THE GIFT OF 
 
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 7583 
 
_ Cornell University Library 
 
 D 640.W26E5 1916 
 
 Enaland's effort 
 
 3 1924 027 846 009 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027846009 
 
ENGLAND'S 
 EFFORT 
 
 MRS. HUMPHRY WARE 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY 
 
 HON. JOSEPH H. CHOATE 
 
England's Effort 
 
 Letters to an American Friend 
 
England's Effort 
 
 Letters to an American Friend 
 
 By 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward 
 
 With a Preface by 
 Joseph H. Choate 
 
 Second Edition 
 
 New York 
 
 Charles Scribner's Sons 
 
 1916 
 
a— i'T-^'J , O t f 
 
 COPTKIOHT, 1916, BT 
 
 CHARLES SCIUBNER'S SONS 
 
 PubUebed May, ldl6 
 Reprinted June, 1916 
 
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 under- 
 taken to answer in this series of letters, and every one 
 who reads them will admit that her answer is as com- 
 plete and triumphant as it is thrilling. Nobody 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 Eng- 
 land 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 abso- 
 lute transformation of English men and women, which 
 has enabled them, living and dying, to secure for their 
 proud nation under God 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 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 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 
 pubhc affairs as she has been in hterature, by which 
 she has attained such world-wide fame, and next to 
 English politics, in American poUtics and American 
 opinion. She has been a staunch believer in the great- 
 ness 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 trenches in France, 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 pre- 
 paredness. She has visited, since the war began, the 
 British fleet, the very key of the whole situation, with- 
 out whose unmatched power and ever-increasing strength 
 the Allies at the outset must have succumbed. She 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 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 Enghsh armies in France, 
 she has seen with her own eyes, that marvellous organi- 
 zation 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 hne. She has 
 witnessed within three-quarters of a mile of the fight- 
 ing line, with a gas helmet at hand, ready to put on, a 
 German counter attack after a successful English ad- 
 vance, something which no other woman, except her- 
 self 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 imiversal 
 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. 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 England was not absolutely unprepared in the sense 
 that the United States is unprepared, even for self- 
 defense 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 Con- 
 tinental war. 
 
 The wholly unexpected news of the invasion of Bel- 
 gium 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 Eng- 
 land 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 buUdmg 
 of mimition shops, and the ordering of vast quantities 
 from abroad, before the second battle of Ypres, in 
 April, 1916, which led to the formation of the new Coa- 
 lition 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, 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 and almost incredible, and without serious collision 
 with the working classes. 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 what- 
 ever cost, and to remove all obstacles that he found in 
 his way. The Grovemment has absolutely taken con- 
 trol 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 aU has been the employment of women on a vast 
 scale to do the work that only men had ever done be- 
 fore. France had set about it immediately after the 
 battle of the Marne, and allowed no Frenchman to re- 
 main idle who could do such work. 
 
 Mrs. Ward does not fail to do full justice to the work- 
 ing men of Great Britain, and shows that besides the 
 hundreds of thousands that they have sent to the fight- 
 ing 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 be- 
 fore had expected to have anything to do with guns 
 and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns. The 
 old ways were laid aside, old distinctions of class and sex 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 forgotten, and all worked with a common and indomita- 
 ble 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 build- 
 ings, in which these manufactures are carried on by thirty- 
 five hundred working people, of whom a large propor- 
 tion are women. I love to quote a single sentence from 
 the utterance of her companion on a visit to this estab- 
 lishment: "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 oflf. 
 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 estab- 
 lishments 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 enthu- 
 siasm for their labors, and at the same time it has in- 
 creased the ardor and intensity of their feUow workmen. 
 Mrs. Ward found four thousand women to five thousand 
 men engaged in this nation-saving labor, in a single 
 
PREJFACE xi 
 
 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 shell 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, 
 nms 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, whp are peril- 
 ling their lives in the trenches. 
 
 None of this distinguished writer's romances com- 
 pare in vivid description and heart-inspiring eloquence 
 with these accounts that she gives of what she has seen 
 with her own eyes of ibe resurrection of England. 
 
 It is not for me to anticipate her startling and thrill- 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 ing 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: "Un- 
 less we quicken our movements, damnation 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 
 coimtries 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 difficul- 
 ties met with among the trade-unions and labor people, 
 and successfully overcome, and explsuns in full what 
 they call over there the work of the Dilution Commis- 
 sioners, which is a wholly new phrase for us, and she 
 gives this clear definition: "Dilution means, of course, 
 that under the sharp analysis of necessity, much engi- 
 neering 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 vari- 
 ous processes, some of which can be sorted out from the 
 others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or semi- 
 skilled worker. By so dividing them up and using su- 
 perior labor with economy, only where it is really neces- 
 sary, it can be made to go infinitely further, and the in- 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 ferior, or untrained, labor can then be brought into work 
 where nobody supposed it could be used; where, in fact, 
 it never has been used." This novel experiment, to- 
 gether 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, diflScul- 
 ties 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 out- 
 put of the factory, which had been planned for four 
 thousand shells a week, ran up to twenty thousand, and 
 everything has gone smoothly since." 
 
 The adaptation of firms and factories, already exist- 
 ing, the control of which was taken by the Government, 
 was wonderful, but the national shell-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 space of a year the de- 
 mands of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been 
 satisfied, and England will depend no more upon for- 
 eign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition, 
 
xiv PREFACE 
 
 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 shell 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 milUon 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 monot- 
 onous. 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, 
 
PREFACE XV 
 
 and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour's word 
 for it, have since the beginning of the war added a mil- 
 lion tons to the navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid jour- 
 neys 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 dis- 
 quiet have existed, the work done by thousands and tens 
 of thousands of workmen since the beginning of the war, 
 especially iu 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 for- 
 gotten, 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; every- 
 
xvi PREFACE 
 
 tiling 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 train- 
 ing 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 destina- 
 tion 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 classes, 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 shells per week, heavy shell work all, 
 which they thought at first they must furnish men to lift 
 
PREFACE xvii 
 
 in and out of the macHnes, 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 Eng- 
 land 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 impassable, not only 
 between men and women, but between the various 
 classes of society, and that it cannot possibly end with- 
 out 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 re- 
 sult after her hundred years of agonies and revolutions. 
 We hear from France no complaints, no internal dis- 
 sensions, 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 
 
xviii PREFACE 
 
 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 protec- 
 tion and guidance of the war office, this distinguished 
 woman followed the khaki-clad soldiers of England, now 
 numbered by millions, across the channel, and every- 
 thing 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, Rail- 
 road, 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 store- 
 house, the largest in the world, "built three years be- 
 fore 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 
 
PREFACE xix 
 
 qiiays sMps of all nations, except Gennany, 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 space, 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 woimded 
 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 every- 
 thing that a soldier does not eat, all metal stores, what- 
 ever, 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 connec- 
 tion 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 foimd 
 beyond repair, to be sent to Yorkshire for shoddy. The 
 marvellous thing is thdt, as soon as they are received, 
 they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and 
 
XX PREFACE 
 
 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 himdred 
 and forty men, and is now employing more than a thou- 
 sand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of 
 pounds a week to the British government. 
 
 Recreation and amusement are supplied in near local- 
 ity for the w^ting soldiers and, although the snow is 
 more than ankle-deep, they visit such places as recrea- 
 tion 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 re- 
 cruits, 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, oiu: visitors make 
 their way in closed motors through the snow, passing 
 scores of motor lorries, and other wagons, stuck in the 
 snow-drifts. They stop for the night at a pleasant 
 
PREFACE xxi 
 
 hotel full of officers, mostly English, belon^ng to the 
 Lines of Communication, and a few of the mothers and 
 sisters of the poor wounded in the neighboring hospi- 
 tals, who have come over to nurse them. 
 
 Every gun, every particle .of tmmition, clothing, and 
 equipment, and whatever else is necessary, including 
 the food of the armies, every horse, every vehicle, haa 
 to be brought across the British channel, to maintiun 
 and reinforce the ever-growing British army, and the 
 ever-daUy increasing congestion at all the ports makes 
 it more and more difficult every day to receive, dis- 
 embark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of 
 men and the masses of material, and all the time there 
 are thousands of troops passing 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, tim- 
 ber, rations, fodder, coal, coke, 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 gbod illustration 
 
xxii PREFACE 
 
 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 balls 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 vehi- 
 cles, and in round figures, one hundred thousand sepa- 
 rate 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 Associa- 
 tion hut, at which five himdred 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 coun- 
 try 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 
 
PREFACE xxiii 
 
 the train to take the soldiers oflf for the fighting line, 
 and the women, left behind, set up the song, already- 
 familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home fires burn- 
 ing 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 in- 
 stant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mys- 
 teries 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 
 
xxiv PREFACE 
 
 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 every- 
 thing 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 thou- 
 sand 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 hos- 
 pitals 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 ambu- 
 
PREFACE XXV 
 
 lance 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 guna 
 were thundering away behind us, and the road was 
 more and more broken up by shell holes." The British 
 lines are just beyond, cottages close by, and the German 
 Hues just in front of a wood near them, three-quarters 
 of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than 
 any woman, even a niurse, had been in this war, to the 
 actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of im- 
 pressions was full. They actually saw the brave boys 
 whom they had passed 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 dose by them all the time. 
 The firing being too hot for the women, the capt^un 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 
 
xxvi PREFACE 
 
 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 Canal 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 Gennan 
 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 wit- 
 ness 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 shells burst. The German lines are right in sight, 
 and soon their shells 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 
 shells, 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; 
 
PREFACE xxvii 
 
 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 aUies, a colossal por- 
 tion of her income; that she has spent at the yearly rate 
 of three thousand million dollars on the army, a thousand 
 milUon dollars on the navy, while the mimition depart- 
 ment 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 mo- 
 ment greater than it was in the corresponding months 
 of 1913; she has raised an army of four miUions 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 noblest pedi- 
 gree, without number, by their Uves and deaths have 
 attested their right to be regarded as the flower of the 
 British youth; the professional classes and the unlverr 
 
xxviii PREFACE 
 
 sities have emptied their halls so that the men of Oxford 
 and Cambridge might take their places with the rest, 
 and ofifer 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 
 noble verse fits them: 
 
 "So nigh is grandeur to our dust. 
 So near is God to man. 
 When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' 
 The youth replies, *I can !'" 
 
 No one who reads this book can doubt for a moment, 
 I think, that ENGLAND HAS DONE ALL SHE 
 COULD, has put forth efforts worthy of her history 
 and of her great traditions, that her national spirit, is 
 invincible, her national resources inexhaustible, and that 
 her irresistible will to conquer and to rescue freedom 
 and civilization for all the world from this terrible con- 
 test, is absolutely sure to win. 
 
 All America is vastly indebted to Mrs. Ward for her 
 triumphant success in proving that England has done 
 her best and for making this great story so clear. 
 
PREFACE xxlx 
 
 In this introduction, too hastily prepared for want of 
 time, which b really little better than a synopsis of the 
 book itself, I have not hesitated to use her own lan- 
 guage from beginning to end, as the clearest by which 
 to express and condense her narrative, and with oc- 
 casional indications by quotation marks. 
 
 I still believe absolutely that nine-tenths of my coun- 
 trymen are in earnest sympathy with the Allies and are 
 confident of their final and complete success. 
 
 Joseph H. Cboatb. 
 
 New Yobk, May 19tli, 1916. 
 
Author's Foreword 
 
 This little book was the outcome of an urgent call from 
 America sent by various friends whose whole sympathy 
 is with the Allies. I have done my best to meet it, in 
 four strenuous months, during which the British Gov- 
 ernment has given me every possible facility. But such 
 work has to be done rapidly, and despatched rapidly. 
 I beg my friends, and England's friends, beyond the 
 Atlantic, to excuse its defects. I can honestly say, 
 however, that I have done my best to get at the facts, 
 and that everything which is here put forward rests 
 upon independent enquiry, so far as the limit of time 
 
 allowed. 
 
 Maby a. YfiBO. 
 May i. 1918. 
 
England's Effort 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 I 
 
 Dear H. 
 
 Your letter has found me in the midst of 
 work quite unconnected with this hideous war 
 in which for the last eighteen months we in 
 England have lived and moved and had our 
 being. My literary profession, indeed, has 
 been to me, as to others, since August 4th, 
 1914, something to be interposed for a short 
 time, day by day, between a mind tormented 
 and obsessed by the spectacle of war and the 
 terrible reality it could not otherwise forget. 
 To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a 
 whUe in memories of life as it was long, long 
 before the war — ^there ivas refreshment and re- 
 newal in that! Once — last spring — ^I tried to 
 base a novel on a striking war incident which 
 had come my way. Impossible! The zest 
 and pleastire which for any story-teller goes 
 with the first shapiug of a story died away at 
 the very beginning. For the day's respite had 
 
 3 
 
4 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 gone. The little "wind-warm" space had dis- 
 appeared. Life and thought were all given up, 
 without mercy or relief, to the fever sind night- 
 mare of the war. I fell back upon my early 
 recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago 
 — and it was like rain in the desert. So that, 
 in the course of months it had become a habit 
 with me never to write about the war; and 
 outside the hours of writing to think and talk 
 of nothing else. 
 
 But your letter suddenly roused in me a de- 
 sire to write about the war. It was partly I 
 think because what you wrote summed up and 
 drove home other criticisms and appeals of 
 the same kind. I had been putting them me- 
 chanically aside as not having any special 
 reference to me; but in reahty they had 
 haunted me. And now you make a personal 
 appeal. You say that England at the present 
 moment is misunderstood, and even hardly 
 judged in America, and that even those great 
 newspapers of yours that are most friendly to 
 the Allies are often melancholy reading for 
 those with English sympathies. Our mistakes 
 — ^real and supposed — loom so large. We are 
 thought to be not taking the war seriously — 
 even now. Drunkenness, strikes, difficulties in 
 recruiting the new armies, the losses of the 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 5 
 
 Dardanelles expedition, the failure to save 
 Serbia and Montenegro, tales of luxurious ex- 
 penditure in the private life of rich and poor, 
 and of waste or incompetence in military ad- 
 ministration — ^these are made much of, even 
 by our friends, who grievej while our enemies 
 mock. You say the French case has been on 
 the whole much better presented in America 
 than the English case; and you compare the 
 international situation with those months in 
 1863 when it was necessary for the Lincoln 
 Government to make strenuous efforts to in- 
 fluence and affect English opinion, which in 
 the case of our upper classes and too many of 
 our leading men was unfavourable or sceptical 
 towards the North. You who know something 
 of the vastness of the Enghsh effort — you 
 urge upon me that English writers whose work 
 and names are familiar to the American public 
 are bound to speak for their country, bound to 
 try and make Americans feel what we here feel 
 through every nerve — ^that cumulative force of 
 a great nation, which has been slow to rouse, 
 and is now immovably — ^irrevocably — set upon 
 its purpose. "Tell me," you say in effect, 
 "what in your belief is the real spirit of your 
 people — of your men in the field and at sea, 
 of your workmen and employers at home, your 
 
4 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 gone. The little "wind-warm" space had dis- 
 appeared. Life and thought were all given up, 
 without mercy or relief, to the fever and night- 
 mare of the war. I fell back upon my early 
 recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago 
 — ^and it was like rain in the desert. So that, 
 in the course of months it had become a habit 
 with me never to vmte about the war; and 
 outside the hours of writing to think and talk 
 of nothing else. 
 
 But your letter suddenly roused in me a de- 
 sire to write about the war. It was partly I 
 think because what you wrote summed up and 
 drove home other criticisms and appeals of 
 the same kind. I had been putting them me- 
 chanically aside as not having any special 
 reference to me; but in reahty they had 
 haunted me. And now you make a personal 
 appeal. You say that England at the present 
 moment is misunderstood, and even hardly 
 judged in America, and that even those great 
 newspapers of yours that are most friendly to 
 the AUies are often melancholy reading for 
 those with English sympathies. Our mistakes 
 — ^real and supposed — loom so large. We are 
 thought to be not taking the war seriously — 
 even now. Drimkenness, strikes, difficulties in 
 recruiting the new armies, the losses of the 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 5 
 
 Dardanelles expedition, the failure to save 
 Serbia and Montenegro, tales of luxurious ex- 
 penditure in the private life of rich and poor, 
 and of waste or incompetence in military ad- 
 ministration — these are made much of, even 
 by our friends, who grievej while our enemies 
 mock. You say the French case has been on 
 the whole much better presented in America 
 than the English case; and you compare the 
 international situation with those months in 
 1863 when it was necessary for the Lincoln 
 Government to make strenuous efforts to in- 
 fluence and afifect EngUsh opinion, which in 
 the case of our upper classes and too many of 
 our leading men was unfavourable or sceptical 
 towards the North. You who know something 
 of the vastness of the EngUsh effort — you 
 urge upon me that English writers whose work 
 and names are famiUar to the American public 
 are bound to speak for their country, bound to 
 try and make Americans feel what we here feel 
 through every nerve — ^that cumulative force of 
 a great nation, which has been slow to rouse, 
 and is now immovably — ^irrevocably — set upon 
 its purpose. "Tell me," you say in effect, 
 "what in your belief is the real spirit of your 
 people — of your men in the field and at sea, 
 of your workmen and employers at home, your 
 
6 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 women, your factory workers, your soldiers' 
 wives, your women of the richer and educated 
 classes, your landowners and poUticians. Are 
 you yet fully awake — ^yet fully in earnest, in 
 this crisis of England's fate? 'Weary Titan' 
 that she is, with her age-long history behind 
 her, and her vast responsibilities by sea and 
 land, is she shouldering her load in this in- 
 credible war, as she must shoulder it; as her 
 friends — ^the friends of liberty throughout the 
 world — ^pray that she may shoulder it?" 
 
 Yes! — ^I must answer your questions — ^to 
 the best of my power. I am no practised jour- 
 naUst — ^the days of my last articles for The 
 Pall Mall under the "John Morley" of those 
 days are thirty odd years behind me ! But I 
 have some qualifications. Ever since — more 
 than half a century ago — ^I paid my first child- 
 ish visit to the House of Commons, and heard 
 Mr. Roebuck, the "Tear 'em" of Punch* s car- 
 toon, make his violent appeal to the English 
 Government to recognise the belligerency of 
 the South, it would be almost true to say that 
 politics and affairs have been no less interest- 
 ing to me than literature; and next to English 
 politics, American politics and American opin- 
 ion; partly because of my early association 
 with men like W. E. Forster, stanch believers. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 7 
 
 even when Gladstone and John Russell wa- 
 vered, in the greatness of the American future 
 and the justice of the Northern cause — and 
 partly because of the warm and deep impres- 
 sion left upon me and mine by your successive 
 Ambassadors in London, by Mr. Lowell above 
 all, by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John 
 Hays, the Choates and the Bayards — no less 
 than by the many intimate friendships with 
 Americans from different worlds which my 
 books have brought me since 1888. During 
 the last thirty years, also, I have had many 
 friends — ^and some kinsmen — among the lead- 
 ers of EngUsh politics, and in both political 
 parties. At the present moment my only son 
 is a member of the English House of Commons, 
 and a soldier fighting in the war. AU my 
 younger kinsfolk are fighting; the sons of all 
 my friends are fighting; and their daughters 
 are ntirsing as members of Voluntary Aid De- 
 tachments — (marvellous what the girl V. A. 
 D.'s, as England affectionately calls them, have 
 done since the beginning of the war !) — or work- 
 ing week-end shifts to relieve mimition work- 
 ers, or replacing men of mihtary age in the pub- 
 lic offices and banks. I live in one of the Home 
 Counties, within five miles of one of the military 
 camps. The small towns near us are crowded 
 
8 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 with soldiers; the roads are full of marching in- 
 fantry, of artillery-trains and supply-wagons. 
 Our village has sent practically all its able-bodied 
 men of military age to the front; the few that 
 remain are "attested" and only waiting to be 
 called up. A great movement, in which this 
 household is engaged, is now beginning to put 
 women on the land, and so replace the agricul- 
 tural labourers who have gone either into the 
 armies or the munition factories. And meanwhile 
 all the elderly men and women of the country- 
 side are sitting on War Committees, or working 
 for the Red Cross. Our lives are penetrated by 
 the war; our thoughts are never free from it. 
 But in trying to answer your questions I 
 have gone far beyond my own normal experi- 
 ence. I asked the English Government to give 
 me some special opportunities of seeing what 
 Great Britain is doing in the war, and in mat- 
 ters connected with the war, and they have 
 given them ungrudgingly. I have been allowed 
 to go, through the snow-storms of this bitter 
 winter, to the far north and visit the Fleet, in 
 those distant waters where it keeps guard 
 night and day over England. I have spent 
 some weeks in the Midlands and the north 
 watching the vast new activity of the Ministry 
 of Munitions throughout the country; and fin- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 9 
 
 ally in a motor tour of some five hundred miles 
 through the zone of the English armies in 
 France, I have been a spectator not only of 
 that marvellous organisation in northwestern 
 France, of supplies, reinforcements, training 
 camps and hospitals, which England has built 
 up in the course of eighteen months behind 
 her fighting line, but I have been — on the first 
 of two days — ^within less than a mile of the 
 fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a 
 Flemish hill — ^with a gas helmet close at hand ! 
 I have been able to watch a German counter- 
 attack, after a successful English advance, 
 and have seen the guns flashing from the Eng- 
 lish lines, and the shell-bursts on the German 
 trenches along the Messines ridge; while in 
 the far distance, a black and jagged ghost, the 
 tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fit- 
 fully through the mists — ^bearing mute wit- 
 ness before God and man. 
 
 For a woman — a marvellous experience! I 
 hope later on in these letters to describe some 
 of its details, and some of the thoughts awak- 
 ened by them in a woman's mind. But let 
 me here keep to the main point raised by 
 your question — the effort of England. During 
 these two months of strenuous looking and 
 thinking, of conversation with soldiers and 
 
10 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 sailors and munition workers, of long days 
 spent in the great supply bases across the 
 Channel, or of motoring through the snowy 
 roads of Normandy and Picardy, I have natu- 
 rally realised that eflFort far more vividly than 
 ever before. It seems to me — ^it must seem to 
 any one who has seriously attempted to gauge 
 it — ^amazing, colossal. "What coimtry has 
 ever raised over sixty per cent of its total re- 
 cruitable strength, for service beyond the seas 
 in a few months?" asks one of our younger 
 historians; and that a country not invaded, 
 protected by the sea, and by a supreme fleet; 
 a country, moreover, without any form of 
 compulsory military service, in which soldier- 
 ing and the soldier have been rather unpopu- 
 lar than popular, a coimtry in love with peace, 
 and with no intention or expectation of going 
 to war with any one ? 
 
 n 
 
 For there we come to the root of everything 
 — the unpreparedness of England — ^and what 
 it meant. It meant simply that as a nation 
 we never wished for war with Germany, and, 
 as a nation, we never expected it. Our Gov- 
 ernments, of course, contained men who saw 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 11 
 
 more or less plainly the dangers ahead, and had 
 spent years of effort in trying to avoid them. 
 On several occasions, during the last twenty 
 years, as we all remember, a wave of sudden 
 anxiety as to German aims and intentions had 
 spread through the thinking portion of the 
 nation — in connection with South Africa, with 
 Morocco, with the Balkans. But it had always 
 died away again. We know now that Germany 
 was not yet ready ! Meanwhile fruitless efforts 
 were made by successive English Governments 
 to limit armaments, to promote arbitration, 
 and extend the scope of the Hague Tribunal. 
 In vain. Germany would have none of them. 
 Year by year, in a world of peace her battle- 
 navy grew. "For what can it be intended but 
 to attack England?" said the alarmist. But 
 how few of us believed them ! Our Tariff Re- 
 formers protested against the encroachments 
 of German trade; but, outside a handful of 
 persons who seemed to most of us fanatics, the 
 emphasis lay always on care for our own peo- 
 ple, and not on hostility to Germany. Those 
 who warned us passionately that Germany 
 meant to provoke a struggle, that the struggle 
 must come, were very Uttle heeded. Nobody 
 slept the worse at night for their harangues. 
 Lord Roberts's agitation for National Service, 
 based on the portentous growth of the German 
 
12 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 Army and Navy, made comparatively little 
 way. I speak from personal experience of a 
 large Parliamentary division. "Did you fore- 
 see it?" I said to one of tlie ablest and most 
 rising men in the Navy a fortnight ago. He 
 thought a little. "I always felt there might 
 be a clash over some colonial question — a. quar- 
 rel about black men. But a war between the 
 white nations over a European question — that 
 Germany would force such a war — ^no, that I 
 never believed!" Nor did any of us — except 
 those few — ^those very few persons, who Cas- 
 sandra-like, saw the coming horror plainly, 
 and spoke to a deaf country. 
 
 "There was no hatred of Germany in this 
 country " — I quote a Cabinet Minister. " Even 
 [in those parts of the country which had most 
 reason to feel the trade rivalry of Germany, 
 there was no thought of war, no wish for war !" 
 It came upon England like one of those sud- 
 den spates through mountain clefts in spring, 
 that fall with havoc on the plains beneath. 
 After such days of wrestling for European 
 peace as have left their indelible mark upon 
 every member of the English Cabinet which 
 declared war on August 4th, 1914, we fought 
 because we must, because, in Luther's words, 
 we "could no other." 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 13 
 
 What is the proof of this — the proof which 
 history will accept as final — ^against the vain 
 and lying pleas of Germany? 
 
 Nothing less than the whole history of the 
 past eighteen months! — ^beginning with that 
 initial lack of realisation, and those harassing 
 difficulties of organisation with which we are 
 now so often and so ignorantly reproached. 
 At the word "Belgium" on August 4th, prac- 
 tically the whole English nation fell into line. 
 We felt no doubts — we knew what we had to 
 do. But the problem was how to do it. Out- 
 side the Navy and the Expeditionary Force, 
 both of them ready to the last gun and button, 
 we had neither men nor equipment equal to 
 the fighting of a Continental war, and we knew 
 it. The fact is more than our justification — 
 it is our glory. If we had meant war, as Ger- 
 many still hoarsely but more faintly says, 
 week after week, to a world that Kstens no 
 longer, could any nation of sane men have be- 
 haved as we did in the years before the war? 
 — 233,000 men on active service — and 263,000 
 Territorials, against Germany's millions ! — ^with 
 arsenals and equipment to match. Is it any 
 wonder that the country — our untouched, imin- 
 vaded country — safe as it believed itself to be 
 under the protection of its invincible Navy, 
 
14 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 was, in some sections of our population at any 
 rate, slow to realise the enormous task to 
 which — ^for the faith of treaties' sake, for self- 
 defence's sake, it was committed? 
 
 And yet — ^was it after all so slow? The 
 day after war was declared the Prime Min- 
 ister asked Parliament to authorise the ad- 
 dition of half a million of men to the Army, 
 and a first war credit of a hundred millions of 
 money (five hundred milUon dollars). The 
 first hundred thousand men came rolling up 
 into the great military centres within a few 
 days. By September 4th nearly three hundred 
 thousand fresh men had enlisted — ^by Christ- 
 mas half a million. By May, a miUion men 
 had been added to the new Armies; by Sep- 
 tember, 1915, Sir John French alone had under 
 his command close on a million men on the 
 lines in France and Flanders, and in December, 
 1915, the addition of another million men to 
 the Army was voted by Parliament, bringing 
 up the British military strength to approxi- 
 mately four millions, excluding Colonials. And 
 what of the Dominions ? By November, 1915, 
 Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces 
 more than equal to the whole of that original 
 Expeditionary Force, that "contemptible little 
 army" which, broken and strained as it was 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 15 
 
 by the sheer weight and fierceness of the Ger- 
 man advance, yet held the gates of the Chan- 
 nel till England could fling her fresh troops 
 into the field, and France — admirable France ! 
 — had recovered from the first onslaught of 
 her terrible and ruthless enemy. 
 
 In one of my later letters I hope to give some 
 particulars of this first rush of men, gathered 
 from those who witnessed it and took part in it. 
 One remarkable point in connection with it is 
 that those districts most heavily employed in 
 munition-making and coal-mining, the two in- 
 dustries absolutely indispensable to our Army 
 and Navy, have also sent the largest supply of 
 men to the fighting line — ^take, for instance, 
 Newcastle and the Clyde. There have been 
 anxious episodes, of course, in the great de- 
 velopment. Was your own vast levy in the 
 Civil War without them? And for the last 
 half million men, we have had to resort, as 
 Lincoln resorted, to a modified form of com- 
 pulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of 
 unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first 
 camp and billeting organisation of the enor- 
 mous forces raised. But when all is said, did 
 we not, in the language of a French observer 
 "improvise the impossible"? — ^and have we 
 not good reason to be proud? — ^not with any 
 
16 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 foolish vainglory, but with the sober and res- 
 olute pride of a great nation, conscious of its 
 past, determined to correct its mistakes, and 
 looking open-eyed and fearless towards the 
 future ? 
 
 Then as to munitions: in many ways, as 
 you will perhaps say, and as I agree, a tragic 
 story. If we had possessed last spring the 
 ammunition — ^both for ourselves and our allies 
 we now possess, the war would have gone dif- 
 ferently. Drunkenness, trade-imion difficul- 
 ties, a small — very small — ^revolutionary ele- 
 ment among our work people — ^all these have 
 made trouble. But the real cause of our 
 shortage lay in the fact that no one, outside 
 Germany, realised till far into the war, what 
 the ammunition needs — the absolutely im- 
 precedented needs — of this struggle were going 
 to be. It was the second Battle of Ypres at 
 the end of April last year which burnt them 
 into the English mind. We paid for the 
 grim knowledge in thousands of our noblest 
 lives. But since then ? 
 
 In a later letter I propose to draw some pic- 
 ture in detail of the really marvellous move- 
 ment which since last July, under the impulse 
 given by Mr. Lloyd George, has covered Eng- 
 land with new munition factories and added 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 17 
 
 enormously to the producing power of the old 
 and famous firms, has drawn in an army of 
 women — ^now reckoned at something over a 
 quarter of a million — ^and is at this moment 
 not only providing amply for our own armies, 
 but is helping those of the Allies against those 
 final days of settlement with Germany which 
 we beHeve to be now steadily approaching. 
 American industry and enterprise have helped 
 us substantially in this field of munitions. We 
 are gratefully conscious of it. But England 
 is now fast overtaking her own needs. 
 
 More of this presently. Meanwhile to the 
 military and equipment effort of the country, 
 you have to add the financial effort — some- 
 thing hke $7,500,000,000, already expended 
 on the war; the organising effort, exemplified 
 in the wonderful "back of the army" in 
 France, which I hope to describe to you; and 
 the vast hospital system, with all its sci- 
 entific adjimcts, and its constantly advancing 
 eflSciency. 
 
 And at the foundation of it all — ^the human 
 and personal effort ! — the hves given for Eng- 
 land, the blood so generously shed for her, the 
 homes that have sacrificed their all, our 
 "golden lads" from all quarters and classes, 
 whose young bodies lie mingled with an ahen 
 
18 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 dust that "is for ever England," since they 
 sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who 
 mourn the death or the wreck of the splen- 
 did sons they reared; our widowed wives and 
 fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel 
 which only very slowly our people have come 
 to feel as in very deed their own. At first we 
 thought most often and most vividly of Bel- 
 gium, of the broken treaty, and of France, so 
 wantonly attacked, whose people no English 
 man or woman could ever have looked in the 
 face again, had we forsaken her. Then came 
 the hammer blows that forged our will — ^Lou- 
 vain, Aerschot, Rheims, the air-raids on our 
 defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our 
 women and children, the Biyce report, the 
 Lusitania, the execution of Edith Cavell — ^the 
 whole stupefying revelation of the German 
 hatred and greed towards this country, and of 
 the qualities latent in the German character. 
 Now we know — that it is they, or we — since 
 they willed it so. And this old, illogical, un- 
 ready country is only just arriving at its fuU 
 strength, only just fully conscious of the stern- 
 ness of its own resolve, only just putting out 
 its full powers, as the German power is weak- 
 ening, and the omens are changing — ^both in 
 East and West. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 19 
 
 ni 
 
 No ! — ^the effort of England during the past 
 eighteen months in spite of all temporary ebbs 
 and difficulties, in spite of that chorus of self- 
 blame in which the English nation delights, 
 has been one of the great things in the histoiy 
 of our country. We have "improvised the 
 impossible" in every direction — but one. 
 
 In one point, indeed, there has been no im- 
 provisation. Nothing was trusted to chance. 
 What is it that alone has secured us the time 
 to make the effort we have made ? 
 
 It is now about a month ago that, by per- 
 mission of the Admiralty, I found myself 
 driving towards a certain pier in a harbour 
 opening on the North Sea. The Coromodore 
 of a Cruiser Squadron was to send his boat 
 for me, and I was to lunch with him on board 
 his Flag-ship. I duly passed the distrustful 
 sentry on the road leading to the pier, arrived 
 at the pier-head and descended from the mo- 
 tor which had brought me. The morning was 
 mistily sunny, and the pier strangely deserted. 
 Where was the boat.? Where was my friend 
 who had hoped to come for me himself? No 
 signs of either. The few old sailors employed 
 about the pier looked at me in astonishment. 
 
20 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 and shook their heads when I inquired. Com- 
 modore 's boat was not there; no boat 
 
 had been in that morning from the ships. I 
 took the Commodore's letter from my hand- 
 bag, to assure myself I had not been dream- 
 ing, and reread it in perplexity. No dates 
 could be clearer — no directions more precise. 
 Suddenly I perceive one tall naval ofl&cer on 
 the pier. "Can you help me, sir?" And I 
 hand him the Commodore's letter. He looks 
 at me — and at the letter. His face twinkles 
 with repressed laughter; and I laugh, too, 
 beginning to understand. "Very sorry," says 
 the charming young man, "but I think I can 
 assure you there will be no boat, and it Is no 
 
 use your waiting. Commodore went to 
 
 sea last night." 
 
 I thanked him, and we laughed together. 
 Then I walked up the pier a httle way, seeing 
 a movement in the mist. A sailor came up to 
 me. "They all went to sea last night," he said 
 in my ear — "and there are the slow ones com- 
 ing back!" And out of the mist came the 
 black shapes of war-ships, moving majesti- 
 cally up the harbour — one might have fancied, 
 with a kind of injured dignity, because their 
 unreasonable fellows had been faster and had 
 gone farther afield t^ian they. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 21 
 
 I walked back to my motor, disappointed 
 indeed, and yet exulting. It was good to real- 
 ise personally through this small incident, the 
 mobihty and ever-readiness of the Fleet — the 
 absolute insignificance — ^non-existence even — 
 of any civilian or shore interest, for the Navy 
 at its work. It was not till a week later that 
 I received an amusing and mysterious line 
 
 from Commodore , the most courteous 
 
 of men. 
 
 IV 
 
 By the time it reached me, however, I was 
 on the shores of a harbour in the far north 
 "visiting the Fleet," indeed, and on the invi- 
 tation of England's most famous sailor. Let 
 me be quite modest about it. Not for me the 
 rough waters, or the thunderous gun-prac- 
 tice — 
 
 "BreaMng the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides" — 
 
 which I see described in the letters of the Rus- 
 sian or American joumaHsts who have been 
 allowed to visit the Grand Fleet. There had 
 been some talk, I understand, of sending me 
 out in a destroyer; it was mercifully aban- 
 doned. All the same, I must firmly put on 
 
22 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 record that mine was "a visit to the Fleet," by 
 Admiralty permission, for the purpose of these 
 letters to you, and through you to the American 
 public, and that I seem to have been so far the 
 only woman who, for newspaper ends, has been 
 allowed to penetrate those mysterious northern 
 limits where I spent two wonderful days. 
 
 It was, indeed, a wintry visit. The whole 
 land was covered with snow. The train could 
 hardly drag itself through the choked High- 
 land defiles; and it was hours behind its time 
 when we arrived at a long-expected station, 
 and a Vice-Admiral looking at me with friendly, 
 keen eyes came to the carriage to greet me. 
 *'My boat shall meet you at the pier with 
 my Flag-Lieutenant to-morrow morning. You 
 will pick me up at the Flag-ship, and I will 
 take you roimd the Fleet. You will limch 
 with me, I hope, afterwards." I tried to show 
 my grateful sense both of the interest and the 
 humour of the situation. My kind visitor dis- 
 appeared, and the train carried me on a few 
 miles farther to my destination for the night. 
 
 And here I take a few words from a journal 
 written at the time: 
 
 It b nearly dawn. A red light in the northeast is coming 
 up over the snowy hills. The water, steely grey — the tide 
 rising. What strange moving bodies are those, scudding along 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 23 
 
 over the dim surface, like the ghosts of sea planes? Dense 
 flocks of duck apparently, rising and falling along the shal- 
 lows of the shore. Now they are gone. Nothing moves. The 
 morning is calm, and the water still. And on it lie, first a 
 cruiser squadron, and then a line of Dreadnoughts stretching 
 out of sight. No Ughta anywhere, except the green lights on 
 a hospital ship far away. The great ships lie dark and silent, 
 and I sit and watch them, in the cold dawn, thinking that but 
 for them, and the multitude of their comrades that guard these 
 seas and shores, England would be as Belgium or as Northern 
 Prance, ravaged and destroyed by a barbarian enemy. My 
 heart goes out to you, great ships, and you, gallant unwearied 
 men, who keep your watch upon them ! That watch has been 
 kept for generations. Never has there been such need for it 
 as now. ... I 
 
 But the day has risen, and the sun with it. 
 As I leave the shore in the Vice-Admiral's 
 boat, the sunlight comes dancing over a low 
 line of hill, lighting up the harbour, the mighty 
 ships, with their guns, and, scattered out to 
 sea along the distance, the destroyers, the 
 trawlers, the mine-sweepers, the small auxil- 
 iary craft of all kinds — those "fringes of the 
 fleet" — ^which Kipling has caught and photo- 
 graphed as none but he can. 
 
 The barge stops beside the Flag-ship, and the 
 Admiral descends into it. What is the stamp, 
 the peculiar stamp that these naval men 
 bear? — ^as of a force trained and disciplined 
 to its utmost capacity, and then held lightly 
 
24 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 in check — till wanted. You see it in so many 
 of their faces, even in eyes hollow for want of 
 sleep. It is always there — ^the same stren^h, 
 the same self-control, the same humanitr. Is 
 it produced by the testing weight of res^onsi- 
 bihty, the silent sense of ever-present danger, 
 both from the forces of nature and the enmity 
 of man, the high, scientific training, and last 
 but not least, that marvellous comradeship of 
 the Navy, whether between officer and officer, 
 or between officers and men, which is con- 
 stantly present indeed in the Army, but is 
 necessarily closer and more intimate here, in 
 the confined world of the ship, where all live 
 together day after day, and week after week, 
 and where — ^if disaster comes — all may perish 
 together ? 
 
 But on this bright winter morning, as we 
 pass under and round the ships, and the Ad- 
 miral points out what a landswoman can 
 understand, in the equipment and the power 
 of these famous monsters with their pointing 
 guns, there was for the moment no thought 
 of the perils of the Navy, but only of the glory 
 of it. And afterwards in the Admiral's pleas- 
 ant drawing-room on board the Flag-ship, with 
 its gathering of naval officers, Admirals, Cap- 
 tains, Commanders, how good the talk was! 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 25 
 
 Not a shade of boasting — ^no mere abuse of 
 Germany — ^rather a quiet regret for the days 
 when German and EngUsh naval men were 
 friends throughout the harbours of the world. 
 "Von Spee was a very good fellow — ^I knew 
 him well — ^and his two sons who went down 
 with him," says an Admiral gently. "I was 
 at Kiel the month before the war. I hnow 
 that many of their men must loathe the work 
 they are set to do." "The point is," says a 
 younger man, broad-shouldered, with the 
 strong face of a leader, "that they are always 
 fouling the seas, and we are always cleaning 
 them up. Let the neutrals understand that! 
 It is not we who strew the open waters with 
 mines for the slaughter of any passing ship, 
 and then call it 'maintaining the freedom of 
 the seas.' And as to their general strategy, 
 their Higher Command — " he throws back his 
 head with a quiet laugh — ^and I listen to a 
 rapid sketch of what the Germans might have 
 done, have never done, and what it is now 
 much too late to do, which I will not re- 
 peat. 
 
 Type after type comes back to me: — ^the 
 courteous Flag-Lieutenant, who is always 
 looking after his Admiral, whether in these 
 brief harbour rests, or in the clash and dark- 
 
26 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 ness of the high seas — ^the Lieutenant-Com- 
 manders whose destroyers are the watch-dogs, 
 the ceaseless protectors, no less than the eyes 
 and ears of the Fleet — ^the Flag-Captain, who 
 takes me through the great ship, with his 
 vigilant, spare face, and his understanding, 
 kindly talk about his men; many of whom 
 on this Thursday afternoon — ^the quasi half- 
 holiday of the Fleet when in harbour — ^are 
 snatching an hour's sleep when and where 
 they can. That sleep-abstinence of the Navy 
 —sleep, controlled, measured out, reduced to 
 a bare minimum, among thousands of men, 
 that we on shore may sleep our fill — look at 
 the signs of it, in the eyes both of these oflS- 
 cers, and of the sailors crowding the "liberty" 
 boats, which are just bringing them back from 
 their short two hours' leave on shore! 
 
 Another gathering, in the Captain's room, 
 for tea. The talk turns on a certain popular 
 play deahng with naval life, and a Comman- 
 der describes how the manuscript of it had 
 been brought to him, and how he had revelled 
 in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. 
 Two men in the play — friends — agoing into 
 action — shake hands with each other "with 
 tears in their eyes." A shout of derisive laugh- 
 ter goes up from the tea-table. But they ad- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 27 
 
 mit "talking shop" off duty. "That's the 
 difference between us and the Army." And 
 what shop it is ! I listen to two young oflScers, 
 both commanding destroyers, describing — one, 
 his adventures in dirty weather the night be- 
 fore, on patrol duty. "My hat, I thought 
 one moment the ship was on the rocks ! You 
 couldn't see a yard for the snow — and the sea 
 — beastly I" The other had been on one of Ad- 
 miral Hood's monitors, when they suddenly 
 loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, 
 and the German army marching along the 
 coast road to Dunkirk and Calais marched no 
 more, but lay in broken fragments behind the 
 dunes, or any shelter available, till the flood- 
 ing of the dikes farther south completed the 
 hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns 
 had begim. 
 
 Then the talk ranges roimd the blockade, 
 the difficulties and dangers of patrol work, 
 the complaints of neutrals. "America should 
 understand us. Their blockade hit us hard 
 enough in the Civil War. And we are fight- 
 ing for their ideals no less than our own. 
 "When has our naval supremacy ever hurt 
 them? Mayn't they be glad of it some day? 
 What about a fellow called Monroe!" — ^so it 
 runs. Then its tone changes insensibly. From 
 
28 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 a few words dropped I realise with a start 
 where these pleasantly chatting men had 
 probably been only two or three days before, 
 where they would probably be again on the 
 morrow. Some one opens a map, and I listen 
 to talk which, in spite of its oflScial reticence, 
 throws many a Ught on the vast range of Eng- 
 land's naval power, and the number of her 
 ships. "Will they come out? When will they 
 come out ? " The question runs round the 
 group. Some one tells a story of a German 
 naval prisoner taken not long ago in the North 
 Sea, and_ of his remark to his captors: ."Yes, 
 we're beaten — we know that — ^but we'll make 
 it hell for you before we give in !" 
 
 For that final clash — that Armageddon that 
 all think must come, our sailors wait, not de- 
 spising their enemy, knowing very well that 
 they — ^the Fleet — ^are the pivot of the situa- 
 tion, that without the British Navy, not all 
 the valour of the Allies in France or Russia 
 could win the war, and that with it, Germany's 
 hope of victory is vain. While the Navy 
 lives, England lives, and Germany's vision of 
 a world governed by the' ruthless will of the 
 scientific soldier is doomed. 
 
 Meanwhile, what has Germany been doing 
 in her shipyards all this time? No one knows. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 29 
 
 but my hosts are well aware that we shall 
 know some day. 
 
 As to England — ^here is Mr. Balfour mov- 
 ing the Naval Estimates in the House of Com- 
 mons — the "token votes" which tell nothing 
 that should not be told. But since the war be- 
 gan, says the First Lord, we have added "one 
 milUon" to the tonnage of the Navy, and we 
 have doubled its 'personnel. We are add- 
 ing more every day; for the Admiralty are 
 always "wanting more.'* We are quite con- 
 scious of our defects — ^in the Air Service first 
 and foremost. But they will be supplied. 
 There is a mighty movement afoot in the work- 
 shops of England — an efifort which, when all 
 drawbacks are allowed for, has behind it a 
 free people's will. 
 
 In my next letter I propose to take you 
 through some of these workshops. "We get 
 the most extraordinary letters from Ameri- 
 ca," writes one of my correspondents, a steel 
 manufacturer in the Midlands. "What do 
 they think we are about.'*" An American let- 
 ter is quoted. "So you are still, in England, 
 taking the war lying down.'*" 
 
 Are we? Let us see. 
 
II 
 
 Dear H. 
 
 In this second letter I am to try and prove 
 to you that England is not taking the war 
 "lying down." 
 
 Let me then give you some accoimt — an 
 eye-witness's account — of- what there is now 
 to be seen by the ordinary intelligent observer 
 in the " Munition Areas," as the public has 
 learned to call them, of England and Scotland. 
 That great spectacle, as it exists to-day — so 
 inspiring in what it immediately suggests of 
 hmnan energy and human ingenuity, so ap- 
 palling in its wider implications — ^testifies, in 
 the first instance, to the fierce stiflEening of 
 England's resolve to win the war, and to win 
 it at a lessened cost in life and suffering to our 
 men in the field, which ran through the na- 
 tion, after the second Battle of Ypres, towards 
 the close of April, 1915. That battle, together 
 with the disagreement between Mr. Winston 
 Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty, 
 had, as we all know, momentous consequences. 
 The two events brought the national dissatis- 
 
 30 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT , 81 
 
 ^faction and disappointment with the general 
 course of the spring fighting to a head. By- 
 May 19 the Ministry which had declared the 
 war and so far conducted it, had disappeared; 
 a National or Coalition Ministry, drawn from 
 the leading men of both parties, reigned in its 
 stead. The statement made by Mr. Asquith, 
 as late, alack, as April 20th, 1915, that there 
 was "no truth in the statement" that our ef- 
 forts at the front "were being crippled or at any 
 rate hampered" by want of ammunition, was 
 seen almost immediately, in the bitter light of 
 events, to be due to some fatal misconceptions, 
 or misjudgments, on the part of those inform- 
 ing the Prime Minister, which the nation in its 
 own interests and those of its allies, could only 
 peremptorily sweep away. A new Ministry 
 was created — ^the Ministry of Mimitions, and 
 Mr. Lloyd George was placed at its head. 
 
 The work that Mr. Lloyd George and his 
 Ministry — ^now employing vast new buildings, 
 and a staff running into thousands — ^have 
 done since June, 1915, is nothing less than 
 colossal. Much no doubt had been done 
 earlier for which the new Ministry has perhaps 
 vmjustly got the credit, and not all has been 
 smooth sailing since. One hears, of course, 
 criticism and complaints. What vast and ef- 
 
32 ENGLAND'S EFFOKT 
 
 fective stir, for a great end, was ever made in 
 the world without them ? 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George has incm-red a certain 
 amount of unpopularity among the working 
 classes, who formerly adored him. In my 
 beUef he has incurred it for the country's sake, 
 and those sections of the working class who 
 have smarted under his criticisms most bitterly 
 will forgive him when the time comes. In his 
 passionate determination to get the thing done, 
 he has sometimes let his theme — of the national 
 need, and the insignificance of all things else 
 in comparison with it — carry him into a vehe- 
 mence which the workmen have resented, and 
 which foreign or neutral countries have mis- 
 , understood. 
 
 He found in his path, which was also the 
 nation's path, three great foes — drunkenness, 
 the old envenomed quarrel between employer 
 and employed, and that deep-rooted industrial 
 conservatism of England, which shows itself on 
 the one hand in the trade-union customs and 
 restrictions of the working class, built up, as 
 they hold, through long years, for the protec- 
 tion of their own standards of life, and, on the 
 other, in the slowness of many of the smaller 
 English employers (I am astonished, however, 
 at the notable exceptions everywhere!) to 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 33 
 
 realise new needs and processes, and to adapt 
 themselves to them. Could any one have 
 made such an omelet without breaking a great 
 many eggs? Is it wonderful that the (em- 
 ployers have sometimes felt themselves un- 
 bearably hustled, sometimes misunderstood, 
 and at other times annoyed, or worried by 
 what seems to them the red tape of the new 
 Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of 
 forms and inquiries? 
 
 Men accustomed to conduct their own busi- 
 nesses with the usual independence of regula- 
 tion have been obliged to submit to regulation. 
 Workmen accustomed to defend certain meth- 
 ods of work and certain customs of their trade 
 as matters of life and death have had to see 
 them jeopardised or swept away. The resto- 
 ration of these methods and customs is solemnly 
 promised them after the war; but meanwhile 
 they become the servants of a public depart- 
 ment almost as much under orders as the sol- 
 dier himself. They are asked to admit un- 
 skilled men to the skilled processes over which 
 they have long kept so jealous a guard; above 
 all, they are asked to assent wholesale to the 
 employment of women in trades where women 
 have never been employed before, where it is 
 obvious that their introduction taps an im- 
 
34 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 mense reservoir of new labour, and equally 
 obvious that, once let in, they are not going to 
 be easily or wholly dislodged. 
 
 Of course, there has been friction and diffi- 
 culty; nor is it all yet at an end. In the few 
 danger-spots of the country, where heads are 
 hottest, where thousands of the men of most 
 natural weight and influence are away fighting, 
 and where among a small minority hatred of 
 the capitahst deadens national feeUng and ob- 
 scures the national danger, there have been 
 anxious moments during the winter; there may 
 possibly be some anxious moments again. 
 
 But, after all, how Httle it amounts to in 
 comparison with the enormous achievement! 
 It took us nine months to reahse what France — 
 which, remember, is a Continental nation un- 
 der conscription — ^had realised after the Battle 
 of the Marne, when she set every hand in the 
 country to work at munitions that could be set 
 to work. With us, whose villages were un- 
 ravaged, whose normal life was untouched, 
 realisation was inevitably slower. Again we 
 were unprepared, and again, as in the case of 
 the Army itself, we may plead that we have 
 "improvised the impossible." "No nation," 
 says Mr. Buchan, "can be adequately prepared, 
 unless, like Germany, it intends war; and 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 35 
 
 Britain, like France, paid the penalty of her 
 honest desire for peace !" 
 
 Moreover, we had our Navy to work for, 
 without which the cause of the Allies would 
 have gone under, must have gone under, at the 
 first shock of Germany. "What the workmen 
 of England did in the first year of the war in 
 her docks and shipyards, history will tell some 
 day. 
 
 "What's wrong with the men!" cried a 
 Glasgow employer indignantly to me, one eve- 
 ning as, quite unknown the one to the other, 
 we were nearing one of the towns on the Clyde. 
 "What was done on the Clyde, in the first 
 months of the war, should never be forgotten 
 by this country. Working from six to nine 
 every day till they dropped with fatigue — and 
 Simdays, too — drinkiag just to keep them- 
 selves going — ^too tired to eat or sleep — ^that's 
 what it was — ^I saw it!" 
 
 I, too, have seen that utter fatigue stamped 
 on a certain percentage of faces through the 
 Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the 
 Clyde — ^fatigue which is yet indomitable, which 
 never gives way. How fresh, beside that look, 
 are the faces of the women, for whom workshop 
 life is new! In its presence one forgets all 
 hostile criticism, all talk of strikes and drink. 
 
36 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 of trade-union difficulties, and the endless wor- 
 ries of the employers. 
 
 The English workman is not tractable mate- 
 rial — ^far from it — ^and he is not imaginative; 
 except in the persons of some of his chosen 
 leaders, he has never seen a ruined French or 
 Flemish village, and he was slow to realise the 
 bitterness of that silence of the guns on the 
 front, when ammunition runs short, and lives 
 must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of 
 thousands to the fighting line; there are a 
 million and a half of him now working at muni- 
 tions, and it is he, in a comradeship with the 
 brain workers, the scientific intelligence of the 
 nation, closer than any he has yet known, and 
 lately, with the new and astonishing help of 
 women — ^it is he, after all, who is "delivering 
 the goods," he who is now piling the great 
 arsenals and private works with guns and 
 shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns, 
 he who is working night and day in the ship- 
 yards, he who is teaching the rising army of 
 women their work, and making new and firm 
 friends, through the national emergency, 
 whether in the trenches or the workshops, with 
 other classes and types in the nation, hitherto 
 little known to him, to whom he, too, is per- 
 haps a revelation. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 37 
 
 There will be a new wind blowing through 
 England when this war is done. Not only 
 will the scientific intelligence, the general edu- 
 cation, and the industrial plant of the nation 
 have gained enormously from this huge im- 
 petus of war; but men and women, employers 
 and employed, shaken perforce out of their 
 old grooves, will look at each other surely with 
 new eyes, in a world which has not been steeped 
 for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in common 
 griefs and a common passion of will.. 
 
 n 
 
 AUover England, then, the same quadruple 
 process has now been going on for months: 
 
 The steady enlargement of existing arma- 
 ment and munition works, national or private. 
 
 The transformation of a host of other engi- 
 neering businesses into munition works. 
 
 The co-ordination of a vast number of small 
 workshops dealing with the innumerable metal 
 industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make 
 them feed the larger engineering works, with 
 all those minor parts of the gun or shell, which 
 such shops had the power to make. 
 
 The putting up of entirely new workshops — 
 
38 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 National Workshops — directly controlled by 
 the new Ministry, under the Munitions Acts. 
 
 Let me take you through a few typical scenes. 
 
 It was on February 1st the day after the 
 Zeppelin raid of January 31st, that I left a 
 house in the north where I had been seeing one 
 of the country-house convalescent hospitals, to 
 which Enghshwomen and EngUsh wealth are 
 giving themselves everywhere without stint, 
 and made my way by train, through a dark and 
 murky afternoon, towards a Midland town. 
 The news of the raid was so far vague. The 
 newspapers of the morning gave no names or 
 details. I was not aware that I was passing 
 through towns where women and children in 
 back streets had been cruelly and wantonly 
 killed the night before, where a brewery had 
 been bombed, and the windows of a train 
 broken, in order that the German pubKc might 
 be fed on ridiculous lies about the destruction 
 of Liverpool dodks and the wrecking of "Eng- 
 hsh industry." "English industry lies in 
 ruins," said the Hamburger Nachrichten com- 
 placently. Marvellous paper ! Just after read- 
 ing its remarks, I was driving down the streets 
 (rf the great industrial centre I had come to see 
 — a town which the murderers of the night be- 
 fore would have been glad indeed to hit. As 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 39 
 
 it was, "English industry" seemed tolerably 
 active amid its "ruins." The clumsy false- 
 hoods of the German oflScial reports and the 
 German newspapers affect me strangely ! It 
 is not so much their lack of truth as their lack 
 of the ironic, the satiric sense, which is a cer- 
 tain protection, after all, even amid the trag- 
 edy of war. We have a tolerable British con- 
 ceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we 
 make foolish or boasting statements about the 
 future, because, in spite of all our grumbling, 
 we are at bottom a nation of optimists, and 
 apt to see things as we wish. But this sturdy 
 or fatuous lying about the past — the "sink- 
 ing" of the Lion, the "capture" of Fort Vaux, 
 or the "bombardment" of Liverpool docks — 
 is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if 
 nothing else, forbids — the instinct of an old 
 people with an old and humorous Hterature. 
 These leading articles of the Hamburger Nach- 
 richten, the sermons of German pastors, and 
 those amazing manifestoes of German pro- 
 fessors, flying straight in the face of historic 
 documents — "scraps of paper" — which are 
 there, none the less, to all time — ^for us, these 
 things are only not comic because, to the 
 spiritual eye, they are written in blood. But 
 to return to the "ruins," and this "English in- 
 
40 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 dustry" which during the last six months has 
 taken on so grim an aspect for Germany. 
 
 My guide, an oflScial of the Ministry, stops 
 the motor, and we turn down a newly made 
 road, leading towards a mass of spreading 
 building on the left. 
 
 "A year ago," says my companion — "this 
 was all green fields. Now the company is em- 
 ploying, instead of 3,500 work-people, about 
 three times the number, of whom a large pro- 
 portion are women. Its output has been 
 quadrupled, and the experiment of introduc- 
 ing women has been a complete success." 
 
 We pass up a fine oak staircase to the new 
 offices, and I am soon listening to the report 
 of the works superintendent. A spare, power- 
 ful man with the eyes of one in whom life 
 burns fast, he leans, his hands in his pockets, 
 against the wall of his office, talking easily 
 and well. He himself has not had a day's 
 holiday for ten months, never sleeping more 
 than five and a half hours, with the telephone 
 at his bedhead, and waking to instant work 
 when the moment for waking comes. His 
 view of his workmen is critical. It is the view 
 of one consumed with "realisation," face to 
 face with those who don't "realise." "But the 
 ^raid will do a deal of good," he says cheerfully. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 41 
 
 "As to the women!" — he throws up his 
 hands — "they're 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. At least, 
 that's what they'd like to do. The Govern- 
 ment are insisting on one Simday — or two Sun- 
 days — a month off. I don't say they're not 
 right. But the women resent it. 'IFe're not 
 tired!' they say. And you look at them! — 
 they're not tired. 
 
 "If I go down to the shed and say: 'Girls! 
 — ^there's a bit of work the Government are 
 pushing for — ^they say they must have — can 
 you get it done?' Why, they'll stay and get 
 it done, and then pour out of the works, laugh- 
 ing and singing. I can tell you of a surgical- 
 dressing factory near here, where for nearly a 
 year the women never had a holiday. They 
 simply wouldn't take one. 'And what'U our 
 men at the front do, if we go holiday-making ? ' 
 
 "Last night" (the night of the Zeppelin 
 raid) "the warning came to put out lights. We 
 daren't send them home. They sat in the dark 
 among the machines, singing, 'Keep the home 
 fires burning,' 'Tipperary,' and the like. I 
 tell you, it made one a bit choky to hear 
 them. They were thinking of their sweet- 
 
42 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 hearts and husbands I'll be bound! — not of 
 themselves." 
 
 In another minute or two we were walking 
 through the new workshops. Often as I have 
 now seen this sight, so new to England, of a 
 great engineering workshop filled with women, 
 it stirs me at the twentieth time Uttle less than 
 it did at first. These girls and women of the 
 Midlands and the north, are a yoimg and 
 comely race. Their slight or rounded figures 
 among the forest of machines, the fair or 
 golden hair of so many of them, their grace of 
 movement, bring a strange touch of beauty 
 into a scene which has already its own spell. 
 
 Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have 
 shown us what can be done in art with these 
 high workshops, with their intricate distances 
 and the endless crisscross of their belting, and 
 their ranged machines. But the coming in of 
 the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, 
 showing the many pretty heads and slender 
 necks, and the rows of light bending forms, 
 spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes 
 as far as the eye can reach, has added a new 
 element — something flower-like, to all this flash 
 of fire and steel, and to the grinmess of war 
 underlying it. 
 
 For the final meaning of it all is neither soft 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 43 
 
 nor feminine ! These girls — at hot haste — are 
 making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hun- 
 dred thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, 
 in the special danger-buildings, filling certain 
 parts of the fuse with explosive. There were 
 about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw 
 the shop, and their number has no doubt in- 
 creased since; for the latest figures show that 
 about 15,000 fresh women workers are going 
 into the munition works every week. The men 
 are steadily training them, and without the 
 teaching and co-operation of the men — ^with- 
 out, that is, the surrender by the men of some 
 of their most cherished trade customs — ^the 
 whole movement would have been impossi- 
 ble. 
 
 As it is, by the sheer body of work the 
 women have brought in, by the deftness, en- 
 ergy, and enthusiasm they throw into the sim- 
 pler but quite indispensable processes, thereby 
 setting the unskilled man free for the Army, 
 and the skilled man for work which women 
 cannot do. Great Britain has become possessed 
 of new and vast resources of which she scarcely 
 dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is 
 a war of machinery — and we all know what 
 Germany's arsenals have done to make it 
 so — its whole aspect is now changing for us. 
 
44 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 The "eternal feminine" has made one more 
 startling incursion upon the normal web of 
 things! 
 
 But on the "dilution" of labour, the burn- 
 ing question of the hour, I shall have some- 
 thing to say in my next letter. Let me record 
 another visit of the same day to a small-arms 
 factory of importance. Not many women 
 here so far, though the number is increasing, 
 but look at the expansion figures since last 
 summer! A large, new factory added, on a 
 bare field; 40,000 tons of excavation removed, 
 two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and 
 four floors high, the output in rifles quadru- 
 pled, and so on. 
 
 We cUmbed to the top floor of the new 
 buildings and looked far and wide over the 
 town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the 
 national flags, marking "controlled" factories, 
 i. e., factories still given over a year ago to one 
 or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of 
 the Midlands, and now making fuse or shell 
 for England's Armies, and under the control 
 of the British Government. One had a sud- 
 den sharp sense of the town's corporate life, 
 and of the spirit working in it everywhere for 
 England's victory. Before we descended, we 
 watched the testing of a particular gun. I was 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 45 
 
 to hear its note on the actual battle-field a 
 month later. 
 
 An afternoon train takes me on to another 
 great town, with some very ancient institu- 
 tions, which have done very modern service in 
 the war. I spent my evening in talking with 
 my host, a steel manufacturer identified with 
 the fife of the city, but serving also on one of 
 the central committees of the Ministry in 
 London. Labour and politics, the chances of 
 the war, America and American feehng to- 
 wards us, the task of the new Minister of 
 Mimitions, the temper of Enghsh and Scotch 
 workmen, the flux into which all manufactur- 
 ing conditions have been thrown by the war, 
 and how far old landmarks can be restored 
 after it — we talked hard on these and many 
 other topics, till I must break it off — unwill- 
 ingly! — to get some sleep and write some 
 notes. 
 
 Next day took me deep into the very cen- 
 tral current of "England's Effort" — so far as 
 this great phase of it at any rate is concerned. 
 In this town, even more than in the city I had 
 just left, one felt the throb of the nation's ris- 
 ing power, concentrated, orderly, determined. 
 Every single engineering business in a town of 
 engineers was working for the war. Every 
 
46 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 manufacturer of any importance was doing his 
 best for the Government, some in connection 
 with the new Ministry, some with the Ad- 
 miralty, some with the War Office. As for 
 the leading firms of the city, the record of 
 growth, of a mounting energy by day and 
 night, was nothing short of bewildering. Take 
 these few impressions of a long day, as they 
 come back to me. 
 
 First, a great steel warehouse, full of raw 
 steel of many sorts and kinds, bayonet steel, 
 rifle steel, shell steel, stacked in every avail- 
 able corner and against every possible wall — 
 all sold, every bit of it, and ready to be shipped 
 — ^some to the Colonies, some to our Allies, 
 with peremptory orders coming in as to which 
 the harassed head of the firm could only shake 
 his head with a despairing "impossible!" 
 
 Then some hours in a famous Works, vmder 
 the guidance of the managing director, one of 
 those men, shrewd, indefatigable, hmnane, in 
 whose company one learns what it is, in spite of 
 all our supposed deficiencies, that makes the 
 secret of England's industrial tenacity. An eld- 
 erly Scotchman, very plainly marked by the 
 labour and strain of the preceding eighteen 
 months, but still steadily keeping his head and 
 his temper, showing the signs of an Evangelical 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 47 
 
 tradition in his strong dislike for Sunday work, 
 his evident care for his work-people — ^men and 
 women — and his just and sympathetic tone 
 towards the labour with which he has to deal 
 — such is my companion. 
 
 He has a wonderful story to tell: "In Sep- 
 tember, 1914, we were called upon to manu- 
 facture a large extra number of field-gims. 
 We had neither buildings nor machinery for 
 the order. However, we set to work. We 
 took down seven dwelling-houses; in three 
 weeks we were whitewashing the walls of our 
 new workshop and laying in the machinery. 
 My idea was to make so many guns. The 
 Government asked for four times as many. 
 So we took down more houses, and built an- 
 other much larger shop. The work was fin- 
 ished in ten weeks. Five other large work- 
 shops were put up last year, all built with 
 hghtning speed, and everywhere additions have 
 been made to the machinery in every depart- 
 ment wherever it was possible to put ma- 
 chines." 
 
 As to their thousands of workmen, Mr. C. 
 has no complaints to make. 
 
 "They have been steadily working any- 
 thing from 60 to 80 hours per week; the aver- 
 age is 64.29 hours per week, and the average 
 
48 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 time lost only 3.51 per cent. A little while 
 ago, a certain union put forward a claim for 
 an advance in wages. We had to decline it, 
 but as the meeting came to an end, the trade- 
 union secretary said: 
 
 " *0f course, we are disappointed, and we 
 shall no doubt return to the matter again. 
 But whether you concede the advance of wages 
 or not, our members will continue to do their 
 level best, believing that they are not only 
 working for themselves, but helping the Gov- 
 ernment and helping our soldiers to wage this 
 war to a successful conclusion.' " 
 
 And the manager adds his belief that this is 
 the spirit which prevails "among the work- 
 people generally." 
 
 Before we plunge into the main works, 
 however, my guide takes me to see a recent 
 venture, organised since the war, in which he 
 clearly takes a special interest. An old ware- 
 house bought, so to speak, overnight, and 
 equipped next morning, has been turned into 
 a small workshop for shell production — employ- 
 ing between three and four hundred girls, with 
 the number of skilled men necessary to keep 
 the new unskilled labour going. These girls 
 are working on the eight hours' shift system; 
 and working so well that a not uncommon 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 49 
 
 wage among them — on piece-work, of course — 
 runs to somewhere between two and three 
 pounds a week. 
 
 "But there is much more than money in it," 
 says the kind-faced woman superintendent, as 
 we step into her little oflSce out of the noise, to 
 talk a little. "The girls are perfectly aware 
 that they are 'doing their bit,' that they are 
 standing by their men in the trenches." 
 
 This testimony indeed is universal. There 
 is patriotism in this grim work, and affection, 
 and a new and honourable self-consciousness. 
 Girls and women look up and smile as a visitor 
 passes. They presume that he or she is there 
 for some useful purpose connected with the 
 war, and their expression seems to say: "Yes, 
 we are all in it ! — ^we know very well what we 
 are doing, and what a difference we are mak- 
 ing. Go and tell our boys ..." 
 
 The interest of this workshop lay, of course, 
 in the fact that it was a sample of innumer- 
 able others, as quickly organised and as eflS- 
 ciently worked, now spreading over the Mid- 
 lands and the north. As to the main works 
 belonging to the same great firm, such things 
 have been often described; but one sees them 
 to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle 
 which is one with the very life of England. 
 
50 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 Acres and acres of ground covered by huge 
 workshops new and old, by interlacing railway 
 lines and moving trolleys. Gone is all the 
 vast miscellaneous engineering work of peace. 
 The war has swallowed everything. 
 
 I have a vision of a great building, where 
 huge naval guns are being lowered from the 
 anneaUng furnace above into the hardening 
 oil-tank below, or where in the depths of a 
 great pit, with Ughts and men moving at the 
 bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket 
 being shrunk upon another similar monster, 
 hanging perpendicularly below me. 
 
 Close by are the forging-shops whence come 
 the howitzers and the huge naval shells. 
 Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot 
 ingots and drop them into the stamping 
 presses. Man directs; but one might think 
 the tools themselves intelligent, Uke those 
 golden automata of old that Hephaestus made, 
 to run and wait upon the gods on Olympus. 
 Down drops the punch. There is a burst of 
 flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and 
 out comes the shell or the howitzer in the 
 rough, nosed and hollowed, and ready for the 
 turning. 
 
 The men here are great, powerful fellows, 
 blanched with heat and labour; amid the flame 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 51 
 
 and smoke of the forges one sees them as typi- 
 cal figures in the national struggle, linked to 
 those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and to 
 those lines in Flanders and Picardy where 
 Britain holds her enemy at bay. Everywhere 
 the same intensity of effort, whether in the 
 men or in those directing them. And what 
 delicate and responsible processes! 
 
 In the next shop, with its rows of shining 
 gims, I stop to look at a great gim apparently 
 turning itseK. No workman is visible for the 
 moment. The process goes on automatically, 
 the bright steel emerging under the tool that 
 here, too, seems alive. Close to it is a man 
 winding steel wire, or rather braid, on a 15- 
 inch gun; beyond again there are workmen and 
 inspectors testing and gauging another similar 
 giant. Look down this shining tube and watch 
 the gauging, now with calUpers, now with a 
 rubber device which takes the impression of 
 the rifling and reveals any defect. The gaug- 
 ing turns upon the ten-thousandth part of an 
 inch, and any mistake or flaw may mean the 
 lives of men. . . . 
 
 We turn out into a pale sunshine. The 
 morning work is over, and the men are troop- 
 ing into the canteens for dinner — and we look 
 in a moment to see for ourselves how good a 
 
52 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 meal it is. At luncheon, afterwards, in the 
 Directors' Offices, I am able to talk with the 
 leading citizens of the great town. 
 
 One of them writes some careful notes for 
 me. Their report of labour conditions is ex- 
 cellent. "No organised strikes and few cessa- 
 tions of work to report. Overtime is being 
 freely ^worked. Little or no drunkenness, and 
 that at a time when the average earnings of 
 many classes of workmen are two or three 
 times above the normal level. The methods 
 introduced in the twenty years before the war — 
 conference and discussion — ^have practically 
 ^settled all difficulties between employers and 
 employed, in these parts at any rate, during 
 this time of England's trial." 
 
 After luncheon we diverge to pay another 
 all too brief visit to a well-known firm. The 
 managing director gives me some wonderful 
 figures of a new shell factory they are just put- 
 ting up. It was begun in September, 1915. 
 Since then 2,000 tons of steelwork has been 
 erected, and 200 out of 1,200 machines re- 
 quired have been received and fixed. Four 
 thousand to 5,000 hands will be ultimately 
 employed. 
 
 All the actual production off the machines 
 will be done by women — and this, although the 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 53 
 
 works are intended for a heavy class of shell, 
 60-pounder high explosive. Women are al- 
 ready showing their capacity — Whelped by me- 
 chanical devices — to deal with this large type 
 of shell; and the workshop when in full work- 
 ing order is intended for an output of a million > 
 shell per annum. 
 
 I drive on, overshadowed by these figures. 
 "Per annum!" The httle common words 
 haunt the ear intolerably. Surely before one 
 more year is over, this horror under which we 
 live will be hfted from Europe ! Britain, a 
 victorious Britain, will be at peace, and 
 women's hands will have something else to do 
 than making high-explosive shell. But, mean- 
 while, there is no other way. The country's 
 call has gone out, clear and stern, and her 
 daughters are coming in their thousands to 
 meet it, from loom and house and shop. 
 
 A little later, in a great board-room, I find 
 the Munitions Committee gathered. Its func- 
 tion, of course, is to help the new Ministry in 
 organising the war work of the town. In the 
 case of the larger firms, the committee has 
 been chiefly busy in trying to replace labour 
 withdrawn by the war. It has been getting 
 skilled men back from the trenches, and ad- 
 vising the Ministry as to the "badging" of 
 
54 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 munition workers. It has itself, through its 
 command of certain scientific workshops, been 
 manufacturing gauges and testing materials. 
 
 It has turned the electroplate workshops of 
 the town on to making steel helmets, and in 
 general has been "working in" the smaller 
 engineering concerns so as to make them feed 
 the larger ones. This process here, as every- 
 where, is a very educating one. The shops 
 employed on bicycle and ordinary motor work 
 have, as a rule, little idea of the extreme accu- 
 racy required in munition work. The idea of 
 working to the thousandth of an inch seems to 
 them absurd; but they have to learn to work 
 to the ten-thousandth, and beyond ! The war 
 will leave behind it greatly raised standards 
 of work in England ! — ^that every one agrees. 
 
 And I carry away with me as a last remem- 
 brance of this great town and its activities two 
 recollections — one of a university man doing 
 some highly skilled work on a particularly fine 
 gauge: "If you ask me what I have been 
 doing for the last few weeks, I can only tell 
 you that I have been working like a nigger 
 and have done nothing ! Patience ! — ^that's all 
 there is to say." And another of a "trans- 
 formed" shop of moderate size, where an active 
 and able man, after giving up the whole of his 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 55 
 
 ordinary business, has thrown himself into the 
 provision, within his powers, of the most press- 
 ing war needs, as he came across them. 
 
 In July last year, for instance, munitions 
 work in many quarters was actually held up 
 for want of gauges. Mr. D. made something 
 like 10,000, to the great assistance of certain 
 new Government shops. Then the Govern- 
 ment asked for a particular kind of gun. Mr. 
 D. undertook 1,000, and has already delivered 
 400. Tools for shell-making are everywhere 
 wanted in the rush of the huge demand. Mr. 
 D. has been making them diligently. This is 
 Just one example among hundreds of how a 
 great industry is adapting itself to the fiery 
 needs of war. 
 
 But the dark has come, and I must catch 
 my train. As I speed through a vast industrial 
 district I find in the evening papers hideous 
 details of the ZeppeUn raid, which give a pecu- 
 har passion and poignancy to my recollections 
 of a crowded day — and pecuhar interest, also, 
 to the talk of an able representative of the 
 Ministry of Munitions, who is travelling with 
 me, and endeavouring to give me a connected 
 view of the whole new organisation. As he 
 speaks, my thoughts travel to the English 
 battle-line, to the trenches and casualty clear- 
 
56 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 ing-stations behind it, to distant Russia; and 
 I think of the Prime Minister's statement in 
 Parliament — that the supply of munitions, for 
 all its marvellous increase, it not yet equal to 
 the demand. New shops, new workers, new 
 efforts — England is producing them now un- 
 ceasingly, she must go on producing them. 
 There must be no pause or slackening. There 
 will be none. 
 
 I am going now to see — after the Midlands — 
 what the Enghsh and Scotch north is doing to 
 swell the stream. And in my next letter there 
 will be plenty to say about "Dilution" of la- 
 bour, about wages, and drink, and some other 
 burning topics of the moment. 
 
Ill 
 
 Dear H. 
 
 It is now three months a'nce Mr. Lloyd 
 George made his startling speech, as Muni- 
 tions Minister, in the House of Commons in 
 which, as he wound up his review of his new 
 department, he declared: "Unless we quicken 
 our movements, damnation will fall on the 
 sacred cause for which so much gallant blood 
 has flowed!" The passion of this peroration 
 was hke the fret of a river in flood chafing at 
 some obstacle in its course. Generally speak- 
 ing, the obstacle gives way. In this case Mr. 
 George's obstacle had begun to give way long 
 before December 21st — ^the date of the speech. 
 The flood had been pushing at it with increas- 
 ing force since the foundation of the Ministry of 
 Munitions in the preceding summer. But the 
 crumbUng process was not quick enough for 
 Great Britain's needs, or for the energy of her 
 Minister. 
 
 Hence the outspoken speech of December 
 21st, supported by Mr. Asquith's grave words 
 of a few weeks later. "We cannot go on," said 
 
 67 
 
58 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 the Prime Minister in effect, "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." "Yes — ^and quicker t" Mr. Lloyd 
 George had already said, with a sharp em- 
 phasis, meant to "hustle" that portion of the 
 nation which still required hustUng; overpaint- 
 ing his picture, no doubt, but with quite legit- 
 imate rhetoric, in order to produce his effect. 
 
 The result of that fresh "hustling" was the 
 appointment of the Dilution Commissioners, a 
 second Munitions Act amending the first, and 
 a vast expansion all over the cormtry of the 
 organisation which had seemed so vast before. 
 It was not till midwinter, in the very midst 
 of the new and immense effort I have been de- 
 scribing, that the Minister of Munitions and 
 those working with him convinced themselves 
 that, without another resolute push, the bar- 
 rier across the stream of the nation's will might 
 still fatally hold it back. More and more men 
 were wanted every week — ^in the Army and the 
 workshops — and there were not men to go 
 round. The second push had to be given — ^it 
 was given — ^and it still firmly persists. 
 
 In the spring of 1915, the executives of the 
 leading trade-unions had promised the Govern- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 59 
 
 ment the relaxation of their trade rules for the 
 period of the war. Many of the trade-union 
 leaders — Mr. Barnes, Mr. Henderson, Mr. 
 Hodge, and many others — ^have worked mag- 
 nificently in this sense, and many unions 
 have been thoroughly loyal throughout their 
 ranks to the pledge given in their name. 
 The iron-moulders, the shipwrights, the brass- 
 workers may be specially mentioned. But in 
 the trades mostly concerned with ammunition, 
 there were certain places and areas where the 
 men themselves, as distinct from their respon- 
 sible leaders, offered a dogged, though often 
 disguised resistance. Personally, I think that 
 any one at all accustomed to try and look at 
 labour questions from the point of view of 
 labour will understand the men while heartily 
 sympathising with the Minister, who was de- 
 termined to get "the goods" and has suc- 
 ceeded in getting them. Here, in talking of 
 "the men" I except that small revolutionary 
 element among them which has no country, 
 and exists in all countries. And I except, too, 
 instances which certainly are to be found, 
 though rarely, of what one might call a purely 
 mean and overreaching temper on the part 
 of workmen — ^taking advantage of the nation's 
 need, as some of the less responsible employers 
 
60 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 have no doubt, also, taken advantage of it. 
 But, in general, it seems to me, there has been 
 an honest struggle in the minds of thousands 
 of workmen between what appears to them the 
 necessary protection of their standards of hfe 
 — ^laboriously attained through long effort — 
 and the call of the war. And that the over- 
 whelming majority of the workmen concerned 
 with munitions should have patriotically and 
 triumphantly decided this struggle as they 
 have — under pressure, no doubt, but under no 
 such pressure as exists in a conscripted, still 
 more in an invaded, nation — ^may rank, I 
 think, when all is said, with the raising of our 
 voluntary Armies as another striking chapter 
 in the book of England's Effort. 
 
 In this chapter, then, Dilution will always 
 take a leading place. 
 
 What is Dilution ? 
 
 It means, of course, that under the sharp 
 analysis of necessity much engineering work, 
 generally reckoned as "skilled" work, and re- 
 served 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 the superior 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 61 
 
 labour with economy, only where it is really 
 necessary, it can be made to go infinitely fur- 
 ther; and the inferior or untrained labour can 
 then be brought into work where nobody sup- 
 posed it could be used, where, in fact, it never 
 has been used. 
 
 Obvious enough, perhaps. But the idea had 
 to be applied in haste to living people — em- 
 ployers, many of whom shrank from reorgan- 
 ising their workshops and changing all their 
 methods at a moment's notice; and workmen 
 looking forward with consternation to being 
 outnumbered, by ten to one, in their own 
 workshops, by women. When I was in the 
 Midlands and the North, at the end of Janu- 
 ary and in early February, Dilution was still 
 an unsettled question in some of the most im- 
 portant districts. One of the greatest em- 
 ployers in the country writes to me to-day 
 (March 24): "Since January, we have passed 
 through several critical moments, but, even- 
 tually, the principle was accepted, and Dilution 
 is being introduced as fast as convenient. 
 For this we have largely to thank an ad- 
 mirable Commission (Sir Croydon Marks, Mr. 
 Barnes, and Mr. Shackleton) which was sent 
 down to interview employers and employed. 
 Their tact and acumen were remarkable. 
 
62 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 Speaking personally, I cannot help believing 
 that there is a better understanding between 
 masters and men now than has existed in my 
 memory." 
 
 A great achievement that! — ^for both em- 
 ployers and employed — ^for the Minister also 
 who appointed the Commission and thus set 
 the huge stone rolling yet another leap upon 
 its way. 
 
 It will be readily seen how much depends 
 also on the tact of the individual employer. 
 That employer has constantly done best who 
 has called his men into council with him, and 
 thrown himself on their patriotism and good 
 sense. I take the following passage from an 
 interesting report by a very shrewd observer,* 
 printed in one of the northern newspapers. 
 It describes an employer as saying: 
 
 I was told by the Ministry that I should have to double 
 my output. Labour was scarce and I consulted a deputation 
 of the men about it. I told them the problem and said I 
 should be glad of suggestions. I told them that we should 
 either have to get men or women, and I asked them for their 
 co-operation, as there would be a great deal of teaching to be 
 done. "Probably," I said, "you would Hke to find the men ? " 
 They agreed to try. I gave them a week, and at the end of 
 a week they came to me and said they would rather have 
 women. I said to them: "Then you must all pull together." 
 They gave me their word. Right from the begioning they have 
 
 * Yorkshire Observer, February 1, 1916. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 63 
 
 done their level best to help, and things have gone on per- 
 fectly. On one occasion, a woman complained that the man 
 directing her was "working against her." I called the men's 
 committee together, said the employer. I told them the facts, 
 and they have dealt with the offender themselves. 
 
 The general system now followed in the 
 shell factories is to put so many skilled men in 
 charge of so many lathes worked by women 
 workers. Each skilled man, who teaches the 
 women, sets the tools, and keeps the machines 
 in rtmning order, oversees eight, ten, or more 
 machines. But sometimes the comradeship is 
 much closer. For instance (I quote again the 
 witness mentioned above), in a machine tool 
 shop, i. e., a shop for the making of tools used 
 in shell production, one of the most highly 
 skilled parts of the business, you may now see 
 a man, with a woman to help him, operating 
 two lathes. If the woman falls into any diffi- 
 culty the man comes to help her. Both can 
 earn more money than each could earn sepa- 
 rately, and the skilled man who formerly worked 
 the second lathe is released. In the same shop 
 a woman watched a skilled man doing slot- 
 drilling — a process in which thousandths of an 
 inch matter — for a fortnight. Now she runs 
 the machine herself by day, while the man 
 works it on the night shift. One woman in 
 
64 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 this shop is "able to do her own tool-setting." 
 The observer thinks she must be the only 
 woman tool-setter in the country, and he 
 drops the remark that her capacity and will 
 may have something to do with the fact that 
 she has a husband at the front! Near by, as 
 part of the same works, which are not special- 
 ised, but engaged in general engineering, is a 
 bomb shop staffed by women, which is now 
 sending 3,000 bombs a week to the trenches. 
 Women are also doing gun-breech work of 
 the most delicate and responsible kind under 
 the guidance of a skilled overseer. One of the 
 women at this work was formerly a char- 
 woman. She has never yet broken a tool. 
 All over the works, indeed, the labour of 
 women and unskilled men is being utilised in 
 the same scientific way. Thus the area of the 
 works has been doubled in a few months, 
 without the engagement of a single additional 
 skilled man from outside. "We have made 
 the men take an interest in the women," say 
 the employers. "That is the secret of our 
 success. We care nothing at all about the 
 money, we are all for the output. If the men 
 think you are going to exploit women and 
 cheapen the work, the scheme is crabbed right 
 away." 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 65 
 
 I myself came across the e£Fect of this sus- 
 picion in the minds of the workmen in the 
 case of a large Yorkshire shell factory, where 
 the employers at once detected and slew it. 
 This great workshop, formerly used for rail- 
 way work, now employs some 1,300 women, 
 with a small staff of skilled men. The women 
 work forty-five hours a week in eight-hour 
 shifts — ^the men fifty-three hours on twelve- 
 hour shifts. There is no diflBculty whatever 
 in obtaining a full supply of women's labour — 
 indeed, the factory has now a waiting-list of 
 500. Nor has there been any difficulty with 
 the men in regard to the women's work. 
 With the exception of two operations, which 
 are thought too heavy for them, all the ma- 
 chines are run by women. 
 
 But when the factory began, the employers 
 very soon detected that it was running below 
 its possible output. There was a curious lack 
 of briskness in the work — a curious constraint 
 among the new workers. Yet the employers 
 were certain that the women were keen, and 
 their labour potentially efficient. They put 
 their heads together, and posted up a notice 
 in the factory to the effect that whatever 
 might be the increase in the output of piece- 
 work, the piece-work rate would not be altered. 
 
66 EW GLAND'S EFFOKT 
 
 Instantly the atmosphere began to clear, the 
 pace of the machines began to mount. 
 
 It was a factory in which the work was new, 
 the introduction of women was new, and the 
 workers strange to each other, and for the 
 most part strange to their employers. A small 
 leaven of distrust on the part of the men 
 workers was enough, and the women were soon 
 influenced. Luckily, the mischief was as 
 quickly scotched. Men and women began to 
 do their best, the output of the factory — ^which 
 had been planned for 14,000 shells a week — 
 ran up to 20,000, and everything has gone 
 smoothly since. 
 
 Let me now, however, describe another effect 
 of Dilution — ^the employment of unskilled men 
 on operations hitherto included in skilled en- 
 gineering. 
 
 On the day after the factory I have just de- 
 scribed, my journey took me to another town 
 close by, where my guide — a. Director of one 
 of the largest and best-known steel and engi- 
 neering works in the kingdom — showed me a 
 new shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, 
 all "medically imfit" for the Army, and al- 
 most all drawn from the small trades and pro- 
 fessions of the town, especially from those 
 which had been hard hit by the war. Among 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 67 
 
 those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing- 
 machines, a publican's assistant, clerks, shop 
 assistants, three clergy — ^these latter going 
 home for their Sunday duty, and giving their 
 wages to the Red Cross — imemployed archi- 
 tects, and the Uke. 
 
 I cannot recall any shop which made a 
 greater impression of energy, of a spirit behind 
 the work, than this shop. In its inspecting- 
 room I foimd a graduate from Yale. "I had 
 to join in the fight," he said quietly — "this 
 was the best way I could think of." And it 
 was noticeable besides for some remarkable 
 machines, which your country had also sent 
 us. 
 
 In other shell factories a single lathe carries 
 through one process, interminably repeated, 
 sometimes two, possibly three. But here, with 
 the exception of the fixing and drilling of the 
 copper band, and a few minor operations, one 
 lathe made the shell — cut, bored, roughed, 
 turned, nosed, and threaded it, so that it 
 dropped out, all but the finished thing — ^minus, 
 of course, the fuse. The steel pole introduced 
 at the beginning of the process made nine shells, 
 and the average time per shell was twenty- 
 three minutes. No wonder that in the great 
 warehouse adjoining the workshop one saw the 
 
68 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 shell heaps piling up in their tens of thousands 
 — only to be rushed off week by week, inces- 
 santly, to the front. The introduction of these 
 machines had been largely the work of an able 
 Irish manager, who described to me the intense 
 anxiety with which he had watched their first 
 putting up and testing, lest the vast expendi- 
 ture incurred should have been in any degree 
 thrown away. His cheerful looks and the shell 
 warehouse told the sequel. When I next met 
 him it was at a northern station in company 
 with his Director. They were then apparently 
 in search of new machinery! The workshop 
 I had seen was being given over to women, and 
 the men were moving on to heavier work. And 
 this is the kind of process which is going on 
 over the length and breadth of industrial Eng- 
 land. 
 
 So far, however, I have described the expan- 
 sion or adaptation of firms already existing. 
 But the country is now being covered with 
 another and new type of workshop — ^the Na- 
 tional Shell factories — which are founded, 
 financed, and run by the Ministry of Muni- 
 tions. The EngUsh Government is now by 
 far the greatest engineering employer in the 
 world. 
 
 Let me take an illustration from a Yorkshire 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 69 
 
 town — ^a town where this Government engi- 
 neering is rapidly absorbing everything but 
 the textile factories. A young and most com- 
 petent Engineer officer is the Government head 
 of the factory. The work was begun last July, 
 by the help of borrowed lathes, in a building 
 which had been used for painting railway-car- 
 riages; its first shell was completed last Au- 
 gust. The staflf last June was 1. It is now 
 about 200, and the eniployees nearly 2,500. 
 
 A month after the first factory was opened, 
 the Government asked for another — ^for larger 
 shell. It was begun in August, and was in 
 work in a few weeks. In September a still 
 larger factory — ^for still larger shells — (how 
 these demands illustrate the course of the war ! 
 — ^how they are themselves illustrated by the 
 ^history of Verdun !) was seen to be necessary. 
 It was begun in September, and is now running. 
 Almost all the machines used in the factory 
 have been made in the town itself, and about 
 100 small firms, making shell parts — ^fuses, 
 primers, gaines, etc. — ^have been grouped round 
 the main firm, and are every day sending in 
 their work to the factory to be tested, put to- 
 gether, and delivered. 
 
 No factory made a better impression upon 
 me than this one. The large, airy building 
 
70 ENGLAND'S EFFORT, 
 
 with its cheerful lighting; the girls in their 
 dark-blue caps and overalls, their long and 
 comely lines reminding one of some proces- 
 sional effect in a Florentine picture; the high 
 proportion of good looks, even of dehcate 
 beauty, among them; the upper galleries with 
 their tables piled with glittering brasswork, 
 amid which move the quick, trained hands of 
 the women — ^if one could have forgotten for a 
 moment the meaning of it all, one might have 
 applied to it Carlyle's description of a great 
 school, as "a temple of industrious peace." 
 
 Some day, perhaps, this "new industry" — 
 as our ancestors talked of a "new learning" — 
 this swift, astonishing development of indus- 
 trial faculty among our people, especially 
 among our women, will bear other and rich 
 fruit for England under a cleared sky. It is 
 impossible that it should pass by without 
 effect, profound effect upon our national life. 
 But at present it has one meaning and one 
 only — warl 
 
 Talk to these girls and women. This woman 
 has lost her son — that one her husband. This 
 one has a brother home on leave, and is rejoic- 
 ing in the return of her husband from the 
 trenches, as a skilled man, indispensable in 
 the shop; another has friends in the places and 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 71 
 
 among the people which suffered in the last 
 Zeppelin raid. She speaks of it with tight Ups. 
 Was it she who chalked the inscription found 
 by the Lady Superintendent on a lathe some 
 nights ago — "Done fourteen to-day. Beat that 
 if you can, you devils ! " 
 
 No! — ^under this fast-spreading industry, 
 ,with its suggestion of good management and 
 high wages, there is the beat of no ordinary im- 
 pulse. Some feel it much more than others; 
 but, says the clever and kindly Superintendent, 
 I have already quoted: "The majority are 
 very decidedly working from the point of view 
 of doing something for their country. ... A 
 great many of the fuse women are earning for 
 the first time. . . . The more I see of them 
 all, the better I like them." And then follow 
 some interesting comments on the relation of 
 the more educated and refined women among 
 them to the skilled mechanics — ^two national 
 types that have perhaps never met in such 
 close working contact before. One's thoughts 
 begin to follow out some of the possible social 
 results of this national movement. 
 
72 ENGLAND'S EFFORT, 
 
 II 
 
 But now the Midlands and the Yorkshire 
 towns are behind me. The train hurries on 
 through a sunny afternoon, and I look through 
 some notes sent me by an expert in the great 
 campaign. Some of them represent its hu- 
 mours. Here is a perfectly true story, which 
 shows an Englishman with "a move on," not 
 unworthy of your side of the water. 
 
 A father and son, both men of tremendous 
 energy, were the chiefs of a very large factory, 
 which had been already extensively added to. 
 The father Hved in a house alongside the works. 
 One day business took him into the neighbour- 
 ing county, whilst the son came up to London 
 on munition work. On the father's return he 
 was astonished to see a furniture van removing 
 the contents of his house. The son emerged. 
 He had already signed a contract for a new 
 factory on the site of his father's house; the 
 materials of the house were sold and the furni- 
 ture half gone. After a first start, the father 
 took it in true Yorkshire fashion — wasting no 
 words, and apparently proud of his son ! 
 
 Here we are at last, in the true north — 
 crossing a river, with a climbing town be- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 73 
 
 yond, its tiled roofs wreathed in smoke, through 
 which the afternoon hghts are playing. I am 
 carried oflf to a friend's house. Some directors 
 of the great works I am come to see look in to 
 make a kindly plan for the morrow, and in the 
 evening, I find myself sitting next one of the 
 most illustrious of modern inventors, with that 
 touch of dream in manner and look which so 
 often goes with scientific discovery. The in- 
 vention of this gentle and courteous man has 
 affected every vessel of any size afloat, whether 
 for war or trade, and the whole electrical de- 
 velopment of the world. The fact was to be 
 driven home even to my feminine ignorance of 
 mechanics when, a fortnight later, the captain 
 of a Flag-ship and I were hanging over the huge 
 shaft leading down to the engine-rooms of the 
 Superdreadnought, and my companion was 
 explaining to me something of the driving 
 power of the ship. But on this first meeting, 
 how much I might have asked of the kind, 
 great man beside me, and was too preoccupied 
 to ask! May the opportunity be retrieved 
 some day! My head! was really full of the 
 overwhelming facts, whether of labour or of 
 output, relating to this world-famous place, 
 which were being discussed around me. I do 
 not name the place, because the banishment of 
 
74 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 names, whether of persons or places, has been 
 part of the plan of these articles. But one can 
 no more disguise it by writing round it than 
 one could disguise Windsor Castle by any de- 
 scription that was not ridiculous. Many a 
 German officer has walked through these works, 
 I imagine, before the war, smoking the 
 cigarette of peace with their Directors, and 
 inwardly ruminating strange thoughts. If any 
 such comes across these few lines, what I 
 have written will, I think, do England no 
 harm. 
 
 But here are some of the figures that can be 
 given. The shop area of the ammimition shops 
 alone has been increased eightfold since the out- 
 break of war. The total weight of shell de- 
 livered during 1915 was — in tons — ^fourteen 
 times as much as that of 1914. The weight of 
 shell delivered per week, as between December, 
 1914 and December, 1915, had risen nearly 
 ten times. The number of work-people, in 
 these shops, men and women, had risen (a) as 
 compared with the month in which war broke 
 out, to a figure eight times as great; (6) as 
 compared with December, 1914, to one be- 
 tween three and four times as great. And over 
 the whole vast enterprise, shipyards, gun shops, 
 ammunition shops, with aU kinds of naval 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 75 
 
 and other machinery used in war, the num- 
 bers of work-people employed had increased 
 since 1913 more than 200 per cent. They, with 
 their famiUes, equal the population of a great 
 city — ^you may see a new town rising to meet 
 their needs on the farther side of the river. 
 
 As to Dilution, it is now accepted by the men, 
 who said when it was proposed to them: 
 "Why didn't you come to us six months ago ?" 
 
 And it is working wonders here as elsewhere. 
 For instance, a particular portion of the breech 
 mechanism of a gun used to take one hour and 
 twenty minutes to make. On the Dilution plan 
 it is done on a capstan, and takes six minutes. 
 Where 500 women were employed before the 
 war, there are now close on 9,000, and there 
 will be thousands more, requiring one skilled 
 man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. 
 In a great gun-carriage shop, "what used to be 
 done in two years is now done in one month." 
 In another, two tons of brass were used before 
 the war; a common figiu-e now is twenty-one. 
 A large milling shop, now entirely worked by 
 men, is to be given up immediately to women. 
 And so on. 
 
 Dilution, it seems to me, is breaking down a 
 number of labour conventions which no longer 
 answer to the real conditions of the engineer- 
 
76 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 ing trades. The pressure of the war is doing 
 a real service to both employers and employed 
 by the simplification and overhauling it is 
 everywhere bringing about. 
 
 As to the problem of what is to be done with 
 the women after the war, one may safely leave 
 it to the future. It is probably bound up with 
 that other problem of the great new workshops 
 springing up everywhere, and the huge new 
 plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid re- 
 covery of French trade after the war of 1870, 
 and of the far more rapid rate — after forty 
 years of machine and transport development, 
 at which the industry of the AUied coimtries 
 may possibly recover the ravages of the pres- 
 ent war, when once peace is signed. In that 
 recovery, how great a part may yet be played 
 by these war workshops ! — transformed to the 
 uses of peace; by their crowds of work-people, 
 and by the hitherto unused intelligence they 
 are everywhere evoking and training among 
 both men and women. 
 
 As for the following day, my impressions, 
 looking back, seem to be all a variant on a well- 
 known Greek chorus, which hymns the amaz- 
 ing — the "terrible" — cleverness of Man ! Sea- 
 faring, tillage, house-building, horse-taming, so 
 muses Sophocles, two thousand three hundred 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 77 
 
 years ago; how did man ever find them out? 
 "Wonders are many, but the most wonderful 
 thing is man ! Only against death has he no 
 resource." 
 
 Intelligence — ^and death! They are written 
 everywhere in these endless workshops, de- 
 voted to the fiercest purposes of war. First of 
 all, we visit the "danger buildings" in the fuse 
 factory, where mostly women are employed. 
 About 500 women are at work here, on different 
 processes connected with the delicate mechan- 
 ism and filling of the fuse and gaine, some of 
 which are dangerous. Detonator work, for in- 
 stance. The Lady Superintendent selects for 
 it specially steady and careful women or girls, 
 who are paid at time-and-a-quarter rate. Only 
 about eight girls are allowed in each room. 
 The girls here all wear — ^for protection — ^green 
 muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curi- 
 ous, ghastly look, that fits the occupation. 
 For they are making small pellets for the charg- 
 ing of shells, out of a high-explosive powder. 
 Each girl uses a small copper ladle to take the 
 powder out of a box before her, and puts it 
 into a press which stamps it into a tiny block, 
 looking like ivory. She holds her hand over 
 a little tray of water lest any of the powder 
 should escape. What the explosive and death- 
 
78 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 dealing power of it is, it does not do to think 
 about. 
 
 In another room a fresh group of girls are 
 handling a black powder for another part of 
 the detonator, and because of the irritant na- 
 ture of the powder, are wearing white band- 
 ages round the nose and mouth. There is 
 great competition for these rooms, the Super- 
 intendent says! The girls in them work on 
 two shifts of ten and one-half hours each, and 
 would resent a change to a shorter shift. 
 They have one hour for dinner, half an hour 
 for tea, a cup of tea in the middle of the morn- 
 ing — ^and the whole of Saturdays free. To 
 the eye of the ordinary visitor they show few 
 signs of fatigue. 
 
 After the fuse factory we pass through the 
 high-explosive factory, where 250 girls are at 
 work in a number of isolated wooden sheds 
 filling 18-pounder shell with high explosive. 
 The brass cartridge-case is being filled with 
 cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown 
 sticks, and the shell itself, including its central 
 gaine or tube, with the various deadly explo- 
 sives we have seen prepared in the "danger 
 buildings." The shell is fitted into the car- 
 tridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. 
 It is now ready to be fired. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 79 
 
 I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed, 
 and about to go straight to the front. A 
 train is waiting close by to take them the first 
 stage on their journey. I little thought then 
 that I should see these boxes, or their fellows, 
 next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lor- 
 ries behind the fighting lines in France, and 
 that within a fortnight I should myself stand 
 by and see one of those shells fired from a 
 British gun, little more than a mile from Neuve 
 Chapelle. 
 
 But here are the women and girls trooping 
 out to dinner. A sweet-faced Superintendent 
 comes to talk to me. "They are not as strong 
 as the men," she says, pointing to the long 
 hues of girls, "but what they lack in strength 
 they make up in patriotic spirit." I speak to 
 two educated women, who turn out to be High 
 School mistresses from a town that has been 
 several times visited by Zeppelins. "We just 
 felt we must come and help to kill Germans," 
 they say quietly. "All we mind is getting up 
 at five-thirty every morning. Oh, no! it is 
 not too tiring." 
 
 Afterwards? — ^I remember one long proces- 
 sion of stately shops, with their high windows, 
 their floors crowded with machines, their roofs 
 lined with cranes, the flame of the forges, and 
 
80 ENGi^ArNjjo Ji.JtijbUJttr 
 
 the smoke of the fizzling steel lighting up the 
 dark groups of men, the huge howitzer shells, 
 red-hot, swinging in mid-air, and the same 
 shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great lathes 
 that rough and bore and finish them. Here 
 are shell for the Queen Elizabeth guns! — ^the 
 biggest shell made. This shop had been put 
 up by good luck just as the war began. Its 
 output of steel has increased from 80 tons a 
 week to 1,040. 
 
 Then another huge fuse shop, quite new, 
 where 1,400 girls in one shift are at work — ^said 
 to be the largest fuse shop known. And on 
 the following morning, an endless spectacle of 
 war work — ^gun-carriages, naval turrets, tor- 
 pedo tubes, armed railway carriages, small 
 Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making 
 shops, gauge shops — and so on for ever. In 
 the tool-making shops the output has risen 
 from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a year ! 
 
 And meanwhile I have not seen anything, 
 and shall not have time to see anything of the 
 famous shipyards of the firm. But with re- 
 gard to them, all that it is necessary to remem- 
 ber is that before the war they were capable 
 of berthing twenty ships at once, from the 
 largest battleship downward; and we have 
 Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what has hap- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 81 
 
 pened, since the war, in the naval shipyards 
 of this country. "We have added a million 
 tons to the Navy — and we have doubled its per- 
 sonnel." 
 
 And now let me record two final sayings. 
 
 One from a manager of a department: 
 
 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 splendidlyi 
 
 And another from one of the Directors: 
 
 I know of no drunkenness among our women. I don't re- 
 member ever having seen a drunken woman round here. 
 
 Ill 
 
 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 vast- 
 ness, in the steady development of a move- 
 ment 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 tech- 
 nical expert could deal, it is of course monoto- 
 
82 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 nous, 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 im- 
 pressions 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 
 deahng. Until further Ught 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 "coun- 
 try" 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 miscon- 
 ceptions, by the sheer nervous fatigue and irri- 
 tation of the men's long efifort, or by those 
 natural fears tor 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 pdint out here one or two interesting 
 facts. In the first place, in this crowded 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 83 
 
 countryside, where a small minority of dan- 
 gerous 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 magnifi- 
 cently." That means that among those left 
 behind, whatever disturbing and disintegrat- 
 [^ing 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 re- 
 mains 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 remem- 
 bers It well. And finally, the invasion of 
 women has perhaps been more startling to the 
 workmen here than anywhere else. Not a sin- 
 gle woman was employed in the works or fac- 
 tories of the district before the war, except In 
 textiles. There will soon be 15,000 in the muni- 
 tion workshops, and that will not be the end. 
 
84 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 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 re- 
 striction of hours which has worked so con- 
 spicuously well in other districts has had com- 
 paratively little effect here. Is it defects of 
 administration, or a certain "cussedness" in 
 the Scotch character, which resents any tight- 
 ening of law .'' One large employer with whom 
 I discuss it, believes it would suit the Scotch 
 better to abohsh all restrictions, and simply 
 punish drunkenness much more severely. 
 And above all — "open all possible means of 
 amusement on Sundays, especially the cine- 
 mas !" — 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 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 85 
 
 whicli 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 efiFort here, 
 could hardly be more striking. In normal 
 times, the district, which is given up to Ad- 
 miralty work, makes ships and guns, but has 
 never made shells. The huge shell factories 
 springing up all over it are a wholly new cre- 
 ation. 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 pro- 
 vided; and the housing question is being 
 tackled. The rapidity of the women's piece- 
 work is astonishing, and the mingling of 
 classes — ^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 com- 
 
86 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 mon 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 shell, 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 shell 
 shops, we passed rapidly through gun shops, 
 where I saw again processes which had become 
 almost famiUar. "The production of howit- 
 zers," 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 space will be filled with machines, and 
 there will be 1,200 people at work here, in- 
 cluding 400 women. In the next shop we are 
 turning out about 4,000 shrapnel and 4,000 
 high-explosive shells per week. When we 
 started women on what we thought this heavy 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 87 
 
 shell, we provided men to help lift the shell 
 in and out of the machines. The women thrust 
 the men aside in five minutes." 
 
 Later on, as I was passing 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 wom- 
 an. "Have you ever done any machine work 
 before.?" "No, Madame, never — Mais, c'est la 
 guerre. II faut tuer les Allemands 1 " It was 
 a quiet, passionless 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 space beyond. A sentry challenges 
 us, and we produce our permit. Then we dis- 
 mount, 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. 
 
88 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 I am looking at what is to be the great "fill- 
 ing" factory of the district, where 9,000 women, 
 in addition to male workmen, will soon be em- 
 ployed in charging the shell coming from the 
 new shell 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 to- 
 wards the country house where we are to spend 
 the night. In my memory there surge a thou- 
 sand recollections of all that I have seen in 
 the preceding fortnight. An England roused 
 at last — ^rushing to factory, and lathe, to ship- 
 yard 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 Uke 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 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 89 
 
 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 
 
 Deab 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 de- 
 tails 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 hstened 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 out- 
 break of war some million and a quarter of 
 men have passed through the great camp, com- 
 ing in ceaselessly for training and equipment, 
 and going out again to the theatres of war. 
 
 00 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 91 
 
 In the first days and weeks of the war — dur- 
 ing 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 occu- 
 pations; rich and poor, north and south coun- 
 try men, English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh; 
 men from the Dominions, who had flung them- 
 selves 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 ma- 
 terial. 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 head- 
 quarters at Aldershot, that Mecca of the sol- 
 dier, where no one would dare to pass in ordi- 
 nary times whose turnout is not immaculate, 
 the most extraordinary figures, in bowler hats 
 and bits of uniform, passed unrebuked. We 
 had to raid the neighbouring towns for food, 
 to send frantic embassies to London for bread 
 and meat; to turn out any sort of shed to house 
 them. Luckily it was summer weather; other- 
 
92 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 wise I don't know what we should have done 
 for blankets. But nobody 'groused.' Every- 
 body worked, and there were many who felt 
 it 'the time of their Uves.'" 
 
 And yet England "engineered the war!" 
 England's hypocrisy and greed demanded the 
 crushing of Germany — Whence the lying "ex- 
 cuse" of Belgium — that apparently is what 
 all good Germans — except those who know 
 better — ^beUeve; 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 un- 
 prepared !" 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 dehberately planned 
 a Continental war with Germany, and Ger- 
 many'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, 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 93 
 
 Chatham, Pitt, and WeUingon has not gener- 
 ally 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 ma- 
 terial." There was no time to build new rail- 
 ways, 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 Wilt- 
 shire downs, the Midland and Yorkshire heaths, 
 the Buckinghamshire hills have been every- 
 where invaded — their old rural sanctities 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 pur- 
 ple 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 bay- 
 onet 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 
 
94 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 spread far and wide round the Aldershot head- 
 quarters. 
 
 Near my own home, a park and a wooded hill- 
 side, that two years ago were carefully guarded 
 even from a neighbour's foot, are now oc- 
 cupied by a large town of miUtary 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 re- 
 cruits 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 Enghsh 
 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 trespass laws in England 
 — ^for the soldier. 
 
 You point to our recruiting difficulties in 
 Parliament. True enough. We have our re- 
 cruiting difficulties still. Lord Derby has not 
 apparently solved the riddle; for riddle it is. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 95 
 
 in a country of voluntary service, where none 
 of the preparations necessary to fit conscrip- 
 tion 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.* 
 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 rein- 
 forcement camps, and the great supply bases, 
 towards that fierce reality of war to which 
 everything tends. 
 
 * Since these lines were written the crisis in the Government, the 
 Irish rising, and the withdrawal of thfe military service bill have hap- 
 pened in quick succession. The country is still waiting (April 28th} for 
 the last inevitable step. 
 
96 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 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 dis- 
 satisfied with it. It included the names of 
 three or four places well known to be the cen- 
 tres 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 foimd 
 everywhere in France in the rear of otu" 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 pre- 
 sented 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 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 97 
 
 English military organisation in France, for a 
 woman possessing a special War Office pass, 
 in addition to her ordinary passport, and un- 
 derstood 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 con- 
 cerned. From the moment of landing on the 
 French side, my daughter and I passed into 
 the charge of the miUtary 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 ven- 
 ture 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 abso- 
 lutely 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. 
 
98 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 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 eight- 
 een 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 reinforce- 
 ment camp, which contains more men than Al- 
 dershot before August, 1914, or in its workshops 
 of the Army Ordnance Corps, gave me my first 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 99 
 
 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 staflf to 
 Nantes — Cleaving only a broken motor-car be- 
 hind 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 com- 
 mercial 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 feel- 
 ing 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 profoimd, for the 
 French spirit in the war, and for the heroic 
 unity of the country through all ranks and 
 classes, accounted for a great deal. In the 
 presence of a good-will so strong, difficulties 
 disappear. 
 
 Look now at this immense hangar or store- 
 house — the largest in the world — through which 
 
100 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 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 pack- 
 ing of the trucks that are going to the front, 
 the order and perfection with which the requi- 
 sitions, 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, deal- 
 ing 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 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 101 
 
 space labelled "Medical Comforts," and gen- 
 erally known as "The Cage." Medical neces- 
 saries 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 — snails, 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 bimks 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 
 
102 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 repaired, or to be sent home for transformation 
 into " shoddy " to the Yorkshire towns. Noth- 
 ing seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s 
 department. Field-glasses, periscopes, water- 
 bottles, they arrive from the trenches with the 
 same certainty as a wounded howitzer or ma- 
 chine-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 coarse 
 French pottery, which some dead father had 
 bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for 
 the children at home. Near by were "sou- 
 venirs" — ^bits of shell, of German equipment; 
 then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck- 
 medalUon of a saint — and so on — every frag- 
 ment 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-fore- 
 men, are busy, the harness-mending room, and 
 the engineering workshops might reassure those 
 pessimists among us — especially of my own 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 103 
 
 sex — ^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 em- 
 ploying more than a thousand, and his repair- 
 ing sheds are saving thousands of poimds a 
 week to the British Government. He makes 
 all his own power, and has four or five pow- 
 erful dynamos at work. 
 
 We come out into a swirl of snow, and hence- 
 forward 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 
 
104 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 brought from the fighting line. The instruct- 
 ors 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. 
 
 As we stand beside the trenches imder the 
 bright sun and piercing wind, looking at the 
 dark lines of British soldiers on the snow, and 
 listening to the explanations of a most keen and 
 courteous officer, one's eyes wander, on the one 
 side, over the great town and port, over the 
 French coast and the distant sea, and on the 
 other side, inland, over the beautiful French 
 landscape with its farms and country houses. 
 Everything one sees is steeped in history, a 
 mingled history, in which England and France 
 up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal 
 share. Now again they are mingled here; all 
 the old enmities buried in a comradeship that 
 goes deeper far than they, a comradeship of 
 the spirit that will surely mould the life of both 
 nations for years to come. 
 
 How we grudged the snow and the low- 
 sweeping clouds and the closed motor, on our 
 drive of the next day ! I remember Uttle more 
 of it than occasional glimpses of the tall cliffs 
 that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty look 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 105 
 
 at a fine church above a steeply built town, an 
 army lorry stuck deep in the snow-drifts, and 
 finally the quays and ships of another base 
 port. Our escort, Colonel S., pilots us to a 
 pleasant hotel full of officers, mostly English, 
 belonging to the Lines of Communications, 
 with a few poor wives and mothers among 
 them who have come over to nurse their 
 wounded in one or other of the innumerable 
 hospitals of the base. 
 
 Before dinner the general commanding the 
 base had found me out and I had told my story. 
 
 "Oh, we'll put some notes together for you. 
 We were up most of last night. I dare say we 
 shall be up most of this. But a little more or 
 less doesn't matter." I protested most sin- 
 cerely. But it is always the busiest men who 
 shoulder the extra burdens; and the notes 
 duly reached me. From them, from the talk 
 of others spending their last ounce of brain 
 and energy in the service of the base, and from 
 the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and 
 draw some general picture of what that ser- 
 vice is. Suppose a British officer speaking: 
 
 Remember first that every man, every horse, every romid of 
 ammunition, every article of clothing and equipment, all the 
 guns and vehicles, and nearly all the food have to be brought 
 across the English Channel to maintain and reinforce the ever- 
 
106 ENGLAND'S EFFOET 
 
 growing British Army, wbich holds now so important a share 
 of the fighting line in France. The ports of entry are already 
 overtaxed by the civil and military needs of France herself. 
 Imagine how difficult it is — and how the difficulty grows 
 daily with the steady increase of the British Army — to receive, 
 disembark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of men 
 and the masses of material ! 
 
 You see the khaki in the French streets, the mingling every- 
 where of French and English; but the ordinary visitor can 
 form no idea of the magnitude of this friendly invasion. There 
 is no formal delimitation of areas or spaces, in docks, or town, 
 or railways. But gradually the observer will realise that the 
 town is honeycombed with the temporary locations of the 
 British Army, which everywhere speckle the map hanging in 
 the office of the Garrison Quartermaster. And let him further 
 visit the place where the long lines of reinforcement, traioing 
 and hospital camps are installed on open ground, and old 
 England's mighty effort wUl scarcely hide itself from the least 
 intelligent. Work, efficiency, economy must be the watch- 
 words of a base. Its functions may not be magnificent — but 
 they are war — and war is impossible unless they are rightly 
 carried out. 
 
 When we came back from the Loire iu September, after our 
 temporary retreat, the British personnel at this place grew 
 from 1,100 to 11,000 iu a week. Now there are thousands of 
 troops always passing through, thousands of men in hospital, 
 thousands at work in the docks and storehouses. And let any 
 one who cares for horses go and look at the Remount Depot 
 and the Veterinary Hospitals. The whole treatment of horses 
 in this war has been revolutionised. Look at the cheap, in- 
 genious stables, the comfort produced by the simplest means, 
 the kind quiet handling; look at the Convalescent Horse De- 
 pots, the operating theatres, and the pharmacy stores ia the 
 Veterinary Hospitals. 
 
 As to the troops themselves, every Regiment has its own 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 107 
 
 lines, for its own reinforcements. Good food, clean cooking, 
 civilised dining-rooms, excellent sanitation — the base provides 
 them all. It provides, too, whatever else Tommy Atkins wants, 
 and close at hand; wet and dry canteens, libraries, recreation 
 huts, tea and coffee huts, palatial cinemas, concerts. And 
 what are the results? Excellent behaviour; excellent rela- 
 tions between the British soldier and the French inhabitants; 
 absence of all serious crime. 
 
 Then look at the docks. You will see there armies of labour- 
 ers, and long lines of ships discharging horses, timber, rations, 
 fodder, coal, coke, petrol. Or at the stores and depots. It 
 would take you days to get any idea of the huge quantities 
 of stores, or of the new and ingenious means of space economy 
 and quick distribution. As to the Works Department — camps 
 and depots are put up "while you wait" by the B. E. oflScers 
 and unskilled military labour. Add to all this the armies of 
 clerks, despatch riders, and motor-cyclists — and the immense 
 hospital personnel — ^then, if you make any intelligible picture 
 of it in yoM mind, you will have some idea of what bases like 
 these mean. 
 
 Pondering these notes, it seemed to me that 
 the only way to get some kind of "intelligible 
 picture" in two short days was to examine 
 something in detail, and the rest in general! 
 Accordingly, we spent a long Sunday morn- 
 ing in the Motor Transport Depot, which is 
 the creation of Colonel B., and perhaps as 
 good an example as one could find anywhere 
 in France of the organising talent of the able 
 British oflBcer. 
 
 The depot opened in a theatre on the 13th 
 
108 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 of August, 1914. "It began," says Colonel 
 B., "with a few balls of string and a bag of 
 nails!" Its staff then consisted of 6 officers 
 and 91 N. C. O.'s and men — its permanent 
 staff at present is about 500. All the drivers 
 of some 20,000 motor vehicles — nearly 40,000 
 men — ^are tested here and, if necessary, in- 
 structed before going up to the fighting lines; 
 and the depot deals with 350 different types 
 of vehicles. In round figures 100,000 separate 
 parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged 
 in the depot. The system of records and ac- 
 counts is extraordinarily perfect, and so in- 
 genious that it seems to work itself. 
 
 Meanwhile Colonel B.'s relations with his 
 army of chauffeurs, of whom about 1,000 are 
 always housed on the premises, are exceedingly 
 human and friendly in spite of the strictness 
 of the army discipline. Most of his men who 
 are not married, the Colonel tells me, have 
 found a "friend," in the town, one or other of 
 its trimly dressed girls, with whom the Eng- 
 lish mechanic "walks out," on Sundays and 
 holidays. There are many engagements, and, 
 as I gather, no misconduct. Marriage is gen- 
 erally postponed till after the war, owing to 
 the legal and other difficulties involved. But 
 marriage there will be when peace comes. As 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 109 
 
 to how the Englishman and the French girl 
 communicate, there are amusing speculations, 
 but little exact knowledge. There can be 
 small doubt, however, that a number of hybrid 
 words perfectly understood by both sides are 
 gradually coming into use, and if the war lasts 
 much longer, a rough Esperanto will have grown 
 up which may leave its mark on both languages. 
 The word "narpoo" is a case in point. It is 
 said to be originally a corruption of "il n'y a 
 plus" — ^the phrase which so often meets the 
 Tommy foraging for eggs or milk or fruit. 
 At present it means anything from "done up" 
 to "dead." Here is an instance of it, told me 
 by a chaplain at the front. He was billeted 
 in a farm with a number of men, and a ser- 
 geant. All the men, from the chaplain to 
 the youngest private, felt a keen sympathy 
 and admiration for the women of the farm, 
 who were both working the land and look- 
 ing after their billetees, with wonderful pluck 
 and energy. One evening the chaplain ar- 
 riving at the open door of the farm, saw in 
 the kitchen beyond it the daughter of the 
 house, who had just come in from farm work. 
 She was looking at a pile of dirty plates and 
 dishes which had to be washed before supper, 
 and she gave a sigh of fatigue. Suddenly in 
 
no ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 'A 
 
 the back door on the other side of the kitchen 
 appeared the sergeant. He looked at the girl, 
 then at the dishes, then again at the girl. 
 "Fattigay?" he said cheerfully, going up to 
 her. "Narpoo? Give 'em me. Compree?" 
 And before she could say a word he had driven 
 her away, and plimged into the work. 
 
 The general relations, indeed, between our 
 soldiers and the French population could not 
 be better. General after General, both in the 
 bases, and at the front dwelt on this point. A 
 distinguished General commanding one of our 
 armies on the Une, spoke to me of it with 
 emphasis. "The testimony is universal, and 
 it is equally creditable to both sides." The 
 French civilian in town and country is, no 
 doubt, profiting by the large demand and 
 prompt payments of the British forces. But 
 just as in the case of the women munition 
 workers, there is infinitely more in it than 
 money. On the British part there is, in both 
 oflScers and men, a burning sympathy for what 
 France has suflfered, whether from the outrages 
 of a brutal enemy, or from the inevitable hard- 
 ships of war. The headquarters of the Gen- 
 eral I have mentioned were not more than 
 fifteen or twenty miles from towns where un- 
 speakable things were done by German sol- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 111 
 
 diers — oflScers no less than men — in the first 
 weeks of the struggle. With such deeds the 
 French peasantry and small townsfolk, as they 
 still remain in Picardy and Artois, can and do 
 contrast, day by day, the temper, the courtesy, 
 the humanity of the British soldier. Great 
 Britain, of course, is a friend and ally; and 
 Germany is the enemy. But these French 
 folk, these defenceless women and children, 
 know instinctively that the British Army, like 
 their own, whether in its officers, or in its rank 
 and file, is incapable, toward any non-com- 
 batant, of what the German Army has' done 
 repeatedly, officially, and still excuses and 
 defends. 
 
 The signs of this feeling for and sympathy 
 with the French civils, among our soldiers, are 
 many. Here is one story, slight but illumi- 
 nating, told me by an eye-witness. She is* 
 one of a band of women under a noble chief, 
 who, since very early in the war, have been 
 running a canteen for soldiers, night and 
 day, at the large railway-station of the very 
 base I have been describing, where trains are 
 perpetually arriving from and departing to 
 the front. In the early days of the war, a 
 a refugee train arrived one afternoon full of 
 helpless French folk, mainly of course women 
 
112 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 and children, and old people, turned out of 
 their homes by the German advance. In gen- 
 eral, the refugees were looked after by the 
 French Red Cross, "who did it admirably, 
 going along the trains with hot drinks and 
 food and clothing." But on this occasion there 
 were a number of small children, and some of 
 them got overlooked in the hubbub. "I found 
 a raw young Scotchman, little more than a 
 boy, from one of the Highland regiments," 
 with six youngsters clinging to him, for whom 
 he peremptorily demanded tea. "He had tears 
 in his eyes, and his voice was all husky as he 
 explained in homely Scotch how the bairns 
 had been turned out of their homes — ^how he 
 couldn't bear it — and he would give them tea." 
 A table was found. "I provided the milk, and 
 he paid for bread and butter and chocolate, 
 and waited on and talked to the six little French 
 people himself. Strange to say, they seemed 
 to understand each other quite well." 
 
 Ill 
 
 It was with this railway-station canteen that 
 my latest memories of the great base are con- 
 cerned. All the afternoon of our second day 
 at was spent in seeing a fine Red Cross 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 113 
 
 hospital, and then in walking or driving round 
 the endless reinforcement and hospital camps 
 in the open country. Everywhere the same 
 vigorous expanding organisation, the same 
 ceaselessly growing numbers, the same hu- 
 manity and care in detail. "How many years 
 have we been at war ? " one tends to ask oneself 
 in bewilderment, as the spectacle unrolls it- 
 self. "Is it possible that all this is the work 
 of eighteen months.?" And I am reminded 
 of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his German 
 captive, who asked his opinion about the dura- 
 tion of the war. "I'll tell you what — ^it's the 
 furrst five years that'll be the worst!" We 
 seem — in the bases — to have shpped through 
 them already, measuring by any of the ordi- 
 nary ratios of work to time. On my return 
 home, a diplomat representing one of the 
 neutral nations, told me that the MiUtary 
 Secretary on his staflf had been round the 
 English bases in France, and had come back 
 with his "eyes starting out of his head." 
 Having seen them myself, the phrase seemed 
 to me quite natural. 
 
 Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell, 
 we turned toward the canteen at the railway- 
 station. We found it going on in an old 
 goods' shed, simply fitted up with a long tea 
 
114 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 and coffee bar, tables and chairs; and in some 
 small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end 
 to end with a crowd of soldiers, who after 
 many hours of waiting, were just departing 
 for the front. The old shabby room, with its 
 points of bright light, and its shadowy sides 
 and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting 
 for the moving throng of figures. Some men 
 were crowding round the bar; some were 
 writing letters in haste to post before the train 
 went off; the piano was going, and a few, 
 gathered round it, were singing the songs of the 
 day, of which the choruses were sometimes 
 taken up in the room. The men — drafts going 
 up to different regiments on the line — appeared 
 to me to come from many parts. The broad 
 Yorkshire and Cumbrian speech, Scotch, the 
 cockney of the Home Counties, the Northum- 
 berland burr, the tongues of Devon and Som- 
 erset — one seemed to hear them all in turn. 
 The demands at the counter had slackened a 
 httle, and I was presently listening to some of 
 the talk of the indefatigable helpers who work 
 this thing night and day. One of them drew 
 a picture of the Canadians, the indomitable 
 fighters of Ypres and Loos, of their breathless 
 energy, and impatience of anything but the 
 quickest pace of life, their appetites! — ^half a 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 115 
 
 dozen hard-boiled eggs, at 3d each, swallowed 
 down in a moment of time; then of the French- 
 Canadians, their Old World French, their old- 
 world CathoKcism, simple and passionate. 
 One of these last asked if there was any chance 
 of his being sent to Egypt, "Why are you so 
 anxious to go to Egypt?" "Because it was 
 there the Holy Family rested," said the lad 
 shyly. The lady to whom he spoke described 
 to him the tree and the Holy Well in St. 
 Georgius, and he Hstened entranced. 
 
 Sometimes a rough lot fill the canteen, 
 drawn from the poorest class, perhaps, of an 
 EngUsh seaport. They hustle for their food, 
 shout at the helpers, and seem to have no 
 notion that such words as "please" and "thank 
 you" exist. After three or four hours of bat- 
 tling with such an apparently mannerless crew 
 one of the helpers saw them depart to the plat- 
 form where their train was waiting for them, 
 with very natural reUef. But they were no 
 sooner gone, when a guardsman, with the 
 manners, the stature, and the smartness of his 
 kind, came back to the counter, and asked to 
 speak to the lady in charge of it. "Those 
 chaps. Miss, what have just gone out," he 
 said apologetically, "have never been used to 
 ladies, and they don't know what to say to 
 
116 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 them. So they asked me just to come in and 
 say for them they were very much obliged for 
 all the ladies' kindness, but they couldn't say 
 it themselves." The tired helper was suddenly 
 too choky to answer. The message, the choice 
 of the messenger, as one sure to do "the right 
 thing," were both so touching. 
 
 But there was a sudden movement in the 
 crowd. The train was up. We all surged out 
 upon the platform, and I watched the embarka- 
 tion — ^the endless train engulfing its hundreds 
 of men. Just as I had seen the food and 
 equipment trains going up from the first base 
 laden with everything necessary to replace the 
 daily waste of the army, so here was the train 
 of human material, going up to replace the 
 daily waste of men. After many hours of 
 travelling, and perhaps some of rest, these 
 young soldiers — ^how young most of them were ! 
 — ^would find themselves face to face with the 
 sharpest realities of war. I thought of what 
 I had seen ia the Red Cross hospital that after- 
 noon — "what man has made of man" — ^the 
 wreck of youth and strength, the hideous pain, 
 the helpless disablement. 
 
 But the station rang with laughter and talk. 
 Some one in the canteen began to play "Keep 
 the Home Fires Burning" — and the men in 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 117 
 
 the train joined in, though not very heartily, 
 for as one or two took care to tell me, laugh- 
 ingly — "That and 'Tipperary' are awfully 
 stale now !" A bright-faced lad discussed with 
 
 D how long the war would last. "And ' 
 
 shan't we miss it when it's done!" he said,) 
 with a jesting farewell to us, as he jumped into 
 the train which had begun to move. Slowly, 
 slowly it passed out of sight, amid waves of 
 singing and the shouting of good-byes. . . . 
 
 It was late that evening, when after much 
 talk with various officers, I went up to my 
 room to try and write, bewildered by a multi- 
 tude of impressions — impressions of human 
 energy, human intelligence, human suffering. 
 What England is doing in this country will 
 leave, it seems to me, indelible marks upon the 
 national character. I feel a natural pride, as I 
 sit thinking over the day, in all this British 
 efficiency and power, and a quick joy in the 
 consciousness of our fellowship with France, 
 and hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun 
 is still in its first intensity, and when I have 
 read all that the evening newspapers contain 
 about it, there stirs in me a fresh realisation 
 of the meaning of what I have been seeing. 
 In these great bases, in the rdarvellous rail- 
 way organisation, in the handling of the vast 
 
118 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 motor transport in all its forms, in the feed- 
 ing and equipment of tlie British Army, we 
 have the scaffolding and preparation of war, 
 which, both in the French and English Armies, 
 have now reached a perfection undreamt of 
 when the contest began. But the war itself — 
 the deadly struggle of that distant line to 
 which it all tends? It is in the flash and roar 
 of the guns, in the courage and endurance of 
 the fighting man, that all this travail of brain 
 and muscle speaks at last. At that courage 
 and endurance, women, after all, can only 
 guess — through whatever rending of their own 
 hearts. 
 
 But I was to come somewhat nearer to it 
 than I thought then. The morrow brought 
 surprise. 
 
t)EAB H. 
 
 Our journey farther north through the deep 
 February snow was scarcely less striking as an 
 illustration of Great Britain's constantly grow- 
 ing share in the war than the sight of the great 
 supply bases themselves. The first part of it, 
 indeed, led over soUtary uplands, where the 
 chained wheels of the motor rocked in the snow, 
 and our military chauflfeur dared make no 
 stop, for fear he should never be able to start 
 again. All that seemed aHve in the white 
 landscape were the partridges — sometimes in 
 great flocks — ^which scudded at our approach, 
 or occasional groups of hares in the middle 
 distance holding winter parley. The road 
 seemed interminably long and straight, and 
 ours were almost the first tracks in it. The 
 snow came down incessantly, and once or twice 
 it looked as though we should be left stranded 
 in the white wilderness. 
 
 But after a third of the journey was over, 
 the snow began to lessen and the roads to clear. 
 We dropped first into a seaport town which 
 
 119 
 
120 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 offered much the same mingled scene of French 
 and EngUsh, of English nurses, and French 
 poilus, of unloading ships, and British soldiers, 
 as the bases we had left, only on a smaller scale. 
 And beyond the town we climbed again on to 
 the high land, through a beautiful country of 
 interwoven downs, and more plentiful habita- 
 tion. Soon, indeed, the roads began to show 
 the signs of war — a village or small town, its 
 picturesque market-place filled with a park of 
 artillery wagons; roads lined with motor lor- 
 ries with the painted shell upon them that tells 
 ammunition; British artillerymen in khaki, 
 bringing a band of horses out of a snow-bound 
 farm; closed motor-cars filled with officers 
 hurrying past; then an open car with "King's 
 Messengers, tall, soldierly figures, looking in 
 some astonishment at the two ladies, as they 
 hurry by. And who or what is this horseman 
 looming out of the sleet — like a figure from 
 a piece of Indian or Persian embroidery, tur- 
 baned and swarthy, his cloak swelling out 
 round his handsome head and shoulders, the 
 buildings of a Norman farm behind him? 
 "There are a few Indian cavalry about here," 
 says onx guide — "they are billeted in the 
 farms." And presently the road is full of 
 them. Their Eastern forms, their dark, in- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 121 
 
 tent faces pass strangely through the Norman 
 landscape. 
 
 Now we are only some forty miles from the 
 line, and we presently reach another town con- 
 taining an important British Headquarters, 
 where we are to stop for luncheon. The inn 
 at which we put up is like the song in "Twelfth 
 Night," "old and plain" — and when lunch is 
 done, our Colonel goes to pay an official call 
 at Headquarters, and my daughter and I make 
 our way to the historic church of the town. 
 The Colonel joins us here with another officer, 
 who brings the amazing news that "G. H. Q." 
 — General Headquarters — ^that mysterious cen- 
 tre and brain of all things — invites us for two 
 days ! If we accept, an officer will come for us 
 on the morning of March 1st to our hotel in 
 Boulogne and take us by motor, some forty 
 miles, to the guest-house where G. H. Q. puts 
 up its visitors. "Accept!" Ah, if one could 
 only forget for a moment the human facts be- 
 hind the absorbing interest and excitement of 
 this journey, one might be content to feel only 
 the stir of quickened pulses, of gratitude for a 
 further opportunity so tremendous. 
 
 As it was, I saw all the journey hencefor- 
 ward with new eyes, because of that to which 
 it was bringing us. On we sped, through the 
 
122 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 French countryside, past a great forest lying 
 black on the edge of the white horizon — I open 
 my map and find it marked Bois de Crbcy! 
 — ^past another old town, with Agincoiu*t a 
 few miles to the east, and so into a region of 
 pine and sand that borders the sea. Dark- 
 ness comes down, and we miss our way. What 
 are these lines of light among the pine woods ? 
 Another military and hospital camp, which we 
 are to see on the morrow — so we discover at 
 last. But we have overshot our goal, and must 
 grope our way back through the pine woods to 
 the seashore, where a httle primitive hotel, 
 built for the summer, with walls that seem to 
 be made of brown paper, receives us. But we 
 have motored far that day, and greet it joy- 
 fully. 
 
 The following morning we woke to a silvery 
 sunlight, with, at last, some promise of spring 
 over a land cleared of snow. The day was spent 
 in going through a camp which has been set 
 down in one of the pleasantest and healthiest 
 spots of France, a favourite haunt of French 
 artists before the war. Now the sandy slopes, 
 whence the pines, alack, have been cut away, 
 are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, 
 by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent 
 depot, and by the training-grounds, where, as 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 123 
 
 at other bases, the newly arrived troops are 
 put through their last instruction before going 
 to the front. As usual, the magnitude of what 
 has been done in one short year filled one with 
 amazement. Here is the bare catalogue: In- 
 fantry Base Depots, i. e. sleeping and mess- 
 quarters, for thousands of men belonging to the 
 new armies; 16 hospitals with 21,000 beds; 3 
 rifle ranges; 2 training-camps; a machine- 
 gun training-school; a vast laundry worked 
 by Frenchwomen under British organisation, 
 which washes for all the hospitals, 30,000 pieces 
 a day; recreation huts of all types and kinds, 
 oflacial and voluntary; a Cinema theatre, seat- 
 ing 800 men, with performances twice a day; 
 nurses' clubs; ofl&cers' clubs; a Supply Depot 
 for food; an Ordnance Depot for everything 
 that is not food; new sidings to the railway, 
 where 1,000 men can be entrained on the one 
 side, while 1,000 men are detraining on the 
 other; or two full ambulance-trains can come 
 in and go out; a Convalescent Depot of 2,000 
 patients, and a Convalescent Horse Depot of 
 2,000 horses, etcetera. And this is the work 
 accomphshed since last April in one camp. 
 
 Yet, as I look back upon it, my chief impres- 
 sion of that long day is an impression, first, 
 of endless hospital huts and marquees, with 
 
124 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 their rows o£ beds, in which the pale or flushed 
 faces are generally ready — unless pain or weari- 
 ness forbid — as a visitor ventures timidly near, 
 to turn and smile in response to the few halt- 
 ing words of sympathy or inquiry which are 
 all one can find to say; and, next, of such a 
 wealth of skill, and pity, and devotion poured 
 out upon this terrible human need, as makes 
 one thank God for doctors, and nurses, and 
 bright-faced V. A. D.'s. After all, one trem- 
 blingly asks oneself, in spite of the appalling 
 facts of wounds, and death, and violence in 
 which the human world is now steeped, is it 
 yet possible, is it yet true, that the ultimate 
 thing, the final power behind the veil — to 
 which at least this vast linked spectacle of 
 suflfering and tenderness, here in this great 
 camp, testifies — is not Force, but Love? Is 
 this the mysterious message which seems to 
 breathe from these crowded wards — to make 
 them just bearable. Let me recollect the open 
 door of an operating theatre, and a young oflS- 
 cer, quite a boy, lying there with a buUet in his 
 chest, which the surgeons were just about to 
 try and extract. The fine, pale features of the 
 wounded man, the faces of the surgeon and the 
 nurses, so intent and cheerfully absorbed, the 
 shining surfaces and appliances of the white 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 125 
 
 room — stamp themselves on memory. I recol- 
 lect, too, one John S , a very bad case, a 
 
 private. "Oh, you must come and see John 
 
 S ," says one of the Sisters. "We get all 
 
 the Uttle distractions we can for John. Will 
 he recover .f" Well, we thought so — ^but" — ^her 
 face changes gravely — "John himself seems 
 to have made up his mind lately. He knows 
 — ^but he never complains." Knows what? 
 We go to see him, and he turns round philo- 
 sophically from his tea. "Oh, I'm all right — 
 a bit tired — ^that's all." And then a smile 
 passes between him and his nurse. He has 
 lost a leg, he has a deep wound in his back 
 which won't heal, which is draining his Hfe 
 
 away — ^poor, poor John S ! Close by is a 
 
 short, plain man, with a look of fevered and 
 patient endurance that haunts one now to 
 think of. "It's my eyes. I'm afraid they're 
 getting worse. I was hit in the head, you see. 
 Yes, the pain's bad — ^sometimes." The nurse 
 looks at him anxiously as we pass, and explains 
 what is being tried to give reUef . 
 
 This devotion of the nurses — ^how can one 
 ever say enough of it! I recall the wrath of 
 a medical oflScer in charge of a large hospital 
 at Rouen. "Why don't they give more Red 
 Crosses to the working nurses? They don't 
 
126 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 get half enough recognition. I have a nurse 
 here who has been twelve months in the oper- 
 ating theatre. She ought to have a V. C. ! — 
 It's worth it." 
 
 And here is a dark-eyed young oflScer who 
 had come from a distant colony to fight for 
 England. I find him in an officers' hospital, 
 established not long after the war broke out, 
 in a former Casino, where the huge baccarat- 
 room has been turned into two large and splen- 
 did wards. He is courteously ready to talk 
 about his wound, but much more ready to 
 talk about his Sister. 
 
 "It's simply wonderful what they do for 
 us !" he says, all his face lighting up. "When 
 I was worst there wasn't an hour in the day or 
 night my Sister wasn't ready to try anything 
 in the world to help me. But they're all like 
 that." 
 
 Let me here gratefully recall, also, the hos- 
 pitals organised by the Universities of Chicago 
 and Harvard, entirely staffed by American 
 Sisters and Doctors, each of them providing 34 
 doctors and 80 nurses, and dealing with 1,040 
 patients. Harvard has maintained a general 
 hospital with the British Force in France since 
 July, 1915. The first passages and uniforms 
 were paid for by the British Government, but 
 the University has itself paid all passages, and 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 127 
 
 provided all uniforms since the start; and it is 
 proposed, I am told, to carry on this generous 
 help indefinitely. 
 
 Twenty thousand wounded! — while every 
 day the ambulance trains come and go from 
 the front, or to other bases — there to fill up one 
 or other of the splendid hospital ships that 
 take our brave fellows back to England, and 
 home, and rest. And this city of hospitals, 
 under its hard-pressed medical chief, with all 
 its wealth of scientific invention, and pain- 
 saving device, and unremitting care, with its 
 wonderful health and recovery statistics, has 
 been the growth of just twelve months. The 
 mind wavers between the two opposing images 
 it suggests: war and its havoc on the one 
 hand — the power of the human brain and the 
 goodness of the human heart on the other. 
 
 n 
 
 It was late on the 29th of February that we 
 reached our next resting-place, to find a kind 
 greeting from another Base Commandant and 
 final directions for our journey of the morrow. 
 We put up at one of the old commerical inns of 
 the town (it is not easy to find hotel quarters 
 of any kind just now, when every building at 
 all suitable has been pressed into the hospital 
 
128 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 service) and I found delight in watching the 
 various types of French ofl&cers, naval and 
 military, who came in to the table d'hote, plung- 
 ing as soon as they had thrown ofiF their caps 
 and cloaks, and while they waited for their 
 consomme, into the papers with the latest news 
 of Verdun. But we were too tired to try and 
 talk! The morning came quickly, and with 
 it our escort from G. H. Q. We said good-bye 
 to Colonel S., who had guided our journey so 
 smoothly through all the fierce drawbacks of 
 the weather, and made friends at once with 
 our new guide, the staff-oflBcer who deals with 
 the guests of G. H. Q. Never shall I forget 
 that morning's journey! I find in my notes: 
 "A beautiful drive — ^far more beautiful than I 
 had expected — over undulating country, with 
 distant views of interlocking downs, and along 
 typical French roads, tree or forest bordered, 
 running straight as a line up-hill and down-hill, 
 over upland and plain. One exquisite point of 
 view especially comes back to me, where a road 
 to the coast — that coast which the Germans so 
 nearly reached ! — diverged upon our left, and 
 all the lowlands westward came into sight. It 
 was pure Turner, the soft sunlight of the day, 
 with its blue shadows, and pale-blue sky; the 
 yellow chalk hills, still marked with streaks of 
 snow; the woods, purple and madder brown; 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 129 
 
 the distances ethereally blue; and the villageiS, 
 bare and unlovely compared with the villages of 
 Kent and Sussex, but expressing a strong old 
 historic life, sprung from the soil, and one with 
 it. The first distant glimpse, as we turned a 
 hill-corner, of the old town which was our 
 destination — extraordinarily fine! — ^its ancient 
 church a towered mass of luminous grey under 
 the simshine, gathering the tiled roofs into one 
 harmonious whole." 
 
 But we avoided the town itself and found 
 ourselves presently descending an avenue of 
 trees to the eighteenth-century chateau, which 
 is used by G. H. Q. as a hostel for its guests 
 — allied and neutral correspondents, military 
 attaches, special missions, and the like. In a 
 few minutes I found myself standing bewil- 
 dered by the strangeness and the interest of 
 it all, in a charming Louis-Quinze room, plain 
 and simple in the true manner of the genuine 
 French country house, but with graceful pan- 
 elled walls, an old armoire of the date, win- 
 dows wide open to the spring sun, and a half- 
 wild garden outside. A femme de menage, 
 much surprised to be waiting on two ladies, 
 comes to look after us. And this is France ! — 
 and we are only thirty miles from that fighting 
 fine, which has drawn our English hearts to it 
 all these days '' 
 
130 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 A map is waiting for each of us down-stairs, 
 and we are told, roughly, where it is proposed 
 to take us. A hurried lunch, and we are in the 
 
 motor again, with Captain sitting in front. 
 
 "You have your passes?" he asks us, and we 
 anxiously verify the new and precious papers 
 that brought us from our last stage, and will 
 have to be shown on our way. We drive first 
 to Arques, and Hazebrouck, then southeast. 
 At a certain village we call at the Divisional 
 Headquarters. The General comes out him- 
 self, and proposes to guide us on. "I will take 
 you as near to the fighting line as I can." 
 
 On we went, in two motors; the General 
 
 with me. Captain and D. following. We 
 
 passed through three villages, and after the 
 first we were within shell range of the German 
 batteries ahead. But I cannot remember giv- 
 ing a thought to the fact, so absorbing to the 
 unaccustomed eye were all the accumulating 
 signs of the actual battle-line; the endless rows 
 of motor-lorries, either coming back from, or 
 going up to the front, now with food, now with 
 ammunition, reserve trenches to right and left 
 of the road; a "dump" or food-station, whence 
 carts filled from the heavy lorries go actually 
 up to the trenches, lines of artillery-wagons, 
 parks of ammunition, or motor-ambulances. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 131 
 
 long lines of picketed horses, motor-cyclists 
 dashing past. In one village we saw a merry- 
 crowd in the little place gathered roimd a field- 
 kitchen whence came an excellent fragrance of 
 good stew. A nmnber of the men were wear- 
 ing leeks in their ears for St. David's Day. 
 "You're Welsh, then?" I said to one of the 
 cooks (by this time we had left the motor and 
 were walking). "I'm not!" said the little 
 fellow, with a laughing look. "It's St. Pat- 
 rick's Day I'm waitin' for! But I've no ob- 
 jection to givin' St. David a turn !" 
 
 He opened his kitchen to show me the good 
 things going on, and as we moved away there 
 came up a marching plattoon of men from the 
 trenches, who had done their allotted time there 
 and were coming back to billets. The General 
 went to greet them. "Well, my boys, you 
 could stick it all right ? " It was good to see the 
 lightening on the tired faces, and to watch the 
 group disappear into the cheerful hubbub of 
 the village. 
 
 We walked on, and outside the village I 
 heard the guns for the first time. JWe were 
 now "actually in the battle," according to my 
 companion, and^ a shell was quite possible, 
 though not probable. Again, I can't remember 
 that the fact made any impression upon us. 
 
132 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 We were watching now parties of men at reg- 
 ular intervals sitting waiting in the jfields be- 
 side the road, with their rifles and kits on the 
 grass near them. They were waiting for the 
 signal to move up toward the firing Une as soon 
 as the dusk was further advanced. "We shall 
 meet them later," said the General, "as we 
 come back." 
 
 At the same moment he turned to address a 
 young artillery-officer in the road: "Is your 
 gun near here?" "Yes, sir, I was just going 
 back to it." He was asked to show us the 
 way. As we followed I noticed the white 
 puff of a shell, far ahead, over the flat, ditch- 
 lined fields; a captive balloon was making ob- 
 servations about half a mile in front, and an 
 aeroplane passed over our heads. "Ah, not 
 
 a Boche," said Captain regretfully. "But 
 
 we brought a Boche down here yesterday, 
 just over this village — a splendid fight." 
 
 Meanwhile, the artillery fire was quickening. 
 We reached a ruined village from which all 
 normal inhabitants had been long since cleared 
 away. The shattered church was there, and I 
 noticed a large crucifix quite intact still hang- 
 ing on its chancel wall. A little farther and 
 the boyish artillery-officer, our leader, who had 
 been by this time joined by a comrade, turned 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 133 
 
 and beckoned to the General. Presently we 
 were creeping tlirough seas of mud down into 
 the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed 
 that no aeroplane overhead could guess it. 
 
 There it was — ^how many of its fellows I had 
 seen in the Midland and northern workshops ! 
 — ^its muzzle just showing in the dark, and nine 
 or ten high-explosive shells lying on the bench 
 in front of the breech. One is put in. We 
 stand back a little, and a sergeant tells me to 
 put my fingers in my ears and look straight at 
 the gun. Then comes the shock — not so vio- 
 lent as I had expected — and the cartridge-case 
 drops out. The shell has sped on its way to 
 the German trenches — ^with what result to 
 human flesh and blood? But I remember 
 thinking very Uttle of that — ^till afterwards. 
 At the time, the excitement of the shot and of 
 watching that Uttle group of men in the dark- 
 ness held all one's nerves gripped. 
 
 In a few more minutes we were scrambling 
 out again through the deep, muddy trench lead- 
 ing to the dugout, promising to come back to 
 tea with the oflScers, in their billet, when our 
 walk was done. 
 
 Now indeed we were "in the battle" ! Our 
 own guns were thundering away behind us, and 
 the road was more and more broken up by 
 
134 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 shell holes. "Look at that group of trees 
 to your left — ^beyond it is Neuve Chapelle," 
 said our guide. "And you see those ruined 
 cottages, straight ahead, and the wood be- 
 hind." He named a wood thrice famous in 
 the history of the war. "Our lines are just be- 
 yond the cottages, and the German lines just in 
 front of the wood. How far are we from them ? 
 Three-quarters of a mile." It was discussed 
 whether we should be taken zigzag through the 
 fields to the entrance of the commimication- 
 trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and 
 
 Captain was evidently reHeved when we 
 
 elected to turn back. Shall I always regret 
 that lost opportunity? You did ask me to 
 write something about "*the life of the soldiers 
 in the trenches" — ^and that was the nearest 
 that any woman could personally have come 
 to it ! But I doubt whether anything more — 
 anything, at least, that was possible — could 
 have deepened the whole effect. We had been 
 already nearer than any woman — even a nurse 
 — ^has been, in this war, to the actual fighting 
 on the EngUsh line, and the cup of impres- 
 sions was full. 
 
 As we turned back, I noticed a little ruined 
 cottage, with a Red Cross flag floating. Our 
 guide explained that it was a field dressing- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 135 
 
 station. It was not for us — ^who could not help 
 — ^to ask to go in. But the thought of it — ^there 
 were some badly wounded in it — ^pursued me 
 as we walked on through the beautiful evening. 
 
 A Uttle farther we came across what I think 
 moved me more than anything else in that 
 crowded hour — those same companies of men 
 we had seen sitting waiting in the fields, now 
 marching quietly, spaced one behind the other, 
 up to the trenches, to take their turn there. 
 Every day I am accustomed to see bodies, 
 small and large, of khaki-clad men, marching 
 through these Hertfordshire lanes. But this 
 was difiFerent. The bearing was erect and 
 manly, the faces perfectly cheerful; but there 
 was the seriousness in them of men who knew 
 well the work to which they were going. 
 I caught a little quiet whistling, sometimes, 
 but no singing. We greeted them as they 
 passed, with a shy "Good luck!" and they 
 smiled shyly back, surprised, of coiu*se, to see 
 a couple of women on that road. But there was 
 no shyness towards the General. It was very 
 evident that the relations between him and 
 them were as good as affection and confidence 
 on both sides could make them. 
 
 I stiU see the bright tea-table in that cor- 
 ner of a ruined farm, where our young officers 
 
136 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 presently greeted us — the General marking our 
 maps to make clear where we had actually 
 been — ^the Captain of the battery springing up 
 to show oflf his gramophone — ^while the guns 
 crashed at intervals close beside us, range- 
 finding, probably, searching out a portion of 
 the German line, under the direction of some 
 hidden observer with his telephone. It was 
 over all too quickly. Time was up, and soon 
 the motor was speeding back towards the 
 Divisional Headquarters. The General and I 
 talked of war, and what could be done to stop 
 it. A more practical religion "lifting mankind 
 again"? — a new St. Francis, preaching the old 
 things in new ways ? "But in this war we had 
 and we have no choice. We are fighting for 
 civilisation and freedom, and we must go on 
 till we win." 
 
 Ill 
 
 It was long before I closed my eyes in the 
 pretty room of the old chMeau, after an eve- 
 ning spent in talk with some officers of the 
 Headquarters Staff. When I woke in the 
 dawn I little guessed what the day (March 
 2nd) was to bring forth, or what was already 
 happening thirty miles away on the firing line. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 137 
 
 Zelie, the femme de menage, brought us our 
 breakfast to our room, coffee and bread and 
 eggs, and by half past nine we were down-stairs, 
 booted and spurred, to find the motor at the 
 door, a simple lunch being packed up, and gas- 
 helmets got ready ! "We have had a very suc- 
 cessful action this morning," said Captain , 
 
 evidently in the best of spirits. "We have ta- 
 ken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines 
 Canal that we lost a little while ago, and cap- 
 tured about 200 prisoners. If we go off at 
 once, we shall be in time to see the German 
 counter-attack." 
 
 It was again fine, though not bright, and the 
 distances far less clear. This time we struck 
 northeast, passing first the sacred region of 
 G. H. Q. itself, where we showed our passes. 
 Then after making our way through roads lined 
 interminably, as on the previous day, with the 
 splendid motor-lorries laden with food and 
 ammunition, which have made such a new 
 thing of the transport of this war, interspersed 
 with rows of ambulances and limbered wagons, 
 with flying-stations and horse Hnes, we chmbed 
 a hill to one of the finest positions in this north- 
 ern land; an old town, where Gaul and Roman, 
 Frank and Fleming, English and French have 
 clashed, which looks out northward towards the 
 
138 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 Yser and Dunkirk, and east towards Ypres. 
 Now, if the mists will only clear, we shall see 
 Ypres! But, alas, they lie heavy over the 
 plain, and we descend the hill again without 
 that vision. Now we are bound for Pope- 
 ringhe, and must go warily, because there is a 
 lively artillery action going on beyond Pope- 
 ringhe, and it is necessary to find out what 
 roads are being shelled. 
 
 On the way we stop at an air-station, to 
 watch the aeroplanes rising and coming down, 
 and at a point near Poperinghe we go over a 
 casualty-clearing station — a collection of hos- 
 pital huts, with storehouses and staff quar- 
 ters — ^with the medical officer in charge. Here 
 were women nurses who are not allowed in the 
 field dressing-stations nearer the line. There 
 were not many wounded, though they were 
 coming in, and the Doctor was not for the 
 moment very busy. 
 
 We stood on the threshold of a large ward, 
 where we could not, I think, be seen. At the 
 farther end a serious case was being attended 
 by nurses and surgeons. Everything was pass- 
 ing in silence; and to me it was as if there 
 came from the distant group a tragic message 
 of suffering, possibly death. Then, as we 
 passed lingeringly away, we saw three young 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 139 
 
 oflBcers, all wounded, running up from the 
 ambulance at the gate, which had just brought 
 them, and disappearing into one of the wards. 
 The first — a splendid kilted figure — had his 
 head bound up; the others were apparently 
 wounded in the arm. But they seemed to walk , 
 on air, and to be quite unconscious that any- 
 thing was wrong with them. It had been a 
 success, a great success, and they had been in it ! 
 The ambulances were now arriving fast 
 from the field dressing-stations close to the 
 line, and we hurried away, and were soon 
 driving through Poperinghe. Here and there 
 there was a house wrecked with shell-fire. The 
 little town indeed with its picturesque 'place 
 is constantly shelled. But, all the same, life 
 seems to go on as usual. The Poperinghe 
 boy, like his London brother, hangs on the 
 back of carts; his father and mother come 
 to their door to watch what is going on, or to 
 ask eagerly for news of the counter-attack; and 
 his little brothers and sisters go tripping to 
 school, in short cloaks with the hoods drawn 
 over their heads, as though no war existed. 
 Here and in the country round, poor, robbed 
 Belgium is still at home on her own soil, and 
 on the best of terms with the English Army, 
 by which, indeed, this remnant of her pros- 
 
140 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 pers greatly. As I have already insisted, the re- 
 lations everywhere between the British soldier 
 and the French and Belgian populations are 
 among the British — or shall I say the AlUed ? — 
 triumphs of the war. 
 
 Farther on the road a company from a fa- 
 mous regiment, picked men all of them, comes 
 swinging along, fresh from their baths! — ^life 
 and force in every movement — ^young Harrys 
 with their beavers on. Then, a house where 
 men have their gas-helmets tested — a very 
 strict and necessary business; and another, 
 where an ex-BalUol tutor and Army Chaplain 
 keeps open doors for the soldier in his hoiu-s of 
 rest or amusement. But we go in search of a 
 safe road to a neighbouring village, where some 
 fresh passes have to be got. Each foot now of 
 the way is crowded with the incidents and ap- 
 purtenances of war, and war close at hand. 
 An Australian transport base is pointed out, 
 with a wholly AustraHan staff. "Some of the 
 men," says our guide, "are millionaires." 
 Close by is an aeroplane descending unexpect- 
 edly in a field, and a crowd of men rushing to 
 help; and we turn away relieved to see the 
 two aviators walking off unhurt. Meanwhile, 
 I notice a regular game of football going on 
 at a distance^and some carefuUy written names 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 141 
 
 of bypaths — "Hyde Park Corner," "Picca- 
 dilly," "Queen Mary's Road," and the like. 
 The animation, the life of the scene are inde- 
 scribable. 
 
 At the next village the road was crowded 
 both with natives and soldiers to see the Ger- 
 man prisoners brought in. Alack! we did not 
 see them. Ambulances were passing and re- 
 passing, the slightly wounded men in cars open 
 at the back, the more serious cases in closed 
 cars, and everywhere the same va et vient of 
 lorries and wagons, of stafif-cars and motor- 
 cyclists. It was not right for us to add to the 
 congestion in the road. Moreover, the hours 
 were drawing on, and the great sight was still 
 to come. But to have watched those prisoners 
 come in would have somehow rounded ofiE the 
 day! 
 
 IV 
 
 Our new passes took us to the top of a hill 
 well known to the few onlookers of which this 
 war admits. The motor stopped at a point 
 on the road where a picket was stationed, who 
 examined our papers. Then came a stiff and 
 muddy climb, past a dugout for protection 
 in case of shelling. Captain carrying the 
 
142 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 three gas-helmets. At the top was a flat green 
 space — three or four soldiers playing football 
 on it! — and an old windmill, and farm-build- 
 ings. 
 
 We sheltered behind the great beams support- 
 ing the windmill, and looked out through them, 
 north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain 
 bordered eastward by low hills, every mile of 
 it, almost, watered by British blood, and con- 
 secrate to British dead. As we reached the 
 windmill, as though in sombre greeting, the 
 floating mists on the near horizon seemed to 
 part, and there rose from them a dark, jagged 
 tower, one side of it torn away. It was the 
 tower of Ypres — ^mute victim! — mute witness 
 to a crime, that, beyond the reparations of our 
 own day, history will avenge through years 
 to come. 
 
 A flash! — ^another! — ^from what appear to 
 be the ruins at its base. It is the EngUsh guns 
 speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; 
 and as we watch we see the columns of white 
 smoke rising from the German lines as the shells 
 burst. There they are, the German lines — 
 along the Messines ridge. We make them out 
 quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain 
 
 's guidance. Their guns, too, are at work, 
 
 and a couple of their shells are bursting on our 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 143 
 
 trenclies somewhere between Vlamertinghe and 
 Dickebusche. Then the rattle of our machine- 
 guns — as it seems from somewhere close below 
 us, and again the boom of the artillery. 
 
 The counter-action is in progress, and we 
 watch what can be seen or guessed of it, in 
 fascination. We are too far off to see what 
 is actually happening between the opposing 
 trenches, but one of the chief fields of past and 
 present battle, scenes which our children and 
 our children's children will go to visit, lie 
 spread out before us. Half the famous sites 
 of the earher war can be dimly made out be- 
 tween us and Ypres. In front of us is the gleam 
 of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 
 60 is in that band of shadow; a little farther 
 east the point where the Prussian Guard was 
 mown down at the close of the first Battle of 
 Ypres; farther south the fields and woods made 
 for ever famous by the charge of the Household 
 Cavalry, by the deeds of the Worcesters, and 
 the London Scottish, by all the splendid valour 
 of that "thin red line," French and English, 
 cavalry and infantry, which in the first Battle 
 of Ypres withstood an enemy four times as 
 strong, saved France, and thereby England, 
 and thereby Europe. In that tract of ground 
 over which we are looking lie more than 
 
144 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 100,000 graves, English and French; and to it 
 the hearts of two great nations will turn for 
 all time. Then if you try to pierce the northern 
 haze, beyond that ruined tower, you may follow 
 in imagination the course of the Yser westward 
 to that Belgian coast where Admiral Hood's 
 guns broke down and scattered the German 
 march upon Dimkirk and Calais; or if you 
 turn south you are looking over the Belfry of 
 Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and Festu- 
 bert, and all the fierce fighting-ground round 
 Souchez and the Labyrinth. Once English and 
 French stood linked here in a common heroic 
 defence. Now the English hold all this line 
 firmly from the sea to the Somme; while the 
 French, with the eyes of the world upon them, 
 are making history, hour by hour, at Verdun. 
 So to this point we have followed one branch 
 — ^the greatest — of England's effort; and the 
 mind, when eyes fail, pursues it afresh from its 
 beginnings when we first stood to arms in 
 August, 1914, through what Mr. Buchan has 
 finely called the "rally of the Empire," through 
 the early rush and the rapid growth of the 
 new armies, through the strengthening of 
 Egypt, the disaster of Gallipoli, the seizure of 
 the German Colonies; through all that vast 
 upheaval at home which we have seen in the 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 145 
 
 munition areas; through that steady, and ever- 
 growing organisation on the friendly French 
 soil we have watched in the supply bases. Yet 
 here, for us, it culminates; and here and in the 
 North Sea, we can hardly doubt — ^whatever may 
 be the diversions in other fields — ^will be fought, 
 for Great Britain, the decisive battles of the 
 war. As I turn to those dim lines on the Mes- 
 sines ridge, I have come at last to sight of 
 whither it all moves. There, in those trenches 
 is The Aggressor — ^the enemy who has wantonly 
 broken the peace of Europe, who has befouled 
 civilisation with deeds of lust and blood, be- 
 tween whom and the Allies there can be no 
 peace tiU the Allies' right arm dictates it. 
 Every week, every day, the British Armies 
 grow, the British troops pour steadily across 
 the Channel, and to the effort of England and 
 her Allies there will be no truce till the right- 
 eous end is won. 
 
 But the shadows are coming down on the 
 great scene, and with the sound of the guns still 
 in our ears we speed back through the crowded 
 roads to G. H. Q., and these wonderful days 
 are over. Now, all that remains for me is to 
 take you, far away from the armies, into the 
 English homes whence the men fighting here 
 are drawn, and to show you, if I can, very 
 
146 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 shortly, by a few instances, what rich and poor 
 are doing as individuals to feed the effort of 
 England in this war. What of the young, of all 
 classes and opportunities, who have laid down 
 their lives in this war? What of the mothers 
 who reared them, the schools and universities 
 which sent them forth ? — ^the comrades who are 
 making ready to carry on their work? You 
 ask me as to the sjiirit of the nation — ^the foun- 
 dation of all else. Let us look into a few lives* 
 a few typical lives and families, and see. 
 
VI 
 
 April 9>%nd 
 Dear H. 
 
 As I begin upon this final letter to you comes 
 the news that the threatened spUt in the Brit- 
 ish Cabinet owing to the proposed introduction 
 of general military service has been averted, 
 and that at a Secret Session to be held next 
 Tuesday, April 25th, Ministers will, for the 
 first time, lay before both Houses of Parha- 
 ment full and complete information — ^much 
 more full aiid complete at any rate, than has 
 yet been given — of the "effort" of Great Britain 
 in this world war, what this country is doing 
 in sea-power, in the provision of Armies, in the 
 lending of money to our Allies, in our own 
 shipping service to them, and in our supply to 
 them of munitions, coal, and other war material 
 — ^including boots and clothing. If, then, our 
 own British Parliament will be for the first 
 time fully apprised next Tuesday of what the 
 nation has been doing, it is, perhaps, small 
 wonder that you on your side of the Atlantic 
 have not rightly understood the performance 
 of a nation which has, collectively, the same 
 
 147 
 
148 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 love of "grousing" as the individual British 
 soldier shows in the trenches. 
 
 Let me, however, go back and recapitulate 
 a little. 
 
 In the first of these letters, I tried, by a 
 rapid "vision" of the Fleet, as I personally 
 saw an important section of it amid the snows 
 of February, to point to the indispensable con- 
 dition of this "effort," without which it could 
 never have been made, without which it could 
 not be maintained for a day, at the present 
 moment. Since that visit of mine, the power 
 of the Fleet and the effect of the Fleet have 
 strengthened week by week. The blockade of 
 Germany is far more effective than it was three 
 months ago; the evidence of its growing strin- 
 gency accumulates steadily, and at the same 
 time the British Foreign Office has been anx- 
 iously trying, and evidently with much success, 
 to minimise for neutrals its inevitable difficul- 
 ties and inconveniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. 
 Asquith will explain next Tuesday, the expendi- 
 ture on the war, not only on our own needs 
 but on those of our Allies is colossal — terrify- 
 ing. The most astonishing Budget of English 
 History, demanding a fourth of his income 
 from every well-to-do citizen, has been brought 
 in since I began to write these letters, and 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 149 
 
 quietly accepted. Five hundred millions ster- 
 ling ($2,500,000,000) have been already lent to 
 our Allies. We are spending at the yearly rate 
 of 600,000,000 sterling ($3,000,000,000) on the 
 Army; 200,000,000 on the Navy as compared 
 with 40,000,000 in 1913; while the Munitions 
 Department is costing about two-thirds as 
 much (400,000,000 sterhng) as the rest of the 
 Army, and is employing close upon 2,000,000 
 workers, one-tenth of them women. The ex- 
 port trade of the country, in spite of sub- 
 marhies and lack of tonnage, is at the moment 
 greater than it was in the corresponding 
 months of 1913, 
 
 As to what we have got for our money. 
 Parliament has authorised an Army of 4,000,- 
 000 men, and it is on the question of the last 
 half million that England's Effort now turns. 
 Mr. Asquith will explain everything that has 
 been done, and everything that still remains to 
 do, in camera to Parliament next Tuesday. 
 But do not, my dear friend, make any mis- 
 take ! England mil get the men she wants; and 
 Labour will be in the end just as determined to 
 get them as any other section of the Commu- 
 nity, Meanwhile, abroad, while we seem, for 
 the moment, in France to be inactive, we are in 
 reality giving the French at Verdun just that 
 
150 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 support which they and General JoflFre desire, 
 and — it can scarcely be doubted — ^preparing 
 great things on our own account. In spite of 
 our failure in Gallipoli, and the anxious posi- 
 tion of General Townshend's force, Egypt is no 
 longer in danger of attack, if it ever has been; 
 our sea-power has brought a Russian force 
 safely to Marseilles; and the possibilities of 
 British and Russian Collaboration in the East 
 are rapidly opening out. As to the great and 
 complex war-machine we have been steadily 
 building up on French soil, as I tried to show 
 in my fourth letter, whether in the supply 
 bases, or in the war organisation along the 
 ninety miles of front now held by the British 
 Armies, it would indeed astonish those dead 
 heroes of the Retreat from Mons — could they 
 come back to see it! We are not satisfied 
 with it yet — Whence the unrest in Parliament 
 and the Press — we shall never be satisfied — 
 till Germany has accepted the terms of the 
 Allies. But those who know England best 
 have no doubt whatever as to the temper of 
 the nation which has so far "improvised the im- 
 possible," in the setting up of this machine, and 
 means, in the end, to get out of it what it wants. 
 The temper of the nation? In this last 
 letter let me take some samples of it. First — 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 151 
 
 what have the rich been doing ? As to money, 
 the figures of the income-tax, the death-duties, 
 and the various war loans are there to show 
 what they have contributed to the State. The 
 Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and 
 the St. John's Ambulance Association has col- 
 lected — ^thowgh not, of course, from the rich 
 only — close on 4,000,000 sterling (between 
 $18,000,000 and $19,000,000), and the Prince 
 of Wales Fund neariy 6,000,000 ($30,000,000). 
 The lavishness of English giving, indeed, in 
 all directions, during the last two years, 
 could hardly I think have been outdone. A 
 few weeks ago I walked with the Duke of 
 Bedford through the training and reinforce- 
 ment camp, about fifteen miles from my 
 own home in the country, which he him- 
 self commands and which, at the outbreak 
 of war, he himself built without waiting for 
 pubUc money or War OflS.ce contractors, to 
 house and train recruits for the various Bed- 
 fordshire regiments. The camp holds 1,200 
 men, and is ranged in a park where the oaks 
 —still standing — ^were considered too old by 
 Ohver Cromwell's Commissioners to furnish 
 timber for the English Navy. Besides ample 
 barrack accommodation in comfortable huts, 
 planned so as to satisfy every demand whether 
 
152 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 of health or convenience, all the opportunities 
 that Aldershot offers, on a large scale, are here 
 provided in miniature. The model trenches 
 with the latest improvements in plan, revet- 
 ting, gun-emplacements, sally-ports, and the 
 rest, spread through the sandy soil; the mus- 
 ketry ranges, bombing and bayonet schools are 
 of the most recent and efficient type. And the 
 Duke takes a keen personal interest in every 
 man in training, follows his progress in camp, 
 sees him off to the front, and very often re- 
 ceives him, when wounded, in the perfectly 
 equipped hospital which the Duchess has estab- 
 Ushed in Wobum Abbey itself. Here the old 
 riding-school, tennis-court, and museum, which 
 form a large building fronting the abbey, have 
 been turned into wards as attractive as bright 
 and simple colour, space, flowers, and exquisite 
 cleanliness can make them. The Duchess is 
 herself the Matron in charge, under the War 
 Office, keeps all the records, is up at half past 
 five in the morning, and spends her day in the 
 endless doing, thinking, and contriving that 
 such a hospital needs. Not very far away 
 stands another beautiful country house, rented 
 by Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid when they 
 were in England. It also is a hospital, but 
 its owner, Lord Lucas, not a rich man, has 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 153 
 
 now given it irrevocably to the nation for the 
 use of disabled soldiers, together with as much 
 land as may suffice a farm colony chosen from 
 among them. The beautiful hospital of 250 
 beds at Paignton, in North Devon, run entirely 
 by women of American birth now resident in 
 Great Britain, without any financial aid from 
 the British Government, was another large 
 country house given to the service of the 
 wounded by Mr. Singer. Lady Sheffield's hos- 
 pital for 25 beds at Alderley Park, is an exam- 
 ple of how part of a country house with all its 
 green and restful surroundings may be used 
 for those who have suffered in the war, and it 
 has many fellows in all parts of England. 
 Altogether about 700 country houses, large and 
 small, have been offered to the War Office. 
 
 But money and houses are the very least 
 part of what the old families, the rich manu- 
 facturers, or the educated class generally have 
 offered to their country in this war. Democ- 
 racy has gone far with us, but it may still be 
 said that the yoimg heir to a great name, to 
 estates with which his family has been con- 
 nected for generations, and to the accumulated 
 "consideration" to use a French word in a 
 French sense, which such a position almost 
 always carries with it — ^has a golden time in 
 
154 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 English life. Difficulties that check others fall 
 away from him; he is smiled upon for his kin- 
 dred's sake before he makes friends for his own; 
 the world is overkind to his virtues and blind 
 to his faults; he enters manhood indeed as 
 "one of our conquerors"; and it will cost him 
 some trouble to throw away his advantages. 
 Before the war such a youth was the common 
 butt of the Socialist orator. He was the typi- 
 cal "shirker" and "loafer," while other men 
 worked; the parasite bred from the sweat of 
 the poor; the soft, eflFeminate creature who had 
 never faced the facts of life and never would. 
 As to his soldiering — ^the common profession 
 of so many of his kind — that was only another 
 offence in the eyes of politicians like Mr. Keir 
 Hardie. When the class war came, he would 
 naturally be found shooting down the work- 
 men; but for any other war, an ignorant popin- 
 jay ! — incompetent even at his own trade, and 
 no match whatever for the scientific soldier of 
 the Continent. 
 
 Those who knew anything of the Army were 
 well aware long before 1914 that this type of 
 officer — if he still existed, as no doubt he had 
 once existed — ^had become extraordinarily rare; 
 that since the Boer War, the level of education 
 in_the Army, the standard of work demanded. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 155 
 
 the quality of the relations between officers 
 and men had all steadily advanced. And with 
 regard to the young men of the "classes" in 
 general, those who had to do with them, at 
 school and college, while fully ^ aUve to their 
 weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which 
 were more instinct than anything else, as to 
 what stuflf these easy-going, sport-loving fellows 
 might prove to be made of in case of emergency. 
 Well, the emergency came. These youths 
 of the classes, heirs to titles and estates, or just 
 younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, 
 so far as it still survives, went out in their 
 hundreds, with the old and famous regiments 
 of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, 
 and perished in their hundreds. Forty-seven 
 eldest sons, heirs to Enghsh peerages had fallen 
 within a year of the outbreak of war — ^among 
 them the heirs to such famous houses as Long- 
 leat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby — ^and the 
 names of Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, 
 Douglas Pennant, Worsley, Hay, St. Aubyn, 
 Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach — together 
 with men whose fathers have played promi- 
 nent parts in the politics or finance of the 
 last half century. And the first ranks have 
 been followed by what one might almost call a 
 levee en masse of those that remained. Their 
 
156 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and 
 La Bass^e, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever 
 may be said henceforward of these "golden 
 lads" of ours, "shirker" and "loafer" they 
 can never be called again. They have died 
 too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted 
 them too well for that — ^and some of the work- 
 ing-class leaders, with the natiural generosity of 
 English hearts, have confessed it abimdantly. 
 
 And the professional classes — the intellec- 
 tuals — everywhere the leading force of the na- 
 tion — have done just as finely, and of course 
 in far greater numbers. Never shall I forget 
 my visit to Oxford last May — ^in the height of 
 the summer term, just at that moment when 
 Oxford normally is at its loveliest and fullest, 
 brimming over with young life, the streets 
 crowded with caps and gowns, the river and 
 towing-path alive with the "flannelled fools," 
 who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's 
 gibe — if it ever applied to them — with interest. 
 For they had all disappeared. They were in 
 the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning 
 Egypt, pushing up to Baghdad. The colleges 
 contained a few forlorn remnants — under age, 
 or medically unfit. The river, on a glorious 
 May day, showed boats indeed, but girls were 
 rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 157 
 
 Newman, of Cecil Rhodes, was filled with 
 women students, whose own college, Somer- 
 ville, had become a hospital. The Examina- 
 tion Schools in the High Street were a pos- 
 pital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced 
 the fragrance of Ulac and hawthorn for ever 
 associated in the minds of Oxford's lovers with 
 the summer term. In New College gardens, 
 there were white tents full of wounded. I 
 walked up and down that wide, deserted lawn 
 of St. John's, where Charles I once gathered his 
 Cavaliers, with an old friend, an Oxford tutor of 
 forty years' standing, who said with a despair- 
 ing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many 
 are gone — so many I — ^and the terrible thing is 
 that I can't feel it as I once did — as blow fol- 
 lows blow one seems to have lost the power." 
 Let me evoke the memory of some of them. 
 From Balliol have gone the two Grenfell 
 brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the tes- 
 timony of those who knew them best, not de- 
 lightful to those who did not love them, not 
 just, often, to those they did not love, but full 
 of that rich stuff which life matures to all fine 
 uses. The yoimger fell in the attack on Hooge, 
 July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had 
 fallen some months earlier. Julian's verses, 
 composed the night before he was woimded. 
 
158 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 will be remembered with Rupert Brooke's son- 
 nets, as expressing the inmost passion of the 
 war in great hearts. They were written in the 
 spring weather of April, 1915, and a month 
 later the writer had died of his wounds. With 
 an exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, 
 expressing the strange and tragic joy of the 
 "fighting man" in the spring, which may be 
 his last — ^in the night heavens — in the wood- 
 land trees: 
 
 "The woodland trees that stand together 
 They stand to him each one a friend; 
 They gently speak in the windy weather; 
 They guide to valley and ridge's end. 
 
 "The kestrel hovering by day 
 
 And the little owls that call by night. 
 Bid him be swift and keen as they 
 As keen of ear, as swift of sight. 
 
 "The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother. 
 If this be the last song you shall sing, 
 Sing well, for you may not sing another 
 Brother, sing.' 
 
 "In dreary, doubtful waiting hours. 
 Before the brazen frenzy starts. 
 The horses show him nobler powers; — 
 O patient eyes, courageous hearts ! 
 
 "And when the burning moment breaks. 
 And all things else are out of mind 
 And only Joy of Battle takes 
 Him by the throat and makes him blind 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 159 
 
 "Through joy and blindness he shall know 
 Not caring much to know, that still 
 Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so 
 That it be not the Destined Will. 
 
 "The thundering line of battle stands. 
 And in the air Death moans and sings; 
 But Day shall clasp him with strong hands. 
 And Night shall fold him in soft wings." 
 
 A young man of another type, inheriting 
 from the Cecils on the one side, and from his 
 grandfather, the first Lord Selborne, on the 
 other, the best traditions of English Conser- 
 vatism and English churchmanship — open- 
 eyed, patriotic, devout — ^has been lost to the 
 nation in Robert A. S. Palmer, the second son 
 of Lord and Lady Selborne, affectionately 
 known to an ardent circle of friends whose 
 hopes were set on him, as "Bobbie Palmer." 
 He has fallen in the Mesopotamian campaign; 
 and of him, as of William Henry Gladstone, the 
 grandson and heir of England's great Liberal 
 Minister, who fell in Flanders a year ago, it 
 may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries said 
 of Sir Philip Sidney, 
 
 Honour and Fame are got about their graves, '• 
 
 And there sit mourning of each other's loss. 
 
 In one of his latest letters, quoted by a friend 
 in a short biography, Robert Palmer wrote: — [ 
 
160 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 "Who isn't weary to death of the war? I 
 certainly have been, for over a year; yes, and 
 sorrowful almost unto death over it, at times, 
 as you doubtless have too. But of one thing I 
 am and always have been sure, that it is worth 
 the cost and any cost there is to come, to pre- 
 vent Prussianism — ^which is Anti-Christ — con- 
 trolling Europe." The following eloquent 
 passage written by an Oxford Fellow and 
 Tutor, in a series of short papers on the losses 
 sustained by Oxford in the war, is understood 
 to refer to Mr. Palmer: — 
 
 "To-night the bell tolls in the brain {kaud 
 rediturus) over one of the noblest — ^if it be not 
 a treason to discriminate — of all the dead 
 one has known who have died for England. 
 Graciousness was in all his goings and^in all 
 the workings of his mind. The music and 
 gymnastic whereof Plato wrote, that should 
 attune the body to harmony with the mind, 
 and harmonise all the elements of the mind in 
 a perfect unison, had done their work upon 
 him. He seemed — ^at any rate, to the eyes of 
 those who loved him, and they were many — to 
 have the perfection of nature's endowment: 
 beauty of mind knit to beauty of body, and all 
 informed by a living spirit of afiFection, so that 
 his presence was a benediction, and a matter 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 161 
 
 for thanksgiving that God had made men 
 after this manner. So to speak of him is per- 
 haps to idealise him; but one can only ideal- 
 ise that which suggests the ideal, and at the 
 least he had a more perfect participation in 
 the ideal than falls to the general lot of hu- 
 manity. 
 
 Such he was: and now he too is dead. 
 From the work to which he had gone, thou- 
 sands of miles away (a work of service, and of 
 his Master's service), he had hastened back to 
 England, and for England he has died. His 
 tutor had once written in his copy of the Vul- 
 gate: "Esto vir fortis, et pugnemus pro populo 
 nostro et pro dvitate Dei nostri." He was 
 strong; and he fought for both. 
 
 Another Oxford man, Gilbert Talbot, young- 
 est son of the much-loved Bishop of Winches- 
 ter, will perhaps stand for many, in coming 
 years, as the pre-eminent type of first youth, 
 youth with all its] treasure of life and promise 
 imspent, poured out like spikenard in this war 
 at the feet of England. Aheady assured at 
 Oxford of a brilliant career in politics, a fine 
 speaker, a hard worker, possessing by inheri- 
 tance the charm of two families always in the 
 pubUc eye and ear, and no less popular than 
 famous, he had just landed in the United 
 
162 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 States when the war broke out. He was going 
 round the world with a friend, youth and am- 
 bition high within him. He turned back with- 
 out a moment's hesitation, though soldiering 
 had never been at all attractive to him, and 
 after his training went out to France. He was 
 killed in Flanders in July last. Let me give 
 the story of his identification after death on 
 the battle-field, by his elder brother, Neville, 
 Army Chaplain, and ex-Balliol tutor, as Canon 
 Scott Holland gave it in the Commonwealth: — 
 "The attack had failed. There was never 
 any hope of its succeeding, for the machine- 
 guns of the Germans were still in full play, 
 with their fire unimpaired. The body had to 
 lie there where it had fallen. Only, his brother 
 could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or 
 unblessed. After a day and a half of anxious 
 searching for exact details, he got to the near- 
 est trench by the 'murdered' wood, which 
 the shells had now smashed to pieces. There 
 he found some shattered Somersets, who begged 
 him to go no farther. But he heard a voice 
 within him bidding him risk it, and the call of 
 the blood drove him on. Creeping out of the 
 far end of the trench, as dusk fell, he crawled 
 through the grass on hands and knees, in 
 spite of shells and snipers, dropping flat on 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 163 
 
 the ground as the flares shot up from the 
 German trenches. And, at last, thirty yards 
 away in the open ... he knew that he was 
 close on what he sought. Two yards farther, 
 he found it. He could stroke with his hand 
 the fair young head that he knew so well; he 
 could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, 
 and the badge and the whistle. He could 
 breathe a prayer of benediction , . . and then 
 crawl back on his perilous way in the night, 
 having done all that man could do for the 
 brother whom he had loved so fondly; and 
 enabled, now, to tell those at home that Gil- 
 bert was dead indeed, but that he had died 
 the death that a soldier would love to die, 
 leaving his body the nearest of all who fell, to 
 the trench that he had been told to take." 
 
 Again, of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Rib- 
 blesdale's eldest son, an Oxford friend says: 
 "There were almost infinite possibilities in his 
 future." He was twice wounded at the Dar- 
 danelles, was then offered a post of impor- 
 tance in the Foreign Office, refused it, and 
 went back to the front — to die. But among 
 the hundreds of memorial notices issued by 
 the Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs 
 and recurs, of unhesitating, uncalculated sacri- 
 fice. Older men, and younger men, Don, and 
 
164 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 undergraduate, lads of nineteen and twenty, 
 and those who were already school-mastering, 
 or practising at the Bar, or in business, they 
 felt no doubts, they made no delays. Their 
 country called, and none failed in that great 
 Adsum. 
 
 Cambridge of course has the same story to 
 tell. One takes the short, pathetic biographies 
 almost at random from the ever-lengthening 
 record, contributed by the colleges. Captain 
 J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, was already Direc- 
 tor of an important steel works, engaged in 
 Government business when war broke out, 
 and might have honourably claimed exemp- 
 tion. Instead he ofifered himself at once on 
 mobilisation, and went out with his battalion 
 to France last spring. On the 15th of Jime, 
 at Festubert, he was killed in volunteering to 
 bring what was left of a frightfully battered 
 battalion out of action. "What seems to me 
 my duty as an officer," he once wrote to a 
 friend, "is to carry my sword across the bar- 
 riers of death clean and bright." "This," says 
 the friend who writes the notice, "he has 
 done." Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trin- 
 ity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the fore- 
 head by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. 
 His General and brother officers write: 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 165 
 
 He wag a very fine young officer. . . . Every one loved him. 
 . . . His men would do anything for him. . . . 
 
 And the sergeant of his machine-gun bri- 
 gade says: 
 
 Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I have 
 lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and hind to me 
 and us all. 
 
 Lieutenant Hamilton, aged twenty-five, says 
 in a last letter to his father: 
 
 Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is going on. 
 It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it all. Any moment 
 one may he put out of action, hut one does not worry. That quiet 
 time alone vnth God at the Holy Communion was most comforting. 
 
 Immediately after writing these words, the 
 writer fell in action. Captain Clarke, a fa- 
 mous Cambridge athlete. President of the 
 C. U. A. C, bled to death — according to one 
 account — ^from a frightful wound received in 
 the advance near Hooge on September 25th. 
 His last recorded act — the traditional act of 
 the dying soldier! — was to give a drink from 
 his flask to a wounded private. Of the gen- 
 eral action of Cambridge men, the Master of 
 Christ's writes: "Nothing has been more 
 splendid than the way the young fellows have 
 
166 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 come forward; not only the athletes and the 
 healthy, but in all cases the most unlikely men 
 have rushed to the front, and have done bril- 
 liantly. The mortality, however, has been ap- 
 palling. In an ordinary way one loses one 
 killed to eight or nine wounded; but in this war 
 the number of Cambridge men killed and miss- 
 ing practically equals the number of wounded." 
 Of the effect upon the University an eye-wit- 
 ness says: "Eighty per cent of the College 
 rooms are vacant. Rows and rows of houses 
 in Cambridge are to let. All the Jimior Fel- 
 lows are on service in one capacity or another, 
 and a great many of the Seniors are working 
 in Government OflSces or taking school posts" 
 — so that the school education of the Country 
 may be carried on. Altogether, nearly 12,000 
 Cambridge men are serving; 980 have been 
 wounded; 780 have been killed; 92 are miss- 
 ing. 
 
 As to one's friends and kinsfolk, let me recall 
 the two gallant grandsons of my dear old 
 friend and publisher, George Murray Smith, 
 the original publisher of Jane Eyre, friend of 
 Charlotte BrontS, and creator of the Diction- 
 ary of National Biography. The elder one, 
 who had just married before going out, fought 
 all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 167 
 
 one of the early actions on the Flanders front. 
 "He led us all the way," said one of his men 
 afterwards. All the way ! — All through the 
 immortal rear-guard actions of August — only 
 to fall, when the tide had turned, and the Ger- 
 man onslaught on Paris had been finally 
 broken! "In all my soldiering," writes a 
 brother oflScer, "I have never seen a warmer 
 feeling between men and their officer." "Was 
 he not," asks a well-known Eton master, 
 "that tall, smiling, strong, gentle-mannered 
 boy at White-Thomson's?" — ^possessing an 
 "affectionate regard and feeling for others 
 which boys as boys, especially if strong and 
 popular, don't always, or indeed often pos- 
 sess." The poor parents were uncertain as to 
 his fate for many weeks, but he finally died 
 of his wounds in a hospital behind the German 
 lines. Then, little more than six months later 
 came the second blow. Geoffrey, the younger 
 brother, aged nineteen, fell on September 29th, 
 near Vermelles. Nothing could be more touch- 
 ing than the letters from officers and men about 
 this brave, sweet-tempered boy. "Poor old 
 regiment!" writes the Colonel to the lad's 
 father — "we were badly knocked about, and 
 I brought out only 3 officers and 375 men, 
 but they did magnificently, and it was thanks 
 
168 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 to oflScers like your son, who put the honour 
 of the regiment before all thought of fatigue 
 or personal danger. Such a gallant lad ! We 
 all loved him." A private, the boy's soldier- 
 servant, who fought with him, writes: "I wish 
 you could have seen him in that trench. . . . 
 All the men say that he deserved the V. C. 
 ... I don't know if we are going back to 
 those trenches any more, but if we do, I am 
 going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in 
 some quiet place. ... I cannot bear to think 
 that I shall not be able to be with him any 
 more." 
 
 But how they crowd upon the mind — the 
 "unreturning brave" ! Take our friends and 
 neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire coirn- 
 try. All round us the blows have fallen — ^again 
 and again the only son — sometimes two broth- 
 ers out of three — ^the most brilliant — the best 
 beloved. And I see still the retreating figure 
 of a dear nephew of my own, as he vanished 
 under the trees waving his hand to us in 
 March last. A boy made of England's best — 
 who after two years in Canada, and at the be- 
 ginning of what must have been a remarkable 
 career, heard the call of the Mother Country, 
 and rushed home at once. He was transferred 
 to an English regiment, and came to say good^ 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT i69 
 
 bye to us in March. It was impossible to 
 think of Christopher's coming to harm — such 
 hfe and force, such wisdom and character also, 
 in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful 
 eyes! We talked of the future of Canada — 
 not much of the war. Then he vanished, and 
 I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, 
 near Bailleul, he went out with a listening party 
 between the trenches, was shot through both 
 legs by a sniper, and otherwise injured — carried 
 back to hospital, and after a few hours' vain 
 hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing 
 only that he had done his duty and fearing 
 nothing. "Romance and melodrama," says 
 Professor Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest 
 and most moving utterances of the war, "were 
 once a memory — ^broken fragments living on 
 of heroic ages in the past. We live no longer 
 upon fragments and memories, we have en- 
 tered ourselves upon an heroic age. ... As 
 for me personally, there is one thought that is 
 always with me — the thought that other men 
 are dying for me, better men, younger, with 
 more hope in their hves, many of them men 
 whom I have taught and loved." The ortho- 
 dox Christian "will be famihar with that 
 thought of One who loved you dying for you. 
 I would Uke to say that now I seem to be fa- 
 
170 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 miliar with the thought that something inno- 
 cent, something great, something that loved 
 me, is dying, and is dying daily for me. That 
 is the sort of community we now are — a com- 
 munity in which one man dies for his brother; 
 and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger 
 and quarrels, we are brothers, who are ready 
 to seal our brotherhood with blood. It is for 
 us these men are dying — ^for the women, the 
 old men, and the rejected men — and to pre- 
 serve civilisation and the common life which 
 we are keeping alive, or building." 
 
 So much for the richer and the educated 
 class. As to the rank and file, the Tommies 
 who are fighting and dying for England in pre- 
 cisely the same spirit as those who have had 
 ten times their opportunities in this imequal 
 world, I have seen them myself within a mile 
 of the trenches, marching quietly up through 
 the fall of the March evening to take their 
 places in that Hue, where, every night, however 
 slack the fighting, a minimum of so many casu- 
 alties per mile, so many hideous or fatal in- 
 juries by bomb or shell fire, is practically in- 
 variable. Not the conscript soldiers of a 
 military nation, to whom the thought of fight- 
 ing has been perforce familiar from childhood ! 
 Men, rather, who had never envisaged fight- 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 171 
 
 ing, to whom it is all new, who at bottom, 
 however firm their will, or wonderful their 
 courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome 
 business. "I do not find it easy," writes a 
 chaplain at the front who knows his men and 
 has shared all the dangers of their life — "to give 
 incidents and sayings. I could speak of the 
 courage of the wounded brought in after battle. 
 How many times has one heard them telling 
 the doctor to attend to others before them- 
 selves ! I could tell you of a very shy and 
 nervous boy who, after an attack, dug, himself 
 alone, with his intrenching tool, a little trench, 
 under continuous fire, up which trench he 
 afterwards crept backwards and forwards car- 
 rying ammunition to an advanced post; or 
 of another who sat beside a wounded comrade 
 for several hours under snipers' fire, and some- 
 how built him a slight protection until night 
 fell and rescue came. Such incidents are 
 merely specimens of thousands which are never 
 known. Indeed it is the heroism of all the men 
 all the time which has left the most lasting 
 impression on my mind after thirteen months 
 at the war. No one can conceive the strain 
 which the daily routine of trench life entails, 
 unless one has been among the men. They 
 never show the slightest sign of unwillingness. 
 
172 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 and they do what they are told when and 
 where they are told without questioning; no 
 matter what the conditions or dangers, they 
 come up smiling and cheery through it all — 
 full of 'grouse,' perhaps, but that is the sol- 
 dier's privilege! ... It is, I think, what we 
 all are feeling and are so proud of — ^this un- 
 breakable spirit of self-sacrifice in the daily 
 routine of trench warfare. We are proud of 
 it because it is the highest of all forms of seK- 
 sacrifice, for it is not the act of a moment when 
 the blood is up or the excitement of battle is 
 at fever heat; but it is demanded of the sol- 
 dier, day in and day out, and shown by him 
 coolly and deliberately, day in and day out, 
 with death always at hand. We are proud of 
 it, too, because it is so surely a sign of the 
 magnificent 'moral' of our troops — and moral 
 is going to play a very leading part as the war 
 proceeds. . . . What is inspiring this splen- 
 did disregard of self is partly the certainty that 
 the Cause is Right; partly, it is a hidden joy 
 of conscience which makes them know that 
 they would be unhappy if they were not doing 
 their bit — and partly (I am convinced of this, 
 too,) it is a deepening faith in the Founder of 
 their Faith Whom so many appreciate and 
 value as never before, because they realise 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 173 
 
 that even He has not shirked that very mill of 
 suffering through which they are now passing 
 themselves." 
 
 A few days ago, I accompanied a woman 
 official distributing some leaflets on behalf of 
 a Government department, in some visits to 
 families living in a block of model dwellings 
 somewhere in South London. We called on 
 nine families. In every single case the man 
 of the family had gone, or was expecting to 
 go, to the war; except in one case, where a 
 man who, out of pure patriotism and at great 
 personal difficulty had joined the Volunteer 
 Reserve at the outbreak of war, had strained 
 his heart in trench-digging and was now medi- 
 cally unfit, to his own bitter disappointment. 
 There was some grumbhng in the case of one 
 young wife that her husband should be forced 
 to go before the single men whom she knew; 
 but in the main the temper that showed itself 
 bore witness both to the feeling and the intel- 
 Ugence that our people are bringing to bear 
 on the war. One woman said her husband 
 was a sergeant in a well-known regiment. 
 He thought the world of his men, and when- 
 ever one was killed, he must be at the bury- 
 ing. "He can't bear, you know" — she added 
 shyly — "they should feel alone." She had 
 
174 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 three brothers-in-law "out" — one recently 
 killed. One was an ambulance driver under 
 the R. A. M. C. He had five small children, 
 but had volunteered. "He doesn't say much 
 about the war, except that 'Tommies are won- 
 derful. They never complain.' " She notices a 
 change in his character. He was always good 
 to his wife and children — "but now he's splen- 
 did!" The brother of another woman had 
 been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the coun- 
 try and the people. When war broke out he 
 "felt he must fight for them." He came home 
 at once and enlisted. Another brother had 
 been a stoker on a war-ship at the Dardanelles, 
 and was in the famous landing of April 25. 
 Bullets "thick and fast like hailstorm. Ter- 
 rible times collecting the dead! Her brother 
 had worked hard forming burial parties. Was 
 now probably going to the Tigris. Wrote 
 jolly letters!" 
 
 Then there was the little woman bom and 
 bred in the Army, with all the pride of the 
 Army — a familiar type. Husband a sergeant 
 in the Guards — was gymnastic instructor at a 
 northern town — and need not have gone to the 
 war, but felt "as a professional soldier" he 
 ought to go. Three brothers in the Army — 
 one a little drummer-boy of sixteen, badly 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 175 
 
 wounded in the retreat from Mons. Her 
 sailor brother had died — probably from ex- 
 posure, in the North Sea. The most cheerful, 
 plucky Uttle creature! "We are Army peo- 
 ple, and must expect to fight." 
 
 Well — ^you say you "would like America to 
 visualise the effort, the self-sacrifice of the 
 English men and women who are determined to 
 see this war through." There was, I thought, 
 a surprising amount of cheerful effort, of under- 
 standing self-sacrifice in those nine homes, 
 where my companion's friendly talk drew out 
 the family facts without difficulty. And I am 
 convinced that if I had spent days instead of 
 hours in following her through the remaining 
 tenements in these huge and populous blocks 
 the result would have been practically the 
 same. The nation is behind the war, and behind 
 the Government — soUdly determined to win this 
 war, and build a new world after it. 
 
 As to the work of our women, I have de- 
 scribed something of it in the munitions area, 
 and if this letter were not already too long, I 
 should hke to dwell on much else — the army 
 of maidens, who, as V. A. D.'s (members of 
 Voluntary Aid Detachments), trained by the 
 Red Cross, have come trooping from Eng- 
 land's most luxurious or comfortable homes. 
 
176 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 and are doing invaluable work in hundreds of 
 hospitals; to begin with, the most menial 
 scrubbing and dish-washing, and by now the 
 more ambitious and honourable — ^but not more 
 indispensable — tasks of nursing itself. In this 
 second year of the war, the first army of V. A. 
 D.'s, now promoted, has everywhere been suc- 
 ceeded by a fresh levy, aglow with the same 
 eagerness and the same devotion as the first. 
 Or I could dwell on the women's hospitals — 
 especially the remarkable hospital in EndeU 
 Street, entirely officered by women; where 
 some himdreds of male patients accept the 
 surgical and medical care of women doctors, 
 and adapt themselves to the fight and easy 
 discipfine maintained by the women of the 
 staff, with entire confidence and grateful good- 
 will. To see a woman dentist at work on a 
 soldier's mouth, and a woman quartermaster 
 presiding over her stores, and managing, be- 
 sides, everything pertaining to the fighting, 
 heating, and draining of the hospital, is one 
 more sign of these changed and changing times. 
 The work done by the Scottish Women's Hos- 
 pital in Serbia will rank as one of the noblest 
 among the minor episodes of the war. The 
 magnificent work of British nurses, everywhere, 
 I have already spoken of. And everywhere. 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 177 
 
 too, among the camps in England and abroad, 
 behind the fighting lines, or at the great rail- 
 way-stations here or in France, through which 
 the troops pass backwards and forwards, hun- 
 dreds of women have been doing ardent 
 yet disciplined service — giving long hours in 
 crowded canteens or Y. M. C. A. huts to just 
 those small kindly ofl&ces, which bring home 
 to the British soldier, more effectively than 
 many things more ambitious, what the. British 
 nation feels towards him. The war has put 
 an end, so far as the richer class is concerned, 
 to the busy idleness and all the costly make- 
 believes of peace. No one gives "dinner-par- 
 ties" in the old sense any more; the very word 
 "reception" is dying out. The high wages 
 that munition-work has brought to the women 
 of the working class, show themselves, no 
 doubt, in some foolish dressing. "You should 
 see the hats round here on a Saturday !" said 
 the Manager of a Midland factory. But I am 
 bound to say he spoke of it proudly. The hats 
 were for him a testimony to the wages paid 
 by his firm; and he would probably have 
 argued, on the girls' part, that after the long 
 hours and hard work of the week, the hats 
 were a perfectly legitimate "fling," and human 
 nature must out. Certainly the children of 
 
178 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 the workers are better fed and better clothed, 
 which speaks so far well for the mothers; and 
 recent Government inquiries seem to show 
 that in spite of universal employment, and 
 high wages, the drunkenness of the United 
 Kingdom as a whole is markedly less, while 
 at the same time — uncomfortable paradox ! — 
 the amount of alcohol consumed is greater. 
 One hears stories of extravagance among those 
 who have been making "war-profits," but 
 they are less common this year than last; and 
 as to my own experience, all my friends are 
 wearing their old clothes, and the West End 
 dressmakers, poor things, in view of a large 
 section of the public which regards it as a 
 crime "to buy anything new" are either shut- 
 ting down till better days, or doing a greatly 
 restricted business. Taxation has grown much 
 heavier, and will be more and more severely 
 felt. Yet very few grimable, and there is a 
 general and determined cutting down of the 
 trappings and appendages of life, which is to 
 the good of us all. 
 
 Undoubtedly, there is a very warm and 
 wide-spread feeling among us that in this war 
 the women of the nation have done uncom- 
 monly well! You will remember a similar 
 stir of grateful recognition in America after 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 179 
 
 your War of Secession, connected with the 
 part playedf in the nursing and sanitation of the 
 war by the women of the Northern States. 
 The feeUng here may well have an important 
 social and political influence when the war is 
 over; especially among the middle and upper 
 classes. It may be counter-balanced to some 
 extent in the industrial class, by the distur- 
 bance and anxiety caused in many trades, but 
 especially in the engineering trades, by that 
 great invasion of women I have tried to de- 
 scribe. But that the war will leave some deep 
 mark on that long evolution of the share of 
 women in our public life, which began in the 
 teeming middle years of the last century, is, 
 I think, certain. 
 
 May %nd. — So I come to the end of the task 
 you set me ! — ^with what gaps and omissions 
 to look back upon, no one knows so well as 
 myself. This letter starts on its way to you 
 at a critical moment for your great country, 
 when the issue between the United States and 
 Germany is still unsettled. What will hap- 
 pen.? Will Germany give way? If not, what 
 sort of relations will shape themselves, and 
 how quickly, between the Central Empires 
 and America? To express myself on this 
 great matter is no part of my task; although 
 
180 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 no English man or woman but will watch its 
 development with a deep and passionate in- 
 terest. What may be best for you, we cannot 
 tell; the military and political bearings of a 
 breach between the United States and Ger- 
 many on our own fortunes are by no means 
 clear to us. But what we do want, in any case, 
 is the sympathy, the moral support and co- 
 operation of your people. We have to thank 
 you for a thousand generosities to our wounded; 
 we bless you — as comrades with you in that 
 old Christendom which even this war shall not 
 destroy — ^for what you have done in Belgimn 
 — ^but we want you to understand the heart 
 of England in this war, and not to be led away 
 by the superficial difficulties and disputes that 
 no great and free nation escapes in time of 
 crisis. Sympathy with France — ^France, the 
 invaded, the heroic — ^is easy for America — ^for 
 us all. She is the great tragic figure of the war 
 —the whole world does her homage. We are 
 not invaded — and so less tragic, less appeal- 
 ing. But we are fighting the fight which is 
 the fight of all freemen everywhere — against 
 the wantonness of military power, against the 
 spirit that tears up treaties and makes peaceful 
 agreement between nations impossible — against 
 a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 181 
 
 our civilisation to shame. We have a right 
 to your sympathy — ^you who are the heirs of 
 Washington and Lincohi, the trustees of Kb- 
 erty in the New World as we, with France, are 
 in the Old. You are concerned — ^you must be 
 concerned — in the triumph of the ideals of 
 ordered freedom and humane justice over the 
 ideals of imbridled force and ruthless cruelty, 
 as they have been revealed in this war, to the 
 horror of mankind. The nation that can never, 
 ito all time, wash from its hands the guilt of the 
 Belgium crime, the blood of the Lusitania vic- 
 tims, of the massacres of Louvain and Di- 
 nant, of Aerschot and Termonde, may some day 
 deserve our pity. To-day it has to be met and 
 conquered by a will stronger than its own, in 
 the interests of civilisation itself. 
 
 This last week, at the close of which I am 
 despatching this final letter, has been a som- 
 bre week for England. It has seen the squaHd 
 Irish rising, with its seven days' orgy of fire 
 and bloodshed in DubUn; it has seen the sur- 
 render at Kut of General Townshend and his 
 starving men; it has seen also a strong demon- 
 stration in Parliament of discontent with cer- 
 tain phases of the conduct of the war. And 
 yet, how shall I convey to you the paradox 
 that we in England — our soldiers at the front. 
 
182 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
 
 and Instructed opinion at home — ^have never 
 been so certain of ultimate victory as we now 
 are? It is the big facts that matter: the 
 steady growth of British resources, in men 
 and munitions, toward a maximimi which we 
 — and Russia-^ — are only approaching, while 
 that of the Central Empires is past; the deep- 
 ening unity of an Empire which is being forged 
 anew by danger and trial, and by the spirit 
 of its sons all over the world — a unity against 
 which the Irish outrage, paid for by German 
 money, disavowed by all that is truly Ireland, 
 Unionist or Nationalist, and instantly effaced, 
 as a mere demonstration, by the gallantry at 
 the same moment of Irish soldiers in the battle- 
 Hne — ^lifts its treacherous hand in vain; the 
 increasing and terrible pressure of the British 
 blockade of Germany, equivalent, as some one 
 has lately said, every twenty-four hours that 
 it is maintained, to a successful action in the 
 field; the magnificent resistance of an indom- 
 itable France; the mounting strength of a re- 
 organised Russia. This island-state — let me 
 repeat it with emphasis — was not prepared for, 
 and had no expectation of a Continental war, 
 such as we are now fighting. The fact cries 
 aloud from the records of the struggle; it will 
 command the ear of history; and it acquits 
 
ENGLAND'S EFFORT 183 
 
 us for ever from the guilt of the vast catas- 
 trophe. But Great Britain has no choice now 
 but to fight to the end — and win. She knows 
 it, and those who disparage her are living in a 
 blind world. As to the difficulty of the task 
 — as to our own failtires and mistakes in learn- 
 ing how to achieve it — ^we have probably fewer 
 illusions than those who criticise us. But we 
 shall do it — or perish. 
 
 May 5th. — Since the preceding lines were 
 written, the "Military Service Bill" bringing 
 to the Colours "every British male subject" 
 between the ages of 18 and 41, except when 
 legally exempted, has passed the House of 
 Commons by an overwhelming majority, and 
 will be law immediately. And the Prime Min- 
 ister informed Parliament three days ago, that 
 "the total naval and military effort of the Em- 
 pire since the beginning of the war exceeds five 
 million men." 
 
 With these two facts, these Letters may 
 fitly close. Those who know England best, her 
 history, and the temperament of her people, 
 will best appreciate what they mean.