MEN, MEN, MEN.
THE very considerable success gained by the Russians in Poland, and the failure of the Germans to break through on their extreme right in the western theatre of the war, give us an opportunity to say something which we could not have said had the immediate prospect been less favourable. While, then, the situation at the moment is so good we can, without risk of doing harm, speak out on a matter which in our opinion is vital—the need of more recruits. We can get the men if we make the country understand the tremendous nature of the issue, and awaken it to a true sense of the dangers of a prolonged war. We shall not get the men if we give the impression that is now being created—that, though the country is glad enough to take recruits, it is not a matter of life and death.
It is wise, it is essential, to avoid panic. But have we not too often of late, in trying to avoid panic, fallen into the opposite extreme ? Have we not avoided that true and serious consideration of peril which is necessary if peril is to be faced and overcome ? Again, in our panic for fear of panic do not we often miss the point altogether, and call by that name what is not panic at all, but merely a proper and sound awakening to the realities of the situation ? Our statesmen and public men generally are apt to be the worst offenders. They get panic on the brain, till at last they are afraid to take their countrymen fully into their confidence. After all, would it so very much matter if the thing which our leaders so much dread did take place and there were a panic, or what they call a panic ? It is an entirely false analogy to suggest that anything would happen like what happens when some fool calls out " Fire ! " in a theatre, or when there is a stampede in a great crowd and a wild rush for safety or supposed safety which ends in hundreds of people being trampled to death. Nothing of that kind would happen if our statesmen were to do what we want them to do—to insist upon the country recognizing the seriousness of the existing situation. Here the true analogy would be more like what sometimes happens in a chemical test tube. The liquid is thick and turbid and without clarity because a great many elements are held in solution. Then a drop or two of acid or a few grains of alkali are thrown in. There is a violent dis- turbance for a minute or two, then precipitation takes place, and the result is a clear liquid, with the elements that had once made it turbid lying at the bottom of the tube. So, even if there were a momentary effervescence owing to our people being forced to recognize the true situa- tion, the net result would, we are certain, be a clearing of the nation's mind which would be very much to the public advantage, and would tend to true safety, not to that "valour of ignorance" which is the greatest and most humiliating of dangers.
It is one of the commonplaces of the moment, though one more often heard in private conversations than in public, that the mass of our countrymen do not yet by any means realize the gravity of the crisis. The greater part of the country, we are told, is not awake. Portions of London may realize it, but even in London there are still great sections of the population which do not. This want of understanding is still more marked in the great industrial centres of the North, and especially in Lancashire, in York- shire, in distant agricultural districts in Wales, Cornwall, and the Midlands, in Scotland, and in some of the remoter parts of the Eastern Counties. People either do not trouble themselves about the war, or else look upon it as a huge pageant which for them has no reality. It is no more than the raw material of the illustrated newspapers and the picture-palaces. That is why these great industrial centres and these scattered and distant portions of the kingdom have failed, as undoubtedly they have failed, to give us their proper proportion of recruits.
Let us hasten to say that we do not suggest for a moment that this is due to any want of essential patriotism. It is due to the fact that the people of those parts of the country in which recruiting has been slack in proportion to the total population have never yet been aroused from their lethargy. They have had rousing appeals made to their patriotism, no doubt, but their natural leaders have never yet spoken to them with the seriousness which the situa- tion demands and made them understand exactly what they have got to face. The leaders of public opinion have failed to do this, not because they themselves lack seriousness or a due understanding of the position—they realize fully what the situation is—but because of their dread of creating panic, and because of their intellectual failure to distinguish between panic and a proper under- standing of the situation. As we have said before, they have been and are in a panic lest they should create it. They ought to have more confidence in their countrymen, and ought to know, as most of them know quite well in private life, that often the only way to keep a man from some false step which may ruin him irretrievably is to make him face the facts—facts he has never recognized because he has been living in a fool's paradise—even though for a few hours or days this new knowledge should give him an acute fit of nerves. He will recover from his shock, and when he does he will not be a less brave or less trustworthy man, but exactly the reverse. He may be angry and indignant, perhaps, that he was not warned sooner, but that cannot be helped. To delay his disillusionment will not make his indignation less dangerous, but infinitely
MOM SO.
Some of our readers whose chief maxim in life hitherto, like that of so many English people, has been that of avoiding panic at all costs, even if it results in the ostrich's policy of seeing no danger because its head is well buried in the sand, will probably ask us with impatience what all this talk is leading up to and what we are driving at. They have a perfect right to ask that question, and we will answer them at once. It means that we are thoroughly convinced that the way to save the State, or let us say, as a concession to our anti-panicmongers, to make sure that we can save the State, is to raise a great armed force—in fact, to recruit more men. If we can rapidly complete the first million men asked for, and then as rapidly raise another million—for nothing short of that will do—we can secure ourselves. If we do not, we are in danger of a war so prolonged that what we shall call success at the end of it may be almost as awful in its results on the welfare of the nation as a whole as defeat in the field. If we could now call a halt in our enemy's preparations for war, it would be possible to argue that we have already done enough, and that by the time we have got our million men composing the new Army and our extra quarter of a million of Territorials thoroughly trained and well organized we shall be able to finish the war. Unfortunately that is not the situation with which we are confronted. The Germans are doing rapidly and effectively what we ought to be doing, and what we must do if we are to win. They are raising new armies and training the remaining portion of their adult male population to arms. When the war began we all thought that about four million German fighting men was the most we need reckon with. These men have already been put into the firing line in the two theatres of the war, and now Germany is turning to that part of her adult male population—another four millions—who have not yet been trained, or else were trained so long ago that they hardly count as trained men. These four million men—we speak in very round numbers—are not first- class "cannon fodder," to use the hideous and brutal German phrase, but the Germans with their splendid organization will soon make them into troops which, backed by the masses of machine guns and artillery which Germany possesses, are capable of taking the field and coming on in that black incessant stream which is the piece de resistaace of German field tactics.
If we are to end the war we must meet these new levies man for man. If not, either we shall be beaten, or else the Germans will be able to prolong the war, as the Revolu- tionary leaders and Napoleon did, till the world will be bled, in Bismarck's phrase, as white as veal. Happily we can raise the men, and better men, to meet the new armies that Germany is rapidly creating if only our people are made to realize what depends upon their springing to arms and springing quickly. If we cannot get them into the firing line as soon as the Germans, we may hear that awful voice, which is the supreme tragedy of nations, echoing in our ears : "Too late ! Too late ! Too late ! "—a voice that will be answered by the cry of the awakened man : "Why was I told too late ? Why did those whom I trusted never let me know what the real need was ? Why did they let me go on at the plough, or the forge, or in the cotton mill when I ought to have been training to save the country from this awful curse. If we had ever dreamt of how great the need was, I and all my mates would have joined the colours a year ago."
But though the men are there and we have the power, if we will only exert ourselves, to train and equip them, we may be certain that we shall never recruit them if we do not begin by making the nation as a whole— and it will be a most difficult and disagreeable, or, if you will, dangerous, task—understand what the need is. It is folly to go on depending upon recruiting on the old flag-wagging lines, and the speech represented by a cheery : "Now roll up, my lads, and join the colours and fight for your country." That may get us another hundred thousand or so, but it will not get us another million men, for here, more than in any other matter, the last pull on the rope is the most difficult pull. What we want is to muster the whole manhood of the nation systematically. Nothing short of that will do.
Now comes the supreme question. How exactly are we to make the people whose ears are apparently deaf realize how great is the peril of a dragging war, and what is the true and only remedy ? In the first place, the Prime Minister and his colleagues of the Cabinet must make an appeal to the country of a very different kind from any they have yet issued. They must tell the country that if they do not want the horrors of a pro- longed war, and, beyond that, if they want to make us absolutely safe from the horrors of actual invasion—which must always remain a possibility, though not a probability —they must flock to the standard as they have never flocked before. Our rulers must make it clear that all precautions, tasteful or distasteful, must be used, and that every available man must be appealed to. Mr.
Asquith has one of the clearest brains in the country or in the world. He knows what a prolonged war will mean for this country, and he can, if he likes, bring it home to his countrymen. He must also bring home to them what invasion would mean. This he and his colleagues can do very well by telling the country what precautions will have to be taken either if invasion takes place or if it becomes imminent. And here he must tell the British people with the full weight of his authority that, even if we do lose the temporary command of the sea, and if a raid on a great scale takes place, we do not mean to lower our colours, but shall fight it out in this country even if the seat of government has to be moved from London to Edinburgh, from Edinburgh to Inverness, and if the contest in our own fields is to be as great and as hard-fought and as long as the contest which for the last three months has been raging from the Swiss frontier to the coasts of the Channel or throughout the Belgian plain. If we have the enemy within our borders for six months, and if it is neces- sary to expose half England to destruction, we must do it. Anything will be better, as our people will then realize in a flash, than giving way. They are not going to fail to do what the gallant Belgians have done.
To put the matter quite plainly, the need is—"Men, Men, Men." The Government have it in their power to get them even on a voluntary system if they will only take the country into their confidence and tell them how great is the need. We are not asking for one moment that the Government should make panic speeches in which they do not believe in order to create a recruiting boon. Men who would do that would deserve the severest condemnation. All we ask is that they should speak the truth to the country, and waken the seventy per cent. of the population which is not yet awake. If they do that, they will get the men fast enough. If they do not, they will be in the position of the doctor or nurse who lets a haemorrhage go on, which may possibly end fatally, rather than tighten the tourniquet sufficiently because it pains and alarms the sufferer. But we can hear our readers saying "If the Government speak as you want them to speak there will be an awful outcry." So no doubt there will be, but it will soon die down, and in its place we shall have the grim determination of dour, if disillusioned, men to see the thing through. On that new foundation of reality, instead of false security, we can build a structure that will defy all the enemy's exertions to overthrow it. We urge our rulers and leaders, then, to abandon their panic lest they should create a panic, and to bend their endeavours to making the nation take matters seriously. If they will do that, they will very soon get all the men they need to end the war. We boast of being a businesslike people. Then let us meet the situation in a businesslike way. The need is men. Let us take the essential step required to get them—the awakening of the nation to the need of the hour.
To sum up. The danger is a prolonged war. The only way to prevent this is to get more men—at least a million more men. These cannot he got quickly under our present happy- go-lucky system, and when the nation is only half awake. The only way to get them is by the Government making the nation realize the gravity of the situation, and by a properly organized muster of the men of military age. By this we do not mean compulsion, but a properly organized and individual appeal.
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