Part 5

‘Trusty and well beloved’ were the words that reached us almost in that hour; and almost in the next came a gracious human message from the King and Queen themselves, even as it were in tender confirmation of the stately phrase. And yet, could words apply more closely to all our glorious boys—above all to Oscar’s ‘one class who are enjoying themselves in this war’? In any other country, by one means or the other, the men were to be had: it is only our Public Schools which could have furnished at once an army of natural officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing in the world but fear itself. Their teaching will not be forgotten by those of us whose strange fate it is to inherit our sons’ great names, to follow humbly in the steps we thought to guide. We shall remember that each was also the son of some great school which shares our sorrow and our pride, and which perhaps did more than we ourselves to make him what he was.

Besides Oscar, I am thinking of two who were here to mourn him last July. Robin Blacker was his old friend’s brilliant young brother—so young that he had once been Oscar’s fag. He had left Eton long before his time, yet full of Eton honours. He might have been First Keeper of the Field this very half: he preferred to play for England, and, in the Guards’ great hour at Loos, fell most gloriously, thirty yards ahead of his platoon, with none between him and his last goal.

In the same hour and the same attack John Kipling was last seen alive. He was even younger than Robin Blacker, but the gap between him and Oscar, two equally independent characters, had long been filled by the love of brothers. It is said that after Oscar fell John’s scheme of war included the personal vendetta, just as one younger than any of them is already preparing ‘to avenge John as he avenged Oscar.’ John’s lot was not to spend many weeks under shell-fire, like Oscar and his merry men; but he lived to lead a platoon of the Irish Guards in such fighting as Oscar never saw. God send that he is living still, and restore him even yet to the world our dear boys loved so well, and surrendered without a sigh!

It may be remembered that in one of those last two letters Oscar promised us more verses of his own. They came at length, among his other papers, in scribbled, experimental fragments which I have no right to put together here, deeply moving as they are to us who can read between the sincere and simple lines. They were not directly about the war: they were about Stone House, his first school and in a sense my own, but to us both a second home. Yet they touch quite openly and naturally on Death, and on all that might come instead to hearts deepened and strengthened by the war. To Oscar it was Death that came before the lines were nearly finished; yet it is from them we know, what his happy letters never hinted, that all the time he was as ready even for that as for everything else. He thinks of old schoolfellows who have gone before him, and only asks, if die he must, to ‘die as they did, by their schoolboy honour aided.’ He pictures the Chapel at Stone House, where reproductions of the regimental colours of Old Boys killed in the Boer War hang like true knights’ banners:

Once again look up above At those flags in order hung To commemorate our love....

‘And there he stops,’ said Mr. Churchill in his beautiful sermon about our boy. ‘It may be the last words he ever wrote. Some day soon we shall have his flag to “commemorate our love.” Our love, for one of the most fearless, one of the kindest, one of the simplest, one of the purest boys we ever had in this school.’

And not at Stone House only is his dear name to endure, but also at Eton, for all the hundreds she has lost. Of their own generous accord, the boys of his Eton house are placing a tablet on the wall of his old room; and for the tablet his revered ‘R. K.’ has written out one of his own stanzas, adding, ‘I like them for Oscar because of the last line’:—

He scarce had need to doff his pride or slough the dross of Earth— E’en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth, In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Eton College Chronicle_, July 22, 1915.

[2] To his godfather, Arthur Conan Doyle.

[3] Lieutenant C. D. W. Rooke, 1st Cameronians, was killed in action on June 19.

[4] Presently he went to see—with a result described in his letter to Mr. de Havilland, p. 46.

[5] = ‘Grandmamma.’

[6] Hooge, apparently.

[7] Not his last escape. A few days later: ‘A bit of a “Little Willie” came in and struck my plate while we were having lunch.’

[8] It is said that Oscar showed the way, and that the task was more ticklish than he suggests.

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