Front matter (continued 8)

But how does it know that the armour of the turrets is good, or that the guns will fire accurately? Indeed, all that it sees is the shell. The rest must be taken on trust. A navy may look all right and be quite bad. The nation gives a certain amount of money to build ships which are taken in charge by officers and men who, shut off from public observation, may do about as they please. The result rests with their industry and responsibility. If they are true to the character of the nation by and large that is all the nation may expect; if they are better, then the nation has reason to be grateful. Englishmen take more interest in their navy than Americans in theirs. They give it the best that is in them and they expect the best from it in return. Every youngster who hopes to be an officer knows that the navy is no place for idling; every man who enlists knows that he is in for no junket on a pleasure yacht. The British navy, I judged, had a relatively large percentage of the brains and application of England.

"It is not so different from what it was for ten years preceding the war," said one of the officers. "We did all the work we could stand then; and whether cruising or lying in harbour, life is almost normal for us to-day."

The British fleet was always on a war footing. It must be. Lack of naval preparedness is more dangerous than lack of land preparedness. It is fatal. I know of officers who had had only a week's leave in a year in time of peace; their pay is less than our officers'. Patriotism kept them up to the mark.

And another thing: once a sailor, always a sailor, is an old saying; but it has a new application in modern navies. They become fascinated with the very drudgery of ship existence. They like their world, which is their house and their shop. It has the attraction of a world of priestcraft, with them alone understanding the ritual. Their drill at the guns becomes the preparation for the great sport of target practice, which beats any big-game shooting when guns compete with guns, with battle practice greater sport than target practice. Bringing a ship into harbour well, holding her to her place in the formation, roaming over the seas in a destroyer—all means eternal effort at the mastery of material, with the results positively demonstrated.

On one of the Dreadnoughts I saw a gun's crew drilling with a dummy six-inch; weight, one hundred pounds.

"Isn't that boy pretty young to handle that big shell?" an admiral asked a junior officer.

"He doesn't think so," the officer replied. "We haven't anyone who could handle it better. It would break his heart if we changed his position."

Not one of fifty German prisoners whom I had seen filing by over in France was as sturdy as this youngster. In the ranks of an infantry company of any army he would have been above the average of physique; but among the rest of the gun's crew he did appear slight. Need more be said about the physical standard of the crews of the fighting ships of the Grand Fleet?

You had an eye to more than guns and machinery and to more than the character of the officers. You wanted to get better acquainted with the personnel of the men behind the guns. They formed patches of blue on the decks, as one looked around the fleet, against the background of the dull, painted bulwarks of steel—the human element whose skill gave the ships life—deep-chested, vigorous men in their prime, who had the air of men grounded in their work by long experience. I noted when an order was given that it was obeyed quickly by one who knew what he had to do because he had done it thousands of times.

There are all kinds of bluejackets, as there are all kinds of other men. Before the war some took more than was good for them when on shore; some took nothing stronger than tea; some enjoyed the sailor's privilege of growling; some had to be kept up to the mark sharply; an occasional one might get rebellious against the merciless repetition of drills.

The war imparted eagerness to all, the officers said. Infractions of discipline ceased. Days pass without anyone of the crew of a Dreadnought having to be called up as a defaulter, I am told. And their health? At first thought, one would say that life in the steel caves of a Dreadnought would mean pasty complexions and flabby muscles. For a year the crews had been prisoners of that readiness which must not lose a minute in putting to sea if von Tirpitz should ever try the desperate gamble of battle.

After a turn in the trenches the soldiers can at least stretch their legs in billets. A certain number of a ship's company now and then get a tramp on shore; not real leave, but a personally conducted outing not far from the boats which will hurry them back to their stations on signal. However, all that one needs to keep well is fresh air and exercise. The blowers carry fresh air to every part of the ship; the breezes which sweep the deck from the North Sea are fresh enough in summer and a little too fresh in winter. There is exercise in the regular drills, supplemented by setting-up exercises. The food is good and no man drinks or eats what he ought not to, as he may on shore. So there is the fact and the reason for the fact: the health of the men, as well as their conduct, had never been so good.

"Perhaps we are not quite so clean as we were before the war," said an officer. "We wash decks only twice a week instead of every day. This means that quarters are not so moist, and the men have more freedom of movement. We want them to have as much freedom as possible."

Waiting, waiting, in such confinement for thirteen months; waiting for battle! Think of the strain of it! The British temperament is well fitted to undergo such a test, and particularly well fitted are these sturdy seamen of mature years. An enemy may imagine them wearing down their efficiency on the leash. They want a fight; naturally, they want nothing quite so much. But they have the seaman's philosophy. Old von Tirpitz may come out and he may not. It is for him to do the worrying. They sit tight. The men's ardour is not imposed upon. Care is taken that they should not be worked stale; for the marksman who puts a dozen shots through the bull's-eye had better not keep on firing, lest he begin rimming it and get into bad habits.

Where an army officer has a change when he leaves the trench for his billet, there is none for the naval officer, who, unlike the army officer, is Spartan-bred to confinement. The army pays its daily toll of casualties; it lies cramped in dug-outs, not knowing what minute extinction may come. The Grand Fleet has its usual comforts; it is safe from submarines in a quiet harbour. Many naval officers spoke of this contrast with deep feeling, as if fate were playing favourites, though I have never heard an army officer mention it.

The army can give each day fresh proof of its courage in face of the enemy. Courage! It takes on a new meaning with the Grand Fleet. The individual element of gallantry merges into gallantry of the whole. You have the very communism of courage. The thought is to keep a cool head and do your part as a cog in the vast machine. Courage is as much taken for granted as the breath of life. Thus, Cradock's men fought till they went down. It was according to the programme laid out for each turret and each gun in a turret.

Smith, of the army, leads a bomb-throwing party from traverse to traverse; Smith, of the navy, turns one lever at the right second. Army gunners are improving their practice day by day against the enemy; all the improving by navy gunners must be done before the battle. No sieges in trenches; no attacks and counter-attacks: a decision within a few hours—perhaps within an hour.

This partially explains the love of the navy for its work; its cheerful repetition of the drills which seem such a wearisome business to the civilian. The men know the reason of their drudgery. It is an all- convincing bull's-eye reason. Ping-ping! One heard the familiar sound of sub-calibre practice, which seems as out of proportion in a fifteen- inch gun as a mouse-squeak from an elephant whom you expect to trumpet. As the result appears in sub-calibre practice, so it is practically bound to appear in target practice; as it appears in target practice, so it is bound to appear in battle practice. It was on the flagship that I saw a device which Sir John referred to as the next best thing to having the Germans come out. He took as much delight in it as the gun-layers, who were firing at German Dreadnoughts of the first line, as large as your thumb, which were in front of a sort of hooded arrangement with the guns of a British Dreadnought inside— the rest I censor myself before the regular censor sees it.

When we heard a report like that of a small target rifle inside the arrangement a small red or a small white splash rose from the metallic platter of a sea. Thus the whole German navy has been pounded to pieces again and again. It is a great game. The gun- layers never tire of it and they think they know the reason as well as anybody why von Tirpitz keeps his Dreadnoughts at home.

But elsewhere I saw some real firing; for ships must have their regular target practice, war or no war. If those cruisers steaming across the range had been sending six or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas. Flashes from turrets indistinguishable at a distance from the neutral-toned bodies of the vessels and the shells struck, making great splashes just beyond the target, which was where they ought to go.

A familiar scene, but with a new meaning when the time is one of war. So far as my observation is worth anything, it was very good shooting, indeed. One broadside would have put a destroyer out of business as easily as a "Jack Johnson" does for a dug-out; and it would have made a cruiser of the same class as the one firing pretty groggy—this not from any experience of being on a light cruiser or any desire to be on one when it receives such a salute. But it seems to be waiting for the Germans any time that they want it.

Oh, that towed square of canvas! It is the symbol of the object of all building of guns, armour, and ships, all the nursing in dry dock, all the admiral's plans, all the parliamentary appropriations, all the striving on board ship in man's competition with man, crew with crew, gun with gun, and ship with ship. One had in mind some vast factory plant where every unit was efficiently organized; but that comparison would not do. None will. The Grand Fleet is the Grand Fleet. Ability gets its reward, as in the competition of civil life. There is no linear promotion indulgent to mediocrity and inferiority which are satisfied to keep step and harassing to those whom nature and application meant to lead. Armchairs and retirement for those whose inclinations run that way; the captain's bridge for those who are fit to command. Officers' records are the criterion when superiors come to making promotions. But does not outside influence play a part? you ask. If professional conscience is not enough to prevent this, another thing appears to be: that the British nation lives or dies with its navy. Besides, the British public has said to all and sundry outsiders: "Hands off the navy!" All honour to the British public, much criticized and often most displeased with its servants and itself, for keeping its eye on that canvas square of cloth! The language on board was the same as on our ships; the technical phraseology practically the same; we had inherited British traditions. But a man from Kansas and a man from Dorset live far apart. If they have a good deal in common they rarely meet to learn that they have. Our seamen do meet British seamen and share a fraternity which is more than that of the sea. Close one's eyes to the difference in uniform, discount the difference in accent, and one imagined that he might be with our North Atlantic fleet.

The same sort of shop talk and banter in the wardroom, which trims and polishes human edges; the same fellowship of a world apart. Securely ready the British fleet waits. Enough drill and not too much; occasional visits between ships; books and newspapers and a lighthearted relaxation of scattered conversation in the mess. One wardroom had a thirty-five-second record for getting past all the pitfalls in the popular "Silver Bullet" game, if I remember correctly.

XXXII Hunting The Submarine

Seaplanes cut practice circles over the fleet and then flew away on their errands, to be lost in the sky beyond the harbour entrance. With their floats, they were like ducks when they came to rest on the water, sturdy and a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army planes, soaring to higher altitudes.

The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird at rest, after its engines stopped, and, a dead thing, was lifted on board its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.

On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious, one-time popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it for its mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades where people had lounged during the voyage and bombs in place of deck-quoits and dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course, one was shown the different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators exhibit them with the pride of a collector showing his porcelains. Every time they seem to me to have grown larger and more diabolical. Where will aerial progress end? Will the next war be fought by forces that dive and fly like fishes and birds?

"I'd like to drop that hundred-pounder on to a Zeppelin!" said one of the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it. And Fritz, the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man's wings above the water.

Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet to another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic ripple and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes have located him they tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it is known that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight of and seen again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and the hunters, keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here and there on the look out for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes altogether. It is a tireless game of hide and seek, like gunnery at the front. Naval ingenuity has invented no end of methods, and no end of experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval secrets, these. Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to avoid.

Very thin is the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or a large charge of explosives to dent the skin beyond repair. It being in the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hunter know when he has struck a mortal blow? If oil and bubbles come up for some time in one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then, it does not require a nautical mind to realize that by casting about on the bottom with a grapnel you will learn if an object with the bulk and size of a submarine is there. The Admiralty accept no guesswork from the hunters about their exploits; they must bring the brush to prove the kill.

With Admiral Crawford I went to see the submarine defences of the harbour. It reminded one of the days of the drawbridge to a castle, when a friend rode freely in and an enemy might try to swim the moat and scale the walls if he pleased.

"Take care! There is a tide here!" the coxswain was warned, lest the barge should get into some of the troubles meant for Fritz. "A cunning fellow, Fritz. We must give him no openings."

The openings appear long enough to permit British craft, whether trawlers, or flotillas, or cruiser squadrons, to go and come. Lying as close together as fish in a basket, I saw at one place a number of torpedo boats home from a week at sea.

"Here to-day and gone to-morrow," said an officer. "What a time they had last winter! You know how cold the North Sea is—no, you cannot, unless you have been out in a torpedo boat dancing the tango in the teeth of that bitter wind, with the spray whipping up to the tops of the smoke-stacks. In the dead of night they would come into this pitch- dark harbour. How they found their way is past me. It's a trick of those young fellows, who command."

Stationary they seemed now as the quay itself; but let a signal speak, an alarm come, and they would soon be as alive as leaping porpoises. The sport is to those who scout and hunt. But do not forget those who watch, those who keep the blockade, from the Channel to Iceland, and the trawlers that plod over plotted sea- squares with the regularity of mowing-machines cutting a harvest, on their way back and forth sweeping up mines. They were fishermen before the war and are fishermen still. Night and day they keep at it. They come into the harbours stiff with cold, thaw out, and return to hardships which would make many a man prefer the trenches. Tributes to their patient courage, which came from the heart, were heard on board the battleships.

"It is when we think of them," said an officer, "that we are most eager to have the German fleet come out, so that we can do our part."

XXXIII The Fleet Puts To Sea

There is another test besides that of gun-drills and target practice which reflects the efficiency of individual ships, and the larger the number of ships the more important it is. For the business of a fleet is to go to sea. At anchor, it is in garrison rather than on campaign, an assembly of floating forts. Navies one has seen which seemed excellent when in harbour, but when they started to get under way the result was hardly reassuring. Some erring sister fouled her anchor chain; another had engine-room trouble; another lagged for some other reason; there was fidgeting on the bridges. Then one asked, What if a summons to battle had come? Our own officers were authority enough that the British had no superiors in any of the tests. But strange reports dodged in and out of the alleys of pessimism in the company of German insistence that the Tiger and other ships which one saw afloat had been sunk. Was the fleet really held prisoner by fear of submarines? If it could go and come freely when it chose, the harbour was the place for it while it waited. If not, then, indeed, the submarine had revolutionized naval warfare. Admiral Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he could get into action against the Germans.

"Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!" I kept thinking while I was with the fleet. "Oh, to see all these monsters on the move!"

A vain wish it seemed, but it came true. A message from the Admiralty arrived while we were on the flagship. Admiral Jellicoe called his Flag Lieutenant and spoke a word to him, which was passed in a twinkling from flagship to squadron and division and ship. He made it as simple as ordering his barge alongside, this sending of the Grand Fleet to sea.

From the bridge of a destroyer beyond the harbour entrance we saw it go. I shall not attempt to describe the spectacle, which convinced me that language is the vehicle for making small things seem great and great things seem small. If you wish words invite splendid and magnificent and overwhelming and all the reliable old friends to come forth in glad apparel from the dictionary. Personally, I was inarticulate at sight of that sea-march of dull-toned, unadorned power.

First came the outriders of majesty, the destroyers; then the graceful light cruisers. How many destroyers has the British navy? I am only certain that it has not as many as it seems to have, which would mean thousands. Trying to count them is like trying to count the bees in the garden. You cannot keep your eye on the individual bees. You are bound to count some twice, so busy are their manœuvres.

"Don't you worry, great ladies!" you imagined the destroyers were saying to the battleships. "We will clear the road. We will keep watch against snipers and assassins."

"And if any knocks are coming, we will take them for you, great ladies!" said the cruisers. "If one of us went down, the loss would not be great. Keep your big guns safe to beat other battleships into scrap."

For you may be sure that Fritz was on the watch in the open. He always is, like the highwayman hiding behind a hedge and envying people who have comfortable beds. Probably from a distance he had a peep through his periscope at the Grand Fleet before the approach of the policeman destroyers made him duck beneath the water; and probably he tried to count the number of ships and identify their classes in order to take the information home to Kiel. Besides, he always has his fingers crossed. He hopes that some day he may get a shot at something more warlike than a merchant steamer or an auxiliary; only that prospect becomes poorer as life for him grows harder. Except a miracle happened, the steaming fleet, with its cordons of destroyers, is as safe from him as from any other kind of fish.

The harbour which is the fleet's home is landlocked by low hills. There is an eclipse of the sun by the smoke from the ships getting under way; streaming, soaring columns of smoke on the move rise above the skyline from the funnels of the battleships before they appear around a bend. Indefinite masses as yet they are, under their night- black plumes. Each ship seems too immense to respond to any will except its own. But there is something automatic in the regularity with which, one after another, they take the bend, as if a stop watch had been held on twenty thousand tons of steel for a second's variation. As they approach they become more distinct and, showing less smoke, there seems less effort. Their motive-power seems inherent, perpetual.

There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make a destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its existence. It is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor truck. They plough through it.

Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite safe. An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track. Mast in line with mast, they held the course with a majestic steadiness. Now the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the same spot, as if it were marked by the grooves of tyres in a road, the others make it. Any variation of speed between them would have been instantly noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the distance between bows and sterns did not change. A line of one length would do for each interval so far as one could discern.

It was difficult to think that they were not attached to some taut, moving cable under water. How could such apparently unwieldy monsters, in such a slippery element as the sea, be made to obey their masters with such fine precision?

The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine- room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in manoeuvring in all weathers, which is kept up with tireless practice.

Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus you have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be no cessation in the striving.

"Look at that!" exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. "They ought to try another painting on her and see if they can't do better."

Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun's rays, strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought's side, made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she seemed as colossal to the eye as to the thought.

"But look, now!" said another officer. She was out of the patch and seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea- haze.

"You can't have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea, I suppose!" muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even for a moment.

The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags at a review at Spithead, the battleships seemed out of their element; giants trying for a fairy's part. Display is not for them. It ill becomes them, as does a pink ribbon on a bulldog.

Irresistibly ploughing their way they presented a picture of resolute utility—guns and turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was visible on board. The crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets, give the range, lay the sights on the enemy's ships, and the battle was on.

"There is the old Dreadnought," said an officer. The old Dreadnought —all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity—and almost forgotten now, while the Queen Elizabeth and the Warspite, and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns, would be in the public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in harmonious effect. But here was an outsider, whom one noted instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel. She had twelve twelve-inch guns, with turret piled on turret in an exotic fashion—one of the two Turkish battleships building in England at the time of the war and taken over by the British.

One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts—even a squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of its might. Sixteen—twenty—twenty-four—it was the unending numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes behind the wind-screen of the destroyer's bridge, only to look back and see more Dreadnoughts going by. A spectator had not realized that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.

The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea, and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever; still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King Edward VII. class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet to come. One's eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.

The destroyer commander looked at his watch.

"Time!" he said. "I'll put you on shore."

He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the engine-room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at twenty knots, towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.

Imagination sped across seas where a man had cruised into harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to visualize the whole globe—all of it except the Baltic seas and a thumb-mark in the centre of Europe. Hong-Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay—yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them, where countless millions dwell, were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.

Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system—and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at those sturdy men behind armour.

When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations of von Tirpitz, glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania, with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea- power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and children would use that power if they had it.

XXXIV British Problems

Throughout the summer of 1915 the world was asking, What about the new British army? Why was it not attacking at the opportune moment when Germany was throwing her weight against Russia? A facile answer is easy; indeed, facile answers are always easy. Unhappily, they are rarely correct. None that was given in this instance was, to my mind. They sought to put a finger on one definite cause; again, on an individual or a set of individuals.

The reasons were manifold; as old as Waterloo, as fresh as the last speech in Parliament. They were inherent in the Anglo-Saxon race. Whoever raised a voice and said, This, or that, or you, are responsible! should first have looked into his own mind and into the history of his race and then into a mirror. Least of all should any American have been puzzled by the delay.

"Oh, we should have done better than that—we are Americans!" I hear my countrymen say. Perhaps we should. I hope so; I believe so. The British public thought that they were going to do better; military men were surprised that they did as well.

Along with laws and language we have inherited our military ideas from England. In many qualities we are different—a distinct type; but in nothing are we more like the British than in our attitude toward the soldier and toward war. The character of any army reflects the character of its people. An army is the fist; but the muscle, the strength, of the physical organism behind the blow in the long run belong to the people. What they have prepared for in peace they receive in war, which decides whether they have been living in the paradise of a fool or of a wise man.

As a boy I was brought up to believe, as an inheritance of the American Revolution, that one American could whip two Englishmen and five or six of any other nationality, which made the feathers of the eagle perched on the national escutcheon look glossy. It was a satisfying sort of faith. Americans had never tried five or six of any first-class fighting race; but that was not a thought which occurred to me. As we had won victories over the English and the English had whipped the French at Waterloo, the conclusion seemed obvious. English boys, I understand, also had been brought up to believe that one Englishman could whip five or six men of any other nationality, but, I take it for granted, only two Americans. This clothed the British lion with majesty, while the lower ratio of superiority over Americans returned the compliment in kind from the sons of the lion to the sons of the eagle.

After I began to read history for myself and to think as I read, I found that when British and Americans had met, the generals on either side were solicitous about having superior forces, and in case of odds of two to one they made a "strategic retreat." When either side was beaten, the other always explained that he was overcome by superior numbers, though perhaps the adversary had not more than ten or fifteen per cent, advantage. Then I learned that the British had not whipped five or six times their number on the continent of Europe. The British Expeditionary Force made as fine an effort to do so at Mons as was ever attempted in history, but they did not succeed.

It was a regular army that fought at Mons. The only two first-class nations which depend upon regulars to do their fighting are the British and the American. This is the vital point of similarity which is the practical manifestation of our military ideas. We have been the earth's spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other powerful military nations. Before any other Power could reach the United States it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must overwhelm ours and bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you say. That is the facile word, so ready to the lips that we do not realize the wonder of it any more than of the sun rising and setting.

When we want soldiers our plan still is to advertise for them. The ways of our ancestors remain ours. We think that the volunteer must necessarily make the best soldier because he offers his services; while the conscript—rather a term of opprobrium to us—must be lukewarm. It hardly occurs to us that some forms of persuasion may amount to conscription, or that the volunteer, won by oratorical appeal to his emotions or by social pressure, may suffer a reaction after enlistment which will make him lukewarm also, particularly as he sees others, also young and fit, hanging back. Nor does it occur to us that there may be virtue in that fervour of national patriotism aroused by the command that all must serve, which, on the continent in this war, has meant universal exaltation to sacrifice. The life of Jones means as much to him as the life of Smith does to him; and when the whole nation is called to arms there ought to be no favourites in life- giving.

For the last hundred years, if we except the American Civil War, ours have been comparatively little wars. The British regular army has policed an empire and sent punitive expeditions against rebellious tribes with paucity of numbers, in a work which the British so well understand. Our little regular army took care of the Red Indians as our frontier advanced from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. To put it bluntly, we have hired someone to do our fighting for us.

Without ever seriously studying the business of soldiering, the average Anglo-Saxon thought of himself as a potential soldier, taking his sense of martial superiority largely from the work of the long- service, severely drilled regular. Also, we used our fists rather than daggers or duelling swords in personal encounters and, man to man, unequipped with fire-arms or blades, the quality which is responsible for our sturdy pioneering individualism gave us confidence in our physical prowess.

Alas! modern wars are not fought with fists. A knock-kneed man who knows how to use a machine-gun and has one to use—which is also quite important—could mow down all the leading heavy-weights of the United States and England, with the latest champion leading the charge.

Now, this regular who won our little wars was not representative of the people as a whole. He was the man "down on his luck," who went to the recruiting depot. Soldiering became his profession. He was in a class, like priests and vagabonds. When you passed him in the street you thought of him as a strange being, but one of the necessities of national existence. It did not interest you to be a soldier; but as there must be soldiers, you were glad that men who would be soldiers were forthcoming.

When trouble broke, how you needed him! When the wires brought news of his gallantry you accepted the deeds of this man whom you had paid as the reflection of national courage, which thrilled you with a sense of national superiority. To him, it was in the course of duty; what he had been paid to do. He did not care about being called a hero; but it pleased the public to make him one—this professional who fights for a shilling a day in England and $17.50 a month in the United States.

Though when the campaign went well the public was ready to take the credit as a personal tribute, when the campaign went badly they sought a scapegoat, and the general who might have been a hero was sent to the wilderness perhaps because those busy men in Congress or Parliament thought that the army could do without that little appropriation which was needed for some other purpose. The army had failed to deliver the goods which it was paid to produce. The army was to blame, when, of course, under free institutions the public was to blame, as the public is master of the army and not the army of the public.

A first impression of the British army is always that of the regiment. Pride of regiment sometimes appears almost more deep-seated than army pride to the outsider. It has been so long a part of British martial inheritance that it is bred in the blood. In the old days of small armies and in the later days of small wars, while Europe was making every man a soldier by conscription, regiment vying with regiment won the battles of empire. The memory of the part each regiment played is the inspiration of its present; its existence is inseparable from the traditions of its long list of battle honours.

The British public loves to read of its Guards' regiment and to watch them in their brilliant uniforms at review. When a cadet comes out of Sandhurst he names the regiment which he wishes to join, instead of being ordered to a certain regiment, as at West Point. It rests with the regimental commander whether or not he is accepted. Frequently the young man of wealth or family serves in the Guards or another crack regiment for awhile and resigns, usually to enjoy the semi-leisurely life which is the fortune of his inheritance.

Then there are the county line regiments, such as the Yorkshires, the Kents, and the Durhams. In this war each county wanted to read about its own regiments at the same time as about the Guards, just as Kansans at home would want to read about the Kansas regiment and Georgians about the Georgia regiment. The most trying feature of the censorship to the British public was its refusal to allow the exploitation of regiments. The staff was adamant on this point; for the staff was thinking for the whole and of the interests of the whole. In the French and the German armies, as in our regular army, regiments are known by numbers.

The young man who lives in the big house on the hill, the son of the man of wealth and power in the community, as a rule does not go to West Point. None of the youth of our self-called aristocracy which came up the golden road in a generation past those in modest circumstances who have generations of another sort back of them, think of going into the First Cavalry or the First Infantry for a few years as a part of the career of their class. A few rich men's sons enter our army, but only enough to prove the rule by the exception. They do not regard the army as "the thing." It does not occur to them that they ought to do something for their country. Rather, their country ought to do something for them.

But sink the plummet a little deeper and these are not our aristocracy nor our ruling class, which is too numerous and too sound of thought and principle for them to feel at home in that company. Any boy, however humble his origin, may go to West Point if he can pass the competitive examination. Europe, particularly Germany, would not approve of this; but we think it the best way. The average graduate of the Point, whether the son of a doctor, a lawyer, or a farmer, sticks to the army as his profession. We maintain the Academy for the strict business purpose of teaching young men how to train our army in time of peace and to lead and direct it in time of action.

Our future officers enter West Point when they are two years younger than is the average at Sandhurst; the course is four years compared with two at Sandhurst. I should venture to say that West Point is the harder grind; that the graduate of the Point has a more specifically academic military training than the graduate of Sandhurst. This is not saying that he may be any better in the performance of the simple duties of a company officer. It is not a new criticism that we train everybody at West Point to be a general, when many of the students may never rise above the command of a battalion. However, it is a significant fact that at the close of the Civil War every army commander was a West Point man and so were most of the corps commanders.

The doors are open in the British army for a man to rise from the ranks; not as wide as in our army, but open. The Chief of Staff of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir William Robertson, was in the ranks for ten years. No man not a West Pointer had a position equivalent in importance to his at the close of the Civil War. His rise would have been possible in no other European army.

But West Point sets the stamp on the American army, and Sandhurst and Woolwich, the engineering and artillery school, on the British army. At the end of the four years at West Point the men who survive the hard course may be tried by courtmartial not for conduct unbecoming an officer, but an officer and a gentleman. They are supposed, whatever their origin, to have absorbed certain qualities, if they were not inborn, which are not easily described but which we all recognize in any man. If they are absent it is not the fault of West Point; and if a man cannot acquire them there, then nature never meant them for him. From the time he entered the school the government has paid his way; and he is cared for until he dies, if he keeps step and avoids courtmartials.

His position in life is secure. His pay, counting everything, is better than that of the average graduate of a university or a first-class professional school who practises a profession. Yet only three boys, I remember, wanted to go to West Point from our congressional district in my youth. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that we are not a military people. From West Point they go out to the little army which is to fight our wars; to the posts and the Philippines, and become a world in themselves; an isolated caste in spite of themselves. I am not at all certain that either the British or the American officer works as hard as the German in time of peace. Neither has the practical incentive nor the determined driver behind him.

For it takes a soldier Secretary of War to drive a soldier; for example, Lord Kitchener. Those British officers who applied themselves in peace to the mastery of their profession and were not content with the day's routine requirements, had to play chess without chessmen; practise manœuvres on a board rather than with brigades, divisions, corps, and armies. They became the rallying points in the concourse of untrained recruits.

German and French officers had the incentive and the chessmen. The Great War could not take them by surprise. They took the road with a machine whose parts had been long assembled. They had been trained for big war; their ambition and intelligence were under the whip of a definite anticipation.

A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become an instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their situation. This the Japanese also possess. It is the right material ready to hand for the builder. Not that it is the kind of material one admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine. One had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and the American Press at the outset of the war to realize how vague was the truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or American—but not to the trained British Staff.

So that little British Expeditionary Force, in ratio of number one to twenty or thirty of the French army, crossed the Channel to help save Belgium. Gallantry it had worthy of the brightest chapter in the immortal history of its regiments from Quebec to Kandahar, from Agincourt, Blenheim and Waterloo to South Africa, Guards and Hussars, Highlanders and Lowlanders, kilts and breeks, Connaught Rangers and Royal Fusiliers, Duke of Wellington's and Prince of Wales' Own, come again to Flanders. The best blood of England was leading Tommy Atkins. Whatever British aristocracy is or is not, it never forgets its duty to the England of its fathers. It is never ingrate to its fortune. The time had come to go out and die for England, if need be, and these officers went as their ancestors had gone before them, as they would go to lectures at Oxford, to the cricket field and the polo field, in outward phlegm, but with a mighty passion in their hearts.

The Germans affected to despise this little army. It had not been trained in the mass tactics which hurl columns of flesh forward to gain tactical points that have been mauled by artillery fire. You do not use mass tactics against Boers, nor against Afridis, nor Filipinos. It is difficult to combine the two kinds of efficiency. Those who were on the march to the relief of the Peking Legations recall how the Germans were as ill at ease in that kind of work as the Americans and British were at home. It made us misjudge the Germans and the Germans misjudge us when they thought of us as trying to make war on the continent of Europe. A small, mobile, regular army, formed to go overseas and march long distances, was to fight in a war where millions were engaged and a day's march would cover an immense stretch of territory in international calculations of gain and loss.

For its own purposes, the British Expeditionary Force was well-nigh a perfect instrument. As quantity of ammunition was an important factor in transport in the kind of campaign which it was prepared for, its guns were the most accurate on a given point and its system of fire adapted to that end; but the French system of fire, with plentiful ammunition from near bases over fine roads, was better adapted for a continental campaign. To the last button that little army was prepared. Man for man and regiment for regiment, I should say it was the best force that ever fired a shot in Europe; this without regard to national character. As England must make every regular soldier count, and as she depended upon the efficiency of the few rather than on numbers, she had trained her men in musketry. No continental army could afford to allow its soldiers to expend the amount of ammunition on the target range that the British had expended. Only by practice can you learn how to shoot. This gives the soldier confidence. He stays in his trench and keeps on shooting because he knows that he can hit those advancing figures and that this is his best protection. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that the Germans ought to have got the British Expeditionary Force; and the Germans were very surprised that they did not get it. With their surprise developed a respect for British arms, reported by all visitors to Germany.

Mr. Thomas Atkins, none other, is the hero of that retreat from Mons. The first statue raised in London after the war ought to be of him. If there had been five hundred thousand of him in Belgium at the end of the second week in August, Brussels would now be under the Belgian flag. Like many other good things in this world, including the French army, there were not enough of him. Many a company on that retreat simply got tired of retreating, though orders were to fall back. It dug a trench and lay down and kept on firing—accurately, in the regular, businesslike way, reinforced by the "stick it" British character—until killed or engulfed. This held back the flood long enough for the remainder of the army to retire.

Not all the generalship emanated from generals. I like best that story of the cross-roads where, with Germans pressing hard on all sides, two columns in retreat fell in together, uncertain which way to go. With confusion developing for want of instructions, a lone, exhausted staff officer who happened along took charge, and standing at the junction in the midst of shell-fire told every doubting unit what to do, with a one-two-three alacrity of decision. His work finished, he and his red cap disappeared, and I never could find anyone who knew who he was.

After the retreat and after the victory of the Marne, what was England's position? The average Englishman had thought that England's part in the alliance was to send a small army to France and to take care of the German fleet. England's fleet was her first consideration; that must be served. France's demand for rifles and supplies must be attended to before the British demand. Serbia needed supplies; Russia needed supplies; a rebellion threatened in South Africa; the Turks threatened the invasion of Egypt. England had to spread her energy out over a vast empire with an army that had barely escaped annihilation. Every soldier who fought must be supplied overseas. German officers put a man on a railroad train and he detrained near the front. Every British soldier had to go on board a train and then a ship and then disembark from the ship and go on board another train. Every article of ordnance, engineering, medical supply, food supply, must be handled four times, while in Germany they need be handled but twice. Any railway traffic manager will understand what this means. Both the British supply system and the medical corps were marvels.

Germany was stronger than the British public thought. Germany and Austria could put at the front in the first six months of the war practically double the number which the Allies could maintain. Russia had multitudes to draw from in reserve, but the need was multitudes at the front. There she was only as strong as the number she could feed and equip. In the first year of the war England suffered 380,000 casualties on land, more than three times the number of men that she had at Mons. This wastage must be met before she could begin to increase her forces. The length of line on the western front that she was holding was not the criterion of her effort. The French who shared with the British that terrible Ypres salient realized this.

Apart from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the same as our National Guard and vary in quality in the same way. Native Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical shell-fire of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the place of the British regulars who were withdrawn for France. Every rifle that England could bring to the assistance of the French in their heroic stand was a rifle to the good.

Meanwhile, she was making her new army. For the first time since Cromwell's day, all classes in England were going to war. Making an army out of the raw is like building a factory to be manned by expert labour which you have to train. Let us even suppose that the factory is ready and that the proprietor must mobilize his managers, overseers, foremen, and labour from far and near—a force individually competent, but which had never before worked together. It would require some time to organize team-play, wouldn't it? Particularly it would if you were short of managers, overseers, and foremen. To express my meaning from another angle, in talking once with an English pottery manufacturer he said:

"We do not train our labour in the pottery district. We breed it from generation to generation."

In Germany they have not only been training soldiers, but breeding them from generation to generation. You may think that system is wrong. It may be contrary to our ideals. But in fighting against that system for your ideals when war is violence and killing, you must have weapons as effective as the enemy's. You express only a part of Germany's preparedness by saying that the men who left the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, became trained soldiers at the command of the staff as soon as they were in uniform and had rifles. These men had the instinct of military co-ordination bred in them, and so had their officers, while England had to take men from the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, and equip them and teach them the rudiments of soldiering before she could consider making them into an army.

It was one thing for the spirit of British manhood to rise to the emergency. Another and even more important requisite went with it. If my country ever faces such a crisis I hope that we also may have the courage of wisdom which leaves an expert's work to an expert. England had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the confidence of the nation through the long months of preparation, when there was little to show except repetition of drills here and there on gloomy winter days. It required a man with a big conception and patience and authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's question to his generals.

Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded.

Where the leaders? Where the drillmasters for the new army? Old officers came out of retirement, where they had become used to an easy life as a rule, to twelve hours a day of hard application. "Dug- outs" they were called. Veteran non-commissioned officers had to drill new ones. It was demonstrated that a good infantry soldier can be made in six months; perhaps in three. But it takes seven months to build a rifle-plant; many more months to make guns—and the navy must never be stinted. Probably the English are slow; slow and thoroughgoing. They are good at the finish, but not quick at the start. They are used to winning the last battle, which they say is the one that counts. The complacency of empire with a century's power was a handicap, no doubt. We are inclined to lean forward on our oars, they to lean back—which does not mean that they cannot lean forward in an emergency or that they lack reserve strength. It may lead us to misjudge them.

Public impatience was inevitable. It could not be kept silent; that is the English of it—the American, too. It demands to know what is being done. It was not silent in the Civil War. From the time McClellan started forming his new army until the Peninsular campaign was six months, if I remember rightly. Von Moltke, who built the German staff system, said that the Civil War was a strife between two armed mobs; though I think if he had brought his Prussians to Virginia a year later, in '63, which would have ended the Civil War there and then, he would have had an interesting time before he returned to Berlin.

The British new army was not to face another new army, but the most thoroughly organized military machine that the world has ever known. Not only this, but the Germans, with a good start and their system established, were not standing still and waiting for the British to catch up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting themselves to the new features of the war. They had been the world's arms-makers. With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic organization could make the most of their resources in men and material.

More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots, though no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in France or wherever they were needed overseas. If no magic could put rifles in their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on the march, the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching from day to day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare was, shows at least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we should have done better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal treatment by the government and the course set by Secretary Root means anything, our staff ought to be better equipped for such a task than the English were; this, too, only war can decide.

Whatsoever of pessimism appeared in the British Press was telegraphed to America. Pessimism was not permitted in the German Press. Imagine Germany holding control of the cable and allowing press dispatches from Germany to pass over it with the freedom that England allowed. Imagine Germany having waited as long as England before making cotton contraband. The British Press demanded information from the government which the German Press would never have dared to ask. I have known an American correspondent, fed out of hand in Germany and thankful for anything that the fearful German war-machine might vouchsafe, turning a belligerent when he was in London for privileges which he would never have thought of demanding in Berlin.

If an English ship were reported sunk, he believed it must be, despite the government's denial. Did he go to the Germans and demand that he might publish the rumours of what had happened to the Moltke in the Gulf of Riga, or how many submarines Germany had really lost? Indeed, he was unconsciously paying a compliment to British free institutions. He expected more in England; it seemed a right to him, as it would at home. Englishmen talked frankly to him about mistakes; he heard all the gossip; and sometimes he concluded that England was in a bad way. In Germany such talk was not allowed. Every German said that the government was absolutely truthful; every German believed all of its reports. But ask this critical American how he would like to live under German rule, and then you found how anti- German he was at heart. Nothing succeeds like success, and Germany was winning and telling no one if she had any setbacks.

If there were a strike, the British Press made the most of it, for it was big news. Pessimism is the Englishman's natural way of arousing himself to fresh energy. It is also against habit to be demonstrative in his effort; so it is not easy to understand how much he is doing. Then, pessimism brought recruits; it made the Englishman say, "I've got to put my back into it!" Muddling there was and mistakes, such as that of the method of attack at Gallipoli; but in the midst of all this dispiriting pessimism, no Englishman thought of anything but of putting his back into it more and more. Lord Kitchener had said that it was to be a long war and evidently it must be. Of course, England's misfortune was in having the war catch her in the transition from an old order of things to social reforms.

But if the war shows anything it is that basically English character has not changed. She still has unconquerable, dogged persistence, and her defects for this kind of war are not among the least admirable of her traits to those who desire to live their own lives in their own way, as the English-speaking people have done for five hundred years, without having a verboten sign on every street corner.

It is still the law that when a company of infantry marches through London it must be escorted by a policeman. This means a good deal: that civil power is superior to military power. It is a symbol of what Englishmen have fought for with spades and pitchforks, and what we have fought Englishmen for. My own idea is that England is fighting for it in this struggle; and starting unready against a foe which was ready, as the free peoples always have done, she was fighting for time and experience before she could strike her sturdiest blows.