n 
 
 1 
 
 STANDING 
 
 BY I 
 
 In 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 i 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 Jt^\^' ! JL|Ji 
 
I 
 
STANDING BY 
 
STANDING BY: 
 
 WAR-TIME REFLECTIONS 
 IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS 
 
 ROBERT KEABLE 
 
 AUTHOR OF " A CITY OF THE DAWN " ETC. 
 
 Xonfcon 
 NISBET & CO. LTD 
 
 BERNERS STREET, W. 1 
 

 First Published in igig 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. On "Standing By" 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 II. Amiens . 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 III. Crecy . 
 
 
 
 20 
 
 IV. Village and ChAteau . 
 
 
 
 27 
 
 V. Army Chaplains . 
 
 
 
 34 
 
 VI. Paris . 
 
 
 
 44 
 
 VII. Old Bill . 
 
 
 
 55 
 
 VIII. French Bells 
 
 
 
 66 
 
 IX. The Heart of a Child . 
 
 
 
 73 
 
 X. Michael and Agnesi 
 
 
 
 • 83 
 
 XI. Modern Ugliness. 
 
 
 
 . 9i 
 
 XII. Versailles . 
 
 
 
 . 102 
 
 XIII. Street Girls 
 
 
 
 . 112 
 
 XIV. The Hangar 
 
 
 
 . 122 
 
 XV. Christmas in the B.E.F. 
 
 
 
 . 130 
 
 XVI. Concerts . 
 
 
 
 • 139 
 
 5010.13 
 
 
 
 
VI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 XVII. Flotsam of War 
 
 XVIII. The Church in the Searchlight 
 
 XIX. Rome 
 
 XX. Contrasts . 
 
 XXI. Kindergarten Religion- 
 i. Philip 
 
 2. At Evening Time 
 
 3. The Romance of Missions 
 
 XXII. "Au Guidon" . 
 
 XXIII. Jumieges . 
 
 XXIV. The Waacs 
 XXV. Peace Terms 
 
 PAGE 
 152 
 
 l6l 
 
 176 
 
 187 
 
 193 
 199 
 206 
 
 212 
 
 222 
 
 237 
 250 
 
STANDING BY: 
 
 WAR-TIME REFLECTIONS IN FRANCE 
 AND FLANDERS 
 
 ON " STANDING BY " 
 
 THE Army cannot have taken much less 
 than five million of us to whom soldier- 
 ing has been practically a new experi- 
 ence. Some, of course, had served in O.T.C.'s 
 or Territorials or Volunteers, and for a year or two 
 put in a fortnight annually under canvas. But 
 we had not known the Army. We had never got 
 past the thrill of the uniform, and that curious 
 sense, either of responsibility in taking, or of 
 membership in giving, the salute. A good many 
 of us had enjoyed the game immensely. We had 
 even hoped to play it under more strenuous con- 
 ditions. We had been aware that it developed us. 
 But we had no idea what it would be like when the 
 routine had become part of our existence, when the 
 machine had dominated our personalities, and 
 
"2 • ' .. STANDING BY 
 
 : ♦ when the days had lengthened to months and the 
 months to years. 
 
 Moreover, of course, this is to set aside the fact 
 that no one, even in the regular Army itself, knew 
 what this war would be like. It is one thing to 
 belong to a regular army whether in peace or in 
 war, and quite another to be a unit in a nation 
 mobilised from top to bottom all but irrespective 
 even of sex. Besides, no living Englishman had 
 experienced a Western European War unless as 
 an isolated volunteer in 1870, and a soldier's life 
 in a foreign civilised country was as strange as 
 combat with highly trained conscript armies in the 
 field itself. All this is upon the surface, but it 
 might be supposed that the ground of such an 
 experience had been fairly well covered by now. 
 Our authors have revealed to us the making of 
 " Kitchener's Army " — it sounds quite far away 
 now ; every phase of life in the trenches, on the 
 sea, and in the air ; even the experiences of V.A.D.'s 
 and chaplains, the latter everywhere. I might 
 well have asked myself where I came in. In fact, 
 however, this book has been written without the 
 posing of such a question at all. 
 
 Life is so varied that every man, since each of 
 us has a different pair of spectacles on his nose, 
 sees it differently from his neighbour ; he sees 
 more and he sees less, he sees this more sharply 
 or that less clearly. The record of every point of 
 view has its value, I think, even if it be so unassuming 
 
ON "STANDING BY" 3 
 
 and commonplace a record as that given here. 
 Not that this particular life, in this age and on this 
 Front, could be commonplace altogether, but it is 
 true that there are fewer thrilling chapters in my 
 little record than in most. My lesson, if any, has 
 been to learn ; my task, if I have one, to seek to 
 indicate the value of one of the simplest experiences 
 in the Army ; but the early simple lessons are often 
 the most valuable. 
 
 That the Army is a great school everybody knows, 
 but that its first and last lesson is patience is not 
 quite so apparent. Discipline, brotherhood, forti- 
 tude, resource, all these it plainly teaches, but I 
 should put first patience. For every one of us 
 spends a great part of his time in " standing by/' 
 and most of us find this the hardest thing of all. 
 Possibly a parson finds it as hard as anyone, and 
 certainly he has most of it to do. He finds it hard, 
 because a parson worth his salt never stands by in 
 his parish. His duty is never done. His responsi- 
 bility can never be shared or passed on to another. 
 In a native mission this is emphasised a hundred- 
 fold, for the mission priest is made responsible, 
 whether he will or no, not merely for marriages but 
 for matches, not merely for Sundays but for sundries. 
 In my parish I am a bit of farmer, doctor, lawgiver, 
 schoolmaster and choir trainer, architect and all but 
 magistrate, as well as priest. Even when other 
 people undertake these duties, I cannot stand by 
 and watch them do it. 
 
4 STANDING BY 
 
 Now the Army is a wonderful institution, and a 
 conscript army of the Nation possibly the most 
 wonderful that the world has ever seen. The 
 sooner the world sees the last of it, too, the better, 
 though that is another story. It is chiefly an 
 employer of labour on the most original terms. It 
 does not engage men for a job or a series of jobs, 
 but it fits all men into all jobs as it pleases. In- 
 ternally it is a business concern in which there is no 
 competition, and in which labour has no voice. 
 It is not a business out to achieve, like most busi- 
 nesses, an unlimited end, but one with a definite 
 programme and no more. It does not particularly 
 encourage super-excellence ; it never asks for 
 voluntary overtime ; but it sets a standard and 
 gives a job, and one has to toe the line to that. 
 When it is not your time for a particular job, you 
 stand by, and the business is indifferent to the 
 length of your standing by so long as you are there 
 and up to scratch when needed. In no other 
 institution is it so true that every dog has his day, 
 for even Tommy has his day with an officer when as 
 sentry he is approached without a pass. But on 
 other days the dog's chief job is to efface himself. 
 Any infringement of this rule leads straight to that 
 soul-killing desert known as Red Tape, and probably 
 to that bottomless precipice of a " strafe " in which 
 one may disappear from sight even for ever. 
 
 Everybody, then, learns to stand by. Men 
 stand by in offices drawing lines on blotting-paper 
 
ON "STANDING BY" 5 
 
 (unless they are in favoured offices and can read 
 the Bystander) until the idler's soul is sick within 
 him. They stand by in trenches twenty-three 
 hours out of twenty-four, and unquestionably the 
 twenty-fourth does not make up for the twenty- 
 three. They stand by for what soon totals into 
 days on docks and in hangars. An officer waits 
 ten hours for opportunities he fulfils in one ; the 
 men wait for the next bale or the next ship quite 
 as long as they spend in handling them. Even 
 Waacs stand by in cars waiting for colonels quite 
 as long a time as they spend in driving them. And 
 as for padres, well, it is commonly supposed that 
 they stand by six days out of seven, and the greater 
 part of the seventh when it comes. Because they 
 seek to do otherwise, they probably know more 
 about red tape and strafing than most people. 
 
 Possibly more standing by has fallen to my lot 
 (and to the lot of my immediate brethren) even than 
 to most padres, because, paradoxically, less standing 
 by has fallen to my flock. Of necessity it is a more 
 or less general principle with us that if the other 
 men are standing by, you are not, and if you are 
 not, they are. In one sense, natives in the Army 
 give fewer opportunities for a padre's work than 
 most units, especially natives who work as ours 
 worked. You cannot play games and stand around 
 smoking with them quite as much as with Tommies. 
 They are rather exclusive even in their recreations. 
 We have, indeed, more services per unit, but again 
 
6 STANDING BY 
 
 we have fewer units per man than most padres, 
 and it cannot be pretended that it takes as long to 
 prepare for a native sermon as for a white one. 
 We could not, in particular, share the life of the 
 boys as the chaplain may hope to do that of his 
 in the trenches. But I have comforted myself 
 with the reflection that the more standing by I had 
 to do, the more opportunity I had of learning the 
 great lesson, and the more chance of seeing the 
 unfolding of this wonderful age. 
 
 The lesson is one's own relative unimportance, 
 and yet of one's own unshared responsibilities 
 in the making of the future. The Army teaches 
 that life is a great machine in which each of us 
 matters remarkably little, and yet that in so far 
 as we do matter we each have a unique place. " Do 
 your own job and don't worry about the next 
 man's," it says. '* See that you come up to line 
 when you're wanted, and let other people get on 
 with their business when you're not." That is 
 very well worth thinking over. It may be that 
 it will be the rule in the age that is coming, and 
 that each citizen will contribute his portion to 
 the great whole, and then turn aside to do more or 
 less as he pleases until his turn comes again. Such 
 a principle does not breed irresponsible men, for 
 in the Army one is absolutely responsible when 
 one is carrying on, but it does breed moderately 
 contented men — or at least it should do — because 
 one is absolutely not responsible if one is standing 
 
ON "STANDING BY" 7 
 
 by. The contrast with civilian life is amazing. 
 At first one carries over the habit of mind that one 
 acquired in ordinary life. Ordered, for example, 
 to travel by train, one worries at first over the 
 ticket, the possibility of accommodation, and so 
 on ; . but all that is superfluous. You have to do 
 no more than report at the hour and place named 
 on your written orders — and without written 
 orders you do nothing of this sort in the Army. 
 You turn up at the given time ; if the R.T.O. is 
 busy you stand by. If he should be busy until 
 the train goes, it would not make the least difference 
 to you, for you are not responsible, and you will 
 be accommodated and fed as well here as you would 
 have been there. But there is no need to worry, 
 the train will not go until the R.T.O. is ready ; and 
 if he keeps it waiting that is his job. And so, 
 finally, you acquire the magnificent indifference of 
 Tommy. He is fully trained to carry on in any 
 stunt that may be required of him ; otherwise he 
 contentedly stands by. I have often watched men 
 come down to the leave boat. They arrive at the 
 quay and things are not quite ready, so they are 
 ordered to stand by. They do so. They will sit 
 down in the road if they cannot get to the curb or 
 the wall, and light a pipe, and speedily become 
 apparently indifferent to time or place. It takes 
 training. But it is the great lesson of the Army. 
 
 Now when you are standing by you need do 
 nothing. You are concerned in nothing. So long 
 
8 STANDING BY 
 
 as you do not actually break some regulation you 
 can do as you please, observe what you like (only 
 in France you must not use a camera, which has 
 been one of the griefs of my life), and record what 
 you like (provided you pay attention to the censor). 
 And all this is incredibly interesting. To have 
 seen the resistless whirl of the maelstrom dragging 
 every element of national life into the vortex ; 
 to have stood above the flood and watched the 
 new rosy dawn on the waters ; to have caught 
 through the mists some glimpse of the Promised 
 Land ; and perhaps more, to have stumbled along 
 with the pilgrims on the march ; could any ask 
 more than this ? Early on in the War, when I 
 read Mr. Philip Gibbs' book The Soul of the War, 
 myself then six thousand miles from the theatre 
 he described, I felt the fascination. I admit that 
 it appealed so to my imagination that I hardly 
 knew rest until at length I too drew near to that 
 throbbing soul. I did not know then how difficult 
 it would be to come. I had not realised, out there, 
 that this was no traditional war, but the nation in 
 arms, and that each had to stand by his old job 
 until there arose the need for carrying on with a 
 new one. But at last that need arose and I could 
 come ; and standing by or carrying on since, I too 
 have seen the travail of this monstrous overwhelming 
 birth. 
 
 I wonder now if I may confess to have written 
 this book without thinking much about the writing ? 
 
ON " STANDING BY" 9 
 
 Some people, I suppose, have to find a medium for 
 expression, and I think I am among them. I 
 simply could not stand by and not try to record. 
 And I have delighted in it, sometimes wickedly, 
 sometimes with more unselfish happiness. Wickedly, 
 because there is an enormous joy in hugging the 
 thought, when one is being strafed, or forgotten, 
 or ragged, that down on paper some of it shall 
 go and maybe be read. Happily, for I have seen 
 things, as we all have seen, that I should like to do 
 my little toward making better known, and yet 
 again at times have felt so strongly that to have 
 been wholly impotent would have been intolerable. 
 And then there is that other secret thing, that joy 
 of creation in literature as in art, which a man 
 feels as never before when all his emotions are 
 stirred. To have lived these days in France, and 
 to have watched the agony and heroism of conflict ; 
 to have stood by while civilisation died, and to 
 have seen the hope of its rising again ; and to have 
 done all this without being able, if only for one's 
 own satisfaction, in some measure to attempt to 
 imprison the spirit of the thing, as the score of 
 the musician imprisons the sob and passion of his 
 music — this would have been hard indeed. 
 
 There can be no doubt, if one feels so, that it is 
 worth while to write, for it is worth while to one's 
 own self. Mr. Arthur Benson, in one of his recent 
 books, discusses the question as to whether a man 
 would write if he were sure no one would read; 
 
io STANDING BY 
 
 and although the answer is possibly bound to be 
 in the negative, I would counter by saying that a 
 man is never sure that no one will read. Some of 
 us, I think, would have to write, though we used a 
 cypher and buried the volumes in a library, having 
 used infinite pains and some bad language, like 
 the immortal Mr. Pepys. For me, I came unduly 
 under his influence early in life. I am inclined to 
 think that Mr. Benson, for all he says, has come 
 later, but come too. For oneself, it is worth while 
 to write. 
 
 But the standpoint of other people's judgment is 
 another matter for the poor devil of an unknown 
 author. There is, of course, a measure of consola- 
 tion if he finds a publisher ; and if he has been in 
 the Army, he should have learned, having finished 
 his part of the job, to stand by contentedly there- 
 after, unless, indeed, he is attempting to live by 
 words alone. But I raise the question because of 
 the saying of a friend, which entered in at my ears 
 and has sunk down into my heart. He said that 
 we had had a plethora of war books, but that there 
 was always room for another, provided that the 
 writer had a psychological point of view of his own. 
 In other words, we have had all but enough of 
 personal narrative, unless there be a magic of 
 imagination in it. Naturally, by imagination he 
 did not mean fiction. He would surely have thought 
 we had had enough of that, even although news- 
 papers in their turn (after men and shells, and 
 
ON "STANDING BY" n 
 
 aeroplanes, and guns, and sovereigns, and tanks, 
 and war bonds, and food tickets, and prohibition 
 and the rest in theirs) are necessary to win the 
 War. 
 
 I have wondered a little, then, if this so great 
 thing might be true of me ; and it was the sudden 
 thought that my title had not perhaps come wholly 
 by chance, but even hid a mystic meaning, that gives 
 me hope. For having chosen it, and having come 
 near to the end of Lent, I struck on a verse that 
 naturally attracted my notice as never before. 
 " There were standing by the Cross of Jesus ..." 
 I read, and the words gripped me. If a man had 
 had the sense of standing by that cross all these days 
 as he stood by in the Army, and if, however im- 
 perfectly and unseemingly at times, he had got 
 something of that into his point of view, it might 
 be well worth while to other people for him to write. 
 And I have had that sense. Mr. Shearley Cripps 
 has a story of an artist whom he took on trek, and 
 who painted for him afterwards the picture of the 
 road as he had seen it, and lo I it took the form of a 
 white figure on a cross. I cannot paint, but none 
 otherwise would I depict the roads of France. And 
 since our civilisation has been so much the product of 
 Christianity, whether true or abused, as that civilisa- 
 tion reels and dies it is Jesus who is stabbed. Yet 
 even in its dying does it rise again, as even in their 
 dying unnumbered boys have entered into life. 
 And even more, what are we Christians (who have a 
 
12 STANDING BY 
 
 unity which cannot be slain) but the Body of the 
 Lord ? and if Mary saw flesh immaculate of her, 
 spat upon, torn, denied, so does He see who stands 
 where she stood that day. As I think of my pages, 
 I am unutterably moved by this. Heroes and 
 harlots are here, and they are not unlike. There is 
 even pitifulness in the one, even nobility in the 
 other. ... I cannot write all that I would say. 
 But standing by the cross I am moved to feel with 
 tears at times, and yet again at others to thunderous 
 acclaim. 
 
 Thorns bloom like roses on His brow, 
 
 King's purple seems this disarray ; 
 From these scarred feet more blanched than snow 
 
 Our lips have kissed the blood away. 
 
 No soft Greek God in proud repose, 
 
 No Sultan for his turbanned pride, 
 No Army brave with banners shows 
 
 So lovely as this Crucified. 
 
II 
 
 AMIENS 
 
 IT was in peace-time and before I had begun to 
 wander that I first saw the great cathedral. 
 I remember the day and the hot sun, and 
 how I knew the proper things I ought to admire, 
 and how I admired them — high nave, carven porch, 
 oaken stall, and the rest. And I remember, too, 
 how we criticised the paper flowers and crooked 
 candles, and votive hearts, and then looked out the 
 train to the next sight. Things seem to have 
 changed so much since then. Of course the War is 
 not responsible for all, but still the War-changes 
 seem to emphasise the rest. 
 
 The car, then, put me down in the moonlight, 
 tired and dusty from the hours of motoring and the 
 fatigue of the last week, but still more dazed and 
 weary in mind with what I had seen. A " Push " 
 had been on, and I, a base chaplain, had stolen a 
 chance to run up to the Line and lend a hand at an 
 Advanced Dressing Station for a day or two. I had 
 been useful, and had been very glad of that, but 
 principally I confess that I had gone only to see. I 
 
 never shall go again only to see. Nor, honestly, 
 
 13 
 
14 STANDING BY 
 
 is it fear that makes me write that, for I would go at 
 once if it were my duty, or even if I had a chance to 
 help ; but it is unthinkable that a man should go 
 twice primarily out of curiosity. We had arrived 
 soon after the first crossing of the parapet, and the 
 wounded had even then begun to come in. The car 
 had left the main road a little south of the famous 
 ruined town, and had jolted over by-roads to a 
 couple of tents, camouflaged, in the corner of a field. 
 The air thundered with guns all day, and the wind 
 blew scents of war across us, though the sun smiled. 
 Shells burst again and again fairly near, and once 
 shrapnel came through a tent. But personally I 
 hardly noticed these things, for all my reading had 
 given me no more idea of the reality than I know my 
 writing will do for others. As many have described, 
 cars brought up the wounded, put them on the grass, 
 carried them away after they had been through the 
 tents. All I had to do was to give water ; light 
 cigarettes ; if I could, pray. And we worked con- 
 tinuously, unrestingly, almost blindly to me at least, 
 all day. But my imagination had failed to warn 
 me adequately. I had not realised that men could 
 so suffer and live. 
 
 There was a Kentish boy, whose stomach had been 
 torn away, and who yet lived. The sickening horror 
 of it numbs. There are no words. And yet I do 
 not feel any of the things people seem to have felt. 
 On the contrary, I ceased that day merely to hate 
 the Germans or to rave against war. I did not know 
 
AMIENS 1 5 
 
 why just then, but I was glad, infinitely glad, to get 
 back to Amiens. 
 
 They thought I would go to my hotel, but I did 
 not ; I went to the cathedral square. The clean 
 moonlight silvered, and shaded too, the delicate 
 tracery and the fine thin spire, and I stood and drank 
 it in. And then I went up between the sand-bags 
 that hid almost all the detail of the glory of the 
 porch, sat down against the closed door, and hid my 
 face in my hands. I believe that so, that night, I 
 saw more of the cathedral than I saw when it had 
 been to me a tourist's " sight." 
 
 All around the carven figures of the porch were 
 chipped and battered, but not by the Hun. No 
 bomb had struck there then, but Time had defaced 
 them just the same. And what does one mean 
 by Time ? A hundred tiny wars, riots, foolishness, 
 storms, even man's uncontrolled religious zeal, 
 have wounded Amiens without the Hun. Given 
 long enough, and it will be as if his worst and 
 strongest shell dropped upon it now. In my shut 
 eyes I could see the tortured face of that poor lad 
 and the time-worn cathedral too, and knew that 
 both are one. It is War, and Time is War, and 
 life is War, and the story of Earth is the tale of 
 Pain. 
 
 I even turned to look up at the grim buttresses 
 of sand-bags, all tarred and timbered and roped, 
 and even, like a silly child, to smile and touch them. 
 Good God, but the whole world is one crying parable 
 
1 6 STANDING BY 
 
 to the souls of men I How we sand-bag everything, 
 and all so carefully. Convention and decency, 
 fair words and subtle logic, comfort and pleasure — 
 we build up the defences, bag by bag, and stave 
 off the inevitable by moments so short as to be 
 negligible. Why, Amiens will be dust yet, and men 
 forget that the sand-bags were ever there I Oh, but 
 let them sand-bag ; it is human and good. But 
 give us leave, now and again, to see the nobler and 
 better way. It is all right to sand-bag, if you 
 know the other. If you do not, there is awful 
 tragedy ahead. Thinking on it, I wondered, with 
 a mist in my eyes, if that young Kentish lad knew 
 it, when Agony struck at him in a moment from 
 the blue, and lifted his naked soul in her grim hands 
 to look into the eyes of God. 
 
 It was in the morning, and within the cathedral, 
 that I was shown a picture of the better way. I 
 awoke too late for Mass, but I went straight to 
 the church when I was ready. Inside the doors, 
 the beauty and peace of such a place find infinite 
 emphasis to-day. Never surely have such visitors 
 wandered curiously about among these memorials 
 of men and God; but it makes no difference to 
 Amiens. Bearded Sikhs ; young men from the 
 lands we call new, because, forsooth, we humans 
 have only just begun to build upon them ; the 
 girls of this new age, in their trim uniforms ; — all 
 were there. One wonders will they learn the 
 lesson ? A dozen of old and feeble folk before 
 
AMIENS 1 7 
 
 the chapel of the robed Christ, dit Saint-Saveur, 
 seem to have learnt it, but will these ? Perhaps. 
 War teaches it ; if not the German War, the War 
 of Time. 
 
 But that has nothing to do with the better way 
 of dealing with pain. I think now, that my heart 
 was groping for it, and that God was preparing 
 the answer, as I roamed unsatisfactorily about the 
 place. Three W.A.A.C. girls inspecting, solemnly, 
 the fragment of St. John the Baptist's bone, 
 brought my perambulations to a close, for between 
 a sense of humour and a sense of the desolation of 
 English religion, I had to go away and sit down. 
 So I waded through the chairs to a centre 
 spot in the nave, and knelt, and thought myself 
 alone. 
 
 So, presently, my eyes caught sight of two figures 
 a dozen yards away to the right — a little before me, 
 but not so much that I could not see their faces. 
 They were sitting perfectly still, hand in hand, and 
 one could read their story plainly enough. She 
 was a young woman of the poorer class, but well 
 dressed, as a Frenchwoman should be ; and he was 
 a soldier in the uniform of the French line, and 
 what was more, his whole kit was there, signifi- 
 cantly, too. I have no doubt whatever that they 
 had slipped into the cathedral on their way to the 
 station. 
 
 As I watched, she said something, and kneeled 
 forward on the prie-Dieu before her. He stood 
 
1 8 STANDING BY 
 
 up, as the French soldier does. Then she began 
 to pray for him to hear, and I could catch a murmur. 
 His eyes were fixed on the High Altar and never 
 wavered from first to last, but she hid hers in her 
 hands, after a little. Also her voice rose with the 
 passion of her prayer, and soon one knew that she 
 was weeping. At last she was praying loudly enough 
 for me to catch the words, in French, of course, 
 but I could understand the well-known prayer, 
 and marvel at the simplicity of her so slight change 
 
 in it. 
 
 " Soul of Christ, sanctify him ; 
 Body of Christ, save him . . ." 
 
 so she went on until : 
 
 "Within Thy wounds hide him," 
 
 she cried, and could say no more for sobs. 
 
 And while I saw dimly, and waited for I knew 
 not what, the man's voice broke calmly and steadily 
 in, without even a hint of passion or of fear : 
 
 " In the hour of my death, call me, 
 And bid me come to Thee, 
 That with Thy Saints / may praise Thee, 
 For ever and ever, Amen." 
 
 And then, like the victor that he was, there, in 
 God's House, and all unashamed before His High 
 Majesty, he lifted the woman to her feet, and 
 turned her face to his, and kissed her long upon 
 the lips. 
 
AMIENS 19 
 
 Oh, my God, how fine a thing can human nature 
 be ! It was no disgrace for You to share it. It 
 has that in it which can look out across the worst 
 that earth can do, and gather up its dearest into 
 its arms, and go forward — to You. 
 
Ill 
 
 CRECY 
 
 IT has been just such a day as I love. In the 
 first place — rude as they will think it, 
 if they ever read these lines ! — my com- 
 panions failed me : one because he had an indifferent 
 knee, the other, I shrewdly suspect, because he 
 thought forty miles a bit too far to ride. Anyway, 
 they failed, and so I, alone with my thoughts, pushed 
 the bicycle out on to the road in the sun and the 
 breeze, and set out. Small clouds scudded across 
 a blue sky ; the wind sang in trees just putting 
 out autumn tints ; and the road lay, first, through 
 those rich water-meadows which once were the 
 swamps of the Somme that daunted Edward until 
 he found a guide in the little village of Mons. It 
 was extraordinarily peaceful. The cattle stood 
 knee-deep in thick green grass, " too fat to want to 
 eat/' as our amazed boys from Basutoland put it 
 when first they saw such beasts in England, and the 
 wild flowers nodded in the fields and hedgerows to a 
 song of peace. The little villages lay asleep in the 
 sun. One ran by those seemingly dilapidated farms 
 with a dung-heap in the front courtyard, that one 
 
CRECY 2 I 
 
 sees in France, yet each a picture with its back- 
 ground of trees and its lush fringe of grass ; or passed 
 little inns that seem to wait still for Napoleon's 
 troopers or the dragoons of Louis. . Ajj&gjAgn we 
 crossed the straight, poplar-lined canal of the Somme, 
 and the shallow, less-drilled river — what the canal 
 has left of it. So, for a mile or two, by the high 
 road ; then sharp up a country lane which twisted 
 and wound until it filtered out in a series of grassy 
 fields, in one of which a maimed soldier and his wife 
 directed a plough, and their children picnicked 
 under the elms. 
 
 That, then, is one side of the picture. And the 
 other ? Well, each house in each village had its 
 billeting board : " Men, Officers, Horses," and a 
 blank after each to be filled up as required. The 
 last numbers were still chalked on them, but most 
 of the villages were empty of troops in any numbers. 
 Where, then, one wondered, were the three officers 
 and forty-two men that had slept in that farm a 
 few weeks ago ? Gone to the fine, I suppose, gone 
 to swell the weekly thousands that win our battles 
 with a "comparatively small" casualty list; gone 
 to be maimed, or wrecked past thought, or blown 
 in one fell blast from the world of recognisable 
 objects, for the sake of — Liberty, Justice, Honour. 
 I write them down in big letters ! They look well, 
 and even if we do not know their meaning, at least 
 they stand for a groping towards the ideal. And 
 one must die ; God in heaven, what is the sorrow 
 
22 STANDING BY 
 
 of dying for that ? There would be none, I think, 
 if one were sure that what one did really made for 
 the ideal. But do they know, these men who die, 
 and does what they do make for that ideal ? 
 
 So thinking, one looked curiously at the traffic 
 on the roads. There was a company of Chinese at 
 one place, marching to work : gay fellows, shirts 
 open, hats off, smiling and laughing, half a dozen 
 rather gloomy " P.B." men shepherding them. 
 They, at any rate, have come for a franc a day, and 
 many of them because, at home, in China, there is 
 not a startling amount of liberty or justice. I do 
 not suggest for a moment " Chinese Slavery " ; 
 I suppose that there is an arrangement with the 
 democracy of China to take such part in the 
 War. Each individual Chinee on the road to-day 
 came because he wanted the adventure, or to clear 
 out of his local city, or to get his franc a day. 
 Once here, we compound ours to some extent ; the 
 French do not. One meets them strolling round 
 the little towns, in the cafes, walking with the girls 
 in the street. Poor France ! But I am a philosopher 
 here. I believe blood-mixing to be inevitable and 
 good in the long end, however nasty the process and 
 immediate results often are. Perhaps as well, then, 
 that it mix now as next century ; as well for a franc 
 a day — no, I mean for Liberty, Justice, and Honour, 
 of course — as for hatred, when the East fights the 
 West in the cycle of things. 
 
 But that traffic, how incredible it is ! A detach- 
 
CRECY 23 
 
 ment of Belgians ; English A.S.C. waggons ; some 
 strollers from an Australian camp ; Indian troopers 
 — fine, bearded fellows ; a French regiment ; a 
 party from an Egyptian labour corps ; cars full of 
 officers, dashing by in a flurry of dust, who must, 
 of course, be on duty ; an ox-waggon, pressed 
 again into the services of sane living since War 
 demands the rest ; and I, a missionary from Basuto- 
 land, who stand for the thousands of " kaffirs " back 
 there on the roads nearer Camp ; — all these passed 
 that morning in the way. Not that the traffic 
 was limited to the road, however, for aeroplanes 
 buzzed overhead. Indeed, I kept a count, and for- 
 asmuch as I was mainly on by-roads, sixteen aero- 
 planes went by overhead at some time or another 
 for the fifteen cars on the level. 
 
 One hardly takes in all that that traffic means. 
 It means the smashing down of ancient barriers, 
 and the passing of an age. The War is not re- 
 sponsible, indeed ; it has merely speeded things up. 
 But my mind goes out to Basutoland — to those 
 silent mountains, and sunlit valleys, and simple 
 villages that I love. Liberty, Justice, Honour — 
 curious ! we had them there. We none of us had 
 votes ; our chiefs were hereditary aristocrats ; our 
 magistrates nominees of a distant alien govern- 
 ment ; our standard of living was primitive. But 
 we lived. We laboured and we loved ; we were 
 glad of the warmth of the gay sun or the clean fire ; 
 even we whites, who talked of the great world, 
 
24 STANDING BY 
 
 we really cared more about our gardens. But after 
 this, what comes ? Ah ! well, we shall come into 
 the Union and have votes ; I expect we shall 
 develop mines and railways, and have hotels — 
 hotels, certainly, for we are an ideal health resort ; 
 and the air will put us within two or three days* 
 reach of London, and turn our mountains into mole- 
 hills. And we shall grow daily more civilised, till 
 white has to reckon with black as rival, which is the 
 thing for which my critics tell me that I work. 
 So I ought to be glad when I see the promise of the 
 new age on the roads in France. 
 
 Curiously enough, I grew sadder instead, as the 
 miles slipped by ; but I became resigned, at least 
 in time. It came about in this way. I found my 
 way out of those green uplands into the forest that is 
 still a forest of green glades and mighty trees and 
 silences. And from it I ran down to the village of 
 Crecy, where a detachment of cavalry watered 
 their horses in the stream that watered the Black 
 Prince's men-at-arms when he commanded the right 
 of his father's army all but six centuries ago. Mr. 
 Hilaire Belloc assured me that the village, too, 
 was all but the same as then, and he pointed out, 
 plainly enough in a few minutes, the lie of the land. 
 I glanced from the map in his book to the landscape 
 spread before me, and found it exactly as he says. 
 There are the woods that sheltered such of the 
 English waggons as had escaped the passage 
 of the Somme ; there in all probability stood the 
 
CRECY 25 
 
 windmill of fame ; and there sloped the fields on 
 which the Genoese cross-bowmen had been slain 
 by the long-bows of England. And it is an old 
 legend that cannon first barked at Crecy — a lie 
 as like as not, although Madame of the Canon d'Or 
 in the village where I lunched, would have been 
 offended. But be that as it may, it was a battle 
 that marked the passing of an age. Chivalry that 
 day went down before peasantry. Feudalism 
 watched its weapons overmatched by those of 
 Democracy. The slain lay in heaps when the sun 
 died down, that same day, 1346, because a stage was 
 being reached towards the ideal of Liberty. Poor 
 old feudal lords — free in their castles, administers 
 of justice, upholders of honour (well, that is what 
 they would have said) — how they would have 
 resented it if they had known ! But it was inevit- 
 able, and as bad a smash as that of a German aero- 
 plane which, by a strange chance, lay on the very 
 field, guarded by a French detachment. I looked 
 at the one and I thought of the other, and at first 
 I laughed. And then I grew silent. I thought of 
 the lives tossed away, from Crecy 1346 to Ypres 
 1915, each one potent for love and labour and con- 
 tentment, but tossed away — for what ? Liberty, 
 
 Just No, I will not write them again. It is a 
 
 sad old world. Wherefore this slow birth in pain ? 
 
 But still the day was not done. The homeward 
 road took me to St. Riguer, where is that superb 
 mother-church, wrought in a wonder of carved 
 
26 STANDING BY 
 
 stone, serene and quiet still. Yet it was not the 
 church that mattered. In its chapel rested the 
 Blessed Sacrament. A peace to controversy ! — 
 let us say that it was but a symbol of God, the 
 Unchanging, the Perfect, the Ever-loving, the 
 Goal which has neither length nor breadth nor 
 height, but is yet fulness of living and of energy 
 and of humanity. What, then, does anything else 
 matter ? It is weary, I know, that we must strive 
 for the ideal of liberty and justice in every changing 
 century, so painfully, and God Himself alone knows 
 what will end it ; but in each century souls can 
 leap straight to the Heart of God and find the ideal 
 there. And in the silence, before the Sacrament, 
 there is a paean of triumphant unthinkable music 
 which my ears just fail to hear. But one day . . . 
 
IV 
 VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 
 
 THE road rises slowly all the three miles 
 from the sea, and at last takes a sharper 
 pitch to a crown of high woods. At the 
 top of it stands the village crucifix, in the lands of 
 Monsieur, and thence the road skirts his estate 
 until you come to the iron gates of the entrance to 
 the drive. The chateau itself stands back only a 
 little from the road, as if it declined to withdraw 
 itself from the village and the village life, but looks 
 out across open lands to the wood and the sea 
 beyond. For still a few hundred yards you have 
 the chateau wall on your left, and then at the corner 
 is a small side door and a little street and the old 
 quaint humble church that is little more than a 
 much -patched barn in appearance. From this 
 point the main road runs sharply downhill, and 
 the tiny hamlet clusters on either side, with its 
 school and its cafe and its shop and its mairie and 
 its dozen of houses. Below lie the cider -apple 
 orchards and the water-meadows, with lanes 
 between that are bordered with high elms and 
 
 poplars, and very fragrant all the year. The place 
 
 27 
 
28 STANDING BY 
 
 has an air of quiet self-contained importance that 
 is characteristic of French villages. It is not a 
 jumping-off place for a town ; folk are born and 
 live out their days and die here, still, as in the old 
 days that come no more. 
 
 It is typical of the best in France, then, this 
 village. Thirty and two of its sons were of an age 
 for war in 1914, and twenty-five of them will never 
 come back again. Seven were employed at the 
 chateau, and they all went, and now the weeds 
 grow in the drive, for the fields take all the labour 
 of the women, and the drive will grow green for 
 ever so far as those seven are concerned. It is 
 overwhelming, this desolation. There is not a 
 woman in the village but has lost father or son or 
 husband or lover. And yet one hardly realises it. 
 There are boys and old men still, and children at 
 the school, and even the women are cheery at the 
 plough or in the street. Only on Sunday one 
 remembers as one sits in the church and sees that 
 all wear, not merely black, but the black of mourning. 
 Perhaps it is imagination, but the villagers seem 
 subdued as nowhere else in the church, as they well 
 may be, for surely, though the loved dust strews 
 the fields from Flanders to Alsace, nevertheless 
 they are here in the presence of their dead. 
 
 The chateau and its family are a chapter of French 
 history and a commentary on French life. Part 
 of the fair building has graced the hill for five 
 hundred years, but the main front was built under 
 
VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 29 
 
 Louis xv. That wing was added under Louis xvu., 
 and this begun after the Hundred Days. Within, 
 the furniture dates almost entirely from the days 
 of Louis xvi., and the drawing-room is one of the 
 most wonderful rooms I know. Think of it : the 
 wall-paper has been on those walls, unchanged and 
 still undimmed, for one hundred and fifty years ! 
 It seems amost incredible, but it is a fact. Possibly 
 there are few rooms like it even in France, but 
 there it is, a testimony to the old builders whose 
 building knew no damp, and to a careful art which 
 we have lost in our modern rushing days. In that 
 old room, how much tragedy and joy there has 
 been. There Monsieur and Madame, quiet and 
 dressed as for guests, were arrested and haled to 
 Paris in the Terror. Madame slipped the key into 
 the hand of an under-housemaid in her teens, and 
 the child locked up the place when the guard and 
 the prisoners had gone. Perhaps the village was 
 too far from the centre to care much for politics, 
 or again perhaps then, as now, this part of France 
 cared still for the faith of the Church and the 
 royal name ; at any rate, the years went by and 
 none came to destroy. The girl grew to a woman, 
 and married and had her children, and still she kept 
 the key, and now and again slipped up to see that 
 no harm came to the chateau of poor Madame. 
 And the wheel spun round at last, and Madame 
 in her age — alone — came back, and that by a miracle. 
 At the door stood the under-housemaid with the 
 
30 STANDING BY 
 
 key, and Madame came back to her own. And I 
 think she must have sought that old drawing-room, 
 and shut the door on all, and wept. 
 
 They turned the hammered iron fire-backs in 
 those days that the fleur-de-lys might be hidden 
 against the wall, and they have turned them back 
 again now, so that you can see them again. But 
 that was the other day, and France had much to 
 go through before then. In the varying fortunes 
 of that early century, the chateau was often empty, 
 though never again for so long; but as the years 
 grew on, the bitter anti-clerical feeling seized the 
 village and turned it yet once more against the 
 Monsieur and the Madame of our days. The family 
 of the under-housemaid was especially bitter, and 
 at length, by the time relations were opened again 
 between chateau and village, the very remembrance 
 of the act of this particular family had disappeared. 
 But last year a strange and touching incident re- 
 vived it. The Cure was called in to the death-bed 
 of a woman whose husband and sons were so bitter 
 republicans that Madame from the chateau could 
 not come to help, as is her kindly, old-fashioned, 
 motherly way. The poor woman knew she could 
 not hope for that, but she called the Cure, and her 
 husband could not deny her him. And to the 
 Cure she whispered, " Father, when I am dead, 
 but not before, go to Madame and beg of her to 
 have Masses said for my soul, for my husband and 
 my sons will do nothing." " Will Madame do so, 
 
VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 31 
 
 then ? M asked the Cure\ " Yes," said the dying 
 woman, " for tell her that it was my grandmother 
 who saved the chateau at the Revolution." Plucky 
 little under-housemaid ! How little we know all 
 that we do ! 
 
 Nowadays the family still maintains its old tradi- 
 tions. Staunch and sincere Catholics, their courtesy 
 and tolerance is a marvel. Madame and her daughter 
 nurse, and Monsieur is a branchard from time to 
 time at Lourdes, and Our Lady of Lourdes has a 
 leafy shrine in the woods, whither the village gathers 
 yearly for Monsieur's great Fete-day. We English 
 officers belong to another world, yet they have 
 opened heart and home to us since first we set up 
 our works in the valley, because of what England 
 has done for France. Here one can see French 
 womanhood as it used to be, and as one fears it 
 is ceasing to be. One wonders, in the streets, if 
 there is purity left among the women of France, 
 but here one can find it. Grace of manner and 
 yet modern knowledge, simple faith and yet honest 
 patriotism, kindness and yet perfect modesty 
 — there are some of us who will carry back over 
 the seas to the new lands, where we would fain 
 plant these things if we could, a very tender re- 
 membrance of the old chateau. 
 
 One Sunday morning I was free to go to church, 
 and that service, so commonplace to them, meant 
 much to me. Madame played the harmonium, and 
 her daughters and a few village girls made up the 
 
32 STANDING BY 
 
 choir. Their singing was exquisite. I know, now, 
 what trouble that little group at the back take 
 that the simple Gregorian Agnus and Kyrie shall 
 be perfect, and how Madame will hurry back from 
 a Paris visit so as not to miss her Sunday labour 
 for the glory of God. But I did not know then, 
 and it was a wonder to hear the clear trained voices 
 ring out over the kneeling black-clothed peasantry 
 that filled the little sanctuary as the priest at the 
 altar before the fifteenth-century statue of our 
 Redemption offered the eternal Sacrifice. So quiet 
 was the little church. Set in its humble church- 
 yard, with the tall thick-set iron crosses starting 
 like a forest about it, with the great trees spread 
 out all around, and with the sun drawing rich 
 scents from flower and garden, I had thought to 
 find a simple worship, but not quite this. 
 
 Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere 
 nobis, rang out. the young voices, and the music 
 of them was bitter-sweet to the soul. The wounded 
 Lamb is so vividly real to-day. 
 
 Monsieur is the Mayor. He farms his lands and 
 shoots over them in the old-time way, and he is 
 exceedingly courteous in the drawing-room. In 
 church he sits with the principal men in a seat 
 near the altar, his only son, too young as yet, thank 
 God, for the scythe of War, beside him. Un- 
 questionably Monsieur is a gentleman, and one 
 sees the true democracy Sunday by Sunday in 
 that church. The old priest, who must now serve 
 
VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 33 
 
 three parishes, bustles down in his vestments and 
 finds no incongruity in a whispered conference with 
 Monsieur before he gives out the notices, just as 
 he would shuffle in alongside him, vestments and all, 
 if another were to preach. He looks at us over 
 his spectacles, and he reads some episcopal letter, 
 very dull and very long, in lieu of sermon. You 
 would not say he was a great power, and he cer- 
 tainly does nothing to make his services " attractive." 
 Rome rarely does, yet she draws souls still, in 
 which thing much lies hidden. And as for that 
 pastor, he never yet came between a soul and its 
 God, but he has brought God back to half the village. 
 And so out we come into the sun, and the 
 villagers curtsey to Madame and stand bareheaded 
 before Monsieur despite the legend of Equality 
 over the church door. And the family are all 
 smiles, and very simple in their talk before they 
 slip in through the little gate. And I go on down 
 the hill, and wonder if the age of that aeroplane 
 yonder that sails by, high in the sunlight, should 
 it destroy finally the ancient landmarks, will ever 
 produce finer than this. 
 
ARMY CHAPLAINS 
 
 WE have just finished a conference — not 
 a very big one, but a small gathering 
 of padres from a South African Corps — 
 and I have but now come in from a meditative 
 walk along the plage. A grey sea was rolling 
 heavily in, and the old castle and the new, now 
 transformed, Casino, both looked melancholy. 
 Little groups battled against the wind — two or 
 three poilus, a group of Waacs, a small party 
 of convalescing officers. And I walked up and 
 down and asked myself the question : Why are 
 there chaplains in the British Army at all ? 
 
 Chaplains, of course, serve an extremely useful 
 purpose, and I make no doubt that the Higher 
 Command would probably be very sorry to see us go. 
 In that event, another department would, I take it, 
 be created to carry on what we do ; surely, indeed, 
 only the fact that our democracy is still rather a 
 lumbering unsocialistic affair prevents the formation 
 into a regular department of what has all but taken 
 our place. I refer, of course, to the Y.M.C.A. 
 and its kindred institutions. The Y.M.C.A. really 
 
ARMY CHAPLAINS 35 
 
 does, on a well-organised and much more efficient 
 scale, all that the Army asks of the Chaplains' 
 Department — with the exception, perhaps, of 
 funerals, which could, of course, be arranged easily. 
 It keeps the men's spirits up ; it provides them 
 with amusements ; it offers a flavouring of religion, 
 sufficiently toned down so as not to hurt anyone's 
 feelings (except those of the R.C.'s, who stand 
 entirely by themselves in the view of the Army) ; 
 and it is a thoroughly successful business concern. 
 This is not meant in the least to the detriment of 
 the Y.M.C.A., for which service I have had distinct 
 thoughts of applying, and it should not hurt any- 
 one's feelings, for it is, after all, what the Y.M.C.A. 
 sets out to do. Its religious standpoint, as one 
 sees it in the Army, could be admirably expressed 
 by the words of a colonel in a recent issue of 
 the Spectator. He hoped the Established National 
 Church would come out in its true colours, 
 follow " the clue " which the Great Example 
 left us, and be "just a community of men and 
 women who are content to agree upon certain 
 things which no one seriously disputes, and to 
 count the disputable things as merely trappings or 
 ornaments." These are wonderful words which 
 repay study. As a matter of fact, that is the religion 
 of the Y.M.C.A. which, in France, is a great deal 
 more Established and National than the Church. 
 The colonel certainly seems justified, inasmuch as 
 the Y.M.C.A. is amazingly successful. Everyone 
 
 ■ 
 
36 STANDING BY 
 
 speaks well of it. We are all welcomed into it. 
 It even smiles on a person like myself, and gives 
 me tea and biscuits because I wear a Maltese Cross, 
 and utterly disarms me. 
 
 But one comes back to the original question : 
 Why, then, are there chaplains in the British Army 
 at all ? I suppose the real answer is that there 
 always have been, and that there are people in 
 England who would be annoyed if there were not. 
 That is really sufficient for an English Government, 
 especially as it has its own inimitable way of dealing 
 with such a matter. Like an out-of-date statute, 
 one would never repeal the Chaplains' Depart- 
 ment. Instead, the English spirit is to smile 
 at it, or bully it, as is most convenient ; coax it 
 into doing work for which it was never intended ; 
 and finally convince it that that is its best and 
 real work, although it keeps another name. In 
 pursuance of the first of these methods, camps are 
 always cleaned up on Sunday, extra parades and 
 inspections are always arranged for Sunday (" Very 
 sorry, Padre, but we couldn't help it "), and the 
 men are always on the verge of breakdown on a 
 Sunday, so that it is a shame to allow more than 
 twenty minutes for a service. Or chaplains are 
 given large areas to cover, and then find it all but 
 impossible, and in any case heart-breaking, to get 
 about, thanks to the difficulty of movement orders 
 and the fact that petrol is so scarce that it cannot 
 be spared for us. So, the Padre plodding wearily 
 
ARMY CHAPLAINS 37 
 
 along on a heavy Government bicycle, the Colonel 
 roars by in a motor-car on real duty, and a dispatch- 
 rider passes on a motor -bicycle going to town to 
 fetch a pound of butter for the mess. 
 
 In pursuance of the second method, that of 
 coaxing the Padre into doing work for which he 
 was not intended, the procedure is particularly 
 charming. " Oh, elect the Padre to be mess- 
 president ; he's just the man, and he's got the 
 time." " Padre, censor these letters, will you, 
 like a good chap ; I'm fearfully busy." " Padre, 
 couldn't you get up some sports for us ? " " Padre, 
 find out the local talent and arrange a concert, 
 will you ? " And the Padre does, since method 
 one gives him time for method two. This is not a 
 grouse, nor is it a fairy tale ; it is just a fact. 
 The other day a friend of mine arrived at a camp. 
 " Awfully sorry," said the Commandant, " but 
 really, you know, Padre, there's no time for a service." 
 (Details followed.) " But stay to dinner with us, 
 won't you, like a good chap ? " And at dinner, 
 expansive, the same Commandant genially re- 
 marked, " By the way, Padre, couldn't you get 
 up a concert for us ? " 
 
 ■' Oh ! " said the Padre, " so you've time for a 
 concert, but not for a parade service ? " 
 
 " By Jove, capital joke ! " roared the Com- 
 mandant, perfectly sincere and not meaning in the 
 least to hurt. There are others, of course, who 
 do, but I purposely refrain from speaking of them 
 
38 STANDING BY 
 
 as I might. I should be told they were rare excep- 
 tions, and there would be a controversy in the 
 Church Times. 
 
 Now I say we have no right to grouse, for the 
 Army is perfectly right in its way. Nine English- 
 men out of ten no longer desire the religious system 
 in which a special order of ministers is a necessity. 
 All they ask of a padre is that he shall be a genial, 
 all-round, broad-minded (how often have I heard 
 that !) good chap, a smoker, not averse to a glass 
 of whisky and soda, athletic, and a speaker who will 
 speak straight out on common-sense things like clean 
 living at bottom, duty, honesty, patriotism, gentle- 
 manliness, good-humour, broad-mindedness. And 
 one curious phenomenon results : nine times out 
 of ten the chaplain is a thoroughly popular person, 
 for quite a large percentage of chaplains are what 
 I have described above. But even this has its 
 humorous side : chaplains are liked in the individual 
 but not in the abstract. Every man you meet, 
 when he gets to know you, will tell you what a 
 rattling fine chap his own chaplain is ; but every 
 man who meets you looks stony, and shuts up, in 
 restaurant, carriage, or bar, until he knows you. 
 And I think I see why. Englishmen do not like or 
 want the things for which they think the Chaplains' 
 Department stands, but once they suppose your 
 particular view-point is a kind of Y.M.C.A. outlook, 
 they are delighted. 
 
 So, as I kicked stones along the beach, I worried 
 
ARMY CHAPLAINS 39 
 
 back to the old question : Why are there chaplains 
 in the British Army at all ? From the Army point 
 of view it is because it is British and conservative ; 
 from ours it must be either because we mean to 
 convert the Army to our idea of a chaplain, or 
 because it is a good shield under which to do Y.M.C.A. 
 work. That, too, is peculiarly British. Those of 
 us who hope for the first are going the queerest 
 way to work to get it ; and those of us who hope 
 for the second are muddle-headed, because they 
 have already converted the nation, and the shield is 
 no longer needed. I am certain half the chaplains 
 in France might as well join in to the Y.M.C.A. 
 right away. It would be a strength to that organisa- 
 tion and an economy to the Army. Consider our 
 conference, for example. First, the O.C. congratu- 
 lated us on the work we had done in keeping the 
 boys fit and cheerful — which was mostly more 
 conventional than true. Then we fell to discussion 
 — whether it would be better to purchase magic- 
 lanterns than cinematographs; bands; marquees; 
 organs ; gramophones ; night schools ; our financial 
 relationship with the Society that supplies us with 
 material; the food, dress, and accommodation of 
 our native chaplains; and so on. Perhaps these 
 are the things a conference would discuss, but they 
 are also a fair indication of by far the greater part 
 of our activities. Oh yes, and we talked of printing 
 a common hymn-book to suit us all, and took it 
 for granted that chaplains should be distributed 
 
40 STANDING BY 
 
 on a territorial and not a sectarian basis. It was 
 exactly the Y.M.C.A. 
 
 However, I will not jest, for it is a moot point 
 whether or not the Y.M.C.A. is not a sounder 
 institution than the Catholic religion. Horrible 
 as that sounds to some of us, I know several chaplains 
 who came out here on the other side, and who have 
 since been solidly converted to this standpoint. 
 One has to consider the greatest good of the largest 
 number. These men affirm that the two methods 
 cannot be combined, which I well believe. If a 
 man sets out to act as a priest and to convert, he 
 will do it better by being unlike than by being like 
 other men. Such a man would set the Sacraments 
 first ; he would be genial, perhaps, but Christianity 
 is an austere religion in a way ; and he would spend 
 his spare time in study and prayer. The inevi- 
 table follows. This was the method of Christ 
 and His apostles, and it brought disturbance in its 
 train. It sets on fire the earth. There is always 
 argument in the mess, and it is very doubtful if 
 guerilla arguments on religion in a mess do any 
 good ; it rules out of any ministrations at all the 
 majority of those for whom one can do something 
 otherwise ; and it does not fulfil the desire of the 
 War Office for chaplains. 
 
 On the other hand, the Padre who is an " all-round 
 good sport M finds his hands full with kindly occupa- 
 tions. He easily attains a certain amount of in- 
 fluence, and checks the coarser immoralities. He 
 
ARMY CHAPLAINS 41 
 
 can do a great deal to introduce a healthy atmosphere 
 into a camp, and he can be a real friend to the men. 
 He will be quoted as solving in his person all religious 
 controversies, and he will thus do more than he 
 knows towards the creation of that public opinion 
 which will ultimately establish the Y.M.C.A. 
 religion. Let us put it even stronger : he will 
 encourage people to love their neighbour and speak 
 respectfully of God ; to live happily and to die 
 without fear. 
 
 The whole question resolves itself very simply, 
 therefore, into a question as to whether you believe 
 Christianity to be a dogmatic, sacramental, sacerdo- 
 tal religion, or whether you believe it to be a theistic 
 system of ethics. Beyond doubt, the Army in 
 France, the Y.M.C.A., and a majority of chaplains 
 believe it to be the latter. In which case I grow 
 furious with the demand that we should say so 
 right out and have done with it. Abolish the 
 Chaplains' Department and establish the Y.M.C.A. 
 Knock on the head the miserable petty squabbles 
 that separate us at home — matters of musty history, 
 of lingering enmities, of obscure philosophies. 
 This is a new age, and we want to step out into it 
 unencumbered. A great confederation of sincere 
 kindly people, pledged to service for common 
 brotherhood, and to a reverence towards God, a 
 community (how does it go ?) " who are content 
 to agree upon certain things which no one seriously 
 disputes, and to count the disputable things as 
 
42 STANDING BY 
 
 merely trappings," — this would be a real power on 
 the earth, at least for a while. 
 
 There is nothing more annoying in the world 
 than bad logic and indecision. It is these two 
 things which alone prevent the attainment of this 
 ideal. For example, Methodist ministers, whose 
 battle for the abolition of priesthood is all but won, 
 are daily setting the clock back by taking to 
 Roman collars and clerical airs; while Catholic 
 clergy, whose aim to reform or break the Church 
 of England was all but accomplished, are daily 
 convincing the Army that they are merely men 
 amongst men. Or again, we have long since largely 
 scrapped the Prayer Book and a great deal of tra- 
 ditional ritual in France. The official Parade 
 Service has secured at a blow all that Prayer Book 
 reform has been righting for, and no one dreams 
 of sticking to the State Prayers or the Athanasian 
 Creed. All over the place, chaplains have evening 
 Communions, usually with coloured stoles, wafer 
 bread, and altar lights. And yet, illogically and 
 indecisively, the old squabbles go on in England, 
 and the old hopeless ways that are neither fish, 
 flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. Kikuyu happens 
 every week in France somewhere, and yet the 
 Bishops still suppose a Lambeth Conference must 
 debate about it. The C.M.S. Bishop of Khartoum 
 prints prayers for the dead for the use of all chap- 
 lains, and yet the Low Church Party still think it 
 is a matter in dispute. My comrade, the Methodist 
 
ARMY CHAPLAINS 43 
 
 Padre, uses wafer bread and will not allow the dis- 
 placement of Crucifix and Madonna when he uses 
 our Altar, and yet folk at home are still prepared 
 to act as if they lived in a century in which people 
 attached importance to these things. 
 
 No, chaplains are an anomaly in the B.E.F. The 
 Department is a foolish waste of men, money, and 
 time. The greater part of it should be absorbed 
 by the Y.M.C.A., and the rest should become Roman 
 Catholic. Not that I suppose either will happen ; 
 we are English. 
 
I 
 
 VI 
 
 PARIS 
 
 ONDON is the Business House of the Eastern 
 Hemisphere, and is a grim kind of place. 
 
 -^ It has its gaieties, but they are exotic, 
 and the gaieties of people who relax a little from 
 the strain of work ; and if one is inclined to 
 be contemptuous of the work that is transacted 
 there, London is a place of which one is glad to see 
 the last. I admit that I always revisit it wonder- 
 ingly. In London people are more deluded than 
 anywhere else in the world, for the importance 
 of the business of which it is the Central House is 
 nothing but a nightmare of the imagination. Of 
 all vanities, nothing is more vain than the making 
 of money, and the life, which commonly attends 
 it, of respectable, unemotional, conventional, 
 middle-class existence. London is Earth. 
 
 Paris, on the contrary, is the International Toy 
 Shop, and toys are symbols of the big things of life. 
 You can only have symbols down here, and the 
 great thing is to love and use your toys, knowing 
 that they are but toys, but for all that symbols of 
 eternity. And this is what people do in Paris. 
 
PARIS 45 
 
 They live. They indulge the emotions by which 
 our souls express themselves. They are gay ; 
 they love ; they pray. All these things are done 
 in Paris, as nowhere else, with all the strength of 
 body and soul. So ought they to be done. Paris, 
 therefore, is Heaven and Hell. 
 
 Contrast the way these two cities have taken 
 the War. London, having maintained previously, 
 through a false sense of its own importance, that 
 its Credit Business System was making War im- 
 possible, declared generally that it would be over 
 by Christmas, and that in the meantime Business 
 must go on as usual. The War, in 1914, did not 
 really worry London, and Business did go on. The 
 Powers that Be in London, certain that this was 
 the admirable attitude, did their best to encourage 
 it, and carefully suppressed news that might upset 
 Business. London learned of Mons after the 
 Marne, but did not understand either even then. 
 But once War had shown the vanity of the idea 
 that Business could check the progress of its grim 
 realities, London began to turn to and make a 
 business of War. To-day, as I write, War 
 has become London's chief occupation. Life is 
 organised for it from the breakfast-table to the 
 office, with the most satisfactory result to London. 
 We are now meeting the Teutonic business of War 
 with the Anglo-Saxon. Chivalry, stupid self- 
 sacrifice, heroics, agony — all these we are obliterat- 
 ing as hard as we can. War is now organised 
 
46 STANDING BY 
 
 and business-like murder. The other things are 
 bound to obtrude a little, to our shame, but for the 
 most part our war machine is running smoothly, 
 and we grind a few kilometres into chaos and take 
 them at the smallest possible cost as often as 
 the factories allow us — and that is very often 
 now. It is an incredibly efficient business, and 
 London is beginning to be quite content with it. 
 
 Paris, on the other hand, always expected War, 
 and embraced it at once as she embraces every other 
 reality of life. We can only dimly visualise the 
 stupendous things she did. Her chivalry blazed 
 like a flame to heaven ; her flesh and blood, flung 
 heroically pell-mell into the jaws of the iron machine 
 of Prussia, bled white into what would have been, 
 without the Allies, as heroic an epic of death as that 
 of 1870 ; and in her churches her agony writhed 
 before the altars till Calvary and it were one. But 
 Paris opened her eyes amazedly at last to find she 
 still lived. She is beginning to find out why, to 
 find out that she has become a partner in the 
 efficient business proposition that London has 
 floated, a proposition so shrewd that New York 
 could no longer keep out. She has gasped, shrugged 
 her shoulders, submitted like a sensible woman — 
 and to a great extent lost interest. 
 
 That is what one feels in Paris. She is not a 
 traitor to the Allied Cause for a moment, but War 
 has become a business and she has gone back to 
 life. A leave in Paris bewilders one. In the whirl 
 
PARIS 47 
 
 of taxis, in the crowded restaurants, passing the 
 glittering shop-fronts, love-making on the boule- 
 vards, intoxicating oneself in the music-halls, one 
 would not know of War. Paris is fondling the 
 toys again with all her heart and soul as London 
 never did or can ; and those who always loved the 
 symbols in the churches, ever appropriate to War 
 but now dear anew with blood and tears, handle 
 them, if it be possible, with even deeper passion. 
 
 Thus it is a wonderful Nemesis that the Germans 
 have met at the hands of London and Paris. Neither 
 city ever believed it possible that so monstrous a 
 thing could be as the making of a business of War. 
 Each human in her own way, neither London 
 nor Paris believed that Berlin could really cease 
 to be human and become diabolical. But man is 
 finer than the devil. London, having grasped the 
 awful fact, set her teeth to build up a business — 
 cleaner, but a business — to oppose to his ; and 
 Paris, heart of humanity, lovable, laughing, 
 passionate Paris, awakening, flings him a look of 
 unutterable disgust and turns away her head. 
 The Prussian monster is crushed by the strength 
 of a man, and scorned by the soul of a woman. 
 
 It is a strange experience to come from native 
 Africa to London and Paris, if one loves Africa. 
 It is to pass from wide unstained sunlit spaces, 
 unconquered silent mountains, the sights and 
 smells and sounds of natural living, and the un- 
 
48 STANDING BY 
 
 trammelled life of man, to the crown and flower of 
 Civilisation. That strange twisted will of man has 
 energised for centuries, and the story of its labour 
 is the history of Civilisation, and the height of its 
 attainment London and Paris. 
 
 One rejects it in either city, but one is tempted 
 longer by Paris, for in London civilisation is re- 
 strained, in Paris it is not. In London — the real 
 London — it is restrained, and it is so dreadfully 
 dull. I wonder sometimes if Time can show a more 
 pathetic spectacle than the life of London. One 
 result, I think, of that twisted will in man, is the 
 desire to hide, which is, after all, the most ancient 
 story in the world. But the bushes of the garden 
 and the fig-leaves were only our initial experiments. 
 We went on to the diversion of every possible 
 thing into fig-leaves to cover our nakedness. In 
 London you can see the process marvellously 
 consummated. In politics, in religion, in social 
 life, they ever seek fresh fig-leaves and deceive 
 themselves. I do not know what Mother Eve 
 did to keep her fig-leaves in place, but nowadays we 
 do it with conventions. If one is too rough with 
 conventions, dreadful things threaten, for the on- 
 lookers promptly spy out nakednesses ; but if one is 
 not rough with them, the man who, for example, 
 loves native Africa, stifles horribly. 
 
 Personally, it is in religion that I feel this thing 
 most, and, to be frank, in Church of England religion, 
 for one cannot help feeling that nine Protestant 
 
PARIS 49 
 
 chapels out of ten have really ceased to have any 
 real religion at all. At least I think the chief 
 part of religion is worship, and traffic with the 
 spiritual world, and growth in a detachment whose 
 flower will be impulsive charity of the spirit un- 
 ostentatiously expressing itself ; but Protestantism 
 seems to be largely sermons, organised relief works, 
 and temperance legislation. In the Church of 
 England, then, one is slowly suffocated. The world, 
 surely, cannot have seen before such an awful 
 civilisation of religion, and that in all but every 
 place. We go on using the old terms, but if sin be 
 sin, how can it be confessed to the drone of a note 
 in a crowd ; if God be God, how can one dictate to 
 Him precise needs in classical English ; if worship 
 be worship, how can one worship to the word of 
 command ; if divine authority be divine authority, 
 how can it condescend to hair-splitting quibbles 
 only fit for politics ? In a word, if religion means 
 anything, it means the abandonment of oneself to 
 God, indifferent to appearances ; and in England, 
 even in religion, it is improper to abandon oneself, 
 and appearances are everything. 
 
 Now this is no treatise on the reform of English 
 religion ; if it is anything, it is just a comparison 
 of London and Paris. In Paris, then, one sees what 
 it would be impossible to see in London, and I shall 
 illustrate what I mean by Montmartre, High Mass 
 at Notre Dame, and a visit to Notre Dame des 
 Victoires. 
 4 
 
50 STANDING BY 
 
 Montmartre is an Act of Faith, of course, but there 
 is something so abandoned and childlike about it 
 that it brings tears to the eyes. Old and young, 
 rich and poor have built it, and their names are 
 carved on the stones they have given : the lady 
 who took me round, showed me the stone the village 
 children of her catechism class had given their sous 
 to buy. They built it high above Paris, as if there 
 were some triumph of love even in that ! The 
 Government is trying to build in front of it to hide 
 it — as if there were some triumph in that. It is big 
 and white and costly, but it is not like the Gothic 
 cathedrals. Inside it is colour and gilt and electric 
 light, which is exactly what it should be. These are 
 the decorations that the children of our age love ; 
 and of what in London we are ashamed, choosing 
 more conventional decorations to hide our naked- 
 ness, Paris gives with both hands. And on any 
 weekday probably more people worship at Mont- 
 martre than in all the churches of London put to- 
 gether. Night and day it has been open since the 
 War. Thousands of names for intercession are sent 
 in every week, and their figures are posted at the 
 doors. And above all, Christ shows His Sacred 
 Heart, which is a figure so humanly simple and senti- 
 mental that English religion is positively shocked 
 at it. 
 
 Then that War-Sunday at Notre Dame stands out 
 as unforgettable. The river and the island lay 
 like a water-colour, with a faint blue sky above and 
 
PARIS 5 1 
 
 a gleam of rainy autumn sunshine in the air. The 
 trees were golden and brown, and, from the east, 
 graceful and tender the cathedral. They had begun 
 when we came in. We found seats far down the 
 nave, among a strange crowd, many in uniform. 
 Far away the mysteries of religion were being per- 
 formed. I formulated to myself, for the first time, 
 the realisation that Humanity has gathered, in 
 Catholicism, the Christ-story to its heart, and made 
 of it a world-religion. It is impossible to have 
 a sense of pageantry and beauty, and of music and 
 of art, and to use them only for Lord Mayors' shows 
 and the openings of Parliament, unless, as in Eng- 
 land, these things are lightly held, and not under- 
 stood to be our sacraments of reality. No : once 
 the Faith of Humanity had gripped the Christ-story, 
 the Love of Humanity demanded its expression. 
 High Mass at Notre Dame is a worthy expression. 
 It is Catholic, for everywhere Humanity has striven 
 for expression — in India, China, or in the ancient 
 worlds—it has expressed itself as here. Matins in 
 St. Paul's, or even a sung Eucharist, is a totally 
 different thing. It is the congregation that is 
 catered for in London ; it is Almighty God in Paris. 
 Yet the congregation of Notre Dame was more 
 reverent than that of St. Paul's, and I believe it 
 knew its way about in what was going forward, 
 so exquisitely but so far away, better as well. It 
 punctuated the Liturgy correctly ; half St. Paul's 
 cannot find the collect for the day. And so the 
 
52 STANDING BY 
 
 music rolled and thundered, not that I might sing 
 or be edified, but that God might be glorified ; and 
 in contrast, the light streamed down those ancient 
 walls, again, on a priest whose thin voice only faintly 
 reached me and finally failed altogether, which 
 did not matter, for he was not talking to me but to 
 God. Curiously, too, that silence drew my soul 
 nearer to the Mercy-Seat than the most musical 
 minor canon at his celebration whom I have ever 
 heard. 
 
 There was that extraordinarily instructive incident 
 too which one sees so often in France. A priest 
 came round collecting what we would give him for 
 himself and his brethren. All priests of great Gods 
 do that — Buddhist, Hindu, or Catholic. I believe 
 there is a philosophy of religion hidden in that act, 
 stupid as it may read. Imagine the Dean of St. 
 Paul's collecting alms on Sunday, and saying " Thank 
 you " to each sou or sovereign. He does collect, of 
 course, but not like that : he collects in fig-leaves. 
 All we English clergy follow suit : we prompt church- 
 wardens, and arrange sidesmen and sustentation 
 funds, and label our offertories " Church Expenses." 
 We do almost anything short of going round our- 
 selves like Buddhist monks or Catholic priests. It 
 is not gentlemanly. But priests are not ashamed 
 to be servants and beggars in the name of the living 
 God. 
 
 And the night I left Paris to return to duty I saw 
 one last scene. One cannot compare it with any- 
 
PARIS 53 
 
 thing that is really London at all, and I shall not 
 try to do so. For I pushed open the door of Notre 
 Dame des Victoires, a church I had never entered 
 before, just about dinner-time at night. I have no 
 idea what the church is really like, for I have read 
 no guide-book of it nor seen even the exterior that I 
 remember by daylight, and I do not want to have 
 any idea. For that dark autumn evening the great 
 Painter laid the strokes of His brush upon my soul. 
 It was dark, and the radiance that blazed from what 
 seemed to be a kind of transept did not reach me 
 directly, but burgeoned out pillar and buttress and 
 statue in shadow against pale gold. Cautiously I 
 went up among the chairs and the ever-thickening 
 congregation, till I saw\ Above the altar stood the 
 white image, and below, like flame-flowers in a 
 breeze, fluttered scores of candle-flames, that grew 
 as worshippers added each his light. The darkness 
 pressed in around, but that radiance lit up the faces 
 of those 'who prayed. Ah ! they prayed — a widow 
 at the altar rails, a poilu by a pillar, the dainty girl 
 at my side, yonder old beggar-man. God ! how 
 they prayed, the hundreds of them, for there were 
 hundreds there, without service or priest or music at 
 all. And it was no special day or hour ; but night 
 and day, since August 1914, so have they prayed. 
 They are praying there now ... in a sense, for 
 me. . . . 
 
 At the door a white sister was asking money, 
 quietly, for missions in the Sudan. I saw"a blue- 
 
54 STANDING BY 
 
 coated private of the line give silver ; a woman offer 
 also, so poor that I think her offering must have had 
 the value of gold. As for me, I knew that I had 
 insisted on remaining so rich that I had really nothing 
 to give, and I went past, and out, ashamed. 
 
VII 
 
 OLD BILL 
 
 SO you find time to read a good deal ? " I 
 asked. 
 "Yes," said he; "I think I keep 
 wonderfully up to date. You'll find them all over 
 there — What we think about Tommy : What 
 Tommy thinks about us (or what we think Tommy 
 thinks about us) : and The Church as it is, as it 
 should be, as it will be, as it might be, as it was 
 meant to be, as we have made it, as it has made us, 
 as it would be if it had made us something — any- 
 thing — except what we are, and so on, rather end- 
 lessly. And if you really plan to write the book 
 you've been outlining to me, you will probably put 
 this conversation into it, and then your book will 
 go into the soap-box too." 
 
 He waved his pipe towards the corner of the dug- 
 out, and I got up and crossed over to have a look. 
 The soap-box was half buried in the earth wall and 
 wedged up with the noses of two 0/2 German shells. 
 It was full of books about religion and the War, as 
 he said, but there was room for another there, at any 
 rate. 
 
 55 
 
56 STANDING BY 
 
 " Well," said I, coming back to my upturned tin 
 pail, " what do you make of them all ? " 
 
 He looked at me reflectively, as he used to look 
 from the depth of his arm-chair at Cambridge when 
 I had thought him an acute, clever young don, 
 and never suspected that an embryo army chaplain, 
 with a reputation for cool gallantry, unquenchable 
 humour, and immense humanity, sat there. 
 
 " Make of them all ? " he repeated cautiously. 
 
 " Yes," said I, not seeing the drift. 
 
 " As a whole I think they are a great sign of the 
 times. That's one of the few things that are quite 
 clear, and it's well worth considering. There's not 
 a shadow of doubt that that body of religious men 
 who thought, before the War, that religion wanted 
 restating, and the religion of the Church of England 
 especially, reforming, have come to their own. 
 They have found an excuse for articulation, and an 
 opportunity such as no reformers of our day have 
 ever had. They have won recruits. It is incon- 
 ceivable, I think, that they will not make an up- 
 heaval. If they do not, at any rate it will be the 
 central disappointment of my life." 
 
 I assented. " That goes without saying," I 
 said. 
 
 " It's a pity when it does," he retorted. " Just 
 now you've got to get the simple facts clear or you 
 get nowhere. And it's the simple initial facts that 
 lead one farthest. Now what strikes you among 
 all that host of writers ? " 
 
OLD BILL 57 
 
 I turned them over in my mind, but I suppose it 
 is not much of a mind. James never thought so, 
 anyway. " Give me a match, old man," I said, 
 " and continue the lecture." 
 
 He smiled. " You always were an old ass, 
 Bobbie," he said. " The thing that strikes me is that 
 there is no new prophet among them. I mean — 
 look at them — they are all parsons who write. I 
 know there's a Donald Hankey or so, but they're the 
 same class. There's Mr. Wells ; but Mr. Wells, in his 
 own way, is a professional prophet too. There'll 
 be you; but you're a professional prophet. The 
 only person who has not written about the religion 
 of Tommy is Tommy. The only person who has not 
 written about the rehabilitation of religion is the 
 person for whom we all want it rehabilitated. And 
 that is remarkable, because it's a real religious move- 
 ment that's on foot. There is a stirring among the 
 dry bones, but the bones that are stirring are not the 
 valleyful that we've always been anxious about. 
 If this War had quickened religion among the men 
 in the street, who, as one of those fellows justly says, 
 are simply Tommies in the trenches, then from the 
 men in the street would have come a prophet with 
 judgment to begin at the House of God. I think 
 it's amazing that no such one has come. The thing 
 that astounds me, that reduces me all but to despair 
 in certain moods, that certainly shows me our pro- 
 fessional failure more plainfy than all the books, is 
 the fact that this War has come, with all its awful 
 
58 STANDING BY 
 
 reality, and never raised a prophet from among the 
 people." 
 
 We smoked on in silence, and he began again in 
 a minute, warming to his words : 
 
 " What I mean is this," he said. " Here's this 
 War, confronting the masses of our people with 
 life and death in all their tremendous importance, 
 throwing a blinding searchlight on the Church, 
 stirring us to the depths of our souls, laying naked 
 before us the exceeding need of ourselves and all 
 men, so that we cry out, • How can we exhibit 
 Christ as the Satisfier, as the Saviour ? How can 
 we vitalise our creeds and credal-forms and credal- 
 worship, to carry us on ? ', and yet the mass of men 
 never seem to cry that at all ! And don't be mis- 
 taken, no human need exists without some offer 
 of satisfaction being forced up by that need. If 
 the men had made to themselves a new god out of 
 this War, I shouldn't have been surprised : one 
 would have known what to do. But they do not 
 seem to feel the need of a god at all — in the mass, 
 I mean. I am so sure of this, that I sometimes 
 wonder if there are not two alternatives, one or 
 the other of which must be true. Perhaps both 
 have truth in them. Maybe the men have made 
 themselves a new god, and that he has his prophets, 
 and we don't realise it ; or maybe they are really 
 content with the old god they have got." 
 
 I hardly caught the last words for the roar of a 
 near explosion, and I half started from my seat. 
 
OLD BILL 59 
 
 Jimmy did not move. As the noise died down he 
 reached for a cigarette, and said : 
 
 " It was too late to do anything, and besides 
 there was nothing to do. One gets used to it. 
 Maybe it hits the trench ; maybe it doesn't. If it 
 doesn't, there's no need for worry ; if it does, 
 there's no good in worrying too soon." 
 
 I accepted the dictum, and took him back to the 
 conversation. " What new god might they have 
 found ? " I asked. 
 
 " How about Old Bill ? " he queried calmly. 
 
 I confess I was a little shocked. " Good heavens, 
 man," I said, " what do you mean ? " 
 
 "Well," he said, "let's be frank. Old Bill 
 symbolises what the men like to see in others and 
 want to see in themselves. He stands for a frame 
 of mind that works. A fellow like that goes through 
 this Hell and comes out on the other side, if he's 
 lucky, sane. That's the test ; that's what they 
 want. That kind of spirit is a gospel to them. 
 They like to read of it, to see it pictorially, to reach 
 out after it. It's found its prophet, or prophets. 
 Old Bill is as sound philosophy in reality as the 
 ones with more dignified names : analysed, one 
 might say he stands for optimism, humour, com- 
 radeship, bravery, common sense. And the great 
 point is that he is within reach. He is within you. 
 You can work at moulding him inside yourself ; 
 you can appeal to his type of man, quote him, 
 develop him ; you can pin him up on the wall 
 
60 STANDING BY 
 
 and admire him. In other religions one calls these 
 things meditation, prayer, worship." 
 
 " Good Lord ! " I fear I said, astounded. 
 
 " Well, Bobbie," he said, " this isn't a time to 
 fool round with things. Can you question the 
 facts ? You've seen the men — travelled with them, 
 talked to them, watched them day and night, much 
 the same as I. Of course Old Bill is only one 
 materialisation of the thing ; for aught I know, 
 thousands of Tommies have never seen a Bairns- 
 father picture, though I doubt it. But the facts 
 are there. It's that type that cheers a thousand 
 waiting men on the quay-side in the winter's rain 
 when the leave boat's late ; it's that sort that any 
 forty men packed into a truck — ' Hommes 40, 
 Chevaux (en long) 8 ' — love to have with them ; 
 it's that type that they tell stories of after an 
 advance. You and I don't come in much on those 
 occasions. Of course the men are very decent ; 
 there are scores of chaplains who buck things up ; 
 but which do you think they'd choose for a twelve 
 hours' journey, or a half -hour's visit to a hospital 
 ward — Old Bill or a chaplain ? " 
 
 " Old Bill," said I promptly. 
 
 " Exactly," said he. " Then if we are right, 
 that's what we've got to face. Not to face it is to 
 play with facts, which is what most of those books 
 do. We are worrying about the Apostles' Creed ; 
 the men aren't interested in it. They don't care 
 two straws about it. It neither helps nor cheers 
 
OLD BILL 6 1 
 
 them, and therefore they don't want it. Even 
 the things that are approximately practical in it 
 are not the things they care about. The Holy 
 Catholic Church either means the Church of Rome, 
 of which our lads know very little and care less, 
 for they don't mean to have anything to do with 
 it, or else it stands for - religious people ' generally, 
 who have no unity, no coherence, and no weight 
 whatever in the world of practical things. The 
 Forgiveness of Sins — well, we've messed that up. 
 The things the average parson calls sins, Tommy 
 doesn't regard as disgraceful at all ; in his heart 
 of hearts he knows they don't spoil a good chum. 
 And although he doesn't theorise over it, I believe 
 he doesn't really think God is on the side of the 
 parsons. If there is a God at all, He is a ' good 
 fellow.' Good heavens ! think of the Ten Com- 
 mandments ! Think of the futility of hammering 
 away still at them ! Why, good Lord, the first 
 three, in their original meaning, no one dreams of 
 breaking ; the fourth, everybody, even the parsons, 
 breaks continually ; the fifth, Tommy keeps better 
 than anyone else ; the sixth, seventh, and eighth 
 are on the statute books ; the ninth is common 
 charity ; the tenth is absurd — everybody breaks 
 it. What I mean is, the Commandments, as they 
 stand, don't get koine." 
 
 " But their spirit is magnificent," I ventured. 
 
 " Of course it is, old dear," he said ; " but what's 
 the use of hanging on to obsolete forms as a fetish 
 
62 STANDING BY 
 
 and trying to make out that they mean something 
 they don't mean ? The Fourth Commandment 
 says : You shan't work on Saturday ; you make it 
 mean : You ought to go to Church on Sunday. 
 Then why harp on saying the one when you mean 
 the other ? It's a fair illustration. That kind of 
 performance simply confuses the issue." 
 
 We sat silent a bit. It is not always noisy in 
 the trenches : all one could hear was the rats. 
 
 " ' The Resurrection of the Body,' " my friend 
 went on in a minute, and in a low tone. " Oh, 
 Bobbie, you've been up here a bit, what do even 
 you make of that ? * The Life Everlasting ' " — he 
 shrugged his shoulders — " this life is too damnable 
 to Tommy in the trenches, too busy to Tommy 
 out of them, for him to think much of that. Also 
 it's incongruous ; it's wrapped up in out-of-date 
 imaginations. To speak plainly, nobody has got 
 much use for it. Except — well, ' God's a good 
 fellow.' " 
 
 " Then you think Christianity is played out ? " 
 I asked. 
 
 He did not directly reply. Instead he said : 
 
 " There's a padre round here whom I should 
 like you to meet. He swears a good deal, as they 
 call it swearing in drawing-rooms ; he drinks ; he 
 even kisses the girls in fun ; he practically never 
 preaches, but administers the Sacraments whenever 
 he gets a chance ; and when two men told him 
 straight that they were living in adultery (just to 
 
OLD BILL 63 
 
 see what he would say) he never said a word. He 
 is always cheerful, utterly unselfish, has apparently 
 no personal fear at all, is tender as a woman to the 
 wounded, and is utterly indifferent to what anyone 
 may think of him. His personal faith in the 
 Apostles' Creed is like a rock, and if you ask him 
 to pray with you, he will go down on his knees in 
 a moment and talk to God as if He were on his 
 right hand. The men can't make him out in the 
 least, but they love him, they play the game when 
 he's around, and their language was incredible 
 when they heard he was to be moved to another 
 battalion. He helps them to live, and if anybody 
 wants it, he helps them to die. What do you 
 make of that ? " 
 
 " I don't know," I said. "It's probably per- 
 sonality ; you couldn't have a ministry like that." 
 
 " No ? " he queried. 
 
 " Well," said I, " could you ? " 
 
 " I don't know," he said. " Of course you 
 couldn't have every individual in it as full of char- 
 acter as that chap, but you could have — you do 
 have a something pretty near it." 
 
 " Explain yourself," I said. 
 
 He smiled. " Let's get back to the soap-box. 
 What else do you notice about it ? " 
 
 I stared at it, and for the life of me could see 
 nothing. I said as much. 
 
 He smiled again, whimsically. " There aren't 
 any Roman Catholic writers there," he said. 
 
64 STANDING BY 
 
 " Oh I " I said weakly and slightly annoyed. 
 
 " Oh, it's all very well, Bobbie," said he, " but 
 face facts. The only people who seem perfectly 
 content with their religious system are the Catholics. 
 I have not seen a single book demanding its reform 
 because it doesn't suit Tommy. I've read half a 
 dozen thanking God for the lives and deaths of 
 Catholic soldiers, but that's all. And why ? " 
 
 I said nothing. 
 
 " Well," said he, "I may be wrong, but I think 
 they have unaccountably got hold of the right end 
 of the stick. That padre I mentioned was an R.C. 
 They have got a perfectly firm credal faith — 
 practical, dogmatic, supernatural. Round those 
 fixed points everything is allowed to be in a state 
 of flux. It's most instructing. The Roman padre's 
 very language is a parable ; he uses Latin and 
 Tommy's language. He usually swears a good 
 deal, because he knows perfectly well that what 
 you and I call swearing is not swearing at all, in 
 the moral sense. He uses Latin, which is an 
 extraordinarily good parable of his belief that he is 
 the medium for the supply of a supernatural forgive- 
 ness and grace which turns, not on a man's intellectual 
 understanding or culture or goodness, but on his 
 sincerity and need. When the padre sees that 
 need he supplies it ; when he doesn't see it, he 
 lives a cheerful, natural, straightforward, manly 
 but also supernatural life, which men like and 
 instinctively — perhaps unconsciously — envy. Such 
 
OLD BILL 65 
 
 a padre wants very little changed. He is perfectly 
 sure of his wealth, its source, and its supply ; he 
 only wishes there were more beggars. If there are 
 not, it is not his fault." 
 
 I filled a pipe and lit it. "What about Old 
 Bill ? " I asked, blowing out the match. 
 
 My friend did not smile. " I don't quite know," 
 he confessed. His voice dropped a little : " Some- 
 times, Bobbie But I don't like to say it, even to 
 
 you. Perhaps I can put it this way : if Old Bill 
 is what I take him to be, I believe he would have 
 worshipped Jesus Christ if he had met Him. I 
 believe he would have died for Him. And the lads 
 that follow Old Bill, they can't be far from the 
 Kingdom, Bobbie, only they don't know it exists." 
 
VIII 
 
 FRENCH BELLS 
 
 FRENCH bells present themselves to the 
 English mind — or ought to — as a remark- 
 able phenomenon. It takes one a great 
 while to get used to them, and after that they well 
 repay a good deal of thought. I admit that it 
 has taken me about ten years to begin to under- 
 stand them, but I believe that at last, since one 
 has so much time for thinking during this War, 
 I am getting to the bottom of the problem. And 
 I believe that a whole philosophy of religion is to 
 be found there. 
 
 About ten years ago I came first to France in 
 what I believed was a sympathetic and was certainly 
 an inquiring frame of mind. I was very young, 
 and, frankly, Roman Catholicism attracted me, while 
 English religion bored me ; to-day, Roman 
 Catholicism no longer " attracts " — that is not 
 nearly the right word — and English religion does 
 far more than bore me ; and looking back at it, 
 I believe the bells have had a great deal to do 
 with the change. The increasing irritation which 
 Catholicism in Normandy produced in me ten years 
 
 66 
 
FRENCH BELLS 67 
 
 ago, came to a head in their regard. At paper 
 flowers and candles at all angles (and sham at that) 
 I pretended that I could smile ; devotions with 
 which I could not sympathise, I put down to foreign 
 characteristics, and was indulgent. But I could 
 not explain the bells. It really was annoying. 
 Again and again, as enlightened Englishmen, we 
 left our hotel at their call, only to find the services 
 half through or no service going on at all. Once 
 might have been a mistake, twice a coincidence, 
 but it happened perpetually. In poor French we 
 tried to arrive at an explanation, but it was not 
 forthcoming ; I think the sacristans thought us 
 imbecile. And finally — in St. Lo, as I remember — 
 having discovered that High Mass was at 10, and 
 having rushed out at 9.30 in a hurry, supposing 
 our watches to be wrong, only to find no sign of a 
 service, I vowed I would not go to a Roman Catholic 
 service in France again. 
 
 The passage of the years helped me to see, by one 
 way and another, that there was a great deal more 
 in continental religion than I thought. There was 
 that cathedral at Marseilles, into which I strayed at 
 the dreadful hour of 5.30 a.m. while waiting for a 
 train, and, no bells having summoned them at all, 
 probably a thousand people were at their prayers. 
 There was that day in Bruges during which I 
 doubt if the bells ever left off ringing at all, although 
 there were considerable gaps between the services. 
 And now here in France in war-time, I have 
 
68 STANDING BY 
 
 solved the problem. The French bells are a perfect 
 illustration of French religion, and they are about 
 as different from English bells as it is possible to 
 imagine. 
 
 In England the direction of our bells is manward. 
 We ring them to call people to church. They are a 
 relic of the past, like calling churches after the 
 names of saints, which we keep up because we have 
 made the thing utilitarian. There is, for example, 
 an English hospital chapel in France called St. 
 Winifred's, for that was the name of a beloved 
 sister who died at her nursing, which is nice enough, 
 but a perfect illustration of what I mean. It was 
 not for any such reason that churches used to be 
 named, and it is a good illustration of an incredible 
 English conservatism that the chaplain searched to 
 see if there were a St. Winifred before he would 
 permit it. So, then, with our bells. We want to 
 tell people when to come to church for services ; 
 we find bells ; we use them. We might use fog- 
 horns or phonographs, or we might, as is now often 
 urged, encourage people to be intelligent and use 
 their own watches ; but finding bells, and not being 
 able to conceive any other use for them, we use bells. 
 
 In France, as in old times in England, this is the 
 last use to which the bell is put. To begin with, 
 they rarely have " services " in the French Church — 
 services as we use the term. Like all world-religions, 
 the French keep priests who serve their God in a 
 succession of rites, at which the faithful assist or 
 
FRENCH BELLS 6g 
 
 not as they please. It does not make any difference 
 to the rite if five people are there or five hundred. 
 In England if five people only come to church the 
 minister would probably cancel the service ; in 
 France he would not know until afterwards — as 
 likely as not then — how many had been in church 
 at all. In England the people are important, and 
 they are called to come ; in France they are a very 
 secondary part of the business. Besides that, if 
 you drop into a French church any time between 
 5.30 and 9 in the morning, or later (if the church 
 is of any size), you will be certain to find a service 
 going on, so that it would be superfluous energy to 
 announce the commencement of each. 
 
 But the bells do ring — very much they ring ; 
 what, then, do they ring for? I can distinguish 
 a multitude of uses, but all of them come to much 
 the same thing, and all point in the same direction — 
 the Godward direction. In England we ring bells 
 because of the people; in France they ring them 
 because of God. 
 
 The first great use of French bells, then, is for 
 worship. They rank with organs and incense and 
 lights and singing and carved stones and soaring 
 steeples ; they are part of man's offering to God, 
 part of his expressioning of religion Godwards. 
 The bells rang all that day in Bruges because the 
 Blessed Sacrament was exposed all day, and a relic 
 going about the streets. The other morning here 
 in Havre nothing indicated that High Mass of All 
 
 I 
 
70 STANDING BY 
 
 Saints began at 10 a.m., but, while the organ 
 thundered, and incense rolled, and men bent, and the 
 priest offered Godward the Divine Oblation, the 
 bells of the old tower beat out their wildest and most 
 joyous melody. One comes to listen for them 
 just as one comes to look for the rest of worship. 
 The deep diapason of a bell at Rouen, sounding 
 solemnly and dimly within the stilled church during 
 the Absolution of the Dead, is one of my keenest 
 impressions yet of the Great War. 
 
 They use bells so much in France, secondly, 
 because they insist on worship being regarded 
 as an integral part of daily life. It is by no manner 
 of means a thing one does on Sundays ; it is a thing 
 one does daily — or better, which is done daily — and at 
 which one is expected to assist on all the days. The 
 Day of the Resurrection the Church insists should 
 be a joyful holiday. On a holiday one ought by 
 no means to omit the daily worship ; indeed, whereas 
 modern life may well compel its omission on work- 
 days, the very fact of the holiday gives an oppor- 
 tunity which, since it is an opportunity, it would 
 be a sin to miss. But on weekdays, if you cannot 
 find time to come to church, you can adore in your 
 heart for a brief second when the Holy Sacrifice 
 is consummated. So ring the bells : it is a useful 
 bit of worship, for men at a distance can know 
 of it, even if they cannot see the genuflection of the 
 priest. Pray with the bells, too, say the French, 
 at morning, midday, and evening, that all may hear 
 
FRENCH BELLS 71 
 
 a prayer too. And ring them all the day, if the 
 church is at prayer the livelong day as well. 
 
 Then again there are the little bells for use within 
 the church. Just as it is sometimes a black vest- 
 ment and not a white, so it is sometimes a clapper 
 and not a bell. Both express the mind of the 
 moment. That is why they ring the bells of the 
 sanctuary during Mass, that people may have 
 a common mind at certain moments. And this is 
 the most striking thing of all. 
 
 In England our services are for the edification of 
 the people. We have a genuinely democratic 
 religion. A successful sermon is one of which the 
 people say, " How well he put that ! That is 
 exactly my point of view : I agree with every word 
 of it. I shall certainly go again." All our prayers 
 we say carefully aloud lest the people shall not 
 hear. All our hymns we select equally conscien- 
 tiously lest the people should not know them, and 
 about our tunes and our ornaments we are still 
 more careful lest the aesthetic sense of the people 
 should be offended or debased. The minister 
 represents the people, in the first place : the idea 
 largely prevails that he should be chosen, as in 
 Scotland, by the people to suit themselves. And 
 this, then, is why Catholicism perplexes and annoys 
 us. 
 
 In a French church they do not care two straws 
 what you do so long as you do not annoy your 
 neighbours. You can kneel or sit or stand ; you 
 
72 STANDING BY 
 
 can sing or you can be silent ; if you know what is 
 going on, so much the better for you ; if you do 
 not, so much the worse. Nobody ever gives you a 
 book in France, partly because you are not im- 
 portant enough, and partly because no one knows if 
 you want it. But in all this freedom, the Church 
 breaks in now and again. The priest metaphori- 
 cally raps your knuckles and demands your atten- 
 tion. He knows his business and has been busy on 
 it — that is what he is there to do ; and presumably 
 you know yours and have been busy on it as well ; 
 but the moment has come and you must fall into line. 
 You can, wherever you are ; for the least of us can 
 bow the head in silent adoration. And the bell rings. 
 But there are some things for which the French 
 bells do not ring at all, and I am not sure that I do 
 not like them best of all for that. In England 
 the bells ring loudly that we may all come and stand I 
 in a body and confess our sins, and it is a very I 
 dreadful and hardening business. They ring 
 loudly, too, that in a body we may go up to the 
 Sacrament of Love, and, at a service, meet our Lord. 
 But for Confession and Communion the French bells 
 never or rarely ring. There are some things which 
 the soul must do alone and in the silence as the 
 Divine Spirit moves. My coming to Him in all my 
 sorrow and weariness, His coming to me in all His 
 love — who dare name time or season for this ? 
 and the bells of France seem to answer — at least 
 not they. 
 
IX 
 
 THE HEART OF A CHILD 
 
 ONE of the most remarkable of the Isaiah 
 prophecies always seems to me that 
 which makes the child heart the con- 
 troller of the new world to be. It was so essenti- 
 ally remote from the religious ideals of Judah 
 and Israel, how remote, indeed, one only realises 
 as one thinks that the God of the Old Testament 
 is the God of the modern German, and there cannot 
 be children left in Germany. Yet no, that is not 
 so. It is the divine miracle that a child is always 
 a child. The child begins as unspoiled to-day 
 anywhere in Europe as he began in Merry England 
 of the past, or in Lyonesse. It is the parents 
 who change. One wonders then if there be any 
 true parents left in the Germany which is prepared 
 to breed children as a man breeds sheep. For 
 that is the final horror, reserved for the modern 
 state, into which not even Paganism fell. 
 
 But, in that wonderful Hebrew dream, there is 
 the vision of the child, just as there is the vision of 
 the vicariously Suffering Servant. It must surely 
 have been so bewilderingly unusual that it passed 
 
74 STANDING BY 
 
 unnoticed for many a day, passed unnoticed until 
 the Child was born, the Child Who kept a child's 
 heart Himself until the end, and Who called a little 
 child and set him in the midst and said, " Of such 
 is the kingdom of heaven." So Christ crowned 
 the prophecy, albeit I suppose the circle that heard 
 Him still did not understand. But Christendom 
 came to understand it at last, never knowing how 
 wise it was ; for a child never knows the marvel of 
 himself until, having lost the precious thing, he 
 looks back with tears. 
 
 Mr. Chesterton has a happy phrase to illuminate 
 this. He is writing of the Crusades, and reminds 
 us that we speak sometimes of one as the Children's 
 Crusade, whereas, in fact, all the crusades were 
 children's crusades. Europe had the heart of a 
 child when it still seemed simple and natural to 
 love the Holy Places and to exchange common 
 sense for adventure. Probably for this very reason 
 the crusades, from the worldly point of view, were 
 unsuccessful. The Saracen always staved them 
 off. It was left for the modern operations of 1917 
 to take Jerusalem, thanks to the fact that these were 
 not a crusade at all. King Richard's soldiers fell 
 on their knees at the sight of Jerusalem ; King 
 George's were not such — children. As I write, 
 I do not know what they did in Jerusalem when 
 they got there, but I could make a pretty certain 
 guess. And as to thanksgiving, save that a silent 
 party probably listened to sung Matins in the English 
 
THE HEART OF A CHILD 75 
 
 church, Tommy must have thought mostly of 
 getting a drink. However, even that is rather 
 nice of him. The Germans would have marched 
 the goose-step, and gone, functioning, to the Mosque 
 of Omar. Tommy is at least a pagan child. 
 He chucked his traps on the floor and wiped his 
 forehead and called out of the depth of his heart 
 for, if possible, a long beer. 
 
 But Tommy is not typical of the middle-class 
 England which sways our destinies and fills, so 
 far as they are rilled, our churches. That England 
 may be fitly considered as represented by the 
 Colonel with whom I discussed the situation when 
 the paper gave us the news of General Allenby's 
 success. 
 
 " Thanksgiving ? " he said. " Good heavens, I 
 should think not ! Why, it would offend our 
 Mohammedan Allies." 
 
 Indeed one noticed that what thanksgiving there 
 was, was due to the fact that the Holy Places were 
 at last delivered out of the hands of the Turks. 
 We said nothing in this century of the " Jews, 
 Infidels, and Hereticks," from whom the crusades 
 also sought to save them. No wonder the Pope 
 was awkwardly placed. He may well have con- 
 sidered the Holy Places to have been delivered 
 out of the hands of the one but into the hands of 
 the others. 
 
 But I like that remark of the Colonel's. It 
 is so gorgeously true, and it is just exactly what 
 
76 STANDING BY 
 
 we should think about. For these are the two 
 artificial things that are alien to the child-mind : 
 to think about oneself, and to think about one's 
 policy. The modern world is for ever doing those 
 two things. Its dull mediocrity, its ugliness, its 
 terrible lack of humour, is due to the fact that these 
 things are precisely the two things which are not 
 worth thinking about. Man, by himself, is a horribly 
 ignoble creature, which is the same as saying that 
 he is a fallen creature, and he is only noble when 
 his heart is set on God. A child's heart is set on 
 God, for fairies and wonders and adventures all 
 belong to God. A child quests things for the sake 
 of the joy of them, and their romance. He would 
 really like the moon to play with, and he will play 
 with it in imagination. Grown-up people do not 
 care in the least about the moon, for if there are 
 gold mines there they are not workable. In just 
 the same way, the German wanted a place in the 
 sun, using a figure of speech. The ruin of Belgium 
 seemed to him to be the road. But every real 
 child has a place there, and he attains it by sitting 
 among the buttercups. 
 
 In these days Russia is giving us an object-lesson 
 which is perhaps the most interesting thing now 
 being taught in the school of the world. It seems 
 to me an amazing thing that nobody appears to 
 see it ; it is perhaps the final judgment on our 
 system of things. When the Russian Revolution 
 came, English statesmen and the English Press 
 
THE HEART OF A CHILD 77 
 
 hailed it with excited delight, being blind leaders 
 of the blind. There were always two possibilities 
 about that Revolution, and in point of fact either 
 was bad for the Allies, although for different reasons. 
 Either the Revolution was being managed by a 
 set of men who might be either fanatics or scoun- 
 drels, or else the Revolution was managing itself. 
 In the first case the result was bound anyway to 
 be bad. There was never the faintest chance 
 that the little group, with their system of com- 
 mittees, would make unwieldy Russia an efficient 
 war weapon — not the faintest. They had every- 
 thing against them, even at the best. Machinery 
 for the government of an Empire like the Russian 
 takes experts to build and decades or centuries 
 to establish itself, and these men were not experts 
 and had no time. They were, moreover, exposed 
 to more temptations than mortal men could possibly 
 weather — temptations of office, of fanaticism, of 
 intrigue; temptations to jealousy and from traitors. 
 Had they been sincere, only a miracle could have 
 saved Russia for the Allied Cause ; and it was 
 not very likely that they would have been sincere. 
 We should have said at once, " This is no time for 
 revolutions ; this is no time for committees ; this 
 is a time for which Democracy is not yet ready. 
 You must do what we are doing : you must sacrifice 
 your likes and dislikes, your ideals and your hu- 
 manity, and blot out this Prussian madness first." 
 And all we did was to shriek the old platitudes, 
 
78 STANDING BY 
 
 as if the river of blood had never burst out of the 
 mountain of our mockery of civilisation to drain 
 to the sea. 
 
 If, however, the Revolution were managing itself — 
 as I believe — it was so infinitely pathetic that it 
 was a matter for tears. We were about to witness 
 another children's crusade. That crusade had 
 been the tender faithful protest of children against 
 the Devil and his world. Little children, knowing 
 only that they loved Jesus and believed in God, 
 had arisen to say, " We will go in weakness to 
 take this thing we love, and the Father Who sees 
 us will pity our simplicity and save us by a miracle." 
 God is good, the children said ; God is stronger 
 than the Devil ; we do love Jesus ; that is enough : 
 Let us go ! And I suppose the Devil and the 
 Saracen laughed, and the children's crusade, such 
 of it as survived the journey, recruited the harems 
 of the Turk and the ranks of the Janissaries. 
 
 Now Russia is just like that. The Russian 
 peasants are children. They have the child heart 
 of love and faith and simplicity. They do not 
 think about policies nor about themselves. The 
 War brought them up against the negation of all 
 they held dear. Its awful tragedy swept over 
 Russia as it swept over the rest of Europe, and 
 blindly, like children, Russia went to the slaughter. 
 They could not understand why peace and simple 
 life should be destroyed. The powers that gripped 
 them and flung them into hell, and devastated tens 
 
THE HEART OF A CHILD 79 
 
 of thousands of homes, and brought starvation 
 and lengthened out grim days into unending years, 
 beggared their imagination. They looked round, 
 wide-eyed and dumb, like suffering children. And a 
 voice ran through the land : God is good, children ; 
 He sees ; take the peace and the simple freedom 
 that you want. March to the holy places, for which 
 man was made, with bare hands, and the German 
 bayonets will be stayed by the power of God. 
 
 I read it as the most pathetic happening in 
 modern history. That great mob of children 
 awoke out of the stupor of pain and looked round. 
 Why, they seemed to say, do you fight, you nations ? 
 We don't hate ; why should men hate each other ? 
 We don't want riches ; we only want, like the rest 
 of the world, sufficiency and the simple life of man 
 with his mate and his children. Come now, throw 
 down your arms ! Divide things up — there is 
 plenty for all. Let us forgive and forget, and live 
 like men, not like beasts. 
 
 Poor children's crusade ! God may be stronger 
 than bayonets, but He does not turn them into 
 butter if children walk up against them. The 
 children's crusade found itself lost in the maze of 
 policies and conventions and horrors of which 
 modern life is fabricated. They tried to push a 
 way through. The wolves fell on them, and the 
 blood began to run through Russia as never before. 
 God knows when that hideous river will cease to run. 
 
 There is exactly this spirit in the rank and file 
 
80 STANDING BY 
 
 of our own Army, only our children are of curiously 
 different stuff. You have only to wander round a 
 battalion in the trenches or in the rear to see it. 
 Our Tommies damn a war they cannot understand. 
 The scheme of things is an insane mystery to them. 
 They thought the Kaiser was off his head and the 
 German nation a race of slaves (thanks to the Press) 
 until they met the Germans. Now we laugh at 
 the Kaiser rather than damn him. One man, 
 however mad, could not have been responsible 
 for all this. Some people blame the politicians, but 
 most regard these as part of a mad muddle which 
 is itself responsible. Tommy loves England because 
 it is his home where his wife and kiddies are, and 
 decent beer, and Bank Holidays ; he calls it Blighty 
 because it is a mad place where all these important 
 things exist, but do not seem to count in the working 
 scheme of things. One is always expecting Tommy 
 to turn round and say, " Look 'ere, chuck it. I'm 
 going back to me ole woman." 
 
 But is the dream of that old Hebrew prophet ever 
 going to come true ? One asks that in France 
 again and again — in the mess, when the talk comes 
 round as it is ever doing to u After the War," and 
 in one's heart as one hears the men talk in hospital, 
 train, and camp. Will these men, dissatisfied as 
 they are, return to England afterwards to insist on 
 a saner, happier England, to seize that fellowship 
 and peace for which man was made ? 
 
 Well, I am certain that the answer turns on one 
 
THE HEART OF A CHILD 81 
 
 thing and one thing only. After the War, men 
 will attempt to realise their ideals ; but what are 
 their ideals ? And then one is up against the 
 tragedy. Your average German had, honestly, 
 ideals for Germany and the German flag. He 
 wanted Empire — the average German wanted it. 
 The average Tommy does not care two straws for 
 Empire. If what he wants can only be obtained 
 through Empire, then he will want Empire, but 
 he does not think, to-day, that they have got any- 
 thing to do with it. Jingoism, as far as the men 
 are concerned, is as dead as a door-nail. Your 
 average Anzac, for example, came in because 
 England was threatened and because he liked the 
 adventure ; very few came in, against their likes 
 and emotions, because they honestly thought the 
 republics of Australia and Canada were threatened, 
 however much it is true that they were threatened. 
 It is hard to realise a thing like that in the Colonies, 
 much harder than people would have us believe. 
 But these men did not come in because they wanted 
 to see more land under the Union Jack, or because 
 they care a pin for Serbia and Belgium, or because 
 the fact of Empire stirs them as it stirred Raleigh 
 and Drake and Clive. We are past all that. 
 What Tommy wants is his wife, his home, his 
 Saturday afternoon and Bank Holiday, his beer and 
 his kiddies. Unluckily he is a bit dazzled by the 
 general increase of wealth. As his employer, who 
 
 used to live next door to the business and walk 
 6 
 
82 STANDING BY 
 
 the streets, now has a country mansion and a 
 couple of cars, so he wants cinemas, and finery, and 
 more sport. But the shine has gone out of his 
 eyes for a little. If it does not return to blind him, 
 he will have those simple things of life, irrespective 
 of policies and diplomacy and royalties and party 
 government and every other thing that stands, 
 or seems to him to stand, in his way. And all good 
 luck to him, I say. 
 
 That, then, is the child-heart in a way. We 
 have it among us more than ever to-day. But is 
 the lion and the wolf tame enough for the child to 
 lead ? It is not only the Kaiser, it is human 
 nature that is the beast. Labour leaders can grasp 
 at those bubbles men call national rights and 
 popular government, and lose their heads seeking 
 the mirage, and develop into tyrants, as easily as 
 kings — perhaps more easily. Or again the million- 
 aire is a thousand times more the foe of liberty, 
 the enemy of the child, than the peer or the squire. 
 And the only remedy is to tame them, to change 
 their hearts. It is no remedy to blot them out, for 
 they will only spring up again ; nor, if we blot out 
 our generation of the wild beasts, will the next 
 remember the lesson. 
 
 I wonder what I have been writing. I suppose 
 some people would call it Anarchy, and others 
 Socialism, and so on through the list of names that 
 deceive us all. But it is my opinion that I have 
 simply been writing about Christianity. 
 
X 
 
 MICHAEL AND AGNESI 
 
 THEY were discussing stories of valour the 
 other night in mess, and I had a contribu- 
 tion to make. Thinking it over, I feel it 
 might well be included in a book on what one has 
 seen Standing By the Army in France. It will 
 come best as a story, pure and simple. 
 
 Michael was eating porridge with enjoyment. 
 It was not a pretty sight from our point of view, 
 because when a native eats with enjoyment he is 
 less particular than ever about spilling the food 
 around and smearing it upon his face. But his 
 wife probably thought otherwise, and in my own 
 mind I am inclined to think that she was right. 
 He was so lithe and well knit ; and as he crouched 
 beside the porridge-pot over the fire, the new sun- 
 light just reaching him over the great shadow cast 
 by the high reed fence, he looked what he was, a 
 fine animal. And she, presumably, had every 
 reason to believe, even then, that he had a fine 
 spirit also. 
 
 When he had finished, he got up and stretched 
 83 
 
84 STANDING BY 
 
 himself, finally stalking out of the Lekhotla, bending 
 to pass the low doorway with native grace. Out- 
 side the thin smoke-wreaths rose from a score of 
 huts around, and the country lay, fresh in the 
 spring green, before him. From where he stood 
 you could see across fifty miles of country to the 
 mountains of the " Conquered Territory," and the 
 view was very good. Ten miles away, however, 
 trees on what looked to be, at that distance, a low 
 ridge marked the Camp. Michael stared at it, 
 and made up his mind. I do not think he had 
 any reason at all in his head, but in that second his 
 die was cast. " I go to the Camp," he called out 
 to his wife. 
 
 " Eh," she answered laconically, and he went. 
 They were never a talkative pair. 
 
 His road ran uphill and down to spruits, and 
 through several villages, and past a couple of stores. 
 He walked with a swinging gait that did not seem 
 fast, but which in reality quickly covered the ground. 
 When the road wound down to cross a stream deep 
 in a rocky valley, he would leave it, and scramble 
 down the rocks, cross, scramble up again, and so 
 save perhaps a mile. So at length he was over 
 the big river fairly full with the spring rains, and 
 up on the veld of the reserve. Past the red-roofed 
 hospital his road climbed, with the vlei beyond it 
 on the left and the doctor's garden on the right. 
 Past church and rectory, too, up to the big store 
 at the top of the street. But he did not stay 
 
MICHAEL AND AGNESI 85 
 
 there : Seanamarena was his mark. So he skirted 
 the loopholed tower of the Gun War that now 
 marks the gaol, and squatted on the stoep of the 
 big trader's store. 
 
 It is almost always busy and interesting (if you 
 are intelligent enough to be interested) there. 
 Strings of horses are unloading who have come 
 tied tail to tail over the great mountains laden 
 with wool or wheat, and you can discuss their value, 
 and hear the details of the journey and the news of 
 Beyond. Then there are beasts to appraise, and 
 the Camp folk to greet, and a few white men to stare 
 at. You hear all the news, and not merely the 
 news, but the news chewed upon by others and served 
 up to fit the chewer's opinion of it. You then have 
 the delightful task of making what you can out of 
 it yourself, and finally of passing it on garbled in 
 your own way. This was the way of the world 
 before newspapers were, and it is a good way. It 
 saves paper and ink, it does not perpetuate in- 
 famies, and it offers a liberal education without 
 expense and with a good deal of pleasure. Now I 
 think of it, it was very much thus that Oxford and 
 Cambridge began. 
 
 In this place and manner, then, Michael heard 
 the news. It ran, I suspect, somewhat to the 
 effect — the Germans were beating the English, and 
 the King therefore required more men. 
 
 This, at much length, was discussed over and 
 over again, the conversation getting more wildly 
 
86 STANDING BY 
 
 original and problematical at every turn. Michael 
 was a somewhat silent person, and he listened and 
 said little. By the time the informal pitso had 
 decided that there were no English soldiers left 
 and that the King was now about to fall back 
 upon the finest fighting men in his dominions (to 
 wit, the Basuto), but was rather ashamed to say so 
 straight out, Michael had made up his mind. 
 
 " Fools," he said. " I can tell you the truth of 
 these things. What the Government says is true. 
 Do white men work down in the mines? No. 
 Why? Because there are none? No. Because 
 they cannot ? No. Why, then ? Why, because 
 they have much other business which grows every 
 day on top. So it is in this war. The great King 
 is eating up his enemies. His soldiers spread over 
 the land like locusts. Therefore he wants us to 
 work at unloading his ships, as the news says. 
 Should soldiers unload ships ? It is a good work, 
 and one would see many strange things. Also, 
 there is good pay. I shall go myself." 
 
 That, I believe, was the substance of it. His 
 audience were amazed that anyone should believe 
 such a stupendous theory as the simple one set out 
 by the Government, but Michael believed it. He 
 walked straight away from them to the magistrate's 
 office, who confirmed his opinion, and he met his 
 padre outside in the street, who did the same. 
 True, he did not enlist that day ; but his mind was 
 made up. He set off home. At dusk he left the 
 
MICHAEL AND AGNESI 87 
 
 road and crossed the grass to his hut, stooped, and 
 entered the enclosure. 
 
 " Greeting, Agnesi," he said. " I go to France." 
 
 I am writing all this because some people will 
 not believe that there are any simple natives left 
 in Africa, especially Christian natives, but there are. 
 The boys went to France for scores of reasons, 
 as I shall hope to show, but some went for the 
 simplest of all possible reasons — namely, the reason 
 the Government gave ; Michael was one. Agnesi, 
 who gave him so readily, was simple too. Certainly, 
 as I know, she asked who should gather in the 
 harvest, and reminded her husband that her baby 
 would shortly come ; but the answers to her riddles 
 she knew before she asked. Their land was all 
 but communal in the family, and the family would 
 look after it and her, and the child. She saw 
 nothing heroic or loyal in her decision, but the 
 loyalty was there all right. The old father, abler 
 at expression, put it into words for her : " I," said 
 he, " fought for the Government in the Gun War. 
 The Government has done well by us on the whole. 
 Now the great King calls for his men, and Michael 
 and the rest should go." 
 
 " Eh," she said again, and pulled her blanket 
 around her. 
 
 Michael departed in due time for Rosebank 
 Camp, Cape Town. He had travelled by train to 
 the mines of the Gold City, but never so far as 
 this, and the journey was full of strange sights 
 
88 STANDING BY 
 
 and sounds. Also, Rosebank was a new experience. 
 He learned the elements of drill, and liked it. He 
 fed better than he had ever done before, and liked 
 that. He was pretty strictly compounded and 
 rather cramped on board ship, but he was a simple 
 soul, and although he did not know it, discipline 
 was stiffening and refining him. He earned a re- 
 putation for stolidity, but it was really something 
 else. That something showed itself in the way 
 he unwrapped his Prayer Book from its hand- 
 kerchief every night and stood in the ring on the 
 well-deck — whether the Prayer Book was used 
 publicly or not. And all these things combined 
 carried him through the supreme crisis of his short 
 life, with others of his fellows, in a way of which his 
 people should be as proud as we of the Birkenhead. 
 The Mende stood out to cross the Channel at dawn 
 on the last stage of that journey from the far Maluti 
 village. She was full of boys, her troop-decks 
 packed, her officers very hopeful of the landing at 
 long last. But the heavy, sullen seas about her 
 were very cold. And then the Channel fog enveloped 
 them, and there was a crash and a jar, and she heeled 
 over ever so slightly and lay like a log. I picture 
 it that Michael was below, in the crowd. Only 
 dimly, perhaps, he and the others realised the danger, 
 but the so short training and the hidden grit told, 
 and there was none of that rush which had been 
 feared. They tramped up on deck in their heavy 
 boots and unlovely blue uniforms and lifebelts, 
 
MICHAEL AND AGNESI 89 
 
 and formed up as on parade. The swish of the 
 sea, the shriek of the siren, the voices of officers, 
 were heard, but the boys were silent, except to call 
 now and again to mates to ask if their particular 
 friends were there. Michael stood with difficulty 
 on the sloping deck, now shaken a step forward 
 as the ship rolled, now dressing back to the line as 
 he had been taught. He watched the efforts made 
 to get out the boats, and must have wondered 
 how they would all get aboard. It was chill ; he 
 shivered slightly ; surely he saw again the cheerful 
 fire and the warm sunlight ; surely the Lekhotla 
 at home. Agnesi would have her baby, perhaps, 
 by now ; maybe it was at her breast this moment. 
 But the officer is speaking. 
 
 " Boys," he called, " at the word of command 
 march forward and jump overboard. Your belts 
 will keep you up ; don't fear. Then the boats 
 around will pick you up in the water. Are you 
 ready ? March ! " 
 
 It is easy to write heroics, but I am not ashamed to 
 do so here. That steady jump of those black boys 
 ought to still the slander in more white throats 
 than it does, and at least for me I am not ashamed 
 to say that I honour the race that did it. And 
 in that cold water the warm African blood of six 
 hundred boys of the King's black people chilled for 
 ever. 
 
 And Agnesi ? What I have to set down is simply 
 true. I do not offer to account for it, and I marvel 
 
90 STANDING BY 
 
 at it with the rest. I would not have thought that 
 even a Mission girl had it in her. But this is what 
 happened. 
 
 It was the padre who had to take her the news — 
 the news of the death of the 6*ne which meant more 
 to her than any of the rumours spy and rebel were 
 circulating among the kraals. He rode up one 
 morning, and she saw him come, and went out, 
 baby in arms, to the door of the house to welcome 
 him. He threw his reins over his beast's head, 
 and walked up slowly, pondering words. They 
 met, and she held out her hand, and he took it 
 and retained it. She may have guessed, but she 
 said nothing, native-wise. And he was clever 
 enough not to try and bolster up the news. 
 
 " Agnesi," he said, '*. Michael is dead, and I have 
 come to tell you." 
 
 He told her the story, standing so, and at the last 
 she looked down at the boy. " Father," she said 
 slowly, " / am glad that he died in the King's waters." 
 And without a tear she turned from him and passed 
 into the dark hut and sat down and hid her face. 
 
 As I have said, that is true. I cannot account for 
 it, but I have much joy of Michael and Agnesi. 
 Black folk — but not a soldier in the King's great 
 armies could have died better than he, and not a 
 mother of sea-girt England could have answered 
 more nobly than she. And the nation that produced 
 them will write its story yet in the record of the 
 peoples. 
 
XI 
 
 MODERN UGLINESS 
 
 IT has been my personal happiness, ever since 
 I was able to decide my work for myself, 
 to live in veritable earthly paradises. I 
 remember a clergyman from the slums of a midland 
 city, taking tea with me, for example, on the ver- 
 andah of a clergy house on the East Coast of Africa. 
 From where we sat a great bay lay spread out below 
 us — a bay to rival Naples at its best. The still 
 water was shot through with colours, the sky was a 
 cloudless blue, the beach glistened white with coral 
 dust, the tall feathery palm trees fringed it just 
 above low cliffs of dark grey coral rock, the bush 
 beneath them was brightest green, except where it 
 was starred with the orange or crimson or white 
 of tropical flowers. Inland the brown stems of the 
 coco-nuts made shady aisles of the paths, and great 
 masses of scarlet lilies flamed beneath them ; while 
 in the distance a long white building of Arabic 
 architecture suggested an enchanted palace. Great 
 lazy birds floated wide- winged along the marge 
 of the sea, and their calling came up to us as from 
 
 a great distance. Twinkling lizards flashed in and 
 
 91 
 
92 STANDING BY 
 
 out of the cool white stones of the verandah, and 
 the scent of oleanders drifted up like incense. My 
 friend sat very silent for a long while. Then he 
 gave a half-sigh and said whimsically : "I am glad 
 I don't live here ; I should never want heaven ! " 
 
 But I am not sure that Basutoland is not more 
 lovely still in its own way. To come down through 
 the village at the time of sunset ; to walk along 
 between the huts with their brown mud walls, their 
 darker roofs, their grey-green aloe fences ; to see 
 the clustering blue-gums and firs of the lower camp, 
 with the white road running down to the great 
 plain, and the solemn, silent mountains all flushed 
 with purple and gold beyond ; and to see it all 
 through a diffused golden light, with the blue 
 smoke-wreaths rising on the air, and the little 
 cheerful human sounds sounding all around — 
 could anything be fairer ? Or, nearer the Range, 
 one will come to a village in the spring, the brown 
 huts peeping out of a sea of peach blossom itself 
 kept in as it were by the aloe fence, with the slow- 
 moving beasts moving in yellow dust to the grey- 
 stone cattle kraals. Or again, one will rein in 
 one's horse in the fastnesses of the Drakensberg, 
 and see the untrodden valley winding far below, the 
 water foaming over the rocks in the sun, the few 
 trees lovely in their scarcity, the great cliffs towering 
 up on each side, the grassy banks rich with flowers, 
 the blue sky dappled with fleecy driven clouds, the 
 while the air is musical with the tinkle of falling 
 
MODERN UGLINESS 93 
 
 water from a hundred tiny rivulets. It is impossible 
 to do it justice. Few pictures can stand for the 
 perpetual panorama of beauty. No raptures over 
 spring or summer suffice when even a burnt-out 
 autumn or a winter, with the lands brown beneath 
 the plough, has its own unsurpassable beauty. 
 
 It is all this, then, that makes the incredible 
 ugliness of modern civilisation so fearful and awful 
 a thing to see. On and off for some months now, 
 I have been living on the outskirts of Havre, and 
 I have sometimes thought that there must be more 
 beauty in the flames of hell. For miles around 
 there stretches a hideous wilderness of railway 
 lines, dumps, docks, and waste places scattered 
 with refuse, old scrap-iron, and filth. The camp, 
 like many about, was once the swampy mud-flats 
 of the Seine mouth. Cinders have been collected 
 in vast quantities, tar and sand have been freely 
 used, the most incredibly ugly utilitarian huts of 
 wood and iron erected, and so the camps have been 
 made. Any few bushes that once grew here have 
 been long since rooted up. Except for sea-birds 
 and for rats, there is no wild life at all. A hundred 
 factory chimneys belch out smuts every day ; 
 railway engines add their quota to the filth ; our 
 own lesser incinerators and fires shower their blacks 
 upon us. The very sunlight is dirty. When it 
 rains, one wades through leagues of mud, and not 
 clean earthy mud, but civilised ghastly mud that 
 hides filth. Every form of every building is hideous, 
 
94 STANDING BY 
 
 and, except where the buildings are those of Govern- 
 ment, practically all the houses are in more or less 
 decay. 
 
 Nor can you excuse it by saying that it is one 
 feature of the War. It is not. The town itself 
 is just as awful in its way. The ramshackle, filthy 
 tramcars ; the mud be-splashed walls and houses ; 
 the staring but still dirty tidiness of villa houses ; 
 the straight, unimaginative streets of the new city ; 
 the garments of the people — from start to finish 
 it is all hideous. Not that Havre is worse than 
 other places, and I admit its moments of trans- 
 formation under an early sun or full moon. But 
 on the whole one wanders about stricken dumb 
 with the thought of this garment of ugliness that is 
 being stretched across the beautiful world. Every 
 day adds to it, every invention makes it worse and 
 extends it. Every social change increases the 
 cities and blackens the country. 
 
 All this is, of course, commonplace ; but what 
 strikes an observer fresh from the clean loveliness 
 of the world, is that we ourselves are getting ugly. 
 One can live in hideousness if one's soul pines away 
 for the beautiful ; but the souls of modern men 
 are not pining for the beautiful. That lovable 
 person, Tommy, is indifferent to it ; indeed he 
 rather likes it. I remember taking a crowd of 
 city Boy Scouts out for a week on to the moors, 
 and that they were more or less miserable until 
 they discovered a fried fish shop in the purlieus 
 
MODERN UGLINESS 95 
 
 of the nearest big village. And individuals that 
 we rank as the class above these are no better. 
 Suburban houses, even the houses we build for 
 ourselves in the country, together with all the litter 
 of modern civilisation, are nearly as ugly too. 
 Down here in Havre, people who could get else- 
 where come to live among us. There are little 
 children being born in this damned wilderness of 
 rusty tram-lines, stagnant water, sooty, crumbling, 
 pigsty houses, noise and smoke, because their 
 parents like it ! The thought of it can become a 
 kind of nightmare. There are children growing up 
 here who will come to regard with perfect com- 
 placency these muddy ugly streets, who will end 
 by being unhappy away from them, and whose 
 chief idea of beauty will be the dresses of the girls 
 at the music-hall or perhaps the theatrical moon- 
 light or sunset of a cinema. And not only will they 
 not want anything else : they would be unhappy 
 in my paradise. 
 
 It surely would be conceit, therefore, to argue 
 in favour of my paradise as compared with theirs, 
 if it were not for certain tests. The things upon 
 which people set their minds are surely open to 
 reasonable comparison. The terrible thing, then, 
 about our democracies is that the mind of the freed 
 people is set on such sordid things, and that with 
 the increase of freedom they seem to grow worse. 
 I remember a discontented rich manufacturer who 
 said, " Yes, business is doing well, but I don't 
 
96 STANDING BY 
 
 know when we are going to stop. I have to have a 
 car to keep pace with my fellows and the growth of 
 trade, but when my workpeople see me in my car 
 they go home and agitate for another shilling to 
 spend on a cinema." That, I think, is a perfectly 
 natural thing. I do not blame the workpeople : 
 I should probably agitate for two shillings if I 
 were one. But the terrible thing is that people 
 should agitate for anything in order to see more of 
 the cinema, as terrible as that any employer should 
 conceive himself as forced to peddle round in an 
 ever-increasing fever at the bidding of some 
 imaginary dirty trade, like a squirrel in a cage. 
 
 Nobody is satisfied, so far as I can see, with 
 simple things — sufficiency, and their home. Never- 
 theless, the contented man, to whom these things 
 are an ideal, can get them even now, and get them 
 beautiful. He will insist on having them beautiful. 
 There was an age once in Europe when people 
 were like this, when there was, in Mr. Chesterton's 
 vivid phrase, " a nameless but universal artistic 
 touch in the moulding of the very tools of life." 
 Here and there, even in such a town as this, one 
 can see the relics of those days. On one of the 
 quays here there is an old house which I always 
 stop to look at in passing. It is sandwiched between 
 two modern tall rectangular buildings, with rusty 
 straight iron bars as their main note. I do not 
 know what function the bars play, but like so 
 many French things, naked, unlovely, dull-painted 
 
MODERN UGLINESS 97 
 
 metal seems most in evidence. But the old house 
 in between is so different. It has great wooden 
 beams dividing its floors, and ancient tiles, gables, 
 and a roof of mystery. There are windows which 
 plainly light queer irregular rooms, each with its 
 own fascination, and each with its own view of the 
 crowded wharf. Whoever built that house, built 
 it bit by bit as he loved to have it. It was added to, 
 and added to, by generations whose eyes were set 
 on their home within it. Now, of course, no one 
 cares any longer. Walking with a brother officer 
 the other day, I stopped and drew his attention 
 to it. He looked at it critically, " How like the 
 French I " he said. " It will fall and kill somebody 
 some day. Why doesn't somebody pull the miser- 
 able thing down?" I said absolutely nothing : 
 what could one say ? 
 
 I am not quite fool enough to argue that people 
 should live in insanitary houses liable to fall down 
 at any time, but I am weeping over the change in 
 ideal. One does not know what people do live for 
 nowadays. It is not money, for people are not 
 content with money, however much they have. It 
 is not pleasure exactly, for people are never content 
 only with pleasure. It is not adventure, for now 
 that it is more easy to adventure than ever before, 
 it is becoming a kind of forgotten art. People 
 seem to live in a vain discontent which has blinded 
 their eyes and choked their souls, out of which even 
 the War cannot arouse them, and which has no 
 7 
 
98 STANDING BY 
 
 goal and no satisfaction. In the pursuit of it, the 
 appreciation of beauty has been lost, and hence our 
 modern ugliness. 
 
 Listening to talk of these things, one finds one- 
 self wandering in a vicious circle. The environ- 
 ment and conditions of the mass of Europeans are 
 such that they have no chance, we are told ; but, 
 on the other hand, when they are given the chance, 
 they throw it away. France is no better than 
 England, indeed in some ways it is worse : even 
 morality has become ugly. But France has been 
 the freest democracy in Europe for generations ; 
 wealth has been more equally distributed here 
 than anywhere ; the French have been endowed 
 with more soul to work upon than most. Perhaps 
 they have shown us the noblest dying in Europe, 
 but it can hardly be said that they have shown us 
 the noblest living. If socialism came to-morrow, I 
 doubt if there would be any saner living on the part 
 of the people. Men are after socialism to-day, not 
 because they wish to live more sanely, but because 
 they wish other people not to live so luxuriously. 
 I have never noted that socialists have happier, 
 simpler, more beautiful homes than other people, 
 that socialists love beauty more than the rest. 
 
 But we began with Africa, and Africa throws a 
 good deal of light on these things, or so it seems to 
 me. The only reason why I write of them is because 
 I conceive that Europe in the light of Africa is a 
 somewhat novel point of view. And one collects a 
 
MODERN UGLINESS 99 
 
 body of evidence from Africa and Africans on the 
 subject. To begin with, one must admit that it is 
 remarkably disconcerting that natives from African 
 paradises do not seem to object to European ugliness 
 as I do. I have a boy whose home, inside and out, 
 materially and morally, is a picture. He is intelli- 
 gent and friendly. But I have never been able to 
 tempt him, however hard I try, into an expression 
 of the disgust that I feel about this city. I am not 
 sure that he even wants to return to the paradise he 
 has left. Why is that ? 
 
 Or again, on the spot, Africans rarely appreciate 
 Africa. Most of the tribes have no name for the 
 flowers and grasses, except such as are good for food 
 or useful for other purposes ; the rest they never 
 notice. I have known one or two who would rein 
 up to admire a view, one who even wrote verse about 
 the sunset, but even he seems to prefer to use a 
 utilitarian tin atrocity from the store rather than a 
 lovely native piece of pottery. That pottery, like to 
 Mr. Chesterton's tools of the Middle Ages in beauty, 
 is rapidly disappearing as a craft. Why is this ? 
 
 On the other hand, your African, especially your 
 decent Christian native who has not been too near 
 civilisation, is often centred on the simple things. 
 Love of one's children, affection for one's plot of 
 earth, interest in one's cattle, contentment with good 
 food and sunshine, fear of and trust in God, these are 
 still his. In consequence, I love the days when I can 
 live all but as a native in a native village. I have 
 
ioo STANDING BY 
 
 one such in mind. I will arrive and talk pleasantly 
 with the women while the boys see to my horse. 
 The man and I will go to the kraal and lean on the 
 grey stone wall smoking while the beasts come home, 
 and each can be discussed. Then we ring the bell 
 and step into the little church with the people and 
 say simple prayers simply in common. Then he and 
 I will sit and watch the changing lights on the 
 mountains while they cook the food, and I will eat 
 it in my mud-hut off tin plates with one knife, fork, 
 and spoon. And then I will go inside his reed fence 
 and sit on a native stool by the dung fire and tell 
 stories about the stars to a naked brown imp on my 
 knee, or run out and play the moon game, which 
 consists of wailing and crying that the moon is being 
 eaten by the clouds, and dancing and singing when 
 she escapes. And then to bed in rough blankets and 
 up with the dawn. 
 
 But as I jog home over the veld I wonder, after 
 all, for what man was made. To tame the lightning 
 and bind the sunshine ; to search out every hidden 
 thing, and drag it into the maelstrom of the " world 
 of becoming " ; to drag down everything that is up, 
 so that everything that is down may have its day — 
 none of these things seem much to me. Rather to 
 live as these Africans are living, only with increasing 
 sense of enj oyment and faculty for praise, and to go 
 out more eagerly than we came in with desire for the 
 All-good, surely this is life. And to have helped 
 others to that ideal, that is service. 
 
MODERN UGLINESS wi 
 
 Our civilisation has one potency — it blinds. It 
 blinds my Africans to the beauties of Africa and the 
 ugliness of Europe. It glitters and charms and 
 blinds them, even there, to their own riches. It 
 blinds us to the meaning of life. It makes us think 
 that to pull down the Hohenzollerns or to set up the 
 socialists is to live ; or that to face discomfort 
 gallantly, to finish at twenty-five, and to do it under 
 the conditions of hell, is to die. To many indi- 
 viduals this War has been all gain. I dread lest 
 our victory should make that gain barren. I dread 
 lest it should bolster up our modern civilisation, 
 and spread its tentacles yet farther. But it may be 
 that the guns will shatter more yet than modern 
 cities and ancient art, and we shall find our souls. 
 
'*:■.■■ 
 
 XII 
 VERSAILLES 
 
 THERE is a chapter in Rupert Brookes' 
 beautiful and vivacious Letters from 
 America which haunts one. He is speak- 
 ing of the Rockies and of the great West, and he 
 says they are " wind-swept and empty." " You 
 may lie awake all night and never feel the passing of 
 evil presences, nor hear printless feet ; . . . there is 
 nothing lurking in the heart of the shadows, and no 
 human mystery in the colours ; ... no ghosts of 
 lovers in Canadian lanes." And he misses " the 
 comfortable consciousness of friendly watchers under 
 our English sky." " For it is possible, at a pinch, 
 to do without gods. But one misses the dead." * 
 
 I do not know the Rockies and I have very little 
 desire to visit the West, but I feel that this is one of 
 the truest things that ever poet wrote. For there 
 is no doubt about the immortals in Europe. There 
 is no doubt about them in many parts of Africa. 
 The Malutis are wind-swept, bare, cruel. Up there, 
 on one of the ribs of the world, one would expect 
 to be alone. But one is not. Though people whose 
 occupation has left scant traces are gone, their 
 
VERSAILLES 103 
 
 ghosts remain. I have camped on empty terraces 
 of the mountains and found them haunted ere the 
 dawn, and haunted indefinably as though by poor 
 spirits, who, as they had not character enough to 
 stamp their mark upon the face of the world, so now 
 give no other impression save that they are alive. 
 
 But if ever the pressure of immortals rested on 
 a place, it rests upon Versailles. It is not merely 
 the vague pressure of the dead ; it is the enchant- 
 ment of a definite age, the stamp of a civilisation. 
 There is a challenge about Versailles. A voice 
 seems to cry through the gardens and down the 
 glades and to echo silently along the great corridors 
 — a voice which will not let one go, and which com- 
 pels, if not a bold answer, an uneasy retreat. A poet 
 can dally with the spirits of the English country- 
 side, but he cannot play with the spirit of Versailles. 
 One can visit many a haunted spot deliberately 
 in order to trifle with the melancholy, the pathos, 
 the joy, or the beauty of the past, but I cannot 
 conceive how anyone could so trifle where lingers 
 yet the spirit of the golden age of France. I would 
 go bravely if I were sure of our present. I did go 
 reverently because I offered homage to that past. 
 But I went timidly because, although I have a hope 
 for the future, I am not sure ; and it may be that 
 the scorn which that past age has of us, the sense 
 of scorn which dominates there, will be awfully 
 justified. 
 
 The ghost of Versailles is the ghost of kingship, 
 
104 STANDING BY 
 
 and nothing lacks to it. You pass, an insignificant, 
 tiny creature, through the great gates and courts, 
 and, creeping round by a back door as if the central 
 entrance were too great for our times to keep 
 open, come out on the terraces. The gardens 
 stretch away before you like a challenge to Nature. 
 She, unaided, can hardly offer such vistas, such 
 swelling breasts of verdure, such shimmering, 
 ordered pools. Her gods and goddesses, tamed in 
 stone, serve this creation of monarchs, just as the 
 spirit of Monarchy and not of them rules it. You, 
 awed by it, reflect that this was done, not by the 
 collective will of a people, but by the will of the 
 King, embodied certainly in two or three of his 
 line, but still of the King, for the King never dies. 
 You enter the vast galleries, and pass from room 
 to room towards the inner sanctuary where the 
 King slept ; or you enter — and it is not an anti- 
 climax — the Musee des Voitures, and see how the 
 King went abroad. Those trumpeting angels, that 
 uplifted crown, that rich and gilded carving, bespeak 
 the insolence of majesty. You marvel that a man 
 should have sat there, should have dared to shoulder 
 the imputation of it all. And yet Versailles can 
 teach you that the King was a man, his consort 
 but a woman. The Pare du Petit Trianon spells 
 that. One visits La Maison du Seigneur, the Homeau, 
 the Laiterie. So great did kingship feel itself, that 
 it conceived it could afford to play. Marie Antoinette 
 went singing down those paths, swinging her sun- 
 
VERSAILLES 105 
 
 bonnet by its ribands, and picking wild flowers 
 in the grass. Ah ! Marie Antoinette ; perhaps 
 kingship could not afford to play. If this be so, 
 here is the vulnerable spot. If the King could not 
 permit himself to play, that means that he had 
 continually to pose, to make believe. Then king- 
 ship were a sham. Maybe it was because the 
 Queen of that tragedy so fiercely believed the opposite 
 that she was willing to put it to the final test. Then 
 were she truly martyr, for she died for her faith. 
 I like at least to think how well she passed the trial 
 of her royalty by death. What fools the people 
 were ! They might have known that kings had 
 long learnt to die kingly. Modern democracies 
 are infinitely wise ; they turn their kings out to 
 play. If I were a king who believed in kingship, 
 I would not risk that; I would force their hand 
 and make them kill me. 
 
 One triumph Versailles has as yet, without the 
 shadow of a doubt. Democracy cannot use it. 
 Democracy can no more use Versailles than Pro- 
 testantism can use a Gothic cathedral. Both 
 challenge us with complete success, and this is a 
 very disquieting thing. At Versailles the empty 
 galleries abase one, and one's guide unutterably 
 humiliates. A mean figure, he paws these sacred 
 things about, and ruthlessly exposes the ignominious 
 pettiness of modernity by supposing that such 
 monuments need such words. He cannot distinguish 
 between the great and the little, jthe noble and the 
 
io6 STANDING BY 
 
 base. As in an English cathedral you will be told 
 in a breath some travesty of an aphorism about 
 the sublimity of the architecture and the cost of 
 the electric lighting, so at Versailles, in a royal 
 anteroom, you will have to listen to the estimated 
 value of the pictures. In France, even more than 
 in England, he will go on to claim, by tone and 
 manner, the equality of modern citizenship, wherein 
 he would be entirely within his rights did he not 
 abjure them when he looks for a tip at the gate. 
 Yet how incontestably contemptible is the point 
 of view for which that action stands, and in which 
 one acquiesces. To have been introduced to the 
 spirit of Versailles is worth a great largesse or grave 
 and honourable thanks. Our century estimates it 
 at a franc a head, unless one arrives in an auto- 
 mobile. 
 
 I feel that Democracy might do many things 
 with Versailles. It might, for example, burn it 
 with due ceremony, because it stood for awful 
 tryanny, and tyranny is past. It might, on the 
 other hand, offer it as a residence to the Pope as 
 the one sovereign left on earth who believes in a 
 sovereignty that one can still respect even if one 
 does not believe in it. The Cardinal Archbishop 
 of Paris might reside there at the public expense. 
 That would please half France and be a graceful 
 act. But Democracy, as we know it to-day, can do 
 neither. It is too miserly for the first, and too 
 weak for the second. So it takes the other course, 
 
VERSAILLES 107 
 
 and turns this mausoleum of that kingship, through 
 faith in which men made the very name of France, 
 into a museum. It prints and sells picture post- 
 cards of it. I have the packet before me as I write. 
 The picture of Les Bains d'Apollon has a careful 
 foreground of an amateur photographer, in a straw 
 hat and frock coat, about to snapshot a party of 
 his friends with binoculars and a luncheon basket, 
 and that of Le Bassin de Latone is designed to 
 advertise the attraction of tourists to the place. 
 
 One of the signals that the ideals towards which 
 our modern hope extends, have finally triumphed, 
 will be the reverence, that the future may see, 
 with which such a place as this will be kept. When 
 the peoples are conscious of the inherent dignity of 
 humanity, there will, in the first place, be no need 
 for police, waste-paper baskets, tickets of admission, 
 and guides. Frenchmen will bid their sons re- 
 member that the spirits of those who helped France 
 to contribute to the faith and triumph of the new 
 world linger here. They will bid them remember 
 how magnificently conceived a theory was staged 
 within these bounds, how nearly it succeeded, how 
 tragically it lost. They will come to reflect among 
 these gardens upon the progress of human aspira- 
 tion and endeavour, and that to have served an 
 ideal nobly is better than to have no ideal to serve. 
 They will come to reverence here, remembering 
 that Almighty God Himself set higher than those 
 of angels the loves and tears of men. An honour- 
 
108 STANDING BY 
 
 able service will keep Versailles. The nations will 
 esteem as highly as any other human department 
 of social employment that which protects the 
 haunt of the human mystery of the past. Maybe 
 the immortals will be " friendly watchers " then. 
 
 For one realises that what underlay kingship 
 was a national faith. Without this realisation 
 the thing is incredible. He was, we say, but a man 
 who wore the crown, but the peoples in the days 
 gone by did not believe that. Versailles bids us 
 reflect how colossal was the might of these bygone 
 kings, and how broad-based their power, since it 
 stood upon the people's faith. Versailles cost I 
 know not how many millions of gold pieces, how 
 many tens of thousands of lives. That majesty 
 might have fitting abode and express its dreams, 
 the wise gave freely of their learning, the rich of 
 their money, the poor of their labour. We conceive 
 that there were those who grudged these, but their 
 grudge was a feeble thing. It had no universal 
 support ; it was not greater than the common 
 faith. If it had been, it would sooner have dis- 
 placed that faith; it would never have stood by 
 and watched the erecting of this palace; for one 
 of the amazing truths hid in Versailles is the weakness 
 of the King's person. He was less able than the 
 majority of modern prime ministers, less wealthy 
 than many millionaires, and controlled a smaller 
 personal force than the Metropolitan Constabulary. 
 Henry viii., on our side the water, would have 
 
VERSAILLES 109 
 
 been a very much limited personality as Henry 
 Tudor, the village butcher ; as King he was an 
 unlimited despot. If a genius like Oliver Cromwell 
 had chanced to live before the people's faith in 
 kingship was all but gone, he would have rivalled 
 Augustus Caesar ; and as for Napoleon, he would 
 have equalled one of those semi-divine legendary 
 monarchs of antiquity and might have ruled the 
 world. The tiue founders of Versailles to-day — 
 to be honest — would probably not have shown 
 enough personal talent to be elected to Parliament. 
 
 No ; the fact was that the world believed in 
 kings. It believed that their blood was blue, and 
 that they went hedged about with divinity. The 
 sacred oil gave them an unction from the Holy 
 One. " God and I," says the Kaiser, but Caesar 
 would have reversed the words, and Louis only 
 not have done so out of conventional piety. For 
 God was in heaven, but the King on earth, and in 
 the King's ear He whispered and through the 
 King's mouth He spoke. As with the priest, his 
 personal unworthiness did not much affect the 
 value of his deeds, and, if they became intolerable, 
 the man but not the King died. And this faith 
 had elements of nobility about it, for it proved that 
 men believed that among them dwelt those for whom 
 God Himself had need, and who were capable of 
 carrying out in secular affairs on earth His Will 
 as it is done in heaven. 
 
 Now, as one wanders about Versailles, one feels 
 
no STANDING BY 
 
 that if the peoples wholly lose such faith, the world 
 is lost indeed. It will be lost, I say, if we lose such 
 faith about sovereignty. This which was believed 
 about the sovereign monarch must have its counter- 
 part in our faith about the sovereign people ; or 
 we are undone. If we conceive no higher of men 
 than that they are the highest of the beasts, if 
 we frame our policies having breeding stocks in 
 view, if we direct our energies solely towards an 
 economic middle-class mediocrity of living — then 
 Democracy is not merely doomed : it is damned. 
 But if we feel that man is God's vicegerent upon 
 earth, that the divine has need of him, that 
 God can whisper in his ear and speak through 
 his mouth, that the blood of man as man runs 
 blue in his veins — then may we yet be saved. It 
 the lodestar of Democracy is the development 
 of the potentiality of the race, and not the coddling 
 of the actuality of the individual, then Democracy 
 is a cause which a man may serve as they of old 
 served the King. And I can see the test of our faith. 
 Our fathers housed their monarch in Versailles, 
 for nothing less was fitting, and nothing less than a 
 Versailles for the sovereign people will serve us 
 either. 
 
 There is a savour of familiarity about Versailles 
 for all its grandeur. Infinite pride and care marked 
 out those broad walks and drew these mighty but 
 still human rooms. But it seemed to me that the 
 spirit of them was not so different from that which 
 
VERSAILLES 1 1 1 
 
 has haunted me before now as I walked down two- 
 foot paths between sweet-scented beds, and entered 
 a spotless kitchen, clean and sweet and open to the 
 sun. There are parlours in England which demand 
 a courtesy no less than that demanded in the 
 drawing-rooms of Versailles, and I have bowed 
 in my soul before now to a labourer's wife as I 
 would have done to Marie Antoinette. It is not the 
 size of the kingdom that matters, nor the cost 
 of the palace ; it is not the place of the queen, but 
 the pride of the woman. There is a sovereignty in 
 motherhood that is crowned more fitly than with 
 gold, and kings have themselves before now offered 
 homage to monarchs who have carved out a king- 
 dom but called it a home. But I wonder, turning 
 the newspapers and listening to speeches in the 
 places of assembly, if this is yet the faith of the 
 peoples, if they believe to-day in the divine right of 
 kings, for I know that as Monarchy stood so long 
 as and no longer than it rested upon that founda- 
 tion, so Democracy has no hope of sovereignty in 
 any lesser thing. 
 
XIII 
 STREET GIRLS 
 
 A PAD RE is, of course, the last person who 
 should know anything of this subject, 
 except enough to enable him to make 
 veiled references in sermons ; and certainly he is 
 the last person to write such things as I propose 
 to do. But the fact remains for all that, and, 
 thank God ! the War helps one to be honest. And 
 therefore, since one cannot be in the B.E.F. in 
 France and not see much of them, and since I cannot 
 understand how one should see and yet not con- 
 sider, I propose to write about the girls of the 
 streets. 
 
 To begin with, he would be an amazingly in- 
 human person who did not find something lovable 
 about them. A place like this can be about as drab 
 and as depressing as possible. Ugliness is universal ; 
 work is dull and monotonous ; the War is perpetually 
 brooding over us ; the majority bear some mark of 
 it, though why say the majority, since all bear 
 some mark in body or soul ? Down town one goes 
 for recreation, but there is little there. And one 
 meets the girls in the streets, cheerful, human, gay, 
 
STREET GIRLS 113 
 
 and one smiles back involuntarily. It is all very 
 well to read the Ten Commandments and preach 
 them ; it is all very well to feel oneself impregnable 
 within a fortress not of this building ; but the padre 
 who cannot see the attraction, and sympathise, 
 seems to me an incredible creature. 
 
 Personally they make me feel hotly indignant, 
 rather tender, and very pitiful, which is a curious 
 mixture. I am afraid I cannot feel shocked : one 
 so soon gets past that ; and however a man can 
 despise or jeer at them, I do not know. They are 
 so human to begin with, indeed they are bits of 
 naked humanity, and humanity is the most lovable 
 thing on earth. There are, naturally, exceptions, 
 but depraved does not seem the right word to use 
 about these girls. I suppose to be depraved is 
 to be vicious, to have taken a good thing and to 
 have made it a bad thing, to have degraded some- 
 thing divine into something devilish; and this is, 
 of course, what is said about prostitution. But in 
 these days, it does not seem to me the right thing to 
 say. Nine men out of ten feel that to dismiss it at 
 that misses the mark, and it is no use being a demo- 
 crat on the one hand, and yet, on the other, despising 
 the opinion of nine men out of ten. 
 
 That is what one has got to face. This is the 
 
 point of view that is becoming increasingly common, 
 
 and which the War has done so much to advance, and 
 
 it would not be so widespread if there were nothing 
 
 in it. 
 
 8 
 
H4 STANDING BY 
 
 The position, as I understand it, is something of 
 this sort. The street girl believes that sensual 
 pleasure is on a kind of par with every other pleasure 
 of men and women, only the greatest of them all. 
 She finds it bound up in that strange composite 
 bundle that we call human nature. She is no 
 longer interested in origins, though the society 
 she represents, which condones her, would accept 
 the Spectator's dictum that " there is no record of 
 man's birth and childhood " ; and she is merely 
 interested in the fact that even men who can live 
 unselfishly and die heroically find a craving here 
 as great as the craving for food and refreshment. 
 She proposes, therefore, to minister to that. She 
 decks herself gaily. She learns, God knows how, 
 continually to smile. And she goes out to do 
 business in a hard world. 
 
 Half our literature glosses over this fact. Perhaps 
 one phase of the modern revolt is due to the circum- 
 stance that the theories of the moralists do not 
 agree with the actualities of life. There is no man 
 not moved by pitiful stories of the White Slave 
 traffic, of drugged, deluded, and despairing girls, 
 and of brutal and bestial agents, and lest it should 
 be thought for a moment that any words here 
 condone them or it, let me write at once how utterly 
 damnable I hold all that to be. I would make it 
 a capital offence. But in these streets, one is left 
 defenceless. What can one say to a girl who has 
 gone into the business of her own free will because 
 
STREET GIRLS 115 
 
 she likes it, or because she has a patriotic affection 
 for the saviours of her country, or because she wants 
 rapidly to earn a marriage dot and become a mother 
 of legitimate children ? What can one say of a 
 girl — and nine-tenths that I have met are so — 
 who has a high standard of honour, who can be 
 extraordinarily affectionate and generous, who is 
 tender and comforting and womanly, whose picture 
 men carry over their hearts into action though they 
 know perfectly well what she is ? 
 
 I know at least what I say : they make me feel 
 chivalrous. They are feminine, in a day when 
 feminine women are hard to seek ; plucky ; per- 
 haps above all things plucky. They never know 
 what they will meet ; they face the cold and wet so 
 gaily ; I know of so many instances of their kind- 
 heartedness ; and as I look at them, and still believe 
 that a terrible fate overtakes them — sometimes 
 the fate of the good books, always the fate of the 
 inexorable laws of God — there is nothing I would 
 not do to help them. As I know, this is dreadful 
 in a padre, and yet I wonder if it is right that 
 it should be thought so. It seems to me that the 
 eyes of Christ must have held something very 
 different from disgust and horror as He looked upon 
 the street girls of His day, or He would never have 
 been called their Friend. 
 
 Now the girls of the streets are, of course, a 
 professional class — a class that exists in all countries, 
 although it exists more easily and happily in some 
 
n6 STANDING BY 
 
 countries than in others, but the real problem 
 of Christianity is not this class at all. What we 
 have got to face is this : the point of view that I 
 have indicated as that of the professional prostitute 
 in France is rapidly becoming the point of view of 
 vast numbers of civilised people. It strikes one 
 forcibly out here that a great deal of sexual pleasure 
 is afforded to men not by these girls but by 
 ordinary and even by married women. Men have 
 said to me again and again, "It is hard to make 
 a mistake." It is hard. There are here, and I 
 know some of them, women whose virtue (in the 
 old language) is above question; but the great 
 majority of the girls of the teashops, for example, 
 from Adderley Street, Cape Town, to Havre and 
 Dieppe, are as open to friendships as it is possible 
 to be, and as often as not include sexual relationship 
 in them. I trust I shall not be assassinated for 
 saying so. As for the men, they are frankly out 
 for anything they can get, and they have no con- 
 trolling discipline due to religion or social custom 
 whatever. They are just eager individuals. And 
 the women meet them more than half-way, married 
 women and ordinary women with less cloak for 
 their readiness than even the prostitute. 
 
 Or again, numbers of civilised decent women no 
 longer expect of men what our grandmothers ex- 
 pected. One woman of the world, a nurse of great 
 experience with whom I got a chance for a real talk, 
 told me that if her fiance* went on leave to Paris she 
 
STREET GIRLS 117 
 
 would not expect him to be what we used to call 
 faithful, and that if married, she would grant to him, 
 and expect herself, absolute liberty. But she would 
 never marry. She knew men too well : their petty 
 jealousy, and that temperamentally one woman 
 never could satisfy them. It was hopeless to 
 expect that she could. And I did not wholly 
 disagree as I might have been expected to do. 
 Once the inspiration, the aspiration, of religion is 
 removed from a human life, I do not see how one 
 can expect lesser things for ever by themselves 
 completely to hold and satisfy. That is only to 
 plagiarise St. Augustin, who, after all, had been a 
 man of the wcrH before he was a saint. 
 
 If these words are ever read, people may perhaps 
 be indignant ; but I cannot help it : it is so. We 
 know it to be. For my part, this War has meant 
 meeting with all sorts and conditions of men and 
 women from Great Britain to Australia, from 
 black through every shade to our own whitey-pink, 
 and I doubt if one can overestimate the break-up of 
 the old standards. True, people all think that the 
 birth of children should be legalised by State 
 recognition of sexual union, but people also think 
 that the State has no right of interference with 
 their private liberty, and that it is its business 
 to take any steps to increase the birth-rate. Easier 
 divorce naturally falls under this heading, divorce 
 laws which should finally make of marriage only a 
 reasonably possible contract and not (as they say) 
 
Ii8 STANDING BY 
 
 an unreasonable impossible union. And it seems 
 to me that they are perfectly right from their point 
 of view, for to them marriage has no superhuman 
 sacramental sanction, and is merely a practical 
 human arrangement for business purposes. One 
 cannot deny that the Catholic Church did not run 
 marriage on business lines, and that the modern 
 non-Christian State should do so. 
 
 What people no longer think — and this is what 
 interests me — is that there is any superhuman 
 authority in the world with the right to touch their 
 personal liberty, their likes and dislikes. God no 
 longer thunders on Sinai. The Sermon on the 
 Mount was preached two thousand years ago. 
 Both incidents are embodied in a discredited book, 
 and the power behind the book is a phantom. You 
 can say Boo ! and nothing happens, and so it can 
 be only a goose. 
 
 There are many inferences to be drawn from this, 
 but I am concerned with one only here. It seems 
 to me that the day has gone by in which we can act, 
 and expect the State to act, as if we and it were 
 dealing with churchmen and Christians. When 
 those two words ceased to be synonymous, the 
 decay began. Now, happily or unhappily, we 
 have come to the logical end. There is no divine 
 authority, and '■ man is the master of things." 
 
 It is therefore perfectly useless to go on talking 
 about sin in quite the same way as before, to damn 
 the girls of the streets as a class, to protest on the 
 
STREET GIRLS 119 
 
 old lines against the trend of modern legislation, 
 and so on. As a matter of fact, except in the 
 abstract, this -modern immorality is no longer sin 
 as sin to those who do it at all. An interesting 
 parallel is offered us by the old-fashioned Protestant 
 attitude towards the Roman Catholic who believed 
 in Transubstantiation. It used to be called idolatry, 
 but it is clearly not that. Though the Host were 
 only bread, the Roman Catholic did not worship 
 bread as God. He does not believe that bread is 
 there any longer, and even if he is mistaken, still 
 all he worships is God. God Himself cannot be 
 conceived as punishing a Breton peasant for idolatry 
 because the peasant worships Him mistakenly, 
 without fault of his own, believing Him to be 
 where He is not, on the Protestant hypothesis. 
 And it is the same in this case. Here is, for example, 
 a girl who has become entirely removed, by the 
 circumstances of her environment and age, from 
 any conception of divine restriction on a certain 
 act ; God Himself cannot punish her as if she had 
 disobeyed what she knew to be His Command. 
 Maybe she ought to have known, but who can say ? 
 We at least should leave the judgment of that to 
 God's mercy-seat. 
 
 An amazing little incident came my way this 
 Christmas. I went into Notre Dame in this town 
 in the dusk, and there were few worshippers. Up 
 one aisle I saw many lights before the Crib, but 
 I went up the other to a shrine that has only one 
 
120 STANDING BY 
 
 small lamp before it in this particular church, and 
 which I thought would be deserted at the Christmas 
 season. I did not notice anyone there, and I knelt 
 to pray, and, motionless, could hardly myself 
 even be seen. But in a few minutes I heard steps 
 come up behind me, and a girl passed the end of 
 my row of chairs, went in between the doors of the 
 screen of the side-chapel, and knelt on the altar- 
 step of the shrine. I hardly noticed her, until I 
 was attracted by the sound of sobs. Then I looked 
 up and saw, in the dim light, that her shoulders 
 were shaking with emotion, and her whole body 
 bent in her grief. A few minutes passed, and then 
 I could stand it no more, and I went up, knelt 
 beside her, and asked if I could help. She looked 
 up, and, despite her tears, I recognised a girl who is 
 often in a gaudy tavern of the place, an unrepentant 
 Magdalene. I thought at once that here was 
 penitence, and pressed her as kindly as I could to 
 speak, meaning to persuade her to enter a confessional 
 if I could. But when she spoke in a moment 
 between her sobs, I got a surprise. 
 
 " One of my boys, one whom I liked so much, 
 has been killed," she said. 
 
 " But why ever did you come here ? " I exclaimed 
 in amazement. 
 
 " Oh, it's so quiet and dark," she said, M and 
 I love this picture of the Sacred Heart. Jesus 
 looks so kind, and as if He understood." 
 
 I venture to think it is hard to bottom all that lies 
 
STREET GTRLS 121 
 
 hid in that incident. I may not know the full story 
 of that child, only that she is one of those who go 
 into the business to earn a marriage dot, and that 
 she is a pretty, kindly, cheerful little person, very 
 gay. But now I realise something more. She is a 
 product of our modern paganism. She has known 
 I no other lawgiver than the state of modern France. 
 The very name of God had been expunged from her 
 school-books. And she has a very human heart 
 which can be broken, and it was to such as she that 
 Jesus said, Come unto Me, and I will give you rest. 
 
 Oh for the end of all our folly ! Oh for the de- 
 struction, in our religious society, of all this in- 
 sistence upon numbers, and laws, and states ! We 
 of the Church have got to face the facts — we are 
 few, despised, disestablished, discredited ; and we 
 have got to tear down all conventions, face all 
 persecutions, outlive all prejudices, and go out to 
 win a race that is rejoicing in pagan liberty to the 
 slavery of Jesus Christ. And we have only 
 one argument : that our faith brings joy, even of 
 earth, that is not of this world ; joy that nothing else 
 can give, and joy that nothing can quench. 
 
 If it does. The world, looking at us, is not at all 
 sure. 
 
XIV 
 THE HANGAR 
 
 IT is ten o'clock in the evening, and a couple 
 of hundred of the boys of the company to 
 which I am attached (for M discipline and 
 rations ") are about to go on night-shift. It is 
 nowise my duty to accompany them, but I like doing 
 it occasionally, because I know of nothing which helps 
 one to realise at least one aspect of the War more 
 than a night visit to the hangar. Even the un- 
 fortunates whose wearisome duty it is to be on their 
 feet watching the boys at work from late in the 
 evening until any time between five o'clock and 
 seven o'clock in the chilly morning share a little of 
 this sense, and I had been asked to make a point 
 of coming this particular night, as some peculiarly 
 interesting work was in progress. 
 
 The boys lined up in the darkness and the mud — 
 for it is nearly always mud here — between the huts. 
 They are nondescriptly dressed, for uniforms have 
 faded and odd gear has replaced lost articles long 
 ere this, and nobody much minds so long as the work 
 is done. In the dark one cannot see the end of the 
 line, and black faces are soon lost sight of, so we wait 
 
THE HANGAR 123 
 
 while the white N.C.O.'s go up and down to see 
 if the turn-out is complete. The sergeant gives 
 the command. A rattling " One-two, One- two, 
 One- two/' runs down the front rank, for that is our 
 way of overcoming the difficulty of the inability of 
 the boys to count above half a dozen or so in English. 
 " Form Fours ! M and the " ones " standfast, while 
 the M twos " execute quite smartly that ancient 
 Army formula, " One pace to the rear with the left 
 foot and one to the right with the right." It is all 
 correct, and they re-form two deep, stand at ease, 
 come to attention, stand at ease, and come to atten- 
 tion again, with the immemorial ritual. The 
 officer takes over. The little business is done over 
 again, and off we go through the muddy camp, 
 sloshing into pools of dirty water and occasionally 
 stumbling into holes, until we are out on the road. 
 The " Gare Maritime " is just across the way, a 
 wilderness of lines and rolling-stock and splitting 
 arc-lamps that serve chiefly to make the shadows 
 deeper. Running its full length across the lines 
 looms the huge hangar, and beyond the hangar 
 are the docks. Ships come up to the wharf and off- 
 load into the hangar, whence the goods are loaded 
 up again into rolling-stock as they are needed. 
 And they are needed perpetually, so that not a 
 moment of the day or night sees the place deserted. 
 We enter from the western end, and one sees 
 at once that the hangar, commonplace as it is, has 
 its beauties^ and its mysteries. The newcomer is 
 
124 STANDING BY 
 
 bewildered by its size. At least half a mile long 
 and some two hundred and fifty yards wide, it is 
 a great, gaunt, enormous shed of iron and steel. 
 Trains run into it and are dwarfed to insignificance. 
 Ships of three or four thousand tons stretch in a long 
 line outside the right-hand wall, which is broken 
 by enormous gaps of sliding doors. Men appear in it 
 like ants, and there is a confused dim clanking of 
 machinery ever going on. High overhead hang the 
 electric lights, and they recede till they merge into 
 lines of light in the far distance, where, through what 
 looks like a small hole, enormous motor-lorries 
 are continually entering and leaving by the huge 
 farther gate. But these many lights only serve 
 to shed a dim, diffused radiance about, and half the 
 place is shadow. Boys are emerging from blackness 
 in endless succession with trucks which pass across 
 some open lighted place and disappear behind some 
 one or other of the great masses of boxes or crates or 
 bales or sacks which constitute the stores. 
 
 We pass out through one of the doors in the 
 great side of the hangar, and find that but 20 feet 
 or so separates us from the water's edge. Standing 
 there, and looking up the wharf and over the 
 dock-basin, one sees how much of beauty there 
 can be even in modern practical machinery, even 
 in filth and mud. The water gleams dully under 
 the stars, and far down and across it lights gleam 
 and flicker, red, white, and green. Running up 
 the waterside and spanning the 20 feet of wharf 
 
THE HANGAR 125 
 
 at right angles high overhead, to connect with the 
 roof of the hangar, are the structures which bear 
 the huge cranes. The great arms stick out each 
 from its own box of clattering machinery in a 
 succession of nightmare forms that fade out of 
 sight in the distance and the night, but in each box 
 gleams the yellow light by which the man controls 
 the monster. Almost like sentient creatures, the 
 arms swing in their semicircle, dropping tentacles 
 into the holds of the ships, gripping merchandise, 
 swinging it aloft and round out of the vessel, and 
 dropping it on the wharf -side. Then a score of 
 our boys, at each point, run forward like ants and 
 seize upon it. The chains are uncoupled, the load 
 falls apart, its component bales or boxes are rushed 
 off through the side of the hangar on hand- trucks, 
 and the tentacle chains are aloft into the night 
 for a new load. None seems ever to be long idle. 
 As fast as one ship is empty, another takes her place. 
 As fast as the stores are built up into monstrous 
 heaps in the hangar, those heaps are eaten away 
 on the other side by boys who load the stuff into 
 railway-trucks — night and day, week in and week 
 out, for the Army in France must be fed. 
 
 One's mind gropes with the organisation, and 
 is fairly baffled by it. How wonderful is the 
 machine which can gather this mass of material 
 constantly from the ends of the earth, dump it 
 here and at a few other like places, collect and 
 scatter it to the far trench-line, and number each 
 
126 STANDING BY 
 
 bale and sack as it goes ! The world has never 
 before seen such an organisation. The food of three 
 million men, the food of their horses, the food of 
 their guns — guns themselves, tanks, rolling-stock, 
 waggons, automobiles — all these are poured con- 
 tinually on these wharves. Certain waste there 
 must be, certain blundering, or so one would 
 think. But the goods get there ; that is the end 
 of the argument. 
 
 Three million men, and not a man or a horse or 
 a gun (at last) goes hungry, day after day, unless it 
 be temporarily for a small sector somewhere within 
 range of the enemy's guns. For myself, I like to 
 think of the all but infinite number of links in the 
 chain, and that our boys are a coupling indispens- 
 able. We grouse sometimes at our unromantic 
 labouring work, but, good heavens ! what romance 
 is here ! The sons of Chaka and Moshesh have 
 come six thousand miles to feed men from every 
 land and island in our wide-flung Empire who make 
 up the Army in France ! 
 
 Let us go a little nearer and watch the unit 
 with which we came at work. The first group is 
 unloading sacks of oats. They are swung by the 
 dozen or so out of the ship, and run on trucks by 
 man-power to the ' conveyor.' This is a neat 
 mechanical contrivance of perpetually moving 
 iron bars in ladder form, running, a foot or so off 
 the ground, across the hangar to the stack that 
 is being made. It is in coupled lengths of perhaps 
 
THE HANGAR 127 
 
 20 feet each, and at each joining of two lengths 
 sits a boy whose duty it is to see that the sack 
 does not catch in the machinery. Thirty yards 
 from the ship the conveyor ceases, and an elevator, 
 set at an angle up to 45 degrees, lifts the 100-pound 
 sacks up to the required height. At the end of 
 the conveyor stand two boys, who, with mathe- 
 matical regularity and seemingly tirelessly, swing 
 the sacks off to three couples, who pass them on 
 and place them on the elevator. At the top of the 
 stack a dozen or more are at work building them 
 up. There is a clank of machinery all the time, 
 and the never-ending line of white sacks comes 
 from the gloom, passes through the light, and 
 mounts into the gloom out of sight. 
 
 Thousands of tons of oats have been discharged 
 here, but the next ship carries a composite cargo. 
 Frozen meat, bully-beef in tins, cheeses, biscuits 
 in boxes, sardines, vegetables, sides of bacon, 
 tins of jam, margarine, and I know not what else, 
 are being stacked each in its own place. From 
 hay to copper bars, from quinine to disinfectants, 
 from mangles and wheelbarrows to shovels and 
 buckets, the stores roll into the Army in France. 
 But farther on is a still more wonderful sight. 
 
 Still larger cranes are lifting bodily from a 
 cavernous hold strange hideous shapes of a night- 
 mare. Each as it is dropped on the wharf-side 
 is boarded from a tiny side-door by a man or two, 
 and in a few minutes, with protesting clanks and 
 
128 STANDING BY 
 
 shrieks, it rolls away into the night under its own 
 power. One is seeing the arrival of the tanks. 
 But possibly the marvel of the whole business 
 is the arrival of ambulance-cars and even rail- 
 way-engines, which are lifted out and seem to 
 start away the moment the girding chains are 
 released. 
 
 At one end of the wharf is a strange snug little 
 sanctum. You steal precariously over chains and 
 bolts round the edge of the docks and enter a 
 low door. Within, bright with pictures and warm, 
 are the two rooms of the dock officers' mess, where 
 one can have a hot drink at any hour of the night. 
 Strange people gather there. Elderly men can 
 be met with here who have been senior magistrates 
 or proconsuls where one white man and a file of 
 black police under the Flag rule thousands by a 
 word, and who have thrown it up for a junior 
 subaltern's star in a black labour battalion. From 
 the ends of the earth they have gathered in that 
 room — padres, landowners, officials, members of 
 the parliaments of the daughter-nations of the 
 Empire. You can hear from them how to kill 
 lion in Rhodesia, or run a sheep ranch in Australia, 
 or protect His Majesty's interests in Singapore. 
 Unsung, these men, all but unknown among the 
 millions of the Army in France. Yet theirs is 
 not the least heroism. Watch up on a cold wet 
 winter's night from 7 p.m. till 5 a.m., and imagine 
 what it would be with your fifty years and dozen 
 
THE HANGAR 129 
 
 of tropical winters behind you, and you will know. 
 They and the boys they officer are a tribute to 
 the power of Empire and the love of England such 
 as is not beaten even in the air or on the sea. 
 
 And they are at it to-night, feeding the Army 
 in France. ... 
 
XV 
 
 CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 
 
 FOR three years I read about Christmas on 
 the Western Front after having vainly 
 tried to spend it there, but this year that 
 joy was mine. And I understand that I was very 
 lucky, for there never had been before such a Christ- 
 mas as this. In the first place, there were more 
 turkeys than ever ; in the second, there were more 
 plum-puddings ; and, in the third, there were even 
 mince-pies. We read all about it at once in 
 that ubiquitous daily of whose circulation the 
 proprietors used to talk so much, but of which less 
 is said now, probably because even they are be- 
 wildered by the numbers of those who read what 
 they serve up. After that we read about it in the 
 illustrated weeklies. The turkeys had articles to 
 themselves in each, until one wondered vaguely 
 if there had not been perhaps some mistake in one's 
 upbringing, and that possibly Christmas was the 
 commemoration of the creation of turkeys. I 
 searched more closely for evidence, and all but con- 
 cluded it was the commemoration of the discovery 
 
 of mistletoe. 
 
 i 3 o 
 
CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 131 
 
 Then I lighted on a paragraph which informed 
 us that there had been no disgraceful recollection 
 of our common Christianity on that day. Men 
 christened had not ceased to try to kill each other 
 for a moment because it was the birthday of Jesus 
 Christ. Turkeys there were, yes, and plum- 
 puddings, but no " truce of God." One could at 
 least congratulate oneself on that. We are con- 
 vinced, this fourth Christmas of the War, that 
 every Saxon and Bavarian peasant, as every 
 Prussian, is a rejoicing baby-killer. 
 
 But at last I found what I sought. There was 
 no textual record anywhere of Christ's Mass, but 
 there was in one paper a large pictorial illustration 
 of " A Christmas Sermon behind the Firing Line." 
 I gazed with awe. At first I thought it must be 
 a dreadful joke, because the men's faces bore a more 
 pained expression than is even usual during the 
 sermon ; but then it dawned on me that the big 
 title did not agree with the letterpress — a minor 
 detail. It was not the sermon but the concluding 
 benediction that was depicted, although strangely 
 enough, for it would seem curiously out of the 
 normal place, u the man at the harmonium is ready 
 to strike up the Christmas hymn." Oh, surely it 
 is a wonderful picture ! I shall keep it for my 
 moments of deepest depression, when Punch fails, 
 and even the Spectator and the Guardian cannot 
 arouse me. The clergyman has a tricky little 
 moustache and an Oxford hood (Warham Guild), 
 
132 STANDING BY 
 
 and he is giving the blessing with a Popish gesture. 
 The men have " set and stern " countenances, so 
 like Tommy's at a church parade, especially on 
 Christmas night. While "asa foil to the soldiers," 
 a French peasant-woman and some children stand 
 — looking on, the artist thought. Maybe he is 
 right there. It must have seemed very wonderful 
 to them. 
 
 Christmas having been thus recorded, it strikes 
 me that I might perhaps add shortly to the record. 
 I promise not to do so exhaustively; indeed, I 
 have not the pen for that. But I should like to 
 describe how thirty odd boys of a half company 
 of Basuto, and I, spent Christmas from the old- 
 fashioned point of view. It is not necessary to 
 bother about the dinner in the evening, though one 
 of the turkeys did come our way, I am glad to say. 
 But the turkeys have had justice done to them. 
 
 In the first place, Providence was upon our side. 
 The powers that be had decided to inoculate the 
 half company on the evening of the 23rd December, 
 a circumstance not perhaps seen immediately to be 
 related to the subject in hand, but capable of 
 explanation. For that entailed the 24th being 
 deprived of their labour until, on the lapse of 
 twenty-four hours, to be precise at 6.30 p.m. of 
 that date, they could be called out once more for 
 the night-shift. Such providential dispensation 
 gave me my chance ; we might have our Christ's 
 Mass almost on the day, indeed upon the Eve, if 
 
CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 133 
 
 we could find any place for an altar. Inquiries 
 almost led to despair. There is no Y.M.C.A. in 
 the camp, no canteen, no recreation-room, no spare 
 cubicle even, and the boys sleep and eat in great 
 huts taking sixty or so, in each of whom the greater 
 part will be heathen. But the sergeant-major 
 came to my rescue and offered the Sergeants' 
 Mess. They themselves would not be up at the 
 hour I wanted it, as the company was to have the 
 holiday, and it was a big and convenient room. I 
 was very grateful. 
 
 At 5.30, then, I was up and out of my own camp. 
 It was terribly cold, especially to us Africans, and 
 still dark. By six the congregation was gathering, 
 and I prepared for the confessions. One by one 
 the burly fellows came in, to make that individual 
 prostration of themselves upon the mercy of God 
 which is so much more real than any general con- 
 fession. One by one as each finished they went 
 out into the snow to make room for the next, and 
 I could hear them stamping and swinging their 
 arms to keep warm. Eighteen in all there were, 
 and at last we could all come in together. I set 
 up the altar. A few drapings, two pictures, one of 
 the Mother with her Son, and the other of the 
 Crucifixion, this last between the candles, soon 
 transformed the common table, and I slipped the 
 altar-stone in under the white cloths. Flowers we 
 had none, but I had brought two sprays of richly 
 berried holly, and these added to our festive appear- 
 
134 STANDING BY 
 
 ance. A server from my own parish attended 
 me, and just as in our far-away Basuto home we 
 sang the Christmas Missa. The men's voices in 
 the Sesuto words behind carried me easily those 
 six thousand miles, and, as we would have done 
 there, we all knelt together, when our Lord had 
 come, to sing the u Adeste Fideles." 
 
 The boys were out nearly twelve hours from that 
 evening, and returned to eat and sleep. But from 
 midday on the 25th all work ceased in dock and 
 hangar, and thus we had the afternoon free. I 
 was round at 2.30, to find somewhat of a commotion 
 on foot, for a party of drunken soldiers had called 
 to the boys over the barbed wire and asked them 
 why they did not come out and enjoy themselves 
 like the rest. When these had been moved on, 
 the sergeants had to deal with an excited camp, 
 ready for anything, and arguing against the com- 
 pound system heart and soul. The black and white 
 question cropped up, and my service came as a 
 happy intervention. So we gathered for Evensong 
 in one of the big huts, boys still sleepy in their 
 blankets round the walls, tables still littered with 
 the fragments of dinner, but a growing crowd at 
 one end. All sorts and conditions were there, 
 heathen, Nonconformists, Roman Catholics, and 
 my boys, the latter in a knot round me. We had 
 a great time. We sang several hymns to draw off 
 more men from the excited crowd outside, and 
 then got on with the shortened Evening Service. 
 
CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 135 
 
 It was strange to hear how well they sang Magnificat 
 and Nunc Dimittis. We do not attempt psalms, 
 or perhaps I should say I do not, and if you explain 
 who first sang, and where, those evangelical hymns 
 of Mary and Simeon, they have a wonderful beauty. 
 I talked for a little about the meaning of the Angels' 
 Song : that true peace would only come on earth 
 when all men gave glory to God in the highest ; 
 and then I suggested my Christmas treat. 
 
 Just about this time the folk would be making 
 their way across the Basuto hills to the little churches 
 that they might close Christmas Day before the Crib 
 in each. Last year we had had our own. It had 
 been literally dug into the mud floor of the church, 
 a shelter of boughs against the rough stone walls, 
 very like to what Joseph must have put up for Mary 
 in Bethlehem, if, as I suppose, the cave and the 
 stable mean that in those parts, as with us, shallow 
 caves under the overhanging lip of some kopje are 
 shut in by low stone walls to make a cattle kraal. 
 A lamp in a native pot and the star had been all the 
 light, and it had fallen on the Holy Babe among the 
 straw, the kneeling Mother and the adoring Pro- 
 tector of that Holy Family. We, then, would go 
 out and rind a Crib and worship with the others, in 
 spirit if not in fact. There was hearty assent. 
 
 It chanced that not far away there was a Catholic 
 chapel, dedicated, appropriately to the season, to 
 Our Lady of the Snows. It stands at cross-roads, 
 in a fearful wilderness of mud and stagnant water 
 
136 STANDING BY 
 
 and railway lines and filth, half-built, with only a 
 house or two near it. We fell in, then, and marched 
 there, thirty-six of us in all, a few being Roman 
 Catholics themselves. I would not take other than 
 men who understood, for otherwise we might have 
 had more than I could manage. Also I was not sure 
 what reception we should get. I myself was a 
 heretic, and I was doubtful if we should be allowed 
 to do more than look. 
 
 The French congregation, with a sprinkling of 
 Tommies, had just finished Benediction as we arrived, 
 and the old cure was even then divesting himself of 
 his stole. There was a little stir as we marched in. 
 The boys looked anxiously about, and recognised 
 the signs of the Presence of our Lord in His Sacra- 
 ment without being told. They genuflected and 
 slipped into pews. I went up and asked in my 
 best French for leave to say the Joyful Mysteries 
 of the Rosary with them in Sesuto. But my best 
 French is not very good. 
 
 " Eh ? " queried the priest. 
 
 11 Can we say the Rosary in Sesuto, Father/' I 
 asked, M and then have a look at the Crib ? " 
 
 He glanced at my collar and smiled. 
 
 " You are a Catholic priest ? " he asked. 
 
 " Well, not as you mean," said I desperately in 
 English. Then, " Anglican — but these boys have 
 no church as in their own homes, where they 
 would be now at the Crib, and I thought . . . 
 perhaps ..." 
 
CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 137 
 
 '■ The Rosary, you say ? " he questioned. 
 
 I held up my own beads. He smiled again. " Of 
 course," he said, " anything you like. You are a 
 Catholic ? " 
 
 I am not sure that he understood even now, and 
 I do not know that I blame him, but after trying 
 again and not getting much more forward, I acted 
 on his permission. We all knelt before the Sacra- 
 ment. First we sang " Adeste Fideles " to the old 
 tune, and then we said the Joyful Mysteries and 
 thought of our Lord's Incarnation. Then I led 
 them in the Divine Praises and the Salve Regina, 
 and then, row by row, we went up to the Crib. It 
 was poor — not nearly so good as ours. But these 
 French do teach us something. The Babe was very 
 big, probably the first part of a church set to be 
 slowly acquired ; Joseph, Mary, and the oxen might 
 have come from a child's Noah's Ark. I would 
 never have dreamed of so dreadful a mixture. But 
 they were right : the boys made no adverse com- 
 ment. The star drew us, and the boughs of green 
 stuff smelt very fragrant. Each genuflected as he 
 drew near, and peered in ; and one, after much 
 fumbling with dirty papers, pushed a ten-franc piece 
 into the manger. The cure stood by and watched 
 it all, and so did the French behind. 
 
 By this time it had grown quite dusk, and we had 
 to go. We knelt once more together — sang Nunc 
 Dimittis to a plain song setting, and the white people 
 recognised the tune. Two or three girls joined in in 
 
138 STANDING BY 
 
 Latin. The cure, a white-haired old man with a 
 very kindly smile, knelt on the pavement. 
 
 One last look around at the pictured faces and the 
 twinkling lamps of that poor little chapel, and we 
 were out into the wet and cold and snow. " What a 
 lovely church ! " said one to me, as he passed. 
 
 " Yes," said I. . . . 
 
 We dismissed in camp. As they broke away, a 
 lance-corporal stopped them. " We thank you, we 
 thank you very much, Father," he said. " This is 
 a strange land, and we are far from home, but we 
 have seen familiar things to-day." 
 
 " Eh," they chorused, native-wise ; " truly it is 
 so." 
 
 Maybe none of us will forget our 19 17 Christmas 
 on the Western Front, even although it was behind 
 the line. There is not very much that we chaplains 
 can do for our black boys under the inevitable 
 conditions of labour here, but it is surely something, 
 which may be remembered next year and many 
 after years in the valleys of the Drackensberg, that 
 in a land so far and among conditions so strange, 
 Christmas brought the first familiar things — the 
 Mother and the Crib. 
 
XVI 
 
 CONCERTS 
 
 AT first sight concerts may not seem to have 
 much bearing on war, but a little reflection 
 reveals the direct opposite. Without 
 referring to the obvious — that a concert overnight 
 often assists you to drive your bayonet better into 
 a Hun the next morning, it is there that one may 
 learn a good deal about the psychology of war. A 
 Martian, visiting this globe for the purpose of 
 reporting later in The Mars on the civilisation of the 
 Earth, might do worse than attend half a dozen 
 music-halls. Certainly merely to visit churches and 
 museums and factories would not be sufficient. He 
 might see then how the world prays, thinks, and 
 works, but he would not see how it laughs; and 
 perhaps laughter is a more sure clue to character 
 than anything else. 
 
 The subject is, of course, vast, especially if, as I, 
 you should feel yourself inadequate to say when a 
 concert is not a concert, but something greater or less. 
 In a word, the concert is generic. Our age has 
 reduced a great number of its plays and the majority 
 
 of its religious observances to the form of the concert, 
 
 139 
 
138 STANDING BY 
 
 Latin. The cure, a white-haired old man with a 
 very kindly smile, knelt on the pavement. 
 
 One last look around at the pictured faces and the 
 twinkling lamps of that poor little chapel, and we 
 were out into the wet and cold and snow. " What a 
 lovely church ! " said one to me, as he passed. 
 
 " Yes," said I. . . . 
 
 We dismissed in camp. As they broke away, a 
 lance-corporal stopped them. " We thank you, we 
 thank you very much, Father," he said. " This is 
 a strange land, and we are far from home, but we 
 have seen familiar things to-day." 
 
 " Eh," they chorused, native-wise ; " truly it is 
 so." 
 
 Maybe none of us will forget our 19 17 Christmas 
 on the Western Front, even although it was behind 
 the line. There is not very much that we chaplains 
 can do for our black boys under the inevitable 
 conditions of labour here, but it is surely something, 
 which may be remembered next year and many 
 after years in the valleys of the Drackensberg, that 
 in a land so far and among conditions so strange, 
 Christmas brought the first familiar things — the 
 Mother and the Crib. 
 
XVI 
 
 CONCERTS 
 
 AT first sight concerts may not seem to have 
 much bearing on war, but a little reflection 
 reveals the direct opposite. Without 
 referring to the obvious — that a concert overnight 
 often assists you to drive your bayonet better into 
 a Hun the next morning, it is there that one may 
 learn a good deal about the psychology of war. A 
 Martian, visiting this globe for the purpose of 
 reporting later in The Mars on the civilisation of the 
 Earth, might do worse than attend half a dozen 
 music-halls. Certainly merely to visit churches and 
 museums and factories would not be sufficient. He 
 might see then how the world prays, thinks, and 
 works, but he would not see how it laughs; and 
 perhaps laughter is a more sure clue to character 
 than anything else. 
 
 The subject is, of course, vast, especially if, as I, 
 you should feel yourself inadequate to say when a 
 concert is not a concert, but something greater or less. 
 In a word, the concert is generic. Our age has 
 reduced a great number of its plays and the majority 
 
 of its religious observances to the form of the concert, 
 
 139 
 
142 STANDING BY 
 
 Africa." " There are voices calling for the living 
 God. . . . God bless Africa, and her sons and her 
 daughters.' ' And then the quartette again, in 
 " Soft and Low." And then, amid wild excite- 
 ment, bare feet beating the floor of the great hut 
 and the hands of the black part of the audience 
 clapping as the women would clap at the kraal, we 
 witnessed a Zulu War Dance in costume, and in 
 lack of it. And then " God Save the King," 
 sonorous, compelling. And all this from savage 
 South Africa, in France, because of a European 
 war, my masters ! And, staggering marvel of 
 marvels, it is nothing to most who pass by ! 
 
 Against this, which I take it requires no comment, 
 I would set what ought not strictly to be called a 
 concert, but for which I claim place here inasmuch 
 as it was given on a regular concert night, in a 
 series of concerts, by a member of the Y.M.C.A. 
 Concert Party which visited us at that time every 
 Thursday. The audience, too, was a concert 
 audience : I mean it was composed of practically 
 the same body of men as had been there the week 
 before and would be the week after. They packed 
 the hall, which was blue with tobacco smoke, and 
 the great majority were privates of the A.O.D., 
 A.S.C., and R.E. They applauded at first vigorously, 
 finally thunderously, and they listened with rapt 
 attention the entire time, which was well over the 
 hour, and this although there was only one per- 
 former and no musical instrument. What, then, 
 
CONCERTS 143 
 
 went they out for to see ? A lightning-pencil 
 artist, perhaps, or a quick-change performer ? 
 Or a conjuring wizard ? Or a cinematograph 
 lecture ? Or Miss Maud Allan ? Or Mr. Horatio 
 Bottomley ? No. I would give you a dozen more 
 guesses. It was a lady, effectively but not remark- 
 ably dressed (or undressed), reciting a Greek tragedy. 
 
 In its way, I am not sure that it was not the most 
 remarkable performance I have ever witnessed, 
 and I am glad to be able to say so, for I had no 
 opportunity of congratulating the lady at the time. 
 Her method was to tell the story, breaking off to 
 recite the more striking speeches and choruses as 
 they occurred. With great genius she sustained 
 the several parts in turn, with no other aid than 
 that of her voice. Nor did she talk down to us. 
 Nemesis was unfolded as surely, as slowly, and as 
 grimly, as it had been in Greece. We confronted 
 the terrible spectacle of love torn between duty 
 and affection ; of the strong powerless ; of the 
 weak passionately, divinely, victorious. It was 
 an appeal to the soul, after its kind, as sure as 
 any sermon. 
 
 The boys, then, showed that they understood. 
 It was a triumphant vindication of Hoxton and 
 Hammersmith. To look back, through the drifting 
 clouds of tobacco smoke, at those English faces — 
 shrewd some, curiously animal others, but all 
 stamped with the hall-mark of our civilisation — 
 was to realise that the English poor, tricked by the 
 
144 STANDING BY 
 
 cheap music-hall, robbed by bureaucracy, and 
 exploited by a mockery of democracy, have yet a 
 soul. We lifted our eyes heavenward that night. 
 We watched the combats of the gods, we who 
 attend generally to the shallow bickerings of modern 
 men. They who have died in Flanders, many of 
 them, I doubt not, since, with the devoted heroism 
 that animated Sparta, Athens, and Troy, but died 
 on the whole blind to the nobility of their dying, 
 they, I say, saw through the medium of that gifted 
 lady, something of the mythical beauty of Helen 
 and of the magical valour of Achilles which is 
 theirs, too, though they know not. It was a night 
 of wonder. We came out to the darkness of the 
 countryside, lone if it had not been for our far- 
 stretching hutments, and to the garishness of 
 canteen and mess-room; but we had been on 
 the Mount of Olympus. I salute you, lady, wherever 
 you be. 
 
 As an example of the extraordinary excellence of 
 local concert parties I would set down a great 
 A.O.D. Revue of last Christmas at a base seaport. 
 It was entirely worthy of the London Stage. Every- 
 thing in it had been created by the men of the 
 unit. The scenery, the songs, the music, the patter, 
 the dresses, the orchestra, even the novelty of the 
 finale when the colonel himself, qua colonel, and in 
 uniform, appeared on the stage, was original, and 
 extraordinarily well done. The piece carried you 
 away. One scene, a representation of a part of 
 
CONCERTS 145 
 
 the great Hangar itself in which most of the actors 
 
 slept, entirely carried out, amid roars of laughter, 
 
 in dumb show, was really remarkably well acted. 
 
 And as one looked, one reflected on many things. 
 
 It is commonplace to point out that so much genius 
 
 in the ranks is due to the nationalisation of the 
 
 army, and that here you saw, in miniature, how 
 
 every profession, every class, every talent, had 
 
 been drawn into the great service. But it is more 
 
 interesting that here one saw Tommy's own idea 
 
 of humour, and not someone else's idea at which he 
 
 is asked to laugh — and does, with the readiness of 
 
 good-fellowship. There was wit about it. The 
 
 comic element was made up, not by the comic 
 
 parson who is utterly unlike anything that ever 
 
 existed, not by the typical funny man who is only 
 
 funny because he is a grotesque caricature, not 
 
 by the expression of a sense of the ludicrous in 
 
 much of the tenderness of life. We laughed because 
 
 the inanities of the normal revues were exposed as 
 
 mercilessly as the trivialities of authority — those 
 
 trivialities that authority takes so seriously. We 
 
 laughed because we saw exhibited the incredible 
 
 nature of the fate that is ours. We laughed because 
 
 we know it to be a very jest of the gods that we 
 
 should have to live as we live and do as we do. And 
 
 we laughed at ourselves, because being men and 
 
 decent citizens, we found ourselves so helplessly 
 
 the sport of circumstances. In a word, we were 
 
 not far removed that night from the spirit of the 
 10 
 
1 46 STANDING BY 
 
 trenches. We laughed, if not at violent death, at 
 least at something as grim and as preposterous. 
 
 There was something inspiritingly Christian about 
 it all. One felt that the Devil must have been 
 exasperated, as were those Roman proconsuls 
 who subjected tender girls to exposure, the whip, 
 the fire, the steel, and heard, as the mutilated 
 bodies of their all but murdered victims were 
 tossed to the beasts, the ringing tones of victorious 
 laughter. One wonders if the Germans laugh. 
 I should doubt it. And it is because your Tommy 
 of to-da}' laughs, that one knows England cannot 
 be beaten. It is not so much the unbreakability 
 of those thin lines that rope in Germany on the 
 West so flexibly up to a point, so inexorably beyond ; 
 it is not the growing output of the never-silent 
 workshops ; it is not the tireless, unshaken, traffic 
 of the seas ; it is none of these things, great as 
 they are, that show that, despite our faults and 
 pettinesses, we cannot be beaten. But it is the 
 fact that men can be torn from the decencies of 
 life, from its sanities, from its hopes and jo3 7 s, 
 and can be flung down in utter discomfort as pawns 
 on the board whereon is played this game of devils 
 in all its tragic madness, and yet can there endure 
 all things, hope all things, believe all things, with 
 a gaiety no less than the gaiety of Christian men — 
 this is victory. 
 
 Lastly, there is your more normal concert, such 
 an one as I attended the other night. It is usually 
 
CONCERTS 147 
 
 distinctly good. The same stray talent is there, 
 as unexpected as Handel in his garret, but with it 
 is that pitiful serving up of the popular airs of the 
 moment with which the singer, good but not great, 
 has perforce to be content. Last night we had a 
 trick cyclist who must surely have made his £1000 
 a year in that dim age before the war, and a conjurer 
 of first-class ability. Their comrades were young 
 men of the good amateur stamp, and the rest of 
 their programme was such as you might find in a 
 score of camps in the B.E.F. somewhere in France 
 any night. The audience, as always, was ap- 
 preciative, but I read again the lesson which each 
 such concert seems to me to teach. 
 
 It is that the death-knell of the military pro- 
 fession has sounded. I may be wrong, but I think 
 so. I do not say that armies shall cease or war 
 not come again, but I do say that the professional 
 soldier of song and story has passed, never to return 
 in our day. We shall probably have to maintain, 
 for dealing with uncivilised peoples, a military 
 police, and their calling may still be a little more 
 hazardous than that of the Metropolitan Constabu- 
 lary owing to the stupidity of governments. Other- 
 wise, of course, the conflict of rebellious natives 
 with a force equipped with aeroplanes and Lewis 
 guns can never be anything else than a dangerless 
 massacre. Probably also we shall be compelled to 
 live under a system of conscription whereby all the 
 adult male population shall be [ready to handle 
 
148 STANDING BY 
 
 bayonet and bomb until the family of nations learns 
 decent behaviour and conscript armies become no 
 more than national gymnasia. 
 
 But this is not war in the old sense. It is only, as 
 Mr. Philip Gibbs perhaps first pointed out, diabolic- 
 ally ghastly murder, conducted on a large scale in the 
 still larger intervals of boredom, waste of time, and 
 discomfort. Gone for ever is the glitter and in a sense 
 the glory. Our modern soldiers live and die gloriously 
 because they must, but we do not glory in our war. 
 We regret it, and curse the authors of it. We 
 are bigger-hearted, wider-eyed, than our ancestors. 
 There is no glory to us, per se, in cleaving foreigners 
 in pieces. As a necessity, we may do it, and reap 
 glory in doing it, but though a man may find glory 
 in choking a mad dog with his bare hands, it is not 
 a glory that he goes to seek or sings. He knows, 
 moreover, what is the reality of war : 
 
 "A dirty, loathsome, servile murder-job: 
 Men lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid, 
 Toiling their hearts out in the pulling slime 
 That wrenches gun-boot down from bleeding heel, 
 And cakes in itching armpits, navel, ears ; 
 Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering ; 
 Men driving men to death and worse than death ; 
 Men maimed and blinded ; men against machines — 
 Flesh versus iron, concrete, flame, and wire ; 
 Men choking out their souls in poison-gas ; 
 Men squelched into the slime of trampling feet ; 
 Men, disembowelled by guns five miles away, 
 Cursing, with their last breath, the living God 
 Because He made them, in His image, men. 
 So — were your talent mine — I'd write of war. . . ." 
 
CONCERTS 149 
 
 Such is the lesson of our songs at the concert, 
 for Tommy, over here, does not care much even 
 for patriotic ones. But this is not to say that 
 he is not patriotic. Moreover, Englishmen of the 
 fields and cities will care a thousand times more 
 for England and things English now that they have 
 spent so long abroad. But to love one's mother 
 passionately is not to hate another man for loving 
 his. True love is not jealousy, and it casts out 
 fear. 
 
 Fear and ignorance are the causes of most wars. 
 We moderns, then, fear less because we know 
 more, and are jealous hardly at all. I suppose 
 there are still dynastic ambitions ; I know there are 
 increasingly commercial lusts utterly unscrupulous 
 and insatiable ; but your average man does not 
 feel these. To him, then, war is just naked war ; 
 and since he knows it to be scientific destruction 
 coupled with every objectionable concomitant — 
 loss of liberty, waste of time, unnatural conditions, 
 unpleasant surroundings, and much pain — he hates 
 it. Tommy sings, " Oh, it's a beautiful war," and 
 not " Rule Britannia." He is a civilian in uniform ; 
 and although he has indeed learnt of the army, 
 and benefited by discipline, still he is anxious to 
 get back into civilian clothes, out of which he will 
 be less anxious to step than ever. After all, if 
 everybody does a thing, and everybody has to do 
 a thing, it loses its charm. Some branches of the 
 Service retain the old glamour — the Air Service, 
 
150 STANDING BY 
 
 for instance — and they may continue to do so, but, 
 on the whole, the glory has departed. Militarism, 
 for good or ill, is dead. The soldier may be still 
 as necessary as the policeman, but he will have no 
 greater praise in the earth. 
 
 It is easy to dismiss it with a nod, but the passing 
 of Militarism demands more. Among the Hindoos, 
 the soldier is next to the priest and of not much 
 lower caste than he. Our past has largely been 
 the story of generals and wars, or at least it has 
 been told as if it were, and that because the story 
 seemed so to those who reviewed it. After all, 
 the standards of heroism, of endurance, of self- 
 sacrifice have been set by the men of the Services. 
 The nation has carried itself proudly and has lived 
 more nobly because of its battles. The soldier, 
 permeating society, has led us to embrace loyalty 
 to the sovereign as a personal thing, the idea of 
 England as a living mistress. And now he goes. 
 His place is taken by the mechanic who turns the 
 handle of a machine-gun at the bidding of a Prime 
 Minister, dressed in a drab uniform, and chiefly 
 anxious to get it over. It is impossible to escape 
 the reflection that we must serve our new ideals 
 nobly if our standard is not to fall. They are higher 
 ideals. But the higher a man climbs, the farther 
 he may fall, and the more steady must be his head. 
 
 Not for nothing is that contrast which one has 
 noted again and again in France. The English 
 concert ends with the National Anthem ; the French 
 
CONCERTS i S i 
 
 republican concert with a rush for the door almost 
 before the fall of the curtain. There seems to us 
 a curious blank. Yes, but do we still sing ' ' God 
 Save the King" as it used to be sung? When it 
 meant Queen Victoria men sang it as they who 
 clung to a personal monarchy very tenderly, if 
 with a smile ; now that it means " God save the 
 Sovereign People " there is a danger that we, too, 
 shall put ourselves first and make a rush for the 
 door. If we do, the end of the play will be the 
 fall of the curtain on an ignoble house. 
 
XVII 
 FLOTSAM OF WAR 
 
 STANDING by in war-time, one naturally 
 sees more of the extraordinary pathos 
 there is in human affairs than at any 
 other time. I say " pathos," for I mean those in- 
 finitely pathetic sorrows which are silently en- 
 dured, and have been innocently incurred, as a result 
 of the clash of powers which the sufferer can scarcely 
 even understand. At the outbreak of War it came 
 as a kind of nightmare, that awful vision of millions 
 of men being thrown at each other, and of their 
 being mangled and torn, while all the time there was 
 practically no personal quarrel, and one hardly 
 knew why War was coming at all. So the exodus 
 from Antwerp or the passion of Serbia has made 
 strong men weep. But I saw something equally 
 pathetic the other day. 
 
 It was our native hospital. One rides to it up the 
 beautiful little river-valley, with the great woods 
 on the left and the high ridge crowned by the ancient 
 castle on the right. The forest was as beautiful 
 as it is possible to conceive. The ground in places 
 was one golden sheet of wild daffodils, and the rarer 
 
FLOTSAM OF WAR 153 
 
 patches of dark blue violets nestling among the 
 still-brown fallen leaves and their own dark emerald 
 contrasted exquisitely. The young green buds of 
 the trees were everywhere bursting in the spring 
 sunshine. The air was pure and clear after rain, 
 and the birds sang as if God would hereby teach us 
 what joy was meant to be. And so I came to the 
 hospital. 
 
 It is, of course, trim, clean, and neat. From the 
 pole in the midst of the careful little garden droops 
 the Union Jack and the Red Cross. The officers' 
 quarters had already some gaiety of garden flowers, 
 and behind, up the slope of the hill, ran the orderly 
 bungalows of the wards, with a tier of two-deckers 
 behind. The gravel paths skirt grass, and the beds 
 of the patients were many of them set out in the sun. 
 Blue-clad natives moved about and smiled con- 
 tentedly enough, and a good many had a hope of 
 speedy removal home. A good many, did I say ? 
 Perhaps it would be truer to say that all had such a 
 hope — therein lies much of the pathos. 
 
 I entered a ward. Here there were few well 
 enough to be up, and the boys lay blanketed on 
 the rough beds, each the regulation paces from its 
 neighbour. It strikes a visitor first that the patients 
 have few of those treasured possessions which each 
 man has in a white hospital, or if any, it is usually 
 no more than Bible or hymn-book or Prayer Book 
 carefully lapped in newspaper. But for the most 
 part they have nothing. They are strangers in a 
 
154 STANDING BY 
 
 strange land. Their few chattels stand in some hut 
 six thousand miles away, so few and rude that 
 they will be unrecognisable litter of the earth again 
 in a year or two, or rubbish on some civilised dust- 
 heap. The native is of the earth, and when he 
 passes he leaves few traces. A village to-day has 
 no memorial left on the hillside to-morrow, when 
 the grasses have grown over the site and the sherds 
 of pottery have been trampled in by the beasts. 
 Not that those odd sticks are not as precious to 
 their owners as the treasures of the West to us, 
 and therefore the boy who abandoned even his 
 clothes for his uniform, and has literally no familiar 
 thing about him, feels his nakedness towards the end. 
 For the more part, then, they lie silently, but 
 here and there one brightens up and greets the 
 friend he knows. Otherwise the long hours go 
 by, and the dark-skinned boys rolled in blankets 
 lie motionless unless they are tossed in pain. They 
 hardly read, partly because many cannot, partly 
 because they have nothing to read. They do not 
 talk much, these sick in a strange land, chiefly 
 because they have nothing to talk about. At home 
 conversation is all but endlessly of crops and beasts 
 and horses ; here there are none of such things for 
 them. They get comparatively few letters, and 
 there is rarely any news in such as they do either 
 receive or write ; for, although we have come to 
 forget it, it takes generations of education to pro- 
 duce the art of letter-writing. They eat, they 
 
FLOTSAM OF WAR 155 
 
 sleep, the} 7 suffer, that is all. Eagerness, vivacity, 
 interest, these are characteristics of the negro at 
 home ; and these in his sickness he is found per- 
 force to have sacrificed to the god of war, as none 
 other of the army of patients in France to-day. 
 And it is impossible not to feel, as one stands by 
 the bed and realises how the great world grips and 
 strives without, that here is flotsam that has served 
 its turn, and is cast up, now, indifferently. 
 
 But I see one who greets me eagerly, very glad 
 that I should have visited him. I go and stand 
 over the bed, and I read the signs, the wasted 
 flesh, the hectic cough, the tell-tale chart. Oh, 
 but he is glad to see me. He had heard that I had 
 come to the camp he had left, and he had hoped to 
 be out by now and back again to see me there. 
 However, he is sure he must be better, and at any 
 rate the year is up in a couple of months, by which 
 time he will see Africa again. His father writes 
 to say that they want him back badly. No, he 
 did not tell any news. And there is silence. . . . 
 
 I wish I did not visualise it all so keenly. No, 
 the father did not tell his son the news, because 
 he had no skill. He could not write of that upland 
 cluster of huts above the lovely crystal-clear stream- 
 let that comes tumbling from the great mountain, 
 through the rocky gorge below the camp, into the 
 well-known shaded river that flows between the great 
 kopjes to the distant sea. It did not strike him to 
 say that the peach was in bloom, and the pink 
 
156 STANDING BY 
 
 petals fluttering down to the new green grass within 
 the grey aloe hedge. Or that the sheep were lamb- 
 ing ; or that the herds came lowing home, led by 
 their ancient leader, every sweet-scented dusk ; or 
 that the ponies still streamed across the veld with 
 flying hoofs and tossing manes in such sunlight 
 as the sick boy's eyes have not seen these ten long 
 months. More, it hardly reached the consciousness 
 of the patient that he yearned for such things ; 
 but the sight of them might well make him whole. 
 
 And now ? The doctor knows, and I know, but 
 we two only, that that will not be. Company by 
 company their comrades will leave this land of 
 France and see these things again, but some here, 
 ever-dwindling, will be left behind. This boy 
 could not stand the voyage. That bootmaker's 
 outfit that he was so eagerly gathering — and he 
 did good work, too — will stand idle on the shelves 
 of the hut for ever, so far as he is concerned. The 
 splendid old father, loyal soldier of the Government 
 in a score of fights, unspoilt native with it all, will 
 shade his eyes and look down the valley, as one 
 by one those who went from his district return, 
 but in vain. Stranded here, tossed up inarticulate 
 and forgot by the eddies of the awful maelstrom, 
 one of the least of its victims, but victim none the 
 less, this lad among the rest will go not out again. 
 
 It has so often fallen to my lot to take a native 
 funeral such as this will be, that I know exactly 
 what will happen. There was one at Le Havre 
 
FLOTSAM OF WAR 157 
 
 the other day. The boy's company had returned 
 home, so that there was not even a mourning 
 party of his own colour to follow him to the grave. 
 Instead, the cheerful sergeant saluted me in the 
 gate, and led me to the cold mortuary M chapel " 
 that is no chapel at all. Oh ! it is decent enough, 
 a square stone box with shelves inside (and on an 
 empty one, for there were only two coffins that 
 day, a bottle of ink, a pen, and the first book that 
 I must sign), and Authority treats these even as 
 the rest. There is the white firing party, and 
 the bearers, and the Union Jack. But it cannot 
 but be that there is less of humanity here than ever, 
 for which of these Yorkshire Tommies, burdened 
 with his own joys and woes as he steps, with arms 
 reversed and slow feet, through the wilderness 
 of stones and under the dripping wintry trees, can 
 care for Pte. Mopedi, No. 21,987, of the S.A.N.L.C. ? 
 And because it is long to the sloping plot recently 
 reclaimed where are the rows of wooden crosses 
 of this African graveyard in a strange land, and 
 because I alone remember that sunny village on 
 the mighty Berg, and because I feel so acutely 
 the contrast of this crossless inhuman burying 
 with that little Christian party of priest and 
 mourners knit in sympathy just down that other 
 slope, it is almost more than I can bear. But we 
 come to the grave. The firing party takes post 
 some twenty paces up the sticky soil of the hill- 
 side, and the staccato orders ring out. The six 
 
158 STANDING BY 
 
 bearers lower the coffin and stand rigidly to atten- 
 tion. The sergeant falls in behind me and waits 
 for me to begin. And I step forward with my 
 Prayer Book, and all of them, waiting in the cold, 
 wonder how much I shall shorten the tiresome 
 service. . . . 
 
 I defy them all. He was a Mosuto, and why 
 should not he be buried, if so lonely here, with the 
 words of his mother-tongue ? Why should I read 
 that stern cold psalm when none can understand 
 or check me if I do not, and why not a passage 
 more suitable for him ? So it is the psalm of the 
 Shepherd that I read over that grave and the 
 story of that triumphant assembly before the 
 throne of God and of the Lamb, whereat it will 
 not be native or kindred that matter, but the white 
 robes and the great tribulation endured. And 
 then for the collects I close my book, for this English 
 office has not the prayers I need. There must 
 be one for the land who gives its sons this day to 
 the dust of France, and one for the soul, so ignorant 
 and forgot, which only the infinite pity of the 
 Shepherd can succour now. And one more for the 
 dark-skinned mourners who will weep in their 
 own way when the story comes to be told, but 
 never here, where the dead must lie. 
 
 Then I paused. Surreptitiously, even the men 
 at attention were eyeing me. I did not know if 
 King's regulations permitted it, but I said : " This 
 native found it as hard to die as you or I would. 
 
FLOTSAM OF WAR 159 
 
 His black friends in Africa will giieve as truly as 
 yours or mine would in England. God hath made 
 of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the 
 face of the whole earth. Let us say altogether 
 * Our Father, which art in heaven ■ " . . . 
 
 vStaccato orders again. A black labourer is for all 
 that a British soldier, and they present arms. The 
 last post rings out and dies solemnly away. 
 
 " German pris'ner next, sir ! Step this way, 
 please." Flotsam of War. . . . 
 
 I climbed to the old castle on the hill that spring 
 morning when I had done all I could for those 
 whose turn was not yet at the hospital. You 
 cross a brawling stream or two, pass an ancient 
 church very clean within and seeming holy, and 
 ascend by a little lane to where the green path 
 circles ancient fortifications of earth and comes at 
 last to the vast Norman gate. Within I saw all 
 that there was to see. This donjon, even to-day 
 so massive, was never taken by arms ; but you can 
 still see the bones of the garrison horses slaughtered 
 at length in a vain attempt to keep the grimmest of 
 invaders from the door, and even one poor human 
 skeleton beside them who fell with none to bury 
 him before that enemy. So this mantling ivy, 
 these whispering trees, and this sunlit turf, hid 
 still more flotsam of war. I make my way to the 
 height of the topmost rampart and look out over 
 the smiling valley to the distant hospital with its 
 own little graveyard by it. The whole world is 
 
160 STANDING BY 
 
 fair, but is there an acre not consecrate to the 
 infinite pathos of our human story ? There is a 
 remembered battlefield yonder and half a hundred 
 forgot. Unnumbered centuries have seen wars 
 great and little, and every tide of Time has cast up 
 on the shore wreckage that knew no more of the 
 causes of the storm than the timbers of some 
 broken ship can know. I am not sure that there 
 was ever a storm that need have been, ever a 
 timber broken untimely that was not broken 
 wantonly too. And yet I do not know ; Almighty 
 God is very just ; there are few who do not deserve 
 the curse somehow or another ; none, perhaps, 
 for whom it is not better that they should shoulder 
 rather than reject the load. But an old song rang 
 in my ears as I came away, and rang in the birds' 
 melody as I crossed the fields : " They shall not hurt 
 nor destroy in all my holy mountain ; for the 
 earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, 
 as the waters cover the sea." . . . How long, O 
 Lord, how long ? 
 
XVIII 
 THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 
 
 I WONDER how many times how many chap- 
 lains have done what I have just done again 
 to-day — folded my Church newspaper and 
 put it away with a sigh ? Perhaps not so many, 
 and yet surely there must be hundreds of priests 
 and laymen who see, in the searchlight of this war, 
 that of religious failures in history it would be hard 
 to find one more tragic and complete than the 
 failure of the Established Church of England. That 
 for the hundreds who see it there are thousands 
 who do not, and that for the thousands who do not 
 there are tens of thousands who do not take enough 
 interest in a palpably worn-out institution to think 
 about the matter at all, only emphasises the tragedy. 
 For tragedy it is. The Established Church of 
 England was not, on the whole, the scheme of 
 fanatics or ignoramuses. Of its founders — con- 
 sidered as we know it to-day — Elizabeth was 
 profoundly astute and genuinely patriotic, and 
 the Elizabethan bishops, for the most part, 
 grave, learned, whole-hearted men who built 
 
 determinedly because they thought their cause 
 n 
 
1 62 STANDING BY 
 
 was just. Their foundation has had its all but 
 saints, its all but martyrs, and very many sons 
 who, upright and restrained, have shaped that 
 England whose name will remain even in these 
 coming days when empire, as we know it, will not be. 
 Our polity owes a vast debt to the Church of 
 England. The Establishment has bred the typical 
 Englishman. A high code of honour, a grave 
 decorum in religion, a sense of decent and fitting 
 conventionalities — all these he has chiefly learned 
 of it. They had their value in the days of limited 
 horizons. But in these days it is not a high code 
 but the right code, not decorum but sincerity, not 
 conventionality but reality, that the world demands. 
 The Barbarians have challenged Rome again, and I 
 am not identifying the Germans with the Barbarians 
 at this moment. The ultimate issue at stake is not 
 Germany versus the Allies, but the New Age versus 
 the Old. They who do not care two straws for 
 manners or traditions demand not treaties, but the 
 Charter of Humanity. 
 
 There is probably no religious instrument in 
 Europe to-day less fitted than the Establishment 
 for this condition of affairs. It is difficult to con- 
 ceive of a religious body more hopelessly stranded 
 than it. Shaped by the State for a policy which 
 no longer exists, and moulded by considerations 
 which no longer have weight, it is hampered but 
 unprotected by its foster parent who would like to 
 see it slain so long as she has not the bother and 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 163 
 
 responsibility of the crime. For the Establishment 
 was framed to unite all Englishmen in one religion 
 suitable to their political isolation in the sixteenth 
 century, and it has been modified, definitely once 
 or twice, imperceptibly down the centuries, fitly 
 to express the religion of the governing educated 
 classes of a constitutional monarchy. To-day the 
 republic is a conglomeration of diverse nationalities, 
 and England herself grows more and more to be 
 their international clearing station ; indeed, she is 
 coming to feel that that is her function. Power 
 no longer rests with certain classes ; there is not 
 even a balance of power between them and the 
 rest ; there will shortly not even be the classes at 
 all. Striving, groaning, for fit expression and new 
 life, the masses of the people are confronted in 
 matters of the soul with an anaemic stranger who 
 does not speak their language. They do not want 
 him. If he were not so pitiably helpless, and if 
 his murder did not still savour of crime, they would 
 cast him out. 
 
 There are a great many who will think that this 
 is an exaggerated statement of the case, but I 
 venture to suggest that it is not. In France to-day 
 a padre who cares to do so can meet men and 
 women of all classes who will speak freely enough 
 to him. That has been my experience, and I 
 wonder if I have met one who has had anything 
 good to say of the religion of the Establishment. 
 I have met a few extreme Evangelicals and a few 
 
1 64 STANDING BY 
 
 extreme High Churchmen, but the religion of 
 neither of these is the religion of the Establishment 
 however much they may be tolerated within it. 
 I have met a few successful padres, and some 
 members of the followings of successful padres at 
 home, but in every case their success has been 
 almost relative to the extent to which they have 
 thrown the Establishment over. I have been 
 to some strikingly successful Church of England 
 services, and as I write I recall them. There was 
 one conducted by a Church of England padre and 
 a Wesleyan which went magnificently ; there was 
 a most remarkable " Sung Mass ■' parade service ; 
 there was another with massed bands and a splendid 
 choir. I have never heard the General Confession 
 more strikingly and dramatically chanted than at 
 this last. But the first two of these were not the 
 Establishment, and it would be an insult to the 
 memory of even the Elizabethan bishops to charge 
 their work with the third. 
 
 Of men, often nominally Anglican, who were 
 inclined to think about religion, I cannot recollect 
 one who was not contemptuous of Anglicanism. 
 " When you have settled your own difference, you 
 can come and talk to us." " It is no use talking 
 of the Church of England, for you do not know 
 with what you are dealing.' ' " There is no getting 
 away from the fact that the Establishment does 
 not seem to men of our generation in the least like 
 the religion of Christ." "I see the Bishops are 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 165 
 
 squabbling again. Why can't they ^ deal o with 
 things that matter ? " "I confess I'm not much 
 interested in your religion, but Lloyd George 
 appointing Hensley Henson to the apostolic 
 succession, and Dean Inge preaching the sermon, 
 strikes me as one of the most comic things that 
 could possibly happen I n " Anyone would think 
 it mattered who was Bishop of Hereford, to hear 
 you talk, Padre ! " Such are a handful of 
 comments. 
 
 One might perhaps persuade oneself that men 
 such as these do not matter (although after all they 
 are lost sheep of the House of Israel), but I think 
 the attitude of the many ministers of other religious 
 bodies whom I have met affects me still more. 
 The War has unquestionably widened our friendship. 
 It will not matter to anyone, but I confess that I 
 see that I had no right to dismiss Presbyterians 
 and Wesleyans, Congregationalists and Baptists, 
 as I once did. Their religious systems do not 
 attract me, and chiefly I wonder that they have 
 wandered so far themselves from the tenets of their 
 own founders, but what I have admitted perhaps 
 only in theory, I now know to be a fact. There 
 are true followers of Christ among them from whom 
 I would learn and whose ministry is blessed. What 
 then do they say of the Establishment ? They 
 would indeed destroy it, but they are not generally 
 bitter about us. They are extraordinarily kind. 
 Their attitude suggests that if a man has really 
 
1 66 STANDING BY 
 
 the misfortune to be a minister of the Church of 
 England, it would not be playing the game not 
 to give the poor fellow a chance. Incredibly 
 hampered as he is, to strike at him is to strike a 
 man who is down. And meantime the spectacle 
 of our floundering, if one can get over the pathos, 
 is really most entertaining. 
 
 And then I open my Church newspaper. I find 
 that the Church of England has a function in the 
 world as a centre of unity. I find enormous debates 
 over minor modifications in the Book of Common 
 Prayer. I find talk of a National Mission of Re- 
 pentance and Hope. I find grave discussion as to 
 two or three additional bishoprics, or as to how to 
 reach the men. And these, when we are in fact 
 radiating disunion from every point of the compass ; 
 when there is practically not a parson who does not 
 modify the Book of Common Prayer although so 
 tentatively that his modifications irritate more 
 than edify ; when we no longer represent the nation 
 and are the last people in the world to call anyone 
 to repentance and faith ; and when it is our fooling 
 with Episcopacy that has largely alienated the 
 men. To say one rubs one's eyes, is not enough. 
 Such trifling is driving some men to despair. It has 
 already caused more than one whom I know humanly 
 speaking to lose his soul. It is forcing me in this 
 chapter (among others in other ways) to incur the 
 odium of being branded as an enemy within the 
 gates for the term of my natural life. 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 167 
 
 Yet if Scipio Africanus was thanked because, in 
 its blackest hour, he did not despair of the republic, 
 the Establishment ought to thank me I For I 
 believe that this despised Church, this whipping- 
 boy of the nation, this hounded and all but aban- 
 doned heir of Elizabethan conventions, Georgian 
 latitudinarianism, and Victorian priggishness, has 
 it in her to save the modern world, has it in her 
 perhaps alone among the reformed churches to 
 win the modern man. Whether or not she will 
 do it, I do not know. I confess I despair more often 
 than I hope. And yet my hope must transcend 
 my despair or I would not be writing this. 
 
 For the Establishment, if it has its own follies, 
 has also the wisdom of all the sects. It is really 
 in a position of extraordinary promise, for it could 
 so easily combine the wisdom of the old with the 
 freedom of the new. The incredible and annoying 
 thing is that it does not know its own power and 
 is wilfully squandering its opportunities. In the 
 mix up in France which has brought one into touch 
 with so many men, one notices it again and again. 
 The Salvation Army has power because it has 
 behind it the driving force of a great dogma literally 
 believed and convincingly preached, but the Church 
 of England has the great soul -moving dogmas 
 in her hand. The Wesleyans do really wonderful 
 things with their class-meetings, but just such 
 machinery is to hand in the Church. The Presby- 
 terians gain from the real place of their ministry 
 
1 68 STANDING BY 
 
 in their communion, but Holy Orders cannot mean 
 less to us. Dissent generally does make a certain 
 appeal from the spontaneity of its services, but 
 there is nothing really to stop us from doing the 
 same. Again, the sentiment of familiarity with 
 old forms and words is of amazing power among men, 
 and whereas most religious bodies rely on hymns, 
 we have them and much more to hand. Men are 
 much moved by " Jesu, Lover of my Soul," but I 
 have seen them equally touched by the Comfortable 
 Words and the Sursum Cor da. And lastly, the 
 sacramental system, liturgical forms and symbolism, 
 might be as effective with us as with the Roman 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 At the same time, I think there is no doubt that 
 our primitive use of the vernacular, the greater 
 audibility of our services (though this does not 
 mean that every one of them need be a continuous 
 roar of sound, as it so often is), and our apparently 
 more human because married priesthood, is, in this 
 age of primitive passion and primitive religious 
 knowledge, a distinct advantage for the moment. 
 I am inclined to think that a converted England 
 would see their development much as converted 
 Europe at one time saw their development, for 
 they serve rudimentary conceptions ; but it is 
 rudimentary conceptions with which we have to 
 deal to-day. Moreover, Episcopacy has nothing 
 whatever to touch it as a power. Every religious 
 system develops bishops of a sort who lead con- 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 169 
 
 gresses and direct synods and inspect circuits and 
 moderate assemblies, but few have conceived of an 
 office so pastoral, so Christ-like, and none have one 
 so venerable. Episcopacy is our final immense 
 potentiality as it is our final tragic failure. 
 
 Yet the fact that Episcopacy has not failed so 
 much because of individuals who are bishops as 
 because of their stultification in the Establishment, 
 leads on to the great point we would make, that the 
 Church in England may live again. She has not 
 inherently failed, nor, surely, is her personnel 
 unready for sacrifice that they may save. Knowing 
 a few bishops from the inside, it is unutterably 
 painful to hear the ordinary soldier speak of them. 
 Few men in England have done more in this war 
 than the bishops of the Church. None has the 
 Cause of Freedom and love for the soldier more 
 passionately at heart. I imagine that the college 
 of bishops in England to-day would be found to 
 provide more martyrs if the occasion arose than at 
 any other time in the history of the Establishment. 
 
 And what is true of the bishops is largely true of 
 the rank and file of the clergy. One of the most re- 
 markable things to me is the popularity of the padre 
 among the men. They hold that he has less to do 
 than any man in the Army — he is certainly more 
 hampered than any ; but I notice that again and 
 again, when the Church is mentioned, a man will 
 say, " Did you ever know the Reverend So-and-so ? 
 He was the finest chap I ever met." And it is 
 
170 STANDING BY 
 
 one's own experience. Padres, of course, are often 
 dull, often stupid, often failures ; but I do not think 
 I have met one yet who was not sincere. To see 
 such men day by day hampered in their services 
 by a bad tradition or an Oxford manner or slavery to 
 the Prayer Book, is painful. You go to the military 
 church at some base. The padre comes in and you 
 know him for a man. He opens his book and faces 
 his congregation. " Dearly beloved brethren," he 
 begins, and you feel the stiffening run through the 
 men. Why is he bound to use Cranmerese when he 
 asks his fellow-sinners to acknowledge our common 
 guilt ? It is liturgiology run riot. This is, of 
 course, one straw, but straws broke the camel's 
 back. 
 
 But with such material it ought to be possible 
 for the Church to burst the grave-clothes and 
 sweep our generation for Christ as I believe she 
 might well do. Remember, desperate diseases re- 
 quire desperate remedies. Let us remember also 
 that our age is about to see desperate remedies 
 applied to desperate diseases other than that of 
 religion, and that it is in the mood to welcome 
 them. We are on the crest of the wave if we talk of 
 revolt. And let us talk. 
 
 Round many mess-fires I have come to the con- 
 clusions that I set out here, and they may for that 
 reason be entitled to a certain consideration. They 
 are not arm-chair remedies. For the most part, 
 they are general specifics, and I am inclined to 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 171 
 
 think that if we dared to act on one or two prin- 
 ciples, everything else would go by default. 
 
 Pay, in the Church, must be placed on the old 
 apostolic footing of a recognition of necessity and 
 not of a reward. The Christian priest must be 
 free to live if he is to work, but he must be free 
 from a suspicion of wealth if he is to save souls. 
 He must be free to live ; he must not expect to 
 enjoy luxuries or ease. He is entitled, as everyone 
 else who labours, to meat and bread ; he must 
 renounce the chance of profiteering so as to obtain 
 game and wine. Two hundred pounds a year will 
 keep a man in health and decency — indeed, many 
 a workman enjoys both on less. If the Church 
 organised for war on this basis ; if the clergy 
 deliberately accepted for themselves the standard 
 which is thought sufficient for men as good as they ; 
 if they submitted even their children to the educa- 
 tion and culture which the State offers to such ; and 
 if for the rest — for the necessity of breeding " gentle- 
 men " and for marrying " ladies " — they put their 
 trust in God, I believe the nation would be stung 
 to life. When I say clergy, I mean bishops and 
 all the higher ranks as well. It is inconceivably 
 wrong that Episcopacy should be held to demand 
 a higher standard of life than that of the respectable, 
 decent working-man. If Episcopacy is the apos- 
 tolate, there must be no suspicion that its rewards 
 are material. I admit that if the world were 
 sincerely Christian, it is incredible that it should 
 
172 STANDING BY 
 
 not insist on its bishops being its princes, just as it 
 is impossible to imagine that, in a Christian com- 
 munity, the King would not vacate his palace if 
 our Lord returned to earth — whatever He might 
 do in the matter. But the world is not sincerely 
 Christian ; it does not acclaim bishops as its 
 princes ; and in consequence bishops must be as 
 they were in the days of Peter and Paul. 
 
 Probably all this will read as the veriest moon- 
 shine, but in the name of God, why, why ? Every 
 diocese must have its organisation, its staff office, 
 and it would be absurd in these days that that should 
 not be fitted with telephones and served by motor- 
 cars. But the bishop need not have personal 
 possession of these things. Travelling allowances, 
 probably, he must have; entertaining, too, for the 
 poor and for those who need to consult him, or 
 retreat with him, at that communal centre, the 
 bishop's palace. " Palace " is just the name for the 
 great home wherein the poor pastor entertains 
 the poor. But if Thomas a Becket were a poor 
 man in Lambeth, why not a modern archbishop ? 
 
 Experiments have been suggested perhaps rather 
 than made in this direction. There is the case of 
 the Bishop of London's offer, and of the Bradford 
 Bishopric scheme. That exactly brings us to 
 the crux of the whole matter, that these things, 
 constantly spoken of, urgently needed, widely 
 recognised, are not done. The Establishment is 
 so bound down that it cannot move. But there 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 173 
 
 is a way of overcoming even a Gordian knot. String 
 was wasted in that process, and, by the same 
 token, more than one millionaire claims to have 
 made himself by not wasting such things as lengths 
 of string. But the Church is already a millionaire, 
 and it does not need to be. We have thousands 
 to gamble with. No scheme of disendowment 
 would beggar us beyond these possibilities, and 
 disendowment would be a light price to pay. 
 
 And then there are the grave-clothes : one smiles 
 to think of them. How terrible it would be if a 
 bishop sent in his resignation to nine-tenths of his 
 vice-presidencies, and with them cut out as many 
 of his committees, abandoned his progress-confir- 
 mations, and abjured his formal preachings ! If 
 he put on his boots and took a penny bus, and 
 dropped in to one of his churches and talked to his 
 people unexpectedly, and shook hands with them 
 afterwards ! If instead of telling us to pray for a 
 large number of varied ends, and then reading the 
 old prayer of the Church Militant, he was in the 
 habit of praying extemporarily at that place ! 
 Surely an apostle would have done so. If he did 
 not wait for letters of business and Acts of Parlia- 
 ment, but reformed the Prayer Book of his diocese 
 on his own authority ! It would indeed be terrible 
 — terrible as an army with banners. The people 
 would believe in miracles again, for behold, these 
 dry 'bones live ! I have not the faintest idea what 
 the Establishment would do, though I expect it 
 
174 STANDING BY 
 
 would collapse under the strain, and I am perfectly 
 certain that there would be all kinds of mistakes 
 made, all sorts of liturgical indecencies committed, 
 all sorts of conventions outraged. I well believe 
 the very foundations of Society would move, and 
 that the world would actually be turned upside 
 down again. Of course both those things will 
 shortly come to pass, but it would be a return to 
 the days of the Apostles and not to the age of the 
 Barbarians, if religion brought them about. 
 
 Incidentally, of course, we should have to have 
 more bishops. One for every town or district of 
 two hundred thousand souls is about the proportion 
 required. Since almost every town or district in 
 England has at least one living worth £400 a year, 
 since the equalisation of all clerical stipends and the 
 sharing of parochial incomes and expenses would 
 give a big margin, there is no financial reason why 
 this episcopal increase should not come about. 
 Nor is there any ecclesiastical reason. Prime 
 Ministers do not make bishops, nor do Acts of 
 Parliament. Resolution on the part of the present 
 episcopate could give us our religious revolution 
 in six months, and it would be delightful to see the 
 Church disestablish itself by the simple method of 
 consecrating to the episcopate without the mandate 
 of the State. It would be quite mad, quite apos- 
 tolic. Adjustment would be the State's worry, 
 not ours, and I do not think the State would worry 
 much. It would free the Church and take the 
 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 175 
 
 greater part of the spoils quite readily. And then 
 the Church would come into the Kingdom of the 
 Lord Christ. 
 
 Remote and impossible as it all sounds, I write in 
 a land where such things have largely come to pass. 
 The Church in France is all but penniless. It is 
 not merely disestablished ; it is — or has been till 
 the heroism of its clergy in the War moved the 
 secret soul of the nation — even persecuted. There 
 are bishops in France with a curate's stipend 
 and a Third-Floor-Back Palace. And the result ? 
 France is not strikingly religious ; indeed, it is 
 strikingly pagan, for broad is the way and wide is 
 the gate that leadeth to destruction ; and narrow 
 is the way and strait is the gate that leadeth into life. 
 But the churches are full. The poor have the gospel 
 preached to them. The pure in heart see God. 
 The lepers are often cleansed, and even the lame 
 walk and the blind see. And no one says to a 
 French priest : " Don't talk to me of the Church 
 in France. No one knows for what the Church in 
 France stands. Let your Church live like Christ 
 before it preaches Him." For one knows for what 
 the Church in France stands ; one knows that 
 its clergy are despised and rejected and poor as He ; 
 and if Christ be still crucified in France to-day, 
 there are centurions at the foot of His Cross who 
 are moved to cry, " Truly this Man is the Son of 
 God." 
 
XIX 
 
 ROME 
 
 FIRST, a little story. 
 In this camp of 2000 boys from South 
 Africa, in addition to Church of England, 
 Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, French 
 Protestant, Zionist, Salvation Army, Wesleyan 
 Methodist, Dutch Reformed, and (at least two) 
 Seventh Day Adventist native Christians, there are 
 some seventy Roman Catholics. For all but these 
 we cater spiritually. Even I, although carefully 
 fencing round the administration of the Sacra- 
 ments to my boys, take my turn in the conducting 
 of somewhat varied services in which we can all 
 unite, chiefly because — at least so it strikes me — 
 there is nothing very definite about them. As 
 for the Sacraments of the Presbyterian, Congre- 
 gationalist, Baptist, French Protestant, Zionist, 
 Salvation Army, Wesleyan Methodist, Dutch 
 Reformed, and Seventh Day Adventist, which, 
 if everyone will promise not to be hurt, for it is not 
 meant in the least unkindly, we might hereinafter 
 call u the Band," after the never-dying example 
 
 of the churchwarden who, following two or three 
 
 176 
 
ROME 177 
 
 attempts, abandoned the task of repeating all the 
 musical instruments of the third chapter of Daniel 
 when reading that passage as a lesson — as for these, 
 I say, they all join happily and holily in one for the 
 ministrations of my two devoted colleagues of the 
 Wesleyan Methodist and Congregationalist bodies 
 respectively. Thus, despite my exclusiveness in 
 some matters (my sorely worried conscience being 
 unheard) we attain to a measure of unison, and 
 certainly to much affection. In short, one might 
 almost say that there would be no flies in the oint- 
 ment of the apothecary if it were not for those 
 seventy Roman Catholics. They have no priest ; 
 they get no Sacraments ; they tremble on the edge 
 of our common but to them forbidden devotions 
 like bathers on the brink of the Serpentine in mid- 
 winter. They feel that it is all but colder out 
 than in. 
 
 These things gave sincere trouble both to myself 
 and my brethren of the Band ; nor did we rest 
 under them day or night. We informed the official 
 Chaplains' Department on both sides of the House 
 (the A.P.C. and the A.C.G.) ; not once nor twice 
 I bestirred myself to see if I could not conduct 
 them to a local French Mass, and might have 
 succeeded if it had not been for circumstances over 
 which neither I nor the authorities have power ; 
 and finally, in desperation, I announced that I would 
 say the Rosary for them and for such of my boys 
 
 who were used to it, once on Sunday and once in the 
 12 
 
178 STANDING BY 
 
 week, commencing the following Sunday. It proved 
 to be the finally effective thing, effective doubtless 
 under Divine Providence, for I do not see how the 
 Roman Catholic powers could have heard of my 
 intention ; but immediately there was a sudden 
 intervention, and on this wise. 
 
 My own Sabbath Mass had been said for my own 
 boys at 5 a.m., and I was back in my cubicle con- 
 sidering how soon the light of the pearly dawn would 
 permit me to shave (as the devil had broken my 
 electric light bulb the night before), when my 
 native padre tapped on my door and threw in a 
 bombshell. " There is a Roman priest here, 
 Father," he said, " waiting to say Mass." I slipped 
 on my collar and coat and hastened out. 
 
 Now, for a priest so to blow in to a camp like 
 ours to say Mass, especially when he has an engage- 
 ment elsewhere an hour later, is to tempt Providence. 
 We are a big camp and a cramped camp, and we 
 send out gangs by day and by night. Where his 
 Reverence expected to say Mass, how he expected 
 to gather a congregation from boys sleeping, or 
 eating, or arriving, or departing, or falling in, or 
 falling out, or lounging about, or digesting either 
 supper or dinner or breakfast, as the case might 
 be, especially seeing that he knew no Sesuto, had 
 no assistant, and was even without a bell ; and 
 what he expected to find, I cannot tell. My im- 
 pression is that he was a true Evangelical and took 
 no anxious thought. But as my experience has 
 
ROME 179 
 
 been, in these circumstances, that if you do not 
 take that anxious thought first, you take it after- 
 wards, I hurried to his assistance. 
 
 It was therefore my cook-house, extorted by me 
 from the Camp Commandant even with tears, 
 and fitted by me at great expense, with crucifix, 
 hangings, candles, flowers, images, and kneelers, 
 that he used. It was our native Church of England 
 padre who gathered his boys, and, since the greater 
 number were out, made up a welcoming congregation 
 of our own Catholic-minded faithful, and it was he 
 also who selected the server. It was I who, when 
 the server broke down, took charge of the bell by 
 means of which the Basuto, dazed by the so sudden 
 apparition of a priest of their own Church, alone 
 recovered their wits and realised their way about 
 the service and answered the Mass, and it was I 
 who instructed the son of a chief there present to 
 lead them in the devotions to which they were 
 accustomed in Basutoland, and to sing a hymn. 
 A Roman Catholic white officer, seeing his Reverence 
 arrive, was present, but when an appeal was made 
 to him to say if the boys were prepared for Com- 
 munion, it was I who had to furnish the information 
 that they were not. In a word, I believe it was 
 the efforts of the Band that had, under Providence, 
 got him there, and certainly it was the efforts of 
 the Church of England that prevented him going 
 away empty. Yet for none of these things did we 
 obtain any blessing from the Church. For brother- 
 
1 80 STANDING BY 
 
 liness we received a stone ; for gratitude No, 
 
 I wrong him. He did nod once in my direction 
 and jerk out " Thanks," stony-eyed. 
 
 It was natural, therefore, that I should return to 
 my cubicle and meditate the while I cut myself 
 shaving in the hurry not now to be late for break- 
 fast ; and it is natural that I should be discoursing 
 on paper. For if ever I have had to stand by in 
 this War, it was this morning. The Church, tardy 
 but persistent and unchanged, had swept in, using 
 my gate and path and tools, and even the children 
 of my household ; had garnered of its own ; had 
 regally assigned to me my part. I could stand by — 
 or not, as I pleased. Maybe even this infallible 
 Church did not know how used I had grown to 
 that, nor to what profit I might put it. . . . 
 
 What strikes one first, then, again, is the 
 magnificent testimony of the Church of Rome to the 
 inviolability of Truth. Not even the shock of an 
 unparalleled world-war can shake that witness. I 
 have heard stories of concessions, but they have 
 certainly been very much in part, and they give 
 no more sign of generally breaking down this resolu- 
 tion than an occasional fall of chalk indicates the 
 abolition of the cliffs of Dover. No truck with 
 heretics because of the holiness and undividedness 
 of Truth — that is the attitude. And whatever 
 else we say, let us express our enormous obligation 
 for such testimony. Looking back over the last 
 three centuries, how, if it had not been for Rome, 
 
ROME 1 8 1 
 
 should we still have had a voice amongst us to say 
 that Truth and Purity are sisters ? That if a 
 doctrine is a revelation of the mind of Christ, neither 
 death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
 things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 
 nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
 must be allowed to separate from it — this is her 
 agelong witness. It is magnificent. It is almost 
 incredible. It is all but a final proof of her divine 
 claim, for unquestionably it is a rock upon which 
 one dashes oneself to pieces or by which one is 
 ground to powder. 
 
 The question, of course, is how far Charity ought 
 to be a solvent, in which connection, taking our 
 microcosm here as an example not untruly repre- 
 sentative of greater things, the solvent has made no 
 impression at all on the rock in the case of Rome, 
 has had a very considerable impression on the 
 Church of England, and has done wonders for the 
 Band. In the case of the latter, indeed, one is 
 tempted to ask if there is any of the rock left, except 
 perhaps in solution. To continue the metaphor, 
 it may be that what is wanted, and what is about 
 to come, will be a fresh and better precipitation of 
 truth. Those who hold so, would assert that the 
 sooner we dissolve what is left of the rock among 
 ourselves, the sooner that precipitation is likely 
 to take place. They would even, for the good of 
 our souls, place us over the Bunsen burner, for 
 which reason, it is said, Rome once placed men 
 
1 82 STANDING BY 
 
 over the fires of Smithfield. So do extremes 
 meet. 
 
 But the problem is not quite so easily solved. As 
 true metal is untouched by the acid, so Truth 
 cannot be diminished by Charity, and we are really 
 only brought up again against the question as to 
 whether any among us have all the truth, or a few 
 among us some of the truth, or none among us any 
 of the truth ; as to whether any among us have no 
 dross, a few among us but little dross, or some among 
 us nothing but dross. I take it that the Church 
 of England is chiefly insistent that we all have some 
 gold and some dross. It worries her. Members of 
 the Band, it seems to me, are less worried because 
 largely convinced that they have very little dross 
 and that Rome has very little gold. But I wish 
 we all admitted more freely that no one sets the 
 true value on gold more resolutely and unflinchingly 
 than Rome. No other Communion would sooner 
 her children went unfed by ministries at all than 
 be fed by any other than her own ; no other would 
 receive so much at our hands as she did this 
 morning, and yet still maintain unfalteringly 
 that we were nothing but heretics and without 
 the Fold. 
 
 But, secondly, this morning's service was really 
 an amazing illustration of Catholicity. There is no 
 getting away from it. Consider what that priest 
 did. Knowing nothing of natives whatever, and 
 utterly unable to speak a word of their language, 
 
ROME 183 
 
 he walks in as cool as you please, and is able to 
 provide them with a service which (as they testified 
 and as I could hear) they enjoyed immensely, and 
 which I have no doubt uplifted them. I imagine 
 myself in a like situation. I should have begun 
 by fussing about hymn-books, looking for an inter- 
 preter, and so on. I remember once in a camp being 
 in just the same position, and I remember how 
 utterly things failed. Nor is it any use to say that 
 any use of a liturgy would obviate this. Our litur- 
 gical practice does not. Partly, no doubt, owing 
 to our different uses, but partly because in our 
 Holy Communion emphasis is laid on language, 
 and the language of the Prayer Book at that, the 
 vast majority of our boys would have been lost in 
 such a situation. A strange priest and a foreign 
 language would bewilder them. I have proved it 
 and I know. Of course boys trained in very High 
 Church circles are different, or should be ; but there 
 are few of our missions which teach as the Romans 
 teach, and all but none who face the possibilities and 
 the consequences of Catholicity, and educate for it, 
 as they do. In consequence, these Kaffirs could 
 attend the Mass of a foreign priest at a moment's 
 notice, and understand what was done. 
 
 And then there was that other slight point ; the 
 white officer came to Mass with them. I will not 
 say that there are no white men who will go to our 
 services with natives, for that would not be true ; 
 but our normal custom is to have two services, 
 
1 84 STANDING BY 
 
 one English and one native, one white and one black, 
 and their normal custom is to have but one. It 
 never enters their heads to question it ; it rarely 
 enters ours to suggest it. Last Sunday I had fifty 
 boys at 5 a.m. and thirty more at 6, and five white 
 men at 8.15. I have seen the same thing all round 
 Africa, at Zanzibar, Cape Town, Sierra Leone, and 
 Port Said. One may talk around it, seek to pooh- 
 pooh it, or object to it, but the fact is that that 
 Catholic altar this morning transcended in a moment, 
 without premeditation, and as a normal thing which 
 I do not suppose even arrested the attention of 
 priest or people, black or white, all bounds of dis- 
 tance, of colour, and of caste. And this is a wonder- 
 ful witness among us at this time. For the Cross 
 alone does this. The Cross of the battlefield anni- 
 hilates all barriers, as we have seen these days a 
 hundred times, and so does the Cross of the Roman 
 Catholic altar. 
 
 I had got so far in my meditations when there 
 dawned on me another thought. True, Rome 
 has her laurels, but the Church of England, might 
 she not fairly claim some too ? The Band is proud 
 of its charity, but I doubt if any other than the 
 Anglican Church would have furnished a minister 
 capable of and willing to assist at a Roman Mass 
 at 7 a.m., and conduct an interdenominational service 
 at 10. If my brothers helped to bring that priest 
 to the door, they did not follow him in, and they 
 would not have been of much use if they had. I 
 
ROME 185 
 
 did, and I have brought them to other doors before 
 now, and followed them in. Yet if this be charity, 
 God knows, on the other hand, that we hold to 
 Truth in our own way. We are generally black- 
 guarded for fencing our Table, and for exclusiveness. 
 I do, here, insist on Sacraments, and Sacraments 
 first. Neither side understands, and both despise 
 us. Some even hate, but most the rather mock. 
 We play fast and loose with Truth, says Rome ; 
 we are absurdly dogmatic, say the others. Our 
 charity is no true charity but a weakness, says 
 Rome, for we pander to heretics ; our charity is a 
 backboneless thing, say the others, for we will not 
 act upon it. Both cast us out. It is perfectly 
 true : the Church of England, seemingly too weak 
 to stand the next blow, is isolated and alone in 
 Christendom. It was that loneliness that first laid 
 chill fingers on Monsignor Benson's eager heart 
 as it has on many another, and relief still seems 
 very far. 
 
 I lifted my eyes. On a shelf in my room stands 
 a plaster figure. The Saviour, bent of back and 
 burdened with His Cross till He is like to fall, moves 
 utterly forsaken down the Via Dolorosa. I looked 
 at it very long, and never do I remember to have been 
 so cheered. Every Communion of faithful people 
 who try to follow Him doubtless manifest some 
 aspect of the Christ, and to some may fall the high 
 and noble share. But if, in our very hopelessness, 
 the Lord Christ hold out to us, because at least we 
 
1 86 STANDING BY 
 
 try to be faithful to the vision that we have, 
 the vocation to manifest His loneliness and His 
 shame, why, then, we will drag our weary feet 
 even to Calvary with song in our hearts and light 
 in our eyes. 
 
XX 
 
 CONTRASTS 
 
 NOTHING has been more striking during 
 this year of standing by and watching the 
 great drama of life than the contrasts it 
 displays. Tragedy and comedy have ever jostled 
 each other, but when each is linked with death, and 
 set out naked before one's eyes, one sees the spectacle 
 as God must see it. Then it ceases to be a wonder 
 that angels weep, and devils tremble ; it is no 
 longer a cause for marvel that God should have 
 sought a Virgin's womb and a felon's cross. There 
 is in human nature that commands even these. 
 
 It was a late November evening that I was 
 hurrying home from the hospital, and to make a 
 short cut to the tram, traversed some back streets 
 little known to me. The cobbles of the roadway 
 were set thick with filthy, black, oozy mud, and 
 the pavements were slimed with it. The water 
 of the quayside scarcely stirred at all, and when 
 it did, there was a sound as if fat evil lips sucked at 
 the stone. A light drizzle fell, and brought down 
 soot from the upper air, begriming one's face and 
 
 hands, streaking again the gloomy, ugly, squalid 
 
 187 
 
1 88 STANDING BY 
 
 houses of the modern town. Occasional gas lamps, 
 half obscured, shone fitfully on the new mud splashes 
 thrown up from the road by passing cars on their 
 standards and on the walls of the footway. At 
 the corner I was bespattered from head to foot. 
 
 Yet one of the streets was busy, with a business 
 that made me so nearly physically sick that I was 
 glad to leave the path and walk in the middle of 
 the road. Every house had a street-door wide open 
 that revealed interiors of horror. It was not merely 
 that garish ornaments, sacred oleograph pictures in 
 such surroundings, soiled linen, and tumbled beds 
 were ugly beyond words, but the poor soul that 
 waited in each, or sat in the doorway, or lounged 
 out on the pavement, lent herself to the creation 
 of an atmosphere no less than devilish. They 
 differed, and yet they were all alike. Some were 
 garishly dressed, others more slatternly ; some 
 with tumbling hair, attractive in its way, others 
 with horrible nondescript-coloured coils hurriedly 
 and carelessly wound together with a certainty 
 that they would not be required to stay up long ; 
 some young, slim, and not bad looking in a coarse 
 way, others fleshy and over-painted ; some with 
 low-cut blouses, others with bodices half-fastened 
 and breasts all but exposed. But all were alike in 
 one way. Gay, bold, brazen, they used the lure 
 of the highest to tempt to the lowest, and dared to 
 call lust, love. If there was one such in the short 
 street, there were twenty. 
 
CONTRASTS 189 
 
 But towards the end, the houses gave way to 
 low- windowed murky shops, selling God knows 
 what, and all but at the corner flared a window 
 gaily lit, from behind which came loud voices. 
 As I passed, and in the instant of my drawing 
 abreast of it, a door swung open and a man pitched 
 out. A burst of sound followed him ; oaths, a 
 querulous complaint, a rattle of gay laughter, if it 
 was laughter that could be so harsh. On hands 
 and knees the man came down, fell sideways, and 
 rolled into the gutter, where, in a trickle of ooze and 
 a mass of slime, he lay still. The door was banged 
 to. A girl of thirteen or so, smiling eagerly, and 
 two or three young children, crossed towards us to 
 look on. 
 
 I moved to the gutter and seized the man, pulling 
 at his arms to get him upon his feet. He stirred 
 and raised himself a little, so that the light of the 
 yellow window fell upon him. It was a boy's face 
 that looked at me, deadly white despite the streaks 
 of filth, and his curly hair was matted with the 
 mud. It was the King's uniform that he wore, and 
 there were badges of rank on his shoulder straps. 
 He wiped blood from his lips with the back of a 
 bleeding hand, but he looked up at me with eyes 
 still reasonable and burning with the horror of 
 knowledge. " Oh, my God," he exclaimed, " is 
 this Hell ? " 
 
 Against that I set a village street. We had 
 halted the car for lunch, and eaten it in the small 
 
190 STANDING BY 
 
 parlour of an inn still served by a woman despite 
 the all but continuous thunder of the guns not far 
 away. Occasionally there was a louder crash near 
 at hand, for they were intermittently shelling the 
 road and the place. I stood by the table, for there 
 was not another chair, and ate an assorted meal of 
 pate de foie gras spread thickly on Bath Oliver 
 biscuits, cheese, chocolate, French bread, and beer. 
 My friend of the Y.M.C.A. and the two Red Cross 
 people shared a chair and a bench. We ate quickly, 
 for it was not a healthy locality. For all that, 
 there was traffic in the street, big motor-waggons, 
 an occasional swift car, the clatter of horse-hoofs, 
 a good many rather slow-moving Tommies. Our 
 car stood outside the door, and the driver, who 
 had finished his meal with us but now, was tinkering 
 at her. I could see him through the glassless window 
 as I stood. 
 
 Suddenly there was an explosion so near that my 
 tumbler crashed from my hand and I involuntarily 
 covered my face. Dead silence fell on the four 
 of us. When I looked up, the chauffeur was leaning 
 against the bonnet of his car, wiping the blood from 
 his face, which had been cut by a flying splinter of 
 glass, and staring through what had been the wind- 
 screen down the street. " Anyone hit ? " I called. 
 
 He glanced back and nodded. I ran out. There 
 was a pistol shot as I left the door. 
 
 A motor-lorry had been hit. I wonder if I can 
 describe it. A smashed chaotic mass lay in the 
 
CONTRASTS 191 
 
 middle of the road, one wheel still spinning in the 
 air, smoke wreaths drifting round the canvas body. 
 Blood had splashed the whole far side of the street, 
 and a man who had propped himself up against the 
 wall and was holding his head in his hands ; and 
 blood lay in a big pool and trickled towards the 
 gutter. Farther along, an orderly had been holding 
 a horse ; he was uninjured, but the Colonel, who 
 had hurried out, still held the smoking pistol of 
 mercy in his hand. But amongst the debris of the 
 waggon, where he had been blown by the explosion, 
 half hidden from me by a rapidly forming little 
 group, lay the figure of central interest in the picture. 
 And over the dull half-wrecked street was a grey 
 sky, and a heavy moist air that was already polluted 
 even to the door of the inn. 
 
 They made way for me when I said I was a chap- 
 lain, but two men were already bending over the 
 body when I reached it, for by good fortune a doctor 
 and a priest were both near. As I arrived the 
 former stood up, with a drawn face and a manner 
 which said he could do nothing. Then I saw that 
 from his waist downwards the poor fellow was 
 mangled untellably, but that his ashen face was 
 alive, and that his lips were gasping. The good 
 father was already saying something quickly but 
 firmly, and I arrested my motion of kneeling down 
 when I saw him sign the lad, whose own hands were 
 powerless, with the cross. 
 
 It was all over in a few seconds, thank God. 
 
192 STANDING BY 
 
 The three or four of us about heard the two half- 
 articulated names. "Jesus ! Mary I " he cried, and, 
 as I live to write it, smiled, and passed. The priest 
 got to his feet ; he was a little man. " Sure," he 
 said, with tears in his eyes, " the boy had no need 
 to die to enter heaven." 
 
 I have seen little of war, but I wonder sometimes 
 if our Lord gave me these two pictures, each so 
 complete, with more than me in His mind. 
 
XXI 
 
 KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 
 i. Philip 
 
 HERE, where factories on all sides and a 
 dozen tugs on the canal belch out smuts 
 continually, I remember it as a preter- 
 naturally beautiful day and another world. Our air, 
 6000 feet up in the Drakensberg, is stainless and in- 
 vigorating, and the sun we know shines on great 
 wind-cooled spaces of veld and mountain like the 
 love of God. Circling half the horizon from the 
 Camp, grassy slope and rocky krantz on the distant 
 Malutis are still undefiled, and I sometimes think 
 the wide lands at their base, through which flow the 
 silver rivers, have the atmosphere of holy ground. 
 Even in the Camp the grey aloe and the dark pine 
 and the brown huts have a quality all their own, 
 and in the garden, among the hardy flowers or 
 under the fruit trees, with the vista of kopjes show- 
 ing through the blue-gums, I have sometimes stood 
 still awhile in sheer delight with life. 
 
 So it was on the morning following the late 
 arrival of the fateful letter. I had it in my hand 
 13 
 
194 STANDING BY 
 
 as I went over to church, for I meant to read it 
 there, and none of the brown folk knew as yet 
 of the contents. The wide space before the church, 
 between our garden and the Sisters', was dotted with 
 them as I crossed it. From the bench under the 
 young oak by the far wall the elders called their 
 greeting ; by the sacristy door the boys were 
 already waiting me, merry and very friendly ; 
 and although the church is iron-roofed and earth- 
 floored, and you would not call my sacristy beautiful, 
 still I felt sad at heart as I went through to vest 
 for the service. 
 
 There was a full church that morning, and I felt 
 inclined to linger over the Sesuto words I have come 
 so speedily to love, or to stop and try to store more 
 firmly the little vivid vignettes of the service — 
 Sam's grave face and incongruous boots as he 
 handled the incense, Philip's nervous responses, 
 Peter's ready understanding and mastery of his 
 singing. But sermon-time came all too soon. I 
 let them sit down, and then I told them : the 
 Bishop wished me to go with the Basuto to France. 
 
 Some white people hate to hear that a priest 
 loves his black folk, and still more find it hard to 
 believe. At one time I, too, used to dislike the 
 man who made too much of it — it seemed so much 
 like affectation ; but I cannot help it, I love mine. 
 That morning, as I went on to speak briefly (yet 
 once more) of the War, and why the Basuto were 
 asked to help, and why I was glad to go, I took 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 195 
 
 them in, row by row, as they sat so silently staring 
 at me. There were the little children, clustered 
 about the pulpit steps and sitting below the figure 
 of the Good Shepherd, even they gravely under- 
 standing and very sorry ; behind them the elder 
 girls of the Guild of the Children of Mary — the girls 
 one strives to keep merry and bright and native, 
 while all the while a cursed civilisation and the 
 Devil seek to drag them away ; and behind them, 
 again, the black mass of the women on the floor and 
 crossing the whole vacant space at the back of the 
 church — the women whose ignorance is my despair 
 nine days out of ten, and whose faithfulness my 
 delight on the other. 
 
 Coming back up the other side were first the 
 ranks of men, upon whom our hold is weakest — 
 men one has to win — and then some rows of white- 
 haired or at least older fathers — the staunch old 
 Zulu, the burly ex-policeman who shot two rebels 
 with his own hand at my garden gate in the Gun 
 War, and poor old blind Zachariah, who seems to 
 me sometimes even now to see the King in His 
 beauty — to name a few of them. Still nearer, 
 younger men and boys, and all around me in the 
 sanctuary is the band x who serve on earth our 
 Lord's Majesty and seem to begin to feel the honour 
 of it. And so I told my going. 
 
 But it is of one of these latter that I want to 
 write. The service was over, and I unvesting and 
 
 1 Practically all of these have served in France. 
 
196 STANDING BY 
 
 putting away the chalice. As I left the sacristy he 
 was standing at the door, waiting to speak with me. 
 
 " What is it, Philip ? " I asked. 
 
 " I go with the father," he said. " When is it 
 that we must leave ? " He spoke just as abruptly 
 as that. 
 
 " But, Philip," I said, " you can't ! Think of 
 your wife and your first baby only a month old ! 
 What will she say ? And I don't know that I can 
 keep you near me. Also, it is a very far journey : 
 are you not afraid ? " 
 
 He looked up at me and smiled nervously. 
 " Wherever the father goes, I go," he said con- 
 clusively and very simply. 
 
 I was very glad. I had not thought that, in my 
 late days, I would meet with that old devotion 
 which democracy, even in black Africa, is fast killing, 
 and I knew he would be very useful. I could trust 
 him absolutely with all that I possessed ; and slow 
 as he is in some ways, and dull in others, he is a 
 boy who never complains, and who will set out with 
 a sack to collect the scattered liso at sunset after a 
 nine hours' march without a word, even if it is 
 raining and very cold — and I know no praise higher 
 than that. But what an adventure for him ! He 
 had never been so much as to Johannesburg. He 
 was newly married, very happy, very content with 
 his land and beasts and son. Yet he would leave 
 all and go out blindly to the end of the earth after 
 me. 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 197 
 
 " Philip,' ' I said, " I am very glad, but we must 
 ask your wife first." He smiled enigmatically. 
 
 The circle of huts of his family stand on the veld 
 high up on the rounded hill up which the road runs 
 from Camp, and you can see over the Caledon far 
 into the Free State, as well as right across our bit of 
 Basutoland, from there. A rectangle of aloes shuts 
 in the orchard and the half-dozen huts which lie in 
 a semicircle facing north, and on that side there 
 is a low turf wall also. Philip and I passed in 
 through the gap. The old father came forward at 
 once, old, but straight and finely built and un- 
 ashamed, his face beaming his welcome, courteous 
 yet humble, one of the finest native Christians I 
 have ever met and one of Nature's gentlemen. He 
 and I stood talking while Philip dived into a hut 
 and came out presently with his wife, a well-made, 
 tall girl, good-looking, unspoilt, but well taught. 
 She speaks capital English, and so it was in English 
 that I spoke. 
 
 n You know," said I, addressing both her and 
 the old man, " that I am to go to France. I told 
 you of it in church this morning. Now, Philip says 
 that he wishes to go with me, and although I wish 
 it very much, I would rather he asked you before 
 he decides. He will be away at least a year ; he 
 will run considerable danger ; but he will be serving 
 his King — and his God. What do you say ? " 
 
 Clearly the girl had not expected it, and she stood 
 dumb. Then she looked down at the babe in her 
 
198 STANDING BY 
 
 arms and then up at her husband. Remember, 
 she was a native woman, and she was being asked 
 to allow her husband to go into the unknown for a 
 period that seems endless to natives as to children. 
 Her face clouded and she burst into tears. 
 
 We stood silently, the old father with a queer 
 look on his face. But it was he who spoke first. 
 " You have not spoken," he said. 
 
 At that she turned to me. " Let him go," she 
 said, " but, oh, Father, protect him," and, turning, 
 she dived from sight into the hut. 
 
 The old man took a prodigious pinch of snuff. 
 " Ho ! " he said contemptuously, " the women 
 of our people are not as I knew them. In the old 
 days, when the King called the young men to 
 battle, their women leapt with joy that they should 
 serve, and sang if they came not back, forasmuch 
 as they had died for their King ! Ho ! The 
 women of our days are children and water ! " 
 
 " But she said he could go," said I. 
 
 " But with tears," he retorted. " Why should 
 she weep? He is honoured; let him go. No, no," 
 he grumbled ; " our women are not as they once 
 were ! " 
 
 He exaggerated a little, I think, but the old 
 fighting spirit thrilled one. Neither he nor Philip 
 looked back from that attitude, even on the last 
 morning. It was a Tuesday, and the church was 
 packed while I offered the Sacrifice for the guardian- 
 ship of the Holy Angels, just as we offer daily at 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 199 
 
 our little side-altar of Our Lady. They knelt all 
 around me, the black folk, and right back, filling 
 the church, and afterwards they waited for me to 
 go to the door and shake hands with each. But 
 then native passion let itself go. The tears of the 
 women soaked my hand as they bent, again and 
 again, despite all that I could do, to kiss it, and 
 even the men were not dry-eyed. And when they 
 were all out, Philip and I walked over to the Rectory 
 in the clear, bright sun silently ; but I vowed, 
 before the God who hears in the silence, that I 
 would come back to these the people He had given 
 me, if He permitted, though the coming meant 
 almost the renunciation of nationality. Better 
 than honours, better than riches, better than the 
 fellowship of England, is the treasure I had seen 
 that day. 
 
 2. At Evening Time 
 
 The first batch of my own boys had been in 
 France nine months before I found them again. 
 I had had letters, but the native letter does not 
 tell you much ; it usually says that the writer 
 is going to tell you everything when he sees you, 
 and will you please keep his job open for him. 
 They took, indeed, a good deal of finding, for in 
 France one does not usually know where one's 
 own brother is. One writes A. P.O. X. 25, or 
 something of that sort, and sends the letter out into 
 the blue without the least idea where X. 25 may be. 
 
200 STANDING BY 
 
 So have I written A. P.O. S. i for a long time, and 
 finally by chance discovered what S. i meant. 
 After that it was easy. I went there, on duty, but 
 the boys did not know I was coming. 
 
 Somewhere, then, in the north of France is a 
 little town by the banks of a small but swift river, 
 as famous now as any in Europe, where the nave of 
 a great church, which was planned but never com- 
 pleted, lifts — or used to lift — twin towers, of the 
 style of Rouen and Amiens, over quaint houses, 
 and, for the most part, narrow, old-fashioned 
 streets. My cattle-truck on the troop-train in 
 which, destitute of even straw for a bed, I had 
 passed the night rolled grumbling to a halt outside 
 the station while the day was still young, but the 
 Camp was a dozen or more kilometres out of the 
 town. So I spent that sunny day of early autumn 
 poking around the canal and the precincts of the 
 church until, in late afternoon, the motor-waggon 
 put in an appearance which was to carry me on. 
 Riding out through the gathering dusk, the country 
 was strangely reminiscent of Cambridge. The 
 rich water-meadows and the little thickets of trees 
 and the half-hidden villages lay still and sweet- 
 scented as they lie in the valley of the Granta. 
 There is something about that damp, clean, earthy 
 smell which a man can love with all his heart. 
 It is a primitive kind of smell. One belongs to it. 
 
 So, at evening time, we climbed the hill to the 
 notice-board on the tree which tells you that here 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 201 
 
 is a camp of negro workers and you must not loiter. 
 It lay to the right of the road, and the ground slopes 
 down to the river, and rises, across the water, to 
 a forest whose black outline lies along the skyline 
 — a skyline lit at night about that time with the 
 flashes of distant guns. The boys' compound lay 
 among the trees and fields, and seemed a hundred 
 times more suited to the boys of veld and berg 
 than the smoke of big towns. At once I sought 
 out the padre, and found that the daily evening 
 services were about to begin. There were two 
 held daily, one in Sesuto, one in Zulu. The Zulu 
 used the little church ; the Basuto met, I was told, 
 in one of the big huts. I seized the opportunity. 
 I would go alone and unannounced, I said, and 
 see how my boys were conducting themselves. 
 
 The huts, big things taking forty boys in each, 
 were in long avenues, and I asked my way among 
 them. I was directed to a hut at the end of one, 
 and knew it for the place by the sound of singing 
 as I drew near. At the door I paused and looked 
 through the window. And there I stood until the 
 last hymn. 
 
 This is what I saw. A swinging lantern at one 
 end gave light to the conductor. I recognised 
 him. He was one of my own catechists who had 
 enlisted as a labourer and remained a private all 
 the time. But day by day he had gathered the 
 Basuto of the Camp for prayer, unpaid, unordered. 
 I saw him many times afterwards, wandering 
 
202 STANDING BY 
 
 through the Camp, ringing his little bell, like a 
 Francis Xavier through the streets of Goa. And 
 there he stood, in his working clothes, a group of 
 native N.C.O.'s about him, conducting the short- 
 ened evening service as I had taught him to do 
 at home. All round the room were the boys, and 
 I picked up faces among the shadows. Most of 
 them had the rough, low stools that the native 
 man constructs for himself in these days, and the 
 majority their own books, and they stood or sat 
 or knelt with that curious air of simple independ- 
 ence that is indefinable, but very really present 
 among them. The yellow light gleamed on the blue 
 uniforms, the bare walls, the serious faces, and lost 
 itself in the shadows. So, night by night, they 
 gathered, unashamed and uncompelled, and as one 
 looked one wondered. How many British com- 
 panies could have produced a similar daily scene? 
 It is inevitable that the question should be asked, 
 and not only it. How many British companies 
 have privates who do what my catechist did un- 
 asked and unrewarded ? 
 
 Later on I questioned the padre in charge, and 
 learned how unostentatiously but how firmly he 
 had dropped into position, and how regularly 
 he had held to it. It interested me enormously. 
 The man was doing Chaplain's work, but he was 
 a labourer, not even a lance-corporal. It agreed 
 with his record. I had found him, when I took 
 over the Mission, in charge of an out-station which 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 203 
 
 was unquestionably a failure. I judged that it 
 was not his fault, but the fault of circumstances, 
 over which neither he nor I have control, and that, 
 moreover, the out-station had been badly placed 
 from the start. So I acted, and closed the place, 
 throwing him out of employment in mission work. 
 Nor had I anything else to offer, until I bethought 
 me that I might strengthen very considerably 
 another station with his extra labour. He had, 
 however, been getting £2 a month, and I could not 
 afford to give that, with the Government grant 
 going elsewhere as a result of closing the first place. 
 But I reckoned my luxury might pan out as worth 
 £12 a year, and that, if not, I could make that good 
 without so much difficulty, and I offered him the 
 new position of a subordinate on a central station 
 at half the wage he had been earning when he 
 was also his own master. As alternatives he might 
 have either gone back to mine labour and earned at 
 the least four times as much, or he might have gone 
 on living on his lands as an ordinary person, but with 
 no Christian work other than the little he could 
 do in his spare time. He chose my £1 a month, and 
 I made a mental note of him. 
 
 Then came the War, and he and a few others 
 asked if they might go. It was a difficult decision, 
 but I decided to thin out even the few catechists 
 I had in answer to that great call, and I let him 
 go. As I say, he joined as a private, and a private 
 he has remained. Day by day, wet or fine, he has 
 
204 STANDING BY 
 
 done his eight hours' or more manual work, and 
 night by night gone round with his little bell, calling 
 to the prayers. He has taught, too, and gathered 
 men for the Sacraments, and done the padre's job 
 as a whole better than most padres. And yet 
 priesthood, under our system, is beyond him abso- 
 lutely. He could never possibly learn the Kings of 
 Israel and Judah, and even St. Paul's Epistles can- 
 not mean much to him. Maybe we are right. 
 Maybe the charismatic ministry should not be 
 always recognised by the gift of regular orders ; 
 but is this true of the Lesuto and like places, where 
 we need both so ? I cannot agree. In any case I 
 believe that man has done as much for the Church 
 on his foreign service as any native padre with his 
 higher status and much greater pay. And I 
 believe in my heart of hearts that he has done 
 more than I with my captain's rank and all that 
 goes with it. 
 
 I opened the door and walked in while they were 
 singing " Abide with me," their all but invariable 
 evening hymn. The catechist looked up and re- 
 cognised me, and his face lit up eagerly. And after- 
 wards the rumour ran around, and he himself walked 
 back with me and cried down the avenues : " Yes, 
 it is our father ! The father has come at last ! " 
 
 It was the same on board ship. One typical 
 evening we were lazing along in the convoy on no- 
 body knew what course, far from land, and not far 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 205 
 
 from the Equator. The sun was going down as he 
 only can go down in those latitudes, a great fierce 
 glowing ball that dipped visibly into the clear-cut 
 horizon. I had strolled along the boat-deck to the 
 stern reserved for the boys, and joined a little group 
 of officers who leaned on the rail. and looked down 
 on to the well-deck. The wide mouth of the hold, 
 planked over and ringed in, was the site of the daily 
 evening church. In the centre, a small space cleared 
 around him, stood the native padre, in his uniform, 
 bare-headed, and all around clustered the boys 
 as thick as bees. In the dying light and in the rich 
 afterglow the service went on — a hymn, a reading 
 of Scripture, a few minutes' explanation, some 
 prayers, a hymn, an extempore prayer, the Grace, 
 and the King. The face of the padre as he prayed 
 impressed me very much. He was so quiet, seem- 
 ingly a little indifferent as to who heard, so grave, 
 so simple. One looked curiously at the boys. 
 The Christians stood reverently motionless ; the 
 heathen, for the most part, gravely watched, a little 
 awed ; some (and one knew them for town-boys 
 or half-castes, on the whole) lay around the ring 
 and smoked indifferently. The padre finished and 
 put on his cap. " The King," he said in English. 
 All then stirred or settled down to attention, and 
 we on the boat-deck lifted hands to the salute. 
 The native day was done. 
 
 A Lieutenant and I strolled forrard together. 
 
206 STANDING BY 
 
 " Two services every day they have, don't they, 
 Padre ? " he asked. 
 
 " Yes," said I. 
 
 " Extraordinary thing ! " he said ; " they seem 
 to like services." 
 
 " Yes," said I. 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders. " Rum thing," he 
 said ; " the Lord knows why ! " 
 
 " I expect He does," said I. 
 
 He stared at me. 
 
 3. The Romance of Missions 
 
 Before ever I went to Africa, I used to do a good 
 deal of public speaking on behalf of Missions, and 
 looking back at it now it seems to me that the things 
 one commonly said on the platform then it would 
 be impossible to say to-day. In those days one's 
 mental attitude was always that of one who appealed 
 to a wealthy and energetic home Church on behalf 
 of the infant Churches overseas and the unfortunate 
 heathen. One knew, of course, that there were 
 elements of weakness at home and elements of 
 strength abroad, and undoubtedly there is more 
 money at home than abroad ; but for all that, I 
 feel now that the days in which such appeal was 
 possible are past for me. Writing here to-day in 
 France, with Africa on the one hand and England 
 on the other, it is Africa — native Africa — that 
 makes one's blood run hotly and one's courage 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 207 
 
 leap high. There is the Christianity of the Apostolic 
 Church ; there is life and love ; there faith is the 
 great adventure, the romance, the triumph, the 
 laughter that it was when the world was young. 
 A call to work in England would be to me a dreadful 
 heart-searching. I should fear that in trying to 
 save England I should become a castaway. But 
 in trying to save Africa, Africa saves you. 
 
 I was coming gradually to think this before the 
 War, but the War has settled it for me. Up there, 
 in the mountains of Leribe, one tends to forget 
 what English Christianity is like. One positively 
 forgets that people are actually squabbling still 
 about vestments and fasting and discipline, and 
 arguing over things like congregational singing and 
 the reform of the Prayer Book. There is, for 
 example, no Sesuto Prayer Book * as yet ; it is being 
 made. There is, for that matter, no English 
 Prayer Book in England to-day in the sense of a 
 Prayer Book suitable to the needs of the modern 
 English people. But the difference between Africa 
 and England is that in Africa we are cutting our 
 clothes to fit us, whereas in England you are always 
 trying to persuade yourselves that the ready-made 
 clothes provided are really an admirable fit. 
 
 But enough of these secondary things ; I want 
 to say something about the more important matters 
 of discipline and life. In Africa one gets to take 
 
 1 There is, of course, a Sesuto translation of the English Book of 
 Common Prayer. 
 
208 STANDING BY 
 
 them for granted, but when Africa came to France, 
 the contrast rose up and confronted one. 
 
 I propose to tell a couple of stories in this little 
 chapter to illustrate part at least of this. 
 
 At one of the regular Church of England Chaplains' 
 meetings at a certain base in France our A.C.G. 
 made a few observations concerning the observance 
 of Fasting Communion. He said it was an excellent 
 discipline if accepted with caution and moderation. 
 In France, however, there was no question but that 
 it had to be much modified. He was not speaking 
 of the firing-line, where it was admitted, even by- 
 Roman Catholics, that soldiers going into action 
 ought to be offered the Holy Sacrament without 
 restriction, but on the lines of communication the 
 pressure was no less stringent. For example, 
 labour men, going out to work for a twelve-hour 
 shift at 6 a.m., and doing that day in and day 
 out, should certainly be given Evening Communion. 
 He hoped there would be no trouble. . . . 
 
 Now, I am not commenting on this. Nothing is 
 farther from my wish than that theological questions 
 should obtrude here. But I stole a guilty and ashamed 
 look at my two native padres on my right. For the 
 day before a number of our black communicants, 
 going out day after day at 5.30 a.m. for often 
 twelve or more hour periods, had asked for and 
 received the Holy Communion at 4.30 a.m. It was 
 not Popery that made them do it. It was simplicity, 
 for it never struck them that an hour's sleep might 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 209 
 
 be more valuable than their Communion. And it 
 was grit. 
 
 Then there was my visit to another base which 
 is yet fresh in my mind. A new company of Basuto 
 had come over, and in it were some thirty com- 
 municants of my own district, boys who had made 
 up their minds in a body, after much deliberation 
 (as is the native way), to follow me overseas. We 
 were delighted to see each other. To them it was a 
 kind of wonder that I should be there. The days 
 of mysterious travelling over trackless seas seemed 
 to them, I suppose, a kind of inconsequent business, 
 and it was really wonderful, not merely to arrive, 
 but to find positively that a friend had been before 
 and was waiting for them. Only children and 
 natives really appreciate the wonder of life. Thus 
 they came running to meet me ; one covered his 
 mouth and said, " Ah ! " a great number of times 
 in delighted amazement ; another, my stable-boy 
 at home, responded to my questions with delightful 
 naivete. " How is the Mofumahali, your mistress ? " 
 I asked. " Very well, my father, but Johnny is 
 looking even better." Now, Johnny is my favourite 
 pony, specially in this boy's charge before the King 
 had need of him. 
 
 Now, these boys went out to work at 5.30 p.m. 
 that Saturday night. It was late November, and as 
 it chanced a particularly stormy week-end. All the 
 night it rained, and the wind was piercingly chill, 
 and as I watched them march off through the 
 14 
 
2io STANDING BY 
 
 horrible mud, I thought how miserable the open 
 wharf-side would be all that long night. At mid- 
 night they knocked off for rest and food, but 
 this latter the thirty odd communicant lads refused. 
 At 6.15 a.m. on the Sunday morning the company 
 tramped in at the Camp gates. They were dismissed 
 and fell out. These Christians then, without 
 a word, streamed off to the hut in which an altar 
 was prepared. I was waiting there, and one by one, 
 as many as had need, they came up for the absolu- 
 tion of the Precious Blood. Then we began the 
 Holy Communion. A Hlotse server served me as 
 at home, and as at home we sang Sanctus and Bene- 
 dictus, and the Agnus and Salutaris Hostia. As 
 I passed down the kneeling line with the Holy Sacra- 
 ment, I looked at them. They had been working 
 at carting sacks of flour, and the stuff had stained 
 and caked their faces. They were wet and tired 
 and cold. And I was so proud that I found it hard 
 to speak. . . . Not that I would have spared them 
 one single hardship ; not for anything would I have 
 given them that day breakfast and four hours' sleep 
 first. It is this that breeds warriors for the Church's 
 hour of need. 
 
 Missions are romantic beyond words, and there 
 are many aspects of their romance. Four of the 
 boys that morning had done public penance for 
 breaking the Seventh Commandment before they left 
 Basutoland. But I have seen so many white 
 communicants break the Seventh Commandment 
 
KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 211 
 
 without doing public penance that I no longer 
 hesitate to write such a fact as that. Indeed, I 
 glory in it. This is the romance of missions that the 
 angels sing about the Throne of God and of the 
 Lamb. 
 
 A tolerant, clever Presbyterian minister whom 
 I met at Cape Town said to a friend of mine of 
 Catholicism, " One must remember that it is the 
 Kindergarten Religion.' ' True. And the Lord 
 Christ said, " Except ye be converted and become 
 as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of 
 heaven." 
 
XXII 
 
 " AU GUIDON " 
 
 ONE must admit that the secret was not, on the 
 whole, well kept, but if it had been I should 
 have feared to risk even the camouflage 
 of this chapter. For the Guidon is a pearl among 
 
 restaurants and it should not be cast before 
 
 Well, perhaps that is an unhappy sentence, though 
 the first part is so happy that I shall merely take the 
 liberty of concluding the latter with, say, ' the 
 world.' The Guidon was not merely the Mecca 
 of gourmands ; it was not merely the Paradise of 
 such impecunious subs as knew it before their 
 pay was raised It was Olympic. It approached 
 Utopia. Here the philosopher could meditate upon 
 those simplicities that Mr. G. K. Chesterton holds 
 up to us, and here the student of men and of affairs 
 could yet savour the days that are past. It was in 
 that sense a survival, yet never was it behind the 
 times. Yesterday's limande never figured on the 
 menu. If the morning catch had been herring and 
 not sole, then, in proud simplicity, the Guidon 
 offered herring, and the habitu£, hearing some 
 chance visitor air his knowledge of the French tongue 
 
«AU GUIDON" 213 
 
 and of modern eating-houses by exclaiming at the 
 apparent scantiness of the bill- of-f are, would glance 
 up and catch Marie's eye, and lean back well content. 
 Oh yes ! Marie would get monsieur le capitaine le 
 limande, but the tone of her voice as she called 
 over the stair was enough. One knew that here was 
 a stranger from the outer darkness who knew not 
 the Guidon, and whom the Guidon would not know. 
 Some false friend, however, must have parted with 
 information for him to be there at all, for surely 
 no mortal officer ever found his way to the place 
 unaided. One passed to seek it down the populous 
 streets, past the great glaring hotels and restau- 
 rants — those strange modern caravanserais where 
 everything is provided, where one eats all dishes 
 at all seasons, plays billiards, drinks cocktails, sets 
 the gramophone going, ogles the girls, and sees the 
 world and (in France) his wife. Far be it from me 
 to say that these have no interest or delight ; I 
 would scorn such hypocrisy. Life in all its mani- 
 festations is interesting, and your modern popular 
 palace, whether in London or in Northern France, 
 has interest as one such manifestation. But a 
 little goes a long way, except in francs. One 
 may turn his back on such for the veld and the 
 mountain without regret. If this be civilisation, 
 it is enough to see and pass on. Few can have 
 delicious lingering memories of such. With pipe 
 glowing, the moon and the stars above, I shall not 
 dream about the camp fire of Tortoni's. 
 
214 STANDING BY 
 
 Pass down the street then, until you are on the 
 quay, but which of the many I shall not say. You 
 are now in the waterside region of many odours 
 and strange passers-by, who smell of the sea. The 
 little cafe debits may invite such, but not, easily, 
 you or me. We are out to do more than pass a 
 slip of humanity under the microscope ; we are 
 out, as the French say, to eat — a great business. 
 If we may do both at once, good ; and such, indeed, 
 is the prospect at the Guidon. We avoid, on the 
 narrow slippery footway, the French equivalent 
 of Mr. W. W. Jacobs' Night-Watchman ; we step 
 aside for a party of marines. I seize you by the 
 arm, for you would otherwise overshoot the mark, 
 and we enter a narrow, dark, unadorned (for I 
 will not write dirty) passage which allows the 
 entry of one man only at a time. At the far end, 
 and reached by faith and not by sight, is a door 
 with perchance a flicker of light beneath it. I 
 turn the familiar handle for which you would have 
 to grope, and we are in a kitchen. 
 
 A big fat man is the presiding deity. He looks 
 us over grudgingly at first, and conveys the im- 
 pression that newcomers are not wholly welcome. 
 One realises one is in the old world, for unlike 
 moderns, he makes no attempt to conceal his trade ; 
 indeed, he might well be — as he is — proud of the 
 art which you have come to admire. But this 
 kitchen, this restaurant indeed, for he is at once 
 cook and proprietor, is his home, his stronghold, 
 
"AU GUIDON" 215 
 
 wherein, if he dispense food, he has nevertheless a 
 dignity. Despite shirt sleeves and apron, he is 
 particular : oh yes ! monsieur is particular. It is good 
 in these days to find the vender of anything par- 
 ticular about his customer. His is the spirit of an 
 artist, not of a business man ; but the days when 
 domestic service and every humble labour was an 
 art, were the days of trade guilds and are gone 
 with them. The proprietor of the Guidon, should 
 he give, as his forbears, a stained-glass window to 
 the Cathedral, would not scorn, as they with their 
 fish-emblem in the corner, to mark his gift with 
 the sign of his trade. It is a proper pride. If I 
 hail him ' Monsieur ' and salute, it is not because 
 of the Revolution, but since this man has plainly a 
 vocation wherein he may well abide as nobly with 
 God as I in mine. 
 
 However, there are winding and steep stairs 
 before us, up which we pass, noticing, however, 
 that the kitchen is small and dark and must often 
 be very hot ; that there are no modern conveni- 
 ences ; that there is a mediaeval sanitation ; that 
 every dish has to be carried by hand up these 
 stairs ; and yet that the two or three girls below 
 are smiling. A miracle in these days, my masters ! 
 I do not account for it, I state it. I state also that 
 at the top is Marie, who is another miracle. Marie. 
 Henceforth there is only one Marie for me, and I 
 name her reverently. 
 
 Marie presides alone, whenever the restaurant 
 
216 STANDING BY 
 
 is open, over a small room that seats some two 
 dozen people. She has two satellites, it is true, 
 who assist on the tiny landing to remove and hang 
 up coats, but these do not enter the holy place. 
 The post of one is practically on the stairs, she is 
 indeed the link between Marie and the under-world. 
 If Marie, on the landing, cries Une omelette aux 
 champignons, it is the satellite who leans half down 
 the stairs and cries into the kitchen. Her sister 
 in labour properly occupies the small scullery 
 which is itself no more than a continuation of the 
 landing, and attends to the washing of plates. 
 Yet surely one pair of hands cannot wash all the 
 plates or wash them there, just as that tiny cup- 
 board cannot surely be the cellar whence come all 
 the wines — wines such as might have contented 
 the Three Musketeers. But then no more would 
 we have supposed that the small sideboard just 
 inside the room could hold all the dessert, all the 
 clean linen, all the knives and forks, essential to 
 the thrice rilling of that room (even if it be small) 
 as is done day after day. But then as with the 
 conveniences, the scullery, the kitchen, the cellar, 
 the sideboard, so with Marie, one asks, bewildered, 
 how she can be sufficient for these things ? It is 
 the mystery, I cannot explain it, but she and they 
 are. 
 
 A small room, then, we enter ; true, but a room. 
 It is a room with a personality, a past ; a room that 
 one feels instinctively knows that it is a room. 
 
«AU GUIDON" 217 
 
 Your modern restaurant dining-room is such a soul- 
 less thing. It has been made to order in a day, 
 its garnishing determined by the bank- account of 
 the firm. It is, as a rule, all gilt and glitter, and 
 all but a sinister thing, like the web of a spider, 
 only not half as beautiful. One knows it through 
 and through in a minute, and though it mav perhaps 
 dazzle, it is impossible to feel at home with it. I 
 know restaurants which make me hate the pro- 
 prietor with a horrible and deadly hatred, or, on 
 the other hand, cafes which make me momentarily 
 tolerant of modernity by a certain grace of decora- 
 tion ; but at the Guidon the room itself becomes 
 one's friend. It has lived, this room. I would not 
 change it in the least. I do not altogether agree 
 with its taste in adding to its walls certain highly- 
 coloured vulgarities of the Swiss lakes ; I should 
 prefer that it had remained content with the homely 
 oil-paintings it gathered half a century ago of ships 
 in full sail ; but then even one's best friends fail 
 sometimes in their taste. I do not love them the 
 less. I smile : maybe I love them more. So it is 
 here : in my dreams I shall often revisit this room, 
 and smile round at the walls, and seek my favourite 
 corner by the window, and glance at the grand- 
 father clock at once to see how long I can linger. 
 
 Sitting opposite me, you may notice that the 
 walls are panelled, and that in the corner is un- 
 mistakably one of those folding beds of the times 
 of our forefathers, that shut back into the wall 
 
218 STANDING BY 
 
 by day and was pulled out by night. You may 
 notice that no line of the old room is straight ; that 
 the linen is spotlessly clean and is changed for 
 every dinner ; that the tables hold six or eight 
 with the camaraderie of last century ; that a 
 charming little cord operates mysteriously these 
 old-fashioned windows that look out across window- 
 boxes of carnations to the docks. It is good to sit 
 here in summer with the window open. The scent 
 of the flowers blows in ; on the gleaming water 
 move trawlers, motor-boat patrols, an occasional 
 seaplane, transatlantic liners, and innumerable 
 small skiffs. Right opposite, moored against the 
 hospital, is the camouflaged liner that the incredible 
 malice of our enemies makes do duty for a Red- 
 Cross blazoned hospital ship. You can see from 
 here something of the pageantry of war, something 
 of that brotherhood which the threatening of our 
 liberties has called into being, something of human 
 wreckage from the flood of human hate. The 
 vigilant destroyer, the transport of cheering troops 
 from the States, the ship that takes passengers who 
 have to be borne to her in stretchers, all are visible 
 from that little window. 
 
 Not that Marie cares for you to dream. She is a 
 great type of French girl, is Marie. A miracle of 
 smart, deft waiting, she is also a marvel of accuracy 
 and a survival of the days before automatic tills 
 and cash registers, when men found it possible to 
 remember without Pelmanism. One says all this, 
 
"AU GUIDON " 219 
 
 and yet Marie remains on her pinnacle. She is not 
 explained. There may be a score of diners, but 
 never a note makes Marie of the orders of each, 
 and at the end, with her stumpy pencil on the 
 back of the restaurant card, she casts up omnisci- 
 ently the line of undecipherable hieroglyphics she 
 has just scribbled down. 
 
 Whether the waiting or the cooking is the greater 
 triumph of the Guidon I can never determine. Not 
 even Madame Poulard turned out better omelettes ; 
 no Paris restaurant can beat the steak ; but all 
 that is understandable. How the omelette comes 
 to smoke upon your plate so close upon the order 
 that you have hardly felt yourself to wait at all, is 
 utterly beyond me. Yes, it must be the service that 
 is the more marvellous. And even in war-time, my 
 good sirs, one can dine like a prince for six francs ! 
 
 Marie is shrewd, witty, plain, but of an excellent 
 figure, always well dressed, always self-possessed. 
 She can command a roomful of merry men as one to 
 the manner born, and that although one knows that 
 she is no icicle. One does not have to wait twelve 
 months for the mistletoe ; I know, for I have seen. 
 But money will not command such favours, for 
 Marie, though a waitress, is aware that she has a 
 kingdom and is a queen. That is one of her secrets, 
 the one I have learned, but for the rest, who can 
 say ? She surely could have married well, could 
 Marie, and the happy estate is not altogether absent 
 from her thoughts ; but she is not so much as 
 
220 STANDING BY 
 
 engaged yet. She pursues her even way. I have 
 seen her at the midnight Mass, devout, reserved, 
 for Marie has religion ; and I have seen her at the 
 Sunday Opera, gay, entrancing, for Marie loves life 
 like all good French girls. I have passed in the 
 early afternoon when dijeuner is over and dinner 
 not begun, and seen her through the window at her 
 sewing ; I have even seen her mistress of her home ; 
 but these things serve, as it were, one central purpose. 
 Marie is a waitress, and she is proud of it. It is 
 her vocation. She must know that the Guidon 
 would not be the Guidon without her. And if I 
 could paint, she should be shown dexterously 
 renewing the snowy napkins of that little table 
 near the window, with a background of flowering 
 carnations in the green boxes. 
 
 I know the story of how the Guidon came to be, 
 but I shall not tell it here. It would be to waste 
 your time and mine. I know that a romance has 
 been woven about it, of the days when the docks were 
 smaller and the edge of the town and the green fields 
 near at hand, but another pen has set that out. 
 It is enough for me that the little restaurant is a 
 sign of the days that are slipping away, but a type 
 also of what we may passionately hope to see when 
 all this madness of national jealousy and imperial 
 pretension and Hohenzollern play-acting is crushed 
 once and for all. If there is a nobility in good 
 service, a dignity in labour, a beauty in simple, 
 homely things well done, left anywhere in the world, 
 
"AU GUIDON * 221 
 
 it is here. Mine host of the Guidon belongs to the 
 days of faith, when a man was content with his trade 
 and found his joy in honest good-fellowship. His 
 ambition lay, not in piling dollars and quitting when 
 he had a fortune, but in the establishment of his 
 name in the earth, and in the enjoyment of reputa- 
 tion and respect. He presumed, simple fellow ! 
 that it was right for the king to rule, and the priest 
 to pray, and the minstrel to sing, and the brewer to 
 brew, and the innkeeper to entertain, and the way- 
 farer to enjoy and be grateful, without jealousy. 
 If he knew that he could cook, he ran a restaurant 
 and cooked ; he did not found a limited liability 
 company and stand for Parliament. And there 
 were homes and inns in merry England in those days, 
 just as in the rest of merry Christendom, and religion 
 in the land, for although there was always rough 
 with the smooth, man knew the secret of each, and 
 abode in his vocation with God. 
 
 We troop in and out of the Guidon, subalterns and 
 colonels, the men from America, Australia, South 
 Africa, England ; we jostle French, Belgians, 
 Italians ; our company is largely, too, of the mer- 
 cantile marine and of the King's Navy ; and we 
 belonged to all the trades four years ago. In a 
 word, the world is passing through the Guidon as 
 it goes up to war. One wonders if it knows that the 
 utmost it can hope to win on the battlefield is in 
 some sort mirrored here. A bottle of your good 
 red Beaune, Marie ! Sirs, to Liberty ! 
 
XXIII 
 
 JUMIEGES 
 
 THE two towers, grey and clean, rise from rich 
 water meadows and orchard lands, far from 
 main roads and the railway. The trees 
 are immemorial here ; the very barns so ancient 
 structures of beam and mud and moss that it seems 
 they must be in some sort alive not to fall ; and the 
 stone farmhouses have been dotted where still 
 they stand since the days when the bells rang in 
 the roofless towers. It may be the spirit of Jumieges 
 is to be sought at large in the wide peaceful lands 
 she owned of old. 
 
 The two towers rise, rounded, mutilated, no 
 longer twin, from the solid Norman western front, 
 and the daws wheel in and out of them. Within, 
 the massive nave stands yet, dangerous in decay, 
 but solemn, still, and grand, and one looks right 
 up the trampled floor, through the great wide- 
 flung arch of the choir, under that miraculously 
 sustained single side of the central tower, across 
 the grass that was the sanctuary, to the nine chapels 
 beyond. There is one of the nine left to show what 
 the eight were like, one so majestic in its isolation, 
 
JUMTEGES 223 
 
 so massive, yet so delicate, so serene, that it would 
 seem that the spirit of Jumieges might still live 
 there. 
 
 Yet nowhere else is turf so rich a green, nor could 
 finer primroses, violets, cowslips, anemones, star 
 more gladsomely its beauty. In no other ruin do 
 such tall trees grow straight by such ruined walls 
 as if they would support them. Surely there is no 
 rival anywhere to the beauty here of the clinging ivy 
 on the falling buttresses, or to the vista of yellow- 
 green beach and dark ancient yew and emerald 
 grass and starry flowers as one sees them through 
 the seventh-century church of St. Peter against 
 the grey stones beyond. And maybe the spirit 
 of Jumieges lives there. 
 
 Or, of the many who visit the ancient Chapter 
 House, set in shade, so cool, so still ; of the many 
 who look where the yawning graves, and the two 
 or three stone coffins burst open, tell again their 
 story of sacrilege ; of the many who are told that 
 on yonder raised step stood the reigning abbot's 
 chair, and that he daily governed living men across 
 the graves of his own dead ; of these some, maybe, 
 go awed away. Some, maybe, though fallen is the * 
 curtain of the years and strange our day, may find 
 heart somehow tuned to hearts once here. For 
 them, the spirit of Jumieges lives here. 
 
 Many have written of Rheims, Ypres, Louvain, 
 and now of Amiens in this War, but no one, so far 
 
224 STANDING BY 
 
 as I know, has written of Jumieges. Yet it is surely 
 impossible not to feel that there is a connection 
 between them all, and it is certain that men will 
 speak of them in one breath a century hence. Very 
 likely someone will write on the ruined churches 
 of France — Mont St. Michel and Jumieges, Rheims 
 and Amiens. Within the same covers will men recall 
 their glories ; but, as of storms upon the tide of 
 life, will it be written that Jumieges fell in the 
 French Revolution and Rheims in the German 
 invasion. 
 
 It is a strange fatality that human affairs should 
 be so fraught with destruction, that reformers 
 must be iconoclasts. One would have thought 
 that we might have accomplished our revolutions 
 without wanton destruction, or at least that the 
 centuries would have taught us reverence and 
 restraint. But no, Presbyterianism must needs 
 ruin Dunkeld, Anglicanism Glastonbury, Puritan- 
 ism Ely and many more, the Religion of the Goddess 
 of Liberty Jumieges, Calvinism the western front 
 of Rouen, Prussian Judaism Rheims. Each must 
 attempt to march to its conquests over the noble 
 and the fair. Yet each phase of thought has so 
 short a day, and none seems able to learn from the 
 past that at least it might not sully such name as 
 it has. 
 
 I trust that I shall not be thought unpatriotic if 
 I compare, for example, Jumieges and Rheims. 
 There seems to me to be so just a comparison. 
 
JUMIEGES 225 
 
 Germany has persuaded herself that she has a 
 culture which the world needs and which should be 
 imposed by arms. No monument of the past, 
 however precious, should be allowed to hinder the 
 consummation of this dream. The foe must not only 
 be beaten ; he must be cowed, trampled upon, 
 ravished, stripped, till he beg his life from the 
 conqueror, and perforce accept his ideals. So 
 France, at the Revolution, thought and acted. 
 The Church was largely the foe within its borders, 
 though the Republic declared war also on the 
 world. No monument, however precious, was 
 allowed to hinder the consummation of the dream 
 of liberty. The foe must not only be beaten ; he 
 must be cowed, trampled upon, ravished, stripped, 
 till he beg his life from the conqueror and perforce 
 accept his ideals. The brethren of Jumieges were 
 driven out, God knows whither ; maybe they 
 shed their blood as other religious in France of the 
 period. This great monument of piety and zeal 
 was first stripped, and then sold for a stone quarry 
 to complete its utter ruin. And so well was the work 
 done that not even millions of francs, such as 
 the Republic, grown wise, has poured out on Mont 
 St. Michel in order to restore what it destroyed, can 
 avail in this case. Even so, if Germany annexed 
 Eastern France, she could not rebuild the glory of 
 Rheims that her guns have laid waste. Roofless 
 walls and naked towers must stand on both sites 
 for generations to testify to human folly. 
 15 
 
226 STANDING BY 
 
 This old abbey, embowered in a bend of the 
 Seine, has become for me a place of pilgrimage. 
 Years ago now I saw it first, coming from the north 
 in the set of sun, and resting for a while at the ferry 
 to see the light die on the mellow grey towers among 
 the thin poplars and wide-spreading apple orchards. 
 Several times this year, coming from the south, 
 have I run through the forest above Rouen, and 
 down the hill to St. George's and across the flats 
 and through the tiny fields, until one sees first the 
 wall of the estate and then that noble stricken 
 front. The other day, the first primroses and 
 violets were about. The clean spring sunlight 
 rested on the lush grass and new green, and dealt 
 tenderly with the tumbling stones. One little 
 chapel came down last winter, and man will never 
 see again that carven roof that was. But still one 
 can pass in a few minutes from century to century, 
 from the sixteenth to the sixth ; still stand in the 
 great refectory and faintly see again the cloister- 
 garth, though only some half-dozen stones remain 
 to show its place. Here, where two thousand five 
 hundred brethren once laboured and prayed to- 
 gether, we soldiers of justice, toleration, and liberty, 
 under the flags of those two great persecuting 
 iconoclasts, Republicanism and Protestantism, 
 make a half-day's holiday. We visit what is shown 
 of the twenty miles of secret tunnelling that once 
 connected Candebec, Jumi&ges, and St. George's 
 de Boscherville. We wonder why they digged so, 
 
JUMIEGES 227 
 
 and jest, forgetful of that voice out of the past, so 
 amazingly tender and yet so pitiful : " We loved 
 passages. They were safe, and the priesthood 
 loveth secret places. There is something in us 
 that loveth mystical things, so we tell not all, 
 but leave it to the love which seeketh and is not 
 wearied." 
 
 I quote, of course, from that wonderful book 
 The Gate of Remembrance, and speak of Glastonbury. 
 But the spirit of those builders was everywhere the 
 same, and it was with a mind full of " Johannes, 
 the Child of Nature," that I visited Jumi&ges last. 
 I make no comment as I speak of him. Not for 
 me are these speculations of the Universal Memory 
 and the rest. It is a jargon some may understand, 
 but the voice that speaks out of those distant years 
 of that past age has a beauty of its own that silences 
 disputation. They say of Johannes : " Simple he 
 was, but as a dog loveth his master, so loved he 
 his Howse with a greater love than any of them 
 that planned and builded it. They were of the 
 earth — planners and builders for their great glory, 
 nor even, though honest men, for the glory of God. 
 But Johannes, mystified and bewildered by its 
 beauty, gave it his heart, as one gives his heart to a 
 beloved mistress. . . . Even as of old he wandered 
 by the mere and saw the sunset shining on her far- 
 off towers, so now in dreams the earth-love part of 
 him strives to picture the vanished glories, and led 
 by the masonry of love, he knows that ye also love 
 
228 STANDING BY 
 
 what he has loved, and so he strives to give you 
 glimpses of his dreams." 
 
 Ah, Johannes, I have never read dreams more 
 beautiful ! I am not ashamed to nil my chapter 
 with them, for if I too have dreamed so, I have not 
 the wit to set them forth as you. " At night," you 
 say, " the sound of many waters refreshed ye 
 parched soil. From tower and from the high roofes 
 the sound came like the sound of water floods, and 
 the gargoyles shouted each to each, and the cloisters 
 whispered comfort and refreshment as we lay under 
 the dormer roofe in parched and sultry nights. I 
 who speak mind me of the glory of sound even now, 
 and I ever loved the waters and the mere, and the 
 voices that whispered around me . . . therefore 
 loved I the rain on our hundred roofs, and the 
 myriad voices that came from the water spouts. 
 I didde sleepe on the south side, hard by the great 
 gabell, and soe heard I the sound whilst others slept. 
 Vai mihi, that it is departed ! and the voices are 
 heard no more. . . . 
 
 " We have sat in the grate gallery under the west 
 window and watched the pilgrims when the sun went 
 downe. It was in truth a brave sight, and one to 
 move the soul of one there. The orgayne that did 
 stande in the gallery did answer hym that spake 
 on the great screene, and men were amazed not 
 knowing which did answer which. Then did ye 
 bellows blowe and ye . . . man who beat with his 
 hands upon the manual did strike yet harder, and 
 
JUMIEGES 229 
 
 all did shout Te Deums, so that all ye town heard 
 the noise of the shouting, and ye little orgaynes in 
 ye chapels did join in the triumph. Then ye belles 
 did ring and we thought hyt must have gone to ye 
 gates of Heaven. . . . 
 
 " Ye have founden our Church, and ye holy places 
 where my unworthy feet have trod, and the Hall 
 where some did talk of Glaston and some did eat 
 that they might be strong for God's ordinances. 
 And ye have found ye lytell chappie where our most 
 holy ones did lie. Now, what think ye ? " 
 
 " What think ye ? " It is a cruel question to 
 ask of us, Johannes, in war-time. Do you know 
 our age ? Do you know that we live in a period 
 which has reduced skill to mechanical accuracy 
 and high adventure to a matter of the preponder- 
 ance of machines ? Do you know that our world 
 is bathed in blood because the half of it has made 
 Superman its god, and utility, commercial gain, 
 and pride of place his vestals ? You may have 
 loved beauty on earth too well, but you loved it 
 because it seemed to you a reflection of heaven ; 
 we live in an age indifferent to heaven and eager 
 to make of earth a model lodging-house. Gar- 
 goyles ! We waste no time on gargoyles ! Do you 
 think we care for the music of their shouting, and 
 for voices that whisper ? Pilgrims ? The only pil- 
 grims we know wait in theatre queues or fill excur- 
 sion trains. What do we think of you ? We 
 think you wasted your life. You did not breed 
 
2 30 STANDING BY 
 
 children for the State. You spent your time learn- 
 ing to sing Te Deum. We know God better. 
 
 " Pish ! 
 He's a good fellow, and 'twill all be well." 
 
 At Jumieges I have been glad before now that it is 
 a ruin. It is nobler so than as a museum, or a 
 " monument of the State," or a church devoted to 
 sacred concerts or exhortations to the Almighty 
 to do His duty, couched in (what did they say of 
 those state prayers recently ?) " nervous but manly 
 English." In some moods, one hardly grieves that 
 the Kaiser's guns are murdering Rheims, for, if he 
 conquer it, the guns may well at least have saved 
 the noble church from worse things. Edith Cavell 
 had a finer fate than many Belgian women. It is 
 better to die than live dishonoured. But must 
 it be so ? Is it not possible that this hellish agony 
 of war may teach us better things ? The light of the 
 flames it has lit shows up pitilessly the weakness 
 of our modern ideals, and maybe one other light 
 would be vivid enough. 
 
 Jumieges stands for the sovereignty of beauty 
 and truth, for the true kingdom of the soul. It is 
 a monument of the belief that God and His affairs 
 come first, and that the kingdoms of this world 
 can hold no more than passing good. We are so 
 incredibly utilitarian. The things that seem to us 
 important are the commensurable things of the 
 boey and the State and the present, and the rest 
 
JUMIEGES 231 
 
 come second or not at all. In the Army the medical 
 staff has every attention, the spiritual picks up the 
 crumbs. A hospital is necessary, a church irrelevant. 
 A recreation-room is all-sufficient. In civil life 
 we build primarily for the edification of men — 
 that they shall see and hear well ; we legislate that 
 they shall eat, sleep, breed, and work well. The 
 younger son goes into the Church. In the East, 
 the fakir is the object of veneration and respect, 
 in the West the millionaire. In the Middle Ages 
 the minstrel, the artist, the dreamer, despite all 
 the rough and tumble of the times, found a welcome 
 and a place ; among us none, save he can perform 
 a new music-hall turn or figure as a cinema artist. 
 This changed point of view runs all through life. I 
 pick up Mr. Saffroni-Middleton's charming book on 
 the South Seas, but he, and the world at large, have 
 no idea that it should be an arguable position that 
 a Christian horribly clothed, dirty and starving, 
 is better off than a heathen beautifully naked, clean 
 and well-fed, and that of the starvation of the 
 Christian and the heathenism of the Samoan, the 
 latter is incomparably the greater and more pressing 
 sorrow. 
 
 But this is to wander off a little, and I would not 
 do that. To come back to Jumieges ; here was a 
 community in which the service of truth and beauty 
 stood first ; in which all that marvellous and un- 
 stinted charitable relief proceeded from a love of 
 God ; in which healthful toil and the enr ' 'ig of 
 
232 STANDING BY 
 
 the earth provided to simple kindly souls joy in 
 labour, since they were for the glory of God. Men 
 were strangely content here. I write strangely 
 because we are so rarely content, and seek it last 
 of all where these found it. Communion with God, 
 honest physical toil, beauty and health, these 
 Jumieges offered to rest the soul. These were the 
 wages offered for the service of a lifetime. There 
 was neither minimum wage nor maximum standard 
 mentioned, though the monastery was almost 
 perfectly democratic. 
 
 It is perfectly true that the monastic life was a 
 special vocation, but it is interesting that the ideals 
 of the monastery were largely the ideals of labour 
 outside it. Those ideals existed in the world of 
 labour so long as the monastic system in its midst 
 radiated them — that also is interesting. For the 
 guild was extraordinarily like the community of 
 religious. It also was based on religion, and sought 
 both the sanction and reward of religion ; it also 
 maintained the honesty of physical toil, for 
 the master had first to serve his apprenticeship, 
 not as a junior partner but as a labourer ; and it 
 also set high the beauty of its craftsmanship as a 
 thing in itself a reward. With the passing of the 
 guilds, passed these ideals generally from the 
 economic world. 
 
 Let us be sure of our ground. The guilds were 
 not the product of a certain type of industry, nor 
 did they cease because the age of machinery was 
 
JUMIEGES 233 
 
 inimical to them. It was not the passing of the 
 individual touch in manufacture, nor the coming 
 of enormous markets and intense competition, 
 that killed the guilds. These things, indeed, have 
 created the trades unions, which tend more and 
 more to be a sort of guild. They fulfil much the 
 same function. They protect the craftsman, and 
 set high standards, not merely of wages ; they have 
 a social side ; their tendency is increasingly to 
 make the master a master workman, and to give 
 the workman a voice in the council chamber. But 
 guilds and trades unions came into existence for 
 totally different ends. They were inspired by 
 totally different ideals. The first were to make 
 possible the worthy exercise of crafts conceived as 
 noble ; the second to wage war on the capitalist 
 classes. The guilds found themselves instinctively 
 allied with religion, the trades unions treat religion 
 as a thing apart. 
 
 Despite modern conditions, then, therewis no 
 intrinsic reason why we should not have guilds 
 again, fulfilling the functions of trades unions in the 
 spirit of Jumi&ges. I am convinced that this is 
 the only solution of our troubles. The other day an 
 eminent and learned Oxford economist visited this 
 base to instruct the men in the proposed course of 
 modern economic legislation. He dealt at large 
 and very ably, with a wonderful touch of sympathy 
 to which the men eagerly responded, with the 
 Whitlow reports, and having finished, he invited 
 
234 STANDING BY 
 
 questions. The first was simple and direct. 
 " Good," said the private who questioned, " is all 
 that you have said, but, sir, in the last resort, if, 
 despite district committees and joint boards, men 
 and masters differ, what then ? " And the answer 
 was as simple. " We recognise that this system 
 cannot ultimately obviate this. It will decrease the 
 probability because removing many of the causes 
 of strife, but the possibility remains. In that 
 event the Government will not coerce. It recog- 
 nises the right of men to strike, the right of masters 
 to lock out. We must admit that ultimately we 
 shall be no better off than we were, if the worst 
 comes to the worst." 
 
 It was the frankest possible confession of the 
 weakness of our modern civilisation. " We can 
 do our best, but we admit our fallibility." Why ? 
 " The Government recognises the right of men 
 to strike, the right of masters to lock out." In a 
 word, the Government — the State — recognises the 
 supremacy of individual rights. It does so because 
 its point of view is material, earth-bound. There 
 is only one authority that does not recognise the 
 supremacy of individual rights, but subordinates 
 them to the rights of the brethren, and even of the 
 weaker brethren, and that does so because its point 
 of view is primarily towards God and cannot see 
 that earth is the final bourne. A union of masters 
 and men, based on the principle that, whatever 
 happens, the man has no right to strike and the 
 
JUMIEGES 235 
 
 master no right to lock out, for if so the noble craft 
 would be injured and the brethren be prevented 
 from the service of God in their labour, that was 
 the guild. A violation of its principles did not carry 
 its members to the Prime Minister, but to the Lord 
 Christ. 
 
 Yet there is hope. There lies before me a paper 
 setting out that " those things which England has 
 been ready to die for, we mean to make England 
 live for." They are : Good Homes, Full Education, 
 Sound Industrial Conditions, and Purity. Concern- 
 ing them it is written : 
 
 " The devotion and loyalty of the vast majority 
 of our soldiers is centred on Christ Himself as the 
 Leader. Men under Him can and will bring in the 
 Kingdom of God here on earth. In His Name 
 we ask you to think of these practical questions, 
 and to prepare yourselves to face them. With His 
 Spirit understood and His Laws obeyed, surrounded 
 by the unseen fellowship of those who — like Him — 
 have died for others, we shall see the better England 
 of our dreams and theirs." And there are three 
 names on the paper : " D. Haig, F.M. ; J. M. 
 Simms, P.C. ; L. H. Gwynne, Bishop, D.C.G." 
 
 What is this but the appeal to Christ in Whose 
 Kingdom the right of brother to fight brother is 
 not recognised, to the Master-Workman of the 
 carpenter's craft, Himself a religious ? Though 
 we have forgotten it, Jumieges enshrined the 
 spirit of those words. They would, if lived out, 
 
236 STANDING BY 
 
 build again the guild and the community-house 
 in what would be again " England's fair and pleasant 
 land," and they would set up Truth and Beauty 
 as pillars in a veritable House of God wherein 
 brethren would dwell together in unity. 
 
XXIV 
 
 THE WAACS 
 
 IT may seem on the surface sheer impudence 
 for one of the three officially black-balled 
 classes, " Officers, Natives, and Foreigners," 
 to sit down and write on the Waacs. Since all 
 save official conversation is forbidden, it is plain 
 that the writer should only have looked on from 
 afar, however grateful that from the height of 
 Pisgah he has seen the Promised Land. In more 
 sober English, despite my disabilities, I must write 
 of the Waacs, for, standing by in France and watch- 
 ing them, I see the fulfilment of a hope. 
 
 Like most others of my sex, I was reared to 
 regard women as inexplicable creatures. Those 
 modern text-books of human science, our standard 
 novels, told me so, and I also was fain to believe 
 the sight of my eyes. True, in the beginning a 
 woman looked ordinary enough, for I distinctly 
 remember seeing a baby in her bath and finding, 
 as a boy, honest friendship with a girl. But the 
 caterpillar changes to the butterfly, and not less 
 remarkable was the change in a woman. One day 
 
 one could run races and climb trees with her ; she 
 
 337 
 
238 STANDING BY 
 
 appeared to be possessed of legs and arms and a 
 useful body ; she could be addressed freely and took 
 a remarkably intelligent interest in birds' -nesting 
 and cricket ; but the next all this was changed. 
 Outwardly it was changed when one paid a long 
 farewell to the vision of her knees and calves which, 
 up to that point, had not been peculiarly interesting. 
 Inwardly she changed too, or, as I am now inclined 
 to think, was changed. She despised our dear 
 delights. She would no longer share the hollow oak 
 and seriously munch chocolate deposited a week 
 ago in a tin box beneath the crumbling, sweet- 
 scented stuff within, against just such a menace as 
 an Indian invasion. The companions she now 
 desired must have aged ten years in a day. She took 
 an hour to dress. . . . 
 
 At the time I, at least, was as ignorant of physi- 
 ology and sex as I am to-day of Cherokee, or nearly 
 so. Indeed, I was never illuminated by that lovely 
 mystery ; I merely became enlightened. By that 
 time it had become clear that there were two worlds, 
 and that she belonged to one, I to another. We 
 might watch each other ; we might occasionally 
 call across the abyss ; but that was all. It was, 
 indeed, recognised that we should meet in time, 
 but that meeting was held to lie to such an extent 
 upon the knees of the inscrutable but all-wise gods 
 that little was said about it. 
 
 This conclusion underran, surely, the whole tide 
 of .. affairs.* Certain occupations, games, in- 
 
THE WAACS 239 
 
 dustries, and ambitions were outside woman's 
 sphere, and certain others were outside man's. 
 This was no natural adjustment of affairs, but an 
 artificial. We did not say that a woman must not 
 vote because she could not, but because in our 
 opinion — an entirely arbitrary one — it was better 
 for her and for us that she should not. We did 
 not say that a woman could not be a navvy, but 
 that she ought to darn socks. It having been 
 proved that a woman was capable of taking an 
 Honours degree at Cambridge, we said that at 
 least she ought not to proceed to that degree. And 
 we did not base all this on the Holy Scriptures, 
 or the teaching of the Catholic Church, — the only 
 two authorities in life, — but we based it upon our 
 sense of what was fitting. In other words, we 
 based it upon a convention. Like most other 
 conventions, the Kaiser blew with his mouth, and 
 it was no more found. Probably it is his greatest 
 achievement. 
 
 So was made possible what I saw the other day. 
 It was wet and muddy under foot, and I was return- 
 ing from the outskirts of a big base city. As I 
 plodded along the semi-country road, sliding back 
 half a foot for every one I took forward, I saw three 
 figures approaching me. They wore breeches, 
 what appeared to be army tunics, heavy boots, and 
 puttees coated nearly to the knee in mud. Each 
 carried a varied paraphernalia of equipment slung 
 about its person. Each walked indiffeiemo to 
 
240 STANDING BY 
 
 appearances, or the condition of the road, with 
 that steady persistence which is characteristic of 
 our troops. All three smoked cigarettes, and they 
 were plainly comrades. But when I got a little 
 nearer I saw that the hair of the central figure was 
 half an inch too long for a modern man, and that 
 the figure was different. The central one was a 
 Waac. And it seemed to me that twenty years 
 slipped off, and that I looked at the companion of 
 my boyhood. 
 
 Not that the Waacs usually wear breeches, or 
 at least that — am I sufficient for these things ? — 
 the Waac breeches are not usually visible. But their 
 legs are. The Waacs are as graceful as men used 
 to be, what time women, except in the Church, 
 were as beasts of the field or as surias of the harem. 
 As I look at their uniform I always think that in 
 it women have not merely equalled but beaten us. 
 It is neat, workmanlike, and beautiful. The High- 
 land costume for men and the Waac for women — 
 perhaps these are the best the West can do. One 
 prays that women may never adopt (visible) 
 breeches, and never garrotte themselves in starched 
 linen collars. I honestly believe that as a sex 
 they will not do so, for I have almost limitless 
 faith in women these days. 
 
 But a truce to this : let us come to the creature 
 within the shell : what of the soul of the Waac ? 
 Everybody knows what the Waacs and their sisters 
 of this birth of a new age have done. From nurses 
 
THE WAACS 241 
 
 to farm-labourers they have shouldered the con- 
 ventions away and established, God grant for ever, 
 that what a woman can do that she shall do. What 
 she can do is not, of course, self-evident yet. Every- 
 one who stopped to think for five seconds knew 
 that she could vote, for of all the easy and inane 
 occupations that is the easiest and inanest. I own 
 that I have always been sorry that she wanted to 
 vote at all, but I have persuaded myself that it was 
 but a symbol, and that having got it, she would 
 round on us all and say : This absurdity of voting 
 has got to stop. She can do so, thank God, she 
 and only she, for the Almighty in His mercy has 
 given her a respectable majority. For the rest, I do 
 not see what she cannot do, unless it be true — as I 
 have heard a Waac officer in high place affirm — 
 she cannot rule on the whole as well as man, which 
 means, I take it, that as yet the sex cannot produce 
 the same proportion of navigators of the troubled 
 currents of this world as men can produce. In 
 this, as in all else, we must be pragmatists. If 
 experience shows that she cannot do it, then, and 
 then only, let her leave it alone. Thus only may 
 we seek peace and ensue it. 
 
 But what of her soul ? How has this strange and 
 complex thing been affected by the change ? That 
 is what I have asked myself a hundred times, watch- 
 ing the swing of her skirts from the club window as 
 she goes down the street, watching her about with 
 
 the favoured Tommy who alone of us may speak to 
 16 
 
242 STANDING BY 
 
 his sisters in this strange land, watching her driving 
 colonels through the traffic as she leans back at the 
 wheel with an easy, careless mastery, or watching 
 her idle — no, " stand by " — in lofty disdain outside 
 H.Q. or a dock hangar. For the body betrays the 
 soul of us daily. Certainly it betrays the soul in 
 the sense that the things we would not, those we 
 do, but it betrays it also in the gestures that be- 
 token character, the laugh, and the glance of the 
 eyes. And although their grandmothers would 
 probably not have believed it possible, the girls one 
 sees in France betray their soul daily, and what 
 one sees makes one very glad. 
 
 Motherhood — sex — that is, of course, the supreme 
 question. All this new work for women, this new 
 outlook, it has been said, will make her sexless, and 
 if that were to be so, the doom would be on us and 
 our kings. But, God bless them, one does not notice 
 that among the Waacs in France. It is not 
 necessary, I take it, to do more than deny the 
 rumours one has heard of a low tone of morality 
 among them, for there is no evidence whatever that 
 France has lowered them in the least ; but it may 
 be necessary to recount with gratitude how often 
 one has seen the Waac and the Tommy go out in 
 pairs. When the day's work for both is done, they 
 forgather, and her arm slips as easily as ever into 
 his as they stroll out together. They have both 
 learned, as London even could not teach them, 
 that there is a false prudery about these things, and 
 
THE WAACS 243 
 
 not so unlike the French, the Waac and the Tommy 
 must be seeing life to-day without blushing. Now I 
 come to think of it, however, it was nearly always 
 the girl who blushed in the old days, and perhaps 
 the discipline of her new life in France has helped 
 the girl over that. 
 
 For unquestionably the attitude of the one to the 
 other is not quite the same as it was before. A 
 thousand little things reveal that. When the rare 
 occasion presents itself and one does get a chance 
 talk with a Waac, the noticeable thing is that the 
 girl is so enormously more independent. One feels 
 that wooing has gone out of fashion, or at least 
 wooing on the old lines. Perhaps we are waiting for 
 the Colonel in some deserted orderly-room by the 
 fire at night ; I take out my cigarette case and as a 
 matter of course offer it to her. As a matter of 
 course she takes it. She crosses her legs, and the 
 short skirts just suffice to cover her knees, and we 
 chat of England and the world. She shall certainly 
 go to the Colonies after the war, she says, blowing 
 out the smoke. Yes, very likely motor-driving, 
 except that there are two friends of hers on the land, 
 who are thinking of a Canadian farm, and of course 
 one would have a Ford and she might fit in there. 
 I suggest that we have a walk one afternoon. Cer- 
 tainly, she agrees, unperturbed ; we can meet well 
 out of the town. . . . The Colonel comes in and 
 we stand chatting a few minutes more. '* Well, 
 if you are ready, Miss Smith," he says. . . . She 
 
244 STANDING BY 
 
 cranks up ; she knows her car, she says, and I should 
 only muddle it. And I lean back in my seat and 
 remember the companionship of past days again. 
 
 One feels, then, that when sex does come in, it 
 comes in differently. Tommy's girl in the old time 
 was one who had an immense admiration for his 
 unknown and glorious life, who thought of him as she 
 washed up the dishes, and who embarked on the 
 adventure of love as on an entrancing but bewilder- 
 ing voyage. The Waac is altogether different. 
 Tommy and she do the same things, at the Base at 
 least, and far from thinking of him as she washed 
 up, she has been watching him across the office or 
 the depot half the day. And as to sex, thank God 
 these girls have opened eyes. They surely must 
 have, in France. 
 
 I suppose there are some who will dislike these 
 things, but I doubt if a philosopher can. The 
 scales were so unfairly weighted in the old days. 
 The lives of man and maid, lived so far apart, were 
 united recklessly in that they often deliberately 
 faced the entering in of knowledge when it would 
 be too late to separate should that knowledge 
 bring disaster. We obviate that to-day. Marriage 
 is bound to be much more of a deliberate bargain. 
 Each knows well enough what the other has to 
 bring to it, and each knows too what must be given 
 up. Nature is very strong, but your modern man 
 and your modern girl can afford to face her serenely. 
 She surely must quake a little in her shoes. She 
 
THE WAACS 245 
 
 must see that her despotism is all but over. Man 
 has been fairly definitely her master for some 
 time, but she was always more or less secure so 
 long as woman was her slave. The Waac and her 
 kind are likely to be mistress now. 
 
 Frankly it seems to me that we may expect all 
 kinds of things to result. There will be, for one 
 thing, divorce legislation, until it is possible for the 
 parties deliberately to determine that marriage 
 shall be with them an arrangement terminable if 
 a failure ; and there will be fewer children. There 
 will also be, I think, a distinct class of women, all 
 but a third sex, who will not marry, but who will 
 prefer equal companionship with men and the 
 business of the world rather than the business of 
 the home. There were, formerly, always women 
 who preferred the business of religion to the business 
 of the home, and when Protestantism largely shut 
 that door to them they were lost. The nation 
 had an extraordinary number of all but useless 
 citizens among such. These now, their numbers 
 increased, will turn to affairs hitherto outside 
 them, and will doubtless do admirably there. And 
 let us frankly face that we of the Church are here 
 up against a dilemma. If, on the one hand, we 
 believe that motherhood is the supreme object for 
 a woman, then we have to face it that Nature has 
 made a mistake in the proportion of the sexes, or 
 that we ought to be polygamists. If, on the other 
 hand, we believe that parentage is a holy thing 
 
246 STANDING BY 
 
 dependent rightly on a perfect union, involving a 
 new relationship as inviolable as that created by 
 birth between mother and child, brother and sister, 
 then we must always have women, as we have men, 
 for whom marriage is shut out, and who had best 
 play a straightforward, unhampered part in the 
 affairs of citizenship. 
 
 One thing I believe our new women will do : 
 they will purify us. A woman, with her latent 
 knowledge of motherhood, is less prone than men 
 are to that damnable suggestion that man is so 
 much of an animal that his animal passion must be 
 gratified. Not all, truly, but most women, realise 
 the soul as men do not, and surely because they 
 are the more concerned in giving it birth. There 
 may be with them times in which sexual relationship 
 is purely animal passion, but they reflect more 
 speedily, and they remember longer. They have 
 also an instinct of sex-protection ; they resent 
 more fiercely the betrayal of the sex. It will be 
 good for us when they shape our laws. 
 
 In the long run, then, we shall benefit by the 
 change. We shall be less conventional and less 
 prudish, and there is hardly anything to be more 
 desired. The Christian Church will assume its 
 rightful place as a free society freely entered of 
 men and women who, recognising revelation, 
 willingly and gladly submit to its divine laws, and 
 if necessary — as in an unsuccessful marriage — 
 suffer pain to keep them. Unless the Church 
 
THE WAACS 247 
 
 again convert Society, Society itself will be freed 
 from the artificial acceptance of a yoke it does not 
 understand and does not wish, and will make its 
 own laws and mind its own business. An individual 
 will choose between them, and if, as is likely, it 
 becomes a contemptible thing to choose the Church, 
 that will be so much the better for the Church. 
 The Church will be less likely to forget her Master 
 and His words. Society, on the other hand, will 
 have her own battle to fight, and we shall see with 
 what success she can control the sexual as the 
 other natural laws. Probably there will be much 
 the same result. We daily bind the winds and 
 tame the lightning, but we still lose an occasional 
 Titanic. The disasters of the old age were not 
 as great, but they were more. A pretty choice is 
 before us, but I at least am glad to see the experi- 
 ment. 
 
 I suppose ultimately I am glad because I do 
 finally believe both in Nature and the Church, 
 though I hate to see either artificially hampered. 
 It struck me how much I believed in them the 
 other day when I had another encounter with the 
 Waacs. I was on my bicycle, in the outskirts of a 
 pretty little seaport, and I passed a company of Waacs 
 as they passed a camp of Tommies. Two of their 
 officers led the girls, spruce and smart, who had no 
 eyes for me or anyone. They were so extraordinarily 
 self-conscious, but for all that so capable, that one 
 was awed more than amused. The swing of the 
 
248 STANDING BY 
 
 skirts seemed a sacrament of emancipation. Behind 
 them marched the girls in fours, for the most part 
 all eyes for the camp. Tommies waved to them 
 and, with a surreptitious glance ahead first, they 
 waved to the Tommies. One even dared to edge 
 left, and as a man moved forward, I caught the 
 interchange : " To-night at six as usual." 
 
 Coming home, I punctured below a great wood, 
 and was — a little profanely, I confess — attending 
 to affairs, when I heard a voice behind me, " Sup- 
 pose I held the wheel, wouldn't that be easier ? " 
 I looked up and saw the Waac officers, hugely 
 amused. It was easier, and presently, while the 
 patch dried, we sat on the bank and discoursed of 
 many things. The prettier had a great bunch of 
 violets which she shared with me, and I learned 
 that the girls were in the woods. For half an hour 
 we lay on the grass and looked at life together, 
 and I felt proud as an Englishman of those 
 healthy, keen, clean-limbed women who were 
 comrades without being foolish, and yet still 
 feminine. 
 
 " Heigh-ho," said the senior ; "it's time we 
 went," and she pulled out a whistle. I was off 
 down the road as she blew it. 
 
 A few minutes later, I slowed down and 
 rested without dismounting against the parapet 
 of a little bridge over a crystal clear streamlet, 
 to listen. The Waacs were trooping out of the 
 woods, and singing as they came. The voices 
 
THE WAACS 249 
 
 rang very true and we could hear the words 
 perfectly : 
 
 "Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away — 
 In Jesu's keeping we are safe, and they . . ." 
 
 " Fine girls they are," said a Tommy to 
 me respectfully, but I thought a trifle hoarsely ; 
 " brings back the old village, it do, to hear them 
 'ere." 
 
 It did ; and I maintain firmly, " we are safe, and 
 they." 
 
XXV 
 
 PEACE TERMS 
 
 " "IT 'VE come to say good-bye," said I. 
 
 " Oh, have you? " said Jim. " Back to 
 
 -*- the cushy Base ? Lucky beggar ! And yet 
 I don't know if you are really lucky. I think I should 
 go stark mad at the Base. Perhaps " (he went on 
 meditatively) " that is just what they are doing." 
 
 " Who ? " I queried, trying to sit down on the 
 folding camp-stool and springing up in alarm. 
 
 " Look here, Bobbie," he exclaimed. " It is bad 
 enough having the Hun trying to smash things up 
 from outside, without having you at the same game 
 within. Sit on the bed, you fat brute ; that'll bear 
 you." 
 
 I thought it might. It was home-made out of 
 what looked like sleepers. So I sat down in silence, 
 with a studied effort of contempt. The effort 
 seemed to fail. Jimmie tossed his pouch over, 
 smiling. 
 
 " Who ? " I queried again, lighting my pipe. 
 For answer he kicked out at the paper that lay on 
 the floor. " When I read that thing," he said, 
 
 "I am always utterly dumbfounded. It is really 
 
 250 
 
PEACE TERMS 251 
 
 a most remarkable experience. The R.A.M.C. pass 
 me as fit for the line ; only the other day the Tripos 
 people gave me a first, and the 'Varsity a prize for 
 Political Science, and yet I must be insane, Bobbie. 
 It's either I or apparently the rest of the world." 
 
 "It's you," I said calmly, but warily. 
 
 Then followed what they call in books a dramatic 
 interlude, which ended in our getting up panting 
 but merry. This war tends to make one feel 
 damnably old ; it is very good to find one is not. 
 
 We sat down again, and I looked at him as I 
 struck another match. This is a very very strange 
 world. It was the same old Jim that I saw ; the 
 dug-out might easily enough have been his room 
 at Jesus for all the difference it had made to him, 
 and yet in that moment a wave of emotion came 
 over me. I did not understand it then ; I do 
 now. But it sobered me, and I felt I could not 
 fool any more. " Well, well, Jimmie," I said. 
 " What's all this about the world being mad ? " 
 
 He jumped up excitedly. " It's these peace 
 terms," he said, " Lloyd George's and Woodrow 
 Wilson's. Do you think they are sincere ? And 
 yet they must be ; I believe they are. And in 
 that case — oh ! Good Lord ! " 
 
 " Explain," said I. 
 
 He sat down again, and stretched out his legs in 
 the old way. " Very well, Bobbie," he said, " let's 
 go quietly over it all. There is no reason why we 
 shouldn't. You correct me if I'm wrong." 
 
252 STANDING BY 
 
 " In the first place, these people say they wish a 
 peace dictated by principles, and not by circum- 
 stances or the advantages of victory. That in 
 itself is very laudable. The old treaties, they say, 
 were not based on principles ; Vienna, for instance, 
 was a patch-up to suit the dynasties. But the 
 peace that is to settle this business, is to be based 
 on — what is the phrase ? — ' elementary and uni- 
 versal principles of justice among nations/ This 
 will make it a lasting peace. Having looked for 
 perpetual motion in what was held to be a stable 
 world, we now look for perpetual stability in what 
 we know to be a world of flux. However, pass that 
 over. Otherwise I'm right, am I not ? " 
 
 " Yes," said I. 
 
 " Well, Bobbie," said he, "I don't like the sound 
 of it from the start. You can pull the phrase to 
 bits in two minutes. It presupposes, to begin with, 
 that nationality is elementary and universal. It's 
 not ; it's a stage in development. Nations are 
 constantly being born and constantly changing, 
 and the tendency is for them to disappear. Of all 
 political units they are the most difficult to define. 
 I speak generally, but in a moment, when we come 
 to apply their principles practically, we shall get 
 sufficient modern illustration of that fact. But 
 what is a nation, anyway ? No one knows. I 
 looked up the word in a decent dictionary the 
 other day and read, ' the inhabitants of a particular 
 country.' But what's a country ? A country is 
 
PEACE TERMS 253 
 
 nothing — so many square miles, that's all. It's 
 determined by the people who live in it — which 
 takes you round the vicious circle. Natural 
 boundaries used to help, but they all but don't 
 exist to-day, and won't in a hundred years or less. 
 Why should they ? Are we sheep to care about 
 pens ? " 
 
 " Here, steady on," I said. 
 
 " But, my dear man," said he, " I'm right. It's 
 the simplest lesson of history. Think it out for 
 yourself : I'm not going to lecture on it. Still, 
 India's a country, but has it a nationality ? The 
 American is a nationality, but the U.S.A. is no 
 country ; it's lines ruled on the map. Is Great 
 Britain a country ? The other day it was three, 
 the day before a dozen. Have we a nationality ? 
 I should say that to-day there is a very definite 
 British nationality, but when in the world did it 
 begin ? The thing doesn't admit of such terms 
 as elementary and universal. Go back far enough 
 and we are all of one blood. Divisions came in some- 
 how and somewhere, and the tendency is for them 
 to disappear. To-day your sense of their im- 
 portance is determined by whether you are standing 
 on top looking down, or underneath looking up. 
 It also depends upon the spirit you are of, and your 
 education and your religion and your circumstances, 
 and quite often on your stomach. No, if I had to 
 make a peace, I'd prefer to work on dynasties rather 
 than on nations." 
 
254 STANDING BY 
 
 " But there are no dynasties, now," I said, " or 
 at least they don't count, and we don't want them to 
 count." 
 
 " No," he went on, " I know that, and so we come 
 to nations. Now I don't so much mind working 
 on a basis of nationality — in fact, the harder the 
 job the more interesting it is, but don't kid yourself 
 with talk about elementary principles. Principles, 
 perhaps, but not elementary or universal ones. 
 There aren't such things, or if there are, either 
 we don't know them, or they belong to religion." 
 
 He stopped to light a cigarette. I said nothing, 
 and the cigarette once going, he blew out the match 
 with a first mouthful of smoke. " Poor old Pope ! " 
 he said. 
 
 " Good Lord," I exclaimed, " what has he to do 
 with it? " 
 
 " Oh, can't you see ? We used to blackguard him 
 for bringing religious principles into politics. Now 
 the Kaiser and Lloyd George do the same thing, 
 and we blackguard the Pope for not doing so any 
 longer — although he does in his own way." 
 
 " Well, leave the Pope alone," said I, " and get 
 on. What about principles ? " 
 
 " Principles ? " he queried. " They're horribly 
 dangerous to start with. Facts, dynasties, victories, 
 bayonets at your tummy — all those things you can 
 deal with, and ultimately laugh over, but principles 
 are elusive things. Also they are things over which 
 people feel more strongly than anything else. Only 
 
PEACE TERMS 255 
 
 one thing is perfectly plain : if you are going to deal 
 in principles, you must be absolutely honest, and as 
 far as possible impartial, and you must carry them 
 right through at all costs." 
 
 " And in this case ? " 
 
 " Well, first, so far as I can see, it means the end 
 of the British Empire, and indeed of all Empires. 
 Possibly that is a good thing : I am not personally 
 sure, but possibly it is. But, secondly, with the 
 passing of Empires, must pass an age. That, 
 again, is no new and possibly no bad thing. Ages 
 have passed before — in fact, none has endured. 
 But they have usually passed blunderingly, with 
 some horrible smash-up, followed by bloody experi- 
 ments for a century or two. Surely we ought to 
 avoid that. But can we ? Do we know what we 
 want ? Have we any real idea how to get it ? " 
 
 " But why the British Empire ? " 
 
 " Well, the principle No. 1 of the Peace Terms 
 is that every nationality can decide its political 
 future. Very good. Poland can elect to be neither 
 German nor Russian, but Polish. So can Finland. 
 Both are conquered peoples of the old regime. 
 But what if Courland elects to be Prussian ? What 
 about the Orange Free State, Egypt, India ? What 
 about Morocco, Tunis, the Philippines ? How can 
 you refuse to the one what you grant to the other ? 
 It's no use saying India can't govern itself : I don't 
 suppose it can ; neither can Russia nor the Balkans 
 nor Ireland. Nor is Great Britain capable of govern- 
 
256 STANDING BY 
 
 ing itself in my opinion. But what is my opinion ? 
 What is anyone's opinion ? Who or what is the 
 Lord of the world to decide when a nation comes of 
 age ? Grant that a right of self-government of 
 choice exists, and where are you going to stop ? 
 You might perhaps set up a Board of Nations to 
 which each people can at all times appeal for in- 
 dependence, but, however doubtful that experi- 
 ment, one thing is certain : Empires pass. And I 
 don't see any guarantee against injustice, chicanery, 
 double-dealing, when I think of that Board. Given 
 our enormous modern political units, specialists 
 must run the Board, and specialists are rarely fair. 
 
 " However, that is the principle. Upon the strength 
 of it, Central African tribes are to vote for their 
 master. Anything more futile than that, I cannot 
 imagine. Look at the Masai, in train-oil and skins 
 coming in to vote ! Nothing appears to me more 
 unutterably stupid and deceitful. The natives 
 will, of course, vote for us : our rule has always 
 been easier, and moreover we shall be on the spot 
 with promises. Also we are victors, and the native 
 always greases the strong man. But has anything 
 whatever been gained when they have voted ? 
 Do you honestly feel a principle has been saved ? 
 W 7 ould you let them vote for anyone else or for in- 
 dependence, and for how long are they to be bound 
 by an entirely prejudiced action which they made 
 in the time of their savagery ? 
 
 " But go on. If the Masai can vote for English 
 
PEACE TERMS 257 
 
 Government, why not the Zulu and the Basuto ? 
 Are they to be forced to remain in or to enter the 
 Union of South Africa ? Or what if the Zulu 
 preferred to vote to be American ? The thing is 
 possible. They might prefer to be under the 
 U.S.A., than under the U. of S.A. 
 
 "Or if a people may vote for their master, why 
 should they not vote to be their own master ? 
 Why should not the people of Bombay vote for 
 independence, and have a guaranteed neutrality, 
 and be judged by the Hague Conference when 
 there is friction with the rest of India ? They are 
 just as capable of independence as the Albanians. 
 
 " Then take principle No. 2 : No annexations. 
 Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine in 1870, so she 
 is to give it back. Good : who annexed Tunis ? 
 Or why stop at 1870 ? Who annexed the West 
 Indies, the Cape, Mauritius ? Possibly the late 
 owners don't want those lands back, but would 
 Spain care to have Gibraltar ? . . . No ; if we mean 
 these principles, Empire is at an end. It does not 
 matter whether it was a good Empire or a bad 
 Empire, but Empire means government, and the 
 day a father says to his son : ' Now, my boy, you 
 are of age ; you can do as you please,' paternal 
 advice may continue, and paternal affection, and 
 family union, but paternal government has abdi- 
 cated." 
 
 " I think I agree with you," I said; " but what 
 then ? " 
 17 
 
258 STANDING BY 
 
 " Well, old son," he went on, " that means that 
 we are deliberately ending an age and beginning 
 another. It is to be an age among the peoples of 
 the world of admitted right, an age of give and take, 
 an age of the surrender of our own desires and 
 interests at the bidding of a majority vote, an 
 age of curiously mixed socialism and individualism, 
 for all are to combine to say that each shall be free — 
 a golden age, in fact." 
 
 u You hope for it, then ? " said I. 
 
 " Hope for it ? " he all but shouted, jumping up. 
 " Why r good heavens, it has been the dream of the 
 world from immemorial time. It is the dream of 
 every Utopia, if I may say so, of every Christ that 
 has ever lived among men, and of none so much as 
 the dream of Jesus. But it is an uncharted sea, 
 and you cannot save it without a guiding principle. 
 And there you are, back to principles again I " 
 
 " Well," said I, " they all talk of them." 
 
 "No," said he; "not of this sort. They talk 
 of principles which are to settle the past, but I see 
 no talk of principles which are to rule the future. 
 A principle may make Poland free and (shall we say) 
 Gibraltar Spanish, but what principle is going to 
 content us all under those conditions ? It seems 
 to me that it will have to be a principle strong 
 enough to rule out national pride and the colour 
 bar ; a principle strong enough to defeat greed and 
 love of power ; a principle that belongs to the 
 Kingdom of God, and not to the kingdoms of men. 
 
PEACE TERMS 259 
 
 And, Bobbie, honestly, is there a nation on earth 
 impregnated with the principle of divine charity 
 enough for that ? M 
 
 I did not answer him. Outside the guns of a 
 battery near woke up as we sat, and talking became 
 impossible. Presently a bugle blew. Jimmy shot 
 his left arm out in that original gesture invented 
 by this war, and said, in a lull : " Mess in a minute 
 or two. Can you come ? " 
 
 I shook my head, and knocked my pipe out 
 against my boot. We got up together, and stepped 
 out into the trench. A subaltern was passing. 
 " All quiet ? " inquired Jimmy humorously, for 
 the infernal guns were at it again. And the sub- 
 altern nodded. Then we clasped hands, and he 
 went right and I left. 
 
 It was just about three months later that I went 
 to the hospital to see him, and as I stood there, 
 looking down, there was a terrible ache at the heart. 
 Could they not even spare Jimmy, the gay, wise, 
 lovable Jimmy, who had never done a man wrong 
 in his life? He lay pitifully white on the bed, 
 breathing so lightly, his black hair, that I could 
 have touched even as if I had been a woman, all 
 hidden in the long swathes of the bandages. " He 
 is quite unconscious, and won't live through the 
 day," said the V.A.D. who had brought me in. I 
 clenched my fist against emotion. My rebel heart 
 reeled with the clash of thought — this damnable 
 
260 STANDING BY 
 
 war, those hell-hounds, whose lust for power, 
 or blundering, or stupidity, have caused it f 
 Jimmy ! — and yet we were but friends, and mother 
 has parted from son like this, girl from lover, un- 
 numbered times. . . . I could have turned a bayonet 
 in the stomach of a German easily with joy. . . . 
 
 And then as I looked, I began to remember. . . . 
 The new age. . . . The new principle. . . . If we did 
 not begin with it, and begin oneself, what likelihood 
 was there of continuing ? It seemed to me that if 
 I left him so, I might be helping to lay again the 
 train that will go on murdering such as Jimmy 
 down the centuries to come, as it has down cen- 
 turies past. And then I saw what hung above his 
 head, and the girl by me caught the glance and 
 whispered : " He would have it there." It was 
 Jimmy's principle, and it is God's. In that moment 
 I think I knew that he was right ; that no glory of 
 the past can match what may be the glory of the 
 future if that be set up. And I knelt by the bed 
 and surrendered my friend for the sake of the 
 Crucified. 
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BV MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 A CITY 
 
 OF THE DAWN 
 
 6/- net 
 
 CHURCH TIMES: 
 
 " Mr. Keable's book found one reader 
 crouching over the fire on a dark and foggy 
 November afternoon, and forthwith transported 
 him for the rest of the day to Africa, where he 
 wandered among narrow streets, and white 
 houses, and watched excitedly the fortunes of 
 the Cross in the Oriental City." 
 
 THE LONELINESS 
 OF CHRIST 
 
 2/6 net and 3/6 net 
 
 CHURCH TIMES: 
 
 " Helpful to the many who need strength 
 and comfort." 
 
 THE PERPETUAL 
 SACRIFICE 
 
 2/6 net and 3/6 net 
 
 GUARDIAN: 
 
 "The whole book merits careful and 
 sympathetic study." 
 
 THIS SAME 
 JESUS 
 
 2/6 net 
 
 YORKSHIRE OBSERVER: 
 
 "Though the essays are short, they are in 
 their own way priceless." 
 
 LONDON : NISBET & CO. LTD. 
 
IMPORTANT WAR BOOKS 
 
 THE DARDANELLES 
 CAMPAIGN 
 
 Illustrated. 18/- net 
 
 By H. W. Nevinson 
 
 TIMES: 
 
 " For his insight, his lucidity, his accuracy 
 of observation, and above all his sympathy with 
 the individual soldier in his trials and his 
 endurance, there can be nothing but praise. " 
 
 SUNDAY CHRONICLE: 
 
 (Mr. Gerald Gould) 
 
 ' ' One thing is certain. No future historian 
 of the Dardanelles campaign will supersede Mr. 
 Nevinson. This big book will remain the 
 standard account." 
 
 SPECTATOR: 
 
 "Mr. Nevinson's admirable style and his 
 commendably impartial tone lend distinction to 
 his story and the tragic and gallant enterprise." 
 
 MY ESCAPE 
 FROM GERMANY 
 
 6/- net 
 
 By Eric A. Keith 
 
 LAND AND WATER: 
 
 "Stands very high in the records of these 
 adventures." 
 
 PALL MALL GAZETTE: 
 
 " Mr. Keith has a gift of expression which 
 enables the reader to share the many breathless 
 thrills which a fugitive Briton's passage through 
 a bitterly hostile country was bound to present." 
 
 LONDON : NISBET & CO. LTD. 
 
A BOOK OF WIT AND HUMOUR 
 
 PRESS 
 
 PLATFORM 
 
 AND PARLIAMENT 
 
 Illustrated. 12/6 net 
 
 By Spencer Leigh Hughes, M.P. 
 
 ("Sub Rosa") 
 
 TIMES: 
 
 "He never fails to entertain." 
 
 EVENING STANDARD: 
 
 " Besides being a humorist, he is essentially 
 human." 
 
 SKETCH: 
 
 "Witty and delightfully entertaining." 
 
 CHRISTIAN WORLD: 
 
 " Mr. Hughes is witty. He is likewise 
 humorous. His genial good-nature gives 
 iridescence to every page." 
 
 BRITISH WEEKLY: 
 
 "A very delightful book. There is high 
 breeding in the manner and tone of this volume. 
 It cannot be defined, but it cannot fail to be 
 recognised." 
 
 DAILY NEWS: 
 
 " Both valuable and entertaining." 
 
 LONDON : NISBET & CO. LTD. 
 
ZEbe Xibran? of TReconstnictton 
 
 Messrs, NISBET beg to call attention 
 to the following volumes which will 
 be found useful to readers interested 
 in the problems of Reconstruction : — 
 
 SOME PROBLEMS OF 
 MODERN INDUSTRY 
 
 By W. L. Hichens. 6d. net {6th Thousand) 
 
 RECONSTRUCTION HANDBOOK 
 
 For Students and Speakers. Prepared by 
 the Industrial Reconstruction Council. 
 9d. net 
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF 
 RECONSTRUCTION 
 
 By H. G. Wells, l/- net {6th Thousand) 
 
 TRADE PARLIAMENTS 
 AND THEIR WORK 
 
 By Ernest J. P. Benn. i/- net 
 
 THE RESTORATION OF TRADE 
 UNION CONDITIONS 
 
 By Sidney Webb. 1/6 net Uth Thousand) 
 
 FROM WAR TO WORK 
 
 By Samuel Turner. 1/6 net {goth Thousand) 
 
 ECLIPSE OR EMPIRE? 
 
 By H. B. Gray and Samuel Turner. 
 
 2/- net (78/A Thousand) 
 
 MUNITIONS OF PEACE 
 
 By Sir H. E. Morgan, K.B.E. 3/- net 
 
 A SELF-SUPPORTING EMPIRE 
 
 By Edward Saunders. 3/6 net 
 
 AMERICA AT SCHOOL AND AT WORK 
 
 By H. B. Gray. 5/- net 
 
 SCIENTIFIC DISTRIBUTION 
 
 By Charles F. Higham. 12/6 net 
 
 LONDON : NISBET & CO. LTD 
 
RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 TO— ► 202 Main Library 
 
 LOAN PERIOD 1 
 HOME USE 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. 
 
 Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405. 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 
 «MJ ■ 
 
 R& 
 
 
 
 FEB 9 ft ioq? 
 
 
 
 X |ROl II ATI/Mki 
 
 
 
 'intrULATfON 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 
 FORM NO. DD6 BERKELEY, CA 94720 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 ■■X I 
 
 % n 
 
 ^Wr- 
 
 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
 mini I! II llil I III! II