Chapter VI: Part 6

“Those shells! One of my fellows had one burst within a yard of him. Lord, I thought he was in pieces! He was covered in earth and rubbish! ‘Has that done for you?’ I called out to him. ‘I think it has, sir,’ he said, and you should have seen him clutching himself all over! And then there was a grin. ‘No, sir, it’s only a bruise!’ Oh, you get not to mind them, except one kind; that does make a nasty noise--a real nasty noise; it was just that noise one minded. Ugh, when you heard it coming along! Spiteful, it was!”

In the private London hospital where he spent three days the bed next to him was occupied by a Major of Artillery, wounded in the head.

“There was not much wrong with him, poor old chap! but he had got a bit of nerve-strain. Lord, he never let me get a wink, calling out all night in his sleep: ‘D---- that mist! I can’t see the swine. A bit more to the left. Now, now, boys, now we’ve got them! Oh, damn that mist! Ha! we got them that time--got the swine!’”

The doctors who saw our soldier were rather surprised to find him so calm in his mind. They could scarcely believe he should sleep so sound at nights--that the human machine should be so little out of gear. Yet there were days when he called himself “slack,” looked ill enough, and one could see that even a short walk was a severe trial of strength.

We shall not lightly forget a funny little incident which happened upon an afternoon when he seemed peculiarly exhausted. He was sitting in his arm-chair close to the fire, looking grey and drawn, declaring that the north-east wind never agreed with him. A kindly clerical neighbour rushed in upon us. He had just heard that fifty thousand Germans had landed at Sheringham. All the troops were under orders. Despatch riders had galloped from Aldershot to stop the billeting of a regiment just arrived here. The men had started up in the middle of their dinners and begun to pack again. They were to go back to Aldershot and concentrate for the great move. Further--indisputable authority!--the Chief Constable of the county had private information of the invasion.

You should have seen our soldier! He was up out of his chair with a spring, his blue eyes blazing. All the languor, the unacknowledged stiffness and ache of his wound, were gone. If ever there was a creature possessed with the pure joy of battle it was he. How much the womenkind miss who have never seen their men leading a charge! What a vital part of a man’s character lies dormant in times of peace!

There is, we believe, a large number of people who regard this fighting spirit as a purely animal quality; recently, indeed, a certain professor delivered a lecture on the subject of wild dogs and wolves who fight in packs, with special reference to the present state of humanity. These thinkers, sitting at ease in their armchairs, placid materialists, who have never known their own souls, much less do they know those of their countrymen. What we saw in our soldier’s eyes was, we swear, the leap of the spirit--the fine steel of the soul springing out of the scabbard of the body, the fire from the clay. Carlyle has somewhere a lovely phrase anent that spark of heroism that will burn in the heart of the lowest British soldier, the poorest, dullest peasant lad, and make of him hero and martyr, enable him to face long agony and death, endure as well as charge.

So H. flung off his languor and dashed out of his armchair and sprang to the telephone to order himself a car, and presently departed, already invisibly armed, in search of--this time--an invisible foe. For the foe was invisible!

No one knew whence the scare had come; whether there were any real justification for the preparations which were certainly ordered. The regiment which had had to pack up again just as it had got into its billets, and go back to Aldershot in the very middle of its dinner, was kept under arms all night; but there was never the point of a single _Pickelhaube_ visible on the horizon at Sheringham or elsewhere. And on examination it turned out that the “Chief Constable” of the county, that unimpeachable and alarming authority, had been none other than the local policeman, which was a comedown indeed! But the thrill was not altogether unpleasant, and we like to remember the sick soldier springing up, that St. Michael fire in his blue eyes.

* * * * *

In a short account written for his school magazine, H. summarizes the experiences of his own regiment at Ypres thus:

“All the officers in my company are wounded or invalided. The men are very cheerful under all the hardships and losses, and their behaviour under fire is splendid. The Brigade (5th) has been taken three times at least to ‘mend the line’ where the Germans had broken through. From October 24 to November 5 my regiment lost about 450 officers and men--mostly, thank God, wounded. The Germans can’t shoot for nuts, but their artillery fire is accurate and _incessant_, and the machine-guns very deadly.”

* * * * *

There is nothing more touching than the devotion of the officers to their men. They feel towards them truly as if they were their children.

“No officer,” said the widow of a great general to us the other day, “ever thinks of himself in action, ever casts a thought to the bullets flying about him. Indeed, the officers don’t seem to believe they can get hit; they’re so occupied in looking after their men. All the time they’re looking at their men.”

Even as we write these lines we see the death, in the Dardanelles, of a young officer who had been under H. when he was training reserves during his recent period of convalescent home service. This youth was, in our brother’s eyes, the perfection of young manhood. He prophesied for him great things. He told us many stories of his quaint humour and incisive wit. One anecdote remains. Among their recruits were between twenty and thirty extremely bad characters--slack, undisciplined fellows, worthless material belonging almost to the criminal classes. After working in vain with all his energy to endeavour to put some kind of soldierly discipline into them, young W. paraded them in the barrack yard, and addressed them in the following language:

“His Majesty’s Government cannot afford nowadays to spend money uselessly. You are a dead waste to the nation. You are not worth the food you get nor the clothes you wear. It has been decided, therefore, to send you to the front; and, as every man is bound to do his utmost to help his country in the present crisis, it is earnestly to be hoped that you will, each one of you, endeavour to get himself shot as soon as possible.”

We understand that the result of this stringent discourse on that “bad hat” squad was miraculous, although the sergeant-major was so overcome with mirth that he had to retire to give vent to it.

This boy had been serving in the East in a wild and difficult district, and had distinguished himself so remarkably that he was summoned to the Foreign Office to advise upon an expedition which it was proposed to send to those regions. Never was there any life so full of promise. Gay and gallant youth, it seems a cruel decree that the bullet of some vile Turk should have had the power to rob England of a son so likely to do her signal honour and service in the future. “It is the best that are taken”--a phrase sadly familiar just now that finds only too true an echo in everyone’s experience.

There was another, whom we had known from the time when he was an apple-cheeked little boy in petticoats--a sunny, level-headed child, who gave the minimum of trouble and the maximum of satisfaction to his parents from the moment of his appearance on this earth. All his short life always busy, always happy. His mother said that she had never seen a frown of discontent on his face. Head boy at Harrow, where the authorities begged to be allowed to keep him on another year for the sake of the good example he gave; writer of the prize essay three years running; winner of all the cups for athletics; champion boxer and fencer--with these brilliant qualities he had--rare combination indeed!--a steady, well-balanced mind. With high ideals he had a sober judgment. He was but twenty. With all these achievements--splendid lad!--he fell leading his platoon of Highlanders at Aubers upon that most ill-fated, most tragic 9th of May.

“I always wanted my son to be just like Keith”--more than one friend gave this tribute to the stricken father.

Characteristic of the unchanged romantic mysticism that lies deep in the hearts of the Scots--Scots of the glens and hills--are the words in which the local paper refers to the loss which had befallen the country in the death of the gallant young officer: “He died like a Stewart: he dreed his weird, he drank the cup of his race!”

It is the fine flower of our young manhood that is being mown down. What is to become of England, robbed of her best? It seems such waste and loss; we who cannot fight feel at times as if the pressure of such calamity “doth make our very tears like unto bloode.” But we must believe that it is not waste, but seed; that the nations who sow in tears will reap in joy; that each of these young lives, so gladly given, shares in the redemption of the country; that, in all reverence, in all faith, that they are mystically united to Calvary; and that their glory will be presently shown forth even as in the glory of resurrection!

A correspondent writing from the front describes the expression in the eyes of the friendly officer, who has been his guide, as he pointed out the myriad crosses of the burial-ground. “He looked envious,” he says, and adds that he noticed that all out there “speak with envy of the dead.”

Is not the nation’s honour sharpened to its finest point when the ideal of its manhood is to die for the country? _Dulce et decorum...._

We were very glad, nevertheless, when, in spite of his repeated applications to return to his own men, H. was ordered to take a command in the Persian Gulf. The link that binds a man to comrades with whom he has shared every possible danger and hardship, to those who have faced death with him, whom he has himself led on to peril and agony, the while they have been to him as his children--such a link is indeed one that is hard to break! Their peril has been his; their glory is his pride.

“If I can single out one regiment for special praise,” said the Commander-in-Chief, “it is the Worcesters.”

And again:

“I consider the Worcesters saved Europe on that day.”

It is no wonder that H. should be proud of them; that the thousand fibres should draw him back to them.

But, when the summons came, he was told “to prepare for a hot climate.” And then, of all strange things, or so it seemed to us, we found that his destination was Persia. The Garden of Eden! Further, it was rumoured, the objective was likely to be Bagdad. It sounded like a fairy tale. He promised us Attar of Roses; and indeed, we think, carpets. And a flippant niece wrote to him that she was sure that by a little perseverance he could find a magic one, and come sailing across the sky some night after duty, like the merchant in the Arabian nights. She added: “And do bring me a hanging garden, if you can.” But when the parting came it was a very cruel reality. It’s a far cry to Persia!

He started on the day of the sinking of the _Lusitania_; a date branded on the history of the world till the end of all time. The two who had gone to fetch him and brought him home--so contented in their tender anxiety that he was safely wounded--saw him on board the great liner.

Many Indians returning to Bombay, a few officers ordered to his own destination, a batch of nurses for Malta, and one or two ladies hurrying to their sons wounded in the Dardanelles--these were all his fellow-passengers.

It somewhat restored our confidence, shaken by the facile success of the monstrous crime, to know that they were to be convoyed a certain way, and that they had a gun on board. Nevertheless, they were not to escape menace.

“The evening we started,” he wrote, “I asked the steward if they had seen any submarines about. ‘No, sir,’ he admitted reluctantly. Then brightened up, anxious to oblige, ‘But we have seen a lot of luggage floating about--trunks and clothes, sir.’”

(It was obvious no passenger need give up hope; and, indeed, the letter posted at Gibraltar continues):--

“I have had no occasion to use your lifesaving waistcoat yet, though, as a matter of fact, we _had_ a small-sized adventure with a submarine. At dinner on Monday we felt that they had suddenly altered the ship’s course. It appears that a submarine was spotted about five hundred yards away. The captain slewed the vessel round to bring our one gun to bear on her. However, the smoke obscured our view, and the submarine must have seen our gun, as she disappeared.”

Then comes an anecdote, dreadfully characteristic of our happy-go-lucky English ways, a comedy that might have been--for this house, at least, God knows!--the direst tragedy.

“Next day,” he continues, “we had gun practice, but it turned out that none of the gun’s crew knew how to work her; and after fumbling for about two hours, a passenger came along and showed them how to manage her, and fired her off. We all cheered.”

The next stage on that lengthening journey that is to take him so unrealizably far away from us is Malta. The place laid its spell upon him, though at first he writes:

“From the ship both islands looked most unprepossessing: dry, arid, khaki-coloured lumps, full of khaki-coloured buildings. Once on shore one begins to love the place. The buildings, fortifications, and general spirit are most inspiring and grandiose. One expects to see some proud old Templar riding down the gay streets, looking neither to the right nor left. I had no time to do any of the right Cathedrals, where there are wonderful paintings by Michael Angelo, etc., nor the Grand Master’s Palace Armoury, with the knight’s armour, nor the Inquisitor’s Palace. I went off to look for wounded Worcesters from the Dardanelles. I had no time to see anything else as the hospital was a long way off.

“Every hole and corner is turned into a beautiful garden, with lovely flowers and ‘penetrating scents,’ fountains, and shady palms and trees.

“How you would revel in the churches! They are more numerous than in Rome, and quite beautiful. The people, too, are intensely religious.

“There are many French shops here, and the French women look tawdry beside the Maltese, with their wonderful black cloaks and reserved aristocratic air.

“I am sending you a weird map full of quaint spelling, given to me by a wounded Worcestershire (4th Batt.) sergeant, at the hospital at Malta, and a rough idea of the difficulties of the landing. Early on one Monday morning, about 1 a.m., the ships got into position round the promontory, with the troop lighters behind. About 4 a.m. the latter were towed off during a bombardment such as never has been heard or seen before in the history of the world.

“The Turks did not reply till the boats got quite close to shore and the ships’ guns could not fire on the located maxims (which were sunk in deep, narrow slips close to the shore). As far as I gathered, the Lancashire Fusiliers were the first actually to get on shore on the extreme left at Tekki Barna, where they charged with the bayonet and the Turks retired. They were able to enfilade a good portion of the ground, and enabled the Essex and 4th Worcesters, both of whom had suffered very heavily from Maxim fire, to land and drive the Turks back. Three boatloads of Dublin Fusiliers were wiped out by gun and Maxim fire near Ish Messarer point. The Lancashire Fusiliers suffered rather badly from the fire of some of our ships’ guns, which, of course, could not be helped.

“The Worcesters were sent up to help the Essex, and advanced against some barbed wire, which a young subaltern called Wyse volunteered to cut. He rolled over sideways till he got under the wire and cut it from strand to strand upwards. As he got to the last strand a sniper shot off two fingers in successive shots.

“The snipers had their faces painted green to harmonize with the surroundings, and were calmly surrendering as we advanced, having picked off numbers of men. They were all shot, however, _pour encourager les autres_.

“My sergeant was shot in the hip that evening, but he told me that by Wednesday the troops had secured Envedos, a most important position, and the safe landing of stores and guns was thus secured.

“He said the Turks either ran from the bayonet or surrendered. The prisoners said they did not want to fight, but were forced to do so by the Germans.

“The ships are in their more or less correct position in the map, the sergeant says, as he took trouble to find out from a naval chart.”

From Malta to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Aden, and from thence to Bombay. His letters mark each point of his Odyssey. And at Alexandria he is fascinated with the movement and colour; he goes on shore and visits the shops; he parts from the delightful American lady who has been the life and soul of the ship; she whose wounded son awaits her in Cairo. At Aden, the heat striking at them from the shore prevents him from landing; an unattractive torrid spot. Here they take in a young Indian Government official, who gives an interesting detail upon his destination:

“He knew Wilcox very well, the man who was going to make the barrage on the Euphrates and Tigris, and convert Mesopotamia into the richest country in the world. Wilcox said he found all the details given in the Bible about the various depths and breadths of the rivers absolutely accurate--curious after all these centuries!”

At Bombay he has a pleasant time; a brother officer having wired to relations who take him about and show him what is most worth seeing in his short stay. He puts up at the Bombay Yacht Club, “wonderful place, like fairyland, with palms and fountains and music, with cool, quiet rooms looking out over wide and lovely views.” He goes on long drives “under trees that grow for miles and miles along the sea coast, where the graceful-moving natives in their bright colours look awfully picturesque.”

He sees the famous towers of silence where, with effective, but no doubt quite unconscious, alliteration, he describes “the ghoulish vultures sitting grimly in the glorious gold mohur trees.”

His last letter says: “I start on Sunday for Bosra.”

He believes that they will remain at Bosra, and makes little of the fact that the heat is terrible there just now.

“We will live in cool underground rooms,” he says, “and be all right!”

And now we know that we shall not have news of him again for a long time. A thousand anxieties assail us, for which we can have no reassurance. We picture him in that strange region, but realize that of its strangeness we can form no real image.

He will see the dead cities and the great desert wastes and the swamps--it is in those swamps under the merciless sun that our terror lies; he will deal with a fierce and treacherous people whose thoughts are not as our thoughts, whose motives and beliefs are irreconcilably alien; and this dangerous race is fermenting under the influences, the money, the lies, the ceaseless open and secret poison leaven of a race more treacherous, more dangerous still.

Blinding sunshine, black shadows, arid stretches of dried earth and mud and burnt vegetation; the colour of the Eastern crowd, the river waters and the harbour stretch; the Arab and the Kurd, the Turk, the Armenian, and the Jew, sights and scenes and creatures that have been but as names to us, are about him. He has followed the drum from Cape Town to Magaliesburg, from Bloemfontein to Bethlehem, from Gibraltar to Cork, from Soupir to Ypres, from Ypres to Plymouth, and from Plymouth to the Euphrates; he has left his cool, green Ireland, his hunting and his fishing, his own wide acres and the rural life among his beasts for this picturesque, unknown, uncertain destiny!

Often in the long hot hours will not his mind go back to those stretches of shady, luxuriant park land where his cattle feed; to the great lime avenue with the voice of the bees; the circle of the purple hills, the woods, those incomparable woods of our old home with their cool depths of bracken, silver green; the dells, the climbing roads, the view over the “deer-park” to the sunset, which impressed even our childish imaginations; the voice of the wild pigeons through the trees; and the immense white house--empty--which before this war broke out, he was about to furnish; the corridors, the vast rooms full of memories; latterly, to us, of hopes. His heart will be there, we know.

And his home is guarded by his faithful Spanish servant, who followed him, out of love, from those far Gibraltar days of his young soldier’s life; who, when a legacy made of him a comparatively rich man, refused to profit of it, and sent the money back to a distant relative in Spain, saying: “What do I want of it? You, my master, you, my father, you, my mother, you, my country, you, all I want!” Pedro, by a singular freak of fate, ruling this Irish land with an equal zeal and ability, writes to us: “I pray my dere master may come home safe. I have great hope in Our Lady, the Mother of God.”

What is left to us, too, but a similar trust? We can but commend him to the Father of All that He may overshadow him with His shoulders; that the sun should not burn him by day, nor the moon by night; that he may be guarded from the arrow that flieth by day, from the assault of the evil one in the noontide!

X

A THREE DAYS’ CHRONICLE

“Happy in England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own:
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through the tall woods with high romances blent;
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian....”

KEATS.

_June 29, 1915._--The feast of Peter and Paul comes round with a new significance. In war time we learn the meaning of so much that has seemed unimportant; of things hidden away at the back of our consciousness--things neglected, unknown, or even despised--and we learn, too, the worthlessness of so much that has seemed paramount and necessary, desirable and precious. War is a stern master. He teaches above all the relative values; how to weigh the greater against the less; how to fling away with one superb gesture the whole sum of human possessions for a single imperishable prize.

“What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

He who spoke these words gently to a handful of poor Jews now seems to cry them with a voice of thunder from end to end of the earth.

Thus, this, their festival day, brings the two great champions of the Cross--and it is for Christ and the Cross that every son of England is fighting to-day--before our minds with a singular vividness and nearness: Peter, type of the natural man, untutored; sure of himself and of his own good impulses, of the honest purpose of his guileless heart; impetuous, loving, weak, with all purely human weakness, even to betrayal; and--divinely strengthened--Peter the rock, Peter the fisherman who conquered the world! Paul, the Patrician, the apostle born out of due time, whose ardour is all of the intellect, keen as a blade and burning as a flame; the little man of Tarsus upon whose spirit the teaching of all Christianity reposes as firmly to-day as does the Church upon the stone of Peter; Paul, whom the Captain, Christ Himself, enlisted by the miraculous condescension of a personal appeal. Has not every Christian, whatever his creed, vowed them reverence throughout all the ages? To-day, may not the eyes of the believer look up to them with a new confidence?

The Signora, lying through a wakeful night and thinking of these things, went with a rush of memory back to Rome, to scenes and experiences and thoughts dominated by the memories of the two chief apostles.

There is nothing more characteristic of their lives than the different manners of their death. Peter is Peter to the end; first yielding to the natural impulse, then, by virtue of the grace of God, returning upon himself and leaping to the highest altitude of superhuman sacrifice. In the whole tradition of the Church there is no legend more touching than that which tells us how Peter, flying out of Rome, met the Christ carrying the Cross. It is the original Peter in all his guilelessness who, unstartled by the vision, with the perfect simplicity of his faith, asks: “_Domine quo vadis?_” And it is the sublime founder of the Church of God who, unquestioning, accepts the Master’s rebuke, and retraces his steps to face his Lord’s torment with the added agony his own holy humility demands.

Every pilgrim to Rome has knelt or stood, prayed or pondered at the tomb of Peter in the golden twilight of the great Basilica, by the vastness of which, as Marion Crawford says, “mind and judgment are dazed and staggered.” Who has not leant on the marble balustrade of the confession and looked down upon the ninety-five gilded lamps that burn there day and night, upon the kneeling white figure of the Seventh Pius?--a vision in which the whole linked grandeur and piety of the Church of Rome seems epitomized. In St. Peter’s, Simon, the poor fisherman, is little thought of; it is Peter, saint and pontiff, who is paramount; he who has miraculously fed the lambs and fed the sheep from that hour on the sea of Galilee to this day. And very few remember the old man, too weak and aged to bear his cross, who had climbed half-way to the Janiculum, when his executioners, seeing that he could not advance any further, planted his gibbet in the deep yellow sand and crucified him then and there--head downwards, as he begged them. This is the ancient tradition, and it further tells us that he was followed by but few of the faithful, who stood apart, weeping.

Impressive as are these hallowed spots, these glorious memorials of the Eternal City; however full, to the believer, of the atmosphere of the days of faith--oases in the great desert of life, where the palms of the martyrs are still green and throw a grateful shade--there is nothing, to our minds, in all the grandeur of Rome, even under the dome of Peter, comparable to the effect produced upon the mind by a visit to Tre Fontane.

As Peter was led to die the death of the lowest criminal--the death of his Master--Paul was brought forth to the death of the sword, reserved for the Patrician.

To go to Tre Fontane and visit the spot of his martyrdom is to return to the primitive ages of the Church. The fisherman lies in a tomb such as no king or emperor, no hero or conqueror or best beloved of the world’s potentates ever had. And Paul sleeps in that great pillared church _fuori le mura_, in a severity and dignity of magnificence very well befitting the stern fire of the apostle’s zeal. But the memory of his martyrdom is consecrated in a curious isolation of poverty, one might almost say, aloofness; an earnest purity that reminds one, as we have said, of early Christian times. You have all the splendours; the golden glory, the marble, the mosaic, the sculpture and the jewels; the movement, the colour and the crowd of Rome behind, and you come out into the sweeping solitudes of the Campagna. For those who know and love those strange, arid, melancholy spaces, there is no more potent spell than the hold they lay upon the spirit. The gem-like distances of the mountains, the radiant arch of the Italian sky, the movement of light and shadow over the immense waste, the romance of each of the historic ways, the mystery of the secrets they hold--better pens than ours have striven to embody the charm and failed! Why should we try? It is like a strain of music the meaning of which is lost to us. We hear; we cannot understand. It is too full of messages. It is sad and beautiful and haunting, and withal intensely human. Here you have nature at her wildest and most untrammelled; and yet, never was city so peopled, so thick with memories of all races and all histories; endless streams of pilgrims have traversed the long roads; the centuries have come and gone upon them; the blood, the tears, the strivings and hopes of all humanity are here.

One looks forward towards wave upon wave of low-lying ground, bordered by the mountain barriers; and each time one looks back, the dome of Peter hangs pearl-like against the sky.

Speaking of the memory of our drive to Tre Fontane, the Signorina is reminded that she has jotted down her impressions in an old diary.

“We drove to the Trappist Monastery,” she wrote, “where St. Paul was beheaded. His head is said to have rebounded three times as it struck the earth, and on each of those three hallowed spots there sprang up a miraculous jet of water. The first spring is still warm as if with the glow of the great spirit that there left its mortal frame; the second spring is tepid; the third cold as death.

“The drive is a beautiful one; through the Campagna stretching wide and green on either side, bounded by the mountains, some now snow-capped. The first sight of the monastery breaks on one from the top of a little hill. The huddled buildings appear suddenly at the foot in a deep valley, shrouded by eucalyptus groves. On the right of the convent the ground rises again, covered with a perfect forest of the same trees. It is one of the saddest and most impressive places I ever saw. It strikes chill, even when the rest of the Campagna is warm, and the continual shuddering of the eucalyptus leaves makes an uncanny murmur. We drove through an avenue of them, grey-green all over, trunks and leaves; and then came to an arched gateway closed by an iron gate.

“We dismounted from our carriage, already quite impressed, and pulled the bell, which echoed with a deep and beautiful note through the monastery grounds.

“A porter opened and we walked into the garden, still under the eucalyptus (mingled here with palms and lemons), and made more beautiful still by the fragments of antique sculpture that border the walks--marble capitols and broken acanthus leaves and pieces of old pavements wonderfully worked in scrolls and twists.

“Papa particularly lost his heart to a lion’s head, with a dear flat nose! He could not tear himself away from it; he wanted it so badly for our new little garden in Surrey!

“As there are three fountains, so there are three churches, but the miraculous springs are all under one roof. This is a fine, comparatively modern church, situated at the end of an avenue of eucalyptus and marble fragments. It has a classic pavement (pagan) representing the four seasons.

“Opposite the entrance are the fountains--built in, now, and covered over, but each with a little opening where the attendant friar will let down a ladle and draw up the water for the faithful. Over each fountain is an altar, with the head of St. Paul, in bas-relief, sculptured by Canova:

“‘A la première, l’âme vient à l’instant même de s’échapper du
corps. Ce chef glorieux est plein de vie! A la seconde, les ombres
de la mort couvrent déjà ses admirables traits; à la troisième, le
sommeil éternel les a envahis, et quoique demeurés tout rayonnants
de beauté, ils disent, sans parler, que dans ce monde ces lèvres ne
s’entr’ouvriront plus, et que ce regard d’aigle s’est voilé pour
toujours.’

“In the right-hand corner of the first altar is the pillar which marks the actual spot of the martyrdom of the fiery-hearted saint. The ancient Via Lorentina passed along this very place, and here stood the mile-stone, whereat St. Paul was beheaded.

“‘This is absolutely certain,’ said the monk who conducted us. ‘Even protestants acknowledge the death to have taken place here. For the rest,’ indicating the three fountains, ‘there is only the legend. You may believe it or not, as you like.’

“He looked so happy, this monk. He had been thirty years at Tre Fontane, but there was no sign of age on his face. It was, perhaps, a trifle withered, like a ripe apple that has lain long on a shelf, but that was all. And yet he said that, for the first fifteen years, he had suffered continuously from malarial fever. He had superintended, and even worked at, the planting of the eucalyptus groves which have so purified the district that there has not been one case of the sickness since.

“The other two churches are close to one another. The first is very old and utterly bare, and, in a strange, mournful way, deeply impressive. It dates from the sixth century, and is lofty and vaulted and almost Gothic in its spirit. It has several rose-windows, and there are many round holes in the walls also. These are now either empty or fitted with common glass, but they were once filled with thin slices of alabaster, or other precious transparencies. At present it seems the embodiment in stone of the Trappist order, ‘la piu severa ordine della chiesa Cattolica,’ as our monk described it. The church is as cold as a well.

“The last of the three churches is of a much gayer mood: quite Romanesque, perched on a pretty flight of rounded steps. It has a crypt over the bodies of St. Zeno and two thousand and more companions, martyred Christians, who built the Baths of Diocletian.”

The drive through that eucalyptus wood here described remains one of the most curious impressions of those Roman days. It was like passing through a Dante circle--the first circle of all, of Limbo, where Virgil met the poet; an unsubstantial wraith-like world, full of a perpetual whisper and murmur:

“Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
Non avea pianto, ma che di sospiri,
Che l’aura eterna facevan tremare:

E cio avvenia di duol senza martiri,
Ch’avean le turbe, ch’eran molte e grandi,
E d’infanti, e di femmine e di vivi.”

Whether the sky became really overcast as we entered into these mysterious precincts, or whether the height of the trees shadowed the narrow way, certainly there was a dimness about us; not a positive darkness but a negation of light, even as the chill that enfolded us was not so much a cold as a cessation of heat.

But through the gates of the monastery courtyard we saw sunshine again, and white pigeons strutting about the cobbles, picking and preening themselves--a wonderful picture of peace. It is a consecrated spot; a place the most aloof, the most severe, the most denuded of all earthly joys that we have ever seen; a stage on the arid way of pilgrims forging determinedly by the shortest cut to heaven. And yet it is full of sweetness. As from a mountain ledge, the world must lie so far below these Trappists that it is no longer seen, scarcely divined behind its own vapours. No use looking down: looking up--there is the blue sky, and there are the peaks pointing heavenward, still to be conquered. There is very little comfort for the traveller, but he has a strange gladness. He is cradled in ethereal silences. The balm of majestic solitude bathes his soul; his spirit is cheered by an air as pure as it is vivifying, and he knows that he will climb the peaks.

_July 4._--Mrs. McComfort, our cook, has a brother on the Clyde. He writes an extraordinary account of the effort expected of, and given by, the able workman.

“It may be, miss,” says Mrs. McComfort to the Signorina, her chief confidant, “he’ll be called up for a job on a ship that’s just come in, and that’ll mean that he and the rest of them will be at it from seven in the morning till eight the next morning. Yes, miss, all night, as well as all day. And then they’ll come home, and it’s too weary to eat they are, and they’ll just roll themselves up and fall asleep, as tired as dogs; and when they’ve slept a bit, maybe they can get a little food down. And then it’s off back again to work! And that’ll go on till the job’s done. And when the battleships come in, the steamers do be waiting all night upon the Clyde, to take the men up to them, it’s that urgent. And, oh, miss, how they do love the ships they’ve built! And when one is lost, you’d never believe the grief there is, with the men crying and saying: ‘It’s my old lady’s gone, my poor old lady!’”

They need no comment, such stories as these. Here are humble heroes, martyrs of duty; here is the poor heart of humanity, with its infinite power of attachment. We have scarcely heard of anything more touching than the tears of these rough men for their “poor old lady.”

We saw a letter the other day from a transport driver describing, to a relative in England, the meeting with an old friend on the bloodstained, shell-battered road at the back of Arras. This man had been the driver of a motor omnibus in a country district at home.

“What do you think?” he writes. “You’ll never believe! If I didn’t come across old Eliza! Me that drove her for more than three years. I knew her at once, poor old girl! knocked about as she was; I’d have known her anywhere, by the shape of her, knowing her in and out as I did those years, every bit of her. She was a bit the worse for wear, but she was fit for a lot yet; a trifle rattley; but there’s a deal of life in her. I can’t tell you what I felt when I came across her so sudden. There, I couldn’t help patting her and patting her! Poor old Eliza! To think of her and me meeting again like that, both of us doing our bit, like!”

* * * * *

This fourth day of July brings us the third of the rain and thunder squalls which have followed the great drought.

Japhet says, relaxing to something approaching a smile, that he doesn’t see why this should not end by being a nice garden, and that the earth is in very good heart.

Dear English earth, it has need to be in good heart! Who knows what it may yet have to bear and give?

The Villino garden wears the war-time stamp, at least to its owners’ eye! The Signora, who has always hitherto plunged at a horticultural list the moment there was a gap in her borders that needed filling or a mistake that needed repairing, which could not be done to her sense of perfection “out of stock,” has had to teach economy to wait on necessity, and ingenuity on both. The result is not really gratifying. In all her long experience economy has never been gratifying in any branch of life. But even if the money were there for extravagance--which it isn’t--thrift has become a positive instead of a negative virtue.

“Thou shalt not spend” is now nearly as urgent a commandment as “Thou shalt not steal.”

It has set her mind to work more and more, however, upon the desirability of permanence in the garden.

In the borders of the terraces round the house she has decided to put a foot-deep edging of Mrs. Simkins pinks. These are adorable in their time of bloom, and the grey-green foliage is tidy, and a pretty bit of colour all the year round.

This year the lobelia, scantily planted, and the climbing geraniums, pathetically subdivided, will take considerable time before forming the show of flower and foliage without which the Villino garden is a failure. But it is a very good thing for individuals as well as nations to be forced to stop and examine their manner of life. Hideous as the struggle is--dead loss of life and happiness and money--good comes out of the evil at many points. Not the least beneficial lesson is that which teaches us now what an extraordinary amount of money and energy one has frittered away by easy-going ways, the amount of items one can put down in a household without being the worse--rather, indeed, the better! Even in a little household, what waste, what excess, what follies of mere show! And if this seems a flat contradiction to the remark upon economy passed a little while ago, let it be noted that conscience and inclination are for ever waging war, and that conscience, as is proper, must have the last word. Moreover, once the domination of conscience is established, the results are, in nine cases out of ten, surprisingly bearable. Frugality combines very well with refinement, and simplicity with dignity. One can be as happy with a three-course lunch and a three-course supper-dinner as one was with an endless array of dishes--those dishes which took so much time and material to prepare, and were so often barely touched! The contents disappeared--thrown away, perhaps, or, what was certainly the case in our household, disposed of as _hors d’œuvres_ between the dining-room and the pantry.

“Why does your butler always come in chewing?” asked an observant relative.

Juvenal, indeed, despite a certain foreign disregard for his meal-times, made such a practice of snatching morsels in transit that the sixteen-year old footman--chief of the many grievances which determined our separation--who outstayed him, has had to be severely reprimanded for making a clean sweep of the dishes that caught his young fancy, with a special partiality for roast chicken.

The new regimen--agreeable this hot weather--of soup, one cold-meat dish, salad, vegetable, sweet, and dessert--supper, in fact, instead of dinner--has, besides its intrinsic economy, the further advantage of diminishing the expenditure of kitchen coal to an almost incredible degree.

We who have to render an account hereafter, even of every idle word, shall we have to answer, we wonder, for all that unconscious waste which mere convention has induced in our homes? How many poor families might have been fed from the agglomeration of the Signora’s years of housekeeping! She did not think. No one thought. It has taken this scourge to make us stop in our easy course, to make us look into ourselves, into our ways.

“What can we do? What can we do without?” These must be now the mottoes written large round our house of life; and, indeed, the first includes the second, for it takes considerable energy to abstain.

“There is none that thinketh in his heart, therefore they shall go down alive into hell.”

A very disagreeable text, which comes disagreeably to the mind this Sunday morning, for the _famiglia_ have just come back from church, where what is vulgarly called a “hell-fire sermon” was delivered by a Welsh preacher, who, though a Franciscan, is, one of his congregation declared, a revivalist lost to his native hills.

“You ought to go down into hell in spirit every day, me brethren,” he thundered, “or ye’ll very likely find yourselves there in the end. And what an off-ful thing that ’ud be! And there’s thousands and thousands of soa-ouls there this minute, better than you are!”

This was neither comforting, nor, we believe, theological, for the congregation was small, and, on the whole, devout. But no doubt there is a type of mind before which it is necessary to hold up a threat of everlasting punishment; the type of person whom conscription alone can move to serve his country before it is too late.

Not the least remarkable result of the German brutality is that the great majority of its opponents find themselves forced back into the old simplicity of belief. We can no longer afford to deny the existence of demons and their power; and if reason is to keep her balance and the soul her ultimate faith in Divine justice, acceptance of the doctrine of hell and adequate punishment must logically follow.

A celebrated, if rather medievally minded, preacher, whom we once heard lashing the vices of the day, cried sarcastically: “You’ll meet the very best society in hell.”

Holy man, we doubt if he would have made the same remark to-day! The resort in question must have become so overwhelmingly German.

_July 8._--The Signora had been a whole year at the Villino--perhaps the longest time in all her life in one place--but circumstances had summoned her family to London for a few days, and she could not contemplate their being exposed to Zeppelins without her.

The little London house which was our home so long, and--to use nursery parlance--the nose of which has been so completely put out of joint by the Villino, seemed glad to see us again.

How curious is the atmosphere of place! These walls that enfold us, that have seen our swift joys and our great sorrows, our merry hours and our sad ones, become fond of us, as we of them. We are convinced that there is a spirit in inanimate things, something that gives back, that keeps. Do not old places ponder? Are they not set with memories? Do they not know their own? Do they not withhold themselves and suffer from the stranger? Who has not seen the millionaire striving to make himself at home in the great house that will have none of him? Who has not felt what an accident he is, how little he belongs, how little he or his race will ever belong to the stones he has bought, and which he will never own?

And even a little London house in a street may become individual to oneself; and you may feel as the Signora did, that it has missed you, that through long absence you have been unkind; that if you finally separate yourself from it, it will always want you, and you it. And, after all--it is with houses, as with people--the link is not necessarily that of the blood relationship or long acquaintance. You need not have inherited your affinity. You are in sympathy, or you are not. The Villino claimed us upon our first meeting, but we impressed ourselves upon the town dwelling. It is still home to us; not _the_ home, _a_ home.

We sat in the high-ceilinged drawing-room, with its rather delicate Georgian air, and found old familiar emotions waiting for us. And we thought of all the kind and dear friends we had seen between these walls; of our gay little parties and the music-makers who had made music to us; hours that seemed to belong to another life. Here the great Pole, whose magic hands have refused themselves to the notes ever since his people have been in anguish, made the night wonderful with his incomparable art. We do not think the small London house can ever forget the echoes of that music. It was always a feast for it when he, with whose friendship we feel ourselves so deeply honoured, came to its board. Loki--he was in his puppyhood then--decorated with the Polish colours, would dance towards him on his hind-legs. The genius would come in like sunshine, happy himself in the immense pleasure his presence gave. Certainly this rare being seemed to give forth light.

“When he leaves the room,” said a friend of his to us, “it is as if the light went out.”

If one had the gift of beholding auras, what a halo of fire would one not have seen about that wonderful head? We once said this to him.

“Do you believe in it?” we asked.

He smiled. “I think everyone has got his flame to cultivate. I think I have cultivated mine.”

Most truly, indeed, has he done so; and not only in the divine way of his art, for year by year the selflessness and the magnanimity of his character seem to deepen and extend; and so, too--inevitable tragedy of years--the sadness. Impossible for any perfectly noble mind not to gather melancholy as life goes on!--a melancholy culminating in his case with the burthen of agony which the present sufferings of his own race have laid upon his shoulders.

Therefore these memories of the days when he was as a young god, the days when a celebrated painter could find no truer way of expressing him than by flinging on the canvas the radiant vision of an Apollo, are poignant memories. We are glad that we should have them, yet they bring a stab of pain for that lost high spirit which life inevitably dashes.

With us all, the good ship Youth sets forth merrily with sails taut and pennons fluttering, filling to the wind and breasting the waves! We know that inevitably the storm winds must catch her; that she will be beaten by breakers; drawn out of her course by false currents; that if she become not a derelict, if she does not founder with all hands, she must--too often--cast much of her treasure overboard, furl her white wings, and come creeping into a cold harbour. Even those who, like our rare and wonderful friend, have gathered glory and dignity and power, as they plough a mighty course, have passed from under radiant skies into the gloom of the storm. A sombre thing, the human span, at the best, and most blest nowadays.

What can we say of the fair craft that founders almost as soon as launched? Ah! the young ghosts in that London drawing-room! The sound of the children’s voices yet ringing in our ears! There is “Mustard-Seed,” the splendid little fair boy, who had been the favourite of our Shakesperian revels nine years ago--not yet nineteen, not a month a soldier--shot through the head on that Flanders field, the graveyard of England’s choicest! And the little Scotch lad, who used to prance about in his black velvet suit, with cheeks that shamed the apple--no one knows where he lies to-day; only two or three saw him fall. And his graver, gentler brother--a prisoner, even as we write in the first agony of the grief which has befallen him in the loss of his life-companion!

And out of a merry group of Irish children, irresponsible, high-spirited, noisy, two brothers sleep in that alien earth--now for ever English--“where their young dust lies,” as the poet who wrote so prophetically of his own fate has beautifully said. And yet another is wounded, and another invalided; and the once merry sister, whose gallant husband was left wounded on the field and was missing long weeks, still mourns him as a prisoner.

Of the rest of the company, those companions of our daughter’s own unclouded childish days, some are widows; and some can scarce meet the morning for apprehension of its news, or return to their homes for fear of that orange envelope that may lie on the hall table, or sleep in the night for listening for the sound of the bell. And some are in the Dardanelles, under skies of brass, treading on earth of iron, and some are in those trenches, deep-dyed and battered a hundredfold. Two more brothers--the elder twenty and the younger nineteen--fell within a month of each other. A few are still on English soil, light-heartedly preparing for the great fray, straining like hounds at the leash, staring with bright, impatient eyes towards that goal with its unknown and terrible possibilities; cursing the slow flight of time. Of these one thinks, perhaps, with a heart more tightened than of all the rest!

The reaper has come forth to reap out of season, and the young corn is mown down in the green ear, and all the poppies and the pretty flowers go down with it.

Sitting in rooms which we had not revisited since before the war, these are sad thoughts that the crowded recollections bring.