The War on All Fronts: England's Effort Part 5

We have a good many Socialists here, and they constantly give trouble. But the great majority of the men have done wonderfully! Some men have put in one hundred hours a week since the war began. Some have not lost a minute since it began. The old hands have worked _splendidly_.

And another from one of the Directors:

I know of no drunkenness among our women. I don't remember ever having seen a drunken woman round here.

III

I have almost said my say on munitions, though I could continue the story much longer. But the wonder of it consists really in its vastness, in the steady development of a movement which will not end or slacken till the Allies are victorious. Except for the endless picturesqueness of the women's share in it, and the mechanical invention and adaptation going on everywhere, with which only a technical expert could deal, it is of course monotonous, and I might weary you. I will only--before asking you to cross the Channel with me to France--put down a few notes and impressions on the Clyde district, where, as our newspapers will have told you, there is at the present moment (March 29th) some serious labour trouble, with which the Government is dealing. Until further light is thrown upon its causes, comment is better postponed. But I have spoken quite frankly in these letters of "danger spots," where a type of international Socialism is to be found--affecting a small number of men, over whom the ideas of "country" and "national honour" seem to have no hold. Every country possesses such men and must guard itself against them. A nucleus of them exists in this populous and important district. How far their influence is helped among those who care nothing for their ideas, by any real or supposed grievances against the employers, by misunderstandings and misconceptions, by the sheer nervous fatigue and irritation of the men's long effort, or by those natural fears for the future of their Unions, to which I have once or twice referred, only one long familiar with the district could say, I can only point out here one or two interesting facts. In the first place, in this crowded countryside, where a small minority of dangerous extremists appear to have no care for their comrades in the trenches, the recruiting for the new Armies--so I learn from one of the leading authorities--has been--"taken on any basis whatever--substantially higher than in any other district. The men came up magnificently." That means that among those left behind, whatever disturbing and disintegrating forces exist in a great Labour centre have freer play than would normally be the case. A certain amount of patriotic cream has been skimmed, and in some places the milk that remains must be thin. In the second place--(you will remember the employer I quoted to you in a former letter)--the work done here by thousands and 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 England remembers it well. And finally, the invasion of women has perhaps been more startling to the workmen here than anywhere else. Not a single woman was employed in the works or factories of the district before the war, except in textiles.

There will soon be 15,000 in the munition workshops, and that will not be the end.

But Great Britain cannot afford--even in a single factory--to allow any trifling at this moment with the provision of guns, and the Government must--and will--act decisively.

As to the drinking in this district of which so much has been said, and which is still far in excess of what it ought to be, I found many people hard put to it to explain why the restriction of hours which has worked so conspicuously well in other districts has had comparatively little effect here. Is it defects of administration, or a certain "cussedness" in the Scotch character, which resents any tightening of law? One large employer with whom I discuss it, believes it would suit the Scotch better to abolish all restrictions, and simply punish drunkenness much more severely. And above all--"open all possible means of amus.e.m.e.nt on Sundays, especially the cinemas!"--a new and strange doctrine, even now, in the ears of a country that holds the bones of John Knox. There seems indeed to be a terribly close connection between the dulness of the Scotch Sunday and the obstinacy of Scotch drinking; and when one thinks of the heavy toil of the week, of the confinement of the workshops, and the strain of the work, one feels at any rate that here is a problem which is to be _solved_, not preached at; and will be solved, some day, by nimbler and humaner wits than ours.

In any case, the figures, gathered a month ago from those directly concerned, as to the general extension of the national effort here, could hardly be more striking. In normal times, the district, which is given up to Admiralty work, makes ships and guns, but has never made sh.e.l.ls. The huge sh.e.l.l factories springing up all over it are a wholly new creation.

As usual, they are filled with women, working under skilled male direction, and everywhere one found among managers and superintendents the same enthusiasm for the women's work. "It's their honour they work on,"

said one forewoman. "That's why they stand it so well." The average working week is fifty-four hours, but overtime may seriously lengthen the tale. Wages are high; canteens and rest-rooms are being everywhere provided; and the housing question is being tackled. The rapidity of the women's piece-work is astonishing, and the mingling of cla.s.ses--girls of education and refinement working quite happily with those of a much humbler type--runs without friction under the influence of a common spirit. This common spirit was well expressed by a girl who before she came to the factory was working a knitting-machine. "I like this better--_because there's a purpose in it_." A sweet-faced woman who was turning copper bands for sh.e.l.l, said to me: "I never worked a machine before the war. I have done 912 in ten hours, but that tired me very much.

I can do 500 or 600 quite easily."

On the same premises, after leaving the sh.e.l.l shops, we pa.s.sed rapidly through gun shops, where I saw again processes which had become almost familiar. "The production of howitzers," said my guide, "is the question of the day. We are making them with great rapidity--but the trouble is to get enough machines." The next shop, devoted to 18-pounder field-guns, was "green fields fifteen months ago," and the one adjoining it, a fine shed about 400 feet square, for howitzer work, was started in August last, on a site "which was a bog with a burn running through it." Soon "every foot of s.p.a.ce will be filled with machines, and there will be 1,200 people at work here, including 400 women. In the next shop we are turning out about 4,000 shrapnel and 4,000 high-explosive sh.e.l.ls per week. When we started women on what we thought this heavy sh.e.l.l, we provided men to help lift the sh.e.l.l in and out of the machines. The women thrust the men aside in five minutes."

Later on, as I was pa.s.sing through a series of new workshops occupied with all kinds of army work and employing large numbers of women, I stopped to speak to a Belgian woman. "Have you ever done any machine work before?"

"No, Madame, never--_Mais, c'est la guerre. Il faut tuer les Allemands_!"

It was a quiet, pa.s.sionless voice. But one thought, with a shiver, of those names of eternal infamy--of Termonde, Aerschot, Dinant, Louvain.

It was with this woman's words in my ears that I set out on my last visit--to which they were the fitting prelude. The afternoon was darkening fast. The motor sped down a river valley, sodden with rain and melting snow, and after some miles we turn into a half-made road, leading to some new buildings, and a desolate s.p.a.ce beyond. A sentry challenges us, and we produce our permit. Then we dismount, and I look out upon a wide stretch of what three months ago was swamp, or wet plough land. Now its 250 acres are enclosed with barbed wire, and patrolled by sentries night and day. A number of small buildings, workshops, stores, etc., are rising all over it. I am looking at what is to be the great "filling" factory of the district, where 9,000 women, in addition to male workmen, will soon be employed in charging the sh.e.l.l coming from the new sh.e.l.l factories we have left behind in the darkness.

Strange and tragic scene! Strange uprising of women!

We regain the motor and speed onwards, my secretary and I, through unknown roads far away from the city and its factories towards the country house where we are to spend the night. In my memory there surge a thousand recollections of all that I have seen in the preceding fortnight. An England roused at last--rushing to factory, and lathe, to shipyard and forge, determined to meet and dominate her terrible enemy in the workshop, as she has long since met and dominated him at sea, and will in time dominate him on land--that is how my country looks to me to-night.

... The stars are coming out. Far away, over what seems like water with lights upon it, there are dim snowy mountains--majestic--rising into the sky. The noise and clamour of the factories are all quiet in the night.

Two thoughts remain with me--Britain's ships in the North Sea--Britain's soldiers in the trenches. And encircling and sustaining both the justice of a great cause--as these white Highland hills look down upon and encircle this valley.

IV

Dear H.

A million and a half of men--over a quarter of a million of women--working in some 4,000 State-controlled workshops for the supply of munitions of war, not only to our own troops, but to those of our allies--the whole, in the main, a creation of six months' effort--this is the astonishing spectacle of some of the details of which I have tried, as an eye-witness, to give you in my previous letters a rapid and imperfect sketch.

But what of the men, the Armies, for which these munitions are being made and hurried to the fighting-lines? It was at Aldershot, a few days ago, that I listened to some details of the first rush of the new Armies, given me by a member of the Headquarters Staff who had been through it all.

Aldershot in peace time held about 27,000 troops. Since the outbreak of war some million and a quarter of men have pa.s.sed through the great camp, coming in ceaselessly for training and equipment, and going out again to the theatres of war.

In the first days and weeks of the war--during and after the marvellous precision and rapidity with which the Expeditionary Force was despatched to France--men poured in from all parts, from all businesses and occupations; rich and poor, north and south country men, English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh; men from the Dominions, who had flung themselves into the first home-coming steamer; men from India, and men from the uttermost parts of Africa and Asia who had begged or worked their way home. They were magnificent material. They came with set faces, asking only for training, training, training!--and "what the peace soldier learns in six months," said my companion, "they learnt in six weeks. We had neither uniforms nor rifles, neither guns nor horses for them. We did not know how to feed them or to house them. In front of the headquarters at Aldershot, that Mecca of the soldier, where no one would dare to pa.s.s in ordinary times whose turnout is not immaculate, the most extraordinary figures, in bowler hats and bits of uniform, pa.s.sed unrebuked. We had to raid the neighbouring towns for food, to send frantic emba.s.sies to London for bread and meat; to turn out any sort of shed to house them. Luckily it was summer weather; otherwise I don't know what we should have done for blankets. But n.o.body 'groused.' Everybody worked, and there were many who felt it 'the time of their lives.'"

And yet England "engineered the war!" England's hypocrisy and greed demanded the crushing of Germany--hence the lying "excuse" of Belgium--that apparently is what all good Germans--except those who know better--believe; what every German child is being taught. As I listen to my companion's story, I am reminded, however, of a puzzled remark which reached me lately, written just before Christmas last, by a German nurse in a Berlin hospital, who has English relations, friends of my own. "We begin to wonder whether it really was England who caused the war--since you seem to be so dreadfully unprepared!" So writes this sensible girl to one of her mother's kindred in England; in a letter which escaped the German censor. She might indeed wonder! To have deliberately planned a Continental war with Germany, and Germany's 8,000,000 of soldiers, without men, guns, or ammunition beyond the requirements of an Expeditionary Force of 160,000 men, might have well become the State of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. But the England of Raleigh, Chatham, Pitt, and Wellington has not generally been reckoned a nation of pure fools.

The military camps of Great Britain tell the tale of our incredible venture. "Great areas of land had to be cleared, levelled, and drained; barracks had to be built; one camp alone used 42,000 railway truck-loads of building material." There was no time to build new railways, and the existing roads were rapidly worn out. They were as steadily repaired; and on every side new camps sprang up around the parent camps of the country.

The Surrey commons and woods, the Wiltshire downs, the Midland and Yorkshire heaths, the Buckinghamshire hills have been everywhere invaded--their old rural sanct.i.ties are gone. I walked in bewilderment the other day up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which when I knew it last was one kingdom of purple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. Barracks now form long streets upon its crest and sides; practise-trenches, bombing-schools, the stuffed and dangling sacks for bayonet training, musketry ranges, and the rest, are everywhere. Tennyson, whose wandering ground it once was, would know it no more. And this camp is only one of a series which spread far and wide round the Aldershot headquarters.

Near my own home, a park and a wooded hillside, that two years ago were carefully guarded even from a neighbour's foot, are now occupied by a large town of military huts, which can be seen for miles round. And fifteen miles away, in a historic "chase" where Catharine of Aragon lived while her trial was proceeding in a neighbouring town, a duke, bearing one of the great names of England, has himself built a camp, housing 1,200 men, for the recruits of his county regiments alone, and has equipped it with every necessary, whether for the soldier's life or training. But everywhere--East, North, South, and West--the English and Scotch roads are thronged with soldiers and horses, with trains of artillery wagons and Army Service lorries, with men marching back from night attacks or going out to scout and skirmish on the neighbouring commons and through the most sacred game--preserves. There are no more trespa.s.s laws in England--for the soldier.

You point to our recruiting difficulties in Parliament. True enough. We have our recruiting difficulties still. Lord Derby has not apparently solved the riddle; for riddle it is, in a country of voluntary service, where none of the preparations necessary to fit conscription into ordinary life, with its obligations, have ever been made. The Government and the House of Commons are just now wrestling with it afresh, and public opinion seems to be hardening towards certain final measures that would have been impossible earlier in the war.[B] The call is still for men--more--and more--men! And given the conditions of this war, it is small wonder that England is restless till they are found. But amid the cross currents of criticism, I catch the voice of Mr. Walter Long, the most practical, the least boastful of men, in the House of Commons, a few nights ago: Say what you like, blame, criticise, as you like, but "what this country has done since August, 1914, is an almost incredible story." And so it is.

And now let us follow some of these khaki-clad millions across the seas, through the reinforcement camps, and the great supply bases, towards that fierce reality of war to which everything tends.

[B] Since these lines were written the crisis in the Government, the Irish rising, and the withdrawal of the military service bill have happened in quick succession. The country is still waiting (April 28th) for the last inevitable step.

II

It was about the middle of February, after my return from the munition factories, that I received a programme from the War Office of a journey in France, which I was to be allowed to make. I remember being at first much dissatisfied with it. It included the names of three or four places well known to be the centres of English supply organisation in France. But it did not include any place in or near the actual fighting zone. To me, in my ignorance, the places named mainly represented the great array of finely equipped hospitals to be found everywhere in France in the rear of our Armies; and I was inclined to say that I had no special knowledge of hospital work, and that one could see hospitals in England, with more leisure to feel and talk with the sufferers in them than a ten days' tour could give. A friendly Cabinet Minister smiled when I presented this view.

"You had better accept. You will find it very different from what you suppose. The 'back' of the Army includes everything." He was more than right!

The conditions of travelling at the present moment, within the region covered by the English military organisation in France, for a woman possessing a special War Office pa.s.s, in addition to her ordinary pa.s.sport, and understood to be on business which has the good-will of the Government, though in no sense commissioned by it, are made easy by the courtesy and kindness of everybody concerned. From the moment of landing on the French side, my daughter and I pa.s.sed into the charge of the military authorities. An officer accompanied us; a War Office motor took us from place to place; and everything that could be shown us in the short ten days of our tour was freely open to us. The trouble, indeed, that was taken to enable me to give some of the vividness of personal seeing to these letters is but one of many proofs, I venture to think, of that warm natural wish in British minds that America should understand why we are fighting this war, and how we are fighting it. As to myself, I have written in complete freedom, affected only by the absolutely necessary restrictions of the military censorship; and I only hope I may be able to show something, however inadequately, of the work of men who have done a magnificent piece of organisation, far too little realised even in their own country.

For in truth we in England know very little about our bases abroad; about what it means to supply the ever-growing needs of the English Armies in France. The military world takes what has been done for granted; the general English public supposes that the Tommies, when their days in the home camps are done, get "somehow" conveyed to the front, being "somehow"

equipped, fed, clothed, nursed, and mended, and sent on their way across France in interminable lines of trains. As to the details of the process, it rarely troubles its head. The fact is, however, that the work of the great supply bases abroad, of the various Corps and Services connected with them--Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, railway and motor transport--is a desperately interesting study; and during the past eighteen months, under the "I.G.C."--Inspector-General of Communications--has developed some of the best brains in the Army.

Two days spent under the guidance of the Base Commandant or an officer of his staff among the docks and warehouses of a great French port, among the huts of its reinforcement camp, which contains more men than Aldershot before August, 1914, or in its workshops of the Army Ordnance Corps, gave me my first experience of the organising power that has gone to these departments of the war. The General in command of the base was there in the first weeks of the struggle and during the great retreat. He retired with his staff to Nantes--leaving only a broken motor-car behind him!--just about the time that the French Government betook itself to Bordeaux. But in September he was back again, and the building-up process began, which has since known neither stop nor stay. That the commercial needs of a great French port should have been able to accommodate themselves as they have to the military needs of the British Army speaks loudly for the tact and good feeling on both sides. The task has not been at all times an easy one; and I could not help thinking as we walked together through the crowded scene, that the tone and temper of the able man beside me--his admiration, simply expressed, yet evidently profound, for the French spirit in the war, and for the heroic unity of the country through all ranks and cla.s.ses, accounted for a great deal. In the presence of a good-will so strong, difficulties disappear.

Look now at this immense hangar or storehouse--the largest in the world--through which we are walking. It was completed three years before the war, partly, it is said, by German money, to house the growing cotton-trade of the port. It now houses a large proportion of the food of the British Army. The hangar is half a mile long, and is bounded on one side by the docks where the ships are discharging, and on the other by the railway lines where the trains are loading up for the front.

You walk through avenues of bacon, through streets of biscuits and jam. On the quays just outside, ships from England, Canada, Norway, Argentina, Australia are pouring out their stores. Stand and watch the endless cranes at work, and think what English sea power means! And on the other side watch the packing of the trucks that are going to the front, the order and perfection with which the requisitions, large and small, of every regiment are supplied.

One thinks of the Crimean scandals. The ghost of Florence Nightingale seems to move beside us, watching contentedly what has come of all that long-reforming labour, dealing with the health, the sanitation, the food and equipment of the soldier, in which she played her part; and one might fancy the great shade pausing specially beside the wired-in s.p.a.ce labelled "Medical Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage." Medical _necessaries_ are housed elsewhere; but here are the dainties, the special foods, the easing appliances of all kinds which are to make life bearable to many a sorely-wounded man.

As to the huge sheds of the Army Ordnance, which supply everything that the soldier doesn't eat, all metal stores--nails, horseshoes, oil-cans, barbed wire--by the ton; trenching-tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors, sand-bags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, and the like--they are of course endless; and the men who work in them are housed in one of the largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Depot to the outsider are the repairing sheds and workshops established in a suburb of the town to which we drive on. For this is work that has never been done before in connection with an army in the field. Day by day trains full of articles for repair come down from the front. I happened to see a train of the kind, later on, leaving a station close to the fighting line. Guns, rifles, range-finders, gun-carriages, harness, all torn and useless uniforms, tents, boots by the thousand, come to this base to be repaired, or to be sent home for transformation into "shoddy" to the Yorkshire towns. Nothing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s department.

Field-gla.s.ses, periscopes, water-bottles, they arrive from the trenches with the same certainty as a wounded howitzer or machine-gun, and are returned as promptly.

In one shed, my guide called my attention to shelves on which were a number of small objects in china and metal. "They were found in kits left on the field," he says gently. "Wherever we can identify the owner, such things are carefully returned to his people. These could not be identified."

I took up a little china dog, a bit of coa.r.s.e French pottery, which some dead father had bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the children at home. Near by were "souvenirs"--bits of sh.e.l.l, of German equipment; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a saint--and so on--every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden death--death in youth, at the height of life.

The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under soldier-foremen, are busy, the harness-mending room, and the engineering workshops might rea.s.sure those pessimists among us--especially of my own s.e.x--who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful animal. Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and its steadily mounting efficiency. He began work with 140 men, he is now employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of pounds a week to the British Government. He makes all his own power, and has four or five powerful dynamos at work.

We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is difficult. Yet we do our best to defy the weather. We tramp through the deepening snow of the great camp, which lines the slopes of the hills above the river and the town, visiting its huts and recreation-rooms, its Cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an Infantry Base Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow.

But on the last morning before we start we mount to the plateau above the reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind blows one of the sharpest blasts of the winter. Here are bodies of men going through some of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front; here are trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting line.

The instructors here, as at other training-camps in France, are all men returned from the front. The men to whom they have to give the final touch of training--men so near themselves to the real thing--are impatient of any other sort.