What is Great Britain Doing?

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 233, 8 December 1916, Page 4 (Supplement)

What is Great Britain Doing?

BY ALFRED NOYES

Probably no civilian has been given facilities for actually seeing Great Britain's great war work, for herself and her Allies, equal to those put at the disposal of Mr. Noyes. His previous articles dealing with the capture of submarines, etc., when published were read with intense interest and pleasure. In this article, written for the New York "Tribune," he sets at rest the dou'bts of those who ask whether Britain is doing her share. It is probably safe to say that more munitions of war of all kinds, from hand grenades to aeroplanes and from trench mortars to big guns, acre produced in one week now than were produced in the whole first year of the war.

Tliis is the question about the war which one hears more frequently than almost any other in America. Frequently it implies a criticism, and certainly t:ll the last few months it implied a large measure of disappointment, even among the warmest friends of Britain in the United States. The Germans have not missed! the opportunity of encouraging th'e. idea among Americans that in some mysterio'is way Great Britain has ''lost prestige.'' They have been aided by* the traditional British reticence, a reticence which nevertheless has its advantages; 'or when results are achieved in silcn'.e they arc, in the end, doubly effective, effective in themselves and deadly 1o ho talkers. i

The silence of "those distant stormbeaten ships" of the British Navy corers ft multitude of results —definite, solid, epoeh-tnakmg results, which are only'too dimly realised even to-day by the world at large. Strangely enough, it is because the work of the British flort been so complete and so all-ef-ficient, because it has been able to do all that was required of it without exerting its full strength in battle, that these solid results hav? been overlooked by the multitude tin neutral countries. The results of a blockade which extends from far north of the British Isles to far below the Equator are manifesting themselves now daily. Not one ship of all the great lines of the enemy is able to show its nose at s,\a; while on every sea o J ; the world the British ships are to be found, blockading, guarding, carrying; wl there are no two ships that pass, !>v day or night, but with some signal, some salute acknowledigng thnt silent and brooding power. There is no better testimony, moreover, to the way In which that power has been exerciser! than the sense of quiet j übiiation which runs through every such instance. It is to be seen on the faces of the passengers and crews —whenever such signal confirms their faith that the invisible aegis of Great Britain is over them, and the tragic exception has more than once proved the rule. The tramp steamers running up the Union Jack and cheering as tlhe Lusitanii went by were undoubtedly, in the eyos of the whole world, on the side of tho angels; and the Lusitania's medal, struck in Germany to commemora.o the foulest act that ever stained the seas, has only marked the whole campaign of Germany with the devil's own seal, for all the centuries never to ' e effa-ced and never to be forgotten. A recent visitor to America who was asked by the newspaper reporters, after their usual fashion, what had impressed him most in his first glimpie of New York, replied: " The spectacle of the German ships imprisoned in NewYork Harbour." Those gigantic liners, of the Ham-burg-American Line and the North German Lloyd, accompanied by a hos> of lessor brethren, are not so impressive outwardly as the great waterwiy of New York Harbour or the majestic skyline of the city; but in their huddled and crowded ranks, as they lie there, th-ay are far more significant of what is happening in the world, and they tell of an unseen and vaster

power, perhaps the greatest power in the world, that has driven them into this distant sanctuary. They look .<.s

if they had been driven in by a tre

mondous gale, never to emerge again, the gale of the sea power of Great Britain. ENFORCED IDLENESS OF GEPMAN SHIPS AT HAMBURG.

Tli-ey are significant, too, of what ts happening in the Gorman seaports from which they came. Liners like tho Vaterland, luxurious palaces of the sea, deteriorating from day to day .-i their enforced idleness, are illustrations for the benefit of America of the deterioration and enforced idleness, the deserted wharves and ruined industry, of Hamburg and Bremen themselves. Two years ago they were engaged in the commercial conquest of the so:n. There was no quarter of the world i« which they were not sending, with a certain theatricality be it said, these grandiose floating emissaries of tho Kaiser, decorated with his portraits and busts in every cabin and saloo'i and companionway. The Germans were oocoming the spoiled children or the world, largely owing to the generous privileges' fccccyded to them in every seaport of the British Empire. Tho luxury of their largest ship —the Imporator—was beyond all precedent. Its Ritz-Carlton restaurant was more elaborate than those in New York or London. In every respect tho ship was a monument of extravagance and spoke of a; nation more than a little drunk with its own quick prosperity. All this was changed almost instantaneously by the silent power of the British fleet. If it is to be asked what the British Empire is doing in the wa", it would be almost enough to point to that frightened fleet in Now York Harbour; for, whatever else may happen in the war, there is nothing more hopelessly remote than that any of those ships should show its noso upon the high seas until Germany capitulate-! Outside all the other rings of pressure that have been brought to bear upon Germany, this iron ring of sea power has closed' in, silent and implacable and conclusive. In Hamburg and Bremen, to which thh "world end steamers," with a tonnage of million', two years ago were bringing annua llv a large share of the world's wealth, we hoar to-d;iv of food riots.

If France, on the othfr hand, ha I been asked, in the early days of the Avar, what help she would expect from England, she would have replied in all probability: "The help of the British Xavv, mik] perhaps an cxpoditiona-v force of 100..000 nun." It would hardly have occurred to any of the Allies that the greatest naval Power should be asked to play the part of tin" greats est military Power. But that w,v» the implied expectation of many mind'; in neutral countries. Nevertheless, behind the shield of the navy, in les than two voars, the original six divisions nf the British army (12H.mil) men) became over five millions (o,()|l.000) More the introduction of compulsory service. It may help Americans to realise the magnitude .tf this effort if one points out that the l'ij:ii'il States, 111 proportion to {ln populaion, would have to raise in army of about fourteen million men to coinpn>o with it.

Moreover, if one is asked for defini - > results at this particular stage and boll re Ibis great new army has really got (m v.'ork, one may point out that the

movements of thj Allies are of a far more comprehensive nature than those of the Central Powers; that therefore they are necessarily of the. slower kind which we call "sure." They are "teo great for haste," and without falling into the grandioso manner of the Germans, one may say that, though the sun and tne moon may bo more obvious bodies, the movement of the stars beyond them is more important and trill outlast them in the cosmic scheme. This astronomical illustration may lend a certain significance to the great slow movement which is taking place all over the world and to the fact that Britain has already taken part in campaigns in Flanders, Kiaochau, Xew Guinea, Samoa, Mesopotamia, Egypt,

the ftoudan. Cameroons, Togolan<i East Africa, South-west Africa, Salon ika, Aden, Persia, and the North-west Frontier of India. AlreaSy Great Britain has captured nearly Seven hundred thousand square miles of Gorman colonies—l'ogoland, Cameroon? Southwest Africa, Kiaochau, Pacific Islands, and over a quarter of East Africa. Already therefore, she holds a very solid asset against the tciTitorics capture 1 by Germany in her first flnmboyaur. rush. j But these larger things ate not a"complishcd by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Gigantic organisations, of which the worltt hears little, have gradually shaped themselves m England. She has undertaken ai! the machinery of blockade and censorship on an unprecedented scale, and though this has drawn upon her the criticism of neutrals, it may fairly be said that considering the nature of the undertaking and its vast scope it has been worked with unprecedented efficiency. Here and there, by one uetail or another, iritation has been caused, but to the disinterested spectator of the enormous whole —if such a spectator could be found-—the abiding miracle is that it could be done at all. It has involved the creation of huge business staffs, by which, for the first time in history, :i blockade has been carried on without overriding neutrals and. on the whole, through winning their confidence. No ship bound for Holland has been put into the prize court for five months, because things havs been arranged beforehand, by agreement, as between gentlemen. No United States letter in transit is now detained beyond four dav«. i Moreover, the word "delay" which is so much used about the British cen- . sorship is often a very misleading one. 1 At best it is merely a technical one in this particular matter; for the absurdly true facts are thai, in many cases, censored mails arrive at their destination more quickly than if they had been uncensored. This is obviously so, for instance, in the ca*> of mails taken at Falmouth from ships which in. tend to proceed by way of the north of Scotland; for the mails thus "delayed" are sent by rail across England and ' usually take the first boat on the other side, with a saving of five or six davs ;on the Avar time schedule. If there ' e any complaint here it should be lodged against the German mines which liar? frightened noutral ships, not against the English censors.

USING THE MAILS. Moreover, I wish that Americans could only s«ee, as I have seen with my own eyes, the masses of contraband of all kmds which are posted as "dotter mail" from the United States to Germany. Great packages bearing letter mail postage, but containing, in the aggregate, enough contraband to fill the Mauretania, come under the rejoicing hands and laughing faces of the immense army of workers in the censorship department. The queerest disguises and strangest vehicles nrc used. Packets leap from the toes of boots and shoes, and then packages are drawn from the lining of clothing. Much of it is curiously suggestive of the criminal courts . Indeed, the "cunning" displayed is all of a piece with other German characteristics in tho war —the initiation of gas attacks, the fear of being poisoned, which German officers have displayed, and the actual use of d'isease germs in South Africa, all cunningly suggest the criminal rather than the knight in shining armour. Submarine and Zeppelin, too. even though we be forced to adopt them, are the felons, not the knights errant of modern war.

The only genuine American letter that has yet been really held up is probably the one which I saw displayed on the Avail of the censorship museum ; and, in any case, it could hardly have reached its destination. The authorities rcgardvd it, however, with something like affection, and the envelop? was distinctly the favourite decoration of that raried art gallery. It was addressed to

WILLIAM HOHKN'ZOLLERX, Esq.. Potsdam Palace, Berlin. If party is absent, please forward :o St. Helena, It combined a collection Ttf the most vigorous cartoons of the Kaiser from several American of the Middle West.

In addition to the gigantic work 1 1 the censorship department, it may Ifl said that British munition factories have increased from something inconsiderable to over four thousand. It is probably safe to say that more munitions of war of all kinds, from band grenades to aeroplanes and fro'n trench mortars to big guns, are pnvduced in one week now than were produced in the whole first 'year of the war. . .

, Wherever one goes in tiroat Britain today, from one end to the other, the-.v is mik one thought a'niT one vast impulse.' Britain at last is mobilised for war; achievement to-day far surpasses j the wildest Gorman idea of "kolossal."' j The British pre-war capacity for making munitions for land services \va« adapted to our army of 200,000 in. 11. The French capacity was for an army !of three to four miiilons. The number 1 of workpeople now employed on BntI ish naval munitions approximately 'equals the total at work on Frenei I munitions for both military and navr.i 1 services. We arc supplying shell ste-l io France at the rate of half a million tons a vear. other steel at hundreds <f thousand* < f tons a year, coal at one and a half million tons a month. The ; conse(|iiences of the temporary loss • I I the French industrial districts thus

I fall largely on Great Britain. The British output of heavy gnus and howitzers for land service is now

three to four times that of the French. The present monthly figuro is 33 per cent, in excess of the total available for the army in the field before the war. The British machine-gun output is 20 per cent, and the small arms ammunition output 50 per cent, in excess of the French. In adition England ha* sent to France tens of thousands of tons of constituents of explosives. It is the neutrals, not our Alliei, who frequently, without one solitary fact to go upon, ask naively: "What is England doing!'" he silence in which the work lias been accomplished was often necessary tc its success, and It never deceived our Allies. Offers of English help at Verdun were declined by J off re for the very grim reasons which are now becoming apparent jn the "great offensive," where the British in turn are grappfjngj with* the ma-sed forces of Germany, while with poetic justice the Ftvnch broke through. But neutrals clamoured for head-lines, clamoured for all the farreaching plans of the Allies to be destroyed in order to make a newspaper holiday. Rational folks, in eVbn thes.' countries, might well forgive tho brusque declaration of a well-know:i writer —'Damn all neutrals."

BRITISH MONEY AND BRI"?*SH MUNITIONS.

It is hardly a.n exaggeration to say that without the help of British finance, and British munitions the great Russian offensive would never hav<> taken place ;for on this side, alone <n niense burden lias been quietly shouldered by the British people. An heroic neutral once remarked to an Englishman : "How terrible for the British prestige that affair at Kut, that dreadful surrender of ten thousand men and a general!" "A mistake to send then; there, you mean?" he was asked. "Oh, no, not that!" was the reply, "I mean that they could have died!" The only additional pleasure that one could suggest to tho hero would be that cinematograph operators should have been present to take pictures of tho sublime holocaust. But the truth al>out the British conduct of the war, and of what is to come as well as what has been done, is to be found in that large and steady movement which will endure tc the end. Indeed, the only way cf obtaining anything like a just view of what ,s really happening in the war is for the individual to do a little co-ordinating on his own behalf; to look at the Russian offensives, for instance, in connection with the heroic resistance of the French at Yerdun. It was this resistance which reduced the mobile elements of the enemy to the points when the Russian attack was sure of success. The Allies have consistently worked on the principle that the lives of men are more than time or money, though, us a writer in the "Westminster"' said <f the Russian offensive: "It appeals more to the imagination to take towns and force the passage of rivers and recover territory —that fetish of the, uninformed —than to break up attacks on a range of shell-scarred hills n.nd to stand up against jets of liquid fire." Yet the Russians themsehes will certainly not be niggardly in tribute to the splendid valour of the Frenchman who enabled them to do these things. And in this great co-operation of the Allies it is, after all, most satisfactory that the French themselves should speak of the part played by England. It may he repeated, there is poetic justice in the fact that, alarmed by the preparation for the British offensive, the Germans massed their strength to meet it; that the British in turn are now paying then- share in flesh and blood, and that the French, who bor.» the brunt so long, arc breaking through.