The War on All Fronts: England's Effort Part 1

The War on All Fronts: England's Effort.

by Mrs. Humphry Ward.

Preface

HAS ENGLAND DONE ALL SHE COULD?

That is the question which Mrs. Ward, replying to some doubts and queries of an American friend, has undertaken to answer in this series of letters, and every one who reads them will admit that her answer is as complete and triumphant as it is thrilling. n.o.body but a woman, an Englishwoman of warm heart, strong brain, and vivid power of observation, could possibly have written these letters which reflect the very soul of England since this wicked and cruel war began. She has unfolded and interpreted to us, as no one else, I think, has even attempted to do, the development and absolute transformation of English men and women, which, has enabled them, living and dying, to secure for their proud nation under G.o.d that "new birth of freedom" which Lincoln at Gettysburg prophesied for his own countrymen.

Really the cause is the same, to secure the selfsame thing, "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people may not perish from the earth";--and if any American wishes to know how this has been accomplished, he must read these letters, which were written expressly for our enlightenment.

Mrs. Ward had marvellous qualifications for this patriotic task. The granddaughter of Doctor Arnold and the niece of Matthew Arnold, from childhood up she has been as deeply interested in politics and in public affairs as she has been in literature, by which she has attained such world-wide fame, and next to English politics, in American politics and American opinion. She has been a staunch believer in the greatness of America's future, and has maintained close friendship with leaders of public thought on both sides of the water. Her only son is a member of Parliament, and is fighting in the war, just as all the able-bodied men she knows are doing.

She has received from the English government special opportunities of seeing what England has been doing in the war, and has been allowed to go with her daughter where few English men and no other women have been allowed to go, to see the very heart of England's preparedness. She has visited, since the war began, the British fleet, the very key of the whole situation, without whose unmatched power and ever-increasing strength the Allies at the outset must have succ.u.mbed. She has watched, always under the protection and guidance of that wonderful new Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George, the vast activity of that ministry throughout the country, and finally in a motor tour of five hundred miles, through the zone of the English armies in France, she has seen with her own eyes, that marvellous organization of everything that goes to make and support a great army, which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her fighting line. She has witnessed within three-quarters of a mile of the fighting line, with a gas helmet at hand, ready to put on, a German counter attack after a successful English advance something which no other woman, except herself and her daughter, who accompanied her, has ever had the opportunity to see.

Mrs. Ward admits that at the beginning England was unprepared, which itself demonstrated that as a Nation she never wished for war with Germany, and never expected it. Her countrymen had no faith in Lord Roberts's ten-year-long agitation for universal national service, based on the portentous growth of the German army and navy. She never knew of any hatred of Germany in the country. On the contrary, she realized what England and all the rest of the world owed to Germany in so many ways.

England was not absolutely unprepared in the sense that the United States is unprepared, even for self-defence from external attack, but except for the fleet and her little expeditionary force, England had neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a great Continental war.

The wholly unexpected news of the invasion of Belgium aroused the whole country to realize that war on a scale never known before had come, and, as the firing upon Fort Sumter awakened America, convinced England that she must fight to the death for her liberties, unready as she was;--but Mr. Balfour, the First Lord of the Admiralty, says that, since the war began, she has added one million to the tonnage of her navy, and has doubled its personnel, and is adding more every day.

In the matter of munitions the story that Mrs. Ward tells is wonderful, almost beyond belief. Much had been done in the first eight months of the war, in the building of munition shops, and the ordering of vast quant.i.ties from abroad, before the second battle of Ypres, in April, 1915, which led to the formation of the new Coalition Ministry, including a wholly new department, the Ministry of Munitions, with Mr. Lloyd George at its head.

From that time to this the work has been colossal, and almost incredible, and without serious collision with the working cla.s.ses. Vast new buildings have been erected all over England, and a huge staff, running into thousands, set in action. The new Minister has set out with determination to get the thing done at whatever cost, and to remove all obstacles that he found in his way. The Government has absolutely taken control of the whole work of the creation of munitions and the regulation of workmen, employed in it by whatever employers, and everything and everybody has had to submit to his imperious will, and the greatest change of all has been the employment of women on a vast scale to do the work that only men had ever done before. France had set about it immediately after the battle of the Marne, and allowed no Frenchman to remain idle who could do such work.

Mrs. Ward does not fail to do full justice to the working men of Great Britain, and shows that besides the hundreds of thousands that they have sent to the fighting line, a million and a half remained at work in the shops, creating munitions with the aid of skilled experts and the astonishing help of the women, who never before had expected to have anything to do with guns and sh.e.l.ls, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns.

The old ways were laid aside, old distinctions of cla.s.s and s.e.x forgotten, and all worked with a common and indomitable will for the saving of the country.

To give a single instance, what was a few months ago a smiling pasture is now found covered with vast buildings, in which these manufactures are carried on by thirty-five hundred working people, of whom a large proportion are women. I love to quote a single sentence from the utterance of her companion on a visit to this establishment: "As to the women, they are saving the country. They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten and a half, or, with overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The Government are insisting on one Sunday, or two Sundays a month off. I don't say they aren't right, but the women resent it. 'We're not tired,'

they say. And look at them! They are not tired."

This unheard-of spectacle of great engineering establishments filled with women, all hard at work, is a sure proof of the undying purpose of the whole English race. They are mostly young and comely, and their beauty of form and feature is only enhanced by their enthusiasm for their labors, and at the same time it has increased the ardor and intensity of their fellow workmen. Mrs. Ward found four thousand women to five thousand men engaged in this nation-saving labor, in a single establishment. They know that they are setting the skilled laborers free for work which women cannot do, and the unskilled in large numbers free for the army.

Every building, as well as every man and woman, that could be put to the work, has been availed of, and the results have been incredible. Another instance she gives of special interest: "An old warehouse, bought, so to speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for sh.e.l.l production, employing between three and four hundred girls with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labor going. These girls are working on the eight-hours' shift system; working so well that a not uncommon wage among them, on piece-work, of course, runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a week," and all the time they are at work they remember that they are doing common service with their husbands, and sweethearts, and sons, and brothers, who are perilling their lives in the trenches.

None of this distinguished writer's romances compare in vivid description and heart-inspiring eloquence with these accounts that she gives of what she has seen with her own eyes of the resurrection of England.

It is not for me to antic.i.p.ate her startling and thrilling narratives on this subject. She takes for her text what Mr. Lloyd George said in his speech in the House of Commons on reviewing his new department: "Unless we quicken our movements, d.a.m.nation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much gallant blood has flowed," and Mr. Asquith's serious words in December: "We cannot go on," said he, "depending upon foreign countries for our munitions. We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and the cost is too great. We must make them ourselves."

Mrs. Ward dwells with keen insight upon the difficulties met with among the trade-unions and labor people, and successfully overcome, and explains in full what they call over there the work of the Dilution Commissioners, which is a wholly new phrase for us, and she gives this clear definition: "Dilution means, of course, that under the sharp a.n.a.lysis of necessity, much engineering work, generally reckoned as 'skilled' work, and reserved to 'skilled' workmen by a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted out from the others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or semiskilled worker. By so dividing them up and using superior labor with economy, only where it is really necessary, it can be made to go infinitely further, and the inferior, or untrained, labor can then be brought into work where n.o.body supposed it could be used; where, in fact, it never has been used." This novel experiment, together with the equally novel employment of women in such work, soon proved a triumphant success, and the women proved themselves able to do the work of men, some of it even better. There were, of course, difficulties at first, but the mischief, whatever it was, was quickly cured, and in one factory that Mrs.

Ward names, "men and women soon began to do their best. The output of the factory, which had been planned for four thousand sh.e.l.ls a week, ran up to twenty thousand, and everything has gone smoothly since."

The adaptation of firms and factories, already existing, the control of which was taken by the Government, was wonderful, but the national sh.e.l.l-factories, founded, financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions, are more wonderful still, and give us many new ideas about government ownership in an emergency, which we may sometimes have to think of more seriously. The speed, the efficiency, the success of the new system have been marvellous, so that in the short s.p.a.ce of a year the demands of Mr.

Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been satisfied, and England will depend no more upon foreign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition, but will be able not only to manufacture all she can use herself, but to help to supply her Allies.

In one department of labor, it is a very startling thing to learn that "in a single fuse factory, what they call the danger buildings, mostly women are employed. About five hundred women are found at work in one of these factories on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which is really dangerous, like detonator work." It is the insertion in the sh.e.l.l of the little pellet which gives it its death-dealing power, that is so risky, but the women do not shrink from even this. In the largest fuse shop known, quite new, fourteen hundred girls, in one shift, are at work.

"An endless spectacle of gun-carriages, naval turrets, torpedo-tubes, army railway-carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops, seems to be going on forever, and in the tool-making shops the output has risen from forty-four thousand to three million a year." The vastness of the work, and the incessant and enormous multiplication of all the products for war must be as overwhelming as it is monotonous. And then there were the huge shipyards, which before the war were capable of the berth of twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward, and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour's word for it, have since the beginning of the war added a million tons to the navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid journeys had not time to stop and inspect these, to our very great regret, for her description of them would have been most instructive.

She declares from actual observation that in the Clyde district, in whose populous centre some threats of disquiet have existed, the work done by thousands and tens of thousands of workmen since the beginning of the war, especially in the great shipyards, and done with the heartiest and most self-sacrificing good-will, has been simply invaluable to the nation, and will never be forgotten, and the invasion of women there has, perhaps, been more startling to the workmen than anywhere else. Where not a single woman was employed in the works and factories before the war, except in textiles, "there will soon be fifteen thousand of them in the munition workshops alone, and that will not be the end."

Wherever she goes, Mrs. Ward's eyes are wide open. From her own home, which is in the midst of one of the most patriotic regions of the realm, she can witness the perpetual activity which has come about in preparation for the war in all its varied phases and branches; everything and everybody is in vigorous motion, both there and in all the counties of England which she has visited. Great camps in every direction for the shelter and training of recruits, all coming and going, all marching and countermarching, training and drilling everywhere, and as fast as the citizen is converted into a soldier, he is bound for the seat of war with all the equipments that war requires, tramping everywhere, tramp, tramp, along the land; tramp, tramp, along the sea, until the new supports, all ready for vital service, reach their destination on French soil.

Mrs. Ward has made a careful study of the effect of the novel introduction of women into all these works of men, especially in the munition factories, and dwells with great significance upon the rapidity of the women's piece-work and the mingling of cla.s.ses, where educated and refined girls work side by side and very happily with those of an humbler type.

What Mrs. Ward well calls "the common spirit" inspires them all, and holds them all in just and equal relations. At every step she is startled by the vastness of the work and the immense hand that women have in it, finding one shop turning out about four thousand shrapnel and four thousand high-explosive sh.e.l.ls per week, heavy sh.e.l.l work all, which they thought at first they must furnish men to lift in and out of the machines, but "the women thrust the men aside in five minutes." Surely this new education of women, of these girls and women who are to become the mothers of the next generation, must have a most inspiring and exalting effect upon the days to come. War may be postponed for whole generations, but England will never fail to be ready for it as a necessary part of the education of the race.

It is quite evident that this war is breaking down the barriers that have heretofore been impa.s.sable, not only between men and women, but between the various cla.s.ses of society, and that it cannot possibly end without bringing these more closely together, all working to the same end in a more perfect harmony, and that the result of it must be that England will hereafter be an even more perfect democracy than it has been up to this time.

France! Glorious France! The conduct of whose government and people in the war seems to have been absolutely perfect, has at last reached a wonderful result after her hundred years of agonies and revolutions. We hear from France no complaints, no internal dissensions, but all the people, mankind and womankind, working together, each in its proper sphere, to the one common end, the salvation of the State. I trust that we shall never forget all that the world and we, especially, owe to France. She is adding to our obligations now by fighting our battles for us.

And now with her daughter under the special protection and guidance of the war office, this distinguished woman followed the khaki-clad soldiers of England, now numbered by millions, across the channel, and everything was thrown freely open to her. She soon found out what the great supply bases, on which the British army in France rests, really mean, made up of the Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, Railroad, Motor, and Transport, and she found it a deeply interesting study, "whose work has involved the labor of some of the best brains in the army," and she learned the organizing power that has gone to make the career of the English army in France possible.

There was the immense dock, and its vast storehouse, the largest in the world, "built three years before the war, partly, it is said, by German money, to house the growing cotton trade of the port, but now it houses a large proportion of the food of the British army," a building half a mile long, bounded on one side by the docks, where the ships discharge the stores and the men, and on the other by the railway lines where the trains are perpetually loading for the front. On the quays ships of all nations, except Germany, are pouring out their stores, and on the other side the trucks that are going to the front are loading with the supplies that are wanted for every regiment in the service. Her eyes light upon one wired in s.p.a.ce, labelled "Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage,"

where, while medical necessaries are housed elsewhere, are "the dainties, the special foods, the easing appliances of all kinds," which are to make life bearable to the wounded men, and she stops to think how the shade of Florence Nightingale would have paused at this spot.

The huge sheds of Army Ordnance are filled with everything that a soldier does not eat, all metal stores, whatever, and the men who work in them are housed in one of the longest sheds in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling, and then there are the repairing sheds and workshops, established near by, and that is the most wonderful thing of the whole to my mind--never done before in connection with an army in the field. Trainsful of articles to be repaired come down from the front every day, and almost every imaginable article that the men at the front can use, from guns to boots, comes here to be repaired, or if found beyond repair, to be sent to Yorkshire for shoddy. The marvellous thing is that, as soon as they are received, they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and returned to their owners at the front, a vast work in itself. The boot and uniform sheds alone, where again she finds five hundred French women and girls, and the harness-making room are doing an enormous work. The Colonel in charge began work with one hundred and forty men, and is now employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of pounds a week to the British government.

Recreation and amus.e.m.e.nt are supplied in near locality for the waiting soldiers and, although the snow is more than ankle-deep, they visit such places as recreation rooms and cinema theaters, and on a neighboring hill great troops of men are going through some of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front. Here are trenches of all kinds and patterns, in which the men may practise, planned according to the latest experience brought from the front. "The instructors are all men returned from the front, and the new recruits, trained up to this last point, would not be patient of any other teachers."

Having thus seen all that one day could afford them at the very base of the great army, our visitors make their way in closed motors through the snow, pa.s.sing scores of motor lorries, and other wagons, stuck in the snow-drifts. They stop for the night at a pleasant hotel full of officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communication, and a few of the mothers and sisters of the poor wounded in the neighboring hospitals, who have come over to nurse them.

Every gun, every particle of munition, clothing, and equipment, and whatever else is necessary, including the food of the armies, every horse, every vehicle, has to be brought across the British channel, to maintain and reinforce the ever-growing British army, and the ever-daily increasing congestion at all the ports makes it more and more difficult every day to receive, disembark, accommodate, and forward the mult.i.tude of men and the ma.s.ses of material, and all the time there are thousands of troops pa.s.sing through, thousands in the hospitals, and thousands at work on the docks and storehouses. Everything tending to Tommy Atkins's comfort is supplied, including again palatial cinemas and concerts, all of which results in excellent behavior and the best of relations between the British soldier and the French inhabitants. At the docks armies of laborers and lines of ships discharging men, horses, timber, rations, fodder, coal, c.o.ke, petrol, and the same at the storehouses and depots.

The visitors spend a long Sunday morning in the motor transport depot, and it gave a good ill.u.s.tration of the complete system of discipline and organization that prevailed everywhere. This depot began, said the Colonel in charge, on the 13th of August, 1914, "with a few b.a.l.l.s of string and a bag of nails." Its present staff is about five hundred. All the drivers of twenty thousand motor vehicles are tested here, and the depot exhibits three hundred and fifty different types of vehicles, and in round figures, one hundred thousand separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged in this same depot. The Sunday morning began with a simple service in the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation hut, at which five hundred motor-drivers attended, about half of the whole number in the station.

The same day they explored endless camps and the wards of a Red Cross hospital. It was impossible to take in everything at once, and our ladies retired at night, bewildered by mingled impressions of "human energy, human intelligence, human suffering," but full of pride and exultation at the efficiency of their country and of the good relations of their soldiers with the French. They carried with them as a last impression of the day the picture of a canteen worked day and night in three shifts by a heroic band of women close by the railway station, full of soldiers just departing for the front, young, gay and full of spirits; then came the train to take the soldiers off for the fighting line, and the women, left behind, set up the song, already familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home fires burning till the boys come home."

In the village where they stopped, some forty miles from the actual front, a special messenger from the general headquarters brings the amazing news that General Headquarters invites Mrs. Ward and her daughter for two days, and will send a motor for them, if they accept, which, of course, they did upon the instant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mysteries of the front, its camps, its men, and its hospitals, that they were to see with their own eyes to-morrow.

The remainder of the day before they are to start for the front suffices for the visit to a camp set down in one of the pleasantest spots in France, a favorite haunt of French artists before the war, now occupied by a British reinforcement camp, the trees having all been cut away, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training grounds, to which we have already referred.

I must copy the bare catalogue of what this vast camp contained: "Sleeping and mess quarters for those belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals with twenty-one thousand beds" (and this shows now what it was to be near the front); "rifle ranges; training camps; a vast laundry, worked by French women under British organization, which washes for all the hospitals thirty thousand pieces a day; recreation huts of every possible kind; a cinema theatre seating eight hundred men, with performances twice a day; nurses clubs; officers clubs; a supply depot for food; an ordnance depot for everything that is not food; railroad sidings on which every kind of man and thing can go out and come in without interruption; a convalescents' depot of two thousand patients; and a convalescent horse depot of two thousand horses; all this in one camp, established since last April."

Ah! But the deepest impression left on the minds of our ladies is of the terrible sufferings in the hospitals, of the smiling endurance with which they were borne, of the timely skill, pity, and devotion of the doctors and nurses, taking care of the twenty thousand wounded. Realizing the sympathy of America with all these scenes and sufferings, they do not fail to note the hospitals organized by the Universities of Chicago and of Harvard, staffed by American sisters and doctors, each providing thirty-four doctors and eighty nurses, and dealing with a thousand patients, and a convalescent depot of two thousand beds. Every day the ambulance train comes in, and splendid hospital ships are taking the brave wounded back to England for home and rest.

And now came the day in which they were to motor forty miles to be the guests of the G.H.Q. Soon they seemed to be in the midst of the battle, "our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and more broken up by sh.e.l.l holes." The British lines are just beyond, cottages close by, and the German lines just in front of a wood near them, three-quarters of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than any woman, even a nurse, had been in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of impressions was full. They actually saw the brave boys whom they had pa.s.sed an hour before, sitting in the fields waiting for orders, now marching into the trenches to take their turn there--they knew that they were marching into the jaws of death, but they walked as quietly and as cheerfully as if they were going to a parade, the guns crashing close by them all the time. The firing being too hot for the women, the captain in charge of them was relieved when they elected to turn back.

The next day, their second as guests of G.H.Q., as they came down from breakfast, our ladies were surprised to find the motor at the door, a simple lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready for them to use, for the captain greeted them in the best of spirits with the news that a very successful action had been fought that morning, "we had taken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Ca.n.a.l that we lost, a little while ago, and captured about two hundred prisoners; and if we go off at once we shall be in time to see the German counter attack." The one impossible thing for any woman ever to have hoped to see!

Somehow or other they very quickly got to the very post of danger. Soon they got close to the Tower of Ypres, which Mrs. Ward well describes as "mute witness of a crime that beyond the reparation of our own day, history will revenge through years to come." Then the English guns spoke, and they watched and saw the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as the sh.e.l.ls burst. The German lines are right in sight, and soon their sh.e.l.ls begin to burst on the English trenches. The German counter attack is on. All the famous sites of the early part of the war are then in sight, but all they can fully see is the bursting German sh.e.l.ls, as from moment to moment they explode.

In her final letter Mrs. Ward shows other great efforts which Great Britain has made since the war began; that the taxes imposed for the support of the war and cheerfully borne demand a fourth part of his income from every well-to-do citizen; that five hundred million sterling, or twenty-five hundred million dollars have been already lent by Britain to her allies, a colossal portion of her income; that she has spent at the yearly rate of three thousand million dollars on the army, a thousand million dollars on the navy, while the munition department is costing about four hundred million sterling, and is employing close upon two million workers, one-tenth, I think, women; that the export trade of the country, in spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at this moment greater than it was in the corresponding months of 1913; she has raised an army of four millions of men, and will get all she wants.

What is more precious than all the rest, besides the vast amount of treasure that she has lavished upon the war, besides the rich mansions in all parts of the land that she has devoted to the uses of the sick and the wounded, she has given thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of her choicest youth, who have willingly surrendered their lives for the great cause; young men of the n.o.blest pedigree, without number, by their lives and deaths have attested their right to be regarded as the flower of the British youth; the professional cla.s.ses and the universities have emptied their halls so that the men of Oxford and Cambridge might take their places with the rest, and offer up their lives as willing sacrifices, and all the men of England of every degree have joined with them and been welcomed as brothers in the ranks for the great sacrifice. The rank and file, who are fighting and dying for England, are fighting in the same spirit as their leaders and falling by the hundred thousand for the nation's salvation. How exactly Emerson's n.o.ble verse fits them:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is G.o.d to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'

The youth replies, 'I can!'"