Part 13

Well, the emergency came. These youths of the classes, heirs to titles and estates, or just younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, so far as it still survives, went out in their hundreds, with the old and famous regiments of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, and perished in their hundreds. Forty-seven eldest sons, heirs to English peerages had fallen within a year of the outbreak of war--among them the heirs to such famous houses as Longleat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby--and the names of Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, Douglas Pennant, Worsley, Hay, St. Aubyn, Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach--together with men whose fathers have played prominent parts in the politics or finance of the last half century. And the first ranks have been followed by what one might almost call a levée en masse of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassée, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever may be said henceforward of these "golden lads" of ours, "shirker" and "loafer" they can never he called again. They have died too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted them too well for that--and some of the working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have confessed it abundantly.

And the professional classes--the intellectuals--everywhere the leading force of the nation--have done just as finely, and of course in far greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May--in the height of the summer term, just at that moment when Oxford normally is at its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the "flannelled fools," who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe--if it ever applied to them--with interest. For they had all disappeared. They were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants--under age, or medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, showed boats indeed, but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college, Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associated in the minds of Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were white tents full of wounded. I walked up and down that wide, deserted lawn of St. John's, where Charles I once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are gone--so many!--and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did--as blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power."

Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the testimony of those who knew them best, not delightful to those who did not love them, not just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge, July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier. Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of April, 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and tragic joy of the "fighting man" in the spring, which may be his last--in the night heavens--in the woodland trees:

"The woodland trees that stand together They stand to him each one a friend; They gently speak in the windy weather; They guide to valley and ridge's end.

"The kestrel hovering by day And the little owls that call by night, Bid him be swift and keen as they As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

"The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing, Sing well, for you may not sing another Brother, sing.'

"In dreary, doubtful waiting hours, Before the brazen frenzy starts, The horses show him nobler powers;-- O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

"And when the burning moment breaks, And all things else are out of mind And only Joy of Battle takes Him by the throat and makes him blind

"Through joy and blindness he shall know Not caring much to know, that still Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so That it be not the Destined Will.

"The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings; But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings."

A young man of another type, inheriting from the Cecils on the one side, and from his grandfather, the first Lord Selborne, on the other, the best traditions of English Conservatism and English churchmanship--open-eyed, patriotic, devout--has been lost to the nation in Robert A.S. Palmer, the second son of Lord and Lady Selborne, affectionately known to an ardent circle of friends whose hopes were set on him, as "Bobbie Palmer." He has fallen in the Mesopotamian campaign; and of him, as of William Henry Gladstone, the grandson and heir of England's great Liberal Minister, who fell in Flanders a year ago, it may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries said of Sir Philip Sidney,

Honour and Fame are got about their graves, And there sit mourning of each other's loss.

In one of his latest letters, quoted by a friend in a short biography, Robert Palmer wrote:--"Who isn't weary to death of the war? I certainly have been, for over a year; yes, and sorrowful almost unto death over it, at times, as you doubtless have too. But of one thing I am and always have been sure, that it is worth the cost and any cost there is to come, to prevent Prussianism--which is Anti-Christ--controlling Europe." The following eloquent passage written by an Oxford Fellow and Tutor, in a series of short papers on the losses sustained by Oxford in the war, is understood to refer to Mr. Palmer:--

"To-night the bell tolls in the brain (haud rediturus) over one of the noblest--if it be not a treason to discriminate--of all the dead one has known who have died for England. Graciousness was in all his doings and in all the workings of his mind. The music and gymnastic whereof Plato wrote, that should attune the body to harmony with the mind, and harmonise all the elements of the mind in a perfect unison, had done their work upon him. He seemed--at any rate, to the eyes of those who loved him, and they were many--to have the perfection of nature's endowment: beauty of mind knit to beauty of body, and all informed by a living spirit of affection, so that his presence was a benediction, and a matter for thanksgiving that God had made men after this manner. So to speak of him is perhaps to idealise him; but one can only idealise that which suggests the ideal, and at the least he had a more perfect participation in the ideal than falls to the general lot of humanity."

Such he was: and now he too is dead. From the work to which he had gone, thousands of miles away (a work of service, and of his Master's service), he had hastened back to England, and for England he has died. His tutor had once written in his copy of the Vulgate: "Esto vir fortis, et pugnemus pro populo nostro et pro civitate Dei nostri." He was strong; and he fought for both.

Another Oxford man, Gilbert Talbot, a youngest son of the much-loved Bishop of Winchester, will perhaps stand for many, in coming years, as the pre-eminent type of first youth, youth with all its treasure of life and promise unspent, poured out like spikenard in this war at the feet of England. Already assured at Oxford of a brilliant career in politics, a fine speaker, a hard worker, possessing by inheritance the charm of two families, always in the public eye and ear, and no less popular than famous, he had just landed in the United States when the war broke out. He was going round the world with a friend, youth and ambition high within him. He turned back without a moment's hesitation, though soldiering had never been at all attractive to him, and after his training went out to France. He was killed in Flanders in July last. Let me give the story of his identification after death on the battle-field, by his elder brother, Neville, Army Chaplain, and ex-Balliol tutor, as Canon Scott Holland gave it in the Commonwealth:--

"The attack had failed. There was never any hope of its succeeding, for the machine-guns of the Germans were still in full play, with their fire unimpaired. The body had to lie there where it had fallen. Only, his brother could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or unblessed. After a day and a half of anxious searching for exact details, he got to the nearest trench by the 'murdered' wood, which the shells had now smashed to pieces. There he found some shattered Somersets, who begged him to go no farther. But he heard a voice within him bidding him risk it, and the call of the blood drove him on. Creeping out of the far end of the trench, as dusk fell, he crawled through the grass on hands and knees, in spite of shells and snipers, dropping flat on the ground as the flares shot up from the German trenches. And, at last, thirty yards away in the open ... he knew that he was close on what he sought. Two yards farther, he found it. He could stroke with his hand the fair young head that he knew so well; he could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, and the badge and the whistle. He could breathe a prayer of benediction ... and then crawl back on his perilous way in the night, having done all that man could do for the brother whom he had loved so fondly; and enabled, now, to tell those at home that Gilbert was dead indeed, but that he had died the death that a soldier would love to die, leaving his body the nearest of all who fell, to the trench that he had been told to take."

Again, of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Oxford friend says: "There were almost infinite possibilities in his future." He was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of importance in the Foreign Office, refused it, and went back to the front--to die. But among the hundreds of memorial notices issued by the Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs and recurs, of unhesitating, uncalculated sacrifice. Older men, and younger men, Don, and under-graduate, lads of nineteen and twenty, and those who were already school-mastering, or practising at the Bar, or in business, they felt no doubts, they made no delays. Their country called, and none failed in that great Adsum.

Cambridge of course has the same story to tell. One takes the short, pathetic biographies almost at random from the ever-lengthening record, contributed by the colleges. Captain J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, was already Director of an important steel works, engaged in Government business when war broke out, and might have honourably claimed exemption. Instead he offered himself at once on mobilisation, and went out with his battalion to France last spring. On the 15th of June, at Festubert, he was killed in volunteering to bring what was left of a frightfully battered battalion out of action. "What seems to me my duty as an officer," he once wrote to a friend, "is to carry my sword across the barriers of death clean and bright." "This," says the friend who writes the notice, "he has done." Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the forehead by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. His General and brother officers write:

He was a very fine young officer.... Every one loved him.... His men would do anything for him....

And the sergeant of his machine-gun brigade says:

Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I have lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and kind to me and us all.

Lieutenant Hamilton, aged twenty-five, says in a last letter to his father:

Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is going on. It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it all. Any moment one may be put out of action, but one does not worry. That quiet time alone with God at the Holy Communion was most comforting.

Immediately after writing these words, the writer fell in action. Captain Clarke, a famous Cambridge athlete, President of the C.U.A.C., bled to death--according to one account--from a frightful wound received in the advance near Hooge on September 25th. His last recorded act--the traditional act of the dying soldier!--was to give a drink from his flask to a wounded private. Of the general action of Cambridge men, the Master of Christ's writes: "Nothing has been more splendid than the way the young fellows have come forward; not only the athletes and the healthy, but in all cases the most unlikely men have rushed to the front, and have done brilliantly. The mortality, however, has been appalling. In an ordinary way one loses one killed to eight or nine wounded; but in this war the number of Cambridge men killed and missing practically equals the number of wounded." Of the effect upon the University an eye-witness says: "Eighty per cent of the College rooms are vacant. Rows and rows of houses in Cambridge are to let. All the Junior Fellows are on service in one capacity or another, and a great many of the Seniors are working in Government Offices or taking school posts"--so that the school education of the Country may be carried on. Altogether, nearly 12,000 Cambridge men are serving; 980 have been wounded; 780 have been killed; 92 are missing.

As to one's friends and kinsfolk, let me recall the two gallant grandsons of my dear old friend and publisher, George Murray Smith, the original publisher of Jane Eyre, friend of Charlotte Brontë, and creator of the Dictionary of National Biography. The elder one, who had just married before going out, fought all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in one of the early actions on the Flanders front. "He led us all the way," said one of his men afterwards. All the way!--All through the immortal rear-guard actions of August--only to fall, when the tide had turned, and the German onslaught on Paris had been finally broken! "In all my soldiering," writes a brother officer, "I have never seen a warmer feeling between men and their officer." "Was he not," asks a well-known Eton master, "that tall, smiling, strong, gentle-mannered boy at White-Thomson's?"--possessing an "affectionate regard and feeling for others which boys as boys, especially if strong and popular, don't always, or indeed often possess." The poor parents were uncertain as to his fate for many weeks, but he finally died of his wounds in a hospital behind the German lines. Then, little more than six months later came the second blow. Geoffrey, the younger brother, aged nineteen, fell on September 29th, near Vermelles. Nothing could be more touching than the letters from officers and men about this brave, sweet-tempered boy. "Poor old regiment!" writes the Colonel to the lad's father--"we were badly knocked about, and I brought out only 3 officers and 375 men, but they did magnificently, and it was thanks to officers like your son, who put the honour of the regiment before all thought of fatigue or personal danger. Such a gallant lad! We all loved him." A private, the boy's soldier-servant, who fought with him, writes: "I wish you could have seen him in that trench.... All the men say that he deserved the V.C.... I don't know if we are going back to those trenches any more, but if we do, I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in some quiet place.... I cannot bear to think that I shall not be able to be with him any more."

But how they crowd upon the mind--the "unreturning brave"! Take our friends and neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country. All round us the blows have fallen--again and again the only son--sometimes two brothers out of three--the most brilliant--the best beloved. And I see still the retreating figure of a dear nephew of my own, as he vanished under the trees waving his hand to us in March last. A boy made of England's best--who after two years in Canada, and at the beginning of what must have been a remarkable career, heard the call of the Mother Country, and rushed home at once. He was transferred to an English regiment, and came to say good-bye to us in March. It was impossible to think of Christopher's coming to harm--such life and force, such wisdom and character also, in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful eyes! We talked of the future of Canada--not much of the war. Then he vanished, and I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, near Bailleul, he went out with a listening party between the trenches, was shot through both legs by a sniper, and otherwise injured--carried back to hospital, and after a few hours' vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had done his duty and fearing nothing. "Romance and melodrama," says Professor Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest and most moving utterances of the war, "were once a memory--broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the past. We live no longer upon fragments and memories, we have entered ourselves upon an heroic age.... As for me personally, there is one thought that is always with me--the thought that other men are dying for me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of them men whom I have taught and loved." The orthodox Christian "will be familiar with that thought of One who loved you dying for you. I would like to say that now I seem to be familiar with the thought that something innocent, something great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying daily for me. That is the sort of community we now are--a community in which one man dies for his brother; and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger and quarrels, we are brothers, who are ready to seal our brotherhood with blood. It is for us these men are dying--for the women, the old men, and the rejected men--and to preserve civilisation and the common life which we are keeping alive, or building."

So much for the richer and the educated class. As to the rank and file, the Tommies who are fighting and dying for England in precisely the same spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal world, I have seen them myself within a mile of the trenches, marching quietly up through the fall of the March evening to take their places in that line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or shell fire, is practically invariable. Not the conscript soldiers of a military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce familiar from childhood! Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, to whom it is all new, who at bottom, however firm their will, or wonderful their courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome business. "I do not find it easy," writes a chaplain at the front who knows his men and has shared all the dangers of their life--"to give incidents and sayings. I could speak of the courage of the wounded brought in after battle. How many times has one heard them telling the doctor to attend to others before themselves! I could tell you of a very shy and nervous boy who, after an attack, dug, himself alone, with his intrenching tool, a little trench, under continuous fire, up which trench he afterwards crept backwards and forwards carrying ammunition to an advanced post; or of another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under snipers' fire, and somehow built him a slight protection until night fell and rescue came. Such incidents are merely specimens of thousands which are never known. Indeed it is the heroism of all the men all the time which has left the most lasting impression on my mind after thirteen months at the war. No one can conceive the strain which the daily routine of trench life entails, unless one has been among the men. They never show the slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do what they are told when and where they are told without questioning; no matter what the conditions or dangers, they come up smiling and cheery through it all--full of 'grouse,' perhaps, but that is the soldier's privilege!... It is, I think, what we all are feeling and are so proud of--this unbreakable spirit of self-sacrifice in the daily routine of trench warfare. We are proud of it because it is the highest of all forms of self-sacrifice, for it is not the act of a moment when the blood is up or the excitement of battle is at fever heat; but it is demanded of the soldier, day in and day out, and shown by him coolly and deliberately, day in and day out, with death always at hand. We are proud of it, too, because it is so surely a sign of the magnificent 'moral' of our troops--and moral is going to play a very leading part as the war proceeds.... What is inspiring this splendid disregard of self is partly the certainty that the Cause is Right; partly, it is a hidden joy of conscience which makes them know that they would be unhappy if they were not doing their bit--and partly (I am convinced of this, too,) it is a deepening faith in the Founder of their Faith Whom so many appreciate and value as never before, because they realise that even He has not shirked that very mill of suffering through which they are now passing themselves."