by Owen Wister
The Spanish War revealed that our Navy could hit eight times out of a hundred, and was in other respects unprepared and utterly inadequate to cope with a first-class power. In consequence of this, and the criticisms of our Navy Department, which Admiral Sims as a young man had written, Roosevelt took the steps he did in his first term. Three ticklish times in that Spanish War England stood our friend against Germany. When it broke out, German agents approached Mr. Balfour, proposing that England join in a European combination in Spain’s favor. Mr. Balfour’s refusal is common knowledge, except to the monomaniac with his complex. Next came the action of Lord Cromer, and finally that moment in Manila Bay when England took her stand by our side and Germany saw she would have to fight us both, if she fought at all.
If you saw any German or French papers at the time of our troubles with Spain, you saw undisguised hostility. If you have talked with any American who was in Paris during that April of 1898, your impression will be more vivid still. There was an outburst of European hate for us.
Germany, France, and Austria all looked expectantly to England—and England disappointed their expectations. The British Press was as much for us as the French and German press were hostile; the London Spectator said: “We are not, and we do not pretend to be, an agreeable people, but when there is trouble in the family, we know where our hearts are.”
In those same days (somewhere about the third week in April, 1898), at the British Embassy in Washington, occurred a scene of significance and interest, which has probably been told less often than that interview between Mr. Balfour and the Kaiser’s emissary in London. The British Ambassador was standing at his window, looking out at the German Embassy, across the street. With him was a member of his diplomatic household. The two watched what was happening. One by one, the representatives of various European nations were entering the door of the German Embassy.
“Do you see them?” said the Ambassador’s companion; “they’ll all be in there soon. There. That’s the last of them.” “I didn’t notice the French Ambassador.” “Yes, he’s gone in, too.” “I’m surprised at that. I’m sorry for that. I didn’t think he would be one of them,” said the British ambassador. “Now, I’ll tell you what. They’ll all be coming over here in a little while. I want you to wait and be present.” Shortly this prediction was verified. Over from the German Embassy came the whole company on a visit to the British Ambassador, that he might add his signature to a document to which they had affixed theirs. He read it quietly. We may easily imagine its purport, since we know of the meditated European coalition against us at she time of our war with Spain. Then the British Ambassador remarked: “I have no orders from my Government to sign any such document as that. And if I did have, I should resign my post rather than sign it.” A pause: The company fell silent.
“Then what will your Excellency do?” inquired one visitor. “If you will all do me the honor of coming back tomorrow, I shall have another document ready which all of us can sign.” That is what happened to the European coalition at this end.
Some few years later, that British Ambassador came to die; and to the British Embassy repaired Theodore Roosevelt. “Would it be possible for us to arrange,” he said, “a funeral more honored and marked than the United States has ever accorded to any one not a citizen? I should like it.
And,” he suddenly added, shaking his fist at the German Embassy over the way, “I’d like to grind all their noses in the dirt.”
Confronted with the awkward fact that Britain was almost unanimously with us, from Mr. Balfour down through the British press to the British people, those nations whose ambassadors had paid so unsuccessful a call at the British Embassy had to give it up. Their coalition never came off. Such a thing couldn’t come off without England, and England said No.
Next, Lord Cromer, at Port Said, stretched out the arm of international law, and laid it upon the Spanish fleet. Belligerents may legally take coal enough at neutral ports to reach their nearest “home port.” That Spanish fleet was on its way from Spain to Manila through the Suez Canal.
It could have reached there, had Lord Cromer allowed it coal enough to make the nearest home port ahead of it—Manila. But there was a home port behind it, still nearer, namely, Barcelona. He let it take coal enough to get back to Barcelona. Thus, England again stepped in.
The third time was in Manila Bay itself, after Dewey’s victory, and while he was in occupation of the place. Once more the Kaiser tried it, not discouraged by his failure with Mr. Balfour and the British Government.
He desired the Philippines for himself; we had not yet acquired them; we were policing them, superintending the harbor, administering whatever had fallen to us from Spain’s defeat. The Kaiser sent, under Admiral Diedrich, a squadron stronger than Dewey’s.
Dewey indicated where the German was to anchor. “I am here by the order of his Majesty the German Emperor,” said Diedrich, and chose his own place to anchor. He made it quite plain in other ways that he was taking no orders from America. Dewey, so report has it, at last told him that “if he wanted a fight he could have it at the drop of the hat.” Then it was that the German called on the English Admiral, Chichester, who was likewise at hand, anchored in Manila Bay. “What would you do,” inquired Diedrich, “in the event of trouble between Admiral Dewey and myself?”
“That is a secret known only to Admiral Dewey and me,” said the Englishman. Plainer talk could hardly be. Diedrich, though a German, understood it. He returned to his flagship. What he saw next morning was the British cruiser in a new place, interposed between Dewey and himself.
Once more, he understood; and he and his squadron sailed off; and it was soon after this incident that the disappointed Kaiser wrote that, if only his fleet had been larger, he would have taken us by the scruff of the neck.
Tell these things to the next man you hear talking about George III or the Alabama. You may meet him in front of a bulletin board, or in a drawing-room. He is amongst us everywhere, in the street and in the house. He may be a paid propagandist or merely a silly ignorant puppet.
But whatever he is, he will not find much to say in response, unless it be vain, sterile chatter. True come-back will fail him as it failed that man by the bulletin board who asked, “What is England doing, anyhow?” and his neighbor answered, “Her fleet’s keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard.”
Chapter XIV: England the Slacker!
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
Let us have these disregarded facts also. From the shelves of history I have pulled down and displayed the facts which our school textbooks have suppressed; I have told the events wherein England has stood our timely friend throughout a century; events which our implanted prejudice leads us to ignore, or to forget; events which show that any one who says England is our hereditary enemy might just about as well say twice two is five.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
They go on asking it. The propagandists, the prompted puppets, the paid parrots of the press, go on saying these eight senseless words because they are easy to say, since the man who can answer them is generally not there: to every man who is a responsible master of facts we have—well, how many?—irresponsible shouters in this country. What is your experience? How often is it your luck—as it was mine in front of the bulletin board—to see a fraud or a fool promptly and satisfactorily put in his place? Make up your mind that wherever you hear any person whatsoever, male or female, clean or unclean, dressed in jeans, or dressed in silks and laces, inquire what England “did in the war, anyhow?
“such person either shirks knowledge, or else is a fraud or a fool. Tell them what the man said in the street about the Kaiser and our front yard, but don’t stop there. Tell them that in May, 1918, England was sending men of fifty and boys of eighteen and a half to the front; that in August, 1918, every third male available between those years was fighting, that eight and a half million men for army and navy were raised by the British Empire, of which Irel
and’s share was two and three tenths per cent, Wales three and seven tenths, Scotland’s eight and three tenths, and England’s more than sixty per cent; and that this, taken proportionately to our greater population would have amounted to about thirteen million Americans, When the war started, the British Empire maintained three soldiers out of every 2600 of the population; her entire army, regular establishment, reserve and territorial forces, amounted to seven hundred thousand men. Our casualties were three hundred and twenty-two thousand, one hundred and eighty-two. The casualties in the British Army were three million, forty-nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-one—a million more than we sent—and of these six hundred and fifty-eight thousand, seven hundred and four, were killed. Of her Navy, thirty-three thousand three hundred and sixty-one were killed, six thousand four hundred and five wounded and missing; of her merchant marine fourteen thousand six hundred and sixty-one were killed; a total of forty-eight thousand killed—or ten per cent of all in active service.
Some of those of the merchant marine who escaped drowning through torpedoes and mines went back to sea after being torpedoed five, six, and seven times.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
Through four frightful years she fought with splendor, she suffered with splendor, she held on with splendor. The second battle of Ypres is but one drop in the sea of her epic courage; yet it would fill full a canto of a poem. So spent was Britain’s single line, so worn and thin, that after all the men available were brought, gaps remained. No more ammunition was coming to these men, the last rounds had been served. Wet through, heavy with mud, they were shelled for three days to prevent sleep. Many came at last to sleep standing; and being jogged awake when officers of the line passed down the trenches, would salute and instantly be asleep again. On the fourth day, with the Kaiser come to watch them crumble, three lines of Huns, wave after wave of Germany’s picked troops, fell and broke upon this single line of British—and it held. The Kaiser, had he known of the exhausted ammunition and the mounded dead, could have walked unarmed to the Channel. But he never knew.
Surgeons being scantier than men at Ypres, one with a compound fracture of the thigh had himself propped up, and thus all day worked on the wounded at the front. He knew it meant death for him. The day over, he let them carry him to the rear, and there, from blood-poisoning, he died.
Thus through four frightful years, the British met their duty and their death.
There is the great story of the little penny steamers of the Thames—a story lost amid the gigantic whole. Who will tell it right? Who will make this drop of perfect valor shine in prose or verse for future eyes to see? Imagine a Hoboken ferry boat, because her country needed her, starting for San Francisco around Cape Horn, and getting there. Some ten or eleven penny steamers under their own steam started from the Thames down the Channel, across the Bay of Biscay, past Gibraltar, and through the submarined Mediterranean for the River Tigris. Boats of shallow draught were urgently needed on the River Tigris. Four or five reached their destination. Where are the rest?
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
During 1917-1918 Britain’s armies held the enemy in three continents and on six fronts, and cooperated with her Allies on two more fronts. Her dead, those six hundred and fifty-eight thousand dead, lay by the Tigris, the Zambesi, the AEgean, and across the world to Flanders’ fields. Between March 21st and April 17th, 1918, the Huns in their drive used 127
divisions, and of these 102 were concentrated against the British. That was in Flanders. Britain, at the same time she was fighting in Flanders, had also at various times shared in the fighting in Russia, Kiaochau, New Guinea, Samoa, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, the Sudan, Cameroons, Togoland, East Africa, South West Africa, Saloniki, Aden, Persia, and the northwest frontier of India. Britain cleared twelve hundred thousand square miles of the enemy in German colonies. While fighting in Mesopotamia, her soldiers were reconstructing at the same time. They reclaimed and cultivated more than 1100 square miles of land there, which produced in consequence enough food to save two million tons of shipping annually for the Allies. In Palestine and Mesopotamia alone, British troops in 1917 took 23,590 prisoners. In 1918, in Palestine from September 18th to October 7th, they took 79,000 prisoners.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
With “French’s contemptible little army” she saved France at the start—
but I’ll skip that—except to mention that one division lost 10,000 out of 12,000 men, and 350 out of 400 officers. At Zeebrugge and Ostend—do not forget the Vindictive—she dealt with submarines in April and May, 1918—but I’ll skip that; I cannot set down all that she did, either at the start, or nearing the finish, or at any particular moment during those four years and three months that she was helping to hold Germany off from the throat of the world; it would make a very thick book. But I am giving you enough, I think, wherewith to answer the ignorant, and the frauds, and the fools. Tell them that from 1916 to 1918 Great Britain increased her tillage area by four million acres: wheat 39 per cent, barley 11, oats 35, potatoes 50—in spite of the shortage of labor. She used wounded soldiers, college boys and girls, boy scouts, refugees, and she produced the biggest grain crop in fifty years. She started fourteen hundred thousand new war gardens; most of those who worked them had worked already a long day in a munition factory. These devoted workers increased the potato crop in 1917 by three million tons—and thus released British provision ships to carry our soldiers across. In that Boston speech which one of my correspondents referred to, our Secretary of the Navy did not mention this. Mention it yourself. And tell them about the boy scouts and the women. Fifteen thousand of the boy scouts joined the colors, and over fifty thousand of the younger members served in various ways at home.
Of England’s women seven million were engaged in work on munitions and other necessaries and apparatus of war. The terrible test of that second battle of Ypres, to which I have made brief allusion above, wrought an industrial revolution in the manufacture of shells. The energy of production rose at a rate which may be indicated by two or three comparisons: In 1917 as many heavy howitzer shells were turned out in a single day as in the whole first year of the war, as many medium shells in five days, and as many field-gun shells in eight days. Or in other words, 45 times as many field-gun shells, 73 times as many medium, and 365 times as many heavy howitzer shells, were turned out in 1917 as in the first year of the war. These shells were manufactured in buildings totaling fifteen miles in length, forty feet in breadth, with more than ten thousand machine tools driven by seventeen miles of shafting with an energy of twenty-five thousand horse-power and a weekly output of over ten thousand tons’ weight of projectiles—all this largely worked by the women of England. While the fleet had increased its personnel from 136,000 to about 400,000, and 2,000,000 men by July, 1915, had voluntarily enlisted in the army before England gave up her birthright and accepted compulsory service, the women of England left their ordinary lives to fabricate the necessaries of war. They worked at home while their husbands, brothers, and sons fought and died on six battle fronts abroad—six hundred and fifty-eight thousand died, remember; do you remember the number of Americans killed in action?—less than thirty-six thousand;—those English women worked on, seven millions of them at least, on milk carts, motor-busses, elevators, steam engines, and in making ammunition. Never before had any woman worked on more than 150 of the 500 different processes that go to the making of munitions. They now handled T. N. T., and fulminate of mercury, more deadly still; helped build guns, gun carriages, and three-and-a-half ton army cannons; worked overhead traveling cranes for moving the boilers of battleships: turned lathes, made every part of an aeroplane. And who were these seven million women? The eldest daughter of a duke and the daughter of a general won distinction in advanced munition work. The only daughter of an old Army family broke down after a year’s work in a base hospital in France, was ordered six months’ rest at home, but after two months entered
a munition factory as an ordinary employee and after nine months’ work had lost but five minutes working time. The mother of seven enlisted sons went into munitions not to be behind them in serving England, and one of them wrote her she was probably killing more Germans than any of the family. The stewardess of a torpedoed passenger ship was among the few survivors.
Reaching land, she got a job at a capstan lathe. Those were the seven million women of England—daughters of dukes, torpedoed stewardesses, and everything between.
Seven hundred thousand of these were engaged on munition work proper.
They did from 60 to 70 per cent of all the machine work on shells, fuses, and trench warfare supplies, and 1450 of them were trained mechanics to the Royal Flying Corps. They were employed upon practically every operation in factory, in foundry, in laboratory, and chemical works, of which they were physically capable; in making of gauges, forging billets, making fuses, cartridges, bullets—”look what they can do,” said a foreman, “ladies from homes where they sat about and were waited upon.”
They also made optical glass; drilled and tapped in the shipyards; renewed electric wires and fittings, wound armatures; lacquered guards for lamps and radiator fronts; repaired junction and section boxes, fire control instruments, automatic searchlights. “We can hardly believe our eyes,” said another foreman, “when we see the heavy stuff brought to and from the shops in motor lorries driven by girls. Before the war it was all carted by horses and men. The girls do the job all right, though, and the only thing they ever complain about is that their toes get cold.”