Chapter XV: The Helmsmen

"We don't want to fight,
But, by Jingo! if we do,
We've got the men,
We've got the ships,
And we've got the money, too!"

When during the dark hours of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 a London music-hall comedian named McDermott popularized the chorus of a ditty which has rung down the ages, he not only enriched the English language with a new synonym for a war zealot--Jingo--but he epitomized British faith in British invincibility and the basis on which it is founded. McDermott's blustering ballad, the _Tipperary_ of its day, interpreted, by a fate which seems strangely ironical in the light of current events, Britain's determination to go to war to prevent the Bear from grabbing Constantinople.

The song applied precisely to conditions in this country in midsummer, 1914. Englishmen "didn't want to fight"--abroad, at least, for they were looking forward to cooling their belligerent ardor nearer home, in Ireland. But when the violation of Belgium resolved all dissension in the British Government on the question of intervention in a conflict which, up to then, concerned purely the Dual and Triple Alliances, and literally dragged Britain into the vortex in the name of both her honor and interest, Englishmen did want to fight. Taking quick stock of their resources, they felt assured, in McDermott's immortal words, that they had "got the men, the ships, and the money, too." But men, ships and money, vital as they are, are useless without leaders, and it was natural that Britons' first thoughts, in the dawn of the Empire's supreme emergency, should be concerned with the personnel of the helmsmen. A super-crisis calls insistently for super-men, and in the midst of an era which cynics call the age of mediocrities doubts were not few that England might find herself fatally lacking in a plight as stupendous as any Pitt, Nelson and Wellington had ever faced.

With their astonishing capacity to stifle domestic controversy and party bickerings on the threshold of a foreign crisis, Englishmen decided that the first essential was to repose implicit confidence in the existing Government. Ireland, Labor, Suffragettes, Opposition, the four thorns in the Asquith Administration's side, withdrew, leaving the cleavage they once made so completely healed that hardly a scar remained. The Liberal Cabinet, admittedly stale with nearly a decade of uninterrupted power, might not contain all the talents of statesmanship essential for the conduct of a struggle on whose issue hung Imperial existence. It was a Government overweighted with "tired lawyers," consisting (with the exception of Lord Kitchener) of exclusively professional politicians, and even tinged in important directions (like Lord Haldane) with confessed Germanophilism. It was a Government long and openly charged by its foes with desiring office at any cost and placing the perpetuation of its hold on the fleshpots before any other interest. It was a Government which had avowedly temporized with the Irish yesterday and the Labor Party to-day as the price of maintaining its Parliamentary existence. It was finally a Government notoriously consisting of rival internal factions best typified by the aristocratic Imperialism of Sir Edward Grey on the one hand and on the other by the rugged and radical Democracy of Mr. Lloyd-George. Yet the nation, in the presence of peril palpably incalculable, relegated its criticisms, its doubts and its carpings, and with one voice agreed that "Trust the Government!" must be the slogan of the hour. The Anglo-Saxon spirit of Fair Play asserted itself. The country said that the Asquith Administration must be given a chance to exhibit its mettle. If it failed, there was always time for a reckoning. The British Government of August, 1914, entered upon the war clothed with a mandate as sweeping in its powers as formal conferment of a Dictatorship could have been--a woof of national confidence amounting to little short of _carte blanche_. John Bright once said that a British Government is always annihilated by the war which it is called upon to wage. But Englishmen wished Mr. Asquith's Cabinet Godspeed, and by their unquestioning support of every measure it proposed showed that their loyalty and trust were real and sincere.

Although the British Government (by which is meant only the Premier's Administration) consists of twenty-one ministers of Cabinet rank, the war regime, it was manifest from the start, would be confined to five outstanding men combining the motive forces of the entire organization. These five were the Prime Minister himself, the Foreign Secretary (Sir Edward Grey), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Lloyd-George), the First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. Winston Churchill), and the Secretary for War (Lord Kitchener). Although the highest-salaried member of the Cabinet, the Lord High Chancellor (Lord Haldane) drew ten thousand pounds a year, and there were half-a-dozen others like the Home Secretary, the Colonial Secretary, the Secretary for India and the Presidents of the Board of Trade and Local Government Board whose financial status (five thousand pounds a year), outranked the four thousand five hundred pounds which Mr. Churchill received, the quintette named, by reason of their posts and personalities, was the logical inner Government to deal with the war. That brilliant English essayist and biographer, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, even further delimited the numerical dimensions of the _real_ War Government when he said that "if Mr. Asquith is the brain of the Cabinet, Sir Edward Grey is its character and Mr. Lloyd-George is its inspiration."

Herbert Henry Asquith, Yorkshireman by birth and barrister by profession, has been Prime Minister for seven years, succeeding his late Liberal chieftain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in 1908. Asquith, whom Bannerman used to call "the sledge-hammer," because of his lucidity of thought and expression, was sixty-three years old in September, 1915. Although not a Pitt, nor even a Disraeli or Palmerston, the statesman who looks like a Roman senator and is gifted with eloquence in keeping was considered in many respects a Heaven-sent blessing in the melting-pot era of British history, for as a purely steadying influence he is probably without a peer in contemporary politics. As a politician in the narrower sense of a party disciplinarian, manager and leader he will rank with the craftiest names in his country's tortuous history. British Liberalism has skated on perilous ice following the reaction which swept the Conservative Party from power after the Boer War and throughout the era of Democratic radicalism in which Great Britain has meantime had its being. That Mr. Asquith's party is enabled to celebrate ten years of sovereignty still strongly intrenched is by general consent due to the astute generalship of its commander-in-chief. Asquith is not commonly accused of imaginativeness. He is too typical a British statesman for that. His temperament is devoid of the adventurous, like that of the true intellectual, and he is pathologically fonder of harking to public opinion than boldly leading it. When he coined the "Wait and See" epigram during the Ulster crisis, he gave utterance to a phrase which accurately epitomizes the tentativeness so preponderant in his political career. British procrastination and vacillation at vital periods of the war were undoubtedly the reflex action of the Prime Minister's own low-speed mental processes. Yet in the revolt of the Curragh Camp officers, that strange curtain-raiser of the impending Ulster crisis, which threatened to embroil these fair isles in another Cromwellian trial of strength between Parliament and the army, Mr. Asquith, by a courageous stroke of positive genius--his own assumption of the Secretaryship for War in succession to the compromised Colonel Seely--resolved into tranquillity and hope a situation more menacing to civil peace in England than living Britons had ever before lived through. Beneath Mr. Asquith's polished exterior, unemotional mask and sweet reasonableness Germany, mistaking his for a peace-at-any-price nature, made one of the most egregious of her numerous and glaring miscalculations.

Only the results of the Peace Conference will determine the true ramifications of Sir Edward Grey's reputation. It was deservedly high when the war began. No Foreign Secretary in Europe approached him in stature, with the possible exception of Delcasse. He had long been Germany's _bete noire_, being looked upon as the incarnation of the British diplomatic policy of blocking German ambitions for a "place in the sun" wherever and whenever they manifested themselves. As long before as December, 1912, Professor Hans Delbrueck, the sanest of German political professors, told me in a prophetic interview for _The Daily Mail_ on "What Germany Wants" that unless England abandoned her policy of "arbitrary opposition to legitimate German political aspirations; if she had no inclination to meet us on that ground; if her interests rather pointed to a perpetuation of the anything-to-beat-Germany policy, so let it be. The Armageddon which must then, some day, ensue will not be of our making." That was a fairly plain warning of coming events. The Germans, as I have said, considered Sir Edward Grey anti-Germanism personified. They regard him to-day as the "organizer of the war." Taking an obviously short-sighted view, I used sometimes to think that it would have been good politics for Britain to buy off Germany with a _Trinkgeld_ (tip) of some sort. If Bismarck was right when he called the Germans "a nation of house-servants," they could obviously have been bribed. Delbrueck himself once confessed to me that Germany did not _need_ more oversea territory; she only _hankered_ for it for window-dressing purposes. She wanted as expensive millinery and high-powered a car as her rich neighbor across the way. Colonies were fashionable, and she had to have them. I occasionally thought that England would be staving off trouble for herself by bribing avaricious Germany with a coaling-station on some inconsequential trade-route or even shutting the eye to some burglarious descent on territory or concessions in Asia Minor or Central Africa. But such notions left the German character, the Oliver Twist in it, fatally out of account. The German is the most eager person in the world to covet a mile if given an inch. Concessions to his rapacity would have meant purchasing turmoil for the conceding party not eliminating it. British opposition to Pan-Germanic designs, typified by Sir Edward Grey, was based on thoroughgoing insight into the German nature and German ambitions, epitomized for all time by Bernhardi when he said that nothing would appease the Fatherland except World Power or downfall. Hush-money to Germany in the shape of periodically new "places in the sun" would have kept her quiet for spells. But the blackmailing process would have been resumed. It is the German way. "Mr. Balfour tells us we must not expect Englishmen to support our aims in the direction of territorial expansion," said Delbrueck. "What remains then for us, except to enforce the accomplishment of our purposes by strengthened armaments?" Could avowal be plainer-spoken?

Sir Edward Grey is fifty-three years old and has been a childless widower since 1906. He has been a Member of Parliament continuously since he was twenty-three years of age. Though an Oxford graduate and successful barrister, he is in no sense a scholar, and his experience of foreign affairs up to his becoming Foreign Secretary in the Campbell-Bannerman ministry in 1905 was confined to an under-secretaryship of the Foreign Office in the preceding (Rosebery) Government. Grey, who is also of the smooth-shaven Romanesque type of statesman in external appearance, is an amazing example of natural British aptitude for the higher politics, for he is not a linguist (he speaks nothing but English) and except for a visit to France with the present King a couple of years ago was said never to have been abroad in his life. His hobbies are tennis, fly-fishing and birds. The only book he ever wrote was a treatise on the piscatory art and he tramped through the New Forest with Colonel Roosevelt talking ornithology all the way. Yet a man has only to read the British White Paper--he need not, indeed, do much except read Sir Edward Grey's dispatches to his ambassadors on July 29, 1914--to realize that the Foreign Secretary is a statesman of marvelous force and capacity to grapple with the essentials of a situation. No state papers of modern times outrival Grey's diplomatic correspondence on the eve of the war. They ought to insure him, as I believe they will, immortality, no matter how the war ends. Sir Edward Grey's speeches are like his dispatches--devoid of irrelevancy or rhetorical claptrap and incisive in the highest degree. They ring conviction and sincerity and their argument is usually unanswerable. Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg's clumsy attempts to parry Grey's mid-bellum dialectics have only brought out the latter in bolder relief. The war has notoriously eaten into Grey's soul. Germany calls it guilty remorse. Men who know are conscious that he labored for peace to the last minute with unflagging enthusiasm. His industry during the war has been intense, and his insistence upon looking at things for himself has threatened more than once to cost him his eyesight. As it is, intermittent relaxation has to be forced upon him by his colleagues and his medical advisers. Sir Edward Grey's permanent disappearance from Downing Street would rejoice Germany like a victorious battle. Grey has been violently blamed for the failure of Britain's mid-war diplomacy, especially in the Balkans. His own defense against charges of failure in that region is likely to seem plausible in the light of history, viz., that, unaccompanied by commensurate military successes, the efforts of Allied diplomacy in the Near East were almost hopelessly handicapped.

One night during the South African War a Radical M.P., advocating the downtrodden brother Boer's cause at a mass-meeting in Birmingham, received such a warm reception from the crowd that he had to flee for his life through a back-door, disguised as a policeman. His name was David Lloyd-George, whose present occupation is that of England's man of the hour. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer when war broke out and introduced the initial war budgets, earning thereby encomiums from the financial community which for years before looked upon him as capital's demagogic arch-foe. To-day, Minister of Munitions--the circumstances under which he became such are treated in a subsequent chapter--Lloyd-George comes far nearer being Britain's national hero than any of his contemporaries. He is charged by his detractors with the design to make himself Dictator. England could have a worse one.

If Lloyd-George were an American instead of a Welshman, he would have been President of the United States by this time, or at least as close to it as Bryan has ever been. There is in fact very little typically British about him. He is emotional, for example, and he has an imagination. His whole make-up is trans-atlantic, which is _Anglice_ for sensational. Picture, if you can, a strong solution of Booker Washington (I mean, of course, only his eloquence), of flamboyant and appealing Billy Sunday, of the Boy Orator of the Platte at his silver-tongued best, and of our inimitable T. R. in his most rampageous form, and you will have Lloyd-George in composite. It was because he is all this that he was chosen for the "shells portfolio" in the reconstructed Asquith cabinet.

He knew very little--probably nothing--about munitions seven months ago. It could not have been very much before that when he probably thought that guncotton was raw material for pajamas. But he is the prize "enthuser" of the Kingdom, a master of the tedious art of welding drowsy Britons into a race of real war-makers. All the ingredients for supplying the army with the shells it needed were in existence; but they needed organization. The manufacturers and their works needed organization. The workmen needed organization. The public spirit needed organization; and the whole business needed a Lloyd-George. It got him ten months after it ought to have had him, but not too late. Obviously the diminutive Welsh country lawyer who had brought about the disestablishment of the State Church of Wales, imposed State Insurance and Old Age Pensions on a reluctant Kingdom, assailed the vested interests of the House of Lords and demolished them, was the man to impress the country with the true meaning of the shells tragedy. He took the stump, his natural element, for the purpose. He went to the people, especially in the great industrial centers, and told them the truth. He burned into their conscience--that was the only way to get the stolid British to wake up to a real peril--that shells, shells, and then shells, and nothing but shells, were required if Britain meant to win the war.

The people listened to Lloyd-George. He has a way of making them listen to him. They gave him their ear even in his pro-Boer days. They listened to him when he (an ardent Baptist) cleared for action against the Welsh Church. They listened to him even when he went down to Limehouse and coined a new word, "to limehouse," meaning violent political spell-binding, second cousin to demagogism, by the nature of his impassioned appeals to the people to rise and slay the Lords. It was inevitable that the country would listen to him in his newest and greatest role as organizer of victory.

Lloyd-George's goal is undoubtedly the Premiership--the ambition of every British politician. He has plenty of time to wait--he is only fifty-two--and unfailing week-end golf keeps him as "fit" as a man fifteen years his junior. Of Napoleonic stockiness of build, with a wealth of wavy gray hair worn long, he is a figure which radiates strength and power, though unimpressive of itself. He is a capital "mixer." It is, indeed, his principal political asset. He is as much at home laboring with a gang of recalcitrant miners at the pit-mouth--he always goes straight to headquarters when he essays to settle a strike--as he is on the floor of the House of Commons or as moderator at a Baptist convention. He likes Americans and specializes in extending hospitality to interesting ones. Unquestionably he has a strong hold on our imaginations, as a man of his temperament, career and talent is bound to have. An eminent Chicagoan visited London last summer, with introductions which would have easily paved his way to the throne or any other exalted British quarter. "Whom would you like to meet most of all?" he was asked. "Lloyd-George," he said, with the intuitive sense of a Yankee who only has time for the things worth while.

Winston Churchill, the son of an English father and an American mother, is the Peck's Bad Boy of the British Government. His popularity has been sadly dimmed since the war began, for he was looked upon as not only the author of the grotesque naval "relief" expedition to Antwerp--now either prisoners of war in Germany or interned in Holland--but the culprit who was chiefly responsible for the far more disastrous Dardanelles adventure. Another crime is charged against him, hardly less serious than the two just named: his imperious administration of the Admiralty drove from the First Sea Lordship the man universally considered Britain's greatest sailor, Lord Fisher. All agree, friend and foe, that to "Winston" was due in a very marked degree, England's superb readiness at sea when war broke out, but it is a matter of grave doubt whether even that superlative service to the country will be looked upon as great enough to blanket his subsequent and costly incompetencies. When the upheaval in the Asquith Cabinet came about, in the spring of 1915, Churchill was nominally squelched by interment in the harmless berth of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, most of whose official time is spent in licensing Justices of the Peace and Notaries Public. That ennui hung heavily on his hands was manifested by the announcement during the summer that Churchill had taken up painting as a pastime.

I have said that "Winston" was nominally subjugated, for a petrel of his peculiarly irrepressible storminess can only be wholly curbed by annihilation. Asquith is far too sagacious a politician to risk Churchill's complete eclipse in the Government of which he has always been the most picturesque constituent. Churchill, too, aspires to the Premier's toga, though a good many people fear that the defects of his qualities will keep him, just as they kept his distinguished father, Lord Randolph Churchill, from No. 10 Downing Street. But "Winston" is far less dangerous to the Government as a friend than as a foe. His chameleon political career justifies the fear that he would turn on his old associates and party cronies the moment he conceived that advantage to self was thereby obtainable. Obviously such a man is better in the Cabinet than out of it, especially if he is of Winston Churchill's undoubted personal charm, magnetism and resistless force.

Combining the best qualities of his dual ancestry, he makes a lively appeal to the average heart. Aristocratic to the core, with the blood of the Marlboroughs in his veins, and a snob of snobs in his personal relations, it is an anomalous fact that Churchill is an endlessly popular figure with the crowd. Whether it is his youth--he is only forty-one, was a soldier of no mean renown at twenty-three, a Member of Parliament at twenty-six, a Cabinet Minister at thirty-two and a force in Imperial politics long before he was forty--or his impetuous devil-may-care make-up, or his bombastic platform style, the masses like him. He has only one serious rival, indeed, in their affections, and that is Lloyd-George. He is remembered in war thus far not only for his Antwerp and Dardanelles indiscretions, but for his equally unhappy oratorical excesses, which are doomed, apparently, always to precede some untoward naval or military event. Within thirty-six hours of proclaiming at Liverpool (in September, 1914) that "if the German navy does not come out and fight, we shall dig it out like rats from a hole," _U9_ sent the _Cressy, Hague_ and _Aboukir_ to the bottom. In the spring of 1915, discussing the Dardanelles, Churchill blustered that "we are within a very few miles of the greatest victory this war has seen," and a few weeks later Kitchener announced that twelve miles of precarious front in Gallipoli were all there was to show for a campaign which had already cost eighty-seven thousand casualties. When Churchill prognosticates nowadays, the country trembles for what the next day will bring forth. Yet he is a rash prophet who would predict that "Winston" has run his course in British politics. He took manfully the discomfiture of the Coalition reshuffle, and although his picture is no longer cheered when it is flashed on the cinematograph screen the shrewdest seers are certain that he will "come back."[1]

[1] Churchill resigned from the Cabinet in November, 1915, declaring that he was a soldier--"and my regiment is in France." To it he said he preferred to go rather than continue in a position of "well-paid inactivity" at home. In a dramatic speech in the House of Commons, he took political farewell of the country and, having pleaded "Not Guilty" to the capital charges of responsibility for Antwerp and the Dardanelles, left England unostentatiously for the trenches, as a major of cavalry.

Lord Kitchener has always boasted that he scorned popularity. He has need for his philosophical temperament to-day, for there is no manner of doubt that his hold on the imaginations of his countrymen is less firm than it was when the war began. "K.'s" dramatic appointment to the War Office, in the earliest hours of the conflict, heartened the nation to an extraordinary degree. Britain had no army, Englishmen said, but it had Kitchener, who was a host in himself. His name alone was an asset which bred indescribable confidence. Men recalled his dominant traits--iron determination, strenuous application to duty, imperious disregard of hide-bound methods and red tape, and, above all, his genius for organization. They rejoiced to hear that he had accepted the War Office, long cob-webbed with circumlocutory traditions and petticoat influence, on the strict understanding that he was to be monarch of all he surveyed--that he would not tolerate such party interference as intrudes itself on departmental affairs in general. Immensely to the popular taste, because it confirmed the masses' conception of "K.," was the story that when he arrived at the War Office for the first time and was told there was "no bed here, Sir," he commanded the affrighted and astonished caretaker, then, "to put one in, as I am going to sleep here." Britain said to herself that she indubitably possessed a match for German Efficiency in her new Secretary for War, and all thought of "losing" with such a man as the supreme chief of the military establishment vanished from her mind.

Kitchener was never one of the war-will-be-over-by-Christmas crew. His maiden speech as War Minister in the House of Lords informed the country, bluntly, that he expected a three years' struggle. During the winter an anecdote ascribed to the taciturn War Secretary's loquacious sister gained currency, and passed from mouth to mouth. "When is the war going to end?" she asked him. "I don't know when it's going to end," he was said to have replied, "but it is going to begin in May." It was in May, by the pitiless irony of Fate, that the War Office's muddle of the ammunition supply was exposed.

Like all else in Britain--men, measures and institutions--the arbitrament of time will be required to pass final judgment on Kitchener's part in the war. In the principal field he was called upon to plow--the raising of a huge army from out of the earth--he accomplished marvels. No nation within fourteen months evolved from practically nothing an organization of, roundly, three million soldiers. It is not enough, for the actual requirements of the war call insistently for more and more, yet "K.'s" recruiting achievement stands forth without parallel in military history. It is certainly without precedent of even approximate magnitude in the annals of a non-conscript democracy. Lord Kitchener's accomplishments in other directions have notoriously not kept pace with his successes as a recruiting-sergeant. The shells affair can hardly fail to dim his reputation. The deficiencies of the voluntary system can not be called a failure directly chargeable to him, in that it has not brought forward men in quantity commensurate with the developed necessities of the campaign. Kitchener has hinted, but only that, that he is prepared to resort to Conscription the moment he is convinced that Voluntaryism has collapsed. But it does not seem unlikely that history may condemn him for clinging to the voluntary principle too long and hesitating to make Englishmen do their duty, instead of relying endlessly on their casual inclination to perform it. Kitchener has ruled the British War Office practically as an autocrat. He brooked no interference, even from the Cabinet. Viewed from that standpoint, "K." can hardly be absolved from cardinal responsibility for British military failures. Before the end of 1915 General Sir Ian Hamilton had disappeared from Gallipoli, Sir John French returned from France, General Townshend retreated from Baghdad, and the Allied "Relief" Expedition to Serbia had retired to Salonica, whence it had set out less than ten weeks previous.