force of the nation--have done just as finely, and of course in far
greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May--in the
height of the summer term, just at that moment when Oxford normally is at
its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets
crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the
"flannelled fools," who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe--if
it ever applied to them--with interest. For they had all disappeared. They
were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to
Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants--under age, or
medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, showed boats indeed,
but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of
Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college,
Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High
Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the
fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associated in the minds of
Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were
white tents full of wounded. I walked up and down that wide, deserted lawn
of St. John's, where Charles I once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old
friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a
despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are gone--so
_many_!--and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did--as
blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power."
Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two
Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the testimony of those
who knew them best, not delightful to those who did not love them, not
just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which
life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge,
July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier.
Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be
remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion
of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of
April, 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an
exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and
tragic joy of the "fighting man" in the spring, which may be his last--in
the night heavens--in the woodland trees:
"The woodland trees that stand together
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridge's end.
"The kestrel hovering by day
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
"The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another
Brother, sing.'
"In dreary, doubtful waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;--
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!
"And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind
And only Joy of Battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind
"Through joy and blindness he shall know
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.
"The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings."
A young man of another type, inheriting from the Cecils on the one side,
and from his grandfather, the first Lord Selborne, on the other, the best
traditions of English Conservatism and English churchmanship--open-eyed,
patriotic, devout--has been lost to the nation in Robert A.S. Palmer, the
second son of Lord and Lady Selborne, affectionately known to an ardent
circle of friends whose hopes were set on him, as "Bobbie Palmer." He has
fallen in the Mesopotamian campaign; and of him, as of William Henry
Gladstone, the grandson and heir of England's great Liberal Minister, who
fell in Flanders a year ago, it may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries
said of Sir Philip Sidney,
Honour and Fame are got about their graves,
And there sit mourning of each other's loss.
In one of his latest letters, quoted by a friend in a short biography,
Robert Palmer wrote:--"Who isn't weary to death of the war? I certainly
have been, for over a year; yes, and sorrowful almost unto death over it,
at times, as you doubtless have too. But of one thing I am and always
have been sure, that it is worth the cost and any cost there is to come,
to prevent Prussianism--which is Anti-Christ--controlling Europe." The
following eloquent passage written by an Oxford Fellow and Tutor, in a
series of short papers on the losses sustained by Oxford in the war, is
understood to refer to Mr. Palmer:--
"To-night the bell tolls in the brain (_haud rediturus_) over one of the
noblest--if it be not a treason to discriminate--of all the dead one has
known who have died for England. Graciousness was in all his doings and in
all the workings of his mind. The music and gymnastic whereof Plato wrote,
that should attune the body to harmony with the mind, and harmonise all
the elements of the mind in a perfect unison, had done their work upon
him. He seemed--at any rate, to the eyes of those who loved him, and they
were many--to have the perfection of nature's endowment: beauty of mind
knit to beauty of body, and all informed by a living spirit of affection,
so that his presence was a benediction, and a matter for thanksgiving
that God had made men after this manner. So to speak of him is perhaps to
idealise him; but one can only idealise that which suggests the ideal, and
at the least he had a more perfect participation in the ideal than falls
to the general lot of humanity."
Such he was: and now he too is dead. From the work to which he had gone,
thousands of miles away (a work of service, and of his Master's service),
he had hastened back to England, and for England he has died. His tutor
had once written in his copy of the Vulgate: "_Esto vir fortis, et
pugnemus pro populo nostro et pro civitate Dei nostri_." He was strong;
and he fought for both.
Another Oxford man, Gilbert Talbot, a youngest son of the much-loved
Bishop of Winchester, will perhaps stand for many, in coming years, as the
pre-eminent type of first youth, youth with all its treasure of life and
promise unspent, poured out like spikenard in this war at the feet of
England. Already assured at Oxford of a brilliant career in politics, a
fine speaker, a hard worker, possessing by inheritance the charm of two
families, always in the public eye and ear, and no less popular than
famous, he had just landed in the United States when the war broke out. He
was going round the world with a friend, youth and ambition high within
him. He turned back without a moment's hesitation, though soldiering had
never been at all attractive to him, and after his training went out to
France. He was killed in Flanders in July last. Let me give the story of
his identification after death on the battle-field, by his elder brother,
Neville, Army Chaplain, and ex-Balliol tutor, as Canon Scott Holland gave
it in the _Commonwealth_:--
"The attack had failed. There was never any hope of its succeeding, for
the machine-guns of the Germans were still in full play, with their fire
unimpaired. The body had to lie there where it had fallen. Only, his
brother could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or unblessed. After a
day and a half of anxious searching for exact details, he got to the
nearest trench by the 'murdered' wood, which the shells had now smashed to
pieces. There he found some shattered Somersets, who begged him to go no
farther. But he heard a voice within him bidding him risk it, and the call
of the blood drove him on. Creeping out of the far end of the trench, as
dusk fell, he crawled through the grass on hands and knees, in spite of
shells and snipers, dropping flat on the ground as the flares shot up from
the German trenches. And, at last, thirty yards away in the open ... he
knew that he was close on what he sought. Two yards farther, he found it.
He could stroke with his hand the fair young head that he knew so well; he
could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, and the badge and the whistle.
He could breathe a prayer of benediction ... and then crawl back on his
perilous way in the night, having done all that man could do for the
brother whom he had loved so fondly; and enabled, now, to tell those at
home that Gilbert was dead indeed, but that he had died the death that a
soldier would love to die, leaving his body the nearest of all who fell,
to the trench that he had been told to take."
Again, of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Oxford
friend says: "There were almost infinite possibilities in his future." He
was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of
importance in the Foreign Office, refused it, and went back to the
front--to die. But among the hundreds of memorial notices issued by the
Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs and recurs, of unhesitating,
uncalculated sacrifice. Older men, and younger men, Don, and
under-graduate, lads of nineteen and twenty, and those who were already
school-mastering, or practising at the Bar, or in business, they felt no
doubts, they made no delays. Their country called, and none failed in that
great _Adsum_.
Cambridge of course has the same story to tell. One takes the short,
pathetic biographies almost at random from the ever-lengthening record,
contributed by the colleges. Captain J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, was already
Director of an important steel works, engaged in Government business when
war broke out, and might have honourably claimed exemption. Instead he
offered himself at once on mobilisation, and went out with his battalion
to France last spring. On the 15th of June, at Festubert, he was killed in
volunteering to bring what was left of a frightfully battered battalion
out of action. "What seems to me my duty as an officer," he once wrote to
a friend, "is to carry my sword across the barriers of death clean and
bright." "This," says the friend who writes the notice, "he has done."
Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in
the forehead by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. His General and
brother officers write:
_He was a very fine young officer.... Every one loved
him.... His men would do anything for him...._
And the sergeant of his machine-gun brigade says:
_Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I
have lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and
kind to me and us all_.
Lieutenant Hamilton, aged twenty-five, says in a last letter to his
father:
_Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is
going on. It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it
all. Any moment one may be put out of action, but one does
not worry. That quiet time alone with God at the Holy
Communion was most comforting_.
Immediately after writing these words, the writer fell in action. Captain
Clarke, a famous Cambridge athlete, President of the C.U.A.C., bled to
death--according to one account--from a frightful wound received in the
advance near Hooge on September 25th. His last recorded act--the
traditional act of the dying soldier!--was to give a drink from his flask
to a wounded private. Of the general action of Cambridge men, the Master
of Christ's writes: "Nothing has been more splendid than the way the young
fellows have come forward; not only the athletes and the healthy, but in
all cases the most unlikely men have rushed to the front, and have done
brilliantly. The mortality, however, has been appalling. In an ordinary
way one loses one killed to eight or nine wounded; but in this war the
number of Cambridge men killed and missing practically equals the number
of wounded." Of the effect upon the University an eye-witness says:
"Eighty per cent of the College rooms are vacant. Rows and rows of houses
in Cambridge are to let. All the Junior Fellows are on service in one
capacity or another, and a great many of the Seniors are working in
Government Offices or taking school posts"--so that the school education
of the Country may be carried on. Altogether, nearly 12,000 Cambridge men
are serving; 980 have been wounded; 780 have been killed; 92 are missing.
As to one's friends and kinsfolk, let me recall the two gallant grandsons
of my dear old friend and publisher, George Murray Smith, the original
publisher of _Jane Eyre_, friend of Charlotte Brontë, and creator of the
_Dictionary of National Biography_. The elder one, who had just married
before going out, fought all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in
one of the early actions on the Flanders front. "He led us all the way,"
said one of his men afterwards. All the way!--All through the immortal
rear-guard actions of August--only to fall, when the tide had turned, and
the German onslaught on Paris had been finally broken! "In all my
soldiering," writes a brother officer, "I have never seen a warmer feeling
between men and their officer." "Was he not," asks a well-known Eton
master, "that tall, smiling, strong, gentle-mannered boy at
White-Thomson's?"--possessing an "affectionate regard and feeling for
others which boys as boys, especially if strong and popular, don't always,
or indeed often possess." The poor parents were uncertain as to his fate
for many weeks, but he finally died of his wounds in a hospital behind the
German lines. Then, little more than six months later came the second
blow. Geoffrey, the younger brother, aged nineteen, fell on September
29th, near Vermelles. Nothing could be more touching than the letters
from officers and men about this brave, sweet-tempered boy. "Poor old
regiment!" writes the Colonel to the lad's father--"we were badly knocked
about, and I brought out only 3 officers and 375 men, but they did
magnificently, and it was thanks to officers like your son, who put the
honour of the regiment before all thought of fatigue or personal danger.
Such a gallant lad! We all loved him." A private, the boy's
soldier-servant, who fought with him, writes: "I wish you could have seen
him in that trench.... All the men say that he deserved the V.C.... I
don't know if we are going back to those trenches any more, but if we do,
I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in some quiet place.... I
cannot bear to think that I shall not be able to be with him any more."
But how they crowd upon the mind--the "unreturning brave"! Take our
friends and neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country. All round us
the blows have fallen--again and again the only son--sometimes two
brothers out of three--the most brilliant--the best beloved. And I see
still the retreating figure of a dear nephew of my own, as he vanished
under the trees waving his hand to us in March last. A boy made of
England's best--who after two years in Canada, and at the beginning of
what must have been a remarkable career, heard the call of the Mother
Country, and rushed home at once. He was transferred to an English
regiment, and came to say good-bye to us in March. It was impossible to
think of Christopher's coming to harm--such life and force, such wisdom
and character also, in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful eyes! We
talked of the future of Canada--not much of the war. Then he vanished, and
I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, near Bailleul, he went out
with a listening party between the trenches, was shot through both legs by
a sniper, and otherwise injured--carried back to hospital, and after a few
hours' vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had
done his duty and fearing nothing. "Romance and melodrama," says Professor
Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest and most moving utterances of the
war, "were once a memory--broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the
past. We live no longer upon fragments and memories, we have entered
ourselves upon an heroic age.... As for me personally, there is one
thought that is always with me--the thought that other men are dying for
me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of them men
whom I have taught and loved." The orthodox Christian "will be familiar
with that thought of One who loved you dying for you. I would like to say
that now I seem to be familiar with the thought that something innocent,
something great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying daily for
me. That is the sort of community we now are--a community in which one man
dies for his brother; and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger and
quarrels, we _are_ brothers, who are ready to seal our brotherhood with
blood. It is for us these men are dying--for the women, the old men, and
the rejected men--and to preserve civilisation and the common life which
we are keeping alive, or building."
So much for the richer and the educated class. As to the rank and file,
the Tommies who are fighting and dying for England in precisely the same
spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal
world, I have seen them myself within a mile of the trenches, marching
quietly up through the fall of the March evening to take their places in
that line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so
many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or
shell fire, is practically invariable. Not the conscript soldiers of a
military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce
familiar from childhood! Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, to
whom it is all new, who at bottom, however firm their will, or wonderful
their courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome business. "I do not
find it easy," writes a chaplain at the front who knows his men and has
shared all the dangers of their life--"to give incidents and sayings. I
could speak of the courage of the wounded brought in after battle. How
many times has one heard them telling the doctor to attend to others
before themselves! I could tell you of a very shy and nervous boy who,
after an attack, dug, himself alone, with his intrenching tool, a little
trench, under continuous fire, up which trench he afterwards crept
backwards and forwards carrying ammunition to an advanced post; or of
another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under snipers'
fire, and somehow built him a slight protection until night fell and
rescue came. Such incidents are merely specimens of thousands which are
never known. Indeed it is the heroism of _all_ the men _all_ the time
which has left the most lasting impression on my mind after thirteen
months at the war. No one can conceive the strain which the daily routine
of trench life entails, unless one has been among the men. They never show
the slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do what they are told when
and where they are told without questioning; no matter what the conditions
or dangers, they come up smiling and cheery through it all--full of
'grouse,' perhaps, but that is the soldier's privilege!... It is, I think,
what we all are feeling and are so proud of--this unbreakable spirit of
self-sacrifice in the daily routine of trench warfare. We are proud of it
because it is the highest of all forms of self-sacrifice, for it is not
the act of a moment when the blood is up or the excitement of battle is at
fever heat; but it is demanded of the soldier, day in and day out, and
shown by him coolly and deliberately, day in and day out, with death
always at hand. We are proud of it, too, because it is so surely a sign of
the magnificent _'moral'_ of our troops--and _moral_ is going to play a
very leading part as the war proceeds.... What is inspiring this splendid
disregard of self is partly the certainty that the Cause is Right; partly,
it is a hidden joy of conscience which makes them know that they would be
unhappy if they were not doing their bit--and partly (I am convinced of
this, too,) it is a deepening faith in the Founder of their Faith Whom so
many appreciate and value as never before, because they realise that even
He has not shirked that very mill of suffering through which they are now
passing themselves."
A few days ago, I accompanied a woman official distributing some leaflets
on behalf of a Government department, in some visits to families living in
a block of model dwellings somewhere in South London. We called on nine
families. In every single case the man of the family had gone, or was
expecting to go, to the war; except in one case, where a man who, out of
pure patriotism and at great personal difficulty had joined the Volunteer
Reserve at the outbreak of war, had strained his heart in trench-digging
and was now medically unfit, to his own bitter disappointment. There was
some grumbling in the case of one young wife that her husband should be
forced to go before the single men whom she knew; but in the main the
temper that showed itself bore witness both to the feeling and the
intelligence that our people are bringing to bear on the war. One woman
said her husband was a sergeant in a well-known regiment. He thought the
world of his men, and whenever one was killed, he must be at the burying.
"He can't bear, you know"--she added shyly--"they should feel alone." She
had three brothers-in-law "out"--one recently killed. One was an ambulance
driver under the R.A.M.C. He had five small children, but had volunteered.
"He doesn't say much about the war, except that 'Tommies are wonderful.
They never complain.'" She notices a change in his character. He was
always good to his wife and children--"but now he's splendid!" The brother
of another woman had been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the country and
the people. When war broke out he "felt he must fight for them." He came
home at once and enlisted. Another brother had been a stoker on a war-ship
at the Dardanelles, and was in the famous landing of April 25. Bullets
"thick and fast like hailstorm. Terrible times collecting the dead! Her
brother had worked hard forming burial parties. Was now probably going to
the Tigris. Wrote jolly letters!"
Then there was the little woman born and bred in the Army, with all the
pride of the Army--a familiar type. Husband a sergeant in the Guards--was
gymnastic instructor at a northern town--and need not have gone to the
war, but felt "as a professional soldier" he ought to go. Three brothers
in the Army--one a little drummer-boy of sixteen, badly wounded in the
retreat from Mons. Her sailor brother had died--probably from exposure, in
the North Sea. The most cheerful, plucky little creature! "We are Army
people, and must expect to fight."
Well--you say you "would like America to visualise the effort, the
self-sacrifice of the English men and women who are determined to see this
war through." There was, I thought, a surprising amount of cheerful
effort, of _understanding_ self-sacrifice in those nine homes, where my
companion's friendly talk drew out the family facts without difficulty.
And I am convinced that if I had spent days instead of hours in following
her through the remaining tenements in these huge and populous blocks the
result would have been practically the same. _The nation is behind the
war, and behind the Government_--solidly determined to win this war, and
build a new world after it.