ON THE WATCH TOWER

Evening Star, Issue 15916, 23 September 1915, Page 2

ON THE WATCH TOWER

[By Ariel,] No doubt the report of K. of K.’s speech in the Lords reviewing the war was, as Mr Massey said, “the best hews we had had for a long time.” Kitchener of Khartum has no reputation as a talker, and we do not look for the precis© and telling adjective in his deliverances that we expect from Mr Asquith, nor for the ■five and the splash of humor that make Lloyd George so effective. Still, I would like to hear K. of K., and would sit for 'ten hours hi hear him tell all he knows about the war. It would be a, quiet time, I daresay, with no fine studied passages and no effective rhetorical exaggeration. He would tell just the bare fact as he sees it, and he would be apt to have his facts right end on, so that it would not be hard to draw an inference. What Mr Massey called his “best news” was not so much new facts as a correct otatemerit of facts in their proper order, accompanied by an indication of what K. of K. regarded as the bearing of the facts on the objects we have in view. Well, is he down-hearted? No. The task before ns is harder than even he thought it was at first, but lie thinks we are steadily getting nearer to being equal to it, and that we will be equal to it yet. ‘ (Mark you, the grave man of facts does not talk about smashing Germany or utterly destroying her. That is ill-advised talk, and is used by the enemy to stimulate their people to sacrifices, and to make them believe that we are, and long have been, inveterate and ruthless foes. K. of K. is satisfied with “ thoroughly defeating the enemy.” That will satisfy me. *******

The tide of national service steadily rises. Mr Lloyd George’s preface is the most striking advance so far, except, perhaps, the storm of opposition attempted to be raised in Parliament. Air George is an honest man according to his lights. His light was imperfect when he took the enemy’s side in the Boer Wav, and I have had a sneaking pleasure in seeing him battling with the whirlwind he has sown; but I will have to forgive him right out n(*v, in view of the purgatory he has passed through. He has learnt in a bitter school what it is to have loud demagogues obstructing the responsible Government when the country is engaged in war. He won’t do it never no more. He has been through the country as a missionary of loyalty and energy, and has learnt that half the energy oT the nation is taken up in restraining itself from doing a fair day’s work with the other half. He found that, the trade unionist would rather that 20 of his mates should be killed in the trenches than that 10 of them should hurry up a bit and do half their best in the workshops. Air George saw that we as a nation were in the position of an'amateur boxer with a pipe in his mouth and one hand in his pocket standing up to the champion heavy-weight. He had made speeches as moving and as clear and forcible as Demosthenes himself could have mad© to stir his country from profound sleep on the brink of ruin, but his speeches broke against the hardened opinion and selfish folly of the trade unions like waves against the chalky cliffs of England. The drunkenness and the absence from work and the agitation and the threat to strike went on as before. He published his speeches in book form—not even John Bright’s speeches make better reading—and wrote a preface which may be taken to be the expression of what he had learnt during his mission. He has been forced to recognise that the nation needs compulsory service, not so much for the trenches as for the benches. ******* The war has been fruitful of deeds of noble devotion. There are thousands of them ; but there have been deeds of concentrated and distilled meanness which arc as far below the zero of honor and decency as the other deeds are above it. The deeds of meanness arc not to bo counted by thousands perhaps, but in some cases they have been organised and done by multitudes with great deliberation, which multiplies and magnifies them to an appalling degree. One of the mean acts was that of a young man in Wellington, who sought to make up for not going to the front by stealing £2 from a returned wounded soldier! That was as dirty an individual act as I know of. But just as the conscience of a nation is ages behind that of the enlightened individual, so is the can science of any organisation that has been created round a centre of labor agitation. The heartless strike of the Tahiti’s firemen, which held up some hundreds of poor fellows within eight of home, was of exactly the same moral texture as the submarining of the Lusitania. There was a paltry end to he gained, and they, like the Kaiser and the would-be assassin of Pierpont Alorgan, “ were sorry to inflict personal inconvenience,” but these ends must bo gained let who may suffer. Equal with this contemptible act of the firemen is the “ca 1 canny ” system in the workshops that are producing the munitions without which our soldiers cannot be efficient or have fair play against the enemy. Air Llovd George has been hard-on the tracks of this system for some time. He tells of an able and industrial worker innuii arsenal who was hounded out, and was perhaps without a job, because h© would not do less than a fair day’s work for his wages. He also told of another who was assaulted by a mate for forgetting to work with that preternatural slowness which is so hard for honest men to acquire. Now he has silenced an impudent secretary of a union who denied having restrained output by publishing a letter in which this secretary denounced the doing of work on a howitzer in eight and a-haif hours which, according to the union rate of movement, should have taken 31!, hours, or nearly four times as long! In ordinary times the trade union doctrine of go-as-slow-as-you-can is only an amateurish blunder in political economy, but in these cases it is the quintessence of meanness, too.

******* When a war .of unusual danger,and difficulty arose the ancient Romans under the Republic used to appoint a dictator. From the moment of Ins appointment all t irgument and discussion ceased, and there was nothing but to obey. He used the whole power of the ,State to secure vielory, and when he had done that he laid aside his office, and Rome went on her way as a republic again. This was a very wise recognition of a fact always obvious to those who have eyes to see—namely, that democracies and debating clubs cannot wage successful war against strong autocracies, We need some recognition of that •principle now, both with regard to taking war matters out of the hands of mere politicians in a crisis like thus, and with regard to national service. Wc want a stronger Government in war than iu peace, and a stronger army system, too; but we do not wish either of them to hamper liberty when the war is over. We want tho dictator to lay down office and return to his plough when the troubles that led us to < appeal to him have passed away. That it a reasonable position to take, and it ought not to be impossible of attainment in practice. But nations that are too big to muster in the Poriyn and hear a debate are at a great disadvantage. It takes years to educate them, and before you can get them to act it is too late. * * * * * * *

. The objection of Britain to conscription is deeply rooted in her history, and is closely associated with the birth of her. dearest liberties. A great standing army makes the King strong, not only against his foreign enemies, but also against the reformer and the agitator at Home. The big standing army and the despotic Government go together. On the Continent the presence of a possible enemy on the" other side of the river, or the mountain, was a perpetual reason for keeping the army strong. Hence kings remaned despotic on the Continent till the French Revolution, and that only led to a new despotism ; for the old reason r armies remained in spite of Fraternite.” The army made hiapoleon a despot. The army made the later & apoleon a despot. The army made r* e grandfather a reactionary. Confidence in his- army., now:, makes

Kaiser himself the most insufferable of despots and divine rightets. In tile case of England there was no sufficient excuse for Keeping •up the army; the Channel at least secured time for preparation. Hence, when the struggle with the King arose, Parliament was able to arm as , well and as quickly as he. If the Stuarts had had an army the freedom of speech, the freedom of the Press, the freedom of worship, the freedom of Parliament, and lots of other freedoms would not have been born into the world. Naturally, therefore, the British people look with detestation on conscription and huge standing forces as mimical to the ideals that have shaped the later centuries of their history. We have, however, arrived at one of those paradoxical situations' in which our ideals can be made good only by abandoning them, or at least abandoning the fens et brigo of them all. As spring advances we gradually remove the shelter from our tender plants, for what is an absolute condition of existence at the beginning of the life of these plants is, later on, their chief danger, and must be got rid of. Sitnilarly a nation builds up its trade ns a. protectionist, and then abolishes that very protection which made it supreme, lest the world-wide development of its trade should be arrested. This was the history of British trade. It may have to be the history of the army, too. The absence' of an army was necessary in the seedling stage of* freedom ; but now that it has become a tree the presence of an army is necessary to prevent if from being cut down. *******

Like Mr Lloyd George and other groat men, I am not above learning something from the progress of events. The war seems to me to cry aloud to the British race; “If you will not adopt universal service to win this war, you must adopt it afterwards to prevent yourselves from being utterly crushed' in a second and last Punic war.” Yet there is a very strong case on the other side, and it has to be weighed carefully. Even if we eliminate the question of danger to liberty, except in so far as military service is itself an infraction of liberty, there remain a number of powerful objections. First, there are now more men enrolled than we can arm and provide with munitions; second, it is now too late for a new system to have a considerable effect on the present war; third, conscription is so hated and suspected by huge masses of laboring people that they would be sure to resent and possibly resist it if it were sought to introduce it suddenly; fourth, that a long period of educational discussion should precede any move towards conscription, and, even if we had ample time for such a discussion, it would he highly inexpedient to hold it during a war which requires all our attention and a union of all parties. Certainly things might easily be worse than they are if there were a hundred firebrands going up and clown the country inflaming the masses and urging strikes for conscience’ sake. The British nation cannot be driven, and it cannot be suddenly converted and brought to the right, about on any great question. If national service were once established, I am satisfied that it would be vastly for the soundness and the sanity of the nation. If it could be done, ’twere well it were done quickly; but, being poised on an “ if,” it is a case for looking before we leap. ******* One of the unpleasant surprises of the war is the discovery that the daylight, robbery of one’s comrades seems to be the rule. Air Asbmead-Bartlett says that it is the regular practice for those coming up behind to fill the places of those who have advanced to loot all they ran. A soldier has no home, no depot. 'He carries all Jus belongings with him. He never knows that lie will return to this place or the other. AYhen he starts, even for an assault, he carries all he can, and is often loaded like a Christmas tree. Heat and weariness compel him to drop one thing after another, or perhaps lie leaves his whole kit at some spot to which he hopes to return. Hence, a battlefield is littered with all manner of articles that have nothing io do with fighting. The next . comer who has leisure or strength to pick up and to carry goes on the principle that “finding is keeping.” or that “all things come to him who takes.” Air Bartlett cites the case of a- force that held a trench being ordered to leave their kits and make a clash for a trench of the enemy*. They took the trench, and a reserve battalion occupied then - place 'in the trench just quitted. The reserve went systematically through the packs of the heroes who were ahead. By and by the reserve were sent to occupy the captured trench, while the captors returned to the trench where they had left their packs. They were furious, and could scarcely be restrained from assaulting the trench ahead a second time to recover their property! We know that our boys who cast aside their loads to attack the precipices at the first landing looked m vain for their belongings when they returned. It is a- shock to our ideas of comradeship to find our mates so eager to_ believe that we are dead that they administer cur estate as soon as they see it. Their peculiarly loos© conception of proprietorship also startles us. for it is a glimpse not only of the soldier’s homelessness, but also of his weakened tenure of life itself. ******* The Russians started the war by changing the name of their capital because it contained a German syllable, though that syllable indicated the fact that the language of the Baltic Provinces is German. The great majority of the people, however, are not German in blood. The Germans are now bethinking themselves of the way their own language is bedecked with words borrowed from the French and from us. When a child is born he is a “ baby,” he is trained by a “ governante,” and then goes to an “institnt” or toa“lycee.” Soon he begins to “flirt” and to he a “bon viva-nb,” and to look out for a “partie.” Then come the “bureau” and the “salon,” the “club” and the “toilette,” and the object in life is to be “chic,’’ “smart,” or “elegant.” In the “eaison” he goes to the “resort,” and, last scene of all, he is “incinerated’’ in a “ crematorium.” “ Enough of this,” exclaims a, patriot. “We must re-Germanise ourselves, otherwise we never Germanise our enemies when we are transformed into their teachers, their mentors, their guides, and their rulers.” It must indeed be i galling to the authors of Kultur that all | words indicating taste and refinement have I been borrowed from their enemies, but so \ it is, and in that fact there is much history, but it cannot be told here. Suppose we English overhaul our language, a bit, and eliminate the unnecessary flecks of German that disfigure it. When we have so good a word as “ cattle plague,” why should we encumber ourselves with “ rinderpest”? While we have “infant school,” and could say “ child garden,” why do vs - use “ kindergarten”?.. .While we have “back country,” “inland,” “ interior,” “ back of beyond,” and no end of such phrases, what use have we for “hinterland”? While .we have “glee club,” “harmonic society,” “Orpheus society,” and as many others as we like bo invent, why should we be burdened (with “ liedertafel ” and “'liederkranz”? Is j “fit/, bath” so much better than “sitting j bath ” that wo need use a word that not j one in a hundred can pronounce correctly? i Come, let us re-Anglicis© ourselves, and j cast out the unclean thing from our midst.