From the defence of Vanity, to the defence of England! “Attend to your
transitions, my boy,” is said to have been the reply of a veteran
orator, when pressed by a junior for some axiom that would sum up the
whole art of oratory in a sentence. Literature also, like oratory, has
to attend to her transitions, else dire confusion, and the just
indignation of her readers, is the result. The diarist stands upon a
slightly different footing. If there is such a being as a literary
libertine, or harmless law-breaker, he perhaps is entitled to the name.
His pages are filled up according to no settled plan, and with an eye to
no particular convention. He claims to be free as the wind upon the
tree-tops, free as all our unwritten moods, which are rarely quite the
same for many consecutive hours. Such at least, is the claim of this
particular diarist. To-day, for instance, leaving the garden, and all
that relates to it, to take care of themselves, he has wandered away
upon the theme, of all things in the world, of _Invasion_, moved
thereto, partly by the desire which assails us at all times, of dilating
upon what one knows least, partly by the equally inborn desire of
running counter to conventions upon which one has been brought up, and
which have been instilled into one’s mind ever since one could walk
unaided.
That the difference between soldiers and civilians is an absolute
difference, clear as glass, hard as adamant, is one of those
conventions. Until the other day I never remember hearing it so much as
questioned. Yet how does that fact now stand in the face of all that we
have been hearing, seeing, reading about, during the last five months?
If one thing more than another has been brought home to us by this
present struggle it is that under modern conditions a civilian--without
the slightest pretensions to be anything else, so long only as he is a
good marksman--is not only as valuable, but under many circumstances,
far _more_ valuable than the average soldier, who as a rule can just
shoot, and nothing more, who has all the finer parts of his art still to
learn, and is not at all likely to learn it when he has no more
leisurely target to practise upon than the living man.
It is upon the strength of this revolution that I have been indulging
this morning in a private Invasion of my own, specially designed for the
exaltation of the rifle-shooting civilian, in whose doings I take a
natural interest. Plans of Invasion are always rather fascinating,
whatever the realities are likely to be. On this occasion I have only
allowed myself a very small and cheap Invasion, just enough to put our
rifle-shooting civilian standing in it and asking how he is to behave
himself. It is not coming off in the orthodox place, which I take to be
nearly opposite the bathing sands of Boulogne, but upon quite a new
theatre, namely upon the shores of Dublin Bay. My invaders are probably
French, but may be anything else, it does not in the least matter.
Whoever they are they have succeeded in evading the Channel Fleet, have
run the gauntlet of the forts--no impossible feat--and have disembarked
some forty or fifty thousand strong somewhere between the Bailey of
Howth and the foot of Bray Head.
As for their purpose in landing, so far as my information extends, it is
simply to do as much damage as can be conveniently accomplished within a
given time. If the defending fleet remains entangled elsewhere, and they
can be reinforced, so much the better. In any case France can afford to
lose some twenty or thirty thousand recruits in a good cause. Moreover
he would be a poor sort of Frenchman who for the sake of burning,
harassing, shooting, raiding, racking, ruining, and generally running
amuck, amongst British possessions, would not run the risk of capture,
and the, not after all, very uncomfortable, entertainment of a prisoner
of war. Here, then, stands our military position; and now comes the
question of what in such a case, are the rights and duties of the
ordinary, peaceable but rifle-shooting civilian?
First let me clear the ground for myself a little. In the course of
certain profound researches upon the whole art and practice of war as
laid down in the _Débâcle_, _La Guerre et la Paix_, and other recondite
manuals, I have learnt that in the case of invasion the barrier between
civilians and professional soldiers is even stricter and more menacing
than at other times. The soldier, let his capacity or incapacity be what
it may, is entitled in case of capture to honourable treatment. He may
be nearly starved to death, if provisions run short, as the French
soldier-prisoners were after Sedan. He may be shot out of hand, if he
endeavours to escape, but with these trifling exceptions he is a person
having definite rights and a definite status; a person the cold-blooded
slaughter of whom would stamp the perpetrator of such a deed as a brute,
no gentleman, and a man generally to be avoided, even by his own side.
Turning now to the position of a civilian during invasion, I learn, by
studying the same authorities, that he is an individual without rights
of any kind should he attempt--no matter upon what provocation--to touch
a weapon in war time. Although the weapon in question be his own
familiar rifle or fowling-piece; although the spot he proposes to defend
with it is his own hearth, with his own wife and daughters standing
beside it, he is liable--legally and honourably liable, for that is the
whole point--to be led away from that hearth, settled comfortably with
his back against the nearest wall, and then and there uncomplainingly
shot, his wife and the rest of his family looking on. This I am assured,
or used to be assured, is the whole law and the gospel, as the law and
the gospel is laid down for military purposes; a law the carrying out of
which is not only permitted, but is the bounden duty of every honourable
soldier and Christian officer. In no other way, so I have always been
told, could the protection of the civil population be guaranteed during
invasion. If a man, merely because the property destroyed is his own,
were free to pot--we call it nowadays to snipe--at the destroyer of that
property, what in such a case would become, one was asked, of the poor
defenceless soldiery?
So much for the old rule, now for its modern application. Bearing all
this in mind, I look away to South Africa, and what do I see? I see a
crowd of fighting men, upon hardly one of whom--our own regulars and
militia of course excepted--can I succeed in discovering any of the
recognisable marks of a soldier. Here and there one or two such may be
discerned, but the bulk are purely and avowedly civilian. They have
walked out of their shops, their farms, their offices, their
counting-houses, their clubs, or wherever else they come from, precisely
as we see them. They can shoot, or they think so; they can ride--more or
less--but in spite of these accomplishments they are no more soldiers
than is the diarist who dips this eminently civilian pen into this
utterly unmilitary inkpot. If the German commanders of 1870 refused to
see in the _francs tireurs_ anything but unrecognisable freebooters; if
Napoleon declined to accord the Tyrolese marksmen and their heroic
leader decent treatment, mainly on the grounds that the latter was an
innkeeper, what would either of them have said to the bulk of those
fighting upon both sides to-day in South Africa?
All this, however, is merely preliminary. Our invasion is no problematic
peril this time, but a peril that has actually arrived. They have
_come_, the aggressors! they are already standing upon our sacred shore!
the question now is what are we to do with them? Can there be any doubt
upon that subject? Up, arm yourselves, and away! high and low, young and
old, brave and the reverse--women first, as befits their daring! Up, and
at the villains! Let them not carry their purpose an inch further. Let
not one of them return to boast of where he has been! Yet hark! what
sound is that? Surely it is not the luncheon bell? How _exceedingly_
inconvenient! Well, our invasion must be postponed for the moment. After
all, as Peter Plymley wrote to his brother Abraham, “It is three
centuries since an English pig has fallen in a fair battle upon English
ground”; so, though this particular struggle is coming off not on
English but Irish ground, it is not likely to be all over before this
afternoon.