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This eBook is a reproduction produced by the National Library of New Zealand from source material that we believe has no known copyright. Additional physical and digital editions are available from the National Library of New Zealand.
EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908327-72-0
PDF ISBN: 978-0-908330-68-3
The original publication details are as follows:
Title: A traveller in news
Author: Thomas, William Beach, Sir
Published: Chapman and Hall, London, 1925
A TRAVELLER IN NEWS
A TRAVELLER IN NEWS
BY SIR WILLIAM BEACH THOMAS, K.B.E.
Al THOR OF
FROM A HERTFORDSHIRE COTTAGE,” “ISTHMIAN ATHLETICS”
WITH THE BRITISH ON THE SOMME ” ETC.
WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATION
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE NORTHUMBERLAND PRESS LIMITED, NE WCASTLB-UPON-TTNB
TO A GREAT SUB-EDITOR
MY DAUGHTER
PREFACE
THOUGH many chapters contain no allusion to him, the chief object of these reminiscences was a desire to give some sketch of the character of Lord Northcliffe, who has been much misrepresented. He was caricatured by both admirers and enemies during his life ; and after his death his memory suffered an eclipse that has darkened his name unduly. The most natural way to do what I wanted was to describe my own relations with him —they were long and friendly—and let them tell their own story of his character. From this it was an easy transference to write of the people T met and the places I visited under his leadership— Teucro duce et auspice Teucro. Some further personal experiences were demanded by the course of the narrative.
Some portions of the text, chiefly in the penultimate chapters, appeared in The Times and Daily Mail, whose proprietors I thank for leave to reproduce the fragments.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
OXFORD AND JOURNALISM
PAGE
The Universities and journalism—The value of athletics— Shrewsbury and Oxford—Athletes and scholars—Christ Church and its dons—Dean Liddell—Lewis Carroll—Dean Paget—Gilkes—Professor Stewart—Grose of Queen’s —York Powell—The Oxford tradition—“Scouts”—C. N. Jackson and the O.U.A.C.—Early Olympic Games—An incident at Stockholm—American athletes in Oxford 1
CHAPTER II
ABOUT LORD NORTHCLIFFE
A start in journalism—“By the Way”—With Garvin on the Outlook —An interview with Lord Northcliffe—Bricks and bouquets—Scottish newspapers—Lord Northcliffe at home— The first lesson in golf—Food, women and money—Acuteness of senses—A visit to Newfoundland—Exploiting “The Times Correspondent” —Sutton Place—Braid and the links—A bungalow on the downs—Selling a home 19
CHAPTER III
A COUNTRY JOURNALIST
The purchase of The Times— Need of secrecy—Meeting at Hampstead—Women’s petticoats—The Daily Mail Farm— French gardening—A week-end at Chequers—Sir Horace Plunkett and A.E.—Stories of Hardy and Meredith —Lord Coventry’s anecdote—A frescoed sanctum—Dublin and Belfast—A militant farmer—Tales of the revolution—A golfer's ditch —Sir Nevil Macready 41
CHAPTER IV
FIRST MONTHS OF THE WAR
Unofficial war correspondents—No War Office policy—Paris in the early days—Hysteric women—Pol Roget’s gift—Civil authority v. military—French officers—German brigandage —The Aisne and the Marne—An old French doctor—Mr. Hedges Butler’s gift—The last train to Lille—Uhlans at Hazebrouck—Imprisonment—A friendly policeman— Bombarded Arras —General Petain’s “Bon”—A French H.Q. 55
viii
CONTENTS
ix
CHAPTER V
BEHIND THE WAR
PAGE
Still no policy—At Calais with the Belgians—An interrupted lunch—“First courage”—Where women excelled —The F.A.N.Y.S. —Belgian hospitals—Want of equipment —An S.O.S.—The arrival of the cow—Great ladies—The Duchess of Sutherland—Lady Angela Forbes —A duel with the War Office —English women and French—Bonne and Beaucoup— A misinterpreted compliment—“Base details”—A misused car—A good Intelligence Officer—Haphazard selection — Enjoying the war—Courage or cowardice?— Three stories 80
CHAPTER VI
OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE
An official policy at last—The five correspondents—Censorship— General Haig v. the journalists—Deceiving the deceivers —Gullible Germans—The need for publicity—The Somme— Casualties—A General’s apologia—Neglect of essentials—The British handicap—“The Factory of Frightfulness”—Arras —The excellence of our artillery—The cavalry—German prisoners—Messines —Official candour—A suicidal Colonel— Some of our Generals—Sir Charles Harington—General Monash —General Plumer—Who make the best soldiers? — Schoolmasters, actors, journalists 103
CHAPTER VII
SOME NOTABLE VISITORS
Barrie and Freiberg—“Orders of Merit”—An autograph collector—Visitors to the front—Arrests —Tomlinson— Royalty—“Proper Geese”—Ben Tillett and an Etonian— H. G. Wells—G.B.B.—Official artists —Muirhead Bone— Frank Reynolds—Sir William Orpen—The visitors’ cháteau 129
CHAPTER VIII
AN AMERICAN INTERLUDE
America in 1918—Shipmates—Canadian ex-prisoners—General Swinton—New York journalism—The “sob-sister”—An earlier visit—Peary v. Cook—Thompson Seton and boy scouts —Henry Ford at Detroit—His views on war—Mass production—The “Flivver” and the “Liberty engine” “ Intellectual Elephantiasis" —America too late—Roosevelt —His love of natural history—A visit to the Kaiser—A great memory 145
CONTENTS
X
CHAPTER IX
AMERICAN IDEALISTS
PAGE
President Wilson, his formality - Mr. Houston’s joke—A prejudice against women workers - Colonel House - “Charlie” Schwab, a second Democritus - “Billy” Sunday, the Revivalist—Satan and the Kaiser—Athletic preaching—American depression—A national “get-to-gether” - The Liberty Loan - Attitude of GermanAmericans—The Poles—Wilbur Wright and aeroplanes—War prophecies—The return journey—American sailors—And soldiers—Back to the trenches 168
CHAPTER X
COLOGNE AND THE RUHR
Last weeks of the war—Entry into Bruges—Obsequious Germans —Reception in Cologne—The fall of the mark—Causes of defeat—“Fraternization”-1922: a great change—The misery of the Ruhr —Inter-Allied hostility—The farce of the Inter-Allied High Commission —Cologne under General Godley—The science of smuggling—The Krupp murders— A Communist preacher—Super-Napoleons—Disarmament figures—The sham revolution —The Flying Army—How it was organized and financed—The Regie—Comedy and tragedy—Social life in Cologne—Visitors—An impossible situation—The revolution doomed to failure 194
CHAPTER XI
ROUND THE WORLD
Lord Northcliffe’s one proviso—Canada’s front door—Irish emigrants—Coincidences—A poetic steward —Interpretations of “dry” A Nova-Scotian statesman - Toronto and Ottawa - Immigrant trains - The cheapness of land— Edmonton, the doorway to the Arctic—Gold seekers—The Esquimaux —New animals —The Banff sanctuary —In the Rockies after grizzly—A prospector’s trail—The Okanagan Valley—Dear orchards—A Japanese Consul—Vancouver— American inroads—Vancouver Island—An ideal holiday resort 224
CHAPTER XII
FROM CANADA TO AUSTRALIA
Across the Pacific—Honolulu—The captain’s strange story — Emigration enthusiasts —Fiji—Sydney and land settlement - Brisbane and the cotton boom—After emu and kangaroo— Bird sanctuaries—The loneliness of Central Australia— Sheep-shearing—A tour in the South West—A rich and an empty land—A karri forest —Sir James Mitchell—A London migrant—News of Lord Northcliffe’s death —A race to New Zealand —The proviso fulfilled—Six thousand miles for six trout 256
CONTENTS
xi
CHAPTER XIII
THE LAST LAP
PAGE
Australian horse-racing—The return journey—Lord Inchcape’s letters—“Freedom of the Bridge”—Lloyd George at Marseilles—Lord Northcliffe and his successors —Wills and deeds—A change in journalism—A social journalist—A tribute to Lord Northcliffe—His humour—Newspapers and finance—A slump in causes 289
Index 301
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
EARLY RUNNING DAYS, SHREWSBURY SCHOOL
7
queen’s CLUB, A CLOSE FINISH
14
LORD NORTHCLIFFE, LORD BALFOUR, AND ORVILLE WRIGHT
24
LOG HOUSE, GRAND FALLS, NEWFOUNDLAND. LORD AND LADY NORTHCLIFFE IN FOREGROUND .
35
A FOREST STABLE ....
146
A BLACK BEAR ....
101
THE HOHENZOLLERN BRIDGE, COLOGNE. THE FOUR WAR
CORRESPONDENTS ...
199
A LANCASHIRE SETTLER, W.A. (WITH AUTHOR)
224
A NOVA SCOTIAN RIVER
226
A DECK BATH
230
WILD SHEEP AT BANFF
242
MOTOR CAMP ON THE WINDERMERE ROAD .
246
IN THE ROCKIES
248
WHERE THE APPLES COME FROM
250
A KARRI GIANT
279
OKOUP SETTLERS, W.A. (WITH AUTHOR) .
284
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A TRAVELLER IN NEWS
ERR A TA
Pages 54 and 133. Read N EVIL for Neville
Page 92. Read PRICHARD for Pritchard
Page 107. Read AYLMER for Blair
Page 125. Read CURRIE for Curry
Page 191. Read ANNIE S. for Flora Annie
the work of editing in an office, while it prompts to a life of stir and travel.
At one point during the war, of the five authorized war correspondents three of us, Mr. H. W. Nevinson, Sir Perry Robinson and myself, were from Christ Church, Oxford, and two of us from Shrewsbury School. Mr. Nevinson is the doyen of war correspondents, and as a lover of lost causes, or at any rate of temporarily losing causes, not to be
1
A
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACINC PAfIR
EARLY RUNNING DAYS, SHREWSBURY SCHOOL
7
A KARRI GIANT . . . —; — —; — —r
~Z173
GROUP SETTLERS, W.A. (WITH AUTHOR) .
284
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A TRAVELLER IN NEWS
CHAPTER I
OXFORD AND JOURNALISM
The Universities and journalism—The value of athletics—Shrewsbury and Oxford —Athletes and scholars —Christ Church and its dons—Dean Liddell—Lewis Carroll—Dean Paget—Gilkes— Professor Stewart—Grose of Queen’s—York Powell—The Oxford tradition—“ Scouts ” —O. N. Jackson and the O.U.A.C.—Early Olympic Games—An incident at Stockholm—American athletes in Oxford.
THE Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are not good schools of journalism, it is said. One of the most modern of newspaper proprietors compounded a list of editors, in which only one Oxford or Cambridge name appeared. Mr. Geoffrey Dawson, a Fellow of All Souls, one of Lord Milner’s famous “ Kindergarten ” in South Africa, saved the Universities’ bacon by editing The Times under successive proprietors. But a list of those journalists who used to be called “ Specials ” would give a very different tally. It is probable that school and university life breeds a native distaste for the work of editing in an office, while it prompts to a life of stir and travel.
At one point during the war, of the five authorized war correspondents three of us, Mr. H. W. Nevinson, Sir Perry Robinson and myself, were from Christ Church, Oxford, and two of us from Shrewsbury School. Mr. Nevinson is the doyen of war correspondents, and as a lover of lost causes, or at any rate of temporarily losing causes, not to be
1
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2
surpassed as a type of Oxford. Imagine this fastidious scholar, philosopher, and lover of life, as well as of lost causes, editing the Daily Mail or Daily Express!
There was certainly nothing journalistic about Oxford in my day. And yet after an interval Oxford pitchforked me into journalism. I met Mr., aftenvards Sir, Clement Kinloch Cook and made some inquiries about writing for newspapers. He was editing a weekly paper and emphasized the utter impossibility of finding any opening for a new hand. So we talked about other subjects. He asked me for politeness’ sake about my life at Oxford, and I told him how inordinately I had wasted my time on athletics and other games. His face lit up with a new interest. “ Did you say you were President of Athletics? Let me see, this is Monday, could you let me have a column by Wednesday? ”
Games are wonderful things in English life. My first term at Shrewsbury School was in danger of being the most miserable in my life, but it happened to be the term of school sports, and I won four events. Immediately after the finish of the chief race, a huge, old and awe-inspiring person, whom I had beaten in a handicap open to the whole school, came up and made excuses for his defeat. It seemed to me incredible that such a thing could happen, that such a vast person should make excuse to a small new boy. But it was true. The attitude of the rest of my fellows suffered the same sort of change. Athletics had “ done the trick.” And I madfc a lasting friendship through one of the victories. The cup was a very pretentious affair given by the French master and in it was a huge bouquet. Some unkind humorist assured me that the right thing was to present it to the headmaster’s sister; and to his intense delight trembling I did it. She was my good friend ever after.
My elder brother, a fine scholar and linguist,
OXFORD AND JOURNALISM
22
missing the civil service through illness, went straight out to India and was instantly given an appointment in the Indian Police, becoming eventually InspectorGeneral. He owed his appointment, not to his scholarship or other linguistic attainments, but to a letter from the Master of the Fitzwilliam Foxhounds to say that he was the best boy rider in the hunt! Perhaps, after all, who knows, it was the more valuable quality that he loved the back of a horse better than the office stool. Lord Cross and Mr. Kinloch Cook agreed.
Towards the end of my second term at Oxford I asked leave of Mr. Hobliouse, my Latin tutor, to stay up some extra days for the sake of training for the Inter-University Sports. He granted it neatly : “Yes, you may stay up ; but remember that he who runs may read." How little at the time either he or I imagined that we should both be journalists years later. He was offered and accepted the editorship of the Guardian, and confessed that nearly all the technical terms of the trade were something much worse than Greek to him. He thought, for example, that “ leaded type ” referred to some special blacking of the letters ! Rut it is a question whether the ignorance made a pennyworth of difference to his skill as editor. Certainly he brought to London the same unexpected humour that distinguished him at Oxford, and the same gift of easy scholarship. I had said something one day of my delight at giving up daily for weekly journalism (a bourse afterwards reversed) and he responded with the humorous confession that he himself “often sighed for a Quarterly”!
I discovered while at Christ Church a new virtue in athletics. The college was supposed to be rather full of cliques; the Bullingdon or fox-hunt-ing clique, the scholars’ clique, even the Church clique; so a group of men who took the deficiency seriously decided to establish a Junior Common
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A TRAVELLER IN NEWS
Room, of which I was appointed secretary on the grounds that a man who ran was outside cliques. The Common Room proved successful in more w r ays than one. In the process of enlarging a room in Tom Quad to make space enough, a great block of rubble was discovered and among it bits of the famous St. Frideswide’s tomb. The Common Room was certainly a social success and among other influences considerably improved the strength of both football and cricket elevens.
As to the cricket, the credit was due chiefly to a man who afterwards made fame in a direction not anticipated by his closest friends. We knew J. A. Gibbs as an ardent rider and a cricketer, keener on “ the rigour of the game ” than Mrs. Battle herself. He was too keen. He stood outside the crease to give himself a start in flogging the bowling whatever it was, fast or slow. He himself bowled left handed and incredibly slowly. So eager was he that he made his short slips—of whom I was always one—stand closer and closer each over, till we were so near that to catch a catch was next door to impossible.
Perhaps his keenness killed him. He died of heart disease after writing the best book ever written about English country life. “ A Cotswold Village ” is formless, amateurish, and unadorned by any passage of peculiar note; but the whole is informed with such zest that it arrives at truth of feeling and interpretation scarcely to be paralleled in this sort of literature. The character of the man breathes through every page.
Athletes grow better and better. Scarcely one record survives. The latest athletes run faster and jump further than their predecessors. The reason, I think, lies almost wholly in more scientific preparation. During my time, for the first occasion in the annals, a professional runner was retained for a short while at Oxford to teach some
OXFORD AND JOURNALISM
24
of us the elements of the art of sprinting; and many thought, especially in Cambridge, that the innovation was too professional an act. What, at that date, would the critics have thought of the trainers and coloured “ rubbers ” et hoc genus omne belonging to the American national team? The little professional was an admirable coach snd a pleasant personality; but he told some grim stories of professional methods. He himself had won the Sheffield handicap—the sprint of sprints; and had cheated the betting men by running in all his open practice with strips of lead in his shoes! The starting odds against him were heavy, and he and his father made a small fortune.
It was easier to get expert advice in games than in work. The dons of Christ Church in my day were a brilliant and charming group; but most lectures seemed to me to be a pure waste of time. There was the splendid figure of Dean Liddell, of w r hom it was written ;
Two men wrote a dictionary,
Liddell and Scott;
One was clever,
The other was not.
He was a great figurehead, very shy, and had as few dealings as possible with the undergraduate. One of his gifts was a peculiar skill in drawing little ink sketches on blotting paper; and after every college meeting these were ravenously collected by the dons present. His wife on the contrary, as she once said, “ simply swam in young men.”
There was Lewis Carroll, whose real name w T as Dodgson, the Rev. C. L. Dodgson. He shared the Dean’s shyness, and in his later days was so much afraid of being exploited that he would hardly be persuaded to accept any social invitation except to the house of one or two more intimate friends. One of these was my father-in-law, Mr. Vernon Harcourt,
A TRAVELLER IN NEWS
25
whose Readership in chemistry did not exclude a host of other interests. He had a great love of letters, much linguistic knowledge and an unquenchable zeal for games, to which indeed I owed my first introduction to him.
Lewis Carroll did not teach, at least in my time, and would only preach when his congregation was composed of college scouts; and to them, we were told, he preached charmingly. It was the custom in the Senior Common Room to turn him on any bore with whom the company were temporarily afflicted. And the remedy was sovereign. He posed one legal bore with detailed query about the right assessment of damages in the case of a hen that was killed as she was about to lay a sitting of eggs which might have produced hens—supposing the sexes of a perfect hatch to be equal—each capable of producing such and such wealth which would amount in the next generation to the sum of £ and so on and so on.
For the edification of another notoriously humourless guest he started an argument on some outrageous pun or other. The victim knitted his brows, thought hard for a minute, and then announced with righteous indignation : “ Why, it’s a false analogy, a mere jest! ”
0%/ y * i There was Dean Paget who succeeded Liddell in my time. The suavity of his manner was so overwhelming that some found it hard to appreciate and could scarcely believe that it was genuine. But it was part of the man, as a contemporary of his one day made clear to me. I was asked to lunch at the Deanery, to meet A. H. Gilkes, the headmaster of Dulwich College. He had been at Shrewsbury School with the Dean, and a master there in my time. If I were asked to quote my ideal Oxford mind, I should quote Gilkes. He was perhaps a little near the crank in some respects; but had the gift of original thought and of expressing it in the
n i
OXFORD AND JOURNALISM
simplest possible words. A phrase of his in a very brief letter to The Times became famous.
“Nothing,” he wrote, “interferes with progress like not wanting to make it ” —and that is a very good characteristic example of his form of speech and thought. Of all the men I have met in my life I admired him the most. He thought of life largely, as became his enormous height and size. Even when he was telling you how to hit a ball off your legs at cricket he was consciously intent on adding his bit to the perfection of the game at large. It was natural to him to think of humanity first and himself not at all, except as one of the tribe. He was only eccentric, as Chesterton said of Browning, because of his intense desire to get to the centre of things.
But he had a most individual sense of humour, the issue of humorous perception, and he usually shook his head like a big gentle lion when the humour was about to become articulate. That day at lunch after one of Paget’s most extreme politenesses I saw the head begin to wag; and the giant spoke.
“ What I remember about you, Paget, at school was that you were the only boy who said ‘ thank you.’ ” From that time I could see that the Dean’s manner was as much a part of his native make-up as the long, ascetic, ugly but charming face. Gilkes hated functions as much, perhaps, as
Paget liked them. I met him once at Dulwich—where he persuaded me to teach for a few terms — on the way to an annual lunch and pow-wow with the President of the Royal Academy at the Dulwich Gallery.
“ I don’t like it,” he said, “ he wants to say to me ‘ what a fool you are,’ and I want to say to him ‘ what a fool you are ’; but we can’t, but we can’t ” ; and away he moved with slow long steps wagging one of the wisest heads in Christendom. It was also a singularly handsome one.
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When he made application—much against his will—for the headmastership of Dulwich College, two of his testimonials said, “ if you see him, you will take him,” and could a better testimonial be devised?
I remember him congratulating a common friend, also a Salopian, on being appointed headmaster of Birkenhead school. “You will never be happy again,” he said, “ but we must play the game, we must play the game.” He was too good a man to be altogether a useful teacher, if the end of teaching is a scholarship or a good degree; and it seems to me looking back that the best of our Christ Church tutors were the same. When I was reading for Mods. I would take a set of verses to Hobhouse and he would risk just one or two comments before handing me a fair copy of his own, with an apology. “ Perhaps they were not much better than mine.” There was, of course, no comparison whatever.
When I came to read Greats I took a problem in free-will to Professor Stewart, a man in whom real culture went at least as deep as in any man I know. He was a philosopher born, a fine Latin and Greek scholar, a student of Dante and an admirer of all that was best in literature up to the latest poem by the youngest poet. I took him my problem. “ Freewill,” he said. “There may be free-will—just a little bit at the very end of development! ” All philosophy was there; but it was hardly a useful guide to the Schools. It did not matter, and in general, if not always in particular, he was an inspiring teacher; but in any case I would rather have had his companionship in philosophy than any skilful cramming leading to a first class. Besides, by some happy accident a special scholarship fell vacant and was given to me chiefly, so I was told afterwards, for the excellence of an essay on Free Will in the paper on Moral Philosophy! But I did not say “ There may be such a thing. Just a very little bit at the very end of development.”
OXFORD AND JOURNALISM
30
Much of the teaching was not only rather bad : it was very bad. But the compensation was talk with first class brains. Stephen Leacock was right in his view of Oxford. I met him at Montreal, while his book on England was in the press, and he was genuinely afraid that his admiration for Oxford had temporarily seduced him from humour into too sentimental expression of delight in the place.
His point of view was that the don taught you nothing directly, but “ smoked at you.” That is true. An evening talk with Professor Stewart or with Mr. Blunt, another Greats tutor at the House, was education indeed. And it had its humours. There were those who took the incidental persiflage as a sort of tip for the Schools. How well I remember the grim smile of the smoking don when a pupil at one of the casual evening talks solemnly took down on his shirt cuff the maxim that “ an omelette was the final cause of an egg ’’! But the offender took a good degree and became a well-known headmaster. He probably teaches much better than some of the dons, but smokes at his pupils with less lasting effects.
A smoking don of the most sharply pronounced Oxford type was Mr. T. H. Grose of Queen’s. I made his acquaintance by the sea at St. Davids, South Wales, where he had taken a reading party, and thereafter dined with him once a term generally with one of his most admired pupils, now Bishop of Liverpool. The Dean, who was a double first, a classic, a philosopher and a mathematician, assured me after one of those dinners, which before the end were almost carouses, that he had only studied one subject in his life with any completeness. That subject was “ European Liqueurs.” He thought he had sampled them all.
A rather curious coincidence occurred to me in regard to him while in Germany. Something moved me to write to him. It was the
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only time that I ever wrote to him, before or since, except to thank him for a wedding present, which, characteristically, was a peg-measure. I posted it on the way to the Dresden theatre in the evening. Almost as soon as I had taken my seat I saw in the box on the other side the Dean himself among three or four Queen’s undergraduates. To make sure that I should not miss him at the end of the performance I interrogated an attendant as to the exits from the particular box where the Englishmen were. “ Ach,” he replied, “ I know. Grose.” It was startling and I asked him how he came to know the name. He answered, “ Nein, nein. Gross, so gross! ’ ’ with appropriate gestures. He had been struck by the girth of the undergraduates, who were all from the Queen’s eight!
Of all the Christ Church dons who came nearest to an international reputation was perhaps York Powell—the Yorker. He was much beloved, thanks partly to a gift of intense admiration for his friends. He would argue of one favourite undergraduate that he was going to be the greatest poet of all time; and himself grew lyrical over one of the worst lyrics in the English language.
I scarcely knew him till some years after I went down, when he asked me to lunch in his little house in Bedford Square. He proposed introducing me to various editors. We had a delightful lunch off the odd bits that could be scraped off a leg of mutton, that had already been through many attacks. It was with difficulty that room for it could be found on a narrow trestle table smothered from end to end with manuscripts. He talked with invincible zest about most subjects, especially of Japan which he had visited, and the mania of the young people for imitation of the English. Their university students had been told that all Oxford undergraduates possessed barometers; and the matter coming to the notice of an enterprising firm of manufacturers, a
OXFORD AND JOURNALISM
32
quantity of imitation barometers with a plausible face but no mercury, had been exported and the Japanese students were commonly to be seen carrying these about with them.
It was a luncheon that I would not have missed for the world; but the only advantage that accrued to me professionally was one piece of advice. “ Most journalists,” he said, “ read too little. Now I should advise you to learn a language a year. It keeps you fresh! ” I am afraid I did not follow the advice. The ideal was perhaps a trifle too high; but I knew two or three journalists who came near it. Mr. J. L. Garvin, who has a gift of memory approaching Macaulay’s, learned Spanish within six weeks, in order to help a friend; and afterwards, received an honorary degree from a Spanish University. It was said of Mr. Wickham Steed, who is a linguistic genius, that he was one of the six or seven best orators in Italy in Italian. As to Dr. Dillon, whose capacity was quite uncanny, his profession was at one time to instruct the Russians in their own dialects! But of him I only know by hearsay. Mr. Garvin was to be a colleague; and the best imaginable.
When the war came, and Oxford undergraduates, at least white undergraduates, disappeared, it was feared that continuity would be broken, precedent would be forgotten and the old Oxford come to an end. The one hope, it was said, lay in the Scouts, or College servants. They represented the most conservative element in the University. At annual junketings they drank the same toasts in my time as in my father’s. There was still an old and serious person who rose with glass in hand to say, “ May the evening’s refection bear the morning’s reflection.” The “ Four H’s ” was still popular. “ ’Appy ’ave we been, ’appy ’ave we met, ’appy may we part and ’appy meet again—the four H’s, gentlemen.”
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Well, the scouts are certainly a constant body. Revisiting Oxford thirty-five years—more than a generation after going down—l was greeted by the porter whom I had not seen since; and he told me which rooms I had lived in and who else were on the same staircase. My old scout had not, so far as I could see, changed so much as a white hair. But the scout was not more changeless than the don. My tutor read me the latest poem of the Poet Laureate just as a generation earlier he had read me one of the earliest. Dr. Spooner—who has already given a word to the language—looked as young and as genial as ever. “ Dr. John Richard Magrath,” about whom Queen’s College undergraduates were singing impromptu songs in the eighties, was still head of the college. Professor Case ruled Corpus and had not mitigated a line of his opinion about the “ Gothic Purists,” whom he accused of desiring to pull down Tom Quad.
In the Senior Common Rooms the decanters still passed from one extremity of the semi-circle of guests to the other by the route of a wooden trolly way.
No, Oxford was very much the same Oxford. When my father came up to see me he said, “ The undergraduates are the same as in my day, only better.” When I went up to see my daughter take her degree, I felt just as he felt. Of the changes for the better in athletics, the new thing that seemed to me most enviable was. the coming of the relay race, which has brought the team spirit into running and made athletics a sort of cricket. It has done more good to athletics than all the talk about Olympic Games.
We thought a good deal about the right spirit in games; and some of us grew wildly indignant when the new football rules, passed chiefly by those who were concerned with professional football, distinguished between accidental and “ intentional ”
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fouls. To suppose that anyone should intentionally do the wrong thing was a grievous slur on the English sportsman.
The feeling was not confined to the undergraduate.
Oxford in my day had the advantage of one of the keenest and kindliest of dons that ever nursed young athletes. Mr. C. N. Jackson, a don at Hertford, in his day a holder of a best record in the 120 yards’ hurdles, was treasurer of the 0.U.A.C., and later of both the football clubs and several others. They all flourished directly he took them in hand. He trained me as a freshman in the art and science of pace-making. Later, when I was President, we spent many hours together in correspondence with American Universities. His almost pitiless inquisition into anything that savoured in the least of any standard that might conflict with English ideals of amateur sport lengthened out the negotiations; and I had gone down some years before the fruits of these discussions were gathered, and the fust Oxford and Cambridge versus Yale and Harvard meeting took place.
Some part of this passionate rage for purity in sport broke forth in a spirited chapter he wrote for the “ Isthmian Athletics,” which was my first effort in book-making : “On both sides of the Atlantic many a reform is needed before there could be arranged, beyond any shadow of doubt, an international meeting of athletes who were one and all in every respect bona fide amateurs. As to bona fide students, Oxford and Cambridge are not liable to difficulties which appear to beset most American Universities; but as long as those difficulties remain, I should decline to advise Oxford and Cambridge students to join issue with rivals who were not legitimate students, or even amateurs. . . . That England may often meet America in ‘ track athletics ’ as the children of Jonathan term them, or
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on the silvery Thames, or on the tented fields of I’hiladelolna, is nonet) to be desired; but when next her athletic champions sally forth, may they go forth as Oxford and Cambridge each went out to battle against Yale, and not as quasi-London encountered quasi-N'ew York. When the excitement of that international tournament had ‘ fizzled out,’ the temporary gratification of even the most ardent noul must have been chilled by the morrow’s reflection that such indiscriminate meetings of mingled ‘ peds ’ and amateurs, of those who compete for love, and those who ‘ spin ’ for lucre, only tend to debase and not to exalt the status of the amateur athlete, alike in the eyes of England and America. Under such conditions victory is dearly bought, and defeat feels doubly sore. Let us trust that in its next international campaign the L.A.C. will be true to itself, will be the L.A.C. of old which has done so much to promote athletics, and will not be a heterogeneous body, with a borrowed title, ‘ engineering ’ into its ranks to-day the veiled pedestrians whom it must for very shame disown to-morrow. Naturally a mistake so fatal, a contretemps so catastrophic, left a warning behind it which none responsible for the direction and integrity of athletic sport could afford to ignore. From that day forth Oxford and Cambridge took up a firmer stand.”
This appeared soon after the first Olympic Games were held at Athens in 1896. Another of my contributors was Mr. C. G. Robertson, who had a contest with Mr. Margoliouth as to who had won the most University prizes. The decision rested on a question whether a victory in throwing the hammer ought to count. For the rest the list was wholly in the realm of scholarship. Mr. Robertson, who attended the Games, afterwards maintained that they were the indirect cause of the Greco-Turkish war. “To the Greek,” he wrote, “ the Games were the greatest achievement of his supposed race
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since, say, the conquest of Babylon by Alexander the Great. Politically the Games undoubtedly did much to produce the subsequent war with Turkey. The Greek nation could only have embarked on such an impossible campaign from blindness to the realities of things, and this blindness was based on the idea that the Greeks had once more taken up the position of the ancient inhabitants of their country, and that the eyes of Europe were upon them. This idea was primarily produced by the Olympic Games.”
I have always thought that these as well as other international games owed much to Mr. C. N. Jackson; and perhaps on the whole they have done more good than harm. But it is a question. I was present at an early event in the Olympic Games in Stockholm. Great Britain was playing Denmark in the Final of the Football and shot a goal almost at once. I was sitting alongside Sir Cecil Spring Rice, our ambassador, who was not in favour of the Games even before the incident that was about to take place. As soon as the goal was signalled, a loud concerted hiss w T ent its sibilant way all round the Stadium. It came from a section of seats filled with naval officers and cadets from two German ships. Some of them stood up to give this abusive noise more emphasis. The ambassador was much upset and in doubt whether to make a political incident of it. He told me that in his first days in Sweden he was treated with special deference as representative of the most popular nation, that from the opening of the present century his position grew less and less pleasant, till it became almost humiliating. He attributed it principally to the growing belief in Sweden that we were athletically and gymnastically decadent; for the Swedes were then gymnastically mad. Gymnastics—in the Greek sense —including such field sports as were encouraged by the Olympic Games, were becoming an idee fixe, throughout
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Scandinavia, were the one test of moral and military excellence. We sent some wonderful athletes: above others Anderson, one of the finest hurdlers who ever ran, and a heroic character, as he proved in the war; and Mr. C. N. Jackson’s nephew, who won the mile in a “ record ” time, and who was to win several D.S.O.’s in the war. But it must be confessed that our athletes in the bulk were not convincing. Their parade was a lamentable spectacle; and the organization was a triumph of stupid mismanagement.
It is one of the regrets of my life that I did not see Jackson’s mile. On the day before, I received from a temporary editor in the Daily Mail as foolish a telegram as a journalist could well receive. It ran : “ Please come home at once to cover cattle plague! ” There had been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the Midlands, and no one in the office, it seemed, knew anything about it. How angry Lord Northcliffe was when I met him on the steps of Carmelite House on my return and explained.
My own disappointment was due to a loss that was entirely non-journalistic. Spring Rice had invited me to his “ tame island ” —in the midst of the entrancing archipelago that makes Stockholm supreme—to seek w r ith him for a pair of black woodpeckers that had been lately noticed.
Lord Northcliffe was horrified at the idea of the Games left without a Daily Mail correspondent; and he had just l egun to probe the cause of the British failure with what he described to me once as his “corkscrew mind.” “Write three columns about it at once,” he said. Three columns about any one thing w r as inordinate in the Daily Mail. Besides, I had travelled fast without sleep, and had been very, very seasick, but with much labour succeeded in grinding out the better part of two columns, and these fluttered a good many dovecotes. His interest in the Games continued till the end;
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and sometimes expressed itself oddly. After the Games at Antwerp I received a sudden call asking me to take down the whole of the American team to Oxford and show them round. A boy would hand me £‘2oo on Paddington platform at such and such a train on the morrow. It was vacation, but I wired to the ground man at Iffley to prepare hurdles and hot baths, and ordered meals for the athletes and cigars for the trainers and rubbers and any chance camp followers. It was a most facetious expedition, from first to last; and I should scarcely have got through alive without the help of those two supreme athletes, Jackson and Rudd. The athletes, though they were to run against an English team at Queen’s Club two days later, refused all allurements at Iffley. They would neither run nor bathe, but the whole time that we spent on the ground they amused themselves with the national game of throwing pennies at dandelions and daisies on the grass. At lunch they devoured sweets ruthlessly.
Throughout our tour of the more famous parts of Oxford they evinced a thirst for information that I never knew equalled, and embalmed in note-books most of the promiscuous information that I poured out under pressure and, at the end of the bombardment, with shameful disregard for accuracy. They desired exact facts and figures ; and it was only polite to supply them. The climax came when we stopped in the meadows of Christ Church and looked over the old city wall topped by the towers of Merton and the spire of the Cathedral. In front of it lies, as Oxford men will remember, a roughish stretch of grass converted during the war into a market garden of which traces still survive. As I tried to play the part of worthy cicerone to this supreme view—filled to the brim with spectacular beauty and historic significance—a champion long jumper came up to me with his note-book and ready pencil. “ And what,” he said, “ might be the acreage of this campus? ”
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I replied with unassailable gravity that it was acres; and down went the figures. I trust they will not be set down on the wrong side of my account by the Recording Angel.
We fortunately discovered one Fellow of New College who was good enough to supply some real facts. He was geniality itself, but I saw a look of humorous reproach in his eye when a half-caste “ rubber ” with an extra large note-book responded to his offer to answer any questions by shouting out, “ Sir, and what might your name be? ”
7 cs j How lightly their learning sits on the best type of Fellow at Oxford. Our lecturer on this occasion did an immensity of valuable work during the war; and for relaxation and to qualify the effects of over-work learned Russian for a pastime, and thereafter translated Russian into English verse very charmingly. And he earned fame in a sort of athletics. The dons contributed a certain number of workers to the farms in their busier times. When the second expedition was being meditated a letter was received from the chief farmer strongly urging that they would by no means omit “ that excellent hoer Professor X” ! Here was fame indeed. .
Though not himself a great player of games, one of my college tutors took the pains to collate the successes in the Schools of his more athletic pupils, especially those who had won “ blues ” ; and brought out results that pleased him. The athletes won a higher average in the Schools than the rest, but missed the top prizes. The result was what one would expect.
Mr. C. N. Jackson was at one time compiling an exhaustive list of the after careers of “ blues ”; but I never heard that it was finished; though he told me that the average of success in life and of good health was high, so far as his figures went. It was especially high at the Bar. As for journalism, it was not mentioned.
CHAPTER II
ABOUT LORD NORTHCLIFFE
A start in journalism—“ By the Way ” —With Garvin on the Outlook—An interview' with Lord Northcliffe—Bricks and bouquets —Scottish newspapers—Lord Northcliffe at home—The first lesson in golf—Food, women and money—Acuteness of senses —A visit to Newfoundland—Exploiting “ The Times Correspondent ” —Sutton Place —Braid and the links—A bungalow on the downs—Selling a home.
THE first steps in journalism are always an adventure. But the profession is a hundred professions, not one, though always a noble one, if the journalist likes to make it so. For example. The first year that I set forth on the adventure I contributed to twenty-eight different papers, and in very early days was simultaneously on the staff of papers as different as the Saturday Review, under Mr. Harold Hodge, and the Globe, under Sir George Armstrong. What had they in common? My first job on the Saturday was to write a summing up of a series of articles by Lord Hugh Cecil on “Rector-craft”! So far as I remember, my place on the Globe was won by a few impromptu puns of the most pernicious character, especially in an address to the cricket season. It ran, so far as I can recall it, in this fashion :
Now once again the paper smiles
Across the breakfast table;
For I can pass the latest crime
And skip our foreign cable,
To see who wielded best the Cane
And whether he were Abel.
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The column was of the sort made famous by Charles Lamb in the wittiest of all the Elia Essays. Immediate predecessors of mine were E. V. Lucas and C. L. Graves, afterwards colleagues on Punch and associates in “ Wisdom - while - you - wait.” Graves continued at the work for years and used to say that his epitaph was to be, “ I grinned through a horse-collar for twice four years.” He was one of the only journalists known to me, but proved a host in himself. His opening canon of advice was more useful than York Powell’s. It was : “ Don’t be afraid of boomerangs,” and was accompanied with the tale of the dozen returns of his own first contribution, finally accepted by the Spectator.
My colleague was Harold Begbie, who began his journalistic work as editor of the Vegetarian for Mr. Arnold Hills, a great Oxford athlete in his day and a great engineer; but a humanitarian first. His life was built on the phrase he continually quoted. “ They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.” I should think that Mr. Harold Begbie was even a better hand than Charles Lamb himself at “By the Way ” column. His speed was fantastic, and he could write verse very nearly as quickly as prose. He sent me a telegram when I was married, and I have always felt sure that he put it down straight away in the post office. It ran agreeably thus :
Happy hours and plenteous platters From “ By the Way ” and “ Men and Matters.”
The last line consists of the names of the two columns at which he and I and Michael Temple toiled from nine a.m. to ten-thirty a.m., and for which we received on Saturday mornings a little canvas bag containing golden sovereigns.
When I left after some two years L bestowed my mantle on a Dulwich boy, who has since become a
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national hero, worshipped by boys and approved even by Lord Balfour—-no less a person than P. G. Wodehouse.
The death of the Globe saddened many good men. It is a strange occurrence that of all the evening papers of those days only two survive. The Pall Mall, the St. James’s, the Westminster, the Sun, the Echo all went the way of the Globe, most of them predeceasing it.
The real excitement of journalism, though not its real interest, began with an introduction to Lord Northcliffe in 1907. Two or three years before this, Mr. Garvin had accepted the editorship of the Outlook. When I joined the staff it consisted principally of the editor and Mr., now Sir Edward Grigg, who had come from The Times. Garvin made it, in my opinion, the best weekly paper there has ever been; and it would soon have been an excellent property. At the very crisis, when its reputation was won, Mr. Sydney Goldman sold it to Lord Iveagh, and it came under the management of Mr. Walter Guinness. The Outlook, as it was, ceased to exist—at least so far as we were concerned; and with it a glorious two years came to an end.' We had been a merry, even a hilarious team; and the regular or occasional correspondents were as keen as the staff. As a rule we enjoyed one weekly carouse. After a crowded and lunchless morning we sent the paper finally to the press about four in the afternoon; and thereupon adjourned to the Bath Club, as guests of Sir Rowland Blennerhassett, who had edited just such a paper of his own many years before and loved it, even the parts that were less in his line. He w r as absurdly pleased, for example, about a phrase in one of my “middles,” or middle articles, about the “fussy wriggle ”of an earwig; and I believe they would never have been collected into a book but for the anticipated pleasure of giving Sir Rowland a copy.
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Our dinner usually began at the absurd hour of fivethirty and continued until about midnight, when I left for my country home which I reached about two after a long country walk. Every week I shared the writing of the middles with Mr. Bentley, Clarihew as he often called himself, another old Oxonian and ex-president of the Union. On one occasion when there was some doubt as to which subject we should take I telegraphed to his home : “ Please do middle, prefer Snails myself” a mystic scroll which thoroughly alarmed his wife, who was alone when it arrived. She inferred some portentous cipher; but Snails was a real and quite successful article.
The last days were melancholy days. The paper marked a thorough advance in the journalism of ideas, and when it died, at least in spirit, we were not prognostic enough to know that it would be in part re-born in the Observer many years later. But even at the end there were hilarious moments. We were collected for discussion of one of the last numbers, and were in some doubt who should review a gorgeous ten-guinea book that had just arrived from the publishers, when the difficulty was resolved by a deus —if that is the word— ex machina. A manager, left by Mr. Goldman when he left for Africa, entered, cast a hasty look round, popped the book under his arm and mumbling some explanation about ten pounds owing to him, carried off the prize under our noses. It was bad luck on the publishers, and the author, who thus missed the benefit of an immortal review, and never knew why.
Very soon after the break, Garvin returned to the Daily Telegraph and to the Fortnightly Review, where he first won his name. Grigg went back to The Times; and as for me, I received a request to call on Lord Northcliffe.
I saw him at once, in a memorable interview, in his heavy portentous room at Carmelite House. I was punctual: and enjoyed a delightful interview.
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He had seen a book of mine—the “ fussy wriggle ” book—or its review in The Times and asked me to bring the spirit of the country into the office, and into the minds of town people. How could it be achieved ?
The theme was attractive, but first the prosaic question must be settled, “ would I join the paper, and what salary did I wish for? ” I was at the time working very hard. The routine was to leave my country cottage in Hertfordshire early enough to catch a train at seven-fifty, and the station was three miles off. From nine to eleven a.m. I was writing paragraphs for the very Victorian Globe, doing regular work for a weekly, and producing a good deal for which niches had to be found.
The result of the work was an irritability greater at the moment even than Northcliffe’s. My proposal was to give half my time to the paper, but he did not like half service and put the definite question, would lor would I not join the staff? Replying to something in his manner rather than to the question itself, I said categorically, “ Nothing in the world would induce me to.” The answer acted like an electric shock. He abandoned his lounging attitude and his slightly patronizing tone, and snapped out “Why not?” I told him exactly why not. The reputation of Carmelite House was of a place where juicy young journalists were collected, made much of, and after a year or two when their first virginal freshness was gone, thrown out into the street like a piece of derelict orange skin. The explanation acted as a second electric shock; but to my amazement Northcliffe took up a defensive line. The only reason why the Daily Mail had earned that reputation was because it tried very many more people than any other paper, gave quantities of young men, “and even young women,” their opportunity; and naturally and properly rejected those that did not make good. Could I name any
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good man who had left the Daily Mail? I named two, and was given the particular and peculiar reason why each had found himself unsuitable. Upon this he pressed the electric bell and commanded the secretary who came from the ante-room to summon this and that editorial person. They came singly and rapidly; and as each entered, even before his body was through the door, one question was snapped at him. “ Did you ever know a good man leave the Daily Mail? ” The requisite assurance was given with humble promptitude in each case; and soon after the last had left, I accepted the offer at a certain price and on condition that I w r as to be given a year’s notice. All was well, and from that day to the day of his death, Lord Northcliffe, who had become “the Chief,” was never for a moment anything but generous and kindly and helpful.
In the lingo of the office, he could “ throw bricks,” but he could also “hand bouquets”; and in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, the bouquets were as three to one to the bricks. He was fond of making proverbs. One of his favourite ones was ; “ Authority is a horse that needs little exercise,” an excellent sentiment sometimes more honoured in the breach than the observance, it must be confessed. The first thing he did every day, and the most important part of his work, was to apportion bouquets and bricks. He skimmed his own papers and most other papers in his bed at a very early hour ; and at the end of the task he dictated a criticism of the day’s paper and suggestions for the morrow’s. They were often caustic and even unwarrantably personal. He would ask, for example, whether the photographic editor’s sole object was to gratify his lady friends. He threatened that if So-and-so wrote such nonsense again he would make him sign it! Of one issue that pained him beyond endurance he wrote, “ The less said of to-day’s paper the better,” and proceeded to
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a number of brilliant suggestions for the next. A peculiar variety of caustic wit informed most of his criticism; but quite a large part of it was marked with admiration. “Yesterday’s paper could hardly have been better; nothing has been missed; and there were four ‘exclusives,’ ” such was the gist of a good number. When he bought The Times, and its most dignified staff were expecting what used to be called “ ha’penny-ness,” there issued from the bedroom in the little bungalow on Merrow Downs short, shrewd comments showing altogether astonishing knowledge of the real importance of things. He told the staff that they did not understand the value of their own dignity; and one of the first things he did was to design and order a new Times note-paper, combining art and superiority in due proportion. It was a masterpiece in blue and silver.
He was so deeply a journalist that a bad paper affected him as a discord might a musician. Once in the early days of our acquaintance I went to see him in his delightful little house in St. James’s Place (a house which once belonged to the poet Rogers), and found him walking to and fro with the restless chasse of a caged hyena. He had just that animal’s petulant toss of the head, as it turns at the corner of the den up against the unbreakable bars. A copy of the Daihj Mail lay upon the floor where it had been flung. His editor had gone on a holiday, and this left a certain Scottish predominance in the office. Sub-editors said that their room echoed with the phrase, “ It’s not impor-rtant,’’ and it was commonly accompanied by a stroke of the blue pencil. The victims of the guillotine were usually light, airy, or graceful paragraphs, especially dear to their writers, to the News Editor, and to “the Chief.” The “ not impor-rtant ” verdict had been very busy overnight, and it was more than the proprietor could endure. He turned on me with a sort of wild beast fury as if I were responsible : “ Do you mean to tell
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me,” he shouted, “ that I have got to suffer from six weeks, six weeks, of Scotch newspapers? ”
The irritability was in part due to ill-health; but in all states of health he was driven by a morbid mental energy, in strange contrast to his heavy body, his objection to any unnecessary physical exertion, and a persuasion that a horizontal position was better for the body than a vertical. He was nervous about his health, and frequently saw both doctors and cranks. One of the wisest had told him that he must play some game or die. With characteristic decision he set about the best way of applying the remedy; he decided that he would learn golf. He had recently bought a life lease of Sutton Place, perhaps the most delightful Henry VIII. house in England, not even excepting Hatfield, which is of the same date. It was one of the first country houses designed without any thought of fortification; and the brick and terracotta had weathered to a perfect mutual relation. Lady Northcliffe, a gardener of genius, had designed a rough garden that became a place of pilgrimage and proved one of the richest bird sanctuaries I have ever known. Lord Northcliffe, who loved natural history and was surprisingly observant, began a collection of eggs of all the birds nesting in the garden, and the number of species reached over eighty at an early date. The moment the golf was decided on, he left the garden for the fields, where Braid laid out an ingenious and difficult course. A Scottish professional was permanently engaged as coach; and became a regular companion. The first lesson was given at a temporary hole and proved one of the most thorough-going in history. On one side of the hedge dividing the desert from the sown, I began to play singles at lawn tennis with that most ardent politician and equally ardent lawn tennis player, Mr. Leo Maxse, and we started just after the opening of the lesson on the other side of the hedge.
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It was still proceeding when we finished our seventh hardly fought set. Lord Northcliffe had already driven 673 balls. Boxes of balls lay about the tee, an arc of small boys were fielding and retrieving in the offing, and all through the games w’e had heard at intervals “little Thompson” repeating his inimitable maxims and metaphors. “Feather” was one, and “ Think you are playing a back hand shot at tennis ” was another. “ Try to think someone is wanting to steal your pocket-book ” was a third. They floated curiously across the bed of Iris and of Penzance briars. The more particular explanations and illustrations they summarized were inaudible. We were compelled to ask afterwards why he was to imagine a thief searching for his pocket-book. It seemed that the thief would be powerless if the left arm were held with the proper rigidity across the chest, and up against it.
Lord Northcliffe’s selection of Thompson, and his friendship with him, if the word is allowable, were very characteristic of his social philosophy. He chaffed him with almost Puckish delight, and gloried in Thompson’s shrewd and good-humoured defences. He admired too. Thompson was much quoted behind Thompson’s back, and a score of stories told of his individuality and talent. Most men who had the idea of retaining a private professional would have kept him on the golf links. This was not Lord Northcliffe’s method. Thompson w r as continually to be met at various offices, at Carmelite House, at Printing House Square, at Fleetway House, obeying his standing orders, which were precise. At five o’clock, or thereabouts, it was his duty to find the Chief and force him to leave the office for Mitcham or some other links. So Thompson, always insistent and dutiful, tracked him down as a spaniel might. When he knew that he had found the right earth he sent in a message to say that the hour had come and the servant was at hand. As a rule no notice was
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taken, or there came a brief reply that Lord Northcliff e was busy. This was no deterrent to the persistent Scotsman. His Scottish accent increased audibly as he argued for a moment with the secretary or other watch-dog ; and soon, when argument failed, he broke through all defences into the sanctum itself and thereafter no more let go his hold than a ferret. It was odds that the two were playing at Mitcham in time for a round before dinner.
Thompson remained with him to the end. The last time I saw Lord Northcliffe, in the spring of 1922, he was staying at Pau; and whenever the weather cleared Thompson was sent forth to arrange golf matches for the many guests, nearly all of them journalists, who stayed at the hotel with him.
It was a foible, or at least a habit, of "‘the Chief’s” always to use the tool nearest at hand. So it came about that most of his male secretaries soon deviated into some form of journalism and some of his household staff took over quite other work than that for which they were engaged. When he went round the world he announced that he would not run the risk of being murdered by any chance chauffeur. So he took his very good friend Mr. Pine. Pine was always to drive him ; that was the intention. What happened was different. Pine did not touch the wheel of a car from the time the company left Liverpool till it returned to London. What Pine did was to look after the luggage, and to report the views on life in general prevailing among the people whom he met in the course of his duties. For Northcliffe delighted to know what everyone and anyone was thinking. He would stop agricultural labourers on the road and get into talk with them, extracting their views, not so much on political and social subjects, as on more elemental themes. Their universal preference for beer over any champagne that he could offer, never ceased to interest him.
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He is said to have laid it down as a journalistic maxim in the office that the three things people were most interested in were Food, Money and Women. But the wisdom of the saying was discounted by the reply of a young member of the staff that “ In this case a lady paying a butcher’s bill would be the ideal story ” ! The distinctive mark of his mental attitude was a readiness to accept direct evidence, but nothing else. He had no conventional ideas whatever of what was important and what was not. When there was a question he just saw and heard; and thereupon judged, not so much by weighing the evidence as by some gift of half-womanish intuition. The gift was intensely valuable in business affairs as well as in producing a newspaper. He gave delightful evidence of this quality during a visit to Newfoundland, where I spent six weeks with him in the early days of his great adventure there. Immense sums of money had been sunk in the equipment of paper mills at Grand Falls, in the purchase of a vast area of lake and timber, in the building of a town, the making of a harbour and the purchase of ships. It was a plunge; but chiefly it was an insurance against the inadequacy of the pulp supplies of the world, resulting from the growing multiplicity of newspaper circulations all over the world, even in China. The greatest difficulties had been overcome. The works, the town, the harbour were in being. The wood was being successfully floated down the River of Exploits. Yet things were not going too well, and nobody knew why, except that the comparative failure lay with the human element. So Lord Northcliffe went out, accompanied not by experts in pulp and paper, but by his wife and some friends. Within the first week he had put his finger on the weak spot and named the remedy. The failure was social dullness and the cure was the cinema. The diagnosis was right, and the drug, though it may sound more popular than real, was specific. From
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the moment that the shops were improved and the amusements increased all went smoothly, for the very excellent reason that the expert foremen were willing to stay on, and continuity was maintained.
The popular verdict on Lord Northcliffe—it has appeared in scores of written criticisms and been repeated in conversation by every sciolist—is that he was an ordinary man writ a little larger, that his success was due to the happy accident that what interested the General Public interested him, that he suffered, may one say, from G.P.I. or General Public Interest. He was, of course, in one aspect a mere schoolboy. He liked motors and cinemas and gramophones, especially gramophones, and flying machines. But in general he w T as more unlike other people than anyone I ever met. The cardinal weakness was that his intense, unceasing interest in the future, in what was going to happen to-morrow, next year, five years hence, was not rooted in any love of the past (though history was his favourite reading). Conventions and cliches were both abominable in his eyes. He had a real dislike of abstract thought—of anything that smacked of philosophy. He substituted perception for thought. But this perception was almost uncanny. Never was man with better eyes and ears, though he once nearly went blind, and but for a German would have. But the reason why he suffered from his eyes was that he harnessed his incredibly clear and long sight to the rapid perusal, not so much of newspapers as of newspaper headings; and nothing is so ruinous to the sight as the rapid change of focus necessary in a quick skimming of the spacious sheets of a Times or Telegraph or like-sized organ. His hearing was so acute and under such control that he could listen to any conversation he pleased at a lunch party of thirty guests. Indeed it was so acute that it became almost a nuisance, useful though the faculty was. He was continually hearing things about him-
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self. One spring morning I motored down the great North Road with him to see the spot where his brother St. John had suffered a terrible motor accident. A certain morbid sense, as well as his great admiration for his brother’s fine courageous character, induced him to visit the place of the accident again and again. We lunched at the Red Lion at Hatfield and while we were talking he was overhearing every word of a conversation carried on by a group of four at a table the other end of the room. They were telling one another with gusto the tale of a threat of a libel against the Daily Mail. The Amen to their hymn of triumph was sung by a parson who said triumphantly : “ And I got a cheque of £BOO out of ’em.” I had heard occasional words but taken no particular notice. Northcliffe had missed nothing, though he had continued to carry on conversation with me. He deliberately cultivated the gift of observation —and taught the art to his young nephews and nieces—just as he practised, deliberately, and as a game, the exercise of willpower. I have watched him brow-beat a comparative stranger, merely for the sake of testing whether he could make him abandon his point. And he liked to have an audience for the sport. More than once he summoned me to watch the progress of his technique. The ordinary man can observe and exercise his will. If to observe and use your will better than others is to be a super-ordinary man, then the popular criticism is true. Personally I think that he won his success as much as, may I say, Pasteur won his, by exceptional simplicity of perception. He saw things, concrete definite things, so clearly that he saw them as they were, not as they were supposed to be. Labels and generalities that deceive most of us meant to him nothing whatever. Pasteur was quite ignorant of the simple process of insect metamorphosis, when he set out to find the remedy of phylloxera, and succeeded where others
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had failed, and within a few months. Lord Northcliffe was neither a business man nor an expert in paper-making; but he found the worm in the Newfoundland bud within a fortnight by virtue of what the philosophers call intuitive perception.
The whole venture in Newfoundland was a new thing in journalism ; and it was regarded with jealous hatred by some rivals. The managers received one day a request from two young Americans for hospitality. They desired to see the country and enjoy its sport. They came and were royally entertained in the very beautiful log-house that represented the residential quarter of the town. They were taken by boat on the lakes and rivers and were conducted over the woods. They saw the caribou and the willow grouse, the two chief representatives of the game of the country. They presently left after expressing their gratitude and their enjoyment of the hospitality. Presently, about the hour of Lord Northcliffe’s arrival at Grand Falls, appeared in an American paper a violent onslaught on the establishment of the place. The directors and their works were damned root and branch; shamelessly traduced. The two young sportsmen were New York journalists who had come to Grand Falls for no other purpose than to collect material for an attack on the proprietor of the Paris Daily Mail.
Newfoundland at this date was astonishingly undeveloped. Its vice-regal government was described as the trappings of an elephant on the back of a rat. One very ill-equipped railway ran from end to end, from Porte-aux-Basques to St. Johns. The train not seldom ran off the lines. It fell completely over one day when a director of the paper-works was travelling with a pocket full of detonators and a box of dynamite under the seat! The extent of the country’s resources may be gauged from the fact that the taxes on the furniture for the new house that had just been erected for
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Lord Northcliffe made a crucial difference to the Exchequer. A balance was assured. Agriculture scarcely existed ; but as soon as Grand Falls was built and a farm set going on the outskirts, the Government determined to earn the gratitude of the country by a new zeal for agricultural development. I was one of the victims of the campaign. We w r ere discussing the subject one Sunday morning, in Grand Falls, when Lord Northcliffe suggested that I should go to St. Johns, stay at the hotel and quietly observe. It was to be a hush-hush expedition for the first day or two. Afterwards I would call on Ministers and the Governor. Knowing the Chief’s impatient spirit I took train that night; and after a journey that may compare in slowness with any train journey in the world—even by the “ Turkey Express ” from Rockhampton in Queensland to Long Reach—l felt the train slowing up at the terminus. Before it had quite stopped a flunkey entered my compartment. He seized my luggage with incredible promptitude, pushed me before him, handed me down the platform and conducted me to the house of the First Minister, who told me I was his guest. Lord Morris, as he was to become, informed me casually at the first meal that he had arranged for me to say a few words to a group of men interested in the agricultural development of the Island; and to the meeting I was led that evening, as a lamb to the slaughter. To my utter horror I found a large hall crowded with people, with the Governor and his elephantine trappings very conspicuous on the platform, though even these were overshadowed by an enormous berg of vegetable produce erected at the corner of the platform, presumably as a symbol of the Government’s solicitude for the people’s food. I gathered from an introductory speech that “ the agricultural correspondent of The Times ” would address the meeting at length. It was whispered in my ear that an oration of an hour
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would be best but that perhaps three-quarters would suffice. It was a small detail that I was not the agricultural correspondent of The Times, never had been and was never likely to be. However, The Times sounded well and I could not deny that I wrote a certain number of articles in The Times on natural history, a more or less kindred subject, and was agricultural correspondent to the Daily Mail. But there and then, below the bulk of the elephant and the pillar of cabbages, I felt more empty of agricultural knowledge than at any moment of my life, and as for Newfoundland, I had not seen so much as a cabbage patch. A speech of three minutes looked to me difficult, a speech of a quarter of an hour impossible. Happily we had been talking at Grand Falls of the possibility of making the works selfsupporting in milk and vegetables. We had made one rather haphazard experiment in clearing a patch of land by hauling out bushes from a marshy patch and cutting a drain. The column of green-stuff obviously called for congratulation. So between the two there came into my dazed intelligence a certain number of sentiments; and for half an hour I drew a picture of Newfoundland transformed into an England of cultivated fields. The ordeal ended most triumphantly. I could not help thinking of an Irish padre in a little country village, well known to me as a boy. He paid us a special visit to describe the effects of his latest sermon. “It made a great impression,” he assured us. “I preached on the parable of the tares and I said ; ‘ Brethren, ye are all tares.’ Och, it made a great impression.” No effort was spared to give my poor references to the croplessness of Newfoundland all proper impressiveness. The papers the next morning consisted of little else beyond the wise words of the “ agricultural correspondent of The Times.” The speech was recorded at least in full; and there was much editorial comment. A second meeting was arranged for two
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nights later when I was to be asked questions by a collection of specialists. It would not be the fault of the Ministry if the speech did not make a great impression.
This nice quiet secretive trip to St. Johns had a sequel. After returning to England I received a request from the Government to buy for them and to dispatch a certain number of pure-bred shorthorn heifers and bulls. Knowing the small scale of the Government’s exchequer, I bought some of the cheapest stock available. It was all pure-bred, but the outside price, so far as I can remember, was £35. Most of the animals were bought for well under £3O. As requested, I cabled out the list of prices, and received the following reply ; “ Do you mean pounds or dollars? ”
Newfoundland may perhaps without offence be called a rat in relation to the total paraphernalia of government. And few countries are more backward agriculturally, though the arrival of the shorthorns and the example of the colony at Grand Falls set in motion a new development. But no one can visit the land, especially as we visited it at this season, without delighting in both place and people. The house built for Lord and Lady Northcliffe, and afterwards given over to the company, was made by native carpenters, from a nation of carpenters. The men go out into the wood with an axe and saw and come back with a ship. The accomplishment is a commonplace. In making this house a good deal even of the fancy work, such as the round wooden balls on the staircase, were cut and polished with the adze; and the whole erected to design by men who were in no technical sense builders. It was all done within a few weeks; and so pat were all the arrangements that when the two arrived every piece of furniture was exactly in the place in each room as drawn out in the plan. Lady Northcliffe, proving her genius in domestic art, worked out the whole in
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England, imagining every detail in every room. Nothing had to be altered or added, though she was accused by one of the party of the unpardonable crime of forgetting a second cigar cutter for the smoking-room!
In the drawing-room, which contained a grand piano, Lord Northcliffe gave us one evening (under compulsion from his wife) an example of the curious instinctive skill that was part of his make-up. He had never learnt music. Lady Northcliffe, herself a capable musician, told me once that she had utterly failed to teach him his notes. He could not learn them, though his ear for music was singularly delicate and true. This evening, for the first and last time in my experience, he sat down at the piano and asked us in turn —we were fourteen persons all told —to give the name of a tune. He played each of the fourteen airs instantly without consideration. Of course he did not play well; but so far as the air was concerned he played accurately and indeed not without a certain charm. As a young man he composed some attractive little tunes, and wrote verse, by virtue of the same queer sensuous instinct.
He had the same sort of gift in games and sports. I have played golf with him many times, and even lawn tennis, and fished with him. He was in no sense proficient at either game. He made himself a tolerably good ten handicap man at golf, and his build was not designed for lawn tennis. But he was astonishingly good at the long putt and the approach putt at golf; and at tennis, though he did not profess to play, he could return the ball with equal certainty however it came to him. His half volleys were a joy to see. He loved to fish; and though he would not rank with great fishermen, largely because he liked everything to be done for him, he had an uncanny skill in the actual throwing of the fly. It fell just where he wished it to fall, however long the line. The one thing he disliked was the killing of the fish.
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He has been called hard and cruel. Doubtless he could turn and rend his best friends or most sensitive companions; but he had a more than feminine repulsion from the affliction of pain or the sight of it. It was quite beyond him to eat the fish he had caught. He actively disliked shooting, though for a while he preserved game on a small scale; and a very delightful shoot it was, for pheasants, for partridges, and though so near London, even for duck and snipe. Indeed I have seen larger wisps of snipe on the water meadows by the Wey in Sutton Place Park than anywhere in the world. Lord Northcliffe himself delighted to talk with keepers who were also naturalists. At one time he had an ambition to make his country place a centre of what was best in petite culture; and asked me to find him a really first-class gardener and at the same time a land agent. He made no stipulations, except the highly characteristic command that the land agent must not be “ a young man who rides a cob and slaps his gaiters with a riding-whip ” !
Almost every considerable journalist in London and many from overseas visited Sutton Place. A sense of charming hospitality invested it. The art of home-making in house and garden could scarcely have been exceeded, though Northcliffe himself insisted on regarding it as a ceremonial dwelling; and some others shared the view. I remember being furious with Lord Haldane, whom I conducted round the gardens, and quite utterly failed to interest. He told me stories about Gottingen and his Seals of Office, which were interesting enough; but it was a sin in the soul to visit Sutton Place and not admire the Japanese maples or the primulas by the stream. For a while the new golf links attracted the ow T ner of this Paradise; and how well Braid designed it. It was a liberal education to see him walk round with a depressed meditative air and lowered head, as if he were revolving the inwardness of the universe. He
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said nothing and took no notes. But when the tour was completed he drew out the links in every detail from a memory that could not go wrong on topographic detail. It was an advanced liberal education on a later visit to see Vardon play the opening match. He was round it twice in sixty-seven strokes; and then for the first time Braid’s philosophic calm was slightly and for a moment ruffled. Vardon with uncanny accuracy had twice done the long doglegged hole with its stiffly guarded sloping green in three. He said himself that he had never played better golf. Braid’s calculated troubles vanished before him, and Braid was not pleased. “If he played it again he’d reverse the figures,” he said gruffly. It was comment enough.
Designers of golf courses like to see victims in their traps. I seldom saw anyone more pleased than Sir Horace Plunkett, who deserves fame as a designer, after a dozen professionals or so had played a match on his garden links at his house at Fox Rock. How often has he broken off serious work, not once or twice in the day, to pull me out for a round or two. The course required only a light mashie and a putter; and when the professors competing for his prize walked round to inspect they said scornfully that it was merely a question of how many twos could be done. The first prize was won with an average of threes, and a medal round many strokes worse than Sir Horace’s own “ best record.” How delightfully happy he was! His skill in golf —he will not mind the criticism—was not on a par with his zest; but on the Kilteragh garden links the best pros went down before him like ninepins.
But the Wicklow Hills are as far from Merrow Downs as Sir Horace Plunkett from Lord Northcliffe. Yet both men were at their most charming on the links—keen, concentrated, observant, goodnatured. Northcliffe was immensely interested in the care and precision of the professional golfer, the
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chalking of the club face, the adaptation of clothes to weather, the carrying of the ball in a warm pocket. I should doubt whether any man in the country has a higher title to respect that the professional golfer. For the most part they have dignity and high manners. They are abstemious and hard-working, and above all they approve and cultivate the rigour of the game in a manner that even Sarah Battle would approve. I have seldom met one who was not worth talking to, perhaps because they preserve the essentials of a liberal education, a knowledge of men and a knowledge of the ground.
Sutton Place was adorable. The Great Hall was the finest room, with livable qualities, that I have ever seen. “ Ille terrarum mihi prseter omnes angulus ridet ” could be said by many of us of house and garden. But Lord Northcliffe, who had nervous fads about his health, decided that it w r as not a good house to sleep in. So he built himself a little rough bungalow on the Merrow Downs, close against a favourite gipsy encampment; and there he would retire about ten o’clock every night and breathe the hill-top air before going to sleep. The only time that I visited the hermit’s cell we walked across the Down talking natural history, till we found ourselves among a gipsy encampment; and after his manner he beguiled the people into friendly conversation. He whispered in the ears of one of them that I was a millionaire much addicted to charity; and very soon a long queue followed me wherever I went, to the school-boy delight of the practical joker. I fear those gipsies when they compared our largess were left with a very poor opinion of the generosity of the rich and a great respect for the poor. It was with infinite trouble that the alleged millionaire at last shook them off.
How his lady sorrowed for the final loss of Sutton Place, where so much of her skill and affection for domestic art had been expended!
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When the war came, the Daily Mail at the Chief’s urgency preached a crusade of “doing without,” especially without servants. He was not going to throw stones—an occupation much to his taste — while he lived in a glass house. So he sold his lease of Sutton Place, suddenly and for a song. The price paid would hardly have covered the incomparable carpets, tapestry and furniture that were included. He had already sold his “ poet’s house ” in St. James’s Place, and lived for the rest of the war in a tiny house in Buckingham Street. He retained what he called the factory, the house at St. Peter’s with the garden bungalow, where he and his wife had founded their fortune, with the aid of courage and ideas, of paste and scissors. Perhaps the contribution of her skill, energy, charm and wisdom has never been fully estimated.
CHAPTER 111
A COUNTRY JOURNALIST
The purchase of The Times —Need of secrecy—Meeting at Hampstead —Women’s petticoats—The Daily Mail Farm —French gardening —A week-end at Chequers—Sir Horace Plunkett and A.E.— Stories of Hardy and Meredith—Lord Coventry’s anecdote—A frescoed sanctum—Dublin and Belfast—A militant farmer — Tales of the revolution—A golfer’s ditch—Sir Neville Mac-ready.
LORD NORTHCLIFFE was fond of nicknames, especially for papers. He used habitually to speak of the Daily Mail as “ The Dogfight ” and The Times as “ The Mausoleum ”or the “ Old Woman.” His purchase of “The Mausoleum” is a story that someone should describe in detail. It was a stirring melodrama, of which he told me from time to time some of the quainter details.
On one of the rare occasions when he dined out, an occupation he disliked intensely, he heard quite casually that The Times had been bought by Sir Arthur Pearson and was to coalesce with The Standard. He scarcely believed it; and Mr. Kennedy Jones, and one or two others whom he set to work to find out, at first denied its truth; but at last one happy question in the right quarter produced evidence enough of the truth.
Armed with this, Lord Northcliffe dictated to one of his household a short paragraph congratulating his rival on reaching the climax of a great career. It was published in the Observer. It looked innocent, but it put the fat in the fire; for as he well knew, The Times was in Chancery, had been for years. Its shareholders had some peculiar
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powers; and the paper could not be bought or sold without the leave of the court.
Many years earlier there had been some suggestion of Sir Alfred Harmsworth, as he then was, coming in as a sort of adviser or perhaps junior partner. Mr. Walter and Sir Alfred met, and according to the account of the interview given to me, were getting on quite well, when Mr. Walter asked : “ Would you make The Times a penny? ” “ No,” said Harmsworth in his abrupt manner. “ I should make it worth threepence.” The idea that a halfpenny journalist should not think The Times, that sacrosanct organ, worth threepence was more than the proud proprietor could endure; and the interview came to an end without result.
The question had now arisen would Lord Northcliffe buy The Times right out? Several syndicates wanted it. One was American, one German. It was said that the Germans wanted it because The Times’ foreign correspondents, especially Mr. Morrison in China, were apt to send news so true that it interfered with the schemes of German financiers. However that may#be, Northcliffe took every sort of precaution to conceal the fact that he would make an offer and hand in the huge sum necessary if the court, acting on behalf of the shareholders, were to accept his proposal in preference to others. If it was known that he was a competitor the others would quite certainly strive to put forward more generous proposals. So he vanished for a while. You met people in Fleet Street who tapped their foreheads sagely and murmured thfft he was off his head, that he would soon give up even the Daily Mail.
All the while negotiations were going on, chiefly between Mr. Moberly Bell, who frequently crossed the channel incognito, and Lord Northcliffe, “ somewhere in France.” Lord Northcliffe used to allege that Mr. Bell wore a beard as disguise till he reached
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Paris; but it was not always wise to believe him on picturesque details of this sort.
At one point it became necessary that Lord Northcliffe should come over to see the proprietors. Having reached London unknown he decided that the safest course would be to go underground—a form of travel that no one would suspect him of indulging. Unhappily an acquaintance took his place immediately opposite him and held out his hand. Northcliffe looked at him stonily, and the man apologized. He was sorry, he had taken him for someone else. The crucial interviews were held under a hedge behind a cabbage patch on Hampstead Heath!
One of the practical difficulties of the secrecy was to shift a sufficiently large sum of money without giving away the secret to the City. But all went well. When the time for decision came Lord Northcliffe’s offer was so much the most generous that the court had very little option but to decide in his favour.
The Times had slowly been dwindling, losing advertisement and circulation. Northcliffe averred that rivals used to intercept advertisers outside Printing House Square, give them a drink and divert the copy into a rival office set up adjacently. Though weakening financially the reputation of The Times abroad was as sound as ever. A wail of formal condolence was heard even in the Austrian Parliament when the news came that it had been bought by Sir Arthur Pearson. A third of its circulation was abroad; and the new proprietors complained that the people in England who bought it did not so much as break the wrapper. It was said that no woman ever read it. ,
I happened to be staying at Broadstairs just after Lord Northcliffe’s first effort to interest women. The only other guest was a very dignified member of The Times who, it was alleged, had been appointed
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“to do tercentenaries ” ! He certainly would have done them very well, for no one had quite so delightfully orotund a manner. In the middle of dinner Northcliffe turned round on him suddenly and said with fine indignation and inimitable emphasis; “ Who was responsible for putting that article on Women’s Petticoats in The Times—The Times I’ll trouble you! ’ ’ The tercentenarian took a deep breath, decided that courage was the only course and said that he was afraid he must confess that the responsibility lay with him. Poor man! He was meeting Northcliffe for the first time, and did not recognize his Puckish humour. He must have realized later that the article had been specially ordered by Northcliffe himself.
The purchase of The Times made much less difference than was feared in other offices, though editors at the Daily Mail were a good deal bored by the recurrent necessity of consultation with Printing House Square. It made none to me, except that I did less work for The 'Times after than before the purchase. The reason was that the one paper was all absorbing, even though Northcliffe wrote me a formal line to say that I must not come to London more than twice a week—surely the strangest prohibition ever received by a journalist.
When Lord Northcliffe appointed me to the Daily Mail he put a pruning hook into my hand without any thought on his part or mine that it would one day turn into the spear of a war correspondent. My first task of note was to start the Daily Mail Farm, as a test whether the townsmen could make a success of a small-holding. An incredible number of men applied, of whom some fifty per cent, were either thirty-nine or forty-nine years of age—a most suspicious figure.
The search for a suitable spot put me in touch with one of the keenest of all our land reformers. It used to be unkindly and untruly said of him that the
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odds were in favour of some allusion to artificial manure within the first ten minutes of an introduction, even if the acquaintance were a young lady and the scene a dinner-party. That he was a Christ Church man made a certain bond between us and he threw’ himself into the scheme with zeal and generosity. His agent, Mr. Orwin, w r as afterwards appointed to the post of Chief Agricultural Economist at Oxford; and is one of the leaders of agricultural thought in England. So the experiment w’as w’ell fathered.
The selected small-holder w r as Mr. Pougher, a railway clerk, and for three years thousands followed his career. Before he w T as established I took him a tour of some of the more interesting holdings in England, and among others we visited the fruit and flower farm of tw T o very enterprising young women, w T ho had started a French garden at Thatcham, near Newbury. The French gardens round Paris and in Holland round The Hague had long interested me; and this was a chance of bruiting abroad the facts of this amazingly intensive system. Accounts of “ the golden soil ” so stirred the public that the young women at Thatcham w r ere overrun with visitors. They came in lorry loads, from all parts of England, and nearly worried to death the French expert. Soon after my visit I received an agitated letter saying that work was no longer possible, what were they to do? I telegraphed back “ Charge a £ entrance,” and this I believe they did, successfully checking the pilgrims and netting a satisfactory sum.
The enthusiasm was such that French gardens w r ere set going in a score of counties, by all sorts of people : by great ladies, as at Poole; by army officers, as at Brighton; by clergymen, as at Christchurch ; by market gardeners, as at Evesham; even, indirectly, by golf clubs, as at Burhill. The technical terms became household words. A purely technical book sold sixty thousand copies w'ithin a few’ weeks. Lord
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Northcliffe himself thought of turning one of his Sunday papers into an agricultural weekly called the “ Golden Soil,” and started a most excellent intensive garden at his Surrey home. Many of the gardens eventually faded away, thanks chiefly to the ignorance of the gardeners or their want of capital. My hope was to show how immense a weight of the best food a small plot of land may produce; and that what can be done in Franee and Holland can be done in England. Any land reform must be preceded by belief in the capacity of the land.
The small-holding was almost forgotten in the French garden, but it came into its own again. The railway clerk was a great worker and was just established on a self-supporting basis when the three years’ experiment ended and he became Mr. Christopher Tumor’s tenant. He had grown to be a friend ; and it was a real grief to hear a little later that he had died suddenly, died of a malady that had killed his father before him.
His zeal for country things was largely an instinct with Lord Northcliffe. He was never a philosopher, indeed had a proper hatred and contempt for anything at all that smacked of the abstract. He was nevertheless greatly interested in a form of rural philosophy preached with rare imagination by one of the not infrequent visitors to Sutton Place—Sir Arthur Lee, afterwards Lord Lee of Fareham.
As everyone knows, Lord and Lady Lee gave Chequers and all the treasures it contained to the nation as a residence for the Prime Minister of the day. I was staying there in the early days before the gift was formally announced, and while watching a herd of his polled cattle Lord Lee began to tell me of his object. Chequers is a gem set in the deep, deep country. Fhe lovely house and garden sink into the Buckinghamshire valley as naturally as a hare slips into its form ; and in spite of its splendour it is scarcely more conspicuous. The spirit of the
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place possesses you. It speaks of historic calm. Why should a single landowner and his wife, however hospitable or rich, be greedy of the influence of such a place? As he revolved the answer to such a question, it came into the mind of Sir Arthur Lee that some day in the future, when perhaps a Labour Government should be in power, such a scene might prove the salvation of minds which had been trained in towns and absorbed in urban thoughts. If you could insure that the rulers of England, whoever they were, and however urban, should spend the quieter intervals of their time there in the green valley among brooding cattle, in a peaceful garden remote from people and crowds, would you not exert a permanent influence for good, help to restore the perspective of minds confused by the hurly-burly at Westminster, and give more depth and constancy to the whole body politic ? Sir Arthur Lee developed his dream with genuine zest and imagination. Just thirteen } T ears after the dream of the future was interpreted to me over the gate behind which the cattle were pastured, Ramsay Macdonald was wandering in plus fours over those same fields; and as a man of imagination was quite certainly absorbing some of that spirit of the country that has been the leaven of wisdom in a long succession of our statesmen. The gift of Chequers had a great idea behind it.
War and agriculture more or less coincided in the course of a number of visits to Ireland, during the rebellion and in the more peaceful times that preceded it. Almost every year I paid a visit to the home of Sir Horace Plunkett, the father of agricultural co-operation. It was burnt down later apparently because Sir Horace was one of the best friends Ireland ever knew. Was ever house more widely regretted, both in itself and as a home of hospitality? It was queer as well as charming. In the middle of the front door was a glass eye with an electric light behind it. This form of electric bell
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was installed, according to Sir Horace, because it attracted the finger of any drunk visitor who might call; and it was bad hospitality to leave him fumbling for an indefinite time for a means of entrance.
On the roof was Sir Horace’s bedroom—a twosided room, else open to the air. By the bed was a sort of steersman’s wheel which enabled him without rising to revolve the room so that the sides faced towards the wind. The house was built with all the downstairs windows on one side, so arranged that each gave a different view of the Wicklow Hills. The little golf links in the garden were a model.
Kilteragh, as it was named, was one of those bouses which stirred people to talk their best. The best literary criticism I ever heard was there, and the best stories. A sample of each may be given. We were discussing Meredith, when Mr. Bernard Holland put just what nearly all readers feel about Meredith into a single simile. “ Reading Meredith,” he said, “ always gives me the impression of seeing a cinema. There is the little shake and shimmer.” Could any criticism be better? But Meredith’s style was natural to him, not artificial. One of the last poems he wrote —one of the best —was extracted from him by a letter from Mr. J. L. Garvin, on the score that one of our staff on the Outlook, to wit myself, was of Welsh origin. Meredith wrote back a delightful letter, in his most characteristic style. “ Most journalism,” he said, “ is either brandy or pap. Or both—in execrable mixture.” With this he contrasted the Garvin journalism which he admired, as ■well he might.
A young colleague of mine had interviewed him a little earlier, on his eightieth birthday, and asked him a stock question about what he thought of his fellow novelists. He drew himself up, and from his throne replied with a fine pomposity, “ I have not climbed the steps of eighty years to use them as a pulpit," with a strong stress on the last word. How he loved
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experiments in language. On one occasion he was utterly disappointed with a neighbour of his who had just read, I think, Beauchamp’s Career. Meredith asked him only one question. “ Did you notice my English phrase for a tete-a-tete? ” and he had to confess ignorance. The phrase was a “ you-and-me.”
Much the same question I once asked, not in an interview, of Thomas Hardy; and we began with his opinion of Meredith. “Oh yes, I like Meredith,” he said in his simple way, “ and I read him—about a page a day ! ’ ’ One of the raciest talkers at Kilteragh was old,
but ever young, Lord Coventry. He came back one day with the news that he had been visiting the Dublin Gallery and listening to the comments of Irishmen up for the Dublin horse show. One old farmer and his wife were proceeding methodically, she with the catalogue, he with his eyes. The man, manlike, was attracted by a picture from the nude and wished to know what was written about it. Whereupon the old lady, who was a little vague about the numbers, read out: “ Queen Elizabeth preparing to receive the Spanish ambassador.” To which the farmer replied : “ Well, I’ve heard things about that Protestant woman, but I never knew she was so bad as that! ’ ’ Whether the story was invented or heard I never discovered.
A rich source of talk was always A.E.—whose other name is Russell. He often came to Kilteragh, looking the poet he is in dress as in face; but he was usually to be found in Plunkett House, a great and spacious building given to Sir Horace by a group of friends as a headquarters for his co-operative movement. Many visitors found one of its upper rooms a clearing house for ideas on Ireland. It is large and spacious, from floor to ceiling its walls are frescoed with great pictures from unwritten Irish legends. Figures not too mystic to be human, nor
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too human to be mystic aspire heavenwards. The sense of a wild wet country is conveyed by the reeds and bulrushes from which marsh birds emerge. The whole is quaintly coloured to the likeness of tapestry, and the perspective designed to enhance the distance of one w r all from another. In this bower of his own imagination A.E., half concealed in masses of manuscript, edited the Irish Homestead, as it was first called, a small agricultural weekly newspaper, in which by some trick of alchemy, turnins and butter and poultry and other useful products became the stuff of literature. Here A.E. preached constructive Plunkettism aloud with Anderson and other eager supporters. He began life as a mystic and still sees fairies when he wants to. One trusts that mysticism will not perish in Ireland, its properest home, and the best hope of its continued vigour is that it is combined in this room with sound and technical views on agricultural development, and supplies force to a movement that has admiring imitators in countries as far apart in distance and character as Denmark and America.
A.E. has some at least of the attributes of genius. His poem with the unattractive title of “ On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers of Tradition”— ending with the fine phrase “ the golden heresy 7 of truth ” —deserves a place along with the best in the language; and incidentally puts the permanent causes of trouble in Ireland into a nutshell. Sir Horace’s house was almost papered with A.E.’s paintings. His art was as untutored as some of his verse and perhaps more open to criticism ; but the stroke of genius was there nevertheless. Perhaps, after all,
A.E. is greatest as a talker; for talk has no canons. Did ever two neighbouring communities live in so different an atmosphere as Dublin and Belfast? In Belfast they did not talk but acted. Once I went straight from Kilteragh to a big Orange demonstration in Ulster and spent an hour in the morning with
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Sir James Craig and Lord Carson. When we had finished our strict!}' political talk I asked Carson point blank why he did it. Why he was giving up a great part of his most lucrative profession, why he was wearing himself out—and the speeches exhausted him physically and emotionally—in order to lead the Orange cause. His answer was at least characteristically Irish: “I suppose it is in the blood,” he said.
The atmosphere was of sheer war, especially among the farmers. There was one whose face and utterance remain as clear in my mind as Lord Carson’s. His family had been two hundred years in Ulster but he was Scottish to the bone, and used “Irish” as if it meant enemy. “What the Irish want to do,” he said, “is to drive out the capitalist just as they have driven out the landowner ; and we want the capitalist.” It was germane to his argument that his best room was hung with pictures of what he called his “ old masters,” the men under whom he and his folk had worked. “Am I going to let a thriftless lot of beggars from the south who’ve no money to buy more than a gutty pipe and a poteen, manage my affairs? ” He asked eagerly,
“ Do you think England will really give us up? The Kaiser would not if we were his men; and what if we w r ere to offer ourselves to the Kaiser ? Ido not believe in hitting a man before he hits you, but if any man tries to steal my farm I fight. Guns,” he went on, “ there is a gun in every house hereabouts, but a gun in a man’s hand is only one thing, and we are not going to be beaten. A Gatling gun’s dearer, I know, but it is more effective.” And a Gatling gun he and two or three neighbours in co-operation had been making arrangements to procure, as I found from other sources. “We are drilling regularly, we are drilling even the street corner boys; and I could be a captain of a thousand men in a very short while, and would be.”
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He had naval plans also; but what most struck me in what he said was the bitter contempt for people who did not work and were not loyal. A rascally troop they were in his eyes, and he concluded a picture of a lazy spoon-fed tribe who backed England’s enemy by boasting that, “If they want ‘ rascality ’ we’ll see who’ll make the better rascal. Talk of Socialists, we can be Socialists too.” If ever I saw the stuff out of which civil war is wrought I saw it in the owner of that Ulster farm. His accents were the accents of revolution to the death.
Revolution had come, not in the north but in the south, the next time I was to spend a long period in Ireland. Ten years had elapsed. Once again I was to stay at Kilteragh, but stayed one night at the Sackville Hotel waiting Sir Horace’s arrival from England.
My table at dinner w r as shared by an IrishAmerican, who told me all about his reasons for being in Dublin. He was distributing money to the families of the men “on the run.” Only a small portion of the funds was in his hands; but he alone was paying out an average of £15,000 a month. Well, £15,000 is not a colossal sum; but you could not know even what I knew about country life in Ireland and the thirst for money, without feeling that the sum was enough to keep the men “ on the run ” for an indefinite period.
Tragedy and comedy were indeed “ in execrable mixture.” One afternoon on the golf links outside Kilteragh the old city golfers were stopped by gunmen, pair after pair, on the fifth green and taken off to dig a trench across the road. While the work was proceeding, the gunmen vanished softly and silently on some secret alarm, and a lorry of British troops dashed up, and began to point their rifles at the unhappy golfers. After satisfactory explanations they hurried back in agony to see whether
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their clubs were safe. Not even a niblick was missing.
Sir Horace himself, an ardent motorist, had broken the back of his car over one of these ditches that the rebels dug promiscuously, and was engaged in a most humorous correspondence with the insurance office. He reported damage to the car “ owing to a roughness in the road.” The insurance people desired to be informed as to the nature of the roughness, since they were not responsible for acts of war, and strongly suspected the nature of this roughness. He and other motorists usually went out equipped with two planks for bridging ditches and an axe and saw for removing tree trunks.
The rebels had made the most un-Irish faux pas in digging a trench across the entrance to the chief race-course just before a popular meeting. The authorities protested and received from rebel headquarters a gracious permission to fill up the trench, if they promised to’ restore it after the meeting was over—and this contract was duly made and carried out. Could such an incident be paralleled in any other country in the world ?
Cottagers short of wood would fell a tree, and when the British troops came up would persuade them to carry the boughs and logs into their shanties. A rebellion that ensured a winter of plentiful kindling was not a political movement to be lightly discarded.
But amid all this, assassination, pillage, terrorism were rife. The small daughter of an Irish official and his wife, whom I visited some seven miles outside Dublin, came in to lunch pale and trembling. She had been to a meeting of girl guides in the local hall. Gunmen had entered, threatened the padre with pistols, and carried off the little girls’ leather belts. One of the pistol-holders had a cigarette in his mouth, and was told by the padre to remove it in the presence of ladies, if he had any manners. And remove it he did without lowering the pistol!
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Melodrama was universal. I went to poor Collins’s office and found three clerks in his ante-room with Gaelic dictionaries half concealed on their laps, trying with much pains to write letters in this strange tongue “that never has been spoken and never will be.” Just outside Irish soldiers had modelled their manners on the Guards, and saluted and drilled themselves with a precision that would have pleased the Kaiser.
While I was in the Castle a telephone message reached me that Sir Neville Macready, in command of the British troops, would like me to lunch with him. My exit was a gorgeous example of melodrama. The car was drawn up well behind the closed gates, which were flung open as we began to get under way, and out we dashed at full speed past soldiers and police and barbed wire in profusion.
The drive with Sir Neville from his headquarters to his house was yet more melodramatic. A.D.C.’s leant on either window with pistol in hand and we all stared with all eyes to catch the gleam of an assassin’s pistol on the pavement. Pistols were beside our plates at luncheon—not that they were any particular good, but as General Macready said, “ I should feel such a fool if I were held up.” How he hated his job ! It had only one compensation in the General’s eyes. He could not have had a better opportunity for training young soldiers.
CHAPTER IV
FIRST MONTHS OF THE WAR
Unofficial war correspondents—No War Office policy—Paris in the early days—Hysteric women—Pol Roget’s gift—Civil authority v. military—French officers —German brigandage—The Aisne and the old French doctor—Mr. Hedges Butler’s gift—The last train to Lille —Uhlans at Hazebrouck—lmprisonment—A friendly policeman—Bombarded Arras—General Petain’s “ Bon ” —A French H.Q.
THAT the war was coming most of us knew. Personally I hold that four nations either wanted it or had decided that it was better to precipitate it: I mean Germany, Russia, Austria and France. Lord Northcliffe, who had a habit of always staring into the future, gave me a very definite prognostic in the middle of the year 1912. While we were motoring across Kent and Surrey, he said, “ Germany has decided to fight before 1916 when the Russian strategic railways will be completed.” And he gave me some odd corroborative details of the perfection of German preparations. “They have a list,” he said, “on which my name figures along with many others, including the Archbishop, of rich men from whom the indemnity is to be personally extracted.” Of what nature his information was I have no sort of notion. Quite possibly he knew T nothing; but at least the prophecy was interesting and not untrue.
When the war did come the accurate prophets were hardly better prepared than the disbelievers. The Daily Mail had no one marked out as war correspondent, and the War Office itself had no sort of policy with regard to war correspondents.
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Lord Northcliffe decided that the right man for the job was the sporting editor, and the War Office instructed him to buy a horse! Neither man nor horse ever reached France. How strangely casual are great organizations, especially if they are supposed to be models of organizing skill. You could scarcely find a prettier example of the halting Pegasus than these unhappy newspaper war horses exercising in the Park against the day when they should be released by the War Office. The policy towards men was as vague as towards horses. For the better part of the first two years of war both the chosen and the chance war correspondents were engaged in a perpetual struggle with the allied armies, especially the British, a warfare all the more difficult as the army never knew its own mind. First the correspondent was to go forth magnificent on a charger with accoutrements. Then no one was to approach the fighting, was not to see or guess what was happening. Then Sir Douglas Haig drew an imaginary line over which no correspondent was to step. Then five journalists were made official, put into uniform and given an expensive organization, with orderlies, lorries, cars, a chateau and staff officers, but secretly one of the officers in control of their mess was definitely instructed to “ waste the time of the correspondents.” Finally and at last under the continuous and vehement pressure of Lord Northcliffe and, in a lesser degree, of other proprietors, the selected five were utterly trusted. It was tempting when the war ended to tell the rather pitiful and very humorous tale in detail; but perhaps after all a selection from the more salient skirmishes of a single correspondent will illustrate the muddle in a less laborious form.
In the early days of September, soon after the critics had written of the “ magnificent tactics of Von Kluck in swinging aside from Paris,” I met Lord Northcliffe in the street by accident. “It is
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no good being in England, is it? Why not go to Paris? ” he said. I met him, again by accident, seven years later and he said in just the same vein and on the spur of the moment, “ Why not go round the world ? ’ ’ and in each case I went, with all convenient speed! The first job occupied four years, the second nearly a year. How rich was each in memories : the first in memories insupportably poignant; the second in memories singularly gay and refreshing. Nothing could have so restored a vitality sapped by the strain of the war as those long sea voyages and the traffic with the Britons overseas.
Paris was a strange place in those early days—bereft of men, and peopled by half-hysteric women. One woman I knew came in daily from Versailles from sheer restlessness, wrote to her husband at the w T ar three times a day, and called nearly as often at the War Office to know what the Ministers meant by not delivering the letters more promptly in the trenches! All sorts of Englishmen of note had come there seeking some sort of work. I met Lord Robert Cecil busying himself on behalf of the Red Cross; and when I asked if publicity could do service in any beneficent direction was urged with extreme gravity to ask the British Public for more pyjamas. A colleague of mine about this time met Mr. Winston Churchill, who told him for his information that the war was going to be “ fought in a fog ” and the best place for correspondence about the war was London. One of the oldest correspondents, who was also an artist, appeared armed to the teeth, with pistols in the holster and a whistle and a kit vaguely military with a flavour of the veldt.
The French communiques served in some measure as a sedative, but thickened the fog that overhung the trenches and fortified lines. They were crisp and seasonable, but much divorced from fact. The last of the daily communiques was posted at eleven
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o’clock at night, rather late for reproduction in the English papers, an accident that proved of great value to one of the Paris journalists. He obtained leave to enter the room where it was published a few minutes before the general crowd; and his green ticket of permission was signed by the Minister of War. It proved an altogether invaluable document, an open sesame to much more exciting places than the doors of the War Office ante-room in Paris. It was green, and the signature was the Minister’s of War. The two virtues in a pass were at once recognized by sentries all over France. Soldiers bowed before it, saluted its bearer, waved him and his car forward, even into Rheims, at a time when all the world wished to know how far the cathedral was damaged and whether the German shells had penetrated to the champagne cellars.
Two days of this Paris were as much as I could endure. So I bought a black gaberdine and a squash hat and took train to Epernay, from where I had a mind to walk to the front at whatever point chance might direct. Epernay buzzed with stories of the German capacity for absorbing wine, and of the bravery and address of the great wine-magnate and Mayor, Monsieur Pol Roget. As to the German thirst, I presently found that the road by which they had retreated to Rheims was thickly lined in both gutters by broken bottles, acquired in the cellars of Epernay. As to the heroic Mayor I was as anxious as any burgess to join his cult. He had a charming humour. I called on him to ask for a general laisser passer. He could not give that, but if I would mention a particular place that I had to visit for private or business reasons he might be able to help me. As he spoke there came into my mind the little village of Gandelu in the Aisne, where I had years ago learned French in the household of a charming doctor and his wife. I had some hope that it might prove to be near the battle line. As
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the Mayor signed my Jaisser passer he delivered a little lecture on the psychology of the French soldiers. “I should advise you,” he said, ‘‘to have lots of papers. Sentries lack either the scholarship or the patience to read more than one or two; and moreover are always impressed by a dossier.” So after signing the usual Mayoral paper pass he produced a stiff mauve card, and with a word of approval for the colour handed it with a bow and a slow, wise smile. It proved almost as sovereign as the green ticket signed by the Minister of War. It was bigger and the mauve tint lent it a certain cachet.
The civilian authorities were the more ready to give help in these matters because they were a little sore at their position of inferiority, vis-a-vis the military. Strictly speaking, all civilian passes were useless. Sentries w r ere ordered to disregard them; but I was never unlucky enough to meet with a poilu who had heard of the order or showed any sign of knowing the difference between a Mayor and a General.
Armed with these purple and voluminous papers I set out on the longest walking tour of my life, and the queerest. It was an autumn of gorgeous weather; and for a fortnight or so I w r as up at five or six every morning and seldom covered less than twenty miles a day, meeting odd adventures, but seeing nothing direct of the war except shells; and not many of these fell dangerously near. But what they call in the jargon of newspaper editors “ human stories ” were unfolded daily. I perpetually met deserters (some of whom took refuge in boats on the Aisne), soldiers who had really lost their units, hidden Germans, French civilians, oscillating this way and that between hope and fear, unruffled peasants who had wonderful stories of their few days under German occupation; and all the time in every place members of the civil population bruiting quite incredible stories of fighting. Once I came
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upon a group of peasants assembled to see a royal German standard that had just been dug up in a little wood. It was finally hung up at the door of the nearest farm-house, and became a place of pilgrimage for weeks.
My first meeting with a French officer on service was at a little village west of Rheims. In walking behind the line of the French and English armies, so tar as possible parallel with them, I repeatedly came into touch with the officers in command; and if I spoke only from my own experience of the war, my inference would be that in France preferment in the army must be chiefly regulated by the degree of gentility of nature. Every superior officer, often in abrupt contrast with the junior, appeared to me to be a soldier and a gentleman ”in the best sense of the time-honoured phrase. In this first experience the commanding officer with his chief of staff iiard at work m a little low kitchen, which was, however, one of the best rooms in the village. He explained to me that the übiquity of German spies—of whom, he said, the English had caught a surprising number made the strictest precautions necessary, and he gave me some curious examples.
Then he took me down to the chief barrack room, and while my safe-conduct was being made out, I had the opportunity to watch the natural refinement with which he gave orders to soldiers and answered the questions of civilians. His dignity of office, it seemed to me, was maintained solely by force of a master refinement, which would allow no reliance on clanking sword or pride of position or professional tone of command. He was as the rest-only a better man. For one instant his quiet courtesy gave way to fine scorn. He was taking me to a point where a jolly lane through the vineyards offered a short cut to my destination, when he stopped and said : Come with me. I have something to show e turned back and the General opened the
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door of the one little village shop. Its humbleness would be hard to parallel even in English villages. It stocked cheap caps and ties and stuffs and a few toys. The whole of what stock remained was heaped on the floor in a tangle of dirt and confusion. The heap reminded me exactly of the scene in a certain cricket pavilion in Surrey, which I once visited a few hours after it had been entered by thieves on their way to the Kent hopfields. The Germans had done exactly what the thieves had done. The old woman to whom the stock belonged complained that they had taken “ all that was most precious.” They had sorted out especially certain sham plaid ties, worth perhaps sixpence each; and this sum represented precious value in the eyes of the old woman. Were the looters intending to flaunt the ties as trophies from the Scotch? The General said nothing : but his gesture expressed what half the French residents of the little towns and villages were saying in one form or another : “ It is commerce, not war with these Germans.”
I saw a more amazing example of this careful commercial brigandage close to La Ferfce-sous-Jouarre. A light motor-car with a wagon body had broken down. Round about trampled in the dust were samples of ware which suggested that a commercial traveller on a large scale had come to grief. The remnants represented the careful and highly instructed pillage of the shops in the surrounding villages. Whether they were on their way back to Germany, like the precious objects of art stolen by a higher brigand from the famous Chateau de Baye I do not know. They included sheets, blankets and pillows from village inns.
An artillery officer, whom I met in the same neighbourhood, talked with me hour after hour on the subject of the campaign. He was a great soldier, but what he talked of was not so much war as peace. The man had a passion for peace. He was clearly
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a considerable mathematician and man of science. He had studied closely the science of artillery. He told me, for example, of experiments being successfully concluded, for the manufacture of a powder which produced a blue flame on explosion—a colour virtually invisible at night. • Rut his interest was academic though practical. He hated nothing more than explosives. The sight of a shattered bridge roused him to a passionate outburst. “ These things belong to humanity, and it is a crime against humanity that they should be scattered to the winds.” He regarded the war solely as a means to a greater and more permanent peace. The deaths and pains of men, the cruelty to horses, the loss of harvests, the ruin of peace of mind, the breaking of the quiet passage of civil life, the shattering of historic buildings ; all these filled him with a great and righteous wrath. In his quiet humble way he stood for the happy warrior of Wordsworth, whose
“ Master bias leans
To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes;”
and thereby he was the better fighter, I have no doubt.
A large proportion of the French officers, and indeed the men, seemed to me to have a continuously acute hatred of war which may perhaps have handicapped them in some details of the business of the campaign, but which certainly added to their moral force. It had also a curious effect on their attitude, for example, to the Turcos and others who had more professional feelings towards fighting. They regarded them, and spoke of them naively with the sort of admiration that a panther might excite, a noble creature enough, not lower or higher, but just different and so wonderful.
It is, of course, as difficult to appraise a class as to indict it without seeming partial. There were
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doubtless French officers, as there were English or German, who, “dressed in a little brief authority,” confused the symbols of position with dignity, and liked fighting because it helped them to play the bully or peacock it over the rest of the world. But if the French officer in war-time is not a soldier and a gentleman whom all the world may take for model, my experience was lucky out of all proportion.
Another French officer—a Colonel of artillery—met me as he was retiring owing to sudden weakness of the heart. He too was curiously philosophic; but his master interest was history. In discussing the 1870 campaign and its parallels with 1914 he made a very French epigram. “ The ruses-de-guerre of the Germans,” he said, “are excellent, their tactics good, their strategy rotten.” He was amused, even delighted at the parody of his epigram when I suggested that a similar criticism might be made of the German language, “ Its words are magnificent, its phrases good, its construction rotten.” A personal experience of his at the battle of the Marne, then only a fortnight old, suggested that red tape was not unknown in the French army. In front of his battery at short range appeared a German brigade in close order. “It was a target for an artillery officer to dream of. Every shell would have taken terrible effect, and the range was registered.” But he received no orders and dared not fire a shot. A few minutes later a despatch-rider came up with precise instructions to take full advantage of the target. He had set out on a motor-bicycle and been stopped by bad roads. “ I shall think of that target till my heart kills me,” said the gunner.
He confirmed in detail the popular view that the Marne was won by the promptitude of Foch in advancing his guns into a w r edge-shaped vacuum in the German front and using them with grim effect on the exposed troops to right and left.
The only occasion on which I had any friction
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with a French officer, or indeed poilu, was in a very tiny village estaminet (our Tommies used to call 'it a “jest a minute”). I had extracted a stick of cordite from a broken but dud shell, and over a pot-au-feu I asked him what it might be. He suggested macaroni, and could think of nothing else when I disallowed the first conjecture. When I told him, his egoism was so hurt that he grew suspicious and wanted to arrest me. However, a second cognac and the mauve ticket of the good Pol Roget restored peace, if not confidence.
On another occasion I got the better of a specialist over this same explosive. On a short leave to my country home, the doctor of the local war hospital told me of some of his queerer cases, one of which entirely defeated him. He felt that the man was a malingerer; but there was no doubt of his bouts of illness and recurrent high temperature. My suggestion that the man had been chewing cordite proved on investigation to be correct. I had heard of its uses for the malingerer in two armies; but this quality in it was still unknown to the general medical profession. Later in the war this form of macaroni became a not unpopular food among the twenty per thousand of “rabbits” who defaced all but the most select battalions. Its consumption was hard to detect, its effects were sufficiently drastic, and it left no serious, no lasting weakness behind it.
Waking one morning at five o’clock in the inn of a little village just, but only just, within the range of the German guns, and quite safe from nasty howitzers, I heard the whole household busy, and hurried to share their coffee. One Englishman was in the company, a sergeant of quite magnificent physique. He must have possessed internal organs to fit his framework. With native generosity, that in spite of intermediate profiteering often marked these country inn-keepers, mine hostess offered the sergeant a generous stirrup cup
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of neat brandy. It vanished as quickly as a small slug in the folds of that lightning organ, a toad’s tongue. He indicated, almost in the idiom of the cliche, that he would like some of it “ in a mug.” The mug was brought and three times emptied; and across the shrewd face of our hostess I saw pass successive looks of anguish admiration. Her best brandy had never vanished so rapidly, but it had never before found passage down the throat of such a demigod. That the best feeling might prevail, as a rivet in the Entente Cordiale, I felt compelled to indicate that the sergeant was drinking at my expense, in relation to the loaded mugs. The early morning draught had no more effect on the sergeant than water. Or did it slightly loosen his tongue? At any rate he told me great news. The battle of the Aisne was over. He was off with his guns at all convenient speed to Belgium.
How high my heart beat that autumn morning! I see now that stalwart sergeant in the little village street, misty with the promise of a golden day. A vision danced through the mind of a German flight from France before the threat of a flank attack from Lille. I saw the first hope of a beginning to the end of the war, the return to peaceful pursuits in an island much lovelier even than La Belle France; and was not I a journalist big with news? The sergeant before we parted spoke of his ambitions to beat all record in moving the field guns; and lam confident that he fulfilled them. For my part I walked on air, through the mist, through the growing heat till the ted woods flashed in the face of the midday sun. In the afternoon I reached Chateau Thierry, fought my way into a train, after being once thrown out by a group of women refugees hysteric with fear and anger, and so reached Paris and sent a thousand words of the great news to London. Never again shall I walk thirty miles or so on a diet of coffee and bvandy and know r no fatigue. The reason will not be
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age or stiffening muscles so much as the unlikelihood that such news will again coincide with such a day. Hopes fell much at the same time as the red leaves of the Aisne; but when all is said a great moment remained. And perhaps after all the end did begin when the German tactics shifted, when the line of the Aisne was judged impregnable; and a quite ludicrous optimism took possession of the British high command.
A little before the meeting with the sergeant I had paid a flying visit to the little village of Gandelu that was written on Pol Roget’s laisser passer; and the memory of the day stands out as one of the kindliest of war experiences. A mile outside I fell in with a group of peasants who had been to see a German prisoner found, so far as I can remember, secreted in a drain that he had used as a house. The place would not have been French if someone had not murmured the suspicion that he was supported by a French traitress. They told me that all was w r ell with the old, old doctor behind whose old horse I had driven hundreds of kilometres years ago and talked dog French. How vividly came before me the evenings in his little house. When supper was over and he had tied his napkin into a fantastic bundle, much like an irregular chignon, that was one of his amiable little tricks, we would sit down to whist. The doctor would pick up his hand and wdth admirable consistency shout out a curse on fortune, “ Rien, absolument rien,” with incredible nasal ferocity. The world seemed to step back to the quietude of the past as I knocked at the door (there in the rough market-place where sometimes we played croquet!) and the doctor himself opened. We had never been great friends, for my French in those days was primitive at the best, and I had so admired his wife, a woman of some literary talent and a perfect English scholar, that the doctor had been to me little more than her husband. Also he
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was irritably impatient of bad French. But when he recognized me that autumn morning, he gave me a welcome that breathed the very spirit of glad hospitality. “ I cannot give you much to eat,” he said, “ but I have a cellar that turns even bad wine into good. We will do what we can with my fatted calf.” So we went to work to revive the crumbled wood fire with intent to boil an egg apiece; and the doctor talked and talked. His wife could not endure the perpetual boom of the cannon, so he had sent her away.
Their golden wedding was at hand. When T called he was writing his daily diary which he sent her three times a week ; and the fragments he showed me suggested a taste in letters I had never suspected. German officers had been billeted on him and he had got on well with them because, he said, “I speak bad German with great facility ” and they take a knowledge of their language as a compliment. His whole face gleamed with the old excitement when he described the flight of the Germans and the entrance of the British soldiers. “ Oh, your athletics serve you well ” —such was his first impression. ‘ ‘ Plow your men came springing down the hill from the old chateau—you remember the old chateau? —so brisk and light on the foot. We felt the heavy Germans had no chance.”
We ate our egg, and before it little pieces of begarlicked sausage; and the doctor, who had delayed opening the dusty wine bottles, asked if I was satisfied. He had been listening intently, and I had w'ondered whether this was a mental trick due to the late fears. But as he asked me, the door w r as knocked open and a buxom woman entered bearing the first of several steaming and most savoury dishes. The old doctor—he was eighty-two—had slipped out when he made his visit to the cellar and commanded his neighbour to send in the best possible dejeuner with all convenient speed. How he
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enjoyed, how we both enjoyed, his ruse de guerre, his successful coup !. And the food too. It was after midday and my breakfast had been little more than coffee and brandy in a village fifteen miles away at six a.m. Not so far away the guns sounded continuously and louder than before. The last stage of the battle of the Aisne was beginning. When next year the doctor and his wife celebrated their golden wedding the battle of the Somme had begun its bloody course.
The name of Pol Roget, Mayor of Epcrna}', was once again to have a pleasant savour in my palate. After leaving my brandy-drinking sergeant and releasing my news from Paris, I hurried, as far as French transport allowed, to see what was to be seen in Belgium. The train to Calais was rather empty and very slow r . The antique but junior French officer, who alone shared my compartment, was not a pleasant neighbour. I had to tip his porter for him and in return he offered me some most potent tobacco. He smoked it himself, and it exerted so continual an influence on his salivary glands that I was driven to the next compartment. How I blessed that French officer then and afterwards! The next compartment had one occupant, obviously and at the first glance a charming fellow r -traveller; and we talked like old friends for the better part of seventeen hours that intervened between Paris and Calais. He had come from the same part, had met some of the same people. He was that great balloonist, traveller, and wine merchant, Hedges Butler, and had been caught in the cellars of Rheims, where he had gone in the course of business to sample champagnes for transference to the cellars that undermine Regent Street. Pol Roget had entertained him, and given him among other mementoes certain medicine bottles full of curious and particular liqueurs brewed solely for Pol Roget’s consumption. One of these he bestowed on me. Little did I think how incredibly grateful
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a contrast to my surroundings it would soon prove. Mr. Fledges Butler had a gift, known to innumerable friends and acquaintance, of unforgetful kindness. I heard no more of him till the autumn of 1918, when he wrote to say that the weather was growing cold and cheerless, and it occurred to him that tw r o bottles of 1820 brandy would be grateful and comforting. I was away pursuing Germans when they arrived, so he sent two more, lest the first had gone astray. With what a conquering bouquet they filled the atmosphere when the cork was drawn! We drank the last in Lille, in the ex-lodgings of Baron Richthaufen, on Armistice night.
Even French war trains eventually-—when they were not wrecked —reached their destination; but they did not reach it always at agreeable hours. Calais platform was an empty and cheerless spot at four in the morning of October, 1914. The station hotel—where strange groups met later and overflowed the rooms—was shut, the restaurant was shut; and I sat on the platform on my box, wondering wdiat to do next. I had just decided to try what Pol Roget’s elixir w'ould do to stimulate ideas when the station revived and a porter called out “ Train for Lille.” It w r as inspiration enough. I had in my pocket a list of addresses of Frenchmen in and about Lille, mostly farmers whom I had met among a deputation sent over by one of the big agricultural syndicates to buy seed wheat and oats in Norfolk. They might prove a useful excuse, it had occurred to me, for wandering in this part of France, and before I left England, Lille seemed likely to be a strategic key. The train went jerkily forward till it passed St. Omer, a town one then passed without a stir of the pulse. But five miles beyond it the pulses were stirred by a much less peaceful spectacle than this fine old town, that neither Marlborough nor Lord French in the midst of famous wars of two centuries quite succeeded in arousing from its
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slumbers. In a field to the north the engine-driver saw, and we saw, two most ill-omened head-pieces disappearing over the stocks. Uhlans, Uhlans, in the flesh! In the compartment with me were two French non-commissioned officers who astonished me by ripping out clasp knives and taking off their tunics. For a moment I wondered whether this was to be their method of tackling the German cavalry; but the manoeuvre was soon apparent. They used the knives to cut off the stripes from their sleeves and explained to me most ingenuously that the Germans were supposed to be severe towards their prisoners in proportion to their rank. My impression was very different, but I did not disturb their faith. The stripes had been on for some time, and the marks they left were only less obvious than the stripes themselves; and these they thrust into the pockets! As a method of improving their position when captured it seemed to me at least inadequate. But as a rule alarmed people must do something, though it is my experience, for what it is worth, that in circumstances of sudden danger it is generally best to do exactly nothing. Even when surprised by a hoot on a crowded road the best defence is often to stand stock still. The engine-driver did not know' what to do. The train stopped, backed, went forward, chasse-ed till I could stand it no longer. So I got down, shouldered my box, which w r as heavy, and set out to trudge to Hazebrouck, now' some three miles away. I reached it a few minutes before the train, the very last train that set out from Calais for Lille for another four years. The Uhlans had been in the town the day before, had killed a porter at the station, and wounded a woman and child in the street. It was one of the points at which the Germans were probing. Later in the day I lay down among thistles on the railway bank along wdth a company of French Dragoons. They fired their rifles occasionally, a battery of field guns backed them
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up. Some mounted troops gathered on the right in the shelter of a block of buildings. It is conceivable that enemy were in the neighbourhood, that there was as real a skirmish as it sounded; but I saw no sign of a German, and I know that the man I was with saw no one, and I had evidence that the group of twenty Uhlans who had ridden to the station were a very long way in front of any body of troops. However, Hazebrouck was evacuated “under pressure ’ ’ early the next morning and both Germans and Allies retreated before the emptiness. What a long list it would make if all the recorded attacks that never took place, if all the defences against phantom attackers, were to be set down in a sort of “index expurgatorius ” by the Veracious Historian.
During the morning I met a correspondent of The Times, the first journalist who had crossed my path for many weeks. He was not by training “ a special,” but a sub-editor, and as such perhaps more skilled in official relationships than greater vagrants. He told me of his wonderful passport, signed by all manner of ambassadors and other magnificent people, a document before which the greatest would bow. He insisted against my urgent protests that this precious thing should be properly appreciated in Hazebrouck, and, very weakly, I followed in his wake. He led me to the Mayor, who, being timid, sent us on to a British officer who was then in the square. Here at least was proof that my sergeant on the Aisne had not misled me. The young officer was obviously rattled. A German aeroplane, the first I had seen at close quarters since a visit to Berlin in 1913, was flying overhead, and a primitive form of anti-aircraft gun was making bad but very noisy shooting. I made a last appeal to The Times representative; but the ambassador’s signature burned in his pocket and he made a bee-line for the officer. It was too late to withdraw. I followed.
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“ Who are you? ” said the officer, with a petulant scream, and he got this damning reply, “ Chiefly a man of letters, but for the moment a journalist.” The subaltern turned to me. “ Are you a journalist too?” It was not the occasion to rely on my agency among the seed-growing farmers of Lille. “Yes,” was the only possible answer. “ A week’s imprisonment for both,” snarled the officer, and handed us to an emissary of the Mayor, who obviously hated the job; and the Mayor himself who committed us was obviously frightened of getting into trouble. However, he did put us into a very evilsmelling cell, dark and without even so much as a manger. The ambassadors must have blushed at the base surroundings to which their august names were subjected. In my pocket lay something better than the subscription of illustrious names. The old French doctor of Gandelu once said to me in his sententious way : “ Every age has its compensation. I was in the ’bus from Chateau Thierry with a bevy of pretty girls; and I kissed them all. Now if I had been a young man, I should not have been able to do that.” So adversity usually has its compensations, and I doubt whether anyone ever found a drink more delicious than the medicine bottle of special liqueur brewed for the Pol Roget family. Two hours passed most pleasantly ; and then a messenger came from the Mayor to say that we might go to the hotel for the night on parole.
Some extremely nervous gens d’armes woke us up at about sunrise. They could only give us five minutes. The town was evacuated by the military. The Germans might arrive at any minute. We were bound for Aire, where the term of imprisonment was to be completed. I will not say I enjoyed the walk. My box was much too heavy for that. Rut it had amusing moments. It was all the gens d’armes could do not to disappear on their cycles and leave the prisoners to find their own way. They
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were frankly afraid. Twice we met some French “ dragons ” looking very mediaeval in their helmets as they appeared suddenly out of the morning mist. They had been sent forward to seek information, and stopped us to ask a number of very ingenuous questions. They knew nothing-—not even that Hazebrouck was evacuated or that Uhlans had ever entered it. They walked their horses forward as nervously as the gens d’armes retreated, but they went forward slowly because they dared not go fast. The whole thing was ineffaceably funny, at the time as it is in retrospect; and the rest of our imprisonment kept up the note. We were lodged in the house of a worthy policeman, with a most charming wife. We were royally entertained. Our mattresses were thick and firm, so thick that the one laid on the floor was as comfortable as any bed. The fatted calf was killed, and what is more, most excellently cooked. Both of them expressed themselves as outraged that two English allies, so full of sympathy with France, should be so abominably treated. All we could do was to assure the wife, who was very nervous, that the guns whose roar was continuous were quite certainly further and further away each day. The policeman took his educational accomplishments seriously, and when finally we parted gave me a Latin text-book (of which he could not read a word) as a leaving present. But he had some little humour. We set out to prove that five days were really a week; and the sport of the argument so appealed to him that he consented to be persuaded of the correctness of our calculations.
How many times I promised to return to Aire when the war was over! There was also a most excellent miller in the suburbs who begged me to come back and fish for some of the large trout that were nosing their way up to his mill wheel. We all hoped that the quiet fishing days would soon return. Before the dream came true experiences so multiplied
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that a twelve-month would scarcely suffice for even a perfunctory sentimental journey. As for the people, indeed as for the very places—where are the snows of yester year ? Could I find even the neighbourhood of that inn at Ramscapelle, of that cottage at Meulte, of that other inn at Bailleul and the friendly dug-out five miles beyond it?
The last and only other time that The Times correspondent and I went forth on an adventure into new country the trouble was of my making. A rumour came to me that a violent attack on Arras was approaching. In St. Pol, which was a French headquarters and crowded with troops, I managed to get a lodging in a cottage, and slept in a hole close under the tiles. You could watch the progress of the stars through the chinks, the while you listened to the incredibly loud snores of the brewer’s assistant who slept beneath. In the morning we set out for Arras in the queerest carriage that was ever put together. It exactly resembled a big perambulator. The driver and owner had agreed to conduct back to Arras a mother and daughter; there would just be room for us. He so tucked us in that the strange hood, the ample proportions of the mother and the flounces of the daughter quite concealed us. A friendly Frenchman for whom we had found a lodging, and who turned out in the sequel to be a French Army spy, cycled with us for half the distance. Soon after he left us our driver, who knew much more than he seemed to (especially about due remuneration), plunged into side roads and after innumerable hours landed us at the gates of Arras, now emptied of all but a thousand or so of inhabitants. We entered the gates, but were, of course, arrested, though in the friendliest fashion. Nevertheless, nerves were on the stretch. The first bombardment of Arras was not completed. Five hundred shells had been dropped into the Petite Place, and two of the most beautiful buildings of
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the Spanish occupation shattered. As we walked back with a guard through Aubigny, the forward headquarters, the scene baffled imagination. A huge tallow factory was on lire. The neighbourhood seemed full of queer signal lights, red, green and white, as if phantom railways had suddenly been born into mad activity. An aeroplane rattled overhead. Such sights and sounds were new, but never again did I see quite so many batteries of guns scattered in the open fields. We had some slight trouble with our guards. The first dispute arose because The Times correspondent explained to them that his constitution did not permit him to go for long hours without food. They said that they must wait for food till they got back to Arras, so he must give an ultimatum to his constitution. However, he sat down and ate some portion of bread at the bayonet’s point. The second was a protest against the excessive speed which we set. I have always found it difficult not to walk fast; and the more exciting one’s thoughts the faster the pace is apt to be. Once we had lost sight of them; and it was really very kind of them not to give us a sharper reminder.
When we reached Aubigny the Chief of Staff to whom we were introduced was very angry indeed. My companion talked French much more fluently and grammatically than I could, but it was what T may Call aggressive French. It bristled with idiom, verve and pronunciation; and though it made its meaning clear to the meanest intelligence, it had not the faculty of assuaging tempers. His pleas might be reasonable, but the reasonableness was not sweet. Even the policeman’s wife at Arras, though she was angelic and liked him, grew restive when he complained (merely for the sake of practising his French) that his mattress was full of fleas. She found it difficult to appreciate humour in that tone and accent. The Chief of Staff was adamant to all the eloquent appeals. His verdict was a week’s imprisonment and
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thereafter deportation through the agency of General French. Just at the climax a tall and handsome Colonel came into the room. He asked a question about the reason of our presence at such a military centre. I saw my companion winding up the clock of his wit. I feared very much that it would strike, not diplomatically. So I burst in with some inferior but more modest French. I said that we were journalists, and that it seemed to us a good thing for the Allied cause that the world should know of these German crimes against historic French buildings—Que le monde connait les crimes Roches, etc., etc. The Colonel stood stock still in meditation for several seconds, then drove his right fist into the palm of his left hand and uttered the pregnant monosyllable Bon! Never was man transported from hell to heaven more briefly, more suddenly. The day had been long, we were very hungry, very tired, and the Chief of Staff had really been very depressing. Deportation had an ugly sound, though prison had begun to lose its terrors. Indeed, during the one experience I had almost
“ Regained my freedom with a sigh.”
The Colonel turned to me and said sternly: “ Have you a camera? ” Now possessing a camera was the worst sort of crime, and my “ No ” was hurried and emphatic. “ That is a great pity,” he replied, “ but never mind.” In a few minutes a luxurious car (it was, I think, German, from a Paris show-room, if I am not confusing experiences) appeared at the door. Room was found also for our guards, and off we all went, very happy in our new relations and new facilities for travel back to Arras. We drove straight to the Petite Place. Arras as a town was still almost intact. The real bombardments had not begun, but on the eve of our arrival the enemy had decided that large stores of food were gathered in the town hall, and that certain spires
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were useful for observation. Never was a better example presented of Teuton thoroughness and scientific skill. The howitzers had deposited five hundred shells in the hall. You might have said almost with literal truth that not one stone stood upon another. The only section that kept any distinct shape was the part fronting the street on the side from which the shells had come. The bottom of this remained in being. I reckoned that every one of the five hundred shells had hit the target. Not one house had been directly touched, though the halfupright wall was not as much as fifty feet distant from the houses across the street. The horrible precision of the murder added I know r not what grimness to the desolate ruins. Round it wandered one single man, a Roman Catholic padre, whose church near at hand had also been selected for destruction. His house was left unto him desolate. Later I was reminded of him by the sight of a more pathetic, more memorable figure in a scene of almost equal desolation. The scene was the little town of Fumes in Belgium, the one town left to the country since Ypres ceased to be. As I drove into the square, much damaged and quite emptied of population, there stood plain and statuesque in the opening of the ruins the gigantic form of the King of the Belgians, quite solitary.
Other buildings and one lovely Spanish monument had been selected. We drove to each, but our inspection was brief, a time limit had been set by the Colonel, who was a man it were wiser to obey. The chauffeur was very nervous when we returned some twenty minutes later; but nothing was said. The staff officer was instructed to give us an introdxiction to the staff at St. Pol, where we were at once drivenThe paper bore the signature of Colonel Petain. Later we all knew his name. He became General in a flash and was known for a while after the Verdun disaster as the Saviour of France. Of a certainty he deserved well of his country. I had evidence, even in
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the short while I was in his company, of his extreme carefulness of life. No dereliction of duty angered him so much as unnecessary exposure.
Instructions were precise that every man had to take cover on the instant that a German plane was reported. The trenches were model—very narrow, very carefully dug and well provided with dug-outs —probably at that early date the most perfect trenches on the front. Their tidiness was a marvel to see; and of the soldierly qualities, in which they for the most part excel, the least well observed as a rule by the French soldiers are neatness and order.
You could not live a minute in the company of Colonel Petain without feeling that he was a man of high seriousness, of masterful purpose, of fine gentility. It is the result of personal prejudice to add that he evinced a quality of common sense. On the way back I said something to my companion, the French scholar, about the quickness of the Colonel’s response to my plea for publicity. Alas for any relic of pride in my diplomacy. His answer smothered me. “ He would have been quicker still if you had said connaisse.” What French critic was it who, after hearing Lord Leighton make a speech in the most perfect French said : “ Ce pauvre Leighton, il a trop de subjonctif.” That, at anv rate, was not mv failing.
When we presented the Colonel’s pass to the Chief of Staff at St. Pol, he burst into a storm of rage. He had been informed of our penetration into his lines (by our friend the spy); he had had two cars out all day trying to find us. What did we mean by it? How t had we dodged him? It was outrageous, scandalous; and now we brought a pass from the Colonel and he was helpless. Or nearly helpless, for he kept a few pin-pricks up his sleeve. Instead of letting us go as best we might, and by the shortest route, he insisted that we should return via Abbeville and go by car. Abbeville was quite in the wrong direction, and there were no public cars. However,
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we finally discovered a private citizen who was garaging someone’s car. He had not driven before, but he would take us. In the sequel, after a puncture wdiich no one could mend, we reached Abbeville at an average speed of three miles an hour.
Two years later I paid a visit to a French General at his headquarters in the south, and sitting next him at dejeuner I saw opposite me this angry Chief of Staff, still conspicuous by reason of one of the largest moustaches that it has ever been my fortune to behold. The opportunity was too good to be lost, so I began to tell my neighbour of my first acquaintance with the great General Retain. As the narrative began to reach its climax, the Chief of Staff turned his back on his neighbour and listened undisguisedly with all his ears. He caught my eye and I caught his ; and finally we both burst out laughing.
The differences between Generals must be a great trial to Chiefs of Staff. Retain was perpetually seeing to it that all details in the front were faithfully observed. This General said to me —it is the one memory of this visit that is clear—that he wmuld consider it “a grave dereliction of duty if he ever went near the front trench. It was his duty to think.” He was of the intellectual type, slept little more than four hours, worked all day. At the time he was much occupied with a new system of stereoscopic photography, which appeared to interest him more than any other question of strategy. We possessed no Generals at all of the same type, and perhaps did not feel the need.
CHAPTER V
BEHIND THE WAR
Still no policy—At Calais with the Belgians—An interrupted lunch —“ First courage ” —Where women excelled —The F.A.N.Y.S.— Belgian hospitals—Want of equipment—An S.O.S.—The arrival of the cow—Great ladies —The Duchess of Sutherland—Lady Angela Forbes—A duel with the War Office—English women and French—Bonne and Beaucoup—A misinterpreted “ Base details ” —A misused car—A good Intelligence Officer— Haphazard selection—Enjoying the war—Courage or cowardice? —Three stories.
THE War Office was still without a policy on war correspondents; but some bad habits had grown up without any very clear definition. The censors would not publish any article if it indicated that the writer had seen what he wrote of. He must write what he thought w r as true, not what he knew to be true. New correspondents -were not allowed to be sent to France, but no decision was reached to banish the men already in France. Life was made more uncomfortable, that was all; and the result was that a great number came, towards the end of 1914, 3be herded together in Calais. It was the one place where life was endurable and regulations lax. Besides, couriers could be found to carry news across the Channel, and this was the only method of transporting “ copy.”
The town had become the Belgian Headquarters. I doubt whether the worst side of the war behind the lines was ever so mingled with both comic and tragic,elements. Officers brought in numbers of altogether too beautiful ladies. There was every
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sign of inefficiency and carelessness. I heard officers talking both unworthy scandal and something very near treachery in the public cafes. No people could have been more pleasant than the Belgians in authority. They gave me the use of a military car and chauffeur, solely because I was well supplied with cigarettes and a certain amount of soldier’s clothing : socks, mufflers, and the rest. Many strange journeys we went by day and night. My habit was to spend a few days at a time in or near Ramscapelle and Pervyse, tw r o ruined villages on the Belgian front line. They were then separated from the Germans by flood land, and shelled casually in a half-hearted manner. The trenches were miserable, and not of great use. In front drowned cattle, one of them upright where she had stuck in the soft ground, and now and again a drowned German were visible enough, and indeed perceptible enough n other ways. One Belgian machine gunner I used to visit was continually betting with a colleague on the date of the animal’s explosion. Stout soldiers used to go out at night and try to make fagot pathways in the lagoon. Now and again shells fell in fair numbers, but casualties were few, seldom too many to be dealt with by the two heroic Englishwomen who had formed an advanced Red Cross dressing-station in the most freely-shelled quarter of Pervyse, a work they maintained for years, till, I believe, the last year of the war.
The food provided for the army was not of the best, mostly consisting, ks far as I could see, of soup and rabbits. What the officers especially yearned for was white bread, and of this I bought sacks in Calais. We enjoyed two luncheons of especial gaiety on consecutive Sundays in the best room in Ramscapelle. Of course it had no glazing, and no quite complete room, but the lights behind the boarded windowframes gave us a festive feeling, further increased by the brandy that, with the yards of white bread, made my contribution. One elderly officer, a charming
F
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fellow, sang to us all the national anthems, one after the other
“ Until the thing almost became A bore.”
This was at our first Sunday lunch. The second Sunday began as merrily; but in the middle the only other visitor beside myself said something of an experience of his in Brussels after the German occupation. An absolute hush fell on the noisy company. It was broken by a young Belgian officer blurting out the general suspicion : “ Then you were a spy.” The man had come with me, had been useful in many ways, spoke perfect English, but was neither French nor Belgian in origin. I knew very little of him, except that he was admirable as a courier. We all looked at one another while the alleged spy mumbled some very vague explanations. When they were over the young officer who had launched the charge said in an admirably off-hand way : “ Doubtless you were there on behalf of the allies.” Lunch was resumed, but it was
“ Never sweet, confident morning again.”
Stiffly and most politely we finished the once merry meal; and as soon as it was over I drove away in the Belgian military car, and saw my friends never again ; not because of suspicion, but by pressure of other circumstances. It was, of course, imperative to investigate the charge. The courier was absolutely absolved; but the inquiry produced evidence of a strange story, in which the villain was a Brussels spy who was taking money from both British and German. In order to hide his double dealing, it was his policy to accuse subordinates of destroying the messages with which he entrusted them.
It was in Ramscapelle that I saw and heard the first shells fall really near. It has been said that the “ first courage is the best courage,” meaning that the more
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you learn of danger the more you fear it. It is true, I think, of shell-fire, if of no other form of danger. I know that there and then these shells, which were small, were objects of sheer curiosity, and of nothing else. They whistled by perhaps thirty yards away, and aimlessly buried themselves in the brickbats ot a cottage long since in absolute ruin. I was nevei again so little afraid of adjacent explosives, except perhaps once or twice, when the target of these expert German artillerymen was clear ; and experience told that the margin of error was small. I remembei admiring greatlv the quiet, observant courage of one of the F.A.N.Y S., Fannys as they were called, a group of Englishwomen from the eastern counties who came over to Calais with their own equipment of motor lorries to do Red Cross work. They drove and cleaned the cars themselves, and except for a man or two to help with the roughest work, were selfsufficing. One of them was up by the Belgian front line when shells were falling and a good deal of muddled nervousness was in evidence. The Fanny, it was Fannv’s little way, did not turn a hair. Don t you see ” she said. “ that the Germans are ranging from right to left ? ” And she went on to explain that if only the people would move to the right of the first shell, they were as safe as houses, and could go on peaceably with their proper work. _ Her particular work at the time was to give first aid to a wounded horse.
When women are courageous their courage seems to be a wholly natural product. Men have to school themselves into courage, as a general rule, by shame, or hate, or a conscious philosophy of intellectual fatalism. Women, and T saw many exhibit high courage during the war, gave the appearance of accepting the presence of danger as a natural condition of life. They endured shells in the same spirit as they endure simple pain and sorrow. On the other hand, a good many French women were hysterical.
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How some of them ran screaming about the*beach at Calais when first a German plane came over ! There was a chorus of “ Les cochons, les cochons and any soldier who did not fire rifle or pistol at the plane, perhaps'eight thousand feet up, was cursed as an imbecile, a poltroon. But the braver half were very brave and quiet. The peasant women had to be driven from their homes, and the trouble to evacuate some of the inhabitants was more than the Generals dare face. One young woman in Arras earned an army-wide reputation for her uncanny skill in interpreting the noise of shells in the air, or on explosion. She could tell with unfailing accuracy the calibre of every single form of explosive that passed within her hearing, and could say from what battery it came. Her contempt for anyone, soldier or civilian, who paid the least attention to anything less than a 5-9 was Olympian. No happy warrior on the front had such a
“ Faculty for storm and turbulence ”
or at least such an ear.
On this question of the superior quality of first courage some discussion arose during a breakfast in Amiens in 1916. I was sitting next to Mr. Lloyd George, who was paying a rapid visit, along with M. Thomas, the French Minister. As soon as I registered my vote for the courage of youth and ignorance, Mr. Lloyd George turned to me with a sparkling eye as if a new hope had suddenly arisen. “ Then we shall win,” he said. “We have more young men to put into the front line than the Germans.” His alertness to make a point for optimism, the vivacity with which he expressed it, the debating skill of the reply, struck me as delightfully characteristic of the man, the lawyer and of the politician.
No writer at the time, or perhaps since, has put in right perspective the fighting of the Belgian army, or
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the suffering. The early resistance at Liege has been exaggerated as much as later feats, not least in the pursuit, have been belittled. But they fought best and suffered most in the battle of the Yser. The wounded were pitchforked into Calais, where little accommodation had been provided and most of the surgeons were too nervous or too ignorant to save life by operation. Scores were herded into the rooms of an infant school and were laid on straw. Their nurses were a few “ religieuses ” who worked hard and told their beads, but knew little about nursing, and had no equipment. There was a crowded mortuary under the narrow staircase. Sanitary arrangements scarcely existed. No battlefield so wrung the heart as the crowded rooms of that infant school where men died daily, and light wounds became foul wounds from mere neglect. One woman, who had toiled sleeplessly for I do not know how many days and nights, took me through “ the hospital ” save the mark!—and finished by throwing open the doors of a little out-building equipped for infants’ sanitation. “ That is all,” she said, “ and grown men! ” and almost laughed and quite cried, as she pointed to the rows of wooden circles. Real pathos is not always quite proper.
It was not possible to give much help, but I telegraphed to England and t with amazing promptitude, very characteristic both of her heart and brain, Lady Northcliffe had sent beds, and I know not what equipment. Seldom was capable kindness so quickly and efficiently exercised. The beds were in the hospital sixty hours after my telegram went. Later, two of her gifts earned a great and peculiar reputation. They were a pair of short-horn milch cows provided by Sir Edward Strutt. One escaped on being landed, chased a terrified porter round the trucks on the landing-stage, and very nearly fell over the edge of the quay. * Finally the two of them, when installed in the garden of the hospital, were treated with
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even more affectionate tenderness than the cow in Cranford. Patients and nurses made adorable jackets for them as protection against the cold; and their milk effected a number of faith cures. It was regarded as a sovereign remedy. When the time came that the milk was no longer forthcoming, permission for their slaughter was received from England, and their bodies fetched a heroic price.
Somewhere about this date I attended a debate of Belgian doctors on the question of typhoid, of which an outbreak was feared. For three hours eloquent speeches were made. Finally an army doctor, a delightful fellow whom I knew well, rose to conclude. He touched lightly on the various rather vague proposals, and at last came to this magnificent conclusion: “ C’est une question tres difficile a resoudre.” The question was finally resolved with the help of British Quakers, who did a service for health, in more than one army, that should never be forgotten.
What a farrago of humour and tragedy Calais was in these early months, before the French cleaned it up and reorganized it!
One morning I met a great and famous actress (accompanied by Lady Drogheda), and she asked me without preface if I snored o’ nights. The point of the question was that she had a spare bunk on her barge, but the partitions were thin ! The journey might offer me an opportunity of seeing the front; and, though nothing was said of this, a little publicity would not be amiss. I assured her of the quietude of my breathing, but refused the hospitality, not without reluctance. The barge presently set forth loaded with food, and made its way by canal into the heart of the Belgian army. By this time General Bridges was established there and was known as a disciplinarian, especially to casual journalists. But the ladies quelled him. “ They have no right here
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whatever,” he said, 44 but what can I do? One must ask them to dinner! ” And he did.
Calais and Boulogne were both littered at this date with great ladies eager for some sort of work, for some sort of notoriety. There are always some who enjoy even the limelight of war, and would reap satisfaction by exploiting even death itself. The old Victorian phrase beloved of Thackeray as a label for a certain type of elderly damsel has more appropriateness than appears on the surface. The 44 old soldier ” is never so conspicuous as in war time, witness the Nelson Hotel at the Cape in the South African war, and the Hotel Folkestone at Boulogne in the European war. Scandalous stories, not a few, went uncontradicted; and it is too late to contradict them now r . But when all is said of these exploiters of war, and I met them all, I can think of only one who w 7 as not a worker to more or less useful ends; and some w 7 ere benefactors worthy a bidding prayer. A notable list of the courageous, hard-working and generous women could be made out. Up in Belgium w'here I was, what quiet, unchronicled work was done by Miss MacNaughten, the author, with her food store at Fumes. Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, was taken prisoner by the Germans while wwking in a German hospital. Her grace and beauty were quite powerless to prevent her being bullied and indeed insulted by German doctors; but she conquered at last by virtue of what may be described as aristocratic pluck. Finding politeness of no avail—so she told me—she adopted an attitude of command. At once, to her own amazement, the Germans fell at her feet. She ordered them this way and that, and finally, when no more good was to be done to the wounded, she ordered her own release and w r as instantly obeyed !
The War Office shilly-shallied in their treatment of these dames very much as they wavered in regard to journalists. The Duchess of Sutherland was
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herself threatened with arrest at Hazebrouck, where I saw my first engagement, by a British officer, though she was working like a galley slave to shepherd a train load of wounded into some shelter where their wounds could be treated. One of them said in a ra ge—and the wit will excuse the phrase—“ Why won’t the War Office make honest women of us? ”
How many hundreds of wounded would have suffered loss if Lady Dudley had not presided over the Australian hospital at Wimereux or Lady Hadfield not financed and managed another hospital near by, or the Duchess of Westminster not organized the Le Touquet hospital? How many thousands of soldiers found the food stalls of Mrs. Swan and her two charming daughters, or of Lady Angela Forbes, almost a necessity of life ?
Many of them got to work long before the necessity of such things occurred to the War Office. This must have been felt in Whitehall; or what was the excuse for their vacillation? Incredible controversies which occasionally reached the columns of The Times, raged. One energetic lady going back from her job in Boulogne was refused leave to land at Folkestone by the landing officer. She had come over, he said, with perfect correctness, against regulations. Of course she refused obedience, and a wordy warfare ensued. It would not have been out of place in Billingsgate. Said the officer in conclusion : “Then I shall telephone to the War Office.” “ That you will,” replied the lady, and hurried him off to the instrument. When they reached it she took command, asked for an officer she knew, and complained that an officious official, who clearly did not know his job, was trying to stop her landing. She won, of course, and duly caught the train to London.
It would not be too much to say that the united energy of the War Office, during the nation’s greatest crisis in history, was employed for two years and a
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half in the effort to expel from France one or two women who had established canteens or other forms of “Soldiers’ Aids.” The establishment that perhaps was most deeply dug in, that w T as most widely bruited was the canteen and soldiers’ baths established by Lady Angela Forbes at Etaples, that crowded spot dear to the British soldier under the name of Eat-apples. It had a reputation only second to “Wipers.” What a scene the huts presented! The best angle was from the kitchen, if a great dame spared time from her cooking to open a chink of the door, and point with infinite humour to the back of a noble lord painstakingly busy with a cash register, while a press of Tommies clamoured round him for tea tickets.
Some of the ladies found sanctuary with the French. Lady Tangye managed a hospital at Paris Plage with the aid of some young and lovely assistants, and the Duchess of Rutland began to prepare a hospital at the old Hardelot chateau, where Lady Diana was to be nurse. Doubtless the best work was, on the whole, done in England, at any rate in the latter half of the war. I remember discussing with one good lady, who was a temporary migrant to France, the ideal hospital. I said that if I was wounded I should like to go to Sutton Place, which at that time Lady Northcliffe had converted into a hospital for officers. “ I shouldn’t,” she said, “ because I should want to tell Northcliffe what I thought of his newspapers.” We were at the time lunching at Boulogne. The boat had just come in, and the boys in the street began calling out the names of the English papers. I asked my neighbour which she would like me to get her. “ Oh,” she said, not without a blush, “get me The Times and Daily Mail.” The incident pleased Lord Northcliffe immensely when I told him several months later. “ It just shows the value of being abused,” he said. The Boulogne newsboys always began their list in
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the same way. “ Daily Mail,” “ Times,” “ Mirror,” all three belonging to Lord Northcliffe, and two invented, created by him. The shouts of the boys were as real a compliment to his newspaper genius as the abufee of the lady.
No contrast between two peoples was ever brought out more strongly than in the relation of the women to the war. Nursing was still, when the w T ar broke out, regarded in France as a thing below the dignity of a woman who had any respect for her social relations; and I think, throughout the war, the French women suffered from want of work. They were certainly astonished, aghast, horrified at the activity of English women. The arrival of the W.A.A.C.S. was a thing their imagination quite “ boggled at.” A most charming and refined French lady asked me if it were true —she supposed it must be true —that the King of England had ordered them to be sent to France because he was afraid that the population would else be too greatly diminished after the war! The popular name for these lithe athletic girls, whose native slimness was enhanced to outward view by the straight simplicity of their khaki kit, was “ limandes,” flat fish!
Many of the French women were incredibly ignorant; and because of their ignorance afraid. In Calais and Boulogne many were quite persuaded that the English had decided to occupy the two towns permanently. They would point to the solid buildings, one of them was said to be in stone, erected by us, to the organization of the control, and tell, I know not what absurd stories, of British designs. Reflections of this feeling were to be found even among the intellectual who were best infornfld. A very clever woman, connected with the proprietors of the Paris Matin, said to me in Calais in 1914, “ We are very fond of you, you know, but we sometimes wonder if we shall ever get rid of you.” She
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spoke of the length of the leases we had taken of various sites and buildings. It is necessary to point out, even though the lady was charming and complimentary, that the French owners of the buildings and sites resolutely insisted on leases longer by years than any of our people desired or were likely to find profitable.
It was difficult just at first to appreciate the psychology, the mental attitude of the French women towards their allies. Among special admirers of the British was the proprietress of one of the larger hotels in Boulogne. She was what I may call for want of a better word, a lady in every sense of the term ; and her appreciative kindness to British officers was conspicuous on all occasions. She even went out of her way to say that she preferred conversation with our people, because they did not misunderstand kindness or take any liberties. One day a young British officer, really touched by her attentiveness, made an effort to say something a little pretty when he got up to go. He would be in the trenches to-morrow. “ Madame,” he said, “we go to fight for you.” In an instant her fac£ flushed with anger, and she broke out into a round of abuse. What did he mean by saying such a thing! He came over to fight for his own country, not hers. It was scandalous that he should make such a hypocritical pretence. He was left utterly dumbfounded and unhappy; and she refused to speak a word to any of the Englishmen staving in the hotel for several davs.
Her outburst was the first indication I had had of the intense sensitiveness of the Frenclf on this subject. Any hint that the British had come into the war for the sake of France, for any other than selfish motives, hurt their egoism unbelievably. The feeling was understandable, but the poor young officer in the Boulogne hotel only meant to say that he was glad to break a lance for the sake of grace and beauty. Perhaps he had not turned his compliment
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as graciously or as neatly as a better linguist might have done.
Sometimes the retail mind that marks many a French manageress of hotel or home, slightly embittered the relations between the British soldier and the French hostess. One very great lady, the owner of a magnificent chateau, came to tea with a British General, and at the conclusion presented him with a bill for ten shillings and a request for immediate payment, on account of a hedge alleged to have been broken by the soldiers. In the towns, the Briton was undoubtedly exploited. Nevertheless, the relations on the whole were wonderfully cordial, especially between the Tommy and the peasant.
“Tommies very nice. Officers beaucoup swank,” was one verdict given me by a peasant woman close to the front. The sentiment and the idiom w r ere typical. How the two conversed is a miracle no one could quite fathom; but a lingua franca, with a vocabulary of about fifty words at the outside, was evolved and served for all sorts of communications. Its standard phrase was Bonne and No bonne. It was universal. At Ilesketh Pritchard’s sniping school one day I saw a British instructor, maddened by the helplessness of a Portuguese student, seize the rifle and demonstrate the right and wrong position. “This bonne,” he said, “This no bonne,” and the Portuguese understood at once. A pleasing phrase was used to me by the daughter of a farmer who had been entertained not wisely but too well by a cavalry mess. “Whisky no bonne,” she said. “Father came home last night beaucoup zigge-zagge, beaucoup zigge-zagge.” The standard description of any person or thing that was stout or strong was “beaucoup bully-beef.” At a very tragic crisis when the inhabitants of a village were forced to flee, a tearful maid explained that her mother was much “ too bully-beef to run away. So mother was taken away on a lorry.
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The relations between two peoples speaking different languages and using different coinages must necessarily be difficult. Boulogne was a French town, but a British base; and the double rule was compact of difficulties, against which Mayors and Governors, Assistant Provost-Marshals and Chief Intelligence Officers were continually barking their shins. I heard and saw a British military policeman order the Mayor of Calais off the Quai with an abrupt “ Allez, allez.” He was told to keep the space clear and he kept it, irrespective of persons, with the help of one of the few French words in his vocabulary.
It was my fate to be cabined at Boulogne for several months in the early part of 1915, with only rare journeys to the front; to see day after day the ambulances go by with the feet of the wounded protruding; to meet agonized parents, who had hurried across to hear the wails of our wounded for more shells. The weary depression was not relieved by the rather vulgar gaieties, common to base towns. In any canteen you could tell at a glance which men were down from the front and which belonged to “base details.” The fighters were polite, deferential, grateful. The inhabitants of the base grumbled and stole. No mug or spoon was safe from them; and more serious thefts were brought to light from time to time. Those grim puns of old John of Gaunt came into my mind every time I went to lend a hand at a canteen. “ Base Court, where kings grow base ” —and the rest. Indeed the baser sort of both sexes were miserably common. At one time camp followers, many of them from Belgium, poured in; but a deputation of Boulogne women to the Mayor led to their rapid ejection. The puns, Shakespearean and other, on that word base were forced on people by the obvious justness of the application. One of the visitors at this time was the Bishop of London, who
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thought, so he said, that he was going to be told improper stories when his host first began to talk of base details.
The base was a base of gloom, of lies, scandal and of bogus gaiety. Magnificent work was done by many people. The Red Cross perfected its organization, and finally won a deserved reputation for doing what had to be done with the maximum speed and the least red tape. It was a relief to go into the offices. The hospitals on the whole were well managed, and the sea transport very well managed. But there were exceptions even here. One old officer, an Irishman with a heart of gold, came over with his own car, a machine he loved like a child, to do voluntary work for a hospital. One of his first jobs was to drive over two medical officers from an overseas hospital, into Boulogne. He sat in his car in the street till long after midnight, waiting till a carouse in the hotel was completed. Such things bred a moral sickness almost mortal in its effect. C. S. Montagu, of whom I was to see much before the war was over, has published a story called “ Disenchantment.” But not all the disillusionment he felt over a course of years could approach the disgust of this fine old officer. Then, and till he left ill with disgust, he knew that he and his car were constantly employed for base uses. The sacrifice was vain.
Perhaps such examples do not give quite a true general picture of Britain in France, even in the early part of 1915; and every month of the year the organization of the bases improved, and, I think, the relations of the people. A considerable debt was due in Boulogne to Mr. Comber, an energetic and tactful don who came from Pembroke College, Cambridge, to be Chief Intelligence Officer. His perfection as a linguist, the cheerfulness of his outlook, and indeed of his appearance, ensured the smoothness of international relations. It is odd.
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and English, that we were singularly fortunate in our Intelligence Officers, though the service was organized from hand to mouth. I suppose few incidents were more ludicrously amateur than the selection of the original batch of young Intelligence Officers in the first week of August, 1914. I knew many of them; and the whole story of the corps formation.
Lieutenant A , a popular member of some of the best clubs in London, bought an extra star, fixed it on his uniform, invaded the War Office as a captain, and suggested that he should collect a group of bright young men to accompany the army to France in the capacity of Intelligence Officers. Leave was given. In the course of two days he gathered together a score and more, who were paraded one morning behind the War Office. One of them (whose relations were friends of mine) appeared in a tail-coat with a sword wrapped in brown paper! An officer went down the line, and selecting them at haphazard, told one group to go to Southampton on motor-cycles, and the others to appear there with a horse! My best friend in the group, with magnificent assurance, commandeered the best horses from a Dorset hunt, of which he knew the master. Another, whose name is well known as a writer of fiction, finished the journey in a cart, along with his motor-cycle. He had never ridden one before, and not unnaturally broke down. I believe all of them did w T ell. They had brains and initiative, and were not hampered by military conventions or any knowledge of their job. Many went up to Mons, and back to the Marne, were pitch-forked into experiences as novel as terrible, but rejoiced in it all.
One of them was afterwards Intelligence Officer in a base town. He told me that never in his memory had he enjoyed life so thoroughly as during the retreat. Every detail was etched in his memory
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with the vivid salience of a green elm against a July thunder cloud. What a glorious muddle it all was! Food was dumped here, there and everywhere in the hopes that the retreating troops might find it. Occasionally those who could not eat it all poured oil on it and lit it to save it from German throats. At Le Cateau, one of these bright young men, straight from a London Club, was provided with a hundred odd French peasants and ordered to see that a trench was dug. He had little idea of what a trench ought to look like, or in what direction this one should face. However, some staff officer gave him a diagram of a military trench, and indicated to him the points of the compass. He and his civilians had scooped out a sort of hen-scratch before morning, when they were ordered to retreat. A few days later he read with a mixture of pity and amazement that our army had “ retired on a prepared position at Le Cateau.”
My experience was that of the small group who really enjoyed the war—what a triumph of vitality that enjoyment implies!—almost all were civilians. By far the most zealous that I knew was a member of the Stock Exchange. He was bald and fifty; but was accepted among the first group of interpreters, or “ interrupters,” as the army calls them. These were at least as amateur a crowd as the Intelligence Officers, and presently were disfranchised to make room for interpreters proper. But my friend of the Stock Exchange had become much too useful to be given up. His unit clave to him, against all regulations; and before he left them he had performed every odd function imaginable. He became an pxpert on trench tramways. He had crept into No 'Jan’s Land and listened to Germans talking. He had interrogated prisoners as they were captured. It was found impossible to give him a decoration for any or all his services because he had no locus standi, though in the sequel, and after much
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trouble, he achieved the rank of lieutenant. He said to me after one especially exciting bout of experiences, “ I never before knew that life could be such a happy thing. I lived in offices. I made money, and lost money. I was hampered and afraid, entangled in social and economic worries. But this life is incredibly free from care and full of interest and good-fellowship.” He waxed eloquent in words of which I only recall the drift, though I hear his very voice and see his eager look. The truth was that he discovered for the first time that he possessed the gift of physical courage. Most of us in our cabined existence, passed in the hurly-burly of artificial conditions and standards, do not discover whether we are cowards or heroes, in a physical reference. And our friends do not know. There is probably no pleasure so great as the sudden sense that you can face danger without excessive fear. You cry, “ Eureka.” You have made the discovery of your life. You are master not slave. “ The worst turns the best. The black minute’s at an end.”
I spent many months of the war with another civilian, who confessed to extracting from shell-fire a mental stimulus quite new and splendid. He too was fifty years old, or more, and the father of many children. When the war broke out he hurried to a barber, who dyed his fine mop of white hair a good rich browm. So disguised, he was accepted by the sportsman’s brigade as a promising recruit of thirtyeight years. He fought through Loos and rose to be a sergeant. Then by some accident and the want of permanence in the dye his age was discovered, and simultaneously his high intellectual quality. He was given a commission and served ft the rest of the war in the Intelligence Branch. I used to think that towards the end he lost a little of his perverse mothlike desire to hurry to the spot where shells were falling or to exhibit himself on the skyline at a spot
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registered by the enemy’s guns; but he still on occasion took shells as a mental tonic.
This courage is a strange capricious thing, often akin even to its opposite, cowardice. Here are three stories, each literally true, though for various reasons it seemed to me best at the time to write them as if they were fiction; and now it is as well to keep to the original form.
I
“ The man’s a born coward. Take my word for it, he’ll be missing one of these days.” So said one officer. The other was of much the same opinion, but he added, “ All the same I’ve seen those nervy fellows turn up trumps.”
The man they spoke of was one of the obvious cowards, because he was a self-conscious coward, always thinking of his own cowardice. Unlike many others, he was less afraid at night, when he could not Ire seen, than by day, when the eyes of critics were upon him. The darkness might have saved him ; but one day someone said in his hearing that the worst of having a coward in the trench was the effect on the other men; and in truth fear and courage are just about equally contagious. But the maxim was unfortunate. The coward kept saying to himself, “ If I make the others funk I had better be away,” and daily, against his will, schemes of escape of the maddest sort waltzed round his brain but brought no decision.
At last this rage of indecisive misery reaehed a pitch that became intolerable. The night was moonless but elear, and from the pit of the trench the stars seemed to look down with a pitiless scrutiny, which added to his wretchedness more than any sane and solid mind could well understand. Before he knew what he was doing the coward slipped over the parapet
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and began to make his tremulous way towards the German trenches. Further fears now seized him and he sidled off to the left, afraid to surrender, afraid to return. So for a while he w r andered, an insane vagrant, through the purgatory of No Man’s Land beneath the accusing stars.
He could not remember afterwards how he came to see so suddenly the thing in front of him, but his belief, from a muddled recollection, was that he had fallen flat on his face upon seeing the explosion of a star shell. At any rate, there within a yard or so of his eyes was the muzzle of a machine-gun hidden with devilish cunning in a pit well outside the German lines.
He heard a gruff whisper and the muzzle moved. With as little reasoned thought as when he fled from his trench he jumped past the muzzle, pulled aside a mud-covered plank over the hole, and when real sanity returned to him he found himself in a spacious enough room with two—he thought two—dead Germans lying in front of him. At any rate, the machinegunners were dead, and he had killed them.
In his excitement he was conscious, he said, of a sense of being born again. He had meant to call “ Kamerad ! ” to the first Germans he approached. He had rehearsed all sorts of forms of surrender, but somehow instead of obeying reason he had attacked the Germans as a ferret attacks a rabbit and had killed them dead, stone dead. His brain and will were clear.
Quickly and silently he released the machine-gun, dragged it out of the hole, took it on his back, and returned to his trench helped by the light of the now kindly stars and a faint hint of dawn.
The next day, much against his will, he was sent into hospital with a very severe strain in the back and a flesh wound in the calf, got somehow' in the struggle. While he lay there he longed, as not one in a hundred longs, to go back to the trenches, that
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he might exercise this new possession of his, this strange thing called courage. The surgeon saw his name in the honours list a few days after he left the hospital for the convalescent camp.
ii
It was a foregone conclusion that the verdict would be guilty, and the sentence—to be shot at dawn. One might well be sorry, with Wordsworth, for “what man has made of man,’’ if this lusty sergeant, of sufficiently long and honourable service, had become deserter. Would anyone two or three months ago have picked out this man of all men for coward or even “ skrimshanker ”?
The fact is steadily dawning on even the Judge Jeffrey’s type who still remain that the delicate, sensitive, complex mind of man may induce actions which cannot be judged as bare, isolated facts and labelled with such-and-such a degree of criminality.
Fncler this dawning notion, this nascent sense of psychology or mind-science, the sergeant was sent to a great nerve specialist. At the interview they sat together in a room looking over the Channel, studded now, as throughout the German menace, with craft of every sort and kind. The doctor had failed to find in his patient any malady, named or unnamed, hut he was not going to give the man up to death without wrestling as hard as a doctor could wrestle with a mortal illness.
The two began to talk of shipping. “Is that a torpedo-boat or a destroyer?” asked the doctor, nodding towards the sea, and at the word driving a needle into the soldier’s leg as his head was turned awav.
Quite quietly, in the even, depressed voice in which he had spoken throughout, the man replied that it was a British destroyer. He did not start, he did
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not seem even aware that his leg had been tampered with. The doctor heaved a sigh of infinite relief.
It is not necessary to describe the rather complicated and numerous tests which followed the primitive trial with the needle. It is enough that they proved beyond all doubt that the burly sergeant was in this strange condition : that the nerves on one side of his body were absolutely numb to painful sensation, though perfectly sound on the other side. What the malady is named does not matter. You may describe it as hysteria, as a form of paralysis or shock, or what not. The fact was that something had reduced the man to a one-sided state, and his actions were likely to be as one-sided as his nerves. The pretty mechanism of the cells of the brain was out of gear, and the man was for the while only half a man, and therefore unmanly.
— 7 j The firing squad were not wanted in the morning; and their almost victim will probably fight again, as well as ever. The doctor who discovered the malady also discovered the cure. Both were mental.
in
The young lieutenant was brought into hospital, wounded rather badly in several places. But his wounds were not so serious as they looked. All were doing well, and he showed unusual impatience to be cured. “ I must get back to the trenches,” he said ; “ I must get back.”
This uneasiness of mind was the only thing that hindered his progress. Something, it seemed, was on his mind, and was likely to stay there till it was confessed and faced. The confession came quietly and unexpectedly.
A friend went to see him, just as he was waking from a doze, and he began to talk freely as a child will talk when it is tired.
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“ We were to go over the parapet at five-five a.m., and I never was so frightened in my life. I heard one of the men say, ‘ The lootenant don’t look half green, does he ? ’
“ Then the moment came. As soon as we got on the run I saw with the tail of my eye the captain fall, and for twenty yards I was thinking of nothing in the world but this—whether I could pretend not to see that I was left in command. It would have been a rotten way to die, shirking like that. But I think I shall do better next time if I can get the chance.”
Then the friend told him what had happened in the action. The self-styled shirker had reached the barbed wire, which had been untouched by the bombardment, an absurd distance in front of his men.
He was hit twice while trying to cut it. He was hit once again as he lay on the ground. The fourth wound was got fifteen hours later while he was helping a Tommy, just about as badly wounded as he was, back to the trench.
The account cheered the invalid, but still, he says, the one vivid impression left in his mind is that he pretended for a while not to see that it had fallen to him to lead the company.
CHAPTER VI
OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE
An official policy at last —The five correspondents—Censorship— General Haig v. the journalists—Deceiving the deceivers —Gullible Germans —The need for publicity—The Somme— Casualties—A General’s apologia—Neglect of essentials—The British handicap—“ The Factory of Frightfulness ” —Arras— The excellence of our artillery—The cavalry—German prisoners —Messines—Official candour—A suicidal Colonel —Some of our Generals—Sir Charles Harington—General Monash—General Plumer —Who make the best soldiers? —Schoolmasters, actors, journalists.
TOWARDS the middle of 1915 the War Office was bullied, largely by Lord Northcliffe, who understood the art, into the adoption of a definite policy on war correspondence. Five men were put into officers’ uniform, less stars and crowns, and composed into a unit, provided with press officers, a chateau in France, many motor-cars, and an elaborate outfit. I joined them towards the end of the year at Tilcque, a chateau just outside St. Omer. We had a fight for it a little later with General Rawlinson, who sent an A.D.C. with very curt manners to inspect our bedrooms; but we won. It was the first of the press victories, and the battle was watched with much interest at headquarters, for General Rawlinson was a masterful person. For the rest of the war five correspondents supplied most of the news that was not contained in the official communiques, and they wrote some of those. The first idea was that each newspaper should give its ow r n man a turn; but in the sequel the same five held the fort. H. Perry Robinson represented The Times and Daily News, an oddly assorted pair;
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Percival Phillips, the Morning Post and Daily Express ; Philip Gibbs, the Daily Telegraph and Daily Chronicle. Originally I was to represent the Daily Mail and Standard, but the Standard died incontinent. 11. Russell, a son of Clark Russell, represented Reuter’s. H. M. Tomlinson, on behalf of the Daily News, sometimes took Robinson’s place ; and his sturdy grip on realities delighted both the army and his colleagues. When I reached Tilcque, Prevost Battersby was representing the Morning Post. He is one of the best all-round men that I ever met: a writer of charm and distinction and knowledge, a soldier, an international hockey player, a fine musician, a good carpenter, and astonishingly adept at certain country pursuits, mowing with a scythe, for example. At various times this and that place was filled by temporary substitutes. They included H. W. Nevinson, Filson Young, afterwards editor of the Saturday Eeview, Percival Gibbon and George Dewar, afterwards editor of the Nineteenth Century. Frederick Palmer was for a long time the sole representative of the United States, and for the most part shared a chateau with us. His little sketch of the group, published in a subsequent book, is amusing. In it he bade farewell: “To Robinson with his poise, his mellowness, his wisdom, his wellbalanced sentences, who had seen the world round from mining camps of the w r est to Siberian refugee camps; to ‘ our Gibbs,’ ever sweet tempered, writing his heart out every night in the human wonder of all he saw in burning sentences that came crowding to his pencil point, which raced on till he was exhausted, though he always revived at dinner to undertake any controversy on behalf of a better future for the whole human race; to blithesome Thomas, who never grew up, making words dance a tune, quoting Horace in order to forget the shells, all himself with his coat off and swinging a peasant’s scythe; to Phillips the urbane, not saying much but coming to the essential
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point, our scout and cartographer, who knew all the places on the map between the Somme and the Rhine and heard the call of Pittsburg; to Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in squadrons and barrages, who saved all our faces as reporters by knowing news when he saw it, arbiter of mess conversations, whose pregnant wit had a movable zero.”
The best of the “ press officers ” were Indian civil servants; and they had this additional virtue that they were not afraid of the army. Just before I reached Tilcque the chief of them was told in precise terms to “ waste the time of the correspondents.” The War Office had given way to pressure, but still clung to the idea of escaping any publicity not officially provided. Six months more fighting by newspaper proprietors, especially Lord Northcliffe and Lord Burnham, and by our group on the spot, were to elapse before General Haig and the rest made a final surrender : Cedit ensis calamo, but not at the first encounter.
Temperamentally, and by training, General Haig was opposed to war correspondents. The first time that I had an interview with him he brought up the incident of The Times military correspondent. Colonel Repington came over by special invitation to spend a day or two at the front, and had written a dispatch which, it was alleged, caused a battery to be shelled. It was as good as proved that the shelling and the dispatch had no connection whatever; but the incident was deeply impressed on the military mind. When General Haig resuscitated the incident I could not help retorting : “ But he was a soldier! ” I thought then and I think now, that a civilian, a trained journalist, accustomed to reporting events without overstepping the limits of the case, is much less likely to give away any secrets than a writer technically skilled in warfare. He is not interested in the technique but is deeply interested in the
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more human and more general aspects. The five journalists worked under censors who lived with them and censored what they wrote on the spot; but from first to last they were their own best censors. It is odd that one of the few severe critics of their judgments was Colonel Repington himself.
On the occasion of this interview given to several of us in a chateau near Montreuil early in the summer of 1916, General Haig denied the coming offensive. It was doubtless an act of wisdom; but it seemed vain. I had in my pocket a sketch of the essential facts of the preparation. I had visited the line and the special dug-outs made for the staff. I knew the date approximately and the line of attack exactly. This excessive discretion could not but seem a little superfluous.
About the same date two of us went to visit the French at a point some thirty miles south of the intended attack along the Somme. Grouped picturesquely under some trees just behind the very peaceful front appeared a British battery. My French conductor pointed it out to me in a gorgeously stagy manner, as if the very core of Allied strategy lay in the spectacle. We visited the French trenches, found a French field gun in a forest clearing sown with oats to conceal the signs of traffic, and were allowed to fire it. I climbed a tree where a French sharp-shooter had fixed a machine-gun. It was “ magnificent, but not war.” We wrote pleasant, appreciative and discreet dispatches, but they disappointed our censors. One of them, a master of red tape and convention, was reduced to the point of asking one of us w r hy we had not made any allusion to the British battery. The cat, which I very well knew to be in the bag, was now out of it. We had been invited with the object of hinting to the enemy that the attack would be delivered to the south of the Somme. Neither of us, though for different reasons, had committed the desired indiscretion. It
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had to be added later at the invitation of the censor. The example will indicate how fatuous a policy it is to deceive, or try to deceive your own agents. It is a little surprising that more definite attempts were not made to use the press as an aid to strategy or tactics. If an army commander really thought that one dispatch in The Times could, within a day or two of its appearance, be translated into definite action by a German battery of the front, he should surely have made the inference that other paragraphs in The Times could misdirect German batteries. What fun he could have had if he had persuaded the enemy’s gunners to pour a layer of expensive shells into some innocent ploughed field !
Such fun was enjoyed. On the eve of the battle of Messines that ingenious engineer, General Sir Blair Hunter Weston, set up a number of empty tents on the south of the coming attack, and by shamming activity attracted whole congregations of German shells to the spot. They spoiled some excellent canvas, but nothing more precious. Among other devices of this date were a quantity of most persuasive lay figures of soldiers designed for showing above the parapet of empty trenches. On the whole the German command was gullible; and probably the one deficient arm of a marvellously efficient organization was the Intelligence. Officers in this department lacked the gift of simplicity. Their vision was spoiled by a too conscious screwing up of the eyes, by a sort of artificial squinnying.
The best example that came under my observation was a report captured during the taking of the first section of the Hindenburg line in front of Arras in 1918. The chief German Intelligence Officer had before him a mass of detailed information. He had taken each item and set his own comment over against it. The airmen had reported the arrival of tanks. Opposite this was a caustic complaint of the optical mania prevailing among German airmen.
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They could not go up without seeing tanks. The arrival of many trains was reported. The too intelligent officer deduced that the trains were probably empty. Finally, in the face of a mass of other corroborative detail, he came to the definite, the triumphant conclusion that “no attack is meditated in the direction of Arras.” The man gave you the impression of an inability to see things as a whole, to trace a tendency or common attribute in the variety of detail before him. Such blindness on this particular occasion negatively completed the success of one of the cleverest movements of troops in the war. The sudden transference of what may be called the Canadian army from the Somme to Arras was a singularly perfect piece of organization. It was so quick, silent and complete that much of it was unperceived even within our own army. About the same time the nose of the German was attracted by a red herring dragged with great ingenuity in a different direction. An engineer friend of mine, a civilian, went up north with some tanks with instructions to be obvious. He was duly seen, and perhaps in order to find out what was happening the Germans raided the trenches. By an incredibly lucky fluke they took in the raid two Canadians, units in a small group who had been sent there in preparation of this false information. Perhaps the news was in front of the Intelligence Officer when he decided that no attack was meditated at Arras.
These events were still two and more years ahead of us at the time that the General was denying the coming of the battle of the Somme. On tlie eve of it the War Office and the army—they did not always see eye to eye—both surrendered to the press. General Charteris, the chief Intelligence Officer, came to us at night in Amiens, and having carefully closed the doors and inspected the room almost
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stagily, announced the Great Endeavour and suggested an appropriate spot beside the road info Albert for watching the battle. A great part of the information supplied to us by the Intelligence was utterly wrong and misleading. We sent off in common, on their authority, a short cable message to say that all \vent w r ell for England and France. Neither we nor the Intelligence knew how complete and costly in life was the defeat from Gommecourt to Albert. Odd units had penetrated great distances and sent up signals, but the remnant of them was not seen again till the war was over, except for a few Northumbrians recaptured in a cellar at Contalmaison a fortnight later. The dispatches were largely untrue so far as they dealt with concrete results; but I think that they must stand as in some measure an historic event. Lord Northcliffe believed that nothing in his time had carried a deeper appeal to the public, who felt that for the first time they were to be allowed to hear what was happening to their civilian army. The army in general at last perceived that publicity was a necessary accompaniment of an army composed of men recruited from every class and county. For myself, on the next day and yet more on the day after that, I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written, for the very good reason that it was untrue, so far as I had transgressed the limits of description. Almost all the official information was wrong. The vulgarity of enormous headlines and the enormity of one’s own name did not lessen the shame. Nevertheless the fruits of the new policy that allowed much longer and fuller dispatches were good and immediate. Two letters reached me from England to say that without these dispatches it would have been quite impossible to persuade the men who stayed at home to work through Bank Holiday. All the newspapers received a host of letters of thanks from the public, especially parents, and from the newer men in the army. Such
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letters as these are the solaces of a profession that must necessarily offend at intervals; and is more apt to evoke protest than compliment. The world loves nothing so much as discovering little errors.
One soldier’s parents wrote thanks for the accuracy of a description of the Gommecourt fighting. Now I knew the trenches at Gommecourt particularly well. An old friend of mine, with whom I had played scores of cricket matches, was in command of a Leicester battalion; and I spent a day in his front trench the day before the great battle opened. What most struck me during that particular visit was the astonishing fineness of the senses of some of the men. Anyone may see the shell of a howitzer soon after it leaves the muzzle; but the dull cloud that you know must be the shell vanishes in the twinkling of an eye. But there was one sergeant, invaluable as an observer, who could see the shell fall. There was no question at all of his capacity. Not many hundred yards in front of the trenches held by this Leicester battalion was a line of trees; and it was suspected that some of them were used by enemy observers. They were therefore swept from time to time with machine-gun bullets. While the firing was in progress two of our observers agreed in the report that they had seen a telescope fall from a particular tree.
Probably the best listener in the army was a Canadian engineer who was a peculiar expert in counter-mining. Not once or twice when his colleagues wished to blow up the approaching tunnel would he hold them back. He would listen day after day to the enemy’s taps, and say exactly what was happening, but, as he explained, took no counter steps till he heard the taps of two picks at a short distance from one another. Then it was that he knew that the German miners were making a broader cavity for the explosive at the end of the tunnel. Now was the time, when thev
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had wasted the maximum of effort, to blow this tunnel in.
No interview during the war affected me quite so deeply as the apologia of one of the Generals commanding the left wing of the army on July Ist in the neighbourhood of Gommecourt. It was given at his headquarters on July 3rd. With what seemed to me amazing candour, he told the exact casualties of various units under his command and suggested that I should take them down. He was aware that I was particularly interested in the Newfoundlanders, some of whom I had known at home. They were not in the first early morning attack, but went up in support about ten o’clock, when the light was good and there was no benefit of barrage. The complement that went forward was made up of twenty-two officers and nearly eight hundred men, almost all of splendid physique and hardihood. All the twenty-two officers were killed or wounded, and there were five more officer casualties among the few who went out to recover those who could be recovered. Of the men, fewer than a hundred came out unwounded. Other units, many other units, suffered losses not to be paralleled in the history of the war. The Newfoundlanders saw no enemy, did not in any real sense fight. They were slaughtered like sheep. How shall one say whose fault it was? The disaster was immediately due to bad information, either to the misinterpreting of signals in the mist, or to the obedience to signals that ought not to have been sent up. Every kind and sort of detail had been thought out before the attack. The men had been drilled, perhaps too well, in the minutiae. They all knew where to store bombs, just how to send up light signals when this and that objective was gained. A most elaborate system had been worked out for permanently supplying water to the final objective. It is probable that from some trenches single men sent up signals.
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Certainly very small groups did; quite oblivious of the grim truth that they were isolated in the midst of the enemy. In the sequel, so far as they could be seen at all in the mist and smoke, they were taken as evidence that such and such trenches were in British hands; and reserves were sent forward to support them and consolidate the position. “We could not have been beaten,” said the General at the end of his apologia, “ except by an enemy who fought with the utmost bravery. He was told that if he stopped us the war would be over. The machine-gunners left their trenches and fired coolly from the parapets. Nothing like it has ever been seen.” It was an emotional moment. The tale, indeed, was almost unbearable, as was the calamity. Yet at the time, and with greater conviction afterwards, I could not help thinking that everything had been thought of except the essentials.
The enemy fought finely; but nevertheless a hundred or two Germans from Gommecourt ran out to surrender at the very opening of the battle. For a while, till they saw the mistakes of the attack, many of them were in terror. We were soon to learn—and even the theory though not the practice was developed and was being taught—that the closer troops follow their own barrage the fewer are the casualties. Some went so far as to say that the more men killed by our own guns the smaller the total sum of losses. In this attack the men were often immense distances behind their own barrage and quite unprotected by it. Pitiable decisions were taken over some smaller matters. At one army conference just before July Ist the question arose at what hour a mine opposite Beaumont Hamel should be exploded. The time fixed gave the enemy ample time to fortify the crater after recovery from the shock. Later, in 1917, our men ran the wiser risk of beinjr hit by bits of the falling debris.
Such things had to be. The civilian armv was
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engaged in its first ordeal on a grand scale; and it was bigger than the regulars could adequately command. How infinitely superior was the organization and the leadership at Passchendaele, in the capture of Beaumont Hamel at the end of the year, and in the great battle of August Bth, 1918, and in the sequent pursuit!
Throughout France terrible tales were circulated of the British losses in the battle of the Somme; and it was often added that they were due to stupidity. Some English critics said bitterly that Britons had been killed wholesale to persuade the French that we were playing our part. It was in truth our fortune throughout the war to be forced to do something different from wdiat we thought best to do. AVe wished to go to Belgium in 1914 and maintain a constant and increasing pressure from Antwerp, on the German flank. This was doubtless the best policy; if it could have been permitted. But the French insisted on our presence on their left wing. So w r e hurried to Mons, and hurried yet faster back again. We wished to put off the battle of the Somme till the civilian army was more ready; but other counsels prevailed. We had no wish a year later to plunge into the mud of Flanders and wade to the Passchendaele Ridge; but we were forced to the sacrifice by the depression of our allies following Nivelle’s defeat and the French mutiny. We wished to complete the Passchendaele campaign by consolidating the position on the ridge, when the second army, who had the business in hand, w r ere ordered to Italy. I never saw a man quite so completely disappointed as the Chief of Staff, when the order reached him. The fact is that our Generals were continually doing what seemed to them second best, sometimes what seemed to them intrinsicallv wrong.
The first event that gave the French in general any suspicion that the British could fight scientifically —they had always understood that we could resist
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stubbornly, as on the Aisne, and die bravely as at Beaumont Hamel —was after the battle of Arras in the spring of 1917. The spectacle was of unequalled magnificence, some of the results scarcely credible. Not long before it I had visited our “ Factory of Frightfulness,” a farm not far from St. Omer, where all the latest devices of scientific warfare were practised. I had seen the huge flame throwers shoot out their devastating gases, just like a dragon in the fairy books, and scorch to perdition everything within a hundred yards and more. I saw the projectors at work, tossing sometimes cylinders of poisoned gas, sometimes of inflammable gas, a distance of a thousand yards. One of the ideas of the moment was a shell containing filings burned into molten fireworks by the explosion. They were very little good in practice, but their use at Arras certainly added terror to the already apprehensive enemy. Nothing could exceed the wild splendour of these molten drops as they fell through a Hell’s Mouth of green and yellow smoke.
But this was a mere spectacle. The miracle of the battle w r as not clear to me till I visited the first cageful of German prisoners. I found there a little bevy of English soldiers defending a hundred or so of German soldiers from several thousand of their fellow y s. The thousands were infantry, the hundreds artillery; and the infantry were furious to the point of madness against the artillery because they had not supported them in the battle. Finally the gunners were marched off separately lest they should be lynched. The explanation of the failure of the German artillery was the excellence of our counterbattery work. We had concentrated on the target of the enemy howitzers with such success that throughout the thunderstorm of bombardment preliminary to the battle and during the battle, only four of our own guns were hit. Some few fresh guns on the east of Arras were unmasked onlv in the
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battle itself and were near enough to fire almost point-blank. The marking down of the German batteries had been very accurate, in spite of the cunning of concealment. In walking the battle-field the day after the battle I found one sham battery composed chiefly of flue pipes; but the absence of shell holes round it suggested that the device w r as too obvious to deceive our observers.
The inspection of a battle-field before the burying parties have crossed it would be scarcely bearable, were it not for curiosity, and the feeling that man must endure to see what others have endured to suffer. On this field I first saw the very narrow, strong concrete pillar boxes used by the enemy for observation. They held one man whose business was to signal to the trench just behind him the moment when the barrage lifted and the attacking infantry were expected. In spite of the intensity of the barrage many were not so much as struck. If these boxes showed how possible it is to escape through the meshes of the heaviest fire, another section of the field witnessed the horrible precision of good artillery, especially of the howitzer. The strongest fortress in the German front was known as the Railway Triangle. High embankments built to carry the rails included a triangular space of ground. The Germans had dug deep trenches close to the bottom of the cliff defending them from British fire. The shelter appeared invincible. Yet our howitzer shells had been lobbed so high, had fallen so vertically, that they had scraped the invisible side of the embankment and quite destroyed the men resting, as they thought, securely in the trench. There were more dead men within this triangle than anywhere in the field. The battle of Arras gave the British army a new reputation in France. It was a magnificent success attained by careful, scientific organization. The attempts to develop it w'ere lamentable, as the histories tell; and the use of the cavalry was lament-
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able. While I was walking across the field with a staff officer after the battle, a considerable detachment of British cavalry had been sent forward and had taken up a position in the most obvious part of the plain. “We can’t go near them,” said my companion. “If they are not shelled to pieces presently, the age of miracles has returned.” So we turned to the left side of the field. The probable happened. Within a quarter of an hour a concentration of shells fell on the spot, and before we left not a horseman was to be seen.
A history of the cavalry in the war would make a pitiful story. How very often we saw them foregather before an attack, and heard their absurdly hopeful anticipation of finding “the Gap.” How invariably, until August Bth, 1918, they rode back again, themselves depressed, and depressing the whole population. The days succeeding the battle of Arras were perhaps their worst experience in the war. One detachment, depending on entirely false news of an infantry success, charged right up to a trenchful of Germans, but was happily saved by one of the sudden snow storms that marked the spring of 1917. It fell full in the face of the Germans, and under its blinding shelter the cavalry wheeled into retreat without loss.
How very often from July, 1916, till the end of the war I spoke with German prisoners! Their psychology was as astounding as the attitude of our men towards them. Going up to Montauban early in the Somme I met a single Tommy in possession of a single “ Fritz.” Both were severely wounded and very bloody. Fritz had this disadvantage, that he could not use his hands, while Tommy had been able to light a cigarette. We stood and talked on that blasted ridge in a smell of tear gas, while the shells fell with damnable iteration on Delville and Trones Wood, from where the two had escaped. The
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Tommy refused to take any interest in his wounds; but he was much interested in Fritz, whom he treated just as a man might treat his favourite dog. “ Wherever Igo Fritz goes. Don’t you, Fritz? ” he said, and taking the cigarette from his mouth he held it for the duration of a puff or two between Fritz’s lips. Then on they went, master with dog at his heels, and were lost in the shell holes.
Not all prisoners were so well conducted. Grim things happened. Did not an Irish sergeant, asked what had happened to his prisoner, reply that he “ w r ould have died anyway ”? But on the whole amazingly little rancour, or anything suggesting it, was observable. My memory holds a long gallery of prisoners, met in all sorts of places, and not one of them so much as suggested even sulkiness, much less hate. One picture is of a round merry face thrust out from between the curtains at the back of a lorry, as it might be a stage curtain. He shouted, for all whom it might concern, “ Off to the best city in the world, London! ” withdrew his head and waved a hand in its place.
In the very last days of the Somme, just after a V.C. had taken Beaucourt almost single-handed, one of the German Red Cross men explained his attitude to the war with the calmest philosophy. The soldiers, he said, were in the position of shareholders in a company. They were not receiving dividends and feared bankruptcy; but obviously the only thing to do was to give the directors, who had more to lose than anyone, a free hand in the hope that they might save the situation.
It was almost certain that ■when one German had given you an opinion another woidd give much the same. I heard this view expressed in less precise terms a good many times. At another date every other man pretended to believe that the war would presently end in a final German victory at Verdun, and that the defeats in the north were merely a
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clever ruse on the part of the High Command. I never heard any criticism on the capacity of the Chiefs. The N.C.O.’s invariably, so far as I saw, maintained discipline after capture. It was safe to trust them to keep their own men in order. They answered commands in a smart military manner, and went to work as if they were being drilled by their own officers.
Years afterwards some of them worked for me in making an English garden. They were energetic and cheerful; and only once did I detect any strong feeling. That was when I went to tell them that Liebknecht had been assassinated. Instantly one of the men stood upright, almost clicked his heels in a potato-bed, and breathed a deep “ Gott sei Dank.” He was a patriot and believed that German}’ would recover rapidly. “It will all depend on raw material,” he argued. “If she can get the stuff for her industries she will flourish. The world cannot do without a nation that works as hard as we work.” Having spoken he resumed his spade. Since he preached the national doctrine, he meant to practise it too.
The use of prisoners differed a good deal in France and England. Perhaps the cleverest use of prisoners belongs to the French. Very early in the war they sent a large number to Morocco, where (with the help of a number of steam rollers ordered from Peterborough) they made roads such as Napoleon would have applauded. I had evidence later that the sight of these men, captives of the French, acted as admirable propaganda, teaching the Moor that the German was the under-dog; and as we all know, the country became, when the war was over, one of the most popular of holiday resorts. The thanks were in part due to Lord Northcliffe. He sent Mr. Prioleau, a motorist who possesses a most charming style in narrative, to travel over these German-made roads and tell the world his experiences in the Daily Mail.
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It was a popular rumour that we were using our prisoners for a yet larger work. On coming back for a short leave I was told categorically by no less a person than a well-known headmaster that thousands of German prisoners were digging the Channel tunnel, and that it would be completed in a year or two! He treated my doubts with the sort of scorn thrown on those who refused to believe that armies of Russians had landed in England in 1914 ! It is a credulous world, especially in w r ar-time.
I date the complete surrender of Army and War Office to the press, June, 1917. The war correspondents always were in possession of some chateau or other; but took up residence for months at a time somewhere near to the scene of every campaign or battle. They were in Amiens during the Somme. It was but a dash in one of the four Vauxhall cars to Albert, that ugly, uncomfortable spot pecked at for years by German shells and finally annihilated by Allied shells. As one of the greatest of our artillery officers said to me about Bailleul, a town much loved by the British army, “You see, we had to have a straight barrage.” So the order was given; and friends completed what the enemy began.
During the Passchendaele campaign the correspondents were in Cassel, that well tee’d town which miraculously enough never received an enemy shell. It was a short run from there into Ypres; and not much of a walk over the Pilkem ridge into full view of the battle. We migrated there in May; and one of the first officers T saw in the street was that famous person, “C. O. Pigeons.” He had a genius for dealing with Homers. His “ dove buses,” usually London omnibuses with a dovecot on top, were to be seen at every headquarters. He used to judge the quality of the corps’ staff wholly by the wav thev treated their birds. He stopped me once as I was
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carrying some crates of birds up to the forward receiving depot or cage for prisoners. “ Ah,” he said, “ those come from General X. He always looks after his birds well.” The object of sending the birds to this forward cage was to get as quickly as possible to the headquarters any fact of importance in the fight of the day that might have been inadvertently blabbed by a prisoner in the flurry of the moment. On that particular occasion I stayed to see the first arrive. The chief fact to report was that the prisoners one and all stripped to the waist as soon as they were put into the cage, and with much assiduity proceeded to remove the lice from their vests and clothing.
The C. O. Pigeons was himself a stormy petrel. As soon as you saw his commanding person you knew that active operations were at hand. Just before the battle of Messines I met him in the streets of Cassel, and recognized the sign. Within a few hours a message was received from the headquarters of the Second Army that the Chief of Staff would like to see us that evening.
When we reached the map-lined room of the Casino on the crown of the hill, we were received by General Sir Charles Harington, as he now is. He was probably the best staff officer in France, and had the gift of lecturing with singular clearness and charm. His candour on this occasion left me aghast. War correspondents had multiplied much by this time. With American and French and Italian correspondents we composed almost a mob. But General Harington had decided to have his say, to put all his cards on the table. He sketched the great battle of the morrow, described exactly how the waves of troops were to go forward and where. He gave us elaborate barrage maps, and maps with the brown, green and blue lines marked. At the end he said, “ If we do not succeed to-morrow it will be all our own fault, for the army has given us every-
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thing we asked for." We were a long way from Mr. Churchill’s doctrine in 1914 that the war was to be fought in a fog and the only place for a war correspondent was in London!
And the Second Army did what it wanted, exactly- The great mines, laid a year earlier, exploded according to plan, the falling clay lumps almost hit our own charging troops. I stood waiting for zero almost alongside General Plumer ; and all the party had the same sensation at the moment of the explosion. The solid earth seemed to shift one way with all its burden and then after a perceptible pause shift back again, rather like a train stopping at a station. We w r ere standing on the slopes of one of those sudden, volcano-like peaks that crop up in Flanders. It is called the Scharpenberg, and served often as a grand-stand. How splendid, glorious, even beautiful battles looked from there! all glamour and fireworks! How different from the real battle, where bodies lay in tortures on the tortured mud. I doubt whether our gunners ever understood the sordid brutality of fighting quite like the infantryman up to this battle of Messines; but they were to know as much as any infantry a little later when their guns became well advertised targets below the Pilkem ridge; and men and guns both perished of mud and water as well as of iron and lead.
I used to go up the ridge to see an old Colonel, who was making roads there. They were knocked to pieces as he made them, of course. The ground reeked. Existence seemed compact that summer of mud and rain. The depression of it so worked on the Colonel that he had a passion to be killed, and his amusement was to see his visitors run the gauntlet. He took me over the ridge to the most obvious point, stretched a Cassandra-like finger towards the German batteries, and told us how they had registered the spot and would begin to shoot in a minute. The truth of his boast was soon verified. As I skulked
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into a shell-hole a 5 y fell between me and the Colom and one big chunk of it lobbed its course straig towards me. I see now the wild Colonel on t skyline, and the bit of iron Hying from him to n: Even at the moment, though I was not a little scare the scene struck me as bearing some fantasl resemblance to an episode in a partridge drive. T Colonel was beater and the chunk of iron the bir Someone must have shot, for it fell to earth befo reaching the shell-hole. “ Get him away,” said t Colonel’s Major, who hated the spot as much-as did. So we emerged from the butt, and the Color was so pleased when I told him that I was t frightened to stay that he retired without demr He was, of course, killed a little later. He want* to be, intensely.
J The Second Army (which before the finish w almost wholly responsible for the campaign, ai planned it with something like genius) accepted w correspondents, as I have said, root and branch. B the army still nursed some doubts. On returnii from one attack I met the Chief of Intelligence ai asked him how much I might tell. “ Say what y( like,” he said. “ Say what you like. But don mention any places or people! ” It did not occi to him that one’s style was a little cramped by su< a prohibition, and I did not ask him what he thougl was left of a battle after place and people we: subtracted. The column was written, nevertheles and passed the censor. What the public thought another question.
About this time a great number of letters reachc me and the newspapers asking why this and thr county regiment were never mentioned. “We wan to know what our boys are doing,” was the cener: emotion. I had many talks on the subject wit General Charteris and others. The standard answe was that no name must be mentioned that woul hint to the enemv the constitution of our battle line
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For this reason no name was “ released, was allowed to be published, unless there was evidence or a reasonable presumption that the enemy already knew what division faced them. The reason was sound enough as far as it went, but it had some unfortunate results. The onl} T divisions that remained in one corps continuously were the Canadian and Australian. The enemy were supposed always to know which corps was in front of them. The unit was too big to be concealed. So it came about that after most * engagements the war correspondents were informed that they could only mention Canadians and Australians. This had the effect of piling up the impression that the whole burden of the fighting was on the shoulders of the overseas troops. General Monash, who became General of what was known in the end as the Australian Army, once raised a small storm because the official account gave credit to
“ British troops ” for an exclusively Australian operation. He recalled this protest of his during a semi-public dinner at Melbourne four years after the war; and I felt compelled to ask him across the table whether he thought Australian or English troops had been worse treated on the altar of publicity. He most graciously acceded my point.
There was no General in France whose intellect and skill in organization I more admired than General Monash’s. You could not be in his company for five minutes without becoming aware that bis brain was a peculiarly fine instrument. He had tactical cunning in a high degree. I believe it was his device to hide the approach of tanks at night by drowning their noise in the noise of aeroplanes. He had also strategical grip, illustrated with particular precision in the engagements that preceded and followed the battle of August Bth, 1918, above all in the switching of the troops across the river before the battle of St. Quentin. It was a war of engineering,
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and he was a brilliant engineer, one of the very few who were successful in the higher places.
When the war was over he returned to engineering, and is to-day busy with the conversion of the brown coal deposit, near Melbourne, into electric power. The defence of Australia was left to General White, who competed with General Harington for the reputation of the best staff officer in the army.
General Plumer was too old a soldier to show his feelings; but that morning he gave the impression of a man delighting in the recovery of his liberty. For two long years he had stone-walled at Ypres, for a long time with insufficient troops. He held a grim and crucial line. All the while with patient wisdom he was building up his organization, bettering his staff and his apparatus, teaching all the fighting arts in schools scattered over the Flemish plain. People at home grumbled at him. It was a common complaint that he did nothing, even that he was not fit for his place. I saw a letter written to General Haig by an eminent man in England with the object of “ putting him wise ” about the public opinion at home, and I saw parts of General Haig’s very quiet and dignified reply. The strongest opinion in it was a tribute to General Plumer. He was sure that “ General Plumer was an asset.” His verdict became the general verdict after the battle of Messines, if not before. He himself must have felt that morning that at last he was able to strike a blow, to hit as well as endure, to prove that stone-walling was not the whole of his outfit. He knew positively that the mines that shook us from side to side were the gongs of a notable victory, won at slight cost as great battles go. He could not have looked so cheerful else. Yet the many times that one saw Generals on the eve of a battle one noticed in them, even in the more nervous, an appearance of reliefThey had worked day and night to perfect the plans.
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The labour at last was over, and for a General the eve of a battle was an idle time. The die had been cast for better or for worse. The event was out of his hands for a short while. He could mentally relax, like an editor when the paper has gone to press. General Plumer, perched at the top of that hill at Cassel (whence at night the star shells outlined some one hundred and fifty miles of the battle front), was like some old lighthouse-keeper, whose whole job it is to prevent wrecks. How that sea of mud below him must have been etched on his brain ! It was a nightmare country for some of us who drove almost daily through Poperinghe, Elverdinghe and so to Ypres, through a crescendo of ruin and danger till the far battlements of Ypres were reached and we groped our way to the core of the Divisional Headquarters. The defence here was impregnable, but the gloom abysmal.
I associate the place especially with the presence of General Watson, a newspaper proprietor from Quebec, who died after the war from strain. He had a wise head and a big heart. His A.D.C.’s were respectively well known as a writer of music-hall songs and an advertisement agent. They were capable at all times, but their real genius did not appear in full glory till the date came when the Canadian Division began to relieve French troops during the pursuit. The slick ceremonial of the entries and celebrations was never surpassed in times of peace and leisure.
It is a nice question which profession provided the best officers. Insurance agents will claim General Curry, though he was to become a don. Fie was as good as any other General, regular or amateur, with three or four exceptions. Schoolmasters did well : men such as Col. C. H. Jones, that energetic housemaster of Uppingham. They had orderly minds and were conscientious. Actors did well. They were cheerful and so fulfilled the chief
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duty of, at any rate, a trench officer. Journalists did well. They were not in the grip of conventions. Among my own close acquaintances in my own profession no little distinction was won by Colonel, now Sir Edward Grigg, who became chief Intelligence Officer to the Guards. Valentine Williams, son of one of the directors of Reuters, proved a born fighter. He could read a map, and did, in the middle of a hot battle, and had the gift of native courage that often goes with a neat and dapper appearance. He “ held up,” as they say in newspapers, the Napoleonic belief in the courage of dandies, if the word can be used of so hard-working and real a character. He had an uncomfortable experience during the battle of Le Transloy. A short shell —some fell half a mile short towards the end of the day—from our own batteries threw him up in the air. He was quite unperturbed, one of the battalion told me, but in going about the battle on his proper occasions, discovered that he was stone deaf. Happily his hearing returned after about two hours.
We are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” I met once that notable lion-hunter, Mr. Baldwin, who was said to be afraid of nothing. In an anecdote of a vanished sense he told me that he had wounded a buffalo which pursued him and his company. The natives vanished into thin air and he became the sole object of attack. For a period which might have been ten minutes, might have been an hour, he dodged the animal round a little group of trees; and at the end of an indeterminate period the buffalo fell dead. The natives re-emerged, took on a bodily presence, and rejoiced; but the real hunter, quite unconscious of fear, and therefore unafraid during the encounter, was startled to find that he could not give orders. The power of speech had quite deserted him, to return an hour or so later after a calming stroll along the edge of the wood.
Excess of concentration always takes its toll, even
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in journalism. One friend of mine, responsible for a London letter to the 4 ‘ Civil and Military In India, never began his letter, which was long and full, till the last possible moment. He was, and is, singularly strong in mind and body; but at post time on each Friday afternoon his native ruddiness was faded to a distressing pallor, and he was very nearly a physical wreck.
The journalist of all the journalists at the front who came nearest to being a soldier, in the sense that he shared the soldiers’ risks, day in day out, was Mr. Charles Bean, official correspondent of the Australian forces first at Gallipoli, then in France. He regarded it as his bounden duty to see everything with his own eyes. General White said to me, long after the war, that he regarded him as the bravest man he knew, because he went into danger of choice. His red head and lean, wiry frame were to be seen wherever trouble was; and all the while he worked at his job with untiring energy and conscience. And he showed high moral courage.
Of all the sudden strange breaks in discipline during the war the suddenest and strangest was the revengeful raid by some Australian troops on a certain woman’s quarters in Cairo. The news was sent to Australia with the same direct, uncoloured veracity as any episode in the war ; and the report was not popular. But the storm was faced and overcome.
Civil populations overseas were very ready to criticize their correspondents. An animated debate w r as raised in the New Zealand Parliament because Mr. Ross, their official correspondent, had cabled an account of a wood-cutting competition in a French forest! Mr. Ross was the oldest of the correspondents, with the exception of Sir H. Perry Robinson of The Times, but quite singularly young in years; and he owed his youth perhaps to his interests as a fisherman and naturalist. The critics themselves, for all their caustic comment, knew that
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New Zealand had chosen a worthy correspondent. After all, the wood-cutting, which I saw, was a very stirring competition in which the various nations and peoples engaged exhibited their qualities. The Maori who conquered the biggest beech at the highest speed gave the finest exhibition of lissom strength that I ever saw in man. But how the local French woodmen scorned them all—Australians, Canadians and the rest! One of them said to me that it was wicked to encourage or practise such wasteful methods. When the competition was over he chopped down a small tree as it should be chopped, at the root, so that not a sliver of good wood should be lost. He .proceeded slowly and methodically, and would have felled one perhaps to the Maori’s ten; but it was horrible to his eyes that a stump should be wasted, or even a large orifice permitted. As woodmen, these Britishers, for all their muscle, were below contempt. The whole theme and ceremony had its charm; but across twelve thousand miles it might sound unimportant in the ears of a people yearning to hear of the fortunes of their fighting division.
General Plumer and General Harington were not to be allowed to reap the full fruits of the campaign that began with the battle of Messines and ended with months of the most deadly and dogged fighting of the war in the mud below the Passchendaele ridge. A man of tact and power was needed in Italy, and there, greatly lamenting, the staff of the Second Army went, at little more than a week’s notice. How ingeniously the lessons of the Ypres salient, especially in digging and manning trenches, were imparted to the Italians is a tale that I may not tell. But in a very short while the lessons prevailed. Once again General Plumer proved “ an asset.”
CHAPTER VII
SOME NOTABLE VISITORS
Barrie and Freiberg—“ Orders of Merit ” —An autograph collector —Visitors to the front—Arrests—Tomlinson—Royalty—“ Proper Geese ” —Ben Tillett and an Etonian—H. G. Wells—G. B. S.— Official artists—Muirhead Bone —Frank Reynolds—Sir William Orpen—The visitors’ chateau.
IF “the proper study of mankind is man,” the special correspondent of a newspaper is a proper student indeed. It is difficult to avoid some acquaintance with the leaders of various activities of national life. Personally, when I joined a daily newspaper first, I made only one bargain. It was that I should not be asked to “ interview,” a proceeding that jars most of those feelings of gentility that the weaker brethren nurse. It is one thing to fix an appointment to discuss a particular question; but to lead a man into talk in order to publish the things in his speech that he least wishes published, is not a male job.
Two books were published just after the war which consisted chiefly of what may be called “ stolen interviews.” They were parodied by Barrie in his most inimitable manner. He read the skits first at a dinner party in London; and seldom was parody better appreciated. The titles gained a wider notoriety afterwards. One was “ Kiss and Tell.” The other was “ Through the war with knife and fork.” What a subtle gift he has for the phrase that means much but says little! Indeed some of his best were as near nonsense as sense. The first time I met him—it was in the war—he came to
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dinner with some of us in a French chateau, Rollencourt, near Hesdin. The rather large company made him a little nervous, but before he reached the centre of the room one irrepressible rushed at him with an autograph book and demanded his name and a sentiment. The sudden attack set Barrie at his ease. With a queer little look that was all observation, he took the measure of the enemy and wrote after his name, “ Beware of a pale woman with a large appetite! ” He had, I believe, shot the same bolt before. This time it produced paralysis. Was it funny? Was it clever? Was his leg being pulled? You could see such questions passing over the face of the autograph-hunter; and the inability to answer quite suppressed further attacks.
You would perhaps infer from Barrie’s quiet and silent modesty that he was first and foremost a man of thought. But his admiration was for the man of action. Of all the men of action who came to the front in the war the most exclusively “ actional,” if the word be allowed, was perhaps Colonel Freiberg. When I met him after the war—it was in Cologne—he was wearing eleven wound stripes, a D.S.O. and a V.C. He said to me during luncheon that he was in despair about his future. What was he to do now that the war was over ? He rather thought he would have to go to Russia where there was still room for action.
Not half his feats have been told. Here is one that occurred late in the war. He wanted to know the exact location of some German snipers. What simpler and surer device than to persuade them to shoot at him? He favoured at this time a motorcycle and side-car; and as soon as the idea entered his head ordered the driver to take him out in front of the line. The man went pale, but obeyed. The Germans could not resist the target and almost at once shot the rider dead. The V.C. then took the dead man’s place, turned the machine round with-
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out any hurry, rode back and gave orders for the destruction of the snipers whose place he had marked down. Such was the tale as told me by an onlooker. I have told in an earlier book the astounding story of his almost single-handed capture of Beaucourt in November, 1916. Is it natural or surprising that this man with his genius for physical action should especially appeal to the quiet and gentle man of letters that Barrie is? People who write—even for the newspapers—are continually discovering, to their never-ceasing wonder, that they are envied to the point of admiration by all sorts of men, who have made careers in other more lucrative and more solid professions. The envy and admiration is mutual; and perhaps, after all, it is a wholly natural thing that persons should be attracted to the opposite, that men of words should wish to be men of deeds, and men of deeds to be men of words. Barrie and Freiberg are Gray and Wolfe over again, for doubtless Gray would rather have taken Quebec than have written the churchyard elegy. Even the Duke of Wellington sought to be a poet in his last phase! As to our Generals, a large number “ commenced author ” as soon as the war was over! But that adventure was perhaps not wholly literary in manner or intention. At any rate it was polemical first and literary by mistake.
In spite of avoiding the humiliation of official interviews, I could not help seeing a very great number of men of distinction. Sometimes it is a temptation not to compare them but to put them in an order of merit in different classes. The ablest man I have met in a certain power of fundamental thought is a journalist: Mr. J. L. Garvin. The two men who most consistently thought of the good of their fellows are a politician and a schoolmaster: Sir Horace Plunkett and Mr. A. IT. Gilkes. Mr. Roosevelt, as I have said, had most control over his mental processes. For genius in the art of
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observation, I know none quite to compare with Major Ingram, who spent what time he could spare from teaching airmen the use of the compass, in learning the song of every bird in France. Lord Northcliffe had the most acute senses of sight and hearing that ever came to my notice. The list could be lengthened out into the realms of science and of games and sports; but it is long enough. Such comparisons are vain if not odious. Yet it may be added that most of those who go about the world come home to admire the English brain. Years ago at a Colonial conference Mr. Deakin, the Premier of Australia, said to me that elsewhere there was no intellectual activity comparable with London’s; and an American official student of character in immigrants put the English brain at the top of the list. I wonder if there is not, after all, something in the contention. One likes to think so, for certainly English people can be incredibly stupid when they really try.
To return to autographs, the most complete selection perhaps ever amassed belonged to Captain Walker, who was in the service of the southern railways during the war and was present at each disembarkment at Boulogne. Every distinguished man who passed through his hands left his autograph in this book, which was closed with the last of the B.E.F. to leave France. What a congeries of generals, kings and authors meet between the rich covers of that portentous volume! With what reverent secrecy was it shown me ! What schemes of publication did not its owner discuss with me! He asked me to be in at the death; and obediently I met the last officer to quit France and saw the book closed.
Celebrities and nonentities, many of them quite unconnected with the war, found their way to France, found their way even to the front. One of the earliest was the present Secretary of State for India, who appeared one day in a staff hat at
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St. Omer to visit Colonel Winston Churchill during his interpolated moment as an active soldier. His arrival, so decorated, fluttered the dovecotes of the Adjutant General’s office. There were reports of an arrest and subsequent deportation ; and since then General Macready has told the whole story in his very charming memoirs.
Arrests of visitors were not unusual. One of our official artists was arrested twice during his first few hours in Amiens. Even an official journalist was not exempt. An experience of infinite humour, if you heard him tell it, befell Mr. H. M, Tomlinson, who at one time shared with Sir Perry Robinson the duty of representing The Times and Daily News. He was wearing —more suo —a cap of something rather less than military precision; and he never nursed any overwhelming desire to be taken for a soldier. He found himself in the dusk in a rather unpleasant spot where shrapnel was falling freely. Nerves were a little on edge, and the Colonel who was his companion had for the moment disappeared. A sergeant caught sight of the cap and demanded with unconcealed suspicion some account of the wearer’s identity. In order to placate him with a highly respectable name, Tomlinson said he represented The Times. The sergeant fixed the cap with a stony stare, and said, “ Bloody likely, ain’t it? ” Arrest was imminent, but the happy return of the Colonel stayed further proceedings. With what delightful gusto Tomlinson would tell the incident, and confess that thereafter he announced himself as representing the Daily News. He was a good correspondent. Soldiers liked what he wrote, as well they might, and they liked what he said. It was a liberal education to hear him tell a high Tory General that he, the General, was a cog in a marvellously socialistic State, paid by the State, fed by the State, given a particular job with other men all fed, paid and compelled by the State to do particular work in a national cause. I must tell
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one other tale of Tomlinson. He and I made a dash for Rapaume the day our troops entered it. Just before entering we came under the indirect fire of some distant machine-gun. The first bullet gave its quaint whistle just over our heads; and Tomlinson—who usually applied to me on ornithological subjects —asked in a puzzled voice : “ What sort of bird was that, Tommy?” The next came nearer before I could answer. “ Ah, I know what sort of a bird it was now,” he drawled, and we hurried on.
The King came over to France more than once. He had long been a student of war, especially of cavalry tactics in war. He set a high example of civilian service throughout; his visits to the front did great service; and of the many visitors to the front, none showed more knowledge of the technique of war as well as its strategy. The first time that I was formally presented to him he asked me how long I had been in France. I said : “ Since the beginning of the war, but not all the time in this fancy dress.” The phrase used to describe His Majesty’s uniform was not perhaps the most tactful in the presence of the King; but it was spoken instinctively under the encouragement of the kindly simplicity of his manner. To my great relief the King laughed loud and long, and called the Queen to enjoy the joke.
The particular scene was quaint and characteristic of Britain. The King was about to read a proclamation to a score or more of African “ Princes ” who had brought over labour companies of their darkskinned subjects to work in France. Round the hollow square where these men were drawn up gathered a crowd of French civilians, immensely intrigued by the ceremony. I only heard one comment on the King. It was spoken by a rather handsome Frenchwoman. She said in French, “ That’s a Man’s voice, and no mistake.”
A little later the King was going to lunch with a Guards’ regiment; and the “ movy-merchant ”
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(as the Colonel called himself) sent up an official photographer. He arrived a little early and had rather a bad time. What was he doing there? What did he mean by it ? Would he be good enough to make himself scarce? Such was the attitude. At this juncture the King arrived and recognized in the photographer a boy who had been in his service at Sandringham. He greeted him at once, and stood for a few minutes talking Norfolk while the Guards officers shifted uncomfortably outside the circle. The bad time for the photographer was over. He was urged to stay to lunch and desired to make himself at home! The atmosphere had quite changed.
The eldest son of the King was on the western front throughout a great part of the war, and consistently proved both the high courage and straightforward common sense of the family. He worked and played his part with admirable simplicity. Many times I met him pedalling his “ push-bike ” down muddy roads to fetch letters. He was A.D.C. to General Cavan, then a Corps Commander. I had known that wise and courteous officer before the war as a retired Colonel and Master of the Fox Hounds in Hertfordshire, and when I went to see him the Prince used usually to shepherd me in. He was very much the young soldier and very little the Prince; but he said to me one thing that took one clean back to the Court of Henry 11, when a king’s hint was law. We were walking to see a new heavy howitzer installed in its camouflage in an open grove. About us ran and skipped, appeared and disappeared, round this tree and that, the conscientious wielder of a cinema. The thing got more and more on the Prince’s nerves till the irritation was irrepressible, and he turned to me and said with a sort of angry humour : “ Will no one kill that photographer? ” The parallel with Henry ll’s petulant outburst: “ Will no one rid me of that turbulent priest? ” was inevitable. What a chance was offered to seek
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promotion and royal favour by turning a revolver on to the too conscientious photographer!
A great number of famous personages who descended upon France from civilian life in England were sent in the blessed name of “ propaganda,” a mission that grew steadily in intensity. The first “ propaganda merchant” was a Colonel in the War Office, nicknamed by a young clerk in the Foreign Office the Proper Goose, because of his illicit relations with the Proper gander. The jest soon became trite as the flock of proper geese multiplied. Yet many of them laid golden eggs. One of the cheeriest and most frequent visitors was Mr. Ben Tillett. He used to relate to me one incident that illustrated, with pretty humour, one of the social effects of the war. He came over to see the men in the trenches and talk of the war from the angle of official Labour. At one of the advanced headquarters he was greeted effusively by a ydung Etonian subaltern. He rushed at him. “Are you Mr. Tillett? Mr. Tillett the Agitator? The Agitator? Delighted to see you. Come and see the General. Come and have a drink.” Mr. Tillett’s parody of the Etonian voice, the succulent gentility he imparted to the pronunciation of Agitator, were a triumph of histrionic mimicry. The subaltern amused him intensely. He had never had the fortune to meet quite so obvious an ass, who confessed even to his unfortunate dealings with his men. “ Dreadful fellows,” he said, “ dreadful fellows. I toss them for pennies, you know, in the trenches. They win all my pennies. Dreadful.”
The next morning Mr. Tillett visited the men in the trenches and made gentle game of their junior officer until he began to understand that the relations between the two were excellent. Indeed the soldiers told a succession of tales of the boy’s gallantry. He was always out of the trench first,
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was a tearless frequenter of No Man's Land. In one attack he was leading the charge by some twenty yards when he stopped, clapped his hands to his hinder parts and shouted, “ Shoot at the Hun, you fools, not at me.” Very soon Mr. Tillett and the Etonian became friends. They met in London and visited clubs together; but before the war was over the inevitable befell. The boy was killed. His death was not in vain. Mr. Tillett, the Agitator, though always a man of broad perceptions and deep humanity, had a broader and deeper sense of human relationship after the short friendship. Before it, he had scarcely found it in him to understand that manly virtue underlay the precise intonation, the delicate voice and affected manner.
The next time I met Mr. Tillett was in Germany under very different circumstances. It was in an attic room in Essen, the temporary headquarters of a group of German labourers, who were rebelling against French militancy in the summer of 1922. Before he left he helped to settle a German labour strike in Cologne. He told me, not without pride, that in his time he had been imprisoned in a large percentage of European countries. But nothing diminished his zest and humour and energy. Harry Lauder, who “ came over to help us ” almost as often, scarcely surpassed him as an entertainer.
How the propagandists poured over! and most of them came to see “ the official correspondents ” or were personally conducted by one of them. H. G. Wells enjoyed a tour of the French as w T ell as the British front; and not a little distressed one of his French guides by his overwhelming interest in the mechanical details of aeroplanes when he ought to have discoursed on all manner of more general and more essential topics. However, that tiny offence was as nothing to his quarrel with the French nation in general when he visited the United States
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on behalf of the Daily Mail, and later the Daily Express, and stressed its invincible militarism. An unfortunate little contretemps occurred when I was talking with him in a room in Amiens at the end of his tour. A Canadian, unknown to both of us, burst in, and mistaking our identities, warmly congratulated Wells on one of my dispatches! It was really very bad luck on a Pacifist of genius, and he did not take it humorously.
Bernard Shaw, who visited, sometimes from the base of our chateau, places as far apart as Ypres and Arras, gave evidence of the remarkably practical side of his genius. In the articles he wrote, the most notable detail, perhaps, was his criticism of the shell that buried itself in the earth and exploded vertically, to no one’s injury, not horizontally. I suppose nc mechanical device did quite so much to alter the war as the making of the instantaneous fuse. In the 1916 days a bombardment did little more than reduce a belt of wire to a nearly impassable morass and tangle of jagged ends. How many scores of times have I walked through the “ cleared ” passages w r ith a good light and no enemy in front, and even so found it difficult to penetrate. In 1918 you saw a pit no bigger than a hen scratch where the shell lit; but the bits cut the wire to smithereens, and half an hour did the work of days. This was very clear to Mr. Shaw long before the new fuses were spoken of or, perhaps, even thought of.
An acuter mind in the common affairs of life I have never known, and the accident of living in the next parish to him in the country gave me plenty of opportunity of testing it. The dose of rebel in him adds attractive tartness to his speech. He endeared himself to one of my sons by a single piece of advice. We met on the platform of the railway, as the boy was starting off to school, and Bernard Shaw going to town to rehearse one of his plays. “ Why don’t you
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lie down and kick? ”he said. “ They could never force you to go if you did.”
Quite apart from his dramatic genius he possesses a talent for common sense that may almost be compared with Samuel Johnson’s. His more advanced ideas notwithstanding, he gave the shrewdest advice to the Irish hotheads in the years that followed the war. At a meeting to discuss the future of Ireland a party urged that Ireland should be converted into “an independent republic guaranteed by Europe,” and Shaw was asked his opinion. “Do you really want to be like Belgium in the late war ? ” he said; and the question was final. But the best example of his direct and hard-hitting wit dates from before the war. He was lecturing in Dublin on the Poor Law at the time when the Gaelic League with its emphasis on the native language was becoming popular.
“ You had much better,” urged Mr. Shaw, “ buy tooth-brushes for the poor than teach them a language that never has been spoken and never will be.” The audience rose and hissed to a man. When peace was restored he said, “ If you hiss me again I shall talk to you in it! ” There were no more interruptions. His address was much too racy to be delivered over to the obscurity of a dead language which only the speaker and perhaps two per cent, of the audience understood.
It has amused people to hear that Mr. Shaw lives for the most part in a country rectory, a very charming country rectory. But he is a “ happy countryman,” can walk with the best, and though a vegetarian, dine satisfactorily with neighbour landlords. It is a liberal education in the art of using time to see him settle down in the corner of a railway compartment, when he goes to town, and take out his writing-pad and proceed to compose. In this way some of his very best work is done. It is well to judge men from the angle at which they present themselves to us, rather than in the Cubist’s
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fashion. Outside his genius as a playwright or his native pose as a destroyer of convention, I see Bernard Shaw as a man of shrewd sense in the affairs of daily life, a lover of the country, an active pedestrian, and a generous supporter of those that need and, in his view, deserve help. If the country people say that “ he keeps himself to himself,” they understand the value of the policy.
Artists at the front were many. Muirhead Bone, who was the first to be officially appointed, found so much to do that he nearly ruined his health by overwork. His output was fantastic. I was with him when he packed up the first consignment to send to the War Office; and he “ parted with difficulty.” It was a wrench to bestow on your employer fruits of genius worth great sums of gold and to receive in lieu a salary of a few hundred pounds. But in spite of a wry criticism or so he was wholeheartedly glad to give his service in this way. He received with delicious humour some of the official suggestions. At a very early stage he was summoned by a staff officer and given his instructions. “ What I want, Mr. Bone, are panoramas.” He looked up with a bland and childlike smile and replied : “ Oh, I can do panoramas like anything .” The satire passed quite unnoticed. The next day Bone and I drove out together along the ridge behind the Somme fighting, and Bone “ did panoramas like anything ” —quite enough to deal out to the officials for the next few weeks, while he spent his time in drawing the pictures he wished to draw. His weakness w r as that he could not pass a church. Each was like a public house to a drunkard. On the way that day to the Somme we passed the little church of Hailly—a village very well known to the British Army. Bone sketched the church. On the way back I told him that there was one perfectly delightful church that simply must be sketched. We entered Hailly this time from a different side; and when we reached the
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square in front of the church Bone was out of the car in a second, and at work a moment later. But at about the third stroke he realized the deception. “ Why, I have drawn it before.”
How delightfully, on returning to Amiens, he sketched the cathedral and said a thing as good as his drawing : “ To think of these shadows sleeping there for a thousand years ! ”
His technique was surely peculiar to himself. When drawing a portrait he began at any point and without any sketch of the general form of the head, and nevertheless felt quite certain of hitting the right proportions. He attributed his skill in part to the fact that he is very short-sighted with one eye, and long-sighted with the other!
Oiam-V-U n itu 1/11 V. uvuvi . What a delightful companion was Frank Reynolds, the art-editor of Punch, one of the propagandists who came to our headquarters for a month or so in 1918 ! The attribute in his skill that most amazed an inartistic companion was his memory. I took him to a cage just beyond Arras on the day that the Canadians stormed the ITindenburg line. We found an immense number of German prisoners, and inspected them as one might wild beasts at the Zoo. Altogether the day was a crowded and exciting experience. We saw and heard an immense variety of things new to me and very new to him. We reached the chateau late, dog-tired. Reynolds, who was an invalid at the time, took no notes of any description and was much too weary to attempt to draw that night. The next day he sat down and without any conscious effort drew and painted portraits of the prisoners. He had retained an exact picture in his mind of the form and very tint of their dress and accoutrements, and the likenesses, as far as my memory served me, were not less exact. The Macaulayan memories, that are the world’s admiration, are surely not more wonderful than this. There are artists of fame who have trouble to catch a likeness
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with the face in front of them for hours, day after day. Here was an artist whose mind’s eye was as good as his external eye, and his sense of colour and proportion quite independent of refreshment.
What struck me most about most of the artists was their exceeding speed. Bone kept up an average at one time of three completed pictures a day. He overworked himself, of course, and quite needlessly; but there it was.
Sir William Orpen, a very übiquitous visitor, was not a whit slower. He started once to paint a group of the war correspondents, but desisted suddenly. Probably our faces frightened him. However, he left behind as an evidence of good faith the background that he had painted in. It was done almost as quickly as if he had used a camera in place of a brush; and yet it was a work of art in itself. He achieved the trick of colour—deep and luminous—that suggested Rembrandt to a French artist who saw the canvas lying about among dusty rubbish and enormous maps in the hall of the chateau.
Was ever a great artist freer from the jargon and poses of the trade? If you had been asked to infer his profession from his appearance you would probably have said something with horses in it. I never saw a man more at home in the world, or more aware of its little wavs. His book on the war—one of the best —was distinguished by directness of perception amounting to genius. It helped him to write almost as well as he painted, and, I have no doubt, as quickly.
Every kind and sort of person came for a personally conducted tour : Gilbert Murray, that refined scholar, came over in company with a journalistic photographer. They were judged apparently by the War Office to be congenial companions. Mrs. Humphry Ward was the hardest worker of them all. She may or may not have been a good novelist; but as a journeyman hand at whatever
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she set herself to do she was very hard to surpass, a model of industry and clearness of perception and, be it said, courage. It is probable that she died of hard work, as many died both at home and in France. Even the blind came to see. Sir Arthur Pearson insisted on being taken to the top of Vimy, and from that unlovely and, at that date, still “ unwholesome ” ridge he was told how the land lay over the spacious view below 1 . At dinner afterwards he described to me his experiences; and in every other sentence or two came the words “I saw.” He repeated the verb so often that it became almost unbearable to look at the sightless eyes and hear it. But his own point of view—the metaphor insists on recurring—was not at all pathetic. He fetched as real satisfaction from his mind’s eye as Frank Reynolds himself; and by insistence on the faculty of sight that he had lost w T on a singular power of visualizing. Others w T ho have lost their sight have done likewise. A blind officer showed me over Lady Dudley’s hospital at Wimereux. He asked no help and did not grope as he moved from w r ard to ward. He pointed precisely at this and that detail in each; and when we came back to his own private room he made me observe the particular attractions of the view’ from the w’indow. What triumphs cannot a brave imagination w T in!
The numbers of visitors were so large and constant that a “visitors’ chateau” was reserved, at a very considerable expense, and became a shaft for a good deal of satire. At dinner there your plate was delivered by an orderly in w'hite gloves. Ladylike dessert w’as served. The trips organized for the flotilla of motor-cars w’ere also rather ladylike; and commanders of show stations w r ell aw r ay from shells w T ere considerably bored by the succession of guests. The civilian organizer of the entertainment became as well knowm in the armv as any official, and when in the sequel he developed into the full imago of a staff
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officer his manly bosom gleamed with a “ rough border” of more hues than most Generals could compass. The Kings and Generals who were entertained at the chateau could do no less than bestow a decoration on their genial host; and the ribands of some of the less remarkable kingdoms do not fail in brilliance.
The establishment tempted to satirical humour, but it played its part, nevertheless. Perhaps the more bitter satirists exaggerated the pettiness of much that occurred behind the front. Little men certainly intrigued for position and honours in the manner satirized in Mr. C. E. Montague’s “ Disenchantment.” Such things must be; and it is easy to understand how petty intrigue would bite into the spirit of so gallant a fighter and great a writer as Mr. Montague. Though much beyond the age, though the father of a considerable family, he volunteered, and by artificial aids belittled his years; he fought as soldier and sergeant in the very worst period of the war before he was translated to Intelligence work. To such men the contrast in spirit between men in the trenches and at Loos and men in the chateau at Perigord was oppressive; but the bad examples were few, not many.
I once started with a colleague to make a list of so-called “birds at the base.” At the top of the list was “ The lesser red-tabbed twitterer,” and there were other names much less polite. But the number of specimens was never exorbitant.
CHAPTER VIII
AN AMERICAN INTERLUDE
America in 1918 —Shipmates—Canadian ex-prisoners—General Swintou—New York journalism—The “ sob-sister ** —An earlier visit —Peary v. Cook—Thompson Seton and boy scouts—Henry Ford at Detroit—His views on war—Mass production—The “ Flivver ” and the “ Liberty Engine ” —lntellectual elephantiasis —America too late—Roosevelt—His love of natural history—A visit to the Kaiser —A great memory.
IN January, 1918, I was at home, recuperating after an attack of sleeplessness, and lunched with Lord Northcliffe in his diminutive house in Buckingham Street. The lunch was a regular event of the week, held to discuss the problem of Red Cross finances with Sir Robert Hudson. In the middle of the lunch Lord Northcliffe asked me across the table, without preface, and, I think, without premeditation, to go to the United States. He did not know what the Americans were doing, and they did not know what we were thinking.
I started at once in the Olympic, which was taking out Lord Reading as special ambassador.. From France to America—how peaceful it sounded; but how far from all that mattered! Whatever might be the restfulness of America, one was not likely to forget the war on the boat. Nearly half the passengers w r ere Canadian soldiers, most of them a little maimed, some of them exprisoners of the Germans. One man kept telling me, and telling me to keep telling others how brutally he had been treated. On his journey into Germany, severely wounded as he was, one German woman had thrown a cup of coffee over him, another
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had spat over him. And both were women who had entered the train on a mission of charity, so were, we must presume, rather more gentle than other women. What can have happened in Germany that the better women were able to do such things ?
Other passengers were three young officers going over to America; one to Chicago, one, an Irish Roman Catholic and guardsman, to Boston, and one to Philadelphia. The little East Anglian lawyer destined for Chicago had gone over the top four times, and on each occasion had received as a memento one bullet; but all he suffered from was “tired feet,” earned in the mud of the trenches, which was very apt to be severe on the spaces between the toes. He was very gallant. Once he had skulked into a shell-hole, he said, during an attack, but getting up again into machine-gun bullets was so horrible that he vowed never to stop again, and never did. Captain Swinton was on board with the ambassador, and recalled meetings in France and his days as “official eye-witness,” and spoke much of tanks and how hard it had been to press their services on the British army.
Some of the soldiers had their wives and children with them; but the only English woman was the wife of the ambassador. The English are a wonderful people. No English woman, only Canadians could win leave to cross the sea on any plea whatever. The regulations were adamant. But there was one way. If a woman with a good reason went behind the back of the Foreign Office and sought out the Canadian authorities, she had just one chance in fifty of overcoming the handicap of English birth. I met just one woman who had achieved this thing; and very proud of it she was.
When the great ship sailed up the Hudson, and eight little angry, obstinate tugs butted her flank against the wharf, the ice floes came clinking down the river, bits bitten off the solid field a little higher
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up. They gave me my first hint why American ships and railways and other things were behind the times. When I went to see the new Colossus, the shipyard at Hog Island, I found men thawing the ground with steam.
Crossing the sea at this date, when the submarines were in the midst of their most intensive campaign, was an experience unlike other experiences. Twice during the voyage we received S.O.S. signals from ships in distress, and each time we steamed as fast as possible in the opposite direction. Such was the order for ships in general as well as for the Olympic with her special cargo. A little fleet of destroyers accompanied us as far as the north coast of Ireland, where, owing to foul weather, they left us rather sooner than was intended. But the plan was for the Olympic to trust to her speed, and to that alone. A strong gale reduced her way at one time to four knots, though she was steaming all she knew; but we made good time.
It had occurred to me, as a journalist, that this lonely journey might appeal to the New \ ork public; but it appeared that my psychology or “ news sense ” was all wrong. The New York papers came out the next morning with highly coloured and even technical accounts of the number of cruisers and destroyers and other craft that had encircled the Olympic from shore to shore.
This passion for lies almost for their own sake, is a mania hard to explain. In England a journalist who deliberately invented such a thing would inevitably lose his job, not so much for moral reasons as because the lie would react disastrously on the paper. Doubtless some fantastic mis-statements and some quite deliberate inventions have been sent from the United States to England by English correspondents. Events have, on occasion, been coloured to provide a “ good story.” But the compulsion put on an American reporter to provide
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“ live copy ” is quite outside the comprehension of a London editor. “Jesting Pilates ” are rare in London newspapers, and dissimulation is commoner than simulation. What lies there are appear more often in the comment than in the pages devoted to news. Beyond all dispute the cardinal sin of a reporter is inaccuracy. “We want to know the true facts ” —that is the commonest of all instructions. In the whole of my journalistic career up to the war I had never received opposite advice. The first exception is recorded against the Intelligence branch of the army.
The sin of London newspapers is false emphasis, not falsification of fact. Consequently the most truthful member of the profession is the reporter, though in the popular view he is the worst sinner. Reporters tell what they see and hear. It is not altogether so in the United States. It was very much not so in France. I knew French correspondents with the British army who deliberately, even boastfully, sat down and wrote some pretty story out of their head; and told the censor not to interfere. It was his business to suppress news that helped the enemy, not to hamper the style of a correspondent by harnessing him compulsorily to fact.
The American correspondents, on the other hand, were careful in recording facts and insatiable in the pursuit. I should select Frederick Palmer, who was at one time the sole correspondent with our armies, as the most thorough and thoroughly honest journalist of my acquaintance. Great Britain owes few foreigners a greater debt. He made himself that impossible thing, an advocate without prejudice.
For some reason that I will not attempt to penetrate, it is at home that the mania for embroidery and sheer invention seems to come in a flood over the American journalist, especially and above all the
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interviewer. He carries with him from the office a pistol with this charge : “ Deliver the goods or I invent the bad.” One of the few people who had the courage altogether to refuse to be interviewed was Lady Northcliffe; but on one unfortunate occasion she was touched in her weak place, sympathy for her fellows. Returning to her hotel in New York she saw a woman sitting in the hall, and was told that she had been there all day. She was pale and obviously tired out and deeply depressed, so Lady Northcliffe took pity, invited the woman to her room, gave her tea, and provided her with a signed photograph. It was a small and honest picture of herself clad in a good, useful, out-of-door dress. Who was the foolish person who said in the early days of the art that the photograph could not lie? The next day one of the great papers appeared with a picture covering the whole page. Lady Northcliffe knew by virtue of the legend underneath that it pretended to be a counterfeit resemblance of herself. The “ going-away dress ” had been converted into an evening dress of exaggerated lowness, and round her neck was a rope of pearls at least as big as walnuts. Her disgust was almost (if not quite) too much for her sense of humour. It is a cruel thing to make a kind person say, “ I will never be kind again.” But the fault did not lie with the “ sob-sister ” —excellent term—who had waited those hours, like a lurking spider for her prey. She had delivered to her office an inoffensive tale and a charming photograph. The rest was achieved without her knowledge in the office. But the “sob-sister” is an added terror to life.
The last time I had visited New York was in company with Lord Northcliffe on the way back from a prolonged visit to Newfoundland. Peary had just returned, as had Cook, from his trip to the North Pole, and at once sought out Lord Northcliffe.
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After a dinner which lasted three hours he led Lord Northclilfe and me off to a private room (on the twenty-seventh story of The Times building) and indulged in a very frank talk. He was at the moment alarmed lest Cook’s record should be accepted by the Copenhagen University, and pressed Lord Northclilfe to send any number of reporters there to see justice done.
It was surprising to notice how closely the Polar expedition was bound up with New York newspapers. Cook and Peary had gone out on the urgency of rival newspapers to reach the Pole, and both came back with the news—syndicated throughout the American continent—that they had succeeded. It was at least a remarkable example of the “ win, tie or wrangle ” principle. At the moment the wrangle was very acute. It was a pity to see such a man as Peary, a born leader of men, masterful, courageous, energetic, involved in the base sequel. He said himself that going to the Pole was nothing compared with the trouble of raising the money to get there, and proving your case when you had. Of all his company the man we most admired was Bartlett, the one Briton, a Newfoundlander, very true to type. The others confessed that he was much the best “ goer ”; and he led the march up to the moment of the last dash. For that, Peary refused to take any European or white American. His only companions were three Esquimaux and a coloured assistant; and it appears from an analysis of the records that throughout the journey, on the way there and the way back, he travelled at nearly double the speed previously recorded. It was a bitter bknv to the Newfoundlander—though his loyalty to Peary even under this decision was impenetrable— to be left behind. One could see no good reason. How t sorry w T e felt for him when Peary said in a little speech at the dinner : “ I was determined that if a Briton could not be first, he should at any rate be second! ” It
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is wonderful what gauche things a man can say when he tries his very hardest to be diplomatic.
It was my fate to be concerned in another wrangle about precedence as a result of this short visit to New York. One of the most charming visits I paid was to the home of my friend, Thompson Seton. He possessed round his house at Cos-Cob a park of quite peculiar charm. It contained many curiosities. On one little island in a lake stood a tree, artificially built by Seton himself. It was a perfect presentment of a dead tree externally, but in the hollow of the trunk was a ladder, and at various stages were windows and little platforms. It was his custom to sprinkle these as well as the plank bridge leading to the miniature island with sand, so that at each visit he could trace the slot of any creature that had strayed across. As a natural historian’s observation post the tree was incomparable. Many a tree like it was afterwards built by French artists along the front for use as observation posts against the Germans. In another part of the park was an Indian camp with throne and totem pole complete, where the boy scout movement was hatched. Its origin was the endeavour to find a healthy amusement for the street Arabs of New York. Mr. Thompson Seton took up the work with zeal and set to inventing games of all sorts and descriptions which would encourage both native wit and the moral sense. The Indian camp was the centre, the headquarters of the game, which was founded on Red Indian practices. The rules and descriptions were put together on the Birch Bark Roll. The ingenuities of this local scheme were developed later, as all the world knows, into a world-wide organization by the ability of General Baden-Powell, who deserves as well of the human race as any man alive.
In the earlier days of the movement some arrangement was made between Thompson Seton and Baden-Powell as to the publication of the Birch Bark Roll in America and the boy scout’s book in
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Britain. An unhappy dispute arose over the formal acknowledgment in the British book of its indebtedness to the Birch Bark Roll, and after my return home a formal request reached me to act as arbitrator. In the sequel the hatchet was buried in the best Red Indian fashion. Few men alive could have developed such a movement as well and as whole-heartedly as Baden-Powell, and I know no one who has anything approaching the ingenuity of Thompson Seton in the devisal of games and the instruction of wood-lore.
A curiously American struggle for the sanctity of Cos-Cob Park and the camp was then in progress. The advent of a railway, turned aside by some millionaire “ pull ” from a neighbouring property, was threatened, and Seton proceeded to New York to consult a lawyer as to the best means of fighting the incursion. The lawyer’s advice was direct and practical. “If I were you,” he said, “ I should shoot the first man to touch your property. That would make the thing public, and the wide interest in the boy scouts would do the rest! ’ ’ Our civilization, it would appear, has not quite rid itself yet, at any rate in America, of its more primitive attributes. No news has reached me of a tragedy at Cos-Cob, which was sold some years later.
Some irreverent persons would say that Thompson Seton was above all a “stunt-merchant.” He is a great deal more than that; a delightful draughtsman, a considerable explorer and possibly the first authority in the world on certain narrow sections of biology, especially the anatomy and classification of the rat. But he has also the control of many amusing “ stunts ” whatever the word may mean. On one occasion he taught me how T to light a fire with two bits of wood for match; and we had a glowing pile of embers within two minutes. The stunt “ came off ”to perfection. The process is very simple. You require one flat piece of wood, one stick of wood, and if you would do the thing in style,
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one bow-like instrument with a loose string and a stone with a smooth round hollow. In the edge of the board you cut a V-shaped slit. At the point you press one end of the stick held vertically. The other end is fitted into the hollow of the stone which you press downwards with the left hand. Round this upright stick you have made a half hitch in the slack bow-string, and with your right hand you saw the bow backwards and forwards. It bores into the flat board, and the sawdust that it rubs off falls through your slit. The heap becomes big enough and hot enough after less than two minutes. You remove the instrument and gently fan the sawdust heap. It glows at once, you add the most inflammable stuff you possess, and your fire is in being. The secret is intensely dry wood, and it does not seem to make much difference whether the board and stick are of different woods or the same. The very experts only know by experience which bits are congenial, which obstinate.
A few days after seeing Seton’s pheasants and rats —this was in 1910 —I went to the Bronx Zoo and met other naturalists, two of them altogether exceptional both in character and attainment. Professor Hornaday, the curator, worked himself almost to death during the war, largely on behalf of Great Britain. He was an advocate of such earnest conviction, and moreover spoke such excellent sense, that no one who came within his orbit could resist the beneficent influence. Professor Hornaday and Major Palmer both deserve in their degree the national gratitude that, we paid and still pay to Ambassador Page, to Admiral Sims and to Owen Wister. The five are five pillars of the solidarity of English speaking people on either side of the Atlantic.
Professor Hornaday was not at that date contemplating himself as a propagandist. For the moment his mind was considerably occupied with
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the wood pigeon, a bird that does not exist on the American Continent. I promised to send him some from England. The Office of Works, under whose aegis the birds have their being, very kindly caught up for me a dozen of the fat and lazy birds that adorn St. James’s Park; but a trouble intervened. It is a law that the Office of Works may not give, and may not sell. They may only exchange. So Professor Hornaday had to send a golden-eyed duck before he got his dozen pigeons.
We made a tour of the Bronx, the pleasantest zoo in the world, with Mr. Beebe, who was to become famous for his travels in the pursuit of birds. His journey, of which he told me a good deal at a later date, over China and among the byways of Asia and its eastern islands, took him into every sort of danger. He always maintained that he would have been eaten on several occasions by cannibals, if it had not been for his wife who had a happy way with races of the more primitive instincts and habits. Her courage and resource were unfailing. The great accomplishment of the journey was the completion of our knowledge of the pheasant and its numerous varieties. Later again his trip to the Galapagos may rank in some measure with the voyage of the Beagle to the same wonderful islands.
His knowledge of birds was as near universal as knowledge can be; but once we caught him tripping in his own zoo. I asked him whether the grey squirrels abounding in the Bronx were not a danger to the birds. He assured us that there was no risk. Even as he spoke a grey squirrel danced across the path with a bird in its mouth !
During the first few weeks of my stay in the United States in the spring of 1918, I was lucky enough to see and talk with a great number of representative men, all men of marked character and individuality. The first on the list was Henry Ford, who everyone told you had a bigger income, though
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not a bigger capital, than any one in the world. The assessment of people by their wealth is a habit not yet wholly extinct in America, though the war did much to scotch it. Henry Ford is a much greater man than his dollars.
His reputation at this date was at a crisis. The ludicrous peace journey in the yacht Eirene had ended in a fiasco. The priest of pacifism had returned to manufacture materials of war, and was preaching the gospel of mass production and cooperative production of the engines of destruction. Was he an arch humbug or a capricious crank or a mere advertiser-at-any-cost, or an engineer lost in the unwonted realm of ideas? Such questions about any character are more surely answered by five minutes talk and one glance than by weighing every deed and utterance. Men as a rule announce themselves. Their personality escapes from the disguise of words by the avenue of tone, of voice, of flash of eye. In apology for his change of heart Mr. Ford told me that he had come to the conclusion that some ulcers could only be cured by lancing.
Detroit itself is the most American thing in America—every way. Its best club has a swimming bath on the fifth floor, a running track on the second, and you really can have a quick lunch —as well as a game of bowls, in the basement. It has splendid buildings and also shacks, for growth has been absurdly rapid. It also possesses a Slater Hotel. You will find in every bedroom a bath or shower bath, and a tract addressed jointly to servants and guests, but especially to servants. Among the many naive instructions is a recommendation not to correct the British guest when he pronounces Pall Mall as Pell Mell, lest he should take it amiss!
In the streets there was an outbreak of brigandage; motor-cars were robbed both of contents and tires. One day during my stay four cars were stripped of their tires in the public square during
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the luncheon hour, and nothing heard of the thieves.
The journey to Detroit provided one curious experience of war conditions. The railway crosses one small section of Canada. No check or ceremony announces the passage, but if you have a reserved compartment you put any little bag outside the door, as a sign apparently of good feeling. The customs official may look at it if he pleases; and will certainly take its presence as a hint that the occupant would rather not be bothered. I happened, not knowing where I was, to go into the restaurant car just as we entered Canadian territory, and asked the black servant —most servants on trains are black—for some meat dish or other. In the masterful, patronizing, almost bullying tone that these servants usually adopt towards mere travellers, he told me that I could not have it. I must wait twenty minutes. We were in Canada and it was a meatless day in the Dominion. For the first and last time in my experience I found something admirable in red tape. On both sides of the border war duties were observed with singular fidelity, with unabating fervour. We eat our omelette and shad’s roe with extra zest for feeling that the war was a real thing over the American continent. In New York notices warned people to avoid restaurants that dared to eat meat on Tuesdays.
Mr. Ford received me in a little glass-walled office, sixteen feet square, stolen from a corner of his new factory for the agricultural tractor. This marvellous machine was Mr. Ford’s dream years before the production of “ Flivvers,*’ or even Ford cars, interrupted his vision. The room, and indeed the factory, reminded one of Krupp’s works at Essen, but all thought of such likeness was swallowed up in the personality of the man there, busy not at the sword but at the ploughshare. A spirit less German could not be imagined.
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“ I care nothing for your war,” was about the first thing Mr. Ford said to me, and his contemptuous emphasis made me for the moment fear a pacifist outbreak.
“ War is destruction, and all I care for is the productivity of the soil, and not least the soil of England.”
And from this text he talked long and earnestly on the state of the world.
“ I believe this war to be necessary,” said Mr. Ford, “ because desperate diseases require desperate remedies.”
At this point I had a great desire to ask Mr. Ford if he was intentionally paraphrasing the king in “Hamlet,” or whether it was a mere accident that this genius in mechanics was stepping in time with the super genius of our race in letters. But the discussion was too earnest for verbal interruption.
“And peace will come,” continued Mr. Ford, “ as soon as we get rid of what is rotten in the state of each nation.” This, I take it, was the cardinal article in Mr. Ford’s view of the war. We had to win it. The war was a purge of evil, first of the master evil, the cruel love of war that dominated the German Empire, and also of the crooked view of life that flourishes wherever financiers or autocrats are gathered together. How he flamed out against New York financial thugs, whom he called the worst in the world.
The face and guise of the speaker added I know not what momentum to his arguments. Enthusiasm, energy, sincerity are written for all to read on every lineament of that face.
When we first came in Mr. Ford sat and talked on his office table, in the attitude that reminded me of the description by a charming French authoress of her first meeting with an English officer on the eve of the battle of the Marne. What struck her most as far as I can remember was the “natural
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friendly way you English people have of sitting on the table and dangling your legs.” Mr. Ford’s attitude was all that —natural and simple, and I found his parallel not among the millionaires but rather among the professors, in a man like Metchnikoff, whose zeal for humanity left him quite content with a salary of £5OO a year.
There were other surprising contrasts. This arch-democrat’s face had the fine lines of the born aristocrat, and this wizard of material creation lives and has his being in a world of ideas in which his own genius for mechanics is no more than an incidental attribute.
Mr. Henry Ford, the pacifist, was one of the war workers most to be dreaded by the enemy. His view of the way to mobilize national industry for war purposes was that every man who had a plant or ideas should tell the government exactly what he and his organization could best do, and if individual enterprise and capacity were thus employed and correlated all the evils of superfluous officialism and all the delay of erecting national workshops could be best avoided. This he himself had done, with the result that his vast organization of industry at Detroit and a portion of his forty thousand workmen and workwomen were at work on all branches of the war ; helping with parts of aeroplanes and engines, building the mystery boats, creating the earth machine, which is the most necessary of all the implements of war. For “ corn, not coin, is the real sinews of war.” If the war had lasted three or four years longer this scheme of mass production would doubtless have been overwhelming.
Mr. Ford was very interesting on the subject of England. Fie regarded her social development during the last five years as one of the great phenomena of the world, and saw in the marvel of her war organization an earnest of the millennium to be. We were all of us to have peace when we
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deserved peace. In the past we had passively allowed the social cancer to grow. Some of us had tried the method of grinning and bearing it. Some of us had rubbed it with red pepper. We were now being forced to cut it out, and we were not to finish the war until we had undergone this operation. Such was Mr. Ford’s general view, his philosophy of Armageddon, for he was a mystic first and a mechanic afterwards.
It would give quite a wrong impression of the man and his force not to acknowledge that he was also a typical American man of business. He had taken but one holiday in his life, and did not like it. He worked every day just as long as he could without losing his fitness. He trained for his work by running (and he looked like a runner), by walking and by swinging the hammer. He ate just enough, it looked barely enough, to keep his machine at full pitch. The energy was so continuous that none of his co-workers had ever noted an interval of moodiness or depression.
He is beyond question a mechanical genius, and even some of his social dreams take their root on the farm. The son of a farmer, he knew the difficulty of managing and tending a team of horses before he apprenticed himself to mechanics. He recalled the day when he was punished as a factory apprentice by a week’s task of filing nuts! Thanks to this early training, was born the Fordson tractor, which he dreamed twenty years ago would regenerate life on the farm and the productivity of the soil.
On the day after our talk in the Fordson factory Mr. Ford took me to see the new “ Flivver ” boat or submarine destroyer. He assured me, doubtless by way of compliment, in which America delights, that I was the first outsider to be allowed to examine the process of manufacture of these ships, of which one of the wonders was that they were built by a firm that had never touched marine architecture before.
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The Ford system of architecture was applied in an enhanced degree. Every part was standardized, every plate and bolt was brought automatically to the workman in his place on whatever stage or storey he stood—the keel where work began or the deck plates where it ended. It was a curious detail that no plate ever touched the ground. Each was swung and carried to its place and suspended there very much as you would carry a coat to a wardrobe. The process by which the ship grew before your eyes was recorded automatically by moving photography which took a picture once a minute.
In a vast corridor or aisle —for it had almost a cathedral look—l saw the first of these U-boat destroyers begin to assume shape, and felt the mystery to be greater, not less, for the intimacy of my acquaintance with it. They were very magnificent, but they were perhaps less useful in war even than the Liberty aeroplane engine.
The method of “ assembling ” is seen at its best perhaps in the Ford tractor and motor-car. To watch the rapid growth gives a sort of uncomfortable feeling, as if the process of birth from the embryo had illegitimately encroached into mechanics. At a certain point in your progress through the usual forest of tools and engines you become definitely aware of the existence of a headless, limbless, truncated thing that travels along a smooth railway of its own either on the ground or hung from a travelling crane. As you w r alk with this chrysalis you realize that it is slowly ceasing to be ugly and is taking shape as a comely organism. Rods, shafts, rims, cranks, valves, cylinders, nuts, have grown together before your eyes. Cinquevalli or Pygmalion has been at work, and by a sleight of hand or by sheer art has produced a live thing out of the inorganic bits.
The birth of the tractor was the more spectacular of the two. I saw the emergence of several. A truncated lump took form and came to life well within
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half an hour. There within the factory itself and among the machines you jumped up on the live back of a complete machine, jerked the simple lever that does all the work, and drove out, either up a platform into a waiting truck or, if you pleased, straight on to the field with a two-furrow plough hitched on behind.
After the Flivvers and the tractors I went to see the Liberty engine. This was to be a wholly American product, manufactured in such quantity—on the Ford principle—that France would be flooded with aeroplanes multitudinous enough to finish the w r ar without the need of infantry or artillery. It was being made for the most part by a company which had given up several acres of works to the engine, just as Ford had allotted many avenues of motor works to the “Flivver chaser.” The most hopeful and sensible part of the manufacture was that several rival companies had combined to turn out various parts of the engine and convey them to the assemblage centre. This meant that the great American manufacturers had “ got together,” just as the completed parts of the engine were to be got together, and this mutual understanding was the best sign of the times to be found in America.
The Flivver chaser and the Liberty engine, of which hopes ran high, failed to fulfil their purpose in the war, though perhaps their advertisement served to frighten the Germans. Within a few weeks I visited every sort of war factory ; ship factories, rifle and cannon factories, aeroplane factories. Every one was suffering from a sort of intellectual elephantiasis, due to perverted idealism. Americans desired to send to Europe something better than Europe possessed, something that should give new glory to the manufacturers as well as to the army of the United States. These ideal weapons were also to be produced in gigantic quantity. Tins ambition was strongest among the politicians. Perhaps not in Detroit, but in nearly every other factory
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manufacturers and politicians were engaged in a duel that grew in bitterness. The manufacturers were ready to produce, but failed week after week, month after month, to get any type of gun or machine “released.” Just as the moment seemed to have come some little improvement w*as discovered or suggested. The aeroplane must have a better wireless telephone, the field-gun musflaiave a higher elevation, the machine-gun must b£ lightened, the ships must be made of concrete. Instead of adopting an existing engine, say the Rolls-Royce or the Caproni, a super-American Liberty engine was to be produced in mass. The French 75 gun was to be improved and given certain advantages of range possessed by the German field-gun. This idea prevailed so strongly among certain political authorities that the commonsense compromise practised by all the other belligerents was rejected. They, too, were busy with improvements, but the war belonged to the present not to the future. Their manufacturers were instructed to produce, say a thousand aeroplanes of a certain type, and only then to hold their hand till the subsequent improvements could be adapted to the next thousand.
About this date the New York Times, one of the very best newspapers in the world, had a bitterly amusing article about the One American Aeroplane in France, with some burlesque account of its crucial activities and influence in bringing the war to an end. But the idealism was too inveterate to be weakened even by ridicule, and the war ended before the United States could send to France any adequate supply of artillery or aeroplanes or could supply sufficient ships to carry over the troops.
The aeroplane engine is too delicate a thing for mass production, though the spectacle of its production and its tests was singularly stirring at the time. Yet in spite of the fascination of the ideal it suffered from a doubly false analogy. An air
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engine and a tractor engine are different in kind, and war does not allow the delays of peace.
After Detroit came Oyster Bay, after Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt. I had long wished to meet him, not because he was a president and a mighty speaker, but because he had championed that delightful na' 'ralist, Mr. Burroughes, and because he loved birds . id animals and wrote charming things about them. And what do you suppose Colonel Roosevelt was doing when I reached the door of his most beautiful home, high up above sound, among the woods of Sagamore Hill? He had speeches to keep him bus}-, several hundred of letters to dictate a day, and he was contributing regularly to a Middle West newspaper; but at this moment he was indignantly answering some writer on natural history who had gone wrong on South African Deer and was backing the excesses of the Neo-Darwinians—the word is the Colonel’s own—on the subject of protective coloration.
He saw me from his desk and came round to open the door himself, and took me to the wide inner hall, which was a treasure cave strewn with gems in precious metals and in vellum, and had vast ivory tusks for its stalactites and stalagmites. It was a great room to talk in, while you sat in the deep window and looked out over the spacious view, sipped English tea, and handled untold treasure, the gifts of kings and emperors, or the booty of many continents.
Much the most remarkable gift that he showed me was a selection of photographs presented to him by the Kaiser after a military review in Germany. The Kaiser had written on the back all manner of the rashest sentiments. “ You and I together could rule the world,” was one. T.R. (the standard American for Roosevelt) had set these photographs in a case so that the back as well as the front could be seen.
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They were more or less a secret at the time, but T.R. was one of those rash—or should we say wise ? —men who trusted acquaintances completely if he trusted them at all. He trusted me, I think, because of a common delight in natural history, and more particularly because I had fought on his side in a now forgotten campaign against the “ nature fakers.”
His story of the endeavours of the German staff to recover the photographs was very characteristic of the two nations. The Germans offered to give Mr. Roosevelt an album, gorgeously illuminated, and signed by the Kaiser with an appropriate sentiment. But T.R. ‘‘wasn’t having any.” The Kaiser’s indiscreet, blazingly indiscreet, sentiments, written in his own hand, were a prize too rich to be entrusted to the mercies of the general staff. He refused to deliver, and took exceptional precautions to guard the photographs safely.
His humour shifted into something like passion when he began to discuss President Wilson. How he hated his successor’s mental attitude in general as well as his particular action in regard to the war! The feeling was doubtless in some degree personal. T.R. had burned to rush over to France with his own division the moment the United States entered the war. It was, of course, an impossible, though a noble ambition. Imagine this masterful man commanding a division enrolled by himself under the authority of a corps commander, an army commander, and perhaps a commander-in-chief! But army ambitions were in his blood at this time, and he nursed an impassioned belief in the cause of the Allies. The title he liked and used was “ Colonel.”
He showed his big heart and male courage over his illness, from which he was convalescent at the time. The operation to his ear had destroyed his sense of balance, and he described very vividly how he was learning to walk again. As he walked with
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you, refusing an arm, you could see that the planting of each foot was a distinct and separate act of conscious will. He had confidence in his complete recovery, but, alas, he was to die a few r months later. The world lost a human and very lovable personality. Whether or no he possessed a great brain may be debated, but I never met a man who had so much control over his mental processes. A friend told me that he had heard him address a crowd in the open air on a windy day. Only those towards whom he turned could catch what he said; so he spoke three speeches, one to those on the left, one to the centre, one to the right. The three speeches were different and were given in alternate sentences; but he managed the triple feat without confusion, without pausing for a word or thought.
I played the game of trying him with the names of people he had met casually in England years ago. All the namps and incidents came to him instantly wdthout any apparent act of recollection. Within the course of an hour or two he had talked persuasively on a great range of subjects. Fatally ill though he was, nevertheless at every turn he still seemed the compact epitome of American virility. Every word he uttered was separate and clear-cut, every thought was vigorous, as it found precise expression past the barrier of the most perfect teeth on the Continent.
His memory, indeed, was so completely instinctive that he startled you occasionally by naming the people you were thinking of. I happened to be saying something about protective mimicry in animals, when he capped me by a reference to an Oxford professor. “ Even Poulton, good man as he is, goes to excesses,” he said. Professor Poulton was the very man whose work and whose spacious evidence were in my mind at the moment. His uncanny recollection of faces and names rvas the natural outcome of the intense humanity of the
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man. The longer you talked the more his came out into the open. It was a little hidden at first by his preciseness of speech and the armour common to public men. But the disguise fell off in the twinkling of an eye, when common congenial ground was touched, and perhaps it was never worn for many minutes in the circle of his home. IT is very clothes forbade it. They suggested a workaday farmer or gamekeeper, and I had an insane desire to ask whether his grey homespun stockings were not knit on the spot before the farm hearth during the winter evenings.
One could not talk for long in war-time without coming round to lost friends and lost opportunities. Colonel Roosevelt w r as saying how humble he felt in the presence of people like Viscount Grey and F. C. Selous. They saw so much in nature that he, naturalist though he was to his finger-tips, would miss. And I spoke of the pity of Selous’s death, the oldest lieutenant in the British army, and the fittest man I ever knew.
“ Yes, yes,” he said with a sigh. “ But what a fine death! And Selous would have wished it so.” It was a fine epitaph to a great fighter from a great fighter; and so we came to speak of the war and America’s part in it.
Colonel Roosevelt had four sons and a brother-in-law fighting. One was wounded in France, one was in our armed motor service in Mesopotamia, and one in the Flying Corps. It was the supreme regret of his life which he did not attempt to disguise, that he was not with that noble company. If only he could have gone to France with the division that he began personally to raise the day after war broke out, he could have been in the trenches with ten thousand men in the first year of the war. There came back to his memory his fighting time in the Spanish w r ar. Within sixty days of the raising of his recruits in America his men were already veterans, one-third of
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the men and one-fifth of the officers casualties on the field.
He spoke with animation of the coloured troops. “They will fight well. I know they will fight well, for I have fought with them. Well led, they are as good as any troops you could wish. If I had gone to France with my division we should have had two coloured regiments, one of them entirely officered by its own men, and after fighting with them I know that they would have given a good account of themselves.”
“ If I had gone to Franee with my division ’’ — that was the forbidden ambition engraved on his heart.
He pressed me when the time came to come back and see the red tanager with him. Alas, the red tanager had not yet arrived when I was recalled to England, so I wrote regretting that the visit was impossible. His reply was characteristic.
CHAPTER IX
AMERICAN IDEALISTS
President Wilson, his formality—Mr. Houston’s joke—A prejudice agamst women workers—Colonel House—“ Charlie Schwab, a second Democritue— 1 “ Billy ” Sunday, the Revivalist—Satan and the Kaiser—Athletic preaching—American depression—A national get-together ” —The Liberty Loan—Attitude of German-Americans —The Poles—Wilbur Wright and aeroplanes War prophecies—The return journey—American sailors —And soldiers—Back to the trenches.
THE two people I most wanted to see in the I'nited States were Roosevelt and Henry Ford; but it was part of my mission to visit more official America, which is always very approachable.
After Oyster Bay and Detroit came the White House. The visit to President Wilson was formal. He received a group of Englishmen in the little Green Room of White House. I had seen him before, and heard him on public platforms; and he spoke well, though scarcely a touch of personality emerged. When I had last seen him at Baltimore, standing under a colossal sham statue of Liberty, festooned with American bunting and flags, and flanked with a faked model of trench life at the front, erected in a huge hall, he seemed to me a sort of theatre President, stripped of all humanity.
The formality did not quite drop from him in the Green Room, He posed a little there too, as on a stage. He did not speak, but read written matter, turning the pages carefully. His gestures were rare, he eschewed all images. Though his tones carried to every corner, and his pauses, as when he said “ I
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accept the challenge” gave a thrill, the speaker impressed me intellectually as a cold, relentless, logic machine, and physically as bearing a resemblance to a male statue of Liberty come to life —as a blend of John Stuart Mill and a headmaster of Eton.
It was clearly impossible that this man and Roosevelt could ever accord. Their personalities were much more contrary than their parties. The only observable gust of feeling was evoked by a reference to a speech of Mr. Lloyd George. “ What does he mean,” he said almost petulantly, “by saying the Americans will surprise the world? We shall do what we set out to do. We shall stay put.” Those last two words—one of the best and quite the most compact of American phrases—came delightfully from the academic lips. They were a welcome relief. As he spoke them I noticed for the first time a surprising likeness in the President to Joe Chamberlain, a likeness, it need hardly be said, only skin deep. Nevertheless, the two shared one thing in common, a great love of flowers. In this respect at least President Wilson was more human than his reputation. lie rejoiced in the beauty of his official dwelling, in the bulbs and fruit blossom that make a strangely bridal setting to this politician’s palace.
One of the soundest members of the President’s cabinet, so far as I could judge of them, was Mr. Houston, the Minister of Agriculture, as we should say. His memory is endeared by a tale he told. No one is allowed to advertise an agricultural nostrum, until it has passed the official test of the Ministry. Now there was one commercial gentleman who wished to put on the market a preparation that he named the “All Bug Killer.” Unfortunately the government savants could only discover one or two bugs that it so much as discouraged, and refused their sanction. But the discoverer of the “ All Bug Killer ” was not easily suppressed. He tried several
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methods of getting his concoction past the official harrier, and finally sent it in as “ Some Log Killer. “ Ought I to pass it or not? ” asked Mr. Houston.
Our war-time talk was chiefly *nt more serioas subjects. The farmers, he said, were the only class in the United States who were asked to begin to organize for war before war broke out. They recovered the enormous area of thirty million acres to cultivation. Their groups which have a personal and elastic constitution that should be the envy of the world, became a nucleus for the Liberty loan, not because they were farmers, but because they were well organized; and if seventeen million persons subscribed, the multiplicity was chiefly due to them. One detail in the organization of farming was unexpected. I inferred from him and others that there was a prejudice (among men, but not among women) against employing women on the land, and women’s labour got no encouragement from the government. I had noticed in an excellent Regular Army Ordinance works away west on the Mississippi that even the simple sewing work was being done by men. “No, we are not in favour of employing women,” was all the explanation I could extract. It lacked a certain persuasiveness.
The decrease of food consumption was as surprising and as fine as the increase of food production. Mr. Hoover, who was a sort of food controller, showed me a large pile of letters from townships all over the United States begging that they should not be provided with any wheat whatever. The Allies’ need of wheat, a grain that stands a sea journey much better than any other edible species, had been widely advertised, with such effect that town after town gave up its consumption wholly in favour of “ corn,” that is to say of maize and mixtures of other grains. If the organizers of war supplies had been as practically efficient as the organizers of food supplies the war would have ended months earlier.
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Before I left England a friend said to me; “ Whatever you do or fail to do in America don t forget to see Colonel House.” He had the reputation all over the United States of being the " power behind the throne.” One example of his influence was known to me. At the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris many of the representatives of the Allies found themselves in a great room, each group separated from the others as succinctly as particles or shaken quicksilver. There was the desire to coalesce, but not at the moment the motive power; the chief actors had not arrived, and the groups eyed one another with a mixture of curiosity and shyness. At this juncture the door opened and there entered a small man, neither conspicuous in personality to those who judge by externals, nor big in reputation, nor high in office. Indeed he held no office at all, and had always shunned publicity. But this inconspicuous person had not reached the middle of the room before all the awkwardness, nervousness and strain were lifted from the bearing and the faces of the company. They joined together round the new arrival with as single a mind, as if an external hand had shaken all the quicksilver drops into one pool.
This man was Colonel House. What was his secret? I went to visit him in some hope of getting at least a hint of the secret of his power in the world, and after a very pleasant, and in some ways intimate, talk in the library-study where his brain ticks—it is never heard to strike —it was not difficult to understand why his entry into a room even of engrooved politicians should alter the atmosphere.
The secret of his personality is not easy to convey in words, but it would be worth while, if I could even suggest a hint of it; for Colonel House is perhaps the best and wisest of living diplomats. He speaks with the delightfully soft voice of the born Southerner, and his manner is perhaps too unpreten-
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tious. The delight of talking to him springs from his peculiar gift of subconscious sympathy. His response to anything said, whether light or weighty, comes so smoothly, quickly and appropriately that you feel all along as if he had been dealing directly with your thoughts rather than your words; and during any pauses in our talk we seemed to be still conversing. His engine, so to speak, starts without any noise or jerk or even emphasis. Lie possesses supremely what a novelist has called “listener’s lure.” He is careful to betray few feelings and boasts few definite opinions, for he is a listener first and a talker second.
But his native idealism, which is a sort of delicate fervour, is curiously palpable whenever congenial people or things are touched upon, especially people. I happened to know well some of his close friends in England, and more than once his whole person brightened when this or that name was mentioned; for example, when we talked of Sir Horace Plunkett and his still invincible faith in the Irish convention and in the high purpose of the United States. His soft and unemphatic voice slowed when we reached the subject of America and the war ; and he told with one of the restrained but vivid gestures that mark him, how the accumulated force of the American Continent was just reaching its true momentum, and how through the doors of New York, the energy and intention of the South and the Middle and the Far West were on the way to their fulfilment in Europe, and how the war, an evil thing in itself, was nevertheless cementing many things that were loose in the American nation.
You could tell his spirits were gayer when he talked of the happy rivalry of the war workers—for instance, of the £‘2,000 wager between shipyards in the east and west; but the gaiety, as it seemed to me, dropped to a sort of home-sickness for the sun and warmth of peace, when he said, “ They are
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thinking chiefly of oranges in California.” A more incisive voice would have made an epigram of it.
The idealist in Colonel House is not on the surface. Very little is on the surface except his uncanny knowledge of persons and things. Even when he spoke glowingly of the momentum of American effort his hand made a little movement, as if he were turning a door handle, before he added that the momentum will be great and visible as soon as “ a little turn ” is given to the organizing centre in Washington.
The gesture and the sentiment announced not the idealist, but the man who gives those “ little turns ” that get the right thing done at the right moment with the least trouble.
I suppose no one had so wide and intimate an insight into the diplomacy of the war. No one heard of him crossing the Atlantic or the Channel, but he was a shuttle plying between East and West and weaving the tissue of alliance. He had been twice in Germany since 1914, and seemed to have been courted by the Germans as a man who might at any time take peace out of his pocket and offer it quietly, as a man would offer a cigar to a friend. But never was there a man whom German mentality was less well qualified to read. It could understand a lath painted to look like iron, but it could not understand a lion camouflaged to the appearance of a mouse.
We like to think in England of our skill in hereditary diplomats. Colonel House proved that diplomats may need but little manufacture. He was born, not made; and born, like the Greek goddess, in full panoply. He had not training, but his quiet zest for organization took him one day from Texas, his native place, to the National Convention, where he met Dr. Woodrow Wilson, almost by accident, and his capacity for hero-worship at once found vent.
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More than any other man he helped to develop the Professor into the President.
Almost as soon as the President’s election was complete Colonel House became a world force. He accepted no office and sought no fame; but his influence was like that of a man who hits a well-timed ball and sends it smoothly to its end. Anyone might approach the oracle, and if he wanted any light on what was happening in the world or on the tendencies that were moving events, a few words with Colonel House at once gave him his bearings and corrected his compass. But let him ask no more. If he wanted a hint of the future he found the Sibylline books a blank. The future is a pet secret which Colonel House always keeps to himself.
Six months after I saw him he appeared almost miraculously in Paris at the very moment of the German request for an armistice. He had come for reasons that had nothing to do with peace, and much to do with war and great warriors; but the neat timing of his arrival was everywhere quoted as a crowning tribute to his quiet omniscience.
It was my fortune to meet within a few weeks a great number of the leading men in the United States, and everyone struck me as characteristic of his country. One day in a New York club an American acquaintance said that Arthur Balfour “ was the most British thing he had ever struck ”; and a discussion ensued as to who was ‘ ‘ the most American thing.” I thought it would be a hard problem to solve, but there was general agreement when some one said, deliberately and with the judicial pause that marks American speech, that he guessed “ Charlie ” was. The most popular appointment ever made in the United States was the selection of Charles M. Schwab to be Minister of Shipping. Few conversationalists could keep off the subject. As I sat down to a farewell luncheon in
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New York the secretary of the club proudly handed me a private letter to read. It was typewritten and terse, but signed “ Charles Schwab,” a good firm signature. Half the members had stories of “ Charlie his youth, his arrival, his “ Bethlehem periods,” a phrase not meant to be sacrilegious. I heard his life story—each version differing from the other—a dozen times. Men and women talked Charlie in the streets, in the cars, in the trains. In political circles his appointment was held to mark the end of political slowness and inefficiency. And all this appreciation of the Steel King as a public character was punctuated by outbursts of personal admiration. “Charlie is such a good fellow’.”
Hero-worship always flourishes in the United States (though the hero may sometimes descend abruptly into a “ Back Number ”), but the worship of “ Charlie ” had, I think, a quality quite of its own, and there was something more than a personal reason why half the American nation continued to talk of bonnie “ Charlie,” as if they w 7 ere Jacobites out of season.
But the king they addressed so familiarly was a king of industry and anything but hereditary in his kingdom. Charles M. Schwab w f as not the first big business man to be set in charge of a great w r ar industry. Stettinius, probably the ablest of all, but unknown, was Assistant Secretary for War; Ryan, copper magnate and road builder, was head of aircraft production. And there were seven or eight others.
But none of these, nor all of these, compared with the new ship-king in their appeal to popular imagination. From ’Frisco to New T York the people believed that Schwab would manufacture ships almost as quickly as the steel plates that made him a millionaire. Hog Island, already the Colossus among the world’s shipyards, and soon to be capable of turning out a “ fabricated ” ship a day, w r as to do his name more honour than even the Bethlehem Steel
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Works. It did no one much honour in the sequel, but that is another story, and had little to do with “ Charlie’s ” influence.
So I went to see Mr. Schwab, and in something under five seconds knew why half America felt happy, felt that all was right with the world when “ Charlie ” went to the White House and said he was “ afraid of nothing, not even of the Ministry of Shipping.” It was quite impossible not to laugh in his presence. He outdid the reputation of Democritus, “ the laughing philosopher ” of the classics.
When he had given me some facts about the shipping and told me that full speed ahead would begin before July Bth, he talked solely of cheerfulness and the value of enthusiasm. The two were the real secrets of his success. His power of drive, of getting things done, had come less from force and energy, though these were present in high enough power, than from a contagious optimism.
“ Nobody can do really good work unless he is cheerful.” “You spoil all good work in a man by blame and grumbling.” “Never judge a man by his mistakes, but always by w r hat he gets done.” “ Don’t get men to work for you, but with you.” “ I suppose few men have made more mistakes than I have.” Mr. Schwab kept laughing out such maxims one after the other in the intervals of enough interruptions on the telephone to set a common man’s nerves at the wasteful job of frantic fussing. And he told me some delightful anecdotes all on the same subject.
Mr. Carnegie, who knew his gift of optimism, brought him from Italy the picture of a poor old monk sitting with his two hands over his stomach and laughing consumedly. He kept the picture in his working room as a source of strength. His ideal character was that of a working man who, refusing to strike, was thrown over the canal, and wobbled, half-drowned and frozen, back to his home.
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“ And what did you do to your fellow-work-men? ” Mr. Schwab had asked him. “Oh, I just laughed,” he said. And that was what Mr. Charles M. Schwab did, even when things were hardest and results were smallest.
He had done much work for Great Britain, and one of his proudest feats, so he told me, was the provision of a score or so of submarines demanded by Mr. Churchill. Mr. Schwab, who knew at the time nothing whatever about the details, promised them in nine months. He produced them, though he had to go to Canada to do it, in six months. He did the same with the shipping, largely because the men who worked under him did more and better work under the contagion of his energetic laughter. What might have been bragging in another, in him was bubbling faith. Like the old philosopher his creed was “ credo quia impossibile ” ; “I believe that it can be done, because others are sure it cannot.”
There were many reasons why “ Charlie ” should have been a hero. Personal qualities and a picturesque career had endeared him to some and advertised him to all, but there was one master reason which gave him a proper prominence above most other heroes. In himself and in his career he served as epitome and type of the whole American nation in its historic development.
As a boy of foreign origin Schwab earned a few dollars a week in the Steel Corporation Works. A gift of music and of hard work combined brought him to the notice of Mr. Carnegie, who was passionately susceptible to melody. He was selected for a particular piece of work. His salary and position were raised. He received a few shares. At a crisis this David who had played to the King, went out and by his sole strength and charm settled a threatened strike. He became a man of mark. His shares multiplied, and one morning a rearrangement
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of the stock, forced by the irresistible growth of the industry, made him more than a millionaire.
He woke to the fact of a sudden. He was himself dazed like the nation which rose, from a halfblind struggle with the inherent wealth of the land, to the perception of a thousand unrealized possibilities. Charlie said to himself day after day: “ What shall Ido with this money? What can I buy with it? ” His answers to his own questions were at first crude enough and elemental enough. One day at an inn he paid a £4 bill with a £lOO note and said : “Keep the change.” The incident meant nothing to him, but it was retold all over the locality, and “Charlie” found himself regarded as an eccentric freak, a reputation not altogether desirable among the directors of a great business concern.
How r many people over the world discussed American finance, and indeed character, very much as they discussed “ Charlie,” in the light of a wild spendthrift prodigy of extraordinary capacity for making dollars, and for spending them in and out of season. But this middle period of man and nation was not likely to last long. Presently Charles Schwab played the part of Henry V, and “ reformation in a flood ” came o’er him. He created the Bethlehem Steel Works, and discovered, for the second time, that his real mission lay along the road of labour. His genius stood out clear. He had found himself.
Was this to be the end? Was the United States only to be famous as a congeries of dollar kings, whose genius lay in dragging out wealth from the bowels of the earth? America’s part in the war was sufficient answer.
New ambitions had arisen in nations as well as in millionaires. The Steel King was now on a national, not a commercial, throne. His laugh had become a national, not a personal, asset. He and his ships and his shipyards took their place in history as makers of
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a new nation, united and Americanized out of all recognition of its earlier self. National development had jumped a hundred years since the news of the German offensive started on March 21st, 1918, when war first came home to the feelings and the imagination of the American people. And famous among its chiefs was and will be, that most characteristic citizen, Democritus Schwab.
Other countries might conceivably have produced Mr. Schwab, but no country could possibly have elaborated a famous American whom I met quite by accident, in Chicago. This immense, and, on the lake side, most beautiful city was agog over the arrival of the Rev. William Sunday, who, probably because he is not visibly reverend, is called Billy Sunday. He, the most athletic preacher in the world, the super-evangelist of America, had at last come to Chicago to “ revivalize ” (save the mark) his native city.
This man and his campaign were both prodigious in a degree beyond the realization of other countries. Revivalism on the American scale was in part a war product, and in the hands of Billy Sunday the Kaiser slipped quite naturally into the place of Satan. Nor was a word raised in rebuke, even in the neighbouring homes of the American Germans, and the sins of alcohol and society with other pulpit targets were allowed to take an inferior place. Within a week hundreds of thousands of persons had come to regard the Kaiser as “weasel-eyed and bull-necked,” and had heard his name inspire a jeremiad of galloping adjectives of abuse, and had watched his effigy smothered under a barrage of contemptuous slang.
I attended the opening meeting of this new campaign, and made close acquaintance with the prodigy. A special hall with ten aisles and a thousand lights had been built for the occasion. It cost £lO,OOO and gave room for fifteen thousand people
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in front of the preacher, and a choir of four thousand behind him. Every newspaper gave information how to reach the hall by motor-car, train or shanks’s mare; and the three sermons of the opening day were printed in full by all the newspapers with many columns, even pages, of comment and illustration by men and women, clerical and lay.
There was never anything like it in the world. It “licked creation.” It was not for nothing that many million people heard and read under the sanction of religion that the United States had “set out to get the hide of the scaly Prussian serpent and was going to fry, frizzle and boil it.” The preacher who had whipped up such enthusiasm by pure personal attraction without any church or body behind him was a national phenomenon. Billy Sunday, twentj’-five years ago, was among the pick of base-ball players of the world. He held the record for speed in running the four bases. He was a great bowler, a good bat, and a fine outfield, as we should One day he gave up his big salary as a professional player and took a small post as secretary to the Y.M.C.A. In due time he became a preacher, and his circulation grew by leaps and bounds, till he was accepted as a national character, and the darling of the Press and the public. When he went to bed we were told that Satan had a reprieve. When he was massaged in the morning we heard of the “ left upper cut that Satan or the Kaiser was to receive before noon.
Billy Sunday’s secret of success was not altogether obscure. It sprang from the perception that the same qualities which make for success in the one game, to wit, base-ball, should be equally useful in any other profession such as preaching. His address at Chicago was the most athletic thing I ever saw. Every stage of it was a gvmnastic feat. His capacity for speed began with the lips. He spoke two hundred and twenty words a minute, and every
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word was loud and distinct. The adjectives tore after one another like boys on a slide, and his verbs —most racy, homely if not vulgar, Saxon verbs —played hilarious leap-frog. Reporters could not follow him in his breakneck race if they did not have a very fair idea of what sequence of words were coming, for he was not a speaker who was afraid of overworking willing phrases.
His gestures excelled his words in speed. He had a peculiar gift of using any part of his body without disturbing the rest. His head twisted and turned without affecting body or arms. I have seen a prize-fighter with the same gift. He could toss an arm about as if it were a crane. He picked up one leg and stamped it down with the invisible celerity of the secretary bird, when it strikes a serpent or rat or other vermin. But when he wished he could hitch all the limbs together in one motion that was rather swifter than any single gesture.
Almost before you had heard the allusion to Martin Luther crawling up the steps, he was on all fours moving like a dog across the platform. He mentioned prayer and at once tumbled on his knees, excelling the speed of Grossmith’s famous flop in the “ Mikado.” Half the time between such excesses of gesture he was moving across the platform with the smooth, restless, quick patrol of the Serbian wolf in his cage at the Zoo. Scores of periods were punctuated by base-ball actions. He was always bowling and throwing over the heads of his audience, and occasionally he dived at the base. Once in an access of perfervid rage he seized a chair, banged it down, and broke it up, a lucky accident, if it were an accident, for when all was over his admirers boarded the pulpit-platform to take away the bits as holy relics.
"W ell, the value of action in oratory was a favourite theory of Burke’s, and Billy Sunday’s chair in the £lO,OOO hall was much more successful than
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Burke’s throwing down a dagger in the House of Commons. . ,
In his final peroration Dr. Sunday seized a stronger chair, whisked it to the pulpit, leaped on the two, and, leaning forward with a foot on each like the statue of the Greek runner, poured out one thousand words in three minutes. He frequently megaphoned to heaven through the funnel of his two hands, as if he were testing the acoustic properties not of the £lO,OOO hall, but of the universal dome.
I took down the last words of three of his most impassioned passages. These were the sentences: “ We will fight you dirty dogs to the last ditch. “ And you go to hell.” “ And you keep your dirty rotten hands off.” They do not, as quoted, sound in the highest vein of spiritual oratory or thought, but fifty thousand people a day went to hear them, and everyone was forced to read them.
And what was the final influence of it all? Thousands hated the “ scaly Prussian serpent” more than they did. That was at any rate something, bad or good. Yet the prevailing applause, the standard emotion, was laughter, free and unashamed. Perhaps the laughter “did the trick.” It is generally held that without Billy Sunday America would not have gone dry.
On the morning of March 22nd, 1918, a day or two after the Chicago revival week ended, the papers were filled to the brim with news of the German offensive, of the first advance from Cambrai and its startling success. The mere breadth of sea between Cambrai and New York at first destroyed all sense of perspective. Apparently sane and reasonable men thought for a day or two that the British and French armies were wiped out; and were in terror that the whole burden of the war was left on the back of the United States. A member of one of the best clubs in New York said to me; “I suppose if the worst
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comes to the worst we shall find a few battalions (sic) of French and English to fight with our American army ! ”
When news came of the ‘‘grosse Bertha who bombarded Paris at seventy miles the black servant in my hotel asked me in a horrified whisper whether anything now could stop the Germans winning.
These were the two extreme follies, but such excesses floated on the surface of an emotion deeper than any that ever stirred the continent since one nation stretched from the Pacific to the Atlantic. America was Americanized within the space of a week. The instant and insistent feeling from ’Frisco to New York, from New Orleans to Chicago, that the nation was “ up against it ” killed almost at once all that was left of the dilettante idealism that titillated all classes except the navy. One after another men of business, Ryan, Schwab and the rest, were appointed to control the material forces of war; America felt that what had been thought to be rather easy and very glorious was now going to be hard, and would not be at all glorious if there was any more playing with the issue. Whatever happened now death would accompany glory.
It is a great experience to have seen a giant wake up and stretch himself and make quite sure that all his limbs were his own and that none of his nerves had gone to sleep. The giant was, of course, certain to wake at some hour or other, but that noise from Montidier did it with slick completeness at the moment when there was giant’s work to do.
In all sorts of ways the movement called the “ get together ” of the American Nations went on at a surprising rate. The chief advertisement of the historic fact was the appearance of the soldiers. I saw at this time a good deal of the “Rainbows,” regiments recruited from every state in the Union. I saw them in camp, on parade, and on the march. They were more level, more uniform, more of a
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pattern than any soldiers that I ever saw anywhere. Even the shake of their legs, set off in trim spats, seemed to me of a peculiar sort. It is quite beyond dispute that the American face is of a more distinct type than the English or French. By the shades of Darwin and Columbus, how does this come about? They were holding classes in English in Upton Camp to enable the men to understand commands. A group were on the point of being punished for not obeying the order “Right about face,” when they pleaded that the words did not belong to a language they understood. In Chicago I was told “ There are more Polish papers than German in the town! ” Wandering through New York a notice caught my eye. It said that those who did not understand Italian must go elsewhere! A common saying in America, at least as true physically as morally, is, “once a German always a German.” It were truer to say, so I felt looking along the ranks, “ once an American at once an American.” Among Uncle Sam’s nephews, real and adopted, the long, serious, firm American face and the limber limbs prevail over all the scores of racial strains. How can this be? Are school children taught to make a particular face? Is climate so strict a master? Can men be so subdued to what they work in? to the olive uniform or the factory or the street?
All the papers began at this date to speak of ’S ankees, meaning Americans. Are we to reject the old advice to call no American a Yankee unless he comes from the north-east? It seems so. The effort to give the soldiers the name of Sammy quite failed before the attractions of Yankee or even Yanks, and none objected.
The collection of the Liberty Loan played its part in the get together.” Was money ever before so patriotically extracted? You were rung up on the telephone at seven-thirty a.m. to be told your duty to the section of the city in which you resided. Your
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post brought you letters and forms making all easy. You missed your train to Washington because you could not cross a procession that outdid the Lord Mayor’s show. Hoarse men and women, growing more falsetto as the day advanced, exhausted you and themselves in continuous orations from booths and windows and the tops of omnibuses.
A peculiarly eloquent person of a patriotic fervour that none could dispute, shouted and showed his soldier’s scars in the Central Station ; and collected great sums for the Loan. I could not help feeling what a pity it was to arrest him as a deserter. He would have escaped all right, but the attraction of the Loan overcame him. He was forced to go downstream, to follow the current, and work for the Loan.
Half the w T orld was asked to help in collecting this money from the American people. Charlie Chaplin went round in a wagon and did wonders, a Scotsman sold his kilt for untold sums, on the plea that “it had fought at Gallipoli.” It was wrong, but I could not help thinking of Aristophanes’ reference to “that which fought at Salamis,” meaning the seats of the oarsmen. This kilt went on being sold interminably, and I never heard who was the “ Old Maid ” at last permanently saddled with the bauble.
The fashion of selling kilts grew. Harry Lauder, with whom I travelled home, had the loan of one to sell. He auctioned it with great humour for his own particular charity; and the happy purchaser, after paying his one hundred dollars, presented the object —it had fought at Ypres, or was it Arras?—to a young lady, who for the rest of the voyage was asking advice about it. What did one do with a kilt that had fought at Ypres?
I went to the theatre to forget the Liberty Loan for a moment in listening to the charming art of Mr. Craven. After the first act he came before the curtain —I ought to have known he would—and spoke for
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thirty-five minutes on behalf of the Liberty Loan* But he did it so well that it was “ as good as a play. By mere delicacy of humour he wheedled one hundred thousand dollars out of the audience towards the end of the campaign when things were very dull. He made the stalls cap the thousand dollar bid of the millionaire of the dress circle. He made a poor Englishman subscribe four hundred dollars because a Frenchman had paid four hundred to extract the “ Marseillaise ” out of the band. He saw that it was of course compulsory for the British in the audience to demand “ God Save the King ; and he knew that he would get four thousand dollars presently for "The Star-Spangled Banner. ’ All this proves that the American plan for gathering in the money, however noisy, had method in its madness. You can wheedle and bully money out of people, if you wheedle and bully well. You can fail if you do it badly. Some did it very badly. I was in a theatre in Buffalo when a goodly citizen nearly emptied the house before he squeezed out one hundred dollars. He recited a poem “ composed by a friend.” It described chiefly the various tortures to be inflicted on the Kaiser after he was dead. People did not like it. They liked Mr. Craven very much; and generosity is always founded on liking of some sort, for some person or some thing.
One of the most curious features in the collection of the third Liberty Loan was the generosity of the Middle West. The list of towns that had most quickly subscribed or over-subscribed their quota was headed by four or five German towns. Were the German-Americans richer? Were they superpatriots? Or was there a simpler cause, something with the fears of tar and feathers in it ? Three } T oung stalwart Americans in one of these districts won remarkable success in their collecting tour. Their method, as explained to me, was as simple as effective. Their spokesman asked each householder his name.
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“Fritz Muller, did you say? Ah! ’ “ And, Heir Muller, have you subscribed to the Liberty Loan. If Mr. Muller offered to subscribe five hundred dollars, it was suggested to him to make it five thousand as a first instalment of ten thousand in case the town’s quota was behindhand. And with this a paper and a fountain-pen were slipped into Mr. Muller’s hand. There was no fulminate of mercury in the pen, as in some of those left by the Germans in their retreat, but Mr. Muller hastened to sign and give it back. The repetition of his name and a determined young American were enough. Everywhere Germans gave freely. Opposite my club in New York was this notice :
Kauft Freiheit’s Bonds
America’s FREIHEIT ist die unserige
It read queerly. But as soon as it became quite clear that no hyphens were to be permitted in America, it is certain that millions of Mullers in their deliberate conscious manner solemnly at a particular moment put the choice before themselves. Should they, being German-Americans, select the name on the left or the right of the hyphen ? A story is told of one household that held a conseil de famille to thresh out the question, and that all the children attached themselves to the party of the right: they voted American. Everyone knows the zeal of the convert. Real converts perhaps contributed to the pre-eminence of Cincinnati and Milwaukee in providing money for the Liberty Loan.
The most ardent of all the patriots were the Poles. The manager of one of the vaster of the aeroplane factories near Magara told me story after story of the self-sacrificing, inspired feelings of the Poles of Buffalo to the cause of the war. The young Poles volunteered to a man. The poorest women offered their houses for lodgings and billets. One Polish mother in a cottage we passed spent her last
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dollar in paying for the cartage of straw to provide a shake-down for soldiers. The Polish papers collected vast sums of money, and preached war to the knife with a sentimental rage and an intellectual fervour scarcely to be paralleled. What historian w r ould have imagined, as he traced the effects of those cynical partitions of Poland, that the seething leaven of this injustice would one day work to the beneficent end of the Americanization of the United States ?
‘ ’ Get together ’ ’ speeches were part of the routine of many factories. A desire to see Wilbur Wright, the pioneer of the aeroplane, took me to a factory where he was one of the advisers, though he was described rather brutally (and quite untruly) as a back-number. He told me the whole story of the first flight, and what was most interesting on flight in general, that is on the flying qualities common to the aeroplane and to the bird or bat. He and his brothers watched birds day after day, indeed year after year, especially the bigger birds. They learnt, he confessed, nothing practical until they too could fly; and then very soon they discovered half the secrets that had just escaped the mere watcher. Especially they learnt the use and value of updraught. He was convinced that the buzzards, a very common species everywhere, even in the suburbs, circle round till they create an upward current on which they float.
My talk with W ilbur \\ right was interrupted, first by a flight on one of the new aeroplanes and then by a visit to the factory. Within a great hall, built for the purpose, all the workmen had been summoned to listen to a moral oration by one of the directors. It was spoken from the “get together” text by an orator who had all the manner and appearance of a very professional padre. The droop of the shoulders, the long loose limbs, the big spectacles, not to mention the platitudinous periods, suggested
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a vocation, either professional or episcopal. Yet appearances must be deceptive. In the first place he was becoming a millionaire; and I learned that he started from the bottom. Pure science was his subject. He handled his car like a perfect chauffeur ; and as he drove he talked; and boiled down a little, indeed a good deal, his talk was wonderful. He felt the need one day in his experiments with engines of getting in touch with the soul of the airplane motor; and so went up day after day, and night after night, having so contrived the seats that he could lay his hands on the hands of the pilot and feel the soul of the motor through this medium. Soon he made the discovery that he had learnt to fly, had himself become an expert pilot merely through the agency of sympathetic touch. A little later a sort of mania for solitary flights by night overwhelmed him. All this I learnt, not at first from the man himself, but from his colleagues and servants. I had no niche to put him into. He was a skilled mechanic, he was an idealist professor, he was fond of money and a great hand at making it, and that not only in one direction. He was a dreamer and a fighter, and yet overlaid with the manner of an engrooved pulpiteer. He was not yet forty years old.
Ultra-American himself, he talked a great deal about the American character. In his view the fault and virtue of America was a sort of scientific idealism. He put into apt words the complaint that was general. The people wanted something better than the best. They wanted a motor-engine which in the old idiom would “lick creation,” and be capable of infinitely rapid production. The immediate result was that while the Germans were turning out rough planes, often with metal struts and no stream lines, the Americans were still experimenting. The German planes were good enough to fight with, and this satisfied that most material and realistic people. In the first lap of the race, as usual, the realist was
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beating the idealist. This desire for the licking of creation was due, in his view, partly to parochial egotism.” But true idealism was behind it, a reaching for an ideal if only for a mechanical ideal. All the while he himself as producer was personally smarting under the compulsion to produce samples for some idealistic governmental board, when he yearned and was ready to turn ten thousand hands into quantitive standardized production, and had indeed been ready for months.
Even when the German offensive slackened and stopped, opinion in the United States was pessimistic, and there was a general desire to cheer the people up. With this view the editor of one of the magazines came to me with the request that I would write an article to say “Where, when, how, and why the Germans would be defeated. I sat down on the spot and wrote two thousand words on this “whole hog” theme, announcing as far as a selfrespecting prophet dared, just “where, when, how and why the Germans would be defeated.” It frightened me a little when I saw far-flung advertisements of the article with descriptive details of the writer, who had just come from headquarters in France. The day after it appeared a syndicate wrote to me to point out that I had not half exhausted the theme. Would I not write for them a series of articles telling the world exactly “ where, when, how and why the Germans would be defeated.” The wonder is that they did not add “by whom.” But perhaps it was too early a date for that controversy.
In the sequel the prophet escaped without disgrace. “The old battle line” was my answer to the “ Where.” “ Not later than the spring of 1919, which would be the American year,” answered the “ When.” The answer to the “ How ” I have forgotten, but it was tempting to say “ by America’s
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aeroplane.” That the spiritual always beats the material was a good enough reason “ Why.”
Any temptation further to exploit the theme was removed by a very welcome recall to the Front in France.
I returned with a convoy of eight vessels, and we completed the journey in a fortnight, which at that time was a best on record. It was an interesting voyage. Among those on board were Lord and Lady Aberdeen, who had been living for some time in New York, collecting money for an Irish charity. Their mission had grown unpopular, and perhaps did not accord with war conditions. Severe things were said. Harry Lauder was another of the passengers, and should have been the life of the ship. To some extent he was, but he was so full of the patriotic speeches which he had been delivering that he produced them even at the concert and could scarcely be diverted into song. Another patriotic speaker who had more success than anyone among American women was “Flora Annie Swan.” Two British officers among the passengers had met one another outside the customs hut on the quay at New York. “You?” said one. “You!” said the other, and then together: “Why are you not in France?” The men were brothers. Neither knew that the other was in America. One had left France to speak on behalf of the Liberty Loan, and the other was on the way back from China, where he had been to collect coolie labour!—a good example of British activities.
Many of the American soldiers on board had never seen the sea, and some could not understand it at all. One of them asked me the glorious question, “How did it all keep together?” It adds a new terror to life to imagine what would happen if the sea sprang a leak or burst its banks!
But a much stranger thing than the soldiers’ ignorance of the sea was the sailors’. About three-
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quarters of the American navy is recruited from the Middle West, especially in the Chicago neighbourhood. Yet these men make sailors very quickly. In spite of their training, shall I say, or because of it? He is a rash man who will deny American idealism after a visit in war-time to a naval training station. The Germans would cram their men with sea-knowledge and technical training. The American instructors seemed to me to spend at least half their energy on teaching morality. The men in a month or two of preliminary training, before they go down to the sea, learn only one thing really well, and that is “the good of the ship.” The meaning of this motto, the value of the spirit of a great navy, courage and self-sacrifice, these were the nucleus of the training system at the very crisis of the war. Was ever such a proof of a nation’s belief in the mastery of the spiritual over the material ?
The most popular event on the ship was the daily French class for soldiers. The men had a wonderful thirst for knowledge. One has been told rather the reverse, that Americans “ guessed that they hadn’t much to learn from Europe any way.” One has been told wrong. Among my best friends in America were some of the excellent teams of instructors machine-gun, bombing, gassing, bayonet, rifle-shooting instructors that the British and French sent over. They all said that they never found keener learners or more modest learners. A story was prevalent before I left England of an American who visited our chief Intelligence Department, and said to the officer in charge by way of opening the interview, “ Say, we want to begin right there where you left off.' Does the question issue from modesty or conceit? I am in favour of modesty. At any rate in the camps in America, and yet more in the camps in France, French officers and British officers all said the same thing in effect,
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that the men were humble but not diffident; and what more can you ask of the Happy Warrior himself ?
A month or so later I met in France some of the Australians w T ho attacked with a company of Americans at Villers Bretonneux. “ Our men started with more prejudice,” they said. “They had a habit of calling the Americans ‘ stokers,’ which meant men who keep the home fires burning. Now they call ’em ‘diggers,’ which you know is the final term of friendship in our ranks. While we were lying out waiting for the attack, the Americans just looked hard at our men to see what they would do and how they took it. Mind you, some of these men had never seen a barrage or heard a shell burst. It was the same all through the attack. They watched the old soldier, and as soon as they saw his line they went in hard and did the same sort of thing. I never saw fellows so keen to learn or so chock full of faith in their neighbours. They got a bit too excited when the assault began, and w T ent too far and fast in places, but that was a detail. They’ll make old soldiers as quick as any new troops in France.” So said “ The Digger,” and praise from an Australian soldier is praise indeed, even if it has a touch of patronage.
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CHAPTER X
COLOGNE AND THE RUHR
Last weeks of the war—Entry into Bruges—Obsequious Germans— Reception in Cologne—The fall of the mark—Causes of defeat —“ Fraternization ” —1922: a great change—The misery of the Ruhr—lnter-Allied hostility—The farce of the Inter-Allied High Commission—Cologne under General Godley—The science of smuggling—The Krupp murders—A Communist preacher— Super-Napoleons—Disarmament figures—The sham revolution — The Flying Army—How it was organized and financed—The Regie—Comedy and tragedy—Social life in Cologne—Visitors— An impossible situation —The revolution doomed to failure.
I KNEW at midday on August Bth that the war was over, that the end had begun. Nevertheless the Armistice, three months later, was an inexpressible relief. The German word for it gives the heart of the matter—the Wappenstillstand ; shells woidd no longer explode. Very early in the morning of November 11th I was at the corps headquarters, but earlier still General Butler had sent out his aides-de-camp to find the advanced patrols. His happiness at the end of hostilities was a little marred by the fact that before setting out the aides had eaten the General’s breakfast. They did most of their work in time, but one cavalry patrol failed to hear and was very proud of having fought, and, it was alleged, taken a gun half an hour after the “ Stillstand ” was ordained. Nothing much happened, but the memory of the little military ceremony that I witnessed in a hamlet at the centre of Marlborough’s victories, of Malplaquet, of Oudenarde, of Ramillies, still at intervals brings the sort of happy feeling that accompanies one’s awakening the morning after the receipt of some good news or welcome experience,
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The most moving scene was at Mons, entered by the Canadians on the morning of the 11th. There, whence in August, 1914, the regular British Army had retreated as gloriously as Sir John Moore from Corunna, within a few yards of the old palace, the dead of the advanced Canadian force had been brought together in one room and covered with flowers by the French population, overcome with emotional joy and for the moment—it did not perhaps last very long—overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude.
Relief at the end of the war was enhanced for the war correspondent by a purely selfish feeling. As the advance was pushed forward over country shattered and robbed of all convenience in the way of hotels or telegraph wires, he was forced to longer and longer journeys up and back. Day after day he was not less than seven hours in a motor-car, and a car that was pressed to the utmost possible speed, that often started in the dark and ended in the twilight. Between the two journeys he saw what was to be seen of battles, of barrages, of the country and the people in it, he searched out prisoners—and once, at any rate, one of them was just missed, along with the prisoners, by German shrapnel. He wrote at what speed was possible, anywhere, and anyhow; and often had not a moment’s leisure so much as to read through the words. Three of my colleagues at one time could scarcely endure to enter a motor-car except under compulsion. So worn were their nerves.
A phrase used to recur in my head about this time, as phrases will to tired minds. Years earlier Mr. Kennedy Jones, who had been junior proprietor of the Daily Mail, said to me in reference to his start on the paper : “ Whether I have worked to the glory of God or not, I don’t know; but I have worked.” We had worked. That no one can doubt, whatever judgment is passed on the result. Physically and
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mentally the work was intense. You wrote of battles still in progress, you wrote of things not certain, you wrote with the conscious compulsion to censor every statement that touched persons or movements, you wrote elliptically for the telegraph, and you wrote with feelings, harrowed by grim spectacles of death and suffering that could not be told and could only be felt.
The strain was not yet over, but the back of the business was broken.
Many scenes had much more of the spirit of victory and more stirred the emotion. Philip Gibbs and I were the first soldiers or civilians to enter Bruges after the German retirement. We were mobbed by the enthusiasts who wanted our shoulder straps and buttons, and would hardly allow us a passage. Gibbs, being smaller, lost more buttons than I did. With the utmost difficulty we managed to get our cars to the gates of a nunnery where Gibbs had friends; and even within its quiet precincts the emotion was hardly less. How they fell on our necks!
We had spent some twelve hours in a car to make the necessary detour round broken bridges ; and began to fear we should never get away again w r ith our news. Very, very slowly, late in the day, we pushed through the crowds up to where our cars were parked and were in sight of escape, when our way w r as blocked by a line of veterans in black coats decorated with many medals. They stood firmly phalanxed in front of us and insisted on singing “ It’s a long, long way ”in a slow and almost lugubrious chant. The opinion prevailed that it was our National Anthem; and we were expected to stand at salute. By the time it W'as over the cars were hidden by a mob as impenetrable as ever. When at last we did escape we felt between laughter, emotion and weakness, that the tale could never be told. The whole day was an irrecoverable dream.
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It is curious psychologically that my memories, very vivid for the most part up to the Armistice, at once grew dimmer from that point. Nothing really mattered any more. Even the memory took a rest. Yet the sequel to the Armistice was compact of experiences almost unparalleled in history; and the subsequent journey up to Cologne not without excitement. How would the Germans take their beating ?
On the first day over the border the people had rushed to the churches, and their pastors, as well as the mayors and municipal authorities we talked with, professed to be terrified at the prospect of revolution. “Save us from the Reds” w r as the general burden. You would have thought that communistic threats were infinitely more important than defeat and the coming in of the enemy’s troops. How far this was real, how far a pose is not easy to sajk But the Revolution in Germany in 1918 was as mild an affair as in 1848, and at no time was the bogey a very convincing ghost to any non-German observer.
When we entered Cologne with our advanced troop of cavalry, the Mayor—a man of great intelligence—had put up a quantity of ingenuous notices urging the folk to receive the occupying army; “ Without cringing and without scorn, which are not only foreign to the German character, but odious in the eyes of the enemy.”
We saw little of either cringing or scorn, just at first, except in one instance. Dining with some French officers in the chief hotel in Aix, we were asked if we would like the band to play during the meal; and as soon as gracious permission was accorded, the orchestra opened with the “ Sambre et Oise ” and other semi-national airs of the Allies. The French are a very proud people; and if ever I saw disgust it was on the faces of those officers. They would have preferred even “ Deutschland liber Alles.”
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The mental attitude of the shopkeepers was surprising. The one thing that enflamed them was an edict that the value of the mark was to be taken at -/7 not 1/-. At one tea-shop where I was given a cake that consisted chiefly of chips of wood, the good lady flatly refused to take any payment unless the mark was taken at its full value ; and I was forced to leave without paying a penny. I wonder what their feelings were when the mark was reduced to one millionth part and less of a shilling. tk
i. o The most unexpected reception was in the Hohe Strasse at Cologne, soon to be a very familiar place to a good part of the British army. The Mayor should have been pleased. There was no sort of hint of anything approaching either scorn or cringing. The shop-fronts blazed, a well-dressed crowd flocked ; and neither man, woman nor child showed any other feeling beyond curiosity. After we had reached the Dom Hotel I walked down the street and talked to all sorts and conditions. One boy said : “ Our army must be better than yours because our men salute more ” —a delightfully German sentiment; but the majority appeared to be genuinely pleased that thej r had been handed over to the British, not to the French or Belgians. Perhaps there was some cringing in this attitude; but at this date the special crusade of hate against “ England ” —the refrain of Linshauer’s Hymn of Hate—had quite exhausted itself, at any rate along the Rhine. After some years of increasing French occupation, it changed completely to the view that Germany’s one salvation lay in the advocacy of Britain.
The bitterness of defeat was almost swallowed up in relief at the end of the war, among the more humble part of the populace. A few minutes after reaching the Dom Hotel I asked one of the servants whether many of her close relations had been fighting. Her answer was ingenuous and surprising. “ Only a brother,” she said, “and he deserted in the summer
[Facing page 199. 1 he Hohenzollern Bridge, Cologne, the Four War Correspondents.
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of 1917.” She told me the whole story. He had grown sick of the trenches, and after his leave did not return to the army, but stayed at home in Cologne, took off his uniform and found civilian work. Now and again a sergeant or policeman came to look for him, but they did not pursue the inquiry. It was generally understood that the number of deserters in Cologne was so large that it was not safe to arrest them. When the Armistice came this courageous deserter went to the military and demanded back-pay due to him ! What is more, he got it.
By such little stories glimpses were opened into the causes of the German defeat. The people began to break in 1917, and the crack widened progressively. Probably there was no general mutiny in Germany of quite the scale or apparent seriousness of the sulking of the French army after the terribly costly failure of Nivelle at the Chemin des Dames, when the black troops were hurled against uncut wire and undisturbed machine-guns. I was told at the time, by a visitor to the scene, that a wail went up from the trenches when the Zero moment arrived. It was certain that during the succeeding weeks many troops absolutely refused to fight. But inherent rebellion went much deeper in Germany. It was progressive, not capricious.
One of the ablest of the Germans I met was asked to what one thing above others he attributed die defeat. He thought a moment and then said leliberately ; “ Want of lubricating oil. Our lorries were breaking down, our trains were breaking down, and our human machine was breaking down.”
In some few towns the bitterness of defeat was forgotten in the fear of rebellion. One regiment of Belgians, among whom I had friends, received an urgent request from a town far beyond their bridgehead, for a defensive garrison to keep down the rebels, who were known at that date as Spartacists. A handful of them responded, were enthusiastically
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received and were housed in an hotel commanding two of the principal streets. There they lived, marooned. When some of us managed to get through, they had not seen an allied newspaper for many days and knew next to nothing of what was going on. They fell like wolves on our budget of papers.
The chief officer said that the only trouble was excess of popularity. Biologists have theories about the influence of “ the conquering male.” Not a few instances from the war could be given—in France and Belgium towards the conquering Hun, and in Germany towards the conquering Allies. Municipal notices were placarded up through Ghent urging tbe populace not to take vengeance on the women who had been “too complaisant to the Germans.” I saw a woman’s hair cut off in the square at Liege—cut with a pair of scissors passed by successive hands over the heads of a dense and angry crowd, all pitiless. But complaisance is hardly the word for the attitude of the German women, half-hysteric with the fear of revolution, towards this group of Belgians, who lived in a state of siege, not from the Spartacists, who were negligible, but from a section of the female population. The passage had to be cleared by an orderly before the captain could retire from the bathroom.
A good deal was said and feared about “ fraternization ” between occupying troops and the residents. Several hundred of our soldiers married Germans; and many of the marriages were very unhappy. The wives were very ill-received in England, were, indeed, so completely'ostracized in some of our seaport towms that they were forced ultimately to return to Germany. The most rapid fraternization was in the American section. The army authorities sent up a large proportion of the men who could speak the language. The first time I went down to
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Coblentz, which the Americans held, a sentry asked me for my passes in German. The request filled me with absurd and unreasonable fury, and the man himself was so ashamed that he backed away and let us through before any pass was shown. At a later date I drove —and a desperate drive it was in the wintry conditions —from Cologne to Treves and put up at an hotel reserved for American officers. The chambermaid who brought me hot water asked very shyly, if I would answer a question. It was a very strange one : “ Were the people in Nebraska chiefly savages, and black in colour? ” It appeared that an American sergeant wanted to marry her and carry her off to his home in Nebraska.
Fraternization galloped at so extreme a pace that the policy of sending up German-speaking soldiers was thereafter much modified. After all these linguists were Germans or half-Germans; and nothing was more natural than that they should have congenial relations with the folk of their own race. The wonder is that they ever consented to fight against them.
When I left Cologne in May, 1919, life all along the Rhine was tolerably peaceful, though more pleasant inside the British than in other areas. When I returned in the spring of 1922 utter misery had succeeded, everywhere except in the British sanctuary. The Americans had retired in dudgeon and for more selfish reasons. The French and Belgians were in open hostility to the British, and the better men among the Germans were suffering exile and fines and imprisonment, scarcely to be paralleled in the worst actions of the Germans in Lille. The Ruhr became a byword in the ears of humanity, and several other districts suffered even more, notably Treves.
The situation had the fantastic semblance of a nightmare. You could hardly make yourself believe
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what you heard and saw daily. lam conscious of a sense of unreality in recalling my own personal experiences; and no one could believe many of the incidents reported on good evidence by both visitors and residents. The gist of the situation may be told in a word or two.
As soon as the peace was signed the French sent a specialist to the Ruhr to accumulate information. He put it into a book called “La Ruhr et I’Allemagne.” A short and very pregnant preface was written by M. Uariac of the French Senate, chief financial adviser to M. Poincare. He came to the following conclusions : “ It is useless to extract reparations from Germany if in the effort to pay them she becomes more efficient than ever. We must therefore keep a permanent hold on German sources of wealth.” Pursuing this idea, the French occupied the Ruhr in January, 1922; and the miners of this most crowded industrial district decided on a campaign of passive resistance. In this way a really astounding duel between militarism and labour began. Its developments were “ a thing imagination boggles at.” Before I left Germany in the late summer of 1922 the mark was not so much as one thousand millionth part of a£. Most of the Ruhr magnates from Krupp von Bohlen downwards were undergoing terms of ten to fifteen years’ imprisonment. At least twenty-six thousand railwaymen were evicted and banished from the Rhine. Railways were either littered with wreckage or rusted with disuse. The British on the Cologne bridgehead were in a state of siege, surrounded by French customs officers even on the German side, and by French troops who had dug trenches across the roads. More than this : an alleged revolution \vas raging from Dortmund in the Ruhr to Treves and the Palatinate in the south, everywhere except in the British area. Death and destruction were daily events. The newspapers stereotyped headings for
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“ convictions and evictions,” for fines and for railway accidents.
There was tragedy at the base and high comedy at the summit. The Rhineland was governed by the Rhineland High Commission. As soon as the Americans left, the French, with the Belgians, had an absolute majority on the Commission ; Great Britain and Italy usually stood together against France and Belgium, and the Chairman, who was French, had the casting vote. After a while Lord Kilmarnock, who filled the most humiliating role, did not vote at all; and his abstention became a constant factor. At the end of each meeting the Chairman read out the new (and usually drastic) regulations and, so I was told, with scarcely so much as a definite look at the British representative, interpolated perfunctorily the little parenthesis—“ Abstention Britannique.” The crowning absurdity was that the findings of the High Commission, though they applied to the whole of the Rhineland, were recognized as ineffective in the British area. Owing to this, Mr. Julian Piggott, the young Englishman who was at the head of the branch at Cologne, became a much more powerful and important person than Lord Kilmarnock and our representatives in Coblentz. By good fortune he was as good a diplomat as he was a cricketer. He held up the national end with dignity and decision in a succession of daily difficulties. His chief job was to refuse to obey the regulations passed at the meetings attended by his official superior. It may be imagined what jealousies and squabbles were engendered. Happily, within Cologne itself there was peace. General Godley, in command of the army, was astonishingly successful in maintaining good relations all round —with the Germans, whose police worked admirably with our military police; with the French who were continually asking something or other, principally railway facilities, which w T e could not concede; and with the Rhineland High
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Commission, lie was firm, courteous, sensible, wise. And he looked the part he played. Only once, so far as I know, was his restraint broken down ; and the justification was absolute. One Smeets, the ostensible editor of a Separatist paper, encouraged by the French, was wounded by an assassin's pistol. On the news reaching Coblentz General Godley received over the telephone a French instruction to ordain a curfew regulation in Cologne. What he said before hanging up the receiver was brief and to the point.
The nation was also extremely lucky in its Consul. Mr. Thurston had the intellectual grasp and historical imagination of a great diplomat. If our representatives had not been first-class in their various degrees, an open breach with the French and a retirement from the position would have been inevitable. The annexation of the Rhine provinces might have very well been the sequel.
But these are severe topics. In motoring here, there and everywhere—into the Ruhr, up the Rhine to Ems, around the circle of our bridgehead— I passed very rapidly from comedy to tragedy, from the serious to the ludicrous. It was very humiliating for the British in Cologne to hear how the French had set a customs barrier round their bridgehead and guarded the roads by which they entered Germany. The atmosphere was very different when you reached the spot. Indignation gave way to humour. At one point two squadrons of British and French were encamped within a half-mile on either side of the boundary. When the French, acting rather as customs officers than as soldiers, thought that German lorries were coming through, they would send out scouts into British territory. At once our guard would be called out and the scouts would fly. Presently the German lorries, loaded with goods would roll up and career into Germany proper between lines of our cheering troops.
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These smugglers (evading a wholly illegal customs barrier) would get information, very often from British sources, as to where the day’s ‘'hole” was to be found ; and would pour through the gap. More than once I saw every kind and sort of lorry and cart, all loaded to the brim, travelling in a solid line of a mile or so in length through the one unguarded spot up to a line of waiting trains. They were sometimes so many and so heavy that the road would be fairly ploughed up, and thereafter be scarcely available for motors.
A day or two after a peculiarly hilarious experience on the border (when incidentally I ran some danger of being shot by a brown Algerian, equally ignorant of French and English), I was in the midst of the unadulterated tragedy in the Ruhr. A dozen workmen of Krupps were shot by French soldiers, who had entered the works to “ requisition ” motorcars which, it was alleged, were wanted for joy-riding at Easter. The shooting was due to no premeditated malice but to sheer nerves. The surging out of the workmen frightened the small group of French soldiers, and they loosed off an automatic rifle into the crowd. Indeed more than one death was due to a want of understanding between French soldier and German civilian. The German is slow and inquisitive, and all sorts of natives, men as well as women and children, would go out and stare at the French troops. Again and again the raw and freshly enrolled conscript took this rather dull stupid curiosity for a threat; and the finger went to the trigger. The imprisonment, exile and dissolution of many of the German police created many occasions of friction that would not otherwise have arisen. But French discipline was good. Though the soldiers were quite incredibly dirty, they were good fellows and well controlled; and in the bulk “ unfortunate incidents ” were few.
The affair of the Krupps works was the worst
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exception. Of all the pictures left to me of a long gallery, no ceremonial stands out quite so vividly as the funeral of these men; the most vivid attributes had very little to do with the political crisis of the moment, though perhaps a good deal to do with the remote future.
To the grave-yard, situated at the peak of a ridge overlooking Essen, marched some twenty thousand men and women, most of them grouped behind the bearers of guild standards. At the last scene of all these bearers were concentrated in a circle round the colossal oak coffins, in which the bodies had been placed; and the prevalence of the red standard flamed to the eyes. The Reds had taken full advantage of the occasion. The ceremonial chiefly consisted of a succession of short sermons, spoken from a little temporary pulpit erected in the open air. The eleven dead had been members of three different “ religious ” bodies : Roman Catholics, Protestants and Communists. These three were formally recognized by the organizers of this funeral as on an equal footing; and a representative from each was allowed to give a funeral oration. The Roman Catholic and Protestant padres both delivered short, dignified speeches almost wholly free from any jargon or dogma. The last to mount the pulpit was a young Communist whose atheism was accepted as the third religion. As he came to the rostrum a standard bearer followed behind him, and while he spoke held up behind his head, like the parody of a divine halo, a metal representation of the sickle cut into segments by the flames of the burning torch. A little way farther back were the blood-red banners embossed with the yellow emblems of the Communist faith. The speaker was the only one who attempted oratory. You could see the sinews of his neck stand out like groins as he tried to throw his voice to the extremity of the crowd. His words were not without sarcastic references to the Roman Catholic
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priest; but what most surprised was the frequency of metaphors drawn straight from the Bible story. These men “ had found their Golgotha,” but “ their Easter would ensue. They would rise in the triumph of their class over greed and militancy.” Even as he spoke a French aeroplane rushed with a clatter low overhead. It was the only military display of the dav.
A sort of military mania seemed to possess the French throughout this period. The Krupp workmen were shot in cold blood because a subaltern lost his nerve. After the funeral, in a trial that was a fantastic parody of justice in its manner as well as in its matter, Krupp von Bohlen and other directors were sentenced, some to ten, some to fifteen years of imprisonment, chiefly because their workmen had proved vulnerable to French bullets. Verdict and sentence had all been arranged beforehand, as one of the Frenchmen concerned naively confessed to me. The car I had taken in Diisseldorf to drive to the trial failed me at the last moment. As I was making inquiries for some means of getting through, I met a young and able French propagandist, whose chief business it was to hand out news to the crowd of journalists assembled in the town. He said to me that it did not much matter if I failed to attend the trial, as he could tell me then and there what was going to happen. And he did tell me—and correctly. It was symptomatic of the whole policy in the Ruhr that this young man came straight to his job as propagandist in the Ruhr from his previous work as propagandist for that vast coal and engineering syndicate, the “Comite des Forges.” M. Poincare had been its legal adviser. At the root of the whole campaign lay, beyond all manner of doubt, the ambition of a group of Frenchmen to become “the iron masters of Europe.”
The Ruhr possesses a coal that converts into a
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metallurgical coke incomparably efficient in the work of smelting. The French had won the rich iron mines of Lorraine and Alsace. If they could bring these into close association with the Ruhr under French control, they would make it almost impossible for any other country to wage war with them, either on the battle-field proper or on the plains of commerce.
A great accumulation of evidence was put before me at this time—it came from several sources —of the causes of this unhappy struggle. The French had an army less open to challenge in Europe than any army since the days of Charlemagne. They had armed and officered the Polish army. Their air-force especially was of giant proportions. All this bred among the more ambitious a super-Napoleonic mood. A friend of mine, well known to Parisians, whose language he spoke as well as his own, met in Diisseldorf a warlike senator, who talked with even unwonted largeness and candour. “ But,” said my friend, “ we British really shall not be able to stand this. It is a bit too hot.” “If you object,” replied the Senator, “ we shall flatten out London with our aeroplanes !’ ’ The words of one wild senator do not necessarily mean much; but the threat was symptomatic of the overweening pride, and hostility to Britain, obvious in many quarters. A dozen times men of commerce from England came raging to me with the story of insults piled on them by the French regulators of the new tariffs and customs. The district was full of their property, and when they tried to clear it they were told quite simply to go to blazes.
One member of a north of England shipping firm, whose lamentations I heard at intervals over two months, at last managed to get into a barge some shipping parts without which his ship-building in England could not proceed. When at last the cargo reached the last of the Belgian customs posts on the Rhine, bullets began to fly. The skipper had to stop
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his barge and with some difficulty get it towed back to the customs post up-stream. He showed his waybills and clearance papers; but they left the chief officer cold. “They are no good to me,” he said. What was good to him soon became apparent. The itching of his palm was mollified by a ten-pound note, and all went well. It was corruption that broke the scheme of a customs barrier round the Ruhr and along the Rhine. At one time there grew up a more or less regular tariff for letting a train through; and though the French practically put a stop to such organized bribery before the end, the labour and multiplication of officials grew to a burden scarcely to be borne.
The isolation of the Rhine and Ruhr from Germany, and the new veiled annexation was to be further promoted by a revolution in favour of an independent Republic of Rhineland. The fantastic succession of events and episodes in this “ revolution ” will wholly baffle future historians. One could scarcely believe what one saw happen. Germany had been completely disarmed. The following is the private but official list of some of the material destroyed by our disarmament officers in Cologne alone. The total is enough to take the breath away.
Nature of Material.
Surrendered
Total of guns accounted for
33,552
Gun carriages .
23,052
Gun carriage parts .
88,062
Gun limbers and ammunition wagons
49,723
Gun parts .
304*929
Shells, loaded .
38,104^465
Shells, unloaded .
1,161,882
Fuses .
115,041,614
Detonators .
134,455,084
Cartridge cases, empty
3,063,079
5^599^914
Cartridge cases, filled
Minenwerfer
11,616
Minenwerfer, spare parts .
14,193
o
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Nature of Material.
Minenwerfer ammunition
Machine-guns
Machine-gun barrels
Machine-gun parts
Machine-gun, means of transport Small Qrmc rrrcinrl fr»fol
Small arms, grand total
Small arms parts
Small arms ammunition, blank
Small arms ammunition, live
Bombs
Grenades
Flamenwerfer
Lights and flares
Apparatus for emission of gas and smoke
Tanks ....
Noxious gases, cylinders
Apparatus for protection against gas
Propellants and high explosives, charges
Telephones ....
Optical instruments, for destruction
Military carriages
Military carriage parts
Military harness
Field bakeries
Instruments for military field survey
Side arms
Personal equipment
Tools
Pontoons
Mines, land
Bomb throwers
Military stores
Cable conductors, kilometres
Surrendered
4,958,620
87,937
244,225
25,110,248
29,603
4,556,946
4,218,907
9,511,000
459,952,200
804,989
11,679,680
1,072
14,825,654
2,854
59
25,088
5,345,995
2,077,365
213,015
108,154
60,584
171,372
1,693,391
1,240
10,549
5,652,637
7,814,689
2,263,699
2,199
37,464
10,823
1,734,816
186,847 6
This most thorough disarmament meant that throughout this area any little group in possession of arms was king; and this obvious fact set afoot one of the most fantastic revolutions in history. I took much trouble to track out its origins and aims; and came upon much queer and suggestive detail. In May, 1922, two Germans set out in a fast and luxurious motor-car from Dusseldorf, the headquarters of the French army, engaged in occupying
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and controlling the Ruhr. They were equipped with passes and leave to carry arms by a French Colonel in control of the political section of the army of occupation. In the course of a long and tortuous journey, they came to Cologne, the headquarters of the British army in Germany. There they made a request, not to the military but to the British civil authorities, that a hall should be requisitioned, that they should have full liberty to preach the doctrine of an independent Rhineland and to ask for military recruits to serve the cause. The men quite ingenuously showed their passes and explained their object. One of them was a miner who had been working in the Ruhr for years, the other had at one time made a living as a street artist. They were not distinguished persons, but were indisputably men of character with a genuine and undoubted zeal in their mission. Their request in Cologne was naturally rejected on the grounds that the Prussian authorities could not very well be asked or ordered to provide a platform on which the dissolution of Prussia itself was to be the chief theme. The men seemed a little surprised that any consideration for Germany should find a place in the affections of occupying troops. They drove away unmolested and without any formal protest. Their first stopping place was the University town of Bonn, where they spent the better part of a day in a small cafe in the company of other Germans and two French officers, discussing ways and means of establishing a separate Rhineland. The method chosen was a semi-military one. The men in the car were to tour a number of towns where the Separatist spirit was thought to be strongest, and form a peripatetic flying army, which if given facilities to travel along the Rhineland railways and permission to carry arms, could, it was ealevdated, seize the seat of municipal government in one town after another, and raise the Separatist flag.
The scheme developed very much according to
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plan. One of the first places selected for capture was Aix-la-Chapelle in the Belgian area; and the capture of a number of other towns followed. A separate republic was established in the Palatinate. The headquarters of the movement were set up in Coblentz in the French area, close alongside the headquarters of the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission. The “ Flying Army of the Rhine ”as it was christened, showed promise. Some leaders of no little force and character came to the surface. Among the more notable were Herr Cafine, who printed his own coinage at Bad Ems, and by his influence caused the more eminent enemies of Separatism to be banished into unoccupied Germany. More picturesque, but perhaps less capable was a French-Pole who called himself Parsifal, a real soldier of fortune, who had previously enjoyed some months of successful rioting in Silesia. He ruled his army with a stringency that he had learned in the Prussian army, but tempered it with a romantic touch quite his own. He carried no weapon, imitating General Gordon, and on the lines of the Roman Sulla believed that he bore a charmed life and was invulnerable “till his hour struck.” A third was Mr. Nattar, a German by birth, who had spent twelve years in New York.
The total strength of the “ armies ” controlled by these revolutionary leaders was about three thousand; and of these not more than two thousand were in receipt of regular pay. Who provided the pay? All manner of stories were prevalent and the wildest accusations were made. It w T as roundly asserted in some quarters that the money was supplied by some of the Ruhr magnates who wished to shake themselves free from Berlin and make what bargain they chose with the French. Any number of extraordinary stories—not one of them based on any true foundation—were flung round the name of Herr Otto Wolff, who, in co-operation with Herr
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Strauss, amassed a great fortune during the later years of the war and in the first of the peace. On probing the source of these I found them to be based on Otto Wolff’s remarkable fleet of motor-cars. He kept a crowded stable of them in Cologne, within what was called the British “safety zone,” and some of the cars were driven by men who had enjoyed racing experience. They certainly knew how to drive fast —experto crede; and at a time when French patrols held up all cars and inquired with no little stringency into the business of the occupants, it was a little remarkable how smoothly these drivers steered past such obstacles on the road. At one stage in the Ruhr negotiations an open duel was fought by Otto Wolff with Berlin. He drew up the first agreement with the French by which co-operation in the Ruhr industries could be secured. He had always been an enemy of passive resistance; and when this compact became public property the wild reports about his financial connection with the Flying Army were held to have some justification. They had in fact none. The automobiles were used solely for business purposes, their free passage was due to the influence that belongs to commercial wealth, even in a revolutionary era and area; and the magnates were not insane enough to encourage the enlargement of three thousand alien ruffians in the midst of their native country.
The organizers of the revolution were quite clearly given free passage by the French at a time when transport was very severely regulated. They gathered the men from here, there and everywhere, on the promise of daily pay that varied from fifteen to five francs, according to the rank and duty. The payment was made in French money, except where and when at a later date some of the Separatist leaders—notably Herr Deckers in Diiren and Herr Cafine in Bad Ems —printed their own money. The troops were accorded special privileges on the Regie
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(the name given to the system of Rhineland railways established by the French). They alone were allowed to carry arms. On occasion anyone could observe small bodies of “storm troops” with rifles, “halfconcealed and half-revealed ” under their coats, being loaded into lorries almost in front of the doors of the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission and before the very noses of the French troops. Their subsequent journey was a good deal freer from rubs even than the galloping motor-cars of Herr Otto Wolff. The Flying Army was recognized in all its actions by the occupying troops. At Diiren the local headquarters were actually in the same building as the offices of the Inter-Allied High Commission. Whatever the exact source of their pay It w T as regular and satisfactory. And this strange army played its part well enough. It attacked with vigour when needed, especially in the “ siege of Crefeld ” and in a very short while won a sort of victory all along the line.
News used to come through that the citizens of this town and that had accepted the new regime, that the new Rhineland republic was in being. The list was already considerable when Bonn was added to it. I went there to see how such revolutions appealed to the eye; and shall never forget the picture. Bonn in general looked unchanged and unruffled. A good many French troops were about; and in the sequel I came upon an officer vainly endeavouring to teach the meaning of right and left to a squadron of brown Africans. They w T ere pitifully willing, but could not understand the French words of command without due consideration and thought.
After walking and driving about the town I went to “ draw ” the Town Hall, which was usually the one place where the revolution was at all visible. Everything looked quiet enough, but sure enough the green and white republican flag fluttered from the roof. A dozen poilus hung about the lower
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doors, and on the top of the double flight of steps leading up to the main entrance was a little platform selected as a pitch for a machine-gun. No one hindered my progress past these manifestations of war; and once through the doors I was conducted most politely by a real German policeman to the throne room of the revolutionary leader. He was an American marked with very much of the “ Ward Politician,” the most poisonous product of North America and Canada. Later I saw his record, which was too unsavoury for repetition. He was installed in a considerable room on the middle floor, along with a very stout typist. The room was grubby, and no one had thought it worth while to cloak certain sanitary provisions. Mr. Nattar was delighted to see me, partly because he enjoyed talking bombast, partly because he had nothing whatever to do. His claim to be ruling the town was a pious fiction that even he could not maintain in the face of evidence. On the floor below were the French soldiers. On the floor above was the ex-Mayor with his staff, who continued to carry on the municipal work exactly as if nothing had happened and altogether regardless of Mr. Nattar and his secretary representing the revolution in the middle. This sandwich continued in being for another ten days or so, when Mr. Nattar softly and silently vanished away and the troops of which he had bragged never, so far as I could discover, came to birth. He had told me much of their heroism and bravery, how a handful of these real patriots could overawe, and had already routed, hundreds of the common or ordinary citizens.
The revolution was not quite so flaccid or facetious in other towns as in quiet Bonn. Diiren was one of the little towns that became a sort of scallawag headquarters ; and the staff worked in a room in the same building as the French representative of the Rhineland High Commission. How changed the place
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seemed from the day when I passed through it on the way to Cologne in 1918 ! We reached it famished in the evening. The place seemed dead; and when we entered a small inn that showed more signs of life, the inn-keeper said he had nothing whatever to give us. On a little urgency, however, he took us into an inner room, and looking nervously round confessed that he had a hare—and a very good hare it proved. The place now fairly hummed. French and other soldiers were everywhere. Some of the inhabitants were barricaded in, and broken windows gave evidence of street fighting. Some hundreds of German ragamuffins were paraded in the street preparatory to an advance against Aix. One of them, interrogated by a young correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, answered with charming naivete all the questions put to him, and they were many. He had come up from Treves, where money and work were scarce. He was paid in French money, not German, fifteen francs a day, which was too good to be true; and looking at his rags and shirtlessness you could understand his revolutionary zeal. Pie was willing to free any people at the price. “ But do you not find the shopkeepers at any rate against you? ” he was asked, and he answered eagerly, “Oh yes. All the people (die ganze Befolkerung) are against us! ” Did ever member of an army of liberators deliver so ingenuous a confession? A little later in Diiren the liberators began to print their own paper-money and could not understand what the objection was, nor why the people and the municipal authorities thought so little of it.
Incredibly silly things were done by the French to promote this Separatist movement. Frenchmen boarded the trams and forced the passengers to sign documents expressing approval of an independent Rhine Republic. In one particular instance the passengers consisted chiefly of a number of German schoolboys who signed gleefully.
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The general muddle of life along the Rhine was made inextricable by the taking over of the railways by the French. Troops began to seize them in January, 1923, when the Ruhr was entered. The German railwaymen left their posts as soon as French troops appeared. To counter this passive resistance the French established the Regie, or French control system of the Rhine and Ruhr railways, a vast and most intricate system. It was too vast and intricate. Railway accidents were at least daily events, and each one, of course, was photographed by the Germans. General communication was as good as killed. In anger at the German obstinacy and a certain amount of sabotage, a new' form of compulsion known as the “ Poincare expulsions,” was put in force.
The Times correspondent, who was very careful of his facts and knew the district intimately, summed up the history of the Regie as follows, under the date November 17th, 1924, when the Regie came to its inglorious end ;
“ At first the railwaymen who refused to assist the French Ruhr operations were given several days notice of the removal, but soon the penalty was sharpened. He was allowed to take only a few pounds weight of personal property, and was, with or without his family (who were also expelled), taken to the frontier of the unoccupied territory and unceremoniously dumped there, while his house and entire worldly goods were handed over to strangers. Altogether 26,600 Rhineland railwaymen—if their families be reckoned, some seventy to eighty thousand persons—suffered this fate.
“ Meanwhile it was decided—largely on political grounds—to turn the temporary military control of these lines into a permanent form of civil administration. To the disgust of the ‘ Direction generate des Communications et Ravetaillemants aux Armees ’ and the French military command, the Regie was set up
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in March under the asgis of the Rhineland High Commission. Thousands of French railwaymen were brought in to augment the military personnel, some three or four thousand auxiliaries were engaged locally, but from start to finish not 100 of the 26,000 German railwaymen could be brought into the Regie service.
“The Regie laid claim to the whole of the railways of occupied territory, but excepted ‘ for the time being ’ those of the British zone from its operations. The desire of the Regie to add the Cologne railways to its system was unhappily responsible for some of the most acute Franco-British difficulties.”
A great many lives were lost and a fantastic amount of rolling stock destroyed. Comedies were as common as tragedies. On one occasion the train close to Bad Ems came to a stop between stations; and there was frantic running to and fro to find the cause, as one of the Rhineland High Commission was on board going to an important conference. After half an hour’s search some bright spirit looked at the fire. It was almost out. The detail of stoking had been forgotten !
The French were only in part responsible for the utter confusion invading every detail of life. The German coinage tumbled down by tens of thousands, ultimately by millions in a day. At this same town of Bad Ems the Mayor wanted to buy a load of potatoes for feeding the poor. The farmer he approached refused to sell. Indeed no one, even in a shop, would sell anything that cost a lot of money, for the very sufficient reason that the money might be next door to worthless on the morrow. It was foolish to acquire any money that you could not get rid of instantly. The whole community fled from the mark with all convenient speed. A system of barter began to develop. In the practical deal between the
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Mayor of Bad Ems and the farmer, the potatoes were finally delivered in return for a piano that was taken back to the farm in the same cart that brought the potatoes. It was credibly reported that women shoppers went mad from vain struggles with the enormous figures. Some of us reckoned that it was cheaper to light a cigarette with a million-mark note than to strike a single match. In a crisis when speed was essential I was kept standing in the rain for five minutes at least while my taxi-cab driver descended and took pencil and paper to work out the approximate amount of his fare. When at last I got to the post office with my telegram I was delayed at least ten minutes while the official worked out the sum of three hundred and seventy-six words at one thousand and eighty-seven marks a word. When the money was paid and the telegram put on the wires it took seventeen hours and more to reach London, and was quite useless.
But the Rhineland could scarcely compare with the Ruhr in general muddle and wretchedness; certainly not in tragedy. The cross-currents made a Charybdis, an inevitable whirlpool, of life. The German workmen who have always had a strong pacifist bent in that region, refused to work, as they said to me again and again, “ under bayonets.” At the same time the Communists, the most militant pacifists, if one may say so, had hopes that the French occupation might be used to overthrow the capitalist system; and in pursuance of this policy some of them acted as spies for the French. I saw the evidence for one very grim story that had all the elements of the confused madness of the place and time. A young French soldier, an Alsatian, made up his mind to desert and return home for the harvest. He had picked up acquaintance, thanks to his knowledge of the German language, with one of the miners and offered to buy from him a suit of miner’s overalls. The German happened to be one of the
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Communists deep in intrigue; and in pursuance of his schemes reported the young soldier to his officer. The poilu got off lightly. The French officers, of whom the best were picked for the Ruhr, can be wise as well as stern; and often treat the peasant soldier as if he were a child or indeed a pet dog. The Communist informer was not so fortunate. His action became known to his fellows. He went down the mine the next day, and was never seen again.
In the centre of this turmoil on Rhine and Ruhr, the British in their manner lived a cheerful and careless life almost regardless of what went on. Cologne was said to be the only happy place in Germany. A daily paper was published for the troops, with a sergeant as editor. You would fail to find in it so much as a reference to murders, fights, fines, imprisonments, banishments, revolutions or politics. It had a column of jokes, a light general article or two, full accounts of much football, cricket and other games. The soldier, like his paper, was innocent of any concern for one of the strangest situations in European history. The officers made a golf course, where play was continuous, requisitioned a number of hard tennis courts, ran a very flourishing social club, and many of them hired good shooting and fishing.
His Majesty’s Rhine Flotilla shared such gaieties in the intervals of a purely ornamental patrolling of the Rhine in American motor-boats. A certain number of “ camp followers ” collected. The Dom Hotel with its retired army men and their women folk rather suggested Cheltenham. Golf, tennis, the most excellent opera (at about a shilling a seat) tea parties and dances kept them well employed.
Very few took much thought about the political situation at first; but gradually a rather vicious dualism began to prevail. Two parties grew up, a pro-French and an anti-French. It w T as whispered in my ear that so-and-so was under great obligations to the German industrialists and I must not believe
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a word that he said. It was quite openly asserted of another that he could not act as he did if he were not in French pay. During one visit that I paid to a British acquaintance in Coblentz, I mentioned, very foolishly, that in order to counter the very thorough French organization for propaganda, a German civil servant had been sent to Cologne to give information. The next day two British officials descended on Cologne from the upper Rhine and tried to induce the local branch of the Rhineland High Commission to exile the man at once. The request was refused.
This German had been preceded by a very inoffensive and washily socialistic civil servant, who occasionally delivered himself of a bit of news that had been public property for some days. After a short stay in Cologne he ventured as far as Diisseldorf, where, twice a day the French gave a meal of overcooked propaganda to a score or so of journalists from America, Britain, Scandinavia, Paris and even Spain. The little man was seized in the first hour, pushed into prison, and only released because the American journalists pleaded that he had been sent at their instance, because they wanted to hear both sides. His imprisonment was thereupon commuted to exile. He was not the stuff out of which martyrs are made. Suspicion was rife. One journalist was always called by the French “ L’oeil de Lloyd George,” for no reason whatever; but the idea was that Mr. Lloyd George was harbouring all manner of plots against the French Republic. Astonishingly bitter personal comments were heard, and some printed, against The Times correspondent, whose despatches were altogether remarkable for precise information. The journalists—usually singularly aloof from partisanship —began to quarrel among themselves; and a good manv feathers flew.
Visitors to Cologne were many, and the majority took sides almost violently. Business men were
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furious at “ the law’s delay ” ; and got very little beyond an abrupt non-possumus from the French customs officials. It was remarkable that almost all the British politicians who came to see with their eyes what was going on in the Ruhr were members of the labour party. Lord Thompson, Mr. Noel Buxton, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Ben Tillett were among those whom I met and talked w r ith. Ben Tillett performed the wholly remarkable feat of settling a German strike in Cologne in between whiles. Most of them were much impressed by the insistence of the German workmen that this was a struggle between Militarism and Labour, not only between conqueror and conquered. “ Militarism is again in the seat, but mounted on another horse,” said some one, and another, “ Voila les Prussiens d’aujourd’hui.” But this last was very untrue. Most of the poilus and many of the officers hated their job intensely; and in the bulk did it with the minimum of offence. The contrast between the courtesy of the army officers and the superfluous rudeness of the customs officials was abrupt.
The truth was that an impossible situation had been created. Some extreme Frenchmen saw that France, in a military sense, was supreme in Europe, and desired to make hay while the sun shone. The “ iron mastery of Europe ” seemed an easily realizable ambition. The greed of a small individual group, exploiting the fear of the more ignorant public and the ambition of others, pursued grandiose schemes, foredoomed to failure. After two years of wretchedness, the wildness and wickedness of the undertying ambitions were appreciated. M. Poincare w T ent out, reconstruction began again, and the entente was not shattered. English patience brought its reward—to France if not to England.
On the surface the revolution seemed at one moment to be a partial success and to promise permanent results. But throughout this period the
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French secret services were indebted for some part of their information to the Communists, who appeared to be playing their part as allies well and loyally. It was therefore a surprise and shock when Communist bands—sent by the “ hundred-and-ten clubs ” founded in 1923 all over the Ruhr —suddenly appeared as a rival to the Flying Army and in some places, notably Bonn, joined issue and tore down the red, white and green flag of the Separatists.
A little later civilian communists took the same line, and when finally, at the end of October, the Belgian army, abandoning the policy of their allies by a sudden and most dramatic move, turned the Separatists out of Aix-la-Chapelle, the silly bogus revolution was as good as killed.
CHAPTER XI
ROUND THE WORLD
Lord Northcliffe’s one proviso—Canada’s front door —Irish emigrants —Coincidences—A poetic steward—lnterpretations of “ dry ” A Nova-Scotian statesman—Toronto and Ottawa—lmmigrant trains—The cheapness of land—Edmonton, the doorway to the Arctic—Gold seekers—The Esquimaux—New animals The Banff sanctuary—ln the Rockies after grizzly—A prospector’s trail —The Okanagan Valley—Dear orchards—A Japanese Consul —Vancouver—American inroads—Vancouver Island—An ideal holiday resort.
MY week-end bag was already strapped on the car; and my host, who was going to drive me to town, was stepping in, when a rather breathless maid hurried out to ask me if I would drive up with “His Lordship.” His Lordship was Lord Northcliffe, who had arrived at the country house on Sunday rather unexpectedly. He had been invited on one specific condition, that he would come with only one secretary and no typewriter. We had nearly finished our journey when he said quite suddenly : “ Will you go round the world?” I replied, “Certainly,” and very little more was said. Arrangements were made during the week that I should write articles both for The Times and the Daily Mail. “The Chief”—as he was sometimes called even at home—made only one cast-iron condition : it was essential that I should be m New Zealand in the fishing season ; and the whole itinerary, as first projected, was altered to make this possible. I started West instead of East. The six rainbow trout that I eventually caught eight months later cost me, as it turned out, at least six thousand superfluous miles of travel. By that date Lord
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Northcliffe was dead ; The Timex and Daily Mail had severed connection; and the trout have not yet made an appearance in print.
The proviso about the fish reminded me of an interview between Lord Northcliffe and Mr. John Prioleau, who was to go on a special mission to the United States. He was commanded to stay for the week-end at Sutton Place to discuss a number of the more important issues. He came and enjoyed himself. The place w T as always a paradise of quiet hospitality. But not a word was exchanged with the Chief until “ Master John ” had his foot on the step of “ Imshi,” or some less famous car. At that last moment Lord Northcliffe appeared. “ For heaven’s sake,” he said, “do not wear an eye-glass or white spats when you are in America. It is most important! ” The prohibition sounds a rather inadequate substitute for advice and instruction about a long and expensive trip; but who shall say ? Perhaps these things were more important than things that seemed momentous to a more serious but less observant world.
“ Round the world ” meant round the British Empire, which Lord Northcliffe had just perambulated with rather hectic pleasure. He gave me his private diary; and I think wanted me to enjoy what he had enjoyed. But he had a big idea behind. After years of a rather contrary opinion he had come to a profound conviction that without Empire Settlement and a readjustment of population Britain was in a very bad case. Britain was too full and Australia too empty. My theme was to be the infinite variety, the spacious attraction of Greater Britain overseas.
It proved congenial beyond all my most imaginative expectations.
Lord Northcliffe’s diary made a book. Some portion of mine will serve for a chapter or two. Which is the best way to start round the British
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world? My vote is for Canada’s front door, for Halifax, the Vancouver of the East. It is near, so far as time and trouble go, and it gives, if one may say so, off the main street, the golden roadway of ocean. “ Oceana ” was a good name when Sir James Harrington made it to please the imagination of Cromwell. It has become better and better with every improvement in shipping, in all communication, in what Townsend, that great journalist, called “the shrinkage of the world.’’ (I remember the phrase because I had to read his proof* and he confused miles and knots. The sum was difficult of correction late on Friday morning.)
How near or easy of access Eastern Canada is I never quite realized until the IScythia, a brand new steamer of twenty thousand tons, was set on the right line by two little whippers-in of tugs, and the gulls began to give tongue. Gulls always seem-to know precisely when you are really starting, and bark very much like a dog when it infers thai his master is off for a real walk. Then their notes are strangely like a pack of hounds in full cry.
My first acquaintance on board was an engineer, making his seventieth trip by this road. He caught sight of my golf-bag and gun-case, and this set him discoursing upon the ignorance of English sportsmen in preferring Norway or even Scotland to New Scotland.
“ If you set Nova Scotia on end, they would think it was Norway,” he said. “ Look at Nova Scotia on the map and see how just the description is. What a marvellous coast-line ! What a sea for fish ! What charming rivers and trout streams, quiet and homely, and yet here and there frequented by moose and bear! What farm lands, purchasable perhaps at little more than twice the rent of an English farm! ” The engineer, who was not quite sure whether he was Scotch or New Scotch, was eloquent on the restful pleasure of this sea journey compared
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with others. The North Sea, a virago alongside the Atlantic, is whipped up at a puff into venomous sharp waves, peculiarly fatal to the more queasy stomachs. Did not Ruskin write acidly of their “peruke-like puffs of farinaceous foam” dear to Dutch painters?
The Atlantic doubtless is not always perfect. The Devil’s Hole, which we crossed, had been so scooped out by a storm a few days earlier that a cuttle fish was thrown clean on the deck, and seized the first sailor who advanced to the attack. But the devil mostly keeps to his depths, and at worst is not a nagging devil. You may always nurse a reasonable hope to see a more-than-Norwegian salmon leaping the Mira Falls without the preliminary necessity of suffering any of the worst pains of sea travel.
Our ship was one of the dwindling number that stops its course in the roadsteads of Queenstown Harbour. From the inner harbour, tapering into the soft mysteries of Irish hills, came fussily out a crowded tender carrying a triple freight of third-class emigrants.
The last time I had seen this sight—in 1908 —the mingling of laughter and tears, the rough music from Jew’s harp to concertina, the homely luggage, the waving of sticks and coloured handkerchiefs, gave me an enduring picture of human emotion, of parting that is sweet sorrow, of youthful hope and excitement, of wonder and of strange misgiving. What had happened in the interval? Music? There was none, not a concertina on board.
In well-drilled silence, class by class, the passengers moved up the gangway, as stiffly almost as the sheeps’ carcasses that followed them. The two or three merchants of lace and shillelaghs that came on board sold, or tried to sell, their wares with a dour intensity and not a word of wit. As the girls hurried through the dark hole in the ship’s side they did not so much as look back, not for half a second,
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but followed the semaphoring arm of the ship’s officer in a sort of unhappy hurry.
It all left the impression of the frightened flight of men and girls, so glad to be safely off that they had little room either for regret or hope.
The merriest event of our short stay outside Queenstown Harbour was the recovery of an anchor dropped into the depths on the last voyage. In the interval a diver had been down and fixed a wire. Without the slightest trouble in the world, and without salvage fees, our captain hauled up his £350 worth of anchor, and in a few minutes its ten tons of metal was restored to its proper place—a delightful example of sea efficiency. “Nothing is lost if you know where it is,” he said in excuse for having failed to report the loss when it occurred.
Everyone who travels comes upon little unexpected coincidences that surprise him perhaps more than the odds warrant. The steward greeted me pompously, “ I have come to make myself known,” he said; but there was no need. He was the very same man who had attended to my wants the last time I had crossed the Atlantic. At that time he was known as Garrick by admirers of his perfect articulation and artistic tastes.
What were the odds against such an incident? The ship was different, I had not travelled for four years, and a steward has singularly few rooms under his charge. The artistic sense had developed in the interval. He woke me one morning with the news that it was “ A regular spring morning. The only thing missing is the song of the birds.” Under encouragement he confessed to making poems on the spring theme, and did not refuse to recite an example. The ship’s printers (who turned out an excellently printed daily paper) had made some copies which have an honoured place in the spoils of my travel. This is the more quotable part of the poem, accurately transliterated :
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“ The Cuckoo with its cooing song.
The Throstle with its note so clear;
The Lark it sings as it soars on high
Under the blue ethereal sky.
The blossoms bloom, they scent the air.
Rich and poor alike may share
The fragrance which the blossoms bear.”
This from a sea-borne steward ! The second coincidence was that I found myself sitting at table next the only person on the ship whom I knew of : the friend of a friend. The mere mention of coincidences brought down on me in the smokingroom a Niagara of curious tales.
The most startling was of an American who knew only two people in the England to which he was travelling; and their address he had forgotten, to his daily regret. One day he saw a corner of paper sticking out of a slit in the wardrobe. It was a visiting card belonging to the very persons he sought. Two months earlier they had travelled in the same cabin as his on their way back from New York, where they had made his acquaintance.
The most surprising fact about the new transAtlantic ships is the luxury of the third-class. Just before going through the quarters I talked with a steward who described conditions when he began work twenty-five years ago. Steerage passengers were then obliged to bring their own bedding, their own plates and cups, and sometimes their own flour. They were drawn up in line at meal times, while a steward ladled meat and potatoes or what not on to their plates, which they washed afterwards in a gutter.
To-day there is no difference whatever between first and third-class in the general character of the entertainment. The difference is merely a difference in degree of luxury, as between a first and thirdclass in a railway train.
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Those who travel third-class in such a boat have much more luxury in certain directions than those who travelled first-class thirty years ago. One of the stewards with nearly a generation of experience behind him, had served first-class passengers who paid £l2 for their ticket across the Atlantic. He was now serving third-class passengers who paid a minimum of £l9. Cheapness had vanished along with discomfort.
The most pampered people on the ship were the seventy-three Jew immigrants. It was the eve of the Passover. They had their own dining-room, which had been specially blessed and sanctified. All the food was special “ Kosher ” food. The meat had been killed according to the ordinances laid down by Moses. The Cunard Company provided new knives and forks, an essential of the ritual of the Passover, and a great pile of Passover cakes was heaped on the board. I was told that most of these emigrants to Canada would presently be smuggled over the border by the agency of their friends already in the United States!
Five of the passengers on the ship were Scandinavians ; and I was later to follow them up to their destination. They were fine fellows and very keen. They did not come in a hurry to Nova Scotia, but had made long inquiry into the possibilities of the land and had definite arrangements with farmers.
uiiaiigtuicuta » 11/11 Idl Hid b. They were to start as labourers on the following terms : They 7 were to receive in dollars the equivalent of five pounds a month in addition to free board, lodging and washing; to live with the farmer and be treated as “one of the family,” sharing the life of their employer indoors as well as outdoors.
Every five pounds they saved was the value of an acre of good land; and “it is long odds that before many \ 7 ears we shall all be veoman farmers in some measure, working a little, it mav be, for others, selling a little timber off the land that we shall be steadily
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clearing for apple trees.” That Was the near future that they sketched.
As we neared Halifax and passed the three-mile limit, a waiter came into the smoking-room to ask with a note of infinite cunning whether anyone would like “ a yellow lemon squash.” Now I had drunk no alcohol, though the ship, of course, was “wet,” all the way across; but now that the ship had become officially dry we were all given to understand that it would be lily-livered and goody to refuse an illegal peg. More whisky was drunk when dry waters were entered than in any previous hour on the voyage. On landing I had not been half an hour in the hotel before a Scotch acquaintance tapped me mysteriously on the shoulder and led me to a little back room. Therein I was forced to consume a gin and soda, which I did not at all want. Later, when I set off by train towards Acadie, the waiter, whose Welsh accent I hailed, was so pleased at the compliment that he gave me the ultimate proof of friendship, as understood in all dry countries. He made me follow him to his little pantry and regaled me with a horrible mixture of whisky and ginger ale. Such is the interpretation of dryness in Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia
As I entered the Halifax hotel on Easter morning, I passed in the centre of the Rotunda a man who made me think of Abraham Lincoln. I had no notion who he w r as, but his pose, the great cigar held out, now as a sort of challenge, now as a conductor’s wand, the rugged masterful face, the stalwart figure, the shrewd challenging eyes, made it quite certain that he was somebody—somebody with a vengeance. The Rotunda is the big open hall that serves as a public sitting-room and forecourt to the counters where all the business of the hotel is transacted —the booking, the registration, the sale of tobacco, stamps,
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newspapers, and those curious peppermint capsules in which all the American Continent indulges. The place is as public as a street. As you passed through you were observed, as some would say, located.
I had scarcely registered my name in the book when I was summoned to the presence. My Abraham Lincoln was the Hon. Sir George Murray, Premier of the Province of Nova Scotia since the last century. He has ruled his province in unchallenged supremacy for twenty-five years. At one time the total opposition was reduced to exactly one member. It seemed a pity that the Nirvana of total absorption was not completed.
Can any politician rival this record? Would any such record be possible in any other part of any inhabited country? The Premier was a type of the rare stability of this charming province and the fine simplicity of its people. Why are not other politicians as simple and direct? I expressed a wish to visit a particular part of the Evangeline country made famous by Longfellow (who never saw r the place, but must have studied his guide-books faithfully). Before the words were well out of my mouth the Premier had walked off to the telephone, and in a minute, without fuss or hurry, my trip was arranged, my guide provided. The telephone, I realized, is a great help to the best sort of patriarchal government.
On my ticket from Halifax was printed “ via Evangeline route.” Let no one deny the sentimental charm of Longfellow’s story, which even the monotony of the English hexameter cannot wholly mar. The name is said to be an excellent lure for American tourists; and the true stuff of romance is doubtless to be found in the forced unhappy exodus of the Acadian French.
But there ought also to be a Sam Slick route, to keep travellers merry. Haliburton, the inventor of that racy American maker of clocks, is in the company of Dickens and Surtees. My memory of the book was
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very hazy, but read in the middle of the country about which it was written, it proclaimed itself a classic. It is better than all but the very best of Mark Twain, and Americans themselves forgive its too caustic venom for the sake of its galloping wit.
Mr. Stephen Leacock once asked me if people read Sam Slick in England. Do they? 'lhe same qualities that vexed Sam Slick still stir discussion in Nova Scotia. Indeed I was roused from a perusal of the book to hold pistols in a dialogue and duel that might have come straight from “the Clock-maker.”
The combatants were a Nova Scotian and a British Columbian railway official, lately come to the province. They discussed, not without heat, the alleged slowness of Nova Scotians as compared with Western alacrity. The British Columbian —in the Sam Slick manner—had the last word. “It may be a bad thing,” he said, “to be a booster, but it is a sight worse to be a knocker .” The second of these two reprehensible words is certainly less familiar than the first.
It seems that the folk of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick alone are accused of crying down their wares. Of a certainty their wares are too little known in the world—their farms, their sport, their landscape glories. It may be that some part of the fault lies at the door of the local “ knockers.”
Toronto and Ottawa
Toronto, like Montreal, is made by its position on the lake; but its charm still lies in its centre, in the University. Hart House, where I was entertained, is like nothing else in the world. The very beautiful building contains a theatre, music and gymnastic rooms, a running track, a beautiful library ; and the place becomes not only the centre of the corporate life of the five thousand to six thousand
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undergraduates, men and women, but the head of the musical and dramatic art of the town.
A fellow guest at Hart House wanted me to walk with him “through the clay lands of Northern Ontario ” ; and his tales inspired an inordinate desire to play the pioneer, to fell trees and let in the sunlight, to set the ploughs to work and build a homestead.
You can buy land outright for half a crown an acre. It is alongside the railway, the rivers are many and fine, sport is at your door. Yet who wants these acres? Who wants the infinite toil of clearing and making the soil prosperous for his descendants? And yet—and yet—half a crown for an acre, a plot in a farmer’s and a sportman’s paradise. Forty acres for a five-pound note, with water and timber and a railway all at hand. Someone, you would think, must want that.
Another guest, Sir Joseph Flavelle, the railway magnate, whose line passes all along the belt, told me that the only people who could clear it were the Habitants, the French Canadian peasants who love the soil and have enormous families—l met one man who had seventeen sons working with him—and are now rapidly overflowing the boundaries of Quebec into Ontario. As they come down to these areas by natural instinct and the encouragement of the Church, they will steadily absorb new land, making a little money from the lumber, and all the while adding permanently, little by little, to their farms
The British and French races seem to change character in Canada. Here are the English and Scotch dwindling rather than increasing, while their J'rench neighbours in Quebec multiply inordinately. And it is the Frenchman who plays the territorial pioneer.
My first visit to Toronto was in 1902. What a change since, in place and people! I talked then
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with Gold win Smith, who told me tales of Bright and his early days with Lord Salisbury on the Saturday Review. And he spoke of the horrid new vulgar game Association Football, so different from lawn tennis, which he enjoyed. But the place had changed more than the people. It was scarcely recognizable, and has in part grown more rapidly than any town in the Empire. The residential part of the city had moved in the interval due west, as residential areas, by some inexplicable law, always move when population grows fast.
Ottawa had changed as much as Toronto. The lovely library with its flying buttresses was gone. The last time I had seen it was on the way to visit Sir Wilfred Laurier, “the silver tongued.” It was the last day of the session, which terminated with the reading out of the list of new railways. The bare list occupied nearly ten minutes in the reading. Sir Wilfred was unusually jubilant—and candid. He made many prophecies; Ido not know that any of them has yet been fulfilled. He certainly did not foretell in his sketch of railway development that the Grand Trunk would default and throw the money of its backers into the gutter !
He was, of course, French in sympathy, and held that the rapid increase in population among the Habitants might one day change the whole political balance of the Dominion. The Boer War was in progress. There was some vague talk of “an independent French Republic on the banks of the St. Lawrence.’’ The people felt bitterly the fate of the Boers, whom they likened to themselves. One of them whom I met in an ideal little village twenty miles beyond the Montmorenci Falls, told me that the war could not end till “ Joe Chamberlain avait coupe la gorge a tousles Boers! ” A month later I heard of the end of the war by one of the first long distance wireless messages received by a ship.
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Since those days the most charming of the Ottawa county clubs had grown greatly in popularity. It was situate not in Ontario, but just over the boundary in Quebec; and Quebec was not dry. “ The French have much too fine a sense of liberty to suffer prohibition,” said one of them. Another regarded it as si brutal to forbid a man drinking what he liked.
Winnipeg
Round about midnight on three consecutive nights after reaching Winnipeg I watched a succession of immigrant trains arrive at the great station. No common scene of life in the Did Country—in any old country—makes such a various appeal to the emotion and imagination. Episodes come to the surface as each train is emptied of its human freight, that touch even the most veteran of immigrant agents.
Two very sleepy little boys, under ten years old, were left in one carriage because their father could not be found. It needed all the patient tact of a young agent to get from the elder any sort of description of his father whom he had not seen for some time. Affectionate children cannot describe their father or mother.
When this was done, the sleeping-car attendant was left in charge, while the agent descended from the dim platform to the spacious and well-lit subterranean corridor which, although midnight had struck, was crammed with a crowd of men and women of all races. Some were there to meet acquaintances or relatives, but a good number had drifted in on the off-chance of seeing someone or other from their old home or section.
The agent scanned the ranks, two deep near the stairway, and called out the name of the missing parent. No one answered. He went back to the
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platform and three young women asked eagerly all sorts of questions about Regina and Calgary, the unknown country to which they were journeying, with all the wonder of a Columbus. British and Dutch farm labourers were there. Farmers were there, young men and middle-aged men, with sums up to £l,OOO in their pocket, who meant to buy land after a year or so of labouring work.
A fair number had come to take up land sold by the Canadian Pacific, and of course, for them, all arrangements were cut and dried. The C.P.R. is not a casual organization. A group, mostly women, under the wing of the Salvation Army were at least as thoroughly looked after.
When some passengers had transferred to another train, and some gone to their destination in Winnipeg with friends or their personal conductors, the small remainder were led off to the large Immigration Hall, where beds and other creature comforts are provided. Then, and earlier, I was much struck by the tactful skill of the agents, who seemed to know at a glance who needed help and who did not.
So many and such crowded trains had not been seen in Winnipeg since 1914.
Quite a large number of English and Scotch immigrants were going to Lloydminster, the scene of the most notorious colonization experiment in Canada. There the Barr colony was planted amid a storm of ridicule, and the stories of it are still active after twenty years.
People tell you of women in impossible dresses planted in the open prairie alongside their pianos, baking their seed-potatoes before planting them. Many of the tales are true enough, but it remains that the nucleus of that colony flourished, and flourishes, greatly.
The place is now more famous than notorious; and its fortunes seem to assert the old truth in an
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emphatic form, that the man who settles on good land cannot go very far wrong—at least in the long run and in the sum of things. Eighty thousand pounds worth of such land had been bought by British farmers in the prairie provinces—Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan—within five weeks in the spring of 1922.
Edmonton
When I reached Edmonton, the outer doorway of the Arctic as well as a place of rich and homely farms, I felt an intense desire to take a seat in one particular train that was leaving Edmonton and the farming region for the more romantic north, from where had just come a bevy of tales of new discoveries.
Most of the train-load w r ere in some sort, though unemotionally, explorers, setting out in search of the unknown. Journalists, of course, went with them, not unexpectant; but the bulk were men who had some hope of extracting rumoured wealth out of the bosom of the earth. Tales of gold in vast quantity, and quite near at hand, were again afloat; and the word, that wonderful word, “gold” was drawing youth to the rivers and mountains of the north, with the helpless gaiety of the children who disappeared after the Pied Piper. Casual people you met whispered fairy stories of the riches to be had for the picking up in North Canada. They rolled off a list of precious metals, but the priceless products that head the list were always oil and gold. The day before the train left corroboration came of yet another little settlement that had tapped, and was using natural gas, a sure sign of underlying oil.
I made a sort of rough analysis of the passengers on this train. A number were transport men who ran the flat-bottomed steamers (driven by wood fuel) up the northern rivers. Some obvious traders were
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present, going north to do business with outposts of all sorts, Indians, Esquimaux, Hudson Bay officials. Some were going to Norman, where about five hundred oil claims had been pegged out. Others were stopping a good deal short of that, with the Laird and Nahanni rivers as their destination. Some had twenty-year leases of strips along both banks of the rivers, and there they would spend the summer washing gold from the “ pay gravel.” Some ledges yield specks as big as wheat grains, some fine flakes as small as dust. One nugget was brought down. That quantities exist in the creeks and rivers is unquestionable, though how much money it will yield to what output of energy no one can estimate. Always, at all times, groups of men are wandering about the north looking for gold. They seldom come back; and how they live is a problem, but the thirst for metal is insatiable. The finds on the Nahanni and Laird are adding a more professional, a more systematic group of gold-seekers to their number. The nucleus of the train-load were off to Aklavik, the most northerly point ever definitely established on the McKenzie river, just a hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle.
A regular time-table and list of prices was published. From the end of the railway at Waterwaus to the McKenzie delta is only fourteen days in spite of one long portage, and at the end you find the midnight sun and twenty-four hours of sunlight.
To Aklavik come down to trade that uncomplaining people, the Esquimaux, much of whose country is only now being explored. How r little is known of them! Vague news had come not long since to Ottawa of a murder on an Esquimaux island, marked as a dot on the best maps. The police authority who went up found an island seventy miles long, with a large population of uncomplaining people, living perhaps, the hardest life of any people in the world. In winter, he found, they were usually driven to
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compete with foxes for the one sort of available food —small rodent creatures that live in the mosses under the snow. The supply of a few weapons and means of catching seals in the season was about to restore prosperity to this almost unknown people and quite uncharted spot. As for the murder, it came under the equity of “ the unwritten law.”
Canada to-day, as in Lord Dufferin’s day, “ confounds the arithmetic of the explorer.” Even in British Columbia, so lately as the summer of 1921, a photographer discovered a new place—a great lake in the Selkirks, cut in two by a colossal and quite perpendicular wall of ice. Above it were a hundred square miles of one of the great ice caps of the world.
The newer inventions and discoveries of civilization have already profoundly altered life in the north. It is becoming difficult to be lonely. The pioneer himself, or the solitary squatter, is to-day almost intimately in touch with the world, indeed, with the latest graces of civilization. You might think on many of the homesteads north of Edmonton that you were in England itself. Such country, such soil, extends for hundreds of miles north up the Peace River; much of it is still unbroken.
The radio had just reached Edmonton. The local evening paper was starting regular concerts from eight to ten p.m., to which pioneers and isolated persons, and even communities, listened. What the radio will mean in such countries as this, and the extent to which it may aid in the development of the millions of acres now r wasted, can scarcely be understandable in England, with its short boundaries.
Other discoveries tend in the same direction. A little below Calgary is operated a regular aeroplane establishment which sends out patrols for the detection of forest fires; and these planes are of course equipped with wireless telephones, so that they can communicate at once with the outlying as well as the central posts.
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All this is making immigration easier and more pleasant, especially at the start. Pioneering in the old sense has lost its heroic isolation. We are to-day at home in the wilds.
The farms, too, have their more technical “inventions.” A breeder in the north had just begun to multiply a new animal that he had christened the “ Cowlo ”or cross between cow and buffalo. It is not a freak animal, a lusus naturae. The Cowlo is the issue of a long and definite attempt to breed an animal that can endure the rigours of the far northern climate, and profit by the rich and luscious grasses that prevail there. It is a compound of the buffalo and the Hereford cow in various proportions. The white face of the Hereford is as strong and ineradicable a feature as the Semitic nose; and these crosses keep it untarnished. They also keep the immense shoulder of the buffalo-bison race ; and the cross gives you a white-faced, high-shouldered colossus, weighing a good ton.
The hope of the interbreeding of Herefords and the buffalo is that a breed may be evolved that will enjoy the same conditions of climate that the wild buffalo enjoyed; and some think that the hope is near fulfilment. If so, a more real source of wealth than a new gold-mine will have been tapped. Rut this prospect did not in the least diminish the horror of a certain British breeder of pure-bred Herefords when he was shown the cross. That an animal whose points he had been perfecting all his life should be so converted and debased seemed to him frankly appalling. His undisguised disgust intensely amused his Canadian showman.
At one time Mr. Thompson Seton who was “ official naturalist ” to one of the northern provinces thought, so he told me, that he had found a valuable commercial animal in the Yak; and he imported his specimens—from what part of the world, would you think? From no wilder a place than the ancestral
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acres of Woburn Park. Its virtue was that its coat was long enough to defy the northern mosquito; but I have heard nothing for some years of the fortunes of this sheep-like creature as a colonizer of the northern prairies of “the Woolly West.” In no country in the world do stock fatten more quickly on native grasses than they do in Canada. The ranching, about which too little is said, at any rate in Great Britain, is as worthy of attention as ranching, for example, in South America —much more worthy for a British subject who clings to his own country and countrymen.
The Rockies
The arrival at Banff is one of the great moments in crossing Canada in itself and for the completeness of the change. The prairies, if rich and fertile, are by no means beautiful: Banff has no wealth of fertility, but is all beauty. That is its harvest: and a good one.
It is also a sanctuary—one of the world’s greatest sanctuaries—as well as a tourists’ paradise. On my first day there a great Canadian naturalist and alpinist took me, as he said, to “shake hands” wfith the mountain sheep. I had been brought up to believe that they were as wild as any animal on the sportsman’s list. For the wild sheep is no sheep. He looks like a deer, as trim and light of foot and as dainty, with all the senses singularly acute and alert.
After a drive of a very few miles, we came to a patch of pebbles at the foot of the slopes that lead to the snow-capped hills encircling this adorable plateau. You scarcely noted, at first, among the big variegated stones, that a little flock of sheep were usinsr them as a place of siesta.
The sympathy of colour between animal and stone was so close that at a distance the animals
C P R. Photograph], (Facing pap 242. Wild Sheep at Banff.
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vanished clean into their environment. But they were not trusting to any concealment. Our arrival disturbed them not at all, because they did not regard man as an enemy; and I walked up within ten yards before they gave the least sign of nervousness.
The white-tailed deer are tamer still. My conductor’s children regularly fed a few favourites from the hand, and persuaded one doe to come into the house and rifle the larder. While climbing in the woods I surprised one by my sudden arrival, and 'expected her to make off like a streak. She gave one slight start, but perceiving that I belonged to the quiet and kindly tribe of man, went on feeding as if there had been no interruption.
Even the black bear, as in Yellowstone Park, come to the edge of the little township to grub about in the rubbish heaps. This tameness of the wild animals makes of Banff a “ holy mountain.” Its appeal is irresistible.
But there are snakes in Eden. It is not altogether surprising that animals of prey desire to break into this garden and disturb its peace. The game-wardens, who are men with a wonderful knowledge of woodcraft as of natural history, are troubled by the inroads of “mountain lion,” who have entered the sanctuary to prey upon the sheep. This fierce and feline puma, or cougar, is as troublesome to the herds in South America as in North.
I once sent out two foxhounds to a friend in the Argentine to help him hunt them down, not without success. The wardens say that the cougar, if pursued by two dogs, soon takes to a tree, where he is an easy victim, but will run much farther if only one is used.
The most useful dog, because slow and very good on a stale scent, is said to be a cross between the Airedale and the blood-bound. Another “ snake in
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Eden ” is the wild goat, which does not consort with the sheep. The keepers of the sanctuary must take their choice between the sheep and goat in any given area. The two are real, as well as metaphorical opposites.
One of the expected thrills of travel round the world is crossing the “Great Divide,” the edge of the range after which the rivers begin to run west instead of east. I do not know that the thrill was much greater than the excitement of “crossing the line,” about which more is said by those who have not done it than by those who have.
But in some ways the Great Divide confounds exaggeration. Every step beyond it into British Columbia and out of Alberta opens a country as different from the one you have left as two countries can be. People and problems, beasts and vegetation, seasons and cultivation, are poles apart —farther apart perhaps than is understood even in Ottawa. After all, in sheer distance Vancouver is as far from the capital as the Ural Mountains from Paris.
British Columbia would make a tourist out of anyone. For a fortnight, just that and no more, I forgot all about Empire settlement and the goal of my mission, and plunged into the Selkirks in company with Mr. Byron Harman, a photographer, whose ambition was to photograph a grizzly in his native haunts. It was to be an incidental in his life-work of making a complete photographic survey of the Rockies and Selkirks.
Our company of four was made up by a Canadian guide and packer, George, and an ex-Austrian guide, Conrad, who had climbed and hunted in most countries in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North America. Five pack horses carried us and our baggage, of which much the heaviest part was the
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photographic apparatus, to a camp in the Selkirks at an attitude of 5,000 feet. As soon as camp was pitched we set forth to locate bear, though some preliminary observations had alreadj r been made by Conrad. It was clear at once that grizzly were about. They do not cover up their tracks. Unlike the black bear that begins the spring on a diet of medicinal grass, the grizzly, as soon as he emerges from winter quarters, has a passion for fleshly diet. He finds it chiefly in the gopher, which he attacks tooth and nail, especially nail.
I am sorry for the gopher. He is the most engaging of the rodents. You might easily mistake him for a bird as he twists his little black head this way and that before wholly emerging from his hole. He looks up to the heaven for fear of the hawk or eagle. He searches every neighbouring bush for fear of lurking dog or bear. He whets every sense before leaving the immediate pale of his burrow ; and though he has no friends and a host of enemies, he flourishes and bears a merry look.
The grizzly plays no feline tricks in hunting him. He just tears up the ground where his hole is, whatever its nature. We found one spot where stones weighing at least half a ton —Conrad estimated them at a ton —were scratched out as a hen scratches dust; strong evidence of the old claim that the grizzly is the very strongest of all the animals of the world.
We found places where he had recently scratched the fir trees and rubbed off his rough winter coat on the sticky resin. We found, too, many tracks and other signs, even the very spot where he had slept a night or two ago. But the grizzly was not doing as he ought. He ought at this date to have settled down to regular feeding on one or other of the “ slides ” or avalanche courses, where snow and water, falling annually from the heights, sweep down bigger trees and larger growth and leave an open space where the grasses flourish. By one such slide, baited with
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things that delight the grizzly’s palate, the cinema machine was installed behind its screen.
Tired of failing to come upon any of these travelling grizzlies, George and I set out on the fourth morning on a long journey to the next creek. \\ e had not travelled more than half a mile when George, who had the eye of a hawk (or the eagle that I saw at an indefinite height in the sky above the snow peaks), pulled up his horse and pointed across the stream. There, some hundreds of yards away, was the very beast. I nearly laughed.
This domestic-looking creature, suggesting a certain picture of an ant-eater in a child’s book of beasts, was an altogether ludicrous object beside the savage grizzly, with the irresistible grasp and wicked eyes, that lives in the imagination. He did not see us, but moving on in his groping way had slipped into the elder and poplar shrub by the time we had disengaged ourselves from our peaked Indian saddles.
We came back to camp about six o’clock, and very soon Conrad, who had a gift for cooking, had ready for us an excellent dinner. It included one smallish trout, caught, I regret to say, with a bit of rabbit’s flesh on a hook like a harpoon. When it came to washing up, Harman, who never shirks this domestic business, went down to the stream to get water. In half a minute he was back. “ Bear,” he whispered, and that was all. Then, “ Get your rifles, it is too dark for the camera.” It was nearly too dark for the rifle, but we hurried sinuously behind what cover there was to the water’s edge.
There was our grizzly of the morning identified by his rather curious colouring, and, as in the morning, just on the point of entering the scrub. It was perhaps two hundred yards or less away. I fired one shot and he fell. Harman shouted “You’ve got him,” and George was so certain that he withheld his shot. But grizzly recovered, and before we knew it was under cover of the scrub. George and Buster
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crossed the river, some twenty yards of it, and very rapid, but it was growing dark and the scrub was thick.
The tale is told. I saw no more grizzly and only one more bear. Though merely a black bear, and from its size a yearling, he is worth a word as illustrating the surprises of this amazing country. I had set out on the return to Windermere, and had walked about twelve miles, when I came to a small slide, blue as a blue-bell wood in England, with forget-me-nots. I noticed only the flowers, but Conrad, more biologist than botanist, marked at the top, embowered in forget-me-nots, a black object that he knew to be a bear. He had brought a gun, but the bear was young and the shot a long one. Besides, it would have been too ludicrous, altogether too contrary to the laws of aesthetic propriety, to hunt a bear in a bower of forget-me-nots ! It is not done.
The whole of that valley and thousands, perhaps millions, of acres thereabouts have been unhunted, almost unvisited, for years, except by an occasional trapper and an occasional prospector. On the upper hill we saw many wild goat, and Conrad spent the better part of a day in following the trail of a grizzly who had separated a goat from his fellows. He wished to prove whether or no the grizzly can or cannot hunt down the goat. But the task proved too long, even for him.
What a country ! Sitting one day on an inverted box in a long since deserted log hut, I watched through a square hole in the wall a snowy peak turn ruddy in the light of the setting sun. It was of great height, and its outline was as attractive as the profile of the Matterhorn or Monte Rosa.
I asked Conrad, who was eating tinned tomatoes opposite, what was its name. “It has no name,” he alleged. Why should so common a thing have a whole name to its own cheek? Canada, and above all
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the Rockies and that subsidiary chain, the Selkirks, is compacted of unnamed and unknown glories such as this. Something I know of the Alps in summer and winter, something of the Pyrenees ; here are thousands of miles of Alps and Pyrenees, populous especially between the Rockies and Selkirks, with wild beasts, with bear, elk, moose, mountain lion, goat, sheep and deer.
In regard to the mountain goats, which are usually very much aloft, at first I was utterly unable to see them, till the very spot w r as pointed out. Then, wdien I grew used to the sort of shape and colour that were to be looked for, I could pick out the goats without any trouble at long distances. It is curious how blind one can be in a strange place, and how soon one can acquire sight. We see what we expect to see, and are blind to the unknown. No one so often feels the truth of this as the naturalist. The more learned he is in sights and sounds, and even scents, the more salient and the richer grows the land he lives in.
We-discovered one day, and ascended, a thin trail worn at a forgotten date by some valiant prospector, who found silver and lead and copper visibly outcropping on the summits. These lonely, hopeful pioneering spirits leave their traces like pristine hieroglj'phics in the most lonely regions, and in a country extravagantly rich in minerals their tribe is still large. After the better part of a day’s work spent in clearing the trail, we started up it with three pack horses laden with cinema apparatus, needed in the upper ranges where the goats abide. It was nothing to these burdened horses, on a slope of one in one, to step over fallen trees up to a yard high. They clambered, themselves like goats, through the thick woods, over “slides” of shale and rubbish, and through scrub. The most skittish once ran amok in some unusually deep snow, among which it fell and floundered, but, taking a line of its own, it presently joined the procession and became docile as its companions.
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We lunched on the timber line, where there was still enough wood to make a fire and snow to fill the kettle. The panorama of the peaks above the vegetation was gorgeous, even beside the memories of the Pyrenees. In the mosaic of the valley below our hut, the tents looked “ scarce so gross as beetles,” and the broad “ slides ” were no more than corridors guiding to the immense circle of snow peaks, nameless, unsung, unsurpassed.
And the flowers! Here at the very top, or near it, was only one tiny but delicious yellow sedum, so cunningly placed in the crevices as to defy the ingenuity of the greatest artist at the Chelsea show. A little lower was a large white saxifrage, and lower yet, but among the snow that its leaf and petals melted, as gay a patch of “avalanche lilies” as the daffodils in front of Tennyson’s house in the Isle of Wight.
In spite of more dramatic subjects Harman could not resist them, and took both “ close up stills ” and “ movies ” of the golden scene. The flowers are large, of an amazingly vivid yellow, and their habit of growing two or three on a stalk thickens the weight of colour, and seems to melt the snow by its visible flame. A large woolly leafed anemone, masses of the Indian’s paintbrush, purple clematis and ladies’ fingers were among the other flowers that we carried home.
The Okanagan Valley
The chief trouble in British Columbia is the fascination of its scenery, which has doubled, trebled, quadrupled the value of the land, and no man can make a living off it because so many want to live on it.
The most sudden surprise any traveller could desire is to emerge by the Kettle Valley railway (near the American border) into Melopolis, the apple capital.
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The train that has been miraculously steered past the crags and chasms of an impossible country of rock and forest, slips without warning into a valley bridal throughout its length and breadth with delicious blossom —pear blossom and apple blossom. The two little townships at the southern end of the lake are well christened Summerland and Peachland.
The Okanagan—the rolling fields and flat plains on the side of the lake and radiating valleys—is a new discovery even to Canadians. It is doubtless the best fruit valley in the world. The oldest fruit trees in any sizeable orchard are twenty-five years, and most have not yet reached their full bearing period. But within these few years land has risen to values not reached even in the agricultural fringe of London. It is a sheer miracle. I was offered an orchard at the price of £250 an acre; and had to reply that I could buy good land in beautiful Buckinghamshire, twenty miles distant from the best market in the world, for £2O an acre.
It is strange. And stranger yet is the community. I went to stay with an English colonel. He was in dungarees, handling a sprayer. Just below his house Hindus and Chinese were travelling on their knees in the dust, in the work of cultivating onions on land they had hired at eight pounds an acre. West of his house, over thousands of acres of rolling foot-hills, fit for cultivation but quite uncultivated, ruled some twenty Red Indians, the relics of the tribes for whom the vast tract is reserved. They hunt a little, farm a little, grumble, grow weak, and look muddily picturesque—a rather burdensome survival of the once masterful people who controlled the forests, streams and lakes in unchallenged isolation.
A census had just been taken of the wealth of these Eastern immigrants who have supplanted the natives, and it revealed a gift for accumulation scarcely imagined even by the bankers. Nor is it wholly individual thrift. The Japanese, if not the
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rest, are not neglected by their nation. Just before my arrival a Japanese consul visited one of these pretty townships on the Okanagan Lake. The local Japanese gave him a dinner of honour, to which were asked selected employers of Japanese labour and some important men of the place. The givers of the dinner did not sit down to it, preferring to play the part of waiters, but when it was over they were invited to sit down and smoke.
The Consul asked the employers a succession of quite direct questions. Had they found the Japanese workman honest? Hard-working? Obedient? Capable? “Yes” was the only possible answer to each several query. When the interrogation was over the Consul, still speaking English, said in his naive Japanese manner, that he had previously asked the Japanese somewhat similar questions about their employers; and finally he preached them a little sermon on the duty of working, working, working on behalf of themselves, and yet more, on behalf of the nation.
Such is one, perhaps, not wholly insignificant episode in the relations of the Japanese to their emigrant workers. The people have large families, get possession of more land, and cultivate it to the hilt, and have a pre-eminence in sea-fishing. The orchards of the Okanagan know them as well as the intensive fruit-gardens of the Fraser Valley.
Vancouver
When I reached Vancouver, another of the Canadian towns still suffering from growing pains, Americans were pouring in to “ get a drink.” There is now a dustless concrete road running almost from the Mexican border into Canada. It is nothing to bowl along from California to Columbia; and if Vancouver, a very beautiful place, has not enough
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attractions of its own, it has a government liquor store which sells “ whisky, beer or even wine,” and all good of their kind. The Provincial authority makes a good income from its monopoly; but there are unpleasantnesses in this modified dryness.
It is easy to buy your drink. It is much more difficult to consume it. A prejudiced visitor from England prefers to drink his wine with his meal; but the hotel may not permit you to bring the bottle to the table. You are advised to consume it in your bedroom. With all due respect to new customs, I still maintain that the bedroom is not a congenial drinking saloon; nor a tooth-water tumbler the best vehicle.
Government monopoly has much to recommend it; and it implies liberty to regulate the manner of consumption; but regulations do not always do w-hat they are meant to do. In the ideal village town of Peachland were held dances at regular intervals; and pleasant decorum prevailed so long as the organizers of the dances w r ere allowed to provide “cup” and other pleasant beverages. When that w-as refused every swain felt an obligation to carry a “ pocket pistol ” or well-primed flask for the entertainment of his partners; and at once, on the change of custom, drunkenness succeeded to sobriety.
Vancouver has many peculiar charms. The social habit that most appealed to me was the evening bathing. A huge bon-fire of pine—which is nothing accounted of—is lit on the beach ; and round it gather the youth of Vancouver, male and female, clad in similar and regulation bathing kit. They swim and dive, and then race over the sands to the pine-fire, which scents the whole length of the shore. When I first reached the spot a very red sun w r as setting behind a gorgeous seascape, and its disc took on newtawny hues through the flames and smokes of the enormous fire.
It is a local debating point whether Vancouver City
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yields the palm for “ liveableness ” to Vancouver Island. As a holiday island it is not surpassed even by Honolulu. I doubt whether you could find anywhere in the world holiday spots of more natural charm, where the wild and the tame shake hands so friendlily. The wooden but luxurious inns on the Cowichan river or lake offer everything that a searcher after rest could desire, especially if he is a fisherman. There, as in Vancouver, the smell of pine is pervading, day and night. The smell filled the house as well as the woods when, in the evening, the hundredweight logs were put on the open grate, that the fishermen might dispute at their ease till such time as they stopped to listen to the “ Canadian Band,” the amazing clatter of the amorous frogs by the river’s edge.
Retreat to such places as this, beyond the railways, but in touch with something like luxury as well as nature, is the privilege of all Canadians who have a penny to spend, and some who have not. In a country vast beyond arithmetic and immensely various, this sort of retreat is a common possession, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island. When May comes till autumn dies, business men slip off to the sides of river or lake and live the open life in scenes quite unspoiled by civilization, but yet within reach of its comforts.
But in climate at any rate Vancouver Island takes the palm. Victoria, the capital, and indeed Vancouver, are curiously like Stockholm. There is the same friendliness between land and water, the same pretence of the sea to be a lake, the same pine-covered islands. But in many ways Vancouver Island has no rival anywhere in the world for equable delights. It is, of course, a place to enjoy rather than to profit by, and yet the place in it that gave me most satisfaction, more even than the inn by the river, was designed to yield profit as well as enjoyment. It was a farm bought by a manager of one of the C.P.R.
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hotels, with the object of proving that such farms could pay, if plenty of capital was well expended, and would provide the best and most form of life for a retired man of business. He was proving his point. It is a wmoden farm-house delightfully teed up among the Douglas firs. Strange, steep, narrow ridges of stone run down to the junction of the river and sea, with salved water-meadows between them. I walked down one of them with the farmer, who carried a gun to destroy, if it might be, one of the carrion crows that was attacking his chicks. As we returned we met two of his guests who had been searching for clams on the beach, and of one he gave me a potted biography, a wonderful tale of the enterprise of Canadian womanhood.
The younger—she looked hardly out of her college days—was a famous horse-woman. She had been “ a star reporter” on one of the chief papers in the Dominion, and during the war had driven a motor ambulance in Serbia, where, under heavy fire, she had carried wounded men on her back from the battle-field to the ambulance. She looked like a boy in her sailor blouse and with her short hair—a remnant of her Serbian experience—and active movements.
But her talk was of womanly things. Her theme for the moment was the necessity of offering to woman immigrants a short course of domestic economy in the peculiar needs of a Canadian home. She held that half the immigration question would be solved if knowledge of conditions in different districts could be made more easily available in London.
hile we walked and talked we were continually surprised by the sound of loud explosions. They suggested to me my last visit to devastated France, where the engineers were still exploding the “dud ” shells. The devastation here was the destruction of the stumps of trees with dynamite cartridges.
The explosions signified the bringing of more land into cultivation. But let no one think that dynamite
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makes easy or cheap this beneficent work. It seems to be agreed that the Italians, with their invincible native genius for engineering, can remove bigger stumps with less dynamite than anyone else, but even in their hands the work is neither easy nor quick where the stump areas are so heavy as in this country of towering firs. You reclaim by the sweat of your brow, and in no other way whatever. Yet the labour is worth every drop, if you have the money and the time. Both are needed.
Just before I left England a general with other signatories had written to The Times, complaining of Vancouver Island as a home for Englishmen. I sought him out but missed him, and saw instead a neighbour, a hard-working woman who emigrated from England twelve years ago, and had made a success of life. She gave me a delightful description of the methods of the retired officer who had complained that his farm did not pay. “He drives,” she said, “ his Rolls-Royce into the market with a dozen eggs, carries forty cents back to his palace, and in the evening, after his game of tennis, writes to the British papers to say that farming does not pay.”
The position on the mainland is not much unlike that on the island. Land is dear—£Bo it may be, even £lOO an acre for the best bits—but in certain places very fertile. The intensive gardens of small fruit—strawberries and raspberries especially—along the Fraser river are models of high cultivation, many cultivated by Chinese and Japanese, and they yield big returns. They even export fruit pulp to England for jam-making. The dairies, too, earn dividends. But here as elsewhere profits come by the sweat of the brow and by skilful cultivation. Only the workers win ; and immigrants from across the Pacific are hard competitors on the land as they are in the fisheries.
CHAPTER XII
FROM CANADA TO AUSTRALIA
Across the Pacific—Honolulu—'The captain’s strange storv—Emigraand Z r'u tS t l,l^l ney and land settlement—Brisbane and the cotton boom—After emu and kangaroo—Bird sanctuaries—The loneliness of Central Australia—Sheep-shearing— A. f°ur m the South West—A rich and an empty lLd-A karri NnrthMiffe- J r e + l Mltc hell—A London migrant-Xeu s of Lord -Six Zea,and ~ The
IT is really very difficult to escape from the British Empire. In a year’s tour I only left it twice —iand that momentarily—once at Honolulu and once at Marseilles. Honolulu is an American holiday ground, as well as a great naval centre. Though ‘it is one of the remotest places in the world, over a thousand miles from anywhere, it is a place where people dress for dinner, play golf, and travel by motors, which abound, along excellent roads through highlycultivated fields. Yet were it twenty times more sophisticated than it is, you must feel at certain moments almost the sensations of Captain Cook advir w ’ " hom eich ,andin s ™•g"**
° ur ~s u h ip swarmed, as did Captain Cook’s in r r t V VeS ,l Clad 3S then ’ in tlle equivalent J- r 1-T th, i (, ° pper skins gleaming over their lithe muscles. They barked out their strand vocalic noises (save for the oddest interpolations of pure American) as they dived like plummets from The Tit" d f a Vr m , to , their Second elem ent, the sea The note of Honolulu is its surprise. There is no
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gradation, as in other tropical places, and like other Pacific islands, especially Fiji, it is singularly free from the disadvantages of the tropics in the form of diseases to plant and man. Neither mosquito nor malaria is a menace. Indeed the Tropics, as discovered from a ship crossing the Pacific, are almost temperate. The only thing that seemed to me too hot at Honolulu was the sea.
It was in the nature of a relief to wriggle your body on to one of the surf-boards —heavy, broad planks, slightly rounded underneath —and to paddle it forward with your hands, instead of being completely covered by the warm waters. But if the climate surprised by its moderation, the tropical splendour impressed by its excess. I have never experienced such a coup de theatre, such a difficulty in believing that the real was real, and not some phantasmagoria of scene-shifting. A few smooth revolutions of the wheel transport you from the commonplace of an ordinary American city into—what shall I say?—the Arabian Nights, the grove of Mycerinus, or any Eastern dream. We talk in England of flaming June, not inaptly; but our brightest flowers pale their ineffectual fires beside these orange hedges, these scarlet hibiscus, these flaming trees. “It is not a landscape; it is a bonfire,” a fellow traveller said when we reached the Pali Heights, beyond all question one of the master views of the world.
The volcanic cliffs are impossibly scenic, the sea an incredible gradation of blues .and purples, and between them lies a mottled plain, blue where the pine-apples show, red where the rare earth appears, and yellow-green where nature is left alone.
At the same time as you grow aware of this lavish glory of tropical growth, you find it peopled with an amazing epitome of races “wearing the burnished livery of the sun ” —Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, and Polynesians of various origins.
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Colour is rampant on land, on sea, but especially under the sea. You see the strange fish-creatures only in the corridors of an aquarium, but their shapes and colours are so incongruously lavish that they leave you, as the country leaves you, quite overwhelmed with the sense of the luxuriance, the spilt splendour of the new world you have mysteriously reached. They are so coloured, you would sw r ear, not for any Darwinian reason, but just because colour is part of the being of land and water.
Soon after leaving the Hawaiian Islands, the flower of the North Pacific, the Captain of our good ship, the Makura, showed me a letter that had reached him in Honolulu. It contained the sequel to the most singular story in the region of psychic things that ever I heard or imagined.
Honolulu itself had taken us back to the “ golden days of good Haroun-al-Raschid,” surprised us with its wonders, but the Captain’s letter touched a remoter date, a more surprising miracle.
A British lady, Mrs. B , who lives with her family in one of the Pacific islands, where her grandfather was a missionary, has received within the last few years strange communications from persons who lived in distant lands and in a remote century. In the summer of 1922 she was a passenger on the Makura, and the Captain of the ship, hearing some rumour of her psychic powers, asked her if she would care to make an experiment before him. She agreed to try, and one day sat down at his desk with a pen in her hand. While her husband and the Captain sat together looking at a book on Samoa, she waited for her hand to be directed, without any greater concentration than, say, the wireless operator exercises when he prepares to receive a message.
After a while she ejaculated with irritation : “ What a nuisance ! I hove got back to this
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Eastern writing.” Lately on several occasions she had found herself writing a strange script—it is largely in straight lines set in abrupt angles—which vaguely suggested to herself and others something Eastern. After writing for some twenty minutes she gave the manuscript to the Captain, who determined to seek an interpreter and probe the mystery. The first people he showed it to were some Indians, who had come on a political mission to Fiji; but they coidd make nothing of it. When the Captain reported his failure to Mrs. B she expressed disappointment, adding : “ I suppose there is nothing in it.”
A little later, Professor G , one of the great archaeologists of the world, was a passenger on the same ship, and the manuscript was shown to him, without comment. He at once poured out excited questions, and then gave his surprising verdict. The writing was a very good example of “ Hieratics,” wdiich was the popular form of the Hieroglyphics used by Babylonian priests. It prevailed up to about 5000 b.c. in Asia Minor. Only a handful of people now alive can read the script, and the Professor did not think that anyone could have written the document in the short time taken bv Mrs. B .
The message began by thanking the lady for having got into communication, and went on to describe how differently people travelled now and then, giving a quaint picture of the contrasted motions of a camel and a ship. At the end was an accurate description of the Captain’s cabin and of the state of sky and sea at the moment.
The letter delivered to the Captain on this voyage contained a further communication in the same script, and this too has gone to the Professor for translation. He is also, with the help of books, accurately and in detail, translating the first manuscript. I saw the second manuscript and heard the
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story, with the full names of the people concerned. The evidence has been sifted in a scientific spirit, and none of the three in any sense of the phrase, is professionally psychic—neither the Professor, who is a man of science, nor the Captain, who is a Scottish New Zealander, with no psychic prejudices whatever, nor the lady, who is the mother of a large family, and deprecates any claim to supernatural powers. She has no conscious knowledge whatever of Hieratics.
What does it all mean? It surpasses fiction, is more surprising and dramatic than even Kipling’s “ Finest Story in the World.” Will it have a disappointing sequel? For myself it is the only story of the sort that so much as inclined me to belief, for the very simple reason that it is difficult to find any loophole for incredulity.
Wherever you are in the British Empire you meet enthusiasts on emigration. I very nearly missed my ship at Vancouver because of an urgent message from Miss Christabel Pankhurst. She talked solid migration; and wmuld have continued indefinitely. Her woman’s league was going up by leaps and bounds, her hopes ran high of emptying Britain of its two million “ superfluous women ”; and she was looking forward to alliance with Lord Northcliffe.
On the Makura was travelling the most downright statesman in the Empire—Sir Henry Barwell whom someone called the Mussolini of South Australia. Incidentally, he had a wonderful story of the defeat of Bolshevik emissaries in the Government works in Adelaide; but his first zeal w'as migration. Ever since he announced his scheme for finding homes in Australia for six thousand British boys he had been beset by eager applicants and inquirers. At the Langham Hotel in London, he received fifteen thousand letters within a w T eek or two from boys and girls (and one from a girl, who,
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so she said, had successfully passed herself off as a boy for the last twelve years); and even Australia House could not cope with the correspondence.
All the way across Canada Sir Henry was met with inquiries from Provincial Governments, from journalists, from parents, from children; Ontario had decided to follow his example. Wireless messages found him on the seas, both Atlantic and Pacific.
The Fijians—of whom several were on board — are not less eager on the same subject. Their island is a glorious place, especially rich in fruits; and one of the residents sent on a wireless message to provide us with every sort and variety. It was a disaster that “fish” was substituted for “ fruit” en route; for the fish had been hard to get and were rather dull, if not nasty. However, even without especial advantages we could not go the round of the species of fruits set on the table. For myself, from the date of that meal, I have always plumped for Papaia, which looks like a melon and has seeds that taste like capers. As a prelude to any meal it is incomparable.
The day before we reached Suva harbour, the council had formed a committee to deal with immigration and to formulate a scheme. The Mayor of Suva begged me to let the British public know what Fiji was doing in this respect. Did the name of Fiji ever enter the head of any intending immigrant from Great Britain as a likely home? I doubt it, but why not? Of the astonishing riches of the island there can be no question, and its soil and sun seem to lend particular savour to its products. I never tasted bananas so rich and delicate in flavour as a bunch that were suspended from a lemon tree in the charming garden of one of my hosts. As good pine-apples as were ever grown in Honolulu flourish and cost a third less.
It is a good cattle country. Neither plants nor
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animals suffer from tropical maladies. Malaria is unknown, and in spite of wide mango marshes mosquitoes are not numerous.
As for beauty, that leaves one dumb. It is less spectacular than Honolulu, but the red roofs behind the coral-rimmed harbour offer a peculiar welcome. They suggest Holland rather than the alien tropics.
The glassy smoothness proper to the Pacific gave place to tempest as we approached New Zealand. My fortune was not that of Lord Northcliffe, who said at the conclusion of his diary that he had been round the world without seeing a wave. As fishing was not yet permissible, I continued my journey to Australia.
On landing at Sydney, the first letter I opened was from a carpenter and his wife—she had been nurse to my children—who had emigrated from a Hertfordshire village ten years earlier. It spoke of “our beautiful sunshine.” They had now £2,000 in the bank, a charming house, pleasant neighbours, good education for the children, and a delicious climate. Most of the rest of the pile of letters awaiting me concerned immigration in some form. The biggest subject of the morning newspapers was land settlement, and within two hours of landing I was shown confidentially a long memorandum on land development, on which the cabinet of the New South Wales Parliament was to sit on the morrow. It was drawn up by Sir Gilbert Carruthers, an exPremier and author of the prevailing cry : “A million farms for a million farmers.” Interviewers, the one bane of travel within the Empire, besieged me in Australia as in Canada; and speeches on migration were demanded right and left. Well. It was the first object of my journey, but it was my desire to visit the “back blocks” in all the States, not to chatter to clubs. How can a man talk of migration in the abstract? It presents different
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features in each State, and in different regions in each State. To give one example of the contrasts : three ideal farm units were quoted to me in different places. The cotton men of Queensland spoke of small-holders flourishing on ten acres. The sheep-men of the same State laid it down as a maxim that the minimum was ten thousand acres. The mixed farmers of New South Wales and Western Australia advised a thousand acres as the amount best suited to a single man. But in no country are the towns, which absorb most of the male and nearly all the female population, harder to escape. Within a very few hours of landing in Sydney I was to know how “ quick and kind ” is Australian hospitality. I was deep in work when a waiter interrupted to say that Mr. X wished me to dine with him the next evening. I grunted out a rather absent “ yes ” and the matter left my mind completely. On Sunday evening the waiter reminded me of the engagement, but could not recall my host’s name or address; and I had never consciously heard it. He was to me a real Mr. X.
The next step was not clear, but I had faith and dressed ; and at the right hour a car came and fetched me. It took me to a beautiful house, where a very charming company was gathered, including the most popular actress of the year, and Madame D’Alvarez, whose singing took Sydney by storm. Incidentally, she startled us all in the middle of dinner by letting loose a top note without any apparent provocation. We had a private cinema display, and altogether a very merry evening. It was only on the way back that I learnt, by judicious inquiry, who my host had been. It was Mr. Macintosh, a proprietor of newspapers and theatres, who had climbed rapidly from humble beginnings. If he was as quick with other things as with hospitality, the rapidity of his rise was not at all astonishing. It was his ambition, people said, to be a Lord Northcliffe.
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But the hospitality of the back blocks, though not more whole-hearted, was more to my individual taste. Towns are towns the world over, with a host of imported similarities.
One of the back blocks where I most enjoyed hospitality was no less rural a place than the alleged capital, Canberra. In one of the oldest station- or farm-houses Mr. Charles Bean had set up a factory of war-history; and along with a photograph expert, a verifier and other useful assistants, was “ powdering away,” as Dickens used to say, at the official history—a twelve-year job. He was writing two or three thousand words a day with his own hand; and was receiving all possible help from his employer, the Federal Government. You would have thought he was a person of some national importance, and would have been right. But he lived with no servant. He and his wife washed up after every meal. The lights, among other equipment, were of the worst; but of all this, Australian simplicity took no heed. It never seemed to occur to Bean that he should demand any particular comfort or facilities for himself. Perhaps his work—which is very good—was none the worse for his simple life. Certainly his hospitality was not. My few days there were red letter days.
In the train on the way to Queanbeyan I met General White, who was recognized in the war as one of the best staff officers in France. He quoted Bean as the bravest man he had met. Other people had to go where shells fell. Bean chose to go there always, whether in Gallipoli or, as I know, in France. His industry was even more remarkable. He brought back between thirty and forty large notebooks filled with his day-by-day diary, kept on the spot, and often filled up under fire. The Federal Authorities set such a value by them that they ordered the whole library to be multiplied by a photographic process. Their possession will give
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rare life to the enormous record of the adventures of the Australian army. The history is likely to be much the best of all the war histories.
Bean expressed delightful enthusiasm for the new capital, which he saw with the eye of faith. What he could show me was at that date little more than the site. It is beautiful, but the contours of the hills had quite defied the a priori plans of the town planners. If the first plans had been literally followed a good proportion of the roads would have been in cuttings.
Australian hospitality is far-reaching as well as quick. I was asked to stay on a very remote Queensland sheep-station, where the manager, Mr. GaukRodgers had heard, over I don’t know how many thousand miles, that his hobby was my hobby. He managed sheep, but studied wild birds. I accepted, but found great difficulty in escaping from Brisbane, where everyone wanted me to see cotton and talk cotton. The people were cotton mad.
The very first farmer I visited showed me a patch where he was going to grow cotton next year. When I went to see Mr. Theodore, the Premier of Queensland, he had just one book on the table beside him. It was Pugh’s Almanac for 1862, in which he had underlined a passage about the first experiment in cotton in Queensland. A sample of the first plant had been taken to Manchester and to Scotland; but it was of such superfine texture that it defeated the spinners, and was finally taken to India, where the natives converted it into the finest cotton ever made. The next day I went to see the Governor, who marched straight to his shelves the moment I entered, and took down a small book and found therein very much the same account that Mr. Theodore had found in the almanac.
My first caller in Brisbane showed me a score of samples of cotton. Later an enthusiast for close cultivation spent hours in demonstrating to me that
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cotton was the ideal small-holder’s or family man’s crop, that children are the best pickers—the record is held by a girl of twelve —and that all the work is light. No more than five months after the seed is in the ground the harvest begins. It is all delivered to the Government, who pay over the agreed price (and it is high) direct to the cultivator. The whole process from sowing to marketing is thus completed in half the year, even if the plants are treated as annuals.
A botanist pointed out to me on a map how Queensland alone (which is five and a half times as big as the British Isles) has over a million acres where cotton grows better than in any part of the world except some of the irrigated areas of Egypt. The cotton boom resembled a gold boom in hopeful intensity. The eight thousand acres grown that year were to be seventy-five thousand the next; and infinitely large when there was enough Australiangrown seed of the long fibred varieties to go round.
Mr. Theodore, whose highly socialistic philosophy has made Queensland the one single chamber state in the continent, was an interesting personality. He had taught himself literature, and perhaps it was this training that had given him an open mind. He assured me that he had quite surrendered any views that went contrary to Empire Settlement. He even said that if a people could not populate a country they had no right to prevent other people from occupying it. It was a very cheering sentiment from a politician of his complexion.
But wool, not cotton, is the foundation of Australian prosperity ; the real Australia is pastoral, and its best expression is the sheep station. The train by which I travelled towards the famous sheep country of Western Queensland is sometimes called “the Turkey Express.” The origin of the name is an alleged habit of the officials of stopping the engine
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when they observe bustard or wild turkey, which, indeed, abound, and are an easy prey even to an engine driver.
The express, which travelled at about fifteen miles an hour, took me to the edge of the open gigantic plains where flourishes the master animal of Australia, the merino sheep, and to the lovely homestead of the Yorkshire naturalist, in the centre of a station twenty miles long by twelve broad. The attractions of the house were the broad balconies and the many gorgeous bougainvilleas growing over the roof. It goes without saying that it was teed up on ant-proof pillars. An acquaintance in Brisbane wanted to motor me across the continent to Darwin, and promised to cover one hundred and fifty miles a day over a roadless land. On the station managed by Mr. Gauk-Rodgers I could almost believe the feat was easy. Roads seemed superfluous. The great stock roads were reached by tracks either made by wheels or superficially scraped with a sort of snow plough, which planed off the grass and left a most sympathetic surface for even a delicate car. On our natural history expeditions, which we made daily, we took little heed of the roads, we birds’-nested not on our feet but on the car, which took to the grass and indeed threaded the bushes without any demur whatever. The experience was curiously novel. One morning we ran between a mother emu and her new brood; and as the young made off we set off straight across country in pursuit of the fugitive clutch. After half a mile an awkward scoop in the ground pulled us up just as one of the chicks, who had kept up an amazing speed, fell over a stick. We continued the chase on our legs, but the chick recovered, and when we gave up breathless, was still gaining on us. This was by no means the only animal we pursued in a car. A little while after our defeat by the emu, we separated a young kangaroo from its mother, and made some pretence to keep the two apart. The mother stopped
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within a hundred yards and never evinced any alarm for herself, and within four or five minutes the young one made a great circle round us, and the two slipped into the bush together. It was not until the return journey that we witnessed the speed and dash of which these most Australian creatures are capable. Eight or nine, one of them a very big red kangaroo, crossed the alleged road in front of us. Just at first, alert and watchful, they bounded slowly across, easily taking the road at one leap, in the upright position, the tail lashing the ground with every jump. It was interesting to see how their peculiar gait enabled them to dodge standing, and to clear fallen, timber. Then when they were clear of us and the little bit of scrub, their heads went down and their tails up, and they were taken out of sight at a speed that would test a car on a good road.
Once my companion drove the car in a circuitous course into the bush in search of perhaps the strangest spectacle in the economy of birds. He was looking for a bower bird’s bower or playground, and in the sequel showed me two beautiful specimens, one newly furbished up. The bower itself is a real or imitation tuft of grass bent into a circular corridor nearly joining up at the top. In one case a real tuft of grass was on one side and a composed tuft on the other. As a rule, this grass tunnel looks east and west —a discovery made by my host. Well outside the bowers, and at both ends, is spread and piled—often a bushel of it—a collection of anything bright that takes the bird's fancy. One of the heaps we inspected was chiefly composed of the bleached vertebra of sheep and pieces of coloured glass, not promiscuously thrown dovyn, but collected in colour groups. I noticed also a piece of telegraph insulator, a button, and a small tin or two. It is surprising that the spotted bower bird, who spends so much care and skill on its playground, builds the slightest and most slovenly nest, not much unlike our pigeons at home. Before he
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manoeuvred the car—a powerful Vauxhall—out of the bush, my chauffeur-naturalist showed me a whistling eagle on the nest and a considerable number of native birds. The species are extraordinarily numerous. The very lovely garden of the station-house we had left swarmed with birds, big and little, and all tame. “Allied Kites,” birds as big as an eagle, circled perpetually over the yard. Two “ native companions ’ ’ —a very large heron—would scarcely move out of the way of the car as we left. The trees swarmed with bower birds, sailor birds, peewees, wagtails and many others. I saw over fifty species within two days. One of the loveliest sights was a flock of rose-breasted parrots, which enjoyed the neighbourhood of the house; and a very pretty green parrot, as well as a black and white shrike, was in the habit of taking tea with the household on the verandah.
A sudden happy zeal for bird protection has taken possession of Queenslanders. Rockhampton—which is likely to be famous for growing cotton —is encircled with spacious sanctuaries, and never in my life, not even in the Duke of Bedford’s sanctuary by Woburn Abbey, did I see anything like the quantity of water birds. The shores of the lake by the Botanic Gardens were lined with duck of seven or eight varieties. Egrets, black swan, shag and ibis abounded. I saw at very close quarters that curious bird, the Lotus bird or Jacana, whose huge feet enable him to walk on top of the leaves of the purple lily. Pelican, spoonbill, geese, dotterel, tern, coot, grebe, stilt, heron, kingfisher, Gould Harrier and the whistling eagle were some of those we marked down within half an hour, and we scarcely needed the glass for identification. The last bird I put up on leaving Queensland was a bustard or wild turkey. He was walking very sedately and unsuspiciously with head and shoulders above the long grasses. When I got down from the car and moved towards him he consented to rise at some
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twenty yards’ distance, and flew slowly some two or three hundred yards. Any engine driver or even stoker could have done murder.
The immense emptiness of Australia, felt by all w T ho leave the railways even for a mile or two, becomes a positive quality when you reach Central Australia. This emptiness establishes a new sort of relationship between wayfarers in the desert —desert only in the sense of loneliness, for the soil will grow anything, and many stations, including the one that gave me hospitality, enjoy twenty-four inches of rain within the year. As we motored on and on across the downs, seeing little beyond the tall yellow grasses, reaches of eucalyptus scrub and occasional fences between the league-long “paddocks,” we passed now and again a horseman or a couple of pedestrians wdth their swag upon their shoulders, making straight across country. The less well-equipped of these wanderers receive, as a matter of course, a gift of plentiful rations at any stations they pass. The provision of meat and bread for them is a definite but unconsidered part of the expenses of a station. Universal hospitality is, and must be, a social obligation in such places. Not to give would be as bad as, say, to leave a gate open or to let rabbits multiply, both unpardonable crimes. Yet people who pass one another on the journey as often as not make no friendly sign whatever. The companion who driving me through some of the sheep country to witness a great shearing just once stopped to talk with an old acquaintance who had worked with him for years some while ago. The two were obviously glad to meet, but neither could find anything whatever to say. After a few barely articulate questions and staccato responses, a hopeless silence fell between them. My friend, after shifting from foot to foot for a little, got back into the car, and the other, towering above him on the whip-seat of a huge wool-wagon, called to his horses; and the
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encounter was over. Lonely men do not converse easily till some real subject is opened. The next people we passed were two men with six light horses, nearly thoroughbred. They were conjectured to be off west to arrange some fencing contract. Later we met and passed a low, much-loaded cart of curious pattern. The outfit proclaimed the business. The driver was the cook or his boy, and they were off ahead, according to the unvarying custom, to prepare a camp and a dinner for the stock-men. These, as prophesied, we met later driving some fifteen thousand sheep before them. We had now struck a stock route, well trodden, and for many hundred yards on either side the grass was eaten to the bone by successive herds. Presently we passed a second woolwagon, carrying twelve tons of bales and drawn by tw r enty-four heavy horses, most of them Clydesdales of good type. We were close to the homestead and the shearing shed.
Presently they came into sight, and in spite of pamphlets and illustrations and books that I had read about the master industry of Australia, I was wholly unprepared for one part of the spectacle. Coralled up outside the central shed were many thousand merino sheep, the foremost pressing up a wooden incline leading into the upper storey of the shed. How was it possible that such a continuous stream should enter the considerable, but by no means vast building? for I could see no sheep emerge. They might have been going into a Chicago packing house. The mystery, of course, like most mysteries, was no mystery. When later I w r ent up into the long barn that occupied the whole length of the shed, I saw some forty men wielding forty machines; and could have spent hours watching the cyclopean work. The heavy wood-work gave a cloistral appearance to a building that outside was ugly with the incomparable ugliness of corrugated iron ; and the lazy sunshine from a fleckless sky gave place to an almost religious
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light, where, if “to work is to pray,” men prayed with fervour indeed. I have never before seen so much energy so effectually applied. The team of shearers, young, and athletic in type, each handled an electrically driven clipping machine ; and as it pressed home to the roots of the fleece, the wool peeled back very much as water is folded aside by the bow of a ship travelling fast and smoothly through still water. The men were stripped almost as men working before a furnace ; and the sweat-drops fell from their forehead on to the sheep .huddled at their feet. Few animals struggled or so much as showed restiveness. They doubtless felt themselves helpless in such forcible and skilful hands. It took just over two minutes to disengage the fleece of a heavy merino. The moment that the fleece fell the young athlete had the sheep on its legs, pushed it by the rump between his straddled legs, and hustled it down a sloping gangway to a narrow pen beneath. Instantly a second unshorn sheep was dragged out from the pen behind the shearer, and on the same level. Sometimes the man would pause just a moment or two to drink a few drops of water from a primeval drinking gourd hung on a beam behind him; but that was the only sort of cessation.
Each man’s tally was kept by means of a count of the shorn animals that were cooped in the narrow pen below and behind the shed; and lest the men should work too jealously, and perhaps hurt the sheep in their competitive zeal, each tally was a secret between the shearer and the manager. I was let into it, and saw that ten men were shearing an average of over two hundred sheep in a day of about seven working hours. The price to the shearer was two pounds a hundred. The neck of a merino is peculiarly difficult to shear, but the men seemed to drive the machine into the heavy folds with the rough energy of a crow-bar driven into the ground. Yet the animals did not appear to suffer. Each bled a fraction like the chin
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of a badly shaven man, but you could see no conscious discomfort.
The intensive energy of the shearers imparted itself to all the workers : the men with the brooms (made out of the straw and ear of brown millet) swept up the relic wool as if their life depended on it. The quickest, most continuous worker of all —though, of course, his work was not muscularly heavy—was the classer. Every fleece after being trimmed on a central counter, or grid, through which the smaller fragments fell, was laid on a board before him. He took one little piece between the finger and thumb of the two hands, gave it a sharp jerk to test the strength, and instantly called out the number of the grade. In that instant, by trained touch and sight, he had decided on the grade; and the five qualities were stacked into compartments behind his counter before being pressed into bales.
The papers had been full of accounts of the shearers’ strike, of men “striking on the job” or going slow. It was my fortune not to see this side of things, but to watch a team of piece-workers who put more intensive energy into their toil than I had ever seen or indeed thought possible. They performed an astonishingly athletic feat. Australia may be described as a country where the people have an inordinate power of work qualified by an inordinate desire to play.
The best record in hospitality was surpassed when at last I reached Western Australia. A private train was sent from Perth to Kalgoorlie; and I was told the Upper House had been adjourned for a fortnight in order that a particular minister might travel through the country with me and unfold its charms. He proved to be Mr. Colebatch, who had been acting Premier while Sir James Mitchell was in England, and was soon to be Agent-General in London. If other statesmen in Australia possess his charm and
s
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intellect, the quality is at least as good in our antipodes as at home. And how well he played bridge, even when he went no trumps before sorting his cards!
On the little private train, with a truck behind for the motor-car, we travelled for a fortnight throughout the south-west corner of Western Australia, on either side of a diagonal line drawn from Albany, that lovely natural harbour, to Perth, and the very artificial harbour of Fremantle. The country will always remain in my mind as one of the gems of Empire. It has all the advantages : rainfall, rivers, inlets, forests of incomparable timbers, depth of soil; and botanically it is richer in wild flowers than any corner of the world :
“ Ille terrarum mihi prater omnes,
Angulus ridet,”
even beside New Zealand and British Columbia. Within a space about as big as two Englands live some two hundred and fifty thousand persons. This handful, of whom most are in the towns, have this wide paradise all to themselves, and produce so little that they must import pig-produce and dairy produce from Eastern Australia. And Eastern Australia is like another land, almost another continent. The railway that joins Fort Augusta to Kalgoorlie runs in a bee-line for a thousand miles over a hot desert of red earth and low bush. During one whole day I saw no break in the dead level, no tree, no hillock, no living thing except two crows and a few miserable blacks who gathered round the rare stations. They are the remnants of a race that has died and is dying out as quickly as the North American Indian. The spectacle is pitiable enough. You see the little company as it comes towards the train, encompassed by flies, which elsewhere are not much in evidence. The grime of their long hair seemed to be the attrac-
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tion; and even when the edges of the eye were attacked the older people did not trouble to brush the flies away. The ankles of the women, and what leg appears below the rags, are incredibly thin. You might have taken the little fat children, carried in a blanket on their backs, as little vampires absorbing all the fat that existed in this lean land. None of this race ever has had the energy to work on the land. They were nomads and hunters; and retain the hunter’s gifts. They can smell water two miles away, and find their way in any country. Some of the men—the older rather than the younger—exhibited the skill of a Cinquevalli with the boomerangs that they made to sell to the passengers. In spite of their wretched guise, both men and women seemed to maintain an easy good nature and childlike cheerfulness, laughing on small provocation and singing quaint snatches of vocalic songs. Yet it was a relief to get back into the train and shake off the reddish dust from your feet and the flies from your coat. For the train is luxurious. My single cabin was of sufficient size, and as completely equipped as a ship’s cabin. At the end of the corridor was a shower-bath. The next carriage was the music and card-room, and the smoking-room. The movement of the train was singularly smooth, and the noise nowhere enough to spoil conversation. I had never, except in a private car, enjoyed such comfort in travelling.
A wide stretch there is in Western Ontario along the lines from Toronto to Winnipeg, which is singularly barren. Rock and jack pine and lake succeed lake and jack pine and rock; but the uniformity of this entrance to Western Australia has the uniformity of a sea, of a Sahara, in spite of its potential fertility and unharvested surface. As a sea, this dividing flatness is flanked by different countries. It is true that at either end are excellent sheep stations, not so very different to the casual
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observer, but even apart from the gold ridges of Kalgoorlie and its neighbourhood (made incredibly fertile by water brought from three hundred and fifty miles away) Western Australia is of another nature than South. The trees are of different species. The wild flowers astound you even from the railway train, and confound the knowledge of the most elect who comes to wander among them. Western Australia is said to contain some eighty per cent, of the classified species of wild flowers of the world; but, however this may be, the variety overwhelms you; and the blues are such pure blues, and the reds so pure, that you would swear you never before had sight of just those tints. Their splendour takes by storm even the people of the lusty mining town. Flower-picking is so popular a pastime at the height of spring, that old and young, men and women, go out by the train-load to gather flowers. They return embowered in bouquets as gorgeous as you could collect, say, from the beds of Hampton Court.
The private gardens in the hills behind Adelaide contain an incredible mixture of the flowers of warm and cold countries. I saw r one rock covered with Lithospermum prostratum on the northern side of a palm, and sweet peas flowered in front of an orange tree in fruit. But these are in part borrowed beauties. Of natural and native wild flowers no surface in the wide world perhaps is so lavish as the highlands behind Perth. There are rock gardens and flower borders and annual beds and rough gardens among flowering shrubs and trees quaint and lovely beyond the gardener’s art. Scientific students are few, and the country very empty even in the districts described as closely settled. What a holiday a botanist could spend between Kalgoorlie and Perth ! September, October and November would be his harvest months.
We met some mild but curious adventures in
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traversing this south-western corner of the country. Once our car was hopelessly bogged; and I walked on in search of help. I was told that I might have to walk twenty miles before seeing a person or habitation; but the warning was not justified. Within an hour I came to a station owned by a Mr. Saw. As I approached his door, and before I had time to begin my apologetic explanations, the owner hailed me by name and called out his daughter, who said she had been a nurse under my brother in Franee during the war!
Were ever any people so simple and direct in word and action? These people had at once inferred who I was, had understood, as if they had anticipated it, what the situation was, and instantly made preparation for our relief and entertainment. A son trotted off with a horse and a rope; and by the time the car arrived a meal of cold kangaroo and other very much better food was ready.
We were begged to stay the night. Beds were already prepared; but we had promised to reach the outpost home of Mr. Boulanger, a Frenchman who had retired to a most lovely and lonely hill-top farm for the sake of health.
We reached it after further adventures after midnight, and left at five the next morning. But Madame Boulanger, as energetic as charming, was up before us, and had prepared us a breakfast of asparagus tops and scrambled eggs! It was as good as a breakfast could be. A year later I retailed its delights to Mr. Cherry Garrard, a neighbour in England who had been with Scott’s South Polar expedition. He had a parallel to my super breakfast. Very weary and hungry, some of them found an old store of dried mushroom powder; and this they cooked with scrambled penguin’s eggs—and that was the best breakfast he had remembered. He has been vainly seeking for mushroom powder ever since!
A message was to reach us at the Boulangers’
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house as to the probability of progressing farther. Two horsemen had been dispatched for this purpose from the other end. They had come and gone; and left behind on a scrubby morsel of paper this pregnant sentence: “Roads every (sic) bad.’’ We were forced to return by very much the same way as we had come.
We met delightful characters along the route. An old white-bearded man told us his life history. He had brought up a family of twelve, who were all “ born and bred” in the hollow of a great tree. I shall never forget the exuberant hospitality of Mrs. Pickles, a Lancashire emigrant, who with her husband had seventy acres under peaches, apricots and oranges. They possessed also behind the house two thousand acres of forest which the family were slowly “ ring barking,’’ so letting in the light and encouraging the grasses and multiplying wandering flocks. “Bother England,” said Mrs. Pickles when I asked whether she was ever home-sick. She had found wealth and a life of productive activity on her farm west of “ Denmark,” that Lancashire could never have given her.
We spent a day or two at Pemberton in the great karri forest, one of the sights of the world. I had seen a good deal of logging, of timber-cutting in the forests and woods of Europe and America; but had met nothing comparable with the appearance of the hardwoods growing on this southern coast. The jarrah, the rich red wood of which much London pavement is made, is a notable tree, and the wood wonderfully durable. It defies the attacks of the ants, of water and of moulds. It will endure for a generation as a fence post or even as a railway sleeper ; its stately trunks suggest the sternness of its inner quality. It makes beautiful furniture, and I much treasure a bowl of it, a leaving gift. But as a pillar of the forest even the jarrah yields to the karri. In the forest near Pemberton, where the government
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had built a township for its wood-cutters, we stopped near the base of one of these silver giants along with a group of woodmen, who discussed its height. The tree was bigger than the average, but not one of the biggest. Two lean and wiry Australians stood on a platform some ten feet up the trunk, pulling an eight foot saw (which was much too short for the purpose), and the slit was just beginning to enlarge. In a few minutes we should be able to test our conjectures with a yard measure. There was a loud crack; but the men went on sawing as if they were deaf. There was another, and with the agility of their race they jumped down, ran perhaps twenty yards, when the visible sway began.
“ Anon a sound appalling,
As a hundred years of pride
Crashed ”
But the crash was more than the crash even of a giant Douglas fir in a Vancouver forest, and never did a Sequoia giant in Oregon resound more loudly. The upper trunk fell on a stump and split open with a scream. We walked along it with a surveyor’s measure, and found the tallest of all our height estimates exceeded. The tree was one hundred and thirty-five feet to the first bough, clean, without a suggestion of a waver or a roughness. The total height must have been two hundred feet. The woodman told me tales of the antiquity of these trees, suggesting that they numbered a thousand years, but confessed that he had no grounds whatever for his estimate. He was doubtless entirely wrong. I counted the rings on a similar giant, so far as that can be done, and found the number almost exactly two hundred. The trunk, sawn into twenty ton lengths, was conveyed down the hill to the railway under a yoke supported on two enormous wheels, drawn by teams of oxen, fourteen in each. One block proved too much for a single team and a second was
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hitched on. The teamsman cracked his enormous whip, shouted to the labouring oxen as a team, and by name. If “ Husky ”or “ Charlie ”or “ Ruddy ” moved ever so little out of line he shifted back instantly on hearing his name. They were of every sort: a half shorthorn, half Devon was in the lead, along with a cross-bred Hereford. There were Ayrshires and even half-bred Jerseys; but they knew their job and place. The selection of them and their placing in the line are as expert a work as the making of a boat’s crew; and the driving of them needs the talent of a long-trained “ coach.” They dragged and steered the log between the trunks without a hitch, where hitches looked inevitable. As they began to disappear into the spaces of dappled light far down below us, their billowing backs, four abreast, looked almost like the surface of a forest stream.
These huge Australian forests of the south-west of the state have their grotesque as well as their stately attributes. No growth is more primitive than the “ Black Boy,” to which recent discoveries have given a new prominence. It is a dwarf of anything up to twelve feet, with an unshapely trunk that looks as if it had been charred by fire, and at the top stick up sharp reedy spikes, suggestive of a Red Indian’s head-dress. But this elementary growth is compact of virtues once unsuspected. A sago-like farina is being made from the centre; and from the deep resinous scales that enclose it, valuable varnishes and explosives are being commercially extracted.
The chief karri forest runs up to the area where “group settlements” of immigrants are being installed under the scheme that had been arranged between Sir James Mitchell and Mr. Amery. The nature of the trees that these men are clearing off their future holdings is of vital importance to the prospector. The trees indicate the quality of the soil so accurately that in the extensive soil surveys undertaken by the West Australian Government, the chief
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pointer to the best land has been the presence of gum and karri. Just as in England the cowslip will grow wherever the oak flourishes, so here it is found that wheat and potatoes, and often lucerne, may be cultivated wherever the red gum or karri (both belonging to the prevalent eucalyptus family) abound in conjunction. Doubtless humbler plants might give like indications; but the people are surprisingly incurious about their own flowers, though they gather them by the armful. I found only one man—he was a clergyman—who knew the name of even the commoner wild flowers and flowering shrubs, though I asked scores of people. The spider orchid, the kangaroo’s foot, the “ everlasting ” and the cape weed seemed to be almost the only popular names. The edges of the karri forest, where the timber was rather lower and sparser, were most glorious with the mauve Hovia, known only—in flagrant contempt of its true colour—as “ the blue flower.”
It is very surprising after experience in Canada to watch the ease with which these immigrants, many of them town dwellers in England, clear the land. The trees, even those of considerable dimensions, are readily pulled down by a simple pulley and two horses. The men become experts in a day or two at blowing up the larger trunks with cartridges; and finally the heaped timber is effectively burnt. Very fair wheat and potatoes are growing where red gums flourished twelve months ago. I should have said a priori that such a sudden and complete transformation was impossible. It is a pity to English eyes to see so much beautiful timber destroyed unused; but wood is of as little value here as straw in the prairie provinces of Canada. It is only the work put into it that gives value to the softer trees of the eucalyptus family, and even the best after being cut into boards may be absurdly cheap. Settlers were fencing their garden plots with the aid of posts that would last thirty to forty years, were making tables and chairs and cup-
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boards out of the best jarrah at the cost of a shilling or two. On the edge of one little settlement a public building, capable of holding fifty people, was erected, floored, roofed and glazed for the cost of fifty pounds, full wages for the work included. Like thepeat bogs of Ireland, or the groves alongside the French villages, this free supply of wood must be reckoned as a very real addition to the wealth of the holdings. It is almost a pity that the climate is so charming that no houses are built for the stock and fires are little needed for the sake of mere warmth.
The men working in Pemberton were well paid and contented; but a certain number did not answer the sirens because they had found a more lucrative and less onorous occupation. Protection for the socalled opossum or little tree-bear had been removed, and the pelts were fetching a high price. It was a pitiful sight: the strings of men hurrying back with their victims, for the little marsupial creature is the most engaging of all the wild animals, singularly attractive, quite harmless, and not at all shy.
Perth, though a pleasant place enough, and indeed very beautiful in its way, was a dull contrast to the country, to the active farms of fruit and grain and sheep, to the holiday hamlets by the sea, to the fantastic limestone caves and spacious forests. But no people in the world so concentrate in towns as the Australians. I went with Sir James Mitchell to the great agricultural show held in the capital. He reckoned that one-ninth of the whole population of the State (which is as big as half Europe) were present in the ground in one afternoon !
Sir James, since first I met him in London, has seemed to me one of the few really formative, constructive statesmen of the Empire. He began as a bank manager, and frightened his own bank by his methods. He would refuse any grant to a farmer unless he spent the money on clearing or increasing
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the capital value of his farm. If he would do that he lent on what seemed a very flimsy security.
When he became Premier he followed the same principle. He originated “group settlement,” and spent the State’s money lavishly in clearing land and making parallel roads and railways, so designed that no farm or village should be more than twelve miles off a good line of communication. He lost his place at last, and his scheme was arrested, because the State grew frightened at the expenditure and could not see the “far-off interest of years” with the calm confident gaze of the Premier’s grey eyes. He won his place largely by pure patriarchal methods. He knew every other voter, and could ask him about his family. The whole country delighted in his character, his gentle optimism and humorous perception.
He exercised none of the usual political arts, and quite lacks the art of persuasive oratory. The better sense he talks the less his audience seem tempted to listen. I was entertained at dinner by the two Houses, and never heard a more continuous burble of conversation than flourished during Sir James’s speech. And he was saying things that might very well make history. But the fashion was not to listen to the Premier.
How different was his reception in the country and on the new farms. The people beamed with pleasure at his approach and felt instantly at home with him. He took me to the Peel Estates outside Perth, where group settlements were already flourishing on the drained marshes. Among the cheeriest of the settlers was a young soldier and his very young wife from the Old Kent Road, London.
“Ifou will soon be driving your own car,” said Sir James.
” No, I shan’t,’ said the Cockney with the ready wit of his tribe. “ I shall be having a chauffeur to drive me.”
How Sir James chuckled. He exulted in these
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Peel Estates. The marsh-land is so high up that when a ditch is cut through the reeds the water just flows away and leaves deep black soil that w r as being ploughed up without more ado as soon as the reeds were cut. It was Sir James’s experience that on such holdings the townsman did rather better than the countryman. They were not styled Jimmiegrants for nothing.
A traveller round the world, especially if he visits the back blocks, and moves rapidly, is much cut off from communication. Since I had left England I had heard two or three bits of news about Lord Northcliffe. One which had reached me at Vancouver was that two members of his staff were bringing a libel action against him. This was ominous enough of his failing pow r ers. The other was a telegram from a Sydney newspaper sent to me on a Queensland sheep station, asking me to write his obituary.
Now Lord Northcliffe had been insistent that I should travel all round the Empire and conclude by a journey down from Kenya to the Cape through Rhodesia. It was unlikely that his successors would endorse the more public-spirited part of the dead man’s legacy of ideas. For myself the separation of The Times and Daily Mail left me in the air, for I was representing both. But before taking ship home, I hurried back to the East, for the sake of a brief visit to New Zealand, to lay six rainbow trout on “ the Chief’s ” grave. How disappointed he would have been if that episode in the journey had been omitted. I reckoned that I could reach the North Island as the close season ended. Rotorua—where the trout come from—is one of the world’s wonders still, though an earthquake has destroyed the once famous Pink Terraces. It is a Paradise with a doorway leading to quite another place. Steam and sulphurous emanations rise from the water of the lake. The landscape
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between the lakes is freshly manufactured of volcanic dust. Hot geysers shoot up capriciously. The Maori women cook their dinner in the hot streams. While the natives bathe in the day in the open, the whites have the comfortable habit of taking a long leisurely alkaline bath the last thing at night, and it induces sleep at least as certainly as any drug.
New Zealand is too perfect in one respect. It produces a sort of elephantiasis in many creatures. The trout in Rotorua Lake reached such portentous size and numbers that their fertility suffered. The eggs degenerated in quality; and scores of tons of fish had been netted at the mouths of the rivers, partly to reduce the excessive numbers, but chiefly to arrest degeneracy and to make room for fresh importations from other countries. The red deer (not to mention the hares) have multiplied and enlarged on much the same scale as the fish. They have descended from the upper hills to the afforested regions and cultivated fields, and grown gross by the change. The damage they commit, chiefly by rubbing their horns on the trees, had grown so considerable that they had just been condemned and their sentence proclaimed. It was now lawful to kill them at any season and by any means. As if they were no better than rabbits, they may be and were destroyed by poison. The shooting of them still remains a fine sport on the South Island in the fastnesses of the hills proper to them, but these huge heavy-bodied animals of the plain had become vermin. The report of their crimes, with photographic evidence, had just gone to the government printers when I reached Wellington.
According to plan I reached Rotorua on the first day of the open season, and had one morning’s sport on the Gnongataha brook, a few miles up from the Rotorua Lake. It is not perhaps wholly characteristic of New Zealand fishing. The stream of streams is the Tongariro, which descends from the volcanic hills,
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some still active, upon the middle of the North Island. The rainbow trout has many likenesses to the salmon in habit; and here he is treated like a salmon. A good salmon rod is needed; long casting is necessary. Salmon flies are generally preferred, though many New Zealanders use a curious fly made out of the streaked feather of the Makuto, a sort of bittern. The size and number of fish caught there are almost beyond belief. A New Zealand friend of mine landed almost exactly a quarter of a ton of fish within the compass of sixteen days’ holiday towards the end of May, just before the close of the season. The best authentic catch on record to a single rod is a trifle over six ton of fish within the season, of which a rainbow of twenty-two pounds was the heaviest. The best day of another fisherman was seventeen fish averaging twelve pounds apiece. The river where the giants swarm—moving up clean and silvery from the lake as the season ends—is of singular loveliness, and runs through a valley which is the very home of Maori legend; and the Maoris are an aristocratic people whose traditions go back a thousand years. What more coidd fishermen ask by way of environment?
I found myself almost bereft of the desire to fish by the complete satisfaction of watching the fish in the water. To see was recreation enough. We drove a car along a most infamous road almost skirting the stream; and stopped at any attractive reach to observe the size and number of the trout. The first place and the second place where we walked down to the bank looked to me impossibly good. The waters were alive. Great long deep fish lay side by side in the pools, sometimes six or seven in a group; and as we moved along the shallows, we frightened into movement other fish as many and as large. But my companion said authoritatively that the fishing would be better higher up ; and reluctantly I was dragged back to the car. Finally we inspected a place that
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pleased even this epicure. At one point the waters butted into a bank twenty to thirty feet in height; and in a pool at the foot lay a score or so of rainbow trout, the smallest not less than five pounds in weight. They almost jostled one another; and when the sun shone at rare intervals, it made visible all the glory of their ruddy markings, especially the pink patch on the shoulder. I was advised to try the shallows, but the sight of the pool, difficult though it was of access, was altogether too attractive; and for a half-hour I tried by every available wile to wheedle one of the monsters. At first they took no notice whatever, but at last I persuaded two to pay attention to a large grey fly with a silver body—such a fly as I had never seen or imagined. They would only heed it when I was dragging it very quickly through the water, I think for the reason that it then resembled a small fish, fry not fly. But even so they kept their distance; at last I gave up the pursuit for an easier if less attractive and blinder endeavour. In the broken waters below the pool the fish, of course, were less visible, but here and there and at times you could see a fin or huge tail clear of the water, and backs would appear undulating almost like a porpoise in the sea. The stream was rapid, the wind high, the best places difficult of access without waders, and the fish fought well, but in ten minutes or so I had landed my first New Zealand trout. It weighed something over four pounds, and would have weighed six if it had been in good condition. None of the fish was as yet fully recovered from spawning times. The best fishing of all is much later than November, if the quality of the fish is what matters. But it is only in the first weeks that the fish remain in the upper reaches of the streams. When December comes they will all be round the shores of the lake or by the river’s mouth; and to my taste the stream itself is a good part of the pleasure. I lost several fish, they were rising short—and broke one cast; but in spite
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of such accidents and very insufficient equipment, I caught six trout aggregating twenty pounds during a short morning. I had at least carried out the letter and spirit of Lord Northcliffe’s wish ! That was something.
CHAPTER XIII
THE LAST LAP
Australian horse-racing—The return journey—Lord Inchcape’s letters —“ Freedom of the Bridge ” —Lloyd George at Marseilles —Lord Northcliffe and his successors —Wills and deeds —A change in journalism—A social journalist—A tribute to Lord Northcliffe—His humour—Newspapers and finance—A slump in causes.
THE pleasures of travelling as an end in itself, not a mere means, were greatly increased by a number of letters from Lord Inchcape. He introduced me by letters to his agents and associates in all ports. They formed a string all round the world ; at Vancouver, Fiji, New Zealand, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Bombay, Suez, Marseilles, or where you will. They were like the representatives of some extensive organization designed to increase the amenities of travel, for mere altruistic motives. I could not escape their kindness either by land or sea. I golfed with one at Sydney, and went to the races with another at Brisbane; and felt even more grateful to my host at Ascot than at Rose Bay, for though Australian golf is good, Australian racing is better, and it was new to me. I shall always feel a particular gratitude to Mr. Hamilton, who first let me into the mysteries of that seductive machine, the “ Tote,” or Totalizator. The Ascot course at Brisbane seems to me as perfectly managed for the public amusement as such things can be. Perhaps a happy incident helped to enhance its glories. As I came into the paddock the twelve horses to run in the next race were being paraded and their virtues hotly
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canvassed. I did not know the name or quality of any one; but confessed to a Philistine preference for a big horse, on the established maxim that “ a good big ’un is better than a good little ’un,” and made my pick on this theory in the face of violent protest, and handed over my two ten shillings to the Tote which gives you money for a place as well as a winner. My pair came in first and second, to the scandal of the experts.
The name Ascot challenges comparison—such comparison as a traveller is always making almost unconsciously—with race meetings at home. The Ascot meeting is not a Melbourne Cup, where the crowd may reach to a hundred and twenty thousand, but it is singularly characteristic of the sport in Australia, and singularly enjoyable. The Australians have made horse-racing a national game, as it is nowhere else in the world, with the exception, perhaps, of Ireland, and they lead the field. Ascot, though almost in the city, has all the beauty of more rural race courses. Anyone, however little he pays, may see the race from start to finish, and the excellent signal boards tell him the starting position of each horse and the name of its rider.
The “ Totes ” are divided to suit all purposes. In one the tickets are five shillings, in another ten shillings, and in another five pounds. It is curious to see the bookmakers drawn up under their numbers—rather like prize cattle—alongside the principal “ Tote,” and their business does not seem to suffer unduly from the juxtaposition. It is said on occasion, when they are overloaded with commitments on a particular horse, they make themselves safe by hedging through the agency of their rival, the “ Tote.” The question of Tote versus Bookie is acute in some parts of Australia and New Zealand.
The confirmed racing man seems to prefer the bookmaker, who gives him rather longer odds; but women—and they bet a great deal—prefer the
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silent machine to the noisy man. It is difficult to work out any close comparison of the odds, as the machine gives you a dividend, if your horse is placed among the first three, and it is this good second chance that gives a good deal of its popularity to the machine.
Another hospitable acquaintance introduced me to the “Trots” at Perth just before leaving for home. There is nothing of the sort, so far as I know, in the world. All the meetings are held at night under electric light; and as everyone is then free the meeting is large and entirely democratic. The Phoebe, who waited at my table in the hotel, greeted me in the morning at breakfast as an old friend. She had seen me at the Trots, she said, and hoped I had done as well as she had. She had put something on every race and won six out of seven.
The trotting ponies, some ridden, some driven, even in the same race, were owned by people of all sorts, some rich, some poor. Someone described our own Olympic show as “a steeplechase in a flower garden by electric light ”; but even that gay scene misses something of the “ flip ” and merriment of the Perth Trots.
Lord Inchcape’s letters were of yet more service by sea than by land. His letter contained the following whole-hearted clause :
“ At the same time I should be much obliged if you would give Sir William and his staff the very best accommodation in any of our steamers by which he may decide to travel. ... You might also ask the captains of our steamers to make him free of bridges, so that he may watch the navigation of the ships.”
Many delicious hours I spent on the w T ay home from New Zealand and Sydney on these broad
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bridges and came to admire the captains as great servants of humanity. They have an intense responsibility, work hard and yet bear the burden with unceasing gaiety. The Captain of the Makura, crossing the Pacific, could beat us all, with one exception, at deck tennis and quoits; and when we came to discuss books in his cabin his memory for quotation was surer, and his reading hardly less wide than any of us could claim. He was playing quoits one day when there was a loud explosion and the ship stopped. Some of the passengers were not a little frightened, or would have been, but like Drake before the Armada, he finished his game with utter calmness and so quite calmed our fears, as his purpose was. One quiet gesture may do much. Pulitzer, the blind American millionaire, was a past master at this art. Many years ago, w r hen travelling to Liverpool, the ship stopped with a loud grating noise and the alarm was given. His servant was terrified along with a good many others. Pulitzer, who was being dressed, began to grumble at the fit of his coat and made the frightened valet take a note of the tailor’s name there and then, that he might be abused when they returned to New York. And that was the end of all nervousness among Pulitzer’s suite. He had done what he meant to do.
Travelling is a common art not yet fully appreciated ; but it is rapidly coming to fruition. A good part of the passengers on my home-coming ship were Australians, going, as the habit is for a holiday, to the neighbour island of Ceylon, very much as we should go to the Isle of Wight. The distance is four thousand miles.
How much duller life was when they left us! The ship did not recover liveliness again till we reached Marseilles where we were joined by a company inferior to no Australian in liveliness. The liveliest of all was Mr. Lloyd George. He was on his way to his favourite holiday nook at Algeciras,
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but had funked the Bay. Among merry companions he ranks high. At our Christmas dinner on board he made me stand up and announce that he would give a prize for the best playing of ‘ ‘ God Save the King ” on a penny whistle; and a very hilarious competition it proved. Even an American passenger competed, but he was detected in whistling the tune with his lips behind the camouflage of the whistle, and duly disqualified.
Mr. Lloyd George spoke—to my amazement, I must confess—with a good deal of appreciation of his old ally and later enemy, Lord Northcliffe. His point of view was interesting and not without magnanimity. He said in effect; “ Lord Northclifte used his papers for expressing ideas; and whether one always approved those ideas or not, does not so much matter. His papers were not merely an end in themselves. Now his successors. ...” It would require a chapter at least to fill that gap. Indeed, a year later I was asked by an enterprising agent to write a book on the theme, and I do not think if I accede that there will be any danger of being gravelled for lack of matter.
The first day I was in London on the return from the ten-month’s trip I saw Lord Northcliffe’s will, and heard the story of his later days. He had made two wills. The later one was not adopted, for reasons most honourable and unselfish, and the earlier one with its many unhappy clauses prevailed. The last time I had played golf with him—at Crowborough—he had said that he understood very little about money, but he knew that he was all right if he saved £30,000 a year! His estate certainly did not realize as much as he thought it would, or at least as the provisions of the will implied ; but The Times was bought by Colonel Astor for the very large sum of £1,300,000. By some curious fatality, the original owners had sold most of their remaining shares to Lord Northcliffe just before his
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death, but happily a certain right of pre-emption remained. The Daily Mail, or the Associated Press, was bought with the help of the public by Lord Rothermere, who has never been accused of resembling his brother in his ignorance of finance; and to the amazement of the public, but not of journalists, the property appreciated inordinately within a very short time. It proved full of golden eggs. Brilliant ideas and a wide imagination had so enriched the institution in the past that under economical management it could yield immense returns, at any rate for a few years; and it did.
Lord Northcliffe in his day had doubled and trebled the pay of journalists ; and he had done more. He had added immensely to the self-respect of the profession. He had sought out men of good education and of original ideas. Except for a few of the best papers, the old proprietor desired, or at any rate encouraged, a type of a journalist who was a soulless funnel, and if he were a little disreputable so much the better. Lord Northcliffe was himself very proud of his profession and wished its honour to be increased in every direction. This desire expressed itself sometimes in humorous details. On one occasion the managerial side brought him the expenses accounts of a special correspondent, which they regarded as excessive and desired His Lordship to tell the man so. He glanced at them without interest and sent back the answer : “ Every Daily Mail special correspondent is expected to travel with at least two valets!” Some of them did. Mr. Little, who was a genius in the art of Society correspondent—and a very charming character—used to go about with a valet and as much luggage as an American millionairess. I met him once at an agricultural show, a function he did not understand, dressed in the wrong kit. He was altogether too beautiful, and he told me almost with tears in his eyes how ashamed he was and how he had kept him-
THE LAST LAP
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self in the background. Poor Little! He loved his job, and possessed an amazing faculty for remembering detail. He would attend a crowded rout and come away with an accurate picture in his mind of every gown and every name. He took no notes and did not allow his helpers to take notes. He knew everyone, and his musical and dramatic gifts, apart from his personality, made him popular. His misgivings were few. I remember him at one of the great Friday crushes given by the then Duchess of Sutherland in Stafford House. Little bustled up as I was talking—agriculture, I think, for that was Little’s Moscow —with Mr. Henry Chaplin. He greeted us both with equal warmth as if he had known us both all his life, and continued his genial progress before we had time to say a word. “ Who the devil is that? ” asked Mr. Chaplin. The perfect orchid, the quite beautiful cream waistcoat, the jewelled studs, the robust geniality of manner intrigued his curiosity, and in spite of the greeting he had no recollection of having met Little before. But Little knew him, knew everybody, if not by introduction, by the more simple method of direct greeting.
The dream of a Stafford House Salon, modelled on the various salons of Paris, perished a little later. It was a pity, though perhaps inevitable, for no one ever looked more beautiful and magnificent than the Duchess standing on the sweep of the big staircase. And she has literary gifts as well as social. Did I not owe my first introduction to an over-bold use of the blue pencil on a charming anonymous story that she wrote? A party at Stafford House was a scene that ravished visitors to London. I watched it once alongside Mr. Deakin, the silver-tongued Premier of Australia; and he made what I thought a notable comment on London in general, as a sequel to some more particular notes of admiration. “ Do you know,” he said, “what chiefly strikes us
A TRAVELLER IN NEWS
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Australians about London? It is your amazing vitality. We rather expect at the back of our brains when we come to England, to find you not exactly decadent but a little less vigorous than we are in the New World. We do find you incredibly more vital.”
London, indeed, may surprise the very elite. At another social gathering in the same year, a country house luncheon given to representatives of the Colonial Conference, the cynosure of many eyes was a fine farmer-like figure with garments suggestive of the prairies or backwoods. A great Londoner and a great imperialist, jumping to conclusions, approached him with the greeting, “ Mr. X of the backwoods, I presume! ” “No,” came the answer pat, “ Mr. Park of the Star,” and then the two, each appreciating the humour of the situation, burst into unquenchable laughter.
But these episodes occurred in the heyday of Lord Northcliffe. He was now dead. The change in journalistic London was crucial. It seemed to one quite a different place; and yet in the very offices where he had reigned pigmy journalists were busy with depreciations. “He never was any good.” “He was not a journalist, just a showman.” “He is forgotten already.” These were the sort of comments that I heard in Fleet Street and I came away feeling morally sick.
Doubtless there have been greater journalists than Lord Northcliffe, but he had unquestionable genius, and showed it from the first. Even when he was working as a boy of seventeen on a Coventry cycling paper he trebled the circulation in three months. And he could write, thanks to acute powers of observation, in a note of gay humour. The only time in my acquaintance that I paid him a compliment was when he took under his personal charge the collection of a fund for the Olympic Games. I asked him, without any suspicion of the truth, who was
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responsible for the admirable appeal. Such work could not have been better done. The paragraphs were light and humorous, but very persuasive. He gave the impression from the beginning that the thing was bound to be an outstanding success; and his humour developed into hilarity when sufficient money was collected and he had to tell the public to stop. It was done so well that quite a number of people went on subscribing for the fun of it.
“ Did you read the Morning Post? ” he said to me about this time. ‘‘They are scolding, actually scolding people for not subscribing.” Doubtless his peculiar skill was better exhibited in the production of weekly papers than of daily. He produced them by the score, literally by the score, and followed their fortunes with zest. He was followed even to the other side of the Atlantic with cables giving details of the exact fortunes of the “ Wonder Box ” or whatever particular scheme was afoot. Where he dealt with politics he was handicapped by an absence of any settled convictions. He had no “hearth of thought” as the Greeks said, at which to warm his hands when the wind blew cold. His campaigns were emotions. But he was a patriot always, and could sacrifice his interests and his peace of mind to an enthusiasm, as he did more than once in the years of stress. He could sacrifice a good deal to friendship. Of all his papers he was fonder of the Observer than of any other weekly; and he was a great admirer of its editor and part proprietor. The day came when the two diverged abruptly but openly on questions of national importance, and their association became too difficult to continue.
How few proprietors would have taken so magnanimous or intellectually honest a view as he did. He decided that things could not continue as they were, but without any temper or rancour he made the straight offer : “ Either you must buy me out or I must buy you out. Do whichever you prefer.” It
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w r as a genuine grief to him, as I know, to lose both the paper and the partnership.
His humour helped to give him a sense of perspective, even where his egoism was touched. He delighted to laugh at himself as a fat old man. He said to me once when I was going to meet one of his many brothers for the first time: “Oh, you will like him. He is quite a gentleman for a Harmsworth ! ” It was a double shot at his own abruptness and his brother’s suavity.
He could use snobbery as a weapon ; and was quite extraordinarily humble in the presence of big men. His admiration for Pierpoint Morgan (whom he asked to show me his inner sanctum of manuscripts) was straightforward hero-worship. But no man was less a snob or nursed a more honest dislike of privilege, or more clearly saw people as they were. At the very end of his life, when he was ill and losing control of his mental processes, he wrote some foolish or meaningless articles and composed a pamphlet, chiefly about other newspaper proprietors. They gave particular offence, were not in all respects accurate, and left a wrong taste in the mouth. But even the pamphlet, strangely racy, frank, boyish, inconsecutive and unwise, was based on a fidelity to his profession. He hated the idea that men who were not journalists should wield papers. He felt as a musician might feel towards a performer with a bad ear. A badly edited paper made a discord so horrible that it pained him. That is the bare truth. He was in regard to his special art an artist with an artist’s feelings.
At the worst he had always been loyal to his profession ; and the loss of that loyalty began to affect the whole body of London, and indeed, in some respects, Empire journalists, within a few weeks of his death. London newspapers began immediately to move eastward, rapidly and to their loss. For the first time the Stock Exchange took close and con-
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tinuous interest in their finances. The change is likely to be better for Lombard Street than for Fleet Street, for the financier who works for dividends than the journalist who works for ideas. “You won’t find any interest in Empire Settlement now that Lord Northcliffe is gone,” said Mr. Lloyd George; and he was right. A boom in stocks not uncommonly coincides with a slump in causes.
INDEX
Aberdeen. Earl of, 191
Acadie, 231
Adelaide, 276
“ A.E.,” 49, 50
Aire, 72, 73
Aisne, battle of, 65, 66, 68
Aix-la-Chapelle, 212, 216, 223
Albany, 274
Albert, 109, 119
Alberta, 224
America, 145-190
American
athletes, 5, 13, 14, 17, 18
journalism, 147-150
sailors, 191, 192
soldiers, 191-193
war-supplies, 161. 162, 189
Amery, Rt. Hon. L. C. M. S 280
Amiens, 108, 119, 141
Anderson, Mr., 16
Antwerp, 113
Armistice, the, 194-197
Armstrong. Sir George, 19
Arras, 74-77
battle of, 107, 108, 114-116
Associated Press, 294
Astor, Colonel, 293
Athletics, 2, 4, 5, 12-17, 67
Aubigny, 75
Australia, 124, 262-284
Australian
Dtton-growing, 263, 265, 266
horse-racing, 289-291
natives, 274, 275
eheep-farming, 263, 266 , 271273
timber, 274, 275
wild animals, 267-270, 282
wild flowers, 274, 276. 281
Australians in the war, 123, 127, 193
Bad Ems, 212, 213, 219
Baden-Powell. Lieut.-Gen. Sir
Robert, 151, 153
344
Bailleul, 119
Banff, 242, 243
Bapaume, 134
Barrie, Sir James, 129-131
Bartlett, Mr., 150
Barwell, Sir Henry, 260, 261
Base, the, 93, 94. See Boulogne Battersby, Provost, 104
Bean, Charles, 127, 264, 265
Beaucourt, 117, 131
Beaumont Hamel, 112-114
Beebe, William, 154
Begbie, Harold, 20
Belfast, 50
Belgian headquarters. See Calais hospitals, 85, 86
officers, 81. 82
Belgium, 65, 68, 81, 82
Bell, Moberly, 42
Bentley, Mr., 22
Birkenhead. Earl of, 132
Bishop of Liverpool, 9
Bishop of London, 93
Blennerhassett, Sir R., 21
“Blues,” 18
Blunt, H. W., 9
Boer War, 235
Bone, Muirhead, 140-142
Bonn, 211, 215, 223
Boulanger, M., 277
Boulogne, 87-94
Bower-bird, 268
Braid, James, 26, 37, 31
Bridges, Lt.-Gen. Sir G., 86 Brisbane, 265, 267, 289
British Columbia, 240, 244-252
Bronx Zoo. the, 153, 154
Bruges, 196
Burnham, Viscount, 105 Butler, Hedges. 68, 69
Butler, Major-Gen. Sir Richard 194
“ By-the-Way,” 20
Cafinb, Herr, 212, 213
INDEX
345
Cairo, 127
Calais, 69, 80-87, 90
Calgary, 240
Cambridge, 1, 5, 13
Canada, 226-255
Canadian
cattle-farming, 241, 242
fruit-farming, 249, 250, 255
land-clearing, 254, 255
wild animals, 242-244, 247, 248 Canadian Pacific Railway, 237, 253-255
Canadians in the war, 108, 110, 123, 128, 195
Canberra, 264
Carmelite House, 16, 22, 23, 27
Carrol, Lewis (0. L. Dodgson), 5, 6
Carruthers, Sir Gilbert, 262
Carson, Lord, 51
Case, Professor, 12
Ca.ssel, 119, 120, 125
Cavalry in the war, 116 Cecil, Lord Hugh, 19
Cecil, Lord Robert, 57
Censorship, 105-107, 122, 123 Central Australia, 270
Ceylon, 292
Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. J., 169, 235
Chaplin, Charlie, 185
Chaplin, Henry, 295
Charteris, Brig.-Gen., 108, 122 CViofoon Tli i orrxr f\’-\ 70
Chateau Thierry, 65, 72
Chequers, 46, 47
Chicago, 179
Chinese in Canada, 250 Christchurch, 45
Christ Church, Oxford, 1-10, 17
Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, 57, 121, 133
Coblentz, 201, 203, 204, 212, 221
Colebatch, Hon. H. P., 273
Collins, Michael, 54
Cologne in 1919, 197-199 in 1922, 201-204, 209-211, 220222
Comber, Mr., 94
Oomite des Forges, 207
Communists, 206, 219, 220, 223
Contalmaison. 109
luy Cooke, Sir Clement Kinlock, 2, 3
Cook, Mr., 149, 150
Cos-Cob, 151-152
“ Cots wold Village,” a, 4
Coventry, Earl of, 49
Oraig, Sir James, 51
Graven, Mr., 185. 186
Currie, General, 125
Daily Chronicle, 104
Daily Express, 2, 104
Vaily Mail , 2, 16, 23-25, 41, 44
in the war, 40, 90, 104
sale of, 284, 294
Daily Mail Farm, 44-46
Daily Mirror, 90
Daily News, 103, 104. 133
Daily Telegraph, 22, 104
D’Alvarez, Madame, 263
Dariac, M., 202
Dawson, Geoffrey, 1
Deakin, Mr., 132, 295
Delville Wood, 116
Denmark, 15
Detroit, 155-161
Dewar, G. A. 8., 104
Dillon, Dr., 11
Disarmament, 209, 210
“ Disenchantment,” 94, 144 Urnirli or! o ( nnf ddc n f
Drogheda, Countess of, 86
Dublin, 49, 50, 52, 54
Dudley, Countess of, 88
Dulwich College, 7 TV;01/1 oi£
Duren, 214-216
Edmonton, 238, 240
Elverdinghe, 12;
Emigration, 260
Australian, 260-262, 281, 283 Canadian, 227-230, 236-23^. 254, 255 Fijian, 261 shipping conditions, 229, 230
Emu, 267
Epernay, 58
Esquimaux, 239, 240 Essen, 206
Etaples, 89
“ Factory of Frightfclkesa.'’ 114
F.A.N.Y.S., 83
Fiji, 257, 261
X IJI, fCM , Flavelle, Sir Joseph, 234
Fleetway House, 27
Foch, General, 63
Forbes, Lady Angela, 88, 89
Ford, Henry. 154-161
Fortnightly Review , 22
Freiberg, Colonel, 117, 130, 131
Fremantle, 274
French
communiques, 57
language, 66, 75, 76, 78, 92
officers, 60, 62-64, 68
women, 84, 90-92
French gardening, 45
Fumes, 77, 87
Gandblu, 58, 66, 72
Garrard, A. G. Cherry, 277
Garvin. J. L., 11, 21, 22, 48, 131
Gawk-Rogers, Mr., 265, 267
George V., His Majesty, 134. 135
German brigandage, 61
“ Intelligence,” 107, 108 prisoners, 66, 114, 116, 117, 119, 141
Red Cross, 117, 145
spies, 60, 82
treatment of prisoners, 70
Gibbs, J. A., 4
Gibbs, Sir Philip, 104, 19(
Gibbon, Percival, 104
Gilkes/A. H., 6, 7, 131
Globe, the, 19, 23
Godley, Lieut.-Gen. Sir A., 203, 204
Goldman, Svdnev, 21, 22
uomman, oyaney, zi, zz Gommecourt, 109-112
Grand Falls, 29, 34 , 3£
Graves, C. L.. 20
Great Divide, the, 244
Grigg, Sir Edward, 21, 22, 126 P.; 1 044 047
Grizzly bear, 244-24'
Grose, T. H.. 9, 10
Group-settlement, 281
Guardian , the, 3
Guinness, Walter, 21
“ Habitants,” 234, 235
Haig, Gen. Earl of, 56, 105, 106, 124
Haldane, Viscount, 37
Halifax (Nova Scotia), 231, 23S
Hardelot, 89
Hardy. Thomas, 49
Harington, Major-Gen. Sir C 120, 124, 128
Harman, Byron, 244. 246, 249
Harmsworth, St. John, 31
Hart House, 233 . 23^
Hazebrouck, 70. 71, 73, 88
Hills, Arnold, 20
Hobhouse, Walter, 3, 8
Hodge, Harold. 19
Hog Island, 147, 175 1 m J Prtrnnprl 4Q
Holland, Bernard, 48
Honolulu. 256-258. 262
Hoover, H. C., 170
Hornaday, Professor, 153
House, Colonel. 171-174
Houston, Mr., 169, 170
Hunter-Weston, Lieut.-Gen, Si A.. 107
346
Inchcape, Lord, 289, 291
Ingram, Major, 132
Intelligence Officers, 94-97, 107109, 122, 192
Inter-Allied relations, 91-93
Interpreters, 96
Inter-University sports, 3
Ireland, 47-54
Irish
emigrants, 227, 228 CO CQ
gunmen, 52, 53
Irish Homestead, the, 50 “ Isthmian Athletics,” 13
Italy, 113, 128
Iveagh, Earl of, 21
Jackson, C. N., 13-15, 17, 18
Japan, 10
Japanese in Canada, 251
Jewish emigrants, 230
Jones, C. H., 125
Jones, Kennedy, 195
Kaiser, the, 51, 163, 164, 179, 180
Kalgoorlie, 273, 276
Kangaroo, 267, 268
Kilmarnock, Lord, 203
Kilteragh, 47-49, 52
King of the Belgians, 77
Krupp von Bohlen, 202, 207
Krupp’s works, 205, 207
L.A.C., 14
Laisser passer, 58, 59, 71
UUIOiIDI JSU.OOCI , UU, XJO, I X Lauder, Sir Harry, 137, 185, 191
Laurier, Sir Wilfred, 235
Leacock, Stephen, 9
Le Gateau, 9(
Le Touquet, 88
Le Transloy, 12 i
Lee, Lord, 46, 4'
Leighton, Lord, 78
Liberty Loan, the, 170, 184-187. 191
Liddell, Dean, 5,
Liege, 85
Lille, 65, 69
Little, Mr., 294. 29. e
Lloyd George, Rt. Hon. D., 84,
169, 221, 292, 293, 299
Lloydminster, 237
Macdonald, Rt. Hon. Ramsay 47
Macintosh, Mr., 263
MaoNaughten, Miss, 87
Maereadv, Rt. Hon. Gen. Sir N, 54, 133
INDEX
INDEX
347
Magrath, Dr., 12
a mi, Makura , s.s., 258, 260, 292
Manchester Guardian, 216
Manners, Lady Diana, 89
Maoris, 128, 285, 286
Margoliouth, Professor, 14
Marne, battle of, 63, 95
Matin, Le, 90
Maxse, Leo., 26
Melbourne, 123, 124
Meredith, George, 48, 49
Merrow Downs, 25, 38, 39
Messines, battle of, 107, 120, 121, 124, 128
Mitchell, Hon. Sir James, 280, 282-284
Monash, Lieut.-Gen. Sir John, 123
Mens, 95, 113, 195
Montague, O. S., 94, 144
Mon tau ban, 116
Montreal, 9
Morgan, Pierpomt 298
Morning Tost, 104 , 297 4f.. » r, X Q Q
Morris, Lord, 33
Morrison, Mr 42
Murray, Hon. Sir George, 232 Ti__r n;n a 1 40
Murray, Professor Gilbert, 142
Nattar, Herr, -1-/, 210
Nevinson, H. W., 1, 104
New Brunswick, 233
Newfoundland. 29, 32-34,
soldiers 111
New South Wales, 262, 263
New York Times, 162
New Zealand, 127, 128, 224, 26 284, 288
trout-fishing, 286-288
Nivelle, General, 113 Ttr it i:n„ xt: *■ oi Af\
Northcliffe, Viscount, 21-40, 89, 150, 224, 262, 284 , 288, 293299
and Newfoundland, 32, 39 O *•! o+l /If, OH Q 1 07 /II
nna i\ewiounaiana, oz, characteristics, 30, 31, 37, 41 46, 132 nloavtm'A CftWAn 1C 17
Olympic Games, 16, 17 rr 1- 'll ■ or: A 1 Ai
The Times. 25, 41-44 +Vi nrfir Sf! Rfi
the war, 55, 56 nor onrrocivin rlonpo ."ifi 10.4
Wa in* C °^no SlWndenCe ’ ° 6 ’ 103 '
iuy Northcliffe. Viscountess, 35, 36 39, 85, 89, 149
Nova Scotia, 226, 230, 231-233
Ohserv'r. the. 22, 41, 297
Okanagan Valley? 249-251
Olympic Games, 12, 296, 297
at Antwerp, 17
at Athens, 14, 15
at Stockholm, 15
Olympic, s.s., 145
Ontario, 234, 236, 261. 275
Orpen, Sir William, 142
Orwin, 0. S., 45 All (lOC ooc
Ottawa, 235, 236 /X. >47/\n7. tVin 01
Outlook , the, 21, 22. 48
Oxford, 1-12, 17, 18
U.U.A.U., lo
Oyster Bay, 163
Paget, Dean, 6, 7
Vnll Mali Gazette 21
ran man tr«zccie, zi Palmer, Major Frederick, 104, 148, 153
Pankhurst, Miss Christabel, 260
r itiiKHUIIIXIOB wiunuauci, Paris, 56-58, 65, 68, 89
“ Parsifal,” 212
Passchendaele, 113, 119, 128 T4 O.' A 1 AO 1 (1
Poarson, Sir Arthur, 41, 43. 143
Peary, Commander, 149, 150
Peel Estates. 283. 284
Pemberton, 278, 282
Perth, 273, 274, 276, 282, 283, 291
Pervyse, 81
Petain, General, 77-79
Phillips, Sir Percival, 104
Pickles, Mrs., 278
Pigeons in the war. 119, 129
Piggott, Julian, 203
Pilkhem Ridge, 119, 121
-TiiKueni xviugt Pine Mr . 28
rme, ivir., Plumer, Gen. Lord, 121, 124, 125, 128
Plunkett, Rt. Hon. Sir Horace. 38, 47-53. 131
00, 41-00. IOX Plunkett House. 49
p:- 009 999
romcare, ivi., &&& Poles in America, 187, 188
M^^4s
Pougher. Mr., 45 Press officers, 10c
Prichard. Hesketh, 92
rncnara. nesKexn. Prince of Wales. 13.'
rnnce or wares. 100 Printing House Square, 27, 43
rriiii/iug nuuse cx|uaie. Prioleau, John. 118. 22-5
Prohibition. 231. 236 , 251, 252
Pulitzer, Mr., 292
Quakers in the war, 86
Quebec, 234, 236
Queen’s Club. 17
Queensland, 263 . 265. 266, 269
Queenstown Harbour, 227 , 228
U
INDEX
348
“ Railway Triangle,” 115
Ramseapelle, 81, 82
Rawlinson, Gen. Lord, 103
Red Cross, 57, 81, 83, 94
German, 117
Red Indians, 250
“ Regie,” the, 213, 214. 217, 218
Repington, Colonel, 105, 106
Reuters, 104, 126
Reynolds, Frank, 141
Rheims, 58, 68
Rhineland. 201-204, 211, 212, 219
High Commission, 203, 204 214, 215, 218, 221 ui ■ orvi oon on 01 /(
Republic, 204, 209, 211, 214
River of Exploits, 29
Robertson, C. G., 14 t»~u: d i i ao mi
Robinson, Sir Perry, 1, 103, 104, 127
Rockhampton, 33, 269
Somme, battle of, 106, 108, 113, 116, 117, 119
Spectator, the, 20
Spooner, the Rev. W. A., 12
Spring Rice, Sir Cecil, 15
Stafford House, 295
Standard, the, 104
Steed, Wickham, 11
Stewart, Professor, 8, 9
Strutt, Sir Edward. 85
Sunday, Billy, 179-182 Sutherland, Millicent, Duchess of, 87
Sutton Place, 26, 37, 39, 40, 89
Suva, 261
Swan, Mrs., 88
Swan, Mrs. Annie, 191
Swinton, General, 146
Sydney, 262
Rockies, the. 242-249
Roget, Pol (Mayor of Epernay), 58, 66, 68, 72 D nll vi ,I 1 OH
Rollencourt, 130
Roosevelt. Theodore, 131, 163167, 169 L> Ann A f o 1 /.cl tv» 107
Ross, Malcolm, 127
Rotorua, 284, 285
Rudd, B. G., 17
Ruhr, the, 201, 202, 204-209, 211, 212, 217, 219, 220, 222. 223
Russell. Sir Herbert, 104-105
Rutland, Duchess of, 89
Ryan, Mr., 175, 183
James's Gazette , 21
St. John’s (Newfoundland), 32 33
St. Omer. 69. 102. 114, 133
oi'. umer, oy. iuz. xaa St. Peter’s. Broadstairs, 40, 43
St! Pol, 74, 77, 78
St. Ouentin, 123
Salvation Army, 237
“Sam Slick,” 232. 233
Saturday Review. 19, 235
Saw. Mr., 277
Scharpenberg, 121
I 1,1 I | ICIII lr*l JZ,. J . 4,1 Schwab, Charles, 174-179, 183
“ Scoots,” 11
Scythia, s.s., 226
Selkirks. 244-249
Selous, F. C., 166
Seton, Thompson. 151-153, 241
Shaw, Bernard. 139, 140
Shaw. Tom, 222
Shrewsbury School. 1, 2, 6
Sims, Admiral, 153
Tang ye, Lady, 89
Temple, Michael, 20
Theodore, E. G., 265, 266
Thompson, Mr.. 27, 28
Thurstan, E. W. P.. 204
Tillett, Ben, 136, 137, 222
Tilque, 103, 105
Times, The , 89, 90, 225 and Lord Northcliffe, 25, 41, 44
correspondents, 33, 34, 71-79, 103, 105-107, 133 l_ A 1 A A ono
sale of, 41-44, 293
Ul, t Tomlinson, H. M., 104, 133, 134
Toronto, 233-235. 27. f
Trones Wood, 116
“ Turkey Express.” 33. 266, 267
Tumor, Christopher, 46
Ulster, 50-52
Vancouver, 251-253
Vancouver Island, 253, 254
Vardon, Harry, 38 Verdun, 77, 117
Vernon Harcourt, A. G., 5
W.A.A.C.S., 90
Walker, Captain, 132 11 T„I A o
Walter, John, 42
War correspondents, 71, 72-76, 104-110, 119, 120
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 142, 143
War Office, 87, 88, 95
and correspondents, 55-57, 80, 103-106, 108, 119
Watson, Lieut.-Gen., 125
Smith, Goldwin. 235
Wells, H. G., 137, 138
349
INDEX
Western Australia, 263, 273-284
Wodehouse, P. G., 21
Westminster, Duchess of, 88
Wolff, Herr Otto, 212-214
Westminster Gazette, 21
Wright, Wilbur, 188
White, General, 124, 127, 264Williams, Valentine, 126
Yale and Harvard, 13, 14
Wilson, President, 168, 169, 173
York Powell, Professor, 10, 11. 20 Young, Filson, 104
Wimereux, 88
Winnipeg, 236-238
Young, Filson, 104
“ Wisdom-While-You-Wait,” 20
Ypres, 119, 124, 125, 128
Wister, Owen, 153
Yser, battle of, 85
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Bibliographic details
APA: Thomas, William Beach, Sir. (1925). A traveller in news. Chapman and Hall.
Chicago: Thomas, William Beach, Sir. A traveller in news. London: Chapman and Hall, 1925.
MLA: Thomas, William Beach, Sir. A traveller in news. Chapman and Hall, 1925.
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A traveller in news Thomas, William Beach, Sir, Chapman and Hall, London, 1925
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