 A Traveler in Wartime by Winston Churchill I am reprinting here in response to requests certain recent experiences in Great Britain and France. These were selected in the hope of conveying to American readers some idea of the atmosphere of what it is like in these countries under the immediate shadow of the battle-clouds. It was what I myself most wished to know. My ideal was first to send home my impressions while they were fresh and to refrain as far as possible from comment and judgment until I should have had time to make a fuller survey. Hence I chose as a title for these articles intended to be a preliminary, a traveler in wartime. I tried to banish from my mind all previous impressions gained from reading. I wished to be free for the moment to accept and record the chance invitation or adventure wherever met with at the front in the streets of Paris, in Ireland, or on the London Omnibus. Later on I hoped to write a book summarizing the changing social conditions as I had found them. Unfortunately for me my stay was unexpectedly cut short. I was able to avail myself of but few of the many opportunities offered. With this apology the articles are presented as they were written. I have given the impression that at the time of my visit there was no lack of food in England, but I fear that I have not done justice to the frugality of the people, much of which was self-imposed for the purpose of helping to win the war. On very good authority I have been given to understand that food was less abundant during the winter just past, partly because of the effect of the severe weather on our American railroads, which had trouble in getting supplies to the coast, and partly because more and more ships were required for transporting American troops and supplies for these troops to France. This additional curtailment was most felt by families of small income, whose earners were at the front or away on other government service. Mothers had great difficulty in getting adequate nourishment for growing children, but the British people cheerfully submitted to this further deprivation. Summer is at hand. It is to be hoped that before another winter sets in, American and British shipping will have sufficiently increased to remedy the situation. In regard to what I have said of the British army, I was profoundly struck, as were other visitors to that front, by the health and morale of the men, by the marvel of organization accomplished and so comparatively brief a time. It was one of the many proofs of the extent to which the British nation had been socialized. When one thought of that little band of regulars sent to France in 1914, who became immortal at Mons, who shared the glory at the Marne, and in that first dreadful winter held back the German hosts from the Channel Ports. The presence in the battle-line of millions of disciplined and determined men seemed astonishing indeed. And this had been accomplished by a nation facing the gravest crisis in its history, under the necessity of sustaining and financing many allies and of protecting an empire. Since my return to America a serious reverse has occurred. After the Russian peace, the Germans attempted to overwhelm the British by hurling against them vastly superior numbers of highly-trained men. It is for the military critic of the future to analyze any tactical errors that may have been made at the second battle of the Somme. Apparently there was an absence of preparation of specific orders from high sources in the event of having to seed ground. This much can be said that the morale of the British army remains unimpaired, that the presence of mind and ability of the great majority of the officers who flung on their own resources conducted the retreat cannot be questioned, while the accomplishment of General Kerry in stopping the gap with an improvised force of non-combatants will go down in history in an attempt to bring home to myself, as well as to my readers, a realization of what American participation in this war means or should mean. End of PREFACE A TRAVELER AND WAR TIME by Winston Churchill This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. READING BY BALONA TIMES A TRAVELER AND WAR TIME Toward the end of the summer of 1917 it was very hot in New York, and hotter still aboard the transatlantic liner thrust between the piers. One glance at our cabins and the crowded decks and dining-room, at the little writing-room above where the ink had congealed in the inkwells, suffice to bring home to us that the days of luxurious sea-travel, of Alucard restaurants, and Louis C's bedrooms were gone, at least for a period. The prospect of a voyage of nearly two weeks was not enticing. The ship, to be sure, was far from being the best of those still running on a line which had gained a magic reputation of immunity from submarines. Three years ago she carried only second- and third-class passengers. But most of us were in a hurry to get to the countries where war had already become a grim and terrible reality, and one way or another we had all enlisted. By we, I mean the American passengers. The first welcome discovery among the crowd, wandering aimlessly and somewhat disconsolently about the decks, was the cheerful face of a friend whom, at first, I did not recognize because of his amazing disguise and uniform. Hitherto he had been associated, in my mind, with dinner parties and clubs. That life was passed. He had laid up in his yacht and joined the Red Cross, and henceforth, for an indeterminable period, he was to abide amidst the discomforts and dangers of the Western Front, with five days leave every three months. The members of a group similarly attired, whom I found gathered by the after rail, were likewise cheerful. Two well-known specialists from the Massachusetts General Hospital made significant the hasjira now taking place that threatens to leave our country, like Britain, almost daughterless. When I reached France, it seemed to me that I met all the celebrated medical men I had ever heard of. A third in the group was a businessman from the Middle West who had wound up his affairs and left a startled family in charge of a trust company. Though his physical activities had hitherto consisted of an occasional mild game of golf, he wore his khaki, like an old campaigner, and he seemed undaunted by the prospect, still somewhat remotely ahead of him, of a winter journey across the Albanian Mountains from the Aegean to the Adriatic. After a restless night we sailed away in the hot dawn of a Wednesday. The shores of America faded behind us, and as the days went by we had the odd sense of threading uncharted seas. We found it more and more difficult to believe that this empty, lonesome ocean was the Atlantic of the twentieth century. Once we saw a foremaster, once a shy, silent steamer avoided us, westward bound, and once in mid-ocean, tossed on a sea sun-silvered under a rack of clouds, we overtook a gallant little schooner out of New Bedford, or Gloucester, a fourth-farer too. Meanwhile, amongst the Americans, the socializing process had begun. Many elements which, in a former, stratified existence, would never have been brought into contact were fusing by the pressure of a purpose of a great adventure common to us all. On the upper deck, high above the waves, was a little firmware, which, by some odd trick of association, reminded me of the villa formerly occupied by the Kaiser in Corfu, perhaps because of the faience plaques set in the walls. Although I cannot now recall whether the villa had faience plaques or not, the room was, of course, on the order of a French provincial café, and as such delighted the bourgeoisie monopolizing the alcove tables and joking with the fat steward. Here in this firmware, liars, doctors, businessmen of all descriptions, newspaper correspondents, movie photographers, and millionaires who had never crossed save-in-a-cabin deluxe rubbed elbows and exchanged views and played bridge together. There were YMCA people on their way to the various camps, reconstruction workers intending to build temporary homes for the homeless French, and youngsters in the uniform of the American Field Service going over to drive camions and ambulances, many of whom, without undue regret, had left college after a freshman year. They invaded the Foumoire, undaunted, to practice atrocious French on the phlegmatic steward. They took possession of a protesting piano in the banal little salon, and sang, We're not coming back till it's over, over there, and in the evening, on the darkened decks we listened and thrilled to the refrain. There's a long, long trail of winding until the land of my dreams. We were Argonauts, even the Red Cross ladies on their way to establish rust camps behind the lines and brave the mud and rains of a winter in eastern France. None, indeed, were more imbued with the forth-faring spirit than these women, who were leaving without regret sheltered, comfortable lives to face hardships and brave dangers without a question, and no sharper proof of the failure of the old social order to provide for human instincts and needs could be found than the conviction they gave of new and vitalizing forces released in them. The timidities with which their sex is supposedly encumbered had disappeared, and even the possibility of a disaster at sea held no tears for them. When the sun fell down into the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, and the cabins below were sealed, and thus become insupportable, they settled themselves for the night in their steamer-chairs, and smiled at the remark of Monsieur Legue Commissaire that it was a good season for submarines. The moonlight filtered through the trunks in the burlap, shrouding the deck. About three a.m. the khaki-clad lawyer from Milwaukee became communicative. The Red Cross ladies produced chocolate. It was the genial hour before the final nap, from which one awoke abruptly at the sound of squeegees and brooms to find the deck a river of seawater, on whose banks a wild scramble for slippers and biscuit boxes invariably ensued. No experience could have been more socializing. Well, it's a relief, one of the ladies exclaimed, not to be traveling with half a dozen trunks and a half box. Oh yes, I realize what I'm doing. I'm going to live in one of those flimsy portable houses with twenty cots and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, but it's better than thrashing around looking for something to do and never finding it, never getting anything real to spend one's energy on. I've closed my country house, I've sublet my apartment, I've done with teas and bridge, and I'm happier than I have been in my life even if I don't get enough sleep. Another lady, who looked still young and had two sons in the army. There was nothing for me to do but sit around the house and wait, and I want to be useful. My husband has to stay at home. He can't leave his business. Be useful! There she struck the new and aggressive note of emancipation from the restricted self-sacrifice of the old order, of wider service for the unnamed and the unknown, and, above all, for the wider self-realization of which service is but a by-product. I recall particularly among these women a young widow with an eager look in clear gray eyes that gazed eastward into the unknown with hope renewed. Had she lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been doomed to slow desiccation. There are thousands of such women in France today, and to them the Great War has brought salvation. From what country other than America could so many thousands of pilgrims, even before our nation had entered the war, have hurried across a wide ocean to take their part. No matter what religion we profess, whether it be Calvinism or Catholicism, we are individualists, pragmatists, empiricists, forever. Our faces are set towards strange worlds, presently to rise out of the sea and take on form and color and substance, worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values, and on this voyage I was reminded of Josiah Royce's splendid summary of the American philosophy, of the American religion as set forth by William James. Quote, The spirit of the frontiersmen, of the gold-seeker, or the home-builder, transferred to the metaphysical or to the religious realm, there is a far-off home our long-lost spiritual fortune. Experience alone can guide us to the place where these things are, hence indeed you need experience. You can only win your way on the frontier, unless you are willing to live there. End quote. Through the pall of horror and tragedy, the American sees a vision. For him it is not merely a material and bloody contest of arms and men, a military victory to be gained over an aggressive and wrong-minded people. It is a world calamity, indeed, but a calamity, since it has come to be spiritualized and utilized for the benefit of the future society of mankind. It must be made to serve a purpose in helping to liberate the world from sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and can't. Part two. One night we entered the danger zone. There had been an entertainment in the little salon which, packed with passengers, had gradually achieved the temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. For the ports had been closed as tight as gaskets could make them. The electric fans, as usual, obstinately refused to march. After the amateur speech-making and concert-pieces, an Italian violinist who had thrown over a lucrative contract to become a soldier played exquisitely, and one of the French sisters we had seen walking the deck with the menacing steps of the cloisters sang, somewhat precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria. Its pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we fled into the open air, we were conscious of having turned our backs irrevocably, yet determinedly upon an era whose life and convictions, the music of the composer, so beautifully expressed. And the sister's sweet, withered face was reminiscent of a missile, one bright with color and still shining faintly, a missile in a library of modern books. On deck, a fine rain was blowing through a gap in our burlap shroud, a phosphorescent fringe of foam hissed along the sides of the ship, giving the illusory appearance of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggerating the sinister blackness of the night. We were, apparently, a beacon in that sepia waste where modern undersea monsters were lurking. There were on board other elements which, in the normal times gone by, would have seemed disquienting enough. The evening after we had left New York, while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw in the poop a crowd of steerage passengers listening intently to harangues by speakers addressing them from the top of a pile of life rafts. Arminians, I was told, on their way to fight the Turks, all recruited in America by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in two by a German officer. Twilight was gathering as I joined the group. The sea was silvered by the light of an august moon floating serenely between swaying stays. The orators, passionate words and gestures evoked wild responses from his hearers, whom the drag of an ancient hatred had snatched from the peaceful asylum of the West. This smiling, happy folk, which I had seen in our manufacturing towns and cities, were now transformed atavistic, all save one, a student who stared wistfully through his spectacles across the waters. Later, when Twilight deepened, when the moon had changed from silver to gold, the orators gave place to a singer. He had been a boot-black in America. Now he had become a bard. His plaintive minor chant evoked, one knew not how, the flavor of that age-long history of oppression and wrong these were now determined to avenge. Their conventional costumes were proof that we had harbored them. Almost, indeed, assimilated them. And suddenly they had reverted. They were going to slaughter the Turks. On a bright Saturday afternoon we steamed into the wide mouth of the Chiron, a name stirring vague memories of romance and terror. The French passengers gazed wistfully at the low-lying strip of sound and forest, but our uniformed pilgrims crowded the rail and hailed it as the promised land of self-realization. A richly colored watering-place slid into view, as in a moving picture show. There was, indeed, all the reality and unreality of the cinematograph about our arrival. Presently the reel would end abruptly, and we should find ourselves pushing our way out of the emptying theater into a rainy street. The impression of unreality in the face of visual evidence persisted into the night when, after an afternoon at anchor, we glided up the river, our ducks and ports ablaze across the land. Silhouettes of tall poplars loomed against the blackness. Occasionally a lamp revealed the milky blue facade of a house. This was France, war-torn France, at last vividly brought home to us, when a glare appeared on the sky, growing brighter and brighter until, at a turn of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomiting furnaces, thousands of electric lights, strung-like beads over the crest of a hill, and below these dim rows of houses, all of a sameness stretching along monotonous streets, a munitions-town in the night. One could have tossed a biscuit on the stone wharfs where the workmen, crouching over their tasks, straightened up at side of us and cheered, and one cried out hoarsely, You come to save us, an exclamation I was to hear again in the days that followed. All day long, as the Rapide hurried us through the smiling wine-country and passed the well-remembered chateaus of the noir, we wondered how we should find Paris, beautiful Paris, safe from violation as by a miracle. Our first discovery, after we had pushed our way out of the dim station into the obscurity of the street, was that of the absence of taxicabs. The horse-drawn buses ranged along the curb were reserved for the foresighted and privileged few. Men and women were rushing desperately about in search of conveyances, and in the midst of this confusion, undismayed, debonair, I spied a rugged, slouch-hatted figure standing under a lamp, the unmistakable American soldier. Are there any cabs in Paris? I asked. Oh yes, they tell me they're here, he said. I've given a man a dollar to chase one. Evidently one of our millionaire privates who have aroused such burnings in the heart of the French peau, with his five sewers a day. We left him there and staggered across the Seine with our bags. A French officer approached us. You'll come from America, he said. Let me help you. There was just enough light in the streets to prevent us from getting utterly lost, and we recognized the dark mass of the tullaries as we crossed the gardens. The hotel we sought was still there, and its menu, save for the warbread and the tiny portion of sugar, as irreproachable as ever. The next morning, as if by magic, hundreds of taxis had sprung into existence, though they were much in demand. And in spite of the soldiers thronging the sunlit streets, Paris was seemingly the same Paris one had always known, gay and sociant, pleasure-bent. The luxury shops appeared to be thriving. The world were known restaurants to be doing business as usual, to judge from the prices a little better than usual. The expensive hotels were full. It is not the real France, of course, yet it seemed none the less surprising that it should still exist. Oddly enough, the presence of such overwhelming numbers of soldiers should have failed to strike the note of war, emphasized that of lavishness, of the casting off of mundane troubles for which the French capital has so long been known. But so it was. Most of the soldiers were here precisely with the object of banishing from their minds the degradations and horrors of the region from which they had come. And which was so unbelievably near. A few hours in an automobile, less than that in one of those dragonfly machines we saw intermittently hovering in the blue above our heads. Paris, to most Americans, means that concentrated little district, Deluxe, of which the place Vendôme is the center, and we had always unconsciously thought of it as in the possession of the Anglo-Saxons. So it seems today one saw hundreds of French soldiers, of course, in all sorts of uniforms, from the new grey blue and visor to the traditional cloth blouse and kepi, once in a while a smart French officer. The English and Canadians, the Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans were much in evidence. Set them down anywhere on the face of the globe under any conditions conceivable, and you could not surprise them. Such was the impression. The British officers, and even the British Tommies, were blasé, wearing the air of the Samène anglaise and the five o'clock tea, as the French delight to call it. That these could have come direct from the purgatory of the trenches seemed unbelievable. The Anzacs, with looped up hats, strolled about, enjoying themselves, halting before the shops at the Rue de la Pa, to gaze at the priceless jewelry there, or stopping at a sidewalk café to enjoy a drink. Our soldiers had not seen the front. Many of them, no doubt, were on leave from the training camps. Others were on duty in Paris, but all seemed in a hurry to get somewhere, bound for a definite destination. They might have been in New York, or San Francisco. It was a novel sight, indeed, to observe them striding across the Place Vendome, without so much as, daining to cast a glance at the column dedicated to the great emperor who fought that other world war a century ago. To see our square-shouldered officers hustling around corners in Ford and Packard automobiles. And the atmosphere of our communication headquarters was so essentially one of getting things done, as to make one forget the medieval narrowness of the Rue Saint-Anne, and the inconvenient French private-dwelling arrangements of the house. You were transported back to America. Such, too, was the air of our Red Cross establishment in the ancient building facing the palace de la Concorde, where the unfortunate Louis lost his head. History had been thrust into the background. I was never more aware of this than when, shortly after dawn Wednesday, the massive gray pile of the Palace of Versailles suddenly rose before me. As the motor shot through the empty plus-arms, I made a desperate attempt to summon again a vivid impression, when I had first stood there many years ago, of an angry Paris mob beating against that grill of the Swiss guards dying on the stairway for their queen. But it was no use. France had undergone some subtle change, yet I knew I was in France. I knew it when we left Paris, and sped through the dem leafy tunnels of the Bois, when I beheld a touch of filtered sunlight on the dense blue thatch of the maroniers behind the walls of a vast estate once dedicated to the sports and pleasures of kings, when I caught glimpses of silent chateaus mirrored in still waters. I was on my way, with one of our naval officers, to visit an American naval base on the western coast. It was France, but the laughter had died on her lips. A few women and old men and children were to be seen in the villages, a bent figure in a field, an occasional cart that drew aside as we hurried at eighty kilometers an hour along deserted routes, drawn as with a ruler across the land. Sometimes the road dipped into a canyon of poplars, and the sky between their crests was a tiny strip of mottled blue and white. The sun crept in and out, the clouds cast shadows on the hills. Here and there the tower of lonely church or castle broke the line of a distant ridge. Morning glories nodded over lodge walls where the ivy was turning crimson, and the little gardens were masses of colors, French colors, like that in the beds of the tuleries, brick red geraniums and dahlias, yellow marigolds, and purple asters. We lunched at one of the little ends that for generations had been tucked away in the narrow streets of provincial towns. This time a cheval blanc with an unimposing front and a blaze of sunshine in his heart. After a déjeuner fit for the most exacting of bon vivares, we sat in that courtyard and smoked, while an ancient waiter served us with coffee that dripped through silver percolators into our glasses. The tourists have fled. If happily you should come again, monsieur, said madame, as she led me with pardonable pride through her immaculate bedrooms and salons with wavy floors. And I dwelt upon a future holiday there, on the joys of sharing with a friend that historic place. The next afternoon I lingered in another town, built on a little hill ringed about with ancient walls, from whose battlements, tied veined marshes, stretched away to a gleaming sea. A figure flitting through the cobbled streets, a woman in black who sat sewing, sewing in a window, only served to heighten the impression of emptiness, to give birth to the odd fancy that some alchemic quality in the honeyed sunlight now steeping it must have preserved the place through the ages. But in the white clothes surrounding the church were signs that life still persisted. A peasant was drawing water at the pump, and the handle made a noise. A priest chatted with three French ladies who had come over from a neighbouring seaside resort. And then a woman in deep mourning emerged from a tiny shop and took her bicycle from against the wall and spoke to me. Was that American, monsieur? I acknowledged it. The same question I had heard on the lips of the workmen in the night. I hope so, madam, I replied, and would have added, we come also to save ourselves. She looked at me with sad, questioning eyes, and I knew that for her, and alas for many like her, we were too late. When she had mounted her wheel and ridden away, I bought a matine, and sat down on a doorstep to read about Kerensky and the Russian Revolution. The things seemed incredible here. War seemed incredible, and yet its tentacles had reached out to this peaceful old world spot and taken a heavy toll. Once more I sought the ramparts, only to be reminded of those crumbling, matriculated ruins that I was in a war-ridden land few generations had escaped the pestilence. At no great distance lay the little city which had been handed over to us by the French government for a naval base, one of the ports where our troops and supplies are landed. Those who know provincial France will visualise its narrow streets and reticence shops, its grey-white and ecru houses, all more or less of the same design, with long French windows guarded by ornamental balconies of cast iron. A city that has never experienced such a thing as a real estate boom. Imagine, against such background, the bewildering effect of the dynamic presence of a few regiments of our new army. It is a curious commentary on this war that one does not think of these young men as soldiers, but as citizens engaged in a scientific undertaking of a magnitude unprecedented. You come unexpectedly upon truckloads of tanned youngsters whose features, despite flannel shirts and campaign hats, summon up memories of Harvard Square and the Yale Yard of campuses at Berkeley and Ithaca. The youthful drivers of these camions are alert, intent, but a hard day's work on the docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of the passengers who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over the cobbles. And the note they strike is presently sustained by a glimpse on a siding of an efficient-looking Baldwin ranged alongside several of the tiny French locomotives of yesterday, sustained too by an acquaintance with the young colonel in command of the town. Though an officer of the regular army, he brings home to one the fact that the days of the military's Martinette have gone forever. He is military, indeed erect and soldierly, but Fortune has amazingly made him a mayor and an autocrat, a builder, and in some sense a railway manager and superintendent of docks. And to these functions have been added those of police commissioner, of administrator of such welfare and hygiene. It will be a comfort to those at home to learn that their sons and our army in France are cared for as no enlisted men have ever been cared for before. Part four. By the end of September I had reached England, eager to gain a fresh impression of conditions there. The weather in London was mild and clear. The third evening after I had got settled in one of those delightfully English hotels in the heart of the city, yet removed from the traffic with letter boxes that still bear the initials of Victoria, I went to visit some American naval officers in their sitting-room on the ground floor. The cloth had not been removed from the dinner table, around which we were chatting, when a certain strange sound reached our ears. A sound not to be identified with the distant roar of the motor-buses in Paul Mall, nor with the sharp bark of the taxi-horns, although not unlike them. We sat listening intently and heard the sound again. The Germans have come, one of the officers remarked, as he finished his coffee. The other looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock. They must have left the lines about seven, he said. Inspired of the fact that our newspapers at home had made me familiar with these aeroplane raids, as I sat there amidst those comfortable surroundings, the things seemed absolutely incredible. To fly one hundred and fifty miles across the Channel and southern England, bomb London, and fly back again by midnight. We were going to be bombed. The anti-aircraft guns were already searching the sky for the invaders. It is sinister, and yet yours sees by an overwhelming curiosity that draws you, first to pull aside the heavy curtains of the window, and then to rush out into the dark street, both proceedings in the worst possible form. The little street was deserted, but in Paul Mall the dark forms of buses could be made out scurrying for shelter. One wondered where. Above the roar of London the pop-pop-pop of the defending guns could be heard now almost continuously, followed by the shrieks and moans of the shrapnel shells as they passed close overhead. They sounded like giant rockets, and even as rockets some of them broke into a cascade of sparks. Star shells, they are called, bursting, it seemed, among the immutable stars themselves that burned serenely on. And there were other stars, like November meteors, hurrying across space. The lights of the British plains scouring the heavens for the relentless enemies. Everywhere the restless white rays of their searchlights pierced the darkness, seeking, but seeking in vain. Not a sign of the intruders was to be seen. I was induced to return to the sitting-room. But what are they shooting at? I asked. Listen, said one of the officers. There came a lull in the firing, and then a faint droning noise, like the humming of insects, on a still summer day. It's all they have to shoot at, that noise. But their own planes? I objected. The Gotha has two engines. It has a slightly different noise, when you get used to it. You'd better step out of that window. It's against the law to show light, and if a bomb falls in the street you'd be filled with glass. I overcame my fascination and obeyed. It isn't only the bombs, my friend went on. It's the falling shrapnel, too. The noise made by those bombs is unmistakable, unforgettable, and quite distinct from the chorus of the guns and shrapnel. A crashing note reverberating, sustained, like the E-minor of some giant calliope. In the face of the raids, which coincide with the coming of the moon, London is calm, but naturally indignant over such methods of warfare. The damage done is ridiculously small, the percentage of deaths and injuries insignificant. There exists, in every large city, a riffraff to get panicky. These are mostly foreigners. They seek the tubes, and some the crypt of St. Paul's, for it is wise to get under shelter during the brief period of the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of the police. It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt by shrapnel. The Friday following the raid I have described, I went out of town for a weekend, and returned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gone through the roof outside of the room I had vacated, and the ceiling and floor of the bedroom of one of the officers who lived below. He was covered with dust and debris. His lights went out, but he calmly stepped through the window. You'd best have your dinner early, sir. I was told by the waiter on my return. Last night a lady had her soup upstairs, a chicken in the office, and her coffee in the cellar. It is worth well noting that she had all three. Another evening, when I was dining with Sir James Berry, he showed me a handful of shrapnel fragments. I gathered them off the roof, he informed me, and a lady next to him I had sat at lunching. Told me, in a matter of fact tone, that a bomb had fallen the night before in the garden of her townhouse. It was quite disagreeable, she said, and broke all our windows on that side. During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by a new and ingenious system of barrage fire the Germans were driven off. The question of the ethics of reprisals is agitating London. One raid, which occurred at midday, is worth recording. I was on my way to our Embassy when, in the residential quarter, through which I passed, I found all the housemates in the areas gazing up at the sky, and I was told by a man in a grocery's cart that the Huns had come again. But the invader on this occasion turned out to be a British aviator from one of the camps who was bringing a message to London. The warmth of his reception was all that could be desired, and he alighted hastily in the first open space that presented itself. Looking back to the time when I left America, I can recall the expectation of finding a Britain beginning to show signs of distress. I was prepared to live on a small ration, and the impression of the scarcity of food was seemingly confirmed when the table was being set for the first meal at my hotel. When the waiter, who chanced to be an old friend, pointed to a little bowl half full of sugar and exclaimed, I ought to warn you, sir, it's all y'all to have for a week, and I'm sorry to say you're only out loud a bit of bread, too. It is human perversity to want a great deal of bread when bread becomes scarce. Even war bread, which, by the way, is better than white. But the rest of the luncheon, when it came, proved that John Bull was under no necessity of stenting himself. Save for wheat and sugar. He is not in want. Everywhere in London you are confronted by signs of an incomprehensible prosperity. Everywhere, indeed, in Great Britain. There can be no doubt about that of the wage earners. Nothing like it has ever been seen before. One sure sign of this is the phenomenal sale of pianos to households whose occupants had never dreamed of such luxuries. And not once, but many times, have I read in the newspapers of working men's families of four and five, which are gaining collectively more than five hundred pounds a year. The economic and social significance of this tendency, the new attitude of the working classes, the ferment it is causing, need not be dwelt upon here. That England will be a changed England is unquestionable. The London theatres are full. The movies crowded. And you have to wait your turn for a seat at a restaurant. Bond Street and Piccadilly are doing a thriving business. Never so thriving, you are told. And presently you are willing to believe it. The vendor-baggers, so familiar a sight a few years ago, have all but disappeared. And you may walk from Waterloo Station to the Haymarket without so much as meeting it needy soul anxious to carry your bag. Taxicamps are in great demand. And one odd result of the scarcity of what the English are pleased to call petrol, by which they mean gasoline, is the reappearance of that respectable, but almost obsolete animal, the family carriage-horse, of that equally obsolete vehicle, the Victoria. The men on the box are invariably in black. In spite of taxes to make the hair of any American turned gray, in spite of lavish charities, the wealthy classes still seem wealthy, if the expression may be allowed. That they are not so wealthy as they were goes without saying. In the country houses of the old aristocracy the most rigid economy prevails. There are new fortunes undoubtedly, munitions and war fortunes made before certain measures were taken to control profits. And some establishments, including a few supported by American accumulations, still exhibit the number of men's servants and amount of gold plate formally thought adequate. But in most of these great houses, maids have replaced the butlers and footmen. Mansions have been given over for hospitals, gardeners are fighting in the trenches, and courts and drives of country places are often overgrown with grass and weeds. Yes, we do dine in public quite often, said a very great lady. It's cheaper than keeping sevens. Two of her three sons had been killed in France, but she did not mention this. The English do not advertise their sorrows. Still another explanation when husbands and sons and brothers come back across the channel for a few days leave, after long months in the trenches nothing is too good for them. And when these days have flown there is always the possibility that there may never be another leave. Not long ago I read a heart-rending article about the tragedies of the goodbyes in the stations and the terminal hotels. Tragedies hidden by silence and a smile. Well, so long, says an officer. Bring back a VC, cries his sister from the group on the platform, and he waves his hand in deprecation as the train pulls out, lights his pipe, and pretends to be reading the sphere. Some evening, perchance, you happen to be in the dark street outside of Charing Cross Station. An occasional hooded lamp throws a precarious gleam on a long line of men carrying, so gently, stretchers on which lie the silent forms of rich and poor alike. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of A Traveller in Wartime Chapter 2 For the student of history who is able to place himself within the stream of evolution, the really important events of today are not taking place on the battle lines, but behind them. The keynote of the new era has been struck in Russia, and as I write these words after the Italian retreat, a second revolution seems possible. For three years one has thought inevitably of 1789 and of the ensuing world conflict out of which issued the beginnings of democracy. History does not repeat itself, yet evolution is fairly consistent. While our attention has been focused on the military drama enacted before our eyes and recorded in the newspapers another drama, unpremeditated but a vastly greater significance, is unfolding itself behind the stage. Never in the history of the world were generals and admirals, statesmen and politicians so sensitive to or concerned about public opinion as they are today. From a military point of view the situation of the allies at the present writing is far from reassuring. Germany and her associates have the advantage of interior lines of a single, dominating and purposeful leadership, while our five big nations, democracies or semi-democracies, are stretched in a huge ring with precarious connections on land with the submarine alert on the sea. Much of their territory is occupied. They did not seek the war. They still lack coordination and leadership in waging it. In some of these countries, at least, politicians and statesmen are so absorbed by administrative duties, by national, rather than international problems, by the effort to sustain themselves, that they have little time for allied strategy. Governments rise and fall. Familiar names and reputations are juggled about, like numbered balls and a shaker, come to the top to be submerged again in a new emut. There are conferences and conferences without end. Meanwhile a social format is at work. In Russia conspicuously. In Italy a little less so. In Germany and Austria undoubtedly. In France and England. And even in our own country. Once of the most radical of the world now become the most conservative. What form will the social revolution take? Will it be unbridled, unguided? Will it run through a long period of anarchy before the fermentation begun, shall it be completed, or shall it be handled in all the nations concerned by leaders who understand and sympathize with the evolutionary trend, who are capable of controlling it, of taking the necessary international steps of cooperation in order that it may become secure and mutually beneficial to all? This is an age of cooperation, and in this at least, if not in other matters, the United States of America is in an ideal position to assume the leadership. To a certain extent, one is not prepared to say how far the military and social crises are interdependent, and undoubtedly the military problem rests on the suppression of the submarine. If Germany continues to destroy shipping on the seas, if we are not able to supply our new armies and the allied nations with food and other things, the increasing social ferment will paralyze the military operations of the entente. The result of a German victory under such circumstances is impossible to predict, but the chances are certainly not worth running. In a sense, therefore, in a great sense, the situation is up to us in more ways than one, not only to supply wise democratic leadership, but to contribute material aid and brains in suppressing the submarine, and to build ships enough to keep Britain, France, and Italy from starving. We are looked upon by all the allies, and I believe justly, as being a disinterested nation, free from the age-long jealousies of Europe, and we can do much in bringing together and making more purposeful the various elements represented by the nations to whose aid we have come. I had not intended in these early papers to comment, but to confine myself to such of my experiences abroad as might prove interesting and somewhat illuminating, so much I cannot refrain from saying. It is a pleasure to praise where praises do, and too much cannot be said of the personnel of our naval service, something of which I can speak from intimate personal experience. In these days, in that part of London near the Admiralty, you may chance to run across a tall, erect, and broad-shouldered man in blue uniform with three stars on his collar, striding rapidly along the sidewalk, and sometimes, in his haste, cutting across a street. People smile at him, costar-mongers, clerks, and shoppers, and whisper among themselves, there goes the American Admiral, and he invariably smiles back at them, especially at the children. He is an admiral, every inch a seaman, commanding a devoted loyalty from his staff and from the young men who are scouring the seas with our destroyers. In France, as well as in England, the name Sems is a household word, and if he chose he might be faded every day of the week. He does not choose. He spends long hours instead in the quarters devoted to his administration in Grosvenor Gardens, or in traveling in France and Ireland, supervising the growing forces under his command. It may not be out of place to relate a characteristic story of Admiral Sems, whose career and our service, whose notable contributions to naval gunnery are too well known to need repetition. Several years ago, on a memorable trip to England, he was designated by the Admiral of Fleet to be present at a banquet given our sailors in the Guild Hall. Of course, the Lord Mayor called upon him for a speech, but Commander Sems insisted that a blue jacket should make the address. What, a blue jacket? exclaimed the Lord Mayor in astonishment. Do blue jackets make speeches in your country? Certainly they do, said Sems. Now there is a fine-looking man over there, a quartermaster on my ship. Let's call on him and see what he has to say. The quartermaster, duly summoned, rose with aplomb and delivered himself of a speech that made the hall ring, that formed the subject of a puzzled and amazed comet by the newspapers of the British capital. Nor was it ever divulged that Commander Sems had foreseen the occasion and had picked up the impressive quartermaster to make a reputation for oratory for the enlisted force. As a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to add that there were, and are, other non-commissioned officers and enlisted men in the service who could have acquitted themselves equally well. One has only to attend some of their theatrical performances to be assured of it. But to the European mind, our blue jacket is still something of an anomaly. He is a credit to our public schools, a fruit of our system of universal education. And he belongs to a service in which are reconciled, paradoxically, democracy, and discipline. One moment you may hear a blue jacket talking to an officer as man to man, and the next you will see him salute and obey and order implicitly. On a wet and smoky night I went from the London streets into the brightness and warmth of that refuge for American soldiers and sailors, the Eagle Hut, as the YMCA is called. The place was full, as usual, but my glance was at once attracted by three strapping, intelligent-looking men and sailor-blouses playing pool in a corner. I simply can't get used to the fact that people like that are ordinary sailors, said the lady in charge to me, as we leaned against the soda fountain. They are a continual pride and delight to us Americans here, always so boiling to help when there is anything to be done and so interesting to talk to. When I suggested that her ideas of the Navy must have been derived from Pinafore, she laughed. I can't imagine using a cat or nine tails on them, she exclaimed, and neither could I. I heard many similar comments. They are indubitably American, these sailors, youngsters, with the stamp of our environment on their features, keen and self-reliant. I am not speaking now only of those who have enlisted since the war, but of those others, largely from the small towns and villages of our Middle West, who, in the past dozen years or so, have been recruited by an interesting and scientific system which is the result of the genius of our naval recruiting officers. In the files at Washington may be seen, carefully tabulated, the several reasons for their enlisting. Some have friends in the service, others wish to perfect themselves in a trade to complete their education or see the world, our adventurous spirit. And they are seeing it. They are also engaged in the most exciting and adventurous sport, with the exception of aerial warfare ever devised or developed, that of hunting down in all weathers over the wide spaces of the Atlantic those modern sea monsters that prey upon the Allied shipping. For the super-dreadnought is reposing behind the nets, the battle-cruiser, ignominiously laying mines, and for the present at least, until some wizard shall invent a more effective method of annihilation. Victory over Germany depends primarily on the airplane and the destroyer. At three o'clock one morning I stood on the crowded deck of an Irish mailboat watching the full moon riding over Holy Head Mountain and shimmering on the Irish Sea. A few hours later, in the early light, I saw the green hills of Kalarney against a washed and clearing sky, the mud flats beside the railroad shining like purple enamel. All the forenoon and the train I traveled through a country bathed in translucent colors, a country of green pastures dotted over with white sheep, of banked hedges and perfect trees, of shadowy blue hills in the high distance. It reminded one of nothing so much as a stained glass window depicting some delectable land of plenty and peace. And it was Ireland. When at length I arrived at the station of the port for which I was bound, and which the censor does not permit me to name, I caught sight of the figure of our admiral on the platform. And the fact that I was in Ireland and not in Emanuel's land was brought home to me by the jolting drive we took on an outside car. The admiral perched precariously over one wheel and eye over the other. Winding up the hill by narrow roads, we reached the gates of the admiralty house. The house sits, as it were, in the emperor's seat of the amphitheater of the town, overlooking the panorama of a perfect harbour. A ring of emerald hills is broken by a little gap to seaward, and in the centre is a miniature emerald isle. The ships lying at anchor seemed like children's boats in a pond. To the right, where a river empties in, were scattered groups of queer, rakish craft, each with four slanting pipes and a tiny flag floating from her hal yards. A flag, as the binoculars revealed, of crimson bars and stars on a field of blue. These were our American destroyers. And in the midst of them, swinging to the tide, were the big motherships. We have sent over to nurse them when, after many days and nights of hazardous work at sea, they have brought their flock of transports and merchantmen safely to port. This mothering, by repairships, which are merely huge machine shops afloat. This trick of keeping destroyers tuned up and constantly ready for service has inspired much favourable comment from our allies in the British service. It is an instance of our national adaptability learned from an experience on long coasts where navy yards are not too handy. Few landsmen understand how delicate an instrument the destroyer is. A service so hazardous, demanding as it does such qualities as the ability to make instantaneous decisions and powers of mental and physical endurance. A service so irresistibly attractive to the young and adventurous produces a type of officer quite unmistakable. The day I arrived in London from France, seeking a characteristically English meal, I went to Simpson's in the Strand, where I found myself seated by the side of two very junior officers of the British navy. It appeared that they were celebrating what was left of a precious leaf. At a neighbouring table they spied two of our officers, almost equally youthful. Let's have them over, suggested one of the Britishers, and they were had over. He raised his glass. Here's how, as you say in America, he exclaimed, you destroyer chaps a certainly top hole. And then he added, with a blush, I say, I hope you don't think I'm cheekin' you. I saw them afloat. I saw them coming ashore in that Irish port, these young destroyer captains, after five wakeful nights at sea, weather-bitten, clear-eyed, trained down to the last ounce, one with whom I had played golf on the New England Hills, carried his clubs in his hand, and invited me to have a game with him. Another, who apologized for not being dressed at noon on Sunday, he had made the harbour at three that morning, was taking his racket out of its case, preparing to spend the afternoon on the hospitable courts of Admiralty House with a fellow captain and two British officers. He was ashamed of his late rising, but when it was suggested that some sleep was necessary, he explained that, on the trip, just ended, it wasn't only the submarines that kept him awake. When these craft get jumping about in a sea-way, you can't sleep, even if you want to. He who has had the experience with them knows the truth of this remark. Incidentally, though he did not mention it, this young captain was one of three who had been recommended by the British Admiral to his government from the Distinguished Service Order. The captain's report, which I read, is terse, and needs to be visualized. There is simply a statement of the latitude and longitude, the time of day, the fact that the wave of a periscope was sighted at 1500 yards by the quartermaster, first class on duty, general quarters rung, the executive officer signals full speed ahead, the commanding officer takes charge and maneuvers for position, and then something happens which the censor may be fussy about mentioning. At any rate, oil and other things rise to the surface of the sea, and the Germans are minus another submarine. The chief machinist mate, however, comes in for special mention. It seems that he ignored the latter and literally fell down the hatch, dislocating his shoulder but getting the throttle wide open within five seconds. In this town, facing the sea, is a street lined with quaint houses painted in yellows and browns and greens, and under each house the kind of a shop that brings back to the middle-aged delectable memories of extreme youth and nickels to spend. Up and down that street, on a bright Saturday afternoon, may be seen our middle-western jackies chumming with the British sailors and Tommies, or flirting with the Irish girls, or gazing through the little panes of the show windows, whose enterprising proprietors have imported from the States a popular brand of chewing gum to make us feel more at home. In one of these shops, where I went to choose a picture postcard, I caught sight of an artistic display of a delicacy I had thought long obsolete, the everlasting gumdrop. But when I produced a shilling, the shopkeeper shook his head. Sure, every day the sailors are wanting to buy them of me, but it's for ornament. I'm keeping them, he said. There's no more to be had till the war will be over. Eight years they're here now, and you wouldn't get a tooth in them, sir. So I wandered out again, joined the admiral, and inspected the Blue Jackets Club by the water's edge. Nothing one sees, perhaps, is so eloquent of the change that has taken place in the life and fabric of our navy. If you are an enlisted man here in this commodious group of buildings you can get a good shore meal and entertain your friends among the allies. You may sleep in a real bed instead of a hammock. You may play pool or see a moving picture show, or witness a vaudeville worthy of professionals, like that recently given in honor of the visit of the admiral of our Atlantic fleet. A band of thirty pieces furnished the music, and in the opinion of the Jackies one feature alone was lacking to make the entertainment a complete success. The new drop curtain had failed to arrive from London. I happened to be present when this curtain was first unrolled, and beheld spread out before me a most realistic presentation of little old New York, seen from the North River, towering against blue American skies. And though I have never been over-fond of New York, that curtain and that place gave me a sensation. Such is the life of our officers and sailors in these strange times that have descended upon us. Five to eight days of vigilance, of hardship and danger, in short, of war, and then three days of relaxation and enjoyment in clubs, on golf courses and tennis courts, barring the time it takes to clean ship and paint. There need be no fear that the war will be neglected. It is eminently safe to declare that our service will be true to its traditions. Part 3. Dog-it-does-it ought to be added to Die Edmond-droit and other devices of England. On a day when I was lunching with Mr. Lloyd George in the dining-room at Ten Downing Street that looks out over the horse-guards parade, the present premier, with a characteristic gesture, flung out his hand toward the portrait of a young man in the panel over the mantle. It was of the younger pit who had taken his meals and drunk his port in this very room and that other great war a hundred years ago. The news of Austerlitz brought to him during his illness is said to have killed him. But England, undismayed, fought on for a decade and won. Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens even heavier than pits, happily retains his health, and his is the indomitable spirit characteristic of the New Britain as well as of the old. For it is a New Britain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime minister of a transformed Britain, a Britain modernized and democratized. Like the Englishman who, when he first witnessed a performance of Uncle Tom's cabin, cried out, How very unlike the home life of our dear Queen! The American who lunches in Downing Street is inclined to exclaim how different from Lord North and Palmerston. We have, I fear, been too long accustomed to interpret Britain in terms of these two ministers and of what they represented to us of the rule of a George III or of an inimical aristocracy. Three out of the five men who formed the war cabinet of an empire are of what would once have been termed an humble origin. One was, if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia. General Smuts, unofficially associated with this council not many years ago, was in arms against Britain in South Africa, and the Prime Minister himself is the son of a Welsh tailor, a situation that should mollify the most exacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats. I listened to many speeches and explanations of the prejudice that existed in the mind of the died-in-the-wall American against England, and the reason most frequently given was the schoolbook reason. Our histories kept the feeling alive. Now, there is no doubt that the histories out of which we were taught made what psychologists would call action patterns or complexes in our brains, just as the schoolbooks have made similar complexes in the brains of German children and prepared them for this war. But after all, there was a certain animus behind the histories. Boiled down, the sentiment was one against the rule of a hereditary aristocracy, and our forefathers had it long before the separation took place. The Middle Western farmer has no prejudice against France, because France is a republic. The French are lovable and worthy of all the sympathy and affection we can give them. But Britain is still nominally and our patriot thinks of its people very much as the cowboy used to regard citizens of New York. They all lived on Fifth Avenue. For the cowboy, the residents of the dreary side streets simply did not exist. We have been want to think of all the British as aristocrats, while they have returned the compliment by visualizing all Americans as plutocrats, despite the fact that one-tenth of our population is said to own nine-tenths of all our wealth. But the war will change that. It is already changing it. To comprender, we have been soaked in the same common law literature and traditions of liberty, or of chaos, as one likes. Whether we all be of British origin or not, it is the mind that makes the true patriot, and there is no American so dead as not to feel a thrill when he first sets foot on British soil. Our school teachers felt it when they began to travel some twenty years ago, and the thousands of our soldiers who passed through on their way to France are feeling it today and writing home about it. Our soldiers and sailors are being cared for and entertained in England just as they would be cared for and entertained at home. So are their officers. Not long ago, one of the finest townhouses in London was donated by the owner for an American officers club. The funds were raised by contributions from British officers, and the club was inaugurated by the King and Queen and Admiral Sems. Hospitality and goodwill have gone much further than this. Anyone who knows London will understand the sacredness of those private squares surrounded by proprietary residences, where every tree and every blade of grass has been jealously guarded from intrusion for a century or more. And of all these squares, that of St. James is perhaps the most exclusive, and yet it is precisely in St. James there is to be built the first of those hotels designed primarily for the benefit of American officers, where they can get a good room for five shillings a night and breakfast at a reasonable price. One has only to sample the wartime prices of certain hostilities to appreciate the value of this. On the first of four unforgettable days, which I was a guest behind the British lines in France, the officer who was my guide, stopped the motor in the street of an old village beside a courtyard surrounded by ancient barns. There are some of your Americans, he remarked. I had recognized them not by their uniforms, but by their type. Despite their costumes, which were negligible, they were eloquent of college campuses and every one of our eight and forty states. Lean, thin-hipped, alert. The persistent rains had ceased. A dazzling sunlight made that beautiful countryside as bright as a colored picture postcard, but a riotous cold gale was blowing. Yet all wore cotton trousers that left their knees as bare as a Highlander's kilts. Above these some had on sweaters, others brown cocky tunics, from which I gathered that they belonged to the officer's training corps. They were drawn up on two lines facing each other with fixed bayonets, a grim look on their faces that would certainly have put any hunt to flight. Between the files stood an unmistakable, gippling sergeant with a crimson face and a bristling little chestnut moustache talking like a machine gun. Now then, not too lightly like, there's a bosh in front of you. Run him through. Now then. The lines surged forward. Out went the bayonets, first the long thrust and then the short, and then a man's gun was seized, and by a swift backward twist of the arm he was made helpless. Do you feel it? asked the officer as he turned to me. I did. Up and down your spine, he added, and I nodded. These chaps will do, he said. He had been through that terrible battle of the psalm, and he knew. So had the sergeant. Presently came a resting spell. One of the squad approached me, whom I recognized as a young man I had met in the Harvard Union. If you write about this, he said, just tell our people that we're going to take that sergeant home with us when the war is over. He's too good to lose. Part four. It is trite to observe that democracies are organized, if indeed they are organized at all, not for war, but for peace. And nowhere is this fact more apparent than in Britain. Even while the war is in progress, has that internal democratic process of evolution been going on, presaging profound changes in the social fabric. And these changes must be dealt with by statesmen, must be guided with one hand while the war is being prosecuted with the other. The task is colossal. In no previous war had the British given more striking proof of their inherent quality of doggedness. Greatness, as Confucius said, does not consist in never falling, but in rising every time you fall. The British speak with appalling frankness of their blunders. They are fighting, indeed, for the privilege of making blunders, since out of blunders arise new truths and discoveries not contemplated in German philosophy. America must now contribute what Britain and France, with all their energies and resources and determination, have hitherto been able to contribute. It must not be men, money, and material alone, but some quality that America has had in herself during her century and a half of independent self-realization. Mr. Chesterton, in writing about the American Revolution, observes that the real case for the colonists is that they felt that they could be something which England would not help them to be. It is, in fact, the only case for separation. What may be called the English tradition of democracy, which we inherit, grows through conflicts and differences through experiments and failures and successes toward an intellectualized unity. Experiments by states, experiments by individuals, a widely spread development and new contributions to the whole. Democracy has arrived at the stage when it is ceasing to be national and selfish. It must be said of England, in her treatment of her colonies subsequent to her revolution, that she took this greatest of all her national blunders to heart. As a result, Canada and Australia and New Zealand have sent their sons across the seas to fight for an empire that refrains from coercion. While, thanks to the policy of the British Liberals, which was the expression of the sentiment of the British nation, we have the spectacle today of a Botha and a Smuts fighting under the Union Jack. And how about Ireland? England has blundered there, and she admits it freely. There exist an England who cry out for the coercion of Ireland, and who at times have almost had their way. But to do this, of course, would be a surrender to the German contentions, an acknowledgement of the wisdom of the German methods against which she is protesting with all her might. Democracy, apparently, must blunder on until that question, too, is solved. Part 5 Many of the picturesque features of the older England that stir us by their beauty, and by the sense of stability and permanence they convey, will no doubt disappear or be transformed. I am thinking of the great estates, some of which date from Norman times. I am thinking of the aristocracy, which we Americans repudiated in order to set up a plutocracy instead. Let us hope that what is fine in it will be preserved, for there is much. By the theory of the British constitution, that unwritten but very real document, in return for honors, emoluments, and titles, the burden of government has hitherto been thrown on a class, nor can it be said that they have been untrue to their responsibility. That class developed a tradition and held fast to it, and they had a foreign policy that guided England through centuries of greatness. Democracy, too, must have a foreign policy, a tradition of service, a trained, if not hereditary group to guide it through troubled waters. Even in an intelligent community there must be leadership. And, if the world will no longer tolerate the old theories, a tribute may at least be paid to those who from conviction upheld them, who ruled perhaps in affluence, yet were also willing to toil, and, if need be, to die for the privilege. One Saturday afternoon, after watching for a while the boys playing fives and football, and romping over the green lawns of Eden, on my way to the headmaster's rooms, I paused in one of the ancient quads. My eye had been caught by a long column of names posted there, printed in heavy black letters. Itona non imimora. Every week many new names are added to those columns. On the walls of the chapel and in other quads and passages may be found tablets and inscriptions in memory of those who have died for England and the Empire in bygone wars. I am told that the proportion of Itonians of killed to wounded is greater than that of any other public school, which is saying a great deal. They go back across the channel and back again until their names appear on the last and highest honor list of the school and nation. In one of the hospitals I visited lay a wounded giant who had once been a truckman in a little town in Kent. Incidentally, in common with his neighbors, he had taken no interest in the war, which had seemed as remote to him as though he had lived in North Dakota. One day a zeppelin dropped a bomb on that village, whereupon the able-bodied males enlisted to a man and he with them. A subaltern in his company was an eaten boy. We just couldn't think of him as an officer and sir. In the camps he used to play with us like a child, and then we went to front, and one night when we was wet to the skin and the bulges was dropping shell all around us, we got the word. It was him leaped over the top first of all, shouting back at us to come on. He tumbled right back and died in my arms, he did, as I was climbing up after him. I shan't ever forget him. As you travel about in these days you become conscious among the people you meet of a certain bewilderment. A static world and a static order are dissolving, and in England that order was so static as to make the present spectacle the more surprising. Signs of the disintegration of the old social strata were not lacking. Indeed, in the earlier years of the 20th century when labour members and North Country radicals began to invade Parliament, but the cataclysm of this war has accelerated the process. In the muddy trenches of Flanders and France a new comradeship has sprung up between officers and Tommies, while time-honoured precedent has been broken by the necessity of giving thousands of commissions to men of merit who did not belong to the officer caste. At the Haymarket Theatre I saw a fashionable audience wildly applaud a play in which the local tailor becomes a major general and returns home to marry the daughter of the Lord of a mayor whose clothes he used to cut before the war. The Age of Great Adventure were the words used by Mr. H. G. Wells to describe this epic as we discussed it. At a large proportion of the descendants of those who have governed England for centuries are apparently imbued with the spirit of this adventure, even though it may spell the end of their exclusive rule. As significant of the social minglings of elements which in the past never exchanged ideas or points of view I shall describe a weekend party at a large country house of liberal complexion. On the Thames I have reason to believe it fairly typical. The owner of this estate holds an important position in the Foreign Office, and the hostess has, by her wit, an intelligent grasp of affairs made an enviable place for herself. On her right, at luncheon, on Sunday, was a labour leader, the head of one of the most powerful unions in Britain, and next to him sat a member of one of the oldest of England's titled families. The two were on terms of Christian names. The group included two or three women, a sculptor and an educator, another Foreign Office official who has made a reputation since the beginning of the war, and finally an employer of labour, the chairman of the biggest shipbuilding company in England. That a company presenting such a variety of interests should have been brought together in the fresco dining-room of that particular house is noteworthy. The thing could happen nowhere save in the England of today. At first the talk was general, ranging over a number of subjects from that of the personality of certain politicians to the conduct of the war and the disturbing problem raised by the conscientious objector. Little by little, however, the rest of us became silent to listen to a debate which had begun between the labour leader and the shipbuilder on the labour question. It is not my purpose here to record what they said, needless to add that they did not wholly agree, but they were much nearer to agreement than one would have thought possible. What was interesting was the open-mindedness with which on both sides the argument was conducted, and the fact that it could seriously take place then and there, for the subject of it had long been the supreme problem in the lives of both these men. Their feelings concerning it must at times have been tinged with bitterness, yet they spoke with courtesy and restraint, and though each maintained his contentions, he was quick to acknowledge a point made by the other. As one listened, one was led to hope that a happier day is perhaps at hand when such things as complexes and convictions will disappear. The types of these two were in striking contrast. The labour leader was stocky, chestnut-coloured, vital, possessing the bulldog quality of the British self-made man combined with a natural wit, sharpened in the arena that often startled the company into an appreciative laughter. The shipbuilder, on the other hand, was one of those spare and hard Englishmen whom no amount of business cares will induce to neglect the exercise of his body, the obligation at all times to keep fit, square-rigged, as it were, with a lean face and a wide moustache accentuating a square chin. Occasionally a gleam of humour, a ray of idealism, lighted his practical grey eyes. Each of these two had managed rather marvelously to triumph over early training by self-education, the labour leader who had had his first lessons in life from injustices and hard knocks, and the shipbuilder who had overcome the handicap of the public school tradition and of Manchester economics. Yes, titles and fortunes must go, remarked our hostess with a smile as she rose from the table and led the way out on the sunny stone-flagged terrace. Below us was a wide parterre whose flower beds, laid out by a celebrated landscape gardener in the days of the stewards, were filled with vegetables. The day was like our New England Indian summer, though the trees were still heavy with leaves, and a gossamer blue veil of haze stained the hill between which the shining river ran. If the social revolution or evolution takes place, one wonders what will become of this long cherished beauty. I venture to dwell upon one more experience of that weekend party. The Friday evening of my arrival I was met at the station, not by a limousine with a chauffeur and footman, but by a young woman with a taxi cab. One of the many reminders that a war is going on. London had been reeking in a green yellow fog, but here the mist was white, and through it I caught glimpses of the silhouettes of stately trees in a park, and presently saw the great house with its clock tower looming up before me. A fire was crackling in the hall, and before it my hostess was conversing amusedly with a well-known sculptor. A sculptor typical of the Renaissance times, large, full-blooded, with vigorous opinions on all sorts of matters. A lecturer is coming down from London to talk to the wounded in the amusement hall of the hospital. Our hostess informed us, and who both must come and speak too. The three of us got into the only motor of which the establishment now boasts, a little runabout using a minimum of petrol, and she guided us rapidly by devious roads through the fog until a blur of light proclaimed the presence of a building, one of some score or more built on the golf course by the British government. I have not space here too. Describe that hospital, which is one of the best in England, but it must be observed that its excellence and the happiness of its inmates are almost wholly due to the efforts of the lady who now conducted us across the stage of the amusement hall, where all the convalescents who could walk or who could be rolled thither in chairs were gathered. The lecturer had not arrived, but the lady of the manner seated herself at the speaker's table, singling out scotch wits in the audience. For whom she was more than a match, well, the sculptor and I looked on and grinned and resisted her blandishments to make speeches. When at last the lecturer came, he sat down informally on the table with one foot hanging in the air and grinned two at her bantering but complimentary introduction. It was then I discovered for the first time that he was one of the best educational experts of that interesting branch of the British government, the Department of Reconstruction, whose business it is to teach the convalescents the elements of social and political science. This was not to be a lecture, he told them, but a debate in which every man must take apart, and his first startling question was this. Why should Mr. Lloyd George, instead of getting five thousand pounds a year for his services as prime minister, receive any more than a common laborer? The question was a poser. The speaker folded his hands and, being down at them, he seemed fairly to radiate benignity. Now we must be afraid of him, just because he seems to be intelligent, declared our hostess. This Sally was greeted with spasmodic laughter. Her eyes flitted from bench to bench, yet met nothing save averted glances. Chock! Where are you, Chock? Why don't you speak up? You've never been down before. More laughter and craning of necks for the jocks. This appeared to be her generic name for the vitae. But the jocks remained abduately modest. The prolonged silence did not seem in the least painful to the lecturer, who thrust his hand in his pocket and continued to beam. He had learned how to wait. And at last his patience was rewarded. A middle-aged soldier, with a very serious matter, arose hesitatingly, with encouraging noises from his comrades. It's not Mr. Lloyd George I'm worrying about, sir, he said. All I want is enough for the Mrs. and me. I had trouble to get that before the wall. Why did you have trouble? inquired the lecturer, mildly. The wages was too low. And why were the wages too low? You got me there, I hadn't thought. But isn't it your business as a voter to think, as the lecturer? That's why the government is sending me here, to start you thinking, to remind you that it is you soldiers who will have to take charge of this country and run it after the war is over. And you won't be able to do that unless you think and think straight. We've never been taught to think, was the illuminating reply. And if we do think, we've never been educated to express ourselves, same as you. Shouted another man, in whom excitement had overcome timidity. I'm here to help you educate yourselves, said the lecturer. But first, let's hear any ideas you may have on the question I asked you. There turned out to be plenty of ideas, after all, an opinion was ventured that Mr. Lloyd George served the nation, not for money, but from public spirit. A conservative insisted that ability should be rewarded and rewarded well, whereupon ensued one of the most enlightening discussions, not only as a revelation of intelligence, but of complexes and obsessions pervading many of the minds in whose power lies the ultimate control of democracies. One, for instance, declared that if every man went to church proper of a Sunday and minded his own business, the country would get along well enough. He was evidently of the opinion that there was too much thinking and not enough of what he would have termed religion. Gradually the audience split up into liberals and conservatives, and the liberals noticeably were the younger men who had had the advantages of better board schools, who had formed fewer complexes, and had had less time in which to get them set. Of these a Canadian made a plea for the American system of universal education, whereupon a combative Stan Petter declared that every man wasn't fit to be educated, that the American plan made only for discontent. Look at them, he exclaimed, then never satisfied to stay in their places. This provoked laughter, but it was too much for the sculptor, and for me. We both broke our vows and made speeches in favor of equality and mental opportunity, while the lecturer looked on and smiled. Mr. Lloyd George and his salary were forgotten. By some subtle art of the chairman the debate had been guided to the very point where he had from the first intended to guide it to the burning question of our day. Education is the true foundation of democracy. Perhaps, after all, this may be our American contribution to the world's advance. As we walked homeward through the fog, I talked to him of Professor Dewey's work and its results, while he explained to me the methods of the Reconstruction Department. Out of every audience like that we get a group and form a class, he said. They're always a bit backward at first, just as they were tonight, but they grew very keen. We have a great many classes already started, and we see to it that they are provided with textbooks and teachers. Oh no, it's not propaganda, he added, in answer to my query. All we do is to try to give them the facts in such a way as to make them able to draw their own conclusions and join any political party that they choose, just so they join one intelligently. I must add that before Sunday was over he had organized his class and arranged for their future instruction. End of chapter two.