cz
123 167
A FIRST SELECTION OF THE LIVES
YOUNG MEN WHO HAVE FALLEN IN T
GREAT WAR fig & BY E. B. OSBO
" Others may find their loves and keep them,
But for us two there still shall be
A kinder heart and a fairer city,
The home and wife we shall never see.
Lost adventurers, watching ever
Over the toss of the tricksy foam,
Many a joyous port and city,
Never the harbour lights of home."
T E. A. MACKINTOSH
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCM
TO
OUR AMF r ' AN COMRADES
WHOSE WORKS AND DAYS
PROVE THEM THE PEERS OF
THESE YOUNG KNIGHTS OF
AN ELDER CHIVALRY
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION i
A DRAMATIC DICKENS. HAROLD CBAMH 8
THE TRUE AMATEUR. RICHARD MOLHSWORTH DENNYS 17
THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY. CHARLES LISTER 26
A SOUTHSIDE SAXON. ANTHONY FREDERICK WILDING 38
THE MODERN ACTOR. BASIL HALLAM 48
THE ABSOLUTE POET; CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY 54
THE WILDERNESS WINNER. BRIAN BROOKE 64
THE JOYOUS CRITIC. DiroN SCOTT 78
AN OXFORD CAVALIER, ROBERT WILLIAM STERLING 86
LOST LEADERS. COLWYN AND ROLAND PHILIPPS 98
THE SACRED WAY. DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 112
NATURE WORSHIPPERS. HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 127
PIONEERS, PIONEERS, (i) ALAN SISEGER 144
(z) HARRY BUTTERS 162
THE STUDENT IN ARMS. DONALD HANKEY 178
THE HIGHLAND SOUL. IVAR CAMPBELL 191
AN IRISH TORCH.-BEARER. TOM KETTLE zn
THE HAPPY ATHLETE. RONALD POULTON 228
THE MAN ABOUT TOWN. THOMAS VADE-WALPOLE 242
THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER. WILLIAM NOEL HODGSON 249
THE CANADIAN ENTENTE. GUY DRUMMOND 266
CASTOR AND POLLUX. JULIAN AND BILLY GRZNFELL 283
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE HON. JULIAN GRENFELL. (Captain, Royal
Dragoons, D.S.O.) .... Frontispiece
from a photograph taJun at Taj>I0w Court. The dog is the original
ofhisjoem entitled, " The Black Greyhound"
To face page
HAROLD CHAPIN. (Lance-Corporal, R.A.M.C.) . 8
RICHARD MOLESWORTH DENNYS. (Captain, Loyal
North Lancashire Regiment) . . . . 17
THE HON. CHARLES LISTER. (Lieutenant, Royal
Marines) . . . . . . - 26
From an anginal drawing by ftlm Sargent> R-A.
ANTHONY F. WILDING. (Captain, Royal Marines) . 38
BASIL HALLAM. (Captain and Kite Commander, Royal
Flying Corps) ..... 48
CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY. (Captain, Suffolk
Regiment) . . . . . . 54
BRIAN BROOKE. (Captain, Gordon Highlanders) . 64
DIXON SCOTT. (Lieutenant, 3rd West Lancashire
Brigade, R.F.A.) 78
ROBERT WILLIAM STERLING. (Lieutenant, Royal
Scots Fusiliers) . . . . . 86
THE HON, COLWYN PHILIPPS. (Captain, Royal
Horse Guards) , . . . . 98
THE HON. ROLAND PHILIPPS. (Captain, Royal
Fusiliers, M.C.) . . . . .100
THOMAS M. KETTLE, (Lieutenant, Dublin Fusiliers) 1 1 1
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE. (Lieutenant, Argyll and Suther-
land Highlanders) . . . . > . n 2
HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON, (Lieutenant, /th
Northumberland Fusiliers) , . , . 127
From a fainting by his father, John Charlton.
SKETCHES BY HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON . 128
x ILLUSTRATIONS
Tojfatt page
THE CORMORANT : A STUDY FROM LIFE. By HUGH
VAUGHAN CHARLTON . . . . .130
JOHN MACFARLAN CHARLTON. (Captain, 2 1st
Northumberland Fusiliers, 2nd Tyneside Scottish) . 135
AN IMPRESSION OF JOHN MACFARLAN CHARL-
TON. By his brother, HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON . 136
GOLDEN PLOVER : A SKETCH. By JOHN MACFARLAN
CHARLTON . . . . * 3 8
THE DEAD BLACKCOCK : A SKETCH. By JOHN MAC-
FARLAN CHARLTON . . . . .14.0
ALAN SEEGER. (Foreign Legion of France) . . 144
HARRY BUTTERS. (Lieutenant, Royal Field Artillery.)
Arrival at Stow-on-the-Wold . . . . 162
DONALD HANKEY. (Lieutenant, Royal Warwickshire
Regiment) . . . , . . 178
IVAR CAMPBELL. (Captain, Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders) . . . . . 191
RONALD POULTON PALMER. (Lieutenant, 4th Royal
Berkshire Regiment) . . . . . 228
from a, photograph taken hi the dycs$irig-?ooi at Twickenham afitii
his fast tnteriitttieiial ?K&tch on English sott^ign).
THOMAS VADE-WALPQLE. (Lieutenant, roth Gordon
Highlanders) ..... 242
WILLIAM NOEL HODGSON. (Lieutenant, 9th Devon
Regiment, M.C.) , 249
GUY DRUMMOND, (Captain, Royal Highlanders of
Canada) ...., 266
From a statue by R< Tali Mackenzie.
THE HON. GERALD WILLIAM GRENFELL. (Lieu-
tenant, Rifle Brigade.) As a Roman Centurion 282
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many of the relations and friends of the subjects of
tht Memoirs included in this volume have helped to provide
me with the means of just appreciation that a mere list of
names would fill several pages. In a large number of cases
no publicity of any kind is desired. It seems lest in the
circumstances to express my gratitude for their kindness and
helpful suggestions without naming any of them.
I have to thank Mr John Lane for the great interest he
has taken in my work throughout, and for his flair in
procuring much material that has been invaluable for
my purpose. My thanks are also due to Mr William
Hutcheon, Mr Ian Colvin, Mr G. E. Morrison, Mr Robert
Hield, Lieutenant Power, and Mr Ernest Ward for excellent
contributions to this volume and to the sequel, which the
natural growth of the work has rendered necessary* To
the first-named 1 am also indebted for thai helpful kind
of sympathy which lightens a long task and also opens up
new vistas of inquiry.
In these " characters " I have chiefly relied on the '
opinions^ written or communicated in conversation, of the
younger generation. Youth knows more about the young
than middle age or old age. But my lest thanks are due
to the authors and publishers of the following books for
allowing me to quote freely : " Charles Lister : Letters and
Recollections " (Fisher Unwiri), with the Memoir by Lord
Ribblesdale ; " Captain Anthony Wilding " (Hodder fcf
Stoughtori), by A. Wallis Myers ; " Marlborough and other
Poems" (Cambridge University Press), by Charles H. Sorley,
edited by his father. Professor W. Rl Sorley ; " Poems "
(Constable), by Alan Seeger, with the delightful Memoir
by William Archer ; " War Essays " (Constable], by T. M.
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kettle, with the biographical sketch by Mrs
works of Donald Hankey (" The Student in A>
published by Mr Andrew Melrose ; the volume of * 1 3
and Prose in War Time " (Murray), by W. N. H
edited by his father > the Bishop of St Edmondsbm 1 ^
Ipswich ; and the following books published by Mr j
Lane: "Soldier and Dramatist" (Harold Chapiri) $
"Brian Brooke" and "There is no Death" Other
works which have been helpful are mentioned in the
text.
It was necessary to omit from the present volume, owing
to exigencies of space^ several of the " characters " that had
already been written. That of Rupert Brooke was left out
in view of the publication of the Memoir by Mr Marshy
and several other biographical notices. They will be given
in the Second Series.
THE NEW ELIZABETHANS
INTRODUCTION
THE title of this book of brief memoirs has
to be explained or, if you will, excused,
It is the more necessary to do so because
the father of one of the young men here com-
memorated and held up as examples of the true
patriot for coming generations has suggested that
they deserve a name of their own, a modern name,
a name that does not convey a sense of their in-
debtedness to far-off ancestors. What that name
should be I cannot guess; "Georgians" would
hardly be acceptable, even if it had not already
been applied to a particular group of newly-arrived
poets. When the time comes, no doubt the new
name, the true name, will find itself. Meanwhile
there is authority for a style which implies that the
new and fresh greatness of our cause and country is
rooted in the past, and that tradition, after all, is a
source of the undying vigour of our race. In his
brief Plutarchan character" of Charles Lister, Sir
Rennell Rodd makes a significant comparison :
He was of the type which would have found its right environment
'in the large-horizoned Elizabethan days, and he would have been
of the company of Sidney and Raleigh and the Gilberts, and boister-
ously welcomed at the Mermaid Tavern.
There never lived a keener or kindlier judge of
young men than our Ambassador at Rome, and
this sentence is a lightning-flash of intuitive criti-
cism which reveals to us the arrival, by every social
path, of the New Elizabethans, These golden lads,
brothers in the spirit of Meredith's maid of gold,
come from every class and vocation, are of all
ranks in the new army* They are already a race
2 INTRODUCTION
of conquerors, though the siege of Germany is
but beginning. First, they conquered their easier
selves; secondly, they led the ancestral generations
into a joyous captivity. Watch the way of any one
of them with his proud father (almost always the
boy is longer in the limb and not so short in the
temper), and you will see how glad the " Governor "
is to be governed. Middle-age has always been a
blunder, a sad blunder. Since the war began it
has seemed to me and other middle-aged persons a
kind of felony a crime for which one ought to be
committed for trial, like the youth in Erewbon^
who was tried on a charge of pulmonary consump-
tion. Yet these generous creatures, our own and
other people's sons, are so valiant in their forgive-
ness of it that they most willingly die lest our poor
residue of years should be embittered. They resign
their bright young lives to comfort us as Sidney
gave up the cup of keen cold water, Alas, that
we veterans of peace, with the scars of easy living
upon us, should have the greater need of so precious
a gift that can but once be given !
It would not be difficult to deduce the charac-
teristics of the New Elizabethans from those whom
we meet every day in the great city of muted lights,
which no longer shines for us with delight from
within. Their valiancy a brighter quality than
the Roman virtus because more compassionate
shines in them all like a star. Brayed in war's
mortar, their spirit is yet unbroken and rings clear.
As in the case of a shockingly-shattered corporal
who, when a visitor to his ward condoled with him,
laughed and said : " But, my dear sir, Pm alive ! "
We have all met such examples of antique heroism,
and could deduce the New Elizabethan spirit from
INTRODUCTION 3
a study of them. But it is easier to see what a
brave and joyous thing it is from the records of
those who have fallen so young that it can be said
of them
They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old ;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
and yet had time for self-expression. These young
men, explicitly Elizabethan, actually form a group
bound together by ties of personal friendship and,
what is even more, a common confidence that life
and love are inexhaustible. The group would in-
clude Julian and " Billy " Grenfell, Rupert Brooke
and his less known but equally lovable brother,
Alfred, Charles Lister, Raymond Asquith, Charles
Sorley, Colwyn Philipps, Douglas Gillespie, and
many others. Even before the war gave them the
greatest of all their opportunities to justify it, these
young men knew and practised a large-horizoned
philosophy of living which scorned social conven-
tions and scoffed at party fictions. They were all
scholars and sportsmen and poets even if they did
not write poetry, they had a conviction that life
ought to be lived poetically. They had the Eliza-
bethan exuberance. They were as various and
insatiate and adventurous in the art of living as
were the old Elizabethans, before whom the gates
of the Greek past, of a Roman future, were flung
wide open. It is true that they veiled with veils of
wit, sometimes verging on cynicism, a deep moral
earnestness, a passionate love of country. Because
of this habit, and also because they liked to pull up
principles by the roots (which often dripped blood !)
in discussing them, they were at times frowned upon
by serious-minded elders.
4 INTRODUCTION
The professional patriot, for example, seriously
doubted their patriotism. They were riotous at
times in their joy of living ; they thought nothing
of throwing a young Cabinet Minister in becoming
into the Thames, frock coat and silk hat and
crabbed superiority and all. As time went on, they
had a fear that the age of adventurous living was
over for ever one of them said the " Julianesque
life," meaning a life that could be lived a outrcince
in every, sphere, was ceasing to be possible* Then
came the war, and personality was matched with
opportunity. And in the glorious use they made
of this opportunity, two points both character-
istically Elizabethan are to be especially discerned.
First, the instinct of brotherliness became a flame
of passion in them. They all insisted on remaining
regimental officers, in serving their companies of the
glorious unnamed, even when staff or diplomatic
appointments were offered. The lines of a still-
living member of this brotherhood, the greatest
of the war poets as yet published, express their
passionate devotion to their men :
Was there love once ? I have forgotten her.
Was there grief once ? Grief still is mine.
Other loves I have ; men rough but men who stir
More joy, more grief than love of thce and thine.
Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth,
Lined by the wind, burned by the sun,
Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth
As whose children brothers we are and one.
Secondly, their land was the Gloriana they
glorified in their deeds. And is not this land of
ours very like that crowned, thankless, just, un-
generous, celestial virago who could give herself
to no man ? In all the New Elizabethan verse this
INTRODUCTION 5
love of country burns, as when the soldier poet
sees the memorial beauty of his own countryside
in a sudden vision before battle, and cries to his
soul
The gorse upon the twilit down^
The English loam so sunset brown,
The bowed pines and the sheep bells' clamour,
The wet, lit lane and the yellow-hammer^
The orchard and the chaffinch song
Only to the brave belong.
Other points of resemblance to the old Eliza-
bethans, the greatest of whom were so often novi
homines or the scions of newly-advanced families,
could also be discovered. For example, a pleasant
brevity of everyday diction bridges the gulf of
time between the two ages of action. Drake
described his greatest moral achievement as " singe-
ing the King of Spain's beard," which may be
compared with the description of the Zeebrugge
affair as "going in with skooters and skimming
dishes and making Fritz sit up and take notice."
The professed historian, deeply entrenched in his
arm-chair, is apt to be misled by such colloquial and
exiguous phrases. It has been so in the case of
Drake's raid into Cadiz, which was not the gallant
piece of impudence most people imagine it to have
been, but an amazing victory which suddenly
brought a long-descended form of naval warfare
to an end and made the future of Philip's plan of
invasion inevitable. Drake went into the Spanish
harbour with small vessels armed with heavy guns
and proved beyond doubt that oar-propelled galleys
with rams, the capital ships of two thousand years
of naval warfare, were helpless against the English
new model. Let us hope the Zeebrugge affair
will not be thus misunderstood by posterity.
A DRAMATIC DICKENS
HAROLD CHAPIN
HAROLD CHAPIN, the most promising
of the younger dramatists working in
England when the War-storm burst on
us, was born in Brooklyn, U.S.A., on February
1 5th, 1886, He remained an American citizen to
the end, and when a letter was shown to him, in
which an old friend of his mother said how noble
it was of him " to fight for King and Country,' 5
his comment defined his standpoint very com-
pletely. " I'm fighting for no King," he said with
a laugh, " and the best of this King is that he
knows we are not fighting for him." It was a
saying full of dramatic meaning; very like the
subtle bits of dialogue, so frequent in his plays,
which .leave after-thoughts in the mind of an
audience. If he lived for American ideas of de-
mocracy, it is certain that he died for his adopted
mother country. He was killed in the battle of
Loos on September 26th, 1915, and his death was a
disaster to the drama of reality (not realism) in the
land of all lands most cumbered up with stage
conventions and traditional business,
His family was of good old New England stock,
descended from Huguenot refugees, and there is a
family legend of an Indian princess, some fair un-
named Pocahontas, who married one of his ancestors.
The legend may well be true for he had the dark
and intent gaze at times which is regarded in the
West as one of the most enduring signs of a drop
or two of Indian blood. He himself always insisted
on the reality of his Indian ancestress. His mother,
HAROLD CIIATIN
(IAXCK-CORPORAL, R.A.M
HAROLD CHAPIN 9
a clever and well-known actress, brought him to
England before he was three years old, and he
spent the rest of his life there. And he was
only seven when his mother was engaged to play
Volumnia in Coriolanus at Stratford -on- A von in
1893, tke Y ear w h erl the Shakespeare Festival was
postponed from April to August owing to Sir Frank
Benson's illness, and he himself was cast for the
part of Young Marcus, You cannot begin too
soon to learn how to live in the strange world
beyond the footlights if you wish to distinguish
yourself in the triple role of actor, producer, and
dramatist. Harold Chapin must have profited by
these early experiences of stageland, for those who
knew him as a boy declared that he always possessed
that curious gift known as "the sense of the theatre,"
which is the most valuable of the dramatist's assets,
next to a knowledge of the human heart.
Mrs Chapin did not allow excursions into stage-
land to interfere with her son's schooling. He was
packed off to a boarding school at an early age, and
he hated it heartily ; so much so that in after years
he always denounced the custom of sending boys
away from home to be educated, which has certainly
destroyed the individuality of many a child-artist in
the making. But he was very happy as a day-boy
at University College School, and he decided later
on that his own son should go there when he was
old enough.
He was a staunch little chap in his early teens ; a
boy among boys when at school, and having none of
those queer faults of the artistic temperament which
so often cause the budding genius to be unpopular
among school-mates destined to grow up into men
of action and men of transaction. He was quick
io A DRAMATIC DICKENS
and clever at his school work, but not possessed by
a very keen sense of its importance; for he had
already chosen his vocation in life, and was busy
storing up in his memory the first fruits of the
born dramatist's keen and insatiate faculty of ob-
servation. Later on, when he had his life's work
in hand, he used to fill note-books with odds and
ends of detail and stray scraps of dialogue, overheard
or imagined or suggested by something he had
read and he was, as you might expect, omnivorous
in his reading. As a small boy he was curiosity
incarnate; he simply had to look into every new
thing which turned up, and a walk in labyrinthine
London or in the country was for him a wondrous
voyage of exploration and discovery. Indeed, the
Elizabethan spirit of adventure was a flame in his
soul. And thus blossomed to fruition in him a
keen and understanding sympathy with all living
creatures more especially animals of all kinds and
those poor unconsidered bits of humanity, whose
simplicity breeds in the true lover of his kind the
humour that issues in tears and laughter com-
mingled. He might laugh at some freak of
character he had discovered. But, even as he
laughed, you saw that his eyes were too bright
to be tearless. One of the experiences he was
fondest of recalling was a tour with a company of
barn-stormers, a veritable Crummies galaxy of stars
a-twinkle, in which he played all manner of parts,
from Hastings in Jane Shore to the Father in
Maria Martin (there's no father in any real acting
version of this old masterpiece, but the women had
run short, and the mother's sex had to be changed).
He loved a living oddity; had he not fallen in
action he might have become the Dickens of the
HAROLD CHAPIN n
British stage. The few plays he left justify that
great, sad hope of what might have been.
He was a clever and most trustworthy actor, who
worked very hard indeed, profited by all kinds of
experience, and never fell below the expectations of
his friends. A pleasing, well-modulated, virile
voice, a manly presence : above all, the power of
thinking out a part intelligently instead of making
it a bag of tricks or " business " collected from
others these and other good qualities were bound
to bring him advancement in a profession which
suffers more than any other from lack of reliability
in its votaries and intelligence stultified by an in-
growing egoism. There was nothing of the egoist
in Harold Chapin; his reverential love of human
nature saved him' from the weakness so admirably
satirized in Bottom (how Shakespeare must have loved
him !). He was the most clubbable of men, but for
all his kindly camaraderie he never squandered his
time and energy even in the cleanly wantonness of
these Georgian days. Had he stuck to acting he
might or might not have made a great success. It
would have been largely a matter of luck ; though
he was no genius, chance might have provided him
with one of those crowd-compelling parts which
marry opportunity with personality and make a
little-known actor or actress famous in a night.
But it is impossible to avoid the thought that
acting, much as he loved it, was for him but a
means to an end a not unprofitable form of ex-
perience which would help his dramatic gift to
ripen. All his spare time was devoted to dramatic
work, and the fact that he has left us sixteen plays
(ten of them in one Act), in spite of the wear and
tear of rehearsing and playing, is a great tribute, not
12 A DRAMATIC DICKENS
only to his indefatigable industry, but also to his
single-hearted devotion to the art he loved most
of all
It is in his one-act plays that his dramatic genius
it was genius beyond question is best expressed.
Art and Opportunity^ the three-act play which he
wrote for Miss Marie Tempest, was a well-made
affair, full of pleasant wit and original ideas. He
devised a heroine that fitted Miss Tempest's talent
like that vivacious lady's evening frocks. She was
a novel species of adventuress who puts her cards
on the table, partly because she is a sportswoman,
partly because she knows that her opponents, human
nature being what it is, will never believe that her
real cards are displayed. The play was fairly suc-
cessful, and brought the author cash as well as
reputation. And no great actress is more kind and
considerate to the playwright that " makes for her "
than Miss Tempest, who is also as sound a judge of
stage technique as her French sister-in-art, Mine
Rejane. But he parted with some of his sincerity
in making this play, and the royalties that flowed
in brought him only vexation of spirit. He felt he
had sold himself to oblige a lady ! A worse play,
but better drama, was his four-act Marriage of
Columbine^ which was written round an idea picked
up in his barn-storming experience. There he was
dealing with people and pursuits he knew and loved,
and his tender Dickensian turn of mind finds itself
again and again, and is strangely effectual.
But, as I have said, his one-act plays arc his best
title-deeds to remembrance. The one-act play has
not yet come into its own because English play-
goers or American playgoers for that matter do
not yet see that it is a form of dramatic art which is
HAROLD CHAPIN 13
sul generis ^ and as different from the three- or four-
act play as the short story is from the novel. We
still look upon the drama as a means of time-
slaughter, and secretly resent the spectacle of reality
beyond the footlights. That is why the dramatic
conte^ of which Harold Chapin was a true master,
is a mere stop-gap in this country, something to be
punctuated by the alarums and incursions of late
arrivals. If a manager is afraid somebody with a
piano or a wallet of anecdotes will not fill the gap,
he will offer some needy friend a bank-note to
make him a one-act trifle,, and expect delivery by
first post next morning. Well, Harold Chapin did
a good deal to continue the conversion to a better
appreciation of the true one-act play which was
begun by ^Qp-ff-my-Thumb and other great little
masterpieces. The Dumb and the Blind is an excel-
lent example of the sincerity and simplicity with
which he shows us the life of the humble folk he
knew so sternly, loved so tenderly. " A man he
was both loving and severe " in his use of the
dramatic search-light in such cases.
Joe Henderson, bargeman, has hitherto been able
to spend two nights a week at home. He enters,
with his mate Bill, to tell his wife that he has just
got a job which will give him ten bob a week more,
and enable him to come home every night. Joe is
rather critical and blustering ; in the opening scene
between Liz, his wife, and Eminy, a sharp daugh-
ter, we gather that he is a discomfortable house-mate.
Liz is sent out for a jug of beer, while Joe sits
gossiping with his friend. The beer is a long time
coming, and going to the door Joe looks out and
sees something (we do not know what for the
moment) which impresses him. Liz is called back ;
14 A DRAMATIC DICKENS
the jug is still empty, and she looks caught out.
Bill, is sent for the beer, and Liz is questioned.
" Wot was you a-doin' of? " " Puttin 5 on me 'at."
" No, you wasn't ... I see you kneelin 3 wiv your
head on the bed." Reluctantly Liz admits she was
"saying her prayers ; it just come over her, like, that
she wanted to. Why? Because she felt grateful
like she wanted to sort o' thank Gawd. The
domestic blusterer (he is hardly bully) questions her
strictly, to be certain that praying is not a mechani-
cal habit with her, and slowly yields to the strange,
pleasing idea that she is really glad to have him at
home for good. The dumb has spoken to God ;
the blind has had a glimpse of one of Love's
miracles. And when Bill comes in with beer, Joe
refuses his share of it and Bill, in his turn, is dumb-
founded. We are left hoping for better things in
the Henderson circle, but have our doubts. Nobody
ever saw this tiny play, which rings true in every
part, without thinking over it again and yet again.
Harold Chapin could always sow a crop of after-
thoughts in the intelligent playgoer's mind.. And
this little play, and all the others he wrote, see life,
and see it whole, and present it as a mingling of
sadness and gladness. Thus he avoids the fatal
mistake of the stern "intellectuals" who would
revitalize our drama, but have so far failed, because
they take too dismal a view of life. Yes, he might
have become a dramatic Dickens, if the German
bullet had spared him.
When the War began it speedily engrossed all
Harold Chapin's thoughts and emotions. All the
tentacles of his sympathy for human nature drew
him into the host that was making to save England
and the world's liberties. He could not act; "it
HAROLD CHAPIN 15
seems so silly ! " he said. By this time he had
married Calypso Valetta (in 1910), and had a little
son. The twain owned all his heart between them;
home held all his happiness. Yet he must serve his
land and his people, and a month after August 4th,
1914, that undying day, he enlisted in the R.A.M.C.
All that he felt, while training and when at the
front, is faithfully recorded in the letters he wrote
home to his wife, his little son, his mother, and to
the dog Emma. They are unlike any other letters
I have ever seen. They are records of things seen
and done, of feelings and thoughts that must out ;
without a trace of sentimentality, of cleverness, of
posing, of literary allusiveness. They show you a
mind cleared for action, a heart concentrated on
loving; and they define the man as vividly and
exactly as he was wont to define the humble folk
of his one-act plays by their own works and words.>
The book that contains them is the simplest and
sincerest, the pithiest and most poignant, of all the
domestic war dramas as yet presented to a weeping,
smiling posterity. Again and again he regrets the
enlistment, which has saddened his wife's lot, made
his son's future so doubtful, straitened the life of the
thrifty little home. He makes no secret of his
discomforts and little pleasures, his hopes and fears,
his eagerness to be out of it all, and his unwilling-
ness to go where the bullets are. But the time
comes when he must write as follows : " I made the
discovery yesterday that, unless I can leave a nice,
well-finished-off war behind me, I don't want to
come home. This in spite of the fact that I am
regularly and miserably homesick for at least half
an hour every morning, and two hours every even-
ing, and heartily fed up with the war every waking
16 A DRAMATIC DICKENS
hour between ... of course, the sooner c out' the
better, and I'd give my teeth for a week's leave, but
I don't want to be away from the work even my
insignificant share of it permanently or for long/'
He had come to set his comrades above all other
loves, old or new ; even above the wife he adored,
the little boy whose religious education he discusses
with such touching wisdom ; his best happiness was
to be useful to them. The men are in his thoughts
all the time he is always talking of their cheerful-
ness, their courtesy to women and kindness to
children and the beasts that are so harshly treated
in Latin countries, the cleanliness of their bodies
under the mire and blood of action, their sweet
reasonableness even in delirium. How sad to think
he could never show them as they truly are to
people at home, to whom war is as that torfured,
ever-hidden face of the moon! A single one-act
war-play by this true dramatist would have blown
the Bairnsfather convention into dust and ashes !
How he fell will never be fully known. The
story of a great battle is full of tragic half-glimpsed
acts of heroism which, had they been marked by
authoritative eyes, would have won a cross of bronze*
This at least is certain as the sun at noon he quit
himself like the man he was in the deadly turmoil
of attack and counter-attack on September 25th
and 26th, working without rest, and taking any
and every risk to bring the wounded into safety.
And in the end, after being wounded and taking
no heed of his wound, he won that cross of wood
which is nobler far than any earthly order, for it is
the eternal symbol of willing self-sacrifice.
[< ii \KD MOI
LOYM Noin
I)|',\N\S
LAVASIUKK KM.IMKMI
THE TRUE AMATEUR
RICHARD MOLESWORTH DENNYS
" "V TOUTH and wisdom is genius," says the
V strange poet who plays Elisha to the
* Elijah of Walt Whitman. If that be
so, the gift of genius must have been given to
Richard Dennys ; for though he died in his thirty-
second year of a wound received in the Somme
advance of July 1916, he had long since made
his peace with Death (which is the crowning
act of human wisdom), and found out a way
of living that was sufficient to all occasions.
England has always been full of these quiet, self-
contained personalities who seek no public recogni-
tion of their happy qualities, but are well content to
remain an occluded fire, as it were, at which a few
chosen friends can find spiritual warmth and light.
These patient souls constitute the secret strength of
England, that incalculable and inexhaustible reserve
of spiritual power which has always baffled and
amazed her mightiest enemies the latest of whom
are all the more confounded because they had for-
gotten that war, as Napoleon himself confessed, is
three-fourths a moral issue.
But for the War we might never have known the
true worth of Richard Dennys, the shyest and most
reluctant of our soldier-poets, and one of the most
" Elizabethan " in his single-hearted devotion to the
quest of Beauty. " Of his artistic gifts," wrote one
of his closest friends, Captain Desmond Coke, u it
is not easy to write, because a curious quality, which
seemed to be half diffidence and half inertia, induced
him to hide their performance. He practised, it is
t* 17
i8 THE TRUE AMATEUR
true, in almost all the Arts he painted, he played
the piano, he wrote in poetry and prose, he acted
and there was nothing he touched that he did not
adorn ; but few, even of his intimates, were allowed
far into this sacred corner of his life, and though he
would sometimes speak of coming before the public
as a writer, none who knew him ever took this
saying seriously. He was an essential amateur,
not in the vile modern sense, but in the fine old
meaning of that terribly ill-treated word. Beauty in
every form he loved, and his whole life was beautiful
in a degree that could never be communicated to
anyone who had not known him ; nor is it easy to
explain in what way he impressed one as possessing,
far beyond those of more elaborate performance, the
spirit and the splendour of rare artistry. He was a
man above all to know and to be thankful for
having known."
In France nobody would find any difficulty in
" placing " such a personality. Richard Dennys
would have been speedily recognized as a member of
that intellectual aristocracy which the greatest of
French artists treats with deference, knowing as he
does that it forms the ultimate court of appeal in all
questions of artistic reputation. But why ? Because
the members thereof see the artist's achievement,
whatever it may be, in its relation to the mother-art
of living, and so are able to distinguish between the
eternal and the ephemeral that which is a real
addition to the amenities of human nature and that
which is accidental and meaningless save for a
moment In England the "universal man" the
thinker who has discovered what underlies all the
arts is a solitary creature, and his influence is
invariably confined to a narrow circle. In France
RICHARD DENNYS 19
he is sought out and sought after, and in course of
time he is co-opted into the fellowship of true
amateurs, which constitutes an organized force of
disinterested opinion in regard to all the issues of
what used to be called taste in the eighteenth century.
Now and again men of this stamp, always provided
they have practised prose or verse with a measure
of success, have exercised a sort of critical dictator-
ship in English literature, Johnson was by far the
most famous in his day of our literary dictators ; a
less notable example was the late W. E. Henley
during his editorship of the National Observer,
which made or marred so many young writers.
This one-man rule is apt to degenerate into a tyranny
and there can be no doubt that it is better for
art to be ruled by an intellectual aristocracy, which
inherits and hands on its tradition, as is the case in
France*. Richard Dennys was not of the stuff out
of which the tyrant of conversational criticism is
wrought. There was not enough ego in his cosmos
for such a part. If you wanted his opinion on a
book or a play or a picture, it was yours for the
asking ; and, though he never laid down the law in
his reply to such a request, his instinct for the deep-
lying truth came to be implicitly trusted by an
increasing circle of friends, some of whom were
creative artists of repute.
His boyish 'ambition was to be a poet, and some
of the verse he wrote before entering his teens is
remarkable both in form and matter. A Boys
Thanksgiving (written at Bexley in 1896) has the
sincerity and simplicity of R. L. Stevenson's open-
air poetry ; indeed one would not have been sur-
prised at finding it in that famous author's collected
works* This admirable poem must be quoted in
20 THE TRUE AMATEUR
full, for it shows how deep-rooted in time was the
philosophy that of a Christian and yet a Nature-
worshipper by which he lived and died :
God's gifts so many a pleasure bring
That I will make a thanksgiving.
For eyes whereby I clearly see
The many lovely things there be ;
For lungs to breathe the morning air,
For nose to smell its fragrance rare ;
For tongue to taste the fruits that grow,
For birds that sing and flowers that blow ;
For limbs to climb, and swim, and run,
And skin to feel the cheerful sun 5
For sun and moon and stars in heaven,
Whose gracious light is freely given ;
The river where the green weed floats,
And where I sail my little boats ;
The sea where I can bathe and play,
The sands where I can race all day ;
The pigeons wheeling in the sun,
Who fly more quick than I can run j
.The winds that sing as they rush by,
The clouds that race across the sky ;
The pony that I sometimes ride,
The curly dog that runs beside ;
The shelter of the shady woods,
Where I may spend my lonely moods
The gabled house that is my home,
The garden where I love to roam,
And bless my parents every day,
Though they be very far away.
Take Thou my thanks, O God above,
For all these tokens of Thy love*
And when I am a man, do Thou
Make me as grateful then as now.
RICHARD DENNYS 21
And here is a charming impression of frost, written
a year or two later, which . has the completeness
of the tiny poems made by Japanese Nature-
worshippers :
Last night at bed-time, cold and white
A fog breathed on my window-pane,
It hid the blinking stars from sight
And masked a moon upon the wane.
This morning it has gone away,
The fog whereon I looked last night,
But every tiny twig and spray
Is frosted with a coat of white.
But the time was at hand when school life was to
absorb all his activities, and it was not until his
twenty-fifth year that he once more * wrote verse
which seemed to him worth keeping. How many
pieces he threw into the fire during his 'prentice
days will never be known ! He went to Winchester
College where poetry, or at any rate prosody, is in
the air just as at Shrewsbury School dust falling in
the sixth-form library was found to consist of Greek
particles ! The Winchester master who saw a small
man reading Swinburne and could find nothing
better to say than " Poor little devil ! " was really
outside the traditional picture. When his school-
days were over Richard Dennys went to St
Bartholomew's Hospital, where he took his final
degrees (M.R.C.S. and L.R,C.R) in 1909. His
heart, however, was not in the business of medicine,
and he never practised. Strange to say, nothing
that he wrote in later years bears any trace of the
knowledge he must have acquired at St Bartholo-
mew's of the mysteries of the human flesh and the
half-explained powers .that sustain it. Later on he
went to Florence and worked at Gordon Craig's
22 THE TRUE AMATEUR
school for the improvement of the Art of the Theatre.
And his many-sided mind had full play there, for
the Art of the Theatre is, or ought to be, a synthesis
of all the other arts. So far his life had been un-
eventful ; the so-called " practical " man might have
called it empty of urgent interests. His friends and
relations ; the old houses in which he felt the action
and atmosphere of past ages ; his own small store of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treasures; above
all, his never-ceasing, ever-increasing devotion to Art
in all its manifestations these were the matters that
filled his life through and through and gave him an
unbroken happiness which was all the more real and
vital, perhaps because he was always looking back on
the youthful years that had been, and was visited by
moods of an unappeased melancholy which expressed
itself in such lines as these :
I do not understand the eyes of the dead,
Nor the message of stillness
From lips that have loved
And hands that have given caresses.
He was at Florence when the War broke out, and
he at once returned to England, Various attempts
to get work in which his medical training would be
useful were unsuccessful. He obtained instead a
commission in the Loyal North Lancashire Regi-
ment, and from that time on was absolutely absorbed
in his military duties. Those who thought him too
much of a dreamer and likely to fail in dealing with
the rough, ugly, defiling necessities of war were
astonished to find that he soon became an admirable
regimental officer. After all, will-power is half the
secret of military leadership indeed, nothing can
compensate for the lack of it, either in a general or
in a subaltern and no artist, no seeker after Beauty,
RICHARD DENNYS 23
ever succeeded in his quest without a full share of
the spirit that will bear down all difficulties to
achieve its end. The true artist, the true amateur,
must have an iron will, as all Frenchmen and a
few Englishmen very well know. It was so with
Richard Denny s, who from first to last put his
whole soul into the work that had found him ; no
labour was too hard or too tiresome, no mental or
physical misery too great for him, if it made for the
welfare and efficiency of his men. His extraordinary
ability was recognized at once. He was promoted
temporary captain before the end of 1914, and he
got his company soon after he went to France.
The miseries of a wet winter in the trenches left him
smiling and imperturbable. " Under the most ad-
verse circumstances," wrote his C,O., " he was always
cheery ; nobody ever heard him grouse. The best
interests of the men and traditions of the Battalion
were always his chief concern. 5 ' No company com-
mander was ever more indefatigable in screwing
comforts out of the authorities for his men, who
soon learnt to trust him and love him in spite of the
habit of reserve which he could never overcome.
Physical courage is, of course, taken for granted, but
Richard Dennys (who had long ago " given Death
the lie," like the great Elizabethan soldier-poet)
showed an inspiring coolness under the bombard-
ments that accompanied the Somme advance of July
1916. Had he survived that great feat of arms
there can be no doubt that he would have risen
rapidly to high rank, for by that time his keen and
many-sided intelligence had made him a master of
his business.
His war poems, hastily written while he was rest-
ing in billets, are few in number. But they are
24 THE TRUE AMATEUR
ample evidence for the belief that his old philosophy
of living and dying based on a bed-rock certainty
that God is immanent in Nature had proved suffi-
cient for all his newer needs. In simple, soldierly
verse he pays a tribute to the men he loved so wisely
and so well :
Ted, Harry, Bill and John,
Cheery friends I know to-day,
Goodly lads to look upon,
Willing lads for work or play.
Duty claims a man entire,
With will and strength to pay the price,
Relinquishing his heart's desire
To make the final sacrifice.
But the strangely beautiful tie of affection between
the regimental officer and his men which prompted
Lieutenant E. A. Macintosh, M.G, to say in a
poem addressed to the fathers of his slain High-
landers :
You were only their fathers,
I was their officer
must have seemed to him too intimate and sacred a
matter to be made the theme even of poetry. Yet
in Better Far to Pass Away the veils of reserve
are drawn apart, and the secret sources of his fortitude
are shown in lines which have the true Elizabethan '
ring:
Better far to pass away
While the limbs are strong and young,
Ere the ending of the day,
Ere Youth's lusty song be sung.
Hot blood pulsing through the veins,
Youth's high hope a burning fire,
Young men needs must break the chains
That hold them from their heart's desire.
RICHARD DENNYS 25
My friends the hills, the sea, the sun,
The winds, the woods, the clouds, the trees-
How feebly, if my youth were done,
Could I, an old man, relish these !
With laughter, then, Fll go to greet
What Fate has still in store for me,
And welcome Death if we should meet,
And bear him willing company.
My share of fourscore years and ten
Fll gladly yield to any man,
And take no thought of " where " or " when,"
Contented with my shorter span,
For I have learned what love may be,
And found a heart that understands,
And known a comrade's constancy,
And felt the grip of friendly hands*
Come when it may, the stern decree
For me to leave the cheery throng,
And quit the sturdy company
Of brothers that I work among.
No need for me to look askance,
Since no regret my prospect mars,
My day was happy and perchance
The coming night is full of stars,
In A Bofs *Ihanksgmng and in this last poem
of all his character is explained and his career
justified.
THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY
CHARLES LISTER
CHARLES LISTER (according to the
Memoir by his father, Lord Ribblesdale)
was a personality even in babyhood. Mr
Gladstone made his acquaintance at the age of six,
and was much pleased by his accurate and pellucid
pronunciation of long and sonorous words, such as
ornithorhyncbus. The two discussed the habits of
the more obscure animals as depicted in a natural
history book with fine plates, and parted on terms
of mutual respect " He seems to be a clever man,"
said the little boy when asked what he thought of
the visitor. Later on he gave up the use of poly-
syllabic words (which clever children invariably
collect from the conversation of grown-up people),
and his boyish letters were pithy and to the point.
His wish to create a social Utopia, which made him
a Socialist even in his Eton days, found early
expression in a well-ordered polity of rabbits,
guinea-pigs, and mice, maintained by him in the
stable-yard at Gisburne, the family home. This
model community was subjected to a complex code
of eugenic and dietary rules and regulations. The
inhabitants were very tame, and seemed to accept
their master as a benevolent and beneficent deity.
But they were unconstitutional in their habits and
practices ; the mice were always escaping, the rabbits
evaded the well-devised marriage-laws, and the
guinea-pigs as their owner once told Lady Ulrica
Buncombe, a very close friend of his at the time
exhibited traces of the worst qualities of humanity
dirt, greed, and cowardice. " These guinea-pigs
TJ1K HON < IIAK1 ES I I^'JER
(MKUTKVANT, ROYAL MARINES)
/o<w //^ oii^inal limiting by /. S Saugeut, K A , Gisbitrnfi August, 1899
When M>. bmtniif wa* paying ti visit at disburse he ions impressed by a
fidelity to tyf>( tan^uitoi^ in this mid-wentecntk centitry po> trait ami the
Charles Listen of /Sty. '1 hi*, accounts f 01 tht, back^oitnd nf hi\ diaiwnq.
CHARLES LISTER 27
are not a comfort to me," said another little boy to
the writer ; and in that case the socialistic state was
dissolved by allowing all its members to escape into
a plantation, after which no sign of their existence
was ever seen by mortal eye. ' If Jean Jacques
Rousseau had only kept guinea-pigs !
But Charles Lister's Socialism which flourished
at Eton and at Oxford, the most tolerant of
democracies, survived the collapse of the stable-yard
polity, because it was rooted in a real love of human
nature and a lively confidence in its possibilities.
The time came when this instinctive sympathy with
all sorts and conditions of human beings was satisfied
by the camaraderie of the shell-vexed Gallipoli
trenches. " From the first," said an old friend of
his Eton days, " he was the embodiment of com-
radeship in whatever society he found himself. The
way men lived filled him with curiosity. Like the
Celt of old who awaited at the cross-roads the
passers-by to compel them to tell him something
new, so Charles interrogated his companions."
Naturally and necessarily, he was happy at school ;
for Eton is always kind to all whose philosophy of
living, whatever it may be, does not issue in
priggishness or snobbishness two of the modern
deadly sins which were unknown, nay, unthinkable,
to all the New Elizabethans. When, however, he
had reached the age of indiscretion, and political
searchlights began to move across his horizon the
old Party organizations are always interested in
young men of good birth and fine talents some of
his friends and relations had searchings of heart
about his Socialism, which threatened to become
much more than a form of ineffectual idealism.
After leaving Oxford, where he won a classical
28 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY
exhibition at Balliol and took a first in Greats, he
entered into close relations with the Independent
Labour Party ; he became enveloped, so to speak,
in sociological treatises and statistical surveys, both
animate and inanimate, and seemed to be throwing
away his chance of a political careen But there
was never any reason to fear that he would lose
touch with the realities of human life, that rough
fabric of human strength and weakness interwoven.
A young man, said the late King Oscar of Sweden,
who has not been a Socialist before he was twenty-
five shows that he has no heart ; a young man who
remains one after twenty-five shows that he has no
head. Mr Balfour, another connoisseur of men in
the making, was consulted by the young man's
mother. And he took the common-sensible view of
the matter, pointing out that the I.L.P. intimacy
would enable him to get all sorts of experience
and a fund of special knowledge more valuable
than that to be acquired by keeping selling-
platers or running a minor actress. Socialism, like
measles, is best taken in youth ; either disease, if
contracted in middle age, is dangerous to the patient
and apt to leave some sort of constitutional disability
behind. A wider knowledge of men and affairs
convinced him of the truth of Jowett's saying, that
human beings are not governed by logic, and it was
not long before he parted company with the " intel-
lectuals/' who think that human nature can be
argued into a state of blessedness, that barbara
celarent is a guarantee of the Millennium. But
he never lost his keen and blissful liking for his
fellow-creatures and his anxious desire to serve
them; the social phenomenon known as labour
unrest, which is really the protest of flesh and blood
CHARLES LISTER 29
against being made cogs and wheels and footlin*
little keys in a vast industrial mechanism, always
troubled his generous, purposeful spirit.
The writing of small memorials (in prose or verse)
has been much practised since the Great War began.
It is natural that the intimate friends of the joyous
youths, who have made the last sacrifice, giving all
that they were, and all that they might have been,
in the service of their country, should make such
offerings of thought touched with emotion. From
two of those memorials to Charles Lister I make the
following excerpts ; the first is by the Rev. Ronald
Knox, and the second by Sir Rennell Rodd, our
Ambassador at Rome, under whom he served his
apprenticeship in diplomacy :
i. " Political Oxford, sporting Oxford, ecclesi-
astical Oxford, intellectual Oxford, philanthropic
Oxford, revolutionary Oxford, all knew him as a
familiar. His infectious vitality galvanized every-
thing ; no festive occasion was complete without him,
no meeting would suffer him to keep silence, and he
even contrived to instil a certain heartiness into the
cloistered Gregorians of the Cowley Fathers' church.
His lighter and his more serious moments were
strangely blended. Once when he came into colli-
sion with the authorities of Trinity, he was rusticated
for the short remnant of a term. Having made
arrangements for the entertainment of an expected
guest, a Labour M.P., he went off to study poverty
at first-hand in an East-end Settlement.
** He had none of the inhuman detachment which
often makes public characters unknowable in private ;
while he tolerated widely, he was whole-hearted in
his attachments to personal friends. His friendship
enriches the past, and the memories you shared with
30 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY
him stand out vividly from a hazier background,
whether you picture him shooting on a Scotch moor,
or assisting boisterously at a stormy meeting of the
Church Congress, or applauding the efforts of M. de
Rougemont to ride a turtle in a tank at the Man-
chester Hippodrome. Though he was at the moment
of action regardless of the figure he cut, he could
laugh at himself in private and prove his sense of
proportion. His richest vein of humour, whether in
conversation or in writing, was a running parody of
bad journalese : his best serious writing was almost
always in this manner. But the secrets of per-
sonality, especially in a personality so complex,
necessarily evade description." -
2* "Charles Lister displayed two characteristics
which are but rarely found in combination the
spirit of the sportsman and the lover of adventure
with the instincts of the scholar gentleman. He
was of the type which would have found its right
environment in the large-horizoned Elizabethan
days, and he would have been of the company of
Sidney and Raleigh and the Gilberts and boister-
ously welcomed at the Mermaid Tavern. He would
sometimes pretend that he was divided in his mind
whether the life of the fox-hunter or that of the
college don would have most tempted him if he had
only had to follow his instincts. But in reality he
was much too deeply imbued with the sense of duty
and the higher obligations of life to have devoted
himself to the former to the exclusion of graver
things. He was, however, seriously drawn towards
the student's life, and was a deep and thoughtful
reader with a very retentive memory. No doubt he
was also a hard and fearless rider, without the graces
of the natural horseman, and here in the Roman
CHARLES LISTER 31
Campagna, with its long deceptive reaches of grass
and its sudden and unexpected obstacles, his im-
petuosity often alarmed his friends. But there, as
in the sea in the bay of Naples, where currents ran
strong and seas were high, as afterwards in the
deadly battle area of Gallipoli, he was physically
the most fearless of men. In the more difficult tests
of moral courage I have known no braver soul"
It might seem from these fragments that he lacked
the power of self-concentration on a definite piece of
work which might appear interesting to-day, dull
and monotonous to-morrow. But both these wit-
nesses and many others certify that it was not so
with Charles Lister. At Oxford he got a First in
" Greats " at the end of his third year, and success
of that kind can only be achieved by keen and con-
tinuous hard work (not drudgery . . . Oxford exists
to put the mere drudge in his proper place among the
Seconds). And Sir Rennell Rodd assures us that
he was conscientious in carrying out the daily routine
work of an embassy, even when his duties seemed
dull and mechanical. He even made strenuous
efforts, as an attache, to master the accomplishments
of the ball-room.
His letters to friends from Rome, from India,
which he visited on leave, and from Constantinople,
are, full of the mellow wisdom which one expects
only from a seasoned diplomatist, well versed in men
and events. Diplomacy, in spite of its bewildering
restrictions, was manifestly his life's work, if only
because he was able to read at sight the most complex
of alien types, even those human palimpsests which
are so common in the Near East, an ancient melting-
pot of civilized and uncivilized races. His pithy,
picturesque letters are full of passages which show a
32 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY
profound insight into the mentality of peoples whom
the average Englishman would not learn to under-
stand in a thousand years. For example, he sees
that the Italians are a race that has never quite
grown up. He says they are certainly great babies
especially the " smart " ones and rejoices in the
freshness and charm of their perennial babyhood.
India is so full of pitfalls for the hasty traveller,
even if his faculty of observation is trained, that
one begins his gay, go-as-you-please letters from
Lucknow or Delhi with a feeling of trepidation.
But a sense of historical perspective saves him from
the errors into which a lover of his fellow-creatures is
so apt to fall when he passes through that wilderness
of indistinguishable persons. He does not jump to
the conclusion that those silent millions have been
ground down into dust by Juggernauts of gover-
nance, of which the British Raj is the latest; he
knows that the land they live in has been their
destiny, and that the vision of an independent India
is vetoed, not only by history, but also by geography.
He finds the key to Indian policy in Akbar's inscrip-
tion on the great gate built at Delhi to commemorate
his victories in the Deccan and his conquest of
Ahmednagar and its Queen : " Said Jesus, on whom
be Peace, The world is a bridge^ build no bouse on
it" He sees India as a land of glorious illusion and
dread disillusionment where the work of the wise is
always being wrecked by the impulses of the fool.
He goes straight to the secret of the comparative
success of British rule in India when he says that
the Briton there must live dead straight, both in
manners and morals, seeing that it is Bible-and-
Sword heroes like old Havelock (whose tomb he
saw at the Alum-bagh) who have made us respected.
CHARLES LISTER 33
Once or twice his quick sense of humour prevents
him from seeing the full significance of some curious
fact, e.g. the request of the captain of hockey at
the Khalse College who asked, before an important
match, that the assistant-clerk in the Principal's
office should be let off work for the day because he
was such a first-rate pray-er that Heaven would
certainly listen to his petition for victory. But this
was merely a rather involved proof of their implicit
belief in a Deity which has all earth's affairs, great
and small, under His hand. If hockey had been
played in the true Middle Ages, the noontide of
Christianity, any Christian captain would have
called on the local saint to intercede for his team.
At a great jousting, everybody prayed hard for the
success of his champion the one who carried his
money, in point of fact ! And don't we all do this
very thing in war-time on the off-chance of getting
luck we don't deserve ?
The letters from Constantinople, written on the
eve of war, and while Turkey was being fast
entangled in the German plot, will be invaluable to
the historian of the future. More especially those
received by the writer's aunt, the Hon. Beatrix
Lister, who was conversant with all the complex
problems of European affairs and could draw him
out. Evidence exists in them for the belief, con-
firmed from many other sources, that ever since the
ist of July Germany had finally determined on war.
The feigned innocence of the Lichnowskys, over
whom tears were literally shed in London at the
leave-taking, is scoffed at by this keen and cool-
headed observer. The persons of the Turkish
tragedy pass before us in a kind of diplomatic
cinematograph. Wangenheim, who began by saying
34 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY
that Germany would wage a " Platonic War " with
England, but afterwards changed his tune ; Enver
Pasha and his one-man claque, the Grand Vizier;
the tempestuous Liman von Sandars; the solid
tennis-playing Gretchens of the German colony;
and many other major and minor actors all admir-
ably characterised and bustling about their own and
other people's business in the liveliest fashion. No
wonder that " Charles Lister : Letters and Recol-
lections" (Fisher Unwin) is already in a fourth
edition.
The work of the diplomatists is not at an end in
war-time ; nay, it is more important than in peace-
time, for they must play their part in "gaining
public opinion " according to- the third axiom of
national warfare as anatomised by Clausewitz. In
France or Germany young men of the calibre of
Charles Lister or Raymond Asquith are not allowed
to descend into the trenches and be lost in the mass
of indistinguishable cannon-fodder. Brain-power is
the most valuable of national assets in. war- time
as in peace-time, and it is the height of folly to
waste it unnecessarily. It will be part of the stern
discipline of Great Britain's future wars to compel
the New Elizabethan to work where his special
gifts have the highest value for his country. But
these philosophic arguments counted for nothing,
for less than nothing, with Charles Lister and his
friends. They were inspired with the spirit of the
old Crusaders; the call to dare and endure all
things, in company with their inarticulate and un~
gifted countrymen, came on them as the Holy
Ghost came upon the apostles as a sudden great
sound in the likeness of fiery tongues. If something
was lost, something was gained by their consuming
CHARLES LISTER 35
desire to show the world the mettle of their pasture.
It was proved urbi et orbl that, as we were all
Englishmen, so we could be Englishmen all to-
gether. Social classes, intellectual castes all these
distinctions, real and half-real and unreal, vanished
in the chanting flames of a spiritual conflagration
out of which a New England is even now emerging
like the legendary phoenix.
With a group of Oxford men of various genera-
tions, Charles Lister went out to the East and
joined the Hood Battalion, R.N.D. His letters
from Gallipoli show that his soul was at peace with
itself in this high adventure, which ended, alas,
in the greatest disaster of the war, the withdrawal
which so amazed the shattered and starving Turkish
troops, and must have seemed to them Allah's
crowning act of mercy ! Sir Ian Hamilton's Honours
despatch gives us one aspect of Charles Lister's admir-
able services in the most ancient theatre of European
warfare (was Helen really only a metaphor of
the control of Black Sea trade?). He was com-
mended " For brilliant deeds of gallantry throughout
our operations. On July 2ist he personally re-
connoitred a Turkish communication trench, and,
although wounded (for the second time) he returned
and led forward a party to the attack. Subsequently
he was a third time wounded and has since died, to
the sorrow of all ranks who knew him."
When he was recovering from his first wound,
efforts were made to persuade him to return to his
diplomatic work. An appointment was offered
which would have given full and free scope for
the exercise of his special gifts. But he felt that
he could not leave his " spfendid men," and he was
soon back on the dreary shell-swept beaches of the
36 THE HUMANE DIPLOMACY
haunted Peninsula, where, as another witness said,
the ghosts of Greek and Trojan heroes sit warming
themselves in the white moonlight. The " Hoods "
had missed him sorely. He returned to assure them
joyously that they were having the time of their
lives. " There was no mess in the Peninsula,"
said Lieutenant Ivan Heald, who afterwards fell
in an air-fight on the West Front, and was himself
a master of the munitions of merriment, " so merry
as ours with Lister leading such rare wits as
Asquith, Kelly, and Patrick Shaw-Stewart Lister
always on the most uncomfortable packing-case,
declaiming and denouncing with that dear old stiff
gesture of his, which we came to know so well."
And behind all this joyous logomachy, the sense of
duty burnt like the undying flame on a secret altar.
Would he, after all, have done more for England if
he had saved his life and used it in the still-con-
tinuing war of Chancelleries ? Let the present
Headmaster of Eton, that fine judge of characters
and careers, have the last word :
" To have laughed and talked wise, witty, fantastic,feckless
' To have mocked at rules and rulers and learnt to obey,
To have led your men with a daring adored and reckless,
To have struck your blow for Freedom, the old straight way :
" To have hated the world and lived among those who love it,
To have thought great thoughts, and lived till you knew them
true,
To have loved men more than yourself, and have died to
prove it
Yes, Charles, this is to have lived : was there more to do ? "
If there was more to do, he must be doing it now.
So wise and wonderful a spirit must needs be immortal.
When M* Bergson's wonderful vision comes true
when the forces of Life in a last great offensive ride
CHARLES LISTER 37
over and occupy the dismal trenches Death has held
for half eternity and all time he and his comrades
will be there to lead the way as in Gallipoli of old.
It is absurd to think of them as other than the
undying translated into a loftier and even more
joyous sphere of delight in action.
A SOUTHSIDE SAXON
ANTHONY FREDERICK WILDING
THE typical New Zealander is much nearer
to the Saxon type of the narrow seas
than the " sombre, indomitable, wan "
Australian, who is the product of transplantation
into a mightier land with a fiercer climate more
than a century ago. New Zealand is the youngest
of the Dominions, and a party of its people is not
easily distinguished from a group of the inhabitants
of the mother country. Gallaher's famous team,
for example, who came over twelve years ago to
teach us how to play a more imaginative form of
Rugby football in the old, staunch, untiring style
of the 'eighties, looked like an assortment of the
sturdy, indefatigable toilers
" Wick and warm at work and play "
who are to be met with anywhere in the northern
industrial counties. And, but for a subtle, exotic
charm of intonation (nothing so obvious as an
accent !) and his fresh outlook on life, and singular
power of kindly receptivity, you could never have
told Anthony Frederick Wilding, the most famous
of New Zealand athletes, from a native son of this
old crowded island which is still u Home " to the
settlers in the " Long White Cloud" of the Maori
adventurers. When he was playing lawn-tennis in
the Davis Cup Competition in New York, just
before the war began, he had the greatest difficulty
in persuading a certain American journalist that he
had not been born and raised in England. " All I
can say/* said the interviewer, "is that you look
ANTHONY F. WINDING
(('\ITAIN, ROYA.I, MARINES)
ANTHONY WILDING 39
like an Englishman, sound like an Englishman,
and act like an Englishman. Ain't there been a
little mistake somewhere?" What puzzled this
doubting Thomas, no doubt, was the equanimity
he displayed when defeated by M'Loughlin (whom
he had beaten a year before) in the last match of
his life. Americans, and to a less extent Australians
and Canadians, are seldom capable of hiding their
disappointment in such a case. But Anthony
Wilding lived up to the highest ideal of English
sportmanship ; he was always able, without an
effort, to forget all about prizes in remembering the
zest of a well-fought game, and his sunny smile
and willing word of congratulation added to a
chivalrous opponent's pleasure in a victory which
must always have been more or less unexpected.
Anthony Wilding was born at Opawa, near
Christchurch, on the last day of October 1883.
His father, Frederick Wilding, K.G., a leader of
the New Zealand Bar, was born in Montgomery-
shire ; his mother was a daughter of the Charles
Anthony who was six times Mayor of Hereford,
and did more than anybody else to make the
sleepiest of ancient cathedral cities into a thriving
centre of business. All the Anthonys have brains
and character, as I well remember, and Mrs Wilding
was an admirable mother, who taught her children
that what was worth doing at all was worth doing
well But Anthony Wilding was his father's son
as well as his mother's son ; it was from his father
that he inherited the athletic ability which, turned
in a new direction, made his name famous wherever
lawn-tennis is played as it ought to be not as a
mere accompaniment to tea, talk, and flirtation, but
as a picturesque and inexhaustible game which taxes
4 o A SOUTHSIDE SAXON
the athlete's skill and staying-power in an equal
degree. Mrs Wilding was keenly interested in all
open-air games; she never went to see a cricket-
match without carefully keeping the score. But
Frederick Wilding was the finest all-round athlete
Herefordshire has ever produced, and his name and
fame are still remembered at Shrewsbury, where his
long jump of 20 ft. 6 ins. is still the school record,
and he proved himself the brainiest of bowlers. He
was good at every game he tried, from Rugby
football (which is the national game of New
Zealand) to bowls and billiards. On one occasion
he made cricket history; for when Shrewsbury's
team visited New Zealand, some thirty years ago,
he played for Eighteen of Canterbury, taking eight
wickets for twenty-one runs, Lohmann and Briggs
being two of his notable victims, And seeing that
he and R. D. Harman won the Lawn-Tennis
Doubles Championship of New Zealand live times,
it is easy to see where his son got his first insight
into the game which has long been a familiar
diversion in every civilised or uncivilised part
of the world.
Fownhope, the home of the Wildings at Christ-
church, was named after the village on the winding
Wye, where Frederick Wilding's father practised as
a country doctor. It was a roomy and comfortable
house, with spacious verandas in an extensive
pleasance of orchards and flower-beds. There was
nay, still is a fine grass tennis-court, and beyond
it an asphalt court with a volleying board at the
back of it. Further on you come to the most
joyous thing of all an open-air swimming-bath
of white stone, fed with the diamond-water from
an artesian well (by way of a fish-pond on a terrace
ANTHONY WILDING 41
above), and surrounded by an evergreen hedge. In
summer this hedge is covered by the climbing sweet-
peas, that grow so luxuriantly in the soft New
Zealand air, and the many hues of the fragrant
blossoms, seen above a border of scarlet poppies,
would be mirrored in the translucent depths of the
silver bathing-pool. Further still were spacious
meadows extending to the Opawa, a gentle little
stream such as one sees in Southern England.
Many stay-at-home Britons believe that only rude
comfort is to be had in the Dominions that a
hasty log-hut is the best habitation one can
hope to find there. In point of fact the English
country-house has migrated into all the "demi-
Englands " (Hanley's phrase) beyond the narrow
seas, and having adapted itself to a new climate
and a new environment is playing its old part as a
humanising influence. The overseas country-house
is not as large, not nearly so, as that which is a
feature of every English landscape. Lack of servants
within and without, together with the exigencies of
climate and the absence of great fortunes, accounts
for the difference. But the later and lesser home,
whether in the rus in urbe of a Canadian city or in
such gracious islands as the New Zealanders possess,
has its appropriate amenities, and is a character-
building institution, as in the ancient mother
country. . . , The charm of Fownhope down under
was reflected in the charm, indefinable yet so de-
finitely felt, of the young athlete who made a game
of lawn-tennis almost epical in its appeal to the
imagination.
When he went to Cambridge in 1902 Anthony
Wilding was a good cricketer as well as a lawn-
tennis player, quite up to the inter-' Varsity standard,
42 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON
though perhaps not equal to the necessities of the
ultra-modern game as played in the Wimbledon
Championships. Had he made cricket his chief
pursuit he must have won his "Blue 55 long before
going down. But he chose lawn-tennis as his very
own game, and spared no pains to make himself a
real expert The late Kenneth Powell was one of
many witnesses to the way in which he put his
mind into lawn-tennis, whether when practising the
various strokes or coaching a succession of Cam-
bridge disciples. There was much to learn before
he himself could approach championship form. He
had to learn to meet the service when used as an
attacking force of the first importance. He had to get
rid of the ugly and cramped backhand drive which
he brought from New Zealand such English
authorities as. H. L. Doherty warned him that he
must " anglicize " this stroke if he wished to be
absolutely first-rate. He did so at the cost of
infinite toil and trouble, innumerable hours of daily
practice which could give no pleasure at all, for the
extirpation of a youthful habit is a tedious business
for the most adaptable of athletes. In the end he
achieved his ambition. He won the All-England
Championship at Wimbledon in 1910, and the little
New Zealand nation "little, but oh my ! " rejoiced
as one man at his victory. But that was not the
climax of this super-specialist's careen The day of
all his athletic days came in 1913, when he met
M. E. M'Loughlin, the American champion, in the
Challenge round. M'Loughlin, after a narrow
escape from defeat by the astute Roper Barrett on
the first day, had reached the Challenge round
easily enough, thanks to his terrific service. Though
the committee changed the day of decision from
ANTHONY WILDING 43
Saturday to Friday not daring to face the dangers of
a Saturday crowd more than seven thousand people
were on the ground when the great match began.
Hundreds were turned away from the gates;
hundreds saw only the scoring board ; it was said
that patriotic Americans paid ten pounds for a seat.
They the Americans were willing to lay odds on
the young Californian,-and M'Loughlin's play had
been so impressive that there were very few takers.
Only two or three critics with the courage of their
convictions, who saw the weakness of the American's
backhand and remembered that Wilding had beaten
him at Sydney in 1909 by three sets to one, were
certain that the New Zealander would win, barring
accidents. M c Loughlin won the first two games,
and the American spectators were in throes of
delight. But, as time went on, it became evident
that the New Zealander could return the American's
terrific services to good purpose, that he was prepared
to batter away relentlessly at the latter's weak point,
and that his superior strategy was constantly giving
him control of the court. After a glorious effort to
pull the match out of the fire in the third game,
M'Loughlin went down literally, for he fell head-
long and his opponent had won a clear-cut
victory by three sets to none (8-6, 6-3, 10-8).
That year he won all three world's championships
on grass, wood, and sand courts and attained a
degree of all-round strength which was never
equalled by himself or any other at any time in the
history of the youngest of the Ludi Hitmanwres.
In 1 9 14. Norman Brookes beat hirri in the Challenge
round ; the born player, the great artist, was better
on the day of decision than a rival of equal physique
and more equable temperament who had more of
44 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON
the genius for taking infinite pains. For all that,
the Wilding of 1913 was the greatest player of
lawn-tennis we have ever seen or ever shall see, for
more than one generation must pass away before the
English-speaking peoples can afford to cultivate
athletics as in the happy, reckless, picturesque past.
Was it worth while to give the golden years of
youth to the cultivation of a game which, with
all its merits, lacks the joyous rigour and kindly
discipline of such co-operative pastimes as football
or cricket ? Yes a thousand times yes ! since
Anthony Wilding found it worth while ! In the
first place, lawn-tennis, which is played all over the
world, is one of the very few games in which men
and women can take part on equal and enjoyable
terms. If it is to be played so as to foster the mens
sana in corpora sano y then we must have from time
to time both male and female players who set an
example of virtuosity. Anthony Wilding carried
on a tradition of scientific endeavour and artistic
form which began with Lawford and the Renshaws,
and has prevented lawn-tennis from degenerating
into as fatuous a means of time-slaughter as Mid-
Victorian croquet. The old silly " patball " could
never give the health and happiness, the clear eye
and clean liver and release from workaday cares
which are enjoyed by the million votaries of the
modern pastime. . And the health-giving " vigour
of the game " as now played is the outcome of the
keenness and artistry of Anthony Wilding and the
other famous experts,
Anthony Wilding was essentially a man of action.
He was not a scholar ; he despised politics ; he had
no particular liking for any art, save the art of
living. He had, however, a real love and sympathy
ANTHONY WILDING 45
for machines those strong, uncomplaining members
of the second creation (Man's), each of which has
its own little personal peculiarities. He treated
these strange creatures, which must play a part of
ever-increasing importance in the great drama of
modernity, with as much care as he had for his
own body a mechanism of power and precision
that was never allowed to become slack for a
moment or lose its bright vigour through any
form of self-indulgence. He neither smoked nor
drank; he never played the man-about-town nor
even dressed the part; he never squandered his
time and himself in so-called love affairs. Within
and without he was as clean and bright as a new
pin. And he also had a certain bright mysterious
quality which caused him to be liked at first sight
by all sorts and conditions of men and women.
In his charming biography Mr Wallis Myers de-
fines this rare, elusive gift as a kind of Peter-
Pannishness : " Beneath his perfectly developed
frame there beat the heart of a child. Like a
child, he was pure and ingenuous. Like a child,
he was unconscious of control and impatient of
discipline* Like a child, using only the art of
an unsophisticated nature, he claimed and won
indulgence. Yet when the real test came in
sport or in war Anthony Wilding revealed a
steadfastness, a faculty for concentration, a self-
reliance and resourcefulness which made up a strong
character. Physically and mentally he became a
man ; spiritually he was a boy until the end,"
I believe this to be a true definition of his peculiar
charm, which closely resembled that of not a few
famous soldiers of the past and present men in
whose character a simple sincerity, unconcealed by
46 A SOUTHSIDE SAXON
pose or the subtleties of intellectualism, sends to
every minces eye a white beam of piercing
brightness.
When war broke out he returned to England
at once and lost not a moment in volunteering.
Having previously held a commission in the King's
Colonials ("colonial" is a word which must now
be scrapped altogether), his way to a suitable job
was easy enough. His knowledge of motor-cars
and skill in driving them, added to an intimate
knowledge of France and Belgium gained in many
visits, caused him to be temporarily attached to .the
' Headquarters Intelligence Corps. He saw at once
it was to be a motor war. His courage and cool-
ness and untiring usefulness were immediately recog-
nized, and he was transferred to the Naval Air
Wing, which had armoured motor-cars as a side-
line. Commander Sampson, R.N., who organised
it all, testifies that he found Captain Wilding " an
extremely cheery messmate, always terribly keen
to do anything to help." When Commander
Sampson and his flying squadron went to the
Dardanelles, the armoured cars were left behind ;
Wilding was for a time at a loose end, the useless-
ness of his machines in attacking trenches having
been demonstrated, During a short leave in England
he devised a two- wheel trailer, to carry a 3 -pounder,
which was very mobile over rough ground. A
strain of inventiveness was coming out in him
which, had he lived, might have had other and
invaluable consequences. It was due to his faith
and persistency that the trailer design was adopted
and given a practical trial " My own little stunt/*
as he described it, was a success, for the 3-pounders
on wheels strafed a sort of hostelry for German
ANTHONY WILDING 47
snipers. He received a little command of his own,
and on May 2, 1915, received news of his pro-
motion to the rank of captain. On Ma} 7 loth he
was killed by a shell, and was buried near Neuve
Chapelle. Hundreds of letters of sorrow and sym-
pathy were sent to his New Zealand home.
Lieutenant-Commander Chilcott of the Royal
Naval Air Service wrote as follows : " I had learnt
to love him as few men love each other. My ad-
miration for him was unbounded, and I fear it
will never be my good fortune during the re-
mainder of my travel through this world to meet
another friend with a nature such as his. I always
felt that he was an example to his fellow-men in
everything. God rest his great soul. 55
See what a fine and indefatigable soul had been
trained in the little, familiar lawn with its white
lines, which is the arena of the youngest, yet most
popular, of our joyous ball-games. These essentially
English games must never be given up to please
the " intellectuals 5) who scoff at them or the money-
makers who think that the science of gaming a
livelihood must altogether oust the art of living,
To forget all our joyous yt^vacrrifo?, which gives
us men that can be made into soldiers in a few
months, would be to " Germanize 55 our natural life.
It would be a fatal folly.
THE MODERN ACTOR
BASIL HALLAM
BASIL HALLAM was born in London,
April 3, 1889, was educated at St Andrews,
Eastbourne, and Charterhouse, made his
first appearance on the boards (as Basil Radford)
at His Majesty's in April 1908, and after seven
years of varied stage-work created Gilbert the
Filbert in The Passing Show, produced at the
Palace Theatre in April 1914. A year later, being
then at the height of his popularity, he volunteered
for the Royal Flying Corps, and on July 16, 1916,
died at the front, the parachute by which he was
descending failing to expand.
His career, even taking only the stage part of it,
was unique. In the theatrical world it is as rare
for a man to be a public idol at twenty-five as it is
common for a woman. This and this alone is the
reason why a profession that has liberally responded
to the call to arms, and has written its name large
on the roll of honour, furnishes but one New
Elizabethan as actor pure and simple. War
demands youth, and few men attain high stage dis-
tinction before middle-age. Further, the characters
in which such distinction is gained are very seldom
young men. Youth has its charm, but all else is
apt to be vague, undeveloped, and not settled or
deep-rooted enough to interest greatly. With age
the character hardens and one plays the game of
life with a full-sized bat. Where an actor, what-
ever his age, has made a notable impression in the
part of a young man, it has almost invariably been
in virtue of some marked eccentricity or of a strong
Vfall. IIAI1 \M
(r\PTAIN AND KITE-COMMANDER, ROYAL FLYING CORPS)
BASIL HALLAM 49
story which sweeps him along in its current so that
he has little to do but float. Now Gilbert had
neither of these advantages. He had no strong
story at the back of him his life was but a routine
of futilities. And so far from being an eccentric, or
viewed as one, he was accepted as typical of a not
inconsiderable section of our community. As
stamped by Basil Hallam he became, as it were,
legal tender, circulating throughout the realm as
freely and unchallenged from mouth to mouth as
current coin from hand to hand.
The case would be the less remarkable had there
been the resemblance, too often traded on, between
the actor and the part. There was no such resem-
blance. One cannot imagine Gilbert exerting him-
self unduly over sports. Mr Hallam excelled at
racquets, playing for Charterhouse, and in after life
vigorously keeping his hand in at the Bath Club
and elsewhere. Only less was he devoted to other
games as lawn-tennis and, later, golf. He believed
in keeping himself fit, and did. The man who, as
Gilbert, sang every evening
" I'm called by two and by five I'm out,
Which I couldn't do if I slacked about,"
might every morning be seen, though he did not
ask to be, running round the Park before breakfast.
Not only was the part the antithesis of the actor,
but the entertainment in which it occurred was
clean outside the fairway of his ambition and
interest. When, without the sanction of his father,
Mr Walter Hallam-Radford, merchant, and Master
of the Ironmongers' Company, he determined to go
on the stage, his objective was serious drama, and
e3pecially Shakespeare. Hence one day, having got
5 o THE MODERN ACTOR
school-leave to come up to London to see his dentist,
he contrived to visit also His Majesty's Theatre and
see Sir Herbert Tree, with whom he had no
previous acquaintance. "What can you do?"
asked Sir Herbert. His answer, " I can do anything
you do," so touched Sir Herbert that, after hearing
him recite a passage or two from Hamlet, he assigned
him several minor parts in his forthcoming Festival
of 1908. Of these the chief was 'Pistol in The
Merry Wives of Windsor a curious experiment of
which one would like to have seen the result. And
though destined to spend most of his stage life in
modern comedy and to end it in revue^ he returned
to Shakespeare, whose works he had from an
early age studied closely, as often as he had the
chance. Thus he took part in several of Mr Robert
Arthur's 1911 Commemoration performances at the
Coronet; and, immediately before appearing as
Gilbert, played Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice
at the Court, repeating the performance in Paris,
whither the company subsequently went. In this
revival Mr Michael Sherbrook played Shy lock, to
play which part was the dream of Hallam's life.
(What would Shylock have had to say of Gilbert,
who had none of the redeeming qualities of the
young men-about- Venice ?) Even stronger proof
of his ardour for Shakespeare is seen in his partici-
pation in revivals at the Royal Victoria Hall, the
only theatre in London in which Shakespeare can
feel at home and is allowed to meet his audience
face to face.
Nor of the parts he did play was Gilbert the one
he liked best. His favourite part was Archie Graham
in The Blindness of Virtue^ a seriously-intended play,
in which he appeared not only at the Little Theatre,
BASIL HALLAM 51
but in America. There he acted a thoughtless rather
than graceless young man with frank and natural
address, and in Ann much less seriously intended
he played no less engagingly a literary youth per-
plexed by the wiles of woman. Another seriously-
intended play in which he appeared was The Next
Religion^ and another, less seriously intended, Mrs
Dot. He did other comedy parts in London, on
tour with Miss May Palfrey, and with Miss Billie
Burke in America, which he visited twice. But all
his comedy performances were swallowed up and for-
gotten in his solitary performance in revue. He did
not seek revue : he found his way into it almost by
accident and by way of musical comedy. Mr George
Edwardes wanted someone to play Max Dearly in
The Girl on the Film while Mr George Grossmith
was. away in Paris. He thought of Hal lam, whom
he knew, and so Hallam put in a fortnight at the
Gaiety. Later, when lunching at the Carl ton,
Hallam fell in with Miss Elsie Janis, whose
acquaintance he had made during his second visit
to America, She, hearing that he was disengaged,
as he conceived himself to be, and the Court of
Appeal decided that he was right, proposed that he
should join her at the Palace, And so Gilbert the
Filbert !
However heartily Hallam would have detested
and despised Gilbert in life, he took the greater
pains to do him justice in art. Gilbert has a song
indeed, he has very little else and the song called
not only for singing but for dancing. Hallam could
dance, of course, as other men dance, and sang fairly
well in private, though he always preferred to recite,
classical pieces for choice. But here a great deal
more was demanded than mere amateur accomplish-
52 THE MODERN ACTOR
ment ; the least failure in either respect and Gilbert
would have made no great way in the work. So
Hallam set himself to master all that was necessary of
singing and dancing, with what brilliant success all
that saw him know. He could not have done more
for the creation had he loved him, or, again, had it
been Shy lock. And his ambition cannot have been
wholly out of his mind, for it was again April, and
Shakespeare was again in full bloom. Surely there
must have occurred to him some such line as
" Oh ! to be in Shakespeare, now that April's here."
Strange how much happened to Hallam in April !
It is no more necessary to describe Gilbert than to
describe a halfpenny or a penny. Suffice it to say
that in April 1914 people, who had already suffered
gladly the Johnny and the Dude, were now enam-
oured of the Nut. And never had there been a Nut
to compare with Mr Hallam's so faultless in form,
of flavour at once so full, so rich and so subtle. The
war was not thought of then, and when it came
three months later it found Gilbert the Filbert the
most popular character on the English stage.
And it was the war, which has changed so much,
that proved Hallam's mettle both as an artist and as
a man. It is true that Gilbert had "made good"
before the war broke out, and true again that, when
it did break out, some time elapsed before people
could re-discover their ideals and get them into
working order. But when they did, Gilbert's
position remained unshaken* , This waster, com-
pared with whom the Conscientious Objector is
almost a hero, went on changing his kit (without
wincing at the expression) and counting his ties as
before. And the public stood firm by him not only
BASIL HALLAM 53
the stalls, but the gallery, that had most reason to
resent his existence. Other characters of the same
kidney were not so fortunate. Some were immedi-
ately withdrawn, others sought re-election only as
objects of scorn. Even the admirable Miss Vesta
Tilley found her account in joining the Army of
to-day. How came Gilbert to survive where so
many perished? The answer is that Gilbert was
a perfect work of art, and that as Gilbert, Hallam
performed the feat, little short of a miracle, of
making a London audience from floor to ceiling
artists too.
On the other hand, the war revealed to him a
duty higher than the ambition of playing even
Shylock. It revealed, too, a new field in which
that duty might be honourably discharged. One
who knew him only across the footlights can -hardly
think of him as a soldier in the trenches or as a
sailor in the trough of the sea. But the air, the
newly discovered and still uncharted region, the air!
Yes, one can think of him there. It was there he
found his duty. It was there that, after more than
a year's service, during which he spent but one
week at home, and was promoted to be captain
and kite-commander on account of extreme courage
and control shown under fire, that he met his death.
" Courage and control " : the words bear thinking
over. Can better advice be given to an actor or to
anyone ?
G. E. M.
THE ABSOLUTE POET
CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY
CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY was
born at Old Aberdeen on May 19, 1895;
he was the son of W. R. Sorley, who is
now Professor of Moral Philosophy in'the University
of Cambridge. From 1900 onwards his home was
in Cambridge ; and he was at Marlborough College
from September 1908 until December 1913, when
he was elected to a classical scholarship at University
College, Oxford. After leaving school he spent
rather more than six months in Germany. He was
three months in Schwerin, learning the language and
seeing something of German provincial society, and
then for another three months a student at the Uni-
versity of Jena, At the outbreak of war he was on
a walking tour with a friend on the banks of the
Moselle. He was put in prison at Trier on the 2nd
of August, but released the same evening and given
a passport to leave the country. After some rather
disconnected travelling he reached England on the
6th, and at once applied for a commission. He was
gazetted to the Suffolk Regiment later in the month.
He became lieutenant in November and captain in
the following August, and there is no doubt that he
would have highly distinguished himself in the voca-
tion of arms, for he knew how to handle men and
gain their confidence, and had that carefulness in small
matters which is a mark of the good regimental
officer who must leave nothing to chance. His
battalion was sent to France on May 30, 1915,
and he was killed in action near Hulluch on October
1 3th in the same year.
C1URIKS HAMILTON SORI KV
(LVPIAIN, SUM-OLK REMMEVI)
CHARLES SORLEY 55
I find myself regretting that his father has not
given the many readers of his poems some such
reasoned explanation of his career and character
(both of which have a carious look of complete-
ness) as that in which Lord Ribblesdale has dealt
with the personality of his son, Charles Lister, in a
spirit of almost scientific disinterestedness. Many
others have felt the same regret, and in order to
satisfy what is certainly not a vain curiosity (for
one feels that greater intimacy would make for a
clearer understanding of this soldier-poet's philosophy
of living) the third edition of Marlborough and
Other Poems contains a number of prose passages
from letters to his family and friends. Naturally
and necessarily, -these excerpts contain more of the
stuff of true autobiography than his poems. The
most sincere of poets and sincerity is as a wind out
of the Fens, a dynamic and all-pervading bleak
vigour, in this poet's verse cannot give us the sheer
truth, as he feels it, in the form of rhyme and
rhythm. The artist intervenes; and even if there
be no posing, no proleptic feeling of qua/is artifex
pereo^ no emotional mimicry, no intellectual look-see,
yet the poet can never become even a close approxi-
mation to the man-in-himself. It is impossible to
deduce the man from his poetry ; I am very sure of
that, having known both major and minor poets
here and in France somewhat intimately. Turner's
confession that painting is u a rum job " is applicable
to poetry, which is perhaps the rummest job of all
But, as you talk and even think in prose, and it
is not a resisting medium (until a style is deliber-
ately cultivated), letters written as the pen flies are
often reliable evidence of the scope and nature of
personality.
56 THE ABSOLUTE POET
The released fragments of Charles Sorley's occa-
sional and casual letters, certainly illuminate his
mentality with stray lightning-flashes. They show,
for example, how deeply he realised the life of the
Homeric Age and its strange modernity in every-
day essentials. Helen, he says, never gives him
the impression of being quite happy ; he thinks that
she could only make other people happy, and con-
sequently, another set of people miserable. " One
of the best things in the Iliad" he goes on to say,
" is the way you are made to feel (without any
statement) that Helen fell really in love with
Hector and this shows her good taste, for, of all
the Homeric heroes, Hector is the only unselfish
man. She seems to me only to have loved to
please Menelaus and Paris, but to have really
loved Hector." This would have made a better
reconstruction of Helen's inner life than Mr Hew-
lett's, which so absurdly endows Menelaus with the
capacity of grand passion and, what is still more
surprising, the power to renew the first ardour of
possession all of which is sheer honeymoon-sun-
shine. But Mr Hewlett reduces all the Homeric
heroes, and even the cruder and more cumbrous
heroes of Northern fighting legends, to the dimen-
sions of "intellectuals 15 flirting over tea-cups and
cucumber sandwiches ; the lusty love of good eating
and good drinking, which Charles Sorley under-
stands so well, is one of many Homeric qualities
utterly beyond the inventor of forest Iover.s who
honeymoon on a basis of hips and haws, apparently,
though couching on upland lawns in the open air.
Again, in the Helen of the Odyssey , " bustling about
a footstool for Telemachus or showing off her new
presents (she had just returned from a jaunt to
CHARLES SORLEY 57
Egypt) a washing-tub and a work-basket that ran
on wheels (think!)" what should Charles Sorley
see but "the perfect German Hausfrau." What
a human realisation of human personages ! And
here we get on the track of the secret of his
own poetic style, which at high moments has the
vivid precision and sad earnestness of the greater
Greek models no sentimentalists, for they never
could stick slovenly thinking or sloppy writing!
To get the fair, fresh, naked Hellenic style (as
he did, and Rupert Brooke never did), you must
have reached this soldier-poet's sound working
hypothesis of the Hellenic character. An exact
knowledge of Greek language is not enough;
though it is very useful as a training in scientific
thinking and (as a soldier and scholar told me
lately) in the making of a regimental officer, who
has to attend to many microscopic matters that his
men may be comfortable. " Watching the ways of
particles," said this authority, " taught me how to
learn all the little tricks of this queer trade."
Most interesting and a tonic against rancour and
repining for all non-combatants, who have not the
use of fighting as an emotional safety-valve are
the passages in which he dwells on his experiences
in peace-time Germany. He saw through the pan-
German types readily enough ; he thought them the
very worst results of 1871. "They have no idea
beyond * The State,* and have put me off Socialism
for the rest of my life. They are not the kind of
people (as the Irish R.M. puts it) c you could borrow
half-a-crown from to get drunk with.'"" But he
liked the German lack of reserve and self-conscious-
ness. And when war came, he was not to be
shocked out of his sense of justice ; he saw and said
58 THE ABSOLUTE POET
that we were fighting, not a bully, but a bigot.
What follows that fine epigram contains a vindica-
tion of the British system of discipline as against
'the Prussian model, which is now a rusty machine
in danger of breaking down for want of oil :
" If the bigot conquers he will learn in time his
mistaken methods (for it is only of the methods and
not of the goal of Germany that one can disapprove)
just as the early Christian bigots conquered by
bigotry and grew larger in sympathy and tolerance
after conquest. I regard the war as one between
sisters, between Martha and Mary, the efficient and
intolerant against the casual and sympathetic. Each
side has a virtue for which she is fighting, and each
that virtue's supplementary vice. And I hope that
whatever the material result of the conflict, it will
purge these two virtues of their vices, and efficiency
and tolerance will no longer be incompatible.
" But I think that tolerance is the larger virtue of
the two, and efficiency must be her servant. So I
am quite glad to fight against this rebellious servant.
In fact, I look at it this way. Suppose my platoon
were the world. Then my platoon sergeant would
represent efficiency, and I would represent tolerance.
And I always take the sternest measures to keep my
platoon sergeant in check ! I fully appreciate the
wisdom of the War Office when they put inefficient
officers to rule sergeants. Adsit omen"
He must, I think, have come in time to think
Germany bully as well as bigot and to loathe her
as the Greeks loathed the tyrant in whom there was
a touch of the yeasty blood of the Titans, prisoned
at last for humanity's safety in the penal abyss by
the sunny-souled gods of Olympus. To me he
seems to grow more aad more Greek and to justify
CHARLES SORLEY 59
a couplet that I wrote of another such undying proof
of the validity of a true classical training :
" I deem the Englishman a Greek grown old,
Deep waters crossed and many a watchfire cold."
Standing as he did on the watershed of English
poetry (his own metaphor) the cloistral and guarded
poetry of Tennyson and the like was not for him ;
he felt the need of the whole world of men to
serve as inspiration. But he would have kept to
the straight and unadorned style which makes him the
antithesis in his art of Rupert Brooke, that laughing
streamlet of chiming thoughts and coloured syllables.
The one was a truth-seeker, the other a beauty-
seeker. But either, of course, found that which he
did not go out to find. But Charles Sorley was the
modern poet for it is of the essence of modern poetry
to seek truth first of all, nor complain if glimpses
of the beautiful by the way are as infrequent as wild
flowers in the autumnal months.
Charles Sorley had not the rough, compelling,
strong, triumphant voice he admires in Mr Mase-
field a great nature (there is no English equivalent
for that useful term) rather than a great poet, whose
chief fault is that he is too much of a rhetorician.
But he is above and beyond the mannered subtle-
ties of Late- Victorian poets and men of letters, of
whose style he says : " It teems with sharp saws and
rich sentiment ; it is a marvel of delicate technique ;
it pleases, it flatters, it charms, it soothes; it is a
living lie. 5 ' He is strong but never rowdy ; in the
quest for new matter he is as little apt to lose his
temper as his temperament. The beauty of the
word, the fascination of phrase-making are not for
him, who must show the truth as he sees it without
60 THE ABSOLUTE POET
fear or favour. Even in the earlier poems, written
at school, he has long ago left the highway of con-
vention. He loved Marlborough as well as any
boy has ever loved his old school: the windy,
upland scenery of the place is vivid in remembrance
to the end, and furnishes him with large and
picturesque similitudes. But he will not accept the
verdicts of that microcosm, and he sees in the
so-called " wasters," who get no thanks for the little
they had to give to the community even if they give
all and are clean forgotten :
" Because we cannot collar low
Nor write a strange dead tongue the same
As strange dead men did long ago "
souls that are reserved for something finer than the
winning of tassel'd caps or scholarships :
" The School we care for has not cared
To cherish nor keep our names to be
Memorials. God hath prepared
Some better thing for us, for we
His hopes have known, His failures shared."
A Tale ofTivo Careers, Nov. 1912.
All wholesome boy poets have a leaning to
melancholy and the macabre, as every teacher of
English literature in a great school knows, or ought
to t know. " Wholesome " seems at first sight a
paradoxical epithet but it is wholesome to be your
whole self, and boyhood is a period of sunny,
unruffled happiness only in retrospect ; in reality it
is a time of light and gloom which breeds many a
sick fantasy in the struggling soul That is why
Eugene Aram so often appeals to the sixth
form poet, practising in secret, that I was once dis-
posed to consider it a test for the poetic instinct.
The River y a picture jpf suicide, is Charles Sorley's
CHARLES SORLEY 61
one essay in this mode. The theme is nothing
new, but the treatment is all his own, and strangely
impressive, as the first stanza proves :
" He watched the river running black
Beneath the blacker sky ;
It did not pause upon its track
Of silent instancy.
It did not hasten, nor was slack,
But still went gliding by."
Not desire of death, but the compulsion of a larger
and more purposeful life caused the catastrophe :
" He put his foot upon the track
That still went gliding by."
A drone-rhyme runs throughout all the nine
stanzas, which is a fine and appropriate piece of
technique. Minor poetry is not the criticism of life,
but a criticism of poetry. But even Charles Sorley's
earlier poems criticise life, not poetry, and are quite
free from the learned allusiveness of those destined
to write Prize Poems either for University tribunals
or for the great public that likes " scholarly " stuff,
the derivations of which can be traced without too
much difficulty. From the very first he was a
major poet ; his matter life, his manner formed from
within, and the two woven together, as woof and
warp, in a loom of his own invention.
Whosoever wishes to understand his later poems
must get the book in which they are collected, and
read and re-read it. The language is diamond-
clear ; even in the pieces hastily written in the field
and sent home unrevised. But, like a diamond and
unlike glass, they are not to be seen through at a
glance. The few brief passages quoted below are
intended to persuade the reader into a closer study
of a poet whose early death was a loss to English
62 THE ABSOLUTE POET
letters as great as Rupert Brooke's perhaps greater,
for we may have had the latter's best, whereas the
other, having Robert Browning's infinite interest in
the vastness and wonderment of modern life, and
Emily Bronte's eager undazzled gaze and scorn of
evasive verbiage, must have climbed to heights
unknown, whereof we now shall know nothing.
" I do not know if it seems brave
The youthful spirit to enslave,
And hedge about, lest it should grow.
I don't know if it's better so
In the long end. I only know
That when I have a* son of mine,
He shan't be made to droop and pine,
Bound down and forced by rule and rod
To serve a God who is no God.
But I'll put custom on the shelf
And make him find his God himself.
Perhaps he'll find him in a tree,
Some hollow trunk where you can see.
Perhaps the daisies in the sod
Will open out and show him God.
Or he will meet him in the roar
Of breakers as they beat the shore ?
Or in the spiky stars that shine ?
Or in the rain (where I found mine) ?
Or in the city's giant moan ? "
What Tou Will, June 1913.
" We swing ungirded hips,
And lightened are our eyes,
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
We know not whom we trust
Nor whitherward we fare,
But we run because we must
Through the great wide air,"
The Son% of the Ungirt Runners.
" We have no comeliness Hke you.
We toil, unlovely, and we spin.
We start, return j we wind, undo 5
We hope, we err, we strive, we sin,
CHARLES SORLEY 63
We love : your love's not greater, but
The lips of our love's might stay shut.
We have the evil spirits too
That shake our soul with battle-din.
But we have an eviller spirit than you,
We have a dumb spirit within :
The exceeding bitter agony,
But not the exceeding bitter cry."
To Poets.
" I have a temple I do not
Visit, a heart I have forgot,
A self that I have never met,
A secret shrine and yet, and yet,
This sanctuary of my soul
Unwitting I keep white and whole,
Unlatched and lit, if Thou should'st care
To enter or to tarry there,"
Expectant Expectavi, May 1915.
How his completeness would have blossomed to
fruition we may not know. But we know he was
complete in soul, and so would write on the cross
over his grave : " Being made perfect in a little
while, he fulfilled long years/*
THE WILDERNESS WINNER
BRIAN BROOKE
IT was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth that
men began to leave these little islands to
conquer the world's wildernesses. They
passed like wind-blown sparks across the narrow
seas and the broad oceans beyond, and as often as
not no tidings of their fate ever reached the havens
from which they sailed into the sunset in the
firm belief that the rich lands of the sunrise, which
Marco Polo had described, could be reached most
quickly and at least cost in that direction. And
from then to now this radio-activity of our race
has never for a moment ceased indeed, the spirit
of adventuring in lands forlorn was never so strong
in all our island-history as in the generation of the
New Elizabethans which has died that Greater
Britain as well as Great Britain may live happily
ever afterwards. For, as it is now clear that
Germany will be defeated and "kraaled" until
Canada, Australia, and South Africa have grown
up into Great Powers, the British Empire is sure
of at least as long a lease of life as the Roman
Imperium. As Rome taught the world law, so
it is the destiny of our world-wide commonwealth
to teach equity to all the nations and languages
within its kindly and unselfish dispensation.
How deeply the desire of wilderness winning is
rooted in our race may be gathered from the British
soldier's curious phrase for death in action : * c Going
West." Death is for him the greatest of all ad-
ventures; the journeying, by a long, long trail of
which no sure chart exists, into a land more
UKI\N BROOKE
(CAPTAIN, GORDON HI^HI ANDERS)
BRIAN BROOKE 65
wonderful and remote than that on the unseen
side of the Moon. " I would have emigrated to
Canada after the war/ 5 said a mortally wounded
corporal who had been a city clerk earning 353.
a week for ten years, u for I've sweated the wood
of that damned desk and stool out of my system.
That's all over now, but somehow I can't feel sorry.
Going West'll be a bigger experience, and I'm too
curious about it all to be afraid." It is certain that
a great many of those who survive the war will
never go back to their old humdrum jobs in English
towns. Having tasted the harsh delights of danger-
ous living under the naked sky, and knowing as
they do that the robust health that comes of it is
the greatest of all joys, they can never return to sit at
a desk or serve a machine for the rest of their days.
So they too, like the Elizabethans that were, will
go forth to fight against the brute forces of Nature
on the far frontiers of civilization.
Brian Brooke comes into this list of New Eliza-
bethans as the most perfect type of the wilderness
winner. It is a type more common in Scotland
than in England ; partly because life beyond the
Cheviots offers fewer opportunities for ambitious
youth, and partly because the Scottish system of
education the best in these islands is from first
to last a training in self-reliance and adaptability.
"My people/' said the late Lord Strathcona to
the writer, "are born pioneers. We go out to
new countries and find something worth doing
there, and, when we h-ave made our fortunes, as
the saying is, we stay there to show others how
to do as we did." So it comes about that in almost
all newly-developed lands especially in Western
Canada one finds the business leadership in Scottish
66 THE WILDERNESS WINNER
hands. And it often happens that these local
leaders train on into those statesmen-capitalists of
the Strath cona type who have done more than all
the politicians to build up the gigantic fabric of our
overseas Empire British politicians, indeed, have
really done more to hamper than to help the carrying-
out of that tremendous task.
Had he lived, Brian Brooke must have become
one of the architects of the colossal commonwealth,
extending from the Cape to Cairo, of which British
and German East Africa tropical demesnes with
hilly regions where a white man can live and keep
his health must form the keystone. He had all
the qualities one finds in the Empire-builders like
Cecil Rhodes, whose hie jacets are written in capital
letters on the world's map. In the first place, he
took the precaution of being born in a part of
Scotland which produces characters of living granite
men and women whose purposeful lives cannot
be shattered by any shock of circumstance. And
he had Irish as well as Scottish blood in his veins,
so that a due measure of the perfervidum ingenium
Scotorum 1 the Celtic energy that burns up all
obstacles in its way was combined in him with
practical common sense and inexhaustible staying-
power. He was born at Lickleyhead Castle, in
Aberdeenshire, on December 9, 1889, being the
third son of Captain H. V. Brooke, formerly of the
92nd Gordon Highlanders, and grandson of the late
Sir Arthur Brooke, M.P., of Colebrooke, County
Fermanagh, Ireland. On his mother's side he came
of an old Jacobite family, which has kept the white
rose of a tradition that set honour and loyalty to a
lost cause high above all earthly rewards. The
1 The Scoti of this quotation, 80 often misused, were Irishmen,
BRIAN BROOKE 67
Celtic sense of other-worldly things gave him the
freedom of fairyland in his childhood. He lived in
a world apart as a child a world of fairies, gnomes,
and aerial spirits whose chronicles he knew by heart,
and would often rehearse as he sat by the hour
under a brier bush. The winged creature, small
but wondrous wise, that inhabits a daffodil bell was
as real to him as the birds and beasts that were his
visible comrades. He had a great and engrossing
tenderness for all the little lives about him. He
would run out in a rainstorm to cover up some
cherished family of nestlings with a large leaf an
inconvenient coverpane, no doubt, from the mother-
bird's point of view ! Once, when he was ill with
scarlet fever, he insisted on watching a favourite
goldfish which was dying and, suddenly, a joyous
thought caused his face to be lit up from within, and
he exclaimed : " Mother, if that little goldfish dies
just before I die, I will hide it away, and then I
will take it up to Heaven with me." This tender
regard for weak and broken lives found an un-
expected expression later on ; as also did his sym-
pathetic study of the ways of wild creatures.
Presently the fairies were forgotten, and the
boy's mind was filled with an endless procession of
fighting gods and demi-gods, legendary chieftains,
knights in glittering harness, famous commanders of
ancient and modern times. He still loved the open-
air life best of all; like the Douglas of Border
ballads he would sooner hear the lark sing than the
mouse cheep. But every moment which had to be
spent indoors was devoted to making battle-pictures,
in which his favourite hero for the moment led his
men to victory or perished gloriously. He felt in
himself the qualities of William of Deloraine, that
68 THE WILDERNESS WINNER
stark moss-trooping Scot, and dreamed of strange
victories such as that won by a dreamer whose
dream came true:
But I have dreamed a wearie dream
Beyond the Isle of Skye,
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And 1 think that man was L
His three brothers were in the Services, two in
the Army and one in the Navy; so that family
traditions, as well as his own vehement desire, urged
him to become a soldier. But his eyesight was
imperfect, and the oculists, in those days when an
officer in spectacles was unthinkable, could give him
but scant hope of passing the medical examination.
So he made up his mind to be a colonist, and
presently all his energies were concentrated on pre-
paring for that high, Elizabethan vocation. The
man of action had now definitely emerged ; the
winning of a junior boxing competition at Clifton
College was a turning-point in the life of this
dreamer of dreams. But, after all, there is an
idealist latent in every man of action. Is not that
one of the chief lessons we learn from the lives
of all the great soldiers and seamen and Empire-
builders ?
Before he was sixteen Brian Brooke asked to be
taken away from Clifton so as to attend classes
especially planned to prepare students for a colonial
career. This specific training he obtained at Aber-
deen University, and also at Gordon's College,
where Byron studied. But attendance at classes on
veterinary hygiene, first-aid, mechanics, carpentry,
agriculture, book-keeping, etc., etc., which involved
a daily trudge of twelve miles, did not seem to him
a complete preparation for the rough life of a wilder-
BRIAN BROOKE 69
ness winner. So he deliberately set to work to
provide himself with a body big and strong enough
to bear any amount of roughing it. For example,
during the two years of training he refused to sleep
indoors. As a rule he would sleep in a little wooden
hut ; and, when the week-end brought release from
his studies, he would spend his nights in the woods
rolled up in rugs, even though the grim countryside
was deep in snow. He subsisted chiefly on the
game he shot, cooking it at an open-air fire, after
the manner of Western hunters and trappers. Now
and again a particular boy friend was invited to
share the amenities of his woodland existence, but
those guests almost always failed to " make good,"
and went away convinced that the stern joys of
pioneering were not for them, Brian Brooke's idea
of a real holiday also harmonised with his set plan
of open-air physical culture. He would wander
about the country disguised as a vagrant piper, play-
ing through the villages, and sometimes giving a
silver coin as change for a bawbee, to the amaze-
ment of the lover of pipe-music and his own secret
amusement. In this disguise, which often deceived
both servants and mistresses at friends' houses, he
would cover many miles in a day ; on one occasion
he walked sixty miles between sunrise and sunset.
And the reward of all this rough, joyous, open-air
living was this from a slender stripling with no
physique worth mentioning he grew up into a
sturdy youth of great stature and enormous strength,
who could do more than a man's work and endure
any hardship without fatigue. He felt equal to his
life's task before his eighteenth year, when he left
Scotland to settle on land bought for him in British
East Africa. Inaction had sown in him the seeds of
70 THE WILDERNESS WINNER
restlessness ; at the age of seventeen and a half he
wrote : " I have only one great possession ; that is
youth, and it is slipping away from me ! " Perhaps
the Celtic seer in him had muttered that he had no
time to lose.
In British East Africa he soon emerged from the
ruck of indistinguishable settlers, the men who
follow the lead of others, and succeed or fail through
the force of circumstance. At school he had found
the learning of languages Greek, Latin, and
French a burdensome business. But he quickly
mastered the native tongues of his new environment,
and was soon accepted by his white neighbours as
an authority on aboriginal manners and customs,
He entered into blood-brotherhood with the Masai,
the ceremony giving him certain rights and privi-
leges among the tribesmen. The Masai admired
his great strength and high courage, which enabled
him to meet and kill a leopard while on foot and
armed with nothing but a native spear* He did this,
not out of a spirit of bravado, but to convince his
blood-brothers that they were wrong in thinking
that there is anything a black can do which cannot
be done by a white man. Like Stevenson in Samoa,
he earned a native name ; the Masai knew him as
Korongo (" The Big Man "), which, as an autho-
rity on their language tells me, was a tribute not
only to his physical powers, but also to the great-
ness of character which they discerned in him. It
is clear he knew the secret of impressing a savage
people who judge a white man by what he does
and is, not by what he says that secret, unknown
to the Germans, which enables us to impose the
Pax Britannic a on uncivilised hordes by the might
of sheer personal prestige. Brian Brooke had the
BRIAN BROOKE 71
rare qualities of one of those famous administrators,
men of action and men of transaction as well, who
have accomplished so many bloodless conquests in the
tropical regions which Germany hoped to win from
us. Except for a visit to Scotland and a few
months spent in Ceylon, where he found the busi-
ness of tea-planting uncongenial and caught malarial
fever, he gave all his time and all himself to the
silent building up of Central Africa, his own dear
mistress-land. He had the wilderness hunter's
instinct, and he was much sought after as an organizer
.of expeditions in quest of big game. As he tells us
in his verse of which more anon he had little
but contempt for some of the expensive sportsmen
who indulge in battue shooting at home and go to
British East Africa for a sumptuous sporting tour :
Well armed with musical boxes, and loaded with gramophones,
Butterfly nets for beetles and bugs, and tins for the precious
stones,
While under their stacks of rifles the black man sweats and
groans.
The best of wilderness sport is that it requires you
to be your own gamekeeper; to know the habits
of game so well that you can find them at any
hour of the day or night, and to be capable of
caring for your own weapons. All this fascinating
work, as well as the keen pleasure of rest after
roughing it in lonesome places > is apt to be missed
by the millionaire in search of trophies for the walls
of his newly-purchased palace.
The outbreak of war found Brian Brooke acting
as transport officer on the Jubaland frontier. No
doubt his many Wanderings in British East Africa
and Uganda and in non-British demesnes had given
him an insight into the German plan for creating
72 THE WILDERNESS WINNER
footholds of departure for African conquests. He
must have heard the rumours never believed at
home in the last years of a century of slothful
peace, but now known to fall short of the truth
of Germany's attempt to create a huge black army
of Askaris, the finest fighters in all Africa, which
should give her the control of the whole continent
as soon as the Central Powers were victorious in
Europe. That would have been an army after
the German heart ; for the Askaris can " live on
the population " of an enemy country, and would
have saved their overlords the cost of commissariat
and feeding prisoners with handfuls of meal. Brian
Brooke played his part in saving Africa from the un-
speakable horrors of those black wars for the control
of the Tropics, which had long since been worked
out in the Pan-German mind. He hastened, riding
night and day, to Nairobi, and enlisted as a trooper
in the ranks of the British East African field-force.
Almost at once he rose from private to sergeant,
from sergeant to captain. He was wounded in a
night attack, narrowly escaping with his life, but
was back at his post again within thirty-six hours.
When, however, the African peril was well in hand,
thanks to the military genius of General Jan Smuts,
he longed to be fighting in the theatre of war, where
his military instinct assured him the final decision was
to be expected. Moreover, at - that very moment
news came to him of the heroic death of his brother,
Captain J. A. O. Brooke, who received the post-
humous honour of the Victoria Cross for most
conspicuous bravery* Korongo went to England
to get himself transferred to his father's and brother's
famous regiment The offer of a good appoint-
ment on the staff of the force advancing into
BRIAN BROOKE 73
German East Africa was declined. Eventually he
was gazetted as captain in the 2nd Battalion of
the Gordon Highlanders. During his training at
Aberdeen he learnt to know all his men in-
dividually. Thus he lived up to the fine Scottish
tradition of camaraderie between commanders and
commanded (based on the creed that, though of
different ranks, all are gentlemen born) which is
so nobly expressed in Lieutenant E. A. Mackintosh's
poem addressed to the fathers of his lost comrades.
He had but three weeks on the West Front in
which to show his genius for soldiering. Yet in
that narrow space of time he proved himself his
father's son, his brother's brother. When the Great
Push began at Mametz, on July I, 1916, he was
in command of the right wing of the Gordons,
including his own beloved B Company. Though
wounded in the leg as he went over the top, he
continued to lead the attack, he and the other
officers and his men marching steady and solid as
though on parade. When the two front trenches
held by the Germans were taken he was wounded
in the arm. At the third trench he fell with his
third wound, a mortal injury in the neck. He died
after weeks of agony, borne without a word of com-
plaint, his only regret being that he was not with
the few men of his company who had survived
Mametz. They also longed in vain to see him
once more ; they said : " We would have followed
him anywhere^ even to the gates of HelL" He
was mentioned in the despatch from Sir Douglas
Haig which was published on January 4,
The intimate record of his life as a wilderness
winner is the book of adventurous verse, which was
74 THE WILDERNESS WINNER
published with a brief but inspired Memoir by
Miss M. P. Wilcocks about a year after his
death. Brian Brooke cared nothing for the nice
manipulation of rhyme and rhythm ; he was no
hunter of the mot juste^ but took the first word
that came into his mind; and the everlasting
jog-trot of his anapaests is at times intolerable to
the critical ear, trained in the subtleties of modern
poetical craftsmanship. Indeed, his ballads have
been condemned as a bad amalgam of Kipling at his
worst, indifferent Adam Lindsay Gordon, and G. R.
Sims at his best. For all that they are full of living
pictures of British East Africa, and of the social
derelicts who, whatever their faults may be, do the
spade-work of Empire-building. So that they do
really constitute a "criticism of life," to use Matthew
Arnold's phrase, and I hope I shall not be called a
paradoxical person if I venture to define them as
poetry without prosody which is a better and much
rarer thing than prosody without poetry. In such
haphazard, helter-skelter stuff as The Song of the
Bamboos^ with
Its endless shuffle and distant boom,
Murmuring mutter of men who grieve,
a note is struck and sustained which must^tir the
heart of every man who has lived in our half-
finished tropical demesnes. There the voice of
the bamboos, that bend but break not, can never be
evaded, and here is the message and menace they
say and sing even when there seems to be no wind
at all :
On the Abadares you will always find us,
Singing of death and forgotten hopes*
On Killamonjaro grows our crop,
And struggling right to the very top
BRIAN BROOKE 75
You'll find us dense on the Killan Kop,
And along the hills of the Kenia slopes.
And always something is left behind us
In those \vho happen beneath our thrall ;
If bad, the remaining good we kill,
If straight, then we turn them straighter still ;
Only invertebrates' hearts we fill
With the awful knowledge of nought at all.
That is the tragedy of the unsuccessful settler in
the hard-won wilderness; to know that there is
nothing in him after all, that he lost all when he
turned his back on an old land of comfortable con-
ventions. Now and again, as in Labour, Brooke
doles out good advice to the newcomer, warning
him that his first and last duty is to maintain the
prestige of white men among black men :
While we rule by our sense of honour,
While we rule by our strength of will,
In a thousand years, ye need have no fears,
They'll find that we're ruling still.
And still there's another great danger,
And perhaps it is just as bad,
The man who will play with his boy all day,
He's a mixture of fool and cad.
'Tis gen'rally wrought by a stranger,
While he's buying experience, *
And, unless he's wrong, it does not take long
To teach him a bit of sense.
And he who is constantly turning,
Who romps like a great baboon,
Who wrestles his boy in the morning with joy
And flogs out his soul at noon;
'Tis time that these men started learning :
A nigger cannot be his toy,
His dog he can pat and play with his cat,
But he never must rag with his boy !
v[o better advice could be given to those who find
themselves in contact with the strange races, half
76 THE WILDERNESS WINNER
devil and half child, which no other colonizing nation
and least of all the Germans have ever yet learnt
to use aright. In Through Other Eyes his burning
indignation at cruelty to the dumb slaves of man,
nowhere worse used than in Africa, is expressed in
the prayer of a dying trek-ox :
Sold to civilization, bound to the yoke and chain ;
Never in all creation suflered a beast such pain ;
Flogged they my hide to jelly, right from the flanks to hump,
Fires beneath my belly, tail twisted off to stump.
Neck rubbed raw with the timber, blood on my knees does splash :
" Whip up that red ox Siniba : " ooe eye goes with the lash.
Trained by a brutal master ; never seen ox before :
" Get the work done and faster ! " that was his working law.
License your motor-drivers, motors can feel no pain ;
We are the honest strivers, God, do I plead in vain ?
But it is to the derelict, the strong man with
weaknesses, the outlaw who is down and out, that
his thoughts recur again and yet again ; and a
singular power of psychical mimicry is revealed in
A Night on the German Frontier and other ballads
of the kind. To touch ivory, he says, is always a
first step on the track to damnation, and here is his
picture of an ivory-hunter come to the last step
of all :
Here I sit, a blooming outlaw, with my rifle 'cross my knees,
And my ivory is buried at my feet ;
And the only shelter left me, is the shelter of the trees,
And my fire's so low, I scarcely feel its heat.
And my niggers all have bolted : how I hope their blood may
freeze !
It's a way they have, when posho's running short ;
And I've only got three cartridges, and dare not fire these,
For I never know the moment Til be caught.
Now, for years the Germans sought me, still I'm quite alive and
free 5
But I've had my swing, so reckon soon, their day will have
to be, *
But guess they'll have to be wide-awake, the day they lasso rno.
BRIAN BROOKE 77
It is a grim, garish story that follows and finishes
in the vast, dreary African dawn.
It is in Nature^ however, that his own philosophy
of living is fully revealed :
But the things I love in nature are the height, the depth, the
length
Of the mountains and the ocean and the plain,
All the things that tell so wondrously, the magnitude and strength
Of the hand that made the things which will remain.
He also, now that he has gone, looms up as the
shadow of a magnitude, a man who was greater
than all the things he had time to do and be, a
great man in the making whose early death was a
disaster.
THE JOYOUS CRITIC
DIXON SCOTT
IN the heavy toll that the war has exacted from
our young men of high literary promise, the
death of Dixon Scott must be accounted not
the least grievous incident For in this country the
true critical faculty is perhaps rarer than the poetic ;
and Dixon Scott was a born critic. It is true that
he left behind him little, as far as mere bulk goes,
that is capable of collection and republication in
witness to his matured talent ; but it is more than
enough to make manifest the great gift that was
his, and to justify a poignant sense of what English
letters has lost by the untimely extinction of such
a light Of many even accomplished writers and
especially of those who practise journalism it may
be said that they adopt the vocation because they
must, and not because they will. With Dixon
Scott the career was predestined it opened to the
talents. He wrote because he had something to
say that must find utterance, and because literature
to him was as the zest of life. It was not merely
a hobby ; it haunted him like a passion. For him,
in a special sense, syllables ruled the world.
When I first met Scott he was twenty-seven
years old, and he was just beginning to find his
way in the art of self-expression. I remember that
my first impression of him was as of a hungry raven
fledgling. He seemed all eyes and beak and black
plumage; and he was so eager, so avid for every
bringer of new things. The exuberance which his
writing reveals was the reflection of his intense and
vivid interest in what he worked in. All his
DIXON SCOTT
(LIEUTENANT, 3RD WEST LANCASHIRE BRIGADE R.PA.'
DIXON SCOTT 79
senses were at full stretch to receive impressions;
all his mind was intended on the matter of his
study. He was the craftsman delighting in his
craft, and impatient to acquire a mastery of it.
Be it remembered that young Dixon Scott
started with no literary bias or influence from his
environment. Born in Liverpool whose motto,
"Ships, Colonies, and Commerce," expresses its
attitude to letters he passed through the local
schools as one intended for a commercial career;
and at sixteen or thereabouts he became a bank
clerk, and laboured among the money-changers for
nine years. The routine of a bank is surely enough
to discourage any but the most decided aptitude for
the art of writing. With Scott, it only stimulated
the itch to express himself; and, as the likeliest means
to that end, he established himself first as an outside
contributor to a local daily the Liverpool Courier
and later, for a year or so, as a member of the
editorial staff. The inside of a provincial news-
paper office is not very satisfying to literary
ambition, but it served Scott as an admirable
exercise ground. Anything that would give him
an opportunity of saying what he wanted to say
and of finding out how to say it was meat and
wine to him. He wrote leading articles, reviews,
"specials," and descriptive articles with the same
irrepressible zest and exuberance, producing, in the
staid columns of his medium, something of the
effect of a bold post-impressionist canvas in a gallery
of early Victorian pictures. Naturally he provoked
reactions in the astonished public that were not
altogether flattering; but the character and in-
dividuality of his work could not be ignored His
most striking achievement was a series of studies of
So THE JOYOUS CRITIC
the occupants of the principal Liverpool pulpits.
As in Liverpool the pulpit looms large, the enter-
prise was not a little daring. The ordinary
journalist, thus commissioned, would have regarded
and treated his "job " as part of an irksome routine,
and would have got through it certainly without
enthusiasm. But Scott flung himself into the task.
With that rare faculty of his for getting at the
heart of what he observed- of seeing it through
and through, and of tracing its processes as from
the inside he "sat under" Liverpool's most famous
preachers, and dealt shrewdly and faithfully with
them. At this time his power of observation and
analysis was much greater than his power of ex-
pression. He had not learnt economy, but he
made his effect
Later on, I remember, he undertook to " do the
notice" of the annual Autumn Art Exhibition
pictures being to 'him only second in interest to
books and he went through that rather mixed
collection, with all his guns of satire, raillery, and
interrogation in action, like the little Rmtnge run-
ning down the line of the portly Spanish galleons.
All this time Scott had been absorbing literature
as a dry sponge sucks up moisture, and both his
interest and his aptitude attracted attention in the
direction most likely to be serviceable to the de-
velopment of his talent. Largely through the
influence of Professor Oliver Elton whose early
recognition and encouragement of Scott are indeed
to be reckoned to him for righteousness the young
journalist was awarded (in 1907) a scholarship at
Liverpool University, and thus enabled to enter
seriously and systematically on the study of letters,
He had already, by the way, produced a History
DIXON SCOTT Si
of Liverpool a work which, whatever its defects,
is a standing testimony to young Scott's powers of
presenting and interpreting things with the conscious
composition of an artist.
Two or three years later he undertook, apart from
his appointed academic task of collecting material
for a study of William Morris's prose, to give a
course of University Extension Lectures on modern
novelists, and he began to write reviews and literary
criticism for the Manchester Guardian and the
Bookman. His lectures displayed not only his gifts
as a critic, but the remarkable range of his reading
reading done, not as others use, for mere diversion,
but with all his receptive and critical faculties wide
awake. His reviews and essays in criticism written
at this time provide the matter for the one book,
besides the History of Liverpool and his little
masterpiece on Stratford-on-Avon^ that remains
as his literary monument.
Scott had to earn bread and butter, and that stern
necessity compelled him to give to journalism what
ought to have been dedicated to a higher service ;
but he never forgot his ordination vows ; and if his
worship had to be conducted in a little corrugated-
iron chapel-of-ease instead of in a cathedral, it was
still worship, infused with an ardent, unquenchable
fire. Almost suddenly Scott found himself. His
maturity came to him swiftly, like the opening of
the buds in spring. One day, it seemed, he was
struggling to command his medium. The next, he
had acquired mastery. True, his exuberance re-
mained. The last enemy that inspired youth shall
put under its feet is the delight in its own strength ;
and it is at worst an amiable fault. It may betray
judgment here and there, but how it quickens the
82 THE JOYOUS CRITIC
perceptions and the feelings ! And with Scott it
was beginning to find restraint, for he had grown
conscious as an artist of its embarrassment, and he
spent much too much, alas! of his energy in
revising and re-revising the work of his hand. The
papers that he left bear pathetic evidence to his
passion for rewriting what had already been so well
done. But he had so much to say, and so many
forms of saying it, that the difficulty was not to
invent but to select, when the need for selection, in
the interests of art, became evident to him.
In his introduction to Scott's one book of col-
lected criticisms (Men of Letters : Hodder &
Stoughton) Mr Max Beerbohm says : " One often
wonders which of these two things, the power to
feel strongly and the power to think strongly, plays
the greater part in the making of fine criticism."
Both capacities Scott had in an exceptional degree,
as these essays testify. He not only understood his
author, seized himself of the quiddity of him, but
felt with him. His receptivity was amazing and
infinite. He could put himself in tune with the
most diverse spirits, and extract from them that
which only perfect sympathy can discern. Indeed,
' one of Scott's chief characteristics was his whole-
hearted admiration for the achievements of others.
Far from any feeling of jealousy, he rejoiced as in
a personal triumph at the success of his contem-
poraries; and the present writer will not forget
Scott's fine enthusiasm over a new volume of
verse by Lascelles Abercrombie. He radiated pride
qualified only by something akin to reverence.
These collected essays have some of the surface
faults of journalism, as was inevitable. The titles,
for instance, have the catchiness of headlines, and a
DIXON SCOTT 83
paradoxically possibly learnt from Mr Chesterton.
The Innocence of Bernard Shaw^ The Meek-
ness of Mr Rudyard Kipling^ The Arthssness
of Mr H. G. Wells^ and The Homeliness of
Browning have an unmistakable ad captandum
flavour. But they are but the stalking-horses for
the critic's real wit. The test of all criticism is the
degree in which it enables the reader to understand
and appreciate the subject criticized ; and judged by
that test these essays of Scott, written for news-
papers and periodicals though they be, must be
admitted to have a rare distinction. Here, again,
one sees his astonishing capacity for seeing things
from the inside for getting right into his
author's mind, so to say. A juster and shrewder
appreciation than Scott's of the idiosyncrasy and
method of Bernard Shaw, for instance, has
never been written, though Mr Shaw himself
may complain that Scott treated what was in-
tended as an indictment of civilization as a mere
specimen of style. To read these essays is not only
to obtain a new insight into literary craftsmanship,
but to have revealed in authors already familiar a
new significance. Things that one had passed by
unobserved are discovered by this critic and pre-
sented with a vividness which is almost a reproach.
To him there is no dead stuff anywhere. All
literature is a bell to him ; he strikes and it rings.
Occasionally, indeed, Scott sees what is not actually
there; but the only security against seeing too
-much is not to see at all. In this book there are
two essays at least that alone would establish a
critic's reputation the essay on Henry James, a
beautiful piece of appreciation both of a great
writer and a noble spirit ; and the essay on Morris,
84 THE JOYOUS CRITIC
which must be accepted as an enduring contribu-
tion to the study of the poet. These two essays,
and perhaps the Chronicle of Mr John Masefield^
present Scott's powers in their highest expression,
and in their austerest form. The ornamentation
is chastened, though the vivacity remains that
vivacity which runs through all his work, some-
times almost to riot, and manifests itself in figure
and trope and epithet so as almost to dazzle the
attention.
Through the less than ten years of his literary
activity Scott's vitality as a writer grew as his
physical vitality dwindled* He was a martyr to a
particularly distressing form of dyspepsia, and was
continually under the doctor's hands, enduring special
diets and even operations. But his spirit was always
buoyant, and his interest in life and books as his
letters eloquently testify never flagged.
He was just coming into his own he had
entered the land of his promise when the war
broke out, and the call to active service came. He
joined the Territorials, and obtained a commission
under Col. J. P. Reynolds, in the 3rd West Lanca-
shire Brigade, R.F.A. As a soldier Scott, in spite
of his poor health, proved a great success. He had
a remarkable aptitude for organization, and for the
ordering of detail gifts rare to the literary tempera-
ment On October 2, 1915, Scott and his brigade
sailed for Gallipoli, and only three weeks later he
fell a victim to dysentery that scourge of the
Dardanelles Expedition which " many a tall fellow
hath destroyed so cowardly." A man of his in-
firmity, indeed, could hardly have hoped to escape
where the most robust succumbed* A soldier's
death was the last that those who knew Dixon
DIXON SCOTT 85
Scott would have predicted for him. But his best
epitaph is that he was worthy of it; though such
a death adds to the war's tragedy of high promise
extinguished and capacity for splendid service
unfulfilled.
R. H.
AN OXFORD CAVALIER
ROBERT WILLIAM STERLING
OXFORD, which is still Cavalier rather
than Roundhead, mobilized the whole of
her joyous youth the moment the call to
arms was heard in her ancient courts. No other
English city, save Cambridge, has been so much
changed by the war; none speaks its fell effect
more eloquently than this fair, mournful witness,
who feels in her stricken heart the sad truth of
Pericles' lamentation over the loss of the young
Athenians : " The spring has gone out of the year.'*
There should be well over 3000 undergraduates
at this moment in residence. "In June 1914,"
wrote the President of Magdalen, my own much
loved and dearly remembered college, in an account
of Oxford's contribution to the man-power of
the Empire militant, "every college was full to
overflowing. Step into any one to-day! If it
is full at all, it is full of young soldiers. When
they are out, it is empty. The remnant of under-
graduates, the invalid, the crippled, the neutrals,
make absolutely no show at all. They can hardly
be discovered. Colleges which before the war con-
tained 150 now contain half a dozen. Emptiness,
silence reign everywhere. The younger teachers
are gone too/' At many of the colleges those who
left for their military training in the first year of
the war bound themselves to return, if they sur-
vived, and renew the old traditions for the genera-
tions to come. When these survivors of the loyal
lovers of Oxford and her traditions are home
from the front on short leave, they tell you this
Photo ttyS A Rroum
ROBERT WILLIAM STERLING
(LIEUTENANT, ROYU, SCOTS FUSlI IKRs)
ROBERT STERLING 87
promise still holds good. But they do not visit
the deserted city, which was once all one great
country house thronged with happy young guests.
Short leave is intended as a period of spiritual
refreshment in which the soldier's valiancy is to
get a new edge to it, as a sword is resharpened ;
the brief moments of release must not be devoted
to sorrowful remembrance. So Oxford is avoided,
because her silent quadrangles are haunted with
the innumerable ghosts of loved-and-lost com-
panions, and the heart of the living is strangely
troub]ed by the sense of their unseen presence.
" Let the dead bury their dead " is one of the
hard texts which make up the stern creed of the
soldier who must sacrifice so many tendernesses in
the service of his country. What were the motives
that compelled the undergraduates at all our
Universities (not only Oxford and Cambridge) to
respond so quickly to the call to arms ? An
Oxford soldier poet of high distinction 1 has given
me the following reasoned catalogue of the motives
at work in his own University :
1. A sense that England's honour was not only imperilled
but would no longer exist if we made our Belgian pact a mere
" scrap of paper."
2. Sympathy with France. (The French was one of the
largest and most enthusiastic of Oxford Clubs.)
3. That genuine but much concealed desire, which exists in
almost every youthful breast, to suffer for others.
"4. Love of England, in the sense expressed in John Masefield's
August, 1914:
And such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam
As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind.
5. The "Zeit-geist" of the time. Our restlessness was to
1 Mr Robert Nichols, the author of Ardours and Endurance^
who served as an officer on the West Front with other Wykehamists,
and was invalided with nerves shattered by shell-shock.
88 AN OXFORD CAVALIER
be offered a stable occupation, our unsatisfiedness an immense
task; our egoism a fulfilment in the personal guidance of
inferiors in rank and appeasement in submission to those
superior. Our wearisome and wearied preoccupation with the
problems of sex was to be abolished in the hearty companion-
ship of the men we were to lead. Our vague and intense
idealism, so fluctuantly directed, and so much at the mercy of
an ironic sense of depressing reality, was to be granted a high,
immediate realisable purpose; our realism (intense desire for
contact with the actual truth, be it never so brutal) was to be
satisfied with the terrific external verities of fatigue, suffering,
bodily danger, meanness and greatness of soul, beloved life and
staggering death.
6. The pure spirit of adventure.
7. Curiosity.
8. Vague feeling that "it was the thing to do."
9. Fear of the world's censure and State compulsion later on.
Several of these motives were visibly at work
in the Elizabethan age, when our right to be
Englishmen was challenged for the first time, and
it follows that the vast majority of the Oxford
and Cambridge undergraduates who volunteered at
the beginning of the war can be justly called
New Elizabethans until such times as they get
that name of their own to which, as Professor
W. R. Sorley said in a letter to the chronicler,
they are so clearly entitled.
It has not been easy to choose between the
thousands of University undergraduates young
men fresh from school and at the threshold of a
career of inevitable distinction who sacrificed all
that they were, all that they must have been, to
" take the cross " in defence of Christian civilization.
After long consideration, so great was the number
of appropriate examples, I have selected Robert
William Sterling, who was elected King Charles
Scholar at Pembroke College (Dr Johnson's College,
by the way) in 1912, and won the Newdigate
ROBERT STERLING 89
Prize Poem in the following year, when the subject
was The Burial of Socrates. In his gaiety and
gravity commingled he was a typical example of
the - Cavalier spirit that animated the Oxford we
knew before the war and shall see again in the
coming years of peace. He preferred a few close
friends to a multitude of acquaintances, having that
rare genius for friendship which is a characteristic
of all strong, influential personalities. But Oxford
was beginning to discover him even before he had
his first great success, and there can be no doubt
that the charm of his fresh and eager soul would
have made for the greater joyousness of his genera-
tion of undergraduates. The saying of the late
Bishop Mitchinson, then Master of Pembroke, in a
letter of sympathy to his mother, " I seem to have
lost, not a scholar, but a son," illustrates his singular
capacity for winning a place in the hearts of those
who met him in the daily round of doing and
being. Heads of colleges are somewhat remote and
inaccessible personages ; it is part of their metier to
stand for a tradition of bygone courtesy, to set
with a certain aloofness the example of an earlier
dispensation of manners and customs. Sometimes,
as in the case of the venerable Dr Routh of
Magdalen, who was the last of the great school of
essentially English theologians, they are the mirrors
of a century that has been. But, with old and
young alike, this scholarly young Cavalier, who
seemed to have ridden to Oxford out of an age of
gleaming breastplates and tossing love-locks, won
an intimate affection without ever an effort to
win it. He was, of course, a born poet; and he
earnestly endeavoured to live up to the truth of
the (amended) classical tag, Paeta nascitur necnon fit*
go AN OXFORD CAVALIER
But it was his natural bent to set the art of living
poetry above that of writing it. And to-day he
lives on poetically in the hearts of those who knew
him ever so slightly. A gallant, boyish figure who
has ridden past into the unknown in a great
concourse of joyous comrades how often in the
days gone by has such a still-remembered sight
been seen by the ageless eyes of the Eternal City
of Youth he describes so well :
I saw her bow'd by Time's relentless hand,
Calm as cut marble, cold and beautiful,
As if old sighs through the dim night of years,
Like frosted snow-flakes on the silent land,
Had fallen : and old laughter and old tears,
Old tenderness, old passion, spent and dead,
Had moulded her their stony monument :
While ghostly memory lent
Treasure of form and harmony to drape her head.
Proud-stepping statue ! still her arm, up-raised,
Pointed the sceptre skyward, like a queen
Gleaming bright wonder from the world amazed.
But this was the Oxford of the vanished peace-
time who seemed to so many cold and incredulous,
never allowing the youthful to forget that they
were but casual guests of the dead in her ancient
pleasances. Oxford was to Robert Sterling too old
and majestical to have much thougKt for her laugh-
ing, boyish guests ; the makers of her secret life and
visible scrolls of petrified history were to him living
presences and the sole subjects of her regal meditation.
If he saw her to-day, he would see a very human
creature, a mother mourning the loss of ten thousand
sons and finding her only solace in the humblest
war-work.
At Sedbergh, that fine old northern school, where
every boy acquires the Roman virtus and a con-
ROBERT STERLING 91
tempt for " easy options " in work and play, he
spent the last four years of his happy school-life,
He was fond of the school games, especially Rugby
football, in which Sedbergh is supreme among
English schools, as is proved by her long list of
International players. But he did not greatly excel
in games; there exists a portrait of him coming
in last in the Wilson Run, which is an even more
drastic test of cross-country running than the famous
a Crick Run " at Rugby. He was bound to finish ;
for, like all Sedberghians, he lived by and for the
first axiom of Public School life so well expressed
in Sir Henry Newbolt's lines of counsel to the
aspiring youth whom he strait ly enjoins :
To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize.
He was a scholar by instinct, and as one who
shared a study with him bears witness : " His
interest in literature alone was quite enough to
keep him busy and happy: like a true workman
he put his whole soul into what he did/' , Classics
were his chief pursuit, but he had an all-round
intelligence, and loved to discuss a scientific problem,
building up his argument from first principles in a
most surprising manner. He was not in the least
a bookworm. None felt more keenly the rapture
of open-air pursuits, of the blustering wind over
the Yorkshire fells. " Perhaps his happiest hours,"
writes a friend of his school-days, "were spent
wandering over the Sedbergh hills, now leisurely
fishing some lonely beck, now lying on the grass
in the sunshine, watching the clouds drift over
Winder." Winder is the fell nearest to the school ;
it rises some noo feet above the playing-fields,
92 AN OXFORD CAVALIER
and has always been regarded by Sedberghians as
a chief source of the school's inspiration (just as the
sea is regarded by Rossallians). A new boy is
not considered initiated until he has climbed Winder.
In one of his school poems, entitled Early Prep^
he celebrates this notable hill, the silent, consulting
friend of so many generations of hardy climbers :
O Sedbergh and the Morning
And the dancing of the air ;
See the crown of Winter glancing
To the sun his welcome rare !
And we valley-folk are scorning
All the labour and the care :
For heart and feet are dancing
With the dancing of the air.
He will always be remembered as the laureate
of Sedbergh, " stern nurse of men," for the genius
loci lives abundantly in his poems on the hill-side,
brooklets and the airy revelry of the snow-flakes
over winter's ghostly brow :
Embodied smiles from the white sky falling,
and on the cricket field when the game is over and
the umpire (conscience in a white garment) has
pocketed the bails and
The mystic music of the scented gale
Sings the dead day: and all the objects fade,
Making their separate hues one blended whole ! . . .
Chapel and school and field whatever made
Glorious the day richly together roll
In single wealth : Sedbergh reveals her soul.
And, above all, in his glad song of the delights of a
plunge in the River Lune when the sluggards are tak-
ing what somebody once called their ugliness sleep :
"When the messenger sunbeam over your bed
Silently creeps in the morn ;
And the dew-drops glitter on flower and tree,
Like the tears of hope new-born ;
ROBERT STERLING 93
When the clouds race by in the painted sky
And the wind has a merry tune :
Ah ! then for the joy of an early dip
In the glorious pools of Lune.
Because of these poems, inspired by the narrow, but
intense, patriotism of a great school (see Douglas
Gillespie's life for yet another example of that root
of the love of country), Robert Sterling will also
live on the lips of boyhood, which is a joyous
form, surely, of mundane immortality.
Of his Oxford career almost enough has already
been said. His scholarship ripened there, and he
worked hard at the perfecting of his technique.
That is why his Oxford poems have lost something
of the breezy freshness and spontaneity of the
verse he wrote at Sedbergh. A time comes to
all young poets when the dynamics of expression
insist on being seriously studied, and their ex-
periments in rhyme and rhythm seem prosody
rather than poetry. In a most interesting fragment
entitled Maran we have the results of a valiant
attempt to recover for the English tongue a lost
heritage the forgotten legacy of the Saxon epic
poets who used stress and alliteration with such an
impressive effect. In this curious form the number of
unaccentuated syllables does not matter ; accentuated
syllables must be four and three alternately and
are to be intoned ; only one accentuated syllable
in each line is unalliterative. The scheme is seen
to advantage in the following stanza :
The w'ind was w'ailing over the la'nd w'ildiy
S'ong-/ighing, and the Mo'on
languishing, a /o've-/o'rn ma'iden
Pa'le-^e'ering from a shr'ond.
His Newdigate was not one of the very few
real poems which have won the famous prize,
94 AN OXFORD CAVALIER
nor does it contain a memorable line such as
that which occurs in Dean Burgon's oft-quoted
description of Petra :
A rose-red city half as old as Time.
But it is much more than the average prize
poet's careful exercise in scholarly versification, in
which convention has everything its own way.
The subject was the story told by Thucydides of
Spartan courtesy in permitting the burial of Sophocles
among his ancestral olives :
And he was laid in the tomb of his fathers, that is situated
in front of the wall, on the road leading past Decelea. . . .
Now Decelea had been taken from the Athenians and fortified
against them by the Lacedaemonians, to whose general, Lysander,
the god Dionysus appeared in a dream, bidding him give leave for
the man to be buried in that tomb. When Lysander made light
of it, the god appeared a second time with the same behest.
Then Lysander inquired from deserters who the dead man was ;
and learning that it was Sophocles, sent a herald with permission
for the burial.
The poet's grandson is made to tell the story of
the journey by night, in the darkest hour of
Athens' fortunes, and this is his final word of
farewell :
Ah ! Master, when the blast uproots a tree,
Its form lies bedded but a god beneath
Treasures its leaves and perished fragrancy,
To pierce anew tlie pregnant soul of death :
So from thy poetry, thy spirit-tomb,
Shall burgeon wealth of tears and tenderness
And beauty, when forgotten is this pit
And drain' d is Athens' doom
Come, leave his body, friends, to Earth's caress.
Oh, lightly, lightly, Earth, encompass it !
His friends greatly rejoiced at this victory, and
he wore his academic laurel without ostentation,
ROBERT STERLING 95
insisting that he had only just entered on his
apprenticeship to poetry. His* genius for friend-
ship now found fuller play. " He could convey,"
writes one of his college friends, " a rare warmth
of welcome in one exclamatory word, whilst in
his mouth the use of a Christian name at some
surprise meeting was a thing not lightly forgotten."
Had he lived, he must have become one of those
quiet, abiding influences, responsive to simple joys
and sorrows and so never growing old, which
have made Oxford, with all its faults and failings,
a place where all can learn the highest art of
living.
Early in August 1914 he applied for and re-
ceived a commission in the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
In February of the following year he was sent to
France. " It was a great relief," he wrote at the
time, " to get out here after kicking my heels toy-
soldiering at home." He had already shown that
a man of action, a fine soldier, could be evolved
from the gentle and joyous scholar. He gave
the whole of himself to soldiering ; his men, to
whom he was devoted, knew from the first that
he had the capacity for leadership. But he still
sought for links with the kindly cosmos on which,
as fate would have it, he had turned his back for
ever. " Pve been longing for some link with the
normal universe detached from the storm. It's
funny how trivial incidents sometimes are seized as
symbols by the- memory, but I did find such a
link about three weeks ago. We were in trenches
in woody country (just S.E. of Ypres). The
Germans were about eighty yards away, and
between the trenches lay pitiful heaps of dead
friends and foes. Such trees as were left standing
90 AN OXFORD CAVALIER
were little more than stumps, both behind our
lines and the enemy's. The enemy had just been
shelling our reserve trenches, and a Belgian battery
behind us had been replying, when there fell a
few minutes' silence ; and I, still crouching ex-
pectantly in the trench, suddenly saw a pair of
thrushes building a nest in a c bare, ruin'd choir '
of a tree, only about five yards behind our line.
At the same time a lark began to sing in the
sky above the German trenches. It seemed almost
incredible at the time, but now, whenever I think
of those nest-builders and that all but 'sightless
song, 5 they seem to represent in some degree the
very essence of the Normal and Unchangeable
Universe carrying on unhindered and careless amid
the corpses and the bullets and the madness."
This was written within a week of his death. In
another letter he wrote : " I think I should go mad,
if I didn't still cherish some faith in the justice
of things, and a vague but confident belief that
death cannot end great friendships." He had no
time, in that terrible year when the British Army
was outnumbered and outgunned and the German
observation balloons, evil things full of eyes, hung
unmolested above our trenches, and the Allies'
left flank was all but turned, to write verse. All
his thought and energy was spent in an infinite
carefulness for his men, in ceaseless vigilance against
the subtle inventions of the Hun. The cold hatred,
which inspired the scientific savagery of the enemy,
seemed to him a wrong against human nature.
But he knew, as from the first all British soldiers
have known, that the moral of a victorious nation
is maintained with such unworldly passion, and this
chivalrous certainty a truth that Time has con-
ROBERT STERLING 97
firmed is expressed in one of two quatrains he
wrote in the trenches :
Ah ! Hate like this would freeze our human tears,
And stab the morning star :
Not it, not it commands and mourns and bears
The storm and bitter glory of red war.
His other trench poem was a valedictory to a
dear friend killed in action :
O brother, I have sung no dirge for thee :
Nor for all time to come
Can song reveal my grief's infinity :
The menace of thy silence makes me dumb.
These quatrains show that he had found himself
as a soldier poet, a worker in the stubborn medium
of stern reality. He fell in action, after holding
his trench valiantly through many hours of bitter
fighting, on St George's Day, 1915, when in the
twenty-second year of his age. His commanding
officer and his men deeply deplored his loss, seeing
in him a lovely and terrible type of the chivalrous
British soldier who remains undefeated even in
death.
LOST LEADERS
COLWYN AND ROLAND PHILIPPS
THE death in the field for them a field of
glory indeed of the two brilliant and
beloved sons of Lord St Davids was noth-
ing less than a national disaster. Their personalities
differed in a marked degree, but they were alike in
this each looked upon his life as a precious pos-
session to be used in the service of his fellow-men
and to the greater glory of God, They had the
tenderest affection for their parents, and it is easily
seen that the well-spring of either's aspirations and
inspirations was to be found in the happy family
life at the Welsh home of which the elder brother
sings :
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
He has ordained one place should prove
Beloved over all.
The lot has fallen to me
At a fair place, at a fair place,
At Lydstep by the sea.
Each of them was trusted at sight by all sorts
and conditions of men, for honour and honesty
grew in both as manifestly as the gentle wild
flowers appear in this ancient garden-land of ours.
Each had innumerable friends and never an enemy ;
for a true humility made them both so truly charit-
able that courtesy seemed ever the better part of
charity in all their works and words. Snobbishness
was to them the deadliest of sins, and they loathed
the religious, political and social shams of the
indolent and luxurious age they were bora into
that dishonest and dishonourable age which now lies
98
THE HON. COLAVYN I'HILIPPS
(CAPTAIN, ROYAL HORSE (.UVRDS)
Ft&m a fabait ly Frank Saluhuy
COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 99
so far behind us as to seem only a sick and mean-
ingless dream. Had they lived they must have
achieved leadership, or had it thrust upon them ; for
all men saw in them a single-hearted devotion to
the work they had chosen or which had chosen
them. The elder brother must have become a
famous soldier with that rare faculty of statesman-
ship (seen in such leaders as Lord Roberts) which is
born of the soldier's sense of the stern realities of
national life. The younger, already distinguished
as an orator among a people with a racial genius for
oratory, would have made his mark in politics and
proved that it can be made something better than
the "great game" of self-seeking demagogues.
Each made the last great sacrifice of all that he was
and all that he might have been in the spirit of a
Christian hero, and the proud lament for the fallen
chieftains of Israel is theirs also: "They were
lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death
they were not divided."
* .
Colwyn Philipps was a born soldier; he never
had the slightest doubt (nor had his friends) as to his
true vocation from the moment he decided, while
still at Eton, to, enter the Army. He was a keen
sportsman with a great love for animals, especially
horses and dogs, and a profound insight into the
various characters of those humble servitors of
man :
Poor dwindled souls that lost the upward way
In memory's morning when the world was young.
Country sport, after all, is still the best training
for warfare, since it cultivates the sense of reality
ioo LOST LEADERS
and forms the habit of making quick decisions.
You have only to look into the personal history of
Sir Douglas Haig and other famous commanders,
past and present, to admit the truth of Sir Evelyn
Wood's contention that the hunting-field is a fine
school of military leadership, Colwyn Philipps was
a keen and fearless horseman, who could take a
toss as well as any man. He had good hands and
a fine judgment of pace and it is not surprising to
learn that he won regimental steeplechases and
point-to-point races in his native Pembrokeshire.
But he knew that the mastery of modern warfare,
a science as well as an art, requires a highly-trained
intelligence in addition to that open-air common
sense which every good sportsman possesses. He
read widely and wisely in order to increase his
knowledge of men and affairs; he was a keen
student of the treatises bearing on his profession;
he taught himself to think accurately and write
clearly, which every young officer should learn to
do, seeing that an order that is ill thought out or '
obscurely worded is often the cause of unnecessary
loss of life- He took the utmost pains to master
the minutest details of a regimental officer's work,
and had a perfect understanding of every branch
of his business. Major Lord Tweedmouth, writing
to his father after his death in the second battle of
Ypres, said that " he was extraordinarily keen and
energetic and a first-class officer." Above all he
made it his chief ambition to know his men indi-
vidually, to win and keep their confidence, and to
consider their comfort and well-being in every
possible way. He knew the value of cheerfulness
as a military asset, and had the capacity of unceasing
watchfulness a letter from a trooper of the Royal
;pfWi|
THE HON. ROJ\ND I'UILIIM'S
(CAP1AIX, ROYAL FILSIIIERS, M.C.
COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 101
Horse Guards, describing his conduct in the grey
dawning of his last day of life, says : " He was, as
usual, in the best spirits, and always on the look-
out" The Old Army has died that England might
live, and few indeed of his men survive. But those
few will always remember him as the kindly and
considerate friend of all his comrades, in whose
judgment it was easy to have the utmost confidence
so that he was not obliged to cultivate a manner
of aloofness to keep his authority.
His letters from the Front, written from
November 1914 to April 1915, a period of forlorn
hopes, give as vivid and delightful a picture of this
young soldier's various personality as one could wish
to possess. Most of them were written to his
mother, whom he adored, and I know of nothing
more moving than the " character " he gave her in
the last letter he ever wrote to her :
This is not a letter, it's a testimonial. I give you a char-
acter of twenty-six years. You have never advised me to do
anything because it seemed wise unless it was the highest right.
Single-minded you have chosen love and honour as the " things
that are more excellent, 5 * and you have not failed. . . . You are
to me the dearest friend, the perfect companion, the shining
example, and the proof that honour and love are above all
things and are possible of attainment.
This is a chord, a beautiful star of appealing
music in a proud silence of grief with honour, which
is often struck in the last letters of the innumerable
dead. It is well we should remember these love-
letters to mothers enskied and easainted, for they
show that the mood of the British soldier high
courage and infinite, tenderness commingled is the
creation of British womanhood. It is to the
mothers of the fallen, more than to any others, that
we shall owe the victorious renewal of our ancient
102 LOST LEADERS
strength and a right use of victory in the days to
come.
Hitherto it has been generally supposed that the
Briton is somewhat lacking even in affectionate
regard for his mother. The Frenchman, whose
passionate tenderness is revealed whenever he utters
the words "ma mere," has seen in this alleged
want of natural feeling a strong proof of the cold-
ness of our national character. It is a sad libel
yet some apologists of English birth have accepted
it as an unpleasing truth, an unhappy result of the
custom of packing boys off to school at a very
early age. Moreover, such sayings as,
My son is my son till he marries a wife,
My daughter's my daughter till the end of her life,
can be quoted in confirmation of the belief that
the most beautiful tie of human intimacy is not
as strong and enduring in this island as in other
countries. The truth, as I see and have felt it in
the past, is that a misunderstanding has arisen out of
our national predilection for avoiding any demon-
strative display of emotion even, if possible, in the
extremest ecstasies of life, when all the barriers are
down between spirit and spirit. The curious thing,
which no foreigner not even an American can
ever understand, is that this convention of cold-
ness is condoned by both sexes ; so that even the
at-one-ment of lovers losing themselves in one
another may be a miracle of the mingling of
fire and snow as though Etna in eruption should
yet keep its covering of icy, virginal whiteness.
Our sons and mothers alike accept this convention,
most of all in war-time ; the " with it or on it " of
the Spartan mother, giving her son his shining shield,
COLWYN ROLAND PHILIPPS 103
has been paralleled in many eternal partings since the
war began. But let me give an everyday example
which bears more immediately on the mother. A boy
at school, now serving in France, wrote to his sister,
when expecting a visit from his parents : " Please ask
mother," he said in a postscript, " not to pull my
hair and call me c dearest ' when the men are
about. They used to call a man here Little Lord
Fauntleroy Fauntie for short. Best love to mother.
I do hope she will come down." You can't get
behind that. The plain truth is that Britons love
their mothers as dearly as British mothers deserve
to be loved ; and if a certain exotic touch of passion,
which is found in the Frenchman's more open and.
yet more secret emotion, be lacking in this mutual
loving, let us remember that the difference even
if Michelet's strange suggestion be rejected is
perhaps in our favour.
In others of these brief characters it is. shown how
and why a perfect intimacy between mother and
son has irradiated a character and a career. Out
of such an intimacy, all the daily giving and
taking, there grows a compassionate tenderness for
the womanhood of all women; so that the young
men blest with it can never be thought of as
giving less than they take from the other half of
human creation, and are always able to live up
to the quaint, wise doctrine of the old rhyme :
Treat the woman tenderly, tenderly,
Out of a crooked rib God made her slenderly, slenderly.
Straight and strong He did not make her,
Let love be kind, or else ye'll break her.
Could the unreckoning ardour of youth be thus
directed, then the greatest of all social reforms
would be accomplished; for it is out of the still
104 LOST LEADERS
powerful dogma of the inferiority of woman's con-
tribution to the sources of national greatness that
most of the evils and indignities of human life
are directly or indirectly derived. If the war had
taught us nothing else, it would have been well
worth while !
All manner of topics are touched on in these
valiant letters, but the soldier is predominant. He
finds the French people perfectly charming, but is
horrified at the way they have been treated by
some of their English guests. A French mistress
of the house, discovered in a wash-house surrounded
by a dozen other women and girls, refuses at first
to lend him a lantern. She had lent one the day
before to some English and they had not returned
it. He answered that the English were lending
their lives and a lantern was a small exchange.
" This somewhat bombastic speech " (a characteristic
touch !) " had the amazing effect of making the
whole room cheer, and Madame, blushing hotly,
insisted on giving me two lanterns, and carrying
them herself!' ' Part of a letter written a little
later to an officer friend shall .be quoted to show
that he had the true soldier's keen sense of the
significance of details :
Now about tips. Dig, never mind if the men are tired,
always dig. Make trenches as narrow as possible, with no
parapet if possible 5 dig them in groups of eight or ten men,
and join up later; leave large traverses. Once you have got
your deep narrow trench you can widen out the bottom, but
don't hollow out too much as a Maria shakes the ground for
a hundred yards and will make the whole thing fall in. Don't
allow any movement or heads to show, or any digging or
going to the rear in the daytime. All that can be done at
night or in the mists of morning that are heavy and last till
8 or p a.m. Always carry wire and always put wire forty
yards in front of the trench, not more. One trip-wire will
GOLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 105
do if you have no time for more. The Germans often rush
at night, and the knowledge of wire gives the men confidence.
Don't shoot unless you have a first-rate target, and don't ever
shoot from the trenches at aeroplanes, remember that the
whole thing is concealment, and then again concealment. Never
give the order " fire " without stating the number of rounds,
as otherwise you will never stop them again ; you can't be
too strict aly>ut this in training.
In other letters of advice, based on personal
experience, he emphasizes the folly of anything in the
nature of playing to the gallery. " The first thing we
learn here is to forget about c Glory.' . . , Another
thing we learn is to avoid c brave men.' The ass
who * does not mind bullets ' walks about and only
draws fire that knocks over better men than himself. 55
Here is another consignment of good counsel :
Always carry lots of ammunition to the trenches : you
may not want it for months, but when you do you will find
200 rounds don't go far. You will usually take over trenches
at night 5 don't, in the confusion, forget to ask the chap you
relieve
T. Where the supporting trench is.
2. Exactly who is on your flanks, and where.
3. Where the dressing-station is.
4. If any water is to be had, and where.
5. If you have wire in front of you ; and if you have not,
you must have half of the men standing to arms all
night.
If you hear tremendous fusilades going on it will probably
be yeomen or French : don't stand to arms without real need.
A good regiment will* be in the trenches for days and hardly
fire a shot, a bad one will have bursts of rapid once an hour.
Well, old boy, I wish you every kind of luck. Another hint.
Do not, however great the temptation, allow straw in the firing
trenches (have it in the supports, of course), nothing gives the
show away so. The other day I found my trench lined with
nice warm straw pellets. We were shelled like hell, but in the
night I had all the straw carried out and put in a line 200 yards
behind us. They shelled this line of straw all day, and never
touched us."
lo6 LOST LEADERS
When treatises on the whole art of trench war-
fare come to be written, the authors will do well
to consult these soldierly messages,
He takes great delight in the quaint sayings
of his men. For example, that of a weary person,
on whose face he had stepped while crawling to
his sleeping place in a lean-to behind a barn.
A weary voice muttered : " This is a blooming fine
game, played slow." And after a very long march
a trooper was heard saying to his very rough horse :
" You're no blooming Rolls-Royce, I give you my
word." He accepts somebody's definition of war
as utter boredom for many months, interspersed
with moments of acute terror "the boredom is
a fact," he adds. When there was a piece of much-
shelled ground to be crossed and his men's faces
looked rather long, he " restored confidence," in the
absence of cigarettes, by taking a ration biscuit
in one hand and a lump of cheese in the other, and
eating them in alternate mouthfuls, " We escaped
without a shell, but I nearly choked myself."
Here, to end this little catalogue of humorous
sayings and doings, is an address he overheard
given to three recruits by an N.C.O. who had been
told to increase their esprit de corps by anecdotes
and references :
'Ave you ever heard tell o' the Black Prince ? No ?
Well, you are ignorant blighters ! 'E was a cove what rode
about in armour, 'eavy cavalry 'e was, and 'e licked the French.
Well, a pal o' 'is was St George wat 'as 'is birthday to-morrow :'
Vs the cove as I want to tell you about. Never 'eard tell of
'im ? Why, look at the back of 'arf a quid. There you see
} im sitting on a nanimale a-fighting of a dragon. You will note
as 'is thigh is in the c'rect position but 'is toe is too depressed
don't forget as the sole of the foot is to be kept parallel to
the ground however, 'e was fighting of a dragon, which
accounts for it. Well, this 'ere St George is the patron Saint of
COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS 107
cavalry, and don't yer forget it. What's that? What is a
patron saint ? Now none of your back answers 'ere, my lad,
or you and me will fall out. Carry on !
Everybody reads in the long days of nothing to
do at the Front, and he finds time for a little
literary criticism.
For example, he wishes to commend Browning
" as the perfect poet for lovers he does not write
about love as if it was a fever of the youthful,
which most people do, and he delights in the cosy
prettinesses of his lady without being fulsome or
sticky." A most just piece of criticism. A great
lover of children, he had a box of toys sent out
for some French kiddies. The toys were a great
success, especially the toy elephant, a creature
which none of them had seen before, and innumer-
able inquiries as to its size, habits, etc., taxed his
French vocabulary severely. His last letter but
one quotes a Canadian's criticism of his officers :
" Our chaps are all right, our rifle is a good one,
the grub is first-rate, and our officers oh, well,
we just take them along as mascots." Also he
says that the latest joke is to call the cavalry M.P.'s,
because they sit and do nothing.
The end came all too soon. He fell in the
counter-attack at the second battle of Ypres by
two cavalry brigades which succeeded in spite of
very heavy shrapnel and rifle fire in regaining the
original line of trenches (see Sir John French's
despatch published July 12, 1915). Brother officers
give a glorious picture of his gallant death. He
gave view-halloos as the advance was made ; a
little later he was seen on his knees, facing those
following after and waving his cap and shouting
" Come on, boys ! " He was the first man into
io8 LOST LEADERS
the recovered trenches, and he killed five Germans
before being shot at close quarters and instantly
killed. Thus died the bravest of the brave, a type
and examplar of undying chivalry.
The poet remr.ins ; until you know him you
have not sounded the depths of this valiant and
compassionate heart. A little anthology of his easy,
crystal-clear verse (which always means what it
says and says what it means), will help you to
understand the deep earnestness which was the seed-
plot of all his happy virtues. In An Apprecia-
tion he pays homage to Mr Lloyd George, whom
he had accepted as his leader on the path of social
reform :
An absolute silence greeted your birth,
Latest and greatest of children of earth ;
No shouting or routing, no rockets on high,
For you, the long-looked for, the star in the sky.
The masses make much of a Mafeking holiday,
On Ladysmith night all the streets will be dressed,
On the fifth of November they still make a jolly day,
And you they will greet as a street-corner jest.
You, who are a plank to bridge o'er the disparity,
The deep yawning gulf 'twixt the rich and the poor ;
You, that mean health as a right, not a charity
Well, you know stamp-licking is such a bore.
Pro is an amiable rebuke to the critic whose
whole creed is expressed in Lord Melbourne's
Why not let it alone?
The Suffragettes put up your back,
Socialists you can't abide,
And likewise the Insurance Act,
And I don't know what beside*
Money-making in the City
Seems to you both coarse and wrong,
And you think it is a pity
That I waste my time in song.
COLWYN ROLAND PHILIPPS 109
All we do before we die, Friend,
Is, at best, so very scanty j
Don't you think you might try, Friend,
To be Pro instead of Anti ?
An Outsider is the soverain antidote to the
national habit, which is seen in all classes, of
regarding form as even more important than
character :
You judge him that he does not play
The social game in just the way
That you have learned with toil and care.
He falls into each careful snare ;
He lacks repose ; he has no style ;
He loudly laughs where you would smile.
But though I grant you, if you please,
A certain lack of social ease,
He's -helped men live and helped them die,
While you have learnt to fold a tie.
The restlessness of men, which some call Pro-
gress (with the biggest possible P), is satirized in
An Allegory^ which reminds one of the bleak,
unadorned stuff of Charles Sorley :
I heard a sound of running feet,
And all along the dusty street
A multitude came sweeping by.
On every shoulder was a load,
Each drove his neighbour with a goad.
I saw one stop, and heard him cry
" Why drive ye in this dreadful race,
Why urge ye such an awful pace,
"What treasure do ye look to find ? "
They turned upon him in amaze
And gaped at him with owlish gaze.
And suddenly I saw them blind !
" Where to ? We neither know nor care,
But hurry, hurry onward there,"
The multitude was called Mankind.
licity of soul is the one thing which is not
of vanities at the long last :
no LOST LEADERS
When you have grasped the highest rung,
When the last hymn of praise is sung,
When all around you thousands bow,
When Fame with laurel binds your brow,
When you have reached the utmost goal
Tha you have set your hurrying soul
To reach, and found that it is dim ;
When you have gratified each whim,
When naught is left you to desire,
You of the whole round world shall tire :
Then you shall see the whole thing small
Beside the one gift worth it all.
The one good thing from pole to pole
Is called Simplicity of Soul.
He was vexed in his very soul, as happens to so
many deep and loving natures, by a sense of the
impossibility of a complete understanding between
any two human beings. In The Barrier this
strange, sad thought is well worked out:
A wall and gulf for ever lie between,
Not all that we may do through love or wit
Can quite avail to pull away the screen,
s Nor yet succeed in bridging o'er the pit.
He knows the reason, He that ordered it,
Who bade us love but never undrestand.
He fixed the barrier as He saw fit,
And bade us yearn and still stretch forth the hand
Across the very sea He'd said should ne'er be spanned.
Be sure this great and aching love of mine,
That ever yearns to know and to be known,
Can tear the veil that sometimes seems so fine
As though 'twere cobweb waiting but the blow
To fall asunder and for ever go.
E'en as I rise to strike, it is too late,
The cobwebs billow, thicken, seem to grow
To a thick wall with buttress tall and great . . ,
I stand alone, a stranger at a city gate.
Except ye become as little children is the title
of an epigram in which this truth is even more
rigorously enforced :
THOMAS M KETTLE
(Ui:UTLNA\T, FMTJJUN FUSII TERS)
COLWYN & ROLAND PHILIPPS in
With iron will but ever-ebbing force
He held him dumb and desperate to the course,
And when Death came upon him, broken-hearted,
He'd almost reached the place . . . from which he started.
I have given orily examples of the verse which
defines his ultimate philosophy of living. You
must read the In Memoriam collection of his poetry
and prose, if you wish to know how joyously he
can write on racing and hunting, the wild beauty
of Lydstep by the sea, the infinite charm of children,
the faithfulness of animals, the perplexities of loving,
and so forth. His own life was the best of his
poems. Can more be said ?
THE SACRED WAY
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE
And here for dear dead brothers we are weeping,
Mourning the withered rose of chivalry,
Yet, their work done, the dead are sleeping, sleeping
Unconscious of the long lean years to be.
SO an anonymous writer in the Wykehamist
of July 31, 1917, interpreting, as it were,
the feelings of the Old Boys gathered in
conclave to consider whether a War Cloister or
other edifice of stone and mortar shall stand as the
permanent memorial of the many gallant dead
from Wykeham's School. The Crimean Porch and
the South African and Herbert Stewart Gates stand
in memory of Wykehamist patriotism of the past,
and a Cloister might serve as an incentive, were such
needed, to the boys of future years to uphold the
traditions of the School But there sprang from the
heart and brain of one of Winchester's most dis-
tinguished scholars, now resting like so many others
in the blood-sodden fields of Flanders, so noble a
suggestion for a wider memorial an international
memorial of this greatest of all wars, that one
would fain hope to see the Wiccamical Body, as
partners in the greater scheme, throw the weight
of their influence into an effort to have it trans-
lated into the memorial of our "withered rose of
chivalry."
Alexander Douglas Gillespie, subaltern in the
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, writing from
the trenches to Mr Rendall, his beloved Head at
Winchester, thus put forward his inspiration of a
memorial road on the Western Front that should
be a Via Sacra, but not a Via Dolorosa :
112
DOUGLAS GILI ESl'IE
(LIEUTENANT, \RIIYLL \\ STTTHERI \M> HIGHLANDERS)
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 113
u In May the fruit blossom was beautiful where
our trenches ran through an orchard, and we used
to go back at night to a ruined village and plunder
the gardens in order to make our own. So we
have rose trees, too, and pansies and lily of the
valley, but not in this unquiet corner where I am at
present ; for here the Germans are almost on three
sides of us, and the dead have been buried just where
they fell, behind the trenches. There are graves
scattered up and down, some with crosses and
names upon them, some nameless and unmarked
as I think my brother's grave must be, for they
have been fighting round the village where he
was killed all through these eight months. That
doesn't trouble me much, for iracra yfj ra<o? ; but
still, these fields are sacred in a sense, and I wish
that when the peace comes our Government might
combine with the French Government to make one
long avenue between the lines from the Vosges to
the sea, or, if that is too much, at any rate from
La Bassee to Ypres. The ground is so pitted and
scarred and torn with shells and tangled with wire
that it will take years to bring it back to use again ;
but I would make a fine broad road in the * No
Man's Land' between the lines, with paths for
pilgrims on foot, and plant trees for shade, and fruit
trees, so that the soil should not be altogether waste.
Some of the shattered farms and houses might be
left as evidence, and the regiments might put up
their records beside the trenches which they held all
through the winter* Then I would like to send
every man, woman, and child in Western Europe
on pilgrimage along that Via Sacra, so that they
might think and learn what war means from the
silent witnesses on either side. A sentimental idea,
n 4 THE SACRED WAY
perhaps, but we might make it the most beautiful
road in all the world/'
,There may be names of greater glamour on
Winchester's Roll of Honour than that of Douglas
Gillespie ; almost the whole possible number of her
sons of military age have served or are serving, and
already over 350 are numbered among the dead or
missing. But there will be none that will stand for
a finer type of Englishman, using the word to
embrace one who, above all, was a Scot, proud of his
land, its history, and its associations. For a man
who has the high fortune to be born a Scot, with
the fine inheritance of the race, to be educated at a
great English public school with its tradition of
centuries, and to pass thence to Oxford, there to
develop his faculties in competition with brilliant
contemporaries drawn from the Empire's farthest
stretch, may be said to have well and truly laid the
foundation of a life of public service. It was
Douglas Gillespie's hope so to use his powers. But
war came; he made the great sacrifice gave his
life willingly for his country's cause.
**
Mr and Mrs T. P. Gillespie, of Longcroft, Lin-
lithgow, were supremely fortunate in their two sons,
Douglas and Tom. Both moved along the same
educational lines Cargilfield, Winchester, and New
College, Oxford. Douglas was a scholar to whom
success came early and easily. Tom's mind was of
slower motion. He was of superb build, of an
open-air temperament, and favoured and excelled in
athletics. At Oxford Douglas carried things before
him, and was Ireland scholar of his year. Tom
rose to fame as an oarsman. He rowed for three
years in his College boat, and represented the United
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 115
Kingdom in the New College crew at the Olympic
Games in Stockholm in 1912. Douglas decided to
read for the bar, with a view to taking up Inter-
national Law. Tom obtained a University com-
mission in the Army, and was gazetted to the
King's Own Scottish Borderers.
In August 1914 came the call for service. Tom
joined his regiment, went at once to the Front, and
was killed on October 18, near La Bassee. Douglas
was at first refused a commission on account of his
defective sight, and he enlisted as a private in a new
battalion of the Seaforths, and was with them at
Bedford until the middle of October. Midway in
training his commission came, and he went to the
Front in February 1915 as a subaltern in the Argyll
and Sutherland Highlanders. On September 25 he
fell in the German trenches at La Bassee, just
eleven months after his brother Tom had given
up his fine young life for the same cause, and almost
at the same spot These twin-lives were knitted
together in love and understanding of each other,
and in a deep-rooted affection for parents, home,
and country. Tom Gillespie had scarcely time to
show what manner of man he was, but his friends
were able fully to estimate his sterling quality.
Douglas Gillespie, in his year of war, had fuller
opportunity; but strangely enough his recognition,
so far as the wider general public was concerned,
came through the publication of his intensely human
letters to his home people 1 written for their eye
alone, but properly given to the public as an indica-
tion of his habits' of life and thought of the best of
our citizen-soldiers. And again, strangely enough,
though Tom could lay no claim to the literary
1 Letters from Flanders. By A. B. GUlespie. Smith, Elder & Co.
n6 THE SACRED WAY
power of his brother, his last letter, which finds a
place in Douglas's volume, has touched the hearts
of thousands of readers all over the world. Such is
the power of deep and simple sincerity.
But it is of the elder brother that this sketch falls
to be written, though no memoir would have been
complete that omitted reference to Tom. The
charm of " Bez," to use the familiar name by
which he was known to those who were his friends,
manifested itself early. A former headmaster of
Cargilfield, the fine preparatory school at Cramond
Bridge which did so much to pave the way for his
future success, says he was one of the three ablest boys
encountered during thirty years' school mastering,
and the most lovable. He had not a trace of
conceit, and his affection was generously given and
openly displayed. He went to Cargilfield in
September 1900, when eleven years of age* He
was placed in the Third Form (from the top), and
soon jumped to the first place. Such a presumption
in a new boy brought upon him the cry of " beastly
swot," which, reaching the ears of the authorities,
led them to institute a system of rewards by which
an industrious boy helped his form to get an extra
half-holiday. The " beastly swot," in consequence,
became the "wise frog" (his nickname was
" Froggy"), and his Form applauded and shared
his success. Of his ability, Mr H. C. Tillard, a
former head of Cargilfield, writes: "It was not
specialized, but general He developed into a
c pure ' classic, his verses being a specially strong
point, but I feel sure that he could just as well
have specialised under different circumstances into
an c applied 5 classic, or historian, or even quite
possibly into a scientist or mathematician. He
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 117
had the most unusual power of anticipating know-
ledge, if I may coin the phrase; for example, he
had that queer gift of being able to make out an
' unseen/ which was really quite beyond what was
reasonably to be expected of him. This rare gift
is, in my experience, an invariable concomitant of
first-class ability. I suppose it is partly intuitive
and partly the result of unconscious observation
and ratiocination."
Douglas was not prominent at cricket, but he
was in the Rugby Union fifteen, playing as hard as
he worked. Before he left he was elected scholar
of Winchester in June 1903 he was head of the
school. Seven years later, when he won the
Ireland, the school, through its head boy, Colin
MacLehose, sent him a congratulatory telegram,
which drew from Gillespie a characteristic letter of
thanks. " Fm afraid," he wrote, " that it's over
ten years now since I went to Cargilfield, so that I
can't claim to know anyone in the school now.
But it's very nice to know that one's name is not
quite forgotten even if it is beginning to take up a
position a long way back on the boards in Hall.
There is no place where I would sooner give
pleasure by my success than Cargilfield, for I know
that I should never have found myself Ireland
scholar if it hadn't been for what I learnt there.
And as most of the masters who taught me are still
with you, I Ijope we shall see other scholars from
Cargilfield in a few years time." Colin MacLehose,
too, it may be added, after a career full of honour as
Head of the Schoolhouse, Rugby, fell in action
in 1917.
" One's time at Winchester is one's golden age,"
wrote Mr Cyril Asquith to Mrs Gillespie after
ii8 THE SACRED WAY
Douglas's death, " and no one who was with him
in College can think of Winchester apart from
him." He carried his high influence with him right
through the school, in work as in play. He entered
the school in Short Half, 1903, having been placed
seventh on the Roll for College. He moved up
the school rapidly, and was half-way up Senior
Division of Sixth Book, second of his year, in Short
Half, 1906. Here is his record for the next two
years :
June 1907. Mentioned in English Verse, Prize.
March 1908. Mentioned in Greek Verse, Prize.
July 1908. King's Gold Medal, Latin Verse.
King's Silver Medal, Latin Speech.
Warden & Fellow's Prize, Greek Prose.
Warden & Fellow's Prize, Latin Essay.
Proxime Accessit, Goddard Scholarship.
Proxime Accessit, Kenneth Freeman Prize,
Winchester College School Exhibition "ad
Oxon."
He was placed second on the Roll for New
College in December 1907, and went up to
Oxford in the following year. It must be re-
membered that his was a time of very strong
classical competition, and two of his strongest
opponents (and equally strong friends) were Cyril
Asquith and D. Davies, both of them distinguished
in many directions. Perhaps no one outside his
family, except Mr Kendall, the present Headmaster
of Winchester, and then his housemaster and tutor,
knew Douglas Gillespie more intimately than
Cyril Asquith, his successor as Ireland scholar,
and one may be pardoned therefore for quoting from
the very fine tribute paid by him to his dead friend
in the private letter to Mrs Gillespie from which
quotation has been made. It sums up concisely the
feeling of all Gillespie's Winchester contemporaries :
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 119
" He was my first friend at Winchester," he
wrote, "and I associate with him chiefly long
walks and bicycle rides for birds' eggs on summer
afternoons days of more unclouded happiness than
I have had since, I had then as I have still a
limitless admiration for him. First, because he
could always find a bird's nest when I could see
nothing, and because he could tell what tuft of
grass would bear one's weight in crossing a bog.
Then because he had an uncanny aptitude for
Greek and Latin. Lastly, because he could win
people's hearts at once by his inimitable candour
and friendliness. . * . He had all I value most
kindness, intelligence, sympathy, taste, humour,
wisdom, vitality, and a certain moral elevation*
. . . He abhorred sentimentality, but sentiment
he had in plenty, particularly for the humble and
obscure. No man was dver less dominated by the
world's scale of values. The State has lost in
him just the type of servant it can least afford
to sacrifice; his friends a man who had something
like a genius for friendship. Much as I loved
him I had no idea what a gap he would make
in my life. Much more must you be desolated
who have given him and another magnificent
son to the greatest cause which ever exacted these
sacrifices. For you there is unbounded sorrow,
but with it all the priceless consolation which the
manner of his life and death affords a life of
flawless integrity, honesty, and capacity devoted to
generous causes, and a death which, if he had lived
fifty years longer, he could not have bettered."
"His life was like his scholarship," he wrote
gain; "there was a fine sort of reticence about
both. He did not over-express himself, and he
120 THE SACRED WAY
was always as good as his word or better." These
passages were written at Winchester, where the
writer was temporarily stationed and where old
memories had been poignantly revived. " This
place," he continued, " is very sometimes almost
intolerably reminiscent of one's lost friends, and
particularly of Bez, because of all our long rambles
together. Every stick and stone had a history for
us, and now has only a history for me. I went
over College yesterday, and saw the c shop f where
he used, his first term, to do a sword dance, the
panels in Vth, where he used to secrete a large
slab of maple sugar, which we consumed together
the place where he and I and another man acted
a charade of the Boston tea party."
Douglas Gillespie had other sides than that of
bookishness. He had a merry heart, and was not
behindhand when any fun was going on at College.
He was, moreover, an excellent shot and a keen
angler, and when he was a junior at Winchester
he won a cup for senior " purling " (diving). He
was devoted to hill climbing; he went "up the
steepest mountains like a rabbit, leaving everybody
far behind, sweating and swearing." He was
interested in botany and a keen naturalist. He
had a very good collection of birds' eggs, all got
by himself; he would not keep any that he
himself had not found. He took horrible risks
in getting some of them, clinging by his nails on
the face of some perilous cliff, after a raven's or
buzzard's nest, or swarming up a tall fir tree, with
only a few rotten branches near the top, Tor the
eggs of a heron or a hawk.
But we have dallied too long at Winchester,'
and we must let Mr H. W. B. Joseph, Fellow
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 121
of New College, and one who knew Douglas well,
speak briefly for Gillespie's work at Oxford, where
the man fulfilled the rich promise of his youth.
"Among the best there is no one first," he
writes, " but I don't know whom, among those
I remember here, I would put before him.
Gillespie came to New College as a scholar from
Winchester in October 1908. I do not think his
work for election had given full promise of his
subsequent achievement as a classic, but he soon
showed his quality, and in December 1910 he
won the chief classical prize in the University,
the Ireland. He was, however, much more than
a brilliant translator and composer, having a keen
love for all kinds of good literature, and a robust,
critical sense* Nor were his abilities only literary ;
for he could seize quickly and make himself master
of a difficult subject and he had an eye for the
important issues. He had a strong and accurate
memory, and his judgment was steady and inde-
pendent ; and he could express himself forcibly
and clearly, not without touches of eloquence. . . .
He knew that he had ability, but he accepted it
only as a man may who is too sincere not to
acknowledge what he finds. He remained
absolutely simple and unassuming, and though not
without ambition he was ambitious to serve others
and not himself. . . . He was keenly interested
in social and political questions, and a prominent
member at Oxford of the chief University Liberal
Club, but -he was never a mere party man. Of
the many who have fallen in the first flower of
their age I know none whose death seems to me
in sober earnest more of a public loss, for he had
gifts which political life requires without the weak-
122 THE SACRED WAY
nesses that beset so many politicians, and he was
resolved to use these gifts not for his own profit,
but for his Country's. No one was more generally
liked among his contemporaries, and at the same
time no one was more respected* He would
take the popular and unpopular side with equal
unconcern, according as he judged right, and others,
whether they agreed or disagreed, would hear him
and not mistrust him. He had no fear, and he
could show indignation, but it was always without
malice. He went directly forward upon the work
that was to be done, without considering - what
others would think of him, but in the courtesies
of daily life he thought first of others."
* .
Gillespie's Letters from Flanders show his love
of parents, of school, of country, of nature, of
books, and of friends. Winchester was always with
him, and one is glad that in the later editions of
the book the profits of which, by the way, are
being added to a fund provided (in accordance with
his will) by the refunding of his Winchester and
New College Scholarships for the benefit of boys
that are not too well off the letter to Mr Rendall
on the Via Sacra is given in its entirety. One
passage will go straight to the hearts of all
Winchester boys: The ^-Germans were hurling
" sausages " at them.
"The sausages," he writes, "are rather like a
Bath Oliver biscuit tin only not quite so big
full of old nails and rusty scrap-iron, and they
make an infernal din. We could see them come
flying over the tops of some tall trees which
stand above our trenches, turning over and over
in the air. It seemed to me that I was a junior
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 123
again in Meads, taking practice in high 4 barters *
from Gordon, Nicolls, Fawcus, and other giants
of those days. For the sausage seemed to hang
in the air above my head, just as the ball did to
a nervous and incompetent cricketer like myself,
and I wondered when and where it was coming
down, and whether it would hit a branch and
fall straight into the trench, and what would
happen then. ... I heard the Captain beside me
shout when the first sausage went- up : * Well, I
am a rotter if I drop that catch ! ' and that made
the telephone Orderly laugh so much that he could
hardly pass the fire orders to his mortar. The
next minute a sausage smashed all his wires, and
he had to go out and mend them in the open, with
shrapnel flying round, but he came back still
laughing."
Take again this description of a nightingale
singing over the Flanders battlefield :
" Presently a misty morn came up, and a nightin-
gale began to sing. I have only heard him once
before Fn the daytime, near Farly Mount at
Winchester; but ,of course I knew him at once,
and it was strange to stand there and listen, for the
song seemed to come all the more sweetly and
clearly in the quiet intervals between the bursts
of firing. There was something infinitely sweet
and sad about it, as if the country-side were singing
gently to itself in the midst of all our noise and
confusion and muddy work; so that you felt the
nightingale's song was the only real thing which
would remain when all the rest was long past and
forgotten. It is such an old song too, handed on
from nightingale to nightingale through the summer
nights of so many innumerable years. ... So I
i2 4 THE SACRED WAY
stood there, and thought of all the men and women
who had listened to that song, just as for the first
few weeks after Tom was killed I found myself
thinking perpetually of all the men who had been
killed in battle Hector and Achilles and all the
heroes of long ago, who were once so strong and
active, and now are so quiet. Gradually the night
wore on until day began to break, and I could see
the daisies and buttercups in the long grass about
my feet."
One could quote endlessly. The bog myrtle
from the Highlands, the smell of warm mint and
water weeds in Flanders, the singing of the birds
each had its message for him memories of Scot-
land, of Winchester, of Oxford. The friends of
boyhood and manhood fell fighting around him,
and for each he had his little sprig of rue. But
his love for his home folks was surpassing strong,
and two letters one the last from England as he
left for France, the other written on the eve of
his death, and with apparently full prevision of
what the morrow was to bring forth seem to
enclose, as the golden setting grips a jewel, all that
animated and inspired his life and death.
February 19, 1915.
For no one likes saying good-bye. ... I was
always proud to be your son, but you have made
me prouder than ever and you and Daddy must
remember when I am in France that my greatest
help will always be to think of you at home, for
whatever comes I shall be ready for it. ... And
now you will know all the time how glad I am to
be young and fit for something whatever news you
get of me ; when a man is fighting for his country
DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 125
in a war like this the news is always good if his
spirit does not fail, and that I hope will nev~r
happen to your son.
September 24, 1915.
Before long I think we shall be in the thick of
it, for if we do attack my company will be one of
those in front, and I am likely to lead it. ...
I have no forebodings, for I feel that so many of
my friends will charge by my side, and if a man's
spirit may wander back at all, especially to the
places where he is needed most, then Tom will be
here to help me and give me courage and resource,
and that cool head which will be needed most of
all to make the attack a success. It will be a great
fight, and even when I think of you I would
not wish to be out of this. You remember
Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior "
Who if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad, for human kind
Is happy as a lover, and is attired
With sudden brightness like a man inspired.
Well, I could never be all that a happy warrior
should be, but it will please you to know that I
am very happy, and, whatever happens, you will
remember that.
These letters these are striking parallels in the
abounding love of those Happy Warriors, the two
Grenfells, for their parents give the keynote to
the work of our soldier so,ns. It is the love of
home, and of the homelana encompassing all that
lies near and dear to them, and not blood-lust that
has nerved our men to meet death tranquilly
almost half-way on the field.
126 THE SACRED WAY
" Somehow I never thought this blow would
fall," wrote Mr Kendall sadly. " He was so buoyant,
so brave, so equable, so full of the wine of life
that it seemed impossible for this light to go out
suddenly. He had twice as much stuff in him as
most men : fibre and nerve for all the battle of life.
I had looked forward eagerly to the fulfilment of
this rich promise. Now it must be elsewhere."
The tragedy and yet the glory of it all !
W. H.
HUGH VAUGHAN CHARLTON
(LIEUTEXYMT, 7TH NORTHUMBERLAND FUSILIERS)
FJ out ft. painting by his father, John Chai lion
NATURE WORSHIPPERS
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON
LOVE of country in the Englishman is
always something above and beyond the
'ics and 'isms of the professional patriot
Much more often than not it is articulate only in
works, never in words ; so that such an essential
Englishman as Dr Johnson went so far as to
suggest that patriotism as a political creed was
the last refuge of a scoundrel It is but rarely,
even in poetry, that love of country has expressed
itself as clearly as in the noble lines of a young
soldier poet who, on the eve of going into action,
had a sudden vision of the beauty of the far-off
English countryside, and at last understood that
the fair sights and sounds and perfumed airs of
his mother country belonged only to those who
would fight to keep home inviolate :
O yellow-hammer, once I heard
Thy yaffle when no other bird
Could to my sunk heart comfort bring,
But now I could not have thee sing
So sharp thy note is with the pain
Of England I may not see again !
Tet sing thy song : there answereth
Deep in me a voice which saith :
" The gorse upon the twilit down
The English loam so sunset brown
The bowed pines and the sheep-bells 3 clamour
- The wet, lit lane and the yellow-hammer,
The orchard and the chaffinch song
Only to the Brave belong,
And he shall lose their joy for aye
If their price he cannot pay.
Who shall find them dearer far
Enriche'd by blood after long war"
12?
NATURE WORSHIPPERS
In some form or other this thought has occurred
to all our soldier poets that the bird-song and
wild flowers of their green island, the very sea-
fenced garden of the whole wide world, are the
heritage of valour and in some sense its re-
ward. The " conscientious objector " who became a
combatant on the score that he was ashamed of
hearing the cuckoo and doing nothing, must have
had a glimmering of this great truth in his
momentarily-darkened soul. Foreign critics, how-
ever, fail to understand how the Englishman's pro-
found patriotism finds its best expression in what
are really acts of nature-worship worship of the
various and benign Nature that inhabits this fair
and fortunate island.
And so they go on calling us a nation of
shop-keepers, with whom commercial interest is the
over-ruling motive because, forsooth, our love of
country is so deeply rooted in our hearts that no
lip-service can do full justice to it. They say
What do they say ? Let them say.
Patriotism as nature-worship has its highest
fulfilment in the works and days of John and
Hugh Chad ton, the two sons of a distinguished
artist, Mr John Charlton of Knightsbridge and
Newcastle-on-Tyne. Both of them were keen
and indefatigable students of bird-life ; they studied
the beautiful winged creatures of this island-sanctu-
ary with the intelligence and industry shown by
Henri Fabre in his investigations of insect-life.
Each had a great tenderness for the small, innocent
lives,- which they lived to understand, and they
were quite free, from the mania to go out and
kill something, which is still far too common
among so-called sportsmen. They would sooner
"V '-., '. ;ii* >*:.
uHVX < t lIAKL f lON
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 129
use pencil or paint-brush than a shot-gun, and
as each of them inherited his father's artistic
ability, their many character-sketches of birds con-
stitute a fascinating record of their studies and one
which is a permanent addition to our knowledge
of wild life. It was the living creatures they
were interested in ; not the small dead bodies to
which the elder brother, a taxidermist of genius,
took such infinite pains to restore the vivid
semblance of life.
When war was declared they lost not a moment
in responding to the call to arms. They had the
happiness of -leading men, brave and untiring
Northern folk, to whom they were united by a
mutual love of open-air sport and many another tie
of true neighbourliness. They were devoted to their
men, who returned their devotion and had the
fullest confidence in their leadership. They both
fell in action and are buried in France, where
their graves are especially visited who can doubt
it ? by the small winged pilgrims whose tc tiny
foot-steps print the vernal ground," to quote from
the beautiful stanza which Gray left out of his
Elegy in the second edition.
Hugh Vaughan Charlton was born in London
on April 10, 1884, and was educated at Aldenham
School. Even as a boy he had keen powers
of open-air observation, and as time went on he
proved himself possessed of a fine sense of colour
and a really wonderful gift for drawing and
sketching. His father was at first unwilling that
he should adopt art as his profession, well knowing
1 3 o NATURE WORSHIPPERS
that many are called but few chosen in that perilous
pursuit. Passionately fond of country life as he
was, he decided to make farming his metier, and for
a time he studied practical agriculture at farms near
Castle Carroch (in Cumberland) and on the Solway.
But the artist whose art is a form of nature-
worship could not be suppressed in him most of
his time there was spent in making natural history
observations and painting the birds, animals, and
scenery of Cumberland and the Solway. country.
Eventually his father allowed him to follow his
bent, and he studied painting and drawing at
Newcastle-on-Tyne, Edinburgh and London.
The work he left behind shows rare talent, and
his choice of a profession was fully justified by what
was seen of it at the Royal Academy and various
Provincial Exhibitions, " The Home of the Dipper,"
which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1912,
bearing witness to his keen craftsmanship and pro-
found knowledge of the habits and habitations of
Nature's pensioners in our little island wildernesses.
Had he lived, he must have won a high place
among the painters who find their subjects in the
inexhaustible book of the English countryside
ubi cor, ibi thesaurus is their motto, and their work
is patriotism in terms of line and colour !
Thanks to their father's kindness I am able to
give reproductions of the wonderful drawings in
which these two brothers have interpreted the very
character of the birds they observed with so much
loving kindness. They were devoted to one
another and to their father who, owing to the early
death of their mother, had brought them up from
childhood. Their notes and observations formed
a common fund of nature lore; no distinction of
THE CORMORANT
\ STUDY I- ROM LIFE BY HUGH YAI T GIUN CIURLTON
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 131
meum and tuum was ever drawn in their joint
records ; and some of the elder brother's notes and
writings are included among the younger's. But
here is a charming word-picture of Solway birds
from Hugh's notes :
I go for a walk along the shore. The tide is far out, and
the rays of the sun are glinting on the flat, wet sands through
which the oozy Wampool meanders. Dotted over these are
white objects which sit perfectly still by the edge of the stream
or pools. These are common and black-headed gulls ; they
are having a rest from feeding, and seem to see something more
in the water into which they gaze than their own reflections.
Perhaps they are thinking of the pleasures and trials of the past
breeding season, and are looking at the same sights they saw
there. In this respect they are like the stately heron, which
stands alone far out by the edge of the tide, but he has some
set purpose in view. . . . Not thirty yards in front three dotteras
are running about, but do not wait for me, and are soon
skimming away over the sand.
A curlew is flying over, calling "curlee, curlee." This
seems to be a different call to the call that I heard in early
spring far away in the Cumberland hills ; then the call was
cheerful and full of love, but now it is a melancholy cry, a cry
which startles one, when heard on a dark night, while groping
one's way over the flats coming from evening service at church ;
it makes one think some spirit is calling.
From a depression in the sands a small flock of dunlins rise,
and flying past, settle some 200 yards in front, where they
immediately begin to feed. The oyster catchers and ringed
dotteras breed here, and when I approached, several rose, and
flying round, kept up a continual whistling, but I cannot find
any eggs. I count twenty shelduck sitting in a row on the wet
sand. Two oyster catchers rise up calling loudly and circling
round very fast ; one flies slowly in front of me for about 30
yards with its wings stretched full out, pretending to be
wounded, thus showing they have eggs or young near. As
I walk they become more and more excited. One suddenly
makes a rush at me, and when close to, swoops upwards over
my head. ... As I pass an old shooting punt drawn up on
shore, I think of its work next winter. I seem to see it gliding
slowly up to a huge flock of barnacle geese floating lazily on the
water, with old Tom Jackson lying full length in it with his
huge old gun pointing over its bow, I hear the crash as the fatal
NATURE WORSHIPPERS
weapon is discharged, and see the commotion among the geese as
they rise up, leaving some of their number floundering about in
the water in their death throes.
Many people have seen such sights in the watery
fastnesses of the circuit of the English coast-line
but few indeed know even the names of the birds
that inhabit there, much less their manners and
customs, which vary slightly from place to place.
Is it not better thus to study life between the sun
and sea than to dissect some poor, pathetic body
of death in a laboratory ? Henri Fabre compares
the latter work the science that brings fine salaries
and letters lining up after one's name with the
slicing of carrots by his housekeeper to make a
modest dish which is not always a success. But
the academic scientists are like Drover Dingdong's
sheep, which followed the ram Panurge had
maliciously thrown overboard, and one after
another leapt nimbly into the sea. There is more
true science, surely, in the field notes of Hugh
and John Charlton, naturalists and sportsmen ; for
they studied instinct and intelligence in the living
creature, and it is the problems which cluster about
these matters which must now be solved if we
would get a nearer and clearer understanding of
the high mystery of the unfolding of intelligence
on this planet.
When war thundered out of a sky that had
seemed' cloudless a little while before, both these
brothers the artist and the naturalist at once
sacrificed all they were, all they might have been,
to the nation's need. Hugh was studying in
Edinburgh at the time, and at once joined the
(XT.C. of the Armstrong College at Newcastle-on-
Tyne (where he had once been a pupil), and in
HUGH AND JOHN GHARLTON 133
August 1915 he received a commission in the
yth Northumberland Fusiliers. He was among
friends and neighbours known, and his first and
last thought, in training and at the front, was
for the welfare of his men. He went to France
with a draft of his Regiment in March 1916,
and was almost immediately ordered into the
trenches, where he was in the thick of the fighting
until June 24th, when he was killed by a trench
mortar near Whytschaete in Flanders. His death
was all the more tragical because he had just
received an appointment, in which his artistic
genius would have had full play. Those who
know how France has used some of her artist
officers can guess the nature of the new work
which had chosen him. How shockingly we have
squandered the special gifts of our young officers
in this War! Yet Hugh Charlton was well
content to die among the home folk who had
known him so long and saw in him a kind of
elder brother.
His letters from the Front are pithy yet pictur-
esque records of incessant "strafing 35 at a critical
point of the British line. It is easy to read between
the lines of a soldierly narrative, which is a fusillade
of short sentences, what he was to his " grand lads "
and what they were to him. He hears that a
sentry, an elderly man, who had been knocked
down by a sandbag during a terrific bombardment
(we were still out-gunned) had never left his post,
and he hastens to headquarters to report the man's
devotion in the hope he would be recommended
for the D.G.M. He is constantly caring for the
wounded under fire and bringing them into safety.
Shrapnel hits his " tin hat," and makes it ring like
i 3 4 NATURE WORSHIPPERS
a bell " All the men rush to me," he writes,
" when a strafe is on, and you would have been
amused to see old Hugh with one on each arm,
both mad one, quite, with shell shock. Yester-
day I had a devil of a job to get them away, they
clung to me the more I joke with the men when
they are shelling, it keeps them up. Come on,
Newcastle! Play up!" The figure of a true
soldier, full of old, cold courage and cheery all
the time, emerges clearly from his brief, breathless,
workaday letters. These letters are literature cleared
for action; I wish I had space to quote them in
full. And, though soldiering is his one preoccupa-
tion, the artist and the naturalist and the critic (so
severe on his own work) refuse to be suppressed.
He has an eye for every living thing
Lean-visaged beast in dingy coat
Or bird no bigger than a mote
which comes into or abo~ut the trenches. He hears
a nightingale (at 3.45 A.M.) and sees him sitting on
a fence near a communication trench. The calling
of cuckoos is noted ; so also pheasants near at hand,
and " rats like dogs," and the first swallows flying,
and a single pied wagtail close to his dug-out,
feeding in a shell hole. He sees the prettiest little
chestnut, in an old cart, he has ever seen, exactly
like one his father had painted. And he observes
that Landseer's picture of Wellington at Waterloo
is very real in its treatment of the landscape; He is
all ears and eyes and will-power, ready at a moment's
call Having read his letters, one hardly needs to
learn from his Colonel's letters (which describes his
burial on a beautiful summer evening in a very
pretty French landscape) that all, both officers and
JOHN MAC FAR! AN' CH \RlTOV
(CAPTAIN, 2IST NORTHUMBERLAND FUSILIERS, 2ND
FYNESIDI: scoxnsH
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 135
men, had a very great regard for him and that he
was marked for rapid promotion. His grave is
guarded by a permanent cross set up by his battalion.
So lived gallantly and died gloriously a devout
lover of our Lady of Nature, a great painter in the
making, and a complete Englishman of the North
Country breed -which hates all shams and " easy
options " and is unsurpassed for sticking it out in a
forlorn hope.
II
John Macfarlan Charlton was educated at
Uppingham, where he was in the Cadet Corps, and
well liked by both masters and boys. He was a
born naturalist, with a mastery of descriptive
writing which adds greatly to the fascination of his
field notes. If he had been spared to continue his
studies, he must have made a great name as an
ornithologist. He fell in action at La Boisselle on
July i, 1916, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of
his birthday, so that he did not live long enough to
make his mark as a leading authority on the subject
to which he was so passionately devoted. But he
had already shown himself an adept in open-air
observation. As quite a small boy he won a special
prize for an illustrated essay on The Birds of the
Fame Islands sent in for the John Hancock prize
of the Natural History Society of Northumberland.
In 1910 he won a special bronze medal given by
the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
(Public Schools Competition). In 1912 he wrote
The Birds of South-east Northumberland, which
first appeared in the Zoologist, and was afterwards
published as a pamphlet, with map and illustrations.
In 1913 his Notes on Norwegian Birds appeared
136 NATURE WORSHIPPERS
in Countryside, and was republished as a separate
paper. He also supplied British Birds with a
number of interesting notes (beginning with Vol.
IV.), and wrote numerous short articles for other
journals. He was a most skilful and artistic taxi-
dermist, his methods of securing a natural and life-
like posture being " equal even to those of John
Hancock" than which no higher compliment could
be paid. He worked in words as his brother worked
in paint, and his records of bird-life against the
spacious background of land or sea and sky are
literary masterpieces of a very rare order.
Even as a small boy he would recline for hours
and watch a bird and its movements, with glasses if
necessary, and make notes and sketches of every-
thing it did. From his tenth year onwards he would
study the structure, anatomy, and plumage of birds,
making drawings of the various parts. The follow-
ing little story shows how his ruling passion killed
the sense of discomfort even in boyhood. He was
staying with a boy friend in a house on the
Northumberland moors, and happening to hear a
bird call in the cold, wet grey dawn, he rushed but
in his night-shirt to watch. Two hours later he
returned, drenched and shivering, after lying out
in the dewy heather all the time. ' Mr Duncan, the
well-known taxidermist of Newcastle-on-Tyne,
taught him how to skin and stuff and set up birds,
and he was thus able to preserve many of the
innumerable specimens he collected.
His tenderness for all quaint winged lives was
part of his very being. In one of his notes he tells
us how he accidentally destroyed a dipper's nest
with the eggs nearly hatched out, and he adds :
" What a lovely day ! But I cannot enjoy it. I
AV 1MPRKSSIOX OF JOHN M-U'FARLA.\ t-FIARLTOV BY HIS IIROTHER
HUGH V XtTliHAV CHVRITON
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 137
feel as though I had committed a crime against my
birds." Many of his notes were made in England
and Scotland but the majority are records of what
he saw and heard, yes, and felt, at Hepplewoodside
in Northumberland, at Sandisdyke in Cumberland,
and at Cullercoats in Northumberland, where he
lived with his family for many years, and every-
body knew him. Any uncommon bird found by
the boys and fishermen was usually brought to him.
The workers, especially the miners, in the parts of
Northumberland where he lived knew him well, and
would do anything for him, and he was very much
attached to them all. Many of these kindly neigh-
bours were afterwards in his company of the Tyne-
side Scottish Regiment ; so that, when he went to
the front, he lived and died among his nearest and
dearest friends. In one of his last letters from the
firing-line he wrote to his father: "Look after
everyone for my sake." He knew all the traditions
and history and folklore of the countryside in which
he lived, and this knowledge was another bond of
sympathy between himself and the good neighbours
who took, so much interest in his work and under-
stood it so well He was never so happy as when
wandering off with his dogs, " Tiny " and " Peter,"
on a natural history expedition. He would set out
in all weathers, even when the falls were dangerous
with snow and ice* The day before his family left
Hepplewoodside in 1905 he went off to observe the
birds and wild goats in the hills, and his father and
others set out in search of him, the uplands being very
slippery and dangerous in places. The search parties
were recalled by the blowing of a coach horn from
the house below ; his father knew that he was the
only one there who could play it. His daring and
138 NATURE WORSHIPPERS
endurance, his love of country life and country sport,
his neighbourliness and cheery manner and open looks
and sturdy uprightness, endeared him to the hardy,
honest race to which the lines of Edwin Waugh,
though written to a fiddle-tune in the Lancashire
Pennines far to the south, apply very well :
They've wick and warm at work and play
Whatever may befall ;
The pritnest breed o' English lads,
Good luck attend ? em all !
Such reciprocal respect and affection were destined
to be a part of the universal camaraderie between
officers and men which has made the British Army
a thing apart in history and utterly unconquerable.
This young naturalist describes not only the birds
and beasts he sees, but also the scenery of their
environment, sky and land and sea, and all the
grace of line and glory of colour. Here are a few
brief excerpts from the series of note-books which he
began in his early boyhood :
[1904, at Hepplewoodside, on his way to a grouse drive with
his father.] There is a sharp breeze blowing, and the heather
gets blown up and down, and looking down the hillside you
would almost think you were on the sea, for the heather, as
each gust of wind comes, looks just like water running along
the hillside.
A willow wren is calling in the woods below, lots of
plovers are flying about in the fields low down. A wren is
calling, and at almost every step up gets a meadow pipit. Large
numbers of skylarks are flying about, and upon the hillside a
carrion crow is calling. Two ravens are Hying over the moor,
high up ; they fly almost in a line with each other, when one
turns the other does the same; they keep about the same distance
apart all the time. Suddenly I hear a buzzing sound and up
come the grouse, up they go over the butts, bang, bang, bang,
then some more. , . .
Hearing a rabbit squealing, I hastened up and saw a stoat
killing one. I ran to it, but was too late, the stoat jumped off
and popped into a drain, the rabbit was dead. Looking round
s, *
~ z;
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 139
I saw a curious thing. Several rabbits were squatting around
greatly frightened. Just as I looked up they dashed off to their
holes.
[1904, December.] From a bush near at hand comes the call
of a bullfinch, and in a moment or two out hops a female not
five yards from me, and bending down touches the water with
her bill and away . . . presently there is a buzzing sound, and
a flock of hundreds of greenfinches fly overhead. They swerve
and settle in a big fir tree, where they all sit, facing the wind,
and calling noisily, covering all the topmost branches. They
come every evening to roost at the same time, 3.45 P.M. 5
gradually they drop down in small parties of ten or eleven to
roost in the bushes, and after much squabbling and fluttering all
is quiet, and nobody would think that so many small bodies were
slumbering within a few feet of them.
[1905, January.] When I wake up and look out of my window,
I see a glorious sky, every cloud is a beautiful orange pink, and
the sky a pure turquoise blue. Although this is very beautiful,
yet it is " the shepherd's warning" soon the clouds change to
a yellowish pink and then to a dark purplish blue-grey, then all
this clears away, and grey and white clouds are seen on a blue
background.
But look ! What is that glorious gleam of gold through the
trees to the east ? It is the sun ! Hail ! O glorious sun, rise
in all thy splendour !
I set out for a long walk up the Kenshaw Burn with my two
terriers, Tiny and Peter. The air is - crisp and cold, with a
gentle breeze blowing, and a hoody crow is sailing high above
us. Bullfinches rise from the burn where they have been
bathing and drinking, and sit preening themselves on the birch
trees. Flocks of tits are feeding on the seeds of the birch trees,
and hanging in all sorts of attitudes. The kok-kok-kok ojf
a grouse sounds as he blusters off from the water, and a hen
pheasant rises, a lesser redpole flies from the ground and watches
. me, a creeper is climbing up a tree calling *' cheep, cheep,"
and the wrens are singing merrily. We found a squirrel's
store-house in a hole in a tree full of acorns. A moor hen rises
from the water looking under the root I see a little red beak
showing just above the surface of the water. Three snipe
fly from a small marsh, and a heron rose and flew slowly off.
A kestrel is hovering above a hill in the distance, changing his
position every now and again, and a herring gull is sailing over
the Coquet as we return. The greenfinches are collecting to
roost in the garden when out flashes a Merlin hawk from the
beech tree, throwing the finches into confusion; however, he
140 NATURE WORSHIPPERS
sees me just as he is about to seize a victim, wheels about, and
flies away.
[1906, at Sandisdyke.] Saw a plover chasing a crow and
black-back gull away, and in a ploughed field a male plover
swooping at a cock pheasant and hitting his tail, first he swooped
from one side and then from the other, and the pheasant had to
turn round and face him every time till he (the pheasant) got
tired and ran off slowly.
[1906, August : Sandisdyke.] A whole brood of pied wagtails
have come to-day to feed on the lawn, or to be fed, as the young
ones cannot, or will not, feed themselves. The father and
mother feed the five hungry full-grown birds. They take them
each, one at a time, out on the lawn; the mother takes one
while the father takes another ; when each has had enough they
are sent back to the roof where the other youngsters are sitting
and exchanged for others. When being fed the young bird
follows the old bird about, cheeping ; when the old bird has got
enough food (insects) in its beak, it runs to the young one and
drops them into its mouth, generally in two mouthfuls.
[1907, May : same place.] To-day I saw a very funny bit of
bird life. A female thrush was sitting on the lawn, watching
for any worms which might be tempted out by the wet weather.
Presently another thrush, a male, flew out from the laurels and
settled beside her. She took no notice of him, but he took a
great deal of her, and seemed to be gazing admiringly at her.
Then he began to sing. He puffed out his feathers and poured
out his heart to her. She replied by making a half-playful rush
at him, but he returned again, and walked round and round
singing to her. This was not to go on for long ; for, with a
rush, a brown form dashed from the laurels and made straight
for the showy songster. There was a scuffle, a few screeches,
and away went the admirer, closely followed by the rightful
owner of the little hen. Soon the victor returned, and, mounting
the old beech tree, he sang the song of victory. All this time
the little hen had been hopping about unconcernedly, perhaps
she was rather ashamed of herself.
[1910, Kinghorn.] I have seen the sun set behind a long
ridge of the Cotswolds on a cold evening in early November. I
stood at the bottom of a valley and looked across. The sky is
clear but for the haze of a frost over the horizon, much rain had
fallen the day before, and the small stream in the valley in front
was flooded. The water reflected the light of the sky. Woods
covered the ridge before the sun, and they stood out black and
sharply defined against the bright colour of the sky behind ;
bright orange red lit up a single cloud over the horizon. The
2 5
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 141
air was crisp and chilly and silent, except for the calls of many
birds. The short note of the bullfinch came from a hedge close
by, and a wagtail flew chirping over. Three tiny specks of
clouds floated above the horizon turned to golden atoms by the
sun. A railway ran before, and suddenly all the peace and quiet
was broken by a train rushing by. I heard it coming. Gradu-
ally the sound increased nearer and nearer, and then it was on
me and gone. In the ploughed fields in front, heaps of bean-
stalks are burning, and the smoke rising up in thin columns.
From the rookery in the village comes the noisy clamour of the
rooks returning to roost. A thresher is buzzing from a home-
stead close by, and the throbs seem like the pulse of some great
creature. The pollard willow trunks are reflected clearly in the
placid waters of the stream, aud all is at rest but man. On the
air comes the rollicking song of a labourer returning home, and
I awoke from my musing.
These are some of the best living pictures of the
infinitely various countryside I have ever seen, and
they show a power of wide and yet minute observa-
tion, combined with a gift of simple and direct style,
which would have given the writer fame equal to
that of Richard Jefferies and better earned, for the
latter was sometimes hopelessly astray in his facts.
When war broke out, he at once gave up the
work that was so much a part of his very being.
Towards the end of 1914 he received a commission
in the Northumberland Fusiliers, and was soon pro-
moted to captain in the 2ist N.F. (and Tyneside
Scottish). He went to the Front early in 1916. His
letters from France show that his first and last
thought was the welfare of his men, whose courage
and cheerfulness are constantly being described in
the most touching terms. "I simply love them,"
he writes, " and I think they care for me." He is
happy to think he knows them all individually,
though this intimacy makes the frequent casualties
heart-rending beyond words each fallen comrade
seems a part of himself. He notes their quaint
NATURE WORSHIPPERS
sayings at every turn of the long day's work.
" Breakfast, smoke begins to rise, not a shot is fired,
and the smell of bacon frying wafts from the Hun
trenches. We hear the Huns laughing and joking;
then a voice is heard. ' How are you this morn-
ing, Jock ? ' c All reet, how's yorsell ? ' * Well.
Don't you wish you was back on the Quayside,
Jock? 3 'Yes! Put up your head, then!'
An hour later the crack of Hun rifles is heard again.
A shell explodes thirty yards off and hits a man,
while a barber is shaving somebody near where the
captain is standing. 4 Gome along,' he said, c we
shift into the next bay.' They did so, and I heard
the fellow shaving say to the other when he jumped
at the next shell : * Keep your head still, or
I'll save the next un the trouble of knocking ye
oot.'" He has a great respect for the enemy's
intelligence. " The Hun is no fool, a factor little
considered by our people, and one they'd be wise to
learn. I learnt a lot in the last fourteen days, and
I have great admiration for his brains and discipline."
He is quite happy to be where he is ; the hateful,
the unthinkable lot is that of those who ought to be
fighting and are safe at home. Now and again his
letters, like his brother's, note the presence of certain
birds or the appearance of a landscape. He does not
scoff at " brass hats " ; he remarks in one letter how
well and how hard the staff officers work. But he
says little or nothing about his own doings, and it
was from brother officers that his father learnt the
gallant work in repelling an attack on his trench a
few weeks before his death (he was shot through
the head) on July ist (a week after his brother had
fallen), which caused him to be recommended for
the Military Gross.
HUGH AND JOHN CHARLTON 143
He was killed in the great attack at La Boisselle
while leading his company against the third line of
German trenches, having already assisted in taking
the first and second. He had been doing sentry
duty that morning, so that all his men might have a
short much-needed rest. He was in command of
the first wave, which was composed of one platoon
from each company. The Tyneside Scottish went
on till they penetrated the fourth line ; their losses
were very heavy. The manner of his death is best
told in a letter written to his father by Blacklidge,
his orderly :
" You mention your son's death ; it gives me much pain
when I have got to talk about it ; it really was the heaviest blow
I have had all my life, one that I shall never forget. Your
son, sir, my late master, was more like a father to me than a
master, and I may tell you I thought there was not another man
in this world like him. At least I have never come across one.
I was with your son when he died, and if I may never see any-
thing again, I saw one of the bravest men that ever fras. He
died a hero's death, Your son dropped with his head on my
knees* I spoke to him three times, I got no answer, and then
he just looked up at me, and put his hand down my face, and
said, * Is that you, Joe ? J which was the name he called me by,
'for God's sake, sonny, push on,' and died at that. I shall
avenge his death till the last."
He was shot through the brain, and it is mar-
vellous that he ever spoke again. But a miracle
was wrought by the devotion to his men and the
sense of duty which were his ruling ideals*
Many other letters were written by members of
his company in praise of this cool and courageous
officer who was a father to his men, and will never
be forgotten in Northumberland.
PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
L ALAN SEEGER
Jeune legionnaire enthousiaste et energique, aimant passionnement
la France. Engage volontaire au debut des hostilites, a fait preuve au
cours de la campagne d'un entrain et d'un courage admirables
Glorieusement tombe la 4 JuiJlet 1916.
Citation a fordre dujour de la Division Ju Maroc 9 25 Decembre 1916.
ALAN SEEGER was one of the many
young Americans who saw at once that
their country must sooner or later enter
the. War to fight for the world's and its own
freedom>-.or else for ever lose its place in the van-
guard of civilization. These were the pioneers of
the new spirituality which has passed, in wave
after wave of other-worldly illumination, through
the whole height and breadth of the United States.
JSome.of.them enlistedjn the Canadian Expeditionary
Force ji_ others in the Foreign Legion of .France;
and *a few, forgetting the ancient racine de la
rancunt which so long separated the two great
English-speaking Powers, have fought and fallen
with the " Old Army " of Great Britain in the
early days of a victorious forlorn hope. In Alan
Seeger's case a personal devotion to France was the
immediate motive which prompted him to enlist as
.soon as the mobilization began. In a letter from the
Aisne trenches he explains the urgency of this
motive :
1 have talked with so many of the young volunteers here.
Their case is little known, even by the French, yet altogether
arresting and appealing. They are foreigners on whom the
outbreak of war laid no formal compulsion. But they had stood
on the Butte in springtime perhaps, as Julian and Louise stood,
and looked out over the myriad twinkling lights of the beautiful
city* Paris mystic, maternal, personified, to whom they owed
144
ALAN SEEGER
(FOREIGN LEHION OK I R\M h)
ALAN SEEGER 145
the happiest moments of their lives Paris was in peril. Were
they not under a moral obligation, no less binding than that by
which their comrades were bound legally, to put their breast
between her and destruction ? Without renouncing their
nationality, they had yet chosen to make their homes here
beyond any other city in the world. Did not the benefits and
blessings they had received point them a duty that heart and
conscience could not deny ?
The old haunts were deserted, Paul and Auguste,
and all the other good companions in work and
play, were gone. Some day they would return
with the light of victory about their heads not all,
but some. And how, in that day of garnered
glory, could a shirker face the inevitable smiling
question: "And where have you been all the
time, and what have you been doing ? " Even
if not so intended, the very question would be a
reproach. Moreover, those who joined the Foreign
Legion were conscious that one of the great turning-
points in history had been reached, that War had
once more become the natural order of things, that
every living soul must in the end take part in the
long-premeditated struggle to a decision between
men and Germans. So Alan Seeger goes on to
say in his famous letter:
Face to face with a situation like that a man becomes reconciled,
justifies easily the part he is playing, and comes to understand,
in a universe where logic counts for so little and sentiment and
the impulse of the heart for so much, the inevitableness and
naturalness of war. Suddenly the world is up in arms. All
mankind takes sides. The same faith that made him surrender
himself to the impulses of normal living and of love, forces him
now to make himself the instrument through which a greater
force works out of its inscrutable ends through the impulses of
terror and repulsion. And with no less a sense of moving in
harmony with a universe where masses are in continual conflict
-*nd new combinations are engendered out of eternal collisions,
^ shoulders arms and marches forth with haste.
146 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
Poets are prophets of to-day, and this sudden
vision of the meaning of the ordeal of battle, which
had come upon a world at leisure and luxurious,
would have placed Alan Seeger in the hierarchy of
poets and prophets, even if he had never written
another line. But, as it happened, he was a writer
of power and distinction, both in verse and prose,
and so will be remembered as an interpreter of the
new age of decision, a confessor of its fresh spiritu-
ality, with Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell
and Charles Sorley and the rest of the Sidneian
fellowship of our soldier poets. Their poems are
star-shells that light up the firmament of a century,
and none, not even the great artists that shall see
the world's passion in retrospect, and write of the
vanished storm "in long carved line and painted
parable," can ever displace them in the re-
membrance of mankind. 'The Hosts^ by Alan
Seeger, is in its way as memorable a vindication
of the necessity of war as Julian Grenf ell's Into
Battle. In these fine lines War is presented as
an august process of Nature, a cosmical struggle
which is to decide the issue between men and
Germans :
These are the men that are moved no more
By the will to traffic and grasp and store
And ring with pleasure and wealth and love
The circles that self is the center of ;
But they are moved by the powers that force
The sea forever to ebb and rise,
That hold Arcturus in his course,
And marshal at noon in tropic skies
The clouds that tower on some snow-capped chain
And drift out over the peopled plain.
They are big with the beauty of cosmic things.
Mark how their columns surge ! They seem
To follow the goddess with outspread wings
That points toward Glory, the soldier's dream.
ALAN SEEGER 147
With bayonets bare and flags unfurled,
They scale the summits of the world
And fade on the farthest golden height
In fair horizons full of light.
He does not sentimentalize over his shattered corse,
and the terror and beauty of his self-sacrifice, but
manfully as Charles Sorley did accepts the iron
necessity as part of the laws of Nature (which men
call duty) whereby the ancient heavens are fresh
and strong :
Friend or foe, it shall matter nought ;
This only matters, in fine : we fought.
For we were young and in love or strife
Sought exultation and craved excess :
To sound the wildest debauch in life
"We staked our youth and its loveliness.
Let idlers argue the right and wrong
And weigh what merit our causes had.
Putting our faith in being strong
Above the level of good and bad
For us, we battled and burned and killed
Because evolving Nature willed,
And it was our pride and boast to be
The instruments of Destiny.
There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled the earth and air
Ajid set the stars in the infinite
And made night gorgeous and morning fair,
And all that had sense to reason knew
That bloody drama must be gone through.
Alan Seeger was born in New York on 22nd
June 1888; his father and mother belonged to the old
New England families which still hold the spiritual
leadership of the United States. His childhood
was spent in Staten Island (the glass ball in the bottle
neck of the most wonderful harbour in the world),
whence he could see all day long the ships of all
nations passing through the Narrows, the gateway
of half this planet In the foreground Robbins
148 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
Reef Lighthouse, in the middle distance the majestical
Liberty, and in the background the vast curves
of Brooklyn Bridge and the colossal sky-piercing
buildings of new New York nowhere in the
whole wide world is the everlasting business of
seafaring w lawful occasions " shown in so romantic
and spacious a setting ! Alan, his brother and his
sister, knew the names of all the liners and warships
passing out of the Atlantic "lane" in a never-
ending procession ; the walls of their nursery were
covered with rude yet faithful drawings of the
shipping they watched in such vast variety. Had
he lived, to return home with the embattled youth
of his own land, he would have made pictures of
the stirring, tumultuous sea-scapes, of Staten Island.
Tou/ottrs nous revenons a nos anciens amours ;
especially if we be poetic sons of modern America,
in whom the inexhaustible spirit of Walt Whitman
still goes marching on.
When he was ten years old his family returned
to New York, where he attended the Horace Mann
School The clangorous life of the pent city's life,
which ever grows skyward, entered into his soul ;
his greatest joy was to follow the rushing fire-
engines which are seen every day in her street-
canons. In 1900 came a new migration which
finally determined the bent of his poetic gift
henceforward, like the sunflower, his heart sought
the sun of living and followed it from rising to
setting and blossomed in sub-tropic luxuriance.
His family went to live in Mexico City, where
the silver far-listening peaks of Popocatepetl and
Ixtaccihuatl look down on its vast amphitheatre
and the gentle, valiant shade of Montezuma is still
visible to the eyes of a poetic soul and by its side
ALAN SEEGER 149
the armoured ghost of Cortez, whose cold and
calculated cruelty was a prototype of Teutonic
frightfulness. The two years spent in the wonder-
city, broken by visits in the chilly winter season
to Cuernavaca in the tterra templada below, were
unforgettable years; they opened in Alan's young
heart a well-spring of delight from within that
flooded all his after-days with a romantic joyousness
in which the Puritan in him is overwhelmed. It
was, none the less, a time of keen and incessant
study. The children had a tutor whom they loved
and respected, and their taste for good literature,
especially poetry, ripened speedily under his kindly
and cultured influence. "One of our keenest
pleasures," wrote a member of the family, "was
to go in a body to the old book-shops, and on
Sunday morning to the 'Thieves' market, to
rummage for treasures, and many were the Elzevirs^
and worm-eaten, vellum-bound volumes from the
old convent libraries that fell into our hands." A
home magazine was brought out at irregular
intervals; it was called The Prophet^ and Alan,
who was the sporting editor, soon made it the
vehicle of his first essays in poetry and criticism.
It is a pity that the copies of this curious periodical
were all lost in the wreck of the Merida.
Mexico gave Alan Seeger's literary gift its
definite orientation.. Before he wpt to Paris, to
make literature his vocation, he lived in many
other environments of natural beauty. He was
sent to school at Tarrytown at the age of fourteen
to a college with a spacious domain of meadow
and woodland set upon a noble bill above the
Hudson River, which links together with its
gleaming flood many episodes of scenery that
150 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
suggest amplified versions of the famous view of
the Thames from Richmond Hill. He spent one
of his vacations in the green, glorious ambuscades
of the New Hampshire hills, and another in that
Earthly Paradise called Southern California, where
the habit of worry slips off of its own accord, and
you can live between sun and sea in a sort of
spiritual altogether. Now and again he returned
to Mexico for a brief visit; always to find the
journey an entrancing experience, touched with
a keen emotion of home-coming. There is no
more delightful tour in the Western Hemisphere,
whether ydu travel by land or by sea, for the first
part of the journey, from the clangorous, working-
cities of North and the romance of days gone
by begins to repossess the traveller's soul as he
fares further: "First to pass under the pink walls
of Morro Castle into the wide lagoon of Havana ;
then to cross the Spanish Main to Vera Cruz;
then after skirting the giant escarpment of Orizaba,
to crawl zigzagging up the almost precipitous ascent
that divides the tlerra templada from the tierra
fria ; and then to speed through the endless agave-
fields of the upland haciendas to Mexico City and
home," The glowing colours of his Mexican
experiences, unfading in fond retrospect, were
always ready on the mind's palette in the years
of exile that followed. In . 1906 he entered
Harvard the Oxford of the Western world and
served a joyous apprenticeship not only to Litera-
ture, but also to the art of living in an atmosphere
of eager youth, where discussions de omni scibili
never cease for a moment. He was one. of the
editors of the Harvard Monthly^ and he made
many deft translations from Dante and Ariosto
ALAN SEEGER 151
all of them touched with that Italianate fire, so
seldom achieved by Northern scholars, the secret
of which he had acquired in his lofty tropical home.
Mexico was to him all that the Italian enlighten-
ment, warmth as well as light, was to the old
Elizabethan poets. Mexico had set his imagina-
tion on fire and intensified his dreaming to
vision.
Two years of unhappy hesitation at New York
shall be passed over. Finally, his parents allowed
him to settle in Paris, where he lived as a disciple
of Henri Murger in cleanly wantonness, finding
innumerable friends among the artists and students
of the Latin Quarter and yet never losing touch
with the more secret and sedate society which is the
true, lasting-ripe realization of French ideals. There
he toiled joyously to find himself, never allowing his
ambition to be blunted by self-indulgence; there he
wrote his poems of Mexico and of Paris, painting
either set of impressions with the same glowing
palette. It is in these poems that the true story of
his various lives is to be read you hold his heart in
your hand as you read them.
Sometimes, though seldom, he takes a story from
the dreadful history of the Mexican conquest, and
illuminates it. As in The Torture of Cuauhte-
mac, a blank-verse rendering of the picture familiar
to all visitors to Mexico City. The Aztec lords sit
stripped of their feathered robes, in the deep dungeon
on short stone settles sloping to the head, and under
their projecting feet are heaped the red coals. The
bearded Spaniards, in darkly gleaming armour, fan
the braziers and put the question : " Where is the
gold hidden ? " to the silent sufferers. But one of
them, his chained feet lifted up and with quivering:
152 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
lips, turns a look of wild appeal on the King. But
the tortured King has no mercy for the other's
young anguish :
He who had seen his hopes made desolate,
His realm despoiled, his early crown deprived him,
And watched while Pestilence and Famine piled
His stricken people in their reeking doors,
Whence glassy eyes looked out and lean brown arms
Stretched up to greet him in one last farewell
As back and forth he paced along the streets
With words of hopeless comfort what was this
That one should weaken now ? He weakened not.
Whate'er was in his heart, he neither dealt
In pity nor in scorn, but, turning round,
Met that racked visage with his own unmoved,
Bent on the sufferer his mild calm eyes,
And while the pangs smote sharper, in a voice,
As who would speak not all in gentleness
Nor all disdain, said : " Yes ! And am / then
Upon a bed of roses ? "
But it is mostly the un-storied joyousness of open-air
life in Mexico that draws the soul out of him, so
that it falls in happy tears of an encardined ecstasy.
As in An Ode to Antares :
Star of the South that now through orient mist
At nightfall off Tampico or Belize
Greetest the sailor rising from those seas
Where first in me, a fond romanticist,
The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles
Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles
Thou lamp of the swart lover to his tryst,
O'er planted acres at the jungle's rim
Reeking with orange-flour and tuberose,
Dear to his eyes thy ruddy splendor glows
Among the palms where beauty waits for him ;
Bliss too thou bringest to our greening North,
Red scintillant through cherry-blossom rifts,
Herald of summer-heat, and all the gifts
And all the joys a summer can bring forth
ALAN SEEGER 153
Be thou my star, for I have made my aim
To follow loveliness till autumn-strewn
Sunder the sinews of this flower-like frame
As rose-leaves sunder when the bud is blown.
Like Rupert Brooke, he seeks beauty first and finds
truth by the way; and if he lacks the English
poet's swift sympathy with the intent of the old
Elizabethan master-pieces and power of reproducing
the various accents of their young age, there is per-
haps a deeper colour and a more thrilling music in
his slower and more statuesque verse. In his "Lines
written in a Volume of the Comtesse de Noailles,"
the fascination of Mexico in remembrance brings
him heart to heart with the passionate poetess in
whom, as in him, Occident and Orient are so
wondrously commingled :
Be my companion tinder cool arcades
That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square
Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades
White belfries burn in the blue tropic air.
Lie near me in dim forests where the croon
Of wood-doves sounds and moss-banked water flows,
Or musing late till the midsummer moon
Breaks through some ruined abbey's empty rose.
Sweetest of those to-day whose pious hands
Tend the sequestered altar of Romance,
Where fewer offerings burn, and fewer kneel,
Pour there your passionate beauty on my heart,
And, gladdening such solitudes, impart
How sweet the fellowship of those who feel !
"Le Grand Poete," as the Vicomte Melchior de
Vogu6 called her in an enduring epigram of criticism,
is a sister-in-art indeed of this young American who
saw Paris in the tumultuous after-glow of all the
passionate lovers that have lived and died in her
bright pleasances. London and New York become
mere shadows of a magnitude, long or lofty clouds
154 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
on the soul's horizon, as he enters into the intimacies
of life in the world's one mistress city, where pos-
session is the vanishing-point in every vista :
First, London, for its myriads ; for its height,
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite ;
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . .
Oh, go to Paris. ... In the midday gloom
Of some old quarter take a little room
That looks off over Paris and its towers
From Saint Gervais round to the Emperor's Tomb,
So high that you can hear a mating dove
Croon down the chimney from the roof above,
See Notre Dame and know how sweet it is
To wake between Our Lady and our love.
And have a little balcony to bring
Fair plants to fill with verdure and blossoming,
That sparrows seek, to feed from pretty hands,
And swallows circle over in the Spring.
There of an eveniag-yeu "shall sit at ease-
In the sweet month of flowering chestnut-trees,
There with your little darling in your arms,
Your pretty dark-eyed Manon or Louise,
And looking out over the domes and towers
That chime the fleeting quarters and the hours,
While the bright clouds banked eastward back of them
Blush in the sunset, pink as hawthorn flowers,
You cannot fail to think, as I have done,
Some of life's ends attained, so you be one
Who measures life's attainment by the hours
That Joy has rescued from oblivion.
Yet even more alluring, he finds, is the comrade-
ship of those who seek eternal expressions of
Beauty so fast fading in the flesh, that can become
Truth only in the stubborn, lifeless, mediums of
the written word, of paint and marble :
ALAN SEEGER 155
" Comment qz va ! " " Mon vieux I" " Mon cher ! "
Friends greet and banter as they pass.
'Tis sweet to see among the mass comrades and lovers every-
where,
A law that's sane, a Love that's free, and men of every birth
and blood
Allied in one great brotherhood of Art and Joy and Poverty. . , .
Yet it is always in a tropical effulgence that he
sees Paris to him a city of tense romance, the star
of which is that very star of the South, the
passion-pale and still unrequited Antares.
By silvery waters in the plains afar
Glimmers the inland city like a star,
With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze,
And burnished domes half seen through luminous haze.
And so, rich in the gold of youth that buys all
the joyousness of the City of Light, he lived and
loved and laboured truly to achieve the quest of
Beauty, to catch and hold her for ever in the
art that is nearest of all to the art of living.
And his career, so far and no further, aptly
illustrates Coningsby Dawson's saying in a conversa-
tion with the chronicler: " America is Britain
Gallicized." Long before the storm broke in violet
thunder and a crimson deluge over the whole wide
world, he imagined the time would come:
. , . when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them
Laid in some desert place alone, or where the tides
Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them
Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides.
Little did he guess his poetry was then prophecy.
Another and very different Alan Seeger appears in
the war letters and war poems he left as his soldier's
will to a nation that seemed to hesitate at the place
where the road of progress and prosperity divides
156 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
to the right, the path of honour, to the left, the
path of dishonour ending suddenly in an unseen
abyss but was in truth, as we now know, girding
up its mighty loins for a deadlier struggle for
righteousness than the Civil War. So great a
democracy could but move slowly but, as the sequel
shall show, the force thereof is oceanic and irresist-
ible as Atlantic rollers, once it is set in motion by
a tidal sense of duty. Alan Seeger could not see
this dread certainty when in "A Message to
America" he wielded a many-knotted whip of
satire, telling his brooding compatriots :
You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard,
But your honour ends with your own back yard.
He enlisted in the Foreign Legion and went
through his training at Rouen and Toulouse, learn-
ing in six weeks what the ordinary recruit, in times
of peace, acquires in two years. The intensive
culture of soldiers was a problem solved almost at
once by the keen, practical intelligence of French-
men. In October 1914 he was already marching
up to the Front through the once immense battle-
field, the scene of the wonderful victory of the
Marne, the full significance of which was not yet
'generally realized. But the hopes which he and
his fellow-legionaries cherished of a swift and
decisive war of manoeuvre were destined to dis-
appointment Letters published in the New York
Sun give vivid impressions of the monotonous hard-
ships of trench fighting. For the artillery it was
"doubtless very interesting," but the men had a
poor time of it on their one sou a day :
The winter morning dawns with grey skies and the hoar
frost on the fields. His feet are numb, his canteen frozen, but
he is not allowed to make a fire. The winter night falls, with
ALAN SEEGER 157
its prospect of sentry-duty, and the continual apprehension of
the hurried call to arms ; he is not even permitted to light a
candle, but must fold himself in his blanket and lie down
cramped in the dirty straw to sleep as best he may. How
different from the popular notion of the evening campfire, the
songs and good cheer.
Everybody's chief thought, as the legionaries
sat under the orchestral music of the guns (always
dominated by the sharp metallic twang of the 75),
was how to supplement the regular ration with
small, necessary luxuries, especially chocolate. A
corporal told him that every man in the company
would gladly exchange his rifle for a pot of jam.
Sentry-duty, with its moments of exaltation at
moon-rise or under a sky full of stars, was a
relief to what another New Elizabethan calls the
" organized boredom " of modern warfare :
The sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone under
the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect
reveals itself to him. ... He thrills with the sense of filling
an appointed, necessary place in the conflict of hosts, and,
facing the enemy's crest, above which the Great Bear wheels
upward to the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm
that he has never before known, a kind of companionship with
the stars.
Compare with this passage the lines of Into
Battle^ in which Julian Grenfell says of the
soldier :
All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog Star and the Sisters Seven
Orion's Belt and sworded hip.
In the spring and summer following, the Legion
was moved about a good deal from sector to sector
(as the Higher Command felt for an opportunity
of a profitable push) and his letters note the vary-
158 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
ing beauties of French scenery. He has long
since made his peace with Death, for he writes
to his mother: "Death is nothing terrible after
all It may mean something even more wonderful
than life. It cannot possibly mean anything worse
to the good soldier." Two months' rest enabled
him to realize more keenly the unexampled
nobility of France's gigantic effort for victory.
He took part in the great offensive in Champagne,
which demonstrated the superiority of French
moral and technique, but failed in its larger aim
of breaking the German line and dissolving , the
deadlock of trench warfare. The indecisive victory
deepens his admiration for the poilu :
If we did not entirely succeed, it was not the fault of the
French soldier. He is a better man, man for man, than the
German. Anyone who had seen the charge of the Marsouins
at Souain would acknowledge it. Never was anything more
magnificent. I remember a captain, badly wounded in the leg,
as he passed us, borne back on a litter by four German
prisoners. He asked us what regiment we were, and when
we told him, he cried "Vive la Legion," and kept repeating
" Nous les avons en. Nous les avons en." He was suffering,
but, oblivious of his wound, was still fired with the en-
thusiasm of the assault and all radiant with victory. What
a contrast with the German wounded on whose faces was
nothing but terror and despair. What is the stimulus in
their slogans of ** Gott mit uns" and **Fiir Konig und Vater-
laad" beside that of men really fighting in defence of their
country? Whatever be the force in international conflicts of
having justice and all the principles of personal morality on
one's side, it at least gives the French soldier a strength that's
like the strength of ten against an adversary whose weapon is
only brute violence. It is inconceivable that a Frenchman,
forced to yield, could behave as I saw German prisoners
behave, trembling, on their knees, for all the world like
criminals at length overpowered and brought to justice. Such
men have to be driven to the assault, or intoxicated. But the
Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a passion beside
which any of the other forms of experience that are reckoned
to make life worth while seem pale in comparison.
ALAN SEEGER 159
After Champagne his regiment was sent to the
reserve line and did not return to the Front until
May of the following year. Part of the interven-
ing period he spent in hospital owing to an attack
of bronchitis. When after two months' conge de
convalescence, he relieved the monotony of inaction
by going out scouting after guard, though such
one-man adventures were strictly forbidden. In
the course of the first of these expeditions he
discovered a burnt rocket-stick planted in the
ground, having a bit of the Berliner Tageblatt
stuck in the top, to serve as a guide to Boche
raiding parties and (perhaps) as a range measure-
ment. On another occasion he went as far as the
German wire, where he left a card, to show he
had called. "It was thrilling work,' 5 he wrote
to his marraine^ Mrs Weeks, " courting destruction
with taunts, with invitations," as Whitman would
say. The " horse-sense " or open-air intelligence
of the American youth comes out well in these
and other perilous episodes.
He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decora-
tion Day (May 3oth) to read his Ode in Memory
of the American Volunteers Fallen for France
before the statues of Washington and La Fayette.
The poem had been written at the request of
a Committee of American residents. But his
permission did not arrive in time. On June 24th
he writes to his marraine, giving an account of
the hardest march he had ever had ... "20
kilometres through ' the blazing sun and in a cloud
of dust. Something around 30 kilogrammes on
the back." Half of the men fell out on the
way, but he managed to get in at the finish. This
forced marching was an omen of the imminence
160 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
of the great Somme advance. On July 4th, the
Legion was ordered to clear the enemy out of the
village of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan Seeger was
in the first wave, and his company were all but
wiped out by the enfilading fire of six hidden
machine-guns. He himself went down, wounded
in several places. As the successive waves came
by he cheered them on and sang an English
marching-song.
His few gallant war poems are full of the far
thunder of great battles; the vast war sighs in
them as the sea in a shell :
Rumours, reverberant, indistinct, remote,
Borne from red fields whose martial names have won
The power to thrill like a far trumpet-note,
Vic, Vailly, Soupir, Hurtelise, Craonne . . .
The last line shows a Miltonic sense of the music
abiding in place-names the jewels of sound, echoes
of history caught and imprisoned for ever, which
glitter and glimmer everywhere in the map of
France, In Champagne^ 1914-15, of which
the Matin gave a translation with the comment,
"Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it," he
celebrates the noble deeds of the French soldier in
the sunny chalk-fields that drank his bright blood
so eagerly and hopes for a like immortality :
I love to think that if my blood should be
So privileged to sink where his has sunk,
I shall not pass from Earth entirely,
But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk,
And faces that the joys of living fill
Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer,
In beaming cups some spark of me shall still
Brim towards the lips that once I held so dear.
ALAN SEEGER 161
So shall one coveting no higher plane
Than nature clothes in colour and flesh and tone
Even from the grave put upward to attain
The dreams youth cherished and missed and might
have known.
In Maktoob he commemorates the death of an
Arab in that Legion, which draws together the
true lovers of France from the uttermost ends of
the world, and tells us how he wrought out of a
splinter of the shell that killed him a smooth and
bright ring to bear the legend of soldierly fatalism.
. . "Maktoob, It is written." But his own epitaph
is best expressed in the last strophe of the Ode^
a noble piece of poetical architecture built in two
days, which other lips than his shall some day read,
before the statues named above, in honour of France
and all who came from afar to help her in the
valleys of decision :
She checked each onset, arduous to stem
Foiled and frustrated them
On those red fields where blow with furious blow
Was countered, whether the gigantic fray
Rolled by* the Meuse or at the Bois Sabot,
Accents of ours were in the fierce mle ;
And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground
"Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,
And on the tangled wires
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops.
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers :
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops j
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
i6a PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
II. HARRY BUTTERS
LOVE of France drew Alan Seeger into the
War. But it was love of England which
brought Harry Butters from his busy,
joyous home in California to lay down his life for
a cause not then his country's own the cause, as
he saw it as soon as ever the War began, of the
honour of humanity and all that can be truly called
civilization. California is at the world's end to the
average Englishman ; at most it is for him a
fragment of the unreal estate of manly-adventurous
authors where, in the intervals of the pistol's festive
popping, the " Forty-niner " heaps gold-bearing
gravel into his rocket and Clementine drives her
ducklings to the river every morning. Yet as
readers of Gertrude Atherton's novels know very
well the Englishman is better understood and
more popular in California than in any other state ;
the Californian magnate likes to send his son to an
English school and does not "raise hell" if his
daughters get engaged to one of her brother's school
chums provided, of course, he does not belong to
the ignoble order of remittance men. Why it
should be so is hard to say. Perhaps it is because
enough of the hasta mahana tradition survives from
the days when California was a Spanish Colony to
serve as a bond of sympathy with the easy-going
islander who is never in a hurry and a flurry and a
skurry. Perhaps it is because the English younger
son played such a great part in the building-up of
that Earthly Paradise in the early fifties, when the
voyage from England round Cape Horn was
cheaper (both in blood and money) and more
expeditious than travelling from the Eastern States
HARRY BUTTER^
Nr,, ROVAL FTEI D VRTII I F-RY)
Arrival at S fdw-o
HARRY BUTTERS 163
by the overland route. Perhaps it is because the
Californian, like the Englishman, lives in one of
the world's wise garden-lands and so has a secret
conviction that the art of living is of more conse-
quence, all said and done, than the science of
money-making. All three reasons were suggested
by Bret Harte in* a conversation I had with him
nearly thirty years ago.
Harry Butters was the only son of the late
Henry Butters of Alta Vista, San Francisco, who
had large interests in Californian mines and
railways. " His father, so far as one can reconstruct
that striking personality," says his biographer,
" was a big man, nervous, moody, taciturn ; with
the modern American's capacity for great business
schemes; an astonishing executive ability; a com-
pelling eloquence," Recognizing the unexploited
possibilities of the fertile plain of the Sacramento,
a domain as large as the whole of Ireland, he had,
in a few months, with characteristic vigour and
far-sightedness, conceived and launched the great
scheme of development now in full working order
under the style of the Northern Electric Railway.
Into this far-reaching plan for realizing the latent
assets of an economic principality he put most of
his resources and all his heart. Had the tremendous
catastrophe of 1906, the San Francisco earthquake,
never occurred or been delayed for a year or two,
had his health been able to stand the strain of the
period of unforeseen disaster, his might have become
one of the greatest fortunes in America . . . how
often in American history (real history, not that to
which politicians put their names) has such an
accumulation of financial power gathered swiftly
in the Far West and then travelled, like a storm-
1 64 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
cloud, to darken and disturb the atmosphere of
down- East finance! But the fine mechanism of
his will-power weakened under the tremendous
strain and in the end was wrecked to the great
sorrow of the boy, for whom his father's well-being
was as the sun in the sky. " They were more than
father and son , . . they were mutually enraptured
friends." Many racial strains mingled in the boy's
being. He was of New England descent on both
sides, but he had English, Scotch, Irish, and French
blood in his veins the French ancestor came over
with La Fayette to fight for American Independence,
so that his death in France was in a sense the repay-
ment of an ancient debt. Then there are the
formative vicissitudes of travel to be considered in
the construction of his complex personal equation.
In his first ten years of life he was taken twice to
South Africa, five times to Europe. English
memories were part of the very stuff of his childhood
the old-world quiet of Kensington Gardens, the
formal wilderness called Hampstead Heath, calm
reaches of the Thames where he had his own boat,
his wonderful father driving a four-in-hand on
English highways and teaching him how to hold
and manage the reins. And, above all and before
all, the year (1906-7) he spent at Beaumont School
near Windsor, where he was taught the true mean-
ing of his Catholicism, learning from his much-loved
" Father Tim " that all good things, wealth and
health, and the rest of it, are less than nothing in the
end, if they be not held in trust, and that life on earth
is but the beginning of man's voyage in the vast
ocean of the Divine. Like his father, he combined
the idealist and the realist in his being without
any trace, however, of the father's moodiness,
HARRY BUTTERS 165
which was the sign, it may be, of the imperfect
blending of opposite elements. What was person-
ality in the father, had ripened into character in the
son; a deeper seriousness, a firmer grip of the signifi-
cance of living, inspired the latter with the spirit
of self-sacrifice.
He seems to have been a charming child ; starry-
eyed, frank, vigorous, with the vivid charm, inde-
finable yet definitely felt, which is called magnetism.
But he would have been set in the category of
spoilt darlings -in Old England or even New
England a world of sunshine, constant change,
luxury, the devotion of both parents, and the affec-
tion of big and little half-sisters and half-brothers
had bred in him that tumultuous egoism, which has
been the ruin of so many sons of American million-
aires. School in England cured him of the idea
that he was a pivot of the universe. But the swift
flow of youth (to give the sense of a wise passage
in Sir Rabindrinath Tagore's book of reminiscences)
is a guarantee against the evils of character engendered
in stagnation, the ineradicable faults of an ingrowing
selfishness, As the current of his life widened and
deepened, his early errors were swept out of sight,
and all could see that the waters thereof were fresh
and sweet and that their energy was unabated and
rightly directed. But he could not at first under-
stand the Beaumont discipline, and on one occasion
ran away from school, paying his father a surprise
visit at his London office. His adored "Father
Tim " gives a whimsical account (in a letter begin-
ning "Dear Harry" and dated Easter, 1908} of the
Californian boy's rebellious behaviour during his
first term :
Can you imagine what it would be, to break in a four-year-old
1 66 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
colt which had never previously had any training or handling
whatever ?
Have you ever seen how a strong salmon struggles, when it is
landed to get back to its native waters ?
Have you ever noticed the endeavours of a wild bird
when it is caught and put in a cage?
Now, whichever of these examples appeals to you most, just
multiply it by five and a half and then square it and then see
if the result is at all familiar to you.
Speaking of your first month in the schoolroom, I might
mention that hardly ever did your variations of posture and
looks annoy me j on the contrary, they amused me immensely,
though I may have concealed the fact, and pretended otherwise.
Though the poor Master might easily ask himself " what
next?" when he saw the American Cousin sitting with his
back to the master, and both feet placed carefully on the top of
the ink-pots of the desk behind.
In those early days I never dreamt of making any personal
remark, or giving any personal admonition I thought it better
to watch and take stock, and contented myself with a general
remark, to the effect that "it is a good thing occasionally say,
once a day, for a few minutes to look straight in front of
one!"
After a time, I found those general remarks had their effect.
And what was my joy, after a few weeks, to find that but one
foot was engaged in covering an ink-pot? My joy was some-
what diminished, however, when I noticed that one hand was
engaged in pinching a neighbour, probably Thomas , and
the other hand, hard at work, drawing a complimentary caricature
of the Master ! But I must do you justice and say that the
expression on the eyes and face at that moment, betokened the
most intense attention.
Many months have passed since,' and perhaps the picture is
rather exaggerated but I'm sure you won't mind.
It was most edifying to see how you buckled to the last half-
year, and showed all, that the wild H.A.B. need be second to
none, if he wished, . . .
There are no shrewder judges of character than
English boys, and the fact that Harry was
immensely popular, despite his - eccentricities, at
Beaumont, is the best testimonial one could have
to the courage, generosity, and all-round loveable-
ness of the highly-strung little Galifornian, in whom
HARRY BUTTERS 167
the true Elizabethan exuberance was so manifest.
Beaumont set its hall-mark on him indelibly. His
love of the school and loyalty to old school friends
increased as time went, and the lesson he learnt
there to sacrifice his own delights in the service
of humanity and for the greater glory of God
became, slowly but surely, the ruling ideal of his
life. What he would have done for his country,
had he lived, is one of the questions worth asking,
not easily answered. He had inherited from his
father that genius for handling reality which has
created so many financial powers in the United
States it is not money, but the power it gives,
which is sought after by the American multi-
millionaire. This at least is certain had he gained
the tremendous power wielded by some financial
magnates in America, he would have held it as a
sacred trust, to be used for the good of the toiling
millions who had helped him to accumulate it.
He would never have degenerated into one of the
heartless plutocrats, scoring millions as points in a
cut-throat yet impersonal game, who so strangely
resemble in their mentality the tyrants of the
Italian Renaissance. But I myself think that he
would have sought spiritual rather than material
power in some way that cannot even be guessed at.
For he was of the very stuff, looked at in that
afterglow of all the yesterdays that is called
historic truth, out of which the enraptured world-
lings were wrought who achieved saintship in the
Middle Ages.
Between the last of the days of a desultory
education and his entry, as a pioneer of the true,
valiant Americanism, into the war, he saw a great
deal more of man's wondrous life on this wonderful
168 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
planet. And he gave a signal proof of his contempt
for money at any rate the easy money that is so
often worse than witch's gold to its temporary
possessor by refusing, to the consternation of the
lawyers, the wealth conferred on him by a will that
virtually disinherited his half-brothers and half-
sisters, leaving them dependent on his bounty. He
soon had a clear vision of the large issues of world-
politics, and, seeing the futility of all the talk
about " entangling alliances " and the folly of the
belief that Americans were of a superior order of
creation and destined to escape the burdens of self-
defence as being a people apart, hoped that the old
feud between America and England would soon be
forgotten and forgiven. The two countries, he
earnestly believed, were the trustees of democratic
civilization the kind that prefers the doctrine of
history to the dogmas of Pacifist cranks and cannot
believe that defencelessness is the cheapest form of
defence. * Had an alliance existed between England
and America in August 1914, there would have
been no German War so he believed and the
more we know of the inner workings of the
Pan-German mind in the period of incubation, the
more credible seems his belief* And when hostilities
began, when Catholic Belgium was trodden down
in blood and mire by the Prussian jackboot, he saw
his duty as " a dead-sure thing " (as Hay's Jim
Bludso did), and at once decided to fight on tHe
side of the Allies. One can imagine the consterna-
tion of his Californian friends and relations at this
swift and utterly unexpected decision. To the vast
majority of Western Americans the war seemed as
remote and meaningless for them as a dispute in
another planet; to the strong body of a priori
HARRY BUTTERS ' 169
Pacifists it was no better than a fight between mad
dogs. To Harry Butters, however, it was a phase
of the unending struggle between right and wrong,
and no persuasion in the world could have pre-
vented him from taking the cross to help check the
aggression of a predatory race, which, like the
Albigenses, had decided to cut adrift from the
civilisation of its age.
" Vivid 3J the epithet so often applied to Rupert
Brooke by his friends defines the impression
created by this young American when he came
over to serve in the British Army and, in point
of fact, took the War Office by storm. Mr J. L.
Garvin, that inexhaustible journalist, so fine a man
of letters, to whom his exuberant vivacity naturally
appealed, wrote the following fine appreciation of
his own brilliant son's brilliant friend, when the
news of the latter's death arrived :
When he went back to America he was a young man of
mark, 'framed to excel both in sport and affairs. He was very
tall, supple, active, frank, and comely of face, as gay as he was
good-looking. You saw by a glance at his hands that he had
a born instinct for management aad technique. He had been a
good deal at sea. He knew all about horses and motor-cars.
He was a crack shot and a fine polo player. His business
ability was shown as soon as he took over the management
of his father's estates. With this practical talent that could
turn itself to anything he had other qualities. One remembers
what a delightful level measuring glance he used to give
suddenly from under his brows when he had finished rolling
a cigarette and went on with his keen questioning about men
and things. To talk with him was to receive a new and
promising revelation of the mind of young America. Like so
many of our own young soldiers in their attitude towards
politics, he was not content with either of the old parties in the
United States. He thought that his own generation if it was
earnest enough might make a better hand both of social problems
and world relations. He hoped to play his part. Though he
always thought of himself in a fine spirit as "an American
citizen/ 3 he wanted the United States to take a full share in
170 PIONEERS, O PiONEJiKS
the wider life of the world, and especially to work as far as
possible for common ideals with the whole English-speaking
race.
So when the news of the war came to San Francisco he put
aside as fair a prospect of wealth, success, happiness and long
life as could well open before a young man, and determined
to throw in his lot with the old country and the Allies in the
fight for civilization against ail the armed might of lawless
iniquity which had flung itself on Belgium.
The charm of his conversation, quite Listerian
in its bright, bickering flow, was irresistible. At
Beaumont, they say, he was always talking; even
when reading a book he would prattle to himself.
Mr Winston Churchill, that naughty Peter Pan
of British politics, bore witness to this entertaining
gift in a brief, valedictory sketch of his character
and career :
The death in action of this young American gentleman is a
blow to the many friends he had made for himself- in the British
Army. I met him quite by chance in his observation post near
Ploegsteert and was charmed by his extraordinary fund of wit
and gaiety. His conversation was delightful, full at once of
fun and good sense and continually lighted by original reflections
and captivating Americanisms. A whole table could sit and
listen to him with the utmost interest and pleasure. He was
a great " character," and had he lived to enjoy his bright worldly
prospects he could not have failed to make his mark.
He was a very good soldier and competent artillery officer,
very well thought of by his comrades and trusted by his
superiors. He had seen much service in the front line, includ-
ing the battle of Loos, and came through unscathed until in
June last a bouquet of 5-9 shells destroyed his observation post
and stunned him with shell shock and concussion. Leave was
pressed upon him, but he could only be induced to take a
few days' rest. In little more than a week he was back at the
front disdainful as ever of the continual threats of death. And
thus quite simply he met his fate. " No, sir, I have taken no
oath of allegiance, but I'm just as loyal."
He was only twenty-two when he came over,
in the early part of 1915^0 join the British Army.
He was at first gazetted to the Royal Warwick-
HARRY BUTTERS 171
shire Regiment, but transferred to the Royal Field
Artillery, where his genius for technical matters
an heirloom from his father found wider scope.
He says in one of his letters from the front that
he was born to be in the Artillery. And so
thorough and inspiring was his work that a British
officer, a fine judge of all servitors of the guns,
thought there ought to be an American officer in
every battery ! His most intimate letters are full of
gunnery details. Here, for exazr.ple, in a letter
to his "dearest Gookie" (his sister, Lucile) is a
vivacious and detailed picture of the Artillery
officer's daily and nightly routine : -
The interval has been quite exciting, the Bosch having
favoured us with three gas attacks on this front the first being
a false alarm, the second a pukka attack with heavy shell-fire,
infantry out of the trenches, and all the thrills, and the third
a small affair in which he just let off a little that he had left
over from the main affair. I'll tell you about the main show.
Time 10.30 P.M.
Scene A tubular dugout on top of the high hill overlooking
the trenches, same being my " O.P." In the centre, a table on
which is spread an artillery map. Asleep on a bed in one
corner, an Officer {muh !). In the opposite corner a drowsy
signaller is discovered at his telephone instrument.
Voice over telephone ABX ABX ABX ! Priority
message all batteries. (Signaller pricks up his ears and listens
to the message.)
** A prisoner who deserted from the German lines this after-
noon has been examined at Division Headquarters* He states
that the enemy have the whole front line from ... to ...
dug in with gas cylinders and that they are going to let it off
some time during the night the wind being now favourable
all batteries will double sentries and stand by the guns
S.O.S. guard to be doubled. Acknowledge." D. A.
Signaller (gently stirring me). " Sir Sir Gas alert
message just came through. There's a German prisoner
captured, etc. etc."
Me " All right, all right. Hell and damnation ! Go and
call the Sergeant of the S.O.S. Guard"
172 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
(I rolls out of bed and puts on my boots.)
Sergeant appears at the door.
" Turn out your guard and working party and I'll inspect
their helmets." (It is done,)
Telephone" XX xx xx xx xx "
Signaller. " Hello, hello. Wanted on the 'phone, sir."
(I pick up the 'phone.)
Voice " Captain speaking They've just caught a German
prisoner "
Me (cutting in) " Yes, I got the message, sir."
Captain " All right, be on the alert. Good night."
I roll a cigarette and sit down in comfort to await the gas
signals.
Telephone " XX XX XX I "
Signaller" Hello, hello. Yes. Wanted, sir."
I pick up the 'phone.
Voice " Colonel speaking Have you got - that message
about?"
Me (cutting in) "Yes, sir, got it waiting for the gas
now.'*
Colonel All right keep on the qut vive
1068 1 . . Harry Butters . . 55
Good night 1 "
(I continue my cigarette.)
Telephone" XX XX XX XX !
Signaller" Hello, hello ! Yes. Wanted, sir."
I pick up the 'phone.
Voice " Adjutant speaking They've just caught a German
prisoner "
Me (cutting in) "All right, I know all about it who
started this damned show anyway ? "
Adjutant " All right keep your shirt on. Good night."
(I light another cigarette and glance at the watch 12.15.)
Signaller (hearing a frog croaking outside) "Is that the
gas horns, sir ? "
Me "No."
Telephone*' XX XX XX XX ! "
Signaller "Hello, hello ! Yes, sir. Wanted, sir."
(I pick up the 'phone.)
Voice "Captain Lucas speaking I just wanted to know
if you'd gotten a message to be on "
Me (cutting in)" Yes, good night ! "
(I resume my cigarette.)
My cigarette goes out.
I light another.
HARRY BUTTERS 173
I feel sleepy.
I curse the Bosch.
On second thought I curse the telephone.
Telephone" XX XX XX XX ! "
Signaller " Hello, hello. Yes, sin Here, sir. Wanted
sir."
I curse the 'phone again.
I pick up the 'phone.
Voice "Orderly Officer speaking They've just been
examining a Bosch prisoner at Divisional Headquarters. He
says that "
From the trenches come the startling note of a Klaxon Horn
B-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r ! Br ! B-r-r-r-r !
Half a dozen machine guns open up and are drowned in a
crash of the opening German bombardment.
Orderly Officer (trailing on) "that the Germans have got "
Me " All right, shut up. Here's your damn gas she's
turned loose on the whole front and you'll have it with, you in a
minute ! I hope it chokes the lot of you ! Open up your gun
fire there !
Orderly Officer * f Hey, where is it coming from? How
fast is it coming ? Has it reached you yet ? "
A high pitched hissing note advises me that the Bosch is
putting a barrage over our heads behind the hill and a minute
later the wires are cut by the same.
Me "Thank the Lord free from the bloody telephone
anyway." (Singing out) " Get your gas helmets out and put
'ern on top of your heads." (To the extra signallers) " Get
out and mend the break, but don't take too many chances "
Enter Ludlow (same chap who was forward with me at Loos)
from Right Battery O.P.
" Hello, Ludlow, your wires busted too Hooray ! Let's
get out and see the show,"
Which we did. Picked a nice grassy spot in front of the
bridge and peeled our eyes.
The whole line of trenches curving around the foot of the hill
and stretching away into the distance is lit up by the bursting
shells and the star rockets, and by the light of these we could
occasionally catch glimpses of the clouds of gas rolling out over
our lines. At the base of the hill the cloud divides and flows
around it, leaving us on an island of blessed pure air. Away
on the right a building bursts into flame and by its light every-
thing shows up with stagey fire effect.
Three batteries of ours are shooting right over our heads,
and on top of the hill the shells are passing very low each
174 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
one visible, for all the world like a baby meteor and the whole
combine to make a beautiful, if rather terrible sight terrible
because it's none too sweet for our poor damned infantry in the
front trenches where the cloud is thickest, and knowing that
they will soon be charged by a frightened but entirely dangerous
crowd of Bosches and always containing the interesting element
for us, that if the attack is really going to amount to anything,
they will put a heavy shell fire on our O.P.'s as soon as it
becomes light enough to observe.
But I didn't believe it would amount to this, and it didn't
after an hour, the shell fire commenced to let up, and half an
hour later it was all over but the shouting !
Net result next day
Enemy debouched from his trenches only in spots casualties
almost nix considering the extravagance of the show but the
whole country bleached out to a light yellow and the lovely
Springtime spoiled which is the Bosch all over no eyes for
the beauties of Nature at all. The battery was gassed, and the
cow that gives my morning killed Strafe the Hun !
Boyd Cable, or any other of the new war realists,
who are working out the Kipling tradition, would
not be ashamed to sign this lively sketch.
He is always alluding to the " thundering good
luck " which has given him so glorious an oppor-
tunity of striking a blow for liberty and civilization.
He sees clearly that there is no easy road to victory ;
that the goal of- the great adventure can only be
reached by passing through many hells; that the
"women's conferences" of well-meaning peace-
lovers will do nothing to win a just peace, or,
rather, less than nothing since they tried to weaken
the will-to-win of the Allies. There are many
picturesque descriptions of big and little battles
in his letters, and all are secretly inspired by a
joyous sense of camaraderie and pride in the incom-
parable British soldier who, like himself, is pre-
pared to see it through. Here is the ending
HARRY BUTTERS 175
of a stirring battle-piece which is too long to
quote in full, unfortunately :
We pushed on across the dreadful strip of what had been no man's
land two days before, but was ours now, at the price numbered by
those silent figures (and the Kaiser's receipt acknowledged by the
proportion of dirty gray uniforms among them) on to the first
German fire trenches ; and here the dead were rare, for most of their
defenders had preferred to leave as prisoners. The loot, however,
was far more plentiful and the ground was strewn with every
description of rifle, bayonet and equipment. On across the line of
support trenches and across the last broad gap of several hundred
yards to the reserve line, to find the gladdest and bravest sight that
ever gladdened my eyes, for they were occupied by the finest body
of fighting troops I verily believe in all the world the whole division
of Guards, 12,000 strong, the first pick of the whole British army.
Not a man under five feet ten inches, magnificently disciplined and
with the unbeaten traditions of five centuries behind them. They
had been pushed up during the night and were now cooking their
breakfast ; in high spirits, clean and dry and in the very pink of
fighting condition, their shining rifles with bayonets fixed bristling
over the parapet. And our Divisional Artillery were to have the
honour of reinforcing them 1
He feels himself, body and soul, a part of the
Army in which he serves. " I think less of myself
than I did, less of the heights of personal success
that I aspired to climb and more of the service that
they must render in payment For the right to
live and by virtue of which, only, can we progress/ 5
Long before the end his spirit had been purged of
petulancies; it was naked and bright as a sword*
Humour and tenderness and high spirits irradiate
his letters home with light and delight from within.
He joyously quotes the soldier's new versions of the
Mother Goose rhymes, such as the inimitable
quatrain :
Every day that passes
Filling out the year,
Leaves the wicked Kaiser
Harder up for beer.
176 PIONEERS, O PIONEERS
He warns his Gookie not to read the war books
which give the loathsome and disastrous side of
war an aspect that even the soldier must avoid
thinking over, if he is to remain physically and
mentally fit for his job. He enters into a compact
with his dearest sister to look at the moon" at the
same time and confesses, with playful sorrow,
that the Moon, not so sad-looking and weary
as Sidney saw her in his famous sonnet, had
inveigled him into a flirtation. He tells her
about a dream-leave he had. " Got away for a
week and walked in on you in some dream castle
of home that was a combination of the Airship
(Davy's house) and Bunny Hutch (Lucile's).
You were on the second story porch lovely
as a rose and with the emotion of eighteen
months' separation shining out of your eyes and I
just chucked off my gas helmet and belt, climbed
up the side of the house and grabbed you in my
arms. It was very sweet" Censoring soldiers'
letters had acquainted him with the meaning of
crosses, so he sprinkles one of the letters with
these symbols of kisses (another American officer
thought C,Y.K. a better device). His breakdown
through shell-shock seems at first a shocking
calamity. But he is consoled in realizing that it
is to teach him the lesson of " bumble service." . . ,
" I reckon I've always had too damn much vanity
and low-down selfish ambition in my nature, and
the last week has certainly served to knock out
a large portion- of both." The "honourable
advancement of his soul " was now the ruling
ideal of the life he lived to himself. He sorrows
over the death of his friend, Gerald Garvin, but
sees in it none the less a great good fortune. And
HARRY BUTTERS 177
he himself, when the rose of his life was wide open,
all his attributes unfolded and in full fragrance,
met the same illustrious end on the battle-field.
Alan Seeger and Harry Butters were the pioneers
of America's conversion to a sense of the spiritual
necessity and grandeur of the war against Germany.
They are sealed of the ghostly fellowship of
Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke, and we can
never honour them too much in our national
remembrance.
THE STUDENT IN ARMS
DONALD HANKEY
/ haw seen with the eyes of God. I have seen the naked souls of men,
stripped of circumstance* Rank and reputation, wealth and poverty, know-
ledge and ignorance, manners and uncouthness, these I saw not. I saw the
naked souls of men. I saw who were slaves and who were free ; who
were beasts and who men ; who were contemptible and who honourable.
I have seen with the eyes of God. I have seen the vanity of the temporal
and the glory of the eternal, I have despised comfort and honoured pain*
I have understood the victory of the Cross. death 9 where is thy sting !
Nunc dimittis, Domine.
From A Book of Wisdom by
DONALD HANKEY.
DONALD HANKEY ("A Student in
Arms " ) records somewhere that, when he
was with the Army in France, there came
to him regularly every week from the homeland an
envelope containing a soft handkerchief wrapped
round a sprig of lavender or verbena. That little
breath of fragrance used to bring with it memories
of the deep quiet of old gardens and all things
dainty and remote from the sordid business of the
trenches.
The war was undoubtedly the culminating in-
fluence in Hankey's development. It made of the
student a man of action. It put a term, alas, to a
life that was evolving naturally into a fine maturity.
But it brought him premature celebrity, and because
the pious aura that has posthumously encompassed
his personality may have proved misleading to those
who did not know him, I wish to tender my little
sprig of verbena. For Hankey, though a Christian
in the word's best sense, was a very human man.
But for the war he would have taken his place in
all probability among the better known practical
philosophers of his time. His ideals and his
178
DONALD HANKEY
(I IEITTENAN T, ROYAL WARWICKSHIRE REGIMENT)
DONALD HANKEY 179
ambitions were high and well defined. He wished
to leave the world belter than he found it, but his
aspirations in that direction were both practical and
on the grand scale that of the true artist who
wishes to add to the world's sum of knowledge.
He was the discoverer of new or lost truths 'rather
than a teacher of known ones, a producer rather
than a reproducer, a genius as well as a man of
talent. And he did not make the usual mistake of
thinking that genius cannot or need not be trained.
He realised that, provided the divine spark was
there, it should be assiduously cultivated. And the
divine spark was there.
Hankey set himself to learn before attempting
to teach, thereby following the example of the
majority of the world's men of genius. His
method of doing so may seem to the casual ob-
server to have been somewhat haphazard; but, so
long as, by having his goal in sight all the time,
he kept his general direction right, it did not really
matter by what particular road he travelled.
Donald Hankey was born with unusual advan-
tages in the way of parentage and environment.
His father was English, with Australian experience ;
his mother Australian born. After a childhood
spent at his home and at a private school close by,
in Brighton, he went to Rugby and left there in
1900 at the age of sixteen-and-a-half to take a
Cadetship at the Royal Military Academy, Wool-
wich. He chose a military career chiefly as a result
of external influences among them the death in
South Africa of his idolized eldest brother, Hugh,
in 1900 and at the age of twenty he was drafted
with the R.G.A. to Mauritius, where he spent a
couple of years. He himself has testified that this
i8o THE STUDENT IN ARMS
was the most unsatisfactory part of his life. The
place fascinated him, and it was there he had perhaps
the most important spiritual experience of his life;
but the routine of garrison duty, the narrow
confines of a small mess, and the rather sedentary
nature of the work irked him not a little. The
antics of the subalterns amused him, but the rather
shallow atmosphere and conversation of the mess
did not appeal to him. Moreover, he had a positive
dislike of heavy guns; at any rate the technical
side of his profession did not appeal to him. Re-
turning home, owing to illness, he resigned his
commission, realizing that the time had come for
him to secure a different outlook. Accordingly, at
the comparatively mature age of twenty-two, he
went up to Oxford. It goes without saying that
Hankey now found himself ia infinitely more con-
genial surroundings than ever before; the beauty
and traditions of Oxford appealed to him intensely.
He was seven years younger than his youngest
brother, being, as he used to put it, "an after-
thought on the part of my parents," and it was
doubtless due to the fact of his having been born
at a time when they had reached their full mental
maturity, and had perhaps passed the zenith of
mere physical robustness that in Donald Hankey
the spiritual predominated over the bodily element.
This fact makes it easy to appreciate his foresight
in achieving the practical side of his education before
attempting to advance the theoretical. If he had
gone to Oxford straight from school and without
acquiring any experience of people and things, he
would have become merely an unpractical idealist,
a dreamer.
While at the University he identified himself
DONALD HANKEY 181
only with such of the current movements as were
potentially of real use to him in view of the object
he had in view. Sociology, theology and all kin-
dred subjects were naturally those that appealed
to him most, although his interests were distinctly
broad. He took an active interest in various kinds
of sport, but without allowing it in any way to
become an obsession with him, thereby avoiding
the very common mistake of so many of his con-
temporaries in exalting above everything what he
was wont to describe as "Blue-worship." His
two or three years' seniority to the average under-
graduate and the experience gained in them were
undoubtedly of the greatest use to him in keeping
his values right, and preventing him from being
unduly influenced by any of the passing crazes
and enthusiasms which were current in his time.
Nominally, of course, he was working entirely with
the object of ultimately becoming ordained, but as
time went on it became more and more obvious
that the rationalist tendency of his views would
involve difficulties in his taking this step.
Writing from his experience of the very diverse
systems of training at Woolwich and Oxford,
Hankey notes the essential difference in their pro-
ducts. Woolwich is Spartan, utilitarian, disciplin-
ary ; the aesthetic is left alone. The officer emerges
a man of practical interests and simple pleasures,
unsympathetic to the "isms." Oxford's product is
the converse. Its freedom tends to vague ideals,
unpractical dreams, and ineffective good-will to
one's humbler fellow-men. Hankey concludes that
in war-time each can learn from the other; and
in the days of danger, when men feel in need of
an articulate philosophy of life and death, Oxford
i8a THE STUDENT IN ARMS
and Cambridge can give their sons the power to
evolve one which Sandhurst and Woolwich cannot.
While at Oxford all Hankey's vacations were
spent in social work, mainly in connection with
the Oxford and Bermondsey mission. This work
he continued after obtaining his degree, though
it was interrupted for a spell while he was attached
to the Leeds Clergy School, At this time Hankey
was specially interested in emigration, and was the
means of sending a number of lads from Bermondsey
to Australia. The failure of some of these to make
good led him to visit Western Australia, and it
was characteristic of his methods that he travelled
steerage as an emigrant. The results of his investi-
gations, carried out for . several months under
precisely the conditions that a working lad emigrant
would encounter, were published in the Westminster
Gazette.
From Australia he sailed for British East Africa
and paid a prolonged visit to a friend whose
administrative duties among the natives involved
almost complete isolation from European civilization.
His idea in taking this step was to gain perspective
or, as he put it, " to get outside, and give himself
time to think things over. 55 He also visited Mada-
gascar and revisited Mauritius before returning.
Although on his return to England he threw
himself heart and soul into the organizing and
running of the boys 5 clubs and all the other work
of the Mission, he had no more intention of making
that his permanent occupation than when in the
Army he had of keeping to soldiering as a profes-
sion. He was destined for bigger things, and,
although perhaps only subconsciously, he knew it.
Hence the skilful mapping out of his career, which
DONALD HANKEY 183
was ideally planned to strengthen and develop
a naturally productive and latently powerful
personality.
It is perhaps this very interesting portion of his
career that has tended to create a wrong impression
of the true man. To those who knew him there
was nothing about Donald of what might be
described as the aimless idealist. His idealism and
spirituality were camouflaged under a genial and
humorous personality. Even when he was spend-
ing most of his life working in the slums there was
no better host on the rare occasions when he enter-
tained atrHIs Club or elsewhere, and no one sur-
passed him in such matters as the choice of a menu,
a vintage, or a cigar. His fondness for physical
exercises, boxing, running, and rambling over wide
open spaces like the Sussex Downs or the Vosges
Mountains accentuated the human side of his
character. Incidentally he was quite a clever artist
and a 'cello player of more than average amateur
ability.
Hankey confesses that in the clubs they did not
seem to get at grips with their boys. " I think we
mystified them a little," he says, u and ultimately
bored them. We were always starting afresh with
a new generation and losing touch with the older
ones." But he was building better than he knew,
as was afterwards proved by the devotion of his
old boys to his memory. The war came. Hankey
reconsidered his position. A commission was his
for the asking. But he wanted to " kill a German "
and to keep in touch with the working man, and
he decided that by enlisting in the ranks he would
best be able to accomplish both purposes. He
enlisted in a service battalion and was soon made
1 84 THE STUDENT IN ARMS
a sergeant. He remained a^ sergeant for about
nine months with the now dead officer whom
he has immortalized as " The Beloved Captain " as
his Section Commander. Then, as he naively
states, " for reasons which only concern myself,
I descended with a bump to the rank of private,
and was transferred to a different Company." It
was of course his desire to study, human nature
at close range that made him give up his stripes,
just as it was the reason for one or two other
apparently eccentric actions previously. About
this time, or a little later, he wrote to his brother,
Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet,
a most remarkable letter, full of acute observation
and useful suggestion in regard to the new armies,
which was read by Lord Kitchener with much
interest. Within three months of landing in France
he was wounded and invalided home. He had
been persuaded to agree to take up a commission
in the Royal Garrison Artillery with a view to
joining a heavy battery in the field. The com-
mission came through when he was in hospital.
Probably, however, his old antipathy to the
guns had not diminished; at any rate on his
own initiative he exchanged into the Royal
Warwickshire Regiment to the same battalion as
that in which his brother Hugh (for whom as a
boy he had an immense admiration amounting
almost to veneration) was serving when he was
killed at Paardeburg. Before many months he
himself was killed on the Somme while leading
his men in the attack. There had been a
momentary wavering among his men, and he was
last seen rallying them successfully and carrying
them forward with him to win the trench which
DONALD HANKEY 185
cost him his life. His words to the men just before
they went over the top, " If wounded, Blighty
if killed, the Resurrection," have now become
historic.
One returns from Hankey the soldier to Hankey
the student. Death had ended the career which
the student had chosen for himself, and for which
the whole of his life had been so carefully arranged
It is almost certain that writing and not speech was
Hankey's intended vehicle of expression; he pre-
ferred the lasting glow of the fire of literature to
the transient glamour of speech in the House of
Commons. His reading, while necessarily embrac-
ing chiefly works of a theological and sociological
nature, was of a remarkably wide range. For his
friends he chose, perhaps without realizing it, chiefly
those who could teach him most, whose occupations
kept them in widely differing spheres from his own,
and with these people he kept in constant but not
in exaggeratedly enthusiastic communication. A
favourite * request of his was : ec Be sure to write
often, not every day for a week, nor every week
for a month, but every month for many years!"
His own letters varied greatly in length, but never
in inspiration, owing to the fact that, if he had
nothing to write, he very rarely wrote, and, in
consequence, while some of his letters would run
to five or six sheets, others might be as short as
two lines only. He used to say that when he sat
down to write, provided that he had some sort of
an idea of what he wanted to say, his pen would
usually " run away " with him, and that he found
it quite a sound plan to allow it to do so ! Often,
of course, the results were disappointing, usually
i86 THE STUDENT IN ARMS
they were quite good, and occasionally they were
brilliant. It depended apparently on his mood.
He realized this, and was waiting and working
for the time when he should be able freely to
produce good literature of a wholesomely unre-
strained, and (more important) unstrained kind.
He was quite content to wait until he should have
acquired sufficient knowledge, and sufficient skill
in using it, before making any really ambitious
attempt to apply it. He wished to produce nothing
mediocre, and would have waited until nothing
that he had produced should, when finished, be
mediocre. But in 1914 he was not yet able to
produce uniformly good work, and was, unfortun-
ately, not able to judge the quality of what he had
written until some time after its production ; he
found it necessary, as it were, to place an interval
of time between himself and his work, just as an
artist finds it necessary, in order to view it in
better perspective, to stand back and place an in-
terval of distance between himself and his picture.
Before the war started, Hankey had produced
nothing which was primarily intended for publi-
cation in book form. His first two books :
Religion and Common Sense published post-
humously and, more particularly, The Lord of
All Good Life) were, though it may sound strange
to say so, written for his own enlightenment : before
starting on anything else, he was anxious to place
his own theological ideas on a sound logical basis ;
consequently, since he had an extraordinary faculty
for solving his problems subconsciously, he set to
work and wrote these two books in an incredibly
short time, with very little effort, no planning-out,
and no reference to notes or other works. They
DONALD HANKEY 187
constituted a revelation to him no less than to any-
one else reading them for the first time. Some of
Hankey's own remarks regarding the latter, work,
in a letter of his to his friend Allen of the Mission,
will show the real purpose for which it was written,
and how it served that purpose: " . . . It is
the sudden vision of what lots of obscure things
really meant ... it was written spontaneously in
a burst, in six weeks . . . suddenly everything
cleared up. To myself the writing of it was an
illumination. I did not write it because I wanted
to write a book and be an author. I wrote it
because . . . writing . . . was to me the natural
way of getting everything straight in my own mind,"
But perhaps another letter of Hankey's referring
to this book, written in March 1915 to another
friend of his, and hitherto unpublished, will best
describe his attitude towards current theology.
"... My pet background ideas were rudely destroyed some years
ago and I have since been endeavouring to readjust them. The
book is the result. A well-known American Biologist tells me that
the result is * in no way repugnant to the scientific mind, as nearly
all customary presentations of Christianity are. 5 What I have tried
to do is to find a background in which I could honestly believe while
retaining an open mind on scientific questions, and to build con-
structively, and not argumentatively on that. There is an answer
to a good deal of scientific criticism of Christianity implied in the
book, though it is not stated in that form because I have no quarrel
with Science.
* e For me the bedrock is that I decline to believe that what seems
to all men to be noble and admirable ... is not so.
" There are a number of scientists who refuse to admit the reality
in any sense or degree of the human will or conscience. They are
so obsessed with the idea of necessity as shown in cause and effect
that they refuse to admit that the human mind is anything but a
meeting place where various forces, or heredity, habit, and circum-
stance work out their inevitable resultant. These scientists do not
admit that the fact of human self-consciousness is anything but an
accident moreover, an accident which has no effect whatever. They
i88 THE STUDENT IN ARMS
say that our consciousness of the struggle that takes place within us
is of no more effectual importance than the noise made by a piece of
machinery. It is an accidental bye-product. This view has been
combated in the scientific world by William James and others. But
though I cannot say that I think that the theory can be disproved,
I am equally convinced that it cannot be proved. And I reject it
because it does not give a possible working philosophy. If you study
the religions and philosophies of the world you will find that all those
which are logically complete attain their end by denying the existence
of something which appears to be very real. Thus the Brahmin
denies the existence of all phenomena of everything. The Buddhist
denies the reality of personality. The Christian scientist denies the
reality of pain. And these scientific * determinists ' deny the reality
of the human self-consciousness, will, etc. All these, in the attempt
to produce a philosophy which shall be complete logically, end in
producing one which is unworkable and highly artificial practically.
But in other matterssuch as electricity one has to assume that
theory to be true which works best in practice. And so I think that
one is justified in the matter of morality in assuming that human
self-consciousness and will and conscience are realities, because that
gives the best result in practice. My scientific professor writes that
he has to be c an agnostic with regard to many ultimate questions.'
So have I. And so, he says, have most scientific men (which I am
not). But I feel on firm ground when I lay it down that because
it produces better results to believe that one has got will-power
however limited therefore it is more likely that one really has got
it than that one has not. This attitude is philosophically known as
* pragmatism ' or * humanism ' and is quite respectable !
"You will find traces of this argument in my chapter on the
Apostles' Creed ' Catholic Teaching.'
" After all, what you and I and our mates have got to do is to get
on and make the best of hie ; and you and I ... know that to make
the best of life one has got to be free from selfishness, pride, fear,
false ambitions, and to be kind, brave and pure. A philosophy
which tells us that life is like a hurdy-gurdy with dancing marionettes
who have to dance to the machinery, is no good to us. We know
that such a philosophy will make us bitter, useless, unhappy. It
is therefore untrue to facts as we know them. It is false. It is
disproved. On the other hand, a religion which teaches a point of
view from which all these things love, purity, fearlessness, humility
must necessarily proceed, is one which is going to make us happy
and useful, so that when we die men will say * the world was the better
for his life.' That religion is proved to be in the main true to facts
as we know them, practically true, c pragmatically true,' * humanly
true/ It is, isn't it, the religion we must follow or try to follow.
DONALD HANKEY 189
(( It does not work in practice to take a mechanical view of life.
No one has the right to say that matter and energy are real, and
that the soul is a dream
c Ah ye3, ah yes, but how explain the birth
Of dreams of soul upon a soul-less earth ? '
A philosophy which denies the reality of what seems the most im-
portant factor, the highest and noblest feature of life, has no claim
on our allegiance.
" But all the same, mind you, let truth prevail. Don't fight
against truth, don't defend Genesis against Darwin, don't defend the
indefensible.
" The real Christianity is not what we have been taught to think.
. . . Ultimately, why am I still trying to be a Christian ? Because
of my mother, of heroic men and women I have known in Bermondsey
and elsewhere, who showed me quite unconsciously an ideal which I
recognized as being the best thing I had ever seen or heard of."
In a letter written in January 1916, after he*
had transferred from the R.G.A. to his elder
brother's old regiment, the Royal Warwicks, he
describes the circumstances under which, finding
himself "stuck at home as a superfluous S.R. sub.,"
he wrote his Spectator articles : " However, having
kicked against the pricks and merely barked my
shins (I have twice tried to return to the ranks !)
I am now reconciled to staying here till the big
push, when it comes, creates some vacancies.
Meanwhile I have been perpetrating weekly
articles in the Spectator under the nom dt plume
of * A Student in Arms,' and am thinking of
publishing the series in volume form later on."
He regarded these articles as mere casual efforts,
but the series is indisputably far more brilliant and
human than the vast majority of similar war-time
word-pictures* Had he lived, he would probably
have eliminated the slight tendency to occasional
over-sentimentality of which his few adverse critics
have sometimes complained. His choice of a pen-
name, however, should have shown them that he
ipo THE STUDENT IN ARMS
still regarded himself as emphatically a student^
and his work as essentially the work of a student,
and not as a master in either the scholastic or
the artistic sense of the word.
He was thirty-two when in October 1916 his
life came to an end. He had achieved his ambition
to " leave the world the better for his life." And
war had taught the student much. This sketch
may fitly close as it opens with his own words :
" I have seen the vanity of the temporal and
the glory of the eternal ... I have understood
the victory of the Cross. O death, where is thy
sting ? Nunc dimittis^ Domine ! "
R. F. P.
IVAR CAMI'llIiil L
(LAITUV, AKOYI i, AND SUTHERLAND HK;HL\M>ERS)
THE HIGHLAND SOUL
IVAR CAMPBELL
IVAR CAMPBELL was the only son of Lord
George Campbell and a grandson of the eighth
Duke of Argyll, the famous statesman, and
he gathered up in his fresh young personality all the
various charms of his famous family. " Fair and
fause as a Campbell," says the old Scots proverb,
but there was no trace of the time-imputed Machia-
vellian falsity in this scion of a great family which
seems to gain rather than lose vitality as the genera-
tions pass. After all, the proverb I was compelled
to quote is but a scrap of historical criticism from
the supporters of a lost clause the clans that could
not prevent the encirclement of the Highlands by
the creation of a Campbell " buffer state " stretching
across the whole breadth of broad Scotland. The
sea on three sides and the Campbells on the fourth
contained the dwindling power of the Jacobites, and
so the Hanoverian succession was safely established
despite the militant breakaways of the Fifteen
and the Forty-five, No wonder the Campbells are
not exactly loved by those who still wear the white
rose in their hearts !
As to the " fairness" there could be no doubt
at all in Ivar Campbell's case. "His face,*' wrote
Mr Guy Ridley, who was his familiar friend, " was
of great beauty, with finely-drawn features. There
was something rare in the grace and vigour of his
carriage ; the impression he gave was one of healthi-
ness and virility of mind and body. He was of no
more than medium height, yet his sturdiness, the
breadth of his hands and wrists, the spring in his
r 9 2 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
movements, bore evidence of unusual strength. His
eyes were remarkable not only for their vitality, but
for their depth just as those who knew him best
could feel that there was a mysterious depth of
character behind the brilliance of his laughter, which
set them wondering how in the future years it
would exert its power. Some perhaps suspected the
presence of the same force and charm that made his
grandfather, the eighth Duke of Argyll, the most
eloquent orator of his day."
But it was his vivid youth, untamable or at any
rate untamed, and his keen and universal interest in
men and books which caused even the acquaintance
of a passing hour to remember him always. He
could find something strange and incalculable in the
most commonplace of men or women ; and he was
incapable of boring anybody, because nobody ever
bored him. As for his love of literature (of which
his study of Elizabethans at Eton was the earliest
sign), it cannot be expressed in words. Books were
to him living, breathing creatures, and he knew them
passionately.
Of his life at Inverary, at Eton, at Christ Church,
in Hanover, in Paris, and in America no detailed
account need be given. The hills and glens of
his ancestral home were a perpetual inspiration,
and it was the mightiness of the seasons in that
wondrous countryside which is the leitmotiv of The
Marriage of Earth and Spring^ the fair and
joyous ode which is the most ambitious of his
poetic achievements:
Now wedded Earth puts on her splendid dress
Woven of sunshine shot through quivering green ;
Now courting birds, to lure their heart's choice, preen
Fine feather'd coats
IVAR CAMPBELL 193
And try a thousand times their love-song's notes ;
Now little spear-point fronds of flowers press
Their busy heads
Through garden-beds ;
And once again climbs new sap up the wood,
Making the old trees young with small buds 5 sheen.
Now deathless souls peep 'neath memorial stones,
To prove their bodies' immortality,
Which feed Earth's wombe'd children with their bones.
Now God indeed perceives 'tis very good,
As leaning forward on his throne he hears,
Above the constant shrilling of the spheres,
Earth giving back to him his minstrelsy.
He loved books, but was no bookworm ; all the
joys of open-air living were his from time to time,
and Mr Guy Ridley and other close friends believe
that he was never happier than when tramping the
king's highway, pack on shoulder and the lilt of an
old, old tune on his lips. "Walking is a brave
thing," he wrote, " a large thing, a dusty thing, as
you will, but like the sea it touches heaven." He
had eyes for everything when tramping alone or
with a friend, and his mind became a gallery of
impressions painted in undying colours of which the
following description is a charming example :
Along a lane near Grafton there are more poppies than are to be
found I suppose in any other lane in the English shires. From the
field beyond, hidden by a leafy beech hedge whereon clamber and
sway wild roses and over which elderberry-trees open to the skies
flat flowers that are big platters for the bees to feed upon, they pour
down to the white road's edge in a thousand scarlet ranks ; and in
number they are like a great company of cardinals seated tier upon
tier. And the upper air of Grafton is encircled, as it were, with larks
that hang like spiders from the blue, and sway, and fall a little, and
climb again ladderwise upon the windy currents. And they do not
cease singing until the sun has set.
(I read this passage about the larks to a famous
air fighter, and he said : " Why, he should have
been in the Flying Corps! How he would have
N
i 9 4 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
loved to see the upper side of cloudland, with its
vast snow-fields and sudden precipices ! " It is
curious how everybody who knew Ivar Campbell
felt sure that he could have made a success of any
pursuit). He was happy in untamed Northern
wilds or in the green ambuscades of our Southern
garden-land. Yet for all that he was happily at
home in any city of the soul, such as Venice or
Paris. The simplicity of life in Venice attracted
him as much as the beauty of its monuments of a
glorious past. He did not feel that he was but a
guest of the dead there; he rejoiced in his bright
vision of a living joyous city, where the sonorous
voices of great bells (the slgna of mediaeval times),
the everlasting lapping of little waves, and the full-
throated laughter of children (Venetian babies have
the blackbird's music in their throats) make a harmony
which measures the flowing and ebbing of time.
Paris also was a child's town to him ; though there
it was the grown-ups who seemed children. " Am I
not in child's town?" he once wrote to Mr Guy
Ridley. " Where's the Punch and Judy show played
finer than 'tis played in the Luxembourg Gardens
or where bloom flowers with more colour than there ?
where are the girls prettier? In child's town we
do not frown when we pass strangers I am dancing
now in the sun do you hear me laughing ? " He
was a well-known figure in Paris of the " Riv'
Gauche," and students and artists who live and work
and play there were always glad to see him. He
could easily distinguish between the sincere artist
and the clever charlatan who is so refreshingly fre-
quent on the Batte Montmartre, that realistic Venus-
berg. The former became his intimate friend ; the
latter remained for him one of the amusing children
IVAR CAMPBELL 195
who insisted on never growing up. He loved
children, both old and young. And he himself
never lost that wise childishness, which is a dew of
mysticism on the flowering intelligence and is, for
the creative artist, the greatest of all spiritual gifts,
for it enables you to keep your soul fresh and fragrant
and make your life a new creation daily.
Many of his friends in Paris were Americans,
and the interest he felt in them made him eager to
discover their amazing country for himself. So he
went to Washington as honorary attache to the
British Embassy (1912-14), and what America was
to this child Columbus and what he was to America
is best told in the following passages from a letter
written to Mr Guy Ridley (his pre-ordained bio-
grapher) by Lord Eustace Percy who was with him
at Washington :
" What struck me when Ivar came out to America (for I had hardly
seen him for some years) was the liveliness of his interest in these
movements. 1 He was quick in seizing the point of current Diplomatic
business, but the international questions, I think, left him rather
cold. It was the internal condition of the country, especially on its
human side, and particularly, perhaps, the more radical syndicalist
effervescence in the ranks of unskilled and foreign labour, which
really interested him. Here his interest was most catholic. I
remember, for example, that Gerald Stanley Lee's ' Inspired Million-
aires ' and Giovanitti's revolutionary vers libres ' at one moment
held equal places in his library ! I don't think he ever looked at
things from the political or the statesmen's point of view he never
cared to ask whether a given movement gave promise of permanence
or practical effect. It was simple e humanness ' that he looked for,
and he naturally found it on all sides, for the attraction of America
to a man of active mind is that it provides a clear and open field for
ideals, social experiments, peculiar movements, and attempts at
reform which in older countries are entangled with and obscured by
the dtbris of past efforts. It was remarkable that in all this effer-
vescence, which has its very comic side, Ivar's strong sense of humour
1 The various Radical movements which had found expression in
Roosevelt's Progressive Campaign and in such Labour disturbances as
the Lawrence strike.
196 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
was but rarely aroused by the vagaries of the idealists, though it
sparkled into life over the sordid sides of American politics, of which
this period furnished one or two particularly flagrant examples,
He was careful and accurate in his performance of
the routine work of the Embassy; but, much as
diplomacy interested him on its human side, it is
doubtful whether he would have made a successful
diplomatist. After his return to England in the
spring of 1914 (when few saw the cloud, no bigger
than a mailed fist, rising in the East) he talked of
starting a book-shop in Chelsea. There under the
peaceful name of John Cowslip he proposed to sell
books and drawings by modern artists and also
holly walking-sticks polished like ivory, to be cut
by his familiar friend in certain woodlands they had
discovered in their wanderings. War he never
thought of at all ; he loved his fellow-creatures too
well not to loathe the very idea of that tremendous
release of long-hoarded hatreds which, little as he
dreamed of such a destiny, was to find him an all-
engrossing vocation and at the same time perfect
his literary craftsmanship. Let us look at the
various writings he has left before showing how
the soldier latent in him (as in every member of his
brilliant race) found expression in deeds and words
alike.
His poems, some of which were published in
various periodicals, show a technique far in advance
of what one would expect from so young and in-
frequent a poet. He never mistakes prosody for
poetry ; he never wastes words ; he never mistakes
pose for poise ; he never writes verse for the sake of
versifying, but only under the stress of some
spiritual necessity. Even his sonnets are not merely
exercises in the little gymnasium, to use Henley's
IVAR CAMPBELL 197
similitude in a conversation I had with him, where
so many of the Muse's apprentices learn to get their
poetical muscle up and wear the heavy golden
fetters of difficult form as gracefully as may
be. The Elizabethan note, modulated subtly to
modernity, is clear in the following poem entitled
Love's Recognition :
Conceive mine eyes a mirror : in them gleaming
Behold a picture of tliine outward view
Lovelier fancy than young poet's dreaming,
More splendid than the morn's resplendent hue,
So canst thou see thy pattern in mine eyes,
And I in thine peruse thy deep soul's thought,
And by reflection read love's mysteries
The magic of whose speech thy lips I taught.
And when we hail love's recognition thus,
Eyes close to eyes, the passionate lips must meet
And join in hushed communion marvellous,
And soul speed forth companion soul to greet.
So shall we wander through new realms of bliss,
Two beating hearts made single by that kiss.
In other poems he shows himself an adept in the
distinctly perilous device (among the masters only
Heredia can always be sure of success) of the final
line that sums up all that has gone before. For
example, this is the last stanza of a long ballad of
the wood Barolelf where " it is always Autumn and
the leaves fall from the trees for ever and ever " :
To bury her they fall,
All her limbs to cover,
Tenderly they fall,
Every leaf a lover.
In a curious form, which makes effective use of the
drone-note rhyme, we get perhaps his condemnation
of war, as delusion and illusion even if it be
victorious :
198 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
When in their long lean ships the Greek host weighed
Their splashing anchors, then they had much joy
For lovely Helen's sake to humble Troy . . .
Their first deed was the murder of a maid.
Ten years from their pleasant land they stayed,
And after ten years, had they any joy ?
They had old Helen, and they humbled Troy :
Were they at her lost loveliness dismayed ?
Thinking of their lost Youth were they afraid ?
Was Youth worth more than Helen Helen of Troy ?
Was it for this tired face they had spent joy ?
For this tall, weary woman burnt a maid ?
When on that quiet night the Greek host laid
Down their old dinted armour, had they any joy ?
Later on he wrote, in a letter from the trenches, of the
u organized boredom " of modern warfare. A
monotonous futility is well indicated, surely, in these
fourteen lines rhymed on a hard and a heavy sound.
In all this I find an unfaltering sense of the appro-
priate form and also, what is rarer still in young
poets, a feeling for the artistic values of the vowels.
And, rarest of all gifts with the apprentices of
modern times, he could sing as is shown in these
two examples of the tiny lyric which brings its own
music with it :
i
Peace, God's own pe^ce,
This it is I bring you
The quiet song of sleep,
Dear tired heart, I sing you.
Dream, softly dream,
Till solemn death shall find you,
With coronals of roses
Tenderly to bind you.
Peace past understanding,
Dear tired heart, I bring you ;
The quiet song of evening
Softly I sing you.
IVAR CAMPBELL 199
Once again, earth,
Cometh thy spring ;
Once again thy birth,
Thy new flowering.
After winter dearth
This prayer I bring,
God be with thee, earth,
In thy travailing.
The unpublished prose pieces he left are even
more interesting than his poems. Three essays in
criticism (entitled John Ghtyne's Letters] attempt
a reconciliation between his love of the great
Victorians and his loving kindness for the Georgians.
In form these papers are true essays ; marked by an
almost Elian play of fancy, at times rising to a
lyrical ardour, and always keeping the quality of
casualness which is characteristic of the born essayist.
They are marked by a sheer sincerity ; he refuses to
sit at the feet of any critical Gamaliel or to use the
official short-cuts to appreciation, but makes up his
mind for himself and utters his considered judgment
without fear or favour. The third essay (Oscar
Wilde and True Beauty] ends with a tremendous
onslaught against the false astheticism which was
epidemic among young men in the last two decades
of the nineteenth century :
If you grumble at me and ask What, then, is True Beauty and
where does it lie ? I cannot tell you. But I can most certainly hint
at the direction. It is not the pallid lily that languorously sways in
the hot-house air, but it is the wild white cherry and the golden gorse
upon the uplands. It is not strange perfumes from the East and
amorous soaps and salts that make water of the softness of velvet and
sweeter than kisses, but it is the wind laden with the smell of wild
flowers, and it is the earth and it is the rivers and it is the trees. It
is not delicate and frail and languid ; but it is strong. It is not easy ;
it is difficult. Compare the Beauty Wilde delighted in with the great
Beauty Browning knew, with the soaring spirit Beauty was to Shelley,
200 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
with the mystical but fine Faith Beauty was to Francis Thompson.
Why follow Wilde ? Why blind your eyes to the distinction between
health and disease ? Is it that you love Wilde's words that you
imagine him a master of phrases ? Let me ask you to turn back
to the great prose-writers of England and in their light and in your
knowledge of the structure and rhythm of sentences perceive the
worth of your master's genius a paper wind-mill for babes to play
with ! Is it gorgeousness you wish for lists of gems and descriptions
of splendour, mazy arabesques and mosaics of style ? Read Hakluyt's
Voyages and you will discover that the early merchants who traded
in India understood to perfection the translation into writing of
Oriental magnificence. Is it the mere sonnet of words you wish for ?
It is a poor desire to seek in prose solely the music of vocables.
But turn to Sir Thomas Browne, turn to Jeremy Taylor, turn to your
Bible. You will discover, the more you read, the more you under-
stand, the more ignominious appears the cult of that type of Beauty to
which Oscar Wilde paid homage, and whose idol he set up in England.
So the stout worshipper of Duessa retires abashed,
waving a protest with hands encased in yellow kid
gloves! The second essay is a panegyric on the
open-air lyrics of Mr W. H. Davies (a much bigger
man than the super-tramp whom G. B. S. discovered)
which are as pure as a thrush's note and clean and
fresh as a May morning and joyously live up to and
beyond the singing lines :
Sing out, my Soul, thy songs of joy ;
Such as a happy bird will sing
Beneath a rainbow's lovely arch
In early spring.
The remaining paper confuses and contrasts Nietzsche
and Henley, finding in the latter's famous Hymn oi
Agnosticism a faith beyond and above the former's
philosophy of reaction against the tyranny of pain.
The inner secret, the causa causans y of Nietzsche's
creed, is expounded once for all in the following
story :
Two years ago I fell ill, and had to nurse me a woman of keen in-
tellect and quite remarkable intuition. When convalescent, I read
to her certain passages from our iconoclastic preacher's works. She
IVAR CAMPBELL 201
had not read him had scarcely heard talk of him ; her interests
brave, noble interests are in other things. When I had finished,
I asked her opinion of the author. u I cannot pretend to judge on
so small an extract/ 5 she answered, < but I think this Nietzsche must
have been continually in pain, bodily or mental." Marvelling at so
accurate a discovery of the truth, I asked her reason for saying this.
" Because," she said, " in the course of my expressions I have often
noticed that men, gentle-natured when in health, sometimes become,
when suffering pain, quite extraordinarily cruel. They cannot bear
pain as women can." And she told me one or two stories as a proof
of her remark.
So it was his continuous, shattering headaches that
bred in Nietzsche's ravaged brain his glorification
of brute force ; thus he flouted the cruelty of nature
with a cruelty of his own. But Henley, though
he too lived through purgatories of pain, one dark
fire-illumined chamber opening out of another, kept
his courage unconquered, his soul sweet and genial
in spite of fits of irritation which were sometimes
expressed in injustice to old friends, such as the dead-
and-gone Stevenson sleeping loftily in Samoa. His
soul remained anima naturaliter cbristiana\ he
refused to follow the easy creed of the superman,
hacking his way through all living obstacles with a
butcher's cleaver, and found instead the more
difficult path of which Clement said: "It is an
enterprise of noble daring to take our way to God."
. . . And, in passing, does not this explanation of
Nietzsche's brutal creed also solve the problem of
German cruelty. Of all the peoples in 'the war they
are the most neurotic, the least capable of bearing
pain with courage and dignity. All our surgeons
who have treated wounded Germans are agreed on
that point. Perhaps the pain they inflict on helpless
prisoners of war is their revenge for the pain and,
worse still, the fear of pain with which nature
punishes their ill-balanced nervous system.
202 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
Ivar Campbell had a genius for fantasy, and some
of his efforts in that mode, ranging from full-length
examples like The Story of the Fiddler^ whose
soul hanged itself with a chain of stars on a horn of
the moon, to the tiniest fragments, are unlike anything
else of the kind in English literature. Absinthe,
really an essay in the freest of free verse, is a striking
proof of his gift for making arabesques of thought
touched with emotion :
Beauty veileth her face in seven veils ; she hath become a thing
of doubt, an imagination tainted.
Cloudily, grey-green from the tumbler's depth she whirleth ; to
my brain's innermost chamber she whirleth, green-green, cloudily.
To me the windy uplands were a creed and the bird-song alleluiah ;
to rne the bare earth's bosom was an anthem and a dancing leaf
laughter.
To me the song of running waters was Beauty's song ; and a wood-
land primrose Beauty's prayer.
Beauty, fever-flushed, was a virgin wed ; autumn in forest places
was to me Beauty's celestial violation.
Now she veileth her face in seven veils ; she hath become a thing
of doubt, an imagination tainted.
Cloudily, grey-green from the tumbler's deeps she whirleth; so
to my brain's innermost chamber she whirleth, grey-green, cloudily.
It is clear he was an experimentalist of genius ; he
did not, alas, live long enough for the experience
which chooses one of many by-ways and makes it
the high-way of life-long endeavour. But for the
war, I think, he might have become a master of the
fantastical essay a rare thing indeed in English
literature. Like all young writers his thoughts ran
on death, which is the theme of two curious experi-
ments, one a grim piece of realism relating the pass-
ing of a poor old woman in a hovel where her son,
a tired labourer, sleeps uneasily in his working
clothes. But it is in Roads that his manner is
most formed, that the surest promise is shown of his
IVAR CAMPBELL 203
admirable war-letters. Roads is the story of a
walking tour in which he and a friend played the
part of vagabond so well that village girls giggled at
them ; nay, even the vague people at the coffee-stall
in Sloane Square, where they and Moab, the donkey,
made the first halt, paid them a tribute of laughter.
Hazlitt was asleep, his blinds undrawn, as they
passed his house. But, later on, there came to him
a beatitude, a vision, of the abolition of gentility
according to a half-forgotten prescription, for even in
Germany that Shavian play will never be played
again :
And as I lay upon the packed cart, Ransome loitering many miles
behind, and Moab plod-plodding along, I dreamed this dream. Upon
fair white roads, upon tarred motor-ways, through rutty tracks
among hedges, there passed a procession of pale thin things, set
ill-at-ease upon donkey-carts, gazing with cunous eyes at the country
sights and sounds and snuffing uncertainly the smells of wood and
moorland and leafy lanes. And in my dream I led this procession,
my cart went creaking happily as leader while I ran whispering into
the white ears of these things Say " bloody/ 3 I whispered, and a
sigh would come from the lips of them " bloody " they would say
softly without conviction.
Like Kenneth Grahame's children and Mr Hilaire
Belloc, he enters on a philosophy of roads, as lines
of ulterior significance in the palimpsest of the
English countryside, which he seems to have acquired
from the gipsies, to judge by these excerpts from a
journal :
" In Wiltshire once I told a black-haired woman she was upon a
Roman Road.
" ' It's a Romany Road/ she said.
" ' Well, well/ I said, ' we call it a Roman Road/
" ' You may pronounce it like that/ said she. * A Romany Road
would be a gypsy road, and in Wiltshire the Roman roads are used
by gypsies more than by other travellers/
" ' This road goes all round the World/ said another dark woman
to me ; and this for the Romans was true enough. ' We be Romans
204 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
indeed, it is our road, but the fanners do plant their crops upon it and
fence it in, and we are unable to travel there.' "
He has glimpses of the Roman legionaries marching
on these ancient grass-grown thoroughfares and of
all the later generations of warriors who died in old,
forgotten battles still they march by moonlight, in
darkly gleaming harness, led by the shadows of great
names no more remembered. He died in Meso-
potamia before the memories of that sad, derelict
land could take hold of his vivid imagination. I
can imagine what pictures he would have given us,
had he lived long enough, of the pageantry of the
ages of warfare there the Assyrians with their
mighty calves (tremendous marchers they were, and
that physical trait survives to this very day in their
posterity) hastening to eat up a rebellious city, the
tall chivalrous Persians in their leathern trousers, and
the " Ten Thousand " whose march up to within
sight and hearing of Babylon and successful retreat,
the most wonderful in history, opened a door ot
hope to the ambition of Alexander the Great.
When the war broke out, he volunteered at once,
but the doctors turned him down. This stroke of
ill-luck left him searching everywhere for work in
which he could be of service to his country. There
was a moment when he almost gave up the quest,
sadly resigning himself to being what he called " one
of the useless ones." However he learnt to drive a
motor ambulance, and worked for some time in
France with the American Red Cross. Returning
to England, with his determination to become a
soldier renewed, he was once more rejected by a
medical board. At the third time of asking, how-
ever, he was accepted, and in February, 1915, received
a commission in the regiment of his clan, the Argyll
IVAR CAMPBELL 205
and Sutherland Highlanders. The depression from
which he had been suffering vanished, and he
rejoiced in his new life, giving his whole heart and
soul to the routine and discipline of training. He
had found his vocation ; or, rather, it had found him.
No more pithy or picturesque letters than his
have ever been written from the Western front or on
the way to it. The old, fighting blood sings in his
veins when, in the course of training, he finds him-
self in command of a full company of his clansmen,
" My voice," he writes, " uprose above wind and
rain. I evolved them from close column of platoons
to columns of fours from the right of platoons.
The pipers went before and the drums (terurn tatoo,
terum tatoo) and I came strutting behind, and the
company followed me like a flag flowing down the
road. Me for a sojer ! " But it was a sad blow,
when he went on active service, to find he was not
for the Argylls but for the Seaforths. Four
"cheeky Charlies" or "pipsqueaks," the wicked
little shells that arrive with a sudden whiz, bestowed
on him the baptism of fire four months after he had
been gazetted. His letters are full of small etchings,
not a word astray or askew, of the scenes of trench
warfare. " At dawn," to give an example, u came
a mist over this flat, scarred landj the sun rose
ghostly white as a moon; a cuckoo between the
enemy's lines laughed. Away to the left came "the
long staccato sounds of rifle-fire, and the wooden
tapping of the machine guns. Both sides feared an
advance through the mist j sweep the ground there
to the front with bullets ; make them think twice
about getting out of their trenches. ... In the
mist, careless, unthinking, a German climbed over
his parapet into the field ! The English, no doubt,
206 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
were asleep; anyhow the mist was concealment.
So may he think in Heaven or Hell ; we have some
good shots in this Battalion. That morning the bag
was two brace." Like a born soldier, he is at his
keenest in the weird, far-listening morn ; and in the
evening, when the glimmering landscape fades and so
many are tired and careless. The thought that war,
after all, is the most natural mode of existence occurs
again and yet again :
It is difficult to write things out here. Journalists do it, yet miss
the note of naturalness which strikes me. For these things are natural.
I suppose we have been fighting a thousand thousand years to a thou-
sand years' peace ; they miss, too, the beauty of the scene and action
as a whole that beauty defined as something strange, rarefied;
our deep passions made lawful and evident ; our desires made accept-
able ; our direction straight. Such will be the impressions to linger,
to be handed on to future generations, as the Napoleonic wars are
fine adventures to us. Here, present and glaring to our eyes in
trenches and in billets, etc., the more abiding and deeper meanings
of the war are readable.
Here's a scene I shall remember always : A misty summer morn-
ing I went along a sap-head running towards the German line at
right-angles to our own. Looking out over the country, flat and un-
interesting in peace, I beheld what at first would seem to be a land
ploughed by the ploughs of giants. In England you read of concealed
trencheshere we do not trouble about that. Trenches rise up,
grey clay, 3 or 4 feet above the ground. Save for one or two men
snipers at the sap-head, the country was deserted. No sign of
humanity a dead land. And yet thousands of men were there,
like rabbits concealed. The artillery was quiet ; there was no sound
but a cuckoo in a shell-torn poplar. Then, as a rabbit in the early
morning comes out to crop grass, a German stepped over the enemy
trench the only living thing in sight. " I'll take him," says the
man near me. And like a rabbit the German falls. And again com-
plete silence and desolation.
He is afraid this must be bad writing ; he feels
he had never learnt to write naturally of natural
things. Yet, as he himself guesses, Stevenson wrote
in a similar style of a somewhat similar scene, as
quiet and secret and ominous, when he described
IVAR CAMPBELL 207
the shooting of the king's factor in Appin so as to
bring out the naturalness of it all. Here is a very
different, but equally intimate, impression of the
life in a vast theatre of war which is yet never
theatrical :
A concert in the evening very touching to my incurable senti-
mentalism up against an old farm-house : the stage a cart a ring
of dim faces and knees below ; and the slow, sad songs these men
love, with choruses they sing softly, and occasionally the wild wail
of Gaelic : to end with k ' God save the King " all of us very stiff
at the attention : and back to the mess and drinks and chaff and tales
of nothing at all of this man here and that man there, and how
So-and-So died and Jim got nerves and Bill the D.S.O., and good-
night, good-night : and in the silence following lights out, the thud
of the guns punctures the night stillness.
Affairs are moving here or will move or have moved. Continual
rumours buzz like mosquitoes about us. Those in authority seem
satisfied and pleased : they are able to perceive large and clear ;
we, cooped in our own speculations, are optimistic, for optimism,
though founded on ignorance, is good for the nerves. Douglas writes
the War may collapse as suddenly as it rose up. God and the devil
know ! humanity can but hope. War, perchance, may become a
habit. In twenty years you may still be writing to me and I to you.
We shall have advanced a thousand yards, or retired a strategical
movement.
Paris has passed a law for marriage by proxy for soldiers in the
trenches, God forbid things should go too far, and the children be
born by proxy too ! Yet who can tell, in twenty years. A young
Frenchman arrives in the trenches ; seeks un Monsieur Tel ou Tel.
He finds him. " Bonjour, papa ; j'suis ton fils." " Mon fils ?
Grands Dieux par qui ? " " Ton ancienne amie, Marie-Louise."
" Marie-Louise Marie-Louise ? Ah 1 je m'en souviens. Elle est
ma femme, alors ? " " Oui, Papa, et j'suis ton fils." " Bien, je
suis content : j'en ai d'autres par ici, mais, n'importe. Tu vois les
tranchees en face ? ' " Oui, papa." " Sont les Boches en avant,
fils de Marie-Louise par je ne sais qui en avant, fils de mon coeur "
And here is another night-piece which does not
end in speculative thoughts under the moon, that
whole sepulchre in the skies, scribbled over with
hicjacetS) and the merriment yet is reaction :
Went down to the fire trench with 100 men last night, and dug hard
for three hours. Very tired and hot; the enemy were quiet; a
208 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
starry night ; the peace of war on such occasions is a blessed state ;
though to the sight is little peace. Our star shells and theirs float
continually up into the sky to illumine any evil deeds either may con-
template across that unmanned borderland between the hostile
trenches. I find in this bright white light you see the rare trees
blasted as by lightning blasted indeed by a more terrible but more
common occurrence, shell-fire and the rough outlines of trenches
and men's figures immense behind them : if working, struck immobile
by light, lest any enemy sniper should detect movement. Groups
of Rodin designs in the distance, too, gaunt skeletons of houses.
His men, of course, are in his mind all the time;
it is the custom never to forget them in a Highland
Regiment, where all are thought of as gentlemen,
fellow-clansmen, equals in a sense. He tells a
quaint, quotable story of what one of his men
wrote in a letter home ; he had trained at Airdrie
before coming out. " When I was back home, 35 he
wrote, " I wished to Hell I was out of Airdrie ;
now I wish to Airdrie I was out of Hell." He is
vexed by his dirtiness ; like everybody else he feels
over-savoury. The meaning of the soldier's song :
I've a little grey flea in my vest,
comes home to him, as the co-operative smell ascends
to heaven and each individual conducts a private
offensive against the Little Brothers of the Prussian,
Anyhow, they are cleaner than the Indian regiments-
It is one thing to admire them at night and to feel
you are taking over trenches from bronze gods.
It is another thing to inhabit their trenches which
u move bodily across country like cheese"" and, as
the American soldier said, have to be lassoed first
The enemy is chaffed as well as sniped and strafed
by turns :
There was a pleasant though vulgar incident in the trenches the
other day. We had painted upon a board and shown the enemy the
news of the Riga sea-fight. And to make sure they understood, we
wrote the news down, put the .paper in a jam-tin stuffed with earth
IVAR CAMPBELL 209
to make it heavy, and catapulted it over, as if it had been a bomb,
to the German trenches, which it just failed to reach. However, a
Boche, trusting to the sporting instinct of the Scotch, climbed out of
his trench and picked the tin up !
The details of the Riga fight were fairly written down ; the vulgarity
came in the line :
" The Kaiserin has had twins."
Then comes a battle, not pressed to extremes, and
so called a " demonstration " :
The splutter of shrapnel, the red squeal of field guns, N.E, ; the
growl of the heavies moving slowly through the air, the cr-r-r-r-ump
of their explosion. But in a bombardment all tones mingle and their
noise is like machinery running not smoothly but roughly, pantingly,
angrily ; wildly making chaos of peace and wholeness.
You perceive, too, in imagination, men infinitely small, running,
affrighted rabbits, from the upheaval of the shells nerve-racked,
deafened ; clinging to earth, hiding eyes, whispering " God, O
God ! " You perceive, too, other men, sweaty, brown, infinitely
small also, moving the guns, feeding the belching monster, grimly,
quietly pleased.
But with eyes looking over this land of innumerable irruptions,
you see no man. The land is inhuman.
But thousands of men are there ; men who are below ground,
men who have little bodies but immense brains. And the men facing
West are saying, " This is an attack, they will attack when this hell's
over," and they go on saying this to themselves continually.
And the men facing East are saying, " We've got to get over the
parapet. We've got to get over the parapet when the guns lift."
And then the guns lift up their heads and shout a longer, higher
song.
And this un tenanted land is suddenly alive with little men, rushing,
stumbling rather foolishly leaping forward laughing, shouting,
crying in the charge.
There is one thing cheering. The men of the Battalion through
all and in spite of that noisy, untasty day ; through the wet, cold
night, hungry and tired, living now in mud and water, with every
prospect of more rain to-morrow are cheery. Sometimes t back
in billets, I hate the men their petty crimes, their continual bad
language with no variety of expression, their stubborn moods. But
in a difficult time they show up splendidly. Laughing in mud, joking
in water I'd " demonstrate " into Hell with some of them and not
care.
Yet, under heavy shell-fire it was curious to look into their eyes
210 THE HIGHLAND SOUL
some of them little fellows from shops, civilians before, now and after :
you perceived a wide rathei frightened, piteous wonder in their eyes,
a patient look turned towards you, saying not " What the blankety,
blankety hell is this ? " but " Is this quite fair ? We cannot move,
we are but little animals. Is it quite necessary to make such infernally
large explosive shells to kill such infernally small and feeble animals
as ourselves ? "
I quite agreed with them, but had to put my eye-glass firmly in
my eye and make jokes ; and, looking back, I blush to think of the
damnably bad jokes I did make.
He gets out of the trenches for a time, and has
leisure, in the intervals of teaching the art of throw-
ing bombs, to think over the folly of the politicians,
" men, severally great in peace-time, in war-time
treading upon each other's toes as they grumble and
stutter and stumble and mutter in the dark of their
statesmanship," Kitchener and Joffre are silent,
but they go on talking, talking, talking, and
"Welsh David swings traversely from heights of
tub-oratory to depths of journalistic cliches."
At the end of the year he is transferred to
Mesopotamia, where he knows that war will be
more like the old historic game of pitched battles,
pursuit and retreat, marching and counter-marching.
He asks for a copy of Xenophon's Anabasis, the
best story of military adventure ever written. He
had by then made up his mind to remain a soldier
for the rest of his life. But he was shot through
the body, while gallantly leading his men against a
strong Turkish position in front of Sheikh Saad,
and died on the 8th January 1916, in his twenty-
sixth year.
AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
TOM KETTLE
AT the General Election of 1910 Tom Kettle
(as he was familiarly, affectionately, called
by his political friends and enemies alike)
was again returned as Parliamentary representative
for East Tyrone by an increased majority. In the
course of the election he was welcomed at one remote
and rather inaccessible spot by a poverty-stricken
populace which had improvised a mountain band
and crude home-made torches of turf and paraffin.
" Friends/' said the winning candidate, surely one
of the wisest and wittiest of Irishmen, " you have
met us with God's two best gifts to man fire and
music." All who can see him clear for what he
truly was, in spite of mists of party prejudice and
the age-long misunderstanding between England
and Ireland, will admit that these were the very
gifts he himself gave to humanity in the greatest
crisis of the world's history. Fire and music:
firstly, a most abundant endowment of the per-
ferwdum ingenium Scotorum which has seen a
leaping flame on so many lofty altars in Ireland
and elsewhere; secondly, a career closing in the
Last Post, which was as subtle a harmony of
beautiful assonances as the most exquisite and other-
worldly of Celtic poems.
Thomas M. Kettle was the third son of Andrew
J. Kettle and of Margaret MacGourt ; he was born
in 1880 at Artane, Co, Dublin. He was proud of
his Norse ancestry and of the way in which these
211
212 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
pirates of the North were subdued to nobler usages
" We came, we the invaders, to dominate and
remained to serve, For Ireland has signed us with
the oil and chrism of her human sacrament, and
even though we should deny the faith with our
lips, she would hold our hearts to the end." He
was not less proud of his dour old father, a famous
local reformer, who did more than any other man
to free Ireland from the curse of absentee owners,
and could not bring himself to receive the milder
counsels of an age of more humane politics. Tom
Kettle lived in the country until he was twelve, and
the stilly charm and ancient peace of the remember-
ing fields were with him to the end, wooing him to
leave the dust and uproar of politics and settle down
in some picturesque cottage to cultivate early potatoes
and late literature. The soul of the fine Irishman is
always thus divided against itself; but the fighting
instinct commonly prevails against the deep desire
to live quietly under quicken boughs and be a
comrade of birds and flowers and the consulting
stars, and so make one's soul. He was educated
first at the Christian Brothers' School in Dublin and
next at Clongowes Wood College, and he won
many medals and distinctions there and at Univer-
sity College, whither he proceeded in 1897. At
University College he became Auditor of the
Literary and Historical Society, and won the gold
medal for Oratory. His peculiar gifts were already
apparent, especially his happy faculty, actually
amounting to genius, for grasping a complex sub-
ject and crystallizing it in a brief, brilliant phrase.
A breakdown in health, the effect of over-study on
a high-strung and unresting mind, interrupted his
university career for a long period, and in 1904 the
TOM KETTLE 213
death of a brother to whom he was passionately
attached still further taxed his shattered nervous
system. He had to visit the Tyrol to recover his
health, and it was during this wander-year that he
perfected his knowledge of European languages and
literature and learned to see Irish affairs in the just
and ample perspective of world-thought and world-
policy. Ireland, in the most significant period of
her ancient and impressive history, when she was
the land of refuge for Roman culture during the
Dark Ages and for centuries afterwards, was
intimately in touch much more closely than
England with European civilisation, and it was
Kettle's ruling ideal to revive in Ireland a sense of
her historical mission as a seed-plot of spirituality for
the European world and, what is more, a mediator
between the power of England and the living
mosaic of European cultures. He was drawn into
a close and yet closer sympathy with France, the
conqueror of liberty for herself and for all other
nations, great and small, and always able to under-
stand the beautiful and impulsive soul of Ireland,
" The Irish mind," he wrote in one of his books,
" is like the French c lucid, vigorous, and positive '
though less methodical, since it never had the
happiness to undergo the Latin discipline, 1 France
and Ireland have been made to understand each
other." When these determining motives of his
mentality are fully understood, it becomes manifest
that he could never have held aloof from the
struggle against Germany's attempt to impose her
Kultur, which is barbarism made scientific and pro-
vincialism writ large, on lands that were Christian
and civilized centuries before even the Cross, which
1 Ireland was never* a part of the Roman Empire.
AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
is a sword-hilt, appeared in the forests and wilder-
nesses of the Alemanni.
He was called to the Bar in 1905, after winning
a Victoria Prize at the end of his term at King's
Inns, There can be no doubt he would have been
a brilliantly successful advocate if he could have
made the law his profession. But he could not
confine himself to the point of view for which he
was briefed, could not bind his rich and humane
personality down to the bed of Procrustes of legal
moulds and forms, which seemed to him "too
narrow and too nicely definite, too blank to
psychology to contain the passionate chaos of the
life that is poured into them." A friendly critic
justly observed that he could only have been his
own happy self as an advocate when pleading on
the Judgment Day at the Bar of Heaven for a
reversal of the historic verdicts against all desperate
sinners. The lines of a half-forgotten poet who
stands himself in need of a little white-washing :
Never to bow or kneel
To any brazen lie ;
To love the worst ; to feel
The worst is even as I.
To count all triumph vain
That helps no* burdened man.
I think so still, and so
I end as I began.
was his creed, and none more unsuitable for a success-
ful barrister could be imagined. He found it a
dreadful ordeal to defend a criminal unsuccessfully
and to think afterwards that there might have been
no conviction if another and a better lawyer had
been chosen for the defence. And to have been
successful in the prosecution of some poor wretch
would have been a still more terrible experience for
TOM KETTLE 215
one who believed that, as all human beings are
saints, so they are all sinners, and that the innocent
at any rate the legally innocent are those who
have not been found out.
He soon forsook the Law and plunged into
journalism, which, thanks to his vigorous and varied
prose style, became literature in his hands. He was
too outspoken and too much of a man of letters
to be retained long in an editorial chair by pro-
prietors who, especially in Ireland, think an editor
ought to be a flesh-and-blood gramophone. In
1906 he was given the opportunity of fighting the
East Tyrone constituency, which he won by a
majority of sixteen. Nobody else could have won
and held that particular seat in the Nationalist
interest. In the autumn of the same year he went
to America on a political mission which was for him
a personal triumph. The freedom and hospitality
of the United States greatly delighted him ; he was
at home for six months in that electric atmosphere,
so full of intellectual ozone, and he treasured up the
humorous sayings he heard there such as u I don't
know where I am going but I am on my way," and
" we trust in God ; all others pay cash." There is
a spice of gauloiserie in American humour which
must have appealed to so keen a votary of French
wit. In 1910 he was re-elected for East Tyrone by
a majority of 1 1 8 and the increase in the number
of his supporters was a striking proof of the power
of a humanizing personality, for the dominating
issue in such half-way constituencies in the North
is Catholic green v. Protestant orange, and it is
nothing short of a political miracle for an elector to
change his flag. The truth is that even his bitterest
political opponents could not help liking Tom
218 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
that any form of material prosperity can compensate
a people for the lack of full autonomy. " There is
in liberty," he wrote in his pamphlet on Home
Rule Finance, "a certain tonic inspiration, there
is in the national idea a deep fountain of courage
and energy not to be figured out in dots and
decimals ; and unless you can call these psychological
forces into action your Home Rule Bill will be only
ink, paper, and disappointment. In one word Home
Rule must be a moral as well as a material liquida-
tion of the past." He would not, he could not,
believe that Ulster was beyond the reach of a recon-
ciliation such as he himself was ready to offer ; and,
if all other Nationalists had been as free from bitter,
narrow, obscurantistic views as himself, it is probable
Irish union would have been already an accom-
plished fact. He could see no reason in the nature
of things why the ancient animosities should be
maintained which divided Ireland and separated two
sister-isles. Nationalist Ireland had worse enemies
than Englishmen or Protestant Ulstermen ignor-
ance, poverty, and disease, to wit He could
admire the stark independence of the Protestant
Ulsterman who has always been such a tremendous
moral force in America. At the 1910 East Tyrone
Election a small boy watched the motor-car
wistfully in which he and his wife (whose admir-
able character sketch is here stolen, and will she
think it spoilt in the stealing by one who cannot
see eye to eye with her in politics ? ) were about to
start after a breakdown. He was offered a spin,
and accepted the favour. When he was set down
he lifted his cap, and said : " Thank you, Mr
Kettle. I am much obliged. To hell with the
Pope." Never was an incorruptible independence
TOM KETTLE 219
more quaintly and conclusively expressed. Later
on, when Protestant Ulstermen and Nationalists
fought side by side as good comrades, appreciating
one another's valour at its truth, an even more
intense vision of an Ireland one and indivisible
flamed up in generous merit. The brotherhood
of the brave, he felt, would be the basis of a
complete reconciliation. Even after the fatal events
of Easter Monday, which angered him to the
heart and seemed at first the end of all his dream-
ing, he still believed that the mingling of blood
on the battlefield would be the sacrament of Irish
union. He may have been right ; nay, he must
have been right; for in these high and passionate
dispensations only he who can say credo quia
incredtbile shall truly anticipate the strange and
unexpected truth. But it is as well perhaps that he
did not live through the intervening years to see
Sinn Fein triumphant in its retrograde policy, the
glorious Irish regiments starved of Irishmen, and
his friends the Americans pointing the finger of
scorn at the Irish nation as a race of shirkers and
Pro-Germans and Pacifists. And yet had he lived
on, to hear cries of "Up, the Kaiser," in his own
green countryside, he would not have failed in
hopefulness nor faltered in the high task of securing
peace by blood-brotherhood.
He was a great success in the House of Commons.
" Wit and humour, denunciation and appeal came
from him," said a reliable witness, "not merely
fluently but always with effect. Tall and sliglit,
with his soft boyish face and luminous eyes, he soon
startled and then compelled the attention of the
House by his irresistible sparkle and his luminous
220 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
argument." His keen and vivid intelligence found
an unfailing interest in every subject of debate, and
he liked the political and journalistic life of London
where he felt in touch with the tendencies of
European thought his beloved Dublin, his " grey
and laughing capital/' was an intellectual back-water
in comparison. In 1909, however, which was the
year of his marriage, he was appointed Professor of
National Economics in the National University, and
in the following year he resigned his seat in
Parliament as he found it impossible to combine the
duties of a Member with those of a whole-time
Professorship. The study of economics had always
appealed to him; not as the dismal science, which
traces the course of an " economic man " whose only
attribute was the itching palm, but as a sociological
art, dealing with foundations of a community, which
enabled one to find and formulate "an economic
idea fitted to express the self-realisation of a nation
which is resolute to realize itself." He would have
been the List of Ireland, perhaps. He did not cease
to be a political influence by becoming a Professor,
Nay, the change really widened his opportunities of
impressing his personality on the political thought of
his age and country, for it permitted him to gain a
closer intimacy with the realities of Irish living
particularly with the terrible problem of Irish
poverty and to act as a leading member of an
" Intelligence Department " designed to provide the
fighters at the political front with strategical ideas.
It was not necessary to regret (as many did) what
was not a demotion from realities, but a promotion
from the Westminster trenches to a position on the
higher command or strategic staff of Nationalism,
He must in time have made his mark as a creative
TOM KETTLE 221
economist of the type of A, E,, who has done so
much to convince Englishmen that the economic
reconstruction of Ireland is impracticable as long as
Irishmen are not free to think, feel, and act
nationally.
Then came the War, which he at once recognized
as a struggle to the death for the world's freedom,
His battle-song gives us his vision of its
significance ;
Then lift the flag of the Last Crusade !
And fill the ranks of the Last Brigade !
March on to the fields where the world's re-made,
And the ancient dreams come true !
In an election speech in 1910 he had declared that
"for his part he preferred German invasion to
British finance." In those days neither he nor any-
body else knew what the Prussian, with his double
streak of Tartar ancestry, was capable of in an
occupied territory. Like the rest of the world he
had imagined that Germany was a Civilized Power.
The rape of Belgium convinced him that she was a
Vulture Power, and he at once insisted that it was
Ireland's sacred duty to take up arms as England's
Ally. " This War is without parallel," he wrote in
August 1914, "Britain, France, Russia enter it
purged from their past sins of domination." France
is right now as she was wrong in 1870. England
is right now as she was wrong in the Boer War.
Russia is right now as she was wrong on Bloody
Sunday." In August and September he acted as
war correspondent for the Daily News, and what he
saw of the agony of Belgium scared his very soul
The torture of a little peace-loving nation, the tear-
ing up of the most sacred of European treaties, the
philosophic lie that was worked out to justify the
222 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
ruthless greed of Germany all these things con-
stituted, in his opinion, a direct challenge to
Christian civilization. "Holy Ireland, 5 ' he felt,
would be false to her golden gracious past if she
held aloof from the crusade. Dark Rosaleen, his
saint of saints, must not only girdle her lovers with
steel for the fray but also take the sword of the
spirit in her own holy, delicate hands. The issue
was Christ against Odin and historic wrongs must
be forgotten and forgiven until it was decided.
The depth of his religious feeling, the intensity of
his Catholicism, made his zeal for righteous warfare
a flaming thing. Like all deeply religious men, he
could speak of his religion humorously. His
definition of the difference between the Catholic and
the Protestant faiths: "The Catholics take their
beliefs table d'bdte^ the Protestants theirs a la carte "
is a case in point. There was scope in his spiritual
life for gladness as well as sadness ; he knew that a
laugh, like a tear, could be a spiritual thing. He
wrote a witty sermon for golfers (he would have
liked to be a " plus man " at that great, egotistical
game) in which they were advised to " get out of
the bunker of mortal sin with the niblick of con-
fession." He described the priests, to disarm an
anti-clerical Labourite, as members of a spiritual
Trade Union. In spite of such levities nay,
because of them his religion was from first to last
an all-ruling passion. Forget that, and you lack
the master-key to his personality ! The Catholic,
he thought, had a vast reserve of will-power in the
land of day-springs, the celestial Atlantis, that lay
beyond and above fatflammantia moenia mtmdi^ the
inaccessible ramparts of Space and Time. In war
religion was the mightiest of all motives j an Army
TOM KETTLE 223
could not march on an empty belly nor fight on an
empty soul.
Therefore he declared war on the felon Power
which is the sole blood-cemented Empire in the
world its sovereign merely a commander-in-chief,
its aristocracy a war staff, its people drilled soldiers on
leave, its capital a camp, its chief industry warfare.
He could deal with Kultur in a way that shows
his keen wit and wide reading to great advantage.
Here is a characteristic passage ( " The Ways of
War," pp. 225-6).
In a German university you do not find any uniform, general life
on which everybody can draw. The caste system on which all
Prussia is founded manifests itself very soon. Either you clip off
your friends' ears in duels, keep dogs, abjure learning, and absorb
beer for two or three years, or else you set out to be a Herr Doktor.
By steadily accumulating notes, and grimly avoiding fresh air, you
arrive at the moment when you can order a visiting card with this
wizard-title on it. Then, wearing a nimbus of adulation, you pass
on to be a Privat Docmt) and ultimately a Herr Professor. Every-
body's hat is off to you ; you meet with no real criticism or free thrust
of thought.
Add to this the fact that German is a singularly difficult language
in which to tell the truth plainly, even if you should desire to do so
Two or three writers, like Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche,
have contrived the miracle but the general impression inflicted on
the Latin mind by German literature is that of inadequately cooked
plum-duff. One understands a great Socialist like Otto EfFertz
turning in his third book from German to French with the observa-
tion : " Formerly I wrote in a provincial dialect. I now experiment
in a European language." A brilliant lady of my acquaintance,
who suffered fools more or less gladly at Marburg and Bonn, is of
opinion that the Prussian reaches his most exquisite moment of
lyricism when, at Christmas or -Easter he ties a bow of blue ribbon
on a sausage and presents it to his beloved. This is a disputable
view ; but it does indicate certain inadequacies in the German
apparatus of expression which really exist.
No wonder he preferred any Englishman to any
German, and felt that German control of Ireland
would be a servitude too terrible to think of. He
AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
had not the conception of the Englishman as a
hard-minded, gizzard-hearted, money-grabbing
creature, which seems to be the working hypothesis
of so many Nationalist politicians. He was
essentially a European, though
Irish of the Irish;
Neither Saxon nor Italian, 1
and he saw the Englishman with the eyes of that
greater Ireland, which has its heart in the ancient
centre and its circumference on all the seas
which is to-day a valiant unit in the world- wide
war against Germany. He would surely have
rejoiced in the camaraderie of the fighting English-
men with the fighting Irish Americans which he
did not, alas, live to see though he beheld a
glorious promise of that larger fellowship in the
mutual admiration of English and Irish Regiments
at the front and in the eagerness of the Irishmen
settled in England to volunteer at *the very
beginning of the war.
He who had distributed anti-recruiting pamphlets
in Dublin during the South African War (which
was for all that a fight for freedom, for Kruger
was making the Transvaal a miniature Prussia which
had to be destroyed) flung himself heart and soul
into the recruiting campaign in Ireland. He made
over two hundred speeches there as a member of
what he called " The Army of Freedom," and
some of the brilliant phrases and epigrams in which
he set Ireland's duty to the world above her duty
to herself will long be remembered e.g. his
1 Lines which Ferguson, in the epilogue of his amazing epic ballad of
The Welshmen of Ttrawky, applies to the descendants of "Clan London"
in Ulster.
TOM KETTLE 225
declaration that "the absentee Irishmen to-day is
the Irishman who stays at home/ 5 But it was not
enough to give his living eloquence ; he must also
give his life. The disasters of Easter Week con-
vinced him more than ever that his attitude was
right, and he used all his influence to be sent at
once to the front. And so, on July 14, 1916, he
sailed for France. His letters home were full of
vital thoughts and sayings; the horrors of modern
warfare appalled him, but could never take the
edge off his blithe valiancy. He made up his mind
that, when peace returned, he would devote his life
to waging war on war that hideous anachronism
which must not be allowed to survive the fall of
the German tyranny.
Mrs Kettle quotes in her Memoir the following
account of his brief but brilliant career as an officer
in one of the Irish Regiments which are always
regarded as corps cP elite by all sound judges :
" Kettle was one of the finest officers we had with us. The men
worshipped him, and would have followed him to the ends of the
earth. He was an exceptionally brave and capable officer ^ who
had always the interests of his men at heart. He was in the thick
of the hard fighting in the Guillemont-Ginchy region. I saw him
at various stages of the fighting. He was enjoying it like any veteran,
though it cannot be denied that the trade of war, and the
horrible business of killing one's fellows was distasteful to a man
with bis sensitive mind and kindly disposition. I know it was with
the greatest reluctance that he discarded the Professor's gown for the
soldier's uniform, but once the choice was made he threw himself
Into his new profession, because he believed he was serving Ireland
and humanity by so doing.
" In the Guillemont fighting I caught a glimpse of him for a brief
spell. He was in the thick of a hard struggle, which had for its object
the dislodgment of the enemy from a redoubt they held close to the
village. He was temporarily in command of the company, and he
was directing operations with a coolness and daring that marked him
out as a born leader of men. He seemed always to know what was
the right thing to do, and he was always on the right spot to order
226 AN IRISH TORCH-BEARER
the doing of the right thing at the right moment. The men under his
command on that occasion fought with a heroism worthy of their
leader* They were assailed furiously on both flanks by the foe.
They resisted all attempts to force them back, and at the right
moment they pressed home a vigorous counter-attack that swept
the enemy off the field.
" The next time I saw him his men were again in a tight corner.
They were advancing against the strongest part of the enemy's
position in that region. Kettle kept them together wonderfully
in spite of the terrible ordeal they had to go through; and they carried
the enemy's position in record time. It was in the hottest corner
of the Ginchy fighting that he went down. He was leading his men
with a gallantry and judgment that would almost certainly have won
him official recognition had he lived, and may do so yet. His beloved
Fusiliers were facing a deadly fire and were dashing forward irre-
sistibly to grapple with the foe. Their ranks were smitten by a
tempest of fire. Men went down right and left some never to rise
again. Kettle was among the latter. He dropped to earth and
made an effort to get up. I think he must have been hit again.
Anyhow, he collapsed completely. A wail of anguish went up from
his men as soon as they saw that their officer was down. He turned
to them and urged them forward to where the Huns were entrenched.
They did not need his injunction. They swept forward with a rush.
Well levelled they crashed into the foe. There was deadly work
indeed, and the Huns paid dearly for the loss of Kettle. When the
battle was over his men came back to camp with sore hearts. They
seemed to feel his loss more than that of any of the others. The
men would talk of nothing else, but the loss of their " own Captain
Tom," and his brother officers were quite as sincere,, if less effusive,
in the display of their grief.''
Thus he fell, this Christian soldier, and his
example is a torch the light of which can never
go out. To the best of his capacity the writer
has tried to trace the motives of his wide-horizoned
life, setting the man of action and transaction above
the man of thought and letters as must be in
these iron times when what men do and are counts
for more than what they think and write. The
central impulse of his whole being is best expressed
in the beautiful sonnet, by itself enough to give him
the poet's immortality, which he wrote in the field
TOM KETTLE 227
before Guillemont on the Somme on September 4,
1916, and addressed " To my daughter Betty, the
Gift of God " :
In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death ! And, oh ! they'll give you rhyme
And reason : some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
THE HAPPY ATHLETE
RONALD POULTON
HE appears in the Roll of Oxford's Honour
as Lieutenant Ronald William Pouiton
Palmer of the 4th Royal Berkshire
Regiment But wherever the funera nefumra of
the oval ball are customary, men or boys call
him Ronald Pouiton, and even now, when he has
been resting for more than three years in his wood-
land grave in France, find it hard to think of him
as one of the lost leaders of English sportsmanship.
He was famous all the world over as a player of
Rugby football, as the most original and dangerous
three-quarter who has ever worn the Red Rose.
Critics speak of Spenser as "the poets' poet"
and with equal justice we may say that Ronald
Pouiton was the athlete's athlete in his special sphere,
for no player of what H. B. Tristram (that thunder-
bolt of a tackier) called " the finest game that man
ever devised " appealed so poignantly to the imagin-
ative faculty of his brothers-in-art. " Ever since I
first saw him at Queen's Club," said a Welsh Inter-
national, " I have suspected, that the Welsh game
was not really the last word in Rugby strategy
and tactics, and that a touch of the Poultonesque
may count for more in match-winning than all
our scientific discipline."
He was the younger son of Professor E B. Pouiton
of Oxford, and his athletic promise disclosed itself
in early boyhood. He went to the Oxford Pre-
paratory School and Mr C. C. Lynam, the Head-
master, described him as by far the best all-round
athlete who had ever been at the school. Thence
RONALD POULTON PAIMER
(LIEUTENANT, 4111 ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGIMENT)
From a photograph taken in the dressing oow at Twickenham after
kn last fntct national match on hn$li\h
RONALD POULTON 229
he went to Rugby, entering the School House,
which has been the Delphi, so to speak, of real
football ever since Young Brooks kicked off at
" Big Side " in the famous school story. All the
famous Public Schools have their special pursuits
which every boy learns instinctively; just as you
breathe in Greek at Shrewsbury, so at Rugby
you cannot swallow a mouthful of air without
taking in the true doctrine of the tackling game.
Ronald Poulton was in the Rugby XV four
successive years, and he was captain in his last
season. He was in the cricket XI in 1907
and 1908. At the annual athletic sports he
showed extraordinary all-round form, generally
winning both the jumps, the hurdles, and all
the short races up to and including the quarter-
mile. But he did not live by games alone at
Rugby where, ever since Arnold's reign, high ideals
of intellectual progress and social service have been
realized by generation after generation of those
whose ambkion it has been
Not with the crowd to be spent,
Not without aim to go round
In an eddy of purposeless dust.
Effort unmeaning and vain.
Ronald Poulton was as keen a student of science
as of all local variants of the modern yv/^ao-rtK??,
and he made such good use of his school-time,
and of the scientific ability he inherited from his
father that he won an Exhibition for Science at
Balliol in 1908. At Oxford he entered the
Engineering School which had just been established
under Professor C, F. Jenkin, taking Honours in
the Final Examination when his work was the
best sent in. And it was at Rugby that his genius
230 THE HAPPY ATHLETE
for friendship began to express itself in a wise and
joyous inclusiveness. There he first met his dearest
and most intimate friends and acquired that delight
in the work of boys' clubs which was in after
y ears a t Oxford and Reading and Manchester
the chief interest of his many-sided nature. The
scene of his earliest inspiration was always very
near his heart, and probably the greatest treat he
could allow himself was a visit to Rugby and the
dear friends who lived there.
Mr Ernest Ward, who is an encyclopaedia of
Rugger history and has the whole "mistery" (no
c y/ please) of the game by heart and all its
famous practitioners from the Vassall era onwards
at heart, sends the following notes on Ronald
Poulton's brief but felicitous career in the football
field:
Ronnie Poulton was one of the greatest three-quarters of all time,
perhaps the very greatest. But he was more than that he was an
influence that kept the spirit of his much-loved game sound and
sweet. He had that genius for captaincy which is the rarest gift ;
and how he stood for a victorious moral in that capacity shall be told
by Mr Temple Gordon, the highest living authority on the psychology
of the game :
" I have always considered that Ronnie Poulton's death was an
immense loss not only to English football but to England His
genuine, unaffected interest in his fellow man of whatever class made
him an invaluable link between what, for want of a better definition,
we call the classes and the masses.
" When playing on tour against other countries with working men
on the side his unaffected camaraderie, entirely free from any trace of
snobbish condescension, made him an asset of inestimable value to
the side by blending it before the game (which is half the battle) into
an harmonious whole, and discounting the boredom of the local hotel
and the dragging hours before a match.
" I am sure that few men have been more genuinely missed and
mourned by those who had the privilege of his friendship or even of
his acquaintance."
This was how Mr Gordon wrote after an interval of three years
had passed since Poulton fell on the Western front.
RONALD POULTON 231
Ronnie Poulton in those brief six years or thereabouts between
his leaving school and his death in action wrought great good. It
was at Michaelmas 1908 that he made his entrance into London foot-
ball in a quiet little practice game that the Harlequins had got up
on Richmond Athletic ground. Adrian Stoop the organizing genius
of the Harlequins in one of his visits to his old school at Rugby had
spotted young Poulton and bagged him for the Harlequins. On that
afternoon at Richmond an- old enthusiast met with this welcome from
the perpetual president of the Harlequins (the old Rugby warrior,
W, A. Smith; now, as Elia would have had it, " with the angels ")
" Come and see a born England player ! " Smith was quite right.
Adrian put Ronnie through his facings with a thoroughness that left
no doubt about his ability . And Poulton played with the ease of a
parade : he had been given to winning matches " off his own bat "
at Rugby School. And he then reproduced the elasticity of his school
form. We saw him as flying man, as a centre, as a wing ; and in
every position, to use the Baconian tag, he " succeeded excellently
well." Safe hands, swiftness in the get-off, unchecked pace in the
swerve and when he changed feet for the side step, immense initiative :
these points, so brilliantly matured afterwards at Oxford, were all
easily marked in this preliminary view of Poulton as a school three-
quarter.
This first impression was unchanged in the brief years that he was
seen winning matches for Oxford, for England, for the Harlequins,
and for Liverpool. There vividly remains the picture of a fine whole-
some type of the Public School boy full of the manliness of chivalry ;
the elusive stripling, delightful in symmetry of limb, with his flaxen
hair made sport of by the breeze, as he was under way in his delightful
run.
Poulton is among the immortals in our games. What courage
Hodges of Sedbergh had to disclose to leave Poulton out of the Fifteen
in his first year at Oxford. But what else could Hodges have done ?
He had the four old Blues and Internationals as a legacy from Hoskin
Vassail, Tarr, Martin, and Gilray. And he would not disturb the
line even to put Poulton in. But in avoiding one mistake he fell
into another. He played an unsound man, Vassail, at Queen's Club
in the one match of the Rugby season which is so strenuous and
searching that the cleverest patching-up will never insure the crocked-
up player against a break-down. Vassail broke down in the first five
minutes, and at least three certain tries were lost because he could
not keep his place in a combined attack. However, Poulton came
to his own in the following year. Everyone will recall what he did
on the left wing against Cambridge in his first Inter-'Varsity match :
how he worked with George Cunningham and Colin Gilray and how
he scored five tries a personal record in Oxford and Cambridge
232 THE HAPPY ATHLETE
Rugger and one that is likely to stand. His second appearance was
almost as great a triumph. And his third appearance in the fateful
match at Queen's Club was really the greatest triumph of all in spite
of the fact that he slipped and hurt himself badly before half-time
and was useless to his side for the rest of the game. " It is not possible
to name a man/' wrote a skilled eye-witness of his last match as a
'Varsity footballer, "whose presence so obviously made so much
difference to his side. This time he was captain of a team expected
to lose ; and the performances of Cambridge before and after the game
at Queen's justified the opinion of the prophets. Poulton demoralized
his opponents in the first five minutes, and the game was won for his
side. Of course,, he was well supported, particularly by Knott, the
stand-off half, and his forwards. Knott fielded everything and masked
his game like a second Adrian Stoop. It was from a well-placed
forward kick of Knott's that the first try came. The defence thought
he would pass, but Poulton knew better. He followed the ball with
marvellous speed and got it easily, running over the line, with every-
body planted and looking on. The demoralization of Cambridge, after
two other tnes had been scored against them by the Knott-Poulton
opportunism, was shown by the tactics of the Light Blue threes.
Though a very speedy and skilful lot, they would line up straight
across the ground in defensive formation even when they were inside
the Oxford 25 for fear that Knott and Poulton should get going
even there."
He got his English cap a year before he won his Blue ; in all he
played in 17 Internationals and he captained England in the last
International match before the War, leading his side to a great victory
at Inverleith ; a thrilling match, many of the players in which have
long ago made the final sacrifice for King and country. C. J. B.
Marriott (Cambridge and England), whose playing days were in the
Harry Vassall era, wrote the following appreciation of Poulton as an
England player : " No one ever equalled him in his destructive style
and opportunism. As a captain he was a born leader ; never over-
weeningly confident, never flurried, and always- at his best in pulling
his team together when the score was against them. These attributes
were fully disclosed in the three victories of England in 2914 when
in each match at certain periods of the game the points were against
England."
Poulton himself had a humorous way of describing his experiences
in International matche$. When England won her first match against
Wales in Wales after a lapse of eighteen years, the theatre of warfare
was the Cardiff Arms Park, and the weather recalled the saying of a
spectator overheard some years before " In Cardiff when it rains, it
ralaeth." Poulton wrote as follows : " On assembling at breakfast
RONALD POULTON 233
we found that rain was falling steadily and all hope of a dry ground
and ball was given up. The morning was spent in animated dis-
cussions of numerous devices for winning the match, none of which
by any chance came off during the game itself, except the oft-repeaied
injunction from our captain : * Remember your feet and use them,
and don't forget the watch- word ' but that, I fear, is unprintable.
However, after a game played on a ground where the blades of grass
seemed with difficulty to be holding their heads above the ever-rising
flood, England emerged unrecognizable but victorious by 12 points
to nothmg." Of the visit of the South Africans he wrote : ec I suppose,
to be in keeping with Imperial imagery and ideas, we must call the
members of this team our children, and fine strapping children they
are 1 You feel there must be something extraordinary about the
climate of South Africa when you are easily given twenty yards in a
hundred by a M'Hardy or a Stegmann, when you see the ball propelled
infinite distances with perfect accuracy by a Morkel, and when you
feel the weight of a Morkel, a Van Vuuren or a Shum deposited on your
chest." He could be very drastic in his criticism of the national XV
of which he was a member. After England and Ireland at Dublin
in 1913, though England won, he cordially agreed with the pithy
comment of one of the English selectors, " Well, I've only seen one
team play worse than you did in my life, and I saw that team this
afternoon." He spoke out boldly against English lack of scrummage
science in getting the ball and heeling out. He blamed the slow heeling
of the forwards and, in a lesser degree, the slowness of the English
scrum half for the unsatisfactory play of the English back division
as a whole during that season. These faults, he said, "gave the
opposing three-quarters time to come up and smother our attack."
His suggestions fell on fruitful soil and in the following season, when
the said faults had been amended, he led England to victory in all her
international matches.
He was good at all the games he tried his hand
at. At cricket he made some runs for Rugby v.
Marlborough at Lords in 1907 and 1908, and he
was a brilliant inside forward in the Oxford Hockey-
team (three years). But Rugger was his first love
and his last. Had it not been for the War his keen
and imaginative intelligence would have gone on
with the task, begun by Adrian Stoop, of raising
the standard of Rugger science and artistry, and
forming a national English style which would give
full scope for the individual superiority in pace and
234 THE HAPPY ATHLETE
power of the English players. The principle on
which he would have based this process of evolution
that the offensive is the best form of defence,
ceteris paribus is as sound in co-operative games
as in warfare.
After leaving Oxford, his uncle, the late Rt.
Hon. G. W. Palmer of Marlston House near
Newbury, invited him to enter Huntley &
Palmer's factory in Reading with the view of
ultimately joining the Directorate. He took a small
house near the works and began his duties in
January 1912. It was a strenuous life of early
rising and working late, for he was expected to
acquire a thorough knowledge of every branch of
one of the greatest commercial enterprises in
England a concern of far-reaching tentacles, for
hungry folk munch Huntley & Palmers* biscuits
in the remotest corners of the civilized world. The
Rugby sense of social brotherhood also found ex-
pression, and he took the keenest interest in the
athletic clubs connected with the factory and indeed
in all that concerned the welfare of the men
employed there. Like so many of the young men
of his generation, he thought deeply about the
widespread Labour unrest of the years before
the War and felt that no undertaking had a right
to flourish which did not produce happy lives as
well as its special commodity. He himself took
part in the men's sport, played in the factory
cricket and football teams, and would take the
Socker XI for long training walks. " Rugger "
was not played at the Factory ; Reading is one of
the southern centres of the rival code. But he
secretly hoped that he might have his own home-
made fifteen there some day. With all this work,
RONALD POULTON 235
into which he threw himself heart and soul, he
found time to do a great deal for the development
of a Boys 5 Club in the parish of St John's. To
an Oxford friend who chaffed him about his
business career he said with a laugh : " Well, if
I'm not a man of business yet, Fm a busy man."
After a year and a half of this full and varied life,
sweetened and dignified by so much personal
service, he thought he knew enough of the biscuit-
making business at that stage, and it was decided
that he should gain a wider knowledge of engineer-
ing before finally settling down to the life's work
he had found (or, rather, which had found him),
when he hoped to renew and strengthen the ties
of affection that already bound him to the men
and their sons.
At his uncle's advice he settled in Manchester and
worked in Mather & Platt's, attending courses at
the Municipal School of Technology, of which his
brother-in-law, Mr J. C. Maxwell Garnett, was
Principal He had only just begun work at
Manchester when his uncle, who seemed to be in
perfect health and had made all arrangements for a
winter's voyage, was seized with a stroke and died
in a few days, without ever recovering consciousness.
Thus ended the association between the older and
the younger man which had meant so much for both
of them. They loved and understood one another
and had looked forward, with a confidence that ever
increased as their mutual understanding and sympathy
deepened, to many years of happy co-operation in
the conduct of a vast business on humane lines, after
the younger man's expected return to Reading in
the autumn of 1914. Ronald Poulton became heir
to a considerable income, with a deferred life interest
236 THE HAPPY ATHLETE
in a large estate and, under the terms of the will,
took his uncle's and his mother's maiden name of
Palmer. Thus a future of far-reaching influence
was assured, and there can be no doubt that the
famous young athlete, had he lived, would have
looked upon his position as a trust to be administered
in accordance with the high civic ideals of his uncle,
who was the maker of modern Reading and a man
who combined a genius for practical affairs with an
imaginative insight into the larger privileges and
responsibilities of the latter-day captain of industry.
The Varsity wit who said that " Ronald had taken
the biscuit and the tin as well " had no idea of the
spiritual heritage he had received from his honoured
uncle. Had he lived into the Reconstruction era,
he would have been one of the influences that make
revolution unnecessary. For, as captain of a foot-
ball team or as director of a factory, he would always
have been a man among men, holding the gift of
leadership by force of character, capacity, and that
instinct of camaraderie which reduces all " class-
conscious " talk to absurdity.
It was characteristic of him that this great accession
of wealth and consequence was not allowed to
interrupt his engineering studies for a moment He
remained hard at work in Manchester until June
1914, when he spent a month in visiting various
engineering firms in the North of England. As
might have been expected from his father's son, he
saw the need of a closer alliance between science and
industry in this country, where rule-of-thumb
methods and cut-throat competition have so far pre-
vented a nation of shopkeepers from becoming a
nation of multiple-shopkeepers. There was nothing
dull for him in his work at Manchester, in which
RONALD POULTON 237
theory and practice were so justly combined. If it
had been dull, he would have stuck to it to honour
the wishes of his uncle and as a duty he owed to
himself. He had just begun to enjoy a summer
vacation before taking up his permanent work at
Reading, when the call of his country came* Like
the rich young man in the Gospel, he was suddenly
asked to give up all wealth, popularity, rest after
toil, friendship, and even love and follow the cross
into a bleak desert of being bordering on eternity.
He gave up all and followed.
He had belonged to the O.T.C. in Oxford and on
first taking up his residence in Reading had joined
the Berkshire Territorials. When War was expected,
but not yet declared, they were asked if they would
volunteer for service abroad. Of all vocations the
soldier's had least attraction for him; he thought
war a bitter anachronism. But he had no doubts as
to the justice of his country's cause, " saw his duty
as a dead-sure thing," and at once volunteered and
entered on the course of training. He had only
been at the front just over five weeks when he was
instantaneously killed by a stray bullet at 12.20 a.m.
on May 5, 1915, when on duty as works manager
in the trenches. It was a foggy night, and he was
out on the roof of a dug-out, looking at work that
had been done, when a stray shot, which might have
been a ricochet off the wire in front of the trench,
entered his right side just below the arm-pit. The
day before he had written the following letter to
his sister, Mrs Maxwell Garnett :
Thank you so much for the lovely chocolate which arrived last night
up here. It was sweet of you to write, and also your letters are most
welcome. Just as I was proceeding to open them at about twelve
p,m. ; as I was at work all the early part of the night, we had to " stand
to '* as a Brigade order that meant all being out. It was maddening
THE HAPPY ATHLETE
three hours messing about doing nothing. Then I got to bed at
four, and was woken up and pulled out, because we were being shelled,
and it is safer to be under the parapet than in a dug-out. They were
shelling a house just in the middle of our trench, which they think
we use for sniping (and so we do). But the first four shots hit our
trench. The first went right through one officer's dug-out, but luckily
he was the one officer on duty, so he wasn't hit. Luck ! He'd have
been in tiny bits 1 Another smashed the dug-out of our cook, but he
was out, too. The house had what was left of its chimney piece
[evidently " stack " intended] removed, and another big hole in the
roof. That's about all. Now its lovely, as I sit in our mess, which
is dug down out of sight, but has a lovely back view of the country
to the rear a large root-field, a typical avenue main road to the
right, a hill with a ruined chateau in front. I am getting a bit tired
of the view. But its safer than looking in front,
Cheeriness and a gentle humour of circumstance
characterise all the letters he wrote home to relations
and friends. His brother officers bore witness to
the love and confidence he inspired. " He's just a
glorious chap to have by one," the chaplain of the
Berkshires had said a few days before to the Bishop
of Pretoria who buried him. He had been a
tremendous help and stand-by to the "Padre 55 in
his difficult and never-ending work. The following
tribute from a very close Regimental friend has a
touching finality :
Those of us who have known him for a long while, and loved him,
can enter just a little into the grief of his own people. You will have
heard the details of his death. It is a great consolation to know that
he died painlessly for England, beloved by every one in his Regiment.
When I went round his old Company as they stood to, at dawn, almost
every man was crying. He will always be an inspiration to those of
us who remain. He will be laid in the wood this afternoon in soil
which is already consecrated to the memory of many brave soldiers.
The oak-trees are just coming out, and the spring flowers ; and the
place would remind you much of the woods round Oxford.
He was in his twenty-sixth year, and he died
among men who knew his true worth, for many
of the Berkshires had been his comrades during
RONALD POULTON 239
the apprenticeship he had so faithfully served at
Reading.
It often happens that the athlete, like the actor, is
immortal only for a moment. His personality may
only survive in a single remembered episode as
G. F. Grace's does in the wonderful catch that dis-
missed Bonnor from the loftiest skier ever seen at
Lords or Basil Maclear's in the amazing eighty-yards
run that gave Ireland a try against the first team of
South African invaders in a most thrilling match.
But Ronald Poulton will always receive the larger
tribute of remembrance which is granted to the
undying masters of our national games. Rugby
football is the hardest and most vigorous of all the
Ludi Humaniores which are essentially a part of
English life. It is a game which can only be played
by gentlemen ; for the referee, who controls a match
and lives in the spirit of it, cannot hope to see a
tenth of all that happens in a close ding-dong
struggle. So it has always been, and always will
be, an antidote to the professionalism which sets the
prize above the play and cannot lose without rancour
or repining. Cricket and football and the other
English team-games are modern substitutes for the
hard exercises of the mediaeval knights, and if either
the hardness or the chivalry goes out of them, then
they cease to provide the training in moral which is
the most vital part of true education. The fact
remains that the most important element in war
and in peace for that matter and fhe most difficult
to make sure of, is the moral element, and for that
there is nothing like the old English school tradition
which makes so much use of the hard, exhilarating
discipline of team-games. Ronald Poulton will live
2 4 o THE HAPPY ATHLETE
in the national remembrance as a player of genius
who took all the opportunities afforded him by the
glorious uncertainty of his game and turned them to
account with ruthless originality so that the enemy
could not guess his intention until it was too late
to prevent it being realized. But he will also be
remembered as the most chivalrous of players one
who never used his strength tyrannically nor ever
dreamed of ignoring the spirit of the Rugger code
and indulging in the sharp practices that are just
within its strict letter. And he valued his game not
so much for the chances it gave him of personal
distinction as for the grim beauty of its swift com-
binations and, even more, for the fact that class
distinctions vanished in its fierce medley for any
man can play Rugger if he can play it as a gentleman.
He knew it was the most democratic of diversions
simply because it is the most aristocratic.
When peace returns we shall go again to
Twickenham and Inverleith and other fields where
the Four Nations cultivate the full rigour of Rugby
football. And all who ever saw Ronald Poulton
at his best will have a fleeting vision of his wonder-
ful dash for the goal-line of the friendly enemy
the ball held in outstretched hands, swinging this
way and that ; the sprint that was a series of twists
and wriggles and ever so much faster than it looked ;
the sudden pass in an unexpected direction or the
huge kick into touch or the lightning swift cut-
through to a certain try ; and the grave, intent look
which read the whole position at a glan.ce and
enabled the runner to do the right thing in the right
moment in the right way. A Poulton try was
by far the most fascinating thing in Rugby football
His father, the famous professor, once complained
RONALD POULTON 241
that his most important lecture might get a para-
graph here and there in the newspapers, whereas
any try scored by Ronald would be sure of a
column everywhere. The truth is that one was
conscious of a great personality behind it all ; there
was an incidental greatness, a crowd-compelling
power, in all he did on the football-field. As has
been shown, he would have excelled in larger pur-
suits but for the unlucky bullet that was turned by
the twanging wire ; in war and in peace he would
have lived his life to high and unselfish purposes.
Oxford has produced no sweeter or stronger per-
sonality in our day, and the lines dedicated to the
Happy Warrior by Sir Henry Newbolt should be
his epitaph :
He that has left hereunder
The signs of his release,
Feared not the battle's thunder,
Nor hoped that wars should cease ;
No hatred set asunder
His warfare from his peace.
THE MAN ABOUT TOWN
THOMAS VADE-WALPOLE
WHAT is it that makes the social favourite ?
The question has often been discussed by
the novelists of manners, from Thackeray
to the latest wanderer in the purlieus of Sinister
Street, but has never been finally answered. The
man of letters who is never received by society as an
arbiter elegantiarum for various reasons chief of
them his weakness for pulling up his emotions by
the 'root in order to see how and why they are
growing invariably takes a prejudiced view of the
matter. So it comes about that in all ages the
popular man about town (whether the town be
London or Paris or Vienna or New York) has
always been written down as a selfish and shallow
creature who is incapable of deep feeling or hard
work and owes his popularity to some petty
inexplicable gift for reflecting ihe predilections of the
brainless and heartless majority. Yet, if we look
through the social history of London, we find that
its favourites have always been men of commanding
personality men of whom it was commonly said
hy their critical contemporaries that they might have
done anything or everything, if only they had not
wasted all their time and energy on amusing them-
selves and their world. In every famous man about
town, from Beau Brummel on, we discern the linea-
ments of a man and are forced to conclude that
success in the art of living sociably requires as high
qualifications as are possessed by the successful
politician or captain of industry or painter or poet.
And if the social satirist thinks otherwise, it is
I HOMAS VM>I<:-\\ AT TOI K
(I lEU'l KN ANT, lOFII t;ORI)ON, n U1 H 1 \NDKKs)
TOMMY WALPOLE 243
because he is under the delusion that the whole art
of living should be subordinated to the science of
earning a livelihood. What a tedious world it
would be if the life of each great capital (in which a
pleasure-city must be incorporated) had not its centre
of levity as well as its centre of gravity !
Thomas Vade-Walpole (known as " Tadpole " to
his friends) was as good an example as one could
wish to meet of the popular man about town. He
knew everybody and everybody knew him ; no
social function was complete without his presence.
The charm of his personality was indefinable, though
definitely felt even by the acquaintance of an hour.
The kindest and most unselfish of men, he never
took the slightest advantage of his popularity to
make others feel out of the picture. On the
contrary, he would take the greatest pains to put a
stranger who felt " out of it " at his ease, and he
was rather proud of the number of lasting friendships
he had brought into being by bringing people of
differing temperaments together. Perhaps the secret
of his social success is communicated in the saying of
a friend: "Tom Walpole was always too busy
thinking about his pals ever to think about himself,"
He was a most witty talker, and his witticisms were
all the more effective because always spontaneous
and arising out of the situation so that they had
the appeal of the dramatic motjuste^ the saying that
seems the only thing that ought to have been said
on a particular occasion. Self-assertion in conversa-
tion, which is always a little resented, seemed to him
bad manners. He was content if his own talk
should just be ozone in the oxygen of lively general
conversation. He could administer a snub which
244 THE MAN ABOUT TOWN
made the offender feel as if a load of bricks had
descended on his head but he only used this
weapon when a real offence had been committed,
such as the attempt to circulate a malicious slander
which seemed to him the meanest and most detest-
able of social sins. Once he advised a young fellow
with his way to make in the world, to acquire " as
many useful enemies as possible." But he himself
never practised what he preached on that occasion.
He had many activities undreamed of by any save
his most intimate friends, for he had a very strong
distaste for the window-dressing methods of the
person who likes to pose as a down-to-date
Admirable Crichton. On the whole he may be
taken as a model of the social favourite in these
latter days when society is inclusive rather than
exclusive and its leaders of either sex are so often
deeply interested in the great movements of art,
philosophy and social reform.
. .
He was the elder son of the late Henry Spencer
Vade-Walpole of Stagbury, Surrey and Freethorpe,
Norfolk, and his wife, Frances Selina, one of the
Bourkes of Vrey and Jamaica. On the death of
his father in 1913 he became heir-presumptive to
the two Baronies of Walpole. Owing to constant
ill-health, one symptom of which was a terrible
migraine which made continued brain-work im-
possible, he was unable to follow the family custom
and go to Eton and Oxford. He was educated at
home, and among other proofs of intellectual
initiative obtained by his own exertions a real grasp
of chemistry had he been able to pursue this study
without interruption, he would certainly have
gained scientific distinction, for his flair in the
TOMMY WALPOLE 245
application of principles was strongly marked. In
1895 (when he was in his i6th year) he had the
unusual experience of being bitten by a mad dog,
which necessitated a visit to the Pasteur Institute in
Paris. He showed the greatest fortitude and a
calmness touched with humour in this terrible
ordeal. The cause of his ill-health baffled the most
famous doctors, and many cures were tried in vain
for the agonizing headaches (very like those which
troubled the scholarly and athletic hero of Hard
Cash] which at times rendered him incapable of
mental exertion. When he was nineteen Sir
William Gowers advised a long sea-voyage, and he
went for a tour round the world by himself. Two
years later he circumnavigated Africa. During
those tours, which delighted his adventurous soul,
he had many curious experiences, met many interest-
ing people, and collected a treasure of out-of-the-
way anecdote which in after years added to the
varied charm of his talk not that he ever resembled
the raconteur in his " anecdotage " who bores people
by spatch-cocking little mechanical tales into every
casual conversation. In 1902 his father came to live
in London, and it was then that he began to prove him-
self so notable an expert in the art of social living.
Two tributes from intimate friends not only throw
light on his engaging personality but also show how
he gained athletic and literary fame in spite of that
handicap of ill-health which would have reduced
a less courageous and enduring man to all-round
insignificance. The first, written 1 by Mr Lionel
Martin, reveals him as a champion cyclist :
By the death of poor Tadpole the Bath Road Club has lost one of
the best of good sportsmen and the cheeriest of friends.
1 Printed in the Bath Road News.
246 THE MAN ABOUT TOWN
He joined the Bath Road Club in 1899, about which date I first
met him in connection with track racing, in which we were then both
interested. He had just won one of the big paced races of the Anerly
Bicycle Club, of which we were at that time members.
In 1902, when I had finally abandoned track racing, Tadpole, as
we all loved to call him, introduced me to the Bath Road Club ; and
since that date we must have covered some 50,000 miles in company
by cycle and later by car.
That is the way to find out what is in a man, and he soon proved
that he was good right through. For instance, at first I wondered
how it was that he could not be persuaded to come out for a training
spin on certain days in the week, and it was not for a long time that
I discovered he gave up those days to voluntary work among the
poor. It was in the same unostentatious way that he joined the Army
when he saw his duty before him, gaining a first lieutenant's commis-
sion in the loth Gordon Highlanders in October 1914, the first I heard
of it being when he came to see me on the eve of taking up his
new duties. For the first few months he had a very bad time of it,
the terrible weather, combined with the difficulty of picking up the
routine work, making his life a doubtful pleasure ; but soon his grit
and cheery manner triumphed over all obstacles, and he not only
grew to love his new life, but also soon gained the confidence and love
of his fellow officers and men.
When I saw him last, a day or two before he went to the front
in June, he told me he feared he would never come back, which
has, alas ! proved only too true a presentiment, for he met his death
from a rifle grenade, which I take to be a weapon of but little accuracy
so that it was a doubly sad end for so good a man.
Although all with whom he came into contact loved him for his
unfailing cheeriness and good humour, I think few people realized
what he had in him.
Unable, for medical reasons, to go to a public school, at the age of
nineteen he travelled practically all over the world entirely by him-
self, gaining experience and self-reliance (in addition to a vast fund
of anecdote) which proved invaluable to him in later life. With us
he was always the life and soul of club runs, and no Bath Road dinner
was complete without him.
As to his purely cycling performances, during his comparatively
short term of racing, he won the first 50 miles handicap of 1902, took
a prominent part in the B.R.C. team at the inter-club " 50 " with
the N.R.CC. in that year (in which he put up his best " 50 ") and
in 1903 gained his gold button for the Edinburgh-York tandem
record. In 1902 he will be remembered by Anfieldcrs, with whom
he was very popular, as a "whole-hearted helper in their " 34."
TOMMY WALPOLE 247
Our experiences together, had I the pen of a ready writer, would
fill a book, but let it suffice to put on record that in all our efforts
together he did far more than his fair share of the toil, for it is no
joke pushing a man of my bulk about. His beautiful style, compara-
tively light weight, and unfailing pluck and cheeriness made him a
perfect tandem partner.
Well, the Bath Road Club and we his friends have suffered a very
heavy loss, and we shall never forget him. It is no small consola-
tion, though, to think that he saw his duty plain before him, like
a true Bath Roader, and died gloriously in pursuit of it.
Mr John Lane bears witness to his intellectual
interest in the following appreciation :
He was born at Teddington on September 2, 1879, an ^ * we ^ re "
member his proud father taking me into the nursery the following
Christmas to view his firstborn. Since then, but more especially in
recent years, we met constantly, so that I may claim to have known
him intimately all his life.
In some respects he was the most remarkable young man I have
ever known, and his social charm ensured his being one of the most
popular men about town of his time. For well-nigh twenty years
no ball was complete without his presence, and he was a most
accomplished dancer ; yet very few of his hundreds of hostesses knew
his more serious side. He was a brilliant and most daring conversa-
tionalist, and like his father he belonged to the eighteenth century,
in this respect at any rate. He was a perambulating Almanack de
Gotha in his knowledge as to the ramifications of the great English
and Continental families. His genealogical information and his
familiarity with foreign heraldry were beyond that of any other man
of my acquaintance. Indeed ever since the publication of Coke of
Norfolk in 1907, he was in the habit, as a labour of love, of reading
all the proofs of any books of memoirs, or books connected in any
way with genealogy or heraldry issued at the Bodley Head, and many
are the pitfalls and dilemmas from which he has rescued the authors
and publishers. Indeed his extensive knowledge was always placed
at the disposal of any searcher after truth in these matters and he
was a frequent contributor to Notes and Queries. I have known
him to look upon portraits of the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth
century bearing arms but otherwise anonymous and within a
short time he would identify and reconstruct the personality of
the sitter. Some time before his tragic death John Davidson,
the poet, presented me with an inscribed copy of that fascinating
work, Rush's Residence at the Court of London from 1817 * x& 2 5>
with the recommendation that I should re-issue it. Davidson had
written an enthusiastic article on the book and I handed both, the
248 THE MAN ABOUT TOWN
book and the article to Walpole. On his returning the volume to
me a year or so later I found that of probably over a thousand names
mentioned in the work, all but five or six were voluminously annotated
in his wonderful handwriting. Some day I hope to give to the world
this fruit of his rich and varied knowledge.
All who knew " Tommy Walpole " as he was familiarly called by
so many must feel his loss to be irreparable, for I never knew a man
with a kinder heart, and all his friends must have experienced evidence
of this. Nor was his kindness confined to his own immediate circle,,
as for many years he gave his services daily at the offices of the Charity
Organisation Society; and was always ready to help the poor and
distressed.
Mrs Adrian Porter, in the life of her father, Sir John Henniker
Heaton, records a characteristic anecdote of "Tommy's" won-
derful memory. "One day when he was at a luncheon party
with us I said, c Is it true that you know the exact age and
birthday of everyone you meet at dances ? ' He replied, I
suppose it is more or less true for instance I know you were born
in November 1884.' I said, ' Oh, but perhaps you looked me up
before you came ! ' Everyone joined in the laughter, and at their
request he astonished and amused them by giving correctly the ages
and birth month of four out of the five girls who were present. (The
fifth was a South American who had not long been in London.)"
Innumerable tributes to his memory lay stress on
his humour and high spirits, thoroughness in all his
work, and the natural kindness which was rooted
in the love of human nature for its own sake. He
was the most charitable of men, and with him
courtesy was the better part of charity. . He was
buried in the little soldiers' cemetery known as
" Quality Street," with a man of his own company
on the right and two others of his regiment on the
left. He was a first-rate regimental officer, who set
the comfort of his men before his own at all times
and knew how to win and keep their confidence
in the critical days of the struggle against over-
whelming odds which saved civilization. Had he
lived, he would have been a brilliantly successful
soldier all his superior officers were agreed on that
point.
"ILIUM \OEI HODGSON
(UEU1ENAXI, 9 TH T)K\o\ KECJMEN'T, J[.C.)
THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
WILLIAM NOEL HODGSON
WILLIAM NOEL HODGSON, third and
youngest son of the Bishop of St
Edmundsbury and Ipswich, was born
January 3rd, 1893. He entered Durham School
(School House) in September 1905, having been
elected to a King's Scholarship in the June of that
year. He steered the 2nd Crew in 1907 and was
in the XV, in 1910 and in the XL in 1910-1911.
He won the Steeplechase in 1911. On leaving
school he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where
he had gained a Classical Exhibition. He played
Rugby football and hockey for " The House." In
March 1913 he obtained a First in Classical
Moderations. At the outbreak of war he received
a commission; he was mentioned in dispatches
and awarded the Military Cross in October 1915,
and was subsequently promoted to be lieutenant*
He fell in the Somme offensive on July ist, 1916.
Hundreds of the Oxford and Cambridge Under-
graduates, who joined up the moment we declared
war on Germany, must have had much the same
record in yv/u/acmKT? and /XOVO-IKT? as this young
scholar and athlete who would be remembered
in English literature if he had written nothing
save the famous hymn Before Action. Both at
school and at Oxford, however, he had been
recognized by his contemporaries as an unusually
strong and deep character, with large reserves of
spiritual power. Both in his work and in games
he had a singular gift of rising to the occasion
an incidental greatness seemed to characterize him
249
250 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
whenever a difficult question was proposed or his
side found itself in a tight corner. " From the
first it was evident," wrote his Headmaster in a
survey of his school career, "that he possessed
ability, but its extent was, I fancy, not suspected
until near the end of his time at school. The
impression one now has, looking back, is that he
very seldom gave his powers full play. He kept
them in reserve until the real occasion presented
-itself. He preferred to criticize in silence and to
work out the solution of an intellectual problem, or
discover the happy phrase, and keep them to
himself." As olives grow by moonlight, so the
soul waxes strong in contemplation and that is
why 'the English habit of reserve, which the
foreigner dislikes in us and fears not a little, is a
secret source of national strength. But the intensity
of his inner life those solitary voyages in the vast
ocean of the divine of which his poems are the only
records did not prevent him from tasting every
flavour of the joyousness of school life and college
life in communities established on the chivalrous
equality offarage, whereby all are peers who give
their best in service and self-sacrifice. He made
many a friendship at school, which the passing of
time or even lack of intercourse served only to
confirm, and he did not expect his friends to see
eye to eye with him in all things, a gentle tolerance
being one of his characteristics, the bloom as it
were on a rose-white temperament. In the happy
days of youth he was a truth-seeker, but when he
met Beauty by the way he did not like some of
the Georgian poets think it a waste of time and
himself to worship her a while. The blithe charm of
the English boyhood which he himself never lost :
WILLIAM HODGSON 251
Oh, arrow-straight and slender
With grey eyes unafraid.
You see the roses' splendour
Nor reck that they shall fade.
Youth in its flush and flower
Has a soul of whitest flame,
Eternity in an hour,
All life and death in a game
and its adventurous spirit satiated in fancy, if never
in action :
Great days we've known, when fancy's barque unfurled
Her faery wings, and bore us through the world
To spy upon the devious ways of men.
We trafficked in Baghdad and Samarcand,
Or handled ankers in the smugglers' den,
Or came at evening to an unknown strand
Where each man gripped his cutlass in his hand.
For magic ruled the whole earth over then.
Earth was a treasure house of wond'rous things
That tall-built galleons, with snowy wings,
Brought from strange seas, where coral-ringed lagoons
See great gold suns and amber-girdled moons.
And some men spoiled the hoards of old sea-kings.
Red gold in ingots, jewels rich and rare,
Wrought silver plate and cups with carven lips,
Doubloons and spices, costly silks, and fair
Tall girls with rubies in their raven hair
are the theme of his poems more often than you
would expect. He always kept in mind the debt
he owed to his school and to the great Abbey,
"exceeding wise and strong and full of years,"
which is one of the bulwarks of Christian
civilization, and to the " master-smiths " whose
work it is to build ships for the seas of Eternity :
See the silent smithy where,
On the noiseless anvils laid,
Day by day and year by year
Souls of men are forged and made,
252 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
Ceaselessly the hammers fall,
Making ties and rivets fast.
Till the perfect ship is found
Ready for the seas at last.
Trial and temptation strong
Beat upon the hardening steel.
Love and trust and self-control
Rivet it from truck to keel.
Of the quiet beauty of the Oxford countryside he
does not sing at all ; to the end he was haunted by
the mystical presences of the Northern moors which
he celebrates in God's Hills^ a poem which is a
worthy parallel to Julian Grenfell's magnificent
picture of Indian mountains :
In our hill country of the North,
The rainy skies are soft and grey,
And rank on rank the clouds go forth,
And rain in orderly array
Treads the mysterious flanks of hills
That stood before our race began,
And still shall stand when^Sorrow spills
Her last tear on the dust of man.
There shall the mists in beauty break,
And clinging tendrils finely drawn
A rose and silver glory make
About the silent feet of dawn ;
Till Gable clears his iron sides
And BowfelPs wrinkled front appears,
And ScawfelFs clustered might derides
The menace of the marching years.
The tall men of that noble land
Who share such high companionship,
Are scorners of the feeble hand,
Contemners of the faltering lip.
When all the ancient truths depart
In every strait that men confess,
Stands in the stubborn Cumbrian heart
The spirit of that steadfastness*
WILLIAM HODGSON 253
In quiet valleys of the hills
The humble grey stone crosses lie,
And all day long the curlew shrills
And all day long the wind goes by.
But on some stifling alien plain
The flesh of Cumbrian men is thrust
In shallow pits, and cries in vain
To mingle with its kindred dust.
Yet those make death a little thing
Who know the settled works of God,
Winds that heard Latin watchwords ring
From ramparts where the Roman trod,
Stars that beheld the last King's crown
Flash in the steel grey mountain tarn,
And ghylls that cut the live rock down
Before kings ruled in Ispahan.
And when the sun at even dips
And Sabbath bells are sad and sweet,
When some wan Cumbrian mother's lips
Pray for the son they shall not greet ;
As falls that sudden dew of grace
Which makes for her the riddle plain,
The South wind blows to our own place,
And we shall see the hills again.
Indeed there was nothing dour or sour in his poetic
soul, for he could make a love-song or an exiguous
epitaph for the death of his youth or even indite
stanzas to the honour and glory of rum punch :
Ruby-red Jamaica rum
Seasoned with a pirate's thumb,
Brought from an enchanted ocean
Is the backbone of our potion,
Our immortal magic lotion
Loosing speech in men long dumb.
Brandy, likest bottled sun,
Where the broad French rivers run ;
Liquor that hath not a fellow
Save those ancient wines and mellow,
Emerald green and jasper yellow,
Grown by monks of habit dun*
254 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
A stave of Latin rhyme out of some mediaeval
drinking-hymnal : >
Pocula parantur mensis,
Vinum -potius quam ensis
comes in at the last to remind one of the immemorial
connection between sound doctrine and sound liquor
which, in this land, ceased to be well remembered
after the lamented death of Queen Elizabeth.
Two Oxford appreciations, one by a Don and the
other by an undergraduate friend, are vivid apprecia-
tions of a character that impressed itself on his
companions more even by being than by doing.
Here is the semi-official appreciation or, as Dons
and undergraduates are closer than they were a
generation ago, perhaps one should say demi-semi-
official :
I like to think of Hodgson at Christ Church, He stood distinctly
by himself and from the first struck one as a man most stable and
secure, very sure of himself ; yet without the least touch of self-trust
or self-confidence. When he came up, I was asked by Dr Ottley
to make friends with him, for his father's sake, and also because of
the hope his father had that he might be a clergyman. It was not
hard to get on terms with him, but one felt at once that his character
was one of those vastly firm characters that are well able to look after
themselves. Most men come up to Oxford mentally and morally
less formed than Hodgson. He had got a good line always and kept
to it. When I speak of him as formed I do not mean that he had
reached a kind of mechanical excellence. Nothing would be farther
from the truth. He was growing steadily, justly and freshly, but the
roots were deeper than you will ordinarily find them. He had not
to find his balance or even bother about trying to keep it, His balance
was natural and he was true to it. I was not his tutor, so cannot
speak from any official knowledge of his intellectual capacity. But
I have often heard him praised as a classical scholar, for his nice
feeling for language, his restraint, and his striking command over his
materials. Still more insistently have I heard his " Greats " work
appreciated and admired, He had an extraordinarily cool mind., his
tutor told me. He would not say very much in a private hour, but he
would take in whatever was heard and ponder it ; literally weigh it in
WILLIAM HODGSON 255
his mind ; then, after turning it over, he would make it his own and
produce not the same matter, but the matter worked over and appreci-
ated and even illuminated by a thoroughly fresh and independent
mind. There was a clearness, a sense of logic and consistency and
grasp, and a marshalling of his facts, which promised great things,
not necessarily in the world of learning, though there is little doubt
he would have been among the best when the test of the Schools came,
but in the world of men and in practical affairs. There was exactly
the same feeling of grasp and clear-headed consistency to be observed
in his ordinary out-of-school life. He had a strong sense of responsi-
bility. There was nothing patronising or priggish about it. It is
absurd even to contemplate the possibility of this in thinking of
Hodgson. But he was born, or had become, morally strong, and he
used his strength for the welfare of others. I remember being par-
ticularly struck by his friendships. There were not a few men of
his own year whose tastes and abilities were of a kind to match his
own, and easily and naturally enough he made friends with them.
With them he talked and walked and read and did a thousand happy
things. And yet the man to whom his virtue most went out was a
man, from the ordinary point of view, totally unlike him, morally
inclined to be a weakling, rather dull and with no particular taste
for literature or knowledge of classics or interest in philosophy.
Like Hodgson, he could play a good game of Rugby, but that was
the only obvious link. Yet not deliberately, or of set purpose, but
instinctively, Hodgson adopted him, gave him most of his company
and, though I do not think they ever had much in common, became
his prop. I do not know what sort of an officer Hodgson was when
he joined the army, but I am quite sure that he cared, and cared
exceedingly, for his men.
It may be fancied from all this that Hodgson's interests were of
a highly practical kind. Where did the poetry come in ? A great
many men have their secrets at Oxford, and this was Hodgson's.
His passion for good found its deepest expression in poetiy. I
remember feeling a little surprised when I first heard that Hodgson
wrote poetry. But when you come to read his poetry you see how
exact and just is its revelation of his character. He had, like his
poetry, a strong grasp of fact but there was vision too. How the
Lakes delighted him ; he felt for them as a lover or a child. I have
heard him speak about them as a lover, not ecstatically, but with the
controlled passion of one with whom they were things too deep for
speech, and there was a clear cool look in his face and a clear steadfast
expression not unbecoming those whose travels and whose minds
have been much with the mountains and the waters below them.
Resolute and strong ; active in heart and brain, owning his mind and
body alike well ; far seeing and with a vision of the worlds beyond,
256 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
a good sportsman,, a lover of his kind, a lover of nature,, well-set up,
well disciplined, self-controlled, and therefore able to control;
thoroughly true and steadfast; a good friend, thoughtful not for
himself but for others ; quiet and in some ways reserved ; Christian
in spirit and in observance as well ; his friends can never forget him
nor their lives fail to be a little nobler because he was just what he
was, and did what he did. G. K. A. B.
The friend who shared with him the joyous and
abundant life of " The House " (always in its
reasoned self-esteem a place apart) gets closer still to
the man-in-himself :
What I know of Bill Hodgson at Christ Church was almost entirely
confined to our personal friendship. We never belonged to the same
clubs and rarely met, except in the evenings, when we met in his
rooms or mine after Hall, and sat hour after hour reading Classical
texts and discussing the latest books and each other's writings. Few
subjects remained undiscussed, from football to social reform, and
then frequently we would clear the chairs on one side and have a
spar without gloves, my weight compensating for his skill. Of his
thought and his wonderful scholarship I knew more than anyone at
the House. When I say wonderful I was thinking of Homer. I
really think this should be recorded of him, his love of Homer and
understanding of the Iliad especially. Himself simple, fearless, and
wonderfully alive, he enjoyed every instant he lived, and his games
were one with his scholarship. He played football as one who en-
joyed the sensation as well as the game, and his work was all done
in the same spirit. He was at his best, I thought, on the early summer
mornings, when he and several more of us would go to Long Bridges
and bathe, scaling the iron palings at the bottom of Christ Church
meadows en route in order to seize and make away with the House
punt from the barge, or even some other college punt. A good trespass
or a roguish theft appealed to him vastly. On those mornings whoever
of the party chose t<5*stay in bed, that was not Bill ; in fact he had
a true scorn for such sloth. He was constitutionally impatient of
anything like laziness in action or morbidity of thought ; and he
shamed one out of that : nobody needed his sympathy and help, and
failed to get them. His strength was the support of many less happily
endowed than himself, and his sacrifice of time and patience, despite
the natural hastiness with any weakness of disposition, was generous.
Even in dress he was neat to fastidiousness, and this suited him
when it might have seemed out of place in others. His whole life
was a protest against slipshodness of any kind. His notes at lecture
were copperplate or nothing; often nothing, but never careless.
WILLIAM HODGSON ,257
He was not over-modest or self-esteeming, his vivid common sense
made either impossible. He estimated his own capacities, if ever
he took the trouble, in the same neat and sensible fashion in which
he might the merits of some new book. He had very many friends,
and I am sure he never lost one. And every one of them can see him
clearly as I can while I write. He kept clear of extravagance, and
his circle of acquaintance had nothing to do with politics. I can see
him still with that fine gleam in his eye cataloguing the various public
men " honest fellow " or " knave " or attaching to their name some
literary tag. He had a keen eye for the actual : philosophy wearied
him, but science and social ethics interested him deeply. I am sure
he was greatly impressed by Charles Fisher, whose character was so
like his own ; everybody knew him as deeply, though not fancifully,
religious, and he was never backward in encouraging others in this
respect. His is a picture strongly individual, vivid, and clear-cut;
every action and word full of reason and restraint but his eyes alight
with the enduring boyhood he was never to outlive.
His record as an officer of the pth Devons gives
the same impression of a great reserve of power
under an exterior of cheerful alacrity he was called
"Smiler" by his brother officers. He very soon
acquired a complete knowledge of his duties and of
the psychology of the enemy. His coolness and
gallantry were conspicuous during the attack at
Loos and in the defence of Gun Trench against a
series of counter assaults. He was intensely proud
of the magnificent bravery of his men, and they for
their part loved and admired him and trusted him
implicitly, knowing that he had a clear insight into
the tactical position. " I have been with him a
good deal in action," wrote one of his brother
officers, " and he was about the only man whom I
have never known to show a sign of fear, though I
know he felt it like the rest of us." At the begin-
ning of the Somme offensive, when it was his duty
to supply his battalion with bombs, establishing
depots in the German lines as they were taken, he
carried out his duties without a hitch. He got as
258 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
far as the third German lines and was then mortally
wounded, a bullet passing through his throat. His
last words, addressed to his sergeant, were : " Carry
on ; you know what to do." " Your son received
the Holy Communion just before going up to
battle," wrote the Chaplain of the 9th Devons to
his father, " and though he seldom spoke about such
things, the deep faith that inspired him was plain
to all"
His impressions of warfare are set down in a
few sketches (published in the Spectator and in
the Saturday Review and other literary journals)
which are stirring and full of reality rather than
" realistic,' 3 and as readable as any of the best-
known work of Boyd Cable and the other
chroniclers of battles from the individual soldier's
point of view. The two sketches entitled
"Nestoria" are admirably based on his own
experiences. The first begins with a conversa-
tional epic (would we had it in full !) of the
remaking of a shockingly shattered regiment :
During dinner the man on leave had delivered an epic. It had
traced the adventures of the faithful few who remained over when
the regiment inarched back in the grey hours of Friday's dawn from
the chalk lines before Vermelles, to be flung back to trenches thirty-
six hours later. It followed them through the Givenchy craters and
Festubert marshes, on marches southward and northward, among
shellmgs and bombings ; short rests and heavy labours. It told of the
slow welding of the new regiment, when the fresh drafts came rolling
in from the Base, of worries and perplexities surmounted, of
" quilters " rooted out, of good men discovered, and, finally, of how
the battalion, once more conscious of itself as a unity with history
and honourable scars, was being tempered to a fine edge for the next
stroke.
Hodgson was one of the men on whom a C.O.
relies for invaluable help help which cannot be
WILLIAM HODGSON 259
weighed in Staff balances and gets no tangible
reward in the achievement of that ever-recurring
miracle, the Phcenix-like renewal of the life of a
famous regiment when almost all the old members
of the historic brotherhood have vanished in the
wasting fire of a great action. These sketches are
clearly autobiographical ; the second shows you how
" Smiler " earned his Cross. In " The Raid " there
is an invaluable note on German psychology in
warfare :
The essential difference between ourselves and our enemies is in
nothing moie strikingly displayed than in the raid which we in-
augurated last autumn. It began with a Canadian " cutting-out "
expedition, recalling, by the audacity of its conception and the cool
daring of its execution, the recapture of the Hermione or some other
heroic stroke of Nelson's navy. Others followed of the same kind,
relying on surprise, nerve and man-to-man superiority for success.
Then the German took up the idea and applied to it his hacking-
through principle. To pulverize a small portion of trench by a tre-
mendous artillery concentration and then send a party to pick up any
fragments, was his scientific adaptation of adventurous enterprise
little suited to his character.
Now and again we have a still, entrancing picture
of a brooding landscape, full of consulting trees,
in the same countryside :
Below him in the valley among the poplars, whose sober tracery
was already faintly tinged with green, lay the red and white of cottages
dominated by twin towers, their stone mellowed with the passage of
five hundred years. Faintly through the branches glimmered the
blue of water, and beyond again a thick fir spinney crowning a quarry
stood black against the russet poplars. Behind and over it all swelled
the opposing ridge, where the smooth swathe of grass and stubble
was broken by the vivid green of young wheat and the rich umber
of damp ploughland. Away to the eastward, in a hollow of the hills,
the square pile of a great abbey rose mistily from the smoke of the
city, and farther still the downs ran, ridge upon ridge, into the midst
of illimitable distance a Kingdom of dream.
A Kingdom of dream indeed ! renewing in this
young soldier's mind the vision of those Abbeys,
260 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
citadels of Christianity in his own northern land,
which have seen the barbarians come and go in
remote centuries :
The Abbey's three tall towers
Behold the tides of men
Flow from their silent waters
To seas beyond their ken ,
They gazed on us, my brothers,
And we were happy then.
Our footsteps, oh my brothers,
In pleasant paths were set,
With pleasures to remember,
And sorrows to forget,
Deep draught of love and laughter,
A cup without regret.
In " Pearson " he praises his soldier servant
" If he were Commander-in~Chief, the war would
be over in a week. But I should get no baths,
so I'm glad he isn't" The affair of the Mess
carpet (Headquarters Mess had been installed in
the main room of an empty house, which had a
very cold stone floor) illustrates Pearson's methods
admirably :
I hardly saw how he was to obtain a carpet at twenty -four hours*
notice. However, I called him ; " Pearson," I said, " we want a
carpet for the Mess by tea-time to-morrow."
" Very good, sir."
" There's a bet on it, Pearson."
" I'll see to it, sir," and off he went.
Next morning, as I was returning from the Orderly Room, Pearson
met me.
" Please, sir, will you give me a pass to EXYZED ? "
Now EXYZED is the remains of a town that became uninhabited
very suddenly, and is still attended to daily by the German gunners.
It is out of bounds for troops.
" Sorry, Pearson, I can't."
Pearson looked disappointed. " The carpet, sir*- " he ventured.
" Have to give it a miss," said I.
WILLIAM HODGSON 261
Pearson shook his head and moved sorrowfully away.
Shortly before tea, the door of the Mess Room was violently agitated,
and Pearson entered in a stream of perspiration, bearing on his
shoulders a carpet and two rolls of linoleum.
" Good Lord/' said the Doctor, " where did those corne from ? "
" EXYZED, sir " ; then, turning to me, " you didn't tell me not
to go, sir."
" Pearson/' I said, " you're a bally marvel."
He gave an apologetic smile. " I could not let you lose a bet, sir,
for the sake of a little trouble."
Moral: next time a soldier friend boasts of his
servant as they always do sooner or later re-
member that he is not always such a liar as he
seems. Why the batman is so zealous in service
is another and much more important question. A
German prisoner of war, monocled and superior
and hypercritical, scoffed at the laziness of British
officers in requiring servants ; we have no servants,
he boasted. It was pointed out to him that after
action the British officer gave his whole time to
caring for his men and without a batman would
never even get a meal, whereas in the German
Army the officer has nothing to do but look after
himself. Hence the difference, which is thoroughly
well understood by the British rank-and-file just
as it is carefully ignored by British Bolshevists and
the like who preach class-warfare.
Here is a complete short sketch of a Friday
afternoon in Flanders :
It is half-past four on Friday afternoon in a village beyond the line.
The only difference between Friday and the other afternoons is that
it rains harder on Fridays, and this is no exception. The mile and a
half of street which composes the village is ankle-deep in mud, except
where industrious members of a salvage company are sweeping it to
one side ; in these places it is knee-deep. Gloomily surveying the
prospect is a drenched sentry, who looks as joyless as a teetotal pacifist.
Equally gloomy are six stalwart " grenadiers " in variegated steel
helmets and a coating of chalk, who are unloading boxes of " Grenades,
262 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
Hand " off a G.S. waggon with the contempt bred of familiarity.
They are observed dispassionately by the inevitable French peasant,
his hands deep in the pockets of Brobdingnagian pantaloons. Up to
date the village is still " inhabited/' but the attentions of the Boche
have become rather pressing during the past few days, and the com-
mencement of an exodus is marked by an ancient dame who is wheeling
two chairs down the street on a co-seval wheelbarrow, and has succeeded
in holding up a section of the Brigade Ammunition Column with its
cargo of eighteen-pounder shells. Various small parties of damp
infantrymen hurry across the street on their lawful occasions, and a
couple of sapper officers are approaching with the " clip-clop " of
muddy gum-boots.
Suddenly all the figures in this scene stiffen into immobility ; there
is a sound like a giant cane being swished through the air overhead,
and from the cottages fifty yards behind the sentry two little yellow
mushrooms of smoke and brickdust rise and float away on the
breeze.
" Whizz-bangs," says one of the sappers, " better get under the
church ; there'll be another two in a minute. 3 ' They cross the road
and lean against the substantial church wall ; immediately opposite
the corporal of the guard has come out and is surveying the damage
with a dubious gaze. "Get your sentry under cover, corporal,"
calls the sapper, and the sentry retires with alacrity. The grenadier
party, a hundred yards further along, have paid no attention beyond
a cursory glance to see where the shells pitched ; after all, if one
worried over whizz-bangs, no work would ever be done. But
the ancient of the wheelbarrow is already in a cellar, and a
driver of gunners is pushing her vehicle into the gutter, out of
the way of his waggons. The sapper is right ; again the swish
overhead, and the two mushrooms, this time a hundred yards
further on, making the gunner's horses jump and their drivers
get to work with their whips. At a lumbering trot the column
passes up the street.
The two sapper officers leave the sanctuary of the church wall
and continue their walk in the rain. But before they have made
twenty paces, both halt suddenly, and then with one accord leap for
the nearest door. There is an ominous sound in the air, deliberate,
oily and slow, s-s-swish, s-s-swish a carpet-slippery sound followed
by a petrifying moment of silence then f( cr-r-r-umph " a great
cloud of black smoke, the crash of masonry and the air is full of
whining fragments.
" Crumps, by Gad," says the 'sapper. " There's a cellar by the
guard there," and the two officers cross the road at a double and join
the guard and two cooks in a cellar full of empty bottles under an
estaminet. The Ammunition Column break into a clattering gallop,
WILLIAM HODGbUJM
in which they are followed by the G.S. waggon. Through the distant
door the last of the grenadiers is disappearing, indifference shed like
a garment, and the wheelbarrow has the scene to itself. Again the
distant oily menace is heard ; at the critical moment from a cottage
door runs a soldier in shirt sleeves ; making for the cellar opposite.
He seems to move incredibly slowly. Cr-r-umph, and the recurring
crash and thunder. When the smoke and dust clear away, a shirt-
sleeved crumpled form is lying very still among the mud and rubble.
A thin red stream mingles with the rain that washes into the gutter,
and round the legs of the barrow. In the distance can be heard the
clatter of the departing column, and from the outskirts of the village
the shattering cough of English howitzers hurling vengeance into
some German billet miles away. The rain washes down on the white
upturned face ; all is peace again, and a grenadier appears in the
street lighting the inevitable cigarette. Two stretcher-bearers
materialize from somewhere, and bear away the " casualty/' a gloomy
procession. " La-la/' says the ancient Frenchwoman, shaking her
old head, and plods away with her barrow and the stain of blood on
her sabots.
All this is very good, and it is clear we lost in
" Smiler " a brilliant chronicler of the light-and-
shade, the splendour and horror and humour, of
the phase of social -life called war. But the two
great poems in which he summed up all his deep
and soul-dividing thought on the great ordeal of
battle remain as part of the Englishman's spiritual
heritage for all time. Back to Rest was com-
posed while marching to billets after the fighting
at Loos:
A leaping wind from England,
The skies without a stain,
Clean cut against the morning
Slim poplars after rain,
The foolish noise of sparrows
And starlings in a wood
After the grime of battle
We know that these are good.
Death whining down from Heaven,
Death roaring from the ground,
264 THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
Death stinking in the nostril,
Death shrill in every sound,
Doubting we charged and conquered
Hopeless we struck and stood.
Now when the fight is ended
We know that it was good.
We that have seen the strongest
Cry like a beaten child,
The sanest eyes unholy,
The cleanest hands defiled,
We that have known the heart blood
Less than the lees of wine,
We that have seen men broken,
We know man is divine.
And Before Action^ which shares with Julian
Grenfell's Into Battle the honour of being the
greatest of the new war-poems, is dated June
5 1916:
By all the glories of the day
And the cool evening's benison,
By that last sunset touch that lay
Upon the hills when day was done,
By beauty lavishly outpoured
And blessings carelessly received,
By all the days that I have lived
Make me a soldier, Lord.
By all of all man's hopes and f ears.
And all the wonders poets sing,
The laughter of unclouded years.
And every sad and lovely thing ;
By the romantic ages stored
With high endeavour that was his,
By all his mad catastrophes
Make me a man, O Lord.
I, that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
WILLIAM HODGSON 265
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
Must say good-bye to all of this ;
By all delights that I shall miss,
Help me to die., Lord,
Two days later he fell and was buried in a
front-line trench with many of his loved and
loving comrades*
THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
GUY DRUMMOND
CANADA is the most Elizabethan of the
Dominions. The combination of a Greater
Scotland and a Greater Normandy, she
offered mankind horizons as wide as those of the
United States, Before the war she was chiefly
concerned with the exploration and exploitation of
vast natural resources undreamed of even by
the " Fathers of Confederation. 55 She then felt
sufficient to herself, and great as was her liking
and admiration for the people of the gigantic
Republic with which she shared a continent she
had no thought of a nearer connection, having
within her far-flung boundaries all things material
or spiritual that are necessary to the full growth
of a great nation. In 1911, when she finally
refused the plan of American Reciprocity, she may
be said to have declined an offer of marriage for
the third time of asking, preferring to remain a
sister-power moving "in maiden meditation, fancy
free" in the west, like Shakespeare's vision of
Belphoebe herself. Her message to her mighty
neighbour was poetically rendered as follows :
I and thou by God's behest
Shared His wonder-working West,
Where the peoples old on earth
Once again are brought to birth
In a world of men new-born,
In a fresher, fairer morn,
Side by side we watch reclined,
Face to face and mind to mind ;
Conceiving purposes that run
Westward with the self-same sun
GLTY DRITMMOXI)
(CAPTAIN, ROYAT. HIGHLANDERS OF CANADA)
/row a A/ftttte bv R. Tntt Matkiti^e
GUY DRUMMOND 267
And, dreaming to the self-same end,
Each to each might be a friend.
Side by side we watch reclined,
Face to face and mind to mind.
But dream not any mortal art
Shall make it ever heart to heart !
Ah ; fool ! To think thou hast not seen
The sword spiritual laid between,
Bright with souls of heroes shed
To keep inviolate my bed.
High in my heaven see the sign,
A dearer, nearer flag than thine,
Which ever to the westering airs
In sunlit syllables declares
That never shall thy wooing rude
Break into my beatitude !
Love me ! but love rne as a star
That moves to influences afar.
As much thou shalt then take of me
As the star's picture in the sea 1
The war has brought about a closer union, while
strengthening the ancient ties of liberty and loyalty
which make the British Empire; for the dust of
Canadian and American soldiers is now commingled
in the vast battle-fields of the West Front, and neither
land can ever lose that sense of comradeship in war
which is a far stronger and subtler bond than any
marriage of political convenience could possibly be.
So, when the war is over, Canada will proceed with
the development of the heritage which is her very
own, thanks to the bygone toil and moil of French
and British pioneers. What the poet made her say
in 1911 can be even more truly said in the coming
peace-time :
I am the Lady of the North,
Whence the high floods hasten forth
Wild,, unwearying, white-maned steeds,
I harness them to serve my needs !
See my morning glaciers shine,
Emeralds in the far sky-line ;
268 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
See how on my deathless snows
Evening rests, a dying rose ;
Where the ever-circling day
Shines into my haunted Bay,
See the ice-bergs sweep along
Like a city in a song.
Whoso is not utter clod
These wonders lift him up to God.
Mine is the far-listening plain.
Wave o'er wave of golden grain
Shining, sighing to no shore,
All " lives o' men/' no less, no more.
My forests march from sea to sea,
Perennial in their pageantry ;
The white-leaf d poplars call the rains,
The birch a maiden-ghost remains,
The maple flames in a lone hour,
Ever the pine's a secret tower.
Bird and beast do so abound,
My lonely lands seem holy ground,
Edens at evening where God stood
And saw His works that all were good.
Many an orchard-close is mine,
Many a garden of the vine :
As harvest moons at dusk wax bright
My fruits drink in the dews of light
As luck's lines in my closed hand
Veins of wealth I do command ;
Clenched in many a secret hold
Veins of silver, veins of gold.
Rooted in me, pruned with my knife,
Each soul grows to a tree of life,
Whose waving branches shall be seen,
As centuries pass, more fresh and green.
(Two leaves on a branch side by side
Shall be the bridegroom and his bride.)
Thrice-happy in my works and days,
My every prayer's a song of praise,
And still to honour my great King,
1 waste not, want not, anything,
Yet all was not altogether well with Canada
in the peace-time past The line of cleavage
between the two Canadian races was still so marked
at times as to seem an incurable wound in the body
GUY DRUMMOND 269
politic. There were faults, no doubt, on both
sides. The French Canadians wished to remain a
people apart, and a twofold fear fear of the rapidly-
growing man-power and money-power of the
English-speaking element and fear lest they should
be drawn into what Sir Wilfrid Laurier liked to
call the "vortex of European militarism 35 caused
them to tremble at the thought of their Imperial
destinies. And the English-speaking Canadians
often showed a lamentable lack of sympathy with
their compatriots which was largely due to an
almost invariable ignorance not only of the historic
mentality of les Canadiens but even of the language
they spoke and of the literature they were creating.
"It would be easier for us all," Sir Wilfrid once
observed in a conversation with the writer, "if
every Canadian could speak and read French."
Partly because of the anti-militarism of Quebec and
partly for other reasons, Canada was not contributing
her fair share of the military strength by sea and by
land which was the only security for the existence
of the British Empire as a World-Power and as a
guardian of the world's peace. Many Canadians
believed they need not concern themselves at all with
European politics and that Canada could profitably
hold aloof from a European war in which Great
Britain was involved. They regarded the Balkan
War of 1912 as a kind of fight between mad
dogs, and none of them dreamed that a spark in
the grey ashes of that far-away fire was presently
to kindle a world-wide conflagration. Then the
idea was widely current in Canada, especially in
Quebec and the West, that the accumulation of
armaments provoked attack that defencelessness
was the safest as well as the cheapest form of
270 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
national self-defence. Ignorance of foreign affairs
was universal from end to end of the Dominion,
and the significance of the " Coup d'Agadir," the
first clear omen of Germany's intention to make a
bold bid for world-dominion, was absolutely ignored.
The average politician cared less about such matters
than any other class of the community for politics
had become merely a contest between the " Ins " and
the "Outs, 55 in which the chance of pillaging the
public was the partisan's chief inducement to get
busy. The great captains of industry, commerce
and finance did not care to soil their hands by
taking any personal part in the political game ; they
looked on the politicians as marionettes, whose
wires could always be judiciously pulled in the
case of need. In Canada, as in the United States,
the young man of wealth and culture held aloof
from what seemed to him a rather dirty business,
forgetting that it is every good citizen's first duty
to put an end to corruption and see that his country
is decently governed.
It was not so with Guy Drummond, who decided
at an early age to follow the example of the
wealthy leisured class in Great Britain and make
politics his vocation, fitting himself for it by a
careful study of political science and foreign affairs.
He was the younger son of the late Sir George
Drummond, K.C.M.G,, formerly President of the
Bank of Montreal one of Canada's most 'famous
"statesmen-capitalists," and a lover of art whose
collection bore witness to his profound knowledge
of the French master-painters. He was born on
August i^th, 1887, and was educated at St John's
School, Montreal (his native city), Bradfield, in
GUY DRUMMOND 271
England, and L'Ecole Libre des Sciences Polttiques
(1909-1911) at Paris. The Drummonds have
always heen strong and purposeful and gifted with
a full share of cautious tenacity their motto,
"Gang warily/ 5 was won by the founder of the
house at Bannockburn when thought of using
caltrops to lame the enemy's horses and check the
massed charge of the pennon'd host of southern
knights. Guy Drummond had the gift of vision
as well as the ancestral qualities of his long-
descended family, and he saw that Canada needed
political leaders who could see Canadian affairs in
the just perspective of world-politics, and would
not be tempted to seek personal advantages in
public life. Even when he was a boy the strength
of his purposeful personality was recognized by the
connoisseurs of men in the making, such as Dr
H. B. Gray, who was Headmaster of Bradfield
College during his stay there. Here is Dr Gray's
appreciation, written at the request of the author
of this brief memoir :
Guy Drummond was only at Bradfield for a short period during
his school career. When he came he was a thin, weedy lad who had
clearly outgrown his strength, though his physical frame gave evidence
that he would develop into a powerfully built man.
But no one who was an expert in boyhood could mistake his un-
usual strength of character. From the first day of his entrance into
college, he was a personality. Though a complete stranger to our
insular habits and the general type to which boys from the usual
Preparatory Schools almost inevitably conform, he took his place
with consummate ease and self-possession. Without being a prig
he bore himself with a dignity which suggested an inherited or natural
power of command. This characteristic attracted and fascinated
the masters and boys with whom he came in contact.
His earlier scholastic training, which had not been conducted on
the familiar English lines, prevented him from being conspicuous
in the class-room. But he never made foolish slips. An innate tact
made him silent when others blurted and blundered, and those who
272 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
looked below discovered traces of a big mind and the promise of a
wide view of life.
It was a cause of real sadness to me personally, as his Headmaster,
that his physical delicacy, due to a phenomenal upgrowth, made his
parents and doctors advise a more vigorous climate and a closer
personal supervision than the atmosphere of a Public School in the
Thames Valley could possibly supply.
From my knowledge of his early years and of his after life, I do not
think it an exaggeration to say that his premature sacrifice on the
field of battle was not only a bereavement to his friends but also a
loss to the Empire at large.
At M'Gill University his intellectual gifts
blossomed to fruition, and his studies at the Paris
fecole Libre des Sciences Politiques put a keen
edge on a mind which was manifestly destined
so all his contemporaries believed to find solutions
of many Canadian problems. He was as popular
in Paris as in Canada. The brightness of his soul,
as all could see, was not dimmed by any shadow
of self-seeking. He had a perfect mastery not
only of the French language but also of that
French politesse which is much more than a
matter of tact and taste, being really a sort of
enacted humanism based on a genuine love of
human nature and a generous confidence in its
possibilities* The Frenchman and even more the
French Canadian, be it well understood takes it
as an act of courtesy when a man of another race
speaks to him in his own language ; and if the
other speaks French well and with the wit and
wisdom inherent in what is the most logical and
versatile medium ever devised for social intercourse,
as well as for the exchange of ideas, he the
Frenchman and even more the French Canadian
feels a glow of pleasure which can hardly be ex-
pressed in mere words* In speaking with French-
GUY DRUMMOND 273
men of French Canadians Guy Drummond always
found the mot juste without searching for it ; he
instinctively said the right thing at the right
moment in the right way. Here is an example
of this happy faculty. In June 1911 (the
story is told in a brief obituary in the supplement
to the Revue des Sciences Politiques for August
I jth, 1915) he was travelling in the picturesque
and opulent countryside between Melun and
Coulommiers, where the British G.H.Q. were
established during the First Battle of the Marne.
The sight of the rich crops, the large and well-
found farms, the giant beeches all the beauty and
wealth of a fair garden-land in the mellow light
of a cloudless mid-summer day prompted Guy
Drummond to express his admiration. He turned
and said to his travelling companion : " Maintenant
je comprends bien Texpression : douce France"
It was the word that would most appeal to a
Frenchman ; for it is a word that dominates French
literature, from the chivalrous epic of Roland at
Roncevaux onward, and expresses in a sigh of
deep happiness, as it were, that devotion to the
beautiful, abounding soil which is the secret of
French patriotism. It will be seen how well fitted
this young Canadian was to create new intellectual
links between France and his own country and also
to complete the reconciliation of the two races that
have built up the stately fabric of modern Trans-
continental Canada. If he had lived, he would
have lived to see his ambition realized to behold
these two liberty-loving races finally united in life, as
Wolfe and Montcalm were united in death.
When he returned to Canada Guy Drummond
did everything in his power to encourage among
274 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
his compatriots a wider and deeper knowledge of
France and the French language. Each year he
gave a young Canadian the opportunity of attending
the Ecole Libre, paying the whole of his expenses
a fact known only to a few very intimate friends.
His encouragement of French studies, apart even from
its special value in Canada, was an act of imaginativl
statesmanship. His example ought to be generally
followed in the mother country and in the other
daughter lands. Whatever be the changes and
chances of world-politics after the war, this at
least is certain we can never again think of the
French people as other than our nearest and
dearest friends beyond the narrow seas. The dust
of so many myriads of French and English soldiers
has been mingled together in the vast battle-field
of the Western Front in the Via Sacra of Douglas
Gillespie's wonderful letter to his old school
that the mutual sympathy and confidence which
now unite us can never fade away into a cold
and calculating indifference. The Entente is the
two-handed crusader's sword which is hewing
Germany in pieces before the Lord. For genera-
tions to come it will be the mightiest safeguard of
the world's peace. But the greatness of France, so
gloriously revealed in our armed alliance, is even
more majestical in the world of ideas and there we
shall lose half the benefits of our battle-welded in-
timacy if we do not take pains to acquire an accurate
understanding of the French language. To speak
it well is, perhaps, generally beyond our unskilful
tongues but we can at any rate learn to read it aright
As things are, the grossest errors in French
translation are constantly recurring in books and
GUY DRUMMOND 275
journals written in English. It seems hopeless to
think of extirpating such blunders as morale for
moral^ Boscbe for Bocbe^ nom de plume for pseu-
donyms, double entendre, " the tout ensemble" etc.
These howlers, however, which seem to be a vested
interest of all British journalism, are comparatively
innocuous. Other inaccuracies, by no means in-
frequent even in the cultured Press, have much
more dangerous consequences. For example, the
popular notion that revanche means revenge in the
vindictive sense a misconception I have heard
turned to account by a defeatist M.P who said, in
conversation, that we ought not to go on fighting the
poor Germans merely to gratify France's unholy lust
for vengeance ! Even as used in Paul Deroulede's
famous lines, which have the look of a prophecy
to-day-
Et la revanche doit venir, lente peut-etre,
Mais en tout cas fatale, et terrible a coup sur
the word had not the dark, transpontine colouring
imputed to it ; all it held in it was- the idea of a
return match, or getting one's own back, which
would show that the disasters of 1870-71 were due
to misfortune, not a real inferiority. As for the
mistranslations of French official and military com-
munications since the war began, they have been
past counting, though in no single case, fortunately,
have they had any harmful result. The translation
of un beau tableau (used of seven German aeroplanes
and a Zeppelin shot down in one short sector), as
" a fine picture," is a case in point. It means, of
course, " a fine bag " ; tableau is here used of game
laid out for inspection after the Continental custom.
And the renderings of observations by French
276 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
military experts (the best in that business far
better than ours !) are often so clumsy as to be
meaningless, the translators being absurdly ignorant
of French military terms. . . . Morally and in the
political sense the Entente is now fully a fait
accompli. But it must be made a great intellectual
force, and that can only be done by raising the
standard of French studies throughout the British
Empire on the lines worked out by Guy Drummond.
He had been in touch with the young generation
of Frenchmen the realist generation which worked
and played hard and was no longer content with
amorous adventures and must have known that
a German war could not be long avoided.
Among the young open-air Frenchmen who came
of age between the " Coup d' Agadir " and the
Sarajevo affair there was never any doubt that
Germany ' was preparing for Armageddon. It is
true they very seldom spoke of the coming danger
which some of them thought might yet be averted
by the rising tide of Socialism in Germany for-
getting that this very menace to the Hohenzollern
regime would be yet another secret argument in
favour of a vast military adventure with those
who still believed that war ought to remain Prussia's
chief national industry. Gambetta's " Think of
it ever, talk of it never," was the thought of
the young French patriots who were instinctively
preparing their bodies and their souls to prevent a
second German invasion. Agriculture and politics
were Guy Drummond's chief occupations when
he went home to marry and devote his life to the
service of his city and his country. But the-
military preparedness of Canada was his chief
GUY DRUMMOND 277
preoccupation and, as an officer in the Canadian
Militia, he had been trained for his final task when
the storm broke. The call came and he obeyed
at once, leaving his young wife (he married in
April 1914) and his great possessions and all the
happy activities of a joyous home-life and a public
career already well begun. He volunteered with
the Active Service Battalion of his Regiment
(i3th Canadian Infantry, Royal Highlanders of
Canada), taking a commission as Captain, and
almost immediately sailed for France.
He fell at Langeinarck indeed he was probably
the first to fall in the wonderful battle against over-
whelming odds which was a spiritual birthday of
the Canadian nation. What befell at Langemarck
will never be forgotten in Canada or in any other
of the Allied lands, It was there that the Germans
used poison-gas for the first time, and the Division
on the left flank of the Canadians broke before the
yellow mist of choke-damp rolling on them, and
fled in hopeless confusion. The attack was utterly
unexpected, and the first information the Canadians
had of it, after the order to " stand to " had been
given from the front trenches, was the sight of
Turcos streaming past in wild panic. The dyke
was down, and a furious bombardment was followed
by a massed German attack. The left flank and
left rear of the Canadians were exposed, and a great
disaster would have befallen the Allies perhaps
necessitating a very extensive and difficult retreat
if they had failed to rise to so tremendous an
occasion. They neither failed nor faltered; after
days of hand-to-hand fighting, in which every man
had to do the work of a dozen and show, further-
278 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
more, a degree of intelligence and initiative hardly
to be expected of veterans, the German rush was
dammed up and the breach in the Allied line
repaired, Langemarck is one of the most glorious
episodes in the war, and all the glory is Canada's
now and for ever. It was a greater Thermopylae,
in which the deadliest resources of scientific savagery
were utilized unexpectedly, and it taught military
critics that the trained citizen soldiers of the great
Dominion were the equals of any professional troops
the world has ever seen.
When the German shell-fire was turned directly
on the Canadian trenches, Drummond ordered his
men into the shelter of the dug-outs. By that time
more of the Algerians were streaming past, and being
able to speak French Drummond went out into the
road to stem the flood and rally the fugitives. He
could do nothing with them, so returned to his own
platoon and brought them out to hold the road,
walking up and down among them, talking to each
man and cheering him up, and seeing that they took
the best cover that was available. For a minute or
two he left them, returning with Major Norsworthy.
The Germans were now within a hundred yards and
their fire was intense. The two officers were standing
together and were hit simultaneously Drummond
through the neck, and he died in a few minutes.
His last words to his men were : u Stick to it, boys,
We will get through them somehow." The scene
of his death is vividly presented in the letters written
to his wife and his mother by brother-officers and
the men of his battalion. First we see the long,
low-lying green cloud appearing and brooding above
the French lines; then the panic-stricken Turcos
GUY DRUMMOND 279
streaming past, many of them moving as if dazed ;
lastly the tall figure like Saul, the son of Kish, he
stood head and shoulders above his people with
intent face and bright hair, standing in the white
road and striving to rally the fugitives. The artless
letter of his soldier servant to Mrs Drumrnond is
perhaps the most touching of innumerable tributes
to his worth as a soldier and a man, and adds a
precious detail to the brief story of his ending :
As I was the Captain's servant I am writing these lines to you,
because Captain Drummond asked me to write to you if anything
happened to him, as he was going to do the same for me if anything
happened to me. Well, Madam, I don't know if you have heard the
true story of your poor husband 's death. It was on Thursday night,
the 22nd, that the battle started. I was just getting ready to cook
the supper for him when the French Turcos came running down
towards us, as we were in the reserve trenches they came down, some
with rifles and some without. As soon as they got to where we were,
a terrific shelling started, so that we all had to get into our dug-outs
and we could not move. Well, the Germans were approaching rather
near, and we had to get out and look after them.
I rushed out and put on your husband's equipment and see that
his revolvers was all right, and then we lined the ditch on the road.
In the meantime more of these French black fellows was still coming,
and the shelling was something fierce, with poisonous gas and lyddite,
it was awful ; well, when we got into the road the rifle and machine
gun fire was very hot indeed. Major Norsworthy was injured and
he sent me on a message. When I got back your poor husband was
gone, the last thing I see him doing was trying to rally these Turcos,
he was talking to them in French, he was trying to lead them on in
battle, but they were too nervous. Your husband walked up and
down the road, cheering and jollying us up and speaking to each one
of us. Well, Mrs Drummond, your husband was shot through the
throat, and him and Norsworthy both fell together; there was one
thing I was glad for, your husband got a few Germans before he went
under ; and another, he did not suffer, his last words were to cheer
the boys up. Madam, the Captain was one of the bravest men that
ever I see, he use to love us boys and we all use to love him, and the
boys miss him keenly, and of course they wish me to say that they
wish to express their sympathies to you in your trouble, and I am
sure that I do the same, and there are not many left now, there are
280 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
only a dozen of us. We all hope you will bear up brave in your
bereavement, and the boys wish you to convey to his mother a message
of condolence, hoping both you and his mother will bear up under
such trying circumstances.
This letter, which bears witness to the comradeship
of the Great War, should be compared with the
message of Captain Hugh Charlton's orderly. The
loss of this young Canadian soldier was sincerely
deplored, as a loss to Canada and the Empire, in
numerous letters to his wife and relations. M.
Maurice Barres and other distinguished Frenchmen
paid their tribute of proud regret to a true lover of
" la douce France," M. Jacques Cceur, writing in
a Montreal journal, re-echoed their homage in the
following valedictory :
Nous croyons que le premier devoir de tout citoyen est de con-
sacrer ses Energies, son talent, toute sa vie au pays ou il est n6 ou
qu'il a fait librement sien.
Le lieutenant Guy Drummond poss^dait esprit, instruction et
fortune. II avait sur un trop grand nombre de ses fre"res anglo-
canadiens (il n'aurait pas permis qu'on 1'appeUt ainsi de son vivant,
car il 6tait ficossais, mais non pas Anglais, disait-il), Tincomparable
avantage de connaitre notre langue, de la parler avec facilite* et agr6-
ment, II aurait pu rendre d'utiles services, dans un pays ou son
pre a fait sa fortune et sa reputation. Comme le faisait remarquer
un penseur, il a choisi la conception la plus brillante du devoir, qui
n'est peut-tre pas la plus utile. Mais combien facilement nous nous
inclinons sur sa tombe ! Riche, jeune, beau il 6tait taille* en Hercule,
il 6tait convaincu qu'il se devait & la cause imp&riale. II n'a pas
fait de discours ; il n'a pas 6crit d'articles dans' les journaux ; il n'a
pas joue 7 au sergent recruteur. II a pris modestement son rang dans
le contingent canadien, et il est parti, sans 6clat, avcc son corps, II
est tombi. Saluons sa tombe, c'est celle d'un h6ros.
Nous devons m6me, comme supreme hommage ^ sa m^moire,
transmettre a nos compatriotes la Ie9on qu'il nous donna un jour que,
ne le connaissant pas encore, nous lui adressmes la parole en anglais.
" Pourquoi vous plaindre toujours, disait-il, de ce que nous ne parlons
pas le fran9ais, puisque vous ne manquez pas une occasion de nous
parler anglais ? "
Guy Drummond aimait parler francais, et 4 cause de cela aussi
nous le regrettons. H 6tait un de ceux qui auraient pu le mieux aider
GUY DRUMMOND 281
a ramener Pentente entre les deux grandes races du pays, etant
admirablement qualifi6 pour remplir ce role d'intermediaire.
But the most notable of all was the following tribute
by Professor Macnaughton of M'Gill University :
How splendid Langemarck was 1 How glorious the end of Guy
Drummond. He was the first to fall of that band of heroes whose
death will be, I believe, a new birth of Canada ; at once a Bethlehem
and a Calvary. One thinks of Protesilaus, the first to leap upon the
Trojan shore though he knew well that he must pay the proud penalty
of the pioneer. He looked the part in his heroic stature, like Saul,
the son of Kish, towering by a head and shoulders over the people.
A great loss indeed, to M'Gill especially. He was a graduate of ours
and a great benefactor. But the loss is a thousand times swallowed
up in the gain. He that loses his life shall find not only his own but
his people's. By that end he did more for Canada than if he had
gone on to live five hundred years. And for himself how can it be
otherwise than well with him ? He is in the best of company indeed
in that other young man's who " did so well for himself " as Walt
Whitman says, and for us, nineteen hundred and fifteen years ago. ' l In
a moment, in the twinkling of an eye " he was changed, and passed
into everlasting efficacy among the starry forces which keep our
dull earth sweet and draw it upwards irresistibly ; for himself, can
we doubt ? that or ever he knew it he had exchanged the dust and
stench and labour for living waters and immortal flowers and verdure.
death where is thy sting ? O grave where is thy victory ? The
sting as ever is in the heart of the " mater dolorosa." But it is a
high and noble sorrow, worth a whole world of shallow joys.
Such a bereavement enriches and raises to the true peerage both
of earth and heaven. It would be sheer atheism to condole with the
dead and re-arisen Christ's mother, or with the mother of any son
who has shared his death and rising again. These cannot sorrow as
those wlio have no hope.
And that is the best thing Guy Drummond and the others have
done for us. They have shown us once more what we needed so
much to be revealed again the real meaning of Christianity the
true " religion of valour." That is above all what is to stand out
clear to the world " throned in heaven's immortal noon/' the inner-
most secret of the universe, the one creative power that is so busy
just now in fashioning a new heaven and a new earth, the Cross of
Christ.
The historic " ire of the Drummonds " has long
since avenged the Protesilaus of Langemarck, the
282 THE CANADIAN ENTENTE
battlefield with a name that is a sacring-bell in
Canadian remembrance for all time. As head of
the Canadian Red Cross Information Bureau, and
Assistant Commissioner of the Canadian Red Cross
Society, his mother, Lady Drummond, has built for
him a memorial of loving service. He missed the
life of busy, various,, unselfish usefulness he had
planned for himself it may yet be lived, however,
by his posthumous son.
TIIK H(^N. OKRAf D \\1LI.IAM ORKNFICIJ,
(LIEUTENANT, RIM,E BRUJADK)
AS A ROMAN CE \TURION
CASTOR AND POLLUX
JULIAN AND BILLY GRENFELL
Like Castor and Pollux they are together now, shining in some other
place. How different the most ternble sorrow is to the blight of misery,
isnt it ? If there is any meaning in life at alt, then there must be some-
thing beyond this life ; and if there is, then all question of despair is
eliminated. If there is not, if one were inclined to think that life after all
might be a bad joke or a stupid blunder, then one is Jaced with the difficulty
of accounting for the folds, the honeysuckle and the blossom, the sunset and
the dawn and the night, the Parthenon, Shakespeare, St Francis, Beethoven,
Velasquez, Shelley, the very existence of such radiant beings as Julian and
Billy. They must have been the expression and part of something, and
that something cannot have been impish or wicked or mistaken. To make
up the harmony of the world, to make an inheritance glorious and worth
having, the youthful death of the very bright and the very brave is, I have
always felt, not only a necessary but a precious element. Glorious sorrow
is as necessary, is as priceless, as the nightingale or the evening star,,
THIS passage, which justifies the title for the
last chapter of this book, is taken from a
letter of heart-felt sympathy written by
Maurice Baring to their mother in the summer of
the year they died on the Western Front The
letter is one of many tributes to their memory
(which is one and indivisible, for they cannot be
separated even in a stranger's thought) which are
printed in Pages from a Family Journal, a
record of the sayings and doings, the works and
the days, of her children, by Lady Desborough.
It is a book unlike any other book of the kind
I know ; a book with an atmosphere of happiness
and the joyousness of youth and natural loving-
kindness which illuminates all its contents with a
delight from within that can never fade away.
It is so full of intimate thoughts, of such tender
privacies, that it can never be given to the public
in this generation. But the time will come when
the reading of its glad sad pages will touch even
284 CASTOR AND POLLUX
the heart of the dry-as-dust historian the sifter
of infinitesimal facts in search of facts for his
picture of English family life in the era of the
Great War to a sense of the tears in all things
under the sun and moon. It will survive as a
living part of the Grammata whereby, as Gilbert
Murray said in a beautiful discourse on the neces-
sity of Greek and Latin books, "we find our
escape into that calm world of theirs, where
stridency and clamour are forgotten in the former
stillness, where the strong iron is long since rusted
and the rocks of granite broken into dust, but the
great things of the human spirit still shine like
stars pointing man's way onward to the great
triumph or the great tragedy, and even the little
things, the beloved and tender and funny and
familiar things, beckon across gulfs of death and
change with a magic poignancy, the old things that
our dead leaders and forefathers loved, viva adbuc
et destderio pulcriora" 1 It is appropriate that
I should here quote the words of the great scholar
who has not brought the classics down to the
people, but the people up to the classics. For
when Julian Grenfell lay dying of his wound,
death having already broken into the high places
of his commanding intellect, he repeated aloud
this song, in the Professor's translation, from the
Hippolytus as a charm of coolness against the great
heat of the Military Hospital at Boulogne :
for a deep and dewy spring,
With runlets cool to draw and drink,
And a great meadow blossoming,
Long-grassed, and poplars in a ring,
To rest me by the brink.
1 Living still and more beautiful because of our longing.
JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 285
0, take me to the mountain ; O,
Past the great pines and through the wood,
Up where the lean hounds softly go,
A-whine for wild things' blood.
And madly flies the dappled roe.
God, to shout and speed them there,
An arrow by my chestnut hair
Drawn tight, and one keen glimmering spear
Ah, if I could !
As a charm of coolness, for the song runs limpid
in its lucid English, and also for remembrance of
his own great days of hunting by field and flood
and heathery hill, which were ended for evermore !
His mother's secret and sacred book of memories
is full of such piercing oxymora which those who
read it in the far future will but dimly apprehend*
Yet I can imagine the reader with no Latin at
all and less than no Greek (for the classics are to
go because they are such " class-conscious " studies,
revealing the folly of democracy as a process of
levelling-down instead of levelling-up !) uttering his
grace for this book. He will not say Benedictus
benedicat but will imitate the deep, illiterate
wisdom of the old mendicant monk in the Bene-
dictine refectory, and gasp out his Franciscus fran-
ciscat. For it is a book of love through and
through, and Franciscan from cover to cover.
The two brothers were leaders, athletes, scholars,
men of letters, adepts in courtesy, by right of
inheritance. Their father was one of the most
famous of Oxford oarsmen, and an accomplished
all-round sportsman who persisted in feeling and
looking young when for most men the swift, slippery
descent of middle age begins. Even his political
opponents could not forget his feat of swimming
the Niagara Rapids, as a famous F.E.G. cartoon
286 CASTOR AND POLLUX
reminds us. From their mother and their maternal
grandfather, Julian Fane, they inherited a passion-
ate aptitude for letters which was developed in the
early home training in the fateful years from five
to ten when, as experts in child-study assure us,
the trend of an intelligence is finally determined.
Before he was five years old the literary faculty
began to show itself in the younger brother, whose
" History of the Family " (it was dictated) is a
delightful document. It begins : " Billy is a good
boy, but his Dada will never in the winter stop at
home. He is a tall man. But his wife is a good
woman. She reads to her boys every evening, and
plays with the little baby." There is much Humour
in a " but " as used by this chronicler humour of
the irrelevant kind found in the report of the
Marlborough Master who said of a certain pupil :
" He is tall but deceitful." The custom of reading
aloud was always kept up at Taplow Court, the family
home; there is no better way of teaching children
to love books and really understand them and
acquire a sense of style. Here is a lively, childish
description of a visit to Reading from the little
boy's " History of the Family." ( " Maxie " was
Julian's pet name.)
We went to Reading last week to see the biscuits made Billy
and Julian and Mamma, and we eat a great quantity of biscuits, and
seen a line and a brass rails where the boxes are sent shooting down,
and Billy and Maxie pushed off some of the boxes. And they seen
the " Maries " made too, and Cracknels, and how they was put in
boiling water the Cracknels till they were done, and yon men took
them out with great sieves and put them in cold water, and then bake
them ; we all took one hot-baked one, so there were 3 biscuits gone,
It was very amusing to see the man mixing the ginger-nuts with a
great shovel and putting in the sugar and butter in pailfuls. And
we saw all the girls packing up the boxes to go abroad ; their lids
were soldered in before they went, Then they were sent to all sorts
JULIAN & BILLY GRENFELL 287
of countries India, Iceland, Rome, America, Australia, Europe
countries, Italy, Scotland, Portugal, and nearly all other countries.
And we saw some soldiers and sailors and clowns all made of sugar
for birthday-cakes. And trains run all through, the factories, and
engines to pull them, and trucks which men push along. And one
of the kind men drawed them a violet and a bird and a running rabbit
all with a little screw of paper full of white sugar that came streaming
out at the bottom. And when they were just crossing the railway
bridge a train passed and splashed up steam in my face. And that
was the day which we finished in the train ff Settlers at Home/' and
how they got away from the Red Hill, to the friendly farm-house.
And now we have just finished " Jackanapes/' when dear Jackanapes
was a baby he went out after the little duck, and it said " Quawk "
when it got away into the pond. And how Jackanapes rescued Tony
and how Jackanapes was shot, and about the Major, and all about
the war. And there was the gipsy's red-haired pony, when Jacka-
napes was little, and how little Jackanapes started him by blowing
his twopenny trumpet, and how he spent his two shillings.
And Mr. Balfour came here for Sunday, he is in Parliament. And
Evan came too, and the " babies " as Mum calls them came down
to luncheon too. I cannot tell any more about that thing.
All of which is fine, fresh natural prose and
when we get it from a grown-up (as in Pepys'
Diary or in the wonderful account of the experiences
of a prisoner of war at Wittenberg, which appeared
in the Morning Post two years ago) we rejoice
aloud and call it a work of genius.
Julian's bent for adventurous open-air living was
soon shown* When he was only seven, he was
quite wild about any kind of shooting and sport ;
bows and arrows played a great part in his life,
and he loved to go with his father and grand-aunt
when they shot wild-duck in the evenings at
Panshanger. It was curious how early he began
following and tracking animals the instinct had
already appeared which made him so good at scout-
ing and reconnoitring in the war. He and his
brother loving fishing in the Lochs when the family
went to Assynt Forest in Sutherlandshire, where
288 CASTOR AND POLLUX
they had a great friend named Murdoch Keir who
told them Gaelic legends and stories and sang to
them and played a kind of little fiddle, and taught
them to catch fish and sea-urchins, and bait lobster-
pots and pull them up, and steer a sailing boat.
One of Murdoch Keir's stories was about a visit
to London, when he thought he would stifle at
night and got up and rowed a little boat into the
middle of the Thames and sat there and cried for
sheer home-sickness. The boys never forgot him ;
indeed they were incapable of forgetting any old
friend. In later years when they came home they
always ran up first of all to see "Hawa," their
old nurse, who became too old and infirm to come
downstairs to welcome them.
Their first school was Summer Fields, near
Oxford, and there they showed great promise both
at classics and at ga 
