V
GREAT BRITAIN JUST BEGINNING TO FIGHT
IF I were asked what is the mood which, more than any other, marked the British army at the front and the British nation back of it, at this time, I should reply, "Confidence." From all I can hear, this could not have been said four or five months previous to the summer of 1917. Then there was profound uneasiness lest the submarine should starve the island kingdom, lest the mighty ring of steel about the central empires should fly into a hundred shattered bits and the face of the world be changed. Why has confidence succeeded this apprehension? The answer I get on all sides is: "America has come in!" From what I learned at the front, if any still cherish the fond hope that a great gap will one day be made in the Hindenburg line, and the sides of that gap rolled up upon themselves in a swift turning movement of cavalry, as in the old warfare, let him reconsider it at once. You need only to glimpse the modern enginery of war; walk over, or rather clamber, slip, slide and jump over the field across which it has rolled, to become instantly aware of how utterly impossible it is that light troops should here ever again, with flying banners, dash after a routed foe. War is no longer a "blue racer" that speeds over ground; it is a huge caterpillar that crawls, a measuring worm that humps itself up and inches painfully and slowly along. War has always gone forward on its belly, and now its numbers have become so huge, its necessary equipment so multitudinous, that to supply its wants a whole industrial system must accompany it forward. Railways, telegraphs, depots, shops, stores, buildings, offices, all must crawl forward with it, and that, too, over volcanic surfaces that must be remade and rendered traversable.
To be sure, I met officers in a machine gun school who are experimenting and expecting "a more liquid state of warfare"; but I thought I could see that they were not sanguine of such a consummation in the very near future. No symptoms of liquefaction are discernible at present; gelatinous is the adjective that best characterizes the existing state; mud, putty-like, tenacious mud, unromantic, sordid, ugly mud—that conveys the impression of the whole glorious field of war to any man who has seen it or had a hand in it. No, it is only by pushing the heavy motor truck of war forward through the mud, inch by inch, that the English hope to win; and they know that we Americans have got to get our backs, and hands, and feet, and faces into the mud with them and push and bite and sweat and bleed, in order that civilization may be saved.
There are still a few left of the old type of cavalry officers who feel that some day their horsemen will come into use on the western front. But for the most part these horsemen are grooming their mounts and kicking their spurs and going on parade many miles behind the big guns; and the officers close up in the line smile as they allude to an occasional press dispatch which tells how a hole was made and the cavalry came dashing up. Besides, little triangular bits of steel, so made with three spines that one of them always points up, can be strewn by the handful across any road; and a few strands of barbed wire—omnipresent in this war—will play havoc with any troop of horse that dared to dash anywhere. Very circumspect and gingerly must be the advance of horsemen over these fields.
"But," you say, "is the German not confident, too, these days?"
If so, his confidence is not founded on facts. but upon government dictated reports. The government allows the newspapers to print only what suits it. There is no doubt on this point. The average soldier or officer, on either side, knows from personal experience only a very small bit of the line, his own salient, or strip of trench, or what he can discern from a neighboring hilltop. We, however, are privileged to see, with our own eyes, the conditions covering nearly a hundred miles of British front. The ordinary fighting man must take his knowledge from what the press contains, or his fellows, close at hand, can tell him. So German prisoners, when told they will be taken to London, begin to laugh:
"Why, London is destroyed!"
"You'll see," comes the quiet answer.
"Besides, no prison ship, nor any other, can cross the seas. Our submarines destroy all British ships."
They do cross; they do see London; they realize, when it is too late to communicate their knowledge, that England looks just as she has always done except for her men in khaki and her factories pouring out gun and shell. There is no mistake at all that the German people are deceived—systematically deceived—by the men that rule her. Of course I could not approach German prisoners, although I saw many; but I could talk to the sergeant majors and commissioned officers who handle them. The prisoners are all cheerful, happy, hard-working. They delight in their tasks, as Germans always do. If they had kept on at work instead of going to war they might have conquered the world.
By the way, I talked all one evening to a delightful Scotch major, an attorney from the Highlands. When we asked him if there was any fraternizing between his troops and the Germans he replied:
"I'd like to see the Hieland mon that would fraternize wi' anybody!"
Furthermore, the German confidence is oozing. The Roche is like a cask, the seams of which have been sprung by the British artillery. He is leaking out his spirit. Slowly, in spite of his inspired press and his mendacious government, he is becoming aware that his case is hopeless. If his psychology is such that ax and crowbar are needed, at times, to get ideas in, ax and crowbar have certainly been used. He no longer fights downhill. He is fighting an uphill fight. He no longer possesses superior artillery. Even an amateur can see for himself where the major hand is at the front. He no longer scouts in the air unimpeded; he does precious little scouting at all, although he does some and always has to fight his way.
It is just a question, then, of constant pressure and biting. How long that process must continue before the Roche caves in no man can tell. There are signs of cracking here and there. You can hear the great structure groan and creak clear across the Atlantic almost as well as one can here. When it will collapse is hidden from all but the gods alone; but that it will collapse, unless something entirely unforeseen occurs, nobody in England any longer doubts.
Confidence, therefore, is in the heart of the British nation. It cheers them immensely to realize that as long as the British bulldog is hanging on to the throat of the Hohenzollerns so long will Uncle Sam be hanging on to the ear, the hind leg, the flank, or wherever he can get a hold. I asked one of the leading British war correspondents one day what he believed America could best do for the general cause. His jaws snapped like Roosevelt's as he spat out:
"Give the death blow!"
A dozen other officers, in reply to the same question, and the head of a department at the foreign office, and twenty men on the street, all reply: "Come to us in the air! Bring on war-planes by the thousands I Finish them from above! That is the only fluid warfare!"
Perhaps the press dispatches give America some idea of the heartening effect of American entrance to the war. But I doubt if the length and breadth and depth of that effect can be conveyed in the printed word. But this is certain: We have come at the instant of the greatest need to stand beside France, to take part of her load, to revive the drooping lilies, to repay in a beautiful fashion the debt we have owed her throughout our young life.
When all is said and done, however, it grows plainer and plainer every day that it is with our motherland that our future destiny is to be cast. England is our natural ally. For France, we have a sentimental, grateful regard; but with England the tie is one of interest, business and political interest, as well as blood and common speech and common ideals. There has existed between the two nations, British and American, a quiet understanding for nearly a hundred years. To prove it we have only to look to the three thousand miles of undefended Canadian border. We have only to remember that at Subig Bay on the famous day when Dewey dumped the Philippines in our lap, there were two other fleets at hand, a German and a British. Said the German admiral to the British:
"What are you going to do about it?"
Said the British admiral to the German:
"That is known only to Admiral Dewey and myself."
We have only to remember the words of Admiral Sims some seven years ago in London, words for which, if I remember, he was called home and publicly rebuked and privately patted on the back:
"If ever the British Empire is seriously threatened from without, she will find the United States ready with every ship, every dollar and every drop of blood, to come to her defense."
Those words are not only fulfilled in seven years, but the author of them is promoted and in command of our naval forces on this side at the present moment. We have only to remember, further, that when we fixed the tolls for the Panama Canal England remonstrated with us, and we gave in to her; that her navy makes possible our Monroe Doctrine; that she accepted our mandate gracefully in the Venezuela matter, when she knew and we knew she could have blown us out of the water.
Britannia rules the waves. Without a doubt she must continue to rule them. And it is to our interest that she should. Why should we ever try to rule it, when it is so much cheaper to have her do it for us? Nor is it likely that we shall ever build such a merchant marine as to compete with her. Why create a new express company when there is a line already in existence that we may utilize on equitable terms? We may build some ships, doubtless will; but economic conditions are such that America will not be likely ever to attempt competition with the natural common carrier of the world, Great Britain.
No, it is to our interest, as well as in harmony with our cardinal principles of democracy, freedom of the seas, open ports, rights of peoples to choose their own governments, freedom of conscience; all these and more that we should stand shoulder to shoulder with Great Britain. It is little odds whether the alliance is a tacit one, as in the past, or an articulated one in the future. A quiet understanding with Great Britain is more lasting and more binding than a treaty, signed, sealed and delivered at Berlin. These two great English speaking peoples may and please God they will, together with such allies as they can gather around them, into a league for peace, a federation of states, what you please, for the next thousand years, keep the peace of the world.
We can, in other and far finer words, fulfill the dream of the English poet laureate—no, not English any more than our own—the poet laureate of English speaking people everywhere, when he sang:
"I dipped into the future far as human eye could see.
Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of golden sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight drooping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew,
From the nations' airy navies, grappling in the central blue,
Till the war drums beat no longer, and the battle flags were furled
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world."