It was with perfect sincerity that I answered "Nothing," and having a

great repugnance to consider murder as a factor of politics, I dismissed

the subject. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and

absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of

shadowy Archdukes in the background, out of which one would step forward

to take the place of that dead man in the light of the European stage.

And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a

judgment who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that

time. What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was

fixed upon my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but

because of their fascinating holiday-promising aspect. I had been

obtaining my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good

enough to come down now and then to see us. They arrived with their

pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries casually,

with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. And

yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become

chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less

conscious of it. It had wearied out one's attention. Who could have

guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature

rehearsal of the great world-drama, the reduced model of the very

passions and violences of what the future held in store for the Powers of

the Old World? Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of

that possibility, while they watched Old Europe stage-managing fussily by

means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its

awaiting fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of

guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race,

liberation, justice--and the same mood of trivial demonstrations. One

could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg. "You mean Petrograd,"

would say the booking clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a

friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some _cafe turc_ at the

end of his lunch.

"Monsieur veut dire Cafe balkanique," the patriotic waiter corrected him

austerely.

I will not say that I had not observed something of that instructive

aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and in its second

phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to

see in it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism. As to alarm, I pointed

out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary. It has done as much

as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a

charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a

charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of

disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing--a

sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought a mere jaunty

cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the

usual arguments. It was pointed out to me that these Eastern nations

were not far removed from a savage state. Their economics were yet at

the stage of scratching the earth and feeding the pigs. The

highly-developed material civilisation of Europe could not allow itself

to be disturbed by a war. The industry and the finance could not allow

themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even

the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.

Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been a

book written on that theme--an attempt to put pacificism on a material

basis. Nothing more solid in the way of argument could have been

advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe. War was "bad

business!" This was final.

But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but little on the

condition of the civilised world. Whatever sinister passions were

heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a

simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or interpret

them correctly. The most innocent of passions will take the edge off

one's judgment. The desire which possessed me was simply the desire to

travel. And that being so it would have taken something very plain in

the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things

on the Continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My

eyes were turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one cannot

suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the

darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.

In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some

weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow, but

within the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first seemed to me

considerable. Since leaving the sea, to which I have been faithful for

so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very

little stuff from which travellers are made. I confess that my first

impulse about a projected journey is to leave it alone. But the

invitation received at first with a sort of dismay ended by rousing the

dormant energy of my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent with my

father the last eighteen months of his life. It was in that old royal

and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known

the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of

that age. It was within those historical walls that I began to

understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund

of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into

an unrelated existence. It was like the experience of another world. The

wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that

if I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do

with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my

youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have

gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see what

would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither

would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This

journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a

tribe. My present, all that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate,

would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased

with the idea of showing my companions what Polish country life was like;

to visit the town where I was at school before the boys by my side should

grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own, should lose

their unsophisticated interest in mine. It is only in the short instants

of early youth that we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see

dimly the visions and share the emotions of another soul. For youth all

is reality in this world, and with justice, since it apprehends so

vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether

there is any substance. I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these

young beings in whom, unless Heredity is an empty word, there should have

been a fibre which would answer to the sight, to the atmosphere, to the

memories of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received

its earliest independent impressions.

The first days of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires

hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue books,

yellow books, white books, and to arouse the wonder of mankind, passed

for us in light-hearted preparations for the journey. What was it but

just a rush through Germany, to get across as quickly as possible?

Germany is the part of the earth's solid surface of which I know the

least. In all my life I had been across it only twice. I may well say

of it _vidi tantum_; and the very little I saw was through the window of

a railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys of mine had been

more like pilgrimages when one hurries on towards the goal for the

satisfaction of a deeper need than curiosity. In this last instance,

too, I was so incurious that I would have liked to have fallen asleep on

the shores of England and opened my eyes, if it were possible, only on

the other side of the Silesian frontier. Yet, in truth, as many others

have done, I had "sensed it"--that promised land of steel, of chemical

dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of

Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst

effete Asiatics or barbarous niggers; and, with a consciousness of

superiority freeing their hands from all moral bonds, anxious to take up,

if I may express myself so, the "perfect man's burden." Meantime, in a

clearing of the Teutonic forest, their sages were rearing a Tree of

Cynical Wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may be seen now lying

over the prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that they laboured

openly enough, watering it with the most authentic sources of all

madness, and watching with their be-spectacled eyes the slow ripening of

the glorious blood-red fruit. The sincerest words of peace, words of

menace, and I verily believe words of abasement, even if there had been a

voice vile enough to utter them, would have been wasted on their ecstasy.

For when the fruit ripens on a branch it must fall. There is nothing on

earth that can prevent it.

II.

For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my

companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels should begin in

an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea. We should proceed from

Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being thirty-six times longer than the Dover-

Calais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure in

better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey which for

so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour

and promise, but always retreating, elusive like an enticing mirage.

And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were

excited. It's no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. The day

of departure had come, the very hour had struck. The luggage was coming

downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland then, if erased from the

map, yet existed in reality; it was not a mere _pays du reve_, where you

can travel only in imagination. For no man, they argued, not even

father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the

novelist's art of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with

real trunks for a voyage _au pays du reve_.

As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful

nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled

its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the

parched fields. A pearly blur settled over them, and a light sifted of

all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the

splendour of unveiled skies. All unconscious of going towards the very

scenes of war, I carried off in my eye, this tiny fragment of Great

Britain; a few fields, a wooded rise; a clump of trees or two, with a

short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled

roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I

felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a

beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an

inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a

woman is conquered--by love, which is a sort of surrender.

These were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in

hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And I am

certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble

but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The forms and

the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not

their conquest--which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the most

precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness rather than

possessed by you. Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway

carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt

more and more plainly, that what I had started on was a journey in time,

into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent, but to

him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and

continuity of his life--so that at times it presented itself to his

conscience as a series of betrayals--still more dreadful.

I down here these thoughts so exclusively personal, to explain why there

was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war. I

don't mean to say that I ignored the possibility; I simply did not think

of it. And it made no difference; for if I had thought of it, it could

only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated

mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual

certitude--obviously unattainable by the man in the street--could have

stayed me on that journey which now that I had started on it seemed an

irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.

London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a

monstrous conflagration up into the black sky--with its best Venice-like

aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen

of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city

towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the

glistening roadway.

Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the Mansion House

went on normally with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of

sombre walls through which the inextinguishable activity of its millions

streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous

line of taxi-cabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an

endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and dipping

them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of

the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace. It was the hour

of the boat-trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack

of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these

places. The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great

flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no signs

of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing

in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly

appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of

my existence. For this was the station at which, thirty-seven years

before, I arrived on my first visit to London. Not the same building,

but the same spot. At nineteen years of age, after a period of probation

and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a

North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft--my first long railway

journey in England--to "sign on" for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water

ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city

with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and

unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have been more lonely. I did

not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled

the mysterious distances of the streets. I cannot say I was free from a

little youthful awe, but at that age one's feelings are simple. I was

elated. I was pursuing a clear aim, I was carrying out a deliberate plan

of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the

service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to

live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself,

to redeem a tacit moral pledge. Both these aims were to be attained by

the same effort. How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that

hazy day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for

the first time.

From that point of view--Youth and a straightforward scheme of conduct--it

was certainly a year of grace. All the help I had to get in touch with

the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than the

palm of my hand--in which I held it--torn out of a larger plan of London

for the greater facility of reference. It had been the object of careful

study for some days past. The fact that I could take a conveyance at the

station never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the

street, and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak,

of twenty thousand hansoms. A strange absence of mind or unconscious

conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one's life by

means of a hired carriage? Yes, it would have been a preposterous

proceeding. And indeed I was to make an Australian voyage and encircle

the globe before ever entering a London hansom.

Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of

an obscure shipping agent, was in my pocket. And I needed not to take it

out. That address was as if graven deep in my brain. I muttered its

words to myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart

concealed in the palm of my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to

inquire my way from anyone. Youth is the time of rash pledges. Had I

taken a wrong turning I would have been lost; and if faithful to my

pledge I might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps

my bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the

Whitechapel district, as it had happened to lonely travellers lost in the

bush. But I walked on to my destination without hesitation or mistake,

showing there, for the first time, some of that faculty to absorb and

make my own the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years was to

help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships entrusted to

me off the ground. The place I was bound to was not easy to find. It

was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable

streets, lost among the thick growth of houses like a dark pool in the

depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway as if by

secret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder city, the growth of

which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly

sombre phantasy the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by the

magic of his understanding love. And the office I entered was Dickensian

too. The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its

windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.

It was one o'clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the

light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an

elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a

big nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders. His curly white hair and the

general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the

_barocco_ style of Italian art. Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting

desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was

eating a mutton-chop, which had been just brought to him from some

Dickensian eating-house round the corner.

Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid, _barocco_ apostle's

face with an expression of inquiry.

I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne

sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech, for his face

broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.--"Oh, it's you who

wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship."

I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can't remember a single word of

that letter now. It was my very first composition in the English

language. And he had understood it, evidently, for he spoke to the point

at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for

young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a

view of being trained for officers. But he gathered that this was not my

object. I did not desire to be apprenticed. Was that the case?

It was. He was good enough to say then, "Of course I see that you are a

gentleman. But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able

Seaman if possible. Is that it?"

It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he

could not help me much in this. There was an Act of Parliament which

made it penal to procure ships for sailors. "An Act-of-Parliament. A

law," he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign

understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.

I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an

Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However, the _barocco_

apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round

the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. Yet, strictly

speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen; and in retrospect

there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin of mine. For this Act

of Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the Victorian era, had been

in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me. For many years it had

regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of

my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as

possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling. It isn't such

a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four

corners of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to say that its

seventies have never been applied to me.

In the year 1878, the year of "Peace with Honour," I had walked as lone

as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street

Station, to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the year of the

war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was

there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties

grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendships

secured. It was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle.

All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at his

lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life

of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful,

entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations

crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.

I felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered upon, was bound to

take me away from daily life's actualities at every step. I felt it more

than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark

night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the

tale of the ship's passengers. That sea was to me something

unforgettable, something much more than a name. It had been for some

time the schoolroom of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I had learned,

too, my first words of English. A wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was

that confined, shallow-water academy of seamanship from which I launched

myself on the wide oceans. My teachers had been the sailors of the

Norfolk shore; coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle

voice; men of very few words, which at least were never bare of meaning.

Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all, as far

as I can remember.

That is what years ago the North Sea I could hear growling in the dark

all round the ship had been for me. And I fancied that I must have been

carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more

familiar than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile

of affectionate recognition.

I could not guess that before many days my old schoolroom would be

desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its

waves, hiding under its waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words

the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out

in trawlers, under the Naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.

III.

I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of seamanship

before I launched myself on the wider oceans. Confined as it is in

comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know

it in all its parts. My class-room was the region of the English East

Coast which, in the year of Peace with Honour, had long forgotten the war

episodes belonging to its maritime history. It was a peaceful coast,

agricultural, industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of

its many towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here

and there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the land. On

many a night I have hauled at the braces under the shadow of that coast,

envying, as sailors will, the people on shore sleeping quietly in their

beds within sound of the sea. I imagine that not one head on those

envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest premonition of the

realities of naval war the short lifetime of one generation was to bring

so close to their homes.

Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a part

of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply conscious of the

familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day: and the

aspects of Nature don't change, unless in the course of thousands of

years--or, perhaps, centuries. The Phoenicians, its first discoverers,

the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days

like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light, even on a

July afternoon, from anything they had ever known in their native

Mediterranean. For myself, a very late comer into that sea, and its

former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect

so well remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A grey-

green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-

ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of

wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along

like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few,

very scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, ever re-

forming sky-line.

Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the

emptiness of the decks, favouring my reminiscent mood. It might have

been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were on this and

every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. Yet, thanks

to the unchangeable sea I could have given myself up to the illusion of a

revised past, had it not been for the periodical transit across my gaze

of a German passenger. He was marching round and round the boat deck

with characteristic determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him

in his progress like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet.

He was bringing them home, from their school in England, for their

holiday. What could have induced such a sound Teuton to entrust his

offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and

criminal country I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from

motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the deck of that

decadent British ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a

large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of

a superior destiny. Later I could observe the same truculent bearing,

touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the _Landwehr_

corps, that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian army in

Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have

been, most probably was, an officer of the _Landwehr_; and perhaps those

two fine active boys are orphans by now. Thus things acquire

significance by the lapse of time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a

mote in the dust-cloud of six million fighting particles, an unconsidered

trifle for the jaws of war, his humanity was not consciously impressed on

my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels

round the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green

overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting

cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea. He was but a shadowy intrusion

and a disregarded one, for, far away there to the West, in the direction

of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and

sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in

the winter of '81, not of war, truly, but of a fairly lively contest with

the elements which were very angry indeed.

There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night--or

a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the North Sea is also called

the German Ocean)--when all the fury stored in its heart seemed

concentrated on one ship which could do no better than float on her side

in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable

manner. There were on board, besides myself, seventeen men all good and

true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between

sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow,

became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a good long time moved in

our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The

whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out

of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his

nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before

the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian),

his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black,

savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses

than the green overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger

circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children.

"That's a very nice gentleman." This information, together with the fact

that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year by the ship,

was communicated to me suddenly by our captain. At intervals through the

day he would pop out of the chart-room and offer me short snatches of

conversation. He owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind,

and he was without malice and, I believe, quite unconsciously, a warm

Germanophil. And no wonder! As he told me himself, he had been fifteen

years on that run, and spent almost as much of his life in Hamburg as in

Harwich.

"Wonderful people they are," he repeated from time to time, without

entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious obstinacy.

What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial travellers and

small merchants, most likely. But I had observed long before that German

genius has a hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted

minds. There is an immense force of suggestion in highly organised

mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised half Europe? My man was very much

under the spell of German excellence. On the other hand, his contempt

for France was equally general and unbounded. I tried to advance some

arguments against this position, but I only succeeded in making him

hostile. "I believe you are a Frenchman yourself," he snarled at last,

giving me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off

communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.

Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of

the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their

colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black

uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water

and clouds in the Eastern board: tops of islands fringing the German

shore. While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves--and for

all their solidity they were very elusive things in the failing

light--another passenger came out on deck. This one wore a dark overcoat

and a grey cap. The yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed

his chest. His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of

short white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it

determined the whole character of his physiognomy. Indeed nothing else

in it had the slightest chance to assert itself. His disposition, unlike

the widower's, appeared to be mild and humane. He offered me the loan of

his glasses. He had a wife and some small children concealed in the

depths of the ship, and he thought they were very well where they were.

His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.

"We are Americans," he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone.

He spoke English with the accent of our captain's "wonderful people," and

proceeded to give me the history of the family's crossing the Atlantic in

a White Star liner. They remained in England just the time necessary for

a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the

depths of the ship) were naturally a little tired.

At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from

the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. "Hurrah," he cried under

his breath. "The first German light! Hurrah!"

And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest

fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant

wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. The

shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.

I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights. The

great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me. I had

been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. They

went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade

of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head sea

and bound for the gateway of Dover Straits. Singly, and in small

companies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless,

sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather roughly finished

mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away

there, below the grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam vessels have

reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one

reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe

into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port,

and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when

seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so

unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them

something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble

predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers,

conceited and without grace.

When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo tanks carried tame

lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps

they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here,

there, and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out

to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its

powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the

clouds.

I remained on deck until we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so

overlighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape,

glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar,

as a working implement, will become presently as obsolete as the sail.

The pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy. More and more is mankind

reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little

wheels. Progress! Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces

demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. And

readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles

made a more complete man.

It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro like a

water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance.

Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe lightship floated all dark and

silent under its enormous round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow

watching the broad estuary full of lights.

Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace

ready for flight away from the luckless shores of Europe. Our visual

impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely

difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark

over there, that the Elbe lightship has been towed away from its post of

duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat

laid up, or turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do. And

obviously it must be so.

Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping

along cautiously with the unlighted, war-blighted black coast close on

one hand, and sudden death on the other. For all the space we steamed

through that Sunday evening must now be one great minefield, sown thickly

with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very

spot perhaps where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so

much fussy importance. Mines; Submarines. The last word in sea-warfare!

Progress--impressively disclosed by this war.

There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in the greatness of the

stake and in the fierce animosity of feelings. During that one which was

finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the English Fleet was

keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton himself, offered to

the Maritime Prefect of the port and to the French Admiral, an invention

which would sink all the unsuspecting English ships one after another--or,

at any rate most of them. The offer was not even taken into

consideration; and the Prefect ends his report to the Minister in Paris

with a fine phrase of indignation: "It is not the sort of death one would

deal to brave men."

And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like

proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of

issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of

those self-denying words. Mankind has been demoralised since by its own

mastery of mechanical appliances. Its spirit is apparently so weak now,

and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of

destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy,

murderous contrivance. It has become the intoxicated slave of its own

detestable ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic time

another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation, and held

out to the world.

IV.

On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but

a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had no beacons to look

for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole,

is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous

sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible,

provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like

a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from

it instinctively as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children

and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far

as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.

I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without

sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my voluntary

abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary after all! Each of us is

a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality

returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old

moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much

to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation

of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. By watching.

We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to

my eldest boy, "I can't go to bed. I am going out for a look round.

Coming?"

He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of the interesting

adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of the

hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I

was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a

ghost that the discovery that I could remember such material things as

the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a

moment of wistful surprise.

The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square of the

town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life. We

could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space. At

the corner an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at

midnight a pair of white gloves which made his big hands extremely

noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding

forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned.

The Square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight.

The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed to burn at the

bottom of a bluish pool. I noticed with infinite satisfaction that the

unnecessary trees the Municipality insisted upon sticking between the

stones had been steadily refusing to grow. They were not a bit bigger

than the poor victims I could remember. Also, the paving operations

seemed to be exactly at the same point at which I left them forty years

before. There were the dull, torn-up patches on that bright expanse, the

piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on

a silvery sea. Who was it that said that Time works wonders? What an

exploded superstition! As far as these trees and these paving stones

were concerned, it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the

unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses by our

rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably strengthened within

me.

"We are now on the line A.B.," I said to my companion, importantly.

It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the Square by

the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical

relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it, and, even if they had,

would not have dreamed of taking it seriously. He who used it was of the

initiated, belonged to the Schools. We youngsters regarded that name as

a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered

it to my boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation.

And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the

corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an

inscription in raised black letters, thus: "Line A.B." Heavens! The

name had been adopted officially! Any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any

herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free

to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet

his friends on the line A.B. It had become a mere name in a directory. I

was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. Time could work

wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of

excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast-

iron.

I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the

profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive distaste. And

this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked

that change. There was at the end of the line a certain street I wanted

to look at, I explained to my companion.

To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary's Church soared aloft

into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides,

glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the distance

the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the

street with the square shoulders of the old city wall. In the narrow,

brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses,

its black archway stood out small and very distinct.

There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for

our ears. Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness there issued

out of my aroused memory, a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not

very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of

the third house down from the Florian Gate. It was in the winter months

of 1868. At eight o'clock of every morning that God made, sleet or

shine, I walked up Florian Street. But of that, my first school, I

remember very little. I believe that one of my co-sufferers there has

become a much appreciated editor of historical documents. But I didn't

suffer much from the various imperfections of my first school. I was

rather indifferent to school troubles. I had a private gnawing worm of

my own. This was the time of my father's last illness. Every evening at

seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I walked all the way to a big

old house in a quiet narrow street a good distance beyond the Great

Square. There, in a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with heavy

cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two

candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink

myself all over till the task of my preparation was done. The table of

my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it

would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through

the crack, glide across the room, and disappear. There were two of these

noiseless nursing nuns. Their voices were seldom heard. For, indeed,

what could they have had to say? When they did speak to me it was with

their lips hardly moving, in a claustral, clear whisper. Our domestic

matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our neighbour on the

second floor, a Canon of the Cathedral, lent for the emergency. She,

too, spoke but seldom. She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a

chain on her ample bosom. And though when she spoke she moved her lips

more than the nuns, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully

murmuring note. The air around me was all piety, resignation, and

silence.

I don't know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading

boy. My prep. finished I would have had nothing to do but sit and watch

the awful stillness of the sick room flow out through the closed door and

coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a futile childish way I

would have gone crazy. But I was a reading boy. There were many books

about, lying on consoles, on tables, and even on the floor, for we had

not had time to settle down. I read! What did I not read! Sometimes

the elder nun, gliding up and casting a mistrustful look on the open

pages, would lay her hand lightly on my head and suggest in a doubtful

whisper, "Perhaps it is not very good for you to read these books." I

would raise my eyes to her face mutely, and with a vague gesture of

giving it up she would glide away.

Later in the evening, but not always, I would be permitted to tip-toe

into the sick room to say good-night to the figure prone on the bed,

which often could not acknowledge my presence but by a slow movement of

the eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand lying on the

coverlet, and tip-toe out again. Then I would go to bed, in a room at

the end of the corridor, and often, not always, cry myself into a good

sound sleep.

I looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror. I turned

my eyes from it sometimes with success, and yet all the time I had an

awful sensation of the inevitable. I had also moments of revolt which

stripped off me some of my simple trust in the government of the

universe. But when the inevitable entered the sick room and the white

door was thrown wide open, I don't think I found a single tear to shed. I

have a suspicion that the Canon's housekeeper looked on me as the most

callous little wretch on earth.

The day of the funeral came in due course and all the generous "Youth of

the Schools," the grave Senate of the University, the delegations of the

Trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they cared) _de visu_ evidence of

the callousness of the little wretch. There was nothing in my aching

head but a few words, some such stupid sentences as, "It's done," or,

"It's accomplished" (in Polish it is much shorter), or something of the

sort, repeating itself endlessly. The long procession moved out of the

narrow street, down a long street, past the Gothic front of St. Mary's

under its unequal towers, towards the Florian Gate.

In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and

tragic memories, I could see again the small boy of that day following a

hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an

enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the

chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head, the flames of tapers

passing under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the

pavements with fixed, serious eyes. Half the population had turned out

on that fine May afternoon. They had not come to honour a great

achievement, or even some splendid failure. The dead and they were

victims alike of an unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every

path of merit and glory. They had come only to render homage to the

ardent fidelity of the man whose life had been a fearless confession in

word and deed of a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could

feel and understand.

It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow street I

should become the helpless prey of the Shadows I had called up. They

were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent in their clinging air of

the grave that tasted of dust and of the bitter vanity of old hopes.

"Let's go back to the hotel, my boy," I said. "It's getting late."

It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor dreamt that night

of a possible war. For the next two days I went about amongst my fellow

men, who welcomed me with the utmost consideration and friendliness, but

unanimously derided my fears of a war. They would not believe in it. It

was impossible. On the evening of the second day I was in the hotel's

smoking room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for a few

choice minds of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and

more hushed than any club reading-room I have ever been in. Gathered

into a small knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued tones

suitable to the genius of the place.

A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an impatient

finger in my direction and apostrophised me.

"What I want to know is whether, should there be war, England would come

in."

The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the Cabinet without

faltering.

"Most assuredly. I should think all Europe knows that by this time."

He took hold of the lapel of my coat, and, giving it a slight jerk for

greater emphasis, said forcibly:

"Then, if England will, as you say, and all the world knows it, there can

be no war. Germany won't be so mad as that."

On the morrow by noon we read of the German ultimatum. The day after

came the declaration of war, and the Austrian mobilisation order. We

were fairly caught. All that remained for me to do was to get my party

out of the way of eventual shells. The best move which occurred to me

was to snatch them up instantly into the mountains to a Polish health

resort of great repute--which I did (at the rate of one hundred miles in

eleven hours) by the last civilian train permitted to leave Cracow for

the next three weeks.

And there we remained amongst the Poles from all parts of Poland, not

officially interned, but simply unable to obtain the permission to travel

by train, or road. It was a wonderful, a poignant two months. This is

not the time, and, perhaps, not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic

character of the situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its

misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust anyone, to appeal to

anyone, to look for help from any quarter; deprived of all hope and even

of its last illusions, and unable, in the trouble of minds and the unrest

of consciences, to take refuge in stoical acceptance. I have seen all

this. And I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that

appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so

many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final

words: Ruin--and Extinction.

But enough of this. For our little band there was the awful anguish of

incertitude as to the real nature of events in the West. It is difficult

to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there.

Belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence, France giving in

under repeated blows, a military collapse like that of 1870, and England

involved in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in

a panic! Polish papers, of course, had no other but German sources of

information. Naturally, we did not believe all we read, but it was

sometimes excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness.

We used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat weighing

the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reasons for

hopefulness, and generally cheering each other up. But it was a beastly

time. People used to come to me with very serious news and ask, "What do

you think of it?" And my invariable answer was: "Whatever has happened,

or is going to happen, whoever wants to make peace, you may be certain

that England will not make it, not for ten years, if necessary."'

But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting efforts of Polish

friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna. Once

there, the wing of the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy heads.

We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador (who, all

along, interested himself in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf,

his invaluable assistance and the real friendliness of his reception in

Vienna. Owing to Mr. Penfield's action we obtained the permission to

leave Austria. And it was a near thing, for his Excellency has informed

my American publishers since that a week later orders were issued to have

us detained till the end of the war. However, we effected our hair's-

breadth escape into Italy; and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch

mail steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London as a port of call.

On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the

past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. We saw the signs

of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the

misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of

transports, in the presence of British submarines in the Channel.

Innumerable drifters flying the Naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and

two Naval officers coming on board off the South Foreland, piloted the

ship through the Downs.

The Downs! There they were, thick with the memories of my sea-life. But

what were to me now the futilities of an individual past? As our ship's

head swung into the estuary of the Thames, a deep, yet faint, concussion

passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which missing my ear

found its way straight into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at

my boys, I happened to meet my wife's eyes. She also had felt

profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea,

the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of Flanders--shaping

the future.

FIRST NEWS--1918

Four years ago, on the first day of August, in the town of Cracow,

Austrian Poland, nobody would believe that the war was coming. My

apprehensions were met by the words: "We have had these scares before."

This incredulity was so universal amongst people of intelligence and

information, that even I, who had accustomed myself to look at the

inevitable for years past, felt my conviction shaken. At that time, it

must be noted, the Austrian army was already partly mobilised, and as we

came through Austrian Silesia we had noticed all the bridges being

guarded by soldiers.

"Austria will back down," was the opinion of all the well-informed men

with whom I talked on the first of August. The session of the University

was ended and the students were either all gone or going home to

different parts of Poland, but the professors had not all departed yet on

their respective holidays, and amongst them the tone of scepticism

prevailed generally. Upon the whole there was very little inclination to

talk about the possibility of a war. Nationally, the Poles felt that

from their point of view there was nothing to hope from it. "Whatever

happens," said a very distinguished man to me, "we may be certain that

it's our skins which will pay for it as usual." A well-known literary

critic and writer on economical subjects said to me: "War seems a

material impossibility, precisely because it would mean the complete ruin

of all material interests."

He was wrong, as we know; but those who said that Austria as usual would

back down were, as a matter of fact perfectly right. Austria did back

down. What these men did not foresee was the interference of Germany.

And one cannot blame them very well; for who could guess that, when the

balance stood even, the German sword would be thrown into the scale with

nothing in the open political situation to justify that act, or rather

that crime--if crime can ever be justified? For, as the same intelligent

man said to me: "As it is, those people" (meaning Germans) "have very

nearly the whole world in their economic grip. Their prestige is even

greater than their actual strength. It can get for them practically

everything they want. Then why risk it?" And there was no apparent

answer to the question put in that way. I must also say that the Poles

had no illusions about the strength of Russia. Those illusions were the

monopoly of the Western world.

Next day the librarian of the University invited me to come and have a

look at the library which I had not seen since I was fourteen years old.

It was from him that I learned that the greater part of my father's MSS.

was preserved there. He confessed that he had not looked them through

thoroughly yet, but he told me that there was a lot of very important

letters bearing on the epoch from '60 to '63, to and from many prominent

Poles of that time: and he added: "There is a bundle of correspondence

that will appeal to you personally. Those are letters written by your

father to an intimate friend in whose papers they were found. They

contain many references to yourself, though you couldn't have been more

than four years old at the time. Your father seems to have been

extremely interested in his son." That afternoon I went to the

University, taking with me _my_ eldest son. The attention of that young

Englishman was mainly attracted by some relics of Copernicus in a glass

case. I saw the bundle of letters and accepted the kind proposal of the

librarian that he should have them copied for me during the holidays. In

the range of the deserted vaulted rooms lined with books, full of august

memories, and in the passionless silence of all this enshrined wisdom, we

walked here and there talking of the past, the great historical past in

which lived the inextinguishable spark of national life; and all around

us the centuries-old buildings lay still and empty, composing themselves

to rest after a year of work on the minds of another generation.

No echo of the German ultimatum to Russia penetrated that academical

peace. But the news had come. When we stepped into the street out of

the deserted main quadrangle, we three, I imagine, were the only people

in the town who did not know of it. My boy and I parted from the

librarian (who hurried home to pack up for his holiday) and walked on to

the hotel, where we found my wife actually in the car waiting for us to

take a run of some ten miles to the country house of an old school-friend

of mine. He had been my greatest chum. In my wanderings about the world

I had heard that his later career both at school and at the University

had been of extraordinary brilliance--in classics, I believe. But in

this, the iron-grey moustache period of his life, he informed me with

badly concealed pride that he had gained world fame as the Inventor--no,

Inventor is not the word--Producer, I believe would be the right term--of

a wonderful kind of beetroot seed. The beet grown from this seed

contained more sugar to the square inch--or was it to the square

root?--than any other kind of beet. He exported this seed, not only with

profit (and even to the United States), but with a certain amount of

glory which seemed to have gone slightly to his head. There is a

fundamental strain of agriculturalist in a Pole which no amount of

brilliance, even classical, can destroy. While we were having tea

outside, looking down the lovely slope of the gardens at the view of the

city in the distance, the possibilities of the war faded from our minds.

Suddenly my friend's wife came to us with a telegram in her hand and said

calmly: "General mobilisation, do you know?" We looked at her like men

aroused from a dream. "Yes," she insisted, "they are already taking the

horses out of the ploughs and carts." I said: "We had better go back to

town as quick as we can," and my friend assented with a troubled look:

"Yes, you had better." As we passed through villages on our way back we

saw mobs of horses assembled on the commons with soldiers guarding them,

and groups of villagers looking on silently at the officers with their

note-books checking deliveries and writing out receipts. Some old

peasant women were already weeping aloud.

When our car drew up at the door of the hotel, the manager himself came

to help my wife out. In the first moment I did not quite recognise him.

His luxuriant black locks were gone, his head was closely cropped, and as

I glanced at it he smiled and said: "I shall sleep at the barracks to-

night."

I cannot reproduce the atmosphere of that night, the first night after

mobilisation. The shops and the gateways of the houses were of course

closed, but all through the dark hours the town hummed with voices; the

echoes of distant shouts entered the open windows of our bedroom. Groups

of men talking noisily walked in the middle of the roadway escorted by

distressed women: men of all callings and of all classes going to report

themselves at the fortress. Now and then a military car tooting

furiously would whisk through the streets empty of wheeled traffic, like

an intensely black shadow under the great flood of electric lights on the

grey pavement.

But what produced the greatest impression on my mind was a gathering at

night in the coffee-room of my hotel of a few men of mark whom I was

asked to join. It was about one o'clock in the morning. The shutters

were up. For some reason or other the electric light was not switched

on, and the big room was lit up only by a few tall candles, just enough

for us to see each other's faces by. I saw in those faces the awful

desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in

the contest with no will of its own, and not even the power to assert

itself at the cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no

future, whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral

annihilation. I remember one of those men addressing me after a period

of mournful silence compounded of mental exhaustion and unexpressed

forebodings.

"What do you think England will do? If there is a ray of hope anywhere

it is only there."

I said: "I believe I know what England will do" (this was before the news

of the violation of Belgian neutrality arrived), "though I won't tell

you, for I am not absolutely certain. But I can tell you what I am

absolutely certain of. It is this: If England comes into the war, then,

no matter who may want to make peace at the end of six months at the cost

of right and justice, England will keep on fighting for years if

necessary. You may reckon on that."

"What, even alone?" asked somebody across the room.

I said: "Yes, even alone. But if things go so far as that England will

not be alone."

I think that at that moment I must have been inspired.

WELL DONE--1918

I.

It can be safely said that for the last four years the seamen of Great

Britain have done well. I mean that every kind and sort of human being

classified as seaman, steward, foremast hand, fireman, lamp-trimmer,

mate, master, engineer, and also all through the innumerable ratings of

the Navy up to that of Admiral, has done well. I don't say marvellously

well or miraculously well or wonderfully well or even very well, because

these are simply over-statements of undisciplined minds. I don't deny

that a man may be a marvellous being, but this is not likely to be

discovered in his lifetime, and not always even after he is dead. Man's

marvellousness is a hidden thing, because the secrets of his heart are

not to be read by his fellows. As to a man's work, if it is done well it

is the very utmost that can be said. You can do well, and you can do no

more for people to see. In the Navy, where human values are thoroughly

understood, the highest signal of commendation complimenting a ship (that

is, a ship's company) on some achievements consists exactly of those two

simple words "Well done," followed by the name of the ship. Not

marvellously done, astonishingly done, wonderfully done--no, only just:

"Well done, so-and-so."

And to the men it is a matter of infinite pride that somebody should

judge it proper to mention aloud, as it were, that they have done well.

It is a memorable occurrence, for in the sea services you are expected

professionally and as a matter of course to do well, because nothing less

will do. And in sober speech no man can be expected to do more than

well. The superlatives are mere signs of uninformed wonder. Thus the

official signal which can express nothing but a delicate share of

appreciation becomes a great honour.

Speaking now as a purely civil seaman (or, perhaps, I ought to say

civilian, because politeness is not what I have in my mind) I may say

that I have never expected the Merchant Service to do otherwise than well

during the war. There were people who obviously did not feel the same

confidence, nay, who even confidently expected to see the collapse of

merchant seamen's courage. I must admit that such pronouncements did

arrest my attention. In my time I have never been able to detect any

faint hearts in the ships' companies with whom I have served in various

capacities. But I reflected that I had left the sea in '94, twenty years

before the outbreak of the war that was to apply its severe test to the

quality of modern seamen. Perhaps they had deteriorated, I said

unwillingly to myself. I remembered also the alarmist articles I had

read about the great number of foreigners in the British Merchant

Service, and I didn't know how far these lamentations were justified.

In my time the proportion of non-Britishers in the crews of the ships

flying the red ensign was rather under one-third, which, as a matter of

fact, was less than the proportion allowed under the very strict French

navigation laws for the crews of the ships of that nation. For the

strictest laws aiming at the preservation of national seamen had to

recognise the difficulties of manning merchant ships all over the world.

The one-third of the French law seemed to be the irreducible minimum. But

the British proportion was even less. Thus it may be said that up to the

date I have mentioned the crews of British merchant ships engaged in deep

water voyages to Australia, to the East Indies and round the Horn were

essentially British. The small proportion of foreigners which I remember

were mostly Scandinavians, and my general impression remains that those

men were good stuff. They appeared always able and ready to do their

duty by the flag under which they served. The majority were Norwegians,

whose courage and straightness of character are matters beyond doubt. I

remember also a couple of Finns, both carpenters, of course, and very

good craftsmen; a Swede, the most scientific sailmaker I ever met;

another Swede, a steward, who really might have been called a British

seaman since he had sailed out of London for over thirty years, a rather

superior person; one Italian, an everlastingly smiling but a pugnacious

character; one Frenchman, a most excellent sailor, tireless and

indomitable under very difficult circumstances; one Hollander, whose

placid manner of looking at the ship going to pieces under our feet I

shall never forget, and one young, colourless, muscularly very strong

German, of no particular character. Of non-European crews, lascars and

Kalashes, I have had very little experience, and that was only in one

steamship and for something less than a year. It was on the same

occasion that I had my only sight of Chinese firemen. Sight is the exact

word. One didn't speak to them. One saw them going along the decks, to

and fro, characteristic figures with rolled-up pigtails, very dirty when

coming off duty and very clean-faced when going on duty. They never

looked at anybody, and one never had occasion to address them directly.

Their appearances in the light of day were very regular, and yet somewhat

ghostlike in their detachment and silence.

But of the white crews of British ships and almost exclusively British in

blood and descent, the immediate predecessors of the men whose worth the

nation has discovered for itself to-day, I have had a thorough

experience. At first amongst them, then with them, I have shared all the

conditions of their very special life. For it was very special. In my

early days, starting out on a voyage was like being launched into

Eternity. I say advisedly Eternity instead of Space, because of the

boundless silence which swallowed up one for eighty days--for one hundred

days--for even yet more days of an existence without echoes and whispers.

Like Eternity itself! For one can't conceive a vocal Eternity. An

enormous silence, in which there was nothing to connect one with the

Universe but the incessant wheeling about of the sun and other celestial

bodies, the alternation of light and shadow, eternally chasing each other

over the sky. The time of the earth, though most carefully recorded by

the half-hourly bells, did not count in reality.

It was a special life, and the men were a very special kind of men. By

this I don't mean to say they were more complex than the generality of

mankind. Neither were they very much simpler. I have already admitted

that man is a marvellous creature, and no doubt those particular men were

marvellous enough in their way. But in their collective capacity they

can be best defined as men who lived under the command to do well, or

perish utterly. I have written of them with all the truth that was in

me, and with an the impartiality of which I was capable. Let me not be

misunderstood in this statement. Affection can be very exacting, and can

easily miss fairness on the critical side. I have looked upon them with

a jealous eye, expecting perhaps even more than it was strictly fair to

expect. And no wonder--since I had elected to be one of them very

deliberately, very completely, without any looking back or looking

elsewhere. The circumstances were such as to give me the feeling of

complete identification, a very vivid comprehension that if I wasn't one

of them I was nothing at all. But what was most difficult to detect was

the nature of the deep impulses which these men obeyed. What spirit was

it that inspired the unfailing manifestations of their simple fidelity?

No outward cohesive force of compulsion or discipline was holding them

together or had ever shaped their unexpressed standards. It was very

mysterious. At last I came to the conclusion that it must be something

in the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced

for the most part accidentally by those men who appeared but a loose

agglomeration of individuals toiling for their living away from the eyes

of mankind. Who can tell how a tradition comes into the world? We are

children of the earth. It may be that the noblest tradition is but the

offspring of material conditions, of the hard necessities besetting men's

precarious lives. But once it has been born it becomes a spirit. Nothing

can extinguish its force then. Clouds of greedy selfishness, the subtle

dialectics of revolt or fear, may obscure it for a time, but in very

truth it remains an immortal ruler invested with the power of honour and

shame.

II.

The mysteriously born tradition of sea-craft commands unity in a body of

workers engaged in an occupation in which men have to depend upon each

other. It raises them, so to speak, above the frailties of their dead

selves. I don't wish to be suspected of lack of judgment and of blind

enthusiasm. I don't claim special morality or even special manliness for

the men who in my time really lived at sea, and at the present time live

at any rate mostly at sea. But in their qualities as well as in their

defects, in their weaknesses as well as in their "virtue," there was

indubitably something apart. They were never exactly of the earth

earthly. They couldn't be that. Chance or desire (mostly desire) had

set them apart, often in their very childhood; and what is to be remarked

is that from the very nature of things this early appeal, this early

desire, had to be of an imaginative kind. Thus their simple minds had a

sort of sweetness. They were in a way preserved. I am not alluding here

to the preserving qualities of the salt in the sea. The salt of the sea

is a very good thing in its way; it preserves for instance one from

catching a beastly cold while one remains wet for weeks together in the

"roaring forties." But in sober unpoetical truth the sea-salt never gets

much further than the seaman's skin, which in certain latitudes it takes

the opportunity to encrust very thoroughly. That and nothing more. And

then, what is this sea, the subject of so many apostrophes in verse and

prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never

penetrated either the one or the other? The sea is uncertain, arbitrary,

featureless, and violent. Except when helped by the varied majesty of

the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in

its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile--a grey,

hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very

immensity is wearisome. At any time within the navigating centuries

mankind might have addressed it with the words: "What are you, after all?

Oh, yes, we know. The greatest scene of potential terror, a devouring

enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing if not a

continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual

and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on

beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons."

Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm enough. Or rather a sort

of unholy fascination as of an elusive nymph whose embrace is death, and

a Medusa's head whose stare is terror. That sort of charm is calculated

to keep men morally in order. But as to sea-salt, with its particular

bitterness like nothing else on earth, that, I am safe to say, penetrates

no further than the seamen's lips. With them the inner soundness is

caused by another kind of preservative of which (nobody will be surprised

to hear) the main ingredient is a certain kind of love that has nothing

to do with the futile smiles and the futile passions of the sea.

Being love this feeling is naturally naive and imaginative. It has also

in it that strain of fantasy that is so often, nay almost invariably, to

be found in the temperament of a true seaman. But I repeat that I claim

no particular morality for seamen. I will admit without difficulty that

I have found amongst them the usual defects of mankind, characters not

quite straight, uncertain tempers, vacillating wills, capriciousness,

small meannesses; all this coming out mostly on the contact with the

shore; and all rather naive, peculiar, a little fantastic. I have even

had a downright thief in my experience. One.

This is indeed a minute proportion, but it might have been my luck; and

since I am writing in eulogy of seamen I feel irresistibly tempted to

talk about this unique specimen; not indeed to offer him as an example of

morality, but to bring out certain characteristics and set out a certain

point of view. He was a large, strong man with a guileless countenance,

not very communicative with his shipmates, but when drawn into any sort

of conversation displaying a very painstaking earnestness. He was fair

and candid-eyed, of a very satisfactory smartness, and, from the officer-

of-the-watch point of view,--altogether dependable. Then, suddenly, he

went and stole. And he didn't go away from his honourable kind to do

that thing to somebody on shore; he stole right there on the spot, in

proximity to his shipmates, on board his own ship, with complete

disregard for old Brown, our night watchman (whose fame for

trustworthiness was utterly blasted for the rest of the voyage) and in

such a way as to bring the profoundest possible trouble to all the

blameless souls animating that ship. He stole eleven golden sovereigns,

and a gold pocket chronometer and chain. I am really in doubt whether

the crime should not be entered under the category of sacrilege rather

than theft. Those things belonged to the captain! There was certainly

something in the nature of the violation of a sanctuary, and of a

particularly impudent kind, too, because he got his plunder out of the

captain's state-room while the captain was asleep there. But look, now,

at the fantasy of the man! After going through the pockets of the

clothes, he did not hasten to retreat. No. He went deliberately into

the saloon and removed from the sideboard two big heavy, silver-plated

lamps, which he carried to the fore-end of the ship and stood

symmetrically on the knight-heads. This, I must explain, means that he

took them away as far as possible from the place where they belonged.

These were the deeds of darkness. In the morning the bo'sun came along

dragging after him a hose to wash the foc'sle head, and, beholding the

shiny cabin lamps, resplendent in the morning light, one on each side of

the bowsprit, he was paralysed with awe. He dropped the nozzle from his

nerveless hands--and such hands, too! I happened along, and he said to

me in a distracted whisper: "Look at that, sir, look." "Take them back

aft at once yourself," I said, very amazed, too. As we approached the

quarterdeck we perceived the steward, a prey to a sort of sacred horror,

holding up before us the captain's trousers.

Bronzed men with brooms and buckets in their hands stood about with open

mouths. "I have found them lying in the passage outside the captain's

door," the steward declared faintly. The additional statement that the

captain's watch was gone from its hook by the bedside raised the painful

sensation to the highest pitch. We knew then we had a thief amongst us.

Our thief! Behold the solidarity of a ship's company. He couldn't be to

us like any other thief. We all had to live under the shadow of his

crime for days; but the police kept on investigating, and one morning a

young woman appeared on board swinging a parasol, attended by two

policemen, and identified the culprit. She was a barmaid of some bar

near the Circular Quay, and knew really nothing of our man except that he

looked like a respectable sailor. She had seen him only twice in her

life. On the second occasion he begged her nicely as a great favour to

take care for him of a small solidly tied-up paper parcel for a day or

two. But he never came near her again. At the end of three weeks she

opened it, and, of course, seeing the contents, was much alarmed, and

went to the nearest police-station for advice. The police took her at

once on board our ship, where all hands were mustered on the quarterdeck.

She stared wildly at all our faces, pointed suddenly a finger with a

shriek, "That's the man," and incontinently went off into a fit of

hysterics in front of thirty-six seamen. I must say that never in my

life did I see a ship's company look so frightened. Yes, in this tale of

guilt, there was a curious absence of mere criminality, and a touch of

that fantasy which is often a part of a seaman's character. It wasn't

greed that moved him, I think. It was something much less simple:

boredom, perhaps, or a bet, or the pleasure of defiance.

And now for the point of view. It was given to me by a short,

black-bearded A.B. of the crew, who on sea passages washed my flannel

shirts, mended my clothes and, generally, looked after my room. He was

an excellent needleman and washerman, and a very good sailor. Standing

in this peculiar relation to me, he considered himself privileged to open

his mind on the matter one evening when he brought back to my cabin three

clean and neatly folded shirts. He was profoundly pained. He said:

"What a ship's company! Never seen such a crowd! Liars, cheats,

thieves. . . "

It was a needlessly jaundiced view. There were in that ship's company

three or four fellows who dealt in tall yarns, and I knew that on the

passage out there had been a dispute over a game in the foc'sle once or

twice of a rather acute kind, so that all card-playing had to be

abandoned. In regard to thieves, as we know, there was only one, and he,

I am convinced, came out of his reserve to perform an exploit rather than

to commit a crime. But my black-bearded friend's indignation had its

special morality, for he added, with a burst of passion: "And on board

our ship, too--a ship like this. . ."

Therein lies the secret of the seamen's special character as a body. The

ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our

life. A ship has to be respected, actually and ideally; her merit, her

innocence, are sacred things. Of all the creations of man she is the

closest partner of his toil and courage. From every point of view it is

imperative that you should do well by her. And, as always in the case of

true love, all you can do for her adds only to the tale of her merits in

your heart. Mute and compelling, she claims not only your fidelity, but

your respect. And the supreme "Well done!" which you may earn is made

over to her.

III.

It is my deep conviction, or, perhaps, I ought to say my deep feeling

born from personal experience, that it is not the sea but the ships of

the sea that guide and command that spirit of adventure which some say is

the second nature of British men. I don't want to provoke a controversy

(for intellectually I am rather a Quietist) but I venture to affirm that

the main characteristic of the British men spread all over the world, is

not the spirit of adventure so much as the spirit of service. I think

that this could be demonstrated from the history of great voyages and the

general activity of the race. That the British man has always liked his

service to be adventurous rather than otherwise cannot be denied, for

each British man began by being young in his time when all risk has a

glamour. Afterwards, with the course of years, risk became a part of his

daily work; he would have missed it from his side as one misses a loved

companion.

The mere love of adventure is no saving grace. It is no grace at all. It

lays a man under no obligation of faithfulness to an idea and even to his

own self. Roughly speaking, an adventurer may be expected to have

courage, or at any rate may be said to need it. But courage in itself is

not an ideal. A successful highwayman showed courage of a sort, and

pirate crews have been known to fight with courage or perhaps only with

reckless desperation in the manner of cornered rats. There is nothing in

the world to prevent a mere lover or pursuer of adventure from running at

any moment. There is his own self, his mere taste for excitement, the

prospect of some sort of gain, but there is no sort of loyalty to bind

him in honour to consistent conduct. I have noticed that the majority of

mere lovers of adventure are mightily careful of their skins; and the

proof of it is that so many of them manage to keep it whole to an

advanced age. You find them in mysterious nooks of islands and

continents, mostly red-nosed and watery-eyed, and not even amusingly

boastful. There is nothing more futile under the sun than a mere

adventurer. He might have loved at one time--which would have been a

saving grace. I mean loved adventure for itself. But if so, he was

bound to lose this grace very soon. Adventure by itself is but a

phantom, a dubious shape without a heart. Yes, there is nothing more

futile than an adventurer; but nobody can say that the adventurous

activities of the British race are stamped with the futility of a chase

after mere emotions.

The successive generations that went out to sea from these Isles went out

to toil desperately in adventurous conditions. A man is a worker. If he

is not that he is nothing. Just nothing--like a mere adventurer. Those

men understood the nature of their work, but more or less dimly, in

various degrees of imperfection. The best and greatest of their leaders

even had never seen it clearly, because of its magnitude and the

remoteness of its end. This is the common fate of mankind, whose most

positive achievements are born from dreams and visions followed loyally

to an unknown destination. And it doesn't matter. For the great mass of

mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what

is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort. In

other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense of immediate duty,

and a feeling of impalpable constraint. Indeed, seamen and duty are all

the time inseparable companions. It has been suggested to me that this

sense of duty is not a patriotic sense or a religious sense, or even a

social sense in a seaman. I don't know. It seems to me that a seaman's

duty may be an unconscious compound of these three, something perhaps

smaller than either, but something much more definite for the simple mind

and more adapted to the humbleness of the seaman's task. It has been

suggested also to me that the impalpable constraint is put upon the

nature of a seaman by the Spirit of the Sea, which he serves with a dumb

and dogged devotion.

Those are fine words conveying a fine idea. But this I do know, that it

is very difficult to display a dogged devotion to a mere spirit, however

great. In everyday life ordinary men require something much more

material, effective, definite and symbolic on which to concentrate their

love and their devotion. And then, what is it, this Spirit of the Sea?

It is too great and too elusive to be embraced and taken to a human

breast. All that a guileless or guileful seaman knows of it is its

hostility, its exaction of toil as endless as its ever-renewed horizons.

No. What awakens the seaman's sense of duty, what lays that impalpable

constraint upon the strength of his manliness, what commands his not

always dumb if always dogged devotion, is not the spirit of the sea but

something that in his eyes has a body, a character, a fascination, and

almost a soul--it is his ship.

There is not a day that has passed for many centuries now without the sun

seeing scattered over all the seas groups of British men whose material

and moral existence is conditioned by their loyalty to each other and

their faithful devotion to a ship.

Each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the great mass of

seamen have always been a childless lot) but of loyal and obscure

successors taking up the modest but spiritual inheritance of a hard life

and simple duties; of duties so simple that nothing ever could shake the

traditional attitude born from the physical conditions of the service. It

was always the ship, bound on any possible errand in the service of the

nation, that has been the stage for the exercise of seamen's primitive

virtues. The dimness of great distances and the obscurity of lives

protected them from the nation's admiring gaze. Those scattered distant

ships' companies seemed to the eyes of the earth only one degree removed

(on the right side, I suppose) from the other strange monsters of the

deep. If spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of

half-contemptuous indulgence. A good many years ago it was my lot to

write about one of those ships' companies on a certain sea, under certain

circumstances, in a book of no particular length.

That small group of men whom I tried to limn with loving care, but

sparing none of their weaknesses, was characterised by a friendly

reviewer as a lot of engaging ruffians. This gave me some food for

thought. Was it, then, in that guise that they appeared through the

mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded? And what on

earth is an "engaging ruffian"? He must be a creature of literary

imagination, I thought, for the two words don't match in my personal

experience. It has happened to me to meet a few ruffians here and there,

but I never found one of them "engaging." I consoled myself, however, by

the reflection that the friendly reviewer must have been talking like a

parrot, which so often seems to understand what it says.

Yes, in the mists of the sea, and in their remoteness from the rest of

the race, the shapes of those men appeared distorted, uncouth and

faint--so faint as to be almost invisible. It needed the lurid light of

the engines of war to bring them out into full view, very simple, without

worldly graces, organised now into a body of workers by the genius of one

of themselves, who gave them a place and a voice in the social scheme;

but in the main still apart in their homeless, childless generations,

scattered in loyal groups over all the seas, giving faithful care to

their ships and serving the nation, which, since they are seamen, can

give them no reward but the supreme "Well Done."

TRADITION--1918

"Work is the law. Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a mass of

useless rust, like water that in an unruffled pool sickens into a

stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of men turns to

a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to leave some trace of

ourselves on this earth." The sense of the above lines does not belong

to me. It may be found in the note-books of one of the greatest artists

that ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci. It has a simplicity and a truth

which no amount of subtle comment can destroy.

The Master who had meditated so deeply on the rebirth of arts and

sciences, on the inward beauty of all things,--ships' lines, women's

faces--and on the visible aspects of nature was profoundly right in his

pronouncement on the work that is done on the earth. From the hard work

of men are born the sympathetic consciousness of a common destiny, the

fidelity to right practice which makes great craftsmen, the sense of

right conduct which we may call honour, the devotion to our calling and

the idealism which is not a misty, winged angel without eyes, but a

divine figure of terrestrial aspect with a clear glance and with its feet

resting firmly on the earth on which it was born.

And work will overcome all evil, except ignorance, which is the condition

of humanity and, like the ambient air, fills the space between the

various sorts and conditions of men, which breeds hatred, fear, and

contempt between the masses of mankind, and puts on men's lips, on their

innocent lips, words that are thoughtless and vain.

Thoughtless, for instance, were the words that (in all innocence, I

believe) came on the lips of a prominent statesman making in the House of

Commons an eulogistic reference to the British Merchant Service. In this

name I include men of diverse status and origin, who live on and by the

sea, by it exclusively, outside all professional pretensions and social

formulas, men for whom not only their daily bread but their collective

character, their personal achievement and their individual merit come

from the sea. Those words of the statesman were meant kindly; but, after

all, this is not a complete excuse. Rightly or wrongly, we expect from a

man of national importance a larger and at the same time a more

scrupulous precision of speech, for it is possible that it may go echoing

down the ages. His words were:

"It is right when thinking of the Navy not to forget the men of the

Merchant Service, who have shown--and it is more surprising because they

have had no traditions towards it--courage as great," etc., etc.

And then he went on talking of the execution of Captain Fryatt, an event

of undying memory, but less connected with the permanent, unchangeable

conditions of sea service than with the wrong view German minds delight

in taking of Englishmen's psychology. The enemy, he said, meant by this

atrocity to frighten our sailors away from the sea.

"What has happened?" he goes on to ask. "Never at any time in peace have

sailors stayed so short a time ashore or shown such a readiness to step

again into a ship."

Which means, in other words, that they answered to the call. I should

like to know at what time of history the English Merchant Service, the

great body of merchant seamen, had failed to answer the call. Noticed or

unnoticed, ignored or commanded, they have answered invariably the call

to do their work, the very conditions of which made them what they are.

They have always served the nation's needs through their own invariable

fidelity to the demands of their special life; but with the development

and complexity of material civilisation they grew less prominent to the

nation's eye among all the vast schemes of national industry. Never was

the need greater and the call to the services more urgent than to-day.

And those inconspicuous workers on whose qualities depends so much of the

national welfare have answered it without dismay, facing risk without

glory, in the perfect faithfulness to that tradition which the speech of

the statesman denies to them at the very moment when he thinks fit to

praise their courage . . . and mention his surprise!

The hour of opportunity has struck--not for the first time--for the

Merchant Service; and if I associate myself with all my heart in the

admiration and the praise which is the greatest reward of brave men I

must be excused from joining in any sentiment of surprise. It is perhaps

because I have not been born to the inheritance of that tradition, which

has yet fashioned the fundamental part of my character in my young days,

that I am so consciously aware of it and venture to vindicate its

existence in this outspoken manner.

Merchant seamen have always been what they are now, from their earliest

days, before the Royal Navy had been fashioned out of the material they

furnished for the hands of kings and statesmen. Their work has made

them, as work undertaken with single-minded devotion makes men, giving to

their achievements that vitality and continuity in which their souls are

expressed, tempered and matured through the succeeding generations. In

its simplest definition the work of merchant seamen has been to take

ships entrusted to their care from port to port across the seas; and,

from the highest to the lowest, to watch and labour with devotion for the

safety of the property and the lives committed to their skill and

fortitude through the hazards of innumerable voyages.

That was always the clear task, the single aim, the simple ideal, the

only problem for an unselfish solution. The terms of it have changed

with the years, its risks have worn different aspects from time to time.

There are no longer any unexplored seas. Human ingenuity has devised

better means to meet the dangers of natural forces. But it is always the

same problem. The youngsters who were growing up at sea at the end of my

service are commanding ships now. At least I have heard of some of them

who do. And whatever the shape and power of their ships the character of

the duty remains the same. A mine or a torpedo that strikes your ship is

not so very different from a sharp, uncharted rock tearing her life out

of her in another way. At a greater cost of vital energy, under the well-

nigh intolerable stress of vigilance and resolution, they are doing

steadily the work of their professional forefathers in the midst of

multiplied dangers. They go to and fro across the oceans on their

everlasting task: the same men, the same stout hearts, the same fidelity

to an exacting tradition created by simple toilers who in their time knew

how to live and die at sea.

Allowed to share in this work and in this tradition for something like

twenty years, I am bold enough to think that perhaps I am not altogether

unworthy to speak of it. It was the sphere not only of my activity but,

I may safely say, also of my affections; but after such a close

connection it is very difficult to avoid bringing in one's own

personality. Without looking at all at the aspects of the Labour

problem, I can safely affirm that I have never, never seen British seamen

refuse any risk, any exertion, any effort of spirit or body up to the

extremest demands of their calling. Years ago--it seems ages ago--I have

seen the crew of a British ship fight the fire in the cargo for a whole

sleepless week and then, with her decks blown up, I have seen them still

continue the fight to save the floating shell. And at last I have seen

them refuse to be taken off by a vessel standing by, and this only in

order "to see the last of our ship," at the word, at the simple word, of

a man who commanded them, a worthy soul indeed, but of no heroic aspect.

I have seen that. I have shared their days in small boats. Hard days.

Ages ago. And now let me mention a story of to-day.

I will try to relate it here mainly in the words of the chief engineer of

a certain steamship which, after bunkering, left Lerwick, bound for

Iceland. The weather was cold, the sea pretty rough, with a stiff head

wind. All went well till next day, about 1.30 p.m., then the captain

sighted a suspicious object far away to starboard. Speed was increased

at once to close in with the Faroes and good lookouts were set fore and

aft. Nothing further was seen of the suspicious object, but about half-

past three without any warning the ship was struck amidships by a torpedo

which exploded in the bunkers. None of the crew was injured by the

explosion, and all hands, without exception, behaved admirably.

The chief officer with his watch managed to lower the No. 3 boat. Two

other boats had been shattered by the explosion, and though another

lifeboat was cleared and ready, there was no time to lower it, and "some

of us jumped while others were washed overboard. Meantime the captain

had been busy handing lifebelts to the men and cheering them up with

words and smiles, with no thought of his own safety." The ship went down

in less than four minutes. The captain was the last man on board, going

down with her, and was sucked under. On coming up he was caught under an

upturned boat to which five hands were clinging. "One lifeboat," says

the chief engineer, "which was floating empty in the distance was

cleverly manoeuvred to our assistance by the steward, who swam off to her

pluckily. Our next endeavour was to release the captain, who was

entangled under the boat. As it was impossible to right her, we set-to

to split her side open with the boat hook, because by awful bad luck the

head of the axe we had flew off at the first blow and was lost. The

rescue took thirty minutes, and the extricated captain was in a pitiable

condition, being badly bruised and having swallowed a lot of salt water.

He was unconscious. While at that work the submarine came to the surface

quite close and made a complete circle round us, the seven men that we

counted on the conning tower laughing at our efforts.

"There were eighteen of us saved. I deeply regret the loss of the chief

officer, a fine fellow and a kind shipmate showing splendid promise. The

other men lost--one A.B., one greaser, and two firemen--were quiet,

conscientious, good fellows."

With no restoratives in the boat, they endeavoured to bring the captain

round by means of massage. Meantime the oars were got out in order to

reach the Faroes, which were about thirty miles dead to windward, but

after about nine hours' hard work they had to desist, and, putting out a

sea-anchor, they took shelter under the canvas boat-cover from the cold

wind and torrential rain. Says the narrator: "We were all very wet and

miserable, and decided to have two biscuits all round. The effects of

this and being under the shelter of the canvas warmed us up and made us

feel pretty well contented. At about sunrise the captain showed signs of

recovery, and by the time the sun was up he was looking a lot better,

much to our relief."

After being informed of what had been done the revived captain "dropped a

bombshell in our midst," by proposing to make for the Shetlands, which

were _only_ one hundred and fifty miles off. "The wind is in our

favour," he said. "I promise to take you there. Are you all willing?"

This--comments the chief engineer--"from a man who but a few hours

previously had been hauled back from the grave!" The captain's confident

manner inspired the men, and they all agreed. Under the best possible

conditions a boat-run of one hundred and fifty miles in the North

Atlantic and in winter weather would have been a feat of no mean merit,

but in the circumstances it required uncommon nerve and skill to carry

out such a promise. With an oar for a mast and the boat-cover cut down

for a sail they started on their dangerous journey, with the boat compass

and the stars for their guide. The captain's undaunted serenity buoyed

them all up against despondency. He told them what point he was making

for. It was Ronas Hill, "and we struck it as straight as a die."

The chief engineer commends also the ship steward for the manner in which

he made the little food they had last, the cheery spirit he manifested,

and the great help he was to the captain by keeping the men in good

humour. That trusty man had "his hands cruelly chafed with the rowing,

but it never damped his spirits."

They made Ronas Hill (as straight as a die), and the chief engineer

cannot express their feelings of gratitude and relief when they set their

feet on the shore. He praises the unbounded kindness of the people in

Hillswick. "It seemed to us all like Paradise regained," he says,

concluding his letter with the words:

"And there was our captain, just his usual self, as if nothing had

happened, as if bringing the boat that hazardous journey and being the

means of saving eighteen souls was to him an everyday occurrence."

Such is the chief engineer's testimony to the continuity of the old

tradition of the sea, which made by the work of men has in its turn

created for them their simple ideal of conduct.

CONFIDENCE--1919

I.

The seamen hold up the Edifice. They have been holding it up in the past

and they will hold it up in the future, whatever this future may contain

of logical development, of unforeseen new shapes, of great promises and

of dangers still unknown.

It is not an unpardonable stretching of the truth to say that the British

Empire rests on transportation. I am speaking now naturally of the sea,

as a man who has lived on it for many years, at a time, too, when on

sighting a vessel on the horizon of any of the great oceans it was

perfectly safe to bet any reasonable odds on her being a British

ship--with the certitude of making a pretty good thing of it at the end

of the voyage.

I have tried to convey here in popular terms the strong impression

remembered from my young days. The Red Ensign prevailed on the high seas

to such an extent that one always experienced a slight shock on seeing

some other combination of colours blow out at the peak or flag-pole of

any chance encounter in deep water. In the long run the persistence of

the visual fact forced upon the mind a half-unconscious sense of its

inner significance. We have all heard of the well-known view that trade

follows the flag. And that is not always true. There is also this truth

that the flag, in normal conditions, represents commerce to the eye and

understanding of the average man. This is a truth, but it is not the

whole truth. In its numbers and in its unfailing ubiquity, the British

Red Ensign, under which naval actions too have been fought, adventures

entered upon and sacrifices offered, represented in fact something more

than the prestige of a great trade.