Time, the philosopher said, takes no account of humanity. "The
activest man sets around mostly," I once heard Stacy Shunk remark as he
sat curled up on the store-porch, nursing a bare foot and viewing the
world through the top of his hat. Did the most active man calmly and
without egotism dissect the sum of his useful accomplishment, he would
be highly discouraged, for time is a relentless destroyer. But a man
can not take so disdainful a measure of his own value. He must live.
To superior minds like the philosopher's or Stacy Shunk's he may be
living his tale of years happy in constantly hoodwinking himself with
the idea that he is an important factor in some great purpose. Now in
certain moods I might attain to the lofty view of the philosopher and
Stacy Shunk. Then I would be confronted by my friend the Professor,
who would have been dissatisfied had he been the author of Plato's
dialogues or the victor of Waterloo. Then it seemed to me that the
wise man would allow himself to be hoodwinked, and would walk hard and
fast without too critical an eye on the results of his journey. It is
when he sits around that Stacy Shunk's active man is discontented, and
this is not because he accomplishes much when working, but because he
accomplishes less when idle. Here I had the example of Rufus Blight,
brought at last to expending his restless energy in chopping golf-balls
out of bunkers. So work became to me the panacea for my ills. I
plunged into the struggle harder than ever, and in working found that
self-forgetfulness which is akin to contentment. It was indeed
marching under sealed orders.
Those nights at sea the Professor's words were often in my mind. I was
terribly lonely, and I could stand by the hour at the ship's rail
looking into the heavens, and beyond them into the limitless spaces
where our vulgar minds have placed the home of the Great Spirit whose
mysterious purposes we fulfil. How infinitesimal seemed my own part in
that purpose, though I played it as best I could. I turned in vain to
those limitless spaces to ask why and for what I lived? Did I ask how
I should live, the answer came from the limitless spaces within me as
clearly as though written on this page. My mother had written it
there, unscientifically yet indelibly, in my boyhood days, and Mr.
Pound had added his few words, almost hidden beneath a mass of verbiage
about Ahasuerus, and before them my forebears had every one of them
left imprinted some sage injunction gained from their experience in
living. So I gathered my strength to do my best. But there was a lack
of definiteness in my purpose. There was no goal at which I aimed. In
my younger days I had had instilled into me the necessity of aspiring
to a particular height, to something concrete, to become a leader at
the bar, in politics or commerce, a Webster, a Clay, or a Girard. But
now I cared little if I never owned the paper for which I worked. The
task at hand alone interested me, and to that I bent every energy.
One task lay at my hand that year when I was in London, beside the
routine of my office, and now I undertook its completion for the
personal pleasure which it gave me to gather into concise form the
result of some years of study and patient digging for facts in
forgotten volumes and manuscripts. The result was surprising. The
book, offered to a publisher with diffident apology, raised a storm of
discussion in a half-dozen languages. To me it had been only a
pleasant intellectual exercise to trace "the habit of war" back to the
simple animal instincts of our ancestors; to follow the changing
methods of fighting from the days when men assailed one another with
stone axes to the modern expression of fighting intelligence in the
battleship; to show how, with every step which we had taken to
eradicate disease and alleviate suffering, we had taken two in refining
and organizing our power of destruction. I had facts and figures to
mark the steps in this twofold human progress, and to show the cost to
the race of a single century not only of warring, but of following the
sage injunction to be prepared for war in times of peace. Had I closed
my labor there, the book would have been lost on the shop-shelves; but
writing ironically, I went on to argue on the benefits of war and of
the necessity of the race continuing in the exercise of this elemental
passion. I had always abhorred preaching, and here to preach I used a
method of inversion, peppering my argument with platitudes on war as a
needed discipline for the spiritual in man by its lessons in fortitude
and self-sacrifice, and on the softening influences of peace. But what
I had intended as subtle irony was discovered by a great conservative
journal to be an unassailable argument, supported by facts and figures,
demonstrating the futility of the movements for international amity. I
was hailed as a bold, clear thinker who had pricked the bubble of
unintelligent altruism, who at a time when philanthropists were
preaching disarmament had proved that men could never disarm as long as
they were born with arms, legs and healthy senses.
So David Malcolm was quite unexpectedly raised to some eminence by a
conservative English journal which was clamoring for increased naval
expenditure; and once discovered, he found himself not without honor in
his own country, for he was assailed from the platform of Carnegie Hall
by the advocates of a gentle life, and in Congress his work was used as
a text-book by those who were fighting for a larger military
establishment. The _Morgen-Anzeiger_, in Berlin, printed a translation
with the purpose of quelling the opposition to army service, while the
reading of a chapter in the French Chamber resulted in an appropriation
for experiments in submarines. Such was the effect of my well-intended
irony. To-day, of course, the true purport of the facts, figures and
argument are better known, but then I had the chagrin of seeing my
projectile explode in the wrong camp, and I did not try to right
myself, because I feared that to explain the error might nullify the
ultimate effect of the explosion. To my mother alone did I trouble to
point out my real meaning, and then because she had been shocked to see
me assailed in her favorite journal, the _Presbyterian Searchlight_, as
a notable example of the result of philosophy unwarmed by religion.
That I should have to make my peace with my mother was not surprising,
but my old professional mentor, Mr. Hanks, loved a paradox; if he
wanted to call a man a fool, he praised him for his wisdom; if he
wished to disprove a proposition, he argued for it, adroitly exposing
its weakness, and yet he wrote to me indignantly.
"I can not understand how from the mass of facts you have gathered you
could calmly advance to so cruel an argument," he said. "Your own
figures protest against your bloodthirsty philosophy. Machiavelli's
Prince is a mollycoddle beside your ideal modern statesman. And yet,
Malcolm, you could as easily have produced a work which would have
stood for years as a reproach to the diplomacy of our time."
Dear old Hanks! It was from his suburban heart that he spoke thus, as
the father of four accomplished daughters, and not as the sceptic of
the office who was always quick to prick the bubbles of pretence. But
it was not long before he had an opportunity to turn ironical himself,
and I could fancy the grim smile with which he wrote the despatch which
sent me from the academic discussion of war to the study of war at
first hand.
"Join the Turks at once."
It was laconic. To me it said more. It was addressed to David
Malcolm, suddenly become known as an advocate of wholesale human
butchery, and told him to follow the camp and see how suffering
benefits the race, to stand by the guns and watch them take the toll
that nations pay for their aggrandizement. To-day, when the book is
understood, when peace conferences invite me to address them and navy
leagues condemn me in resolutions, Hanks wonders why I accepted his
commission with such hearty acquiescence. He deems me inconsistent.
The truth was that my heart leaped at this opportunity for real
adventure. I was years older than in the days when I dreamed of
wearing a cork helmet and carrying the Gospel and an elephant gun into
darkest Africa; but few of us, when we become men, really put away
childish things. Here was my boyhood's dream come true and glorified.
And what a week I had buying my toys! The cork helmet became a
reality, and with it I equipped myself with smartly fitting khaki, and
in the quiet of my lodgings viewed myself with ineffable satisfaction.
I bought equipment enough to have lasted me through a three years'
campaign, as I have since learned from experience, for the exigencies
of transport made me abandon most of it at the very outset of my new
career. But the loss was more than compensated by the delight which I
had in the brief possession of so much warlike paraphernalia.
For two years after that I lived in the midst of armies. It was
action, and to me inaction was a dreadful sickness. Even when we lay
in camps for weeks and months there was the never-ending preparation
for the struggles which lay ahead, and though there were hours as quiet
as Broadway in mid-August, days could not be dull when you could see
the smoke of hostile fires on distant mountains or a wild scout
hovering on the fringe of the desert. For me the happiest days were
when I could ride with the marching columns, when the distant barking
of the guns called me to a hard gallop, when at night by the scant
light of a candle I sat in my tent cross-legged, with my pad on my knee
and my pencil in hand.
In war man strips himself of the unessential things which make up the
museum of superfluities that he calls his home. At home he has
countless troubles. Here he has few, but though they are simple, they
are vital. I faced these elemental problems for the first time when
with my little caravan I set out to join the Turkish army where it lay
camped near the Greek frontier. As I rode my vagrant thoughts might
turn back to home, and in my heart I might feel the old dull pain and
longing, but when a pack-horse was running away with half my
commissariat on his back such moody meditations had to be broken short.
Some days the question of mere bread for a crying stomach became vital,
or a flask of water for a parched throat. There were nights when I
should have given all I possessed, not for the folding-bed long since
abandoned, but for a blanket in which to wrap myself as I slept in a
trench. Within a week it was hard for me to believe that I had not
spent all my life in the wake of an advancing army. London, New
York--they were of another age. Home to me was a tent pitched by the
Thessalian roadside, with my shaggy horses picketed about and my
shaggier attendants chattering their strange jargon. This was luxury
to one who had slept the night before in the rain, or worse, perhaps,
in some shamble in a filthy Greek village. This was hardship, but I
came to love it for the action and the forgetfulness. In the brief
weeks of an opera-bouffe war I had my first taste of great adventure,
and once knowing the joy of it I forgot for a time my academic ideas on
the absurdity of international quarrels, and was happy only when I rode
with the marching columns.
I came even to love the Turks, and I rode almost a Turk at heart over
the plain of Thessaly. For they were strong men, these sturdy brown
fellows who slouched as they marched, but always went forward, never
faltering when the bullets snapped around them and the red fezzes of
their comrades were dropping in the dust. It angered me to see my
fellow-Christians shoot them down and then run toward Athens and the
protecting skirts of the powers, for I knew that the powers would
render their battles futile and their conquests empty and send them
back with ranks depleted to their distant hills. They fought, most of
them, hardly knowing why, save that in some mysterious way it was for
their faith. They were dirty and ragged, but they were patient and
brave. Ill-fed and ill-clothed, they could march all day in the
scorching sun, uncomplaining, shiver all night in chilling winds, and
then shamble on in the face of death.
The Greeks fought a little and ran. They would stand and fight a
little again--then run. I thought that we should chase them to Athens.
I had visions of riding into the city in the wake of Edhem Pasha and
pitching my ragged camp by the Acropolis. But I never passed Pharsala.
It was there that I met the Professor again.
He lay at the foot of a roadside shrine which had been wrecked by a
shell and hardly cast a shadow. But he had been dragged out of the
noonday heat into that bit of shadow by some kindly enemy and there
left to die. The war had finished with him and had swung on. He was
hardly worth even an enemy's glance.
Riding by with my eyes intent on the moving fight ahead, I should have
passed him but for my dragoman. To Asaf there was nothing unusual in
the pitiful figure by the roadside, propped against a stone, with the
head fallen on an outstretched arm and a still hand clutching an empty
water-flask. It was the clothes that called a second glance. Save the
cartridge belt around the waist there was nothing to mark the man as a
soldier. The kindly hand which had placed him there had drawn over his
face a soiled gray hat; his suit was a worn blue serge, dyed now with
dark stains, and his feet were encased in patent-leather shoes, cracked
and almost soleless. The plain ahead was filled with the clamor of
battle; a pack-train clattered by me, hurrying to the front, and but
for these and for Asaf, the ragged Turk at my side, pointing mutely to
the still dark heap, I might have thought myself at home, in my own
valley, come suddenly on a mountain tragedy. And now I dismounted,
and, raising the hat, looked into the thin brown face that I had first
seen years ago so wistfully watching the little flake of cloud which
hovered over the ridges.