"_Plus ca change_--!" I said to myself.
But I was a little too quick in my judgment.
"_They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall
mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary: they
shall walk, and not faint_. May God sanctify to us this poor exposition
of His Word; and to Him alone be the glory and the praise!"
The last sentence, at least, was familiar enough. It had rounded off
every one of Doctor Chirnside's sermons, to my certain knowledge, for
the last thirty-five years. The congregation came to life: the
organ-bellows began to pump, almost automatically, for the last hymn.
The elders of the kirk fumbled under their seats for the
collection-bags.
We rose on a triumphant chord from the little organ, and sang the
hymn--stoutly enough, and with that prickly sensation at the back of the
nose which attacks undemonstrative people engaged in a slightly
emotional exercise; for the hymn was "Onward, Christian Soldiers"! I
learned afterwards that it had been sung (alternately with the hymn For
Those at Sea), at the close of morning worship every single Sunday since
the regular casualty lists had started. Then, in good Scottish fashion,
we remained standing for Doctor Chirnside's patriarchal and impressive
Benediction.
"_May the Peace of God, which Passeth All Understanding..._"
His old voice died away; and I was on the point of stooping down to
grope for my glengarry, when I became conscious of a gradual stiffening
in the attitude of the congregation. The organ began to rumble again.
(I could see the young organ-blower working as if to crack every muscle
in his back.) Then, suddenly, explosively, with every pedal and stop in
action, it crashed into "God Save the King"!
Instinctively I came to attention. But though my head was immovable, I
fear I allowed my eyes to stray downward to the scene below. Here was
an unexpected test of war spirit.
Our National Anthem is a curious canticle; you never know what it will
do with you. It may cause you to feel merely ridiculous--as when an
orchestra of aliens in a restaurant drags you to your feet in the middle
of your soup. Too often it elicits a purely perfunctory acknowledgment.
But there are occasions when the sound of it grips the very heart of
you; when you are conscious, deep down in your well-ordered British
soul, of a sudden, tremendous, irresistible wave of passionate loyalty
to the Sovereign who rules you and the thousand-year-old tradition for
which he stands. Here was such an occasion. Here, in this little
church, was our battle hymn being thundered forth, after more than three
years of battle, to a community who had been paying the maximum price
for their participation therein. How would they take it?
My field of vision was naturally constricted, but without moving my head
I could command a fair view. Eric Bethune, of course, was standing as
straight as a ramrod. So was the elder Miss Peabody--also the three
poor Grenadiers. The wounded men beside me stiffened their twisted
bodies proudly: evidently it was incumbent upon them to teach the rest
of the congregation something.
Finally, my eyes fell upon the Abbotrigg pew. Old Couper and his wife
were standing side by side, with bowed heads. I saw that they were
holding hands. Beside them, in order of size, were ranged five small
figures in black--three boys and two girls--the grandchildren whose
father had fallen in action six days ago. They did not look too
well-fed--milk and meat were not over plentiful in those days--but they
stood shoulder to shoulder in a perfectly aligned row, emulating the
soldiers in the gallery above. It was difficult to believe that they
had not rehearsed the formation. (Probably they had, under the personal
direction of a martinet home on leave.) Each small head was held
resolutely up; each small chest--situated rather low down, as is usual
when we are very young--was thrust resolutely forward; each small pair
of arms pointed rigidly to the floor; and each pair of round eyes gazed
fixedly and unblinkingly into space.
Suddenly, I saw nothing more. But I remember feeling reassured about
things.
*CHAPTER XVIII*
*THE OLD ORDER*
After church I joined Lady Christina and Eric, and was conveyed in a
very ancient victoria--her ladyship had "put down" the motor, owing to
petrol difficulties--to Buckholm for luncheon. I noticed that my friend
Bates no longer attended to the front door; he was now, I gathered,
guarding our coast from invasion somewhere in Suffolk. His deputy was a
grim-looking crone in a black skirt, silver-buttoned coat, and yellow
waistcoat, which made her look something between a female impersonator
and a prison wardress. I seemed to have encountered her in a previous
existence hanging washing on a line on the drying-green behind the
Buckholm orchard. She relieved me of my glengarry, gloves, and stick,
and demanded my ration-book.
"There will be meat for dinner," she explained.
I handed over the emergency ration-book with which soldiers on leave
were supplied in those days. It was returned to me when I left the
house, lacking not only one full meat coupon, but all the butter and
sugar coupons as well.
"Her leddyship said you would no be needing them," explained the
wardress, and I meekly acquiesced. If Lady Christina said that I did
not need a thing, who was I to say that I did? In any case I was due to
rejoin the best-fed Army in the world in a few days' time.
The luncheon party consisted of Lady Christina, as bolt upright as ever,
at the head of the table; Eric, at the foot; Lord Eskerley; and a
weather-beaten Lieutenant-Commander of the Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserve, named John Wickersham. Five years ago he had been mainly known
to fame as a prominent King's Counsel, a superb bridge-player, and a
fair-weather yachtsman. Now, for three years or more, his converted
pleasure-craft, navigated by its owner and enrolled an original member
of a certain silent, unadvertised brotherhood of the sea, had been
keeping grim vigil over our island coast, with such effect that German
submarine crews were breaking into open mutiny rather than face that
flotilla of terror any longer. John Wickersham was ashore on long
leave, for the first time for many months.
Doctor Chirnside, who seldom missed his Sunday luncheon at Buckholm, had
been called away, to say what he could to a girl-wife who had just
received a telegram from the War Office.
Having consumed its meat ration and sugarless apple tart, the company
proceeded to mitigate the austerity of Lady Christina's war-time regime
with a glass of port. Then, after a perfunctory and short-lived
struggle, we yielded to the inevitable and settled down to the topic of
the military situation. It was a curious experience for me, who had
heard little round that peaceful table since boyhood but hunting shop
and county gossip, to find myself involved in the same eternal debate as
was exercising every mess, billet, and dug-out on the Western Front--a
debate distinguished in both cases by extreme personal bias and entire
ignorance of essential details. It is hardly necessary to mention that
Lord Eskerley, the one person who could have enlightened us, offered no
contribution.
Naturally we concentrated upon the rumours of the knock-out blow which
Germany was preparing to deal her arch-enemy in the early spring--a blow
which came near, in the actual event, to driving a wedge between the
armies of France and Britain, and establishing a German base on the
English Channel. But in January, nineteen-eighteen, when we had not
lost a field-gun or a trench system since the First Battle of Ypres, and
had been steadily winning back the soil of France and accumulating
German prisoners for more than three years, no one took such a
possibility seriously. Eric was particularly sanguine.
"A good thing, too!" he said. "Let them come! Then we can sit well
back, and make a clean job of the lot, instead of getting hot and dusty
going to look for them! This war will end when we have killed enough
Boches; and if the Boches will help us by coming along to get
killed--and you know what the Boche can do in that way once he gives his
mind to it--there will be no complaints on our side. I feel--"
This characteristic pronouncement was interrupted by Lord Eskerley.
"It's only human nature, you know," he said. "You can't blame them.
Naturally they think of their own front first. Must!"
This did not seem to fit in well with the rest of the conversation--a
not altogether unusual feature of his lordship's table-talk.
"Napoleon was right," he continued. "Or was it Hannibal? Said he would
sooner fight two first-class generals collaborating than one
single-handed second-rater. It works out this way. Tweedledum says to
Tweedledee: 'You must take over more Front.' Tweedledee says to
Tweedledum: 'It can't be done! Look at my casualty list for the last
three months!' Tweedledum replies: 'But you are only holding about half
as much line as I am.' Thereupon Tweedledee produces statistics to show
that although he holds the shorter line he has sixty-seven and a half
per cent. of the enemy massed against him. And so it goes on. The old
game! I believe that in Bohemian circles it is known as 'Passing the
Buck.' A colloquial but apposite expression! I picked it up from an
American _attache_ in Paris. In due course we shall come to the only
solution--a Supreme Commander, responsible for the safety of the whole
line. But, as usual, we shall pay in advance--through the nose!"
The import of the old gentleman's ruminations was now tolerably apparent
to all; that is, to all but our hostess.
"Eh, what? What's he talking about?" she inquired sharply of me. (Of
late, Lady Christina's hearing has deteriorated a little.) "What's he
talking about? Tell me; he mumbles so! What's all this nonsense about
Tweedledee and Tweedledum? Who are Tweedledee and Tweedledum? They
sound like people out of Punch--two of those wretches in the Government.
In German pay, every man-jack of them! Do you know what Bessie
Brickshire told me last week? She went to Downing Street--"
"Your leddyship's coffee is up the stair," announced the deep voice of
the prison wardress; and a libellous and irrelevant anecdote was nipped
in the bud.
Lady Christina rose, informed us that she proposed to take her coffee in
her own room, and, with a passing admonition to her son to be sparing of
the saccharine, left us to ours.
We lit cigars and stretched ourselves, like schoolboys relieved of the
pedagogue's presence.
"How do they feel about things in general up at the top, Eskerley?"
asked John Wickersham. "We never hear any news in our job. Are they all
quite happy and comfortable?"
"Not at all!" replied his lordship brusquely.
"What's the trouble?"
"Not enough troops."
"How? The number of Divisions on the Western Front hasn't been reduced,
has it?"
"Oh, dear, no. We are as strong as ever--on paper. But instead of
going frankly to the Labour bosses and telling them that another
half-million men must be released from civilian employment, our
politicians have reduced the personnel of each Division from thirteen
battalions to ten--nearly twenty-five per cent. It's an admirable
scheme, because it satisfies so many people. It satisfies the
politician, because it saves his face; it satisfies the slacker, because
it saves his skin; and it satisfies the Boche, because it's going to
save him a lot of trouble when he makes his spring offensive. The only
people who are inclined to criticise it are the insignificant
individuals who are responsible for the safety of the Western Front. In
fact, they are crying out to Heaven for more men. But, of course,
nobody takes any notice of recommendations from such a prejudiced person
as a soldier. His turn will come later, when the scapegoats are being
rounded up." The old gentleman sighed. "That's one of our worries.
The other is that we have too many Allies."
"I see! Too many cooks--eh?"
"Precisely! I spend all my working hours nowadays propitiating
plenipotentiaries from countries whose existence I had never heard of
two years ago. By the time I have recognised the status of this Ally,
and soothed the susceptibilities of that, the day is over and there's no
time left to get on with the war. I sometimes sigh for the era when the
French and ourselves muddled along by rule of thumb without having to
expend any tact upon anybody, except a periodical slap on the back to
Russia. _We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!_--and so on. Life
was simple then. Now it is a perpetual Pentecost, without the feast.
Give me a forlorn hope and a lone hand every time; that's an invincible
combination--eh, Alan?"
"I agree," I said. "In the first year or so there was a sort of
cheerful, simple, all-in-the-same-boat feeling about everything. The
French liked us; there was not too many of us; and what there were were
perfectly disciplined--old Regulars and the pick of 'K's' Army; or else
Indian troops, with the manners of Hidalgoes. Now, the average French
citizen never wants to see an ally again--"
Lord Eskerley nodded.
"Exactly!" he said. "And I can't say I blame him. I sometimes feel
that way myself. We're a fairly promiscuous lot. We may be a host of
modern crusaders, but we're a _crowd_! I feel like old McKechnie at the
revivalist meeting here five years ago, who refused to stand up and be
'saved' with the rest because he objected to going to heaven 'with a
d----d Cheap Trup!' Still, we mustn't be ungrateful. Our post entries
may have complicated the machine, but they have made it a pretty
reliable piece of mechanism."
"What I complain of," interposed Eric, "is that we, upon whom the whole
burden fell at the start, are almost forgotten now. Most of us have
ceased to exist, and the rest are lost in a mob of amateurs."
"The wrong attitude entirely!" announced Lord Eskerley promptly.
"What's the right attitude, then?" asked Eric, who hated correction
almost as much as Lord Eskerley delighted to administer it to him.
"The right attitude," replied the old man, with sudden seriousness,
"should be a feeling of pride that We were fortunate enough to find
ourselves Original Members of the Brotherhood--to hold Founders' Shares.
When the edifice is completed--and completed it will be--the world won't
be able to see the foundations. But they will be there all right! And
we shall know who laid them--the Old Order!"
"What do you mean by the Old Order?" asked Eric. "The landed gentry?"
"Far more than that. I mean the people to whom this country, as such,
has always really meant something; I mean every mother's son who felt
the ancient spirit of our race wake in him, perhaps for the first time,
when the challenge came in Nineteen Fourteen. I don't care who he
was--squire's son, parson's son, miner's son, poacher's son--it was all
the same. If he was conscious then of that single blind impulse to get
up and play the game, just because it was the game; just because it was
impossible to do otherwise--without any dialectics about Freedom, or
Altruism, or Democracy, or whether his job would be kept open for him or
not; simply because the Blood told him to--then he belonged to the Old
Order! He held a Founder's Share, all right!
"Of course," the old man continued presently, "the more one has to give
the more one is expected to give, at a time like this. And as a rule it
seems to be the best that is taken. '_This is the heir; come, let us
kill him!_'--that has been the general attitude of the War Gods. Only
the very best would suffice--only the very best!"
We sat silent again. Lord Eskerley himself had lost his two sons, and
his only grandson. After him, what was to become of the ancient
title--of the "Big Hoose" and its "policies"--of the family which had
served the State for three hundred years? "_This is the heir!_" How
true that was. I thought of my brother Walter's eldest son.
Fortunately in this case there were two more. And Roy? What would
become of Baronrigg, if--
But Lord Eskerley was speaking again--more to himself than to us.
"The Old Order! The Willing Horse! There's hardly an estate, or a
farm, or an allotment, in this country-side, or in any part of Scotland
or England, that has not changed hands, prospectively at least, during
the last three years. And what with designedly disruptive death duties,
and income tax on the same scale, levied on people who have no personal
income--only a few precious, ancient, barren acres--the old estates are
passing right away from the original owners--one half sold to pay the
charges on the other half. It seems a queer way of rewarding people who
have given everything--to sell them up because they have nothing more to
give! Still, one has the supreme satisfaction of having played the
game. Our record stands--" He broke off. "I apologise: I was
sermonising! Bad habit!" He looked at his watch. "Three o'clock! I
must go; a trunk call comes through from London every afternoon at four.
Alan, I will give you a lift."
A few minutes later I found myself rolling home in an unaccustomed
motor.
"I still get twenty gallons a month," explained Lord Eskerley.
"Business of State, and so on. Going back soon?"
"Thursday," I said.
"Well, enjoy the war while you can. When it is over there will be no
peace for anybody. After the Boche has given his last expiring kick we
are going to sit down to a Peace Congress in comparison with which the
Congress of Vienna will take rank as a model of sagacity and altruism.
The Millennium that we are all composing cantatas about is not
coming--yet."
"Are we going to have more wars, then?" I asked, gazing rather
dejectedly at the red, wintry sunset.
"We are always going to have more wars," replied my companion
testily--"and then more! (The final war will be between men and women.
Even that won't really settle anything, because there will be too much
rendering aid and comfort to the enemy going on.) By the way, how is
Roy?"