sharp rattle of the windows. Having lived so much beside naval guns in
our own special Kingdom by the Sea, I knew exactly what it was and shook
Himself. "That's naval guns," I said. "There's a fight going on quite
close by." "Nonsense," he answered. "You're dreaming--go to sleep." I
could not, and rose early to hear from the little maid, who had heard it
from the milkman, that the coast places had been bombarded and much
damage done. You know how rumours fly and how disasters are multiplied
and intensified, as they pass from mouth to mouth. Himself came back
from the mess with little news beyond the facts, and I was glad when a
friend rang me up to ask if I'd like to go down to the coast with her in
her car.
Of course I liked it, and we took some of the bigger children with
us--it was Easter week and they were all at home from school,
round-eyed, eager, fearless about the war, which to them is nothing but
the Great Adventure. We hardly expected to get through the military
barrier, but we did, and saw what had been done.
It is the same pitiful tale of destruction which follows in the
Zeppelin's track, senseless, horrible war on defenceless folk who have
little or nothing to protect them. These delightful east-coast watering
places are all ruined, because everybody who could afford it has "quit"
as you say, and the boarding houses and hotels are empty, and will be
for the "duration."
It was very typically British to find the front thronged with
spectators, women wheeling babies in perambulators, all gazing upon the
scene, but not apparently frightened at the wreckage. The story was
soon told. Some battle-cruisers suddenly appeared about six miles out
and opened fire for twenty minutes or so, and then ran. There was no
patrol to attack them, if it was anybody's business to be on the outside
there, they were off guard. The only criticism one is inclined to make
is that it could not happen in Germany.
This pleasant East Anglian land is lovely beyond compare in the
exquisite spring unfolding, but the blight of war seems over all.
They are getting ready great camps nearer the sea, and the troops will
be taken out of their winter billets.
Himself is very busy inspecting and reporting, and generally proving as
efficient and thorough in military life as he is in civilian.
I begin to understand the lure of the life. There is perpetual movement,
excitement, expectation. There is a certain kind of social life,
lunches and dinners and other entertainment offered by hospitable people
to the incomers, the great Highland host that has invaded their stately
precincts. There are lots of little war brides here with their young
soldier husbands, and maturer matrons, some of them with considerable
families, living in furnished houses trying to make a bit of home for
the soldier men, and very interested themselves, though it is all so
strange and inconvenient and far from home.
We have delightful rooms in a comfortable house; it is quite a rest for
me, and I am getting through with my next book.
When they get into camp I shall have to go back home to the loneliness
that is only companioned by fear.
We are kept in inky darkness here on account of the frequent air raids.
A month's imprisonment without the option of a fine is the sentence for
striking a match in the street. The authorities are lynx-eyed and
vigilant, their reward is that this beautiful old city in its historic
setting has remained immune through more than a score of attacks from
the air. It is protected, too, by the trees, which add so much to its
beauty.
It has been an experience, Cornelia, it is all part of the strange
upheaval men call war, the outward fringes of it only, yet how deeply,
inextricably woven in with the whole woof of life!
Every day one hears of the most extraordinary war marriages, rushed
into, too often, after a few days' acquaintance, without a thought given
to the awful indissolubility of the bond. For whatever the experience
of matrimony may be like, you can never be as you were before. Already
there has been much repenting at leisure, and when the glamour of the
khaki is off, the tragedy will deepen and enfold the helpless creatures
who cannot free themselves, and have no basis for a future.
There are scandals, too, and tragedies too deep for tears, broken vows,
faithless lovers and husbands, all the cursed things born of abnormal
situations, and the kind of feverish false atmosphere created by war.
These things cry as loud to Heaven as the blood and sorrow from the
battlefields, and make thoughtful people reiterate the prayer, Oh, Lord!
how long?
They are what we call "after the war problems." Some of them will never
be tackled--there is no machinery known to the human understanding
capable of tackling them--many will just have to be buried deep, and no
cross left to mark the burying place.
There stands out for me here the joy of comradeship as men understand
it, gripping it to their souls with hooks of steel.
We don't have it, Cornelia--we women, I mean--it is something we do not
get, nor perhaps understand. It is not that we are too petty, but
rather, I think, because we have to keep ourselves more detached and
selfless for all that men need and must have from us, if the Family is
to be held together.
I have never seen anything more lovely than the tie between Himself and
the young officers, these splendid boys, pictures, every one in their
Kilts, and all the panoply of war. Old enough to be father to any one of
them, he has kept the boy's heart, so that he is not only with them at
the mess, but one of them. He is so wise and tender with them, that
they come to him in every trouble. It makes me weep, and yet feel so
proud, but not in the least surprised. Did I ever tell you about the
bundle of letters, docketed, dated and tied up, I found among the Boy's
things after he went away? His father's letters--which revealed to me a
side of Himself I had never seen.
They ought to be printed, but I suppose other fathers write the same
kind of letters to their sons at schools, letters that help the
sensitive young souls to grapple with the mysteries of life. It is all
part of their nature--the bit that isn't ours--comradeship between man
and man! When found between father and son, it is the most beautiful
thing in life.
You will be stunned by the news of Kitchener's passing. It created a
panic here among the common folk.
I met a woman in the street, with a crushed copy of the evening paper
under her arm, wringing her hands and crying out that "all was lost."
It shows what a hold he had upon the popular imagination. His has been,
and is, a name to conjure with. The product of his vast personal
magnetism is on every fighting front, and in every training camp at
home. He was a great man--but his work was done--others will reap where
he has sown.
The memorial services in the Cathedral here were fitting and fine,
massed and muffled bands, a dense crowd of khaki-colored men. Generals
and high military personages galore, all the pride and pomp of war. But
Kitchener will live in the hearts of the people--his true memorial is to
be found in the serried rows of crosses in France and Flanders where so
much of the army he called into being lies in consecrated dust that is
"forever England."
I am back again in old Hertford to find letters urging my return to
France.
It is sweet to hear, not only from Effie, who says it in almost every
letter from Camiers, but from those in authority, that the boys are
always asking when I am coming back.
The time-limit is the difficulty--everywhere, but more especially in the
war zone, the restrictions are growing in intensity, and permits for
foreign service to civilians are now almost impossible to obtain. If I
agree to stay three months, I can go to-morrow, but how can I leave home
for three months, as long as Himself is still on this side of the water,
liable to come on leave any day, or even just to say good-bye before he
sails?
I can't do it, so I am compromising by agreeing to go for a spell to the
home camps.
The Winchester Command has asked me for a month and I'll try to put in a
part of it soon. Effie is due on leave immediately, but she is finding
conditions changing too at her base. What has happened is that all the
butterflies and the undesirables, out merely for a new sensation, have
been weeded out and only the solid workers remain.
"The plague of women" that tormented the military authorities during the
Boer War and created endless problems in South Africa has been more
drastically dealt with in this war.
I wish I could tell you all the things Effie has told me, but there is a
certain reticence to be observed, and amid so much that is fine and
noble why insist or dwell upon the flaws?
You asked about Florence in your last letter and I gave her your
message. Daily I thank God for my faithful servant and friend who cares
for me so tenderly, and is so understanding of all the trials of this
changed, unnatural life. She is part of the House of Defence--the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land. She has three brothers in the
war. One who had been frightfully wounded about the head and face came
back convalescent the other day and I saw him here. I was afraid to go
into the kitchen, knowing what the nature of his wounds had been, but so
cleverly, wonderfully, had he been handled by these heaven-born surgeons
who repair the waste and wreckage of war that he looked much as of yore,
though with some deep scars where part of a new jaw had been grafted on.
He was very quiet, as those are who have been long in the midst of
unspeakable things, but when I asked him whether he was willing to go
back, he just smiled.
"There is nothing else to be done," he answered. "And there's the
regiment and the pals." That is the spirit of Kitchener's Army--the
spirit that lives after him, and which will bring the victory. It makes
one proud to be alive and to belong to the old flag.
Picture me then, Cornelia, carrying on as bravely and steadily as may
be, a little rocky and homesick at times, but yet following, if afar
off, in the track the boys have outlined and worn by the tramp of their
brave unflinching feet. To be worthy, not only of those who have died
to keep us safe and free, but of those who have been maimed and wrecked
for us in the summer of their days, and have still to live with their
cross upon them--that is the charge laid upon the rest of us, by the God
who is watching the conflict from His secret place, biding His hour to
strike.
*IX*
The grip of war is tightening in on our little Island, Cornelia. Soon
it will be relentless.
As I was standing this morning with Florence in our sadly diminished and
attenuated store cupboard she said in her simple direct way, "Do you
notice that every day there is a little less, something else we have to
do without?" It was apropos of the plum puddings and the mincemeat, now
due to be made, but for which there are no ingredients. A good many
households in England and Scotland depended upon our Christmas puddings.
I hate to have them go short, but diplomatic relations being what they
are with Tino of Greece, we have no currants. It is thus we visualise
and realise the intimate discomfort of a world at war. It has all to be
cheerfully faced, however, and we talked substitutes for a good half
hour, and there will be a pudding of some sort to go forth to the
waiting households, though it will be minus the plums.
Since I wrote you last I have been to Scotland.
War has shaken the foundations of our Kingdom by the Sea. It has ceased
to be a haven and become in very truth a coast defense. The cliffs
bristle with guns, they have crept up from the fort, till the nearest
one is over the garden wall not fifty yards away. There it stands with
its gleaming nozzle to the sea, the gunners unsleeping night and day by
its side.
It has become horrible and menacing. Its old-world intimate charm,
which belongs to simple places untouched by conventionality, has surely
gone, forever sacrificed, as so much else has been, to the monster that
has convulsed the world.
When we could not keep the Boy we laid him here in the place he so
loved--and it was a crumb of comfort in our sorrow to feel that if he
had been given choice he would himself have chosen to sleep on the windy
hill above the shore where in his childhood days he used to paddle with
his fat brown legs, and his bucket gripped hard in his podgy little
hands.
As I sat there by his white cross on the windy hill and listened to the
beat of the surf on the rocks below, I wondered what he was thinking of
it all, and I felt glad that his dear dust was sleeping sweetly, his
soul safe in the Father's House. I think I must tell you here, my
soul's friend, of a strange story I have had sent to me from France, a
story which affects me and mine. The Boy had his father's genius for
friendship, and clung to his chums with all the ardour of his nature. I
lost sight of his chief one when Oxford swallowed him. In a busy life
like mine there is not time to do all the things one wants to do. The
garden of friendship even has to suffer through the lack of cultivation.
This chum was starting what promised to be a brilliant professional
career when the war threw him into the vortex. As a young lieutenant of
the Engineers he crossed to France and received his death wounds at La
Bassée. I was in France at the time and could so easily have found him
in the hospital among the sand dunes near Wimereux, only I did not know.
I did not even see his name in the _Times_. You know we don't read the
lists so carefully now, most of us are afraid. After a time I got a
letter from his mother telling me how he had died. He had lingered
three weeks, suffering no pain, fully aware that he could not recover,
ready to die as he had lived, without fear, bravely, as brave men only
can and do die. His mother was with him to the end. I am not sure
whether I envy her. Mine went in a flash without pain or warning, or
possible shrinking, straight from one home of love to another. It must
wring a mother's heart to watch the candle flickering out so slowly.
She wanted to be with him night and day, but he always urged her to
leave him at night; both because she never slept and he was better
alone. She was very sad until he said one night, "Do go mother, I am
never lonely you know, for when you go, Ned comes. He is here all the
time--and I want you to know he's waiting for me and I'll be all right
over there." All right over there! God, how beautiful it is, and how
it comforted me to feel that my son is no more lonely in the Father's
House.
Those things are not figments of the imagination, Cornelia--the veil is
very thin, and the Lord Christ Himself walks with these dear lads and
shows them the way home.
I am glad they are both out of it now--safe forevermore.
My sister, Janet, whom you never met, and who has so long cared for our
summer home, is no longer able. She has never really recovered the
shock of the Boy's passing--and though she stoutly denies it, the strain
of the war had told on her very much. She must have a rest and get away
for a while from the guns of the coast defence. So we have let the
house. Conceive it, Cornelia, if you can--strangers living and sleeping
and possessing our Kingdom by the Sea!
The house the children loved best of all the houses in the world is now
in military possession! How truly Florence touched the spring when she
said, "Every day there is something to be given up."
If it means helping to win the war, if it can be won no other way than
by giving up all we are and have, why then let us in the name of God do
it gladly, with high heads and shining eyes in which there are no tears.
It is liberty and love we fight for. If they are slain, what will be
left?
My sister has come here to be with me for some months. I am disquieted
about her. She looks frail, and she has lost the old buoyancy and wit.
Now that she can rest for the first time in her life, the desire to rest
has passed. It is all so pathetic and so typical of the stern discipline
we call life. We really are in the fighting line from the cradle to the
grave. I smiled this morning looking back to when I said it was
necessary to take her out of the strain of the Coast Defence. Because
she has come into the real war zone here, and last night got a taste of
invasion from the air. I must tell you about it because, though we have
had many attacks from the air during the last year, this one stands out.
We brought one of the raiders down--a mass of flaming wreckage--an awful
but a glorious sight.
I have sometimes wished I could have you come here to share one of our
Zeppelin nights, to feel the thrill of tense fear which seizes the
bravest when the warning sounds, to run with us to shelter, and live the
long hours of strain and terror through.
I forget whether I told you that we have very good cellarage in our
Chinese Chippendale house and that we accommodate about 20 or 30 less
fortunate neighbours while the danger is most imminent. Florence takes
special pride in the cellar; she keeps it very clean and snug, spreads
old rugs and sets out the garden chairs. Then there is an oil stove and
various wraps for the cold nights. It can be very cold in a cellar
about 3 A.M. when one's vitality is at its lowest ebb, and fear lurks in
every corner.
Some of the women bring their knitting and the mechanical exercise helps
to allay nervous distress. A woman I met one morning after a raid said
she had been out buying dusters for her Zeppelin guests to hem in their
forced seclusion. Of course it is the gregarious instinct which brings
them together; danger seems less awful somehow when it is shared.
I don't know whether they notice how short a time I spend under
ground--I never sit down there. I want to be up and out if possible,
facing the danger, of which I am yet mortally afraid. I don't fancy
death in a cellar and I fear I am like the tommies, a fatalist as
regards bullets and bombs.
But I'm digressing shamefully. The warning came about seven, and just
before nine, we heard the grating of the engines up aloft. It was so
loud we thought there must be two or three, but we could not see
anything. They went straight over London, approaching as usual from the
North, and just missing us. They dropped a good many bombs, and the air
was full of the noise of bursting shells, and the clatter of our
anti-aircraft guns. Shrapnel was flying from them, even over our little
town, and safety was only to be found indoors.
About midnight the marauders began to retrace their steps, if I may put
it so, and came right overhead.
Then we beheld a wonderful and glorious sight. Our intrepid airmen,
just like great gadflies winging through the night, were searching the
sky for the enemy and presently one got above the stationary Zeppelin
and found the range. It looked as if they were directly above the
church opposite to us, but the actual conflict took place in the air
about 8 miles away.
When he got the range he showed a green light, a signal to the
anti-aircraft guns below to cease firing. We could not hear the shot
that made an end of the monster, but presently we saw vivid streaks like
forked lightning run along the side of the giant airship. The next
moment, a mass of white flame, it toppled over and began slowly to
descend. The cage became detached first and those who were near enough
saw the body of its unfortunate occupant fall from it. It descended in
a field behind the doctor's house at Potter's Bar, and such a cheer rent
the air, ringing hoarse from a million throats, from London to the sea,
that one felt positively thrilled, and forgot the night of fear. Some
wept and some sang "God Save the King." The great solid satisfying fact
that the death-dealing monster had been utterly destroyed sent us
thankful to our beds. These awful happenings have their comic as well as
their tragic side, and even with nerves strung to the highest pitch we
are able to laugh.
We had the Holbrooks for the week end--the whole four of them. He is a
typical John Bull, and he was much annoyed because a very keen game of
bridge was interrupted. He resented the interference with his liberty
and personal convenience. Nothing on earth would take him to the
cellar, he simply planted himself with a very long pipe and a whiskey
and soda in the library, where he sat with a suffering air, what we call
the "O Lord, how long?" expression on his face. His women folk,
thrilled and interested, for though they live in London their area has
so far escaped intimate acquaintance with Zeppelins, could not be
brought in from the street.
Mrs. Holbrook is just as amusing in her way as her spouse. Born in
England of German parents, she is loyal to the core, and rejoices that
she has never even seen Germany. She loathes the war and all it stands
for, and she will never give her son until she is obliged to; she is the
living personification of the line, "I didn't raise my boy to be a
soldier." She can't understand, though she is a dear soul, the thrill
and the pride with which we can give and give and give, not money, but
our heart's blood till there is nothing left.
It is the waste of war which terrifies her. You see, she has no hope or
belief in anything beyond this life. She just shakes her head if you
speak to her of the souls that are marching on. "I hope you're right,"
she says, "but I don't believe it myself, when I am dead there will be
an end of me; that's as far as I've got."
How awful to have to live up against such a blank wall--no wonder she
clings to the material body of her son with frantic hands that will
never let him go.
We got through the night at last, snatched an hour or two's sleep, and
in the morning went over to Potter's Bar in the motor to see all that
was left of the monster of the air.
The pretty little village swarmed with people "out for to see" just as
our town swarmed with them when we got our share of attention from Count
Zeppelin.
We tramped through indescribable mud to the sweet meadow where the
wreckage lay; partly caught in the branches of a giant oak tree--then
trailing away across the sward like the tail of some enormous
rattlesnake. We did not see the engines--they had been removed in the
small hours on a military truck. What we did see was the retrieval of
the bodies from the wreckage--poor charred objects--perfectly
unrecognisable. Mothers' sons every one, and somewhere in Germany their
homes will be desolate because they do not return. I thought of that,
but the temper of the crowd was hostile and bitter, and the feeling
uppermost was grim satisfaction that they had met a righteous and
deserved doom.
More of the dark fruits of war, the tempering and hardening of a
naturally kindly people into a thirst for revenge.
God send it may end soon--before we are all so changed that we shall
bear no semblance to our former selves.
*X*
I seem to have reached the end of my letter just about the time I wrote
to you last and the doctor, whom in the absence of Himself, I had to
call in, ordered me to go away and take a complete rest--you know the
formula--but dear God, how can we rest in a world where there is no
rest, and with the thunder of the guns in our ears night and day. It is
the Somme fighting now, in which we have lost so many of those we love.
I think I gave up the day I got a telegram telling me Dick had been
killed at Trones Wood. You remember Dick, and Isabel, that lovely pair
for whom I wrote the little book, "Letters to a War Bride."
I don't quite know how to tell you what he was like--a most gallant
gentle Knight without fear and without reproach--yet so full of fun,
that somehow laughter sang in the heart wherever he came--the laughter
that doeth good like a medicine. The last time I saw him, Isabel had
come down from Palace Gate to spend a few days and Dick came marching
through with his Fusiliers, en route from Colchester to France. He and
his Major dined with us--and I never saw him again--nor ever will see
him now, till we meet on the other side.
No doubt we are naturally drawn towards those whom nature has richly
endowed. He was as handsome as a dream--tall, dark with flashing tender
eyes and a smile that was never far away from his lips. A man of peace
if ever there was one, yet he was dedicated to war, in order that peace
may be established for all time as "one of those things that cannot be
shaken."
They were a beautiful pair; she with her slender, delicate charm, her
braids of red gold hair, her pathetic eyes. I have never seen such
love. It often made me afraid. And now he sleeps there on the Somme
where we have already left ninety thousand like him. Great God, and yet
there are those who ask when Britain is going to come into the war and
why she doesn't bear her share!