Part 10

EDITH CAVELL

XVII

EDITH CAVELL

To-day, in honouring the memory of Miss Edith Cavell, we honour not only the heroine who fell in the midst of her labours of love and piety, we honour also those, wherever they may be, who have accomplished or will yet accomplish the same sacrifice and who are ready, in like circumstances, to face a like death.

We are told by Thucydides that the Athenians of the age of Pericles--who, to the honour of humanity be it said, had nothing in common with the Athenians of to-day--were accustomed, each winter during their great war, to celebrate at the cost of the State the obsequies of those who had perished in the recent campaign. The bones of the dead, arranged according to their tribes, were exhibited under a tent and honoured for three days. In the midst of this host of the known dead stood an empty bed, covered with tapestry and dedicated to "the Invisible," that is, to those whose bodies it had been impossible to recover. Let us too, before all else, in the quiet of this hall, where none but almost religious words may be heard, raise in our midst such an altar, a sacred and mysterious altar, to the invisible heroines of this war, that is to say, to all those who have died an obscure death and have left no traces and also to those who are yet living, whose sacrifices and sufferings will never be told. Here, with the eyes of the spirit, let us gaze upon all the heroic deeds of which we know; but let us reserve an honoured place for those, incomparably more numerous and perhaps more beautiful, of which we as yet know nothing and, above all, for those of which we shall never know, for glory has its injustices even as death has its fatalities.

Yet it is hardly probable that among these sacrifices we shall discern any more admirable than that of Miss Edith Cavell. I need not recall the circumstances of her death, for they are well-known to everybody and will never be forgotten. Destiny left nothing undone for the purest glory to emerge from the deepest shadow. In the depths of that shadow it concentrated all imaginable hatred, horror, villainy, cowardice and infamy, so that all pity, all innocent courage and mercy, all well-doing and all sweet charity might shine forth above it, as though to show us how low men may sink and how high a woman can rise, as though its express and visible intention had been to trace, with a single gesture, amid all the sorrows and the rare beauties of this war, an outstanding and incomparable example which should at the same time be an immortal and consoling symbol.

And one would say that destiny had taken pains to make this symbol as truthful and as general as possible. It did not select a dazzling and warlike heroine, as it would have done in the days of old: a Judith, a Lucretia, nor even a Joan of Arc. There was no need of resounding words, of splendid raiment, of tragic attitudes and accessories, of an imposing background. The beauty which we find so touching has grown simpler; it makes less stir and wins closer to our heart. And this is why destiny sought out in obscurity a little hospital nurse, one of many thousands of others. The sight of her unpretentious portrait does not tell one whether she was rich or poor, a humble member of the middle classes or a great lady. She would pass unnoticed anywhere until the hour of trial, when glory recognizes its elect; and it seems as though goodness had almost eliminated the individual contours of her face, so that it might the more closely resemble the pensive and sad smiling faces of all the good women in the world.

Beneath those features one might indeed have read the hidden devotion and quiet heroism of all the women who do their duty, that is, of those whom we see about us day by day, working, hoping, keeping vigil, solacing and succouring others, wearing themselves out without complaint, suffering in secret and mourning their dead in silence.

She passed like a flash of light which for one moment illumined that vast and innumerable multitude, confirming our confidence and our admiration. She has added a final beauty to the great revelations of this war; for the war, which has taught us many things that will never fade from our memory, has above all revealed us to ourselves. In the first days of the terrible ordeal, we did not know for certain how men and women would comport themselves. In vain did we interrogate the past, hoping thereby to learn something of the future. There was no past that would serve for a comparison. Our eyes were drawn back to the present; and we closed them, full of uneasiness. In what condition should we find ourselves facing duty, sacrifice, suffering and death, after so many years of peace, well-being and pleasure, of heedlessness and moral indifference? What had been the vast and invisible journey of the human conscience and of those secret forces which are the whole of man, during this long respite, when they had never been called upon to confront fate? Were they asleep, were they weakened or lost, would they respond to the call of destiny, or had they sunk so deep that they would never recover the energy to ascend to the surface of life? There was a moment of anguish and silence; and lo, suddenly, in the midst of this anguish and silence, the most splendid response, the most magnificent cry of resurrection, of righteousness, of heroism and sacrifice that the earth has ever heard since it began to roll along the paths of space and time! They were still there, the ideal forces! They were mounting upward, on every side, from the depths of all those swiftly-assembling souls, not merely intact but more than ever radiant, more than ever pure, more numerous and mightier than ever! To the amazement of all of us, who possessed them without knowing it, they had increased in strength and stature while apparently neglected and forgotten.

To-day there is no longer any doubt. We may expect all things and hope all things from the men and the women who have surmounted this long and grievous trial. If the heroism displayed by man on the battlefield has never been comparable with that which is being lavished at this moment, we may also say of the women that their heroism is even more beyond comparison. We knew that a certain number of men were capable of giving their lives for their country, for their faith or for a generous ideal; but we did not realize that all would wrestle with death for endless months, in great unanimous masses; and above all we did not imagine, or perhaps we had to some extent forgotten, since the days of the great martyrs, that woman was ready with the same gift of self, the same patience, the same sacrifices, the same greatness of soul and was about--less perhaps in blood than in tears, for it is always on her that sorrow ends by falling--to prove herself the rival and the peer of man.

FOOTNOTES:

* * * * *

THE LIFE OF THE DEAD

XVIII

THE LIFE OF THE DEAD

The other day I went to see a woman whom I knew before the war--she was happy then--and who had lost her only son in one of the battles in the Argonne. She was a widow, almost a poor woman; and, now that this son, her pride and her joy, was no more, she no longer had any reason for living. I hesitated to knock at her door. Was I not about to witness one of those hopeless griefs at whose feet all words fall to the ground like shameful and insulting lies? Which of us to-day is not familiar with these mournful interviews, this dismal duty?

To my great astonishment, she offered me her hand with a kindly smile. Her eyes, to which I hardly dared raise my own, were free of tears.

"You have come to speak to me of him," she said, in a cheerful tone; and it was as though her voice had grown younger.

"Alas, yes! I had heard of your sorrow; and I have come...."

"Yes, I too believed that my unhappiness was irreparable; but now I know that he is not dead."

"What! He is not dead? Do you mean that the news...? But I thought that the body...."

"Yes, his body is down there; and I have even a photograph of his grave. Let me show it to you. See, that cross on the left, the fourth cross: that is where they have laid him. One of his friends, who buried him, sent me this card, with all the details. He did not suffer any pain. There was not even a death-struggle. And he has told me so himself. He is quite astonished that death should be so easy, so slight a thing.... You do not understand? Yes, I see what it is: you are just as I used to be, as all the others are. I do not explain the matter to the others; what would be the use? They do not wish to understand. But you, you will understand. He is more alive than he ever was; he is free and happy. He does just as he likes. He tells me that one cannot imagine what a release death is, what a weight it removes from you, nor the joy which it brings. He comes to see me when I call him. He loves especially to come in the evening; and we chat as we used to do. He has not altered; he is just as he was on the day when he went away, only younger, stronger, handsomer. We have never been happier, or more united, or nearer to one another. He divines my thoughts before I utter them. He knows everything; he sees everything; but he cannot tell me everything he knows. He says that I must be wanting to follow him and that I must wait for my hour. And, while I wait, we are living in happiness greater than that which was ours before the war, a happiness which nothing can ever trouble again...."

Those about her pitied the poor woman; and, as she did not weep, as she was gay and smiling, they believed her mad.

Was she as mad as they thought? At the present moment, the great questions of the world beyond the grave are pressing upon us from every side. It is probable that, since the world began, there have never been so many dead as now. The empire of death was never so mighty, so terrible; it is for us to defend and enlarge the empire of life. In the presence of this mother, which are right or wrong, those who are convinced that their dead are forever swept out of existence, or those who are persuaded that their dead do not cease to live, who believe that they see them and hear them? Do we know what it is that dies in our dead, or even if anything dies? Whatever our religious faith may be, there is at any rate one place where they cannot die. That place is within ourselves; and, if this unhappy mother went beyond the truth, she was yet nearer to it than those despairing ones who nourish the mournful certainty that nothing survives of those whom they loved. She felt too keenly what we do not feel keenly enough. She remembered too much; and we do not know how to remember. Between the two errors there is room for a great truth; and, if we have to choose, hers is the error towards which we should lean. Let us learn to acquire through reason that which a wise madness bestowed on her. Let us learn from her to live with our dead and to live with them without sadness and without terror. They do not ask for tears, but for a happy and confident affection. Let us learn from her to resuscitate those whom we regret. She called to hers, while we repulse ours; we are afraid of them and are surprised that they lose heart and pale and fade away and leave us forever. They need love as much as do the living. They die, not at the moment when they sink into the grave, but gradually as they sink into oblivion; and it is oblivion alone that makes the separation irrevocable. We should not allow it to heap itself above them. It would be enough to vouchsafe them each day a single one of those thoughts which we bestow uncounted upon so many useless objects: they would no longer think of leaving us; they would remain around us and we should no longer understand what a tomb is; for there is no tomb, however deep, whose stone may not be raised and whose dust dispersed by a thought.

There would be no difference between the living and the dead if we but knew how to remember. There would be no more dead. The best of what they were dwells with us after fate has taken them from us; all their past is ours; and it is wider than the present, more certain than the future. Material presence is not everything in this world; and we can dispense with it and yet not despair. We do not mourn those who live in lands which we shall never visit, because we know that it depends on us whether we go to find them. Let it be the same with our dead. Instead of believing that they have disappeared never to return, tell yourselves that they are in a country to which you yourself will assuredly go soon; a country not so very far away. And, while waiting for the time when you will go there once and for all, you may visit them in thought as easily as if they were still in a region inhabited by the living. The memory of the dead is even more alive than that of the living; it is as though they were assisting our memory, as though they, on their side, were making a mysterious effort to join hands with us on ours. One feels that they are far more powerful than the absent who continue to breathe as we do.

Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late, before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come much closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly, that they are as real as when they were in the flesh. In putting off this last, they have but discarded the moments in which they loved us least or in which we did not love at all. Now they are pure; they are clothed only in the fairest hours of life; they no longer possess faults, littlenesses, oddities; they can no longer fall away, or deceive themselves, or give us pain. They care for nothing now but to smile upon us, to encompass us with love, to bring us a happiness drawn without stint from a past which they live again beside us.

* * * * *

THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS