THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
THE CORONATION PROCESSION PASSING THE GREAT BELL
A YEAR FROM A
REPORTER'S NOTE-BOOK
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
ILLUSTRATED
W^
i^m
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HAR PER &- BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
L-N
\
TO
CECIL CLARK
SGS7^S1
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The events I have tried to describe in this book occurred
m different parts of the world between the months of May,
1896, and June, 1897.
Of the articles and letters that have been selected to fill it,
those on the Coronation, the Inauguration, and the Jubilee
appeared in Harper s Magazine, the one on the Millennial
Celebration in Hungary in Scribner's Magazine. The letters
from Cuba were written to the New York Jounml while I was
on the island as a correspondent of that paper, and were later
published in a book called "Cuba in War-time." Those
used here were loaned through the courtesy of the publisher,
Mr. RoTsert Howard Russell. The article on the Greek-
Turkish war is made up of one which appeared in Harper s
Magazine and of letters which I wrote from Turkey and Greece
while acting as war correspondent of the London Times.
Richard Harding Davis.
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Coronation 3
The Millennial Celep.ration at Budapest 69
Cuba in War-time:
i. the death of rodriguez 99
ii. along the trocha 113
The Inauguration i37
With the Greek Soldiers i93
The Queen's Jubilee 261
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CORONATION PROCESSION PASSING THE GREAT
BELL Frontispiece
THE CZAR IN HIS STATE ENTRY INTO MOSCOW . Fac
THE czarina's CARRIAGE IN THK- STATE PROCES-
SION
THE CZAR PLACES THE CROWN ON HIS HEAD . .
THE CZAR CROWNING THE CZARINA
THE ENTRANCE TO THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
THE PROCESSION AT THE START
THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ
REGULAR CAVALRYMAN — SPANISH
ONE OF TIIF, BLOCK-HOUSES
FOR CUBA LIBRE
A SPANISH SOLDIER
THE TROCHA
ONE OF THE FORTS ALONG THE TROCHA . . .
SPANISH CAVALRY
THE VICE - PRESIDENT TAKING THE OATH OF
OFFICE
IN THE diplomat's GALLERY
RETURNING FROM THE CAPITOL
REVIEWING THE PROCESSION FROM THE STAND
IN FRONT OF THE WHITE HOUSE ....
AN AMERICAN BODY-GUARD
EVZONES LEAVING VONITZA FOR SALAGURA . .
'ep- 24
32
58
60
72
84
100
108
114
116
1x8
124
12S
132
13S
140
156
180
188
208
IX
ILLUSTRATIONS
I
DRAGGING OFF A TURKISH CANNON ABANDONED
AT SALAGORA Facing p. 2l6
A PRIEST OF THE GREEK CHURCH IN TURKEY
SURROUNDED BY GREEK SOLDIERS .... " 2l8
AN AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT (JOHN BASS)"]
DIRECTING THE FIRE OF THE GREEKS , . • )- " 224
VELESTINOS J
AN ENCAMPMENT OF GREEK SOLDIERS .... " 226
FIRING FROM THE TRENCHES AT VELESTINOS. . " 23O
THE BATTLE OF VELESTINOS " 234
THE MOUNTAIN BATTERY AT VELESTINOS ... " 250
THE STAFF-OFFICERS OF THE INDIAN ARMY . . " 276
THE QUEEN DURING THE THANKSGIVING SERVICE
AT ST. Paul's " 288
LORD ROBERTS OF KABUL AND KANDAHAR ON HIS
CELEBRATED PONY " 292
LT.-COL. THE HON. MAURICE GIFFORD, COMMAND-
ING THE RHODESIAN HORSE " 298
THE CORONATION
THE CORONATION
w
E started for Moscow ten days be-
fore the date set for the corona-
tion, leaving Berlin at midnight, and when
the chief of the wagon - lit woke us at
seven the next morning we were within
fifteen minutes of the custom-house.
It was raining, and outside of the wet
window-panes miles of dark-green grass
were drawn over little hills as far as the
eye could see. No houses, no people, no
cattle, no living thing of any kind moved
under the low dark skies or rose from the
sodden prairie.
It was a gloomy picture of emptiness
and desolation, a landscape without char-
acter or suggestion, and as I surveyed it
sleepily I had a disappointed feeling of
3
THE CORONATION
being cheated in having come so far to
find that the Russian steppes were merely
our Western prairie. But even as this was
in my mind the scene changed, and lived
with meaning and significance, for as the
train rushed on there rose out of the misty
landscape a tall white pillar painted in
black stripes. And I knew that it sig-
nalled to Germany, and to all the rest of
the world, " So far can you go, and no
farther," and that we had crossed into
the domain of the Czar. It must be a
fine thing to " own your own home," as
the real -estate advertisements are con-
stantly urging one to do, and it must give
a man a sensation of pride to see the sur-
veyors' stakes at the corners of his town
site or homestead holding, and to know
that all that lies within those stakes be-
longs to him ; but imagine what it must be
to stake out the half of Europe, planting
your painted posts from the Arctic Ocean
to the Pacific, from the borders of Austria
and Hungary down to the shores of the
4
THE CORONATION
Black Sea, to the Pamirs, in the very face
of the British outposts, and on to China,
saying, as it were, " Keep out, please ; this
belongs to me."
Trowbridge came with me because he
was going to the coronation in any event,
and because he could speak Russian. I
had heard him speak French, German,
and Italian when we had first met at Flor-
ence, and so I asked him to go with me to
Moscow as an assistant correspondent of
the New York paper I was to represent.
He made an admirable associate, and it
was due to him and his persuasive manner
when dealing with Russian officials that I
was permitted eventually to witness the
coronation. It came out later, however,
that his Russian was limited to a single
phrase, which reflected on the ancestors of
the person to whom it was addressed, and
as I feared the result of this, I forbade
his using it, and his Russian, in con-
sequence, was limited to " how much .?"
"tea," and "caviare"; so one might say
5
THE CORONATION
that we spoke the language with equal
fluency.
We had a sealed letter from the Russian
ambassador at Washington to the custom-
house people, and we gave it to a very
smart -looking officer in a long gray over-
coat and a flat white cap. He glanced
over it, and over our heads at the dismal
landscape, and said, " We expected you last
night at one o'clock," and left us wonder-
ing. We differed in opinion as to whether
he really had known that we were coming,
or whether he made the same remark to
every one who crossed the border, in order
to give him to understand that he and his
movements were now a matter of observa-
tion and concern to the Russian govern-
ment.
r As a matter of fact, the Russian govern-
ment probably takes the stranger within
its gates much less seriously than he does
himself. The visiting stranger likes to be-
lieve that he is giving no end of trouble to
a dozen of the secret police ; that, sleeping
THE CORONATION
or waking, he is surrounded by spies. It
adds an element of local color to his visit,
and makes a good story to tell when he
goes home. It may be that for reasons of
their own the Russian police help to en-
courage him in this belief, but that they
spy upon every stranger who comes to see
their show cities seems hardly probable.
And if the stranger thinks he is being
watched he will behave himself just as
well as though he were being watched,
and the result, so far as the police are con-
cerned, is the same.
All the places in the fast trains had been
engaged for many days before, so that we
were forced into a very slow one, and as
the line was being constantly cleared to
make way for the cars of imperial blue
that bore princes and archdukes and spe-
cial ambassadors, we were three days and
three nights on our way to Moscow. But
it was an interesting journey in spite of its
interminable length, and in spite of the
monotonous landscape through which we
7
THE CORONATION
crawled ; and later, in looking back to it
and comparing its lazy progress with the
roar and rush and the suffocating crowds
of the coronation weeks, it seemed a most
peaceful and restful experience.
The land on either side of the track was
as level as our Western prairie, but broken
here and there with woods of trembling
birch and dark fir trees. Scattered vil-
lages lay at great distances from one an-
other and almost even with the soil, their
huts of logs and mud seldom standing
higher than one story, and with doors so
low that a tall man could enter them only
by stooping.
Between these log houses were roads
which the snow and rain had changed into
rivers of mud, and which seemed to lead to
nowhere, but to disappear from off the face
of the earth as soon as they had reached
the last of each group of huts. There were
no stores nor taverns nor town-halls visible
from the car windows, such as one sees on
our Western prairie. Instead there were
THE CORONATION
always the same low -roofed huts of logs
painted brown, the church of two stories
in the centre, the wide, muddy road strag-
gling down to the station, the fields where
men and women ploughed the rich choco-
late-colored soil, and, overhead, countless
flocks of crows that swept like black clouds
across the sky. When the villages ceased
the marshes began, and from them tall
heron and bittern rose and sailed heavily
away, answering the shrill whistle of the
locomotive with their hoarse, melancholy
cries. There are probably no two kinds
of bird so depressing in every way as are
the heron and the crow, and they seemed
to typify the whole country between Alex-
androv and Moscow, where, in spite of the
sun that shone brilliantly and the bright
moist green of the grass, there was no sign
of movement or mirth or pleasure, but, in-
stead, a hopeless, dreary silence, and the
marks of an unceasing struggle for the
bare right to exist.
The railroad stations were the only
y
THE CORONATION
bright spots on our horizon. They stood
in bunches of aspen and birch trees, sur-
rounded by neat white paHngs, and inside
there were steaming samovars brilliantly
burnished, and countless kinds of hors
cToeuvres in little dishes on clean linen
cloths, and innumerable bottles of vodki,
and caviare in large tin buckets. As we
never knew when we should arrive at the
next station, we ate something at each
one, in order that we might be sure of
that much at least, and, in consequence, my
chief recollection of travelling in Russia
is hot tea, which we scalded ourselves in
drinking, and cold caviare, and waiters in
high boots, who answered our inquiries as
to how long the train stopped by exclaim-
ing, " Beefsteak," and dashing off delight-
edly to bring it
At every cross - road there were little
semi-official stations, with the fences and
gates around them painted with the black
and white stripes of the government, the
whole in charge of a woman, who stood in
THE COROXATION
the road with a green (lag held out straight
in front of her. In Russia they feed the
locomotive engines with wood as well as
coal, and long before we reached a station
we would know that we were approaching
it by the piles of kindling heaped up on
either side of the tracks for over a mile,
so that the country had the appearance of
one vast lumber-yard.
These piles of wood, and the black and
white striped fences, and the frequent
spectacle of a lonely child guarding one
poor cow or a half- starved horse, with no
other sien of life within miles of them,
were the three things which seemed to us
to be the most conspicuous and character-
istic features of the eight hundred miles
that stretch from the German border to
the ancient capital.
All that we saw of the moujiks was at
the stations, where they were gathered in
silent, apathetic groups to watch the train
come and go. The men were of a fine
peasant type, big- boned and strong-look-
THE CORONATION
ing, with sad, unenlightened faces. They
neither laughed nor joked, as loungers
around the railroad stations are wont to
do at home, but stood staring, with their
hands tucked in their sleeves, watching
the voyagers with a humble, distressed
look, like that of an uncomprehending
dumb animal.
They all wore long, greasy coats of
sheepskin, cut in closely at the waist and
spreading out like a frock to below their
knees ; on their feet the more well-to-do
wore boots. The legs and feet of the
others were wrapped closely in long linen
bandages, and bound with thongs of raw-
hide or plaited straw. All the men had
the inevitable flat cap, which seems to be
the national badge of Russia, and their
hair was long and clipped off evenly in a
line with their shoulders. The women
dressed exactly like the men, with the
same long sheepskin coats and high boots,
so that it was only possible to distinguish
them by the kerchief each wore round her
THE CORONATION
head. They were short and broad in stat-
ure, and so much smaller than their hus-
bands and sons that they seemed to belong
to another race, and none of them either in
face or figure showed any marked trace of
feminine grace or beauty.
Beyond Poland the Hebrew type, there
prevalent, disappeared, of course, and the
population seemed to be divided into two
classes — those that wore a uniform and
those that wore the sheepskin coat. But
the greater number wore the uniform.
There were so many of these, and they
crowded each other so closely, that all the
men of the nation seemed to spend their
time in saluting somebody, and to enjoy
doing it so much that when no one passed
for some time whom they could reasonably
salute, they saluted some one of equal rank
to themselves. It seemed to be the na-
tional attitude.
"In this country," a man told us, "it is
well to remember that every one is either
master or slave. And he is likely to take
13
THE CORONATION
whichever position you first assign to him."
Stated baldly, that sounds absurd, but in
practice we found that it held good to a
certain degree. If the stranger approach-
es the Russian official — and everybody is
some sort of an official — politely and hat
in hand, the Russian at once assumes an
air of authority over him ; but if he takes
the initiative, and treats the official as a
public servant, he accepts that position, and
serves him so far as his authority extends.
Moscow proved to be a city of enormous
extent, spread out widely over many low
hills, with houses of two stories and streets
of huge round cobble-stones. The houses
are of stucco, topped with tin roofs painted
green; and the bare public squares and lack
of municipal buildings and of statues in
public places give Moscow the undeco-
rated, uncared-for look of Constantinople,
or of any other half-barbaric capital where
the city seems not to have been built with
design, but to have grown up of itself and
to have spread as it pleased.
14
THE CORONATION
The Kremlin, of which so much was
written at the time of the coronation, is
no part of the city proper. It is in it, but
pot of it. It is a thing alone, unlike the
rest of Moscow ; nor, indeed, is it like any
other city in the world. Its great jagged
walls encompass churches, arsenals, pal-
aces, and convents of an architecture bor-
rowed from India and Asia and the Eu-
rope of the Middle Ages ; it is as though
the Tower of London, the Houses of Par-
liament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's,
and the Knightsbridge Barracks were all
huddled together on the Thames Embank-
ment and shut in with monster walls, leav-
ing the rest of London an unpicturesque
waste of shops of stucco, and of churches
with gilded domes instead of spires, sepa-
rated by narrow and roughly hewn high-
ways. If a high wall were built around
the lower part of New York City, and
across it at Rector Street, forming a tri-
angle to the Battery, the extent of the
ground it would cover would about equal
15
THE CORONATION
that shut in by the ramparts of the Krem-
lin.
At the time of the coronation the ar-
teries of the great sprawling city that lies
about this fortress were choked with hun-
dreds of thousands of strange people.
These people were never at rest; they ap-
parently never slept nor relaxed, but turn-
ed night into day and day into night, and
formed a seething, bubbling mixture of
human beings, the like of which perhaps
never before has been brought together in
one place.
There were hundreds of thousands of
Russian peasants who slept in the streets ;
there were tens of thousands of Russian
soldiers who slept under canvas in the
surrounding plains ; there were princes
in gold and plate-glass carriages of state ;
Russian generals seated behind black
horses, driven three abreast, that never
went at a slower pace than a gallop, so
that the common people fell over one an-
other to get out of danger; there were
i6
THE CORONATION
ambassadors and governors of provinces,
and all their wonderfully costumed suites;
bare-kneed Highlanders and bare- kneed
Servians; Mongolians in wrappers of fur
and green brocade, with monster muffs for
hats ; proud little Japanese soldiers in
smart French uniforms ; Germans with
spiked helmets ; English diplomats in top
hats and frock-coats, as though they were
in Piccadilly ; Italian ofHcers with five-
pointed stars on their collars and green
cocks' feathers in their patent-leather som-
breros ; Hungarian nobles in fur-trimmed
satins ; maharajahs from the Punjab and
southern India in tall turbans of silk ; and
masters of ceremonies and dignitaries of
the Russian court in golden uniforms and
with ostrich feathers in their cocked hats.
And all of these millions of people were
crowding each other, pushing and hurry-
ing and worrying, each breathing more
than his share of air and taking up more
than his share of earth, and each of them
feverish, excited, overworked and underfed,
17
THE CORONATION
and thinking only of himself and of his
own duties — whether his duty was to leave
cards at some prince's door, or to risk his
life in hanging a row of lamps to a minaret
in the skies ; whether it was to meet an ar-
riving archduke at the railroad station, or
to beg his ambassador for places for him-
self and his wife on a grandstand.
Imagine a city with its every street as
densely crowded as was the Midway Plai-
sance at the Chicago Fair, and with as dif-
ferent races of people, and then add to that
a Presidential convention, with its brass
bands, banners, and delegates, and send
into that at a gallop not one Princess
Eulalie — who succeeded in upsetting the
entire United States during the short time
she was in it — but several hundred Prin-
cesses Eulalie and crown -princesses and
kings and governors and aides-de-camp,
all of whom together fail to make any im-
pression whatsoever on the city of Mos-
cow, and then march seventy thousand
soldiers, fully armed, into that mob, and
i8
THE CORONATION
light it with a million colored lamps, and
place it under strict martial law, and you
have an idea of what Moscow was like at
the time of the coronation.
There were probably some one or two
of that great crush who enjoyed the coro-
nation ceremonies, but they enjoyed them
best, as every one else does now, in per-
spective ; at the time there was too much
to do and too little time in which to do
it — even though the sun did rise at mid-
night in order to give us a few more hours
of day — for any one to breathe regularly or
to feel at peace.
The moujik who repaired the streets
may possibly, in his ignorance, have en-
vied the visiting prince as he dashed over
the stones which the moujik had just laid
down with his bare hands ; but the prince
had probably been standing several hours
in a padded uniform, with nothing to eat
and nothing to smoke, and was going back
to his embassy to jump into another pad-
ded uniform and to stand for a few hours
19
THE CORONATION
longer, until, as he drove back again and
saw the moujik stretched for the night on
his pile of cobble-stones, he probably en-
vied him and said, " Look at that lazy dog
sleeping peacefully, while I must put on
my fourth uniform to-day, and stand up in
tight boots at a presentation of felicitations
and at a court ball at which no one is al-
lowed to dance." In those days you could
call no man happy unless you knew the
price he paid for his happiness.
A large number of the people in Mos-
cow at that time might have been divided
into two classes : those who were there of-
ficially, and who had every minute of their
stay written out for them, and who longed
for a moment's rest ; and those who were
there unofficially, and who worried them-
selves and every one over them in trying
to see the same functions and ceremonies
from which the officials were as sincerely
anxious to be excused. As a rule, when
the visitor first arrived in Moscow he
found enough of interest in the place it-
THE CORONATION
self to content him, and did not concern
himself immediately with the ceremonies
or court balls; he considered, rightly
enough, that the decorations in the streets
and the congress of strange people from
all parts of the world which he saw about
him formed a spectacle which in itself re-
paid him for his journey. He found the
city hung with thousands of flags and ban-
ners ; with Venetian masts planted at the
street corners and in the open squares ;
with rows of flags on ropes, hiding the sky
as completely as do the clothes that swing
on lines from the back windows of New
York tenements. The streets were tun-
nels of colored bunting by day and valleys
of colored lights by night ; false fa9ades of
electric bulbs had been built before the
palaces, theatres, and the more important
houses, and colored Hass bowls in the
forms of gigantic stars and crowns and
crosses, or in letters that spelled the
names of the young Czar and Czarina,
were reared high in the air, so that they
THE CORONATION
burned against the darkness like pieces of
stationary fireworks.
There were miles and miles of these
necklaces of lamps, and people in strange
costumes and uniforms moved between
them, with their faces now illuminated, as
though by the sun's rays, by great wheels
of revolving electric- light bulbs, and now
dyed red or blue or green, as though they
were figures in a ballet on the stage.
But the visitor who was quite satisfied
with this free out-of-door illumination at
night, or with wandering around, Baede-
ker in hand, by day, soon learned that
there were other sights to see behind
doors which were not free, and access to
which could not be bought with roubles,
and he at once joined the vast army of the
discontented. Sometimes he wanted one
thing, and again another ; it might be that
he aspired only to a seat on a tribune from
which to watch the parade pass, or it might
be that he longed for an invitation to the
ball at the French Embassy ; but, what
22
THE CORONATION
ever it was, he made life a torment to him-
self and to his ofificial representative un-
til he obtained it. The story of the strug-
gles of the visitors to the coronation to be
present at this or that ceremony would
fill many pages in itself; and it might, if
truthfully set down, make humorous read-
ing now. But it was a desperate business
then, and heart-burnings and envy and all
uncharitableness ruled when Mrs. A. was
invited to a state dinner and Mrs. B. was
not, or when an aide-de-camp obtained a
higher place on the tribune than did any
of his brother officers.
There was what was called a court list,
or the distinguished strangers' list, and
that was the root of all the evil ; for when
the visitor succeeded in getting his name
on that list his struggles were at an end,
and he saw at least half of all there was to
see, and received large engraved cards from
the Emperor, and his soul was at peace.
And it may be considered a tribute to
the personal regard in which our minister
23
THE CORONATION
is held in St. Petersburg that he was able
to place more of his countrymen on that
list than were the ambassadors of any
other country. It might be urged that
several of these etrangers de distinction
from the United States had never been
heard of at home until they got their
names upon that list, but that is the more
reason why they should feel grateful to a
minister who had sufficient influence with
the Russian court to do well by those who
had never done very well by themselves.
Much was written, previous to the for-
mal entrance of the Czar into Moscow, of
the precautions which were being taken to
guard against any attack upon his person,
and this feature of the procession was dwelt
upon so continually that it assumed an im-
portance which it did not deserve. Mos-
cow is the holy city of Russia, and the
Czar, as the head of the Orthodox Church,
was, as a matter of fact, in greater safety
while there than he might have been in
any other part of his empire. The people
24
THE CZAR IN HIS STATE ENTRY INTO MOSCOW
THE CORONATION
of Moscow are, outwardly at least, most
fervently religious ; the daily routine of
their lives is filled with devotional exer-
cises, and the symbols of their Church
hang in each room of each house, and are
not only before their eyes, but in their
minds as well. For no devout Russian
enters even a shop without showing def-
erence to the shrine which is sure to be
fastened in some one of its four corners,
and in the streets he is confronted at ev-
ery fifty yards of his progress by other
shrines and altars set in the walls and by
churches, so that in his walks abroad he
is so constantly engaged in the exercise
of crossing himself or of removing his cap
that it is more accurate to say of him that
his prayers are occasionally interrupted
than that he frequently stops to pray.
You will see a porter who is staggering
under a heavy burden stop and put it
down upon the pavement and repeat his
prayers before he picks it up again, and
he will do this three or four times in the
25
THE CORONATION
course of half an hour's walk ; troops of
cavalry come to a halt and remove their
hats and pray while passing a church ; and
when the bells ring, even the policeman
standing in the middle of the street, splat-
tered by mud and threatened by galloping
droschkas, crosses himself and repeats his
prayers bareheaded, while you try vainly
to imagine a policeman on Broadway tak-
ing off his helmet and doing the same
thing. In the restaurants there is a like
show of devotion on the part of the wait-
ers, who stand beside your table mutter-
ing a prayer to themselves, while you al-
low your food to grow cold rather than
interrupt them.
This illustrates the reverential feeling of
the people who welcomed the Czar, whom
they regard as the living representative
of the Church on earth ; so, naturally, his
chief protection came not from his detec-
tives, but from this feeling for him in the
hearts of his subjects.
But in a gathering of four hundred thou-
26
THE CORONATION
sand people, anywhere in the world, there
is likely to be a madman or two. President
Carnot and President Faure, who could not
be called autocratic rulers, found that this
was so, and it was against the possibility
of this chance madman, and not through
any distrust of the mass of the Russian
people, that precautions were taken.
Almost every function connected with
the Czar's coronation was described on the
official programme as "solennel"; even the
banquets were solemn, and the entrance of
the Czar and his progress from outside the
gates to the Kremlin within was more than
solemn ; it was magnificent, imposing, and
beautiful, and in its historical value and in
its pomp and stateliness without compari-
son. Those who expected to see the splen-
dor of a half-barbaric court found a pageant
in which no detail was in bad taste, and
those who came prepared to exclaim at all
they saw sat hushed in wonder. It was
as solemn a spectacle as the annual prog-
ress of the Pope through the Church of
27
THE CORONATION
St. Peter, as beautiful as a picture of fairy,
land, and as significant in its suggestion
of hidden power as a moving line of battle-
ships. For an hour and a half the proces-
sion passed like a panorama of majesty
and wealth and beauty, and as silently as
a dream, while all about it the air was
broken by the booming of cannon as
though the city were besieged, and the
clashing of bells, and the curious moan-
ing cheer of the Russian people. In this
procession were the representatives of
what had once been eighteen separate
governments, each of which now bowed
in allegiance to the Russian Emperor.
They appeared in their national costumes
and with their own choice of arms, and
they represented among them a hundred
millions of people, and each of them bore
himself as though his chief pride was that
he owed allegiance to a young man twenty-
eight years old, a young man who never
would be seen by his countrymen in the
distant provinces from which he came, to
28
THE CORONATION
whom the Czar was but a name and a sym-
bol, but a symbol to which they prayed,
and for which they were prepared to give
up their lives.
Among these people, whose place was
in the van of the procession, were the tall
Cossacks in long scarlet tunics, their
breasts glittering with silver cartridge-
cases, and their heads surmounted with
huge turbans of black Astrakhan ; dwarf-
ish soldiers from Finland, short and squat
like Esquimaux; yellow-faced Tartars in
furs, and Mongolians in silver robes ; wild-
eyed, long-haired horsemen from Toorkis-
tan and the Pamirs, with spear points as
long as a sword blade ; and the gentlemen
of the Chevaliers Gardes and of the Garde
^ Cheval, in coats of ivory-white with sil-
ver breastplates, and helmets of gold on
which perched the double eagle of Russia
in burnished silver.
Behind these came many open carriages
of gold, lined with scarlet velvet, in which
sat the ministers of the court, holding their
29
THE CORONATION
wands of office, and after them servants of
the Emperor's household on foot in gold-
laced coats and white silk stockings and
white wigs; masters of horse rode beside
them, with coats all of gold, both back and
front, and with sleeves and collars of gold;
and behind them the most picturesque
feature of the whole pageant, the bronzed,
fiercely bearded huntsmen of the Emperor,
the men who throttle the wolves with their
bare hands until the dogs rush in and pull
them down, dressed in high boots and
green coats, and armed with long glitter-
ing knives ; following them were gigantic
negroes in baggy trousers and scarlet jack-
ets — a relic of the days of Catherine —
whose duty it is to guard with their lives
the entrance to the royal bedchamber; and
after them footmen dressed as you see them
in the old prints, with ostrich plumes and
tall wands — descendants of the time when
a footman ran on foot before his master's
carriage and did not ride comfortably on
the box-seat.
30
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After these, beneath the fluttering flags
and between the double row of fifty thou-
sand glittering bayonets, and under as
bright a sun as ever shone, came a re-
splendent group of mounted men in uni-
forms that differed in everything save
magnificence, and in the fact that over
the breast of each was drawn the blue
sash of the Order of St. Andrew. These
riders were the grand-dukes of Russia, the
visiting heirs-apparent and princes, and the
dukes and archdukes from England, Ger-
many, Italy, Greece, and Austria — from all
over the world, from the boy Prince of
Montenegro to the boy Prince of Siam,
They rode without apparent order, al-
though their places were as fixed as the
stars in their orbits, and they formed the
most remarkable mounted escort that this
century has seen ; and in front of them,
riding quite alone, and dressed more sim-
ply than any one in the procession, came
the young Czar, turning his face slightly
from side to side, and with his white-
31
THE CORONATION
gloved hand touching his Astrakhan cap.
The house-tops rocked and the sidewalks
seemed to surge and sway with waving
caps and upraised hands, and the groan-
ing, awe -struck cheer rose to one great
general acclamation which drowned the
bells and the booming cannon.
But it rose still higher when, following
the Czar's escort of princes, came the
Dowager Empress. It was she who was
more loudly greeted than either the Em-
peror or the Czarina, for the people have
loved her longer, and she has made them
worship her through many acts of clem-
ency and kindness, and perhaps far more
than all else through her devotion to her
husband during his six months' illness,
when she sat day and night at his bedside.
Behind the Dowager Empress came the
state carriage of the Czarina. It was drawn
by eight snow-white horses in trappings of
broad red morocco leather, covered with
heavy gold mountings. The harness had
been made in Paris, and the gold had been
32
THE CORONATION
engraved in the Rue de la Paix. Each
horse, that would have preferred a mouth-
ful of oats, ground his teeth on a gold bit as
big around as a man's thumb, and as deli-
cately chased and engraved as a monogram
on a watch, and wore ostrich feathers on
his head, and ten thousand dollars' worth
of harness on his back. The ten different
sets of harness used in the procession cost
the Russian government one million dol-
lars. Each horse that drew the Czarina's
chariot had an attendant in a cap of ostrich
feathers and a coat of gold, who led him by
a silken rein, and two giants, seven feet
high, strode beside the wheels, and two lit-
tle pages sat with their backs to the driver
on his gold throne, and regarded the Czar-
ina through a screen of glass as the young
Empress smiled and bowed to her adopted
people through the windows of her Cinder-
ella chariot. Great artists had decorated
the panels of this carriage, and master-
workmen had carved its gold sides and
wheels and axles; plumes of white and
33
THE CORONATION
black and orange ostrich feathers nodded
and swayed from its top of scarlet velvet,
and the gold-embroidered cushions inside
gave it the appearance of a sumptuous
jewel-box fashioned to hold this most beau-
tiful princess in her gown of silver, with
her ermine cloak fallen back from her
bare shoulders, and with diamonds hang-
ing from her neck to her knees, and with
diamonds high upon her head.
In the train of the Czarina were grand-
duchesses and maids of honor in still more
fairy carriages ; and then, when it seemed
impossible to add another touch of splen-
dor to that which had already passed, the
nature of the procession, as though by a
piece of clever stage-management, sudden-
ly changed, and in magnificent contrast to
the grace and wealth and feminine beauty
which had gone before came three miles
of armed and mounted men, the picked
horsemen of Russia, crowding so closely to-
gether that one saw nothing of the street
over which they passed, but only an un-
34
THE CORONATION
broken mass of tossing manes and flash-
ing breastplates and fluttering pennants,
and one heard only the ceaseless tramp of
horses' hoofs and the clank of steel.
The crowning and chrismation of the
Czar of Russia was to the rest of the
world a beautiful spectacle, but to the Rus-
sian it was an affair of the most tremen-
dous religious significance. How serious
this point of view was is shown in an ex-
tract from the official explanation of the
coronation, the authorized guide to the
service, which was printed in four lan-
guages and furnished to those who wit-
nessed the ceremony. It is interesting to
note that in the paragraph quoted here
the capital letters are about equally di-
vided between the ruling family and the
Deity;
"The Royal power in Russia, from the time that
she was formed into an empire, forms the heart of
the nation. All Russia prays for the Tsar, as for
her father; from Him descends grace & benevo-
35
THE CORONATION
lence upon His subjects, in Him all good finds sup-
port & protection, & evil merited punishment. In
the instance of the Autocrat of Russia we see that
the Tsars reign by the Lord. God Almighty has
often manifested His affection for the Russian peo-
ple on their Tsar. The affection of the Lord rests
on the Ruling House & the right hand of the Al-
mighty guards, removes & saves It from all mis-
fortunes & evils."
This is the spirit in which the corona-
tion is regarded by the orthodox Russian ;
and the desire simply to be near the ca-
thedral where this ceremony was taking
place was what brought hundreds of thou-
sands of Russians of all classes to Moscow
and to the walls of the Kremlin, so that
when the sun rose resplendent on the day
of the coronation, the high banks of that
fortress, the streets around it, the bridges
and open squares, and the shores of the
river which cuts Moscow in two, were
black with the people who had spent the
night in the open air, who followed the
coronation from point to point of the ser-
vice by the aid of the bells and the cannon,
36
THE CORONATION
and who fell upon their knees or lifted
their voices in prayer in unison with those
within the walls of the Church of the As-
sumption.
The story of how these latter were ad-
mitted to the Church of the Assumption
would be extremely interesting reading if
the masters of ceremonies would choose
to tell it. The matter cost these dignita-
ries many sleepless nights, and where it
made them one friend it made them a
dozen enemies. It was an extremely dif-
ficult task, for on account of the lack of
space in the cathedral it was quite impos-
sible to give room there to many who
would have been entitled to a place in it
if their official importance and not their
physical size had been the deciding-point;
but as it was, the question became not
whom " the Ceremonies " could please by
admitting, but whom they could least of-
fend by keeping out. In order to satisfy
these latter, tribunes were arranged around
the cathedral, and those who sat on cer-
37
THE CORONATION
tain tribunes were supposed to be offi-
cially present at the coronation. This
may explain what is meant by several
well-known people when they say they
saw the coronation of the Czar; officially
speaking, they were present, but in much
the same sense that the ruler of England
is supposed to be present on the bridge of
every English man-of-war, so that an of-
ficer always salutes when he mounts the
companionway of that structure; but, as
a matter of fact, these latter only saw the
procession as the Czar and the Czarina
entered and left the cathedral, and that
in itself was worth travelling four thou-
sand miles to see.
Those who saw the actual ceremony
were members of the imperial family and
the most important of the Russian no-
bles, the visiting princes, the heads of resi-
dent and special embassies and legations,
and, in a few instances, their first secre-
taries, the aides-de-camp of the foreign
princes, and a few correspondents and
38
THE CORONATION
artists. An ambassador who happened
to be unmarried was a man among men
to " the Ceremonies," and a prince who
did not insist on having the commander-
in-chief of his army standing at his side
filled their eyes with tears of joy. It was
their duty to decide between an aide-de-
camp from Bulgaria and a Russian am-
bassador at home on leave, a Japanese
prince and an English general, a German
duchess and the correspondent of the
Paris Fi<rayo. It was a matter of so
many square inches chiefly, and one man
or woman who got in kept a dozen appli-
cants for the space out; and the pressure
that was brought to bear in order to gain
a footing — and a footing was actually all
one obtained — threatened the peace of Eu-
rope, and caused tears of disappointment
and wounds that will rankle in the breasts
of noble Russian families for years to
come.
Personally I knew nothing of the strug-
gles of any save the correspondents, and
3';)
THE CORONATION
they were sufficient in themselves to hold
my undivided attention for ten days and
ten niofhts. There were three hundred
correspondents, speaking eleven different
lanQ:ua2:es, and each advanced his indi-
vidual claims and the claims of the peri-
odical he represented with a pertinacity
and vigor worthy of a great cause. It is
a small thing now, but at the time life did
not seem worth living unless you were to
be admitted to the cathedral, and then
even it did not mean so much to get in
as it did to have come that distance and
to be kept out. A great political party
backed the men who represented the of-
ficial organ of that party ; banking houses,
cabinet ministers, ladies of high degree,
ambassadors, and princes brought finan-
cial, social, and political influence into the
fight, and lobbied, bribed, and cajoled for
their favorites with a skill and show of
feeling that reminded one of the struggles
among the delegates at a Presidential con-
vention in Chicago ; while the Russian
40
THE CORONATION
officials, bewildered, dazed, and driven to
distraction, maintained throughout an ab-
solute silence as to who might be the fort-
unate ones, and by so doing kept the
struggles raging round their heads until
the very eve of the coronation. They
even refused hope to one man, an English
artist named Forrestier, who came with
a letter of introduction from Queen Vic-
toria to the Grand-Duchess Sergius, which
fact had naturally a somewhat depress-
ing effect upon those who had no queens
to push them forward ; and even men
like Sir Donald IMcKenzie Wallace, who
represented the Times, and Sir Edwin
Arnold, the correspondent of the Daily
Telegraph, did not know that their call-
ing and election was by any means sure.
In the end "the Ceremonies" turned
away such men as Frederick Villiers, who
had been present at the last coronation,
and who was one of the four correspond-
ents who had followed the Russian army
from the bcoinnino^ of the Russian-Turk-
41
THE CORONATION
ish war to the fall of Plevna; so that
those who got in cannot feel that they
did so on the principle of the selection
of the fittest. It was represented in my
behalf that anything that was written
in a magazine would be more easy of
access in the future, and would have a
more lasting quality than that which ap-
peared in the more ephemeral columns of
a daily paper ; so I was admitted because
I represented a magazine, and in spite
of the fact, and not on account of the
fact, that I was also cabling to a New
York paper. But without the help of the
American minister, and the members of
the visiting and resident American lega-
tions — and Trowbridge — I could not have
got in. The members of our legations
who were present in the chapel were six:
they were the American minister, Mr. Clif-
ton R.Breckinridge, and Mrs. Breckinridge,
General Alexander McD. McCook and
Mrs. McCook, Admiral Selfridge, and Mrs.
Peirce, the wife of the secretary of legation,
42
THE CORONATION
who was admitted even though her hus-
band for some unknown reason was not.
The New York Herald was represented,
but by two Englishmen, Aubrey Stanhope
and Sir Edwin Arnold; the American
Associated Press by another Englishman,
named Watson; the United Press of
America by Louis Moore, an American ;
and Harpers Magazine and the New York
Journal by myself.
These six officials and Louis Moore,
who represented seventeen hundred pa-
pers, and the writer were the only Ameri-
cans in the cathedral — eight in all.
Admittance to the cathedral and to the
Kremlin itself was hedged about with
much formality, and to one who did not
speak or read Russian the attempt was
something of an ordeal, and attended with
a nervous fear of being turned back at the
last moment and when within sight of the
goal. I was required to show a ticket,
which my driver wore in his hat, before
I could pass the police lines in the streets;
43
THE CORONATION
another ticket was necessary to enter the
gates of the Kremlin ; there was a card of
invitation to the palace after the corona-
tion, and one more for the cathedral, and
with it a badge in the shape of a gold
crown and a bow of the blue ribbon of
the order of St. Andrew. Besides these,
I had to carry a photograph, stamped
and sealed for identification by the po-
lice, and a blue and white enamelled star,
which showed that I was an accredited
correspondent.
The word " cathedral " has misled many
people in regard to the size of the church
in which the coronation took place, as
have also the photographs of its exterior.
The Church of the Assumption is really
more of a chapel than a cathedral, and
is cut in two by a great gold screen, so
that those who witnessed the ceremony
were crowded into a space only one-half
as large as that suggested by those pict-
ures which show the building from the
outside. This space is about as large as
44
THE CORONATION
the stage of a New York theatre. It is
hemmed in by three walls and the high
gold screen which separates the altar and
the sacred tombs and the holy relics from
the rest of the cathedral. These walls are
overlaid from the floor to the dome above
with gold-leaf, upon which are frescos of
the saints in dark blues and reds and
greens, each saint wearing around his
head a halo of gold studded with precious
stones. The screen is a wall in itself; the
gold upon it alone weighs five tons, and
the figures of holy men in fresco and
mosaic with which it is decorated are cov-
ered with rows of pearls and hung with
emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. In the
centre of this hall of precious stones and
pure gold are four great pillars, the low-
er half of which were wrapped about for
the coronation in heavy folds of purple
velvet. On a platform stretched between
these pillars, under a canopy of velvet
stamped with the double eagle of Russia
and bearing tufts of ostrich feathers of
43
THE CORONATION
orange, black, and white, were the three
thrones. The Czar's throne was in the
centre, on the left of it the Czarina's, and
that of the Dowager Empress was at the
right. His was of silver inlaid with great
blue turquoises ; the Czarina's of ivory,
carved with scenes of the chase; that of
the Dowager Empress was of silver studded
with all manner of precious stones, includ-
ing eight hundred and eighty diamonds.
The light that illuminated the chapel
came through long stained-glass windows,
and from twinkling lamps fastened by
chains to the dusky dome above, and as
the sun entered the place its long rays of
colored light pierced the smoke of the
incense and regilded the walls, passing
from one jewelled saint to the next, so
that the dull stones gleamed and shone,
and the jewels on the lamps, as they
turned and twisted, coruscated and flashed
in the dim heights above like the hidden
treasures in the cave of Monte Cristo.
It is difficult to know what to tell of
46
THE CORONATION
the ceremony of the coronation — what to
leave unsaid and what to say. The story
might be written by twenty different men,
each writing in much greater detail than
is allowed in the space of this single arti-
cle, and yet all would not be told ; nor
might any two tell of the same thing. It
would depend upon the point of view.
The story might be told as it appealed
to the sad-eyed priest in his long, un-
kempt hair and beard, and robe of gold
— the devout Muscovite to whom the dig-
nitaries present were but as actors on a
stage, in comparison with the sacred char-
acter of the chapel itself and with the holy
relics it contained. That one emerald
alone in the great gold wall was worth a
king's ransom would mean nothing to one
who believed that St. Paul with his own
hands had painted the picture beneath it,
and that a part of the robe of our Saviour
and a nail of the true cross lay hidden
under the same dome which sheltered
these women with bare shoulders, and
THE CORONATION
these princes of a day in their tinsel and
diamond stars. Or why should he con-
sider the deeds of these famous generals
when one of the holy pictures in his
keeping had turned back Tamerlane and
his whole army? Could the grizzled old
warrior Gourko, or the big kindly eyed
Enoflish general Grenfell, the hero of the
Soudan, or the little dark-skinned Yama-
gata, have done more ?
Or the story might be told by one of
the ambassadors in the front row of the
tribune, who would see in the ceremony
and in the display and publicity given it
a new departure for Russia, a bid, as it
were, for the attention of the world. To
him the people themselves would be the
essential feature. He would see a half-
confessed alliance in the position assigned
a brother ambassador, or read a promise
of marriage in the triumphant smile of
one of the visiting princes. His story
would have been one full of diplomatic
secrets, which is only another word for
48
THE CORONATION
the gossip of diplomats ; and he would
have been delighted to explain why the
representative of the United States, in-
stead of ranking with the ambassadors of
other powers nearly as great as his own,
stood below the minister from a little
kingdom as small as Rhode Island, and
not half so important, except for a lurid
past ; and why the Austrian ambassador,
the representative of an emperor, and a
prince in his own right, had been given
the Grand Cross of St. Andrew, as though
he were a ruling monarch, on the evening
of one day, and had been asked to give it
back' before breakfast on the following
morning. He would have told you that
the reason the English bishop, with his
mitre and crook, sat in a higher place
than the papal nuncio was because the
Greek Church was coquetting with the
Church of England, and that the English
ambassador, being a Roman Catholic, had
chosen not to recognize the peer of the
English Church or to present him to the
49
THE CORONATION
Czar, and that the Czar was indignant ac-
cordingly; but how much more serious
than this was the silly act of his confrere,
the French ambassador, who had nearly
undone what his country was striving to
bring about, by refusing to kiss the Cza-
rina's hand, because, forsooth ! the poor
little soul held that act of homage to be
unbecoming in a representative of a free
republic. As though discourtesy had ever
been a sign of independence, or as though
kissing the hand of a woman could bring
anything but honor to any man, even to
a Frenchman whose republicanism has not
become so serious that it has made him
forego his title.
There were enough stories, besides, to
fill many books — stories of the men pres-
ent who had been busy for the last quar-
ter of a century in making the history of
the world; stories full of romance and
intrigue; stories of love and of battle.
There was the sailor prince who had
saved the Czar's life from the sword of
50
TillO CORONATION
an assassin ; the Russian prince who is to
build a railroad from Paris to Pekin, and
who learned how it could be done as a
mechanic in the machine-shops of Al-
toona; there was the Bulgarian prince,
with hooked nose and with jewels to his
nails, who changed his child's religion to
pay for a ticket of admission to this cere-
mony.
Or the story of one stone alone among
the thousands flashing in the light would
read like a romance if it were told in de-
tail — how it gleamed once in the dark
shades of a Hindoo temple in the brow
of a god, how a private soldier with a
bayonet in his profane hands dug it out
and carried it for months in his knapsack,
how it lay tossed by the waves in the sea-
chest of a sailor, who sold it to a Jew
dealer in Hatton Garden, who passed it
on, until its last owner exchanged it for
a title and five million francs and a yearly
pension of two thousand roubles. And
so it rests at last at the end of the Czar's
51
THE CORONATION
sceptre, and on account of its great estate
one must now back away from it, when
he is allowed to look at the regalia, as he
would from royalty itself, or as the Hin-
doos bowed before it long ago when the
Orloff diamond was the eye of the great
god Siva.
The coronation as a picture was much
more beautiful than any one could pos-
sibly have imagined it was going to be,
and the scene would have been even more
impressive if the people had not been so
closely crowded together that the colors
of the uniforms and court dresses with
their ornaments and decorations were lost
in the press of numbers. As it was, ex-
cept in the case of a very tall man or
a particularly lofty tiara, you saw only
those who stood in the front rows, and the
epaulets or coronets of the many behind
them. They were so close together, in-
deed, that when the moment came when
all should have knelt and the Emperor
alone should have remained standing,
52
THE CORONATION
there was not room for the men to kneel,
and many of them were forced to merely
bend forward, supporting themselves on
the shoulders of those already kneeling.
The tribune to the right of the thrones
was the one most closely crowded. It
held the grand-duchesses and the ladies
of the court, who were in the native cos-
tume of the country, and who wore the
diamonds for which that country is cele-
brated. On the tribune immediately be-
hind the throne stood the Russian sena-
tors in magnificent coats of gold, with
boots to the hip and white leather breeches,
and with ostrich feathers in their peaked
hats ; with them were the correspondents,
the Germans and Russians in military
uniforms, the Englishmen in their own
court dress, and the Frenchmen and
Americans in evening dress, which at
that hour of the morning made them look
as though they had been up all night.
The diplomats and their wives, and the
visiting commanders-in-chief and gen-
^ 53
THE CORONATION
erals of armies from all over the world,
occupied the third tribune to the left of
the throne, and formed the most splen-
did and gorgeous group of all. Around
the platform itself were the princes and
grand -dukes glittering with the chains
and crosses of the imperial orders, and
between the screen and the platform the
priests moved to and fro in jewelled mi-
tres as large as a diver's helmet, and in
robes stiff with gold and precious stones,
their vestments flashing like the scales of
goldfish. For five hours the sun shone
dimly through the stained glass and bold-
ly through the high open doors on this
mass of color and mixture of jewels, so
that the eye grew wearied as it flashed
from sword hilts and epaulets or passed
lightly from shining silks and satins to
touch tiaras and coronets, falling for one
instant upon the white hair of some red
and grizzled warrior, or caressing the shoul-
ders and face of some beautiful girl.
But nothing in the whole drama of the
54
THE CORONATION
morning presented so impressive a picture
as did the young Empress when she first
entered the chapel and stood before her
throne. Of all the women there she was
the most simply robed, and of all the wom-
en there she was by far the most beauti-
ful. A single string of pearls was her only
ornament, and her hair, which was worn
like that of a Russian peasant girl, fell
in two long plaits over her bare shoul-
ders — bare even of a strap, of a bow, of a
jewel — and her robe of white and silver
was as simple as that of a child going
to her first communion. As she stepped
upon the dais the color in her cheeks was
high, and her eyes were filled with that
shyness or melancholy which her pictures
have made familiar ; and in contrast with
the tiaras and plumes and necklaces of the
ladies of the court surrounding her, she
looked more like Iphigenia going to the
sacrifice than the queen of the most pow-
erful empire in the world waiting to be
crowned.
55
THE CORONATION
The most interesting part of the cere-
mony, perhaps, was when the Czar changed
from a bareheaded young officer in a colo-
nel's uniform, with his trousers stuck in
his boots, to an emperor in the most mag-
nificent robes an emperor could assume,
and when the Czarina followed him, and
from the peasant girl became a queen, with
the majesty of a queen, and with the per-
sonal beauty which the queens of our
day seem to have lost. When the mo-
ment had arrived for this transformation
to take place, the Czar's uncle, the Grand-
Duke Vladimir, and his younger brother
Alexander lifted the collars of the different
orders from the Czar's shoulders, but in
doing this the Grand-Duke Vladimir let
one of the stars fall, which seemed to hold
a superstitious interest for both of them.
They then fastened upon his shoulders
the imperial mantle of gold cloth, which is
some fifteen feet in length, with a cape of
ermine, and covered with the double eagle
of Russia in black enamel and precious
56
THE CORONATION
stones. Over this they placed the broad
diamond Collar of St. Andrew, which sank
into the bed of snowy white fur, and lay
glimmering and flashing as the Emperor
moved forward to take the imperial dia-
dem from the hands of the Metropolitan
of St. Petersburg,
The crown was a marvellous thing, fash-
ioned in two halves to typify the eastern
and western kingdoms, formed entirely
of white diamonds, and surmounted by a
great glowing ruby, above which was a
diamond cross. The Czar lifted this flash-
ing globe of flame and light high above
him, and then lowered it to his head, and
took the sceptre in his right hand and the
globe in the left.
When the Czar seated himself upon the
throne, the Czarina turned and raised her
eyes questioningly ; and then, in answer
to some sign he made her, she stood up
and walked to a place in front of him,
and sank down upon her knees at his
feet, with her bare hands clasped before
57
THE CORONATION
her. He rested his crown for an instant
on her brow, and then replacing it upon
his own head, lowered a smaller crown
of diamonds upon hers. Three ladies-in-
waiting fastened it to her hair with long
gold hair-pins, the Czar watching them as
they did so with the deepest interest; and
then, as they retired, two of the grand-dukes
placed a mantle similar to the Czar's upon
her shoulders, and hung another diamond
collar upon the ermine of her cape, and
she stepped back to her throne of ivory
and he to his throne of turquoise. The
supreme moment had come and gone,
and Nicholas II. and Alexandra Feodo-
rovna sat crowned before the nations of
the world.
Some one made a signal through the
open door, and the diplomats on the
tribunes outside rose to their feet and
the crush of moujiks below them sank
on their knees, and the regiments of
young peasant soldiers flung their guns
at salute, and the bells of the churches
58
Ml
THE CZAR PLACES IHE CROWN ON HIS HEAD
THE CORONATION
Cciriiccl the news over the heads of the
kneehng thousands across the walls of
the Kremlin to where one hundred and
one cannon hurled it on across the river
and up to the highest hill of Moscow,
where the modern messengers of good
and evil began to tick it out to Odessa,
to Constantinople, to Berlin, to Paris, to
the rocky coast of Penzance, where it
slipped into the sea and hurried on un-
der the ocean to the illuminated glass face
in the Cable Company's tall building on
Broadway, until the world had been cir-
cled, and the answering congratulations
came pouring into Moscow while the
young Emperor still stood under the
dome of the little chapel.
The most interesting part of the cere-
mony that followed was the presentation
of felicitations by the visiting princes and
princesses. It was interesting because the
usual position of things was reversed, and
the royalties who watch with smiles the
courtesies and bows of the humbly born
59
THE CORONATION
who come to their levees and presentations
were now forced to bow and courtesy, and
the lowly born were the smiling, critical
spectators.
And it was satisfactory to find that the
royalties were quite as awkward over it and
as embarrassed as was ever any young de-
butante at a Buckingham Palace Drawing
Room. What they had to do was simple
enough. They had each to cross the plat-
form, to kiss the Czar on the cheek and the
Czarina on the hand alone, and if it were
a woman who was presenting her congratu-
lations, to turn her cheek to the Czarina to
kiss in return. The same ceremony was
required for the Dowager Empress as for
the Czarina. It does not sound difficult,
but not more than six out of a hundred did
what they had been told to do, and each of
them hurried through with it as quickly as
possible, and with an expression of counte-
nance that betokened anything rather than
smiling congratulations. For from their
point of view all their little world was look-
60
THE CZAK CRUWMNU Tllli CZAKINA
THE CORONATION
ing on at them, all their princely cousins
and kingly nephews and royal uncles and
aunts were standing by to see, and for the
brief moment in which each passed across
the platform and most unwillingly held the
centre of the stage, he felt that the whole
of Europe was considering his appearance,
and criticising his bow, and counting the
number of times he kissed or was kissed in
return. The Duke of Connaught, being
the Czarina's uncle, was the only man who
kissed her; and the Prince of Naples, the
heir to the throne of Italy, did not even
kiss the Czar, but gave each of them a hand
timidly, and then backed away as though
he were afraid they would kiss him in
spite of himself. Some of the royalties,
in their embarrassment, assumed a most
severe and disapproving air, as did the
Queen of Greece, a very handsome woman
in fur, who, in contrast to the simpers of
the others and in order to show how self-
possessed she was, scowled at the young
couple like Lady Macbeth in the sleep-
6i
THE CORONATION
walking scene. Others looked as though
they were saying good -night to their
hostess, and assuring her that they had
had a very pleasant evening; but a few
were deeply moved, and kissed the Czar's
diamond collar as a sign of fealty, and
some of the Russian nobles bowed very
low, and then kissed the Czarina's bare
shoulder.
After the congratulations the ceremony
was continued by the priests alone, who
chanted and prayed for nearly two hours,
during which time the Czar and Czarina
took but little part in the service beyond
crossing themselves at certain intervals.
The strain became very great ; it was im-
possible to keep one's attention fixed on
the strange music of the choir or on the
unfamiliar chanting of the priests, and
people began to whisper to one another,
until at the end of the ceremony almost
every one was whispering as though he
were at an afternoon tea.
It was not that there was any disrespect
62
THE CORONATION
felt, but that it had become physically im-
possible, after six hours of silence and of
remaining wedged in an upright position
in one place, to maintain an attentive atti-
tude of either mind or body.
But the priests ceased at last, and the
most solemn ceremony of the chrismation
was reached, and the Czar passed from
sight through the jewelled door of the
screen, while his young wife, who could
not enter with him, waited, praying for him
beside the picture of the Virgin. When
he came forth as^ain the tears were stream-
ing down his cheeks and beard, and he
bent and kissed the Empress like a man
in a dream, as though during the brief
space in which he had stood in the holy
of holies he had been face to face with the
mysteries of another world.
That was the end of the ceremony of
the coronation, and let us hope it will be a
long time before there will be another one.
In looking back at it now, it seems to
me that what made it most impressive
63
THE CORONATION
was the youth of the Czar and Czarina.
There was something in the sweet girlish-
ness of her manner, and of the dauntless-
ness of the boy in his, that gave them
both an inexpressible hold upon your in-
terest and your sympathy. It was not as
though they had been looking forward to
this hour for many years, until it had lost
its first meaning and was now the payment
for a long period of apprenticeship, until
it had been lived so often in anticipation
that when it came it was only a form. It
was not as though he had grown cynical
and stout, and she gray-haired and hard-
ened to it all ; but, instead, she looked like
a bride upon her wedding-day, and you
could see in his face, white and drawn with
hours of prayer and fasting, and in the
tears that wet his cheeks, how strongly he
was moved, and you could imagine what
he felt when he looked forward into the
many years to come and again saw himself
as he was at that moment, a boy of twenty-
eight, taking in his hands the insignia of
64
THE CORONATION
absolute sovereignty over the bodies of one
hundred million people, and on his lips the
most sacred oaths to protect the welfare of
one hundred million souls.
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT
BUDAPEST
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT
BUDAPEST
THERE were two great state ceremo-
nials in two great countries last year;
one was advertised in every tongue that
speaks through a printing-press, and the
fame of it was carried by word of mouth
from the Persian Gulf to the mountains
of Tibet, from Pekin to Melbourne, and
drew four hundred thousand strangers to
the city of Moscow. The other was not
advertised at all, and the number of fortu-
nate foreigners who found it out, and who
journeyed to Budapest to witness it, could
almost have been counted on the fingers
of two hands. The Coronation at Mos-
cow was very much more than a state
ceremonial ; it was planned and carried
69
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
out with the purpose of impressing other
states. It marked a new departure in the
self-sufficient, soHtary attitude of the Rus-
sian Empire, and apart from all the sol-
emn siornificance it held for the Russian
O
people, it was distinctly a play at the royal
boxes of Europe and the grandstands of
the world.
The millennial celebration at Budapest,
where the nobles of all the counties of
Hungary met to swear allegiance to the
King and his crown, differed from it as
greatly in comparison as does a quiet fam-
ily wedding, between two people who love
each other dearly, differ from a royal alli-
ance brought about for political reasons,
and the importance of which is exagger-
ated as greatly as possible.
This gathering of the clans in Hungary
for the Banderium, as the ceremony was
called, was probably suggested by the suc-
cess of the Exposition at Budapest and by
the completion of the Houses of Parlia-
ment in that city. The nobles wished to
70
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
take advantage of the presence in that
double capital of the many Hungarians
who had been brought there by the Expo-
sition, and to signalize the initiation of the
Houses of Parliament by some extraor-
dinary event ; so this ceremony which cel-
ebrated the one thousandth year of the
existence of Hungary as a kingdom was
suggested, and later was carried through
in a manner which made it one of the his-
torical spectacles of the century.
Budapest, as everybody knows, is formed
of two cities, separated by the Danube, and
joined together like New York and Brook-
lyn by great bridges. Buda is a city hun-
dreds of years old, and rises on a great
hill covered with yellow houses with red-
tiled roofs, and surmounted by fortresses
and ancient German - looking castles, and
the palace of the King, with terraces of
marble and green gardens running down
to meet the river. It still is a picturesque,
fortified city of the Middle Ages.
Pesth, just across the way, is the most
71
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
modern city in Europe ; more modern than
Paris, better paved, and better lighted;
with* better facilities for rapid transit than
New York, and with Houses of Parliament
as massive and impressive as those on the
banks of the Thames, and not unlike them
in appearance. Pesth is the Yankee city
of the Old World, just as the Hungarians
are called the Americans of Europe. It
has grown in forty years, and it has sacri-
ficed neither beauty of space nor line in
growing. It has magnificent public gar-
dens, as well as a complete fire department;
it has the best club in the world, the Park
Club ; and it has found time to put electric
tramways underground, and to rear monu-
ments to poets, orators, and patriots above-
ground. People in Berlin and Vienna tell
you that some day all of these things will
disappear and go to pieces, that Pesth is
enjoying a " boom," and that the boom will
pass and leave only the buildings and elec-
tric plants and the car - tracks, with no
money in the treasury to make the wheels
72
lui^
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
go round. This may or may not be true,
but let us hope it is only the envy and un-
charitableness of the Austrian and Ger-
man mind that sees nothing in progress
but disaster, and makes advancement spell
ruin. People who live in a city where one
is asked to show a passport, a certificate of
good health, a police permit, and a resi-
dence-card in order to be allowed to mount
a bicycle, as I \vas asked to do in Berlin,
can hardly be expected to look with favor
on their restless, ambitious young neigh-
bors of the Balkans.
All of this, however, has little to do with
the Banderium, except that it is interest-
ing to find a people as poetic and pict-
uresque, and as easily moved as are the
Hungarians, showing an active concern in
municipal government, in the latest in-
ventions in hotel-elevators and smokeless
powder ; and to find men who are pushing
Hungary ahead of all the other "old-es-
tablished " monarchies of Europe, and who
are delighting in electric tramways and
73
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
horseless carnages, dressing themselves in
the chain - armor of their ancestors, and
weeping over a battered gold crown.
The descendants of the men who fought
for what is now Hungary, and what was a
thousand years ago many separate states
and provinces and principalities, were the
men who formed the Banderium last June,
and who swore allegiance to the crown
which Pope Sylvester VII. gave to Prince
Ithen nine centuries before they were
born.
It was in their eyes a very solemn cere-
mony, much too solemn for them to ad-
vertise it to the world, as they had adver-
tised their Exposition. In consequence, few
people saw the spectacle, and it has passed
away almost unchronicled, which is most
unfortunate, as all of those who took part
in the wonderful pageant will have been
dust for some nine hundred years before
there will be another.
The Hungarian nobles who were to ride
in the procession, the dignitaries of the
74
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
Austrian Court, the Diplomatic Corps from
Vienna, all poured into Pesth on the 7th
of June.
At that time the city was beautifully
dressed in honor of their coming. Arches
and banners shaded the streets, and grand-
stands, covered with red cloth and orna-
mented with fluttering flags, lined the route
of the procession from the new Houses of
Parliament, across the bridges, up the green
hill-sides of Buda to the Emperor's palace,
where the nobles were to pass in review
before marching back to Pesth. The Ex-
position had already filled the town with
Hungarians and Austrians, and every hotel
was overcrowded, and every cafe chantant
overflowed upon the pavements, and the
music of the Tziganes rose and fell at each
street-corner. Peasant men in snow-white
petticoats and high boots and broad som-
breros, with silver buttons on their coats
and waistcoats, and peasant women in vel-
vet bodices and gayly colored kerchiefs,
filled the Exposition grounds and paraded
75
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
the streets in groups of twenty or thirty
from each village; soldiers in skin-tight
breeches, and gypsies and mountaineers,
tanned to a dark -red brown, with short
china pipes hanging from their lips, swag-
gered past in national costumes that have
not changed in so much as the matter of a
red sash, or a silver jacket, or an embroid-
ered cap, from what they were a hundred
years ago.
The visiting strangers made their head-
quarters at the unique club of which I have
already spoken; at least, they met there
every evening, and those who were dining
out at some official banquet hurried there
as soon as they were free. It was a most
remarkable club and a most remarkable
gathering. The club itself is the hobby
of two Hungarian gentlemen, and they
have bestowed as much thought and money
upon it as they have given to their own
homes. Englishmen, Frenchmen, and cos-
mopolitans, from all over the world, who
have seen the Union and the new Metro-
76
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
politan Clubs in New York, the Jockey
and the Union in Paris, and any half-dozen
clubs in London, will tell you that in no
great city is there such a club as this one,
which is virtually unknown, and lies hidden
away in the outskirts of a park at Pesth.
It stai.ds on the edge of the woods, and
those who had come to the Banderium
dined each night on its broad balconies
and lawns, under the open sky, in the light
of the wavering candles, which showed the
faces and bright dresses and the jewels of
the women and the uniforms of the men
against the dark -green background of the
forest about them.
Munkacsy,the Hungarian painter. Count
Teleki, the explorer, tanned with the fierc-
est of African suns, and Kossuth, a de-
scendant of the great Kossuth, were among
the men who sat every evening in groups
around the fairy-lamps. With them were
the sons and grandsons of Andrassy, Ap-
ponyi, Szechenyi, names that are as highly
honored in Hungary as are those of our
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
first three Presidents with us; and there
was a stray English duke, with three at-
tendant peers, who had received a hint of
the ceremony that was to take place at
Buda, and who had posted in hot haste
across the Channel to see eleven hundred
noble horses ridden by eleven hundred
Hungarian nobles. There was the Prince
Liechtenstein, just returned from the Coro-
nation, with new honors heavy upon him,
and Sir Edmund Monson, the English
Ambassador to Vienna, upon whom the
honors were to fall a month later, and there
were lesser diplomats and grizzled old gen-
erals in white tunics, and boy officers in
light blue, and swells in tweed suits and
nobodies in evening dress. It was a most
informal and charming collection of people,
and they all seemed to know one another
intimately, and acted accordingly.
Inside the club there was a great ball-
room, in the style of the Second Empire,
and reading-rooms and libraries with walls
of red -morocco books, and vast banquet-
78
THE MILLENNIAL CELEHKATIOX AT BUDAPEST
ing-halls, and rooms for whist and silence,
or for the more noisy games of roulette
and the petits chevaux. It was a succes-
sion of lessons in good taste, even while it
made you gasp at the money it must have
cost somebody — certainly not the club
members, for they are too few, and the
club is too inaccessible for them to spend
much of their time or money there. It ap-
pears to be just what it is, the hobby of
two rich men, who have robbed the bric-a-
brac shops of Europe to make it beautiful,
and who have searched every club to get
the best ash-tray, the best hand-bell, the
best cook, and the best musician.
They did not have to leave Budapest to
find the musician. His name is Berkes,
and no one who has not been to Budapest
or to Vienna has ever heard him, for the
Hungarians say naively that were he to
leave them and play elsewhere they would
never be able to get him back again, as
those who heard him once would keep
him with them forever. He is the kimr
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
of the gypsy musicians and the master of
their melody. His violin seems to be just
as much a part of him as are his arms or
his eyes or his heart. When he plays, his
body seems to stop at the neck, and he
appears to draw all of his strength and
feeling from the violin in his hands, the
rest of him being merely a support for his
head and his instrument. He has curious
eyes, like those of a Scotch collie — sad,
and melancholy, and pleading — and when
he plays they grow glazed and drunken-
looking, like those of an absinthe drinker,
and tears roll from them to the point of
his short beard and wet the wood of his
violin. His music probably affects differ-
ent people according to their nerves, but
it is as moving as any great passage in
any noble book, or in any great play,
and while it lasts he holds people abso-
lutely in a spell, so that when the music
ceases women burst into tears, and I
have seen men jump to their feet and
empty the contents of their pockets into
80
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
his lap; and they are so sure to do this
that their servants take their money away
from them when they are dressing to dine
at some house where Berkes is announced
to play. One night a Frenchman dipped
a two-thousand-franc note into a glass of
champagne and pasted it on the back of
the man's violin, and the next day Berkes
sent it back to him again, saying that to
have this compliment paid him by a for-
eigner in the presence of his countrymen
was worth more to him than the money.
The Hungarian music is typical of the
people, who are full of feeling and moved
by sudden gusts of passion. To a nation
of a calmer and more phlegmatic nature,
the ceremony of the Banderium could not
have meant so much, nor would they have
taken it so seriously ; but to the Hunga-
rians, who cherish the independence of
their kingdom, and who never speak of
Francis Joseph as the Emperor, but as the
King of Hungary, this swearing allegiance
to the crown was a ceremony heavy with
8i
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
meaning, and surrounded by the most sa-
cred traditions of the life of the nation and
of their own families.
It was interesting in consequence to see
the same blase young men who the night
before at the Park Club had discussed the
only way to break the bank at Monte
Carlo, dressed the next morning in the
clothes that their ancestors had worn, or
in others like them, carrying the same ban-
ners under which their great-grandfathers
had fought, weeping with emotion around
a battered gold crown studded with old
stones, and cheering their King, who, not
many years before, had sentenced some of
the very nobles before him to death.
You cannot imagine Americans or Eng-
lishmen doing the same thing ; in the first
place, they have no national costume, should
they wish to put one on; and, in the second
place, their fear of ridicule or their sense of
humor, which is sometimes the same thing,
would keep them from wearing it if they
had. But there was nothing ridiculous in
82
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
what these Hungarians did. They were
too much in earnest and they were too sin-
cere. Later, when I met some of them in
London in varnished boots and frock-coats,
I wondered if they could possibly be the
same men I had seen prancing around on
horses covered with harnesses of silver and
turquoise, and themselves dressed in bro-
cades and in silk tights, with fur-trimmed
coats and velvet tunics. But at the time
it seemed a most appropriate costume, for
one knew they were merely carrying out
the traditions of their family, and that they
did not wear these particular clothes be-
cause they were beautiful or becoming, but
because they were the costume, not only
of their country but of their race, and as
much a part of their family history as an
Englishman's coat of arms, and because
once, long before, one of their name had
fought in a similar costume and stained its
brocade with blood.
The day of the ceremony was as beau-
tiful as blue skies and a warm, brilliant sun
• 83
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
could help to make it, and a soft summer
breeze shook out the flags and banners,
and stirred the leaves upon the great hill
on which Buda stands, and ruffled the sur-
face of the Danube so that it flashed like
a thousand heliographs. In the streets
were hurrying groups of gayly dressed
peasants, fine stalwart men and simple,
kindly faced women, and pretty girls of a
dark, gypsy type, with black eyes, and red
lips with that peculiar curve which leaves
the white teeth bare. Soldiers of the Em-
pire stood at ease along the quaint streets
of clean, round cobble-stones and yellow-
faced houses, each marking the holiday
with an oak leaf in his cap or helmet.
There was no crowding or pushing, but
everywhere excellent good -humor and
good feeling, and from time to time bursts
of patriotic pride as a state carriage, or
some body of horsemen, passed to take a
place in the procession.
The King's palace stands on the top of
the hill of Buda, and the tribunes for the
1
.^^3:V
THE MILLENNIAL CELEHRATION AT BUDAPEST
diplomats and the cabinet face the court-
yard of the palace, making the fourth side
of the square in which the riders were
to pass in review before the Emperor. Il
was more like a private garden-party than
a national celebration, for every one in the
tribunes seemed to know every one in the
streets below, and the spectators moved
about, and talked and criticised, and named
each new arrival as he or she drove up to
the doors of the great gray palace oppo-
site. The sun beat down with a little too
much vigor, but it showed every uniform
at its best, and it flashed on the jewels and
on the sword-blades of the attendant caval-
ry, and filled the air with color and light.
Then the Emperor stepped out upon the
balcony of the palace and saluted, and the
people arose and remained standing until
one of the archduchesses, a little girl in
pink, and the Empress, in deep black, had
taken their places beside him, and the
members of the Court, the women in tlie
national costume of Hungary and the men
' 85
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
in military uniforms, had grouped them-
selves back of these three figures, and had
crowded the windows so that the old palace
bloomed like the wall of an Oxford college
when the window -gardens are gorgeous
wdth color, and stand out from the gray
stone like orchids on the limb of a dead
tree. In the procession that followed there
were eleven hundred mounted men in silks,
in armor, in furs, and in cloth of gold, and
many state carriages gilded and enamelled,
and decorated with coats of arms and vel-
vet trappings.
It would have been too theatrical and
fantastic had it not been that it was an
historical pageant, and correct in every
detail, and that the fairy princes were real
princes, the jewels real jewels, and the fur
the same fur that a few months before had
covered a wolf or a bear in the mountains
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had
been hunted by these same men who now
wore their skins. For an hour the nobles
passed in dazzling, glittering groups, each
86
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
rivalling the next, and all making one long
line of color that wound along the shady
streets, in and out upon the hill-side, and
down across the great ridge like a many-
colored scarf of silk and gold. Each group
was preceded by its banner, and each
standard-bearer was accompanied by her-
alds on foot, and by attendant squires on
horseback, dressed in the colors of the
province or burgh or municipality from
which they came.
There was no regular uniform, and the
costumes varied from the days of the Iron
Age to those of Maria Theresa, who had
given some of the same uniforms we saw
that day to the forefathers of the men who
wore them. But in the dresses of the later
centuries there was a certain uniformity,
and although the materials and colors dif-
fered greatly, the fashion was the same.
There was a long shirt of silk or satin, silk
tights embroidered with gold or silver, high
boots of colored leather, and a sleeveless
cloak of brocade or velvet, trimmed with
87
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
fur. The cap was of velvet surrounded
with fur, with an aigrette in front orna-
mented with diamonds. The greater num-
ber of the horses were magnificent black
stallions, with as distinguished pedigrees as
those of the men who rode them, and their
trappings were as rich as those worn by
their masters. The average cost of each
rider's uniform, and of the harness for his
horse, was five thousand dollars ; some sin-
gle costumes, on account of the jewels,
were worth many times that sum. The
state contributed nothing to this spectacle ;
each rider paid for his carriage and for the
equipment of his horses and attendants.
Of course there were many features of
the procession which stirred the hearts
and memories of the native spectators, but
which were lost on the stranger — certain
devices on the banners, certain uniforms
that recalled a great victory, or some pe-
culiarity of decoration or weapon that none
but the descendants of a certain family, or
the inhabitants of a particular village, were
88
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
allowed to bear. But the spectacle as a
spectacle could be appreciated by any one,
whether he knew the history of Hungary
or not. Those Englishmen present who
had seen the Queen's Jubilee procession
in 1887 said that the Banderium was much
finer, and those who had witnessed the
entry of the Czar into Moscow found it,
if not so impressive, at least as beautiful.
The Czar's entry was a modern military
pageant, the Banderium was a moving
panorama, an illustration of the history of
Hungary by some of the very men them-
selves who had helped to make it, or by
their sons and grandsons.
There were so many different combina-
tions of color that it is impossible to select
any one as being much more beautiful than
the others. In one notable group the men
wore canary yellow silk from head to foot,
trimmed heavily with silver. Their boots
were yellow, their capes were yellow, and
the tall plumes in their peaked caps were
yellow; another group wore gray velvet
89
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
with gray fur and silver ; another, purple
velvet with gold ; another, blue velvet with
ermine and silver. There were never more
than twenty men at the most in any group;
sometimes there would be but five or six,
but the costume of each one was as rich,
whether he rode or walked, as any court
dress of any emperor of Europe. The
horses were covered with velvet saddle-
cloths, heavy with jewels and gold and
silver ornaments. Some were hung from
the head to the tail with strings of gold
coins that one could hear jangling for a
hundred yards as they advanced stamping
and tossing their heads, and others were
covered with leopard and tiger skins, or
with a harness of red morocco leather, or
with blue turquoises that lay in beautiful
contrast upon the snow-white coat and
mane. Some of the provinces which dated
back to the beginning of civilization were
represented by men with the arms of the
days of the Goths and Vandals, and the
fierce simplicity of their appearance made
go
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
the silks and satins of those next in line
seem foolish and theatrical. These de-
scendants of the earliest warriors were
perhaps the most effective figures in the
procession. Some of them wore black
armor, some gold, some silver, and others
the plain steel shirt of chain-armor, which
clung to them like a woollen jersey. Their
legs were bound with raw leather thongs,
and on their heads they wore steel casques,
with a bar of steel running from the helmet
to the chin to protect the face from sword-
thrusts, and each rider held before him a
great spear, from each side of which sprout-
ed black eagle's feathers. There was some-
thing so grim and fierce in their appear-
ance that the crowd along the sidewalks
stood awed as they passed and then burst
into the most enthusiastic cheers that were
heard that day.
From the palace the procession counter-
marched to the Houses of Parliament, and
in its central chamber the heads of each
deputation gathered around the crown and
91
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
swore allegiance to it. But it was signifi-
cant that they swore this allegiance when
the crown was resting on a cushion in their
new Houses of Constitutional Liberty and
not in a palace on the head of a king. That
ceremony came later when they returned
again to the palace in Buda, and the Em-
peror addressed them, and they interrupted
his speech from the throne with cheer after
cheer. Some of these men present were
those whom early in his reign the Emperor
had sentenced to death, but whose fealty
and admiration he had won later by his
own personality and tact and goodness of
heart. It was a curious spectacle — these
white-haired noblemen, tall, proud, and
fierce-eyed, looking in their velvet and furs
and golden chains like living portraits of
the old masters, waving their jewelled caps
at the little unkingly Emperor in his col-
onel's uniform, padded and tightly laced,
and with smug side-whiskers, like an Eng-
lish inspector of police. There was the
contrast in it of the chivalry and dash and
92
fHE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
poetry of the Middle Ages, with the consti-
tutional law-abiding monarchy of modern
times.
And one wondered as to what will follow
when Francis Joseph passes away !
Will they cheer an archduke as they
cheered him, with the tears rolling down
their cheeks ?
One asks, " What has an Austrian arch-
duke done for Hungary, for Austria, or
for himself even ? Does any one in the
United States know the names of these
archdukes or archduchesses ? Has he ever
heard of them or read of them ?" Of course
he has never seen them, because they con-
stitute "the most exclusive Court in Eu-
rope." That has always been their boast,
as it will be their epitaph. They are the
most exclusive Court in Europe, so exclu-
sive that they have not tried to learn the
language of the twin monarchy of Hun-
gary, nor sought by any deed or act to win
the regard or respect of the sixteen millions
of people over whom some day they hope
93
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
to reign. They are like a colony of people
who hide themselves from the rest of the
world in a deep wood and say to each other,
" Look how exclusive we are ! There is no
one in this wood but ourselves " ; and who,
by repeating their own names daily and
talkine of no one but themselves, have
learned to think that they are the people
of greatest consequence in the world, when,
as a matter of fact, the world outside of the
wood is Groins: about its business in the sun-
shine, working and scheming and pushing
ahead, forgetting that the most exclusive
Court of Europe exists. We know a little
of the princes of other countries, and even
of the pretenders, for they do something.
They explore Africa or Tibet; they open
hospitals or race yachts or win a Derby ;
they are at least picturesque and orna-
mental, and it is pleasant to see them ride
by in fine clothes and with mounted es-
<:orts.
I once heard an American tourist say to
a British workman outside of St. James's
94
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
Palace on a Levee day: "And I suppose
you pay taxes to support this?" The
workman said : " Yes, it costs me about six-
pence a year. Isn't it worth the money ?"
And the American, becoming suddenly
conscious of the fact that he had been
standing for two hours watching the show
of royalty, and that it had not cost him
even sixpence, was honest enough to own
that it was.
But what excuse have the Austrian roy-
alties ever offered for their right to exist ?
It is not quite enough that they have six-
teen quarterings, and that they are exclu-
sive, and only come out of their highly
polished shells once in a great while, when
one of them shocks half of Europe with a
horrible scandal or a silly marriage. For
it is only when such things happen that we
learn anything of the most exclusive Court
in Europe — when one of its archdukes
tramps a stable-boy under his horse's hoofs,
or comes out of the wood into the world —
to marry a dancing-girl.
95
THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST
Perhaps the eleven hundred men who
represented all of Hungary at the millen-
nial celebration will cheer one of these
archdukes when he comes to the throne.
But it may be that when the time comes
they will prefer a king who can speak their
own language, and that we may hear them
cheer one of their own people.
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
I.-THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ
ADOLFO RODRIGUEZ was the
only son of a Cuban farmer, who
lives nine miles outside of Santa Clara,
beyond the hills that surround that city
to the north.
When the revolution broke out young
Rodriguez joined the insurgents, leaving
his father and mother and two sisters at
the farm. He was taken, in December of
1896, by a force of the Guardia Civile, the
corps d'elite of the Spanish army, and de-
fended himself when they tried to capture
him, wounding three of them with his ma-
chete.
He was tried by a military court for
bearing arms against the government, and
99
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some
morning before sunrise.
Previous to execution he was confined
in the military prison of Santa Clara with
thirty other insurgents, all of whom were
sentenced to be shot, one after the other,
on mornings following the execution of
Rodriguez.
His execution took place the morning of
the 19th of January, 1897, at a place a half-
mile distant from the city, on the great
plain that stretches from the forts out to
the hills, beyond which Rodriguez had
lived for nineteen years. At the time of
his death he was twenty years old.
T witnessed his execution, and what fol-
lows is an account of the way he went to
death. The young man's friends could not
be present, for it was impossible for them
to show themselves in that crowd and that
place with wisdom or without distress, and
I like to think that, although Rodriguez
could not know it, there was one person
present when he died who felt keenly for
^
THE DEATH OK RODRIGUEZ
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
him, and who was a sympathetic though
unwilling spectator.
There had been a full moon the night
preceding the execution, and when the
squad of soldiers marched out from town
it was still shining brightly through the
mists, although it was past five o'clock.
It lighted a plain two miles in extent,
broken by ridges and gullies and covered
with thick, high grass, and with bunches
of cactus and palmetto. In the hollow of
the ridges the mist lay like broad lakes of
water, and on one side of the plain stood
the walls of the old town. On the other
rose hills covered with royal palms that
showed white in the moonlight, like hun-
dreds of marble columns. A line of tiny
camp-fires that the sentries had built dur-
ing the night stretched between the forts
at regular intervals and burned brightly.
But as the light grew stronger and the
moonlight faded these were stamped out,
and when the soldiers came in force the
moon was a white ball in the sky, without
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
radiance, the fires had sunk to ashes, and
the sun had not yet risen.
So even when the men were formed into
three sides of a hollow square, they were
scarcely able to distinguish one another in
the uncertain light of the morning.
There were about three hundred soldiers
in the formation. They belonged to the
volunteers, and they deployed upon the
plain with their band in front playing a
jaunty quickstep, while their officers gal-
loped from one side to the other through
the grass, seeking out a suitable place for
the execution, while the band outside the
line still played merrily.
A few men and boys, who had been
dragged out of their beds by the music,
moved about the ridges behind the sol-
diers, half -clothed, unshaven, sleepy-eyed,
yawning, and stretching themselves ner-
vously and shivering in the cool, damp air
of the morning.
Either owing to discipline or on account
of the nature of their errand, or because
102
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
the men were still but half awake, there
was no talking in the ranks, and the sol-
diers stood motionless, leaning on their
rifles, with their backs turned to the town,
looking out across the plain to the hills.
The men in the crowd behind them were
also grimly silent. They knew that what-
ever they might say would be twisted into
a word of sympathy for the condemned
man or a protest against the government.
So no one spoke ; even the officers gave
their orders in gruff whispers, and the men
in the crowd did not mix together, but
looked suspiciously at one another and
kept apart.
As the light increased a mass of people
came hurrying from the town with two
black figures leading them, and the sol-
diers drew up at attention, and part of the
double line fell back and left an opening
in the square.
With us a condemned man walks only
the short distance from his cell to the scaf-
fold or the electric chair, shielded from sight
103
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
by the prison walls, and it often occurs even
then that the short journey is too much for
his strength and courage.
But the merciful Spaniards on this morn-
ing made the prisoner walk for over a half-
mile across the broken surface of the fields.
I expected to find the man, no matter what
his strength at other times might be, stum-
bling and faltering on this cruel journey;
but as he came nearer I saw that he led all
the others, that the priests on either side
of him were taking two steps to his one,
and that they were tripping on their gowns
and stumbling over the hollows in their
efforts to keep pace with him as he walked,
erect and soldierly, at a quick step in ad-
vance of them.
He had a handsome, gentle face of the
peasant type, a light, pointed beard, great
wistful eyes, and a mass of curly black hair.
He was shockingly young for such a sacri-
fice, and looked more like a Neapolitan than
a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting
on the quay at Naples or Genoa, lolling in
104
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
the sun and showing his white teeth when
he laughed. He wore a new scapular around
his neck, hanging outside his linen blouse.
It seems a petty thing to have been
pleased with at such a time, but I confess
to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I
saw, as the Cuban passed me, that he held
a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly
nor with bravado, but with the nonchalance
of a man who meets his punishment fear-
lessly, and who will let his enemies see that
they can kill but cannot frighten him.
It was very quickly finished, with rough
and, but for one frightful blunder, with
merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back
when it came to the square, and the con-
demned man, the priests, and the firing
squad of six young volunteers passed in
and the line closed behind them.
The officer who had held the cord that
bound the Cuban's arms behind him and
passed across his breast let it fall on the
grass and drew his sword, and Rodriguez
dropped his cigarette from his lips and bent
105
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
and kissed the cross which the priest held
up before him.
The elder of the priests moved to one
side and prayed rapidly in a loud whisper,
while the other, a younger man, walked
away behind the firing squad and covered
his face with his hands and turned his back.
They had both spent the last twelve hours
with Rodriguez in the chapel of the prison.
The Cuban walked to where the officer
directed him to stand, and turned his back
to the square and faced the hills and the
road across them, which led to his father's
farm.
As the officer gave the first command
he straightened himself as far as the cords
would allow, and held up his head and fixed
his eyes immovably on the morning light,
which had just begun to show above the
hills.
He made a picture of such pathetic help-
lessness, but of such courage and dignity,
that he reminded me on the instant of that
statue of Nathan Hale which stands in the
io6
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
City Hall Park, above the roar of Broad-
way, and teaches a lesson daily to the hur'
rying crowds of money-makers who pas*
beneath.
The Cuban s arms were bound, as are
those of the statue, and he stood firmly,
with his weight resting on his heels like a
soldier on parade, and with his face held
up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But
there was this difference, that Rodriguez,
while probably as willing to give six lives
for his country as was the American rebel,
being only a peasant, did not think to say
so, and he will not, in consequence, live in
bronze during the lives of many men, but
will be remembered only as one of thirty
Cubans, one of whom was shot at Santa
Clara on each succeeding day at sunrise.
The officer had given the order, the men
had raised their pieces, and the condemned
man had heard the clicks of the triggers as
they were pulled back, and he had not
moved. And then happened one of the
most cruelly refined, though unintentional,
107
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
acts of torture that one can very well im-
agine. As the officer slowly raised his
sword, preparatory to giving the signal,
one of the mounted officers rode up to him
and pointed out silently what I had already
observed with some satisfaction, that the
firing squad were so placed that when they
fired they would shoot several of the sol-
diers stationed on the extreme end of the
square.
Their captain motioned his men to low-
er their pieces, and then walked across the
grass and laid his hand on the shoulder of
the waiting prisoner.
It is not pleasant to think what that
shock must have been. The man had
steeled himself to receive a volley of bullets
in his back. He believed that in the next
instant he would be in another world ; he
had heard the command given, had heard
the click of the Mausers as the locks
caught — and then, at that supreme mo-
ment, a human hand had been laid upon
his shoulder and a voice spoke in his ear,
io8
REGULAR CAVALRYMAN— SPANISH
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
You would expect that any man who
had been snatched back to life in such a
fashion would start and tremble at the re-
prieve, or would break down altogether,
but this boy turned his head steadily, and
followed with his eyes the direction of the
officers sword, then nodded his head
gravely, and, with his shoulders squared,
took up a new position, straightened his
back again, and once more held himself
erect.
As an exhibition of self-control this
should surely rank above feats of heroism
performed in battle, where there are thou-
sands of comrades to give inspiration.
This man was alone, in the sight of the
hills he knew, with only enemies about
him, with no source to draw on for strength
but that which lay within himself.
The officer of the firing squad, mortified
by his blunder, hastily whipped up his
sword, the men once more levelled their
rifles, the sword rose, dropped, and the
men fired. At the report the Cuban's
1 09
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
head snapped back almost between his
shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as
though some one had pushed him gently
forward from behind and he had stumbled.
He sank on his side in the wet grass
without a struggle or sound, and did not
move again.
It was difficult to believe that he meant
to lie there, that it could be ended so with-
out a word, that the man in the linen suit
would not get up on his feet and continue
to walk on over the hills, as he apparently
had started to do, to his home ; that there
was not a mistake somewhere, or that at
least some one would be sorry or say some-
thing or run to pick him up.
But, fortunately, he did not need help,
and the priests returned — the younger one
with the tears running down his face — and
donned their vestments and read a brief
requiem for his soul, while the squad stood
uncovered, and the men in hollow square
shook their accoutrements into place, and
shifted their pieces and got ready for the
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
order to march, and the band began again
with the same quickstep which the fusillade
had interrupted.
The figure still lay on the grass un-
touched, and no one seemed to remember
that it had walked there of itself, or noticed
that the cigarette still burned, a tiny ring
of living fire, at the place where the figure
had first stood.
The figure was a thing of the past, and
the squad shook itself like a great snake,
and then broke into little pieces and started
off jauntily, stumbling in the high grass
and striving to keep step to the music.
The officers led it past the figure in the
linen suit, and so close to it that the file
closers had to part with the column to avoid
treading on it. Each soldier as he passed
turned and looked down on it, some cran-
ing their necks curiously, others giving a
careless glance, and some without any in-
terest at all, as they would have looked at
a house by the roadside or a passing cart
or a hole in the road.
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
One young soldier caught his foot in a
trailing vine, and fell just opposite to it.
He grew very red when his comrades gig-
gled at him for his awkwardness. The
crowd of sleepy spectators fell in on either
side of the band. They had forgotten it,
too, and the priests put their vestments
back in the bag and wrapped their heavy
cloaks about them, and hurried off after the
others.
Every one seemed to have forgotten it
except two men, who came slowly towards
it from the town, driving a bullock -cart
that bore an unplaned coffin, each with a
cigarette between his lips, and with his
throat wrapped in a shawl to keep out the
morning mists.
At that moment the sun, which had
shown some promise of its coming in the
glow above the hills, shot up suddenly
from behind them in all the splendor of
the tropics, a fierce, red disk of heat, and
filled the air with warmth and light.
The bayonets of the retreating column
112
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
flashed in it, and at the sight of it a rooster
in a farm-yard near by crowed vigorously,
and a dozen bugles answered the challenge
with the brisk, cheery notes of the reveille,
and from all parts of the city the church
bells jangled out the call for early mass,
and the whole world of Santa Clara seemed
to stir and stretch itself and to wake to
welcome the day just begun.
But as I fell in at the rear of the proces-
sion and looked back, the figure of the
young Cuban, who was no longer a part of
the world of Santa Clara, was asleep in the
wet grass, with his motionless arms still
tightly bound behind him, with the scap-
ular twisted awry across his face, and the
blood from his breast sinking into the soil
he had tried to free.
II.-ALONG THE TROCHA
The Trocha at the eastern end of Cuba
is the longer of the two, and stretches
form coast to coast at the narrowest part
113
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
of that half of the island, from Jucaro on
the south to Moron on the north.
Before I came to Cuba this time I had
read in our newspapers about the Spanish
trochas without knowing just what a tro-
cha was. I imagined it to be a rampart of
earth and fallen trees, topped with barbed
wire — a Rubicon that no one was allowed
to pass, but which the insurgents appar-
ently crossed at will with the ease of little
girls leaping over a flying skipping-rope.
In reality it seems to be a much more im-
portant piece of engineering than is gener-
ally supposed, and one which, when com-
pleted, may prove an absolute barrier to
the progress of large bodies of troops un-
less they are supplied with artillery.
I saw twenty-five of its fifty miles, and
the engineers in charge told me that I was
the first American, or foreigner of any
nationality, who had been allowed to visit
it and make drawings and photographs of
it. Why they allowed me to see it I do
not know, nor can I imagine either why
114
ONE OF THE lU.OCK-HOUSEiS
(From a photograph taken by Mr. Davis)
CUBA I\ WAR-TIME
they should have objected to my doing so.
There is no great mystery about it.
Indeed, what impressed me most con-
cerning it was the fact that every bit of
material used in constructing this back-
bone of the Spanish defence, this strategic
point of all their operations, and their chief
hope of success against the revolutionists,
was furnished by their despised and hated
enemies in the United States. Every
sheet of armor plate, every corrugated zinc
roof, every roll of barbed wire, every plank,
beam, rafter, and girder, even the nails that
hold the planks together, the forts them-
selves, shipped in sections, which are num-
bered in readiness for setting up, the ties
for the military railroad which clings to
the trocha from one sea to the other — all
of these have been supplied by manufact-
urers in the United States.
This is interesting when one remembers
that the American in the Spanish illustrated
papers is represented as a hog, and general-
ly with the United States flag for trousers,
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
and Spain as a noble and valiant lion.
Yet it would appear that the lion is willing
to save a few dollars on freight by buying
his armament from his hoggish neighbor,
and that the American who cheers for
Cuba Libre is not at all averse to making
as many dollars as he can in building the
wall against which the Cubans may be
eventually driven and shot.
A thick jungle stretches for miles on
either side of the trocha, and the only way
of reaching it from the outer world is
through the seaports at either end. Of
these, Moron is all but landlocked, and
Jucaro is guarded by a chain of keys,
which make it necessary to reship all the
troops and their supplies and all the ma-
terial for the trocha to lighters, which meet
the vessels six miles out at sea.
A dirty Spanish steamer drifted with us
for two nights and a day from Cienfuegos
to Jucaro, and three hundred Spanish, sol-
diers, dusty, ragged and barefooted, own-
ed her as completely as though she had
Il6
p^ «*
■
■ 1
'i^^^
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
been a regular transport. They sprawled
at full length over every deck, their guns
were stacked in each corner, and their
hammocks swung four deep from railings
and riggings and across companion-ways,
and even from the bridge itself. It was
not possible to take a step without tread-
ing on one of them, and their hammocks
made a walk on the deck something like a
hurdle-race.
With the soldiers, and crowding them
for space, were the officers' mules and
ponies, steers, calves, and squealing pigs,
while crates full of chickens were piled on
top of one another as high as the hurricane
deck, so that the roosters and the buglers
vied with each other in continual contests.
It was like travelling with a floating men-
agerie. Twice a day the bugles sounded
the call for breakfast and dinner, and the
soldiers ceased to sprawl, and squatted on
the deck around square tin cans filled with
soup or red wine, from which they fed
themselves with spoons and into which
1X7
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
they dipped their rations of hard-tack, after
first breaking them on the deck with a blow
from a bayonet or crushing them with a
rifle butt.
The steward brought what was supposed
to be a sample of this soup to the oflficer
seated in the pilot-house high above the
squalor, and he would pick out a bean
from the mess on the end of a fork and
place it to his lips and nod his head grave-
ly, and the grinning steward would carry
the dish away.
But the soldiers seemed to enjoy it very
much, and to be content— even cheerful.
There are many things to admire about
the Spanish Tommy. In the seven for-
tified cities which I visited, where there
were thousands of him, I never saw one
drunk or aggressive, which is much more
than can be said of his ofificers. On the
march he is patient, eager, and alert. He
trudges from fifteen to thirty miles a day
over the worst roads ever constructed by
man, in canvas shoes with rope soles, carry-
ii8
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
ing one hundred and fifty cartridges, fifty
across his stomach and one hundred on
his back, weighing in all fifty pounds.
With these he has his Mauser, his
blanket, and an extra pair of shoes, and as
many tin plates and bottles and bananas
and potatoes and loaves of white bread as
he can stow away in his blouse and knap-
sack. And this under a sun which makes
even, a walking-stick seem a burden. In
spite of his officers, and not on account of
them, he maintains good discipline, and no
matter how tired he may be or how much
he may wish to rest on his plank bed, he
will always struggle to his feet when the
officers pass and stand at salute. He gets
very little in return for his efforts.
One Sunday night, when the band was
playing in the plaza, at a heaven-forsaken
fever camp called Ciego de Avila, a group
of soldiers were sitting near me on the
grass enjoying the music. They loitered
there a few minutes after the bugle had
sounded the retreat to the barracks, and
119
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
the officer of the day found them. When
they stood up he ordered them to report
themselves at the cartel under arrest, and
then, losing all control of himself, lashed
one little fellow over the head with his
colonel's staff, while the boy stood with
his eyes shut and with his lips pressed
together, but holding his hand at salute
until the officer's stick beat it down.
These soldiers are from the villages and
towns of Spain ; some of them are not
more than seventeen years old, and they
are not volunteers. They do not care
whether Spain owns an island eighty miles
from the United States or loses it, but
they go out to it and have their pay stolen,
and are put to building earth forts and
stone walls, and die of fever. It seems a
poor return for their unconscious patriot-
ism when a colonel thrashes one of them
as though he were a dog, and an especial-
ly brave act, as he knows the soldier may
not strike back.
The second night out the ship steward
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
showed us a light lying low in the water,
and told us that was Jucaro, and we ac-
cepted his statement and went over the
side into an open boat, in which we drift-
ed about until morning, while the colored
man who owned the boat and a little mu-
latto boy who steered it quarrelled as to
where exactly the town of Jucaro might
be. They brought us up at last against a
dark shadow of a house, built on wooden
posts, and apparently floating in the water.
This was the town of Jucaro as seen at
that hour of the night, and as we left it be-
fore sunrise the next morning, I did not
know until my return whether I had slept
in a stationary ark or on the end of a wharf.
We found four other men sleeping on
the floor in the room assigned us, and out-
side, eating by a smoking candle, a young
English boy, who looked up and laughed
when he heard us speak, and said :
" You've come at last, have you ? You
are the first white men I've seen since I
came here. That's twelve months ago."
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
He was the cable operator at Jucaro,
and he sits all day in front of a sheet of
white paper and watches a ray of light
play across an imaginary line, and he can
tell by its quivering, so he says, all that is
going on all over the world. Outside of
his whitewashed cable -office is the land-
locked bay, filled with wooden piles to
keep out the sharks, and back of him lies
the village of Jucaro, consisting of two
open places filled with green slime and
filth and thirty huts. But the operator
said that what with fishing and bathing
and Tit -Bits and Lloyd's Weekly Times
Jucaro was quite enjoyable. He is going
home the year after this.
"At least, that's how I put it," he ex-
plained. " My contract requires me to stop
on here until December of 1898, but it
doesn't sound so long if you say ' a year
after this,' does it?" He had had the
yellow -fever and had never, owing to
the war, been outside of Jucaro. " Still,"
he added, " I'm seeing the world, and
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
I've always wanted to visit foreign
parts."
As one of the few clean persons I met
in Cuba, and the only contented one, I
hope the cable operator at Jucaro will get
a rise in salary soon, and some day see
more of foreign parts than he is seeing at
present, and at last get back to " the Horse-
shoe, at the corner of Tottenham Court
Road and Oxford Street, sir," where, as we
agreed, better entertainment is to be had on
Saturday night than anywhere in London.
In Havana, General Weyler had given
me a pass to enter fortified places, which,
except for the authority which the signa-
ture implied, meant nothing, as all the
cities and towns in Cuba are fortified, and
any one can visit them. It was as though
Mayor Strong had given a man a permit
to ride in all the cable cars attached to
cables.
It was not intended to include the trocha,
but I argued that if a trocha was not a
" fortified place " nothing else was ; and I
123
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
persuaded the commandante at Jucaro to
take that view of it and to vise Weyler's
order. So at five the following morning
a box -car, with wooden planks stretched
across it for seats, carried me along the
line of the trocha from Jucaro to Ciego,
the chief military port on the fortifications,
and consumed five hot and stifling hours
in covering twenty-five miles.
The trocha is a cleared space one hun-
dred and fifty to two hundred yards wide,
which stretches for fifty miles through what
is apparently an impassable jungle. The
trees which have been cut down in clear-
ing this passageway have been piled up at
either side of the cleared space and laid
in parallel rows, forming a barrier of tree-
trunks and roots and branches as wide as
Broadway and higher than a man's head.
It would take a man some time to pick his
way over these barriers, and a horse could
no more do it than it could cross a jam of
floating logs in a river.
Between the fallen trees lies the single
124
THE TKOCHA
(From a photograph taken by Mr. Davis)
CUBA IX WAR-TIME
track of the military railroad, and on one
side of that is the line of forts, and a few
feet beyond them a maze of barbed wire.
Beyond the barbed wire again is the other
barrier of fallen trees and the jungle. In
its unfinished state this is not an insur-
mountable barricade. Gomez crossed it
last November by daylight with six hun-
dred men, and with but the loss of twenty-
seven killed and as many wounded. To-
day it would be more difficult, and in a few
months, without the aid of artillery, it will
be impossible, except with the sacrifice of
a great loss of life. The forts are of three
kinds. They are best described as the
forts, the block-houses, and the little forts.
A big fort consists of two stories, with a
cellar below and a watch-tower above. It
is made of stone and adobe, and is painted
a glaring white. One of these is placed at
intervals of every half-mile along the trocha,
and on a clear day the sentry in the watch-
tower of each can see three forts on either
side.
125
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
Midway between the big forts, at a dis-
tance of a quarter of a mile from each, is a
block-house of two stories, with the upper
story of wood overhanging the lower foun-
dation of mud. These are placed at right
angles to the railroad, instead of facing it,
as do the forts.
Between each block-house and each fort
are three little forts of mud and planks,
surrounded by a ditch. They look some-
thino: like a farmer's ice-house as we see it
at home, and they are about as hot inside
as the other is cold. They hold five men,
and are within hailing distance of one
another. Back of them are three rows
of stout wooden stakes, with barbed wire
stretching from one row to the other, in-
terlacing and crossing and running in and
out above and below like an intricate cat's-
cradle of wire.
One can judge how closely knit it is by
the fact that to every twelve yards of posts
there are four hundred and fifty yards of
wire fencing. The forts are most com-
126
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
pletely equipped in their way, but twelve
men in the jungle would find it quite easy
to keep twelve men securely imprisoned
in one of them for an indefinite leno-th of
O
time.
The walls are about twelve feet high,
with a cellar below and a vault above the
cellar. The roof of the vault forms a plat-
form, around which the four walls rise to
the height of a man's shoulder. There are
loopholes for rifles in the sides of the vault
and where the platform joins the walls.
These latter allow the men in the fort to
fire down almost directly upon the head of
any one who comes up close to the wall of
the fort, where without these holes in the
floor it would be impossible to fire on him
except by leaning far over the rampart.
Above the platform is an iron or zinc
roof, supported by iron pillars, and in the
centre of this is the watch-tower. The only
approach to the fort is by a movable ladder,
which hangs over the side like the gang-
way of a ship -of -war, and can be raised
127
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
by those on the inside by means of a rope
suspended over a wheel in the roof. The
opening in the wall at the head of the lad-
der is closed at the time of an attack by an
iron platform, to which the ladder leads,
and which also can be raised by a pulley.
In October of 1897 the Spanish hope to
have calcium lights placed in the watch-
towers of the forts with sufficient power
to throw a search-light over a quarter of
a mile, or to the next block-house, and so
keep the trocha as well lighted as Broad-
way from one end to the other.
As a further protection against the in-
surgents, the Spaniards have distributed a
number of bombs along the trocha, which
they showed with great pride. These are
placed at those points along the trocha
where the jungle is less thickly grown, and
where the insurgents might be expected to
pass.
Each bomb is fitted with an explosive
cap, to which five or six wires are attached
and staked down on the ground. Any one
128
ONE OF THE FORTS ALONG THE TROCHA
(From a photograph taken by Mr. Davis)
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
Stumbling over one of these wires explodes
the bomb and throws a charge of broken
iron to a distance of fifty feet. How the
Spaniards are going to prevent stray cattle
and their own soldiers from wandering into
these man-traps it is difficult to understand.
The chief engineer in charge of the
trocha detailed a captain to take me over
it and to show me all that there was to see.
The officers of the infantry and cavalry
stationed at Ciego objected to his doing
this, but he said : " He has a pass from
General Weyler. I am not responsible."
It was true that I had an order from Gen-
eral Weyler, but he had rendered it in-
effective by having me followed about
wherever I went by his police and spies.
They sat next to me in the cafes and in
the plazas, and when I took a cab they
called the next one on the line and trailed
after mine all around the city, until my
driver would become alarmed for fear he,
too, was suspected of something, and would
take me back to the hotel.
129
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
I had gotten rid of them at Clenfuegos
by purchasing a ticket on the steamer to
Santiago, three days farther down the coast,
and then dropping off in the night at the
trocha ; so while I was visiting it I expected
to find that my non-arrival at Santiago had
been reported, and word sent to the trocha
that I was a newspaper correspondent. And
whenever an officer spoke to the one who
was showing me about, my camera ap-
peared to grow to the size of a trunk and
to weigh like lead, and I felt lonely, and
longed for the company of the cheerful ca-
ble operator at the other end of the trocha.
Ciegowas an interesting town. During
every day of the last rainy season an aver-
age of thirty soldiers and officers died there
of yellow-fever. While I was there I saw
two soldiers, one quite an old man, drop
down in the street as though they had been
shot, and lie in the road until they were
carried to the yellow-fever ward of the hos-
pital under the black oilskin cloth of the
stretchers.
130
CUIJA I\ WAR-TIME
There was a very smart officers' club at
Ciego, well supplied with a bar and billiard-
tables, which I made some excuse for not
entering, but which could be seen through
its open doors ; and I suggested to one of
the members that it must be a comfort to
have such a place, where the officers might
go after their day's march on the mud
banks of the trocha, and w^here they could
bathe and be cool and clean. He said
there were no baths in the club nor any-
where in the town. He added that he
thought it might be a good idea to have
them.
The bath - tub is the dividing line be-
tween savages and civilized beings. And
when I learned that regiment after regi-
ment of Spanish officers and gentlemen
have been stationed in that town — and it
was the dirtiest, hottest, and dustiest town
I ever visited — for eighteen months, and
none of them had wanted a bath, I be-
lieved from that moment all the stories I
had heard about their butcheries and atroc-
131
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
ities — stories which I had verified later by
more direct evidence.
From a miUtary point of view the trocha
impressed me as a weapon which could be
made to cut both ways.
If it were situated on a broad plain or
prairie, with a mile of clear ground on
either side of it where troops could ma-
noeuvre, and which would prevent the en-
emy from stealing up to it unseen, it might
be a useful line of defence. But at present,
along its entire length stretches this almost
impassable barrier of jungle. If troops
were sent at short notice from the military
camps along the line to protect any partic-
ular point, one can imagine what their con-
dition would be were they forced to ma-
noeuvre in a space one hundred and fifty
yards broad, the half of which is taken up
with barbed wire fences, fallen trees, and
explosive bomb-shells. Only two hundred
at the most could find shelter in the forts,
which would mean that many more would
be left outside the breastworks and scat-
132
Sl'AMSll CAVALRY
tJ*-; L- vli-
^,Jt,
..^llffif'^' /:■
SPANISH CAVAI.UY
iKroni photographs bv Mr. Davis,
CUBA IN WAR-TIME
tered over a distance of a half-mile, with a
forest on both sides of them from which
the enemy could fire volley after volley into
their ranks, protected from pursuit not only
by the jungle but by the walls of fallen
trees which the Spaniards themselves have
placed there.
A trocha in an open plain, as were the
English trochas in the desert around Sua-
kin, makes an admirable defence when a
few men are forced to withstand the assault
of a great many; but fighting behind a
trocha in a jungle is like fighting in an
ambush, and if the trocha at Moron is
ever attacked in force it may prove to be
a Valley of Death to the Spanish troops.
THE INAUGURATION
THE INAUGURATION
WHEN the Vice-President of the
United States is sworn into office
he takes the oath in the same Senate-Cham-
ber where, later, he is to preside over a
limited, and, in one sense, a select body of
men. But as the President of the United
States presides over the entire nation, he
takes his oath of office in the presence of
as many of the American people as can
see him, and he is not shut in by the close
walls of a room, but stands in the open
air, under the open sky, with the marble
heights of the House of Representatives
and of the Senate for his background, and
with the great dome of the Capitol for his
sounding-board.
The two ceremonies differ greatly. One
137
THE INAUGURATION
suggests the director of a railroad address-
ing the stockholders at their annual meet-
ing, while the other is as impressive in its
simplicity as Moses talking to the chosen
people from the mountain-side.
The Chamber of the Senate is a great
oblong room, with a heavy gallery running
back frum an unbroken front to each of
the four walls, and rising almost to the
ceiling. There is a carpet on the floor,
and rows of school-desks placed in curved
lines, facing a platform and three short
rows of chairs. The first row, where the
official stenographers sit, is on the floor of
the Senate -Chamber; the second, for the
clerks, is raised above it ; and higher still,
behind the clerks, is the massive desk of
the Vice-President, or the President of the
Senate, as he is called when he presides
over that body. Opposite to the desk of
the Vice-President, and at each side of it,
are wide entrances with swinging doors.
The Chamber is lighted from above, and
is decorated in quiet colors.
138
THE VICE-rKKSIDENT TAKING THE OAIH OF OFFICE
THE INAUGURATION
On tlie morning of the 4th of March
last the galleries were massed with people,
and the Senators, instead of sitting each at
his own desk, crowded together to see the
Vice-President inaugurated, while several
hundreds of yellow chairs were squeezed
in amono: the school -desks for the use of
the members of the House. In front of
the clerk's desk were two leather chairs,
for the new President and the old Presi-
dent, and the seats for the foreign ambas-
sadors.
It had been an all-night session, and the
Senators had remained in the Chamber un-
til near sunrise, and looked rumpled and
weary in consequence. Among them were
several men whose term of office would ex-
pire when the clock over the door told mid-
day ; they had been six years or less in that
room, and in three-quarters of an hour they
would leave it perhaps for the last time.
The men who had taken their seats from
them, and who were to be sworn in by the
new Vice-President, sat squeezed in beside
139
THE INAUGURATION
them, looking conscious and uncomfortable,
like new boys on their first day at school.
Caricaturists and the artists of the daily
papers had made the faces of many of
them familiar, and while the people waited
for the chief actors to appear, they pointed
out the more conspicuous Senators to each
other, looking down upon them with the
same interest that visitors to the Zoo be-
stow on the bears.
. In the front of the gallery reserved for
the diplomatic corps sat the wife of the
Chinese minister. She was the only bit
of color in the room that was not Ameri-
can or imported from Paris. She was a
little person in blue satin, with a great
head-dress of red, and her face was painted
like the face of a picture, according to the
custom of her country.
Back of her, accompanied by her secre-
tary, was the exiled Queen of Hawaii, a
handsome, dark-skinned negress, quietly
but richly dressed, and carrying herself
with great dignity. In front of her was
140
THE INAUGURATION
a young English peer, a secretary of the
British Embassy, who took photographs
of the scene below him with a hand-cam-
era, knowing perfectly well that had he
been guilty of such a piece of impertinence
in his own Lower House he would have
been taken out of the gallery by the collar
and thrown into the lobby.
The expectant quiet of the hour was
first broken by a young man with his hair
banged over his forehead and a fluffy satin
tie that drooped upon his breast. He
gazed meekly about him out of round
spectacles and announced in a high, shrill
voice :
" The ambassadors from foreign coun-
tries."
In the courts of Europe, where they
take state ceremonies more seriously than
we do, there is a functionary who is known
as the " Announcer of Ambassadors," or
the "Introducer of Ambassadors" — his
title explains his duties. The American
introducer of ambassadors was a subordi-
141
THE INAUGURATION
nate official, and although we are a free
people and love simplicity and hate show,
it did seem as though, for that occasion
only, some one with a little more manner,
or a little less ease of manner, might have
been chosen to announce the various dig-
nitaries as they entered the Chamber. A
thin young man in a short sack-coat run-
ning excitedly up and down the aisle lead-
ins to the President's desk did not exact-
ly seem to rise to the requirements of
the occasion ; especially was this the case
when he put his hand on the breast of
the first of the ambassadors and shoved
him back until he was ready to announce
him.
The foreign ambassadors were four in
number, and very beautiful in their diplo-
matic uniforms and sashes of the royal or-
ders. They seated themselves, with obvi-
ous content, in places on a line with those
reserved for the President and President-
elect.
The young man skipped gayly back up
142
THE INAUGURATION
the aisle and announced, *' The members of
the Supreme Court of the United States,"
and the Chief Justice and his fellow-judges
came rustling forward in black silk robes
and seated themselves facing the ambassa-
dors, and then all of them with one accord
crossed their legs.
The " ministers from foreign lands " came
next in a glittering line, and crowded into
the second row of school-desks, shunting
and shifting themselves about several times,
like cars in a freight-yard when a train is
being made up, until each was in his right
place and no one's dignity was jeoparded.
Then came the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, who ascended the steps
leading to the desk and took his place next
to the chairs reserved for the incoming
Vice - President and the outgoing Vice-
President, and looked down at the empty
red chair below him, on which, had the
pleasure of many people been consulted,
he would have sat that day.
The other members of the House poured
143
THE INAUGURATION
into the room without order or precedence,
and spread themselves over the floor, pick-
ing up the yellow chairs and carrying them
nearer to the front, or shoving them out of
their way and piling them up one on top of
the other in the corners. There were very
young men among them, and many old and
well-known men, and they had smuggled in
with them Governors of States, with a few
of their aides in uniform, and a number of
lobbyists, and politicians out of office, but
with much more power than those to whom
they had given it. Then quietly from a
side door behind the President's desk came
Major-General Nelson A. Miles, commander
of the United States army, and the naval
officer who ranked him, and their adju-
tants ; and opposite to them, from the oth-
er door, appeared the next ambassador to
France, who, as the marshal of the great
parade which was to follow, and on account
of his promised new dignity, was one of the
celebrities of the hour. The three aides
of General Porter were the sons of former
144
THE INAUGURATION
Presidents. The youngest of them was
young Garfield, a modest, manly, good-
looking boy in the uniform of a cavalry
ofificer.
In the gallery to the left of the Presi-
dent's desk were three empty rows of
benches, which, as every one knew by this
time, were reserved for the family of the
incoming President, and the first real in-
terest of the morning arrived when the
doors above this gallery wfere held open,
and the ladies who were to occupy these
places, and later, so large a place in the
interest of the country, appeared at the top
of the steps. Portraits and photographs
rendered it easy to recognize them, and
though the spectators gave no sign of wel-
come to these unofficial members of the
President's household, they held every eye
in the place. The mother of the incoming
President came down the steps briskly, as
eager and smiling and young as her son
in spite of her white hair and gold spec-
tacles. The people smiled back at her in
145
THE INAUGURATION
sympathy with her pleasure at his triumph,
and the scene at once took on a human
interest it had not held before. For while
it is possible at any time to look at ambas-
sadors in diamond stars and brave soldiers
in gold lace, it is not possible every day to
see a mother as she watches her son at the
moment when he takes the oath that makes
him the executive head of seventy millions
of people.
The wife of the new President followed
his mother slowly. She had been ill, and
as she came down the steps she was partly
supported on each side by one of her hus-
band's friends. Her face was very pale,
but quite beautiful and young-looking, like
that of a girl, and the blue velvet that she
wore softened and enriched the noble lines
which pain and great suffering had cut on
her face.
The young man with the butterfly tie
and the short coat dashed up and down the
middle aisle now with hysterical vigor, and
announced over his shoulder during one
146
THE INAUGURATIOxV
of his flights that the " Vice-President and
the Vice-President-elect " were approach-
ing. Mr. Stevenson came in, with Mr.
Hobart following him, and the two men
ascended the steps of the platform and
bowed to Speaker Reed, who rose to greet
them.
There were now only the two chief
actors to come, and the crowded room
waited with its interest at the highest
pitch. The members of Congress who
had crowded in around the doorways were
pushed back on each other, and those who
had slipped down the aisles slid in be-
tween the desks, as the young man an-
nounced " The President and President-
elect."
As Mr. Cleveland and Major McKinley
entered, walking close together, the people
rose, and every one leaned forward for a
better sight of the President to be, and to
observe " how the outgoing President took
it." The outgoing President took it ex-
ceedingly well. He could afford to do so.
147
THE INAUGURATION
He had taken that short walk down that
same aisle often before, and he looked as
though he took it now for the last time
with satisfaction and content. He smiled
slightly as he passed between his enemies
of the Senate. He could afford to do that
also, for he had kept a country at peace
when they had tried to drag it into war,
and he had framed the great Treaty of
Arbitration which they had emasculated in
order to hurt him, and only succeeding in
hurting themselves.
As the two men walked down the aisle
together, Major McKinley with all his
troubles before him, in his fresh, new
clothes, and with an excited, nervous smile
on his clear-cut face, looked like a bride-
groom; and Mr. Cleveland, smiling toler-
antly, and with that something about him
of dignity which comes to a man who has
held great power, looked like his best man,
who had been through the ordeal himself
and had cynical doubts as to the future.
As the two men seated themselves, Mr.
148
THE INAUGURATION
Cleveland on the right and Major Mc Kin-
ley on the left, the latter looked up at the
gallery where his wife and mother sat and
gave them a quick bow of recognition, as
though he wished them to feel that they,
too, were included in this, his moment of
triumph.
The ceremony which followed was brief
and full of business. Mr. Stevenson read
a farewell address to the Senators, in which
he said flattering things to them and
thanked them for their courtesies ; and a
clergyman read a long prayer, almost as
long as the address of the Vice-President,
while the Senators gazed at their friends
in the galleries, and three people in the
gallery stood up, while the greater number
sat staring about them. Then Mr. Steven-
son delivered the oath to Mr. Hobart, and
Mr. Hobart took the oath by bowing his
head gravely, and the country was on the
instant in the strange position of having
a Democratic President and a Republican
Vice-President. Mr. Hobart read his ad-
149
THE INAUGURATION
dress calmly and in the same manner in
which the president of a bank might read
a report to the board of directors. It of
necessity could not contain anything of a
startling nature, as the Vice - President's
duties are entirely those of a presiding
officer. Mr. Hobart's first duty as Vice-
President was to swear in the new Sena-
tors, who came up to his desk in groups of
four, the incoming Senators being escorted
by the outgoing Senators.
When the new Senators had taken the
oath, the procession formed again with
the purpose of marching out to the stand
erected in front of the Senate wing of
the Capitol, where the chief ceremony
of the day, the swearing in of the new
President by the Chief Justice, was to
take place.
But the Senate committee who had
charge of the arrangements, or it may
have been the young man with the butter-
fly tie, bungled the procession sadly, and
the feelings of the diplomatic corps were
150
THE INAUGURATION
hurt. Tlic members of a diplomatic corps
usually take themselves seriously, and es-
pecially those in Washington, which is a
post where they have very little to do ex-
cept to look after their dignity. And the
women in Washington spoil them, and the
rude and untutored American politicians,
some of whom are opposed on principle to
the demoralizing practice of wearing even-
ing dress, do not appreciate the niceties of
the positions which the foreign diplomatists
hold to one another. The ministers were
hurt, in the first place, because the ambas-
sadors had been allowed to go into the
Senate -Chamber without them; they did
not like the places assigned them after
they had arrived there ; and when the pro-
cession started they found themselves left
to follow Congressmen and others before
whom they should have taken precedence.
So, instead of going out on to the platform
to witness the inauguration of the Presi-
dent, they held an indignation meeting in
the draughty corridors and decided to go
151
THE INAUGURATION
home, which they did. These gentlemen
were the guests of the nation, and the
members of Congress and of the judiciary
are our own people and acted as their
hosts. Common courtesy and the conven-
tion which exists in other countries en-
join it upon a government to give the
diplomatic corps precedence of the local
administrators, just as a host gives the
better place at dinner to the visiting
stranger, and not to members of his own
family. If a thing is worth doing, it is
worth doing correctly, and either there
should be no precedence at all or it should
mean something, and should show what it
means. Neither the members of the Sen-
ate nor of the House gained any credit or
additional glory by shoving themselves
into places which should by right and
courtesy have been given to the foreign
ministers. The diplomatic corps, on the
other hand, were there as representatives
of friendly powers to show respect to the
new President ; and if, through no fault of
152
THE Ix\AU(;UKAriON
his, they were treated with insufficient con-
sideration, it would surely have been better
for them to witness the ceremonies and
afterwards to lodge their complaint. But
to go away pouting like a parcel of children
with their toys under their arms was dis-
tinctly disrespectful to the President, and
was hardly the act of gentlemen, not even
of diplomats.
The platform to which the procession
made its way was built out upon the steps
of the Capitol, between the Senate wing
and the main entrance. It was construct-
ed of unplaned boards, with a raised dais
in front, upon which were three arm-chairs
and a table ; around this dais were many
chairs for the chief dignitaries, and behind
this chosen circle were unplaned benches
slanting: back like hurdles to the wall of
the Capitol. There were more than enough
of these benches, and the spectators from
the Senate-Chamber did not suffice to fill
more than half of them. Hence, at
the back of the crowd on the stand
153
THE INAUGURATION
was an ugly blank stretch of yellow-pine
boards, which, besides being undecorative
in itself, gave the erroneous impression
that there was not as full a house as had
been expected, and that the attraction had
failed to attract. Except for this blot of
pine boards, the picture as the crowd saw
it, looking up from the grounds of the
Capitol, was a noble and impressive one,
full of dignity and meaning. Any scene,
with the Capitol building for a background,
must, of necessity, be impressive. Its sit-
uation is more imposing than that of tlTiC
legislative buildings of any other country ;
the Houses of Parliament on the Thames,
and at Budapest, on the Danube, appear
heavy and sombre in comparison; the
Chamber of Deputies, on the Seine, is not
to be compared with it in any way. No
American can look upon it, and see its
great swelling dome, balanced on the broad
shoulders of the two marble wings, and
the myriads of steps leading to it, without
feeling a thrill of pride and pleasure that
154
THE INAUGURATION
SO mcignificent a monument should belong
to his country and to him.
Rising directly above the heads of the
crowd was the front of the platform,
wrapped with American flags and colored
bunting; above that was the black mass
of the spectators, with just here and there
a bit of color in a woman's gown, or in the
uniforms of the ambassadors and of the
few officers of the army and militia. Be-
yond these the crowd saw the empty
boards glaring in the sunshine; and then
the grand fa9ade of the Capitol, black with
spectators, on the steps, on the great stat-
ues, along the roof, and around the dome.
The crowd gathered there were so far dis-
tant that what went on below was but a
pantomine to them, played by tiny, fore-
shortened dwarfs.
To the foreigners in the crowd the ab-
sence of any guard or escort of soldiers
near the President, or of soldiers of any
sort, was probably the most peculiar feat-
ure of the scene. In no other country
155
THE INAUGURATION
would the head of the nation, whether he
rule by inheritance or is elected to power,
stand on such an occasion so close to the
people without a military escort. The
President of France does not even sfo to
the races at Longchamps without an es-
cort of soldiers. But the President of the
United States is always unattended, and
soldiers could not add to the dignity of
his office. When he rode in state, later
in the day, from the Capitol to the White
House, he was surrounded by cavalry,
who were, however, part of and in keeping
with the procession. But when the Presi-
dent takes the oath of office before the
people, and delivers his inaugural address,
there is not a single man in uniform to
stand between him and his fellow-country-
men, crowded together so close to him
that by bending forward he could touch
them with his hand.
The spectacle, as it was presented to the
people on the stand, was more brilliant
than that seen by those on the ground.
156
RETURN! N(". KROM THK CAPITOL
THE INAUGURATION
The stand overlooked a crowd of men,
among whom were many women. It was
a well - dressed crowd and well - behaved,
but by no means a great crowd : at a foot-
ball match on Thanksgiving Day in New
York, three times as many people are
gatiered together. But it spread away
froin the stand in an unbroken mass for
about a hundred yards, and stretched even
farther to the right and left. On the out-
skirts people came and stood for a moment
and walked away again, moving in and
out among the trees of the Capitol grounds
freely, and without police supervision or
interference ; bicyclers dismounted and
looked across the heads of the mass for a
few minutes, and then mounted and rode
away. There were no tickets of admission to
this open space. The man with the broad-
est shoulders, or the woman who came first,
stood as near to the President as any one
on the platform, and heard him as easily
as though they were conversing together
in the same room. From the centre of
157
THE INAUGURATION
the crowd, rising like the judges' stands
at a race - meeting, were three roughly
made shanties, from which cameras pho-
tographed the actors on the platform at
the rate of several thousands of exposures
a minute, which photographs were a few
days later to reproduce the scene from the
stao^e of a dozen different theatres all over
the United States.
Three or four troops of the United
States cavalry, and two troops of the
smart cavalry from Cleveland, were drawn
up at the edge of the crowd, and the shin-
ing coats of the horses, and the tossing
plumes in the helmets, and the yellow-
topped busbies, made a brilliant bit of col-
or under the trees. Back of all was the
front of the new Congressional Library,
trying not to look like the fa9ade of the
Paris Opera- House, with its gilded dome
flashing in the warm sunshine.
The family and friends of the President,
who were so numerous that it seemed as
though the entire town of Canton had
15^
THE IXAUC.URATION
moved down upon Washington, took their
places around the dais, and the crowd
cheered Major McKinley's wife and Major
McKinley's mother. And the ladies smiled
and bowed, and appeared supremely happy
and content, as they looked down upon
the faces in the crowd, which had turned
a queer ghastly white in the bright sun-
light, and appeared, as they were all raised
simultaneously, like a carpet of human
heads.
The procession, as it came from the
Senate-Chamber, was not as effective as
it might have been, for it came by jerks
and starts, with long spaces in between,
and then in groups, the members of which
crowded on each other's heels. Senators
and Representatives, who had lagged be-
hind, in their anxiety to catch up with the
procession, walked across the benches,
stepping from one to another as boys race
each other to the place in the front row of
the top gallery. The crowd below cheer-
ed mightily when it saw the President
i59
THE INAUGURATION
and President-elect, and Major McKinley
walked out on the dais, and bowed bare-
headed many times, while Mr. Cleveland,
who throughout the day had left the cen-
tre of the stage entirely to his friend,
gazed about him at the swaying crowd,
and perhaps remembered two other in-
augural addresses, which he had delivered
to much the same crowd from the same
platform.
The people were not kept waiting long,
for the ceremony that makes a President
lasts less than six minutes, while six hours
are required to fasten the crown upon the
Czar of Russia and to place the sceptre in
his hand. One stone in that sceptre is
worth one million of dollars, the crown
three millions, and all the rulers of Europe,
or their representatives, and great generals
and statesmen, surround the Emperor while
he takes the oath of office in the chapel of
the gilded walls and jewelled pillars. And
outside seventy thousand soldiers guard his
safety. The President of the United States
1 60
THE INAUGURATION
last IMarch took his oath of office on a
Bible which had been given him by the col-
ored congregation of a Methodist church,
with the sunshine on his head in place of
a crown, with his mother and wife sitting
near him on yellow kitchen chairs, and
his only sceptre was the type-written ad-
dress bulging from the pocket of his frock-
coat.
The little Chief Justice in his vast silken
robe took the Bible which the clerk of the
Senate handed to him and held it open
before the President-elect, and the Presi-
dent, who was in a moment to be the ex-
President, stood up beside them, with his
hat in his hand and his head bared to the
spring breeze, and turned and looked down
kindly at the people massed below.
The people saw three men dressed
plainly in black, one of them grave and
judicial, another pale and earnest, and the
third looking out across the mob unmoved
and content. The noise and movement
among the people \vere stilled for a mo-
iCi
THE INAUGURATION
mcnt as the voice of the Chief Justice re-
cited the oath of office. As he spoke, it
was as though he had pronounced an in-
cantation, for, although the three figures
remained as they were, so far as the people
could see, a great transformation which
the people could not see passed over the
whole of the land, and its influence pene-
trated to the furthermost corners of the
earth. There came a new face at the
door and a new step on the floor, and
men who had thoughts above office, men
who held office, and men who hoped to
hold office recognized the change that
had come. It came to the postmaster of
the fourth class buried in the snows near
British Columbia, to the ambassador to
the Court of St. James, to the inspector
of customs where the Rio Grande cuts
Mexico from the alkali plains and chap-
arral of Texas, to the gauger on the coral
reef of Key West, to the revenue - officer
among the moonshiners on Smoky Moun-
tain, to American consuls in Europe, in
I&2
TIIi: IN'AUGLI'L.VTION
South America, in Asia, in the South Pa-
cific isles. Little men who had been made
cabinet ministers became little men again,
and dwindled and sank into oblivion ; other
(ittle men grew suddenly into big men,
until the name and fame of them filled
the land ; mills that had been closed down
sprang into usefulness; in other mills
wheels ceased to turn and furnace fires
grew cold ; the lakes of Nicaragua moved
as though a hand had stirred the waters,
and besran to flow from ocean to ocean
and to cut a continent in two ; stocks rose
and fell ; ministers of foreign affairs in all
parts of the world planned new treaties and
new tariffs; a newspaper correspondent
in a calaboose in Cuba saw the jail doors
swing open and the Spanish comandante
beckon him out ; and the boy orator
of the Platte, who had been given the
votes of nearly seven million citizens,
heard the door of the White House
close in his face and shut him out for-
ever.
163
THE INAUGURATION
A government had changed hands with
the quietness and dignity of the voice
of the Chief Justice itself, and as Major
McKinley bent to kiss the open Bible
he became the executive nead of the gov-
ernment of the United States and Gro-
ver Cleveland one of the many millions
of American citizens he had sworn to
protect.
A few foolish people attended the inau-
guration exercises and went away disap-
pointed. This was not because the exer-
cises were not of interest, but for the
reason that the visitors saw them from the
wrong point of view. They apparently
expected to find in the inauguration of the
President of a republic the same glitter
and display that they had witnessed in state
ceremonies in Europe. And by looking
for pomp and rigid etiquette and official-
ism they missed the whole significance of
the inauguratian, which is not intended to
glorify any one man, but is a national
celebration, in which every citizen has a
164
THE INAUGURATION
share — a sort of family gathering, where
all the members of the clan, from the resi-
dents of the thirteen original States to
those of that State which has put the lat-
est star in the flag, are brought together
to rejoice over a victory and to make the
best of a defeat. There is no such cel-
ebration in any other country, and it is
surely much better to enjoy it as some-
thing unique in its way and distinctly our
own, than to compare some of its features
with like features of coronations and royal
weddings abroad, in which certain ruling
families glorify themselves and the people
pay the bill. Why should we go out of
our way to compare cricket in America
with cricket as it is played on its native
turf in England when we have a national
game of our own which we play better than
any one else ?
There was an effort made before the
inauguration by certain anarchistic news-
papers in New York to make it appear
that the managers of ceremonies at Wash-
165
THE INAUGURATION
ington were aping the extravagant and
ostentatious festivities of a monarchy, and
it was pointed out with indignation that
the inauguration would probably cost a
half-million of dollars, of which the govern-
ment would pay the larger part, and com-
mittees and private subscribers would make
up the rest. This estimate looks rather
small when it is remembered that at the
coronation of the Czar the sum spent on
ten sets of harness used in the procession
alone amounted to eighty thousand dollars,
which is more than the actual cost of the
entire inaugural exercises. So it can be
seen that the laurels of our foreign friends,
in this respect at least, are as yet quite safe
from us. It is impossible to compare the
inauguration with state celebrations abroad,
because the whole spirit of the thing is dif-
ferent. In Europe the people have little
part in a state function except as specta-
tors. They pay taxes to support a royal
family and a standing army, and when a
part of the royal family or a part of the
i66
rilK INAUGURATION
army goes out on parade the people line
the sidewalks and look on.
In the inaugural procession the people
themselves are the performers ; the rulers
for the time being are of their own choos-
ing ; and the people not only march in the
parade, but they accomplish the somewhat
difficult feat of standing on the sidewalks
and watching themselves as they do it.
There is all the difference between the two
that there is between an amateur perform-
ance in which every one in the audience
knows every one on the stage, and has
helped to make the thing a success, and a
professional performance where the spec-
tators pay a high price to have some one
else amuse them.
Every man who had voted the straight
Republican ticket, and every Democrat
who had voted for Major McKinley be-
cause he represented sound money, felt
that his vote gave him a share in the in-
auguration, and that he had as good a
right to celebrate the event as Mr. Mark
167
THE INAUGURATION
Manna himself; so the inaugural proces-
sion and the inaugural ball which fol-
lowed the swearing in of the new Presi-
dent were distinctly representative of the
whole people, and not especially of any
party, and certainly not of any class. In
the inaugural parade there were many
magnificent displays by the military and
some superb uniforms and excellent music,
and distinofuished men from all over the
Union, but the feature of the parade was
its democracy. It represented the people,
and every condition of the people ; the
people got it up, and the people carried it
through to success, and their brothers and
cousins stood by and applauded them.
Parts of it were homely and parts of it
were absurd, and some of it dragged and
was tiresome ; but the part that bored one
spectator was probably the very feature of
the parade which the man standing next
to him enjoyed the most.
It was a great family outing, and it was
interesting to hear the people of Washing-
i68
THE INAUGURATION
ton — many of whom do not know that
there is any cultivated land lying beyond
the shadow of the Washington monu-
ment — cheering their fellow-countrymen
from the far West and North, and to hear
the bands playing " Dixie " and " My
Maryland," which, had they been whistled
in the streets of Washington some years
before, would have brought out a riot in-
stead of cheers. It was interesting also to
see the white folks applauding the colored
troops, and the old G. A. R. veteran who
would not have had his lost arm back
again on that day for several pensions, and
to see the ambassador to France march-
ing in the same column with the men
against whom he had fought at Grant's
side.
It was a great pity that more Americans
could not have seen the bluejackets from
the ships of war rolling and swaggering
down Pennsylvania Avenue, which is the
finest boulevard for such a procession that
this country affords, and the engineers with
i6q
THE INAUGURATION
their red capes, the cavalry with their
yellow plumes and two thousand sabres
flashing in the sunlight, and the bicycle
corps creeping and balancing at a snail's
pace.
Next to the bluejackets, who are al-
ways first in the hearts of their country-
men, the light -blue uniforms and red
capes of the engineers probably pleased
the people best. They were all good and
splendid in their own way, whether it was
the rows on rows of infantry with their
white facings, or the gauntlets and plumes
of the cavalry, or the shining guns of the
artillery crawling disjointedly like great
iron spiders over the smooth asphalt.
There was a foreign touch and a sug-
gestion of Europe in the jackets of Troop
A of Cleveland on their magnificent black
horses, in the brass-spiked helmets of the
Essex troop, and in the new, light-blue
uniforms of the squad from Troop A of
New York, who looked even handsomer
than when they wore the service uniform.
170
THE INAUGURATION
These arc all miliiiamen, but they are
rough riders and trick riders, and can
clear a street during a riot or sit their
horses and dodge coupling-pins with the
sang-froid -^wA coolness of real veterans.
There was one cavalry troop that was
missed at the inauguration which should
have been there, and, because of its tra-
ditions, should always be the escort of
the incoming President. The First City
Troop of Philadelphia took part in the
war of the Revolution, and in every war
in which this country has been engaged.
It is a small body, but it sent eighty offi-
cers in command of cavalry regiments
into the civil war. This troop acted as
the escort of General Washington when
he was President, and as the body-guard of
almost every other new President. Gen-
eral Harrison, however, broke the prece-
dent, and preferred to have some of the
members of his old regiment act as his
body-guard. Major McKinley followed his
example. The next President may like
171
TTTE INAUGURATION
to have his bicycle club escort him. The
action of General Harrison was no doubt
pleasant for the Grand Army pensioners
and his personal friends of the old regi-
ment, but it is a question whether the
people would not have preferred the record
and the magnificence of the City Troop,
who may be considered to have inherited
their risfht to act as the escort of the
President.
When the government, as represented
by the soldiers and the bluejackets, had
inspired the spectators with pride and
patriotism, the people themselves, as rep-
resented by the militia and the Governors
of the different States and political or-
ganizations, fell into line behind them,
and showed how well they could march,
and claimed their share of the public
triumph and the public applause. Some
of the militia regiments marched as well
as the regulars, or better, and the naval
cadets from New Jersey, Maryland, and
Rhode Island would have passed inspec-
172
THF. INAUGURATION
tion as " apprentices " for a real ship of
war. There were many different kinds
of uniform, and the men who wore them
came from such great distances that their
presence in Washington brought home
the fact of how far-reaching is tlie sway
of the republic, and how broad its terri-
tory. There were the Hemming Guards,
Texas volunteers from Gainesville, Texas,
who won their uniforms only last July by
scoring 977 at the State encampment, and
who appeared in them at the inaugura-
tion. And near these new soldiers from
the largest State, was what is perhaps the
oldest organization, from the smallest State,
the Newport Artillery, which antedates
the Union, and exists under a charter
from King George II. in 1739, when Eng-
land declared war on Spain — a charter
which was ratified in 1782 by the Rhode
Island General Assembly. There was also
the Fifth Regiment of Maryland, which
has a reputation almost as great as that of
the New York Seventh, and there was the
173
THE INAUGURATION
Seventy-first of that city, a body which
has its nucleus in the American Rifles;
there was the order of the Old Guard
from the modern city of Chicago, but
which is composed of descendants of men
who fought in the Indian wars and French
wars, and in the wars of the Revolution
and of 1 812; and a few members of the
Medal of Honor Legion, to each of whom
Congress had voted a medal for bravery on
the field of battle. There were, too, the
Shenandoah Valley Patriotic League, from
Virginia, formed of ex-Confederate soldiers
and their sons, with the motto, " There
should be no North, no South, no East, no
West, but a common country," and a dele-
gation from the Harmony Pre-Legion of
Philadelphia, a relic of the old Harmony
fire company, in helmets and red shirts ;
and there was the Republican Glee Club
of Columbus, which has sung patriotic
songs in every national campaign since that
of Grant and Greeley.
These are but a few of the organizations
•74
THE INAUGURATION
that passed up Pennsylvania Avenue in
the brilHant afternoon sunshine between
curtains of flags, with brass bands, every
one of them playing " El Capitan" or the
" Washington Post March." These are
but a few, but they illustrate the varied
nature of the procession. They repre-
sented, as it were, the whole people.
There was one feature of the parade
which would have puzzled the foreigner
had he understood its significance, and
which was a commentary on our political
system. It was the number of clubs and
organizations which bore the name and
existed for the personal and selfish aggran-
dizement of some one man, and that man
seldom a great man or a wise man or a
man of whom many people outside of his
own city had ever heard. Every one must
recognize the importance of political organ-
izations; and when they are called the
Junior Political Club of the Fourth Ward,
or the Unconditional Republican Club
of Albany, or the First Voters' Repub-
THE INAUGURATION
lican League of Detroit, their object for
existing is obvious, and may be approved
by every one, be he a Democrat, a mug-
wump, or a Populist. But when three
hundred men march under a banner bear-
ing the name and features of " Matt" Quay
or " Tom " Piatt or " Dave " Martin, the
spectator is reminded not of a republic
where every citizen is supposed to vote
freely and as his conscience dictates, but of
the feudal days, and of the baron and his
serfs and retainers. It is easy to under-
stand why the political boss exists, from the
point of view of the boss, or why a slave-
holder should be willing to hold slaves, but
it is difficult to understand why the slaves
themselves should rejoice in their degrada-
tion and wish to publish it abroad. Any
one might be proud to march in the ranks
of an organization that bore the name of
an American who had accomplished some-
thing for his country, who had lived and
died for a great truth, or who had repre-
sented a noble idea. But why should men
170
THE INAUGURATION
wear the collar of a boss where every one
can sec it ; and why should they, for fear
that every one should not see it, hire a brass
band to draw attention to the fact that they
have it on ? These gentlemen who marched
on Inauguration Day were, so the papers
said, prominent business men, lawyers, and
bankers. Many of them certainly looked
as if they belonged to that class ; but if
they were men of intelligence, why could
they not see how undemocratic and how
un-American they were in giving their con-
sciences into the hands of one man ? One
organization of nearly a thousand had for
its motto, "We follow where Quigg leads."
Now Mr. Quigg may be, probably is, a well-
meaning young man, but why should a
thousand men travel all the way to Wash-
ington when representatives from every
part of the Union are gathered together
there, and proclaim to them that they are
no longer freeborn American citizens with
a sacred right to vote as they please, but
merely tools and heelers for " Quigg".''
177
THE INAUGURATION
These are the very same Americans who
boast of their independence in the smoking-
room of ocean steamers and in the railway
carriages of Continental railroads, forget-
ting that there are few people in Europe
who are ruled by such a boss as this or
that one designated on these banners. If
they are so ruled they are ashamed of the
fact, and do not paint his face on a silk
banner as though he were a saint, and
bow down to it, or carry a gilded speaif
with a pennant bearing his name at its
point.
"Who," the poor king -ridden visitor
might have asked at Washington, as the
clubs went marching by with these pen-
nants — "who is Kurtz, or Quigg, or
Quay ?"
Who indeed!
But how much more important it would
be to know who the men are who glorify
them, and who have sunk their indepen-
dence so far that, for the chance of getting
a window in a post-ofifice, or a policeman's
178
THE INAUGURATION
uniform, they will march through the dirty
streets under their banners.
However, these men formed but a small
part of this extremely democratic proces-
sion, and their presence in it was soon for-
gotten. It was the soldiers and the blue-
jackets, the militia and the naval reserve,
that the spectators remembered, the men
who carry a United States flag, and not a
banner bearing a man's portrait, and who
serve unselfishly their State and country,
and are willing to follow their leaders to
more dangerous places than the club-room
and the polling-booth.
When the vanguard of the procession
reached the White House, Mr. Cleveland,
who had accompanied the President on
his return journey from the Capitol, but
seated now on his left instead of on his
right, entered the White House perhaps
for the last time, and left it again imme-
diately.
No incident of the inauguration exer-
cises is so significant or dramatic as this
179
THE INAUGURATION
abrupt departure into private life of the
ex- President. There is no farewell speech
for him to make, no post-mortem address
such as the one the Vice - President de-
livers. The ex- President's works must
speak for him, and he departs in silence
and unattended.
On this last occasion, while the new
President walked out to the reviewing-
stand in front of the White House grounds,
and the spectators on the grandstand op-
posite rose to cheer him, Mr. Cleveland
stepped into his carriage at a side door,
and, leaving the house he had occupied for
eight of the best years of his life, drove
away with no more important business be-
fore him than a few days' fishing. The
blare of the bands and the cheers for
his successor in office followed him, but
the faces of the people were turned away ;
they were greeting the new and rising
sun ; and, freed from the terrible responsi-
bilities of office, from abuse and criticism,
and from the glare that falls even more
l8o
REVIEWING THE PROCESSION FROM THE STAND IN FRONT OF
THE WHIl E HOUSE
THE INAUGURATION
impudently upon the President of a re-
public than upon a throne, Mr. Cleveland
was driven, a free man once again, to the
Seventh Street wharf, where a tender with
steam up was awaiting his coming. Two
of his friends hurried him on board, the
ropes were cast off, the captain jingled his
bell into the depths of the engine-room,
and the ex -President glided peacefully
down the Potomac, sorting out his rods
and lines on the deck, and intent only
upon the holiday before him.
Our local historians and political writ-
ers, John Bach McMaster, Woodrow Wil-
son, and Albert Shaw, have already placed
Mr. Cleveland high among the Presidents,
and, as time wears on, and the grievances
and disappointments which explain so
much of the criticism that he has received
shall have passed away, he will be remem-
bered if only for the things he dared to
leave undone. He will take his place in
history as a man more hated and more
respected than any of his immediate pre-
'' I8i
THE INAUGURATION
decessors, and as one of the three great
Presidents of America.
Before the two men had parted at the
White House steps, Mrs. Cleveland re-
ceived Mrs. McKinley on her return from
the Capitol, and put a bunch of flowers
in her hand, and led her to the luncheon
she had prepared for her and her guests,
and then slipped away as quietly as her
husband, to make ready the new home
they have chosen in the pretty old town
of Princeton. And while the new first
lady of the land was receiving the greet-
ings from the populace in front of the
White House, its late mistress was speed-
ing away through the late afternoon twi-
light, her car swamped with the flowers
that had come to her from every part of
the United States, and carrying with her
into her new life in her new home the best
wishes of a great nation.
The inaugural ball was held in the
Pension Building; it was as democratic
in its way as was the parade, and it was
182
THE INAUGURATION
as successful. Any one who paid five
dollars was welcome, and no one after he
had arrived made himself unwelcome. That
is much more than can be said of many
other public balls given for charity or for
the benefit of some organization, and to
which access is more difificult. The most
successful feature of the ball was perhaps
the decoration of the building, the original
character of which— if anything connected
with our pension system can be said to
have a character — was completely hidden
by the most charming and graceful ar-
rangement of white and yellow draperies
and flowering yellow plants and great
green palms and palmettoes. This scheme
of color, of white and yellow with dark
green, was continued over the entire ball-
room.
The Pension Buildino: is arransred
around a great court, which is overhung
with galleries and has a high roof 1 20 feet
from the tiled floor. This court is divided
into smaller courts by rows of immense
TS3
THE INAUGURATION
pillars. On the night of the ball the roof
over each of the three sections was hidden
by streamers of white challis as wide as
the sails of a ship, which were caught up
together in the centre by bunches of white
electric lights, and fell from them in billowy
folds to meet and wind about the pillars.
To one who looked up at the ceiling it
appeared as though he were standing in a
great white tent rather than in a house of
stone and iron, and the effect of the elec-
tric lights against the soft white folds of the
challis was that of yellow diamonds shin-
ing through spun silver. The huge pillars
were treated to resemble onyx, and were
built high about the base with flowering
plants, all of yellow — yellow jonquils, yel-
low tulips, and acacias. Along the galleries
and across the white ceiling crept long del-
icate vines of ivy, and hidden among the
sturdier palms and palmettoes on the floor
were hundreds of tiny electric globes glow-
ing like red and green fire -flies. There
were many uniforms in the crush, and more
184
THE INAUGURATION
gold lace than this country has probably
ever seen gathered into one place before ;
and there were some fine gowns, and some
gowns which were peculiar. A number of
the women wore black silk frocks or their
street dress, but they made up for the
simplicity of these by the brilliancy of the
silk badges with which they had covered
themselves from shoulder to shoulder. The
shoulders of a few other women were their
most conspicuous feature, and they were,
in consequence, objects of the most earnest
interest to many grave-eyed strangers from
the far interior, in frock-coats and white
satin ties, who had read about such things
in the papers, but who disbelieved in them
as they disbelieved in the existence of
bunco-steerers. One stranger had brought
his little child with him, who went to sleep
on his shoulder, and he carried her there
all the evening while he pushed his way
through the crowd, serious and solemn-
eyed, and unconscious that he was in any
way conspicuous.
185
THE INAUGURATION
Women of great social position, as it is
meted out to them in the columns of the
Sunday papers, passed in the crowd un-
recognized and unobserved, while other
women, through a somewhat novel arrange-
ment of fur capes on a silk shirt-waist, or
a gown covered with silk flowers, received
the respectful attention which they de-
served. It was the people's ball, and the
manners of the people, as contrasted with
those of that same " society " which is
chronicled in the papers, were much the
finer of the two. They were not afraid to
enjoy themselves, and they were genial
and unaffected and genuinely polite, in-
troducing all their friends to all of their
other friends whenever they met, while the
men seldom gave an arm to less than three
of the ladies in their care.
There were ambassadors and their wives;
Governors of States surrounded by aides
to the number of a dozen or more, glitter-
ing with gold braids and flashing scab-
bards ; there were beautiful women from
1 86
THE TNAUr.URATION
the South and West, and women from the
sister repubh'cs of Soutli America, with
strange little dark-skinned husbands ; and
there were countless numbers of well-
dressed w.omen whose clothes came from
Europe, and who were anxious to go back
to Europe again as the wives of newly ap-
pointed ministers or secretaries of legation,
and who followed the passing of Mark
Hanna with anxious and agitated eyes.
Just before the President and Mrs. Mc-
Kinley entered the ballroom the commit-
teemen pushed their way through the
crowd and asked the men standing near-
est to them to join hands with the men
next them, and in this way they formed two
long lines of young men who never had
met before, who would probably never meet
again, and who had no interest in common
except their anxiety that the ball should
pass off well. Through these lines of vol-
unteers the President and his wife passed,
followed by the members of his cabinet,
and the people bowed and smiled and
187
THE INAUGURATION
beamed upon them much as the crowd in a
church does when the bride and the groom
come back from the altar up the aisle. In
a foreign country there would have been
soldiers or policemen to push the crowd
back and to clear the way for the ruler of
the nation. How much pleasanter it was
to have the men in the crowd act as their
own police and look after their own Presi-
dent themselves!
The casual picking up of these young
men and pressing them into this particular
service was typical of all of the inaugu-
ration ceremonies. It shows where our
celebration differed from that other great
ceremonial which took place last year at
Moscow.
The coronation ceremony, parade, and
ball were state ceremonials, to pay for which
the people were taxed forty millions of dol-
lars, and at which their part was to stand
behind two rows of soldiers and look at
fireworks in the sky.
The inauguration exercises, the parade,
i88
THE INAUGURATION
and the ball were all a part of a celebration
of the victory of honesty and of principle
for the American people, and at these cer-
emonies the people themselves were the
chief actors.
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
The Illustrations in this Article are Reproductions from Photographs
taken by Mr. Davis
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
THE strategic position of the Greek
and Turkish armies in the late cam-
paign was but little more complicated than
the strategic position of two football teams
when they are lined up for a scrimmage.
When the game began, the Greeks had
possession of the ball, and they rushed it
into Turkish territory, where they lost it
almost immediately on a fumble, and after
that the Turks drove them rapidly down
the field, going around their ends and
breaking through their centre very much
as they pleased.
The Greeks were outnumbered three to
one, but there are many people who think
that they would have run away even had
the number of men on both sides been
193
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
equal. There is, however, no way of prov-
ing that they would have done this, while
it can be proved that they were outnum-
bered, and were nearly always, for that rea-
son, attacked as strongly on the flank as
in the front. This fact should be placed
to their credit side in summing up their
strange conduct. If an eleven from Prince-
ton played three elevens from Yale at the
same time, one can see that the game
would hardly be interesting; and to carry
out the simile still further, and then to drop
it, it was as though this Princeton eleven
was untrained, and had no knowledge of
tricks nor of team-play, and absolutely no
regard for its captain as a captain.
It is a question whether the chief trouble
with the Greeks is not that they are too
democratic to make good soldiers, and too
independent to submit to being led by any
one from either the council-chamber or the
field. Perhaps the most perfect example
of pure democracy that exists anywhere in
the world is found among the Greeks to-
194
WITH Till': GREEK SOLDIERS
day — a state of equality the like of which
is not to be found with us nor in the re-
pubHc of France. Each Greek thinks and
acts independently, and respects his neigh-
bor's opinion just as long as his neighbor
agrees with him. The king sits in cafes
and chats with his subjects, and they buy
the wine he sells and the asparagus he
grows, and in return he purchases their
mutton. My courier, who was a hotel
runner, used to shake hands with the Min-
ister of War and the Minister of the In-
terior, and they called him by his first
name and seemed very glad to meet him.
Newsboys in Athens argued together as to
what the concert of the Powers might do
next, and private soldiers travelled first-
class, and discussed the war with their
officers during the journey in the most
affable and friendly manner. The country
was like a huge debating society. When
these men were called out to act as sol-
diers, almost every private had his own
idea as to how the war should be con-
195
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
ducted. He had a map of the country in
his canvas bag, and as his idea not infre-
quently clashed with the ideas of his su-
periors, there were occasional moments of
confusion. The fact that his officers wore
a few more stars on their collars than he
did, and were called colonel or major, did
not impress him in the least. He regard-
ed such distinctions as mere descriptive
phrases, intended to designate one man
from another, just as streets are named
differently in order to distinguish them,
and he continued to act and to think for
himself, as had been his habit. On the
march to Domokos three privates argued
with a major, who was old enough to have
been the father of all of them, as to whether
or not they should leave the camp to fill
their canteens. The major stamped his
feet and threw his hands above his head
and expostulated frantically, and they
soothed him and tried to persuade him by
various arguments that he was unreason-
able. They treated him respectfully, prob-
196
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
ably on account of his years, but they
showed him clearly that they considered
his premises erroneous and his position
illogical.
It may be argued that discipline is not
the most essential quality in a soldier, and
that sometimes naturally born fighting-men,
with the advantage of greater numbers, can
defeat trained veterans. But the Greeks
were neither born fighters nor trained sol-
diers.
In Greece^every soldier was a little army
by himself, and when he decided that it
was time to turn and run, there was no
familiar elbow-touch to remind him that
he was not alone. He was sure he was
just as intelligent as any one else, and
quite as able to tell when the critical mo-
ment had arrived, and so, naturally, it ar-
rived very often.
This does not mean that all the Greeks
were cowards. That would be an exceed-
ingly absurd thing to suggest. Some of
them, officers and men alike, showed ad-
14 197
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
mirable calmness and courage, and an ex-
cellent knowledge of what they had to do.
But a great many of them knew little of
campaigning, and nothing of fighting. A
boy in the States who has camped out for
one summer in the Adirondacks would
have known better how to care for the
Greek soldiers in the field than did half of
their officers, who had learned what they
knew of war around the cafes in Athens.
I was with one regiment in which almost
every man started for the field in perfect-
ly new shoes. The result was that within
five hours or sooner half of them were
walking barefoot; and when we came to the
first water-tank these men ran ahead and
stuck their bleeding feet into the cool
water, and stamped it full of mud, and
made it quite impossible for any of their
comrades to fill their thirsty canteens.
Whenever we came to water, instead of
holding the men back and sending a de-
tail on ahead to guard the well, and then
calling up a few men from each company
198
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
to fill the canteens for the majority, there
was always a stampede of this sort, and
the water was wasted and much time lost.
These are little things, but they illustrate
as well as more important blunders how
ignorantly the men were handled.
Too many of the Greeks, also, went
forth to war with a most exaggerated idea
of the ease with which a Turkish regiment
can be slaughtered or made to run away;
and when they found that very few Turks
were killed, and that none of them ran
away, the surprise at the discovery quite
upset them, and they became panic-strick-
en, and there was the rout to Larissa in
consequence. The rout to Larissa was as
actual a disaster for the Greeks as bad
ammunition would have been, or an epi-
demic of fever among the troops. We
can remember how the fire in the Charity
Bazaar in Paris affected the Parisians for
weeks after it had occurred, and made
them fearful of entering public places of
amusement, and that the size of audiences
199
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
on account of it suffered all over the
world. A similar terror la)' back in the
mind of each Greek soldier. He felt that
what one Greek had done he might do.
He remembered how his comrades had
hurled their arms away from them, how
they rode each other down, and how their
own artillery left a line of dead and wound-
ed Greeks behind it in its flight. Instead
of assuring himself, in lack of any evidence
to the contrary, that he was going to stand
and fall in his own footprints, he was
haunted with doubts of his courage. "Am
I going to run, as they did at Larissa .?" he
asked himself repeatedly, and he was con-
sidering to what point he could retreat, in-
stead of observing the spot in the, land-
scape to which he would advance. He
kept his fingers feeling and probing at the
pulse of his courage, instead of pressing
them on the hammer of his rifle. If it be
possible to inspire men to deeds of bravery
by calling upon them to remember Mar-
athon or Waterloo or the Alamo, it is
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
easy to understand that the word Larissa,
even though it were whispered by a camp
fire at midnight, might produce an oppo-
site result.
Many people believe that a true under-
standing of the Greek campaign depends
upon an acquaintance with the letters
which passed between the King and his
royal relatives in the courts of Europe.
Without them no one can guess how
much the secret orders he may or may
not have received from the Powers served
to influence the conduct of the war. The
Greek soldiers, at one time, at least, were
undoubtedly of the opinion that they had
been deceived and betrayed by the King at
the demands of the Powers, and that their
commander-in-chief, the Crown-Prince, had
received orders not to give battle, but to
retreat continually. This feeling was as
strong among the people in the towns and
cities as it was among the soldiers in the
fields, and portraits and photographs of
the royal family were defaced and thrown
201
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
out into the street, and in Athens a mob
led by a Deputy marched upon the palace
to assassinate the King, after having helped
itself to arms and ammunition in the dif-
ferent gun-shops. The mob would proba-
bly have done nothing to the King, except
to frighten him a little, and only desired
to make a demonstration, and, as a matter
of history, it did not even see him. For
when the Deputy, at the threshold of the
palace, demanded to be led at once into
the presence of his Majesty, a nervous
aide-de-camp replied through the half-open
door that his Majesty did not receive on
that day. And the Deputy, recognizing
the fact that it is impossible to kill a man
if he is not at home, postponed the idea of
assassination, and explained to the blood-
thirsty mob that for purposes of regicide
it had chosen an inconvenient time. His
Majesty's days for being killed were prob-
ably Tuesdays and Thursdays, between
four and seven.
King George was unfortunate in having
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
been carried beyond his depth by a people
who seem as easily moved as those of a
Spanish- American republic, and the worst
they say of him is that he is a weak man,
and one who plays the part of king badly.
Had he told the people stoutly that they
were utterly unprepared for war — a fact
which no one knew better than himself —
they could not, when they received the
thrashing which he knew must come, have
blamed him for not having warned them
like a true friend. But he did not do that.
He said, from the balcony of the palace,
that, if war should come, he himself would
lead them into Thessaly; and then, by de-
laying the declaration of war, he allowed
the Turkish forces sufficient time in which
to take up excellent positions. Even after
the war began he made no use whatsoever
of the navy. As the Turks had no navy
worth considering, the Greek war-ships in
comparison formed the most important
part of their war equipment. And had their
government, or the Powers, allowed them to
203
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
do SO, the Greek vessels might have seized
any number of Httle Turkish islands and
garrisoned them until peace was declared.
These would have been of great value to
Greece later, when the terms of peace were
being drawn up and indemnities were be-
ins: discussed and demanded. But as it
was, except for the siege of Prevesa, no one
heard of the Greek navy from the begin-
ning of the war to its end.
It is difficult to arouse much sympathy
for the royal family. People of unimagina-
tive minds already suggest that kings and
princes are but relics of the Middle Ages,
and if the kings and princes who still sur-
vive wish to give a reason for their place in
the twentieth century they should at least
show themselves to be men. A prince en-
joys a very comfortable existence ; he is
well paid to be ornamental and tactful, and
not to interfere in affairs of state ; but oc-
casionally there comes the time when he
has to pay for what has gone before by
showing that he is something apart from
204
WITH THE GRKEK SOLDIERS
his subjects — that he is a prince among
men. In the old days the Crown-Prince
was not exempt from exposing himself in
the fighting line. It is true he disguised a
half-dozen other men in armor like his own,
so that he had a seventh of a chance of
escaping recognition. But there was that
one chance out of seven that he would be
the one set upon by the enemy, and that
he would lose his kingdom by an arrow or
a blow from a battle-axe. They led their
subjects in those days ; they did not, at
the first sign of a rebuff, desert them on a
special train.
That, unfortunately, was what the Crown-
Prince Constantine did at Larissa. It was
only right that, both as the heir-apparent
and as commander-in-chief, he should have
taken care to preserve his life. But he
was too careful ; or, to be quite fair to him,
it may have been that he was ill-advised
by the young men on his staff. Still, his
staff was of his own choosing. His chief-
of-staff was a young man known as a lead-
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
er of cotillions in Athens, and who, so 1
was repeatedly informed, has refused to
fight nine duels in a country where that
relic of barbarism is still recognized as an
affair touching a man's honor. It was this
youth who turned the Greek ladies out of
a railroad carriage to make room for the
Prince, and who helped to fill it with his
Highness's linen and dressing-cases. It is
pleasant to remember that one of the demo-
cratic porters at the railroad station was
so indi2:nant at this that he knocked the
aide-de-camp full length on the platform.
One of the Greek papers, in describing the
flight of the Crown-Prince, said, in an edi-
torial, "We are happy to state that on the
arrival of the train it was found that not
one pocket-handkerchief belonging to the
Prince was lost — and so the honor of
Greece is saved." Another paper said,
" Loues the peasant won the race from
Marathon; Constantine the Prince won
the race from Larissa."
" It is given to very few men to carry a
206
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
line to a sinking ship or to place a flag
upon the walls of Lucknow," and even less
frequently than to other men is such a
chance given to a crown-prince ; and when
he fails to take the chance, the conspicu-
ousness of his position makes his failure
just so much the more terrible. When
other men make mistakes they can begin
a new life under a new flag and a new
name at Buenos Ayres or Callao ; but a
crown-prince cannot change his name nor
his flag. Other men, who had no more
lives to spare than has his Royal Highness,
remained in the trenches ; indeed, many of
them went there out of mere idle curiosity,
to see a fight, to take photographs, or to
pick up souvenirs from the field. And
women, too, with little scissors and lancets
dangling like trinkets from their chate-
laines, and red crosses on their arms, stood
where he did not stand. If he had only
walked out and shown himself for a mo-
ment, and spoken to the men and ques-
tioned the officers, and then ridden away
207
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
again, he would have made himself the
most popular man in Greece, and would
have established his dynasty forever in
that country. He did this at Pharsala, but
then it was too late ; every one knew that
when the whole country was calling him a
coward, he would have to be brave the sec-
ond time. And so Constantine must spend
the rest of his life explaining his conduct,
when he might have let one brave act speak
for him. Nicholas, the other prince, who
is a lieutenant in the artillery, was not
seen near his battery during the fight be-
fore the retreat to Larissa ; and as for that
big, bluff, rollicking sea-dog, George, who
is always being photographed in naval
togs, with his cap cocked recklessly over
one ear, he was never heard of from one
end of the campaign to the other. It was
generally reported that he had taken the
navy on a voyage of exploration to the
north pole.
One night, on our way to Volo, an Aus-
tralian correspondent, who was very much
208
r
w
WITH THK GREEK SOLDIERS
of a democrat, and anything but a snob,
was trying to explain and to justify the
conduct of the Crown- Prince at Larissa.
But he either found his audience unsym-
pathetic or sceptical, for at last he laughed
and shrugged his shoulders : " After all,"
he said, " it should mean something even
to-day to be a prince."
I first came up with the Greek soldiers
at Actium, on the Gulf of Arta, where the
artillery and the war-ships were shelling
Prevesa.
The Gulf of Arta has Greece on its one
bank and Turkey on the other, and where
it empties into the Adriatic, there is Pre-
vesa on the Turkish side, and on the Greek
side a solitary stone hut. Below it is the
island of Santa Maura and a town of toy
houses as old and black as Dutch-ovens
and with overhanging, red - tiled roofs.
Santa Maura lies below Corfu and above
Cephalonia, and close to neither ; but those
are the places nearest on the map that are
displayed in type large enough to serve as
209
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
an address. From the Greek bank Pre-
vesa was only a wall of white ramparts
shimmering in the sun, with tall poplars
and pencil-like minarets pointing against
the blue sky ; as seen from the other bank
it was, so they said, a town filled with
hungry people and wounded soldiers and
shattered cannon. The siege of Prevesa
began on the i8th of April, and the Greek
officers on the war-ships continued the siege
until the armistice.
It was hard to believe that war existed
in that part of Greece ; it was difficult to
see how, with such a background, men
could act a part so tragic ; for the scene
was set for a pastoral play — perhaps for a
comic opera. If Ireland is like an emer-
ald, this part of Greece is like an opal ; for
its colors are as fierce and brilliant as are
tliose of the opal, and are hidden, as they
are, with misty white clouds that soften
and beautify them. Against the glaring
blue sky are the snow-topped mountains^
and below the snow -line green pasture-
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
lands glowing with great blocks of purple
furze and yellow buttercups and waving
wheat, that changes when the wind blows,
and is swayed about like waves of smoke.
In the high grass are the light-blue flow-
ers of the flax, on tall, bending stalks, and
white flowers with hearts of yellow, and
miles of scarlet poppies, and above them
tall, dark poplars and the grayish -green
olive-trees. The wind from the Adriatic
and the Gulf of Arta sweeps over this burn-
ing landscape in great, generous waves,
cooling^ the hot air and stirrins: the sfreen
leaves and the high grass and the bending
flowers with the strong, fresh breath of the
sea.
White clouds throw shadows over the
whole as they sweep past or rest on the
hills of gray stones, where the yellow sheep
look, from the path below, like fat grains
of corn spilled on a green billiard cloth.
You may ride for miles through this fair
country and see no moving thing but the
herds of silken -haired goats and yellow
811
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
sheep, and the shepherds leaning on their
long rifles, and looking, in their tights and
sleeveless cloaks and embroidered jackets,
like young princes of the soil.
It is hard to imagine men fighting fierce-
ly and with bloodshot eyes in such a
place ; and, as a matter of fact, no men
were fighting there, except in a measured,
leisurely, and well-bred way. Over in
Thessaly, for all we know here, there was
war, and all that war entails; but by the
Arta the world went on much as it had be-
fore — the sheep-bells tinkled from every
hill-side, the soldiers picnicked under the
shade of the trees, and the bombardment
of Prevesa continued, with interruptions
of a day at a time, and the answering
guns of the Turks returned the compli-
ment in an apologetic and desultory fash-
ion. Sometimes it almost seemed — so bad
was the aim of the Turkish soldiers —
that they were uncertain as to whether
or not they had loaded their pieces, and
were pulling the lanyards in order to find
212
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
out, being too lazy to open the breech and
look.
I rode out one day into the camp at
Actium, where the solitary stone hut
looked across on Prevesa, and Prevesa on
the sea, and found a regiment of artillery
camping out in the bushes, and two offi-
cers and a cable - operator bivouacked in
the hut. A merry sergeant explained that
a correspondent had come all the way from
America to describe their victories; and
the regiment gathered outside the stone
hut and made comments and interrupted
their officers and contradicted them, and
the officers regarded the men kindly and
with the most perfect good feeling. It was
not the sort of discipline that obtains in
other Continental armies, but it was proba-
bly attributable to the scenery — no colonel
could be a martinet under such a sky.
The cable-operator played for us on a gui-
tar, and the major sang second in a rich
bass voice, and the colonel opened tinned
cans of caviare and Danish butter, and the
»* 213
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
army watched us eat with serious and hos-
pitable satisfaction. One man brought
water, and another made chocolate, and a
stern corporal ordered the soldiers away ;
but they knew he was only jesting, and,
after turning around, came back again,
and bowed as one man, and removed their
caps whenever we drank anybody's health.
It reminded one of a camp of volunteers
off for a week of sham-battles in the coun-
try. When I started on my way again the
colonel detailed an escort; and when I
assured him there was no danger, he as-
sured me in return that he was well aware
of that, but that this was a "guard for
honor.'* No man can resist a " guard for
honor," and so part of the army detached
itself and tramped off, picking berries as it
marched, and stopping to help a shepherd
lad " round up " a stray goat, or to watch two
kids fighting for the supremacy of a ledge
of rock. It is impossible to harbor evil
thoughts, even of a Turk who is shelling
your camp, after you have stood for a quar-
214
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
tcr of an hour watching two kids roll each
other off a rock. The state of mind that
follows the one destroys the possibility of
your entertaining the state of mind that is
necessary for the other.
On the next day a company of the loth
Regiment of Infantry left Salagora for the
Five Wells, where there was to be a great
battle that afternoon. We were on Turkish
soil now, but still the soldiers carried them-
selves like boys off on a holiday, and, like
boys, enjoyed it all the more because they
were trespassing on forbidden ground. We
all may have our own ideas as to how an
armed force invades the territory of the
enemy — the alertness with which the men
watch for an ambush, the pickets thrown
out in front, and the scowling faces of the
inhabitants as the victors and invaders
pass. Perhaps, to a vivid imagination, the
situation suggests poisoned wells left be-
hind as mementos, and spiked cannon
abandoned by the road-side, and burning
fields that mark the wake of the flying
315
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
enemy. But we saw none of these things
on that part of the frontier. It is true the
inhabitants of Salagora had abandoned a
few cannon, and (which seemed to cause
more delight to the Greek soldiers) a post-
office full of postal-cards, upon which they
wrote messages to their friends at home,
with the idea of posting them while on
Turkish soil, and so making the Turkish
government unwittingly forward these
evidences of its own humiliation. The
men sang as they marched, and marched
as they pleased, and the country people
that we met saluted them gravely by
touching the forehead and breast. No
one scowled at them, and they feared no
ambush, but jogged along, strung out over
a distance of a quarter of a mile, and only
stopping when the Turkish guns, which
were now behind us, fired across the gulf
at a round fort on a hill in Greece, and a
white puff of smoke drifted lazily after the
ball to see where it had gone. The field
birds, and the myriad of insect life, and the
216
H -
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
low chimes of the sheep-bells so filled the
hot air with the sounds of peace that it
was an effort to believe that the heavy
rumble and thick upheaval of the air be-
hind us came from hot-throated cannon.
One suspected rather that some workmen
were blasting in a neighboring quarry, and
one looked ahead for the man with the red
flag who should warn us of descending
stones. The soldiers halted near mid-day
at a Greek church— for almost all of those
Turks who live on the shores of the Arta
are Christians — and the old priest came
out and kissed each of them on the cheek,
and the conquering heroes knelt and kiss-
ed his hand. Then there was more pic-
nicking, and the men scattered over the
church-yard, and some plucked and cooked
the chickens they had brought with them,
and others slept, stretched out on the
tombstones, and others chatted amicably
and volubly with the Turkish peasants,
who had come, full of curiosity, from the
fields to greet them. And after an hour
217
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
we moved on again ; but before we left the
village, a Turk ran ahead and lifted the
glass from the front of the picture of the
Saviour that hung under a great tree, and
his friends the enemy broke ranks, and,
with their caps in their hands and crossing
themselves, knelt and kissed the picture
that the Turk held out to them, and pray-
ed that his brother Turks might not kill
them a few hours later at the Five Wells.
But we never saw the Five Wells ; for
within an hour's ride from it we met
peasants fleeing down the road, bent un-
der their household goods, and with wild
tales that the battle had already gone to
the Turks, and that all the Greek troops
were retreating on the city of Arta. And
soon we came in sight of long lines of
men crawling into the valley from all
sides, and looking no larger than tin sol-
diers against the high walls of the monn-
tain. It was a leisurely withdrawal, and
no one seemed to know the reason for it.
A colonel, with his staff about him, shrug-
218
WITH THE r.KKEK SOLDIERS
ged his shoulders when I rode up and
asked why the battle we had marched so
far to see had been postponed. The com-
mander-in-chief had ordered him to return,
he said, for what reason he knew not.
" But I am coming back again," he added,
cheerfully.
The road to Arta was not wider than a
two-wheeled ox-cart, and down it, for many
hours, and until long after the stars began
to show, poured and pressed an unbroken
column of artillery and cavalry and infan-
try, which latter carried their guns as they
chose and walked in no order. Men sat
by the road-side, panting in the heat, or
stretched sleeping in the wheat-fields, or
splashed in the mud around some stone
well, where a village maiden dipped the
iron bucket again and again, and filled
their canteens, and smiled upon them all
with equal favor. Now and then a courier
would break through the cloud of dust,
taking outline gradually, like an impression
on a negative, his brass buttons showing
219
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
first in the sunlight, and then the head of
the horse, and then the rider, red -faced
and powdered white, who would scatter
the column into the hedges, and then dis-
appear with a rattle and scurry of hoofs
into the curtain of dust. Commissariat
wagons stuck in the ruts, and the commis-
sariat mule, that acts in Albania apparent-
ly just as he does on the alkali plains of
Texas, blocked the narrow way, and blows
and abuse failed to move him. To add to
the confusion, over a thousand Christian
peasants chose that inopportune time to
come into Arta for safety, and brought
their flocks with them. So that, in the
last miles of the road, sheep and goats
jostled the soldiers for the right of way,
which they shared with little donkeys, carry-
ing rolls of tents and bedding, and women,
who in this country come next after the
four-legged beasts of burden, staggering
under great iron pots and iron-bound boxes.
Little children carried children nearly as
big as themselves, and others lay tossed
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
on the packs of bedding, and others slept
lashed to their mothers' shoulders in queer,
three-cornered,trough-like cradles. The men
and boys, costumed like grand-opera brig-
ands, dashed shrieking in and out of the
mob, chasing back the goats and sheep
that had made a break for liberty, and the
soldiers helped them, charging the sheep
with their bayonets, and laughing and
shouting as though it were some kind of
game. Over all the dust rose and hung
in choking clouds, through which the sun
cast a yellow glare. And so for many hours
the two armies of peasants and of soldiers
panted and pushed and struggled towards
the high narrow bridge that guards the
way to Arta.
It is such a bridge as Horatius with two
others might have held against an army;
it rises like a rainbow in the air, a great
stone arch as steep as an inverted V. It
is made of white stone, with high parapets.
Into this narrow gorge cannon and ammu-
nition wagons, goats and sheep, little girls
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
carrying other little girls, mules loaded
with muskets, mules hidden under packs
of green fodder, officers struggling with
terrified horses that threatened to leap
with them over the parapet into the river
below, peasants tugging at long strings of
ponies, women bent to the earth under
pans and kettles, and company after com-
pany of weary and sweating soldiers pushed
and struggled for hours together, while far
out on either side hordes of the weaker
brothers, who, leaving it to others to de-
monstrate the survival of the fittest, had
dropped by the way -side, lay spread out
like a great fan, but still from time to time
feeding the bridge, until it stretched above
the river like a human chain of men and
beasts linked together in inextricable cori-
fusion.
Of course it was a feast day when this
happened. It always is a feast day of the
Greek Church when such an event can be
arranged to particularly inconvenience the
greatest number of people. There were
222
Wnil THE GREEK SOLDIERS
three in succession at Moscow when the
Czar was crowned, and for that time no
bank was opened, and every one borrowed
from every one else or went hungry. And
no shop was opened in Arta that night
when the army retreated upon it, and offi-
cers and men packed the streets until day-
light, beating at the closed shutters and
offering their last drachma for a slice of
bread, while the shepherds camped out
with their flocks on the sidewalks and in
the public squares.
But the wine -shops were open, and in
and out of them the soldiers and their offi-
cers tramped and pushed, hungry and foot-
sore and thirsty; and though no "lights
out " sounded that night, or if it did no
one heard it, there was not a drunken man,
not a quarrelsome man, in that great mob
that overwhelmed and swamped the city.
Late at night, when I turned in on a
floor that I shared with three others, the
men were still laughing and singing in the
streets, and greeting old friends like lost
223
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
brothers, and utterly unconscious of the
shadow of war that hung over them, and
of the fact that the Turks were already far
advanced on Greek soil, and were threat-
ening Pharsala, Velestinos, and Volo.
The Turks had made three attacks on
Velestinos on three different days, and had
been repulsed each time. A week later,
on the 4th of May, they came back again,
to the number of ten thousand, and brought
four batteries with them, and the fighting
continued for two days more. This was
called the second battle of Velestinos. In
the afternoon of the 5th the Crown-Prince
withdrew from Pharsala to take up a
stronger position at Domokos, and the
Greeks under General Smolensk!, the mili-
tary hero of the campaign, were forced to
retreat, and the Turks came in, and, ac-
cording to their quaint custom, burned the
village and marched on to Volo. John
Bass, an American correspondent, and
myself were keeping house in the village,
in the home of the mayor. He had fled
224
AN AMERICAN WAR CORRKSPONDKNT (jOHN liASS) DIRI-XTING
TllK I'lRK OK VHE GREEKS
VF.I.ESTINOS
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
from the town, as had nearly all of the vil-
lagers ; and as we liked the appearance of
his house, I gave Bass a leg up over the
wall around his garden, and Bass opened
the gate, and we climbed in through his
front window. It was like the invasion of
the home of the Dusantes by Mrs. Leeks
and Mrs. Aleshine, and, like them, we were
constantly making discoveries of fresh
treasure-trove. Sometimes it was in the
form of a cake of soap or a tin of coffee,
and once it was the mayor's fluted petti-
coats, which we tried on, and found very
heavy. We could not discover what he
did for pockets. All of these things, and
the house itself, were burned to ashes, we
were told, a few hours after we retreated,
and we feel less troubled now at having
made such free use of them than we did
at the time of our occupation.
On the morning of the 4th we were
awakened by the firing of cannon from a
hill just over our heads, and we both got
up and shook hands in the middle of the
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
room. There was to be a battle, and we
were the only correspondents on the spot.
As I represented the London Times, Bass
was the only representative of an Amer-
ican newspaper who saw this battle from
its beginning to its end.
We found all the hills to the left of
the town topped with long lines of men
crouching in little trenches. There were
four rows of hills. If you had measured
the distance from one hill-top to the next,
they would have been from one hundred
to three hundred yards distant from one
another. In between the hills were gul-
lies, or little valleys, and the beds of
streams that had dried up in the hot sun.
These valleys were filled with high grass
that waved about in the breeze and was
occasionally torn up and tossed in the air
by a shell. The position of the Greek
forces was very simple. On the top of
each hill was a trench two or three feet
deep and some hundred yards long. The
earth that had been scooped out to make
226
Wnil THE GREEK SOLDIERS
the trench was packed on the edge facing
the enemy, and on the top of that some of
the men had piled stones, through which
they poked their rifles. When a shell
struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter
these stones in among the men, and they
did quite as much damage as the shells.
Back of these trenches, and down that side
of the hill which was farther from the en-
emy, were the reserves, who sprawled at
length in the long grass, and smoked and
talked and watched the shells dropping
into the gully at their feet.
The battle, which lasted two days, opened
in a sudden and terrific storm of hail. But
the storm passed as quickly as it came,
leaving the trenches running with water,
like the gutters of a city street after a
spring shower; and the men soon sopped
them up with their overcoats and blank-
ets, and in half an hour the sun had dried
the wet uniforms, and the field-birds had
begun to chirp again, and the grass was
warm and fragrant. The sun was terribly
227
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
hot. There was no other day during that
entire brief campaign when its glare was so
intense or the heat so suffocating. The
men curled up in the trenches, with their
heads pressed against the damp earth, pant-
ing and breathing heavily, and the heat-
waves danced and quivered about them,
making the plain below flicker like a pict-
ure in a cinematograph.
From time to time an officer would rise
and peer down into the great plain, shading
his eyes with his hands, and shout some-
thing at them, and they would turn quickly
in the trench and rise on one knee. And
at the shout that followed they would fire
four or five rounds rapidly and evenly, and
then, at a sound from the officer's whistle,
would drop back again and pick up the
cigarettes they had placed in the grass
and begin leisurely to swab out their rifles
with a piece of dirty rag on a cleaning-
rod. Down in the plain below there was
apparently nothing at which they could
shoot except the great shadows of the
223
wrrii THE greek soldiers
clouds drifting across the vast checker-
board of green and yellow fields, and dis-
appearing finally between the mountain-
passes beyond. In some places there were
square dark patches that might have been
bushes, and nearer to us than these were
long lines of fresh earth, from which steam
seemed to be escaping in little wisps.
What impressed us most of what we could
see of the battle then was the remarkable
number of cartridges the Greek soldiers
wasted in firing into space, and the fact
that they had begun to fire at such long
range that, in order to get the elevation,
they had placed the rifle -butt under the
armpit instead of against the shoulder.
Their sights were at the top notch. The
cartridges reminded one of corn-cobs jump-
ing out of a corn-sheller, and it was inter-
esting when the bolts were shot back to
see a hundred of them pop up into the air
at the same time, flashing in the sun as
though they were glad to have done their
work and to get out again. They rolled
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
by the dozens underfoot, and twinkled in
the grass, and when one shifted his posi-
tion in the narrow trench, or stretched his
cramped legs, they tinkled musically. It
was like wading in a gutter filled with
thimbles.
Then there began a concert which came
from just overhead — a concert of jarring
sounds and little whispers. The "shriek-
ing shrapnel," of which one reads in the
description of every battle, did not sound
so much like a shriek as it did like the
jarring sound of telegraph wires when
some one strikes the pole from which
they hang, and when they came very close
the noise was like the rushing sound that
rises between two railroad trains when
they pass each other in opposite direc-
tions and at great speed. After a few
hours we learned by observation that when
a shell sang overhead it had already struck
somewhere else, which was comforting,
and which was explained, of course, by
the fact that the speed of the shell is so
230
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
nuich greater than the rate at which sound
travels. The bullets were much more dis-
turbing; they seemed to be less open in
their warfare, and to steal up and sneak
by, leaving no sign, and only whispering as
they passed. They moved under a cloak
of invisibility, and made one feel as though
he were the blind man in a game of blind-
man's-buff, where every one tapped him
in passing, leaving him puzzled and igno-
rant as to whither they had gone and
from what point they would come next.
The bullets sounded like rustling silk, or
like humming-birds on a warm summer's
day, or like the wind as it is imitated on
the stage of a theatre. Any one who has
stood behind the scenes when a storm is
progressing on the stage, knows the little
wheel wound with silk that brushes against
another piece of silk, and which produces
the whistling effect of the wind. At Vel-
estinos, when the firing was very heavy,
it was exactly as though some one were
turning one of these silk wheels, and so
231
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
rapidly as to make the whistling contin-
uous.
When this concert opened, the officers
shouted out new orders, and each of the
men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel,
and when he fired again, rubbed the butt
of his gun snugly against his shoulder.
The huge green blotches on the plain had
turned blue, and now we could distinguish
that they moved, and that they were mov-
ing steadily forward. Then they would
cease to move, and a little later would be
hidden behind great puffs of white smoke,
which were followed by a flash of flame;
and still later there would come a dull re-
port. At the same instant something would
hurl itself jarring through the air above
our heads, and by turning on one elbow
we could see a sudden upheaval in the sunny
landscape behind us, a spurt of earth and
stones like a miniature geyser, which was
filled with broken branches and tufts of
grass and pieces of rock. As the Turkish
aim grew better these volcanoes appeared
232
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
higher up the hill, creeping nearer and
nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the
second trench until the shells hammered
it at last again and again, sweeping it
away and cutting great gashes in it,
through which we saw the figures of men
caught up and hurled to one side, and
others flinging themselves face downward
as though they were diving into water;
and at the same instant in our own trench
the men would gasp as though they had
been struck too, and then becoming con-
scious of having done this would turn and
smile sheepishly at each other, and crawl
closer into the burrows they had made in
the earth.
From where we sat on the edge of the
trench, with our feet among the cartridges,
we could, by leaning forward, look over
the piled-up earth into the the plain below,
and soon, without any aid from field-glass-
es, we saw the blocks of blue break up
into groups of men. These men came
across the ploughed fields in long, widely
233
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
opened lines, walking easily and leisurely,
as though they were playing golf or sow-
ing seed in the furrows. The Greek rifles
crackled and flashed at the lines, but the
men below came on quite steadily, picking
their way over the furrows and appearing
utterly unconscious of the seven thousand
rifles that were calling on them to halt.
They were advancing directl}^ towards a
little sugar-loaf hill, on the top of which
was a mountain battery perched like a
tiara on a woman's head. It was throw-
ing one shell after another in the very path
of the men below, but the Turks still con-
tinued to pick their way across the field,
without showing any regard for the moun-
tain battery. It was worse than threaten-
ing; it seemed almost as though they
meant to insult us. If they had come up
on a run they would not have appeared so
contemptuous, for it would have looked
then as though they were trying to escape
the Greek fire, or that they were at least
interested in what was going forward.
234
?J»^'^'
'4»
^il
ii ',' .
i.^
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
But the steady advance of so many men,
each plodding along by himself, with his
head bowed and his gun on his shoulder,
was aggravating to a degree.
There was a little village at the foot of
the hill. It was so small that no one had
considered it. It was more like a collec-
tion of stables gathered round a residence
than a town, and there was a wall com-
pletely encircling it, with a gate in the
wall that faced us. Suddenly the doors
of this gate were burst open from the in-
side, and a man in a fez ran through them,
followed by many more. The first man
was waving a sword, and a peasant in
petticoats ran at his side and pointed up
with his hand at our trench. Until that
moment the battle had lacked all human
interest; we might have been watching a
fight against the stars or the man in the
moon, and, in spite of the noise and clat-
ter of the Greek rifles, and the ghostlike
whispers and the rushing sounds in the
air, there was nothing to remind us of any
235
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
other battle of which we had heard or
read. But we had seen pictures of officers
waving swords, and we knew that the fez
was the sign of the Turk — of the enemy —
of the men who were invading Thessaly,
who were at that moment planning to
come up a steep hill on which we hap-
pened to be sitting and attack the people
on top of it. And the spectacle at once
became comprehensible, and took on the
human interest it had lacked. The men
seemed to feel this, for they sprang up
and began cheering and shouting, and
fired in an upright position, and by so do-
ing exposed themselves at full length to
the fire from the men below. The Turks
in front of the village ran back into it
again, and those in the fields beyond turn-
ed and began to move away, but in that
same plodding, aggravating fashion. They
moved so leisurely that there was a pause
in the noise along the line, while the men
watched them to make sure that they were
really retreating. And then there was a
236
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
long cheer, after which they all sat down,
breathing deeply, and wiping the sweat and
dust across their faces, and took long pulls
at their canteens.
The different trenches were not all en-
gaged at the same time. They acted ac-
cording to the individual judgment of
their commanding officer, but always for
the general good. Sometimes the fire of
the enemy would be directed on one par-
ticular trench, and it would be impossible
for the men in that trench to rise and re-
ply without having their heads carried
away; so they would lie hidden, and the
men in the trenches flanking them would
act in their behalf, and rake the enemy
from the front and from every side, un-
til the fire on that trench was silenced,
or turned upon some other point. The
trenches stretched for over half a mile in
a semicircle, and the little hills over which
they ran lay at so many different angles,
and rose to such different heights, that
sometimes the men in one trench fired di-
237
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
rectly over the heads of their own men.
From many trenches in the first line it
was impossible to see any of the Greek
soldiers except those immediately beside
you. If you looked back or beyond on
either hand there was nothing to be seen
but high hills topped with fresh earth, and
the waving yellow grass, and the glaring
blue sky.
General Smolenski directed the Greeks
from the plain to the far right of the town;
and his presence there, although none of
the men saw him nor heard of him direct-
ly throughout the entire day, was more
potent for good than would have been the
presence of five thousand other men held in
reserve. He was a mile or two miles away
from the trenches, but the fact that he was
there, and that it was Smolenski who was
giving the orders, was enough. Few had
ever seen Smolenski, but his name was
sufficient; it was as effective as is Mr.
Bowen's name on a Bank of England note.
It gave one a pleasant feeling to know.
238
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
that he was somewhere within call ; you
felt there would be no "routs" nor stam-
pedes while he was there. And so for
two days those seven thousand men lay
in the trenches, repulsing attack after at-
tack of the Turkish troops, suffocated with
the heat and chilled with sudden showers,
and swept unceasingly by shells and bullets
— partly because they happened to be good
men and brave men, but largely because
they knew that somewhere behind them
a stout, bull-necked soldier was sitting on
a camp-stool, watching them through a
pair of field-glasses.
Towards mid-day you would see a man
leave the trench with a comrade's arm
around him, and start on the long walk to
the town where the hospital corps were
waitinQT for him. These men did not wear
their wounds with either pride or bragga-
docio, but regarded the wet sleeves and
shapeless arms in a sort of wondering sur-
prise. There was much more of surprise
than of pain in their faces, and they seemed
239
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
to be puzzling as to what they had done
in the past to deserve such a punishment.
Other men were carried out of the trench
and laid on their backs on the high grass,
staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun,
and with their limbs fallen into unfamiliar
poses. They lay so still, and they were so
utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and
the anxious energy around them that one
grew rather afraid of them and of their su-
periority to their surroundings. The sun
beat on them, and the insects in the grass
wavine above them buzzed and hummed,
or burrowed in the warm moist earth upon
which they lay ; over their heads the invis-
ible carriers of death jarred the air with
shrill crescendoes, and near them a com-
rade sat hacking with his bayonet at a
lump of hard bread. He sprawled con-
tentedly in the hot sun, with humped
shoulders and legs far apart, and with his
cap tipped far over his eyes. Every now
and again he would pause, with a piece of
cheese balanced on the end of his kuife-
240
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
blade, and look at the twisted figures by
him on the grass, or he would dodge in-
voluntarily as a shell swung low above his
head, and smile nervously at the still forms
on either side of him that had not moved.
Then he brushed the crumbs from his
jacket and took a drink out of his hot can-
teen, and looking again at the sleeping fig-
ures pressing down the long grass beside
him, crawled back on his hands and knees
to the trench and picked up his waiting
rifle.
The dead gave dignity to what the other
men were doing, and made it noble, and,
from another point of view, quite senseless.
For their dying had proved nothing. Men
who could have been much better spared
than they, were still alive in the trenches,
and for no reason but through mere dumb
chance. There was no selection of the
unfittest; it seemed to be ruled by unrea-
soning luck. A certain number of shells
and bullets passed through a certain area
of space, and men of different bulks
241
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
blocked that space in different places. If
a man happened to be standing in the line
of a bullet he was killed and passed into
eternity, leaving a wife and children, per-
haps, to mourn him. " Father died," these
children will say, " doing his duty." As a
matter of fact, father died because he hap-
pened to stand up at the wrong moment,
or because he turned to ask the man on
his right for a match, instead of leaning
towards the left, and he projected his bulk
of two hundred pounds where a bullet, fired
by a man who did not know him and who
had not aimed at him, happened to want
the right of way. One of the two had to
give it, and as the bullet would not, the
soldier had his heart torn out. The man
who sat next to me happened to move to
fill his cartridge-box just as the bullet that
wanted the space he had occupied passed
over his bent shoulder; and so he was
not killed, but will live for sixty years,
perhaps, and will do much good or much
evil. Another man in the same trench
242
WITH IIIE GREEK SOLDIERS
sat up to clean out his rifle, and had his
arm in the air driving the cleaning-rod
down the barrel, when a bullet passed
through his lungs, and the gun fell across
his face, with the rod sticking in it, and he
pitched forward on his shoulder quite dead.
If he had not cleaned his gun at that mo-
ment he would probably be alive in Athens
now, sitting in front of a cafe and fighting
the war over again. Viewed from that
point, and leaving out the fact that God
ordered it all, the fortunes of the game
of war seemed as capricious as matching
pennies, and as impersonal as the wheel at
Monte Carlo. In it the brave man did not
win because he was brave, but because he
was lucky. A fool and a philosopher are
equal at a game of dice. And these men
who threw dice with death were interest-
ing to watch, because, though they gam-
bled for so great a stake, they did so
unconcernedly and without flinching, and
without apparently appreciating the seri-
ousness of the game.
243
WITH THE GREEK SOLMERS
There was a red -headed, freckled peas-
ant boy, in dirty petticoats, who guided
Bass and myself to the trenches. He was
one of the few peasants who had not run
away, and as he had driven sheep over
every foot of the hills, he elected to guide
the soldiers through those places where
they were best protected from the bullets
of the enemy. He did this all day, and
was always, whether coming or going, un-
der a heavy fire ; but he enjoyed that fact,
and he seemed to regard the battle only as
a delightful change in the quiet routine of
his life, as one of our own country boys at
home would regard the coming of the spring
circus or the burning of a neighbor's barn.
He ran dancing ahead of us, pointing to
where a ledge of rock offered a natural
shelter, or showing us a steep gully where
the bullets could not fall. When they came
very near him he would jump high in the
air, not because he was startled, but out of
pure animal joy in the excitement of it,
and he would frown importantly and shake
244
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
his red curls at us, as though to say : " I
told you to be careful. Now, you see.
Don't let that happen again." We met
him many times during the two days, es-
corting different companies of soldiers
from one point to another, as though they
were visitors to his estate. When a shell
broke, he would pick up a piece and pre-
sent it to the officer in charge, as though
it were a flower he had plucked from his
own garden, and which he wanted his
guest to carry away with him as a souve-
nir of his visit. Some one asked the boy
if his father and mother knew where he
was, and he replied, with amusement, that
they had run away and deserted him, and
that he had remained because he wished
to see what a Turkish army looked like.
He was a much more plucky boy than
the overrated Casablanca, who may have
stood on the burning deck whence all
but him had fled because he could not
swim, and because it was with him a
choice of being either burned or drowned.
245
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
This boy stuck to the burning deck when
it was possible for him at any time to
have walked away and left it burning.
But he stayed on because he was amused,
and because he was able to help the sol-
diers from the city in safety across his
native' heath. I wrote something about
him at the time, but I do not apologize for
telling about him again, because he was
the best part of the show, and one of the
bravest Greeks on the field. He will grow
up to be something fine, no doubt, and his
spirit will rebel against having to spend
his life watching his father's sheep. He
may even win the race from Marathon.
It would be an excellent thing for Greece
if some one discovered that, in spite of the
twenty years discrepancy in their ages, he
and the Crown - Prince had been changed
at birth.
Another Greek who was a most inter-
esting figure to us was a Lieutenant Am-
broise Frantzis. He was in command of
the mountain battery on the flat, round
246
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
top of the high hill. On account of its
height the place seemed much nearer to
the sun than any other part of the world,
and the heat there was three times as fierce
as in the trenches below. When you had
climbed to the top of this hill it was like
standing on a roof-garden, or as though
you were watching a naval battle from the
mast-head of one of the battle-ships. The
top of the hill was not unlike an immense
circus ring in appearance. The piled-up
earth around its circular edge gave that
impression, and the glaring yellow wheat
that was tramped into the glaring yellow
soil, and the blue ammunition-boxes scat-
tered about, helped out the idea. It was
an exceedingly busy place, and the smoke
drifted across it continually, hiding us from
one another in a curtain of flying yellow
dust, while over our heads the Turkish
shells raced after each other so rapidly
that they beat out the air like the branches
of a tree in a storm. On account of its
height, and the glaring heat, and the shells
247
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
passing, and the Greek guns going off
and then turning somersaults, it was not a
place suited for meditation ; but Ambroise
Frantzis meditated there as though he were
in his own study. He was a very young
man and very shy, and he was too busy to
consider his own safety, or to take time, as
the others did, to show that he was not
considering it. Some of the other ofHcers
stood up on the breastworks and called
the attention of the men to what they
were doing ; but as they did not wish the
men to follow their example in this, it was
difficult to see what they expected to gain
by their braggadocio. Frantzis was as un-
concerned as an artist painting a big pict-
ure in his studio. The battle plain below
him was his canvas, and his nine mountain-
guns were his paint-brushes. And he paint-
ed out Turks and Turkish cannon with
the same concentrated, serious expression
of countenance that you see on the face of
an artist when he bites one brush between
his lips and with another wipes out a false
243
WITH lliE GREEK SOLDIERS
iine or a touch of the wrong color. You
have seen an artist cock his head on one
side, and shut one eye and frown at his can-
vas, and then select several brushes and
mix different colors and hit the canvas a
bold stroke, and then lean back to note the
effect. Frantzis acted in just that way.
He would stand with his legs apart and
his head on one side, pulling meditatively
at his pointed beard, and then he would
take a closer look through his field-glasses,
and then select the three guns which he
had decided would give him the effect that
he wanted to produce, and he would pro-
duce that effect. When the shot struck
plump in the Turkish lines, and we could
see the earth leap up into the air like gey-
sers of muddy water, and every one would
wave his cap and cheer, Frantzis would
only smile uncertainly, and begm again to
puzzle out fresh combinations with the aid
of his field-glasses.
The battle that had begun in a storm of
hail ended on the first day in a storm of
249
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
bullets that had been held in reserve by
the Turks, and which were let off just after
sundown. They came from a natural trench,
formed by the dried-up bed of a stream
which lay just below the hill on which the
first Greek trench was situated. There
were bushes growing on the bank of the
stream nearest to the Greek Hnes, and these
hid the men who occupied it. Throughout
the day there had been an irritating fire
from this trench from what appeared to be
not more than a dozen rifles, but we could
see that it was fed from time to time with
many boxes of ammunition, which were
carried to it on the backs of mules from
the Turkish position a half-mile farther to
the rear. Bass and a corporal took a great
aversion to this little group of Turks, not
because there were too many of them to
be disregarded, but because they were so
near; and Bass kept the corporal's ser*
vices engaged in firing into it, and in dis-
couraging the ammunition - mules when
they were being driven in that direction.
250
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
Our Ci)rporal was a sharp-shooter, and, ac-
cordingly, felt his superiority to his com-
rades ; and he had that cheerful contempt
for his officers that all true Greek soldiers
enjoy, and so he never joined in the volley-
firing, but kept his ammunition exclusively
for the dozen men behind the bushes and
for the mules. He waged, as it were, a
little battle on his own account. The other
men rose as commanded and fired regular
volleys, and sank back again, but he fixed
his sights to suit his own idea of the range,
and he rose when he was ready to do so,
and fired whenever he thought best. When
his officer, who kept curled up in the hol-
low of the trench, commanded him to lie
down, he would frown and shake his head
at the interruption, and paid no further
attention to the order. He was as much
alone as a hunter on a mountain peak
stalking deer, and whenever he fired at
the men in the bushes he would swear
softly, and when he fired at the mules he
would chuckle and laugh with delight
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
and content. The mules had to cross a
ploughed field in order to reach the bush-
es, and so we were able to mark where his
bullets struck, and we could see them skip
across the field, kicking up the dirt as they
advanced, until they stopped the mule al-
together, or frightened the man who was
leading it into a disorderly retreat.
It appeared later that instead of there
being but twelve men in these bushes
there were six hundred, and that they were
hiding there until the sun set in order to
make a final attack on the first trench.
They had probably argued that at sunset
the strain of the day's work would have
told on the Greek morale, that the men's
nerves would be jerking and their stomachs
aching for food, and that they would be
ready for darkness and sleep, and in no
condition to repulse a fresh and vigorous
attack. So, just as the sun sank, and the
officers were counting the cost in dead and
wounded, and the men were gathering up
blankets and overcoats, and the firing from
252
WITH THE CREEK SOLDIERS
the Greek lines had almost ceased, there
came a fierce rattle from the trench to the
right of us, like a watch-dog barking the
alarm, and the others took it up from all
over the hill, and when we looked down
into the plain below to learn what it meant,
we saw it blue with men, who seemed to
have sprung from the earth. They were
clambering from the bed of the stream,
breaking through the bushes, and forming
into a long line, which, as soon as formed,
was at once hidden at regular intervals by
flashes of flame that seemed to leap from
one gun -barrel to the next, as you have
seen a current of electricity run along a
line of gas-jets. In the dim twilight these
flashes were much more blinding than
they had been in the glare of the sun, and
the crash of the artillery coming on top of
the silence was the more fierce and terrible
by the contrast. The Turks were so close
on us that the first trench could do litde to
help itself, and the men huddled against it
while their comrades on the surrounding
253
AYITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
hills fought for them, their volleys passing
close above our heads, and meeting the
rush of the Turkish bullets on the way, so
that there was now one continuous whist-
ling shriek, like the roar of the wind
through the rigging of a ship in a storm.
If a man had raised his arm above his
head his hand would have been torn off.
It had come up so suddenly that it was
like two dogs springing at each others'
throats, and in a greater degree it had
something of the sound of two wild animals
struggling for life. Volley answered vol-
ley as though with personal hate — one
crashing in upon the roll of the other, or
beating it out of recognition with the burst-
ing roar of heavy cannon. At the same
instant all of the Turkish batteries opened
with great, ponderous, booming explosions,
and the little mountain-guns barked and
snarled and shrieked back at them, and the
rifle volleys crackled and shot out blister-
ins: flames, while the air was filled with in-
visible express trains that shook and jarred
254
WITH TIIK GREEK SOLDIERS
it and crashed into one another, bursting
and shrieking and groaning. It seemed
as though you were lying in a burning
forest, with giant tree trunks that had with-
stood the storms of centuries crashing and
falling around your ears, and sending up
great showers of sparks and flame. This
lasted for five minutes or less, and then the
death -grip seemed to relax, the volleys
came brokenly, like a man panting for
breath, the bullets ceased to sound with
the hiss of escaping steam, and rustled aim-
lessly by, and from hill-top to hill-top the
officers' whistles sounded as though a
sportsman were calling off his dogs. The
Turks withdrew into the coming night,
and the Greeks lay back, panting and
sweating, and stared open-eyed at one
another, like men who had looked for a
moment into hell, and had come back to
the world again.
The next day was like the first, except
that by five o'clock in the afternoon the
Turks appeared on our left flank, crawling
255
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
across the hills like an invasion of great
ants, and the Greek army that had made
the two best and most dignified stands
of the war at Velestinos withdrew upon
Halmyros, and the Turks poured into the
village and burned it, leaving nothing
standing save two tall Turkish minarets
that they had built many years before,
when Thessaly belonged to the Sultan.
There have been many Turkish mina-
rets within the last two years standing
above burning villages and deserted homes
all over Asia Minor and Armenia. They
have looked down upon the massacre of
twenty thousand people within these last
two years, and upon the destruction of no
one knows how many villages. If the
five Powers did not support these mina-
rets, they would crumble away and fall to
pieces. Greece tried to upset them, but
she was not brave enough, nor wise enough,
nor strong enough, and so they still stand,
as these two stand at Velestinos, pointing
256
WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS
to the sky above the ruins of the pret-
ty village. Some people think that all of
them have been standing quite long enough
— that it is time they came down forever.
THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE
THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE
AS the day for celebrating the Dia-
. mond Jubilee drew nearer, the inter-
est in it increased in proportion, and fed
on itself, spreading and growing until it
overwhelmed every other interest of the
British Empire. To the people of London
the signs of its approach were only too ob-
vious, but long before it had given any
outward warning of its coming in that
city, men were already working to make it
a success, not in the Lord Chamberlain's
office alone, but in barracks and work-
shops, in fields and in ship-yards, and it
had upset values and demoralized trade in
certain avenues all over the wide world.
So far in advance did the people prepare
for its coming that managers of hotels in
lij 261
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
London bought up whole fields before the
green stuffs they would produce later had
been planted and while the ground was
covered with snow. An invitation to dine
on a certain night in June was sent to the
colonial" premiers in January, six months
before the dinner was cooked ; and on ac-
count of the expected presence in London
of an additional million and a half of people,
food stuffs to feed them were imported
months before, and freight rates from the
River Plate and New Zealand rose thirty per
cent, in consequence. This fact alone, which
comes from the underwriters, suggests how
far-reaching were the effects of the Jubilee,
and also how tightly the world is now knit
together, since a street parade in London
disturbs traffic in Auckland and on the
Bay of Plenty. The people in London
regarded the celebration itself from two
widely different points of view — some were
for putting themselves as far away from it
as possible, while the one idea of the oth-
ers was to use their influence and money
262
THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE
to see it all, and to the best advantage.
So earnest were the former in their efforts to
escape that all of the steam-launches on the
Thames were hired for Jubilee Day many
weeks in advance ; while for the use of the
others every window facing the route of
the procession was put at their disposal,
either by invitation or at prices ranging
from five dollars to five hundred. One
house in Piccadilly was rented for the
week to an American at ten thousand dol-
lars. A room facing St. Paul's Cathedral,
in front of which the chief ceremony of the
day occurred, was advertised at twenty-five
hundred dollars; seats on a roof at the
same place were sold for fifty dollars each ;
and, in order to obtain room for a stand
near by, an entire building was torn down,
the lessees contracting to replace it after
the Jubilee with another.
For a month previous to the Jubilee this
speculation in windows and stands seemed
to be the chief means in London of mak-
ing money. It was like a miniature South
263
THE queen's jubilee
Sea bubble, or the late gamble in Kaffirs;
syndicate after syndicate bought up the
building-lots and half-finished houses bor-
dering on the route of the procession, and
came into the market offering seats at the
best place from which to see it, which
seemed to be at every possible point along
the entire route. The prices asked by
these gentlemen had their effect, and soon
there was hardly a building of any sort
that faced or was even near the route that
was not converted into a stand for specta-
tors. Churches built huge structures over
their graveyards that towered almost to
the steeples, and theatres, hotels, restau-
rants, and shops of every description were
so covered with scaffoldings that it was
impossible to distinguish a book-store from
a public-house, so enveloped were they by
planks and price-lists of seats. Some of
the shopkeepers advertised " free " seats to
the most generous purchasers of their
wares, and others offered luncheon and
dinner, with the choice of "champagne or
264
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
tea," to possible patrons. Landlords and
householders along the route gave notice
to tenants of months' occupation whose
windows faced the streets to move out at
once, and as the tenants naturally object-
ed, a series of forcible evictions took place,
and in many cases the neighbors sided
with the tenants, and there were fighting
and rioting in consequence. Paragraphs
like the following appeared in the papers
daily :
"Another Jubilee eviction took place last evening
amid great excitement in the Borough Road. The
doors of the house were barricaded, and had to be bat-
tered in before admission could be obtained. A large
force of police were present."
The demand for windows and seats gave
a rare chance to the unscrupulous, and the
same seats were sold several times to dif-
ferent people by men who had no right to
sell them at all. These gentlemen even
went so far afield as Port Said, where they
met passengers from Australia and India
and showed them plans of seats, and sold
265
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
them, in exchange for many guineas, beau-
tifully colored tickets that called for places
which only existed on paper ; and even the
astute " Yankees," to the delight of the
English newspapers, when they arrived at
Liverpool, were cajoled into buying from
these ingenious gentlemen, one man pay-
ing two hundred and fifty dollars for two
seats for which he may be still looking.
This gamble for seats was perhaps un-
fortunate in giving the impression that the
Jubilee, instead of being an expression of
devotion and loyalty, had been turned into
a chance for money-making, and that the
nation of shopkeepers was living up to its
name. As a matter of fact, this was not
the case, and more money was spent by
the shopkeepers in decorating and illumi-
nating than they received from their win-
dows ; and the syndicates, as it turned out
eventually, lost heavily, and many of the
speculators were left absolutely bankrupt ;
as the contractors who supplied them with
lumber raised the prices to four and five
266
THE queen's jubilee
times the regular figures, and the carpen-
ters and joiners went on strike daily for
higher and higher wages, until it was esti-
mated that the average cost of building
a stand rose from twelve shillings a seat
to nineteen shillings, so that if the specu-
lators had asked a guinea for eighteen
inches of pine board they would only have
made fifty cents profit. Even had the
prices originally demanded by the specu-
lators and syndicates been paid by the
public, they would not have recovered
what they had spent in labor and material.
As it was, when the day arrived, seats ad-
vertised at fifteen dollars sold for two dol-
lars and a half, and those facing St. Paul's
Cathedral, which were advertised at one
hundred and twenty-five dollars, were sold
for twenty-five dollars. That was the aver-
age drop in prices all along the line of
procession.
While this speculation was raging, and
contractors and syndicates and labor un-
ions and landlords were showing a sordid
267
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
desire for the mighty dollar, the remainder
of the people were going quite mad in their
loyalty and enthusiasm over the Queen
and the greatest birthday of her reign.
Ambitious and intricate illuminations com-
posed of colored glass and gas-jets began
to spread over the entire city. There was
not a street, hardly a house, that did not
show the letters V. R. Sometimes they
were cut out of colored paper with a pair
of scissors and stuck behind a dirty win-
dow-pane, and sometimes they were of cut
glass and weighed many pounds, and hid
the entire story of a house, and they be-
came as familiar on the front of every
Englishman's castle as they are on the
round red letter-boxes. Gilded lions and
unicorns, imperial crowns of colored glass,
and the numerals 37-97 formed with rows
of tiny fairy-lamps, and the flags of Eng-
land reproduced in silk or in printed mus-
lin, testified to the loyalty of shopkeepers,
householders, clubs, banks, and hotels.
Members of the royal family, whenever
268
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
they appeared in i^ublic, were received
more royally than they had ever been be-
fore; and at the military tournament, at
the theatres, and at all the music-halls,
songs, scenes, and ballets illustrating the
growth and power of the empire were the
chief features of each performance, and
were received nightly with shouts and
cheers. At one music-hall the national
anthem was sung three times in one even-
ing, the audience rising each time and
singing the words as fervently as though
they were in church. One of the most cu-
rious illustrations of the feeling of the Eng-
lish people at the time of the Jubilee oc-
curred one night in the Savoy restaurant
— perhaps the last place one would look
for the higher emotions — when the Hun-
garian band suddenly struck into the na-
tional anthem, and the entire room, filled
with strangers, of men from all over the
world and of women from both worlds,
rose from their chairs and cheered and
waved napkins, and remained standing
26q
THE queen's jubilee
until the music ended and while their din-
ners grew cold.
It is difficult to believe that any event
could ever disturb the settled majesty of
London, or that any power would dare to
intrude upon her inexorable laws of the
road, upon her early closing hours, her
sombre, sooty countenance, and the in-
terminable caravans in her streets. Even
an earthquake would hesitate at the im-
pertinence of jarring London. But the
Jubilee upset that city as it is to be hoped
nothing ever will do again, and for three
weeks the capital of the world did not
know herself. She was like the old lady
who had her skirts cut off and at whom
even her own dog barked. For her great
grim house-fronts, which the soft soot had
turned into sweet and venerable castles,
were painted a glaring yellow ; her public
statues were scrubbed until they were
positively indecent; her islands of safety
at tlie crossways were uprooted and the
street lamps carried away ; her sky - line
270
THE queen's jubilee
was broken by tiers of yellow-pine seats;
her great thoroughfares, the highways of
the world, were lined with giant packing-
cases instead of houses; and her deep
murmur which rumbles and rises and falls
like the " roaring loom of Time," was
broken by the ceaseless banging of ham-
mers and the scraping of saws. The smell
of soft coal, which is perhaps the first and
most distinctive feature of London to greet
the arriving American, was changed to
that of green pine, so that the town smelt
like a Western mining-camp. All the old
landmarks disappeared, the National Gal-
lery was disguised by a grandstand as
large as that at the Polo Grounds, the
statues in Trafalgar Square peeped over
high wooden fences, and looked as though
they had been boxed up for shipment ; in
some places trees were cut down, and in
others stands were built high in the air
above them, so that where there had been
open places, with green turf and waving
branches, there were fixed interminable
271
THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE
walls of yellow boards. Between the ris*
ing skeletons of rafters and scaffolding
there came what was at first a hardly per-
ceptible increase in the great tidal waves
of traffic ; but this swelled and grew until
at certain points all movements in the
streets were stopped for half -hours at a
time, and carriages went where the current
took them and not where they wished to
go. At Hamilton Place, and where Berke-
ley Street breaks into Piccadilly, it would
have been possible at many hours of the
day to walk for a hundred yards on the
tops of hansoms and 'buses and vans, lock-
ed together as tightly as logs in a jam of
lumber. One man, who was driving his
own dog-cart to a luncheon, was caught in
the crush at Hamilton Place, and sent his
groom into the Bachelors' Club to forward
a telegram to his hostess, saying he would
probably be late, and he arrived eventually
twenty minutes after the telegram had
been received. On account of these dams
in the current, cabmen discovered new
272
THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE
streets in unknown territories, or refused
point-blank to venture into certain thor-
oughfares unless they were taken by the
hour. Others did not attempt to take out
a cab at all, for a shilling fare often kept
them buried for an hour and a half in
some great barricade that moved only when
the sweating policeman had broken anoth-
er barricade as great, and one of the two
lurched forward, with brakes snapping as
they were unlocked, and whips cracking,
and hundreds of hoofs slipping and pound-
ing on the asphalt.
But it was on the sidewalks that the
coming event cast its most picturesque
shadows, and showed the most effective
sisns of the times. These shadows were
substantial enough, and wore kharki tu-
nics, and broad sombreros, and bandoleers
heavy with cartridges swinging from the
left shoulder, or they were in brilliant
turbans of India silk, or red fezes; they
were black of face, or brown, or yellow,
and up to that time they had been familiar
273
THE queen's jubilee
to the cockneys of London only through
the iUustrated papers and the ballads of
Mr. Rudyard Kipling. But now they met
them face to face, wearing their odd uni-
forms, speaking their impossible tongues,
and worshipping strange gods, but each of
them showing in every movement that it
was a British drill-sergeant who had pulled
his shoulders back and chucked his chin
in the air, and taught him to swagger and
cut his leg with his whip when he walked,
and to stick it in his boot when he stood
at ease, with his gauntlets under his shoul-
der-strap. There were so many things
to look at in those Jubilee days that per-
haps no one appreciated them fully until
they were gone, and Tommy in his red
jacket and pill - box cap began once more
to take his original value in the life of the
streets. But while they continued, not
even a house-maid looked at him. Even
the red and gold liveries of the royal
coachmen, who were as plentiful as han-
som-cab drivers, were no more regarded
274
THE QUEENS JUBILEE
ill comparison than the red coals of the
crossing -sweepers. It was the Colonials
that people turned to look after; and the
Chinese police from the British treaty-
port at Hong-kong, with flat enamelled
soup-plates on their heads ; and the broad-
lipped negroes from the Gold Coast of
Africa, and Jamaica, and Trinidad ; the
reformed head-hunters from Borneo, now
clothed in brown kharki and in their right
minds ; and the Mohammedans from Cy-
prus, at whom the costers in the East End
hooted at first, mistaking them for the un-
speakable Turk. But before all the others
the Rhodesian Horse, because they were
associated in the mind of the " man on the
omnibus" with Cecil Rhodes and the Ma-
tabele wars and the Jameson raid. There
was much reason to envy these happy few
who were chosen to represent the different
British colonies and possessions at the
jubilee, for London does not hold out her
hand to most strangers. Some, when they
go there, are thankful enough to have their
275
THE queen's jubilee
existence recognized by a hansom - cab
driver raising his whip, and the translation
of these men must have been startHng.
They were probably worthy young men,
but at home they were part of a whole
regiment, and of no more honor in their
own country than so many policemen,
while in their eyes London was the capital
of the world, and a place where good colo-
nists go to spend money, and where they
are content if they can look on as humble
spectators. But these men found, when
they reached the great capital, that they
were as gods and heroes, and their strange
uniforms passed them freely into theatres
and music-halls and public - houses, and
women smiled on them, and men quarrel-
led to have the privilege of standing them
a drink. Banquets and special perform-
ances, medals and titles, were showered
upon them according to their rank and de-
gree, and they in their turn furnished the
most picturesque feature of the spectacle
when it came.
276
THE STAl'F-OFFICKRS OF TIIF INDIAN AKMV
THE queen's jubilee
Within a week of the great day the
stands began to clothe themselves decent-
ly in red cloth, and those decorations that
had been held back until the last, from
fear of the rain, were hung on the outer
walls, and mottoes and insignia and plants
and flowers, which made the shops look
like house -boats at Henley, were spread
along every foot of the six miles. To see
these, a procession of wagons, drags, and
'buses travelled over the route carrying
people from the suburbs and from all over
London, and the already swollen avenues
of traffic became impassable, and it was
only possible to move about by going on
foot. When a stranger asked how long it
would take to reach a certain point, he was
told, ten minutes if he walked, or forty min-
utes if he took a cab. The decorations
were not beautiful, and, with the exception
of those in St. James's Street, there was no
harmony of design nor scheme of color,
and a great opportunity was lost. There
was probably no other time when so much
19 277
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
money was spent in display with results so
inadequate. Had the government put the
matter in the hands of a committee of ar-
tists, much might have been done that
would teach a lesson for the future, and
have made the route of the procession a
valley full of beauty and significance ; but,
as it was, every householder followed his
own ideas, and so, while the loyalty dis-
played was quite evident, the taste was
most primitive. It was the same sort of
decoration that one sees on a Christmas^
tree.
The prophets of disaster and the sensa-
tion-mongers were not idle in those days,
and, looking back now to the event, it is
hardly possible to believe the celebration
held such terrors at the time, for nearly
every one thought it could not come off
without such another sacrifice as that at
Moscow during the Coronation, or the pan-
ic at the Charity Bazaar in Paris. One pre-
diction was that the Embankment would
not be able to support the crowd, and that
278
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
it would cave in on the tracks of the under-
ground railroad. Another was that the
East End would rise in its might and take
possession of the stands, and would keep
the seats for which the West End had paid
so many guineas ; and it was said that eight
thousand coffins had been ordered in Paris,
and had been sent over in readiness for
the loss of life that was expected to follow
when the masses gathered in such a multi-
tude. And forebodings of falling stands
and sudden panics, and of fires, and of mobs
of people crushing each other to death,
were in the minds of every one. That none
of these things happened was perhaps the
most remarkable and interesting fact of the
whole Jubilee. In any other city one or
all of these things might have occurred,
but the English conservatism, and the
English regard for the law, and the won-
derful management and executive ability
shown in organizing the procession and
in disciplining the spectators, prevented
it. The chief credit is undoubtedly due
279
THE queen's jubilee
to the head of the police, and to the fact
that when he had decided which was the
best way to regulate the movements of the
people, the people were willing to abide by
his decision. For many months before the
procession the police studied the map of
London, with the line of the parade marked
out on it, and considered every possible
accident that might occur, and every act
that might lead up to such an accident.
They rehearsed what the populace would
do at every hour of the day; from which
points people would come on foot, and
from which points they would come in
carriages ; where they would collect in the
greatest numbers ; and when the proces-
sion had passed one point, in what direc-
tion they would rush in order to view it
from another.
The problem was such a one as would
present itself to the police of New York,
were it necessary to protect a route six
miles in length which would cross from
New York to Brooklyn over one bridge
280
THE queen's jubilee
and return by another, were there such a
bridge. It was expected that three millions
of people would view the procession, and
that it would be necessary to bring fifty
thousand soldiers into London in order to
line the route properly — that is, with as
many soldiers as, had they been placed
shoulder to shoulder, would have stretched
in a straight line for thirty-two miles. The
chief danger that presented itself was that
the crowd, having seen the procession in
London, would rush across to the Surrey
side to see it again, and that the people on
the Surrey side would cross over to London.
The police cut this Gordian knot by treat-
ing the two banks of the river separately,
and by closing London Bridge at midnight
on the day before the Jubilee, and the four
bridges nearest to the route of the proces-
sion on the day of the Jubilee from eight
in the morning until three in the afternoon.
In other parts of London all vehicular traf-
fic was stopped at different points from
seven o'clock up to ten, and only certain
281
THE QUEENS JUBILEE
streets crossing the line of the procession
were open. No carts or wagons, or even
people on horseback, were allowed to take
up a place in the cross streets within a hun-
dred feet of the procession, and no boxes
nor ladders nor camp-stools were allowed
within the same limited boundaries. The
greatest danger to the public safety during
the great parades in New York City is the
criminal practice of allowing trucks and
drays, which are used as temporary stands,
to take up places on the cross streets. In
case of a stampede they would completely
cut off every outlet from the main thor-
oughfare, and impede the passage of fire-
ensrines and ambulances. It is a mistaken
kindness on the part of the authorities, for,
while the owners of the trucks and drays
may make a few dollars by renting seats,
their barricades may cost many hundreds
of lives.
This route over which the Queen was to
drive, and which was guarded so admirably,
and made beautiful by the display of such
282
THE (QUEEN'S JUBILEE
loyal good feeling, held in its six miles of
extent more places of historical value to the
English-speaking race than perhaps any
other six miles that could be picked off on
a map of the world.
One of the English papers said that
each step of the route was a lesson in
English history, and pointed out some of
the many features that made it historical ;
and it was these points of interest that gave
the route and the procession its great dig-
nity and its magnificent significance. It
was not the troops that guarded it, nor the
decorations of an hour that hung on its two
sides, nor the flying banners that hid it
from the sun. Queen Victoria was the
first English sovereign to use Buckingham
Palace as a royal residence, and, according
to the route laid down for her to follow on
the 2 2d of June, it was from this palace,
which she had first entered a month after
her accession, sixty years before, that she
was to set forth on the greatest triumphal
procession of her reign. Three millions
283
THE queen's jubilee
of loyal subjects and crown-princes of for-
eign and barbarous courts, ambassadors
and Christian archbishops, field -marshals
and colonial premiers, red-coated Tommys,
costers, and publicans, would line this route
to greet her on her way ; but greater than
any of these were the dumb statues and
silent signs of those who had gone before,
who had made that triumphal procession
possible, who had created her empire, and
who had spread and upheld her dominion
on the land and on the sea.
At the top of Constitution Hill she
would find the Iron Duke waiting for her
on his bronze charger, and he might ask,
" What is my part in this triumph ?" and
he could answer, " I held back Napoleon."
At this corner, where to-day there is the
greatest crash of traffic and the most lav-
ish display of wealth and fashion in the
world, the toll-gates which separated the
open country from London once stood,
and not so long ago but that the Queen
can remember it. From Hyde Park Cor-
284
THE queen's jubilee
ner her route lay through Piccadilly, the
street that took its name from a French
ruff and gave it to a collar, and then down
St. James's Street, past the windows of
White's and Boodle's, where Fox, Pitt,
Sheridan, and Brummel once looked out
of these same windows. And so on to
St. James's Palace, the hospital for lepers
which Henry VIII. changed into a royal
residence, and where to-day the Prince of
Wales holds levees for statesmen and diplo-
mats on the spot that once echoed to the
cry of " Unclean ! unclean !" Then past
Marlborough House, that took its name
from the soldier Duke who built it, be-
tween the " sweet shady " sides of Pall
Mall, where Nell Gwynne leaned over her
orarden wall and held her celebrated con-
versation with the King which so shocked
Mr. Pepys. And then, waiting for the
Queen at the foot of Regent Street, the
bronze soldiers who commemorate the death
of thousands of others who died for her in
the ice and snows of the Crimea ; and, a few
285
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
rods beyond, Trafalgar Square, with Land-
seers crouching lions watching the four
corners of the earth, and above them Nel-
son, the one-armed sailor who died for the
empire in the cockpit of the Victory, and
who is now reared high above the beating
heart of London on the cannon he wrested
from the French war -ships in the Nile;
and below him the statue to Gordon, who
in his turn gave up his life for the Queen,
and who stands now as immovable in
bronze as he stood for so many months
in life, when he looked out with weary eyes
across the glaring desert, watching for the
white helmets that came too late. From
Trafalgar Square, where the blood of the
regicides is marked by the statue of the
monarch they murdered, the procession
was directed into the Strand, past the
church where Falstaff heard the bells ring
at midnight, and so on to Temple Bar,
where the Virgin Queen, many years be-
fore, was met by the Lord Mayor of that
day when she rode into the city to cele-
286
TIIK QUEENS JUBILEE
bratc the destruction of the Armada;
and then past the Temple and the Law
Courts, the home of the Crusaders, and
later of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Charles
Lamb; past Fetter Lane and Fleet Street,
where Pope and Addison and Steele walked
and talked, and wrote lampoons on each
other in the neighboring coffee-shops.
And then, after the solemn halt at St.
Paul's Cathedral, on into Cheapside, where
the knights once rode to the tourneys, and
where Whittington heard the bells calling
him back to London ; and across London
Bridsre, that used to hold the heads of the
traitors; and so to the Surrey side, past
the Church of St. Saviour, the resting-place
of Fletcher and Massinger; and into the
Hi^h Street, where stood the Tabard Inn
of Chaucer; and then past the Houses of
Parliament; past the statue of Disraeli,
who first taught her Majesty to spell the
word Empire; and the Abbey, the grave-
yard of England's greatest dead; intoWhite-
hall, where Charles was executed, where the
287
THE queen's jubilee
horse-guards sit in their saddles in the
narrow doorways; and so back again to
the palace. In those six miles the Queen
would have passed over earth hallowed by
memories of men so great that queens will
be remembered because they reigned while
these men lived — men whose memories will
endure for so many years that a monarch's
" longest reign" will seem but an hour in
the vast extent of their immortality.
When the sun pushed aside the mists at
ten o'clock on the morning of the 2 2d of
June, it saw the route of the procession
like a double nought or a crooked eight,
carved on the sooty surface of London.
The rest of the city was busy with hurry-
ing people, and soldiers marching at a
quickstep, and galloping figures on horse-
back, but this cleared space was swept and
garnished and empty. Looking from above
it was as though the people living on the
streets that formed these loops had over-
slept themselves and did not know that
the world was astir. Looking from the
288
TIIK QUEKN DURING TIIK THANKSGIVING SERVICE Al
ST. TAUL's
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
street, you saw that every house that faced
this empty highway was decorated Hke a
box in a theatre when royalty is expected
to be present. It was hke two continuous
walls of boxes and grandstands facing each
other for six miles ; and every seat was tak-
en and there were people in the windows
peering from far back over each other's
shoulders, and people hanging to the roofs,
and people packed on the sidewalks. These
people cheered the sun when it appeared,
and cheered belated cabs when the police
turned them back, and Sarah Bernhardt
when they allowed her to pass on. They
were in a humor to cheer anything; they
even cheered the police. And when at
eleven o'clock the cannon in Hyde Park
boomed out the fact that the Queen had
started towards them, they cheered the
cannon, just as boys in the gallery applaud
the orchestra when they appear — not be-
cause they are lovers of music, but because
the event of the night is at hand.
As the Queen was leaving Buckingham
289
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
Palace she stopped and pressed an electric
button, and a little black dot appeared on
a piece of paper at the telegraph-office at
St. Martin's-le-Grand. This was the signal
that the message for which the cable peo-
ple had been keeping the wires clear was
to be sent on its way, and a sealed enve-
lope that had been awaiting the signal was
torn open, and they read these lines: " From
my heart I thank my beloved people. May
God bless them !— Victoria, R. I."
And in a few seconds five different
cable companies were transmitting her
Majesty's message to forty different points
in her empire; in a few minutes it had
passed Suez and Aden on its way to Simla,
Singapore, and Hong-kong, and in Central
Africa a native runner set forth with it to
Uganda ; while for those places which the
cable does not reach, letters carried it to
the islands of the world. The first answer
was received from Ottawa. It arrived in
sixteen minutes, and before the Queen had
reached London Bridge other replies had
ago
THE queen's jubilee
come to her from the Cape, from the Gold
Coast, and from AustraHa.
The procession halted in three places —
at the entrance to the City in the Strand,
where Temple Bar once stood ; at St.
Paul's Cathedral, where the religious cere-
mony took place; and at the Mansion
House.
At the entrance to the City the Lord
Mayor, in a long velvet cloak, presented
her Majesty with the freedom of the City,
and tendered her the great two-handed
sword as a symbol of allegiance. The Queen
returned it by touching it with her hand,
and the Lord Mayor mounted a black
horse, and managing the great sword and
the great cloak with much delight to him-
self and to the populace, galloped away.
Lord Roberts, of Kabul and Kandahar,
was the only other ofificial who recognized
the existence of the invisible barrier that
guards the entrance to the City. As he
reached it he drew up and saluted, and
then rode on ; but all of the others, with
2gi
THE queen's jubilee
the exception of the men of one company,
rode or marched into the City without
making any sign. The circumstance was
only of interest because on ordinary occa-
sions soldiers under arms may not march
through the City without reversing their
guns, and every night one can see the
Household troops detailed for guard duty
at the Bank of England tuck their guns
under their arms when they pass the line
of Temple Bar. The one exception on
the day of the Jubilee was the men of the
Royal Marine Artillery, who came to a
halt and fixed bayonets, and then marched
on again. This they did because their or-
ganization is a relic of the old train-bands
of the City, and so for many years has en-
joyed the privilege of marching through
it with fixed bayonets. It was essentially
English and characteristic for one com-
pany to halt in a Jubilee procession in
which was the Queen, with many of the
most important people in Europe, simply
that they might assert their ancient rights
292
'^^Sr^
LORD ROBERTS OF KABUL AND KANDAHAR ON HIS CELE-
BRATED PONY
TlIK (queen's jubilee
and privileges, even, as it were, at the point
of the bayonet.
The procession, when it came, was dis-
tinctly a military spectacle, and as English
people, especially the inhabitants of Lon-
don, are used to soldiers, the presence of
the Queen and the part played in it by
the colonials was for them its chief inter-
est. But without the Queen and the co-
lonials, who were by far the most pictu-
resque feature of the procession, there
was enough to repay the visiting stran-
ger for his journey, no matter from what
distance he came. The procession was
three-quarters of an hour in passing, and
the test of its interest was that it seemed
to have appeared and disappeared in ten
minutes. There was a blurred vision of
close ranks of great horses with silken
sides, and above them rows of mirror-like
breastplates and helmets, and quivering
pennants, and bands of music with a drum-
mer in advance of each throwing: himself
recklessly about in his saddle, and pound-
30 293
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
ing alternately on two silver kettle-drums
hung with gold-embroidered cloths as rich
as an archbishop's robe. There was artil-
lery with harness of russet leather that
shone like glass, and blue-jackets spread
out like a fan and dragging brass guns
behind them, and sheriffs in cloaks of fur
with gold collars and chains, and Indian
princes as straight and fine as an un-
sheathed sword, in colored silk turbans of
the East, and gilded chariots filled with
poor relations from Germany, and three lit-
tle princesses in white, who bowed so ener-
getically that one of them fell in between
the seats and had to be fished out again ;
there were foreign princes from almost
every country except Greece, and military
attaches in as varied uniforms as there are
costumes at a fancy ball ; and there was
the commander-in-chief of the United
States army riding with the representative
of the French army, and Lieutenant Cald-
well of our navy sitting a horse as calmly
as though he had been educated at West
294
THE queen's jubilee
Point, and the Hon. Whitelaw Reicl in
evening dress riding in the same carriage
with the Spanish ambassador, and the pa-
pal nuncio in the same carriage with the
ambassador from China.
And there were the colonials. The co-
lonial premiers wore gold lace and white
silk stockings, but their faces showed they
were men who had fought their way to
the top in new, unsettled countries, and
who had had to deal with problems greater
than the precedence of a court. And sur-
rounding each of them were the picked
men of his country who had helped in
their humbler way to solve these problems
— big, sunburned, broad-shouldered men
in wide slouch hats, and with an alert, vig-
ilant swagger that suggested long, lonely
rides in the bush of Australia and across
the veldt of South Africa and through the
snows of Canada. There were also Dyaks
from Borneo, with the scalps of their for-
mer enemies neatly sewn to their scab-
bards, even though they did follow in the
295
THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE
wake of a Christian Queen ; and black ne-
groes in zouave uniforms from Jamaica;
and Hausas from the Gold Coast who had
never marched on asphalt before, and who
would have been much more at home slip-
ping over fallen tree trunks and stealing
through a swampy jungle. There were
police from British Guiana, and Indians,
and even Chinamen. Central America
was the only one of the great divisions of
the world that was not represented, and
had there been a detachment from British
Honduras, there would have been march-
ing in that parade British subjects from
North, Central, and South America, Eu-
rope, Asia, Africa, and Australia, and from
the islands that, starting at Trinidad, cir-
cle the globe from the South Atlantic and
Caribbean Sea, through the Mediterranean
to the Indian Ocean, and down through
the South Pacific, and back again past the
Falkland Islands to Jamaica and Trinidad.
The three millions of people who watch-
ed the procession cheered every one in it,
2g6
Till-: queen's jubilee
from Captain " Ossie " Ames, the tallest
officer in the British army, who was not
only born great, but who, much to his dis-
tress, had greatness thrust upon him, and
who rode in front, to the police who
brought up the rear.
But there were four persons in the pro-
cession for whom the cheering was so
much more enthusiastic than for any of
the others that they rode apart by them-
selves. These were the Queen, Lord Rob-
erts, Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Maurice
Gifford, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
Lord Wolseley, the commander-in-chief,
was not so well received as Lord Roberts,
and suffered on account of his position,
which was immediately in front of the
Queen ; so no one had time to look at
him nor to cheer him. The Prince of
Wales was also too near the throne to re-
ceive his accustomed share of attention,
and some of the other favorites passed so
quickly that the crowd failed to recognize
them. But everybody seemed to know
297
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
Lord Roberts and his white Arab pony
that carried him during his ride of nine-
teen days from Kabul to Kandahar, and
no one in that procession knew better than
that pony, with his six war medals hanging
from his breast-band or strap, what a great
day it was. The crowd saluted the hero
of Kandahar as " Bobs," and cried " God
bless you, Bobs !" and every now and then
during a halt the general would ride up
and speak to some soldier in the line
who had served with him in India, and so
make him happy.
Lieutenant-Colonel Gifford was popular
for two reasons — in the first place, he com-
manded the Rhodesian Horse, and that
body, as has been previously suggested,
was the one associated in the minds of the
English with the Chartered Company and
the Matabele war and Dr. Jameson's raid,
and the next raid which it seems now must
inevitably follow. And besides the fact
that he led this body of rough riders, he
'had lost an arm in the last Matabele war,
298
.ik \^.
"1
\
1.1. -COL. THE HON. MArklCK GIKKOUD, COMMANDING 1 HK
RMODKSIAN HORSE
THE queen's jubilee
and his sleeve was pinned across his chest,
and he received his reward that day for
losing it. His reception seemed to show
what sympathy the man in the street had
with the Parliamentary investigation of
the Chartered Company's actions in South
Africa.
The enthusiasm over Sir Wilfrid Lau-
rier was probably due to his position as
premier of Canada, and to the picturesque
fact that he is a Frenchman by descent,
and that his face is so strong and fine that
he was easily recognized by his portraits.
Next to these four in the hearts of the
crowd, on that day at least, were the Ind-
ian princes, the Lord Mayor, Lord Charles
Beresford, and all the colonial troops.
The street that opens into the oval of
St. Paul's Cathedral breaks in two just in
front of the cathedral, and passes by on
either side. In the open space that is
formed by this parting of the highways is
a statue of Queen Anne, which is shut off
from the street by an iron railing. The
299
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
Queen's carriage, with the eight cream-
colored ponies, came up Ludgate Hill and
turned to the left and then to the right,
and stopped in front of the steps to the
cathedral; the foreign princes, on horse-
back, grouped themselves in front of the
statue, and the enamelled and gilded lan-
daus of the special ambassadors and of
the princesses formed en echelon along the
roadway to the right. Beyond these were
circles of the Household troops in red
coats and bear- skins, and contingents of
soldiers from the far East, from India,
Africa, and China.
Rising from the lowest step of the ca-
thedral was a great tribune separated into
three parts, and back of this, red-covered
balconies hung between the great black
pillars like birds' nests in the branches of
a tree. Below them the vast tribune shone
with colored silk and gold cloth, and ra-
diated with jewels like a vast bank of beau-
tiful flowers. Among these flowers were
Indian princes in coats sewn with dia-
300
THE QUEEN S JUBILEE
monds that liid them in flashes of h'ght,
archbishops and bishops in robes of gold
that suggested those of the Church of
Rome, ambassadors in stars and sashes,
with their official families in gold braid
and decorations. In the centre was a great
mass of smiling-faced choir-boys, like cher-
ubs in night-gowns, and two hundred mu-
sicians picked from bands of many regi-
ments and wearing many uniforms. On
the lowest steps were dignitaries of the
Church in the pink and crimson capes the
different universities had bestowed upon
them, and the Bishop of Finland, the rep-
resentative of Russia, and the Bishop of
New York, and, what was perhaps the most
striking example of the all-embracing nat-
ure of the celebration, a captain from the
Salvation Army with his red ribbon around
his cap. There were judges in wigs and
black silk gowns, and Chinamen in robes
of colored silk, and Turkish envoys in
fezes, and Persian envoys in Astrakhan
caps. There were individuals in this group
THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE
who on most occasions take the centre of
the stage at any gathering and hold it for
hours, but on this great day they were
only spectators, and had not as much to
do in the celebration as had one of the
soldiers that lined the street.
Lord Salisbury, Mr. Balfour, Joseph
Chamberlain, and Sir William Harcourt
were among these, and there was also
our ambassador, the Hon. John Hay, and
the secretaries of his embassy, which, as
a whole, is perhaps the best embassy our
country or any other country has sent to
the Court of St. James. And there were
rows of Beef-eaters in the costume of the
Tudors, and Bluecoat Boys in the costume
of Edward VI.
The ceremony that followed upon the
arrival of the Queen was a very simple
one, but it was the most impressive one
that could have been selected for that
moment in the history of the Empire. It
consisted of the Te Deum, the National
Anthem, and the Doxology. That Is a
302
THE queen's jubilee
difficult selection to surpass at any time,
and especially when the three are sung
from the hearts of ten thousand people.
The Te Deum was given to music writ-
ten for the occasion, and the National
Anthem, had it not been already written,
would have been inspired by that occasion,
and the Doxology was probably sung as it
was never sung before. When the Jaenes-
ville miners were rescued alive from the
pit after they had been entombed there
and given up for dead for eighteen days,
their rescuers and all the mining popula-
tion of Jaenesville marched to the house
of the owner of the mines at two o'clock
in the morning, and, standing in the snow,
sang the Doxology, and a man who was
there told me he hid himself in the house
and cried. If he had been at St. Paul's
Cathedral he would have had to hide him-
self as:ain, for there were ten thousand
people singing, " Praise God from Whom
all blessings flow," as loudly as they could,
and with tears running down their faces.
THE queen's jubilee
There were princesses standing up in their
carriages, and black men from the Gold
Coast Maharajahs from India, and red-
coated Tommys, and young men who will
inherit kingdoms and empires, and arch-
bishops, and cynical old diplomats, and
soldiers and sailors from the "land of the
palm and the pine" and from the seven
seas, and women and men who were just
subjects of the Queen and who were con-
tent with that. There was probably never
before such a moment, in which so many
races of people, of so many castes, and of
such different values to this world, sang
praises to God at one time, and in one
place, and with one heart. And when it
was all over, and the cannon at the Tower
were booming across the water-front, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, of all the people
in the world, waved his arm and shouted,
" Three cheers for the Queen !" and the
soldiers stuck their bear -skins on their
bayonets and swung them above their
heads and cheered, and the women on the
304
THE queen's jubilee
house-tops and balconies waved their hand-
kerchiefs and cheered, and the men beat
the air with their hats and cheered, and the
Lady in the Black Dress nodded and bowed
her head at them, and winked away the
tears in her eyes.
THE END
r?t^ ij/^l '■'^.
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