Читать книгу A Passing World - Marie Belloc Lowndes - Страница 5

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ARMÉE DE TERRE ET ARMÉE DE MER
ORDRE
DE MOBILISATION GÉNŔALE
—————
Par déscret du Président de la République, la mobilisation des armées de terre at de mer est ordonnée, ainsi dew la réquisition des animaux, voiture et harnais nécessaires au complément de ces armées.
Le premier jour de la mobilisation est le Dimanche Deux Août 1914
—————
Tout Français soumis aux obligations militaires doit, sous peine d'être puni avec toute la rigueur des lois, obéir aus prescriptions du FASCICULE DE MOBILISATION (pages coloriées placées dans son livret).
Sont visés par le présent ordre TOUS LES HOMMES non présents sous les Drapeaus et appartenant:
1° à l'ARMÉE DE TERRE y compris les TROUPES COLONIALES et les hommes des SERVICES AUXILIAIRES;
2° à l'ARMÉE DE MER y compris les INSCRITS MARITIMES et les ARMURIERS de la MARINE.
—————
Les Autorités civiles et militaires sont responsable de l'exécution du présent décret.
Le Ministre de la Guerre		Le Ministre de la Marine
(seal)		(seal)

Before he left for the Front again, my mother sent Charles a letter, which I read long afterwards, telling him what she knew would interest him concerning Slindon, the village in Sussex where he had spent a good deal of his childhood. She ended with the words, "You are rarely out of my thoughts. This little house seems to me full of you at every age, and you know I remain, always Your loving Granny."

She felt fearfully anxious when her two grandsons were both fighting and she was deeply moved by the death of my brother's eldest son, Louis Belloc, in 1918. She felt for him a special affection, as he had been named after his grandfather. The memory of the husband she had lost after five years filled with happiness was constantly in her mind.

In the December of 1918, after my son had come back from France, where he had nearly died from a form of Russian 'flu caught in a German dug-out the day of the Armistice, she wrote a letter to be given him on New Year's Day, in which, with her characteristic simplicity, she wrote, "I thank God, my dear, your life has been spared".

She was not in any way deaf and used occasionally, in her Sussex garden, to hear the guns in France. She wrote in one of her letters to me, "They seem to bring the War nearer home. How well I remember seeing the gun carriages go by our house in the early August of 1870 just after your brother's birth."

She took the closest interest in the young men who had joined the Army from Slindon. When she heard a rumour in August 1915 that approaches had been made separately to France and England on the part of Germany, she expressed a strong hope that no peace offer would be accepted unless it meant total victory. The only time she seemed anxious and disturbed was during the three weeks my brother spent with the French Army. He had told her he hoped to be in the French trenches for a few days; she thought this foolhardy and also wrong on his part.

August 5th, 1915, was to be one of the very few times in my life that I was not with my mother on my birthday. She wrote me a touching letter, telling me various incidents connected with my birth, and she ended her letter, "When you appeared, it was an occasion for deep rejoicing. Hilaire, when he was born, was very ugly, whereas you were as lovely as the dawn. How well I remember the wonderful cradle given you by your Aunt Louise, which the brutal Prussians made away with." In the same birthday letter, she gave a vivid sketch of Lady Sarah Lennox, and of how Horace Walpole had written from Goodwood, saying that she had an incommunicable charm. My mother had a cult for Lady Sarah, and in this same letter she sent me the following lines, apropos of a certain statue in Trafalgar Square:

Napier, who in the bright light stand,

Of all the triumphs that you won,

Proclaim to all the listening land

That you were Lady Sarah's son.

She read again and again the letters of Lady Sarah and her friends. I remember at Goodwood her once surprising a man who was with us, by observing that it always gave her pleasure to be present at those races because she felt it probable that Lady Sarah as a child had run across the strip of down where we were then standing.

So unexpected was the outbreak of war that one of the English difficulties in the summer of 1914 was getting money for the Secret Service. All London was raked for French gold and notes; yet the sum required was only ten thousand pounds. Any amount, however small, was welcome. I heard of one well-known peer who kept four thousand pounds in francs, as he wished to be always ready to go to France at a moment's notice. He gave them at once to the Government. Six weeks before the war, the Germans had managed to extract three hundred millions sterling from British bankers, by offering a little more interest than could be got in London.

During the early months of the war, my brother, Hilaire Belloc, made many determined efforts to join the British or French Army as a liaison officer. His remarkable knowledge of French military terms (owing to his having served in the French Army in his early youth) would have been of considerable value to the British General Headquarters; but the fact that he had stood as an Independent Liberal went against him with the then Government. He twice prepared his kit, and twice was told that he could not leave England. At last de guerre lasse, to use an old French expression, he began writing articles on the war, and there came a joyful day when he called on me to say he had had a very good offer of work on a paper called Land and Water. He often came in to see me for a few moments, and I remember his telling me one morning that the war just started would be the first of many wars, and not as the people about me said, "the war to end war".

I have a note of something he told me which makes it clear that he foresaw with startling clarity what was to happen in 1939-1945. He always believed that the Allies would win the first war, but he was convinced that Germany would fight in due course a war of revenge.

Before the summer of 1914, few Englishwomen went to France except to buy clothes in Paris, or to escape from the cold to the Riviera, but a great number of people—in fact all those who could afford to do so—sent their young daughters to be what was called "finished" in Germany. This not only led in some cases to Anglo-German marriages, which were on the whole happy and successful, it also caused many young people in this country to have a most affectionate feeling for Germany. This being so, the outbreak of war in 1914 seemed to stun many of my friends.

For some time no one read anything except the war news. This state of things made me feel very anxious, but I told no one of my anxiety except my mother. To her I wrote in that first September:

"No one is now reading fiction, and my literary agent warns me that he doubts whether my publisher will be able to carry out the contract he made with me. Thus I am far more anxious about money than I am about the War. I also feel that when England begins paying for victory, all those who have money, or who earn money, will be in a very bad way, and no one will think of buying books."

How amazed, and oh, how relieved I should have been, to learn that fairly soon reading would become the principal diversion of the British public, and that my war novels would all do well.

My brother came to see me one morning at eight o'clock. We had a long talk, and he told me that he was convinced no invasion would take place. He said it would be easy for the Germans to make a landing, as the British coast-line is so long. "But," he exclaimed, "once here, how could they get away again?"

I have often felt, since that far-off day, that it was indeed unfortunate no landing on the English coast was attempted by the Germans during the first World War. Had such an attempt been made, I feel sure the war of 1939-1945 would not have taken place. Even a small landing would have roused England to the German peril, and what would then have happened might have halted Hitler in 1939. As it was, there was very little anti-German feeling—I heard, to my indignation, far more criticism of the French than of the Germans.

I wrote to my mother in the autumn of 1914:

"London has become very melancholy. The mourning worn by relations of the soldiers who have been killed is beginning to show in the streets, and strikes a tragic note. Everything is going to be terribly dear. I got in a case of China tea this morning at the old price, and in the afternoon it went up twopence a pound, so now I wish I had got in two cases. I am being offered more work, but it is to be very badly paid."

Our children stayed on in Epsom, as my husband believed a bombing-raid on London might take place any night. After spending a week-end out of town I noted:

"There is a regular panic in Epsom, trenches being dug, and so on. But I am not in the least nervous. How can the Germans land while the British fleet is in being? Yet it is true that troops just starting for France are being kept back. Lord Roberts believes in a possible invasion, Kitchener and Asquith do not."

As time went on, the whole of my working income stopped. I did, however, write a short life of Lord Kitchener, for which I received fifty-five pounds. Then I suddenly thought of writing a war book for children, to be called Told in Gallant Deeds. For that book I received an advance of a hundred and fifty pounds from my kind friend, Bertram Christian, of Nisbet's. The gallant deeds described were not only those of the Allies, for I put in a number of gallant deeds performed by the Germans. I went on receiving letters about this book for years, and from all over the world.

Gradually the food situation in London became serious, for Germany intended to starve England out. But I could regard myself as more fortunate than most people in the winter of 1914-1915. For some years I had had six pounds of butter posted to me each week from Ireland, and the parcels went on arriving long after butter had vanished from London, and I was able to give some away. But at last the parcels stopped altogether.

There were two households within a short walk of our house in Westminster where I was always welcome. The one was that of Lord Haldane, in Queen Anne's Gate, and the other, in Smith Square, close to Barton Street, belonged to the Reginald McKennas. The men and women I met in those two houses were very different, though equally interesting to me, as they were almost all connected with the Government, the War Office, or the Admiralty.

I had a standing invitation to dinner at 48 Lennox Gardens, where lived the Judge, Sir Edward Ridley, and his wife. She was my closest friend for exactly forty years. Their elder son was in the Grenadier Guards, and when he was on leave I saw him constantly, and so heard what to me were extraordinarily exciting accounts of what life was like on the Western Front. Certain of my friends much disliked what they called "war talk", but it was the only talk I wished to hear. Edward Ridley was the first British officer I had the privilege of knowing really well, and I was exceedingly fond of him.

I was also in constant correspondence with three men at the Front, a general, a major, and a captain. I used to send them books and newspapers.

A friend of mine, Guy Ridley, who was a lawyer, was doing important work at Scotland Yard. It was fortunate for me he was there, for a strange misfortune befell me in 1915, while I was writing a spy story, Good Old Anna. The plot of the novel had as central figure a dear old German woman who had been a nurse in England for many years, and had stayed on with her nursling and the nursling's mother as housekeeper, and, without knowing it, was used by the German spy service. In due course she was asked to keep a parcel for her German friends, and in that parcel was a bomb.

I took considerable trouble to find out what a bomb was made of, and I described the process in my story. I was bringing the manuscript from Epsom to London, and because I was very tired, I left it on the rack of a railway carriage. There it had been found, and sent to Scotland Yard. An official called on me, and said that he did not think the book could be published until after the war, as I described the making of a bomb. When the war was over, the story would have been of little interest; I therefore appealed to Guy Ridley, and I went to see Sir Basil Thomson at Scotland Yard. He was very kind, and, having read the passage in question, told me he thought it was of no consequence.

Good Old Anna was the first real success I had ever had. It was for a time refused in America as it was thought un-neutral, but in the end it did appear there, and did very well. I wrote another war story I far preferred, called Lilla; A Part of Her Life, in which the hero was drowned with Lord Kitchener in the Hampshire.

All sorts of curious tales were being told concerning people who had been caught in Germany at the outbreak of war. Many Englishwomen were well treated by the Germans. This was especially the case with my friend Alice Hughes, the noted photographer. In her unhappiness after her father's death, she had sold her studio in London, undertaking not to start again within a thousand miles. She was warmly invited by a group of people attached to the Court in Berlin to settle in Germany, and she had just arrived there in the spring of 1914. When war began, several ladies of the German nobility at once came to see what they could do for her, and they succeeded in getting her back to England.

Among the stories going the rounds was one concerning a telegram sent by a Scotch peer who was in Germany at the outbreak of war. It was to his wife, and ran as follows, "To think that in a week I shall have left this——" and he signed the telegram with the initial "L", as if his name were "Leopold" or "Lancelot".

I felt intensely interested as to what was going on in the German capital, and a friend of mine, knowing this, asked me to meet an American who had just come from Berlin. He was obviously very pro-German, and spoke to me with great anger about the possibility of Germany being starved out by the British blockade.

Some time in the August of 1914, two women, neither of whom knew the other, came to see me in order to ask (perhaps owing to my known friendship with Haldane, then Minister for War) whether I could help, in one case a dearly loved husband, in the other an adored brother, to be sent to the Front. In each case the request struck me—I can truly say dumb with surprise. In those days society, using the word in its narrowest sense, still appeared to live in the atmosphere of the Boer War. There had been tragic losses in South Africa, but it had not been war in the sense in which I understood the term, and I felt distressed and dismayed when some friend would speak to me exultantly of her son's "luck" in having been sent to the Front two or three weeks earlier than he had expected to be. That he would probably be killed or, to my mind worse, seriously injured, did not seem to occur to her.

As I look back, I am astonished at the calmness shown, and the lack of anxiety felt, in the London of that first war summer. One of the most intelligent soldiers I knew was convinced that the fighting would be over within three months. Portugal, England's friend, was the only country which steadfastly believed in her final victory. Every neutral was convinced that at the best, from the British point of view, the war would end in a "draw".

Again and again, during the winter of 1914-1915, I quoted in my letters well-known men and women who believed the war would soon be over. Sometimes a year was mentioned, sometimes two years, but never longer than three years.

The only soldier I met now and again who foresaw what was going to happen I foolishly thought a pessimist. This was Richard Pope-Hennessy. He was a fine soldier, and never doubted that in the end Germany would be defeated. I noted in the March of 1915 that he estimated that between the coming Easter and October, fifty thousand British officers and men would be killed and wounded. When I asked him if he believed the Allied armies would ever reach German soil, he replied, "Yes, they will certainly do so. For one thing, nothing else would be of any lasting good."

The personality of the German Emperor was often discussed in my presence, and I met now and again certain people who had known William the Second really well, and who had been brought into touch with him during his visits to England. They almost all liked him, and thought him extremely clever.

In the autumn of 1914 I met Sir Frank Lascelles in the house of his sister, Lady Edward Cavendish. Sir Frank had been British Ambassador in Berlin, and was a most agreeable man, and a really brilliant diplomat. Of all the people I met during that winter he was almost alone in the belief that the war would go on for a long time. On one occasion, when I was sitting next to him at dinner, he spoke to me with great frankness. He said he had liked the Germans, and had believed in their good intentions towards England. He added that he had proved this belief by founding an Anglo-German friendship society. But what was of intense interest to me at the time, and for the matter of that still is, was the fact that Sir Frank Lascelles, who had been in Germany and had access to Court circles, regarded William the Second as largely, if not entirely, responsible for the outbreak of the war.

Sir Frank had known the Emperor intimately, and he had gradually become convinced that, from boyhood, William the Second had been secretly and passionately anxious to repeat what he regarded as the glorious triumphs of 1870-1871. It was, however, with France he intended to go to war. He had no wish to fight with England.

But, as is unfortunately the case with almost all royal personages, William the Second was surrounded by men who only told him what he wished to be told. Thus, in the early summer of 1914, he had been convinced by those about him that the Irish imbroglio would make it impossible for England to fight. Another of his theories was that Englishmen would only embark on a war to defend England. He further misconceived the character of his mother's country to so great an extent that he actually believed—he told this to someone I knew—that the British had become at once so soft and so over-civilized that they would have no stomach for fighting in Europe.

In my view it must be admitted that William the Second was a remarkable man. This was shown by the varying opinions of him expressed by people who had known him well. What impressed me was that with one exception—an Englishwoman—they neither liked nor respected him. The Englishmen who met him regarded him as unpleasantly arrogant, and they also thought him easily deceived by the camarilla among whom he lived, moved, and had his being.

It has been often said that William the Second had a kind of jealous love of England, and a wish—directly inherited from his mother—that the Germans should become like the British, or rather, like those British of whom he approved, and whose qualities he admired. Yet the only man I have met who thoroughly liked and admired the German Emperor was an American named Bigelow. I used to see this gentleman in the house of Mrs. George Prothero. Mr. Prothero had for many years edited the Quarterly Review, and I remember his telling me, with a smile, that among his most assiduous readers had been William the Second.

George and Rowland Prothero (afterwards Lord Ernle) had an age-long intimacy with the royal family, owing to the fact that their father had been the Rector of Whippingham, close to Osborne House, in the Isle of Wight. As was natural, the children at the Rectory and Queen Victoria's children at Osborne were constantly—indeed daily—together. With one member of that family, the Empress Frederick remained on terms of intimate friendship, and I believe it to be true that after her marriage he and she wrote to each other every week.

It was suggested to me early in this century that I should write a Life of the Empress Frederick. To many Englishmen and Englishwomen of her generation she remained a vivid and admired figure, and when the Life of her father, the Prince Consort, was published, this feeling became intensified. Certain letters in that Life, and letters alone do not lie, make it plain she had been a really remarkable woman.

I agreed to write this royal biography, if I was allowed to omit my name. I was already becoming known as a novelist, and I thought, and I still think, it would have injured me to be known as having written something so different from the sort of novels I was writing. There were still living, at the time I wrote the book, a considerable number of English people who had known the Empress well, and certain among them, notably Lord Ernle and Lady Edward Cavendish, told me interesting and authentic facts concerning her life. The Empress had a singular character. I say singular, because she was certainly quite unlike any other woman of royal blood who ever lived. Apart from that fact, she was passionately interested in literature and in art, also, in a lesser measure, in religion. She read every English book—whether it was a novel or a work of philosophy—she had reason to think worth reading. To the annoyance of Queen Victoria, she insisted, during one of her visits to England, on being taken to see George Eliot.

The Empress Frederick's most intimate friend from girlhood was Lady Ponsonby, a granddaughter of the distinguished statesman, Sir George Grey. After having been for a short time a Maid of Honour, she had married Colonel Ponsonby, one of the secretaries of the Prince Consort. Ponsonby was not only a delightful, but also a highly intelligent, man, with an original mind. This is proved by his letters which were published long after his death by his son, the late Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, who became one of the first Socialist peers. After sitting next to Lord Ponsonby at dinner, I wrote a long account of our talk to my mother. That he should be a Liberal was natural, but he was in some ways a Red, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his lifelong association with the Court. As a child he had been one of Queen Victoria's pages, and he was once photographed with the Queen. In this photograph he looks a very cross little boy.

All through the years of 1914-1918, the luncheon club known as the Thirty Club, to which I belonged, met during two-thirds of each year. As the women who were members of the club were from every section of the London world, the talk was keenly interesting, and covered every kind of subject. I also heard a great deal of news there, and many happenings which were not allowed to be made public were revealed during the luncheons, as also what the French call les petits côtés de l'histoire.

Before the first year of the war was over, I used to meet fairly frequently a remarkable man called Leverton Harris. He had a singularly beautiful wife, and they both, most unfairly, got into trouble owing to their supposed kindness to German officer prisoners. This kindness only took the form of sending fruit to a young Austrian who was a vegetarian. I met in the Leverton Harris's house many Americans going to, and coming from, Germany. These gentlemen, unlike Colonel House, felt free to say exactly what they had seen and heard, so to my mind were far more worth listening to than was their then famous fellow-countryman.

I heard of a curious story having been told by an American diplomat. He had occasion to visit a prison camp of German officers. Their spokesman complained bitterly of everything, and at last the visitor said to him, "Will you give me an example of one particular matter you wish put right?" The German exclaimed, "Whereas in Germany officers who are prisoners of war can buy anything they like at the canteen, in our canteen there is no pomade for our hair, or bay rum for use after shaving."

Many strange and sometimes terrible stories were told during the war. One such story made a great impression upon me. An Englishman was shipwrecked, and taken prisoner on the way home. He had refused to have the diplomatic bags in his charge weighted down, though according to my informant a three-pound weight attached to each of the bags would have caused them to sink. As it was, various papers floated, and were captured by the Germans, who, with natural delight, published the secret information they contained. There was a strong rumour which I remember hoping with all my heart was false, that among the other secrets which the bags had contained, were the names of all the British agents in a certain neutral country. News from them ceased abruptly, though it was believed that even from prison they could have got news through.

A great deal of information came through from German sources, and a man in the diplomatic service who knew Germany well told me that early in the war the German Government were convinced the French Government was about to surrender. Had that been true such easy terms would have been offered to London that it was confidently thought in Berlin a British surrender would at once follow.

The greatest difference between the war of 1914-1918 and that of 1939-1945 was the comparatively small part played in the air during the first World War. Yet in 1914 I wrote, "A German staff officer who has been taken prisoner by the French, declared that the Air Service of his country is being tremendously developed, and that it is hoped in Berlin that ten thousand British civilians will be killed by bombing from the air".

It became the fashion, for the obvious reason that there were so few men left in England, for women who could afford it to give what were called "ladies' dinner-parties". After having been at one of these dinners I noted:

"I was told of a most exciting diary kept by a woman who died recently and which was going to be published. This was mentioned in the hearing of Princess Christian. The Princess said the lady had been her dearest friend, and she would like to see the proofs. She slashed them about so much that every good story was deleted, as was also a report of a long and interesting talk which King Edward, as Prince of Wales, had had with a friend concerning Germany. As this conversation had taken place years ago, during the Danish war, there was nothing to which any reasonable person could have objected. All it proved was the prescience of the then Prince of Wales, who had told his informant valuable data concerning Germany's aims and ambitions."

As time went on I felt indignant at the bitter feeling which was then being shown concerning Lord Haldane. A striking example concerned the plaintiff in an action, who, originally named Haldenstein, had altered his name to Haldane. The Judge persisted in calling the man "Haldenstein". At last his Counsel leaned forward, and whispered, "My Lord, Mr. Haldane has dropped the 'stein'," whereupon Mr. Justice Darling, quick as lightning, replied, "I suppose the Lord Chancellor has picked it up."

There was very little ill-feeling against Germany among the women I knew. I wrote:

"Now and again one hears something greatly to the credit of the Germans. A friend of mine has a distant German cousin who lives in Hamburg. The German was most kind in secretly helping a young English clergyman to get away—though they were then interning all Englishmen of military age. This clergyman had gone over to Germany the last week of July 1914, to take part in a tennis tournament. According to him there were thousands of first-line troops ready to embark for an attack on England. He saw them being loaded on to transports on three different occasions, yet the transports never put out to sea."

During those war years I was always anxious to meet anyone who had news of the state of Germany. I met one man who showed me a letter he had received from Holland. It was written in English, and described a dinner at the Adlon, the Ritz of Berlin. A friend of the writer had sat down to a beautifully arranged table, where there was actually gold plate, and some fine flowers. There were five courses, but each consisted of something to eat about the size of a walnut. The same man had believed in an inconclusive peace, but now felt convinced that if the Allies remained united, they were certain of victory.

I heard of a letter written by the Crown Prince of Sweden. He stayed in Berlin when he was on his way back from the funeral of the old Austrian Emperor. He was a first cousin of the German Emperor, and stayed in one of the royal palaces. His breakfast was composed entirely of substitutes. He was given a sham egg, sham butter, even—according to him—sham bread.