But there were flashes of almost divine light in the black darkness
of Belgium’s tragedy, and perhaps the brightest of them surrounded the
person of her King. What King Albert did in those dark days of August
1914, to keep the soul of his nation alive in the midst of the immense
sorrow of her utter overthrow his nation alone can fully know. But we
who are not Belgians were thrilled again and again by the inspired tones
of a great Spirit speaking to his subjects with that authority, dignity,
and courage which alone among free nations are sufficient to unite the
people to the Throne.
“A country which defends its liberties in the face of tyranny commands
the respect of all. Such a country does not perish.” What King Albert
did for Belgium in the stand he made against German aggression is partly
known already, and will leave its record in history, but what he did
at the same time for kingship throughout the world, as well as in his
country, can only be realized by the few who are aware that almost
at the moment of the outbreak of war the Belgian Courts (much to the
unmerited humiliation of Belgium) were on the eve of such disclosures
in relation to the life and death of the King’s predecessor as would
certainly have shaken the credit of monarchy for centuries.
Nobody who ever met the late King Leopold could have had any doubt that
he was a great man, if greatness can be separated from goodness and
measured solely by energy of intellect and character. I see him now as
I saw him in a garden of a house on the Riviera, the huge, unwieldy
creature, with the eyes of an eagle, the voice of a bull and the flat
tread of an elephant, and I recall the thought with which I came away:
“Thank God that man is only the King of a little country! If he had been
the sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of the
world.”
After King Leopold’s death, accident brought me knowledge of astounding
facts of his last days which were shortly to be exposed in Court--of
the measure of his unnatural hatred of his children; of his schemes
to deprive them of their rightful inheritance; of his relations with
certain of his favourites and his death-bed marriage to one of them;
of the circumstances attending the surgical operation which immediately
preceded the extinction of his life; of the burning of endless documents
of doubtful credit during the night before the knife was used; of the
intrigues of women of questionable character over the dying man’s body
to share the ill-got gold he had earned in the Congo, and finally of his
end, not in his palace, but in a little hidden chalet, alone save for
one scheming woman and one calculating priest. What a story it was,
whether true or false, or (as is most probable) partly true and partly
false, of shame, greed, lust, and life-long duplicity! And all this dark
tale was (one way or other) to be told in the cold light of open
Court, to the general discredit of monarchy, by showing the world how
contemptible may be some of the creatures who control the destinies of
mankind.
But the war and King Albert’s part in it saved Belgium from that
unmerited obloquy. The modest, retiring, studious, almost shy but heroic
young sovereign who, with his valiant little band, is fighting by the
side of our own king’s soldiers, and the soldiers of the Republic of
France, has sustained the highest traditions of kingship. He may have
lost his country at the hands of a great Power, drunk with pride, but he
has won Immortality. He may have no more land left to him than his tent
is pitched upon, but his spiritual empire is as wide as the world. He
may be a king without a kingdom, but he still reigns over a kingdom of
souls.
“WHY SHOULDN’T THEY, SINCE THEY WERE ENGLISHMEN?”
The next flash as of lightning that revealed to us the progress of the
drama of the past 365 days came at the end of the first month of the war
with the terrible story of Mons. That touched us yet more closely than
the tragedy of Belgium, for it seemed at first to be our own tragedy.
Between the departure of an army and the first news of victory or defeat
there is always a time of exhausting suspense. At what moment our first
Expeditionary Force had left England no one quite knew, but after we
learned that it had landed in France we waited with anxious hearts and
listened with strained ears.
We heard the tramp of the gigantic German army, pouring through the
streets of Brussels, fully equipped down to its kitchens, its
smoking coffee-wagons, its corps of gravediggers, and, of course, its
cuirassiers in burnished helmets that were shining in the autumn sun.
The huge, interminable, apparently irresistible multitude! Regiment
after regiment, battalion after battalion, going on and on for hours,
and even days--the mighty legions of the nation that a few days before
had “never so much as dreamt” of war!
At last we had news of our men. Against overwhelming odds they had
fought like heroes--why shouldn’t they, since they were Englishmen?--but
had been compelled to fall back at length, and were now retreating
rapidly, some reports said flying in confusion, broken and done. What?
Was it possible? Our army thrown back in disorder? Our first army, too,
the flower of the fighting men of the world? It was too monstrous, too
awful!
The news was cruelly, and even wickedly, exaggerated, but nevertheless
it did us good. He knows the British character very imperfectly who does
not see that the qualities in which it is unsurpassed among the races
of mankind are those with which it meets adversity and confronts the
darkest night. Within a few days of the report that our soldiers were
falling back from Mons, the old cry “Your King and country need you”
went through the land with a new thrill, and hundreds of thousands of
free men leapt to the relief of the flag.
There has been nothing like it in the history of any nation. And it is
hard to say which is the more moving manifestation of that moment in the
great drama of the war--the spontaneous response of the poor who sprang
forward to defend their country, though they had no more material
property in it than the right to as much of its soil as would make their
graves, or the splendid reply of the rich whose lands were an agelong
possession, and often the foundation of their titles and honours.
“BUT LIBERTY MUST GO ON, AND... ENGLAND.”
What startling surprises! We of the lower, the middle, or the
upper-middle classes had come to believe that too many of the young men
of our nobility had grown effeminate in idleness and selfish pleasure
indulged in on the borderland of a kind of aristocratic Bohemia, but,
behold! they were fighting and dying with the bravest. We had thought
too many of their young women (as thoughtless and capricious creatures
of fashion) had sacrificed the finest bloom of modest and courageous
womanhood in luxury and self-indulgence; but, lo! they were hurrying
to the battlefields as nurses, and there facing without flinching the
scenes of blood and horror, of foul sights and stenches, which make the
bravest man’s heart turn sick.
Some of the scenes at home in those last days of August and early days
of September were yet more affecting. The first of our casualty lists
had been published, and they were terrible. They hit the old people
hardest, the old fathers and old mothers who had given all, and had
nothing left--not even a little child to live for. At the railway
stations, when fresh troops were leaving for the front, you saw sights
which searched the heart so much that you felt ashamed to look, feeling
they opened sanctuaries in which God’s eye alone should see.
Old Lady So-and-So seeing her youngest son off to Flanders. She has lost
two of her sons in the war already, and Archie is the last of them. The
dear old darling! It is pitiful to see her in her deep black, struggling
to keep up before the boy. But when the train has left the platform and
she can no longer wave her handkerchief she breaks down utterly. “I’ve
seen the last of him,” she says; “something tells me I’ve seen the last
of him. And now I’ve given everything I have to the country.”
Ah! that’s what you have all got to do, or be prepared to do, you brave
mothers of England, if you have to defeat a desperate enemy, who stoops
to any method, any crime.
Then old Lord Such-a-One at Victoria to meet the body of his only son
being brought back from the hospital at Boulogne. How proud he had been
of his boy! He could remember the day he captained for Eton at Lord’s,
or perhaps rowed stroke--and won--for Cambridge. And now on the field
of Flanders.... He had seen it coming, though. He had thought of it when
the war broke out. “Ours is an old family,” he had told himself, “four
hundred years old, and my son is the last of us. If I let him go to the
war my line may end, my family may stop... but then liberty must go on,
civilization must go on, and... England!”
Yes, it must be night before the British star will shine.