The Assault Part 19

While Germanic-Turko armies have been wrecking their military hopes East, West and Near East, Allied diplomacy has been disastrously foiled in the pivotal Balkans. Bulgaria, deemed friendly, though venal, openly goes over to the enemy. Sir Edward Grey, like his fellow-idol, Kitchener, is under withering fire. He is charged with permitting Berlin to score a victory which might have been London's if British diplomacy had been characterized by less tentativeness of policy and greater impetuosity of deed. It seems the old story--"too late." "Have we a Foreign Office?" bitterly asks Fleet Street. But the cup of disappointment is not full even yet. Greece, too, is recreant. She mobilizes, supposedly as a pro-Ally counterstroke to the pro-German Bulgarian menace, for is not the King of the h.e.l.lenes bound by solemn treaty to join Peter of Serbia in the eventuality of attack by Ferdinand of Sofia? But Downing Street failed to reckon with King "Tino" of Athens and his Hohenzollern consort, the Kaiser's favorite sister, Sophia. Premier Venizelos, the Allies' hope, is forced to resign.

Greece remains "neutral," between German Charybdis and English Scylla, as King Constantine himself describes his plight. She shuts her eyes to the nebulous Allied expeditionary force landed at Salonica and "rushed"

precipitately at the eleventh hour to the relief of the Serbs, who are even now threatened with annihilation between the German-Austrians on the north and west, and the back-stabbing Bulgars on the east. Belgrade falls. Uskub is captured. The Salonica line to Nish is cut. Germany's "road to Constantinople" is open. The Kaiser can get there now before the Allies. Diplomacy grasps at a last straw. Cyprus, annexed from Turkey by Britain early in the war, is offered to Greece if she will fling her army into the breach. In Athens, it appears, dictates of self-preservation govern. Revealing a highly-developed Missourian trait, Greece asks to be "shown." By active operations against the Germanic Powers and Bulgaria, a.s.sisted by mere promises of more Allied reinforcements via Salonica or the driblets already sent, Greece fears to share Belgium and Serbia's fate. If the Allies will send 400,000 troops to the Balkans--or about twice as many as have been pounding fruitlessly at the Dardanelles--Greece might change her mind. The suggestion inspires little enthusiasm in England. Kitchener and French can doubtless spare the men. But the equipment of another huge British army for operations in the Near East in time to turn the tables is a taller order. Meantime Mackensen and Gallwitz batter their way across the Serbian ranges. In London there are anxious doubts whether there will even be any Serbian army to "relieve" by the time the Allies place an effective rescuing expedition in the decisive theater. Serbia begins to look uncomfortably like another Belgium--Salonica like ill-starred Antwerp. Blunder and procrastination were ever the parents of disaster.

So much for the military and political situation, which even the Truth-Hiders begin to see in its true colors. But if things were "messed" abroad--in the West and in the Near East--muddle and bungle were even more rampant at home. Take the Zeppelins. They first visited these sh.o.r.es in January, 1915. In October Press and Parliament commenced for the first time seriously to investigate the adequacy of Britain's "aerial defenses," with the result that chaotic demoralization and systemless go-as-you-please were found to prevail. Sir Percy Scott, the country's greatest gunnery expert, had been in charge of London's defenses against the sky-pirates, but it appeared that his guns were ineffective, his gunners untrained for the highly specialized feat of hitting mile-high targets flying in the dark, and things in general unorganized and more or less futile. The Press Bureau condescendingly parted with an abstract story of the latest and most disastrous raid of all over "the London area." People derived lively satisfaction from its disclosure that the metropolis was "cool" and unafraid under fire. Only a few courageous "alarmists" read the signs of the times aright and demand that some life and efficiency forthwith be injected into the "anti-aircraft" department, lest, when Count Zeppelin's range-finding practise cruises across London are finished, an armada of German airs.h.i.+ps sail across the Channel and reduce the heart of the Empire, ever calm, to a smoking ash-heap before Sir Percy Scotts' defense is perfected. There was anxious talk of bringing over "expert gunners"

from France--in October, after nearly ten months and after twenty-five Zeppelin raids over English territory!

The while the elephant-hided Censors.h.i.+p, as if Britannia's troubles were not all-sufficient, insisted upon making itself more of an international laughing-stock and object of world contempt than ever. It censored Kipling's _Recessional_ in a battle-story from France. It deleted a quotation from Browning in another narrative from the front. It cut out a famous war correspondent's tribute to the bravery of the enemy. It eliminated a reference to Chatham, England's greatest War Minister, because it confused him with the famous British naval base from which he took his t.i.tle. It refused to let out a single notch in the muzzle it has attached even to the benevolently neutral American Press, as represented by its accredited and notoriously Anglophile correspondents in England. It reveled in concealment, deception and grotesqueness, though concealing nothing from the enemy and everything from England, deceiving exclusively the British public, and making n.o.body grotesque except its egregious self. Calls for the light at home, ridicule and criticism from abroad, alike left the Censor unmoved. The sparrows cried from the housetops in ever more insistent accents that all was not well with England, but the Censors.h.i.+p, magnificently blind even to the Royal p.r.o.nouncement that Britons unfailingly respond when the hour is dark, maintained imperiously that what it was well for the country to know was for it, and it alone, to decide. If the British public were a transgressor, its way could not have been harder.

Came Mr. Montagu, the Financial Secretary of the Treasury, the reputed "budget genius" of the Government. Britons must be prepared, he told them, "during the year ahead, to disgorge to the State _not less than one-half of their entire income_, either in the form of taxes or loans."

Lord Reading's borrowing commission to America was still on the water, the ink on its $500,000,000 "credit loan" in New York not yet dry. "I estimate our expenditure for the year," said Mr. McKenna, the Finance Minister, in the House of Commons, at "seven billions, nine hundred fifty million dollars" (only he spoke in pounds). "As our total estimated revenue, inclusive of new taxes, is one billion, five hundred twenty-five million dollars, the deficit for the year will be six billion, four hundred twenty-five million dollars. We have now to contemplate a Navy costing for the current year $950,000,000, an Army costing $3,575,000,000, and external advances to our Allies (Russia, France, Italy, Serbia and Belgium) amounting to $2,115,000,000."

Then the merciless Chancellor of the Exchequer acquainted Parliament with his scheme for raising a part of this Brobdingnagian revenue. Free trade must be partially shelved. There will be a revenue tariff on "luxury" imports. Income-tax in 1916 will be forty per cent. higher and will amount altogether to about fifty cents on every five dollars earned. Even the man with $650 a year will pay, while "plutocrats" with incomes above that figure will be mulcted even more relentlessly. He of $25,000 will pay $5,150, and nabobs with $50,000, $100,000 and $500,000 per annum (England has several in the latter category) will contribute, respectively, $12,650, $30,150 and $170,150. War is h.e.l.l. No wonder a parliamentary wag, on the day Mr. McKenna introduced "Conscription of Wealth," interrupted with a merry "Why don't you take it all?"

Up to December, 1915, the Government had asked Parliamentary sanction for war credits aggregating $6,500,000,000. But even this staggering total (the war was now costing $25,000,000 a day) was planned to carry the campaign only up to the middle of November. The $500,000,000 loan transaction in the United States only produced funds to be spent there, and it was but half of what was asked. It only indirectly relieves the situation at home. Allowing for the deficit carried over from last year, the latest budget proposes taxes amounting to $1,525,000,000 and loans aggregating $6,425,000,000 for the fiscal year 1915-16. But even the most patriotic experts in Threadneedle Street acknowledge the utter impossibility of raising $6,425,000,000 of genuine money by public loan in Britain per year. They reluctantly predict that the Government will soon be driven to extend its use of fict.i.tious money and paper--on the excoriated German model. The war has already eaten toward the bottom of the stockings and the strong-boxes of Britain where American securities are stored.

As the financier not only of her own colossal requirements in the war, but as banker for her allies, England's money necessities are thus seen to be no less urgent than her need of men and munitions. They comprise, these three M's, the trilogy on which the existence of the Empire now depends. British performances in respect to the cash sinews of war have truly been on a monumental scale. History shows no parallel for the achievement of raising at home in loans and Treasury bills over $5,500,000,000 without abandonment of the gold standard and without resort to inconvertible paper, and yet keeping British credit at an alt.i.tude which gives hard-headed Uncle Sam no pause in taking John Bull's I-O-U for another half billion. It is an imperishable tribute to the stamina, prestige, wealth and commercial fabric of the British Empire and to the enterprise and ingenuity of the merchants, manufacturers, s.h.i.+ppers, bankers and traders who have made their islands the center of the world's exchanges and London the money-market of the universe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lord Northcliffe]

But magnificent as has been the past, the financial future can not be viewed except with anxiety. Indebtedness has been piled up sky-high--out of every twenty-five dollars spent since the war began, at least twenty dollars has been borrowed. That was possible because of the superlative excellence of British credit. "Our credit is now almost everything,"

explains _The Economist_. "It comes next to the Navy, and the two can not be dissociated. For if either suffer, our food supplies would be in danger. In one sense, credit is at the mercy of the Government and of the Treasury, for a great false step of policy or continuance in a false course would bring disaster. The responsibility of the Prime Minister and of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and of the Cabinet, as a whole, is prodigious. Whatever else we do, we must maintain our financial equilibrium. With that and the command of the seas, we can not be defeated."

Manifestly Britain's economic problem is almost the darkest spot on her overclouded war horizon--the problem of meeting rising obligations out of falling revenue. The Empire suffers from no lack of men; its physical resources are well-nigh inexhaustible. If patriotism does not send them to the trenches of their own free will in adequate numbers, they will be "fetched." There is no longer any question of shortage of munitions. England's own vast industrial plant, as well as that of France, is now occupied almost exclusively in the production of man-killing merchandise for the Allies and is turning it out at high pressure. To the manufacturing equipment of England and France are harnessed, in addition, German bombs and German-incited strikes to the contrary notwithstanding, the limitless productive facilities of the United States and Canada. Britain's one and only nightmare is money, and its corollary aspects, exchange and credit.

No estimate has so far appeared which fixes the 1916 deficit which England will have to meet at less than $7,000,000,000, based on a total war cost for the calendar year of $9,000,000,000. How to grapple with the gigantic task conjured up by such a prospect is not engaging popular attention to any marked degree, though upon its solution depends, primarily, Britain's ability to conquer in this war of exhaustion. With the palpable impossibility of raising the wind at home by successive new public loans; with the necessity to invoke such heroic measures as borrowing $500,000,000 in America to bolster up sterling exchange and keep British credit "intact"; with Englishmen sacrificing their enormous holdings of American securities for the same pious purpose; with the British industrial plant so preoccupied with munitions that it can neither, in accordance with tradition, pay for British imports with British exports nor increase British revenue by the same token; with national expenditure advancing by gigantic leaps and national income restricted as it never was before; with all these immutable conditions staring at Englishmen, it is no wonder that those of them who think, as distinguished from those who merely hurrah, contemplate what looms ahead with anxious concern.

But admittedly grave as the future is, it is by no means hopeless.

Britain's plight is not "desperate," as the Germans, seeking to hide their own, are so fond of making believe. Even the misgivings of Englishmen themselves regarding their economic situation would be promptly and legitimately resolved into confidence if the community as a whole could be induced to pull itself together and look facts in the face. In its incorrigible disinclination to do so alone lies danger.

The British Empire is not bankrupt. It can hardly ever become so. A recent estimate a.s.sessed the income of the Empire, including India, at something over the fabulous sum of $20,000,000,000! It may be embarra.s.sed--it is unquestionably that already--just as the richest of men frequently are, in the midst of t.i.tanic transactions which have outrun their calculations. But embarra.s.sment seldom eventuates in ruin, either for men or nations, if they come to grips with it betimes. Thus, disaster can only follow tribulation in the case of Britain if her people, preferring to wallow in happy-go-lucky nonchalance and drift, postpone until too late those sagacious, clean-sweep measures of reorganization and retrenchment which alone, in the opinion of competent judges, can save the situation.

In the preceding chapter I told of the introduction of the Simple Life, of the dawn of the Economy Era in war-time England; but it would be hyperbole to intimate that it has been inaugurated on anything but a superficial scale. Luxury and self-indulgence are still rife. To vast numbers of people, in the cla.s.ses as well as the ma.s.ses, the war, far from oppressing them, has brought positive affluence, and with their new riches they have gone in for spending instead of saving. Spartanism in Britain remains a good deal of a theory; it has not become a condition.

While Germany, shut off by land and sea, contrives to remain at fighting zenith without her customary imports of $2,500,000,000 a year (she calls Jellicoe's blockade a blessing in disguise because it has compelled her to spend at home what she used to pay out abroad), England's imports of such articles as oranges, cocoa, tea, coffee, tobacco, cheese, rice, meats, pepper and onions have heavily exceeded her importations of the same articles in corresponding peace periods.[1] The Prime Minister tells the country that "victory seems likely to incline to the side which can arm itself the best and stay the longest." Mr. Asquith declares that "that is what we meant to do." But until, for instance, Englishmen realize that by abstaining from tobacco for a year, $40,000,000 of money would be available for the smoke of battle; that if every man, woman and child in the Kingdom puts away 25 cents a week, a new treasure of $600,000,000 could be piled up for war; and that unless waste, extravagance and slothful habits generally are banished, by duke and by docker, as if they were leprous disease, Mr. Asquith's brave words will remain a hollow aspiration. They alone will not enable England to "stay the longest" in the world's most destructive endurance compet.i.tion.

[1] There are ugly rumors that Produce Exchange patriots who burnt _The Daily Mail_ for exposing the "sh.e.l.ls tragedy" are the importers of these excessively large stores and are selling them to "Holland"--and other "neutrals" adjacent to Germany at exorbitant profits.

It is not change of governments, but ruthless change of system, which England requires. She has relegated a vast deal since the cleansing process set in, in August a year ago, but the sc.r.a.p-heap clamors for more. It cries most insistently of all for obliteration of the fetish that politicians, lawyers and other amateurs are fit to conduct a government engaged in the most terrible combat of human history.

Napoleon once said that a nation of lions led by a stag would be beaten by a nation of stags led by a lion. Britons claim to be a nation of lions. They contemplate the first year of the war and ask if they are to continue to be led along the path of disaster by stags. The Truth-Hiders quote Lincoln and deprecate "swapping horses while crossing a stream." Lord Willoughy de Broke effectually disposes of this "plea for incompetence in office" by telling the House of Lords that "whether such a course should be adopted depends on what sort of a horse a man has beneath him. If the horse is standing in the middle of the stream and seems as if he were going to lie down, the best thing is to get another." Englishmen admit that war like this demands wholesale reconstruction of national life, yet their government has subst.i.tuted spasmodic patchwork for reconstruction. Instead of bold tearing-down and rebuilding, there has been nibbling and tinkering, and even then, too late. The people have waited for marching orders in countless directions, but the Government band has played nothing but a hesitation waltz. Take the drink evil, Britain's most malignant ulcer. Russia is not commonly looked to for economic or social inspiration, yet even she has wrestled with drink in a manner which puts England to shame. While the Czar was banis.h.i.+ng vodka absolutely for the pestilence that it was, England's governors, fearful of Labor and "the trade" alike, temporized and enacted makes.h.i.+fts which materially ameliorated the liquor menace without throttling its power for evil. They have made "treating" a misdemeanor, closed the saloons, both public and private, at 10 P.M., and restricted the hours when drink may be sold in London and the industrial districts. But clubmen, artisans and soldiers can get drunk to their heart's content as of yore. They have had only to rearrange their bibulous hours. Take the air defense muddle. "I, for one," wrote a Briton in October, protesting against the prevailing theory that the call of the hour, in the midst of the Zeppelin peril was "coolness," "am tired of being complimented on the calmness with which I behave in the presence of danger. It is no comfort to me that my death, if it occurs, will have no military importance. I want to be congratulated not on the stoicism with which I go to my funeral, but on my share in a system of government which affords effective protection to my country."

Nothing could better stigmatize the epidemic of Self-Sufficiency which, in the writer's deliberate judgment, is primarily responsible for British failures in the war thus far. _There has been too much congratulation and self-congratulation on the sang-froid with which John Bull can take punishment_. He is a mighty gladiator, but cheery comfort from his seconds between rounds has failed on many an occasion to prevent a champion pugilist from being knocked out. It is not that England is _incapable_ of defeating Germany. It is that she seems _unwilling_ to do so by throwing into the balance every atom of strength for which that prodigious task calls. For at least a decade before 1914 Britain's political ostriches, disarmament-mongers, professional pacifists and pro-Germans declined to recognize the German danger even when it was approaching with strides so brazen that almost the blind could see. They preferred the "valor of ignorance," thought Ballin and Harnack instead of Tirpitz and Bernhardi typified Modern Germany, continued to revel in the bliss of contemptuous self-confidence, and attempted to parley with a tiger which was crouching for the attack. I enter a modest claim to have done my own little share for eight years in the futile work of arousing Britain to the Teuton peril. I refer merely to my work at Berlin, in reporting military and naval developments--"Germany laid all her cards on the table," as Admiral von Tirpitz once said to me. When the crash came, Englishmen pinned their faith to their history. They were no match for "forty years of preparations," of course; but they always "started late" and "muddled through" their wars. The Crimea began in terror and ended in triumph.

The South African affair was the same sort of thing. War with Germany would be no different. The race which had finished off Napoleon need have no qualms in tackling his pinchbeck successor. Britons admit that a year of war has dissipated nearly all their comfortable illusions, but signs are still wanting that there is nation-wide, deep-seated realization of the immensity of the ordeal and the dimensions of the sacrifices yet to be faced. On December 8, 1915, when the war was sixteen months old, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford wrote this letter to _The Times_:

"We are at present in a complex tangle of muddle and mismanagement. Our military campaigns are being conducted without any objective or plan.

Policy only has been considered.

"In war a policy has to be enforced by the Navy and Army. The War Staffs have not been consulted as to whether they had the means in men and material for enforcing the different policies inaugurated by the Cabinet. Individuals have been consulted; combined opinion of War Staffs has not been sought. The result is disaster in nearly every direction.

"We have not taken full advantage of our mastery of the sea. In every department we observe doubt, hesitation, and procrastination. War requires quick decisions and prompt actions. The question of supplying recruits for the Army has been postponed once, and apparently may be postponed again. Unless a decision is come to immediately we shall be a year before the recruits joined under any new scheme can possibly be ready to take the field.

"The public is sick of the policy conveyed in the sentence 'Wait and see.' The danger to the Empire becomes more apparent every day. The country is waiting for a strong, clear lead. Our present methods will prolong the war indefinitely. If we continue hesitating without making up our minds on any single question connected with the war, we shall plunge straight into disaster."

I, too, shall be a pessimist about England's chances to win the war only so long as she neglects to _go to war_. Mere command of the sea, it has been amply demonstrated, can not crush Germany. It can sorely inconvenience her and compel her to live on the ration basis, but it can not force what King George has called "a highly organized enemy"

prematurely to make peace. When England has staked her all, I shall turn blithe optimist, for I believe that nothing else in the world can overthrow her savagely efficient antagonist. Germany has staked her _all_. Until England does likewise, they will not fight on even terms.

When England, like Germany, has relentlessly marshaled every t.i.the of her national strength for war, subordinated all else to that purpose, harnessed to the chariot of Mars every conceivable resource at her command, pulverized caste distinctions, banned politics and politicians, and made the war and the winning of it the only thing the nation eats for, works for, dreams of, or wastes thought upon--then I shall feel constrained to feel a.s.sured that victory will perch, however distant the hour, on Liberty's and not on Tyranny's banners. The Anglo-German endurance test--into which the war will eventually resolve itself--can have but one issue. Germans know that. Their a.n.a.lytical mind long ago taught them that the dormant resources of the British Empire, _once mobilized_, would be invincible. But what is happening is precisely what the Germans counted upon: the irresolute British habit of mind, the "too late" system, the century-old cult of comfort and ease, the "Splendid Isolation" school of thought, which, when the hour of trial came, might be relied upon to cripple the effort to convert latent potentialities into an inconquerable organism. History will have names for all these things. It will call them Belgium, Serbia, Dardanelles and Salonica.

The British people must triumph over themselves before they can break the Germans. Their inexhaustible moral and material a.s.sets must be commandeered and husbanded, if they are to accomplish their manifest destiny, and not merely be bragged about in the clubs of Pall Mall and the ostrich-farms of Fleet Street. If the world-wide realm on which the sun never sets can produce armies calculable only in millions, as it most a.s.suredly is able to do, let them come forth, or be brought forth.

If the wealth of the United Kingdom, India and the dominions oversea represents riches unmatched, as it does, let it be lavished exclusively on war, and not squandered in any other single direction. If common sense is the proudest of Anglo-Saxon virtues, let it prevail and sweep away governments which value votes more than men's lives and abolish a Censors.h.i.+p which treats Britons as if they were half-witted. If there must be calm at all costs, let it be the calm of high-pressure effort, and not the coolness of impotent resignation or casual performance. If faith must be placed in the efficacy of "attrition," let the process of "bleeding Germany white" be hastened by British achievements afield, lest "attrition," when the flags are furled, find the victor as emaciated as the vanquished.

I forget neither Germany's wrecked military hopes and economic disintegration, nor the magnitude of Britain's service and accomplishment thus far. I regret only, along with England's other well-wishers, that her sacrifices have not resulted, as they so richly deserved to, in advancing the British cause farther toward the goal. I can not help thinking that, in many respects, it is wasted achievement, for the object which England and her Allies have set themselves is not merely the pinioning of Germany to fronts in Russia, France, Belgium and Greece beyond which she can not thrust herself. I am not unmindful of the glorious response of Britain's n.o.blest sons, who sleep by their gallant thousands in the blood-manured soil of France, Belgium, Turkey and the Balkans, nor of the Trojan spirit in which the women of the Empire are giving their best and bravest, and weeping not. I mourn only because death and suffering leave triumph still so remote. The remorselessness with which the Reaper has stalked through the great families and homes of England is saddening, yet inspiring, evidence that the heart of Britain is sound. The immortal deeds of the Grenfells and the O'Learys and of all the one hundred thirty who have won Victoria Crosses are only the outstanding tokens of undying British heroism. But if sacrifice is not to continue to be cruelly in vain, there must be relentless regeneration of the purely material governance of British life, even more destructible of tradition and inst.i.tutions than anything which has gone before. Of bulldog British determination to fight to a finish and to win there is no shadow of doubt. There is no Briton worthy of the name not ready to be beggared to that end. The sublimity of the cause for which England is bleeding is a more enn.o.bling incentive than ever, for it has come to comprehend life or death for herself, as well as the liberation of Belgium. Spirituality has forfeited none of its pristine efficacy as an a.s.set in war and bulwark in stress, but in our machine-gun era it must be backed by scientific efficiency and patriotism of deed before there can be imposed upon Germany that peace which is essential not only to British security, but to the world's happiness.

FINISH.