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[Transcriber's notes: Original spelling retained, original copyright
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Volume II

England's Effort

Letters To An American Friend

[Illustration: Spring-time in the North Sea--Snow on a British
Battleship.]




_The War On All Fronts_


England's Effort

Letters To An American Friend

By Mrs. Humphry Ward

With A Preface By Joseph H. Choate


Illustrated


New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1918

Copyright, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS




Preface

HAS ENGLAND DONE ALL SHE COULD?


That is the question which Mrs. Ward, replying to some doubts and queries
of an American friend, has undertaken to answer in this series of letters,
and every one who reads them will admit that her answer is as complete and
triumphant as it is thrilling. Nobody but a woman, an Englishwoman of warm
heart, strong brain, and vivid power of observation, could possibly have
written these letters which reflect the very soul of England since this
wicked and cruel war began. She has unfolded and interpreted to us, as no
one else, I think, has even attempted to do, the development and absolute
transformation of English men and women, which, has enabled them, living
and dying, to secure for their proud nation under God that "new birth of
freedom" which Lincoln at Gettysburg prophesied for his own countrymen.
Really the cause is the same, to secure the selfsame thing, "that
government of the people, by the people, and for the people may not perish
from the earth";--and if any American wishes to know how this has been
accomplished, he must read these letters, which were written expressly for
our enlightenment.

Mrs. Ward had marvellous qualifications for this patriotic task. The
granddaughter of Doctor Arnold and the niece of Matthew Arnold, from
childhood up she has been as deeply interested in politics and in public
affairs as she has been in literature, by which she has attained such
world-wide fame, and next to English politics, in American politics and
American opinion. She has been a staunch believer in the greatness of
America's future, and has maintained close friendship with leaders of
public thought on both sides of the water. Her only son is a member of
Parliament, and is fighting in the war, just as all the able-bodied men
she knows are doing.

She has received from the English government special opportunities of
seeing what England has been doing in the war, and has been allowed to go
with her daughter where few English men and no other women have been
allowed to go, to see the very heart of England's preparedness. She has
visited, since the war began, the British fleet, the very key of the whole
situation, without whose unmatched power and ever-increasing strength the
Allies at the outset must have succumbed. She has watched, always under
the protection and guidance of that wonderful new Minister of Munitions,
Lloyd George, the vast activity of that ministry throughout the country,
and finally in a motor tour of five hundred miles, through the zone of the
English armies in France, she has seen with her own eyes, that marvellous
organization of everything that goes to make and support a great army,
which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her
fighting line. She has witnessed within three-quarters of a mile of the
fighting line, with a gas helmet at hand, ready to put on, a German
counter attack after a successful English advance something which