The Last Million: How They Invaded France—and England. Ian Hay
enjoying a few days’ vacation. The majority of them are soldiers on leave from the Front. Few of them will be here next week; some of them will never see a play again. The play goes on and helps the audience to forget for a while, but it is a different audience every time.
And you will hear little talk about the War. We prefer to talk of almost anything else. Probably you will understand why. There is hardly a house in this country which has not by this time made a personal contribution to our cause. In each of these houses one of two trials is being endured—bereavement, the lesser evil, or suspense, the greater. We cannot, therefore, talk lightly of the War, and being determined not to talk anxiously about it, we compromise—we do not talk about it at all.
We want you to know this. To know is to understand.
II. First Impressions
Meanwhile, let us ask for your impressions of our country. It is only fair that we should be allowed to do this, for you know what happens to visitors in the United States when the reporters get their hooks into them.
So far as I have been able to gather, your impressions amount to something like this:
There is no ice-water, no ice-cream, no soda-fountains, no pie. It is hard to get the old familiar eats in our restaurants.
Our cities are planned in such a way that it is impossible to get to any place without a map and compass.
Our traffic all keeps to the wrong side of the street.
Our public buildings are too low.
There are hardly any street-car lines in London.
Our railroad cars are like boxes, and our locomotives are the smallest things on earth.
Our weather is composed of samples.
Our coinage system is a practical joke.
Nobody, whether in street, train or tube, ever enters in conversation with you. If by any chance they do, they grouch all the time about the Government and the general management of the country.
Let us take the eats and drinks first. There is no ice-water. I admit it. I am sorry, but there it is. There never was much, but now that ammonia is mostly commandeered for munition work, there is less than ever. As a nation we do not miss it. In this country our difficulty is not to get cool, but to keep warm. Besides, it is possible that our moist climate, and the absence of steam-heat in our houses, saves us from that parched feeling which I have so often experienced in the United States. Anyway, that familiar figure of American domestic life, the iceman, is unknown to us. We drink our water at ordinary temperature—what you would call tepid—and we keep our meat in a stone cellar instead of the ice chest. As for ice-cream and soda-fountains, we have never given ourselves over to them very much. As a nation, we are hot-food eaters—that is, when we can get anything to eat! We are living on strict war rations here, just as you are beginning to do in the States. So you must forgive our apparent want of hospitality.
III. The Land We live in
Next, our cities. After your own straight, wide, methodically-numbered streets and avenues, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the rest must seem like a Chinese puzzle. I can only say in excuse that they have been there a very long time, and the people who started in to build them did not foresee that they would ever extend more than a few blocks. If Julius Cæsar had known that London was ultimately going to cover an area of seven hundred square miles, and house a population of seven and a half millions, I dare say he would have made a more methodical beginning. But Julius Cæsar never visited America, and the science of town-planning was unknown to him.
The narrow, winding streets of London are not suited to trolley-car lines. This fact has given us the unique London motor ’bus, driven with incredible skill, and gay with advertisements. There are not so many of these ’buses to-day as there might be, and such as there are are desperately full. But—c’est la guerre! Hundreds of our motor ’buses are over in France now. You will meet them when you get there, doing their bit—hurrying reënforcements to some hard-pressed point, or running from the back areas to the railhead, conveying happy, muddy Tommies home on leave.
And while we are discussing London, let me recommend you to make a point of getting acquainted with the London policeman. He is a truly great man. Watch him directing the traffic down in the City, or where Wellington Street, on its way to Waterloo Bridge, crosses the Strand. He has no semaphore, no whistle; but simply extends an arm, or turns his back, and the traffic swings to right or left, or stops altogether. Foreign cities, even New York, are not ashamed to send their police to London to pick up hints on traffic control from the London “Bobby.” Watch him handle an unruly crowd. He is unarmed, and though he carries a club, you seldom see it. If you get lost, ask him to direct you, for he carries a map of London inside his head. He is everybody’s friend. By the way, if he wears a helmet he is one of the regular force. A flat cap is a sign of a “Special”—that is, a business man who is giving his spare time, by day or night, to take the place of those policemen who have joined the Colours. But, “Regular” or “Special,” he is there to help you.
There are no skyscrapers in England. The fact is, London is no place for skyscrapers. It was New York which set the fashion. That was because Manhattan Island, with the Hudson on one side and the East River on the other, is physically incapable of expansion, and so New York, being unable to spread out, shot upwards. Moreover, New York is built on solid rock—you ask the Subway contractors about that!—while the original London was built on a marsh, and the marsh is there still. So it will not support structures like the Woolworth Building.
Most of our national highways start from London. There is one, a Roman road, called Watling Street, which starts from the Marble Arch and runs almost as straight as a rod from London to Chester, nearly two hundred miles; and it never changes its name after the first few miles, which are called the Edgware Road. Another, the Great North Road, runs from London to Edinburgh, and is four hundred miles long. One hundred years ago the mail coaches thundered along that road night and day, and highwaymen had their own particular pitches where no other highwaymen dreamed of butting in. Five years ago that road was a running river of touring automobiles. Now, strings of grey military motor lorries rumble up and down its entire length. Perhaps you will ride on some of them.
London, easy-going London, has her short cuts, too. That is where she differs from the methodical, rectangular, convenient cities of the United States. She is full of cunning by-ways, and every street has a character of its own. The Strand was called “The Strand” a thousand years ago, because it was a strand—a strip of beach which ran alongside the Thames at the foot of a cliff (which has long since been smoothed and sloped out of existence) and was submerged each high tide. The English fought a great battle with Danish pirates near by, and to-day the dead Danes sleep their last sleep in St. Clement Danes’ Church, right in the middle of the Strand.
Charing Cross, again, is the last of a great chain of such Crosses, stretching from London to Scotland, each a day’s march from the next. They were set up at the end of the thirteenth century by King Edward the First of England, to commemorate the last journey of his beloved Queen—his Chère Reine—who died while accompanying him upon a campaign against the Scots. At each stopping-place on his homeward journey the King erected one of these crosses to mark the spot where the Queen’s body lay that night. Many have perished, but you can still trace some of them along the Great North Road—Neville’s Cross, Waltham Cross, and finally Chère Reine Cross, or Charing Cross. That strikes the imagination. So do Aldgate, Aldersgate, Moorgate, London Wall, and other streets which go back to the days when London really was a walled city.
But a walk around London repays itself. There is Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment—the veteran among all monuments of the