That resolution about the war and its newspapers I still feel to have
been the right one. Unfortunately, like many excellent resolutions, it
has only one drawback, which is that it is impossible to keep to it! The
situation has grown too strained; it clutches at one like a demon; it
rides one all day like some waking nightmare. In vain I assure myself
that the proper attitude for all non-combatants is one of absolute
patience. That it becomes us just now to study patience, as we might
study one of the fine arts; to learn, that is to say, either to go about
our own concerns, or else to wait till we are told--as we might be at
the end of an operation--“All over!” “All well!” This, I have no doubt,
is the proper and patriotic attitude, only how is it to be attained? or
who is sufficient for such placidity? It is not so many days since I
opened my paper at eight o’clock in the morning, and the message
heliographed by Sir George White to Sir Redvers Buller sprang to meet
my eye. “Very hard pressed” and immediately below it the comment--“Here
the light failed”!
“Here the light failed!” That seems indeed to be the summary of the
whole situation. One question at least we are all forced to ask, if not
with our lips, at least inwardly. What of Ladysmith? Will it; can it now
be reached? and if not what is the alternative? Such thoughts are
gadflies, and would drive the tamest mad. Restlessness gets possession
of one. The thirst for news, more news, ever more, and more, becomes a
possession; one that is no sooner slaked than it revives afresh. My
particular garden boy has been turned into a mere newspaper boy, and
spends his whole days running downhill to the station, on the bare
chance of another paper having come in, or of someone having seen
someone, who may possibly know something.
Has it often happened I wonder in the history of a country that this
sort of external and public news--the news of the street and of the
newspaper--becomes to each individual his own absolutely private news;
news that for the moment seems to supersede even the acutest personal
grief; news that makes the tears start, the pulses throb, the heart, at
apprehension of what may be going to happen, literally stand still from
fear? The thought of Ladysmith, it is no exaggeration to say, amounts
to an agony. One feels it in one’s very bones. Fear of what its fate may
be is the last thought at night, and one awakens to remember it with a
sensation of despair which would be ridiculous were it not so real.
For the odd part of it is that not a single creature near and dear to me
is shut up within those walls. My interest in it is therefore a purely
external one, the interest of a citizen, nothing more. If we--myself,
and others in the like case--feel it thus acutely, how must the
situation stand to-day, to-morrow, all these pitiless, interminable
days, to some?