England The Slacker !

Hokitika Guardian, 14 May 1921, Page 4

England The Slacker !

(From “The Square Deal,” by Owen Wister, an American citizen.)

What did England do in the war, anyhow ? Let us have these disregarded facts also. From the shelves of liistory I have pulled down and displayed the facts which our (American) 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 anyone 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 propagan- ! dists, 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—ir--1 responsible shouters in this country. : What is your experience? how often is ' it your luck to see a fraud or a fool promptly and satisfactorily put in las 1 place. Make up your mind that wherej ever you hear any person whatever, j male or female, clean or unclean, dressed in jeans, or dressed in silks and i laces, inquire what England “ did in the war, anyhow?” such person either shirks knowledge, or else is a fraud or ! a fool. Tell them how England stopped | the Kaiser invading our front yard, but ! don’t stop there. Tell them that in j May, 1918, England was sending men ol j fifty and boys of eighteen and a half to ! the front; that in August, 1918, every third male available between these years was lighting; that eight and a half million men for army and navy were raised by the British Empiie, of which Ireland’s share was two and three-tenths per cent, Wales’ three and seven-tenths, Scotland’s eight and 1 three-tenths, and England’s more than I 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 2,600 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 seventyone —a •million moie 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 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; any-

how ? Through four frightful years she fought with splendour, she suffered with splendour. 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 gigantice whole. Who will tell it right? Who will make this drop of perfect valour shine in prose or verse for future eyes to see? Imagine a Unbroken 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 1017-1918 Britain's nnnies held the enemy in three continents and on six fronts, and co-operated with her Allies oh two more fronts. Her dead, those six hundred and fifty-eight thousand dead, lie by the Tigris, the Zambesi, the Aegean, and across the world to Flanders’ fields. Between March 21 and April 17, 1918, the Huns in their drive used 127 divisions and of those 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, Kiachau, New Guinea, Samoa, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Kg.vpt, the Sudan, Persia, and the north-west 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 recultivated 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 Mesoptamia alone, British troops in .1917 took 23,590 prisoners, Tp 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 thta one division lost 10,000 out of 12,000 men, and 350 out of 400 officers. At Zeebrugge and Ostend —do not forget tiie 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 threat 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 labour. 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 potaato 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 thous-

and of the boy scouts joined the colours, 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. On 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 totalling fifteen miles in length, forty foot in breadth, with more than ten thousand machine tools driven

by seventeen miles of shafting with an energy of 25,000 horse-power, and a weekly output of over ten thousand tons' weight of projectiles —all these largely worked by the women of England. While the fleet has 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 lier 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 brothers, husbands 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 or 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 travelling cranes for moving the boilers of battleships; turned lathes, and 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. 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 1,450 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 glasses, drilled and tapped in the shipyards, renewed electric wire* and fittings, wound armatures, lacquered guards for lamps and radiator fronts, repaired junction and section boxes, fire control instruments, automatic search lights. “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 bv 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 i week, and with the voluntary saeriice of nublie holidays.

That is not all, or nearly all, that the women of England did—l skip their welfare work, recreation work, musing —hut it is enough wherewith to answer the ignorant, or the fraud, or the fool. What did England do in the war, anyhow : J

On August 8, 1914, Lord Kitchener asked for 100,000 volunteers. He had their, within fourteen days. In the first v. eek of September 175,000 men enrolled. 30,000 in a single day. Eleven months later, two million had enlisted. Ten months later, five million and fortyone thousand had voluntarily enrolled in the Army and Navy. In 1914 Britain had in her Royal Naval Air Service (14 aeroplanes and'Bo') airmen. In 1917 she had many thousand aeroplanes and 42,000 airmen. In her Royal Flying Corps she had in 1914, GO 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, 4,102 enemy machines were destroyed or brought down with a loss of 1,213 machines. Besides financing her own war costs she had by October 1917, loaned eight million dollars to the Dominions and five billion five hundred million to the Allies. She raised five billion in thirty clays. 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 people. During the earliest 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 tim6 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 today, 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 t be answered. 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 bis 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 hones! 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 for himself. For his benefit I add some particulars concerning the British Navy which kept the Kaiser out of oui front yards. Admiral .Mahan said in bis book—and be was an American or 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 Atlnn tic to the Pacific? Because the command of the sea at the decisive era lalonged 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, (on behalf of the United States).

Admiral Sims said in the second instalment 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, bad engulfed the British Fleet at Scapa Flow. The world would 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 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 hack 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 Sons Fleet of Germany, costing her one billion five hundred million dollars, was bottled up. Five million live hundred thousand tons of Gorman shipping and one million tons of Austrian shipping were driven off the seas or captured ; overseas trade and overseas colonies were cut off. Two million oversea Huns of lighting ago wore hindered from joining the enemy. Ocean commerce and coniuniciition were stopped for the Huns and secured to the Allies. Tn 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. hundred and 1 ’ i--+v million tons of ’food and other materials for the use of the Allies. In one month three hundred and fifty-five thousand men wore 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 lr ne 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

teen too accurately info: mod. We did not seem to have been told by anybody, for instance, that of the five l 1 oustc' anti-submarine craft operating day and night in the infested waters, we bad MID, or 3 per cent; that cf the million and a h vlf troops which lad gone over from here in a few .months, Great Haiti ii i brought over two-thirds and es-oo-tedi half.

“f tvould like American papers to pay particular attention to the fact that there are about 5000 aiiti-subma.-ine craft in the ocean to-da.v, cutting out mines, escorting troop ships, and making it possible for us to go ahead and win this war. They carl do this because the British Grand Fleet is so

powerful that tile German High Seas Fleet has to stay at home. The British Grand Fleet is the stone of the cause of the whole of the Allies.” j Thus Admiral Sims. i That is part of what England did in the war.