to a new fact; the fact of the actual presence of the new peasantry.
They had first come into complete possession of their farms, by the
deed of gift signed by Enoch Oates in the February of 19-- and had
thus been settled on the land for ten or twelve years when Lord Eden
and his Cabinet finally committed themselves to the scheme of Land
Nationalization by which their homesteads were to pass into official
control. That curious and inexplicable thing, the spirit of the
peasant, had made great strides in the interval. It was found that
the Government could not move such people about from place to place,
as it is possible to do with the urban poor in the reconstruction of
streets or the destruction of slums. It was not a thing like moving
pawns, but a thing like pulling up plants; and plants that had already
struck their roots very deep. In short, the Government, which had
adopted a policy commonly called Socialist from motives that were in
fact very conservative, found themselves confronted with the same
peasant resistance as brought the Bolshevist Government in Russia to
a standstill. And when Lord Eden and his Cabinet put in motion the
whole modern machinery of militarism and coercion to crush the little
experiment, he found himself confronted with a rural rising such as
has not been known in England since the Middle Ages.
“It is said that the men of the Long Bow carried their mediæval
symbolism so far as to wear Lincoln green as their uniform when they
retired to the woods in the manner of Robin Hood. It is certain that
they did employ the weapon after which they were named; and curiously
enough, as will be seen, by no means without effect. But it must be
clearly understood that when the new agrarian class took to the woods
like outlaws, they did not feel in the least like robbers. They hardly
even felt like rebels. From their point of view at least, they were
and had long been the lawful owners of their own fields, and the
officials who came to confiscate were the robbers. Therefore when Lord
Eden proclaimed Nationalization, they turned out in thousands as their
fathers would have gone out against pirates or wolves.
“The Government acted with great promptitude. It instantly voted
£50,000 to Mr. Rosenbaum Low, the expenditure of which was wisely
left to his discretion at so acute a crisis, with no more than the
understanding that he should take a thorough general survey of the
situation. He proved worthy of the trust; and it was with the gravest
consideration and sense of responsibility that he selected Mr. Leonard
Kramp, the brilliant young financier, from all his other nephews to
take command of the forces in the field. In the field, however,
fortune is well known to be somewhat more incalculable; and all the
intelligence and presence of mind that had enabled Kramp to postpone
the rush on the Potosi Bank were not sufficient to balance the
accidental possession by Crane and Pierce of an elementary knowledge of
strategy.
“Before considering the successes obtained by these commanders in
the rather rude fashion of warfare which they were forced to adopt,
it must be noted, of course, that even on their side there were also
scientific resources of a kind; and an effective if eccentric kind.
The scientific genius of Bellew Blair had equipped his side with many
secret processes affecting aviation and aeronautics, and it is the
peculiarity of this extraordinary man that his secret processes really
remained for a considerable time secret. For he had not told them
to anybody with any intention of making any money out of them. This
quixotic and visionary behaviour contrasted sharply with the shrewd
good sense of the great business men who knew that publicity is the
soul of business. For some time past they had successfully ignored the
outworn sentimental prejudice that had prevented soldiers and sailors
from advertising the best methods of defeating the enemy; and we can
all recall those brilliantly coloured announcements which used to
brighten so many hoardings in those days, ‘Sink in Smith’s Submarine;
Pleasure Trips for Patriots.’ Or ‘Duffin’s Portable Dug-Out Makes War
a Luxury.’ Advertisement cannot fail to effect its aim; the name of
an aeroplane that had been written on the sky in pink and pea-green
lights could not but become a symbol of the conquest of the air; and
the patriotic statesman, deeply considering what sort of battleship
might best defend his country’s coasts, was insensibly and subtly
influenced by the number of times that he had seen its name repeated on
the steps of a moving staircase at an Imperial Exhibition. Nor could
there be any doubt about the brilliant success that attended these
scientific specialities so long as their operations were confined to
the market. The methods of Commander Blair were in comparison private,
local, obscure and lacking any general recognition; and by a strange
irony it was a positive advantage to this nameless and secretive crank
that he had never advertised his weapons until he used them. He had
paraded a number of merely fanciful balloons and fireworks for a jest;
but the secrets to which he attached importance he had hidden in cracks
of the Welsh mountains with a curious and callous indifference to the
principles of commercial distribution and display. He could not in any
case have conducted operations on a large scale, being deficient in
that capital, the lack of which has so often been fatal to inventors;
and had made it useless for a man to discover a machine unless he
could also discover a millionaire. But it cannot be denied that when
his machine was brought into operation it was always operative, even
to the point of killing the millionaire who might have financed it.
For the millionaire had so persistently cultivated the virtues of
self-advertisement that it was difficult for him to become suddenly
unknown and undistinguished, even in scenes of conflict where he most
ardently desired to do so. There was a movement on foot for treating
all millionaires as non-combatants, as being treasures belonging alike
to all nations, like the Cathedrals or the Parthenon. It is said that
there was even an alternative scheme for camouflaging the millionaire
by the pictorial methods that can disguise a gun as a part of the
landscape; and that Captain Pierce devoted much eloquence to persuading
Mr. Rosenbaum Low how much better it would be for all parties if his
face could be made to melt away into the middle distance or take on the
appearance of a blank wall or a wooden post.”
“The extraordinary thing is,” interrupted Pierce, who had been
listening eagerly, “that he said I was personal. Just at the moment
when I was trying to make him most _im_personal, when I was trying to
wave away all personal features that could come between us, he actually
said I was personal.”
Hood went on reading as if nobody had spoken. “In truth the successes
of Blair’s instruments revealed a fallacy in the common commercial
argument. We talk of a competition between two kinds of soap or two
kinds of jam or cocoa, but it is a competition in purchase and not in
practice. We do not make two men eat two kinds of jam and then observe
which wears the most radiant smile of satisfaction. We do not give two
men two kinds of cocoa and note which endures it with most resignation.
But we do use two guns directly against each other; and in the case of
Blair’s methods the less advertised gun was the better. Nevertheless
his scientific genius could only cover a corner of the field; and a
great part of the war must be considered as a war in the open country
of a much more primitive and sometimes almost prehistoric kind.
“It is admitted of course by all students that the victories of Crane
and Pierce were gross violations of strategic science. The victors
themselves afterwards handsomely acknowledged the fact; but it was then
too late to repair the error. In order to understand it, however, it is
necessary to grasp the curious condition into which so many elements
of social life had sunk in the time just preceding the outbreak.
It was this strange social situation which rendered the campaign a
contradiction to so many sound military maxims.
“For instance, it is a recognized military maxim that armies depend
upon roads. But anyone who had noticed the conditions that were
already beginning to appear in the London streets as early as 1924
will understand that a road was something less simple and static
than the Romans imagined. The Government had adopted everywhere in
their road-making the well-known material familiar to us all from the
advertisements by the name of ‘Nobumpo,’ thereby both insuring the
comfort of travellers and rewarding a faithful supporter by placing
a large order with Mr. Hugg. As several members of the Government
themselves held shares in ‘Nobumpo’ their enthusiastic co-operation
in the public work was assured. But, as has no doubt been observed
everywhere, it is one of the many advantages of ‘Nobumpo,’ as
preserving that freshness of surface so agreeable to the pedestrian,
that the whole material can be (and is) taken up and renewed every
three months, for the comfort of travellers and the profit and
encouragement of trade. It so happened that at the precise moment
of the outbreak of hostilities all the country roads, especially in
the west, were as completely out of use as if they had been the main
thoroughfares of London. This in itself tended to equalize the chances
or even to increase them in favour of a guerilla force, such as that
which had disappeared into the woods and was everywhere moving under
the cover of the trees. Under modern conditions, it was found that by
carefully avoiding roads, it was still more or less possible to move
from place to place.
“Again, another recognized military fact is the fact that the bow
is an obsolete weapon. And nothing is more irritating to a finely
balanced taste than to be killed with an obsolete weapon, especially
while persistently pulling the trigger of an efficient weapon,
without any apparent effect. Such was the fate of the few unfortunate
regiments which ventured to advance into the forests and fell under
showers of arrows from trackless ambushes. For it must be remembered
that the conditions of this extraordinary campaign entirely reversed
the normal military rule about the essential military department of
supply. Mechanical communications theoretically accelerate supply,
while the supply of a force cut loose and living on the country is
soon exhausted. But the mechanical factor also depends upon a moral
factor. Ammunition would on normal occasions have been produced with
unequalled rapidity by Poole’s Process and brought up with unrivalled
speed in Blinker’s Cars; but not at the moment when riotous employees
were engaged in dipping Poole repeatedly in a large vat at the factory
or in the quieter conditions of the countryside, where various tramps
were acquiring squatters’ rights in Blinker’s Cars, accidentally
delayed upon their journey. Everywhere the same thing happened; just
as the great manufacturer failed to keep his promise to the workers
who produced munitions, so the petty officials driving the lorries had
failed to keep their promise to loafers and vagrants who had helped
them out of temporary difficulties; and the whole system of supply
broke down upon a broken word. On the other hand, the supply of the
outlaws was in a sense almost infinite. With the woodcutters and the
blacksmiths on their side, they could produce their own rude mediæval
weapons everywhere. It was in vain that Professor Hake delivered a
series of popular lectures, proving to the lower classes that in
the long run it would be to their economic advantage to be killed
in battle. Captain Pierce is reported to have said: ‘I believe the
Professor is a botanist as well as an economist; but as a botanist he
has not yet discovered that guns do not grow on trees. Bows and arrows
do.’
“But the incident which history will have most difficulty in
explaining, and which it may perhaps refer to the region of myth or
romance, is the crowning victory commonly called the Battle of the
Bows. It was indeed originally called ‘The Battle of the Bows of God’;
in reference to some strangely fantastic boast, equally strangely
fulfilled, that is said to have been uttered by the celebrated Parson
White, a sort of popular chaplain who seems to have been the Friar Tuck
of this new band of Robin Hood. Coming on a sort of embassy to Sir
Horace Hunter, this clergyman is said to have threatened the Government
with something like a miracle. When rallied about the archaic sport of
the Long Bow, he replied: ‘Yes, we have long bows and we shall have
longer bows; the longest bows the world has ever seen; bows taller
than houses; bows given to us by God Himself and big enough for His
gigantic angels.’
“The whole business of this battle, historic and decisive as it was, is
covered with some obscurity, like that cloud of storm that hung heavy
upon the daybreak of that gloomy November day. Had anyone been present
with the Government forces who was well acquainted with the western
valley in which they were operating, such a person could not have
failed to notice that the very landscape looked different; looked new
and abnormal. Dimly as it could be traced through the morning twilight,
the very line of the woodland against the sky would have shown him a
new shape; a deformity like a hump. But the plans had all been laid
out in London long before in imitation of that foresight, fixity of
purpose, and final success that will always be associated with the last
German Emperor. It was enough for them that there was a wood of some
sort marked on the map, and they advanced towards it, low and crouching
as its entrance appeared to be.
“Then something happened, which even those who saw it and survived
cannot describe. The dark trees seemed to spring up to twice their
height as in a nightmare. In the half-dark the whole wood seemed to
rise from the earth like a rush of birds and then to turn over in
mid-air and come towards the invaders like a roaring wave. Some such
dim and dizzy sight they saw; but many of them at least saw little
enough afterwards. Simultaneously with the turning of this wheel of
waving trees, rocks seemed to rain down out of heaven; beams and stones
and shafts and missiles of all kinds, flattening out the advancing
force as under a pavement produced by a shower of paving-stones. It
is asserted that some of the countrymen cunning in woodcraft, in the
service of the Long Bow, had contrived to fit up a tree as a colossal
catapult; calculating how to bend back the boughs and sometimes even
the trunks to the breaking-point, and gaining a huge and living
resilience with their release. If this story is true, it is certainly
an appropriate conclusion to the career of the Long Bow and a rather
curious fulfilment of the visionary vaunt of Parson White when he said
that the bows would be big enough for giants, and that the maker of the
bows was God.”
“Yes,” interrupted the excitable White, “and do you know what he said
to me when I first said it?”
“What who said when you said what?” asked Hood patiently.
“I mean that fellow Hunter,” replied the clergyman. “That varnished
society doctor turned politician. Do you know what he said when I told
him we would get our bows from God?”
Owen Hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.
“Yes,” he said grimly. “I believe I can tell you exactly what he said.
I’ve watched him off and on for twenty years. I bet he began by saying:
‘I don’t profess to be a religious man.’”
“Right, quite right,” cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a
joyous manner, “that’s exactly how he began. ‘I don’t profess to be
a religious man, but I trust I have some reverence and good taste. I
don’t drag religion into politics.’ And I said: ‘No, I don’t think you
do.’”
A moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction. “And
that reminds me of what I came about,” he cried. “Enoch Oates, your
American friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it’s a
rather American sort of religion. He’s talking about a United States
of Europe and wants to introduce you to a Lithuanian Prophet. It seems
this Lithuanian party has started a movement for a Universal Peasant
Republic or World State of Workers on the Land; but at present he’s
only got as far as Lithuania. But he seems inclined to pick up England
on the way, after the unexpected success of the English agrarian party.”
“What’s the good of talking to me about a World State,” growled Hood.
“Didn’t I say I preferred a Heptarchy?”
“Don’t you understand?” interrupted Hilary Pierce excitedly. “What
can we have to do with international republics? We can turn England
upside-down if we like; but it’s England that we like, whichever
way up. Why, our very names and phrases, the very bets and jokes in
which the whole thing began, will never be translated. It takes an
Englishman to eat his hat; I never heard of a Spaniard threatening to
eat his sombrero, or a Chinaman to chew his pigtail. You can only set
the Thames on fire; you cannot set the Tiber or the Ganges on fire,
because the habit of speech has never been heard of. What’s the good of
talking about white elephants in countries where they are only white
elephants? Go and say to a Frenchman, ‘_Pour mon château, je le trouve
un elephant blanc_’ and he will send two Parisian alienists to look
at you seriously, like a man who says that his motor-car is a green
giraffe. There is no point in telling Czecho-Slovakian pigs to fly, or
Jugo-Slavonic cows to jump over the moon. Why, the unhappy Lithuanian
would be bewildered to the point of madness by our very name. There
is no reason to suppose that he and his countrymen talk about a Long
Bowman when they mean a liar. We talk about tall stories, but a tall
story may mean a true story in colloquial Lithuanian.”
“Tall stories are true stories sometimes, I hope,” said Colonel Crane,
“and people don’t believe ’em. But people’ll say that was a very tall
story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones. Afraid it’ll come
to be a bit of a joke.”
“All our battles began as jokes and they will end as jokes,” said Owen
Hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded its way towards
the sky in grey and silver arabesque. “They will linger only as faintly
laughable legends, if they linger at all; they may pass an idle hour or
fill an empty page; and even the man who tells them will not take them
seriously. It will all end in smoke like the smoke I am looking at; in
eddying and topsy-turvy patterns hovering for a moment in the air. And
I wonder how many, who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that
where there was smoke there was fire?”
There was a silence; then Colonel Crane stood up, a solitary figure
in his severe and formal clothes, and gravely said farewell to his
hostess. With the failing afternoon light he knew that his own wife,
who was a well-known artist, would be abandoning her studio work, and
he always looked forward to a talk with her before dinner, which was
often a more social function. Nevertheless, as he approached his old
home a whim induced him to delay the meeting for a few minutes and to
walk around to his old kitchen-garden, where his old servant Archer was
still leaning on a spade, as in the days before the Flood.
So he stood for a moment amid a changing world exactly as he had stood
on that distant Sunday morning at the beginning of all these things.
The South Sea idol still stood at the corner; the scarecrow still wore
the hat that he had sacrificed; the cabbages still looked green and
solid like the cabbage he had once dug up, digging up so much along
with it.
“Queer thing,” he said, “how true it is what Hilary once said about
acting an allegory without knowing it. Never had a notion of what I
was doing when I picked up a cabbage and wore it for a wager. Damned
awkward position, but I never dreamed I was being martyred for a
symbol. And the right symbol too, for I’ve lived to see Britannia
crowned with cabbage. All very well to say Britannia ruled the waves;
it was the land she couldn’t rule, her own land, and it was heaving
like earthquakes. But while there’s cabbage there’s hope. Archer,
my friend, this is the moral: any country that tries to do without
cabbages is done for. And even in war you often fight as much with
cabbages as cannon balls.”
“Yes, sir,” said Archer respectfully; “would you be wanting another
cabbage now, sir?”
Colonel Crane repressed a slight shudder. “No, thank you; no, thank
you,” he said hastily. Then he muttered as he turned away: “I don’t
mind revolutions so much, but I wouldn’t go through that again.”
And he passed swiftly round his house, of which the windows began to
show the glow of kindled lamps, and went in to his wife.
Archer was left alone in the garden, tidying up after his work and
shifting the potted shrubs; a dark and solitary figure as sunset and
twilight sank all around the enclosure like soft curtains of grey with
a border of purple; and the windows, as yet uncurtained and full of
lamplight, painted patterns of gold on the lawns and flagged walks
without. It was perhaps appropriate that he should remain alone and
apart; for he alone in all these changes had remained quite unchanged.
It was perhaps fitting that his figure should stand in a dark outline
against the darkening scene; for the mystery of his immutable
respectability remains more of a riddle than all the riot of the rest.
No revolution could revolutionize Mr. Archer. Attempts had been made
to provide so excellent a gardener with a garden of his own; with a
farm of his own, in accordance with the popular policy of the hour. But
he would not adapt himself to the new world; nor would he hasten to
die out, as was his duty on evolutionary principles. He was merely a
survival; but he showed a perplexing disposition to survive.
Suddenly the lonely gardener realized that he was not alone. A face
had appeared above the hedge, gazing at him with blue eyes dreaming
yet burning; a face with something of the tint and profile of Shelley.
It was impossible that Mr. Archer should have heard of such a person
as Shelley: fortunately he recognized the visitor as a friend of his
master.
“Forgive me if I am mistaken, Citizen Archer,” said Hilary Pierce
with pathetic earnestness, “but it seems to me that you are not
swept along with the movement; that a man of your abilities has been
allowed to stand apart, as it were, from the campaign of the Long
Bow. And yet how strange! Are you not Archer? Does not your very name
rise up and reproach you? Ought you not to have shot more arrows or
told more tarradiddles than all the rest? Or is there perhaps a more
elemental mystery behind your immobility, like that of a statue in
the garden? Are you indeed the god of the garden, more beautiful than
this South Sea idol and more respectable than Priapus? Are you in no
mortal sense an Archer? Are you perhaps Apollo, serving this military
Admetus; successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from
me?” He paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed:
“Or are you not rather that other Archer whose shafts are not shafts
of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant themselves
like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you are planting in
this garden? Are you he that gives the sunstroke not in the head but
the heart; and have you stricken each of us in turn with the romance
that has awakened us for the revolution? For without that spirit of
fruitfulness and the promise of the family, these visions would indeed
be vain. Are you in truth the God of Love; and has your arrow stung and
startled each of us into telling his story? I will not call you Cupid,”
he said with a slight air of deprecation or apology, “I will not call
you Cupid, Mr. Archer, for I conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather
as that image clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost Christian,
as he might have appeared to Chaucer or to Botticelli. Nay, it was you
that, clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediæval heraldry,
blew a blast on his golden trumpet when Beatrice saluted Dante on the
bridge. Are you indeed that Archer, O Archer, and did you give each one
of us his Vita Nuova?”
“No, sir,” said Mr. Archer.
* * * * *