North German Lloyd

“ Matters are worse than I imagined. Men with pitchforks are even being called up to help guard the frontier. Too late! M. le Directeur is here in a khaki suit. The brave man. He is about to take dispatches. His motor-cycle needs petrol. The entire village hurls itself on the machine. We are all panting to be useful.
“Doucement, doucement, mes braves gens. Ce n’est pas un Allemand.” (Quietly, my good people! I am not a German) , he says, laughing.
The spirit of the peasants obviously delights him. He breaks into a Walloon song. They all shout the chorus, beating time with their hands. ”

“ Lord Rhondda, who disliked him greatly and rather despised him, told me how often Mr. Lloyd George put heart into a Cabinet that was really trembling on the edge of despair. It seems true that he never once doubted ultimate victory, and, what is much more remarkable, never once failed to read the German's mind.
I think that the doom that has fallen upon him comes in some measure from the amusement he takes in his mental quickness, and the reliance he is sometimes apt to place upon it. A quick mind may easily be a disorderly mind. Moreover quickness is not one of the great qualities. ”

“ Like a flash it came to Lloyd that he was free. Free to go “over the top” with his Company. Free to die like a true Briton fighting for his King and Country. A great gladness and warmth came over him. Carefully stepping over the body of the sentry, he started on a mad race down the ruined street of the village, amid the bursting shells, minding them not, dodging through or around hurrying platoons on their way to also go “over the top.” Coming to a communication trench he could not get through. It was blocked with laughing, cheering, and cursing soldiers. ”

“ Holland attempted to reduce the revolting province by force, but the powers intervened and an adjustment was made. The last King was William, III, who died in 1890, leaving his daughter Wilhelmina, then but 10 years old, Queen.
Of the neutral countries none endured more than heroic Norway. With a long coast line practically undefended and with the full force of the German navy anchored but a few hours away, and a none too friendly country on her land border, possessing an army greater than her own, Norway's position was extremely difficult. ”

“ The Germans, though brave, seem inferior to the French in their scouting methods. Time and again small French patrols would cut them off, exercising superior finesse. One day in a skirmish outside the village, however, the Uhlans beat the French. An officer was triumphantly borne away prisoner to Werboumont. How thrilled we were at the sight of the culotte rouge. If there had only been more of them and free!
No one speaks of the men in skirts any more. The continuous stream of trains that was carrying the Highlanders into Liège have gone the way of all myths. ”

“ Taking the comparative statistics of naval expenditure from 1900, in which year England spent £32,055,000 on her navy, and Germany spent £7,472,000, down to 1914 it is absolutely impossible to make the figures show that Germany enforced upon the other nations of Europe an unwilling competition in naval armament.
But the German army! According to all accounts of German militarism which were suffered to reach these shores, it is here that we shall find evidence of what Mr. Lloyd George, on 4 August, 1917, called "the most dangerous conspiracy ever plotted against the liberty of nations ”

“ Parallels from history are dangerous; but they always haunt the mind of a well-read imaginative man. Mr. Lloyd George is very fond of them. One evening in 1908, when we were sitting in the Orangerie at Stuttgart, in a pause of the German tour of that year, the conversation began to turn on the possibilities of a war between Britain and Germany. ”

“ At breakfast I am informed that the Germans are only a day’s march distant. They have already crossed the frontier and are advancing on us. Bombarded Liège is safer than Manhay, situated on one of the high roads from the frontier. The blindest Teuton could not miss this short, straight line of white-washed houses.
I join the crowd of peasants standing in a cluster at the cross-roads. Everyone is busy advising, gesticulating, prophesying. Other peasants are pouring in from the neighbouring villages for directions and news. Any stranger at once forms the nucleus of an entranced group. ”

“ I say.
“I tell you they fight—not like men but—comme les démons. They don’t ride up as the Uhlans do. They just ‘appear’ like lightning or earthquake or any other phenomenon and then—phew—le déluge.”
“Every German who comes in here says that the Belgians have cut off the ears and gouged out the eyes of their wounded before Liège,” I say. “We on our side are horrified at the tale of German atrocities. Each time a German enters this village we feel that the tragedy of Visé may be enacted over again.”
The Tax-collector shrugs his shoulders as he fingers a cigarette. ”

“ Thornbrough, and was employed for some time in the North Sea, chiefly cruising off Goree, on which station she detained several homeward bound Dutch West Indiamen, and cut out and destroyed numerous vessels and boats, many of them intended to join the invasion flotilla at Boulogne. She was afterwards employed in watching the movements of the enemy at the latter place, and Mr. Lloyd appears to have been a constant volunteer in frequent nightly excursions along the coast, for the purpose of intercepting their armed craft proceeding to the same general rendezvous from the eastward. ”

“ He flushed a hot color, and said, “My views have undergone a change. England has behaved abominably.”
The particular abomination which he resented most deeply was the warning delivered by Lloyd George—of all people in England!—that Great Britain would support French interests in Morocco, and would not tolerate German aggression in that region. That was at the time of the Agadir incident. The British attitude in that affair, said the Düsseldorf editor, was a clear sign that Great Britain challenged the right of Germany to develop [Pg 222] and expand. ”

“ The politicians at the new Lloyd's Coffee-house very busily engaged in speculative bets upon a war with Denmark; but considerate people imagined that Lord North was much too wise to engage offensively against any power merely on account of a family faux-pas, especially when the conduct of the person to be supported was indefensible. ”

“ At 2 p.m., the boats, with the first division of the army, under Major-General Henry Warde, pulled towards the shore, and effected a landing in the bay of Mapou, under an extensive line of sea-wall, without the smallest opposition. In order to ascertain whether any of the enemy’s troops were concealed behind this natural defence. Lieutenant Lloyd had obtained permission to land by himself; and on his ascending the bank, and finding only a few unarmed negroes there, he waved his hat to the anxious spectators afloat, cheering at the same time as a signal for the boats to advance. ”

“ Lloyd George himself proposed an ultimatum in which military occupation532 of the Ruhr Valley was threatened if Germany did not accept without reservation the indemnity schedule fixed at Paris on January 29. On May 5 Lloyd George told Parliament that he was sure of Germany’s yielding, for “with the Ruhr gone industrial Germany withers: it cannot exist.” With Marshal Foch on the Rhine and ready to march in, the German Government agreed to the Paris program. It was the only means of preventing the Ruhr occupation. ”

“ Fleets of warships are meant to fight when the need for fighting comes; but there was no affront to Germany, no cause for resentment or agitation, in the concentration of the main strength of the British Fleet in such places, and with such bases, that they could carry their power into the North Sea. Force attracts force in strategy as in physics, and the growth of the German High Sea Fleet at Wilhelmshaven, with the great sea canal thence to Kiel on the Baltic, inevitably brought about the British concentration. ”

“ Their constant watchings and struggles against the slow encroachments or sudden inroads of an enemy more inveterate even than the Danes,—namely, the sea,—had imparted to them from the earliest times somewhat of that wariness and perseverance which we perceive in the national character of the Dutch and the Venetians. But the fresh breezes of the German Ocean and the Baltic kept their nerves well braced and their hearts buoyant; and for muscular development the arms of these sturdy ploughers of the sea and the land can vie with those of any of their neighbors on the isles or on the Continent. ”

“ Should our victory be complete, there is little which Germany can yield to us save the removal of that shadow which has darkened us so long. But our children and our children’s children will never, if we do our work well now, look across the North Sea with the sombre thoughts which have so long been ours, while their lives will be brightened and elevated by money which we, in our darker days, have had to spend upon our ships and our guns. ”

“ It is rare in history that a nation has found itself as perfectly identified with one man as England is to-day with Lloyd George. The world, enemies and friends included, stands amazed by the energy Lloyd George displays in dealing with the huge difficulties that the war has raised. But few know that in the energy of this one man is apparent the energy of the whole English nation. ”

“ Should a civilian dare to fire on [51] the German troops, well, that village may expect to be decimated of its remaining men. Besides this the Teutons do not trust our word. Twice to-day an officer has forced me to drink first from his glass of beer. The young Job-Lepouses have to do the same. A suspicious Uhlan intends to run no unnecessary risk.
No peace for the wicked! There is the air peril to contend with. A sound often heard here, like a hundred threshing machines in full swing, made me think at first that the peasants were working in the fields. ”

“ It is pitiful to read of the proceedings of the great ship-money fleets, created under circumstances so memorable in English history, roaming about the Channel in their vain attempts to compel the French men-of-war to strike their flags, and in the North Sea forcing the king’s licenses on the poor Dutch herring fishermen. The Earl of Northumberland 12 succeeded in the latter mission, against which the Dutch Government strongly protested, and there is no doubt that if the policy had been persisted in, the first Dutch war would have been antedated by some fifteen years. ”

“ Norway is a land of little farms, the shipping and fishing industries occupy many men, but with the exception of the water power driven nitrate plants, [223] on the coast, and the wood-pulp factories, there is little manufacturing.
The mass of the people are with the Allies. Last winter, when it was proposed that a German concert troupe should play and sing in Christiania, the people threatened to burn the theatre if the performance was permitted.
But, as in Sweden, the German propagandists are at work in Norway. Here again, unless we present our case, the people may be turned from the Allies. ”

“ The German coast on the North Sea is only about a hundred miles from west to east, not counting indentations; and it is washed by very shallow waters, which are much impeded by sandbanks. The sea is gaining on the shore, as you may notice from the long line of fringing islands which were formerly part of the mainland. Close to the Dutch frontier, on the estuary of the Ems, is the port and manufacturing town of Emden. The Germans have spent much money in constructing at Emden a harbour big enough and deep enough to accommodate the largest liners and warships. ”

“ But Louis XIV. began to be tired of the war, especially as Holland proved to be unconquerable. Negotiations for peace were commenced in 1678, and on the 5th of February, 1679, the "Peace of Nymwegen" was concluded with Holland, Spain and the German Empire—except Brandenburg! Leopold I. openly declared that he did not mean to have a Vandal kingdom in the North. ”

“ The Moroccan question showed England ready to back up France in war, but now comes this meeting in the Black Forest. Germany has shown England the greater advantage of a German-English coalition, and France is frozen out. England, with her shrewd alertness to make the most profitable deal, entertained if did not close the German proposition. In a nutshell, it is this:
Germany must have the lowland ports. Holland is not adverse to coming into the German Federation. Belgium is adverse, but could be snuffed out as easily as a candle. ”

“ August 18th.—A dreadful blow! We English are forbidden to go to Holland, and told that our destination is to be Denmark. Imagine crossing that mined sea now! For reasons of their own German authorities will not allow any of us to go by or near the Rhine.
August 19th.—The German Press is to me a revelation of bombast, self-righteousness, falsehood, and hypocrisy. What shocks one most is the [26] familiar and perpetual calling upon God to witness that He alone has led the Germans to victory and blessed their cause. ”

“ In the North he did not propose to interfere in arms: there others should fight, and France support them with quiet subsidies and good will. He pressed matters on with the English, the Dutch, the North German Princes; he negotiated with Maximilian of Bavaria and the League, hoping to keep the South German Princes clear of the Imperial policy. ... The French ambassador at Copenhagen, well supported by the English envoy, Sir Robert Anstruther, at this time organised a Northern League, headed by Christian IV. of Denmark [see GERMANY: A. D. 1624-1626] . ... ”