mind.
[image]Kitchener.
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Kitchener.
Kitchener was never one of the war-will-be-over-by-Christmas crew. His maiden speech as War Minister in the House of Lords informed the country, bluntly, that he expected a three years' struggle. During the winter an anecdote ascribed to the taciturn War Secretary's loquacious sister gained currency, and passed from mouth to mouth. "When is the war going to end?" she asked him. "I don't know when it's going to end," he was said to have replied, "but it is going to begin in May." It was in May, by the pitiless irony of Fate, that the War Office's muddle of the ammunition supply was exposed.
Like all else in Britain--men, measures and institutions--the arbitrament of time will be required to pass final judgment on Kitchener's part in the war. In the principal field he was called upon to plow--the raising of a huge army from out of the earth--he accomplished marvels. No nation within fourteen months evolved from practically nothing an organization of, roundly, three million soldiers. It is not enough, for the actual requirements of the war call insistently for more and more, yet "K.'s" recruiting achievement stands forth without parallel in military history. It is certainly without precedent of even approximate magnitude in the annals of a non-conscript democracy. Lord Kitchener's accomplishments in other directions have notoriously not kept pace with his successes as a recruiting-sergeant. The shells affair can hardly fail to dim his reputation. The deficiencies of the voluntary system can not be called a failure directly chargeable to him, in that it has not brought forward men in quantity commensurate with the developed necessities of the campaign. Kitchener has hinted, but only that, that he is prepared to resort to Conscription the moment he is convinced that Voluntaryism has collapsed. But it does not seem unlikely that history may condemn him for clinging to the voluntary principle too long and hesitating to make Englishmen do their duty, instead of relying endlessly on their casual inclination to perform it. Kitchener has ruled the British War Office practically as an autocrat. He brooked no interference, even from the Cabinet. Viewed from that standpoint, "K." can hardly be absolved from cardinal responsibility for British military failures. Before the end of 1915 General Sir Ian Hamilton had disappeared from Gallipoli, Sir John French returned from France, General Townshend retreated from Baghdad, and the Allied "Relief" Expedition to Serbia had retired to Salonica, whence it had set out less than ten weeks previous.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GENERAL, THE ADMIRAL AND THE KING
That Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in France and Flanders, an army which reduces to comparative insignificance the largest host ever marshaled by Napoleon, comes from fighting stock is plain enough from the fact that his only sister, Mrs. Despard, is a militant suffragette. She herself provides homely evidence that the appointment of her brother (whom she practically "brought up") to lead the British fight against the Germans on land realized a boyhood aspiration. "When we were children," Mrs. Despard relates, "the great province of Schleswig-Holstein was taken from Denmark by what was then Prussia. We were discussing the disgraceful incident of poor little Denmark losing the province, and a certain little boy, then ten or twelve years of age, strutted about and said: 'If I was only a man, I know what I'd do to them.' He was very indignant. That little boy is now commander of Britain's great army."
It has been said that South Africa is the grave of British military reputations. Sir Redvers Buller's was buried there, and though those of Roberts and Kitchener emerged from the Boer War, the renown of Botha and Dewet admittedly outshone them. One British General at least was "made" by the three years' conflict with the Dutch Republics--Sir John French, the cavalryman who relieved Kimberley, and whose escutcheon during the sorry South African campaign was alone untarnished by blunder or reverse. As Kitchener was the logical choice for organizer of Britain's new armies, Sir John French was the natural selection for their field-commandership. French, following in paternal footsteps, began his fighting career in the navy, but he has been a soldier for the past forty-one years--he was sixty-three in September, 1915. A man whose entire manhood has been lived in the army, who knows it through and through, loves it passionately, has devoted himself to it with the zeal of a student, and fought in all its campaigns for nearly half a century, had an ideal claim upon its supreme honor in the hour of superlative crisis. Doubtless in the Government's mind when it entrusted "Jack" French with the command of the British Expeditionary Force was the reputation he had won in South Africa as a fighting field-general. Unquestionably the broad sweeping movements his cavalry divisions executed at Elandslaagte, Lombard's Kop, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Barberton were operations which contributed, perhaps, more than any other scheme of the brilliantly mismanaged Boer campaign finally to bring it to a victorious end. Neither the British nor the German General Staff realized in August, 1914, that Armageddon was going to develop into a trench or "positional" war, with little or no latitude for those grandiose tactical maneuvers which delighted the heart of Moltke and made a Sedan the ambition of every modern tactician. Yet Sir John French, whose military virtues include adaptability, if not imaginativeness, which is oftener born, than acquired, turned out to be ideally fitted for "spade warfare," in which the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and patience have displaced the more spectacular talents of daring and recklessness and those bold strokes of magnificent vastness known as Napoleonic. Bonaparte's scintillating genius, his predilection for the stupendous, would probably have counted for little amid such immobile conditions as the Allied armies have had to face in the West, just as the Germans' prized Moltke traditions in the same region have come to naught.
[image]Sir John French.
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Sir John French.
Military history will unquestionably accord the retreat of the British army from Mons a place among the finest achievements of all times. It was due to Sir John French's strategy that Berlin was cheated of that fiendishly coveted orgy of gloating over the "annihilation" of what the Kaiser is said to have called "the contemptible little British army." Since Mons and the Marne the British Field-Marshal's task has been to "hold" the enemy and to inspire his men to fulfil, unflinchingly, that prodigious, but comparatively inglorious, task. In the circumstances it was fortunate that a man of Sir John French's temperament was in charge. He knew how to "sit tight." Kinship with his soldiers has been his lifetime specialty. He is fond of sharing their joys and sorrows not in any stereotyped, dress-parade sense, but actually. He likes to move among them, and does so. His jaunty fighting bearing and unfailing good humor are a constant inspiration. Short and stocky, straight and energetic of movement, he looks every inch a soldier, and he has a soldier's habit of saying what he means, direct from the shoulder, whether it is a corporal, a staff officer, a brigadier or a Cabinet Minister to whom he is addressing himself.
The Allied military arrangement conferred supreme authority on General Joffre, but the British Field Marshal's character and career were considered a joint guarantee that Sir John French would not be found lacking when called upon to do and dare greatly on his own account. It would be going too far to say that the war has covered French with glory. He would be the first to banish such a thought. Though Britons have fallen laurel-crowned on a score of fields in France and Flanders and irrigated the cock-pit which lies between the Alps and the Channel with as heroic blood as was ever spilled, the British offensives in the West have been little more than brilliant failures. Neuve Chapelle is an undying story of Anglo-Saxon gallantry, as was Ypres before it; but it was nothing else. The "big push" which England hoped had at last begun with the fighting in Artois and the Champagne at the end of September, 1915, turned out to be a victory of distressingly short life and little real effectiveness. Yet when Germany lost the war--when she failed to take Paris--the British army under Sir John French wrote history of which Englishmen will never be ashamed. Who it was that most effectually parried von Kluck and the Crown Prince's thrust at the French capital will probably, among generations of schoolboys yet unborn, be as fruitful a theme of argument as is the question who won Waterloo--Wellington or Blücher--but whatever the verdict of posterity the smashing of the Germans on the Marne reeked glory for all concerned, and Britain's share of it is a heritage which will survive with Blenheim, Balaclava, Kandahar and Khartoum.[1]
[1] Sir John French returned to England in December, 1915, relinquishing (at his own request, it was officially stated) the commandership-in-chief in France for the command of the Home Defense forces. King George conferred the dignity of a Viscountcy on the Field-Marshal.
Another Sir John--Admiral Jellicoe--is commander-in-chief of the British navy. Events still to come must determine whether Anglo-Saxon history is to be enriched with another Nelson. But as far as human prescience could foretell, "Jack" Jellicoe was of all men in the British Fleet preordained by talent, temperament and training to be the admiral in whose keeping could safely be entrusted British destinies more priceless than those which were safeguarded at Trafalgar.
Jellicoe was one of the godfathers of the dreadnought, having been summoned by Lord Fisher, the real author of that revolution in naval science, to support and carry into execution the all-big-gun ship idea. Fisher had years before associated young Captain Jellicoe with him as assistant director of naval ordnance, whereupon there ensued an intimacy which friends say will link their names together much as history associated St. Vincent and Nelson as the twin victors of Trafalgar--the one, the far-sighted planner of preparatory reforms; the other, the faithful executor of their purpose.
Jellicoe resembles Sir John French in more than given name. Like him, he is of quite markedly small stature. Neither the Generalissimo or Admiralissimo of Britain in the Great War at all corresponds, physically, to the popular notion that the English are "big" men. Like French, again, Jellicoe is mild and gentle, a pair of conspicuously tight lips indicating poise, reserve force and self-confidence. The chieftain of the Grand Fleet--that is its official title and not an effusive expletive--did not make his first acquaintance with danger afloat when von Tirpitz' submarines began to make life a burden for British sailors. He has been snatched from the jaws of death on three separate occasions. In 1893 Jellicoe was commander of Sir George Tryon'sVictoria, when it was sent to its doom in the Mediterranean, and, although "below" in the ship-hospital with fever at the moment of the disaster, was miraculously rescued by a midshipman when he came to the surface more dead than alive after the vessel foundered. Seven years previous, as if Fate was keeping a protecting hand over him for some great hour, Jellicoe had an equally marvelous escape from drowning when a gig he was commanding off Gibraltar capsized and he was washed ashore. In the Boxer war of 1900, Jellicoe was flag captain to Admiral Seymour, the commander of the Allied expedition which marched from Tien-tsin to the relief of the Powers' legations in Pekin, and at the battle of Peitsang Jellicoe was struck by a Chinese bullet, incurring wounds which the flagship-surgeon considered fatal. Again Jellicoe was spared. A brother-officer tells a story of Jellicoe's agony on that occasion, which illuminates his capacity for facing the music, however doleful. He had asked how the advance to Pekin was proceeding. Told that everything was going satisfactorily, Jellicoe flashed back: "Tell me the truth, damn it. Don't lie!"
The triumvirate which has accomplished that amazing, silent victory of the British Fleet in the war--the complete conquest of sea power without anything savoring of a decisive action in the open--consists of Lord Fisher, the creator of the dreadnought; Admiral Sir Percy Scott, the inventor of the central "fire control" system, and Sir John Jellicoe, to whose gunnery science and innovations in that all-important branch of naval warfare are ascribed, in large measure, the acknowledged preeminence of the British Fleet as a striking force. He had not been director of ordnance a year when the percentage of the navy's hits out of rounds fired increased from forty-two to more than seventy. "In other words," as a critic describes it, "Jellicoe enhanced by more than a third the fighting value of the British Fleet, and that without a keel being added to its composition."
Jellicoe, who is fifty-six years old, has nothing but sailor blood in his veins. His father was a captain in the Fleet before him, and one of his kinsmen, Admiral Philip Patton, was Second Sea Lord in Nelson's time. Jellicoe is the incarnation of the spirit, traditions, practises and brain-force of the British navy of to-day. He has the not inconsiderable advantage of having had opportunity personally to take the measure of his German antagonists, for he has visited their country, where he made the acquaintance of von Tirpitz, Ingenohl, Pohl, Behncke, Holtzendorff, Prince Henry and all the other naval men of the Fatherland, and was even privileged to cruise over Berlin in a Zeppelin.
England has heard little and seen nothing of Jellicoe during the war. The veil of mystery which envelops the Grand Fleet is seldom lifted. Not one Englishman in a million knows where the Fleet is, though all know that it is where it ought to be. A ten days' visit paid to the officers and men of the Armada by the Archbishop of York in the late summer of 1915 resulted in imparting to the nation the first glimmer of their life, of their indomitable watch and wait, which had been forthcoming.
"It is difficult for our sailormen," wrote the Archbishop, "to realize the value of their long-drawn vigil. Their one longing is to meet the German ships and sink them; and yet month after month the German ships decline the challenge. The men have little time or chance or perhaps inclination to read accounts in serious journals of the invaluable service which the Navy is fulfilling by simply keeping its watch; and naval officers do not make speeches to their men. I think, indeed I know, that it was a real encouragement to them to hear a voice from the land of their homes telling them of the debt their country owes them for the command of the seas--the safety of the ships carrying food and means of work to the people, supplies of men and munitions to the fields of battle--which is secured to us by the patient watching of the Fleet."
Speaking of Admiral Jellicoe, the Archbishop said:
"It was refreshing and exhilarating beyond words to find oneself in a world governed by a great tradition so strong that it has become an instinct of unity and mutual trust. But to the influence of this great tradition must be added the influence of a great personality. I can not refrain from saying here that I left the Grand Fleet sharing to the full the admiration, affection, and confidence which every officer and man within it feels for its Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Jellicoe. He reassuredly is the right man in the right place at the right time. His officers give him the most absolute trust and loyalty. When I spoke of him to his men I always felt that quick response which to a speaker is the sure sign that he has reached and touched the hearts of his hearers. The Commander-in-Chief--quiet, modest, courteous, alert, resolute, holding in firm control every part of his great fighting engine--has under his command not only the ships but the heart of his Fleet. He embodies and strengthens that comradeship of single-minded service which is the crowning honor of the Navy."
More than once the criticism has been uttered in England itself that the Fleet has been conspicuously lacking in the "Nelson touch." Even Americans, friendly observers, have ventured to suggest that there seemed to be an absence of the Farragut or Dewey "to-hell-with-mines" spirit. Up to the end of the first year of war, Britons faced the fact that their "supreme navy" had lost seven battleships aggregating 97,600 tons (not counting a super-dreadnought reported by the foreign press to have been lost in the early months of the war, but which was a loss never "officially confirmed" in England), and ten cruisers aggregating 81,365 tons. Submarines, in that nerve-racking and troublous day before Scott and Jellicoe solved the problem of sinking "U boats" almost faster than German dockyards could launch substitutes, accomplished terrific havoc among the British merchant fleet, even though the sea commerce of these islands was never remotely in danger of being "paralyzed," as von Tirpitz and the minions of Frightfulness fondly planned.
[image]Sir J. R. Jellicoe.
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Sir J. R. Jellicoe.
Yet all this while, the British Fleet was tightening its grip upon the command of the sea to an extent which may now be described as absolute. The German flag, war ensign and merchant pennant, has been swept from the oceans as if it had never flown. Hamburg and Bremen, the Fatherland's prides, are as completely demolished, as far as their usefulness to Germany for war is concerned, as if they had been battered into smoking ruins. German mercantile trade simply no longer exists, except such of it as can be smuggled in tramps and ferries across the narrow reach of the Baltic between Pomerania and the Scandinavian ports. The Germanic Allies can import and export nothing oversea except by the grace of Jellicoe. Their deported propaganda chieftains or compromised ambassadors and attachés can not return to their homes in Europe from the United States without gracious "safe conduct" by the British Fleet. The toymakers of Nuremberg can not deliver a solitary tin soldier to an American Christmas tree unless Jellicoe says yes. Two score proud German liners, including the queen of them all, theVaterland, are rotting and rusting in United States harbors, ingloriously imprisoned by British naval power. In a dozen other ports throughout the world Hamburg and Bremen vessels tug at anchor--greyhounds enchained. Germany is banned from the oceans like an outlaw. Her people can eat and drink only on the ration basis. The British Fleet has done something else of which, it seemed to me, an American Presidential message might legitimately have made mention. It has enabled the people of the United States for many months to traverse the oceans in security.
These are the immediate effects of British sea supremacy on the enemy, but even they are incommensurate with the advantages which accrue to Britain herself. A navy has three cardinal functions: to preserve its own shores from invasion; to maintain inviolate its country's oversea communications, including cables, food supply, passenger traffic and postal transportation; and, finally, to destroy the sea forces of the enemy. The first two of these functions have been fulfilled by the Grand Fleet, and at a cost in men and material, though not inconsiderable, which is infinitesimal, measured by the results attained. To absolve the third, and, of course, climacteric, function, Jellicoe and his men and his ironclads stand ready when the opportunity is given them--readier, by far, than when the war began. They have not lost a really vital fighting unit (supposing unconfirmed reports to the contrary to be unfounded). They have had a priceless experience of sea warfare under almost every conceivable condition. They are veterans of every essential contingency. There is hardly a terror, military or atmospheric, which they have not faced and surmounted. They have added to their battle efficiency by a great many new and powerful ships. Theirmoraleis unbroken.
When the Kaiser's Canal Armada finally makes up its mind, as I believe that German public opinion will some day compel it to, to forsake the snug harbors of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven and the screen of Heligoland for the high sea, it will find that Jellicoe has up his iron sleeve a welcome, as to the issue of which no one in these islands is capable of cherishing the remotest doubt. History is barren of an instance of a Power defeated in war, who retained command of the sea. Were there no other considerations which spell the eventual, though probably not the early, frustration of Germany's ambition to master Europe and, as William II once sighed, to snatch the trident from Britannia's grasp, the vise-like grip of naval power which Jellicoe has wrested alone denotes that Armageddon can have but one ending, however long it be deferred.
In this cursory review of the men at Britain's helm, the Sovereign is deliberately put at the end instead of the beginning. I mean to cast no impious slur upon George V in thus classifying his relative importance in the scheme of British war life, yet to rank him at the front of the captains of the State would be hyperbole as unpardonable in a chronicler as gratuitous defamation would be.
To discuss the figure cut by England's King during the past year is a task which a foreigner approaches with diffidence. I should not dream of taking such liberties with their Britannic Majesties, for example, as my gifted friend and colleague, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, who recently diagnosed the Royal situation in England thus: "I have seen the King and Queen, and I know now why they call him George the Fifth; Mary's the other four-fifths." Whether this subtle tribute to the undoubtedly potent influence of the gracious Queen explains it or not, the indisputable fact remains that the part played by King George in the day of supreme British national trial has been a keen disappointment to a great many of his subjects. It is not a topic which they discuss at all in public, nor one upon which it is easy to extract their views even in private. But when an inquiring alien even of unmistakably sympathetic sentiment accomplishes the miracle of inducing a Briton to pour out his heart, he will secure evidence corroborative of an impression the foreigner has had from the start, if he has lived in England since August, 1914--that the monarchy, as such, has not given a wholly satisfactory account of itself. Men who are so utterly un-English as to be "quite" frank even suggest that King George's insistence not only upon enacting the "constitutional monarch," butoverplayingthat rôle, has not inconsiderably undermined the solidity of the Royal principle in numerous British hearts. They will tell you, if in communicative mood, that George has failed to rise to the majestic opportunities of the moment. They contrast his incorrigibly "constitutional" behavior with what they feel assured is the red-blooded lead King Edward would have given. They assert that the hour of Imperial peril, when national existence itself is at stake, has caused so many cherished shibboleths to go by the board, that the strait-jacket of "constitutional monarchy," which is another name for Irresponsibility, ought to go with them. In times of peace, say Englishmen, a conscientious figurehead on the throne is good enough. In times of war, they want a King. He need not be the blatant, ubiquitous limelight-chaser that the Kaiser is, but some of that royal dynamo's attributes, diluted with English seasoning, would not have been unwelcome to his people during the past year and a half. Britons, though, I repeat, they do not cry it out for the multitude to hear, are not edified by the spectacle of a sovereign who has sojourned with his army and fleet only in the most formal manner, whose war-time activities are confined to peripatetic visits to hospitals and convalescent homes, to inspections and reviews, and to distribution of Victoria Crosses and Distinguished Service medals at Buckingham Palace.
"The King," to whom Englishmen, before 10 P.M., still drink in reverential sincerity, and who rise in devout respect when they hear the anthem which beseeches Divine salvation for him, is an institution from which Britain felt it had a right to expect both lead and deed in a great war. She did not demand, or at least no conspicuous section of her has, that the King should take the field or the sea, and prance about in the saddle or on the quarter-deck, but they did hope, I think, for something more inspiring than nebulous constitutionalism. It was many months after thousands of other British mothers had sent their sons to death and glory that Queen Mary consented to the dispatch of the twenty-one-year-old Prince of Wales to the trenches. And Prince Albert, who is twenty, and was in the navy before the war, was never, as far as the public is informed, able to gratify his desire to return to active service afloat, but must cool his martial ardor in the inglorious capacity of an Admiralty messenger in London. Britons look across to Germany, Russia and Italy, even to Belgium and Serbia, and, contrasting the spectacle with "constitutionalism" in their own Royal household, acknowledge that theirs is not a thrilling picture.
If you attempt to penetrate into what may strike you as a mystery, you will be told that the cause as far as King George is concerned, is twofold: first, his high-minded, even slavish, devotion to his conception of his constitutional limitations, and, secondly, his equally incorrigible shyness. Sarah Bernhardt, when King George and Queen Mary were in Paris a couple of years ago, was once summoned to the royal box of the Comédie Franchise for presentation to the British sovereigns. She explained to friends afterward that the King's modesty positively unnerved her. He was as bashful as a schoolgirl. I have been told that his manner in the presence even of his Ministers is almost deferential. He does not know the meaning of "mixing," an art in which his late father excelled. "The King and Queen are fond of lunching alone, and usually take their tea together," I read the other day in a "well-informed" society paper. Edward VII was fond of lunching with men of affairs. He did not heed the hoots of the aristocratic set, which was scandalized by his intimacy with tea-merchants and money kings, because through them he was accustomed to keep in touch with the human currents of his people's life and times. Edward would hardly have allowed even the Empire's greatest soldier (Englishmen explain) to call the new army "Kitchener's Army." It would have been called the "King's Army" and the King would have thrown his incalculably great moral influence into the breach in some more practical way than lending his photograph for recruiting advertisements. George V could have been England's finest recruiting sergeant. He preferred to remain a constitutional monarch.