For WWI Notes: Louis Sheehan 9

For WWI Notes:   Louis Sheehan  9

CHAPTER IV

WITH THE BRITISH ARMY

I

In sheltered America we cannot realize what war means, but when we entered the warring countries of Europe, in an instant we were in a different atmosphere. We landed in England upon a darkened coast, we entered a darkened train, where every blind was drawn lest it furnish a guide to London for invading Zeppelins or aeroplanes. We passed through gloomy towns and villages, where not a single light was showing from a window, where every street lamp and railway station was darkened or hidden. Automobiles with a dim spark of light groped through the black streets of the metropolis.

In London we saw a great Zeppelin brought down in flames. It was a sight never to be forgotten. At half-past two in the morning we were awakened by the roar of the anti-aircraft guns in and around the city. After traveling all night from Germany, one Zeppelin had arrived over London and a whole fleet of them was scattered over the coasts and counties of England.

We sprang to the window and found the sky swept by a score of searchlights with their great shafts of piercing light, shooting from the dark depths of the city high into the sky, where they all converged on a single bright object that hung nine thousand feet above us. Long, and shining like silver with its flashing aluminum, the Zeppelin seemed held as if blinded by the fierce light. Bombs were dropping from it and explosions followed in rapid succession in the city beneath.

It was a battle to the death, high in the air with all London looking on. The guns were in full play and the shell and shrapnel were bursting all about the Zeppelin. Sometimes you could trace the whole trajectory of a projectile, as a spark of light swept through the sky toward the Zeppelin and then burst to the right or left, above or below it. Most of the shots seemed to go wide of the mark. More than a score of aeroplanes had been sent up to attack it, with one plane to guide the rest and signal to the guns below by wireless or lights. The battle finally developed into a duel to the death between the machine guns of the Zeppelin and Lieutenant Robinson of the Flying Corps, who was up for two hours in his aeroplane after the enemy—one man fighting for a city of five millions. He attacked from below and bombs were thrown at his plane; then he attacked from the side as he circled about the monster, but he was driven off by their machine guns. At last, mounting high in the sky, he attacked from above. The guide-plane flashed down the signal for the guns to cease firing and give him a chance.

For a few moments all was silent; the battle seemed to be over. The great airship, which had swung sharply to the left, was triumphantly leaving for home. Then it was that Robinson dropped his incendiary bomb. Suddenly there was an explosion. A flame of burning gas leaped into the sky. London was lit up for ten miles round-about. Our room was instantly as bright as though a searchlight had flashed into the window. Far above us was the Zeppelin in flames. Now it began to sink—first it was in a blaze of white light, then its outline turned to a dull red, finally it crumpled to a glowing cinder, sank from sight, and fell crashing to the earth. Then all was dark again. Death had fallen suddenly upon the men in the Zeppelin and upon some in the sleeping city below.

As we drove through London we passed the draper's shop, near St. Paul's Cathedral, where George Williams and a group of twelve young men met in a little upper room on June 6, 1844, to organize the first Young Men's Christian Association. A dozen young men with little wealth, influence, or education might not seem a very formidable force, but twelve men have upset the world and changed the course of history before now. They had only thirteen shillings, or $3.25, in the treasury, and were too poor even to print and send out a circular announcing their little organization. But George Williams brought his fist down on the table, with the confident words, "If this movement is of God, the money will come."

It has come. The twelve men have been multiplied now to a million and a half, scattered in forty lands. Girded with new strength and with the dauntless optimism of youth, the movement has risen up to minister not only to the millions of British and American soldiers and munition workers, but also to the men in the camps, hospitals, or prisons in most of the nations now at war. The thirteen shillings have been multiplied until now the permanent Y M C A buildings are worth over a hundred million dollars. An average of two new huts or centers have been erected and opened by the British or American Associations every day since war was declared; while two permanent buildings in brick or stone rise each week in some part of the world.

Wars are the birth-pangs of new eras. A new day dawned for the Young Men's Christian Association with the present war. At midnight on August 4, 1914, the British Association as it had been for seventy years was buried and forgotten, and a new movement arose on the ruins of the old. Ninety per cent of its former workers left to join the colors, but a new army of over thirty thousand men and women was mustered and trained within its huts for the service of the British soldiers. The Y M C A had suddenly to "think imperially," and to minister to a world at war.

Seventy years ago George Williams was the man of the hour, but a leader of the British war work of the Y M C A was found in the present crisis in the person of Mr. A. K. Yapp, General Secretary of the National Council of Great Britain, who has recently been knighted by virtue of his distinguished service for the nation. He had spent Sunday, August second, in deep searching of heart and had caught a vision of what the war would mean, and the opportunity that would be presented to an organization that was interdenominational, international, readily mobile, and adaptable enough instantly to meet a great national crisis.

Within a fortnight the British army and the whole British navy were mobilized for war. During that time the Y M C A was represented in four-fifths of the camps of the territorial forces and 250 centers were opened. In six months 500 centers were occupied; at the end of the first year there were 1,000, and after two years of the war 1,500 such centers were in full swing. The area of operations includes the British Isles, Egypt, the Dardanelles, Malta, the Mediterranean ports, India, Mesopotamia, East and South Africa, Canada, Australia, and out to the last limits of Britain's far flung battle line.

The Y M C A has a strong homing instinct, aiming to provide "a home away from home." In the dugouts behind the trenches, in the deserts of Egypt, or in the jungles of Africa, it has been forced to make a home in every kind of shelter. It was significant that its first three successive dwelling places seventy years ago were a little bedroom, a coffee house, and a room in a tavern. During the present war, one may see Associations in actual operation along the fighting line in France, in a cowshed, a pigsty, a stable, a hop-house, dugouts under the earth; in battered and ruined buildings in Flanders; in tents in the Sahara and on the ancient Peninsula of Mt. Sinai; at the bases of the big battle fleets; in the rest houses of the flying corps; on the Bourse in Cairo; in hotels taken over in Switzerland and France, and in the great Crystal Palace of London. In four centers it has used and transformed a brewery, a saloon, a theater, and a museum. Its dwellings stretch away from the tents of "Caesar's Camp," where the Roman Julius lauded in 55 B. C., on the southern shores of Britain, to the far north, in the new naval institute at Invergordon, erected for the sailors of the Grand Fleet at a cost of more than $20,000. They range from the battered dugouts at the front in France to the Shakespeare hut in London, costing more than $30,000. They stretch from the rest huts of the great metropolis, with sleeping and feeding accommodations for some ten thousand men a day during the dangerous period of leave in London, away to the hut in "Plug Street" Woods, recently blown to atoms by a shell, where the secretary escaped by a few seconds and returned to find literally nothing left save the rims of his spectacles and two coins melted and fused together by the terrific heat of the explosion. Several of the secretaries and workers have been killed by shell fire, or in transit by torpedoes from submarines, while other Association men have received the Victoria Cross for heroism in action.

Let us visit a typical hut to grasp the significance of its work, in order that we may realize what is going on in the fifteen hundred similar centers. We are on the great Salisbury Plain, in the midst of thirty miles square of weltering mud during the long winter months. To realize what a hut means to the men in such a place, we must understand the unnatural situation created by the conditions of war. Here are multitudes of men far from home, shut out from the society of all good women, taken away from their church and its surroundings, weary and wet with marching and drilling, often lonely and dejected, in an atmosphere of profanity and obscenity in the cheerless barrack rooms, and tempted by the animal passions which are always loosed in war-time. The men need all the help we can give them now, and need it desperately.