Gabriel Tar--A Hard Nut to Crack--In the Cemetery--An Old Tipperary
Soldier--Marks of the Broad Arrow--The "Scorpions"--The
Jaunting-Cars--Amusements on the Bock--Mrs. Damages' Complaint--The
Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa--How to Learn Spanish--Types of the
British Officer--The Wily Ben Solomon--A Word for the
Subaltern--Sunset Gun--The Sameness of Sutlersville.
WHERE I went to school, we had a droll lad, whose humour developed
itself in mispronunciation. In my nonage I considered that unique. Now I
know it is a rather common order of quaintness. Hugh used to call Sierra
Leone, "Sarah Alone;" Cambodia, "Gamboge;" Stromboli, "Storm-boiler;"
and Gibraltar, "Gabriel Tar." How we used to wrinkle with laughter at
his sallies, launched with an artistically unconscious air, until the
swooping cane came swishing down on our backs! And here I was in Gabriel
Tar. I vow the first inclination I felt was to write to Hugh with the
date engraved on the note-paper, and indeed so I should have done, but
that I had not seen him for nigh twenty years, and when last I heard of
him he was married, and had learned to be serious and to speak with
precision. The fun had been driven out of him by responsibility.
Propriety had come with prosperity.
Call it by what name you will, Gabriel Tar, or Gibraltar, that
infinitesimal scrap of territory over which the Union Jack floats, is
supremely unpalatable and insolently insulting to the Spaniard. It is a
bitter pill to swallow, an adamantine nut to crack. I suppose he is
welcome to take it--when he can; but he knows better than to try. It is
the gate of the Mediterranean. Logically, it is an injustice that a
stranger should sit in the porter's lodge and swing the key at his
girdle; but it is as well that the porter is one who is too surly to
barter his trust for gold. So Gabriel Tar will remain intact, until the
porter grows feeble or falls asleep.
British Spain, or "the Rock," or Gib, as it is indifferently termed, or
Sutlersville, as I prefer to name it, can be converted into an island at
the will of its defenders. The sandy spit of Neutral Ground at one side
of which Tommy Atkins, fresh-faced, does his sentry-go in brick-red
tunic and white pith-helmet, and at the other side of which swarthy
Sancho Panza y Toro, in projecting cap and long blue coat, fondles a
rifle in the bend of his arm, can readily be flooded; and the bare,
sheer, lofty north front, with scores of cannon of the deadliest modern
pattern lying in wait behind the irregular embrasures that grimly pit
its surface, hardly invites attack. It frowns a calm but determined
defiance; and even the Cid himself might be excused if he turned on his
heel and puffed a meditative cigarette after he had surveyed it.
British Spain is small, being but one and seven-eighth square miles
English in area; but it is mighty strong. The population, comprising the
garrison, is less than fifteen thousand; but behind that slender cipher
of souls are the millions of the broadest and biggest of empires. I do
not know what the population of the cemetery is, but it receives rapid
and numerous accessions at each periodical outbreak of cholera. I paid a
visit to it--I have a fondness for sauntering in God's acre--and arrived
in time to witness a funeral. When the coffin was laid in the grave, a
young man, probably the husband of the deceased, threw himself prone on
the turf beside the open burial-trench, and burst into such a passionate
tempest of heart-rending sobs and moans and wailings, that I had to move
away. These Southerners are more demonstrative in their grief than the
men of the North. I question if their sorrows spring from deeper depths,
or are so lasting. The caretaker of the cemetery, an elderly Tipperary
soldier, with a short _dudheen_ in his mouth, was seated smoking on a
head-stone by a goat-willow. We got into conversation.
"There were worse places than Gib--singing-birds were raysonable here,
and some of them had rayl beautiful plumage."
My countryman, like the Duke of Argyll, had a weakness for ornithology.
"That spread of land beyant was where the races were held, and small-arm
parties from the fleet sometimes kem ashore and practised there. They
used to play cricket there, too. The symmetry wasn't a gay place, but
there were worse. There were some beautiful tombs--now _there_ was a
parable ov wan; 'twas put up by their frinds to some officers who were
dhrownded while they were crossing a flooded sthrame on their way back
from a shooting excursion. The car-drivers, who were dhrownded wid them,
had no monument. 'Twas a quare world; a poor man had the chance of dying
wid a rich man, but was not to be berrid in his company. Well, he
supposed it was for the best," and here he hammered the heel-tap out of
his pipe on the side of his shoe; "when the last bugle sounded a
field-officer would feel uncomfortable like if he had to be looking for
his bones in the same plot wid a lance-corporal."
Truly, a queer world. Death with impartial summons knocks at the cabin
of the poor and the palace of the wealthy; but in the undertaker's
interest the equality of the grave must not be conceded. The plebeian
who commits _felo de se_ is served properly if he is hidden at the
cross-roads by night and a stake driven through his body. The lunatic
King who drowns himself, and drags his doctor to the same fate--who is a
suicide duplicated with the suspicion of murder--is embalmed and laid to
rest in consecrated ground amid incense and music, lights and flowers,
the tolling of bells, and the chanting of dirges.
The funeral was over; they were just finishing the _De Profundis_. My
countryman had to quit me. "_Oyeh!_ that fellow who was making such a
lamentation might be married agin in a twelvemonth. The army plan was
the best; after the 'Dead March' in _Saul_ came 'Tow-row-row.'--another
so'jer was to be had for a shilling. He did not drink; he thanked me all
the same--had taken the pledge from Father Mathew whin he was a boy, and
meant to stick by it; but he would accept the price of a singing-bird he
had set his mind upon, since it was pressed upon him."
Gibraltar is but a huge garrison. In the moat by the gate, as I
re-entered, a big drummer and a tiny mannikin-soldier with cymbals were
practising how to lead off a marching-past tune. The "Fortune of War"
tavern elbows "Horse-Barrack Lane;" a print of "The Siege of Kars" is
side by side in a shop-window with Dr. Bennett's "Songs for Soldiers."
The Plazas and Calles of the mainland of Spain have been parted with.
The names of streets, hostelries, and stores are English. Instead of
tiendas and almacenes and fondas, you have fancy repositories,
regimental shoe-shops, and porter-houses. There, for example, is the
celebrated "Cock and Bottle," and farther on "The Calfs Head Hotel." If
you traverse Cathedral Square, no larger than an ordinary-sized
skittle-alley, you arrive by Sunnyside Steps to the Europa Pass. Notices
are posted by the roadside cautioning against plucking flowers or
treading on the beds under pain of prosecution. But the bazaar bewilders
you with its alien figures, its confusion of tongues, and its eccentric
contrasts of dress. In five minutes you meet Spanish officers; nuns in
broad-leaved white bonnets; a bearded sergeant nursing a baby;
bare-legged, sun-burnished Moors; pink-and-white cheeked ladies'-maids
from Kent; local mashers in such outrageously garish tweeds; stiff
brass-buttoned turnkeys; Jews in skull-cap and Moslems in fez; and while
you are lost in admiration of a burly negro, turbaned and in grass-green
robe, with face black and shiny as a newly-polished stove, you are
hustled by a sailor on cordial terms with himself who is vigorously
attempting to whistle "Garry Owen."
But above and before all, the sights and sounds are military. Sappers
and linesmen and artillerists pullulate at every corner; fatigue-parties
are confronted at every turn; the bayonet of the sentinel flashes in
every angle of the fortress from the minute the sun, bursting into
instantaneous radiance from behind the great barrier of craggy hill,
lights up the town and bastions and moles, until the boom of the
sunset-gun gives signal for the gates to be closed. Every tavern looks
like a canteen; the gossip is of things martial; the music is that of
the reveille or tattoo--the blare of brass, the rub-a-dub of parchment,
or the shrill sound-revel of Highland pipes (for there is usually a
Scotch regiment here). The ladies one meets all have husbands, or
fathers, or uncles in the Service; even the children--those of English
parents well understood--keep step as they walk, and the boys amongst
them compliment any well-dressed stranger with a home face by rendering
him the regulation salute. This is highly gratifying to the civilian
sojourning in the place; for he insensibly succumbs to the _genius
loci_, squares his shoulders, expands his chest, and feels that if he is
not an officer he ought to be one.
Except the enterprising gentry who devote themselves to cheating the
Spanish excise by smuggling cigars and English goods across the border,
the Scorpions live by and on the garrison, and therefore do I name their
habitat Sutlersville. "Scorpion," I should add, for the benefit of the
uninitiated, is the _sobriquet_ conferred by Tommy Atkins on the natives
of the Rock, as that of "Smiches" is merrily applied by him to the
Maltese, and of "Yamplants" to the denizens of St. Helena. There is a
tolerable infusion of English blood among the Scorpions, but it is
hardly of the healthiest or most respectable.
Gib is familiar to thousands of Englishmen, but it must be unfamiliar to
many thousands more. This is my excuse for exhuming some notes of my
stay there. Don't be afraid, I am not going to pester you with
guide-book erudition. Let others take you to the galleries and caves,
lead you up the ascent to the Moorish tower, inform you that the one
spot in Europe where there is an indigenous colony of monkeys (the
patriarch of which is styled the "town major") is here, and enlighten
you as to the interesting fact that this is the only locality out of
Ireland where the Irish jaunting-car is to be objurgated. Mine be a
humbler task.
Society in Gib is select, but limited. It is uniform, like the clothes
of the influential portion of the inhabitants. Gib is the wrong place to
bring out a young lady, though Major Dalrymple's daughters, immortalized
in Lever's novel, could not well have found a better hunting-ground. But
then Major Dalrymple's daughters were regular garrison hacks--so the
irreverent subs of the Rovers used to call them--and never stood a
chance beside the daughters of the county families. There are racing and
chasing at the station, and theatricals and balls. I arrived at the
wrong season. The three days' local racing, for horses of every breed
but English, was over, and most of the men were going to Cadiz by
special boat next day, _en route_ for the Jerez races, which are the
best--indeed, I might almost say the solitary--meeting in Spain.
"There are only two things in this land worth talking about," said an
English merchant to me at Cadiz; "the steamers of Lopez and the races of
Jerez."
The hunting (thanks to brave old Admiral Fleming for having started that
diversion) was over too. The meets have to come off, naturally, outside
the frontier of British Spain. The sport is pretty good--one cannot
quite expect the Melton country, of course--the riding hard, and the
horses invariably Spanish; no English horses would do, for no English
horse would be equal to climbing up a perpendicular bank with sixteen
stone on his back, and that is a feat the native steeds, bestridden by
British warriors in pink who follow the Calpe pack, have sometimes to
accomplish. There is a Spanish lyrical and theatrical troop in the town;
but it is Holy Week, and lyricals and theatricals are under taboo.
Occasionally charity concerts are given by amateurs, and plays are even
performed in Lent Champagne, of the Fizzers, has won a reputation by his
success on the boards when he dons the habiliments of lovely woman
beyond a certain age. But, as I told you before, I arrived at the wrong
season. There are no balls at the Convent, which is the Governor's
residence; and, touching these balls, I have a grievance to ventilate,
at the request of Mrs. Quartermaster Damages. She specially imported
frilled petticoats from England to display in the mazy dance, and she
assured me they were turning sere and yellow in her boxes. She never
gets a chance of bringing them out except once in the twelvemonth, when
she is asked to the "Quartermasters' Ball." But there is a reason for
everything, and Mrs. Quartermaster Damages is fat and forty, and not
fair, and--tell it not out of mess--they say she has a tongue.
At this particular time, you perceive, this fortified fragment of the
empire was dull; but usually it is gay, and the officer quartered there
has always an excellent opportunity of learning his trade and acquiring
skill in the gentlemanly game of billiards. He can make maps and surveys
of the neutral ground, and watch the guard mounting on the Alameda, or
read the account of the siege in Drinkwater's days; and when he tires of
the green cloth and its distractions, and of his own noble profession,
he can throw a sail to the breeze in the unequalled Bay, or take a
flying trip to Tarifa to sketch the beautiful from the living model, or
go to Ceuta to see the Spanish galley-slaves and disciplinary regiments,
forgetful of our own chain-gangs; or steam across to Tangier to riot in
Nature and a day's pig-sticking.
The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa--these are the three delights of
Gibraltar.
You have heard of the Bay of Naples, and the Bay of Dublin, which equals
it in Paddy Murphy's estimation. I know both; and Gibraltar, the
little-spoken-of, leaves them nowhere. The sky, and the undulating
mirror below that reflects it, are such a blue; the rocks are such an
ashen-grey; the Spanish sierras such a leonine brown, with summits
wrapped in clouds like rolling smoke; and the sun goes down to his bath
in the west 'mid such a vaporous glow of yellowing purple and rosy gold!
The Alameda is a bower of Venus cinctured by Mars. Here is a gravelled
expanse bounded by hill and sea, with cosy benches under the shade of
palmitos--the civilization of the West in alliance with the rich
vegetation of the East. Sometimes, in the morning, five hundred men or
more--garrison artillery, engineers, and infantry--muster there,
previous to marching to their posts; there is a banging of drums, a
blowing of bugles, a bobbing vision of cocked-hats, and a roar of hoarse
words of command--all the pomp and pride and circumstance of glorious
war before the fighting begins. Sometimes, in the evening, a band plays,
and the Alameda is the resort of fashion and of nursery-maids.
Tarifa, shining in the sunset across the water, is a tempting morsel for
the landscape-painter, and the dwellers in Tarifa are the best teachers
of Spanish. A British subaltern bent on improving his mind could
encounter an infinitely better preceptor there than "Jingling Johnny,"
the self-appointed professor to the garrison, who hires himself on
Monday, makes you a present of a guitar-tutor on Tuesday, and asks you
to favour him with six months' payment in advance on Wednesday. To be
sure, the Spanish those Tarifans speak is slightly Arabified; but their
tones of voice are persuasive, and their methods of teaching agreeable.
The professor taken by the British subaltern is invariably a female, and
the females of Tarifa are not the ugliest in the world. They still
retain many customs peculiar to their Moorish ancestors. They wear a
manta, not a mantilla--a sort of large-hooded mantle, with which they
hide the light of their countenance, except an eye--but that is a
piercer, ye gods I and they keep it open for business. When a stranger
passes, especially if he looks like a sucking lieutenant from the
fortress beyond, the manta falls, disclosing the soft loveliness
beneath, and the wearer affects a pretty confusion, and hastens with
judicious slowness to re-adjust its folds. The British subaltern reels
to his quarters seriously wounded, and may be seen the following
morning, with his hair blown back, spouting poetry to the zephyrs on
Europa Point. Oh no!--that only occurs in romances; but he may be seen
drinking brandy-and-soda moderately in the Club-House.
Poor British subaltern! How Sutlersville does exploit him! He is a
sheep, and bears his fleecing without a kick. Watch those lazy,
lounging, able-bodied, smoking, and salivating loons who prop up every
street-corner, and monopolize the narrow pathways--these all live by
him; they eat up his substance, and fatten thereupon. These are the
touting and speculating sons of the Rock, the veritable Scorpions, who
are ever ready to find the "cap'n" a dog or a horse or a boat, or
something not so harmless, to help him on the road to ruin, and whisper
in his ear what a fine fellow he is--"As ver fine a fellow--real
gemman--as Lord Tomnoddy, who give me such a many dollars when he go
away." The first word these loons pronounce after coming into the world
must be _baksheesh_. They are born with beggary in their mouths, and the
British subaltern acts as if he were born to be their victim. There he
is below, of every type, lolling outside the hotel-door that looks on
that Commercial Square which is so thorough a barrack-square, with its
romping children, its dogs, its dust, its guard-house with chatting
soldiers on a form in front, and the important sentinel pacing to and
fro, regular and rigid as a pendulum, keeping vigilant watch and ward
over nothing in particular. We have a rare company to-day; besides the
engineers and bombardiers, and the linesmen of the 24th, 31st, 71st, and
81st, the four infantry regiments on the station, we have men on leave
from Malta. They came up to the races, and are waiting for the P. and O.
steamer to take them back. That fat little customer is your sporting
sub. I only wonder he is not in cords, tops, and spurs. What a hearty
voice he talks in! He asks for the _Field_ as if he were giving a
view-halloo. Then there is the moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy,
convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too
friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is
dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession.
I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they
should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and
his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, _kriegspiel_ and the
new drill, you would imagine he was bound to put the extinguisher on
Marlborough, Wellington, Wolseley, and the rest of them; and yet the
chances are, if you meet him twenty years hence, he will be a captain on
the recruiting service, with no forces to marshal but six growing
children. Then there is the sentimental sub, the perfect ladies' man,
who plays croquet and the flute, pleads guilty to having cultivated the
Nine, and affects a simpering pooh-pooh when he is impeached with having
inspired that wicked but so witty bit of scandal in the local paper. By
singularity of pairing, his fast friend is the muscular sub, who walks
against time, and can write his initials with a hundredweight hanging
from his index-finger.
Happy dogs in the heyday of life, all of them; how I envy them their
buoyant spirits, their rollicking enjoyment of to-day, and their
contempt for the morrow! But the morrow will come nevertheless, and
with it Black Care will come often. Gib is a haunt of the Hebrews; they
or their myrmidons beset the subaltern at genial hours, after luncheon
or after mess, pester him with vamped-up knick-knacks for sale, appeal
to him to patronize a poor man by buying articles he does not and never
by any means can want--"pay me when you likes, Cap'n, one yearsh, two
yearsh." The "cap'n," who may have left Sandhurst but six months, may be
weakly good-natured, and ignore the fact that his income is not elastic;
some day that he thinks of taking a run to England Ben Solomon, who
seems to be able to read the books in the Adjutant-General's Office
through the walls, pounces upon him with his little bill, and he is
arrested if he cannot satisfy his Jewish benefactor. Loans are advanced
at a high rate "per shent" by the harpies, and enable him to stave off
the temporary embarrassment; the "cap'n" is happy for the moment, but
the reckoning is only deferred that it may grow. The arrival of Black
Care is adjourned, not averted. The plain truth of it is, Gibraltar is a
den of thieves, and has been the burial-pit of many a promising young
fellow's hopes. There are two tariffs for everything--one for natives,
the other for the British subaltern and the British tourist; and the
British subaltern and the British tourist are foolish enough to submit
to the extortion in most cases. With some half-dozen honourable
exceptions, the traders are what is popularly known as "Jews" in their
mode of dealing. They cozen on principle, sell articles that will not
last, and charge preposterous prices for them; they impose upon the
young officer's softness or delicate gentlemanly feeling, and consider
themselves smart for so doing. In this manner Gibraltar, with all its
discomforts, is dearer than the most expensive and luxurious quarter in
the British Isles.
But we have other specimens of the genus officer in the lounging
slaughterers by profession, who are so busy killing time. The lean
bronzed aristocratic major, whose temper long years in India have not
soured; the squat pursy paymaster (why are paymasters so fearfully
inclined to fat?); the raw-boned young surgeon with the Aberdeen accent;
"the ranker," erect and grizzled, and looking ever so little not quite
at his ease, you know, for the languid lad with fawn-coloured moustache
straddling on the chair beside him is an Honourable; the jovial portly
Yorkshireman, who is in the Highland Light Infantry, naturally; and the
lively loud-voiced Irishman, laughing consumedly at his own jokes--all
are here, conversing, smoking, mildly chaffing each other, and
exchanging "tips" as to the next Derby. They make a book in a quiet way,
and occasionally invest in a dozen tickets in a Spanish lottery. What
will you? One cannot perpetually play shop, and the British officer has
a rooted objection to it, although he does his duty like a man when the
tug of war arises. Better that he should join in a regimental
sweepstakes, or lose what he can afford to lose to a comrade, than give
way to the blues. He does not gamble or curse, like his Spanish
_confrere_; his potations are not deep, nor is he quick to quarrel. Then
let him race on the Neutral Ground; let him hunt with the Calpe pack;
and let him back his fancy for the big event at Epsom. Those are his
chief excitements at Gib, and help to give a fillip to life in that
circumscribed microcosm, pending the anxiously expected morn when the
route will come, or, mayhap, the call to active service, in one of those
petty wars which are constantly breaking the monotony of this so-called
pacific reign.
"Guard, turn out!" cries the Highland Light Infantry sentinel under my
window, and the smart soldier laddies fall in for the inspection of the
officer of the day. What a thoroughly military town it is! By-and-by the
evening gun booms from the heights above, where Sergeant Munro, taking
time from his sun-dial and the town major, notifies the official sunset.
Bang go the gates. We are imprisoned. Anon the streets are traversed by
patrols in Indian file to warn loiterers to return to barracks, the
pipers of the 71st skirl a few wild tunes on Commercial Square, the
buglers sound the last post, the second gun-fire is heard, and a hush
falls over the town, broken only by the challenges of sentries or their
regular echoing footfalls on their weary beats. The thunder of artillery
wakes you in the morning anew, and if you venture out for a walk before
breakfast you thread your way through waggons of the army train or
fatigue-parties in white jackets. You stumble across cannon and
symmetric pyramids of shot where you least expect them; the line of
sea-wall is intersected by figures in brick-red tunic, moving back and
forward on ledges of masonry; the morning air is alive with drum-beats
and bugle and trumpet-calls; everything is of the barrack most
barrack-like; the broad arrow is indented in large deep character on the
Rock. It is impossible to shake off the Ordnance atmosphere. The Irish
jaunting-cars are all driven by the sons of soldiers' wives; the
clergy-men are all military chaplains; those goats are going up to be
milked for the major's delicate daughter; that lady practising horse
exercise in a ring in her garden is wife to Pillicoddy of the Control
Department, and is merely correcting the neglected education of her
youth; the very monkeys--diminishing sadly, it grieves me to say--recall
associations of the mess-room, for you never fail to hear of that
terrible sportsman, "one of Cardwell's gents," who thought it excellent
fun to shoot one some time ago. Luckily, the rules of the service did
not permit him to be tried by court-martial, or the wretched boy might
have been ordered out for instant execution, so great was the
indignation. But if he was not shot he was roasted as fearfully as ever
St. Laurence was; he was reminded a thousand times if once that
fratricide is a fearful crime, and if ever Nemesis visits his pillow it
will be in the shape of a monkey without a tail.
One wearies of the same scenes of beauty, and would fain barter the Cork
Woods for the chestnuts in Bushy Park; the bright Bay and the watchet
sky pall on the senses, and a dull river and drab clouds would be
welcomed for change. The day rises when the conversation of the same
set, the stories repeated as often as that famous one of grouse in the
gun-room, and the stale jokes anent the Sheeref of Wazan and the rival
innkeepers of Tangier, black Martin and "Lord James," cloy like treacle;
the fiction palmed upon the latest novice that he must go and have a few
shots at the monkeys, if he wishes to curry favour at headquarters,
misses fire; the calls of the P. and O. steamers, and the thought that
their passengers within a week either have seen, or will see, the
little village works its effect; even bull-fighting is adjudged a bore,
and one sighs for Regent Street and the "Rag and Famish," flaxen
ringlets, and roast beeL A twelvemonth might pass pleasantly on the
Rock; but after that the "damnable iteration" of existence must jar on
the nerves like the note of a cuckoo. Still, as my philosopher of the
cemetery remarked, there are worse places--far worse, Assouan and Aden,
for example; so let not the gallant gentleman repine whom Fate has
assigned to a round of duty in Sutlersville. For Tommy Atkins of the
rank and file, it is wearisome when he is young; he should not be asked
to stay there longer than a twelvemonth while he is at the age which
yearns for novelty, and during that twelvemonth he should be drilled as
at the depot. For the old soldier it is a good station, and should be
made a haven of rest.