Part 15

Toward the end of his life a shadow darkened his spirit, though it did not dim his eyes or the fire that still burnt in him, as when, half a century before, he blew up the gates of Delhi and brought relief to the beleaguered survivors. He saw very clearly the approach of the German menace to Europe and that war in which we should be involved, unprepared, without a national army, with untrained men. Again and again he tried to warn the nation of its impending peril, of the tremendous forces preparing the destruction of its youth, and he devoted the last years of his life in another attempt to induce Great Britain to adopt some form of compulsory military service, without avail.

I remember traveling down to his house at Ascot on the morning following one of those speeches in the House of Lords. I went to ask him to write some reminiscences for a weekly paper. He would not listen to that, and when we sat together in a first-class carriage on the way to town (I had a third-class ticket!) he buried himself behind _The Times_, and was disinclined to talk. But I was inclined to talk, because it is not often that I should sit alone with “Our Bobs,” and when I caught his eye over the top of _The Times_, I ventured a remark which I thought might please him.

“Powerful speech of yours, sir, last night!”

He put down _The Times_, and stared at me, moodily.

“Do you think so? Shall I tell you what the British people think of me?”

“What is that, sir?”

“They think I’m a damned old fool, scare mongering and raising silly bogies. That’s what they think of my speech.”

And it was true, and to some extent I agreed with them, as I must confess, not believing much in the German menace, and believing anyhow that by wise diplomacy, a little tact, friendly demonstrations to a friendly folk, we might disarm the power of the military caste and insure peace.

“All the same,” said Lord Roberts, “I talk of what I know. Germany is preparing for war--and we have no army such as we shall need when it happens.”

It was to my brother, Cosmo Hamilton, then editor of _The World_ in London, that Lord Roberts detailed his scheme of military service. A series of articles, published anonymously in that paper, attracted considerable interest among the small crowd who believed in a big army of defense, but no one knew that every word of them was dictated by Lord Roberts to my brother, as his last message to the nation--before the storm broke.

It was fitting that the little old soldier whose life covered a great span of our imperial history in so many wars, which now some of us look back to without much pride except in the ceaseless courage and the gay adventurous spirit of our officers and men, should die, if not on the field of battle, then at least at General Headquarters within sound of the guns. He had been a prophet of this war. Perhaps if we had believed him more, and if our statesmen and people had realized the frightful menace ahead, it might never have happened. But those “ifs” belong to the irrevocable tragedy of history.

I was a war correspondent in France when he died, but I came back to England to attend his funeral and write my tribute to this great and gallant old man who, in spite of a life of war, or because of it, had a great tenderness in his heart for humanity, a love of peace, and the chivalry which belonged, at least in ideal, to the old code of knighthood.

Going back to the subject of the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, it is amusing to me to remember an interview I had which, at the time, was rather painful. We were anxious to obtain the support of Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice, on the General Committee, and I drove up in a hansom to his house in Kensington, to put the request before him.

I wore that day a “topper” and a tail coat, and looked so extremely respectable that I impressed the critical eyes of his lordship’s footman. He explained that Lord Alverstone had been away on circuit but was due back very shortly that afternoon. Perhaps I might like to wait for him. I agreed, and was shown into the Lord Chief’s study, where I waited for something like an hour.

During that time I became aware that if I were of a curious and dishonorable mind, I might learn many strange secrets in this room. Bundles of letters and documents were lying on the Lord Chief’s desk. The drawers were unlocked, as I could see by papers revealed in them. A “crook” in this room might get hold of the seals, the writing paper, the signature, and the private correspondence of the Lord Chief Justice of England, and play a great game with them. It seemed to me extraordinary that a footman should put an unknown visitor, on unknown business, into this private room, and leave him there for nearly an hour.

The Lord Chief thought so, too. Just as I was becoming uneasy at my position to the point of ringing the bell and going away, there was a bang at the front door, followed by heavy footsteps in the hall. Then I heard a deep and angry voice say, “Who is he?” A moment later the door of the study was flung open and the great and rather terrifying figure of Lord Alverstone strode in. He stared at me as though about to sentence me to death, and I blenched under his gaze.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked, with a growl of rage and suspicion. “What the devil do you mean by taking possession of my study?”

“Why did your footman show me in, and what do you mean by speaking to me like that?” I answered, suddenly angered by his extraordinary discourtesy.

It was not a good introduction to the subject of Shakespeare. Nor was it a respectful way of address to the Lord Chief Justice of England. But my reply seemed to reassure him as to my respectability. He breathed heavily for a moment, and then, in a mild voice, requested to know my business. When I told him I wished to enlist his aid on the Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial, a twinkle of humor came into his eyes, and he asked me to sit down and have a cigar while we chatted over the subject. He agreed to give his name and a subscription. Before I left, he made a half apology for his burst of anger at the sight of me.

“There are lots of papers about this room.... I have to be careful.”

Then he put his heavy hand in a friendly way on my shoulder and said, “Glad you came.”

I was jolly glad to go, but I thought in case of any accident that might happen to me later it would be useful to have the favor of the Lord Chief. I thought so when I saw him sitting below the sword of justice, in all his terrible power.

From the little flat in Overstrand Mansions my wife and I and a small boy aged four sent out thousands of invitations on behalf of the committee which included his name, to a general public meeting at the Mansion House. The small boy trundled those bundles of letters in his wheelbarrow to the pillar box and insisted upon being lifted up to thrust them into the red mouth of that receptacle. We stuffed it full, to the great annoyance, I imagine, of the postman.

The public meeting was a splendid success. Israel Gollancz was happy, Beerbohm Tree was brilliant. Anthony Hope made one of his charming speeches. Bernard Shaw was surprisingly kind to Shakespeare. There were columns about it in the newspapers. But though many years have passed, the Shakespeare Memorial is still in the air, the Committee is still quarreling with one another as to the best way of using their funds, and Sir Israel Gollancz is still honorary secretary, trying in his genial way to compromise between a hundred conflicting plans.

XV

In September of 1912 war broke out in the Balkans and, though we knew it not at the time, it was the overture to another war in which the whole world would be involved.

This seemed to be no more than a gathering of semi-civilized peoples--Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro--joined together in military alliance and by an old heritage of hatred against the Turk in Europe. Behind that combination, however, there were Great Powers, watching this affair with jealous hostility, with brooding anxiety, and with racial, dynastic, and financial interests closely touched. Russia was behind Serbia, whose hatred of Austria was equaled only by its fear that Austria might attack it in the rear when it marched against the Turks. Germany was behind the Turks, afraid of a Russian intervention. Serbia’s claim for “an open window,” on the Adriatic would not be tolerated by the Austrian Empire. The Greek claim to Crete and the dream of getting back to Asia Minor would arouse the jealousy of France and Italy. There was in this Balkan business a devil’s brew to poison the system of international relations, and behind the scenes corrupt interests of armament firms, Jewish money lenders, international financiers, were working in secret, sinister ways for great stakes.

Before war was actually declared, I set out for Serbia, on the way to Bulgaria, as “artist correspondent” of _The Graphic_ and _Daily Graphic_, a title that amused me a good deal, as my artistic talent was of a most elementary kind. All I was required to do, however, was to provide the roughest sketches to be worked up by artists at home.

I was excited by this chance of becoming a war correspondent, which seemed to me the crown of journalistic ambition, and the heart of its adventure and romance. I little knew then that my squalid experience in this Balkan campaign would be but the first faint whiff of war with which, two years later, like most other men of my age, I was to become familiar in its daily routine, in the midst of its monstrous melodrama.

Provided with enough notebooks and sketchbooks to write and illustrate a history of the world, and enriched with a belt of gold which weighed heavy and chafed my waistline, I had an uneventful journey as far as the Danube below Belgrade. Then it brightened up a little. After my passports had been examined by a fat Serbian officer in a highly decorated uniform, my baggage was pounced on by a band of hairy brigands who, without paying the slightest attention to me, proceeded to fight among themselves for my bags. They shouted and cursed each other, exchanging lusty blows, and it was full twenty minutes before the victors piled my baggage into a miserable cab drawn by two starved horses, and allowed me to go, after heavy payment. My driver whipped up his bags of bones and started off on a wild career over the roads of Belgrade, that is to say, over rock-strewn quagmires and gaping pits. The carriage lurched from one side to another, with its wheels deep in the ruts, or high on piles of stones, and at times it seemed to me that only a miracle could save me from instant death.

The city of Belgrade, perched high above the Danube, with old, narrow, filthy streets within its walls, was filled with crowds of peasants mobilized for the war which had not yet been declared. Many of them had come from remote villages, and looked as if they had come from the Middle Ages. Some wore sheepskin coats with the shaggy wool inside and the skin decorated with crude paintings or garish embroideries. Others had woolen vests and a loose undergarment reaching like a kilt to their knees. Nearly all of them wore loose gaiters, worked with red stitches, or white woolen buskins. Others wore flat, oval sandals, almost as big as a tennis racquet, or shoes turned up at the toes with sharp peaks.

A wild cavalcade came riding down from the hills, like the hordes of Ghengis Khan. Their black hair was long and matted, beneath sheepskin caps or broad-brimmed hats. Pistols bristled in their red sashes, and they stood up, yelling, above saddles made of fagots tied to a piece of skin, cracking long whips, and urging on hairy little horses with rope reins and stirrups.

I had not been in Belgrade more than a few hours when I was arrested as an Austrian spy. Anxious to begin work as an “artist correspondent,” I made a rough sketch of a crowd of reservists waiting to entrain. Suddenly two soldiers fell upon me, took me prisoner, and hauled me through the streets, followed by a yelling crowd. Speaking only Serbian, they paid no heed to my protests in English, French, and German. In the police headquarters, I had the same difficulty with the commandant, who had one language and perfect conviction that I was an Austrian and a spy. After a weary time, when I thought of a white wall and a firing party, an interpreter appeared and listened to my efforts at explanation in bad German. The sketch was what alarmed them, as well it might have done, if they had any artistic sense. Finally, I was allowed to go, after a close investigation of my papers.

That night news came that the Montenegrins had fired the first shots in a war that was now certain, though still undeclared, and the streets were thronged with crowds drunk with emotion. I went to a café filled with Serbian officers, most of whom were amateur soldiers who had been professors, lawyers, doctors, and business men in civil life. They drank innumerable toasts, shouted and cheered, even wept a little.

At my table one, who spoke English, raised his glass and said, “Here’s to our first meal in Constantinople!” Later, having drunk much wine, he confided to me in a whisper, that he was deeply anxious. No one knew the power of the Turk, and he added gloomily, “War is an uncertain thing.”

There was an immense rally of correspondents, photographers, and cinema men in Belgrade, all desperate to get to the front with the Serbians, or the Bulgarians, or the Greeks. Some of the “old guard” were there, like Frederic Villiers, Henry Nevinson, and Bennett Burleigh, who had been in many campaigns before I was born. Frederic Villiers had a wonderful kit, with a glorious leather coat, and looked a romantic old figure. His pencil, his pocket knife, his compass, were fastened to his waist belt by steel chains. He still played the part of the war correspondent familiar in romantic melodrama. Among the younger crowd was Percival Phillips, afterward my comrade from first to last in a greater and longer war. It was then that I first become acquainted with his rapid way on a typewriter, on which he rattled out words like bursts of machine-gun fire.

After waiting about Belgrade for some days, I left Serbia and traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where I hoped to be attached to the Bulgarian army. It was a horrible experience. Before the train started there was a wild stampede by a battalion of reservists and Bulgarian peasants. I narrowly escaped getting jabbed by long bayonets, as the men scrambled on to the train, storming the doorways and clambering on to the roof. When at last I got on board, I found myself wedged in the corridor between piles of baggage, peasants, and soldiers. I had only a piece of cheese and a little drop of brandy, and I cursed myself for my folly when I found that the journey was likely to take two days. We stopped at every wayside station, and were then turned out at night on the platform at Sarabrot, hungry, chilled to the bone, with a biting wind and hard frost, and without a place in which to lay our heads.

Here we waited all night till dawn, and the one room in which there was shelter from the wind was crowded to suffocation by peasants lying asleep on their bundles, and was filled with a foul, sickening heat. One fantastic figure stood among the Serbians with their peaked caps, leather coats, and baggy white breeches. He wore a frock coat and tall hat, and looked as though he had just stepped out of the Rue de Rivoli. He was a French journalist on his way to the front!

Outside the station door there was, all night long, the tramp of soldiers, as battalion after battalion of Serbian troops marched up to entrain for the front. Officers moved up and down the ranks with lanterns which threw pallid rays of light upon these gray-clad men. Presently a long troop train came into Sarabrot, and the soldiers were packed into open trucks, so tightly that they could not move. Their bayonets made a quickset hedge above each truck. They were utterly silent. There was no laughing or singing now. These young peasants were like cattle being carried to the slaughterhouses.

It was a night of queer conversations for me. One man slouched up in the dim light, and said, “I guess you’re an Englishman, anyhow?” I returned the compliment, saying, “You’re an American, of course?” But I was wrong. He was a Bulgarian who had been in America for a few years and had now come back, in a thin flannel suit, and a straw hat, from a township in the Western states.

“I heard the call,” he told me, “and I’m ready to take my place in the firing line. I’ll be glad to give hell to the Turks.”

I was as dirty as a Bulgarian peasant, and exhausted with hunger, when at last I reached Sofia.

Still war had not been declared, but its spirit reigned in Sofia. Outside the old white mosque, with its tall and slender minaret--the one thing of beauty which had been inherited from the Turks--there passed all day long companies of soldiers, heavily laden in their field kit, and bands of Macedonian volunteers. Through the streets there was the rumble of bullock wagons and forage carts, drawn by buffaloes. On the plain of Slivnitza, the old battle ground between the Bulgars and Serbians, there were great camps of the Macedonians who drilled all day long, and at intervals shouted strange war cries, and flung up their fur caps, while, from primitive bagpipes, there came a squealing as though a herd of pigs were being killed. In the ranks stood many young girls, dressed in the rough sheepskin jackets and white woolen trousers of their men folk, and serving as soldiers. Bullocks and buffaloes roamed in the outskirts of their camps, and when darkness crept down the distant mountains the light of camp fires turned a lurid glare upon the scene.

One night in Sofia a few of us heard that the Turkish Ambassador had handed in his papers, and driven to the station, where a train was waiting for him. That meant war. A few hours later King Ferdinand signed a manifesto, proclaiming it to his people, and then delayed its publication for twenty-four hours while he stole away from his capital, leaving his flag flying above the palace, to his headquarters at Stara Zagora. It was as though he was frightened of his people.

He need not have been. Those Bulgarian folk, whose sons and brothers were already on their way to the front, behaved as all people do when the spell of war first comes to them, before its disillusion and its horror. They greeted it as joyful tidings. The great bell of the cathedral boomed out above the peals of innumerable bells with vaguely clashing notes. That morning in the cathedral, a Te Deum was sung before Queen Eleanor and all the Ministers of State. It was market day, and thousands of women had come in from the country districts, with market produce and great milk cans slung across their shoulders on big poles, glistening like quicksilver in the brilliant sunlight. In their white headdresses, short embroidered kirtles, and lace petticoats, they made a pretty picture as they pressed toward the great cathedral. The square was filled with Macedonian peasants, in their sheepskins and white woolen trousers, standing bareheaded and reverent before the cathedral doors. There were remarkable faces among them, belonging to young men with long flaxen hair, parted in the middle and waving on each side, like pictures of John the Baptist. Others were old, old fellows, with brown, rugged faces, white beards, and bent backs, who, in their ragged skins and fur caps, looked like a gathering of Rip van Winkles down from the mountains....

After exasperating delays, the correspondents of all countries--a wild horde--who had come to describe this war, as though its bloody melodrama had been staged as a spectacle for a dull world, were allowed to proceed to Stara Zagora, where King Ferdinand had established his headquarters. A special train was provided for this amazing crowd, accompanied by the military _attachés_, and a large number of Bulgarian staff officers. The journey was uneventful, except for a strange sign in the heavens, which seemed a portent of ill omen for the Bulgarians. As night came over the Rhodope Mountains, there rose a crescent moon with one bright star in the curve of its scimitar. It was the Turkish emblem, and the Bulgarian officers, who had been chatting gayly in the corridor, became silent and moody.

In the town of Stara Zagora, which my humorous friend Ludovic Nodeau called invariably Cascara Sagrada, I came in touch for the first time with the spirit of the Near East. It was Oriental in its architecture, in its dirt, in its smell, and in its human types. Turkish minarets rose above the huddle of houses. Turkish houses, with their lattice casements and ironwork grilles, high up in whitewashed walls, were among the Bulgarian hovels, shops, and churches. Mohammedan women, closely veiled, came into the market place, and young Turks and old squatted round the fountains, sat cross-legged inside their wooden booths, and smoked their _narghile_ in dirty little cafés.

A strange people from the farther East dwelt in a village of their own outside the town--a village of houses so low that I was a head taller than their roofs when I walked down its streets, like Gulliver in Lilliput. Their doorways were like the holes of dog kennels and the inhabitants crawled in and out on their hands and knees. It was a gypsy village, swarming with wild-looking men--black-haired, sunburned to the color of terra cotta, wonderfully handsome--and with women and young girls clad in tattered gowns of gaudy color, with bare arms and legs, and the breast revealed. Children, stark naked, played among heaps of filth, and savage dogs leaped at every stranger, as they did when I went with two friends inside the village. A tall girl, beautiful as an Eastern houri, beat back the dogs and led us to the king of this Romany tribe, an old, old villain who made signs for money and was not satisfied with what I gave him. Presently he called to some women, and they brought out a girl of some fifteen years, like a little wild animal, with the grace and beauty of a woodland thing. She was for sale; and I could have bought her and taken her as my slave, for five French francs. I was tempted to do so, but did not quite know how I should get her back to my little house in Holland Street, Kensington, as a Christmas present to my wife. Also, I was not certain whether my wife would like to adopt her. I declined the offer, therefore, but gave the old man the five francs as a sign of friendship--and as a bribe of safety.

We were surrounded, now, by a crowd of tall young Gypsies with long sticks, and I did not like the way they eyed us. Luckily, a Bulgarian police officer rode through the village, and at the sight of him, the Gypsies scuttled like rabbits in their holes. We kept close to his saddle until we were beyond the village, and by expressive gesticulation the man made us understand that, in his judgment, the place behind us was not a safe spot for Christian gentlemen.