What did England do in the war, anyhow?
Let us have these disregarded facts also. From the shelves of history I
have pulled down and displayed the facts which our school textbooks have
suppressed; I have told the events wherein England has stood our timely
friend throughout a century; events which our implanted prejudice leads us
to ignore, or to forget; events which show that any one who says England
is our hereditary enemy might just about as well say twice two is five.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
They go on asking it. The propagandists, the prompted puppets, the paid
parrots of the press, go on saying these eight senseless words because
they are easy to say, since the man who can answer them is generally not
there: to every man who is a responsible master of facts we have—well,
how many?—irresponsible shouters in this country. What is your
experience? How often is it your luck—as it was mine in front of the
bulletin board—to see a fraud or a fool promptly and satisfactorily
put in his place? Make up your mind that wherever you hear any person
whatsoever, male or female, clean or unclean, dressed in jeans, or dressed
in silks and laces, inquire what England “did in the war, anyhow?” such
person either shirks knowledge, or else is a fraud or a fool. Tell them
what the man said in the street about the Kaiser and our front yard, but
don’t stop there. Tell them that in May, 1918, England was sending men of
fifty and boys of eighteen and a half to the front; that in August, 1918,
every third male available between those years was fighting, that eight
and a half million men for army and navy were raised by the British
Empire, of which Ireland’s share was two and three tenths per cent, Wales
three and seven tenths, Scotland’s eight and three tenths, and England’s
more than sixty per cent; and that this, taken proportionately to our
greater population would have amounted to about thirteen million
Americans, When the war started, the British Empire maintained three
soldiers out of every 2600 of the population; her entire army, regular
establishment, reserve and territorial forces, amounted to seven hundred
thousand men. Our casualties were three hundred and twenty-two thousand,
one hundred and eighty-two. The casualties in the British Army were three
million, forty-nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-one—a million
more than we sent—and of these six hundred and fifty-eight thousand,
seven hundred and four, were killed. Of her Navy, thirty-three thousand
three hundred and sixty-one were killed, six thousand four hundred and
five wounded and missing; of her merchant marine fourteen thousand six
hundred and sixty-one were killed; a total of forty-eight thousand killed—or
ten per cent of all in active service. Some of those of the merchant
marine who escaped drowning through torpedoes and mines went back to sea
after being torpedoed five, six, and seven times.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
Through four frightful years she fought with splendor, she suffered with
splendor, she held on with splendor. The second battle of Ypres is but one
drop in the sea of her epic courage; yet it would fill full a canto of a
poem. So spent was Britain’s single line, so worn and thin, that after all
the men available were brought, gaps remained. No more ammunition was
coming to these men, the last rounds had been served. Wet through, heavy
with mud, they were shelled for three days to prevent sleep. Many came at
last to sleep standing; and being jogged awake when officers of the line
passed down the trenches, would salute and instantly be asleep again. On
the fourth day, with the Kaiser come to watch them crumble, three lines of
Huns, wave after wave of Germany’s picked troops, fell and broke upon this
single line of British—and it held. The Kaiser, had he known of the
exhausted ammunition and the mounded dead, could have walked unarmed to
the Channel. But he never knew.
Surgeons being scantier than men at Ypres, one with a compound fracture of
the thigh had himself propped up, and thus all day worked on the wounded
at the front. He knew it meant death for him. The day over, he let them
carry him to the rear, and there, from blood-poisoning, he died. Thus
through four frightful years, the British met their duty and their death.
There is the great story of the little penny steamers of the Thames—a
story lost amid the gigantic whole. Who will tell it right? Who will make
this drop of perfect valor shine in prose or verse for future eyes to see?
Imagine a Hoboken ferry boat, because her country needed her, starting for
San Francisco around Cape Horn, and getting there. Some ten or eleven
penny steamers under their own steam started from the Thames down the
Channel, across the Bay of Biscay, past Gibraltar, and through the
submarined Mediterranean for the River Tigris. Boats of shallow draught
were urgently needed on the River Tigris. Four or five reached their
destination. Where are the rest?
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
During 1917-1918 Britain’s armies held the enemy in three continents and
on six fronts, and cooperated with her Allies on two more fronts. Her
dead, those six hundred and fifty-eight thousand dead, lay by the Tigris,
the Zambesi, the AEgean, and across the world to Flanders’ fields. Between
March 21st and April 17th, 1918, the Huns in their drive used 127
divisions, and of these 102 were concentrated against the British. That
was in Flanders. Britain, at the same time she was fighting in Flanders,
had also at various times shared in the fighting in Russia, Kiaochau, New
Guinea, Samoa, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, the Sudan, Cameroons,
Togoland, East Africa, South West Africa, Saloniki, Aden, Persia, and the
northwest frontier of India. Britain cleared twelve hundred thousand
square miles of the enemy in German colonies. While fighting in
Mesopotamia, her soldiers were reconstructing at the same time. They
reclaimed and cultivated more than 1100 square miles of land there, which
produced in consequence enough food to save two million tons of shipping
annually for the Allies. In Palestine and Mesopotamia alone, British
troops in 1917 took 23,590 prisoners. In 1918, in Palestine from September
18th to October 7th, they took 79,000 prisoners.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
With “French’s contemptible little army” she saved France at the start—but
I’ll skip that—except to mention that one division lost 10,000 out
of 12,000 men, and 350 out of 400 officers. At Zeebrugge and Ostend—do
not forget the Vindictive—she dealt with submarines in April and
May, 1918—but I’ll skip that; I cannot set down all that she did,
either at the start, or nearing the finish, or at any particular moment
during those four years and three months that she was helping to hold
Germany off from the throat of the world; it would make a very thick book.
But I am giving you enough, I think, wherewith to answer the ignorant, and
the frauds, and the fools. Tell them that from 1916 to 1918 Great Britain
increased her tillage area by four million acres: wheat 39 per cent,
barley 11, oats 35, potatoes 50—in spite of the shortage of labor.
She used wounded soldiers, college boys and girls, boy scouts, refugees,
and she produced the biggest grain crop in fifty years. She started
fourteen hundred thousand new war gardens; most of those who worked them
had worked already a long day in a munition factory. These devoted workers
increased the potato crop in 1917 by three million tons—and thus
released British provision ships to carry our soldiers across. In that
Boston speech which one of my correspondents referred to, our Secretary of
the Navy did not mention this. Mention it yourself. And tell them about
the boy scouts and the women. Fifteen thousand of the boy scouts joined
the colors, and over fifty thousand of the younger members served in
various ways at home.
Of England’s women seven million were engaged in work on munitions and
other necessaries and apparatus of war. The terrible test of that second
battle of Ypres, to which I have made brief allusion above, wrought an
industrial revolution in the manufacture of shells. The energy of
production rose at a rate which may be indicated by two or three
comparisons: In 1917 as many heavy howitzer shells were turned out in a
single day as in the whole first year of the war, as many medium shells in
five days, and as many field-gun shells in eight days. Or in other words,
45 times as many field-gun shells, 73 times as many medium, and 365 times
as many heavy howitzer shells, were turned out in 1917 as in the first
year of the war. These shells were manufactured in buildings totaling
fifteen miles in length, forty feet in breadth, with more than ten
thousand machine tools driven by seventeen miles of shafting with an
energy of twenty-five thousand horse-power and a weekly output of over ten
thousand tons’ weight of projectiles—all this largely worked by the
women of England. While the fleet had increased its personnel from 136,000
to about 400,000, and 2,000,000 men by July, 1915, had voluntarily
enlisted in the army before England gave up her birthright and accepted
compulsory service, the women of England left their ordinary lives to
fabricate the necessaries of war. They worked at home while their
husbands, brothers, and sons fought and died on six battle fronts abroad—six
hundred and fifty-eight thousand died, remember; do you remember the
number of Americans killed in action?—less than thirty-six thousand;—those
English women worked on, seven millions of them at least, on milk carts,
motor-busses, elevators, steam engines, and in making ammunition. Never
before had any woman worked on more than 150 of the 500 different
processes that go to the making of munitions. They now handled T. N. T.,
and fulminate of mercury, more deadly still; helped build guns, gun
carriages, and three-and-a-half ton army cannons; worked overhead
traveling cranes for moving the boilers of battleships: turned lathes,
made every part of an aeroplane. And who were these seven million women?
The eldest daughter of a duke and the daughter of a general won
distinction in advanced munition work. The only daughter of an old Army
family broke down after a year’s work in a base hospital in France, was
ordered six months’ rest at home, but after two months entered a munition
factory as an ordinary employee and after nine months’ work had lost but
five minutes working time. The mother of seven enlisted sons went into
munitions not to be behind them in serving England, and one of them wrote
her she was probably killing more Germans than any of the family. The
stewardess of a torpedoed passenger ship was among the few survivors.
Reaching land, she got a job at a capstan lathe. Those were the seven
million women of England—daughters of dukes, torpedoed stewardesses,
and everything between.
Seven hundred thousand of these were engaged on munition work proper. They
did from 60 to 70 per cent of all the machine work on shells, fuses, and
trench warfare supplies, and 1450 of them were trained mechanics to the
Royal Flying Corps. They were employed upon practically every operation in
factory, in foundry, in laboratory, and chemical works, of which they were
physically capable; in making of gauges, forging billets, making fuses,
cartridges, bullets—“look what they can do,” said a foreman, “ladies
from homes where they sat about and were waited upon.” They also made
optical glass; drilled and tapped in the shipyards; renewed electric wires
and fittings, wound armatures; lacquered guards for lamps and radiator
fronts; repaired junction and section boxes, fire control instruments,
automatic searchlights. “We can hardly believe our eyes,” said another
foreman, “when we see the heavy stuff brought to and from the shops in
motor lorries driven by girls. Before the war it was all carted by horses
and men. The girls do the job all right, though, and the only thing they
ever complain about is that their toes get cold.” They worked without
hesitation from twelve to fourteen hours a day, or a night, for seven days
a week, and with the voluntary sacrifice of public holidays.
That is not all, or nearly all, that the women of England did—I skip
their welfare work, recreation work, nursing—but it is enough
wherewith to answer the ignorant, or the fraud, or the fool.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
On August 8, 1914, Lord Kitchener asked for 100,000 volunteers. He had
them within fourteen days. In the first week of September 170,000 men
enrolled, 30,000 in a single day. Eleven months later, two million had
enlisted. Ten months later, five million and forty-one thousand had
voluntarily enrolled in the Army and Navy.
In 1914 Britain had in her Royal Naval Air Service 64 aeroplanes and 800
airmen. In 1917 she had many thousand aeroplanes and 42,000 airmen. In her
Royal Flying Corps she had in 1914, 66 planes and 100 men; in 1917,
several thousand planes and men by tens of thousands. In the first nine
months of 1917 British airmen brought down 876 enemy machines and drove
down 759 out of control. From July, 1917, to June, 1918, 4102 enemy
machines were destroyed or brought down with a loss of 1213 machines.
Besides financing her own war costs she had by October, 1917, loaned eight
hundred million dollars to the Dominions and five billion five hundred
million to the Allies. She raised five billion in thirty days. In the
first eight months of 1918 she contributed to the various forms of war
loan at the average rate of one hundred and twenty-four million, eight
hundred thousand a week.
Is that enough? Enough to show what England did in the War? No, it is not
enough for such people as continue to ask what she did. Nothing would
suffice these persons. During the earlier stages of the War it was
possible that the question could be asked honestly—though never
intelligently—because the facts and figures were not at that time
always accessible. They were still piling up, they were scattered about,
mention of them was incidental and fugitive, they could be missed by
anybody who was not diligently alert to find them. To-day it is quite
otherwise. The facts and figures have been compiled, arranged, published
in accessible and convenient form; therefore to-day, the man or woman who
persists in asking what England did in the war is not honest but dishonest
or mentally spotted, and does not want to be answered. They don’t want to
know. The question is merely a camouflage of their spite, and were every
item given of the gigantic and magnificent contribution that England made
to the defeat of the Kaiser and all his works, it would not stop their
evil mouths. Not for them am I here setting forth a part of what England
did; it is for the convenience of the honest American, who does want to
know, that my collection of facts is made from the various sources which
he may not have the time or the means to look up for himself. For his
benefit I add some particulars concerning the British Navy which kept the
Kaiser out of our front yard.
Admiral Mahan said in his book—and he was an American of whose
knowledge and wisdom Congress seems to have known nothing and cared less—“Why
do English innate political conceptions of popular representative
government, of the balance of law and liberty, prevail in North America
from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the
Pacific? Because the command of the sea at the decisive era belonged to
Great Britain.” We have seen that the decisive era was when Napoleon’s
mouth watered for Louisiana, and when England took her stand behind the
Monroe Doctrine.
Admiral Sims said in the second installment of his narrative The Victory
at Sea, published in The World’s Work for October, 1919, at page 619: “...
Let us suppose for a moment that an earthquake, or some other great
natural disturbance, had engulfed the British fleet at Scapa Flow. The
world would then have been at Germany’s mercy and all the destroyers the
Allies could have put upon the sea would have availed them nothing, for
the German battleships and battle cruisers could have sunk them or driven
them into their ports. Then Allied commerce would have been the prey, not
only of the submarines, which could have operated with the utmost freedom,
but of the German surface craft as well. In a few weeks the British food
supplies would have been exhausted. There would have been an early end to
the soldiers and munitions which Britain was constantly sending to France.
The United States could have sent no forces to the Western front, and the
result would have been the surrender which the Allies themselves, in the
spring of 1917, regarded as a not remote possibility. America would then
have been compelled to face the German power alone, and to face it long
before we had had an opportunity to assemble our resources and equip our
armies. The world was preserved from all these calamities because the
destroyer and the convoy solved the problem of the submarines, and because
back of these agencies of victory lay Admiral Beatty’s squadrons, holding
at arm’s length the German surface ships while these comparatively fragile
craft were saving the liberties of the world.”
Yes. The High Seas Fleet of Germany, costing her one billion five hundred
million dollars, was bottled up. Five million five hundred thousand tons
of German shipping and one million tons of Austrian shipping were driven
off the seas or captured; oversea trade and oversea colonies were cut off.
Two million oversea Huns of fighting age were hindered from joining the
enemy. Ocean commerce and communication were stopped for the Huns and
secured to the Allies. In 1916, 2100 mines were swept up and 89 mine
sweepers lost. These mine sweepers and patrol boats numbered 12 in 1914,
and 3300 by 1918. To patrol the seas British ships had to steam eight
million miles in a single month. During the four years of the war they
transported oversea more than thirteen million men (losing but 2700
through enemy action) as well as transporting two million horses and
mules, five hundred thousand vehicles, twenty-five million tons of
explosives, fifty-one million tons of oil and fuel, one hundred and thirty
million tons of food and other materials for the use of the Allies. In one
month three hundred and fifty-five thousand men were carried from England
to France.
It was after our present Secretary of the Navy, in his speech in Boston to
which allusion has been made, had given our navy all and the British navy
none of the credit of conveying our soldiers overseas, that Admiral Sims
repaired the singular oblivion of the Secretary. We Americans should know
the truth, he said. We had not been too accurately informed. We did not
seem to have been told by anybody, for instance, that of the five thousand
anti-submarine craft operating day and night in the infested waters, we
had 160, or 3 per cent; that of the million and a half troops which had
gone over from here in a few months, Great Britain brought over two thirds
and escorted half.
“I would like American papers to pay particular attention to the fact that
there are about 5000 anti-submarine craft in the ocean to-day, cutting out
mines, escorting troop ships, and making it possible for us to go ahead
and win this war. They can do this because the British Grand Fleet is so
powerful that the German High Seas Fleet has to stay at home. The British
Grand Fleet is the foundation stone of the cause of the whole of the
Allies.”
Thus Admiral Sims.
That is part of what England did in the war.
Note.—The author expresses thanks and acknowledgment to Pearson’s
Magazine for permission to use the passages quoted from the articles by
Admiral Sims.
