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Page 44
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 Bront�, 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."
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