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The Message, a novel by Alec John Dawson |
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Part 1. The Descent - Chapter 18. The Dear Loaf |
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_ PART I. THE DESCENT CHAPTER XVIII. THE DEAR LOAF
I saw Constance Grey only for a few minutes during that day. She had passed the stage of shocked sorrow and sad fear in which I had found her on Sunday, and was exceedingly busy in organizing a corps of assistant nurses, women who had had some training, and were able to provide a practical outfit of nursing requisites. She had the countenance of the Army Medical authorities, but her nursing corps was to consist exclusively of volunteers. The organizing ability this girl displayed was extraordinary. She spared five minutes for conversation, and warmed my heart with her appreciation of my severance of The Mass connection. And then, before I knew what had happened, she had me impressed, willingly enough, in her service, and I was off upon an errand connected with the volunteer nursing corps. News had arrived of some wounded refugees in Romford, unable to proceed on their way into London; and a couple of motor-cars, with nurses and medical comforts, were despatched at once. Detailed news of the sacking of Colchester showed this to have been a most extraordinarily brutal affair for the work of a civilized army. The British regular troops at Colchester represented the whole of our forces of the northeastern division, and included three batteries of artillery. The regiments of this division had been reduced to three, and for eighteen months or more these had been mere skeletons of regiments, the bulk of the men being utilized to fill other gaps caused by the consistently followed policy of reduction which had characterized "The Destroyers'" regime. A German spy who had been captured in Romford and brought to London, said that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in England had publicly announced to his men that the instructions received from their Imperial master were that the pride of the British people must be struck down to the dust; that the first blows must be crushing; that the British people were to be smitten with terror from which recovery should be impossible. Be this as it may, the sacking of Colchester was a terrible business. A number of citizens had joined the shockingly small body of regulars in a gallant attempt at defence. The attempt was quite hopeless; the German superiority in numbers, discipline, metal, and material being quite overwhelming. But the German commander was greatly angered by the resistance offered, and, as soon as he ascertained that civilians had taken part in this, the town was first shelled and then stormed. It was surrounded by a cordon of cavalry, and--no prisoners were taken. The town was burned to the ground, though many valuable stores were first removed from it; and those of the inhabitants who had not already fled were literally mown down in their native streets, without parley or quarter--men, women, and children being alike regarded as offenders against the edict forbidding any civilian British subject, upon pain of death, to offer any form of resistance to German troops. I myself spoke to a man in Knightsbridge that evening who had definite news that his nineteen-year-old daughter, a governess in the house of a Colchester doctor, was among those shot down in the streets of the town while endeavouring to make her escape with two children. The handful of British regulars had been shot or cut to pieces, and the barracks and stores taken over by the Germans. As I left Constance Grey's flat that evening I passed a small baker's shop, before which an angry crowd was engaged in terrifying a small boy in a white apron, who was nervously endeavouring to put up the window shutters. I asked what the trouble was, and was told the baker had refused to sell his half-quartern loaves under sevenpence, or his quartern loaves under a shilling. "It's agin the law, so it is," shouted an angry woman. "I'm a policeman's wife, an' I know what I'm talking about. I'll have the law of the nasty mean hound, so I will, with his shillin' for a fivepenny loaf, indeed!" Long before this time, and while Britain still held on to a good proportion of her foreign trade, it had been estimated by statisticians that in the United Kingdom some ten to twelve million persons lived always upon the verge of hunger. But since then the manufacturers of protected countries, notably Germany and the United States, had, as was inevitable in the face of our childish clinging to what we miscalled "free" trade, crowded the British manufacturer out of practically every market in the world, except those of Canada. Those also must of necessity have been lost, but for the forbearing and enduring loyalty of the Canadian people, who, in spite of persistent rebuffs, continued to extend and to increase their fiscal preference for imports from the Mother-country. But, immense as Canada's growth was even then, no one country could keep the manufacturers of Britain busy; and I believe I am right in saying that at this time the number of those who lived always on the verge of hunger had increased to at least fifteen millions. Cases innumerable there were in which manufacturers themselves had gone to swell the ranks of the unemployed and insufficiently employed; the monstrous legion of those who lived always close to the terrifying spectre of hunger. If the spirit of Richard Cobden walked the earth at that time, even as his obsessions assuredly still cumbered it, it must have found food for bitter reflection in the hundreds of empty factories, grass-grown courtyards, and broken-windowed warehouses, which a single day's walk would show one in the north of England. You may be sure I thought of those things as I walked away from that baker's shop in South Kensington. A journalist, even though he be only the assistant of a man like Blaine, is apt to see the conditions of life in his country fairly plainly, because he has a wider vision of them than most men. Into Fleet Street, each day brings an endless stream of "news items," not only from all parts of the world, but from every town and city in the kingdom. And your journalist, though he may have scant leisure for its digestion, absorbs the whole of this mass of intelligence each day in the process of conveying one-tenth part of it, in tabloid form, to the public. If one assumes for the moment that only twelve million people in Great Britain were living on hunger's extreme edge at that time, the picture I had of the sullen, angry crowd outside the baker's shop remains a sufficiently sinister one. As a matter of fact, I believe that particular baker was a shade premature, or a penny or two excessive, in his advance of prices. But I know that by nightfall you could not have purchased a quartern loaf for elevenpence halfpenny within ten miles of Charing Cross. The Bakers' Society had issued its mandates broadcast. Shop-windows were stoned that night in south and east London; but twenty-four hours later the price of the quartern loaf was 1s. 3d., and a man offering 1s. 2d. would go empty away. And with the same loaf selling at one-third the price, twelve million persons at least had lived always on the verge of hunger. I mention the staple food only, but precisely the same conditions applied to all other food-stuffs with the exception of dairy produce, the price of which was quadrupled by Tuesday afternoon, and fish, the price of which put it at once beyond the reach of all save the rich, and all delicacies, the prices of which became prohibitive. Twelve million persons had lived on the verge of hunger, before, under normal conditions, and when the country's trade had been far larger and more prosperous than of late. Now, with the necessities of life standing at fully three times normal prices, a large number of trades employing many thousands of work-people were suddenly shut down upon, and rendered completely inoperative. It must be borne in mind that we had been warned again and again that matters would be precisely thus and not otherwise in the event of war, and we had paid no heed whatever to the telling. Historians have explained for us that the primary reason of the very sudden rise to famine rates of the prices of provisions was the persistent rumour that the effective bulk of the Channel Fleet had been captured or destroyed on its way northward from Spanish waters. German strategy had drawn the Fleet southward, in the first place, by means of an international "incident" in the Mediterranean, which was clearly the bait of what rumour called a death-trap. Once trapped, it was said, German seamanship and surprise tactics had done the rest. The crews of the Channel Fleet ships (considerably below full strength) had been rushed out of shore barracks, in which discipline had fallen to a terribly low ebb, to their unfamiliar shipboard stations, at the time of the Mediterranean scare. Beset by the flower of the German Navy, in ships manned by crews who lived afloat, it was asserted that the Channel Fleet had been annihilated, and that the entire force of the German Navy was concentrated upon the task of patrolling English waters. We know that men and horses, stores and munitions of war, were pouring steadily and continuously into East Anglia from Germany during this time, escorted by German cruisers and torpedo-boats, and uninterrupted by British ships. There was yet no report of the Channel Fleet, the ships of which were already twenty-four hours overdue at Portsmouth. Two things, more than any others, had influenced the British Navy during the Administration of "The Destroyers": the total cessation of building operations, and the withdrawal of ships and men from sea service. The reserve ships had long been unfit to put to sea, the reserve crews had, for all practical purposes, become landsmen--landsmen among whom want of sea-going discipline had of late produced many mutinous outbreaks. It had been said by the most famous admiral of the time, and said without much exaggeration, that, within twelve months of "The Destroyers'" abandonment of the traditional two-Power standard of efficiency, the British Navy had "fallen to half-Power standard." The process was quickened, of course, by the unprecedented progress of the German Navy during the same period. It was said that at the end of 1907 the German Government had ships of war building in every great dockyard in the world. It is known that the entire fleet of the "Kaiser" class torpedo-boats and destroyers was built and set afloat at the German Emperor's own private expense. Then there were the "Well-borns," as they were called--vessels of no great weight of metal, it is true, but manned, armed, officered, and found better perhaps than any other war-ships in the world; entirely at the instigation of the German Navy League, and out of the pockets of the German nobility. The majority of our own wealthy classes preferred sinking their money in German motor-cars and German pleasure resorts; or one must assume so, for it is well known that our Navy League had long since ceased to exert any active influence, because it was unable to raise funds enough to pay its office expenses. Our Navy might have had a useful reserve to draw upon in the various auxiliary naval bodies if these had not, one by one, been abolished. The Mercantile Marine was not in a position to lend much assistance in this respect, for our ships at that time carried eighty-seven thousand foreign officers and men, three parts of whom were Teutons. These facts were presumably all well known to the heads and governing bodies of the various trades, and, that being so, the extremely pessimistic attitude adopted by them, directly the fact of invasion was established, is scarcely to be wondered at. In banking, insurance, underwriting, stock and share dealing, manufacturing, and in every branch of shipping the lead of the bakers were followed, and in many cases exceeded. The premiums asked in insurance and underwriting, and the unprecedented advance in the bank-rate, corresponding as it did with a hopeless "slump" in every stock and share quoted on the Stock Exchange, from Consols to mining shares, brought business to a standstill in London on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday entire blocks of offices remained unopened. In business, more perhaps than in any other walk of life, self-preservation and self-advancement were at that time, not alone the first, but the only fixed law. With bread at 1s. 4d. a loaf, great ship-owners in England were cabling the masters of wheat ships in both hemispheres to remain where they were and await orders. This last fact I learned from Leslie Wheeler, whom I happened to meet hurrying from the City to Waterloo, on his way down to Weybridge. His family were leaving for Devonshire next morning, to stay with relatives there. "But, bless me!" I said, when he told me that friends of his father, shipping magnates, had despatched such cable messages that morning, "surely that's a ruffianly thing to do, when the English people are crying out for bread?" Leslie shrugged his smartly-clad shoulders. "It's the English people's own affair," he said. "How's that?" "Why, you see it's all a matter of insurance. All commerce is based on insurance, in one form or another. The cost of shipping insurance to-day is absolutely prohibitive; in other words, there isn't any. We did have a permanent and non-fluctuating form of insurance of a kind one time. But you Socialist chaps--social reform, Little England for the English, and all that--you swept that away. Wouldn't pay for it; said it wasn't wanted. Now it's gone, and you're feeling the pinch. The worst of it is, you make the rest of us feel it, too. I'm thankful to say the dad's pulling out fairly well. He told me yesterday he hadn't five hundred pounds in anything British. Wise old bird, the dad!" My friend's "You Socialist chaps" rather wrang my withers; its sting not being lessened at all by my knowledge of its justice. I asked after the welfare of the Wheeler family generally, but it was only as Leslie was closing the door of the cab he hailed that I mentioned Sylvia. "Yes, Sylvia's all right," he said, as he waved me good-bye; "but she won't come away with the rest of us--absolutely refuses to budge." And with that he was off, leaving me wondering about the girl who had at one time occupied so much of my mind, but of late had had so little of it. During the next few hours I wove quite a pretty story round Sylvia's refusal to accompany her family. I even thought of her as joining Constance Grey's nursing corps. The thought of this development of Sylvia Wheeler's character interested me so much that I wrote to her that evening, tentatively sympathizing with her determination not to be frightened away from her own place. The whole thing was a curious misapprehension on my part; but Sylvia's reply (explaining that it was her particular place of worship she refused to leave, and that she was staying "with his Reverence's sister"), though written within twenty-four hours, did not reach me until after many days--days such as England will never face again. _ |
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