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Page 10
In one of my later letters I hope to give some particulars of this first
rush of men, gathered from those who witnessed it and took part in it.
One remarkable point in connection with it is that those districts most
heavily employed in munition-making and coal-mining, the two industries
absolutely indispensable to our Army and Navy, have also sent the largest
supply of men to the fighting line--take, for instance, Newcastle and the
Clyde. There have been anxious episodes, of course, in the great
development. Was your own vast levy in the Civil War without them? And for
the last half million men, we have had to resort, as Lincoln resorted, to
a modified form of compulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of
unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first camp and billeting
organization of the enormous forces raised. But when all is said, did we
not, in the language of a French observer "improvise the impossible"?--and
have we not good reason to be proud?--not with any foolish vainglory, but
with the sober and resolute pride of a great nation, conscious of its
past, determined to correct its mistakes, and looking open-eyed and
fearless towards the future?
Then as to munitions: in many ways, as you will perhaps say, and as I
agree, a tragic story. If we had possessed last spring the
ammunition--both for ourselves and our allies we now possess, the war
would have gone differently. Drunkenness, trade-union difficulties, a
small--very small--revolutionary element among our work people--all these
have made trouble. But the real cause of our shortage lay in the fact that
no one, outside Germany, realised till far into the war, what the
ammunition needs--the absolutely unprecedented needs--of this struggle
were going to be. It was the second Battle of Ypres at the end of April
last year which burnt them into the English mind. We paid for the grim
knowledge in thousands of our noblest lives. But since then?
In a later letter I propose to draw some picture in detail of the really
marvellous movement which since last July, under the impulse given by Mr.
Lloyd George, has covered England with new munition factories and added
enormously to the producing power of the old and famous firms, has drawn
in an army of women--now reckoned at something over a quarter of a
million--and is at this moment not only providing amply for our own
armies, but is helping those of the Allies against those final days of
settlement with Germany which we believe to be now steadily approaching.
American industry and enterprise have helped us substantially in this
field of munitions. We are gratefully conscious of it. But England is now
fast overtaking her own needs.
More of this presently. Meanwhile to the military and equipment effort of
the country, you have to add the financial effort--something like
$7,500,000,000, already expended on the war; the organising effort,
exemplified in the wonderful "back of the army" in France, which I hope to
describe to you; and the vast hospital system, with all its scientific
adjuncts, and its constantly advancing efficiency.
And at the foundation of it all--the human and personal effort!--the lives
given for England, the blood so generously shed for her, the homes that
have sacrificed their all, our "golden lads" from all quarters and
classes, whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien dust that "is for
ever England," since they sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who mourn
the death or the wreck of the splendid sons they reared; our widowed wives
and fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel which only very slowly our
people have come to feel as in very deed their own. At first we thought
most often and most vividly of Belgium, of the broken treaty, and of
France, so wantonly attacked, whose people no English man or woman could
ever have looked in the face again, had we forsaken her. Then came the
hammer blows that forged our will--Louvain, Aerschot, Rheims, the
air-raids on our defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our women and
children, the Bryce report, the _Lusitania_, the execution of Edith
Cavell--the whole stupefying revelation of the German hatred and greed
towards this country, and of the qualities latent in the German character.
Now we _know_--that it is they, or we--since they willed it so. And this
old, illogical, unready country is only just arriving at its full
strength, only just fully conscious of the sternness of its own resolve,
only just putting out its full powers, as the German power is weakening,
and the omens are changing--both in East and West.
III
No!--the effort of England during the past eighteen months in spite of all
temporary ebbs and difficulties, in spite of that chorus of self-blame in
which the English nation delights, has been one of the great things in the
history of our country. We have "improvised the impossible" in every
direction--_but one_.
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