mother of Parliaments to match the classic purity of the building in
which it meets. Its members are men, swayed by many winds of interest
and influence, and if they wobble a bit it is only natural. We
youngsters would settle the Irish Question and the problem of the Drink
Traffic monopoly very quickly! We would fix up the Suffrage for them and
bring everything up-to-date very soon! We would indeed—until we get the
over-sea mail and are reminded of our own lesser problems unsolved and
see our own wobbling. If we have nicer chimneys it is because our
climate is more kindly; and if life seems easier with us it is because
we are so young. We did not have so much hoary feudalism to dig up;
neither, however, have we such golden traditions and such a storied
history. Our life is free, but is it so full?
Let us be very charitable to the homely chimney-pots of London. We have
poured out our treasure and blood for the Empire in this great war
gladly, but this one city has sent over a million of her sons to fight
and given readily scores of millions of her wealth without a murmur, and
is still giving out, giving out, without stint. It is the most heroic,
adventurous city in the world, where men use big maps, think in
millions, and build nationhood not for to-day only but for the centuries
to come.
To speak of lesser things, where is there a more orderly, a more
good-tempered crowd than the crowd of London? Paris has its gay beauty,
Edinburgh its classic lines; but here they have dug parks out of the
quarries of bricks and mortar. The trees, squares, little green patches,
breathing-spaces, unexpected quiet nooks—all these are a surprise to us
because they have cost so much, and they represent a city of ideals
which embrace the past as well as the future.
Later on, when we are older and wiser, you will call us to your
council-chambers. And we shall bring something with us of the freedom of
the large spaces, some vaulting ambitions from new countries where life
is a young man's adventure, some clearness of vision brought from the
solitary places.
We shall bring Home some of the sweeping perspective of a land of
magnificent distances. Freighted, too, we shall be with that love for
England which only those can feel who have left her shores behind to
strike the long trail of Empire. But we can never bring back such gifts
to the mother county as she first dowered us with when she sent us out
to the great new lands with a love for freedom which she nourished
through the centuries with her own blood.
Ah, London of the crazy chimney-pots! what we like about you specially
is your marvellous courage. London afraid, shrinking, timorous! Only
madmen would think it! How you wrestled with your mighty
problems!--problems of transport (you plant mighty railway systems in
your heart, and dig ways underground for your people), and problems of
administration greater than those of many nations!
But your courage is still challenged. You will not fail us, Great Mother
of Cities! We look to you for a lead. You _are_ going to root out your
slum public-houses. You _are_ going to do more for the housing of your
people. And in the larger sphere of the politics of the world you are
still going to hold aloft the banner of freedom and righteousness. Send
out your life-blood of brave endeavour, and we shall feel every
heart-beat and respond to it, away under the Southern Cross, and
wherever the Union Jack flies or English is spoken.
VIII
HORSEFERRY ROAD
Hail to the brave!
Who, going, come no more;
Th' imperious call broke on their slumb'ring souls,
And woke to action all their manhood strong,
And bade them go, that Right might conquer wrong.
Hail to the brave!
Who, going, come no more.
Hail to the brave!
Who going, come again,
Though our poor vision may not see their form;
Yet in the silent hour, when thought seems deep,
We hail them near, and holy vigil keep
With all the brave,
Who going, come again.
J. WILLIAMS BUTCHER.
VIII
HORSEFERRY ROAD
When the great war is over there are some places which will live in the
minds of the Australians. Mena and the desert around the Pyramids has
become a part of the perspective of many Australian lives. It is stamped
there by many a long route march, and the training of the Australian
Forces there is a page in the annals of the history of Egypt, which
includes so much that is military, most noteworthy being the assembling,
training, and fighting of Napoleon's Army at the same place. We had our
Battle of the Pyramids, strenuous enough if only a sham battle.
Heliopolis, with its old associations—the City of the Sun in the days of
Joseph and the place of his marriage, was the centre for our New Zealand
troops and also for many of our Australian units. Particularly will it
be remembered by the thousands of sick and wounded who came there to our
great No. 1 Australian General Hospital, which occupied the largest
hotel in the world, the Heliopolis Palace. The classic island of Lemnos,
both before our landing at Gallipoli and after our evacuation, loomed
large in our life. Salisbury Plain with its ancient towns and its
Druidical remains at Stonehenge also comes into the picture.
But Horseferry Road has its special place in our records. Thousands of
Australians, on business bent, visit Head Quarters there, and the number
who report there on duty or leave every week never falls below four
figures. They see that it is a college, and that the officers are
working in libraries surrounded by memorial busts and bronzes of old
Masters, Tutors, and Scholars. They see hundreds of clerks working in
lecture-halls, class-rooms, or College Chapel. It will be interesting
for them to know that Horseferry Road is worthy of coming into the
historic perspective of the Australian Army.
To begin with, it is probably the oldest road in England, certainly
older than Watling Street. The Archbishop's horse ferry began when his
Grace was more powerful than any of the several kings in England, and
brought the traffic from one side of the Thames to the other before
bridges were thought of. The Horseferry Road carried this ancient
traffic, and was laid out by use, very much the same as Parramatta Road
followed the tracks of the bullock teams along the ridge leading from
Sydney to Parramatta—and thus became in a casual way the first road in
the history of the new nation under the Southern Cross.
The ancient Archbishop never could in his wildest dreams foreshadow the
time when hosts of British soldiers from the other side of the world
would march along his narrow horse ferry road.
The building occupied by our Head Quarters is the Westminster Training
College for teachers, whose principal is Dr. Workman, a leading scholar
of England, and one of the first authorities on Mediaeval History. It
was first thought of taking the College for an officers' training depot,
but the War Office ultimately handed it over to the Australian
Commonwealth.
The Australian Imperial Force but continues the war record of this great
college. Of its 800 or more pre-war students who have attested, 735 are
on active service: 47 have been killed in action, 23 wounded, 7 reported
missing, and 3 are prisoners of war. It has contributed 97 commissioned
officers and 218 non-commissioned officers to the army. The men of this
college have obtained many distinctions in the field. Lieutenant William
F. Forshaw and Lieutenant Donald Simpson Bell have won the V.C. The
first case is well known to Australians, for Lieutenant Forshaw won his
V.C. in the critical days of Gallipoli by holding up Turks for forty-one
hours by throwing bombs. Captain C. H. Hill Roberts and Captain J. W.
Wood won the Military Cross, and Lieutenant E. J. Phillips the
Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Médaille Militaire. Private Herbert
Brindle and Gunner W. L. Cooper, B.A., have won the Military Medal.
This does not profess to be a complete record of the honours won by
Westminster Training College men, but just a list dug out of the
statistics while the war continues, to show that the Australians have
become citizens of no mean city in coming to Horseferry Road,
Westminster.
Besides this _war work_, the Westminster College has done a great deal
for Britain in sending one of its old tutors, Dr. Lowry, to the Munition
Board. He is a great chemist, and the author of some of the surprise
packets which have been sent to Fritz in the shape of new explosives.
In peace, as well as war, the college, which was founded over seventy
years ago at Horseferry Road, has gained honourable distinction. Hedley
Fitton, the famous etcher, was one of its old pupils. Sir James Yoxall,
author and M.P., is another old student. James Smetham, the famous
artist and letter-writer, was a tutor here. John Scott, grandfather of
the Rev. Dr. Scott Lidgett, was the first Principal, and was followed by
Dr. Rigg, the great educational expert and writer on Methodism and
Anglican theology. Besides that, it is linked to Australia by the fact
that some of its old pupils have gone to occupy honourable positions as
teachers and in some cases ministers in the Commonwealth.
At least one of our great Australian schoolmasters, Mr. F. Chapple,
M.A., B.Sc., Principal of the largest boys' college in Australia, Prince
Alfred College, Adelaide, was a student and a member of the staff here.
One of the strange things that war does is to bring back in khaki men
from Australia, on business to the A.I.F. Head Quarters to find that it
is their own old college. Men from Westminster Training College are
fighting in France, Palestine, Mesopotamia, on the Salonica front, and
some of them are in naval work; and while this famous Alma Mater sends
out her own sons to the frontiers of the Empire, she opens wide her
hospitable portals to receive the brawny pioneers of New Lands away
'down under.' Thus men from back-block townships in Australia are
brought into a sort of fellowship of service with the English trainers
of the old Horseferry Road Training College.
Our men will think kindly, too, of Horseferry Road, because the War
Chest Club, just opposite the Head Quarters, was so often their home.
Here, under the hostess, Mrs. Samuel, a capable group of lady workers
have dispensed thousands of hot meals to sore-footed and war-weary
Australians on leave from France. Then there was the quiet refuge of the
Y.M.C.A. Hostel on the other side of the road, in the Wesleyan Central
Hall, where, under the lady superintendent, Mrs. Workman, and her
voluntary assistants, similar good work was done.
To Horseferry Road the Australian came gladly, leaving it regretfully
for war again; and when the war is over it will be a kindly memory. In
close proximity to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, where
so many bonds of Empire are forged, the old Westminster Training College
will continue to do its useful part in Empire building.
* * * * *
_Printed by Jarrold & Sons, Ltd., Norwich, England._
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Transcriber’s Note:
● Where hyphenation occurs on a line break, the decision to
retain or remove is based on occurrences elsewhere in the
text.
● The errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have
been corrected, and are noted here.
● The numbers are references are to the page and line in the
original book.
● Errors in punctuation and quotes have been silently
restored.
Reference correction original text
22.26 tin-hat I pull my tin hat firmly down
32.6 field-guns a battery of field guns
33.18 depot bombs for some dépot
37.16 gunfire demolished by gun-fire
77.5 Zeppelins Bomb their Zeppelyns,
81.20 process world in prosess of reconstruction
83.8 Bazaars Bazars of the Monsky
86.3 battleships battle-ships of a mighty
86.10 Minnewaska the Minniwaska is something
99.16 by the by Austrian Emperor
116.1 chaplain at Étaples, a chaplaín said
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