The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-TimeWile, Frederic William
History
The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
Wile, Frederic William
World War, 1914-1918
The methods to which the American Democracy has resorted to secure
soldiers for her wars were also in the minds of Lord Kitchener and Mr.
Le Bas. Indeed, the practises of President Lincoln, in respect of
raising armies, were the model to which the British Government from the
start determined to adhere. It was discovered that Lincoln and Seward
had not shrunk from appealing to the men of the North from the hoardings
and through the newspapers, while the advertisements of the United
States army and navy during the Spanish-American War were a modern
example of recruiting measures in a country where the absence of
conscription compels a Government, in the hour of emergency, to scrape
an army together by hook or crook. Then the constant advertising by our
War and Navy departments, even in peace-times, proved that there must be
efficacy in asking men to serve their country in posters, magazines or
newspaper-columns in which they were also being persuasively urged to
buy automobiles, "quality" clothes or shaving-sticks. Kitchener’s
"advertising campaign" was destined, before the war was old, to be the
target of bitter attack, but the skill, persistence and
comprehensiveness with which it was prosecuted played an immense rôle in
the creation of the greatest volunteer army in history. It opened a new
epoch in advertising and clothed that art with a distinction which will
never be taken from it. The seal of an Empire has been placed on the
maxim that it pays to advertise.
[Illustration: To the Warriors of Manchester.]
By the end of October, after three months of war, the muster of the
British Empire was in full progress. Complacency and nonchalance in
London were still wretchedly wide-spread, but the call of the Motherland
for soldiers was echoing around the world. Wherever Britons were
domiciled, it was answered. It penetrated into far-off British
Columbia, where young Englishmen, comfortably settled in new existences,
abandoned them unhesitatingly. It was heard in even more distant
climes, like Australia, New Zealand and Africa, where adventurous
spirits who had crossed the seas to seek their fortunes in lands of
promise were now dominated by no other ambition than to "do their bit"
for King and country. Even emigrated Irishmen, long irreconcilable,
were electrified by John Redmond’s clarion message, and they, too,
turned their faces homeward. By the ides of November whole shiploads of
repatriated Britons, returning from the four points of the compass,
reached the island shores, fired by one consuming purpose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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