William Le Queux

“ Ireland to-day, dropping all her historic feuds, is practically solid for the Empire, and her sons, as ever, have shown their glorious deeds under the British flag. India, with one voice and heart, has rallied to the Empire; her men have given their blood without stint in our cause, her princes have poured out their treasure like water in our service, proud and glad to make what return they could for the blessings they have enjoyed under British rule. The deeds of the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, have added a new and imperishable tradition to British history. ”

“ It is the fashion of our arm-chair critics and pessimists to talk and write as though all the triumphs of the campaign belonged to Germany, while all the mistakes and misfortunes were the exclusive attributes of the Allies. The perfection of the German military machine is held up eternally for our admiration; we are told day by day—and several times a day—to pay tributes of wondering admiration to the marvels Germany has accomplished. It is pointed out to us how much of her enemies’ territory she has occupied, and even, sometimes, how impossible it will ever be to turn her out. ”

“ When we come to think of the expanse of ocean to be covered, the services which the British Navy has rendered to civilisation will be seen to be stupendous. Not merely have all the German ships which were at liberty outside the North Sea and the Baltic been hunted down and destroyed, but the Grand Fleet, the darling of the Kaiser’s heart, the object upon which millions have been poured out like water with the express purpose of crushing Britain, has been penned up in the narrowest of quarters, and from every strategical point of view has been reduced to practical impotence. ”

“ For eighteen months the civilised world has been struggling against the most formidable menace to its liberties by which it has ever been faced. For eighteen months we have seen the enemy apparently going on from triumph to triumph. We have seen the devastation of Belgium, the crucifixion of a little people whose only wish was that they should be allowed to live their happy lives in peace, and whose only crime was that they dared to resist the Prussian bully. We have seen the martyrdom of Poland. We have seen the very heart of France—incomparable Paris—threatened with destruction. ”

“ Over and over again the Germans have attempted, with barefaced effrontery, to buy off our Allies, to attempt to induce them to forsake the common cause, to acquiesce, in short, in the betrayal of Britain. That to-day is the keystone of the game of chicanery and fraud which passes in Berlin for diplomacy. There can be no doubt that to France, to Italy, and to Russia splendid gains are freely open as the price of a dishonourable peace; there is to-day hardly any concession which Germany would not willingly make to either of the Allies to secure their withdrawal from the contest. ”

“ None of us desires to see the War prolonged, with all its terrible cost in blood and treasure; but, on the other hand, no Englishman worthy the name can fail to share the view expressed by Lord Rosebery. It is the business of all loyal Britons to see that the poisonous propaganda which finds its best representation in such egregious bodies as the “Union of Democratic Control” shall be decisively countered. It is the business of the nation to concentrate all its energies to-day upon the winning of a clear and unmistakable victory which shall ensure the peace of Europe for a century to come. ”

“ We have seen the stately memorials of a great civilisation, such as Germany has never known and never can know, wrecked and plundered. We have seen innocent civilians murdered in hundreds, women and children sent to death or a far worse fate. We have seen the ruin of Serbia. We have lost thousands of our best and bravest sons. We have seen the tragic failure in the Gallipoli Peninsula—itself a mere incident of the world-war, yet one of the greatest military undertakings upon which we have ever embarked. ”

“ Finally, the great new masses of the British Army, straining at the leash, are eagerly awaiting the signal to hurl themselves at the foe for his destruction.
The British Navy, silent and invincible, holds the seas of all the world, and Germany and her Allies are to-day feeling the pinch of war in most deadly earnest. Prices in enemy countries are rising by leaps and bounds; the food supply is beginning to fail; money is lacking; the value of the mark is falling, and there is every prospect of a shortage of men—cannon-fodder they were once called by Germans—in the near future. ”

“ The one aim of Germany to-day is to detach Britain’s Allies, because Germany thinks that with Britain as her sole antagonist she would be sure of ultimate victory. And with her warped code of national honour, with her cynical disregard of the plighted word, she simply cannot understand why the baits she is ready to offer are rejected on all hands with loathing and scorn. She cannot understand the obligations of national honour; she cannot understand that a nation may be too proud to stoop to betrayal for the reward of a bribe. ”

“ To scatter bombs over a countryside, to destroy indiscriminately the mansion and the cottage, the church and the school, to murder unoffending civilians, women, children, and sucklings in their beds—these are the noble aspirations of Prussian chivalry, acclaimed by their nation as deeds of merit and daring.
Let them realise their triumph. Let us bring it directly to their hearts and homes. Let us unsparingly mete out their measure to themselves. Nothing else will make them realise their glories. And the blood of any who may suffer will rest on their Government, not on ours. ”

“ If we fail now, if we put off our harness with our task unfulfilled, if, having set our hand to the plough, we become faint and weak, it needs no strong imagination to see stretching out before us the downward path which must lead the British Empire to disruption and decay.
No matter what the cost, no matter what the sacrifice, we must win this War, and win it so decisively that the menace of Teuton aggression and arrogance, of the immoral doctrine that brute force is the only right, shall be ever removed from civilisation. ”

“ The policy of terrorism has been a complete failure; it has failed in Belgium, it has failed in France, it has failed in Serbia, it has failed in Poland, it has failed afloat, and it has failed in the air. It is a record of blood and murder unredeemed by a solitary success; it has steeled the hearts and the resolution of all to whom it has been applied, and among the neutral nations it has provoked feelings which cause nausea whenever Germany is mentioned. ”

“ And unless in this hour of supreme trial Britain is true to herself and to the great cause for which she and her Allies have unsheathed the sword, if she is content with less than the utmost effort of which she is capable, the historian of the future, looking backward across the centuries, will be able to place his finger unerringly upon the day and hour of which it will be possible to say, “Here the decline of the British Empire began.” Happily, indeed, for ourselves and civilisation at large the awakening spirit of our people is the best possible guarantee against any such disaster. ”

“ It was just this consideration of national honour which brought not only England in particular, but the whole Empire, into the field as one man. Great armies sprang into existence before our very eyes. From every quarter of the globe offers of men, money, and supplies of all kinds were poured into our lap with a profusion which was as surprising as it was gratifying. We witnessed, in fact, what required a great national peril to bring to birth, the nascence of the British Empire as a fighting force. ”

“ Do we owe any consideration to such a nation? Do we owe to them any of the chivalry and honourable forbearance which we have shown, not once, but a thousand times, in our long contests with civilised adversaries on a hundred fields in all parts of the world? Are our hands to be tied and our people to suffer through our adherence to creeds of warfare which the Huns evidently regard—as they regard Christianity itself—as a lot of worn-out shibboleths? ”

“ We all know only too well what happened when war broke out. Germany, with her armies trained to the hour after years of patient preparation, with her forces ready to the last man and the last gun, shamelessly broke her plighted word with the invasion of Belgium. She had counted that there, at least, she would meet with no resistance; she could not realise that a little people, even to save its honour, would dare to oppose the onrush of her countless hordes. ”

“ And if our nation has closed its ranks and determined that this War shall be fought to the only finish consistent with the continued existence of civilisation as we understand it, what shall we say of our Allies? What tribute can be too great for the matchless heroism of France? How can we praise too highly the dogged courage of the Russian soldier, which has time and again saved the situation in the West by a display of self-sacrifice of which the world can offer few parallels? ”

“ Surely never was any people in the world so lacking in a sense of proportion and common sense! There is no doubt, I think, that the first “starvation” cries which emanated from Germany were a cunningly devised plan to work upon the sympathies of neutrals and, in particular, upon the United States. There are always in every country a certain number of good, sentimental souls whose hearts are apt to run away with their heads, who are apt to think or act very much as their emotions lead them, and are entirely incapable of looking at more than one side of any question. ”

“ To those who say that we cannot afford to raise larger armies than we have already raised, I would reply that if necessary the last of Britain’s savings, the whole strength of her manhood, must be flung into the melting-pot of war. And I am happy to think that at length the nation as a whole is showing a growing realisation of this undoubted fact. We are fast getting over our preliminary troubles (which have lasted far too long) ; the entire nation is settling down in grim and deadly earnest to make an end once and for all of the German pretensions. ”

“ The conditions are plain for everyone, both at home and abroad, to see for himself, and we have plenty of evidence to suggest that they are fully appreciated in Germany; the idle quays of Hamburg, the idle fleets of German merchant ships rotting in the shelter of neutral ports, the peaceful progress of the ships of the Allies over the seas of the world, and the growing stringency of conditions in Germany brought about by the British blockade are quite sufficient evidence for those Germans—and their number is growing—who are no longer blinded by the national megalomania. ”

“ It has cost us, it is true, many valuable vessels and many valuable lives, but as a means to ending the War it has achieved practically nothing. The policy of terrifying by murder has prospered no more afloat than it did ashore, while outside the ranks of the combatants it has done nothing but earn for Germany the contempt of the whole civilised world, to bring Germany within an ace of war with the United States, and to brand the German Navy and the entire German nation with an indelible stain of blood and crime. ”

“ We shall not know the exact facts until after the War, but we know at least that the German people have at length awakened to an uneasy realisation of the fact that they have murdered in vain, and that they have covered themselves with undying infamy to no real purpose.
I do not suppose that knowledge sits very hardly upon their consciences; but even in Germany there must be people who are beginning to wonder what judgment the civilised world will pass upon them in the future, and how they are ever to hold up their heads again among civilised nations. ”

“ With these object-lessons before her eyes, perhaps in the days to come even Germany, who has shown herself so thoroughly oblivious to what honour and conscience mean, may realise that there are nations in the world to whom there are better and higher things than mere wealth and power, that there are principles which soar far above material considerations, that she is face to face with something which is at present far beyond her comprehension, and that something far mightier than the mightiest cannon ever forged in the furnaces of Krupps’ is working for her downfall. ”

“ Germany has shown conclusively that she is not to be bound by any considerations of honour, and that she has deliberately aimed at what the world will never tolerate—world-dominion in the hands of a single Power. We and our Allies have determined that she shall not be allowed to realise her ambitions in this direction; it is our duty to see that for the future, in the interests of humanity as a whole, she is robbed of the power of making herself a nuisance and a danger to her neighbours, who wish only to live in peace. ”

“ I do not think that either now or in the future we need fear any comparison between the financial position of Britain and of her enemy. We are, and always have been, a far wealthier nation than the Germans; our credit is good, while Germany’s is tottering to complete collapse; our resources in capital are as yet not seriously touched; our trade, even though its volume be diminished by the withdrawal of men for the Army and for munition making, still goes on as far as we can carry it. ”

“ It is a frightful nightmare to all of us out here that we shall suddenly be told one morning that peace is declared while we are still sitting on this present line of trenches through Belgium and France. No one wants peace more than we do out here, but I—and I know most soldiers are the same—would rather die than see a peace made before we have shown them in Germany what the peasants of the Allies have suffered. ”