The Fiddlers
Drink in the
Witness Box

Submarines destroyed 27 British cargoes, mostly over 1600 tons.

The granaries of Canada were crammed with wheat waiting for British ships, but there were no ships to bring this people’s food.

A woman was fined £5 for destroying a quartern loaf.

Poor people waited in queues to buy sugar in London.

We do not, of course, use this dark sugar when white sugar is cheap and easily procurable, but during the war we have used it for coffee, cocoa, and tea; and for puddings where colour did not matter. We have used it a good deal in our bakeries for chocolate goods, where colour again does not matter. It is a good, pure sugar, and the colour is the principal drawback.

Malt flour can be used to make excellent cake with 50 per cent. wheat flour. It is sweet and pleasant to taste without the need of any sugar. Good scones can be made with 25 per cent. of malt flour. Its use in bread made with yeast causes too much fermentation in the bread, but it has no effect on baking-powder. The Food Controller’s Department is aware of the practicability of using malt flour, but the sale is restricted in order to limit its use for making beer. Brewers and maltsters are too patriotic to wish to use for beer what could be applied to food in case of a serious shortage, and the large stocks of barley and malt can supplement the supply of wheat flour.

One afternoon we had to postpone our conference in Paris, and the French Minister of Finance said, “I have to go to the Chamber of Deputies, because I am proposing a bill to abolish absinthe.” Absinthe plays the same part in France that whisky plays in this country, and they abolished it by a majority of something like ten to one that afternoon.

Absinthe was banned by a thunderstroke, and Parisians who had acquired the absinthe habit trembled in every limb at this judgment which would reduce them to physical and moral wrecks. But the edict was given and Paris obeyed, loyally and with resignation.

Russia, knowing her deficiency, knowing how unprepared she was, said, “I must pull myself together. I am not going to be trampled upon, unready as I am. I will use all my resources.” What is the first thing she does? She stops drink.

I was talking to M. Bark, the Russian Minister of Finance, and I asked, “What has been the result?” He said, “The productivity of labour, the amount of work which is put out by the workmen, has gone up between 30 and 50 per cent.”

I said, “How do they stand it without their liquor?” and he replied, “Stand it? I have lost revenue over it up to £65,000,000 a year and we certainly cannot afford it, but if I proposed to put it back there would be a revolution in Russia.”

Try to imagine all the publichouses in the British Isles closed; all the restaurants putting away their wine cards and offering nothing stronger than cider or ginger ale. That is the state of things in Russia. Strange it seems indeed, yet there is one thing stranger. Nobody makes any audible complaint.

“Without a murmur of protest,” said the Moscow correspondent of the Times, “the most drunken city in Europe was transformed into a temple of sobriety, and we felt that if Russia could thus conquer herself in a night, there was indeed nothing that might not be accomplished.” And two years later, when the revolution came, we 16read in the Times this note from Odessa: “Perfect tranquillity continues to prevail here, although for the moment Odessa is practically without police. The satisfactory absence of crime may largely be attributed to the sealing up of spirituous liquors.”

In one respect it must be said that the Reactionaries saw clearly. They always claimed that the Tsar had ruined himself by decreeing the abolition of vodka. None but a sober people could have carried out the Russian Revolution.

The police were, on the other hand, the victims of drink. They had seized the vodka at the order of the Government, and had kept plentiful supplies for themselves. Thus the Revolution was in part a struggle between drunken reaction and sober citizens. Sobriety triumphed.

A Tooting soldier whose wife had sent him loving letters to the trenches came back to surprise her after 18 months. He found another man in possession of his home and a new baby; and, overcome by the discovery, he gave way to drink and killed himself.

A soldier who had left a comfortable home behind returned from the Front to find it ruined, with not a bed to lie on, his children never sent to school, his wife all 17the time in publichouses. “I wish I had been shot in the trenches,” he said when he arrived.

Outside a publichouse in Liverpool a man was dragging home his drunken wife, the mother of eleven children. They rolled over and over on the ground, the drunken women violently resisting the maddened man. Then came up the eldest son, home from the Front, with five wounds in his body.

A soldier came back to his home in London to find his wife drinking his money away, harbouring another man; one of his children cruelly neglected and the other in its grave, perished from neglect; and a drunken carman’s baby about to be born in his home.

A Lance-Corporal heard in the trenches of his wife’s misconduct. His commanding officer wrote to make inquiries, and the soldier wrote to the Chief Constable a pitiful letter: “What have I to look forward to at the end of the war?” he said. “Nothing, only sorrow. I never get a letter to know how my loving son is getting on; I think it will drive me mad.”

He came home, opened the door of his house, threw his kit on the floor, and declared that he would kill his wife. He put a razor on the table, and his little boy hid it in a cupboard, but a week later this boy of 12 went home and found his father and mother lying on the floor, the father drunk, the mother dead. The soldier, drowning his misery in drink, had strangled his wife. Rousing himself beside her, he said, as the police found them, “Kiss me, Sally. Aye, but tha are poorly.”

He had been the best of fathers, said the little boy; the best of soldiers, said his commanding officer; and the judge declared that such a man, with such a character, ought not to be with criminals.

A soldier asked a London magistrate if he could draw the allowance instead of his wife, who was in prison for drunkenness and was neglecting his four children. The magistrate said the only thing was to send the children to the workhouse.

The Soldier: “So I am to be a soldier for my King and country while my children go to the workhouse?” The Magistrate: “That is so, because you have a drunken wife. I am sorry for you.”

A seaman gunner, who had been torpedoed and had fought in the trenches, arrived home to find his wife, in his own words, “filthy drunk,” and his children utterly deplorable. He reclothed them, but his wife pawned the clothes, though she had £7 a month. He took his children away, but a crowd of women interfered with him, and the police were powerless against the mob.

A soldier just back from the Front was found in the street weeping bitterly on discovering that his wife was in gaol through drink, and his child, through her neglect, had been burned.

A soldier came home from the Front to find that drink had ruined his home, and his children were being cared for by Glasgow Parish Council. “Hour after hour we sit on this council,” says the chairman, “listening to case after case, and the cause is drunkenness, drunkenness, drunkenness. There are 2300 children under the council, and two thousand of them have parents living.” “Our raw material is the finished product of the public-house,” says one of these workers.

A motor mechanic at the Front, hearing that his wife, hitherto a sober woman, had given way to drink, obtained leave to come home. He found his wife, very drunk, struggling home with the help of the railings in the street, and neighbours described her horrible life with other soldiers. The husband obtained a separation for the sake of his children, and went back to France.

A young soldier came from the trenches to spend Christmas in his home in Sheffield—a teetotal home before the war. He found that his wife had given way to drink, had deserted one child and disappeared with the other, and that a baby was to be born which was not his.

18A miner fighting at the Front came home to find his wife at a publichouse, his home filthy, and his children cruelly neglected. He was heartbroken. His young wife frequently left the house from tea-time till midnight, and in order to keep the children from the fire she had burned them severely with a piece of iron. A respectable-looking woman, the mother pleaded for a chance, and was led from the dock sobbing bitterly.

A young Yorkshire miner enlisted and left his wife, hitherto sober, with three children. She took to drink, neglected the home, and is now a dipsomaniac, with two children not her husband’s.

A soldier came home ill from France, hurried from Waterloo to his home, and found the door locked. He knocked, and his little boy’s voice came—“Is that you, mother, and are you drunk?” Hearing his father’s voice the excited lad opened the door. “Where’s mother?” asked his father. “Mother?” said the boy; “she’s drinking. She comes home drunk night after night now and knocks the kids about. She daren’t hit me; I’m fair strong, dad; but the other.... And as for baby, she never does nothing for her. I and Freddy takes turns, but I dunno what to give her to eat sometimes.”

Midnight passed before the mother appeared, helplessly drunk. “Did you expect me to sit at home weeping for you?” she said. The next morning, broken with tears, she promised to mend her ways. The soldier went into hospital, and there he had a letter from his boy. This is part of it:

“Dear Dad, I write to let you know mother is going on awful. She has took all Fred and Timmy’s clothes to the pawnshop, and she hit Selina on Saturday with the toasterfork and cut her face. She cried all night, it hurt her so. She is drunk every night and some nights dussent come back at all. She daren’t hit me, but I am getting afraid about baby. We are all very hungry and miserable.”

The soldier got leave, found his wife had disappeared, and, finding charity for his four little ones, he left his ruined home and went back to the hospital.

A working-man at Gravesend went to the Front, leaving behind a wife and three children, the baby lately born. His wife started drinking away her allowance, neglected her home, and, full of remorse and shame for the disgrace she had brought on the man who was in the trenches, she hanged herself. The man came home to find waiting for him three motherless children, and one of the most pathetic letters a man has ever had to read.

A soldier’s wife in Sunderland drew £12 arrears of Army pay, and she and her mother began to drink it away. She drew her pay on Friday, was carried home drunk on Saturday, gave birth to twins on Sunday morning, and died on Sunday night. The twins died a week or two after, and a week or two after that the soldier came home from the trenches to find his family in the grave.

Two women went drinking in Chester on a Sunday night, a soldier’s mother and a soldier’s wife. They had five whiskies each, and fell drunk in the street. One slept all night on a sofa, and the other lay on the floor, shouting and swearing. Her husband propped her up with a mat, and for hours she lay shrieking. In the morning she was dead. The publican was fined £5.

The wife of a Yorkshire soldier was drowned while drunk at Sheffield. She started drinking with another soldier’s wife disappeared with a drunken man, and her death was a mystery.

19At an inquest on the bodies of a soldier’s twin children, both dead from chronic wasting, it was stated that the mother had 34s. a week, and both she and her husband drank. The mother had had four children in fifteen months, and all were dead.

In one street in London where there were one day four convictions for drunkenness, a woman carried a sick baby into a public house. As she stood at the bar the little baby died, but the mother went on drinking, with the dead child in her arms.

The wife of a highly-esteemed sergeant-major fighting in France was found lying drunk. Her four children, shockingly neglected, were put in a home, but she took them out, went on drinking, and received soldiers at her house. In a few weeks her husband heard in the trenches that his wife had died from drinking.

A soldier left three children at home. He had been earning £1 a week, but his wife received 32s. 6d. a week. She drank it away, neglected the children, and died in an asylum while her husband was in France.

The little child of a soldier in France died in Guy’s Hospital from burns. The mother said she could not buy a fireguard. While she was absent the baby was burned, and the mother, returning in a drunken state carrying a can of beer, said, “A good job!”

A soldier’s widow with six children, an Army pension of 30s. a week, and her eldest boy’s wages of 30s., drinks every night with a married man who has a respectable, clean, and sober wife with eight children and a ninth lately born—born prematurely as a result of her husband’s beating her. The child bore the marks of his violence, and died in two months.

The young wife of a soldier was brought from prison to be tried for manslaughter of her baby, who had died in the infirmary from neglect. She spent her time in the publichouses, and laughed when the children were taken to the infirmary. She went out one day to fetch a bottle of whisky and as she drank with a neighbour she said she knew the baby would die. The doctor said the child’s skin was hanging in folds on the bones.

A soldier’s wife drank continuously while her child wasted away, left the tiny baby alone in the house while she went for beer, and a policeman found her lying drunk across the dead child’s body.

The mother of two children whose father was fighting in France gave way to drink in his absence, neglected her children and left them in grave moral danger, and committed suicide.

A soldier’s baby starved slowly to death as the mother drank away his pay, and while the child lay in its coffin the mother was out drinking.

A munition worker at Newcastle was grievously upset by the drinking habits of his wife. The police left a summons for her and she disappeared. Two days later her body was found in the Tyne. The man broke down at the inquest, saying, between his sobs: “She was such a good wife to me for 20 years, and reared a good family before she took to drink.”

The wife of a corporation workman at Sheffield, home from the trenches with six gunshot wounds and three pieces of shell in his body, found that his wife had given way to drink and starved her five children. She was sent to prison for six months.

A soldier’s wife who had spent the greater part of £100 Army money in drink was sent to prison for neglecting her children. Almost everything in the house was pawned, including the children’s clothes; and the woman began to drink at five o’clock in the morning, and went on drinking all day.

A soldier’s wife in Monmouthshire, with £3 9s. a week, was found sodden with drink, while the soldier’s eight children were in rags starving by day and huddling up in one bed by night.

20A smart tidy woman in a London suburb, whose husband is fighting in Mesopotamia, has £2 10s. 6d. a week. She used to love her children and had a happy home, but she drinks away her Army pay, lives with a married man who has six children, and has become a drunken slattern. The other wife is beaten and neglected, and the soldier’s children have gone to the workhouse.

The four children of a soldier in Dublin were found hungry and shivering with cold while the mother was drinking. Several times she had let her baby fall while reeling with it in the street.

At the trial of a soldier’s wife for drinking and neglecting seven children, it was stated that a child of eleven was left in charge of a baby a fortnight old while the mother was drinking. At night all the children were heard screaming. The house was in utter darkness, and there was an escape of gas. Some men went in and turned off the gas, and at last the mother came stumbling out of a publichouse across the road.

“Your husband is fighting for his country, and his children have the right to be protected,” said the Chairman of the Chesterfield Bench to a soldier’s wife. Her children were found starving while she was drinking, and one day the little boy of three was found crouching naked inside the fender, trying to get warm. The police described the house as foul from top to bottom, with a heap of horrible rags for a bed, and a food cupboard that made the house unendurable when the door was opened.

The wife of a missing soldier was sent to prison at Chesterfield for neglecting three children between 13 years and 16 weeks old. She had gone astray through drink, and the youngest child, born under terrible conditions, was not her husband’s. It was found lying on a filthy bed, and its drunken mother, to satisfy its pangs of hunger, had given it pennyworths of laudanum. Eleven people slept in two foul bedrooms.

Five hundred children of soldiers are being cared for in the great Homes founded by Mr. Quarrier in Scotland, and most of them are there because of drinking mothers.

A soldier’s wife at Biggleswade spent her allowance on drink and left her three children locked up in the house for days at a time.

A soldier’s wife was found reeling in the streets of Dublin with a baby in her arms. At her home were found four other children, cruelly neglected.

Nineteen hundred children of soldiers have come into the care of the N.S.P.C.C., mainly through drink, since the war began.

Of 3000 soldiers’ wives being cared for in South London, 2000 are splendid, while 1000 are sinking daily to lower and lower levels through drink.

21A soldier’s wife, with a separation allowance of 32s. 6d. a week, drank most of it away, ruined her home, neglected her children, and became a lunatic.

A young soldier’s wife, hitherto “quite an elegant type,” is rapidly becoming a drunkard. Women hitherto sober have not the courage to keep from women’s drinking parties, and young girls come out of factories and go to publichouses in little groups.

Outside a public house in Dublin 15 small children were crying in the cold, waiting for their mothers. Ninety-four drunken women came out in 25 minutes. There were ten drunken soldiers, and two girls of 15 were thrown into the street hopelessly drunk.

In Dundee over 170 wives of soldiers gave way to drink last year, and cruelly neglected their homes.

A soldier in the trenches received a letter from his little boy, which he sent to London with a pitiful appeal for help.

“Kindly do what you can for me and the well-being and welfare of my four beautiful children,” the poor soldier wrote. “I am enclosing a fearful letter I have received from my poor little lad, 14-1/2, the first and only letter I have received from him. Sir, I shall be most anxiously awaiting your reply, for this letter is the greatest blow I have ever received.”

This is the little boy’s letter:

A stream of nearly 15,000 men and women poured into 58 publichouses in Birmingham in less than four hours; over 6,000 were women. Into one house the people streamed at nearly 500 an hour.

For months some wives of soldiers and sailors in Scotland were never really sober. “We have done our best,” says a worker among them, “going to their homes and doing all in our power, but it beats us.” In 23 families, with 178 children born, 61 were dead.

A number of soldiers at Ormskirk came into camp drunk on Christmas night. A request for quiet led to a fight, and one of the men was struck two blows and was dead the next morning.

A Liverpool soldier, drinking continuously, had overstayed his leave, and in a quarrel about this he stabbed his brother dead.

A soldier invalided from France, having recovered from his wounds, gave way to drink, assaulted an officer, and hanged himself in his prison cell.

A young lieutenant shot himself in an hotel near Trafalgar Square, and among the documents read at the inquest was a letter striking him off his battalion for drinking and gross carelessness.

A captain in the Army ruined by drink, with a fine record of military service, started drinking on his way to a shooting range in London, and in a struggle he shot a detective dead.

In the Scottish Express, between Doncaster and Selby, a drunken corporal of the Coldstream Guards was showing his rifle to a friend when it went off, the bullet killing a munitions works director in the next compartment, and narrowly escaping a lady in the compartment beyond. The corporal had in his pocket a bottle of whisky, which was freely handed round.

A soldier who had been drinking heavily was placed in the guard room, and died after a night of groaning, evidently as the result of a fall.

A young soldier arriving from India on Christmas morning was arrested three days later, after a drunken fight in which a man was killed.

A soldier spent a day’s leave in Manchester, ate and drank very heavily, and was found dead the next morning from choking.

A soldier home on leave was found drunk with his wife. They had been throwing pots at one another, and on Christmas morning the woman was found dead with a wound in her head.

Three gunners had four drinks each of rum, and at midnight lay down to sleep in a garden at Lee, where one was found dying from alcohol.

A soldier died from alcohol in a house where drink was unlawfully sold.

A private in the Welsh Fusiliers died from alcohol, cold and exposure. He left a publichouse with a 4s. bottle of whisky, and was found dead on the roadside next morning, with the bottle almost empty.

An old man who was said to be in a drunken condition was wounded in a fall with a soldier from Gallipoli, and died a few days after.

An elderly man, seeing a drunken soldier lying in the street, went to his assistance, and was killed in a disturbance that followed.

A soldier was found drowned in the Trent. He was described as a good man at his work, but not steady, and had been drinking.

23A terrible disturbance occurred in a camp at Portland Reservoir after the closing of the canteen one Sunday night. A large number of men who had been drinking created a disturbance, in which bricks and stones were used, a tent collapsed, and the officers were called to quell the riot. The captain, drawing his revolver, rushed with two lieutenants into a hut where men were shouting and struggling, but appeals had no effect—the men “did not appear to hear or recognize their officers,” and one man raised his rifle and took aim at them. At least fifty shots were fired, and a young corporal fired many shots through the window into the darkness. In the morning a soldier was found dead. Nobody knew who shot him, but the corporal thought he must have done.

A soldier who was wounded at La Bassée, a total abstainer until then, was sentenced at the Old Bailey for killing his uncle while drunk. He was a newsvendor, aged 21, and had no memory of the tragedy in which he killed his uncle at a Christmas party.

A private in the Royal Scots Fusileers, aged 17, was charged with murdering a bugler boy, aged 16, in his regiment. The private became mad drunk in the camp canteen, went back to his hut, locked himself in and fired two shots, one of which entered another hut and killed the bugler. “Was there no one with power to say how much drink should be given?” asked the judge, and an officer said there was no one. “Then it was high time power was given to the commanding officer,” said the judge. “Was there to be no restraining hand to prevent young boys from fuddling themselves in canteens?”

An old man sat in a tram in great distress. He had lost his boy at the Front. When he joined the Army he had never tasted alcohol, but when he came home on leave to see his mother he was drunk every night. He was drunk the night he went away, and in three days he was dead. “The last we saw of him,” said the poor old man between his sobs, “was his going away drunk, and his mother, who is old-fashioned in her faith, cannot get it out of her mind that no drunkard can enter the Kingdom of God.”

Many young officers, called upon to share the wine bill at mess, naturally say, “If I have to pay I may as well drink my share,” and one man accounted for ten glasses of champagne. On a Guest night in his mess several more “were under the table.”

A boy got his V.C., and came home wounded. The publican in his street sounded his praises in the taproom, where they subscribed to the bar for 120 pints for him when he arrived. He came home and began to drink it, and was nearly dead with it before he was rescued.

When the Scottish Horse Brigade were at Perth whisky was literally forced down the men, and they were inundated with floods of bad women.

A teetotal household had two boys in an officers’ training camp, and they gave pitiable accounts of drinking. Boys from school had a drunken sergeant put over 24them, and a canteen in the midst of them. “Our boys never saw drink before,” one father wrote.

A boy of 17, discharged from the Navy, spent 8s. one night on beer and rum, and created a disturbance in a workshop at Sheffield.

Mr. Justice Atkin, charging the Grand Jury at Bristol, said that in nearly every case where a soldier was tried in the Western Circuit the defence was drink. One lad of 18 was treated to eight pints of beer in two hours, and did not know what happened. That sort of thing, said the judge, must seriously impair the efficiency of the troops when sent to the Front.

Two boys, 15 and 17, were fined for being drunk in munition works. One was discovered just in time to save him from carrying molten liquid.

“A boy joined the Royal Navy as a carpenter, living in barracks and working on shore. Every day he was given ‘grog’ for his rations, although he never asked for it and never took it.”

The girl-wife of a Cardiff seaman died in the street from exposure after drinking in publichouses with other girls.

A publican at Lincoln was fined £5 for allowing children to be drunk on his premises. Ruth Onyon, 14, and Rose Herrick, 16, were found in his house with a soldier. They had been in five houses and had ten drinks each and reached home helplessly drunk.

A number of cartridge workers were summoned for taking drink into a munition works. One young woman was led to the surgery drunk at half-past four in the morning; another was discharged because she could not stand. Sixteen girls subscribed for four bottles of wine and whisky.

Two girls of 16 and 17 were fined for being helplessly drunk in an explosive works, the magistrates pointing out that their conduct imperilled the lives of other workers.

The men and girls at a large armament works drank all night. Girls would lurch into the dormitory dead drunk at 2 a. m.; one lady was up till 4 a. m. letting in drunken girls. As a result of drunkenness there was an explosion at these works, two men being killed and six injured.

A Dublin publichouse was found full of girls and soldiers, all drunk. Three drunken girls were taken away by six soldiers.

In half an hour 367 girls entered Birmingham publichouses, scores under 18. Stout and beer were chiefly drunk, but whisky and water also, and some port wine. Ten young girls were quite drunk.

A captain in the Royal Flying Corps drove a motor-car through London, knocked a man down, drove on, and ignored the police, who eventually mounted the footboard and found the officer drunk.

A lance-corporal on Chesterfield station was so drunk that he walked off the platform and fell on the line as a passenger train came up.

A corporal of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, leaving the Front with 150 rounds of ammunition and his service rifle, came out drunk into the streets of West Ham and began firing his rifle.

A soldier who had received a cartridge from his son at the Front, put it in his rifle, and while drunk fired it in the streets of Manchester.

In the early hours of the morning two unarmed soldiers were fired at in Woolwich by a drunken soldier, who chased them for a long distance, firing shots all the time, until he was arrested.

Drunkenness among soldiers and sailors is appalling. Unoffending travellers are delayed by drunken sentries. Sailors landing after weeks of arduous toil in the North Sea find it easy to get so drunk that some are drowned, some die from exposure, and many return to their ships in a condition of helpless inebriety.

Two drunken soldiers entered the parish church at Codford, set fire to the vestry, threw down the altar cross and candlestick, broke a stained-glass window, and tore leaves out of a Bible 200 years old.

A drunken soldier at Cannock was imprisoned for drawing his bayonet in the streets. “If I meet a policeman I will murder the dog,” he said, and, meeting one, he threatened to cut off his head.

400 soldiers tried to get a drunken man from the police in Grantham.

26A drunken sergeant was found forcibly detaining a girl at Hornsey. On the police interfering, the drunken soldier drew his bayonet.

Three splendid-looking fellows, minesweepers, were traveling on the Highland Railway. “All were married men,” said a fellow passenger, “happy and proud of their homes, and they spoke with ache still in their hearts something of their lives and work. Well, these men succumbed during the journey. A change of trains was their opportunity, and I left them in a nearly helpless condition.”

A lady visited a soldier’s wife and found her at home with all her clothes in pawn. Her husband and brother had both been home from the Front, and in one week had spent £8 on drink.

A labourer, home from tunnelling work at the Front, was fined 13s. for drunkenness on his 33rd appearance, having spent £45 in seven days.

A disabled soldier was selling papers in Kingsway, London. He was proud of his military record and the character his colonel gave him. He was trying to compound for a pension; he thought he would settle for £50. “Mind you,” said he “there is not a better character in London than mine, and I shall get the £50. Then I shall have a month’s booze.” “What, with that fine character of yours?” a gentleman said to him. “Yes,” said the man, “when I came home, and could leave the hospital, there was £50 due to me, and I had a regular booze.”

A soldier with twelve years’ clean record in the Army was sentenced for felony after being made drunk by his friends.

A house in Westminster reeked with filth and drink and drunken overseas soldiers, “and it would be better,” said the Crown Solicitor, “if power were given to the police to sweep such places off the earth.”

A sapper seaman was found dead at the quay. Another seaman said his friend had seven drinks. They left the publichouse arm-in-arm, and went to the quay. There he saw a corporal, who was boatswain for the night, and was drunk. Leaving the sapper, he got the corporal into the boat, and went back for his friend, but the sapper had disappeared.

The lieutenant: “The deceased was one of the quietest boys who had ever been on the ship, and one of the best oarsmen. The whole trouble was that it was pay day.”

The Coroner: “Prohibition during the war would be a blessing to all. It seems to be a very rotten state of affairs.”

The foreman: “Drink.”

The lieutenant: “Prohibition would be the best thing.”

The Coroner: “This poor man, unfortunately, is one of many.”

A publican at Dover was fined £20 for selling a bottle of whisky to a sailor. The Admiral said drink undermined the efficiency of the patrol vessels, and those who supplied it directly assisted the enemy, and might be the cause of the loss of very many lives.

A private in the Northumberland Fusiliers, aged 23, was charged with burglary while drunk. His father and three brothers were in the Army. He took part in the battle of Loos, was wounded at Salonika, and was recommended for distinction for helping to save a wounded officer.

During the whole of Christmas leave he was drinking, made drunk by his friends who were probably proud of his having held part of a trench against a German 27bombing party. His captain described him as a good soldier in peace, and brave in action—a man whose disgrace would be felt by the regiment.

Mr. Justice Rowlatt said everyone was hoping for the time when millions of brave men would come home after facing incredible dangers, and we must look forward almost with terror to having these men exposed to drink and its temptations. What would be the state of the country in such a case unless we could make a clean sweep of drink? We should have to face this question over and over again, and the sooner we faced it the better.

Whoever allowed soldiers or sailors to drink to excess, said the Mayor of Tynemouth, should be tried by court-martial for treason. He would be recreant in his duty to God, to himself, and to the citizens, if he did not call attention to the brutalising of so many townspeople and the callous conduct of the “waster” element in the drink trade. He had no quarrel with those who conducted their business properly.

The Aldershot command appealed for the closing of half the publichouses, to save the men from temptation when the troops are demobilised and return with their pockets full of money.

The Army and Navy Gazette, in an article disapproving of the Prohibition Campaign, issues a terrible warning which should be printed on the door of the room in which the Army Council meets. These are its words:

Dear Sir, In answer to your inquiry, the only limitation in the size of cases consigned to officers in the Expeditionary Force is that they must not exceed 1 cwt.

We can guarantee delivery right into the front trenches. The cases are handed over at Southampton to the Military Forwarding Officer, and the A.S.C. see them right through. We are shipping hundreds of cases weekly. Yours faithfully,

Soldiers at the front, tried for drunkenness, have declared that they have received drink from home. Men sometimes receive flasks in the trenches. They are exhausted, the stimulant revives them for a minute or two, and the harm is done. “And then (says Col. Crozier) they get about two years’ hard labour.”

As a result of a Court-martial investigating charges of excessive drinking among the officers of a regiment at the Front, the Army Council removed the commanding officer from his post.

In the torrid climate of Mesopotamia, in defiance of all military medical history, rum was issued to the men instead of food and sterile water, and the presence of cholera, dysentery and other diseases, was attributed to this by Sir Victor Horsley. “Our gross failures and stupidity,” he said, “are in my opinion due to whisky affecting the intellectual organs and clearness of our leaders. They do not realise that alcohol in small doses acts as a brake on the brain.”

Battalion Headquarters—colonel and chaplain present. Enter Adjutant: “The rum ration is due tonight, sir; am I to distribute it?” The colonel (nobly and in a voice audible all over the trench): “No! Damn the rum! To hell with the rum!”

At a court-martial in Newcastle, a sergeant-major, charged with misappropriating funds of the sergeant’s mess, pleaded that during this period a resolution of the mess had come into effect, providing free drinks during Christmas and the New Year.

29“In the Flying Services one has seen more than one good man go to the dogs through drink, or become fat and flabby and useless through just the excess of alcohol which falls short of taking to drink in the usual acceptance of the term. More men take to drink because of the ‘have another’ custom than because they like or need alcohol, and simple Prohibition would stop all this nonsense straight away. This kindly note is not the outpouring of a teetotal fanatic, for I suppose I have paid in my time rather more than my share of the nation’s drink-bill; it is merely a perfectly sound argument in favour of increasing the nation’s efficiency at the expense of its chief bad habit.”

A lieutenant in the trenches, knowing that the rum ration made him cold, threw his rum on the ground. His captain saw him, and threatened to report him. “You do, sir,” said the lieutenant, “and I will report you for being drunk on duty.”

A seaman serving on a ship in Cork Harbour died from alcohol. Found drunk and unknown, he was put on a stretcher and died.

“Over three-quarters of the court-martials I have had anything to do with are due directly or indirectly to drunkenness. Many thousands of competent N.C.O.s and soldiers have been punished, and become useless to the nation during their punishment, as a result of drink.

“I have never been a teetotaler, and have rather opposed the radical temperance agitation, but am now changing my views as I see our success over here hampered and our progress towards victory retarded so obviously by drink.”

The captain of a British merchant ship, drunk on the bridge, ordered his chief gunner to fire 50 rounds of shell at nothing. The gunner fired four rounds to appease him. Going through the Mediterranean, the drunken captain ordered his gunner to fire at a British hospital ship, and the incident led to a struggle for life, which ended in the captain’s being put in irons, tried, and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

An officer was left in charge of a British ship. Mad with drink, he went among the men and shot one dead. He is now in an asylum.

The crew of a Dutch ship arriving in the Tyne was placed under a naval guard after a drunken riot in which three were killed.

The captain of a Norwegian barque mysteriously disappeared, and the vessel arrived in port from the North Sea. The mate, who had been drinking heavily, was seen, with a hammer in his hand, with the captain in a corner, bleeding from wounds about the head.

A seaman ashore in Glasgow, “wild with drink and passion,” was terribly wounded in a quarrel in a public-house, and died the same night. A youth of 19 was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

A barge-loader at West India Docks died from alcohol, and three other men were removed in an ambulance after drinking rum.

Orders were given on a steamer for the boats to be swung out in readiness for submarines. The first and second officer, having been drinking, could not do their duty.

The jury returned a verdict of murder against a youth of 19 who, after drinking one night, went on to his ship and killed the second officer.

A drunken captain in command of a drifter landed with an armed party on the Isle of Man. He posted the men on the quay, and gave them orders to allow no one to pass. Declaring he would shoot every person who came within reach, he fired twice, and threatened to kill two police officers.

Somebody gave a glass of neat whisky to two wounded men at a garden party in Tottenham. Both were drunk when the brake came to take them home, and one died on the way.

Three wounded soldiers at Oxford were overcome by four bottles of rum smuggled into the hospital by visitors, and one of the men died.

A wounded soldier asked for two hours’ leave, came back in four hours drunk with whisky, and died after a terrible night in the hospital.

Two limbless soldiers were found helplessly drunk on the pavement at Brighton. A publican was fined £20.

A wounded soldier, mentioned in despatches, was charged with causing the death of a soldier with whom he had been drinking. Reeling under a heavy blow, the injured man was helped to bed, but when the bugle sounded in the morning he was dead.

A soldier, aged 29, with a gunshot wound in his arm, died from alcohol at Oxford. One Sunday night he and two other wounded soldiers consumed four bottles of rum brought into the hospital.

Three soldiers in hospital uniform were found lying helplessly drunk on the tramlines of Sheffield. Two were back from the Dardanelles.

Seamen on a ship bringing wounded to England from Boulogne were so drunk that they interfered with the stretcher bearers, and one fell across a wounded soldier lying on deck.

31There was a paralysed and helpless man who was found hopelessly drunk in hospital after his friends had visited him.

An officer who has trained hundreds of men for the ambulance corps declared that a large percentage of wounded are in a very nervous condition, in which alcohol means collapse and almost certain death.

Lying helpless at a London station, moaning on the ground in drunken delirium, was a lad in hospital blue who had, in truth, been wounded by his friends. Drink was taking him again through the worst of his experiences, and his mental pain was pitiable to see.

Two drunken soldiers from Gallipoli made what a doctor described as the most savage attack he ever saw on a civilian. They held a young man’s head against a wall and pounded him unmercifully.

A party of soldiers were seriously injured in a struggle to arrest a drunken private at Pontefract. The publican called on the men in his taproom to rescue the private, but the sergeants drove them off.

A sergeant of a Welsh regiment, invited to drink by friends in Waterloo Road, was picked up as he lay senseless, his pulse beating feebly, his eyes wide open, and his body starving with cold.

A drunken man rushed from a publichouse and kicked a soldier unconscious. The military police, chasing the man, were stoned. Four soldiers were injured, one having his head cut open, and the military were ordered to clear the place with fixed bayonets.

The medical officer in charge of the Mental Block of a large military hospital said to the Colonel: “I have the worst job of all, and it is through Drink, Drink, Drink! Men recover fairly soon from shell shock, but officers, especially the younger ones, who habitually take wines and spirits, are subject to relapses every few days. It is awful!”

Of the thirty war hospitals in Hertfordshire, with 8000 men passing through them in the first thirty months of the war, there is not one that has not had trouble with drink.

A doctor from a Canadian hospital said a large percentage of their troops had had to be sent back to Canada rendered permanently insane through the action of alcohol.

“During the war we have had admitted into the hospitals of England over 70,000 cases of gonorrhœa, over 20,000 cases of syphilis, and over 6000 cases of another disease somewhat similar. I am quite openly prepared to state that of these 20,000 cases of syphilis you do not get much work out of them under two and a half years. I know from what I have seen of the modern conditions of this War that you may absolutely wipe them out, except for a few handfuls.

“When you come to the great mass of casualties under this head ... the figures mean that you have a Division constantly out of action. If you have anything like 70,000 men enfeebled, you find that you suffer to that extent also. It is not only that you lose the men, and not only the men who are partially cured are suffering for many months to come, but their chances of recovery from wounds are not nearly so good.

“I know of a hospital for venereal cases which it was found necessary to expand from its normal accommodation for 500 or 600 up to 2,000 cases, and they are continually full. It is a British hospital in France. A figure I should like to submit to challenge is that during the course of the war between 40,000 and 50,000 cases of syphilis have passed through our hospitals in France. When you come to gonorrhœa, the figure given me which covers that is between 150,000 and 200,000 cases.”

“Every Canadian soldier who comes to this country arrives here not only a first-class specimen of a fine soldier, but as clean-limbed and as clean a man as the Creator Himself could create. The fact that in one only of the three Canadian camps in this country 7,000 of these clean Canadian boys went through the hospital for venereal disease in fourteen months is not only a great discredit to any Government in this country but has an effect in Canada which I can assure the House does not make for a better feeling with the Home Country, and does not make for what we all desire—Imperial Unity.”

It is not possible to tell the whole truth about drink; the language in which it must be written would be offensive in a civilised country. It must be said, simply, that soldiers in England have been court-martialled for having been influenced by drink to commit unspeakable offences against animals.

A special constable in a harlot-haunted district in London describes how these harpies carry off lonely soldiers to their rooms, make them drunk, and finally innoculate them, as likely as not, with disease. Is it not possible to hold in check these women who prey upon and poison our soldiers? asks Sir Conan Doyle.

One of the hot-beds of venereal disease to which drink leads our soldiers, was kept by an Austrian woman in Lambeth, who was receiving 15s. a week from the Austrian Government in April 1916, and used to lure our soldiers when weakened by drink. All the men seen to enter this house were either soldiers or sailors.

A soldier from the Front with £18 was taken by a married woman to her home, where he was found after a drunken bout with eight women, all drunk. The woman’s children were terribly neglected.

If you describe the Waterloo Road and the back streets as an open sewer you will be somewhere near the truth. Not a day goes by without bringing some soldier who has been waylaid.

A soldier came from the Front to go home to Scotland. He got drunk near Waterloo, losing all his money and his railway pass. He spent his leave living on charity, and returned to the Front without having been near either his home or his friends.

Abundant evidence was given as to the intimate relation between alcohol and venereal diseases.

Alcohol renders a man liable to yield to temptations which he might otherwise resist, and aggravates the disease by diminishing the resistance of the individual.

Alcoholism makes latent syphilis and gonorrhœa active.

Our evidence tends to show that the communication in disease is frequently due to indulgence in intoxicants, and there is no doubt that the growth of temperance among the population would help to bring about an amelioration of the very serious conditions which our enquiry has revealed.

We desire, therefore, to place on record our opinion that action should be taken without delay.

A young Canadian who had never tasted alcohol came from a Prohibition camp in Canada, came to England on a Prohibition ship, and was put in a camp with a drink canteen. He started drinking and contracted venereal disease. Ordered home as unfit, in fear and shame he sought a friend’s advice about the girl he was to marry. 36“You can never marry her,” said his friend, and that night in his hut the young Canadian blew out his brains.

A young Canadian officer was sent home disgraced. Sodden with alcohol, he left the train and shot a railway clerk dead.

A Russian soldier in the Canadian forces, described as a clean, soldierly man, with a splendid character from his officer, was charged with the murder of a Canadian private who tried to separate two quarrelling soldiers in a bar. The prisoner had drunk much whisky and remembered nothing of his crime, and was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour for manslaughter. The judge hoped he might be used as a soldier in the Russian Army.

A man from Prohibition Russia enlisted in Prohibition Canada, and came to England. He spent 9s. on drink one day, and that night he crept from his bed and killed his corporal at Witley Camp.

A Canadian soldier, aged 26, after a publichouse quarrel with another soldier, was found dying on the pavement in Hastings. His throat had been cut, and he died on entering the hospital. The other soldier was charged with murder, and sentenced to 15 years.

A young Canadian soldier, aged 20, died from alcohol while in training at Witley. He had a bottle of stout followed by nine or ten “double-headers” of neat whisky in about two hours. He was carried back to camp, laid unconscious on his bed, and died.

A Canadian lieutenant was tried for the murder of a canteen sergeant. They arrived together at a house at Grayshott, where the lieutenant asked for some strong drink and took a bottle of whisky and two glasses. The sergeant was afterwards found dead in the cellar, and the lieutenant carried the body into the stable.

A man leaving a publichouse in company with a woman, with whom he had been drinking, met a Canadian soldier not far from Charing Cross. The soldier spoke, and the man struck him. The soldier was carried to the hospital, where he died soon afterwards from a wound two inches deep, caused by a knife.

The wife of a gunner in the South African Heavy Artillery died at Bexhill from alcohol. The soldier said he bought 12 bottles of stout and 12 bottles of beer, one of whisky, and one of port, which they drank between Saturday night and Monday night.

A soldier from Toronto, having been drinking away his pay in a Carlisle publichouse, with another Canadian soldier and some married women, failed to appear the next morning, and was found dead on a footpath with a bottle of whisky in his pocket

A Canadian soldier, having drawn £20 from the Canadian office, visited several publichouses, and was killed in a scuffle in London.

In an officers’ mess of two double companies of Canadians only one officer drank on his arrival in a canteen camp in England; within three months there was not an abstainer in the mess.

These men come mostly from districts in Canada where intoxicants are prohibited by law, and many of them, being young lads, who perhaps have never tasted liquor before their arrival, fall easy victims.

Overseas soldiers come to our hospitals astonishingly cheerful and fit in a general sense, and wonderfully receptive to treatment. Only three per thousand die in our great hospitals. This is largely due to the hardy life of the men and the fact that they are removed from the danger of taking too much alcohol. The home troops have a much higher mortality, partly because their use of alcohol diminishes their chances. Re-admissions are largely due to drink on furlough.

A Canadian soldier, who had been wounded at the Front, was taken to a house by women and left alone drunk. An officer gave him an excellent character, and said he was on his way back to Canada. These men experience temptations here (he said) that they would not find in Canada, and there was too much of this going on.

I heard a sad account of the havoc of the wet canteen and a private in a Canadian A.M.C. told us of a lad of 17 who is made so drunk that there is rarely a night when he has not to be helped up to bed. One of the soldiers here told me of his son in Canada being anxious to join up, but after seeing the condition of things over here he was doing all he could to discourage his son.

The Canadians in most cases are entirely lost when they arrive in this country, and are much more liable to the temptation which is thrown in their way, but when you give a figure such as this—that in one camp during last year, and two months of the previous year, there were 7,000 cases—it seems to me that it is about time we realised the magnitude of the evil. I do not know what has happened to them, except that I imagine a large number have gone back to Canada, and have not been able to play the part they had hoped to play.

A Canadian corporal, wounded in the Battle of Ypres, was found terribly drunk after being missing all day from hospital. Confronted with the surgeon after violent acts of insubordination, the corporal broke down and cried like a child.

In the first weeks of the war 42 Canadian soldiers disgraced themselves, by excessive drinking, insubordination, and disorderly conduct, to such an extent that they had to be sent back to Canada.

A Canadian soldier, helplessly drunk, was seen at King’s Cross station eating, tearing, and crumpling up £1 notes, and would have lost about fifteen pounds but for kindly help from passers by.

A gunner from Montreal, missing from camp for several days, drank himself delirious, and cut his throat with a razor.

38A Canadian soldier spent £70 in three weeks on drink and bad characters.

A Sergeant-Major from Canada declared that he had lost 20 per cent. of the men of his battery through venereal disease. They had a little drink, and were captured by the swarm of bad women at Folkestone.

A woman was imprisoned for placing young children in moral danger. Every night the girls brought soldiers home, and colonial soldiers were frequently so drunk that they were carried in.

“Great numbers of our men never saw France. Canadian boys cried because they had not munitions. England reeled and beer flowed like water while thousands of our boys went down into their graves. We will never forget it in Canada.”

“I met many fathers and mothers whose boys had been sent back to Canada debilitated and ruined for life because they had been enmeshed by harpies, and again and again these parents have said to me, ‘We do not mind our boys dying on the field of battle for old England, but to think that we sent our sons to England to come back to us ruined in health, and a disgrace to us, to them, and to the country, is something the Home Country should never ask us to bear.’”

Letter from a Solicitor in Ontario to the Author:

I wonder if the advocates of the drink traffic in Britain appreciate the contempt in which they are held in Canada. Before the war I had a class of ten young men. Every one of them is now at the Front, and one writes that when I told them of the drink conditions in England he did not believe half of it; now he says I did not tell him half. Letters from our Canadian soldiers are appearing in our papers, and they are all amazed at the drinking habits of Britain.

From a Resolution received by Mr. Lloyd George from the Social Service Council of Nova Scotia:

That we, representing the social, moral, and spiritual forces of this part of the British Empire, who have proved our loyalty by the thousands of men this small province has sent overseas, do record our most earnest protest against Britain’s inaction in this matter, which we are sure must result in longer and increased suffering for the men we have sent to help her win the war; and do most insistently plead with the British Government and the British Parliament that they at once exercise the power vested in them to strike the blow that will dispose of this enemy at home, and so give mighty reinforcement to those who are bleeding and dying for Britain and human liberties on the battlefields abroad.

39Sermon by Dr. Flanders in London, Ontario, Feb. 25, 1917:

Canada has the right to make this demand on the Motherland from the simple standpoint of political economics. That we might put the Dominion into the best possible shape to give the utmost of our strength in men and munitions, we have an almost Dominion-wide Prohibition, and no intelligent person will deny that our contributions to the war from the first have been multiplied and intensified by that action. Why should little Johnnie Canuck abolish drink that he might conserve his manhood and material resources in the interest of the Empire’s war, and big John Bull refuse to abolish the traffic to the great waste of his material resources and the undoing of his efficiency?

A public man with three soldier sons wrote to the Toronto Globe:

Canada, for efficiency in war, casts out the drink evil. Is it too much to expect Britain, in fairness, to do the same? Is it not a mockery for the British Isles to face our common struggle with this palsy in her frame?

Here is the bitter pill, the embittering thought for many a Canadian parent. Let me be a type. Three of my sons are in khaki. I gave them a father’s blessing when they enlisted. But this thought strains, most of all, the ties of my loyalty to the cause—to see my sons fight and fall for a Britain that at home is saddled by distillery interests, and misguided by a Press silent as the grave on this entrenched evil. Why should our sons go from a country where booze is banished to spend months on the way to the trenches in England, where the vices of the liquor traffic are legalised?

We see the spirit of Canada in those great words of the Premier of Ontario, Mr. Hearst, speaking of the giving up of drink:

In this day of national peril, in this day when the future of the British Empire, the freedom of the world, and the blessings of democratic government hang in the balance, if I should fail to listen to what I believe to be the call of duty, if I should neglect to take every action that in my judgment will help to conserve the financial strength and power and manhood of this province for the great struggle in which we are engaged, I would be a traitor to my country, a traitor to my own conscience, and unworthy of the brave sons of Canada that are fighting, bleeding and dying for freedom and for us.

A letter from one of the most eminent public men in Canada:

“British Canada is intensely loyal to the Empire and the Allied Cause, but at present recruiting is almost at an end. Why? Partly because of considerable dissatisfaction with many of the conditions which prevail. Suffering, wounds, death, are expected as inevitable in war, but the evil influences, the lavish temptations of liquor and bad women which sweep down upon our boys in England, are not felt to be necessary, and the hearts of multitudes of Canadian parents are hot with indignation at the apparent indifference of the authorities to the moral welfare of our troops.”

Captain John MacNeill, with the Canadian troops in France:

“I say to you solemnly, if England should lose this war because of drink, or if England should unnecessarily prolong the war with great sacrifice of life in her effort to protect drink, or even if England should win the war in spite of drink, you will have put upon the bonds of Empire such a strain as they have never known before, and such a strain as we cannot promise they will be able to survive.”

From the petition presented to the Prime Minister of Canada, signed by 64,000 mothers and wives in Toronto:

1. That Mothers and Wives of Canada in giving their sons and husbands for King and Empire, asked and received from your Minister of Militia this only assurance that, in sending them into the ranks, we were not hereby irrevocably thrusting them into the temptation of Strong Drink.

2. We appreciated from the depths of our hearts, your action in abolishing the Wet Canteen from the Canadian Militia. We believe the Wet Canteen established in the ranks of the front to be a double danger, robbing our King of the success in arms which in these days comes only to the brave heart that is controlled by a clear head, and robbing us and our Canada of the Manhood which we gave into our Empire’s keeping.

403. We do not believe that the King will refuse the aid of Canada’s sons; nor that he will appreciate your patriotic efforts the less, if you keep faith with us and make known to His Majesty, his Ministers and Commanders, that our boys are sent forth on the one condition that the dispensing of intoxicating liquors shall be prohibited in the ranks.

From a Sermon preached in Ontario, February 25, 1917:

“Thank God, if any of our Canadian soldiers return to us with the drink habit formed and raging, we can welcome them to a land nearly purged of the liquor traffic, where they may have a chance to recover their manhood.”

Letter on the effects of Prohibition, from a business man in Ontario, published in the “Spectator:”

“Men I have known for years to be regular promenading tanks have given it up, and are starting a decent life again. The Police Court is empty. England should try it. It would be, after the first heavy initial loss, the best thing that ever struck the nation. I cursed these temperance guys as hard as any, but all the same it cannot blind you from the truth.”