Surely people live fast in these days, even the very slowest of them! I
find myself turning back of a morning to the thoughts of the Transvaal,
and of the struggle still going on there, with the oddest sense of
renewal; as of one trying to rekindle dead fires, or to reawaken some
set of well-nigh obliterated emotions. When did it begin, this war,
which seems to have been going on throughout the greater part of one’s
lifetime? which the newspapers have again and again announced to be just
over, but with which they nevertheless manage to fill several columns
every morning? It is perhaps a mere personal impression, due to closer
anxieties, but to myself the fears and perturbations of last spring seem
often almost incredibly remote. There are moments when they appear to be
as out of date for any practical purpose as the alarms that convulsed
our grandfathers and grandmothers two generations ago. _E pur si muove!_
It is still going on, this war of ours, and seems likely moreover, to
do so for a considerable time longer. Botha, De Wet, Delarey, with half
a dozen more guerrilla leaders, are swarming about, active as ants, and
at least as dangerous as hornets. We have got Pretoria, but we have
emphatically _not_ got our new colonies, though both, I see, are now
officially annexed. That we shall get them some day or other, and that
the last of England’s big daughters will--in the course, say of the
coming century--become as friendly and tolerant of her as are the other
two, a good many people seem to expect. Possibly. The very moderate view
she takes of the motherly function will certainly be a help in that
direction. In these days grown-up daughters are not expected fortunately
to be deferential--especially, perhaps, to their mothers.
The closing scenes of a war have a tendency to awaken in some
speculative minds thoughts of war as a whole; of the entire attitude of
man as a combative being. So long as the particular struggle we have
been watching remains at the acute stage, so long especially as the
faintest doubt exists as to its final result, such a merely academic
attitude is impossible. Pride; dignity; honour; fear of what may be;
anger, perhaps, at what has been; all these rush in a tide through even
the most tepid veins, and everything else is for the time being as
though it were not. When however the struggle is nearing its end; when
the trumpets are beginning to sound the recall, and the fighting, even
if it still goes on, appears on both sides to be growing somewhat
perfunctory; then thoughts of what it all means, thoughts of War in the
abstract, make themselves felt, and in place of hanging breathlessly
over the newspapers, one wonders, as one saunters to and fro the garden,
whether this same instinct of combativeness really is an integral part
of man’s nature? Whether, in other words, it is an absolutely incurable
disease, congenital to the species, or merely a sort of youthful malady,
destined, like other youthful maladies, to pass away, as a very slowly
evolving race attains nearer and nearer to its full maturity?
In a year when the roll and rumble of cannon have never ceased even for
a day; when the rattle of rifle-shot has seemed like something that had
become part of every brain; when all public life has centred round a
single point, and the most reticent of races has flung its reticence
utterly to the winds; in such a year so remote and speculative a fashion
of looking at the matter strikes even the speculator himself as somewhat
thin, and cold-blooded. “What right,” he turns round, and asks himself
hotly, “what right have you, or such as you, people who, far from taking
any part in the struggle, have kept out of even the very wind and whiff
of it! Who have chartered no yachts, nursed no wounded, sung no war
songs, or even--lowest of all the efforts of patriotism--so much as
composed any! Who have remained at home the whole time; tending your own
gardens, culling your own fancies, and sorrowing over your own sorrows.
What right have such as you--idlers, cumberers, that you are!--so much
as to mention the word “war” at all?
“Very true,” the other self answers submissively. And yet again, he
reflects, as he looks around him, is it not, after all, just such little
plots as these that the earthquake of battle has this year shaken the
most fiercely? Is it not such gardens as these--not this one perhaps,
but others almost identical; flowery places, where the robins peck
about, and where no hostile foot has ever trod--is it not against these
that the harshest blows have been struck, where the cruellest wounds
have been received? Quick, quick, as in a dream, fancy conjures up a
vision--a procession, rather--floating along upon the soft bands of
autumn sunshine; a procession of mothers, of sisters, of betrothed ones,
of wives. As each in turn passes by memory evokes the face, or the
faces, that belong to it; then turns to linger last and longest with the
mothers. Ah, those mothers! God’s pity, above all others, rest this year
with the mothers. For whom hope can never be anything again but a
delusive word; for whom the future can hold _no_ compensations; for
whom the very things that they love the best--their gardens; the walks
they pace along; the flowers that they stoop to pick--must henceforth
seem all bestreaked and shadowed over by the red, abhorrent shadow of
the battlefield. Truly the garden is a place of peace, but it may also
be a place of the most cruel, the most undeserved war, and the bullets
that have been speeding thousands of miles away, have too often found
their last, and their deadliest targets within its circle.