One glimpse at the end of my little motor tour seemed to send a flash of
light through the drama of the past 365 days. It was of our young Prince
of Wales, home for a short holiday from the front. I had seen the King’s
son only once before--at his investiture in Carnarvon Castle. How long
ago that seemed! In actual truth “no human creature dreamt of war” that
day, although the shadow of it was even then hanging over our heads.
Some of us who have witnessed most of the great pageants of the world
thought we had never seen the like of that spectacle--the grey old
ruins, roofless and partly clothed by lichen and moss, the vast
multitude of spectators, the brilliant sunshine, the booming of the
guns from the warships in the bay outside, the screaming of the seagulls
overhead, the massed Welsh choirs singing “Land of my Fathers,” and,
above all, the boy of eighteen, beautiful as a fairy prince in his blue
costume, walking hand in hand between the King and Queen to be presented
to his people at the castle gate.
And now he was home for a little while from that blackened waste across
the sea, which had been trodden into desolation under the heel of a
ruthless aggressor and was still shrieking as with the screams of hell.
He had gone there willingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, doing the work
and sharing the risk of every other soldier of the King, and he would
go back, in another few days, although he had more to lose by going than
any other young man on the battle-front--a throne.
But if he lives to ascend it he will have his reward. England will not
forget.
When we hear people say that Great Britain is not yet awake to the fact
that she is at war I wonder where they keep their eyes. If I had been a
Rip Van Winkle, suddenly awakened after twenty years of sleep, or yet
an inhabitant of Mars dropped down on our part of this planet, I think
I should have known in any five minutes of any day since August 5, 1914,
that Great Britain was at war. Such a spirit has never breathed through
our Empire during my time, or yet through any other empire of which I
have any knowledge. Everybody, or almost everybody, doing something for
England, and few or none idle who are of military age except such as
have heavy burdens or secret disabilities into which I dare not pry.
It is not alone in Flanders or on the North Sea that our country’s
battle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on ten
thousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, and
the thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, and
Cleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long shifts
day and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimes
half choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it is
not for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, to
dishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, or
weaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint against
the young manhood of my country.