CHAPTER XIII.

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THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

MAY 1917.

_BRING UP THE GUNS._

BY BOYD CABLE.

When Jack Duncan and Hugh Morrison suddenly had it brought home to them

that they ought to join the New Armies, they lost little time in doing

so. Since they were chums of long standing in a City office, it went

without saying that they decided to join and ‘go through it’ together,

but it was much more open to argument what branch of the Service or

regiment they should join.

They discussed the question in all its bearings, but being as ignorant of

the Army and its ways as the average young Englishman was in the early

days of the war, they had little evidence except varied and contradictory

hearsay to act upon. Both being about twenty-five they were old enough

and business-like enough to consider the matter in a business-like way,

and yet both were young enough to be influenced by the flavour of romance

they found in a picture they came across at the time. It was entitled

‘Bring up the Guns,’ and it showed a horsed battery in the wild whirl of

advancing into action, the horses straining and stretching in front of

the bounding guns, the drivers crouched forward or sitting up plying whip

and spur, the officers galloping and waving the men on, dust swirling

from leaping hoofs and wheels, whip-thongs streaming, heads tossing,

reins flying loose, altogether a blood-stirring picture of energy and

action, speed and power.

‘I’ve always had a notion,’ said Duncan reflectively, ‘that I’d like to

have a good whack at riding. One doesn’t get much chance of it in city

life, and this looks like a good chance.’

‘And I’ve heard it said,’ agreed Morrison, ‘that a fellow with any

education stands about the best chance in artillery work. We’d might as

well plump for something where we can use the bit of brains we’ve got.’

‘That applies to the Engineers too, doesn’t it?’ said Duncan. ‘And the

pottering about we did for a time with electricity might help there.’

‘Um-m,’ Morrison agreed doubtfully, still with an appreciative eye on

the picture of the flying guns. ‘Rather slow work though—digging and

telegraph and pontoon and that sort of thing.’

‘Right-oh,’ said Duncan with sudden decision. ‘Let’s try for the

Artillery.’

‘Yes. We’ll call that settled,’ said Morrison; and both stood a few

minutes looking with a new interest at the picture, already with a

dawning sense that they ‘belonged,’ that these gallant gunners and

leaping teams were ‘Ours,’ looking forward with a little quickening of

the pulse to the day when they, too, would go whirling into action in

like desperate and heart-stirring fashion.

‘Come on,’ said Morrison. ‘Let’s get it over. To the

recruiting-office—quick march.’

And so came two more gunners into the Royal Regiment.

* * * * *

When the long, the heart-breakingly long period of training and waiting

for their guns, and more training and slow collecting of their horses,

and more training was at last over, and the battery sailed for France,

Morrison and Duncan were both sergeants and ‘Numbers One’ in charge of

their respective guns; and before the battery had been in France three

months Morrison had been promoted to Battery Sergeant-Major.

The battery went through the routine of trench warfare and dug its guns

into deep pits, and sent its horses miles away back, and sat in the same

position for months at a time, had slack spells and busy spells, shelled

and was shelled, and at last moved up to play its part in The Push.

Of that part I don’t propose to tell more than the one incident—an

incident of machine-pattern sameness to the lot of many batteries.

The infantry had gone forward again and the ebb-tide of battle was

leaving the battery with many others almost beyond the water-mark of

effective range. Preparations were made for an advance. The Battery

Commander went forward and reconnoitred the new position the battery was

to move into, everything was packed up and made ready, while the guns

still continued to pump out long range fire. The Battery Commander came

in again and explained everything to his officers and gave the necessary

detailed orders to the Sergeant-Major, and presently received orders of

date and hour to move.

This was in the stages of The Push when rain was the most prominent

and uncomfortable feature of the weather. The guns were in pits built

over with strong walls and roofing of sand-bags and beams which were

weather-tight enough, but because the floors of the pits were lower than

the surface of the ground, it was only by a constant struggle that the

water was held back from draining in and forming a miniature lake in each

pit. Round and between the guns was a mere churned-up sea of sticky mud.

As soon as the new battery position was selected a party went forward to

it to dig and prepare places for the guns. The Battery Commander went

off to select a suitable point for observation of his fire, and in the

battery the remaining gunners busied themselves in preparation for the

move. The digging party were away all the afternoon, all night, and on

through the next day. Their troubles and tribulations don’t come into

this story, but from all they had to say afterwards they were real and

plentiful enough.

Towards dusk a scribbled note came back from the Battery Commander at the

new position to the officer left in charge with the guns, and the officer

sent the orderly straight on down with it to the Sergeant-Major with a

message to send word back for the teams to move up.

‘All ready here,’ said the Battery Commander’s note. ‘Bring up the guns

and firing battery waggons as soon as you can. I’ll meet you on the way.’

The Sergeant-Major glanced through the note and shouted for the Numbers

One, the sergeants in charge of each gun. He had already arranged with

the officer exactly what was to be done when the order came, and now he

merely repeated his orders rapidly to the sergeants and told them to ‘get

on with it.’ When the Lieutenant came along five minutes after, muffled

to the ears in a wet mackintosh, he found the gunners hard at work.

‘I started in to pull the sand-bags clear, sir,’ reported the

Sergeant-Major. ‘Right you are,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Then you’d better

put the double detachments on to pull one gun out and then the other. We

must man-handle ’em back clear of the trench ready for the teams to hook

in when they come along.’

For the next hour every man, from the Lieutenant and Sergeant-Major

down, sweated and hauled and slid and floundered in slippery mud and

water, dragging gun after gun out of its pit and back a half dozen yards

clear. It was quite dark when they were ready, and the teams splashed

up and swung round their guns. A fairly heavy bombardment was carrying

steadily on along the line, the sky winked and blinked and flamed in

distant and near flashes of gun fire, and the air trembled to the

vibrating roar and sudden thunder-claps of their discharge, the whine

and moan and shriek of the flying shells. No shells had fallen near the

battery position for some little time, but, unfortunately, just after

the teams had arrived, a German battery chose to put over a series of

five-point-nines unpleasantly close. The drivers sat, motionless blotches

of shadow against the flickering sky, while the gunners strained and

heaved on wheels and drag-ropes to bring the trails close enough to drop

on the hooks. A shell dropped with a crash about fifty yards short of

the battery and the pieces flew whining and whistling over the heads of

the men and horses. Two more swooped down out of the sky with a rising

wail-rush-roar of sound that appeared to be bringing the shells straight

down on top of the workers’ heads. Some ducked and crouched close to

earth, and both shells passed just over and fell in leaping gusts of

flame and ground-shaking crashes beyond the teams. Again the fragments

hissed and whistled past and lumps of earth and mud fell spattering and

splashing and thumping over men and guns and teams. A driver yelped

suddenly, the horses in another team snorted and plunged, and then out

of the thick darkness that seemed to shut down after the searing light

of the shell-burst flames came sounds of more plunging hoofs, a driver’s

voice cursing angrily, threshings and splashings and stamping. ‘Horse

down here ... bring a light ... whoa, steady, boy ... where’s that light?’

Three minutes later: ‘Horse killed, driver wounded in the arm, sir,’

reported the Sergeant-Major. ‘Riding leader Number Two gun, and centre

driver of its waggon.’

‘Those spare horses near?’ said the Lieutenant quickly. ‘Right. Call up a

pair; put ’em in lead; put the odd driver waggon centre.’

Before the change was completed and the dead horse dragged clear, the

first gun was reported hooked on and ready to move, and was given the

order to ‘Walk march’ and pull out on the wrecked remnant of a road that

ran behind the position. Another group of five-nines came over before the

others were ready, and still the drivers and teams waited motionless for

the clash that told of the trail-eye dropping on the hook.

‘Get to it, gunners,’ urged the Sergeant-Major, as he saw some of the

men instinctively stop and crouch to the yell of the approaching shell.

‘Time we were out of this.’

‘Hear, bloomin’ hear,’ drawled one of the shadowy drivers. ‘An’ if

you wants to go to bed, Lanky’—to one of the crouching gunners—‘just

lemme get this gun away fust, an’ then you can curl up in that blanky

shell-’ole.’

There were no more casualties getting out, but one gun stuck in a

shell-hole and took the united efforts of the team and as many gunners

as could crowd on to the wheels and drag-ropes to get it moving and

out on to the road. Then slowly, one by one, with a gunner walking and

swinging a lighted lamp at the head of each team, the guns moved off

along the pitted road. It was no road really, merely a wheel-rutted

track that wound in and out the biggest shell-holes. The smaller ones

were ignored, simply because there were too many of them to steer clear

of, and into them the limber and gun wheels dropped bumping, and were

hauled out by sheer team and man power. It took four solid hours to cover

less than half a mile of sodden, spongy, pulpy, wet ground, riddled with

shell-holes, swimming in greasy mud and water. The ground they covered

was peopled thick with all sorts of men who passed or crossed their way

singly, in little groups, in large parties—wounded, hobbling wearily or

being carried back, parties stumbling and fumbling a way up to some vague

point ahead with rations and ammunition on pack animals and pack-men,

the remnants of a battalion coming out crusted from head to foot in

slimy wet mud, bowed under the weight of their packs and kits and arms;

empty ammunition waggons and limbers lurching and bumping back from the

gun line, the horses staggering and slipping, the drivers struggling

to hold them on their feet, to guide the wheels clear of the worst

holes; a string of pack-mules filing past, their drivers dismounted and

leading, and men and mules ploughing anything up to knee depth in the

mud, flat pannier-pouches swinging and jerking on the animals’ sides, the

brass tops of the 18-pounder shell-cases winking and gleaming faintly

in the flickering lights of the gun flashes. But of all these fellow

wayfarers over the battlefield the battery drivers and gunners were

hardly conscious. Their whole minds were so concentrated on the effort of

holding and guiding and urging on their horses round or over the obstacle

of the moment, a deeper and more sticky patch than usual, an extra large

hole, a shattered tree stump, a dead horse, the wreck of a broken-down

waggon, that they had no thought for anything outside these. The gunners

were constantly employed manning the wheels and heaving on them with

cracking muscles, hooking on drag-ropes to one gun and dragging it clear

of a hole, unhooking and going floundering back to hook on to another and

drag it in turn out of its difficulty.

The Battery Commander met them at a bad dip where the track degenerated

frankly into a mud bath—and how he found or kept the track or ever

discovered them in that aching wilderness is one of the mysteries of

war and the ways of Battery Commanders. It took another two hours, two

mud-soaked nightmare hours, to come through that next hundred yards. It

was not only that the mud was deep and holding, but the slough was so

soft at bottom that the horses had no foothold, could get no grip to

haul on, could little more than drag their own weight through, much less

pull the guns. The teams were doubled, the double team taking one gun

or waggon through, and then going back for the other. The waggons were

emptied of their shell and filled again on the other side of the slough;

and this you will remember meant the gunners carrying the rounds across a

couple at a time, wading and floundering through mud over their knee-boot

tops, replacing the shells in the vehicle, and wading back for another

couple. In addition to this they had to haul guns and waggons through

practically speaking by man-power, because the teams, almost exhausted by

the work and with little more than strength to get themselves through,

gave bare assistance to the pull. The wheels, axle deep in the soft mud,

were hauled round spoke by spoke, heaved and yo-hoed forward inches at a

time.

When at last all were over, the teams had to be allowed a brief

rest—brief because the guns must be in position and under cover before

daylight came—and stood dejectedly with hanging ears, heaving flanks, and

trembling legs. The gunners dropped prone or squatted almost at the point

of exhaustion in the mud. But they struggled up, and the teams strained

forward into the breast collars again when the word was given, and the

weary procession trailed on at a jerky snail’s pace once more.

As they at last approached the new position the gun flashes on the

horizon were turning from orange to primrose, and although there was no

visible lightening of the Eastern sky, the drivers were sensible of a

faintly recovering use of their eyes, could see the dim shapes of the

riders just ahead of them, the black shadows of the holes, and the wet

shine of the mud under their horses’ feet.

The hint of dawn set the guns on both sides to work with trebled energy.

The new position was one of many others so closely set that the blazing

flames from the gun muzzles seemed to run out to right and left in a

spouting wall of fire that leaped and vanished, leaped and vanished

without ceasing, while the loud ear-splitting claps from the nearer guns

merged and ran out to the flanks in a deep drum roll of echoing thunder.

The noise was so great and continuous that it drowned even the roar of

the German shells passing overhead, the smash and _crump_ of their fall

and burst.

But the line of flashes sparkling up and down across the front beyond the

line of our own guns told a plain enough tale of the German guns’ work.

The Sergeant-Major, plodding along beside the Battery Commander, grunted

an exclamation.

‘Boche is getting busy,’ said the Battery Commander.

‘Putting a pretty solid barrage down, isn’t he, sir?’ said the

Sergeant-Major. ‘Can we get the teams through that?’

‘Not much hope,’ said the Battery Commander, ‘but, thank Heaven, we don’t

have to try, if he keeps barraging there. It is beyond our position.

There are the gun-pits just off to the left.’

But, although the barrage was out in front of the position, there were

a good many long-ranged shells coming beyond it to fall spouting fire

and smoke and earth-clods on and behind the line of guns. The teams were

flogged and lifted and spurred into a last desperate effort, wrenched

the guns forward the last hundred yards and halted. Instantly they were

unhooked, turned round, and started stumbling wearily back towards the

rear; the gunners, reinforced by others scarcely less dead-beat than

themselves by their night of digging in heavy wet soil, seized the

guns and waggons, flung their last ounce of strength and energy into

man-handling them up and into the pits. Two unlucky shells at that

moment added heavily to the night’s casualty list, one falling beside

the retiring teams and knocking out half a dozen horses and two men,

another dropping within a score of yards of the gun-pits, killing three

and wounding four gunners. Later, at intervals, two more gunners were

wounded by flying splinters from chance shells that continued to drop

near the pits as the guns were laboriously dragged through the quagmire

into their positions. But none of the casualties, none of the falls and

screamings of the high-explosive shells, interrupted or delayed the work,

and without rest or pause the men struggled and toiled on until the last

gun was safely housed in its pit.

Then the battery cooks served out warm tea, and the men drank greedily,

and then, too worn out to be hungry or to eat the biscuit and cheese

ration issued, flung themselves down in the pits under and round their

guns and slept there in the trampled mud.

The Sergeant-Major was the last to lie down. Only after everyone else had

ceased work, and he had visited each gun in turn and satisfied himself

that all was correct, and made his report to the Battery Commander, did

he seek his own rest. Then he crawled into one of the pits, and before

he slept had a few words with the ‘Number One’ there, his old friend

Duncan. The Sergeant-Major, feeling in his pockets for a match to light a

cigarette, found the note which the Battery Commander had sent back and

which had been passed on to him. He turned his torch light on it and read

it through to Duncan—‘Bring up the guns and firing battery waggons ...’

and then chuckled a little. ‘Bring up the guns.... Remember that picture

we saw before we joined, Duncan! And we fancied then we’d be bringing ’em

up same fashion. And, good Lord, think of to-night.’

‘Yes,’ grunted Duncan, ‘sad slump from our anticipations. There was some

fun in that picture style of doing the job—some sort of dash and honour

and glory. No honour and glory about “Bring up the guns” these days. Na

poo to-night anyway.’

The Sergeant-Major, sleepily sucking his damp cigarette, wrapped in his

sopping British Warm, curling up in a corner on the wet cold earth,

utterly spent with the night’s work, cordially agreed.

Perhaps, and anyhow one hopes, some people will think they were wrong.

_FRANCE AND BRITAIN: THEIR COMMON MEMORIES._

‘France and England, whose very shores look pale

With envy of each other’s happiness.’

SHAKESPEARE, _Henry V._, Act v. sc. ii.

‘Each the other’s mystery, terror, need and love.’

RUDYARD KIPLING.

Our common memories? Well, are they so many of this nature which brings

closer those who recollect them together? They are indeed! Let this

article be a friendly protest, a grounded protest against the idea which

is no doubt, still, the prevalent popular idea on both sides of the

Channel, I mean this one: ‘The Entente Cordiale is something splendid,

but when one comes to think about it, how wonderful, how new!’ Yes, when

we think about it _superficially_, how wonderful, how new, but when we

think somewhat more deeply and with a little more knowledge of the past,

how natural! Not a miracle: the logical result, only too long deferred,

of the long centuries of our common history. It is not mere pastime to

show it. How important on the contrary, how _practically_ important for

the present and for the future of our alliance, to make conscious again

the old moral ties and to reawaken the sleeping sense of historical

fellowship!

II.

To make that fellowship apparent, at a glance, at least from certain

points of view, I have devised the appended diagram. There you see

represented, as it were, the streams of the history of our two nations

from their farthest origins down to our own times. Please note the scale

of centuries. See both streams rising about eight or six centuries

before Christ in the same mountain—if I may say so figuratively—in the

same mountain of the Celtic race. They spring, as you see, from the same

source, and, though geographically divided, their waters remain a long

time of the same colour—green in my draught.

[Illustration: SYMBOLIC DRAUGHT ILLUSTRATING THE HISTORY OF

FRANCO-BRITISH RELATIONS.]

We have, on that point of their origins, very interesting and very

numerous testimonies, chiefly in the contemporary Greek and Roman

writers. Very striking in particular was the fellowship of ancient

Britons and Gauls with regard to religion. If you open one—I may say

any one—of our French history text-books, you will see that it begins

exactly as one of yours, with the same story, and pictures, of Druids,

priests, teachers, and judges—some of them bards; the same story of the

solemn gathering of the mistletoe verdant in winter on the bare branches

of oaks, symbol of the cardinal creed of the race: the immortality of

the soul. Caesar, who had a Druid among his best friends, observes that

the young Gauls who wanted to go deeper into the study of their religion

generally used to go over to Britain in order to graduate, if I may say

so, in this mysterious and lofty science.[1] It appears, therefore,

that, though the Celts had passed originally from Gaul into Britain, yet

Britain had become and remained the sanctuary of their common religion.

Note that nothing of the sort was to be found elsewhere. Here we have

characteristics of ancient Britain and ancient Gaul and of them alone.

Now observe that though this Celtic colour is to be later on—in fact much

later—modified by waters from other sources, yet it will never completely

disappear. The Celtic element remains visible to our day in our two

nations: you have your green Celtic fringe in Cornwall, Wales, part of

Scotland, and the greater part of Ireland;—we have something of the kind

in Brittany.

III.

During the first century B.C. a very big event took place which was to

stamp the whole of our ulterior history on this side of the Channel with

its principal character: I am referring to the Romanisation of Gaul.

For many reasons which I omit, the advent of the Romans, though of course

it met with some strenuous and even splendid resistance for a short time,

could hardly be called a conquest in the odious meaning of the word.

Now, you know that Caesar in the very midst of his campaigns in Gaul

found time to carry out two bold expeditions into Britain. It is very

interesting to note his motives. He was not, as one could easily imagine,

impelled by an appetite of conquest. This appetite, by the way, was much

less among the Romans than is generally imagined, and Caesar himself

had enough to do at that time with the turbulent Gallic tribes without

entering, if it could be avoided, upon a doubtful enterprise beyond the

Channel. But he could not do otherwise, and he gives us himself his

motives, which are extremely interesting from the point of view of the

history of our early relations. He felt that he could not see an end to

his Gallic war if he did not at least intimidate the British brothers

of the Gauls always ready to send them help! Let me quote his own words

(remember that he speaks of himself in the third person):

‘Though not much was left of the fine season—and winter comes

early in those parts—he resolved to pass into Britain, at

least, to begin with, for a reconnoitring raid, because he saw

well that in almost all their wars (the Romans’ wars) with the

Gauls, help came from that country to their enemies.’[2]

His two bold raids into Britain had some of the desired effect. His

successors achieved more, leisurely, without too much trouble, but very

incompletely too, both as regards extent of territory and depth of

impression. You see how I have expressed all this in my draught.

In Gaul, on the contrary, the transformation was complete and lasting,

lasting to our days. The civilisation of Rome, which had already

fascinated Gaul from afar, was so eagerly and so unanimously adopted all

over the country that, in the space of a few decades, this country was

nearly as Roman as Rome. The fame of the Gallo-Roman schools, the great

number of Latin writers and orators of Gallic origin, the numberless

remains of theatres, temples, bridges, aqueducts—some in marvellous

state of preservation—which are even now to be found in hundreds of

places, not only in the south but even in the north of this country, from

the Mediterranean to the Rhine, and still more than anything else our

language, so purely Romanic, abundantly testify to the willingness, nay

to the enthusiasm, with which Gaul made her own the civilisation of Rome.

But why do I insist on this fact? Because much of all this we were to

transmit to you later on, chiefly on the Norman vehicle. The direct

impression of Rome on your country was to remain superficial—though it

would be a mistake to overlook it altogether—but the indirect influence

through us was nearly to balance any other influence and to become one of

the chief factors of your moral and intellectual history.

IV.

But before we reach that time we have to take note of two nearly

simultaneous events. In the fifth century the Franks established

themselves in Roman Gaul and the Angles and Saxons in Roman Britain.

You see in my draught each of these rivers—English and Frankish—flowing

respectively into the streams of British and Gallic history. I have

given about the same bluish colour to these new rivers to point out that

Anglo-Saxons and Franks were originally cousins and neighbours. Their

establishment was more or less attended with some rough handling, but

even in their case, and chiefly in our case, the strict propriety of the

word conquest to describe their coming can be questioned. There had been

previous and partial agreements with the old people to come over, besides

they were few in numbers. Yet the results were strikingly different. On

our side the Franks were gradually absorbed, though giving their name

to the country—France—and constituting, specially in the north, a small

aristocracy of soldiers. On your side, on the contrary, the Anglo-Saxons

converted the old country into a new one. Instead of giving up their own

language they imposed it, at least to a large extent. Between them and

their Frankish cousins established in old Roman Gaul relations remained

quite cordial. A king of Kent, who had married a Christian daughter of a

king of Paris, showed remarkable good will for the second introduction

of Christianity into Britain. He and his Anglo-Saxon comrades would not

accept Christianity from the ancient Britons who had already become

Christian, more or less, under the Romans, but they accepted it eagerly

at the recommendation of the Romanised and Christianised Franks. May I

say that the Franks went so far as to provide the Mission under Augustine

with the necessary interpreters! Very soon the Anglo-Saxons became so

eager themselves for Christianity that they became foremost in the

spreading of it to the last country which remained to be converted to

the new faith, I mean Germany. This is a very interesting story, though

an old one, and, I am afraid, much forgotten: your Winfrid—he and his

pupils—with the recommendation and support of Charles Martel—the founder

of our Carolingian dynasty—Christianising Germany, founding there a

dozen bishoprics, with British bishops, becoming himself the first

archbishop of Mayence, and then dying a martyr on German soil.... Is not

it interesting, this now forgotten story, in which we see early England

and early France friendly co-operating to Christianise and to civilise

Germany?

V.

The next stage in the history of both countries was again analogous.

About the same time—the ninth century—we, and you, had troubles from

the same people: the Northmen. They were few in numbers, but gave much

annoyance for some time. The result was the same on both sides: you

practically turned your Northmen into Anglo-Saxons, and we turned ours

into Romanised Frenchmen of the best sort. The process was much more

rapidly completed on our side than on yours, and you were still engaged

in it when our Romanised Normans arrived in Britain and nearly succeeded

in achieving what the Romans themselves had failed to achieve. And more

than that—more from the point of view of our relations—they very nearly

succeeded in building out of our two countries a practically unified but

short-lived empire.

In 1180 the whole of the present United Kingdom of Great Britain and

Ireland and nearly two-thirds of France were practically acknowledging,

under one title or another, only one sovereign: Henry II. Plantagenet.

Let me say—though I own it is not the view which is generally prevalent

in our schools, and far from it!—that it is a pity they did not succeed

altogether! Henry II. had against him untoward circumstances and, above

all, Philip Augustus! He had finally to give up that fine dream. Now,

union failing to be achieved that way, it is a pity, I think, that it

failed also the _other_ way, a little time after in 1216. Then the far

greater part of your people, barons and clergy, revolting against one

of the unworthiest rulers ever known, King John, agreed to invite over

the eldest son, _and heir_, of the French king to be their own king. He

came over, of course, was received at Westminster, accepted and confirmed

Magna Charta, the charter of your liberties, and was going to be

acknowledged in all parts of the kingdom when John—allow me these strong

terms—did the stupidest and wickedest thing of his stupid and wicked life

by dying at the wrong time! at that time! He died when by living a little

longer he might have been the occasion of joining our two countries into

one empire! Fancy for a moment what _this_ would have meant, the course

our common history would have taken for our common glory and the future

of the whole human race! But, dying, he left an heir, a boy of nine

years of age, and the idea of innocent legitimacy, with the strenuous

support of the Papal legate, prevailed over the half-accomplished fact!

And thus this splendid chance was lost!

Another occasion presented itself hardly more than a century afterwards,

when the Capetian line of our own kings became extinct and the nearest

heir was the English king Edward III. In fact, he was as much French as

English, and the king of a country whose official language was still

French and whose popular language was now permeated with French. I think

it was no more difficult for France, in 1328, to accept this king, and

be united with England under the same sovereign while remaining herself,

than for England in 1603 to accept a king from Scotland. Well, there

was some hesitation among the French barons and clergy, and a solemn

discussion was held on the point of law. In fact, there was no law at all

on the subject and they had a free choice. To my mind the interest of

the country pointed to the recognition of Edward, that is to union. No

doubt, on the other hand, that it was the way pointed to by civil and by

canon laws. They preferred the other course. No doubt they meant well,

but to be well-meaning and far-seeing are two things, and I for one, in

the teeth of all adverse and orthodox teaching, lament the decision which

they took and the turn which they gave to national feelings yet in their

infancy. The other decision would have spared the two countries not only

one, but several hundred years’ wars, and would have secured to the two

sister countries all the mutual advantages of peaceful development and

cordial co-operation.

I can only briefly refer to the famous Treaty of Troyes, 1420, by which

in the course of the Hundred Years’ War our King—insane literally

speaking—and his German wife, disinherited their son to the profit of

their son-in-law, the English king, and handed over to him, at once,

as Regent, the crown of France. This treaty of course, under such

circumstances, and when national feelings had been roused—however

unfortunately—in the contrary direction, had little moral and political

value. Yet, had your Henry V. lived—he died two years after the treaty—he

might possibly have got it accepted by France. Professor A. Coville in

his contribution to what is presently the latest, the leading, history of

France, commenting on Henry’s love of justice and the stern discipline he

maintained in his army—the Army of Agincourt—concludes in the following

remarkable terms, which I beg to translate:

‘After so many years of strife the people of this Kingdom [the

French Kingdom] looked up to his stern government to turn this

anarchy into order. Paris accepted as a deliverance this yoke,

heavy no doubt but protective.’[3]

It is interesting to observe that this view of this French historian is

in complete agreement with Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V.’ Such an agreement

between an English poet and a French scientist is certainly worthy of

attention!

Well, Henry V. died, and national feelings being decidedly roused,

flaming into the stupendous miracle of Joan of Arc, decided otherwise.

VI.

What about this _otherwise_, I mean this definitive political separation

and these centuries of hostility which fill our history text-books? We

can speak of it without the slightest uneasiness, not only because all

this seems now to be so far in the past, a past which can never revive,

but, above all, because of the remarkable characters of this hostility

and of its brilliant interludes.

I say that this hostility had, on the whole, this remarkable character,

to be lofty rivalry, not low hatred. It may have been—it was indeed

at times—fierce and passionate, but it was all along accompanied by

mutual respect. Our two countries aimed at surpassing much more than

at destroying each other. It was more like a world race for glory than

a grip for death. Its spirit was quarrelsome animosity taking immense

delight in stupid pinpricks and daring strokes, not cold hate dreaming of

mortal stabs to the heart.

Your great poet Rudyard Kipling has expressed this very finely in the

poem he wrote three years ago on the occasion, if I remember well, of

your King’s first visit to Paris. Let me quote from this poem:

‘We stormed the seas tack for tack and burst

Through the doorways of new worlds, doubtful which was first.’

‘Ask the wave that has not watched war between us two ...

Each the other’s mystery, terror, need, and love.’

‘O companion, we have lived greatly through all time.’

I could illustrate this spirit by many stories. One of the most typical

is about the encounter on the battlefield of Fontenoy, in 1745, of

the massive English column and of the French centre. There is in that

story a mixture of fine legend and historical truth, but anyway it is

illustrative of the spirit. The very fact that the legend could grow out

of the truth is a proof of the spirit by itself.

There is another story much less known, but which is as much

illuminating. It was at the beginning of the American war, thirty-four

years after Fontenoy, in 1779. Your famous seaman Rodney was in Paris,

which he could not leave on account of certain debts, yet he was

perfectly free to walk about as any ordinary private man, though France

and England were at war. Concentration camps had not been invented

as yet! One day, then, as he was dining with some French military

friends—always remember, please, that we were at war—they came to talk of

some recent successes we had just had at sea, among them the conquest of

Grenada in the West Indies. Rodney expressed himself on these successes

with polite disdain, saying that if _he_ was free—he Rodney—the French

would not have it so easy! Upon which old Marshal de Biron paid for his

debts and said: ‘You are free, sir, the French will not avail themselves

of the obstacles which prevent you from fighting them.’ Well, it cost us

very dear to have let him go, but was not it fine!

I am glad to hear from my friend, your Oxford countryman, Mr. C.R.L.

Fletcher, the author of a brilliantly written ‘Introductory History of

England’ in four volumes, that the story is told in substantially the

same terms on your side, by all the authorities on the subject: Mundy’s

‘Life and Correspondence of Lord Rodney’ (vol. i. p. 180); Laughton in

the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’; Captain Mahan in his ‘Influence

of Sea Power in History,’ p. 377.

We could tell many, many stories of that kind, but let these two

be sufficient for our purpose to-day. And yet, even with all these

extenuating circumstances, how pitiful it would have been if this enmity

had been continuous! But it was not, and even far from it! Even the worst

of all our wars, the Hundred Years’ War, was interrupted by very numerous

and very long truces lasting years and even decades of years! In fact,

that war consisted generally of mere raids with handfuls of men, though

it must be said that they often did harm out of all proportion to their

numbers. As to the other wars in more modern times they were pleasantly

intermingled with interludes of co-operation and alliance. The simple

enumeration of them is instructive and may even appear surprising.

In the sixteenth century there was a temporary alliance between your

Henry VIII. and our Francis the First, against the Emperor of Germany,

Charles V. In fact Henry VIII., at first, had allied himself with the

German Emperor against the French king, but when the latter, attacked

from all cardinal points (Spain and most of Italy were then in the hands

of the Emperor), had been beaten at Pavia and taken prisoner to Madrid,

your King perceived his mistake, _i.e._ England’s ultimate danger. He

consequently offered his alliance to Francis for the restoration of this

balance of power, which, for want of something better, was the guarantee

of the independence of all states. In Mignet’s study[4] of these times

I find this extract from your King’s instructions to his ambassadors in

France, in March 1526, as to the conditions forced upon the French king,

in his Spanish prison, by the Emperor of Germany:

‘They [the English ambassadors] shall infer what damage the

crown of France may and is likely to stand in by the said

conditions—this be the way to bring him [Charles] to the

monarchy of Christendom.’

You know that, after all, the world-wide ambition of the then Emperor of

Germany was defeated, to the point that he resigned in despair and ended

his life in a monastery.

Again, towards the end of the same century Queen Elizabeth was on quite

friendly terms with our Henry the Fourth. They had the same enemy:

Philip the Second of Spain, son of Charles the Fifth and heir to the

greater part of his dominions. This friendship ripened into alliance,

and there was a very strong English contingent in the French army which

retook Amiens, from the Spaniards, in 1597. Both sovereigns united also

in helping the Low Countries in their struggle for independence against

Spain.

In the seventeenth century your Cromwell and our Mazarin renewed the

same alliance against Spain, and in 1657 a Franco-British army under the

ablest of the French soldiers of that time, Marshal Turenne, beat the

Spaniards near Dunkirk and took Dunkirk itself, which was handed over to

you as the price previously agreed upon of the alliance.

After the Restoration your Stuarts were on so friendly terms with the

French Government that they were accused, sometimes with some show of

justice, of forgetting the national interests. There is no doubt that

they tried, and to a certain extent successfully, to evade the just

demands and control of your Parliament by becoming pensioners of the King

of France. Their selling Dunkirk to France in 1662, five years after

its capture from Spain, made them particularly unpopular. Of course,

when they were finally expelled by your revolutions of 1688, they found,

with hundreds of followers, a hospitable reception at the French court,

causing thereby on the other hand a revival of hostility between our

government and your new one. May I observe, by the way, that the head of

this new government of yours was the Prince of Orange—French Orange, near

Avignon—and that this little, practically self-governing principality was

suffered to remain his until his death, in 1702, when Louis XIV. annexed

it to France?

In the eighteenth century itself, marked by so keen a rivalry, there were

temporary periods of understanding, specially during the two or three

decades following the peace of Utrecht, with a view of preserving the

peace of Europe. The names of Sir Robert Walpole and Cardinal Fleury are

attached to this period.

In the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon, the improvement

of our relations—down to the present day—has been nearly continuous

and marked by a series of remarkable facts. It was first the union of

our navies, with that of Russia, for the destruction of the Turkish

fleet at Navarino, in 1827, thereby securing the independence of

Greece—an independence which was completed in the ensuing years by

French and Russian armies—(we wish the present Greek Government, the

Royal government, remembered this better!). It was then the union of our

policies for the liberation of Belgium from Dutch vassalage, a liberation

which Prussia wanted to oppose but durst not, seeing that France and

England had made up their minds about it. Then came the union of our

armies for the mistaken object of protecting Turkey against Russia (how

strange it sounds now!), or of opening China to the European trade. Chief

of all, how could we forget that—some way or other—France and Britain

have been godmothers to Italian unity!

Well, all this is rather a long record and it may appear surprising to

many as an aggregate, though nearly each component part of it is well

known! The reason for this impression of surprise is this: in spite

of this political co-operation, and side by side with it, much of the

acrimonious spirit long survived, unwilling to die. The twentieth

century, thank God! and the present alliance have given it the ‘coup de

grâce’!

VII.

I have adverted until now to the political side only of our relations,

but if we look at our past relations from another standpoint—the

standpoint of the mind, of moral progress, of civilisation—we have a

somewhat simpler story to tell, yet a chequered story too. Whatever our

political relations may have been—with perhaps the only exception of the

time when you opposed all reforms, because we were making revolutionary,

disconcerting reforms!—we have been generally emulating for all that

ennobles the life of man: higher thought, justice, and liberty. There

is here such a formidable accumulation of interesting facts that I can

scarcely refer to them except in very general terms, lest I should lose

sight of the limits within which I must compress this article.

French and English writers rarely took much account of the political

hostility which prevailed between the two countries. Your writers

have generally paid, from Chaucer’s time down to our own, the closest

attention to our literature, whether they have followed its lead or

reacted against its influence. On the other hand, all our political

philosophers have always found in the study of your institutions a source

of inexhaustible interest, whether they have been admirers of them like

Montesquieu or sharp critics like Rousseau. And let no one imagine that

this side of the question is devoid of practical interest. It is owing

to this continuous interchange of ideas that both countries have been

equipped for these intellectual, moral and political achievements by

which, in spite of all their shortcomings, they have won the glory of

being generally acknowledged, on so many points, as the joint leaders

of modern civilisation. It is the fact that they have been more or less

conscious all along, or nearly so, of this joint leadership, which has so

happily counteracted and at the end got the better of political acrimony

and popular prejudices. The Entente Cordiale between our two countries

is largely a triumph of the mind, the finest in history and certainly

the most far-reaching. Let us not underestimate therefore the influence

of intellectual workers. It has been the glory of most of them in this

country and in yours to plead for the noblest ideals: for liberty and

justice at home, and also, abroad, for a cordial understanding of all

nations, for harmony between national interests and the rights of

humanity. In modern Germany, on the contrary, most of those who are

supposed to be the representatives of the mind have not been ashamed of

ministering, long before this war, to the brutal appetites of a feudal

and military caste by spreading among their own people a monstrous

belief in the divine right of the German race to oppress all the world.

The best of them, with extremely rare exceptions, have done nothing to

oppose this dangerous fanaticism and to maintain the nobler traditions

of German thought. Both instances therefore, ours and theirs—I mean

French and British intellectual history on one side, German later

intellectual history on the other side—sufficiently illustrate the power

of spiritual factors for good or for evil. The only thing to be deplored

in our case is that our Entente was so long deferred. Things would have

turned otherwise if our Entente had ripened somewhat earlier into a

closer association, gradually extending by a moral attraction to all

peace-loving nations. Had it been so who would have dared to attack them?

At least let the bitter lesson be turned to account for the future!

And chief of all let us think of the new chapter of our common history.

There is being written on the banks and hills of the Somme such a chapter

of our common history as will live eternally in the souls of Britons and

Frenchmen. Let the memory of it, added to all those I have recounted,

bind together in eternal alliance the hearts and the wills of the two

nations. Let it be known to all the world that this present alliance is

not like so many of the past a temporary combination of governments, but

the unanimous and for ever fixed will of both nations as the crowning

and _logical_ conclusion of their glorious history. Let this close and

intimate association include all our noble allies, and all such nations

as may be worthy to join it; let it become the Grand Alliance, the only

one really and completely deserving of this name, to which it will have

been reserved to establish, at last, the reign of Right and Peace on

earth.

GASTON E. BROCHE.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Caesar, _B.G._ vi. 13.

[2] Caesar, _B.G._ iv. 20.

[3] See _Histoire de France_ publiée sous la direction de Mr. Lavisse:

Tome IV. par A. Coville, Recteur de l’Académie de Clermont-Ferrand,

Professeur honoraire de l’Université de Lyon.

[4] Mignet, _Rivalité de François 1er et de Charles-Quint_, II ch. ix.

_OLD WAYS AT WESTMINSTER._

RECALLED BY SIR HENRY LUCY.

To the July number of CORNHILL I last year contributed an article gleaned

from the Recollections of an anonymous observer of the House of Commons

from the year 1830 to the close of the session of 1835. It contained a

series of thumb-nail personal sketches of eminent members long since gone

to ‘another place,’ leaving names that will live in English history. A

portion of the musty volume was devoted to descriptions of Parliamentary

surroundings and procedure interesting by comparison with those

established at the present day.

‘Q,’ as for brevity I name the unknown recorder, describes the old

House of Commons destroyed by fire in 1834 as dark, gloomy and badly

ventilated, so small that not more than 400 out of the 658 members could

be accommodated with any measure of comfort. In those days an important

debate was not unfrequently preceded by ‘a call of the House,’ which

brought together a full muster. On such occasions members were, ‘Q’ says,

‘literally crammed together,’ the heat of the House recalling accounts of

the then recent tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Immediately over

the entrance provided for members was the Strangers’ Gallery; underneath

it were several rows of seats for friends of members. This arrangement

exists in the new House. Admission to the Strangers’ Gallery was obtained

on presentation of a note or order from a member. Failing that, the

payment of half a crown to the doorkeeper at once procured admittance.

When the General Election of 1880 brought the Liberals into power,

parties in the House of Commons, in obedience to immemorial custom,

crossed over, changing sides. The Irish members, habitually associated

with British Liberals, having when in Opposition shared with them

the benches to the left of the Speaker, on this occasion declined to

change their quarters, a decision ever since observed. They were, they

said, free from allegiance to either political party and would remain

uninfluenced by their movements. This was noted at the time as a new

departure. Actually they were following a precedent established half a

century earlier.

In the closing sessions of the unreformed Parliament, a group of extreme

Radicals, including Hume, Cobbett and Roebuck, remained seated on the

Opposition Benches whichever party was in power. Prominent amongst them

was Hume, above all others most constant in attendance. He did not

quit his post even during the dinner hour. He filled his pockets with

fruit—pears by preference—and at approach of eight o’clock publicly ate

them.

In the old House of Commons a bench at the back of the Strangers’

Gallery was by special favour appropriated to the reporters. The papers

represented paid the doorkeepers a fee of three guineas a session. As

they numbered something over threescore this was a source of snug revenue

in supplement to the strangers’ tributary half-crown. Ladies were not

admitted to the Strangers’ Gallery. The only place whence they could

partly see, and imperfectly hear, what was going on was by looking down

through a large hole in the ceiling immediately above the principal

candle-stocked chandelier. This aperture was the principal means of

ventilating the House, and the ladies circled round it regardless of the

egress of vitiated air. Mr. Gladstone, who sat in the old House as member

for Newark, once told me that during progress with an important debate he

saw a fan fluttering down from the ceiling. It had dropped from the hand

of one of the ladies, who suddenly found herself in a semi-asphyxiated

condition. Something more than half a century later Mr. Gladstone was

unconsciously the object of attention from another group of ladies

indomitable in desire to hear an historic speech. On the night of the

introduction of the first Home Rule Bill there was overflowing demand for

seats in the Ladies’ Gallery. When accommodation was exhausted, the wife

of the First Commissioner of Works happily remembered that the floor of

the House is constructed of open iron network, over which a twine matting

is laid. These cover the elaborate machinery by which fresh air is

constantly let into the Chamber, escaping by apertures near the ceiling.

Standing or walking along the Iron Gallery that spans the vault, it is

quite easy to hear what is going on in the House. Here, on the invitation

of the First Commissioner’s wife, were seated a company of ladies who,

unseen, their presence unsuspected, heard every word of the Premier’s

epoch-making speech.

‘Q’ incidentally records details of procedure in marked contrast with

that of to-day. In these times, on the assembling of a newly elected

Parliament, the Oath is administered by the Clerk to members standing in

batches at small tables on the floor of the House. In the old Parliament,

members were sworn in by the Lord Steward of His Majesty’s Household.

At the same period a new Speaker being duly elected or re-elected was

led by the Mover and Seconder from his seat to the Bar, whence he was

escorted to the Chair. To-day he is conducted direct to the Chair.

When divisions were taken in Committee of the whole House, members did

not, as at present, go forth into separate lobbies. The ‘ayes’ ranged

themselves to the right of the Speaker’s Chair, the ‘noes’ to the left,

and were counted accordingly. The practice varied when the House was

fully constituted, the Speaker in the Chair and the Mace on the Table.

In such circumstances one only of the contending parties, the ‘ayes’ or

the ‘noes’ according to the nature of the business in question, quitted

the Chamber. The tellers first counted those remaining in the House, and

then, standing in the passage between the Bar and the door, counted the

others as they re-entered. The result of the division was announced in

the formula: ‘The ayes that went out are’ so many. ‘The noes who remained

are’ so many, or otherwise according to the disposition of the opposing

forces. A quorum then as now was forty, but when the House was in

Committee the presence of eight members sufficed. ‘Q’ makes no reference

to the use of a bell announcing divisions. But he mentions occasions on

which the Mace was sent to Westminster Hall, the Court of Request, or to

the several Committee Rooms to summon members to attend.

At the period of Parliamentary history of which ‘Q’ is the lively

chronicler, the ceremony of choosing a Speaker and obtaining Royal Assent

to the choice was identical with that first used on the occasion of Sir

Job Charlton’s election to the Chair in the time of Charles II. The title

of Speaker was bestowed because he alone had the right to speak to or

address the King in the name and on behalf of the House of Commons. Of

this privilege he customarily availed himself at considerable length. On

being summoned to the presence of the Sovereign in the House of Lords

he, in servile terms, begged to be excused from undertaking the duties

of Speaker, ‘which,’ he protested, ‘require greater abilities than I can

pretend to own.’ The Lord Chancellor, by direction of the Sovereign,

assured the modest man that ‘having very attentively heard your discreet

and handsome discourse,’ the King would not consent to refusal of the

Chair. Thereupon the Speaker-designate launched forth into a fresh,

even more ornate, address, claiming ‘renewal of the ancient privileges

of Your most loyal and dutiful House of Commons.’ Whereto His Majesty,

speaking again by the mouth of the Lord Chancellor, remarked, not without

a sense of humour, that ‘he hath heard and well weighed your short and

eloquent oration and in the first place much approves that you have

introduced a shorter way of speaking on these occasions.’

Up to 1883 the Speaker’s salary was, as it is to-day, £5000 a year. In

addition to his salary he received fees amounting to £2000 or £3000 per

session. On his election he was presented with 2000 ounces of plate,

£1000 of equipment money, two hogsheads of claret, £100 per annum for

stationery, and a stately residence in convenient contiguity to the

House. These little extras made the post worth at least £8000 per annum.

In the present and recent Parliament an ancient tradition is kept up by a

member for the City of London seating himself on the Treasury Bench. Two

members are privileged to take their places there, but after his election

for the City Mr. Arthur Balfour left Sir Frederick Banbury in sole

possession of the place. To-day, by the strange derangement of party ties

consequent on the war, the ex-Prime Minister has permanently shifted his

quarters to the Treasury Bench under the leadership of a Radical Premier.

In the first third of the nineteenth century the City of London returned

four members, who not only sat on the Treasury Bench on the opening day

of the new Parliament, but arrayed themselves in scarlet gowns. Sir

Frederick Banbury stopped short of acquiring that distinction.

During the first two sessions of the reformed Parliament the Commons met

at noon for the purpose of presenting petitions and transacting other

business of minor importance. These morning sittings, precursors of

others instituted by Disraeli and since abandoned, usually lasted till

three o’clock, the House then adjourning till five, when real business

was entered upon. Subsequently this arrangement was abandoned, the

Speaker taking the Chair at half-past three. Even then the first and

freshest hour and a half of the sitting were spent in the presentation of

petitions or in debate thereupon. The interval can be explained only upon

the assumption that the petitions were read verbatim.

In the Parliamentary procedure of to-day petitions play a part of ever

decreasing importance. Their presentation takes precedence of all other

business. But the member in charge of one is not permitted to stray

beyond briefest description of its prayer and a statement of the number

of signatories. Thereupon, by direction of the Speaker, he thrusts the

petition into a sack hanging to the left of the Speaker’s chair, and

there an end on’t. There is, it is true, a Committee of Petitions which

is supposed to examine every document. As far as practical purposes are

concerned, petitions might as well be dropped over the Terrace into the

Thames as into the mouth of the appointed sack.

At times of popular excitement round a vexed question—by preference

connected with the Church, the sale of liquor, or, before her ghost was

laid, marriage with the deceased wife’s sister—the flame systematically

fanned is kept burning by the presentation of monster petitions. Amid

ironical cheers these are carried in by two elderly messengers, who lay

them at the foot of the Table. Having been formally presented, they are,

amid renewed merriment, carried forth again and nothing more is heard of

them, unless the Committee on Petitions reports that there is suspicious

similarity in the handwriting of blocks of signatures, collected by an

energetic person remunerated by commission upon the aggregate number.

The most remarkable demonstration made in modern times happened during

the short life of the Parliament elected in 1892. Members coming down

in time for prayers discovered to their amazement the floor of the

House blocked with monster rolls, such as are seen in the street when

the repair of underground telegraph wires is in progress. The member to

whose personal care this trifle had been submitted rising to present

the petition, Mr. Labouchere, on a point of order, objected that sight

of him was blocked by the gigantic cylinders. ‘The hon. gentleman,’ he

suggested, ‘should mount one and address the Chair from the eminence.’

The suggestion was disregarded, and in time the elderly messengers put

their shoulders to wheels and rolled the monsters out of the House.

‘Q,’ whose eagle eye nothing escapes, comments on the preponderance of

bald heads among Ministers. Occupying an idle moment, he counted the

number of bald heads and found them to amount to one-third of the full

muster. ‘Taking the whole 658,’ he writes in one of his simple but

delightful asides, ‘I should think that perhaps a fourth part are more or

less baldheaded. The number of red heads,’ he adds, ‘is also remarkable.

I should think they are hardly less numerous than bald ones. When I come

to advert to individual members of distinction it cannot fail to strike

the reader how many are red-headed.’

This interesting inference is, if it be accepted as well-founded,

damaging to the status of the present House of Commons. I do not, on

reflection, recall a single member so decorated.

As to baldheadedness—which in the time of the prophet Elisha was

regarded as an undesirable eccentricity, public notice of which, it

will be remembered, condemned the commentators to severe disciplinary

punishment—it was, curiously enough, a marked peculiarity among members

of the House of Commons in an early decade of the nineteenth century. I

have a prized engraving presenting a view of the interior of the House of

Commons during the sessions of 1821-3. Glancing over the crowded benches,

I observe that the proportion of baldheaded men is at least equal to that

noted by ‘Q’ in the Parliament sitting a dozen years later.

What are known as scenes in the House were not infrequent in ‘Q’s’ time.

He recalls one in which an otherwise undistinguished member for Oxford,

one Hughes Hughes, was made the butt. It was a flash of the peculiar, not

always explicable, humour of the House of Commons, still upon occasion

predominant, to refuse a gentleman a hearing. ‘Hughes’s rising was the

signal for continuous uproar,’ ‘Q’ writes. ‘At repeated intervals a sort

of drone-like drumming, having the sound of a distant hand organ or

bagpipes, arose from the back benches. Coughing, sneezing and ingeniously

extended yawning blended with other sounds. A voice from the Ministerial

benches imitated very accurately the yelp of a kennelled hound.’

For ten minutes the double-barrelled Hughes faced the music, and when he

sat down not a word save the initial ‘Sir’ had been heard from his lips.

The nearest approach to this scene I remember happened in the last

session of the Parliament of 1868-74, when, amidst similar uproar,

Cavendish Bentinck, as one describing at the time the uproar wrote, ‘went

out behind the Speaker’s Chair and crowed thrice.’ This was the occasion

upon which Sir Charles Dilke made his Parliamentary début. In Committee

of Ways and Means he, in uncompromising fashion that grated on the ears

of loyalists, called attention to the Civil List of Queen Victoria and

moved a reduction. Auberon Herbert, now a staid Tory, at that time

suspected of a tendency towards Republicanism, undertook to second the

amendment. Sir Charles managed amid angry interruptions to work off his

speech. Herbert, following him, was met by a storm of resentment that

made his sentences inaudible.

After uproar had prevailed for a full quarter of an hour a shamefaced

member, anxious for the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments, called

attention to the presence of strangers. Forthwith, in accordance with the

regulation then in force, the galleries were cleared. As the occupants

of the Press Gallery reluctantly departed, they heard above the shouting

the sound of cock-crowing. Looking over the baluster they saw behind

the Chair Little Ben, as Cavendish Bentinck was called to distinguish

him from his bigger kinsman, vigorously engaged upon a vain effort to

preserve order by a passable imitation of Chanticleer saluting the happy

morn.

From ‘Q’s’ report of another outbreak of disorder it would appear that in

the House meeting in the ‘thirties of the nineteenth century, exchange of

personalities went far beyond modern experience. The once heated Maynooth

question was to the fore. In the course of an animated set-to between a

Mr. Shaw and Daniel O’Connell, the former shouted ‘The Hon. Member has

charged me with being actuated by spiritual ferocity. My ferocity is not

of the description which takes for its symbol a death’s head and cross

bones.’ O’Connell, as a certain fishwife locally famous for picturesque

language discovered, was hard to beat in the game of vituperation.

Turning upon Shaw, he retorted ‘Yours is a calf’s head and jaw bones.’

‘Q’ records that the retort was greeted with deafening cheers from the

Ministerial side where O’Connell and his party were seated. Mr. Shaw’s

polite, but perhaps inconsequential, remark had been received with equal

enthusiasm by the Opposition.

_AFTER THE BATTLE._

BY BENNET COPPLESTONE.

‘Caesar,’ said a Sub-lieutenant to his friend, a temporary Lieutenant

R.N.V.R., who at the outbreak of war had been a classical scholar at

Oxford, ‘you were in the thick of our scrap yonder off the Jutland coast.

You were in it every blessed minute with the battle cruisers, and must

have had a lovely time. Did you ever, Caesar, try to write the story of

it?’

It was early in June of last year, and a group of officers had gathered

near the ninth hole of an abominable golf course which they had

themselves laid out upon an island in the great landlocked bay wherein

reposed from their labours long lines of silent ships. It was a peaceful

scene. Few even of the battleships showed the scars of battle, though

among them were some which the Germans claimed to be at the bottom of the

sea. There they lay, coaled, their magazines refilled, ready at short

notice to issue forth with every eager man and boy standing at his action

station. And while all waited for the next call, officers went ashore,

keen, after the restrictions upon free exercise, to stretch their muscles

upon the infamous golf course. It was, I suppose, one of the very worst

courses in the world. There were no prepared tees, no fairway, no greens.

But there was much bare rock, great tufts of coarse grass greedy of

balls, wide stretches of hard, naked soil destructive of wooden clubs,

and holes cut here and there of approximately the regulation size. Few

officers of the Grand Fleet, except those in Beatty’s Salt of the Earth

squadrons, far to the south, had since the war began been privileged to

play upon more gracious courses. But the Sea Service, which takes the

rough with the smooth, with cheerful and profane philosophy, accepted the

home-made links as a spirited triumph of the handy-man over forbidding

nature.

‘Yes,’ said the naval volunteer, ‘I tried many times, but gave up all

attempts as hopeless. I came up here to get first-hand material, and

have sacrificed my short battle leave to no purpose. The more I learn

the more helplessly incapable I feel. I can describe the life of a ship,

and make you people move and speak like live things. But a battle is

too big for me. One might as well try to realise and set on paper the

Day of Judgment. All I did was to write a letter to an old friend, one

Copplestone, beseeching him to make clear to the people at home what we

really had done. I wrote it three days after the battle, but never sent

it. Here it is.’

Lieutenant Caesar drew a paper from his pocket and read as follows:

‘MY DEAR COPPLESTONE,—Picture to yourself our feelings. On

Wednesday we were in the fiery hell of the greatest naval

action ever fought. A real Battle of the Giants. Beatty’s and

Hood’s battle cruisers—chaffingly known as the Salt of the

Earth—and Evan Thomas’s squadron of four fast Queen Elizabeths

had fought for two hours the whole German High Seas Fleet.

Beatty, in spite of his heavy losses, had outmanœuvred Fritz’s

battle cruisers and enveloped the German line. The Fifth Battle

Squadron had stalled off the German Main Fleet, and led them

into the net of Jellicoe, who, coming up, deployed between Evan

Thomas and Beatty, though he could not see either, crossed the

T of the Germans in the beautifullest of beautiful manœuvres,

and had them for a moment as good as sunk. But the Lord giveth

and the Lord taketh away; it is sometimes difficult to say

Blessed be the Name of the Lord. For just when we most needed

full visibility the mist came down thick, the light failed, and

we were robbed of the fruits of victory when they were almost

in our hands. It was hard, hard, bitterly hard. But we had

done the utmost which the Fates permitted. The enemy, after

being harried all night by destroyers, had got away home in

torn rags, and we were left in supreme command of the North

Sea, a command more complete and unchallengeable than at any

moment since the war began. For Fritz had put out his full

strength, all his unknown cards were on the table, we knew

his strength and his weakness, and that he could not stand

for a moment against our concentrated power. All this we had

done, and rejoiced mightily. In the morning we picked up from

Poldhu the German wireless claiming the battle as a glorious

victory—at which we laughed loudly. But there was no laughter

when in the afternoon Poldhu sent out an official message from

our own Admiralty which, from its clumsy wording and apologetic

tone, seemed actually to suggest that we had had the devil of a

hiding. Then when we arrived at our bases came the newspapers

with their talk of immense losses, and of bungling, and of

the Grand Fleet’s failure! Oh, it was a monstrous shame! The

country which depends utterly upon us for life and honour, and

had trusted us utterly, had been struck to the heart. We had

come back glowing, exalted by the battle, full of admiration

for the skill of our leaders and for the serene intrepidity

of our men. We had seen our ships go down and pay the price

of sea command—pay it willingly and ungrudgingly as the Navy

always pays. Nothing that the enemy had done or could do was

able to hurt us, but we had been mortally wounded in the house

of our friends. It will take days, weeks, perhaps months, for

England and the world to be made to understand and to do us

justice. Do what you can, old man. Don’t delay a minute. Get

busy. You know the Navy, and love it with your whole soul.

Collect notes and diagrams from the scores of friends whom

you have in the Service; they will talk to you and tell you

everything. I can do little myself. A Naval Volunteer who

fought through the action in a turret, looking after a pair

of big guns, could not himself see anything outside his thick

steel walls. Go ahead at once, do knots, and the fighting Navy

will remember you in its prayers.’

The attention of others in the group had been drawn to the reader and his

letter, and when Lieutenant Caesar stopped, flushed and out of breath,

there came a chorus of approving laughter.

‘This temporary gentleman is quite a literary character,’ said a two-ring

Lieutenant who had been in an exposed spotting top throughout the whole

action, ‘but we’ve made a Navy man of him since he joined. That’s a

dashed good letter, and I hope you sent it.’

‘No,’ said Caesar. ‘While I was hesitating, wondering whether I would

risk the lightning of the Higher Powers, a possible court martial, and

the loss of my insecure wavy rings, the business was taken out of my

hands by this same man to whom I was wanting to write. He got moving on

his own account, and now, though the battle is only ten days old, the

country knows the rights of what we did. When it comes to describing the

battle itself, I make way for my betters. For what could I see? On the

afternoon of May 31, we were doing gun drill in my turret. Suddenly came

an order to put lyddite into the guns and follow the Control. During

the next two hours as the battle developed we saw nothing. We were just

parts of a big human machine intent upon working our own little bit with

faultless accuracy. There was no leisure to think of anything but the

job in hand. From beginning to end I had no suggestion of a thrill, for

a naval action in a turret is just gun drill glorified, as I suppose it

is meant to be. The enemy is not seen; even the explosions of the guns

are scarcely heard. I never took my ear-protectors from their case in

my pocket. All is quiet, organised labour, sometimes very hard labour

when for any reason one has to hoist the great shells by the hand

purchase. It is extraordinary to think that I got fifty times more actual

excitement out of a squadron regatta months ago than out of the greatest

battle in naval history.’

‘That’s quite true,’ said the Spotting Officer, ‘and quite to be

expected. Battleship fighting is not thrilling except for the very few.

For nine-tenths of the officers and men it is a quiet, almost dull

routine of exact duties. For some of us up in exposed positions in the

spotting tops or on the signal bridge, with big shells banging on the

armour or bursting alongside in the sea, it becomes mighty wetting and

very prayerful. For the still fewer, the real fighters of the ship in

the conning tower, it must be absorbingly interesting. But for the

true blazing rapture of battle one has to go to the destroyers. In a

battleship one lives like a gentleman until one is dead, and takes the

deuce of a lot of killing. In a destroyer one lives rather like a pig,

and one dies with extraordinary suddenness. Yet the destroyer officers

and men have their reward in a battle, for then they drink deep of the

wine of life. I would sooner any day take the risks of destroyer work,

tremendous though they are, just for the fun which one gets out of it.

It was great to see our boys round up Fritz’s little lot. While you

were in your turret, and the Sub. yonder in control of a side battery,

Fritz massed his destroyers like Prussian infantry and tried to rush up

close so as to strafe us with the torpedo. Before they could get fairly

going, our destroyers dashed at them, broke up their masses, buffeted and

hustled them about exactly like a pack of wolves worrying sheep, and with

exactly the same result. Fritz’s destroyers either clustered together

like sheep or scattered flying to the four winds. It was just the same

with the light cruisers as with the destroyers. Fritz could not stand

against us for a moment, and could not get away, for we had the heels of

him and the guns of him. There was a deadly slaughter of destroyers and

light cruisers going on while we were firing our heavy stuff over their

heads. Even if we had sunk no battle cruisers or battleships, the German

High Seas Fleet would have been crippled for months by the destruction of

its indispensable “cavalry screen.”’

As the Spotting Officer spoke, a Lieutenant-Commander holed out on the

last jungle with a mashie—no one uses a putter on the Grand Fleet’s

private golf course—and approached our group, who, while they talked,

were busy over a picnic lunch.

‘If you pigs haven’t finished all the bully beef and hard tack,’ said

he, ‘perhaps you can spare a bite for one of the blooming ’eroes of the X

Destroyer Flotilla.’ The speaker was about twenty-seven, in rude health,

and bore no sign of the nerve-racking strain through which he had passed

for eighteen long-drawn hours. The young Navy is as unconscious of nerves

as it is of indigestion. The Lieutenant-Commander, his hunger satisfied,

lighted a pipe and joined in the talk.

‘It was hot work,’ said he, ‘but great sport. We went in sixteen and

came out a round dozen. If Fritz had known his business, I ought to be

dead. He can shoot very well till he hears the shells screaming past his

ears, and then his nerves go. Funny thing how wrong we’ve been about

him. He is smart to look at, fights well in a crowd, but cracks when he

has to act on his own without orders. When we charged his destroyers

and ran right in he just crumpled to bits. We had a batch of him nicely

herded up, and were laying him out in detail with guns and mouldies, when

there came along a beastly intrusive Control Officer on a battle cruiser

and took him out of our mouths. It was a sweet shot, though. Someone—I

don’t know his name, or he would hear of his deuced interference from

me—plumped a salvo of twelve-inch common shell right into the brown of

Fritz’s huddled batch. Two or three of his destroyers went aloft in

scrap-iron, and half a dozen others were disabled. After the first hour

his destroyers and light cruisers ceased to be on the stage; they had

flown quadrivious—there’s an ormolu word for our classical volunteer—and

we could have a whack at the big ships. Later, at night, it was fine.

We ran right in upon Fritz’s after-guard of sound battleships and

rattled them most tremendous. He let fly at us with every bally gun he

had, from four-inch to fourteen, and we were a very pretty mark under

his searchlights. We ought to have been all laid out, but our loss was

astonishingly small, and we strafed two of his heavy ships. Most of his

shots went over us.’

‘Yes,’ called out the Spotting Officer, ‘yes, they did, and ricochetted

all round us in the Queen Elizabeths. There was the devil of a row. The

firing in the main action was nothing to it. All the while you were

charging, and our guns were masked for fear of hitting you, Fritz’s

bonbons were screaming over our upper works and making us say our prayers

out loud in the Spotting Tops. You’d have thought we were at church. I

was in the devil of a funk, and could hear my teeth rattling. It is when

one is fired on and can’t hit back that one thinks of one’s latter end.’

‘Did any of you see the _Queen Mary_ go?’ asked a tall thin man with the

three rings of a Commander. ‘Our little lot saw nothing of the first part

of the battle; we were with the K.G. Fives and Orions.’

‘I saw her,’ spoke a Gunnery Lieutenant, a small, quiet man with dreamy,

introspective eyes—the eyes of a poet turned gunner. ‘I saw her. She was

hit forward, and went in five seconds. You all know how. It was a thing

which won’t bear talking about. The _Invincible_ took a long time to

sink, and was still floating bottom up when Jellicoe’s little lot came

in to feed after we and the Salt of the Earth had eaten up most of the

dinner. I don’t believe that half the Grand Fleet fired a shot.’

There came a savage growl from officers of the main Battle Squadrons,

who, invited to a choice banquet, had seen it all cleared away before

their arrival. ‘That’s all very well,’ grumbled one of them; ‘the four

Q.E.s are getting a bit above themselves because they had the luck of

the fair. They didn’t fight the High Seas Fleet by their haughty selves

because they wanted to, you bet.’

The Gunnery Lieutenant with the dreamy eyes smiled. ‘We certainly

shouldn’t have chosen that day to fight them on. But if the _Queen

Elizabeth_ herself had been with us, and we had had full visibility—with

the horizon a hard dark line—we would have willingly taken on all Fritz’s

twelve-inch Dreadnoughts and thrown in his battle cruisers.’

‘That’s the worst of it,’ grumbled the Commander, very sore still at

having tasted only of the skim milk of the battle; ‘naval war is now only

a matter of machines. The men don’t count as they did in Nelson’s day.’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ remarked the Sub-Lieutenant; ‘may I say a word or two

about that? I have been thinking it out.’

There came a general laugh. The Sub-Lieutenant, twenty years of age,

small and dark and with the bright black eyes of his mother—a pretty

little lady from the Midi de la France whom his father had met and

married in Paris—did not look like a philosopher, but he had the

clear-thinking, logical mind of his mother’s people.

‘Think aloud, my son,’ said the Commander. ‘As a living incarnation

of l’Entente Cordiale, you are privileged above those others of the

gun-room.’

The light in the Sub’s eyes seemed to die out as his gaze turned inwards.

He spoke slowly, carefully, sometimes injecting a word from his mother’s

tongue which could better express his meaning. He looked all the while

towards the sea, and seemed scarcely to be conscious of an audience of

seniors. His last few sentences were spoken wholly in French.

‘No—naval war is a war of men, as it always was and always will be. For

what are the machines but the material expression of the souls of the

men? Our ships are better and faster than the German ships, our guns

heavier and more accurate than theirs, our gunners more deadly than

their gunners, because our Navy has the greater human soul. The Royal

Navy is not a collection of lifeless ships and guns imposed upon men

by some external power as the Kaiser sought to impose a fleet upon the

Germans, a nation of landsmen. The Navy is only a matter of machines

in so far as human beings can only achieve material ends by material

means. I look upon the ships and guns as secreted by the men just as a

tortoise secretes its shell. They are the products of naval thought,

and naval brains, and, above all, of that ever-expanding naval soul

(_l’esprit_) which has been growing for a thousand years. Our ships

yonder are materially new, the products almost of yesterday, but really

they are old, centuries old; they are the expression of a naval soul

working, fermenting, always growing through the centuries, always seeking

to express itself in machinery. Naval war is an art, the art of men, and

where in the world will one find men like ours, officers like ours? Have

you ever thought whence come those qualities which one sees glowing every

day in our men, from the highest Admiral to the smallest ship boy—have

you ever thought whence they come?’

He paused, still looking out to sea. His companions, all of them his

superiors in rank and experience, stared at him in astonishment, and one

or two laughed. But the Commander signalled for silence. ‘Et après,’

he asked quietly; ‘d’où viennent ces qualités?’ Unconsciously he had

sloughed the current naval slang and spoke in the native language of the

Sub.

The effect was not what he had expected. At the sound of the Commander’s

voice speaking in French the Sub-Lieutenant woke up, flushed, and

instantly reverted to his English self. ‘I am sorry, sir. I got speaking

French, in which I always think, and when I talk French I talk the most

frightful rot.’

‘I am not so sure that it was rot. Your theory seems to be that we are,

in the naval sense, the heirs of the ages, and that no nation that has

not been through our centuries-old mill can hope to stand against us. I

hope that you are right. It is a comforting theory.’

‘But isn’t that what we all think, sir, though we may not put it quite

that way? Most of us know that our officers and men are of unapproachable

stuff in body and mind, but we don’t seek for a reason. We accept it as

an axiom. I’ve tried to reason the thing out because I’m half French;

and also because I’ve been brought up among dogs and horses and believe

thoroughly in heredity. It’s all a matter of breeding.’

‘The Sub’s right,’ broke in the Gunnery Lieutenant with the poet’s eyes;

‘though a Sub who six months ago was a snotty has no business to think

of anything outside his duty. The Service would go to the devil if the

gun-room began to talk psychology. We excuse it in this Sub here for the

sake of the Entente Cordiale, of which he is the living embodiment; but

had any other jawed at us in that style I would have sat upon his head.

Of course he is right, though it isn’t our English way to see through

things and define them as the French do. No race on earth can touch us

for horses or dogs or prize cattle—or Navy men. It takes centuries to

breed the boys who ran submarines through the Dardanelles and the Sound

and stayed out in narrow enemy waters for weeks together. Brains and

nerves and sea skill can’t be made to order even by a German Kaiser. Navy

men should marry young and choose their women from sea families, and

then their kids won’t need to be taught. They’ll have the secret of the

Service in their blood.’

‘That’s all very fine,’ observed a Marine Lieutenant reflectively; ‘but

who is going to pay for it all? We can’t. I get 7_s._ 6_d._ a day, and

shall have 11_s._ in a year or two; it sounds handsome, but would hardly

run to a family. Few in the Navy have any private money, so how can we

marry early?’

‘Of course we can’t as things go now,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant.

‘But some day even the Admiralty will discover that the English Navy

will become a mere list of useless machines unless the English naval

families can be kept up on the lower deck as well as in the ward-room

and gun-room. Why, look at the names of our submarine officers whenever

they get into the papers for honours. They are always salt of the sea,

names which have been in the Navy List ever since there was a List. You

may read the same names in the Trafalgar roll and back to the Dutch

wars. Most of us were Pongos before that—shore Pongos who went afloat

with Blake or Prince Rupert—but then we became sailors, and so remained,

father to son. I can only go back myself to the Glorious First of June,

but some of us here in the Grand Fleet date from the Stuarts at least. It

is jolly fine to be of Navy blood, but not all plum jam. One has such

a devil of a record to live up to. In my term at Dartmouth there was a

poor little beast called Francis Drake—a real Devon Drake, a genuine

antique—but what a load of a name to carry! Thank God, my humble name

doesn’t shine out of the history books. And as with the officers, so with

the seamen. Half of them come from my own county of Devon—the cradle

of the Navy. They are in the direct line from Drake’s buccaneers. Most

of the others come from the ancient maritime counties of the Channel

seaboard, where the blood of everyone tingles with Navy salt. The Germans

can build ships which are more or less accurate copies of our own, but

they can’t breed the men. That is the whole secret.’

The Lieutenant-Commander, whose war-scarred destroyer lay below

refitting, laughed gently. ‘There is a lot in all that, more than we

often realise when we grumble at the cursed obstinacy of our old ratings,

but even you do not go back far enough. It is the old blood of the

Vikings and sea-pirates in us English which makes us turn to the sea;

the rest is training. In no other way can you explain the success of the

Fringes, the mine-sweepers, and patrols, most of them manned by naval

volunteers who, before the war, had never served under the White Ensign

nor seen a shot fired. What is our classical scholar here, Caesar, but a

naval volunteer whom Whale Island and natural intelligence have turned

into a gunner? But as regards the regular Navy, the Navy of the Grand

Fleet, you are right. Pick your boys from the sea families, catch them

young, pump them full to the teeth with the Navy Spirit—_l’esprit marine_

of our bi-lingual Sub here—make them drunk with it. Then they are all

right. But they must never be allowed to think of a darned thing except

of the job in hand. The Navy has no use for men who seek to peer into

their own souls. They might do it in action and discover blue funk. We

want them to be no more conscious of their souls than of their livers.

Though I admit that it is devilish difficult to forget one’s liver when

one has been cooped up in a destroyer for a week. It is not nerve that

Fritz lacks so much as a kindly obedient liver. He is an iron-gutted

swine, and that is partly why he can’t run destroyers and submarines

against us. The German liver is a thing to wonder at. Do you know—’ but

here the Lieutenant-Commander became too Rabelaisian for my delicate pen.

The group had thinned out during this exercise in naval analysis. Several

of the officers had resumed their heart-and-club-breaking struggle with

the villainous golf course, but the Sub, the volunteer Lieutenant, and

the Pongo (Marine) still sat at the feet of their seniors. ‘May I say how

the Navy strikes an outsider like me?’ asked Caesar diffidently. Whale

Island, which had forgotten all other Latin authors, had given him the

name as appropriate to one of his learning.

‘Go ahead,’ said the Commander generously. ‘All this stuff is useful

enough for a volunteer; without the Pongos and the Volunteers to swallow

our tall stories, the Navy would fail of an audience. The snotties know

too much.’

‘I was going to speak of the snotties,’ said Caesar, ‘who seem to me to

be even more typical of the Service than the senior officers. They have

all its qualities emphasised, almost comically exaggerated. I do not know

whether they are never young or that they never grow old, but there is no

essential difference in age and in knowledge between a snotty six months

out of cadet training and a Commander of six years’ standing. They rag

after dinner with equal zest, and seem to be equally well versed in the

profound technical details of their sea work. Perhaps it is that they are

born full of knowledge. The snotties interest me beyond every type that I

have met. Their manners are perfect and in startling contrast with those

of the average public school boy of fifteen or sixteen—even in College

at Winchester—and they combine their real irresponsible youthfulness

with a grave mask of professional learning which is delightful to look

upon. I have before me the vision of a child of fifteen with tousled

yellow hair and a face as glum as a sea-boot, sitting opposite to me in

the machine which took us back one day to the boat, smoking a “fag” with

the clumsiness which betrayed his lack of practice, in between bites of

“goo” (in this instance Turkish Delight), of which I had seen him consume

a pound. He looked about ten years old, and in a husky, congested voice,

due to the continual absorption of sticky food, he described minutely to

me the method of conning a battleship in manœuvres and the correct amount

to allow for the inertia of the ship when the helm is centred; he also

explained the tactical handling of a squadron during sub-calibre firing.

That snotty was a sheer joy, and the Navy is full of him. He’s gone

himself, poor little chap—blown to bits by a shell which penetrated the

deck.’

‘In time, Caesar,’ said the Commander, ‘by strict attention to duty you

will become a Navy man. But we have talked enough of deep mysteries. It

was that confounded Sub, with his French imagination, who started us.

What I really wish someone would tell me is this: what was the “northern

enterprise” that Fritz was on when we chipped in and spoilt his little

game?’

‘It does not matter,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘We spoilt it, anyhow.

The dear old newspapers talk of his losses in big ships as if they were

all that counted. What has really crippled him has been the wiping out of

his destroyers and fast new cruisers. Without them he is helpless. It was

a great battle, much more decisive than most people think, even in the

Grand Fleet itself. It was as decisive by sea as the Marne was by land.

We have destroyed Fritz’s mobility.’

The men rose and looked out over the bay. There below them lay their

sea homes, serene, invulnerable, and about them stretched the dull,

dour, treeless landscape of their northern fastness. Their minds were

as peaceful as the scene. As they looked a bright light from the

compass platform of one of the battleships began to flicker through the

sunshine—dash, dot, dot, dash. ‘There goes a signal,’ said the Commander.

‘You are great at Morse, Pongo. Read what it says, my son.’

The Lieutenant of Marines watched the flashes, and as he read grinned

capaciously. ‘It is some wag with a signal lantern.’ said he. ‘It reads:

Question—Daddy,—what—did—you—do—in—the—Great—War?’

‘I wonder,’ observed the Sub-Lieutenant, ‘what new answer the lower deck

has found to that question. Before the battle their reply was: “I was

kept doubling round the decks, sonny.”’

‘There goes the signal again,’ said the Pongo; ‘and here comes the

answer.’ He read it out slowly as it flashed word after word: ‘“I LAID

THE GUNS TRUE, SONNY.”’

‘And a dashed good answer, too,’ cried the Commander heartily.

‘That would make a grand fleet signal before a general action,’ remarked

the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘I don’t care much for Nelson’s Trafalgar signal.

It was too high-flown and sentimental for the lower deck. It was aimed at

the history books, rather than at old tarry-breeks of the fleet a hundred

years ago. No—there could not be a better signal than just “Lay the Guns

True”—carry out your orders precisely, intelligently, faultlessly. What

do you say, my Hun of a classical volunteer?’

‘It could not be bettered,’ said Caesar.

‘I will make a note of it,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant, ‘against the day

when, as a future Jellicoe, I myself shall lead a new Grand Fleet into

action.’

_L’ILE NANCE._

BY ROWLAND CRAGG.

Nance was a tomboy, or whatever may be the equivalent of this type in the

doggy world, and she looked it. An ungainly body, clad in a rough coat of

silver and grey on a foundation of brown, carried a head that appeared

ill-shaped because of the unusual width of skull. Over her forehead

continually straggled a tangle of hairs that mixed with others growing

stiffly above her snout, and through this cover were to be seen two

pearly eyes that were wondrously bright and intelligent. She had a trick,

too, of tossing her head in a manner suggestive of nothing so much as a

girl throwing back the curls from face and shoulders, and it seemed to

emphasise the tomboy in Nance. But she had sterling qualities, of which

her broad skull and quick eyes gave more than a hint. If ungainly, her

little body was untiring and as supple as a whiplash, and her legs were

as finely tempered steel springs. She had, too, a rare turn of speed, and

it was the combination of these gifts with her remarkable intelligence

that in later days made her the most noted dog in Craven.

Her puppyhood was unpromising. Indeed, for one born on a farm, where

is lack neither of shelter nor food, her earliest hours were doubly

perilous, for, in addition to the prospect of a watery grave in a bucket,

her existence, and that of the whole litter, was threatened by negligent

nursing. Fate had given the little family a mother not only herself

young, but of all dogs that ever worked on a farm the most irresponsible.

It was quite in keeping with her reputation that Lucy should bring her

children to birth in the exposed hollow trunk of a tree and then forget

the blind, sprawling, whimpering puppies for hours together. It was going

hard with the weaklings when fate again took a hand in their welfare,

this time in the person of young Zub.

It had become evident to the farm folk, to whom matters of birth and

reproduction are commonplaces of daily life, that Lucy’s new duties had

come upon her, and it was plainly evident, too, before the third day had

run, that she was neglecting them. It was then that young Zub, or Zubdil,

as he was indifferently called, either name serving to distinguish him

from Owd Zub, his father, actively bestirred himself. Hitherto he had

done no more than keep his eyes and ears open as he moved about the

farm buildings, but neither soft whimper nor the sound of tender noses

nuzzling against a warm body had rewarded him. His first deliberate

efforts were to watch Lucy’s comings and goings, in the hope of tracing

her hiding-place. But the mother dog, a poacher at heart and with all a

four-footed poacher’s cunning, had easily beaten him at this game. When

he recognised this, angry at the thought that somewhere a small family

was suffering, he soundly cuffed her about the ears in the hope that she

would bolt for her hiding-place and her blind charges. But the graceless

one, howling, raced no further than to her kennel, and from its depths

kept one watchful eye open for further developments.

‘Drat thee,’ cried Zubdil, as his experiment went wrong, ‘but I’ll find

’em yet.’ He turned and slowly entered the kitchen, where Owd Zub was

quietly chuckling to himself.

‘Shoo’s bested thee, reight an’ all, this time,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t thy

books tell thee owt?’

It was a thrust he was fond of making. Zubdil’s strongly developed taste

for reading was something beyond the old farmer’s understanding. He would

have given but occasional heed to it had not the younger man taken up

works on scientific farming and breeding, and also studied these subjects

in a course of postal lessons with the Agricultural Department at the

Northern University. New ideas thus acquired often clashed with the

father’s ingrained conservative methods, and they left him sore. A chance

to get in a sly dig at this ‘book larning’ was too good to be missed. He

chuckled again as he asked the question.

The younger man laughed. He was broadening in more ways than one, and he

bore no malice. ‘Happen they do,’ he said. ‘Yo just watch, fayther, an’

happen yo’ll leearn summat.’

He reached up to the blackened oak beam that spanned the ceiling, took

down his gun, and strolled casually out across the yard. In a moment

Lucy had tumultuously burst out of the kennel and was dancing about him,

all animation and keenness. Graceless she might be, and lacking in the

discharge of her mothering duties, but heart and soul she was a lover

of sport. At the sight of the gun she was in transports. Unheeding her,

young Zub passed on through the gate. Wriggling through ere it closed,

Lucy was after him and away in front of him like a streak, making

river-wards. There, as well she knew, were the plumpest rabbits. When

the old dalesman, his curiosity whetted, reached a point where he could

see without being seen, the two were ranging the low field where runs

the Wharfe. Steadily they passed along through Dub End and into Lang

Pasture, the gun still hooked in the curl of the man’s arm, then as they

came through the field gate together into the High Garth Lucy’s tail

suddenly drooped. She hesitated, turned about in indecision, and finally,

disregarding the sharp whistle calling her to heel, slid off up the hill

under the wall-side and vanished by the riven oak.

‘Dang it,’ said Owd Zub, greatly interested, and understanding, ‘I owt to

ha’ knawn shoo’d ha’ gooan to ’em if they came owt near ’em.’

By the time he arrived on the spot, and he walked across the field with a

great show of carelessness, Zubdil had the whimpering youngsters on the

grass and was examining them. Couched near by, her tail going in great

pride, Lucy was mothering each one as it was laid down again.

‘They’re a poor lot,’ said the elder man, eyeing them critically, and

discreetly making no reference to the finding of them; ‘put ’em ivvery

one i’ t’ pail.’

Zubdil did not reply immediately. He was watching one puppy, more

vigorous than any of the rest, trying to prop itself up on its forelegs.

Its sightless eyes were turned towards him, its tiny nostrils were

working, and there was a decided quiver—it was an immature wagging—in its

wisp of a tail. He picked it up again. A tiny patch of red slid out and

licked his hand, and there were faint noises that brought Lucy’s ears to

the prick. Zubdil laughed.

‘Sitha for pluck, fayther,’ he cried. ‘This is best o’ t’ lot. I’se

keeping this for mysen.’

‘Thou’ll drown t’ lot,’ said his father, sharply. ‘We’ve dogs enough on

t’ farm. Besides, they’re hawf deead.’

They are sparing of speech, these Craven dalesmen, but their words are

ever to the point. They have also a stiff measure of obstinacy in their

constitution, as have all men whose forebears for generations have lived

and died amid the everlasting hills. Obstinacy now showed in the younger

man. He put the youngster down beside the mother dog, gathered up the

others into a bag that he took from his capacious pocket, and rose. Lucy

was up in an instant, ears cocked. Zubdil checked her sternly.

‘Lig thee theer,’ he ordered, and she resumed her nursing under

constraint. Young Zub turned to the elder.

‘I’se keeping it,’ he announced, briefly.

The other knew that tone, and gave in. ‘Well,’ grudgingly, ‘I’se heving

nowt to do wi’ it, then. An’ if theer’s another licence to get, tha pays

for it thysen.’

So the pup was spared, and she flourished and grew apace. Nance, he

called her, after one from a neighbouring farm, thoughts of whom had been

occupying his mind a good deal of late. He ventured to tell her what he

had done when one evening, by chance that had been occurring frequently

of late, he met her by the old bridge. The girl reddened with pleasure at

the implied compliment, giggled a little, and gave him a playful nudge

with her elbow. It was a nudge that would have upset many a city-bred

man. ‘Thou’s a silly fond fellow,’ she said, but there was no reproach

in her words. Rather was it that in turn he was pleased. It was a little

incident that marked a distinct advance in their relations.

It was also an incident that led young Zub to take more interest in

the dog’s welfare than otherwise he might have done. Dimly floating

at the back of his mind, tinged with romance, was the idea that the

four-footed Nance ought to be worthy of the name she bore. It led him

to take her education in hand seriously, and to the task he brought all

his fieldcraft, his native shrewdness, and his great patience. He began

early, when she was not yet half grown and still a playful puppy; but,

early as he was, someone was before him. Whatever her demerits as a

mother, Lucy excelled in woodcraft and the art of the chase. She had the

soul of an artist for it, which was perhaps why, as an ordinary working

farm dog, she was an indifferent success. And what she knew she taught

her daughter, taking the young one with her as soon as Nance was strong

enough to stand these excursions. Their favourite time was dawn of day,

and their hunting-ground the woods that mantled the breast of the moors

high above the farm, or the sandy stretches along Wharfe side, where fat

rabbits were abundant. Nance was an apt pupil. She learned to stalk, to

obliterate herself behind seemingly inadequate cover, to crawl almost

without action visible to the eye, and her instinct for choosing the

moment for the final fatal rush was not bettered even in the older dog.

Thus it happened that when Zubdil took up her training the ground had

been prepared for him better than ever he knew. Yet he began his task

opportunely, for Nance was at the parting of the ways. Lucy was a clever

dog, but her best and finest qualities, neglected through want of

recognition, had deteriorated until she was now no more than a cunning

hunter. The little dog—l’ile Nance she was to everybody—inherited all her

mother’s cleverness, and, happily for her, Zubdil took her in hand while

yet she was in her plastic, impressionable days. He made her his constant

companion. If he went no further than the length of the field to fasten

up the chickens safe from the predatory fox, he called her to accompany

him. If he went on to the moor, or to the village, or to a neighbouring

farm, she was with him. And she was taught to do strange things.

Sometimes she was sent chasing round a field and brought back to heel in

zigzag tracings. At other times she was bidden to crouch by a gate and to

stir not at all until his return. Sometimes she was sent ahead at full

gallop and then made to stop dead and lie prone, when he would overtake

and pass her, man and dog alike apparently unconscious of each other’s

presence, save for the way in which those pearly eyes of hers watched his

every movement.

It was all done with no more language than can be conveyed in a whistle.

But expressive! With his ash stick tucked under one arm Zubdil would

thrust the better part, as it seemed, of both hands into his mouth,

whence would proceed now a single piercing call, now a prolonged

high-pitched note, now a series of staccato commands, and ever and again

fluty modulations as if a blackbird had joined in the business. And every

note had a definite meaning. It was a great game for Nance, who at these

times was nothing more than two bright eyes and a pair of ever-working

ears. She strove to please and worked hard, and when it dawned upon the

deliberately moving mind of the young dalesman that he had a dog of

unusual parts it stimulated him to greater efforts. It also stimulated

him to secrecy, though why he could not have explained.

He gave her experience in the rounding-up of the half-wild, hardy,

half-bred sheep on the moorlands, and here she learned to work dumbly,

without yielding to the temptation to nip the flying legs of the nervous

fleeces. It was on these uplands, too, that he received his first meed

of praise, and it fired the smouldering pride in his heart and lifted

him out of the ordinary workaday rut. For it gave him an idea. It was

dipping-time, when the moors had to be thoroughly scoured for the sheep,

and from a dozen farms in the dale below men had gathered together to

co-operate in the work. With them came their dogs; dogs that barked and

fought, dogs that raced hither and thither irresolutely trying to obey

the many and confusing whistlings, doing their best to please all and

giving satisfaction to none. Young Zub stood on a knoll a little apart,

and at his bidding a silver and grey-brown form flashed among the bracken

and the ling, sometimes buried from sight, at times only the tips of

pricked ears visible, but always making a wider and further stretching

circle than the others. And wherever Nance ranged sheep came into view

and were deftly piloted to the common gathering-ground.

It was Long Abram who first recognised what she was doing.

‘That theer young dog o’ thy lad’s is doing weel,’ he said, turning to

Owd Zub. ‘It’ll mak a rare ’un i’ time.’

It was luncheon-time, and the men had halted in their work to discuss the

contents of the baskets that had been sent up from the farms. Owd Zub

helped himself to another piece of cold apple pie before answering.

‘It’s a gooid dog nah,’ he said presently, speaking with deliberation,

‘if t’ lad doesn’t get it ower fond.’

‘Ower fond?’ It was Nance the woman who spoke. She had brought up her

father’s luncheon and was sitting near at hand. There was a sparkle in

her eye, and her resolute little chin was thrust forth aggressively.

‘Ower fond,’ she repeated, scornfully. ‘Some o’ yo think us younger end

can’t do owt reight. Why, Zubdil’s trained that dog reight, an’ all. It’s

good enough for t’ trials.’

The men laughed good-humouredly. The girl’s relations with Zubdil were

now well established and recognised, and her quick intervention was to be

expected. But good enough for the trials—well, working it on the moors

was one thing, but to direct an inexperienced dog on an enclosed field

under the eyes of a crowd, and in competition with some of the best and

most experienced trial working animals, was another matter altogether.

They laughed at the girl’s warmth, and let it go at that. But young Zub,

happening to walk past at the time while counting up the sheep, heard the

words. They quickened him and gave birth to the idea, while Long Abram’s

praise, which, if brief, went a long way, emboldened him. He thought

deeply, but kept his counsel; not even to Nance did he open his mind for

some time. But he worked the young dog even more regularly and watched

her keenly. Then one day he wrote a letter, and the girl, face flushed,

looked on.

A few weeks later the two, with Owd Zub, were units in the crowd that had

gathered in a large field in a village some miles higher up the dale.

It was the dale’s annual agricultural show and gala day, and all the

farming community that could toddle, walk, or ride, to say nothing of

visitors, had converged upon the spacious pasture. On the back of the

right hand of each and all of them was an impression in purple ink; it

was the pass-out check, imprinted upon each one with a rubber date stamp

by a stalwart, red-faced policeman, who stood guard at the gate. They

have little use for gloves, these folk of the Craven dales.

The three, with l’ile Nance stretched at ease at their feet, stood

somewhat apart from the crowd. Owd Zub was uneasy and a trifle wrathful,

and also, having already paid several visits to the refreshment booth,

inclined to be querulous. Not until that morning, as they were packing

into the farm gig, had he learned that l’ile Nance had been entered for

the sheep-dog trials. For years these trials had been the feature of the

show, and they attracted good dogs, and knowing this, and being convinced

that the little dog would not shine against such opponents, he was sore.

Deep down in his heart he was proud of his son, and he did not relish

seeing him beaten before his fellows of the dale.

‘What chance hes shoo?’ he growled. ‘Theer’s lots o’ first-class dogs

here. There’s Tim Feather wi’ his, ’at’s run i’ theease trials for t’

past six year. An’ theer’s Ike Thorpe, thro’t’ Lancashire side. He’s

ta’en t’ first prize here this last two year. He’s owd hand at t’ game,

an’ soa is his dog.’

‘Well,’ said his son, ‘if he wins it ageean he can hev it.’

He spoke somewhat abstractedly. The trials had already begun, and he was

more intent on watching his rivals and in familiarising himself with

the course than in listening to the elder man. It was a long field and

of good breadth, so that there was plenty of room for the sheep to run.

Along the farther side, close to the bank of the river, were three sets

of upright posts, like goal-posts, but lacking the net and cross-bar.

Through these the sheep had to be driven, and whilst this was being

done the owner of the dog had to stay near the judges; he was, in fact,

looped to a rope attached to a stake to prevent him, in his eagerness,

going to the assistance of his animal. As a consequence, all his commands

had to be given in whistles or by word of mouth. Near the head of the

enclosure was the second set of obstacles—a cross-road made of hurdles.

The sheep had to be piloted through each road and then driven to a little

hurdle enclosure and penned there. The competing owners were allowed to

drop their rope and go to the help of their dogs at the cross-roads and

the pen, and the winning dog was the one that penned the sheep in the

shortest time with the fewest mistakes.

Young Zub was the last to compete, and so far the best performance had

been done by Ike’s dog, which had penned its three allotted sheep in

fine style in nine-and-a-half minutes. As the young farmer looped the

rope about his arm he took stock of his three sheep, held by as many

perspiring attendants at the far end of the enclosure. They were fresh

from the moors that morning, and their fear and wildness were manifest.

Zubdil saw that there would be trouble if once they broke away, but he

was cool and unflurried as he nodded to the time-keeper to indicate that

he was ready.

‘Time,’ said that official, and dropped a white handkerchief. It was

the signal for the men to let go the sheep, which, once released, ran

a little way, and then began to nibble the rich luscious grass. It was

grand fare for them after what the moors had provided. At the same

instant Zubdil waved his stick. As if galvanised into life, Nance, who

had been stretched lazily at his feet snapping at the flies, shot up the

field like an arrow from a bow. Young Zub, straining hard at the rope,

his fingers in his mouth, watched her every stride, judging both pace

and distance. A moment later a shrill whistle, a long-drawn-out rising

cadence, went up, and with one ear cocked by way of reply the young dog

closed in on the rear of the nibbling sheep. They threw up their heads

and broke towards the river in a swift rush. A series of sharp notes

stabbed the air, and l’ile Nance, belly flat almost, such was her speed,

swung round them and headed them off. Back they came in a huddled group

to the very mouth of the first lot of posts. For a second they hesitated,

uncertain where to run, but Nance was coming up on their rear and they

broke through. Hard on their heels she followed, swinging now right,

now left, as one or other made as if to burst away, and so skilful her

piloting that she took them straight away through the second line of

posts at the run. A loud cheer went up from the onlookers; it was a neat

bit of work. But not a man but knew that things were going too well; it

is not in the nature of driven sheep to keep the proper course for long

together.

True to their traditions of stupidity and contrariness, they broke away

fan-wise when nearing the last posts. Zubdil, straining on loop until

he was drawn sideways, sent out clear, quick calls, a Morse code of

commands. Nance was as if making circles on her two near legs. With

ears laid flush, body stretching and closing like a rubber cord, she

flashed round the heads of the straying ones, collected them and hustled

them through the posts at panic speed. Once again that rising note rang

out, and in response she swept them round in a wide circle towards the

cross-roads. This was the danger point, for the hurdles stood close to

the ring of spectators, and here, if anywhere, the sheep were most likely

to bolt out of hand.

What happened was the unexpected. A fussy fox-terrier, excited by the

tumult and its nerves snapping at the sight of the racing sheep, broke

loose from its owner and, open-mouthed and noisy, sprang in to take a

hand. It caught the nearest sheep and nipped its leg. A roar of anger

went up; an interruption like this was against all tradition. Young

Zub, who was racing across the field to join l’ile Nance, rapped out an

excusable ‘damn,’ and half a dozen farmers on the edge of the ring loudly

expressed a wish to break the neck of the terrier, and to ‘belt’ the

careless owner of that animal. On the slope above the crowd Owd Zub was

dancing with rage.

‘They done it a’ purpose,’ he roared, his voice booming above the din.

‘Sumbody’s done it a’ purpose. They knawed t’ l’ile dog ’ud win. We’ll

hev another trial. We’ll tak all t’ dogs i’ England an’ back wer own for

a ten-pun noat. We’ll hev another trial.’

In deep wrath he was making his way to the enclosure, one hand fumbling

meanwhile to get into the pocket where lay his old-fashioned purse,

securely tied and buttoned up, when a hand gripped him firmly. Another,

equally decided in its action, closed over his mouth.

‘Ho’d thi din,’ cried Nance, for it was she. ‘It’s all reight. Sitha,

look at t’ l’ile dog nah. Well done, Zubdil.’

It was all over in a moment, but it was a stirring moment. L’ile Nance

had dealt with the intruder. Taking it in her stride, she had seized the

terrier by the back of the neck, flung it from her with a toss of her

head, and was about her business. She and her master had to deal with a

serious situation, for one sheep, in mad panic at the terrier’s attack

and at the feel of its teeth in her leg, had bolted blindly through the

crowd, clearing the fence in one fine leap. A silver-and-grey streak

flew through the opening thus made, and in a second both dog and sheep

were swallowed up among the onlookers. Zub, down on his knees the better

to see through the legs of the huddled spectators, was whistling until

he was well-nigh black in the face, but he never lost his head. His

calls were wonderful, articulate almost. They were thrilling, short, but

infinitely encouraging and coaxing. Many a man would have deeply cursed

his dog; every ounce of Zubdil went into encouraging the little animal.

‘Over, over, over,’ said the whistles, as plainly as could be, and at

the moment that the other Nance on the slope had stayed the wrathful old

farmer, her four-footed namesake came back over the fence in the rear of

the missing sheep.

The prodigal, bearing down upon its fellows, who had stopped to graze the

moment they found they were not being harried, alarmed them, and they

fled. By good luck they bore down straight upon the cross-road hurdles.

With Zubdil on one flank, l’ile Nance on the other, there was no escape,

and they bolted straight through. All the precious seconds lost by the

incident of the fox-terrier were thus won back, with more to them. Nance

awaited the panting fleeces at the exit, and with her tongue lolling,

and her bright eyes just visible through the tangled fringe of hair, she

appeared to be grinning them a welcome. The sheep spun round to avoid

her, and were brought up opposite the second entrance by the long form of

the young farmer. His arms were swaying, gently, unhurriedly, waving them

into the entrance. There was need now of patience and tact, for seconds

were becoming precious, and an over-alarmed sheep is a—mule. He whistled

softly with pursed lips while yet they hesitated what to do. Nance sank

prone.

Save that there was a dark patch against the green of the grass, she

had disappeared. Without any visible movement the patch drew nearer

the hesitating sheep. It was pretty work, and the crowd marked their

admiration by their dead silence. The sheep sighted the dog, backed round

to face her, and crowded with their hind-quarters against the hurdle.

Zubdil was silent, motionless, save for the slow movement of his arms.

Nance slid a little nearer, nearer yet. The sheep crowded further back

against the opening. She was not now a yard away. Suddenly she sat up

and panted hard. One of the animals, turning sharply to escape, found an

opening, pushed along it in dread haste. The other two struggled for next

place, and the cross-roads were won.

Again was l’ile Nance there to meet them as they gained the open, and

collecting them smartly she raced them off towards the pen. They broke

away, but their wild rush ended in their being brought up exactly against

the opening of the pen. Zubdil was there, too, his arms going like the

sails of a windmill on an almost breezeless day. They pushed past the

opening, and Nance rose up out of the grass to greet them. They spun

about and raced off, but in a trice she was doing trick running about

their heads and flanks, and when they stopped for breath the mouth of

the pen was again before them. Zubdil drew a cautious step nearer, arms

outspread, his lips puckered. Just wide of him a pair of ears pricked up

above the grass. There was a moment’s hesitation; one of the sheep poked

its head through the mouth of the pen. Nance glided a little nearer, and

the other two animals crowded against the first. Another step into the

pen; the dog was only a yard away. There was a flurried movement about

the opening. L’ile Nance sat up and lolled out a red tongue. She appeared

to be laughing. There was a crush, a scramble, the sheep burst in, and

Nance slid across the opening, lay down, and fixed her pearly eyes on her

master. What wonder if she appeared to be grinning cheerfully?

Before the cheering had subsided, a stolid-faced judge stepped towards

Zubdil. The pink rosette which denoted the first prize was in his hand,

and at the sight of it there was more cheering. The other Nance on the

slope clutched the arm of Owd Zub. For his part he was smiling broadly,

and ecstatically slapping his leggings hard with his ash stick.

‘Nine-an’-a-quarter minutes,’ said the judge, handing the rosette to the

young farmer. ‘By gum, but it wor a near do. Shoo’s a rare ’un, that dog

o’ thine, an’ nobbut a young ’un, too.’

But Zubdil’s greatest reward came later. It was not the hearty

congratulations of so doughty an opponent as Ike, nor the incoherent

remarks of Owd Zub. It was when an arm slid through his, when eyes dimmed

with the moisture of genuine pride looked into his, and a low voice said:

‘I’se reight glad, lad. I is.’

He laughed, gladly. Then openly, unashamed, he stooped and took toll of

her lips. Nor was he denied. And the other Nance, looking up from where

she lay at their feet, tossed back a lock of hair and wagged her tail in

approval.

_FRAGMENTS FROM GERMAN EAST._

BY A SOLDIER’S WIFE.

A still lagoon of veld, mile upon mile. Nowhere in the world, I should

suppose, does the tide of battle ebb and flow so almost imperceptibly.

Sometimes, only in echo, we hear the thunder of the overwhelming

seas—sometimes, just now and then, the ripple at our feet breaks in a

little cloud of spray and for a moment dims the eyes that are used to

vast spaces, with sudden yearning for an island home beneath the far

horizon, and perhaps hands tremble a little in tearing the wrapper from

the daily newspaper.

But enough for us, so far, has been our all unequal struggle with Nature,

who turns our skies to steel and with fierce winds scatters the hovering

clouds, while the young crops shrivel and the watersprings are dry and

the eyes of the beasts wait upon us who can give them no meat in due

season.

A Kaffir boy comes round one evening and sings a doggerel he has

fashioned from an old nigger melody, and others join in the foolish

refrain:

‘I come to Basutoland,

I come through lands and sea,

I kill five thousand Germans,

With my banjo on my knee.’

We laugh and throw him a tickey, and turn again to watch the

skies—to-morrow, perhaps, the rains will come and we can plough and sow.

For the dread hand that writes upon the wall has formed no fearful word

for us—as yet—and sympathy, deep and very real as it is, stands in our

lexicon as ‘a feeling for’ rather than ‘a feeling with.’

And then a cable calls me in haste to Durban to meet a returning

transport and suddenly there is nothing in the world but war and its

magnificence and its horror. The clusters of people at various stations

who come to meet the mail train—the event of the day—the youths who

slouch up and down the platform with loud voices and noisy jests, the

girls who laugh with them, the groups of farmers talking of the crops—all

these rouse me to a feeling of irritation, then to an impotent anger.

‘Come with me,’ I want to urge, ‘and I will take you where men are heroes

in life and death.’ And again, ‘Is it nothing to you that your brothers

agonise? Will you jest while the earth opens under your feet?’—and

something ominous creeps into the meaningless laughter.

And then at last comes Durban, and I am surrounded with war activities

and what was sinister has vanished in the wholesomeness of sacrifice and

strenuous work.

To hundreds here war work has become their daily life. The town is always

full of soldiers—Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans—coming and

going. Here is a company of New Zealanders winding up the street. From

a balcony I watch them marching with a fine swing—well set-up, stalwart

fellows. Someone comes with a tray of cigarettes and we throw packets

down amongst them, and their upturned, laughing boyish faces ask for

more. Youngsters all of these, eager for happiness, eager for a slap at

the Germans, and to ‘see life’—and their destination is the battlefield

of Flanders! At the corner they dismiss and there is a race for the

rickshaws; three crowd into one, and the Zulu boy gladly sweats up the

incline and capers and leaps when the downward slope relieves him,

knowing that for his brief exertion he will ask and get six times his

lawful fee. His ostrich feathers wave, his black limbs flash, and the

passengers lean back and laugh.

And the other side of the picture—a shipload of returning Australians,

on crutches, arms in slings, helpless on wheeled chairs, with the look

of the trenches on the brave faces that smile their grateful thanks.

For to each and all Durban has a warm welcome. While they still lie off

the Point, a girl signaller bids them come to the Y.M.C.A. Hut for all

that they want, ladies from the Patriotic League wait on the wharf with

supplies of cigarettes and fruit, motor-cars and carriages stop to pick

up stragglers and carry them home to dinner, to a concert or theatre,

and the Hut itself tempts with open doors to the comforts within, to the

tables strewn with magazines and papers, to the letter-writing facilities

and varied games, to the most excellent meals, where one penny will give

a hungry man a liberal helping of cold meat or an appetising plate of

fish mayonnaise, while a second penny provides the steaming cup.

Down on the Point a little crowd has gathered. The steamer is a day late,

and wives and mothers sit and wait, or restlessly ply any and all with

endless reiterate questions, or hold impatiently to a telephone receiver.

And the night falls, and along the beach gardens the coloured lights hang

in jewelled strings against the dark. A drizzle of rain makes a halo of

their blurred radiance, the band plays, the few wanderers—the last of

the holiday-makers—talk of their homeward journey, for the summer and

the beginning of the season of rains are with us. Far out in the bay a

mast-head light springs up, then more lights, a stir of excitement in the

gathering crowd at the Point, and slowly the tug leads the transport to

her moorings.

‘Stand back—stand back! Make way there!’ and with a whir of starting

engines, the motor ambulances steer their way through the pressing crowd,

and slowly the stretcher-bearers carry their freight along the lower

deck and round the difficult angle of the lowered gangway. In silence

this, and the greetings are very quiet as the waiting women meet their

loved ones again—for this great steamer with her rows of decks and wide

accommodation holds but the remnant of a regiment. Fifteen hundred strong

they marched through Durban nine months ago, and how many have not

returned! Fever, dysentery, debility, starvation, wounds and death—these

have all taken their toll.

I suppose there are few parts of the world which nature has made more

difficult to the intruder than German East Africa. In the forest the

thorny creepers join tree to tree in close high walls until the very

stars—man’s only guide—are hidden, nearly all the trees also are

a-bristle with protecting spears, sharp as needles to pierce and tear

the flesh, and to leave behind, it may be, a poisoned festering sore.

Mountain ranges throw their boulders and tear their gaping chasms in the

way, the streams, too few and far between for thirsty man, are torrents

to be crossed on fallen logs, on slimy boulders where one sees the sudden

agony flash in the eyes of a laden mule that slips, and with a struggle

of frantic hoofs is tossed to death. A herd of elephants crashes like

thunder through the scrub, trumpeting their suspicion of man’s presence,

the lions prowling unheard startle with a sudden hungry roar and seek

their meat from God.

Then come the swamps where the crocodile lies in the slime, and snakes

coil, and the mosquito goes about its deadly work. Men sink to their

waists in mud, the transports break down—all are tried in vain, ox

waggons, mule carts, motor-cars, ‘and then we go hungry,’ said one man to

me. Gaunt and weak, with eyes too bright for health, he smiled and spoke

lightly—a least trembling of the hands, a twitch of a muscle, a look

behind the smiling eyes which no laugh could quite conceal, these the

only signs of the over-strained, still quivering nerves. He told me the

story of how the flour supply ran out, of how the pangs of hunger were

eased with the flesh of donkey or rhinoceros. For eight days the hungry

men waited and watched and then a transport laden with sacks appeared—and

the sacks held newspapers!

Another spoke. ‘The worst thing that ever I went through was in the ⸺

valley. Will you ever forget it, Mike? We were going into action along

one of those awful winding elephant tracks through grass above our

heads—sort of maze, and you don’t know where you’ll find yourself next

minute, perhaps back where you came from, or perhaps in a clearing,

looking into the muzzle of a machine gun—can’t see a foot ahead. Suddenly

the Boches opened fire, and at the very same moment we were attacked

by a swarm of bees. Sounds funny, but I can tell you it wasn’t. There

were millions of ’em, going for us all they were worth. The horses and

pack-mules went near mad and there were we, blind and dazed, stumbling

along trying to keep the brutes from our faces and the enemy’s fire

dropping around. Pretty sights we were when they’d finished with us—my

two eyes were bunged up so I’d just a slit to see through, and hands so

stiff and swollen I could scarce bend my fingers.’

‘My worst day,’ and another took up the tale, ‘was just when we were

at our worst off for food—fair starved we were, and just at daybreak

a family of rhinos came charging through our camp—Pa and Ma and a lot

of rum little coves scooting after them. Well, thinks I, a slice of

Pa would come in very handy grilled, so off I treks with two or three

chaps after me, and there, far below the rise, was a vlei and a whole

lot of rhinos standing round. Worse luck, as we got down, we found it

just chock-a-block with crocodiles. You hardly see them at first, but

just look close and you see a mud-bank sort of heave and here and there

you’ll get the glimpse of a great wide jaw, the colour of the mud and as

still, never moving an inch, but with eyes watching the rhinos all the

time. I tell you we didn’t go any too close, but we were mortal hungry,

so we tried to edge round to the rhinos, keeping well clear of the mud

and slime. One huge awkward-looking brute was a bit away from the others

and the swamp, so we let fly and brought him down, staggering and falling

not very far from us—but by God, if these crocs hadn’t ripped out and got

him before we had a show, and so we didn’t get dinner that day. As nasty

brutes as you’d care to see, those crocs. A chap of ours shot one of ’em

one day and cut it open, and inside he found an anklet ornament and a

ring. How’s that for an ugly story? At another camp a horse went down

to the river to drink all serene, no sign of another living thing—when

sudden up comes a grinning jaw, and like a flash of light, it snaps on

the poor beast’s nose and pulls him in, and there was an end of him.’

In the more open country grows the giant grass, waving over a man’s head,

dense and resistant as sugar-cane, and once a source of deathly peril.

The regiment had dug itself in some 300 yards from the enemy trenches,

when the wind, blowing in their faces, brought to the men a smell of

burning, and with a sudden roar a sea of flames came sweeping down upon

them—the enemy had set fire to the tall grass. There was not a second to

spare. The men leaped up and, weak and exhausted as they were, forced

their failing strength into clearing the ground and cutting a fire belt.

It was done with the speed of demons, for a fiercer demon was upon them;

the men with their tattered garments that would have flared up so easily,

put half a life into those few seconds.

The heat of the fire was on their faces, blinding their eyes, the flames

reached out tongues towards their store of ammunition. Under cover of the

fire and smoke the enemy came out and attacked heavily. Our men leaped

back, turned the full strength of their fire on the enemy through the

blinding smoke, and suddenly, miraculously—_the wind changed_! It is

gratifying to know that in a few moments the enemy survivors were hurried

back to their trenches before the flames, to find their grass shelters on

fire, and under a withering storm from every rifle, maxim, and gun a grim

silence fell upon their trenches.

And so Nature, whose gigantic forces have joined our enemy’s in this

war against us, for once played him false; but the Hun is always quick

to turn her help to his best advantage. He sees to it that every post,

detached house, village, kraal, &c., has the protection of a ‘boma’—a

thick impenetrable fence made of thorn trees, with the huge strong spikes

thrust outwards and the smooth butts inside the shelter, made of such

height and depth as is necessary to resist the onslaught of elephant and

rhinoceros and the cunning of the lion. All around a wide thorn carpet

is spread to pierce the feet of the intruder. Imagine such a ‘boma’

flanked by rifle and machine-gun fire from deep trenches concealed by

cover and by a ‘false boma’ in rear which makes the boma line apparently

continuous—and a frontal attack by infantry becomes a hazardous

undertaking.

‘Could not the artillery destroy them?’ I asked, and was told of the

difficulties of locating the trenches for this purpose and of the

unlimited supply of high-explosive shells that would be required. All

approaches to defended posts have lanes cut through the bush, and these

are so arranged in irregular shape that every open piece of ground can be

covered by machine-gun and cross rifle fire.

Of the hardships of the march, of the hunger and thirst—once a battle

was fought for two days before a drop of water could be obtained—of the

fever and exhaustion, I could guess from watching the speakers, and from

the men’s talk to each other I heard of the skilfully posted machine guns

alert for a fleeting glimpse of troops grouped, perhaps, round a wounded

man, of the snipers in the trees, of the maxims fired from the backs

of animals clothed in grass, of the danger of horrors and mutilation

should a wounded man fall into the hands of the Askari. All of this I was

told freely; but of the endurance, the magnificent self-oblation, the

comradeship and devotion, these came to my ears only from those who had

commanded troops and who could barely speak of these things for a catch

in the throat.

The actual warfare, the battles, the bayonet charges, the fervour and

courage of attack—these are described by newspaper correspondents in

cables and despatches; but of the more human side—‘the soul of the

war’—few tales reach the outside world. The courage of endurance, the

absence of one word of complaint from men so weak, latterly, that five

miles a day sometimes had to be the limit of their march—who shall tell

of these?

Hear one last story from an outsider.

‘That regiment of yours is very thick with its companion regiment, the

Nth,’ he said. ‘A chap who is in the Nth told me the one regiment never

loses a chance of doing the other a good turn. Once, he said, the Nth

were in the first firing line, only 150 yards from the enemy. There had

been no chance of getting water-bottles filled, and the men’s tongues

were swollen with thirst. The other chaps were suffering a lot too, but

what do you think they did? All the regiment, officers and men, sent up

every bottle that had a drain left in it to the fellows of the Nth, and

mind you this was done under continuous fire. Pretty fine, wasn’t it?’

A bugle call, a whistle, and the short breathing space is past.

Faces lean over the bulwarks, pink and boyish beside the thin and

often haggard brown, hands are waved and with songs and cheers the old

regiment, reinforced with its recruits, sways slowly and steams into the

blue.

Were the whole history of the war ever to be written, were the myriad

glorious deeds ever to be chronicled, would the world itself contain the

books that should be written?

_COQ-D’OR: A LETTER TO A SOUL._

BY R. C. T.

MY DEAR DICK,—When you went out from the breastwork that night, along the

little muddy path, and whispered me a laughing _au revoir_, I thought

no more of it than of a hundred similar episodes that made up day and

night in these mad, half-romantic, unbelievable times. There was nothing

especial to make the incident memorable. It was ten o’clock at night and

the second relief for the sniper pits had gone out half an hour or so. A

frost had started after the previous day’s cold rain, the water-filled

crump holes had iced over and the so-called paths through the wood were

deceptively firm looking, though in reality one’s feet and legs sank

through the ice a foot deep into that ghastly, sticky foot-trodden mud.

I knew your job—to visit the listening patrols and the snipers on the

edge of the wood—and I remember thinking that your habit of going out

alone without an orderly was foolish, near though the posts might be

to the breastworks. However, you were young—four and twenty isn’t a

great age, Dick—and I recalled your saying that you would no more think

of taking an orderly than of asking a policeman to pilot you across

Piccadilly Circus.

The wood was fairly quiet that night, though there were the usual

bursts of machine-gun fire, the stray ping of high rifle shots against

the branches of the trees, and the noisy barking of that fussy field

battery of ours which always seemed to want to turn night into day.

The light of the moon let me see you disappear into the shadows, and I

heard the scrunch of your feet as you picked between the tree trunks a

gingerly way. Then I went along the breastwork line, saw that all was

right, found Peter munching chocolate and reading a month-old copy of

_The Horse-Breeders’ Gazette_!—fellows read such funny literature in

war time—in his dug-out—and myself turned down the corduroy path to the

splinter-proof hut that you so excellently named ‘The Château.’

Dennis and Pip had already turned in and had left me an uncomfortably

narrow space to lie down beside them, and they were daintily snoring.

Through the partition beyond I heard our company servants doing the same,

only with greater vigour in their snore. But my bed was already prepared,

the straw was only moderately dirty and odorous, and after ridding my

boots with a scraper of some portion of the mud, I thrust my feet into

the sand-bags, lay down, coiled myself up comfy in my bag and blankets

and went to sleep.

For ten minutes only. Then I suddenly awakened into full consciousness

and found myself sitting up staring into the darkness, and the chinks of

moonlight coming in below and at the sides of the ill-fitting door. I was

listening intently too, and I did not know why. The wood was absolutely

quiet at the moment, and Dennis, Pip, and the servants had all settled

off into their second sleep where snoring is an intrusion.

I had not dreamt, or I had no recollection of any dream if I had. But

upon me was a curious ill-defined sensation of uneasiness. No, I am

wrong—uneasiness is not the word. The feeling was merely that something

had happened. I did not know where or how or to whom.

Now the one thing one ought not to be in war time is fidgety. It is a bad

habit and yet a habit into which it is very easy to drift. So with this

thought upon me I deliberately lay quietly down again and attempted to

renew the sleep from which I had so suddenly been wakened. Of course I

failed. Sleep had gone from me completely, absolutely, and moreover there

was a force—that indefinite word best describes it—impelling me to be up

and doing. Doing what Heaven only knew! I struggled against the feeling

for a minute or two, then I definitely gave in to it. Fidgety or not, I

was going out of the hut.

Dennis wakened momentarily as I rose and untied the sand-bags off my

legs and made for the door. He muttered ‘What’s the matter?’ heard my

‘Nothing, go to sleep again,’ and did as he was told.

The night was beautiful outside and I stood at the door of the hut

shivering a little with the cold, but thinking what a madness it was

that had turned this wonderful wood into a battlefield! The sound of a

rifle shot knocking off a twig of a tree three or four feet above me

recalled my thoughts. Mechanically I felt to see that I had my revolver,

and then with my trusty walking-stick in my hand I went up to the front

breastworks.

I went along them and found all correct—the sentries alert and at their

posts. They were in the third night of their spell in the trenches and in

the moonlight they gave one the impression of sandstone statues, their

khaki a mass of dried yellow clay. Then I peeped in at Peter and found

the youth still munching chocolate, and afterwards I went along to your

abode expecting to find you asleep, and found instead that your tiny

dug-out was untenanted.

The curious feeling that had wakened me from my sleep had disappeared

while I had been making my tour of the breastworks and only now did it

reappear. There was no especial reason why I should have been anxious,

for a score of things might have taken you elsewhere, but I nevertheless

found myself striding quickly back to the little gap between No. 2 and 3

breastworks, the spot where I had last seen you and where you had bidden

me good-night. I questioned the sentry. It happened to be Rippon, that

quaint little five-foot-three cockney, who, I honestly believe, really

likes war and chuckles because he is genuinely amused when a shell hits

the ground ten yards in rear and misses the trench itself. He had seen

nothing of you since we parted.

‘Mr. Belvoir,’ he said—and you know how he mutilates the pronunciation

of your name—‘never comes back the same way as he goes out.’ He gave me

the information with a trace of reproof in his voice, as though I ought

to have remembered better the principal points of my own lectures on

Outposts, which I had so often given the company in peace time. I nodded,

walked along to the other sentries and questioned them. They had none

of them seen you return. They were all quite confident that you had not

passed by them.

I returned to Rippon and stood behind him a moment or two. The cold was

increasing and he was stamping his feet on the plank of wood beneath him,

and humming to himself quietly. I did not want to seem anxious, but I

was. I could not understand what had become of you, where you had gone. I

took a pace or two towards Rippon and spoke to him.

‘Things been quiet to-night?’ I said casually.

He started at the sound of my voice, for he had not heard my approach.

‘Quieter than usual, sir,’ he answered. ‘There was a bit of a haroosh

on the left half an hour ago and the Gerboys opposite us took it up for

a minute or so, but they’ve quieted down since. Funny creatures, them

Gerboys,’ he ruminated—‘good fighters and yet always getting the wind

up. I remember at Ligny when we was doin’ what wasn’t too elegant a

retirement, me and Vinsen was in a farm’ouse....’

I stopped him hurriedly. When Rippon gets on to the subject of Ligny his

garrulity knows no bounds.

‘I’m going out ahead, Rippon,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back again this way.

Warn the next sentry that I shall be doing so. Give me an orderly, too.’

Rippon looked at me curiously. Perhaps my tone was not normal. Then he

bent down and stirred a man snoring in the breastwork beside him. The man

stirred uneasily and then suddenly jumped up and clutched at the rifle

through the sling of which his right arm was thrust.

‘What’s up?’ he murmured. Rippon smiled.

‘It ain’t no attack,’ he answered. ‘The Captain wants you as his orderly.’

A minute later we had left the breastwork line and were out in front in

the wood, our feet breaking through the thin film of ice and sinking over

our ankles in the mud beneath. Belgian mud may not be any different from

other mud, but to my dying day I shall always imagine it so. It clasps

you as though it wants to pull and keep you down, as though, with so many

of your friends lying beneath it, you too should be there. We tugged

our feet out each step, treading on fallen branches where we could. I

tried to trace by footsteps the path you had taken, but failed. I could

not think of anything better to do than go out to the sniping pits and

question the men there to know if you had visited them.

I turned to the left then and made for number one group, Bell, my

orderly, following a pace or two behind. A cloud came over the face of

the moon, the night became suddenly dark, and the next moment I had

stumbled and almost fallen over what I imagined for a second to be a

stray sand-bag.

It was not a sand-bag, God knows it was not! The moon reappeared and I

saw it was you, Dick, lying on your side, with your legs outstretched.

I bent down when I realised that it was a body, turned you over on your

back and with Bell’s assistance ripped open your Burberry, your tunic

and your vest. A bullet had gone straight through your heart, there was

a little spot of congealed blood on your breast, and—you had died—well,

as suddenly and as easily as you deserved to do, Dick. On your face was a

smile.

I am not good at analysing feelings and there is no purpose in trying to

analyse mine. Indeed, I cannot remember exactly what my sensations were.

I had no sorrow for you, as I have never had sorrow for those killed in

this war. I do not suppose two men have ever been closer friends than you

and I, yet I was not even sorry for myself. I remember that I turned to

Bell and said half angrily: ‘I told him to take an orderly, I was always

telling him to take an orderly!’

I heard Bell’s irrelevant reply, ‘Damn them Bosches, sir.’ (The men in

your platoon had an affection for you, Dick.) Then together we raised

you, your wet clothes frozen, your hair matted with mud, and picking

up your cap and rifle from the ground, carried you slowly back to the

breastwork line, and there wakened a couple of stretcher bearers.

Oh! I’m sick of this war, Dick, dully, angrily sick of it. This world

can’t be anything, I know, otherwise fellows like you would be kept in

it. For a week or two the fighting is all right; it is amazing, and

wonderful and elemental. Then as month after month goes by, when there is

nothing in your brain but making your line stronger, when you think in

sand-bags and machine guns and barbed wire and bombs, when the stray shot

or the casual shell kills or lacerates some sergeant or corporal whom you

have had since his recruit days in your company, given C.B. to, spoken

to like a father, recommended step by step for promotion and at length

grown to trust and rely on—then it begins to show its beastliness and you

loathe it with a prolonged and fervent intensity.

Down at the field dressing station half a mile away, the young doctor did

what he could to preserve the decencies of death. I stood at the door

of the little cottage and looked out into the night. I remember that my

thoughts flew back to the immediate days before the war and to a night

a little party of us spent at the Russian Opera at Drury Lane, when we

saw that wonderful conceit ‘_Coq-d’Or_.’ You, your sister, I and that

young Saxon friend of yours—and of your sister’s too! We had dined at The

Carlton and were ever so pleased with life. We had chuckled delightedly

at the mimic warfare on the stage, the pompous King, the fallen heroes.

Now the mimic warfare had turned to reality and here you were—dead in a

ruined Belgian cottage.

I left after a quarter of an hour and returned to the wood, my feelings

numb, my brain a blank. The corduroy path seemed interminably long. Sleep

was not for me that night and the morning would do to tell Peter, Dennis

and Pip that you were killed. Unaccompanied by any orderly this time, I

went through the breastwork line to the spot where we had found you. The

impress of your body was on the ground; your loaded revolver, which for

some reason or other you must have had in your hand, was lying a yard or

two away. I picked it up, examined it and noticed that a round had been

fired.

I wondered why. You must have aimed at somebody and that somebody must

have shot back at you, and the somebody must have been close. You were

not the sort of man to blaze off into the blue. I leant against a tree

and tried to think the matter out. Our snipers were out on your left, so

the shot could not have come from that direction, and a hundred yards on

the right was the machine-gun emplacement and the first of the outworks.

In between was Potsdam House, that no-man’s habitation into which,

before the outskirts of the wood had become definitely ours, sometimes

the German patrols had wandered and sometimes ours. We had had a working

party there the night before sand-bagging the shell-shattered walls and

making the place a defensive or a jumping-off spot, as one might wish.

It was almost unthinkable that any German or Germans could have reached

it, for we had a listening patrol fifty yards ahead, but it was just

possible that a brave man might have avoided the patrol and have done so.

At the thought I made up my mind to move forward, and took my revolver

from my holster. My wits suddenly became keen again, my lassitude left

me, the sight of the outline of your body on the frozen mud made me

angry, wild.

I had only fifty yards to go, but I went as cautiously and silently as

I could. I did not intend to be killed if I could help it. I was out to

avenge, not to add another life to the German bag. I chose the spot for

each step with excessive care. I stopped and listened if my feet were

making too much noise on the frozen ground.

Then just as I was about twenty yards from my objective I heard a sound.

Stopping suddenly, I listened. Someone was talking in a confused, halting

sort of way. A snatch of conversation, a long pause, and then another

remark. The voice was so low that I could not make out words, but I had

the impression that it was not English that was being spoken. The tone

was uniform too, as though it were not two people but one speaking—a

curious, pointless monologue it sounded like.

My heart was beating a little more quickly, my fingers clutched my

revolver a little more tightly. I knelt down, wondering what to do. The

voice came from the ruined Potsdam House, and if indeed a small German

patrol had got in there it seemed foolhardy to go alone to meet them. On

the other hand, it might be but one person there, though why he should be

talking thus to himself I could not imagine. Anyhow, foolhardy or not, I

was going to find out.

I moved forward therefore over the intervening yards slowly and as

quietly as might be. The voice broke off at times, then continued, and

each time that it stopped I halted too, lest in the stillness I should be

betrayed.

You remember the little pond at the side of the house, the pond that has

at the bottom of it, to our knowledge, a dead Bavarian and an Argyll and

Sutherland Highlander? At the edge of it I must have stopped a full five

minutes, lying flat upon my stomach and listening to the intermittent

sound of the voice. It was clearer now, low but distinct, and at last

I knew for a certainty that the words came from a German throat.

Occasionally a light laugh broke out which sounded uncannily in the still

air. Laughter is not often heard from patrols between the lines, and I

was puzzled and interested too.

A minute later I had clambered over the broken-down wall and was in what

we used to think must have been the drawing-room of the house. Some time

after this war is over I shall return and make straight for this house.

I want to see what it looks like in daytime. I want to be able to stand

in front of it and look out on the country beyond. I’ve crawled into it

a dozen times at night, I’ve propped up its shelled, roofless walls with

sand-bags, I’ve made a look-out loophole in the broken-down chimney. I’ve

seen dim outlines from its glassless windows of hills and houses, but I

am sure, quite sure, that when I see it and the country beyond it in the

full glare of a summer sun I shall give a gasp of astonishment at what it

is and what I thought it was.

Once inside the house I paused no longer, but, my revolver ready, my

finger on the trigger, made straight for the spot from which came the

voice.

My revolver was not needed, Dick. In the furthest corner of what we used

to think must be the living-room, just near the spot where we found that

photograph of the latest baby of the family in its proud mother’s arms

and the gramophone record and the broken vase with the artificial flowers

still in it—you remember what trophies they were to us—just there was the

man. He was seated with his back propped up against the sand-bags where

the two walls of the room make a corner, his legs angled out and his arms

hanging limply down. It did not take a second glance to see that I had

to do with a badly wounded German, but I took a look round first to make

sure that there were no others either in the shell of the house or near

it. When I had made certain, I returned to him and, putting my revolver

within my reach on the floor beside me, knelt down and examined the man.

He was plastered with mud, his cap was off his head, his breath was

coming in little heavy jerks, and on the blue-grey uniform, just below

the armpit on the right side, was a splash of blood mingling with the mud.

What I had done for your dead body I did for his barely living one,

opened the tunic and by the aid of my electric torch—it was safe enough

in the angle of the walls—examined the wound. It did not need a doctor to

see that the man’s spirit was soon going to set out on the same voyage of

adventure as yours, but I did what I could. I ripped my field dressing

out of the lining of my coat and bound up the wound. Then I took out my

flask and poured some brandy into his mouth. He had winced once or twice

as I had dressed the wound but had not spoken; I think he was scarcely

conscious.

But the spirit revived him and in a minute or so his eyes slowly opened

and looked into mine. There was no such thing for him then as enemy or

friend. He was simply a dying man and I was someone beside him helping

him to die. His head turned over to one side and he murmured some German

words. You used to laugh at me, Dick, for my hatred of the German

language and my refusal to learn a word of it, but I wished heartily I

knew some then. I answered him in English in the futile way one does.

‘That’s all right, old man,’ I said. ‘Feeling a bit easier now, eh?’

He looked at me fixedly for a moment or two and then suddenly summed up

the International situation in a phrase.

‘This damned silly war!’ he said.

The remark, made with a strong German accent, was delivered with a little

smile, and there was consciousness in his eyes. He finished it with a

weary sigh and his hand moved slightly and rested on mine as I bent over

him. There was a pool of water beside us in a hole in the hearth and I

dipped my not too clean handkerchief in it and wiped some of the mud

off his face. If I had felt any enmity against him for killing you, it

was gone now. A war of attrition those beautiful war critics term it,

and here was the attrition process in miniature. He had killed you and

you had killed him, an officer apiece, and the Allies could stand the

attrition longer than the Germans. I knew the argument and I have not the

slightest doubt it is sound. In the meantime here was a man dying rather

rapidly, very weary and only too ready for the last trench of all.

I chatted to him and have no notion what I said. I dare say it is a

comfort to have, at the hour of death, a human being by you and a human

voice speaking to you. He was quite conscious, the water on his face had

refreshed him and had revealed clear-cut, aristocratic features, that had

nothing bestial or cruel about them. Just as I had thought about you, so

I thought about him. Waste! waste! I felt as though I had met him before,

and certainly I knew his type if not the individual. Perhaps too,

sitting opposite one another week after week, in trenches two hundred

yards apart, the spirits bridge a gap the bodies cannot. I do not know, I

do not greatly care.

His voice was feeble, but he seemed to wish to speak to me and his

English was that of an educated man, precise and at times idiomatic. He

accounted for that almost in his first words.

‘I have been in England on long visits, twice, three times,’ he said. ‘I

like England. Germany and England are worth dying for. Also I am Saxon,

and Saxony is a great country. Anglo-Saxons, is it not?’

‘Anglo-Saxons,’ I repeated lightly. ‘We have the same blood in us.’

‘Good blood, too,’ he said, glancing down at the little splash of it on

his tunic. ‘A pity to spill so much. Will you bathe my face again, it

helps me, and I would like to die clean.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ I said. ‘To-morrow morning you will be in our

lines—another man.’ He did not answer for a moment, then he said, almost

with humour in his voice, ‘That is quite true, to-morrow morning I will

surely be in your lines—a dead man.’

Again there was silence between us. He spoke the truth and knew that I

knew it. His arm moved: the fingers of his hand pawed aimlessly at the

rubble by his side. I half rose and told him that I was going to our

breastworks to bring some bearers with a stretcher.

He shook his head and spoke in a voice almost strong. ‘No, please, no!

You shall go in half, in a quarter of an hour. I am quite easy here. In

no great pain. Death is, sometimes, quite easy. I would like you to stay

if you will.’

‘Of course I will stay if you wish.’

‘Yes. Also I would like to speak to you ... I ... I ... killed ... one of

your officers ... just now?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I ... saw him fall. As he fell he fired at me too. I am sorry I killed

him. Will you tell his ... his ... people so? And tell them, too, that

it is just war ... silly, wasteful war. He was a soldier, was he, by

profession I mean?’

‘Yes, a soldier.’

‘Then it is his death ... I am only a soldier as all of us are soldiers.

In peace I make music, compose you call it. Music is better than war.’

‘Far better,’ I answered grimly enough.

‘If I had lived I would have written great things. I had vowed it. I had

in my head ... I have it still ... a ... wonderful ballet. It would have

been finer than Petrouchka—as great as _Coq-d’Or_. And the ballet of our

enemies, the Russians, would have performed it.... Enemies! how silly it

is.’ He smiled.

My heart beat a little faster. This was madness, sheer madness, for us to

be discussing music and the Russian ballet on the battlefield and with

him dying. But at the words ‘_Coq-d’Or_’ my memory had suddenly stirred,

and I carried on the conversation eagerly.

‘_Coq-d’Or_ is wonderful, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Where have you seen it?’

‘Where have I not?’ he answered. ‘In Moscow, Berlin, Paris, in London. It

is great, astonishing.’

‘In London?’

‘But a short time ago—just before the war. I ... I ... had a friend. I

was staying with him. He, too, was a soldier. I forget in what regiment.

I was not interested in armies then.’ He stirred uneasily and partially

turned over on his side. I put my arm beneath him, moistened his lips

with the water. He sighed and began to wander in his talk, the words

German, beyond my comprehension. Yet one kept recurring that told me all,

everything. He must not, should not die yet!

Only for a minute or two did his delirium last. Then his senses returned

and quite suddenly he pressed my hand, and though his voice was fainter

the words were distinct and spoken very slowly as though he wished to be

sure I understood.

‘I ... I want you to do something for me.... I am sure you will. We are

both gentlemen....’ His hand moved to his breast and he made as if to

take something from his tunic.

‘In the pocket of my coat, inside, there is a little leather case. Inside

that ... a photograph of a lady, of an English lady too.’ (Oh! little

world, O narrow little world!) ‘It has been with me through the war. I

dare not and would not have shown it to one of my comrades.... When I die

I want you to take it out and send it to the Honourable Richard Belvoir.

He was a lord’s son, my friend, and the photograph is of his sister. I

... she did not know it, you understand?... I loved her.’

Did she not? I wonder. My thoughts rushed back again to Drury Lane, to

the crowded house, to the little quartette of us, you, I, the young

Saxon, and Peggy, standing together in the foyer during the entr’acte.

Every one of her twenty years had added something to her beauty, and as

you and I strolled away and left the other two together, I remember I

wondered if we were making a proper division of the quartette and if it

was quite fair to the Saxon to leave him to such an inevitable result. I

spoke my thought to you and I recall your laughing comment.

Of course I promised to perform the simple duty the dying man gave me. I

was glad he had not recognised me. It made the duty easier. Once I had

spoken the promise he thanked me and seemed contented. He had little

strength left and the end was very near. His body slipped lower down, he

tried to speak no more—his breath came more feebly.

The next day we buried you and him side by side in the little clearing at

the back of the road. In your pocket is the little leather case with your

sister’s photograph in it. I have given it to you as I was asked to do.

The crosses in the clearing daily are added to in number. Some day your

sister will come to visit the spot. I am writing to her telling her of

your death and of the Saxon’s too. But of how closely they hung upon each

other I shall not speak. It is enough that she should think a strange

chance brought you together in the same part of the line, that death came

to both of you and that you now lie side by side.

Chance! What a word it is. It explains nothing, it evades all. I can

imagine you, knowing now so much more than we do, smiling at the idea of

such a thing as coincidence. I have said that I am weary beyond words

of this war. I am sure you and the Saxon were weary of it too. I am not

guessing, for I am in some way absolutely sure that the twin shots which

disturbed the silence of the night were mercifully winged; that you and

he, who must have had more in common than I knew, were sending each other

unwittingly the final gift of good fellowship.

Good-night. I am sitting in the dug-out you and I shared. The sound of

the artillery has died down. The divisional guns have fired their final

salvos at the enemy’s cross roads and dumps. The Germans for once have

not even troubled to reply. Pip and Dennis are out with working parties.

The new machine-gun emplacement on the right of Madden’s mound, which you

were so anxious to have finished, is done. Whatever you may say, I am

still not sure that it is rightly placed. Perhaps you know that it does

not matter where it is placed!

Some day, somewhere, we shall meet. Till then good-bye, Dick.

Yours ever

PHILIP.

_THE PRAGMATIC PRINCIPLE: AN APPLICATION._

It was said of the historic centipede that he was so embarrassed by his

multitude of legs that locomotion became impossible. Similarly perhaps

it may be said of Pragmatism that it suffered principally from the

numerous formulations of its principles, all of which sought to explain

it, but many of which left it obviously unexplained. Perhaps that is

the reason why the vogue which it had seven years ago, following upon

Professor James’ brilliant ‘popular lectures,’ was scarcely maintained.

On the other hand, this was probably foreseen by some of the most loyal

pragmatists. As one said of it, ‘If Pragmatism is going to live and

give life, it will be by its spirit and not by any magic contained in

pragmatic dicta.’ And it will be generally agreed that as a contribution

to the thought of the twentieth century, it _has_ lived and has perhaps

quickened other established modes of thought and feeling. ‘On the

pragmatic side,’ writes Professor James, ‘we have only one edition of the

universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the

places _where thinking beings are at work_.’

Meanwhile many people were at work endeavouring to compress the pragmatic

point of view into a formula. The most generally accepted definition

stated that it represented theory as subordinate to practice. Another

popular formula gives it as the doctrine that the truth of an assertion

is decided by its consequences. And again—this with the authority of

Dr. Schiller—‘the making of truth is necessarily and _ipso facto_ also

a making of reality.’ But inasmuch as none of these definitions cover

the whole ground, and as we are here concerned with a modern and vital

application of the pragmatic issue, it may perhaps be worth our while

to retrace the history of the matter in the first place to its source,

craving the patience of the reader meanwhile.

In the year 1878, at Balliol, there were three men who were destined

to exercise strong influence upon the intellectual life of their

generation: Benjamin Jowett, the Master; Nettleship, the tutor; and

Thomas Hill Green. ‘I do not forget,’ says Professor Wallace, in speaking

of the last-named in the preface to his Hegel, ‘what I and others owe

to him,—that example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of earnest

and intrepid thinking on the deep things of Eternity.’ In his own day

perhaps Green was not greatly understood. He was known as the eccentric

College tutor; a lecturer in metaphysics (and dry at that) ‘Obscurum

per obscurius,’ said a witty undergraduate, though of course a witty

undergraduate will say anything. Moreover an idealist, though a member of

the City Council; a man of dreams, but a pioneer of evening schools for

working men. Such was Green as Oxford knew him, but it is—briefly—with

his position in philosophy that we are at the moment concerned.

Like all English idealists,—like Hegel also and the German School,—he

built upon the rough foundations once laid down by the philosophers of

Asia Minor. The Greeks had seen one thing plainly; that the spiritual

entities of Science, Art, morality, or religion were of intrinsic value

_in themselves_ as expressions of the self-conscious spirit; but the

one thing that lay hidden in the womb of Christianity they lacked,

the conception of human brotherhood. So the philosophy of the later

centuries, while still reaping where the ancient world had sown, has

included the developed ideals of citizenship as well as the life of

co-operation made possible therein. When we find one of Green’s works

headed ‘Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life,’ we realise the

gist of his teaching. He was in fact a practical mystic, which, as Lord

Rosebery said of Cromwell, is a ‘formidable combination.’ To Green, the

most solid and practical things about a man were the ideals which he put

into practice. That in his philosophy was the one permanent use of any

philosophical idea; _its working power as a basis for human effort_.

It will be seen that here we are not very far off from those ‘thinking

beings at work’ in the adventurous world of the pragmatist.

The idealism of Green was of a robuster type than some other kindred

systems. He never maintained that we as human beings were unnecessary

to the working out of the Divine plan. He never denied that by the

application of human reason new possibilities may be brought to light,

and that out of the treasure-house of the Eternal may be brought forth

things at once old and new. And so, consistently, when we consider the

personality of this man who was so vivid a directing force in thought and

action, we find at the one end a professor of moral philosophy, and at

the other the town councillor and worker in the slums.

Thus far Green and his influence in the English schools of 1878. But in

that same year, in an American journal, there appeared an article by

Charles Sanders Pierce, concerning ‘our ideas and “how to make them

clear,”’ and entitled ‘The Principle of Pragmatism.’

The article did not attract very great attention on this side of the

water. English scholars are apt to be a little shy of the swift and

arresting methods of the American; and perhaps if pragmatism had remained

the original contribution of Charles Sanders Pierce, it might have sunk

into oblivion. But, as everybody knows, it found its ‘vates sacer’ in

after years in the late Professor James of Harvard, who ushered it

sixteen years ago, with some pomp and circumstance, into the world of

English philosophy. Meanwhile, some apt maker of epigram, considering

the works of Professor James and his brilliant brother, summed them

up as ‘the philosopher who writes novels, and the novelist who writes

psychology.’

To do him justice, James said at the outset that pragmatism was no new

thing. He took Aristotle indeed to his ancestor, and claimed relationship

with the English idealists and even with Hume. He then, by virtue of

his vivid and stimulating style, achieved for his subject a certain

popularity, and a small following began to arise. When, however, people

had learnt to speak of the British pragmatists, they discovered that the

other people who spoke of the American pragmatists did not always seem to

find their systems identical. And time has emphasised this difference.

The pragmatism imported from America by Professor James has remained what

it always professed to be—a method,—and, withal, a gentle and peaceable

method,—not only of airing its own ideas, but of persuading everybody

else that just as M. Jourdain had spoken prose all his life without

knowing it, so they, too, had been pragmatists all their lives. The

method is, perhaps, at times a little superior, and at times a little

irreverent; nor can it clearly claim to have produced a ‘philosophy’ as

such. It is, in truth, as its votaries have claimed, a spirit and an

attitude towards philosophical problems and towards life. As such it

would seem to be a characteristic product of the Anglo-Saxon genius which

is essentially practical and values things for their use. ‘In pragmatic

principles,’ says James, ‘we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences

useful to life flow from it.’ And elsewhere, ‘Beliefs are rules for

actions.’ And again, ‘An idea is true so long as it is profitable to

our lives to believe it.’ In all these cases the act, the consequence,

the deed are placed, so to speak, in the predicative position. The

whole force of the sentence is concentrated upon the consequence, the

deed. ‘The proof of the pudding,’ says our homely proverb, ‘is in the

eating.’ And we have been reminded that ‘Honesty is the best policy’

from our copy-book days. Here, however, there is a difference between

the established ethic—whether idealistic or religious—and the pragmatic

view. Honesty, it seems, would win the ‘pragmatic sanction’ because of

its results:—it ‘works’ satisfactorily. Therefore it is ‘true.’ There

is a shifting of attention from the intrinsic beauty of honesty as a

virtue to its consequences; from its moral value to its face value;

from the ideal to the actual and empirical. The impartial observer may

come to the conclusion that after all the inquiry comes to the same

thing. Honesty has been twice blessed: by the pragmatic sanction of its

results, and by the moral sanction for those who identify the virtue

with the moral imperative of religion. Nevertheless, this attitude of

pragmatism is an exceedingly interesting one, and its application to

human life and activities is undeniable. It is, in essence, the doctrine

of the survival of the fittest, carried into the field of philosophy.

The test of an idea, of an ideal, of a ‘movement’ is its working. If it

worked well, it was fitted to survive; it was, at any rate, ‘true’ for

the epoch wherein it did survive or flourish. On the other hand, a thing

cannot be judged until it _is_ tried. It must be known by its results.

There must be evolution, shifting, experiment. ‘The universe is always

pursuing its adventures’; and truth is always ‘in the making,’—especially

where the ‘thinking beings’ are getting to work. Which brings us to the

application aforesaid. For assuredly among all the many ‘movements’ which

have stirred the surface of the body politic during the last forty years,

the so-called ‘woman’s movement’ may in its deeper aspects lay claim to

the ‘pragmatic sanction.’ In it undoubtedly many thinking and adventurous

persons have been at work. And there are passages in James’ book speaking

of ‘our acts as the actual turning places in the great workshop of being

where we catch truth in the making,’ to which the hearts of many of

our modern women doctors and nurses will respond. On the other hand,

the attitude of the many who at every stage have sought to oppose a

professional career for women has never been more aptly summed up than

in the words of the pragmatist: ‘They are simply afraid: afraid of more

experience, afraid of life.’

A few years ago the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission published

a weighty record of the usefulness of women in municipal work, suggesting

further outlets for their energies; but the writers certainly did not

foresee the astonishing influx of female labour into the many departments

of public service consequent upon the exigencies of the present time.

On the face of it we must own that some of these occupations seem

little suited to the worker’s capacity. One can imagine the chorus

of disapproval that would have risen from the ranks of the acutely

feminine if such innovations as women postmen, ’bus conductors, and

window-cleaners had offered themselves a few years ago. Even now it is

probably only the most seasoned philosophers who regard them with perfect

equanimity; the rest comfort themselves with the reflection that they

are the unnatural products of an abnormal time: a sort of _epiphenomena_

thrown up from an underworld of chaos and destined to disappear again in

the natural course of things. There is little doubt that this will be

so in the end. Post delivery and window cleaning will scarcely become

common occupations for girls any more than it will be usual for them to

go into the trenches in the firing line, as some gallant Russian women

have been doing in order to succour the starving Poles. All these things

are exceptional, and exceptional things are generally the outcome of

a strong emotion. As Professor Jebb has observed, ‘The feeling that

covers a thousand square miles must, we instantly perceive, be a strong

feeling.’ We have had many opportunities for such observation during

the present war, but nowhere more emphatically than among women. In

adapting themselves to the requirements of social service they have

taken to heart that excellent advice of Mr. Wells: they have ‘flung

themselves into their job, and have done it with passion.’ But now after

eliminating the exceptional, after allowing moreover for a natural ebb

in the warm flowing tide of patriotic emotion, there undoubtedly remains

a record of efficiency which is destined to have far-reaching results.

The women whose former status in the industrial world was so precarious

and unsatisfactory have now been swept into that world in increasing

thousands because the industries of the country could not be maintained

without them. The Government appeal of 1915 offered a curious comment

upon the popular axiom that the woman’s ‘sphere is the home.’ In the

face of the wholesale slaughter of the bread-winners, and the consequent

invitation to all unoccupied women to rise to the country’s need, this

unimpeachable motto has a pathetic look like that of a picture turned

face to the wall. Pathetic because it was always true, even obviously

true; but the relativity of truth makes so many isolated truths look

out of focus. Anyhow, the fact remains that, in this universe which just

now is ‘pursuing its adventures’ at a remarkably accelerated pace, women

have been called out of their homes into very unexpected places; and it

is with the result that we are just now especially concerned. Evidence

at first hand is not far to seek. It comes from all quarters, from the

magnificently organised hospitals of the Scottish women in Serbia, from

the railway companies, from the Women’s Service Aircraft Department,

from the engineers’ shops in some of the industrial centres, and from

the munition factories themselves. As to the hospitals, it is doubtful

whether the public entirely realise the extent of the work that has been

done.

At the Knightsbridge Exhibition in November 1915, one of the most

interesting exhibits was that representing the Anglo-Russian hospital

which, with its eight surgeons and thirty nurses, and complete unit

of bedding and outfit, was sent as a gift to Petrograd; and several

delightful articles have been written about the beautiful old Cistercian

Abbey in Northern France which was turned into a hospital and staffed

entirely by women for the necessities of the war. Of these institutions

there has been an ever-increasing number both at home and abroad; one

of the Suffrage societies has to its credit the financing and equipment

of eight hospital units in France and Serbia. But all this is still

the acknowledged sphere of women. As nurses and even doctors they are

accepted as a matter of course by a generation which has scarcely

heard of the criticisms once thrown at Florence Nightingale. It is in

the other departments of social service that they are challenging the

public estimates of their capacity, and here the facts must speak for

themselves. Some of the factories have published statistics regarding

their output of work; and the following comparisons were made in one of

the engineers’ shops of the Midland Railway Company.

Average percentage earned by men on Group No. 17 by the week, 42·5.

Average percentage earned by women on Group No. 17 by the week, 49·6.

The two hundred women thus employed had only lately displaced the male

workers, and Sir Guy Granet, manager of the Midland Railway, remarked

that ‘the efficiency of women in certain directions had been a revelation

to him.’ Something must be added for the absence of any organised

‘restrictions of outputs,’ but in fact there has been a reiterated note

of surprise in most of the testimonials to the women workers’ capacity,

as though we were being faced with a new phenomenon, uncaused and

spontaneous, instead of the outcome of underlying forces in the vanished

world before the war.

‘I am not sure,’ wrote Mr. A. G. Gardiner in the _Daily News_, ‘that

the future will not find in the _arrival_ of women the biggest social

and economic result of the war.... Woman has won her place in the ranks

beyond challenge.’

In Manchester, last June, one of the great attractions was the ploughing

demonstration made by women ‘on the land.’ Lancashire criticism was

sparing of words, but here again it was appreciative. ‘Ay, they frame

well,’ said the men. The same results are recorded from clerks’ offices,

from the tramcars, from motor driving, and, perhaps most unexpectedly,

from the factories where women are in charge of delicate and intricate

machinery. In all these branches of manual and intellectual labour, the

women workers have risen to their opportunities and have made good.

The comment by _Punch_ gave to the general view its own characteristic

expression.

‘Whenever he sees one of the new citizens or whenever he hears fresh

stories of their ability Mr. Punch is proud and delighted. “It is almost

worth having a war,” he says, “to prove what stuff our women are made of.

Not,” he adds gallantly, “that it wanted proof.”’

On the other hand, it must, we think, be admitted that proof was in fact

the one essential thing which the world needed. On November 2, 1915, the

Prime Minister, referring in the House of Commons to the death of Nurse

Cavell, said:

‘She has taught the bravest men among us a supreme lesson of courage....

In this United Kingdom there are thousands of such women, and a year ago

_we did not know it_.’

At first sight the saying was a strange one, for the supreme crises of

life are commonly those which call forth the highest response in human

nature; but on reflection the words are just: we do not practically

‘know’ what we have not had an opportunity of proving. We had to wait

for the experience furnished by a national crisis in opening the gates

of industry to over three hundred thousand new recruits, bringing up

the total of women workers, according to Mr. Sidney Webb’s calculation,

to six million and a half: figures and results which forced the Prime

Minister at a later date into the acknowledgment that women’s claim to

the privileges of full citizenship was now ‘unanswerable.’

‘They have been put to many kinds of work,’ said Mr. Webb, ‘hitherto

supposed to be within the capacity of men only, and they have done it on

the whole successfully.’

Now, both these figures and these achievements must surely be recognised

as a result of the trend of the last forty or fifty years. Without

long preparation it could not have sprung into being. As the ripple

is sustained by the weight of ocean, so the self-respecting work of

the modern woman in the higher department of service has only been

made possible by the education and tradition at her back; while even

the factory worker has imbibed a sense of responsibility which is not

the mark of the unfree. The new type is therefore, as is usual in the

evolutionary process, found to be suited to its age. It was not enough

that the women of the country should be, as always, eager to help,

willing for sacrifice: it was necessary that they should have had the

training in work, in business habits, and in self-control which gives to

inherent good-will its market value.

Briefly then, we see in this record of women’s service, which is coming

as a surprise to many, an instance wherein the pragmatic philosophy has

come to its own. In the early days of the Crimean War the people who were

‘afraid of experience, afraid of life,’ were shocked at the initiative

of Florence Nightingale. No really ‘nice’ women, they said, would want

to go out to nurse soldiers. The incredible insults heaped upon the

first women doctors are remembered by many to-day. The advocates of the

‘movement’ were charged at every new departure with the desire to change

the character of woman herself, whereas all that has been changed is

her position in the national life; and that change has undoubtedly been

rendered more conspicuous since the war.

To all reasonable persons, whether pragmatists or not, the record of

experience is worth a great deal of theory. There are many cautious but

fair-minded people who have regarded women’s capacity for difficult

administrative offices as unproven until now. There are many more who

would have hastily judged them unfit for the responsible work which they

are doing in the aircraft and munition departments. For all such there

is a message in the principle of pragmatism. ‘It preserves,’ says its

genial apologist, ‘a cordial relation with facts.... The pragmatist turns

towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and

towards power.... That means the open air and possibilities of nature as

against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.’

And Truth, to quote again from a former passage, can just now be vividly

observed ‘in the making’ in the great workshop of the world. She can

be caught in the grip of the philosopher, and submitted to the most

searching inquiry which the mind of man can desire: she can be traced

through the past, as Green desired to trace her, to her eternal source

in the ‘ideas’ which are a ‘basis for human effort’: she can be brought

to the bar of Reality. In this way, it may be added, the method of

Pragmatism may exercise a wholesome bracing effect upon one’s thought. It

clears away the cobwebs of abstractions; it watches Truth at its daily

work in particulars whence only careful generalisations should be drawn.

It brings all theory to the test of experiment. And finally recurring

to our starting point, it lays stress upon the power of every idea in

action, insisting upon the vital correlation of thought and deed. For in

the words of the old Greek dramatist,[5] ‘The word and the deed should be

present as one thing, to dispatch that end whereto the counselling mind

moveth.’

LESLIE KEENE.

FOOTNOTES

[5] Aeschylus.

_THE BRITISH RED CROSS IN ITALY._

BY LEWIS R. FREEMAN.

For the first time in a fortnight there had been a few hours of really

good visibility, and, as a consequence, the artillery of both sides were

endeavouring to make up for lost time with an increase of activity, just

as a pet Pomeranian begins to cut capers the instant it is freed from its

restraining leash. For some reason, a goodly share of the Austrian fire

appeared to be directed to the vicinity of a certain road along which we

had to pick our way in returning from an advanced Italian position we had

just visited.

A road under heavy gun fire is not a comfortable place to be at large

upon on any of the battle fronts of Europe, and least of all that of

the stony Carso, where flying rock fragments increase the casualties

three and four-fold over what they would be if the hurtling shells were

burying themselves in eight or ten feet of soft earth before accumulating

enough resistance to detonate their charges of high explosive. The

‘cave-men’ who held the plateau had all disappeared into their burrows

on the ‘lee’ side of the _dolinas_ or sink-holes which pit the repulsive

face of the Carsic hills, but here and there along the road there

were evidences—mostly pools of blood and scattered kit—that some whom

recklessness or duty had kept from cover had met with trouble. Plainly

there was going to be work for the Red Cross, and one of the first

things I began to wonder about after we had passed on to the comparative

shelter of a side-hill, was whether or not they would see fit to risk one

of their precious ambulances up there on the shell-torn plateau where,

from the rattle and roar, it was evident that, in spite of the failing

light, things were going to be considerably worse before they began to be

better. Picking up our waiting car in the niche of a protecting cliff,

we coasted down across the face of a hillside honeycombed with dug-outs

to the bottom of a narrow valley, a point which appeared, for the time

being at least, the ‘head of navigation’ for motor traffic. Here we found

ourselves stopped by the jam that had piled up on both sides of a hulking

‘210’ that was being warped around a ‘hairpin’ turn. Suddenly I noticed

a commotion in the wriggling line of lorries, carts, and pack-mules

that wound down from the farther side of the jam, and presently there

wallowed into sight a couple of light ambulances, plainly—from the

purposeful persistence with which they kept plugging on through the

blockade—on urgent business.

Now the very existence of a jam on a road is in itself evidence of the

fact that there is an _impasse_ somewhere, and until this is broken the

confusion only becomes confounded by any misdirected attempts to push

ahead from either direction. But the ambulance is largely a law unto

itself, and when it signals for a right-of-way there is always an attempt

to make way for it where any other vehicle (save, of course, one carrying

reinforcements or munitions at the height of a battle) would have to wait

its turn. Mules and carts and lorries crowded closer against each other

or edged a few more precarious inches over the side, and by dint of good

luck and skilful driving, the two ambulances finally filtered through the

blockade and came to a halt alongside our waiting car on the upper end.

Then I saw that their cool-headed young drivers were dressed in khaki,

and knew, even before I read in English on the side of one of the cars

that it was the gift of some Indian province—that they belonged to a unit

of the British Red Cross.

‘Plucky chaps those,’ remarked the Italian officer escorting me. ‘Ready

to go anywhere and at any time. But it’s hardly possible they’re going to

venture up on to the plateau while that bombardment’s going on. That’s

work for the night-time, after the guns have quieted down. But there

is one of them coming back now; perhaps they’re going to discuss the

situation before going on.’

I leaned out to eavesdrop on that momentous debate, and this is what I

heard:

‘Jolly awful tobacco this,’ said the one on the ground, after filling his

pipe from his companion’s pouch.

‘Poisonous,’ agreed the other, ‘and nothing better in sight for a week.

Your engine isn’t missing any more, is it?’

‘Nu-u,’ mumbled the first, continuing to puff at the pipe he was

lighting. ‘Goin’—like a—top.’

‘Right-o, then; better be getting on.’

‘Hu-u’; and so the ‘discussion’ ended.

Without another word the boy on the ground pulled on his gloves, walked

back to his car, cranked up, climbed into his seat, and led the way off

up the empty road.

‘They’re not much on “dramatics,” these young Britons,’ said my

companion, ‘but they’re always on hand when they’re wanted, and they

take danger and emergencies—and there isn’t much else to work on the

Carso—just about as much of a matter of course as they do afternoon

tea. The actual work they’ve done for us here with their ambulances and

hospital has been very considerable; but even more importance attaches

to the fact that they have come to stand in the minds of the Italian

army as the tangible expression of British sympathy for our country. The

good they have done, and will continue to do, on this score is beyond

reckoning.’

* * * * *

It has been well said, now that the absolute superiority of the Allies

in men, material, and _moral_ has been established beyond a doubt, that

the only eventuality that can conceivably intervene to prevent their

obtaining a sweeping victory over the Central Powers is one which might

arise as a consequence of trouble among themselves. It is for this reason

that every effort calculated to promote better feeling between, and a

fuller appreciation of each other’s efforts and ideals among, the various

peoples of the Entente nations is so highly desirable; and it is on this

account that the work of the British Red Cross Mission to Italy has an

importance incalculably greater than that which attaches to it merely as

a material contribution.

The work of this Mission comes nearer, perhaps, to being a pure labour

of love than any other comprehensive piece of international effort

called forth by the war. Duty, sympathy, pity—these are the mainsprings

of the American Commission for Belgian Relief, and the splendid work is

carried on by men to whom Belgium was but little more than a name before

the invading Germans began trampling it under foot; and in the American

ambulances and flying squadron in France the spirit of adventure vies

with affection for France in bringing those devoted workers and fighters

across the sea. The Red Cross and other British work for the comfort and

welfare of the Italian army is almost entirely under the direction of

those who have seized the opportunity to pay back with present effort the

accumulated debts of past years of residence or study in a country which

occupies only a lesser place in their hearts, and a slighter claim on

their services, than their own.

Mr. George M. Trevelyan, essayist and historian and author of the works

on the life of Garibaldi, had been with the Relief Committee in Servia

prior to Italy’s entry into the war. As soon as that event took place he

hastened to England, and was fortunately able to unite the efforts of

a number of persons, all equally anxious to demonstrate in a practical

form their friendship for Italy. There resulted the formation of a Red

Cross ambulance unit for service on the Italian front. With the help

of the British Red Cross authorities at home, and Lord Monson, their

Commissioner in Italy, this unit came out in September 1915, under Mr.

Trevelyan as commandant; forming the original nucleus of the present

Mission of the British Red Cross and Order of St. John, which, united

under the direction of Lt.-Col. Lord Monson, now consists of three

ambulance and two X-ray units and an English-staffed hospital of 110

beds. Two other hospitals of 320 and 150 beds respectively are also being

equipped for the Italian Sanitary Service.

From the inception of the movement all of the British residents in Italy

threw themselves into it heart and soul; and not only these, but also

those then resident in England who, through past acquaintance or study,

felt that the land of Michael Angelo and Raphael, of Dante and Tasso,

of Garibaldi and Mazzini, was deserving of a fitting testimonial of

sympathy. Voluntary contributions of money and service poured in for the

Red Cross Mission from all sides, while various auxiliary organisations

were formed to help in other ways. Over 20,000 garments and over 12,000

bandages have been made in the Joint War Committee’s ten War Hospital

Supply Depots in Italian cities, where 500 ladies are engaged in making

comforts for the sick and wounded. The total of garments supplied through

the Commissioner’s Stores Department is in excess of 60,000, and that of

bandages 113,000. A number of _Posti di Ristoro_, or refreshment depots,

are conducted by English ladies at various railway stations near and on

the way to the front, while more recently a movement has been inaugurated

for starting a system of recreation huts patterned after those conducted

with such success by the Y.M.C.A. in France and Flanders.

To return to the Red Cross work. Mr. Trevelyan’s pioneer unit is the

largest of the three now in operation. It consists of an 110-bed

hospital, working as a regular part of the Italian army corps, and of

some thirty ambulances and twelve other cars, which are attached to

several army corps in Gorizia and neighbourhood. The hospital is under

the charge of Dr. George S. Brock, the medical doctor of the British

Embassy in Rome, and Colonel Sir Alexander Ogston, the celebrated Scotch

surgeon, and Dr. W. E. Thompson of Edinburgh. The personnel of the

hospital consists of about twenty English nurses, the matron, Miss Power,

having marched through the snow in the retreat of the Servian army, with

which she worked in 1915. There are sixty English drivers and mechanics,

one of whom has been severely wounded and another slightly. The King of

Italy has made personal presentation of the Silver Medal for Military

Valour to the commandant as a testimony to the services of the whole unit

under fire during its year and a half of service on the Italian front.

The Second Unit, with a smaller number of cars, under the command of Mr.

F. Sargant, has been working in the rough and difficult Carnic Alps for

fifteen months. This is the most isolated of all the units, and its work

under conditions calling for unusual resource and initiative has resulted

in its being commended in a special Order of the Day issued by General

Lequio, who at the time commanded the unit to which it is attached. This,

the highest honour an Italian General can confer on the troops under his

command, reads as follows:

‘H.Q. CARNIA ZONE,

‘_July 23, 1916_.

‘General Orders N. 72.

‘I wish to draw the attention of the troops under my command

to the courageous behaviour, the never-failing cheerfulness,

and the single-hearted devotion of the officers and men of the

British Red Cross Unit serving in the Carnia Zone.

‘This Unit, which arrived at Tolmezzo on October 26, 1915, has

from that date worked with untiring zeal and devotion. Wherever

duty has called its members—in the neighbourhood of the first

lines, frequently under heavy bombardment—they have one and

all devoted themselves to the removal of our wounded who were

exposed to the merciless fire of the enemy’s artillery.

‘It is, therefore, a great pleasure to me to confer on them all

_l’encomio solenne_, adding thereto my sincerest good wishes

and gratitude.

‘(_Signed_) C. LEQUIO,

‘_Lieut.-General Commanding_.’

Mr. Douglas Cooper, of this unit, has received the Bronze Medal for

Military Valour for his services under fire.

The ambulances of the Third Unit, which is under the command of Mr.

F. Alexander, were a gift of the British Coal Owners’ and Miners’

Committee for service in Italy. This unit has now completed a year of

service on the Carso front, especially distinguished for the extremely

heavy fighting which has taken place there. No more conclusive proof is

required of the high opinion held by the Italian Sanitary Service of the

judgment and consideration of the British driver than the fact that over

one-third of the wounded carried by the ambulances of this Third Unit

have been stretcher cases.

The Fourth Unit is a radiographic one, under the joint command of

Countess Helena Gleichen and Mrs. Hollings, who realised early in the

war the incalculably valuable work that radiography could fulfil in the

immediate vicinity of the front. The apparatus, which combines both

power and mobility, is one of the most up-to-date yet devised. For

over a year now, without the briefest leave of absence, these ladies

have carried on their work close up to the firing line, where their

devotion, unselfishness, and disdain of all danger have won for them the

Italian Bronze Medal for Military Valour, to say nothing of the undying

gratitude, not alone of the wounded who have passed through their hands,

but of the whole army corps under whose eyes they have laboured.

The Fifth Unit, recently formed, is also devoted to ‘close-up’

radiography. It is under the command of Mr. Cecil Pisent.

The following grimly amusing, but highly illuminative anecdote is told to

illustrate the resourcefulness and energy of the British ambulance driver

in an emergency hardly covered by his instructions or previous experience.

One of the voluntary drivers was bringing down, over an especially

difficult piece of road, an ambulance full of wounded from a lofty

sector of the Alpine front, when he encountered a soldier in a desperate

condition from a gaping bullet-wound in the throat. Realising that the

man was in imminent danger of bleeding to death, the driver lifted the

inert body to his seat, propping it up the best he could next to where he

sat behind his steering-wheel. Driving with his right hand, while with a

finger of his left he maintained a firm pressure on the severed carotid

artery, he steered his ambulance down the slippery, winding mountain road

to the clearing station at the foot of the pass. The laconic comment of

the astonished but highly pleased Italian doctor on the incident was

direct but comprehensive.

‘Well, young man,’ he said, as he took hasty measures further to staunch

the gushes of blood, ‘you’ve saved his life, but in five minutes more you

would have throttled him.’

It will hardly be necessary to enlarge on the effect upon the Italian

wounded of the devoted care they have received while in charge of

the British Red Cross Ambulance and Hospital Units; nor yet on the

admiration awakened throughout the Italian army by the presence in

their midst of these quietly energetic and modestly brave workers of

mercy. Reciprocally, too, it has given to hundreds (to be passed on to

thousands) of Britons an experience of Italian courage and fortitude

which could never have been gained except through the medium of hospital

and ambulance work. I do not believe I have heard a finer tribute of one

Ally to another than that which a member of the British Red Cross Mission

paid to the Italians as he had observed them under the terrible trial of

the especially aggravated Austrian gas attack of June 30, 1916.

‘The gas employed on this occasion,’ he said, ‘was the deadliest of which

there has been any experience; much deadlier than the Germans employed

against us at Ypres. It was, as General Cadorna’s dispatch admitted, very

destructive of life, although the valour of the Italian soldier prevented

the enemy from reaping any military advantage from the foul sowing.

Our cars were summoned early, and we worked all night at Sagrado. The

trenches on the Carso were at that time close at hand, and the soldiers

who were not overcome at their posts came staggering into the hospitals

for many hours after the horror was released. Several hundred of them

died that night in the court and garden.

‘It was a scene of heartrending suffering—much the same sort of horror

the British went through in Flanders a year before—and the Italians were,

very naturally, in a rage with the savagery of the Austrian methods

of war. If there ever was a moment when they might have been capable

of cruelty or roughness with their prisoners, this was the one when

their fury would have carried them away. Their comrades, racked with

unspeakable agony, were dying around them by scores. Yet even on that

night I observed with admiration that they medicated the Austrian wounded

prisoners with exactly the same kindness and attention they showed to

their own, passing them on to our waiting cars in due time without injury

or insult.’

Under the leadership of Geoffrey Young, Alpine climber and poet, the

ambulances of the British Red Cross were the first motor vehicles to

enter Gorizia following its capture in August 1916. Perhaps I cannot

convey a better idea of the conditions under which the drivers work, and

the spirit in which that work is carried out, than by quoting from Mr.

Young’s report to Mr. Trevelyan, the commander of his unit, a copy of

which has kindly been put at my disposal.

‘On August 8, 6.30 P.M.,’ he writes, ‘I picked up at Lucinico and carried

back two cavalry officers, still wet from the ride across the Isonzo.

All August 9 Bersaglieri, &c., passed, moving on to cross the river. At

7.50 P.M. Captain Z⸺, who had just moved with us from the Osteria to

Vallisella, informed me that he had an urgent call from Gorizia to fetch

in cavalry wounded. He asked me if I could get an ambulance across. I

selected the light touring car, loaded with bandages (Driver Sessions),

and the Ford Ambulance, as that could pass where heavier cars might not

be able to; also the Crossley (Watson) as the next in size, and the No.

14 Buick, in case the bridge would allow it.

‘... The roads were still full of shell holes and blocked by munition

carts and guns. We reached the Iron Bridge just as darkness fell. Here

the cars had to halt, as the holes in the bridge were making it necessary

to unharness the artillery horses and man-handle the guns across. At the

worst passages the shells were being unloaded from the carts and reloaded

beyond the obstacles.

‘I walked across ahead by moonlight. Every ten feet or so there were

shell breaches through the bridge. At night it was next to impossible

to see them, and even after some twenty crossings I found the greatest

circumspection necessary. In various places soldiers, mules, and carts

severally fell through during the night. In two places nearly two-thirds

of the bridge had been blown away, leaving only narrow passages along the

edge. These were slightly but insecurely inclosed by a few loose planks.

Again and again the heavy artillery carts broke through, gradually paring

away the edge of the remaining galleries. Each of our cars had to be

piloted across on foot, inch by inch. In the block it was impossible

to keep them together ... and long waits and many retraversings were

necessary before all four were steered safely over. There had been no

time as yet even to clear away the bodies of the soldiers killed in the

first passage of the morning.

‘We then wound up into the town, again impeded by shell holes in the

road, fallen trees, and by remains of carts, horses, and mules. The town

was utterly deserted. The only occupation was by squadrons of cavalry.

The Austrians were still being cleared out of the outskirts, and stray

bullets announced any open gaps in the line of houses to the east of us.

‘We traversed the town in convoy, visiting the Municipio and the

principal Piazzas. We failed to find any cavalry aid-post with wounded.

We were informed by a colonel of cavalry, who received us most cordially,

that no aid-posts had as yet been established, and that we were the first

motor ambulances to cross the bridge.

‘In passing and repassing, however, we had constant appeals from the

corner-posts of regimental stretcher-bearers, and had soon filled our

ambulance with wounded and distributed most of the stores of bandages,

&c., with which the touring car had been loaded.

‘We then started to return. The moon had now sunk. The gaps in the

Iron Bridge had opened farther. The traffic was all from the other

bank, and the munition carts were all successively breaking through and

necessitating lengthy rescue operations. It was fully an hour before I

secured passage for the touring car. Sessions then returned with me to

drive the Ford Ambulance. Another hour passed before he could be started.

I left him half-way across, and returned to fetch the other cars. On

recrossing I found the Ford with one wheel through. Sessions’ coolness

and the car’s lightness enabled us to extract the latter and its load. It

was then clear that passage for a wider car had now become impossible.

On our return on foot we saw that another portion of one of the narrow

galleries had opened out (the footway separating from the roadway),

carrying with it a mule. No course lay open but to leave the heavier

cars, with their wounded, on the Gorizia side, and to try to get the

others back to Vallisella, returning later with another car to which the

wounded could be carried across the bridge. The night was cold, and we

left all available coats, &c., to cover the wounded in their long wait.

The drivers accepted the situation with the coolness one could expect

from them.

‘On reaching the Italian side again we found a block, three carts wide,

extending back almost to Lucinico. We were forced to abandon, therefore,

the remaining Ford Ambulance, for which it proved impossible to make a

passage. After a few hundred yards of slow progress in the block, the

touring car fell over the side of the road into a shell hole. It was

extricated, but a few yards further the block became impracticable. We

left it, half in a trench, and walked to Vallisella. On the way we met

our two remaining cars, loaded with the material of the hospitals to

which we were attached, also completely locked in the block.

‘At Vallisella we filled rucksacks with food and thermos, and with our

adjutant, Kennedy, to help, trudged back for the bridge. Fortunately, our

tramp-like appearance only led to one “hold-up” in the kindly darkness.

‘My anxiety to return was emphasised by the certainty that the Austrians

would begin shelling the bridge as soon as daylight revealed the block.

Day broke as we approached it. The risk had also appealed to the drivers,

and we met the lorries, cars, &c., all breaking out of the jam and racing

for the cover of Lucinico. Glaisyer was able to move off just as we

reached him. The two cars that were still on the near side got down to

the protection of the Galleria with their hospital staff.

‘As I walked up to the bridge, I was just in time to see Woolmer ably

rushing the Crossley over the holes, across which the Genio had thrown a

few loose planks and beams. The heavier Buick had to be carefully piloted

over, Christie winding through the gaps and rushing the awkward narrow

traverses with skill and nerve. The Buick was the last heavy car to

recross before the bridge, under fire, was repaired about mid-day. It had

also been the first to cross.

‘We were barely clear of the bridge—perhaps four minutes—when the first

big shell exploded at the Italian end.’

* * * * *

From the time of the capture of Gorizia down to the present the cars of

the First Unit have been stationed there, picking up their wounded within

a mile of the Austrian first-line trenches. At the time of my visit to

the British Red Cross Hospital one of the drivers had just suffered a

broken leg and other injuries sustained when the walls of his quarters in

Gorizia were blown down upon him by an Austrian shell.

‘They’re talking about sending me home on a bit of a leave to rest up a

bit,’ he told me; ‘but—much as I should like to go—I’m not too keen on

it. It’s more men we need here, rather than less. So, unless they insist

upon it, I think my leave can wait better than our wounded.’

That seems to me fairly typical of the spirit imbuing every member of the

Mission with whom I talked.

_UNCONQUERED: AN EPISODE OF 1914._

BY MAUD DIVER.

Copyright, 1917, by Mrs. Diver, in the United States of America.

CHAPTER XIII.

‘I am the Fact,’ said War, ‘and I stand astride the path of

Life.... There can be nothing else and nothing more in human

life until you have reckoned with me.’—H. G. WELLS.

That same evening, a good deal later on, Lady Forsyth sat at her

dressing-table, brushing out her hair, recalling, with pride, Mark’s

vivid speech, the cheers, the record ‘bag’ of recruits, and wondering if

he would forget to come for his usual good-night.

His room opened out of hers; and the door between stood chronically

ajar—a companionable habit begun in her first days of loneliness after

his father’s death. He rarely missed the little ceremony of early tea,

when he would establish himself at the foot of the bed and argue, or read

aloud, or simply ‘rag’ her, as the spirit moved him. Then he would wander

in and out, in the later stages of dressing, hindering and delighting her

in about equal measure. Or they would carry on a violent argument through

the open door, a pair of disembodied voices, till some climax would bring

one or other gesticulating to the threshold. These morning and evening

hours were the times of their most formidable encounters, their wildest

nonsense, their utmost joy in each other’s society, exhibited in a manner

peculiar to themselves. At night the ‘hair-brush interview’ had become

a regular institution. It might be over in ten minutes or last till

midnight, according to their mood. This was the time for graver matters,

for the give and take of advice; and although there might be little

outward show of sentiment, those hours of comradeship were among the most

sacred treasures of the mother’s heart.

To-night she brushed till her arm ached, listening for his footstep; and

the moment she put the hated thing down, he came, bringing with him the

whiff of cigarette smoke she loved.

Standing behind her, he took her head between his hands, lightly passed

his fingers through her hair and smiled at her in the glass. She was

responsive as a cat when her hair was caressed; and he knew it.

‘Poor deserted little Mums!’ he said. ‘Had you given me up in despair?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And how long would you have hung on past despair point?’ he asked with a

twinkle.

‘Probably half an hour.... What have you done with your lady-love?’

‘Ordered her to bed.’

‘So early? All for my benefit? I scent an ulterior motive.’

He laughed and pulled her hair. ‘Your instinct’s infallible! It’s this

marrying business. I know I promised to wait; but the whole face of the

world has changed since then.’

He detected the faint compression of her lips.

‘Mums, you’re incorrigible. She’s a delicious thing.’

‘Who says otherwise?’

‘You do—internally! Not a mite of use throwing dust in my eyes. When

you’re converted I shall know it, to the tick of a minute. Meantime’—he

moved over to the window and stood there facing her—‘the question is, in

a war like this, oughtn’t one to marry, if possible, before going out?

She got on to war weddings this evening, and I was tongue-tied. That

mustn’t happen again. What’s your notion? D’you still think—wait?’

A pause. She dreaded, as he did, the possibility of Wynchcombe Friars

passing into the hands of Everard Forsyth and his son, whose views were

not their views, except in matters political. Had the wife in question

been Sheila, her answer would have been unhesitating. As it was, she

parried his awkward question with another.

‘What do you think yourself, Mark?’

He laughed.

‘Oh, you clever woman! I have my answer. And in this case ... I believe

you’re right. Personally, I’m game to marry her at once. But ... there

_are_ other considerations. Seems her precious Harry’s been rubbing into

her that these war marriages aren’t fair on women—that it’s a bigger

shadow on their lives losing a husband than a lover. It’s a tragic sort

of start, I admit; and once we’re married the wrench of separation

would surely be harder for both. Then, as regards myself, _you_ know

how this coming struggle has obsessed my mind; how we’ve doubted, both

of us, the spirit of modern England—the selfish, commercial spirit of

the red-necktie brand. And now that I see the old country shaming our

doubts, I simply want to fling myself into this business—heart and brain

and body. And, frankly, I’ve a feeling I could give myself to things with

a freer mind ... as a bachelor. That’s the truth—for your very private

ear. Thirdly and lastly, if we married, she ought to be here with you.

And I’m doubtful if you’d either of you relish that arrangement, lacking

me to do buffer state. See?’

‘I do see, very clearly,’ she answered, smiling at him with grave

tenderness, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands.

‘Thought you would. There’s only one thing worries me. As my wife—if

the worst happened, she’d at least be well provided for. Seems she has

literally no money, and a very fair gift for spending it.’

Helen’s quick brain—lightened by her relief—sprang to instant decision.

‘You could settle that by adding a codicil to your will. Those

investments of father’s that are not tied up with the place would give

her quite a comfortable income.’

‘Capital! Fool I was not to think of it. Simply forestall my instructions

about her marriage settlement. We’ll fix it up at once and I’ll talk

things over with her to-morrow. See how she feels about it herself.’

They discussed details for another half-hour; then, in his peremptory

fashion, he ordered her to bed.

‘God bless you,’ she whispered as he shed a kiss on her hair. ‘This

afternoon I was the proudest mother in England.’

‘O fool woman—just because I’ve caught the gift of the gab! With practice

I might even degenerate into a politician. Just as well I’m in for a few

years of the silent service. Go to sleep quick, and don’t let yourself be

bogey-ridden by German devilments.’

But though wisdom endorsed his command, she disobeyed it flatly. There

was no sleep in her brain; and instead of going to bed, she sat down in

the window-seat, leaned against the woodwork and looked out upon the

still serenity of garden, terrace and pinewood, softly illumined by an

unclouded moon. The very peace and beauty of those moonlit August nights

had an uncanny power of intensifying the inner visions that daylight and

ceaseless occupation kept partially in check. She could not now look

upon the moon without seeing the sacked villages, the human wreckage of

battle that the same impartial goddess illumined, over there, on the

shell-battered fields of Belgium and France.

Earlier in the day her spirit had been uplifted by Miss Sorabji’s

beautiful letter ‘England in Earnest’; by her exhortation, from the Gita,

‘Think of this not as a war, but as a sacrifice of arms demanded of the

gods.’ But now, in the peace and silence of night, it was the anguish

of the flight from Tirlemont that lived before her eyes and chilled

her blood. Too vividly, she pictured the flaming town; the rush of

panic-stricken people; women and children, shot, bayonetted, ruthlessly

ridden down. And already there were whispers of things infinitely worse

than killing—things unnamable, at thought of which imagination blenched⸺

From that great, confused mass of misery there emerged the pathetic

figure of one fugitive peasant woman and five children who stood

bewildered in the Place de la Gare, crying all of them as if their hearts

would break. That morning the German soldiery had killed the woman’s

husband and trampled two of her children to death before her face—a minor

item in an orgy of horrors. But it is the poignant personal detail that

pierces the heart: and the acute realisation of one mother’s anguish

brought sudden tears to Helen’s eyes.

So blurred was the moonlit garden, when she looked down into it, that a

shadow moving at the end of the terrace set her heart fluttering in her

throat.

Spy hunting and spy mania were in the air. Almost every day brought its

crop of tales, credible and incredible: horses poisoned wholesale at

Aldershot, mysterious gun-emplacements, hidden arms and ammunition in

the least expected places. Even allowing for exaggeration, these tales

were sufficiently disturbing. They gave a creepy, yet rather thrilling

sense of insecurity to things as perennially and unshakably secure as the

Bank of England or Westminster Abbey. Nor could even those symbols of

stability be reckoned immune, with the financial world in convulsions and

a mysterious fleet of Zeppelins threatening to bombard London!

In the over-civilised and over-legislated world that came by a violent

end in July 1914, the uncertainty of life had been little more than a

pious phrase, spasmodically justified by events. Now it was an impious

fact, vaguely or acutely felt almost every hour of the day—by none more

acutely than by Helen Forsyth with her quick sensibilities and vivid

brain. Even Mark admitted that she was keeping her head creditably on

the whole; but in certain moods she was capable of demanding a drastic

search for gun-emplacements in her own grounds or suspecting a secret

store of ammunition among the ruins of Wynchcombe Abbey, all on the

strength of a semi-German gardener dismissed years ago. Only last week

a suspicious, Teutonic-looking individual had come to the back door and

put the cook ‘all in a tremor’ by asking superfluous questions about the

neighbourhood. And now this mysterious wanderer in the garden—at such an

hour⸺!

She was on her feet, brushing aside the tears that obscured her vision.

But the shadow had vanished behind a bush and did not seem disposed to

reappear. For a second she stood hesitating. If she called Mark, he would

either laugh at her or scold her for not being in bed. The creature

was probably harmless. She would creep downstairs quietly and explore.

For all her nerves and fanciful fears, she was no coward in the grain.

Hastily twisting up her hair, she slipped on a long opera coat and crept

noiselessly down into the drawing-room. There she found that the French

window leading on to the terrace had been left unlocked.

‘How careless of Mark!’ she murmured; and, with fluttering pulse, stepped

out into the moonlight.

There he was again! Summoning all her courage she went forward, uncertain

even now what she meant to say.

The shadowy figure had turned. It was coming towards her. Then—with a

start of recognition she stopped dead.

‘Keith!’ she exclaimed softly, and could have laughed aloud in her relief.

‘Helen—what are you doing out here?’ he asked, an odd thrill in his low

voice.

‘What are _you_ doing?’ she retorted. ‘Frightening me out of my life! I

saw a suspicious-looking shadow; and—don’t laugh at me—I thought it might

be a spy.’

‘And you came down to tackle him alone! Just like you. Supposing it had

been?’

‘Oh—thank _good_ness it’s not! But don’t you ever give me away.’ Helen’s

laugh ended in an involuntary shiver.

‘Cold?’ he asked quickly.

‘No—no. Let’s walk a little and feel normal.’

He moved on beside her, anxious, yet deeply content. Then: ‘Helen,’ he

said suddenly, ‘if you’re going to let things get on your nerves like

this, you’ll be done for. Your best chance is to take up some absorbing

war-work; the harder the better.’

‘_What_ work? And where?’ He caught a note of desperation in her tone.

‘Scrubbing hospital floors? Or playing about with Belgians and invalids

here, while Sheila is at Boulogne, you scouring France in our car, and

Mark in the thick of it all? He wants me to stay here, I know. But,

Keith, I simply _can’t_. What else, though, can a useless woman of fifty

do?’

‘To start with, she can refrain from calling herself useless, which is

a libel! To go on with⸺’ He paused, regarding her. The supposed spy was

meditating a bold suggestion. ‘Helen—could you ... would you ... come

out with me as my orderly? If so, I could confine my activities to the

Base. I verily believe you’d find the real thing less nerve-racking than

the nightmares of an imagination like yours. But, could you stand it,

physically? And ... would the conventions permit?’

Her low laugh answered him straight away. ‘My dear Keith, talk of

inspiration! It would just save my soul alive. I can act infinitely

better than I can endure. I should feel nearer to Mark. And as for the

conventions, I hanged them all years ago. What harm, if the poor dead

things are drawn and quartered?’ She checked herself and looked up at

him. ‘Will you take your Bible oath that I shouldn’t simply be in the

way?’

‘I’ll take it on as many Bibles as you like to produce,’ he answered,

with becoming gravity. ‘But I’m thinking ... for your sake ... another

woman.... How about Sheila?’

‘Sheila! Lovely.’

‘Would she give up her precious massage?’

‘If _I_ wanted her, she’d give up anything. But—the massage wouldn’t

bring her up against the worst horrors. Your work would. And she’s full

young—barely three and twenty.’

‘She is that. Though, if I’m any good at observation, I should say the

stature of her spirit is far in advance of her years. She gives me the

impression of great reserve power, that girl. She never seems to put out

her full strength, or to waste it in kicking against the pricks.’

‘One for me!’ Lady Forsyth murmured meekly.

‘Yes, one for you! And I make bold to prophesy she would be worth five of

you in a painful emergency.’

He made that unflattering statement in a tone of such extraordinary

tenderness that she beamed as at a compliment.

‘Let the righteous smite me friendly—when I deserve it! You seem to have

made a close study of my Sheila. It only remains to secure her services

and Mark’s consent⸺’

‘_Mother!_’ His deep voice called suddenly from the window. ‘I’m ashamed

of you. Come in at once!’

‘Coming!’ she called back, adding under her breath: ‘Keith, remember I

only came down for a book. And you found me locking you out.’

Then she hurried away, obedient always to the voice of her son.

Nightmares had been effectually dispelled.

* * * * *

Bel’s hope that the War Office would be merciful was not fulfilled. The

Great Man, who worked day and night, creating new armies, had need of

every promising semblance of an officer he could lay hands on; and Mark’s

name was a recommendation in itself.

Bel was given little more than a week in which to be ‘heavenly good’;

and it must be admitted that she made the most of it. She took kindly,

on the whole, to Mark’s solution of the marriage problem. How far her

acquiescence was due to his exceeding thoughtfulness in the matter of

money it might be invidious to inquire. There remained the fact that

Harry O’Neill—scenting a possible war wedding—had skilfully put forward

her own pronounced views on the subject; while, incidentally, spoiling

her idol more egregiously than ever. And the girl herself leaned towards

a more auspicious beginning of her married life. Mark found her oddly

superstitious on the subject; and, with her gift for evading unpleasant

facts, she had risen readily to the optimistic conviction that the war

would be over by Christmas or the New Year. Apparently it did not occur

to her, or to others of her persuasion, that a short war could only

mean victory for Germany. But there seemed little use in dispelling an

illusion that kept her happy; and, in her case, could do no harm.

So she clung unchallenged to her comforting belief; and, the great

question being settled, Mark was free to consider other matters.

To start with, there was Keith’s amazing proposition to enlist Mums—a

project that did not square with Mark’s private plan for keeping her

safely wrapped in cotton wool and harmless war-activities at Wynchcombe

Friars. Son-like, he had scarce realised how infinitely dear she was to

him, till her eagerness to cross the Channel had driven him to consider

the possibility in all its bearings. And the inclusion of Sheila in the

programme brought to light his hidden tenderness for her that seemed in

no way diminished by his passion for Bel. Why the deuce couldn’t the

women be reasonable, and stay in England where there would be work

enough for all? And what business had Keith to go encouraging them? But

so plainly were the three enamoured of their idea that in the end he had

not the heart to damp them.

In the privacy of his thoughts, he thanked goodness that Bel could be

trusted not to emulate them; though her attitude towards the war was now

less hostile than it had been. The very air she breathed was impregnated

with war-fever, war-talk and war-realities. It was increasingly evident

that new activities were going to become the fashion; and she was of

those who unquestioningly follow a fashion, lead it where it may. Having

no taste for the menial work of hospitals or for tending the sick and

wounded, she had elected to help in some sort of women’s work engineered

by Harry, ‘the Cause’ being temporarily extinct. So far as possible she

turned away her eyes from beholding and her heart from feeling the full

measure of the invisible horror, which, to more imaginative minds, became

too acutely visible and audible during that critical last week of August

1914.

For by now, across the Channel, the Great Retreat had begun. Days that,

at Wynchcombe Friars, slipped by all too fast, seemed over there, to have

neither beginning nor end. Common standards of time were lost in that

ceaseless, sleepless nightmare of dogged marching and still more dogged

fighting, whenever Prussian hordes gave the broken remnant of an army

a chance to turn and smite, as the British soldier can smite even in

retreat.

It was from Le Cateau that an officer friend sent a pencil scrawl to Mark.

‘It is quite evident that we have taken the knock badly. With

any other army one would say we’re beaten. But Tommy doesn’t

understand the word. You can only beat him by knocking the

life out of him. And even when you think he’s dead, chances

are he’ll get up and kick you. People at home simply haven’t

begun to know what heroes these chaps are. Makes me sick even

to think of certain supercilious folk, I seem to remember, who

thought the worst of any man in uniform on principle. Great

Scott, they’re not fit to lick Tommy’s boots.’

Mark handed that letter to Bel.

‘There’s one in the eye for your precious Maitland,’ he remarked coolly.

‘Copy it out verbatim, please, and send it to him with my compliments!’

And Bel obeyed with exemplary meekness. She had rather objected to the

tone of Maitland’s last letter; and, in her own fashion, she was very

much impressed. Heroism, a long way off and entirely unconnected with

one’s self, was an admirable thing in man.

* * * * *

It was near the end of August, when the Channel ports were being

evacuated and the fall of Paris seemed merely a matter of days, that

Mark at last found his name in the Gazette coupled with that of a

distinguished Highland regiment; and in record time he was ready—uniform,

equipment, parting presents and all.

Like most of his race and kind, he would have preferred an informal

departure—casual ‘good-byes,’ as though he were going off on business

for a week or so. But he had won the hearts of his people by justice,

understanding, and the personal touch that was a tradition at Wynchcombe

Friars: he had inspired them, by precept and exhortation, to give of

their best ungrudgingly; and he could not deny them the legitimate thrill

of speeding his departure with congratulations and cheers.

Only on Sunday, his last day, he evaded one ordeal by limiting his

attendance at church to early service with his mother. Bel had little

taste for early rising, and Mark did not press the point.

In the afternoon he delighted his humbler friends—wives of the

gamekeeper, the coachman and the manager of his industrial colony—by

calling on them in full uniform. Though he occasionally wore the kilt

and glengarry at Inveraig, his Hampshire folk had never seen him thus

attired; and their open admiration was so embarrassing that, after

several hours of it, he returned limp and exhausted, clamouring for

whisky and soda and the society of Bel, who could always be trusted to

keep her admiration within bounds.

To her he devoted the evening; and early on Monday the more personal

farewells must be said; the cheerful, casual note vigorously maintained.

It was not ‘the real thing’ yet; and the women, in their hearts, prayed

that ‘the real thing’ might be deferred for many months to come.

Meantime, unless England was favoured with an invasion, he would be safe

enough on the south-east coast of Scotland; and later on, if rooms were

available, he would permit his mother and Bel to intrude upon his violent

industry for a week.

Keith drove them all to the station, and behold, outside the gray stone

gateway, an impromptu guard of honour lined the road to Westover:

villagers and farm hands, weavers and metal-workers, women, children and

ineligible men. At sight of the motor, they broke into shouts and ragged

cheers that would have moved a heart many degrees less responsive than

the heart of Mark Forsyth.

‘Drive slower, man,’ he said to Keith; and, standing up in the car, he

waved his glengarry—giving them shout for shout—till he could no more.

That vision of him, so standing, with the morning light in his eyes,

the sun upon his chestnut-red hair and his kilt blown back by the wind,

remained stamped indelibly upon his mother’s brain....