I was going down to the country the other night when I fell into
conversation with a soldier who was going home on leave. He was a
reservist, who, after leaving the Army, had taken to gardening, and who
had been called up at the beginning of the war. He had many
interesting things to tell, which he told in that unromantic,
matter-of-fact fashion peculiar to the British soldier. But something
he said about his cousin led him to make a reference to Lord Kitchener,
and I noticed that he spoke of the great soldier as if he were living.
"But," said I, "do you think Kitchener wasn't drowned?"
"Yes," he replied, "I can't never believe he was drowned."
"But why?"
"Well, he hadn't no escort. You're not going to make me believe he
didn't know what he was doing when he went off and didn't have no
escort. It stands to reason. He wasn't no stick of rhubub, as you
might say. He was a hard man on the soldier, but he had foresight, he
had. He could look ahead. That's what he could do. He could look
ahead. What did he say about the war? Three years, he said, or the
duration, and he was about right. He wasn't the man to get drowned by
an oversight--not him. Stands to reason.
"Same with Hector Macdonald," he said, warming to his theme. "He's
alive right enough. He's fighting for the Germans. Why, I know a man
who see him in a German uniform before the war began. I should know
him if I see him. He inspected me often. He made a fool of himself at
Monte Carlo and that sort o' thing, and just went off to get a new
start, as you might say.
"And look at Hamel. He ain't dead--course not. He went to
Germany--that's what he did. Stands to reason."
"And what has become of Kitchener?" I asked. "Is he fighting for the
Germans too?"
Well no. That was too tall an order even for his credulity. He
boggled a bit at the hedge and then proceeded:
"He's laying by--that's what he's doing. He's laying by. You see,
he'd done his job. He raised his army and made the whole job, as you
may say, safe, and he wasn't going to take a back seat and be put in a
corner. Not him. Stands to reason. Why should he? And him done all
what he had done. So he just goes off and lays by until he's wanted
again. Then he'll turn up all right. You'll see."
"But the ship was blown up," I said, "and only one boatload of
survivors came to shore. There were 800 men who perished with Lord
Kitchener. Not one has been heard of. Are they all 'laying by'? And
where are they hiding? And why? And were they all in Lord Kitchener's
secret?"
He seemed a little gravelled by these considerations, but unmoved.
"I can't never believe that he's dead," he said with the air of a man
who didn't want to be awkward and would oblige if he possibly could.
"I can't do it.... With his foresight and all.... And no escort, mind
you.... No, I can't believe it.... Stands to reason."
And as he sank back in his seat and lit a cigarette I realised that the
legend of Kitchener had passed beyond the challenge of death. I had
heard much of that legend, much of mysterious letters from prisoners in
Germany who had seen a very tall and formidable-looking man and hinted
that that man's name was--well, whose would you think? Why, of
course.... But here was the popular legend in all its naked simplicity
and absoluteness. It did not rest upon fact. It defied all facts and
all evidence. It was an act of tyrannic faith. He was not dead,
because the mind simply refused to believe that he was dead. And so he
was alive. And there you are.
No doubt there was much in the circumstances of the great soldier's end
that helped the growth of the myth. He filled so vast a place in the
public mind and vanished so swiftly that his total disappearance seemed
unthinkable. No living man had seen him die and no man had seen his
body in death. He had just walked out into the night, and from the
night he would return.
But, apart from the mystery of circumstance, the legend is a tribute to
the strange fascination which this remarkable man exercised over the
popular mind. It endowed him with qualities which were supernatural.
In a world filled with the tragedy of mortality, here was a man who
could daunt death itself. And when death stabbed him suddenly in the
dark of that wild night off the Orkneys and flung his body to the
wandering seas, the popular mind rejected the thought as a sort of
blasphemy and insisted on his victory over the enemy. "Stands to
reason." That's all. It just "stands to reason."
It seems a childish superstition, and yet if we could probe this belief
to the bottom we might find that there is a truth beneath the apparent
foolishness. It is that truth which Whitman, in his "Drum Taps,"
expresses over his fallen comrade--
O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
Nor the bayonet stab what you really are!
There is something in the heroic soul that defies death, and the simple
mind only translates that faith in the deathlessness of the spirit into
material terms. Drake lies in his hammock in Nombre Dios Bay, but he
lies "listening for the drum and dreamin' arl the time of Plymouth Hoe."
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when your powder's running low--
"If the Dons sight Devon
I'll leave the port of Heaven,
And we'll drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."
And so the legend of Drake's drum lives on, and long centuries after,
in the midst of another and fiercer storm, men sail the seas and hear
that ghostly inspiration to brave deeds and brave death. The torch of
a great spirit never goes out. It is handed on from generation to
generation and flames brightest when the night is darkest. And that I
think is the truth that dwells at the back of my companion's obstinate
credulity. Kitchener has become to him a symbol of something that
cannot die, and his non-metaphysical mind must have some material
immortality to give his faith an anchorage. And so, out in the vague
shadows of the borderland he sees the stalwart figure still at his
post--"laying by," it is true, but watching and waiting and "listening
for the drum" that shall summon him back to the field of action.
As the train slowed down at a country station and he prepared to go out
into the night, he repeated in firm but friendly accents: "No, I can't
never believe that he's dead.... Stands to reason." And as he bade me
"Good-night," I said, "I think you are right. I think he is living,
too." And as the door closed, I added to myself, "Stands to reason."