Part 12

There is, we believe, a large number of people who regard this fighting spirit as a purely animal quality; recently, indeed, a certain professor delivered a lecture on the subject of wild dogs and wolves who fight in packs, with special reference to the present state of humanity. These thinkers, sitting at ease in their armchairs, placid materialists, who have never known their own souls, much less do they know those of their countrymen. What we saw in our soldier’s eyes was, we swear, the leap of the spirit--the fine steel of the soul springing out of the scabbard of the body, the fire from the clay. Carlyle has somewhere a lovely phrase anent that spark of heroism that will burn in the heart of the lowest British soldier, the poorest, dullest peasant lad, and make of him hero and martyr, enable him to face long agony and death, endure as well as charge.

So H. flung off his languor and dashed out of his armchair and sprang to the telephone to order himself a car, and presently departed, already invisibly armed, in search of--this time--an invisible foe. For the foe was invisible!

No one knew whence the scare had come; whether there were any real justification for the preparations which were certainly ordered. The regiment which had had to pack up again just as it had got into its billets, and go back to Aldershot in the very middle of its dinner, was kept under arms all night; but there was never the point of a single _Pickelhaube_ visible on the horizon at Sheringham or elsewhere. And on examination it turned out that the “Chief Constable” of the county, that unimpeachable and alarming authority, had been none other than the local policeman, which was a comedown indeed! But the thrill was not altogether unpleasant, and we like to remember the sick soldier springing up, that St. Michael fire in his blue eyes.

* * * * *

In a short account written for his school magazine, H. summarizes the experiences of his own regiment at Ypres thus:

“All the officers in my company are wounded or invalided. The men are very cheerful under all the hardships and losses, and their behaviour under fire is splendid. The Brigade (5th) has been taken three times at least to ‘mend the line’ where the Germans had broken through. From October 24 to November 5 my regiment lost about 450 officers and men--mostly, thank God, wounded. The Germans can’t shoot for nuts, but their artillery fire is accurate and _incessant_, and the machine-guns very deadly.”

* * * * *

There is nothing more touching than the devotion of the officers to their men. They feel towards them truly as if they were their children.

“No officer,” said the widow of a great general to us the other day, “ever thinks of himself in action, ever casts a thought to the bullets flying about him. Indeed, the officers don’t seem to believe they can get hit; they’re so occupied in looking after their men. All the time they’re looking at their men.”

Even as we write these lines we see the death, in the Dardanelles, of a young officer who had been under H. when he was training reserves during his recent period of convalescent home service. This youth was, in our brother’s eyes, the perfection of young manhood. He prophesied for him great things. He told us many stories of his quaint humour and incisive wit. One anecdote remains. Among their recruits were between twenty and thirty extremely bad characters--slack, undisciplined fellows, worthless material belonging almost to the criminal classes. After working in vain with all his energy to endeavour to put some kind of soldierly discipline into them, young W. paraded them in the barrack yard, and addressed them in the following language:

“His Majesty’s Government cannot afford nowadays to spend money uselessly. You are a dead waste to the nation. You are not worth the food you get nor the clothes you wear. It has been decided, therefore, to send you to the front; and, as every man is bound to do his utmost to help his country in the present crisis, it is earnestly to be hoped that you will, each one of you, endeavour to get himself shot as soon as possible.”

We understand that the result of this stringent discourse on that “bad hat” squad was miraculous, although the sergeant-major was so overcome with mirth that he had to retire to give vent to it.

This boy had been serving in the East in a wild and difficult district, and had distinguished himself so remarkably that he was summoned to the Foreign Office to advise upon an expedition which it was proposed to send to those regions. Never was there any life so full of promise. Gay and gallant youth, it seems a cruel decree that the bullet of some vile Turk should have had the power to rob England of a son so likely to do her signal honour and service in the future. “It is the best that are taken”--a phrase sadly familiar just now that finds only too true an echo in everyone’s experience.

There was another, whom we had known from the time when he was an apple-cheeked little boy in petticoats--a sunny, level-headed child, who gave the minimum of trouble and the maximum of satisfaction to his parents from the moment of his appearance on this earth. All his short life always busy, always happy. His mother said that she had never seen a frown of discontent on his face. Head boy at Harrow, where the authorities begged to be allowed to keep him on another year for the sake of the good example he gave; writer of the prize essay three years running; winner of all the cups for athletics; champion boxer and fencer--with these brilliant qualities he had--rare combination indeed!--a steady, well-balanced mind. With high ideals he had a sober judgment. He was but twenty. With all these achievements--splendid lad!--he fell leading his platoon of Highlanders at Aubers upon that most ill-fated, most tragic 9th of May.

“I always wanted my son to be just like Keith”--more than one friend gave this tribute to the stricken father.

Characteristic of the unchanged romantic mysticism that lies deep in the hearts of the Scots--Scots of the glens and hills--are the words in which the local paper refers to the loss which had befallen the country in the death of the gallant young officer: “He died like a Stewart: he dreed his weird, he drank the cup of his race!”

It is the fine flower of our young manhood that is being mown down. What is to become of England, robbed of her best? It seems such waste and loss; we who cannot fight feel at times as if the pressure of such calamity “doth make our very tears like unto bloode.” But we must believe that it is not waste, but seed; that the nations who sow in tears will reap in joy; that each of these young lives, so gladly given, shares in the redemption of the country; that, in all reverence, in all faith, that they are mystically united to Calvary; and that their glory will be presently shown forth even as in the glory of resurrection!

A correspondent writing from the front describes the expression in the eyes of the friendly officer, who has been his guide, as he pointed out the myriad crosses of the burial-ground. “He looked envious,” he says, and adds that he noticed that all out there “speak with envy of the dead.”

Is not the nation’s honour sharpened to its finest point when the ideal of its manhood is to die for the country? _Dulce et decorum...._

We were very glad, nevertheless, when, in spite of his repeated applications to return to his own men, H. was ordered to take a command in the Persian Gulf. The link that binds a man to comrades with whom he has shared every possible danger and hardship, to those who have faced death with him, whom he has himself led on to peril and agony, the while they have been to him as his children--such a link is indeed one that is hard to break! Their peril has been his; their glory is his pride.

“If I can single out one regiment for special praise,” said the Commander-in-Chief, “it is the Worcesters.”

And again:

“I consider the Worcesters saved Europe on that day.”

It is no wonder that H. should be proud of them; that the thousand fibres should draw him back to them.

But, when the summons came, he was told “to prepare for a hot climate.” And then, of all strange things, or so it seemed to us, we found that his destination was Persia. The Garden of Eden! Further, it was rumoured, the objective was likely to be Bagdad. It sounded like a fairy tale. He promised us Attar of Roses; and indeed, we think, carpets. And a flippant niece wrote to him that she was sure that by a little perseverance he could find a magic one, and come sailing across the sky some night after duty, like the merchant in the Arabian nights. She added: “And do bring me a hanging garden, if you can.” But when the parting came it was a very cruel reality. It’s a far cry to Persia!

He started on the day of the sinking of the _Lusitania_; a date branded on the history of the world till the end of all time. The two who had gone to fetch him and brought him home--so contented in their tender anxiety that he was safely wounded--saw him on board the great liner.

Many Indians returning to Bombay, a few officers ordered to his own destination, a batch of nurses for Malta, and one or two ladies hurrying to their sons wounded in the Dardanelles--these were all his fellow-passengers.

It somewhat restored our confidence, shaken by the facile success of the monstrous crime, to know that they were to be convoyed a certain way, and that they had a gun on board. Nevertheless, they were not to escape menace.

“The evening we started,” he wrote, “I asked the steward if they had seen any submarines about. ‘No, sir,’ he admitted reluctantly. Then brightened up, anxious to oblige, ‘But we have seen a lot of luggage floating about--trunks and clothes, sir.’”

(It was obvious no passenger need give up hope; and, indeed, the letter posted at Gibraltar continues):--

“I have had no occasion to use your lifesaving waistcoat yet, though, as a matter of fact, we _had_ a small-sized adventure with a submarine. At dinner on Monday we felt that they had suddenly altered the ship’s course. It appears that a submarine was spotted about five hundred yards away. The captain slewed the vessel round to bring our one gun to bear on her. However, the smoke obscured our view, and the submarine must have seen our gun, as she disappeared.”

Then comes an anecdote, dreadfully characteristic of our happy-go-lucky English ways, a comedy that might have been--for this house, at least, God knows!--the direst tragedy.

“Next day,” he continues, “we had gun practice, but it turned out that none of the gun’s crew knew how to work her; and after fumbling for about two hours, a passenger came along and showed them how to manage her, and fired her off. We all cheered.”

The next stage on that lengthening journey that is to take him so unrealizably far away from us is Malta. The place laid its spell upon him, though at first he writes:

“From the ship both islands looked most unprepossessing: dry, arid, khaki-coloured lumps, full of khaki-coloured buildings. Once on shore one begins to love the place. The buildings, fortifications, and general spirit are most inspiring and grandiose. One expects to see some proud old Templar riding down the gay streets, looking neither to the right nor left. I had no time to do any of the right Cathedrals, where there are wonderful paintings by Michael Angelo, etc., nor the Grand Master’s Palace Armoury, with the knight’s armour, nor the Inquisitor’s Palace. I went off to look for wounded Worcesters from the Dardanelles. I had no time to see anything else as the hospital was a long way off.

“Every hole and corner is turned into a beautiful garden, with lovely flowers and ‘penetrating scents,’ fountains, and shady palms and trees.

“How you would revel in the churches! They are more numerous than in Rome, and quite beautiful. The people, too, are intensely religious.

“There are many French shops here, and the French women look tawdry beside the Maltese, with their wonderful black cloaks and reserved aristocratic air.

“I am sending you a weird map full of quaint spelling, given to me by a wounded Worcestershire (4th Batt.) sergeant, at the hospital at Malta, and a rough idea of the difficulties of the landing. Early on one Monday morning, about 1 a.m., the ships got into position round the promontory, with the troop lighters behind. About 4 a.m. the latter were towed off during a bombardment such as never has been heard or seen before in the history of the world.

“The Turks did not reply till the boats got quite close to shore and the ships’ guns could not fire on the located maxims (which were sunk in deep, narrow slips close to the shore). As far as I gathered, the Lancashire Fusiliers were the first actually to get on shore on the extreme left at Tekki Barna, where they charged with the bayonet and the Turks retired. They were able to enfilade a good portion of the ground, and enabled the Essex and 4th Worcesters, both of whom had suffered very heavily from Maxim fire, to land and drive the Turks back. Three boatloads of Dublin Fusiliers were wiped out by gun and Maxim fire near Ish Messarer point. The Lancashire Fusiliers suffered rather badly from the fire of some of our ships’ guns, which, of course, could not be helped.

“The Worcesters were sent up to help the Essex, and advanced against some barbed wire, which a young subaltern called Wyse volunteered to cut. He rolled over sideways till he got under the wire and cut it from strand to strand upwards. As he got to the last strand a sniper shot off two fingers in successive shots.

“The snipers had their faces painted green to harmonize with the surroundings, and were calmly surrendering as we advanced, having picked off numbers of men. They were all shot, however, _pour encourager les autres_.

“My sergeant was shot in the hip that evening, but he told me that by Wednesday the troops had secured Envedos, a most important position, and the safe landing of stores and guns was thus secured.

“He said the Turks either ran from the bayonet or surrendered. The prisoners said they did not want to fight, but were forced to do so by the Germans.

“The ships are in their more or less correct position in the map, the sergeant says, as he took trouble to find out from a naval chart.”

From Malta to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Aden, and from thence to Bombay. His letters mark each point of his Odyssey. And at Alexandria he is fascinated with the movement and colour; he goes on shore and visits the shops; he parts from the delightful American lady who has been the life and soul of the ship; she whose wounded son awaits her in Cairo. At Aden, the heat striking at them from the shore prevents him from landing; an unattractive torrid spot. Here they take in a young Indian Government official, who gives an interesting detail upon his destination:

“He knew Wilcox very well, the man who was going to make the barrage on the Euphrates and Tigris, and convert Mesopotamia into the richest country in the world. Wilcox said he found all the details given in the Bible about the various depths and breadths of the rivers absolutely accurate--curious after all these centuries!”

At Bombay he has a pleasant time; a brother officer having wired to relations who take him about and show him what is most worth seeing in his short stay. He puts up at the Bombay Yacht Club, “wonderful place, like fairyland, with palms and fountains and music, with cool, quiet rooms looking out over wide and lovely views.” He goes on long drives “under trees that grow for miles and miles along the sea coast, where the graceful-moving natives in their bright colours look awfully picturesque.”

He sees the famous towers of silence where, with effective, but no doubt quite unconscious, alliteration, he describes “the ghoulish vultures sitting grimly in the glorious gold mohur trees.”

His last letter says: “I start on Sunday for Bosra.”

He believes that they will remain at Bosra, and makes little of the fact that the heat is terrible there just now.

“We will live in cool underground rooms,” he says, “and be all right!”

And now we know that we shall not have news of him again for a long time. A thousand anxieties assail us, for which we can have no reassurance. We picture him in that strange region, but realize that of its strangeness we can form no real image.

He will see the dead cities and the great desert wastes and the swamps--it is in those swamps under the merciless sun that our terror lies; he will deal with a fierce and treacherous people whose thoughts are not as our thoughts, whose motives and beliefs are irreconcilably alien; and this dangerous race is fermenting under the influences, the money, the lies, the ceaseless open and secret poison leaven of a race more treacherous, more dangerous still.

Blinding sunshine, black shadows, arid stretches of dried earth and mud and burnt vegetation; the colour of the Eastern crowd, the river waters and the harbour stretch; the Arab and the Kurd, the Turk, the Armenian, and the Jew, sights and scenes and creatures that have been but as names to us, are about him. He has followed the drum from Cape Town to Magaliesburg, from Bloemfontein to Bethlehem, from Gibraltar to Cork, from Soupir to Ypres, from Ypres to Plymouth, and from Plymouth to the Euphrates; he has left his cool, green Ireland, his hunting and his fishing, his own wide acres and the rural life among his beasts for this picturesque, unknown, uncertain destiny!

Often in the long hot hours will not his mind go back to those stretches of shady, luxuriant park land where his cattle feed; to the great lime avenue with the voice of the bees; the circle of the purple hills, the woods, those incomparable woods of our old home with their cool depths of bracken, silver green; the dells, the climbing roads, the view over the “deer-park” to the sunset, which impressed even our childish imaginations; the voice of the wild pigeons through the trees; and the immense white house--empty--which before this war broke out, he was about to furnish; the corridors, the vast rooms full of memories; latterly, to us, of hopes. His heart will be there, we know.

And his home is guarded by his faithful Spanish servant, who followed him, out of love, from those far Gibraltar days of his young soldier’s life; who, when a legacy made of him a comparatively rich man, refused to profit of it, and sent the money back to a distant relative in Spain, saying: “What do I want of it? You, my master, you, my father, you, my mother, you, my country, you, all I want!” Pedro, by a singular freak of fate, ruling this Irish land with an equal zeal and ability, writes to us: “I pray my dere master may come home safe. I have great hope in Our Lady, the Mother of God.”

What is left to us, too, but a similar trust? We can but commend him to the Father of All that He may overshadow him with His shoulders; that the sun should not burn him by day, nor the moon by night; that he may be guarded from the arrow that flieth by day, from the assault of the evil one in the noontide!

X

A THREE DAYS’ CHRONICLE

“Happy in England! I could be content To see no other verdure than its own: To feel no other breezes than are blown Through the tall woods with high romances blent; Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment For skies Italian....”

KEATS.

_June 29, 1915._--The feast of Peter and Paul comes round with a new significance. In war time we learn the meaning of so much that has seemed unimportant; of things hidden away at the back of our consciousness--things neglected, unknown, or even despised--and we learn, too, the worthlessness of so much that has seemed paramount and necessary, desirable and precious. War is a stern master. He teaches above all the relative values; how to weigh the greater against the less; how to fling away with one superb gesture the whole sum of human possessions for a single imperishable prize.

“What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

He who spoke these words gently to a handful of poor Jews now seems to cry them with a voice of thunder from end to end of the earth.

Thus, this, their festival day, brings the two great champions of the Cross--and it is for Christ and the Cross that every son of England is fighting to-day--before our minds with a singular vividness and nearness: Peter, type of the natural man, untutored; sure of himself and of his own good impulses, of the honest purpose of his guileless heart; impetuous, loving, weak, with all purely human weakness, even to betrayal; and--divinely strengthened--Peter the rock, Peter the fisherman who conquered the world! Paul, the Patrician, the apostle born out of due time, whose ardour is all of the intellect, keen as a blade and burning as a flame; the little man of Tarsus upon whose spirit the teaching of all Christianity reposes as firmly to-day as does the Church upon the stone of Peter; Paul, whom the Captain, Christ Himself, enlisted by the miraculous condescension of a personal appeal. Has not every Christian, whatever his creed, vowed them reverence throughout all the ages? To-day, may not the eyes of the believer look up to them with a new confidence?

The Signora, lying through a wakeful night and thinking of these things, went with a rush of memory back to Rome, to scenes and experiences and thoughts dominated by the memories of the two chief apostles.

There is nothing more characteristic of their lives than the different manners of their death. Peter is Peter to the end; first yielding to the natural impulse, then, by virtue of the grace of God, returning upon himself and leaping to the highest altitude of superhuman sacrifice. In the whole tradition of the Church there is no legend more touching than that which tells us how Peter, flying out of Rome, met the Christ carrying the Cross. It is the original Peter in all his guilelessness who, unstartled by the vision, with the perfect simplicity of his faith, asks: “_Domine quo vadis?_” And it is the sublime founder of the Church of God who, unquestioning, accepts the Master’s rebuke, and retraces his steps to face his Lord’s torment with the added agony his own holy humility demands.

Every pilgrim to Rome has knelt or stood, prayed or pondered at the tomb of Peter in the golden twilight of the great Basilica, by the vastness of which, as Marion Crawford says, “mind and judgment are dazed and staggered.” Who has not leant on the marble balustrade of the confession and looked down upon the ninety-five gilded lamps that burn there day and night, upon the kneeling white figure of the Seventh Pius?--a vision in which the whole linked grandeur and piety of the Church of Rome seems epitomized. In St. Peter’s, Simon, the poor fisherman, is little thought of; it is Peter, saint and pontiff, who is paramount; he who has miraculously fed the lambs and fed the sheep from that hour on the sea of Galilee to this day. And very few remember the old man, too weak and aged to bear his cross, who had climbed half-way to the Janiculum, when his executioners, seeing that he could not advance any further, planted his gibbet in the deep yellow sand and crucified him then and there--head downwards, as he begged them. This is the ancient tradition, and it further tells us that he was followed by but few of the faithful, who stood apart, weeping.

Impressive as are these hallowed spots, these glorious memorials of the Eternal City; however full, to the believer, of the atmosphere of the days of faith--oases in the great desert of life, where the palms of the martyrs are still green and throw a grateful shade--there is nothing, to our minds, in all the grandeur of Rome, even under the dome of Peter, comparable to the effect produced upon the mind by a visit to Tre Fontane.