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Title: The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLII, no. 251 new series, May 1917)
Author: Various
Release date: November 25, 2023 [eBook #72225]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1860
Credits: hekula03 and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE (VOL. XLII, NO. 251 NEW SERIES, MAY 1917) ***
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THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.
MAY 1917.
_BRING UP THE GUNS._
BY BOYD CABLE.
When Jack Duncan and Hugh Morrison suddenly had it brought home to them
that they ought to join the New Armies, they lost little time in doing
so. Since they were chums of long standing in a City office, it went
without saying that they decided to join and ‘go through it’ together,
but it was much more open to argument what branch of the Service or
regiment they should join.
They discussed the question in all its bearings, but being as ignorant of
the Army and its ways as the average young Englishman was in the early
days of the war, they had little evidence except varied and contradictory
hearsay to act upon. Both being about twenty-five they were old enough
and business-like enough to consider the matter in a business-like way,
and yet both were young enough to be influenced by the flavour of romance
they found in a picture they came across at the time. It was entitled
‘Bring up the Guns,’ and it showed a horsed battery in the wild whirl of
advancing into action, the horses straining and stretching in front of
the bounding guns, the drivers crouched forward or sitting up plying whip
and spur, the officers galloping and waving the men on, dust swirling
from leaping hoofs and wheels, whip-thongs streaming, heads tossing,
reins flying loose, altogether a blood-stirring picture of energy and
action, speed and power.
‘I’ve always had a notion,’ said Duncan reflectively, ‘that I’d like to
have a good whack at riding. One doesn’t get much chance of it in city
life, and this looks like a good chance.’
‘And I’ve heard it said,’ agreed Morrison, ‘that a fellow with any
education stands about the best chance in artillery work. We’d might as
well plump for something where we can use the bit of brains we’ve got.’
‘That applies to the Engineers too, doesn’t it?’ said Duncan. ‘And the
pottering about we did for a time with electricity might help there.’
‘Um-m,’ Morrison agreed doubtfully, still with an appreciative eye on
the picture of the flying guns. ‘Rather slow work though—digging and
telegraph and pontoon and that sort of thing.’
‘Right-oh,’ said Duncan with sudden decision. ‘Let’s try for the
Artillery.’
‘Yes. We’ll call that settled,’ said Morrison; and both stood a few
minutes looking with a new interest at the picture, already with a
dawning sense that they ‘belonged,’ that these gallant gunners and
leaping teams were ‘Ours,’ looking forward with a little quickening of
the pulse to the day when they, too, would go whirling into action in
like desperate and heart-stirring fashion.
‘Come on,’ said Morrison. ‘Let’s get it over. To the
recruiting-office—quick march.’
And so came two more gunners into the Royal Regiment.
* * * * *
When the long, the heart-breakingly long period of training and waiting
for their guns, and more training and slow collecting of their horses,
and more training was at last over, and the battery sailed for France,
Morrison and Duncan were both sergeants and ‘Numbers One’ in charge of
their respective guns; and before the battery had been in France three
months Morrison had been promoted to Battery Sergeant-Major.
The battery went through the routine of trench warfare and dug its guns
into deep pits, and sent its horses miles away back, and sat in the same
position for months at a time, had slack spells and busy spells, shelled
and was shelled, and at last moved up to play its part in The Push.
Of that part I don’t propose to tell more than the one incident—an
incident of machine-pattern sameness to the lot of many batteries.
The infantry had gone forward again and the ebb-tide of battle was
leaving the battery with many others almost beyond the water-mark of
effective range. Preparations were made for an advance. The Battery
Commander went forward and reconnoitred the new position the battery was
to move into, everything was packed up and made ready, while the guns
still continued to pump out long range fire. The Battery Commander came
in again and explained everything to his officers and gave the necessary
detailed orders to the Sergeant-Major, and presently received orders of
date and hour to move.
This was in the stages of The Push when rain was the most prominent
and uncomfortable feature of the weather. The guns were in pits built
over with strong walls and roofing of sand-bags and beams which were
weather-tight enough, but because the floors of the pits were lower than
the surface of the ground, it was only by a constant struggle that the
water was held back from draining in and forming a miniature lake in each
pit. Round and between the guns was a mere churned-up sea of sticky mud.
As soon as the new battery position was selected a party went forward to
it to dig and prepare places for the guns. The Battery Commander went
off to select a suitable point for observation of his fire, and in the
battery the remaining gunners busied themselves in preparation for the
move. The digging party were away all the afternoon, all night, and on
through the next day. Their troubles and tribulations don’t come into
this story, but from all they had to say afterwards they were real and
plentiful enough.
Towards dusk a scribbled note came back from the Battery Commander at the
new position to the officer left in charge with the guns, and the officer
sent the orderly straight on down with it to the Sergeant-Major with a
message to send word back for the teams to move up.
‘All ready here,’ said the Battery Commander’s note. ‘Bring up the guns
and firing battery waggons as soon as you can. I’ll meet you on the way.’
The Sergeant-Major glanced through the note and shouted for the Numbers
One, the sergeants in charge of each gun. He had already arranged with
the officer exactly what was to be done when the order came, and now he
merely repeated his orders rapidly to the sergeants and told them to ‘get
on with it.’ When the Lieutenant came along five minutes after, muffled
to the ears in a wet mackintosh, he found the gunners hard at work.
‘I started in to pull the sand-bags clear, sir,’ reported the
Sergeant-Major. ‘Right you are,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Then you’d better
put the double detachments on to pull one gun out and then the other. We
must man-handle ’em back clear of the trench ready for the teams to hook
in when they come along.’
For the next hour every man, from the Lieutenant and Sergeant-Major
down, sweated and hauled and slid and floundered in slippery mud and
water, dragging gun after gun out of its pit and back a half dozen yards
clear. It was quite dark when they were ready, and the teams splashed
up and swung round their guns. A fairly heavy bombardment was carrying
steadily on along the line, the sky winked and blinked and flamed in
distant and near flashes of gun fire, and the air trembled to the
vibrating roar and sudden thunder-claps of their discharge, the whine
and moan and shriek of the flying shells. No shells had fallen near the
battery position for some little time, but, unfortunately, just after
the teams had arrived, a German battery chose to put over a series of
five-point-nines unpleasantly close. The drivers sat, motionless blotches
of shadow against the flickering sky, while the gunners strained and
heaved on wheels and drag-ropes to bring the trails close enough to drop
on the hooks. A shell dropped with a crash about fifty yards short of
the battery and the pieces flew whining and whistling over the heads of
the men and horses. Two more swooped down out of the sky with a rising
wail-rush-roar of sound that appeared to be bringing the shells straight
down on top of the workers’ heads. Some ducked and crouched close to
earth, and both shells passed just over and fell in leaping gusts of
flame and ground-shaking crashes beyond the teams. Again the fragments
hissed and whistled past and lumps of earth and mud fell spattering and
splashing and thumping over men and guns and teams. A driver yelped
suddenly, the horses in another team snorted and plunged, and then out
of the thick darkness that seemed to shut down after the searing light
of the shell-burst flames came sounds of more plunging hoofs, a driver’s
voice cursing angrily, threshings and splashings and stamping. ‘Horse
down here ... bring a light ... whoa, steady, boy ... where’s that light?’
Three minutes later: ‘Horse killed, driver wounded in the arm, sir,’
reported the Sergeant-Major. ‘Riding leader Number Two gun, and centre
driver of its waggon.’
‘Those spare horses near?’ said the Lieutenant quickly. ‘Right. Call up a
pair; put ’em in lead; put the odd driver waggon centre.’
Before the change was completed and the dead horse dragged clear, the
first gun was reported hooked on and ready to move, and was given the
order to ‘Walk march’ and pull out on the wrecked remnant of a road that
ran behind the position. Another group of five-nines came over before the
others were ready, and still the drivers and teams waited motionless for
the clash that told of the trail-eye dropping on the hook.
‘Get to it, gunners,’ urged the Sergeant-Major, as he saw some of the
men instinctively stop and crouch to the yell of the approaching shell.
‘Time we were out of this.’
‘Hear, bloomin’ hear,’ drawled one of the shadowy drivers. ‘An’ if
you wants to go to bed, Lanky’—to one of the crouching gunners—‘just
lemme get this gun away fust, an’ then you can curl up in that blanky
shell-’ole.’
There were no more casualties getting out, but one gun stuck in a
shell-hole and took the united efforts of the team and as many gunners
as could crowd on to the wheels and drag-ropes to get it moving and
out on to the road. Then slowly, one by one, with a gunner walking and
swinging a lighted lamp at the head of each team, the guns moved off
along the pitted road. It was no road really, merely a wheel-rutted
track that wound in and out the biggest shell-holes. The smaller ones
were ignored, simply because there were too many of them to steer clear
of, and into them the limber and gun wheels dropped bumping, and were
hauled out by sheer team and man power. It took four solid hours to cover
less than half a mile of sodden, spongy, pulpy, wet ground, riddled with
shell-holes, swimming in greasy mud and water. The ground they covered
was peopled thick with all sorts of men who passed or crossed their way
singly, in little groups, in large parties—wounded, hobbling wearily or
being carried back, parties stumbling and fumbling a way up to some vague
point ahead with rations and ammunition on pack animals and pack-men,
the remnants of a battalion coming out crusted from head to foot in
slimy wet mud, bowed under the weight of their packs and kits and arms;
empty ammunition waggons and limbers lurching and bumping back from the
gun line, the horses staggering and slipping, the drivers struggling
to hold them on their feet, to guide the wheels clear of the worst
holes; a string of pack-mules filing past, their drivers dismounted and
leading, and men and mules ploughing anything up to knee depth in the
mud, flat pannier-pouches swinging and jerking on the animals’ sides, the
brass tops of the 18-pounder shell-cases winking and gleaming faintly
in the flickering lights of the gun flashes. But of all these fellow
wayfarers over the battlefield the battery drivers and gunners were
hardly conscious. Their whole minds were so concentrated on the effort of
holding and guiding and urging on their horses round or over the obstacle
of the moment, a deeper and more sticky patch than usual, an extra large
hole, a shattered tree stump, a dead horse, the wreck of a broken-down
waggon, that they had no thought for anything outside these. The gunners
were constantly employed manning the wheels and heaving on them with
cracking muscles, hooking on drag-ropes to one gun and dragging it clear
of a hole, unhooking and going floundering back to hook on to another and
drag it in turn out of its difficulty.
The Battery Commander met them at a bad dip where the track degenerated
frankly into a mud bath—and how he found or kept the track or ever
discovered them in that aching wilderness is one of the mysteries of
war and the ways of Battery Commanders. It took another two hours, two
mud-soaked nightmare hours, to come through that next hundred yards. It
was not only that the mud was deep and holding, but the slough was so
soft at bottom that the horses had no foothold, could get no grip to
haul on, could little more than drag their own weight through, much less
pull the guns. The teams were doubled, the double team taking one gun
or waggon through, and then going back for the other. The waggons were
emptied of their shell and filled again on the other side of the slough;
and this you will remember meant the gunners carrying the rounds across a
couple at a time, wading and floundering through mud over their knee-boot
tops, replacing the shells in the vehicle, and wading back for another
couple. In addition to this they had to haul guns and waggons through
practically speaking by man-power, because the teams, almost exhausted by
the work and with little more than strength to get themselves through,
gave bare assistance to the pull. The wheels, axle deep in the soft mud,
were hauled round spoke by spoke, heaved and yo-hoed forward inches at a
time.
When at last all were over, the teams had to be allowed a brief
rest—brief because the guns must be in position and under cover before
daylight came—and stood dejectedly with hanging ears, heaving flanks, and
trembling legs. The gunners dropped prone or squatted almost at the point
of exhaustion in the mud. But they struggled up, and the teams strained
forward into the breast collars again when the word was given, and the
weary procession trailed on at a jerky snail’s pace once more.
As they at last approached the new position the gun flashes on the
horizon were turning from orange to primrose, and although there was no
visible lightening of the Eastern sky, the drivers were sensible of a
faintly recovering use of their eyes, could see the dim shapes of the
riders just ahead of them, the black shadows of the holes, and the wet
shine of the mud under their horses’ feet.
The hint of dawn set the guns on both sides to work with trebled energy.
The new position was one of many others so closely set that the blazing
flames from the gun muzzles seemed to run out to right and left in a
spouting wall of fire that leaped and vanished, leaped and vanished
without ceasing, while the loud ear-splitting claps from the nearer guns
merged and ran out to the flanks in a deep drum roll of echoing thunder.
The noise was so great and continuous that it drowned even the roar of
the German shells passing overhead, the smash and _crump_ of their fall
and burst.
But the line of flashes sparkling up and down across the front beyond the
line of our own guns told a plain enough tale of the German guns’ work.
The Sergeant-Major, plodding along beside the Battery Commander, grunted
an exclamation.
‘Boche is getting busy,’ said the Battery Commander.
‘Putting a pretty solid barrage down, isn’t he, sir?’ said the
Sergeant-Major. ‘Can we get the teams through that?’
‘Not much hope,’ said the Battery Commander, ‘but, thank Heaven, we don’t
have to try, if he keeps barraging there. It is beyond our position.
There are the gun-pits just off to the left.’
But, although the barrage was out in front of the position, there were
a good many long-ranged shells coming beyond it to fall spouting fire
and smoke and earth-clods on and behind the line of guns. The teams were
flogged and lifted and spurred into a last desperate effort, wrenched
the guns forward the last hundred yards and halted. Instantly they were
unhooked, turned round, and started stumbling wearily back towards the
rear; the gunners, reinforced by others scarcely less dead-beat than
themselves by their night of digging in heavy wet soil, seized the
guns and waggons, flung their last ounce of strength and energy into
man-handling them up and into the pits. Two unlucky shells at that
moment added heavily to the night’s casualty list, one falling beside
the retiring teams and knocking out half a dozen horses and two men,
another dropping within a score of yards of the gun-pits, killing three
and wounding four gunners. Later, at intervals, two more gunners were
wounded by flying splinters from chance shells that continued to drop
near the pits as the guns were laboriously dragged through the quagmire
into their positions. But none of the casualties, none of the falls and
screamings of the high-explosive shells, interrupted or delayed the work,
and without rest or pause the men struggled and toiled on until the last
gun was safely housed in its pit.
Then the battery cooks served out warm tea, and the men drank greedily,
and then, too worn out to be hungry or to eat the biscuit and cheese
ration issued, flung themselves down in the pits under and round their
guns and slept there in the trampled mud.
The Sergeant-Major was the last to lie down. Only after everyone else had
ceased work, and he had visited each gun in turn and satisfied himself
that all was correct, and made his report to the Battery Commander, did
he seek his own rest. Then he crawled into one of the pits, and before
he slept had a few words with the ‘Number One’ there, his old friend
Duncan. The Sergeant-Major, feeling in his pockets for a match to light a
cigarette, found the note which the Battery Commander had sent back and
which had been passed on to him. He turned his torch light on it and read
it through to Duncan—‘Bring up the guns and firing battery waggons ...’
and then chuckled a little. ‘Bring up the guns.... Remember that picture
we saw before we joined, Duncan! And we fancied then we’d be bringing ’em
up same fashion. And, good Lord, think of to-night.’
‘Yes,’ grunted Duncan, ‘sad slump from our anticipations. There was some
fun in that picture style of doing the job—some sort of dash and honour
and glory. No honour and glory about “Bring up the guns” these days. Na
poo to-night anyway.’
The Sergeant-Major, sleepily sucking his damp cigarette, wrapped in his
sopping British Warm, curling up in a corner on the wet cold earth,
utterly spent with the night’s work, cordially agreed.
Perhaps, and anyhow one hopes, some people will think they were wrong.
_FRANCE AND BRITAIN: THEIR COMMON MEMORIES._
‘France and England, whose very shores look pale
With envy of each other’s happiness.’
SHAKESPEARE, _Henry V._, Act v. sc. ii.
‘Each the other’s mystery, terror, need and love.’
RUDYARD KIPLING.
Our common memories? Well, are they so many of this nature which brings
closer those who recollect them together? They are indeed! Let this
article be a friendly protest, a grounded protest against the idea which
is no doubt, still, the prevalent popular idea on both sides of the
Channel, I mean this one: ‘The Entente Cordiale is something splendid,
but when one comes to think about it, how wonderful, how new!’ Yes, when
we think about it _superficially_, how wonderful, how new, but when we
think somewhat more deeply and with a little more knowledge of the past,
how natural! Not a miracle: the logical result, only too long deferred,
of the long centuries of our common history. It is not mere pastime to
show it. How important on the contrary, how _practically_ important for
the present and for the future of our alliance, to make conscious again
the old moral ties and to reawaken the sleeping sense of historical
fellowship!
II.
To make that fellowship apparent, at a glance, at least from certain
points of view, I have devised the appended diagram. There you see
represented, as it were, the streams of the history of our two nations
from their farthest origins down to our own times. Please note the scale
of centuries. See both streams rising about eight or six centuries
before Christ in the same mountain—if I may say so figuratively—in the
same mountain of the Celtic race. They spring, as you see, from the same
source, and, though geographically divided, their waters remain a long
time of the same colour—green in my draught.
[Illustration: SYMBOLIC DRAUGHT ILLUSTRATING THE HISTORY OF
FRANCO-BRITISH RELATIONS.]
We have, on that point of their origins, very interesting and very
numerous testimonies, chiefly in the contemporary Greek and Roman
writers. Very striking in particular was the fellowship of ancient
Britons and Gauls with regard to religion. If you open one—I may say
any one—of our French history text-books, you will see that it begins
exactly as one of yours, with the same story, and pictures, of Druids,
priests, teachers, and judges—some of them bards; the same story of the
solemn gathering of the mistletoe verdant in winter on the bare branches
of oaks, symbol of the cardinal creed of the race: the immortality of
the soul. Caesar, who had a Druid among his best friends, observes that
the young Gauls who wanted to go deeper into the study of their religion
generally used to go over to Britain in order to graduate, if I may say
so, in this mysterious and lofty science.[1] It appears, therefore,
that, though the Celts had passed originally from Gaul into Britain, yet
Britain had become and remained the sanctuary of their common religion.
Note that nothing of the sort was to be found elsewhere. Here we have
characteristics of ancient Britain and ancient Gaul and of them alone.
Now observe that though this Celtic colour is to be later on—in fact much
later—modified by waters from other sources, yet it will never completely
disappear. The Celtic element remains visible to our day in our two
nations: you have your green Celtic fringe in Cornwall, Wales, part of
Scotland, and the greater part of Ireland;—we have something of the kind
in Brittany.
III.
During the first century B.C. a very big event took place which was to
stamp the whole of our ulterior history on this side of the Channel with
its principal character: I am referring to the Romanisation of Gaul.
For many reasons which I omit, the advent of the Romans, though of course
it met with some strenuous and even splendid resistance for a short time,
could hardly be called a conquest in the odious meaning of the word.
Now, you know that Caesar in the very midst of his campaigns in Gaul
found time to carry out two bold expeditions into Britain. It is very
interesting to note his motives. He was not, as one could easily imagine,
impelled by an appetite of conquest. This appetite, by the way, was much
less among the Romans than is generally imagined, and Caesar himself
had enough to do at that time with the turbulent Gallic tribes without
entering, if it could be avoided, upon a doubtful enterprise beyond the
Channel. But he could not do otherwise, and he gives us himself his
motives, which are extremely interesting from the point of view of the
history of our early relations. He felt that he could not see an end to
his Gallic war if he did not at least intimidate the British brothers
of the Gauls always ready to send them help! Let me quote his own words
(remember that he speaks of himself in the third person):
‘Though not much was left of the fine season—and winter comes
early in those parts—he resolved to pass into Britain, at
least, to begin with, for a reconnoitring raid, because he saw
well that in almost all their wars (the Romans’ wars) with the
Gauls, help came from that country to their enemies.’[2]
His two bold raids into Britain had some of the desired effect. His
successors achieved more, leisurely, without too much trouble, but very
incompletely too, both as regards extent of territory and depth of
impression. You see how I have expressed all this in my draught.
In Gaul, on the contrary, the transformation was complete and lasting,
lasting to our days. The civilisation of Rome, which had already
fascinated Gaul from afar, was so eagerly and so unanimously adopted all
over the country that, in the space of a few decades, this country was
nearly as Roman as Rome. The fame of the Gallo-Roman schools, the great
number of Latin writers and orators of Gallic origin, the numberless
remains of theatres, temples, bridges, aqueducts—some in marvellous
state of preservation—which are even now to be found in hundreds of
places, not only in the south but even in the north of this country, from
the Mediterranean to the Rhine, and still more than anything else our
language, so purely Romanic, abundantly testify to the willingness, nay
to the enthusiasm, with which Gaul made her own the civilisation of Rome.
But why do I insist on this fact? Because much of all this we were to
transmit to you later on, chiefly on the Norman vehicle. The direct
impression of Rome on your country was to remain superficial—though it
would be a mistake to overlook it altogether—but the indirect influence
through us was nearly to balance any other influence and to become one of
the chief factors of your moral and intellectual history.
IV.
But before we reach that time we have to take note of two nearly
simultaneous events. In the fifth century the Franks established
themselves in Roman Gaul and the Angles and Saxons in Roman Britain.
You see in my draught each of these rivers—English and Frankish—flowing
respectively into the streams of British and Gallic history. I have
given about the same bluish colour to these new rivers to point out that
Anglo-Saxons and Franks were originally cousins and neighbours. Their
establishment was more or less attended with some rough handling, but
even in their case, and chiefly in our case, the strict propriety of the
word conquest to describe their coming can be questioned. There had been
previous and partial agreements with the old people to come over, besides
they were few in numbers. Yet the results were strikingly different. On
our side the Franks were gradually absorbed, though giving their name
to the country—France—and constituting, specially in the north, a small
aristocracy of soldiers. On your side, on the contrary, the Anglo-Saxons
converted the old country into a new one. Instead of giving up their own
language they imposed it, at least to a large extent. Between them and
their Frankish cousins established in old Roman Gaul relations remained
quite cordial. A king of Kent, who had married a Christian daughter of a
king of Paris, showed remarkable good will for the second introduction
of Christianity into Britain. He and his Anglo-Saxon comrades would not
accept Christianity from the ancient Britons who had already become
Christian, more or less, under the Romans, but they accepted it eagerly
at the recommendation of the Romanised and Christianised Franks. May I
say that the Franks went so far as to provide the Mission under Augustine
with the necessary interpreters! Very soon the Anglo-Saxons became so
eager themselves for Christianity that they became foremost in the
spreading of it to the last country which remained to be converted to
the new faith, I mean Germany. This is a very interesting story, though
an old one, and, I am afraid, much forgotten: your Winfrid—he and his
pupils—with the recommendation and support of Charles Martel—the founder
of our Carolingian dynasty—Christianising Germany, founding there a
dozen bishoprics, with British bishops, becoming himself the first
archbishop of Mayence, and then dying a martyr on German soil.... Is not
it interesting, this now forgotten story, in which we see early England
and early France friendly co-operating to Christianise and to civilise
Germany?
V.
The next stage in the history of both countries was again analogous.
About the same time—the ninth century—we, and you, had troubles from
the same people: the Northmen. They were few in numbers, but gave much
annoyance for some time. The result was the same on both sides: you
practically turned your Northmen into Anglo-Saxons, and we turned ours
into Romanised Frenchmen of the best sort. The process was much more
rapidly completed on our side than on yours, and you were still engaged
in it when our Romanised Normans arrived in Britain and nearly succeeded
in achieving what the Romans themselves had failed to achieve. And more
than that—more from the point of view of our relations—they very nearly
succeeded in building out of our two countries a practically unified but
short-lived empire.
In 1180 the whole of the present United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland and nearly two-thirds of France were practically acknowledging,
under one title or another, only one sovereign: Henry II. Plantagenet.
Let me say—though I own it is not the view which is generally prevalent
in our schools, and far from it!—that it is a pity they did not succeed
altogether! Henry II. had against him untoward circumstances and, above
all, Philip Augustus! He had finally to give up that fine dream. Now,
union failing to be achieved that way, it is a pity, I think, that it
failed also the _other_ way, a little time after in 1216. Then the far
greater part of your people, barons and clergy, revolting against one
of the unworthiest rulers ever known, King John, agreed to invite over
the eldest son, _and heir_, of the French king to be their own king. He
came over, of course, was received at Westminster, accepted and confirmed
Magna Charta, the charter of your liberties, and was going to be
acknowledged in all parts of the kingdom when John—allow me these strong
terms—did the stupidest and wickedest thing of his stupid and wicked life
by dying at the wrong time! at that time! He died when by living a little
longer he might have been the occasion of joining our two countries into
one empire! Fancy for a moment what _this_ would have meant, the course
our common history would have taken for our common glory and the future
of the whole human race! But, dying, he left an heir, a boy of nine
years of age, and the idea of innocent legitimacy, with the strenuous
support of the Papal legate, prevailed over the half-accomplished fact!
And thus this splendid chance was lost!
Another occasion presented itself hardly more than a century afterwards,
when the Capetian line of our own kings became extinct and the nearest
heir was the English king Edward III. In fact, he was as much French as
English, and the king of a country whose official language was still
French and whose popular language was now permeated with French. I think
it was no more difficult for France, in 1328, to accept this king, and
be united with England under the same sovereign while remaining herself,
than for England in 1603 to accept a king from Scotland. Well, there
was some hesitation among the French barons and clergy, and a solemn
discussion was held on the point of law. In fact, there was no law at all
on the subject and they had a free choice. To my mind the interest of
the country pointed to the recognition of Edward, that is to union. No
doubt, on the other hand, that it was the way pointed to by civil and by
canon laws. They preferred the other course. No doubt they meant well,
but to be well-meaning and far-seeing are two things, and I for one, in
the teeth of all adverse and orthodox teaching, lament the decision which
they took and the turn which they gave to national feelings yet in their
infancy. The other decision would have spared the two countries not only
one, but several hundred years’ wars, and would have secured to the two
sister countries all the mutual advantages of peaceful development and
cordial co-operation.
I can only briefly refer to the famous Treaty of Troyes, 1420, by which
in the course of the Hundred Years’ War our King—insane literally
speaking—and his German wife, disinherited their son to the profit of
their son-in-law, the English king, and handed over to him, at once,
as Regent, the crown of France. This treaty of course, under such
circumstances, and when national feelings had been roused—however
unfortunately—in the contrary direction, had little moral and political
value. Yet, had your Henry V. lived—he died two years after the treaty—he
might possibly have got it accepted by France. Professor A. Coville in
his contribution to what is presently the latest, the leading, history of
France, commenting on Henry’s love of justice and the stern discipline he
maintained in his army—the Army of Agincourt—concludes in the following
remarkable terms, which I beg to translate:
‘After so many years of strife the people of this Kingdom [the
French Kingdom] looked up to his stern government to turn this
anarchy into order. Paris accepted as a deliverance this yoke,
heavy no doubt but protective.’[3]
It is interesting to observe that this view of this French historian is
in complete agreement with Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V.’ Such an agreement
between an English poet and a French scientist is certainly worthy of
attention!
Well, Henry V. died, and national feelings being decidedly roused,
flaming into the stupendous miracle of Joan of Arc, decided otherwise.
VI.
What about this _otherwise_, I mean this definitive political separation
and these centuries of hostility which fill our history text-books? We
can speak of it without the slightest uneasiness, not only because all
this seems now to be so far in the past, a past which can never revive,
but, above all, because of the remarkable characters of this hostility
and of its brilliant interludes.
I say that this hostility had, on the whole, this remarkable character,
to be lofty rivalry, not low hatred. It may have been—it was indeed
at times—fierce and passionate, but it was all along accompanied by
mutual respect. Our two countries aimed at surpassing much more than
at destroying each other. It was more like a world race for glory than
a grip for death. Its spirit was quarrelsome animosity taking immense
delight in stupid pinpricks and daring strokes, not cold hate dreaming of
mortal stabs to the heart.
Your great poet Rudyard Kipling has expressed this very finely in the
poem he wrote three years ago on the occasion, if I remember well, of
your King’s first visit to Paris. Let me quote from this poem:
‘We stormed the seas tack for tack and burst
Through the doorways of new worlds, doubtful which was first.’
‘Ask the wave that has not watched war between us two ...
Each the other’s mystery, terror, need, and love.’
‘O companion, we have lived greatly through all time.’
I could illustrate this spirit by many stories. One of the most typical
is about the encounter on the battlefield of Fontenoy, in 1745, of
the massive English column and of the French centre. There is in that
story a mixture of fine legend and historical truth, but anyway it is
illustrative of the spirit. The very fact that the legend could grow out
of the truth is a proof of the spirit by itself.
There is another story much less known, but which is as much
illuminating. It was at the beginning of the American war, thirty-four
years after Fontenoy, in 1779. Your famous seaman Rodney was in Paris,
which he could not leave on account of certain debts, yet he was
perfectly free to walk about as any ordinary private man, though France
and England were at war. Concentration camps had not been invented
as yet! One day, then, as he was dining with some French military
friends—always remember, please, that we were at war—they came to talk of
some recent successes we had just had at sea, among them the conquest of
Grenada in the West Indies. Rodney expressed himself on these successes
with polite disdain, saying that if _he_ was free—he Rodney—the French
would not have it so easy! Upon which old Marshal de Biron paid for his
debts and said: ‘You are free, sir, the French will not avail themselves
of the obstacles which prevent you from fighting them.’ Well, it cost us
very dear to have let him go, but was not it fine!
I am glad to hear from my friend, your Oxford countryman, Mr. C.R.L.
Fletcher, the author of a brilliantly written ‘Introductory History of
England’ in four volumes, that the story is told in substantially the
same terms on your side, by all the authorities on the subject: Mundy’s
‘Life and Correspondence of Lord Rodney’ (vol. i. p. 180); Laughton in
the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’; Captain Mahan in his ‘Influence
of Sea Power in History,’ p. 377.
We could tell many, many stories of that kind, but let these two
be sufficient for our purpose to-day. And yet, even with all these
extenuating circumstances, how pitiful it would have been if this enmity
had been continuous! But it was not, and even far from it! Even the worst
of all our wars, the Hundred Years’ War, was interrupted by very numerous
and very long truces lasting years and even decades of years! In fact,
that war consisted generally of mere raids with handfuls of men, though
it must be said that they often did harm out of all proportion to their
numbers. As to the other wars in more modern times they were pleasantly
intermingled with interludes of co-operation and alliance. The simple
enumeration of them is instructive and may even appear surprising.
In the sixteenth century there was a temporary alliance between your
Henry VIII. and our Francis the First, against the Emperor of Germany,
Charles V. In fact Henry VIII., at first, had allied himself with the
German Emperor against the French king, but when the latter, attacked
from all cardinal points (Spain and most of Italy were then in the hands
of the Emperor), had been beaten at Pavia and taken prisoner to Madrid,
your King perceived his mistake, _i.e._ England’s ultimate danger. He
consequently offered his alliance to Francis for the restoration of this
balance of power, which, for want of something better, was the guarantee
of the independence of all states. In Mignet’s study[4] of these times
I find this extract from your King’s instructions to his ambassadors in
France, in March 1526, as to the conditions forced upon the French king,
in his Spanish prison, by the Emperor of Germany:
‘They [the English ambassadors] shall infer what damage the
crown of France may and is likely to stand in by the said
conditions—this be the way to bring him [Charles] to the
monarchy of Christendom.’
You know that, after all, the world-wide ambition of the then Emperor of
Germany was defeated, to the point that he resigned in despair and ended
his life in a monastery.
Again, towards the end of the same century Queen Elizabeth was on quite
friendly terms with our Henry the Fourth. They had the same enemy:
Philip the Second of Spain, son of Charles the Fifth and heir to the
greater part of his dominions. This friendship ripened into alliance,
and there was a very strong English contingent in the French army which
retook Amiens, from the Spaniards, in 1597. Both sovereigns united also
in helping the Low Countries in their struggle for independence against
Spain.
In the seventeenth century your Cromwell and our Mazarin renewed the
same alliance against Spain, and in 1657 a Franco-British army under the
ablest of the French soldiers of that time, Marshal Turenne, beat the
Spaniards near Dunkirk and took Dunkirk itself, which was handed over to
you as the price previously agreed upon of the alliance.
After the Restoration your Stuarts were on so friendly terms with the
French Government that they were accused, sometimes with some show of
justice, of forgetting the national interests. There is no doubt that
they tried, and to a certain extent successfully, to evade the just
demands and control of your Parliament by becoming pensioners of the King
of France. Their selling Dunkirk to France in 1662, five years after
its capture from Spain, made them particularly unpopular. Of course,
when they were finally expelled by your revolutions of 1688, they found,
with hundreds of followers, a hospitable reception at the French court,
causing thereby on the other hand a revival of hostility between our
government and your new one. May I observe, by the way, that the head of
this new government of yours was the Prince of Orange—French Orange, near
Avignon—and that this little, practically self-governing principality was
suffered to remain his until his death, in 1702, when Louis XIV. annexed
it to France?
In the eighteenth century itself, marked by so keen a rivalry, there were
temporary periods of understanding, specially during the two or three
decades following the peace of Utrecht, with a view of preserving the
peace of Europe. The names of Sir Robert Walpole and Cardinal Fleury are
attached to this period.
In the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon, the improvement
of our relations—down to the present day—has been nearly continuous
and marked by a series of remarkable facts. It was first the union of
our navies, with that of Russia, for the destruction of the Turkish
fleet at Navarino, in 1827, thereby securing the independence of
Greece—an independence which was completed in the ensuing years by
French and Russian armies—(we wish the present Greek Government, the
Royal government, remembered this better!). It was then the union of our
policies for the liberation of Belgium from Dutch vassalage, a liberation
which Prussia wanted to oppose but durst not, seeing that France and
England had made up their minds about it. Then came the union of our
armies for the mistaken object of protecting Turkey against Russia (how
strange it sounds now!), or of opening China to the European trade. Chief
of all, how could we forget that—some way or other—France and Britain
have been godmothers to Italian unity!
Well, all this is rather a long record and it may appear surprising to
many as an aggregate, though nearly each component part of it is well
known! The reason for this impression of surprise is this: in spite
of this political co-operation, and side by side with it, much of the
acrimonious spirit long survived, unwilling to die. The twentieth
century, thank God! and the present alliance have given it the ‘coup de
grâce’!
VII.
I have adverted until now to the political side only of our relations,
but if we look at our past relations from another standpoint—the
standpoint of the mind, of moral progress, of civilisation—we have a
somewhat simpler story to tell, yet a chequered story too. Whatever our
political relations may have been—with perhaps the only exception of the
time when you opposed all reforms, because we were making revolutionary,
disconcerting reforms!—we have been generally emulating for all that
ennobles the life of man: higher thought, justice, and liberty. There
is here such a formidable accumulation of interesting facts that I can
scarcely refer to them except in very general terms, lest I should lose
sight of the limits within which I must compress this article.
French and English writers rarely took much account of the political
hostility which prevailed between the two countries. Your writers
have generally paid, from Chaucer’s time down to our own, the closest
attention to our literature, whether they have followed its lead or
reacted against its influence. On the other hand, all our political
philosophers have always found in the study of your institutions a source
of inexhaustible interest, whether they have been admirers of them like
Montesquieu or sharp critics like Rousseau. And let no one imagine that
this side of the question is devoid of practical interest. It is owing
to this continuous interchange of ideas that both countries have been
equipped for these intellectual, moral and political achievements by
which, in spite of all their shortcomings, they have won the glory of
being generally acknowledged, on so many points, as the joint leaders
of modern civilisation. It is the fact that they have been more or less
conscious all along, or nearly so, of this joint leadership, which has so
happily counteracted and at the end got the better of political acrimony
and popular prejudices. The Entente Cordiale between our two countries
is largely a triumph of the mind, the finest in history and certainly
the most far-reaching. Let us not underestimate therefore the influence
of intellectual workers. It has been the glory of most of them in this
country and in yours to plead for the noblest ideals: for liberty and
justice at home, and also, abroad, for a cordial understanding of all
nations, for harmony between national interests and the rights of
humanity. In modern Germany, on the contrary, most of those who are
supposed to be the representatives of the mind have not been ashamed of
ministering, long before this war, to the brutal appetites of a feudal
and military caste by spreading among their own people a monstrous
belief in the divine right of the German race to oppress all the world.
The best of them, with extremely rare exceptions, have done nothing to
oppose this dangerous fanaticism and to maintain the nobler traditions
of German thought. Both instances therefore, ours and theirs—I mean
French and British intellectual history on one side, German later
intellectual history on the other side—sufficiently illustrate the power
of spiritual factors for good or for evil. The only thing to be deplored
in our case is that our Entente was so long deferred. Things would have
turned otherwise if our Entente had ripened somewhat earlier into a
closer association, gradually extending by a moral attraction to all
peace-loving nations. Had it been so who would have dared to attack them?
At least let the bitter lesson be turned to account for the future!
And chief of all let us think of the new chapter of our common history.
There is being written on the banks and hills of the Somme such a chapter
of our common history as will live eternally in the souls of Britons and
Frenchmen. Let the memory of it, added to all those I have recounted,
bind together in eternal alliance the hearts and the wills of the two
nations. Let it be known to all the world that this present alliance is
not like so many of the past a temporary combination of governments, but
the unanimous and for ever fixed will of both nations as the crowning
and _logical_ conclusion of their glorious history. Let this close and
intimate association include all our noble allies, and all such nations
as may be worthy to join it; let it become the Grand Alliance, the only
one really and completely deserving of this name, to which it will have
been reserved to establish, at last, the reign of Right and Peace on
earth.
GASTON E. BROCHE.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Caesar, _B.G._ vi. 13.
[2] Caesar, _B.G._ iv. 20.
[3] See _Histoire de France_ publiée sous la direction de Mr. Lavisse:
Tome IV. par A. Coville, Recteur de l’Académie de Clermont-Ferrand,
Professeur honoraire de l’Université de Lyon.
[4] Mignet, _Rivalité de François 1er et de Charles-Quint_, II ch. ix.
_OLD WAYS AT WESTMINSTER._
RECALLED BY SIR HENRY LUCY.
To the July number of CORNHILL I last year contributed an article gleaned
from the Recollections of an anonymous observer of the House of Commons
from the year 1830 to the close of the session of 1835. It contained a
series of thumb-nail personal sketches of eminent members long since gone
to ‘another place,’ leaving names that will live in English history. A
portion of the musty volume was devoted to descriptions of Parliamentary
surroundings and procedure interesting by comparison with those
established at the present day.
‘Q,’ as for brevity I name the unknown recorder, describes the old
House of Commons destroyed by fire in 1834 as dark, gloomy and badly
ventilated, so small that not more than 400 out of the 658 members could
be accommodated with any measure of comfort. In those days an important
debate was not unfrequently preceded by ‘a call of the House,’ which
brought together a full muster. On such occasions members were, ‘Q’ says,
‘literally crammed together,’ the heat of the House recalling accounts of
the then recent tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Immediately over
the entrance provided for members was the Strangers’ Gallery; underneath
it were several rows of seats for friends of members. This arrangement
exists in the new House. Admission to the Strangers’ Gallery was obtained
on presentation of a note or order from a member. Failing that, the
payment of half a crown to the doorkeeper at once procured admittance.
When the General Election of 1880 brought the Liberals into power,
parties in the House of Commons, in obedience to immemorial custom,
crossed over, changing sides. The Irish members, habitually associated
with British Liberals, having when in Opposition shared with them
the benches to the left of the Speaker, on this occasion declined to
change their quarters, a decision ever since observed. They were, they
said, free from allegiance to either political party and would remain
uninfluenced by their movements. This was noted at the time as a new
departure. Actually they were following a precedent established half a
century earlier.
In the closing sessions of the unreformed Parliament, a group of extreme
Radicals, including Hume, Cobbett and Roebuck, remained seated on the
Opposition Benches whichever party was in power. Prominent amongst them
was Hume, above all others most constant in attendance. He did not
quit his post even during the dinner hour. He filled his pockets with
fruit—pears by preference—and at approach of eight o’clock publicly ate
them.
In the old House of Commons a bench at the back of the Strangers’
Gallery was by special favour appropriated to the reporters. The papers
represented paid the doorkeepers a fee of three guineas a session. As
they numbered something over threescore this was a source of snug revenue
in supplement to the strangers’ tributary half-crown. Ladies were not
admitted to the Strangers’ Gallery. The only place whence they could
partly see, and imperfectly hear, what was going on was by looking down
through a large hole in the ceiling immediately above the principal
candle-stocked chandelier. This aperture was the principal means of
ventilating the House, and the ladies circled round it regardless of the
egress of vitiated air. Mr. Gladstone, who sat in the old House as member
for Newark, once told me that during progress with an important debate he
saw a fan fluttering down from the ceiling. It had dropped from the hand
of one of the ladies, who suddenly found herself in a semi-asphyxiated
condition. Something more than half a century later Mr. Gladstone was
unconsciously the object of attention from another group of ladies
indomitable in desire to hear an historic speech. On the night of the
introduction of the first Home Rule Bill there was overflowing demand for
seats in the Ladies’ Gallery. When accommodation was exhausted, the wife
of the First Commissioner of Works happily remembered that the floor of
the House is constructed of open iron network, over which a twine matting
is laid. These cover the elaborate machinery by which fresh air is
constantly let into the Chamber, escaping by apertures near the ceiling.
Standing or walking along the Iron Gallery that spans the vault, it is
quite easy to hear what is going on in the House. Here, on the invitation
of the First Commissioner’s wife, were seated a company of ladies who,
unseen, their presence unsuspected, heard every word of the Premier’s
epoch-making speech.
‘Q’ incidentally records details of procedure in marked contrast with
that of to-day. In these times, on the assembling of a newly elected
Parliament, the Oath is administered by the Clerk to members standing in
batches at small tables on the floor of the House. In the old Parliament,
members were sworn in by the Lord Steward of His Majesty’s Household.
At the same period a new Speaker being duly elected or re-elected was
led by the Mover and Seconder from his seat to the Bar, whence he was
escorted to the Chair. To-day he is conducted direct to the Chair.
When divisions were taken in Committee of the whole House, members did
not, as at present, go forth into separate lobbies. The ‘ayes’ ranged
themselves to the right of the Speaker’s Chair, the ‘noes’ to the left,
and were counted accordingly. The practice varied when the House was
fully constituted, the Speaker in the Chair and the Mace on the Table.
In such circumstances one only of the contending parties, the ‘ayes’ or
the ‘noes’ according to the nature of the business in question, quitted
the Chamber. The tellers first counted those remaining in the House, and
then, standing in the passage between the Bar and the door, counted the
others as they re-entered. The result of the division was announced in
the formula: ‘The ayes that went out are’ so many. ‘The noes who remained
are’ so many, or otherwise according to the disposition of the opposing
forces. A quorum then as now was forty, but when the House was in
Committee the presence of eight members sufficed. ‘Q’ makes no reference
to the use of a bell announcing divisions. But he mentions occasions on
which the Mace was sent to Westminster Hall, the Court of Request, or to
the several Committee Rooms to summon members to attend.
At the period of Parliamentary history of which ‘Q’ is the lively
chronicler, the ceremony of choosing a Speaker and obtaining Royal Assent
to the choice was identical with that first used on the occasion of Sir
Job Charlton’s election to the Chair in the time of Charles II. The title
of Speaker was bestowed because he alone had the right to speak to or
address the King in the name and on behalf of the House of Commons. Of
this privilege he customarily availed himself at considerable length. On
being summoned to the presence of the Sovereign in the House of Lords
he, in servile terms, begged to be excused from undertaking the duties
of Speaker, ‘which,’ he protested, ‘require greater abilities than I can
pretend to own.’ The Lord Chancellor, by direction of the Sovereign,
assured the modest man that ‘having very attentively heard your discreet
and handsome discourse,’ the King would not consent to refusal of the
Chair. Thereupon the Speaker-designate launched forth into a fresh,
even more ornate, address, claiming ‘renewal of the ancient privileges
of Your most loyal and dutiful House of Commons.’ Whereto His Majesty,
speaking again by the mouth of the Lord Chancellor, remarked, not without
a sense of humour, that ‘he hath heard and well weighed your short and
eloquent oration and in the first place much approves that you have
introduced a shorter way of speaking on these occasions.’
Up to 1883 the Speaker’s salary was, as it is to-day, £5000 a year. In
addition to his salary he received fees amounting to £2000 or £3000 per
session. On his election he was presented with 2000 ounces of plate,
£1000 of equipment money, two hogsheads of claret, £100 per annum for
stationery, and a stately residence in convenient contiguity to the
House. These little extras made the post worth at least £8000 per annum.
In the present and recent Parliament an ancient tradition is kept up by a
member for the City of London seating himself on the Treasury Bench. Two
members are privileged to take their places there, but after his election
for the City Mr. Arthur Balfour left Sir Frederick Banbury in sole
possession of the place. To-day, by the strange derangement of party ties
consequent on the war, the ex-Prime Minister has permanently shifted his
quarters to the Treasury Bench under the leadership of a Radical Premier.
In the first third of the nineteenth century the City of London returned
four members, who not only sat on the Treasury Bench on the opening day
of the new Parliament, but arrayed themselves in scarlet gowns. Sir
Frederick Banbury stopped short of acquiring that distinction.
During the first two sessions of the reformed Parliament the Commons met
at noon for the purpose of presenting petitions and transacting other
business of minor importance. These morning sittings, precursors of
others instituted by Disraeli and since abandoned, usually lasted till
three o’clock, the House then adjourning till five, when real business
was entered upon. Subsequently this arrangement was abandoned, the
Speaker taking the Chair at half-past three. Even then the first and
freshest hour and a half of the sitting were spent in the presentation of
petitions or in debate thereupon. The interval can be explained only upon
the assumption that the petitions were read verbatim.
In the Parliamentary procedure of to-day petitions play a part of ever
decreasing importance. Their presentation takes precedence of all other
business. But the member in charge of one is not permitted to stray
beyond briefest description of its prayer and a statement of the number
of signatories. Thereupon, by direction of the Speaker, he thrusts the
petition into a sack hanging to the left of the Speaker’s chair, and
there an end on’t. There is, it is true, a Committee of Petitions which
is supposed to examine every document. As far as practical purposes are
concerned, petitions might as well be dropped over the Terrace into the
Thames as into the mouth of the appointed sack.
At times of popular excitement round a vexed question—by preference
connected with the Church, the sale of liquor, or, before her ghost was
laid, marriage with the deceased wife’s sister—the flame systematically
fanned is kept burning by the presentation of monster petitions. Amid
ironical cheers these are carried in by two elderly messengers, who lay
them at the foot of the Table. Having been formally presented, they are,
amid renewed merriment, carried forth again and nothing more is heard of
them, unless the Committee on Petitions reports that there is suspicious
similarity in the handwriting of blocks of signatures, collected by an
energetic person remunerated by commission upon the aggregate number.
The most remarkable demonstration made in modern times happened during
the short life of the Parliament elected in 1892. Members coming down
in time for prayers discovered to their amazement the floor of the
House blocked with monster rolls, such as are seen in the street when
the repair of underground telegraph wires is in progress. The member to
whose personal care this trifle had been submitted rising to present
the petition, Mr. Labouchere, on a point of order, objected that sight
of him was blocked by the gigantic cylinders. ‘The hon. gentleman,’ he
suggested, ‘should mount one and address the Chair from the eminence.’
The suggestion was disregarded, and in time the elderly messengers put
their shoulders to wheels and rolled the monsters out of the House.
‘Q,’ whose eagle eye nothing escapes, comments on the preponderance of
bald heads among Ministers. Occupying an idle moment, he counted the
number of bald heads and found them to amount to one-third of the full
muster. ‘Taking the whole 658,’ he writes in one of his simple but
delightful asides, ‘I should think that perhaps a fourth part are more or
less baldheaded. The number of red heads,’ he adds, ‘is also remarkable.
I should think they are hardly less numerous than bald ones. When I come
to advert to individual members of distinction it cannot fail to strike
the reader how many are red-headed.’
This interesting inference is, if it be accepted as well-founded,
damaging to the status of the present House of Commons. I do not, on
reflection, recall a single member so decorated.
As to baldheadedness—which in the time of the prophet Elisha was
regarded as an undesirable eccentricity, public notice of which, it
will be remembered, condemned the commentators to severe disciplinary
punishment—it was, curiously enough, a marked peculiarity among members
of the House of Commons in an early decade of the nineteenth century. I
have a prized engraving presenting a view of the interior of the House of
Commons during the sessions of 1821-3. Glancing over the crowded benches,
I observe that the proportion of baldheaded men is at least equal to that
noted by ‘Q’ in the Parliament sitting a dozen years later.
What are known as scenes in the House were not infrequent in ‘Q’s’ time.
He recalls one in which an otherwise undistinguished member for Oxford,
one Hughes Hughes, was made the butt. It was a flash of the peculiar, not
always explicable, humour of the House of Commons, still upon occasion
predominant, to refuse a gentleman a hearing. ‘Hughes’s rising was the
signal for continuous uproar,’ ‘Q’ writes. ‘At repeated intervals a sort
of drone-like drumming, having the sound of a distant hand organ or
bagpipes, arose from the back benches. Coughing, sneezing and ingeniously
extended yawning blended with other sounds. A voice from the Ministerial
benches imitated very accurately the yelp of a kennelled hound.’
For ten minutes the double-barrelled Hughes faced the music, and when he
sat down not a word save the initial ‘Sir’ had been heard from his lips.
The nearest approach to this scene I remember happened in the last
session of the Parliament of 1868-74, when, amidst similar uproar,
Cavendish Bentinck, as one describing at the time the uproar wrote, ‘went
out behind the Speaker’s Chair and crowed thrice.’ This was the occasion
upon which Sir Charles Dilke made his Parliamentary début. In Committee
of Ways and Means he, in uncompromising fashion that grated on the ears
of loyalists, called attention to the Civil List of Queen Victoria and
moved a reduction. Auberon Herbert, now a staid Tory, at that time
suspected of a tendency towards Republicanism, undertook to second the
amendment. Sir Charles managed amid angry interruptions to work off his
speech. Herbert, following him, was met by a storm of resentment that
made his sentences inaudible.
After uproar had prevailed for a full quarter of an hour a shamefaced
member, anxious for the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments, called
attention to the presence of strangers. Forthwith, in accordance with the
regulation then in force, the galleries were cleared. As the occupants
of the Press Gallery reluctantly departed, they heard above the shouting
the sound of cock-crowing. Looking over the baluster they saw behind
the Chair Little Ben, as Cavendish Bentinck was called to distinguish
him from his bigger kinsman, vigorously engaged upon a vain effort to
preserve order by a passable imitation of Chanticleer saluting the happy
morn.
From ‘Q’s’ report of another outbreak of disorder it would appear that in
the House meeting in the ‘thirties of the nineteenth century, exchange of
personalities went far beyond modern experience. The once heated Maynooth
question was to the fore. In the course of an animated set-to between a
Mr. Shaw and Daniel O’Connell, the former shouted ‘The Hon. Member has
charged me with being actuated by spiritual ferocity. My ferocity is not
of the description which takes for its symbol a death’s head and cross
bones.’ O’Connell, as a certain fishwife locally famous for picturesque
language discovered, was hard to beat in the game of vituperation.
Turning upon Shaw, he retorted ‘Yours is a calf’s head and jaw bones.’
‘Q’ records that the retort was greeted with deafening cheers from the
Ministerial side where O’Connell and his party were seated. Mr. Shaw’s
polite, but perhaps inconsequential, remark had been received with equal
enthusiasm by the Opposition.
_AFTER THE BATTLE._
BY BENNET COPPLESTONE.
‘Caesar,’ said a Sub-lieutenant to his friend, a temporary Lieutenant
R.N.V.R., who at the outbreak of war had been a classical scholar at
Oxford, ‘you were in the thick of our scrap yonder off the Jutland coast.
You were in it every blessed minute with the battle cruisers, and must
have had a lovely time. Did you ever, Caesar, try to write the story of
it?’
It was early in June of last year, and a group of officers had gathered
near the ninth hole of an abominable golf course which they had
themselves laid out upon an island in the great landlocked bay wherein
reposed from their labours long lines of silent ships. It was a peaceful
scene. Few even of the battleships showed the scars of battle, though
among them were some which the Germans claimed to be at the bottom of the
sea. There they lay, coaled, their magazines refilled, ready at short
notice to issue forth with every eager man and boy standing at his action
station. And while all waited for the next call, officers went ashore,
keen, after the restrictions upon free exercise, to stretch their muscles
upon the infamous golf course. It was, I suppose, one of the very worst
courses in the world. There were no prepared tees, no fairway, no greens.
But there was much bare rock, great tufts of coarse grass greedy of
balls, wide stretches of hard, naked soil destructive of wooden clubs,
and holes cut here and there of approximately the regulation size. Few
officers of the Grand Fleet, except those in Beatty’s Salt of the Earth
squadrons, far to the south, had since the war began been privileged to
play upon more gracious courses. But the Sea Service, which takes the
rough with the smooth, with cheerful and profane philosophy, accepted the
home-made links as a spirited triumph of the handy-man over forbidding
nature.
‘Yes,’ said the naval volunteer, ‘I tried many times, but gave up all
attempts as hopeless. I came up here to get first-hand material, and
have sacrificed my short battle leave to no purpose. The more I learn
the more helplessly incapable I feel. I can describe the life of a ship,
and make you people move and speak like live things. But a battle is
too big for me. One might as well try to realise and set on paper the
Day of Judgment. All I did was to write a letter to an old friend, one
Copplestone, beseeching him to make clear to the people at home what we
really had done. I wrote it three days after the battle, but never sent
it. Here it is.’
Lieutenant Caesar drew a paper from his pocket and read as follows:
‘MY DEAR COPPLESTONE,—Picture to yourself our feelings. On
Wednesday we were in the fiery hell of the greatest naval
action ever fought. A real Battle of the Giants. Beatty’s and
Hood’s battle cruisers—chaffingly known as the Salt of the
Earth—and Evan Thomas’s squadron of four fast Queen Elizabeths
had fought for two hours the whole German High Seas Fleet.
Beatty, in spite of his heavy losses, had outmanœuvred Fritz’s
battle cruisers and enveloped the German line. The Fifth Battle
Squadron had stalled off the German Main Fleet, and led them
into the net of Jellicoe, who, coming up, deployed between Evan
Thomas and Beatty, though he could not see either, crossed the
T of the Germans in the beautifullest of beautiful manœuvres,
and had them for a moment as good as sunk. But the Lord giveth
and the Lord taketh away; it is sometimes difficult to say
Blessed be the Name of the Lord. For just when we most needed
full visibility the mist came down thick, the light failed, and
we were robbed of the fruits of victory when they were almost
in our hands. It was hard, hard, bitterly hard. But we had
done the utmost which the Fates permitted. The enemy, after
being harried all night by destroyers, had got away home in
torn rags, and we were left in supreme command of the North
Sea, a command more complete and unchallengeable than at any
moment since the war began. For Fritz had put out his full
strength, all his unknown cards were on the table, we knew
his strength and his weakness, and that he could not stand
for a moment against our concentrated power. All this we had
done, and rejoiced mightily. In the morning we picked up from
Poldhu the German wireless claiming the battle as a glorious
victory—at which we laughed loudly. But there was no laughter
when in the afternoon Poldhu sent out an official message from
our own Admiralty which, from its clumsy wording and apologetic
tone, seemed actually to suggest that we had had the devil of a
hiding. Then when we arrived at our bases came the newspapers
with their talk of immense losses, and of bungling, and of
the Grand Fleet’s failure! Oh, it was a monstrous shame! The
country which depends utterly upon us for life and honour, and
had trusted us utterly, had been struck to the heart. We had
come back glowing, exalted by the battle, full of admiration
for the skill of our leaders and for the serene intrepidity
of our men. We had seen our ships go down and pay the price
of sea command—pay it willingly and ungrudgingly as the Navy
always pays. Nothing that the enemy had done or could do was
able to hurt us, but we had been mortally wounded in the house
of our friends. It will take days, weeks, perhaps months, for
England and the world to be made to understand and to do us
justice. Do what you can, old man. Don’t delay a minute. Get
busy. You know the Navy, and love it with your whole soul.
Collect notes and diagrams from the scores of friends whom
you have in the Service; they will talk to you and tell you
everything. I can do little myself. A Naval Volunteer who
fought through the action in a turret, looking after a pair
of big guns, could not himself see anything outside his thick
steel walls. Go ahead at once, do knots, and the fighting Navy
will remember you in its prayers.’
The attention of others in the group had been drawn to the reader and his
letter, and when Lieutenant Caesar stopped, flushed and out of breath,
there came a chorus of approving laughter.
‘This temporary gentleman is quite a literary character,’ said a two-ring
Lieutenant who had been in an exposed spotting top throughout the whole
action, ‘but we’ve made a Navy man of him since he joined. That’s a
dashed good letter, and I hope you sent it.’
‘No,’ said Caesar. ‘While I was hesitating, wondering whether I would
risk the lightning of the Higher Powers, a possible court martial, and
the loss of my insecure wavy rings, the business was taken out of my
hands by this same man to whom I was wanting to write. He got moving on
his own account, and now, though the battle is only ten days old, the
country knows the rights of what we did. When it comes to describing the
battle itself, I make way for my betters. For what could I see? On the
afternoon of May 31, we were doing gun drill in my turret. Suddenly came
an order to put lyddite into the guns and follow the Control. During
the next two hours as the battle developed we saw nothing. We were just
parts of a big human machine intent upon working our own little bit with
faultless accuracy. There was no leisure to think of anything but the
job in hand. From beginning to end I had no suggestion of a thrill, for
a naval action in a turret is just gun drill glorified, as I suppose it
is meant to be. The enemy is not seen; even the explosions of the guns
are scarcely heard. I never took my ear-protectors from their case in
my pocket. All is quiet, organised labour, sometimes very hard labour
when for any reason one has to hoist the great shells by the hand
purchase. It is extraordinary to think that I got fifty times more actual
excitement out of a squadron regatta months ago than out of the greatest
battle in naval history.’
‘That’s quite true,’ said the Spotting Officer, ‘and quite to be
expected. Battleship fighting is not thrilling except for the very few.
For nine-tenths of the officers and men it is a quiet, almost dull
routine of exact duties. For some of us up in exposed positions in the
spotting tops or on the signal bridge, with big shells banging on the
armour or bursting alongside in the sea, it becomes mighty wetting and
very prayerful. For the still fewer, the real fighters of the ship in
the conning tower, it must be absorbingly interesting. But for the
true blazing rapture of battle one has to go to the destroyers. In a
battleship one lives like a gentleman until one is dead, and takes the
deuce of a lot of killing. In a destroyer one lives rather like a pig,
and one dies with extraordinary suddenness. Yet the destroyer officers
and men have their reward in a battle, for then they drink deep of the
wine of life. I would sooner any day take the risks of destroyer work,
tremendous though they are, just for the fun which one gets out of it.
It was great to see our boys round up Fritz’s little lot. While you
were in your turret, and the Sub. yonder in control of a side battery,
Fritz massed his destroyers like Prussian infantry and tried to rush up
close so as to strafe us with the torpedo. Before they could get fairly
going, our destroyers dashed at them, broke up their masses, buffeted and
hustled them about exactly like a pack of wolves worrying sheep, and with
exactly the same result. Fritz’s destroyers either clustered together
like sheep or scattered flying to the four winds. It was just the same
with the light cruisers as with the destroyers. Fritz could not stand
against us for a moment, and could not get away, for we had the heels of
him and the guns of him. There was a deadly slaughter of destroyers and
light cruisers going on while we were firing our heavy stuff over their
heads. Even if we had sunk no battle cruisers or battleships, the German
High Seas Fleet would have been crippled for months by the destruction of
its indispensable “cavalry screen.”’
As the Spotting Officer spoke, a Lieutenant-Commander holed out on the
last jungle with a mashie—no one uses a putter on the Grand Fleet’s
private golf course—and approached our group, who, while they talked,
were busy over a picnic lunch.
‘If you pigs haven’t finished all the bully beef and hard tack,’ said
he, ‘perhaps you can spare a bite for one of the blooming ’eroes of the X
Destroyer Flotilla.’ The speaker was about twenty-seven, in rude health,
and bore no sign of the nerve-racking strain through which he had passed
for eighteen long-drawn hours. The young Navy is as unconscious of nerves
as it is of indigestion. The Lieutenant-Commander, his hunger satisfied,
lighted a pipe and joined in the talk.
‘It was hot work,’ said he, ‘but great sport. We went in sixteen and
came out a round dozen. If Fritz had known his business, I ought to be
dead. He can shoot very well till he hears the shells screaming past his
ears, and then his nerves go. Funny thing how wrong we’ve been about
him. He is smart to look at, fights well in a crowd, but cracks when he
has to act on his own without orders. When we charged his destroyers
and ran right in he just crumpled to bits. We had a batch of him nicely
herded up, and were laying him out in detail with guns and mouldies, when
there came along a beastly intrusive Control Officer on a battle cruiser
and took him out of our mouths. It was a sweet shot, though. Someone—I
don’t know his name, or he would hear of his deuced interference from
me—plumped a salvo of twelve-inch common shell right into the brown of
Fritz’s huddled batch. Two or three of his destroyers went aloft in
scrap-iron, and half a dozen others were disabled. After the first hour
his destroyers and light cruisers ceased to be on the stage; they had
flown quadrivious—there’s an ormolu word for our classical volunteer—and
we could have a whack at the big ships. Later, at night, it was fine.
We ran right in upon Fritz’s after-guard of sound battleships and
rattled them most tremendous. He let fly at us with every bally gun he
had, from four-inch to fourteen, and we were a very pretty mark under
his searchlights. We ought to have been all laid out, but our loss was
astonishingly small, and we strafed two of his heavy ships. Most of his
shots went over us.’
‘Yes,’ called out the Spotting Officer, ‘yes, they did, and ricochetted
all round us in the Queen Elizabeths. There was the devil of a row. The
firing in the main action was nothing to it. All the while you were
charging, and our guns were masked for fear of hitting you, Fritz’s
bonbons were screaming over our upper works and making us say our prayers
out loud in the Spotting Tops. You’d have thought we were at church. I
was in the devil of a funk, and could hear my teeth rattling. It is when
one is fired on and can’t hit back that one thinks of one’s latter end.’
‘Did any of you see the _Queen Mary_ go?’ asked a tall thin man with the
three rings of a Commander. ‘Our little lot saw nothing of the first part
of the battle; we were with the K.G. Fives and Orions.’
‘I saw her,’ spoke a Gunnery Lieutenant, a small, quiet man with dreamy,
introspective eyes—the eyes of a poet turned gunner. ‘I saw her. She was
hit forward, and went in five seconds. You all know how. It was a thing
which won’t bear talking about. The _Invincible_ took a long time to
sink, and was still floating bottom up when Jellicoe’s little lot came
in to feed after we and the Salt of the Earth had eaten up most of the
dinner. I don’t believe that half the Grand Fleet fired a shot.’
There came a savage growl from officers of the main Battle Squadrons,
who, invited to a choice banquet, had seen it all cleared away before
their arrival. ‘That’s all very well,’ grumbled one of them; ‘the four
Q.E.s are getting a bit above themselves because they had the luck of
the fair. They didn’t fight the High Seas Fleet by their haughty selves
because they wanted to, you bet.’
The Gunnery Lieutenant with the dreamy eyes smiled. ‘We certainly
shouldn’t have chosen that day to fight them on. But if the _Queen
Elizabeth_ herself had been with us, and we had had full visibility—with
the horizon a hard dark line—we would have willingly taken on all Fritz’s
twelve-inch Dreadnoughts and thrown in his battle cruisers.’
‘That’s the worst of it,’ grumbled the Commander, very sore still at
having tasted only of the skim milk of the battle; ‘naval war is now only
a matter of machines. The men don’t count as they did in Nelson’s day.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ remarked the Sub-Lieutenant; ‘may I say a word or two
about that? I have been thinking it out.’
There came a general laugh. The Sub-Lieutenant, twenty years of age,
small and dark and with the bright black eyes of his mother—a pretty
little lady from the Midi de la France whom his father had met and
married in Paris—did not look like a philosopher, but he had the
clear-thinking, logical mind of his mother’s people.
‘Think aloud, my son,’ said the Commander. ‘As a living incarnation
of l’Entente Cordiale, you are privileged above those others of the
gun-room.’
The light in the Sub’s eyes seemed to die out as his gaze turned inwards.
He spoke slowly, carefully, sometimes injecting a word from his mother’s
tongue which could better express his meaning. He looked all the while
towards the sea, and seemed scarcely to be conscious of an audience of
seniors. His last few sentences were spoken wholly in French.
‘No—naval war is a war of men, as it always was and always will be. For
what are the machines but the material expression of the souls of the
men? Our ships are better and faster than the German ships, our guns
heavier and more accurate than theirs, our gunners more deadly than
their gunners, because our Navy has the greater human soul. The Royal
Navy is not a collection of lifeless ships and guns imposed upon men
by some external power as the Kaiser sought to impose a fleet upon the
Germans, a nation of landsmen. The Navy is only a matter of machines
in so far as human beings can only achieve material ends by material
means. I look upon the ships and guns as secreted by the men just as a
tortoise secretes its shell. They are the products of naval thought,
and naval brains, and, above all, of that ever-expanding naval soul
(_l’esprit_) which has been growing for a thousand years. Our ships
yonder are materially new, the products almost of yesterday, but really
they are old, centuries old; they are the expression of a naval soul
working, fermenting, always growing through the centuries, always seeking
to express itself in machinery. Naval war is an art, the art of men, and
where in the world will one find men like ours, officers like ours? Have
you ever thought whence come those qualities which one sees glowing every
day in our men, from the highest Admiral to the smallest ship boy—have
you ever thought whence they come?’
He paused, still looking out to sea. His companions, all of them his
superiors in rank and experience, stared at him in astonishment, and one
or two laughed. But the Commander signalled for silence. ‘Et après,’
he asked quietly; ‘d’où viennent ces qualités?’ Unconsciously he had
sloughed the current naval slang and spoke in the native language of the
Sub.
The effect was not what he had expected. At the sound of the Commander’s
voice speaking in French the Sub-Lieutenant woke up, flushed, and
instantly reverted to his English self. ‘I am sorry, sir. I got speaking
French, in which I always think, and when I talk French I talk the most
frightful rot.’
‘I am not so sure that it was rot. Your theory seems to be that we are,
in the naval sense, the heirs of the ages, and that no nation that has
not been through our centuries-old mill can hope to stand against us. I
hope that you are right. It is a comforting theory.’
‘But isn’t that what we all think, sir, though we may not put it quite
that way? Most of us know that our officers and men are of unapproachable
stuff in body and mind, but we don’t seek for a reason. We accept it as
an axiom. I’ve tried to reason the thing out because I’m half French;
and also because I’ve been brought up among dogs and horses and believe
thoroughly in heredity. It’s all a matter of breeding.’
‘The Sub’s right,’ broke in the Gunnery Lieutenant with the poet’s eyes;
‘though a Sub who six months ago was a snotty has no business to think
of anything outside his duty. The Service would go to the devil if the
gun-room began to talk psychology. We excuse it in this Sub here for the
sake of the Entente Cordiale, of which he is the living embodiment; but
had any other jawed at us in that style I would have sat upon his head.
Of course he is right, though it isn’t our English way to see through
things and define them as the French do. No race on earth can touch us
for horses or dogs or prize cattle—or Navy men. It takes centuries to
breed the boys who ran submarines through the Dardanelles and the Sound
and stayed out in narrow enemy waters for weeks together. Brains and
nerves and sea skill can’t be made to order even by a German Kaiser. Navy
men should marry young and choose their women from sea families, and
then their kids won’t need to be taught. They’ll have the secret of the
Service in their blood.’
‘That’s all very fine,’ observed a Marine Lieutenant reflectively; ‘but
who is going to pay for it all? We can’t. I get 7_s._ 6_d._ a day, and
shall have 11_s._ in a year or two; it sounds handsome, but would hardly
run to a family. Few in the Navy have any private money, so how can we
marry early?’
‘Of course we can’t as things go now,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant.
‘But some day even the Admiralty will discover that the English Navy
will become a mere list of useless machines unless the English naval
families can be kept up on the lower deck as well as in the ward-room
and gun-room. Why, look at the names of our submarine officers whenever
they get into the papers for honours. They are always salt of the sea,
names which have been in the Navy List ever since there was a List. You
may read the same names in the Trafalgar roll and back to the Dutch
wars. Most of us were Pongos before that—shore Pongos who went afloat
with Blake or Prince Rupert—but then we became sailors, and so remained,
father to son. I can only go back myself to the Glorious First of June,
but some of us here in the Grand Fleet date from the Stuarts at least. It
is jolly fine to be of Navy blood, but not all plum jam. One has such
a devil of a record to live up to. In my term at Dartmouth there was a
poor little beast called Francis Drake—a real Devon Drake, a genuine
antique—but what a load of a name to carry! Thank God, my humble name
doesn’t shine out of the history books. And as with the officers, so with
the seamen. Half of them come from my own county of Devon—the cradle
of the Navy. They are in the direct line from Drake’s buccaneers. Most
of the others come from the ancient maritime counties of the Channel
seaboard, where the blood of everyone tingles with Navy salt. The Germans
can build ships which are more or less accurate copies of our own, but
they can’t breed the men. That is the whole secret.’
The Lieutenant-Commander, whose war-scarred destroyer lay below
refitting, laughed gently. ‘There is a lot in all that, more than we
often realise when we grumble at the cursed obstinacy of our old ratings,
but even you do not go back far enough. It is the old blood of the
Vikings and sea-pirates in us English which makes us turn to the sea;
the rest is training. In no other way can you explain the success of the
Fringes, the mine-sweepers, and patrols, most of them manned by naval
volunteers who, before the war, had never served under the White Ensign
nor seen a shot fired. What is our classical scholar here, Caesar, but a
naval volunteer whom Whale Island and natural intelligence have turned
into a gunner? But as regards the regular Navy, the Navy of the Grand
Fleet, you are right. Pick your boys from the sea families, catch them
young, pump them full to the teeth with the Navy Spirit—_l’esprit marine_
of our bi-lingual Sub here—make them drunk with it. Then they are all
right. But they must never be allowed to think of a darned thing except
of the job in hand. The Navy has no use for men who seek to peer into
their own souls. They might do it in action and discover blue funk. We
want them to be no more conscious of their souls than of their livers.
Though I admit that it is devilish difficult to forget one’s liver when
one has been cooped up in a destroyer for a week. It is not nerve that
Fritz lacks so much as a kindly obedient liver. He is an iron-gutted
swine, and that is partly why he can’t run destroyers and submarines
against us. The German liver is a thing to wonder at. Do you know—’ but
here the Lieutenant-Commander became too Rabelaisian for my delicate pen.
The group had thinned out during this exercise in naval analysis. Several
of the officers had resumed their heart-and-club-breaking struggle with
the villainous golf course, but the Sub, the volunteer Lieutenant, and
the Pongo (Marine) still sat at the feet of their seniors. ‘May I say how
the Navy strikes an outsider like me?’ asked Caesar diffidently. Whale
Island, which had forgotten all other Latin authors, had given him the
name as appropriate to one of his learning.
‘Go ahead,’ said the Commander generously. ‘All this stuff is useful
enough for a volunteer; without the Pongos and the Volunteers to swallow
our tall stories, the Navy would fail of an audience. The snotties know
too much.’
‘I was going to speak of the snotties,’ said Caesar, ‘who seem to me to
be even more typical of the Service than the senior officers. They have
all its qualities emphasised, almost comically exaggerated. I do not know
whether they are never young or that they never grow old, but there is no
essential difference in age and in knowledge between a snotty six months
out of cadet training and a Commander of six years’ standing. They rag
after dinner with equal zest, and seem to be equally well versed in the
profound technical details of their sea work. Perhaps it is that they are
born full of knowledge. The snotties interest me beyond every type that I
have met. Their manners are perfect and in startling contrast with those
of the average public school boy of fifteen or sixteen—even in College
at Winchester—and they combine their real irresponsible youthfulness
with a grave mask of professional learning which is delightful to look
upon. I have before me the vision of a child of fifteen with tousled
yellow hair and a face as glum as a sea-boot, sitting opposite to me in
the machine which took us back one day to the boat, smoking a “fag” with
the clumsiness which betrayed his lack of practice, in between bites of
“goo” (in this instance Turkish Delight), of which I had seen him consume
a pound. He looked about ten years old, and in a husky, congested voice,
due to the continual absorption of sticky food, he described minutely to
me the method of conning a battleship in manœuvres and the correct amount
to allow for the inertia of the ship when the helm is centred; he also
explained the tactical handling of a squadron during sub-calibre firing.
That snotty was a sheer joy, and the Navy is full of him. He’s gone
himself, poor little chap—blown to bits by a shell which penetrated the
deck.’
‘In time, Caesar,’ said the Commander, ‘by strict attention to duty you
will become a Navy man. But we have talked enough of deep mysteries. It
was that confounded Sub, with his French imagination, who started us.
What I really wish someone would tell me is this: what was the “northern
enterprise” that Fritz was on when we chipped in and spoilt his little
game?’
‘It does not matter,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘We spoilt it, anyhow.
The dear old newspapers talk of his losses in big ships as if they were
all that counted. What has really crippled him has been the wiping out of
his destroyers and fast new cruisers. Without them he is helpless. It was
a great battle, much more decisive than most people think, even in the
Grand Fleet itself. It was as decisive by sea as the Marne was by land.
We have destroyed Fritz’s mobility.’
The men rose and looked out over the bay. There below them lay their
sea homes, serene, invulnerable, and about them stretched the dull,
dour, treeless landscape of their northern fastness. Their minds were
as peaceful as the scene. As they looked a bright light from the
compass platform of one of the battleships began to flicker through the
sunshine—dash, dot, dot, dash. ‘There goes a signal,’ said the Commander.
‘You are great at Morse, Pongo. Read what it says, my son.’
The Lieutenant of Marines watched the flashes, and as he read grinned
capaciously. ‘It is some wag with a signal lantern.’ said he. ‘It reads:
Question—Daddy,—what—did—you—do—in—the—Great—War?’
‘I wonder,’ observed the Sub-Lieutenant, ‘what new answer the lower deck
has found to that question. Before the battle their reply was: “I was
kept doubling round the decks, sonny.”’
‘There goes the signal again,’ said the Pongo; ‘and here comes the
answer.’ He read it out slowly as it flashed word after word: ‘“I LAID
THE GUNS TRUE, SONNY.”’
‘And a dashed good answer, too,’ cried the Commander heartily.
‘That would make a grand fleet signal before a general action,’ remarked
the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘I don’t care much for Nelson’s Trafalgar signal.
It was too high-flown and sentimental for the lower deck. It was aimed at
the history books, rather than at old tarry-breeks of the fleet a hundred
years ago. No—there could not be a better signal than just “Lay the Guns
True”—carry out your orders precisely, intelligently, faultlessly. What
do you say, my Hun of a classical volunteer?’
‘It could not be bettered,’ said Caesar.
‘I will make a note of it,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant, ‘against the day
when, as a future Jellicoe, I myself shall lead a new Grand Fleet into
action.’
_L’ILE NANCE._
BY ROWLAND CRAGG.
Nance was a tomboy, or whatever may be the equivalent of this type in the
doggy world, and she looked it. An ungainly body, clad in a rough coat of
silver and grey on a foundation of brown, carried a head that appeared
ill-shaped because of the unusual width of skull. Over her forehead
continually straggled a tangle of hairs that mixed with others growing
stiffly above her snout, and through this cover were to be seen two
pearly eyes that were wondrously bright and intelligent. She had a trick,
too, of tossing her head in a manner suggestive of nothing so much as a
girl throwing back the curls from face and shoulders, and it seemed to
emphasise the tomboy in Nance. But she had sterling qualities, of which
her broad skull and quick eyes gave more than a hint. If ungainly, her
little body was untiring and as supple as a whiplash, and her legs were
as finely tempered steel springs. She had, too, a rare turn of speed, and
it was the combination of these gifts with her remarkable intelligence
that in later days made her the most noted dog in Craven.
Her puppyhood was unpromising. Indeed, for one born on a farm, where
is lack neither of shelter nor food, her earliest hours were doubly
perilous, for, in addition to the prospect of a watery grave in a bucket,
her existence, and that of the whole litter, was threatened by negligent
nursing. Fate had given the little family a mother not only herself
young, but of all dogs that ever worked on a farm the most irresponsible.
It was quite in keeping with her reputation that Lucy should bring her
children to birth in the exposed hollow trunk of a tree and then forget
the blind, sprawling, whimpering puppies for hours together. It was going
hard with the weaklings when fate again took a hand in their welfare,
this time in the person of young Zub.
It had become evident to the farm folk, to whom matters of birth and
reproduction are commonplaces of daily life, that Lucy’s new duties had
come upon her, and it was plainly evident, too, before the third day had
run, that she was neglecting them. It was then that young Zub, or Zubdil,
as he was indifferently called, either name serving to distinguish him
from Owd Zub, his father, actively bestirred himself. Hitherto he had
done no more than keep his eyes and ears open as he moved about the
farm buildings, but neither soft whimper nor the sound of tender noses
nuzzling against a warm body had rewarded him. His first deliberate
efforts were to watch Lucy’s comings and goings, in the hope of tracing
her hiding-place. But the mother dog, a poacher at heart and with all a
four-footed poacher’s cunning, had easily beaten him at this game. When
he recognised this, angry at the thought that somewhere a small family
was suffering, he soundly cuffed her about the ears in the hope that she
would bolt for her hiding-place and her blind charges. But the graceless
one, howling, raced no further than to her kennel, and from its depths
kept one watchful eye open for further developments.
‘Drat thee,’ cried Zubdil, as his experiment went wrong, ‘but I’ll find
’em yet.’ He turned and slowly entered the kitchen, where Owd Zub was
quietly chuckling to himself.
‘Shoo’s bested thee, reight an’ all, this time,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t thy
books tell thee owt?’
It was a thrust he was fond of making. Zubdil’s strongly developed taste
for reading was something beyond the old farmer’s understanding. He would
have given but occasional heed to it had not the younger man taken up
works on scientific farming and breeding, and also studied these subjects
in a course of postal lessons with the Agricultural Department at the
Northern University. New ideas thus acquired often clashed with the
father’s ingrained conservative methods, and they left him sore. A chance
to get in a sly dig at this ‘book larning’ was too good to be missed. He
chuckled again as he asked the question.
The younger man laughed. He was broadening in more ways than one, and he
bore no malice. ‘Happen they do,’ he said. ‘Yo just watch, fayther, an’
happen yo’ll leearn summat.’
He reached up to the blackened oak beam that spanned the ceiling, took
down his gun, and strolled casually out across the yard. In a moment
Lucy had tumultuously burst out of the kennel and was dancing about him,
all animation and keenness. Graceless she might be, and lacking in the
discharge of her mothering duties, but heart and soul she was a lover
of sport. At the sight of the gun she was in transports. Unheeding her,
young Zub passed on through the gate. Wriggling through ere it closed,
Lucy was after him and away in front of him like a streak, making
river-wards. There, as well she knew, were the plumpest rabbits. When
the old dalesman, his curiosity whetted, reached a point where he could
see without being seen, the two were ranging the low field where runs
the Wharfe. Steadily they passed along through Dub End and into Lang
Pasture, the gun still hooked in the curl of the man’s arm, then as they
came through the field gate together into the High Garth Lucy’s tail
suddenly drooped. She hesitated, turned about in indecision, and finally,
disregarding the sharp whistle calling her to heel, slid off up the hill
under the wall-side and vanished by the riven oak.
‘Dang it,’ said Owd Zub, greatly interested, and understanding, ‘I owt to
ha’ knawn shoo’d ha’ gooan to ’em if they came owt near ’em.’
By the time he arrived on the spot, and he walked across the field with a
great show of carelessness, Zubdil had the whimpering youngsters on the
grass and was examining them. Couched near by, her tail going in great
pride, Lucy was mothering each one as it was laid down again.
‘They’re a poor lot,’ said the elder man, eyeing them critically, and
discreetly making no reference to the finding of them; ‘put ’em ivvery
one i’ t’ pail.’
Zubdil did not reply immediately. He was watching one puppy, more
vigorous than any of the rest, trying to prop itself up on its forelegs.
Its sightless eyes were turned towards him, its tiny nostrils were
working, and there was a decided quiver—it was an immature wagging—in its
wisp of a tail. He picked it up again. A tiny patch of red slid out and
licked his hand, and there were faint noises that brought Lucy’s ears to
the prick. Zubdil laughed.
‘Sitha for pluck, fayther,’ he cried. ‘This is best o’ t’ lot. I’se
keeping this for mysen.’
‘Thou’ll drown t’ lot,’ said his father, sharply. ‘We’ve dogs enough on
t’ farm. Besides, they’re hawf deead.’
They are sparing of speech, these Craven dalesmen, but their words are
ever to the point. They have also a stiff measure of obstinacy in their
constitution, as have all men whose forebears for generations have lived
and died amid the everlasting hills. Obstinacy now showed in the younger
man. He put the youngster down beside the mother dog, gathered up the
others into a bag that he took from his capacious pocket, and rose. Lucy
was up in an instant, ears cocked. Zubdil checked her sternly.
‘Lig thee theer,’ he ordered, and she resumed her nursing under
constraint. Young Zub turned to the elder.
‘I’se keeping it,’ he announced, briefly.
The other knew that tone, and gave in. ‘Well,’ grudgingly, ‘I’se heving
nowt to do wi’ it, then. An’ if theer’s another licence to get, tha pays
for it thysen.’
So the pup was spared, and she flourished and grew apace. Nance, he
called her, after one from a neighbouring farm, thoughts of whom had been
occupying his mind a good deal of late. He ventured to tell her what he
had done when one evening, by chance that had been occurring frequently
of late, he met her by the old bridge. The girl reddened with pleasure at
the implied compliment, giggled a little, and gave him a playful nudge
with her elbow. It was a nudge that would have upset many a city-bred
man. ‘Thou’s a silly fond fellow,’ she said, but there was no reproach
in her words. Rather was it that in turn he was pleased. It was a little
incident that marked a distinct advance in their relations.
It was also an incident that led young Zub to take more interest in
the dog’s welfare than otherwise he might have done. Dimly floating
at the back of his mind, tinged with romance, was the idea that the
four-footed Nance ought to be worthy of the name she bore. It led him
to take her education in hand seriously, and to the task he brought all
his fieldcraft, his native shrewdness, and his great patience. He began
early, when she was not yet half grown and still a playful puppy; but,
early as he was, someone was before him. Whatever her demerits as a
mother, Lucy excelled in woodcraft and the art of the chase. She had the
soul of an artist for it, which was perhaps why, as an ordinary working
farm dog, she was an indifferent success. And what she knew she taught
her daughter, taking the young one with her as soon as Nance was strong
enough to stand these excursions. Their favourite time was dawn of day,
and their hunting-ground the woods that mantled the breast of the moors
high above the farm, or the sandy stretches along Wharfe side, where fat
rabbits were abundant. Nance was an apt pupil. She learned to stalk, to
obliterate herself behind seemingly inadequate cover, to crawl almost
without action visible to the eye, and her instinct for choosing the
moment for the final fatal rush was not bettered even in the older dog.
Thus it happened that when Zubdil took up her training the ground had
been prepared for him better than ever he knew. Yet he began his task
opportunely, for Nance was at the parting of the ways. Lucy was a clever
dog, but her best and finest qualities, neglected through want of
recognition, had deteriorated until she was now no more than a cunning
hunter. The little dog—l’ile Nance she was to everybody—inherited all her
mother’s cleverness, and, happily for her, Zubdil took her in hand while
yet she was in her plastic, impressionable days. He made her his constant
companion. If he went no further than the length of the field to fasten
up the chickens safe from the predatory fox, he called her to accompany
him. If he went on to the moor, or to the village, or to a neighbouring
farm, she was with him. And she was taught to do strange things.
Sometimes she was sent chasing round a field and brought back to heel in
zigzag tracings. At other times she was bidden to crouch by a gate and to
stir not at all until his return. Sometimes she was sent ahead at full
gallop and then made to stop dead and lie prone, when he would overtake
and pass her, man and dog alike apparently unconscious of each other’s
presence, save for the way in which those pearly eyes of hers watched his
every movement.
It was all done with no more language than can be conveyed in a whistle.
But expressive! With his ash stick tucked under one arm Zubdil would
thrust the better part, as it seemed, of both hands into his mouth,
whence would proceed now a single piercing call, now a prolonged
high-pitched note, now a series of staccato commands, and ever and again
fluty modulations as if a blackbird had joined in the business. And every
note had a definite meaning. It was a great game for Nance, who at these
times was nothing more than two bright eyes and a pair of ever-working
ears. She strove to please and worked hard, and when it dawned upon the
deliberately moving mind of the young dalesman that he had a dog of
unusual parts it stimulated him to greater efforts. It also stimulated
him to secrecy, though why he could not have explained.
He gave her experience in the rounding-up of the half-wild, hardy,
half-bred sheep on the moorlands, and here she learned to work dumbly,
without yielding to the temptation to nip the flying legs of the nervous
fleeces. It was on these uplands, too, that he received his first meed
of praise, and it fired the smouldering pride in his heart and lifted
him out of the ordinary workaday rut. For it gave him an idea. It was
dipping-time, when the moors had to be thoroughly scoured for the sheep,
and from a dozen farms in the dale below men had gathered together to
co-operate in the work. With them came their dogs; dogs that barked and
fought, dogs that raced hither and thither irresolutely trying to obey
the many and confusing whistlings, doing their best to please all and
giving satisfaction to none. Young Zub stood on a knoll a little apart,
and at his bidding a silver and grey-brown form flashed among the bracken
and the ling, sometimes buried from sight, at times only the tips of
pricked ears visible, but always making a wider and further stretching
circle than the others. And wherever Nance ranged sheep came into view
and were deftly piloted to the common gathering-ground.
It was Long Abram who first recognised what she was doing.
‘That theer young dog o’ thy lad’s is doing weel,’ he said, turning to
Owd Zub. ‘It’ll mak a rare ’un i’ time.’
It was luncheon-time, and the men had halted in their work to discuss the
contents of the baskets that had been sent up from the farms. Owd Zub
helped himself to another piece of cold apple pie before answering.
‘It’s a gooid dog nah,’ he said presently, speaking with deliberation,
‘if t’ lad doesn’t get it ower fond.’
‘Ower fond?’ It was Nance the woman who spoke. She had brought up her
father’s luncheon and was sitting near at hand. There was a sparkle in
her eye, and her resolute little chin was thrust forth aggressively.
‘Ower fond,’ she repeated, scornfully. ‘Some o’ yo think us younger end
can’t do owt reight. Why, Zubdil’s trained that dog reight, an’ all. It’s
good enough for t’ trials.’
The men laughed good-humouredly. The girl’s relations with Zubdil were
now well established and recognised, and her quick intervention was to be
expected. But good enough for the trials—well, working it on the moors
was one thing, but to direct an inexperienced dog on an enclosed field
under the eyes of a crowd, and in competition with some of the best and
most experienced trial working animals, was another matter altogether.
They laughed at the girl’s warmth, and let it go at that. But young Zub,
happening to walk past at the time while counting up the sheep, heard the
words. They quickened him and gave birth to the idea, while Long Abram’s
praise, which, if brief, went a long way, emboldened him. He thought
deeply, but kept his counsel; not even to Nance did he open his mind for
some time. But he worked the young dog even more regularly and watched
her keenly. Then one day he wrote a letter, and the girl, face flushed,
looked on.
A few weeks later the two, with Owd Zub, were units in the crowd that had
gathered in a large field in a village some miles higher up the dale.
It was the dale’s annual agricultural show and gala day, and all the
farming community that could toddle, walk, or ride, to say nothing of
visitors, had converged upon the spacious pasture. On the back of the
right hand of each and all of them was an impression in purple ink; it
was the pass-out check, imprinted upon each one with a rubber date stamp
by a stalwart, red-faced policeman, who stood guard at the gate. They
have little use for gloves, these folk of the Craven dales.
The three, with l’ile Nance stretched at ease at their feet, stood
somewhat apart from the crowd. Owd Zub was uneasy and a trifle wrathful,
and also, having already paid several visits to the refreshment booth,
inclined to be querulous. Not until that morning, as they were packing
into the farm gig, had he learned that l’ile Nance had been entered for
the sheep-dog trials. For years these trials had been the feature of the
show, and they attracted good dogs, and knowing this, and being convinced
that the little dog would not shine against such opponents, he was sore.
Deep down in his heart he was proud of his son, and he did not relish
seeing him beaten before his fellows of the dale.
‘What chance hes shoo?’ he growled. ‘Theer’s lots o’ first-class dogs
here. There’s Tim Feather wi’ his, ’at’s run i’ theease trials for t’
past six year. An’ theer’s Ike Thorpe, thro’t’ Lancashire side. He’s
ta’en t’ first prize here this last two year. He’s owd hand at t’ game,
an’ soa is his dog.’
‘Well,’ said his son, ‘if he wins it ageean he can hev it.’
He spoke somewhat abstractedly. The trials had already begun, and he was
more intent on watching his rivals and in familiarising himself with
the course than in listening to the elder man. It was a long field and
of good breadth, so that there was plenty of room for the sheep to run.
Along the farther side, close to the bank of the river, were three sets
of upright posts, like goal-posts, but lacking the net and cross-bar.
Through these the sheep had to be driven, and whilst this was being
done the owner of the dog had to stay near the judges; he was, in fact,
looped to a rope attached to a stake to prevent him, in his eagerness,
going to the assistance of his animal. As a consequence, all his commands
had to be given in whistles or by word of mouth. Near the head of the
enclosure was the second set of obstacles—a cross-road made of hurdles.
The sheep had to be piloted through each road and then driven to a little
hurdle enclosure and penned there. The competing owners were allowed to
drop their rope and go to the help of their dogs at the cross-roads and
the pen, and the winning dog was the one that penned the sheep in the
shortest time with the fewest mistakes.
Young Zub was the last to compete, and so far the best performance had
been done by Ike’s dog, which had penned its three allotted sheep in
fine style in nine-and-a-half minutes. As the young farmer looped the
rope about his arm he took stock of his three sheep, held by as many
perspiring attendants at the far end of the enclosure. They were fresh
from the moors that morning, and their fear and wildness were manifest.
Zubdil saw that there would be trouble if once they broke away, but he
was cool and unflurried as he nodded to the time-keeper to indicate that
he was ready.
‘Time,’ said that official, and dropped a white handkerchief. It was
the signal for the men to let go the sheep, which, once released, ran
a little way, and then began to nibble the rich luscious grass. It was
grand fare for them after what the moors had provided. At the same
instant Zubdil waved his stick. As if galvanised into life, Nance, who
had been stretched lazily at his feet snapping at the flies, shot up the
field like an arrow from a bow. Young Zub, straining hard at the rope,
his fingers in his mouth, watched her every stride, judging both pace
and distance. A moment later a shrill whistle, a long-drawn-out rising
cadence, went up, and with one ear cocked by way of reply the young dog
closed in on the rear of the nibbling sheep. They threw up their heads
and broke towards the river in a swift rush. A series of sharp notes
stabbed the air, and l’ile Nance, belly flat almost, such was her speed,
swung round them and headed them off. Back they came in a huddled group
to the very mouth of the first lot of posts. For a second they hesitated,
uncertain where to run, but Nance was coming up on their rear and they
broke through. Hard on their heels she followed, swinging now right,
now left, as one or other made as if to burst away, and so skilful her
piloting that she took them straight away through the second line of
posts at the run. A loud cheer went up from the onlookers; it was a neat
bit of work. But not a man but knew that things were going too well; it
is not in the nature of driven sheep to keep the proper course for long
together.
True to their traditions of stupidity and contrariness, they broke away
fan-wise when nearing the last posts. Zubdil, straining on loop until
he was drawn sideways, sent out clear, quick calls, a Morse code of
commands. Nance was as if making circles on her two near legs. With
ears laid flush, body stretching and closing like a rubber cord, she
flashed round the heads of the straying ones, collected them and hustled
them through the posts at panic speed. Once again that rising note rang
out, and in response she swept them round in a wide circle towards the
cross-roads. This was the danger point, for the hurdles stood close to
the ring of spectators, and here, if anywhere, the sheep were most likely
to bolt out of hand.
What happened was the unexpected. A fussy fox-terrier, excited by the
tumult and its nerves snapping at the sight of the racing sheep, broke
loose from its owner and, open-mouthed and noisy, sprang in to take a
hand. It caught the nearest sheep and nipped its leg. A roar of anger
went up; an interruption like this was against all tradition. Young
Zub, who was racing across the field to join l’ile Nance, rapped out an
excusable ‘damn,’ and half a dozen farmers on the edge of the ring loudly
expressed a wish to break the neck of the terrier, and to ‘belt’ the
careless owner of that animal. On the slope above the crowd Owd Zub was
dancing with rage.
‘They done it a’ purpose,’ he roared, his voice booming above the din.
‘Sumbody’s done it a’ purpose. They knawed t’ l’ile dog ’ud win. We’ll
hev another trial. We’ll tak all t’ dogs i’ England an’ back wer own for
a ten-pun noat. We’ll hev another trial.’
In deep wrath he was making his way to the enclosure, one hand fumbling
meanwhile to get into the pocket where lay his old-fashioned purse,
securely tied and buttoned up, when a hand gripped him firmly. Another,
equally decided in its action, closed over his mouth.
‘Ho’d thi din,’ cried Nance, for it was she. ‘It’s all reight. Sitha,
look at t’ l’ile dog nah. Well done, Zubdil.’
It was all over in a moment, but it was a stirring moment. L’ile Nance
had dealt with the intruder. Taking it in her stride, she had seized the
terrier by the back of the neck, flung it from her with a toss of her
head, and was about her business. She and her master had to deal with a
serious situation, for one sheep, in mad panic at the terrier’s attack
and at the feel of its teeth in her leg, had bolted blindly through the
crowd, clearing the fence in one fine leap. A silver-and-grey streak
flew through the opening thus made, and in a second both dog and sheep
were swallowed up among the onlookers. Zub, down on his knees the better
to see through the legs of the huddled spectators, was whistling until
he was well-nigh black in the face, but he never lost his head. His
calls were wonderful, articulate almost. They were thrilling, short, but
infinitely encouraging and coaxing. Many a man would have deeply cursed
his dog; every ounce of Zubdil went into encouraging the little animal.
‘Over, over, over,’ said the whistles, as plainly as could be, and at
the moment that the other Nance on the slope had stayed the wrathful old
farmer, her four-footed namesake came back over the fence in the rear of
the missing sheep.
The prodigal, bearing down upon its fellows, who had stopped to graze the
moment they found they were not being harried, alarmed them, and they
fled. By good luck they bore down straight upon the cross-road hurdles.
With Zubdil on one flank, l’ile Nance on the other, there was no escape,
and they bolted straight through. All the precious seconds lost by the
incident of the fox-terrier were thus won back, with more to them. Nance
awaited the panting fleeces at the exit, and with her tongue lolling,
and her bright eyes just visible through the tangled fringe of hair, she
appeared to be grinning them a welcome. The sheep spun round to avoid
her, and were brought up opposite the second entrance by the long form of
the young farmer. His arms were swaying, gently, unhurriedly, waving them
into the entrance. There was need now of patience and tact, for seconds
were becoming precious, and an over-alarmed sheep is a—mule. He whistled
softly with pursed lips while yet they hesitated what to do. Nance sank
prone.
Save that there was a dark patch against the green of the grass, she
had disappeared. Without any visible movement the patch drew nearer
the hesitating sheep. It was pretty work, and the crowd marked their
admiration by their dead silence. The sheep sighted the dog, backed round
to face her, and crowded with their hind-quarters against the hurdle.
Zubdil was silent, motionless, save for the slow movement of his arms.
Nance slid a little nearer, nearer yet. The sheep crowded further back
against the opening. She was not now a yard away. Suddenly she sat up
and panted hard. One of the animals, turning sharply to escape, found an
opening, pushed along it in dread haste. The other two struggled for next
place, and the cross-roads were won.
Again was l’ile Nance there to meet them as they gained the open, and
collecting them smartly she raced them off towards the pen. They broke
away, but their wild rush ended in their being brought up exactly against
the opening of the pen. Zubdil was there, too, his arms going like the
sails of a windmill on an almost breezeless day. They pushed past the
opening, and Nance rose up out of the grass to greet them. They spun
about and raced off, but in a trice she was doing trick running about
their heads and flanks, and when they stopped for breath the mouth of
the pen was again before them. Zubdil drew a cautious step nearer, arms
outspread, his lips puckered. Just wide of him a pair of ears pricked up
above the grass. There was a moment’s hesitation; one of the sheep poked
its head through the mouth of the pen. Nance glided a little nearer, and
the other two animals crowded against the first. Another step into the
pen; the dog was only a yard away. There was a flurried movement about
the opening. L’ile Nance sat up and lolled out a red tongue. She appeared
to be laughing. There was a crush, a scramble, the sheep burst in, and
Nance slid across the opening, lay down, and fixed her pearly eyes on her
master. What wonder if she appeared to be grinning cheerfully?
Before the cheering had subsided, a stolid-faced judge stepped towards
Zubdil. The pink rosette which denoted the first prize was in his hand,
and at the sight of it there was more cheering. The other Nance on the
slope clutched the arm of Owd Zub. For his part he was smiling broadly,
and ecstatically slapping his leggings hard with his ash stick.
‘Nine-an’-a-quarter minutes,’ said the judge, handing the rosette to the
young farmer. ‘By gum, but it wor a near do. Shoo’s a rare ’un, that dog
o’ thine, an’ nobbut a young ’un, too.’
But Zubdil’s greatest reward came later. It was not the hearty
congratulations of so doughty an opponent as Ike, nor the incoherent
remarks of Owd Zub. It was when an arm slid through his, when eyes dimmed
with the moisture of genuine pride looked into his, and a low voice said:
‘I’se reight glad, lad. I is.’
He laughed, gladly. Then openly, unashamed, he stooped and took toll of
her lips. Nor was he denied. And the other Nance, looking up from where
she lay at their feet, tossed back a lock of hair and wagged her tail in
approval.
_FRAGMENTS FROM GERMAN EAST._
BY A SOLDIER’S WIFE.
A still lagoon of veld, mile upon mile. Nowhere in the world, I should
suppose, does the tide of battle ebb and flow so almost imperceptibly.
Sometimes, only in echo, we hear the thunder of the overwhelming
seas—sometimes, just now and then, the ripple at our feet breaks in a
little cloud of spray and for a moment dims the eyes that are used to
vast spaces, with sudden yearning for an island home beneath the far
horizon, and perhaps hands tremble a little in tearing the wrapper from
the daily newspaper.
But enough for us, so far, has been our all unequal struggle with Nature,
who turns our skies to steel and with fierce winds scatters the hovering
clouds, while the young crops shrivel and the watersprings are dry and
the eyes of the beasts wait upon us who can give them no meat in due
season.
A Kaffir boy comes round one evening and sings a doggerel he has
fashioned from an old nigger melody, and others join in the foolish
refrain:
‘I come to Basutoland,
I come through lands and sea,
I kill five thousand Germans,
With my banjo on my knee.’
We laugh and throw him a tickey, and turn again to watch the
skies—to-morrow, perhaps, the rains will come and we can plough and sow.
For the dread hand that writes upon the wall has formed no fearful word
for us—as yet—and sympathy, deep and very real as it is, stands in our
lexicon as ‘a feeling for’ rather than ‘a feeling with.’
And then a cable calls me in haste to Durban to meet a returning
transport and suddenly there is nothing in the world but war and its
magnificence and its horror. The clusters of people at various stations
who come to meet the mail train—the event of the day—the youths who
slouch up and down the platform with loud voices and noisy jests, the
girls who laugh with them, the groups of farmers talking of the crops—all
these rouse me to a feeling of irritation, then to an impotent anger.
‘Come with me,’ I want to urge, ‘and I will take you where men are heroes
in life and death.’ And again, ‘Is it nothing to you that your brothers
agonise? Will you jest while the earth opens under your feet?’—and
something ominous creeps into the meaningless laughter.
And then at last comes Durban, and I am surrounded with war activities
and what was sinister has vanished in the wholesomeness of sacrifice and
strenuous work.
To hundreds here war work has become their daily life. The town is always
full of soldiers—Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans—coming and
going. Here is a company of New Zealanders winding up the street. From
a balcony I watch them marching with a fine swing—well set-up, stalwart
fellows. Someone comes with a tray of cigarettes and we throw packets
down amongst them, and their upturned, laughing boyish faces ask for
more. Youngsters all of these, eager for happiness, eager for a slap at
the Germans, and to ‘see life’—and their destination is the battlefield
of Flanders! At the corner they dismiss and there is a race for the
rickshaws; three crowd into one, and the Zulu boy gladly sweats up the
incline and capers and leaps when the downward slope relieves him,
knowing that for his brief exertion he will ask and get six times his
lawful fee. His ostrich feathers wave, his black limbs flash, and the
passengers lean back and laugh.
And the other side of the picture—a shipload of returning Australians,
on crutches, arms in slings, helpless on wheeled chairs, with the look
of the trenches on the brave faces that smile their grateful thanks.
For to each and all Durban has a warm welcome. While they still lie off
the Point, a girl signaller bids them come to the Y.M.C.A. Hut for all
that they want, ladies from the Patriotic League wait on the wharf with
supplies of cigarettes and fruit, motor-cars and carriages stop to pick
up stragglers and carry them home to dinner, to a concert or theatre,
and the Hut itself tempts with open doors to the comforts within, to the
tables strewn with magazines and papers, to the letter-writing facilities
and varied games, to the most excellent meals, where one penny will give
a hungry man a liberal helping of cold meat or an appetising plate of
fish mayonnaise, while a second penny provides the steaming cup.
Down on the Point a little crowd has gathered. The steamer is a day late,
and wives and mothers sit and wait, or restlessly ply any and all with
endless reiterate questions, or hold impatiently to a telephone receiver.
And the night falls, and along the beach gardens the coloured lights hang
in jewelled strings against the dark. A drizzle of rain makes a halo of
their blurred radiance, the band plays, the few wanderers—the last of
the holiday-makers—talk of their homeward journey, for the summer and
the beginning of the season of rains are with us. Far out in the bay a
mast-head light springs up, then more lights, a stir of excitement in the
gathering crowd at the Point, and slowly the tug leads the transport to
her moorings.
‘Stand back—stand back! Make way there!’ and with a whir of starting
engines, the motor ambulances steer their way through the pressing crowd,
and slowly the stretcher-bearers carry their freight along the lower
deck and round the difficult angle of the lowered gangway. In silence
this, and the greetings are very quiet as the waiting women meet their
loved ones again—for this great steamer with her rows of decks and wide
accommodation holds but the remnant of a regiment. Fifteen hundred strong
they marched through Durban nine months ago, and how many have not
returned! Fever, dysentery, debility, starvation, wounds and death—these
have all taken their toll.
I suppose there are few parts of the world which nature has made more
difficult to the intruder than German East Africa. In the forest the
thorny creepers join tree to tree in close high walls until the very
stars—man’s only guide—are hidden, nearly all the trees also are
a-bristle with protecting spears, sharp as needles to pierce and tear
the flesh, and to leave behind, it may be, a poisoned festering sore.
Mountain ranges throw their boulders and tear their gaping chasms in the
way, the streams, too few and far between for thirsty man, are torrents
to be crossed on fallen logs, on slimy boulders where one sees the sudden
agony flash in the eyes of a laden mule that slips, and with a struggle
of frantic hoofs is tossed to death. A herd of elephants crashes like
thunder through the scrub, trumpeting their suspicion of man’s presence,
the lions prowling unheard startle with a sudden hungry roar and seek
their meat from God.
Then come the swamps where the crocodile lies in the slime, and snakes
coil, and the mosquito goes about its deadly work. Men sink to their
waists in mud, the transports break down—all are tried in vain, ox
waggons, mule carts, motor-cars, ‘and then we go hungry,’ said one man to
me. Gaunt and weak, with eyes too bright for health, he smiled and spoke
lightly—a least trembling of the hands, a twitch of a muscle, a look
behind the smiling eyes which no laugh could quite conceal, these the
only signs of the over-strained, still quivering nerves. He told me the
story of how the flour supply ran out, of how the pangs of hunger were
eased with the flesh of donkey or rhinoceros. For eight days the hungry
men waited and watched and then a transport laden with sacks appeared—and
the sacks held newspapers!
Another spoke. ‘The worst thing that ever I went through was in the ⸺
valley. Will you ever forget it, Mike? We were going into action along
one of those awful winding elephant tracks through grass above our
heads—sort of maze, and you don’t know where you’ll find yourself next
minute, perhaps back where you came from, or perhaps in a clearing,
looking into the muzzle of a machine gun—can’t see a foot ahead. Suddenly
the Boches opened fire, and at the very same moment we were attacked
by a swarm of bees. Sounds funny, but I can tell you it wasn’t. There
were millions of ’em, going for us all they were worth. The horses and
pack-mules went near mad and there were we, blind and dazed, stumbling
along trying to keep the brutes from our faces and the enemy’s fire
dropping around. Pretty sights we were when they’d finished with us—my
two eyes were bunged up so I’d just a slit to see through, and hands so
stiff and swollen I could scarce bend my fingers.’
‘My worst day,’ and another took up the tale, ‘was just when we were
at our worst off for food—fair starved we were, and just at daybreak
a family of rhinos came charging through our camp—Pa and Ma and a lot
of rum little coves scooting after them. Well, thinks I, a slice of
Pa would come in very handy grilled, so off I treks with two or three
chaps after me, and there, far below the rise, was a vlei and a whole
lot of rhinos standing round. Worse luck, as we got down, we found it
just chock-a-block with crocodiles. You hardly see them at first, but
just look close and you see a mud-bank sort of heave and here and there
you’ll get the glimpse of a great wide jaw, the colour of the mud and as
still, never moving an inch, but with eyes watching the rhinos all the
time. I tell you we didn’t go any too close, but we were mortal hungry,
so we tried to edge round to the rhinos, keeping well clear of the mud
and slime. One huge awkward-looking brute was a bit away from the others
and the swamp, so we let fly and brought him down, staggering and falling
not very far from us—but by God, if these crocs hadn’t ripped out and got
him before we had a show, and so we didn’t get dinner that day. As nasty
brutes as you’d care to see, those crocs. A chap of ours shot one of ’em
one day and cut it open, and inside he found an anklet ornament and a
ring. How’s that for an ugly story? At another camp a horse went down
to the river to drink all serene, no sign of another living thing—when
sudden up comes a grinning jaw, and like a flash of light, it snaps on
the poor beast’s nose and pulls him in, and there was an end of him.’
In the more open country grows the giant grass, waving over a man’s head,
dense and resistant as sugar-cane, and once a source of deathly peril.
The regiment had dug itself in some 300 yards from the enemy trenches,
when the wind, blowing in their faces, brought to the men a smell of
burning, and with a sudden roar a sea of flames came sweeping down upon
them—the enemy had set fire to the tall grass. There was not a second to
spare. The men leaped up and, weak and exhausted as they were, forced
their failing strength into clearing the ground and cutting a fire belt.
It was done with the speed of demons, for a fiercer demon was upon them;
the men with their tattered garments that would have flared up so easily,
put half a life into those few seconds.
The heat of the fire was on their faces, blinding their eyes, the flames
reached out tongues towards their store of ammunition. Under cover of the
fire and smoke the enemy came out and attacked heavily. Our men leaped
back, turned the full strength of their fire on the enemy through the
blinding smoke, and suddenly, miraculously—_the wind changed_! It is
gratifying to know that in a few moments the enemy survivors were hurried
back to their trenches before the flames, to find their grass shelters on
fire, and under a withering storm from every rifle, maxim, and gun a grim
silence fell upon their trenches.
And so Nature, whose gigantic forces have joined our enemy’s in this
war against us, for once played him false; but the Hun is always quick
to turn her help to his best advantage. He sees to it that every post,
detached house, village, kraal, &c., has the protection of a ‘boma’—a
thick impenetrable fence made of thorn trees, with the huge strong spikes
thrust outwards and the smooth butts inside the shelter, made of such
height and depth as is necessary to resist the onslaught of elephant and
rhinoceros and the cunning of the lion. All around a wide thorn carpet
is spread to pierce the feet of the intruder. Imagine such a ‘boma’
flanked by rifle and machine-gun fire from deep trenches concealed by
cover and by a ‘false boma’ in rear which makes the boma line apparently
continuous—and a frontal attack by infantry becomes a hazardous
undertaking.
‘Could not the artillery destroy them?’ I asked, and was told of the
difficulties of locating the trenches for this purpose and of the
unlimited supply of high-explosive shells that would be required. All
approaches to defended posts have lanes cut through the bush, and these
are so arranged in irregular shape that every open piece of ground can be
covered by machine-gun and cross rifle fire.
Of the hardships of the march, of the hunger and thirst—once a battle
was fought for two days before a drop of water could be obtained—of the
fever and exhaustion, I could guess from watching the speakers, and from
the men’s talk to each other I heard of the skilfully posted machine guns
alert for a fleeting glimpse of troops grouped, perhaps, round a wounded
man, of the snipers in the trees, of the maxims fired from the backs
of animals clothed in grass, of the danger of horrors and mutilation
should a wounded man fall into the hands of the Askari. All of this I was
told freely; but of the endurance, the magnificent self-oblation, the
comradeship and devotion, these came to my ears only from those who had
commanded troops and who could barely speak of these things for a catch
in the throat.
The actual warfare, the battles, the bayonet charges, the fervour and
courage of attack—these are described by newspaper correspondents in
cables and despatches; but of the more human side—‘the soul of the
war’—few tales reach the outside world. The courage of endurance, the
absence of one word of complaint from men so weak, latterly, that five
miles a day sometimes had to be the limit of their march—who shall tell
of these?
Hear one last story from an outsider.
‘That regiment of yours is very thick with its companion regiment, the
Nth,’ he said. ‘A chap who is in the Nth told me the one regiment never
loses a chance of doing the other a good turn. Once, he said, the Nth
were in the first firing line, only 150 yards from the enemy. There had
been no chance of getting water-bottles filled, and the men’s tongues
were swollen with thirst. The other chaps were suffering a lot too, but
what do you think they did? All the regiment, officers and men, sent up
every bottle that had a drain left in it to the fellows of the Nth, and
mind you this was done under continuous fire. Pretty fine, wasn’t it?’
A bugle call, a whistle, and the short breathing space is past.
Faces lean over the bulwarks, pink and boyish beside the thin and
often haggard brown, hands are waved and with songs and cheers the old
regiment, reinforced with its recruits, sways slowly and steams into the
blue.
Were the whole history of the war ever to be written, were the myriad
glorious deeds ever to be chronicled, would the world itself contain the
books that should be written?
_COQ-D’OR: A LETTER TO A SOUL._
BY R. C. T.
MY DEAR DICK,—When you went out from the breastwork that night, along the
little muddy path, and whispered me a laughing _au revoir_, I thought
no more of it than of a hundred similar episodes that made up day and
night in these mad, half-romantic, unbelievable times. There was nothing
especial to make the incident memorable. It was ten o’clock at night and
the second relief for the sniper pits had gone out half an hour or so. A
frost had started after the previous day’s cold rain, the water-filled
crump holes had iced over and the so-called paths through the wood were
deceptively firm looking, though in reality one’s feet and legs sank
through the ice a foot deep into that ghastly, sticky foot-trodden mud.
I knew your job—to visit the listening patrols and the snipers on the
edge of the wood—and I remember thinking that your habit of going out
alone without an orderly was foolish, near though the posts might be
to the breastworks. However, you were young—four and twenty isn’t a
great age, Dick—and I recalled your saying that you would no more think
of taking an orderly than of asking a policeman to pilot you across
Piccadilly Circus.
The wood was fairly quiet that night, though there were the usual
bursts of machine-gun fire, the stray ping of high rifle shots against
the branches of the trees, and the noisy barking of that fussy field
battery of ours which always seemed to want to turn night into day.
The light of the moon let me see you disappear into the shadows, and I
heard the scrunch of your feet as you picked between the tree trunks a
gingerly way. Then I went along the breastwork line, saw that all was
right, found Peter munching chocolate and reading a month-old copy of
_The Horse-Breeders’ Gazette_!—fellows read such funny literature in
war time—in his dug-out—and myself turned down the corduroy path to the
splinter-proof hut that you so excellently named ‘The Château.’
Dennis and Pip had already turned in and had left me an uncomfortably
narrow space to lie down beside them, and they were daintily snoring.
Through the partition beyond I heard our company servants doing the same,
only with greater vigour in their snore. But my bed was already prepared,
the straw was only moderately dirty and odorous, and after ridding my
boots with a scraper of some portion of the mud, I thrust my feet into
the sand-bags, lay down, coiled myself up comfy in my bag and blankets
and went to sleep.
For ten minutes only. Then I suddenly awakened into full consciousness
and found myself sitting up staring into the darkness, and the chinks of
moonlight coming in below and at the sides of the ill-fitting door. I was
listening intently too, and I did not know why. The wood was absolutely
quiet at the moment, and Dennis, Pip, and the servants had all settled
off into their second sleep where snoring is an intrusion.
I had not dreamt, or I had no recollection of any dream if I had. But
upon me was a curious ill-defined sensation of uneasiness. No, I am
wrong—uneasiness is not the word. The feeling was merely that something
had happened. I did not know where or how or to whom.
Now the one thing one ought not to be in war time is fidgety. It is a bad
habit and yet a habit into which it is very easy to drift. So with this
thought upon me I deliberately lay quietly down again and attempted to
renew the sleep from which I had so suddenly been wakened. Of course I
failed. Sleep had gone from me completely, absolutely, and moreover there
was a force—that indefinite word best describes it—impelling me to be up
and doing. Doing what Heaven only knew! I struggled against the feeling
for a minute or two, then I definitely gave in to it. Fidgety or not, I
was going out of the hut.
Dennis wakened momentarily as I rose and untied the sand-bags off my
legs and made for the door. He muttered ‘What’s the matter?’ heard my
‘Nothing, go to sleep again,’ and did as he was told.
The night was beautiful outside and I stood at the door of the hut
shivering a little with the cold, but thinking what a madness it was
that had turned this wonderful wood into a battlefield! The sound of a
rifle shot knocking off a twig of a tree three or four feet above me
recalled my thoughts. Mechanically I felt to see that I had my revolver,
and then with my trusty walking-stick in my hand I went up to the front
breastworks.
I went along them and found all correct—the sentries alert and at their
posts. They were in the third night of their spell in the trenches and in
the moonlight they gave one the impression of sandstone statues, their
khaki a mass of dried yellow clay. Then I peeped in at Peter and found
the youth still munching chocolate, and afterwards I went along to your
abode expecting to find you asleep, and found instead that your tiny
dug-out was untenanted.
The curious feeling that had wakened me from my sleep had disappeared
while I had been making my tour of the breastworks and only now did it
reappear. There was no especial reason why I should have been anxious,
for a score of things might have taken you elsewhere, but I nevertheless
found myself striding quickly back to the little gap between No. 2 and 3
breastworks, the spot where I had last seen you and where you had bidden
me good-night. I questioned the sentry. It happened to be Rippon, that
quaint little five-foot-three cockney, who, I honestly believe, really
likes war and chuckles because he is genuinely amused when a shell hits
the ground ten yards in rear and misses the trench itself. He had seen
nothing of you since we parted.
‘Mr. Belvoir,’ he said—and you know how he mutilates the pronunciation
of your name—‘never comes back the same way as he goes out.’ He gave me
the information with a trace of reproof in his voice, as though I ought
to have remembered better the principal points of my own lectures on
Outposts, which I had so often given the company in peace time. I nodded,
walked along to the other sentries and questioned them. They had none
of them seen you return. They were all quite confident that you had not
passed by them.
I returned to Rippon and stood behind him a moment or two. The cold was
increasing and he was stamping his feet on the plank of wood beneath him,
and humming to himself quietly. I did not want to seem anxious, but I
was. I could not understand what had become of you, where you had gone. I
took a pace or two towards Rippon and spoke to him.
‘Things been quiet to-night?’ I said casually.
He started at the sound of my voice, for he had not heard my approach.
‘Quieter than usual, sir,’ he answered. ‘There was a bit of a haroosh
on the left half an hour ago and the Gerboys opposite us took it up for
a minute or so, but they’ve quieted down since. Funny creatures, them
Gerboys,’ he ruminated—‘good fighters and yet always getting the wind
up. I remember at Ligny when we was doin’ what wasn’t too elegant a
retirement, me and Vinsen was in a farm’ouse....’
I stopped him hurriedly. When Rippon gets on to the subject of Ligny his
garrulity knows no bounds.
‘I’m going out ahead, Rippon,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back again this way.
Warn the next sentry that I shall be doing so. Give me an orderly, too.’
Rippon looked at me curiously. Perhaps my tone was not normal. Then he
bent down and stirred a man snoring in the breastwork beside him. The man
stirred uneasily and then suddenly jumped up and clutched at the rifle
through the sling of which his right arm was thrust.
‘What’s up?’ he murmured. Rippon smiled.
‘It ain’t no attack,’ he answered. ‘The Captain wants you as his orderly.’
A minute later we had left the breastwork line and were out in front in
the wood, our feet breaking through the thin film of ice and sinking over
our ankles in the mud beneath. Belgian mud may not be any different from
other mud, but to my dying day I shall always imagine it so. It clasps
you as though it wants to pull and keep you down, as though, with so many
of your friends lying beneath it, you too should be there. We tugged
our feet out each step, treading on fallen branches where we could. I
tried to trace by footsteps the path you had taken, but failed. I could
not think of anything better to do than go out to the sniping pits and
question the men there to know if you had visited them.
I turned to the left then and made for number one group, Bell, my
orderly, following a pace or two behind. A cloud came over the face of
the moon, the night became suddenly dark, and the next moment I had
stumbled and almost fallen over what I imagined for a second to be a
stray sand-bag.
It was not a sand-bag, God knows it was not! The moon reappeared and I
saw it was you, Dick, lying on your side, with your legs outstretched.
I bent down when I realised that it was a body, turned you over on your
back and with Bell’s assistance ripped open your Burberry, your tunic
and your vest. A bullet had gone straight through your heart, there was
a little spot of congealed blood on your breast, and—you had died—well,
as suddenly and as easily as you deserved to do, Dick. On your face was a
smile.
I am not good at analysing feelings and there is no purpose in trying to
analyse mine. Indeed, I cannot remember exactly what my sensations were.
I had no sorrow for you, as I have never had sorrow for those killed in
this war. I do not suppose two men have ever been closer friends than you
and I, yet I was not even sorry for myself. I remember that I turned to
Bell and said half angrily: ‘I told him to take an orderly, I was always
telling him to take an orderly!’
I heard Bell’s irrelevant reply, ‘Damn them Bosches, sir.’ (The men in
your platoon had an affection for you, Dick.) Then together we raised
you, your wet clothes frozen, your hair matted with mud, and picking
up your cap and rifle from the ground, carried you slowly back to the
breastwork line, and there wakened a couple of stretcher bearers.
Oh! I’m sick of this war, Dick, dully, angrily sick of it. This world
can’t be anything, I know, otherwise fellows like you would be kept in
it. For a week or two the fighting is all right; it is amazing, and
wonderful and elemental. Then as month after month goes by, when there is
nothing in your brain but making your line stronger, when you think in
sand-bags and machine guns and barbed wire and bombs, when the stray shot
or the casual shell kills or lacerates some sergeant or corporal whom you
have had since his recruit days in your company, given C.B. to, spoken
to like a father, recommended step by step for promotion and at length
grown to trust and rely on—then it begins to show its beastliness and you
loathe it with a prolonged and fervent intensity.
Down at the field dressing station half a mile away, the young doctor did
what he could to preserve the decencies of death. I stood at the door
of the little cottage and looked out into the night. I remember that my
thoughts flew back to the immediate days before the war and to a night
a little party of us spent at the Russian Opera at Drury Lane, when we
saw that wonderful conceit ‘_Coq-d’Or_.’ You, your sister, I and that
young Saxon friend of yours—and of your sister’s too! We had dined at The
Carlton and were ever so pleased with life. We had chuckled delightedly
at the mimic warfare on the stage, the pompous King, the fallen heroes.
Now the mimic warfare had turned to reality and here you were—dead in a
ruined Belgian cottage.
I left after a quarter of an hour and returned to the wood, my feelings
numb, my brain a blank. The corduroy path seemed interminably long. Sleep
was not for me that night and the morning would do to tell Peter, Dennis
and Pip that you were killed. Unaccompanied by any orderly this time, I
went through the breastwork line to the spot where we had found you. The
impress of your body was on the ground; your loaded revolver, which for
some reason or other you must have had in your hand, was lying a yard or
two away. I picked it up, examined it and noticed that a round had been
fired.
I wondered why. You must have aimed at somebody and that somebody must
have shot back at you, and the somebody must have been close. You were
not the sort of man to blaze off into the blue. I leant against a tree
and tried to think the matter out. Our snipers were out on your left, so
the shot could not have come from that direction, and a hundred yards on
the right was the machine-gun emplacement and the first of the outworks.
In between was Potsdam House, that no-man’s habitation into which,
before the outskirts of the wood had become definitely ours, sometimes
the German patrols had wandered and sometimes ours. We had had a working
party there the night before sand-bagging the shell-shattered walls and
making the place a defensive or a jumping-off spot, as one might wish.
It was almost unthinkable that any German or Germans could have reached
it, for we had a listening patrol fifty yards ahead, but it was just
possible that a brave man might have avoided the patrol and have done so.
At the thought I made up my mind to move forward, and took my revolver
from my holster. My wits suddenly became keen again, my lassitude left
me, the sight of the outline of your body on the frozen mud made me
angry, wild.
I had only fifty yards to go, but I went as cautiously and silently as
I could. I did not intend to be killed if I could help it. I was out to
avenge, not to add another life to the German bag. I chose the spot for
each step with excessive care. I stopped and listened if my feet were
making too much noise on the frozen ground.
Then just as I was about twenty yards from my objective I heard a sound.
Stopping suddenly, I listened. Someone was talking in a confused, halting
sort of way. A snatch of conversation, a long pause, and then another
remark. The voice was so low that I could not make out words, but I had
the impression that it was not English that was being spoken. The tone
was uniform too, as though it were not two people but one speaking—a
curious, pointless monologue it sounded like.
My heart was beating a little more quickly, my fingers clutched my
revolver a little more tightly. I knelt down, wondering what to do. The
voice came from the ruined Potsdam House, and if indeed a small German
patrol had got in there it seemed foolhardy to go alone to meet them. On
the other hand, it might be but one person there, though why he should be
talking thus to himself I could not imagine. Anyhow, foolhardy or not, I
was going to find out.
I moved forward therefore over the intervening yards slowly and as
quietly as might be. The voice broke off at times, then continued, and
each time that it stopped I halted too, lest in the stillness I should be
betrayed.
You remember the little pond at the side of the house, the pond that has
at the bottom of it, to our knowledge, a dead Bavarian and an Argyll and
Sutherland Highlander? At the edge of it I must have stopped a full five
minutes, lying flat upon my stomach and listening to the intermittent
sound of the voice. It was clearer now, low but distinct, and at last
I knew for a certainty that the words came from a German throat.
Occasionally a light laugh broke out which sounded uncannily in the still
air. Laughter is not often heard from patrols between the lines, and I
was puzzled and interested too.
A minute later I had clambered over the broken-down wall and was in what
we used to think must have been the drawing-room of the house. Some time
after this war is over I shall return and make straight for this house.
I want to see what it looks like in daytime. I want to be able to stand
in front of it and look out on the country beyond. I’ve crawled into it
a dozen times at night, I’ve propped up its shelled, roofless walls with
sand-bags, I’ve made a look-out loophole in the broken-down chimney. I’ve
seen dim outlines from its glassless windows of hills and houses, but I
am sure, quite sure, that when I see it and the country beyond it in the
full glare of a summer sun I shall give a gasp of astonishment at what it
is and what I thought it was.
Once inside the house I paused no longer, but, my revolver ready, my
finger on the trigger, made straight for the spot from which came the
voice.
My revolver was not needed, Dick. In the furthest corner of what we used
to think must be the living-room, just near the spot where we found that
photograph of the latest baby of the family in its proud mother’s arms
and the gramophone record and the broken vase with the artificial flowers
still in it—you remember what trophies they were to us—just there was the
man. He was seated with his back propped up against the sand-bags where
the two walls of the room make a corner, his legs angled out and his arms
hanging limply down. It did not take a second glance to see that I had
to do with a badly wounded German, but I took a look round first to make
sure that there were no others either in the shell of the house or near
it. When I had made certain, I returned to him and, putting my revolver
within my reach on the floor beside me, knelt down and examined the man.
He was plastered with mud, his cap was off his head, his breath was
coming in little heavy jerks, and on the blue-grey uniform, just below
the armpit on the right side, was a splash of blood mingling with the mud.
What I had done for your dead body I did for his barely living one,
opened the tunic and by the aid of my electric torch—it was safe enough
in the angle of the walls—examined the wound. It did not need a doctor to
see that the man’s spirit was soon going to set out on the same voyage of
adventure as yours, but I did what I could. I ripped my field dressing
out of the lining of my coat and bound up the wound. Then I took out my
flask and poured some brandy into his mouth. He had winced once or twice
as I had dressed the wound but had not spoken; I think he was scarcely
conscious.
But the spirit revived him and in a minute or so his eyes slowly opened
and looked into mine. There was no such thing for him then as enemy or
friend. He was simply a dying man and I was someone beside him helping
him to die. His head turned over to one side and he murmured some German
words. You used to laugh at me, Dick, for my hatred of the German
language and my refusal to learn a word of it, but I wished heartily I
knew some then. I answered him in English in the futile way one does.
‘That’s all right, old man,’ I said. ‘Feeling a bit easier now, eh?’
He looked at me fixedly for a moment or two and then suddenly summed up
the International situation in a phrase.
‘This damned silly war!’ he said.
The remark, made with a strong German accent, was delivered with a little
smile, and there was consciousness in his eyes. He finished it with a
weary sigh and his hand moved slightly and rested on mine as I bent over
him. There was a pool of water beside us in a hole in the hearth and I
dipped my not too clean handkerchief in it and wiped some of the mud
off his face. If I had felt any enmity against him for killing you, it
was gone now. A war of attrition those beautiful war critics term it,
and here was the attrition process in miniature. He had killed you and
you had killed him, an officer apiece, and the Allies could stand the
attrition longer than the Germans. I knew the argument and I have not the
slightest doubt it is sound. In the meantime here was a man dying rather
rapidly, very weary and only too ready for the last trench of all.
I chatted to him and have no notion what I said. I dare say it is a
comfort to have, at the hour of death, a human being by you and a human
voice speaking to you. He was quite conscious, the water on his face had
refreshed him and had revealed clear-cut, aristocratic features, that had
nothing bestial or cruel about them. Just as I had thought about you, so
I thought about him. Waste! waste! I felt as though I had met him before,
and certainly I knew his type if not the individual. Perhaps too,
sitting opposite one another week after week, in trenches two hundred
yards apart, the spirits bridge a gap the bodies cannot. I do not know, I
do not greatly care.
His voice was feeble, but he seemed to wish to speak to me and his
English was that of an educated man, precise and at times idiomatic. He
accounted for that almost in his first words.
‘I have been in England on long visits, twice, three times,’ he said. ‘I
like England. Germany and England are worth dying for. Also I am Saxon,
and Saxony is a great country. Anglo-Saxons, is it not?’
‘Anglo-Saxons,’ I repeated lightly. ‘We have the same blood in us.’
‘Good blood, too,’ he said, glancing down at the little splash of it on
his tunic. ‘A pity to spill so much. Will you bathe my face again, it
helps me, and I would like to die clean.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ I said. ‘To-morrow morning you will be in our
lines—another man.’ He did not answer for a moment, then he said, almost
with humour in his voice, ‘That is quite true, to-morrow morning I will
surely be in your lines—a dead man.’
Again there was silence between us. He spoke the truth and knew that I
knew it. His arm moved: the fingers of his hand pawed aimlessly at the
rubble by his side. I half rose and told him that I was going to our
breastworks to bring some bearers with a stretcher.
He shook his head and spoke in a voice almost strong. ‘No, please, no!
You shall go in half, in a quarter of an hour. I am quite easy here. In
no great pain. Death is, sometimes, quite easy. I would like you to stay
if you will.’
‘Of course I will stay if you wish.’
‘Yes. Also I would like to speak to you ... I ... I ... killed ... one of
your officers ... just now?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I ... saw him fall. As he fell he fired at me too. I am sorry I killed
him. Will you tell his ... his ... people so? And tell them, too, that
it is just war ... silly, wasteful war. He was a soldier, was he, by
profession I mean?’
‘Yes, a soldier.’
‘Then it is his death ... I am only a soldier as all of us are soldiers.
In peace I make music, compose you call it. Music is better than war.’
‘Far better,’ I answered grimly enough.
‘If I had lived I would have written great things. I had vowed it. I had
in my head ... I have it still ... a ... wonderful ballet. It would have
been finer than Petrouchka—as great as _Coq-d’Or_. And the ballet of our
enemies, the Russians, would have performed it.... Enemies! how silly it
is.’ He smiled.
My heart beat a little faster. This was madness, sheer madness, for us to
be discussing music and the Russian ballet on the battlefield and with
him dying. But at the words ‘_Coq-d’Or_’ my memory had suddenly stirred,
and I carried on the conversation eagerly.
‘_Coq-d’Or_ is wonderful, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Where have you seen it?’
‘Where have I not?’ he answered. ‘In Moscow, Berlin, Paris, in London. It
is great, astonishing.’
‘In London?’
‘But a short time ago—just before the war. I ... I ... had a friend. I
was staying with him. He, too, was a soldier. I forget in what regiment.
I was not interested in armies then.’ He stirred uneasily and partially
turned over on his side. I put my arm beneath him, moistened his lips
with the water. He sighed and began to wander in his talk, the words
German, beyond my comprehension. Yet one kept recurring that told me all,
everything. He must not, should not die yet!
Only for a minute or two did his delirium last. Then his senses returned
and quite suddenly he pressed my hand, and though his voice was fainter
the words were distinct and spoken very slowly as though he wished to be
sure I understood.
‘I ... I want you to do something for me.... I am sure you will. We are
both gentlemen....’ His hand moved to his breast and he made as if to
take something from his tunic.
‘In the pocket of my coat, inside, there is a little leather case. Inside
that ... a photograph of a lady, of an English lady too.’ (Oh! little
world, O narrow little world!) ‘It has been with me through the war. I
dare not and would not have shown it to one of my comrades.... When I die
I want you to take it out and send it to the Honourable Richard Belvoir.
He was a lord’s son, my friend, and the photograph is of his sister. I
... she did not know it, you understand?... I loved her.’
Did she not? I wonder. My thoughts rushed back again to Drury Lane, to
the crowded house, to the little quartette of us, you, I, the young
Saxon, and Peggy, standing together in the foyer during the entr’acte.
Every one of her twenty years had added something to her beauty, and as
you and I strolled away and left the other two together, I remember I
wondered if we were making a proper division of the quartette and if it
was quite fair to the Saxon to leave him to such an inevitable result. I
spoke my thought to you and I recall your laughing comment.
Of course I promised to perform the simple duty the dying man gave me. I
was glad he had not recognised me. It made the duty easier. Once I had
spoken the promise he thanked me and seemed contented. He had little
strength left and the end was very near. His body slipped lower down, he
tried to speak no more—his breath came more feebly.
The next day we buried you and him side by side in the little clearing at
the back of the road. In your pocket is the little leather case with your
sister’s photograph in it. I have given it to you as I was asked to do.
The crosses in the clearing daily are added to in number. Some day your
sister will come to visit the spot. I am writing to her telling her of
your death and of the Saxon’s too. But of how closely they hung upon each
other I shall not speak. It is enough that she should think a strange
chance brought you together in the same part of the line, that death came
to both of you and that you now lie side by side.
Chance! What a word it is. It explains nothing, it evades all. I can
imagine you, knowing now so much more than we do, smiling at the idea of
such a thing as coincidence. I have said that I am weary beyond words
of this war. I am sure you and the Saxon were weary of it too. I am not
guessing, for I am in some way absolutely sure that the twin shots which
disturbed the silence of the night were mercifully winged; that you and
he, who must have had more in common than I knew, were sending each other
unwittingly the final gift of good fellowship.
Good-night. I am sitting in the dug-out you and I shared. The sound of
the artillery has died down. The divisional guns have fired their final
salvos at the enemy’s cross roads and dumps. The Germans for once have
not even troubled to reply. Pip and Dennis are out with working parties.
The new machine-gun emplacement on the right of Madden’s mound, which you
were so anxious to have finished, is done. Whatever you may say, I am
still not sure that it is rightly placed. Perhaps you know that it does
not matter where it is placed!
Some day, somewhere, we shall meet. Till then good-bye, Dick.
Yours ever
PHILIP.
_THE PRAGMATIC PRINCIPLE: AN APPLICATION._
It was said of the historic centipede that he was so embarrassed by his
multitude of legs that locomotion became impossible. Similarly perhaps
it may be said of Pragmatism that it suffered principally from the
numerous formulations of its principles, all of which sought to explain
it, but many of which left it obviously unexplained. Perhaps that is
the reason why the vogue which it had seven years ago, following upon
Professor James’ brilliant ‘popular lectures,’ was scarcely maintained.
On the other hand, this was probably foreseen by some of the most loyal
pragmatists. As one said of it, ‘If Pragmatism is going to live and
give life, it will be by its spirit and not by any magic contained in
pragmatic dicta.’ And it will be generally agreed that as a contribution
to the thought of the twentieth century, it _has_ lived and has perhaps
quickened other established modes of thought and feeling. ‘On the
pragmatic side,’ writes Professor James, ‘we have only one edition of the
universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the
places _where thinking beings are at work_.’
Meanwhile many people were at work endeavouring to compress the pragmatic
point of view into a formula. The most generally accepted definition
stated that it represented theory as subordinate to practice. Another
popular formula gives it as the doctrine that the truth of an assertion
is decided by its consequences. And again—this with the authority of
Dr. Schiller—‘the making of truth is necessarily and _ipso facto_ also
a making of reality.’ But inasmuch as none of these definitions cover
the whole ground, and as we are here concerned with a modern and vital
application of the pragmatic issue, it may perhaps be worth our while
to retrace the history of the matter in the first place to its source,
craving the patience of the reader meanwhile.
In the year 1878, at Balliol, there were three men who were destined
to exercise strong influence upon the intellectual life of their
generation: Benjamin Jowett, the Master; Nettleship, the tutor; and
Thomas Hill Green. ‘I do not forget,’ says Professor Wallace, in speaking
of the last-named in the preface to his Hegel, ‘what I and others owe
to him,—that example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of earnest
and intrepid thinking on the deep things of Eternity.’ In his own day
perhaps Green was not greatly understood. He was known as the eccentric
College tutor; a lecturer in metaphysics (and dry at that) ‘Obscurum
per obscurius,’ said a witty undergraduate, though of course a witty
undergraduate will say anything. Moreover an idealist, though a member of
the City Council; a man of dreams, but a pioneer of evening schools for
working men. Such was Green as Oxford knew him, but it is—briefly—with
his position in philosophy that we are at the moment concerned.
Like all English idealists,—like Hegel also and the German School,—he
built upon the rough foundations once laid down by the philosophers of
Asia Minor. The Greeks had seen one thing plainly; that the spiritual
entities of Science, Art, morality, or religion were of intrinsic value
_in themselves_ as expressions of the self-conscious spirit; but the
one thing that lay hidden in the womb of Christianity they lacked,
the conception of human brotherhood. So the philosophy of the later
centuries, while still reaping where the ancient world had sown, has
included the developed ideals of citizenship as well as the life of
co-operation made possible therein. When we find one of Green’s works
headed ‘Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life,’ we realise the
gist of his teaching. He was in fact a practical mystic, which, as Lord
Rosebery said of Cromwell, is a ‘formidable combination.’ To Green, the
most solid and practical things about a man were the ideals which he put
into practice. That in his philosophy was the one permanent use of any
philosophical idea; _its working power as a basis for human effort_.
It will be seen that here we are not very far off from those ‘thinking
beings at work’ in the adventurous world of the pragmatist.
The idealism of Green was of a robuster type than some other kindred
systems. He never maintained that we as human beings were unnecessary
to the working out of the Divine plan. He never denied that by the
application of human reason new possibilities may be brought to light,
and that out of the treasure-house of the Eternal may be brought forth
things at once old and new. And so, consistently, when we consider the
personality of this man who was so vivid a directing force in thought and
action, we find at the one end a professor of moral philosophy, and at
the other the town councillor and worker in the slums.
Thus far Green and his influence in the English schools of 1878. But in
that same year, in an American journal, there appeared an article by
Charles Sanders Pierce, concerning ‘our ideas and “how to make them
clear,”’ and entitled ‘The Principle of Pragmatism.’
The article did not attract very great attention on this side of the
water. English scholars are apt to be a little shy of the swift and
arresting methods of the American; and perhaps if pragmatism had remained
the original contribution of Charles Sanders Pierce, it might have sunk
into oblivion. But, as everybody knows, it found its ‘vates sacer’ in
after years in the late Professor James of Harvard, who ushered it
sixteen years ago, with some pomp and circumstance, into the world of
English philosophy. Meanwhile, some apt maker of epigram, considering
the works of Professor James and his brilliant brother, summed them
up as ‘the philosopher who writes novels, and the novelist who writes
psychology.’
To do him justice, James said at the outset that pragmatism was no new
thing. He took Aristotle indeed to his ancestor, and claimed relationship
with the English idealists and even with Hume. He then, by virtue of
his vivid and stimulating style, achieved for his subject a certain
popularity, and a small following began to arise. When, however, people
had learnt to speak of the British pragmatists, they discovered that the
other people who spoke of the American pragmatists did not always seem to
find their systems identical. And time has emphasised this difference.
The pragmatism imported from America by Professor James has remained what
it always professed to be—a method,—and, withal, a gentle and peaceable
method,—not only of airing its own ideas, but of persuading everybody
else that just as M. Jourdain had spoken prose all his life without
knowing it, so they, too, had been pragmatists all their lives. The
method is, perhaps, at times a little superior, and at times a little
irreverent; nor can it clearly claim to have produced a ‘philosophy’ as
such. It is, in truth, as its votaries have claimed, a spirit and an
attitude towards philosophical problems and towards life. As such it
would seem to be a characteristic product of the Anglo-Saxon genius which
is essentially practical and values things for their use. ‘In pragmatic
principles,’ says James, ‘we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences
useful to life flow from it.’ And elsewhere, ‘Beliefs are rules for
actions.’ And again, ‘An idea is true so long as it is profitable to
our lives to believe it.’ In all these cases the act, the consequence,
the deed are placed, so to speak, in the predicative position. The
whole force of the sentence is concentrated upon the consequence, the
deed. ‘The proof of the pudding,’ says our homely proverb, ‘is in the
eating.’ And we have been reminded that ‘Honesty is the best policy’
from our copy-book days. Here, however, there is a difference between
the established ethic—whether idealistic or religious—and the pragmatic
view. Honesty, it seems, would win the ‘pragmatic sanction’ because of
its results:—it ‘works’ satisfactorily. Therefore it is ‘true.’ There
is a shifting of attention from the intrinsic beauty of honesty as a
virtue to its consequences; from its moral value to its face value;
from the ideal to the actual and empirical. The impartial observer may
come to the conclusion that after all the inquiry comes to the same
thing. Honesty has been twice blessed: by the pragmatic sanction of its
results, and by the moral sanction for those who identify the virtue
with the moral imperative of religion. Nevertheless, this attitude of
pragmatism is an exceedingly interesting one, and its application to
human life and activities is undeniable. It is, in essence, the doctrine
of the survival of the fittest, carried into the field of philosophy.
The test of an idea, of an ideal, of a ‘movement’ is its working. If it
worked well, it was fitted to survive; it was, at any rate, ‘true’ for
the epoch wherein it did survive or flourish. On the other hand, a thing
cannot be judged until it _is_ tried. It must be known by its results.
There must be evolution, shifting, experiment. ‘The universe is always
pursuing its adventures’; and truth is always ‘in the making,’—especially
where the ‘thinking beings’ are getting to work. Which brings us to the
application aforesaid. For assuredly among all the many ‘movements’ which
have stirred the surface of the body politic during the last forty years,
the so-called ‘woman’s movement’ may in its deeper aspects lay claim to
the ‘pragmatic sanction.’ In it undoubtedly many thinking and adventurous
persons have been at work. And there are passages in James’ book speaking
of ‘our acts as the actual turning places in the great workshop of being
where we catch truth in the making,’ to which the hearts of many of
our modern women doctors and nurses will respond. On the other hand,
the attitude of the many who at every stage have sought to oppose a
professional career for women has never been more aptly summed up than
in the words of the pragmatist: ‘They are simply afraid: afraid of more
experience, afraid of life.’
A few years ago the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission published
a weighty record of the usefulness of women in municipal work, suggesting
further outlets for their energies; but the writers certainly did not
foresee the astonishing influx of female labour into the many departments
of public service consequent upon the exigencies of the present time.
On the face of it we must own that some of these occupations seem
little suited to the worker’s capacity. One can imagine the chorus
of disapproval that would have risen from the ranks of the acutely
feminine if such innovations as women postmen, ’bus conductors, and
window-cleaners had offered themselves a few years ago. Even now it is
probably only the most seasoned philosophers who regard them with perfect
equanimity; the rest comfort themselves with the reflection that they
are the unnatural products of an abnormal time: a sort of _epiphenomena_
thrown up from an underworld of chaos and destined to disappear again in
the natural course of things. There is little doubt that this will be
so in the end. Post delivery and window cleaning will scarcely become
common occupations for girls any more than it will be usual for them to
go into the trenches in the firing line, as some gallant Russian women
have been doing in order to succour the starving Poles. All these things
are exceptional, and exceptional things are generally the outcome of
a strong emotion. As Professor Jebb has observed, ‘The feeling that
covers a thousand square miles must, we instantly perceive, be a strong
feeling.’ We have had many opportunities for such observation during
the present war, but nowhere more emphatically than among women. In
adapting themselves to the requirements of social service they have
taken to heart that excellent advice of Mr. Wells: they have ‘flung
themselves into their job, and have done it with passion.’ But now after
eliminating the exceptional, after allowing moreover for a natural ebb
in the warm flowing tide of patriotic emotion, there undoubtedly remains
a record of efficiency which is destined to have far-reaching results.
The women whose former status in the industrial world was so precarious
and unsatisfactory have now been swept into that world in increasing
thousands because the industries of the country could not be maintained
without them. The Government appeal of 1915 offered a curious comment
upon the popular axiom that the woman’s ‘sphere is the home.’ In the
face of the wholesale slaughter of the bread-winners, and the consequent
invitation to all unoccupied women to rise to the country’s need, this
unimpeachable motto has a pathetic look like that of a picture turned
face to the wall. Pathetic because it was always true, even obviously
true; but the relativity of truth makes so many isolated truths look
out of focus. Anyhow, the fact remains that, in this universe which just
now is ‘pursuing its adventures’ at a remarkably accelerated pace, women
have been called out of their homes into very unexpected places; and it
is with the result that we are just now especially concerned. Evidence
at first hand is not far to seek. It comes from all quarters, from the
magnificently organised hospitals of the Scottish women in Serbia, from
the railway companies, from the Women’s Service Aircraft Department,
from the engineers’ shops in some of the industrial centres, and from
the munition factories themselves. As to the hospitals, it is doubtful
whether the public entirely realise the extent of the work that has been
done.
At the Knightsbridge Exhibition in November 1915, one of the most
interesting exhibits was that representing the Anglo-Russian hospital
which, with its eight surgeons and thirty nurses, and complete unit
of bedding and outfit, was sent as a gift to Petrograd; and several
delightful articles have been written about the beautiful old Cistercian
Abbey in Northern France which was turned into a hospital and staffed
entirely by women for the necessities of the war. Of these institutions
there has been an ever-increasing number both at home and abroad; one
of the Suffrage societies has to its credit the financing and equipment
of eight hospital units in France and Serbia. But all this is still
the acknowledged sphere of women. As nurses and even doctors they are
accepted as a matter of course by a generation which has scarcely
heard of the criticisms once thrown at Florence Nightingale. It is in
the other departments of social service that they are challenging the
public estimates of their capacity, and here the facts must speak for
themselves. Some of the factories have published statistics regarding
their output of work; and the following comparisons were made in one of
the engineers’ shops of the Midland Railway Company.
Average percentage earned by men on Group No. 17 by the week, 42·5.
Average percentage earned by women on Group No. 17 by the week, 49·6.
The two hundred women thus employed had only lately displaced the male
workers, and Sir Guy Granet, manager of the Midland Railway, remarked
that ‘the efficiency of women in certain directions had been a revelation
to him.’ Something must be added for the absence of any organised
‘restrictions of outputs,’ but in fact there has been a reiterated note
of surprise in most of the testimonials to the women workers’ capacity,
as though we were being faced with a new phenomenon, uncaused and
spontaneous, instead of the outcome of underlying forces in the vanished
world before the war.
‘I am not sure,’ wrote Mr. A. G. Gardiner in the _Daily News_, ‘that
the future will not find in the _arrival_ of women the biggest social
and economic result of the war.... Woman has won her place in the ranks
beyond challenge.’
In Manchester, last June, one of the great attractions was the ploughing
demonstration made by women ‘on the land.’ Lancashire criticism was
sparing of words, but here again it was appreciative. ‘Ay, they frame
well,’ said the men. The same results are recorded from clerks’ offices,
from the tramcars, from motor driving, and, perhaps most unexpectedly,
from the factories where women are in charge of delicate and intricate
machinery. In all these branches of manual and intellectual labour, the
women workers have risen to their opportunities and have made good.
The comment by _Punch_ gave to the general view its own characteristic
expression.
‘Whenever he sees one of the new citizens or whenever he hears fresh
stories of their ability Mr. Punch is proud and delighted. “It is almost
worth having a war,” he says, “to prove what stuff our women are made of.
Not,” he adds gallantly, “that it wanted proof.”’
On the other hand, it must, we think, be admitted that proof was in fact
the one essential thing which the world needed. On November 2, 1915, the
Prime Minister, referring in the House of Commons to the death of Nurse
Cavell, said:
‘She has taught the bravest men among us a supreme lesson of courage....
In this United Kingdom there are thousands of such women, and a year ago
_we did not know it_.’
At first sight the saying was a strange one, for the supreme crises of
life are commonly those which call forth the highest response in human
nature; but on reflection the words are just: we do not practically
‘know’ what we have not had an opportunity of proving. We had to wait
for the experience furnished by a national crisis in opening the gates
of industry to over three hundred thousand new recruits, bringing up
the total of women workers, according to Mr. Sidney Webb’s calculation,
to six million and a half: figures and results which forced the Prime
Minister at a later date into the acknowledgment that women’s claim to
the privileges of full citizenship was now ‘unanswerable.’
‘They have been put to many kinds of work,’ said Mr. Webb, ‘hitherto
supposed to be within the capacity of men only, and they have done it on
the whole successfully.’
Now, both these figures and these achievements must surely be recognised
as a result of the trend of the last forty or fifty years. Without
long preparation it could not have sprung into being. As the ripple
is sustained by the weight of ocean, so the self-respecting work of
the modern woman in the higher department of service has only been
made possible by the education and tradition at her back; while even
the factory worker has imbibed a sense of responsibility which is not
the mark of the unfree. The new type is therefore, as is usual in the
evolutionary process, found to be suited to its age. It was not enough
that the women of the country should be, as always, eager to help,
willing for sacrifice: it was necessary that they should have had the
training in work, in business habits, and in self-control which gives to
inherent good-will its market value.
Briefly then, we see in this record of women’s service, which is coming
as a surprise to many, an instance wherein the pragmatic philosophy has
come to its own. In the early days of the Crimean War the people who were
‘afraid of experience, afraid of life,’ were shocked at the initiative
of Florence Nightingale. No really ‘nice’ women, they said, would want
to go out to nurse soldiers. The incredible insults heaped upon the
first women doctors are remembered by many to-day. The advocates of the
‘movement’ were charged at every new departure with the desire to change
the character of woman herself, whereas all that has been changed is
her position in the national life; and that change has undoubtedly been
rendered more conspicuous since the war.
To all reasonable persons, whether pragmatists or not, the record of
experience is worth a great deal of theory. There are many cautious but
fair-minded people who have regarded women’s capacity for difficult
administrative offices as unproven until now. There are many more who
would have hastily judged them unfit for the responsible work which they
are doing in the aircraft and munition departments. For all such there
is a message in the principle of pragmatism. ‘It preserves,’ says its
genial apologist, ‘a cordial relation with facts.... The pragmatist turns
towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and
towards power.... That means the open air and possibilities of nature as
against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.’
And Truth, to quote again from a former passage, can just now be vividly
observed ‘in the making’ in the great workshop of the world. She can
be caught in the grip of the philosopher, and submitted to the most
searching inquiry which the mind of man can desire: she can be traced
through the past, as Green desired to trace her, to her eternal source
in the ‘ideas’ which are a ‘basis for human effort’: she can be brought
to the bar of Reality. In this way, it may be added, the method of
Pragmatism may exercise a wholesome bracing effect upon one’s thought. It
clears away the cobwebs of abstractions; it watches Truth at its daily
work in particulars whence only careful generalisations should be drawn.
It brings all theory to the test of experiment. And finally recurring
to our starting point, it lays stress upon the power of every idea in
action, insisting upon the vital correlation of thought and deed. For in
the words of the old Greek dramatist,[5] ‘The word and the deed should be
present as one thing, to dispatch that end whereto the counselling mind
moveth.’
LESLIE KEENE.
FOOTNOTES
[5] Aeschylus.
_THE BRITISH RED CROSS IN ITALY._
BY LEWIS R. FREEMAN.
For the first time in a fortnight there had been a few hours of really
good visibility, and, as a consequence, the artillery of both sides were
endeavouring to make up for lost time with an increase of activity, just
as a pet Pomeranian begins to cut capers the instant it is freed from its
restraining leash. For some reason, a goodly share of the Austrian fire
appeared to be directed to the vicinity of a certain road along which we
had to pick our way in returning from an advanced Italian position we had
just visited.
A road under heavy gun fire is not a comfortable place to be at large
upon on any of the battle fronts of Europe, and least of all that of
the stony Carso, where flying rock fragments increase the casualties
three and four-fold over what they would be if the hurtling shells were
burying themselves in eight or ten feet of soft earth before accumulating
enough resistance to detonate their charges of high explosive. The
‘cave-men’ who held the plateau had all disappeared into their burrows
on the ‘lee’ side of the _dolinas_ or sink-holes which pit the repulsive
face of the Carsic hills, but here and there along the road there
were evidences—mostly pools of blood and scattered kit—that some whom
recklessness or duty had kept from cover had met with trouble. Plainly
there was going to be work for the Red Cross, and one of the first
things I began to wonder about after we had passed on to the comparative
shelter of a side-hill, was whether or not they would see fit to risk one
of their precious ambulances up there on the shell-torn plateau where,
from the rattle and roar, it was evident that, in spite of the failing
light, things were going to be considerably worse before they began to be
better. Picking up our waiting car in the niche of a protecting cliff,
we coasted down across the face of a hillside honeycombed with dug-outs
to the bottom of a narrow valley, a point which appeared, for the time
being at least, the ‘head of navigation’ for motor traffic. Here we found
ourselves stopped by the jam that had piled up on both sides of a hulking
‘210’ that was being warped around a ‘hairpin’ turn. Suddenly I noticed
a commotion in the wriggling line of lorries, carts, and pack-mules
that wound down from the farther side of the jam, and presently there
wallowed into sight a couple of light ambulances, plainly—from the
purposeful persistence with which they kept plugging on through the
blockade—on urgent business.
Now the very existence of a jam on a road is in itself evidence of the
fact that there is an _impasse_ somewhere, and until this is broken the
confusion only becomes confounded by any misdirected attempts to push
ahead from either direction. But the ambulance is largely a law unto
itself, and when it signals for a right-of-way there is always an attempt
to make way for it where any other vehicle (save, of course, one carrying
reinforcements or munitions at the height of a battle) would have to wait
its turn. Mules and carts and lorries crowded closer against each other
or edged a few more precarious inches over the side, and by dint of good
luck and skilful driving, the two ambulances finally filtered through the
blockade and came to a halt alongside our waiting car on the upper end.
Then I saw that their cool-headed young drivers were dressed in khaki,
and knew, even before I read in English on the side of one of the cars
that it was the gift of some Indian province—that they belonged to a unit
of the British Red Cross.
‘Plucky chaps those,’ remarked the Italian officer escorting me. ‘Ready
to go anywhere and at any time. But it’s hardly possible they’re going to
venture up on to the plateau while that bombardment’s going on. That’s
work for the night-time, after the guns have quieted down. But there
is one of them coming back now; perhaps they’re going to discuss the
situation before going on.’
I leaned out to eavesdrop on that momentous debate, and this is what I
heard:
‘Jolly awful tobacco this,’ said the one on the ground, after filling his
pipe from his companion’s pouch.
‘Poisonous,’ agreed the other, ‘and nothing better in sight for a week.
Your engine isn’t missing any more, is it?’
‘Nu-u,’ mumbled the first, continuing to puff at the pipe he was
lighting. ‘Goin’—like a—top.’
‘Right-o, then; better be getting on.’
‘Hu-u’; and so the ‘discussion’ ended.
Without another word the boy on the ground pulled on his gloves, walked
back to his car, cranked up, climbed into his seat, and led the way off
up the empty road.
‘They’re not much on “dramatics,” these young Britons,’ said my
companion, ‘but they’re always on hand when they’re wanted, and they
take danger and emergencies—and there isn’t much else to work on the
Carso—just about as much of a matter of course as they do afternoon
tea. The actual work they’ve done for us here with their ambulances and
hospital has been very considerable; but even more importance attaches
to the fact that they have come to stand in the minds of the Italian
army as the tangible expression of British sympathy for our country. The
good they have done, and will continue to do, on this score is beyond
reckoning.’
* * * * *
It has been well said, now that the absolute superiority of the Allies
in men, material, and _moral_ has been established beyond a doubt, that
the only eventuality that can conceivably intervene to prevent their
obtaining a sweeping victory over the Central Powers is one which might
arise as a consequence of trouble among themselves. It is for this reason
that every effort calculated to promote better feeling between, and a
fuller appreciation of each other’s efforts and ideals among, the various
peoples of the Entente nations is so highly desirable; and it is on this
account that the work of the British Red Cross Mission to Italy has an
importance incalculably greater than that which attaches to it merely as
a material contribution.
The work of this Mission comes nearer, perhaps, to being a pure labour
of love than any other comprehensive piece of international effort
called forth by the war. Duty, sympathy, pity—these are the mainsprings
of the American Commission for Belgian Relief, and the splendid work is
carried on by men to whom Belgium was but little more than a name before
the invading Germans began trampling it under foot; and in the American
ambulances and flying squadron in France the spirit of adventure vies
with affection for France in bringing those devoted workers and fighters
across the sea. The Red Cross and other British work for the comfort and
welfare of the Italian army is almost entirely under the direction of
those who have seized the opportunity to pay back with present effort the
accumulated debts of past years of residence or study in a country which
occupies only a lesser place in their hearts, and a slighter claim on
their services, than their own.
Mr. George M. Trevelyan, essayist and historian and author of the works
on the life of Garibaldi, had been with the Relief Committee in Servia
prior to Italy’s entry into the war. As soon as that event took place he
hastened to England, and was fortunately able to unite the efforts of
a number of persons, all equally anxious to demonstrate in a practical
form their friendship for Italy. There resulted the formation of a Red
Cross ambulance unit for service on the Italian front. With the help
of the British Red Cross authorities at home, and Lord Monson, their
Commissioner in Italy, this unit came out in September 1915, under Mr.
Trevelyan as commandant; forming the original nucleus of the present
Mission of the British Red Cross and Order of St. John, which, united
under the direction of Lt.-Col. Lord Monson, now consists of three
ambulance and two X-ray units and an English-staffed hospital of 110
beds. Two other hospitals of 320 and 150 beds respectively are also being
equipped for the Italian Sanitary Service.
From the inception of the movement all of the British residents in Italy
threw themselves into it heart and soul; and not only these, but also
those then resident in England who, through past acquaintance or study,
felt that the land of Michael Angelo and Raphael, of Dante and Tasso,
of Garibaldi and Mazzini, was deserving of a fitting testimonial of
sympathy. Voluntary contributions of money and service poured in for the
Red Cross Mission from all sides, while various auxiliary organisations
were formed to help in other ways. Over 20,000 garments and over 12,000
bandages have been made in the Joint War Committee’s ten War Hospital
Supply Depots in Italian cities, where 500 ladies are engaged in making
comforts for the sick and wounded. The total of garments supplied through
the Commissioner’s Stores Department is in excess of 60,000, and that of
bandages 113,000. A number of _Posti di Ristoro_, or refreshment depots,
are conducted by English ladies at various railway stations near and on
the way to the front, while more recently a movement has been inaugurated
for starting a system of recreation huts patterned after those conducted
with such success by the Y.M.C.A. in France and Flanders.
To return to the Red Cross work. Mr. Trevelyan’s pioneer unit is the
largest of the three now in operation. It consists of an 110-bed
hospital, working as a regular part of the Italian army corps, and of
some thirty ambulances and twelve other cars, which are attached to
several army corps in Gorizia and neighbourhood. The hospital is under
the charge of Dr. George S. Brock, the medical doctor of the British
Embassy in Rome, and Colonel Sir Alexander Ogston, the celebrated Scotch
surgeon, and Dr. W. E. Thompson of Edinburgh. The personnel of the
hospital consists of about twenty English nurses, the matron, Miss Power,
having marched through the snow in the retreat of the Servian army, with
which she worked in 1915. There are sixty English drivers and mechanics,
one of whom has been severely wounded and another slightly. The King of
Italy has made personal presentation of the Silver Medal for Military
Valour to the commandant as a testimony to the services of the whole unit
under fire during its year and a half of service on the Italian front.
The Second Unit, with a smaller number of cars, under the command of Mr.
F. Sargant, has been working in the rough and difficult Carnic Alps for
fifteen months. This is the most isolated of all the units, and its work
under conditions calling for unusual resource and initiative has resulted
in its being commended in a special Order of the Day issued by General
Lequio, who at the time commanded the unit to which it is attached. This,
the highest honour an Italian General can confer on the troops under his
command, reads as follows:
‘H.Q. CARNIA ZONE,
‘_July 23, 1916_.
‘General Orders N. 72.
‘I wish to draw the attention of the troops under my command
to the courageous behaviour, the never-failing cheerfulness,
and the single-hearted devotion of the officers and men of the
British Red Cross Unit serving in the Carnia Zone.
‘This Unit, which arrived at Tolmezzo on October 26, 1915, has
from that date worked with untiring zeal and devotion. Wherever
duty has called its members—in the neighbourhood of the first
lines, frequently under heavy bombardment—they have one and
all devoted themselves to the removal of our wounded who were
exposed to the merciless fire of the enemy’s artillery.
‘It is, therefore, a great pleasure to me to confer on them all
_l’encomio solenne_, adding thereto my sincerest good wishes
and gratitude.
‘(_Signed_) C. LEQUIO,
‘_Lieut.-General Commanding_.’
Mr. Douglas Cooper, of this unit, has received the Bronze Medal for
Military Valour for his services under fire.
The ambulances of the Third Unit, which is under the command of Mr.
F. Alexander, were a gift of the British Coal Owners’ and Miners’
Committee for service in Italy. This unit has now completed a year of
service on the Carso front, especially distinguished for the extremely
heavy fighting which has taken place there. No more conclusive proof is
required of the high opinion held by the Italian Sanitary Service of the
judgment and consideration of the British driver than the fact that over
one-third of the wounded carried by the ambulances of this Third Unit
have been stretcher cases.
The Fourth Unit is a radiographic one, under the joint command of
Countess Helena Gleichen and Mrs. Hollings, who realised early in the
war the incalculably valuable work that radiography could fulfil in the
immediate vicinity of the front. The apparatus, which combines both
power and mobility, is one of the most up-to-date yet devised. For
over a year now, without the briefest leave of absence, these ladies
have carried on their work close up to the firing line, where their
devotion, unselfishness, and disdain of all danger have won for them the
Italian Bronze Medal for Military Valour, to say nothing of the undying
gratitude, not alone of the wounded who have passed through their hands,
but of the whole army corps under whose eyes they have laboured.
The Fifth Unit, recently formed, is also devoted to ‘close-up’
radiography. It is under the command of Mr. Cecil Pisent.
The following grimly amusing, but highly illuminative anecdote is told to
illustrate the resourcefulness and energy of the British ambulance driver
in an emergency hardly covered by his instructions or previous experience.
One of the voluntary drivers was bringing down, over an especially
difficult piece of road, an ambulance full of wounded from a lofty
sector of the Alpine front, when he encountered a soldier in a desperate
condition from a gaping bullet-wound in the throat. Realising that the
man was in imminent danger of bleeding to death, the driver lifted the
inert body to his seat, propping it up the best he could next to where he
sat behind his steering-wheel. Driving with his right hand, while with a
finger of his left he maintained a firm pressure on the severed carotid
artery, he steered his ambulance down the slippery, winding mountain road
to the clearing station at the foot of the pass. The laconic comment of
the astonished but highly pleased Italian doctor on the incident was
direct but comprehensive.
‘Well, young man,’ he said, as he took hasty measures further to staunch
the gushes of blood, ‘you’ve saved his life, but in five minutes more you
would have throttled him.’
It will hardly be necessary to enlarge on the effect upon the Italian
wounded of the devoted care they have received while in charge of
the British Red Cross Ambulance and Hospital Units; nor yet on the
admiration awakened throughout the Italian army by the presence in
their midst of these quietly energetic and modestly brave workers of
mercy. Reciprocally, too, it has given to hundreds (to be passed on to
thousands) of Britons an experience of Italian courage and fortitude
which could never have been gained except through the medium of hospital
and ambulance work. I do not believe I have heard a finer tribute of one
Ally to another than that which a member of the British Red Cross Mission
paid to the Italians as he had observed them under the terrible trial of
the especially aggravated Austrian gas attack of June 30, 1916.
‘The gas employed on this occasion,’ he said, ‘was the deadliest of which
there has been any experience; much deadlier than the Germans employed
against us at Ypres. It was, as General Cadorna’s dispatch admitted, very
destructive of life, although the valour of the Italian soldier prevented
the enemy from reaping any military advantage from the foul sowing.
Our cars were summoned early, and we worked all night at Sagrado. The
trenches on the Carso were at that time close at hand, and the soldiers
who were not overcome at their posts came staggering into the hospitals
for many hours after the horror was released. Several hundred of them
died that night in the court and garden.
‘It was a scene of heartrending suffering—much the same sort of horror
the British went through in Flanders a year before—and the Italians were,
very naturally, in a rage with the savagery of the Austrian methods
of war. If there ever was a moment when they might have been capable
of cruelty or roughness with their prisoners, this was the one when
their fury would have carried them away. Their comrades, racked with
unspeakable agony, were dying around them by scores. Yet even on that
night I observed with admiration that they medicated the Austrian wounded
prisoners with exactly the same kindness and attention they showed to
their own, passing them on to our waiting cars in due time without injury
or insult.’
Under the leadership of Geoffrey Young, Alpine climber and poet, the
ambulances of the British Red Cross were the first motor vehicles to
enter Gorizia following its capture in August 1916. Perhaps I cannot
convey a better idea of the conditions under which the drivers work, and
the spirit in which that work is carried out, than by quoting from Mr.
Young’s report to Mr. Trevelyan, the commander of his unit, a copy of
which has kindly been put at my disposal.
‘On August 8, 6.30 P.M.,’ he writes, ‘I picked up at Lucinico and carried
back two cavalry officers, still wet from the ride across the Isonzo.
All August 9 Bersaglieri, &c., passed, moving on to cross the river. At
7.50 P.M. Captain Z⸺, who had just moved with us from the Osteria to
Vallisella, informed me that he had an urgent call from Gorizia to fetch
in cavalry wounded. He asked me if I could get an ambulance across. I
selected the light touring car, loaded with bandages (Driver Sessions),
and the Ford Ambulance, as that could pass where heavier cars might not
be able to; also the Crossley (Watson) as the next in size, and the No.
14 Buick, in case the bridge would allow it.
‘... The roads were still full of shell holes and blocked by munition
carts and guns. We reached the Iron Bridge just as darkness fell. Here
the cars had to halt, as the holes in the bridge were making it necessary
to unharness the artillery horses and man-handle the guns across. At the
worst passages the shells were being unloaded from the carts and reloaded
beyond the obstacles.
‘I walked across ahead by moonlight. Every ten feet or so there were
shell breaches through the bridge. At night it was next to impossible
to see them, and even after some twenty crossings I found the greatest
circumspection necessary. In various places soldiers, mules, and carts
severally fell through during the night. In two places nearly two-thirds
of the bridge had been blown away, leaving only narrow passages along the
edge. These were slightly but insecurely inclosed by a few loose planks.
Again and again the heavy artillery carts broke through, gradually paring
away the edge of the remaining galleries. Each of our cars had to be
piloted across on foot, inch by inch. In the block it was impossible
to keep them together ... and long waits and many retraversings were
necessary before all four were steered safely over. There had been no
time as yet even to clear away the bodies of the soldiers killed in the
first passage of the morning.
‘We then wound up into the town, again impeded by shell holes in the
road, fallen trees, and by remains of carts, horses, and mules. The town
was utterly deserted. The only occupation was by squadrons of cavalry.
The Austrians were still being cleared out of the outskirts, and stray
bullets announced any open gaps in the line of houses to the east of us.
‘We traversed the town in convoy, visiting the Municipio and the
principal Piazzas. We failed to find any cavalry aid-post with wounded.
We were informed by a colonel of cavalry, who received us most cordially,
that no aid-posts had as yet been established, and that we were the first
motor ambulances to cross the bridge.
‘In passing and repassing, however, we had constant appeals from the
corner-posts of regimental stretcher-bearers, and had soon filled our
ambulance with wounded and distributed most of the stores of bandages,
&c., with which the touring car had been loaded.
‘We then started to return. The moon had now sunk. The gaps in the
Iron Bridge had opened farther. The traffic was all from the other
bank, and the munition carts were all successively breaking through and
necessitating lengthy rescue operations. It was fully an hour before I
secured passage for the touring car. Sessions then returned with me to
drive the Ford Ambulance. Another hour passed before he could be started.
I left him half-way across, and returned to fetch the other cars. On
recrossing I found the Ford with one wheel through. Sessions’ coolness
and the car’s lightness enabled us to extract the latter and its load. It
was then clear that passage for a wider car had now become impossible.
On our return on foot we saw that another portion of one of the narrow
galleries had opened out (the footway separating from the roadway),
carrying with it a mule. No course lay open but to leave the heavier
cars, with their wounded, on the Gorizia side, and to try to get the
others back to Vallisella, returning later with another car to which the
wounded could be carried across the bridge. The night was cold, and we
left all available coats, &c., to cover the wounded in their long wait.
The drivers accepted the situation with the coolness one could expect
from them.
‘On reaching the Italian side again we found a block, three carts wide,
extending back almost to Lucinico. We were forced to abandon, therefore,
the remaining Ford Ambulance, for which it proved impossible to make a
passage. After a few hundred yards of slow progress in the block, the
touring car fell over the side of the road into a shell hole. It was
extricated, but a few yards further the block became impracticable. We
left it, half in a trench, and walked to Vallisella. On the way we met
our two remaining cars, loaded with the material of the hospitals to
which we were attached, also completely locked in the block.
‘At Vallisella we filled rucksacks with food and thermos, and with our
adjutant, Kennedy, to help, trudged back for the bridge. Fortunately, our
tramp-like appearance only led to one “hold-up” in the kindly darkness.
‘My anxiety to return was emphasised by the certainty that the Austrians
would begin shelling the bridge as soon as daylight revealed the block.
Day broke as we approached it. The risk had also appealed to the drivers,
and we met the lorries, cars, &c., all breaking out of the jam and racing
for the cover of Lucinico. Glaisyer was able to move off just as we
reached him. The two cars that were still on the near side got down to
the protection of the Galleria with their hospital staff.
‘As I walked up to the bridge, I was just in time to see Woolmer ably
rushing the Crossley over the holes, across which the Genio had thrown a
few loose planks and beams. The heavier Buick had to be carefully piloted
over, Christie winding through the gaps and rushing the awkward narrow
traverses with skill and nerve. The Buick was the last heavy car to
recross before the bridge, under fire, was repaired about mid-day. It had
also been the first to cross.
‘We were barely clear of the bridge—perhaps four minutes—when the first
big shell exploded at the Italian end.’
* * * * *
From the time of the capture of Gorizia down to the present the cars of
the First Unit have been stationed there, picking up their wounded within
a mile of the Austrian first-line trenches. At the time of my visit to
the British Red Cross Hospital one of the drivers had just suffered a
broken leg and other injuries sustained when the walls of his quarters in
Gorizia were blown down upon him by an Austrian shell.
‘They’re talking about sending me home on a bit of a leave to rest up a
bit,’ he told me; ‘but—much as I should like to go—I’m not too keen on
it. It’s more men we need here, rather than less. So, unless they insist
upon it, I think my leave can wait better than our wounded.’
That seems to me fairly typical of the spirit imbuing every member of the
Mission with whom I talked.
_UNCONQUERED: AN EPISODE OF 1914._
BY MAUD DIVER.
Copyright, 1917, by Mrs. Diver, in the United States of America.
CHAPTER XIII.
‘I am the Fact,’ said War, ‘and I stand astride the path of
Life.... There can be nothing else and nothing more in human
life until you have reckoned with me.’—H. G. WELLS.
That same evening, a good deal later on, Lady Forsyth sat at her
dressing-table, brushing out her hair, recalling, with pride, Mark’s
vivid speech, the cheers, the record ‘bag’ of recruits, and wondering if
he would forget to come for his usual good-night.
His room opened out of hers; and the door between stood chronically
ajar—a companionable habit begun in her first days of loneliness after
his father’s death. He rarely missed the little ceremony of early tea,
when he would establish himself at the foot of the bed and argue, or read
aloud, or simply ‘rag’ her, as the spirit moved him. Then he would wander
in and out, in the later stages of dressing, hindering and delighting her
in about equal measure. Or they would carry on a violent argument through
the open door, a pair of disembodied voices, till some climax would bring
one or other gesticulating to the threshold. These morning and evening
hours were the times of their most formidable encounters, their wildest
nonsense, their utmost joy in each other’s society, exhibited in a manner
peculiar to themselves. At night the ‘hair-brush interview’ had become
a regular institution. It might be over in ten minutes or last till
midnight, according to their mood. This was the time for graver matters,
for the give and take of advice; and although there might be little
outward show of sentiment, those hours of comradeship were among the most
sacred treasures of the mother’s heart.
To-night she brushed till her arm ached, listening for his footstep; and
the moment she put the hated thing down, he came, bringing with him the
whiff of cigarette smoke she loved.
Standing behind her, he took her head between his hands, lightly passed
his fingers through her hair and smiled at her in the glass. She was
responsive as a cat when her hair was caressed; and he knew it.
‘Poor deserted little Mums!’ he said. ‘Had you given me up in despair?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And how long would you have hung on past despair point?’ he asked with a
twinkle.
‘Probably half an hour.... What have you done with your lady-love?’
‘Ordered her to bed.’
‘So early? All for my benefit? I scent an ulterior motive.’
He laughed and pulled her hair. ‘Your instinct’s infallible! It’s this
marrying business. I know I promised to wait; but the whole face of the
world has changed since then.’
He detected the faint compression of her lips.
‘Mums, you’re incorrigible. She’s a delicious thing.’
‘Who says otherwise?’
‘You do—internally! Not a mite of use throwing dust in my eyes. When
you’re converted I shall know it, to the tick of a minute. Meantime’—he
moved over to the window and stood there facing her—‘the question is, in
a war like this, oughtn’t one to marry, if possible, before going out?
She got on to war weddings this evening, and I was tongue-tied. That
mustn’t happen again. What’s your notion? D’you still think—wait?’
A pause. She dreaded, as he did, the possibility of Wynchcombe Friars
passing into the hands of Everard Forsyth and his son, whose views were
not their views, except in matters political. Had the wife in question
been Sheila, her answer would have been unhesitating. As it was, she
parried his awkward question with another.
‘What do you think yourself, Mark?’
He laughed.
‘Oh, you clever woman! I have my answer. And in this case ... I believe
you’re right. Personally, I’m game to marry her at once. But ... there
_are_ other considerations. Seems her precious Harry’s been rubbing into
her that these war marriages aren’t fair on women—that it’s a bigger
shadow on their lives losing a husband than a lover. It’s a tragic sort
of start, I admit; and once we’re married the wrench of separation
would surely be harder for both. Then, as regards myself, _you_ know
how this coming struggle has obsessed my mind; how we’ve doubted, both
of us, the spirit of modern England—the selfish, commercial spirit of
the red-necktie brand. And now that I see the old country shaming our
doubts, I simply want to fling myself into this business—heart and brain
and body. And, frankly, I’ve a feeling I could give myself to things with
a freer mind ... as a bachelor. That’s the truth—for your very private
ear. Thirdly and lastly, if we married, she ought to be here with you.
And I’m doubtful if you’d either of you relish that arrangement, lacking
me to do buffer state. See?’
‘I do see, very clearly,’ she answered, smiling at him with grave
tenderness, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands.
‘Thought you would. There’s only one thing worries me. As my wife—if
the worst happened, she’d at least be well provided for. Seems she has
literally no money, and a very fair gift for spending it.’
Helen’s quick brain—lightened by her relief—sprang to instant decision.
‘You could settle that by adding a codicil to your will. Those
investments of father’s that are not tied up with the place would give
her quite a comfortable income.’
‘Capital! Fool I was not to think of it. Simply forestall my instructions
about her marriage settlement. We’ll fix it up at once and I’ll talk
things over with her to-morrow. See how she feels about it herself.’
They discussed details for another half-hour; then, in his peremptory
fashion, he ordered her to bed.
‘God bless you,’ she whispered as he shed a kiss on her hair. ‘This
afternoon I was the proudest mother in England.’
‘O fool woman—just because I’ve caught the gift of the gab! With practice
I might even degenerate into a politician. Just as well I’m in for a few
years of the silent service. Go to sleep quick, and don’t let yourself be
bogey-ridden by German devilments.’
But though wisdom endorsed his command, she disobeyed it flatly. There
was no sleep in her brain; and instead of going to bed, she sat down in
the window-seat, leaned against the woodwork and looked out upon the
still serenity of garden, terrace and pinewood, softly illumined by an
unclouded moon. The very peace and beauty of those moonlit August nights
had an uncanny power of intensifying the inner visions that daylight and
ceaseless occupation kept partially in check. She could not now look
upon the moon without seeing the sacked villages, the human wreckage of
battle that the same impartial goddess illumined, over there, on the
shell-battered fields of Belgium and France.
Earlier in the day her spirit had been uplifted by Miss Sorabji’s
beautiful letter ‘England in Earnest’; by her exhortation, from the Gita,
‘Think of this not as a war, but as a sacrifice of arms demanded of the
gods.’ But now, in the peace and silence of night, it was the anguish
of the flight from Tirlemont that lived before her eyes and chilled
her blood. Too vividly, she pictured the flaming town; the rush of
panic-stricken people; women and children, shot, bayonetted, ruthlessly
ridden down. And already there were whispers of things infinitely worse
than killing—things unnamable, at thought of which imagination blenched⸺
From that great, confused mass of misery there emerged the pathetic
figure of one fugitive peasant woman and five children who stood
bewildered in the Place de la Gare, crying all of them as if their hearts
would break. That morning the German soldiery had killed the woman’s
husband and trampled two of her children to death before her face—a minor
item in an orgy of horrors. But it is the poignant personal detail that
pierces the heart: and the acute realisation of one mother’s anguish
brought sudden tears to Helen’s eyes.
So blurred was the moonlit garden, when she looked down into it, that a
shadow moving at the end of the terrace set her heart fluttering in her
throat.
Spy hunting and spy mania were in the air. Almost every day brought its
crop of tales, credible and incredible: horses poisoned wholesale at
Aldershot, mysterious gun-emplacements, hidden arms and ammunition in
the least expected places. Even allowing for exaggeration, these tales
were sufficiently disturbing. They gave a creepy, yet rather thrilling
sense of insecurity to things as perennially and unshakably secure as the
Bank of England or Westminster Abbey. Nor could even those symbols of
stability be reckoned immune, with the financial world in convulsions and
a mysterious fleet of Zeppelins threatening to bombard London!
In the over-civilised and over-legislated world that came by a violent
end in July 1914, the uncertainty of life had been little more than a
pious phrase, spasmodically justified by events. Now it was an impious
fact, vaguely or acutely felt almost every hour of the day—by none more
acutely than by Helen Forsyth with her quick sensibilities and vivid
brain. Even Mark admitted that she was keeping her head creditably on
the whole; but in certain moods she was capable of demanding a drastic
search for gun-emplacements in her own grounds or suspecting a secret
store of ammunition among the ruins of Wynchcombe Abbey, all on the
strength of a semi-German gardener dismissed years ago. Only last week
a suspicious, Teutonic-looking individual had come to the back door and
put the cook ‘all in a tremor’ by asking superfluous questions about the
neighbourhood. And now this mysterious wanderer in the garden—at such an
hour⸺!
She was on her feet, brushing aside the tears that obscured her vision.
But the shadow had vanished behind a bush and did not seem disposed to
reappear. For a second she stood hesitating. If she called Mark, he would
either laugh at her or scold her for not being in bed. The creature
was probably harmless. She would creep downstairs quietly and explore.
For all her nerves and fanciful fears, she was no coward in the grain.
Hastily twisting up her hair, she slipped on a long opera coat and crept
noiselessly down into the drawing-room. There she found that the French
window leading on to the terrace had been left unlocked.
‘How careless of Mark!’ she murmured; and, with fluttering pulse, stepped
out into the moonlight.
There he was again! Summoning all her courage she went forward, uncertain
even now what she meant to say.
The shadowy figure had turned. It was coming towards her. Then—with a
start of recognition she stopped dead.
‘Keith!’ she exclaimed softly, and could have laughed aloud in her relief.
‘Helen—what are you doing out here?’ he asked, an odd thrill in his low
voice.
‘What are _you_ doing?’ she retorted. ‘Frightening me out of my life! I
saw a suspicious-looking shadow; and—don’t laugh at me—I thought it might
be a spy.’
‘And you came down to tackle him alone! Just like you. Supposing it had
been?’
‘Oh—thank _good_ness it’s not! But don’t you ever give me away.’ Helen’s
laugh ended in an involuntary shiver.
‘Cold?’ he asked quickly.
‘No—no. Let’s walk a little and feel normal.’
He moved on beside her, anxious, yet deeply content. Then: ‘Helen,’ he
said suddenly, ‘if you’re going to let things get on your nerves like
this, you’ll be done for. Your best chance is to take up some absorbing
war-work; the harder the better.’
‘_What_ work? And where?’ He caught a note of desperation in her tone.
‘Scrubbing hospital floors? Or playing about with Belgians and invalids
here, while Sheila is at Boulogne, you scouring France in our car, and
Mark in the thick of it all? He wants me to stay here, I know. But,
Keith, I simply _can’t_. What else, though, can a useless woman of fifty
do?’
‘To start with, she can refrain from calling herself useless, which is
a libel! To go on with⸺’ He paused, regarding her. The supposed spy was
meditating a bold suggestion. ‘Helen—could you ... would you ... come
out with me as my orderly? If so, I could confine my activities to the
Base. I verily believe you’d find the real thing less nerve-racking than
the nightmares of an imagination like yours. But, could you stand it,
physically? And ... would the conventions permit?’
Her low laugh answered him straight away. ‘My dear Keith, talk of
inspiration! It would just save my soul alive. I can act infinitely
better than I can endure. I should feel nearer to Mark. And as for the
conventions, I hanged them all years ago. What harm, if the poor dead
things are drawn and quartered?’ She checked herself and looked up at
him. ‘Will you take your Bible oath that I shouldn’t simply be in the
way?’
‘I’ll take it on as many Bibles as you like to produce,’ he answered,
with becoming gravity. ‘But I’m thinking ... for your sake ... another
woman.... How about Sheila?’
‘Sheila! Lovely.’
‘Would she give up her precious massage?’
‘If _I_ wanted her, she’d give up anything. But—the massage wouldn’t
bring her up against the worst horrors. Your work would. And she’s full
young—barely three and twenty.’
‘She is that. Though, if I’m any good at observation, I should say the
stature of her spirit is far in advance of her years. She gives me the
impression of great reserve power, that girl. She never seems to put out
her full strength, or to waste it in kicking against the pricks.’
‘One for me!’ Lady Forsyth murmured meekly.
‘Yes, one for you! And I make bold to prophesy she would be worth five of
you in a painful emergency.’
He made that unflattering statement in a tone of such extraordinary
tenderness that she beamed as at a compliment.
‘Let the righteous smite me friendly—when I deserve it! You seem to have
made a close study of my Sheila. It only remains to secure her services
and Mark’s consent⸺’
‘_Mother!_’ His deep voice called suddenly from the window. ‘I’m ashamed
of you. Come in at once!’
‘Coming!’ she called back, adding under her breath: ‘Keith, remember I
only came down for a book. And you found me locking you out.’
Then she hurried away, obedient always to the voice of her son.
Nightmares had been effectually dispelled.
* * * * *
Bel’s hope that the War Office would be merciful was not fulfilled. The
Great Man, who worked day and night, creating new armies, had need of
every promising semblance of an officer he could lay hands on; and Mark’s
name was a recommendation in itself.
Bel was given little more than a week in which to be ‘heavenly good’;
and it must be admitted that she made the most of it. She took kindly,
on the whole, to Mark’s solution of the marriage problem. How far her
acquiescence was due to his exceeding thoughtfulness in the matter of
money it might be invidious to inquire. There remained the fact that
Harry O’Neill—scenting a possible war wedding—had skilfully put forward
her own pronounced views on the subject; while, incidentally, spoiling
her idol more egregiously than ever. And the girl herself leaned towards
a more auspicious beginning of her married life. Mark found her oddly
superstitious on the subject; and, with her gift for evading unpleasant
facts, she had risen readily to the optimistic conviction that the war
would be over by Christmas or the New Year. Apparently it did not occur
to her, or to others of her persuasion, that a short war could only
mean victory for Germany. But there seemed little use in dispelling an
illusion that kept her happy; and, in her case, could do no harm.
So she clung unchallenged to her comforting belief; and, the great
question being settled, Mark was free to consider other matters.
To start with, there was Keith’s amazing proposition to enlist Mums—a
project that did not square with Mark’s private plan for keeping her
safely wrapped in cotton wool and harmless war-activities at Wynchcombe
Friars. Son-like, he had scarce realised how infinitely dear she was to
him, till her eagerness to cross the Channel had driven him to consider
the possibility in all its bearings. And the inclusion of Sheila in the
programme brought to light his hidden tenderness for her that seemed in
no way diminished by his passion for Bel. Why the deuce couldn’t the
women be reasonable, and stay in England where there would be work
enough for all? And what business had Keith to go encouraging them? But
so plainly were the three enamoured of their idea that in the end he had
not the heart to damp them.
In the privacy of his thoughts, he thanked goodness that Bel could be
trusted not to emulate them; though her attitude towards the war was now
less hostile than it had been. The very air she breathed was impregnated
with war-fever, war-talk and war-realities. It was increasingly evident
that new activities were going to become the fashion; and she was of
those who unquestioningly follow a fashion, lead it where it may. Having
no taste for the menial work of hospitals or for tending the sick and
wounded, she had elected to help in some sort of women’s work engineered
by Harry, ‘the Cause’ being temporarily extinct. So far as possible she
turned away her eyes from beholding and her heart from feeling the full
measure of the invisible horror, which, to more imaginative minds, became
too acutely visible and audible during that critical last week of August
1914.
For by now, across the Channel, the Great Retreat had begun. Days that,
at Wynchcombe Friars, slipped by all too fast, seemed over there, to have
neither beginning nor end. Common standards of time were lost in that
ceaseless, sleepless nightmare of dogged marching and still more dogged
fighting, whenever Prussian hordes gave the broken remnant of an army
a chance to turn and smite, as the British soldier can smite even in
retreat.
It was from Le Cateau that an officer friend sent a pencil scrawl to Mark.
‘It is quite evident that we have taken the knock badly. With
any other army one would say we’re beaten. But Tommy doesn’t
understand the word. You can only beat him by knocking the
life out of him. And even when you think he’s dead, chances
are he’ll get up and kick you. People at home simply haven’t
begun to know what heroes these chaps are. Makes me sick even
to think of certain supercilious folk, I seem to remember, who
thought the worst of any man in uniform on principle. Great
Scott, they’re not fit to lick Tommy’s boots.’
Mark handed that letter to Bel.
‘There’s one in the eye for your precious Maitland,’ he remarked coolly.
‘Copy it out verbatim, please, and send it to him with my compliments!’
And Bel obeyed with exemplary meekness. She had rather objected to the
tone of Maitland’s last letter; and, in her own fashion, she was very
much impressed. Heroism, a long way off and entirely unconnected with
one’s self, was an admirable thing in man.
* * * * *
It was near the end of August, when the Channel ports were being
evacuated and the fall of Paris seemed merely a matter of days, that
Mark at last found his name in the Gazette coupled with that of a
distinguished Highland regiment; and in record time he was ready—uniform,
equipment, parting presents and all.
Like most of his race and kind, he would have preferred an informal
departure—casual ‘good-byes,’ as though he were going off on business
for a week or so. But he had won the hearts of his people by justice,
understanding, and the personal touch that was a tradition at Wynchcombe
Friars: he had inspired them, by precept and exhortation, to give of
their best ungrudgingly; and he could not deny them the legitimate thrill
of speeding his departure with congratulations and cheers.
Only on Sunday, his last day, he evaded one ordeal by limiting his
attendance at church to early service with his mother. Bel had little
taste for early rising, and Mark did not press the point.
In the afternoon he delighted his humbler friends—wives of the
gamekeeper, the coachman and the manager of his industrial colony—by
calling on them in full uniform. Though he occasionally wore the kilt
and glengarry at Inveraig, his Hampshire folk had never seen him thus
attired; and their open admiration was so embarrassing that, after
several hours of it, he returned limp and exhausted, clamouring for
whisky and soda and the society of Bel, who could always be trusted to
keep her admiration within bounds.
To her he devoted the evening; and early on Monday the more personal
farewells must be said; the cheerful, casual note vigorously maintained.
It was not ‘the real thing’ yet; and the women, in their hearts, prayed
that ‘the real thing’ might be deferred for many months to come.
Meantime, unless England was favoured with an invasion, he would be safe
enough on the south-east coast of Scotland; and later on, if rooms were
available, he would permit his mother and Bel to intrude upon his violent
industry for a week.
Keith drove them all to the station, and behold, outside the gray stone
gateway, an impromptu guard of honour lined the road to Westover:
villagers and farm hands, weavers and metal-workers, women, children and
ineligible men. At sight of the motor, they broke into shouts and ragged
cheers that would have moved a heart many degrees less responsive than
the heart of Mark Forsyth.
‘Drive slower, man,’ he said to Keith; and, standing up in the car, he
waved his glengarry—giving them shout for shout—till he could no more.
That vision of him, so standing, with the morning light in his eyes,
the sun upon his chestnut-red hair and his kilt blown back by the wind,
remained stamped indelibly upon his mother’s brain....
CHAPTER XIV.
‘Hearts that are as one high heart,
Withholding nought from doom or bale,
Burningly offered up—to bleed,
To beat, to break, but not to fail.’
LAURENCE BINYON.
The dream of that coveted week at Mark’s war station came true about the
middle of September. More: it was a success—a blessed memory unspoiled by
any jarring note—and it brought the two women nearer to each other than
they had been yet.
They found Mark in charge of a double company, chiefly armed with
broomsticks, handling his Highlanders to some purpose; giving his spare
hours to revolver practice, with plump German targets in view. His
Colonel, who lost no time in making friends with Lady Forsyth, spoke
of him in glowing terms, and gave his womenfolk every facility for
seeing the coast defences prepared against the promised invasion. They
wandered, shivering inwardly, through a maze of genuine trenches, heavily
sandbagged, that, in the event of a landing, were to be held ‘at all
costs.’ They inspected cunning entanglements of barbed wire on the beach
and underground forts that looked more like heat bumps on the face of the
earth than strong defensive positions; and they heard amazing stories of
spies, though the Government had nominally demolished the system.
Everything conspired to make those few September days an untarnished
memory. The tide of retreat had turned. The miracle had happened, and
the Germans, flung back from the gates of Paris, had been brilliantly
defeated on the Marne. Hopeful souls dreamed again of a swift and
decisive issue. But the Great Brain piling up armies in Whitehall still
pinned his faith on England’s ‘last million men.’
In fact, there was only one flaw in the week of their content: it passed
too soon. Then the price must be paid in the renewed wrench of parting,
and for the first time Lady Forsyth saw tears in Bel’s eyes. They were
not allowed to fall, but they were unmistakably there.
Of course they must come again, Mark assured them at the last. ‘The C.O.
has fallen in love with Mums! He’d be heart-broken if I didn’t give him
another chance. And he’s a useful chap to please. So that settles it!’
* * * * *
But towards the end of September, before there was time even to think of
another chance, Mark had his orders. A decimated battalion was clamouring
for reinforcements; and a message flashed to Wynchcombe Friars that he
would be home next day on forty-eight hours’ leave, picking up Bel in
town.
That blunt announcement drove the blood from Lady Forsyth’s face. Sheila
was back with her again, and Keith had just returned from a week’s
absence on business connected with the Forsyth-Macnair car.
‘He’s got his wish,’ was all she said: and went quickly out of the room.
Next morning they arrived—the two of them—Mark rather defiantly cheerful,
Bel more than a little subdued. Lady Forsyth had never liked the girl
better than in those two days.
To the women it seemed hard that so many of his precious hours at home
must be squandered on business. But Mark had to face the fact that he
might never return, and to make his dispositions accordingly. It had
always been his wish to emulate his father and be practically his own
land agent. But four years of minority and the long absence in Europe
had obliged him to employ a trustworthy man of experience; and he was
thankful for it now. George Russell, happily well over forty, had proved
as capable as he was devoted, which is saying a good deal for his
capacity. He possessed, moreover, a shrewder business head than either
mother or son; and on occasion, to Mark’s huge delight, he would assume a
tenderly protective attitude, as of one whose mission in life was to save
them from themselves.
In the matter of Belgian refugees, he regretted to report that Lady
Forsyth was not sufficiently discriminating. They were proving, as was
natural, ‘a very mixed lot,’ and Russell had a positive flair for the
wrong sort. It was not fair on Sir Mark to crowd up his cottages with
‘foreign riff-raff’: the deserving would make a quite sufficient drain
on his limited resources. The good fellow learnt with unconcealed relief
that Lady Forsyth would soon be going to Boulogne with Miss Melrose and
that he would be left practically in charge of everything.
Mark himself was thankful for business details that relieved the
underlying strain. But he refused on this occasion to bid any official
‘good-byes.’ He had taken leave of his people when he joined the army.
This final wrench was his own most private and personal affair, as they
would doubtless understand.
Tea on the terrace was a creditably cheerful meal; and it was not till
near dinner-time that Mark managed to slip away by himself for an hour
of quiet communing with the land he loved—the woods, the river and the
lordly ruins that, for him, were written all over with the inner history
of his own brief twenty-seven years. Bel had asked him more than once
how he could bear to leave it all; and to-night, as he saw the red sun
tangled among his pine-tops, that question so shook his fortitude that
he challenged it with another. Could he bear to think of German troops
defiling the fair and stately face of it, terrorising with torture and
outrage the men and women whose welfare was his main concern in life?
Confronted with that challenge, the coward question fled ashamed.
After dinner he had half an hour’s talk with Sheila, into whose hands he
solemnly commended his more mercurial mother. ‘She’s a jewel of price,’
he added frankly, ‘but in certain moods she takes some managing. And on
the whole you’re better at it than old Keith. Don’t let her crock up from
the strain of it all. And write to me. Promise.’
She promised—and his mind felt more at rest.
Later on he took Bel out on to the terrace, where they paced up and down
in the starlight, talking fitfully. Time was too short for all they had
to say; and for that very reason they could not say one half of it.
Interludes of silence increased. At last came one so prolonged that, by
a mutual impulse, they came to a standstill, near a low stone bench,
confronting each other and the inexorable fact.
‘Oh Mark—to-morrow!’ Bel breathed unsteadily, her dim face close to his.
‘It seems impossible.’
For answer he took hold of her, and sitting down, gathered her on to
his knees. Then, amazed, he heard her whisper at his ear: ‘Darling—I’m
horribly afraid. I keep feeling—I shall never get you back.’
It was spoken at last, the fear of perpetual parting that knocked at both
their hearts. But the man knew that spectre must be ignored.
‘I’ll come back with any luck, my Bel,’ he said, kissing her, ‘to claim
you for good, and worry your life out! I vote we marry the first leave I
get.’
He passed his hand slowly down her bare arm. ‘Darling, you’re cold,’
he said. ‘There’s a dew and a half falling. Come in at once. Are we
down-hearted?—No!’
The light of the hall showed her on the verge of tears. But she pulled
herself together and he dismissed her with a blessing that meant more to
him than to her.
In the drawing-room he found Keith alone, with a solitary electric light
switched on, smoking by the open window; a privilege Helen permitted him
for the sake of his company.
‘Hullo! Gone—both of ’em?’ Mark asked in surprise.
‘Yes. I ordered them off. They looked strained and tired. Couldn’t read.
Couldn’t talk. Your mother has some letters to write, I think. She left
word—would you look in?’
‘Bless her, she takes things beastly hard.’
‘She does,’ Keith assented briefly; and Mark proceeded to fill his pipe.
During the process Keith watched him, appraising his straight, clean
manhood and cursing the devilish nature of modern war.
Presently, when Mark had finished with his pipe, he spoke.
‘Keith, old chap, on the strength of peculiar circumstances and
the general uncertainty of things, I’m going to make an infernally
impertinent remark. To begin with, mother’s most distractingly on my
mind. I’ve fixed up most things, with a view to—possible contingencies.
But I don’t seem able to fix up her. If I’m knocked out—she’s simply done
for. Not even this precious work of hers for consolation. It all goes to
Uncle Everard, who’ll make an end of our colony straight away. She’ll
lose everything at a stroke, except Inveraig. And she—alone there⸺!’
He set his teeth hard, and Keith passed a long thin hand across his
eyes. ‘That’s the tragedy of it,’ he said, adding, with forced lightness.
‘Where does the impertinence come in?’
‘It’s jolly well coming in now. Don’t bite my head off. Truth is, I’m not
stone blind; and just lately—I’ve been wondering ... why the deuce don’t
you make a match of it? You and Mums!’
Macnair started, and his face looked rather a queer colour in the dim
light.
‘Great heavens, Mark! Talk of explosives!’
For the moment he could get no further, and Mark was puzzled. ‘You
mean—it’s never occurred to you?’
‘I mean nothing of the sort.’
‘Then I bet you _do_ want to bite my head off⸺’
‘I’m not ... so sure,’ he said slowly. His voice was more natural now. ‘I
always like your sledge-hammer directness. At the same time⸺’ He rose and
paced the length of the room, revolving that amazing proposition.
‘If I thought there was a ghost of a chance,’ Mark persisted, as Keith
turned in his stride, ‘it would take a ton weight off my mind.’
‘Not to mention mine,’ Keith answered smiling; and when he reached the
window he put a hand on Mark’s shoulder. ‘As it seems a case of plain
speaking to-night, I may as well admit the truth. She’s been the star of
my life for fifteen years—and I’d give all I possess to marry her.’
Mark’s eyebrows went up.
‘And she ten years a widow! Why not have a shot at it, old chap, and make
this Boulogne trip a sort of war honeymoon⸺’
‘My dear boy! The pace you young fellows travel! And you ignore ...
there’s Helen herself to be reckoned with⸺’
For the first time in his life Mark saw the blood mount into Keith’s face
and heard him hesitate over his mother’s name—phenomena that checked his
fluency a little but rather increased his zeal.
‘Well, if you don’t have a try,’ he said, ‘hanged if the C.O. won’t
forestall you. He’s dead smitten. Two lovers at fifty—she ought to be
ashamed of herself!’
But Keith seemed no way perturbed by the possibility of a rival.
‘_If_ she ever marries again,’ he said quietly, ‘it will be myself. But,
Mark, is it possible you’ve never realised that, for her, your father
is still as much alive as when he walked this earth? There’s a modest
percentage of human beings so made, and a good few of them are Scots.
For them there is actually neither death, nor separation. I believe your
father still bars my way, as much as he did when—I first loved her. Of
course ... I may exaggerate!’
‘Hope you do!’ Mark was deeply moved. ‘She doesn’t often speak of him to
me.’
‘Nor to me. But—when she does, it’s quite clear.’
‘’M. Rough luck. All the same, if the worst happens, give me your word
you’ll have a try ... for her sake and mine as well as your own. No one
would dream there’s ten years between you.’
Keith simply held out his hand and Mark’s closed on it hard. The good
understanding that had always existed between them was complete.
Mark found his mother writing letters in bed. He had accused her more
than once of writing them in her bath. She looked strained and tired, as
Keith said; but in her blue dressing-jacket, with hair demurely parted
and a thick plait over her shoulder, she appeared younger, if anything,
than the man he had left downstairs.
‘Incurable woman!’ he said lightly. ‘Who’s your victim this time?’
She told him; and while she read out snatches of her letter,
Mark—watching her with new eyes—wondered, had she the least inkling?
Would a word from him be of any service to Keith?
Curiosity impelled him to talk of the Boulogne trip, to enlarge on his
confidence in Keith, and even to touch on the unconventional character
of the whole plan. Neither in look nor tone could he detect a glimmer
of after-thought or shadow of self-consciousness. The causes of her
satisfaction were clear as daylight: longing to be in the same country as
himself, candid pleasure in Keith’s and Sheila’s company, and her innate
love of getting off the beaten track.
‘It’s just one of the many beautiful things that a genuine, understanding
friendship makes possible,’ she concluded, stamping and sealing her
letter: and Mark began to feel rather sorry for Keith. But he wisely
refrained from any hint of his own knowledge. It would probably do no
good and would certainly spoil her pleasure in going.
Instead, he commandeered her writing-board, an act of tyranny that would
normally have involved a fight. Her unnatural meekness hurt him more
sharply than any words of love, could she have brought herself to speak
them. When he came back to the bed, she indicated a little pile of Active
Service Compendiums and a pocket Red-letter Testament on the table beside
her. She had already given him his wrist-watch and a silver flask.
‘That _from_ me,’ she said, touching the Book, ‘and those _for_ me. I
shall be hungry for news, remember, and out of touch with Bel, who will
get it all.’
‘Not quite all—faithless and unbelieving!’ he answered, echoing her
lightness. Then he added with decision: ‘You’re not coming up to town,
Mums; not even to the station—understand? It’ll be bad enough having Bel.
But she’s cooler all through. No matter how brave you are, I can always
feel you quivering inside. And I couldn’t stand it. Nor could you.’
She shook her head. ‘It was only—a temptation. Not to miss....’
A spasm crossed her face, and he went down on his knees beside her.
‘Darling, if we are going to make fools of ourselves,’ he said huskily,
‘I’d better be off. It’s near midnight. Time you were asleep.’ No answer;
and he spoke still lower. ‘Give me your blessing, Mums—like when I went
to school.’
Still without speaking, she laid her hands on his bowed head; and from
his heart he echoed her passionate silent plea for his safe return.
Then he stood up and kissed her good-night.
* * * * *
For sheer misery and discomfort nothing could exceed the actual hour
or two before departure. Bel could be with him in his room while he
‘completed his mobilisation.’ The rest could only hang about aimlessly,
making futile talk or inventing futile occupations to keep thought at
bay. In the background several maids and a grey-haired butler hovered
fitfully; and Bobs, a picture of abject misery, lay awaiting his master
at the foot of the stairs.
He came at last, in a violent hurry, shouting an order to Keith and
springing clean over the prostrate Bobs.
Bel followed more leisurely, flushed a little, but controlled. Then
the hovering servants came forward and Helen slipped quietly into her
husband’s study.
There, at last, Mark came to her—followed by an apparently tailless Bobs.
Somehow she contrived to smile. Then his arms were round her, crushing
her to him.
‘God bless you,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t fret. It’s going to be all right.
And—if it isn’t ... it’ll _still_ be all right.’
Then he kissed her again and let her go.
From the threshold he waved to her, smiling resolutely, though tears
stood in his eyes. She waved back to him. The door shut between them. He
was gone.
As she stood motionless, fighting back her grief, she was startled by
that sharp, familiar pang in the region of her heart, and a momentary
darkness as if a raven’s wing had brushed across her eyes. She shivered
and kneeled hastily down to comfort the desolate Bobs, while her tears
fell, unchecked now, upon his rough brown head.
CHAPTER XV.
‘Here is the hard paradox: war ... this devilish, bestial,
senseless thing, produces in masses—as peace distinctly does
not produce them—brothers and sisters to Christ.’—G. A. B.
DEWAR.
Wynchcombe Friars without Mark was no place to tarry in, but there seemed
no end to the delays; and Keith turned even these to good account by
teaching Sheila to drive the Forsyth-Macnair car. Two drivers with one
orderly would get through twice the work.
It was near the middle of October when, at last, they found themselves
speeding towards Folkestone. Keith, who had laid aside philosophy ‘for
the duration of the war,’ delighted in his own small ark of salvation
as a captain delights in his ship. From ‘stem to stern’ she was perfect
as skill and money could make her; fitted up with four stretchers and
bedding; crammed to the limit of her capacity with first-aid appliances
and a minimum of luggage.
Here and there autumn had laid a fiery finger on the woods. Birches
and elms were tipped with gold. Otherwise the October sun, riding in a
cloudless heaven, suggested high summer. Mark had been gone nearly a
fortnight. Two brief cheerful letters assured his mother he was alive
and well. Till she could see him again, those simple facts were all
that vitally concerned herself; though pessimists prophesied invasion
by Zeppelin and transport; and over there across the Channel, Belgium
continued her heroic stand against the all-devouring, all-defiling German
Army.
The fall of Antwerp had resounded through Europe like the knell of doom.
For a time, even the bravest were shaken with dismay, and the stream of
refugees increased daily. The streets of Folkestone overflowed with that
pitiful flotsam of wrecked cities. Some wept; some cursed; some prayed;
but the prevailing expression was a terrible stunned indifference, as
though shock on shock had hammered them into automata that could move and
eat and sleep, but could no longer feel.
In Boulogne—when they reached it—the flotsam of wrecked battalions
was more in evidence. Things were still primitive here as regards
organisation, but already the place was an English colony. The British
Red Cross Society was beginning to make things move and owners of private
cars were doing splendid service. To these were now added the unrelated
trio from Wynchcombe Friars. But their first objective was Rouen, where
a young Stuart nephew lay badly wounded, craving for the sight of a face
from home. His invalid mother could not get to him; so Lady Forsyth went
in her stead, only to find on arrival that the boy had been dead an
hour. For the sake of that far-away mother she asked to see him, though
privately she dreaded the ordeal. She was aware, suddenly, of a very
unheroic shrinking from close contact with the awful actualities of war.
But that shrinking in no way affected her zeal for the work in hand.
News that a train-load of casualties was expected that evening sent them
full speed to the station. It was dusk when they arrived to find the
train in and the process of unloading begun. At the entrance, a group of
Red Cross officials stood talking and laughing, hardened by habit to the
painful scene. As the car drew up they crowded round, admiring it and
questioning Macnair, while tragic burdens were carried past them in the
half light.
Helen, too overwrought to make allowances, wondered how Keith had the
patience to answer them.
Presently, her attention was caught by a number of black shadows, like
wheelbarrows abnormally large and high.
‘What are those?’ she asked a porter, and discovered that they were
severely wounded men, on wheeled stretchers, either too brave or too
exhausted to utter a sound of complaint.
At that she could restrain herself no longer.
‘Keith,’ she exclaimed, flagrantly interrupting a Medical Authority with
a passion for cars, ‘_why_ are those unfortunate men kept hanging about
in this noisy place? Can’t we get four of them away?’
But Medical Authority checked her impatience in a tone of mild reproof.
‘Those fellows are all right where they are, Lady Forsyth,’ he said.
‘They’re not fit to be moved off their stretchers. So we’re waiting for
the trams. If you like to back into the station, you may pick up some
milder cases who’ll be glad of a lift.’
They backed in accordingly and picked up two maimed men and a remarkably
cheerful subaltern with his left arm in a sling and a bandage across one
eye. As they passed out, Keith offered to return for another load; and,
to Helen’s disgust, the offer was politely declined.
By the time they reached the field hospital—a collection of marquees,
fitted up with electric light—it was nearly ten o’clock.
‘Quite early; but as we don’t seem to be _wanted_, I suppose we must go
to bed,’ Helen remarked with doleful emphasis, as they re-settled the
car. ‘I feel distinctly snubbed. Four out of three hundred! What’s that?’
‘A beginning—and no bad one!’ Keith answered placidly, filling his pipe.
‘Fanshawe says if we report ourselves at Boulogne we shall get all the
work we want. There’s heavy fighting on the north—a big battle developing
for Ypres and Calais.’
To Boulogne they returned accordingly, and had no cause this time to feel
either snubbed or superfluous. There was still a famine of cars at the
Base and the wounded were arriving in thousands: their bodies mangled and
mutilated; their spirits, in the main, unquenched.
Macnair and his party drove up to their hotel at noon, and their greeting
from the Red Cross Authority was very much to the point.
‘All available cars wanted immediately at the Gare Maritime. Better get
some lunch first.’
That lunch was of the briefest. Keith dumped their luggage in the hall
without so much as asking if there were rooms to be had. Helen did
not even open the coveted letter from Mark till they were back in the
motor, speeding towards the bare unsheltered gare, where impromptu and
comfortless hospital trains disgorged their tragic loads. Mercifully the
sun of that miraculous autumn still shone unclouded; and, by the time
autumn gave place to the wettest winter in decades, better arrangements
had been made.
All that afternoon they worked unceasingly, and late into the night.
Back and forth, back and forth between station and hospital, jolting
inevitably over railway lines, and a strip of merciless cobble pavement
that, for men with shattered limbs, hurriedly dressed, involved several
minutes of excruciating agony.
‘Keith, couldn’t they possibly take up that cruel bit of _pavé_?’ Helen
pleaded after their seventh journey with three men at death’s door. ‘Even
a raw road would be better than those stones.’
‘I’ll move heaven and earth to get it improved,’ he assured her, little
guessing that he had pledged himself to a labour of Hercules.
* * * * *
By the time they could take breath and think about finding beds, they
were all dead weary, sustained only by the knowledge that they had given
their mite of service to the utmost of their power. In Mark’s letter,
which Helen had scarcely found time to read, there was a sentence on this
head that had haunted her brain throughout those strenuous hours.
‘Oh Mums, if only the good casual folk at home could be made _see_ even
the half of what we see in the way of wanton destruction and calculated
brutality, wherever the gentle German has left his trail, they’d possibly
begin to realise the powers of evil we’re up against in this war, and
things in general would march to a different tune. But they can’t _see_.
That’s the trouble. And hearing about such things isn’t the same at
all. If we’re ever going to win through hell to human conditions again,
it won’t be merely by signing cheques and making speeches, but by the
individual personal service of every man and woman in whatever capacity;
and I’m proud to feel you three are giving it like Trojans. God bless you
all!’
She stood gleaning a few more scraps under an electric light, when Keith
came up to say he had secured a room for her and Sheila; and a friendly
Irish doctor had offered him a bed in his hospital train.
‘I’m in great luck with my two assistants,’ he added, smiling down at her
eager, tired face. ‘Sheila betters my expectation, which is saying a good
deal. Her self-possession to-day astonished me. She’d have the nerve for
advance ambulance work in the firing line, I do believe. But I’m glad
we’ve got her safe here.’
He glanced towards her where she sat at a writing-table, scribbling a
hurried letter to Mark in praise of their mutually beloved Mums. Then he
went up and touched her shoulder.
‘Good-night, Sheila,’ he said. ‘Get to bed sharp, both of you. I’ll call
for you to-morrow.’
‘We’ll be ready early,’ she answered, looking up at him; and he
discovered, to his surprise, that her eyes were swimming in tears.
* * * * *
There was a certain monotony about the days of unremitting work that
followed—a monotony tinged with its own peculiar high lights and shadows;
with beauty and terror, fortitude and anguish, the incoming and outgoing
pulse-beat of life at the Base. Scarcely a day passed without some minor
incident, some flash of human revelation that none of them would forget
while they lived.
For Helen—with every nerve responsive to the suffering around them—the
strain of it all proved no light matter; yet, in retrospect, she counted
those terrible days as among the richest experiences of her life.
To her it was distracting that wounded men should suffer additional
miseries from the fact that even in two and a half months of war it had
been impossible to cope with all the complex needs of the situation.
Hospitals were few and quite inadequate. The magnificent ambulance
trains of later days were still in the workshops at home; while untiring
men on the spot did the best they could with the high, comfortless
passenger coaches of France. Even the more luxurious sleeping carriages
were too cramped for the ingress and egress of badly wounded men; and
when, at last, these were landed, like so many bales of goods, on the
unsheltered platform of the _gare_, shortage of ambulance cars and
trained stretcher-bearers added the finishing touch to their nightmare
journey. But soon after Keith’s arrival, the zeal and organisation of the
British Red Cross began to make themselves felt, in this respect as in
others. Every ambulance that could be raised in London was rushed across
to Boulogne, till in a few days there were eighty of one kind or another
plying between train and hospital and ship.
For all that, there was still need of superhuman exertion to cope,
even inadequately, with the terrible stream of wounded—the backwash,
as it were, from the Homeric struggle round Ypres. In that region the
Belgians were making their last desperate stand, and war-worn British
divisions—haggard, sleepless, cruelly depleted—were still miraculously
holding their own against army corps on army corps of fresh German
troops heartened by an overwhelming superiority in guns and shells.
There—during those awful days—whole battalions of the finest troops on
earth practically ceased to exist; and thence came the main influx of
comfortless, overcrowded trains.
Steadily the tale of wounded swelled, till it reached an average of two
thousand a day. And what were eighty cars among so many? Little better
than the five loaves and two small fishes in Galilee; and here was no
hope of miraculous intervention. The outstanding miracle of that golden
October—when England neither knew her peril nor the full cost of her
salvation—was the superhuman fortitude of those that were broken on the
wheel and the untiring energy of those who served them in the teeth of
baffling conditions.
Day after day the open platform was thronged with men on stretchers
in all stages of mental and bodily collapse: British, Indian, French,
Belgian, German—brothers all, for the moment, in suffering if in nothing
else. Some stared wildly and talked nonsense; some were apathetic; some
incurably cheerful, though often their wounds had not been dressed for
days.
The lack of trained stretcher-bearers was a serious difficulty till St.
John Ambulance Association came to the rescue. Porters, willing but
unskilful, did what they could. Keith himself, and others like him,
helped to carry scores of men. From early morning till near midnight the
cars of rescue ran to and fro; but in spite of every effort there were
unavoidable delays. Men died there on the stretchers, or in draughty
cars, while red-tape regulations kept them waiting outside hospitals and
ships. And that cruel strip of _pavé_ remained unsmoothed, though Keith
had pressed the point with unauthorised persistence. And Helen cursed—so
far as her ladyhood permitted—every time they crossed it with patients in
the last extremity.
The unceasing rush of work left small leisure for nightmares, or even
for anxiety; but the strain and pain of it were taxing her nerves to
breaking-point. Always, as they drew near the familiar crowded station,
there sprang the inevitable question: ‘Will it be Mark this time?’ But,
though the passing days brought many from his regiment, Mark was not
found among them.
As for Sheila, her sensitive spirit felt the test more acutely than
either of the elders, who kept watchful eyes on her, were allowed to
suspect. Only by clinging desperately to her childhood’s code of courage
could she save herself, at times, from the ignominy of collapse. It was
sustaining, too, to feel that Keith trusted her, that Helen relied on
her; and Mark’s occasional letters—full of a brotherly tenderness that
showed little in his speech—made it seem possible to win through anything
without flinching visibly. The fact that she could face this inferno
of pain and death and mental anguish without a sense of bitterness or
rebellion was more of an asset than she knew. It was, in fact, the
keystone of her character, the secret of her spiritual poise. For to
accept, actively to accept, spells capacity to transcend; but that she
had still to discover.
They had little time, any of them, for abstract or personal thought. The
war, and its pressing demands on them, constituted their life. Keith
had secured a small private sitting-room, where they could enjoy an
occasional evening of quiet and rest. But as work was seldom over till
near eleven, such oases were rare indeed. At times their heads felt
stunned with the eternal rattling to and fro, their hearts numbed by
contact with the awful harvest of a modern battlefield. But on the whole
they loved their work, and would not have been otherwhere for a kingdom.
They grew skilled in the art of talking the men’s minds away from their
sufferings; and Sheila—‘Mouse’ though she was—showed so notable a gift
for this form of spiritual healing, that Lady Forsyth finally christened
her ‘Queen of the Poor Things.’ Some mother-quality in her touch and tone
seemed to go straight to their hearts. Men who left the station groaning
and clenching their teeth, to keep the curses back, would surprisingly
soon be conjured into recounting their adventures, or, better still,
talking of wives and children at home.
Keith himself confessed that he had never properly appreciated the
British Tommy till he carried him wounded, and Helen lost her heart a
dozen times over. More than once, when they chanced upon men shattered
and bandaged past human recognition, she came very near losing her head;
but only once did she disgrace herself by fainting outright.
On that occasion Keith carried her straight back to their hotel, laid her
on the sofa and stayed by her till she was sufficiently recovered to feel
very much ashamed of herself.
‘Promise I won’t do it again,’ she assured him, as he stood leaning over
her.
‘No, that you _certainly_ won’t,’ he said sternly. ‘If ever you do, I
shall pack you straight off home. To-night, for a punishment, you’ll go
early to bed. Sheila will be quite safe with me.’
Argument and rebellion were useless. Moreover, she was honestly
exhausted, and before ten o’clock she was sound asleep. But even
weariness could not break the habit of short rest, and by one of the
morning she was amazingly wide awake.
Some distant sound had roused her, and now it drew nearer—footsteps and
voices; men cheering and singing of ‘la gloire’ and ‘la mort.’ Nearer
still they came, tramping along the pavement, till they were almost under
her open window.
Then she was aware of a discordant note in that gallant chorus. One
voice, raised in terror and remonstrance, was trying to dominate those
other voices that were obviously shouting it down.
‘J’ai peur! Mon Dieu, camarades, j’ai peur!’
The words reached her distinctly now. But the rest, unheeding, sang
louder than ever of ‘la mort’ and ‘la gloire.’
Possibly they were sorry for him. The coward is the unhappiest of men.
Yet he too, being ‘enfant de la patrie,’ must go, even as others went;
and Helen Forsyth, hearing him go, found the tears streaming down her
face—not for the coercion of one reluctant citizen, but for the unending
horror and misery of it all: the fear and the anguish and the calculated
cruelty that were so infinitely worse than death.
Sheila, sleeping the profound sleep of healthily exhausted youth, stirred
not an eyelash even when the noise was at its height. But for Helen that
pitiful interlude had put an end to rest and had opened the door to
nightmare memories and her own most private fears.
Since the letter that greeted her, there had been one barren field
post-card. Even that was ten days old. And away there, in the trenches,
the struggle seemed to wax fiercer every hour.
The blank parallelogram of her window gleamed pale grey before, in spite
of herself, she fell asleep.
* * * * *
The strain of Mark’s sudden silence told upon the others also. It was
tacitly assumed that postal arrangements were disorganised. Each hoped
that the rest believed in that consoling fiction; but privately, they
were sceptics all.
Helen continued to post his paper and her own thick envelope every other
day in the hope that he was still to be found somewhere in the terrible
maze of trenches that drew England’s best and bravest as a magnet draws
steel.
Meantime they were thankful for unremitting work—for the constant
movement and interest of life at the Base. Young officers, eager for
action, might be bored to extinction by a few weeks in camp or in one of
the crowded hotels; but an observer, blessed with humour and a large love
of human nature, could not fail to find at every turn food for thought,
for laughter and for tears.
War is neither all horror, nor all heroism, or it could not be waged
by flesh and blood. Soldiers who can die like gods, or fight as the
beasts that perish, are, in the intervals, men of like passions with
their kind. And genuine soldiers were scarce among those who now poured
into Boulogne, to fill the gaps in that dangerously thin line round
Ypres—Territorials and schoolmasters, clergymen and clerks, lords of
commerce and lords of the land; dissimilar in almost every essential,
yet welded together by one common resolve, one common faith: a crusade
indeed, as Mark had said.
And the manifold needs of a host undreamed of by the wildest, wickedest
‘militarists,’ demanded the existence of that other army chiefly
congregated at the Base: doctors, nurses, chaplains, ambulance folk,
owners of private cars, and those sorrowful birds of passage—relations
of dying or dangerously wounded men. On the quays, in streets and hotels
they thronged, those incongruous fragments of the world’s greatest drama;
and Lady Forsyth never tired of watching them or listening to their
snatches of talk. Neither weariness, nor nightmare visions, nor anxiety,
even, could blunt the edge of her keen interest in the human panorama.
‘Oh, Sheila, my lamb,’ she exclaimed one evening after a day of very
varied emotions, ‘aren’t people—all sorts and kinds of them—passionately
interesting? Even when I’m laid on the uttermost shelf I shall still be
always peeping over the edge!’
‘And you’ll always find _me_ peeping up at you,’ the girl answered,
smiling at the quaint conceit. ‘It’s simply wonderful, being with
you—through all this!’
A temporary lull in the stream of wounded was followed, too soon, by a
renewed rush of hospital trains filled to overflowing—the harvest of a
fresh German onslaught. But by this time there were more cars and more
stretcher-bearers. Ambulance trains, splendidly equipped, were being
hurried out from England; and the Customs sheds at the station had
become a great shelter, roughly partitioned into dressing-stations, for
those who had need of immediate care. From this seed of voluntary effort
there sprang up, in time, a big stationary hospital; but by then the
Forsyth-Macnair car was needed elsewhere.
Meantime, in every effort to minimise the sufferings of the men he
served, Keith was actively to the fore. Helen herself was amazed at
his energy and versatility—he whom she had hitherto regarded as a man
wedded entirely to books and thought. But among all the surprises of a
war rich in surprise, good and evil, were none more remarkable than such
unlooked-for revelations of human capacity and character.
Day in, day out, the work went on. There were strange discoveries, sad
and glad, on that ever-crowded platform; but of the three they looked
for—Mark, Maurice and Ralph—never a sign, as yet.
(_To be continued._)
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