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Page 42
"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_:--
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