CHAPTER III.

‘You know not the limit of this kingdom, still you are its

queen.’

RABINDRANATH TAGORE.

Miss O’Neill, as might be supposed, proved no easy subject for diplomatic

manipulation. Long before they had made an end of their picnic-lunch,

in a glen of rocks and birches and purple cushions of heather, she had

effectually given Mr. Lenox to understand that she was neither to be

deceived nor coerced by his tactful attempts to detach her from the

other two. Years of pushing and shouldering through obstacles, in the

Suffrage campaign, had so far blunted her finer sensibilities that she

could smilingly hold her ground even among those who obviously wished her

elsewhere: and she held it to-day, till Mark lost patience and frankly

took the bull by the horns.

‘I say, Miss O’Neill, you might take pity on Lenox and honour him with

your company up the glen,’ he said; and beneath his engaging tone there

lurked a faint note of command. ‘He’s no fisherman, and he can’t keep

himself to himself for ten minutes on end. So you see, it would be a real

act of charity to remove him.’

‘Yes, Sir Mark, I can see _that_ without spectacles,’ answered the

redoubtable Harry, challenging him with her greenish-brown eyes.

‘Good business!’ Sir Mark retorted unabashed. ‘When you reach the high

moor you’ll be rewarded by a view that’s worth some climbing to see. Of

course, if Miss Alison would prefer to go with you⸺’

‘Miss Alison’s far too comfortable where she is, thanks!’ Bel interposed

with her deliberate drawl. She had settled herself on a low rock and

sat dreamily watching the river, elbows on knees, chin cradled in her

hands. Without changing her attitude, she glanced up at Sir Mark and her

smile seemed to link them in completest understanding. ‘If the necessity

for silence becomes too overpowering I can always go to sleep. I’ll be

as good as gold, Harry dear⸺’ She shifted her gaze to Miss O’Neill’s

resolute, rebellious face. ‘And I think Sir Mark can be trusted not to

let me fall into the river!’

The upward jerk of Harry’s head implied wholesale distrust of the

species; but finding herself cornered she surrendered at discretion.

‘Well, Mr. Lenox,’ she said, ‘since it’s a case of obeying orders, we

must make the best of each other. This way, I suppose?’ She strode on

before him up the narrow, stony path; and Maurice, with an abortive grin

at Mark, followed in her wake.

Keeping well ahead of him, she toiled on indomitably till trees were

dwarfed to bushes and the primeval splendour of the high moors came

suddenly into view. Before them, and upon either hand, the heather

and the heavens were all. It was as if they stood upon the shore of

an amethystine sea, studded with islands of granite and juniper, and

shadowed only by slow-moving continents of cloud. For Maurice, with the

blood of Eldred and Quita Lenox in his veins, such a vision was among the

rare things that could smite him to silence. He drew a great breath and

stood very still, his young, expressive face glorified, passingly, by the

artist’s pure joy in colour, and the Scot’s love of the land.

Miss O’Neill, a townswoman by taste and habit, would have preferred a

throng of human faces, any day, to the sublime emptiness around them.

Hot, breathless, and in a ferment of anxiety, she sank gratefully on to

the nearest rock and looked up at her companion; but the light on his

face checked her ever-ready tongue. She liked the boy. He was more than

‘a mere he-thing,’ and that streak of the woman in him appealed strongly

to the masculine strain in herself. But protracted silence irked her; and

very soon anxiety goaded her into speech.

‘Mr. Lenox, how long have you known Sir Mark Forsyth? Are you

acquaintances or friends?’

Maurice considered that point without removing his eyes from the heather.

‘Rather more than acquaintances, I should say, and on the way to becoming

friends. I’ve known him two years on and off. But I’ve never yet been to

Wynchcombe Friars, his Hampshire place. He’s crazy about it. They say

you never know the real Forsyth till you’ve seen him there. I’m going

there this autumn, to be converted from Futurism and Experimental Art in

general! At least that’s his notion. He’s a splendid chap. Chock-full of

ideas. A bit reactionary, some of them. He’s dead against what we should

call industrial progress, and what he calls sacrificing the man to the

machine. They’ve got a great scheme on, he and his mother and Macnair,

for joining up all the scattered attempts at reviving handicrafts and

guilds⸺’

‘Oh, bother their crafts and guilds!’ Miss O’Neill broke in with scant

ceremony. ‘Sheer fads! Result of riches and idleness. _I_ want to know is

he the kind of man to take up a girl violently—you see how it’s been—just

to pass the time?’

‘No!’ Maurice rapped out the negative with unusual vehemence. ‘As a

matter of fact, I believe he intends to offer her his heart and his

title and all his worldly goods before we get back to them.’

Miss O’Neill started visibly. ‘What—on a fortnight’s acquaintance?’

‘Yes. A trifle steep, isn’t it? And, for a man in his position, a wife’s

a rather important item.’

‘Something more than an amiable housekeeper—is that your meaning?’ Miss

O’Neill rounded on him, a flash of temper in her eyes. ‘I thought better

of _you_, Mr. Lenox. But you’re all alike in the grain. A man in Sir

Mark’s position must have a beautiful figure-head for his dinner-table: a

graceful, accommodating doll, that he can hang with jewels and silks and

satins. But my Bel’s no doll-woman, for all her soft manners and sweet

temper. No doubt he flatters himself that, in a fortnight, he’s read her

from cover to cover: and he’ll be telling her, sure as fate, that he’s

the one man on earth to make her happy, and think he’s paying her the

compliment of her life into the bargain!’

Good-natured Maurice began to feel that Forsyth had been a trifle

inconsiderate, saddling him with a virago whom he was quite at a loss how

to appease.

‘Well—compliment or no, she’s free to refuse him,’ he remarked

soothingly; ‘and after all, it’s the natural thing.’

Miss O’Neill pounced on the words almost before they were out. ‘_Of

course_ it’s the natural thing for a man like Sir Mark—spoilt by his

mother, one can see with half an eye—to snatch at a beautiful woman.

And where does a girl’s freedom come in when a man dazzles her brain

with extravagant lover’s talk? Besides—he’s rich. She’s poor. It almost

amounts to bribery. I hate the whole thing. I came away for her sake, to

give her a chance of knowing him better, just in case⸺But if it’s true,

what you say, I shall go straight down again⸺’

She sprang up from her rock and faced about; but Lenox, smilingly,

determined, stood astride across the narrow path.

‘Excuse me, Miss O’Neill, not if I can prevent it,’ he said. ‘Forsyth’s

going to have his chance fair and square. Of course if you’re game for a

free fight—well, come on!’

For a second she looked him up and down, a sudden flicker of humour in

her eyes. ‘I tackled a policeman once. A bigger fellow than you. And he

was very glad to get rid of me.’

‘I can well believe it,’ Maurice answered with becoming gravity. ‘But

look here, just consider, what earthly good would you do by deferring

the inevitable—say, twenty-four hours—and probably annoying Miss Alison

into the bargain?’

The last shot told. Harry let out her breath in a great sigh. ‘Life’s

a bewildering business,’ she mused aloud. But common sense told her he

spoke truth; and she liked him none the less for backing up his friend.

‘Very well, Mr. Lenox, I give it up. You evidently have instructions from

head-quarters, and I’ll stay here till you give the word. But scenery

bores me stiff; so please make yourself as interesting as you know how.’

‘Right you are,’ said Maurice; and indicating her deserted rock he flung

himself on the heather at her feet in such a position that her prosaic

figure in its knitted coat and rough skirt should not intrude upon his

vision of the landscape. Then he proceeded, in his fluent fashion, to

enlarge on the subject uppermost in his mind—Sir Mark’s queer conviction

that a wide-spread revival of handicrafts and guilds would go far to

solve the strike problem by restoring the creative sense in labour and

renewing the broken link between art and life⸺

For Sir Mark himself, at that moment, life held only one purpose,

one achievement worthy of serious consideration—the linking of his

own destiny with that of the girl who seemed capable of maintaining

indefinitely her graceful pose of contemplation. It was a pose that

revealed to admirable advantage the long lines of her figure and the

beauty of her small head with its close-fitting coils of hair. Her

discarded hat lay on the heather at her feet. Close to her chosen rock

sprang a young birch, its supple grace a reflection of her own; its

drooping plumes, stirred by the breeze, dappling her blue dress with tiny

restless shadows.

Was it some day-dream that so held her, Mark wondered, or pure

consideration for the trout that he had presumably come out to catch?

Either way, her silence and abstraction had the effect of so intensifying

his own emotion that speech seemed desecration. Besides—he had spoken

already. Could there really be any need to tell her again how swiftly

and strangely she had swept him from his moorings, so that life held

nothing, momentarily, but his glorified vision of herself? Last night

the sound of her voice, echoing his own confession, had silenced, for

good, the whispers of prudence that strove to curb his impetuous spirit,

counselling delay. If only that confounded Miss O’Neill had given him

a chance while the glamour was on them both, the whole thing might

have seemed less egregiously precipitate. Now that he had schemed for

half an hour’s privacy; now that she sat there, only a few yards away,

seemingly unaware of his existence, a shiver of uncertainty chilled him.

A fortnight ago to-day, while he and Maurice were rambling in search of

subjects, he had beheld her for the first time. For him that fortnight

was an indefinable age. For her it might simply be fourteen days⸺

But this sort of havering would never do. He was a strong man, not

unschooled in suffering, but little used to be thwarted in his desire.

And he did not seriously expect to be thwarted now. Deliberately he laid

aside his fishing tackle, and leaning on one elbow looked up at the girl,

whose rock was set a little higher along the sloping bank of the stream.

For a few seconds he took his fill of her, from the coronet of her hair

to the seductive curves of her mouth and chin that made such tender

atonement for the cool directness of her eyes.

Still she did not move; but her lips parted in a small sigh, and the

spell was broken. Mark rose and planted himself before her.

‘Miss Alison,’ he began—and could get no further.

‘Well?’ she asked with that distracting lift of her lashes. ‘Is the

precious tackle out of gear?’

Her coolness almost angered him and gave him sudden command of his

tongue. ‘_Tackle?_ D’you really suppose I came out here to catch trout?’

‘You said so last night. And you seemed to be making elaborate

arrangements⸺’

‘So I was—to get half an hour alone with you,’ he announced bluntly, and

saw the ghost of a blush creep up under her skin. He wanted simply to

take her in his arms without more ado. Instead, he sat down close to the

rock, plunged his hands in the heather, and leaned towards her.

‘I was trying to tell you last night. Didn’t you understand?’

‘N-no. I thought the music and—the sentiment had rather carried you away.’

‘It was _you_ who carried me away. The music was a kind of safety-valve,

that’s all.’ He leaned still nearer. ‘Bel—is there a ghost of a chance

for me? Is it sheer conceit and impertinence on my part to ask—so soon?’

‘No—oh no.’ And suddenly she covered her face as if the intensity of his

gaze affected her like strong sunlight.

He was silent a moment, watching her and crushing the heather in his

strong fingers. Then, very gently, he laid a hand on her knee.

‘What is it? Tell me. I _must_ know.’

At that she dropped her hands. By chance or design, one of them fell on

his own and rested there. The light contact sent electric thrills up his

arm.

‘That’s just it,’ she said with her slow smile. ‘You must know. But we

neither of us do—yet. It’s been a wonderful fortnight. And if I haven’t

travelled quite so fast or so far as you, that doesn’t mean⸺’

‘Of course it doesn’t. I’m not such a conceited ass as to suppose you

could fall in love with me at sight. But now I’ve spoken—isn’t there any

response?’

‘Haven’t you felt any?’ she asked lightly, and the hand that rested on

his moved in a just perceptible caress.

‘For God’s sake don’t play with me!’ he broke out, half angry again. ‘I’m

in deadly earnest.’

‘I know. That’s just why one of us must try to keep a cool head.’

‘Nonsense! You’re simply fencing. And you haven’t answered my question.’

‘I’m trying to. But I’m half afraid ... to let myself go. No—don’t!’ She

warded him off with a gesture, but deliberately replaced her hand over

his. ‘It’s too sudden altogether. Wouldn’t it be wiser—for both of us—to

wait a little? You don’t really know me one bit.’

He bowed his head and kissed the fingers that covered his own. ‘I know

I love you,’ he said simply, his deep voice low and controlled. ‘And if

you can say the same, that’s enough for me. The rest will be an enchanted

voyage of discovery.’

‘Voyages of discovery are rather risky things,’ she reminded him. ‘And

sometimes—they end in smoke. You see, you’re not just anyone. I’m outside

your world; and—your mother doesn’t like me.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said again, with less conviction than before.

‘It isn’t. I’m sure she wants you to marry Miss Melrose. And I thought at

first—you seem very intimate.’

‘Naturally. Our intimacy began when she was eight and I was twelve.’

He spoke looking out across the stream. Something in him winced at her

allusion to Sheila in that connection. But it was only fair on her to

explain things; and he forced himself to proceed. ‘Her people are our

nearest neighbours in Hampshire. Her mother’s the sort of person who

subsists chiefly on fads and philanthropy—the kind of philanthropy that

makes you abominate charity and all its works. When we lost ... Ailsa,

my little sister, Mother sort of annexed Sheila, unofficially. But that

doesn’t imply—that she expects me to do likewise. We’re devoted to

her—both of us. She’s a splendid little person;’ he turned now and spoke

with greater naturalness and warmth. ‘Not very easy to know. But _real_,

right through. You’re bound to love her. There—are you satisfied?’

Without warning he slipped an arm round her. ‘Will you give me my answer

now?’

He felt her yield under pressure of his hand: then, with a sudden

enchanting simplicity, she lifted her face to his⸺

Presently she sighed; pushed him from her a little and looked steadily

into his eyes—blue, like her own, but a deeper, tenderer shade, shot

through with fine radiations of orange. Hers seemed still to hold a

question. His were purely exultant.

‘Darling, we’ve done it now,’ he said under his breath.

‘Yes. I suppose—we have,’ she answered in the same key.

‘Suppose? You’re not going back on things, after _that_. Next question

is—when will you marry me? Next week?’

Her flush, that had died down, mounted again, clear carmine, beautiful

to see. ‘Oh, Mark! Give me a few minutes to realise it all. You’re so

impatient. Such a boy. You make me feel ... ages old’⸺

‘Look here, I can’t have you talking that sort of rot,’ he protested;

incorrigibly blunt, even in love. ‘It’s morbid sentimentalism. You see,

I’m the son of a mother who doesn’t know how to feel old at fifty. “Boy,”

indeed! You’re a mere child yourself—the dearest in creation.’

‘No—no. I’m _not_ a child.’ Her emphatic protest rang true. ‘Perhaps your

mother has kept the bloom on life. Mine has never had any bloom on it,

worth mentioning. I was reared in a groove; a very virtuous groove; and

... I didn’t fit. I wanted to feel and know and live; to be something

more than a vegetable in a Wiltshire village. I knew I had talents of

sorts; and I felt, if I could only get away and have a fair chance, I

might achieve something worth doing, or, at least ... meet a man worth

marrying.’ She spoke looking away from him across the sun-splashed

water. ‘The only brother I cared about went off to the ends of the earth

before he was twenty. If I’d been old enough to go with him, I wouldn’t

be here now!’

‘Poor darling!’ He tightened his hold of her. ‘Dreadful calamity—isn’t

it?—to be here now! But didn’t your mother understand you—help you?’

‘Poor little mother. She did her best. My unconventional streak comes

from her side. But she’s a very tame edition; watered down by an

early marriage with father, who’s as conventional as a high road, but

unfortunately not as broad! Privately, I think she was half proud of

me and half terrified of what I might do next, like the hen in Hans

Andersen. It was father’s pharisaical attitude towards my mild vagaries

that made me worse, till at last I kicked clean over the traces, demanded

a reasonable allowance (to my amazement, I got it), and went off to

London, to take the world by storm!’

‘To Miss O’Neill?’ Mark queried, a faint anxiety in his tone.

‘Oh no. Harry’s a fairly recent phase. I boarded with a friendly

family in the second-rate theatrical line. That was my chosen road to

achievement. But it didn’t come off—worse luck!’

‘Nor the man worth marrying?’

Her eyes lingered in his. ‘Not to any great extent! They were rather a

mixed lot. And everything seemed in league against me. I made no headway

anywhere. Still—it was experience. It was life. One was too busy, either

hoping or despairing, to be dull. Each new phase seemed to be the

discovery of a new kingdom, till you found—you hadn’t the key. There was

the writing phase, the acting phase, the American phase⸺’

‘America? Why on earth⸺?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. The chance came. And the notion attracted me. A

bigger, fresher world; experience⸺’

‘You seem mighty keen on experience,’ Mark struck in. ‘D’you mean

knowledge—or simply new sensations?’

She hesitated. ‘After all—new sensations _are_ a form of knowledge. The

most interesting on earth. I’d go almost anywhere to discover the feel of

things⸺’

She stopped short, and Mark frowned into vacancy. For the first time he

caught himself wondering how old was she.

‘_I_ should say better be an ignoramus than a mere connoisseur in

sensations,’ he remarked quietly. ‘But perhaps I missed your meaning?’

‘Perhaps there wasn’t any meaning to miss! I was talking—rather

at random.’ Then very lightly she leaned her head against his.

‘Mark—dearest, don’t look like that.’

‘Well, you mustn’t talk like that,’ he said with decision. ‘How long were

you in America?’

‘Eighteen months. Not very pleasant always. But it did me no end of good.

I even went home for a time, full of fine resolves. But the poor things

soon shrivelled up in father’s atmosphere. Then—it was Harry to the

rescue.’

‘And now it’s Mark!’ With sudden fervour he caught her to him. ‘No more

“phases” after this, my Bel. You shall have your freedom and your chance.

I’ll make up to you, all I can, for the bad years. Mother will love you⸺’

Bel shook her head. ‘She doesn’t like me.’

‘Darling, she doesn’t know you. Mother may have her cranks and

prejudices. But if there’s one woman on earth she can be trusted to

love—it’s my wife. I’ll take you to her to-night.’

‘No—no. To-morrow. To-night—there’s Harry. It’ll be a blow. You see, when

I first came to her, I was so sick—with everything, I swore I’d never

marry. She’s jealous already—’

‘Poor soul!’ Mark said tenderly. ‘But I’m jealous too. I can’t share you

with Miss O’Neill. If it comes to a tug, you’ll have to choose between

us.’

‘I have chosen.’ She spoke with genuine fervour; and leaning against him,

she closed her eyes. So seen, her face looked years younger and of a

saint-like purity. Doubts and qualms seemed sacrilege. Without a word he

kissed her lowered lids, and found, to his surprise, that her lashes were

wet.

(_To be continued._)

_THE BATTLEFIELDS OF THE OURCQ._

BY EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

In the midst of the delicious Ile de France there lies an open piece

of country roughly bounded by three rivers—the Marne, the Ourcq, and

the Nonette. It is a high plateau, with rolling hills and winding

valleys, fertile and smiling. It forms the northern extremity of the

famous district of Brie, richly productive, the kitchen-garden of Paris,

which lies to the west of it—surprisingly, alarmingly near. This is

the battlefield of the Marne, or more exactly of the Ourcq, and was

the scene, in September 1914, of what will probably be looked upon in

history as one of the most portentous, and most obscurely enthralling,

of the combats of the world. At the courteous invitation of the French

Government, and under the charge of a distinguished staff-officer,

Captain Gabriel Puaux, I paid a visit to these battlefields towards

the end of last September. It was a pilgrimage wholly objective and

sentimental, for I have no pretensions of any kind to a knowledge of the

arts of war. I can but give a visual impression of what the scenes looked

like two years after the stupendous event.

We proceeded in a War Office car almost directly east from the gates of

Paris, along the great high road towards Strasburg. We reached in some

seventeen miles the point, at Claye-Souilly, which marks the extreme

advance of the German armies. Their outposts came within sight of the

village of Claye, where they found the French awaiting them, but they did

not cross the bridge over the Ourcq canal. It overwhelms the imagination

to realise, on the spot, how close the Germans were to the zone of Paris

on this 5th of September 1914. Civilisation, as observed by the angels in

Mr. Hardy’s drama, might well then seem to hang by a single thread over

the abyss. At this moment, as Mr. Belloc says, ‘at the maximum of its

developed energy, at the highest degree of its momentum,’ the horrible

German machine was first checked and then put out of gear by the splendid

genius of the French Higher Command. We were eager to see the places

where France earned for herself this endless meed of glory.

Soon after passing Claye we left the high road, and turned north into a

labyrinth of byways. The weather was superb; it was one of those blue

days of late September, which are apt to collect to themselves all the

best beauty of the year in France. From dawn to sunset not a cloud rose

in the sky; there reigned a soft continual radiance in which the colour

of every object took peculiar intensity. The first hamlet we reached,

Charny, brought us to the only disappointment of our day; for we failed,

after much inquiry, to find the place of death, or even of burial, of

the poet Charles Péguy, who has been the intellectual mascot of this war

to France. His gallant death opened the battle of the Marne. Under the

shelter of a slope, he and his men fought until they were driven into the

open. The officer who led them, and his lieutenant, were soon killed;

Péguy then had no sooner taken the command than a ball struck him full in

the forehead. His death marked the moment of transition between France

in danger and France redeemed. We endeavoured to follow his track, and

we drove through Villeroy, where there is little or nothing left to see.

The rustic calm of these grey hamlets is unbroken, and at first all that

tells us of the tragedy is the appearance from this point onwards of the

flags which mark where the French soldiers lie.

The dominant feature of these rural battlefields, as we saw them in

the full upland sunshine on that long splendid September day, was the

scattered profusion of little tricolor flags. A long blue horizon, broken

by golden haystacks against the sky, gave a general tone of greyness

to the earth, which, green with oats, livid with beetroot, brown with

parched lucerne, rolled beneath that vast expanse. In the midst of this

harmony of tender hues there stood out sharply the hard red, white, and

blue of the little flags, planted now solitary and now in clusters,

without arrangement or system—the bright flags flapping and fluttering in

the wind as far as the eye could reach, like charming indigenous flowers,

like brilliant ixias on some pale South African veldt; and each marking

the spot where a hero fell. At first, a stick with a képi on the top of

it, or even a cravat or a medal, had to serve for a provisional mark,

but now the little splendid flag seems to be a permanent memorial. It

leaps from a corner of the beetroot field, from a slope of the harvest,

from the turn of an apple-orchard, from the edge of the road, and in its

singleness and in its multitude alike, it marks this district of the Brie

a holy land for ever.

But this is to anticipate a little. We passed north through Iverny,

where there was a great deal of fighting, and then eastwards, skirting

Montyon, where the Germans, pressed hard in their retreat, threw nine

hundred bombs into a duckpond. It was only in the neighbourhood of the

graceful hill of Montyon that the flags began to be noticed. In Montyon

we observed the first ruined cottage; but it is at Barcy, the next hamlet

to the north-east, that the vestiges of war begin to be numerous. Barcy

was the centre of the enemy’s line on September 6, and this village

has not made much effort to recover from its heavy devastation. These

little communes of the Ile de France possess nothing of the architectural

charm which gives so exquisite and tender a beauty to many a village of

Southern England, but most of them have a single feature, the church. In

the case of Barcy, the broad village street forms an avenue closed, at

its northern end, by the graceful parish church, with its short pointed

spire. This building is violently injured by the bombardment, and looks

as though some monster had bitten large pieces out of it; while no

attempt has yet been made to restore it.

Other buildings at Barcy have been patched or mended. It is probable that

this work of restoration has been delayed by the uncertainty which has

prevailed as to the part which the State was prepared to take in this

rehabilitation. Only ten days after my visit the French Government, for

the first time, assumed the full responsibility for the rebuilding of

private property destroyed in the war, and now, therefore, so soon as

labour is forthcoming, the work may be expected to go merrily forward.

What is involved is so enormous that the imagination fails to follow the

course which it must take. Up to the present time it has been left to

private enterprise, and as regards these villages of the Marne and Ourcq,

except where the owner has been in a hurry to resume his normal life, the

bombarded villages have been left in a deplorable disarray.

On the open down above Barcy, and quite close to the road, a peasant was

loading a hay-cart with the help of two sullen-looking men in rough white

clothes. These were German prisoners, and we were moved by curiosity

to stop and talk to the peasant. He, from his half-built rick, replied

with stolidity to our questions. ‘He had no complaints to make of the

prisoners,’ he said; ‘that one’, indicating a burly captive, ‘really

works quite well.’ ‘Had they learned to speak French?’ we asked. ‘Oh no!’

‘How, then, did the work get on?’ ‘Ah,’ said the master, ‘we show them

what they have to do, and they point at what they want.’ During this, and

more, conversation the prisoners pursued their slow labour, not glancing

at us or taking more notice than cattle would. Strange it seemed, and

almost inhuman, that these Germans should have lived two years in this

sequestered French village and that neither on the one side nor on the

other should there have been the smallest approximation of language.

The peasant ‘had no complaints to make,’ and that was the sum of their

relations.

It was beyond Barcy that the bright flags began to be abundant. The eye

had no longer any need to seek for them; the garden of death was now

lavish of its bouquets of flowers. They were difficult to distinguish

among the beetroot, easy among the oats, insistent on the grey expanse

of stubble. Soon after leaving Barcy, at the corner where the road turns

abruptly south, there is a great cluster of them, and, always at a little

distance off, the plain black crosses which mark the spots where Germans

are buried. Presently we paused to examine the great monument raised to

the memory of officers and men who fell in the battle of the Ourcq. It is

garish in colour, and too much adorned with symbols in silvered cardboard

and wreaths of arsenical green. No doubt it is provisional; a memorial

in severer taste will ultimately testify to the riper genius of France.

We descend to Chambry, another tiny village of Brie, and here we meet

with a feature of poignant importance. In the great ‘push,’ the retiring

Germans occupied the cemetery of Chambry, a walled enclosure at the

summit of the village; this was a position of great strength, commanding

the countryside in every direction.

The Germans used this cemetery as a citadel, and the holes which they

made for their guns in the wall, and the breaches in the parapet, are

still untouched. As their army retired the enemy were obliged to withdraw

from this position, and there was a violent struggle, in the course of

which the French regained the enclosure, and used it in their turn.

They fired with full effect from behind the granite tombstones. After

the battle the whole cemetery was a scene of ruin and confusion, but of

this nothing remains now, except the gun-holes and breaches in the wall,

which have not been repaired. All the monuments of the dead, on the

other hand, have been replaced with extreme piety, and, the cemetery not

having been nearly full before, its free spaces have been used to hold

the tombs of officers and men who fell in the battle. I noted, among many

of pathetic interest, the stone erected in memory of Lieut. Quiliquini,

who brought his Tunisian troops, the 8th Tirailleurs, from Sfax. There

seemed something which moved the fancy sorrowfully in the idea of these

loyal Africans who fell to ward off the barbarians’ blow at Paris.

Outside the cemetery local patriotism has fitted up, in a barn, a sort

of rough museum of objects found on the battlefields. No doubt this will

be a great attraction when once the tourist reassembles in his myriads.

At present the solitude is broken only by occasional privileged mourners,

‘brisés d’émotion et de tristesse.’

Proceeding south, we were soon out of the battlefield of the Ourcq, the

frontier being marked at Penchard by another rather garish monument to

the fallen officers. This is the place where three thousand Morocco

troops dashed with memorable fury of attack up the Penchard hill. At this

point the road turns, revealing, far below, to the left, the clustered

houses of Meaux, with its cathedral, seated in a rich glade across a

curve of the silver Marne. The first stage of our pilgrimage was over,

and we paused an hour in the exquisite city of which Bossuet was the

Eagle-bishop. Meaux is celebrated for the miracle which snatched it from

the very jaws of the dog, and prevented it from becoming another Arras,

another Reims. The catastrophe seemed inevitable, when at six o’clock on

September 5 a patrol of Uhlans appeared in the city. All day long they

were close to Meaux, the population of which had given themselves up

for lost three days before. The bombardment of the cathedral actually

began, but, as by the direct interposition of God, no shell touched the

building, and then, under the pressure of the English army, the Germans

retired altogether. The situation of Meaux, with its row of great

seventeenth-century mills on a stone bridge spanning the river—mills

which still produce immense quantities of flour for Paris—is as

picturesque as that of any provincial city in France, and on the occasion

of our recent visit, with its brimming river, its ancient russet mills,

its noble church, all bathed in the liquid gold of September, it seemed

lovelier than ever before. The only sign of disturbance is the modern

bridge, which the English blew up for strategical purposes, without

hurting the old town in any respect.

In leaving Meaux to return to the battlefields we took a northward road

almost parallel with that by which we had entered, but somewhat to

the east of it, thus crossing the battlefields at a point a couple of

miles farther on in the German retreat. There is little to see close to

Meaux, but presently the graves begin, many of them gay with dahlias and

chrysanthemums. We descended to the village of Varreddes, which takes a

prominent place in the chronicle of the fighting. The struggle here was

very heavy. Varreddes is a rather large village, built a little distance

to the south of the canal of the Ourcq, which makes at this place a

great bend, surrounding the village on three sides, while the Marne

nearly isolates it on the fourth. Hence it was held by the enemy with

determination as long as possible. At Varreddes the Germans did dreadful

things. They ordered the population of the village to leave it at once,

and a group of seventeen very old men, who were too infirm to move

quickly, they set up against a wall and shot in cold blood. The priest, a

venerable man of seventy-six years, they seized as a hostage, and killed

in their retreat.

Many bright new roofs and walls testify in the village of Varreddes to

the enterprise of the inhabitants, who have ventured to rebuild their

ruined houses. The church, which has some good thirteenth-century

features, seems to be intact. And yet it is precisely at Varreddes

that the scheme of the battle, as it swept from west to east, is most

intelligible to a civilian. The intensity of the fighting is proved by

the profusion of graves, whose flags glitter and shimmer, with their

petals of red, white, and blue, in every direction. Farther on, above

Etrépilly, a large turfed reservoir, perched on a hillock, forms a

landmark, from which the eye explores in every direction the rolling

country, intersected by scarcely visible glens or trenches, through

which the rivers wind. On the summit of this commanding height we found

a curious monument, which called for an explanation which no one seemed

competent to give. It consists of a metal shield of brilliant vermilion

and azure, surmounted by seven flags—one of them the American flag—and

addressed in large letters, ‘Les Prisonniers de Guerre aux Héros de la

Marne.’ What prisoners these were we asked one another in vain. But it

made our hearts, with a touch of added mystery, thrill in fresh response

to those myriads of memorial flowers that twinkled and sparkled on the

circle of brown fields around us. There is one object of horror that

attracts attention here. It was a great barn or hangar, in which the

bodies of the fallen Germans were heaped up after the battle, and then

burned by their comrades. It is now nothing but a huge skeleton of

twisted iron, grimacing at the sky.

Between Varreddes and Etrépilly, as we prepare to cross the Ourcq, we

pass a little tavern at the left-hand side of the road, which carries on

a newly painted sign the name ‘À l’Obus.’ The excuse for this is that

on its gable-end, close to a window, it displays an unexploded German

shell, rusty and red, which half penetrated the wall and stuck there,

without bursting. Similar bombs are already pointed out as curiosities in

tree-trunks, and will doubtless be much exploited when tourists begin

to be admitted. On the east from Varreddes we had seen, through a screen

of trees, the Marne below us, and the great bridge at Germigny-l’Evêque,

which the Germans blew up behind them in their final retreat. We are now

in the very midst of the worst slaughter of September 6 and 7, 1914,

but it is very curious to see how little sign of it is left in the

countryside. Occasional remnants of barbed wire, and here and there the

trenches of defence, might easily be overlooked by a hasty traveller.

He will more readily notice that here are orchards, starred with the

rose-colour of ripening apples; there feathery boskage of acacias

delicately green; here we run between violently contrasted fields, with

the sulphur of mustard on one side, the purple of beetroot on the other;

there the oat-harvest descends to little copses of chestnut and beech,

that brood over some unseen rivulet. Everywhere the peace of uniform

rustic experience, unaltered through the sober centuries, would seem

stamped upon the landscape, if the little occasional groups of flapping

tricolors were not there to remind us that only two brief years ago the

question whether European liberty should or should not be overwhelmed for

ever was fought out here with unsurpassable fury and tenacity.

The winding walled hamlet of Etrépilly is bright with the sunshine on

its new orange and velvet-brown roofs, by which the damage done by

the German shells is concealed. This is not the case with the little

village of Vincy-Manœuvres, through which we pass next on our northward

course. Vincy was heavily shelled on September 7, and still presents

an appearance of dismal dilapidation. Without doubt, this is a matter

which depends on the enterprise or wealth of individual proprietors,

and it will be curious to see what immediate effect the decision of

the Government to repair all private property at the cost of the State

will have in these remote communes. It was on September 9, 1914,

that the German army made a final stand on the wooded height between

Vincy-Manœuvres and Acy-en-Multien, from which they were dislodged next

day by the army of Manoury. This was the third and conclusive stage of

the great struggle, in the course of which the sixth French army pushed

back the half-encircling corps of Kluck’s reinforcements, and here we

felt it necessary to bear in mind, as much as the peaceful uniformity of

the landscape would permit, the great double line of attack and retreat

which we had now twice traversed.

We sped on north, and were now no longer in the department of the

Seine-et-Marne, but in that of the Oise. No place was more prominent in

the battle than Acy-en-Multien, which we now approached. This must have

been, and indeed still is, much the most attractive and picturesque of

the villages which the battle of the Ourcq has immortalised. Acy lies

in a wooded dimple of the high plateau, and it is scattered broadly

over its site, more like an English than a French township. When it is

considered with what violence the Germans were hunted out of Acy, it is

surprising how few marks of their presence are left. One large house,

of château pretensions, is a complete wreck, having been bombed out of

existence by German shells, but the beautiful and curious church, with

its twelfth-century octagonal tower and its rudiments of earliest Gothic

ornament, is, so far as the eye can judge, intact. At Acy a prodigious

number of French soldiers are buried in a vast cemetery, which seems to

have been improvised for the occasion. The piety of relatives and friends

keeps these graves so lavishly covered with nosegays that the cemetery

looks like a flower-garden. The epitaphs and sentiments on the tombstones

are poignant, and we lingered long and with great emotion in this sacred

melancholy place. I was particularly struck by one inscription—that

on the tombstone of a certain Charles Schulz, who died as a corporal,

leading on his men. He had been, till the war broke out, a Protestant

pastor, but in what locality the epitaph does not say. The text chosen

for his place of burial—‘il tint ferme, parcequ’il voyait celui qui

est invisible’—may well have been the echo of his own sentiments when

he exchanged his ministry for the terrible duty of fighting for his

fatherland. By his name, he was doubtless an Alsatian, and curiosity was

eager to know more of this Protestant pastor-corporal who sleeps in the

pretty cemetery of Acy-en-Multien.

In leaving Acy, our motor lost its way up a lane that led only to a

farmyard. By this happy chance, in our descent or retreat, we enjoyed

an exquisite view of the village, nestled in its grove of chestnuts

around the spire of its rather fantastic church—a view which in other

conditions we should have missed, since these villages, sunken in

folds of the upland, have a strange faculty for making themselves

invisible at a little distance. Recovering our route, we continued

northward, over the high rounded plateau of the Multien, which is the

local name for this part of the department of the Oise. The character

of the landscape now changes, and becomes very English. Proceeding

from Acy to Nanteuil-le-Hardouin is like traversing the high parts

of Gloucestershire; the lie of the land exactly resembles that of

the Cotswolds, and I could easily have persuaded myself that we were

driving from Stow-in-the-Wold to Burford. It is obvious that this

rolling country, here entirely deprived of streams and glens, offers an

extraordinary opportunity for the evolutions of troops, but remarkably

little shelter for them.

Nanteuil, a gloomy village, almost a town, with winding narrow streets,

severely grey, and a great church which towers over the wayfarer, marks

the limit of the battle north-eastwards. Although there was a good deal

of fighting around Nanteuil, it shows, so far as we could perceive, no

trace of injury, even on the picturesque façade of the church. We left

it to enter a long avenue of oaks, and there was no mark of any kind to

indicate where the battle ended. My companion humorously remarked that it

was the duty of the Government to put up a _poteau_ with the inscription,

‘Ici finit le champ de bataille de l’Ourcq’! But in the absence of such a

guide-post to aid the imagination of the traveller there was nothing in

the rolling agricultural landscape, from which the little flowery flags

had now disappeared, to indicate that here there had been any disturbance

of the peace of the world.

At this point, therefore, a picture of the battlefields of the Ourcq

as they now exist should end. But an impression was awaiting us at the

threshold of the very next village, Baron, which was perhaps the most

poignant and certainly the most extraordinary of our whole day. As we

motored along we noticed, just before reaching Baron, a high wall on

the left hand containing a marble plaque, with an inscription in gold

letters. Curiosity prompted us to stop and read this inscription, which

stated that in the house behind this wall the musical composer, Albéric

Magnard, was shot and burned on Wednesday, September 3, 1914. A funereal

poem by M. Edmond Rostand described how

Celui-là, qui, rebelle à toute trahison,

had lived there, died to preserve the honour of his art. We were

therefore close to the scene of a horrible crime, which the magnitude

of the events that closely followed it has somewhat obscured in memory.

Albéric Magnard, the author of ‘Guercœur’ and other operas, born on June

9, 1865, was one of the most eminent and successful musicians of France.

He had for many years possessed a country-seat at Baron, where he had

built a little château, Le Manoir des Fontaines, in which he had brought

together a collection of musical instruments and books which was famous.

We were reading the inscription on the wall, when a door in the latter

opened and a sad woman appeared, asking us if we would like to see the

place where Monsieur Magnard died. She led us through a pergola of

climbing plants to a point where we suddenly saw before us what resembled

a scene in some opera—a garden blazing with begonias and African

marigolds, surrounded on three sides by a graceful balustrade, and

velvety with green sward. Below the balustrade a little park, beautifully

kept, testified to the elegant taste of the proprietor. But in the midst

of this brilliance and neatness the livid shell of the house itself

stood untouched since the disaster, producing in the midst of the bright

parterres and trim lawns an extraordinary effect of sinister and ironic

horror. It was like seeing a skeleton in a ball-dress, or a wreath of

roses round a skull.

The good woman, who herself had lost in the fighting her two sons,

described to us the murder. A troop of Germans was marching down the

road and, attracted by something in the Manoir des Fontaines, they had

insisted on being admitted by the door at which we entered. M. Magnard

was in his bath-room, at the back of the house. He is believed to have

appeared at the window, and a German soldier immediately shot him

dead. They then set fire to the house, and they watched it till the

half-calcined body of the composer fell through the rafters on to the

floor of the room below. Meanwhile, they took his son and tied him,

facing the scene of his father’s murder, to the trunk of a tree in

the garden, and prepared to shoot him. But three peasants out of the

village of Baron swore that he was not the son of M. Magnard, but of the

gardener; and so, when their work was done, the Germans went off, leaving

the boy alive, to be released by the villagers. The exact conditions

under which the famous composer was killed are mysterious, and are likely

to remain so, since no French eye witnessed the actual commission of the

crime. It is possible that he offered, or appeared likely to offer, some

resistance to the aggressors.

M. Rostand’s verses suggest that, in the version of the event which

reached him, Magnard was attempting ‘to preserve the honour of his art.’

Whether he obeyed an instinct of self-preservation, or whether he fell a

passive victim, matters very little. The incident in any case illustrates

that Teutonic spirit of anarchism which Viscount Grey has stigmatised as

a menace to the future of civilisation.

_TWO MONUMENTS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY._

BY SIR CHARLES P. LUCAS, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.

In Westminster Abbey, towards the western end of the nave, on the

northern side, stands a monument of rather special interest at the

present day, upon which there is this inscription:

‘The Province of Massachusets Bay in New England, by an order

of the great and general Court bearing date Feb. 1st, 1759,

caused this monument to be erected to the memory of George

Augustus Lord Viscount Howe, Brigadier General of His Majesty’s

forces in America, who was slain July the 6th, 1758, on the

march to Ticonderoga, in the 34th year of his age: in testimony

of the sense they had of his services and military virtues,

and of the affection their officers and soldiers bore to his

command. He lived respected and beloved, the public regretted

his loss, to his family it is irreparable.’

Dean Stanley, in his ‘Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey’

(1869 ed.), makes the following reference to this monument, which

apparently stood, at the date when he wrote, in the south aisle of the

nave: ‘Massachusetts and Ticonderoga, not yet divided from us, appear

on the monument in the South aisle of the Nave erected to Viscount

Howe, the unsuccessful elder brother of the famous Admiral.’ It is

difficult to understand why the Dean used the curiously infelicitous

term ‘unsuccessful’ in this case. The word might have been applied

with some accuracy to the younger soldier brother, Sir William Howe,

most successful in his early military career, but not so in the War of

American Independence, though even in that war he was a constant winner

of battles; but unless to die young is, on the principle of the survival

of the fittest, to be considered a mark of failure, no word could be more

inappropriate to a man whose life, according to the notice of him in the

Annual Register for 1758, presumably written by Edmund Burke, ‘was long

enough for his honour, but not for his country.’

He was the eldest of three brothers. The second was the famous Admiral,

‘Black Dick,’ the hero of ‘The Glorious First of June,’ which we recalled

on the occasion of the late great sea-fight in the North Sea. The third

was the general already mentioned. They were a notable trio, but the

eldest, the shortest lived, the ‘unsuccessful’ one of the three, had in

him the promise of greatness of the rarest kind. It would be difficult

to pick out any man whose death called forth such a consensus of eulogy.

Possibly he was _felix opportunitate mortis_. Possibly the same might be

said of his friend Wolfe, who was killed in his thirty-third year, as

Howe in his thirty-fourth. But assuredly, had these two men lived on,

there would have been a different story to tell of England and America.

Dean Stanley writes of Wolfe’s friendship for Lord Howe the Admiral,

quoting Horace Walpole’s words, that they were ‘friends to each other

as cannon to gunpowder’; but Wolfe’s friendship for the ‘unsuccessful’

brother must have been as great; his admiration for him at any rate was

unbounded. Wolfe was no great respecter of persons; he was somewhat

impatient and critical of other commanders, but—‘If my Lord Howe had

lived, I should have been very happy to have received his orders.’ In

Wolfe’s eyes Howe was ‘the very best officer in the King’s service,’

‘the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time.’ And so said they

all: there was no dissentient voice, no whisper of criticism, no trace

of jealousy. General Abercromby, to whom Howe was second in command, in

reporting his death, wrote, ‘He was, very deservedly, universally beloved

and respected throughout the whole army.’ Pitt’s testimony ran that ‘he

was by the universal voice of army and people a character of ancient

times, a complete model of military virtue in all its branches.’ Robert

Rogers, the bold leader of the Rangers, in whose company Howe learnt the

art of North American bush fighting, wrote of him as a ‘noble and brave

officer,’ ‘universally beloved by both officers and soldiers of the

army’; while the members of the Massachusetts House of Assembly, no great

lovers of the redcoats from home, and close-fisted enough in ordinary

dealings, voted £250 for a monument to the Englishman, whose character

had impressed them all, and whose person their soldiers dearly loved.

Howe had been made colonel of the lately raised Royal Americans, the

ancestors of the 60th Rifles, the famous King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the command of the 55th

Regiment. Pitt then appointed him to be brigadier to General Abercromby,

who, in 1758, was placed in chief command of the Central Advance on

Canada, along the line of Lake George and Lake Champlain. Abercromby

neither was, nor had the reputation of being, a first-rate general,

and Lord Chesterfield was no doubt roughly accurate when he wrote,

‘Abercromby is to be the sedentary and not the acting commander.’

The inspiration and the motive force were to come from Howe. Early in

July 1758 the army, consisting of over 6000 regulars and some 9000

provincials, was carried on _bateaux_ and whaleboats to the northern end

of Lake George, where, near the outlet of that lake into Lake Champlain,

stood the immediate objective, the French fort of Ticonderoga. The force

was landed, an advance was made through dense forest and scrub, Lord Howe

with a party of Rangers was leading the principal column, they stumbled

across a French reconnoitring party, there was a skirmish, and Howe

was killed. ‘The French lost above three hundred men, and we, though

successful, lost as much as it was possible to lose in one.’ That is one

of the many comments made upon the incident, all on the same note. Here

is another: ‘In Lord Howe the soul of General Abercromby’s army seemed to

expire.’ Two days later Abercromby ordered a headlong, blundering assault

upon the works of the fort, which ended in terrible losses and complete

repulse.

In his dispatch of August 26, 1915, reporting upon the operations at the

Dardanelles up to that date, Sir Ian Hamilton wrote:

‘Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood has been the soul of

Anzac. Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post.

Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours of

each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front trenches,

and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least

every soldier in the force believes he is known to his chief.’

Here we have something like a modern counterpart, happily still with us,

of Lord Howe.

It is at once the glory of the British Empire, and its chief source

of strength, that it contains within it so many diverse elements, all

co-operating for the common weal, all owing free and willing allegiance

to one sovereign. Many races combine to make the great community which

we call by the strangely inaccurate term of Empire; and the British race

itself, in the process of transplantation, has developed different types

in differing lands, climates, and surroundings. The home Briton, born

and bred within the four seas of the United Kingdom, necessarily differs

somewhat in character and physique from the Briton of the Canadian

prairies or the Australian backblocks. The Canadian Briton again differs

from the Australasian or South African, while among Australasians the

Australian is of one type, the New Zealander of another. All supplement

each other; all contribute to the common stock some ingredient which the

others have not, and the sum total is greater and richer than if the

units of which it is composed were all alike and uniform. On the other

hand, diversities demand wise handling, or they may become a source not

of strength, but of weakness. It is as easy to drift farther apart as to

come closer, to exaggerate differences as to minimise them. Every citizen

of the Empire is a missionary of the Empire, for by the individual

citizens the types are judged. The home Briton who visits Australia

leaves behind him a good or bad taste for England among the Australians

with whom he has been brought into contact. The Australian who comes to

the Old Country gives to Australia among the people of the Old Country a

better or a worse name. But of necessity the leaders are most potent in

mission work, and among the leaders those who lead armed men on active

service; who are in touch with them day by day in the camp, on the

march, in the trenches or on the open battlefield; on whom it devolves

to enforce discipline, and with whom it rests whether or not discipline

means friction. It is impossible to measure the amount of lasting good

which is wrought when overseas soldiers associate tact and sympathy with

home leadership or, on the other hand, the mischief which results from

want of personal assimilation. It is not by any means military capacity

alone that makes the soul of an Empire army. We are all beginning to know

each other, to value each other, to make allowances for each other, to

an extent which was impossible before steamers multiplied the coming and

going of men, and turned uncertain and spasmodic into regular and assured

communication. Doubts can be at once set at rest and misapprehensions

promptly removed by the use of the submarine cable. Moreover, this

familiarising process, and the annihilation of distance, is a progressive

matter. Every year leaves us rather closer to one another than we were

the year before. If, even under these favourable modern conditions, the

personal element still plays a most important part, it was all-important

in the middle years of the eighteenth century.

In the Seven Years’ War, when, in the words of Frederick the Great,

England, having been long in labour, had at length brought forth a man,

that man, William Pitt, set himself to fight France in America, and

sent out what were for the time comparatively large armies to conquer

Canada. He called upon the British North American colonies to co-operate

and raise their levies; and inasmuch as his appeal was made in wise and

tactful terms, and the colonies realised that for once England would not

leave them in the lurch, they, or some of them, answered to the call with

patriotism and goodwill. Thus regular soldiers from England, in greater

numbers than ever before, came among the colonists, and provincial

regiments were raised to march and fight side by side with the troops of

the line. Then was seen and felt in its fullest extent the difference

between the home Briton and his brother beyond the seas, at a time when

the divergence was most pronounced. The regulars were very regular, the

Provincials were very provincial; from a military point of view the two

bodies of men were at opposite poles. The Provincials knew nothing of

training or discipline; they were nondescript, temporary soldiers of

small democracies; they were farmers enlisted for the campaign, their

term of service in any case not exceeding one year: few had uniforms,

some brought guns with them, some had none to bring: the officers were

in effect chosen by the men. The troops of the line, on the other hand,

imported into the backwoods of North America the stiffness and rigidity

of European dress, discipline, and tactics in the eighteenth century,

and between the officers and soldiers there was a great gulf fixed, as

between the ranks of society in Europe.

It was but natural that these officers should regard the provincial

soldiery with disdain, and that a corresponding resentment should be felt

in the provincial ranks. Some of the greatest soldiers of the day were

not exempt from this partisan feeling. After the disaster to Braddock’s

force in 1755, Washington, who had been present on the field and who

contrasted the conduct of the Virginians in the fight with that of the

regulars, wrote in the bitterest terms of the latter. Wolfe, on the other

hand, had, in 1758, no words strong enough to express his disgust at the

shortcomings of the American soldiers. ‘The Americans are in general

the dirtiest, most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive.’

If these were the views of the foremost men of the day in the colonial

levies and in the regular army respectively, it must be presumed that

the lesser men felt at least as strongly. Mrs. Grant, the authoress of

‘Memoirs of an American Lady,’ a book which was published at New York, in

1809, speaks of the ‘secret contempt’ with which ‘many officers justly

esteemed, possessed of capacity, learning, and much knowledge, both

of the usages of the world and the art of war ... regarded the blunt

simplicity and plain appearance of the settlers’; and among the officers

who came out from England there must have been a large proportion whose

contempt was not unspoken or unnoticed.

It was not merely a case of friction between the professional soldier and

the amateur, the one looking down upon the other, and the other resenting

the airs of the superior person. The mischief was deeper seated. The

northern colonies of British America were cradled in centrifugal

traditions: a large proportion of the first colonists had come out to be

rid of the Home Government, its discipline and its control. Puritanism

was the dominant religious and political creed; and the surroundings,

except at a few town centres, were of a stern and simple kind. Among

men and women born and reared on these lines, and into their family

circles, came regimental officers from England, many, if not most, of

whom had been bred in the ways of fashionable English Society, which, in

the middle of the eighteenth century, was not, to say the least of it,

characterised by high tone or scrupulous refinement. The settlers in the

New World, by the mere fact of their removal out of the Old World into

the wilderness, had preserved for themselves and their descendants the

old-time feeling and modes of thought in the Old World, and to them the

new leaven from an up-to-date Old World was a leaven of unrighteousness.

Mrs. Grant was the daughter of an officer in the 55th Regiment, Howe’s

own regiment, but she had spent her childhood in the American atmosphere,

and had been mainly brought up in a Dutch family. Consequently she tells

us that she was ‘a little ashamed of having a military father,’ and

writes of ‘the scarlet coat, which I had been taught to consider as the

symbol of wickedness.’ It was to some extent as though Cavaliers and

Roundheads had come to life again, and were jostling one another, while

fighting under the same flag and for the same cause, as a prelude to once

more springing at each other’s throats.

At this time and place a man of the type of Lord Howe was an almost

priceless asset to the cause of Imperial Unity—a cause which can never

stand still, but either declines or goes forward, and goes forward only

through intelligent appreciation of existing conditions and active

sympathy with living men. Of high social standing in England, and

acknowledged military reputation, he set himself, by precept and still

more by personal example, to the work of assimilation.

‘This gallant man,’ says the Annual Register for 1758, ‘from

the moment he landed in America, had wisely conformed and

made his regiment conform to the kind of service which the

country required. He did not suffer any under him to encumber

themselves with superfluous baggage; he himself set the example

and fared like a common soldier. The first to encounter

danger, to endure hunger, to support fatigue; rigid in his

discipline but easy in his manners, his officers and soldiers

readily obeyed the commander, because they loved the man.’

Wolfe wrote of him as a man ‘whom nature has formed for the war of this

country,’ and Mrs. Grant, that he was ‘above the pedantry of holding up

standards of military rules, where it was impossible to enforce them, and

the narrow spirit of preferring the modes of his own country to those

proved by experience to suit that in which he was to act.’ She christens

him ‘This young Lycurgus of the camp.’

Under Howe everything was literally cut down to meet the exigencies of

American warfare. Gold and scarlet was laid aside: baggage was reduced to

a minimum: the muskets were shortened: their barrels were darkened: the

skirts of the long regimental coats were cut off: Indian leggings were

brought into use. Wolfe writes in May 1758, ‘Our clothes, our arms, our

accoutrements, nay even our shoes and stockings are all improper for this

country. Lord Howe is so well convinced of it that he has taken away all

the men’s breeches.’ A French writer tells us that the officers and men

were only allowed one shirt apiece. ‘Lord H. set the example, by himself

washing his own dirty shirt, and drying it in the sun, while he in the

meantime wore nothing but his coat.’ And here is the unkindest cut of

all—in Mrs. Grant’s words:

‘The greatest privation to the young and vain yet remained.

Hair well dressed, and in great quantity, was then considered

as the greatest possible ornament, which those who had it took

the utmost care to display to advantage, and to wear in a bag

or queue, whichever they fancied. Lord Howe’s was fine and very

abundant; he, however, cropped it and ordered every one else to

do the same.’

In all things the commander set the example: he never asked his officers

or men to do anything or to give up anything which he did not do or give

up himself. Thus his regiment of regulars was set in order for backwood

fighting and, what was more, it was attuned to the ways of the land and

of the people of the land. ‘They were ever after considered as an example

to the whole American Army.’

Mrs. Grant tells a story, which Francis Parkman has repeated in his

delightful ‘Montcalm and Wolfe,’ of Lord Howe giving a dinner to his

officers in his tent. The furniture consisted of logs of wood and

bearskins, ‘and presently the servants set down a large dish of pork

and pease.’ Howe pulled a sheath with a knife and fork in it out of his

pocket, and proceeded to carve the meat. The officers ‘sat in a kind

of awkward suspense’ for want of knives and forks, until Howe, after

expressing surprise that they did not possess ‘portable implements’

of the kind, ‘finally relieved them from their embarrassment, by

distributing to each a case the same as his own, which he had provided

for that purpose.’ The real point of the story is that, if Howe had been

an ordinary man, his dinner would probably have been resented by the

officers as an impertinent practical joke. But he was not an ordinary

man; among his officers and soldiers he was like King David: ‘Whatsoever

the king did pleased all the people.’

Albany in New York State was always the base for expeditions against

Canada, by the central route, which lay along the line of water

communication. In war time through Albany regiments came and went, and

in and around it they congregated and encamped. Albany was pre-eminently

a centre for the old New York families of Dutch descent. On the upper

waters of the Hudson and the lower reaches of the Mohawk River, which

joins the Hudson a little above Albany, were the estates of the

‘patroons’ of the Dutch régime, and here their descendants lived and

thrived. Mrs. Grant, in her Memoirs, tells of the lives and surroundings

of one of the foremost of these families, the Schuylers, whose homes were

in Albany and to the north of it in the district known as ‘The Flats.’ In

her book an old Mrs. Schuyler (‘Aunt Schuyler’) is the central figure,

as she was in the year 1758 the central figure of the Schuyler clan.

The book tells of Lord Howe’s intimacy with the family, though he never

took up his quarters with them, for he ‘always lay in his tent with the

regiment which he commanded’; how the old lady loved him almost as a son,

how sadly and affectionately she sped him on his last advance, and her

grief when the news came that he was killed. ‘Aunt Schuyler ... had the

utmost esteem for him, and the greatest hope that he would at some future

period redress all those evils that had formerly impeded the service;

and perhaps plant the British standard on the walls of Quebec.’ We have

drawn for us the contrast between the good and bad type of officer,

the gentleman and the bully, though both may be efficient fighting

men. Returning to his friends on one occasion, Howe found to his great

indignation that in his absence Captain Charles Lee had come through

and, ‘as if he were in a conquered country,’ commandeered the loyal

old lady’s stock and property, without having the necessary warrants

for his high-handed proceedings. Lee’s next visit was after the fight

at Ticonderoga, when he was brought back a wounded man to be nursed by

those whom he had browbeaten and robbed. He was a king’s officer; but

it is difficult to deduce from his case the moral that conduct such as

his brought on the Revolution, seeing that he became a general in the

Revolutionary army, of great though somewhat dubious reputation.

In 1757 and 1758 Lord Howe was winning the love and esteem of all

who came into contact with him in America. In 1759 the Assembly of

Massachusetts voted the monument to his memory. In 1765 the men of Boston

were rioting against the Stamp Act, and in 1773 throwing cargoes of tea

into Boston harbour. In 1775 came open war with the Mother Country and

the fight of Bunker Hill. At Bunker Hill hardest of hard fighters among

the Americans was Israel Putnam: he had been by Howe’s side when the

latter was killed. The night before his death Howe had been in company

with John Stark, noted among the New Hampshire Rangers who followed

Robert Rogers. It was Stark who, in 1777, planned and won the fight at

Bennington, which was the beginning of the end of Burgoyne’s army. A

young member of the Schuyler group, who had taken Howe to their hearts,

was Philip Schuyler, afterwards one of the best known and most trusted

of the Revolutionary leaders. Probably England and America had drifted

too far apart at the time of the Seven Years’ War for any human influence

to bring them wholly into line again. Yet, had Howes been multiplied and

English statesmen and commanders been modelled on his lines, the parting

might well have been postponed and been less bitter when it came. He

stands out in history as one who in his day did all that man could do

to bring the Colonies and the Mother Country closer together; and he is

a type of the Englishmen who are still wanted to-day, and who happily

are not wanting, as shown by the love and confidence borne towards Sir

William Birdwood by the splendid fighting men from the Southern Seas,

whom he led to less and yet to more than victory.

Just over a year from the date of Lord Howe’s death and Abercromby’s

repulse at Ticonderoga, a much abler general than Abercromby, Jeffrey

Amherst, marched once more against the fort. The French abandoned

their entrenchments in front of it, of which Amherst promptly took

possession; and a rearguard, left to hold the fort itself, after two

or three days’ artillery fire, blew it up and left the ruins to be

occupied by Amherst’s army. As the death of Lord Howe had immediately

preceded Abercromby’s attack, so a day before the second enterprise ended

successfully, another officer, well known in the army and in English

Society, though not comparable with Lord Howe, was killed. An entry in

Knox’s Historical Journal runs: ‘The Honourable Colonel Townshend was

picked off to-day in the trenches by a cannon shot; he is very deservedly

lamented by the General and the army’; a later entry mentions that his

body was taken to Albany for burial. On the south side of the nave of

Westminster Abbey, much farther up towards the Chancel than the place

where the monument to Lord Howe stands, will be found a monument—

‘erected by a disconsolate parent, The Lady Viscountess

Townshend, to the memory of her fifth son, The Honble.

Lt.-Colonel Roger Townshend, who was killed by a cannon ball on

the 25th of July 1759 in the 28th year of his age, as he was

reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderagoe in North America

... tho’ premature his death, his life was glorious, enrolling

him with the names of those immortal statesmen and commanders

whose wisdom and intrepidity in the cause of this comprehensive

and successful war have extended the commerce, enlarged the

Dominion, and upheld the Majesty of these Kingdoms beyond the

idea of any former age.’

The monument is an elaborate one, and the eulogy is obviously

exaggerated. Horace Walpole would evidently have had it otherwise. In

his ‘Short Notes of My Life’ he tells us, ‘I gave my Lady Townshend

an epitaph and design for a tomb for her youngest son, killed at

Ticonderoga; neither was used.’ He also gives us to understand that the

mother was not so disconsolate as the monument asserts:

‘My Lady Townshend, who has not learning enough to copy a

Spartan mother, has lost her youngest son. I saw her this

morning—her affectation is on t’other side; she affects

grief—but not so much for the son she has lost, as for t’other

that she may lose.’

And again, ‘Poor Roger, for whom she is not concerned, has given her a

hint that her hero George may be mortal too.’ Whatever may have been the

mother’s preferences, the two brothers loved each other dearly. A few

weeks before he was killed, Roger Townshend wrote to George Townshend’s

wife to tell her of her husband’s safe arrival at Halifax from England in

the best of health, and how he had sent him supplies of fresh vegetables

to make up for the long sea-voyage. The letter continues:

‘My opinion of General Amherst as an honest good man, and my

attachment to him as a soldier I thought would never allow me

to wish that I might serve under any other person in America,

but the tie of brother and friend united is too powerful, and I

confess nothing ever gave me more real concern than not being

employed on the same expedition.’

In turn we have George Townshend writing sadly before the fall of Quebec

of the news of his brother’s death; and after Quebec had fallen, on the

eve of his return to England, he writes to Amherst:

‘I hear I have got Barrington’s regiment. Alas, what a Bouquet

this had been a year or two hence for poor Roger. I assure

you I return thoroughly wounded from America. I loved him

sincerely.’

George Townshend, the eldest son, whom Walpole clearly did not love, was

Wolfe’s well-known brigadier, to whom Quebec capitulated, and around whom

so much controversy gathered. He ended as a Marquess and a Field-Marshal,

and there is no reason to doubt that he was a competent soldier. So

also evidently was the younger brother. Amherst appointed him to be

one of the two Deputy Adjutant-Generals of his army, his own brother,

Colonel Amherst, being the other. We read of him in connection with the

training of the Provincial regiments, and as commanding a detachment of

Rangers sent to reconnoitre along Lake George. Amherst wrote to Wolfe

that he had intended to send him home with dispatches after the fall

of Ticonderoga, that his loss ‘marred the enjoyment I should otherwise

have had in the reduction of the place.’ We may set him down as one of

the might-have-beens, and Dean Stanley would presumably have classed him

as the unsuccessful brother. If he had marked military ability, it has

assuredly remained in the family; for those who read the epitaph upon his

monument in Westminster Abbey, with its reference to a comprehensive war

and upholding the majesty of these kingdoms, will carry their thoughts

across the seas from North America to Mesopotamia, from Ticonderoga to

Kut.[1]

FOOTNOTES

[1] All who are interested in the personalities of the Seven Years’ War,

as far as North America was concerned, owe a deep debt of gratitude to

Dr. Doughty, the Government Archivist of the Dominion of Canada, for the

immense amount of material which he has collected and made accessible in

‘The Siege of Quebec’ (Doughty and Parmelee), and in his edition, for the

Champlain Society, of Knox’s Historical Journal.

_THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE FIRST CHRISTMAS._

BY BOYD CABLE.

The Divisional Ammunition and Supply Column had done a long march on

the Christmas Eve. It was not so much that the distance was long in

measured kilometres, but from a point of time, of dragging weariness,

of bad roads, of cold and wet and discomfort it was prolonged to a

heart-breaking length.

The column had taken the road at daybreak, and this meant that the men

had to be on parade a full quarter-hour before, had to turn out of their

uncomfortable billets and sleeping-places an hour and a half before the

time to parade. In that time they had to pack their kits (a quick enough

and simple job, to be sure), put on their wet boots, water and feed

their horses, eat a biscuit-and-cheese breakfast, scramble for a ‘lick

and a promise’ sort of wash, harness up their teams, pack picketing gear

and odd stores on the wagons and sheet them over, have themselves and

everything belonging to them packed and harnessed and standing ready to

turn out promptly to the shout of ‘Hook in.’ They were all ready, and

with a nicely-timed handful of seconds to spare, when the word came,

because the practice that makes perfect had been their regular routine

for a good many months past, and there had been plenty of times when

they had been obliged to do the same routine in very much less than this

present leisured hour and a half.

It was raining when the wagons turned out, formed up on the road, and,

dropping into place unit by unit, rolled steadily off on the march.

The rain was taken quite philosophically and as a matter of course, as

indeed it had come to be by now and any time for a month past. There

were a good many even by then who had wondered where all the rain could

come from, and held a firm opinion that it must cease very soon, on the

reasonable assumption that no rain supply is inexhaustible and that the

past month must have ‘pretty well emptied the watering-pot.’ They were

to learn for another solid three months almost without a break what the

Flanders watering-pot can supply when it really sets about the job in

earnest, and it was to come to be a standing joke and boast of the first

Expeditionaries that you could always tell one of the men who went

through that first winter in France because an examination of his toes

would show him to be web-footed.

But at the end of December the wet had not been accepted as such a

permanent feature of life as it was to become, and there were plenty of

men in the column who, as they marched out that Christmas Eve, looked

up at the sky and round the grey horizon and tried to find, or persuade

themselves and each other they could see, a spot where it was ‘lifting.’

But it did not lift, and before long the men’s damp clothes, half dried

by body heat in sleeping in them, had become soaked and saturated through

again. It was cold too, and fingers gripped about the wet reins of their

pairs of horses grew numbed and stiff, were periodically revived with

much blowing of warm breath—the only item of warmth left about a man—into

cupped hands, and arm beating and flapping. The roads were heavy, rutted

and inches deep in stiff mud, flooded in parts by the overflow from

brimming-over ditches.

The march was bad enough in its early stages; it became acute in its

discomfort as the day wore on, and men and horses grew tired and more

tired. By far the worst feature was the constant series of halts. The

road taken by the column was filled for miles with a slow-crawling and

packed procession of horses and wagons. The slightest check at the head

of the procession meant a stop to all the rest, and because each wagon

took a fraction of time longer than the one ahead to see its predecessor

started and to get under way itself, what to a wagon in the front ranks

was no more than a slowing to avoid running into the wagon ahead was

easily translated a few teams back into a pull-up and immediate move on,

and further back the line to a longer and longer interval of halt. So

that in the middle and rear of the line there were frequent halts of a

minute, two, three, and up to ten minutes. And if a wagon driving through

an extra soft portion of road was caught and held beyond the immediate

strength of the tired team to pull out, the halt might spin out into

anything up to fifteen minutes. Several times during the day there were

hour-long halts at cross- or fork-roads, while cross streams of traffic

passed clear or entering streams were shuffled in. Towards mid-day

exasperated officers strove to avail themselves of the frequent halts to

water and feed. Buckets would be unhooked from their places under the

wagons, and the drivers, leaning out and scooping the water up from the

ditches, would perhaps get so far in the watering performance when there

would be a hurried order to ‘Get mounted,’ the buckets would be emptied,

the drivers hurriedly remount and move on again—to halt again perhaps

within a hundred yards. No officer dare halt or hold his section of the

column to complete his watering and feeding because the orders were

imperative to press on and avoid halting the whole. A halt to feed was

actually made about 2 P.M. when it was plain that there was no hope of

getting the column in, as had been intended, by the early afternoon; but

the halt was so short that there could be no attempt to cook food or make

a hot drink for the men. They ate cold bully beef and biscuit while the

horses fed, and finished their meal in the saddle when the horses moved

again.

During the afternoon it grew steadily colder, and the rain drizzled on

without ceasing. The road ran parallel now with the firing line, and

as the darkness fell the horizon was lit continually with rising and

falling belts of light from the trench flares, while the guns flashed

quick leaping and vanishing gusts of vivid light, rolled and grumbled

and roared incessantly. The rattle and splutter of rifle fire swelled to

what one might have thought an alarming nearness when the road twisted

in towards the firing line, or a falling away of the ground or change in

the wind allowed the sound to carry better, dropped away again to no more

than a distant crackle as a belt of wood shut it off or the road ran wide

out from the battle line.

But of all these things the men on the road were heedless. They were

concerned only with the slowness of the journey, the wish for it to

end, the approach of dark long before it could be completed. The column

carried no lights, and as the night shut down the road under the horses’

feet became almost invisible to the eyes of the drivers sitting on their

horses or box seats. Each lead driver had to be content to follow close

on the tracks of the wagon in front of him, to hold his tired horses up

when they stumbled, to halt them quickly when the wagon ahead halted, to

move them on again instantly on the other vehicle starting. Every man

kept his eyes carefully away from the dancing lights on the horizon,

because watching them for a few seconds meant a temporary total blindness

and the vanishing of the road beneath them when they came to look down,

and this driving in the dark was quite bad enough without that.

The inevitable happened at last. A team driven too close to the road-side

brought its wagon wheels within a foot of the ditch, just at a part,

unfortunately, where the road-edge sloped sharply to the steep side of

the ditch. The ‘long-rein driver’ perched on the box called a sharp word

of warning and swung his wheelers to the left, felt the wagon beneath

him skid sideways, lurch suddenly, sink sharply ‘by the stern’ and halt

abruptly. The driver of the next team saw what had happened, shouted to

the other drivers behind him, wrenched his horses’ heads clear of the

bogged wagon and tried to pull up. But the horses, jerked from their

sleepy plodding, swerved, plunged, slithered wildly on the wet road;

the wagon wheels, gripped fast by the sharp thrust of the brake, failed

to bite on the slippery surface, skidded forward, butted the wheelers

heavily, slewed, slithered again and brought up with a splintering jar

and a rear wheel fast locked in the wheel of the bogged wagon. The near

wheeler of the second team, floundering and splashing and scrambling

wildly for foothold, caught the bump of the wagon, fell, and slid

wholesale into the ditch. The road was completely and effectually blocked.

Now the ditches in this part of Flanders are anything from about three

to six feet deep, and their sides are cut down as straight and smooth

as a wall; in winter they are full to the brim with ice-cold water, and

their bottom is an unplumbed depth of mud of the consistency of molasses

and the tenacity of fish glue. From all of which you will understand

and appreciate the difficulty of rescuing the trapped wagon and horse,

although you will never, unless you have experienced it, understand

the wetness, the cold, the exasperating stupidity of the horse, the

monumental bulk and weight and the passive resistance of a wet and

mud-plastered wagon, the bitter unpleasantness of the whole job.

Actually, although this may appear surprising, the salving of the horse

was a greater difficulty than the restoration of the wagon to the road.

The wagon had to be unloaded, it is true, but after that a plank pushed

sloping down under the wheel, a swarm of men clustering and clutching on

the wheels and tailing on a couple of drag-ropes, brought the concern out

with a rush. Then the team was hooked in again and the wagon rolled off,

and with a chorus of cries, of scuffling hoofs, of grinding wheels, the

column halted behind the stalled wagons came to life and rumbled on their

way. The horse made a longer and more temper-raising job. Driver Jim

Ruff, of the A.S.C., had always had an inordinate pride in his wheelers,

a liking for them that in connection with a human would have been called

love, a belief in their intelligence that was beyond doubt. But that

night his pride had a muddy fall, his love a cooling off into annoyance,

his belief a staggering blow. ‘Golly,’ the ditched near-wheeler,

displayed a stupidity that, as Driver Ruff assured her, would have

disgraced ‘a mongrel mule,’ an indifference to helping herself, and

a calm resignation and acceptance of her fate that respectively, and

again in the words of Driver Ruff, ‘was more like a oyster than a ’orse’

and ‘might do for a bloomin’ padre, but wasn’t no use in the A.S.C.’

Driver Ruff, at the first crash of catastrophe, had flung down off his

perch and was round at his wheelers’ heads in a flash, unhooking ‘Wog,’

lying quietly on his side in the road and waiting for assistance and

instructions, and adjuring the struggling ‘Golly’ to keep quiet an’ not

make a fool of herself. ‘Golly’ took the advice so completely that,

having quietened, she refused—although the mud clamped about her legs

may have had something to do with it—to move a limb thereafter. At first

Ruff and the other drivers called to assist tried to persuade her to

get her fore-feet on the bank, then by passing a drag-rope round her

fore-legs tried to pull them from under her and up on to firm ground. The

only result was to upset her balance and set her slowly sinking sideways

until her body was completely covered and only her neck and head were

above water. It began to look as if the horse must drown in a four- or

five-foot ditch.

Meantime the wagon was man-handled along and into the side of the road

and the stream of vehicles resumed their interrupted march, rumbling past

a busy rescue party grouped at the ditch-side, working in the light of a

couple of lanterns with picks and spades and drag-ropes, to extricate the

sunken ‘Golly.’ At last a shelving cut was made in the bank of the ditch,

and Driver Ruff, already three parts soaked with splashings and fumblings

to fix a rope correctly about his horse, completed the job and the

soaking by plunging boldly into the ditch and passing a couple of ropes

under the mare’s body. A string of men tailed on to the ropes, and at the

word from an A.S.C. officer who had taken charge of the proceedings threw

their weight into a regular tug-of-war heave, and hauled the animal out

bodily on to the shelving bank, up it, and on to the road.

It was after ten o’clock before the wheelers were hooked in and the

wagon swung into the traffic procession, with Driver Ruff soaked and

shivering on the box. In ten minutes he had to pull up again for another

block somewhere in the darkness ahead. He climbed down and stamped to

and fro for full thirty minutes. Then he went and rummaged out a couple

of box-lids he had been saving in his wagon for firewood, and, always

keeping a wary ear turned to the road for the sound of callings and

crunching wheels that would tell him the transport was on the move again,

jumped the ditch, hunted in the darkness of a patch of wood, and managed

to collect a small armful of twigs and branches. He split his dry wood,

built it up and lit it, his fingers so numbed and shaking that he could

scarcely fumble out a match. Under the shelter of his cap—it was still

drizzling fine rain—he managed to get a brisk flame going, and when he

had it burning strong and bright piled his twigs and branches on it. The

wood hissed and sputtered, but caught at last, and tongues of flame began

to crackle up, throwing a cheerful radiance on the wet faces and forms of

the men who quickly crowded round and a most grateful glow of life-giving

warmth on Driver Ruff, crouched with chattering teeth and blue lips close

over the blaze. But before the fire had even completely caught there

came a distant shout, repeated along and down the line, ‘Get mounted—get

mounted,’ and the sound, far off at first but rapidly coming nearer and

nearer, of tramping hoof-beats, scrunching wheels, and the rumble of

moving wagons. The men about the fire scattered and ran to their horses,

and Ruff had no choice but to leave his precious fire and run with them.

The procession started, wagon after wagon—and within two hundred yards

halted again. The disgusted Ruff had the mortification of seeing his

fire blazing up strongly and cheerfully and immediately surrounded by a

fresh crowd of the nearest men. It was too far to go back, since the move

might come again any minute, and anyhow Ruff guessed the difficulty he

would have in forcing a way to the front of the dense ring about his own

fire. He tried to wrap his wet coat closer about him, and sat huddled and

shivering on his seat for another half-hour before the way was clear and

the wagons crawled on again.

It was nearly midnight when he dragged wearily into camp. He took his

horses’ bits out, slacked their girths, gave them generous feeds, and

when their nosebags were empty hung a net full of hay to the point of

the wagon-pole, and then went to the cook-house, where he was given a

mess-tin of soup and meat and a mug of hot tea. These things finished to

the last bite and drop, he, by special and gracious favour of the cook,

took off his soaking boots and hung his wet jacket before the embers of

the fire, sat himself beside it, and dropped instantly into deep sleep.

This, be it noted, was the only sleep he had been able to have for some

thirty-six hours. The night before the column marched he had been out

with his wagon drawing rations from ‘Refilling Point,’ had been from

6 P.M. on the road, waiting his turn for loading, moving up a wagon’s

length at a time to the loading-place, where, under the light of a couple

of lanterns, men were hacking up cheeses, dismembering sides of bacon,

trundling out boxes of bully and biscuits and tins of tea and sugar.

Driver Ruff had pulled out as soon as his wagon was loaded, waited for

the others to complete their loading, moved on to rejoin his unit with

them. Delays and checks on a road already, even at that early hour, astir

with traffic, had prevented their reaching the camping-ground until

about a couple of hours before the hour fixed to turn out on the march,

and that brief time had been fully occupied by Ruff, first in watering

and feeding and rubbing down his horses, and then in getting his own

breakfast, packing his kit for the road, and harnessing up again.

Now, as may be imagined, he slept heavily, sitting huddled over the

half-dead fire, on this his second night out of bed, after a day of

wearying and strenuous work—and in case that be not properly understood

it may be remarked that sitting on the hard wooden seat of a jolting

wagon, bumping and jarring over a rough road, holding a pair of ‘heavy

draught’ horses and steering them with a constantly needed care, hauling

them up every few minutes, all these things are actually tiring hard

physical work.

But he only slept for half an hour. At the end of that time he was shaken

roughly awake and told to get a move on, and to fall in outside the lines

before hooking in his horses. He rose stiffly, sore in every joint and

aching in every limb as if he had been beaten and bruised with a club.

The fire was dead and he was chilled to the marrow with the cold that had

struck in from his wet clothes, with the more miserable cold that comes

out of late and insufficient sleep. He shook like a man in the ague, and

his teeth chattered as he thrust his arms into the clammy dampness and

coldness of his jacket’s clinging sleeves. Putting on his boots was sheer

torture. They were icy cold, and the wet leather was stiff and hard as a

board. Altogether he was just about as miserable, cold, and uncomfortable

as a man can be, as he hobbled stiffly from the cook-house into the

bitter rawness of the winter morning. As he went out one of the cooks

came in and commenced to make up the fire, and it suddenly struck Driver

Ruff what a magnificent and enviable job a cook had, always messing about

with a warm fire and hot water and other of the pleasantest things in

life. The cook, roused from a warm straw bed in the cold of one o’clock

to light a fire with damp wood, probably held a different opinion of

the pleasures of his office. Ruff had three minutes with his horses

before the ‘Fall in’ was called. They whickered and nuzzled at him, each

jealously pushing the other’s head aside as he spoke to them and rubbed

their noses and pulled their ears. ‘After all, Golly,’ he said, ‘a cook

don’t have horses; eh, Wog?’ and at that thought the cook’s job lost its

savour and a gleam of content warmed the driver’s soul.

A figure suddenly appeared in the shape of lamp-illumined breeches and

boots and a blot of shadow above them, and his sergeant spoke briskly:

‘Hullo, Ruff. Merry Christmas.’

‘Lumme!’ said Driver Ruff. ‘If I hadn’t clean forgot—same to you,

sergeant.’

‘An’ may we see the next at ’ome,’ said the sergeant. ‘Now what about

this pair o’ yours? Had a stiffish day yesterday, didn’t they?’

Ruff told him briefly but pungently the sort of day they had had and the

work they had done. He was so eloquent on their behalf—quite omitting

any mention of his own sorrows—that the sergeant promised to manage it

somehow that they’d get a light wagon-load that day and the other wagons

share the balance.

Driver Ruff began to feel the world not so bad a place after all, and

even the briefly outlined programme of the day’s work to begin at once

and keep on till evening did not cast him down. ‘They’ll do it easy with

a light load,’ he said cheerfully.

The ‘Fall in’ was called, and wondering rather at this unusual item

of the morning’s work, the men fell in at the end of the horse lines,

standing in an ankle-deep porridge of mud.

Their officer addressed them shortly, an N.C.O. beside him with a

lantern, and another with a handful of envelopes and a bundle of

cardboard boxes. The wagons, said the officer, would go to Refilling

Point, load, march together from there and rejoin the Division at their

new camp, separate there, and each take their rations to their own units.

And because he might not see them together again that day he had paraded

them then to wish them a happy Christmas and good luck, and to give them

a little present that had been sent out to every man in the Expeditionary

Force.

One by one the men received a photograph of the King and Queen with a

message written on the back, and a brass tobacco-box containing tobacco

and cigarettes and the Christmas wishes of Princess Mary.