THE END OF RUPERT'S STORY
§1
Let Monty have the last word, for he spoke it well. He spoke it a
few days ago, in the late autumn of 1918, that is to say, as the war
breaks up, and nearly three years after we slipped away in the
moonlight from W Beach.
In those intervening years the game losers of Gallipoli had avenged
themselves at Bagdad, Jerusalem, and Aleppo. In every field the
Turkish Armies had been destroyed: and now the forts of the
Dardanelles were to be surrendered, and the Narrows thrown open to
the Allies. One wished that the dead on Gallipoli might be awakened,
if only for a minute, at the sound of the old language spoken among
the graves, to see the khaki ashore again, and British ships sailing
in triumph up the Straits.
Many of the old Colonel's visions of the emancipation of the Arab
world, and the control of the junction of the continents, had thus
been realised. And a nobler crusade than that which he saw in the
Dardanelles campaign had been fought and won by the army which
entered Jerusalem. And, note it well, the men who won these
victories were in great part the men who escaped from Suvla and
Helles. For, like the Suvla Army, the whole Helles Army escaped. And
the Turk was a fool to let them go.
But, before I give you Monty's last word, let me tell you where I am
at this moment. It is early evening, and I am writing these closing
lines, in which I bid you farewell, sitting on the floor of my
kennel-like dug-out in a Belgian trench. There is a most glorious
bombardment going on overhead. It has thundered over our trench for
days and nights on to the German lines, which to-morrow, when we go
over the top, we shall capture, as surely as we captured the one I
am sitting in now. Yes, Turkey is out of the game; Bulgaria is out
of it; Austria is crying for quarter; and Germany is disintegrating
before our advance.
Our bombardment is the most uplifting and exciting thing. So fast do
the shells fly over and detonate on the enemy ground that it is
almost impossible to distinguish the isolated shell-bursts; they are
lost in one dense fog of smoke. Just now we ceased to be rational as
we stood watching it. "That's the stuff to give 'em!" cried a Tommy
in his excitement. "Pump it over! Pump it over!" and, as some German
sand-bags flew into the air: "Gee! Look at that! Are we downhearted?
NO! 'Ave we won? YES!" And I wanted to throw up my hat and cheer.
There seized me the sensation I got when my house was winning on the
football-ground at school. "We're on top! On top of the Boche, and
he asked for it!"
I have now returned to my dug-out, feeling it in my heart to be
sorry for the Germans. I am impatient to finish my story, for we go
over the top in the morning.
§2
It is in a letter just arrived from my mother that we find Monty's
last word--his footnote to this history. She describes a ceremony
which she attended at Kensingtowe, the unveiling of a memorial in
the chapel to the Old Kensingtonians who fell at Gallipoli. Monty,
as an old Peninsula padre, had been invited to preach the sermon. My
mother writes in her womanly way:
"He preached a wonderful sermon. We all thought him like a man
who had seen terrible things, and was passionately anxious that
somehow good should come of it all.
"Calvary, he said, was a sacrifice offered by a Holy Family.
There was a Father Who gave His Son, because He so loved the
world; a mother who yielded up her child, whispering (he
doubted not): 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord'; and a Son Who
went to His death in the spirit of the words: 'In the volume of
the Book it was written of me that I should do Thy will, O my
God; I am content to do it.'
"And, in days to come, England must remember that once upon a
time she, too, was a Holy Family; for there had been years in
which she was composed of fathers who so loved the world that
they gave their sons; of mothers who whispered, as their boys
set their faces for Gallipoli or Flanders: 'Behold the handmaid
of the Lord' (and oh, Rupert, I felt so ashamed to think
how badly I behaved that last night before you went to
Gallipoli--how rebellious I was!). He went on to speak of the
sons, and what do you think he said? He spoke of one who, the
evening before the last attack at Cape Helles, asked him: 'Will
you take care of these envelopes, in case--' He declared that
this simple sentence was, in its shy English way, a reflection
of the words: 'It was written of me that I should do Thy will;
I am content to do it.'
"That boy, an old Kensingtonian, was mortally hit in the
morning. There was another with him, also an old Kensingtonian,
who was still alive, and might yet come marching home with the
victorious army.
"I lost his next words, for there I broke down. But I seem to
remember his saying:
"'All men and all nations are the better for remembering that
once they were holy. England's past, then, is holy; her future
is unwritten. But Idealism is mightily abroad among those who
shall make the England that is to be. And all that remains for
the preacher to say is this: Nothing but Christianity will ever
gather in that harvest of spiritual ideals which alone will
make good our prodigal outlay; for, after all, we have sown the
world with the broken dreams and spilled ambitions of a
generation of schoolboys....
"'All you who have suffered, you fathers and mothers, remember
this: only by turning your sufferings into the seeds of
God-like things will you make their memory beautiful.'
"Oh, Rupert, I was elevated by all he said, and I prayed that
you might go on with willingness and resolution to the end,
and that I might face the last few weeks of the war with
courage. I thought of the remark of your old Cheshire Colonel,
that, instead of wandering during these years among the
undistinguished valleys, you have been transferred straight to
the mountain-tops. Do you remember how I used to call you 'my
mountain boy'? The name has a new meaning now. Even if you are
in danger at this time, I try to be proud. I think of you as on
white heights."
§3
"Only by turning your sufferings into the seeds of God-like things
will you make their memory beautiful."
As I copied just now those last words of Monty's sermon, I laid down
my pencil on the dug-out floor with a little start. As in a
flashlight I saw their truth. They created in my mind the picture of
that Ægean evening, when Monty turned the moment of Doe's death,
which so nearly brought me discouragement and debasement, into an
ennobling memory. And I foresaw him going about healing the sores of
this war with the same priestly hand.
Yes, there are reasons why such wistful visions should haunt me now.
Everything this evening has gone to produce a certain exaltation in
me. First, there has been the bombardment, with its thought of going
over the top to-morrow. Then comes my mother's glowing letter, which
somehow has held me enthralled, so that I find sentences from it
reiterating themselves in my mind, just as they did in the old
schooldays. And lastly, there has been the joyous sense of having
completed my book, on which for three years I have laboured lovingly
in tent, and billet, and trench.
I meant to close it on the last echo of Monty's sermon. But the
fascination was on me, and I felt I wanted to go on writing. I had
so lost myself in the old scenes of schoolroom, playing-fields,
starlit decks, and Grecian battlegrounds, which I had been
describing, that I actually ceased to hear the bombardment. And the
atmosphere of the well-loved places and well-loved friends remained
all about me. It was the atmosphere that old portraits and fading
old letters throw around those who turn them over. So I took up
again my pencil and my paper.
I thought I would add a paragraph or two, in case I go down in the
morning. If I come through all right, I shall wipe these paragraphs
out. Meanwhile, in these final hours of wonder and waiting, it is
happiness to write on.
I fear that, as I write, I may appear to dogmatise, for I am still
only twenty-two. But I must speak while I can.
What silly things one thinks in an evening of suspense and twilight
like this! One minute I feel I want to be alive this time to-morrow,
in order that my book, which has become everything to me, may have a
happy ending. Pennybet fell at Neuve Chapelle, Doe at Cape Helles,
and one ought to be left alive to save the face of the tale. Still,
if these paragraphs stand and I fall, it will at least be a _true_
ending--true to things as they were for the generation in which we
were born.
And the glorious bombardment asserts itself through my thoughts, and
with a thrill I conceive of it--for we would-be authors are persons
obsessed by one idea--as an effort of the people of Britain to make
it possible for me to come through unhurt and save my story. I feel
I want to thank them.
Another minute I try to recapture that moment of ideal patriotism
which I touched on the deck of the _Rangoon_. I see a death in No
Man's Land to-morrow as a wonderful thing. There you stand exactly
between two nations. All Britain with her might is behind your back,
reaching down to her frontier, which is the trench whence you have
just leapt. All Germany with her might is before your face. Perhaps
it is not ill to die standing like that in front of your nation.
I cannot bear to think of my mother's pain, if to-morrow claims me.
But I leave her this book, into which I seem to have poured my life.
It is part of myself. No, it _is_ myself--and I shall only return
her what is her own.
Oh, but if I go down, I want to ask you not to think it anything but
a happy ending. It will be happy, because victory came to the
nation, and that is more important than the life of any individual.
Listen to that bombardment outside, which is increasing, if
possible, as the darkness gathers--well, it is one of the last
before the extraordinary Sabbath-silence, which will be the Allies'
Peace.
And, if these pages can be regarded as my spiritual history, they
will have a happy ending, too. This is why.
In the Mediterranean on a summer day, I learned that I was to
pursue beauty like the Holy Grail. And I see it now in everything. I
know that, just as there is far more beauty in nature than ugliness,
so there is more goodness in humanity than evil. There is more
happiness in life than pain. Yes, there is. As Monty used to say, we
are given now and then moments of surpassing joy which outweigh
decades of grief, I think I knew such a moment when I won the
swimming cup for Bramhall. And I remember my mother whispering one
night: "If all the rest of my life, Rupert, were to be sorrow, the
last nineteen years of you have made it so well worth living."
Happiness wins hands down. Take any hundred of us out here, and for
ten who are miserable you will find ninety who are lively and
laughing. Life is good--else why should we cling to it as we
do?--oh, yes, we surely do, especially when the chances are all
against us. Life is good, and youth is good. I have had twenty
glorious years.
I may be whimsical to-night, but I feel that the old Colonel was
right when he saw nothing unlovely in Penny's death; and that Monty
was right when he said that Doe had done a perfect thing at the
last, and so grasped the Grail. And I have the strange idea that
very likely I, too, shall find beauty in the morning.
THE END