Blackhampton was in the war from the first moment. Never its custom
to do things by halves, this body of clear thinking Britons did its
best to rise to the greatest occasion in history. Its best was not
enough--nothing human could have been--but as far as it went it was
heroic.
In the first days of the disaster none could tell its magnitude. Forces
had been set in motion whose colossal displacement was beyond human
calculation. Something more than buckets of water are required to cope
with a prairie fire, but at first there seemed no other means at hand
of dealing with it.
Within the tentative and narrow scope of the machinery provided by the
state wonders were performed in the early weeks of the holocaust. Every
bucket the country could boast was called into use, but the flames
seemed always to gain in power and fury.
From the outset this midland city, like the kingdom itself, betrayed
not a sign of panic. In the presence of fathomless danger it remained
calm. British nerves lie deep down, and in those first shattering weeks
the entire nation stood stolidly to its guns under the threat of night
and disruption.
The energy shown by Blackhampton in organizing hospitals and in
raising men to fill them was truly amazing, yet in this it was no more
than the mirror of the whole country. City vied with city, shire vied
with shire, in voluntary service to a state, that, no matter what
its defects, was able to maintain a sense of proportion which may be
claimed as the common measure of the republic. The curious anachronism,
magniloquently miscalled the British Empire, rose at once to a moral
height without a precedent in the history of the world. It would have
been fatally easy in the circumstances of the case for a brotherhood of
free peoples to have turned a deaf ear to the voice of honor. The mine
was sprung so quickly, the issues at stake were so cunningly veiled,
that only "a decent and a dauntless people," unprepared as they were
and taken by surprise, would have cast themselves into the breach at
an hour's notice, fully alive to the nature of the act and by a divine
instinct aware of its necessity, yet without fully comprehending what
it involved.
Governments and politicians, like books and writers, exist to be
criticized, and it is their common misfortune that impudence is now the
first function of wisdom. History is not likely to deny the great part
played in a supreme moment by certain brave and enlightened men. In the
end the mean arts of the party journal will not rob of their need those
who have made still possible a decent life.
Within a fortnight of the outbreak arose a crying need for men.
Few, even at that moment, were bold enough to breathe the word
"conscription." Britain was a maritime power. Armies on the Continental
scale were none of her business. Russia and France bred to European
conditions, with a fundamental man power fully equal to that of the
Central Empires could be trusted to hold their own. But these fallacies
were soon exposed.
Still, even then, the country hesitated to take the plunge.
Conscription seemed to many the direct negation of what it had stood
for in the past. These still pinned their faith to the system of
voluntary levies. The rally of the country's manhood to a cause only
indirectly its own was beyond all precedent. Field Marshal Viscount
Partington mobilized his very best mop and sent it to deal with the
Atlantic. For all that the flood did not subside and it gradually
dawned on the public mind that more comprehensive methods might be
needed.
In the meantime the Hun was at the gate of Paris. The Channel ports, if
not actually in the hands of the enemy, were as good as lost. Belgium
was being ground under the heel of a savage conqueror. And in the city
of Blackhampton, as elsewhere in Britain, these things made a very deep
impression.
Among the many forcible men that a new world phase revealed
Blackhampton to possess, none stood out more boldly in those first
grim weeks than Josiah Munt. The proprietor of the Duke of Wellington
was a man of peculiar gifts, and it was soon only too clear that not
only Blackhampton, but England herself, had need of them. His was the
ruthless energy that disdains finesse. It sees what to do, or believes
it does--almost as important in life as we know it!--and goes straight
ahead and gets it done.
One evening in the middle of September Josiah came home to dinner in a
very black mood. It was not often that he yielded to depression. But
he had had a hard day on local war committees in the course of which
he had been in contact with men nearer to the center of things than
he was himself. Moreover, these were men from whom this shrewd son of
the midlands was only too ready to learn. They were behind the scenes.
Sources of information were open to them which even a Blackhampton
alderman might envy; and they were far from echoing the airy optimism
of the public press. The fabric of society, stable but elastic, by
means of which Josiah himself and so many like him had been able in
the course of two or three decades to rise from obscurity to a certain
power and dignity was in urgent danger. The whole of the western world
was in the melting pot. That which had been could never be again.
Cherished institutions were already in the mire. And all this was but
the prelude to a tragedy of which none could see the end.
Josiah's mood that evening was heavy. Even the presence at the meal of
his sister-in-law, as a rule a natural tonic, did little to lighten it.
"They won't get Paris now," she affirmed.
"We don't know that." He shook his head with the gesture of a tired
man. "Nobody knows it."
"No, I suppose they don't." Miss Preston read in that somber manner the
need for mental readjustment. "But the papers say that General Joffre
has the situation in hand."
Josiah renounced a plate of mutton broth only half consumed. "Mustn't
believe a word you see in the papers, my gel. They don't know much, and
half of what they do know they are not allowed to tell." Miss Preston
discreetly supposed that it was so. "But things are going better,
aren't they?"
"We'll hope they are." Josiah's fierce attack upon the joint in front
of him seemed to veto the subject.
The silence that followed was broken by Maria, whose entrance into the
conversation was quite unexpected and rather startling. "Did you know,"
she said, "that Melia's husband has joined the army?"
Josiah suspended operations to poise an interrogatory carving knife.
"Who tells you that?" he said frostily.
"The boy from Murrell's, the greengrocer's,"--somehow the infrequent
voice of Maria had an odd precision--"said to Alice this morning that
he heard that Mr. Hollis had gone for a soldier."
Josiah returned to the joint, content for the time being with the
remark, "that it was a bad lookout for the Germans," a sally that won a
timely laugh from his sister-in-law. On the other hand, Maria, who had
never been known to laugh at anything in all her anxious days, began to
wonder somberly whether Melia would be able to carry on the business.
"From all that I hear," growled Josiah, "there ain't a sight o'
business to be carried on."
In the silence which followed Maria gave a sniff that was slightly
lachrymose, and then the strategic Gerty after a veiled glance towards
the head of the table, ventured on "Poor Amelia."
Josiah was in the act of giving himself what he called "a man's
helping" of beans. "She made her own bed," he said in a tone that
gained in force by not being forcible, "and now she's got to lie in it."
For the first time in many years, however, Maria seemed to be visited
by a spark of spirit. "Well, I think it's credible of that Hollis, very
creditable."
Josiah raised a glass of beer to the light with a connoisseur's
disparagement of its color, and then he said, "In my opinion he's
running away from his creditors. I hear he owes money all round."
"He's going to risk his life, though," ventured Aunt Gerty. "And that's
something."
"It is--if he risks it," Josiah reluctantly allowed.
Maria became so tearful that she was unable to continue her dinner.