as a matter of fact, we _had_ a small-sized adventure with a submarine.
At dinner on Monday we felt that they had suddenly altered the ship’s
course. It appears that a submarine was spotted about five hundred
yards away. The captain slewed the vessel round to bring our one gun to
bear on her. However, the smoke obscured our view, and the submarine
must have seen our gun, as she disappeared.”
Then comes an anecdote, dreadfully characteristic of our happy-go-lucky
English ways, a comedy that might have been--for this house, at least,
God knows!--the direst tragedy.
“Next day,” he continues, “we had gun practice, but it turned out that
none of the gun’s crew knew how to work her; and after fumbling for
about two hours, a passenger came along and showed them how to manage
her, and fired her off. We all cheered.”
The next stage on that lengthening journey that is to take him so
unrealizably far away from us is Malta. The place laid its spell upon
him, though at first he writes:
“From the ship both islands looked most unprepossessing: dry, arid,
khaki-coloured lumps, full of khaki-coloured buildings. Once on shore
one begins to love the place. The buildings, fortifications, and
general spirit are most inspiring and grandiose. One expects to see
some proud old Templar riding down the gay streets, looking neither to
the right nor left. I had no time to do any of the right Cathedrals,
where there are wonderful paintings by Michael Angelo, etc., nor
the Grand Master’s Palace Armoury, with the knight’s armour, nor the
Inquisitor’s Palace. I went off to look for wounded Worcesters from the
Dardanelles. I had no time to see anything else as the hospital was a
long way off.
“Every hole and corner is turned into a beautiful garden, with lovely
flowers and ‘penetrating scents,’ fountains, and shady palms and trees.
“How you would revel in the churches! They are more numerous than in
Rome, and quite beautiful. The people, too, are intensely religious.
“There are many French shops here, and the French women look tawdry
beside the Maltese, with their wonderful black cloaks and reserved
aristocratic air.
“I am sending you a weird map full of quaint spelling, given to me
by a wounded Worcestershire (4th Batt.) sergeant, at the hospital at
Malta, and a rough idea of the difficulties of the landing. Early on
one Monday morning, about 1 a.m., the ships got into position round the
promontory, with the troop lighters behind. About 4 a.m. the latter
were towed off during a bombardment such as never has been heard or
seen before in the history of the world.
“The Turks did not reply till the boats got quite close to shore and
the ships’ guns could not fire on the located maxims (which were sunk
in deep, narrow slips close to the shore). As far as I gathered, the
Lancashire Fusiliers were the first actually to get on shore on the
extreme left at Tekki Barna, where they charged with the bayonet and
the Turks retired. They were able to enfilade a good portion of the
ground, and enabled the Essex and 4th Worcesters, both of whom had
suffered very heavily from Maxim fire, to land and drive the Turks
back. Three boatloads of Dublin Fusiliers were wiped out by gun and
Maxim fire near Ish Messarer point. The Lancashire Fusiliers suffered
rather badly from the fire of some of our ships’ guns, which, of
course, could not be helped.
“The Worcesters were sent up to help the Essex, and advanced against
some barbed wire, which a young subaltern called Wyse volunteered to
cut. He rolled over sideways till he got under the wire and cut it from
strand to strand upwards. As he got to the last strand a sniper shot
off two fingers in successive shots.
“The snipers had their faces painted green to harmonize with the
surroundings, and were calmly surrendering as we advanced, having
picked off numbers of men. They were all shot, however, _pour
encourager les autres_.
“My sergeant was shot in the hip that evening, but he told me that by
Wednesday the troops had secured Envedos, a most important position,
and the safe landing of stores and guns was thus secured.
“He said the Turks either ran from the bayonet or surrendered. The
prisoners said they did not want to fight, but were forced to do so by
the Germans.
“The ships are in their more or less correct position in the map, the
sergeant says, as he took trouble to find out from a naval chart.”
From Malta to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Aden, and from thence to
Bombay. His letters mark each point of his Odyssey. And at Alexandria
he is fascinated with the movement and colour; he goes on shore and
visits the shops; he parts from the delightful American lady who has
been the life and soul of the ship; she whose wounded son awaits her
in Cairo. At Aden, the heat striking at them from the shore prevents
him from landing; an unattractive torrid spot. Here they take in a
young Indian Government official, who gives an interesting detail upon
his destination:
“He knew Wilcox very well, the man who was going to make the barrage
on the Euphrates and Tigris, and convert Mesopotamia into the richest
country in the world. Wilcox said he found all the details given in the
Bible about the various depths and breadths of the rivers absolutely
accurate--curious after all these centuries!”
At Bombay he has a pleasant time; a brother officer having wired to
relations who take him about and show him what is most worth seeing
in his short stay. He puts up at the Bombay Yacht Club, “wonderful
place, like fairyland, with palms and fountains and music, with cool,
quiet rooms looking out over wide and lovely views.” He goes on long
drives “under trees that grow for miles and miles along the sea coast,
where the graceful-moving natives in their bright colours look awfully
picturesque.”
He sees the famous towers of silence where, with effective, but no
doubt quite unconscious, alliteration, he describes “the ghoulish
vultures sitting grimly in the glorious gold mohur trees.”
His last letter says: “I start on Sunday for Bosra.”
He believes that they will remain at Bosra, and makes little of the
fact that the heat is terrible there just now.
“We will live in cool underground rooms,” he says, “and be all right!”
And now we know that we shall not have news of him again for a long
time. A thousand anxieties assail us, for which we can have no
reassurance. We picture him in that strange region, but realize that of
its strangeness we can form no real image.
He will see the dead cities and the great desert wastes and the
swamps--it is in those swamps under the merciless sun that our terror
lies; he will deal with a fierce and treacherous people whose thoughts
are not as our thoughts, whose motives and beliefs are irreconcilably
alien; and this dangerous race is fermenting under the influences, the
money, the lies, the ceaseless open and secret poison leaven of a race
more treacherous, more dangerous still.
Blinding sunshine, black shadows, arid stretches of dried earth and
mud and burnt vegetation; the colour of the Eastern crowd, the river
waters and the harbour stretch; the Arab and the Kurd, the Turk, the
Armenian, and the Jew, sights and scenes and creatures that have been
but as names to us, are about him. He has followed the drum from Cape
Town to Magaliesburg, from Bloemfontein to Bethlehem, from Gibraltar to
Cork, from Soupir to Ypres, from Ypres to Plymouth, and from Plymouth
to the Euphrates; he has left his cool, green Ireland, his hunting and
his fishing, his own wide acres and the rural life among his beasts for
this picturesque, unknown, uncertain destiny!
Often in the long hot hours will not his mind go back to those
stretches of shady, luxuriant park land where his cattle feed; to the
great lime avenue with the voice of the bees; the circle of the purple
hills, the woods, those incomparable woods of our old home with their
cool depths of bracken, silver green; the dells, the climbing roads,
the view over the “deer-park” to the sunset, which impressed even our
childish imaginations; the voice of the wild pigeons through the trees;
and the immense white house--empty--which before this war broke out, he
was about to furnish; the corridors, the vast rooms full of memories;
latterly, to us, of hopes. His heart will be there, we know.
And his home is guarded by his faithful Spanish servant, who followed
him, out of love, from those far Gibraltar days of his young soldier’s
life; who, when a legacy made of him a comparatively rich man, refused
to profit of it, and sent the money back to a distant relative in
Spain, saying: “What do I want of it? You, my master, you, my father,
you, my mother, you, my country, you, all I want!” Pedro, by a singular
freak of fate, ruling this Irish land with an equal zeal and ability,
writes to us: “I pray my dere master may come home safe. I have great
hope in Our Lady, the Mother of God.”
What is left to us, too, but a similar trust? We can but commend him to
the Father of All that He may overshadow him with His shoulders; that
the sun should not burn him by day, nor the moon by night; that he may
be guarded from the arrow that flieth by day, from the assault of the
evil one in the noontide!
X
A THREE DAYS’ CHRONICLE
“Happy in England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own:
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through the tall woods with high romances blent;
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian....”
KEATS.
_June 29, 1915._--The feast of Peter and Paul comes round with a
new significance. In war time we learn the meaning of so much that
has seemed unimportant; of things hidden away at the back of our
consciousness--things neglected, unknown, or even despised--and we
learn, too, the worthlessness of so much that has seemed paramount and
necessary, desirable and precious. War is a stern master. He teaches
above all the relative values; how to weigh the greater against the
less; how to fling away with one superb gesture the whole sum of human
possessions for a single imperishable prize.
“What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the
loss of his own soul?”
He who spoke these words gently to a handful of poor Jews now seems to
cry them with a voice of thunder from end to end of the earth.
Thus, this, their festival day, brings the two great champions of the
Cross--and it is for Christ and the Cross that every son of England
is fighting to-day--before our minds with a singular vividness and
nearness: Peter, type of the natural man, untutored; sure of himself
and of his own good impulses, of the honest purpose of his guileless
heart; impetuous, loving, weak, with all purely human weakness, even
to betrayal; and--divinely strengthened--Peter the rock, Peter the
fisherman who conquered the world! Paul, the Patrician, the apostle
born out of due time, whose ardour is all of the intellect, keen as
a blade and burning as a flame; the little man of Tarsus upon whose
spirit the teaching of all Christianity reposes as firmly to-day as
does the Church upon the stone of Peter; Paul, whom the Captain, Christ
Himself, enlisted by the miraculous condescension of a personal appeal.
Has not every Christian, whatever his creed, vowed them reverence
throughout all the ages? To-day, may not the eyes of the believer look
up to them with a new confidence?
The Signora, lying through a wakeful night and thinking of these
things, went with a rush of memory back to Rome, to scenes and
experiences and thoughts dominated by the memories of the two chief
apostles.
There is nothing more characteristic of their lives than the different
manners of their death. Peter is Peter to the end; first yielding to
the natural impulse, then, by virtue of the grace of God, returning
upon himself and leaping to the highest altitude of superhuman
sacrifice. In the whole tradition of the Church there is no legend
more touching than that which tells us how Peter, flying out of Rome,
met the Christ carrying the Cross. It is the original Peter in all
his guilelessness who, unstartled by the vision, with the perfect
simplicity of his faith, asks: “_Domine quo vadis?_” And it is the
sublime founder of the Church of God who, unquestioning, accepts the
Master’s rebuke, and retraces his steps to face his Lord’s torment with
the added agony his own holy humility demands.
Every pilgrim to Rome has knelt or stood, prayed or pondered at the
tomb of Peter in the golden twilight of the great Basilica, by the
vastness of which, as Marion Crawford says, “mind and judgment are
dazed and staggered.” Who has not leant on the marble balustrade of
the confession and looked down upon the ninety-five gilded lamps
that burn there day and night, upon the kneeling white figure of the
Seventh Pius?--a vision in which the whole linked grandeur and piety of
the Church of Rome seems epitomized. In St. Peter’s, Simon, the poor
fisherman, is little thought of; it is Peter, saint and pontiff, who
is paramount; he who has miraculously fed the lambs and fed the sheep
from that hour on the sea of Galilee to this day. And very few remember
the old man, too weak and aged to bear his cross, who had climbed
half-way to the Janiculum, when his executioners, seeing that he could
not advance any further, planted his gibbet in the deep yellow sand and
crucified him then and there--head downwards, as he begged them. This
is the ancient tradition, and it further tells us that he was followed
by but few of the faithful, who stood apart, weeping.
Impressive as are these hallowed spots, these glorious memorials of
the Eternal City; however full, to the believer, of the atmosphere of
the days of faith--oases in the great desert of life, where the palms
of the martyrs are still green and throw a grateful shade--there is
nothing, to our minds, in all the grandeur of Rome, even under the dome
of Peter, comparable to the effect produced upon the mind by a visit to
Tre Fontane.
As Peter was led to die the death of the lowest criminal--the death of
his Master--Paul was brought forth to the death of the sword, reserved
for the Patrician.
To go to Tre Fontane and visit the spot of his martyrdom is to return
to the primitive ages of the Church. The fisherman lies in a tomb such
as no king or emperor, no hero or conqueror or best beloved of the
world’s potentates ever had. And Paul sleeps in that great pillared
church _fuori le mura_, in a severity and dignity of magnificence very
well befitting the stern fire of the apostle’s zeal. But the memory of
his martyrdom is consecrated in a curious isolation of poverty, one
might almost say, aloofness; an earnest purity that reminds one, as
we have said, of early Christian times. You have all the splendours;
the golden glory, the marble, the mosaic, the sculpture and the jewels;
the movement, the colour and the crowd of Rome behind, and you come out
into the sweeping solitudes of the Campagna. For those who know and
love those strange, arid, melancholy spaces, there is no more potent
spell than the hold they lay upon the spirit. The gem-like distances
of the mountains, the radiant arch of the Italian sky, the movement
of light and shadow over the immense waste, the romance of each of
the historic ways, the mystery of the secrets they hold--better pens
than ours have striven to embody the charm and failed! Why should we
try? It is like a strain of music the meaning of which is lost to us.
We hear; we cannot understand. It is too full of messages. It is sad
and beautiful and haunting, and withal intensely human. Here you have
nature at her wildest and most untrammelled; and yet, never was city so
peopled, so thick with memories of all races and all histories; endless
streams of pilgrims have traversed the long roads; the centuries have
come and gone upon them; the blood, the tears, the strivings and hopes
of all humanity are here.
One looks forward towards wave upon wave of low-lying ground, bordered
by the mountain barriers; and each time one looks back, the dome of
Peter hangs pearl-like against the sky.
Speaking of the memory of our drive to Tre Fontane, the Signorina is
reminded that she has jotted down her impressions in an old diary.
“We drove to the Trappist Monastery,” she wrote, “where St. Paul was
beheaded. His head is said to have rebounded three times as it struck
the earth, and on each of those three hallowed spots there sprang up a
miraculous jet of water. The first spring is still warm as if with the
glow of the great spirit that there left its mortal frame; the second
spring is tepid; the third cold as death.
“The drive is a beautiful one; through the Campagna stretching wide and
green on either side, bounded by the mountains, some now snow-capped.
The first sight of the monastery breaks on one from the top of a little
hill. The huddled buildings appear suddenly at the foot in a deep
valley, shrouded by eucalyptus groves. On the right of the convent the
ground rises again, covered with a perfect forest of the same trees. It
is one of the saddest and most impressive places I ever saw. It strikes
chill, even when the rest of the Campagna is warm, and the continual
shuddering of the eucalyptus leaves makes an uncanny murmur. We drove
through an avenue of them, grey-green all over, trunks and leaves; and
then came to an arched gateway closed by an iron gate.
“We dismounted from our carriage, already quite impressed, and pulled
the bell, which echoed with a deep and beautiful note through the
monastery grounds.
“A porter opened and we walked into the garden, still under the
eucalyptus (mingled here with palms and lemons), and made more
beautiful still by the fragments of antique sculpture that border the
walks--marble capitols and broken acanthus leaves and pieces of old
pavements wonderfully worked in scrolls and twists.
“Papa particularly lost his heart to a lion’s head, with a dear flat
nose! He could not tear himself away from it; he wanted it so badly
for our new little garden in Surrey!
“As there are three fountains, so there are three churches, but
the miraculous springs are all under one roof. This is a fine,
comparatively modern church, situated at the end of an avenue of
eucalyptus and marble fragments. It has a classic pavement (pagan)
representing the four seasons.
“Opposite the entrance are the fountains--built in, now, and covered
over, but each with a little opening where the attendant friar will let
down a ladle and draw up the water for the faithful. Over each fountain
is an altar, with the head of St. Paul, in bas-relief, sculptured by
Canova:
“‘A la première, l’âme vient à l’instant même de s’échapper du
corps. Ce chef glorieux est plein de vie! A la seconde, les ombres
de la mort couvrent déjà ses admirables traits; à la troisième, le
sommeil éternel les a envahis, et quoique demeurés tout rayonnants
de beauté, ils disent, sans parler, que dans ce monde ces lèvres ne
s’entr’ouvriront plus, et que ce regard d’aigle s’est voilé pour
toujours.’
“In the right-hand corner of the first altar is the pillar which marks
the actual spot of the martyrdom of the fiery-hearted saint. The
ancient Via Lorentina passed along this very place, and here stood the
mile-stone, whereat St. Paul was beheaded.
“‘This is absolutely certain,’ said the monk who conducted us. ‘Even
protestants acknowledge the death to have taken place here. For the
rest,’ indicating the three fountains, ‘there is only the legend. You
may believe it or not, as you like.’
“He looked so happy, this monk. He had been thirty years at Tre
Fontane, but there was no sign of age on his face. It was, perhaps, a
trifle withered, like a ripe apple that has lain long on a shelf, but
that was all. And yet he said that, for the first fifteen years, he had
suffered continuously from malarial fever. He had superintended, and
even worked at, the planting of the eucalyptus groves which have so
purified the district that there has not been one case of the sickness
since.
“The other two churches are close to one another. The first is very old
and utterly bare, and, in a strange, mournful way, deeply impressive.
It dates from the sixth century, and is lofty and vaulted and almost
Gothic in its spirit. It has several rose-windows, and there are many
round holes in the walls also. These are now either empty or fitted
with common glass, but they were once filled with thin slices of
alabaster, or other precious transparencies. At present it seems the
embodiment in stone of the Trappist order, ‘la piu severa ordine della
chiesa Cattolica,’ as our monk described it. The church is as cold as a
well.
“The last of the three churches is of a much gayer mood: quite
Romanesque, perched on a pretty flight of rounded steps. It has a crypt
over the bodies of St. Zeno and two thousand and more companions,
martyred Christians, who built the Baths of Diocletian.”
The drive through that eucalyptus wood here described remains one of
the most curious impressions of those Roman days. It was like passing
through a Dante circle--the first circle of all, of Limbo, where Virgil
met the poet; an unsubstantial wraith-like world, full of a perpetual
whisper and murmur:
“Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
Non avea pianto, ma che di sospiri,
Che l’aura eterna facevan tremare:
E cio avvenia di duol senza martiri,
Ch’avean le turbe, ch’eran molte e grandi,
E d’infanti, e di femmine e di vivi.”
Whether the sky became really overcast as we entered into these
mysterious precincts, or whether the height of the trees shadowed the
narrow way, certainly there was a dimness about us; not a positive
darkness but a negation of light, even as the chill that enfolded us
was not so much a cold as a cessation of heat.
But through the gates of the monastery courtyard we saw sunshine again,
and white pigeons strutting about the cobbles, picking and preening
themselves--a wonderful picture of peace. It is a consecrated spot; a
place the most aloof, the most severe, the most denuded of all earthly
joys that we have ever seen; a stage on the arid way of pilgrims
forging determinedly by the shortest cut to heaven. And yet it is full
of sweetness. As from a mountain ledge, the world must lie so far below
these Trappists that it is no longer seen, scarcely divined behind its
own vapours. No use looking down: looking up--there is the blue sky,
and there are the peaks pointing heavenward, still to be conquered.
There is very little comfort for the traveller, but he has a strange
gladness. He is cradled in ethereal silences. The balm of majestic
solitude bathes his soul; his spirit is cheered by an air as pure as
it is vivifying, and he knows that he will climb the peaks.
_July 4._--Mrs. McComfort, our cook, has a brother on the Clyde. He
writes an extraordinary account of the effort expected of, and given
by, the able workman.
“It may be, miss,” says Mrs. McComfort to the Signorina, her chief
confidant, “he’ll be called up for a job on a ship that’s just come in,
and that’ll mean that he and the rest of them will be at it from seven
in the morning till eight the next morning. Yes, miss, all night, as
well as all day. And then they’ll come home, and it’s too weary to eat
they are, and they’ll just roll themselves up and fall asleep, as tired
as dogs; and when they’ve slept a bit, maybe they can get a little food
down. And then it’s off back again to work! And that’ll go on till
the job’s done. And when the battleships come in, the steamers do be
waiting all night upon the Clyde, to take the men up to them, it’s that
urgent. And, oh, miss, how they do love the ships they’ve built! And
when one is lost, you’d never believe the grief there is, with the men
crying and saying: ‘It’s my old lady’s gone, my poor old lady!’”
They need no comment, such stories as these. Here are humble heroes,
martyrs of duty; here is the poor heart of humanity, with its infinite
power of attachment. We have scarcely heard of anything more touching
than the tears of these rough men for their “poor old lady.”
We saw a letter the other day from a transport driver describing,
to a relative in England, the meeting with an old friend on the
bloodstained, shell-battered road at the back of Arras. This man had
been the driver of a motor omnibus in a country district at home.