The Enemy in England

The Enemy in England

Part IX of the series ‘England in Arms’.

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, January 1918.

It is not inconsistent, though it is unfortun­ate, that those charac­teristics which, in time of peace, are counted to a nation’s credit, in time of war oft-times stand to its dis­service and mischief. Bound into the very foundation on which the British Empire was built, close, indeed, to its keystone, is tolerence; just as, sooner or later, the first crumbling breach in the walls of German resistance will show where intolerance has been so prominently fixed. But as even a virtue, uncontrolled, may approach a vice, so Britain’s (especially Eng­land’s) acceptance of the widest ap­plication of tolerance, in a time when little counts but the life of the nation and the sternest support of those great principles which focus only in the defeat of an inhuman foe, has become to it in certain stages of the war a menace it should not have risked. And yet it is so much easier to moralize than to follow the straight path of virtue as demanded by the altered conditions of war that his­tory is not apt to sum up England’s part in the war as a careless disre­gard for the sensible precautions that consider only victory.

Behind England’s calm tolerance of the enemy in its midst stand the principles of government that have held together an Empire more di­verse than ever before was bound to­gether even by the thinnest threads. The ancient Romans, whose dominion was more ambitious but infinitely less effective and extensive, never at­tempted the feat of welding such con­fusion of tongue, such diversity of character, such uncongenial spirits as Great Britain has governed with­out serious strife for generations Necessarily it had perforce to be a government of indulgence, of conces­sions, of licence. To weave into one fabric the Scotsman and the Indian and the Chinese, and the hundred distinct units of a hundred corners of the world, imprinted that on the English character which has made him a cosmopolite. It has opened his mind to a thousand vagaries of individual belief. It has opened his hand to the puny communities of dis­tant sections which would have been beneath the notice of any other na­tion. It has opened its doors to the world’s refugees—which means not alone the world’s downtrodden but its criminals, its outcasts, its great un­wanted. And with the unlimited opening has grown up an intolerance of intolerance, a firm reputation of the closed corporation, in national as in commercial life. Only in his pri­vate life does the Englishman cling to the barriers.

England became a haven, built in those principles. The Anarchists of France and Spain and Italy found a home there; the Nihilists of Russia fled there before the sword of unre­lenting Czarism; the political out­casts of a score of countries swarmed to the little island that refused to give them up to the avenging hand of their own countries. And, more dan­gerous than all, the spies of the na­tions that train spies as a feature of the national system, found there their mart of exchange, their delving ground, their most profitable source of the information which might some day be used against the country that gave them shelter. It has always been presented as the best justifica­tion of this attitude that the Anar­chist and the political exiles who harbour there have thrown aside their dangerous tenets in their relationship to England. But it is a defence which has been repudiated more often than has been made public and from which countries friendly to Great Britain have suffered almost without protest. When Winston Churchill turned machine guns on the foreign criminals of a street in East-End London he was but laying the foundation for an enlightenment which has been spreading over Eng­land since the greatest war in his­tory revealed new national prin­ciples. But tolerance died hard. Indeed, it is not dead, though the Empire pays for it in human blood.

One must let these truths pene­trate in any examination of the treat­ment that has been meted to the enemy alien in England. No nation, and especially not England, can throw aside the principles of genera­tions that have built up such an Em­pire. Add thereto the sporting in­stincts of the Englishman, the desire to give even the most powerful and menacing enemy the privileges of open combat, and there opens up some­thing of the reasons behind the leni­ency which met the German and the Austrian and the Turk who had found their homes in the British Isles. Consider therewith, too, the freedom of action which these foreigners enjoyed for so long that they had been able to make themselves powers in the land, hacked by the official support of their own govern­ments, aided by the co-operation of a million fellow-countrymen in other parts of the world. These men had wormed their way into the very na­tional framework, of finance and in­dustry and commerce, even into poli­tics. They had stormed society with gold and kingly honours. They had married their sons and daughters to English daughters and sons, often, it is certain, merely in pursuit of the common aim of influence. They had won or purchased staunchest friends, in civil as in political life. They held many of the imposing properties which commanded respect and sub­servience as ancient rights. In the House of Commons were ardent de­fenders whose honesty has never been impugned, as well as a few others whose motives might well be questioned.

So that when the war broke out they had behind them the English wall of tradition, the firm support of influential friends, the trust of the powers who alone could curtail their liberties, and the pride of the Eng­lishman who disdains to excite himself over any peril. They were many times entrenched.

To the man on the street it would seem to be the part of wisdom in­stantly to protect the nation against the machinations of the enemy resi­dent. But the man on the street finds the way to action long. Canada, as well as England, has been indul­gent to the German in its midst. The politician is bound by different views, by different motives and necessities. It happened that in the British House at the outbreak of war the Home Office was under one whose sympa­thies were loyal enough but more ac­tively tolerant. Indeed, the head of the office has at all times concerned himself with the enemy alien and his rights and protection more than is agreeable to the public and to his fellow Ministers. It may be more the fault of the estimated duties of the office than of the man himself. With the declaration of war nothing was done to control the spy. Evid­ences of his handiwork were not only suspected but revealed in a score of cases. Prominent Germans, known to be in the favour of the Kaiser, were afforded their customary liberties. Enemy firms whose interests were wholly German were permitted to conduct their businesses along the usual lines. England, with its eyes firmly fixed on the star of its lofty principle in entering the war, was far above the crude pettiness of in­dividual coercion and limitation. Glowing speeches, that might have sounded well in history had Great Britain won the war during the first four months, were delivered by the page to convince the public that we were waging war on Kaiserism, not on the individual German. It sounded well, but the public was going by sight not by sound. And in the meantime the individual Ger­man in many cases was doing his ut­most for Kaiserism.

The state of public opinion early in the war drove the resident Germans and Austrians by the hundred to take out naturalization papers; and, ac­cording to the law, there was nothing to prevent. The Schmitzs became plain Joneses, and the German signs on the fronts of scores of shops gave place to good old British names with­out changing proprietors. Protest by the press was met by lifted hands of helplessness. The announced de­termination of the German rulers to exact retribution from those Ger­mans who did not remain true to their homeland, the declaration that a German could secure naturalization in a foreign country without affect­ing his German nationality, had no effect on the stand of the authorities.

Only when the Zeppelins in early 1915, dropped death on innocent Britons and friendly foreigners did the public take the course of events into its own hands. Each raid was followed by rioting in the East-End of London that threatened much more than the destruction of a few German shops or injury to a few Germans. To hold the mob in check the Government was forced to take steps to intern 20,000 Germans and Austrians throughout England. In haste the internments were decided upon, but it was noticeable that only the uninfluential Germans were touched, with here and there one of note to make the total bulk large. The relegation to private life of the Prince of Battenberg from his posi­tion of authority in the navy early in the war was but one of these act’s of pandering to public clamour without realizing the justice of the protest. At the time the internments com­menced there was established an Ad­visory Committee whose duties have apparently been to find ground for excusing prominent Germans from internment, not to intern. In all the list of angry queries which have been thrown at the Government by en­thusiastic Britons in the House, there are remarkably few replies pointing to internment upon the advice of this committee, while every German at large has been protected by its re­ported findings. All over England well-known Germans went about their daily work, not quietly and inoffen­sively, but boastfully. Many instances have been quoted of a sneer­ing ridicule of their enemies. “They can’t intern me” has been hurled by impudent Germans in the face of angry fathers whose sons have died through the release of information that can have been obtained only through spies.

In the time of Asquith the Ger­man in England fared exceedingly well. Only after persistent pursuit by the press was he interned, and from his comfortable quarters in Donnington Hall or in the other elabor­ate quarters where he was semi-con­trolled, he looked out upon an England disturbed and suffering from a war that inconvenienced him little. He was clothed and fed and waited upon as few Englishmen. His wife was paid an allowance of from five to ten shillings a week more than that allowed the wife of the British soldier fighting in France. His business was run for him, either by an English de­puty who paid him the profits, or he was permitted occasional freedom to oversee it. In the two years and more of the Asquith war Premier­ship scarcely a German business was closed down, although hundreds of them were theoretically under con­trol. Asquith’s lax methods made action repugnant, in spite of the con­stant protest of an influential press. To be sure Enemy Trading Acts were introduced, intended to prevent enemy profit, but there was nothing to prevent a Briton carrying on the business and piling up the profits to be paid the German proprietor after the war is over. Many of these Ger­man firms even secured large con­tracts from the Government at the expense of the British firms.

The entry of Lloyd George into the field promised more than it ef­fected. He found himself faced by a people more intent on the noise of protest than an effective action to satisfy that protest. They saw and resented the freedom of the enemy in the country and to some extent backed the steps necessary to curtail it; but the ways of the country intervened, and had it not been for papers like the Northcliffe press there would have been little more done than to intern a few powerless merchants who had thus far escaped. Then, too, the Court of Appeal came to the protec­tion of the German. Taking advan­tage of the laws of the land—laws he would have laughed at in his own country—many a German secured his liberty. The Court of Appeal declared that a German at large in England is not an enemy alien, and debts were collected on the strength of it. Lloyd George did, without delay, place in internment several of the best known Germans whose im­munity hitherto had been a matter of marvel and whose brazenness threat­ened a popular uprising. But always there was evident a desire more to ap­pease the public than to effect a pub­lic benefit. From the beginning the coercion of German subjects and naturalized Germans has been with a view to exercising official control as little as possible.

The Home Office, driven by a group of influential Britons whose sympa­thies from the first have been with Germany, has undertaken the care of the German resident, and Lloyd George’s administration has altered this attitude little. Official appeals were sent all over the country for firms to engage interned aliens. There was, no doubt, the excuse that it would save the expense of intern­ment, but there was far more the danger that these men, who had been considered dangerous enough to look away from the public, would be able to resume most of their former ac­tivities and opportunities for evil; and there was the subtle folly of se­curing good jobs for a foe whose re­lentless style of warfare placed them beyond more than mere human con­sideration. The move was discounted from the first by the indignant re­fusal of employers to throw open their shops to the enemy.

A committee had been formed early in the war for the benefit of the alien enemy, its funds provided by some of the best known naturalized Germans, German admirers and paci­fists. In the list were included such significant names as Haldane, Beit, a prominent Government Official, and the Cadbury Brothers. The influence of the latter was great. As the pro­prietors of two London daily papers, they had been insistently declaring from the first rumours of war that it was impossible, that Britain misun­derstood Germany; and ever since, as Quakers, they have been edging towards peace at every stage where such a word dare be mentioned. Public disgust expressed itself most effectively when a county Prisoners of War Committee returned Mr. B. Cadbury (these are the Cadburys of cocoa fame) the five pounds he had contributed, on the ground that they could not accept it in the face of a personal contribution of £750 and a firm contribution of £1,500 to the funds for interned and uninterned aliens. This pro-enemy committee was constantly at work endeavouring to ease the lot of the enemy alien, soliciting work for him, purchasing luxuries denied our prisoners in Germany, and generally presenting his case to the authorities and the public.

The matter of German businesses walked the same uncertain course under the new Premier. Here and there a German business that had been much in the public eye was closed, but until the press took up a case nothing was done to it. The English manager of Bradstreet’s, German born, continued to sign the firm’s letters, although theoretically supplanted, until the folly of it was exposed in the press. Of the German banks which had been closing for al­most three years one was finally wound up. But in this act, too, was evidenced the unduly favourable treat­ment accorded the enemy. In strict British fairness, debts owing the Ger­man firms were set against their own debts; yet it developed that, while the British debtor was forced to pay 20s. on the pound, the British credi­tor received only 13s. 4d. The Ger­man debts, incurred when the mark stood at 20.40 per £, were paid at an existing rate of 30.45, although at the moment there might be sufficient assets to pay at the full rate; and no one seemed to be able to state how the rate was established.

Failing to find places for the in­terned Germans in British firms, many were allowed freedom to reopen or manage their former businesses. Others were freed for no apparent reason but that they might resume their former methods of life, living on their incomes. Here and there Germans who had been interned re­appeared in their old haunts without public explanation. For some of these someone had gone bail, others were allowed out for a sort of holiday, and still others were released on the word of influential friends or for unknown reasons. The lot of those left in internment continued to be com­fortable. At the time when the country was rationing itself, the Germans in Donnington Hall and Alexandra Palace were allowed much larger food supplies, and only when protest was made in the House was a change in­troduced. To-day, when thousands of homes are unable to secure coal through transportation difficulties Alexandra Palace is amply stocked. An example of superlative kindness to the German is that in Donnington Hall there are 115 servants to wait on 389 German officers.

And still there were at the middle of 1917 about 22,000 Germans and Austrians at large, less than half of them women; and at the last returns given in the House several thousands were living in areas that are called prohibited, where the most valuable information is obtainable. One prom­inent German purchased recently through his son an estate within a mile of a hill commanding a wide view over the sea, and in the House it was stated that he had been already fined for trading with the enemy and his son for showing a bright light at night. An uninterned German was arrested with important secret military documents and an officer’s kit bag in his possession, with German calling-up papers in his pocket. A celebrated Austrian painter has only now been taken into custody (his case was fought out before the advisor committee), although he became naturalized only after war was declared and at the time a letter of his in friends in Austria told of his reluctance to seem thus to repudiate the land of his birth, as well of his enmity to “the predatory Serbian nation”. A German was shot by an officer for in­trigues with the latter’s wife, after the police had known for months of his origin and his association with a woman executed as a spy. Two foun­dations of German monks were until recently allowed complete freedom in England. On the very day the papers announced a fine of £100 against a British engineer for attempting to purchase without a permit a pistol for experimenting, the English Con­sul-General for Montenegro arrived at a summer resort in England with an Austrian valet who had been ex­empted from internment by the Home Office. Several German women have been found doing service in the homes of British officers. The British wife of an interned German was recently lightly fined for attempting to pur­chase an aeroplane seating four and capable of flying to Germany. As there are many German escaped of­ficers still at large the affair assumed a serious aspect.

Even the Government itself seemed disposed to do its best in its own de­partments for the Germans. In the central telegraph office were, at one time since the middle of 1917, eight men, in addition to Belgians, not Bri­tish-born. A young man who claimed exemption from military service on the ground that his parents were Ger­man was found employed in a Gov­ernment telegraph office, through which the most important secrets pass­ed, although substitutes offered them­selves. The assistant constructor at an important dockyard was the son of a German father and had visited Germany shortly before the war. A naturalized German was permitted to live close to a large aerodrome. The Minister of Blockades appealed for the exemption of a young German on its staff—and the tribunal granted it. A man of German descent was appoint­ed British Commercial Attaché at The Hague, although his brother had already been convicted of disloyalty, and only the persistent outcry of the press obtained his dismissal after the Government had once refused to yield to public indignation.

Indeed, from the first it has been a constant struggle between the public and the Government or certain pow­erful interests in the Government. The latter have steadily refused to take the steps necessary to overcome the spy evil until they were forced to it by the people; and even the English people have endured what few other countries would permit. Now and then some public body with sufficient Power to make itself heard has acted. School trustees have dismissed their pro-German teachers, and won their cases when the law was appealed to. At least one university rid itself of two or three German professors after the German names attracted public attention. The guardians of a spe­cially fitted hospital refused to ac­cept more German wounded when they found that their entire main building was filled with 1,700 Ger­mans, while in the annex were a thou­sand British. As the apparatus pro­vided was unexcelled in England, the guardians claimed that its benefits should be more largely open to Bri­tish wounded.

In all this favouritism to the Germans were bound up the energies of the pacifists and conscientious objec­tors. In public meetings before their friends, in their own press, in the House of Commons, the most was made by these men of fair treatment to the enemy, their idea of fairness being favouritism. Every month or two a question was asked concerning complaints about the food at the internment camps, although the ra­tions were superior to that which was allowed the British soldier. No com­plaints seem to have been made at the camps themselves, but there were al­ways friends in the House anxious to forestall rationing. The same influ­ence that rendered the British bloc­kade so ineffective until the United States acted was at work from the beginning of the war to protect the enemy alien in England. While Great Britain was allowing to percolate through its blockade net the very es­sentials of life in the enemy countries, is was also handing out to German prisoners and to the interned treat­ment not accorded our own soldiers at home and not expected or asked for our interned in Germany. But the question of the blockade included other issues that hound Great Bri­tain’s hands, releasing them only when the United States stood behind it at the source of supplies. What tem­pers one’s sympathy with the difficult position Britain finds herself in in supplying neutral countries is the fact that food was even being shipped to South America.

Yet it is not for Canada to criticize. England’s pacifists have never been al­lowed the freedom of expression enjoy­ed by a few traitorous spirits in Can­ada; nor has such political use been made of pro-Germans in England as has characterized political operations in Western Canada. The handling of enemy aliens is theoretically simple of plan and action, but in the every­day life of a nation, even at war, there are interests and influences that seem willing to sacrifice the country to the worst of foes.

The next article of this series will be “The Human Side”, describing the mar­vellous work for the welfare of the distressed in England.

The Listening-Post

The Listening-Post and the Despatch-Bearer.

Part V of ‘With Canadians from the Front’

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, February 1917.

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, August 2016.

He was a woeful looking figure when I saw him first—thin, sickly, stoop-shouldered, with a light growth of fair hair in constant rebellion. His white, wan face carried a story I longed to hear. As the kind treat­ment of the convalescent home began to have its effect, he brightened to its influence, his cheeks began to fill, his colour to return, and the misery in his eyes passed into a deceiving in­nocence that covered depths of mis­chief. But always the mere mention of his life in the trenches drove him back to sober thoughtfulness.

He never should have been there at all. Only the sheer grit of him had kept him from the hospital many a time. And when he left us once more for the front there was grit in his last smile. He had not learned to look forward to the bully beef and mud with any greater pleasure; but he knew what was expected of him, and his friends—the very friends who had always taken advantage of his mild ways—would tell you that he had never been found wanting in that.

A Canadian to the tips, he was not born in Canada. Indeed, even when I knew him, he spoke English imperfectly. He was born in France. Perhaps that accounted in part for his willingness to face the fight again as soon as the doctors thought he could, when many a bigger, better lad was adding a touch of limp or cough or a twist of pain when the examining doctor came.

From what level of French society he came is immaterial. His father died when he was very young, and his step-father was cruel to him. At thirteen he ran away. He had heard of Canada even at that age, and it sounded good to him. But the French boats would not take him without his parents’ consent; so he shipped on a Norwegian.

His story of the trip across is a series of brutality worthy of the Ger­mans. His mild manners, I suppose it was, and his immature age made him a butt for the cruel sailors. He was kicked and cuffed. A favourite pastime of the crew was to force him to climb the mast when it was caked with frozen spray; and at every slip they kicked him up again. And then he came to Canada, undergrown, ill-nourished, his constitution under­mined.

Landing first in the Maritime Pro­vinces, without a word of English at his command, he nevertheless found work. From job to job he drifted into the lumber woods. And there he was, where the harshest conditions of life demand the strongest, hardiest frames, when the war broke out.

One would think that such a career would have hardened him to anything the trenches had to offer. Lads from homes of luxury had stood it, most of them with less grumble than comes from those who had always existed beneath the knocks of life. But the little French lad’s constitution had been weakened when he was too young to profit physically from the buffets of his experience. The new kind of exposure told on him from the first. He did not drink, and some of his mates have told me what a pitiful sight he was in the cold, wet dawn, shiveringly refusing his grog, while everyone else was clamouring for the touch of liquid fire that open­ed each day through the cold season.

But to a man they repudiated the thought that the boy was any the worse for it in the long run, certain­ly not in morale. “Whenever there was any particularly dirty job on, V. was the first to volunteer,” they said. “He never funked. He was on listen­ing-post longer and oftener than any­one else in the company. Grit clear through!” And his illness came to him when his perils seemed to be over for the time. “I thought I was going to Heaven,” he breathed to me, in that sentimental way of his, “when I got my first leave.” He nearly did. In England but a day or two, he develop­ed pneumonia—as many another has done. That was how I met him.

Always back in his eyes was a sad­ness, as of looking at pictures he did not like to talk about. But when he did talk I could see a little of what he felt; he described it to me with the simple clarity of a mind that does not make a habit of speaking all it thinks.

It was his listening-post duties of which he was always thinking—those lonesome, terrible, perilous hours of which he had spent more than his share out before the front lines. “Often I used to wish a bomb would fall beside me,” he confided, “and get me out of it. But they never would. Fellows all about me were killed, boys who didn’t want to die, but I always escaped. From Novem­ber when I went in I was never dry. Two or three times I found dry places to sleep, and it was wonderful.” And never a hint that his duties had been volunteered, that he had offered to go out and lie in the mud before the German trenches while his comrades held back.

V.’s battalion had a particularly bad spot in the line. The trenches were shallow; to go deeper was but to wallow in deeper water. The Ger­man line was out across a brutal No Man’s Land where water lay in every depression. Men were drowned there. The trenches were bad; the listening-post was inhuman. And the shiver­ing lad returning from before the German fire had no warm dugout to look forward to. He was never dry.

Listening-post duty is the local spying system of the front lines. Every night No Man’s Land is inhabited by two parties, the patrol squads and the listening-posts. The latter usual­ly go in pairs, their duty to listen to the Germans in their trenches if they can approach close enough, to waylay enemy patrols, to uncover working parties. They are the spies, the door­keepers, the watch-dogs, and alto­gether the uncomfortable ones of the company. They are selected for the things that make a good soldier—steadiness of nerve, intelligence, dis­crimination, knowledge of German quick-wittedness, and endurance. Which does not imply that all on listening-post possess these traits. If they do they are the more valuable.

After dark they crawl out over the parapet, often alone, conscious that their return is uncertain, aware that ahead of them stretches an intermin­able two hours of danger and discom­fort. As close as they can get to the German trenches is their goal—through the German wire barricades if possible. And there they lie motionless, silent, low as the ground will let them, in water and mud. The deepest depression, where the mud and water await them, is their safest resting-place. To be against the skyline is certain exposure. And all the time the nervous German is send­ing up star-shells in search for such as he. He has orders not to shoot—as have all in No Man’s Land at night—save as a last extremity. Three bombs he carries for protection if pressed, and a password for his own patrol partlies who are prowling about. In his hand may be the end of a string attached to a bell in the trench he has left, and by it he can say all he need say in a hurry.

For the rest he trusts to Providence and to the luck of the soldier. If the luck of the soldier is according to his deserts I know there is good fortune in store for such as V.

The patrol party is the listening-post in action. It combines the spy­ing of the other with the beat of the policeman and the destructiveness of the soldier. Those of the regular patrol party are relieved of fatigue duty, but into the hours of darkness they cram thrills and danger enough at times to earn them more relief that they get.

Perhaps you, in your Morris chair to-night, can picture the weird work of the patrol in No Man’s Land. Out there where not a finger dare show in daylight, where any careless bullet from either side may find its billet in him, where every second is a possible encounter with a thousand lurking dangers he cannot see, he prowls about in search of anything of value. He may crawl through the barb-wire before the German trenches and lie listening to the conversation of an enemy who fancies himself secure. He may run suddenly into a dark form, or a score of them, and have to hold his hand until he knows them as friend or foe. If friend there is the password. If foe—well, some quick thinking is necessary first of all. He must not reveal his location to either trench by bullet or bomb, except as a last resort. The knife or the bayonet are the saf­est weapons; failing these, bombs. The scene of a couple of patrol parties throwing bombs indiscriminatingly in the darkness contains all the mystery and excitement and uncertainty of a detective story with the possible solu­tion the death of all concerned. When the patrol is out the trenches they left have orders not to fire towards the Germans; a friend is as vulner­able to a rifle bullet as a foe.

And yet the boys like it when there is no other excitement. There is ac­tion in it, the chance of getting even. There is about it that uncertainty that gives gambling its lure—and then there may be a V. C. To poke around in the darkness with the thrills running down your spine, un­certain what is ahead of you, whether a German, a clamorous machine-gun bullet, a sudden jab from a bayonet, or a six-foot hole filled with water, is more exciting than “playing the pon­ies” or dodging the police for a crap game. It even has its points over being caught in the open when the fog rises and shows you up to a thousand or two of snipers whose only interest in life is your death.

A patrol party usually consists of an officer, a sergeant, and six men, and a connection may be retained with the trenches by means of a bell at each end of the platoon.

Connection between the various parts of the army is vital. That is so obvious that its development has been affected less than any other de­partment by the exigencies of this novel war. Communication between General Staff and army, between army and division, between division and brigade, between brigade and battalion, between battalion and com­pany, between company and platoon, and even between scores of individu­als off in hiding by themselves and their officers. And the guns must never lose touch with the infantry.

There is a system that keeps all these units together, and this war has culled out the useless details and lean­ed on those which have been found not wanting. The backbone of connection is the telephone. There are telephones everywhere on the field of battle, sometimes from far before the front line right back to General Joffre. Every tree may have its tele­phone, every shell hole, every dug-out; and every fence skeleton and hedge is certain to be the trail of wires that direct the conflict.

Wire layers and repairers are a part of every branch of the service, and their work is never complete. But the telephone is not always vocal. Back of battalion headquarters it may be a buzzer, and sometimes in front if the German lines are not too close. The buzzer can be tapped by the enemy more easily. The vocal tele­phone, when within some hundreds of yards of the enemy, is on metallic cir­cuit for the purpose of retaining its secrets. And at the front end of the wire is the signaller.

Of course you have watched with more than ordinary interest the dril­ling in Canada of the signaller before he is sent overseas. You have seen a group of them, each with a pair of flags, wig-wagging to another group across a field. And you have been awed by the swiftness of gesticulation and the certainty of reply. It is there for you to see. So it would be for the enemy if it were in use where there is one.     .

The disillusioning feature of it is that these spectacular evolutions are nothing more than a course of calis­thenics, so far as their usefulness to the present-day line of battle is con­cerned. The signaller is a signaller no longer. His flags are probably somewhere back in England with the rest of the junk of war waste. In the first place battles don’t wait now for an officer in one field to wig-wag to an officer in another field that his guns are cutting up his friends in­stead of his enemies, or that the enemy is about to come over. In the second place signallers are not im­mortal—not in this life, and the supply would run out before a single flag had been raised. The enemy is not the least bit considerate when it comes to passing along messages by anticipated methods.

I am not certain of it offhand, but I should say that not a flag has wav­ed in battle since 1914. It is a pre­paratory exercise for the consumption of open-mouthed civilians, and to con­vince those who enlist for the signal corps that they are signallers.

And the signallers have profited by it as well as the army. There is no straining of eyes, no nervous doubt, no mistake, no exposure. The signaller lies under cover taking the orders of his officer and transmitting them to their destination. And up at the front he has to do his own repairing of wires.

If anyone should guess at the miles of telephone wire that have been used in this war he would probably go mad with the immensity of it. At first the wire was a nice rubbered af­fair that cost so much per inch and when required elsewhere was taken up in order to limit the cost of the British army to $25,000,000 a day—as it is at the time of writing. Then common sense awoke. It struck some­one that service was the thing, not polish; that a wire that could lie ignored when of no further use, at the saving of time and human life, was what this war needed. So they produced an enamelled wire that worked as well without costing enough to make it worth while to send a gang of men to remove it. Now there must be thousands of miles of cheap wire that has served its purpose, kicking about France for peace to collect and sell as souvenirs. It is everywhere over the ground, and everywhere it has been smashed to powder by a thousand guns.

Of course there is other wire. The nicely insulated variety is still used in the rear and removed with the re­moval of the units it feeds. Armour­ed cable is still in use for permanent posts and for headquarters. But where a flag used to deliver a message from the open on clear days in a couple of minutes, a bit of flimsy wire staked to the ground or run through a hedge transmits the same message more surely in a second. And sec­onds count.

There are times when the wires fail—when there is not time for their laying, when movement is too swift to be followed by the wire gang, when the bursting shells make dust of formal communication. It is then man comes into his own—with all the tight places and impenetrable bar­riers into which the carrying of de­spatches throws him.

Orders are carried under these con­ditions by three distinct bodies of orderlies. Back in comparative safe­ty, although still within range of the guns and sometimes under excite­ment, the despatch riders whizz from headquarters to headquarters on motor-cycles. With the distances they have to cover and the large urgency of their reports, speed is im­portant. Between the smaller units behind the lines bicycle orderlies do the work, their course facilitated by the lightness and mobility of their machines.

But while there is a certain glamour thrown on the work of the despatch riders, largely because they are the snobs of the despatch service and roar and rave and rattle about from point to point on mounts whose ef­fectiveness seems to be based upon the noise they make and the speed they can maintain, there is a third branch of the service that performs the really dangerous, unsung work up at the front where the fury of the fight makes wire too mortal, where advance of small units has separated them from their companions, where the extreme pressure of the enemy makes immediate reinforcements and sup­plies necessary to the very life of the struggling men. Those who figure there are the battalion runners.

Were the services of the battalion runners narrated in full there would be books of bravery and sacrifice, of grim perseverance and reckless dar­ing that would pretty nearly discount any other branch of the service. But because these young fellows work at sudden emergency, because they are too busy to demand their dues from the press, because they are few in number and small of size and come into contact only with a few officers, they pursue their imperilled path without a publicity agent.

I have talked to despatch riders whose many months of active service has earned nothing more serious for them than a spill at sixty miles an hour or thereabouts, or a hundred yard acquaintance with a “coal-box.” But the despatch rider—like certain of the Flying Oorp before they have heard the sound of a gun—is primed with a luridness of description that savours of the exhaust of their motor­cycles while carrying perhaps nothing more momentous than an invitation to a brother officer to come over and make up a table.

I have also talked with battalion runners who, having not the capacity for description, treat the most hair-raising experiences as the details of an ordinary day’s work. In fact I have never yet drawn a story from a battalion runner except by the exer­cise of all my “pumping” ability. They are modest boys, trained in a silent, modest school, and their very isolation from the usual trench life deprives them of that ready exchange where the ordinary soldier is cram­med with stock experiences.

Battalion runners seem to be select­ed for their smallness of size, their quickness of foot, their stubborness and determination, and their ability to go on to the end without being swerved aside by the incidents about them. The latter is the main qualifi­cation.. The battalion runner must close his eyes and ears to everything but his destination. His work is not to fight except against the obstacles in his path; and nothing but death must stop him.

Battalion runners are the connect­ing links between units that have be­come separated. They must keep these units in touch, whether across the very mouths of German rifles or backward to the sources of relief and supply. Their orders are simply to get there, using every facility avail­able. Usually they are on foot, sneak­ing along through shattered trenches, crawling from shell hole to shell hole, skirting danger by the merest hair’s breadth to save time—running, creep­ing, lying down until danger is past, in silence and alone looking only to their own resources for the fulfilment of their purpose.

There are stories in my mind of the suffering and grim endurance and persistence of these despatch-bearers, that are almost monotonous in their lack of lurid detail. But anyone with some conception of conditions among the trenches may fill in without diffi­culty. I have heard of battalion run­ners on their way through enemy lines to reach a unit beyond, who were forced to worm along on hands and knees for miles and hours, al­ways within touch of the foe. One runner hid for a week in the remains of a small woods, sneaking out at night to sustain himself on the pick­ings from the dead bodies that lay about. Germans by the hundreds were around him. But he delivered his message at the end—days after it was of any value. Often in their silent passage they meet the enemy on equally silent errands, and fight or run as the occasion or opportunity demands.

And such service is not rendered unscathed. They lie down and die out there where none knows what has happened, their message undelivered and their devotion unrewarded—and they are only casualties. The one thought in their minds is to last out to the moment when they can place the message in the hands they seek. Wounded to death they stagger on, and sink to final rest with the last words of the message on their lips. Even they hide their wounds that they might bear back the reply awaited.

A brave, tireless, defiant, silently suffering band of devoted soldiers, these runners who tempt to their own bodies the wounds they are trying to save their comrades. A modest group whose reward is in duty performed, not in the applause of the casual pub­lic. Some day their historian will earn them their deserts.

The next article of this series is entitled “The Non-Combatants”, which describes the work of the vast number of men in the army who never see the firing-line.