There has never, I suppose, been a time when the moon had such a vogue
as during the past ten days. For centuries, for thousands of years,
for I know not what uncounted ages, she has been sailing the sky,
"clustered around with all her starry fays." She has seen this
tragi-comedy of man since the beginning, and I daresay will outlive its
end. What she thinks of it all we shall never know. Perhaps she
laughs at it, perhaps she weeps over it, perhaps she does both in
turns, as you and I do. Perhaps she is only indifferent. Yes, I
suppose she is indifferent, for she holds up her lamp for the just and
the unjust and lights the assassin's way as readily as the lover's and
the shepherd's.
But in all her timeless journeyings around this flying ball to which we
cling with our feet she has never been a subject of such painful
concern as now. Love-sick poets have sung of her, and learned men have
studied her countenance and made maps of her hills and her valleys, and
children have been lulled to sleep with legends of the old man in the
moon and the old woman eternally gathering her eternal sticks. But for
most of us she had no more serious import than a Chinese lantern hung
on a Christmas tree to please the children.
And suddenly she has become the most sensational fact of our lives.
From the King in his palace to the pauper in his workhouse we have all
been talking of the moon, and watching the moon and studying the phases
of the moon. There are seven millions of Londoners who know more about
the moon to-day than they ever dreamed there was to be known, or than
they ever dreamed that they would want to know. John Bright once said
that the only virtue of war was that it taught people geography, but
even he did not think of the geography of the moon and of the
firmament. But in the intense school of these days we are learning
about everything in heaven above and in the earth beneath and in the
waters under the earth. Count Zeppelin taught us about the stars, and
now Herr von Gotha is giving us a lesson on the moon. We are not so
grateful as we might be.
But the main lesson we are all learning, I think, is that Nature does
not take sides in our affairs. We all like to think that she does take
sides--that is, our side--that a special providence watches over us,
and that invisible powers will see us through. It is a common
weakness. The preposterous Kaiser exhibits it in its most grotesque
assumption. He does really believe--or did, for dreadful doubts must
be invading the armour-plated vanity of this jerry-built Caesar--that
God and Nature are his Imperial agents.
And in a less degree most of us, in times of stress, pin our faith to
some special providence. We are so important to ourselves that we
cannot conceive that we are unimportant to whatever powers there be.
Others may fall, but we have charmed lives. Our cause must prevail
because, being ours, it is beyond mortal challenge. A distinguished
General was telling me not long ago of an incident in the second battle
of Ypres. He stood with another General, since killed, watching the
battle at its most critical phase. They saw the British line yield,
and the Germans advance, and all seemed over. My friend put up his
glasses with the gesture of one who knew the worst had come. His
companion turned to him and said, "God will never allow those ---- to
win." It was an odd expression of faith, but it represents the
conviction latent in most of us that we can count on invisible allies
who, like the goddess in Homer, will intervene if we are in straits,
and fling a cloud between us and the foe.
This reliance on the supernatural is one of the sources of power in men
of primitive and intense faith. Cromwell was a practical mystic and
never forgot to keep his powder dry, but he saw the hand of the Lord
visibly at work for his cause on the winds and the tempest, and that
conviction added a fervour to his terrible sword. In his letter to
Speaker Lenthall on the battle of Dunbar he tells how in marching from
Musselburgh to Haddington the enemy fell upon "the rear-forlorn of our
horse" and "had like to have engaged our rear brigade of horse with
their whole army--_had not the Lord by His Providence put a cloud over
the moon_, hereby giving us opportunity to draw off those horse to the
rest of our army."
In the same way Elizabethan England witnessed God Himself in the
tempest that scattered the Armada, and a hundred years later the people
saw the same Divine sanction in the winds that brought William Prince
of Orange to our shores and drove his pursuers away. "The weather had
indeed served the Protestant cause so well," says Macaulay, "that some
men of more piety than judgment fully believed the ordinary laws of
nature to have been suspended for the preservation of the liberty and
religion of England. Exactly a hundred years before, they said, the
Armada, invincible by man, had been scattered by the wrath of God.
Civil freedom and divine truth were again in jeopardy; and again the
obedient elements had fought for the good cause. The wind had blown
strong from the east while the Prince wished to sail down the Channel,
had turned to the south when he wished to enter Torbay, had sunk to a
calm during the disembarkation, and, as soon as the disembarkation was
completed, had risen to a storm and had met the pursuers in the face."
If we saw such a sequence of winds blowing for our cause, we should, in
spite of Macaulay, allow our piety to have the better of our judgment.
Indeed, there have been those who in the absence of more solid evidence
have accepted the Angels of Mons with as touching and unquestioning a
faith as they accepted the legend of the Army of Russians from
Archangel. Perhaps it is not "piety" so much as anxiety that accounts
for this credulity. In its more degraded form it is responsible for
such phenomena as the revival of fortune-telling and the emergence of
the Prophet Bottomley. In its more reputable expression it springs
from the conviction of the justice of our cause, of the dominion of the
spiritual over the material and of the witness of that dominion in the
operations of Nature.
Then comes this wonderful harvest moon with its clear sky and its still
air to light our enemies to their villainous work and to remind us
that, however virtuous our cause, Nature is not concerned about us.
She is indifferent whether we win or lose. She is not against us, but
she is not for us. Sometimes she helps the enemy, and sometimes she
helps us. She blew a snowstorm in the face of the Germans on the most
critical day of Verdun, and helped to defeat that great adventure. In
August last she came out on the side of the enemy. She rained and blew
ceaselessly, and disarranged our plans in Flanders, so that the attack
on which so much depended was driven perilously late into the year.
And even the brilliant moon and the cloudless nights that have been so
disturbing to us in London speak the same language of Nature's
impartiality. They serve the enemy here, but they are serving us far
more just across the sea, where every bright day and moonlit night
snatched from the mud and rain of the coming winter is of priceless
value to our Army. That consideration should enable us to bear our
affliction with fortitude as we crowd the "tubes" or listen to the roar
of the guns from under the domestic table.
But we must admit, on the evidence, that Nature does not care twopence
who wins, and is as unconcerned about our affairs as we are about the
affairs of a nest of ants that we tread on without knowing that we have
trodden on it. She is beyond good and evil. She has no morals and is
indifferent about justice and what men call right and wrong. She
blasts the wise and leaves the foolish to flourish.
Nature, with equal mind
Sees all her sons at play;
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away;
Allows the proudly riding and the found'ring barque.
It is a chill, but a chastening thought. It leaves us with a sense of
loneliness, but it brings with it, also, a sense of power, the power of
the unconquerable human spirit, self-dependent and self-reliant,
reaching out to ideals beyond itself, beyond its highest hope of
attainment, broken on the wheel of intractable things, but still
stumbling forward by its half-lights in search of some Land of Promise
that always skips just beyond the horizon.
Happily the moon is skipping beyond the horizon too. Frankly, we have
seen enough of her face to last us for a long time. When she comes out
again let her clothe herself in good fat clouds and bring the winds in
her train. We do not like to think of her as a mere flunkey of the
Kaiser and the torch-bearer of his assassins.