The zest and pleasure which for any story-teller goes
with the first shaping of a story died away at the
very beginning. For the day’s respite had
gone. The little “wind-warm” space
had disappeared. Life and thought were all given
up, without mercy or relief, to the fever and nightmare
of the war. I fell back upon my early recollections
of Oxford thirty, forty years ago—and it
was like rain in the desert. So that, in the
course of months it had become a habit with me never
to
write about the war; and outside the hours
of writing to think and talk of nothing else.
But your letter suddenly roused in me a desire to
write about the war. It was partly I think because
what you wrote summed up and drove home other criticisms
and appeals of the same kind. I had been putting
them mechanically aside as not having any special
reference to me; but in reality they had haunted me.
And now you make a personal appeal. You say that
England at the present moment is misunderstood, and
even hardly judged in America, and that even those
great newspapers of yours that are most friendly to
the Allies are often melancholy reading for those with
English sympathies. Our mistakes—real
and supposed—loom so large. We are
thought to be not taking the war seriously—even
now. Drunkenness, strikes, difficulties in recruiting
the new armies, the losses of the Dardanelles expedition,
the failure to save Serbia and Montenegro, tales of
luxurious expenditure in the private life of rich and
poor, and of waste or incompetence in military administration—these
are made much of, even by our friends, who grieve,
while our enemies mock. You say the French case
has been on the whole much better presented in America
than the English case; and you compare the international
situation with those months in 1863 when it was necessary
for the Lincoln Government to make strenuous efforts
to influence and affect English opinion, which in the
case of our upper classes and too many of our leading
men was unfavourable or sceptical towards the North.
You who know something of the vastness of the English
effort—you urge upon me that English writers
whose work and names are familiar to the American
public are bound to speak for their country, bound
to try and make Americans feel what we here feel through
every nerve—that cumulative force of a great
nation, which has been slow to rouse, and is now immovably—irrevocably—set
upon its purpose. “Tell me,” you
say in effect, “what in your belief is the real
spirit of your people—of your men in the
field and at sea, of your workmen and employers at
home, your women, your factory workers, your soldiers’
wives, your women of the richer and educated classes,
your landowners and politicians. Are you yet
fully awake—yet fully in earnest, in this
crisis of England’s fate? ‘Weary
Titan’ that she is, with her age-long history
behind her, and her vast responsibilities by sea and
land, is she shouldering her load in this incredible
war, as she must shoulder it; as her friends—the
friends of liberty throughout the world—pray
that she may shoulder it?”
Print
Word
PDF
