Towards The Goal - Mrs. Humphry Ward
Now let us look at these destroyers in another scene. It is the last day
of February, and I find myself on a military steamer, bound for a French
Port, and on my way to the British Headquarters in France. With me is
the same dear daughter who accompanied me last year as "dame secretaire"
on my first errand. The boat is crowded with soldiers, and before we
reach the French shore we have listened to almost every song--old and
new--in Tommy's repertory. There is even "Tipperary," a snatch, a ghost
of "Tipperary," intermingled with many others, rising and falling, no
one knows why, started now here, now there, and dying away again after a
line or two. It is a draft going out to France for the first time, north
countrymen, by their accent; and life-belts and submarines seem to amuse
them hugely, to judge by the running fire of chaff that goes on. But,
after a while, I cease to listen. I am thinking first of what awaits us
on the further shore, on which the lights are coming out, and of those
interesting passes inviting us to G.H.Q. as "Government Guests," which
lie safe in our handbags. And then, my thoughts slip back to a
conversation of the day before, with Dr. Addison, the new Minister of
Munitions.
A man in the prime of life, with whitening hair--prematurely white, for
the face and figure are quite young still--and stamped, so far as
expression and aspect are concerned, by those social and humane
interests which first carried him into Parliament. I have been long
concerned with Evening Play Centres for school-children in Hoxton, one
of the most congested quarters of our East End. And seven years ago I
began to hear of the young and public-spirited doctor and man of
science, who had made himself a name and place in Hoxton, who had won
the confidence of the people crowded in its unlovely streets, had worked
for the poor, and the sick, and the children, and had now beaten the
Tory member, and was Hoxton's Liberal representative in the new
Parliament elected in January 1910, to deal with the Lords, after the
throwing out of Lloyd George's famous Budget. Once or twice since, I had
come across him in matters concerned with education--cripple schools and
the like--when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education,
immediately before the war. And now here was the doctor, the Hunterian
Professor, the social worker, the friend of schools and school-children,
transformed into the fighting Minister of a great fighting Department,
itself the creation of the war, only second--if second--in its
importance for the war, to the Admiralty and the War Office.
I was myself, for a fortnight of last year, the guest of the Ministry of
Munitions, while Mr. Lloyd George was still its head, in some of the
most important Munition areas; and I was then able to feel the current
of hot energy, started by the first Minister, running--not of course
without local obstacles and animosities--through an electrified England.
That was in February 1916. Then, in August, came the astonishing speech
of Mr. Montagu, on the development of the Munitions supply in one short
year, as illustrated by the happenings of the Somme battlefield. And
now, as successor to Mr. Montagu and Mr. Lloyd George, Dr. Addison sat
in the Minister's chair, continuing the story.
What a story it is! Starting from the manufacture of guns, ammunition
and explosives, and after pushing that to incredible figures, the
necessities of its great task has led the Ministry to one forward step
after another. Seeing that the supply of munitions depends on the supply
of raw material, it is now regulating the whole mineral supply of this
country, and much of that of the Allies; it is about to work qualities
of iron ore that have never been worked before; it is deciding, over the
length and breadth of the country, how much aluminium should be allowed
to one firm, how much copper to another; it is producing steel for our
Allies as well as for ourselves; it has taken over with time the whole
Motor Transport of the war, and is now adding to it the Railway
Transport of munitions here and abroad, and is dictating meanwhile to
every engineering firm in the country which of its orders should come
first, and which last. It is managing a whole gigantic industry with
employes running into millions, half a million of them women, and
managing it under wholly new conditions of humanity and forethought; it
is housing and feeding and caring for innumerable thousands;
transforming from day to day, as by a kind of by-work, the industrial
mind and training of multitudes, and laying the foundations of a new,
and surely happier England, after the War. And, finally, it is
adjusting, with, on the whole, great success, the rival claims of the
factories and the trenches, sending more and more men from the workshops
to the fighting line, in proportion as the unskilled labour of the
country--men and women, but especially women--is drawn, more and more
widely, into the service of a dwindling amount of skilled labour, more
and more "diluted."
* * * * *
But the light is failing and the shore is nearing. Life-belts are taken
off, the destroyers have disappeared. We are on the quay, kindly
welcomed by an officer from G.H.Q. who passes our bags rapidly through
the Custom House, and carries us off to a neighbouring hotel for the
night, it being too late for the long drive to G.H.Q. We are in France
again!--and the great presence of the army is all about us. The quay
crowded with soldiers, the port alive with ships, the grey-blue uniforms
mingling with the khaki--after a year I see it again, and one's pulses
quicken. The vast "effort of England" which last year had already
reached so great a height, and has now, as all accounts testify, been so
incredibly developed, is here once more in visible action, before me.
Next day, the motor arrives early, and with our courteous officer who
has charge of us, in front, we are off, first, for one of the great
camps I saw last year, and then for G.H.Q. itself. On the way, as we
speed over the rolling down country beyond the town, my eyes are keen to
catch some of the new signs of the time. Here is the first--a railway
line in process of doubling--and large numbers of men, some of them
German prisoners, working at it; typical both of the immense railway
development all over the military zone, since last year, and of the
extensive use now being made of prisoners' labour, in regions well
behind the firing line. They lift their heads, as we pass, looking with
curiosity at the two ladies in the military car. Their flat round caps
give them an odd similarity. It is as if one saw scores of the same
face, differentiated here and there by a beard. A docile hard-working
crew, by all accounts, who give no trouble, and are managed largely by
their N.C.O.'s. Are there some among them who saw the massacre at
Dinant, the terrible things in Lorraine? Their placid, expressionless
faces tell no tale.
But the miles have flown, and here already are the long lines of the
camp. How pleasant to be greeted by some of the same officers! We go
into the Headquarters Office, for a talk. "Grown? I should think we
have!" says Colonel----. And, rapidly, he and one of his colleagues run
through some of the additions and expansions. The Training Camp has been
practically doubled, or, rather, another training camp has been added to
the one that existed last year, and both are equipped with an increased
number of special schools--an Artillery Training School, an Engineer
Training School, a Lewis Gun School, a Gas School, with an actual gas
chamber for the training of men in the use of their gas helmets,--and
others, of which it is not possible to speak. "We have put through half
a million of reinforcements since you were here last." And close upon
two million rations were issued last month! The veterinary accommodation
has been much enlarged, and two Convalescent Horse Depots have been
added--(it is good indeed to see with what kindness and thought the Army
treats its horses!). But the most novel addition to the camp has been a
Fat Factory for the production of fat,--from which comes the glycerine
used in explosives--out of all the food refuse of the camp. The fat
produced by the system, here and in England, has already provided
glycerine _far millions of eighteen-pounder shells_; the problem of camp
refuse, always a desperate one, has been solved; and as a commercial
venture the factory makes 250 per cent. profit.
Undeterred by what we hear of the smells! we go off to see it, and the
enthusiastic manager explains the unsavoury processes by which the bones
and refuse of all the vast camp are boiled down into a white fat, that
looks _almost_ eatable, but is meant, as a matter of fact, to feed not
men but shells. Nor is that the only contribution to the fighting line
which the factory makes. All the cotton waste of the hospitals, with
their twenty thousand beds--the old dressings and bandages--come here,
and after sterilisation and disinfection go to England for gun-cotton.
Was there ever a grimmer cycle than this, by which that which feeds, and
that which heals, becomes in the end that which kills! But let me try to
forget that side of it, and remember, rather, as we leave the smells
behind, that the calcined bones become artificial manure, and go back
again into the tortured fields of France, while other bye-products of
the factory help the peasants near to feed their pigs. And anything,
however small, that helps the peasants of France in this war, comforts
one's heart.
We climb up to the high ground of the camp for a general view before we
go on to G.H.Q. and I see it, as I saw it last year, spread under the
March sunshine, among the sand and the pines--a wonderful sight.
"Everything has grown, you see, except the staff!" says the Colonel,
smiling, as we shake hands. "But we rub along!"
Then we are in the motor again, and at last the new G.H.Q.--how
different from that I saw last year!--rises before us. We make our way
into the town, and presently the car stops for a minute before a
building, and while our officer goes within, we retreat into a side
street to wait. But my thoughts are busy. For that building, of which
the side-front is still visible, is the brain of the British Army in
France, and on the men who work there depend the fortunes of that
distant line where our brothers and sons are meeting face to face the
horrors and foulnesses of war. How many women whose hearts hang on the
war, whose all is there, in daily and nightly jeopardy, read the words
"British Headquarters" with an involuntary lift of soul, an invocation
without words! Yet scarcely half a dozen Englishwomen in this war will
ever see the actual spot. And here it is, under my eyes, the cold March
sun shining fitfully on it, the sentry at the door, the khaki figures
passing in and out. I picture to myself the rooms within, and the news
arriving of General Gough's advance on the Ancre, of that German retreat
as to which all Europe is speculating.
But we move on--to a quiet country house in a town garden--the
Headquarters Mess of the Intelligence Department. Here I find, among our
kind hosts, men already known to me from my visit of the year before,
men whose primary business it is to watch the enemy, who know where
every German regiment and German Commander are, who through the aerial
photography of our airmen are now acquainted with every step of the
German retreat, and have already the photographs of his second line. All
the information gathered from prisoners, and from innumerable other
sources, comes here; and the department has its eye besides on
everything that happens within the zone of our Armies in France. For a
woman to be received here is an exception--perhaps I may say an
honour--of which I am rather tremulously aware. Can I make it worth
while? But a little conversation with these earnest and able men shows
plainly that they have considered the matter like any other incident in
the day's work. _England's Effort_ has been useful; therefore I am to be
allowed again to see and write for myself; and therefore, what
information can be given me as to the growth of our military power in
France since last year will be given. It is not, of course, a question
of war correspondence, which is not within a woman's powers. But it is a
question of as much "seeing" as can be arranged for, combined with as
much first-hand information as time and the censor allow. I begin to
see my way.
The conversation at luncheon--the simplest of meals--and during a stroll
afterwards, is thrilling indeed to us newcomers. "The coming summer's
campaign _must_ decide the issue of the war--though it may not see the
end of it." "The issue of the war"--and the fate of Europe! "An
inconclusive peace would be a victory for Germany." There is no doubt
here as to the final issue; but there is a resolute refusal to fix
dates, or prophesy details. "Man for man we are now the better army. Our
strength is increasing month by month, while that of Germany is failing.
Men and officers, who a year ago were still insufficiently trained, are
now seasoned troops with nothing to learn from the Germans; and the
troops recruited under the Military Service Act, now beginning to come
out, are of surprisingly good quality." On such lines the talk runs, and
it is over all too soon.
Then we are in the motor again, bound for an aerodrome forty or fifty
miles away. We are late, and the last twenty-seven kilometres fly by in
thirty-two minutes! It is a rolling country, and there are steep
descents and sharp climbs, through the thickly-scattered and
characteristic villages and small old towns of the Nord, villages
crowded all of them with our men. Presently, with a start, we find
ourselves on a road which saw us last spring--a year ago, to the day.
The same blue distances, the same glimpses of old towns in the hollows,
the same touches of snow on the heights. At last, in the cold sunset
light, we draw up at our destination. The wide aerodrome stretches
before us--great hangars coloured so as to escape the notice of a Boche
overhead--with machines of all sizes, rising and landing--coming out of
the hangars, or returning to them for the night. Two of the officers in
charge meet us, and I walk round with them, looking at the various
types--some for fighting, some for observation; and understanding--what
I can! But the spirit of the men--that one can understand. "We are
accumulating, concentrating now, for the summer offensive. Of course the
Germans have been working hard too. They have lots of new and improved
machines. But when the test comes we are confident that we shall down
them again, as we did on the Somme. For us, the all-important thing is
the fighting behind the enemy lines. Our object is to prevent the German
machines from rising at all, to keep them down, while our airmen are
reconnoitering along the fighting line. Awfully dangerous work! Lots
don't come back. But what then? They will have done their job!"
The words were spoken so carelessly that for a few seconds I did not
realise their meaning. But there was that in the expression of the man
who spoke them which showed there was no lack of realisation there. How
often I have recalled them, with a sore heart, in these recent weeks of
heavy losses in the air-service--losses due, I have no doubt, to the
special claims upon it of the German retreat.
The conversation dropped a little, till one of my companions, with a
smile, pointed overhead. Three splendid biplanes were sailing above us,
at a great height, bound south-wards. "Back from the line!" said the
officer beside me, and we watched them till they dipped and disappeared
in the sunset clouds. Then tea and pleasant talk. The young men insist
that D. shall make tea. This visit of two ladies is a unique event. For
the moment, as she makes tea in their sitting-room, which is now full of
men, there is an illusion of home.
Then we are off, for another fifty miles. Darkness comes on, the roads
are unfamiliar. At last an avenue and bright lights. We have reached the
Visitors' Chateau, under the wing of G.H.Q.
No. 2
_March 31st, 1917_.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--My first letter you will perhaps remember took us
to the Visitors' Chateau of G.H.Q. and left us alighting there, to be
greeted by the same courteous host, Captain----, who presided last year
over another Guest House far away. But we were not to sleep at the
Chateau, which was already full of guests. Arrangements had been made
for us at a cottage in the village near, belonging to the village
schoolmistress; the motor took us there immediately, and after changing
our travel-stained dresses, we went back to the Chateau for dinner. Many
guests--all of them of course of the male sex, and much talk! Some of
the guests--members of Parliament, and foreign correspondents--had been
over the Somme battlefield that day, and gave alarmist accounts of the
effects of the thaw upon the roads and the ground generally. Banished
for a time by the frost, the mud had returned; and mud, on the front,
becomes a kind of malignant force which affects the spirits of
the soldiers.
The schoolmistress and her little maid sat up for us, and shepherded us
kindly to bed. Never was there a more strangely built little house! The
ceilings came down on our heads, the stairs were perpendicular. But
there was a stove in each room, and the beds though hard, and the floor
though bare, were scrupulously clean. In the early morning I woke up and
looked out. There had been a white frost, and the sun was just rising in
a clear sky. Its yellow light was shining on the whitewashed wall of the
next cottage, on which a large pear-tree was trained. All round were
frost-whitened plots of garden or meadow--_preaux_--with tall poplars in
the hedges cutting the morning sky. Suddenly, I heard a continuous
murmur in the room beneath me. It was the schoolmistress and her maid at
prayer. And presently the house door opened and shut. It was
Mademoiselle who had gone to early Mass. For the school was an _ecole
libre_, and the little lady who taught it was a devout Catholic. The
rich yet cold light, the frosty quiet of the village, the thin French
trees against the sky, the ritual murmur in the room below--it was like
a scene from a novel by Rene Bazin, and breathed the old, the
traditional France.
We were to start early and motor far, but there was time before we
started for a little talk with Mademoiselle. She was full of praise for
our English soldiers, some of whom were billeted in the village. "They
are very kind to our people, they often help the women, and they never
complain." (Has the British Tommy in these parts really forgotten how to
grouse?) "I had some of your men billeted here. I could only give them a
room without beds, just the bare boards. 'You will find it hard,' I
said. 'We will get a little straw,' said the sergeant. 'That will be all
right.' Our men would have grumbled." (But I think this was
Mademoiselle's _politesse_!) "And the children are devoted to your
soldiers. I have a dear little girl in the school, nine years old.
Sometimes from the window she sees a man in the street, a soldier who
lodges with her mother. Then I cannot hold her. She is like a wild thing
to be gone. 'Voila mon camarade!--voila mon camarade!' Out she goes, and
is soon walking gravely beside him, hand in hand, looking up at him."
"How do they understand each other?" "I don't know. But they have a
language. Your sergeants often know more French than your officers,
because they have to do the billeting and the talking to our people."
The morning was still bright when the motor arrived, but the frost had
been keen, and the air on the uplands was biting. We speed first across
a famous battlefield, where French and English bones lie mingled below
the quiet grass, and then turn south-east. Nobody on the roads. The
lines of poplar-trees fly past, the magpies flutter from the woods, and
one might almost forget the war. Suddenly, a railway line, a steep
descent and we are full in its midst again. On our left an encampment of
Nissen huts--so called from their inventor, a Canadian officer--those
new and ingenious devices for housing troops, or labour battalions, or
coloured workers, at an astonishing saving both of time and material. In
shape like the old-fashioned beehive, each hut can be put up by four or
six men in a few hours. Everything is, of course, standardised, and the
wood which lines their corrugated iron is put together in the simplest
and quickest ways, ways easily suggested, no doubt, to the Canadian
mind, familiar with "shacks" and lumber camps. We shall come across them
everywhere along the front. But on this first occasion my attention is
soon distracted from them, for as we turn a corner beyond the hut
settlement, which I am told is that of a machine-gun detachment, there
is an exclamation from D----.
_Tanks_! The officer in front points smiling to a field just ahead.
There is one of them--the monster!--taking its morning exercise;
practising up and down the high and almost perpendicular banks by which
another huge field is divided. The motor slackens, and we watch the
creature slowly attack a high bank, land complacently on the top, and
then--an officer walking beside it to direct its movements--balance a
moment on the edge of another bank equally high, a short distance away.
There it is!--down!--not flopping or falling, but all in the way of
business, gliding unperturbed. London is full of tanks, of course--on
the films. But somehow to be watching a real one, under the French sky,
not twenty miles from the line, is a different thing. We fall into an
eager discussion with Captain F. in front, as to the part played by them
in the Somme battle, and as to what the Germans may be preparing in
reply to them. And while we talk, my eye is caught by something on the
sky-line, just above the tank. It is a man and a plough--a plough that
might have come out of the Odyssey--the oldest, simplest type. So are
the ages interwoven; and one may safely guess that the plough--that very
type!--will outlast many generations of tanks. But, for the moment, the
tanks are in the limelight, and it is luck that we should have come upon
them so soon, for one may motor many miles about the front without
meeting with any signs of them.
Next, a fine main road and an old town, seething with all the stir of
war. We come upon a crowded market-place, and two huge convoys passing
each other in the narrow street beyond--one, an ammunition column, into
which our motor humbly fits itself as best it can, by order of the
officer in charge of the column, and the other, a long string of
magnificent lorries belonging to the Flying Corps, which defiles past us
on the left. The inhabitants of the town, old men, women and children,
stand to watch the hubbub, with amused friendly faces. On we go, for a
time, in the middle of the convoy. The great motor lorries filled with
ammunition hem us in till the town is through, and a long hill is
climbed. At the top of it we are allowed to draw out, and motor slowly
past long lines of troops on the march; first, R.E.'s with their store
waggons, large and small; then a cyclist detachment; a machine-gun
detachment; field kitchens, a white goat lying lazily on the top of one
of them; mules, heavily laden; and Lewis guns in little carts. Then
infantry marching briskly in the keen air, while along other roads,
visible to east and west, we see other columns converging. A division,
apparently, on the march. The physique of the men, their alert and
cheerful looks, strike me particularly. This pitiless war seems to have
revealed to England herself the quality of her race. Though some credit
must be given to the physical instructors of the Army!--who in the last
twelve months especially have done a wonderful work.
At last we turn out of the main road, and the endless columns pass away
into the distance. Again, a railway line in process of doubling; beyond,
a village, which seems to be mainly occupied by an Army Medical
detachment; then two large Casualty Clearing Stations, and a Divisional
Dressing Station. Not many wounded here at present; the section of the
line from which we are only some ten miles distant has been
comparatively quiet of late. But what preparations everywhere! What
signs of the coming storm! Hardly a minute passes as we speed along
without its significant sight; horse-lines, Army Service depots bursting
with stores,--a great dump of sandbags--another of ammunition.
And as I look out at the piles of shells, I think of the most recent
figures furnished me by the Ministry of Munitions. Last year, when the
Somme offensive began, and when I was writing _England's Effort_, the
_weekly_ output of eighteen-pounder shells was 17-1/2 times what it was
during the first year of the war. _It is now_ 28 _times as much_.
Field howitzer ammunition has _almost doubled_ since last July. That of
medium guns and howitzers _has more than doubled_. That of the heaviest
guns of all (over six-inch) _is more than four times_ as great. By the
growth of ammunition we may guess what has been the increase in guns,
especially in those heavy guns we are now pushing forward after the
retreating Germans, as fast as roads and railway lines can be made to
carry them. The German Government, through one of its subordinate
spokesmen, has lately admitted their inferiority in guns; their retreat,
indeed, on the Somme before our pending attack, together with the state
of their old lines, now we are in and over them, show plainly enough
what they had to fear from the British guns and the abundance of British
ammunition.