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Page 118
"It's a wonderful, spirited picture, and it thrilled England. It
was in accord with her legends. England has little favor of
either the gods of the hills or the gods of the valleys. But
always, in all her wars, the gods of the seas back her."
The big Baronet paused and poured out a cup of tea. He tasted it
and set it down on the table.
"That's a fine monument," he said, indicating the white shaft
that shot up into the cloudless evening sky. "The road makes a
sharp turn by it. You have got to slow up, no matter how you
travel. The road rises there. It's built that way; to make the
passer go slow enough to read the legends on the base of the
monument. It's a clever piece of business. Everybody is bound
to give his tribute of attention to the conspicuous memorial.
"There are two faces to the monument that you must look at if you
go that road. One recounts the man's services to England, and
the other face bears his memorable words:
"`Don't threaten, fire if you like!'"
The Baronet fingered the handle of his teacup.
"The words are precisely suited to the English people," he said.
"No heroics, no pretension, that's the whole spirit of England.
It's the English policy in a line: We don't threaten, and we
don't wish to be threatened by another. Let them fire if they
like, - that's all in the game. But don't swing a gun on us with
a threat. St. Alban was lucky to say it. He got the reserve,
the restraint, the commonplace understatement that England
affects, into the sentence. It was a piece of good fortune to
catch the thing like that.
"The monument is tremendous. One can't avoid it. It's always
before the eye here, like the White Horse of Alfred on the chalk
hill in Berkshire. All the roads pass it through this
countryside. But every mortal thing that travels, motor and
cart, must slow up around the monument."
He stopped for a moment and looked at the white needle shimmering
in the evening sun.
"But St. Alban's greatest monument," he said, "was the lucky
sentence. It stuck in the English memory and it will never go
out of it. One wouldn't give a half-penny for a monument if one
could get a phrase fastened in a people's memory like that."
Sir Henry moved in his chair.
"I often wonder," he said, "whether the thing was an inspiration
of St. Alban's that morning on the deck of the hospital
transport, or had he thought about it at some other time? Was
the sentence stored in the man's memory, or did it come with the
first gleam of returning consciousness from a soul laid open by
disaster? I think racial words, simple and unpretentious, may
lies in any man close to the bone like that to be rived out with
a mortal hurt. That's what keeps me wondering about the words he
used. And he did use them.
"I don't doubt that a lot of our hero stuff has been edited after
the fact. But this sentence wasn't edited. That's what he said,
precisely. A hundred wounded soldiers on the hospital transport
heard it. They were crowding round him. And they told the story
when they got ashore. The story varied in trifling details as
one would expect among so many witnesses to a tragic event like
that. But it didn't vary about what the man said when the Hun
commander was swinging his automatic pistol on him.
"There was no opportunity to edit a brave sentence to fit the
affair. St. Alban said it. And he didn't think it up as he
climbed out of the cabin of the transport. If he had been in a
condition to think, he had enough of the devil's business to
think about just then; a brave sentence would hardly have
concerned him, as I said awhile ago.
"Besides, we have his word that, after what happened in the
cabin, everything else that occurred that morning on the
transport was a blank to the man; was walled off from his
consciousness, and these words were the first impulse of one
returning to a realization of events."
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