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.