Asquithian Warfare

Asquithian Warfare

Showing Why the Old Government in England Did Not Get Along With War.

By Lacey Amy.

From Saturday Night magazine 20 January, 1917, Toronto, Canada.

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, 25 September, 2017 for Stillwoods.Blogspot.Ca

Apology – This entry has been created from very old microfilm from a very old magazine. Certain areas of the graphic are unclear. I have endeavoured to reason at the missing parts of words. If there are errors, or if the meaning is not clear, it is my fault./drf

AT last the seal is broken. Into Canada’s bewildered but loyal complacency that Britons never will be slaves one may interject a note that, up to a month ago, might have made that last hundred thousand a Utopian dream. The change of Government has opened one’s lips.

I do not believe that with Asquith as Premier, the Allies would have won the war, save by a starvation exacting almost as much from England as from Germany.

I am equally confident that, with Asquith’s Cabinet free from the beginning to follow it’s bent, we would never have won the war. Before it finally lifted him from the Premier’s chair with reverent gentleness, only public opinion had saved Great Britain from the depths of humility. And I give to the late Government full credit for the Empire’s one example of war statesmanship, its complete and wonderful financing of the Allies.

Canada has been fortunate in being spared the spectacle of Asquith’s persistent failure. Add to bereavement and business disasters the sum of the daily evidences that the late Government was utterly unable to grasp the seriousness of the war, and one may have some lot of what England has been passing through. Canada, judging by her Press, has seen only the big failures, the Balkans, Mesopotamia, the Dardanelles, and the rest of the ugly diplomatic round. England has shuddered with the certainty that even in the very foundations of victory the Government has been leaving holes that would sooner or later bring the entire structure down. .

I do not speak rashly in this. I came to England with every prejudice against the Government’s detractors, with every respect for Asquith’s marvellous capacity of a kind. I still retain that respect; but an intelligent Canadian, reared in an atmosphere of action instead of deliberation, knows that war cannot be waged adagio. And in movement of that kind alone lay Asquith’s strength.

I will not even touch on the large follies that have impressed themselves on the world to Britain’s eternal discredit. What Canada will find of most interest now is the side-issues here at the source of England’s might which reveal in an amazing manner the reasons why Lloyd George replaced the late master of circumspection.

Perhaps the most complete exhibition of the late Cabinet’s failure to grasp the awful seriousness of the war was in the recruiting muddle. There is no discredit in having tried voluntary enlistment, but there is in having delayed conscription until Germany had entrenched herself in France. Therein lies, only one of the proofs of the fatal hold of tradition in England. And when conscription was introduced it was built like a sieve. The conscientious objector crawled through the first hole. Labor, grandly as it has responded in parts, found a range of meshes large enough to escape the net. To relieve itself of one more war responsibility the Government left the enforcement of conscription in the hands of local Tribunals.

The farce in this was that each of these Tribunals knew personally every man brought before it for exemption, was dependent upon him for votes or business, was personally interested in many of them, and was always blinded by the spectre of local requirements. They had to pass on their own employees, on their personal friends, on their debtors and creditors, and many of them were made up of members out of sympathy with conscription or out of tune with the requirements of the war. Thus were ex­empted, for example, eligible young unmarried men like these: a professional billiard player, a comedian, a secre­tary of an organization, for fighting conscription, municipal employees in the most unimportant positions, a tie manufacturer, teachers who admitted their opposition to conscription and even their antagonism to England, a street gambler who posed as a fish porter, pugilists by the half dozen, an organist whose fingers might be stiffened by war. an undertaker’s coachman who could drive four horses, one with no other appeal than an unfaltering smile, a man who claimed to be a born coward, hundreds of Jews with extensive businesses which had grown from nothing, a man whose parents’ illiteracy would leave his brothers at the front without their weekly letter, horsemen, an ambulance driver, cabmen, a picture framer, a coach builder, a plumber, a Tribunal member’s chauffeur, and on and on.

THE strong young man with ingenuity defied the military. If all else failed he sought work in a munitions factory, was badged even after he had been denied exemption, and conscription passed him by. Thousands of them were hidden safely away in these factories or in “starred” occupations which they sought in extremity without an hour’s experience. Five thousand young men were finally taken from Woolwich Arsenal alone.

And the Government departments were equally funk-holes. Every one of them had its thousands. It was estimated that in Whitehall and other Government offices at the middle of 1916, two years after the war started, 50,000 men of military age were cuddled. The Cabinet heads stubbornly refused to oust them, although nine-tenths were engaged only in the simplest clerking.

Pullman Company secured exemption from the Adjutant-General because its employees were engaged in “carrying officers back and forth.” Big firms with hundreds of branches had their managers exempted, although individual businesses went to the wall by the thousands because their proprietors were called up. Badges were sent en bloc, by the Government without a moment’s investigation of those who were awarded them. So that porters and simple office clerks were all immune if the products of the firm were even in part considered war necessities. Every Government department had the privilege of granting badges, and it frequently happened that those whom the Tribunals refused to exempt were saved by badges sent by parcel post. The secretary of one of the departments most intimately concerned with the progress of the war badged 35 of his farm employees, also retaining nine fancy gardeners. In France exemptions ran to hundreds of thousands, said Lloyd George in an explosion of disgust, while in England they ran to millions—more than 3,000,000 men of military age.

Had every other source of labor been tapped there would be little to say, although loafing was the main interest of these slackers. But men of 35 to 40, with large families, were turned loose from exempted occupations to make way for the young unmarried men, until finally some of the Tribunals struck, refusing to send another man to the trenches until the scandal was aired. The result was a Man-Power Board that picked out a few here and there as a sop to public demand, but truckled completely to the original ideas that had held sway. For each department was jealous of its authority. Each refused to make the sacrifices it was demanding of the public. Last summer the Government declined to grant any Whitsun holiday—and promptly went off on a six weeks’ holiday of its own.

The matter of substitution was equally ignored except in public. Some weeks ago a critic of mine in Satuiuay Night indignantly wrote: “Does Mr. Lacey Amy actually expect sane and intelligent Canadians to believe that the War Office publishes its appeals in the English papers by way of a joke?” Anyone in England would smile at the indignation. It so happened that, under my direction, a qualified woman was at that moment going the rounds of the Government offices in response to the appeals, to prove their insincerity. I may tell her experiences some time.

While the newspapers were full of formal appeals, until at last they refused to publish them in face of such evident insincerity, thousands of women were offering their services in vain. And with the men it was the same. Substitution was the cry of the Government, and I have personal knowledge of many men of undoubted capacity who found it impossible to secure warwork, voluntary or pay. One, a little over military age, sons all killed in France, doing without effort his twenty miles a day, was refused by the recruiting offices, turned over to a Labor Exchange, and there informed there was nothing for him to do. Another approached twelve departments and was turned down. A citizen of fifty, with an income of $50,000 a year and abundant energy, was referred to a local Labor Exchange, one of those bodies formed to hoodwink the public. A man of sixty, famous for his strength, forty years experience in a large business, persisted until he was finally told that if he could get three others he could go to cutting down trees in Kent, although he had never handled an axe or a saw in his life. A ship’s plater, one of the most expert occupations in the world, discharged from the army for deafness and sunstroke at Mesopotamia, was sent out as a common laborer, although his previous employer pleaded for him. and the industry upon which England’s very life depends was languishing for workmen.

THE strange laxity of the late Government in the matter of interning Germans in residence in England is to some extent known in Canada. Not one German would have been put where he could do no harm had it not been for the public outcry, not one German business closed. Businesses that were announced as closed at the beginning of the war continued openly to operate under Government sanction for more than two years, not one being finally shut down until within the last few months when England almost rose in rebellion. The Home Secretary, Mr. Samuel, was concerned only in the defence of resident Germans. The ugly part of it was that the winding-up proceedings, continuing for more than two years in full operation, netted to the leading Government officials concerned a salary of $26 a day, and to the pettier clerk $24 a week. And some of these accountants were “winding-up” so many businesses that their receipts reached the staggering sum of $4,500 a day. Of course there was no rush about it

An official investigation—it is noticeable that the reports of these investigations are made public only now when the Government which ordered them to be made is out of power—has announced that there are 4,294 enemy aliens in prohibited areas in England with permits from the late Government.

Back of all this is merely delay, not treason: incapacity for appreciating the necessities of war, not deliberate carelessness. The English way of doing things is always irritatingly slow to a Canadian. Perhaps the medium would be happiest. I have in mind a so-called Canadian convalescent home opened in England under an English manager and an English matron. The simplest move required a fortnight’s deliberation—the purchase of a dish bowl, the making of the most obvious rules, the establishment of the simplest routine—and even a kitten’s name had to be taken under consideration for a couple of days. I can safely say that not a half dozen Canadians did not squirm under the deliberateness and procrastination of the late Government.

Officialdom was reeking with it. I am informed by Government contractors engaged on the manufacture of the very necessities of the struggle that they were unable to reach the ear of any responsible heads of the depart meats save through a series of underlings who were utterly incapable of grasping the points at issue. The pettiest Government official is unapproachable. A large shell order is delayed a week because some sudden hitch has to be straightened out through a long line of clerks and stenographers. “No gentleman could swallow his lunch in an hour,” is the snobbery and tradition that has been muddling the war. And eleven o’clock continued to be the opening hour for offices while the nation cried for haste—just as the large stores of London are still unprepared for business at ten in the morning.

The Government’s attacks on waste and extravagance were farcical in the extreme. Scarcely a thing was done save to plaster the city with huge signs: “It is bad form to dress extravagantly,” “Save gas, electric light, coal and petrol.” “Do not be extravagant at Christmas time.” The simplicity of a Government that would depend upon such measures is its own judgment.

THE Cabinet held up its hands in helplessness at the strife between the Admiralty and the Army. In the respective air services there was fierce competition in the open market for supplies, and the officers would not speak to each other. Long after the Admiralty had a waiting list for its ranks it refused to close its recruiting offices to young men who slunk away to them to escape the army, knowing that they would not be called upon for many months, if at all.

The entire muddle of the air service was unbroken until a few extremists, by making hysterical charges, roused the people. Zeppelins came and went with immunity, both here and at their aerodromes. A Board of Enquiry, presided over by the head of the service, spent its time browbeating the critics, so that only two or three of the more daring volunteered to give evidence. Another Board has now brought in a report that exposes some of the extreme criticisms while hitting the Government hard. At one time twenty-seven aeroplanes were consumed in the effort to get twelve over to France, and no enquiry was held. The very newest of England’s types of aeroplane was sent straight from England to a German aerodrome because it was entrusted, by telephoned orders from the War Office, to the care of a pilot and an observer who had never before flown to France. And wherein is the change? It is a strange coincidence that almost on the day my article, “Canada in English Eyes.” should have appeared in Saturday Night, the new Premier was announcing in the House in his first speech the co-operation of the Dominions in the councils of war. The Food Controller, whose appointment had been dallied with for weeks by the late Government, was named the transportation of supplies, deliberated upon for months by Asquith, was placed immediately in the hands of a competent shipping man. Labor whose every demand had been granted almost without quibble by the late Government, was firmly informed by the new Labor Minister, a Labor leader himself, that not a moment’s consideration would be given the demands of the striking boilermakers until they had resumed work; and they immediately took up their tools. Billboard appeal for economy became Government measures. Badges were withdrawn from semi-skilled and unskilled workers. The air services of both branches of war were amalgamated under one head.

And England is responding grandly, without a murmur, with a deep respect for the man who does things in wartime rather than deliberate how to present them in beautiful phrasing.