so strange and cruel to them. What have they to do with the quarrels of
Emperors and Kings and Diplomatists? They are heirs of all the ages and
have the right to live in peace and comfort, none daring to make them
afraid. Sometimes I have a nightmare of the first indictment this young
generation will bring up at the Day of Judgment--the children who have
known naught but terror--the sons who have had to die before they
lived--the widowed girls and the girls who never will taste the joy of
wifehood or motherhood, but must go unmated to their graves.
Almost it makes me long to be there lying sweetly and unconsciously
beside the quiet dead.
I have no letters from Himself. Where he is--whether alive or dead--how
can I tell? I haven't even the poor consolation of writing to
him--because I have no address.
There is no glory in war for women's hearts, Cornelia. To-day I am
neither proud nor glad, but only sorry to be a soldier's wife.
*XV*
I have been reading over your last letter and find that my impassioned
tirade about Food left many of your questions unanswered.
What you tell me about the present state of your war activities takes me
back about three years to the time when we were at the same stage. Have
you noticed that one woman's matrimonial experience is not of the
slightest use to another? It doesn't even help her to avoid quite
obvious pitfalls. War seems to me to be a little like that. Every
country has to "dree her own weird" in it--grope for her soul in her own
particular way.
One of Lloyd George's speeches put the matter in a nut shell: "To
peace-loving peoples war is a trackless waste--an undiscovered country
through which a pathway has to be made."
That being so, there must of necessity be side tracking. I see your
George stamping about in righteous indignation because things are not
being "put over" with the rapidity and despatch which seem to him
essential. Tell him he'll just have to possess his soul in patience,
and don't let him do anything foolish. He'll only hinder thereby.
I do hope and pray most fervently, however, that you are exaggerating
the state of affairs. I wonder why it is that the war machine has such a
tendency to become unwieldy. It needs not any vivid imagination, nor a
particularly brilliant intelligence to grasp the magnitude of your war
task.
You have almost everything the old world now lacks, your trouble is to
co-ordinate your forces from sea to sea, and get them into line.
Colossus can't move with the agility of his lesser brethren, we must
comfort ourselves and stay our impatience with that reflection. I am
sure you will hate leaving your lovely home, but Washington will have
compensations. I could not, somehow, imagine or contemplate existence
for myself very far from London, in wartime, at least for any length of
time.
I don't agree with all you say about the mobilisation of your women for
war.
There is no other way of doing it; and the things you tell me are only
the excrescences of a great forward movement, the shock of which will
soon make itself felt throughout the entire country.
We, too, had the kind of women you criticise so severely. I knew one
whose first act of war service for her country was the purchase of a red
cross of rubies to wear with her uniform. She went to France with it,
but abandoned it before very long. The real cross, when she came up
with it, red with the blood of brave men, put her to shame. She has won
the saint's crown out there, and her name has been on a hundred dying
lips.
So don't worry about these little things, Cornelia, they will pass as a
tale that is told. The best will remain--the things that cannot be
shaken, and which are the same in all countries, and of all peoples.
God, how I cling to that text. I have to say it over and over a hundred
times a day. We are getting so badly shaken here that sometimes we feel
as if we had no foundation whatsoever.
I don't know whether I have made you understand that a big section of
England now is as truly the war zone as that across the Channel.
The air raids are increasing in number and intensity; this week we had
four nights in the cellar.
There are not so many oddities about the proceedings now we have settled
in to the game in dead earnest. When we get the warning we act with as
little delay as possible, seek one nearest available shelter, where we
sit down to endure the strain as best we can.
There is precious little badinage now about the Zeppelin parties; we all
feel that they have long passed the amusing stage.
Can you read between the lines? I wonder have you grasped the fact that
the strain is becoming almost more than we can bear? I have the
dreadful feeling that perhaps I myself will not be able to hold out.
You know I never could do without sleep; my too active brain has always
demanded its full measure, and rebelled when cheated of it.
A Zeppelin night means anything from seven or eight o'clock at night
till four in the morning--the strain of tension and fear never relaxed
for a moment. Always you are listening, listening--and the gunfire
never ceases. It is punctuated by the noise of the explosions following
the bomb dropping, which means, though it may be a good many miles from
you, that somebody is being punished.
We still speak about the Zeppelins, though they don't come any more.
Their successors, the Gothas, are not less terrible; in fact they seem
to be more daring, more destructive, faster and less vulnerable.
Also they are equipped with all kinds of new and terrible death-dealing
weapons.
A very strange one descended on our little town night before last. We
heard a noise like a rushing mighty wind or an express train, going at
lightning speed through the air. It was not the usual steady whir of
the Gotha's engine. The thing fell in a garden at the top of Queen's
Hill and then exploded, doing much damage to houses, though mercifully
no one was killed. They say it was an aerial torpedo which travels
through the air by its own momentum. If this is true, imagine what
magnitude this form of attack might achieve and how much we may yet have
to suffer!
How often one is appalled by this dedication of human will and mind
power to the devil's service. Is there to be no limit set to it? Is it
the beginning of the terrors which will make men call on the rocks to
cover them? You have no idea, Cornelia, what a weak helpless thing
humanity is until it is subjected to this sort of thing. It isn't clean
fighting; it makes brave men desperate.
I think on the whole the women bear it better. They are more used to
suffering and never forget to be protective. All sorts of moving things
happen about the children. One poor woman stretched herself over her
two children on the floor as the torpedo was coming, hoping to receive
the brunt herself. None of them were hurt.
But these things are getting home, Cornelia, they are telling on us all.
Little portents show the weakening of the fibre here and there. I am
feeling it myself, while all the time fighting against it.
Of course the chief object of these diabolical visitations is just that,
so to weaken the moral stamina that we people will cry for peace at any
price. That cry will never be heard in this country, Cornelia, not if
he sends his aerial torpedoes hurtling through the sky, world without
end.
There is no grumbling, surprisingly little protest anywhere. Our people
accept these things as part of the horrible business in which we are
presently engaged. They don't even know how to hate properly. We have
a German prison camp nearby, the men being employed in the woods,
cutting and preparing the timber of which so many of our finest
properties are now being denuded. These men are scared to death in the
raids, but though you may hear an occasional hope expressed that a bomb
might fall on the prison camp, I question whether, if you drove it home,
you would find they really desired such a thing to happen. We are not
successful haters; we are only clean fighters, and desperate lovers of
peace.
Can you accept that paradoxical presentment which is an actual
description of our mental attitude?
The children in the war zone here are beginning to exercise us; some of
them are really subnormal now, like their poor little brothers and
sisters in the other countries. Those who can, remove them to safer
places, sending them often to relations in remote parts of the country.
Children quickly droop when their sleeping hours are shortened or much
disturbed.
The school teachers find them either restless or extremely languid after
an air raid; and cannot urge them to concentrate on their lessons. One
wee chap in our cellar, in his pajamas the other night, said
pathetically to his mother, with eyes heavy with sleep: "Mummy, you
won't get me up next night, will you, till they are really here?"
No, I am not hearing regularly from Himself. There has been no letter
for weeks and weeks. Whether they are being torpedoed when written, or
not written at all, I don't know. There is only the blank wall of
silence. How much can the human heart stand, I wonder? We are amazing
creatures, bound by "cords which come from out eternity."
*XVI*
Yes, I have read Sir Oliver Lodge's book and had some correspondence
with him about it. Somehow he got it into his head that I had written a
rather brutal, unsigned article on it in the _Daily Mail_. Writing to
refute this, I set forth my views on spiritualism and the intervention
of mediums between us and those who have passed on. We say "gone away"
in Scotland, and I think I like it better. He sent me a long letter in
reply. I will enclose you a copy.
I don't think there is any road that way. The only key to the grave was
left on the stone of the sepulchre on the Resurrection morning.
Do you remember the Leightons--Robert and Marie? They lost their
beautiful son, not the only, but the favourite one, in France, and she
has written a beautiful book about him, called "Boy of My Heart." It is
the best thing by far she has ever written, and immensely worth reading.
She is now side-tracking with the rest along these doubtful and
bewildering paths. Oh, I wish people wouldn't. To me it seems a kind
of desecration.
If I can have any communication with my son, I don't want to have it
through some strange, odd freak of a person, who has to go into a trance
for the purpose. If God means me to hear from the other side, He will
send the Boy to me direct. That I most firmly believe, and am content
to wait that day. If it never comes, why then I can go on waiting for
the day which can't be so very far distant, when I shall cross the
narrow sea between that happy land and ours. I wrote as strongly and
convincingly as I could to Mrs. Leighton, but I don't think it availed
much. There is a little group of the intellectuals just now all heading
in the same direction, names familiar all the world over.
To me it is all intensely pathetic. It is the cry of lost youth, the
admission that they have no real city or abiding place, and no sort of
surety about what is going to come.
I remember Himself coming in one day and sending me out to a dying woman
with the words: "I'm through with my job. It's yours now." When I got
to her she looked at me so wistfully, saying: "Doctor says you are so
sure."
You have no idea how these words thrilled me. Thank God I am sure. We
are all sure, who know in Whom we have believed.
Since I wrote to you last I have had disquieting news about Effie. She
was knocked down, while standing beside her car, by a big French
military motor. The officers riding in it did not even stop to pick her
up. Possibly they were not even aware that anything had happened. One
must be charitable enough to suppose so. Some one came along and took
her to a hospital, from which she is now able to send a few pencilled
lines. She escaped with a few good bruises and it was quite a few days
before I could discover whether there was any facial injury. Nobody
seemed to reflect that I might be worrying about that. I applied for
permission to go over to see her, but was refused. Nobody is permitted
to cross the Channel to visit wounded or sick relatives unless the case
is hopeless.
Her temperature kept up obstinately for longer than they liked, but I am
thankful to say she is now convalescent.
I have had shoals of letters from all kinds of people over there, from
the Brigadier to the orderly, expatiating on her absolute
indispensability at the Base. They seem terrified in case we order her
to come home.
It is very sweet to hear that she is so greatly beloved, and doing
efficiently and cheerfully so much useful service. What experience she
must have locked in her too uncommunicative bosom! She has had three
years of it now, and has really told us very little. If she never tries
to express it in writing, well, it surely will inform and colour all her
after life. I should not dare to bid her home on my own responsibility,
though there are days when I not only want, but need her desperately.
Talking of the modernity of these inaccessible, mysterious young
creatures, I don't think I told you of a friend of mine, mother of four,
who soon after the outbreak of war, received from her family a letter
signed by each member, thanking her for permitting them to be born at
the psychological moment of history.
Another friend of mine who had the misfortune to marry a full-blooded
and very German German, who, however, conveniently departed this life
the year before the war, told me her sons passionately reproached her
for giving them a German father.
One gets bewildered in this strange hurly-burly where every mask seems
to be torn off and the decencies of life hardly respected any more.
I am so glad you are easier in your mind about Anne. Effie was
tremendously interested. All she said was "Anne will never marry that
one; he's only experimental." Perhaps that may comfort you a little.
Presumably, these birds of a feather understand one another!
Sometimes I have the awful feeling that Effie has passed out of the
region of my love and care. Yet how dare I intrude these little
personal fears upon a world's sorrow?
Every day I am writing letters to fathers and mothers whose darlings
have gone forever "where, beyond these voices, there is peace."
One grows heart weary of the task, and even the balm of Gilead seems to
have lost its power to soothe or heal.
Yet often and often I am thrilled by the courage and calmness and faith
of those who have given the most. They are upheld and illumined by some
white and lovely flame which surely emanates from the secret place of
the Most High.
Never has there been such glory of sacrifice ennobled by that passion
for the right which lifts those whom it inspires very high, above
ignoble things.
My country was never greater than now, Cornelia. Shorn and
blood-stained, she is worthy to be numbered with those who are arrayed
in white robes and have come out of great tribulation.
A wonderful, wonderful thing has just happened. I don't know quite how
to tell you.
I have been asked by our Foreign Office to go to America and tell part
of the story of what we have done in the war and what the war has done
for us.
Do you understand, Cornelia, I am coming to you, right now, by the very
earliest boat?
God has undoubtedly opened this door. I shall be so glad to leave the
tired Old World for a spell, and drink at the Fount of your glorious
youth.
Even the submarines can't scare me away from this great Adventure.
At this moment America means only you and George and dear little Anne,
and the heavenly rest under your roof tree.
Perhaps it may prove to be something very different, but that is how I
am feeling at the moment.
God will surely forgive me for this momentary slackening.
I am so tired, Cornelia.
Only God knows how tired I am!
THE END