The Last Million: How They Invaded France—and England. Ian Hay

[Note: The following is the substance of a little “Welcome” which the author was requested to write to American soldiers and sailors visiting England for the first time during the fateful days of 1918. It was distributed upon the transports and in various American centres in England. Its purpose is to set forth some of our national peculiarities—and incidentally the author’s Confession of Faith. It has no bearing upon the rest of the story, and may be skipped by the reader without compunction.]

I. A Word of Explanation

Table of Contents

I write this welcome to you American soldiers and sailors because I know America personally and therefore I know what the word “welcome” means. And I see right away from the start that it is going to be a difficult proposition for us over here to compete with America in that particular industry. However, we mean to try, and we hope to succeed. Anyway, we shall not fail from lack of good-will.

Having bid you welcome to our shores, I am next going to ask you to remember just one thing.

We are very, very short-handed at present. During the past four years the people of the British Isles have contributed to our common cause more than six million soldiers and sailors. On a basis of population, the purely British contribution to the forces of the British Empire should have been seventy-six per cent. The actual contribution has been eighty-four per cent; and when we come to casualties, not eighty-four but eighty-six per cent of the total have been borne by those two little islands, Great Britain and Ireland, which form the cradle of our race. You can, therefore, imagine the strain upon our man-power. Every man up to the age of fifty is now liable to be drafted. The rest of our male population—roughly five millions—are engaged night and day in such occupations as shipbuilding, coal-mining, munition-making, and making two blades of corn grow where one grew before. They are assisted in every department, even in the war zone, by hundreds and thousands of devoted women.

So we ask you to remember that the England which you see is not England as she was, and as she hopes to be again. You see England in overalls; all her pretty clothes are put away for the duration. Some day we hope once again to travel in trains where there is room to sit down; in motor omnibuses and trolley cars for which you have not to wait in line. We hope again to see our streets brightly lit, our houses freshly painted, flower boxes glowing in every window, and fountains playing in Trafalgar Square. We hope to see the city once again crowded with traffic as thick as that on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, and the uncanny silence of our present-day streets banished by the cheerful turmoil of automobiles and taxis. And above all we hope to see the air-raid shelters gone, and the hundreds of crippled men in hospital blue no longer visible in our streets, and the long lines of motor ambulances, which assemble every evening outside the stations to meet the hospital trains, swept away forever.

That is the old London—London as we would have you see it—London as we hope you will see it when you come back to us as holiday visitors. Meanwhile, we know you will make allowances for us.

Also, you may not find us very hilarious. In some ways we are strangely cheerful. For instance, you will see little mourning worn in public. That is because, if black were worn by all those who were entitled to wear it, you would see little else. Again, you will find our theatres packed night after night by a noisy, cheerful throng. But these are not idle people, nor

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