The thorns which I have reap'd are of the treeI planted; they have torn me, and I bleed.I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.Byron.
The thorns which I have reap'd are of the treeI planted; they have torn me, and I bleed.I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.
Byron.
ThatSunday night was not one of London's black nights that have been so often described. The police began to be a little sharp with the people after nine or ten o'clock, and by midnight the streets were getting tolerably clear. For the great majority, I believe it had been a day of more or less pleasurable excitement and amusement. For the minority, who were better informed, it was a day and night of curious bewilderment and restless anxiety.
I looked in at several newspaper offices on my way home from South Kensington, but found that subordinate members of the staffs had no information to give, and that their superiors maintained an attitude of strict reticence. As I passed the dark windows of my own office I thought of our "feature" for the coming week: the demand for disarmament, in order that naval and military expenditure might be diverted into labour reform channels; Herr Mitmann's voluble assurances of the friendliness of the German people; of the ability and will of the German Socialiststo make German aggression impossible, for the sake of their brother workers in England.
I thought of these things, and wished I could spurn under foot my connection withThe Mass. Then, sitting at the window of my little bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, I looked into my petty finances. If I left Clement Blaine I had enough to subsist upon for six or eight weeks. It was a risky business. Then I pictured myself casually mentioning to Constance Grey that I was no longer connected withThe Mass. I fancied that I saw the bright approval in her eyes. Before blowing my light out, I had composed the little speech to Blaine which, in the morning, should set a period to our connection.
And then I thought of Beatrice. It was barely twenty-four hours since we had parted beside Battersea Park (though it seemed more like twenty-four days), and recollection showed me Beatrice in her rather rumpled finery, with the bleakness of the gray hour that follows such pleasures as most appealed to her, beginning to steal over her handsome face, sapping its warm colour, thinning and sharpening its ripe, smooth contours. Beatrice would pout when she heard of my leaving her father. The thought showed me her full red lips, and the little even white teeth they so often disclosed.
The curves of Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her throat when she laughed, thathad thrilled me time and again. And how often, and how gaily she laughed.
In the midst of a picture of Beatrice, laughing at me across a restaurant table with a raised glass in her hand, I had a shadowy vision of Constance Grey beside the foot of the stairs in South Kensington. There was no laughter in her face. I had gathered, when I dined there, that Constance did not care for wine. She had said: "I don't care for anything that makes me feel as though I couldn't work if I wanted to." How Beatrice would have scoffed at that! And then, how Constance would have smiled over Beatrice's ideals—her "fluffy" evenings—in a kind of regretful, wondering way; almost as she had smiled when she first called me "Dick," in asking what had become of our staid English reserve; as she watched the noisy crowd in Fleet Street, singing its silly doggerel about England's security and England's "dibs."
And then, suddenly, my picture-making thoughts swept out across low Essex flats to the only part of East Anglia with which I was familiar, and gave me a vision of burning farmhouses, and terror-smitten country-folk fleeing blindly before a hail of bullets, and the pitiless advance of legions of fair-haired men in long coats of a kind of roan-gray, buttoned across the chest with bright buttons arranged to suggest the inward curve to an imaginary waist-line. The faces of the soldiers were all the same; they all had the face of Herr Mitmann of Stettin. And a hot wave of angry resentment and hatred of these machine-like invaders of a peaceful unprotectedcountryside pulsed through my veins. Could they dare—here on English soil? My fists clenched under the bed-clothes. If it was true, by heavens, there was work for Englishmen toward!
My blood was hot at the thought. It was perhaps the first swelling of a patriotic emotion I had known; the first hint of any larger citizenship than that which claims and demands, without thought of giving. And, immediately, it was succeeded by a sharp chill, a chill that ushered me into one of the bitterest moments of humiliation that I can remember. The thought accompanying that chill was this:
"What can you do? What are you fit for? What boy's part, even, can you take, though the roof were being burned over your mother's head? What of Constance, or Beatrice? Could you strike a blow for either? Work for Englishmen, forsooth! Yes, for those of them who have ever learned a man's part in such work. But you—you have never had a gun in your hand. What have you done? You have poured out for your weekly wage so many thousands of words; words meaning—what? Why, they have meant what the roadside beggar means: 'Give! Give! Give!' They have urged men to demand more from the State, and give the State nothing; to rob the State of even its defences, for the sake of adding to their own immediate ease. And you have ridiculed, as a survival of barbarous times, the efforts of such men as the brave old Field Marshal who gave his declining years to the thankless task of urging England to make some effort of preparation to fend off just that very crisis which has now come upon her,and found her absolutely unprepared. That is how you have earned your right to live, a citizen of the freest country in the world, a subject of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. And when you have had leisure and money to spend, you have devoted it to overeating and drinking, and helping to fill the tills of alien parasites in Soho. That has been your part. And now, now that the fatal crisis has arrived, you, whose qualification is that you can wield the pen of a begging letter-writer, who is also scurrilous and insolent—you lie in bed and clench your useless hands, and prate of work for Englishmen!"
That was the thought that came to me with a sudden chill that night; and I suppose I was one of the earliest among millions doomed to writhe under the impotent shame of such a thought. I shall never forget that night in my Bloomsbury lodging. It was my ordeal of self-revelation. I suppose I slept a little toward morning; but I rose early with a kind of vague longing to escape from the company of the personality my thought had shown me in the night.
It is natural that the awakening of an individual should be a more speedy process than the awakening of a people—a nation. I regard my early rising on that Monday morning as the beginning of my first real awakening to life as an Englishman. I had still far to go—I had not even crossed the threshold as yet.
Thy trust, thy honours, these were great; the greater now thy shame, for thou hast proved both unready and unfit, unworthy offspring of a noble sire!—Merrow'sCountry Tales.
Thy trust, thy honours, these were great; the greater now thy shame, for thou hast proved both unready and unfit, unworthy offspring of a noble sire!—Merrow'sCountry Tales.
Fiveminutes after Clement Blaine reached the office ofThe Massthat morning, he had lost the services of his assistant editor, and I felt that I had taken one step upward from a veritable quagmire of humiliation.
Blaine was almost too excited about the news of the day to pay much heed to my little speech of resignation. The morning paper to which he subscribed—a Radical journal of pronounced tone—had observed far less reticence than most of its contemporaries, and, in its desire to lend sensational interest to its columns, had not minimized in any way the startling character of such intelligence as it had received.
"The bloodthirsty German devils!" said Blaine, the erstwhile apostle of internationalism and the socialistic brotherhood of man. "By God, the Admiralty and the War Office ought to swing for this! Here are we taxed out of house and home to support their wretched armies and navies, and German soldiers marching on London, they say, with never a sign of a hand raised to oppose 'em—damn them!Nice time you choose to talk of leaving. By God, Mordan, you may be leaving from against a wall with a bullet through your head, next thing you know. These German devils don't wear kid gloves, I fancy. They're not like our tin-pot army. Army!—we haven't got one—lot of gold-laced puppets!"
That was how Clement Blaine was moved by the news. Last week: "Bloated armaments," "huge battalions of idle men eating the heart out of the nation through its revenues." This week, we had no army, and because of it the Admiralty and the War Office ought to "swing." In Blaine's ravings I had my foretaste of public opinion on the crisis.
On the previous day I had listened to a prominent Member of Parliament urging that our children should be preserved from the contamination of contact with those who taught the practice of the "hellish art" of shooting.
The leading daily papers of this Monday morning admitted the central fact that England had been invaded during Saturday night, and even allowed readers to assume that portions of the eastern counties were then occupied by "foreign" troops. But they used the word "raid" in place of "invasion," and generally qualified it with such a word as "futile." The general tone was that a Power with whom we had believed ourselves to be upon friendly terms had been guilty of rash and provocative action toward us, which it would speedily be made to regret. It was an insult, which would be promptly avenged; full atonement for which would be demanded and obtained at once. It was even suggested that sometragic misunderstanding would be found to lie at the root of the whole business; and in any case, things were to be set right without delay. One journal, theStandard, did go so far as to say that the British public was likely to be forced now into learning at great cost a lesson which had been offered daily as a free gift since the opening of the century, and as steadily repudiated or ignored.
"Two things it should teach England," said this journal; "never to invite insult and contempt by a repetition of Sunday's Disarmament Demonstration or enunciation of its fallacious and dangerous teaching; and the necessity for paying instant heed to the warnings of the advocates of universal military training for purposes of home defence."
But at that time the nicknames of the "The Imperialist Banner" and "The Patriotic Pulpit," applied by various writers and others to this great newspaper, were scornful names, applied with opprobrious intent; and London was still full of people whose only comment upon this sufficiently badly-needed warning would be: "Oh, of course, theStandard!"
But the policy of reticence, though I have no doubt that it did save London from some terrible scenes of panic, was not to be tenable for many hours. Within half an hour of noon special editions of a halfpenny morning paper, and an evening paper belonging to the same proprietors, were issued simultaneously with a full, sensational, and quite unreserved statement of all the news obtainable from East Anglia. A number of motor-cyclists had been employed in the quest ofintelligence, and one item of the news they had to tell was that Colchester had offered resistance to the invaders, and as a result had been shelled and burned to the ground. A number of volunteers and other civilians had been found bearing arms, and had been tried by drum-head court martial and shot within the hour, by order of the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces.
Another sensational item was a copy of a proclamation issued by the German Commander-in-Chief. This proclamation was dated from Ipswich, and I think it struck more terror into the people than any other single item of intelligence published during that eventful day. It was headed with the Imperial German Arms, and announced the establishment of German military jurisdiction in England. It announced that the penalty of immediate death would be inflicted without any exception upon any British subject not wearing and being entitled to wear British military uniform who should be found:
1. Taking arms against the invaders.
2. Misleading German troops.
3. Injuring in any manner whatever any German subject.
4. Injuring any road, rail, or waterway, or means of communication.
5. Offering resistance of any kind whatsoever to the advance and occupation of the German Army.
Then followed peremptory details of instructions as to the supplies which every householder must furnish for the German soldiers quartered in his neighbourhood, and an announcement as to the supremeand inviolable authority of the German officer in command of any given place.
Nothing else yet published brought home to the public the realization of what had happened as did this coldly pompous and, in the circumstances, very brutal proclamation. And no item in it so bit into the hearts of the bewildered Londoners who read it as did the clear incisive statement to the effect that a British subject who wore no military uniform would be shot like a dog if he raised a hand in the defence of his country or his home. He must receive the invader with open arms, and provide him food, lodging, and assistance of every kind, or be led out and shot. There were hundreds of thousands of men in London that day who would have given very much for the right to wear a uniform which they had learned almost to despise of late years; a uniform many of them had wished to abolish altogether, as the badge of a primitive and barbarous trade, a "hellish art."
We had talked glibly enough of war, of its impossibility in England, and of the childish savagery of the appeal to arms; just as, a few years earlier, before the naval reductions, we had talked of England's inviolability, secured her by her unquestioned mastery of the sea. We had written and spoken hundreds of thousands of fine words upon these subjects; and, within the last forty-eight hours, we had demonstrated with great energy the needlessness of armed forces for England. For and against, about it and about, we had woven a mazy network of windy platitudes and catch-phrases, all devised to hide the manifestand manly duties of citizenship; all intended to justify the individual's exclusive concentration upon his own personal pleasures and aggrandizement, without waste of time or energy upon any claims of the commonwealth.
And now, in a few score of short, sharp words, in a single brief document, peremptorily addressed to the fifty million people of these islands, a German soldier had brought an end to all our vapourings, all our smug, self-interested theories, and shattered the monstrous fabric of our complaisance, as it were, with a rattle of his sword-hilt. Never before in history had a people's vanity been so shaken by a word.
In the early afternoon an unavoidable errand took me to a northeastern suburb. I made my return to town as one among an army of refugees. The people had begun flocking into London from as far north and east as Brentwood. The Great Eastern Railway was disorganized. The northern highways leading into London were occupied by unbroken lines of people journeying into the city for protection—afoot, in motor-cars, on cycles, and in every kind of horse-drawn vehicle, and carrying with them the strangest assortment of personal belongings.
At the earliest possible hour I made my way toward South Kensington. I told myself there might be something I could do for Constance Grey. Beyond that there was the fact that I craved another sight of her, and I longed to hear her comment when she knew I had finished withThe Mass.
A porter on the Underground Railway told me that the Southwestern and Great Western termini wereblocked by feverish crowds of well-to-do people, struggling, with their children, for places in trains bound south and west. Huge motor-cars of the more luxurious type whizzed past one in the street continuously, their canopies piled high with bags, their bodies full of women and children, their chauffeurs driving hard toward the southern and western highways.
Outside South Kensington station I had my first sight of a Royal Proclamation upon the subject of the invasion. Evidently the Government realized that, prepared or unprepared, the state of affairs could no longer be hidden from the public. The King was at Buckingham Palace that day I knew, and it seemed to me that I read rather his Majesty's own sentiments than those of his Cabinet in the Proclamation. I gathered that the general public also formed this impression.
There is no need for me to reproduce a document which forms part of our history. The King's famous reference to the Government—"The Destroyers"—"Though admittedly unprepared for such a blow, my Government is taking prompt steps for coping in a decisive manner," etc.; and again, the equally famous reference to the German Emperor, in the sentence beginning: "This extraordinary attack by the armed forces of my Royal and Imperial nephew." These features of a nobly dignified and restrained Address seemed to me to be a really direct communication from their Sovereign to the English people. Whatever might be said of the position of "The Destroyers" in Whitehall, it became evident, even at this early stage, that the Throne was in no danger—thatthe sanctity pertaining to the person of the Monarch who, as it were in despite of his Government, had done more for the true cause of peace than any other in Europe, remained inviolate in the hearts of the people.
For the rest, the Proclamation was a brief, simple statement of the facts, with an equally simple but very heart-stirring appeal to every subject of the Crown to concentrate his whole energies, under proper guidance, upon the task of repelling "this dastardly and entirely unprovoked attack upon our beloved country."
I heard many deeply significant and interesting comments from the circle of men and women who were reading this copy of the Proclamation. The remarks of two men I repeat here because in both cases they were typical and representative. The first remark was from a man dressed as a navvy, with a short clay pipe in his mouth. He said:
"Oh, yus; the King's all right; Gawd bless un! No one 'ld mind fightin' for 'im. It's 'is blighted Gov'nment wot's all bloomin' wrong—blast 'em!"
The reply came from a young man evidently of sedentary occupation—a shop-assistant or clerk:
"You're all right, too, old sport; but don't you forget the other feller's proclamation. If you 'aven't got no uniform, your number's up for lead pills, an' don't you forget it. A fair fight an' no favour's all right; but I'm not on in this blooming execution act, thank you. Edward R. I. will have to pass me, I can see."
"Well, 'e won't lose much, matey, when all's said.But you're English, anyway; that seems a pity. Why don't yer run 'ome ter yer ma, eh?"
"Go it, old sport. You're a blue-blooded Tory; an Imperialist, aren't you?"
"Not me, boy; I'm only an able-bodied man."
"What ho! Got a flag in your pocket, have you? You watch the Germans don't catch you fer sausage meat."
And then I passed on, heading for Constance Grey's flat. I reflected that I had done my share toward forming the opinions, the mental attitude of that young clerk or shop-assistant. The type was familiar enough. But I had had no part nor lot in the preservation of that navvy's simple patriotism. Rather, by a good deal, had the tendency of all I said and wrote been toward weakening the sturdy growth, and causing it to be deprecated as a thing archaic, an obstacle in the way of progress.
Progress! The expounding of Herr Mitmann of Stettin! That Monday was a minor day of judgment for others beside myself.
A third of the people, then, in the event of war, would immediately be reduced to starvation: and the rest of the thirty-eight million would speedily be forced thither.—L. Cope Cornford'sThe Defenceless Islands(London, 1906).
A third of the people, then, in the event of war, would immediately be reduced to starvation: and the rest of the thirty-eight million would speedily be forced thither.—L. Cope Cornford'sThe Defenceless Islands(London, 1906).
IÂ sawConstance Grey only for a few minutes during that day. She had passed the stage of shocked sorrow and sad fear in which I had found her on Sunday, and was exceedingly busy in organizing a corps of assistant nurses, women who had had some training, and were able to provide a practical outfit of nursing requisites. She had the countenance of the Army Medical authorities, but her nursing corps was to consist exclusively of volunteers.
The organizing ability this girl displayed was extraordinary. She spared five minutes for conversation, and warmed my heart with her appreciation of my severance ofThe Massconnection. And then, before I knew what had happened, she had me impressed, willingly enough, in her service, and I was off upon an errand connected with the volunteer nursing corps. News had arrived of some wounded refugees in Romford, unable to proceed on their way into London; and a couple of motor-cars, with nurses and medical comforts, were despatched at once.
Detailed news of the sacking of Colchester showed this to have been a most extraordinarily brutal affair for the work of a civilized army. The British regular troops at Colchester represented the whole of our forces of the northeastern division, and included three batteries of artillery. The regiments of this division had been reduced to three, and for eighteen months or more these had been mere skeletons of regiments, the bulk of the men being utilized to fill other gaps caused by the consistently followed policy of reduction which had characterized "The Destroyers'" régime.
A German spy who had been captured in Romford and brought to London, said that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in England had publicly announced to his men that the instructions received from their Imperial master were that the pride of the British people must be struck down to the dust; that the first blows must be crushing; that the British people were to be smitten with terror from which recovery should be impossible.
Be this as it may, the sacking of Colchester was a terrible business. A number of citizens had joined the shockingly small body of regulars in a gallant attempt at defence. The attempt was quite hopeless; the German superiority in numbers, discipline, metal, and material being quite overwhelming. But the German commander was greatly angered by the resistance offered, and, as soon as he ascertained that civilians had taken part in this, the town was first shelled and then stormed. It was surrounded by a cordon of cavalry, and—no prisoners were taken.
The town was burned to the ground, though many valuable stores were first removed from it; and those of the inhabitants who had not already fled were literally mown down in their native streets, without parley or quarter—men, women, and children being alike regarded as offenders against the edict forbidding any civilian British subject, upon pain of death, to offer any form of resistance to German troops. I myself spoke to a man in Knightsbridge that evening who had definite news that his nineteen-year-old daughter, a governess in the house of a Colchester doctor, was among those shot down in the streets of the town while endeavouring to make her escape with two children. The handful of British regulars had been shot or cut to pieces, and the barracks and stores taken over by the Germans.
As I left Constance Grey's flat that evening I passed a small baker's shop, before which an angry crowd was engaged in terrifying a small boy in a white apron, who was nervously endeavouring to put up the window shutters. I asked what the trouble was, and was told the baker had refused to sell his half-quartern loaves under sevenpence, or his quartern loaves under a shilling.
"It's agin the law, so it is," shouted an angry woman. "I'm a policeman's wife, an' I know what I'm talking about. I'll have the law of the nasty mean hound, so I will, with his shillin' for a fivepenny loaf, indeed!"
Long before this time, and while Britain still held on to a good proportion of her foreign trade, it had been estimated by statisticians that in the UnitedKingdom some ten to twelve million persons lived always upon the verge of hunger. But since then the manufacturers of protected countries, notably Germany and the United States, had, as was inevitable in the face of our childish clinging to what we miscalled "free" trade, crowded the British manufacturer out of practically every market in the world, except those of Canada. Those also must of necessity have been lost, but for the forbearing and enduring loyalty of the Canadian people, who, in spite of persistent rebuffs, continued to extend and to increase their fiscal preference for imports from the Mother-country.
But, immense as Canada's growth was even then, no one country could keep the manufacturers of Britain busy; and I believe I am right in saying that at this time the number of those who lived always on the verge of hunger had increased to at least fifteen millions. Cases innumerable there were in which manufacturers themselves had gone to swell the ranks of the unemployed and insufficiently employed; the monstrous legion of those who lived always close to the terrifying spectre of hunger.
If the spirit of Richard Cobden walked the earth at that time, even as his obsessions assuredly still cumbered it, it must have found food for bitter reflection in the hundreds of empty factories, grass-grown courtyards, and broken-windowed warehouses, which a single day's walk would show one in the north of England.
You may be sure I thought of those things as I walked away from that baker's shop in South Kensington.A journalist, even though he be only the assistant of a man like Blaine, is apt to see the conditions of life in his country fairly plainly, because he has a wider vision of them than most men. Into Fleet Street, each day brings an endless stream of "news items," not only from all parts of the world, but from every town and city in the kingdom. And your journalist, though he may have scant leisure for its digestion, absorbs the whole of this mass of intelligence each day in the process of conveying one-tenth part of it, in tabloid form, to the public.
If one assumes for the moment that only twelve million people in Great Britain were living on hunger's extreme edge at that time, the picture I had of the sullen, angry crowd outside the baker's shop remains a sufficiently sinister one. As a matter of fact, I believe that particular baker was a shade premature, or a penny or two excessive, in his advance of prices. But I know that by nightfall you could not have purchased a quartern loaf for elevenpence halfpenny within ten miles of Charing Cross. The Bakers' Society had issued its mandates broadcast. Shop-windows were stoned that night in south and east London; but twenty-four hours later the price of the quartern loaf was 1s. 3d., and a man offering 1s. 2d. would go empty away.
And with the same loaf selling at one-third the price, twelve million persons at least had lived always on the verge of hunger. I mention the staple food only, but precisely the same conditions applied to all other food-stuffs with the exception of dairy produce, the price of which was quadrupled by Tuesday afternoon,and fish, the price of which put it at once beyond the reach of all save the rich, and all delicacies, the prices of which became prohibitive. Twelve million persons had lived on the verge of hunger, before, under normal conditions, and when the country's trade had been far larger and more prosperous than of late. Now, with the necessities of life standing at fully three times normal prices, a large number of trades employing many thousands of work-people were suddenly shut down upon, and rendered completely inoperative.
It must be borne in mind that we had been warned again and again that matters would be precisely thus and not otherwise in the event of war, and we had paid no heed whatever to the telling.
Historians have explained for us that the primary reason of the very sudden rise to famine rates of the prices of provisions was the persistent rumour that the effective bulk of the Channel Fleet had been captured or destroyed on its way northward from Spanish waters. German strategy had drawn the Fleet southward, in the first place, by means of an international "incident" in the Mediterranean, which was clearly the bait of what rumour called a death-trap. Once trapped, it was said, German seamanship and surprise tactics had done the rest.
The crews of the Channel Fleet ships (considerably below full strength) had been rushed out of shore barracks, in which discipline had fallen to a terribly low ebb, to their unfamiliar shipboard stations, at the time of the Mediterranean scare. Beset by the flower of the German Navy, in ships manned by crews wholived afloat, it was asserted that the Channel Fleet had been annihilated, and that the entire force of the German Navy was concentrated upon the task of patrolling English waters.
We know that men and horses, stores and munitions of war, were pouring steadily and continuously into East Anglia from Germany during this time, escorted by German cruisers and torpedo-boats, and uninterrupted by British ships. There was yet no report of the Channel Fleet, the ships of which were already twenty-four hours overdue at Portsmouth.
Two things, more than any others, had influenced the British Navy during the Administration of "The Destroyers": the total cessation of building operations, and the withdrawal of ships and men from sea service. The reserve ships had long been unfit to put to sea, the reserve crews had, for all practical purposes, become landsmen—landsmen among whom want of sea-going discipline had of late produced many mutinous outbreaks.
It had been said by the most famous admiral of the time, and said without much exaggeration, that, within twelve months of "The Destroyers'" abandonment of the traditional two-Power standard of efficiency, the British Navy had "fallen to half-Power standard." The process was quickened, of course, by the unprecedented progress of the German Navy during the same period. It was said that at the end of 1907 the German Government had ships of war building in every great dockyard in the world. It is known that the entire fleet of the "Kaiser" classtorpedo-boats and destroyers was built and set afloat at the German Emperor's own private expense.
Then there were the "Well-borns," as they were called—vessels of no great weight of metal, it is true, but manned, armed, officered, and found better perhaps than any other war-ships in the world; entirely at the instigation of the German Navy League, and out of the pockets of the German nobility. The majority of our own wealthy classes preferred sinking their money in German motor-cars and German pleasure resorts; or one must assume so, for it is well known that our Navy League had long since ceased to exert any active influence, because it was unable to raise funds enough to pay its office expenses.
Our Navy might have had a useful reserve to draw upon in the various auxiliary naval bodies if these had not, one by one, been abolished. The Mercantile Marine was not in a position to lend much assistance in this respect, for our ships at that time carried eighty-seven thousand foreign officers and men, three parts of whom were Teutons. These facts were presumably all well known to the heads and governing bodies of the various trades, and, that being so, the extremely pessimistic attitude adopted by them, directly the fact of invasion was established, is scarcely to be wondered at.
In banking, insurance, underwriting, stock and share dealing, manufacturing, and in every branch of shipping the lead of the bakers were followed, and in many cases exceeded. The premiums asked in insurance and underwriting, and the unprecedented advance in the bank-rate, corresponding as it didwith a hopeless "slump" in every stock and share quoted on the Stock Exchange, from Consols to mining shares, brought business to a standstill in London on Monday afternoon.
On Tuesday entire blocks of offices remained unopened. In business, more perhaps than in any other walk of life, self-preservation and self-advancement were at that time, not alone the first, but the only fixed law. With bread at 1s. 4d. a loaf, great ship-owners in England were cabling the masters of wheat ships in both hemispheres to remain where they were and await orders.
This last fact I learned from Leslie Wheeler, whom I happened to meet hurrying from the City to Waterloo, on his way down to Weybridge. His family were leaving for Devonshire next morning, to stay with relatives there.
"But, bless me!" I said, when he told me that friends of his father, shipping magnates, had despatched such cable messages that morning, "surely that's a ruffianly thing to do, when the English people are crying out for bread?"
Leslie shrugged his smartly-clad shoulders. "It's the English people's own affair," he said.
"How's that?"
"Why, you see it's all a matter of insurance. All commerce is based on insurance, in one form or another. The cost of shipping insurance to-day is absolutely prohibitive; in other words, there isn't any. We did have a permanent and non-fluctuating form of insurance of a kind one time. But you Socialist chaps—social reform, Little England for the English,and all that—you swept that away. Wouldn't pay for it; said it wasn't wanted. Now it's gone, and you're feeling the pinch. The worst of it is, you make the rest of us feel it, too. I'm thankful to say the dad's pulling out fairly well. He told me yesterday he hadn't five hundred pounds in anything British. Wise old bird, the dad!"
My friend's "You Socialist chaps" rather wrang my withers; its sting not being lessened at all by my knowledge of its justice. I asked after the welfare of the Wheeler family generally, but it was only as Leslie was closing the door of the cab he hailed that I mentioned Sylvia.
"Yes, Sylvia's all right," he said, as he waved me good-bye; "but she won't come away with the rest of us—absolutely refuses to budge."
And with that he was off, leaving me wondering about the girl who had at one time occupied so much of my mind, but of late had had so little of it. During the next few hours I wove quite a pretty story round Sylvia's refusal to accompany her family. I even thought of her as joining Constance Grey's nursing corps.
The thought of this development of Sylvia Wheeler's character interested me so much that I wrote to her that evening, tentatively sympathizing with her determination not to be frightened away from her own place. The whole thing was a curious misapprehension on my part; but Sylvia's reply (explaining that it was her particular place of worship she refused to leave, and that she was staying "with hisReverence's sister"), though written within twenty-four hours, did not reach me until after many days—days such as England will never face again.
England can never have an efficient army during peace, and she must, therefore, accept the rebuffs and calamities which are always in store for the nation that is content to follow the breed of cowards who usually direct her great affairs. The day will come when she will violently and suddenly lose her former fighting renown to such an unmistakable extent that the plucky fishwives will march upon Downing Street, and if they can catch its usual inmates, will rend them. One party is as bad as the other, and I hope and pray that when the national misfortune of a great defeat at sea overtakes us, followed by the invasion of England, that John Bull will turn and rend the jawers and talkers who prevent us from being prepared to meet invasion.—From a letter written by Lord Wolsley, ex-Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, to Lord Wemyss, and published, and ignored by the public, in the year 1906.
England can never have an efficient army during peace, and she must, therefore, accept the rebuffs and calamities which are always in store for the nation that is content to follow the breed of cowards who usually direct her great affairs. The day will come when she will violently and suddenly lose her former fighting renown to such an unmistakable extent that the plucky fishwives will march upon Downing Street, and if they can catch its usual inmates, will rend them. One party is as bad as the other, and I hope and pray that when the national misfortune of a great defeat at sea overtakes us, followed by the invasion of England, that John Bull will turn and rend the jawers and talkers who prevent us from being prepared to meet invasion.—From a letter written by Lord Wolsley, ex-Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, to Lord Wemyss, and published, and ignored by the public, in the year 1906.
Itis no part of my intention to make any attempt to limp after the historians of the Invasion. The Official History, the half-dozen of standard military treatises, and the well-known works of Low, Forster, Gordon, and others, have allowed few details of the Invasion to escape unrecorded. But I confess it has always seemed to me that these writers gave less attention to the immediate aftermath of the Invasion than that curious period demanded. Yet here was surely a case in which effect was of vastly more importance than cause, and aftermath than crisis. But perhaps I take that view because I am no historian.
To the non-expert mind, the most bewildering and extraordinary feature of that disastrous time was the amazing speed with which crisis succeeded crisis, and events, each of themselves epoch-making in character, crashed one upon another throughout the progress toward Black Saturday. We know now that much of this fury of haste which was so bewildering at the time, which certainly has no parallel in history, was due to the perfection of Germany's long-laid plans. Major-General Farquarson, in his "Military History of the Invasion," says:
"It may be doubted whether in all the history of warfare anything so scientifically perfect as the preparations for this attack can be found. It is safe to say that every inch of General von Füchter's progress was mapped out in Berlin long months before it came to astound and horrify England. The maps and plans in the possession of the German staff were masterpieces of cartographical science and art. The German Army knew almost to a bale of hay what provender lay between London and the coast, and where it was stored; and certainly their knowledge of East Anglia far exceeded that of our own authorities. The world has never seen a quicker blow struck; it has seldom seen a blow so crushingly severe; it has not often seen one so aggressively unjustifiable. And, be it noted, that down to the last halter and the least fragment of detail, the German Army was provided with every conceivable aid to success—in duplicate.
"Never in any enterprise known to history was less left to chance. The German War Office left nothing at all to chance, not even its conception—acertainty really—of Britain's amazing unreadiness. And the German Army took no risks. A soldier's business, whether he be private or Field Marshal, is, after all, to obey orders. It would be both foolish and unjust to blame General von Füchter. But the fact remains that no victorious army ever risked less by generosity than the invading German Army. Its tactics were undoubtedly ruthless; they were the tactics necessitated by the orders of the Chief of the Army. They were more severe, more crushing, than any that have ever been adopted even by a punitive expedition under British colours. They were successful. For that they were intended. Swiftness and thoroughness were of the essence of the contract.
"With regard to their humanity or morality I am not here concerned. But it should always be remembered by critics that British apathy and neglect made British soil a standing temptation to the invader. The invasion was entirely unprovoked, so far as direct provocation goes. But who shall say it was entirely undeserved, or even unforeseen, by advisers whom the nation chose to ignore? This much is certain: Black Saturday and the tragic events leading up to it were made possible, not so much by the skill and forethought of the enemy, which were notable, as by a state of affairs in England which made that day one of shame and humiliation, as well as a day of national mourning. No just recorder may hope to escape that fact."
In London, the gravest aspect of that tragic week was the condition of the populace. It is supposed that over two million people flocked into the capitalduring the first three days. And the prices of the necessities of life were higher in London than anywhere else in the country. The Government measures for relief were ill-considered and hopelessly inadequate. But, in justice to "The Destroyers," it must be remembered that leading authorities have said that adequate measures were impossible, from sheer lack of material.
During one day—I think it was Wednesday—huge armies of the hungry unemployed—nine-tenths of our wage-earners were unemployed—were set to work upon entrenchments in the north of London. But there was no sort of organization, and most of the men streamed back into the town that night, unpaid, unfed, and sullenly resentful.
Then, like cannon shots, came the reports of the fall of York, Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Hull, and Huddersfield, and the apparently wanton demolition of Norwich Cathedral. The sinking of theDreadnoughtnear the Nore was known in London within the hour. Among the half-equipped regulars who were hurried up from the southwest, I saw dozens of men intercepted in the streets by the hungry crowds, and hustled into leaving their fellows.
Then came Friday's awful "surrender riot" at Westminster, a magnificent account of which gives Martin's big work its distinctive value. I had left Constance Grey's flat only half an hour before the riot began, and when I reached Trafalgar Square there was no space between that and the Abbey in which a stone could have been dropped without falling upon a man or a woman. There were women inthat maddened throng, and some of them, crying hoarsely in one breath for surrender and for bread, were suckling babies.
No Englishman who witnessed it could ever forget that sight. The Prime Minister's announcement that the surrender should be made came too late. The panic and hunger-maddened incendiaries had been at work. Smoke was rising already from Downing Street and the back of the Treasury. Then came the carnage. One can well believe that not a single unnecessary bullet was fired. Not to believe that would be to saddle those in authority with a less than human baseness. But the question history puts is: Who was primarily to blame for the circumstances which led up to the tragic necessity of the firing order?
Posterity has unanimously laid the blame upon the Administration of that day, and assuredly the task of whitewashing "The Destroyers" would be no light or pleasant one. But, again, we must remind ourselves that the essence of the British Constitution has granted to us always, for a century past at least, as good a Government as we have deserved. "The Destroyers" may have brought shame and humiliation upon England. Unquestionably, measures and acts of theirs produced those effects. But who and what produced "The Destroyers" as a Government? The only possible answer to that is, in the first place, the British public; in the second place, the British people's selfish apathy and neglect, where national duty and responsibility were concerned, and blindly selfish absorption, in the matter of its own individual interests and pleasures.
One hundred and thirty-two men, women, and children killed, and three hundred and twenty-eight wounded; the Treasury buildings and the official residence of the Prime Minister gutted; that was the casualty list of the "Surrender Riot" at Westminster. But the figures do not convey a tithe of the horror, the unforgettable shame and horror, of the people's attack upon the Empire's sanctuary. The essence of the tragedy lay in their demand for immediate and unconditional surrender; the misery of it lay in "The Destroyers'" weak, delayed, terrified response, followed almost immediately by the order to those in charge of the firing parties—an order flung hysterically at last, the very articulation of panic.
No one is likely to question Martin's assertion that Friday's tragedy at Westminster must be regarded—"not alone as the immediate cause of Black Saturday's national humiliation, but also as the crucial phase, the pivot upon which the development of the whole disastrous week turned." But the Westminster Riot at least had the saving feature of unpremeditation. It was, upon the one side, the outcry of a wholly undisciplined, hungry, and panic-smitten public; and, upon the other side, the irresponsible, more than half-hysterical action of a group of terrified and incompetent politicians. These men had been swept into great positions, which they were totally unfitted to fill, by a tidal wave of reactionary public feeling, and of the blind selfishness of a decadence born of long freedom from any form of national discipline; of liberties too easily won and but half-understood;of superficial education as to rights, and abysmal ignorance as to duties.
But, while fully admitting the soundness of Martin's verdict, for my part I feel that my experiences during that week left me with memories not perhaps more shocking, but certainly more humiliating and disgraceful to England, than the picture burnt into my mind by the Westminster Riot. I will mention two of these.
By Wednesday a large proportion of the rich residents of Western London had left the capital to take its chances, while they sought the security of country homes, more particularly in the southwestern counties. Such thoroughfares as Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Bond Street were no longer occupied by well-dressed people with plenty of money to spend. Their usual patrons were for the most part absent; but, particularly at night, they were none the less very freely used—more crowded, indeed, than ever before. The really poor, the desperately hungry people, had no concern whatever with the wrecking of the famous German restaurants and beer-halls. They were not among the Regent Street and Piccadilly promenaders.
The Londoners who filled these streets at night—the people who sacked the Leicester Square hotel and took part in the famous orgy which Blackburn describes as "unequalled in England since the days of the Plague, or in Europe since the French Revolution"; these people were not at all in quest of food. They were engaged upon a mad pursuit of pleasure and debauchery and drink. "Eat, drink, and bevicious; but above all, drink and be vicious; for this is the end of England!" That was their watchword.
I have no wish to repeat Blackburn's terrible stories of rapine and bestiality, of the frenzy of intoxication, and the blind savagery of these Saturnalias. In their dreadful nakedness they stand for ever in the pages of his great book, a sinister blur, a fiery warning, writ large across the scroll of English history. I only wish to say that scenes I actually saw with my own eyes (one episode in trying to check the horror of which I lost two fingers and much blood), prove beyond all question to me that, even in its most lurid and revolting passages, Blackburn's account is a mere record of fact, and not at all, as some apologists have sought to show, an exaggerated or overheated version of these lamentable events.
Regarded as an indication of the pass we had reached at this period of our decadence, this stage of our trial by fire, the conduct of the crowds in Western London during those dreadful nights, impressed me more forcibly than the disaster which Martin considers the climax and pivot of the week's tragedy.
One does not cheerfully refer to these things, but, to be truthful, I must mention the other matter which produced upon me, personally, the greatest sense of horror and disgrace.
Military writers have described for us most fully the circumstances in which General Lord Wensley's command was cut and blown to pieces in the Epping and Romford districts. Authorities are agreed that the records of civilized warfare have nothing morehorrible to tell than the history of that ghastly butchery. As a slaughter, there was nothing exactly like it in the Russo-Japanese war—for we know that there were less than a hundred survivors of the whole of Lord Wensley's command. But those who mourned the loss of these brave men had a consolation of which nothing could rob them; the consolation which is graven in stone upon the Epping monument; a consolation preserved as well in German as in English history. Germany may truthfully say of the Epping shambles that no quarter was given that day. England may say, with what pride she may, that none was asked. The last British soldier slaughtered in the Epping trenches had no white flag in his hand, but a broken bayonet, and, under his knee, the Colours of his regiment.
The British soldiers in those blood-soaked trenches were badly armed, less than half-trained, under-officered, and of a low physical standard. But these lamentable facts had little or nothing to do with their slaughter. There were but seven thousand of them, while the German force has been variously estimated at between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand horse and foot, besides artillery. One need not stop to question who should bear the blame for the half-trained, vilely equipped condition of these heroic victims. The far greater question, to which the only answer can be a sad silence of remorse and bitter humiliation, bears upon the awful needlessness of their sacrifice.
The circumstances have been described in fullest detail from authentic records. The stark fact whichstands out before the average non-expert observer is that Lord Wensley was definitely promised reinforcements to the number of twenty thousand horse and foot; that after the Westminster Riot not a single man or horse reached him;and he was never informed of the Government's forced decision to surrender.
And thus those half-trained boys and men laid down their lives for England within a dozen miles of Westminster, almost twelve hours after a weak-kneed, panic-stricken Cabinet had passed its word to the people that England would surrender.
That, to my thinking, was the most burning feature of our disgrace; that, as an indication of our parlous estate, is more terrible than Martin's "pivot" of the tragic week.