Winning a Cause Part 12

"Aye," said the rubies, glowing red-- "There comes new life from life-blood shed; And though the Goth o'erride the Gaul.

Eternal justice rides o'er all!

Might may be Right for its own short day, But Right is Might forever and aye!"

"Aye," said the diamonds, tongued with fire; "Grief tracks the pathways of desire.

Our Kaiser, on whose head we glow, Takes little heed of his people's woe, Or the deep, deep thoughts in the people's brain That burn and throb like healing pain.

"Thinks not that Germany, joyous now, Cares naught for the crown upon his brow, But much for the Freedom--wooed, not won-- That must be hers ere all is done,-- That gleams, and floats, and shines afar, A glorious and approaching star!"

"Aye!" said they all, with one accord, "He is the Kaiser, King, and Lord; But kings are small, the people great; And Freedom cometh, sure, though late-- A stronger than he shall cast him down!"

This was my dream of the Kaiser's crown.

CHARLES MACKAY--1871.

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

There is an old saying, "Like king, like people," which means that the king is usually not very different from the people whose executive he is. If this is true of kings, it surely must be true of American presidents. With this in mind, contrast the German Kaiser, William II, with Abraham Lincoln. The first constantly talked of himself and G.o.d as ruling the world. Boastfully declaring that he was the greatest of all men and that he ruled by divine right, the former German emperor brought upon the world the greatest evil that has ever befallen it through selfish ambition for himself, his family, and for the German autocracy; the other claiming to be a common man, a servant of men, seeking no riches, no throne, no personal power, entirely unselfish, gave his life at last to save a united democracy. Shall we not say that Lincoln served by the right of the divine qualities in him, while the Kaiser turned the world into a h.e.l.l because of the selfish aims of his nature--aims that are just the opposite of divine?

During the American Civil War, Mrs. Bixby, a Ma.s.sachusetts mother, lost five sons. President Lincoln wrote her the following letter:--

"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Ma.s.sachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may a.s.suage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

During the World War, Frau Meter, a German mother, lost nine sons.

Kaiser William wrote her the following letter:--

"His Majesty the Kaiser hears that you have sacrificed nine sons in defense of the Fatherland in the present war. His Majesty is immensely gratified at the fact, and in recognition is pleased to send you his photograph, with frame and autograph signature."

Is it necessary to add a word to make one who reads the two letters understand the difference between the two rulers and the two ideals they represent? G.o.d is man's highest ideal of good. Which represents this ideal, Lincoln or the Kaiser? The United States or Germany?

A poet says of the Kaiser's letter:--

"What bit of writing plainer tells That neither love nor mercy dwells Within his heart? What picture grim Could better paint the soul of him?"

The Kaiser was reported to have said that no family in Germany had escaped loss. Perhaps he was "gratified" at this as he was at the fact that Frau Meter had lost nine sons. One family in Germany lost neither father nor any one of the six adult sons,--the family of Kaiser William II. Certainly no other family in Germany of such a size escaped loss.

Would the Kaiser have felt equally "gratified" if his six sons had given up their lives in fighting Germany's war of plunder and conquest?

In the last days of the war, American soldiers found upon a German prisoner a postal card with a picture of Quentin Roosevelt lying dead beside his airplane. Below was printed in German the statement that America was so short of fliers, that she had to use her presidents'

sons. Germans could not understand that in America the presidents'

sons would be the first to offer their services and for work of the most dangerous kind. The sons of the Kaiser were carefully kept out of danger.

THE REALLY INVINCIBLE ARMADA

The northern coast of Scotland is about as far north as the southern point of Greenland and nearly all of Norway lies still nearer the pole.

Across the stretch of ocean between Scotland and Norway, a distance of about three hundred miles, for over four years the English navy kept guard, summer and winter. After the United States entered the war, the entire distance was protected also by mines.

The hardships suffered by the crews of these blockading ships during the terrible winters in that northern lat.i.tude can never be fully appreciated by any one who did not have to endure them and overcome them. This called for courage of the highest order, and the British sailors proved again, as they have so many times in the past, that they possessed it.

For thirty to forty days, each blockading ship kept the seas and then returned to port for a short period of rest. When on blockade, the men were frequently on duty on deck for twenty hours at a time wet through to the skin; they then went below to their berths for a few hours'

sleep, to be followed by twenty hours more of duty on deck. "Blow high, blow low, rain, hail, or snow, mines or submarines," said one of them, "we have to go through it."

A suspicious vessel is sighted, headed for Norway, Denmark, or Holland.

She must be hailed, stopped, and boarded to make sure she is not carrying cotton or rubber, or other contraband of war intended for Germany. No matter how rough the sea or what the temperature, this duty must be done. "We have just crawled into port again," wrote an officer; "what fearful weather it has been, nothing but gales, rain and snow, with rough seas. Two nights out of the last four were terrible and for the last fortnight it seems to have been one incessant gale, sometimes from the east, and then, for a change, from the west, with rain all the time. The strictest lookout must be kept at all times, as with the rough seas that are going now, a submarine's periscope takes a bit of spotting, likewise a floating mine, the lookout hanging on to the rigging in blinding rain, with seas drenching over them for hours at a time, peering into the darkness."

W. Macneile Dixon gives the following vivid account of the work of the British navy. "So it goes, and none save these who know the sea can form a picture or imagine at all the unrelaxing toil and strain aboard these ocean outposts that link northern with southern climes and draw their invisible barrier across the waters. The sea, if you would traffic with her, demands a vigilance such as no landsman dreams of, but here you have men who to the vigilance of the mariner have added that of the scout, who to the sailor's task have added the sentry's, and on an element whose moods are in ceaseless change, today bright as the heavens, tomorrow murky as the pit.

"To this rough duty in northern seas what greater contrast than that other in southern, the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles? How broad and various the support given by the British fleet to the Allies can thus be judged. Separated each from the other by some thousands of miles, the one fleet spread over leagues of ocean, kept every ship its lonely watch, while the bombarding vessels, concentrated in imposing strength, attempted to force a pa.s.sage through a channel, the most powerfully protected in the world. Unsuccessfully, it is true, but in the grand manner of the old and vanished days when war had still something of romance, and was less the hideous thing it has become.

"We have here at least a standard by which to measure the doings of Britain on the sea. For remember the attempt upon the Dardanelles, with all the strength and energy displayed in it, must be thought of as no more than a minor episode in the work of the navy, not in any way vital to the great issue. It was not the first nor even the second among the tasks allotted to it. For while, first of all, the great vessels under the commander-in-chief paralyzed the activities of the whole German navy, while second in importance, the cruising patrols held all the doors of entrance and exit to the German ports, still another fleet of great battleships remained free to conduct so daring an adventure as the attempt upon the Dardanelles. Nor was this all, for, when the unsupported fleet could do no more, another heroic undertaking was planned upon which fortune beguilingly smiled--the landing on the historic beaches of Gallipoli.

"Take, first, the attempt of the ships upon the Straits. In the light of failure no doubt it must be written down a military folly. Ships against forts had long been held a futile and unequal contest. But it was not the forts that saved Constantinople. In the narrow gulf leading to the Sea of Marmora no less than eight mine fields zigzagged their venomous coils across the channel. The strong, unchanging current of the Dardanelles, flowing steadily south, carried with it all floating mines dropped in the upper reaches. Torpedo tubes ranged on the sh.o.r.e discharged their missiles halfway across the Straits. Before warships could enter these waters a lane had to be swept and kept.

Daily, therefore, the minesweepers steamed ahead of the fleet to clear the necessary channel. But when thus engaged they became the target of innumerable and hidden guns, secluded among the rocks, in gullies and ruins and behind the shoulders of the hills, in every fold of the landscape. To 'spot' these shy, retiring batteries was of course imperative, but when spotted they vanished to some other coign of vantage, equally inconspicuous, and continued to rain fire upon the minesweepers. The warships poured cataracts of sh.e.l.l along the sh.o.r.es and among the slopes, the sea trembled, and the earth quaked. Amid the devastating uproar the trawlers swept and grappled and destroyed the discovered mines, but almost as fast as they removed them others were floated down to fill their places. Ships that ventured too far in support of the sweepers, like the _Bouvet_ and the _Triumph_, perished; the waterways were alleys of death. Progress indeed was made, but progress at a cost too heavy, and wisdom decreed the abandonment of the original plan.

"There remained another way. An army landed on the peninsula might cross the narrow neck of land, demolish the batteries, and free the minesweepers from their destructive fire. Could that be done, it was thought the ships might yet force a pa.s.sage into the broader waters and approach within easy range of the Turkish capital. After long and fatal delay the attempt was made. What might have been easily accomplished a month or two earlier had increased hour by hour in difficulty. Warned in good time of the coming danger, the Turks converted Gallipoli, a natural fortress, into a position of immeasurable strength. With consuming energy, in armies of thousands, they worked with pick and shovel till every yard of ground commanding a landing place was trench or rifle pit or gun emplacement. An impenetrable thicket of barbed wire ran up and down and across the gullies, stretched to the sh.o.r.e and netted the shallow waters of the beach itself. Then when all that man could do was done, they awaited the British attack in full confidence that no army, regiment, or man could land on that peninsula and live.

"No more extraordinary venture than this British landing on a naked beach within point-blank range of the most modern firearms can be read in history or fable. It was a landing of troops upon a foreign sh.o.r.e thousands of miles from home, hundreds from any naval base. Without absolute command of the sea, it could not have been so much as thought of. Men, guns, food, ammunition, even water had to be conveyed in ships and disembarked under the eyes of a hostile army, warned, armed, alert, and behind almost impregnable defenses.

"To conceive the preposterous thing was itself a kind of sublime folly; to accomplish it, simply and plainly stated, a feat divine. Though a thousand pens in the future essay the task no justice in words can ever be done to the courage and determination of the men who made good that landing. Put aside for a moment the indisputable fact that the whole gigantic undertaking achieved in a sense nothing whatever. View it only as an exploit, a martial achievement, and it takes rank as the most amazing feat of arms that the world has ever seen or is likely to see. That at least remains, and as that, and no less than that, with the full price of human life and treasure expended, it goes upon the record, immortal as the soul of man. And nothing could be more fitting than that an accomplishment which dims the glory of all previous martial deeds, which marks the highest point of courage and resolution reached by Britain in all her wars, should have been carried through by British, Irish, and Colonial troops, representatives of the whole empire under the guidance and protecting guard, of the British fleet.

"At Lemnos, for the more than Homeric endeavor on Homer's sea, lay an a.s.semblage of shipping such as no harbor had ever held. Within sight of Troy they came and went, and in the cla.s.sic waters ringed round by cla.s.sic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon line of black transports, crowded with the finest flower of modern youth, and beyond them, nearer the harbor mouth, the long, projecting guns and towering hulls of the warships. On April 24th they sailed, while, amid tempests of cheering, as the anchors were got and the long procession moved away, the bands of the French vessels played them to the Great Endeavor. There is no need to tell again the story of the arrival, the stupendous uproar of the bombardments, so that men dizzy with it staggered as they walked, the slaughter in the boats and on the bullet-torn shingle, the making good of the landings and all the subsequent battles on that inhuman coast. They will be told and retold while the world lasts. And now that all is over, the chapter closed, the blue water rippling undisturbed which once was white with a tempest of shrapnel, now that all is over, the armies and the ships withdrawn, and one reflects upon the waste of human life, the gallant hearts that beat no longer, the prodigal expenditure of thought and energy and treasure, there should perhaps mingle with our poignant regret and disappointment no sense of exultation. Yet it surges upward and overcomes all else. For our nature is so molded that it can never cease to admire such doings, the more perhaps if victory be denied the doers. And here at least on the sh.e.l.l-swept beaches, among the rocks and flowery hillsides of Gallipoli, men of the British race wrote, never to be surpa.s.sed, one of the world's deathless tales. . . .

"There are navies and navies. The old and fighting British navy, whose representatives keep the seas today against the king's enemies, has been heard of once or twice during the present war, but for the most part preserves a certain aristocratic and dignified aloofness from the public gaze. There is, however, another and an older navy which comes and goes under the eyes of all, as it has done any time these three or four centuries. On its six or eight thousand ships, to prove that England is Old England still, the Elizabethan mariner has come to life again, who took war very much as he took peace, unconcernedly, in his day's work. Needless to say no other nation on earth could have produced, either in numbers or quality, for no other nation possessed these men, bred to the sea and the risks of the sea, born where the air is salt, who, undeterred by the hazards of war, which was none of their employ, answered their country's call as in the old Armada days. From the Chinese and Indian seas they came, from the Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, from whaling, it might be, or the Newfoundland fishing grounds or the Dogger Bank--three thousand officers and some two hundred thousand men--to supply the Grand Fleet, to patrol the waterways, to drag for the German mines, to carry the armies of the Alliance, and incidentally, to show the world, what it has perhaps forgotten, that it is not by virtue of their fighting navy that the British are a maritime people, but by virtue of an instinct amounting to genius, rooted in a very ancient and unmatched experience of shipping and the sea. The Grand Fleet is only the child of this service which was already old before the word 'Admiralty' was first employed, which made its own voyages and fought its own battles since Columbus discovered America, and before even that considerable event.

These travel-worn ships formed the solid bridge across which flowed in unbroken files the men and supplies to the British and the Allied fronts.

"Picture a great railroad which has for its main line a track four or five thousand miles in length, curving from Archangel in Russia to Alexandria in Egypt, a track which touches on its way the coasts of Norway, of the British Isles, of France, of Portugal, of Spain, of Italy, of Greece. Picture from this immense arc of communication branch lines longer still, diverging to America, to Africa, to India, knitting the ports of the world together in one vast railway system.

That railroad system, with its engines and rolling stock, its stations and junctions, its fuel stores and offices, over which run daily and nightly the wagon loads, of food, munitions, stores for a dozen countries at war with the Central Powers, is a railroad of British ships. To dislocate, to paralyze it, Germany would willingly give a thousand millions, for the scales would then descend in her favor and victory indubitably be hers. For consider the consequences of interruption in that stream of traffic. Britain herself on the brink of starvation, her troops in France, in Egypt, in Salonica, cut off without food, without ammunition, unable to return to their homes. But for this fleet that bridges the seas, Britain could not send or use a single soldier anywhere save in defense of her own sh.o.r.es. India, Australia, Canada, all her dependencies would be cut off from the Mother Country, the bonds of empire immediately dissolved. Some little importance then may be attached to this matter of bridging the waterways, and some admiration extended towards the men who do it and the manner of the doing.

"If you ask what have the Allies gained, take this evidence of a French writer in _Le Temps_: 'If at the beginning of the war we were enabled to complete the equipment of our army with a rapidity which has not been one of the least surprises of the German staff, we owe it to the fleet which has given us the mastery of the seas. We were short of horses. They were brought from Argentina and Canada. We were short of wool and of raw materials for our metal industries. We applied to the stockbreeders of Australia. Lancashire sent us her cottons and cloth, the Black Country its steel. And now that the consumption of meat threatens to imperil our supplies of live stock, we are enabled to avoid danger by the importation of frozen cargoes. For the present situation the mastery of the sea is not only an advantage but a necessity. In view of the fact that the greater part of our coal area is invaded by the enemy the loss of the command of the sea by England would involve more than her own capitulation. She indeed would be forced to capitulate through starvation. But France also and her new ally, Italy, being deprived of coal and, therefore, of the means of supplying their factories and military transport, would soon be at the mercy of their adversaries.'

"On this command of the sea rested, then, the whole military structure of the Alliance. It opposed to Germany and her friends not the strength of a group of nations, each fighting its own battle, separate and apart, but the strength of a federation so intimately knit together as to form a single united power which has behind it the inexhaustible resources of the world. Thus the British navy riveted the Great Alliance by operations on a scale hardly imaginable, operations whose breadth and scope beggar all description, since they span the globe itself. As for the men and the spirit in which they work, let him sail on a battleship, a tramp, a liner, or a trawler, the British sailor is always the same, much as he has been since the world first took his measure in Elizabeth's days.

'Like the old sailors of the Queen and the Queen's old sailors.'

"A great simplicity is his quality, with something of the child's unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cunning in the hour of necessity, an ascetic simplicity almost like the saints', looking things in the face, so that to that fine carelessness everything, all enterprises, hazards, fortunes, shipwreck, if it come, or battle, are but the incidents of a chequered day, and his part merely to 'carry on'

in the path of routine and duty and the honorable tradition of his calling. Manifestly his present business is epic and the making of epic, if he knew it; yet not knowing it he grasps things, as the epic paladins always grasp them, by the matter-of-fact, not the heroic, handle. What better stories have the poets to tell than that of Captain Parslow, a Briton if ever there was one, who, refusing to surrender, saved his ship in a submarine attack at the cost of his own life? Mortally wounded as he stood on the ship, the wheel was taken from the dying father's hand by his son, the second mate. Knocked down by the concussion of a sh.e.l.l that gallant son of a gallant father still held to his post and steered the vessel clear. Or have they anything better to relate than the tale of the _Ortega_ and Captain Douglas Kinneir, who, when pursued by a German cruiser of vastly greater speed, called upon his engineers and stokers for a British effort and drove his vessel under full steam, and a trifle more, into the uncharted waters of Nelson's Straits, 'a veritable nightmare for navigators,' the narrowest and ugliest of channels, walled by gloomy cliffs, bristling with reefs, rocks, overfalls, and currents, through which, by the mercy of G.o.d and his own daring, he piloted his ship in safety and gave an example to the world of what stout hearts can do. It is such men Germany supposed she could intimidate!

"These are but episodes in the long roll of honor. You will find others in the quite peaceful occupation of minesweeping, or the search for mines--'fishing' the navy calls it--that the impartial German scatters to trip an enemy, perhaps a friend, an equal chance and it matters not which, an occupation for humanitarians and seekers after a quiet life. On this little business alone a thousand ships and fourteen thousand fishermen have been constantly engaged. Take the case of Lieutenant Parsons, who was blown up in his trawler, escaped with his life, and undisturbed continued to command his group of sweepers. On that day near Christmas time they blew up eight and dragged up six other mines, while, as incidents within the pa.s.sage of ten crowded minutes, his own ship and another were damaged by explosions and a third destroyed! Read that short chapter of North Sea history and add this, for a better knowledge of these paths of peace, from the letter of an officer: 'Things began to move rapidly now.

There was a constant stream of reports coming from aloft. "Mine ahead, Sir," "Mine on the port bow, Sir"; "There is one, Sir, right alongside," and on looking over the bridge I saw a mine about two feet below the surface and so close that we could have touched it with a boat hook. . . . After an hour at last sighted the minesweepers, which had already started work.'

"One may judge of these North Sea activities from the record of a single lieutenant of the Naval Reserve who, besides attending to other matters, destroyed forty or fifty mines, twice drove off an inquisitive German Taube, attacked an equally inquisitive Zeppelin, twice rescued a British seaplane and towed it into safety; rescued in June the crew of a torpedoed trawler, sixteen men, also the crew of a sunk fishing vessel; in July a.s.sisted two steamers that had been mined, saving twenty-four of the sailors; in September a.s.sisted another steamer, rescued three men from a mined trawler, towed a disabled Dutch steamer and a.s.sisted in rescuing the pa.s.sengers; in November a.s.sisted a Norwegian steamer, rescued twenty-four men, and also a Greek steamer which had been torpedoed and rescued forty.