My Year of the War Part 39

Apart from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the same as our National Guard and vary in quality in the same way.

Native Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical sh.e.l.l-fire of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the place of the British regulars who were withdrawn for France. Every rifle that England could bring to the a.s.sistance of the French in their heroic stand was a rifle to the good.

Meanwhile, she was making her new army. For the first time since Cromwell's day, all cla.s.ses in England were going to war. Making an army out of the raw is like building a factory to be manned by expert labour which you have to train. Let us even suppose that the factory is ready and that the proprietor must mobilize his managers, overseers, foremen, and labour from far and near--a force individually competent, but which had never before worked together. It would require some time to organize team-play, wouldn't it? Particularly it would if you were short of managers, overseers, and foremen. To express my meaning from another angle, in talking once with an English pottery manufacturer he said:

"We do not train our labour in the pottery district. We breed it from generation to generation."

In Germany they have not only been training soldiers, but breeding them from generation to generation. You may think that system is wrong. It may be contrary to our ideals. But in fighting against that system for your ideals when war is violence and killing, you must have weapons as effective as the enemy's. You express only a part of Germany's preparedness by saying that the men who left the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, became trained soldiers at the command of the staff as soon as they were in uniform and had rifles. These men had the instinct of military co-ordination bred in them, and so had their officers, while England had to take men from the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, and equip them and teach them the rudiments of soldiering before she could consider making them into an army.

It was one thing for the spirit of British manhood to rise to the emergency. Another and even more important requisite went with it. If my country ever faces such a crisis I hope that we also may have the courage of wisdom which leaves an expert's work to an expert.

England had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the confidence of the nation through the long months of preparation, when there was little to show except repet.i.tion of drills here and there on gloomy winter days. It required a man with a big conception and patience and authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's question to his generals.

Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded.

Where the leaders? Where the drillmasters for the new army? Old officers came out of retirement, where they had become used to an easy life as a rule, to twelve hours a day of hard application. "Dug- outs" they were called. Veteran non-commissioned officers had to drill new ones. It was demonstrated that a good infantry soldier can be made in six months; perhaps in three. But it takes seven months to build a rifle-plant; many more months to make guns--and the navy must never be stinted. Probably the English are slow; slow and thoroughgoing. They are good at the finish, but not quick at the start.

They are used to winning the last battle, which they say is the one that counts. The complacency of empire with a century's power was a handicap, no doubt. We are inclined to lean forward on our oars, they to lean back--which does not mean that they cannot lean forward in an emergency or that they lack reserve strength. It may lead us to misjudge them.

Public impatience was inevitable. It could not be kept silent; that is the English of it--the American, too. It demands to know what is being done. It was not silent in the Civil War. From the time McClellan started forming his new army until the Peninsular campaign was six months, if I remember rightly. Von Moltke, who built the German staff system, said that the Civil War was a strife between two armed mobs; though I think if he had brought his Prussians to Virginia a year later, in '63, which would have ended the Civil War there and then, he would have had an interesting time before he returned to Berlin.

The British new army was not to face another new army, but the most thoroughly organized military machine that the world has ever known.

Not only this, but the Germans, with a good start and their system established, were not standing still and waiting for the British to catch up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting themselves to the new features of the war. They had been the world's arms-makers. With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic organization could make the most of their resources in men and material.

More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots, though no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in France or wherever they were needed overseas. If no magic could put rifles in their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on the march, the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching from day to day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare was, shows at least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we should have done better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal treatment by the government and the course set by Secretary Root means anything, our staff ought to be better equipped for such a task than the English were; this, too, only war can decide.

Whatsoever of pessimism appeared in the British Press was telegraphed to America. Pessimism was not permitted in the German Press. Imagine Germany holding control of the cable and allowing press dispatches from Germany to pa.s.s over it with the freedom that England allowed. Imagine Germany having waited as long as England before making cotton contraband. The British Press demanded information from the government which the German Press would never have dared to ask. I have known an American correspondent, fed out of hand in Germany and thankful for anything that the fearful German war-machine might vouchsafe, turning a belligerent when he was in London for privileges which he would never have thought of demanding in Berlin.

If an English ship were reported sunk, he believed it must be, despite the government's denial. Did he go to the Germans and demand that he might publish the rumours of what had happened to the Moltke in the Gulf of Riga, or how many submarines Germany had really lost?

Indeed, he was unconsciously paying a compliment to British free inst.i.tutions. He expected more in England; it seemed a right to him, as it would at home. Englishmen talked frankly to him about mistakes; he heard all the gossip; and sometimes he concluded that England was in a bad way. In Germany such talk was not allowed. Every German said that the government was absolutely truthful; every German believed all of its reports. But ask this critical American how he would like to live under German rule, and then you found how anti- German he was at heart. Nothing succeeds like success, and Germany was winning and telling no one if she had any setbacks.

If there were a strike, the British Press made the most of it, for it was big news. Pessimism is the Englishman's natural way of arousing himself to fresh energy. It is also against habit to be demonstrative in his effort; so it is not easy to understand how much he is doing. Then, pessimism brought recruits; it made the Englishman say, "I've got to put my back into it!" Muddling there was and mistakes, such as that of the method of attack at Gallipoli; but in the midst of all this dispiriting pessimism, no Englishman thought of anything but of putting his back into it more and more. Lord Kitchener had said that it was to be a long war and evidently it must be. Of course, England's misfortune was in having the war catch her in the transition from an old order of things to social reforms.

But if the war shows anything it is that basically English character has not changed. She still has unconquerable, dogged persistence, and her defects for this kind of war are not among the least admirable of her traits to those who desire to live their own lives in their own way, as the English-speaking people have done for five hundred years, without having a verboten sign on every street corner.

It is still the law that when a company of infantry marches through London it must be escorted by a policeman. This means a good deal: that civil power is superior to military power. It is a symbol of what Englishmen have fought for with spades and pitchforks, and what we have fought Englishmen for. My own idea is that England is fighting for it in this struggle; and starting unready against a foe which was ready, as the free peoples always have done, she was fighting for time and experience before she could strike her st.u.r.diest blows.