Part 15

There were many such events to record. The Roll of Honour, fluttering in the draughty porch outside, bore witness to that fact. So did the composition of the congregation. Most of the men present were forty-five years old and upwards. Those below that age were mainly in khaki. But it was the women who told the most eloquent tale. The three tall daughters of Sir Alistair Graeme--The Three Grenadiers--still sat side by side in the Burling pew, to all appearances unchanged except for their V.A.D. uniforms. Yet I knew that each of those girls had been made a wife and widow within three short years. Mrs. Gillespie, the Bank Manager's wife, on the other hand, made no pretence of being the same woman: her son Robert, the Divinity student, had died of dysentery in Mesopotamia. Of the Misses Peabody, only the elder now sat in the pew. The younger was dead--dead of overwork as a ward-maid in a Base Hospital. None disputed her claim to be of the elect now. Little Mrs. Menzies, the wife of Lord Eskerley's late factor, was changed too--but only in name. She had done her bit--by becoming the widow of a D.S.O. and promptly marrying a C.M.G.

Looking further afield, I observed that old Couper and his wife were almost crowded out of their pew by a string of grandchildren, billeted upon Abbotrigg until such time as a newly-widowed daughter-in-law could adjust her compasses again. I missed the kindly vacant countenance of my friend Jamie Leslie, our organ-blower, which had usually been visible, on pre-war days, peering furtively round the red rep curtain which screened the organ-bellows from view. His place was now occupied by a bucolic young gentleman of thirteen. Subsequent inquiry on my part elicited the news that Jamie had at last achieved his heart's desire and been accepted for the Army, the authorities having very properly decided that what was sauce for the Staff was sauce for the rank-and-file.

In a back pew under the gallery I noticed old Mrs. Rorison, accompanied by her giant son, Jock, the Scots Guardsman--discharged, permanently unfit, with a crippled foot. I had met the pair in Main Street the day before.

"That's bad luck, Jock!" I had said, noting his crutches.

"It's naething of the kind!" replied Jock's mother, tartly. (She usually replied for Jock.) "See him, sir! Sax feet fower--and gets himsel' shot in the fit! I doot he was standing on his head in they trenches!" concluded the old lady bitterly. "Trust him!"

Eric was sitting in the Buckholm pew, with his lady mother: I was to lunch with them presently. I surveyed my friend's handsome profile, his empty sleeve, and the medal ribbons on his uniform. I thought of our regiment--which I now commanded and which he himself had led. I thought of the day, eighteen months since, when we had carried him away insensible, followed by what was left of our personnel, from that tight corner opposite Beaumont Hamel. Eric was home now with a decoration and a soft job--the idol and the oracle of the country-side. I had not been decorated, or even mentioned in Dispatches, but I had, so far, preserved a whole skin--which was far better--and been confirmed in my rank. Though lean and grizzled, I still felt fighting fit, and had no desire to change places with any one. I was staying at The Heughs--a sober household in those days, for my brother Walter had lost his eldest boy at Gallipoli. Of the other two, John was helping to navigate one of His Majesty's Destroyers, while the youngest, Alan, my namesake and particular crony, was consuming his impatient young soul--to his mother's private relief--at Sandhurst.

"_Finally, my brethren_"--began Doctor Chirnside; and I knew that we were within five minutes of the end of the sermon. The maimed men beside me wriggled in relieved anticipation, then settled down again; and I hastened to conclude my church inspection.

I glanced across to the Netherby pew. Mr. and Mrs. Clegg were both there, with the younger children. The two grown-up sons were absent: I remembered having heard vaguely that one of them had enlisted and that the other had secured a "cushie" job somewhere. The fair daughter was nowhere to be seen. I was sorry, because a thing of beauty is a joy for ever--especially during a long sermon. I wondered what had become of her--and Master Roy's infatuation. I had once or twice, during the early days in France, made playful allusion to the lady in Roy's presence, but my pleasantries had not been well received, and had been discontinued.

I gave a final glance round the church.

"_Plus ca change_--!" I said to myself.

But I was a little too quick in my judgment.

"_They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary: they shall walk, and not faint_. May God sanctify to us this poor exposition of His Word; and to Him alone be the glory and the praise!"

The last sentence, at least, was familiar enough. It had rounded off every one of Doctor Chirnside's sermons, to my certain knowledge, for the last thirty-five years. The congregation came to life: the organ-bellows began to pump, almost automatically, for the last hymn. The elders of the kirk fumbled under their seats for the collection-bags.

We rose on a triumphant chord from the little organ, and sang the hymn--stoutly enough, and with that prickly sensation at the back of the nose which attacks undemonstrative people engaged in a slightly emotional exercise; for the hymn was "Onward, Christian Soldiers"! I learned afterwards that it had been sung (alternately with the hymn For Those at Sea), at the close of morning worship every single Sunday since the regular casualty lists had started. Then, in good Scottish fashion, we remained standing for Doctor Chirnside's patriarchal and impressive Benediction.

"_May the Peace of God, which Passeth All Understanding..._"

His old voice died away; and I was on the point of stooping down to grope for my glengarry, when I became conscious of a gradual stiffening in the attitude of the congregation. The organ began to rumble again. (I could see the young organ-blower working as if to crack every muscle in his back.) Then, suddenly, explosively, with every pedal and stop in action, it crashed into "God Save the King"!

Instinctively I came to attention. But though my head was immovable, I fear I allowed my eyes to stray downward to the scene below. Here was an unexpected test of war spirit.

Our National Anthem is a curious canticle; you never know what it will do with you. It may cause you to feel merely ridiculous--as when an orchestra of aliens in a restaurant drags you to your feet in the middle of your soup. Too often it elicits a purely perfunctory acknowledgment. But there are occasions when the sound of it grips the very heart of you; when you are conscious, deep down in your well-ordered British soul, of a sudden, tremendous, irresistible wave of passionate loyalty to the Sovereign who rules you and the thousand-year-old tradition for which he stands. Here was such an occasion. Here, in this little church, was our battle hymn being thundered forth, after more than three years of battle, to a community who had been paying the maximum price for their participation therein. How would they take it?

My field of vision was naturally constricted, but without moving my head I could command a fair view. Eric Bethune, of course, was standing as straight as a ramrod. So was the elder Miss Peabody--also the three poor Grenadiers. The wounded men beside me stiffened their twisted bodies proudly: evidently it was incumbent upon them to teach the rest of the congregation something.

Finally, my eyes fell upon the Abbotrigg pew. Old Couper and his wife were standing side by side, with bowed heads. I saw that they were holding hands. Beside them, in order of size, were ranged five small figures in black--three boys and two girls--the grandchildren whose father had fallen in action six days ago. They did not look too well-fed--milk and meat were not over plentiful in those days--but they stood shoulder to shoulder in a perfectly aligned row, emulating the soldiers in the gallery above. It was difficult to believe that they had not rehearsed the formation. (Probably they had, under the personal direction of a martinet home on leave.) Each small head was held resolutely up; each small chest--situated rather low down, as is usual when we are very young--was thrust resolutely forward; each small pair of arms pointed rigidly to the floor; and each pair of round eyes gazed fixedly and unblinkingly into space.

Suddenly, I saw nothing more. But I remember feeling reassured about things.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*THE OLD ORDER*

After church I joined Lady Christina and Eric, and was conveyed in a very ancient victoria--her ladyship had "put down" the motor, owing to petrol difficulties--to Buckholm for luncheon. I noticed that my friend Bates no longer attended to the front door; he was now, I gathered, guarding our coast from invasion somewhere in Suffolk. His deputy was a grim-looking crone in a black skirt, silver-buttoned coat, and yellow waistcoat, which made her look something between a female impersonator and a prison wardress. I seemed to have encountered her in a previous existence hanging washing on a line on the drying-green behind the Buckholm orchard. She relieved me of my glengarry, gloves, and stick, and demanded my ration-book.

"There will be meat for dinner," she explained.

I handed over the emergency ration-book with which soldiers on leave were supplied in those days. It was returned to me when I left the house, lacking not only one full meat coupon, but all the butter and sugar coupons as well.

"Her leddyship said you would no be needing them," explained the wardress, and I meekly acquiesced. If Lady Christina said that I did not need a thing, who was I to say that I did? In any case I was due to rejoin the best-fed Army in the world in a few days' time.

The luncheon party consisted of Lady Christina, as bolt upright as ever, at the head of the table; Eric, at the foot; Lord Eskerley; and a weather-beaten Lieutenant-Commander of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, named John Wickersham. Five years ago he had been mainly known to fame as a prominent King's Counsel, a superb bridge-player, and a fair-weather yachtsman. Now, for three years or more, his converted pleasure-craft, navigated by its owner and enrolled an original member of a certain silent, unadvertised brotherhood of the sea, had been keeping grim vigil over our island coast, with such effect that German submarine crews were breaking into open mutiny rather than face that flotilla of terror any longer. John Wickersham was ashore on long leave, for the first time for many months.

Doctor Chirnside, who seldom missed his Sunday luncheon at Buckholm, had been called away, to say what he could to a girl-wife who had just received a telegram from the War Office.

Having consumed its meat ration and sugarless apple tart, the company proceeded to mitigate the austerity of Lady Christina's war-time regime with a glass of port. Then, after a perfunctory and short-lived struggle, we yielded to the inevitable and settled down to the topic of the military situation. It was a curious experience for me, who had heard little round that peaceful table since boyhood but hunting shop and county gossip, to find myself involved in the same eternal debate as was exercising every mess, billet, and dug-out on the Western Front--a debate distinguished in both cases by extreme personal bias and entire ignorance of essential details. It is hardly necessary to mention that Lord Eskerley, the one person who could have enlightened us, offered no contribution.

Naturally we concentrated upon the rumours of the knock-out blow which Germany was preparing to deal her arch-enemy in the early spring--a blow which came near, in the actual event, to driving a wedge between the armies of France and Britain, and establishing a German base on the English Channel. But in January, nineteen-eighteen, when we had not lost a field-gun or a trench system since the First Battle of Ypres, and had been steadily winning back the soil of France and accumulating German prisoners for more than three years, no one took such a possibility seriously. Eric was particularly sanguine.

"A good thing, too!" he said. "Let them come! Then we can sit well back, and make a clean job of the lot, instead of getting hot and dusty going to look for them! This war will end when we have killed enough Boches; and if the Boches will help us by coming along to get killed--and you know what the Boche can do in that way once he gives his mind to it--there will be no complaints on our side. I feel--"

This characteristic pronouncement was interrupted by Lord Eskerley.

"It's only human nature, you know," he said. "You can't blame them. Naturally they think of their own front first. Must!"

This did not seem to fit in well with the rest of the conversation--a not altogether unusual feature of his lordship's table-talk.

"Napoleon was right," he continued. "Or was it Hannibal? Said he would sooner fight two first-class generals collaborating than one single-handed second-rater. It works out this way. Tweedledum says to Tweedledee: 'You must take over more Front.' Tweedledee says to Tweedledum: 'It can't be done! Look at my casualty list for the last three months!' Tweedledum replies: 'But you are only holding about half as much line as I am.' Thereupon Tweedledee produces statistics to show that although he holds the shorter line he has sixty-seven and a half per cent. of the enemy massed against him. And so it goes on. The old game! I believe that in Bohemian circles it is known as 'Passing the Buck.' A colloquial but apposite expression! I picked it up from an American _attache_ in Paris. In due course we shall come to the only solution--a Supreme Commander, responsible for the safety of the whole line. But, as usual, we shall pay in advance--through the nose!"

The import of the old gentleman's ruminations was now tolerably apparent to all; that is, to all but our hostess.

"Eh, what? What's he talking about?" she inquired sharply of me. (Of late, Lady Christina's hearing has deteriorated a little.) "What's he talking about? Tell me; he mumbles so! What's all this nonsense about Tweedledee and Tweedledum? Who are Tweedledee and Tweedledum? They sound like people out of Punch--two of those wretches in the Government. In German pay, every man-jack of them! Do you know what Bessie Brickshire told me last week? She went to Downing Street--"

"Your leddyship's coffee is up the stair," announced the deep voice of the prison wardress; and a libellous and irrelevant anecdote was nipped in the bud.

Lady Christina rose, informed us that she proposed to take her coffee in her own room, and, with a passing admonition to her son to be sparing of the saccharine, left us to ours.

We lit cigars and stretched ourselves, like schoolboys relieved of the pedagogue's presence.

"How do they feel about things in general up at the top, Eskerley?" asked John Wickersham. "We never hear any news in our job. Are they all quite happy and comfortable?"

"Not at all!" replied his lordship brusquely.

"What's the trouble?"

"Not enough troops."

"How? The number of Divisions on the Western Front hasn't been reduced, has it?"

"Oh, dear, no. We are as strong as ever--on paper. But instead of going frankly to the Labour bosses and telling them that another half-million men must be released from civilian employment, our politicians have reduced the personnel of each Division from thirteen battalions to ten--nearly twenty-five per cent. It's an admirable scheme, because it satisfies so many people. It satisfies the politician, because it saves his face; it satisfies the slacker, because it saves his skin; and it satisfies the Boche, because it's going to save him a lot of trouble when he makes his spring offensive. The only people who are inclined to criticise it are the insignificant individuals who are responsible for the safety of the Western Front. In fact, they are crying out to Heaven for more men. But, of course, nobody takes any notice of recommendations from such a prejudiced person as a soldier. His turn will come later, when the scapegoats are being rounded up." The old gentleman sighed. "That's one of our worries. The other is that we have too many Allies."

"I see! Too many cooks--eh?"

"Precisely! I spend all my working hours nowadays propitiating plenipotentiaries from countries whose existence I had never heard of two years ago. By the time I have recognised the status of this Ally, and soothed the susceptibilities of that, the day is over and there's no time left to get on with the war. I sometimes sigh for the era when the French and ourselves muddled along by rule of thumb without having to expend any tact upon anybody, except a periodical slap on the back to Russia. _We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!_--and so on. Life was simple then. Now it is a perpetual Pentecost, without the feast. Give me a forlorn hope and a lone hand every time; that's an invincible combination--eh, Alan?"

"I agree," I said. "In the first year or so there was a sort of cheerful, simple, all-in-the-same-boat feeling about everything. The French liked us; there was not too many of us; and what there were were perfectly disciplined--old Regulars and the pick of 'K's' Army; or else Indian troops, with the manners of Hidalgoes. Now, the average French citizen never wants to see an ally again--"

Lord Eskerley nodded.

"Exactly!" he said. "And I can't say I blame him. I sometimes feel that way myself. We're a fairly promiscuous lot. We may be a host of modern crusaders, but we're a _crowd_! I feel like old McKechnie at the revivalist meeting here five years ago, who refused to stand up and be 'saved' with the rest because he objected to going to heaven 'with a d----d Cheap Trup!' Still, we mustn't be ungrateful. Our post entries may have complicated the machine, but they have made it a pretty reliable piece of mechanism."

"What I complain of," interposed Eric, "is that we, upon whom the whole burden fell at the start, are almost forgotten now. Most of us have ceased to exist, and the rest are lost in a mob of amateurs."

"The wrong attitude entirely!" announced Lord Eskerley promptly.

"What's the right attitude, then?" asked Eric, who hated correction almost as much as Lord Eskerley delighted to administer it to him.

"The right attitude," replied the old man, with sudden seriousness, "should be a feeling of pride that We were fortunate enough to find ourselves Original Members of the Brotherhood--to hold Founders' Shares. When the edifice is completed--and completed it will be--the world won't be able to see the foundations. But they will be there all right! And we shall know who laid them--the Old Order!"

"What do you mean by the Old Order?" asked Eric. "The landed gentry?"

"Far more than that. I mean the people to whom this country, as such, has always really meant something; I mean every mother's son who felt the ancient spirit of our race wake in him, perhaps for the first time, when the challenge came in Nineteen Fourteen. I don't care who he was--squire's son, parson's son, miner's son, poacher's son--it was all the same. If he was conscious then of that single blind impulse to get up and play the game, just because it was the game; just because it was impossible to do otherwise--without any dialectics about Freedom, or Altruism, or Democracy, or whether his job would be kept open for him or not; simply because the Blood told him to--then he belonged to the Old Order! He held a Founder's Share, all right!

"Of course," the old man continued presently, "the more one has to give the more one is expected to give, at a time like this. And as a rule it seems to be the best that is taken. '_This is the heir; come, let us kill him!_'--that has been the general attitude of the War Gods. Only the very best would suffice--only the very best!"

We sat silent again. Lord Eskerley himself had lost his two sons, and his only grandson. After him, what was to become of the ancient title--of the "Big Hoose" and its "policies"--of the family which had served the State for three hundred years? "_This is the heir!_" How true that was. I thought of my brother Walter's eldest son. Fortunately in this case there were two more. And Roy? What would become of Baronrigg, if--

But Lord Eskerley was speaking again--more to himself than to us.

"The Old Order! The Willing Horse! There's hardly an estate, or a farm, or an allotment, in this country-side, or in any part of Scotland or England, that has not changed hands, prospectively at least, during the last three years. And what with designedly disruptive death duties, and income tax on the same scale, levied on people who have no personal income--only a few precious, ancient, barren acres--the old estates are passing right away from the original owners--one half sold to pay the charges on the other half. It seems a queer way of rewarding people who have given everything--to sell them up because they have nothing more to give! Still, one has the supreme satisfaction of having played the game. Our record stands--" He broke off. "I apologise: I was sermonising! Bad habit!" He looked at his watch. "Three o'clock! I must go; a trunk call comes through from London every afternoon at four. Alan, I will give you a lift."

A few minutes later I found myself rolling home in an unaccustomed motor.

"I still get twenty gallons a month," explained Lord Eskerley. "Business of State, and so on. Going back soon?"

"Thursday," I said.

"Well, enjoy the war while you can. When it is over there will be no peace for anybody. After the Boche has given his last expiring kick we are going to sit down to a Peace Congress in comparison with which the Congress of Vienna will take rank as a model of sagacity and altruism. The Millennium that we are all composing cantatas about is not coming--yet."

"Are we going to have more wars, then?" I asked, gazing rather dejectedly at the red, wintry sunset.

"We are always going to have more wars," replied my companion testily--"and then more! (The final war will be between men and women. Even that won't really settle anything, because there will be too much rendering aid and comfort to the enemy going on.) By the way, how is Roy?"

I reported favourably upon my nephew's health and service record.

"I suppose you know," I remarked, "that Tom Birnie appointed yourself and myself Roy's trustees and executors?"

"Yes. Tom wrote me a letter to that effect before he enlisted."

"He did enlist, then?"

"I believe so."

I did not press for details. Lord Eskerley has means at his disposal of discovering most of the secrets of this world--which is not to say that he is accustomed to pass these on to third parties.

"Have you seen Roy," I continued, "or heard from him of late?"

"I have not seen him, and he has not favoured me with a single line since he went out for the first time. By the way, I observe she received a decoration the other day--for conspicuous bravery during an air-raid."

"Who?"

"Who? The girl!"

"The girl? You mean--the Netherby girl? Is that _affaire_ still--?"

"Yes. Name of Clegg. You know what became of her, I suppose?"

"No. Roy has never been communicative on the subject, although I believe he used to maintain a correspondence with her. The junior members of the mess were quite intrigued about it. I had almost forgotten her existence. What became of her?"