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Page 43
"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.
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