might have passed I did not stop to hear, being interrupted by a sound
on the stairs. Mrs. Travers was standing on the landing-place; I limped
up the stairs to meet her. Among the many pictures of those fatal days
engraven on my memory, I remember none more clearly than the mournful
aspect of my poor friend, widowed and childless within a few moments,
as she stood there in her white dress, coming forth like a ghost from
the chamber of the dead, the candle she held lighting up her face, and
contrasting its pallor with the dark hair that fell disordered round
it, its beauty radiant even through features worn with fatigue and
sorrow. She was calm and even tearless, though the trembling lip told
of the effort to restrain the emotion she felt. “Dear friend,” she
said, taking my hand, “I was coming to seek you; forgive my selfishness
in neglecting you so long; but you will understand”--glancing at the
door above--“how occupied I have been.” “Where,” I began, “is” ---- “my
boy?” she answered, anticipating my question. “I have laid him by his
father. But now your wounds must be cared for; how pale and faint you
look!--rest here a moment,”--and, descending to the dining-room, she
returned with some wine, which I gratefully drank, and then, making me
sit down on the top step of the stairs, she brought water and linen,
and, cutting off the sleeve of my coat, bathed and bandaged my wounds.
’Twas I who felt selfish for thus adding to her troubles; but in truth
I was too weak to have much will left, and stood in need of the help
which she forced me to accept; and the dressing of my wounds afforded
indescribable relief. While thus tending me, she explained in broken
sentences how matters stood. Every room but her own, and the little
parlour into which with Wood’s help she had carried me, was full of
soldiers. Wood had been taken away to work at repairing the railroad
and Lucy had run off from fright; but the cook had stopped at her
post, and had served up supper and opened the cellar for the soldiers’
use: she herself did not understand what they said, and they were
rough and boorish, but not uncivil. I should now go, she said, when
my wounds were dressed, to look after my own home, where I might be
wanted; for herself, she wished only to be allowed to remain watching
there--glancing at the room where lay the bodies of her husband and
child--where she would not be molested. I felt that her advice was
good. I could be of no use as protection, and I had an anxious longing
to know what had become of my sick mother and sister; besides, some
arrangement must be made for the burial. I therefore limped away. There
was no need to express thanks on either side, and the grief was too
deep to be reached by any outward show of sympathy.
Outside the house there was a good deal of movement and bustle; many
carts going along, the waggoners, from Sussex and Surrey, evidently
impressed and guarded by soldiers; and although no gas was burning,
the road towards Kingston was well lighted by torches held by persons
standing at short intervals in line, who had been seized for the duty,
some of them the tenants of neighbouring villas. Almost the first of
these torch-bearers I came to was an old gentleman whose face I was
well acquainted with, from having frequently travelled up and down in
the same train with him. He was a senior clerk in a Government office,
I believe, and was a mild-looking old man with a prim face and a long
neck, which he used to wrap in a white double neckcloth, a thing
even in those days seldom seen. Even in that moment of bitterness I
could not help being amused by the absurd figure this poor old fellow
presented, with his solemn face and long cravat doing penance with a
torch in front of his own gate, to light up the path of our conquerors.
But a more serious object now presented itself, a corporal’s guard
passing by, with two English volunteers in charge, their hands tied
behind their backs. They cast an imploring glance at me, and I stepped
into the road to ask the corporal what was the matter, and even
ventured, as he was passing on, to lay my hand on his sleeve. “Auf dem
Wege, Spitzbube!” cried the brute, lifting his rifle as if to knock
me down. “Must one prisoners who fire at us let shoot,” he went on to
add; and shot the poor fellows would have been, I suppose, if I had
not interceded with an officer, who happened to be riding by. “Herr
Hauptmann,” I cried, as loud as I could, “is this your discipline,
to let unarmed prisoners be shot without orders?” The officer, thus
appealed to, reined in his horse, and halted the guard till he heard
what I had to say. My knowledge of other languages here stood me in
good stead, for the prisoners, north-country factory hands apparently,
were of course utterly unable to make themselves understood, and did
not even know in what they had offended. I therefore interpreted their
explanation: they had been left behind while skirmishing near Ditton,
in a barn, and coming out of their hiding-place in the midst of a party
of the enemy, with their rifles in their hands, the latter thought they
were going to fire at them from behind. It was a wonder they were not
shot down on the spot. The captain heard the tale, and then told the
guard to let them go, and they slunk off at once into a by-road. He was
a fine soldier-like man, but nothing could exceed the insolence of
his manner, which was perhaps all the greater because it seemed not
intentional, but to arise from a sense of immeasurable superiority.
Between the lame _freiwilliger_ pleading for his comrades, and the
captain of the conquering army, there was, in his view, an infinite
gulf. Had the two men been dogs, their fate could not have been decided
more contemptuously. They were let go simply because they were not
worth keeping as prisoners, and perhaps to kill any living thing
without cause went against the _hauptmann’s_ sense of justice. But
why speak of this insult in particular? Had not every man who lived
then his tale to tell of humiliation and degradation? For it was the
same story everywhere. After the first stand in line, and when once
they had got us on the march, the enemy laughed at us. Our handful of
regular troops was sacrificed almost to a man in a vain conflict with
numbers; our volunteers and militia, with officers who did not know
their work, without ammunition or equipment, or staff to superintend,
starving in the midst of plenty, we had soon become a helpless mob,
fighting desperately here and there, but with whom, as a manœuvring
army, the disciplined invaders did just what they pleased. Happy those
whose bones whitened the fields of Surrey; they at least were spared
the disgrace we lived to endure. Even you, who have never known what
it is to live otherwise than on sufferance, even your cheeks burn when
we talk of these days; think, then, what those endured who, like your
grandfather, had been citizens of the proudest nation on earth, which
had never known disgrace or defeat, and whose boast it used to be that
they bore a flag on which the sun never set! We had heard of generosity
in war; we found none: the war was made by us, it was said, and we
must take the consequences. London and our only arsenal captured, we
were at the mercy of our captors, and right heavily did they tread on
our necks. Need I tell you the rest?--of the ransom we had to pay, and
the taxes raised to cover it, which keep us paupers to this day?--the
brutal frankness that announced we must give place to a new naval
Power, and be made harmless for revenge?--the victorious troops living
at free quarters, the yoke they put on us made the more galling that
their requisitions had a semblance of method and legality? Better have
been robbed at first hand by the soldiery themselves, than through
our own magistrates made the instruments for extortion. How we lived
through the degradation we daily and hourly underwent, I hardly even
now understand. And what was there left to us to live for? Stripped of
our colonies; Canada and the West Indies gone to America; Australia
forced to separate; India lost for ever, after the English there had
all been destroyed, vainly trying to hold the country when cut off from
aid by their countrymen; Gibraltar and Malta ceded to the new naval
Power; Ireland independent and in perpetual anarchy and revolution.
When I look at my country as it is now--its trade gone, its factories
silent, its harbours empty, a prey to pauperism and decay--when I
see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask
myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I
should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live! France
was different. There, too, they had to eat the bread of tribulation
under the yoke of the conqueror! Their fall was hardly more sudden or
violent than ours; but war could not take away their rich soil; they
had no colonies to lose; their broad lands, which made their wealth,
remained to them; and they rose again from the blow. But our people
could not be got to see how artificial our prosperity was--that it all
rested on foreign trade and financial credit; that the course of trade
once turned away from us, even for a time, it might never return; and
that our credit once shaken might never be restored. To hear men talk
in those days, you would have thought that Providence had ordained
that our Government should always borrow at 3 per cent., and that
trade came to us because we lived in a foggy little island set in a
boisterous sea. They could not be got to see that the wealth heaped up
on every side was not created in the country, but in India and China,
and other parts of the world; and that it would be quite possible for
the people who made money by buying and selling the natural treasures
of the earth, to go and live in other places, and take their profits
with them. Nor would men believe that there could ever be an end to
our coal and iron, or that they would get to be so much dearer than
the coal and iron of America that it would no longer be worth while
to work them, and that therefore we ought to insure against the loss
of our artificial position as the great centre of trade, by making
ourselves secure and strong and respected. We thought we were living
in a commercial millennium, which must last for a thousand years at
least. After all, the bitterest part of our reflection is, that all
this misery and decay might have been so easily prevented, and that
we brought it about ourselves by our own shortsighted recklessness.
There, across the narrow Straits, was the writing on the wall, but we
would not choose to read it. The warnings of the few were drowned in
the voice of the multitude. Power was then passing away from the class
which had been used to rule, and to face political dangers, and which
had brought the nation with honour unsullied through former struggles,
into the hands of the lower classes, uneducated, untrained to the use
of political rights, and swayed by demagogues; and the few who were
wise in their generation were denounced as alarmists, or as aristocrats
who sought their own aggrandisement by wasting public money on bloated
armaments. The rich were idle and luxurious; the poor grudged the cost
of defence. Politics had become a mere bidding for Radical votes, and
those who should have led the nation stooped rather to pander to the
selfishness of the day, and humoured the popular cry which denounced
those who would secure the defence of the nation by enforced arming of
its manhood, as interfering with the liberties of the people. Truly the
nation was ripe for a fall; but when I reflect how a little firmness
and self-denial, or political courage and foresight, might have averted
the disaster, I feel that the judgment must have really been deserved.
A nation too selfish to defend its liberty, could not have been fit to
retain it. To you, my grandchildren, who are now going to seek a new
home in a more prosperous land, let not this bitter lesson be lost upon
you in the country of your adoption. For me, I am too old to begin life
again in a strange country; and hard and evil as have been my days,
it is not much to await in solitude the time which cannot now be far
off, when my old bones will be laid to rest in the soil I have loved so
well, and whose happiness and honour I have so long survived.
GARDEN CITY PRESS
LIMITED PRINTERS
LETCHWORTH, HERTS
+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber’s note: |
| |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------+