About this time a new voice began to be heard in England, a big
insistent voice that the deafest ears could not shut out. It spoke with
candid fearlessness and direct simplicity. It painted, with rough, sure
touches, in the very colors of life, pictures that were living and
real. It gave praise where praise was due. It pointed out neglects and
denounced abuses, having begun by drawing the attention of Britannia to
the fact that the sick among her troops--and we had brought the Cholera
with us from England--had been landed without blankets or nourishment
at Gallipoli.
Looking back through many yellowed, time-faded columns of this date,
one sees the formless, weltering confusion upon which the Cimmerian
darkness that is dear to Officialdom heavily brooded, pierced by a
ray of pure dazzling light. And presently the thick mists were to be
scattered--the bat-winged demons of Ignorance, Incapacity, Meanness,
Neglect, Indifference, and Carelessness, Mismanagement, Corruption,
Greed, and Venality, exorcised and--if not absolutely banished--at
least deprived of power to work unlimited misery and ruin upon
Humanity, by the timely intervention of that beneficent Genius, the
Influence of the Daily Press.
What time the Brigade of Guards were encamped upon the grass-slopes
of Scutari, near the great Cemetery where the wild dogs and the
nightingales sang all the night through, a little blue striped tent had
sprung up on the flank of the Cut Red Feathers. Between 2 and 6 a. m.,
Tussell, War Correspondent of _The Thunderbolt_, was occasionally
to be found inside, writing, upon a saddle, and by the light of a
tallow dip stuck in an empty whiskey-bottle, the letters that were
presently to wake all England up.
* * * * *
When the cases containing the new Minié rifles were opened, and the
weapons they contained served out to the Cut Red Feathers and their
neighbors, the Bearskins Plain, in lieu of the old smooth-bore Brown
Bess, this intrusive person--destined to earn an unfading halo of
popularity by telling unpleasant truths with force and vigor--happened,
by the merest accident, to be upon the ground.
The odor of cabbaging was rank in the nostrils--not only of young
Mortimer Jowell--as the contents of the cases were distributed. For
only the top layers consisted of Miniés. Removing these new and
serviceable weapons of warfare, the Armorer-Sergeant and his minions
laid bare--what a heterogeneous collection of obsolete and discarded
firelocks, bearing the marks of no less than fifty different corps!
Roars of Homeric laughter went up from the ranks as the men stood at
ease and handled the interesting relics. And Morty’s C. O. promptly
returned Brown Bess to her original owners, conferred the Miniés
upon certain Regimental sharpshooters, tumbled the rusty relics back
into their cases, and returned them whence they came. And the War
Office--which had contracted with Crowell for the supply of the new
rifles, maintained a Rhadamanthine silence--and Crowell, a member of
the great fraternity not previously mentioned, preserved a discreet
opaqueness.... Of his blunt iron swords that would not cut through
Russian helmets and great-coats; of his soft-iron, short-handled picks
and mattocks, that bent and buckled and broke in the frost-bitten hands
of the soldiers toiling at the trenches before Sevastopol--Tussell, War
Correspondent of _The Thunderbolt_, told us later on.
The myrmidons of other Fleet Street rags, following Tussell’s lead,
presently took to telling the truth in ladlefuls. There was no
silencing them. They would write home. And Jowell, Cowell, Sowell,
Crowell, Dowell, Bowell, and Co., danced and popped like chestnuts on
a red-hot shovel as they perused the columns containing their latest
revelations. And when one ink-smeared varlet presumed to weigh in with
a copy of the official statement regarding the _personnel_ of
the Medical Department of the Eastern Expedition--which afforded for
the comfort and relief of twenty-seven thousand men of all arms, two
hundred and four medical officers; including one chief Apothecary and
three dispensers of medicines--and provided no ambulance-corps, beyond
the stretcher-carrying bandsmen--and revealed the fact that three out
of the four Divisions of troops landed in the Crimea had been without
their knapsacks since the day of disembarkation--even Officialdom
wriggled uneasily in its well-stuffed chair at the War Office Council
Board; and Britannia, lulled to hypnotic slumber by the mellifluous
voice and snaky eye of Sire my Ally, drowsily wondered whether it would
not be as well to think about waking up?
Those Letters from the Seat of Hostilities, how eagerly they were
devoured by the British Public! How they were welcomed, discussed,
denounced, and praised! And presently, when sorrow and bereavement came
knocking at the doors of people of all ranks and classes, and every
hour added to the huge roll of Deaths issued from the War Office--even
Routine and Red Tape were powerless to silence those voices that
clamored in Britannia’s drowsy ears....
“Wake up!” they cried, “wake up! for your sons are dying! On the
stinking, earthen floors of the hospital-tents--on the naked, filthy
planks of the hospital-ships, they lie unhelped, unfed, unclothed,
unpitied! Doomed to be the food of vermin, flies, and maggots!--sealed
as the victims of Fever, Gangrene, and Cholera, unless you wake and
come speedily to the rescue!”
And so, with a tremendous start, Britannia WOKE UP.
* * * * *
Over the United Kingdom broke a cyclone of indignant grief and generous
emotion. Not a woman but was enveloped and carried off her feet. From
the seamstress in the attic to the Queen in her palace the wave spread,
the thrill was communicated, the magic worked its wonder.... Do you
remember when that cry of pity came from the heart of Victoria? She was
more a sovereign in the true sense of the word, at that moment, than
any Queen that had ever reigned before her on the throne of England....
She atoned for a thousand faults, she reached the hearts of her people
once and forever, with those outstretched, womanly hands of sorrow and
compassion and love.
Perhaps you can see my grandmother rushing to her store-cupboards,
filling boxes with pots of home-made jam, pound-cakes, bottles of
calf’s-foot jelly, potted meats, and pickled shalots. Imagine how my
Aunts--typifying the younger generation of Britain’s daughters--pitched
_The Ladies’ Mentor_--always gracefully reticent about the
War--behind the fire--tore up their Berlin-woolwork patterns--threw
the green baize cover over the canary’s cage--boxed the King Charles
spaniel’s ears--had hysterics--came out of them--and set to scraping
lint with a vengeance. The most rigorous spinster knitted waistcoats
and socks and undervests. Professed man-haters compromised on
helmet-caps and muffetees.
My Aunt Julietta bottled broth, scraped lint, cut out and made Hospital
shirts in a kind of sacred frenzy. Her Captain Goliath was not amongst
the wounded, but any day--who knew?... Her round face grew puckered,
and her pretty eyes dim by dint of searching through War Office
Casualty Lists. She pictured her hero on outpost-duty on the snowy
plains, knee-deep in the freezing slush of the muddy trenches--many
a time when he was sheltered by a roof of ragged canvas, and warmed
by a scanty fire of grubbed up-roots. She dreamed of him as starving
when he had cleared his tin platter-full of hot fried biscuit and
scraps of salt pork, it may be. And how often she saw him brought
back dead and bloody from a sortie, when he was roaring some stave of
an Irish song over the punch-bowl, I leave you to guess. Yet for all
that, the Captain took his manly share of peril, privation, suffering
and hardship with the best of them; and a day dawned when--oh! with
what tears of anguish, and delight, and rapture--my Aunt got him back
again....
* * * * *
You have heard how the call came to the less heroic daughters of
England.... To Ada Merling, dreaming one gold October noon under her
Wraye Rest cedars, it came, as of old, to the virgin Joan of Arc. If
Tussell of the roaring bull-voice and the pronounced Hibernian brogue
was her St. Michael, who shall wonder?... God chooses His Messengers
when and where He wills.
For as the Sainted Maid was chosen, consecrated, inspired, and sped,
nearly five hundred years before upon the errand that was to end in
the deliverance of her dear land of France; so certainly the path this
woman was to tread was pointed by a Hand from Heaven; so surely the
words she was to utter, the deeds that were to be done by her--were
prompted and helped by the Angelic Messengers of God.
One wonders whether any foreknowledge of her high fate, her great and
wonderful destiny, the sufferings she was to alleviate and soothe;
the sorrows she was to pity and console; the crying wrongs she was to
redress; the prim and mean and narrow Officialism her generosity was to
put to shame,--may have been vouchsafed her, ere that sunset hour?
I do not think she ever dreamed of what was coming. Her path was set
about with homely duties; her mild, beneficent influence was exercised
in a comparatively narrow sphere. She would have smiled if it had been
told her that a time was at hand when the demands upon her trained
skill, her fertile brain, her vast genius for organization were to be
varied and innumerable; when the road before her was to widen out into
a vast Field of Battle where nations strove with nations in bloody
combat; where the smoke of cannon blotted out Heaven, and Earth shook
with the roll of iron-shod wheels and the trampling of iron-shod hoofs,
and was furrowed deep with trenches and honeycombed with mines, and
mines yet more; though the picks and shovels of the haggard men who dug
them tunneled their dreadful way through the festering bodies of the
buried dead, whom Famine and Pestilence--no less than steel and shot
and shell--had slain.
* * * * *
With her to decide was to act, swiftly and certainly. To Bertham, once
again in divided, incomplete authority at the War Office, the quivering
butt for every shaft launched at Officialdom, she wrote in words like
these:
“It is asked whether there is not at least one woman in England who is
fitted by knowledge, training, character, and experience to organize
and take a Staff of nurses to the East, in aid of these suffering
soldiers? I know that I am capable of undertaking the leadership. If
you think me worthy, say so, and I will go!”
Twenty-four hours before, as the Emergency Sitting had ended, and
friend and foe had passed out into the cool of the Westminster night
air, a pale man with long black hair and a markedly sarcastic cast
of countenance, had said in Bertham’s hearing to a colleague of the
Opposition benches:
“The Government needs three remarkable men to save the country at this
crisis. It has not got them, and that _Thunderbolt_ fellow knows
it has not! Therefore he appeals to the nation, on the principle that
if nine tailors go to the making of one ordinary son of Adam, nineteen
millions of average Britons of both sexes may produce a reliable Prime
Minister, a capable Commander-in-Chief, and an efficient Secretary at
War!”
Disraeli’s gibe failed to wound. Bertham was devoid of the base quality
of vanity. Single-handed he had striven against colossal and venerable
prejudices, moss-grown abuses, corruption wide-spreading as unsuspected
and unseen. He had fought a good fight against overwhelming odds, and
he knew it. As he walked home with his long light step and through the
graying gaslit streets, he repeated the beginning of the wit’s poisoned
sentence:
“‘We need three remarkable men to save the country. We have not got
them.’” And then he added: “But we have one woman who might help us!
Why have I not thought before of Ada Merling? I will write and ask her
now!”
No answer came to his letter. We may know she had not received it. She
was hurrying to London, to beg him to let her go. Ignorant of this,
unable to endure suspense longer, he went next morning early to the
house in Cavendish Street, and found that she was there.
She had arrived on the previous night. She expected him--came hurrying
into the hall at the sound of his voice, speaking to the servant. And
her air seemed so gallant, her eyes were so beautiful and calm and
courageous, that the sick heart of Robert Bertham lifted on a wave of
hope as he looked at her, and said, taking her hand in his courtly way:
“In this my hour of sorrow and humiliation I have turned to you, dear
Ada. Give me your answer. Decide--not as friendship dictates, but as
reason counsels, and let your great heart have the casting-vote. It is
tender to those suffering men, I know!”
She had answered in that voice of warm, human kindness:
“It would break for them, if it could not serve them infinitely better
by keeping in working-order. But you speak of your letter. Has not
mine?--no!--mine must have traveled up in the very train by which I
came. You will find it on your table when you go home presently, asking
you to lay upon me if you think fit, this burden of duty. Ah! if you
do, God knows that I will bear it faithfully as long as He gives me
strength.”
So she had entreated to be let help when her help was the one thing
needful! A passionate gratitude dimmed his brilliant eyes as he looked
at her. He had no words, who was usually eloquent. But he took her
white, strong, slender hand, and stooped low over it and reverently
kissed it. Then he threw on his hat in his careless, breezy fashion,
and, hardly speaking, and with his face turned from her, went upon his
way.... And so out of the story, taking with him the love and respect
of all true men and women, for one of whom, in the best and most
chivalrous sense of the words, it may be written:
“_He loved and labored for his fellow-men!_”