She is the pleasant, middle-aged Irish widow of an Irish doctor,
and her good-humour is as pronounced as her brogue. Finding herself
alone on the terrace with the Signorina after the departure of the
convalescents, she mystified her with the following remark:
“How frightened the poor old lady was!”
The poor old lady? The Signorina was all at sea. There was no one
answering to such a description among us to-day.
“The poor old lady,” repeated the other firmly. “Yes, Lady ----.
I was talking to her, and oh! anybody could see how terrified she
was. Nervous, you know; trembling at the mention of the war, upset,
shrinking away. And no wonder, I’m sure,” she concluded genially.
“Hasn’t she got a son out there?”
She betook herself down the steps towards her cottage. Our daughter
watched the purple-spotted blouse meandering downwards from terrace to
terrace till it disappeared. She was too astounded even to be able to
remonstrate.
And, indeed, of what use would it have been? That Lady ----,
distinguished, humorous, with her figure erect and slender as a girl’s,
and her refined, delightful face stamped with genius on the brow, and
with the most delicate humour about the mouth; that this incomparable
woman, actually in the zenith of her power, personal as well as
artistic, a being whom it seems that age can never touch, to whom the
years have so far only brought a maturing of all kinds of excellence,
should have appeared to anyone as the _poor old lady_! And that she
should be further classed among the frightened! She who more than any
fighter of them all sees the romance of war, the high lesson of war;
who only the day before, speaking of a discontented soldier friend, had
said to us in tones of wonder:
“He’s not enjoying war! It seems so strange.”
There was nothing for it but to laugh. But what an insight into the
manner in which “other people see us.”
In the Signora’s early teens her family indulged in a Dublin season,
during which a very worthy prelate, the Cardinal Archbishop of her
Church, died. He was full of years and good works, but at no moment of
his existence remarkable for good looks.
A sprightly housemaid of the establishment demanded permission to go
and visit the church where he was laid out in state. On her return the
Padrona’s mother inquired how the sight had impressed her, expecting a
duly pious response.
Quoth the damsel, with her brisk Dublin accent:
“Well, really, ’m, I thought the Cawdinal looked remawkably well!”
As a rule, however, the Irish lower classes are more quick to seize
shades of feeling, refinements of emotion, than the poor of other
races; especially--to hark back to a former page--that peasantry of the
older type in which a vivid spirituality was kept alive by their faith.
A chaplain has written to us from the Isle of Wight speaking of the
immense consolation he had had in the presence of some Irish soldiers
among the troops stationed there. “Their faith made me ashamed.”
But indeed the feeling of religion among all our men, of whatever
creed, and from whatever part of the British Isles they have come, is
not one of the least remarkable manifestations of the war.
“I knew I would not be killed,” said a wounded soldier beside whose bed
we sat the other day. “But I knew I’d come back a better man, and I
think I have.”
Then he added that the only thing that troubled them, lying in
hospital, was the thought of the comrades in the thick of it, and not
being able to help them.
“Of course,” he went on thoughtfully, “we can pray. We all do that, of
course; we do pray, and we know that helps.”
This man was neither Irish nor Catholic.
Infinitely touching are the remarks they make, these dear fellows;
beautiful sometimes in their unconscious heroism.
“Well, at least,” said the Signorina to a man permanently crippled by
shrapnel, saddened by the decision that he could never go back to the
front. “At least you know you’ve done your little bit.”
“Ah, but you see, miss,” he answered in all simplicity, “among us
the saying goes, no one has really done his little bit till he’s
underground.”
“Will you mind going back?” said a rather foolish friend of ours to an
exhausted, badly wounded sufferer in a Dublin hospital. He had seen
Mons and its horrors, all the brutality of war with little of its
concomitant glory. The eyes in his drawn face looked up at her steadily.
“If it’s my dooty, lady, I’m ready to go.”
“I’d give my other leg to go back,” said a maimed lad to Lady ----. He
was in a hospital at Lyndhurst, a fair, splendid boy, not yet eighteen.
“Don’t make me too soft, Sister,” pleaded an Irish Fusilier with five
bullet wounds in his back, to his kindly nurse in the little convent
hospital near here. “I’ve got to finish my job out there.”
At a recent lecture delivered on “Five Months with the British
Expeditionary Force”--his own experience--Professor Morgan made use of
these remarkable words: “Our men count no cost too high in the service
of the nation. They greet death like a friend, and go into battle as to
a festival.”
What wonder, then, that there should be such an unshakable spirit of
confidence throughout the whole of our army, for with conscience at
peace, and eyes fixed on their high ideal, they go forth to fight,
knowing that, as a great preacher has said, those who do battle in a
just cause already carry the flame of victory on their foreheads.
IX
IT’S A FAR CRY TO PERSIA
“Come, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready!
Have you your pistols?--Have you your sharp-edged axes?
* * * * *
For we cannot tarry here--we must march, my darlings;
we must bear the brunt of danger!
* * * * *
O resistless, restless race! O beloved race in all! O, my breast
Aches with tender love for all!
O, I mourn and yet exult. I am rapt with love for all!”
WALT WHITMAN.
The master of the Villino got the telegram when he was shaving, that
morning of October 26.
“Slightly wounded. Going London.--H.”
He came straight in to the Signora, who instantly read all kinds of
sinister meanings into the reticent lines.
Slightly wounded! H. would be sure to say that whatever had happened.
Even if he had lost an arm or a leg he might very well try and break it
to us in some such phrase. There were certainly grounds for consolation
in the fact that he should be “going London,” but were not the papers
full of accounts of the felicitous manner in which the transport of
very serious cases was being daily accomplished?
The only brother and very precious! Always in the Signora’s
mind--stalwart, middle-aged man as he is--doubled by and impossible
to dissociate from a little fair-haired boy, the youngest of the
family, endeared by a thousand quaint, childish ways. That he should be
wounded, suffering Heaven knew what unknown horror of discomfort and
pain, was absurdly, but unconquerably to her heart, the hurting of the
child. Alas! if an elder sister feels this, what must the agony of the
mothers be all through the world to-day!
We telephoned to the clearing station at Southampton, and found that
the ambulance train had already started. Then the master of the
Villino, and the sister whose home is with us, determined to leave for
London themselves and endeavour to trace our soldier.
It was late in the afternoon when a comforting telegram came through to
those left behind; it told us that H. had been run to earth; that the
wound was indeed favourable; that he was well in health, and that we
might expect him here to be nursed in a couple of days.
Very glad the Villino was to have him, very proud of its own soldier,
deeply thankful to be granted the care of him!
The Signorina immediately instituted herself Red Cross nurse, the local
lectures having borne fruit after all. The wound was for us and for him
a very lucky one, but the doctor called it dreadful, and, indeed, one
could have put one’s hand into it; and Juvenal, summoned to assist at
the first dressing, fainted at the sight. But it had not touched any
vital point, and though the muscle under the shoulder-blade was torn in
two, it has left no weakness in the arm.
Like all soldiers we have met, he will not hear of the suggestion that
it was inflicted by a dum-dum bullet. Nevertheless, it is a singular
fact that where the bullet went in the hole is the ordinary size of
the missile, and where it came out it is the size of a man’s fist.
Something abnormal about that German projectile there must have been.
But we were ready to go down on our knees and thank God fasting for
a good man’s life; and it was clear that it would take a long time to
heal!
Anyone who knows our soldiers knows the perfectly simple attitude
of their minds as far as their own share in the great struggle is
concerned. Further, they have an everyday, common-sense, unexaggerated
manner of speaking of their terrible experiences which helps us
stay-at-homes very much--we who are apt to regard the front as a
nightmare, hell and shambles mixed.
“We were a bit cut up that day, but we got our own back with the
bayonet.”
“Well, they took our range rather too neatly, but man for man Tommy’s a
match for the Hun any day, even if we were short of shells.”
“Poor lads! they had to trot off before they’d had their breakfast--a
six-mile walk and stiff work to follow--after three days and three
nights of it below Hollebeke. We’d been sent back for a rest when the
message came; but the men didn’t mind anything, only the loss of the
breakfast. ‘Such a good breakfast as it was, sir,’ as one of them said
to me. Six o’clock in the morning and a six-mile march! A few of the
fellows clapped their bacon into their pockets. The line was broken
and the Germans coming in. Someone had to drive them out, and the
Worcesters came handy.”
“Oh yes, we did it all right; running like smoke they were,
squealing--they can’t stand the bayonet!”
That was the “little bit” where our soldier got his wound.
“It’s nothing at all, me child.”
His sergeant dressed it first at the back of the firing-line, then he
walked into Ypres. He went to the hospital, found it crowded--‘Lots
of fellows worse than I was’--so he strolled away and had his hair
cut!--“A real good shampoo and a shave, and a bath, and then a jolly
good dinner!” And then he proceeded to look up some nice fellows of the
Irish Horse. And in the end he went back to the hospital, and they “did
him up!”
When one thinks that in peace time, if anyone had accidentally received
such a wound, what a fuss there would have been! What a sending for
doctors and nurses! what long faces! what lamentations, precautions,
and misgivings! It makes one understand better the state of things over
there. How splendidly indifferent our manhood has become to suffering!
How gloriously cheap it holds life itself!
H. is happily not among those unfortunate brave men who suffer nervous
distress from the sights, the scenes, and the strain of warfare, but he
has a keen, almost a poetic, sensibility to the romance and tragedy of
his experiences.
As he sat, those November days, in one of the deep arm-chairs before
the great bricked hearth in the Villino library, a short phrase here
and there would give us a picture of some episode which stamped itself
upon the memory of the listener.
“Lord, it was jolty, driving along in the ambulance to the station! The
poor boy next to me--badly wounded, poor chap! lost a lot of blood--he
got faint and lay across my breast; went to sleep there in the end.”
“Shells? ’Pon me word, it was beautiful to see them at night! Oh,
one’s all right, you know, if one keeps in one’s trenches. One of my
subalterns--ah, poor lad! I don’t know what took him--he got right
out of the trench and stood on the edge, stretching himself. A shell
came along and bowled him over. We dug him out. He was an awfully
good-looking boy. There wasn’t a scratch on him, but he was stone dead;
his back broken. And there he lay as beautiful as an angel. The Colonel
and I, we buried him. He was twenty-three; just married. The Colonel
and I used to bury our men at night.”
Suddenly the speaker’s shoulders shook with laughter.
“Those shells! One of my fellows had one burst within a yard of him.
Lord, I thought he was in pieces! He was covered in earth and rubbish!
‘Has that done for you?’ I called out to him. ‘I think it has, sir,’ he
said, and you should have seen him clutching himself all over! And then
there was a grin. ‘No, sir, it’s only a bruise!’ Oh, you get not to
mind them, except one kind; that does make a nasty noise--a real nasty
noise; it was just that noise one minded. Ugh, when you heard it coming
along! Spiteful, it was!”
In the private London hospital where he spent three days the bed next
to him was occupied by a Major of Artillery, wounded in the head.
“There was not much wrong with him, poor old chap! but he had got a
bit of nerve-strain. Lord, he never let me get a wink, calling out all
night in his sleep: ‘D---- that mist! I can’t see the swine. A bit more
to the left. Now, now, boys, now we’ve got them! Oh, damn that mist!
Ha! we got them that time--got the swine!’”
The doctors who saw our soldier were rather surprised to find him so
calm in his mind. They could scarcely believe he should sleep so sound
at nights--that the human machine should be so little out of gear. Yet
there were days when he called himself “slack,” looked ill enough, and
one could see that even a short walk was a severe trial of strength.
We shall not lightly forget a funny little incident which happened upon
an afternoon when he seemed peculiarly exhausted. He was sitting in his
arm-chair close to the fire, looking grey and drawn, declaring that
the north-east wind never agreed with him. A kindly clerical neighbour
rushed in upon us. He had just heard that fifty thousand Germans had
landed at Sheringham. All the troops were under orders. Despatch riders
had galloped from Aldershot to stop the billeting of a regiment just
arrived here. The men had started up in the middle of their dinners and
begun to pack again. They were to go back to Aldershot and concentrate
for the great move. Further--indisputable authority!--the Chief
Constable of the county had private information of the invasion.
You should have seen our soldier! He was up out of his chair with a
spring, his blue eyes blazing. All the languor, the unacknowledged
stiffness and ache of his wound, were gone. If ever there was a
creature possessed with the pure joy of battle it was he. How much the
womenkind miss who have never seen their men leading a charge! What a
vital part of a man’s character lies dormant in times of peace!
There is, we believe, a large number of people who regard this fighting
spirit as a purely animal quality; recently, indeed, a certain
professor delivered a lecture on the subject of wild dogs and wolves
who fight in packs, with special reference to the present state of
humanity. These thinkers, sitting at ease in their armchairs, placid
materialists, who have never known their own souls, much less do they
know those of their countrymen. What we saw in our soldier’s eyes was,
we swear, the leap of the spirit--the fine steel of the soul springing
out of the scabbard of the body, the fire from the clay. Carlyle has
somewhere a lovely phrase anent that spark of heroism that will burn in
the heart of the lowest British soldier, the poorest, dullest peasant
lad, and make of him hero and martyr, enable him to face long agony and
death, endure as well as charge.
So H. flung off his languor and dashed out of his armchair and sprang
to the telephone to order himself a car, and presently departed,
already invisibly armed, in search of--this time--an invisible foe. For
the foe was invisible!
No one knew whence the scare had come; whether there were any real
justification for the preparations which were certainly ordered. The
regiment which had had to pack up again just as it had got into its
billets, and go back to Aldershot in the very middle of its dinner, was
kept under arms all night; but there was never the point of a single
_Pickelhaube_ visible on the horizon at Sheringham or elsewhere. And
on examination it turned out that the “Chief Constable” of the county,
that unimpeachable and alarming authority, had been none other than
the local policeman, which was a comedown indeed! But the thrill was
not altogether unpleasant, and we like to remember the sick soldier
springing up, that St. Michael fire in his blue eyes.
* * * * *
In a short account written for his school magazine, H. summarizes the
experiences of his own regiment at Ypres thus:
“All the officers in my company are wounded or invalided. The men are
very cheerful under all the hardships and losses, and their behaviour
under fire is splendid. The Brigade (5th) has been taken three times
at least to ‘mend the line’ where the Germans had broken through.
From October 24 to November 5 my regiment lost about 450 officers and
men--mostly, thank God, wounded. The Germans can’t shoot for nuts, but
their artillery fire is accurate and _incessant_, and the machine-guns
very deadly.”
* * * * *
There is nothing more touching than the devotion of the officers to
their men. They feel towards them truly as if they were their children.
“No officer,” said the widow of a great general to us the other day,
“ever thinks of himself in action, ever casts a thought to the bullets
flying about him. Indeed, the officers don’t seem to believe they can
get hit; they’re so occupied in looking after their men. All the time
they’re looking at their men.”
Even as we write these lines we see the death, in the Dardanelles, of
a young officer who had been under H. when he was training reserves
during his recent period of convalescent home service. This youth was,
in our brother’s eyes, the perfection of young manhood. He prophesied
for him great things. He told us many stories of his quaint humour and
incisive wit. One anecdote remains. Among their recruits were between
twenty and thirty extremely bad characters--slack, undisciplined
fellows, worthless material belonging almost to the criminal classes.
After working in vain with all his energy to endeavour to put some kind
of soldierly discipline into them, young W. paraded them in the barrack
yard, and addressed them in the following language:
“His Majesty’s Government cannot afford nowadays to spend money
uselessly. You are a dead waste to the nation. You are not worth the
food you get nor the clothes you wear. It has been decided, therefore,
to send you to the front; and, as every man is bound to do his utmost
to help his country in the present crisis, it is earnestly to be hoped
that you will, each one of you, endeavour to get himself shot as soon
as possible.”
We understand that the result of this stringent discourse on that “bad
hat” squad was miraculous, although the sergeant-major was so overcome
with mirth that he had to retire to give vent to it.
This boy had been serving in the East in a wild and difficult district,
and had distinguished himself so remarkably that he was summoned to the
Foreign Office to advise upon an expedition which it was proposed to
send to those regions. Never was there any life so full of promise. Gay
and gallant youth, it seems a cruel decree that the bullet of some vile
Turk should have had the power to rob England of a son so likely to do
her signal honour and service in the future. “It is the best that are
taken”--a phrase sadly familiar just now that finds only too true an
echo in everyone’s experience.
There was another, whom we had known from the time when he was an
apple-cheeked little boy in petticoats--a sunny, level-headed child,
who gave the minimum of trouble and the maximum of satisfaction to
his parents from the moment of his appearance on this earth. All his
short life always busy, always happy. His mother said that she had
never seen a frown of discontent on his face. Head boy at Harrow, where
the authorities begged to be allowed to keep him on another year for
the sake of the good example he gave; writer of the prize essay three
years running; winner of all the cups for athletics; champion boxer
and fencer--with these brilliant qualities he had--rare combination
indeed!--a steady, well-balanced mind. With high ideals he had a sober
judgment. He was but twenty. With all these achievements--splendid
lad!--he fell leading his platoon of Highlanders at Aubers upon that
most ill-fated, most tragic 9th of May.
“I always wanted my son to be just like Keith”--more than one friend
gave this tribute to the stricken father.
Characteristic of the unchanged romantic mysticism that lies deep in
the hearts of the Scots--Scots of the glens and hills--are the words in
which the local paper refers to the loss which had befallen the country
in the death of the gallant young officer: “He died like a Stewart: he
dreed his weird, he drank the cup of his race!”
It is the fine flower of our young manhood that is being mown down.
What is to become of England, robbed of her best? It seems such waste
and loss; we who cannot fight feel at times as if the pressure of
such calamity “doth make our very tears like unto bloode.” But we
must believe that it is not waste, but seed; that the nations who sow
in tears will reap in joy; that each of these young lives, so gladly
given, shares in the redemption of the country; that, in all reverence,
in all faith, that they are mystically united to Calvary; and that
their glory will be presently shown forth even as in the glory of
resurrection!
A correspondent writing from the front describes the expression in the
eyes of the friendly officer, who has been his guide, as he pointed out
the myriad crosses of the burial-ground. “He looked envious,” he says,
and adds that he noticed that all out there “speak with envy of the
dead.”
Is not the nation’s honour sharpened to its finest point when the ideal
of its manhood is to die for the country? _Dulce et decorum...._
We were very glad, nevertheless, when, in spite of his repeated
applications to return to his own men, H. was ordered to take a command
in the Persian Gulf. The link that binds a man to comrades with whom
he has shared every possible danger and hardship, to those who have
faced death with him, whom he has himself led on to peril and agony,
the while they have been to him as his children--such a link is indeed
one that is hard to break! Their peril has been his; their glory is his
pride.
“If I can single out one regiment for special praise,” said the
Commander-in-Chief, “it is the Worcesters.”
And again:
“I consider the Worcesters saved Europe on that day.”
It is no wonder that H. should be proud of them; that the thousand
fibres should draw him back to them.
But, when the summons came, he was told “to prepare for a hot climate.”
And then, of all strange things, or so it seemed to us, we found
that his destination was Persia. The Garden of Eden! Further, it was
rumoured, the objective was likely to be Bagdad. It sounded like a
fairy tale. He promised us Attar of Roses; and indeed, we think,
carpets. And a flippant niece wrote to him that she was sure that by a
little perseverance he could find a magic one, and come sailing across
the sky some night after duty, like the merchant in the Arabian nights.
She added: “And do bring me a hanging garden, if you can.” But when the
parting came it was a very cruel reality. It’s a far cry to Persia!
He started on the day of the sinking of the _Lusitania_; a date branded
on the history of the world till the end of all time. The two who had
gone to fetch him and brought him home--so contented in their tender
anxiety that he was safely wounded--saw him on board the great liner.
Many Indians returning to Bombay, a few officers ordered to his own
destination, a batch of nurses for Malta, and one or two ladies
hurrying to their sons wounded in the Dardanelles--these were all his
fellow-passengers.
It somewhat restored our confidence, shaken by the facile success of
the monstrous crime, to know that they were to be convoyed a certain
way, and that they had a gun on board. Nevertheless, they were not to
escape menace.
“The evening we started,” he wrote, “I asked the steward if they had
seen any submarines about. ‘No, sir,’ he admitted reluctantly. Then
brightened up, anxious to oblige, ‘But we have seen a lot of luggage
floating about--trunks and clothes, sir.’”
(It was obvious no passenger need give up hope; and, indeed, the letter
posted at Gibraltar continues):--