In Good Company. Coulson Kernahan
Foreword, in which he said:
“This discussion of the question of national armaments aroused extraordinary interest among a very wide circle of readers, as it appeared in The Magazine of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in March, April, May and June of this year. It also led to much correspondence in other journals. No one then dreamed of the terrible significance which events were to attach to the subject. … Here are Mr. Kernahan’s words, printed last March, before any shadow had fallen across the sun. He says: ‘I have studied the question at home and abroad with as much closeness as was possible, and the more closely I study it the more convinced I am that we are well within the possibility of one of the most awful disasters that ever befell a great nation.’ In the light of to-day that is a remarkably verified warning.”
This controversy, on account of the importance attached to the issues involved, Lord Roberts followed with exceptional interest. One passage of arms between my opponent and myself I may be permitted to quote, since it centres around Lord Roberts himself.
“Mr. Kernahan proves,” my critic wrote, “that his special hero, Lord Roberts, is a truly Christian man. I would not question it for a moment. And yet—so terrible a power has familiarity with war to blind men’s eyes to its satanic wickedness—it was Lord Roberts who uttered in our Free Trade Hall at Manchester the cynical sentence about Germany’s right to strike when her hour came, which shocked even convinced conscriptionists on his platform. I wonder whether Lord Roberts approved of the way Germany struck when her hour came in 1870! Strange indeed to hear a Christian man echoing the very sentiments of Bismarck, who was so proud of the cunning lie by which he tricked France into a disastrous war!”
My reply I venture to quote, since Lord Roberts was so good as to say it exactly interpreted his views and his position.
“Lord Roberts,” I wrote, “claimed no such ‘right’ for any nation wantonly and wickedly to force war upon another. He pointed out that when one nation has decided, for reasons of her own (possibly because she is ambitious and determined to play a great part in history), to force a war upon another nation, which possibly may decide to resist, if only because she is determined to hold to her own—the policy is that adopted by Germany. That policy—as a student of history as well as a soldier, Lord Roberts had to admit that it is often a winning policy—is to strike at what has been called the selected moment, or in other words, when she (Germany) is at her strongest, and the nation which she wishes to overthrow is weak. It was because Lord Roberts knew that this was and is Germany’s policy, and because he wellnigh despairs sometimes at the criminal apathy of his fellow-countrymen, and because he knows the consequences which must almost inevitably follow, that he felt compelled, under a terrible sense of responsibility, to speak out thus plainly. Had he, knowing what he does of Germany’s ambitions, intentions, and strength, and of England’s ignorance, weakness, and unpreparedness, elected to maintain a cowardly and traitorous silence—then, and not till then, would he be guilty of the ‘cynical’ and ‘satanic’ wickedness of which my opponent speaks. … For the latter cannot deny that Germany has not gone back in her ambition or in her strength since 1870. On the contrary, she has gone on, not only in piling up an army which, as Mr. Churchill warned the nation, is now four and a half millions in number, but also in the most strenuous effort to create a vast Navy, which she has said must be, shall be, greater than ours. With her huge army she needs no Navy for defence. It is, as has been said, a ‘luxury’ and is meant for attack, whereas to us a Navy is a matter of life and death. And my opponent knows that we have twice held out the hand of friendship to Germany with proposals to stay this insane race in armaments, and that her reply was more battleships, more soldiers, more guns.”
I do not print this passage here to reopen an old controversy, but because—though the details of Lord Roberts’ proposals will, in the light of recent events, require considerable modification—the main issues raised by him abide and must be reaffirmed. Here in England we have short memories. It is possible that in the bewildering happenings of the war and in the breathless interest with which, at its end, the shifting of frontiers and the striking of great balances will be watched, there is the danger, if only from reaction, that we slackly fall back into our previous national inertia and national apathy, and that the little puddles of party politics (dirty puddles for the most part) once again matter more to us than to hold sacred and inviolate the great Empire and these world-trusts which God has seen well to commit to Britain’s charge.
II
I have heard many noble tributes paid to Lord Roberts, but I remember none which touched him more than that of Sir William Robertson Nicoll at the Whitefriars’ Club. Lord Roberts was the club guest, that brilliant author and journalist Mr. John Foster Fraser being Chairman. I had the honour of being in the Vice-Chair.
The toast of Lord Roberts’ health was seconded by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who was meeting the Field-Marshal for the first time. The Whitefriars’ dinner to Lord Roberts was merely a compliment to a great soldier. Not all of those present would have shared the views he entertained upon the question of National Service, and controversial issues were carefully excluded. Speaking, therefore, of Lord Roberts as a soldier, as a writer, and as a man, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, in one of the most graceful and generous tributes to which I have ever listened, assured him that by no class was our guest held in greater honour and affection than by the Nonconformists of this country and of every denomination. Lord Roberts knew that many Nonconformists differed from him in politics and upon the question of National Service, of which he was the acknowledged champion, and Sir William’s tribute so gracefully phrased, so obviously sincere in its expression of personal reverence and affection, touched and gratified him deeply.
That he felt a little sore, in regard to the misunderstanding of his views by some Nonconformists, is clear, I think, from a letter to me which lies before me as I write.
I happen to be a Churchman myself, but for the last eight or nine years before the war I devoted no inconsiderable portion of my time in trying to put the case for National Defence, as advocated by the Field-Marshal, before my many friends in the Nonconformist Churches, and I am glad and grateful to remember that, while not sharing my views, the editors of the great Nonconformist and Free Church organs gave me for the most part—there were exceptions—full opportunity to “state a case.” In April, 1913, a prominent Free Churchman of Hastings asked me to speak at the Brotherhood meeting in that town. I told him frankly that I dislike public speaking, but would do so if I were permitted to speak upon the subject of National Defence. My friend demurred, but it was finally arranged that I should first give a reading from a tiny booklet of my own, and after that I should speak for twenty minutes on the subject that lay so near my heart.
As this was the first occasion upon which an address upon National Defence was to be given at a Brotherhood meeting, Lord Roberts took deep interest in the matter. He was, indeed, so anxious to remove any misunderstanding which existed that he sent me a special message to deliver in his name to my audience. The message was in the form of a letter to myself, and as it puts his views very plainly, I print it here in full.
Englemere, Ascot,
Berks, 12.4.13.
Dear Mr. Kernahan,
I am very glad to learn that when asked to speak at the Brotherhood Meeting which is to take place in your own town on Sunday the 20th instant, you refused to do so unless you were allowed to deal with the question of National Service.
I know that there are many very well-meaning people who think that all military training is an abomination, and who are convinced that the life of youth in barracks is a continued round of vice and immorality of all kinds. I am prepared to admit that this certainly was true 200 years ago, and possibly it was true even at the beginning of the last century. During Marlborough’s wars we know from history that the ranks of the Regular Army were filled up by taking broken men of all kinds, and forcing them into the service.
Any man who was really on his last legs—broken debtors, tramps and vagabonds, condemned felons—these and