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Page 8
Yes!--I must answer your questions--to the best of my power. I am no
practised journalist--the days of my last articles for _The Pall Mall_
under the "John Morley" of those days are thirty odd years behind me! But
I have some qualifications. Ever since--more than half a century ago--I
paid my first childish visit to the House of Commons, and heard Mr.
Roebuck, the "Tear 'em" of _Punch's_ cartoon, make his violent appeal to
the English Government to recognise the belligerency of the South, it
would be almost true to say that politics and affairs have been no less
interesting to me than literature; and next to English politics, American
politics and American opinion; partly because of my early association with
men like W.E. Forster, stanch believers, even when Gladstone and John
Russell wavered, in the greatness of the American future and the justice
of the Northern cause--and partly because of the warm and deep impression
left upon me and mine by your successive Ambassadors in London, by Mr.
Lowell above all, by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John Hays, the Choates
and the Bayards--no less than by the many intimate friendships with
Americans from different worlds which my books have brought me since 1888.
During the last thirty years, also, I have had many friends--and some
kinsmen--among the leaders of English politics, and in both political
parties. At the present moment my only son is a member of the English
House of Commons, and a soldier fighting in the war. All my younger
kinsfolk are fighting; the sons of all my friends are fighting; and their
daughters are nursing as members of Voluntary Aid Detachments--(marvellous
what the girl V.A.D.'s, as England affectionately calls them, have done
since the beginning of the war!)--or working week-end shifts to relieve
munition workers, or replacing men of military age in the public offices
and banks. I live in one of the Home Counties, within five miles of one of
the military camps. The small towns near us are crowded with soldiers;
the roads are full of marching infantry, of artillery-trains and
supply-wagons. Our village has sent practically all its able-bodied men of
military age to the front; the few that remain are "attested" and only
waiting to be called up. A great movement, in which this household is
engaged, is now beginning to put women on the land, and so replace the
agricultural labourers who have gone either into the armies or the
munition factories. And meanwhile all the elderly men and women of the
countryside are sitting on War Committees, or working for the Red Cross.
Our lives are penetrated by the war; our thoughts are never free from it.
But in trying to answer your questions I have gone far beyond my own
normal experience. I asked the English Government to give me some special
opportunities of seeing what Great Britain is doing in the war, and in
matters connected with the war, and they have given them ungrudgingly. I
have been allowed to go, through the snow-storms of this bitter winter,
to the far north and visit the Fleet, in those distant waters where it
keeps guard night and day over England. I have spent some weeks in the
Midlands and the north watching the vast new activity of the Ministry of
Munitions throughout the country; and finally in a motor tour of some five
hundred miles through the zone of the English armies in France, I have
been a spectator not only of that marvellous organisation in northwestern
France, of supplies, reinforcements, training camps and hospitals, which
England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her fighting
line, but I have been--on the first of two days--within less than a mile
of the fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a Flemish
hill--with a gas helmet close at hand! I have been able to watch a German
counter attack, after a successful English advance, and have seen the guns
flashing from the English lines, and the shell-bursts on the German
trenches along the Messines ridge; while in the far distance, a black and
jagged ghost, the tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fitfully through
the mists--bearing mute witness before God and man.
For a woman--a marvellous experience! I hope later on in these letters to
describe some of its details, and some of the thoughts awakened by them in
a woman's mind. But let me here keep to the main point raised by your
question--_the effort of England_. During these two months of strenuous
looking and thinking, of conversation with soldiers and sailors and
munition workers, of long days spent in the great supply bases across the
Channel, or of motoring through the snowy roads of Normandy and Picardy, I
have naturally realised that effort far more vividly than ever before. It
seems to me--it must seem to any one who has seriously attempted to gauge
it--amazing, colossal. "What country has ever raised over sixty per cent
of its total recruitable strength, for service beyond the seas in a few
months?" asks one of our younger historians; and that a country not
invaded, protected by the sea, and by a supreme fleet; a country,
moreover, without any form of compulsory military service, in which
soldiering and the soldier have been rather unpopular than popular, a
country in love with peace, and with no intention or expectation of going
to war with any one?
II
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