Frank Fox

“ In pre-war days an Australian in England might have felt himself a little of the barbarian in so smooth a comity, where people loved moderately and hated very moderately; walked always by paths; were somewhat ashamed of their own merits and suavely tolerant of others' demerits; and were nervous of allowing patriotism to become infected with the sin of pride. But England at war understood them better—the Anzacs, the young of the British. The young of the British, not of the English only, though that is the master element of the breed. ”

“ I do not think an Empire managed on the old British lines could survive another great shock. It is charming to be so equable and good-tempered and to love your enemy as yourself and to do good to those who hate you. But it brings a nation too close to the fate which overcame the Peruvians under the Incas (they were a charmingly equable and good-tempered and confiding race) . Yet those who hope for an Empire managed on Canadian lines, or on Australian lines, leave me cold. ”

“ Very often in the history of war a "ragged Army" has done wonders, and the praise of those wonders has led to some minds confusing raggedness with heroism, thinking that desperate impoverishment is a good thing for an Army. It might have been sometimes in the old days, when the sack of the enemy's country was the reward of victory and [117] it was a case of fight or perish. In modern times it is a sound principle of warfare that the better an Army is supplied with the means of warfare the less will be the cost of life in achieving its purpose. ”

“ I have seen batches of recruits for the old army just when they joined, and they looked usually rather forlorn—men accustomed to be unemployed, men at a loose end, disappointed men, with just a sprinkling of eager men taking to the soldier's life for the love of it. Only after three months of the wholesome life, the wholesome food, the kindly discipline of the Army, would they fairly compare in physique, manhood, and intelligence with the recruits of the New Armies. ”

“ On the front edge of each ditch the Eyes are thick in line; farther back, in every possible post of observation, are groups of Eyes, and Eyes soar up into the air now and again to stare into the secrets concealed on the other side. There are Eyes of infantry, Eyes of artillery, Eyes of airmen. The scrutiny never pauses for an instant. Let an Eye blink a moment and it may mean catastrophe, a stealthy rush on a trench or a flood of poisoning [7] gas. The great dark gutter stretching across Belgium and France was fringed with staring Eyes ”

“ British Army reached the highest standard of the campaign.
In this matter the horse markets of Europe spoke after the Armistice with no uncertain voice. When the British Army was disposing of its superfluous horses, everybody rushed to buy them. Prices touched a truly extraordinary level. The unhappy taxpayer amid all his burdens saw a golden stream flowing into the Treasury, because his Army was a humane, conscientious, and skilful horsemaster. The military advantage to transport through keeping the Army's animals fit and well is so obvious that it need not be dwelt upon. ”

“ A well-marked stream coming to join the flood of New Army recruits was that of British men from overseas. The British blood is strangely responsive to the magic of the seas. Send a careless young Englishman abroad to Australia, South Africa, or to some foreign land such as China or the Argentine, and the salt air of the seas as he traverses them seems to set tingling in his blood a new keenness of Imperial pride. ”

“ A modern industry depends as much almost on capital as on labour. Capital was withdrawn from production and devoted to destruction at an appalling rate. That meant that industry was starved of machinery, of communications, of nutriment generally. Like a human body deprived of proper nourishment, it began to suffer from debility. Every neglect to replace machinery, to repair roads or to open up necessary new roads, every draft, too, made on the administrative staff, is just as much a weakening of an industry as the direct loss of hand workers. ”

“ Is not the British Empire all right? And is not the New Army a sort of Representative Assembly of the British Empire?
G.H.Q. in 1918 saw clearly enough that never before in the history of any Empire was such splendid raw material for an Army gathered together as in Great Britain in 1914-1918. There were things to offend dainty tastes in the recruiting campaign of which the New Armies [171] were the harvest. But nothing can spoil the value of the result, that many hundreds of thousands of the best men who ever served in an Army joined the colours. ”

“ With summer and autumn came new colours, but always splendour and glow and movement. The country around carried that wide variety of crops in which the French peasant's thrifty and careful culture delights. There were beans and oats and wheat and corn and flax and mustard and bits of pasturage, and of fodder crops, weaving their many colours [49] into a delightful carpet pattern which changed with every day of the year and almost with every hour of the day. ”

“ Yet we ate, drank, slept, played a little and talked, very much as if we were workers in some commercial house, directing coffee from a plantation to a warehouse and then to a breakfast table, instead of dealing in blood and tears, drawing without stint on human life and human hope so that the idea of Right and Liberty might be saved in the world. ”

“ Of course it is difficult for those who are not accustomed to give close attention to the problems of production to appreciate how deeply a world war of four years' duration affects every industry; and especially so when on one side the war was waged on the principle of destroying everything that could be got at, whether it was military or civil property, whether it was an enemy or a neutral possession. ”

“ We agree that after the war, the British Empire will have more of a general likeness. Colonial ideas will have penetrated more strongly into the Mother Country. British ideas will have permeated the Colonial restlessness and impatience. What an ideal race the [196] British could be with a constant coming and going from the Mother's home to the children's houses; an exchange of good grey wisdom with eager enthusiasm, the equable spirit of green and cloudy England mingling with the ardency of the Dominions. ”

“ The growth shows as marvellous, and especially so to those who understand how an army in the field is comparable to an iceberg [12] at sea, of which the greater part is unseen. For every rifleman in the trenches and gunner in the gun-pits there are at least three other people working to keep him supplied with food, clothing, ammunition, and on communications. So an Army's growth demands a growth behind the line three times as great as that in the line. And this growth is not merely a matter of the multiplication of riflemen and gunners and auxiliaries, a heaping up of men. ”

“ But whether it was just a guess or a bit of far-seeing on the part of Sir Travers Clarke, that G.H.Q. Motor Lorry Reserve had been built up; and it was available to rush into the breach when the railways could not face the task of supply.
Very nobly the Motor Transport—including that reserve—did its duty. There were drivers who held the wheel for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and were lifted from their seats fainting or asleep; a few—who carried on until no longer able to see through their bloodshot and torturing eyes—ran their cars into trees or walls or ditches. ”

“ Painters from all over the world used to come to Montreuil to attempt to put on canvas the glow of its summer scenes, the wild grandeur of its winters. No day was without its special beauty, and the beauty was ever renewed afresh. ”

“ In the sum the story of the British Army horse in the Great War is a thrilling one. Our Home horse-lovers opened the chapter gloriously. The British Navy followed up by making it possible to transport remounts from all parts of the world. Then the men of the Old Army and of the New Armies showed what grit and resource and kindness could do. So we rode home to victory.
The record of the animals of the B.E.F. should do something to dissipate the marked prejudice against the mule in Great Britain. People here do not understand its virtues as a draught animal. ”

“ The Anzac striding—or limping—along with rakish hat and challenging glance, for the first time brought Australasia actually home to the Mother Country. These Australasians, the men of the Bush, were as remarkable, as significant almost, as the Dacians in the army of another Imperial nation two thousand years ago. Easily can they be picked out. They walk the streets with a slightly obvious swagger. When they are awed a little, it is a point of honour not to show it. When they are critical a little, it peeps out. ”

“ At the time Germany was drawing troops and guns from the Russian Front and pouring them on to our Front in wholesale fashion. Both France and Great Britain had had to send Armies to the help of Italy. Our Battle of Passchendaele was not exactly flourishing. To undertake a new battle was the last development the enemy expected of us; and to do what is absolutely unexpected is to do the big thing in war. The British command collected an Army ostensibly for Italy, made a great secret assemblage of Tanks, and suddenly attacked the Germans in the strongest part of their Hindenburg line. ”

“ Besides fighting men it had doctors, vets., sanitary engineers, mechanics of all kinds, chemists, electricians. Behind the line the Division's supports, its munition and clothing factories, its food providers, had to be organised just as carefully.
Nothing can be made without making mistakes, and in the carrying out of this giant task of making the Army of the British Empire there were many mistakes of detail. It is in the nature of the human mind to see such mistakes in high relief, as the human eye sees small patches of stone stand out from a vast field of snow. ”

“ Then when the grim shadow of the great American preparation was already over the German despotism, and the greatest single white nation of the world was seen preparing its mighty strength to the full, the German people were asked to take comfort from yet another delusion, that the American nation would prove to be a "quitter," that it would be frightened off the field by the German offensive of the Spring of 1918. ”

“ Judge the New Army by the standard of the "Regulars."
The soldiers of the first Expeditionary Force (the "Regulars," the men who, despite the booming of certain special units, did the greater part of the heroic work of Lord French's command up to Loos) have proved themselves so nobly that it is possible to say now, without fear of offence, that if they had been judged as individuals before they joined the Army, they might not have been held to represent the best average of the British people. ”

“ How different the truth about that [238] "inspection trip" which had the effect, certainly, of impressing the American Staff with the extreme seriousness of the campaign, but led to the result not of "quitting" but of brigading the American troops temporarily with those of the Allies. It was an instance of a sensible sacrifice of national vanity that has probably no parallel in history—that decision of the Americans to allow their soldiers to fight under British and French flags while they learned their business.
Unhappy German people to have been fed by their leaders with such delusions! ”

“ Fascinating as a fairy tale, absorbing as a good detective story, stimulating as the records of a stubborn battle, will be the record of British medical work in the Great War when it comes to be written. ”

“ And, such as it was, I attempt to record it—a serious enough life in any sense of the word, monkish in its denial of some pleasures, rigid in discipline, exacting in work, but neither austere nor anxious—such a life as studious boys might live in a Public School, if there can be imagined a Public School in which sport was reduced to the minimum essential to keep one fit for hard "swotting." But a life with some relaxations, and some pleasures, cheerful, actually light-hearted. ”

“ A British officer explains that the English are a shy people and a people with a high ideal of personal liberty and individualism; that the Englishman loves a corner seat in a train not so much because it is more comfortable but because it leaves his shyness, and his desire to keep himself to himself, safe on one side; that he does not like to be bothered, that he is very shy from the fear of bothering other people. ”

“ Was it inevitable that Marshal Foch should be chosen as Generalissimo? It is quite certain that no other choice was possible in view of all the circumstances. There is no need to come to the question of who was the more renowned soldier, or to argue that if Lord Haig had been given the same chance he would probably have achieved the same result. Personally I think that the British Army in 1918 was in respect of Generalship as in other respects equal to any in the Field. ”

“ It is quite clear that in many world industries (and most particularly in those industries which are connected with the great staples of human comfort, the food industries, the clothing industries, the transport industries) that limit was reached long before the war was over, and the world began to suffer from a constitutional enfeeblement of its powers of production; something more serious than the temporary interruption of production, something which makes now a restoration of prosperity difficult and tedious. ”

“ The advantage to the morale of the men is not so generally appreciated, but was none the less real. It helped to keep our men in good heart that the animals who worked with them, and for them, were in good heart and condition. To British men with their fine tradition of humanity to animals it would have been demoralising to have seen their brutes hungry and suffering. Finally, the world markets came forward with their evidence that the British Army policy of kindness to its animals was not only good for transport and good for morale but also good for business. ”