The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days Part 7

But when humanity was being openly outraged, and conventions to which America had set her seal were being flagrantly violated, we thought, with Mr. Roosevelt, that it was the duty of the United States, as a Christian country, to step in with the expression of her deep and just indignation.

America was long in doing that. But, thank G.o.d, she did it at last, and for the courage and strength of the Notes which President Wilson (speaking with a voice that is no unworthy echo of the great one that spoke at Gettysburg) has lately sent to Germany on the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and the outrage thereby committed on the laws of justice and humanity, which are immutable, the whole civilized world (outside the countries of our enemies) now salutes the United States in respect and reverence.

THE THUNDERCLAP THAT FELL ON ENGLAND

Among the flashes as of lightning that revealed to us the drama of the past 365 days, some of the most vivid were those that lit up the condition at home towards the end of Spring. The war had been going on ten months when it fell on our ears like a thunderclap that all was not well with us in England. In the ominous unrest that followed there was danger of serious division, with the risk of a breakdown in that national unity without which there could be no true strength. The result was a Coalition Government, uniting all the parties save one, followed by an appeal to the patriotism of the people through their purse.

Never before had Great Britain witnessed such a response to her call.

The first Cabinet in England that aimed at coalition had broken down in personal corruption, but the Cabinet now called into being was beyond the suspicion of even party interest. The first appeal to the purse of the British people had yielded one hundred and thirty millions in a year, but the appeal now made yielded six hundred millions in a month.

It was almost as if Great Britain had ceased to be a nation and become a family.

Nor did the industries of the country, in spite of the lure of drink and the temptation to strikes, fall behind the spirit of the people. At the darkest moment of our inquietude the call of health took me for a tour in a motor-car over fifteen hundred miles of England, and though my journey lay through three or four of the least industrial and most placid of our counties, I found evidences of effort on every hand, The high roads were the track of marching armies of men in training; the broad moors were armed camps; the little towns were recruiting stations or depots for wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers with the hay crop still standing for want of hands to cut it, and the villages seemed to be deserted save by little children and the feeble, old men, who had nothing left to do but to wait for death.

The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remote hamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for the front, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answered by sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large boardings on the face of a public building recorded in golden letters the names of the townsmen who had joined the colours. In every little shop window along the high road to Bath there were portraits of the King, Kitchener, Jellicoe, French, and Joffre, flanked sometimes by pictures of poor, burnt and blackened Belgium.

On the edge of Dartmoor, in Drake's old town, Tavistock, I saw a thrilling sight--thrilling yet simple and quite familiar. Eight hundred men were leaving for France. In the cool of the evening they drew up with their band, four square in the market-place under the grey walls of the parish church, a thousand years old. The men of a regiment remaining behind had come to see their comrades off, bringing their own band with them. For a short half-hour the two bands played alternately, "Tipperary," "Fall In," "We Don't want to Lose You," and all the other homely but stirring ditties with which Tommy has cheered his soul. The open windows round the square were full of faces, the balconies were crowded, and some of the townspeople were perched on the housetops.

Suddenly the church clock struck eight, the hour for departure; a bugle sounded; a loud voice gave the word of command like a shot out of a musket; it was repeated by a score of other sharp voices running down the line, and then the two bands, and the men, and all the people in the windows, on the balconies and on the roofs (except such of us as had choking throats) played and sang "For Auld Lang Syne." Was the spirit of our mighty old Drake in his Tavistock town that day?

"Come on, gentlemen, there's time to finish the game, and beat the Spaniards, too!"

A GLIMPSE OP THE KING'S SON

One glimpse at the end of my little motor tour seemed to send a flash of light through the drama of the past 365 days. It was of our young Prince of Wales, home for a short holiday from the front. I had seen the King's son only once before--at his invest.i.ture in Carnarvon Castle. How long ago that seemed! In actual truth "no human creature dreamt of war" that day, although the shadow of it was even then hanging over our heads.

Some of us who have witnessed most of the great pageants of the world thought we had never seen the like of that spectacle--the grey old ruins, roofless and partly clothed by lichen and moss, the vast mult.i.tude of spectators, the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne, the booming of the guns from the wars.h.i.+ps in the bay outside, the screaming of the seagulls overhead, the ma.s.sed Welsh choirs singing "Land of my Fathers," and, above all, the boy of eighteen, beautiful as a fairy prince in his blue costume, walking hand in hand between the King and Queen to be presented to his people at the castle gate.

And now he was home for a little while from that blackened waste across the sea, which had been trodden into desolation under the heel of a ruthless aggressor and was still shrieking as with the screams of h.e.l.l.

He had gone there willingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, doing the work and sharing the risk of every other soldier of the King, and he would go back, in another few days, although he had more to lose by going than any other young man on the battle-front--a throne.

But if he lives to ascend it he will have his reward. England will not forget.

When we hear people say that Great Britain is not yet awake to the fact that she is at war I wonder where they keep their eyes. If I had been a Rip Van Winkle, suddenly awakened after twenty years of sleep, or yet an inhabitant of Mars dropped down on our part of this planet, I think I should have known in any five minutes of any day since August 5, 1914, that Great Britain was at war. Such a spirit has never breathed through our Empire during my time, or yet through any other empire of which I have any knowledge. Everybody, or almost everybody, doing something for England, and few or none idle who are of military age except such as have heavy burdens or secret disabilities into which I dare not pry.

It is not alone in Flanders or on the North Sea that our country's battle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on ten thousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, and the thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, and Cleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long s.h.i.+fts day and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimes half choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it is not for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, to dishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, or weaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint against the young manhood of my country.

THE PART PLAYED BY WOMAN

The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning which have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us the part played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always in the histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of the spectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdom of the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands by the machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governed continents by playing upon the pa.s.sions of men. Thank G.o.d, there has been nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman's part in this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, and undivided glory.

Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of London of 30,000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve the State. I do not envy the man who, having eyes to see, a heart to feel, and a mind to comprehend, was able to look on that sight unmoved. Every cla.s.s of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, and the tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, and the heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, as well as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marching together, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was not so much a procession of British women as a demonstration of British womanhood, and it seemed to say, "We hate war as no man can ever hate it, but it has been forced upon us all, so we, too, want to take our share in it."

THE WORD OF WOMAN

But long before July 17, 1915, woman's part in this war began. It began on August 5, 1914, when the first hundred thousand of our voluntary army sprang into being as by a miracle. The miracle (if I am asked to account for it) had its origin in the word of woman. Without that word we should have had no Kitchener's Army, for "on the decision of the women, above everything else, lay the issues of the men's choice." {*}

* The Times.

It needs little imagination to lift, as it were, the roofs off a hundred homes, and see and hear what was going on there in those early days of the war, after the clear call went out over England, "Your King and Country need you."

In the little house of a City clerk, married only a year before, the young wife is saying, "Yes, I think you ought to go, dear. It's rather a pity, so soon after the boy was born... just as you were expecting a rise, too, and we were going to move into that nice cottage in the garden suburb. But, then, it will be all for the best, and you mustn't think of me."

Or perhaps it is early morning in the flat of a young lawyer on the day he has to leave for the front. He is dressed in his khaki, and his wife, who is busying about his breakfast, is rising to a sublime but heartbreaking cheerfulness for the last farewell. "Nearly time for you to go, Robert, if you are to get to the barracks by six.... Betty? Oh, no, pity to waken her. I'll kiss her for you when she awakes and say daddy promised to bring her a dolly from France.... Crying? Of course not I Why should I be crying?... Good-bye then I Good-bye!..."

Or perhaps it is evening in a great house in Belgravia, and Lady Somebody is saying adieu to her son. How well she remembers the day he was born! It was in May. The blossom was out on the lilacs in the square, and all the windows were open. How happy she had been! He had a long fever, too, when he was a child, and for three days Death had hovered over their house. How she had prayed that the dread shadow would pa.s.s away! It did, and now that her boy has grown to be a man he comes to her in his officer's uniform to say,... Ah, these partings! They are really the death-hours of their dear ones, and the women know it, although, like Andromache, they go on "smiling through their tears."

With what brave and silent hearts they face the sequel too! The mother of Sub-Lieutenant So-and-So receives letters from him nearly every other week. Such cheerful little pencil scribblings! "Dearest Mother, I have a jolly comfortable dug-out now--three planks and a truss of straw, and I sleep on it like a top." Or, perhaps, "You see they have sent me back to the Base after six weeks under fire, and now I have a real, _real_ room, and a real, _real_ bed!" The dear old darling! She puts her precious letters on the mantelpiece for everybody to see, and laughs over them all day long. But when night comes, and she is winding the clock before going upstairs, thinking of the boy who not so long ago used to sleep on her knees.... "Ah, me!"

And then the final trial, the last tragic test--the women are equal to that also. First, the letter in the large envelope from the War Office: "Dear Madam, the Secretary of State regrets to inform you that Lieutenant So-and-So is reported killed in action on... Lord Kitchener begs to offer you..." And then, a little later, from the royal palace: "The King and Queen send you their most sincere...." Oh, if she could only go out to the place where they have laid... But then the Lord will know where to find His Own!

Somebody in Paris said the other day, "No one will ever make our women cry any, more--after the war." All the springs of their tears will be dry.

THE NEW SCARLET LETTER

It is brave in a man to face death on the battlefield, instantaneous death, or, what is worse, death after long suffering, after lying between trenches, perhaps, on the "no-man's ground" which neither friend nor foe can reach, grasping the earth in agony, seeing the dark night coming on, and then dying in the cold s.h.i.+ver of the dawn. Yes, it is brave in a man to face death like that. But perhaps it is even braver in a woman to face life, with three or four fatherless children to provide for, on nothing but the charity of the State. Then battle is in the blood of man, and the heroic part falls to him by right, but it is not in the blood of woman, who shrinks from it and loathes it, and yet such is her nature, the fine and subtle mystery of it, that she flies to the scene of suffering with a bravery which far out-strips that of the man-at-arms.

On the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that have borne tens of thousands of the sons who have fallen in this war the Red Cross is now enshrined. It is the new scarlet letter--the badge not of shame, but glory. And "through the rolling of the drums" and the thundering of the guns a voice comes to us in this year of service and sacrifice whose message no one can mistake. Woman, who faces death every time she brings a man-child into the world, must henceforth know what is to be done with him. It is her right, her natural right, and the part she has taken in this war has proved it.

AND... AFTER?

Such is the drama of the war as I have seen it. How far it has gone, when it will close and the curtain fall on it none of us can say. With five millions already dead, twice as many wounded, one kingdom in ruins, another desolate from disease, the larger part of Europe under arms, civil life paralysed, social existence overshadowed by a mourning that enters into nearly every household; with a war still in progress compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance; with a public debt which Pitt, Fox, and Burke (who thought 240,000,000 frightful) would have considered certain to sink the s.h.i.+p of State; with taxation such as our fathers never conceived possible--what will be our condition when this hideous war comes to an end?

It is dangerous to prophesy, but, as far as we can judge, the least of the results will be that we shall all be poorer; that great fortunes will have diminished and vast enterprises disappeared; that what remains of our savings will have a different value; that some of us who thought we had earned our rest will have to go on working; that the industrial cla.s.ses will have a time of privation; and that (most touching of human tragedies) the old and helpless and dependent among the very poor will more than ever feel themselves to be in the way, filling the beds and eating the bread of the children.

Yet none can say. It is one of the paradoxes of history that after the longest and most exhausting wars the acc.u.mulation of the largest national debts and the imposition of the heaviest taxations, nations have rapidly become rich. Although 1817 was a time of extreme distress in these islands, England prospered after the Napoleonic wars. Although 1871 was a time of fierce trial in Paris, yet France recovered herself quickly after the war with Germany. And though the Civil War in America left poverty in its immediate trail, the United States have since ama.s.sed boundless wealth.

So do the nations, generation after generation, renew their strength even after the most prolonged campaigns. But beyond the economic loss there will in this case be the physical loss of ten millions, perhaps, of the young manhood of Europe dead, and ten other millions permanently disabled, with all the injury to the race thereby resulting; and beyond the physical loss there will be the intellectual loss in the ruthless destruction of those ancient monuments which had linked us with the past; and beyond the intellectual loss there will be the moral loss in the uprooting of that sympathy of nation with nation which had seemed to unite us with the future. As a consequence of this war a great part of Europe will be closed to some of us for the rest of our natural lives, and the world will contain more than a hundred millions fewer of our fellow-creatures in whose welfare we shall take joy.

WAR'S SPIRITUAL COMPENSATIONS