A traveller threw his cloak over his shoulder and came down slopes of
gold in El Dorado. From incredible heights he came. He came from where
the peaks of the pure gold mountain shone a little red with the
sunset; from crag to crag of gold he stepped down slowly. Sheer out of
romance he came through the golden evening.
It was only an incident of every day; the sun had set or was setting,
the air turned chill, and a battalion’s bugles were playing
“Retreat” when this knightly stranger, a British aëroplane, dipped,
and went homeward over the infantry. That beautiful evening call, and
the golden cloud bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the
cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact (which
hours of thinking sometimes will not bring) that we live in such a
period of romance as the troubadours would have envied.
He came, that British airman, over the border, sheer over No Man’s
Land and the heads of the enemy and the mysterious land behind,
snatching the secrets that the enemy would conceal. Either he had
defeated the German airmen who would have stopped his going, or they
had not dared to try. Who knows what he had done? He had been abroad
and was coming home in the evening, as he did every day.
Even when all its romance has been sifted from an age (as the
centuries sift) and set apart from the trivial, and when all has been
stored by the poets; even then what has any of them more romantic than
these adventurers in the evening air, coming home in the twilight with
the black shells bursting below?
The infantry look up with the same vague wonder with which children
look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that
comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible story as
well as with the incidents of the day, incidents that recur year in
and year out, too often for us to notice them. If a part of the moon
were to fall off in the sky and come tumbling to earth, the comment on
the lips of the imperturbable British watchers that have seen so much
would be, “Hullo, what is Jerry up to now?”
And so the British aëroplane glides home in the evening, and the light
fades from the air, and what is left of the poplars grows dark against
the sky, and what is left of the houses grows more mournful in the
gloaming, and night comes, and with it the sounds of thunder, for the
airman has given his message to the artillery. It is as though Hermes
had gone abroad sailing upon his sandals, and had found some bad land
below those winged feet wherein men did evil and kept not the laws of
gods or men; and he had brought this message back and the gods were
angry.
For the wars we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders
of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga
and epic, how shall we tell of them?