This devotion of the nurses—how can one ever say enough of it! I recall the wrath of a medical officer in charge of a large hospital at Rouen. "Why don't they give more Red Crosses to the working nurses? They don't get half enough recognition. I have a nurse here who has been twelve months in the operating theatre. She ought to have a V.C.!—It's worth it."

And here is a dark-eyed young officer who had come from a distant colony to fight for England. I find him in an officer's 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 splendid 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 hospitals 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 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 painsaving 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.

II

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 commercial 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 service) and I found delight in watching the various types of French officers, naval and military, who came in to the table d'hote, plunging as soon as they had thrown off 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-officer 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, the distances ethereally blue; and the villages, 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 sunshine, 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 bewildered 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 panelled walls, an old armoire of the date, windows 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 line, which has drawn our English hearts to it all these days.

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 himself, 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 giving 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, long lines of picketed horses, motor-cyclists dashing past. In one village we saw a merry crowd in the little place gathered round a field-kitchen whence came an excellent fragrance of good stew. A number of the men were wearing 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. Patrick's Day I'm waitin' for! But I've no objection 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 platoon 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. We 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. We were watching now parties of men at regular intervals sitting waiting in the fields beside the road, with their rifles and kits on the grass near them. They were waiting for the signal to move up toward the firing line 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 observations 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 hanging 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 and beckoned to the General. Presently we were creeping through 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 violent 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 little of that—till afterwards. At the time, the excitement of the shot and of watching that little group of men in the darkness held all one's nerves gripped.

In a few more minutes we were scrambling out again through the deep, muddy trench leading to the dugout, promising to come back to tea with the officers, 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 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 behind." He named a wood thrice famous in the history of the war. "Our lines are just beyond 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 communication-trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and Captain —— was evidently relieved 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 English line, and the cup of impressions 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-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 little 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 different. 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 course, 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 still see the bright tea-table in that corner of a ruined farm, where our young officers presently greeted us—the General marking our maps to make clear where he had actually been—the Captain of the battery springing up to show off 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."

III

It was long before I closed my eyes in the pretty room of the old chateau, after an evening 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. 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 successful action this morning," said Captain ——, evidently in the best of spirits. "We have taken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Canal that we lost a little while ago, and captured 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 lines, we climbed a hill to one of the finest positions in this northern land; an old town, where Gaul and Roman, Frank and Fleming, English and French have clashed, which looks out northward towards the 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 Poperinghe, and must go warily, because there is a lively artillery action going on beyond Poperinghe, 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 hospital huts, with storehouses and staff quarters—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 passing 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 officers, 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 anything 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 prospers greatly. As I have already insisted, the relations everywhere between the British soldier and the French and Belgian populations are among the British—or shall I say the Allied?—triumphs of the war.

Farther on the road a company from a famous 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-Balliol tutor and Army Chaplain keeps open doors for the soldier in his hours 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 appurtenances of war, and war close at hand. An Australian transport base is pointed out, with a wholly Australian staff. "Some of the men," says our guide, "are millionaires." Close by is an aeroplane descending unexpectedly 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 carefully written names of bypaths—"Hyde Park Corner," "Piccadilly," "Queen Mary's Road," and the like. The animation, the life of the scene are indescribable.

At the next village the road was crowded both with natives and soldiers to see the German 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 staff-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 off 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 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-buildings.

We sheltered behind the great beams supporting 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 consecrate 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 English 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 trenches 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 earlier war can be dimly made out between 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 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 Dunkirk and Calais; or if you turn south you are looking over the Belfry of Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and Festubert, 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 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 Messines 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, between whom and the Allies there can be no peace till 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 righteous 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 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 spirit of the nation—the foundation of all else. Let us look into a few lives, a few typical lives and families, and see.



VI

April 22nd.

Dear H.

As I begin upon this final letter to you comes the news that the threatened split in the British 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 Parliament full and complete information—much more full and 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 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 condition 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 stringency accumulates steadily, and at the same time the British Foreign Office has been anxiously trying, and evidently with much success, to minimise for neutrals its inevitable difficulties and inconveniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. Asquith will explain next Tuesday, the expenditure on the war, not only on our own needs but on those of our Allies is colossal—terrifying. 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 quietly accepted. Five hundred millions sterling ($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 sterling) as the rest of the Army, and is employing close upon 2,000,000 workers, one-tenth of them women. The export trade of the country, in spite of submarines 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 mistake England will get the men she wants; and Labour will be in the end just as determined to get them as any other section of the Community. Meanwhile, abroad, while we seem, for the moment, in France to be inactive, we are in reality giving the French at Verdun just that support which they and General Joffre desire, and—it can scarcely be doubted—preparing great things on our own account. In spite of our failure in Gallipoli, and the anxious position 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 comes back to see it! We are not satisfied with it yet—hence 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 impossible," 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—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 have collected—though 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 nearly 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 reinforcement camp, about fifteen miles from my own home in the country, which he himself commands and which, at the outbreak of war, he himself built without waiting for public money or War Office contractors, to house and train recruits for the various Bedfordshire regiments. The camp holds 1,200 men, and is ranged in a park where the oaks—still standing—were considered too old by Oliver 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 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, revetting, gun-emplacements, sally-ports, and the rest, spread through the sandy soil; the musketry 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 receives him, when wounded, in the perfectly equipped hospital which the Duchess has established in Woburn 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 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 hospital for 25 beds at Alderley Park is an example 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 manufacturers, or the educated class generally have offered to their country in this war. Democracy has gone far with us, but it may still be said that the young heir to a great name, to estates with which his family has been connected 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 English life. Difficulties that check others fall away from him; he is smiled upon for his kindred'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 typical "shirker" and "loafer," while other men worked; the parasite bred from the sweat of the poor; the soft, effeminate 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 he found shooting down the workmen; but for any other war, an ignorant popinjay!—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, 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 alive to their weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which were more instinct than anything else, as to what stuff 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 English peerages had fallen within a year of the outbreak of war—among them the heirs to such famous houses as Longleat, 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 prominent 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 blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassee, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever may be said henceforward of these "golden lads" of ours, "shirker" and "loafer" they can never he called again. They have died too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted them too well for that—and some of the working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have confessed it abundantly.

And the professional classes—the intellectuals—everywhere the leading force of the nation—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 Newman, of Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college, Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the fragrance of lilac 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 despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are gone—so many!—and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did—as blow follows 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 testimony of those who knew them best, not delightful 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 younger 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 wounded, will be remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, 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 woodland 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

"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 Conservatism 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:—"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 prevent Prussianism—which is Anti-Christ—controlling 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 (haud 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 doings 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 affection, so that his presence was a benediction, and a matter for thanksgiving that God had made men after this manner. So to speak of him is perhaps to idealise him; but one can only idealise 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 humanity."

Such he was: and now he too is dead. From the work to which he had gone, thousands 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 Vulgate: "Esto vir fortis, et pugnemus pro populo nostro et pro civitate Dei nostri." He was strong; and he fought for both.

Another Oxford man, Gilbert Talbot, a youngest son of the much-loved Bishop of Winchester, 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 unspent, poured out like spikenard in this war at the feet of England. Already assured at Oxford of a brilliant career in politics, a fine speaker, a hard worker, possessing by inheritance the charm of two families, always in the public eye and ear, and no less popular than famous, he had just landed in the United States when the war broke out. He was going round the world with a friend, youth and ambition high within him. He turned back without 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 nearest 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 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 Gilbert 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 Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Oxford friend says: "There were almost infinite possibilities in his future." He was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of importance 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 sacrifice. Older men, and younger men, Don, and under-graduate, 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 Director of an important steel works, engaged in Government business when war broke out, and might have honourably claimed exemption. Instead he offered himself at once on mobilisation, and went out with his battalion to France last spring. On the 15th of June, 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 barriers of death clean and bright." "This," says the friend who writes the notice, "he has done." Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the forehead by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. His General and brother officers write:

He was a very fine young officer.... Every one loved him.... His men would do anything for him....

And the sergeant of his machine-gun brigade says:

Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I have lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and kind 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 be put out of action, but one does not worry. That quiet time alone with God at the Holy Communion was most comforting.

Immediately after writing these words, the writer fell in action. Captain Clarke, a famous 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 general action of Cambridge men, the Master of Christ's writes: "Nothing has been more splendid than the way the young fellows have 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 brilliantly. The mortality, however, has been appalling. In an ordinary way one loses one killed to eight or nine wounded; but in this war the number of Cambridge men killed and missing practically equals the number of wounded." Of the effect upon the University an eye-witness says: "Eighty per cent of the College rooms are vacant. Rows and rows of houses in Cambridge are to let. All the Junior Fellows are on service in one capacity or another, and a great many of the Seniors are working in Government Offices 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 missing.

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 Bronte, and creator of the Dictionary of National Biography. The elder one, who had just married before going out, fought all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in 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 German onslaught on Paris had been finally broken! "In all my soldiering," writes a brother officer, "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 possess." 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 touching 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 to officers 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 country. All round us the blows have fallen—again and again the only son—sometimes two brothers 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 beginning 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-bye to us in March. It was impossible to think of Christopher's coming to harm—such life 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 entered 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 lives, many of them men whom I have taught and loved." The orthodox Christian "will be familiar with that thought of One who loved you dying for you. I would like to say that now I seem to be familiar with the thought that something innocent, something great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying daily for me. That is the sort of community we now are—a community 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 preserve 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 precisely the same spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal 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 line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or shell fire, is practically invariable. Not the conscript soldiers of a military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce familiar from childhood! Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, 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 themselves! 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 carrying ammunition to an advanced post; or of another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under snipers' fire, and somehow 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, 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 soldier's privilege!... It is, I think, what we all are feeling and are so proud of—this unbreakable 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 self-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 soldier, 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 splendid 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 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 medically unfit, to his own bitter disappointment. There was some grumbling 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 intelligence 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 whenever one was killed, he must be at the burying. "He can't bear, you know"—she added shyly—"they should feel alone." She had 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 wonderful. They never complain.'" She notices a change in his character. He was always good to his wife and children—"but now he's splendid!" The brother of another woman had been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the country 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. Terrible 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 born 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 wounded in the retreat from Mons. Her sailor brother had died—probably from exposure, in the North Sea. The most cheerful, plucky little creature! "We are Army people, 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 understanding 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—solidly determined to win this war, and build a new world after it.

As to the work of our women, I have described something of it in the munitions area, and if this letter were not already too long, I should like 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 England's most luxurious or comfortable homes, 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 succeeded 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 Endell Street, entirely officered by women; where some hundreds of male patients accept the surgical and medical care of women doctors, and adapt themselves to the light and easy discipline 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, besides, everything pertaining to the lighting, heating, and draining of the hospital, is one more sign of these changed and changing times. The work done by the Scottish Women's Hospital 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, too, among the camps in England and abroad, behind the fighting lines, or at the great railway-stations here or in France, through which the troops pass backwards and forwards, hundreds 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 offices, 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-parties" 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 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 shutting 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 grumble, 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 uncommonly well! You will remember a similar stir of grateful recognition in America after your War of Secession, connected with the part played in the nursing and sanitation of the war by the women of the Northern States. The feeling 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 disturbance and anxiety caused in many trades, but especially in the engineering trades, by that great invasion of women I have tried to describe. 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 2nd.—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 happen? 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 no English man or woman but will watch its development with a deep and passionate interest. What may be best for you, we cannot tell; the military and political bearings of a breach between the United States and Germany 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 Belgium—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 appealing. 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 our civilisation to shame. We have a right to your sympathy—you who are the heirs of Washington and Lincoln, the trustees of liberty 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 unbridled force and ruthless cruelty, as they have been revealed in this war, to the horror of mankind. The nation that can never, to all time, wash from its hands the guilt of the Belgium crime, the blood of the Lusitania victims, of the massacres of Louvain and Dinant, 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 sombre week for England. It has seen the squalid Irish rising, with its seven days' orgy of fire and bloodshed in Dublin; it has seen the surrender at Kut of General Townshend and his starving men; it has seen also a strong demonstration in Parliament of discontent with certain 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, 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 maximum which we—and Russia—are only approaching, while that of the Central Empires is past; the deepening 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-line—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 indomitable France; the mounting strength of a reorganised 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 us for ever from the guilt of the vast catastrophe. 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 failures and mistakes in learning 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 Minister informed Parliament three days ago, that "the total naval and military effort of the Empire 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.



VII

AN EPILOGUE

August 16, 1916.

I

It is now three months since I finished the six preceding Letters, written in response to an urgent call from America; nor did I then anticipate any renewal of my work. But while a French translation of the six Letters has been passing through the Press, an appeal has been made to me from France to add an Epilogue, or supplementary Letter, briefly recapitulating the outstanding facts or events which in those three months have marked the British share in the war, and played their part in the immense transformation of the general outlook which has taken place during those months. Not an easy task! One thinks first of one's own inadequacy; and then remembers, as before, that one is a unit in a nation under orders. I must therefore do what I can. And perhaps other readers, also, of this little book, in America and England, as they look back over the ever-changing scene of the war, will not find this renewed attempt to summarise Britain's part in it as it has developed up to the present date (August 16, 1916) unwelcome. The outstanding facts of the last three months, as I see them, are, for Great Britain:—

1. The immense increase in the output of British Munitions of War;

2. The Naval Battle of Jutland;

3. The Allied offensive on the Somme.

The first and third of these events are, of course, so far as the latter concerns Great Britain, the natural and logical outcome of that "England's Effort" of which I tried—how imperfectly!—to give a connected account three months ago.

At that time the ever-mounting British effort, though it had reached colossal dimensions, though everybody aware of it was full of a steadily growing confidence as to its final result, had still to be tested by those greater actions to which it was meant to lead. After the local failures at the Dardanelles, and in Mesopotamia, Great Britain was again, for a time, everywhere on the defensive, though it was a very vigorous and active defensive; and the magnificent stand made by the French at Verdun was not only covering France herself with glory, and kindling the hearts of all who love her throughout the world, but under its shield the new armies of Great Britain were still being steadily perfected, and wonderfully armed; time was being given to Russia for reorganisation and re-equipment, and time was all she wanted; while Germany, vainly dashing her strength in men and guns against the heights of Verdun, in the hope of provoking her enemies on the Western front to a premature offensive, doomed to exhaustion before it had achieved its end, was met by the iron resolve of both the French and British Governments, advised by the French and British Commanders in the field, to begin that offensive only at their own time and place, when the initiative was theirs, and everything was ready.

But the scene has greatly altered. Let me take Munitions first. In February, it will be remembered by those who have read the preceding Letters, I was a visitor, by the kindness of the Ministry of Munitions, then in Mr. Lloyd George's hands, to a portion of the munitions field—in the Midlands, on the Tyne, and on the Clyde. At that moment, Great Britain, as far as armament was concerned, was in the mid-stream of a gigantic movement which had begun in the summer of 1915, set going by the kindling energy of Mr. Lloyd George, and seconded by the roused strength of a nation which was not the industrial pioneer of the whole modern world for nothing, however keenly others, during the last half-century, have pressed upon—or in some regions passed—her. Everywhere I found new workshops already filled with workers, a large proportion of them women, already turning out a mass of shell which would have seemed incredible to soldiers and civilians alike during the first months of the war; while the tale of howitzers, trench-mortars, machine-guns, and the rest, was running up week by week, in the vast extensions already added to the other works. But everywhere, too, I saw huge, empty workshops, waiting for their machines, or just setting them up; and everywhere the air was full of rumours of the new industrial forces—above all, of the armies of women—that were to be brought to bear. New towns were being built for them; their workplaces and their tools were being got ready for them, as in that vast filling factory—or rather town—on the Clyde which I described in my third Letter. But in many quarters they were not yet there; only one heard, as it were, the tramp of their advancing feet.

But to-day! Those great empty workshops that I saw in February, in the making, or the furnishing, are now full of workers and machines; and thousands like them all over the country. Last night (Aug. 15), the new Minister of Munitions, Mr. Montagu, who, a few weeks ago, succeeded Mr. Lloyd George, now Minister for War, rendered an account of his department up to date, which amazed even the House of Commons, and will surely stir the minds of men throughout the British Empire with a just and reasonable pride. The "effete" and "degenerate" nation has roused herself indeed!

Here is the bare resume of the Minister's statement:—

Ammunition.—The British output of ammunition at the beginning of the war was intended for an army of 200,000 men.

Naturally, the output rose steadily throughout the first year of war.

But—the same output which in 1914-15 took 12 months to produce could now be produced—

As to 18-pounder ammunition, in 3 weeks " Field howitzer " in 2 weeks " Medium gun and howitzer ammunition, in 11 days " Heavy shell, in 4 days

We are sending over to France every week as much as the whole pre-war stock of land service ammunition in the country.

As to guns, I would ask my readers to turn back to the second and third chapters in this little book, which show something of the human side and the daily detail of this great business, and then to look at this summary:—

Every month, now, we are turning out nearly twice as many big guns as were in existence for land service—i.e., not naval guns—when the Ministry of Munitions came into being (June, 1915).

Between June, 1915, and June, 1916, the monthly output of heavy guns has increased 6-fold—and the present output will soon be doubled.

For every 100 eighteen-pounders turned out in the first 10 months of the war, we are now turning out 500.

We are producing 18 times as many machine-guns.

Of rifles—the most difficult of all war material to produce quickly in large quantities—our weekly home production is now 3 times as great as it was a year ago. We are supplying our Army overseas with rifles and machine-guns entirely from home sources.

Of small-arms ammunition our output is 3 times as great as a year ago.

We are producing 66 times as much high explosive as at the beginning of 1915; and our output of bombs is 33 times as great as it was last year.

At the same time, what is Great Britain doing for her Allies?

The loss of her Northern Provinces, absorbed by the German invasion, has deprived France of three-quarters of her steel. We are now sending to France one-third of the whole British production of shell-steel.

We are also supplying the Allies with the constituents of high explosive in very large quantities, prepared by our National factories.

We are sending to the Allies millions of tons of coal and coke every month, large quantities of machinery, and 20 per cent. of our whole production of machine tools (indispensable to shell manufacture).

We are supplying Russia with millions of pairs of Army boots.

And in the matter of ammunition, we have not only enormously increased the quantity produced—we have greatly improved its quality. The testimony of the French experts—themselves masters in these arts of death—as conveyed through M. Thomas, is emphatic. The new British heavy guns are "admirably made"—"most accurate"—"most efficient."

Meanwhile a whole series of chemical problems with regard to high explosives have been undertaken and solved by Lord Moulton's department. If it was ever true that science was neglected by the War Office, it is certainly true no longer; and the soldiers at the front, who have to make practical use of what our scientific chemists and our explosive factories at home are producing, are entirely satisfied.

For that, as Mr. Montagu points out, is the sole and supreme test. How has the vast activity of the new Ministry of Munitions—an activity which the nation owes—let me repeat it—to the initiative, the compelling energy, of Mr. Lloyd George—affected our armies in the field?

The final answer to that question is not yet. The Somme offensive is still hammering at the German gates; I shall presently give an outline of its course from its opening on July 1st down to the present. But meanwhile what can be said is this.

The expenditure of ammunition which enabled us to sweep through the German first lines, in the opening days of this July, almost with ease, was colossal beyond all precedent. The total amount of heavy guns and ammunition manufactured by Great Britain in the first ten months of the war, from August, 1914, to June 1, 1915, would not have kept the British bombardment on the Somme going for a single day. That gives some idea of it.

Can we keep it up? The German papers have been consoling themselves with the reflection that so huge an effort must have exhausted our supplies. On the contrary, says Mr. Montagu. The output of the factories, week by week, now covers the expenditure in the field. No fear now, that as at Loos, as at Neuve Chapelle, and as on a thousand other smaller occasions, British success in the field should be crippled and stopped by shortage of gun and shell!

By whom has this result been brought about? By that army of British workmen—and workwomen—which Mr. Lloyd George in little more than one short year has mobilised throughout the country. The Ministry of Munitions is now employing three millions and a half of workers—(a year ago it was not much more than a million and a half)—of whom 400,000 are women; and the staff of the Ministry has grown from 3,000—the figure given in my earlier letters—to 5,000, just as that army of women, which has sprung as it were out of the earth at the call of the nation, has almost doubled since I wrote in April last. Well may the new Minister say that our toilers in factory and forge have had some share in the glorious recent victories of Russia, Italy, and France! Our men and our women have contributed to the re-equipment of those gallant armies of Russia, which, a month or six weeks earlier than they were expected to move, have broken up the Austrian front, and will soon be once more in Western Poland, perhaps in East Prussia! The Italian Army has drawn from our workshops and learnt from our experiments. The Serbian Army has been re-formed and re-fitted.

Let us sum up. The Germans, with years of preparation behind them, made this war a war of machines. England, in that as in other matters, was taken by surprise. But our old and proud nation, which for generations led the machine industry of the world, as soon as it realised the challenge—and we were slow to realise it!—met it with an impatient and a fierce energy which is every month attaining a greater momentum and a more wonderful result. The apparently endless supply of munitions which now feeds the British front, and the comparative lightness of the human cost at which the incredibly strong network of the German trenches on their whole first line system was battered into ruin, during the last days of June and the first days of July, 1916:—it is to effects like these that all that vast industrial effort throughout Great Britain, of which I saw and described a fragment three months ago, has now steadily and irresistibly brought us.

II

This then is perhaps the first point to notice in the landscape of the war, as we look back on the last three months. For on it everything else, Naval and Military, depends:—on the incredibly heightened output of British workshops, in all branches of war material, which has been attained since the summer of last year. In it, as I have just said, we see an effect of a great cause—i.e., of the "effort" made by Great Britain, since the war broke out, to bring her military strength in men and munitions to a point, sufficient, in combination with the strength of her Allies, for victory over the Central Powers, who after long and deliberate preparation had wantonly broken the European peace. The "effort" was for us a new one, provoked by Germany, and it will have far-reaching civil consequences when the war is over.

In the great Naval victory now known as the Battle of Jutland, on the other hand, we have a fresh demonstration on a greater scale than ever before, of that old, that root fact, without which indeed the success of the Allied effort in other directions would be impossible—i.e., the overwhelming strength of the British Navy, and its mastery of the Sea.

In a few earlier pages of this book, I have described a visit which the British Admiralty allowed me to make in February last to a portion of the Fleet, then resting in a northern harbour. On that occasion, at the Vice-Admiral's luncheon-table, there sat beside me on my right, a tall spare man with the intent face of one to whom life has been a great arid strenuous adventure, accepted in no boyish mood, but rather in the spirit of the scientific explorer, pushing endlessly from one problem to the next, and passionate for all experience that either unveils the world, or tests himself. We talked of the war, and my projected journey. "I envy you!" he said, his face lighting up. "I would give anything to see our Army in the field." My neighbour was Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot, commanding the First Cruiser Squadron, who went down with his flagship H.M.S. Defence, in the Battle of Jutland, on the 31st of May last, while passing between the British and German fleets, under a very heavy fire. "It is probable," said Admiral Jellicoe's despatch, "that Sir Robert Arbuthnot, during his engagement with the enemy's light cruisers, and in his desire to complete their destruction, was not aware of the approach of the enemy's heavy ships, owing to the mist, until he found himself in close proximity to the main fleet, and before he could withdraw his ships, they were caught under a heavy fire and disabled." So, between the fleets of Germany and England, amid the mists of the May evening, and the storm and smoke of battle, my courteous neighbour of three months before found, with all his shipmates, that grave in the "unharvested sea" which England never forgets to honour, and from which no sailor shrinks. At the same luncheon-table were two other Admirals and many junior Officers, who took part in the same great action; and looking back upon it, and upon the notes which I embodied in my first Letter, I see more vividly than ever how every act and thought of those brave and practised men, among whom I passed those few—to me—memorable hours, were conditioned by an intense expectation, that trained prevision of what must come, which, in a special degree, both stirs and steadies the mind of the modern sailor.

But one thing perhaps they had not foreseen—that by a combination of mishaps in the first reporting of the battle, the great action, which has really demonstrated, once and for all, the invincible supremacy of Great Britain at sea, which has reduced the German Fleet to months of impotence, put the invasion of these islands finally out of the question, and enabled the British blockade to be drawn round Germany with a yet closer and sterner hand, was made to appear, in the first announcements of it, almost a defeat. The news of our losses—our heavy losses—came first—came almost alone. The Admiralty, with the stern conscience of the British official mind, announced them as they came in—bluntly—with little or no qualification. A shock of alarm went through England! For what had we paid so sore a price? Was the return adequate, and not only to our safety, but to our prestige?

There were a few hours when both Great Britain—outside the handful of men who knew—and her friends throughout the world, hung on the answer. Meanwhile the German lie, which converted a defeat for Germany into a "victory," got at least twenty-four hours' start, and the Imperial Chancellor made quick and sturdy use of it when he extracted a War Loan of L600,000,000 from a deluded and jubilant Reichstag. Then the news came in from one quarter after another of the six-mile battle-line, from one unit after another of the greatest sea-battle Britain had ever fought, and by the 3rd or 4th of June, England, drawing half-ironic breath over her own momentary misgiving, had realised the truth—first—that the German Fleet on the 31st had only escaped total destruction by the narrowest margin, and by the help of mist and darkness; secondly—that its losses were, relatively far greater, and in all probability, absolutely, greater than our own; thirdly—that after the British battle-fleet had severed the German navy from its base, the latter had been just able, under cover of darkness, to break round the British ships, and fly hard to shelter, pursued by our submarines and destroyers through the night, till it arrived at Wilhelmshaven a battered and broken host, incapable at least for months to come of any offensive action against Great Britain or her Allies. Impossible henceforth—for months to come—to send a German squadron sufficiently strong to harass Russia in the Baltic! Impossible to interfere successfully with the passage of Britain's new armies across the seas! Impossible to dream any longer of invading English coasts! The British Fleet holds the North Sea more strongly than it has ever held it; and behind the barbed wire defences of Wilhelmshaven or Heligoland the German Fleet has been nursing its wounds.

Some ten weeks have passed, and as these results have become plain to all the world, the German lie, or what remained of it, has begun to droop, even in the country of its birth. "Do not let us suppose," says Captain Persius—the most honest of German naval critics, in a recent article—"that we have shaken the sea-power of England. That would be foolishness." While Mr. Balfour, the most measured, the most veracious of men, speaking only a few days ago to the representatives of the Dominion Parliaments, who have been visiting England, says quietly—"the growth of our Navy, since the outbreak of war, which has gone on, and which at this moment is still going on, is something of which I do not believe the general public has the slightest conception."

For the general public has, indeed, but vague ideas of what is happening day by day and week by week in the great shipyards of the Clyde, the Tyne, and the Mersey. But there, all the same, the workmen—and workwomen—of Great Britain—(for women are taking an ever-increasing share in the lighter tasks of naval engineering)—are adding incessantly to the sea-power of this country, acquiescing in a Government control, a loosening of trade custom, a dilution and simplification of skilled labour, which could not have been dreamt of before the war. At the same time they are meeting the appeal of Ministers to give up or postpone the holidays they have so richly earned, for the sake of their sons and brothers in the trenches, with a dogged "aye, aye!" in which there is a note of profound understanding, of invincible and personal determination, but rarely heard in the early days of the war.

III

So much for the Workshops and the Navy. Now before I turn to the New Armies and the Somme offensive, let us look for a moment at the present facts of British War Finance. By April last, the date of my sixth Letter, we had raised 2,380 millions sterling, for the purposes of the war; we had lent 500 millions to our Allies, and we were spending about 5 millions a day on the war. According to a statement recently made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (August 10), by March next our debt will have risen to 3,440 millions sterling, 1,060 millions more than it stood at in March last; our advances to our Allies will have increased to 800 millions, while our daily war expenditure remains about the same.

Mr. McKenna's tone in announcing these figures was extraordinarily cheerful. "We have every reason," he said, amid the applause of the House of Commons—"to be proud of the manner in which British credit has stood the strain." The truth is that by March next, at the present rate of expenditure, our total indebtedness (deducting the advances to our Allies) will almost exactly equal "one year's national income," i.e., the aggregate of the income of every person in the country. But if a man having an income of L5,000 a year, were to owe a total of L5,000, we should not consider his position very serious. "We shall collect a revenue in one year equal to 20 per cent. of the whole debt (i.e., 522 millions sterling), and we shall be able to pay, out of existing taxation, the interest on the debt, and a considerable sinking-fund, and shall still have left a large margin for the reduction of taxation"—words which left a comfortable echo in the ears of the nation. Meanwhile British trade—based on British sea-power—has shown extraordinary buoyancy, the exports steadily increasing; so that the nation, in the final words of the Chancellor, feels "no doubt whatever that we shall be able to maintain our credit to the end of the war, no matter how long it may last."

But do not let it be supposed that this huge revenue is being raised without sacrifice, without effort. It means—for the present—as I have already pointed out, the absorption by the State of five shillings in the pound from the income of every citizen, above a moderate minimum, and of a lesser but still heavy tax from those below that minimum; it means new and increased taxation in many directions; and, as a consequence, heavy increases in the cost of living; it means sharply diminished spending for large sections of our population, and serious pinching for our professional and middle classes.

But the nation, as a whole, makes no lament. We look our taxes in the face, and we are beginning to learn how to save. We have our hearts fixed on the future; and we have counted the cost.

The money then is no difficulty. Our resisting power, our prosperity even, under the blows of war, have been unexpectedly great.

But what are we getting for our money?

In the case of the Navy, the whole later course of the war, no less than the Battle of Jutland, has shown what the British Navy means to the cause of the Allies. It is as I have said, the root fact in the war; and in the end, it will be the determining fact; although, of itself, it cannot defeat Germany as we must defeat her; at any rate in any reasonable time.

Then as to the Army. Take first of all the administrative side. To what—in the last four months—has come that wonderful system of organisation and supply I tried to sketch in my fourth Letter, largely in the words of some of the chief actors in it?

Within the last fortnight, a skilled observer has been reporting to the British public his impressions of the "Army behind the Lines" in France, as I saw a portion of it last February, in the great British supply bases and hospital camps, on the lines of communication, and throughout the immense and varied activities covered by the British motor transport.

"The Germans," says this recent eye-witness, "have persisted that, even if we could find the men, we could not make the machine, which they have been perfecting for forty years and more. But it is here!—operating with perfect smoothness; a machine, which in its mere mass and intricacy, almost staggers the imagination. One cannot speak of the details of the system for fear of saying something which should not be told; but it is stupendous in its proportion, dealing as it does with the methodical handling of the men in their hundreds of thousands, of all their equipment and supplies, food, miscellaneous baggage and ammunition, and with the endless trains of guns—guns—guns, and shells, by millions upon millions, all brought from England, and all here in their place, or moved from place to place with the rhythm of clock-work. One cannot convey any idea of it, nor grasp it in its entirety; but day by day the immensity of it grows on one, and one realises how trivial beside it has been anything that British military organisation has had to do in the past. That is the real miracle; not the mere millions of men, nor even their bravery, but this huge frictionless machine of which they are a part—this thing which Great Britain has put together here in the last twenty months."