“When peace comes,” wrote an officer of the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, the
regiment in which Munro was a private and in which he rose to the rank of
lance-sergeant, “Saki will give us the most wonderful of all the books
about the war.” But that book of the war will not be written; for Munro
has died for King and country. In this volume are his last tales. And
it is because these tales, brilliant and elusive as butterflies, hide,
rather than reveal, the character of the man who wrote them, give but a
suggestion of his tenderness and simplicity, of his iron will, of his
splendour in the grip of war, that it is my duty to write these pages
about him, now that he lies in the kind earth of France. It is but to do
what his choice of a pen-name makes me sure he himself would have done
for a friend.
“Yon rising Moon that looks for us again,
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter, rising, look for us!
Through this same Garden—and for _one_ in vain.
“And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass
Among the Guests, star-scattered on the grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty glass.”
The first time that Munro used the name of Saki was, I believe, in 1890,
when he published in the _Westminster Gazette_ the second of the
political satires, which were afterwards collected in a volume, called
_Alice in Westminster_. It was, I think, because the wistful philosophy
of FitzGerald appealed to him, as it did to so many of his
contemporaries, that he chose a pen-name from his verses. He loved the
fleeting beauty of life. “There is one thing I care for and that is
youth,” he once said. And he always remained youthful. It was perfectly
natural for him, although he was then a man of forty, to celebrate the
coming in of a new year by seizing the hands of strangers and flying
round in a great here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush at Oxford Circus,
and, later in the year, to dance in the moonlight round a bonfire in the
country, invoking Apollo with entreaties for sunshine to waken the
flowers. His last tale, _For the Duration of the War_, written when he
was at the front, shows that his spirit remained youthful to the end.
But if he gloried in the beauty of life, he was conscious of its sadness.
Have we any book in which the joy and pain of life are so intimately
blended as they are in _The Unbearable Bassington_? Munro himself
laughed when he was looking through a collection of criticisms of that
novel, some of which emphasised its gaiety and others its poignancy, and
remarked that they would bewilder the people who read them.
It is not my present purpose to write a biography of my friend. That is
a task which must be discharged later, and an account of his life will be
given in the first volume of the collected edition of his works, which it
is proposed to publish after the war. Nevertheless, before writing of
the transformation wrought in him by the war, it may be well to give a
brief outline of his career.
Munro was born in 1870 in Burmah, where his father, the late Colonel C.
A. Munro, was stationed. At his christening he was named Hector Hugh.
He belonged to a family with traditions of the two services. His
paternal grandfather had been in the army, and his mother was a daughter
of Rear-Admiral Mercer. Mrs. Munro died when her children were very
young, and Hector, his elder brother and his sister were brought up by
their father’s sisters, two maiden ladies, who were devoted to the
children, but had old-fashioned Scottish ideas of discipline. Their home
was near Barnstaple, a lonely house in a garden shut in by high stone
walls with meadows beyond. The three children had no companions, and
were thrown on their own resources for amusement. One of their
diversions was to produce a newspaper. All through his childhood Hector
professed violent Tory opinions, and at a very early age he began to take
an interest in politics and to read any books or papers dealing with them
that came his way. He loved, above all, the woodlands and the wild
things in them, especially the birds. His delicate health caused his
aunts somewhat to temper their severity in his case, but I fancy they
must have had some difficulty in curbing his high spirits; for he was a
thoroughly human boy and up to every sort of prank. He was sent for a
time to a private school at Exmouth, and when he left it did lessons at
home with his sister’s governess. Later he was sent to Bedford College.
When school-days were over and Colonel Munro had returned to England for
good, Hector and his sister were taken abroad by their father. They
lived in Normandy and then in Dresden, where the first German words that
Hector learnt were the names of birds, sometimes picked up from strangers
in the zoological gardens. Then came a strenuous series of visits to
German and Austrian cities, which Colonel Munro arranged as much for the
education as the pleasure of his son and daughter. Museums and
picture-galleries were visited everywhere. Hector amused himself by
counting up the number of St. Sebastians in each gallery and making bets
with his sister as to which would have the most. Berlin won with
eighteen. The impression made on Munro by this tour is to be seen in his
books, and in the present volume there are two tales, _The Interlopers_
and _The Wolves of Cernogratz_, which seem to have been inspired by the
memory of some romantic castle in the heart of Europe. A short play,
_Karl Ludwig’s Window_, which will be published later, is based on an
idea given by a visit to a castle near Prague.
After a long visit to Davos, Colonel Munro returned with his family to
England and settled in North Devon, where he devoted himself during the
next two years to directing the studies of his son and daughter. Then
came another long visit to Davos, after which Hector left England and
joined the Burmese Mounted Police. He once told me of the feeling of
loneliness he experienced when he first arrived in Burmah, using almost
the same words in which he described Bassington’s sense of isolation in
the colony to which he was sent. That account of the young Englishman
looking enviously at a native boy and girl, racing wildly along in the
joy of youth and companionship, is one of the rare instances of
autobiography in Munro’s works. He was unable to support the Burmese
climate and, after having fever seven times in eleven months, was forced
to return to England. He remained at home for a year and hunted
regularly with his sister during the winter. He then came to London with
the intention of making a literary career for himself. His talent was
recognised by Sir Francis Gould, to whom a friend had given him an
introduction, and he soon began to write for the _Westminster Gazette_.
Two years after he settled in London the publication of the political
satires, based on _Alice in Wonderland_, brought him into prominence as a
wit and a writer to be counted with. Mr. Balfour was his chief butt in
these pieces. He was still, as he always remained, a Conservative, but
he held at the time that Mr. Balfour’s leadership was a weakness to the
party.
In 1902 Munro went to the Balkans for the _Morning Post_, and later he
became the correspondent of that paper in St. Petersburg, where he was
during the revolution of 1905.
He left St. Petersburg to represent the _Morning Post_ in Paris, and
returned to London in 1908, where the agreeable life of a man of letters
with a brilliant reputation awaited him. He had a lodging in Mortimer
Street and lived exceedingly simply. It was his custom to pass the
morning in a dressing-gown writing. His writing-pad was usually propped
up with a book to make it slant and he wrote slowly in a very clear hand,
rarely erasing a word or making a correction. His air and the movement
of his hand gave one the impression that he was drawing and not writing.
He almost always lunched at a Lyons bread-shop, partly because it was
economical and partly because, as he said, he got exactly the sort of
luncheon he liked. He cared nothing for money. He had to earn his
living, but he was content as long as he had enough money to supply his
needs. When a friend once suggested a profitable field for his writings,
he dismissed the idea by saying that he was not interested in the public
for which it was proposed that he should write. He loved his art, and,
by refusing to adopt a style that might have appealed to wider circles,
he made himself a place in our literature which, in the opinion of many,
will be lasting. Almost every day he played cards, either in the late
afternoon or in the evening, at the Cocoa Tree Club. The sight of the
wealth of others did not excite his envy. I remember his coming home
from a ball and relating that he had sat at supper next a millionairess,
whose doctor had prescribed a diet of milk-puddings. “I had a hearty
supper,” he said gleefully, “and for all her millions she was unable to
eat anything.”
Munro was exceedingly generous. He would share his last sovereign with a
friend, and nothing pleased him better than to entertain his friends at
dinner in a club or restaurant. Nothing angered him more than meanness
in others. I remember the indignation with which he spoke of a rich
woman who had refused to give adequate help to a poor person, who stood
in need of it.
This even life in town, occasionally varied by a visit to a country
house, was rudely disturbed by the shock of war. Munro was in the House
of Commons when Sir Edward Grey made his statement on the position that
this country was to take up. He told me that the strain of listening to
that speech was so great that he found himself in a sweat. He described
the slowness with which the Minister developed his argument and the way
in which he stopped to put on his eye-glasses to read a memorandum and
then took them off to continue, holding the House in suspense. That
night we dined at a chop-house in the Strand with two friends. On our
way Munro insisted on walking at a tremendous pace, and at dinner, when
he ordered cheese and the waiter asked whether he wanted butter, he said
peremptorily: “Cheese, no butter; there’s a war on.” A day or two later
he was condemning himself for the slackness of the years in London and
hiring a horse to take exercise, to which he was little addicted, in the
Park. He was determined to fight. Nothing else was to have been
expected of the man who wrote _When William Came_, a novel in which he
used his supreme gift of irony to rouse his fellow-countrymen from their
torpor and to stir them to take measures for the defence of the country.
_Punch_ declared that there had been no such conversational fireworks
since Wilde, in reviewing this book, but Munro was more gratified by a
word of encouragement sent him by Lord Roberts, after he had read the
book, than by all the praise of the critics. He was over military age
and he was not robust. In the first weeks of the war there seemed little
chance of his being able to become a soldier. “And I have always looked
forward to the romance of a European war,” he said.
There still hangs in his room in Mortimer Street an old Flemish picture,
which he had picked up somewhere, of horsemen in doublets and plumed
hats, fighting beneath the walls of a city. It was, I think, the only
painting in his possession. Perhaps it was this picture that represented
to him the romance of which he spoke; but he did not hide from himself
the terrible side of war. Happily thoughts about war can be given in his
own words. The following piece appeared in the first edition of the
_Morning Post_ of April 23, 1915, under the title, _An Old Love_—
“‘I know nothing about war,’ a boy of nineteen said to me two days
ago, ‘except, of course, that I’ve heard of its horrors; yet,
somehow, in spite of the horrors, there seems to be something in it
different to anything else in the world, something a little bit
finer.’
“He spoke wistfully, as one who feared that to him war would always
be an unreal, distant, second-hand thing, to be read about in special
editions, and peeped at through the medium of cinematograph shows.
He felt that the thing that was a little bit finer than anything else
in the world would never come into his life.
“Nearly every red-blooded human boy has had war, in some shape or
form, for his first love; if his blood has remained red and he has
kept some of his boyishness in after life, that first love will never
have been forgotten. No one could really forget those wonderful
leaden cavalry soldiers; the horses were as sleek and prancing as
though they had never left the parade-ground, and the uniforms were
correspondingly spick and span, but the amount of campaigning and
fighting they got through was prodigious. There are other
unforgettable memories for those who had brothers to play with and
fight with, of sieges and ambushes and pitched encounters, of the
slaying of an entire garrison without quarter, or of chivalrous,
punctilious courtesy to a defeated enemy. Then there was the slow
unfolding of the long romance of actual war, particularly of European
war, ghastly, devastating, heartrending in its effect, and yet
somehow captivating to the imagination. The Thirty Years’ War was
one of the most hideously cruel wars ever waged, but, in conjunction
with the subsequent campaigns of the Great Louis, it throws a glamour
over the scene of the present struggle. The thrill that those
far-off things call forth in us may be ethically indefensible, but it
comes in the first place from something too deep to be driven out;
the magic region of the Low Countries is beckoning to us again, as it
beckoned to our forefathers, who went campaigning there almost from
force of habit.
“One must admit that we have in these Islands a variant from the
red-blooded type. One or two young men have assured me that they are
not in the least interested in the war—‘I’m not at all patriotic, you
know,’ they announce, as one might announce that one was not a
vegetable or did not use a safety-razor. There are others whom I
have met within the recent harrowing days who had no place for the
war crisis in their thoughts and conversations; they would talk by
the hour about chamber-music, Greek folk-dances, Florentine art, and
the difficulty of getting genuine old oak furniture, but the national
honour and the national danger were topics that bored them. One felt
that the war would affect them chiefly as involving a possible
shortage in the supply of eau-de-Cologne or by debarring them from
visiting some favourite art treasure at a Munich gallery. It is
inconceivable that these persons were ever boys, they have certainly
not grown up into men; one cannot call them womanish—the women of our
race are made of different stuff. They belong to no sex and it seems
a pity that they should belong to any nation; other nations probably
have similar encumbrances, but we seem to have more of them than we
either desire or deserve.
“There are other men among us who are patriotic, one supposes, but
with a patriotism that one cannot understand; it must be judged by a
standard that we should never care to set up. It seems to place a
huckstering interpretation on honour, to display sacred things in a
shop window, marked in plain figures. ‘If we remained neutral,’ as a
leading London morning paper once pleaded, ‘we should be, from the
commercial point of view, in precisely the same position as the
United States. We should be able to trade with all the belligerents
(so far as war allows of trade with them); we should be able to
capture the bulk of their trade in neutral markets; we should keep
our expenditure down; we should keep out of debt; we should have
healthy finances.’
“A question was buzzing in my head by the time I had finished reading
those alluring arguments:
“Some men of noble stock were made;
Some glory in the murder-blade:
Some praise a science or an art,
But I like honourable trade.
“The poet has given a satiric meaning to the last word but one in
those lines; perhaps that is why they flashed so readily to the mind.
“One remembers with some feeling of relief the spectacle last August
of boys and youths marching and shouting through the streets in
semi-disciplined mobs, waving the flags of France and Britain. There
is perhaps nothing very patriotic in shouting and flag-waving, but it
is the only way these youngsters had of showing their feelings.”
When at last Munro managed to enlist in the 2nd King Edward’s Horse, he
was supremely happy. He put on a trooper’s uniform with the exaltation
of a novice assuming the religious habit. But after a few months he
found that he was not strong enough for life in a cavalry regiment and he
arranged to exchange into the 22nd Royal Fusiliers. He chafed at the
long months of training in England and longed to get to the front, but
military discipline was to him something sacred and, whether in England
or in France, he did his utmost to conform himself to it and to force
others to do the same. One of his comrades told me that at the front
they would sometimes put their packs on a passing lorry; it was against
orders, and Munro refused to lighten the strain of a long march in this
way, although the straps of the pack galled his shoulders.
Twice he was offered a commission, but he refused to take one. He
distrusted his ability to be a good officer and also he desired to go on
fighting side by side with his comrades, one of whom, now an officer and
a prisoner in Germany, had been his friend before the war. I was told by
a man of his company that one day a General was conducted along the
trenches by the Colonel commanding the regiment and recognised Munro,
whom he had met at dinner-parties in London. “What on earth are you
doing here?” he asked, and said that he had a job to be done at the rear
which would be the very thing for him. Munro excused himself from
accepting it. Another opportunity of less arduous work was offered him.
Men who could speak German were ordered to report: interpreters were
wanted to deal with prisoners. Munro reported, but urged that it had
taken him two years to get out to the front and that he desired to remain
there. He was allowed to do as he wished. And his gaiety never left
him. Those who were with him speak of the tales with which he amused
them. He even founded a club in one place at which they were stationed,
and called it the Back Kitchen Club, because the members met in the
kitchen of a peasant’s cottage.
When he came home on leave, it was evident that the strain of military
life was telling on him. He was thin and his face was haggard. But the
spiritual change wrought in him by the war was greater than the physical.
He told me that he could never come back to the old life in London. And
he wrote asking me to find out from a person in Russia whether it would
be possible to acquire land in Siberia to till and to hunt, and whether a
couple of Yakutsk lads could be got as servants. It was the love of the
woodlands and the wild things in them, that he had felt as a child,
returning. The dross had been burnt up in the flame of war.
Munro fell in the Beaumont-Hamel action in November 1916. On the 12th he
and his comrades were at Beldancourt. At one o’clock in the morning of
the 14th they went to Mailly. As the men were crossing No-Man’s-Land to
occupy trenches evacuated by the enemy, Munro was shot through the head.
“Poor Saki! What an admiration we all had for him,” wrote the officer in
command of the 22nd Royal Fusiliers. “I always quoted him as one of the
heroes of the war. I saw daily the appalling discomforts he so
cheerfully endured. He flatly refused to take a commission or in any way
to allow me to try to make him more comfortable. General Vaughan told
him that a brain like his was wasted as a private soldier. He just
smiled. He was absolutely splendid. What courage! The men simply loved
him.”