ili I ' ''n'i UNIVERSriY Ul^ CALII-U! AT LOS ANGELES /^ SOUTHERN SRAWCt^* yNIYERSITY Of CAHfOK^^^K, LIBRARY, (JDS ANQELES. ^Sfi^Ui^* / THE NEW ELIZABETHANS ■V Tin: lloN. JULIAN GRKNl Kl.I- (CAI'TAIN, ROYAL DRACOONS, D.S.O.) From a /-hoto^raph taken at Taplo-.v Court. The Dog is the o> igiiial of his poem cittit/iil '' The Klack Creyhound" THE NEW ELIZABETHANS A FIRST SELECTION OF THE LIVES OF YOUNG MEN WHO HAVE FALLEN IN THE GREAT WAR © ^ BY E. B. OSBORN " Others may find their loves and keep them, But for us two there still shall be A kinder heart and a fairer city, The home and wife we shall never see; Lost adventurers, watching ever Over the toss of the tricksy foam, Many a joyous port and city. Never the harbour lights of home." T E. A. Mackintosh LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXIX « • « • » • • _ * ' V , . Printed in Great Rriiair. iy Turnbull d-' Spears, Edinburgh TO OUR AMERICAN COMRADES WHOSE WORKS AND DAYS PROVE THEM THE PEERS OF THESE YOUNG KNIGHTS OF AN ELDER CHIVALRY ■^ CONTENTS INTRODUCTION i A DRAMATIC DICKENS. Harold Chapin 8 THE TRUE AMATEUR. Richard Molesworth Dennys 17 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY. Charles Lister 26 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON. Anthony Frederick Wilding 38 THE MODERN ACTOR. Basil Hallam 48 THE ABSOLUTE POET. Charles Hamilton Sorley 54 ]l;j THE WILDERNESS WINNER. Brian Brooke 64 "^ THE JOYOUS CRITIC. Dixon Scott 78 v\^ AN OXFORD CAVALIER. Robert William Sterling 86 LOST LEADERS. Colwyn and Roland Philipps 98 THE SACRED WAY. Douglas Gillespie 112 NATURE WORSHIPPERS. Hugh and John Charlton 127 'v3 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS, (i) Alan Seeger 144 (2) Harry Butters 162 THE STUDENT IN ARMS. Donald Hankey 178 THE HIGHLAND SOUL. Ivar Campbell 191 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER. Tom Kettle 211 C THE HAPPY ATHLETE. Ronald Poulton 228 THE MAN ABOUT TOWN. Thomas Vade-Walpole 242 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER. William Noel Hodgson 249 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE. Guy Drummond 266 CASTOR AND POLLUX. Julian and Billy Grenfell 283 vn ILLUSTRATIONS. THE HON. JULIAN GRENFELL. (Captain, Royal Dragoons, D.S.O.) .... Frontispiece From a Jihotasrraph taken at Taplow Court. The dog is the original of his poem entitled, " The Black Greyhound." To face page HAROLD CHAPIN. (Lance-Corporal, R.A.M.C.) . 8 RICHARD MOLESWORTH DENNYS. (Captain, Loyal North Lancashire Regiment) . . . . 17 THE HON. CHARLES LISTER. (Lieutenant, Royal Marines) ...... 26 From an original drawing by John Sargent^ R.A. ANTHONY F. WILDING. (Captain, Royal Marines) . 38 BASIL HALLAM. (Captain and Kite Commander, Royal Flying Corps) . . . . . 48 CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY. (Captain, Suffolk Regiment) . . . . . . 54 BRIAN BROOKE. (Captain, Gordon Highlanders) . 64 DIXON SCOTT. (Lieutenant, 3rd West Lancashire Brigade, R.F.A.) ..... 78 ROBERT WILLIAM STERLING. (Lieutenant, Royal Scots Fusiliers) ..... 86 THE HON. COLWYN PHILIPPS. (Captain, Royal Horse Guards) . . . . . 98 THE HON. ROLAND PHILIPPS. (Captain, Royal Fusiliers, M.C.) . . . . .100 THOMAS M. KETTLE. (Lieutenant, Dublin Fusiliers) 1 1 1 DOUGLAS GILLESPIE. (Lieutenant, Argyll and Suther- land Highlanders) . . . . . 112 HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON. (Lieutenant, 7th Northumberland Fusiliers) . . . . 127 From a painting by his father, John Charlton. SKETCHES BY HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON . 128 X ILLUSTRATIONS To face page THE CORMORANT : A Study from Life. By Hugh Vaughan Charlton ..... fjo JOHN MACFARLAN CHARLTON. (Captain, 21st Northumberland Fusiliers, 2nd Tyneside Scottish) . 135 AN IMPRESSION OF JOHN MACFARLAN CHARL- TON. By his brother, Hugh Vaughan Charlton . 136 GOLDEN PLOVER : A Sketch. By John Macfarlan Charlton . . . . . . 138 THE DEAD BLACKCOCK : A Sketch. By John Mac- farlan Charlton . . . . .140 ALAN SEEGER. (Foreign Legion of France) . . 14+ HARRY BUTTERS. (Lieutenant, Royal Field Artillery.) Arrival at Stow-on-the-Wold . . . . 162 DONALD HANKEY. (Lieutenant, Royal Warwickshire Regiment) . . . . . .178 IVAR CAMPBELL. (Captain, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) . . . . . 191 RONALD POULTON PALMER. (Lieutenant, 4th Royal Berkshire Regiment) . . . . . 228 From a photograph taken in the di-Cishig-)-ooni at Tivickenhain a/let his last International match on English soil (i()n). THOMAS VADE-WALPOLE. (Lieutenant, loth Gordon Highlanders) ..... 242 WILLIAM NOEL HODGSON. (Lieutenant, 9th Devon Regiment, M.C.) ..... 249 GUY DRUMMOND. (Captain, Royal Highlanders of Canada) ...... 266 From a statue by R. Tait Mackenzie. THE HON. GERALD WILLIAM GRENFELL. (Lieu- tenant, Rifle Brigade.) As a Roman Centurion . 282 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS So many of the relations and frie?ids of the subjects of the Memoirs included in this volume have helped to provide me with the means of just appreciation that a mere list of names would fill several pages. In a large number of cases no publicity of any kind is desired. It seems best in the circumstances to express my gratitude for their kindness and helpful suggestions without naming any of them. I have to thank Mr John Lane for the great interest he has taken in my work throughout, and for his flair i7i procuring much material that has been invaluable for my purpose. My thanks are also due to Mr William Hutcheon, Mr Ian Colvin, Mr G. E. Morrison, Mr Robert Hield, Lieutenant Power, and Mr Ernest Ward for excellent contributions to this volume and to the sequel, which the natural growth of the work has rendered necessary. To the first-named I am also indebted for that helpful kind of sympathy which lightens a long task and also opens up new vistas of inquiry. In these " characters " / have chiefly relied on the opinions, written or communicated in conversation, of the younger generation. Touth knows more about the young than middle age or old age. But my best thanks are due to the authors and publishers of the following books for allowing me to quote freely : — " Charles Lister : Letters and Recollections " {Fisher Unwin), with the Memoir by Lord Ribblesdale ; " Captain Anthony Wilding " (Hodder tsf Stoughton), by A. Wallis Myers ; " Marlborough and other Poems " {Cambridge University Press), by Charles H. Sorley, edited by his father. Professor W. R. Sorley ; " Poems " {Constable), by Alan Seeger, with the delightful Memoir by William Archer ; " War Essays " {Constable), by T. M. xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Kettle, with the hiogruphical sketch by Mrs Kettle ; the works of Donald Hankey (" The Student in Arms "), published by Mr Andrew Melrose ; the volume of " Verse and Prose in War Time * (Murray), by W. N. Hodgson, edited by his father, the Bishop of St Edmondsbury and Ipswich ; and the following books published by Mr John Lane : " Soldier and Dramatist " {Harold Chapin) ; " Brian Brooke,''^ and " There is no Deaths Other works which have been helpful are mentioned in the text. It was necessary to omit from the present volume, owing to exigencies of space, several of the " characters " that had already been written. That of Rupert Brooke was left out in view of the publication of the Memoir by Mr Marsh, and several other biographical notices. They will be given in the Second Series. THE NEW ELIZABETHANS INTRODUCTION THE title of this book of brief memoirs has to be explained or, if you will, excused. It is the more necessary to do so because the father of one of the young men here com- memorated and held up as examples of the true patriot for coming generations has suggested that they deserve a name of their own, a modern name, a name that does not convey a sense of their in- debtedness to far-off ancestors. What that name should be I cannot guess ; " Georgians " would hardly be acceptable, even if it had not already been applied to a particular group of newly-arrived poets. When the time comes, no doubt the new name, the true name, will find itself Meanwhile there is authority for a style which implies that the new and fresh greatness of our cause and country is rooted in the past, and that tradition, after all, is a source of the undying vigour of our race. In his brief Plutarchan character of Charles Lister, Sir Rennell Rodd makes a significant comparison : — He was of the type which would have found its right environment in the large-horizoned Elizabethan days, and he would have been of the company of Sidney and Raleigh and the Gilberts, and boister- ously welcomed at the Mermaid Tavern. There never lived a keener or kindlier judge of young men than our Ambassador at Rome, and this sentence is a lightning-flash of intuitive criti- cism which reveals to us the arrival, by every social path, of the New Elizabethans. These golden lads, brothers in the spirit of Meredith's maid of gold, come from every class and vocation, are of all ranks in the new army. They are already a race 2 INTRODUCTION of conquerors, though the siege of Germany is but beginning. First, they conquered their easier selves; secondly, they led the ancestral generations into a joyous captivity. Watch the way of any one of them with his proud father (almost always the boy is longer in the limb and not so short in the temper), and you will see how glad the " Governor" is to be governed. Middle-age has always been a blunder, a sad blunder. Since the war began it has seemed to me and other middle-aged persons a kind of felony — a crime for which one ought to be committed for trial, like the youth in Ertwhon^ who was tried on a charge of pulmonary consump- tion. Yet these generous creatures, our own and other people's sons, are so valiant in their forgive- ness of it that they most willingly die lest our poor residue of years should be embittered. They resign their bright young lives to comfort us as Sidney gave up the cup of keen cold water. Alas, that we veterans of peace/' with the scars of easy living upon us,"should have the greater need of so precious a gift that can but once be given ! It would not be difficult to deduce the charac- teristics of the New Elizabethans from those whom we meet every day in the great city of muted lights, which no longer shines for us with delight from within. Their valiancy — a brighter quality than the Roman virtus because more compassionate — shines in them all like a star. Brayed in war's mortar, their spirit is yet unbroken and rings clear. As in the case of a shockingly-shattered corporal who, when a visitor to his ward condoled with him, laughed and said : " But, my dear sir, I'm alive ! " We have all met such examples of antique heroism, and could deduce the New Elizabethan spirit from INTRODUCTION 3 a study of them. But it is easier to see what a brave and joyous thing it is from the records of those who have fallen so young that it can be said of them — They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old ; Age shall not weary them^ nor the years condemn, and yet had time for self-expression. These young men, explicitly Elizabethan, actually form a group bound together by ties of personal friendship and, what is even more, a common confidence that life and love are inexhaustible. The group would in- clude Julian and " Billy " Grenfell, Rupert Brooke and his less known but equally lovable brother, Alfred, Charles Lister, Raymond Asquith, Charles Sorley, Colwyn Philipps, Douglas Gillespie, and many others. Even before the war gave them the greatest of all their opportunities to justify it, these young men knew and practised a large-horizoned philosophy of living which scorned social conven- tions and scoffed at party fictions. They were all scholars and sportsmen and poets — even if they did not write poetry, they had a conviction that life ought to be lived poetically. They had the Eliza- bethan exuberance. They were as various and insatiate and adventurous in the art of living as were the old Elizabethans, before whom the gates of the Greek past, of a Roman future, were flung wide open. It is true that they veiled with veils of wit, sometimes verging on cynicism, a deep moral earnestness, a passionate love of country. Because of this habit, and also because they liked to pull up principles by the roots (which often dripped blood !) in discussing them, they were at times frowned upon by serious-minded elders. 4 INTRODUCTION The professional patriot, for example, seriously doubted, their patriotism. They were riotous at times in their joy of living ; they thought nothing of throwing a young Cabinet Minister in becoming into the Thames, frock coat and silk hat and crabbed superiority and all. As time went on, they had a fear that the age of adventurous living was over for ever — one of them said the " Julianesque life," meaning a life that could be lived a outrance in every sphere, was ceasing to be possible. Then came the war, and personality was matched with opportunity. And in the glorious use they made of this opportunity, two points — both character- istically Elizabethan — are to be especially discerned. First, the instinct of brotherliness became a flame of passion in them. They all insisted on remaining regimental officers, in serving their companies of the glorious unnamed, even when staff or diplomatic appointments were offered. The lines of a still- living member of this brotherhood, the greatest of the war poets as yet published, express their passionate devotion to their men : — Was there love once ? I have forgotten her. Was there grief once ? Grief still is mine. Other loves I have ; men rough but men who stir More joy^ more grief than love of thee and thine. Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth, Lined by the wind, burned by the sun. Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth As whose children brothers we are and one. Secondly, their land was the Gloriana they glorified in their deeds. And is not this land of ours very like that crowned, thankless, just, un- generous, celestial virago who could give herself to no man \ In all the New Elizabethan verse this INTRODUCTION 5 love of country burns, as when the soldier poet sees the memorial beauty of his own countryside in a sudden vision before battle, and cries to his soul — The gorse upon the twilit down, The English loam so sunset brown. The bowed pines and the sheep bells' clamour, The wet, lit lane and the yellow-hammer. The orchard and the chaffinch song Only to the brave belong. Other points of resemblance to the old Eliza- bethans, the greatest of whom were so often ?iovi homines or the scions of newly-advanced families, could also be discovered. For example, a pleasant brevity of everyday diction bridges the gulf of time between the two ages of action. Drake described his greatest moral achievement as " singe- ing the King of Spain's beard," which may be compared with the description of the Zeebrugge affair as " going in with skooters and skimming dishes and making Fritz sit up and take notice." The professed historian, deeply entrenched in his arm-chair, is apt to be misled by such colloquial and exiguous phrases. It has been so in the case of Drake's raid into Cadiz, which was not the gallant piece of impudence most people imagine it to have been, but an amazing victory which suddenly brought a long-descended form of naval warfare to an end and made the future of Philip's plan of invasion inevitable. Drake went into the Spanish harbour with small vessels armed with heavy guns and proved beyond doubt that oar-propelled galleys with rams, the capital ships of two thousand years of naval warfare, were helpless against the English new model. Let us hope the Zeebrugge affair will not be thus misunderstood by posterity. 6 INTRODUCTION However, the Englishman in action will always use phrases as short as his temper and as unrhetori- cal as his temperament — he cannot cure himself of a habit which can be traced back into the Middle Ages. Again, it would not be difficult to make out a case for the moral superiority of the old to the new Elizabethans. The contemporaries of Sir Philip Sidney, when closely considered in the light of their deeds and words, often display unpleasant shortcomings — they were shamelessly " on the make " in many instances and were often corrupted through and through by their perpetual intrigues for Court favour. There is actually a dark and unattractive side to the character of Sir Philip Sidney himself. He had a " nervy " tendency to make haphazard accusations against perfectly innocent people, as in the well-known letter in which he threatens to thrust his dagger into Molyneux, his father's faithful servant. Moreover, he had not enough mirthfulness in his nature, and both as friend and lover is lacking in simplicity and sincerity. Indeed, we need not fear a comparison of the young heroes of this warlike awakening with those of any other country or of any other age that has ever been. There are no two types alike in this gallery of portraits ; they are similar only in their swift and unselfish devotion in a great cause and in an underlying and uplifting sense of the brother- hood of all true men. It would have been as easy to find three hundred as thirty examples of such self-devotion in that portion of the Allies' Roll of Honour which is writ in English so to speak. And in considering these countless examples of blissful and sacrificial devotion, and the infinite INTRODUCTION 7 variety of the personal gifts that have been sacrificed, v^re find a bright certainty that, in spite of incalcul- able losses, the survivors of this youth-devouring war will be numerous enough to take the lead in rebuilding our shattered world nearer to the heart's desire — more like than unlike that visionary Civ it as Dei, which is the only home of mankind's aspira- tions and inspirations. Let the elder generations stand aside when the young men come back from the War and would set their hands to the task of rebuilding. For this is the chief lesson of the War — that age is not wiser than youth, as we used to think in the former peace-time. E. B. O. A DRAMATIC DICKENS HAROLD CHAPIN HAROLD CHAPIN, the most promising of the younger dramatists working in England when the War-storm burst on us, was born in Brooklyn, U.S.A., on February 15th, 1886. He remained an American citizen to the end, and when a letter was shown to him, in which an old friend of his mother said how noble it was of him "to fight for King and Country," his comment defined his standpoint very com- pletely. " I'm fighting for no King," he said with a laugh, " and the best of this King is that he knows we are not fighting for him." It was a saying full of dramatic meaning; very like the subtle bits of dialogue, so frequent in his plays, which leave after-thoughts in the mind of an audience. If he lived for American ideas of de- mocracy, it is certain that he died for his adopted mother country. He was killed in the battle of Loos on September 26th, 19 15, and his death was a disaster to the drama of reality (not realism) in the land of all lands most cumbered up with stage conventions and traditional business. His family was of good old New England stock, descended from Huguenot refugees, and there is a family legend of an Indian princess, some fair un- named Pocahontas, who married one of his ancestors. The legend may well be true — for he had the dark and intent gaze at times which is regarded in the West as one of the most enduring signs of a drop or two of Indian blood. He himself always insisted on the reality of his Indian ancestress. His mother, IIAROI.U CHATIN (I.AN-CE-CORPORAL, R.A.M.C. ) HAROLD CHAPIN 9 a clever and well-known actress, brought him to England before he was three years old, and he spent the rest of his life there. And he was only seven when his mother was engaged to play Volumnia in Coriolanus at Stratford-on-Avon in 1893, the year when the Shakespeare Festival was postponed from April to August owing to Sir Frank Benson's illness, and he himself was cast for the part of Young Marcus. You cannot begin too soon to learn how to live in the strange world beyond the footlights if you wish to distinguish yourself in the triple role of actor, producer, and dramatist. Harold Ghapin must have profited by these early experiences of stageland, for those who knew him as a boy declared that he always possessed that curious gift known as "the sense of the theatre," which is the most valuable of the dramatist's assets, next to a knowledge of the human heart. Mrs Chapin did not allow excursions into stage- land to interfere with her son's schooling. He was packed off to a boarding school at an early age, and he hated it heartily ; so much so that in after years he always denounced the custom of sending boys away from home to be educated, which has certainly destroyed the individuality of many a child-artist in the making. But he was very happy as a day-boy at University College School, and he decided later on that his own son should go there when he was old enough. He was a staunch little chap in his early teens ; a boy among boys when at school, and having none of those queer faults of the artistic temperament which so often cause the budding genius to be unpopular among school-mates destined to grow up into men of action and men of transaction. He was quick lo A DRAMATIC DICKENS and clever at his school work, but not possessed by a very keen sense of its importance ; for he had already chosen his vocation in life, and was busy storing up in his memory the first fruits of the born dramatist's keen and insatiate faculty of ob- servation. Later on, when he had his life's work in hand, he used to fill note-books with odds and ends of detail and stray scraps of dialogue, overheard or imagined or suggested by something he had read — and he was, as you might expect, omnivorous in his reading. As a small boy he was curiosity incarnate ; he simply had to look into every new thing which turned up, and a walk in labyrinthine London or in the country was for him a wondrous voyage of exploration and discovery. Indeed, the Elizabethan spirit of adventure was a flame in his soul. And thus blossomed to fruition in him a keen and understanding sympathy with all living creatures — more especially animals of all kinds and those poor unconsidered bits of humanity, whose simplicity breeds in the true lover of his kind the humour that issues in tears and laughter com- mingled. He might laugh at some freak of character he had discovered. But, even as he laughed, you saw that his eyes were too bright to be tearless. One of the experiences he was fondest of recalling was a tour with a company of barn-stormers, a veritable Crummies galaxy of stars a-twinkle, in which he played all manner of parts, from Hastings in Jane Shore to the Father in Maria Martin (there's no father in any real acting version of this old masterpiece, but the women had run short, and the mother's sex had to be changed). He loved a living oddity ; had he not fallen in action he might have become the Dickens of the HAROLD CHAPIN ii British stage. The few plays he left justify that great, sad hope of what might have been. He was a clever and most trustworthy actor, who worked very hard indeed, profited by all kinds of experience, and never fell below the expectations of his friends. A pleasing, well-modulated, virile voice, a manly presence : above all, the power of thinking out a part intelligently instead of making it a bag of tricks or " business " collected from others — these and other good qualities were bound to bring him advancement in a profession which suffers more than any other from lack of reliability in its votaries and intelligence stultified by an 'in- growing egoism. There was nothing of the egoist in Harold Chapin ; his reverential love of human nature saved him from the weakness so admirably satirized in Bottom (how Shakespeare must have loved him !). He was the most clubbable of men, but for all his kindly camaraderie he never squandered his time and energy even in the cleanly wantonness of these Georgian days. Had he stuck to acting he might or might not have made a great success. It would have been largely a matter of luck ; though he was no genius, chance might have provided him with one of those crowd-compelling parts which marry opportunity with personality and make a little-known actor or actress famous in a night. But it is impossible to avoid the thought that acting, much as he loved it, was for him but a means to an end — a not unprofitable form of ex- perience which would help his dramatic gift to ripen. All his spare time was devoted to dramatic work, and the fact that he has left us sixteen plays (ten of them in one Act), in spite of the wear and tear of rehearsing and playing, is a great tribute, not 12 A DRAMATIC DICKENS only to his indefatigable industry, but also to his single-hearted devotion to the art he loved most of all. It is in his one-act plays that his dramatic genius — it was genius beyond question — is best expressed. Art arid Opportunity^ the three-act play which he wrote for Miss Marie Tempest, was a well-made affair, full of pleasant wit and original ideas. He devised a heroine that fitted Miss Tempest's talent like that vivacious lady's evening frocks. She was a novel species of adventuress who puts her cards on the table, partly because she is a sportswoman, partly because she knows that her opponents, human nature being what it is, will never believe that her real cards are displayed. The play was fairly suc- cessful, and brought the author cash as well as reputation. And no great actress is more kind and considerate to the playwright that " makes for her " than Miss Tempest, who is also as sound a judge of stage technique as her French sister-in-art, Mme Rejane. But he parted with some of his sincerity in making this play, and the royalties that flowed in brought him only vexation of spirit. He felt he had sold himself— to oblige a lady ! A worse play, but better drama, was his four-act Marriage of Columbine^ which was written round an idea picked up in his barn-storming experience. There he was dealing with people and pursuits he knew and loved, and his tender Dickensian turn of mind finds itself again and again, and is strangely effectual. But, as I have said, his one-act plays are his best title-deeds to remembrance. The one-act play has not yet come into its own because English play- goers — or American playgoers for that matter — do not yet see that it is a form of dramatic art which is HAROLD CHAPIN 13 sui generis^ and as different from the three- or four- act play as the short story is from the novel. We still look upon the drama as a means of time- slaughter, and secretly resent the spectacle of reality beyond the footlights. That is why the dramatic conte^ of which Harold Chapin was a true master, is a mere stop-gap in this country, something to be punctuated by the alarums and incursions of late arrivals. If a manager is afraid somebody with a piano or a wallet of anecdotes will not fill the gap, he will offer some needy friend a bank-note to make him a one-act trifle, and expect delivery by first post next morning. Well, Harold Chapin did a good deal to continue the conversion to a better appreciation of the true one-act play which was begun by 'Op-o'-iny-Thufnb and other great little masterpieces. The Dumb and the Blind is an excel- lent example of the sincerity and simplicity with which he shows us the life of the humble folk he knew so sternly, loved so tenderly. " A man he was both loving and severe " in his use of the dramatic search-light in such cases. joe Henderson, bargeman, has hitherto been able to spend two nights a week at home. He enters, with his mate Bill, to tell his wife that he has just got a job which will give him ten bob a week more, and enable him to come home every night. Joe is rather critical and blustering ; in the opening scene between Liz, his wife, and Emmy, a sharp daugh- ter, we gather that he is a discomfortable house-mate. Liz is sent out for a jug of beer, while Joe sits gossiping with his friend. The beer is a long time coming, and going to the door Joe looks out and sees something (we do not know what for the moment) which impresses him. Liz is called back ; 14 A DRAMATIC DICKENS the jug is still empty, and she looks caught out. Bill is sent for the beer, and Liz is questioned. "Wot was you a-doin' of?" *' Puttin' on me 'at." " No, you wasn't ... I see you kneelin' wiv your head on the bed." Reluctantly Liz admits she was saying her prayers ; it just come over her, like, that she wanted to. Why ? Because she felt grateful hke — she wanted to sort o' thank Gawd. The domestic blusterer (he is hardly bully) questions her strictly, to be certain that praying is not a mechani- cal habit with her, and slowly yields to the strange, pleasing idea that she is really glad to have him at home for good. The dumb has spoken — to God ; the blind has had a glimpse of one of Love's miracles. And when Bill comes in with beer, Joe refuses his share of it — and Bill, in his turn, is dumb- founded. V/e are left hoping for better things in the Henderson circle, but have our doubts. Nobody ever saw this tiny play, which rings true in every part, without thinking over it again and yet again. Harold Chapin could always sow a crop of after- thoughts in the intelligent playgoer's mind. And this little play, and all the others he wrote, see life, and see it whole, and present it as a mingling of sadness and gladness. Thus he avoids the fatal mistake of the stern "intellectuals" who would revitalize our drama, but have so far failed, because they take too dismal a view of life. Yes, he might have become a dramatic Dickens, if the German bullet had spared him. When the War began it speedily engrossed all Harold Chapin's thoughts and emotions. All the tentacles of his sympathy for human nature drew him into the host that was making to save England and the world's liberties. He could not act ; " it HAROLD CHAPIN 15 seems so silly ! " he said. By this time he had married Calypso Valetta (in 19 10), and had a little Son. The twain owned all his heart between them; home held all his happiness. Yet he must serve his land and his people, and a month after August 4th, 1 9 14, that undying day, he enlisted in the R.A.M.C. All that he felt, while training and when at the front, is faithfully recorded in the letters he wrote home to his wife, his little son, his mother, and to the dog Emma. They are unlike any other letters I have ever seen. They are records of things seen and done, of feelings and thoughts that must out ; without a trace of sentimentality, of cleverness, of posing, of literary allusiveness. They show you a mind cleared for action, a heart concentrated on loving; and they define the man as vividly and exactly as he was wont to define the humble folk of his one-act plays by their own works and words. The book that contains them is the simplest and sincerest, the pithiest and most poignant, of all the domestic war dramas as yet presented to a weeping, smiling posterity. Again and again he regrets the enlistment, which has saddened his wife's lot, made his son's future so doubtful, straitened the life of the thrifty little home. He makes no secret of his discomforts and little pleasures, his hopes and fears, his eagerness to be out of it all, and his unwilling- ness to go where the bullets are. But the time comes when he must write as follows : " I made the discovery yesterday that, unless I can leave a nice, well-finished-off^ war behind me, I don't want to come home. This in spite of the fact that I am regularly and miserably homesick for at least half an hour every morning, and two hours every even- ing, and heartily fed up with the war every waking i6 A DRAMATIC DICKENS hour between ... of course, the sooner 'out' the better, and I'd give my teeth for a week's leave, but I don't want to be away from the work — even my insignificant share of it — permanently or for long." He had come to set his comrades above all other loves, old or new ; even above the wife he adored, the little boy whose religious education he discusses with such touching wisdom ; his best happiness was to be useful to them. The men are in his thoughts all the time — he is always talking of their cheerful- ness, their courtesy to women and kindness to children and the beasts that are so harshly treated in Latin countries, the cleanliness of their bodies under the mire and blood of action, their sweet reasonableness even in delirium. How sad to think he could never show them as they truly are to people at home, to whom war is as that tortured, ever-hidden face of the moon ! A single one-act war-play by this true dramatist would have blown the Bairnsfather convention into dust and ashes ! How he fell will never be fully known. The story of a great battle is full of tragic half-glimpsed acts of heroism which, had they been marked by authoritative eyes, would have won a cross of bronze. This at least is certain as the sun at noon — he quit himself like the man he was in the deadly turmoil of attack and counter-attack on September 25th and 26th, working without rest, and takmg any and every risk to bring the wounded into safety. And in the end, after being wounded and taking no heed of his wound, he won that cross of wood which is nobler far than any earthly -order, for it is the eternal symbol of willing self-sacrifice. KIi HARD MOI.F,S\\OKTn HKNNVS (lAI'IAIN, I.OVAI. NDKTIl l.ANCASHIKK KKillMKNl THE TRUE AMATEUR RICHARD MOLESWORTH DENNYS '*'^T'OUTH and wisdom is genius," says the \ strange poet who plays Elisha to the -^ Elijah of Walt Whitman. If that be so, the gift of genius must have been given to Richard Dennys ; for though he died in his thirty- second year of a wound received in the Somme advance of July 191 6, he had long since made his peace with Death (which is the crowning act of human wisdom), and found out a way of living that was sufficient to all occasions. England has always been full of these quiet, self- contained personalities who seek no public recogni- tion of their happy qualities, but are well content to remain an occluded fire, as it were, at which a few chosen friends can find spiritual warmth and light. These patient souls constitute the secret strength of England, that incalculable and inexhaustible reserve of spiritual power which has always baffled and amazed her mightiest enemies — the latest -of whom are all the more confounded because they had for- gotten that war, as Napoleon himself confessed, is three-fourths a moral issue. But for the War we might never have known the true worth of Richard Dennys, the shyest and most reluctant of our soldier-poets, and one of the most " Elizabethan " in his single-hearted devotion to the quest of Beauty. " Of his artistic gifts," wrote one of his closest friends, Captain Desmond Coke, " it is not easy to write, because a curious quality, which seemed to be half diffidence and half inertia, induced him to hide their performance. He practised, it is 17 i8 THE TRUE AMATEUR true, in almost all the Arts — he painted, he played the piano, he wrote in poetry and prose, he acted — and there was nothing he touched that he did not adorn ; but few, even of his intimates, were allowed far into this sacred corner of his life, and though he would sometimes speak of coming before the public as a writer, none who knew him ever took this saying seriously. He was an essential amateur, not in the vile modern sense, but in the fine old meaning of that terribly ill-treated word. Beauty in every form he loved, and his whole life was beautiful in a degree that could never be communicated to anyone who had not known him ; nor is it easy to explain in what way he impressed one as possessing, far beyond those of more elaborate performance, the spirit and the splendour of rare artistry. He was a man above all to know and to be thankful for having known." In France nobody would find any difficulty in " placing " such a personality. Richard Dennys would have been speedily recognized as a member of that intellectual aristocracy which the greatest of French artists treats with deference, knowing as he does that it forms the ultimate court of appeal in all questions of artistic reputation. But why ? Because the members thereof see the artist's achievement, whatever it may be, in its relation to the mother-art of living, and so are able to distinguish between the eternal and the ephemeral — that which is a real addition to the amenities of human nature and that which is accidental and meaningless save for a moment. In England the "universal man" — the thinker who has discovered what underlies all the arts — is a solitary creature, and his infiuence is invariably confined to a narrow circle. In France RICHARD DENNYS 19 he is sought out and sought after, and in course of time he is co-opted into the fellowship of true amateurs, which constitutes an organized force of disinterested opinion in regard to all the issues of what used to be called taste in the eighteenth century. Now and again men of this stamp, always provided they have practised prose or verse with a measure of success, have exercised a sort of critical dictator- ship in English literature. Johnson was by far the most famous in his day of our literary dictators ; a less notable example was the late W. E. Henley during his editorship of the National Observer^ which made or marred so many young writers. This one-man rule is apt to degenerate into a tyranny • — and there can be no doubt that it is better for art to be ruled by an intellectual aristocracy, which inherits and hands on its tradition, as is the case in France. Richard Dennys was not of the stuff out of which the tyrant of conversational criticism is wrought. There was not enough ego in his cosmos for such a part. If you wanted his opinion on a book or a play or a picture, it was yours for the asking ; and, though he never laid down the law in his reply to such a request, his instinct for the deep- lying truth came to be implicitly trusted by an increasing circle of friends, some of whom were creative artists of repute. His boyish ambition was to be a poet, and some of the verse he wrote before entering his teens is remarkable both in form and matter. u4 Boys Thanksgiving (written at Bexley in 1896) has the sincerity and simplicity of R. L. Stevenson's open- air poetry ; indeed one would not have been sur- prised at finding it in that famous author's collected works. This admirable poem must be quoted in 20 THE TRUE AMATEUR full, for it shows how deep-rooted in time was the philosophy — that of a Christian and yet a Nature- worshipper — by which he lived and died : — God's gifts so many a pleasure bring That I will make a thanksgiving. For eyes whereby 1 clearly see The many lovely things there be ; For lungs to breathe the morning air, For nose to smell its fragrance rare ; For tongue to taste the fruits that grow, For birds that sing and flowers that blow •, For limbs to climb, and swim, and run. And skin to feel the cheerful sun ; For sun and moon and stars in heaven, "Whose gracious light is freely given •, The river where the green weed floats, And where I sail my little boats ; The sea where I can bathe and play. The sands where I can race all day ; . The pigeons wheeling in the sun. Who fly more quick than I can run ; The winds that sing as they rush by, The clouds that race across the sky ; The pony that I'sometimes ride, The curly dog that runs beside ; The shelter of the shady woods. Where I may spend my lonely moods The gabled house that is my home, The garden where I love to roam, And bless my parents every day, Though they be very far away. Take Thou my thanks, O God above, For all these tokens of Thy love. And when I am a man, do Thou Make me as grateful then as now. RICHARD DENNYS 21 And here is a charming impression of frost, written a year or two later, which has the completeness of the tiny poems made by Japanese Nature- worshippers : — Last night at bed-time, cold and white A fog breathed on my window-pane, It hid the blinking stars from sight And masked a moon upon the wane. This morning it has gone away, The fog whereon I looked last night, But every tiny twig and spray Is frosted with a coat of white. But the time was at hand when school life was to absorb all his activities, and it was not until his twenty-fifth year that he once more wrote verse which seemed to him worth keeping. How many pieces he threw into the fire during his 'prentice days will never be known ! He went to Winchester College where poetry, or at any rate prosody, is in the air — just as at Shrewsbury School dust falling in the sixth-form library was found to consist of Greek particles ! The Winchester master who saw a small man reading Swinburne and could find nothing better to say than " Poor little devil ! " was really outside the traditional picture. When his school- days were over Richard Dennys went to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he took his final degrees (M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P.) in 1909. His heart, however, was not in the business of medicine, and he never practised. Strange to say, nothing that he wrote in later years bears any trace of the knowledge he must have acquired at St Bartholo- mew's of the mysteries of the human flesh and the half-explained powers that sustain it. Later on he went to Florence and worked at Gordon Craig's 22 THE TRUE AMATEUR school for the improvement of the Art of the Theatre. And his many-sided mind had full play there, for the Art of the Theatre is, or ought to be, a synthesis of all the other arts. So far his life had been un- eventful ; the so-called " practical " man might have called it empty of urgent interests. His friends and relations; the old houses in which he felt the action and atmosphere of past ages ; his own small store of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treasures; above all, his never-ceasing, ever-increasing devotion to Art in all its manifestations — these were the matters that filled his life through and through and gave him an unbroken happiness which was all the more real and vital, perhaps because he was always looking back on the youthful years that had been, and was visited by moods of an unappeased melancholy which expressed itself in such lines as these : — I do not understand the eyes of the dead, Nor the message of stillness From lips that have loved And hands that have given caresses. He was at Florence when the War broke out, and he at once returned to England. Various attempts to get work in which his medical training would be useful were unsuccessful. He obtained instead a commission in the Loyal North Lancashire Regi- ment, and from that time on was absolutely absorbed in his military duties. Those who thought him too much of a dreamer and likely to fail in dealing with the rough, ugly, defiling necessities of war were astonished to find that he soon became an admirable regimental officer. After all, will-power is half the secret of military leadership — indeed, nothing can compensate for the lack of it, either in a general or in a subaltern — and no artist, no seeker after Beauty, RICHARD DENNYS 23 ever succeeded in his quest without a full share of the spirit that will bear down all difficulties to achieve its end. The true artist, the true amateur, must have an iron will, as all Frenchmen and a few Englishmen very well know. It was so with Richard Dennys, who from first to last put his whole soul into the work that had found him ; no labour was too hard or too tiresome, no mental or physical misery too great for him, if it made for the welfare and efficiency of his men. His extraordinary ability was recognized at once. He was promoted temporary captain before the end of 19 14, and he got his company soon after he went to France. The miseries of a wet winter in the trenches left him smiling and imperturbable. " Under the most ad- verse circumstances," wrote his CO., " he was always cheery ; nobody ever heard him grouse. The best interests of the men and traditions of the Battalion were always his chief concern." No company com- mander was ever more indefatigable in screwing comforts out of the authorities for his men, who soon learnt to trust him and love him in spite of the habit of reserve which he could never overcome. Physical courage is, of course, taken for granted, but Richard Dennys (who had long ago " given Death the lie," like the great Elizabethan soldier-poet) showed an inspiring coolness under the bombard- ments that accompanied the Somme advance of July 1916. Had he survived that great feat of arms there can be no doubt that he would have risen rapidly to high rank, for by that time his keen and many-sided intelligence had made him a m.aster of his business. His war poems, hastily written while he was rest- ing in billets, are few in number. But they are 24 THE TRUE AMATEUR ample evidence for the belief that his old philosophy of living and dying — based on a bed-rock certainty that God is immanent in Nature — had proved suffi- cient for all his newer needs. In simple, soldierly verse he pays a tribute to the men he loved so v^isely and so vv^ell : — Ted, Harry, Bill and John, Cheery friends I know to-day, Goodly lads to look upon, Willing lads for work or play. Duty claims a man entire. With will and strength to pay the price, Relinquishing his heart's desire To make the final sacrifice. But the strangely beautiful tie of affection between the regimental officer and his men which prompted Lieutenant E. A. Macintosh, M.C., to say in a poem addressed to the fathers of his slain High- landers : You were only their fathers, I was their officer must have seemed to him too intimate and sacred a matter to be made the theme even of poetry. Yet in Better Far to Pass A-way the veils of reserve are drawn apart, and the secret sources of his fortitude are shown in lines which have the true Elizabethan ring : — Better far to pass away While the limbs are strong and young, Ere the ending of the day, Ere Youth's lusty song be sung. Hot blood pulsing through the veins, Youth's high hope a burning fire. Young men needs must break the chains That hold them from their heart's desire. RICHARD DENNYS 25 My friends the hills, the sea, the sun, The winds, the woods, the clouds, the trees — How feebly, if my youth were done, Could I, an old man, relish these ! With laughter, then, I'll go to greet What Fate has still in store for me, And welcome Death if we should meet. And bear him willing company. My share of fourscore years and ten I'll gladly yield to any man, And take no thought of '' where " or " when," Contented with my shorter span. For I have learned what love may be, And found a heart that understands, And known a comrade's constancy, And felt the grip of friendly hands. Come when it may, the stern decree For me to leave the cheery throng. And quit the sturdy company Of brothers that I work among. No need for me to look askance. Since no regret my prospect mars. My day was happy — and perchance The coming night is full of stars. In A Boy*s Thanksgiving and in this last poem of all his character is explained and his career justified. THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY CHARLES LISTER ' CHARLES LISTER (according to the Memoir by his father, Lord Ribblesdale) was a personality even in babyhood. Mr Gladstone made his acquaintance at the age of six, and was much pleased by his accurate and pellucid pronunciation of long and sonorous words, such as ornithorhynchus. The two discussed the habits of the more obscure animals as depicted in a natural history book with fine plates, and parted on terms of mutual respect. " He seems to be a clever man," said the little boy when asked what he thought of the visitor. Later on he gave up the use of poly- syllabic words (which clever children invariably collect from the conversation of grown-up people), and his boyish letters were pithy and to the point. His wish to create a social Utopia, which made him a Socialist even in his Eton days, found early expression in a v/ell-ordered polity of rabbits, guinea-pigs, and mice, maintained by him in the stable-yard at Gisburne, the family home. This model community was subjected to a complex code of eugenic and dietary rules and regulations. The inhabitants were very tame, and seemed to accept their master as a benevolent and beneficent deity. But they were unconstitutional in their habits and practices ; the mice were always escaping, the rabbits evaded the well-devised marriage-laws, and the guinea-pigs — as their owner once told Lady Ulrica Duncombe, a very close friend of his at the time — exhibited traces of the worst qualities of humanity — dirt, greed, and cowardice. " These guinea-pigs 26 CHARLES LISTER 27 are not a comfort to me," said another little boy to the writer; and in that case the sociahstic state was dissolved by allowing all its members to escape into a plantation, after which no sign of their existence was ever seen by mortal eye. If Jean Jacques Rousseau had only kept guinea-pigs ! But Charles Lister's Socialism which flourished at Eton and at Oxford, the most tolerant of democracies, survived the collapse of the stable-yard polity, because it was rooted in a real love of human nature and a lively confidence in its possibilities. The time came when this instinctive sympathy with all sorts and conditions of human beings was satisfied by the camaraderie of the shell-vexed Gallipoli trenches. " From the first," said an old friend of his Eton days, "he was the embodiment of com.- radeship in whatever society he found himself. The way men lived filled him with curiosity. Like the Celt of old who awaited at the cross-roads the passers-by to compel them to tell him something new, so Charles interrogated his companions." Naturally and necessarily, he was happy at school ; for Eton is always kind to all whose philosophy of living, whatever it may be, does not issue in priggishness or snobbishness — two of the modern deadly sins which were unknown, nay, unthinkable, to all the New Elizabethans. When, however, he had reached the age of indiscretion, and political searchlights began to move across his horizon — the old Party organizations are always interested in young men of good birth and fine talents — some of his friends and relations had searchings of heart about his Socialism, which threatened to become much more than a form of ineffectual idealism. After leaving Oxford, where he won a classical 28 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY exhibition at Balliol and took a first in Greats, he entered into close relations with the Independent Labour Party ; he became enveloped, so to speak, in sociological treatises and statistical surveys, both animate and inanimate, and seemed to be throwing away his chance of a political career. But there was never any reason to fear that he would lose touch with the realities of human life, that rough fabric of human strength and weakness interwoven. A young man, said the late King Oscar of Sweden, who has not been a Socialist before he was twenty- five shows that he has no heart ; a young man who remains one after twenty-five shows that he has no head. Mr Balfour, another connoisseur of men in the making, was consulted by the young man's mother. And he took the common-sensible view of the matter, pointing out that the l.L.P. intimacy would enable him to get all sorts of experience and a fund of special knowledge more valuable than that to be acquired by keeping selling- platers or running a minor actress. Socialism, like measles, is best taken in youth ; either disease, if contracted in middle age, is dangerous to the patient and apt to leave some sort of constitutional disability behind. A wider knowledge of men and affairs convinced him of the truth of Jowett's saying, that human beings are not governed by logic, and it was not long before he parted company with the " intel- lectuals," who think that human nature can be argued into a state of blessedness, that barbara celarent is a guarantee of the Millennium. But he never lost his keen and blissful liking for his fellow-creatures and his anxious desire to serve them ; the social phenomenon known as labour unrest, which is really the protest of flesh and blood CHARLES LISTER 29 against being made cogs and wheels and footlin* little keys in a vast industrial mechanism, always troubled his generous, purposeful spirit. The writing of small memorials (in prose or verse) has been much practised since the Great War began. It is natural that the intimate friends of the joyous youths, who have made the last sacrifice, giving all that they were, and all that they might have been, in the service of their country, should make such offerings of thought touched with emotion. From two of those memorials to Charles Lister I make the following excerpts ; the first is by the Rev. Ronald Knox, and the second by Sir Rennell Rodd, our Ambassador at Rome, under whom he served his apprenticeship in diplomacy : I. "Political Oxford, sporting Oxford, ecclesi- astical Oxford, intellectual Oxford, philanthropic Oxford, revolutionary Oxford, all knew him as a familiar. His infectious vitality galvanized every- thing ; no festive occasion was complete without him, no meeting would suffer him to keep silence, and he even contrived to instil a certain heartiness into the cloistered Gregorians of the Cowley Fathers' church. His lighter and his more serious moments were strangely blended. Once when he came into colli- sion with the authorities of Trinity, he was rusticated for the short remnant of a term. Having made arrangements for the entertainment of an expected guest, a Labour M.P., he went off to study poverty at first-hand in an East-end Settlement. " He had none of the inhuman detachment which often makes public characters unknowable in private; while he tolerated widely, he was whole-hearted in his attachments to personal friends. His friendship enriches the past, and the memories you shared with 30 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY him stand out vividly from a hazier background, whether you picture him shooting on a Scotch moor, or assisting boisterously at a stormy meeting of the Church Congress, or applauding the efforts of M. de Rougemont to ride a turtle in a tank at the Man- chester Hippodrome. Though he was at the moment of action regardless of the figure he cut, he could laugh at himself in private and prove his sense of proportion. His richest vein of humour, whether in conversation or in writing, was a running parody of bad journalese : his best serious writing was almost always in this manner. But the secrets of per- sonality, especially in a personality so complex, necessarily evade description." 2. " Charles Lister displayed two characteristics which are but rarely found in combination — the spirit of the sportsman and the lover of adventure with the instincts of the scholar gentleman. He was of the type which would have found its right environment in the large-horizoned EHzabethan days, and he would have been of the company of Sidney and Raleigh and the Gilberts and boister- ously welcomed at the Mermaid Tavern. He would sometimes pretend that he was divided in his mind whether the life of the fox-hunter or that of the college don would have most tempted him if he had only had to follow his instincts. But in reality he was much too deeply imbued with the sense of duty and the higher obligations of life to have devoted himself to the former to the exclusion of graver things. He was, however, seriously drawn towards the student's life, and was a deep and thoughtful reader with a very retentive memory. No doubt he was also a hard and fearless rider, without the graces of the natural horseman, and here in the Roman CHARLES LISTER 31 Campagna, with its long deceptive reaches of grass and its sudden and unexpected obstacles, his im- petuosity often alarmed his friends. But there, as in the sea in the bay of Naples, where currents ran strong and seas were high, as afterwards in the deadly battle area of Gallipoli, he was physically the most fearless of men. In the more difficult tests of moral courage I have known no braver soul." It might seem from these fragments that he lacked the power of self-concentration on a definite piece of work which might appear interesting to-day, dull and monotonous to-morrow. But both these wit- nesses and many others certify that it was not so with Charles Lister. At Oxford he got a First in " Greats " at the end of his third year, and success of that kind can only be achieved by keen and con- tinuous hard work (not drudgery . . . Oxford exists to put the mere drudge in his proper place among the Seconds). And Sir Rennell Rodd assures us that he was conscientious in carrying out the daily routine work of an embassy, even when his duties seemed dull and mechanical. He even made strenuous efforts, as an attache, to master the accomplishments of the ball-room. His letters to friends from Rome, from India, which he visited on leave, and from Constantinople, are full of the mellow wisdom which one expects only from a seasoned diplomatist, well versed in men and events. Diplomacy, in spite of its bewildering restrictions, was manifestly his life's work, if only because he was able to read at sight the most complex of alien types, even those human palimpsests which are so common in the Near East, an ancient melting- pot of civilized and uncivilized races. His pithy, picturesque letters are full of passages which show a 32 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY profound insight into the mentaUty of peoples whom the average Englishman would not learn to under- stand in a thousand years. For example, he sees that the Italians are a race that has never quite grown up. He says they are certainly great babies — especially the *' smart " ones — and rejoices in the freshness and charm of their perennial babyhood. India is so full of pitfalls for the hasty traveller, even if his faculty of observation is trained, that one begins his gay, go-as-you-please letters from Lucknow or Delhi with a feeling of trepidation. But a sense of historical perspective saves him from the errors into which a lover of his fellow-creatures is so apt to fall when he passes through that wilderness of indistinguishable persons. He does not jump to the conclusion that those silent millions have been ground down into dust by Juggernauts of gover- nance, of which the British Raj is the latest ; he knows that the land they live in has been their destiny, and that the vision of an independent India is vetoed, not only by history, but also by geography. He finds the key to Indian policy in Akbar's inscrip- tion on the great gate built at Delhi to commemorate his victories in the Deccan and his conquest of Ahmednagar and its Queen : " Said Jesus, on whom be Peace, The ivorld is a bridge^ build ?io house on it." He sees India as a land of glorious illusion and dread disillusionment where the work of the wise is always being wrecked by the impulses of the fool. He goes straight to the secret of the comparative success of British rule in India when he says that the Briton there ??iust live dead straight, both in manners and morals, seeing that it is Bible-and- Sword heroes like old Havelock (whose tomb he saw at the Alum-bagh) who have made us respected. CHARLES LISTER ^^ Once or twice his quick sense of humour prevents him from seeing the full significance of some curious fact, e.g. the request of the captain of hockey at the Khalse College who asked, hefore an important match, that the assistant-clerk in the Principal's office should be let off work for the day because he was such a first-rate pray-er that Heaven would certainly listen to his petition for victory. But this was merely a rather involved proof of their implicit belief in a Deity which has all earth's affairs, great and small, under His hand. If hockey had been played in the true Middle Ages, the noontide of Christianity, any Christian captain would have called on the local saint to intercede for his team. At a great jousting, everybody prayed hard for the success of his champion — the one who carried his money, in point of fact ! And don't we all do this ,very thing in war-time — on the off-chance of getting luck we don't deserve ^ The letters from Constantinople, written on the eve of war, and while Turkey was being fast entangled in the German plot, will be invaluable to the historian of the future. More especially those received by the writer's aunt, the Hon. Beatrix Lister, who was conversant with all the complex problems of European affairs and could draw him out. Evidence exists in them for the belief, con- firmed from many other sources, that ever since the I St of July Germany had finally determined on war. The feigned innocence of the Lichnowskys, over whom tears were literally shed in London at the leave-taking, is scoffed at by this keen and cool- headed observer. The persons of the Turkish tragedy pass before us in a kind of diplomatic cinematograph. Wangenheim, who began by saying 34 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY that Germany would wage a " Platonic War " with England, but afterwards changed his tune ; Enver Pasha and his one-man claque, the Grand Vizier; the tempestuous Liman von Sandars ; the solid tennis-playing Gretchens of the German colony; and many other major and minor actors — all admir- ably characterised and bustling about their own and other people's business in the liveliest fashion. No wonder that " Charles Lister : Letters and Recol- lections" (Fisher Unwin) is already in a fourth edition. The work of the diplomatists is not at an end in war-time ; nay, it is more important than in peace- time, for they must play their part in " gaining public opinion " according to the third axiom of national warfare as anatomised by Clausewitz. In France or Germany young men of the calibre of Charles Lister or Raymond Asquith are not allowed to descend into the trenches and be lost in the mass of indistinguishable cannon-fodder. Brain-power is the most valuable of national assets in war-time as in peace-time, and it is the height of folly to waste it unnecessarily. It will be part of the stern discipline of Great Britain's future wars to compel the New Elizabethan to work where his special gifts have the highest value for his country. But these philosophic arguments counted for nothing, for less than nothing, with Charles Lister and his friends. They were inspired with the spirit of the old Crusaders ; the call to dare and endure all things, in company with their inarticulate and un- gifted countrymen, came on them as the Holy Ghost came upon the apostles — as a sudden great sound in the likeness of fiery tongues. If something was lost, something was gained by their consuming CHARLES LISTER ^s desire to show the world the mettle of their pasture. It was proved tiri?i et orbi that, as we were all Englishmen, so we could be Englishmen all to- gether. Social classes, intellectual castes — all these distinctions, real and half-real and unreal, vanished in the chanting flames of a spiritual conflagration out of w^hich a New England is even now emerging like the legendary phcenix. With a group of Oxford men of various genera- tions, Charles Lister went out to the East and joined the Hood Battalion, R.N.D. His letters from Gallipoli show that his soul was at peace with itself in this high adventure, which ended, alas, in the greatest disaster of the war, the withdrawal which so amazed the shattered and starving Turkish troops, and must have seemed to them Allah's crowning act of mercy ! Sir Ian Hamilton's Honours despatch gives us one aspect of Charles Lister's admir- able services in the most ancient theatre of European warfare (was Helen really only a metaphor of the control of Black Sea trade ?). He was com- mended " For brilliant deeds of gallantry throughout our operations. On July 21st he personally re- connoitred a Turkish communication trench, and, although wounded (for the second time) he returned and led forward a party to the attack. Subsequently he was a third time wounded and has since died, to the sorrow of all ranks who knew him." When he was recovering from his first wound, efforts were made to persuade him to return to his diplomatic work. An appointment was offered which would have given full and free scope for the exercise of his special gifts. But he felt that he could not leave his " splendid men," and he was soon back on the dreary shell-swept beaches of the 36 TH?: HUMANE DIPLOMACY haunted Peninsula, where, as another witness said, the ghosts of Greek and Trojan heroes sit warming themselves in the white moonlight. The " Hoods " had missed him sorely. He returned to assure them joyously that they were having the time of their lives. " There was no mess in the Peninsula," said Lieutenant Ivan Heald, who afterwards fell in an air-fight on the West Front, and was himself a master of the munitions of merriment, " so merry as ours with Lister leading such rare wits as Asquith, Kelly, and Patrick Shaw-Stewart — Lister always on the most uncomfortable packing-case, declaiming and denouncing with that dear old stiff gesture of his, which we came to know so well." And behind all this joyous logomachy, the sense of duty burnt like the undying flame on a secret altar. Would he, after all, have done more for England if he had saved his life and used it in the still-con- tinuing war of Chancelleries ? Let the present Headmaster of Eton, that fine judge of characters and careers, have the last word : — " To have laughed and talked — wise, witty, fantastic, feckless — To have mocked at rules and rulers and learnt to obey. To have led your men with a daring adored and reckless. To have struck your blow for Freedom, the old straight way : " To have hated the world and lived among those who love it, To have thought great thoughts, and lived till you knew them true. To have loved men more than yourself, and have died to prove it — Yes, Charles, this is to have lived : was there more to do ?" If there was more to do, he must be doing it now. So wise and wonderful a spirit must needs be immortal. When M. Bergson's wonderful vision comes true — when the forces of Life in a last great offensive ride CHARLES LISTER 37 over and occupy the dismal trenches Death has held for half eternity and all time — he and his comrades will be there to lead the way as in Gallipoli of old. It is absurd to think of them as other than the undying translated into a loftier and even more joyous sphere of delight in action. ^3053 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON ANTHONY FREDERICK WILDING THE typical New Zealander is much nearer to the Saxon type of the narrow seas than the " sombre, indomitable, wan " Australian, who is the product of transplantation into a mightier land with a fiercer climate mfire than a century ago. New Zealand is the youngest of the Dominions, and a party of its people is not easily distinguished from a group of the inhabitants of the mother country. Gallaher's famous team, for example, who came over twelve years ago to teach us how to play a more imaginative form of Rugby football in the old, staunch, untiring style of the 'eighties, looked like an assortment of the sturdy, indefatigable toilers— ** Wick and warm at work and play " — who are to be met with anywhere in the northern industrial counties. And, but for a subtle, exotic charm of intonation (nothing so obvious as an accent !) and his fresh outlook on life, and singular power of kindly receptivity, you could never have told Anthony Frederick Wilding, the most famous of New Zealand athletes, from a native son of this old crowded island which is still " Home " to the settlers in the " Long White Cloud " of the Maori adventurers. When he was playing lawn-tennis in the Davis Cup Competition in New York, just before the war began, he had the greatest difficulty in persuading a certain American journalist that he had not been born and raised in England. " All 1 can say," said the interviewer, " is that you look 38 ANTHONY F. WII.DINC. (CAPTAIN, ROYAL MARINES) ANTHONY WILDING 39 like an Englishman, sound like an Englishman, and act like an Englishman. Ain't there been a little mistake somewhere ? " What puzzled this doubting Thomas, no doubt, was the equanimity he displayed when defeated by M'Loughlin (whom he had beaten a year before) in the last match of his life. Americans, and to a less extent Australians and Canadians, are seldom capable of hiding their disappointment in such a case. But Anthony Wilding lived up to the highest ideal of English sportmanship ; he was always able, without an effort, to forget all about prizes in remembering the zest of a well-fought game, and his sunny smile and willing word of congratulation added to a chivalrous opponent's pleasure in a victory which must always have been more or less unexpected. Anthony Wilding was born at Opawa, near Christchurch, on the last day of October 1883. His father, Frederick Wilding, K.C., a leader of the New Zealand Bar, was born in Montgomery- shire ; his mother was a daughter of the Charles Anthony who was six times Mayor of Hereford, and did more than anybody else to make the sleepiest of ancient cathedral cities into a thriving centre of business. All the Anthonys have brains and character, as I well remember, and Mrs Wilding was an admirable mother, who taught her children that what was worth doing at all was worth doing well. But Anthony Wilding was his father's son as well as his mother's son ; it was from his father that he inherited the athletic ability which, turned in a new direction, made his name famous wherever lawn-tennis is played as it ought to be — not as a mere accompaniment to tea, talk, and flirtation, but as a picturesque and inexhaustible game which taxes 40 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON the athlete's skill and staying-power in an equal degree. Mrs Wilding was keenly interested in all open-air games ; she never went to see a cricket- match without carefully keeping the score. But Frederick Wilding was the finest all-round athlete Herefordshire has ever produced, and his name and fame are still remembered at Shrewsbury, where his long jump of 20 ft. 6 ins. is still the school record, and he proved himself the brainiest of bowlers. He was good at every game he tried, from Rugby football (which is the national game of New Zealand) to bowls and billiards. On one occasion he made cricket history ; for when Shrewsbury's team visited New Zealand, some thirty years ago, he played for Eighteen of Canterbury, taking eight wickets for twenty-one runs, Lohmann and Briggs being two of his notable victims. And seeing that he and R. D. Harman won the Lawn-Tennis Doubles Championship of New Zealand five times, it is easy to see where his son got his first insight into the game which has long been a familiar diversion in every civilised — or uncivilised — part of the world. Fownhope, the home of the Wildings at Christ- church, was named after the village on the winding Wye, where Frederick Wilding's father practised as a country doctor. It was a roomy and comfortable house, with spacious verandas in an extensive pleasance of orchards and fiiower-beds. There was — nay, still is — a fine grass tennis-court, and beyond it an asphalt court with a volleying board at the back of it. Further on you come to the most joyous thing of all — an open-air swimming-bath of white stone, fed with the diamond-water from an artesian well (by way of a fish-pond on a terrace ANTHONY WILDING 41 above), and surrounded by an evergreen hedge. In summer this hedge is covered by the climbing sweet- peas, that grow so luxuriantly in the soft New Zealand air, and the many hues of the fragrant blossoms, seen above a border of scarlet poppies, would be mirrored in the translucent depths of the silver bathing-pool. Further still were spacious meadows extending to the Opawa, a gentle little stream such as one sees in Southern England. Many stay-at-home Britons believe that only rude comfort is to be had in the Dominions — that a hasty log-hut is the best habitation one can hope to tind there. In point of fact the English country-house has migrated into all the " demi- Englands " (Hanley's phrase) beyond the narrow seas, and having adapted itself to a new climate and a new environment is playing its old part as a humanising influence. The overseas country-house is not as large, not nearly so, as that which is a feature of every English landscape. Lack of servants within and without, together with the exigencies of climate and the absence of great fortunes, accounts for the difference. But the later and lesser home, whether in the rus in urbe of a Canadian city or in such gracious islands as the New Zealanders possess, has its appropriate amenities, and is a character- building institution, as in the ancient mother country. . . . The charm of Fownhope down under was reflected in the charm, indefinable yet so de- finitely felt, of the young athlete who made a game of lawn-tennis almost epical in its appeal to the miagmation. When he went to Cambridge in 1902 Anthony Wilding was a good cricketer as well as a lawn- tennis player, quite up to the inter-' Varsity standard. 42 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON though perhaps not equal to the necessities of the ultra-modern game as played in the Wimbledon Championships. Had he made cricket his chief pursuit he must have won his " Blue " long before going down. But he chose lawn-tennis as his very- own game, and spared no pains to make himself a real expert. The late Kenneth Powell was one of many witnesses to the way in which he put his mind into lawn-tennis, whether when practising the various strokes or coaching a succession of Cam- bridge disciples. There was much to learn before he himself could approach championship form. He had to learn to meet the service when used as an attacking force of the first importance. He had to get rid of the ugly and cramped backhand drive which he brought from New Zealand — such English authorities as H. L. Doherty warned him that he must " anglicize " this stroke if he wished to be absolutely first-rate. He did so at the cost of infinite toil and trouble, innumerable hours of daily practice which could give no pleasure at all, for the extirpation of a youthful habit is a tedious business for the most adaptable of athletes. In the end he achieved his ambition. He won the All-England Championship at Wimbledon in 19 lo, and the little New Zealand nation — " little, but oh my ! " — rejoiced as one man at his victory. But that was not the climax of this super-specialist's career. The day of all his athletic days came in 1913, when he met M. E. M'Loughlin, the American champion, in the Challenge round. M'Loughlin, after a narrow escape from defeat by the astute Roper Barrett on the first day, had reached the Challenge round easily enough, thanks to his terrific service. Though the committee changed the day of decision from ANTHONY WILDING 43 Saturday to Friday — not daring to face the dangers of a Saturday crowd — more than seven thousand people were on the ground when the great match began. Hundreds were turned away from the gates; hundreds saw only the scoring board ; it was said that patriotic Americans paid ten pounds for a seat. They — the Americans — were willing to lay odds on the young Californian, and M*Loughlin's play had been so impressive that there were very few takers. Only two or three critics with the courage of their convictions, who saw the weakness of the American's backhand and remembered that Wilding had beaten him at Sydney in 1909 by three sets to one, were certain that the New Zealander would win, barring accidents. M*Loughlin won the first two games, and the American spectators were in throes of delight. But, as time went on, it became evident that the New Zealander could return the American's terrific services to good purpose, that he was prepared to batter away relentlessly at the latter's weak point, and that his superior strategy was constantly giving him control of the court. After a glorious effort to pull the match out of the fire in the third game, M'Loughlin went down — literally, for he fell head- long — and his opponent had won a clear-cut victory by three sets to none (8-6, 6-3, 10-8). That year he won all three world's championships — on grass, wood, and sand courts — and attained a degree of all-round strength which was never equalled by himself or any other at any time in the history of the youngest of the Ludi Htimaniores. In 19 14 Norman Brookes beat him in the Challenge round ; the born player, the great artist, was better on the day of decision than a rival of equal physique and more equable temperament who had more of 44 A SOUTH SIDE SAXON the genius for taking infinite pains. For all that, the Wilding of 1913 was the greatest player of lawn-tennis we have ever seen or ever shall see, for more than one generation must pass away before the English-speaking peoples can afford to cultivate athletics as in the happy, reckless, picturesque past. Was it worth while to give the golden years of youth to the cultivation of a game which, with all its merits, lacks the joyous rigour and kindly discipline of such co-operative pastimes as football or cricket ? Yes — a thousand times yes ! — since Anthony Wilding found it worth while ! In the first place, lawn-tennis, which is played all over the world, is one of the very few games in which men and women can take part on equal and enjoyable terms. If it is to be played so as to foster the mens Sana in corpore sano^ then we must have from time to time both male and female players who set an example of virtuosity. Anthony Wilding carried on a tradition of scientific endeavour and artistic form which began with Lawford and the Renshaws, and has prevented lawn-tennis from degenerating into as fatuous a means of time-slaughter as Mid- Victorian croquet. The old silly "patball" could never give the health and happiness, the clear eye and clean liver and release from workaday cares which are enjoyed by the million votaries of the modern pastime. And the health-giving *' vigour of the game " as now played is the outcome of the keenness and artistry of Anthony Wilding and the other famous experts. Anthony Wilding was essentially a man of action. He was not a scholar ; he despised politics ; he had no particular liking for any art, save the art of living. He had, however, a real love and sympathy ANTHONY WILDING 45 for machines — those strong, uncomplaining members of the second creation (Man's), each of which has its own little personal peculiarities. He treated these strange creatures, which musr play a part of ever-increasing importance in the great drama of modernity, with as much care as he had for his own body — a mechanism of power and precision that was never allowed to become slack for a moment or lose its bright vigour through any form of self-indulgence. He neither smoked nor drank ; he never played the man-about-town nor even dressed the part ; he never squandered his time and himself in so-called love affairs. Within and without he was as clean and bright as a new pin. And he also had a certain bright mysterious quality which caused him to be liked at first sight by all sorts and conditions of men and women. In his charming biography Mr Wallis Myers de- fines this rare, elusive gift as a kind of Peter- Pannishness : — " Beneath his perfectly developed frame there beat the heart of a child. Like a child, he was pure and ingenuous. Like a child, he was unconscious of control and impatient of discipline. Like a child, using only the art of an unsophisticated nature, he claimed and won indulgence. Yet when the real test came — in sport or in war — Anthony Wilding revealed a steadfastness, a faculty for concentration, a self- reliance and resourcefulness which made up a strong character. Physically and mentally he became a man ; spiritually he was a boy until the end." I believe this to be a true definition of his peculiar charm, which closely resembled that of not a few famous soldiers of the past and present— men in whose character a simple sincerity, unconcealed by 46 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON pose or the subtleties of Intel lectiialism, sends to every mind's eye a white beam of piercing brightness. When war broke out he returned to England at once and lost not a moment in volunteering. Having previously held a commission in the King's Colonials ("colonial" is a word which must now be scrapped altogether), his way to a suitable job was easy enough. His knowledge of motor-cars and skill in driving them, added to an intimate knowledge of France and Belgium gained in many visits, caused him to be temporarily attached to the Headquarters Intelligence Corps. He saw at once it was to be a motor war. His courage and cool- ness and untiring usefulness were immediately recog- nized, and he was transferred to the Naval Air Wing, which had armoured motor-cars as a side- line. Commander Sampson, R.N., who organised it all, testifies that he found Captain Wilding " an extremely cheery messmate, always terribly keen to do anything to help." When Commander Sampson and his flying squadron went to the Dardanelles, the armoured cars were left behind ; Wilding was for a time at a loose end, the useless- ness of his machines in attacking trenches having been demonstrated. During a short leave in England he devised a two-wheel trailer, to carry a 3-pounder, which was very mobile over rough ground. A strain of inventiveness was coming out in him which, had he lived, might have had other and invaluable consequences. It was due to his faith and persistency that the trailer design was adopted and given a practical trial. " My own little stunt," as he described it, was a success, for the 3-pounders on wheels strafed a sort of hostelry for German ANTHONY WILDING 47 snipers. He received a little command of his own, and on May 2, 19 15, received news of his pro- motion to the rank of captain. On May loth he was killed by a shell, and 'was buried near Neuve Ghapelle. Hundreds of letters of sorrow and sym- pathy were sent to his New Zealand home. Lieutenant-Commander Chilcott of the Royal Naval Air Service wrote as follows : " i had learnt to love him as few men love each other. My ad- miration for him was unbounded, and I fear it will never be my good fortune during the re- mainder of my travel through this world to meet another friend with a nature such as his. I always felt that he was an example to his fellow-men in everything. God rest his great soul." See what a fine and indefatigable soul had been trained in the little, familiar lawn with its white lines, which is the arena of the youngest, yet most popular, of our joyous ball-games. These essentially English games must never be given up to please the " intellectuals " who scoff at them or the money- makers who think that the science of gaining a livelihood must altogether oust the art of living. To forget all our joyous yvf-cvaa-TLK-Q, which gives us men that can be made into soldiers in a few months, would be to "Germanize" our natural life. It would be a fatal folly. THE MODERN ACTOR BASIL HALLAM BASIL HALLAM was born in London, April 3, 1889, was educated at St Andrews, Eastbourne, and Charterhouse, made his first appearance on the boards (as Basil Radford) at His Majesty's in April 1908, and after seven years of varied stage-work created Gilbert the Filbert in 'The Passing Show^ produced at the Palace Theatre in April 19 14. A year later, being then at the height of his popularity, he volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps, and on July 16, 19 16, died at the front, the parachute by which he was descending failing to expand. His career, even taking only the stage part of it, was unique. In the theatrical world it is as rare for a man to be a public idol at twenty-five as it is common for a woman. This and this alone is the reason why a profession that has liberally responded to the call to arms, and has written its name large on the roll of honour, furnishes but one New Elizabethan as actor pure and simple. War demands youth, and few men attain high stage dis- tinction before middle-age. Further, the characters in which such distinction is gained are very seldom young men. Youth has its charm, but all else is apt to be vague, undeveloped, and not settled or deep-rooted enough to interest greatly. With age the character hardens and one plays the game of life with a full-sized bat. Where an actor, what- ever his age, has made a notable impression in the part of a young man, it has almost invariably been in virtue of some marked eccentricity or of a strong 48 Photo by Foiitsham and Kanfi'id BASIL HAI.l.AM (captain and kite-commander, royal flying corps) BASIL HALLAM 49 story which sweeps him along in its current so that he has little to do but float. Now Gilbert had neither of these advantages. He had no strong story at the back of him — his life was but a routine of futilities. And so far from being an eccentric, or viewed as one, he was accepted as typical of a not inconsiderable section of our community. As stamped by Basil Hallam he became, as it were, legal tender, circulating throughout the realm as freely and unchallenged from mouth to mouth as current coin from hand to hand. The case would be the less remarkable had there been the resemblance, too often traded on, between the actor and the part. There was no such resem- blance. One cannot imagine Gilbert exerting him- self unduly over sports. Mr Hallam excelled at racquets, playing for Charterhouse, and in after life vigorously keeping his hand in at the Bath Club and elsewhere. Only less was he devoted to other games — as lawn-tennis and, later, golt. He believed in keeping himself fit, and did. The man who, as Gilbert, sang every evening ^* I'm called by two and by five I'm out, Which I couldn't do if I slacked about," might every morning be seen, though he did not ask to be, running round the Park before breakfast. Not only was the part the antithesis of the actor, but the entertainment in which it occurred was clean outside the fairway of his ambition and interest. When, VvUthout the sanction of his father, Mr Walter Hallam-Radford, merchant, and Master of the Ironmongers' Company, he determined to go on the stage, his objective was serious drama, and especially Shakespeare. Hence one day, having got D so THE MODERN ACTOR school-leave to come up to London to see his dentist, he contrived to visit also His Majesty's Theatre and see Sir Herbert Tree, with whom he had no previous acquaintance. " What can you do ? " asked Sir Herbert. His answer, " I can do anything you do," so touched Sir Herbert that, after hearing him recite a passage or two from Ham/et, he assigned him several minor parts in his forthcoming Festival of 1908. Of these the chief was Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor — a curious experiment of which one would like to have seen the result. And though destined to spend most of his stage life in modern comedy and to end it in revue^ he returned to Shakespeare, whose works he had from an early age studied closely, as often as he had the chance. Thus he took part in several of Mr Robert Arthur's 191 1 Commemoration performances at the Coronet; and, immediately before appearing as Gilbert, played Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice at the Court, repeating the performance in Paris, whither the company subsequently went. In this revival Mr Michael Sherbrook played Shylock, to play which part was the dream of Hallam's life. (What would Shylock have had to say of Gilbert, who had none of the redeeming qualities of the young men-about- Venice ?) Even stronger proof of his ardour for Shakespeare is seen in his partici- pation in revivals at the Royal Victoria Hall, the only theatre in London in which Shakespeare can feel at home and is allowed to meet his audience face to face. Nor of the parts he did play was Gilbert the one he liked best. His favourite part was Archie Graham in The Blindness of Virtue^ a seriously-intended play, in which he appeared not only at the Little Theatre, BASIL HALLAM 51 but in America. There he acted a thoughtless rather than graceless young man with frank and natural address, and in Ann — much less seriously intended — he played no less engagingly a literary youth per- plexed by the wiles of woman. Another seriously- intended play in which he appeared was I'he Next Religion^ and another, less seriously intended, Mrs Dot. He did other comedy parts in LcJlidon, on tour with Miss May Palfrey, and with Miss Billie Burke in America, which he visited twice. But all his comedy performances were swallowed up and for- gotten in his solitary performance in revue. He did not seek revue : he found his way into it almost by accident and by way of musical comedy. Mr George Edwardes wanted someone to play Max Dearly in The Girl on the Film while Mr George Grossmith was away in Paris. He thought of Hallam, whom he knew, and so Hallam put in a fortnight at the Gaiety. Later, when lunching at the Carlton, Hallam fell in with Miss Elsie Janis, whose acquaintance he had made during his second visit to America. She, hearing that he was disengaged, as he conceived himself to be, and the Court of Appeal decided that he was right, proposed that he should join her at the Palace. And so Gilbert the Filbert ! However heartily Hallam would have detested and despised Gilbert in life, he took the greater pains to do him justice in art. Gilbert has a song — indeed, he has very little else — and the song called not only for singing but for dancing. Hallam could dance, of course, as other men dance, and sang fairly well in private, though he always preferred to recite, classical pieces for choice. But here a great deal more was demanded than mere amateur accomplish- 52 THE MODERN ACTOR ment ; the least failure in either respect and Gilbert would have made no great way in the work. So Hallam set himself to master all that was necessary of singing and dancing, with what brilliant success all that saw him know. He could not have done more for the creation had he loved him, or, again, had it been Shylock. And his ambition cannot have been wholly out of his mind, for it was again April, and Shakespeare was again in full bloom. Surely there must have occurred to him some such line as — " Oh ! to be in Shakespeare, now that April's here." Strange how much happened to Hallam in April ! It is no more necessary to describe Gilbert than to describe a halfpenny or a penny. Suffice it to say that in April 19 14 people, who had already suffered gladly the Johnny and the Dude, were now enam- oured of the Nut. And never had there been a Nut to compare with Mr Hallam's — so faultless in form, of flavour at once so full, so rich and so subtle. The war was not thought of then, and when it came three months later it found Gilbert the Filbert the most popular character on the English stage. And it was the war, which has changed so much, that proved Hallam's mettle both as an artist and as a man. It is true that Gilbert had "made good" before the war broke out, and true again that, when it did break out, some time elapsed before people could re-discover their ideals and get them into working order. But when they did, Gilbert's position remained unshaken. This waster, com- pared with whom the Conscientious Objector is almost a hero, went on changing his kit (without wincing at the expression) and counting his ties as before. And the public stood firm by him — not only BASIL HALLAM s3 the stalls, but the gallery, that had most reason to resent his existence. Other characters of the same kidney were not so fortunate. Some were immedi- ately withdrawn, others sought re-election only as objects of scorn. Even the admirable Miss Vesta Tilley found her account in joining the Army of to-day. How came Gilbert to survive where so many perished ? The answer is that Gilbert was a perfect work of art, and that as Gilbert, Hallam performed the feat, little short of a miracle, of making a London audience from floor to ceiling artists too. On the other hand, the war revealed to him a duty higher than the ambition of playing even Shylock. It revealed, too, a new field in which that duty might be honourably discharged. One who knew 'him only across the footlights can hardly think of him as a soldier in the trenches or as a sailor in the trough of the sea. But the air, the newly discovered and still uncharted region, the air! Yes, one can think of him there. It was there he found his duty. It was there that, after more than a year's service, during which he spent but one week at home, and was promoted to be captain and kite-commander on account of extreme courage and control shown under fire,^that he met his death. " Courage and control " : the words bear thinking over. Can better advice be given to an actor or to anyone ? G. E. M. THE ABSOLUTE POET CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY was born at Old Aberdeen on May 19, 1895; he was the son of W. R. Sorley, who is now Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. From 1900 onwards his home was in Cambridge; and he was at Marlborough College from September 1908 until December 191 3, when he was elected to a classical scholarship at University College, Oxford. After leaving school he spent rather more than six months in Germany. He was three months in Schwerin, learning the language and seeing something of German provincial society, and then for another three months a student at the Uni- versity of Jena. At the outbreak of war he was on a walking tour with a friend on the banks of the Moselle. He was put in prison at Trier on the 2nd of August, but released the same evening and given a passport to leave the country. After some rather disconnected travelling he reached England on the 6th, and at once applied for a commission. He was gazetted to the Suffolk Regiment later in the month. He became lieutenant In November and captain in the following August, and there is no doubt that he would have highly distinguished himself in the voca- tion of arms, for he knew how to handle men and gain their confidence, and had that carefulness in small matters which is a mark of the good regimental officer who must leave nothing to chance. His battalion was sent to France on May 30, 19 15, and he was killed in action near HuUuch on October 13th in the same year. 54 CHARLES HAMILTON SOKLEY (captain, SUFFOLK RECIMENT) CHARLES SORLEY SS I find myself regretting that his father has not given the many readers of his poems some such reasoned explanation of his career and character (both of which have a curious look of complete- ness) as that in which Lord Ribblesdale has dealt with the personality of his son, Charles Lister, in a spirit of almost scientific disinterestedness. Many others have felt the same regret, and in order to satisfy what is certainly not a vain curiosity (for one feels that greater intimacy would make for a clearer understanding of this soldier-poet's philosophy of living) the third edition of Marlborough and Other Poems contains a number of prose passages from letters to his family and friends. Naturally and necessarily, these excerpts contain more of the stuff"^ of true autobiography than his poems. The most sincere of poets — and sincerity is as a wind out of the Fens, a dynamic and all-pervading bleak vigour, in this poet's verse — cannot give us the sheer truth, as he feels it, in the form of rhyme and rhythm. The artist intervenes ; and even if there be no posing, no proleptic feeling of qua lis art if ex pereo^ no emotional mimicry, no intellectual look-see, yet the poet can never become even a close approxi- mation to the man-in-himself. It is impossible to deduce the man from his poetry ; I am very sure of that, having known both major and minor poets here and in France somewhat intimately. Turner's confession that painting is " a rum job " is applicable to poetry, which is perhaps the rummest job of all. But, as you talk and even think in prose, and it is not a resisting medium (until a style is deliber- ately cultivated), letters written as the pen flies are often reliable evidence of the scope and nature of personality. 56 THE ABSOLUTE POET The released fragments of Charles Sorley's occa- sional — and casual — letters, certainly illuminate his mentality with stray lightning-flashes. They show, for example, how deeply he realised the life of the Homeric Age and its strange modernity in every- day essentials. Helen, he says, never gives him the impression of being quite happy ; he thinks that she could only make other people happy, and con- sequently, another set of people miserable. " One of the best things in the Il'iad^'' he goes on to say, " is the way you are made to feel (without any statement) that Helen fell really in love with Hector — and this shows her good taste, for, of all the Homeric heroes, Hector is the only unselfish man. She seems to me only to have loved to please Menelaus and Paris, but to have really loved Plector." This would have made a better reconstruction of Helen's inner life than Mr Hew- lett's, which so absurdly endows Menelaus with the capacity of grand passion and, what is still more surprising, the power to renew the first ardour of possession — all of which is sheer honeymoon-sun- shine. But Mr Hewlett reduces all the Homeric heroes, and even the cruder and more cumbrous heroes of Northern fighting legends, to the dimen- sions of " intellectuals " flirting over tea-cups and cucumber sandwiches ; the lusty love of good eating and good drinking, which Charles Sorley under- stands so well, is one of many Homeric qualities utterly beyond the inventor of forest lovers who honeymoon on a basis of hips and haws, apparently, though couching on upland lawns in the open air. Again, in the Helen of the Odyssey^ " bustling about a footstool for Telemachus or showing off her new presents (she had just returned from a jaunt to CHARLES SORLEY 57 Egypt) — a washing-tub and a work-basket that ran on wheels (think !) " what should Charles Sorley see but *' the perfect German Hausfrau." What a human realisation of human personages ! And here we get on the track of the secret of his own poetic style, which at high moments has the vivid precision and sad earnestness of the greater Greek models — no sentimentalists, for they never could stick slovenly thinking or sloppy writing ! To get the fair, fresh, naked Hellenic style (as he did, and Rupert Brooke never did), you must have reached this soldier-poet's sound working hypothesis of the Hellenic character. An exact knowledge of Greek language is not enough ; though it is very useful as a training in scientific thinking and (as a soldier and scholar told me lately) in the making of a regimental officer, who has to attend to many microscopic matters that his men may be comfortable. " Watching the ways of particles," said this authority, " taught me how to learn all the little tricks of this queer trade." Most interesting — and a tonic against rancour and repining for all non-combatants, who have not the use of fighting as an emotional safety-valve — are the passages in which he dwells on his experiences in peace-time Germany. He saw through the pan- German types readily enough ; he thought them the very worst results of 1871. " They have no idea beyond * The State,' and have put me off^ Socialism for the rest of my life. They are not the kind of people (as the Irish R.M. puts it) * you could borrow half-a-crown from to get drunk with.' " But he liked the German lack of reserve and self-conscious- ness. And when war came, he was not to be shocked out of his sense of justice ; he saw and said 58 THE ABSOLUTE POET that we were fighting, not a bully, but a bigot. What follows that fine epigram contains a vindica- tion of the British system of discipline as against the Prussian model, which is now a rusty machine in danger of breaking down for want of oil : — " If the bigot conquers he will learn in time his mistaken methods (for it is only of the methods and not of the goal of Germany that one can disapprove) — ^just as the early Christian bigots conquered by bigotry and grew larger in sympathy and tolerance after conquest. I regard the war as one between sisters, between Martha and Mary, the efficient and intolerant against the casual and sympathetic. Each side has a virtue for which she is fighting, and each that virtue's supplementary vice. And 1 hope that whatever the material result of the conflict, it will purge these two virtues of their vices, and efficiency and tolerance will no longer be incompatible. " But I think that tolerance is the larger virtue of the two, and efficiency must be her servant. So 1 am quite glad to fight against this rebellious servant. In fact, 1 look at it this way. Suppose my platoon vvere the world. Then my platoon sergeant would represent efficiency, and I would represent tolerance. And I always take the sternest measures to keep my platoon sergeant in check ! I fully appreciate the wisdom of the War Office when they put inefficient officers to rule sergeants. Ads'it 07nen." He must, I think, have come in time to think Germany bully as well as bigot and to loathe her as the Greeks loathed the tyrant in whom there was a touch of the yeasty blood of the Titans, prisoned at last for humanity's safety in the penal abyvSS by the sunny-souled gods of Olympus. To me he seems to grow more and more Greek and to justify CHARLES SORLEY 59 a couplet that I wrote of another such undying proof of the validity of a true classical training : — " I deem the Englishman a Greek grown old, Deep waters crossed and many a watchfire cold." Standing as he did on the watershed of English poetry (his own metaphor) the cloistral and guarded poetry of Tennyson and the like was not for him ; he felt the need of the whole world of men to serve as inspiration. But he would have kept to the straight and unadorned style which makes him the antithesis in his art of Rupert Brooke, that laughing streamlet of chiming thoughts and coloured syllables. The one was a truth-seeker, the other a beauty- seeker. But either, of course, found that which he did not go out to find. But Charles Sorley was the modern poet — for it is of the essence of modern poetry to seek truth first of all, nor complain if glimpses of the beautiful by the way are as infrequent as wild flowers in the autumnal months. Charles Sorley had not the rough, compelling, strong, triumphant voice he admires in Mr Mase- field — a great nature (there is no English equivalent for that useful term) rather than a great poet, whose chief fault is that he is too much of a rhetorician. But he is above and beyond the mannered subtle- ties of Late-Victorian poets and men of letters, of whose style he says : " It teems with sharp saws and rich sentiment ; it is a marvel of delicate technique ; it pleases, it flatters, it charms, it soothes; it is a living lie." He is strong but never rowdy ; in the quest for new matter he is as little apt to lose his temper as his temperament. The beauty of the word, the fascination of phrase-making are not for him, who must show the truth as he sees it without 6o THE ABSOLUTE POET fear or favour. Even in the earlier poems, written at school, he has long ago left the highv^ay of con- vention. He loved Marlborough as well as any boy has ever loved his old school : the windy, upland scenery of the place is vivid in remembrance to the end, and furnishes him with large and picturesque similitudes. But he will not accept the verdicts of that microcosm, and he sees in the so-called *' wasters," who get no thanks for the little they had to give to the community even if they give all and are clean forgotten : — ** Because we cannot collar low Nor write a strange dead tongue the same As strange dead men did long ago " — souls that are reserved for something finer than the winning of tassel'd caps or scholarships : — " The School we care for has not cared To cherish nor keep our names to bo Memorials. God hath prepared Some better thing for us, for we His hopes have known, His failures shared." A Talc ofTivo Careers, Nov. 1912. All wholesome boy poets have a leaning to melancholy and the macabre, as every teacher of English literature in a great school knows, or ought to know. " Wholesome " seems at first sijrht a paradoxical epithet — but it is wholesome to be your whole self, and boyhood is a period of sunny, unruffled happiness only in retrospect ; in reality it is a time of light and gloom which breeds many a sick fantasy in the struggling soul. That is why Eugene Aram so often appeals to the sixth form poet, practising in secret, that I was once dis- posed to consider it a test for the poetic instinct. The River ^ a picture of suicide, is Charles Sorley's CHARLES SORLEY 6i one essay in this mode. The theme is nothing new, but the treatment is all his own, and strangely impressive, as the first stanza proves : — " He watched the river riinnina black Beneath the blacker sky ; It did not pause upon its track Of silent instancy. It did not hasten, nor was slack, But still went gliding by." Not desire of death, but the compulsion of a larger and more purposeful life caused the catastrophe : — ** He put his foot upon the track That still went gliding by." A drone-rhyme runs throughout all the nine stanzas, which is a fine and appropriate piece of technique. Minor poetry is not the criticism of life, but a criticism of poetry. But even Charles Sorley's earlier poems criticise life, not poetry, and are quite free from the learned allusiveness of those destined to write Prize Poems either for University tribunals or for the great public that likes " scholarly " stuff, the derivations of which can be traced without too much difficulty. From the very first he was a major poet ; his matter life, his manner formed from within, and the two woven together, as woof and warp, in a loom of his own invention. Whosoever wishes to understand his later poems must get the book in which they are collected, and read and re-read it. The language is diamond- clear; even in the pieces hastily written in the field and sent home unrevised. But, like a diamond and unlike glass, they are not to be seen through at a glance. The few brief passages quoted below are intended to persuade the reader into a closer study of a poet whose early death was a loss to English 62 THE ABSOLUTE POET letters as great as Rupert Brooke's — perhaps greater, for we may have had the latter's best, whereas the other, having Robert Browning's infinite interest in the vastness and wonderment of modern hfe, and Emily Bronte's eager undazzled gaze and scorn of evasive verbiage, must have climbed to heights unknown, whereof we now shall know nothing. ** I do not know if it seems brave The youthful spirit to enslave, And hedge about, lest it should grow. I don't know if it's better so In the long end. I only know That when I have a son of mine, He shan't be made to droop and pine, Bound down and forced by rule and rod To serve a God who is no God. But I'll put custom on the shelf And make him find his God himself. Perhaps he'll find him in a tree. Some hollow trunk where you can see. Perhaps the daisies in the sod Will open out and show him God. Or he will meet him in the roar Of breakers as they beat the shore ? Or in the spiky stars that shine .'' Or in the rain (where I found mine) ? Or in the city's giant moan ? " What Tou Will, June 191 3. " "We swing ungirded hips, And lightened are our eyes, The rain is on our lips, We do not run for prize. We know not whom we trust Nor whitherward we fare, But we run because we must Through the great wide air." The Son(^ of the Ungirt Runners. " We have no comeliness like you. We toil, unlovely, and we spin. We start, return j we wind, undo ; We hope, we err, we strive, we sin. CHARLES SORLEY 6;^ We love : your love's not greater, but The lips of our love's might stay shut. We have the evil spirits too That shake our soul with battle-din. But we have an eviller spirit than you, We have a dumb spirit within : The exceeding bitter agony, But not the exceeding bitter cry." To Poets. ** I have a temple I do not Visit, a heart I have forgot, A self that I have never met, A secret shrine — and yet, and yet, This sanctuary of my soul Unwitting I keep white and whole. Unlatched and lit, if Thou should'st care To enter or to tarry there." Expedans Expectavi, May 1915. How his completeness would have blossomed to fruition we may not know. But we know he was complete in soul, and so would write on the cross over his grave : " Being made perfect in a little while, he fulfilled long years." THE WILDERNESS WINNER BRIAN BROOKE IT was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth that men began to leave these little islands to conquer the world's wildernesses. They passed like wind-blown sparks across the narrow seas and the broad oceans beyond, and as often as not no tidings of their fate ever reached the havens from which they sailed into the sunset — in the firm belief that the rich lands of the sunrise, which Marco Polo had described, could be reached most quickly and at least cost in that direction. And from then to now this radio-activity of our race has never for a moment ceased — indeed, the spirit of adventuring in lands forlorn was never so strong in all our island-history as in the generation of the New Elizabethans which has died that Greater Britain as well as Great Britain may live happily ever afterwards. For, as it is now clear that Germany will be defeated and "kraaled" until Canada, Australia, and South Africa have grown up into Great Powers, the British Empire is sure of at least as long a lease of life as the Roman Imperium. As Rome taught the world law, so it is the destiny of our world-wide commonwealth to teach equity to all the nations and languages within its kindly and unselfish dispensation. How deeply the desire of wilderness winning is rooted in our race may be gathered from the British soldier's curious phrase for death in action : *' Going West." Death is for him the greatest of all ad- ventures ; the journeying, by a long, long trail of which no sure chart exists, into a land more 6-1 BRIAN BROOKE (captain, '>0RD0N HICIII.ANDKRS) BRIAN BROOKE 6s wonderful and remote than that on the unseen side of the Moon. " I would have emigrated to Canada after the war," said a mortally wounded corporal who had been a city clerk earning 35s. a week for ten years, " for I've sweated the wood of that damned desk and stool out of my system. That's all over now, but somehow I can't feel sorry. Going West'U be a bigger experience, and I'm too curious about it all to be afraid." It is certain that a great many of those who survive the war will never go back to their old humdrum jobs in English towns. Having tasted the harsh delights of danger- ous living under the naked sky, and knowing as they do that the robust health that comes of it is the greatest of all joys, they can never return to sit at a desk or serve a machine for the rest of their days. So they too, like the Elizabethans that were, will go forth to fight against the brute forces of Nature on the far frontiers of civilization. Brian Brooke comes into this list of New Eliza- bethans as the most perfect type of the wilderness winner. It is a type more common in Scotland than in England ; partly because life beyond the Cheviots offers fewer opportunities for ambitious youth, and partly because the Scottish system of education — the best in these islands — is from first to last a training in self-reliance and adaptability. "My people," said the late Lord Strathcona to the writer, " are born pioneers. We go out to new countries and find something worth doing there, and, when we have made our fortunes, as the saying is, we stay there to show others how to do as we did." So it comes about that in almost all newly-developed lands — especially in Western Canada — one finds the business leadership in Scottish E 66 THE WILDERNESS WINNER hands. And it often happens that these local leaders train on into those statesmen-capitalists of the Strathcona type who have done more than all the politicians to build up the gigantic fabric of our overseas Empire — British politicians, indeed, have really done more to hamper than to help the carrying- out of that tremendous task. Had he lived, Brian Brooke must have become one of the architects of the colossal commonwealth, extending from the Cape to Cairo, of which British and German East Africa — tropical demesnes with hilly regions where a white man can live and keep his health — must form the keystone. He had all the qualities one finds in the Empire-builders like Cecil Rhodes, whose hie jacets are written in capital letters on the world's map. In the first place, he took the precaution of being born in a part of Scotland which produces characters of living granite — men and women whose purposeful lives cannot be shattered by any shock of circumstance. And he had Irish as well as Scottish blood in his veins, so that a due measure of the perftrvidum ingen'tum S color um^ — the Celtic energy that burns up all obstacles in its way — was combined in him with practical common sense and inexhaustible staying- power. He was born at Lickleyhead Castle, in Aberdeenshire, on December 9, 1889, being the third son of Captain H. V. Brooke, formerly of the 92nd Gordon Highlanders, and grandson of the late Sir Arthur Brooke, M.P., of Colebrooke, County Fermanagh, Ireland. On his mother's side he came of an old Jacobite family, which has kept the white rose of a tradition that set honour and loyalty to a lost cause high above all earthly rewards. The ^ The Scott of tliis quotation, so often misused, were Irislimen. BRIAN BROOKE ^'^ Celtic sense of other-worldly things gave him the freedom of fairyland in his childhood. He lived in a world apart as a child' — a world of fairies, gnomes, and aerial spirits whose chronicles he knew by heart, and would often rehearse as he sat by the hour under a brier bush. The winged creature, small but wondrous wise, that inhabits a daffodil bell was as real to him as the birds and beasts that were his visible comrades. He had a great and engrossing tenderness for all the little lives about him. He would run out in a rainstorm to cover up some cherished family of nestlings with a large leaf — an inconvenient coverpane, no doubt, from the mother- bird's point of view ! Once, when he was ill with scarlet fever, he insisted on watching a favourite goldfish which was dying — and, suddenly, a joyous thought caused his face to be lit up from within, and he exclaimed : " Mother, if that little goldfish dies just before I die, I will hide it away, and then I will take it up to Heaven with me." This tender regard for weak and broken lives found an un- expected expression later on ; as also did his sym- pathetic study of the ways of wild creatures. Presently the fairies were forgotten, and the boy's mind was filled with an endless procession of fighting gods and demi-gods, legendary chieftains, knights in glittering harness, famous commanders of ancient and modern times. He still loved the open- air life best of all; like the Douglas of Border ballads he would sooner hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep. But every moment which had to be spent indoors was devoted to making battle-pictures, in which his favourite hero for the moment led his men to victory or perished gloriously. He felt in himself the qualities of William of Deloraine, that 68 THE WILDERNESS WINNER stark moss-trooping Scot, and dreamed of strange victories such as that won by a dreamer whose dream came true : — But I have dreamed a wearie dream Beyond the Isle of Skye, I saw a dead man win a fight, And I think that man was I. His three brothers were in the Services, two in the Army and one in the Navy ; so that family traditions, as well as his own vehement desire, urged him to become a soldier. But his eyesight was imperfect, and the oculists, in those days when an officer in spectacles was unthinkable, could give him but scant hope of passing the medical examination. So he made up his mind to be a colonist, and presently all his energies were concentrated on pre- paring for that high, Elizabethan vocation. The man of action had now definitely emerged ; the winning of a junior boxing competition at Clifton College was a turning-point in the life of this dreamer of dreams. But, after all, there is an idealist latent in every man of action. Is not that one of the chief lessons we learn from the lives of all the great soldiers and seamen and Empire- builders ? Before he was sixteen Brian Brooke asked to be taken away from Clifton so as to attend classes especially planned to prepare students for a colonial career. This specific training he obtained at Aber- deen University, and also at Gordon's College, where Byron studied. But attendance at classes on veterinary hygiene, first-aid, mechanics, carpentry, agriculture, book-keeping, etc., etc., which involved a daily trudge of twelve miles, did not seem to him a complete preparation for the rough life of a wilder- BRIAN BROOKE 69 ness winner. So he deliberately set to work to provide himself with a body big and strong enough to bear any amount of roughing it. For example, during the two years of training he refused to sleep indoors. As a rule he would sleep in a little wooden hut ; and, when the week-end brought release from his studies, he would spend his nights in the woods rolled up in rugs, even though the grim countryside was deep in snow. He subsisted • chiefly on the game he shot, cooking it at an open-air fire, after the manner of Western hunters and trappers. Now and again a particular boy friend was invited to share the amenities of his woodland existence, but those guests almost always failed to " make good," and went away convinced that the stern joys of pioneering were not for them. Brian Brooke's idea of a real holiday also harmonised with his set plan of open-air physical culture. He would wander about the country disguised as a vagrant piper, play- ing through the villages, and sometimes giving a silver coin as change for a bawbee, to the amaze- ment of the lover of pipe-music and his own secret amusement. In this disguise, which often deceived both servants and mistresses at friends' houses, he would cover many miles in a day ; on one occasion he walked sixty miles between sunrise and sunset. And the reward of all this rough, joyous, open-air living was this — from a slender stripling with no physique worth mentioning he grew up into a sturdy youth of great stature and enormous strength, who could do more than a man's work and endure any hardship without fatigue. He felt equal to his life's task before his eighteenth year, when he left Scotland to settle on land bought for him in British East Africa. Inaction had sown in him the seeds of 70 THK WILDERNESS WINNER restlessness ; at the age of seventeen and a half he wrote : " I have only one great possession ; that is youth, and it is slipping away from me ! " Perhaps the Celtic seer in him had muttered that he had no time to lose. In British East Africa he soon emerged from the ruck of indistinguishable settlers, the men who follow the lead of others, and succeed or fail through the force of circumstance. At school he had found the learning of languages — Greek, Latin, and French — a burdensome business. But he quickly mastered the native tongues of his new environment, and was soon accepted by his white neighbours as an authority on aboriginal manners and customs. He entered into blood-brotherhood with the Masai, the ceremony giving him certain rights and privi- leges among the tribesmen. The Masai admired his great strength and high courage, which enabled him to meet and kill a leopard while on foot and armed with nothing but a native spear. He did this, not out of a spirit of bravado, but to convince his blood-brothers that they were wrong in thinking that there is anything a black can do which cannot be done by a white man. Like Stevenson in Samoa, he earned a native name ; the Masai knew him as Korofigo (" The Big Man "), which, as an autho- rity on their language tells me, was a tribute not only to his physical powers, but also to the great- ness of character which they discerned in him. It is clear he knew the secret of impressing a savage people who judge a white man by what he does and is, not by what he says — that secret, unknown to the Germans, which enables us to impose the Pax Br'ttannica on uncivilised hordes by the might of sheer personal prestige. Brian Brooke had the BRIAN BROOKE 71 rare qualities of one of those famous administrators, men of action and men of transaction as well, who have accomplished so many bloodless conquests in the tropical regions which Germany hoped to win from us. Except for a visit to Scotland and a few months spent in Ceylon, where he found the busi- ness of tea-planting uncongenial and caught malarial fever, he gave all his time and all himself to the silent building up of Central Africa, his own dear mistress-land. He had the wilderness hunter's instinct, and he was much sought after as an organizer of expeditions in quest of big game. As he tells us in his verse — of which more anon — he had little but contempt for some of the expensive sportsmen who indulge in battue shooting at home and go to British East Africa for a sumptuous sporting tour : — Well armed with musical boxes, and loaded with gramophones, Butterfly nets for beetles and bugs, and tins for the precious stones. While under their stacks of rifles the black man sweats and groans. The best of wilderness sport is that it requires you to be your own gamekeeper ; to know the habits of game so well that you can find them at any hour of the day or night, and to be capable of caring for your own weapons. All this fascinating work, as well as the keen pleasure of rest after roughing it in lonesome places, is apt to be missed by the millionaire in search of trophies for the walls of his newly-purchased palace. The outbreak of war found Brian Brooke acting as transport officer on the Jubaland frontier. No doubt his many wanderings in British East Africa and Uganda and in non-British demesnes had given him an insight into the German plan for creating 72 THE WILDERNESS WINNER footholds of departure for African conquests. He must have heard the rumours — never beUeved at home in the last years of a century of slothful peace, but now known to fall short of the truth — of Germany's attempt to create a huge black army of Askaris, the finest fighters in all Africa, which should give her the control of the whole continent as soon as the Central Powers were victorious in Europe. That would have been an army after the German heart ; for the Askaris can " live on the population" of an enemy country, and would have saved their overlords the cost of commissariat and feeding prisoners with handfuls of meal. Brian Brooke played his part in saving Africa from the un- speakable horrors of those black wars for the control of the Tropics, which had long since been worked out in the Pan-German mind. He hastened, riding night and day, to Nairobi, and enlisted as a trooper in the ranks of the British East African field-force. Almost at once he rose from private to sergeant, from sergeant to captain. He was wounded in a night attack, narrowly escaping with his life, but was back at his post again within thirty-six hours. When, however, the African peril was well in hand, thanks to the military genius of General Jan Smuts, he longed to be fighting in the theatre of war, where his military instinct assured him the final decision was to be expected. Moreover, at that very moment news came to him of the heroic death ot his brother, Captain J. A. O. Brooke, who received the post- humous honour of the Victoria Cross for most conspicuous bravery. Korongo went to England to get himself transferred to his father's and brother's famous regiment. The offer of a good appoint- ment on the staff of the force advancing into BRIAN BROOKE 73 German East Africa was declined. Eventually he was gazetted as captain in the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders. During his training at Aberdeen he learnt to know all his men in- dividually. Thus he lived up to the fine Scottish tradition of cainaraderie between commanders and commanded (based on the creed that, though of different ranks, all are gentlemen born) which is so nobly expressed in Lieutenant E. A. Mackintosh's poem addressed to the fathers of his lost comrades. He had but three weeks on the West Front in which to show his genius for soldiering. Yet in that narrow space of time he proved himself his father's son, his brother's brother. When the Great Push began at Mametz, on July i, 19 16, he was in command of the right wing of the Gordons, including his own beloved B Company, Though wounded in the leg as he went over the top, he continued to lead the attack, he and the other officers and his men marching steady and solid as though on parade. When the two front trenches held by the Germans were taken he was wounded in the arm. At the third trench he fell with his third wound, a mortal injury in the neck. He died after weeks of agony, borne without a word of com- plaint, his only regret being that he was not with the few men of his company who had survived Mametz. They also longed in vain to see him once more ; they said : " We would have followed him anywhere, even to the gates of Hell." He was mentioned in the despatch from Sir Douglas Haig which was published on January 4, 19 17. • ••••• The intimate record of his life as a wilderness winner is the book of adventurous verse, which was 74 THE WILDERNF:SS WINNER published — with a brief but inspired Memoir by Miss M. P. Wilcocks — about a year after his death. Brian Brooke cared nothing for the nice manipulation of rhyme and rhythm ; he was no hunter of the mot juste^ but took the first word that came into his mind ; and the everlasting jog-trot of his anapaests is at times intolerable to the critical ear, trained in the subtleties of modern poetical craftsmanship. Indeed, his ballads have been condemned as a bad amalgam of Kipling at his worst, indifferent Adam Lindsay Gordon, and G. R. Sims at his best. For all that they are full of living pictures of British East Africa, and of the social derelicts who, whatever their faults may be, do the spade-work of Empire-building. So that they do really constitute a "criticism of life," to use Matthew Arnold's phrase, and I hope I shall not be called a paradoxical person if I venture to define them as poetry without prosody — which is a better and much rarer thing than prosody without poetry. In such haphazard, helter-skelter stuff as The So?tg of the Bamboos^ with Its endless shuffle and distant boom, Murmuring mutter of men who grieve, a note is struck and sustained which must stir the heart of every man who has lived in our half- finished tropical demesnes. There the voice of the bamboos, that bend but break not, can never be evaded, and here is the message and menace they say and sing even when there seems to be no wind at all : — On the Abadares you will always find us', Singing of death and forgotten hopes. On Killamonjaro grows our crop, And struggling right to the very top BRIAN BROOKE 75 You'll find us dense on the Killan Kop, And along the hills of the Kenia slopes. And always something is left behind us In those who happen beneath our thrall ; If bad, the remaining good we kill. If straight, then we turn them straighter still 5 Only invertebrates' hearts we fill With the awful knowledge of nought at all. , That is the tragedy of the unsuccessful settler in the hard-won wilderness; to know that there is nothing in him after all, that he lost all when he turned his back on an old land of comfortable con- ventions. Now and again, as in Labour^ Brooke doles out good advice to the newcomer, warning him that his first and last duty is to maintain the prestige of white men among black men : — While we rule by our sense of honour, While we rule by our strength of will, In a thousand years, ye need have no fears, They'll find that we're ruling still. • • • • • • And still there's another great danger, And perhaps it is just as bad, The man who will play with his boy all day. He's a mixture of fool and cad. 'Tis gen'rally wrought by a stranger, While he's buying experience. And, unless he's wrong, it does not take long To teach him a bit of sense. And he who is constantly turning. Who romps like a great baboon. Who wrestles his boy in the morning with joy And flogs out his soul at noon ; 'Tis time that these men started learning : A nigger cannot be his toy, His dog he can pat and play with his cat, But he never must rag with his boy ! No better advice could be given to those who find themselves in contact with the strange races, half 76 THE WILDERNESS WINNER devil and half child, which no other colonizing nation — and least of all the Germans — have ever yet learnt to use aright. In Through Other Eyes his burning indignation at cruelty to the dumb slaves of man, nowhere worse used than in Africa, is expressed in the prayer of a dying trek-ox : — Sold to civilization, bound to the yoke and chain : Never in all creation suffered a beast such pain ; Flogged they my hide to jelly, right from the flanks to hump. Fires beneath my belly, tail twisted off to stump. Neck rubbed raw with the timber, blood on my knees does splash: " Whip up that red ox Simba : " one eye goes with the lash. Trained by a brutal master ; never seen ox before : '* Get the work done and faster ! " that was his working law. License your motor-drivers, motors can feel no pain ; We are the honest strivers, — God, do I plead in vain ? But it is to the derelict, the strong man with weaknesses, the outlaw who is down and out, that his thoughts recur again and yet again ; and a singular power of psychical mimicry is revealed in A Night on the Ger?nan Frontier and other ballads of the kind. To touch ivory, he says, is always a first step on the track to damnation, and here is his picture of an ivory-hunter come to the last step of all :— Here I sit, a blooming outlaw, with my rifle 'cross my knees. And my ivory is buried at my feet ; And the only shelter left me, is the shelter of the trees. And my fire's so low, I scarcely feel its heat. And my niggers all have bolted : how I hope their blood may freeze ! It's a way they have, when posho's running short ; And Fve only got three cartridges, and dare not fire these. For I never know the moment I'll be caught. Now, for years the Germans sought me, still I'm quite alive and free ; But I've had my swing, so reckon soon, their day will have to be, But guess they'll have to be wide-awake, the day they lasso me. BRIAN BROOKE 77 It is a grim, garish story that follows and finishes in the vast, dreary African dawn. It is in Nature^ however, that his own philosophy of living is fully revealed : — But the things I love in nature are the height, the depth, the length Of the mountains and the ocean and the plain, All the things that tell so wondrously, the magnitude and strength Of the hand that made the things which will remain. He also, now that he has gone, looms up as the shadow of a magnitude, a man who was greater than all the things he had time to do and be, a great man in the making whose early death was a disaster. THE JOYOUS CRITIC DIXON SCOTT IN the heavy toll that the war has exacted from our young men of high literary promise, the death of Dixon Scott must be accounted not the least grievous incident. For in this country the true critical faculty is perhaps rarer than the poetic ; and Dixon Scott v^^as a born critic. It is true that he left behind him little, as far as mere bulk goes, that is capable of collection and republication in witness to his matured talent ; but it is more than enough to make manifest the great gift that was his, and to justify a poignant sense of what English letters has lost by the untimely extinction of such a light. Of many even accomplished writers — and especially of those who practise journalism — it may be said that they adopt the vocation because they must, and not because they will. With Dixon Scott the career was predestined — it opened to the talents. He wrote because he had something to say that must find utterance, and because literature to him was as the zest of life. It was not merely a hobby ; it haunted him like a passion. For him, in a special sense, syllables ruled the world. When I first met Scott he was twenty-seven years old, and he was just beginning to find his way in the art of self-expression. I remember that my first impression of him was as of a hungry raven fledgling. He seemed all eyes and beak and black plumage ; and he was so eager, so avid for every bringer of new things. The exuberance which his writing reveals was the reflection of his intense and vivid interest in what he worked in. All his 78 DIXON SCOTT (lieutenant, 3RD WEST LANCASHIRE BRIGADl R.K. A. DIXON SCOTT 79 senses were at full stretch to receive impressions ; all his mind was intended on the matter of his study. He was the craftsman delighting in his craft, and impatient to acquire a mastery of it. Be it remembered that young Dixon Scott started with no literary bias or influence from his environment. Born in Liverpool — whose motto,- " Ships, Colonies, and Commerce," expresses its attitude to letters — he passed through the local schools as one intended for a commercial career ; and at sixteen or thereabouts he became a bank clerk, and laboured among the money-changers for nine years. The routine of a bank is surely enough to discourage any but the most decided aptitude for the art of writing. With Scott, it only stimulated the itch to express himself; and, as the likeliest means to that end, he established himself first as an outside contributor to a local daily — the Liverpool Courier — and later, for a year or so, as a member of the editorial staff. The inside of a provincial news- paper office is not very satisfying to literary ambition, but it served Scott as an admirable exercise ground. Anything that would give him an opportunity of saying what he wanted to say and of finding out how to say it was meat and wine to him. He wrote leading articles, reviews, "specials," and descriptive articles with the same irrepressible zest and exuberance, producing, in the staid columns of his medium, something of the effect of a bold post-impressionist canvas in a gallery of early Victorian pictures. Naturally he provoked reactions in the astonished public that were not altogether flattering; but the character and in- dividuality of his work could not be ignored. His most striking achievement was a series of studies of 8o THE JOYOUS CRITIC the occupants of the principal Liverpool pulpits. As in Liverpool the pulpit looms large, the enter- prise was not a little daring. The ordinary journalist, thus commissioned, would have regarded and treated his "job" as part of an irksome routine, and would have got through it certainly without enthusiasm. But Scott flung himself into the task. With that rare faculty of his for getting at the heart of what he observed — of seeing it through and through, and of tracing its processes as from the inside — he "sat under" Liverpool's most famous preachers, and dealt shrewdly and faithfully with them. At this time his power of observation and analysis was much greater than his power of ex- pression. He had not learnt economy, but he made his effect. Later on, I remember, he undertook to " do the notice" of the annual Autumn Art Exhibition — pictures being to him only second in interest to books — and he went through that rather mixed collection, with all his guns of satire, raillery, and interrogation in action, like the little Revenge run- ning down the line of the portly Spanish galleons. All this time Scott had been absorbing literature as a dry sponge sucks up moisture, and both his interest and his aptitude attracted attention in the direction most likely to be serviceable to the de- velopment of his talent. Largely through the influence of Professor Oliver Elton — whose early recognition and encouragement of Scott are indeed to be reckoned to him for righteousness — the young journalist was awarded (in 1907) a scholarship at Liverpool University, and thus enabled to enter seriously and systematically on the study of letters. He had already, by the way, produced a History DIXON SCOTT 8i of Liverpool — a work which, whatever its defects, is a standing testimony to young Scott's powers of presenting and interpreting things with the conscious composition of an artist. Two or three years later he undertook, apart from his appointed academic task of collecting material for a study of William Morris's prose, to give a course of University Extension Lectures on modern novelists, and he began to write reviews and literary criticism for the Ma?ichester Guardian and the Bookman. His lectures displayed not only his gifts as a critic, but the remarkable range of his reading — reading done, not as others use, for mere diversion, but with all his receptive and critical faculties wide awake. His reviews and essays in criticism written at this time provide the matter for the one book, besides the History of Liverpool and his little masterpiece on Stratford-on-Avon^ that remains as his literary monument. Scott had to earn bread and butter, and that stern necessity compelled him to give to journalism what ought to have been dedicated to a higher service ; but he never forgot his ordination vows ; and if his worship had to be conducted in a little corrugated- iron chapel-of-ease instead of in a cathedral, it was still worship, infused with an ardent, unquenchable fire. Almost suddenly Scott found himself His maturity came to him swiftly, like the opening of the buds in spring. One day, it seemed, he was struggling to command his medium. The next, he had acquired mastery. True, his exuberance re- mained. The last enemy that inspired youth shall put under its feet is the delight in its own strength ; and it is at worst an amiable fault. It may betray judgment here and there, but how it quickens the 82 THE JOYOUS CRITIC perceptions and the feelings ! And with Scott it was beginning to find restraint, for he had grown conscious as an artist of its embarrassment, and he spent much — too much, alas ! — of his energy in revising and re-revising the work of his hand. The papers that he left bear pathetic evidence to his passion for rewriting what had already been so well done. But he had so much to say, and so many forms of saying it, that the difficulty was not to invent but to select, when the need for selection, in the interests of art, became evident to him. In his introduction to Scott's one book of col- lected criticisms — {Men of Letters : Hodder & Stoughton) — Mr Max Beerbohm says : " One often wonders which of these two things, the power to feel strongly and the power to think strongly, plays the greater part in the making of fine criticism." Both capacities Scott had in an exceptional degree, as these essays testify. He not only understood his author, seized himself of the quiddity of him, but felt with him. His receptivity was amazing and ' infinite. He could put himself in tune with the most diverse spirits, and extract from them that which only perfect sympathy can discern. Indeed, one of Scott's chief characteristics was his whole- hearted admiration for the achievements of others. Far from any feeling of jealousy, he rejoiced as in a personal triumph at the success of his contem- poraries ; and the present writer will not forget Scott's fine enthusiasm over a new volume of verse by Lascelles Abercrombie. He radiated pride qualified only by something akin to reverence. These collected essays have some of the surface faults of journalism, as was inevitable. The titles, for instance, have the catchiness of headlines, and a DIXON SCOTT 83 paradoxicality possibly learnt from Mr Chesterton. The Innocence of Bernard Shaiv^ The Meek- ness of Mr Rudyard Kipling^ The Artlessness of Mr H, G. JVel/s, and The Homeliness of Broiuning have an unmistakable ad captandum flavour. But they are but the stalking-horses for the critic's real wit. The test of all criticism is the degree in which it enables the reader to understand and appreciate the subject criticized ; and judged by that test these essays of Scott, written for news- papers and periodicals though they be, must be admitted to have a rare distinction. Here, again, one sees his astonishing capacity for seeing things from the inside — for getting right into his author's mind, so to say. A juster and shrewder appreciation than Scott's of the idiosyncrasy and method of Bernard Shaw, for instance, has never been written, though Mr Shaw himself may complain that Scott treated what was in- tended as an indictment of civilization as a mere specimen of style. To read these essays is not only to obtain a new insight into literary craftsmanship, but to have revealed in authors already familiar a new significance. Things that one had passed by unobserved are discovered by this critic and pre- sented with a vividness which is almost a reproach. To him there is no dead stuff anywhere. All literature is a bell to him ; he strikes and it rings. Occasionally, indeed, Scott sees what is not actually there; but the only security against seeing too much is not to see at all. In this book there are two essays at least that alone would establish a critic's reputation — the essay on Henry James, a beautiful piece of appreciation both of a great writer and a noble spirit ; and the essay on MorrivS, 84 THE JOYOUS CRITIC which must be accepted as an enduring contribu- tion to the study of the poet. These two essays, and perhaps the Chronicle of Mr John Masefield^ present Scott's powers in their highest expression, and in their austerest form. The ornamentation is chastened, though the vivacity remains — that vivacity which runs through all his work, some- times almost to riot, and manifests itself in figure and trope and epithet so as almost to dazzle the attention. Through the less than ten years of his literary activity Scott's vitality as a writer grew as his physical vitality dwindled. He was a martyr to a particularly distressing form of dyspepsia, and was continually under the doctor's hands, enduring special diets and even operations. But his spirit was always buoyant, and his interest in life and books — as his letters eloquently testify — never flagged. He was just coming into his own — he had entered the land of his promise — when the war broke out, and the call to active service came. He joined the Territorials, and obtained a commission under Col. }. P. Reynolds, in the 3rd West Lanca- shire Brigade, R.F.A. As a soldier Scott, in spite of his poor health, proved a great success. He had a remarkable aptitude for organization, and for the ordering of detail — gifts rare to the literary tempera- ment. On October 2, 19 15, Scott and his brigade sailed for Gallipoli, and only three weeks later he fell a victim to dysentery — that scourge of the Dardanelles Expedition which "many a tall fellow hath destroyed so cowardly," A man of his in- firmity, indeed, could hardly have hoped to escape where the most robust succumbed. A soldier's death was the last that those who knew Dixon DIXON SCOTT 85 Scott would have predicted for him. But his best epitaph is that he was worthy of it ; though such a death adds to the war*s tragedy of high promise extinguished and capacity for splendid service unfulfilled. R. H. AN OXFORD CAVALIER ROBERT WILLIAM STERLING OXFORD, which Is still Cavalier rather than Roundhead, mobilized the whole of her joyous youth the moment the call to arms was heard in her ancient courts. No other English city, save Cambridge, has been so much changed by the war; none speaks its fell effect more eloquently than this fair, mournful witness, who feels in her stricken heart the sad truth of Pericles' lamentation over the loss of the young Athenians : " The spring has gone out of the year." There should be well over 3000 undergraduates at this moment in residence. "In June 19 14," wrote the President of Magdalen, my own much loved and dearly remembered college, in an account of Oxford's contribution to the man-power of the Empire militant, " every college was full to overflowing. Step into any one to-day ! If it is full at all, it is full of young soldiers. When they are out, it is empty. The remnant of under- graduates, the invalid, the crippled, the neutrals, make absolutely no show at all. They can hardly be discovered. Colleges which before the war con- tained 150 now contain half a dozen. Emptiness, silence reign everywhere. The younger teachers are gone too." At many of the colleges those who left for their military training in the first year of the war bound themselves to return, if they sur- vived, and renew the old traditions for the genera- tions to come. When these survivors of the loyal lovers of Oxford and her traditions are home from the front on short leave, they tell you this Photthy S. A. ErouH ROKERT WILLIAM STEKLINIi (LIEUTKXANT. ROYAL SCOTS KUSILIERS) ROBERT STERLING 87 promise still holds good. But they do not visit the deserted city, which was once all one great country house thronged with happy young guests. Short leave is intended as a period of spiritual refreshment in which the soldier's valiancy is to get a new edge to it, as a sword is resharpened ; the brief moments of release must not be devoted to sorrowful remembrance. So Oxford is avoided, because her silent quadrangles are haunted with the innumerable ghosts of loved-and-lost com- panions, and the heart of the living is strangely troubled by the sense of their unseen presence. " Let the dead bury their dead " is one of the hard texts which make up the stern creed of the soldier who must sacrifice so many tendernesses in the service of his country. What were the motives that compelled the undergraduates at all our Universities (not only Oxford and Cambridge) to respond so quickly to the call to arms ? An Oxford soldier poet of high distinction ^ has given me the following reasoned catalogue of the motives at work in his own University : — 1. A sense that England's honour was not only imperilled but would no longer exist if we made our Belgian pact a mere " scrap of paper." 2. Sympathy with France. (The French was one of the largest and most enthusiastic of Oxford Clubs.) 3. That genuine but much concealed desire, which exists in almost every youthful breast, to suffer for others. 4. Love of England, in the sense expressed in John Masefield's August, 1914 : And such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind. 5. The *' Zeit-geist " of the time. Our restlessness was to 1 Mr Robert Nichols, the author of Ardours and Endurances, v/ho served as an officer on the West Front with other Wykehamists, and was invalided with nerves shattered by shell-shock. 88 AN OXFORD CAVALIER be offered a stable occupation, our unsatisfiedness an immense task ; our egoism a fulfilment in the personal guidance of inferiors in rank and appeasement in submission to those superior. Our wearisome and wearied preoccupation with the problems of sex was to be abolished in the hearty companion- ship of the men we were to lead. Our vague and intense idealism, so fluctuantly directed, and so much at the mercy of an ironic sense of depressing reality, was to be granted a high, immediate realisable purpose ; our realism (intense desire for contact with the actual truth, be it never so brutal) was to be satisfied with the terrific external verities of fatigue, suffering, bodily danger, meanness and greatness of soul, beloved life and staggering death. 6. The pure spirit of adventure. 7. Curiosity. 8. Vague feeling that " it was the thing to do." 9. Fear of the world's censure and State compulsion later on. Several of these motives were visibly at w^ork in the Elizabethan age, when our right to be Englishmen was challenged for the first time, and it follows that the vast majority of the Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates who volunteered at the beginning of the war can be justly called New Elizabethans — until such times as they get that name of their own to which, as Professor W. R. Sorley said in a letter to the chronicler, they are so clearly entitled. It has not been easy to choose between the thousands of University undergraduates — young men fresh from school and at the threshold of a career of inevitable distinction — who sacrificed all that they were, all that they must have been, to " take the cross " in defence of Christian civilization. After long consideration, so great was the number of appropriate examples, I have selected Robert William Sterling, who was elected King Charles Scholar at Pembroke College (Dr Johnson's College, by the way) in 191 2, and won the Newdigate ROBERT STERLING 89 Prize Poem in the following year, when the subject was The Burial of Socrates. In his gaiety and gravity commingled he was a typical example of the Cavalier spirit that animated the Oxford we knew before the war and shall see again in the coming years of peace. He preferred a few close friends to a multitude of acquaintances, having that rare genius for friendship which is a characteristic of all strong, influential personalities. But Oxford was beginning to discover him even before he had his first great success, and there can be no doubt that the charm of his fresh and eager soul would have made for the greater joyousness of his genera- tion of undergraduates. The saying of the late Bishop Mitchinson, then Master of Pembroke, in a letter of sympathy to his mother, " I seem to have lost, not a scholar, but a son," illustrates his singular capacity for winning a place in the hearts of those who met him in the daily round of doing and being. Heads of colleges are somewhat remote and inaccessible personages ; it is part of their metier to stand for a tradition of bygone courtesy, to set with a certain aloofness the example of an earlier dispensation of manners and customs. Sometimes, as in the case of the venerable Dr Routh of Magdalen, who was the last of the great school of essentially English theologians, they are the mirrors of a century that has been. But, with old and young alike, this scholarly young Cavalier, who seemed to have ridden to Oxford out of an age of gleaming breastplates and tossing love-locks, won an intimate affection without ever an effort to win it. He was, of course, a born poet ; and he earnestly endeavoured to live up to the truth of the (amended) classical tag, Pa^ta nascitur nection fit. 90 AN OXFORD CAVALIER But it was his natural bent to set the art of Uving poetry above that of writing it. And to-day he lives on poetically in the hearts of those who knew him ever so slightly. A gallant, boyish figure who has ridden past into the unknown in a great concourse of joyous comrades — how often in the days gone by has such a still-remembered sight been seen by the ageless eyes of the Eternal City of Youth he describes so well : — I saw her bow'd by Time's relentless hand, Calm as cut marble, cold and beautiful. As if old sighs through the dim night of years, Like frosted snow-flakes on the silent land, Had fallen : and old laughter and old tears. Old tenderness, old passion, spent and dead, Had moulded her their stony monument : While ghostly memory lent Treasure of form and harmony to drape her head. Proud-stepping statue ! still her arm, up-raised, Pointed the sceptre skyward, like a queen Gleaming bright wonder from the world amazed. But this was the Oxford of the vanished peace- time who seemed to so many cold and incredulous, never allowing the youthful to forget that they were but casual guests of the dead in her ancient pleasances. Oxford was to Robert Sterling too old and majestical to have much thought for her laugh- ing, boyish guests ; the makers of her secret life and visible scrolls of petrified history were to him living presences and the sole subjects of her regal meditation. If he saw her to-day, he would see a very human creature, a mother mourning the loss of ten thousand sons and finding her only solace in the humblest war-work. At Sedbergh, that fine old northern school, where every boy acquires the Roman virtus and a con- ROBERT STERLING 91 tempt for " easy options " in v/ork and play, he spent the last four years of his happy school-life. He was fond of the school games, especially Rugby football, in which Sedbergh is supreme among English schools, as is proved by her long list of International players. But he did not greatly excel in games ; there exists a portrait of him coming- in last in the Wilson Run, which is an even more drastic test of cross-country running than the famous " Crick Run " at Rugby. He was bound to finish ; for, like all Sedberghians, he lived by and for the first axiom of Public School life so well expressed in Sir Henry Newbolt's lines of counsel to the aspiring youth whom he straitly enjoins : — To set the cause above renown, To love the game beyond the prize. He was a scholar by instinct, and as one who shared a study with him bears witness : " His interest in literature alone was quite enough to keep him busy and happy : like a true workman he put his whole soul into what he did." Classics were his chief pursuit, but he had an all-round intelligence, and loved to discuss a scientific problem, building up his argument from first principles in a most surprising manner. He was not in the least a bookworm. None felt more keenly the rapture of open-air pursuits, of the blustering wind over the Yorkshire fells. " Perhaps his happiest hours," writes a friend of his school-days, " were spent wandering over the Sedbergh hills, now leisurely fishing some lonely beck, now lying on the grass in the sunshine, watching the clouds drift over Winder." Winder is the fell nearest to the school ; it rises some 1 1 00 feet above the playing-fields, 92 AN OXFORD CAVALIER and has always been regarded by Sedberghians as a chief source of the school's inspiration (just as the sea is regarded by Rossallians). A new boy is not considered initiated until he has climbed Winder. In one of his school poems, entitled Early Prep^ he celebrates this notable hill, the silent, consulting friend of so many generations of hardy climbers : — O Sedbergh and the Morning And the dancing of the air ; See the crown of Winter glancing To the sun his welcome rare ! — And we valley-folk are scorning All the labour and the care : For heart and feet are dancing With the dancing of the air. He will always be remembered as the laureate of Sedbergh, "stern nurse of men," for i\\t genius loci lives abundantly in his poems on the hill-side, brooklets and the airy revelry of the snow-flakes over winter's ghostly brow : — Embodied smiles from the white sky falling, and on the cricket field when the game is over and the umpire (conscience in a white garment) has pocketed the bails and The mystic music of the scented gale Sings the dead day: and all the objects fade, Making their separate hues one blended whole ! . . . Chapel and school and field — whatever made Glorious the day — richly together roll In single wealth ; Sedbergh reveals her soul. And, above all, in his glad song of the delights of a plunge in the River Lune when the sluggards are tak- ing what somebody once called their ugliness sleep : — When the messenger sunbeam over your bed Silently creeps in the morn ; And the dew-drops glitter on Hower and tree, Like the tears of hope new-born j ROBERT STERLING 93 When the clouds race by in the painted sky And the wind has a merry tune : Ah ! then for the joy of an early dip In the glorious pools of Lune. Because of these poems, inspired by the narrow, but intense, patriotism of a great school (see Douglas Gillespie's life for yet another example of that root of the love of country), Robert Sterling will also live on the lips of boyhood, which is a joyous form, surely, of mundane immortality. Of his Oxford career almost enough has already been said. His scholarship ripened there, and he worked hard at the perfecting of his technique. That is why his Oxford poems have lost something of the breezy freshness and spontaneity of the verse he wrote at Sedbergh. A time comes to all young poets when the dynamics of expression insist on being seriously studied, and their ex- periments in rhyme and rhythm seem prosody rather than poetry. In a most interesting fragment entitled Maran we have the results of a valiant attempt to recover for the English tongue a lost heritage — the forgotten legacy of the Saxon epic poets who used stress and alliteration with such an impressive effect. In this curious form the number of unaccentuated syllables does not matter; accentuated syllables must be four and three alternately and are to be intoned ; only one accentuated syllable in each line is unalliterative. The scheme is seen to advantage in the following stanza : — • The w'ind was w'ailing over the la'nd w'ildly S'ong-Zighing, and the Mo'on Z, 'anguishing, a /o've-/o'rn ma'iden Pa'le-/)e'ering from a shr'oud. His Neivdigate was not one of the very few real poems which have won the famous prize. 94 AN OXFORD CAVALIER nor does it contain a memorable line such as that which occurs in Dean Burgon's oft-quoted description of Petra : — A rose-red city half as old as Time. But it is much more than the average prize poet's careful exercise in scholarly versification, in which convention has everything its own way. The subject was the story told by Thucydides of Spartan courtesy in permitting the burial of Sophocles among his ancestral olives : — And he was laid in the tomb of his fathers, that is situated in front of the wall, on the road leading past Decelea. . . . Now Decelea had been taken from the Athenians and fortified against them by the Lacedaemonians, to whose general, Lysander, the god Dionysus appeared in a dream, bidding him give leave for the man to be buried in that tomb. When Lysander made light of it, the god appeared a second time with the same behest. Then Lysander inquired from deserters who the dead man was ; and learning that it was Sophocles, sent a herald with permission for the burial. The poet's grandson is made to tell the story of the journey by night, in the darkest hour of Athens' fortunes, and this is his final word of farewell : — Ah ! Master, when the blast uproots a tree. Its form lies bedded — but a god beneath Treasures its leaves and perished fragrancy, To pierce anew the pregnant soul of death : So from thy poetry, thy spirit-tomb, Shall burgeon wealth of tears and tenderness And beauty, when forgotten is this pit And drain'd is Athens' doom — Come, leave his body, friends, to Earth's caress. — Oh, lightly, lightly. Earth, encompass it ! His friends greatly rejoiced at this victory, and he wore his academic laurel without ostentation, ROBERT STERLING 95 insisting that he had only just entered on his apprenticeship to poetry. His genius for friend- ship now found fuller play. " He could convey," writes one of his college friends, " a rare warmth of welcome in one exclamatory word, whilst in hjs mouth the use of a Christian name at some surprise meeting was a thing not lightly forgotten." Had he lived, he must have become one of those quiet, abiding influences, responsive to simple joys and sorrows and so never growing old, which have made Oxford, with all its faults and failings, a place where all can learn the highest art of living. Early in August 19 14 he applied for and re- ceived a commission in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. In February of the following year he was sent to France. " It was a great relief," he wrote at the time, " to get out here after kicking my heels toy- soldiering at home." He had already shown that a man of action, a fine soldier, could be evolved from the gentle and joyous scholar. He gave the whole of himself to soldiering ; his men, to whom he was devoted, 'knew from the first that he had the capacity for leadership. But he still sought for links with the kindly cosmos on which, as fate would have it, he had turned his back for ever. " I've been longing for some link with the normal universe detached from the storm. It's funny how trivial incidents sometimes are seized as symbols by the memory, but I did find such a link about three weeks ago. We were in trenches in woody country (just S.E. of Ypres). The Germans were about eighty yards away, and between the trenches lay pitiful heaps of dead friends and foes. Such trees as were left standing 96 AN OXFORD CAVALIER were little more than stumps, both behind our lines and the enemy's. The enemy had just been shelling our reserve trenches, and a Belgian battery behind us had been replying, when there fell a few minutes' silence ; and I, still crouching ex- pectantly in the trench, suddenly saw a pair 4)f thrushes building a nest in a ' bare, ruin'd choir ' of a tree, only about five yards behind our line. At the same time a lark began to sing in the sky above the German trenches. It seemed almost incredible at the time, but now, whenever I think of those nest-builders and that all but 'sightless song,' they seem to represent in some degree the very essence of the Normal and Unchangeable Universe carrying on unhindered and careless amid the corpses and the bullets and the madness." This was written within a week of his death. In another letter he wrote : " I think I should go mad, if I didn't still cherish some faith in the justice of things, and a vague but confident belief that death cannot end great friendships." He had no time, in that terrible year when the British Army was outnumbered and outgunned and the German observation balloons, evil things full of eyes, hung unmolested above our trenches, and the Allies' left flank was all but turned, to write verse. All his thought and energy was spent in an infinite carefulness for his men, in ceaseless vigilance against the subtle inventions of the Hun. The cold hatred, which inspired the scientific savagery of the enemy, seemed to him a wrong against human nature. But he knew, as from the first all British soldiers have known, that the moral of a victorious nation is maintained with such unworldly passion, and this chivalrous certainty — a truth that Time has con- ROBERT STERLING 97 firmed — is expressed in one of two quatrains he wrote in the trenches : — Ah ! Hate like this would freeze our human tears, And stab the morning star : Not it, not it commands and mourns and bears The storm and bitter glory of red war. His other trench poem was a valedictory to a dear friend killed in action : — O brother, I have sung no dirge for thee : Nor for all time to come Can song reveal my grief's infinity : The menace of thy silence makes me dumb. These quatrains show that he had found himself as a soldier poet, a worker in the stubborn medium of stern reality. He fell in action, after holding his trench valiantly through many hours of bitter fighting, on St George's Day, 19 15, when in the twenty-second year of his age. His commanding officer and his men deeply deplored his loss, seeing in him a lovely and terrible type of the chivalrous British soldier who remains undefeated even in death. LOST LEADERS COLWYN AND ROLAND PHILIPPS THE death in the field — for them a field of glory indeed — of the two hrilliant and beloved sons of Lord St Davids was noth- ing less than a national disaster. Their personalities differed in a marked degree, but they were alike in this — each looked upon his life as a precious pos- session to be used in the service of his fellow-men and to the greater glory of God. They had the tenderest affection for their parents, and it is easily seen that the well-spring of either's aspirations and inspirations was to be found in the happy family life at the Welsh home of which the elder brother sings : — God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small, He has ordained one place should prove Beloved over all. The lot has fallen to me At a fair place, at a fair place, At Lydstep by the sea. Each of them was trusted at sight by all sorts and conditions of men, for honour and honesty grew in both as manifestly as the gentle wild flowers appear in this ancient garden-land of ours. Each had innumerable friends and never an enemy ; for a true humility made them both so truly charit- able that courtesy seemed ever the better part of charity in all their works and words. Snobbishness was to them the deadliest of sins, and they loathed the religious, political and social shams of the indolent and luxurious age they were born into — that dishonest and dishonourable age which now lies 98 THE HO\. COLWYN I'HII.IPPS (CAI'TAIN, ROYAL HORSE (lUARDS) From a />oitrait hy Frank Salislniry COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 99 so far behind us as to seem only a sick and mean- ingless dream. Had they lived they must have achieved leadership, or had it thrust upon them ; for all men saw in them a single-hearted devotion to the work they had chosen or which had chosen them. The elder brother must have become a famous soldier with that rare faculty of statesman- ship (seen in such leaders as Lord Roberts) which is born of the soldier's sense of the stern realities of national life. The younger, already distinguished as an orator among a people with a racial genius for oratory, would have made his mark in politics and proved that it can be made something better than the " great game " of self-seeking demagogues. Each made the last great sacrifice of all that he was and all that he might have been in the spirit of a Christian hero, and the proud lament for the fallen chieftains of Israel is theirs also : " They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." • • • • • • Colwyn Philipps was a born soldier; he never had the slightest doubt (nor had his friends) as to his true vocation from the moment he decided, while still at Eton, to enter the Army. He was a keen sportsman with a great love for animals, especially horses and dogs, and a profound insight into the various characters of those humble servitors of man : — Poor dwindled souls that lost the upward way In memory's morning when the world was young. Country sport, after all, is still the best training for warfare, since it cultivates the sense of reality loo LOST LEADERS and forms the habit of making quick decisions. You have only to look into the personal history of Sir Douglas Haig and other famous commanders, past and present, to admit the truth of Sir Evelyn Wood's contention that the hunting-field is a fine school of military leadership. Colwyn Philipps was a keen and fearless horseman, who could take a toss as well as any man. He had good hands and a fine judgment of pace — and it is not surprising to learn that he won regimental steeplechases and point-to-point races in his native Pembrokeshire. But he knew that the mastery of modern warfare, a science as well as an art, requires a highly-trained intelligence in addition to that open-air common sense which every good sportsman possesses. He read widely and wisely in order to increase his knowledge of men and afl^airs ; he was a keen student of the treatises bearing on his profession ; he taught himself to think accurately and write clearly, which every young officer should learn to do, seeing that an order that is ill thought out or obscurely worded is often the cause of unnecessary loss of life. He took the utmost pains to master the minutest details of a regimental officer's work, and had a perfect understanding of every branch of his business. Major Lord Tweedmouth, writing to his father after his death in the second battle of Ypres, said that " he was extraordinarily keen and energetic and a first-class officer." Above all he made it his chief ambition to know his men indi- vidually, to win and keep their confidence, and to consider their comfort and well-being in every possible way. He knew the value of cheerfulness as a military asset, and had the capacity of unceasing watchfulness — a letter from a trooper of the Royal Pll 'to t>y Htliott and Fry THE HON. ROLAND I'lIILlPl'S (CAPTAIN, ROYAT- FUSILIERS, M.C. COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS loi Horse Guards, describing his conduct in the grey dawning of his last day of life, says : " He was, as usual, in the best spirits, and always on the look- out." The Old Army has died that England might live, and few indeed of his men survive. But those few will always remember him as the kindly and considerate friend of all his comrades, in whose judgment it was easy to have the utmost confidence — so that he was not obliged to cultivate a manner of aloofness to keep his authority. His letters from the Front, written from November 19 14 to April 19 15, a period of forlorn hopes, give as vivid and delightful a picture of this young soldier's various personality as one could wish to possess. Most of them were written to his mother, whom he adored, and I know of nothing more moving than the " character " he gave her in the last letter he ever wrote to her : — This is not a letter, it's a testimonial. I give you a char- acter of twenty-six years. You have never advised me to do anything because it seemed wise unless it was the highest right. Single-minded you have chosen love and honour as the "things that are more excellent," and you have not failed. . . . You are to me the dearest friend, the perfect companion, the shining example, and the proof that honour and love are above all things and are possible of attainment. This is a chord, a beautiful star of appealing music in a proud silence of grief with honour, which is often struck in the last letters of the innumerable dead. It is well we should remember these love- letters to mothers enskied and ensainted, for they show that the mood of the British soldier — high courage and infinite tenderness commingled — is the creation of British womanhood. It is to the mothers of the fallen, more than to any others, that we shall owe the victorious renewal of our ancient I02 LOST LEADERS strength and a right use of victory in the days to come. Hitherto it has been generally supposed that the Briton is somewhat lacking even in affectionate regard for his mother. The Frenchman, whose passionate tenderness is revealed whenever he utters the words " ma mere," has seen in this alleged want of natural feeling a strong proof of the cold- ness of our national character. It is a sad libel — yet some apologists of English birth have accepted it as an unpleasing truth, an unhappy result of the custom of packing boys off to school at a very early age. Moreover, such sayings as, My son is my son till he marries a wife, My daughter's my daughter till the end of her life, can be quoted in confirmation of the belief that the most beautiful tie of human intimacy is not as strong and enduring in this island as in other countries. The truth, as I see and have felt it in the past, is that a misunderstanding has arisen out of our national predilection for avoiding any demon- strative display of emotion — even, if possible, in the extremest ecstasies of life, v^'hen all the barriers are down between spirit and spirit. The curious thing, which no foreigner — not even an American — can ever understand, is that this convention of cold- ness is condoned by both sexes ; so that even the at-one-ment of lovers losing themselves in one another may be a miracle of the mingling of fire and snow — as though Etna in eruption should yet keep its covering of icy, virginal whiteness. Our sons and mothers alike accept this convention, most of all in war-time ; the " with it or on it " of the Spartan mother, giving her son his shining shield, COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 103 has been paralleled in many eternal partings since the war began. But let me give an everyday example which bears more immediately on the mother. A boy at school, now serving in France, wrote to his sister, when expecting a visit from his parents : " Please ask mother," he said in a postscript, " not to pull my hair and call me ' dearest ' when the men are about. They used to call a man here Little Lord Fauntleroy — Fauntie for short. Best love to mother. I do hope she will come down." You can't get behind that. The plain truth is that Britons love their mothers as dearly as British mothers deserve to be loved ; and if a certain exotic touch of passion, which is found in the Frenchman's more open and yet more secret emotion, be lacking in this mutual loving, let us remember that the difference — even if Michelet's strange suggestion be rejected — is perhaps in our favour. In others of these brief characters it is shown how and why a perfect intimacy between mother and son has irradiated a character and a career. Out of such an intimacy, all the daily giving and taking, there grows a compassionate tenderness for the womanhood of all women ; so that the young men blest with it can never be thought of as giving less than they take from the other half of human creation, and are always able to live up to the quaint, wise doctrine of the old rhyme : — Treat the woman tenderly, tenderly, Out of a crooked rib God made her slenderly, slenderly. Straight and strong He did not make her, Let love be kind, or else ye'll break her. Could the unreckoning ardour of youth be thus directed, then the greatest of all social reforms would be accomplished ; for it is out of the still 104 LOST LEADERS powerful dogma of the inferiority of woman's con- tribution to the sources of national greatness that most of the evils and indignities of human life are directly or indirectly derived. If the war had taught us nothing else, it would have been well worth while ! All manner of topics are touched on in these valiant letters, but the soldier is predominant. He finds the French people perfectly charming, but is horrified at the way they have been treated by some of their English guests. A French mistress of the house, discovered in a wash-house surrounded by a dozen other women and girls, refuses at first to lend him a lantern. She had lent one the day before to some English and they had not returned it. He answered that the English were lending their lives and a lantern was a small exchange. " This somewhat bombastic speech " (a characteristic touch !) " had the amazing effect of making the whole room cheer, and Madame, blushing hotly, insisted on giving me two lanterns, and carrying them herself." Part of a letter written a little later to an oflBcer friend shall be quoted to show that he had the true soldier's keen sense of the significance of details : — Now about tips. — Dig, never mind if the men are tired, always dig. Make trenches as narrow as possible, with no parapet if possible; dig them in groups of eight or ten men, and join up later; leave large traverses. Once you have got your deep narrow trench you can widen out the bottom, but don't hollow out too much as a Maria shakes the ground for a hundred yards and will make the whole thing fall in. Don't allow any movement or heads to show, or any digging or going to the rear in the daytime. All that can be done at night or in the mists of morning that are heavy and last till 8 or 9 a.m. Always carry wire and always put wire forty yards in front of the trench, not more. One trip-wire will COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 105 do if you have no time for more. The Germans often rush at night, and the knowledge of wire gives the men confidence. Don't shoot unless you have a first-rate target, and don't ever shoot from the trenches at aeroplanes, — remember that the whole thing is concealment, and then again concealment. Never give the order "fire" without stating the number of rounds, as otherwise you will never stop them again ; you can't be too strict about this in training. In Other letters of advice, based on personal experience, he emphasizes the folly of anything in the nature of playing to the gallery. " The first thing we learn here is to forget about ' Glory.' . . . Another thing we learn is to avoid * brave men.' The ass who ' does not mind bullets ' walks about and only draws fire that knocks over better men than himself." Here is another consignment of good counsel : — Always carry lots of ammunition to the trenches : you may not want it for months, but when you do you will find 200 rounds don't go far. You will usually take over trenches at night ; don't, in the confusion, forget to ask the chap you relieve — 1. Where the supporting trench is. 2. Exactly who is on your flanks, and where. 3. Where the dressing-station is. 4. If any water is to be had, and where. 5. If you have wire in front of you ; and if you have not, you must have half of the men standing to arms all night. If you hear tremendous fusilades going on it will probably be yeomen or French : don't stand to arms without real need. A good regiment will be in the trenches for days and hardly fire a shot, a bad one will have bursts o^ rapid once an hour. Well, old boy, I wish you every kind of luck. Another hint. — Do not, however great the temptation, allow straw in the firing trenches (have it in the supports, of course), nothing gives the show away so. The other day I found my trench lined with nice warm straw pellets. We were shelled like hell, but in the night I had all the straw carried out and put in a line 200 yards behind us. They shelled this line of straw all day, and never touched us." io6 LOST LEADERS When treatises on the whole art of trench war- fare come to be written, the authors will do well to consult these soldierly messages. He takes great delight in the quaint sayings of his men. For example, that of a weary person, on whose face he had stepped while crawling to his sleeping place in a lean-to behind a barn. A weary voice muttered : " This is a blooming fine game, played slow." And after a very long march a trooper was heard saying to his very rough horse : " You're no blooming Rolls-Royce, I give you my word." He accepts somebody's definition of war as utter boredom for many months, interspersed with moments of acute terror — " the boredom is a fact," he adds. When there was a piece of much- shelled ground to be crossed and his men's faces looked rather long, he " restored confidence," in the absence of cigarettes, by taking a ration biscuit in one hand and a lump of cheese in the other, and eating them in alternate mouthfuls. " We escaped without a shell, but I nearly choked myself." Here, to end this little catalogue of humorous sayings and doings, is an address he overheard given to three recruits by an N.C.O. who had been told to increase their esprit de corps by anecdotes and references : — 'Ave you ever heard tell o' the Black Prince? No? — Well, you are ignorant blighters ! 'E was a cove what rode about in armour, 'eavy^cavalry 'e was, and 'e licked the French. Well, a pal o' 'is was St George wat 'as 'is birthday to-morrow : 'e's the cove as I want to tell you about. Never 'eard tell of 'im ? Why, look at the back of 'arf a quid. There you see 'im sitting on a nanimale a-fighting of a dragon. You will note as 'is thigh is in the c'rect position — but 'is toe is too depressed — don't forget as the sole of the foot is to be kept parallel to the ground — however, 'e was fighting of a dragon, which accounts for it. Well, this 'ere St George is the patron Saint of COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 107 cavalry, and don't yer forget it. What's that ? What is a patron saint ? Now none of your back answers 'ere, my lad, or you and me will fall out. Carry on ! Everybody reads in the long days of nothing to do at the Front, and he finds time for a little literary criticism. For example, he wishes to commend Browning " as the perfect poet for lovers — he does not write about love as if it was a fever of the youthful, which most people do, and he delights in the cosy prettinesses of his lady without being fulsome or sticky." A most just piece of criticism. A great lover of children, he had a box of toys sent out for some French kiddies. The toys were a great success, especially the toy elephant, a creature which none of them had seen before, and innumer- able inquiries as to its size, habits, etc., taxed his French vocabulary severely. His last letter but one quotes a Canadian's criticism of his officers : " Our chaps are all right, our rifle is a good one, the grub is first-rate, and our officers — oh, well, we just take them along as mascots." Also he says that the latest joke is to call the cavalry M.P.'s, because they sit and do nothing. The end came all too soon. He fell in the counter-attack at the second battle of Ypres by two cavalry brigades which succeeded in spite of very heavy shrapnel and rifle fire in regaining the original line of trenches (see Sir John French's despatch published July 12, 19 15). Brother officers give a glorious picture of his gallant death. He gave view-halloos as the advance was made ; a little later he was seen on his knees, facing those following after and waving his cap and shouting " Come on, boys ! " He was the first man into io8 LOST LEADERS the recovered trenches, and he killed five Germans before being shot at close quarters and instantly killed. Thus died the bravest of the brave, a type and examplar of undying chivalry. The poet remains ; until you know him you have not sounded the depths of this valiant and compassionate heart. A little anthology of his easy, crystal-clear verse (which always means what it says and says what it means), will help you to understand the deep earnestness which was the seed- plot of all his happy virtues. In A?i Apprecia- tion he pays homage to Mr Lloyd George, whom he had accepted as his leader on the path of social reform : — An absolute silence greeted your birth, Latest and greatest of children of earth j No shouting or routing, no rockets on high, For you, the long-looked for, the star in the sky. The masses make much of a Mafeking holiday, On Ladysmith night all the streets will be dressed, On the fifth of November they still make a jolly day, And you they will greet as a street-corner jest. You, who are a plank to bridge o'er the disparity. The deep yawning gulf 'twixt the rich and the poor ; You, that mean health as a right, not a charity — Well, you know stamp-licking is such a bore. Pro is an amiable rebuke to the critic whose whole creed is expressed in Lord Melbourne's Why not let it alone P — The Suffragettes put up your back, Socialists you can't abide, And likewise the Inslirance Act, And I don't know what beside. Money-making in the City Seems to you both coarse and wrong, And you think it is a pity That I waste my time in song. COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 109 All we do before we die, Friend, Is, at best, so very scanty ; Don't you think you might try, Friend, To be Pro — instead of Anti ? An Outsider is the soverain antidote to the national habit, which is seen in all classes, of regarding form as even more important than character : — You judge him that he does not play The social game in just the way That you have learned with toil and care. He falls into each careful snare ; He lacks repose ; he has no style ; He loudly laughs where you would smile. But though I grant you, if you please, A certain lack of social ease. He's helped men live and helped them die. While you have learnt to fold a tie. The restlessness of men, which some call Pro- gress (with the biggest possible P), is satirized in jin Allegory^ which reminds one of the bleak, unadorned stuff of Charles Sorley : — I heard a sound of running feet, And all along the dusty street A multitude came sweeping by. On every shoulder was a load. Each drove his neighbour with a goad. I saw one stop, and heard him cry — " Why drive ye in this dreadful race, Why urge ye such an awful pace. What treasure do ye look to find ? " They turned upon him in amaze And gaped at him with owlish gaze. And suddenly I saw them — blind ! '* Where to ? We neither know nor care. But hurry, hurry onward there," — The multitude was called Mankind. Simplicity of soul is the one thing which is not vanity of vanities at the long last : — no LOST LEADERS When you have grasped the highest rung, When the last hymn of praise is sung, When all around you thousands bow, When Fame with laurel binds your brow, When you have reached the utmost goal That you have set your hurrying soul To reach, and found that it is dim ; When you have gratified each whim. When naught is left you to desire, You of the whole round world shall tire : Then you shall see the whole thing small Beside the one gift worth it all. The one good thing from pole to pole Is called Simplicity of Soul, He was vexed in his very soul, as happens to so many deep and loving natures, by a sense of the impossibility of a complete understanding between any two human beings. In The Barrier this strange, sad thought is well worked out : — A wall and gulf for ever lie between, Not all that we may do through love or wit Can quite avail to pull away the screen, Nor yet succeed in bridging o'er the pit. He knows the reason. He that ordered it, Who bade us love but never undrestand. He fixed the barrier as He saw fit. And bade us yearn and still stretch forth the hand Across the very sea He'd said should ne'er be spanned. Be sure this great and aching love of mine. That ever yearns to know and to be known, Can tear the veil that sometimes seems so fine As though 'twere cobweb waiting but the blow To fall asunder and for ever go. E'en as I rise to strike, it is too late. The cobwebs billow, thicken, seem to grow To a thick wall with buttress tall and great . . . I stand alone, a stranger at a city gate. Except ye become as little children is the title of an epigram in which this truth is even more rigorously enforced : — Photo hy y. Stanley THOMAS M. KKTll.E (l.II-U'TENANT, DUin.IN Kl'SIMKKS) COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS iii With iron will but ever-ebbing force He held him dumb and desperate to the course, And when Death came upon him, broken-hearted, He'd almost reached the place . . . from which he started. I have given only examples of the verse which defines his ultimate philosophy of living. You must read the In Memoriam collection of his poetry and prose, if you wish to know how joyously he can write on racing and hunting, the wild beauty of Lydstep by the sea, the infinite charm of children, the faithfulness of animals, the perplexities of loving, and so forth. His own life was the best of his poems. Can more be said ? THE SACRED WAY DOUGLAS GILLESPIE And here for dear dead brothers we are weeping, Mourning the withered rose of chivah'y, Yet, their work done, the dead are sleeping, sleeping Unconscious of the long lean years to be. SO an anonymous writer in the Wykehamist of July 31, 191 7, interpreting, as ..it were, the feehngs of the Old Boys gathered in conclave to consider whether a War Cloister or other edifice of stone and mortar shall stand as the permanent memorial of the many gallant dead from Wykeham's School. The Crimean Porch and the South African and Herbert Stewart Gates stand in memory of Wykehamist patriotism of the past, and a Cloister might serve as an incentive, were such needed, to the boys of future years to uphold the traditions of the School. But there sprang from the heart and brain of one of Winchester's most dis- tinguished scholars, now resting like so many others in the blood-sodden fields of Flanders, so noble a suggestion for a wider memorial — an international memorial — of this greatest of all wars, that one would fain hope to see the Wiccamical Body, as partners in the greater scheme, throw the weight of their influence into an eff^ort to have it trans- lated into the memorial of our " withered rose of chivalry." Alexander Douglas Gillespie, subaltern in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, writing from the trenches to Mr Rendall, his beloved Head at Winchester, thus put forward his inspiration of a memorial road on the Western Front that should be a Via Sacra, but not a Via Dolorosa : — U2 DOUGLAS CILl.ESl'IE (lieutenant, AK(;YI,I, and SUTHERI.AM) )iir,HI. ANDERS) DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 113 " In May the fruit blossom was beautiful where our trenches ran through an orchard, and we used to go back at night to a ruined village and plunder the gardens in order to make our own. So we have rose trees, too, and pansies and lily of the valley, but not in this unquiet corner where I am at present ; for here the Germans are almost on three sides of us, and the dead have been buried just where they fell, behind the trenches. There are graves scattered up and down, some with crosses and names upon them, some nameless and unmarked — as I think my brother's grave must be, for they have been fighting round the village where he was killed all through these eight months. That doesn't trouble me much, for iracra yrj Td^o<; ; but still, these fields are sacred in a sense, and I wish that when the peace comes our Government might combine with the French Government to make one long avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea, or, if that is too much, at any rate from La Bassee to Ypres. The ground is so pitted and scarred and torn with shells and tangled with wire that it will take years to bring it back to use again ; but I would make a fine broad road in the ' No Man's Land ' between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot, and plant trees for shade, and fruit trees, so that the soil should not be altogether waste. Some of the shattered farms and houses might be left as evidence, and the regiments might put up their records beside the trenches which they held all through the winter. Then I would Uke to send every man, woman, and child in Western Europe on pilgrimage along that Via Sacra, so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side. A sentimental idea. H 114 THE SACRED WAY perhaps, but we might make it the most beautiful road in all the world." There may be names of greater glamour on Winchester's Roll of Honour than that of Douglas Gillespie ; almost the whole possible number of her sons of military age have served or are serving, and already over 350 are numbered among the dead or missing. But there will be none that will stand for a finer type of Englishman, using the word to embrace one who, above all, was a Scot, proud of his land, its history, and its associations. For a man who has the high fortune to be born a Scot, with the fine inheritance of the race, to be educated at a great English public school with its tradition of centuries, and to pass thence to Oxford, there to develop his faculties in competition with brilliant contemporaries drawn from the Empire's farthest stretch, may be said to have well and truly laid the foundation of a life of public service. It was Douglas Gillespie's hope so to use his powers. But war came ; he made the great sacrifice — gave his life willingly for his country's cause. • ••••• Mr and Mrs T. P. Gillespie, of Longcroft, Lin- lithgow, were supremely fortunate in their two sons, Douglas and Tom. Both moved along the same educational lines — Cargilfield, Winchester, and New College, Oxford. Douglas was a scholar to whom success came early and easily. Tom's mind was of slower motion. He was of superb build, of an open-air temperament, and favoured and excelled in athletics. At Oxford Douglas carried things before him, and was Ireland scholar of his year. Tom rose to fame as an oarsman. He rowed for three years in his College boat, and represented the United DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 115 Kingdom in the New College crew at the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 191 2. Douglas decided to read for the bar, with a view to taking up Inter- national Law. Tom obtained a University com- mission in the Army, and was gazetted to the King's Own Scottish Borderers. In August 1 9 14 came the call for service. Tom joined his regiment, went at once to the Front, and was killed on October 1 8, near La Bass^e. Douglas was at first refused a commission on account of his defective sight, and he enlisted as a private in a new battalion of the Seaforths, and was with them at Bedford until the middle of October. Midway in training his commission came, and he went to the Front in February 19 15 as a subaltern in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. On September 25 he fell in the German trenches at La Bassee, just eleven months after his brother Tom had given up his fine young life for the same cause, and almost at the same spot. These twin-lives were knitted together in love and understanding of each other, and in a deep-rooted affection for parents, home, and country. Tom Gillespie had scarcely time to show what manner of man he was, but his friends were able fully to estimate his sterling quality. Douglas Gillespie, in his year of war, had fuller opportunity ; but strangely enough his recognition, so far as the wider general public was concerned, came through the publication of his intensely human letters to his home people ^ — written for their eye alone, but properly given to the public as an indica- tion of his habits of life and thought of the best of our citizen-soldiers. And again, strangely enough, though Tom could lay no claim to the literary 1 Letters from Flanders. By A. D. Gillespie. Smith, Elder & Co. ii6 THE SACRED WAY power of his brother, his last letter, which finds a place in Douglas's volume, has touched the hearts of thousands of readers all over the world. Such is the power of deep and simple sincerity. But it is of the elder brother that this sketch falls to be written, though no memoir would have been complete that omitted reference to Tom. The charm of " Bez," to use the familiar name by which he was known to those who were his friends, manifested itself early. A former headmaster of Cargilfield, the fine preparatory school at Cramond Bridge which did so much to pave the way for his future success, says he was one of the three ablest boys encountered during thirty years' school mastering, and the most lovable. He had not a trace of conceit, and his affection was generously given and openly displayed. He went to Cargilfield in September 1900, when eleven years of age. He was placed in the Third Form (from the top), and soon jumped to the first place. Such a presumption in a new boy brought upon him the cry of " beastly swot," which, reaching the ears of the authorities, led them to institute a system of rewards by which an industrious boy helped his form to get an extra half-holiday. The "beastly swot," in consequence, became the " wise frog " (his nickname was " Froggy "), and his Form applauded and shared his success. Of his ability, Mr H. C. Tillard, a former head of Cargilfield, writes : "It was not specialized, but general. He developed into a ' pure ' classic, his verses being a specially strong point, but 1 feel sure that he could just as well have specialised under different circumstances into an ' applied ' classic, or historian, or even quite possibly into a scientist or mathematician. He DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 117 had the most unusual power of anticipating know- ledge, if I may coin the phrase ; for example, he had that queer gift of being able to make out an ' unseen,' which was really quite beyond what was reasonably to be expected of him. This rare gift is, in my experience, an invariable concomitant of first-class ability. I suppose it is partly intuitive and partly the result of unconscious observation and ratiocination." Douglas was not prominent at cricket, but he was in the Rugby Union fifteen, playing as hard as he worked. Before he left — he was elected scholar of Winchester in June 1903 — he was head of the school. Seven years later, when he won the Ireland, the school, through its head boy, Colin MacLehose, sent him a congratulatory telegram, which drew from Gillespie a characteristic letter of thanks. " I'm afraid," he wrote, " that it's over ten years now since I went to Cargilfield, so that I can't claim to know anyone in the school now. But it's very nice to know that one's name is not quite forgotten even if it is beginning to take up a position a long way back on the boards in Hall. There is no place where I would sooner give pleasure by my success than Cargilfield, for I know that I should never have found myself Ireland scholar if it hadn't been for what I learnt there. And as most of the masters who taught me are still with you, I hope we shall see other scholars from Cargilfield in a few years time." Colin MacLehose, too, it may be added, after a career full of honour as Head of the Schoolhouse, Rugby, fell in action in 19 1 7. " One's time at Winchester is one's golden age," wrote Mr Cyril Asquith to Mrs Gillespie after ii8 THE SACRED WAY Douglas's death, " and no one who was with him in College can think of Winchester apart from him." He carried his high influence with him right through the school, in work as in play. He entered the school in Short Half, 1903, having been placed seventh on the Roll for College. He moved up the school rapidly, and was half-way up Senior Division of Sixth Book, second of his year, in Short Half, 1906. Here is his record for the next two years : — June 1907. Mentioned in English Verse, Pri/,e. March 1908. Mentioned in Greek Verse, Prize. July 1908. King's Gold Medal, Latin Verse. ,, King's Silver Medal, Latin Speech, ,, Warden Sc Fellow's Prize, Greek Prose. ,, Warden & Fellow's Prize, Latin Essaj^ ,, Proxime Accessit, Goddard Scholarship. ,, Proxime Accessit, Kenneth Freeman Prize. ,, Winchester College School Exhibition " ad Oxon." He was placed second on the Roll for New College in December 1907, and went up to Oxford in the following year. It must be re- membered that his was a time of very strong classical competition, and two of his strongest opponents (and equally strong friends) were Cyril Asquith and D. Davies, both of them distinguished in many directions. Perhaps no one outside his family, except Mr Rendall, the present Headmaster of Winchester, and then his housemaster and tutor, knew Douglas Gillespie more intimately than Cyril Asquith, his successor as Ireland scholar, and one may be pardoned therefore for quoting from the very fine tribute paid by him to his dead friend in the private letter to Mrs Gillespie from which quotation has been made. It sums up concisely the feeling of all Gillespie's Winchester contemporaries : DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 119 " He was my first friend at Winchester," he wrote, " and I associate with him chiefly long walks and bicycle rides for birds' eggs on summer afternoons — days of more unclouded happiness than I have had since. I had then — as I have still — a limitless admiration for him. First, because he could always find a bird's nest when I could see nothing, and because he could tell what tuft of grass would bear one's weight in crossing a bog. Then because he had an uncanny aptitude for Greek and Latin. Lastly, because he could win people's hearts at once by his inimitable candour and friendliness. . . . He had all I value most — kindness, intelligence, sympathy, taste, humour, wisdom, vitality, and a certain moral elevation. . . . He abhorred sentimentality, but sentiment he had in plenty, particularly for the humble and obscure. No man was ever less dominated by the world's scale of values. The State has lost in- him just the type of servant it can least afford to sacrifice ; his friends a man who had something like a genius for friendship. Much as I loved him I had no idea what a gap he would make in my life. Much more must you be desolated who have given him and another magnificent son to the greatest cause which ever exacted these sacrifices. For you there is unbounded sorrow, but with it all the priceless consolation which the manner of his life and death afi^ords — a life of flawless integrity, honesty, and capacity devoted to generous causes, and a death which, if he had lived fifty years longer, he could not have bettered." " His life was like his scholarship," he wrote again ; " there was a fine sort of reticence about both. He did not over-express himself, and he I20 THE SACRED WAY was always as good as his word or better." These passages were written at Winchester, where the writer was temporarily stationed and where old memories had been poignantly revived. " This place," he continued, " is very — sometimes almost intolerably — reminiscent of one's lost friends, and particularly of Bez, because of all our long rambles together. Every stick and stone had a history for ///, and now has only a history for me. I went over College yesterday, and saw the ' shop ' where he used, his first term, to do a sword dance, the panels in Vth, where he used to secrete a large slab of maple sugar, which we consumed together — the place where he and I and another man acted a charade of the Boston tea party." Douglas Gillespie had other sides than that of bookishness. He had a merry heart, and was not behindhand when any fun was going on at College. He was, moreover, an excellent shot and a keen angler, and when he was a junior at Winchester he won a cup for senior " purling " (diving). He was devoted to hill climbing ; he went " up the steepest mountains like a rabbit, leaving everybody far behind, sweating and swearing." He was interested in botany and a keen naturalist. He had a very good collection of birds* eggs, all got by himself; he would not keep any that he himself had not found. He took horrible risks in getting some of them, clinging by his nails on the face of some perilous cliff, after a raven's or buzzard's nest, or swarming up a tall fir tree, with only a few rotten branches near the top, for the eggs of a heron or a hawk. But we have dallied too long at Winchester, and we must let Mr H. W. B. Joseph, Fellow DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 121 of New College, and one who knew Douglas well, speak briefly for Gillespie's work at Oxford, where the man fulfilled the rich promise of his youth. " Among the best there is no one first," he writes, " but I don't know whom, among those I remember here, I would put before him. Gillespie came to New College as a scholar from Winchester in October 1908. I do not think his work for election had given full promise of his subsequent achievement as a classic, but he soon showed his quality, and in December 1910 he won the chief classical prize in the University, the Ireland. He was, however, much more than a brilliant translator and composer, having a keen love for all kinds of good literature, and a robust, critical sense. Nor were his abilities only literary ; for he could seize quickly and make himself master of a difficult subject and he had an eye for the important issues. He had a strong and accurate memory, and his judgment was steady and inde- pendent ; and he could express himself forcibly and clearly, not without touches of eloquence. . . . He knew that he had ability, but he accepted it only as a man may who is too sincere not to acknowledge what he finds. He remained absolutely simple and unassuming, and though not without ambition he was ambitious to serve others and not himself. . . . He was keenly interested in social and political questions, and a prominent member at Oxford of the chief University Liberal Club, but he was never a mere party man. Of the many who have fallen in the first flower of their age I know none whose death seems to me in sober earnest more of a public loss, for he had gifts which political life requires without the weak- 122 THE SACRED WAY nesses that beset so manv noliticians, and he was resolved to use these gifts not for his own profit, but for his Country's. No one was more generally liked among his contemporaries, and at the same time no one was more respected. He would take the popular and unpopular side with equal unconcern, according as he judged right, and others, whether they agreed or disagreed, would hear him and not mistrust him. He had no fear, and he could show indignation, but it was always without malice. He went directly forward upon the work that was to be done, without considering what others would think of him, but in the courtesies of daily life he thought first of others." • ••••• Gillespie's Letters from Flanders show his love of parents, of school, of country, of nature, of books, and of friends. Winchester was always with him, and one is glad that in the later editions of the book — the profits of which, by the way, are being added to a fund provided (in accordance with his will) by the refunding of his Winchester and New College Scholarships for the benefit of boys that are not too well off^ — the letter to Mr Rendall on the Via Sacra is given in its entirety. One passage will go straight to the hearts of all Winchester boys : The Germans were hurling " sausages " at them. " The sausages," he writes, " are rather like a Bath Oliver biscuit tin — only not quite so big — full of old nails and rusty scrap-iron, and they make an infernal din. We could see them come flying over the tops of some tall trees which stand above our trenches, turning over and over in the air. It seemed to me that I was a junior DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 123 again in Meads, taking practice in high ' barters ' from Gordon, Nicolls, Fawcus, and other giants of those days. For the sausage seemed to hang in the air above my head, just as the ball did to a nervous and incompetent cricketer like myself, and I wondered v^hen and where it was coming down, and whether it would hit a branch and fall straight into the trench, and what would happen then. ... I heard the Captain beside me shout when the first sausage went up : ' Well, I am a rotter if I drop that catch ! ' and that made the telephone Orderly laugh so much that he could hardly pass the fire orders to his mortar. The next minute a sausage smashed all his wires, and he had to go out and mend them in the open, with shrapnel flying round, but he came back still laughing." Take again this description of a nightingale singing over the Flanders battlefield : — " Presently a misty morn came up, and a nightin- gale began to sing. I have only heard him once before in the daytime, near Farly Mount at Winchester ; but of course I knew him at once, and it was strange to stand there and listen, for the song seemed to come all the more sweetly and clearly in the quiet intervals between the bursts of firing. There was something infinitely sweet and sad about it, as if the country-side were singing gently to itself in the midst of all our noise and confusion and muddy work ; so that you felt the nightingale's song was the only real thing which would remain when all the rest was long past and forgotten. It is such an old song too, handed on from nightingale to nightingale through the summer nights of so many innumerable years. ... So I 124 T'HE SACRED WAY stood there, and thought of all the men and women who had listened to that song, just as for the first few weeks after Tom was killed I found myself thinking perpetually of all the men who had been killed in battle — Hector and Achilles and all the heroes of long ago, who were once so strong and active, and now are so quiet. Gradually the night wore on until day began to break, and 1 could see the daisies and buttercups in the long grass about my feet." One could quote endlessly. The bog myrtle from the Highlands, the smell of warm mint and water weeds in Flanders, the singing of the birds — each had its message for him — memories of Scot- land, of Winchester, of Oxford. The friends of boyhood and manhood fell fighting around him, and for each he had his little sprig of rue. But his love for his home folks was surpassing strong, and two letters — one the last from England as he left for France, the other written on the eve of his death, and with apparently full prevision of what the morrow was to bring forth — seem to enclose, as the golden setting grips a jewel, all that animated and inspired his life and death. February 19, 19 15. For no one likes saying good-bye. ... I was always proud to be your son, but you have made me prouder than ever — and you and Daddy must remember when I am in France that my greatest help will always be to think of you at home, for whatever comes I shall be ready for it. . . . And now you will know all the time how glad I am to be young and fit for something whatever news you get of me ; when a man is fighting for his country DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 125 in a war like this the news is always good if his spirit does not fail, and that I hope will never happen to your son. September 24, 1915. Before long I think we shall be in the thick of it, for if we do attack my company will be one of those in front, and I am likely to lead it. . . . I have no forebodings, for I feel that so many of my friends will charge by my side, and if a man's spirit may wander back at all, especially to the places where he is needed most, then Tom will be here to help me and give me courage and resource, and that cool head which will be needed most of all to make the attack a success. It will be a great fight, and even when I think of you I would not wish to be out of this. You remember Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior " — "Who if he be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad, for human kind Is happy as a lover, and is attired With sudden brightness like a man inspired. Well, I could never be all that a happy warrior should be, but it will please you to know that 1 am very happy, and, whatever happens, you will remember that. These letters — these are striking parallels in the abounding love of those Happy Warriors, the two Grenfells, for their parents — give the keynote to the work of our soldier sons. It is the love of home, and of the homeland encompassing all that lies near and dear to them, and not blood-lust that has nerved our men to meet death tranquilly — almost half-way — on the field. 126 THE SACRED WAY " Somehow I never thought this blow would fall," wrote Mr Rendall sadly. " He was so buoyant, so brave, so equable, so full of the wine of life that it seemed impossible for this light to go out suddenly. He had twice as much stuff in him as most men : fibre and nerve for all the battle of life. I had looked forward eagerly to the fulfilment of this rich promise. Now it must be elsewhere." The tragedy and yet the glory of it all ! W. H. in (111 VAUGHAN CHARLTON (LIEUTENANT, 7TH NORTHUMHERLAND KUSILIKKS) From a /.aiiithis h I'is/athtr, John Charlton NATURE WORSHIPPERS HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON LOVE of country in the Englishman is always something above and beyond the 'ics and 'isms of the professional patriot. Much more often than not it is articulate only in works, never in words ; so that such an essential Englishman as Dr Johnson went so far as to suggest that patriotism as a political creed was the last refuge of a scoundrel. It is but rarely, even in poetry, that love of country has expressed itself as clearly as in the noble lines of a young soldier poet who, on the eve of going into action, had a sudden vision of the beauty of the far-off English countryside, and at last understood that the fair sights and sounds and perfumed airs of his mother country belonged only to those who would fight to keep home inviolate : O yellow-hammer, once I heard Thy yaffle when no other bird Could to my sunk heart comfort bring, But now I could not have thee sing So sharp thy note is with the pain Of England I may not see again ! Yet sing thy song : there answereth Deep in me a voice which saith : ' ' The gorse upon the tivilit donvn The English loam so sunset broivn The hoived pities and the sheep-bells'' clamour The ivet, lit lane and the yelloiv-hammer, The orchard and the chaffinch song Only to the Brave belong. And he shall Jose their joy for aye If their price he cannot pay. Who shall Jind them dearer far Enriched by blood after long ivar." 127 128 NATURE WORSHIPPERS In some form or other this thought has occurred to all our soldier poets — that the bird-song and wild flowers of their green island, the very sea- fenced garden of the whole wide world, are the heritage of valour and in some sense its re- ward. The " conscientious objector " who became a combatant on the score that he was ashamed of hearing the cuckoo and doing nothing, must have had a glimmering of this great truth in his momentarily-darkened soul. Foreign critics, how- ever, fail to understand how the Englishman's pro- found patriotism finds its best expression in what are really acts of nature-worship — worship of the various and benign Nature that inhabits this fair and fortunate island. And so they go on calling us a nation of shop-keepers, with whom commercial interest is the over-ruling motive — because, forsooth, our love of country is" so deeply rooted in our hearts that no lip-service can do full justice to it. They say What do they say ? Let them say. Patriotism as nature-worship has its highest fulfilment in the works and days of John and Hugh Charlton, the two sons of a distinguished artist, Mr John Charlton of Knightsbridge and Newcastle-on-Tyne. Both of them were keen and indefatigable students of bird-life ; they studied the beautiful winged creatures of this island-sanctu- ary with the intelligence and industry shown by Henri Fabre in his investigations of insect-life. Each had a great tenderness for the small, innocent lives, which they lived to understand, and they were quite free from the mania to go out and kill something, which is still far too common among so-called sportsmen. They would sooner \\it.. Mu.a' ,ii> _ V Vi^ i^ SKETCHES BY UVCM VAUCHAN CHARLTON HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 129 use pencil or paint-brush than a shot-gun, and as each of them inherited his father's artistic ability, their many character-sketches of birds con- stitute a fascinating record of their studies and one which is a permanent addition to our knowledge of wild life. It was the living creatures they were interested in ; not the small dead bodies to which the elder brother, a taxidermist of genius, took such infinite pains to restore the vivid semblance of life. When war was declared they lost not a moment in responding to the call to arms. They had the happiness of leading men, brave and untiring Northern folk, to whom they were united by a mutual love of open-air sport and many another tie of true neighbourliness. They were devoted to their men, who returned their devotion and had the fullest confidence in their leadership. They both fell in action and are buried in France, where their graves are especially visited — who can doubt it ? — by the small winged pilgrims whose '' tiny foot-steps print the vernal ground," to quote from the beautiful stanza which Gray left out of his Elegy in the second edition. I Hugh Vaughan Charlton was born in London on April 10, 1884, and was educated at Aldenham School. Even as a boy he had keen powers of open-air observation, and as time went on he proved himself possessed of a fine sense of colour and a really wonderful gift for drawing and sketching. His father was at first unwilling that he should adopt art as his profession, well knowing I30 NATURE WORSHIPPERS that many are called but few chosen in that perilous pursuit. Passionately fond of country life as he was, he decided to make farming his metier^ and for a time he studied practical agriculture at farms near Castle Carroch (in Cumberland) and on the Solway. But the artist whose art is a form of nature- worship could not be suppressed in him — most of his time there was spent m making natural history observations and painting the birds, animals, and scenery of Cumberland and the Solway country. Eventually his father allowed him to follow his bent, and he studied painting and drawing at Newcastle-on-Tyne, Edinburgh and London. The \/ork he left behind shows rare talent, and his choice of a profession was fully justified by what was seen of it at the Royal Academy and various Provincial Exhibitions, " The Home of the Dipper," which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 191 2, bearing witness to his keen craftsmanship and pro- found knowledge of the habits and habitations of Nature's pensioners in our little island wildernesses. Had he lived, he must have won a high place among the painters who find their subjects in the inexhaustible book of the English countryside — ubi cor^ ibi thesaurus is their motto, and their work is patriotism in terms of line and colour! Thanks to their father's kindness 1 am able to give reproductions of the wonderful drawings in which these two brothers have interpreted the very character of the birds they observed with so much loving kindness. They were devoted to one another and to their father who, owing to the early death of their mother, had brought them up from childhood. Their notes and observations formed a common fund of nature lore ; no distinction of THE CORMORANT A STUDY FROM LIFE BY HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 131 meum and tuiim was ever drawn In their joint records ; and some of the elder brother's notes and writings are inckided among the younger's. But here is a charming word-picture of Solway birds from Hugh's notes : — ^ I go for a walk along the shore. The tide is far out, and the rays of the sun are glinting on the flat, wet sands through which the oozy Wampool meanders. Dotted over these are white objects which sit perfectly still by the edge of the stream or pools. These are common and black-headed gulls ; they are having a rest from feeding, and seem to see something more in the water into which they gaze than their own reflections. Perhaps they are thinking of the pleasures and trials of the past breeding season, and are looking at the same sights they saw there. In this respect they are like the stately heron, which stands alone far out by the edge of the tide, but he has some set purpose in view. . . . Not thirty yards in front three dotteras are running about, but do not wait for me, and are soon skimming away over the sand. A curlew is flying over, calling " curlee, curlee." This seems to be a different call to the call that I heard in early spring far away in the Cumberland hills ; then the call was cheerful and full of love, but now it is a melancholy cry, a cry which startles one, when heard on a dark night, while groping one's way over the flats coming from evening service at church ; it makes one think some spirit is calling. From a depression in the sands a small flock of dunlins rise, and flying past, settle some 200 yards in front, where they immediately begin to feed. The oyster catchers and ringed dotteras breed here, and when I approached, several rose, and flying round, kept up a continual whistling, but I cannot find any eggs. I count twenty shelduck sitting in a row on the wet sand. Two oyster catchers rise up calling loudly and circling round very fast ; one flies slowly in front of me for about 30 yards with its wings stretched full out, pretending to be wounded, thus showing they have eggs or young near. As I walk they become more and more excited. One suddenly makes a rush at me, and when close to, swoops upwards over my head. ... As I pass an old shooting punt drawn up on shore, I think of its work next winter. I seem to see it gliding slowly up to a huge flock of barnacle geese floating lazily on the water, with old Tom Jackson lying full length in it with his huge old gun pointing over its bow. I hear the crash as the fatal 132 NATURE WORSHIPPERS weapon is discharged, and see the commotion among the geese as they rise up, leaving some of their number floundering about in the water in their death throes. Many people have seen such sights in the watery fastnesses of the circuit of the English coast-Hne — but few indeed know even the names of the birds that inhabit there, much less their manners and customs, which vary slightly from place to place. Is it not better thus to study Hfe between the sun and sea than to dissect some poor, pathetic body of death in a laboratory ? Henri Fabre compares the latter work — the science that brings fine salaries and letters lining up after one's name — with the slicing of carrots by his housekeeper to make a modest dish which is not always a success. But the academic scientists are like Drover Dingdong's sheep, which followed the ram Panurge had maliciously thrown overboard, and one after another leapt nimbly into the sea. There is more true science, surely, in the field notes of Hugh and John Charlton, naturalists and sportsmen ; for they studied instinct and intelligence in the living creature, and it is the problems which cluster about these matters which must now be solved if we would get a nearer and clearer understanding of the high mystery of the unfolding of intelligence on this planet. When war thundered out of a sky that had seemed cloudless a little while before, both these brothers — the artist and the naturalist — at once sacrificed all they were, all they might have been, to the nation's need. Hugh was studying in Edinburgh at the time, and at once joined the O.T.C. of the Armstrong College at Newcastle-on- Tyne (where he had once been a pupil), and in HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 133 August 19 15 he received a commission in the 7th Northumberland Fusihers. He was among friends and neighbours known, and his first and last thought, in training and at the front, was for the welfare of his men. He went to France with a draft of his Regiment in March 19 16, and was almost immediately ordered into the trenches, where he was in the thick of the fighting until June 24th, when he was killed by a trench mortar near Whytschaete in Flanders. His death was all the more tragical because he had just received an appointment, in which his artistic genius would have had full play. Those who know how France has used some of her artist officers can guess the nature of the new work which had chosen him. How shockingly we have squandered the special gifts of our young officers in this War! Yet Hugh Charlton was well content to die amiong the home folk who had known him so long and saw in him a kind of elder brother. His letters from the Front are pithy yet pictur- esque records of incessant "strafing" at a critical point of the British line. It is easy to read between the lines of a soldierly narrative, which is a fusillade of short sentences, what he was to his " grand lads " and what they were to him. He hears that a sentry, an elderly man, who had been knocked down by a sandbag during a terrific bombardment (we were still out-gunned) had never left his post, and he hastens to headquarters to report the man's devotion in the hope he would be recommended for the D.C.M. He is constantly caring for the wounded under fire and bringing them into safety. Shrapnel hits his " tin hat," and makes it ring like 134 NATURE WORSHIPPERS a bell. " All the men rush to me," he writes, " when a strafe is on, and you would have been amused to see old Hugh with one on each arm, both mad— one, quite, with shell shock. Yester- day I had a devil of a job to get them away, they clung to me the more — I joke with the men when they are shelling, it keeps them up. Come on, Newcastle ! Play up ! " The figure of a true soldier, full of old, cold courage and cheery all the time, emerges clearly from his brief, breathless, workaday letters. These letters are literature cleared for action ; I wish I had space to quote them in full. And, though soldiering is his one preoccupa- tion, the artist and the naturalist and the critic (so severe on his own work) refuse to be suppressed. He has an eye for every living thing — Lean-visaged beast in dingy coat Or bird no bigger than a mote — which comes into or about the trenches. He hears a nightingale (at 3.45 A.m.) and sees him sitting on a fence near a communication trench. The calling of cuckoos is noted ; so also pheasants near at hand, and " rats like dogs," and the first swallows flying, and a single pied wagtail close to his dug-out, feeding in a shell hole. He sees the prettiest little chestnut, in an old cart, he has ever seen, exactly like one his father had painted. And he observes that Landseer's picture of Wellington at Waterloo is very real in its treatment of the landscape. He is all ears and eyes and will-power, ready at a moment's call. Having read his letters, one hardly needs to learn from his Colonel's letters (which describes his burial on a beautiful summer evening in a very pretty French landscape) that all, both officers and JOHN MACKAKI.AN CHARLTOX (CAP PAIN, 2IST NOKTHUMliERI.AM) FUSII.IKRS, 2ND TYNEsiDK scorrisH HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 135 men, had a very great regard for him and that he was marked for rapid promotion. His grave is guarded by a permanent cross set up by his battalion. So hved gallantly and died gloriously a devout lover of our Lady of Nature, a great painter in the making, and a complete Englishman of the North Country breed which hates all shams and " easy options " and is unsurpassed for sticking it out in a forlorn hope. II John Macfarlan Charlton was educated at Uppingham, where he was in the Cadet Corps, and well liked by both masters and boys. He was a born naturalist, with a mastery of descriptive writing which adds greatly to the fascination of his field notes. If he had been spared to continue his studies, he must have made a great name as an ornithologist. He fell in action at La Boisselle on July I, 1 9 16, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his birthday, so that he did not live long enough to make his mark as a leading authority on the subject to which he was so passionately devoted. But he had already shown himself an adept in open-air observation. As quite a small boy he won a special prize for an illustrated essay on The Birds of the Fame Islands sent in for the John Hancock prize of the Natural History Society of Northumberland. In 1 9 10 he won a special bronze medal given by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (Public Schools Competition). In 191 2 he wrote The Birds of South-east Northumberland^ which first appeared in the Zoologist^ and was afterwards published as a pamphlet, with map and illustrations. In 19 1 3 his Notes on Norwegian Birds appeared 136 NATURE WORSHIPPERS in Countryside^ and was republished as a separate paper. He also supplied British Birds with a number of interesting notes (beginning with Vol. IV.), and wrote numerous short articles for other journals. He was a most skilful and artistic taxi- dermist, his methods of securing a natural and life- like posture being " equal even to those of John Hancock" than which no higher compliment could be paid. He worked in words as his brother worked in paint, and his records of bird-life against the spacious background of land or sea and sky are literary masterpieces of a very rare order. Even as a small boy he would recline for hours and watch a bird and its movements, with glasses if necessary, and make notes and sketches of every- thing it did. From his tenth year onwards he would study the structure, anatomy, and plumage of birds, making drawings of the various parts. The follow- ing little story shows how his ruling passion killed the sense of discomfort even in boyhood. He was staying with a boy friend in a house on the Northumberland moors, and happening to hear a bird call in the cold, wet grey dawn, he rushed out in his night-shirt to watch. Two hours later he returned, drenched and shivering, after lying out in the dewy heather all the time. Mr Duncan, the well-known taxidermist of Newcastle-on-Tyne, taught him how to skin and stuff and set up birds, and he was thus able to preserve many of the innumerable specimens he collected. His tenderness for all quaint winged lives was part of his very being. In one of his notes he tells us how he accidentally destroyed a dipper's nest with the eggs nearly hatched out, and he adds : " What a lovely day ! But I cannot enjoy it. I £ Xs \' X 15^ 41 '■; ' -0 ^i p S '/-i^f^jM ■^^-^^■.^.^-^mi^i^ 4 i' AN IMPRESSION OF JOHN MACFARl-AN CHARLTON BY HIS liKOTHER HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 137 feel as though I had committed a crime against my birds." Many of his notes were made in England and Scotland — but the majority are records of what he saw and heard, yes, and felt, at Hepplewoodside in Northumberland, at Sandisdyke in Cumberland, and at Cullercoats in Northumberland, where he lived with his family for many years, and every- body knew him. Any uncommon bird found by the boys and fishermen was usually brought to him. The workers, especially the miners, in the parts of Northumberland where he lived knew him well, and would do anything for him, and he was very much attached to them all. Many of these kindly neigh- bours were afterwards in his company of the Tyne- side Scottish Regiment ; so that, when he went to the front, he lived and died among his nearest and dearest friends. In one of his last letters from the firing-line he wrote to his father : " Look after everyone for my sake." He knew all the traditions and history and folklore of the countryside in which he lived, and this knowledge was another bond of sympathy between himself and the good neighbours who took so much interest in his work and under- stood it so well. He was never so happy as when wandering off with his dogs, " Tiny " and " Peter," on a natural history expedition. He would set out in all weathers, even when the falls were dangerous with snow and ice. The day before his family left Hepplewoodside in 1905 he went off to observe the birds and wild goats in the hills, and his father and others set out in search of him, the uplands being very slippery and dangerous in places. The search parties were recalled by the blowing of a coach horn from the house below ; his father knew that he was the only one there who could play it. His daring and 138 NATURE WORSHIPPERS endurance, his love of country life and country sport, his neighbourliness and cheery manner and open looks and sturdy uprightness, endeared him to the hardy, honest race to which the lines of Edwin Waugh, though written to a hddle-tune in the Lancashire Pennines far to the south, apply very well : — They've wick and warm at work and play Whatever may befall ; The primest breed o' English lads, Good luck attend 'em all ! Such reciprocal respect and affection were destined to be a part of the universal camaraderie between officers and men which has made the British Army a thing apart in history and utterly unconquerable. This young naturalist describes not only the birds and beasts he sees, but also the scenery of their environment, sky and land and sea, and all the grace of line and glory of colour. Here are a few brief excerpts from the series of note-books which he began in his early boyhood : [1904, at Hcpplewoodside, on his way to a grouse drive with his father.] There is a sharp breeze blowing, and the heather gets blown up and down, and looking down the hillside you would almost think you were on the sea, for the heather, as each gust of wind comes, looks just like water running along the hillside. A willow wren is calling in the woods below, lots of plovers are flying about in the fields low down. A wren is calling, and at almost every step up gets a meadow pipit. Large numbers of skylarks are flying about, and upon the hillside a carrion crow is calling. Two ravens are Hying over the moor, high up •, they fly almost in a line with each other, when one turns the other does the same; they keep about the same distance apart all the time. Suddenly I hear a buzzing sound and up come the grouse, up 'they go over the butts, bang, bang, bang, then some more. . , . Hearing a rabbit squealing, I hastened up and saw a stoat killing one. I ran to it, but was too late, the stoat jumped off and popped into a drain, the rabbit was dead. Looking round o < u r u O O p o ^^ HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 139 I saw a curious thing. Several rabbits were squatting around greatly frightened. Just as I looked up they dashed oft^ to their holes. [1904, December.] From a bush near at hand comes the call of a bullfinch, and in a moment or two out hops a female not five yards from me, and bending down touches the water with her bill and away . . . presently there is a buzzing sound, and a flock of hundreds of greenfinches fly overhead. They swerve and settle in a big fir tree, where they all sit, facing the wind, and calling noisily, covering all the topmost branches. They come every evening to roost at the same time, 3*45 ^-M- j gradually they drop down in small parties of ten or eleven to roost in the bushes, and after much squabbling and fluttering all is quiet, and nobody would think that so many small bodies were slumbering within a few feet of them. ' [1905, January.] When I wake up and look out of my window, I see a glorious sky, every cloud is a beautiful orange pink, and the sky a pure turquoise blue. Although this is very beautiful, yet it is "the shepherd's warning" — soon the clouds change to a yellowish pink and then to a dark purplish blue-grey, then all this clears away, and grey and white clouds are seen on a blue background. But look ! What is that glorious gleam of gold through the trees to the east ? It is the sun ! Hail ! O glorious sun, rise in all thy splendour ! I set out for a long walk up the Kenshaw Burn with my two terriers. Tiny and Peter. The air is crisp and cold, with a gentle breeze blowing, and a hoody crow is sailing high above us. Bullfinches rise from the burn where they have been bathing and drinking, and sit preening themselves on the birch trees. Flocks of tits are feeding on the seeds of the birch trees, and hanging in all sorts of attitudes. The kok-kok-kok of a grouse sounds as he blusters ofl^ from the water, and a hen pheasant rises, a lesser redpole flies from the ground and watches me, a creeper is climbing up a tree calling "cheep, cheep," and the wrens are singing merrily. We found a squirrel's store-house in a hole in a tree full of acorns. A moor hen rises from the water — looking under the root I see a little red beak showing just above the surface of the water. Three snipe fly from a small marsh, and a heron rose and flew slowly off. A kestrel is hovering above a hill in the distance, changing his position every now and again, and a herring gull is sailing over the Coquet as we return. The greenfinches are collecting to roost in the garden when out flashes a Merlin hawk from the beech tree, throwing the finches into confusion ; however, he I40 NATURE WORSHIPPERS sees me just as he is about to seize a victim, wheels about, and flies away. [1906, at Sandisdyke.] Saw a plover chasing a crow and black-back gull away, and in a ploughed field a male plover swooping at a cock pheasant and hitting his tail, first he swooped from one side and then from the other, and the pheasant had to turn round and face him every time till he (the pheasant) got tired and ran off slowly. [1906, August : Sandisdyke.] A whole brood of pied wagtails have come to-day to feed on the lawn, or to be fed, as the young ones cannot, or will not, feed themselves. The father and mother feed the five hungry full-grown birds. They take them each, one at a time, out on the lawn ; the mother takes one while the father takes another ; when each has had enough they are sent back to the roof where the other youngsters are sitting and exchanged for others. When being fed the young bird follows the old bird about, cheeping ; when the old bird has got enough food (insects) in its beak, it runs to the young one and drops them into its mouth, generally in two mouthfuls. [1907, May : same place.] To-day I saw a very funny bit of bird life. A female thrush was sitting on the lawn, watching for any worms which might be tempted out by the wet weather. Presently another thrush, a male, flew out from the laurels and settled beside her. She took no notice of him, but he took a great deal of her, and seemed to be gazing admiringly at her. Then he began to sing. He puffed out his feathers and poured out his heart to her. She replied by making a half-playful rush at him, but he returned again, and walked round and round singing to her. This was not to go on for long ; for, with a rush, a brown form dashed from the laurels and made straight for the showy songster. There was a scuffle, a few screeches, and away went the admirer, closely followed by the rightful owner of the little hen. Soon the victor returned, and, mounting the old beech tree, he sang the song of victory. All this time the little hen had been hopping about unconcernedly, perhaps she was rather ashamed of herself. [1910, Kinghorn.] I have seen the sun set behind a long ridge of the Cotswolds on a cold evening in early November. I stood at the bottom of a valley and looked across. The sky is clear but for the haze of a frost over the horizon, much rain had fallen the day before, and the small stream in the valley in front was flooded. The water reflected the light of the sky. "Woods covered the ridge before the sun, and they stood out black and sharply defined against the bright colour of the sky behind -, bright orange red lit up a single cloud over the horizon. The z o D < ■J y M < '■S ffi — o HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 141 air was crisp and chilly and silent, except for the calls of many birds. The short note of the bullfinch came from a hedge close by, and a wagtail flew chirping over. Three tiny specks of clouds floated above the horizon turned to golden atoms by the sun. A railway ran before, and suddenly all the peace and quiet was broken by a train rushing by. I heard it coming. Gradu- ally the sound increased nearer and nearer, and then it was on me and gone. In the ploughed fields in front, heaps of bean- stalks are burning, and the smoke rising up in thin columns. From the rookery in the village comes the noisy clamour of the rooks returning to roost. A thresher is buzzing from a home- stead close by, and the throbs seem like the pulse of some great creature. The pollard willow trunks are reflected clearly in the placid waters of the stream, and all is at rest but man. On the air comes the rollicking song of a labourer returning home, and I awoke from my musing. These are some of the best living pictures of the infinitely various countryside I have ever seen, and they show a power of wide and yet minute observa- tion, combined with a gift of simple and direct style, which would have given the writer fame equal to that of Richard Jefferies and better earned, for the latter was sometimes hopelessly astray in his facts. When war broke out, he at once gave up the work that was so much a part of his very being. Towards the end of 1914 he received a commission in the Northumberland Fusiliers, and was soon pro- moted to captain in the 21st N.F. (2nd Tyneside Scottish). He went to the Front early in 191 6. His letters from France show that his first and last thought was the welfare of his men, whose courage and cheerfulness are constantly being described in the most touching terms. " I simply love them," he writes, " and I think they care for me." He is happy to think he knows them all individually, though this intimacy makes the frequent casualties heart-rending beyond words — each fallen comrade seems a part of himself. He notes their quaint 142 NATURE WORSHIPPERS sayings at every turn of the long day's work. " Breakfast, smoke begins to rise, not a shot is fired, and the smell of bacon frying wafts from the Hun trenches. We hear the Huns laughing and joking ; then a voice is heard. ' How are you this morn- ing, Jock ? ' 'All reet, how's yorsell?' * Well. Don't you wish you was back on the Quayside, Jock ? ' ' Yes ! Put up your head, then ! ' An hour later the crack of Hun rifles is heard again. A shell explodes thirty yards off and hits a man, while a barber is shaving somebody near where the captain is standing. ' Come along,' he said, * we shift into the next bay.' They did so, and I heard the fellow shaving say to the other when he jumped at the next shell : ' Keep your head still, or Pll save the next un the trouble of knocking ye oot.' " He has a great respect for the enemy's intelligence. " The Hun is no fool, a factor little considered by our people, and one they'd be wise to learn. I learnt a lot in the last fourteen days, and I have great admiration for his brains and discipline." He is quite happy to be where he is ; the hateful, the unthinkable lot is that of those who ought to be fighting and are safe at home. Now and again his letters, like his brother's, note the presence of certain birds or the appearance of a landscape. He does not scoff at " brass hats " ; he remarks in one letter how well and how hard the staff officers work. But he says little or nothing about his own doings, and it was from brother officers that his father learnt the gallant work in repelling an attack on his trench a few weeks before his death (he was shot through the head) on July ist (a week after his brother had fallen), which caused him to be recommended for the Military Cross. HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 143 He was killed in the great attack at La Boisselle while leading his company against the third line of German trenches, having already assisted in taking the first and second. He had been doing sentry duty that morning, so that all his men might have a short much-needed rest. He was in command of the first wave, which was composed of one platoon from each company. The Tyneside Scottish went on till they penetrated the fourth line ; their losses were very heavy. The manner of his death is best told in a letter written to his father by Blacklidge, his orderly : — *' You mention your son's death j it gives me much pain when I have got to talk about it ; it really was the heaviest blow I have had all my life, one that I shall never forget. Your son, sir, my late master, was more like a father to me than a master, and I may tell you I thought there was not another man in this world like him. At least I have never come across one. I was with your son when he died, and if I may never see any- thing again, I saw one of the bravest men that ever was. He died a hero's death. Your son dropped with his head on my knees. I spoke to him three times, I got no answer, and then he just looked up at me, and put his hand down my face, and said, * Is that you, Joe .'" which was the name he called me by, ' for God's sake, sonny, push on,' and died at that. I shall avenge his death till the last." He was shot through the brain, and it is mar- vellous that he ever spoke again. But a miracle was wrought by the devotion to his men and the sense of duty which were his ruling ideals. Many other letters were written by members of his company in praise of this cool and courageous officer who was a father to his men, and will never be forgotten in Northumberland. PIONEERS, O PIONEERS I. ALAN SEEGER Jeune legionnaire enthousiaste et energique, ainiant passionnement la France. Engage volontaire au debut des hostilites, a fait preuve au cours de la campagne d'un entrain et d'un courage admirablcs — Gloricusenient tombe la 4 Juillet 1916. Citcition a fordre du jour dc la Division du Maroc, 25 Decembre 19 16. ALAN SEEGER was one of the many young Americans who saw at once that their country must sooner or later enter the War to fight for the world's and its own freedom, or else for ever lose its place in the van- guard of civilization. These were the pioneers of the new spirituality which has passed, in wave after wave of other-worldly illumination, through the whole height and breadth of the United States. Some of them enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force ; others in the Foreign Legion of France ; and a few, forgetting the ancient racine de la rancunc which so long separated the two great English-speaking Powers, have fought and fallen with the "Old Army" of Great Britain in the early days of a victorious forlorn hope. In Alan Seeger's case a personal devotion to France was the immediate motive which prompted him to enlist as soon as the mobilization began. In a letter from the Aisne trenches he explains the urgency of this motive : — 1 have talked with so many of the young volunteers here. Their case is little known, even by the French, yet altogether arresting and appealing. They are foreigners on whom the outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion. But they had stood on the Butte in springtime perhaps, as Julian and Louise stood, and looked out over the myriad twinkling lights of the beautiful city. Paris — mystic, maternal, personified, to whom they owed 144 alan seeger (fokeigx i,e<;ion ok kraxce) ALAN SEEGER 145 the happiest moments of their lives — Paris was in peril. Were they not under a moral obligation, no less binding than that by which their comrades were bound legally, to put their breast between her and destruction ? Without renouncing their nationality, they had yet chosen to make their homes here beyond any other city in the world. Did not the benefits and blessings they had received point them a duty that heart and conscience could not deny ? The old haunts were deserted, Paul and Auguste, and all the other good companions in work and play, were gone. Some day they would return with the light of victory about their heads — not all, but some. And how, in that day of garnered glory, could a shirker face the inevitable smiling question : *' And where have you been all the time, and what have you been doing ? " Even if not so intended, the very question would be a reproach. Moreover, those who joined the Foreign Legion were conscious that one of the great turning- points in history had been reached, that War had once more become the natural order of things, that every living soul must in the end take part in the long-premeditated struggle to a decision between men and Germans. So Alan Seeger goes on to say in his famous letter : — Face to face with a situation like that a man becomes reconciled, justifies easily the part he is playing, and comes to understand, in a universe where logic counts for so little and sentiment and the impulse of the heart for so much, the inevitableness and naturalness of war. Suddenly the world is up in arms. All mankind takes sides. The same faith that made him surrender himself to the impulses of normal living and of love, forces him now to make himself the instrument through which a greater force works out of its inscrutable ends through the impulses of terror and repulsion. And with no less a sense of moving in harmony with a universe where masses are in continual conflict and new combinations are engendered out of eternal collisions, he shoulders arms and marches forth with haste. K 146 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS Poets are prophets of to-day, and this sudden vision of the meaning of the ordeal of battle, which had come upon a world at leisure and luxurious, would have placed Alan Seeger in the hierarchy of poets and prophets, even if he had never written another line. But, as it happened, he was a writer of power and distinction, both in verse and prose, and so will be remembered as an interpreter of the new age of decision, a confessor of its fresh spiritu- ality, with Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell and Charles Sorley and the rest of the Sidneian fellowship of our soldier poets. Their poems are star-shells that light up the firmament of a century, and none, not even the great artists that shall see the world's passion in retrospect, and write of the vanished storm " in long carved line and painted parable," can ever displace them in the re- membrance of mankind. The Hosts, by Alan Seeger, is in its way as memorable a vindication of the necessity of war as Julian Grenfell's Into Battle. In these fine lines War is presented as an august process of Nature, a cosmical struggle which is to decide the issue between men and Germans : — These are the men that are moved no more By the will to traffic and grasp and store And ring with pleasure and wealth and love The circles that self is the center of; But they are moved by the powers that force The sea forever to ebb and rise, * That hold Arcturus in his course, ^ And marshal at noon in tropic skies The clouds that tower on some snow-capped chain And drift out over the peopled plain. They are big with the beauty of cosmic things. Mark how their columns surge ! They seem To follow the goddess with outspread wings That points toward Glory, the soldier's dream. ALAN SEEGER 147 With bayonets bare and flags unfurled, They scale the summits of the world And fade on the farthest golden height In fair horizons full of light. He does not sentimentalize over his shattered corse, and the terror and beauty of his self-sacrifice, but manfully — as Charles Sorley did — accepts the iron necessity as part of the laws of Nature (which men call duty) whereby the ancient heavens are fresh and strong : — Friend or foe, it shall matter nought ; This only matters, in fine : we fought. For we were young and in love or strife Sought exultation and craved excess : To sound the wildest debauch in life We staked our youth and its loveliness. Let idlers argue the right and wrong And weigh what merit our causes had. Putting our faith in being strong — Above the level of good and bad — For us, we battled and burned and killed Because evolving Nature willed, And it was our pride and boast to be The instruments of Destiny. There was a stately drama writ By the hand that peopled the earth and air And set the stars in the infinite And made night gorgeous and morning fair, And all that had sense to reason knew That bloody drama must be gone through. Alan Seeger was born in New York on '22nd June 1888; his father and mother belonged to the old New England families which still hold the spiritual leadership of the United States. His childhood was spent in Staten Island (the glass ball in the bottle neck of the most wonderful harbour in the world), whence he could see all day long the ships of all nations passing through the Narrows, the gateway of half this planet. In the foreground Robbins 148 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS Reef Lighthouse, in the middle distance the majestical Liberty, and in the background the vast curves of Brooklyn Bridge and the colossal sky-piercing buildings of new New York — nowhere in the whole wide world is the everlasting business of seafaring " lawful occasions " shown in so romantic and spacious a setting ! Alan, his brother and his sister, knew the names of all the liners and warships passing out of the Atlantic " lane " in a never- ending procession ; the walls of their nursery were covered with rude yet faithful drawings of the shipping they watched in such vast variety. Had he lived, to return home with the embattled youth of his own land, he would have made pictures of the stirring, tumultuous sea-scapes, of Staten Island. Toujours tious revefions a nos anciens amours^y especially if we be poetic sons of modern America, in whom the inexhaustible spirit of Walt Whitman still goes marching on. When he was ten years old his family returned to New York, where he attended the Horace Mann School. The clangorous life of the pent city's life, which ever grows skyward, entered into his soul ; his greatest joy was to follow the rushing fire- engines which are seen every day in her street- canons. In 1900 came a new migration which finally determined the bent of his poetic gift — henceforward, like the sunflower, his heart sought the sun of living and followed it from rising to setting and blossomed in sub-tropic luxuriance. His family went to live in Mexico City, where the silver far-listening peaks of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl look down on its vast amphitheatre and the gentle, valiant shade of Montezuma is still visible to the eyes of a poetic soul — and by its side ALAN SEEGER 149 the armoured ghost of Cortez, whose cold and calculated cruelty was a prototype of Teutonic Rightfulness. The two years spent in the wonder- city, broken by visits in the chilly winter season to Cuernavaca in the tierra templada below, were unforgettable years; they opened in Alan's young heart a well-spring of delight from within that flooded all his after-days with a romantic joyousness in which the Puritan in him is overwhelmed. It was, none the less, a time of keen and incessant study. The children had a tutor whom they loved and respected, and their taste for good literature, especially poetry, ripened speedily under his kindly and cultured influence. " One of our keenest pleasures," wrote a member of the family, "was to go in a body to the old book-shops, and on Sunday morning to the ' Thieves ' market, to rummage for treasures, and many were the Elzevirs and worm-eaten, vellum-bound volumes from the old convent libraries that fell into our hands." A home magazine was brought out at irregular intervals; it was called T^he Prophet^ and Alan, who was the sporting editor, soon made it the vehicle of his first essays in poetry and criticism. It is a pity that the copies of this curious periodical were all lost in the wreck of the Merida. Mexico gave Alan Seeger's literary gift its definite orientation. Before he went to Paris, to make literature his vocation, he lived in many other environments of natural beauty. He was sent to school at Tarrytown at the age of fourteen — to a college with a spacious domain of meadow and woodland set upon a noble hill above the Hudson River, which links together with its gleaming flood many episodes of scenery that I50 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS suggest amplified versions of the famous view of the Thames from Richmond Hill. He spent one of his vacations in the green, glorious ambuscades of the New Hampshire hills, and another in that Earthly Paradise called Southern California, where the habit of worry slips off of its own accord, and you can live between sun and sea in a sort of spiritual altogether. Now and again he returned to Mexico for a brief visit ; always to find the journey an entrancing experience, touched with a keen emotion of home-coming. There is no more delightful tour in the Western Hemisphere, whether you travel by land or by sea, for the first part of the journey, from the clangorous, working- cities of North — and the romance of days gone by begins to repossess the traveller's soul as he fares further: " First to pass under the pink walls of Morro Castle into the wide lagoon of Havana ; then to cross the Spanish Main to Vera Cruz ; then after skirting the giant escarpment of Orizaba, to crawl zigzagging up the almost precipitous ascent that divides the tierra templada from the tierra fria ; and then to speed through the endless agave- fields of the upland haciendas to Mexico City and home." The glowing colours of his Mexican experiences, unfading in fond retrospect, were always ready on the mind's palette in the years of exile that followed. In 1906 he entered Harvard — the Oxford of the Western world — and served a joyous apprenticeship not only to Litera- ture, but also to the art of living in an atmosphere of eager youth, where discussions de omni scibili never cease for a moment. Pie was one of the editors of the Harvard Monthly, and he made many deft translations from Dante and Ariosto — ALAN SEEGER 151 all of them touched with that Italianate fire, so seldom achieved by Northern scholars, the secret of which he had acquired in his lofty tropical home. Mexico was to him all that the Italian enlighten- ment, warmth as well as light, was to the old Elizabethan poets. Mexico had set his imagina- tion on fire and intensified his dreaming to vision. Two years of unhappy hesitation at New York shall be passed over. Finally, his parents allowed him to settle in Paris, where he lived as a disciple of Henri Murger in cleanly wantonness, finding innumerable friends among the artists and students of the Latin Quarter and yet never losing touch with the more secret and sedate society which is the true, lasting-ripe realization of French ideals. There he toiled joyously to find himself, never allowing his ambition to be blunted by self-indulgence; there he wrote his poems of Mexico and of Paris, painting either set of impressions with the same glowing palette. It is in these poems that the true story of his various lives is to be read — you hold his heart in your hand as you read them. Sometimes, though seldom, he takes a story from the dreadful history of the Mexican conquest, and illuminates it. As in The Torture of Cuauhte- moc^ a blank-verse rendering of the picture familiar to all visitors to Mexico City. The Aztec lords sit stripped of their feathered robes, in the deep dungeon on short stone settles sloping to the head, and under their projecting feet are heaped the red coals. The bearded Spaniards, in darkly gleaming armour, fan the braziers and put the question : " Where is the gold hidden ? " to the silent sufferers. But one of them, his chained feet lifted up and with quivering 152 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS lips, turns a look of wild appeal on the King. But the tortured King has no mercy for the other's young anguish : — He who had seen his hopes made desolate, His realm despoiled, his early crown deprived him, And watched while Pestilence and Famine piled His stricken people in their reeking doors. Whence glassy eyes looked out and lean brown arms Stretched up to greet him in one last farewell As back and forth he paced along the streets With words of hopeless comfort — what was this That one should weaken now ? He weakened not. Whate'er was in his heart, he neither dealt In pity nor in scorn, but, turning round, ^ Met that racked visage with his own unmoved. Bent on the sufferer his mild calm eyts. And while the pangs smote sharper, in a voice. As who would speak not all in gentleness Nor all disdain, said : " Yes ! And am / then Upon a bed of roses ? " But it is mostly the un-storied joyousness of open-air life in Mexico that draws the soul out of him, so that it falls in happy tears of an encardined ecstasy. As in An Ode to ^Antares : — Star of the South that now through orient mist At nightfall ofFTampico or Belize Greetest the sailor rising from those seas Where first in me, a fond romanticist. The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles — Thou lamp of the swart lover to his tryst, O'er planted acres at the jungle's rim Reekmg with orange-flour and tuberose. Dear to his eyes thy ruddy splendor glows Among the palms where beauty waits for him; Bliss too thou bringest to our greening North, Red scintillant through cherry-blossom rifts. Herald of summer-heat, and all the gifts And all the joys a summer can bring forth ALAN SEEGER 153 Be thou my star, for I have made my aim To follow loveliness till autumn-strown Sunder the sinews of this flower-like frame As rose-leaves sunder when the bud is blown. Like Rupert Brooke, he seeks beauty first and finds truth by the way ; and if he lacks the EngHsh poet's swift sympathy with the intent of the old Elizabethan master-pieces and power of reproducing the various accents of their young age, there is per- haps a deeper colour and a more thrilling music in his slower and more statuesque verse. In his "Lines written in a Volume of the Comtesse de Noailles," the fascination of Mexico in remembrance brings him heart to heart with the passionate poetess in whom, as in him, Occident and Orient are so wondrously commingled : — Be my companion under cool arcades That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades White belfries burn in the blue tropic air. Lie near me in dim forests where the croon Of wood-doves sounds and moss-banked water flows, Or musing late till the midsummer moon Breaks through some ruined abbey's empty rose. Sweetest of those to-day whose pious hands Tend the sequestered altar of Romance, Where fewer offerings burn, and fewer kneel, Pour there your passionate beauty on my heart, And, gladdening such solitudes, impart How sweet the fellowship of those who feel ! " Le Grand Poete," as the Vicomte Melchior de Vogiie called her in an enduring epigram of criticism, is a sister-in-art indeed of this young American who saw Paris in the tumultuous after-glow of all the passionate lovers that have lived and died in her bright pleasances. London and New York become mere shadows of a magnitude, long or lofty clouds 154 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS on the souFs horizon, as he enters into the intimacies of life in the world's one mistress city, where pos- session is the vanishing-point in every vista : — First, London, for its myriads ; for its height, Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite ; But Paris for the smoothness of the paths That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . . • ••••• Oh, go to Paris. ... In the midday gloom Of some old quarter take a little room That looks off over Paris and its towers From Saint Gervais round to the Emperor's Tomb, — So high that you can hear a mating dove Croon down the chimney from the roof above, See Notre Dame and know how sweet it is To wake between Our Lady and our love. And have a little balcony to bring Fair plants to fill with verdure and blossoming. That sparrows seek, to feed from pretty hands. And swallows circle over in the Spring. There of an evening you shall sit at ease In the sweet month of flowering chestnut-trees, There with your little darling in your arms. Your pretty dark-eyed Manon or Louise. And looking out over the domes and towers That chime the fleeting quarters and the hours. While the bright clouds banked eastward back of them Blush in the sunset, pink as hawthorn flowers, You cannot fail to think, as I have done. Some of life's ends attained, so you be one "Who measures life's attainment by the hours That Joy has rescued from oblivion. Yet even more alluring, he finds, is the comrade- ship of those who seek eternal expressions of Beauty so fast fading in the tiesh, that can become Truth only in the stubborn, lifeless, mediums of the written word, of paint and marble : — ALAN SEEGER 155 " Comment 9a va ! " " Mon vieux ! " "Moncher!" Friends greet and banter as they pass. 'Tis sweet to see among the mass comrades and lovers every- where, A law that's sane, a Love that's free, and men of every birth and blood Allied in one great brotherhood of Art and Joy and Poverty. . . . Yet it is always in a tropical effulgence that he sees Paris — to him a city of tense romance, the star of which is that very star of the South, the passion-pale and still unrequited Antares. By silvery waters in the plains afar Glimmers the inland city like a star, With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze, And burnished domes half seen through luminous haze. And so, rich in the gold of youth that buys all the joyousness of the City of Light, he lived and loved and laboured truly to achieve the quest of Beauty, to catch and hold her for ever in the art that is nearest of all to the art of living. And his career, so far and no further, aptly illustrates Coningsby Dawson's saying in a conversa- tion with the chronicler : " America is Britain Gallicized." Long before the storm broke in violet thunder and a crimson deluge over the whole wide world, he imagined the time would come : — . . . when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides. Little did he guess his poetry was then prophecy. Another and very different Alan Seeger appears in the war letters and war poems he left as his soldier's will to a nation that seemed to hesitate at the place where the road of progress and prosperity divides — 156 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS to the right, the path of honour, to the left, the path of dishonour ending suddenly in an unseen abyss — but was in truth, as we now know, girding up its mighty loins for a deadlier struggle for righteousness than the Civil War. So great a democracy could but move slowly — but, as the sequel shall show, the force thereof is oceanic and irresist- ible as Atlantic rollers, once it is set in motion by a tidal sense of duty. Alan Seeger could not see this dread certainty when in ** A Message to America " he wielded a many-knotted whip of satire, telling his brooding compatriots : — You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard, But your honour ends with your own back yard. He enlisted in the Foreign Legion and went through his training at Rouen and Toulouse, learn- ing in six weeks what the ordinary recruit, in times of peace, acquires in two years. The intensive culture of soldiers was a problem solved almost at once by the keen, practical intelligence of French- men. In October 1 9 14 he was already marching up to the Front through the once immense battle- field, the scene of the wonderful victory of the Marne, the full significance of which was not yet generally realized. But the hopes which he and his fellow-legionaries cherished of a swift and decisive war of manoeuvre were destined to dis- appointment. Letters published in the Neiv York Sun give vivid impressions of the monotonous hard- ships of trench fighting. For the artillery it was " doubtless very interesting," but the men had a poor time of it on their one sou a day : — The winter morning dawns with grey skies and the hoar frost on the fields. His feet are numb, his canteen frozen, but he is not allowed to make a fire. The winter night falls, with ALAN SEEGER 157 its prospect of sentry-duty, and the continual apprehension of the hurried call to arms ; he is not even permitted to light a candle, but must fold himself in his blanket and lie down cramped in the dirty straw to sleep as best he may. How different from the popular notion of the evening campfire, the songs and good cheer. Everybody's chief thought, as the legionaries sat under the orchestral music of the guns (always dominated by the sharp metallic twang of the 75), was how to supplement the regular ration with small, necessary luxuries, especially chocolate. A corporal told him that every man in the company would gladly exchange his rifle for a pot of jam. Sentry-duty, with its moments of exaltation at moon-rise or under a sky full of stars, was a relief to what another New Elizabethan calls the " organized boredom " of modern warfare : — The sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone under the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals itself to him. . . . He thrills with the sense of filling an appointed, necessary place in the conflict of hosts, and, facing the enemy's crest, above which the Great Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has never before known, a kind of companionship with the stars. Compare with this passage the lines of Into Battle^ in which Julian Grenfell says of the soldier : — All the bright company of Heaven Hold him in their high comradeship. The Dog Star and the Sisters Seven Orion's Belt and sworded hip. In the spring and summer following, the Legion was moved about a good deal from sector to sector (as the Higher Command felt for an opportunity of a profitable push) and his letters note the vary- 158 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS ing beauties of French scenery. He has long since made his peace with Death, for he writes to his mother : " Death is nothing terrible after all. It may mean something even more wonderful than life. It cannot possibly mean anything worse to the good soldier." Two months' rest enabled him to realize more keenly the unexampled nobility of France's gigantic effort for victory. He took part in the great offensive in Champagne, which demonstrated the superiority of French moral and technique, but failed in its larger aim of breaking the German line and dissolving the deadlock of trench warfare. The indecisive victory deepens his admiration for the poilu : — If we did not entirely succeed, it was not the fault of the French soldier. He is a better man, man for man, than the German. Anyone who had seen the charge of the Marsouins at Souain would acknowledge it. Never was anything more magnificent. I remember a captain, badly wounded in the leg, as he passed us, borne back on a litter by four German prisoners. He asked us what regiment we were, and when we told him, he cried " Vive la Legion," and kept repeating " Nous les avons en. Nous les avons en." He was suffering, but, oblivious of his wound, was still fired with the en- thusiasm of the assault and all radiant with victory. What a contrast with the German wounded on whose faces was nothing but terror and despair. What is the stimulus in their slogans of " Gott mit uns" and " Flir Konig und Vater- land" beside that of men really fighting in defence of their country .'' Whatever be the force in international conflicts of having justice and all the principles of personal morality on one's side, it at least gives the French soldier a strength that's like the strength of ten against an adversary whose weapon is only brute violence. It is inconceivable that a Frenchman, forced to yield, could behave as I saw German prisoners behave, trembling, on their knees, for all the world like criminals at length overpowered and brought to justice. Such men have to be driven to the assault, or intoxicated. But the Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a passion beside which any of the other forms of experience that are reckoned to make life worth while seem pale in comparison. ALAN SEEGER 159 After Champagne his regiment was sent to the reserve line and did not return to the Front until May of the following year. Part of the interven- ing period he spent in hospital owing to an attack of bronchitis. When after two months' conge de convalescence^ he relieved the monotony of inaction by going out scouting after guard, though such one-man adventures were strictly forbidden. In the course of the first of these expeditions he discovered a burnt rocket-stick planted in the ground, having a bit of the Berliner lageblatt stuck in the' top, to serve as a guide to Boche raiding parties and (perhaps) as a range measure- ment. On another occasion he went as far as the German wire, where he left a card, to show he had called. " It was thrilling work," he wrote to his marraine^ Mrs Weeks, " courting destruction with taunts, with invitations," as Whitman would say. The " horse-sense " or open-air intelligence of the American youth comes out well in these and other perilous episodes. He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decora- tion Day (May 30th) to read his Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France before the statues of Washington and La Fayette. The poem had been written at the request of a Committee of American residents. But his permission did not arrive in time. On June 24th he writes to his marraine^ giving an account of the hardest march he had ever had . . . "20 kilometres through the blazing sun and in a cloud of dust. Something around 30 kilogrammes on the back." Half of the men fell out on the way, but he managed to get in at the finish. This forced marching was an omen of the imminence i6o PIONEERS, O PIONEERS of the great Somme advance. On July 4th, the Legion was ordered to clear the enemy out of the village of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan Seeger was in the first wave, and his company were all but wiped out by the enfilading fire of six hidden machine-guns. He himself went down, wounded in several places. As the successive waves came by he cheered them on and sang an English marching-song. His few gallant war poems are full of the far thunder of great battles ; the vast war sighs in them as the sea in a shell : — Rumours, reverberant, indistinct, remote, Borne from red fields whose martial names have won The power to thrill like a far trumpet-note, — Vic, Vailly, Soupir, Hurtelise, Craonne . . . The last line shows a Miltonic sense of the music abiding in place-names — the jewels of sound, echoes of history caught and imprisoned for ever, which glitter and glimmer everywhere in the map of France. In Champagne^ 19 14-15, of which the Matin gave a translation with the comment, " Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it," he celebrates the noble deeds of the French soldier in the sunny chalk-fields that drank his bright blood so eagerly and hopes for a like immortality : — I love to think that if my blood should be 80 privileged to sink where his has sunk, I shall not pass from Earth entirely, But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk. And faces that the joys of living fill Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer, In beaming cups some spark of me shall still Brim towards the lips that once I held so dear. ALAN SEEGER i6i So shall one coveting no higher plane Than nature clothes in colour and flesh and tone Even from the grave put upward to attain The dreams youth cherished and missed and might have known. In Maktoob he commemorates the death of an Arab in that Legion, which draws together the true lovers of France from the uttermost ends of the world, and tells us how he wrought out of a splinter of the shell that killed him a smooth and bright ring to bear the legend of soldierly fatalism. ..." Maktoob, It is written." But his own epitaph is best expressed in the last strophe of the Ode, a noble piece of poetical architecture built in two days, which other lips than his shall some day read, before the statues named above, in honour of France and all who came from afar to help her in the valleys of decision : — She checked each onset, arduous to stem — Foiled and frustrated them — On those red fields where blow with furious blow Was countered, whether the gigantic fray Rolled by the Meuse or at the Bois Sabot, Accents of ours were in the fierce melee ; And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires. When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound, And on the tangled wires The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops. Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers : — Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops ; Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours. i62 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS II. HARRY BUTTERS LOVE of France drew Alan Seeger into the War. But it was love of England which brought Harry Butters from his busy, joyous home in California to lay down his life for a cause not then his country's own — the cause, as he saw it as soon as ever the War began, of the honour of humanity and all that can be truly called civilization. California is at the world's end to the average Englishman ; at most it is for him a fragment of the unreal estate of manly-adventurous authors where, in the intervals of the pistol's festive popping, the "Forty-niner" heaps gold-bearing gravel into his rocket and Clementine drives her ducklings to the river every morning. Yet — as readers of Gertrude Atherton's novels know very well — the Englishman is better understood and more popular in California than in any other state ; the Californian magnate likes to send his son to an English school and does not " raise hell " if his daughters get engaged to one of her brother's school chums — provided, of course, he does not belong to the ignoble order of remittance men. Why it should be so is hard to say. Perhaps it is because enough of the hasta mahana tradition survives from the days when California was a Spanish Colony to serve as a bond of sympathy with the easy-going islander who is never in a hurry and a flurry and a skurry. Perhaps it is because the English younger son played such a great part in the building-up of that Earthly Paradise in the early fifties, when the voyage from England round Cape Horn was cheaper (both in blood and money) and more expeditious than travelling from the Eastern States harry butters (lieutenant, royal field artillery) Arrival at Stow-on-the-Wold HARRY BUTTERS 163 by the overland route. Perhaps it is because the Californian, Hke the Englishman, lives in one of the world's wise garden-lands and so has a secret conviction that the art of living is of more conse- quence, all said and done, than the science of money-making. All three reasons were suggested by Bret Harte in a conversation I had with him nearly thirty years ago. Harry Butters was the only son of the late Henry Butters of Alta Vista, San Francisco, who had large interests in Californian mines and railways. " His father, so far as one can reconstruct that striking personality," says his biographer, " was a big man, nervous, moody, taciturn ; with the modern American's capacity for great business schemes ; an astonishing executive ability ; a com- pelling eloquence." Recognizing the unexploited possibilities of the fertile plain of the Sacramento, a domain as large as the whole of Ireland, he had, in a few months, with characteristic vigour and far-sightedness, conceived and launched the great scheme of development now in full working order under the style of the Northern Electric Railway. Into this far-reaching plan for realizing the latent assets of an economic principality he put most of his resources and all his heart. Had the tremendous catastrophe of 1906, the San Francisco earthquake, never occurred or been delayed for a year or two, had his health been able to stand the strain of the period of unforeseen disaster, his might have become one of the greatest fortunes in America . . . how often in American history (real history, not that to which politicians put their names) has such an accumulation of financial power gathered swiftly in the Far West and then travelled, like a storm- i64 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS cloud, to darken and disturb the atmosphere of down-East finance! But the fine mechanism of his will-power weakened under the tremendous strain and in the end was wrecked — to the great sorrow of the boy, for whom his father's well-being was as the sun in the sky. " They were more than father and son . . . they were mutually enraptured friends." Many racial strains mingled in the boy's being. He was of New England descent on both sides, but he had English, Scotch, Irish, and French blood in his veins — the French ancestor came over with La Fayette to fight for American Independence, so that his death in France was in a sense the repay- ment of an ancient debt. Then there are the formative vicissitudes of travel to be considered in the construction of his complex personal equation. In his first ten years of life he was taken twice to South Africa, five times to Europe. English memories were part of the very stuffs of his childhood — the old-world quiet of Kensington Gardens, the formal wilderness called Hampstead Heath, calm reaches of the Thames where he had his own boat, his wonderful father driving a four-in-hand on English highways and teaching him how to hold and manage the reins. And, above all and before all, the year (1906-7) he spent at Beaumont School near Windsor, where he was taught the true mean- ing of his Catholicism, learning from his much-loved "Father Tim" that all good things, wealth and health, and the rest of it, are less than nothing in the end, if they be not held in trust, and that life on earth is but the beginning of man's voyage in the vast ocean of the Divine. Like his fiither, he combined the idealist and the realist in his being — without any trace, however, of the father's moodiness, HARRY BUTTERS 165 which was the sign, it may be, of the imperfect blending of opposite elements. What was person- ality in the father, had ripened into character in the son ; a deeper seriousness, a firmer grip of the signifi- cance of living, inspired the latter with the spirit of self-sacrifice. He seems to have been a charming child ; starry- eyed, frank, vigorous, with the vivid charm, inde- finable yet definitely felt, which is called magnetism. But he would have been set in the category of spoilt darlings in Old England or even New England — a world of sunshine, constant change, luxury, the devotion of both parents, and the afi^ec- tion of big and little half-sisters and half-brothers had bred in him that tumultuous egoism, which has been the ruin of so many sons of American million- aires. School in England cured him of the idea that he was a pivot of the universe. But the swift flow of youth (to give the sense of a wise passage in Sir Rabindrinath Tagore's book of reminiscences) is a guarantee against the evils of character engendered in stagnation, the ineradicable faults of an ingrowing selfishness. As the current of his life widened and deepened, his early errors were swept out of sight, and all could see that the waters thereof were fresh and sweet and that their energy was unabated and rightly directed. But he could not at first under- stand the Beaumont discipline, and on one occasion ran away from school, paying his father a surprise visit at his London office. His adored " Father Tim" gives a whimsical account (in a letter begin- ning "Dear Harry" and dated Easter, 1 908) of the Californian boy's rebellious behaviour during his first term : — Can you imagine what it would be, to break in a four-year-old i66 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS colt which had never previously had any training or handling whatever ? Have you ever seen how a strong salmon struggles, when it is landed — to get back to its native waters ? Have you ever noticed the endeavours of a wild bird — when it is caught and put in a cage? Now, whichever of these examples appeals to you most, just multiply it by five and a half — and then square it — and then see if the result is at all familiar to you. Speaking of your first month in the schoolroom, I might mention that hardly ever did your variations of posture and looks annoy me ; on the contrary, they amused me immensely, though I may have concealed the fact, and pretended otherwise. Though the poor Master might easily ask himself " what next?" — when he saw the American Cousin sitting with his back to the master, and both feet placed carefully on the top of the ink-pots of the desk behind. In those early days I never dreamt of making any personal remark, or giving any personal admonition — I thought it better to watch and take stock, and contented myself with a general remark, to the effect that "it is a good thing occasionally — say, once a day, for a few minutes — to look straight in front of one ! " After a time, I found those general remarks had their effect. And what was my joy, after a few weeks, to find that but one foot was engaged in covering an ink-pot? My joy was some- what diminished, however, when I noticed that one hand was engaged in pinching a neighbour, probably Thomas , and the other hand, hard at work, drawing a complimentary caricature of the Master ! But I must do you justice and say — that the expression on the eyes and face at that moment, betokened the most intense attention. Many months have passed since, and perhaps the picture is rather exaggerated — but I'm sure you won't mind. It was most edifying to see how you buckled to the last half- year, and showed all, that the wild H.A.B. need be second to none, if he wished. . . . There are no shrewder judges of character than English boys, and the fact that Harry was immensely popular, despite his eccentricities, at Beaumont, is the best testimonial one could have to the courage, generosity, and all-round loveable- ness of the highly-strung little Californian, in whom HARRY BUTTERS 167 the true Elizabethan exuberance was so manifest. Beaumont set its hall-mark on him indelibly. His love of the school and loyalty to old school friends increased as time went, and the lesson he learnt there — to sacrifice his own delights in the service of humanity and for the greater glory of God — became, slowly but surely, the ruling ideal of his life. What he would have done for his country, had he lived, is one of the questions worth asking, not easily answered. He had inherited from his father that genius for handling reality which has created so many financial powers in the United States — it is not money, but the power it gives, which is sought after by the American multi- millionaire. This at least is certain — had he gained the tremendous power wielded by some financial magnates in America, he would have held it as a sacred trust, to be used for the good of the toiling millions who had helped him to accumulate it. He would never have degenerated into one of the heartless plutocrats, scoring millions as points in a cut-throat yet impersonal game, who so strangely resemble in their mentality the tyrants of the Italian Renaissance. But 1 myself think that he would have sought spiritual rather than material power in some way that cannot even be guessed at. For he was of the very stuff, looked at in that afterglow of all the yesterdays that is called historic truth, out of which the enraptured world- lings were wrought who achieved saintship in the Middle Ages. Between the last of the days of a desultory education and his entry, as a pioneer of the true, valiant Americanism, into the war, he saw a great deal more of man's wondrous life on this wonderful i68 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS planet. And he gave a signal proof of his contempt for money — at any rate the easy money that is so often worse than witch's gold to its temporary possessor — by refusing, to the consternation of the lawyers, the wealth conferred on him by a will that virtually disinherited his half-brothers and half- sisters, leaving them dependent on his bounty. He soon had a clear vision of the large issues of world- politics, and, seeing the futility of all the talk about "entangling alliances" and the folly of the belief that Americans were of a superior order of creation and destined to escape the burdens of self- defence as being a people apart, hoped that the old feud between America and England would soon be forgotten and forgiven. The two countries, he earnestly believed, were the trustees of democratic civilization — the kind that prefers the doctrine of history to the dogmas of Pacifist cranks and cannot believe that defencelessness is the cheapest form of defence. Had an alliance existed between England and America in August 19 14, there would have been no German War — so he believed — and the more we know of the inner workings of the Pan-German mind in the period of incubation, the more credible seems his belief. And when hostilities began, when Catholic Belgium was trodden down in blood and mire by the Prussian jackboot, he saw his duty as "a dead-sure thing" (as Hay's Jim Bludso did), and at once decided to fight on the side of the Allies. One can imagine the consterna- tion of his Californian friends and relations at this swift and utterly unexpected decision. To the vast majority of Western Americans the war seemed as remote and meaningless for them as a dispute in another planet ; to the strong body of a priori HARRY BUTTERS 169 Pacifists it was no better than a fight between mad dogs. To Harry Butters, however, it was a phase of the unending struggle between right and wrong, and no persuasion in the world could have pre- vented him from taking the cross to help check the aggression of a predatory race, which, like the Albigenses, had decided to cut adrift from the civilisation of its age. " Vivid " — the epithet so often applied to Rupert Brooke by his friends — defines the impression created by this young American when he came over to serve in the British Army and, in point of fact, took the War Office by storm. Mr J. L. Garvin, that inexhaustible journalist, so fine a man of letters, to whom his exuberant vivacity naturally appealed, wrote the following fine appreciation of his own brilliant son's brilliant friend, when the news of the latter's death arrived : — When he went back to America he was a young man of mark, framed to excel both in sport and affairs. He was very tall, supple, active, frank, and comely of face, as gay as he was good-looking. You saw by a glance at his hands that he had a born instinct for management and technique. He had been a good deal at sea. He knew all about horses and motor-cars. He was a crack shot aad a fine polo player. His business ability was shown as soon as he took over the management of his father's estates. With this practical talent that could turn itself to anything he had other qualities. One remembers what a delightful level measuring glance he used to give suddenly from under his brows when he had finished rolling a cigarette and went on with his keen questioning about men and things. To talk with him was to receive a new and promising revelation of the mind of young America, Like so many of our own young soldiers in their attitude towards politics, he was not content with either of the old parties in the United States. He thought that his own generation if it was earnest enough might make a better hand both of social problems and world relations. He hoped to play his part. Though he always thought of himself in a fine spirit as " an American citizen," he wanted the United 'States to take a full share in 170 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS the wider life of the world, and especially to work as far as possible for common ideals with the whole English-speaking race. So when the news of the war came to San Francisco he put aside as fair a prospect of wealth, success, happiness and long life as could well open before a young man, and determined to throw in his lot with the old country and the Allies in the fight for civilization against all the armed might of lawless iniquity which had flung itself on Belgium. The charm of his conversation, quite Listerian in its bright, bickering flow, was irresistible. At Beaumont, they say, he was always talking ; even when reading a book he would prattle to himself. Mr Winston Churchill, that naughty Peter Pan of British politics, bore witness to this entertaining gift in a brief, valedictory sketch of his character and career : — The death in action of this young American gentleman is a blow to the many friends he had made for himself in the British Army. I met him quite by chance in his observation post near Ploegsteert and was charmed by his extraordinary fund of wit and gaiety. His conversation was delightful, full at once of fun and good sense and continually lighted by original reflections and captivating Americanisms. A whole table could sit and listen to him with the utmost interest and pleasure. He was a great " character," and had he lived to enjoy his bright worldly prospects he could not have failed to make his mark. He was a very good soldier and competent artillery officer, very well thought of by his comrades and trusted by his superiors. He had seen much service in the front line, includ- ing the battle of Loos, and came through unscathed until in June last a bouquet of 5.9 shells destroyed his observation post and stunned him with shell shock and concussion. Leave was pressed upon him, but he could only be induced to take a few days' rest. In little more than a week he was back at the front — disdainful as ever of the continual threats of death. And thus quite simply he met his fate. "No, sir, I have taken no oath of allegiance, but I'm just as loyal." He was only twenty-two when he came over, in the early part of 19 15, to join the British Army. Pie was at first gazetted to the Royal Warwick- HARRY BUTTERS 171 shire Regiment, but transferred to the Royal Field Artillery, where his genius for technical matters — an heirloom from his father — found wider scope. He says in one of his letters from the front that he was born to be in the Artillery. And so thorough and inspiring was his work that a British officer, a fine judge of all servitors of the guns, thought there ought to be an American officer in every battery ! His most intimate letters are full of gunnery details. Here, for example, in a letter to his " dearest Gookie " (his sister, Lucile) is a vivacious and detailed picture of the Artillery officer's daily and nightly routine :— The interval has been quite exciting, the Bosch having favoured us with three gas attacks on this front — the first being a false alarm, the second a pukka attack with heavy shell-fire, infantry out of the trenches, and all the thrills, and the third a small affair in which he just let off a little that he had left over from the main affair. I'll tell you about the main show. Time — 10.30 P.M. Scene — A tubular dugout on top of the high hill overlooking the trenches, same being my " O.P." In the centre, a table on which is spread an artillery map. Asleep on a bed in one corner, an Officer (muh !). In the opposite corner a drowsy signaller is discovered at his telephone instrument. Voice over telephone — ABX — ABX — ABX ! Priority message all batteries. (Signaller pricks up his ears and listens to the message.) " A prisoner who deserted from the German lines this after- noon has been examined at Division Headquarters. He states that the enemy have the whole front line from . . . to . . . dug in with gas cylinders and that they are going to let it off some time during the night — the wind being now favourable — all batteries will double sentries and stand by the guns — S.O.S. guard to be doubled. Acknowledge." D. A. Signaller (gently stirring me). — " Sir — Sir — Gas alert — message just came through. There's a German prisoner captured, etc. etc." Me — " All right, all right. Hell and damnation ! Go and call the Sergeant of the S.O.S. Guard." 172 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS (I rolls out of bed and puts on m}' boots.) Sergeant appears at the door. ** Turn out your guard and working party and I'll inspect their helmets." (It is done.) Telephone — " XX — xx — xx — xx — xx — " Signaller. " Hello, hello. Wanted on the 'phone, sir." (I pick up the 'phone.) Voice — "Captain speaking — They've just caught a German prisoner " — Me (cutting in) — " Yes, I got the message, sir." Captain — " All right, be on the alert. Good night." I roll a cigarette and sit down in comfort to await the gas signals. Telephone—" XX— XX~XX ! " Signaller — " Hello, hello. Yes. Wanted, sir." I pick up the 'phone. Voice — " Colonel speaking — Have you got that message about— ? " Me (cutting in) — " Yes, sir, got it — waiting for the gas now." Colonel — All right — keep on the qui vive — 1068 1 . . Harry Butters . . $^ Good night ! " (I continue my cigarette.) Telephone—" XX— XX— XX— XX ! " Signaller — " Hello, hello ! Yes. Wanted, sir." I pick up the 'phone. Voice — "Adjutant speaking — They've just caught a German prisoner — " Me (cutting in) — " All right, I know all about it — who started this damned show anyway ? " Adjutant — " All right — keep your shirt on. Good night." (I light another cigarette and glance at the watch — 1 2. 1 5.) Signaller (hearing a frog croaking outside) — "Is that the gas horns, sir ^ " Me— "No." Telephone—" XX— XX— XX— XX ! " Signaller — " Hello, hello ! Yes, sir. Wanted, sir." (I pick up the 'phone.) Voice — "Captain Lucas speaking — I just wanted to know if you'd gotten a message to be on — " Me (cutting in) — " Yes, — good night ! " (I resume my cigarette.) My cigarette goes out. I light another. HARRY BUTTERS 173 I feel sleepy. I curse the Bosch. On second thought I curse the telephone. Telephone—" XX— XX— XX— XX ! " Signaller — ** Hello, hello. Yes, sir. Here, sir. Wanted sir." I curse the 'phone again. I pick up the 'phone. Voice — "Orderly Officer speaking — They've just been examining a Bosch prisoner at Divisional Headquarters. He says that — " From the trenches come the startling note of a Klaxon Horn — B-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r ! Br ! B-r-r-r-r ! Half a dozen machine guns open up and are drowned in a crash of the opening German bombardment. Orderly Officer (trailing on) — " that the Germans have got — " Me — " All right, shut up. Here's your damn gas — she's turned loose on the whole front and you'll have it with you in a minute ! I hope it chokes the lot of you ! Open up your gun fire there ! " Orderly Officer — " Hey, where is it coming from ? — How fast is it coming ? — Has it reached you yet ? " A high pitched hissing note advises me that the Bosch is putting a barrage over our heads behind the hill and a minute later the wires are cut by the same. Me — "Thank the Lord — free from the bloody telephone anyway." (Singing out) " Get your gas helmets out and put 'em on top of your heads." (To the extra signallers) — " Get out and mend the break, but don't take too many chances — " Enter Ludlow (same chap who was forward with me at Loos) from Right Battery O.P. " Hello, Ludlow, your wires busted too — Hooray ! Let's get out and see the show." Which we did. Picked a nice grassy spot in front of the bridge and peeled our eyes. The whole line of trenches curving around the foot of the hill and stretching away into the distance is lit up by the bursting shells and the star rockets, and by the light of these we could occasionally catch glimpses of the clouds of gas rolling out over our lines. At the base of the hill the cloud divides and flows around it, leaving us on an island of blessed pure air. Away on the right a building bursts into flame and by its light every- thing shows up with stagey fire effect. Three batteries of ours are shooting right over our heads, and on top of the hill the shells are passing very low — each 174 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS one visible, for all the world like a baby meteor — and the whole combine to make a beautiful, if rather terrible sight — terrible because it's none too sweet for our poor damned infantry in the front trenches where the cloud is thickest, and knowing that they will soon be charged by a frightened but entirely dangerous crowd of Bosches and always containing the interesting element for us, that if the attack is really going to amount to anything, they will put a heavy shell fire on our O.P.'s as soon as it becomes light enough to observe. But I didn't believe it would amount to this, and it didn't — after an hour, the shell fire commenced to let up, and half an hour later it was all over but the shouting ! Net result next day — Enemy debouched from his trenches only in spots — casualties almost nix considering the extravagance of the show — but the whole country bleached out to a light yellow and the lovely Springtime spoiled — which is the Bosch all over — no eyes for the beauties of Nature at all. The battery was gassed, and the cow that gives my morning killed — Strafe the Hun ! Boyd Cable, or any other of the new war reahsts, who are working out the Kipling tradition, would not be ashamed to sign this hvely sketch. He is always alluding to the " thundering good luck " which has given him so glorious an oppor- tunity of striking a blow for liberty and civilization. He sees clearly that there is no easy road to victory ; that the goal of the great adventure can only be reached by passing through many hells ; that the " women's conferences " of well-meaning peace- lovers will do nothing to win a just peace, or, rather, less than nothing since they tried to weaken the will-to-win of the Allies. There are many picturesque descriptions of big and little battles in his letters, and all are secretly inspired by a joyous sense of camaraderie and pride in the incom- parable British soldier who, like himself, is pre- pared to see it through. Here is the ending HARRY BUTTERS 175 of a stirring battle-piece which is too long to quote in full, unfortunately : — We pushed on across the dreadful strip of what had been no man's land two days before, but was ours now, at the price numbered by those silent figures (and the Kaiser's receipt acknowledged by the proportion of dirty gray uniforms among them) — on to the first German fire trenches ; and here the dead were rare, for most of their defenders had preferred to leave as prisoners. The loot, however, was far more plentiful and the ground was strewn with every description of rifle, bayonet and equipment. On across the line of support trenches and across the last broad gap of several hundred yards to the reserve line, to find the gladdest and bravest sight that ever gladdened my eyes, for they were occupied by the finest body of fighting troops I verily believe in all the world — the whole division of Guards, 12,000 strong, the first pick of the whole British army. Not a man under five feet ten inches, magnificently disciplined and with the unbeaten traditions of five centuries behind them. They had been pushed up during the night and were now cooking their breakfast ; in high spirits, clean and dry and in the very pink of fighting condition, their shining rifles with bayonets fixed bristling over the parapet. And our Divisional Artillery were to have the honour of reinforcing them ! He feels himself, body and soul, a part of the Army in which he serves. " 1 think less of myself than I did, less of the heights of personal success that I aspired to climb and more of the service that they must render in payment. For the right to live and by virtue of which, only, can we progress." Long before the end his spirit had been purged of petulancies ; it was naked and bright as a sword. Humour and tenderness and high spirits irradiate his letters home with light and delight from within. He joyously quotes the soldier's new versions of the Mother Goose rhymes, such as the inimitable quatrain : — Every day that passes Filling out the year, Leaves the wicked Kaiser Harder up for beer. 176 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS He warns his Gookie not to read the war books - which give the loathsome and disastrous side of war — an aspect that even the soldier must avoid thinking over, if he is to remain physically and mentally fit for his job. He enters into a compact with his dearest sister to look at the moon at the same time — and confesses, with playful sorrow, that the Moon, not so sad-looking and weary as Sidney saw her in his famous sonnet, had inveigled him into a flirtation. He tells her about a dream-leave he had. " Got away for a week and walked in on you in some dream castle of home that was a combination of the Airship (Davy's house) and Bunny Hutch (Lucile's). You were on the second story porch — lovely as a rose and with the emotion of eighteen months' separation shining out of your eyes — and I just chucked ofl^ my gas helmet and belt, climbed up the side of the house and grabbed you in my arms. It was very sweet." Censoring soldiers' letters had acquainted him with the meaning of crosses, so he sprinkles one of the letters with these symbols of kisses (another American officer thought C.Y.K. a better device). His breakdown through shell-shock seems at first a shocking calamity. But he is consoled in realizing that it is to teach him the lesson of " humble service." . . . " I reckon I've always had too damn much vanity and low-down selfish ambition in my nature, and the last week has certainly served to knock out a large portion of both." The " honourable advancement of his soul " was now the ruling ideal of the life he lived to himself. He sorrows over the death of his friend, Gerald Garvin, but sees in it none the less a great good fortune. And HARRY BUTTERS 177 he himself, when the rose of his life was wide open, all his attributes unfolded and in full fragrance, met the same illustrious end on the battle-field. Alan Seeger and Harry' Butters were the pioneers of America's conversion to a sense of the spiritual necessity and grandeur of the war against Germany. They are sealed of the ghostly fellowship of Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke, and we can never honour them too much in our national remembrance. M THE STUDENT IN ARMS DONALD HANKEY / have seen with the eyes of God. I have seen the naked souls of men, stripped of circumstance. Rank and reputation, ivealth and poverty, knotu- iedge and ignorance, manners and uncouthness, these I saiv not. I saiv the naked souls of men. I saiu luho were slaves and nvho ivere free : tuho 'were beasts and tuho men : who 'were contemptible and luho honourable. I have seen 'with the eyes oj God. I have seen the vanity of the temporal and the glory of the eternal. I have despised comfort and honoured pain. I have understood the victory of the Cross. death, 'where is thy sting I Nunc dimittis, Doniine. From ^ Book of JVisdom by Donald Hankey. DONALD HANKEY ("A Student in Arms " ) records somewhere that, when he was with the Army in France, there came to him regularly every week from the homeland an envelope containing a soft handkerchief wrapped round a sprig of lavender or verbena. That little breath of fragrance used to bring with it memories of the deep quiet of old gardens and all things dainty and remote from the sordid business of the trenches. The war was undoubtedly the culminating in- fluence in Hankey's development. It made of the student a man of action. It put a term, alas, to a life that was evolving naturally into a fine maturity. But it brought him premature celebrity, and because the pious aura that has posthumously encompassed his personality may have proved misleading to those who did not know him, I wish to tender my little sprig of verbena. For Hankey, though a Christian in the word's best sense, was a very human man. But for the war he would have taken his place in all probability among the better known practical philosophers of his time. His ideals and his 178 Photo by h. A. terts/oi ,i DONALD HANKEY (LIEUTENANT, ROYAI. WARWICKSHIRE KECIMENT' DONALD HANKEY 179 ambitions were high and well defined. He wished to leave the world better than he found it, but his aspirations in that direction were both practical and on the grand scale — that of the true artist who wishes to add to the world's sum of knowledge. He was the discoverer of new or lost truths rather than a teacher of known ones, a producer rather than a reproducer, a genius as well as a man of talent. And he did not make the usual mistake of thinking that genius cannot or need not be trained. He realised that, provided the divine spark Vv^as there, it should be assiduously cultivated. And the divine spark was there. Hankey set himself to learn before attempting to teach, thereby following the example of the majority of the world's men of genius. His method of doing so may seem to the casual ob- server to have been somewhat haphazard ; but, so long as, by having his goal in sight all the time, he kept his general direction right, it did not really matter by what particular road he travelled. Donald Hankey was born with unusual advan- tages in the way of parentage and environment. His father was English, with Australian experience ; his mother Australian born. After a childhood spent at his home and at a private school close by, in Brighton, he went to Rugby and left there in 1900 at the age of sixteen-and-a-half to take a Cadetship at the Royal Military Academy, Wool- wich. He chose a military career chiefly as a result of external influences — among them the death in South Africa of his idolized eldest brother, Hugh, in 1900 — and at the age of twenty he was drafted with the R.G.A. to Mauritius, where he spent a couple of years. He himself has testified that this i8o THE STUDENT IN ARMS was the most unsatisfactory part of his Hfe. The place fascinated him, and it was there he had perhaps the most important spiritual experience of his life ; but the routine of garrison duty, the narrow confines of a small mess, and the rather sedentary nature of the work irked him not a little. The antics of the subalterns amused him, but the rather shallow atmosphere and conversation of the mess did not appeal to him. Moreover, he had a positive dislike of heavy guns ; at any rate the technical side of his profession did not appeal to him. Re- turning home, owing to illness, he resigned his commission, realizing that the time had come for him to secure a different outlook. Accordingly, at the comparatively mature age of twenty-two, he went up to Oxford. It goes without saying that Hankey now found himself in infinitely more con- genial surroundings than ever before ; the beauty and traditions of Oxford appealed to him intensely. He was seven years younger than his youngest brother, being, as he used to put it, "an after- thought on the part of my parents," and it was doubtless due to the fact of his having been born at a time when they had reached their full mental maturity, and had perhaps passed the zenith of mere physical robustness — that in Donald Hankey the spiritual predominated over the bodily element. This fact makes it easy to appreciate his foresight in achieving the practical side of his education before attempting to advance the theoretical. If he had gone to Oxford straight from school and without acquiring any experience of people and things, he would have become merely an unpractical idealist, a dreamer. While at the University he identified himself DONALD HANKEY i8i only with such of the current movements as were potentially of real use to him in view of the object he had in view. Sociology, theology and all kin- dred subjects were naturally those that appealed to him most, although his interests were distinctly broad. He took an active interest in various kinds of sport, but without allowing it in any way to become an obsession with him, thereby avoiding the very common mistake of so many of his con- temporaries in exalting above everything what he was wont to describe as " Blue- worship." His two or three years' seniority to the average under- graduate and the experience gained in them were undoubtedly of the greatest use to him in keeping his values right, and preventing him from being unduly influenced by any of the passing crazes and enthusiasms which were current in his time. Nominally, of course, he was working entirely with the object of ultimately becoming ordained, but as time went on it became more and more obvious that the rationalist tendency of his views would involve difficulties in his taking this step. Writing from his experience of the very diverse systems of training at Woolwich and Oxford, Hankey notes the essential difference in their pro- ducts. Woolwich is Spartan, utilitarian, disciplin- ary ; the aesthetic is left alone. The officer emerges a man of practical interests and simple pleasures, unsympathetic to the "isms." Oxford's product is the converse. Its freedom tends to vague ideals, unpractical dreams, and ineffective good-will to one's humbler fellow-men. Hankev concludes that in war-time each can learn from the other; and in the days of danger, when men feel in need of an articulate philosophy of life and death, Oxford i82 THE STUDENT IN ARMS and Cambridge can give their sons the power to evolve one which Sandhurst and Woolwich cannot. While at Oxford all Hankey's vacations were spent in social work, mainly in connection with the Oxford and Bermondsey mission. This work he continued after obtaining his degree, though it was interrupted for a spell while he was attached to the Leeds Clergy School. At this time Hankey was specially interested in emigration, and was the means of sending a number of lads from Bermondsey to Australia. The failure of some of these to make good led him to visit Western Australia, and it was characteristic of his methods that he travelled steerage as an emigrant. The results of his investi- gations, carried out for several months under precisely the conditions that a working lad emigrant would encounter, were published in the Westminster Gazette. From Australia he sailed for British East Africa and paid a prolonged visit to a friend whose administrative duties among the natives involved almost complete isolation from European civilization. His idea in taking this step was to gain perspective or, as he put it, " to get outside, and give himself time to think things over." He also visited Mada- gascar and revisited Mauritius before returning. Although on his return to England he threw himself heart and soul into the organizing and running of the boys' clubs and all the other work of the Mission, he had no more intention of making that his permanent occupation than when in the Army he had of keeping to soldiering as a profes- sion. He was destined for bigger things, and, although perhaps only subconsciously, he knew it. Hence the skilful mapping out of his career, which DONALD HANKEY 183 was ideally planned to strengthen and develop a naturally productive and latently powerful personality. It is perhaps this very interesting portion of his career that has tended to create a wrong impression of the true man. To those who knew him there was nothing about Donald of what might be described as the aimless idealist. His idealism and spirituality were camouflaged under a genial and humorous personality. Even when he was spend- ing most of his life working in the slums there was no better host on the rare occasions when he enter- tained at his Club or elsewhere, and no one sur- passed him in such matters as the choice of a menu, a vintage, or a cigar. His fondness for physical exercises, boxing, running, and rambling over wide open spaces like the Sussex Downs or the Vosges Mountains accentuated the human side of his character. Incidentally he was quite a clever artist and a 'cello player of more than average amateur ability. Hankey confesses that in the clubs they did not seem to get at grips with their boys. " I think we mystified them a little," he says, " and ultimately bored them. We were always starting afresh with a new generation and losing touch with the older ones." But he was building better than he knew, as was afterwards proved by the devotion of his old boys to his memory. The war came. Hankey reconsidered his position. A commission was his for the asking. But he wanted to " kill a German " and to keep in touch with the working man, and he decided that by enlisting in the ranks he would best be able to accomplish both purposes. He enlisted in a service battalion and was soon made i84 THE STUDENT IN ARMS a sergeant. He remained a sergeant for about nine months with the now dead officer whom he has immortaHzed as " The Beloved Captain " as his Section Commander. Then, as he naively states, "for reasons which only concern myself, I descended with a bump to the rank of private, and was transferred to a different Company." It was of course his desire to study human nature at close range that made him give up his stripes, just as it was the reason for one or two other apparently eccentric actions previously. About this time, or a little later, he wrote to his brother. Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet, a most remarkable letter, full of acute observation and useful suggestion in regard to the new armies, which was read by Lord Kitchener with much interest. Within three months of landing in France he was wounded and invalided home. He had been persuaded to agree to take up a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery with a view to joining a heavy battery in the field. The com- mission came through when he was in hospital. Probably, however, his old antipathy to the guns had not diminished ; at any rate on his own initiative he exchanged into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment to the same battalion as that in which his brother Hugh (for whom as a boy he had an immense admiration amounting almost to veneration) was serving when he was killed at Paardeburg. Before many months he himself was killed on the Somme while leading his men in the attack. There had been a momentary wavering among his men, and he was last seen rallying them successfully and carrying them forward with him to win the trench which DONALD HANKEY 185 cost him his life. His words to the men just before they went over the top, " If wounded, BHghty — if killed, the Resurrection," have now become historic. • ••••• One returns from Hankey the soldier to Hankey the student. Death had ended the career which the student had chosen for himself, and for which the whole of his life had been so carefully arranged. It is almost certain that writing and not speech was Hankey's intended vehicle of expression ; he pre- ferred the lasting glow of the fire of literature to the transient glamour of speech in the House of Commons. His reading, while necessarily embrac- ing chiefly works of a theological and sociological nature, was of a remarkably wide range. For his friends he chose, perhaps without realizing it, chiefly those who could teach him most, whose occupations kept them in widely diff^ering spheres from his own, and with these people he kept in constant but not in exaggeratedly enthusiastic communication. A favourite request of his was : " Be sure to write often, not every day for a week, nor every week for a month, but every month for many years ! " His own letters varied greatly in length, but never in inspiration, owing to the fact that, if he had nothing to write, he very rarely wrote, and, in consequence, while some of his letters would run to five or six sheets, others might be as short as two lines only. He used to say that when he sat down to write, provided that he had some sort of an idea of what he wanted to say, his pen would usually " run away " with him, and that he found it quite a sound plan to allow it to do so ! Often, of course, the results were disappointing, usually i86 THE STUDENT IN ARMS they were quite good, and occasionally they were brilHant. It depended apparently on his mood. He realized this, and was waiting and working for the time when he should be able freely to produce good literature of a wholesomely unre- strained, and (more important) unstrained kind. He was quite content to wait until he should have acquired sufficient knowledge, and sufficient skill in using it, before making any really ambitious attempt to apply it. He wished to produce nothing mediocre, and would have waited until nothing that he had produced should, when finished, be mediocre. But in 19 14 he was not yet able to produce uniformly good work, and was, unfortun- ately, not able to judge the quality of what he had written until some time after its production ; he found it necessary, as it were, to place an interval of time between himself and his work, just as an artist finds it necessary, in order to view it in better perspective, to stand back and place an in- terval of distance between himself and his picture. Before the war started, Hankey had produced nothing which was primarily intended for publi- cation in book form. His first two books : Religion and Common Sense — published post- humously — and, more particularly, The Lord of All Good Life^ were, though it may sound strange to say so, written for his own enlightenment : before starting on anything else, he was anxious to place his own theological ideas on a sound logical basis ; consequently, since he had an extraordinary faculty for solving his problems subconsciously, he set to work and wrote these two books in an incredibly short time, with very little effort, no planning-out, and no reference to notes or other works. They DONALD HANKEY 187 constituted a revelation to him no less than to any- one else reading them for the first time. Some of Hankey's own remarks regarding the latter work, in a letter of his to his friend Allen of the Mission, will show the real purpose for which it was written, and how it served that purpose : — " ... It is the sudden vision of what lots of obscure things really meant ... it was written spontaneously in a burst, in six weeks .... suddenly everything cleared up. To myself the writing of it was an illumination. I did not write it because I wanted to write a book and be an author. I wrote it because . . . writing . . . was to me the natural way of getting everything straight in my own mind." But perhaps another letter of Hankey's referring to this book, written in March 19 15 to another friend of his, and hitherto unpublished, will best describe his attitude towards current theology. "... My pet background ideas were rudely destroyed some years ago and I have since been endeavouring to readjust them. The book is the result. A well-known American Biologist tells me that the result is ' in no way repugnant to the scientific mind, as nearly all customary presentations of Christianity are.' What I have tried to do is to find a background in which I could honestly believe while retaining an open mind on scientific questions, and to build con- structively, and not argumentatively on that. There is an answer to a good deal of scientific criticism of Christianity implied in the book, though it is not stated in that form because I have no quarrel with Science. " For me the bedrock is that I decline to believe that what seems to all men to be noble and admirable ... is not so. " There are a number of scientists who refuse to admit the reality in any sense or degree of the human will or conscience. They are so obsessed with the idea of necessity as shown in cause and effect that they refuse to admit that the human mind is anything but a meeting place where various forces, or heredity, habit, and circum- stance work out their inevitable resultant. These scientists do not admit that the fact of human self-consciousness is anything but an accident — moreover, an accident which has no effect whatever. They i88 THE STUDENT IN ARMS say that our consciousness of the struggle that takes place within us is of no more effectual importance than the noise made by a piece of machinery. It is an accidental bye-product. This view has been combated in the scientific world by William James and others. But though I cannot say that I think that the theory can be disproved, I am equally convinced that it cannot be proved. And I reject it because it does not give a possible working philosophy. If you study the religions and philosophies of the world you will find that all those which are logically complete attain their end by denying the existence of something which appears to be very real. Thus the Brahmin denies the existence of all phenomena — of everything. The Buddhist denies the reality of personality. The Christian scientist denies the reality of pain. And these scientific ' determinists ' deny the reality of the human self-consciousness, will, etc. All these, in the attempt to produce a philosophy which shall be complete logically, end in producing one which is unworkable and highly artificial practically. But in other matters — such as electricity — one has to assume that theoi"y to be true which works best in practice. And so I think that one is justified in the matter of morality in assuming that human self-consciousness and will and conscience are realities, because that gives the best result in practice. My scientific professor writes that he has to be ' an agnostic with regard to many ultimate questions.' So have I. And so, he says, have most scientific men (which I am not). But I feel on firm ground when I lay it down that because it produces better results to believe that one has got will-power — however limited — therefore it is more likely that one really has got it than that one has not. This attitude is philosophically known as ' pragmatism ' or ' humanism ' and is quite respectable ! " You will find traces of this argument in my chapter on the Apostles' Creed — ' Catholic Teaching.' " After all, what you and I and our mates have got to do is to get on and make the best of life ; and you and I . . . know that to make the best of life one has got to be free from selfishness, pride, fear, false ambitions, and to be kind, brave and pure. A philosophy which tells us that life is like a hurdy-gurdy with dancing marionettes who have to dance to the machinery, is no good to us. We knov/ that, such a philosophy will make us bitter, useless, unhappy. It is therefore untrue to facts as we know them. It is false. It is disproved. On the other hand, a religion which teaches a point of view from which all these things — love, purity, fearlessness, humility — must necessarily proceed, is one which is going to make us happy and useful, so that when we die men will say ' the world was the better for his life.' That religion is proved to be in the main true to facts as we know them, practically true, ' pragmatically true,' ' humanly true.' It is, isn't it, the religion we must follow — or try to follow. DONALD HANKEY 189 '* It does not work in practice to take a mechanical view of life. No one has the right to say that matter and energy are real, and that the soul is a dream, ' Ah yes, ah yes, but how explain the bu-th Of dreams of soul upon a soul-less earth ? ' A philosophy which denies the reality of what seems the most im- portant factor, the highest and noblest feature of life, has no cla.im on our allegiance. " But all the same, mind you, let truth prevail. Don't fight against truth, don't defend Genesis against Darwin, don't defend the indefensible. " The real Christianity is not what we have been taught to think. . . . Ultimately, why am I still trying to be a Christian ? Because of my mother, of heroic men and women I have known in Bermondsey and elsewhere, who showed me quite unconsciously an ideal which I recognized as being the best thing I had ever seen or heard of." In a letter written in January 19 16, after he had transferred from the R.G.A. to his elder brother's old regiment, the Royal Warwicks, he\ describes the circumstances under which, finding himself " stuck at home as a superfluous S.R. sub.," he wrote his Spectator articles; "However, having kicked against the pricks and merely barked my shins (I have twice tried to return to the ranks !) I am now reconciled to staying here till the big push, when it comes, creates some vacancies. Meanwhile I have been perpetrating weekly articles in the Spectator under the nom de plume of * A Student in Arms,' and. am thinking of publishing the series in volume form later on." He regarded these articles as mere casual efforts, but the series is indisputably far more brilliant and human than the vast majority of similar war-time word-pictures. Had he lived, he would probably have eliminated the slight tendency to occasional over-sentimentality of which his few adverse critics have sometimes complained. His choice of a pen- name, however, should have shown them that he 190 THE STUDENT IN ARMS still regarded himself as emphatically a sUident^ — and his work as essentially the work of a student, — and not as a master in either the scholastic or the artistic sense of the word. He was thirty-two when in October 19 16 his life came to an end. He had achieved his ambition to " leave the world the better for his life." And war had taught the student much. This sketch may fitly close as it opens with his own words : — " 1 have seen the vanity of the temporal and the glory of the eternal ... I have understood the victory of the Cross. O death, where is thy sting ? Nunc d'tmittis^ Domine ! " R. F. P. IVAK CAMrHKl.l. ((■AI'TAIN, AK(;VI.I, AM) Srill F.KI.AN' I ) H 1 1 ; 1 1 1 . A M IK KS) THE HIGHLAND SOUL IVAR CAMPBELL IVAR CAMPBELL was the only son of Lord George Campbell and a grandson of the eighth Duke of Argyll, the famous statesman, and he gathered up in his fresh young personality all the various charms of his famous family. " Fair and fause as a Campbell," says the old Scots proverb, but there was no trace of the time-imputed Machia- vellian falsity in this scion of a great family which seems to gain rather than lose vitality as the genera- tions pass. After all, the proverb I was compelled to quote is but a scrap of historical criticism from the supporters of a lost clause — the clans that' could not prevent the encirclement of the Highlands by the creation of a Campbell " buffer state " stretching across the whole breadth of broad Scotland. The sea on three sides and the Campbells on the fourth contained the dwindling power of the Jacobites, and so the Hanoverian succession was safely established despite the militant breakaways of the Fifteen and the Forty-five. No wonder the Campbells are not exactly loved by those who still wear the white rose in their hearts ! As to the "fairness" there could be no doubt at all in Ivar Campbell's case. " His face," wrote Mr Guy Ridley, who was his familiar friend, " was of great beauty, with finely-drawn features. There was something rare in the grace and vigour of his carriage ; the impression he gave was one of healthi- ness and virility of mind and body. He was of no more than medium height, yet his sturdiness, the breadth of his hands and wrists, the spring in his 191 192 THE HIGHLAND SOUL movements, bore evidence of unusual strength. His eyes were remarkable not only for their vitality, but for their depth — ^just as those who knew him best could feel that there was a mysterious depth of character behind the brilliance of his laughter, which set them wondering how in the future years it would exert its power. Some perhaps suspected the presence of the same force and charm that made his grandfather, the eighth Duke of Argyll, the most eloquent orator of his day." But it was his vivid youth, untamable or at any rate untamed, and his keen and universal interest in men and books which caused even the acquaintance of a passing hour to remember him always. He could find something strange and incalculable in the most commonplace of men or women ; and he was incapable of boring anybody, because nobody ever bored him. As for his love of literature (of which his study of Elizabethans at Eton was the earliest sign), it cannot be expressed in words. Books were to him living, breathing creatures, and he knew them passionately. Of his life at Inverary, at Eton, at Christ Church, in Hanover, in Paris, and in America no detailed account need be given. The hills and glens of his ancestral home were a perpetual inspiration, and it was the mightiness of the seasons in that wondrous countryside which is the leitmotiv of The Marriage of Earth and Springs the fair and joyous ode which is the most ambitious of his poetic achievements : — Now wedded Earth puts on her splendid dress Woven of sunshine shot through quivering green ; Now courting birds, to lure their heart's choice, preen Fine feather'd coats IVAR CAMPBELL 193 And try a thousand times their love-song's notes ; Now Httle spear-point fronds of flowers press Their busy heads Through garden-beds ; And once again climbs new sap up the wood, Making the old trees young with small buds' sheen. Now deathless souls peep 'neath memorial stones, To prove their bodies' immortality, Which feed Earth's womb^d children with their bones. Now God indeed perceives 'tis very good. As leaning forward on his throne he hears, Above the constant shrilling of the spheres. Earth giving back to him his minstrelsy. He loved books, but was no bookworm ; all the joys of open-air living were his from time to time, and Mr Guy Ridley and other close friends believe that he was never happier than when tramping the king's highway, pack on shoulder and the lilt of an old, old tune on his lips. " Walking is a brave thing," he wrote, " a large thing, a dusty thing, as you will, but like the sea it touches heaven." He had eyes for everything when tramping alone or with a friend, and his mind became a gallery of impressions painted in undying colours of which the following description is a charming example : — Along a lane near Grafton there are more poppies than are to be found I suppose in any other lane in the English shires. From the field beyond, hidden by a leafy beech hedge whereon clamber and sway wild roses and over which elderberry-trees open to the skies flat flowers that are big platters for the bees to feed upon, they pour down to the white road's edge in a thousand scarlet ranks ; and in number they are like a great company of cardinals seated tier upon tier. And the upper air of Grafton is encircled, as it were, with larks that hang like spiders from the blue, and sway, and fall a little, and climb again ladderwise upon the windy currents. And they do not cease singing until the sun has set. (I read this passage about the larks to a famous air fighter, and he said : " Why, he should have been in the Flying Corps ! How he would have N 194 THE HIGHLAND SOUL loved to see the upper side of cloudland, with its vast snow-fields and sudden precipices ! " It is curious how everybody who knew Ivar Campbell felt sure that he could have made a success of any pursuit). He was happy in untamed Northern wilds or in the green ambuscades of our Southern garden-land. Yet for all that he was happily at home in any city of the soul, such as Venice or Paris. The simplicity of life in Venice attracted him as much as the beauty of its monuments of a glorious past. He did not feel that he was but a guest of the dead there ; he rejoiced in his bright vision of a living joyous city, where the sonorous voices of great bells (the sig?ia of mediaeval times), the everlasting lapping of little waves, and the full- throated laughter of children (Venetian babies have the blackbird s music in their throats) make a harmony which measures the flowing and ebbing of time. Paris also was a child's town to him ; though there it was the grown-ups who seemed children. " Am I not in child's town ?" he once wrote to Mr Guy Ridley. " Where's the Punch and Judy show played finer than 'tis played in the Luxembourg Gardens — or where bloom flowers with more colour than there ? where are the girls prettier ? In child's town we do not frown when we pass strangers — I am dancing now — in the sun — do you hear me laughing ? " He was a well-known figure in Paris of the " Riv' Gauche," and students and artists who live and work and play there were always glad to see him. He could easily distinguish between the sincere artist and the clever charlatan who is so refreshingly fre- quent on the Batte Montmartre, that realistic Venus- berg. The former became his intimate friend ; the latter remained for him one of the amusing children IVAR CAMPBELL 195 who insisted on never growing up. He loved children, both old and young. And he himself never lost that wise childishness, which is a dew of mysticism on the flowering intelligence and is, for the creative artist, the greatest of all spiritual gifts, for it enables you to keep your soul fresh and fragrant and make your life a new creation daily. Many of his friends in Paris were Americans, and the interest he felt in them made him eager to discover their amazing country for himself. So he went to Washington as honorary attache to the British Embassy (19 12-14), and what America was to this child Columbus and what he was to America is best told in the following passages from a letter written to Mr Guy Ridley (his pre-ordained bio- grapher) by Lord Eustace Percy who was with him at Washington : — " What struck me when Ivar came out to America (for I had hardly seen him for some years) was the liveliness of his interest in these movements.^ He was quick in seizing the point of current Diplomatic business, but the international questions, I think, left him rather cold. It was the internal condition of the country, especially on its human side, and particularly, perhaps, the more radical syndicalist effervescence in the ranks of unskilled and foreign labour, which really interested him. Here his interest was most catholic. I remember, for example, that Gerald Stanley Lee's ' Inspired Million- aires ' and Giovanitti's revolutionary ' vers libres ' at one moment held equal places in his library ! I don't think he ever looked at things from the political or the statesmen's point of view — he never cared to ask whether a given movement gave promise of permanence or practical effect. It was simple ' humanness ' that he looked for, and he naturally found it on all sides, for the attraction of America to a man of active mind is that it provides a clear and open field for ideals, social experiments, peculiar movements, and attempts at reform which in older countries are entangled with and obscured by the dibris of past efforts. It was remarkable that in all this effer- vescence, which has its very comic side, Ivar's strong sense of humour 1 The various Radical movements which had found expression in Roosevelt's Progressive Campaign and in such Labour disturbances as the Lawrence strike. 196 THE HIGHLAND SOUL was but rarely aroused by the vagaries of the idealists, though it sparkled into life over the sordid sides of American politics, of which this period furnished one or two particularly flagrant examples. He was careful and accurate in his performance of the routine work of the Embassy ; but, much as diplomacy interested him on its human side, it is doubtful whether he would have made a successful diplomatist. After his return to England in the spring of 19 14 (when few saw the cloud, no bigger than a mailed fist, rising in the East) he talked of starting a book-shop in Chelsea. There under the peaceful name of John Cowslip he proposed to sell books and drawings by modern artists and also holly walking-sticks polished like ivory, to be cut by his familiar friend in certain woodlands they had discovered in their wanderings. War he never thought of at all ; he loved his fellow-creatures too well not to loathe the very idea of that tremendous release of long-hoarded hatreds which, little as he dreamed of such a destiny, was to find him an all- engrossing vocation and at the same time perfect his literary craftsmanship. Let us look at the various writings he has left before showing how the soldier latent in him (as in every member of his brilliant race) found expression in deeds and words alike. His poems, some of which were published in various periodicals, show a technique far in advance of what one would expect from so young and in- frequent a poet. He never mistakes prosody for poetry ; he never wastes words ; he never mistakes pose for poise ; he never writes verse for the sake of versifying, but only under the stress of some spiritual necessity. Even his sonnets are not merely exercises in the little gymnasium, to use Henley*s IVAR CAMPBELL 197 similitude in a conversation I had with him, wliere so many of the Muse's apprentices learn to get their poetical muscle up and wear the heavy golden fetters of difficult form as gracefully as may be. The Elizabethan note, modulated subtly to modernity, is clear in the following poem entitled Love's Recognitiofi : — Conceive mine eyes a mirror : in them gleaming Behold a picture of thine outward view — Lovelier fancy than young poet's dreaming, More splendid than the morn's resplendent hue. So canst thou see thy pattern in mine eyes, And I in thine pei'use thy deep soul's thought, And by reflection read love's mysteries The magic of whose speech thy lips I taught. And when we hail love's recognition thus, Eyes close to eyes, the passionate lips must meet And join in hushed communion marvellous, And soul speed forth companion soul to greet. So shall we wander through new realms of bliss, Tw^o beating hearts made single by that kiss. In other poems he shows himself an adept in the distinctly perilous device (among the masters only Heredia can always be sure of success) of the final line that sums up all that has gone before. For example, this is the last stanza of a long ballad of the wood Barolelf where " it is always Autumn and the leaves fall from the trees for ever and ever " : — To bury her they fall, All her limbs to cover, Tenderly they fall. Every leaf a lover. In a curious form, which makes effective use of the drone-note rhyme, we -get perhaps his condemnation of war, as delusion and illusion even if it be victorious : — 198 THE HIGHLAND SOUL When in their long lean ships the Greek host weighed » Their splashing anchors, then they had much joy For lovely Helen's sake to humble Troy . . . Their first deed was the murder of a maid. Ten years from their pleasant land they stayed, And after ten years, had they any joy ? They had old Helen, and they humbled Troy : Were they at her lost loveliness dismayed ? Thinking of their lost Youth were they afraid ? Was Youth worth more than Helen — Helen of Troy ? Was it for this tired face they had spent joy ? For tliis tall, weary woman burnt a maid ? When on that quiet night the Greek host laid Down their old dinted armour, had they any joy ? Later on he wrote, in a letter from the trenches, of the " organized boredom " of modern warfare. A monotonous futility is well indicated, surely, in these fourteen lines rhymed on a hard and a heavy sound. In all this I find an unfaltering sense of the appro- priate form and also, what is rarer still in young poets, a feeling for the artistic values of the vowels. And, rarest of all gifts with the apprentices of modern times, he could sing — as is shown in these two examples of the tiny lyric which brings its own music with it : — I Peace, God's own peace. This it is I bring you The quiet song of sleep, Dear tired heart, I sing you. Dream, softly dream. Till solemn death shall find you. With coronals of roses Tenderly to bind you. Peace past understanding, Dear tired heart, I bring you ; The quiet song of evening Softly I sing you. IVAR CAMPBELL 199 Once again, earth, Cometh thy spring ; Once again thy birth, Thy new flowering. After winter dearth This prayer I bring, God be with thee, earth. In thy travaihng. The unpublished prose pieces he left are even more interesting than his poems. Three essays in criticism (entitled John Cheyne's Letters) attempt a reconciliation between his love of the great Victorians and his loving kindness for the Georgians. In form these papers are true essays ; marked by an almost Elian play of fancy, at times rising to a lyrical ardour, and always keeping the quality of casualness which is characteristic of the born essayist. They are marked by a sheer sincerity ; he refuses to sit at the feet of any critical Gamaliel or to use the official short-cuts to appreciation, but makes up his mind for himself and utters his considered judgment without fear or favour. The third essay (Oscar Wilde ajid True Beauty) ends with a tremendous onslaught against the false astheticism which was epidemic among young men in the last two decades of the nineteenth century : — If you grumble at me and ask — What, then, is True Beauty and where does it He ? — I cannot tell you. But I can most certainly hint at the direction. It is not the pallid lily that languorously sways in the hot-house air, but it is the wild white cherry and the golden gorse upon the uplands. It is not strange perfumes from the East and amorous soaps and salts that make water of the softness of velvet and sweeter than kisses, but it is the wind laden with the smell of wild flowers, and it is the earth and it is the rivers and it is the trees. It is not delicate and frafl and languid ; but it is strong. It is not easy ; it is difficult. Compare the Beauty Wilde delighted in with the great Beauty Browning knew, with the soaring spirit Beauty was to Shelley, 200 THE HIGHLAND SOUL with the mystical but fine Faith Beauty was to Francis Thompson. Why follow Wilde ? Why blind your eyes to the distinction between health and disease ? Is it that you love Wilde's words — that you imagine him a master of phrases ? Let me ask you to turn back to the great prose-writers of England and in their light and in your knowledge of the structure and rhythm of sentences perceive the worth of your master's genius — a paper wind-mill for babes to play with ! Is it gorgeousness you wish for — lists of gems and descriptions of splendour, mazy arabesques and mosaics of style ? Read Hakluyt's Voyages and you vnW discover that the early merchants who traded in India understood to perfection the translation into writing of Oriental magnificence. Is it the mere sonnet of words you wish for ? It is a poor desire to seek in prose solely the music of vocables. But turn to Sir Thomas Browne, turn to Jeremy Taylor, turn to your Bible. You will discover, the more you read, the more you under- stand, the more ignominious appears the cult of that type of Beauty to which Oscar Wilde paid homage, and whose idol he set up in England. So the stout worshipper of Duessa retires abashed, waving a protest with hands encased in yellow kid gloves ! The second essay is a panegyric on the open-air lyrics of Mr W. H. Davies (a much bigger man than the super-tramp whom G. B. S. discovered) which are as pure as a thrush's note and clean and fresh as a May morning and joyously live up to and beyond the singing lines : — Sing out, my Soul, thy songs of joy ; Such as a happy bird will sing Beneath a rainbow's lovely arch In early spring. The remaining paper confuses and contrasts Nietzsche and Henley, finding in the latter's famous Hymn of Agnosticism a faith beyond and above the former's philosophy of reaction against the tyranny of pain. The inner secret, the causa causans^ of Nietzsche's creed, is expounded once for all in the following story : — Two years ago I fell ill, and hi\d to nurse me a woman of keen in- tellect and quite remarkable intuition. When convalescent, I read to her certain passages from our iconoclastic preacher's works. She IVAR CAMPBELL 201 had not read him— had scarcely heard ta.lk of him ; her interests- brave, noble interests — are in other things. When I had finished, I asked her opinion of the author. " I cannot pretend to judge on so small an extract," she answered, " but I think this Nietzsche must have been continually in pain, bodily or mental." Marvelling at so accurate a discovery of the truth, I asked her reason for saying this. " Because," she said, " in the course of my expressions I have often noticed that men, gentle-natured when in health, sometimes become, when suffering pain, quite extraordinarily cruel. They cannot bear pain as women can." And she told me one or two stories as a proof of her remark. So it was his continuous, shattering headaches that bred in Nietzsche's ravaged brain his glorification of brute force ; thus he flouted the cruelty of nature with a cruelty of his own. But Henley, though he too lived through purgatories of pain, one dark fire-illumined chamber opening out of another, kept his courage unconquered, his soul sweet and genial in spite of fits of irritation which were sometimes expressed in injustice to old friends, such as the dead- and-gone Stevenson sleeping loftily in Samoa. His soul remained an'ima naturaliter christiana ; he refused to follow the easy creed of the superman, hacking his way through all living obstacles with a butcher's cleaver, and found instead the more difficult path of which Clement said : " It is an enterprise of noble daring to take our way to God." . . . And, in passing, does not this explanation of Nietzsche's brutal creed also solve the problem of German cruelty. Of all the peoples in the war they are the most neurotic, the least capable of bearing pain with courage and dignity. All our surgeons who have treated wounded Germans are agreed on that point. Perhaps the pain they inflict on helpless prisoners of war is their revenge for the pain — and, worse still,, the fear of pain — with which nature punishes their ill-balanced nervous system. 202 THE HIGHLAND SOUL Ivar Campbell had a genius for fantasy, and some of his efforts in that mode, ranging from full-length examples like Tihe Story of the Fiddler^ whose soul hanged itself with a chain of stars on a horn of the moon, to the tiniest fragments, are unlike anything else of the kind in English literature, jib sin the, really an essay in the freest of free verse, is a striking proof of his gift for making arabesques of thought touched with emotion : — Beauty veileth her face in seven veils ; she hath become a thing of doubt, an imagination tainted. Cloudily, ^rey-green from the tumbler's depth she whirleth ; to my brain's innermost chamber she whirleth, green-green, cloudily. To me the windy uplands were a creed and the bird-song alleluiah ; to me the bare earth's bosom was an anthem and a dancing leaf laughter. To me the song of running waters was Beauty's song ; and a wood- land primrose Beauty's prayer. Beauty, fever-flushed, v/as a virgin wed ; autumn in forest places was to me Beauty's celestial violation. Now she veileth her face in seven veils ; she hath become a thing of doubt, an imagination tainted. Cloudily, grey-green from the tumbler's deeps she whirleth ; so to my brain's innermost chamber she whirleth, grey-green, cloudily. It is clear he was an experimentalist of genius ; he did not, alas, live long enough for the experience which chooses one of many by-ways and makes it the high-way of life-long endeavour. But for the war, I think, he might have become a master of the fantastical essay — a rare thing indeed in I'lnglish literature. Like all young writers his thoughts ran on death, which is the theme of two curious experi- ments, one a grim piece of realism relating the pass- ing of a poor old woman in a hovel where her son, a tired labourer, sleeps uneasily in his working clothes. But it is in Roads that his manner is most formed, that the surest promise is shown of his IVAR CAMPBELL 203 admirable war-letters. Roads is the story of a walking tour in which he and a friend played the part of vagabond so well that village girls giggled at them; nay, even the vague people at the coffee-stall in Sloane Square, where they and Moab, the donkey, made the first halt, paid them a tribute of laughter. Hazlitt was asleep, his blinds undrawn, as they passed his house. But, later on, there came to him a beatitude, a vision, of the abolition of gentility according to a half-forgotten prescription, for even in Germany that Shavian play will nev^er be played again : — And as I lay upon the packed cart, Ransome loitering many miles behind, and Moab plod-plodding along, I dreamed this dream. Upon fair white roads, upon tarred motor- ways, through rutty tracks among hedges, there passed a procession of pale thin things, set ill-at-ease upon donkey-carts, gazing with curious eyes at the country sights and sounds and snuffing uncertainly the smells of wood and moorland and leafy lanes. And in my dream I led this procession, my cart went creaking happily as leader while I ran whispering into the white ears of these things. Say " bloody," I whispered, and a sigh would come from the lips of them — " bloody " they would say softly without conviction. Like Kenneth Grahame's children and Mr Hilaire Belloc, he enters on a philosophy of roads, as lines of ulterior significance in the palimpsest of the English countryside, which he seems to have acquired from the gipsies, to judge by these excerpts from a journal : — " In Wiltshire once I told a black-haired woman she was upon a Roman Road. " ' It's a Romany Road,' she said. " ' Well, well,' I said, ,' we call it a Roman Road.' " ' You may pronounce it like that,' said she. ' A Romany Road would be a gypsy road, and in Wiltshire the Roman roads are used by gypsies more than by other travellers.' " ' This road goes all round the World,' said another dark woman to me ; and this for the Romans was true enough. ' We be Romans 204 THE HIGHLAND SOUL indeed, it is our road, but the farmers do plant their crops upon it and fence it in, and we are unable to travel there.' " He has glimpses of the Roman legionaries marching on these ancient grass-grown thoroughfares and of all the later generations of warriors who died in old, forgotten battles — still they march by moonlight, in darkly gleaming harness, led by the shadows of great names no more remembered. He died in Meso- potamia before the memories of that sad, derelict land could take hold of his vivid imagination. I can imagine what pictures he would have given us, had he lived long enough, of the pageantry of the ages of warfare there — the Assyrians with their mighty calves (tremendous marchers they were, and that physical trait survives to this very diy in their posterity) hastening to eat up a rebellious city, the tall chivalrous Persians in their leathern trousers, and the " Ten Thousand " whose march up to within sight and hearing of Babylon and successful retreat, the most wonderful in history, opened a door ot hope to the ambition of Alexander the Great. When the war broke out, he volunteered at once, but the doctors turned him down. This stroke of ill-luck left him searching everywhere for work in which he could be of service to his country. There was a moment when he almost gave up the quest, sadly resigning himself to being what he called " one of the useless ones." However he learnt to drive a motor ambulance, and worked for some time in France with the American Red Cross. Returning to England, with his determination to become a soldier renewed, he was once more rejected by a medical board. At the third time of asking, how- ever, he was accepted, and in February, 19 15, received a commission in the regiment of his clan, the Argyll IVAR CAMPBELL 205 and Sutherland Highlanders. The depression from which he had been suffering vanished, and he rejoiced in his new life, giving his whole heart and soul to the routine and discipline of training. He had found his vocation ; or, rather, it had found him. No more pithy or picturesque letters than his have ever been written from the Western front or on the way to it. The old, fighting blood sings in his veins when, in the course of training, he finds him- self in command of a full company of his clansmen. " My voice," he writes, " uprose above wind and rain. I evolved them from close column of platoons to columns of fours from the right of platoons. The pipers went before and the drums (terum tatoo, terum tatoo) and I came strutting behind, and the company followed me like a flag flowing down the road. Me for a sojer ! " But it was a sad blow, when he went on active service, to find he was not for the Argylls but for the Seaforths. Four "cheeky Charlies" or "pipsqueaks," the wicked little shells that arrive with a sudden whiz, bestowed on him the baptism of fire four months after he had been gazetted. His letters are full of small etchings, not a word astray or askew, of the scenes of trench warfare. " At dawn," to give an example, " came a mist over this flat, scarred land ; the sun rose ghostly white as a moon ; a cuckoo between the enemy's lines laughed. Away to the left came the long staccato sounds of rifle-fire, and the wooden tapping of the machine guns. Both sides feared an advance through the mist ; sweep the ground there to the front with bullets ; make them think twice about getting out of their trenches. ... In the mist, careless, unthinking, a German climbed over his parapet into the field ! The English, no doubt. 2o6 THE HIGHLAND SOUL were asleep; anyhow the mist was concealment. So may he think in Heaven or Hell ; we have some good shots in this Battalion. That morning the bag was two brace." Like a born soldier, he is at his keenest in the weird, far-listening morn ; and in the evening, when the glimmering landscape fades and so many are tired and careless. The thought that war, after all, is the most natural mode of existence occurs again and yet again : — It is difficult to write things out here. Journalists do it, yet miss the note of naturalness which strikes me. For these things are natural. I suppose we have been fighting a thousand thousand years to a thou- sand years' peace ; they miss, too, the beauty of the scene and action as a whole — that beauty defined as something strange, rarefied ; our deep passions made lawful and evident ; our desires made accept- able ; our direction straight. Such will be the impressions to linger, to be handed on to future generations, as the Napoleonic wars are fine adventures to us. Here, present and glaring to our eyes in trenches and in billets, etc., the more abiding and deeper meanings of the war are readable. Here's a scene I shall remember always : A misty summer morn- ing — I went along a sap-head running towards the German line at right-angles to our own. Looking out over the country, flat and un- interesting in peace, I beheld what at first would seem to be a land ploughed by the ploughs of giants. In England you read of concealed trenches — here we do not trouble about that. Trenches rise up, grey clay, 3 or 4 feet above the ground. Save for one or two men — snipers — at the sap-head, the country was deserted. No sign of humanity — a dead land. And yet thousands of men were there, like rabbits concealed. The artillery was quiet ; there was no sound but a cuckoo in a shell-torn poplar. Then, as a rabbit in the early morning comes out to crop grass, a German stepped over the enemy trench — the only living thing in sight. " I'll take him," says the man near me. And like a rabbit the German falls. And again com- plete silence and desolation. He is afraid this must be bad writing; he feels he had never learnt to write naturally of natural things. Yet, as he himself guesses, Stevenson wrote in a similar style of a somewhat similar scene, as quiet and secret and ominous, when he described IVAR CAMPBELL 207 the shooting of the king's factor in Appin so as to bring out the naturalness of it all. Here is a very- different, but equally intimate, impression of the life in a vast theatre of war which is yet never theatrical : — A concert in the evening — very touching to my incurable senti- mentaUsm — up against an old farm-house : the stage a cart— ^a ring of dim faces and knees below ; and the slow, sad songs these men love, with choruses they sing softly, and occasionally the wild wail of Gaelic : to end with " God save the King "—all of us very stiff at the attention : and back to the mess and drinks and chaff and tales of nothing at all — of this man here and that man there, and how So-and-So died and Jim got nerves and Bill the D.S.O., and good- night, good-night : and in the silence following lights out, the thud of the guns punctures the night stillness. Affairs are moving here— or will move — or have moved. Continual rumours buzz like mosquitoes about us. Those in authority seem satisfied and pleased : they are able to perceive large and clear ; we, cooped in our own speculations, are optimistic, for optimism, though founded on ignorance, is good for the nerves. Douglas ^v^ites the War may collapse as suddenly as it rose up. God and the devil know! — humanity can but hope. War, perchance, may become a habit. In twenty years you may still be writing to me and I to you. We shall have advanced a thousand yards, or retire:;— a strategical movement. Paris has passed a law for marriage by proxy for soldiers in the trenches. God forbid things should go too far, and the children be bom by proxy too ! Yet who can tell, in twenty years. A young Frenchman arrives in the trenches ; seeks un Monsieur Tel ou Tel. He finds him. " Bonjour, papa ; j'suis ton fils." " Mon fils ? Grands Dieux — par qui ? " " Ton ancienne amie, Marie-Louise." " Marie-Louise — Marie-Louise ? Ah ! je m'en souviens. Elle est ma femme, alors ? " " Qui, Papa, et j'suis ton fils." " Bien, je suis content : j'en ai d'autres par ici, mais, n'importe. Tu vois les tranchees en face ? ' " Qui, papa." " Sont les Boches — en avant, fils de Marie-Louise par je ne sais qui — en avant, fils de mon coeur " And here is another night-piece which does not end in speculative thoughts under the moon, that whole sepulchre in the skies, scribbled over with h'lc jacets^ and the merriment yet is reaction : — Went down to the fire trench with loo men last night, and dug hard for three hours. Very tired and hot ; the enemy were quiet ; a 2o8 THE HIGHLAND SOUL starry night ; the peace of war on such occasions is a blessed state ; though to the sight is Uttle peace. Our star shells and theirs float continually up into the sky to illumine any evil deeds either may con- terrlplate across that unmanned borderland between the hostile trenches. I find in this bright white light you see the rare trees blasted as by lightning — blasted indeed by a more terrible but more common occurrence, shell-fire — and the rough outlines of trenches and men's figures immense behind them : if working, struck immobile by light, lest any enemy sniper should detect movement. Groups of Rodin designs — in the distance, too, gaunt skeletons of houses. His men, of course, are in his mind all the time ; it is the custom never to forget them in a Highland Regiment, where all are thought of as gentlemen, fellow-clansmen, equals in a sense. He tells a quaint, quotable story of what one of his men wrote in a letter home ; he had trained at Airdrie before coming out. " When I was back home," he wrote, " I wished to Hell I was out of Airdrie ; now I wish to Airdrie I was out of Hell." He is vexed by his dirtiness ; like everybody else he feels over-savoury. The meaning of the soldier's song : — I've a little grey flea in my vest, comes home to him, as the co-operative smell ascends to heaven and each individual conducts a private offensive against the Little Brothers of the Prussian. Anyhow, they are cleaner than the Indian regiments. It is one thing to admire them at night and to feel you are taking over trenches from bronze gods. It is another thing to inhabit their trenches which " move bodily across country like cheese " and, as the American soldier said, have to be lassoed first. The enemy is chaffed as well as sniped and strafed by turns : — There was a pleasant though vulgar incident in the trenches the other day. We had painted upon a board and shown the enemy the news of the Riga sea-fight. And to make sure they understood, we wrote the news down, put the paper in a jam-tin stufied with earth IVAR CAMPBELL 209 to make it heavy, and catapulted it over, as if it had been a bomb, to the German trenches, which it just failed to reach. However, a Boche, trusting to the sporting instinct of the Scotch, climbed out of his trench and picked the tin up ! The details of the Riga fight were fairly written down ; the vulgarity came in the line : " The Kaiserin has had twins." Then comes a battle, not pressed to extremes, and so called a " demonstration " : — The splutter of shrapnel, the red squeal of field guns, N.E. ; the growl of the heavies moving slowly through the air, the cr-r-r-r-ump of their explosion. But in a bombardment all tones mingle and their noise is like machinery running not smoothly but roughly, pantingly, angrily ; wildly making chaos of peace and wholeness. You perceive, too, in imagination, men infinitely small, running, affrighted rabbits, from the upheaval of the shells — nerve-racked, deafened ; clinging to earth, hiding eyes, whispering " God, God ! " You perceive, too, other men, sweaty, brown, infinitely small also, moving the guns, feeding the belching monster, grimly, quietly pleased. But with eyes looking over this land of innumerable irruptions, you see no man. The land is inhuman. But thousands of men are there ; men who are below ground, men who have little bodies but immense brains. And the men facing West are saying, " This is an attack, they will attack when this hell's over," and they go on saying this to themselves continually. And the men facing East are saying, " We've got to get over the parapet. We've got to get over the parapet — when the guns lift." And then the guns lift up their heads and shout a longer, higher song. And this untenanted land is suddenly alive with little men, rushing, stumbling — rather foolishly leaping forward — laughing, shouting, crying in the charge. • ••■•••■ There is one thing cheering. The men of the Battalion — through all and in spite of that noisy, untasty day ; through the wet, cold night, hungry and tired, living now in mud and water, with every prospect of more rain to-morrow — are cheery. Sometimes, back in billets, I hate the men — their petty crimes, their continual bad language with no variety of expression, their stubborn moods. But in a difficult time they show up splendidly. Laughing in mud, joking in water — I'd " demonstrate " into Hell with some of them and not care. Yet, under heavy shell-fire it was curious to look into their eyes — o 2IO THE HIGHLAND SOUL some of them little fellows from shops, civilians before, now and after : you perceived a wide rathei frightened, piteous wonder in their eyes, a patient look turned towards you, saying not " What the blankety, blankety hell is this ? " but " Is this quite fair ? We cannot move, we are but little animals. Is it quiie necessary to make such infernally large explosive shells to kill such infernally small and feeble animals as ourselves ? " I quite agreed with them, but had to put my eye-glass firmly in my eye and make jokes ; and, looking back, I blush to think of the damnably bad jokes I did make. He gets out of the trenches for a time, and has leisure, in the intervals of teaching the art of throw- ing bombs, to think over the folly of the politicians, " men, severally great in peace-time, in war-time treading upon each other's toes as they grumble and stutter and stumble and mutter in the dark of their statesmanship." Kitchener and jofFre are silent, but they go on talking, talking, talking, and " Welsh David swings traversely from heights of tub-oratory to depths of journalistic cliches." At the end of the year he is transferred to Mesopotamia, where he knows that war will be more like the old historic game of pitched battles, pursuit and retreat, marching and counter-marching. He asks for a copy of Xenophon's A?iabasis^ the best story of military adventure ever written. He had by then made up his mind to remain a soldier for the rest of his life. But he was shot through the body, while gallantly leading his men against a strong Turkish position in front of Sheikh Saad, and died on the 8th January 19 16, in -his twenty- sixth year. AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER TOM KETTLE AT the General Election of 1910 Tom Kettle (as he was familiarly, affectionately, called by his political friends and enemies alike) was again returned as Parliamentary representative for East Tyrone by an increased majority. In the course of the election he was welcomed at one remote and rather inaccessible spot by a poverty-stricken populace which had improvised a mountain band and crude home-made torches of turf and paraffin. " Friends," said the winning candidate, surely one of the wisest and wittiest of Irishmen, " you have met us with God's two best gifts to man — fire and music." All who can see him clear for what he truly was, in spite of mists of party prejudice and the age-long misunderstanding between England and Ireland, will admit that these were the very gifts he himself gave to humanity in the greatest crisis of the world's history. Fire and music : firstly, a most abundant endowment of the per- fervidum ingenium Scotorum which has seen a leaping flame on so many lofty altars in Ireland and elsewhere ; secondly, a career closing in the Last Post, which was as subtle a harmony of beautiful assonances as the most exquisite and other- worldly of Celtic poems. Thomas M. Kettle was the third son of Andrew J. Kettle and of Margaret MacCourt ; he was born in 1880 at Artane, Co. Dubhn. He was proud of his Norse ancestry and of the way in which these 2U 212 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER pirates of the North were subdued to nobler usages — " We came, we the invaders, to dominate and remained to serve. For Ireland has signed us with the oil and chrism of her human sacrament, and even though we should deny the faith with our lips, she would hold our hearts to the end." He was not less proud of his dour old father, a famous local reformer, who did more than any other man to free Ireland from the curse of absentee owners, and could not bring himself to receive the milder counsels of an age of more humane politics. Tom Kettle lived in the country until he was twelve, and the stilly charm and ancient peace of the remember- ing fields were with him to the end, wooing him to leave the dust and uproar of politics and settle down in some picturesque cottage to cultivate early potatoes and late literature. The soul of the fine Irishman is always thus divided against itself; but the fighting instinct commonly prevails against the deep desire to live quietly under quicken boughs and be a comrade of birds and flowers and the consulting stars, and so make one's soul. He was educated first at the Christian Brothers' School in Dublin and next at Clongowes Wood College, and he won many medals and distinctions there and at Univer- sity College, whither he proceeded in 1897. ^^ University College he became Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society, and won the gold medal for Oratory. His peculiar gifts were already apparent, especially his happy faculty, actually amounting to genius, for grasping a complex sub- ject and crystallizing it In a brief, brilliant phrase. A breakdown in health, the effect of over-study on a high-strung and unresting mind, interrupted his university career for a long period, and in 1904 the TOM KETTLE 213 death of a brother to whom he was passionately- attached still further taxed his shattered nervous system. He had to visit the Tyrol to recover his health, and it was during this wander-year that he perfected his knowledge of European languages and literature and learned to see Irish affairs in the just and ample perspective of world-thought and world- policy. Ireland, in the most significant period of her ancient and impressive history, when she was the land of refuge for Roman culture during the Dark Ages and for centuries afterwards, was intimately in touch — much more closely than England — with European civilisation, and it was Kettle's ruling ideal to revive in Ireland a sense of her historical mission as a seed-plot of spirituality for the European world and, what is more, a mediator between the power of England and the living mosaic of European cultures. He was drawn into a close and yet closer sympathy with France, the conqueror of liberty for herself and for all other nations, great and small, and always able to under- stand the beautiful and impulsive soul of Ireland. "The Irish mind," he wrote in one of his books, " is like the French — ' lucid, vigorous, and positive ' — though less methodical, since it never had the happiness to undergo the Latin discipline.^ France and Ireland have been made to understand each other." When these determining motives of his mentality are fully understood, it becomes manifest that he could never have held aloof from the struggle against Germany's attempt to impose her Kiiltur^ which is barbarism made scientific and pro- vincialism writ large, on lands that were Christian and civilized centuries before even the Cross, which ^ Ireland was never a part of the Roman Empire. 214 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER is a sword-hilt, appeared in the forests and wilder- nesses of the Alemanni. He was called to the Bar in 1905, after winning a Victoria Prize at the end of his term at King's Inns. There can be no doubt he would have been a brilliantly successful advocate if he could have made the law his profession. But he could not confine himself to the point of view for which he was briefed, could not bind his rich and humane personality down to the bed of Procrustes of legal moulds and forms, which seemed to him " too narrow and too nicely definite, too blank to psychology to contain the passionate chaos of the life that is poured into them." A friendly critic justly observed that he could only have been his own happy self as an advocate when pleading on the Judgment Day at the Bar of Heaven for a reversal of the historic verdicts against all desperate sinners. The lines of a half-forgotten poet who stands himself in need of a little white-washing : — Never to bow or kneel To any brazen lie ; To love the worst ; to feel The worst is even as I. To count all triumph vain That helps no burdened man. I think so still, and so I end as I began. was his creed, and none more unsuitable for a success- ful barrister could be imagined. He found it a dreadful ordeal to defend a criminal unsuccessfully and to think afterwards that there might have been no conviction if another and a better lawyer had been chosen for the defence. And to have been successful in the prosecution of some poor wretch would have been a still more terrible experience for TOM KETTLE 215 one who believed that, as all human beings are saints, so they are all sinners, and that the innocent — at any rate the legally innocent — are those who have not been found out. He soon forsook the Law and plunged into journalism, which, thanks to his vigorous and varied prose style, became literature in his hands. He was too outspoken — and too much of a man of letters — to be retained long in an editorial chair by pro- prietors who, especially in Ireland, think an editor ought to be a flesh-and-blood gramophone. In 1906 he was given the opportunity of fighting the East Tyrone constituency, which he won by a majority of sixteen. Nobody else could have won and held that particular seat in the Nationalist interest. In the autumn of the same year he went to America on a political mission which was for him a personal triumph. The freedom and hospitality of the United States greatly delighted him ; he was at home for six months in that electric atmosphere, so full of intellectual ozone, and he treasured up the humorous sayings he heard there — such as " I don't know where I am going but I am on my way," and "we trust in God; all others pay cash." There is a spice of gaulo'iserie in American humour which must have appealed to so keen a votary of French wit. In 19 10 he was re-elected for East Tyrone by a majority of 1 1 8 — and the increase in the number of his supporters was a striking proof of the power of a humanizing personality, for the dominating issue in such half-way constituencies in the North is Catholic green v. Protestant orange, and it is nothing short of a political miracle for an elector to change his flag. The truth is that even his bitterest political opponents could not help liking Tom 2i6 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER Kettle, who, for his part, would not deny their claim to be considered honest Irishmen ac- cording to their lights. He was impatient of any attempt to stir up the ashes of ancient feuds. Appealing to Ulstermen to refrain their enthusiasm for William of Orange, he said: "Why let us quarrel over a dead Dutchman ? " His famous reply to Rudyard Kipling : — The poet, for a coin, Hands to the gabbling rout A bucketful of Boyne To put the sunrise out, would perhaps have been more telling without the suggestion that the poem to which it was a reply was written for cash, not from a solemn sense of duty. Tom Kettle was not impeccable ; he pre- ferred to be human and lovable. His Parliamentary epigrams are as often quoted by his opponents as by his friends. Mr Balfour's complaisance in yielding to the Tariff Reformers was satirized in the saying : "They have nailed their leader to the mast." He summed up the difference between the two great British parties as follows : " When in office the Liberals forget their principles and the Tories remember their friends." He could be hard on his critics. " I don't mind loquacity as long as it is not Belloc-quacity " ; and " Mr Long knows a sentence should have a beginning, but he quite forgets it should also have an end " — these quips w^ere singularly effective as they sprang dramatically out of the occasion. His description of Mr Healy as " a brilliant calamity " is a definition. He spoke of Irish emigrants as " landless men from a manless land." Home Rule he described as " a divorce between two administrations, but a marriage TOM KETTLE 217 between two nations." Of the Royal Irish Con- stabulary he observed : " It was formerly an army of occupation. Now, owing to the all but complete disappearance of crime, it is an army of no occupation." " Loyalty," he suggested significantly, " is the bloom on the face of freedom." His literary criticisms were almost always brief and felicitous. A stupid book which appeared in the Christmas season was described as " very suitable for the Christmas fire." Cleverness he defined as a perfumed malice — the perfume predominating in literature, the malice in life. Of Mr George Moore, who so steadfastly refuses to become old or ugly, he said : " He suff^ers from the sick imagination of the growing boy." He was delightfully adroit in his dealings with literary impostors. A popular novelist who made money without making literature spoke of his success with great unction, boasting that his latest book had been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and even Dutch. In a most urbane voice Kettle observed : " That is very interesting. I daresay then it will soon be translated into English." Even more crushing was his quiet retort on an Australian minor poet who argued that men of letters should keep out of the war and hand on the torch of culture to the future generation — " I would rather be a tenth-rate minor poet," he said, "than a great soldier," " Well, aren't you.?" was the devastating reply. His political position was clear and unequivocal. He was for a Free United Ireland in a free world ; and it was for freedom, not for a flag, that he fought all his life and in the end died gloriously. He scorned the notion, so widely current in England, 2i8 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER that any form of material prosperity can compensate a people for the lack of full autonomy. " There is in liberty," he wrote in his pamphlet on Home Rule Fifiafice^ " a certain tonic inspiration, there is in the national idea a deep fountain of courage and energy not to be figured out in dots and decimals ; and unless you can call these psychological forces into action your Home Rule Bill will be only ink, paper, and disappointment. In one word Home Rule must be a moral as well as a material liquida- tion of the past." He would not, he could not, believe that Ulster was beyond the reach of a recon- ciliation such as he himself was ready to offer ; and, if all other Nationalists had been as free from bitter, narrow, obscurantistlc views as himself, it is probable Irish union would have been already an accom- plished fact. He could see no reason in the nature of things why the ancient animosities should be maintained which divided Ireland and separated two sister-isles. Nationalist Ireland had worse enemies than Englishmen or Protestant Ulstermen — ignor- ance, poverty, and disease, to wit. He could admire the stark independence of the Protestant Ulsterman who has always been such a tremendous moral force in America. At the 1910 East Tyrone Election a small boy watched the motor-car wistfully in which he and his wife (whose admir- able character sketch is here stolen, and will she think it spoilt in the stealing by one who cannot see eye to eye with her in politics ? ) were about to start after a breakdown. He was offered a spin, and accepted the favour. When he was set down he lifted his cap, and said: "Thank you, Mr Kettle. I am much obliged. To hell with the Pope." Never was an incorruptible independence TOM KETTLE 219 more quaintly and conclusively expressed. Later on, when Protestant Ulstermen and Nationalists fought side by side as good comrades, appreciating one another's valour at its truth, an even more intense vision of an Ireland one and indivisible flamed up in generous merit. The brotherhood of the brave, he felt, vv^ould be the basis of a complete reconciliation. Even after the fatal events of Easter Monday, which angered him to the heart and seemed at first the end of all his dream- ing, he still believed that the mingling of blood on the battlefield would be the sacrament of Irish union. He may have been right ; nay, he must have been right ; for in these high and passionate dispensations only he who can say credo quia incredibile shall truly anticipate the strange and unexpected truth. But it is as well perhaps that he did not live through the intervening years to see Sinn Fein triumphant in its retrograde policy, the glorious Irish regiments starved of Irishmen, and his friends the Americans pointing the finger of scorn at the Irish nation as a race of shirkers and Pro-Germans and Pacifists. And yet — had he lived on, to hear cries of "Up, the Kaiser," in his own green countryside, he would not have failed in hopefulness nor faltered in the high task of securing peace by blood-brotherhood. • • • • • He was a great success in the House of Commons. " Wit and humour, denunciation and appeal came from him," said a reliable witness, " not merely fluently but always with effect. Tall and slight, with his soft boyish face and luminous eyes, he soon startled and then compelled the attention of the House by his irresistible sparkle and his luminous 220 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER argument." His keen and vivid intelligence found an unfailing interest in every subject of debate, and he liked the political and journalistic life of London v^here he felt in touch with the tendencies of European thought — his beloved Dublin, his " grey and laughing capital," was an intellectual back-water in comparison. In 1909, however, which was the year of his marriage, he was appointed Professor of National Economics in the National University, and in the following year he resigned his seat in Parliament as he found it impossible to combine the duties of a Member with those of a whole-time Professorship. The study of economics had always appealed to him ; not as the dismal science, which traces the course of an " economic man" whose only attribute was the itching palm, but as a sociological art, dealing with foundations of a community, which enabled one to find and formulate " an economic idea fitted to express the self-realisation of a nation which is resolute to realize itself." He would have been the List of Ireland, perhaps. He did not cease to be a political influence by becoming a Professor. Nay, the change really widened his opportunities of impressing his personality on the political thought of his age and country, for it permitted him to gain a closer intimacy with the realities of Irish living — particularly with the terrible problem of Irish poverty — and to act as a leading member of an " Intelligence Department " designed to provide the fighters at the political front with strategical ideas. It was not necessary to regret (as many did) what was not a demotion from realities, but a promotion from the Westminster trenches to a position on the higher command or strategic staffs of Nationalism. He must in time have made his mark as a creative TOM KETTLE 221 economist of the type of A. E., who has done so much to convince Englishmen that the economic reconstruction of Ireland is impracticable as long as Irishmen are not free to think, feel, and act nationally. Then came the War, which he at once recognized as a struggle to the death for the world's freedom. His battle-song gives us his vision of its significance : — Then lift the flag of the Last Crusade ! And fill the ranks of the Last Brigade ! March on to the fields where the world's re-made^ And the ancient dreams come true ! In an election speech in 19 10 he had declared that '^ for his part he preferred German invasion to British finance." In those days neither he nor any- body else knew what the Prussian, with his double streak of Tartar ancestry, was capable of in an occupied territory. Like the rest of the world he had imagined that Germany was a Civilized Power. The rape of Belgium convinced him that she was a Vulture Power, and he at once insisted that it was Ireland's sacred duty to take up arms as England's Ally. " This War is without parallel," he wrote in August 1 9 14, "Britain, France, Russia enter it purged from their past sins of domination." France is right now as she was wrong in 1870. England is right now as she was wrong in the Boer War. Russia is right now as she was wrong on Bloody Sunday." In August and September he acted as war correspondent for the Daily News^ and what he saw of the agony of Belgium scared his very soul. The torture of a little peace-loving nation, the tear- ing up of the most sacred of European treaties, the philosophic lie that was worked out to justify the 222 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER ruthless greed of Germany — all these things con- stituted, in his opinion, a direct challenge to Christian civilization. " Holy Ireland," he felt, would be false to her golden gracious past if she held aloof from the crusade. Dark Rosaleen, his saint of saints, must not only girdle her lovers with steel for the fray but also take the sword of the spirit in her own holy, delicate hands. The issue was Christ against Odin and historic wrongs must be forgotten and forgiven until it was decided. The depth of his religious feeling, the intensity of his Catholicism, made his zeal for righteous warfare a flaming thing. Like all deeply religious men, he could speak of his religion humorously. His definition of the difference between the Catholic and the Protestant faiths : " The Catholics take their beliefs table d'hote^ the Protestants theirs a la carte " is a case in point. There was scope in his spiritual life for gladness as well as sadness ; he knew that a laugh, like a tear, could be a spiritual thing. He wrote a witty sermon for golfers (he would have liked to be a " plus man " at that great, egotistical game) in which they were advised to " get out of the bunker of mortal sin with the niblick of con- fession." He described the priests, to disarm an anti-clerical Labourite, as members of a spiritual Trade Union. In spite of such levities — nay, because of them — his religion was from first to last an all-ruling passion. Forget that, and you lack the master-key to his personality ! The Catholic, he thought, had a vast reserve of will-power in the land of day-springs, the celestial Atlantis, that lay beyond and above xhtjlammantia moenia mundi^ the inaccessible ramparts of Space and Time. In war religion was the mightiest of all motives ; an Army TOM KETTLE 223 could not march on an empty belly nor fight on an empty soul. Therefore he declared war on the felon Power which is the sole blood-cemented Empire in the world — its sovereign merely a commander-in-chief, its aristocracy a war staff, its people drilled soldiers on leave, its capital a camp, its chief industry warfare. He could deal with Kultur in a way that shows his keen wit and wide reading to great advantage. Here is a characteristic passage ( " The Ways of War," pp. 225-6). In a German university you do not find any uniform^ general life on which everj^body can draw. The caste system — on which all Prussia is founded — manifests itself very soon. Either you clip off your friends' ears in duels^ keep dogs^ abjure learning, and absorb beer for two or three years, or else you set out to be a Herr Doktor. By steadily accumulating notes, and grimly avoiding fresh air, you arrive at the moment when you can order a visiting card with this wizard-title on it. Then, v/earing a nimbus of adulation, you pass on to be a Privat Docent, and ultimately a Herr Professor. Every- body's hat is off to you ; you meet with no real criticism or free thrust of thought. Add to this the fact that German is a singularly difficult language in which to tell the truth plainly, even if you should desire to do so Two or three writers, like Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, have contrived the miracle ; but the general impression inflicted on the Latin mind by German literature is that of inadequately cooked plum-duff. One understands a great Socialist like Otto Effertz turning in his third book from German to French with the observa- tion : " Formerly I wrote in a provincial dialect. I now experiment in a European language." A brilliant lady of my acquaintance, who suffered fools more or less gladly at Marburg and Bonn, is of opinion that the Prussian reaches his most exquisite moment of lyricism when, at Christmas or Easter he ties a bow of blue ribbon on a sausage and presents it to Kis beloved. This is a disputable view ; but it does indicate certain inadequacies in the German apparatus of expression which really exist. No wonder he preferred any Englishman to any German, and felt that German control of Ireland would be a servitude too terrible to think of. He 224 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER had not the conception of the Englishman as a hard-minded, gizzard-hearted, money-grabbing creature, which seems to be the working hypothesis of so many NationaUst poUticians. He was essentially a European, though Irish of the Irish, Neither Saxon nor ItaUan/ and he saw the Englishman with the eyes of that greater Ireland, which has its heart in the ancient centre and its circumference on all the seas — which is to-day a valiant unit in the world-wide war against Germany. He would surely have rejoiced in the camaraderie of the fighting English- men with the fighting Irish Americans which he did not, alas, live to see — though he beheld a glorious promise of that larger fellowship in the mutual admiration of English and Irish Regiments at the front and in the eagerness of the Irishmen settled in England to volunteer at the very beginning of the war. • • • • • He who had distributed anti-recruiting pamphlets in Dublin during the South African War (which was for all that a fight for freedom, for Kruger was making the Transvaal a miniature Prussia which had to be destroyed) flung himself heart and soul into the recruiting campaign in Ireland. He made over two hundred speeches there as a member ol what he called " The Army of Freedom," and some of the brilliant phrases and epigrams in which he set Ireland's duty to the world above her duty to herself will long be remembered — e.g. his 1 Lines which Ferguson, in the epilogue of his amazing epic baUad of The Welshmen of Tiraiuley, applies to the descendants of" Clan London " in Ulster. TOM KETTLE 225 declaration that " the absentee Irishmen to-day is the Irishman who stays at home." But it was not enough to give his hving eloquence ; he must also give his life. The disasters of Easter Week con- vinced him more than ever that his attitude was right, and he used all his influence to be sent at once to the front. And so, on July 14, 19 16, he sailed for France. His letters home were full of vital thoughts and sayings ; the horrors of modern warfare appalled him, but could never take the edge off his blithe valiancy. He made up his mind that, when peace returned, he would devote his life to waging war on war — that hideous anachronism which must not be allowed to survive the fall of the German tyranny. ' Mrs Kettle quotes in her Memoir the following account of his brief but brilliant career as an officer in one of the Irish Regiments which are always regarded as corps d'' elite by all sound judges : — . " Kettle was one of the finest officers we had with us. The men worshipped him^ and would have followed him to the ends of the earth. He was an exceptionally brave and capable officer, who had always the interests of his men at heart. He was in the thick of the hard fighting in the Guillemont-Ginchy region. I saw him at various stages of the fighting. He was enjoying it Uke any veteran, though it cannot be denied that the trade of war, and the horrible business of killing one's fellows was distasteful to a man with his sensitive mind and kindly disposition. I know it was with the greatest reluctance that he discarded the Professor's gown for the soldier's uniform, but once the choice was made he threw himself into his new profession, because he believed he was serving Ireland and humanity by so doing. " In the Guillemont fighting I caught a glimpse of him for a brief spell. He was in the thick of a hard struggle, which had for its object the dislodgment of the enemy from a redoubt they held close to the village. He was temporarily in command of the company, and he was directing operations with a coolness and daring that marked him out as a born leader of men. He seemed always to know what was the right thing to do, and he was always on the right spot to order 226 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER the doing of the right thing at the right moment. The men under his command on that occasion fought with a heroism worthy of their leader. They were assailed furiously on both flanks by the foe. They resisted all attempts to force them back, and at the right moment they pressed home a vigorous counter-attack that swept the enemy off the field. " The next time I saw him his men were again in a tight comer. They were advancing against the strongest part of the enemy's position in that region. Kettle kept them together wonderfully in spite of the terrible ordeal they had to go through^ and they carried the enemy's position in record time. It was in the hottest corner of the Ginchy fighting that he went down. He was leading his men with a gallantry and judgment that would almost certainly have won him official recognition had he Hved, and may do so yet. His beloved Fusiliers were facing a deadly fire and were dashing forward irre- sistibly to grapple with the foe. Their ranks were smitten by a tempest of fire. Men went down right and left — some never to rise again. Kettle was among the latter. He dropped to earth and made an effort to get up. I think he must have been hit again. Anyhow, he collapsed completely. A wail of anguish went up from his men as soon as they saw that their officer was down. He turned to them and urged them forward to where the Huns were entrenched. They did not need his injunction. They swept forward with a rush. Well levelled they crashed into the foe. There was deadly work indeed, and the Huns paid dearly for the loss of Kettle. When the battle was over his men came back to camp with sore hearts. They seemed to feel his loss more than that of any of the others. The men would talk of nothing else, but the loss of their " own Captain Tom," and his brother officers were quite as sincere, if less effusive, in the display of their grief." Thus he fell, this Christian soldier, and his example is a torch the light of which can never go out. To the best of his capacity the writer has tried to trace the motives of his wide-horizoned life, setting the man of action and transaction above the man of thought and letters — as must be in these iron times when what men do and are counts for more than what they think and write. The central impulse of his whole being is best expressed in the beautiful sonnet, by itself enough to give him the poet's immortality, which he wrote in the field TOM KETTLE 227 before Guillemont on the Somme on September 4, 1 9 1 6, and addressed " To my daughter Betty, the Gift of God " :— In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown To beauty proud as was your mother's prime, In that desired, delayed, incredible time. You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own, And the dear heart that was your baby throne, To dice with death ! And, oh 1 they'll give you rhyme And reason : some will call the thing sublime. And some decry it in a knowing tone. So here, while the mad guns curse overhead. And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor. Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed, And for the secret Scripture of the poor. THE HAPPY ATHLETE RONALD POULTON HE appears in the Roll of Oxford's Honour as Lieutenant Ronald William Poulton Palmer of the 4th Royal Berkshire Regiment. But wherever the funera ?iejunera of the oval ball are customary, men or boys call him Ronald Poulton, and even now, when he has been resting for more than three years in his wood- land grave in France, find it hard to think of him as one of the lost leaders of English sportsmanship. He was famous all the world over as a player of Rugby football, as the most original and dangerous three-quarter who has ever worn the Red Rose. Critics speak of Spenser as " the poets' poet " — and with equal justice we may say that Ronald Poulton was the athlete's athlete in his special sphere, for no player of what H. B. Tristram (that thunder- bolt of a tackier) called " the finest game that man ever devised " appealed so poignantly to the imagin- ative faculty of his brothers-in-art. " Ever since I first saw him at Queen's Club," said a Welsh Inter- national, " I have suspected that the Welsh game was not really the last word in Rugby strategy and tactics, and that a touch of the Poultonesque may count for more in match-winning than all our scientific discipline." He was the younger son of Professor E. B. Poulton of Oxford, and his athletic promise disclosed itself in early boyhood. He went to the Oxford Pre- paratory School and Mr C. C. Lynam, the Head- master, described him as by far the best all-round athlete who had ever been at the school. Thence 228 RONALD POULTON PALMER (lieutenant, 4TH ROYAL BERKSHIRE REC.IMENT) From a photograph taken in the tiri'ssins^-rooiii at Tivickenhaiii after his last International ntatcli on F.m^lisJi soil I IQ141 RONALD POULTON 229 he went to Rugby, entering the School House, which has been the Delphi, so to speak, of real football ever since Young Brooks kicked off at " Big Side " in the famous school story. All the famous Public Schools have their special pursuits which every boy learns instinctively ; just as you breathe in Greek at Shrewsbury, so at Rugby you cannot swallow a mouthful of air without taking in the true doctrine of the tackling game. Ronald Poulton was in the Rugby XV four successive years, and he was captain in his last season. He was in the cricket XI in 1 907 and 1908. At the annual athletic sports he showed extraordinary all-round form, generally winning both the jumps, the hurdles, and all the short races up to and including the quarter- mile. But he did not live by games alone at Rugby where, ever since Arnold's reign, high ideals of intellectual progress and social service have been realized by generation after generation of those whose ambition it has been — Not with the crowd to be spent, Not without aim to go round In an eddy of purposeless dust, Effort unmeaning and vain. Ronald Poulton was as keen a student of science as of all local variants of the modern yv/xvacrrtKry, and he made such good use of his school-time, and of the scientific ability he inherited from his father that he Vv^on an Exhibition for Science at Balliol in 1908. At Oxford he entered the Engineering School which had just been established under Professor C. F. Jenkin, taking Honours in the Final Examination when his work was the best sent in. And it was at Rugby that his genius 230 THE HAPPY ATHLETE for friendship began to express itself in a wise and joyous inclusiveness. There he first met his dearest and most intimate friends and acquired that dehght in the work of boys' clubs which was in after years — at Oxford and Reading and Manchester — the chief interest of his many-sided nature. The scene of his earliest inspiration was always very near his heart, and probably the greatest treat he could allow himself was a visit to Rugby and the dear friends who lived there. Mr Ernest Ward, who is an encyclopaedia of Rugger history and has the whole " mistery " (no ' y,' please) of the game by heart and all its famous practitioners from the Vassall era onwards at heart, sends the following notes on Ronald Poulton's brief but felicitous career in the football field :— Ronnie Poulton was one of the greatest three-quarters of all time, perhaps the very greatest. But he was more than that — he was an influence that kept the spirit of his much-loved game sound and sweet. He had that genius for captaincy which is the rarest gift ; and how he stood for a victorious moral in that capacity shall be told by Mr Temple Gordon^ the highest living authority on the psychology of the game : — " I have always considered that Ronnie Poulton's death was an immense loss not only to English football but to England His genuine, unaffected interest in his fellow man of whatever class made him an invaluable link between what, for want of a better definition, we call the classes and the masses. "When playing on tour against other countries with working men on the side his unaffected camaraderie, entirely free from any trace of snobbish condescension, made him an asset of inestimable value to the side by blending it before the game (which is half the battle) into an harmonious whole, and discounting the boredom of the local hotel and the dragging hours before a match. " I am sure that few men have been more genuinely missed and mourned by those who had the privilege of his friendship or even of his acquaintance." This was how Mr Gordon wrote after an interval of three years had passed since Poulton fell on the Western front. RONALD POULTON 231 Ronnie Poulton in those brief six years or thereabouts between his leaving school and his death in action wrought great good. It was at Michaelmas 1908 that he made his entrance into London foot- ball in a quiet little practice game that the Harlequins had got up on Richmond Athletic ground. Adrian Stoop — the organizing genius of the Harlequins — in one of his visits to his old school at Rugby had spotted young Poulton and bagged him for the Harlequins. On that afternoon at Richmond an old enthusiast met with this welcome from the perpetual president of the Harlequins (the old Rugby warrior, W. A. Smith, now, as Elia would have had it, " with the angels ") — " Come and see a born England player ! " Smith was quite right. Adrian put Ronnie through his facings with a thoroughness that left no doubt about his ab lity. And Poulton played with the ease of a parade : he had been given to winning matches " off his own bat " at Rugby School. And he then reproduced the elasticity of his school form. We saw him as flying man, as a centre, as a wing ; and in every position, to use the Baconian tag, he " succeeded excellently well." Safe hands, swiftness in the get-off, unchecked pace in the swerve and when he changed feet for the side step, immense initiative : these points, so brilliantly matured afterwards at Oxford, were all easily marked in this preHminary view of Poulton as a school three- quarter. This first impressioft was unchanged in the brief years that he was seen winning matches for Oxford, for England, for the Harlequins, and for Liverpool. There vividly remains the picture of a fine whole- some type of the Public School boy full of the manliness of chivalry ; the elusive striphng, delightful in symmetry of limb, with his flaxen hair made sport of by the breeze, as he was under way in his delightful run. Poulton is among the immortals in our games. What courage Hodges of Sedbergh had to disclose to leave Poulton out of the Fifteen in his first year at Oxford. But what else could Hodges have done ? He had the four old Blues and Internationals as a legacy from Hoskin — Vassall, Tarr, Martin, and Gilray. And he would not disturb the line even to put Poulton in. But in avoiding one mistake he fell into another. He played an unsound man, Vassall, at Queen's Club in the one match of the Rugby season which is so strenuous and searching that the cleverest patching-up will never insure the crocked- up player against a break-down. Vassall broke down in the first five minutes, and at least three certain tries were lost because he could not keep his place in a combined attack. However, Poulton came to his own in the following year. Everyone will recall what he did on the left wing against Cambridge in his first Inter-'Varsity match : how he worked with George Cunningham and Cohn Gilray and how he scored five tries — a personal record in Oxford and Cambridge 232 THE HAPPY ATHLETE Rugger and one that is likely to stand. His second appearance was almost as great a triumph. And his third appearance in the fateful match at Queen's Club was really the greatest triumph of all in spite of the fact that he slipped and hurt himself badly before half-time and was useless to his side for the rest of the game. " It is not possible to name a man/' wrote a skilled eye-witness of his last match as a 'Varsity footballer, " whose presence so obviously made so much difference to his side. This time he was captain of a team expected to lose, and the performances of Cambridge before and after the game at Queen's justified the opinion of the prophets. Poulton demoralized his opponents in the first five minutes, and the game was won for his side. Of course, he was well supported, particularly by Knott, the stand-oS half, and his forwards. Knott fielded everything and masked his game like a second Adrian Stoop. It was from a well-placed forward kick of Knott's that the first try came. The defence thought he would pass, but Poulton knew better. He followed the ball with marvellous speed and got it easily, running over the hne, with every- body planted and looking on. The demoralization of Cambridge, after two other tries had been scored against them by the Knott-Poulton opportunism, was shown by the tactics of the Light Blue threes. Though a very speedy and skilful lot, they would hne up straight across the ground in defensive formation even when they were inside the Oxford 25 — for fear that Knott and Pouiton should get going even there." He got his English cap a year before he won his Blue ; in all he played in 17 Internationals and he captained England in the last International match before the War, leading his side to a great victory at Inverleith ; a thrilling match, many of the players in which have long ago made the final sacrifice for King and country. C. J. B. Marriott (Cambridge and England), whose playing days were in the Harry Vassall era, wrote the following appreciation of Poulton as an England player : " No one ever equalled him in his destructive style and opportunism. As a captain he was a bom leader ; never over- weeningiy confident, never flurried, and always at his best in pulling his team together when the score was against them. These attributes were fully disclosed in the three victories of England in 1914 when in each match at certain periods of the game the points were against England." Poulton himself had a humorous way of describing his experiences in International matches. When England won her first match against Wales in Wales after a lapse of eighteen years, the theatre of warfare was the Cardiff Arms Park, and the weather recalled the saying of a spectator overheard some years before — " In Cardiff when it rains, it raineth." Poulton wrote as follows : " On assembling at breakfast RONALD POULTON 233 we found that rain was falling steadily and all hope of a dry ground and ball was given up. The morning was spent in animated dis- cussions of numerous devices for winning the match, none of which by any chance came off during the game itself, except the oft-repeated injunction from our captain : ' Remember your feet and use them, and don't forget the watch-word ' — but that, I fear, is unprintable. However, after a game played on a ground where the blades of grass seemed with difficulty to be holding their heads above the ever-rising flood, England emerged unrecognizable but victorious by 12 points to nothing." Of the visit of the South Africans he wrote : " I suppose, to be in keeping with Imperial imagery and ideas, we must call the members of this team our children, and fine strapping children they are 1 You feel there must be something extraordinary about the climate of South Africa when you are easily given twenty yards in a hundred by a M'Hardy or a Stegmann, when you see the ball propelled infinite distances with perfect accuracy by a Morkel, and when you feel the weight of a Morkel, a Van Vuuren or a Shum deposited on your chest," He could be very drastic in his criticism of the national XV of which he was a member. After England and Ireland at Dublin in 19 1 3,, though England won, he cordially agreed with the pithy comment of one of the English selectors. " Well, I've only seen one team play worse than you did in my Hfe, and I saw that team this afternoon." He spoke out boldly against English lack of scrummage science in getting the ball and heehng out. He blamed the slow heeling of the forwards and, in a lesser degree, the slowness of the EngHsh scrum half for the unsatisfactory play of the English back division as a whole during that season. These faults, he said, " gave the opposing three-quarters time to come up and smother our attack." His suggestions fell on fruitful soil and in the following season, when the said faults had been amended, he led England to victory in all her international matches. He was good at all the games he tried his hand at. At cricket he made some runs for Rugby v. Marlborough at Lords in 1907 and 1908, and he was a brilliant inside forward in the Oxford Hockey team (three years). But Rugger was his first love and his last. Had it not been for the War his keen and imaginative intelligence would have gone on with the task, begun by Adrian Stoop, of raising the standard of Rugger science and artistry, and forming a national English style which would give full scope for the individual superiority in pace and 234 T'HE HAPPY ATHLETE power of the English players. The principle on which he would have based this process of evolution — that the offensive is the best form of defence, ceteris paribus — is as sound in co-operative games as in warfare. After leaving Oxford, his uncle, the late Rt. Hon. G. W. Palmer of Marlston House near Newbury, invited him to enter Huntley & Palmer's factory in Reading with the view of ultimately joining the Directorate. He took a small house near the works and began his duties in January 1912. It was a strenuous life of early rising and working late, for he was expected to acquire a thorough knowledge of every branch of one of the greatest commercial enterprises in England — a concern of far-reaching tentacles, for hungry folk munch Huntley & Palmers' biscuits in the remotest corners of the civilized world. The Rugby sense of social brotherhood also found ex- pression, and he took the keenest interest in the athletic clubs connected with the factory and indeed in all that concerned the welfare of the men employed there. Like so many of the young men of his generation, he thought deeply about the widespread Labour unrest of the years before the War and felt that no undertaking had a right to flourish which did not produce happy lives as well as its special commodity. He himself took part in the men's sport, played in the factory cricket and football teams, and would take the Socker XI for long training walks. "Rugger" was not played at the Factory ; Reading is one of the southern centres of the rival code. But he secretly hoped that he might have his own home- made fifteen there some day. With all this work, RONALD POULTON 235 into which he threw himself heart and soul, he found time to do a great deal for the development of a Boys' Club in the parish of St John's. To an Oxford friend who chaffed him about his business career he said with a laugh : " Well, if I'm not a man of business yet, I'm a busy man." After a year and a half of this full and varied life, sweetened and dignified by so much personal service, he thought he knew enough of the biscuit- making business at that stage, and it was decided that he should gain a wider knowledge of engineer- ing before finally settling down to the life's work he had found (or, rather, which had found him), when he hoped to renew and strengthen the ties of aff^ection that already bound him to the men and their sons. At his uncle's advice he settled in Manchester and worked in Mather & Piatt's, attending courses at the Municipal School of Technology, of which his brother-in-law, Mr J. C. Maxwell Garnett, was Principal. He had only just begun work at Manchester when his uncle, who seemed to be in perfect health and had made all arrangements for a winter's voyage, was seized with a stroke and died in a few days, without ever recovering consciousness. Thus ended the association between the older and the younger man which had meant so much for both of them. They loved and understood one another and had looked forward, with a confidence that ever increased as their mutual understanding and sympathy deepened, to many years of happy co-operation in the conduct of a vast business on humane lines, after the younger man's expected return to Reading in the autumn of 19 14. Ronald Poulton became heir to a considerable income, with a deferred life interest 236 THE HAPPY ATHLETE in a large estate and, under the terms of the will, took his uncle's and his mother's maiden name of Palmer. Thus a future of far-reaching influence was assured, and there can be no doubt that the famous young athlete, had he lived, would have looked upon his position as a trust to be administered in accordance with the high civic ideals of his uncle, who was the maker of modern Reading and a man who combined a genius for practical affairs with an imaginative insight into the larger privileges and responsibilities of the latter-day captain of industry. The Varsity wit who said that " Ronald had taken the biscuit and the tin as well " had no idea of the spiritual heritage he had received from his honoured uncle. Had he lived into the Reconstruction era, he would have been one of the influences that make revolution unnecessary. For, as captain of a foot- ball team or as director of a factory, he would always have been a man among men, holding the gift of leadership by force of character, capacity, and that instinct of camaraderie v/hich reduces all " class- conscious" talk to absurdity. It was characteristic of him that this great accession of wealth and consequence was not allowed to interrupt his engineering studies for a moment. He remained hard at work in Manchester until June 1 9 14, when he spent a month in visiting various engineering firms in the North of England. As might have been expected from his father's son, he saw the need of a closer alliance between science and industry in this country, where rule-of-thumb methods and cut-throat competition have so far pre- vented a nation of shopkeepers from becoming a nation of multiple-shopkeepers. There was nothing dull for him in his work at Manchester, in which RONALD POULTON 237 theory and practice were so justly combined. If it had been dull, he would have stuck to it — to honour the wishes of his uncle and as a duty he owed to himself. He had just begun to enjoy a summer vacation before taking up his permanent work at Reading, when the call of his country came. Like the rich young man in the Gospel, he was suddenly asked to give up all — wealth, popularity, rest after toil, friendship, and even love — and follow the cross into a bleak desert of being bordering on eternity. He gave up all and followed. He had belonged to the O.T.C. in Oxford and on first taking up his residence in Reading had joined the Berkshire Territorials. When War was expected, but not yet declared, they were asked if they would volunteer for service abroad. Of all vocations the soldier's had least attraction for him ; he thought war a bitter anachronism. But he had no doubts as to the justice of his country's cause, " saw his duty as a dead-sure thing," and at once volunteered and entered on the course of training. He had only been at the front just over five weeks when he was instantaneously killed by a stray bullet at 12.20 a.m. on May 5, 19 15, when on duty as works manager in the trenches. It was a foggy night, and he was out on the roof of a dug-out, looking at work that had been done, when a stray shot, which might have been a ricochet off the wire in front of the trench, entered his right side just below the arm-pit. The day before he had written the following letter to his sister, Mrs Maxwell Garnett : — Thank you so much for the lovely chocolate which arrived last night up here. It was sweet of you to write^ and also your letters are most welcome. Just as I was proceeding to open them at about twelve p.m.^ as I was at work all the early part of the night, we had to " stand to " as a Brigade order — that meant all being out. It was maddening 238 THE HAPPY ATHLETE — three hours messing about doing nothing. Then I got to bed at four, and was woken up and pulled out^ because we were being shelled, and it is safer to be under the parapet than in a dug-out. They were sheUing a house just in the middle of our trench, which they think we use for sniping (and so we do). But the first four shots hit our trench. The first went right through one ofhcer's dug-out, but luckily he was the one ofHcer on duty, so he wasn't hit. Luck ! He'd have been in tiny bits 1 Another smashed the dug-out of our cook, but he was out, too. The house had what was left of its chimney piece [evidently " stack " intended] removed, and another big hole in the roof. That's about all. Now its lovely, as I sit in our mess, which is dug down out of sight, but has a lovel}- back view of the country to the rear — a large root-field, a typical avenue main road to the right, a hill with a ruined chateau in front. I am getting a bit tired of the view. But its safer than looking in front. Cheeriness and a gentle humour of circumstance characterise all the letters he wrote home to relations and friends. His brother officers bore witness to the love and confidence he inspired. " He's just a glorious chap to have by one," the chaplain of the Berkshires had said a few days before to the Bishop of Pretoria who buried him. He had been a tremendous help and stand-by to the " Padre " in his difficult and never-ending work. The following tribute from a very close Regimental friend has a touching finality : — Those of us who have known him for a long while, and loved him, can enter just a Uttle into the grief of his own people. You will have heard the details of his death. It is a great consolation to know that he died painlessly for England, beloved by every one in his Regiment. When I went round his old Company as they stood to, at dawn, almost every man was crying. He will always be an inspiration to those of us who remain. He will be laid in the wood this afternoon in soil which is already consecrated to the memory of many brave soldiers. The oak-trees are just coming out, and the spring flowers ; and the place would remind you much of the woods round Oxford. He was in his twenty-sixth year, and he died among men who knew his true worth, for many of the Berkshires had been his comrades during RONALD POULTON 239 the apprenticeship he had so faithfully served at Reading. It often happens that the athlete, like the actor, is immortal only for a moment. His personality may only survive in a single remembered episode — as G. F. Grace's does in the wonderful catch that dis- missed Bonnor from the loftiest skier ever seen at Lords or Basil Maclear's in the amazing eighty-yards run that gave Ireland a try against the first team of South African invaders in a most thrilling match. But Ronald Poulton will always receive the larger tribute of remembrance which is granted to the undying masters of our national games. Rugby football is the hardest and most vigorous of all the Ludi Humaniores which are essentially a part of English life. It is a game which can only be played by gentlemen ; for the referee, who controls a match and lives in the spirit of it, cannot hope to see a tenth of all that happens in a close ding-dong struggle. So it has always been, and always will be, an antidote to the professionalism which sets the prize above the play and cannot lose without rancour or repining. Cricket and football and the other English team-games are modern substitutes for the hard exercises of the mediaeval knights, and if either the hardness or the chivalry goes out of them, then they cease to provide the training in moral which is the most vital part of true education. The fact remains that the most important element in war — and in peace for that matter — and fhe most difficult to make sure of, is the moral element, and for that there is nothing like the old English school tradition which makes so much use of the hard, exhilarating discipline of team-games. Ronald Poulton will live 240 THE HAPPY ATHLETE in the national remembrance as a player of genius who took all the opportunities afforded him by the glorious uncertainty of his game and turned them to account with ruthless originality — so that the enemy could not guess his intention until it was too late to prevent it being realized. But he will also "be remembered as the most chivalrous of players — one who never used his strength tyrannically nor ever dreamed of ignoring the spirit of the Rugger code and indulging in the sharp practices that are just within its strict letter. And he valued his game not so much for the chances it gave him of personal distinction as for the grim beauty of its swift com- binations and, even more, for the fact that class distinctions vanished in its fierce medley — for any man can play Rugger if he can play it as a gentleman. He knew it was the most democratic of diversions simply because it is the most aristocratic. When peace returns we shall go again to Twickenham and Inverleith and other fields where the Four Nations cultivate the full rigour of Rugby football. And all who ever saw Ronald Poulton at his best will have a fleeting vision of his wonder- ful dash for the goal-line of the friendly enemy — the ball held in outstretched hands, swinging this way and that ; the sprint that was a series of twists and wriggles and ever so much faster than it looked ; the sudden pass in an unexpected direction or the huge kick into touch or the lightning swift cut- through to a certain try ; and the grave, intent look which read the whole position at a glance and enabled the runner to do the right thing in the right moment in the right way. A Poulton try was by far the most fascinating thing in Rugby football. His father, the famous professor, once complained RONALD POULTON 241 that his most important lecture might get a para- graph here and there in the newspapers, whereas any try scored by Ronald would be sure of a column everywhere. The truth is that one was conscious of a great personality behind it all ; there was an incidental greatness, a crowd-compelUng power, in all he did on the football-field. As has been shown, he would have excelled in larger pur- suits but for the unlucky bullet that was turned by the twanging wire ; in war and in peace he would have lived his life to high and unselfish purposes. Oxford has produced no sweeter or stronger per- sonality in our day, and the lines dedicated to the Happy Warrior by Sir Henry Newbolt should be his epitaph : — He that has left hereunder The signs of his release, Feared not the battle's thunder, Nor hoped that wars should cease ; No hatred set asunder His warfare from his peace. THE MAN ABOUT TOWN THOMAS VADE-WALPOLE WHAT is it that makes the social favourite ? The question has often been discussed by the noveHsts of manners, from Tiiackeray to the latest wanderer in the purlieus of Sinister Street, but has never been finally answered. Tlie man of letters who is never received by society as an arbiter elegantiarum for various reasons — chief of them his weakness for pulling up his emotions by the root in order to see how and why they are growing — invariably takes a prejudiced view of the matter. So it comes about that in all ages the popular man about town (whether the town be London or Paris or Vienna or New York) has always been written down as a selfish and shallow creature who is incapable of deep feeling or hard work and owes his popularity to some petty inexplicable gift for rctiecting the predilections of the brainless and heartless majority. Yet, if we look through the social history of London, we find that its favourites have always been men of commanding personality — men of whom it was commonly said by their critical contemporaries that they might have done anything or everything, if only they had not wasted all their time and energy on amusing them- selves and their world. In every famous man about town, from Beau Brummel on, we discern the linea- ments of a man and are forced to conclude that success in the art of living sociably requires as high qualifications as are possessed by the successful politician or captain of industry or painter or poet. And if the social satirist thinks otherwise, it is THOMAS VADE-WALVOI.E (LIEUTENANT, lOTH i;ORI)ON H ICHI.AN DEKS ) TOMMY WALPOLE 243 because he is under the delusion that the whole art of living should be subordinated to the science of earning a livelihood. What a tedious world it would be if the life of each great capital (in which a pleasure-city must be incorporated) had not its centre of levity as well as its centre of gravity ! Thomas Vade-Walpole (known as " Tadpole " to his friends) was as good an example as one could wish to meet of the popular man about town. He knew everybody and everybody knew him ; no social function was complete without his presence. The charm of his personality was indefinable, though definitely felt even by the acquaintance of an hour. The kindest and most unselfish of men, he never took the slightest advantage of his popularity to make others feel out of the picture. On the contrary, he would take the greatest pains to put a stranger who felt " out of it " at his ease, and he was rather proud of the number of lasting friendships he had brought into being by bringing people of differing temperaments together. Perhaps the secret of his social success is communicated in the saying of a friend : " Tom Walpole was always too busy thinking about his pals ever to think about himself." He was a most witty talker, and his witticisms were all the more effective because always spontaneous and arising out of the situation — so that they had the appeal of the dramatic mot juste^ the saying that seems the only thing that ought to have been said on a particular occasion. Self-assertion in conversa- tion, which is always a little resented, seemed to him bad manners. He was content if his own talk should just be ozone in the oxygen of lively general conversation. He could administer a snub which 244 THE MAN ABOUT TOWN made the offender feel as if a load of bricks had descended on his head — but he only used this weapon when a real offence had been committed, such as the attempt to circulate a malicious slander which seemed to him the meanest and most detest- able of social sins. Once he advised a young fellow with his way to make in the world, to acquire " as many useful enemies as possible." But he himself never practised what he preached on that occasion. He had many activities undreamed of by any save his most intimate friends, for he had a very strong distaste for the window-dressing methods of the person who likes to pose as a down-to-date Admirable Crichton. On the whole he may be taken as a model of the social favourite in these latter days when society is inclusive rather than exclusive and its leaders of either sex are so often deeply interested in the great movements of art, philosophy and social reform. • ••••• He was the elder son of the late Henry Spencer Vade-Walpole of Stagbury, Surrey and Freethorpe, Norfolk, and his wife, Frances Selina, one of the Bourkes of Vrey and Jamaica. On the death of his father in 19 13 he became heir-presumptive to the two Baronies of Walpole. Owing to constant ill-health, one symptom of which was a terrible migraine which made continued brain-work im- possible, he was unable to follow the family custom and go to Eton and Oxford. He was educated at home, and among other proofs of intellectual initiative obtained by his own exertions a real grasp of chemistry — had he been able to pursue this study without interruption, he would certainly have gained scientific distinction, for his flair in the TOMMY WALPOLE 245 application of principles was strongly marked. In 1895 (when he was in his i6th year) he had the unusual experience of being bitten by a mad dog, which necessitated a visit to the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He showed the greatest fortitude and a calmness touched with humour in this terrible ordeal. The cause of his ill-health baffled the most famous doctors, and many cures were tried in vain for the agonizing headaches (very like those which troubled the scholarly and athletic hero of Hard Cash) which at times rendered him incapable of mental exertion. When he was nineteen Sir William Gowers advised a long sea-voyage, and he went for a tour round the world by himself. Two years later he circumnavigated Africa. During those tours, which delighted his adventurous soul, he had many curious experiences, met many interest- ing people, and collected a treasure of out-of-the- way anecdote which in after years added to the varied charm of his talk — not that he ever resembled the raconteur in his " anecdotage " who bores people by spatch-cocking little mechanical tales into every casual conversation. In 1902 his father came to live in London, and it was then that he began to prove him- self so notable an expert in the art of social living. Two tributes from intimate friends not only throw light on his engaging personality but also show how he gained athletic and literary fame in spite of that handicap of ill-health which would have reduced a less courageous and enduring man to all-round insignificance. The first, written^ by Mr Lionel Martin, reveals him as a champion cyclist : — By the death of poor Tadpole the Bath Road Club has lost one of the best of good sportsmen and the cheeriest of friends. 1 Printed in the Bath Road Neivs. 246 THE MAN ABOUT TOWN He joined the Bath Road Club in 1899, about which date I first met him in connection with track racing, in which we were then both interested. He had just won one of the big paced races of the Anerly Bicycle Club, of which we were at that time members. In 1902, when I had finally abandoned track racing, Tadpole, as we all loved to call him, introduced me to the Bath Road Club ; and since that date we must have covered some 50,000 miles in company by cycle and later by car. That is the way to find out what is in a man, and he soon proved that he was good right through. For instance, at first I wondered how it was that he could not be persuaded to come out for a training spin on certain days in the week, and it was not for a long time that I discovered he gave up those days to voluntaiy work among the poor. It was in the same unostentatious way that he joined the Army when he saw his duty before him, gaining a first lieutenant's commis- sion in the loth Gordon Highlanders in October 19 14, the first I heard of it being when he came to see me on the eve of taking up his new duties. For the first few months he had a very bad time of it, the terrible weather, combined with the difficulty of picking up the routine work, making his life a doubtful pleasure ; but soon his grit and cheery manner triumphed over all obstacles, and he not only grew to love his new life, but also soon gained the confidence and love of his fellow officers and men. When I saw him last, a day or two before he went to the front in June, he told me he feared he would never come back, which has, alas ! proved only too true a presentiment, for he met his death from a rifle grenade, which I take to be a weapon of but little accuracy — so that it was a doubly sad end for so good a man. Although all v.ith whom he came into contact loved him for his unfailing cheeriness and good humour, I think few people realized what he had in him. Unable, for medical reasons, to go to a public school, at the age of nineteen he travelled practically all over the world entirely by him- self, gaining experience and self-reliance (in addition to a vast fund of anecdote) which proved invaluable to him in later life. With us he was always the life and soul of club runs, and no Bath Road dinner was complete without him. As to his purely cycling performances, during his comparatively short term of racing, he won the first 50 miles handicap of 1902, took a prominent part in the B.R.C. team at the inter-club " 50 " with the N.R.C.C. in that year (in which he put up his best " 50 ") and in 1903 gained his gold button for the Edinburgh-York tandem record. In 1902 he will be remembered by Anfielders, with whom he was very popular, as a whole-hearted helper in their " 24." TOMMY WALPOLE 247 Our experiences together^ had I the pen of a ready waiter, would fill a book, but let it suffice to put on record that in all our efforts together he did far more than his fair share of the toil, for it is no joke pushing a man of my bulk about. His beautiful style, compara- tively light weight, and unfailing pluck and cheeriness made him a perfect tandem partner. Well, the Bath Road Club and we his friends have suffered a very heavy loss, and we shall never forget him. It is no small consola- tion, though, to think that he saw his duty plain before him, Hke a true Bath Roader, and died gloriously in pursuit of it. Mr John Lane bears witness to his intellectual interest in the following appreciation : — He was bom at Teddington on Septem.ber 2, 1879, and I well re- mem.ber his proud father taking me into the nursery the following Christmas to view his firstborn. Since then, but more especially in recent years, we met constantly, so that I may claim to have known him intimately all his life. In some respects he was the most remarkable young man I have ever known, and his social charm ensured his being one of the most popular men about town of his time. For well-nigh twenty years no ball was complete without his presence, and he was a most accomplished dancer ; yet very few of his hundreds of hostesses knew his more serious side. He was a brilliant and most daring conversa- tionalist, and like his father he belonged to the eighteenth century, in this respect at any rate. He was a perambulating Almanach de Gotha in his knowledge as to the ramifications of the great English and Continental families. His genealogical information and his famiharity with foreign heraldry were beyond that of any other man of my acquaintance. Indeed ever since the publication of Coke of Norfolk in 1907, he was in the habit, as a labour of love, of reading all the proofs of any books of memoirs, or books connected in any way with genealogy or heraldry issued at the Bcdley Head, and many are the pitfalls and dilemmas from which he has rescued the authors and publishers. Indeed his extensive knowledge was always placed at the disposal of any searcher after truth in these matters and he was a frequent contributor to Notes and Queries. I have known him to look upon portraits of the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century — bearing arms but otherwise anonymous- — and within a short time he would identify and reconstruct the personality of the sitter. Some time before his tragic death John Davidson, the poet, presented -m_e with an inscribed copy of that fascinating work. Rush's Residence at the Court of London from 181 7 to 1825, with the recommendation that I should re-issue it. Davidson had written an enthusiastic article on the book and I handed both the 248 THE MAN ABOUT TOWN book and the article to Walpole. On his returning the volume to me a year or so later I found that of probably over a thousand names mentioned in the work, all but five or six were voluminously annotated in his wonderful handwriting. Some day I hope to give to the world this fruit of his rich and varied knowledge. All who knew " Tommy Walpole " — as he was familiarly called by so many — must feel his loss to be irreparable, for I never knew a man with a kinder heart, and all his friends must have experienced evidence of this. Nor was his kindness confined to his own immediate circle, as for many years he gave his services daily at the offices of the Charity Organisation Society, and was always ready to help the poor and distressed. Mrs Adrian Porter, in the life of her father, Sir John Henniker Heaton, records a characteristic anecdote of " Tommy's " won- derful memory. " One day when he was at a luncheon party with us I said, ' Is it true that you know the exact age and birthday of everyone you meet at dances ? ' He replied, ' I suppose it is more or less true — for instance I know you were bom in November 1884.' I said, ' Oh, but perhaps you looked me up before you came ! ' Everyone joined in the laughter, and at their request he astonished and amused them by giving correctly the ages and birth month of four out of the five girls who were present. (The fifth was a South American who had not long been in London.)" Innumerable tributes to his memory lay stress on his humour and high spirits, thoroughness in all his work, and the natural kindness which was rooted in the love of human nature for its own sake. He was the most charitable of men, and with him courtesy was the better part of charity. He was buried in the little soldiers' cemetery known as " Quality Street," with a man of his own company on the right and two others of his regiment on the left. He was a first-rate regimental officer, who set the comfort of his men before his own at all times and knew how to win and keep their confidence in the critical days of the struggle against over- whelming odds which saved civilization. Had he lived, he would have been a brilliantly successful soldier — all his superior officers were agreed on that point. Wll.IIAM \0\:\. HODCSON (IIKITKNAN r, 9111 I>i;\<)N KKCIMENT, M.C.) THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER WILLIAM NOEL HODGSON WILLIAM NOEL HODGSON, third and youngest son of the Bishop of St Edmundsbiiry and Ipswich, was born January 3rd, 1893. He entered Durham School (School House) in September 1905, having been elected to a King's Scholarship in the June of that year. He steered the 2nd Crew in 1907 and was in the XV. in 1910 and in the XL in 1910-1911. He won the Steeplechase in 191 1. On leaving school he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he had gained a Classical Exhibition. He played Rugby football and hockey for " The House." In March 19 13 he obtained a First in Classical Moderations. At the outbreak of war he received a commission ; he was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Cross in October 19 15, and was subsequently promoted to be lieutenant. He fell in the Somme offensive on July ist, 19 16. Hundreds of the Oxford and Cambridge Under- graduates, who joined up the moment we declared war on Germany, must have had much the same record in yvixvao-riKt] and fxovaCKr) as this young scholar and athlete who would be remembered in English literature if he had written nothing save the famous hymn Before Ac'tion. Both at school and at Oxford, however, he had been recognized by his contemporaries as an unusually strong and deep character, with large reserves of spiritual power. Both in his work and in games he had a singular gift of rising to the occasion — an incidental greatness seemed to characterize him 249 250 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER whenever a difficult question was proposed or his side found itself in a tight corner. " From the first it was evident," wrote his Headmaster in a survey of his school career, " that he possessed ability, but its extent was, I fancy, not suspected until near the end of his time at school. The impression one now has, looking back, is that he very seldom gave his powers full play. He kept them in reserve until the real occasion presented itself. He preferred to criticize in silence and to work out the solution of an intellectual problem, or discover the happy phrase, and keep them to himself." As olives grow by moonlight, so the soul waxes strong in contemplation — and that is why the English habit of reserve, which the foreigner dislikes in us and fears not a little, is a secret source of national strength. But the intensity of his inner life — those solitary voyages in the vast ocean of the divine of which his poems are the only records — did not prevent him from tasting every flavour of the joyousness of school life and college life in communities established on the chivalrous equality oi parage^ whereby all are peers who give their best in service and self-sacrifice. He made many a friendship at school, which the passing of time or even lack of intercourse served only to confirm, and he did not expect his friends to see eye to eye with him in all things, a gentle tolerance being one of his characteristics, the bloom as it were on a rose-white temperament. In the happy days of youth he was a truth-seeker, but when he met Beauty by the way he did not — like some of the Georgian poets — think it a waste of time and himself to worship her a while. The blithe charm of the English boyhood which he himself never lost : — WILLIAM HODGSON 251 Oh, arrow-straight and slender With grey eyes unafraid. You see the roses' splendour Nor reck that they shall fade. Youth in its flush and flower Has a soul of whitest flame, Eternity in an hour, All life and death in a game — and its adventurous spirit satiated in fancy, if never in action : — Great days we've known, when fancy's barque unfurled Her faery wings, and bore us through the world To spy upon the devious ways of men. We trafficked in Baghdad and Samarcand, Or handled ankers in the smugglers' den, Or came at evening to an unkno^vn strand "Where each man gripped his cutlass in his hand. For magic ruled the whole earth over then. Earth was a treasure house of wond'rous things That tall-built galleons, with snowy wings. Brought from strange seas, where coral-ringed lagoons See great gold suns and amber-girdled moons. And some men spoiled the hoards of old sea-kings, Red gold in ingots, jewels rich and rare. Wrought silver plate and cups with carven lips, Doubloons and spices, costly silks, and fair Tall girls with rubies in their raven hair — are the theme of his poems more often than you would expect. He always kept in mind the debt he owed to his school and to the great Abbey, " exceeding wise and strong and full of years," which is one of the bulwarks of Christian civilization, and to the " master-smiths " whose work it is to build ships for the seas of eternity : — See the silent smithy where. On the noiseless anvils laid, Day by day and year by year Souls of men are forged and made. 252 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER Ceaselessly the hammers fall, Making ties and rivets fast, Till the perfect sliip is found Ready for the seas at last. Trial and temptation strong Beat upon the hardening steel, Love and trust and self-control Rivet it from truck to keel. Of the quiet beauty of the Oxford countryside he does not sing at all ; to the end he was haunted by the mystical presences of the Northern moors which he celebrates in God^s Hills^ a poem which is a worthy parallel to Julian Grenfell's magnificent picture of Indian mountains : — In our hill country of the North, The rainy skies are soft and grey, And rank on rank the clouds go forth. And rain in orderly array Treads the mysterious flanks of hills That stood before our race began, And still shall stand when Sorrow spills Her last tear on the dust of man. There shall the mists in beauty break, And clinging tendrils finely drawn A rose and silver glory make About the silent feet of dawn ; Till Gable clears his iron sides And Bowfell's wrinkled front appears. And Scawfell's clustered might derides The menace of the marching years. The tall men of that noble land Who share such high companionship. Are scorners of the feeble hand, Contemners of the faltering lip. When all the ancient truths depart In every strait that men confess. Stands in the stubborn Cumbrian heart The spirit of that steadfastness. WILLIAM HODGSON 253 In quiet valleys of the hills The humble grey stone crosses lie, And all day long the curlew shrills And all day long the wind goes by. But on some stifling alien plain The flesh of Cumbrian men is thrust In shallow pits, and cries in vain To mingle with its kindred dust. Yet those make death a little thing Who know the settled works of God, Winds that heard Latin watchwords ring From ramparts where the Roman trod, Stars that beheld the last King's crown Flash in the steel grey mountain tarn. And ghylls that cut the live rock down Before kings ruled in Ispahan. And when the sun at even dips And Sabbath bells are sad and sweet. When some wan Cumbrian mother's lips Pray for the son they shall not greet ; As falls that sudden dew of grace Which makes for her the riddle plain. The South wind blows to our own place. And we shall see the hills again. Indeed there was nothing dour or sour in his poetic soul, for he could make a love-song or an exiguous epitaph for the death of his youth or even indite stanzas to the honour and glory of rum punch : — Ruby-red Jamaica rum Seasoned with a pirate's thumb. Brought from an enchanted ocean Is the backbone of our potion. Our immortal magic lotion Loosing speech in men long dumb. Brandy, Ukest bottled sun, Where the broad French rivers run ; Liquor that hath not a fellow Save those ancient wines and mellow, Emerald green and jasper yellow. Grown by monks of habit dun. 254 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER A stave of Latin rhyme out of some mediaeval drinking-hymnal : — Pocula parantur niensis, Vinum polius quam ensis — comes in at the last to remind one of the immemorial connection between sound doctrine and sound liquor which, in this land, ceased to be well remembered after the lamented death of Queen Elizabeth. Two Oxford appreciations, one by a Don and the other by an undergraduate friend, are vivid apprecia- tions of a character that impressed itself on his companions more even by being than by doing. Here is the semi-official appreciation — or, as Dons and undergraduates are closer than they were a generation ago, perhaps one should say demi-semi- official : — I like to think of Hodgson at Christ Church. He stood distinctly by himself and from the first struck one as a man most stable and secure, very sure of himself, yet without the least touch of self-trust or self-confidence. When he came up, I was asked by Dr Ottley to make friends with him, for his father's sake, and also because of the hope his father had that he might be a clergyman. It was not hard to get on terms with him, but one felt at once that his character was one of those vastly firm characters that are well able to look after themselves. Most men come up to Oxford mentally and morally less formed than Hodgson. He had got a good line always and kept to it. \Vhcn I speak of him as formed I do not mean that he had reached a kind of mechanical excellence. Nothing would be farther from the truth. He was growing steadily, justly and freshly, but the roots were deeper than you will ordinarily find them. He had not to find his balance or even bother about tr>ang to keep it. His balance was natural and he was true to it. I was not his tutor, so cannot speak from any ofhcial knowledge of his intellectual capacity. But 1 have often hoard him praised as a classical scholar, for his nice feeling for language, his restraint, and his striking command over his materials. Still more insistently have I heard his " Greats '' work appreciated and admired. He had an extraordinarily cool mind, his tutor told me. He would not say very much in a private hour, but he would take in whatever was heard and ponder it, literally weigh it in WILLIAM HODGSON 255 his mind ; then, after turning it over, he would make it his own and produce not the same matter, but the matter worked over and appreci- ated and even illuminated by a thoroughly fresh and independent mind. There was a clearness, a sense of logic and consistency and grasp, and a marshalling of his facts, which promised great things, not necessarily in the world of learning, though there is little doubt he would have been among the best v/hen the test of the Schools came, but in the world of men and in practical affairs. There was exactly the same feeling of grasp and clear-headed consistency to be observed in his ordinary out-of-school life. He had a strong sense of responsi- bihty. There was nothing patronising or priggish about it. It is absurd even to contemplate the possibility of this in thinking of Hodgson. But he was born, or had become, morally strong, and he used his strength for the welfare of others. I remember being par- ticularly struck by his friendships. There were not a few men of his own year whose tastes and abilities were of a kind to match his own, and easily and naturally enough he made friends with them. With them he talked and walked and read and did a thousand happy things. And yet the man to whom his virtue most went out was a man, from the ordinary point of view, totally unlike him, morally inclined to be a weakling, rather dull and with no particular taste for Uterature or knowledge of classics or interest in philosophy. Like Hodgson, he could play a good game of Rugby, but that was the only obvious link. Yet not deliberately, or of set purpose, but instinctively, Hodgson adopted him, gave him most of his company and, though I do not think they ever had much in common, became his prop. I do not know what sort of an officer Hodgson was when he joined the army, but I am quite sure that he cared, and cared exceedingly, for his men. It may be fancied from all this that Hodgson's interests were of a highly practical kind. Where did the poetry come in ? A great many men have their secrets at Oxford, and this was Hodgson's. His passion for good found its deepest expression in poetry. I remember feeling a little surprised when I first heard that Hodgson wrote poetry. But when you come to read Iiis poetry you see how exact and just is its revelation of his character. He had, hke his poetry, a strong grasp of fact but there was vision too. How the Lakes delighted him ; he. felt for them as a lover or a child. I have heard him speak about them as a lover, not ecstatically, but with the controlled passion of one with whom they were things too deep for speech, and there was a clear cool look in his face and a clear steadfast expression not unbecoming those whose travels and whose minds have been much with the mountains and the waters below them. Resolute and strong ; active in heart and brain, owning his mind and body ahke well ; far seeing and with a vision of the worlds beyond, 256 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER a good sportsman, a lover of his kind^ a lover of nature, well-set up, well disciplined, self-controlled, and therefore able to control ; thoroughly true and steadfast ; a good friend, thoughtful not for himself but for others ; quiet and in some ways reserved ; Christian in spirit and in observance as well ; his friends can never forget him nor their lives fail to be a little nobler because he was just what he was, and did what he did. G. K. A. B. The friend who shared with him the joyous and abundant Hfe of " The House " (always in its reasoned self-esteem a place apart) gets closer still to the man-in-himself : — What I know of Bill Hodgson at Christ Church was almost entirely confined to our personal friendship. We never belonged to the same clubs and rarely met, except in the evenings, when we met in his rooms or mine after Hall, and sat hour after hour reading Classical texts and discussing the latest books and each other's writings. Few subjects remained undiscussed, from football to social reform, and then frequently we would clear the chairs on one side and have a spar without gloves, my weight compensating for his skill. Of his thought and his wonderful scholarship I knew more than anyone at the House. When I say wonderful I was thinking of Homer. I really think this should be recorded of him, his love of Homer and understanding of the Iliad especially. Himself simple, fearless, and wonderfully alive, he enjoyed every instant he lived, and his games were one with his scholarship. He played football as one who en- joyed the sensation as well as the game, and his work was all done in the same spirit. He was at his best, I thought, on the early summer mornings, when he and several more of us would go to Long Bridges and bathe, scaling the iron palings at the bottom of Christ Church meadows en route in order to seize and make away with the House punt from the barge, or even some other college punt. A good trespass or a roguish theft appealed to him vastly. On those mornings whoever of the party chose to stay in bed, that was not Bill ; in fact he had a true scorn for such sloth. He was constitutionally impatient of anything like laziness in action or morbidity of thought ; and he shamed one out of that : nobody needed his sympathy and help, and failed to get them. His strength was the support of many less happily endowed than himself, and his sacrifice of time and patience, despite the natural hastiness with any weakness of disposition, was generous. Even in dress he was neat to fastidiousness, and this suited him when it might have seemed out of place in others. His whole life was a protest against slipshodness of any kind. His notes at lecture were copperplate or nothing ; often nothing, but never careless. WILLIAM HODGSON 257 He was not over-modest or self-esteeming, his vivid common sense made either impossible. He estimated his own capacities, if ever he took the trouble, in the same neat and sensible fashion in which he might the merits of some new book. He had very many friends, and I am sure he never lost one. And every one of them can see him clearly as I can while I write. He kept clear of extravagance, and his circle of acquaintance had nothing to do with politics. I can see him still with that fine gleam in his eye cataloguing the various public men " honest fellow " or " knave " or attaching to their name some Hterary tag. He had a keen eye for the actual : philosophy wearied him, but science and social ethics interested him deeply. I am sure he was greatly impressed by Charles Fisher, whose character was so like his own ; everybody knew him as deeply, though not fancifully, religious, and he was never backward in encouraging others in this respect. His is a picture strongly individual, vivid, and clear-cut ; every action and word full of reason and restraint — but his eyes alight with the enduring boyhood he was never to outlive. His record as an officer of the 9th Devons gives the same impression of a great reserve of power under an exterior of cheerful alacrity — he was called " Smiler " by his brother officers. He very soon acquired a complete knowledge of his duties and of the psychology of the enemy. His coolness and gallantry were conspicuous during the attack at Loos and in the defence of Gun Trench against a series of counter assaults. He was intensely proud of the magnificent bravery of his men, and they for their part loved and admired him and trusted him implicitly, knowing that he had a clear insight into the tactical position. " I have been with him a good deal in action," wrote one of his brother officers, '' and he was about the only man whom I have never known to show a sign of fear, though I know he felt it like the rest of us." At the begin- ning of the Somme offensive, when it was his duty to supply his battalion with bombs, establishing depots in the German lines as they were taken, he carried out his duties without a hitch. He got as R 258 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER far as the third German lines and was then mortally wounded, a bullet passing through his throat. His last words, addressed to his sergeant, were : " Carry- on ; you know what to do." " Your son received the Holy Communion just before going up to battle," wrote the Chaplain of the 9th Devons to his father, " and though he seldom spoke about such things, the deep faith that inspired him was plain to all." His impressions of warfare are set down in a few sketches (published in the Spectator and in the Saturday Revieiv and other literary journals) which are stirring and full of reality rather than " realistic," and as readable as any of the best- known work of Boyd Cable and the other chroniclers of battles from the individual soldier's point of view. The two sketches entitled " Nestoria " are admirably based on his own experiences. The first begins with a conversa- tional epic (would we had it in full !) of the remaking of a shockingly shattered regiment : — • During dinner the man on leave had delivered an epic. It had traced the adventures of the faithful few who remained over when the regiment marched back in the grey hours of Friday's dawn from the chalk lines before Vermellcs, to be flung back to trenches thirty- six hours later. It followed them through the Givenchy craters and Festubert marshes, on marches southward and northward, among shellings and bombings, short rests and heavy labours. It told of the slow welding of the new regiment, when the fresh drafts came rolling in from the Base, of worries and perplexities surmounted, of " quilters " rooted out, of good men discovered, and, finally, of how the battalion, once more conscious of itself as a unity with history and honourable scars, was being tempered to a fine edge for the next stroke. Hodgson was one of the men on whom a CO. relies for invaluable help — help which cannot be WILLIAM HODGSON 259 weighed in Staff balances and gets no tangible reward — in the achievement of that ever-recurring miracle, the Phoenix-like renewal of the life of a famous regiment when almost all the old members of the historic brotherhood have vanished in the wasting fire of a great action. These sketches are clearly autobiographical ; the second shows you how " Smiler " earned his Cross. In " The Raid " there is an invaluable note on German psychology in warfare : — The essential difference between ourselves and our enemies is in nothing more strikingly displayed than in the raid which we in- augurated last autumn. It began with a Canadian " cutting-out " expedition, recalling, by the audacity of its conception and the cool daring of its execution, the recapture of the Hermione or some other heroic stroke of Nelson's naw. Others followed of the same kind, relying on surprise, nerve and man-to-man superiority for success. Then the German took up the idea and applied to it his hacking- through principle. To pulverize a small portion of trench by a tre- mendous artilleiy concentration and then send a party to pick up any fragments, was his scientific adaptation of adventurous enterprise little suited to his character. Now and again we have a still, entrancing picture of a brooding landscape, full of consulting trees, in the same countryside : — Below him in the valley among the poplars, whose sober tracery was already faintly tinged with green, lay the red and white of cottages dominated by twin towers, their stone mellowed with the passage of five hundred years. Faintly through the branches glimmered the blue of water, and beyond again a thick fir spinney crov/ning a quarry stood black against the russet poplars. Behind and over it all swelled the opposing ridge, where the smooth swathe of grass and stubble was broken by the vivid green of young wheat and the rich umber of damp ploughland. Away to the eastward, in a hollow of the hills, the square pile of a great abbey rose mistily from the smoke of the city, and farther still the downs ran, ridge upon ridge, into the midst of illimitable distance — a Kingdom of dream. A Kingdom of dream indeed ! — renewing in this young soldier's mind the vision of those Abbeys, 26o THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER citadels of Christi;;nity in his own northern land, which have seen the harbarians come and go in remote centuries : — The Abbey's three tall towers Behold the tides of men Flow from their silent waters To seas beyond their ken ; They gazed on us, my brothers, And we were happy then. Our footsteps, oh my brothers, In pleasant paths were set. With pleasures to remember, And sorrows to forget, Deep draught of love and laughter, A cup without regret. In " Pearson " he praises his soldier servant — " If he were Commander-in-Chief, the war would be over in a week. But I should get no baths, so I'm glad he isn't." The affair of the Mess carpet (Headquarters Mess had been installed in the main room of an empty house, which had a very cold stone floor) illustrates Pearson's methods admirably: — I hardly saw how he was to obtain a carpet at twenty -four hours' notice. However, I called him ; " Pearson," I said, " we want a carpet for the Mess by tea-time to-morrow." " Very good, sir." " There's a bet on it, Pearson." " I'll see to it, sir," and off he went. Next morning, as I was returning from the Orderly Room, Pearson met me. " Please, sir, will you give me a pass to EXYZED ? " Now EXYZED is the remains of a town that became uninhabited very suddenly, and is still attended to daily by the German gunners. It is out of bounds for troops. " Sorr}% Pearson, I can't." Pearson looked disappointed. " The carpel, sir — — " he ventured. " Have to give it a miss," said I. WILLIAM HODGSON 261 Pearson shook his head and moved sorrowfully away. Shortly before tea, the door of the Mess Room was violently agitated, and Pearson entered in a stream of perspiration, bearing on his shoulders a carpet and two rolls of linoleum. " Good Lord," said the Doctor, " where did those come from ? " " EXYZED, sir " ; then, turning to me, " you didn't tell me not to go, sir." " Pearson," I said, " you're a bally marvel." He gave an apologetic smile. " I could not let you lose a bet, sir, for the sake of a httle trouble." Moral : next time a soldier friend boasts of his servant — as they always do sooner or later — re- member that he is not always such a liar as he seems. Why the batman is so zealous in service is another and much more important question. A German prisoner of war, monocled and superior and hypercritical, scoffed at the laziness of British officers in requiring servants ; we have no servants, he boasted. It was pointed out to him that after action the British officer gave his whole time to caring for his men and without a batman would never even get a meal, whereas in the German Army the officer has nothing to do but look after himself. Hence the difference, which is thoroughly well understood by the British rank-and-file — just as it is carefully ignored by British Bolshevists and the like who preach class-warfare. Here is a complete short sketch of a Friday afternoon in Flanders : — It is half-past four on Friday afternoon in a village beyond the line. The only difference between Friday and the other afternoons is that it rains harder on Fridays, and this is no exception. The mile and a half of street which composes the village is ankle-deep in mud, except where industrious members of a salvage company are- sweeping it to one side ; in these places it is knee-deep. Gloomily surveying the prospect is a drenched sentry, who looks as joyless as a teetotal pacifist. Equally gloomy are six stalwart " grenadiers " in variegated steel helmets and a coating of chalk, who are unloading boxes of " Grenades, 262 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER Hand " off a G.S. waggon with the contempt bred of familiarity. They are observed dispassionately by the inevitable French peasant, his hands deep in the pockets of Brobdingnagian pantaloons. Up to date the village is still " inhabited," but the attentions of the Boche have become rather pressing during the past few days, and the com- mencement of an exodus is marked by an ancient dame who is wheeling two chairs down the street on a co-seval w'hcelbarrow, and has succeeded in holding up a section of the Brigade Ammunition Column with its cargo of eighteen-pounder shells. Various small parties of damp infantrymen hurry across the street on their lawful occasions, and a couple of sapper ofhcers are approaching with the " clip-clop " of muddy gum-boots. Suddenly all the figures in this scene stiffen into immobility ; there is a sound like a giant cane being swished through the air overhead, and from the cottages fifty yards behind the sentry two little yellow mushrooms of smoke and brickdust rise and float away on the breeze. " Whizz-bangs," says one of the sappers, " better get under the church ; there'll be another two in a minute," They cross the road and lean against the substantial church wall ; immediately opposite the corporal of the guard has come out and is surveying the damage with a dubious gaze. " Get your sentry under cover, corporal," calls the sapper, and the sentry retires with alacrity. The grenadier party, a hundred yards further along, have paid no attention beyond a cursory glance to see where the shells pitched ; after all, if one worried over whizz-bangs, no work would ever be done. But the ancient of the wheelbarrow is already in a cellar, and a driver of gunners is pushing her vehicle into the gutter, out of the way of his waggons. The sapper is right ; again the swish overhead, and the two mushrooms, this time a hundred yards further on, making the gunner's horses jump and their drivers get to work with their whips. At a lumbering trot the column passes up the street. The two sapper officers leave the sanctuary of the church wall and continue their walk in the rain. But before they have made twenty paces, both halt suddenly, and then with one accord leap for the nearest door. There is an ominous sound in the air, deliberate, oily and slow, s-s-swish, s-s-swish — a carpet-slippery sound — followed by a petrifying moment of silence — then " cr-r-r-umph " a great cloud of black smoke, the crash of masonry and the air is full of whining fragments. " Crumps, by Gad," says the sapper. " There's a cellar by the guard there," and the two officers cross the road at a double and join the guard and two cooks in a cellar full of empty bottles under an estaminet. The Ammunition Column break into a clattering gallop, WILLIAM HODGSON 263 in wliich they are followed by the G.S. waggon. Through the distant door the last of the grenadiers is disappearing, indifference shed like a garment, and the wheelbarrow has the scene to itself. Again the distant oily menace is heard ; at the critical moment from a cottage door runs a soldier in shirt sleeves, making for the cellar opposite. He seems to move incredibly slowly. Cr-r-umph, and the recurring crash and thunder. When the smoke and dust clear away, a shirt- sleeved crumpled form is lying very still among the mud and rubble. A thin red stream mingles vvdth the rain that washes into the gutter, and round the legs of the barrow. In the distance can be heard the clatter of the departing column, and from the outskirts of the village the shattering cough of English howitzers hurling vengeance into some German billet miles away. The rain washes down on the white upturned face ; all is peace again, and a grenadier appears in the street lighting the inevitable cigarette. Two stretcher-bearers materialize from somewhere, and bear away the " casualty," a gloomy procession. " La-la," says the ancient Frenchwoman, shaking her old head, and plods away with her barrow and the stain of blood on her sabots. All this is very good, and it is clear we lost in " Smiler " a brilliant chronicler of the light-and- shade, the splendour and horror and humour, of the phase of social life called war. But the two great poems in which he summed up all his deep and soul-dividing thought on the great ordeal of battle remain as part of the Englishman's spiritual heritage for all time. Back to Rest was com- posed while marching to billets after the fighting at Loos : — A leaping wind from England, The skies without a stain. Clean cut against the morning Slim poplars after rain, The' foolish noise of sparrows ' And starlings in a wood — After the grime of battle We know that these are good. Death whining down from Heaven, Death roaring from the ground, 264 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER Death stinking in the nostril, Death shrill in every sound, Doubting we charged and conquered — Hopeless we struck and stood. Now when the fight is ended We know that it was good. We that have seen the strongest Cry like a beaten child, The sanest eyes unholy, The cleanest hands defiled, We that have known the heart blood Less than the lees of wine, We that have seen men broken, We know man is divine. And Before Action^ which shares with Julian Grenfell's Into Battle the honour of being the greatest of the new war-poems, is dated June 27th, 1916 : — By all the glories of the day And the cool evening's benison, By that last sunset touch that lay Upon the hills when day was done^ By beauty lavishly outpoured And blessings carelessly received, By all the days that I have lived Make me a soldier, Lord. By all of all man's hopes and fears, And all the wonders poets sing, The laughter of unclouded years, And every sad and lovely thing ; By the romantic ages stored With high endeavour that was his, By all his mad catastrophes Make me a man, Lord. I, that on my familiar hill Saw with uncomprehending eyes A hundred of Thy sunsets spill Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, WILLIAM HODGSON 265 Ere the sun swings his noonday sword Must say good-bye to all of this ; — By all delights that I shall miss. Help me to die, Lord. Two days later he fell and was buried in a front-line trench with many of his loved and loving comrades. THE CANADIAN ENTENTE GUY DRUMMOND CANADA is the most Elizabethan of the Dominions. The combination of a Greater Scotland and a Greater Normandy, she offered mankind horizons as wide as those of the United States. Before the war she was chiefly concerned with the exploration and exploitation of vast natural resources undreamed of even by the " Fathers of Confederation." She then felt sufficient to herself, and great as was her liking and admiration for the people of the gigantic Republic with which she shared a continent she had no thought of a nearer connection, having within her far-flung boundaries all things — material or spiritual — that are necessary to the full growth of a great nation. In 191 1, when she finally refused the plan of American Reciprocity, she may be said to have declined an offer of marriage for the third time of asking, preferring to remain a sister-power moving " in maiden meditation, fancy free " in the west, like Shakespeare's vision of Belphoebe herself. Her message to her mighty neighbour was poetically rendered as follows : — I and thou by God's behest Shared His wonder-working West, Where the peoples old on earth Once again are brought to birth — In a world of men new-born, In a fresher, fairer morn, Side by side we watch reclined. Face to face and mind to mind ; Conceiving purposes that run Westward with the self -same sun 2UU (iUY UKUMMONIJ (CAI'TAIN, ROYAL HIGHLANDERS OF CANADA) From a statue by R. Tait litackeuzie GUY DRUMMOND 267 Aiid, dreaming to the self-same end, Each to each might be a friend. Side by side we watch reclined. Face to face and mind to mind. But dream not any mortal art Shall make it ever heart to heart ! Ah, fool ! To think thou hast not seen The sword spiritual laid between, Bright with souls of heroes shed To keep inviolate my bed. High in my heaven see the sign, A dearer, nearer flag than thine, Which ever to the westering airs In sunlit syllables declares That never shall thy wooing rude Break into my beatitude ! Love me ! — but love me as a star That moves to influences afar. As much thou shaft then take of me As the star's picture in the sea 1 The war has brought about a closer union, while strengthening the ancient ties of liberty and loyalty which make the British Empire ; for the dust of Canadian and American soldiers is now commingled in the vast battle-fields of the West Front, and neither land can ever lose that sense of comradeship in war which is a far stronger and subtler bond than any marriage of political convenience could possibly be. So, when the war is over, Canada will proceed with the development of the heritage which is her very own, thanks to the bygone toil and moil of French and British pioneers. What the poet made her say in 1 9 1 1 can be even more truly said in the coming peace-time : — I am the Lady of the North, Whence the high floods hasten forth — Wild, unwearying, white-maned steeds, I harness them to serve my needs ! See my morning glaciers shine. Emeralds in the far sky-line ; 268 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE See how on my deathless snows Evening rests, a dying rose ; Where the ever-circling day Shines into my haunted Bay, See the ice-bergs sweep along Like a city in a song. Whoso is not utter clod These wonders lift him up to God. Mine is the far-listening plain, Wave o'er wave of golden grain Shining, sighing to no shore. All " Hves o' men," no less, no more. My forests march from sea to sea, Perennial in their pageantry ; The white-leaf'd poplars call the rains, The birch a maiden-ghost remains. The maple flames in a lone hour, Ever the pine's a secret tower. Bird and beast do so abound. My lonely lands seem holy ground, Edens at evening where God stood And saw His works that all were good. Many an orchard-close is mine. Many a garden of the vine : As harvest moons at dusk wax bright My fruits drink in the dews of light As luck's Hnes in my closed hand Veins of wealth I do command ; Clenched in many a secret hold Veins of silver, veins of gold. Rooted in me, pruned with my knife, Each soul grows to a tree of life. Whose w-aving branches shall be seen. As centuries pass, more fresh and green. (Two leaves on a branch side by side Shall be the bridegroom and his bride.) Thrice-happy in my works and days. My c\'cry prayer's a song of praise. And still to honour my great King, I waste not, want not, anything. Yet all was not altogether well with Canada in the peace-time past. The line of cleavage between the two Canadian races was still so marked at times as to seem an incurable wound in the body GUY DRUMMOND 269 politic. There were faults, no doubt, on both sides. The French Canadians wished to remain a people apart, and a twofold fear — fear of the rapidly- growing man-power and money-power of the English-speaking element and fear lest they should be drawn into what Sir Wilfrid Laurier liked to call the *' vortex of European militarism " — caused them to tremble at the thought of their Imperial destinies. And the English-speaking Canadians often showed a lamentable lack of sympathy with their compatriots which was largely due to an almost invariable ignorance not only of the historic mentality of les Cana'diens but even of the language they spoke and of the literature they were creating. " It would be easier for us all," Sir Wilfrid once observed in a conversation with the writer, " if every Canadian could speak and read French." Partly because of the anti-militarism of Quebec and partly for other reasons, Canada was not contributing her fair share of the military strength by sea and by land which was the only security for the existence of the British Empire as a World-Power and as a guardian of the world's peace. Many Canadians believed they need not concern themselves at all with European politics and that Canada could profitably hold aloof from a European war in which Great Britain was involved. They regarded the Balkan War of 191 2 as a kind of fight between mad dogs, and none of them dreamed that a spark in the grey ashes of that far-away fire was presently to kindle a world-wide conflagration. Then the idea was widely current in Canada, especially in Quebec and the West, that the accumulation of armaments provoked attack — that defencelessness was the safest as well as the cheapest form of 270 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE national self-defence. Ignorance of foreign affairs was universal from end to end of the Dominion, and the significance of the " Coup d'Agadir," the first clear omen of Germany's intention to make a bold bid for world-dominion, was absolutely ignored. The average politician cared less about such matters than any other class of the community — for politics had become merely a contest between the " Ins" and the " Outs," in which the chance of pillaging the public was the partisan's chief inducement to get busy. The great captains of industry, commerce and finance did not care to soil their hands by taking any personal part in the political game ; they looked on the politicians as marionettes, whose wires could always be judiciously pulled in the case of need. In Canada, as in the United States, the young man of wealth and culture held aloof from what seemed to him a rather dirty business, forgetting that it is every good citizen's first duty to put an end to corruption and see that his country is decently governed. It was not so with Guy Drummond, who decided at an early age to follow the example of the wealthy leisured class in Great Britain and make politics his vocation, fitting himself for it by a careful study of political science and foreign affairs. He was the younp;er son of the late Sir George Drummond, K.C.M.G., formerly President of the Bank of Montreal — one of Canada's most famous " statesmen-capitalists," and a lover of art whose collection bore witness to his profound knowledge of the French master-painters. He was born on August 15th, 1887, and was educated at St John's School, Montreal (his native city), Bradfield, in GUY DRUMMOND 271 England, and L'Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques ( 1 909-1 9 11) at Paris. The Drummonds have always been strong and purposeful and gifted with a full share of cautious tenacity — their motto, " Gang warily," was won by the founder of the house at Bannockburn when thought of using caltrops to lame the enemy's horses and check the massed charge of the pennon'd host of southern knights. Guy Drummond had the gift of vision as well as the ancestral qualities of his long- descended family, and he saw that Canada needed political leaders who could see Canadian affairs in the just perspective of world-politics, and would not be tempted to seek personal advantages in public life. Even when he was a boy the strength of his purposeful personality was recognized by the connoisseurs of men in the making, such as Dr H. B. Gray, who was Headmaster of Bradfield College during his stay there. Here is Dr Gray's appreciation, written at the request of the author of this brief memoir : — Guy Drummond was only at Bradfield for a short period during his school career. When he came he was a thin, weedy lad who had clearly outgro^vn his strength, though his physical frame gave evidence that he would develop into a powerfully built man. But no one who was an expert in boyhood could mistake his un- usual strength of character. From the first day of his entrance into college, he was a personality. Though a complete stranger to our insular habits and the general type to which boys from the usual Preparatory Schools almost inevitably conform, he took his place with consummate ease and self-possession. Without being a prig he bore himself with a dignity which suggested an inherited or natural power of command. This characteristic attracted and fascinated the masters and boys with whom he came in contact. His earlier scholastic training, which had not been conducted on the familiar English Unes, prevented him from being conspicuous in the class-room. But he never made foolish slips. An innate tact made him silent when others blurted and blundered^ and those who 272 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE looked below discovered traces of a big mind and the promise of a wide view of life. It was a cause of real sadness to me personally, as his Headmaster, that his physical delicacy, due to a phenomenal upgrowth, made his parents and doctors advise a more vigorous climate and a closer personal supervision than the atmosphere of a Public School in the Thames Valley could possibly supply. From my knowledge of his early years and of his after life, I do not tliink it an exaggeration to say that his premature sacrifice on the field of battle was not only a bereavement to his friends but also a loss to the Empire at large. At M'Gill University his intellectual gifts blossomed to fruition, and his studies at the Paris Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques put a keen edge on a mind which was manifestly destined — so all his contemporaries believed — to find solutions of many Canadian problems. He was as popular in Paris as in Canada. The brightness of his soul, as all could see, was not dimmed by any shadow of self-seeking. He had a perfect mastery not only of the French language but also of that French politesse which is much more than a matter of tact and taste, being really a sort of enacted humanism based on a genuine love of human nature and a generous confidence in its possibilities. The Frenchman — and even more the French Canadian, be it well understood — takes it as an act of courtesy when a man of another race speaks to him in his own language ; and if the other speaks French iJijell and with the wit and wisdom inherent in what is the most logical and versatile medium ever devised for social intercourse, as well as for the exchange of ideas, he — the Frenchman and even more the French Canadian — feels a glow of pleasure which can hardly be ex- pressed in mere words. In speaking with French- GUY DRUMMOND 273 men of French Canadians Guy Drummond always found the mot juste without searching for it ; he instinctively said the right thing at the right moment in the right way. Here is an example of this happy faculty. In June .1911 (the story is told in a brief obituary in the supplement to the Revue des Sciences Politiques for August 15th, 19 15) he was travelling in the picturesque and opulent countryside between Melun and Coulommiers, where the British G.H.Q. were established during the First Battle of the Marne. The sight of the rich crops, the large and well- found farms, the giant beeches — all the beauty and wealth of a fair garden-land in the mellow light of a cloudless mid-summer day — prompted Guy Drummond to express his admiration. He turned and said to his travelling companion : " Maintenant je comprends bien I'expression : douce France.^"* It was the word that would most appeal to a Frenchman ; for it is a word that dominates French literature, from the chivalrous epic of Roland at Roncevaux onward, and expresses in a sigh of deep happiness, as it were, that devotion to the beautiful, abounding soil which is the secret of French patriotism. . It will be seen how well fitted this young Canadian was to create new intellectual links between France and his own country and also to complete the reconciliation of the two races that have built up the stately fabric of modern Trans- continental Canada. If he had lived, he would have lived to see his ambition realized — to behold these two liberty-loving races finally united in life, as Wolfe and Montcalm were united in death. When he returned to Canada Guy Drummond did everything in his power to encourage among 274 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE his compatriots a wider and deeper knowledge of France and the French language. Each year he gave a young Canadian the opportunity of attending the Ecole Libre, paying the whole of his expenses — a fact known only to a few very intimate friends. His encouragement of French studies, apart even from its special value in Canada, was an act of imaginative statesmanship. His example ought to be generally followed in the mother country and in the other daughter lands. Whatever be the changes and chances of world-politics after the war, this at least is certain — we can never again think of the French people as other than our nearest and dearest friends beyond the narrow seas. The dust oi so many myriads of French and English soldiers has been mingled together in the vast battle-field of the Western Front — in the Via Sacra of Douglas Gillespie's wonderful letter to his old school — that the mutual sympathy and confidence which now unite us can never fade away into a cold and calculating indiff^erence. The Entente is the two-handed crusader's sword which is hewing Germany in pieces before the Lord. For genera- tions to come it will . be the mightiest safeguard of the world's peace. But the greatness of France, so gloriously revealed in our armed alliance, is even more majestical in the world of ideas — and there we shall lose half the benefits of our battle-welded in- timacy if we do not take pains to acquire an accurate understanding of the French language. To speak it well is, perhaps, generally beyond our unskilful tongues — but we can at any rate learn to read it aright. As things are, the grossest errors in French translation are constantly recurring in books and GUY DRUMMOND 275 journals written in English. It seems hopeless to think of extirpating such blunders as morale for morale Bosche for Boche^ tiom de plume for pseu- donyme, double e?itendre^ " the tout ensemble^'' etc. These howlers, however, which seem to be a vested interest of ail British journalism, are comparatively innocuous. Other inaccuracies, by no means in- frequent even in the cultured Press, have much more dangerous consequences. For example, the popular notion that revanche means revenge in the vindictive sense — a misconception I have heard turned to account by a defeatist M.P. who said, in conversation, that we ought not to go on fighting the poor Germans merely to gratify France's unholy lust for vengeance ! Even as used in Paul Deroulede's famous lines, which have the look of a prophecy to-day — Et la revanche doit venir, lente peut-etre, Mais en tout cas fatale, et terrible a coup sur^ — the word had not the dark, transpontine colouring imputed to it ; all it held in it was the idea of a return match, or getting one's own back, which would show that the disasters of 1870-71 were due to misfortune, not a real inferiority. As for the mistranslations of French official and military com- munications since the war began, they have been past counting, though in no single case, fortunately, have they had any harmful result. The translation of un beau tableau (used of seven German aeroplanes and a Zeppelin shot down in one short sector), as " a fine picture," is a case in point. It means, of course, " a fine bag " ; tableau is here used of game laid out for inspection after the Continental custom. And the renderings of observations by French 276 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE military experts (the best in that business — far better than ours !) are often so clumsy as to be meaningless, the translators being absurdly ignorant of French military terms. . . . Morally and in the political sense the Entente is now fully a fait accompli. But it must be made a great intellectual force, and that can only be done by raising the standard of French studies throughout the British Empire on the lines worked out by Guy Drummond. He had been in touch with the young generation of Frenchmen — the realist generation which worked and played hard and was no longer content with amorous adventures — and must have known that a German war could not be long avoided. Among the young open-air Frenchmen who came of age between the " Coup d'Agadir " and the Sarajevo affair there was never any doubt that Germany was preparing for Armageddon. It is true they very seldom spoke of the coming danger which some of them thought might yet be averted by the rising tide of Socialism in Germany — tor- getting that this very menace to the Hohenzollern regime would be yet another secret argument in favour of a vast military adventure with those who still believed that war ought to remain Prussia's chief national industry. Gambetta's " Think of it ever, talk of it never," was the thought of the young French patriots who were instinctively preparing their bodies and their souls to prevent a second German invasion. Agriculture and politics were Guy Drummond's chief occupations when he went home to marry and devote his life to the service of his city and his country. But the military preparedness of Canada was his chief GUY DRUMMOND 277 preoccupation and, as an officer in the Canadian Militia, he had been trained for his final task when the storm broke. The call came and he obeyed at once, leaving his young wife (he married in April 1914) and his great possessions and all the happy activities of a joyous home-life and a public career already well begun. He volunteered with the Active Service Battalion of his Regiment (13th Canadian Infantry, Royal Highlanders of Canada), taking a commission as Captain, and almost immediately sailed for France. He fell at Langemarck — indeed he was probably the first to fall in the wonderful battle against over- whelming odds which was a spiritual birthday of the Canadian nation. What befell at Langemarck will never be forgotten in Canada or in any other of the Allied lands. It was there that the Germans used poison-gas for the first time, and the Division on the left flank of the Canadians broke before the yellow mist of choke-damp rolling on them, and fled in hopeless confusion. The attack was utterly unexpected, and the first information the Canadians had of it, after the order to " stand to " had been given from the front trenches, was the sight of Turcos streaming past in wild panic. The dyke was down, and a furious bombardment was followed by a massed German attack. The left flank and left rear of the Canadians were exposed, and a great disaster would have befallen the Allies — perhaps necessitating a very extensive and difficult retreat — if they had failed to rise to so tremendous an occasion. They neither failed nor faltered ; after days of hand-to-hand fighting, in which every man had to do the work of a dozen and show, further- 278 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE more, a degree of intelligence and initiative hardly to be expected of veterans, the German rush was dammed up and the breach in the Allied line repaired. Langemarck is one of the most glorious episodes in the war, and all the glory is Canada's now and for ever. It was a greater Thermopylae, in which the deadliest resources of scientihc savagery were utilized unexpectedly, and it taught military critics that the trained citizen soldiers of the great Dominion were the equals of any professional troops the world has ever seen. When the German shell-fire was turned directly on the Canadian trenches, Drummond ordered his men into the shelter of the dug-outs. By that time more of the Algerians were streaming past, and being able to speak French Drummond went out into the road to stem the flood and rally the fugitives. He could do nothing with them, so returned to his own platoon and brought them out to hold the road, walking up and down among them, talking to each man and cheering him up, and seeing that they took the best cover that was available. For a minute or two he left them, returning with Major Norsworthy. The Germans were now within a hundred yards and their fire was intense. The two officers were standing together and were hit simultaneously — Drummond through the neck, and he died in a few minutes. His last words to his men were : *' Stick to it, boys. We will get through them somehow." The scene of his death is vividly presented in the letters written to his wife and his mother by brother-officers and the men of his battalion. First we see the long, low-lying green cloud appearing and brooding above the French lines ; then the panic-stricken Turcos GUY DRUMMOND 279 streaming past, many of them moving as if dazed ; lastly the tall figure — like Saul, the son of Kish, he stood head and shoulders above his people — w^ith intent face and bright hair, standing in the white road and striving to rally the fugitives. The artless letter of his soldier servant to Mrs Drummond is perhaps the most touching of innumerable tributes to his worth as a soldier and a man, and adds a precious detail to the brief story of his ending : — As I was the Captain's servant I am writing these lines to you, because Captain Drummond asked me to write to you if anything happened to him, as he was going to do the same for me if anything happened to me. Well, Madam, I don't know if you have heard the true story of your poor husband's death. It was on Thursday night, the 22nd, that the battle started. I was just getting ready to cook the supper for him when the French Turcos came running down towards us, as we were in the reserve trenches they came down, some with rifles and some without. As soon as they got to where we were, a terrific shelling started, so that we all had to get into our dug-outs and we could not move. Well, the Germans were approaching rather near, and v/e had to get out and look after them. I rushed out and put on your husband's equipment and see that his revolvers was all right, and then we lined the ditch on the road. In the meantime more of these French black fellows was still coming, and the shelling was something fierce, with poisonous gas and lyddite, it was awful ; well, when we got into the road the rifle and machine gun fire was very hot indeed. Major Norsworthy was injured and he sent me on a message. When I got back your poor husband was gone, the last thing I see him doing was trying to rally these Turcos, he was talking to them in French, he was trying to lead them on in battle, but they were too nervous. Your husband walked up and down the road, cheering and jollying us up and speaking to each one of us. Well, Mrs Drum.mond, your husband was shot through the throat, and him and Norsworthy both fell together ; there was one thing I was glad for, your husband got a few Germans before he went under ; and another, he did not suffer, his last words were to cheer the boys up. Madam, the Captain was one of the bravest men that ever I see, he use to love us boys and we all use to love him, and the boys miss him keenly, and of course they wish me to say that they wish to express their sympathies to you in your trouble, and I am sure that I do the same, and there are not many left now, there are 28o THE CANADIAN ENTENTE only a dozen of us. We all hope you will bear up brave in your bereavement, and the boys wish you to convey to his mother a message of condolence, hoping both you and his mother will bear up under such trying circumstances. This letter, which bears witness to the comradeship of the Great War, should be compared with the message of Captain Hugh Charlton's orderly. The loss of this young Canadian soldier was sincerely deplored, as a loss to Canada and the Empire, in numerous letters to his wife and relations. M. Maurice Barres and other distinguished Frenchmen paid their tribute of proud regret to a true lover of " la douce France." M. Jaccjues Coeur, writing in a Montreal journal, re-echoed their homage in the following valedictory : — Nous croyons que le premier devoir de tout citoyen est de con- sacrer ses energies, son talent, toute sa vie au pays ou il est ne ou qu'il a fait librement sien. Le lieutenant Guy Drummond possedait esprit, instruction et fortune. II avait sur un trop grand nombre de ses fr^res anglo- canadiens (il n'aurait pas perniis qu'on I'appelat ainsi de son vivant, car il etait !6cossais, mais non pas Anglais, disait-il), 1 'incomparable avantage de connaitre notre langue, de la parler avec facilit6 et agr^- ment. II aurait pu rendre d'utiles services, dans un pays ou son p^re a fait sa fortune et sa reputation. Comme le faisait remarquer un penseur, il a choisi la conception la plus brillante du devoir, qui n'est peut-etre pas la plus utile. Mais combien facilement nous nous inclinons sur sa tombe ! Riche, jeune, beau — il 6tait taille en Hercule, — il 6tait convaincu qu'il se devait a la cause imp6riale. II n'a pas fait de discours ; il n'a pas 6crit d'articles dans les journaux ; il n'a pas joue au sergent recruteur. II a pris modestement son rang dans le contingent canadien, et il est parti, sans 6clat, avec son corps. II est tomb6. Saluons sa tombe, c'est celle d'un h6ros. Nous devons meme, comme supreme hommage a sa m^moire, transmettre a nos compatriotes la le9on qu'il nous donna un jour que, ne le connaissant pas encore, nous lui adressames la parole en anglais. " Pourquoi vous plaindre toujours, disait-il, de ce que nous ne parlons pas le fran9ais, puisque vous ne manquez pas une occasion de nous parler anglais ? " Guy Drummond aimait parler fran9ais, et k cause de cela aussi nous le regrettons. II 6tait un de ceux qui auraient pu le mieux aider GUY DRUMMOND 281 a ramener I'entente entre les deux grandes races du pays, etant admirablement qualine pour remplir ce role d'intermediaire. But the most notable of all was the following tribute by Professor Macnaughton of M'Gill University : — How splendid Langemarck was ! How glorious the end of Guy Drummond. He was the first to fall of that band of heroes whose death will be, I believe, a new birth of Canada ; at once a Bethlehem and a Calvary. One thinks of Protesilaus, the first to leap upon the Trojan shore though he knew well that he must pay the proud penalty of the pioneer. He looked the part in his heroic stature, like Saul, the son of Kish, towering by a head and shoulders over the people. A great loss indeed, to M'Gill especially. He was a graduate of ours and a great benefactor. But the loss is a thousand times swallowed up in the gain. He that loses his life shall find not only his own but his people's. By that end he did more for Canada than if he had gone on to live five hundred years. And for himself how can it be otherwise than well with him ? He is in the best of company indeed — in that other young man's who " did so well for himself " as Walt Whitman says, and for us, nineteen hundred and fifteen years ago. " In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye " he was changed, and passed into everlasting efficacy among the starry forces which keep our dull earth sweet and draw it upwards irresistibly ; for himself, can we doubt ? that or ever he knew it he had exchanged the dust and stench and labour for living waters and immortal flowers and verdure. death where is thy sting ? grave where is thy victory ? The sting as ever is in the heart of the " mater dolorosa." But it is a high and noble sorrow, worth a whole world of shallow joys. Such a bereavement enriches and raises to the true peerage both of earth and heaven. It would be sheer atheism to condole with the dead and re-arisen Christ's mother, or with the mother of any son who has shared his death and rising again. These cannot sorrow as those who have no hope. And that is the best thing Guy Drummond and the others have done for us. They have shown us once more what we needed so much to be revealed again — the real meaning of Christianity — the true " rehgion of valour." That is above all what is to stand out clear to the world " throned in heaven's immortal noon," the inner- most secret of the universe, the one creative power that is so busy just now in fashioning a new heaven and a new earth, the Cross of Christ. The historic " ire of the Drummonds " has long since avenged the Protesilaus of Langemarck, the 282 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE battlefield with a name that is a sacring-bell in Canadian remembrance for ail time. As head of the Canadian Red Cross Information Bureau, and Assistant Commissioner of the Canadian Red Cross Society, his mother, Lady Drummond, has built for him a memorial of loving service. He missed the life of busy, various, unselfish usefulness he had planned for himself — it may yet be lived, however, by his posthumous son. Jloier Street Studio! THE HON. GERALD WILLIAM GRENFELL (LIEUTENANT, RIFLE BRIGADE) AS A ROMAN CENTURION T CASTOR AND POLLUX JULIAN AND BILLY GRENFELL Like Castor and Pollux they are together riozv, shining in some other place. Hoiv dijferent the most terrible sorrow is to the blight of misery^ isn't it ? If there is any meaning in life at all, then there must he some- thing beyond this life ; and f there is, then all question of despair is eliminated. If there is not, if one were inclined to think that Ife after all might be a bad joke or a stupid blunder, then one is faced ivith the difficulty of accounting jor the fields, the honeysuckle and the blossom, the sunset and the daavn and the night, the Parthenon, Shakespeare, St Francis, Beethoven^ Velasquez, Shelley, the .very existence of such radiant beings as Julian and Billy, T-hey must have been the expression and part of sow.ething, and that something cannot have been impish or luicked or mistaken. To make up the harmony of the luorld, to make an inheritance glorious and ivorth having, the youthful death of the very bright and the very brave is, I have always felt, not only a necessary but a precious element. Glorious sorrow is as necessary, is as price/ess, as the nightingale or the evening star. I HIS passage, which justifies the title for the last chapter of this book, is taken from a letter of heart-felt sympathy written by Maurice Baring to their mother in the summer of the year they died on the Western Front. The letter is one of many tributes to their memory (which is one and indivisible, for they cannot be separated even in a stranger's thought) which are printed in Pages from a Family Journal.^ a record of the sayings and doings, the works and the days, of her children, by Lady Desborough. It is a book unlike any other book of the kind I know ; a book with an atmosphere of happiness and the joyousness of youth and natural loving- kindness which illuminates all its contents with a delight from wnthin that can never fade away. It is so full of intimate thoughts, of such tender privacies, that it can never be given to the public in this generation. But the time will come when the reading of its glad sad pages will touch even 283 284 CASTOR AND POLLUX the heart of the dry-as-dust historian— the sifter of infinitesimal facts in search of facts for his picture of English family hfe in the era of the Great War — to a sense of the tears in all things under the sun and moon. It will survive as a living part of the Grammata whereby, as Gilbert Murray said in a beautiful discourse on the neces- sity of Greek and Latin books, " we find our escape into that calm world of theirs, where stridency and clamour are forgotten in the former stillness, where the strong iron is long since rusted and the rocks of granite broken into dust, but the great things of the human spirit still shine like stars pointing man's way onward to the great triumph or the great tragedy, and even the little things, the beloved and tender and funny and familiar things, beckon across gulfs of death and change with a magic poignancy, the old things that our dead leaders and forefathers loved, viva adhuc et desiderio pulcriora.^'' ^ It is appropriate that I should here quote the words of the great scholar who has not brought the classics down to the people, but the people up to the classics. For when Julian Grenfell lay dying of his wound, death having already broken into the high places of his commanding intellect, he repeated aloud this song, in the Professor's translation, from the Hippolytus as a charm of coolness against the great heat of the Military Hospital at Boulogne : — for a deep and dewy spring, With runlets cool to draw and drink, And a great meadow blossoming, Long-grassed, and poplars in a ring, To rest me by the brink. * Living still and more beautiful because of our longing. JULIAN & BILLY GRENPELL 285 O, take me to the mountain ; 0, Past the great pines and through the wood^ Up where the lean hounds softly go, A-whine for wild things' blood, And madly flies the dappled roe. God, to shout and speed them there, An arrow by my chestnut hair Drawn tight, and one keen glimmering spear — Ah, if I could ! As a charm of coolness, for the song runs Hmpid in its lucid English, and also for remembrance of his own great days of hunting by field and flood and heathery hill, which were ended for evermore ! His mother's secret and sacred book of memories is full of such piercing oxymora which those who read it in the far future will but dimly apprehend. Yet I can imagine the reader with no Latin at all and less than no Greek (for the .classics are to go because they are such " class-conscious " studies, revealing the folly of democracy as a process of levelling-down instead of levelling-up !) uttering his grace for this book. He will not say Benedictus bejiedicat — but will imitate the deep, illiterate wisdom of the old mendicant monk in the Bene- dictine refectory, and gasp out his Franciscus fran- ciscat. For it is a book of love through and through, and Franciscan from cover to cover. The two brothers were leaders, athletes, scholars, men of letters, adepts in courtesy, by right of inheritance. Their father was one of the most famous of Oxford oarsmen, and an accomplished all-round sportsman who persisted in feeling and looking young when for most men the swift, slippery descent of middle age begins. Even his political opponents could not forget his feat of swimming the Niagara Rapids, as a famous F.E.G. cartoon 286 CASTOR AND POLLUX reminds us. From their mother and their maternal grandfather, Julian Fane, they inherited a passion- ate aptitude for letters which was developed in the early home training — in the fateful years from five to ten when, as experts in child-study assure us, the trend of an intelligence is finally determined. Before he was five years old the literary faculty began to show itself in the younger brother, whose "History of the Family" (it was dictated) is a delightful document. It begins : " Billy is a good boy, but his Dada will never in the winter stop at home. He is a tall man. But his wife is a good woman. She reads to her boys every evening, and plays with the little baby." There is much humour in a " but " as used by this chronicler — humour of the irrelevant kind found in the report of the Marlborough Master who said of a certain pupil : " He is tall but deceitful." The custom of reading aloud was always kept up at Taplow Court, the family home ; there is no better way of teaching children to love books and really understand them and acquire a sense of style. Here is a lively, childish description of a visit to Reading from the little boy's " History of the Family." ( " Maxie " was Julian's pet name.) We went to Reading last week to see the biscuits made — Billy and Julian and Mamma, and we eat a great quantity of biscuits, and seen a line and a brass rails where the boxes are sent shooting down, and Billy and Mflxie pushed off some of the boxes. And they seen the " Maries " made too, and Cracknels, and how they was put in boiling water the Cracknels till they were done, and yon men took them out with great sieves and put them in cold water, and then bake them ; we all took one hot-baked one, so there were 3 biscuits gone. It was very amusing to see the man mixing the ginger-nuts with a great shovel and putting in the sugar and butter in pailfuls. And we saw all the girls packing up the boxes to go abroad ; their lids were soldered in before they went. Then they were sent to all sorts JULIAN cSl billy G REN fell 287 of countries — India^ Iceland, Rome, America, Australia, Europe countries, Italy, Scotland, Portugal, and nearly all other countries. And we saw some soldiers and sailors and clowns all made of sugar for birthday-cakes. And trains run all through the factories, and engines to pull them, and trucks which men push along. And one of the kind men drawed them a violet and a bird and a running rabbit all with a little screw of paper full of white sugar that came streaming out at the bottom. And when they were just crossing the railway bridge a train passed and splashed up steam in my face. And that was the day which we finished in the train " Settlers at Home," and how they got away from the Red Hill, to the friendly farm-house. And now we have just finished " Jackanapes," when dear Jackanapes was a baby he went out after the little duck, and it said " Quawk " when it got away into the pond. And how Jackanapes rescued Tony and how Jackanapes was shot, and about the Major, and all about the war. And there was the gipsy's red-haired pony, when Jacka- napes was little, and how little Jackanapes started him by blowing his twopenny trumpet, and how he spent his two shillings. And Mr. Balfour came here for Sunday, he is in Parliament. And Evan came too, and the " babies " as Mum calls them came down to luncheon too. I cannot tell any more about that thing. All of which is fine, fresh natural prose — and when we get it from a grown-up (as in Pepys' Diary or in the wonderful account of the experiences of a prisoner of war at Wittenberg, which appeared in the Morning Post two years ago) we rejoice aloud and call it a work of genius. Julian's bent for adventurous open-air living was soon shown. When he was only seven, he was quite wild about any kind of shooting and sport ; bows and arrows played a great part in his life, and he loved to go with his father and grand-aunt when they shot wild-duck in the evenings at Panshanger. It was curious ^*how early he began following and tracking animals — the instinct had already appeared which made him so good at scout- ing and reconnoitring in the war. He and his brother loving fishing in the Lochs when the family went to Assynt Forest in Sutherlandshire, where 288 CASTOR AND POLLUX they had a great friend named Murdoch Keir who told them Gaelic legends and stories and sang to them and played a kind of little fiddle, and taught them to catch fish and sea-urchins, and hait lobster- pots and pull them up, and steer a sailing boat. One of Murdoch Keir's stories was about a visit to London, when he thought he would stifle at night and got up and rowed a little boat into the middle of the Thames and sat there and cried for sheer home-sickness. The boys never forgot him ; indeed they were incapable ot forgetting any old friend. In later years when they came home they always ran up first of all to see " Hawa," their old nurse, who became too old and infirm to come downstairs to welcome them. Their first school was Summer Fields, near Oxford, and there they showed great promise both at classics and at games. There they were some- times visited by their people, who never dressed so carefully for any occasions in life as for' these school visits, . for they had been told of the miserable existence led by a little boy whose very picturesque mother had worn what the other boys pronounced to be " a rum cloak." Julian never cried when he went to Summer Fields ; he faced it even for the first time at all as he would an adventure in the unknown. But Billy did, and his family had to show great ingenuity never to find it out. They got a great many prizes, and were in the school teams. Then Juliaif went to Eton and took the Fifth Form, which was then a very rare thing for an Oppidan. Billy followed later on, winning the second of seventeen scholarships. It was just at the end of his time at Summer Fields that Julian had an experience which made a deep impression on his JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 289 mind. There was a great thunderstorm, and he said, " I seemed suddenly to realize God." It was in his early years at Eton that he became so very fond of Thomas a Kempis. He confessed that he passed through a very priggish state of mind about fifteen. His brother had just arrived at Eton and he would go and see him every Sunday afternoon and lecture him severely " for his own good " — the interview invariably ended in a terrific fight. This was the only time in their lives when they were not completely at one, and a single Half saw the little cloud come and go. Like all brothers who are passionately attached to one another, they often fought terrifically. Once when they went to tea with an old lady, they rolled right down her staircase, locked together, fighting; and their mother once found them clutching one another's throats and both black in the face. I have known two instances of twin-brothers who pined when they were separated, and in both cases their families were terrified and puzzled by their predilection for sudden, all-in fights. There is a psychological point here which requires elucidation-^ — it would have interested the late William James, by whose prag- matism Julian was at one time profoundly intrigued. At Eton they were already social personages (Eton is not a school so much as a manner of social living) and they had so many famous friends, men and women, young and old, that it becomes impossible to follow their lives in detail. Lord Kitchener was one of their best and most admired friends ; even when campaigning in South Africa he found time to write them letters. A character- sketch of the great soldier in one of Julian's letters (the visitor's name was unknown to him when they 290 CASTOR AND POLLUX met one morning) is singularly judicious in its appre- ciation of the fine qualities of the utterly unselfish man who found " in life no rest, in death no grave," and grows in stature daily as his figure recedes in the distance of time gone by. But it is the inalien- able charm and tenderness of the family life which seem to dominate the whole drama of development. Their father and mother were as an elder brother and elder sister ; there was perfect trust and con- fidence on both sides ; and to the very end they were all one another's nearest and dearest friends. When they came together after months of separation, it may be, the old life of love and friendship and abounding sympathy was at once renewed without the slightest sense of effort. They had been in one another's hearts all the time. The lines from Browning which Julian sent to his mother from South Africa : — Feel where your life broke off from mine, How fresh the splinters keep and fine ; Only a touch and we combine — were true of any meeting after separation among the members of this family — " a sort of entity," accord- ing to a philosophic friend who wondered at it all. Taplow was always a kind of annexe of Eton and of Oxford also, so the family life was really the background of all the brothers' experiences in either citadel of the growing soul. Both were fine classical scholars — not of the "professional" type, though — and Billy's record — Eton scholarship, the Newcastle, First Classical Exhibition at Balliol, First in Mods, Craven, mentioned for the Ireland — was brilliant and would have been better still if he had not attempted the all but impossible by reading for the Ireland and " Greats " at the same JULIAN &. BILLY GRENFELL 291 time. But Julian had as deep an insight into the beauty and truth of classical literature ; both he and his brother read Greek and Latin for the delight of it, and what they read became part of their very being. And they had great joy of all manner of games; Billy played tennis and boxed for Oxford, and would certainly have run the half- mile at Queen's Club but for a break-down in health. Julian, however, was his equal — perhaps his superior — as the best type of all-round athlete grown in England, where the American idea of rigid specialization in sport (so that you are forbidden to attempt to jump for length as well as for height) is not yet accepted and, I hope, never will be, for it creates an abnormal physique and is a most bore- some business. The difference in their boxing threw light on that difference of character which made them the spiritual complements of one another. In 1911 I saw Billy knock out the Cambridge heavy-weight in the Inter- Varsity boxing and saw in his great gaunt frame (he was 6 ft. 4^ in.) a very dangerous boxer in outline. He had a long, sturdy left — slightly hooked as it ought to be — and the Cambridge man was up against it from the beginning. The winner's amiable, cherubic smile was a curious contrast to the stealthy alacrity of his foot-work and his menacing hands. With practice, he would have trained on into a very dangerous boxer at his weight. But Julian, whose celebrated fight with Lieutenant Huntingdon I also saw, was a far deadlier proposition ; he was a fighter born and made — what xA.merican critics call a " fighter from Fightersville." His boxing face was as fierce and frowning and intent as that of, say, J. L. Sullivan, who used to frighten his 292 CASTOR AND POLLUX opponents out of their true form and was merciless in finishing off a contest. There was more of the romance of pugihsm in his three rounds with Huntingdon, a boxer with all the tricks of the trade and a clever strategist, than in the average 20- round professional championship contest. JuHan Grenfell had a straight thick right, coming over with the ease of a piston-rod, which would have been a fortune to any fashionable professional. He soon had Huntingdon in difficukies with this weapon. At one time the latter was practically knocked out, though still on his feet, and the contest would have been over at once if his opponent, who had been thumped between the eyes and could not see clearly, had been able to find his man. Huntingdon had time to recover, and eventually won on points by a very narrow margin. It was with difficulty that the spectators — and the referee — adhered to their seats during this thrilling affair. The contrast between the two was defined as follows by one who knew them both at Oxford : " Like Julian, Billy was a fine athlete and a keen sportsman ; very few of his contemporaries were so continuously and efficiently active ; but it was characteristic of him that even in activity he con- trived to give an impression of repose, almost of indolence. In this respect he was in striking con- trast with Julian. Julian stood for motion, Billy for mass ; Julian for force in action, Billy for force in rest. Julian was like a torrent, Billy like a deep, still lake, having the same inviting serenity, the same composure. He (Billy) was singularly intolerant of the common herd, and moved among strangers with a kind of drowsy arrogance, which pointed delightfully the slow and simple sweetness JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 293 of his way with friends." But, as this authority adds, words are here flimsy things; such golden lads are not to be revealed out of the tinsel of a few pale adjectives. Their travels and sporting adventures, their joyous ragging, their innumerable friendships, the books they read and liked or liked not {they detected sham emotions, as in some of Masefield's poems, at a glance) would fill this book to overflowing. They were wondrously in love with the variousness of life. There is a passage in one of Julian's letters from South Africa which brings this out well. " I want to ask for such a lot of things " : — Faith. Hope. Charity. Someone to buy my ponies. A grande passion. A new face. A beautiful soul. !More love of my fellow-men. Death of . Death of . £250. Small feet and hands. Gentleness. Quick repartee. Less appetite. Polished manners of the true gentleman. Truths sudden discovery of the. Boots^ Polo^ new. Life, theory of, new. Books, old. Books, new. Death of which reminds one of a passage in Rupert Brooke's letters in which he speaks of " that tearing hunger to do and do and do things. I want to walk 1000 294 CASTOR AND POLLUX miles and write looo plays and sing looo poems, and drink looo pots of beer, and kiss looo girls, and — oh, a million things ! " Looking back we see these Grenfell brothers, as ancient votaries saw the Dioscuri in a radiant cloud, in a dazzling chang- ing-changeless coruscation of youth and young beauty and yet know they are as anxious to be as to do^ and that the character which is destiny is all the time growing in them skyward, silently, invisibly. There could be no life but a soldier's life for Julian Grenfell, and he found full scope for his love of soldiering and sport in the Royal Dragoons. He was in South Africa when the war broke out. He reached Flanders after the Mons Retreat; the transport in which the Royals crossed over was nearly torpedoed. War he took in the " Old Army" or traditional spirit of the English officer. Young or old, officers in the services look upon war as " noble sport " just as our men did at Agincourt. Lady Desborough quotes a letter from a midship- man-son, aged seventeen, to illustrate this spirit. It was written to his mother : — " It is awful for R being kept at Harrow while this is going on, but I have written to try and cheer him up by saying the war is certain to last two years, by which time he will be able to join in. I do hope you and Father will tell him this too, ivhatcver you may th'ink.^'' Julian Grenfell rather agreed with the definition of the war as " months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror." He loved the dangerous, tumultuous life at the Front, but regretted the use- lessness of cavalry there. " It is horrible^' he wrote, " having to leave one's horse. It feels like leaving half oneself behind, and one feels the dual JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 295 responsibility all the same." However, he says, he " would not be anywhere else for a million pounds and the Queen of Sheba." He thought always of his men, never of himself; any small comforts that came along, cigarettes and chocolate and so forth, he gave to his troop. He did not, however, make them out to be plaster-of-Paris saints ; they were not Galahads, though " blooming day-and-night errants," as one of the troopers said. He gives a curious picture of his men under bad fire — " they used the most filthy language, talking quite quietly and laughing all the time, even after men were knocked over within a yard of them." He longed to be able to say he liked it, but really found it "beastly" — and found also that any pretence to the contrary made him careless and unwatchful and self-absorbed. A useful bit of psychology for fight- ing men ! But his considered verdict was : — " It is all the best fun. I have never felt so well, or so happy, or enjoyed anything so much. It just suits my stolid health and stolid nerves and barbaric disposition. The fighting-excitement vitalizes every- thing, every sight and word and action. One loves one s fellow-man so much more when one is bent on killing him." This, the mystical way of looking at it, is the right way ; for war is a form of mysticism in action. Of course, he turned down the chance of a staff job at once; because (i) he felt he was more useful in the fighting-line, and (2) preferred roughing it with his own friends and his own men. What else could you expect of this born soldier ? He had an opportunity of showing his genius for scouting. They were then entrenched in a dripping rain-sodden wood, where the trees (fir-trees) had 2(j6 CASTOR AND POLLUX mostly been cut down by shrapnel. The story is best told in his own words : — We had been worried by their snipers all along, and I had always been asking for leave to go out and have a try myself. Well, on Tuesday the i6th (November), the day before yesterday, they gave me leave. Only after great difficulty. They told me to take a section with me, and I said I would sooner cut my throat and have done with it. So they let me go alone. Off I crawled through sodden clay and trenches, going about a yard a minute, and Hstening and looking as I thought it was not possible to look and listen. I went out to the right of our lines, where the loth were, and where the Germans were nearest. I took about 30 minutes to do 30 yards, then I saw the Hun trench, and I waited there a long time, but could see or hear nothing. It was about 10 yards from me. Then I heard some Germans talking, and saw one put his head up over some bushes, about 10 yards behind the trench. I could not get a shot at him, I was too low down, and of course I could not get up. So I crawled on again very slowly to the parapet of their trench. It was very exciting. I was not sure that there might not have been someone there, or a little further along the trench. I peered through their loop-hole and saw nobody in the trench. Then the German behind put his head up again. He was laughing and talking. I saw his teeth glistening against my foresight, and I pulled the trigger very slowly. He just grunted, and crumpled up. The others got up and whispered to each other. I do not know which were most frightened, them or me. I think there were four or five of them. They could not trace the shot, I was flat behind their parapet and hidden. I just had the nerve not to move a muscle and stay there. My heart was fairly hammering. They did not come forward, and I could not see them, as they were behind some bushes and trees, so I crept back inch by inch. I went out again in the afternoon, in front of our bit of the line. About 60 yards off I found their trench again, empty again. I waited there for an hour, but saw nobody. Then I went back, because I did not want to get inside some of their patrols who might have been placed forward. I reported the trench empty. The next day, just before dawn, I crawled out there again, and found it empty again. Then a single German came through the woods towards the trench. I saw him 50 yards off. He was coming along upright and careless, making a great noise. I heard him before I saw him. I let him get within 25 yards, and shot him in the heart. He never made a sound. Nothing for 10 minutes, and then there was a noise and talking, and a lot of them came along, through the wood behind the trench about 40 yards from me. I counted about 20, and JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 297 there were more coming. They halted in front, and I picked out the one I thought was the officer, or sergeant. He stood facing the other way, and I had a steady shot at him behind the shoulders. He went down, and that was all I saw. I went back at a sort of galloping crawl to our lines, and sent a message to the loth that the Germans were moving up their way in some numbers. Half an hour afterwards they attacked the loth and our right in massed formation, advancing slowly to within lo yards of the trenches. We simply mowed them do%vn. It was rather horrible. It was a most useful piece of reconnoitring, for it enabled our men to smash up what was intended to be a surprise attack. He proved himself a most excellent officer throughout, and in February 19 15 he received the D.S.O. for gallant and distinguished services. He had a great respect for the Germans as brainy fighters, and gave nothing away in his dealings with them. He would certainly have risen to high command, if he had lived. On May 13th near Ypres he was wounded in the head, and was sent to hospital in Boulogne. He looked so well and was in such good spirits that nobody thought he was really on his way West. But things went badly with his wound, and little hope was left after a second operation. His father and mother and sister were with him, and he knew them all to the end, his last word being his father's name, and his last gesture moving his mother's hand to his lips. His grave in the soldiers' cemetery on the hill above Boulogne was lined and filled with wild flowers from the forest and the gay green oak-leaves which had just come out. His little sister's last letter to him and the flowers from her garden were buried with him. Nobody wore mourning for him ; nor for his brother when his time came. They were not separated for long. Billy Gren- 298 CASTOR AND POLLUX fell was killed on July 30tli while leading his platoon in a charge near Hooge. He must have fallen not a mile from the place where his brother was wounded. He was in the Rifle Brigade, and from the first proved himself one of the young officers who create the moral of an army in the making. His platoon was rather a tough, trouble- some lot, and at first even he found them hard to handle. But the men soon got to know him, and everything was changed, and they would do any- thing and go anywhere. In the trenches he was always making jokes and cheering them up. One favourite joke was about his height, which he often forgot, so that his head would show above the parapet until a bullet came along as a reminder. Then he would duck his head and say, laughing, " Oh, I think my head must be showing," and this saying became one of those standing jokes which are as dear to soldiers as to schoolboys. He was absolutely fearless. The Dioscuri were together again, and there can be no doubt their immortality was "a great activity," as Billy said, long before the war, of a lost and much-loved relation. • ••••■ Billy Grenfell did not live long enough to come to the poetical efflorescence which his power of deep feeling and gift of self-expression in the fewest possible words (you see it in his letters again and again) made inevitable sooner or later. The one poem he left, the tribute to John Manners : — heart-and-soul and careless played Our little band of brothers, And never recked the time would come To change our games for others. It's joy for those who played with you To picture now what grace JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 299 Was in your mind and single heart And in your radiant face. Your light-foot strength by flood and field For England keener glowed ; To whatsoever things are fair We know, through you, the road ; Nor is our grief the less thereby ; swift and strong and dear. Good-bye — is enough to show what he could have done when his hps were at last touched — by some dear disaster or by passion in retrospect, that strong and kindly magician. Some day, if he had lived into the tempestuous peace-time which is approaching, he must have expressed his quick remembrance of Julian in language lifted to a higher plane than that of the most inspired prose, for he was nearer to his brother than anybody else — nearer, perhaps, in some ways than his parents — and knew the very " shoots of everlastingness " which were the mystical influences in what was really the comple- ment of his own soul. It is clear he felt the brief parting as the greatest of impossible calamities ; perhaps he was glad of its brevity, when the end came for him. Arthur Grenfell's twin-brothers, Rivvy and Francis, could not have felt their separation more poignantly. After his brother's death Francis wrote to their Eton tutor : " You who parted us so often in the old days will know what it means to be parted now." • • • • • • Julian Grenfell, however, has left us three poems of a swift intensity which is found only in the mystical verse of Crashaw and Blake. All three might have been written by a brother of the "undaunted daughter of desires," half eagle and half dove, whom Crashaw celebrates in the most 300 CASTOR AND POLLUX ecstatic outpouring in the English language. He was not, as most people still believe, a single-poem genius. Yet even critics who ought to know better think that Into Battle was the first and last gush of melody from a heart of inarticulate rock smitten once, and once only, to such purpose by the brazen rod of war. The truth is that The Hills (written at Chakrata in May 191 1) and To a Black Greyhound (written in the Spring of 19 12) are masterpieces as memorable as the war-poem which will be remembered as the loftiest and most joyous Religio Militis in verse we can hope to possess. Moreover, a number of lesser pieces have been preserved which are often so striking in matter and manner that one feels he was a poet born and made [pacta nascitiir necnon Jit). At the age of fourteen he made this excellent verse translation from the Latin : — " Folia in silvis pronos mutantur in annos.'^ The leaves are falling fast from off the tree And yellow heaps congeal the sodden ground, Pale are the gleams of sunlight on the lea, And western winds give forth a dreary sound. Where are the songs of spring ? Ay, where are they ? Only the small gnat mourns the dying day. Yet flowers here and there adorn the sward, Fruits with their hues still make the trees look gay : The fading autumn doth some joys afford ; Some light and colour still relieve the day. Summer and spring delights are left behind. Nor yet has breathed the icy winter wind. At eighteen (when he had edited the Eton Chronicle for a year, brought out a guerilla school paper called the Outsider^ which lasted for six numbers and had for contributors Charles Lister, Patrick Shaw- JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 301 Stewart, Ronald Knox and others, and also written articles for the World and Vanity Fair), he wrote a long poem on the San Francisco earthquake which is a remarkable piece of verbal architecture and shows that he knew by instinct the secret of impressiveness in verse — the right management of vowels, which are the very soul of verbal music. Here are three stanzas leading up to the moral of the poem, which is, that sorrow fortifies the character of man : — As on that western city fair, Founded in steel and adamant, Which up to heaven's glowing stair, Her towers in lofty masses sent, Trusting in all that mortal can, — In all the strength and skill of man. The deadly anger of the earth. The force which none can conquer, fell And mighty waves of hidden birth Now rose to Heaven, now sank to Hell, And colonnade and church and tower To ruin crashed in one dread hour : As deadly and as unforeseen On man descends the heavenly blow ; The test is sharp, the trial keen, Bitter the pang to undergo ; But sure are we that God is wise. Who doth demand such sacrifice. As one would expect from a boy still at a Public School he cheerfully accepted the ruling of the conventional theologians — delivered in " the bluff Christian voice that is wholly pedagogic," of which Rupert Brooke pretends to be possessed when describing his experiences as acting Housemaster at School Field. In later years, when he had thought — or rather felt — deeply about the great issues of life, he never explicitly formulated his philosophy of living. 302 CASTOR AND POLLUX That is as much as to say he knew the proper functions of a poet — one of which is to remember the dreadful fate of Coleridge and never allow poetry to run to dry scattering seed in philosophy. During his voyage to South Africa on the Saxon (April 191 3) he began a poem which might have been a complete statement of the mystical faith that was in him if it had ever been finished. He threw the fragments away, but they were rescued and kept by a lady on board who sent them to his father after his death. Between the Visioned and the Seen^ Between the Will Be and Has Been, There stays a little space, yet stays not, Where Time, delaying still, delays not ; And all things moving in God's groove Seem not to move — or if they move Move with a dim subsconscious motion, As on the moving tides of Ocean. The ordered Past behind us lies, The Past with ordered argosies Of Memory's abiding treasure. Of pain and joy and driving pleasure. Passion, a fiery flaming sword, Swooping, the Angel of the Lord, Has cut a burning way about. Has struck the soul with fire and rout, Ij Has struck and cleansed, and wandered out. And Lust, the son of storm and thunder. Has seized the empty soul for plunder ; Lust, that Red Mimic, jagged light, Which deadens sense, and sears the sight. The twisted lightning, viper-tongues, The thunder surging from the lungs Of Hell ; the slaying hail down-shattering That cools the flame by blows and battering ; And then false mockery of peace. Half dreaded, half desired release. JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 303 It would not have been sheer poetry any more than it would have been formal philosophy. Only in music, perhaps, can such inexpressive thoughts be artistically expressed. But it is a great pity the piece was never finished. . . • • • • Now and again, like all poets who are too great to let poise be stage-managed into pose, Julian Grenfell wrote light, humorous verse. Personal " Limericks " (are they not an engaging form of Celtic lyric ?) written at Eton are still extinct, and also his reply to a number of Christmas invitations to dances : — Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, To all the social world say " Hang it, I, who for seventeen years of life Have trod this happy, hustling planet, I won't go woman-hunting yet, I won't become a Social Pet." On his way to the war from South Africa he wrote this Short Historical Survey of the German : — When God on high created Man, He made the Hun barbarian. He made the Vandal, and the Goth, A great gross beast inclined to wrath ; The Goths were ever barbarous. Since Csesar fought Arminius. The ancient Goth, so Csesar says, Was heavy in his speech and ways. Was gross and mannerless at table, And ate as much as he was able, And drank as much as he could hold. And beat his wife when she grew old. His soul was filled with heavy pride. His gait was heavy, his inside 304 CASTOR AND POLLUX Was heavy ; he had neck as full, And eye as sluggish, as the bull. (You say that Caesar never said These things ? Well, then, he should have. — Ed.) The Goths and Huns are now called " German " ; " Arminius " is changed to " Hermann." But Germans of the present day Are just as savage as were they. The present German is a scandal - As great as ever was the Vandal. The Germans are barbarians ; (And so are the Hungarians) ; And therefore it is for the best That they are shortly going West, But one thing only makes me fear — When there are no more Germans here, Where shall we get our Munich Beer ? And, while at the war, he composed this derisive Prayer for Those on the Staff — to express the keen regimental officer's not unnatural, if illogical, dis- taste for the less dangerous and more decorative life of the brass-hatted fraternity : — Fighting in mud, we turn to Thee, In these dread times of battle, Lord, To keep us safe, if so may be, From shrapnel, snipers, shell, and sword. But not on us, for we are men Of meaner clay, who fight in clay. But on the Staff, the Upper Ten, Depends the issue of the Day. The Staff is working with its brains. While we are sitting in the trench ; The StafT the universe ordains (Subject to Thee and General French). God help the Staff — especially The young ones, many of them sprung From our high aristocracy ; Their task is hard, and they are young. JITLTAN & BILLY GREW FELL 305 Lord, who mad' si all things to be, And modest some things very good, Please keep the extra A.D.C. From, horrid scenes, and sight of blood. See that his eggs are newly laid^ Not tinged as some of them — with green ; And let no nasty draughts invade The windows of his Limousine, When he forgets to buy the bread, When there are no more minerals, Preserve his smooth well-oil^d head From wrath of caustic Generals. Lord, who mad'st all things to be. And hatest nothing thou hast made, Please keep the extra A.D.C. Out of the sun and in the shade. These trifles not only threw light on the joyous side of his mentality but also prove, if further proof be necessary, that he had a gift of easy, all-round expression in rhyme and rhythm. His Hymn to the Wild Boar, in a vein oif sporting hyperbole, helps one to make the transition to the first of his three great poems : — God gave the horse for man to ride, And steel wherewith to fight, And wine to swell his soul with pride And women for delight : But a better gift than these all four Was when He made the fighting boar. The horse is filled with spirit rare, His heart is bold and free ; The bright steel flashes in the air, And glitters hungrily. But these were little use before The Lord He made the fighting boar. The ruby wine doth banish care, But it confounds the head ; The fickle fair is light as air. And makes the heart bleed red ; u 3o6 CASTOR AND POLLUX But wine nor love can t<;mpt us more When we may hunt the fighting boar. When Noah's big monsoon was laid, The land began to ride again, And then the first hog-spear was made By the hands of Tubal Cain ; The sons of Shem and many more Came out to ride the fighting boar. Those ancient Jew boys went like stinks, They knew not reck nor fear, Old Noah knocked the first two jinks, And Nimrod got the spear. And ever since those times of yore True men do ride the fighting boar. To a Black Greyhound^ which is a worthy com- panion to Blake's " Tiger, Tiger, burning bright," could only have been written by one who was, as a friend said, " the gallantest man I have ever known, and the gentlest." Love of animals was one of the strongest motives in his life, and it was rewarded by that passionate adoration with which dumb creatures: — Poor dwindled lives that lost the upward way In Memory's morning when the world began — requite their lovers, having the genius for gratitude which mankind lost long ago. The black grey- hound is lying at his feet in the portrait that has been chosen for this book of characters : — Shining black in the shining light. Inky black in the golden sun. Graceful as the swallow's flight, Light as swallow, winged one, Swift as driven hurricane — Double-sinewed stretch and spring, Muffled thud of flying feet, Sec the black dog galloping. Hear his wild foot-beat. JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 307 See him lie when the day is dead, Black curves curled on the boarded floor. Sleepy eyes, my sleepy head — Eyes that were aflame before. Gentle now, they burn no more Gentle now and softly warm, With the fire that made them bright Hidden — as when after storm Softly falls the night. God of speed, who makes the fire — God of Peace, who lulls the same, God who gives the fierce desire. Lust for blood as fierce as flame — God who stands in Pity's name — Many may ye be or less, Ye who rule the earth and smi : Gods of strength and gentleness. Ye are ever one. In The Hills a wider and deeper sense of fellow- ship with Nature and Nature's pensioners is revealed ; his body is one with the abounding earth, his soul part of the spirit of God immanent in all things, animate or inanimate : — Mussourieand Chakrata Hill The Jumna flows between ; And from Chakrata's liills afar Mussourie's vale is seen. The mountains sing together In cloud or sunny weather, The Jumna, through their tether. Foams white or plunges green. The mountains stand and laugh at Time ; The}- pillar up the Earth, They watch the ages pass, they bring New centuries to birth. They feel the day-break shiver, They see Time passing ever. As flows the Jumna river, As breaks the white sea-surf. 3o8 CASTOR AND POLLUX They drink the sun in a golden cup^ And in blue mist the rain ; With a sudden brightening they meet the lightning Or ere it strikes the plain. They seize the sullen thunder, And take it up for plunder, And cast it down and under, And up and back again. They are as changeless as the rock, As changeful as the sea ; They rest, but as a lover rests After love's ecstasy. They watch, as a true lover Watches the quick lights hover About the lids that cover His eyes so wearily. Heaven lies upon their breasts at night, Heaven kisses them at dawn ; Heaven clasps and kisses them at even With fire of the sun's death born. They turn to his desire Their bosom, flushing higher With soft receptive fire. And blushing, passion-torn. Here, in the hills of ages I met thee face to face, mother Earth, lover Earth, Look down on me with grace. Give me thy passion burning. And thy strong patience, turning All wrath to power, all yearning To truth, thy dwelling place. And Into Battle^ the last of the trilogy and the subtlest and strongest, is a vindication of war as a mode of intense living, harmonious with the deepest nature of man, in which all sham emotions and root- less thoughts and sick sophistries are consumed as in a refiner's fire, and the old half- forgotten fellowship JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 309 with all the creatures of God's imagination regains its former power : — The naked earth is warm with Spring, And with green grass and bursting trees Leans to the sun's gaze glorying, And quivers in the sunny breeze ; And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light, And a striving evermore for these ; And he is dead who will not fight ; And who dies fighting has increase. The fighting man shall from the sun Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth ; Speed with the light-foot winds to run, And with the trees to newer birth ; And find, when fighting shall be done, Great rest, and fullness after dearth. All the bright company of Heaven Hold him in their high comradeship, The Dog-Star, and the Sisters Seven, Orion's Belt and sworded hip. The woodland trees that stand together, They stand to him each one a friend ; They gently speak in the windy weather They guide to valley and ridge's end. The kestrel hovering by day. And the little owls that call by night, Bid him be swift and keen as they. As keen of ear, as swift of sight. The blackbird sings to him " Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing Sing well, for you may not sing another ; Brother, sing." In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours, Before the brazen frenzy starts, The horses show him nobler powers ; patient eyes, courageous hearts ! 310 CASTOR AND POLLUX And when the burning moment breaks, And all things else are out of mind, And only Joy of Battle takes Him by the throat, and makes him blind. Through joy and blindness he shall know, Not caring much to know, that still Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so That it be not the Destined Will. The thundering line of battle stands. And in the air Death moans and sings ; But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings. In a letter written to a woman friend from France just before he was killed the brother that was left said : " You knew all the mysticism and idealism, and that strange streak of melancholy, which under- lay Julian's war-whooping, sun-bathing, fearless exterior. I love to think that he has attained that perfection and fullness of life for which he sought so untiringly. I seem to hear him cheering me on in moments of stress here with even more vivid power. There is no one whose victory over tlie grave can be more complete." The stir and stress of the life led on earth by these earthly Dioscuri is incommunicable ; all that could here be written about it would be a double handful of the dry, fleeting, whispering dust of circumstance. He and his brother were, perhaps, the most impressive of the young men whom England lost when lighting a forlorn hope victoriously on the West Front. All sorts and conditions of men and women — famous soldiers and statesmen as well as the young blithe companions of their studies, sports, and social diversions — lamented their loss with understanding, feeling that England was the poorer for their passage despite her innumer- able heart and inexhaustible power of making souls JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 311 to match every high occasion. As boys and as men thev were as cheery and natural as wild flowers ; the wildness was impulse in the younger, a sweet fierceness in the elder. They lived unvanquished by any littlenesses, and they died as they lived — none doubted that no more complete victory over death than theirs had ever yet been won. Like Castor and Pollux they are together noiju^ shinitig in some other place. THE END JAM 2 8 liH'i Form L-9-15m-7,'32 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 294 617 6 PR 605 E808