The Assault Part 14

"It will be the greatest thing of the kind ever seen in Germany,"

exclaimed the enthusiast from the U.S.A. "They'll allow us to have 'Luna Park' in letters twenty feet high across a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot front, and you'll be able to see 'em a mile away!"

He expected his British superior fairly to jump for joy. But this is what he said:

"Quite so. But don't you think that will be a bit conspicuous?"

When I returned to London on September 24, after four short, strenuous weeks in the United States, I found Englishmen dominated seemingly by a genuine fear that the war might become "a bit conspicuous." It was true that stupendous things had happened in the interval. Namur, "the impregnable," had melted before the merciless German 42's like the other Belgian fortresses. Brussels was in the enemy's hands, unscotched, thanks to the intervention of the American Minister, Brand Whitlock, and through it were pa.s.sing apparently endless streams of gray-clad Germans bound for Antwerp and the sea. France had been overrun, regardless of the cost in Teuton blood, Lille and the industrial provinces were securely held, and, although the Crown Prince and von Kluck had been gloriously repulsed in their frenzied dash on Paris, the capital had all but resounded to the clatter of Uhlan hoofs, and Bordeaux was still regarded a far safer seat of Government. England herself had lived through hours of anxious crisis blacker than any within the memory of the living generation. At Mons, as official reports disclosed, the gallant little British army narrowly escaped annihilation. As it was, it lost hideously in killed and wounded. Gaping holes had been ripped in the ranks of famous regiments, and the Expeditionary Force, within six weeks of its landing, was already sadly mangled. Sir John French stirred the nation with his dispatch on the retreat from Mons and told how his army, though hurriedly concentrated by rail only two days before, had tenaciously withstood, in the dogged British way, the combined attack of five crack German corps. In the subsequent fighting which beat the Germans on the Marne and saved Paris, British soldiers, battered and battle-scarred as they were, had done even more than their share. Two days before arrival in Liverpool the _Campania_ wireless--I returned to England in the same veteran hulk which had taken me to America in August--brought the dread tidings of the submarining of cruisers _Aboukir, Cressy_ and _Hogue_ in the Channel by the _U9_ and _Weddigen_, with cruelly heavy sacrifice of British lives.

All these things had happened, and yet London was unshaken. She had been "a bit uneasy," my English friends conceded, in the days and nights when the fate of Paris and Sir John French's army seemed to be in doubt, and the _U9's_ feat had "cost us three obsolete boats," but the Germans were checked now, and the worst was over. Churchill was sending a British naval expedition to Belgium to save Antwerp, and what was the use of worrying, anyhow? Kitchener's army was filling up with recruits by the thousand, and England's motto was "Business as Usual."

Yea, verily, Britain was pursuing the even tenor of her imperturbable way. The Savoy, at supper after theater, glittered with all its old-time flare. The tables were thronged in the same old way with gaily-clad women, romping chorus-girls, monocled "nuts" with hair plastered straight back, opulent stock-brokers, theatrical celebrities and all the other familiar people about town. The band interpolated _Tipperary_ a little oftener between rag-time one-steps and fox-trots, and lordlings and other bloods in khaki gave a new tinge to the picture, but otherwise it was night-time London "as usual." The theaters and music-halls were full. At Murray's and the Four Hundred--those dens of revelry called "night clubs," invented for law-respecting English who can afford five guineas a year for the privilege of wining, supping and dancing after the Acts of Parliament send ordinary people to bed--you could hardly wedge your way in. At the Carlton or the Piccadilly, or for the matter of that at any other popular resort in all London, you found yourself lucky to locate a single unpreempted place. Wherever you went or turned, whomever you saw, it was dear old London "as usual." If you were an impulsive, excitable, sentimental American and thought you were mildly rebuking your British friends when you ventured to wonder at the extraordinary naturalness of life in the West End, or at Walton Heath golf links, or at Chelsea football grounds, or at the Newmarket race-course, you found yourself unconsciously paying a tribute to "British character." For John Bull, far from being ashamed of adhering religiously to peace-time activities, was positively proud of the exhibition of "reserve" and "poise" and "calmness" which he was now giving. People talked about the war, of course. They hardly mentioned anything else. But if you had the patience to listen to their airy, fairy converse, you soon gathered that they spoke of it exclusively as something about which no self-respecting Englishman or woman purposed for a solitary moment to get indecorously agitated. There were even people who confessed that the war was beginning to "bore" them.

As for myself, I had a go at British acquaintances from two entirely different standpoints. In the first place, fresh from America, where the war had burnt into people's minds as deeply almost as if it were their own destiny which was at stake, I was still filled with the energizing atmosphere omnipresent there. I remembered how even our puny war with Spain had gripped the nation's thought and concentrated it to the exclusion of all else. I could not, for the life of me, understand how Englishmen, with the history of the preceding eight weeks before them, could still look upon "business as usual" as the desideratum for which the moment insistently called. I knew, I thought, how Americans would feel and act at such an hour; and as I had in my time dozed through many after-dinner speeches about the "kindred ideals" and "identical habits of thought" which so indissolubly bound the English-speaking nations, I ventured to marvel, and even at times to swear, at the spectacle of national nonchalance which Britain at the beginning of October, 1914, so resolutely presented. It was magnificent, but it was not war.

In the second place, I was conscious, with the knowledge and conviction of a long-time eye-witness, of both the visible and the dormant strength of Germany. I had written literally reams, during the preceding eight years, about Teuton preparations on land, in the air and on the sea. I had discussed the German War Party, its leaders and its literature, its aspirations and its plans, till I often grew weary of the task, not so much because pacifist critics in England pilloried me as a war-monger and an alarmist, but because there was a monotony in that sort of news about Germany which strained even the patience of those whose duty it was to report it. When Englishmen now told me, as so many of them did, that they would "muddle through this show," as they had "muddled through" in South Africa and on all the other occasions in Britain's martial past, I grew sick at heart. I knew, as everybody who had lived in Germany between 1904 and 1914 and kept his ears and eyes open knew, that "muddling through" would never beat the Germans, even if it had finally overcome the Boers. I knew, and anybody really acquainted with the Germans knew, that they would not be vanquished so long as there was a man or a mark with which to fight. I knew that nothing short of the supreme effort which the British Empire and its Allies could put forth would suffice to overcome the most highly-organized and efficiently patriotic people which had ever gone to war. I knew that the German General Staff and the other war-makers of the Fatherland had long reckoned, in the emergency of a struggle with England, on the very thing of which my eyes were now witness--British reluctance to shake off the shackles of ease and comfort and buckle down, a nation in arms, to the inconvenient and grim realities of war. Of these things I thought, and the reflection was disquieting, as I saw the mad whirl of light, frivolity and care-free joy which the Savoy at supper-time, plainly epitomizing London life at the moment, presented night after night.

"Business as usual!" It was small comfort my English friends provided, when, remonstrating with me for my foolish solicitude, they a.s.sured me that my misgivings were misplaced because I was hopelessly ignorant of "the British character."

England, it was obvious, was like the manager of "Luna Park" in Berlin.

She was afraid the war might become "a bit conspicuous," and was, moreover, determined that it should not. I remember well the crushing rebuke administered to me by a Britisher of international renown when I intruded my view of all these things. I had offered, in a desire to hold the mirror up to Nature and let Londoners see how they looked to foreigners at so transcendent a moment in their national existence, to produce a little article ent.i.tled "What an American Thinks of the English in War-Time." I even went to the length of putting my thoughts on paper and submitting the ma.n.u.script. I did so with considerable confidence, because the celebrity in question is a notorious "Wake Up, England!" man. But he returned my masterpiece with a look and gesture mingling pity and contempt for my wretched unfamiliarity with "the British character."

"My dear Wile," he explained, "you do not understand us. You forget that this war is not an American World's Championship baseball series.

You mustn't try to foist transatlantic bra.s.s-band methods on us. It is not the British way."

Lest I convey the impression that I had advocated rousing the British lion from his slumbers by wild and woolly western methods palpably unsuited to his stoical temperament, let me make haste to explain that I was pleading for nothing but a system which would, spectacularly if necessary, do something to let the British public at least know that they had a war on their hands, and popularize it. A great contingent of Indian troops, led by Maharajahs and Rajputs, Maliks, Rajahs and Jams, had arrived in Europe, tarried in England and been slipped, in the dead of a Channel night, across to France. An entire army from Canada was encamped on Salisbury Plain, and no one had seen a sign of it except an occasional detachment of boisterous subalterns, many with a p.r.o.nounced "American accent," who had kicked up a row in some Leicester Square music-hall the night before. The Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square was desecrated with recruiting circus-bills which would have delighted the heart of Barnum, and every taxicab wind-shield in town beseeched pa.s.sers-by to "enlist for the duration of the war." But why, I had had the temerity to inquire in my little "Wake Up, England!" homily, which was rejected because it revealed no insight into "British character,"

were not the turbaned Gurkhas and the swarthy Sikhs and the brown men from Punjab and Beluchistan brought to London-town and paraded up and down the Strand and the Embankment, for all the metropolis to have a priceless object-lesson in Imperial patriotism? Why was Kitchener allowed to intern the young giants in khaki from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia in the hidden recesses of the provinces, instead of giving Londoners a glimpse of Colonial love of mother country in the flesh? It was due to the Indians and to the Canadians themselves, no less than to London, I argued, that opportunity should be provided to pay homage to the men who had crossed the seas to fight for Motherland. Non-British though I am, I felt morally certain that even my Hoosier bosom would swell with emotion in the presence of so ocular a demonstration of Britain's Imperial solidarity in the day of trial. But my suggestions were rejected as unbecomingly boisterous in their intent, good enough for the Polo Grounds or Madison Square Garden, but grotesquely out of place in England. If carried out, you see, they would inevitably have made the war "a bit conspicuous."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Kitchener's army]

That the war was almost invisibly hidden, as far as the daily life of the people was concerned, was primarily due to the bureaucratic and autocratic methods of the censorship. Bureaucracy and autocracy in Germany, for instance, have their redeeming qualities. They are usually highly efficient, and their arrogance and high-handedness are tolerated because accompanied by a maximum of practical effectiveness. When England established her war censorship, she went over to bureaucracy and autocracy, as made in Germany, but lamentably lacking in the saving graces of the system as there exemplified. In vain the Press, now muzzled almost as effectually as if the Magna Charta and free speech had never existed, stormed and fumed against the tyranny of the "Press Bureau," the innocuous t.i.tle chosen for the Juggernaut which, before six months had pa.s.sed, was to grind British journalistic liberties into the dust. It was discovered that the "Bureau" was staffed for the most part by amiable gentlemen no longer fit for active duty in the army and navy, who, having patriotically offered their services to King and country, had been pitchforked indiscriminately into billets which clothed them with more real influence on the war than if they had commanded armies or fleets. It became painfully apparent that news of the war was being suppressed, mutilated and generally mismanaged either by military men who knew nothing of journalism, or by journalists who were profoundly ignorant of military matters--for the official censor caused it to be announced, in self-defense, that he had a.s.sociated with the Bureau in an advisory capacity a couple of eminent ex-editors.

Just who was responsible for annihilating the elementary rights of the British Press never became quite clear. Some blamed Kitchener. His hostility to journalists and journalism was notorious, though "With Kitchener to Khartoum," by the most distinguished special correspondent of our time, the late G. W. Steevens, who died in _The Daily Mail's_ service during the South African war, probably did as much to give "K."

a reputation as anything which England's War Minister ever did in the field. Others said Joffre was the man who had put the lid on. Whoever laid down the law saw that it was relentlessly enforced. Pet.i.tions, protests, cajolings, threats, complaints, abuse--all were in vain. The antics of the "Press Bureau" became more exasperating and inexplicable from day to day. Also more domineering, if common report could be believed, for presently Fleet Street heard that "K." had intimated to a mighty newspaper magnate that if the latter did not mend his ways, and abate his insistence, "K." had the power, and would not shrink from using it, to incarcerate even a peer of the realm in the Tower and turn his entire "plant" into junk. That dire threat, I imagine, was just one of the myriad of chatterbox rumors with which the air in England, all through the war, fairly sizzled. At any rate, it failed utterly to curb the stormy petrel to terrorize whom it was said to have been uttered, for his onslaughts on the censorship grew, instead of diminishing, in intensity as the "war in the dark" proceeded.

But it was in its treatment of news destined for the United States that the Press Bureau most convincingly revealed its lack of imagination.

Here was Germany leaving no stone unturned to take American sympathy by storm. The Bernstorff-Dernburg-Munsterberg campaign was in full blast.

Von Wiegand in Berlin was interviewing the Crown Prince and Princess, von Tirpitz and von Bernhardi, Zeppelin, Hindenburg and Falkenhayn, and only narrowly escaped interviewing the Kaiser himself. American correspondents arriving in Germany were received with open arms, and had but to ask, in order to receive. Sometimes they received without asking. They could see anybody and go anywhere. That was German efficiency--and imagination--at work. The Germans realized that we are a newspaper-reading community. They knew that the best way in the world to win American newspapers' and American newspapermen's sympathy is to give them news. So they did it. When the German Crown Prince told the correspondent of the United Press that he would "love" to see American baseball, that he longed to hunt big game in Alaska, and that Jack London was his favorite author, he broke a lance for the Fatherland's cause in the United States that a four-hundred-fifty-paged "unhuman"

British White Paper could never hope to equal. Somebody with an imagination--probably Bernstorff--had put a flea in Berlin's ear, and the result was open-house for American journalists for the duration of the war.

What was happening in London? There were plenty of American newspapermen on the ground, not only special correspondents who had come over to join the British army in the field, like Will Irwin, "Bell"

Shepherd, Alexander Powell, Arthur Ruhl, or Frederick Palmer, to name only a few of them, but resident London correspondents who had lived in England a dozen years, like Edward Price Bell of the _Chicago Daily News_, Ernest Marshall of the _New York Times_, or James M. Tuohy of the _New York World_, who were well known to the British authorities as men of judgment, integrity and responsibility. But resident or newcomer, nothing but inconsequential facilities or the cold shoulder awaited them when they went to the Press Bureau, cap in hand, to ask even the most rudimentary professional courtesies for themselves or their papers.

Quite apart from the indignities thus heaped on American correspondents, the Press Bureau, when it suppressed or butchered their dispatches, left pitiably out of account the susceptibilities of the great neutral news-devouring community which these men represented. Therein lay the real infamy. Think of it. Here was Great Britain and her Government confessedly anxious for American moral support in the war, and something more than that, and yet a subordinate department seemed clothed with authority to flout, exasperate and bully the agency directly responsible for the production of public sentiment in the United States. I call it a tremendous tribute to the sincerity and depth of our loyalty to the Allies' cause that we never for a moment allowed it to waver, even in the face of the British Press Bureau's arrant provocation. The American Press, asking for bread in England, received a stone. That it accepted it, and went on playing the Allies' game, has been one of the miracles of the war, for which these British Isles have reason to be profoundly grateful.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 5 Questions to those who employ male servants]

Inherent imperturbability and unimaginative censorship thus combined in the early weeks of the war, on the one hand to minimize popular conceptions of the struggle's magnitude in England, and on the other to smother enthusiasm for it. You can not fully realize the immensity of the task if you are not permitted by your overlords to see it in its true proportions. You can certainly not become ecstatic about it if they insist on having it painted in exclusively drab, routine and joy-killing tints, when they are not covering it up altogether. Yet British patriotism was triumphing over all these natural and artificial handicaps. Kitchener was not only calling for five hundred thousand volunteers, but intimated that he would soon be asking for another five hundred thousand. He was getting them. London and the provinces were now plastered with recruiting posters, calling in compelling language for soldiers. "Your King and Country Need You!" Thus ran the most direct and frank appeal. By the tens of thousands men answered it. The desecrating bill-board which we know in America is an unknown excrescence in the British Isles, but, for the purposes of advertising for men for "Kitchener's Army," practically every vacant s.p.a.ce in the Kingdom was now turned into a h.o.a.rding. The base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square was splashed red, white and blue, black and yellow, green and orange, and every other shade capable of lending distinction to an eye-arresting poster. The great hotels and theaters, banks, government offices, and even churches, turned their walls and windows over to Kitchener's advertising department for recruiting-bills, and occasionally themselves put up huge signs across their most imposing facades with such legends as:

TO ARMS! RALLY ROUND THE FLAG!

TO ARMS! YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!

TO ARMS! ENLIST AT ONCE FOR THE WAR ONLY!

or

TO-DAY, YOUNG MAN, YOU ARE NEEDED TO FIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S DEFENSE!

FALL IN! JOIN THE ARMY AT ONCE!

or

MEN OF BRITAIN, UPHOLD YOUR COUNTRY'S HONOR AND LIBERTY! SERVE WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

or you would read what the King had said:

"NO PRICE CAN BE TOO HIGH WHEN HONOR AND LIBERTY ARE AT STAKE."

Even the fences of the parks, the windows and sides of the omnibuses and the wind-shields of the taxicabs reminded men every hour of the day and night that "Your King and Country Need You."

I recall, with amus.e.m.e.nt, how "scandalized" some Americans were at England's resort to "circus methods" to manufacture an army. I remember that pert (and extremely pretty) young Chicago newspaper-woman who, having come over from Paris which had not needed to advertise for an army, because France had one, was mortified beyond words to find London screaming with "Your-King-and-Country-Need-You" sign literature. She was so stirred by this "undignified exhibition" that she sat down before she had been in town forty-eight hours and dashed off to her paper just what she thought about "degenerate Britain." She was convinced that a nation so "hopelessly unpatriotic" that it had to advertise for defenders was "doomed." Her erudite observations made a deep impression on her editors, who, in a learned editorial asked gravely whether the British Empire was "reaching the Diocletian period of the Romans."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 4 Questions to the Women of England]

As a matter of fact, Kitchener's project to advertise for an army was the one ray of imagination, and a boundlessly encouraging one, which the War Office had so far revealed. It showed even more imagination in entrusting the technique of the scheme to a professional, Mr. Hedley F.

Le Bas, who, besides bringing to the task the expert knowledge of a publisher, had once been a trooper in the 15th Hussars, and knew and loved the army. Mr. Le Bas modestly disclaims credit for originating the plan to create an army of millions by advertis.e.m.e.nt. He says that the Duke of Wellington beat him to it. A hundred years ago, when England was at grips with the oppressor of that day, a poster appeal for soldiers was issued, which is _prima facie_ evidence that advertising is not a modern invention. Only a few Englishmen, and probably still fewer Americans, are aware that even in Napoleonic times advertising for an army was _de rigueur_, and as the invitation to "The Warriors of Manchester" was, to a certain extent, the spiritual inspiration of Kitchener's remarkable recruit-getting campaign, I make no apologies, despite its raciness, for reproducing on the following page a doc.u.ment of genuinely historical value.

The methods to which the American Democracy has resorted to secure soldiers for her wars were also in the minds of Lord Kitchener and Mr.

Le Bas. Indeed, the practises of President Lincoln, in respect of raising armies, were the model to which the British Government from the start determined to adhere. It was discovered that Lincoln and Seward had not shrunk from appealing to the men of the North from the h.o.a.rdings and through the newspapers, while the advertis.e.m.e.nts of the United States army and navy during the Spanish-American War were a modern example of recruiting measures in a country where the absence of conscription compels a Government, in the hour of emergency, to sc.r.a.pe an army together by hook or crook. Then the constant advertising by our War and Navy departments, even in peace-times, proved that there must be efficacy in asking men to serve their country in posters, magazines or newspaper-columns in which they were also being persuasively urged to buy automobiles, "quality" clothes or shaving-sticks. Kitchener's "advertising campaign" was destined, before the war was old, to be the target of bitter attack, but the skill, persistence and comprehensiveness with which it was prosecuted played an immense role in the creation of the greatest volunteer army in history. It opened a new epoch in advertising and clothed that art with a distinction which will never be taken from it. The seal of an Empire has been placed on the maxim that it pays to advertise.

[Ill.u.s.tration: To the Warriors of Manchester.]

By the end of October, after three months of war, the muster of the British Empire was in full progress. Complacency and nonchalance in London were still wretchedly wide-spread, but the call of the Motherland for soldiers was echoing around the world. Wherever Britons were domiciled, it was answered. It penetrated into far-off British Columbia, where young Englishmen, comfortably settled in new existences, abandoned them unhesitatingly. It was heard in even more distant climes, like Australia, New Zealand and Africa, where adventurous spirits who had crossed the seas to seek their fortunes in lands of promise were now dominated by no other ambition than to "do their bit"

for King and country. Even emigrated Irishmen, long irreconcilable, were electrified by John Redmond's clarion message, and they, too, turned their faces homeward. By the ides of November whole shiploads of repatriated Britons, returning from the four points of the compa.s.s, reached the island sh.o.r.es, fired by one consuming purpose.

These home-coming patriots were not only rendering valiant service by placing their lives at the King's disposal, but they were demonstrating, along with native-born Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians and Indians, that one of Germany's fondest dreams was the hollowest of fantasies. I had been familiar for years with a German political literature based on the roseate theory that, once Great Britain was embroiled in a great European war, her world-wide Empire would crack and tumble like a house of cards in a holocaust. Had not Sir Wilfred Laurier on a famous occasion declared that Canada would never be "drawn into the vortex of European militarism"? Were not the Boers thirsting restlessly for revenge and the hour of deliverance from the British yoke? Were not Republican sentiments notoriously rife in Australia and New Zealand, and would not Labor Governments in those remote regions seize eagerly on coveted opportunity to snap the silken cords which bound them to England, and declare their independence? Would not India, the enslaved Empire of the va.s.sal Rajahs, leap at the throat of an England preoccupied in Europe and drive the tyrant into the sea?

These were the thoughts which were discussed by Teuton political seers as something more than things which Germany merely desired and hoped for. They were treated as axiomatic certainties. The rally round the Union Jack by the Britons of Australia and New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, Nova Scotia and Jamaica, Barbadoes and Ceylon, British Guiana and Mauritius, Newfoundland and New Brunswick, was Germany's great illusion. When the "conquered Boers" under Botha, the "alienated Irish"

under Redmond, the "rebellious Indians" under maharajahs and princes, even the "downtrodden" black Basutos, Barotses, Masai and Maoris of Africa and Australasia under their native chieftains, announced that they, too, were ready to bleed for the Empire, Germany's awakening was rude and complete. London might be callous, pleasure-loving and unperturbed. But the Empire was alive both to the peril and the duty of the hour, and when it vowed to face the one and absolve the other an oath was sworn which spelled British invincibility.

CHAPTER XVIII

WAR IN THE DARK