A SETTING AND A DATE
"I am the captive of your bow and spear, sir. The position
has its obligations--on both sides.... Brainy men languishing
under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is
England--just all England.... If you want to realise your assets,
you should lease the whole proposition to America for ninety-nine
years."
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The Captive_.
I
The men who in 1914 were of military age, as that definition was
used on the outbreak of war, were born at earliest in the middle
of the eighties. Queen Victoria was to reign for half a generation
longer, Lord Beaconsfield was but lately dead, Mr. Gladstone had
ahead of him more than a dozen years of life and one more term as
prime minister, and Mr. Parnell was appearing for the first time as
the maker and breaker of ministries.
Abroad, Prince Bismarck was still chancellor to the Emperor
William I, and the third French Republic was young enough to be
still unsteady on its legs; but, since British fears of Russian
aggression had been for the most part interred with the bones of
Disraeli's spirited foreign policy, the chief imperial problems
related to the yet new British responsibility for Egypt and to
border wars and punitive expeditions on the fringe of empire.
At home, the conservatives, wagged by the tail of the "fourth
party," were coming to terms with the liberal-unionists who had
seceded from Mr. Gladstone in 1886; the liberal party, committed
to home rule as a first charge, unless the findings of the Parnell
commission should discredit its policy, was shelving the rest of
its programme and secretly waiting for its leader's death in order
to infuse a stronger radicalism than was palatable in the lifetime
of a man who had first held office under Sir Robert Peel.
On either side of either house, as on either side of the Irish Sea,
the dominant political problem from 1885 to 1895 was the problem
of Irish self-government: on this old parties were split and new
parties formed; from this proceeded the policies and controversies
which filled the life of Parliament to the exclusion of almost
everything else for the twenty years from 1895 to the great war.
In the first home rule bill and the liberal defeat of 1886, in the
Parnell commission and the second home rule bill, in the Parnell
divorce and the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's last administration, in
the constitutional struggle between Lords and Commons from 1893
to 1911, in the Wyndham land legislation, the devolution scheme
and the fall of Mr. Wyndham, in the Irish councils bill, the
third home rule bill, the threat of rebellion and the outbreak of
civil war, English political history lay under the sable shadow
of Ireland, English political interests and developments were
sacrificed to Irish demands, and English political parties, jointly
and severally, one after another, paid for their failure to give
Ireland an acceptable form of self-government.
Though an Irishman brought up in England may lose the faith, the
speech and the nationality of the one country without acquiring
those of the other, he will inevitably be forced into an
alternating sympathy with both; and, while he may hesitate to
explain the English to the Irish or the Irish to the English, he is
bound, by any affection that he may feel for either, to disperse by
any means in his power the cloud of tragic misunderstanding which
has for so long poisoned the life of both. It was said, in seeming
paradox, at a time of diplomatic tension between Great Britain and
the United States, that both countries laboured equally under the
curse of a common language; and at all times, unless the same words
embody the same ideas to both disputants, they will encounter less
confusion by translating, however cumbrously, from one language to
another. When an American says "gotten", he means "gotten"; but an
Englishman is too ready to imagine that he meant to say "got", but
unhappily knew no better--until, perhaps, set right. Similarly, a
full half of the immemorial friction between Ireland and England
arises from the vulgar belief that, because the two peoples employ
roughly the same language, they must be one people; the other half
from the abysmal ignorance of Ireland exhibited by the English
and the no less abysmal ignorance of England exhibited by the
Irish. Apart from those who for reasons of sport or business are
taken regularly from the one country to the other, there is little
intercourse between them: a hundred Englishmen go to France or
Italy for one who goes to Ireland; and, without a steadying glimpse
of reality to check a too exuberant imagination on either side,
the Irishman deduces an England made up of commercial travellers
from Liverpool and of six-day trippers to Killarney or Portrush,
while the Englishman constructs a figure from the novels of Lever
and half persuades himself that Irishmen habitually brandish
shillelaghs and welcome bad government for its own sake and for
love of a grievance. The literary conception[5] has been somewhat
refined by the writings of Shaw and Synge, of Somerville and Ross,
but he would be little out of pocket who offered a reward to any
Englishman who could distinguish between the intonation of a Galway
fisherman and the accent of Sir Edward Carson.
Some progress towards understanding will be achieved when it is
realised that the Irish derive from an older and different wave
of westerly migration and were a civilised and proselytising
nation when the English were a pagan collection of barbarian
tributaries distracted by the withdrawal of the Roman legions
from Britain. Insulated from Europe by a second sea, Ireland
has retained a faith, a poetry and a mysticism which in England
could not withstand the materialising influence of commercial
development nor the imperial fruits of participation in European
politics; the Irish have never regarded industrial pre-eminence as
the goal of human energy and ambition, they never will; and they
are deaf to the lure of imperialism. Those who confound mysticism
with sentiment mistake the most mystical people in Europe for the
most sentimental; the Irish are without sentimentality, and their
cynicism, once realised, tempts the bewildered alien to doubt their
spiritual quality until he discovers that cynicism may be used as
protective colouring. In conflict with neighbours of sometimes
less generous soul the Irish forgive easily, perhaps they forgive
too easily; they never forget, and perhaps it would be for their
good if they learned to forget. They are more chivalrous than most
of the nations in Europe and more chaste than any. In common with
the rest of the world they believe that a man is worthless unless
he will die for his ideals; they believe also that an ideal is
worthless if men will not die for it. To the English, who in normal
times will do anything for an ideal but sacrifice themselves for
it and who will risk their necks for anything but an ideal, this
fanaticism is as inexplicable as it is exasperating.
In all political relations an Irishman interprets patriotism to
mean his love for Ireland; in all relations with the British
Government Ireland is offered, a year too late, what she would have
accepted thankfully a year earlier. When English political parties
are vying with one another to press upon Ireland a remedy for which
the time has passed, it is hard to recall the days when coercion
bill trod on the heels of coercion bill and "twenty years of
resolute government" was proposed as the blunt, common-sense method
of curing a nation that aspired to independence: Ireland turbulent,
it was said, was unfit for self-government, Ireland at peace no
longer wanted it. In two hundred and fifty years England had tried
every expedient, from the Cromwellian massacres to the Wyndham land
act, with the exception of just that political autonomy which she
blessed so fervently when it was won by Greece and Italy, Bulgaria,
Servia and Roumania. Still the Irish dreamed of a national destiny,
still the imperial genius of the English bled Ireland slowly to
death. More than a century after the act of union, a conservative
ministry discovered that perhaps the Irish really desired to
control their own fate; and the twenty years of resolute government
ended in an abortive scheme of devolution. It is true that Mr.
Wyndham, a great scholar, a greater gentleman and one of the
greatest friends that Ireland ever had, was denounced, betrayed and
left to die heartbroken; his work lived after him; and, when the
Liberal party returned to power in 1906, it was agreed, though not
admitted, by all that some concession must be made to the Irish
demand for home rule; all in turn now prescribe milk, when brandy
is required, and brandy, when oxygen alone will save the patient's
life.
Day after day and year after year, the political youth of any one
who was born after the first home rule bill has been overcast by
Ireland; for a moment the dream of O'Connell and Parnell seemed
likely to be realised by Redmond; but the shadow descended again in
the hour of his death to darken the youth of another generation,
as it descended in the hour of Mr. Gladstone's last defeat and
retirement.
II
If the party of reform in the last years of the nineteenth century
seemed to be waiting for the death of its leader, the whole
English world seems, in retrospect, to have been waiting for the
death of the older generation and for the passing of an era which
was arrested in its decay by the venerable presence and vigour
of the queen and Mr. Gladstone, of Cardinal Manning and Cardinal
Newman, of Dr. Spurgeon and Miss Nightingale. The great Victorian
age, solid and stable, rich in discovery and invention, richer
in literature and art, spanned the historical chasm between the
eighteenth century and the twentieth: the political unrest and
transition which perplexed the sons of George III had given
place to an order so settled that, in the last years of George
III's granddaughter, it seemed to defy change; the licence which
endured as a legacy of the Napoleonic wars and as a memory of
the Regency had been ended by the example and influence of the
queen; in material strength and in the bewildering splendour of
imperial pageantry, England stood higher than at any time since
the last years of Queen Elizabeth. There is a tendency among
the shallow-minded of the present day to see only the stiff
conventionality and smug complacency of Victorianism, to ridicule
its solemnity and to castigate its occasional tastelessness: in
the eyes of such critics, Victorianism is to be remembered only by
the Albert Memorial. Already in the Queen's last years there might
be heard murmurs of revolt against the bloodless rectitude of life
which she inspired; hopes were entertained that, when at length the
Prince of Wales came to the throne, cheerfulness might be allowed
to break in; the English had been on their best behaviour for too
long and were profoundly bored.
When those who opened their eyes on the second half of the eighties
were still young children, the first attack was made on the
outposts of Victorian "respectability": the "new woman" made her
appearance, defiantly smoking in public and--until threatened with
violence by an outraged and susceptible mob--bicycling about the
streets of London in "bloomers"; new ideas were spread, new rights
suggested and an alarming new freedom of discussion inaugurated
by the plays of Ibsen; a new wave of riches poured into England
from the Rand, their possessors resolute to enjoy them without
the restrictions of an outworn decorum. The epithet which has
become the historic description of these years is "roaring," and,
if it described something which by modern standards was mild and
blameless, the vigour of the word registers the public misgiving
and astonishment at the thing which it described. Nevertheless,
though this brawling exuberance gave an earnest of what would
come when the brawlers had discredited Victorianism, as yet
they misconducted themselves clandestinely or "under the eye of
perpetual disapprobation": the nod and frown of the court were
still potent; and the rulers of half-a-dozen great houses decided
effectively and subject only to the veto of the queen who should be
received in the small and envied world known as "society."
In the realm of literature, where the writ of social rulers did
not run, a steady movement towards intellectual freedom, more
permanent in its results and less open to criticism in its course,
made itself felt; and few more illuminating contrasts between the
mental range of late Victorianism and that of the present day
can be presented than by a study of the once forbidden problems
which may now be discussed in novels, on the stage and in the
press. The free lover and the unmarried mother have escaped from
the tribunal of the moralist into the consulting-room of the
pathologist and the workshop of the artist; diseases never before
mentioned have supplied the dramatist with a motive; vices still
unmentionable furnish a hinted explanation to the psychologist. And
between men and women of almost any age there is an unembarrassed
interchange of opinion, not always free from the gratification of
morbid curiosity, which exceeds the limits even of what may be
debated in print. The belief in safety through innocence has been
replaced by a belief in safety through knowledge; the war went far
towards completing the work begun by the early prophets of women's
rights; while the change in outlook must be recorded, there has
not yet been time to judge it in its effects on the well-being
of the nation or on the spiritual quality of the individual. The
revolutionaries of this, as of all other epochs, are too much
concerned in pursuing liberty as an end to regard it as a means.
To them the restrictions of Victorianism would be as intolerable as
its pleasures would be insipid. London, in the nineties, formal and
unvarying, was only in session from Easter until Goodwood; and the
slave of routine followed his appointed path from Sussex to Cowes,
from Cowes to a foreign watering-place or to Scotland and from
Scotland, by way of long visits in different parts of the country,
to the shires, returning to London in the spring after a taste of
cosmopolitanism in the south of France. Once more in England, he
attended a succession of parties as punctually and conscientiously
as he murmured the responses in church; if they grew irksome,
there was no alternative, and, if he absented himself, he incurred
the suspicion, in that intimate small world, of having been left
uninvited. So for seven days a week and for twelve weeks of seven
days: the week-end party, which now diverts a few and exhausts the
rest, only dates from the early nineties; Sunday was always passed
in London, with church and church parade, a luncheon party and
ceremonial calls to urge the lagging hours.
Though the young girl unchaperoned was the young girl abandoned,
it is probably the young bachelor who would have most reason to
dread the obligations entailed by a plunge back into the nineties.
Etiquette ordained that he must leave cards at any house where
he had dined or danced; and a call in those strict days, when no
one but a sloven would dare to be seen without a tall hat between
the months of May and July, postulated that the caller must array
himself in frock-coat and all its concomitants and, for a reason
still obscure, must carry his hat into the drawing-room. Later,
as a concession to human weakness and in imitation of the bar, a
morning-coat was permitted; serge suits and bowler hats, exhibiting
themselves tentatively at either end of the week, were excused by
a presumed sojourn in the country; and then, with the speed of an
avalanche, the reign of dandified dowdiness set in, tidying itself
slowly into comfort that was also presentable.
III
Politically, too, it was felt that the passing of the Victorian era
would be accompanied by upheaval and a transference of power.
The middle-class electorate which ultimately ruled England from
1832 to 1867 was extended by the reform bills of the latter
year and of 1884 to include the vast majority of the adult male
working-classes. At the time of this generous dilution Robert
Lowe caustically suggested that it would be well to "educate
our masters," and in the middle of his 1868 administration Mr.
Gladstone introduced universal elementary education into England.
The first children to benefit by this belated afterthought were
men and women who were in the early twenties by the time that the
generation which is now being described was able to read and to see
what others were reading; its members grew up side by side with
the numerous progeny of a popular, cheap press, and its future
rulers were in a state to digest and discuss political problems for
themselves and by themselves.
This is not to say that a knowledge of letters gave to democracy
political wisdom; it is probable that, while new classes were
enabled to spread and to receive political doctrines, later to
unite and organise themselves into political bodies, their instinct
for affairs became blunted and debased. "Some of us," wrote Lord
Bryce in _Modern Democracies_, "remember among the English rustics
of sixty years ago shrewd men unable to read, but with plenty of
mother wit, and by their strong sense and solid judgement quite as
well qualified to vote as are their grandchildren to-day who read
a newspaper and revel in the cinema. The first people who ever
worked popular government, working it by machinery more complicated
than ours, had no printed page to learn from.... These Greek
voters learnt their politics not from the printed, and few even
from any written page, but by listening to accomplished orators
and by talking to one another.... It is thinking that matters,
not reading.... In conversation there is a clash of wits, and to
that some mental exertion must go.... The man who reads only the
newspaper of his own party, and reads its political intelligence in
a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of
football matches, need not know that there is more than one side
to a question.... The printed page, because it seems to represent
some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in
talk.... A party organ, suppressing some facts, misrepresenting
others, is the worst of all guides.... That impulse to hasty and
ill-considered action which was the besetting danger of ruling
assemblies swayed by orators, will reappear in the impression
simultaneously produced through the press on masses of men all over
a large country."
It is possible that the last thirty years may come to be regarded,
in the development of democracy, as the history of the press rising
victorious over the political mass-meeting, even as the political
mass-meeting, since the days of Mr. Gladstone's electoral campaign
of 1880, had been gradually rising victorious over the House of
Commons. It is possible again that the present moment registers
the highest point which newspaper influence will reach and that,
during the next thirty years, the publicity of the cinematograph
and of the poster will rise victorious over the press. The
patriotism of the public during the war was kept alive by direct
and simple appeals to enlistment and economy; they issued their
message from every hoarding and competed for public interest with
advertisements for patent foods and soaps. Though its want of
dignity may have offended the fastidious, this method of propaganda
permitted neither argument nor contradiction; the government stated
its case and plastered the countryside with an exhortation or
declaration for which the public paid and which the press could not
overtake. Since the war, the government has employed this method of
propaganda in more than one industrial dispute: wages and profits,
nationalisation and private ownership are debated on convenient
walls; it is recognised that, in a democracy, knowledge must not be
denied to the people; and, as in the first French revolution, it is
believed that the information can be supplied most attractively by
the government itself. Robert Lowe, were he still alive, might feel
malicious satisfaction in seeing the use to which democracy had put
its long-deferred education and the manner in which the ultimate
masters of democracy are educated.
The immediate effect of diffused, cheap printing and of the power
of reading and expression was that democracy became articulate and
organised, ready to play in the business of government that part
to which it was entitled by its votes, but to which others were
by no means ready to admit it. In the conversation and literature
of these years may be traced a profound uneasiness at the onward
march of labour, and the opponents of democracy vented their fear
and hostility in outbursts of almost hysterical bitterness against
the ignorant, gullible, self-seeking and rapacious proletariat into
whose hands the welfare of the empire had been surrendered.
In 1833 Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh had written: "Two men I honour,
and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made
Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man's.
Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of
the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face,
all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it
is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable
for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love
thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for
us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our
Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred." In 1850 the fear of Chartism had purged Carlyle's mind
of this veneration, pity and love for a man living manlike, a
hardly-entreated brother and a conscript who had been marred in
fighting the battles of others. "Consider, in fact," he exhorts
his readers, "a body of Six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous
persons set to consult about 'business' with Twenty-seven millions
mostly fools assiduously listening to them, and checking and
criticising them--was there ever since the world began, will there
ever be till the world end, any 'business' accomplished in these
circumstances?"
For fifty years, from Carlyle to Kipling, this scorn for a
deliberative assembly and this contempt for an electorate which had
hitherto been sedulously denied all political education frustrated
all attempts to modify the old machine of government and to
assimilate the new rulers to the old. "Bigots," said Macaulay, "...
never fail to plead in justification of persecution the vices which
persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews less than
half a country; and we revile them because they do not feel for
England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves, and
wonder that they do not regard us as brethren...."
With little change of language, the disabilities of the Jews
could be paralleled by the disabilities of labour; and both were
defended by the same spirit of blatant intolerance which rose in a
self-satisfied _crescendo_ during the second half of the nineteenth
century, till a cynic might have said that, as there had been no
class-antagonism, it would become necessary to create one. Of
the present conflict between classes and of any conflict in the
immediate future the seeds were sown in the last years of Queen
Victoria's reign.
IV
The men of this epoch grew up half-way between the second harvest
of great nineteenth-century literature and the first crop of
the twentieth. In their early boyhood, Tennyson was still Poet
Laureate, Browning was still prolific and Swinburne's last song
was not yet sung; George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were still in
practise as novelists, and Robert Louis Stevenson was approaching
the climax of his powers; John Ruskin, though silent, was still
alive; the influence of Walter Pater was at its zenith; the
reputation of Herbert Spencer stood higher than at any time before
or since; and John Morley was in his prime. Among the younger men
who were winning fame--with the surge and thunder that heralded
the youth of the nineties--was Rudyard Kipling; the seething
brain of H. G. Wells was boiling over into scientific romance;
and old romance was brought to life by the charm of Anthony Hope.
Among those who were doing the work for which a belated fame was
reserved were Samuel Butler and Joseph Conrad. For experimenting,
adventurous youth the pages of _The Yellow Book_ lay open; "the men
of the nineties" flashed meteorically across the deafened heavens,
and, when they had passed with their falsity and clamour, there
was discovered in their train the more abiding genius of Whistler
and Beardsley, the precocious, detached perfection of Beerbohm,
the occasional beauty of Gray and Dowson, the alternate paste and
diamond of Oscar Wilde.
These were the last working years of Leighton and Watts, of Holman
Hunt and Morris, of Tenniel and Crane; the heyday of Ricketts and
Shannon; the morning of Phil May. They were the years, too, of the
first illustrated magazines and of those _Strands_, ever memorable
to the boys of that generation, in which _Sherlock Holmes_ appeared
month after month.
A new chapter in dramatic history was opened by Pinero with _The
Second Mrs. Tanqueray_; and, though Shaw and Barrie were not yet
come into their own, though Galsworthy and Barker were not yet
articulate, the last decade of the nineteenth century was the
summer time of the British stage for a hundred years. Irving ruled
still imperially, with Terriss, Forbes Robertson and Wyndham among
his marshals; Boucicault, Toole and Bancroft were still alive; it
was not yet impossible to find a theatre for serious drama, and
the seductions of burlesque and of musical comedy were confined to
Daly's and the old Gaiety.
The music-halls of that period did not come within the purview of
a boy: the humour was too broad, the air too much tainted, the
associations too squalid; but in those days the true "variety
entertainment"--exhibiting hardly less continuity than the modern
_revue_--was still to be seen, the old-fashioned chairman still sat
at his table surrounded by privileged friends, the prices were
half those of the theatre, it was exceptional for a man to appear
in evening dress and inconceivable for a woman of repute to appear
at all.
The memory of a child is pierced, deeply and without order, by
quarter-comprehended sights and sounds. Those were the days of
Lottie Collins and _Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, of _The Man Who Broke
the Bank at Monte Carlo_ and of _The Bicycle Made for Two_--this
last to commemorate the safety bicycle which took England by storm
and urged the citizens of London in endless, untiring circles
round Regent's Park on Sunday mornings. These were the days of
May Yohe and _Honey, ma Honey_, of Hayden Coffin and _Sunshine
Above_, of Albert Chevalier and his coster songs; of Dan Leno and
Herbert Campbell in immortal partnership at Drury Lane pantomimes,
of Corney Grain--and a piano; of Sims Reeves at the Queen's Hall,
old and inexpressibly sweet; of Maskelyne and Cook at the Egyptian
Hall, of Moore and Burgess at the St. James' Hall; they were the
days of "Niagara" and the old Aquarium.
It was in the middle nineties, when the "knife-board" omnibus
was still to be seen in the streets, that London was excited by
an exhibition of "horseless carriages," though for a few years
still a small boy might be driven to Berkeley Square on a summer
afternoon, there to draw up under the trees opposite Gunter's and
consume raspberry ices. In those days the cows and milk-stall
were not yet evicted from St. James' Park; Booksellers Row had
not been sacrificed to the improvement of London, which was then
more picturesque and less sanitary. Those were the days of the
long frost; the days of the Klondike gold-rush, the Jameson raid,
the Græco-Turkish war; days in which a boy heard dying rumours
of a "baccarat case," of the Parnell divorce, of Barnie Barnato's
death, rumours more active but less intelligible of vast financial
operations and vaster crashes.
The first five years of life, perhaps the first seven, are the
hinterland of memory in which a trail is blazed by word or name
and, later, a road straightened and made durable by reading. After
seven, memory is in ordered cultivation: after 1895 public events
marshal themselves and stand out against the uneventful background
of the child's daily life. The fall of the Rosebery government
seemed less important than Mr. Gladstone's retirement the year
before and, to a boy, neither equalled in excitement the Diamond
Jubilee with its thanksgiving-service and procession, its songs and
marches, its bunting and illumination. A year later the news-bills
stopped every passer-by with the words: "DEATH OF GLADSTONE"; and
children who had never seen him cried in the streets of London as
they had cried in America or Italy at the passing of Lincoln or
Garibaldi.
A year later still came rumours of discord in South Africa; and
the patriot of the private school waited eagerly for a declaration
of war, less eagerly for news that President Kruger had yielded
to pressure; the memory of the Spithead review which had followed
the massing of an empire's troops at the Diamond Jubilee was still
vivid, and in a hundred thousand truculent hearts there lurked the
sinister thought that an army and navy were useless if they did not
fight and that small nations existed, in the scheme of creation,
to be taught sharp lessons. The handful of opponents who cried out
on an impious war of aggression were shouted down or manhandled as
"pro-Boers" until the cheers of the Irish and of a few radicals,
when a British reverse was announced in the House of Commons,
convinced the wondering militarists that opposition might be
prompted by a moral sense as well as by native factiousness. These
were the days of _The Absent-Minded Beggar_, of "Black Friday"
and the Fall of Ladysmith, of the aged queen's recruiting-tour in
Ireland, of the relief of Mafeking and "Mafeking Night" in London;
the days when Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener were sent out to cut
short the retribution which the arrogance of a swollen power had
called down upon its head, the days of concentration-camps and "the
methods of barbarism," of the "Khaki" election, of _The Islanders_
and the last despairing shriek of that vulgar ferocity which had
brought about this needless and iniquitous bloodshed; the days of
Queen Victoria's last illness and death, the approach of peace.
The chapter of imperialism which opened with Mr. Chamberlain's
ultimatum and ended with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's grant of
self-government to the Union of South Africa was only symptomatic
of a wider-spread arrogance and savagery. While the war was still
in progress, another chapter of history, shorter but not less
infamous, was being enacted in the suppression of the Boxer rising
and--incidentally--in the looting of the palace at Pekin. It was in
the middle of these two excursions that there began the six years'
sojourn at Westminster, to which reference was made in the last
chapter.