outbuilding jumped and tumbled asunder. A horse streaked down the street
with trailing halter. Round the corner scurried the niggers: the next
was due from Pepworth's.
Then the tearing scream: horror! it was coming from Bulwan.
Again the annihilating blast, and not ten yards away. A roof gaped and a
house leaped to pieces. A black reeled over, then terror plucked him up
again, and sent him running.
Head down, hands over ears, they tore down the street, and from the
other side swooped down the implacable, irresistible next.
You come out of the dust and the stench of melinite, not knowing where
you were, hardly knowing whether you were hit--only knowing that the
next was rushing on its way. No eyes to see it, no limbs to escape, no
bulwark to protect, no army to avenge. You squirm between iron fingers.
Nothing to do but endure.
XV.
IN A CONNING-TOWER.
THE SELF-RESPECTING BLUEJACKET--A GERMAN ATHEIST--THE SAILORS'
TELEPHONE--WHAT THE NAVAL GUNS MEANT TO LADYSMITH--THE SALT OF THE
EARTH.
LADYSMITH, _Dec. 6._
"There goes that stinker on Gun Hill," said the captain. "No, don't get
up; have some draught beer."
I did have some draught beer.
"Wait and see if he fires again. If he does we'll go up into the
conning-tower, and have both guns in action toge--"
Boom! The captain picked up his stick.
"Come on," he said.
We got up out of the rocking-chairs, and went out past the swinging
meat-safe, under the big canvas of the ward-room, with its table piled
with stuff to read. Trust the sailor to make himself at home. As we
passed through the camp the bluejackets rose to a man and lined up
trimly on either side. Trust the sailor to keep his self-respect, even
in five weeks' beleaguered Ladysmith.
Up a knee-loosening ladder of rock, and we came out on to the green
hill-top, where they first had their camp. Among the orderly trenches,
the sites of the deported tents, were rougher irregular blotches of
hole--footprints of shell.
"That gunner," said the captain, waving his stick at Surprise Hill, "is
a German. Nobody but a German atheist would have fired on us at
breakfast, lunch, and dinner the same Sunday. It got too hot when he put
one ten yards from the cook. Anybody else we could have spared; then we
had to go."
We come to what looks like a sandbag redoubt, but in the eyes of heaven
is a conning-tower. On either side, from behind a sandbag epaulement, a
12-pounder and a Maxim thrust forth vigilant eyes. The sandbag plating
of the conning-tower was six feet thick and shoulder-high; the rivets
were red earth, loose but binding; on the parapets sprouted tufts of
grass, unabashed and rejoicing in the summer weather. Against the
parapet leaned a couple of men with the clean-cut, clean-shaven jaw and
chin of the naval officer, and half-a-dozen bearded bluejackets. They
stared hard out of sun-puckered eyes over the billows of kopje and
veldt.
Forward we looked down on the one 4·7; aft we looked up to the other. On
bow and beam and quarter we looked out to the enemy's fleet. Deserted
Pepworth's was on the port-bow, Gun Hill, under Lombard's Kop, on the
starboard, Bulwan abeam, Middle Hill astern, Surprise Hill on the
port-quarter.
Every outline was cut in adamant.
The Helpmakaar Ridge, with its little black ants a-crawl on their hill,
was crushed flat beneath us.
A couple of vedettes racing over the pale green plain northward looked
as if we could jump on to their heads. We could have tossed a biscuit
over to Lombard's Kop. The great yellow emplacement of their fourth big
piece on Gun Hill stood up like a Spit-head Fort. Through the big
telescope that swings on its pivot in the centre of the tower you could
see that the Boers were loafing round it dressed in dirty
mustard-colour.
"Left-hand Gun Hill fired, sir," said a bluejacket, with his eyes glued
to binoculars. "At the balloon"--and presently we heard the weary
pinions of the shell, and saw the little puff of white below.
"Ring up Mr Halsey," said the captain.
Then I was aware of a sort of tarpaulin cupboard under the breastwork,
of creeping trails of wire on the ground, and of a couple of sappers.
The corporal turned down his page of 'Harmsworth's Magazine,' laid it on
the parapet, and dived under the tarpaulin.
Ting-a-ling-a-ling! buzzed the telephone bell.
The gaunt up-towering mountains, the long, smooth, deadly guns--and the
telephone bell!
The mountains and the guns went out, and there floated in that roaring
office of the 'Daily Mail' instead, and the warm, rustling vestibule of
the playhouse on a December night. This is the way we make war now; only
for the instant it was half joke and half home-sickness. Where were we?
What were we doing?
"Right-hand Gun Hill fired, sir," came the even voice of the bluejacket.
"At the balloon."
"Captain wants to speak to you, sir," came the voice of the sapper from
under the tarpaulin.
Whistle and rattle and pop went the shell in the valley below.
"Give him a round both guns together," said the captain to the
telephone.
"Left-hand Gun Hill fired, sir," said the bluejacket to the captain.
Nobody cared about left-hand Gun Hill; he was only a 47 howitzer; every
glass was clamped on the big yellow emplacement.
"Right-hand Gun Hill is up, sir."
Bang coughs the forward gun below us; bang-g-g coughs the after-gun
overhead. Every glass clamped on the emplacement.
"What a time they take!" sighs a lieutenant--then a leaping cloud a
little in front and to the right.
"Damn!" sighs a peach-cheeked midshipman, who--
"Oh, good shot!" For the second has landed just over and behind the
epaulement. "Has it hit the gun?"
"No such luck," says the captain: he was down again five seconds after
we fired.
And the men had all gone to earth, of course.
Ting-a-ling-a-ling!
Down dives the sapper, and presently his face reappears, with
"Headquarters to speak to you, sir." What the captain said to
Headquarters is not to be repeated by the profane: the captain knows
his mind, and speaks it. As soon as that was over, ting-a-ling again.
"Mr Halsey wants to know if he may fire again, sir."
"He may have one more"--for shell is still being saved for Christmas.
It was all quite unimportant and probably quite ineffective. At first it
staggers you to think that mountain-shaking bang can have no result; but
after a little experience and thought you see it would be a miracle if
it had. The emplacement is a small mountain in itself; the men have run
out into holes. Once in a thousand shots you might hit the actual gun
and destroy it--but shell is being saved for Christmas.
If the natives and deserters are not lying, and the sailors really hit
Pepworth's Long Tom, then that gunner may live on his exploit for the
rest of his life.
"We trust we've killed a few men," says the captain cheerily; "but we
can't hope for much more."
And yet, if they never hit a man, this handful of sailors have been the
saving of Ladysmith. You don't know, till you have tried it, what a worm
you feel when the enemy is plugging shell into you and you can't
possibly plug back. Even though they spared their shell, it made all the
world of difference to know that the sailors could reach the big guns if
they ever became unbearable. It makes all the difference to the Boers,
too, I suspect; for as sure as Lady Anne or Bloody Mary gets on to them
they shut up in a round or two. To have the very men among you makes the
difference between rain-water and brine.
The other day they sent a 12-pounder up to Cæsar's Camp under a boy who,
if he were not commanding big men round a big gun in a big war, might
with luck be in the fifth form.
"There's a 94-pounder up there," said a high officer, who might just
have been his grandfather.
"All right, sir," said the child serenely; "we'll knock him out."
He hasn't knocked him out yet, but he is going to next shot, which in a
siege is the next best thing.
In the meantime he has had his gun's name, "Lady Ellen," neatly carved
on a stone and put up on his emplacement. Another gun-pit bears the
golden legend "Princess Victoria Battery," on a board elegant beyond the
dreams of suburban preparatory schools. A regiment would have had no
paint or gold-leaf; the sailors always have everything. They carry their
home with them, self-subsisting, self-relying. Even as the constant
bluejacket says, "Right Gun Hill up, sir," there floats from below
ting-ting, ting-ting, ting.
Five bells!
The rock-rending double bang floats over you unheard; the hot iron hills
swim away.
Five bells--and you are on deck, swishing through cool blue water among
white-clad ladies in long chairs, going home.
O Lord, how long?
But the sailors have not seen home for two years, which is two less
than their usual spell. This is their holiday.
"Of course, we enjoy it," they say, almost apologising for saving us;
"we so seldom get a chance."
The Royal Navy is the salt of the sea and the salt of the earth also.
THE LAST CHAPTER
BY
VERNON BLACKBURN.
I will give no number to the last chapter of George Steevens's story of
the war. There is no reckoning between the work from his and the work
from this pen. It is the chapter which covers a grave; it does not make
a completion. A while back, you have read that surrendering wail from
the beleaguered city--a wail in what contrast to the humour, the
vitality, the quickness, the impulse, the eagerness of expectation with
which his toil in South Africa began!--wherein he wrote: "Beyond is the
world--war and love. Clery marching on Colenso, and all that a man holds
dear in a little island under the north star.... To your world and to
yourself you are every bit as good as dead--except that dead men have no
time to fill in." And now he is dead. And I have undertaken the most
difficult task, at the command--for in such a case the timorous
suggestion, hooped round by poignant apologies, is no less than a
command--of that human creature whom, in the little island under the
north star, he held most dear of all--his wife, to set a copingstone, a
mere nothing in the air, upon the last work that came from his pen. I
will prefer to begin with my own summary, my own intimate view of George
Steevens, as he wandered in and out, visible and invisible, of the paths
of my life.
"Weep for the dead, for his light hath failed; weep but a little for the
dead, for he is at rest." Ecclesiasticus came to my mind when the news
of his death came to my knowledge. Who would not weep over the
extinction of a career set in a promise so golden, in an accomplishment
so rare and splendid? Sad enough thought it is that he is at rest;
still--he rests. "Under the wide and starry sky," words which, as I have
heard him say, in his casual, unambitious manner of speech, he was wont
to repeat to himself in the open deserts of the Soudan--"Under the wide
and starry sky" the grave has been dug, and "let me lie."
"Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will."
The personality of George Steevens was one which might have been complex
and obscure to the ordinary acquaintance, were it not for one shining,
one golden key which fitted every ward of his temperament, his conduct,
his policy, his work. He was the soul of honour. I use the words in no
vague sense, in no mere spirit of phrase-making. How could that be
possible at this hour? They are words which explain him, which are the
commentary of his life, which summarise and enlighten every act of every
day, his momentary impulses and his acquired habits. "In Spain," a great
and noble writer has said, "was the point put upon honour." The point
of honour was with George Steevens his helmet, his shield, his armour,
his flag. That it was which made his lightest word a law, his vaguest
promise a necessity in act, his most facile acceptance an engagement as
fixed as the laws of motion. In old, old days I well remember how it
came to be a complacent certainty with everybody associated with
Steevens that if he promised an article, an occasional note, a
review--whatever it might be--at two, three, four, five in the morning,
at that hour the work would be ready. He never flinched; he never made
excuses, for the obvious reason that there was never any necessity for
excuse. Truthful, clean-minded, nobly unselfish as he was, all these
things played but the parts of planets revolving around the sun of his
life--the sun of honour. To that point I always return: but a man can be
conceived who shall be splendidly honourable, yet not lovable--a man who
might repel friendship. Steevens was not of that race. Not a friend of
his but loved him with a great and serious affection for those
qualities which are too often separable from the austerity of a fine
character, the honour of an upright man. His sweetness was exquisite,
and this partly because it was so unexpected. A somewhat shy and quiet
manner did not prepare men for the urbanity, the tolerance, the
magnanimity that lay at the back of his heart. Generosity in
thought--the rarest form of generosity that is reared among the flowers
of this sorrowful earth--was with him habitual. He could, and did,
resent at every point the qualities in men that ran counter to his
principles of honour, and he did not spare his keen irony when such
things crossed his path; but, on the other side, he loved his friends
with a whole and simple heart. I think that very few men who came under
his influence refused him their love, none their admiration.
Into all that he wrote--and I shall deal later with that point in
detail--his true and candid spirit was infused. Just as in his life, in
his daily actions, you were continually surprised by his tenderness
turning round the corner of his austere reserve, so in his work his
sentiment came with a curious appeal, with tender surprises, with an
emotion that was all the keener on account of the contrast that it made
with the courage, the hope, and the fine manliness of all his thought
and all his word. Children, helplessness of all kinds, touched always
that merciful heart. I can scarcely think of him as a man of the world,
although he had had in his few and glorious days experience enough to
harden the spirit of any man. He could never, as I think of him, have
grown into your swaggering, money-making, bargaining man of Universal
Trade. Keen and significant his policy, his ordering of his affairs must
ever have been; but the keenness and significance were the outcome, not
of any cool eye to the main chance, but of a gay sense of the pure need
of logic, not only in letters but also in living.
There, again, I touch another characteristic--his feeling for logic, for
dialectic, which made him one of the severest reasoners that it would
be possible to meet in argument. He used, in his admirably assumed air
of brag, an attitude which he could take with perfect humour and perfect
dignity--to protest that he was one of two or three Englishmen who had
ever mastered the philosophical systems of Germany, from Kant to Hegel,
from Hegel to Schopenhauer. Though he said it with an airy sense of fun,
and almost of disparagement, I am strongly inclined to believe that it
was true. He was never satisfied with his knowledge: invariably curious,
he was guided by his joy in pure reasoning to the philosophies of the
world, and in his silent, quiet, unobtrusive way he became a master of
many subjects which life was too brief in his case to permit him to show
to his friends, much less to the world.
This, it will be readily understood, is, as I have said, the merest
summary of a character, as one person has understood it. Others will
reach him from other points of view. Meanwhile Ladysmith has him--what
is that phrase of his?--"You squirm between iron fingers." Fortunate he,
so far that he is at rest, squirming no longer; and with the wail on his
lips, the catch in the throat, he went down in the embrace of a deadlier
enemy than the Bulwan horror, to which he made reference in one of the
last lines he was destined to write in this world. He fell ill in that
pestilent town, as all the world knows. His constitution was strong
enough; he had not lived a life of unpropitious preparation for a
serious illness; but his heart was a danger. Typhoid is fatal to any
heart-weakness, particularly in convalescence; and he was caught
suddenly as he was growing towards perfect health.
I have been privileged to see certain letters written to his wife by the
friend with whom he shared his Ladysmith house during the course of his
illness. "How he contracted enteric fever," says Mr Maud, "I cannot
tell. It is unfortunately very prevalent in the camp just now. He began
to be ill on the 13th of December, but on that day the doctor was not
quite sure about its being enteric, although he at once commenced with
the treatment for that disease. The following day there was no doubt
about it, and we moved him from our noisy and uncomfortable quarters in
the Imperial Light Horse Camp to our present abode, which is quite the
best house in Ladysmith. Major Henderson of the Intelligence Department
very kindly offered his own room, a fine, airy, and well-furnished
apartment, although he was barely recovered of his wound. At first I
could only procure the services of a trained orderly of the 5th Dragoon
Guards lent to us by the colonel, but a few days later we were lucky
enough to find a lady nurse, who has turned out most excellently, and
she takes charge at night.... I am happy to tell you that everything has
gone on splendidly".... After describing how the fever gradually
approached a crisis, Mr Maud continues: "When he was at his worst he was
often delirious, but never violent; the only trouble was to prevent him
getting out of bed. He was continually asking us to go and fetch you,
and always thought he was journeying homewards. It never does to halloa
before one gets out of the wood, but I do really think that he is well
on the road to recovery." Alas!
Not so much as a continued record of Steevens's illness, as in the
nature of a pathetic side-issue to the tragedy of his death, I subjoin
one or two passages from a letter sent subsequently from Ladysmith by
the same faithful friend before the end: "He has withstood the storm
wonderfully well, and he is not very much pulled down. The doctor thinks
that he should be about again in a fortnight"--the letter was written on
the 4th of January--"by which time I trust General Buller will have
arrived and reopened the railway. Directly it is possible to move, I
shall take him down to Nottingham Road.... There has been little or
nothing to do for the last month beyond listening to the bursting of the
Long Tom shells." That touch about General Buller's arrival is surely
one of the most strangely appealing incidents in the recent history of
human confidence and human expectation! Another friend, Mr George Lynch,
whose name occurred in one of his letters in a passage curiously
characteristic of Steevens's drily incisive humour, writes about the
days that must immediately have preceded his illness: "He was as fit and
well as possible when I left Ladysmith last month." (The letter is dated
from Durban, January 11.) "We were drawing rations like the soldiers,
but had some '74 port and a plum-pudding which we were keeping for
Christmas Day.... Shells fell in our vicinity more or less like angels'
visits, and I had a bet with him of a dinner. I backed our house to be
hit against another which he selected; and he won. I am to pay the
dinner at the Savoy when we return."
There is little more to record of the actual facts at this moment. The
following cable, which has till now remained unpublished, tells its own
tale too sadly:--
"Steevens, a few days before death, had recovered so far as to be
able to attend to some of his journalistic duties, though still
confined to bed. Relapse followed; he died at five in the
afternoon. Funeral same night, leaving Carter's house (where
Steevens was lying during illness) at 11.30. Interred in Ladysmith
Cemetery at midnight. Night dismal, rain falling, while the moon
attempted to pierce the black clouds. Boer searchlight from Umbala
flashed over the funeral party, showing the way in the darkness.
Large attendance of mourners, several officers, garrison, most
correspondents. Chaplain M'Varish officiated."
When I read that short and simple cablegram, the thought came to my mind
that if only the greater number of modern rioters in language were
compelled to hoard their words out of sheer necessity for the cable, we
should have better results from the attempts at word-painting that now
cumber the ground. And this brings me directly to a consideration of
Steevens's work. In many respects, of course, it was never, even in
separate papers, completed. Journalist and scholar he was, both. But the
world was allowed to see too much of the journalist, too little of the
scholar, in what he accomplished. 'The Monologues of the Dead' was a
brilliant beginning. It proved the splendid work of the past, it
presaged more splendid work for the future. And then, if you please, he
became a man of action; and a man of action, if he is to write, must
perforce be a journalist. The preparations had made it impossible that
he should ever be anything else but an extraordinary journalist; and
accordingly it fell out that the combination of a wonderful equipment of
scholarship with a vigorous sense of vitality brought about a unique
thing in modern journalism. Unique, I say: the thing may be done again,
it is true; but he was the pioneer, he was the inventor, of the
particular method which he practised.
I began this discussion with a reference to the spare, austere, but
quite lucid message of the cablegram announcing the death of Steevens;
and I was carried on at once to a deliberate consideration of his
literary work, because that work had, despite its vigour, its vividness,
its brilliance, just the outline, the spareness, the slimness, the
austerity which are so painfully inconspicuous in the customary painter
of word-pictures. Some have said that Steevens was destined to be the
Kinglake of the Transvaal. That is patently indemonstrable. His war
correspondence was not the work of a stately historian. He could, out of
sheer imaginativeness, create for himself the style of the stately
historian. His "New Gibbon"--a paper which appeared in 'Blackwood's
Magazine'--is there to prove so much; but that was not the manner in
which he usually wrote about war. He was essentially a man who had
visions of things. Without the time to separate his visions into the
language of pure classicism--a feat which Tennyson superlatively
contrived to accomplish--he yet took out the right details, and by
skilful combination built you, in the briefest possible space, a
strongly vivid picture. If you look straight out at any scene, you will
see what all men see when they look straight out; but when you inquire
curiously into all the quarters of the compass, you will see what no man
ever saw when he simply looked out of his two eyes without regarding the
here, there, and everywhere. When Tennyson wrote of
"flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half-buried in the Eagle's down,
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky
Above the pillar'd town"--
you felt the wonder of the picture. Applied in a vastly different way,
put to vastly different uses, the visual gift of Steevens belonged to
the same order of things. Consider this passage from his Soudan book:--
"Black spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimleted black faces,
donkeys headless and legless, or sieves of shrapnel; camels with
necks writhed back on to their humps, rotting already in pools of
blood and bile-yellow water, heads without faces, and faces without
anything below, cobwebbed arms and legs, and black skins grilled
to crackling on smouldering palm-leaf--don't look at it."
The writer, swinging on at the obvious pace with which this writing
swings, of course has no chance to make as flawless a picture as the
great man of leisure; but the pictorial quality of each is precisely the
same. Both understood the fine art of selection.