and Other Studies 
 
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT
 
 UCSB LIBRARY
 
 THE BROWN MARE
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 OWD BOB 
 
 DANNY 
 
 REDCOAT CAPTAIN 
 
 THE GENTLEMAN 
 
 THE TAMING OF JOHN 
 
 BLUNT 
 THE ROYAL ROAD
 
 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 AND OTHER STUDIES OF 
 ENGLAND UNDER THE CLOUD 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 AUTHOR OF "OWD BOB" 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 
 RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.
 
 First published in 1916 
 
 (All rights reserved)
 
 To 
 
 THE BROWN WOMAN
 
 I owe it to the Editors of The Atlantic 
 Monthly, Country Life, Tht Boston Transcript^ 
 and The Christchurch Times of New Zealand, 
 that I am allowed to reprint these studies. 
 
 A. O.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE BROWN MARE . . .9 
 
 II. THE INVASION OF ENGLAND . . 2<) 
 
 III. THE BOMBARDMENT ; AND A BOY . 4! 
 
 IV. THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE . -53 
 
 V. THE SHADOW . . . . 6j 
 
 VI. THE INDIAN HOSPITAL . . . 83 
 
 VII. THE CONSCRIPT . . . IO 3 
 
 VIII. THE MAN IN COMMAND . , .119 
 
 IX. THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF . T 33 
 
 X. THE COST .... 147
 
 I 
 
 THE 
 
 BROWN MARE
 
 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 I 
 
 HE used to bring her home when he came 
 on his winter's leave in the years before the 
 War, to hunt with the South Down : for 
 she was an unusually fine performer across 
 country. And it was there I met her. 
 
 A tall upstanding creature, sixteen hands 
 and over, very high at the withers, not quite 
 clean-bred and yet showing breeding in 
 every line. She did not really carry bone 
 enough for the heavy Wealden clay, in which 
 your horse sinks up to his hocks at every 
 stride ; but the Major was clearly always 
 pleased when the big iron-gray Granite 
 had strained a sinew and he could fall 
 back on the mare for an extra day. And 
 little sturdy Humbleton, the very British 
 groom, with the blue eyes, the chestnut hair, 
 and stolid way, was just the same. When 
 exercising, he always rode the mare for 
 preference and led the gray. She was honest
 
 12 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 and she was kind, with the heart of a 
 woman and the manners of a lady. Yet 
 except for a general air of breeding I do 
 not think you would have singled her out 
 in a crowd. 
 
 Kitty came first into the Major's stable 
 when after a long spell at the War Office 
 he went back to regimental work and took 
 over the command of a Field Battery. I 
 think he picked her out of the ranks : maybe 
 the trumpeter had been riding her. 
 
 In that stable other horses came and went. 
 The mare stayed ; and her reputation grew. 
 
 At the big Aldershot meeting the Major 
 entered her for the Artillery Point-to-point. 
 He was never hard on his horses, and 
 didn't ride her out. She was not placed. 
 Afterwards he heard the whole Brigade had 
 been backing her. 
 
 When the Major got his Jacket and took 
 command of the Black Horse Battery at the 
 Wood, Humbleton and the mare went with 
 him. She was not black : she was brown. 
 Therefore he could not ride her on cere- 
 monial parades as his first charger. So he 
 bought a sporting little black horse with a 
 short back, Dandy by name, on which he 
 rode with nodding plume at the head of
 
 THE BROWN MARE 13 
 
 his Troop down Park Lane, across Piccadilly 
 and the Mall, to fire salutes on Horse 
 Guards Parade. 
 
 But if she was no longer his first charger 
 she was still first in his heart ; and for long 
 days on Salisbury Plain during autumn 
 manoeuvres she had not her equal. 
 
 There followed three quiet years of pre- 
 paration, the Black Horse Battery doing 
 the Musical Drive at Olympia, swirling at 
 the gallop in rhythmic figures interlaced 
 about the famous bronze Gundamuck gun 
 which the Troop had lost when covering the 
 retreat from Cabul in the first Afghan War 
 and recovered forty years later in the 
 second. The Battery drove to the admira- 
 tion of connoisseurs, artists, and the London 
 crowd ; and then would march down to 
 Salisbury Plain to break records there in the 
 mimic business of war. 
 
 Then came the reality ; and the Major 
 had to make the sacrifice of his life, and 
 break up in a moment the fighting unit which 
 through three laborious years he had trained 
 to the point of perfection. Immediately on 
 mobilization he was called upon to send 
 all his horses, all his men, and half his 
 officers to complete the strength of a first-
 
 i 4 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 for-service Battery at Aldershot. He stood 
 with folded arms on the barrack-square and 
 watched his famous black teams, shining 
 in the sun, and beloved of Londoners, file 
 out of the gate. The subalterns said they 
 thought the Major's heart would break. It 
 was perhaps a little comfort to him that 
 when horses and men arrived at Aldershot 
 the Major of the first-for-service Battery 
 there asked his own gun-team drivers to give 
 place to the newcomers. 
 
 " These are the drivers of the Black Horse 
 Troop," he said. 
 
 The only men left the Major were 
 Humbleton and his batman ; the only horses 
 Dandy and the mare. For the rest he had 
 his guns ; his non-commissioned officers ; a 
 couple of subalterns, reservists, and the pick 
 of all the horses that were streaming into 
 London with which to build up a new Battery. 
 
 II 
 
 He had two months in which to do it ; and 
 he did it. 
 
 In those days there was no tarrying. The 
 Germans were knocking at the Gates of Calais.
 
 THE BROWN MARE 15 
 
 At the beginning of October the Black 
 Horse Battery, its horses no longer black, 
 many-coloured, many-cornered, but a hard 
 and handy crowd, disembarked at Zeebrugge 
 with the Seventh Division in the romantic and 
 desperate endeavour to relieve Antwerp ; and 
 the officers of the Guards Brigade to which 
 the Battery was attached muttered among 
 themselves that if it was no longer the Battery 
 of Olympia days it was still the best Horse 
 Battery in England. 
 
 Antwerp fell the day they landed. The 
 Immortal Division, 20,000 strong, marched 
 out to meet the enemy much as David went 
 to meet Goliath. In a perilously thin-drawn- 
 out line it flung itself across the path of the 
 German herds driving bull-headed, hundred 
 thousands of them, for the sea and the island 
 that lay across the Channel. 
 
 General French sent word to the valiant 
 Division that he would reinforce them in five 
 hours. Those reinforcements took five days 
 to come. But the Division held ; though at 
 the end of the stress it had but forty officers 
 left out of the four hundred who had dis- 
 embarked at Zeebrugge six weeks before. 
 
 In those tremendous days the Black Horse 
 Battery played its fiery part in support of the
 
 16 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 First Battalion of the Grenadier Guards. 
 Tried in that white-hot furnace, Guardsmen 
 and Gunners proved worthy of each other 
 and of the traditions of their great regiments. 
 There was no rest by night or day for officers, 
 men, or horses. 
 
 Kitty, the mare, took it all very calmly. 
 Back with the limbers, on the sheltered side of 
 the ridge on which the guns were barking, she 
 stretched her long neck, bowed a knee, and 
 grazed the Flemish turf at ease much as on 
 Salisbury Plain. The hubbub across the ridge, 
 her master's fierce peremptory voice, the 
 occasional burst of shrapnel near by, disturbed 
 her little. 
 
 Now and then the trumpeter, handing over 
 the mare and his own horse to the care of 
 Humbleton, would crawl to the top of the 
 ridge and watch the Battery in action beyond, 
 pounding away at the gray-coats struggling in 
 the valley. He didn't see much : for the guns 
 were roughly dug in. But once he saw a farm- 
 house which the Major was using for observa- 
 tion post crash down in headlong ruin. 
 
 " Gosh ! " muttered the trumpeter. " Spotted 
 'im. He's done." 
 
 Then the long lean Major came running 
 out of the dust and debris.
 
 THE BROWN MARE 17 
 
 The trumpeter returned at the trot to his 
 horses. 
 
 u Old man ain't 'alf nippy," he reported to 
 Humbleton. 
 
 u He ain't so old neether, then," answered 
 Humbleton, who took no liberties with his 
 master himself, and allowed none. 
 
 " Ain't he, then ? " retorted the trumpeter, 
 who must have the last word even in the 
 mouth of Hell. "I'll lay he's older than he 
 were twenty year ago, then." 
 
 Once on that last desperate day, when the 
 one skeleton Cavalry Brigade held in reserve 
 was dashing here and there to make good as 
 best it might gaps in the broken line, the 
 Major got his guns up under a wall to cover 
 the Guards' counter-attack launched as a 
 forlorn hope. The Germans saw him and 
 swept the wall away with a tidal wave of 
 fire. 
 
 It was Rear limber up / and the gun- 
 teams came up at the gallop. 
 
 In the hubbub and tumult of shells, shouts, 
 of gunners furiously handling gun-wheels, of 
 drivers with outstretched whip-hands quiet- 
 ing their teams, of bloody men disengaging 
 bloody and floundering horses, Kitty, the 
 mare, was steady as a rock. 
 
 2
 
 18 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 " Got her, sir ? " gasped the trumpeter, as 
 he toppled off his own horse, spewing blood. 
 
 " Right," said the Major, toe in his stirrup, 
 and swung into his saddle. " Battery column, 
 gallop ! " 
 
 And somehow or other the Battery swung 
 clear. 
 
 Those were astounding days. For three 
 weeks the officers and men of that Battery 
 never had their clothes off, and for days 
 together the horses were never unharnessed. 
 But whoever else went short Kitty, the mare, 
 never suffered. Humbleton saw to that, and 
 to be just the mare saw to herself in her large 
 and sensible way, grazing when opportunity 
 offered, and snatching bonnes bouches from ruined 
 haystacks. 
 
 After the first terrible six weeks the Armies 
 settled down to trench warfare. It was not 
 the game for Horse Artillery ; but the Black 
 Horse Battery played it with zest all through 
 that first winter. 
 
 The horses stood out in the open and 
 thrived. Kitty grew a coat like a bear's ; and 
 the saddle sank into her back as into a drift 
 of brown snow. But campaigning suited her 
 as it did her black companion Dandy. 
 
 Then came promotion.
 
 THE BROWN MARE 19 
 
 The Major, now a Brevet-Lieutenant- 
 Colonel, took command of a Field Artillery 
 Brigade. That did not last for long. Within 
 a few weeks he and Humbleton and the two 
 horses were back with the Horse Artillery, 
 the Colonel now commanding a Brigade. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Headquarters of the Brigade was in a 
 chateau some thirty miles behind the firing 
 line. 
 
 When the turn of the Cavalry Division, 
 to which the Brigade was attached, came for 
 a spell in the trenches, horses and guns 
 made a long forced march by night and 
 took up their positions early in December 
 of the second winter of the War. 
 
 They had three months in the trenches 
 months of sleet and rain, of dogged endurance, 
 infinitely dull, varied by lurid nightmare 
 interludes. 
 
 When towards the end of February they 
 were relieved nobody in the Division re- 
 gretted it. 
 
 That was the time of the heavy snows ; 
 and all reliefs were made of necessity at night.
 
 20 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 The Horse Artillery started for the thirty- 
 mile trek home at midnight, the long thin 
 line of guns, their wheels thick with snow, 
 trailing worm-like through the white dimness 
 that muffled the noise of their going and 
 made the procession strangely ghost-like. 
 
 Wagons and kits were to follow later. 
 
 The Colonel gave his Brigade an hour's 
 start. 
 
 It was just one when his batman came 
 to the door of his much-shelled lodging and 
 announced that Humbleton and the horses 
 were outside. 
 
 The Colonel, busy destroying papers, went 
 to the door, accompanied by his terrier Bruiser. 
 The little groom, in his goat-skin coat, 
 stood outside in the snow, the horses in 
 hand. Dandy stretched a neck to greet his 
 little friend, the terrier, standing three-legged, 
 and shivering in the snow, while the mare 
 nibbled tentatively at a pile of wood close 
 by. 
 
 " Don't let her eat that ! " ordered the 
 Colonel ferociously. 
 
 He always spoke to his servants as if they 
 were his mortal enemies and he wished them 
 to know he knew it. And they took more 
 from him than they would have done from
 
 THE BROWN MARE 21 
 
 many a man with a smoother tongue and a 
 smaller heart. It was just the old man's 
 way, they said among themselves. And he 
 had the qualities which ensured respect if 
 they did not win love. He was just, con- 
 sistent, and in the heart of him considerate. 
 So, to the surprise of many, they always stuck 
 to him. 
 
 The Colonel went back to his room with 
 Bruiser, and piled on layer upon layer of 
 clothes : sweaters, hunting-waistcoats, Norfolk 
 jackets, towards the top a suit of oilskins, 
 and over all a Burberry. 
 
 In multitudinous pockets he stuffed an 
 electric torch, a flask, a thermos, a map, a 
 ball of string, an extra pair of gloves, a 
 muffler, and other odds and ends. The lean 
 Colonel, now a very portly man, gave certain 
 curt instructions to his batman, tied Bruiser, 
 who was to follow with the kits, to the 
 leg of the table, and mounted Dandy : for 
 he knew of old that the mare was not 
 clever in the snow. 
 
 Then he set off into the night, Humbleton 
 and the mare following in his wake. 
 
 Once clear of the village the Colonel 
 looked round. In that little distance he had 
 already gained greatly on the other pair.
 
 22 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 He waved for the groom to come up 
 alongside. 
 
 " Leg her up," he ordered gruffly. " Keep 
 her alongside me." 
 
 Side by side master and man rode along 
 through the night, the snow coating them 
 heavily. 
 
 "She's walking abominably," said the 
 Colonel. 
 
 " Yes, sir," answered Humbleton, who never 
 wasted words, least of all on his master. 
 
 Laboriously the Colonel disengaged his 
 electric torch and flashed it on the mare. 
 
 What he saw he didn't like. The snow 
 was heavy on her shoulders, thick in her 
 ears, plastering her heavy coat ; and she was 
 slouching along disconsolately, her head down, 
 as though smelling out a track. 
 
 If s that woods poisoned her^ thought the 
 Colonel ; but he didn't say anything. 
 
 " Does she feel all right ? " he asked. 
 
 "Yes, sir," answered Humbleton. 
 
 Twelve miles out they stopped at a little 
 estaminet for a water and feed. 
 
 Dandy tucked into his nose-bag greedily. 
 The mare would not look at hers. 
 
 " Come on, missus," said Humbleton. 
 
 He warmed some water, making a weak
 
 THE BROWN MARE 23 
 
 gruel, sprinkled bran on the top, and held the 
 bucket to her nostrils temptingly. 
 
 She breathed on it, her breath mingling 
 with the steam, but would not touch it. 
 
 The Colonel walked round her with anxious 
 eyes, pulled her ears, hand-rubbed her cold 
 pasterns. 
 
 It's that woody he thought. 
 
 Then he rummaged in his multitudinous 
 pockets. After long search he produced a 
 thermometer and took her temperature. 
 
 It was 103 ; and there was still a twenty- 
 mile march before them. 
 
 He got her a ball and gave it her. 
 
 There was no stabling at the estaminet ; and 
 nothing for it therefore but to go on. 
 
 He mounted again. 
 
 The track lay before them invisible save 
 for the half-obliterated furrows left by the 
 gun-wheels. The snow came waving across 
 them in white curtains that almost seemed to 
 lighten the darkness. The moustaches of both 
 men froze and were thatched with snow. The 
 two white-cloaked figures laboured along side 
 by side like two phantom horsemen with feet 
 of lead. 
 
 The mare seemed to come on a little better. 
 
 Every now and then the Colonel said
 
 24 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 <{ How's she feel now ? " 
 
 And Humbleton answered 
 
 "Very queer, sir." 
 
 At length they came to the foot of a long 
 bare ridge, stretching interminably before them, 
 smooth and bleak and white as a shroud, great 
 curtains of snow flapping dismally across its 
 desolate face. 
 
 The mare stopped. 
 
 Both men dismounted. The Colonel with 
 a hoof-picker, disengaged with difficulty from 
 a remote interior pocket, emptied her hoofs of 
 the balling snow. 
 
 He thought she was going to lie down ; and 
 once she lay down on that slope he knew he 
 would never get her up again. 
 
 He and Humbleton, crouching in the snow, 
 hand-rubbed her legs and flanks. Then they 
 started leading her up the slope. 
 
 The two men were wonderfully kind and 
 patient with the suffering creature ; far more 
 kind and patient with her than with each other. 
 
 The forlorn little group toiled desolately up 
 the slope, now engulfed in a billow of waving 
 white, now emerging into blotted dimness, the 
 wind rollicking away with terrible laughter in 
 the valley below. The horses, with windy tails 
 tucked-in and strewn about their flanks,
 
 THE BROWN MARE 25 
 
 plodded on with downward heads, shaking the 
 snow from their ears like big dogs with a rattle 
 of accoutrements that sounded weirdly in the 
 night. 
 
 Honest and kind as always, the mare was 
 doing her dumb best ; and both men knew it. 
 One on either side, they shouldered her up the 
 slope, easing her, halting her, talking to her, 
 coaxing her on a step at a time, as a nurse 
 teaching a child to walk. And every now and 
 then she rubbed her snowy head against one 
 man or the other, as though recognizing their 
 love, and wishing to tell them about it. 
 
 Somehow or other they bolstered her up to 
 the top of that Ridge of Windy Death. 
 
 Down in the valley, on the other side, the 
 Colonel hoped he might find a Cavalry Division, 
 and some shelter for the mare. 
 
 He was right. 
 
 As they descended the slope, the mare walk- 
 ing more easily, they found themselves among 
 friends. 
 
 The Gunners were in possession of the 
 valley. 
 
 Officers and men with lanterns came to the 
 rescue. Most of them knew the Colonel ; 
 many of them the mare. A veterinary surgeon 
 was found and pulled out of his bed. The
 
 26 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 mare was given a roomy box in a farm. She 
 revived somewhat. Willing hands bedded her 
 down in bracken. Humbleton set to work to 
 warm and dry her. The Colonel took her 
 temperature and found it less. 
 
 The light was just stealing over the white- 
 bosomed hills and snow-thatched roofs when he 
 swung into the saddle to ride the last long 
 stage to his Headquarters alone. 
 
 The mare was playing with some hay, and 
 Humbleton was rugging her up, as he left her. 
 
 IV 
 
 All that day he was busy, and no news came 
 through ; but a horse of his Orderly Officer's 
 died, partly from exposure and partly from 
 eating wood, the vet said. 
 
 Next morning early the Colonel rode off to 
 the valley where the mare was stabled to see 
 how things were going. 
 
 As he rode up to the yard of the farm, 
 Humbleton, looking in his goat-skin like a 
 little clean-shaven Robinson Crusoe, came 
 ploughing through the snow to meet him. 
 
 He looked very dogged and did not catch 
 the Colonel's eye.
 
 THE BROWN MARE 27 
 
 Well ? " said the Colonel. 
 
 " Mare's dead, sir," answered the little 
 man. 
 
 " Indeed ! " said the Colonel rudely. " What 
 time ? " 
 
 " Two o'clock this morning." 
 
 The Colonel said nothing and dismounted. 
 
 Heavily he walked through the slush of the 
 farmyard towards the loose-box and entered. 
 
 Honest and kind in death as in life, the 
 brown mare lay on her side, rough of coat, her 
 long flat neck stretched out, her long thin 
 legs slightly crooked, her shoes upturned and 
 shining, looking strangely pathetic. 
 
 Over her head Humbleton had scrawled in 
 chalk upon a beam : 
 
 KITTY: 
 
 'Died for her country, 
 I March, 1916. 
 
 The Colonel stood above her. 
 
 He was glad she had such a thick bed of 
 bracken to rest upon. 
 
 Then he bent and felt her heart. 
 
 One of those strange and overwhelming 
 waves of emotion, of which we cannot trace 
 the origin, came surging up out of the inland 
 ocean of his being and choked him.
 
 28 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 He kicked the bracken about with his feet, 
 and blew his nose. 
 
 Then he said 
 
 " We shall miss her, Humbleton." 
 
 The little groom, standing in his goat-skin 
 jacket in the door, his back towards his master, 
 looked out over the snow and answered 
 nothing.
 
 II 
 
 THE 
 
 INVASION 
 OF ENGLAND
 
 THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 
 
 MISTY, toiling, mute, she was much as we 
 had left her, in outward seeming at all events, 
 as we made our way up the Mersey between 
 crowded banks on that chill October morning. 
 But for the fact that a sentry with a rifle 
 and fixed bayonet paced the wharf, you would 
 never have known that England was engaged 
 in a life-and-death struggle such as she has 
 not known for a hundred years. 
 
 And the same held good as we travelled 
 south. There were a few more men in khaki 
 about the stations, a few more tents beside 
 the line, a few strange placards on the 
 hoardings : for the rest, battered men ploughed 
 behind steaming horses under dank and 
 dripping woodlands as of old ; coveys of 
 partridges whirred away over purpling hedges ; 
 and warm old farms, warmer and older surely 
 than any others in the world, seemed to 
 sleep as they had slept for centuries. 
 
 At Stafford we left the train to spend 
 the night with a friend in a village hard
 
 32 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 by ; and here we came on the first signs 
 of the Invasion. 
 
 Our friend had an empty cottage in her 
 garden, and was preparing it for the invaders. 
 That morning had brought her a telephone 
 message from the Organizing Secretary of the 
 Central Committee at Birmingham, saying 
 
 " Several crowds of refugees arrived. Am 
 sending you some." 
 
 The message was vague and of a character 
 to have crushed the spirit of one less 
 valiant than our friend. Nothing daunted, 
 she had sallied down at once into the village, 
 and asked for what she needed. One had 
 given a mattress, another a chair, a third had 
 offered two eggs a day for a month. One 
 man would meet the refugees at the station 
 with a truck, another would supply vegetables 
 from his allotment : all were helping in their 
 humble way. That day the promised refugees 
 did not arrive. Next morning our friend 
 went into Birmingham and made her way 
 to the Central Receiving Hall. There were 
 refugees in their hundreds, waiting for hosts 
 to claim them. She wandered up and down 
 amongst them much as of old a Roman 
 matron may have wandered up and down 
 the slave-market of her imperial city. A
 
 THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 33 
 
 nursing mother with a swarm of little 
 children ran after her, begging to be taken. 
 
 "I've nothing but a poor little cottage to 
 offer you," our friend had said. 
 
 " O madame ! " the poor woman had 
 replied. " Anywhere where I can be alone 
 with my children and see to them properly ! 
 We have lived in herds for weeks." 
 
 That was her cry ; and it is the cry of 
 millions more in Western Europe to-day. 
 
 Indeed, the first thing you hear on your 
 return to England is that cry raised on every 
 side ; the first thing you see is this stream 
 of helpless, homeless exiles driven forth from 
 their farms and cottages and peaceful towns 
 before this tornado of death and destruction 
 that has swept their innocent land. 
 
 When I reached London and went down 
 to that poor quarter of the town where of 
 old I lived and worked I found the same 
 story. 
 
 " How are things going ? " I asked the 
 stewardess, as I entered the bar-parlour of 
 our Club for Working-men. 
 
 " Very slack, sir," she answered. " We've 
 over forty of our members at the War. 
 It's all Belgian Refugees now." 
 
 As I walked down the alley I saw that 
 3
 
 34 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 the house we had been fitting up in July 
 last as a Girls' Club had been rechristened 
 Maison Beige. Strange, dark peasant women 
 leaned out of the windows ; strange children 
 of strange speech played in the garden. 
 
 At twelve hours' notice that little house 
 had been fitted up to receive refugees toward 
 the end of August. The call came late 
 one night. The neighbours rushed to the 
 rescue. Mattresses, pots and pans, tables 
 and chairs, came pouring in from the houses 
 of rich and poor. And after them came 
 the vanquished of Liege : women and girls, 
 old men, boys, and children. They had lost 
 everything but each other. One woman had 
 seen two of her children scattered to death 
 by a shell before her eyes ; another sat 
 down and wept for endless hours when first 
 she found the shelter of those blank but 
 kindly walls. 
 
 " I thought she'd never have done, poor 
 lamb," said a sympathetic neighbour. 
 
 Others did not know where their husbands, 
 fathers, brothers, sons might be. All had their 
 story : most had little more. 
 
 Since Maison Beige was established thousands 
 from all over London have trooped to see 
 the children with their hands and feet cut
 
 THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 35 
 
 off, their eyes gouged out, by the Prussian 
 soldiers and have been sent away disappointed. 
 As though anything imaginable of man could 
 exceed the horror of the thing consummated ! 
 a country razed ; swept as by fire of 
 houses, human beings, stock ; the patient toil 
 of generations thrown on the rubbish-heap 
 of Time ; men maimed, women dying uncared 
 for in childbirth, girls shooting themselves, 
 children lost and starving to death in woods 
 and desolate rat-haunted barns and all 
 innocent, as even their persecutors admit, of 
 any crime. 
 
 " Ces sont des braves gens, les Allemands ! " 
 said a noble girl I found busy at her lace-work 
 in an upper room at the Club ; and she said 
 it with an irony so gentle that at first I did 
 not detect the terrible quality of it. 
 
 She herself and a crowd of others had been 
 locked into a church for two days "sans 
 nourriture." 
 
 Then they had burst out and made for the 
 ships and the sea men and women and 
 children, a trembling mass of fugitives driven 
 before this tidal wave of cruelty and brutality 
 and death ; many of them spending days in 
 open boats on the terrible waters that were 
 still kinder than Prussian steel.
 
 36 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 It was such an expulsion as not even the 
 Edict of Nantes had caused. 
 
 And that is how England has come to be 
 invaded. And her invaders are everywhere. 
 Belgian girls are selling Belgian papers on the 
 curb within a stone's-throw of Charing Cross. 
 Not a street in London but out of one or 
 more houses hang the black and red and 
 yellow of the Belgian flag. In the streets, at 
 the stations, emerging from the houses of the 
 rich, and issuing from the mews and alleys 
 where dwell the poor, are strange- faced men, 
 with strange-cut beards, in strange hats, who 
 talk a strange tongue, and solid simple peasant 
 women, unlike our own, their neat black 
 shawls about their heads. 
 
 And the stories of these invaders as you 
 hear them on bus or car are pitiful enough. 
 
 A Saturday or two ago I was at Waterloo 
 Station. Two men stood outside the door of 
 a carriage I was about to enter. One of 
 them, an obvious Englishman, asked me if I 
 was going down to Weybridge. I answered 
 yes. He asked me if I would see his friend, 
 a Belgian, out at the station. 
 
 " He speaks no English," he said. c ' He 
 was a customer of ours in Brussels."
 
 THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 37 
 
 The Belgian and I entered. He was a 
 comfortable bourgeois, sleek, clean-shaven, 
 immaculately dressed, admirably fed. Every 
 great city of the Western world possesses 
 thousands of such citizens, self-respecting, 
 prosperous, middle-aged, who go down to their 
 offices in the city every morning and return 
 to their villa in the suburbs every evening. 
 
 He, it seemed, was a wholesale druggist. 
 For thirty years he had been trading in 
 Brussels and had done well ; growing gradually 
 and without offence in his own eyes and those 
 of his neighbours. His bank account had 
 expanded year by year, and so had his 
 waistcoat. Industrious, innocuous ; loving his 
 friends and clients well, not hating his com- 
 petitors unduly ; what he lacked in vision 
 made up for by benevolence ; as good as 
 most of us, and better perhaps than some ; 
 and he had passed quietly into affluent middle- 
 age. He was not married perhaps he had 
 been too selfish : he lived with his two sisters 
 and a brother instead perhaps because it was 
 his duty. He had bought house-property 
 seven houses in all ; and laid by money. He 
 loved his little comforts, and his habits 
 were dear to him. Every Sunday he took 
 his stroll about the town and eyed with
 
 38 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 comfortable assurance the houses that meant 
 for him ease and well-being in his old age. 
 
 On the 3Oth of July last there had been few 
 happier men on earth than my well-lined 
 friend. A week later this plump man, who 
 had never known hardship, to whom his coffee 
 after dinner was so dear, and his hot-water- 
 bottle in bed of winter evenings almost a 
 necessity, was a wanderer on the face of the 
 earth. 
 
 " C'est dur, Monsieur. C'est dur," he said, 
 and the tears coursed down his cheeks. 
 
 I was at my wits' end to know how to 
 comfort him. 
 
 True he was mainly concerned about him- 
 self; but if his view was not exalted it was 
 touchingly human. 
 
 He asked me how long I thought the War 
 would last. Somehow he had managed to get 
 hold of 1,200 francs before he fled, he and 
 his sisters and his brother. 
 
 If the war lasted no more than six months 
 his little store would see him and his through 
 at 7 francs a day the four. 
 
 " Ce n'est pas beaucoup, Monsieur, pour 
 quatre ! " 
 
 If it lasted more, one year, two years 
 Ah!
 
 THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 39 
 
 He shrugged his stout shoulders. 
 
 " I do not tell my sisters," he said. " Such 
 things are not for women." 
 
 "You've got us behind you," I ventured 
 lamely. "England the world." 
 
 " Ah, yes, Monsieur," he admitted. " But 
 to be dependent to live on charity ! Ah, 
 c'est terrible terrible" And he was crying 
 once again. 
 
 In the days of his prosperity, it seemed, he 
 had bought his drugs, some in England, some 
 in Germany. 
 
 Did I think he would ever buy of Germany 
 again ? He clicked his thumb-nail against his 
 front teeth, making a vicious snapping noise. 
 
 " Jamais ! Jamais ! Jamais ! " 
 
 That fat man who had never hated in his 
 life hated now. 
 
 And it is not only by women and children, 
 the old and the invalid, that England has 
 been invaded to-day. 
 
 Everywhere in the gray bustle of the streets, 
 amid the flaming glory of autumn woods, in 
 great thoroughfares and country lanes, you are 
 surprised by men in their prime, singly or in 
 groups, wearing a blue uniform strange to our 
 eyes ; some of them limping, some with arms
 
 40 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 in slings, some with bandaged heads ; and not 
 a few, especially among the younger men, with 
 faces so purged by suffering that the dross of 
 human nature has been swept away leaving the 
 pure gold of the spirit. They creep on 
 crutches in and out of extemporized hospitals ; 
 they sun themselves on the seats of country 
 houses turned into convalescent homes. And 
 wherever we meet one such, be he a humble 
 private of the line hobbling along, or a staff 
 officer dashing by in an automobile lent him by 
 a wealthy host, our instinct is to raise our hats 
 to the representative of the. land that has flung 
 itself in desperate valour across the path of the 
 hordes whose goal was the city from which I 
 write.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE 
 
 BOMBARDMENT; 
 AND A BOY
 
 THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 
 
 SUDDENLY in the grey December afternoon, 
 as we slid along the street, those astonishing 
 newspaper placards shot out at us : 
 
 East Coast Towns Bombarded. 
 
 Leaning forward in the taxi, I pointed them 
 out to the Woman. 
 
 " What about Frog ? " was her immediate 
 inquiry. 
 
 Frog was her nephew ; and Frog was at 
 school on the East Coast at Scarborough. 
 
 " It's probably Yarmouth again," I said ; and 
 my words were not entirely disinterested. 
 
 At the beginning of the War I had made 
 a solemn resolution to buy one paper in the 
 morning and one at night and no more ; and 
 so far, in spite of manifold temptations, I had 
 kept to my resolve. The evening paper is 
 bought after dinner at 8.15 precisely. At 
 8.13 I rise from my dinner, fumble in the box 
 in the lobby for the latch-key, sally out, wet or 
 fine, cross the greasy road, and at the little shop 
 
 4:.
 
 44 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 in the side-street where they sell sweets and 
 papers spend a penny. 
 
 And it was now 3.30. 
 
 " Don't you think you could get an evening 
 paper early this once ? " suggested my wife, 
 who was an Aunt as well. 
 
 '* I hate departing from my principles," I 
 said with marked acridity, and gripped the 
 copper in my pocket with tenacious fist. 
 
 A habit once established is dear to me as 
 life. 
 
 But the man on the lift could afford a 
 newspaper, it seemed, if I could not. 
 
 "Any news?" I asked innocently, as we 
 ascended to our flat. 
 
 " Yes, sir," he answered. " Scarborough in 
 ruins ! Somethin shockin." 
 
 It was too much for me. The thought of 
 that sturdy blue-eyed urchin of ten, with his 
 plume of fair hair, and his wonderful air of 
 integrity, whom I had last seen on the lawn 
 courted by the bridesmaids in that remote 
 village of Bucks on the glorious August 
 morning I took the Woman to be my wife, 
 overwhelmed me. 
 
 Self-respect forbade me to offer to buy the 
 porter's halfpenny paper second-hand. So I 
 threw my principles and my penny alike to the
 
 THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 45 
 
 winds, and descending in the lift spent far more 
 than I could afford on the nearest paper. 
 
 There was little in it but that cool, curt 
 announcement from the Admiralty : 
 
 Between 8 and 9 this morning Scarborough, Wkitby, and 
 the Hartlepools were bombarded by an enemy squadron. 
 The situation is developing. 
 
 I was not unduly concerned for Scarborough, 
 Whitby, or the Hartlepools. The bombard- 
 ment was an incident in the War a pin-prick ; 
 not unexpected ; the somewhat spiteful retort 
 to the destruction of the German Pacific 
 Squadron. One met the incident much as one 
 would meet the jeers of a street-boy. In my 
 heart I was not even greatly concerned about 
 Frog. Scarborough might be in ruins, as the 
 porter averred ; but I had a clear vision of 
 Master Frog sauntering about amid those ruins 
 on those pillar-like little legs of his, full of 
 aplomb, both hands deep in his pockets, a very 
 big bull's-eye plugging his cheek, as he blunted 
 the toes of his boots against the broken 
 concrete. 
 
 But I was the husband of the Aunt of Frog ; 
 and Frog's mother and my wife were singular 
 and intimate allies ; and Frog's mother was in 
 London.
 
 46 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 We speculated with interest on the action 
 she would take. 
 
 " I bet old Edie got the funks and wired for 
 him to come home," said the Woman, who was 
 not above criticism of her friend. 
 
 " She'd hardly be such an ass, surely," I 
 remarked. " What would be the good when it 
 was all over ? Besides, it was in the middle of 
 term." 
 
 " There's only one Frog," said his Aunt 
 sagaciously. "And term's nearly over." 
 
 " If she did take him away, Frog will never 
 forgive her," I muttered. 
 
 I knew Frog. 
 
 He was a typical little Anglo-Saxon sturdy, 
 dogged, unimaginative ; combining already in 
 his small person that passion for religion and 
 sport which is still the characteristic of the men 
 of his country and his class. It was known 
 that he was already in the football eleven ; and 
 it was whispered in the family that he had 
 started an Anti-swearing League at school. 
 
 " I expect Edie'll come round this evening," 
 said the Woman. 
 
 But she did not. 
 
 And the next morning brought nothing but 
 a postcard from another Aunt. 
 
 Where is Frog ?
 
 THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 47 
 
 It was not till the evening that the question 
 was answered. 
 
 Then the door opened quietly, and a small 
 and merry boy grinned in it, his stately 
 mother towering behind. 
 
 " Who's the coward ? " came yells from the 
 sofa and the arm-chair at once. 
 
 " Not me ! " piped Frog, already in his 
 Aunt's arms. 
 
 " It's mother ! " came the mocking voice 
 from the sofa. " I know her. Edie ! " 
 
 " No ; it's not ! " The rich voice of the 
 mother blended with the shrill treble of the 
 boy. "It's Booth." 
 
 Booth was Frog's schoolmaster. 
 
 " Of course they put it on the absent one ! " 
 jeered the mocker. " Now, Frog ! let's hear 
 all about it." 
 
 The boy sat stolidly down, his merry face 
 rippling smiles. His legs were so short that 
 his feet were off the floor, and he swung 
 them, as he gave us his first experience of war. 
 
 " Well, we were at breakfast when it 
 began ! " he chirped. 
 
 <c Did you know what it was ? " 
 
 " Rather ! We knew at once. Only Mr. 
 Bagshaw tried to make out it was the Fleet 
 practising. But of course we knew it wasn't."
 
 48 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 He laughed gaily at the ineffectual wile 
 of the young master. 
 
 " How did you know ? " 
 
 " Because of the noise." 
 
 " What was it like ? " 
 
 He did not answer at once, and became 
 suddenly grave. This was the thing that 
 had most impressed his impressionable boyish 
 mind. All else might pass. That would 
 remain the noise ! the noise ! 
 
 " Why, it was like nothing else you ever 
 heard. It was awful and the smell ! " 
 
 There was a moment's pause. Then the 
 cross-examination continued. 
 
 " Was the school struck by shells ? " 
 
 " No ; but the house next door was a lot 
 of times." 
 
 We seemed to see it all ; the bare gas-lit hall 
 of the school ; the boys sitting round the long 
 tables in the dim December morning, opening 
 their mothers' letters ; the matron, rather 
 cross, serving out the porridge ; the maids, 
 rather sleepy, handing it round ; the young 
 master in- his pince-nez feeling his unshaven 
 chin, and wishing he'd had time to shave and 
 suddenly all about them legions of screaming 
 devils swooping out of the sea ; tornadoes 
 of terrifying noise ; a stench as of a pestilence ;
 
 THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 49 
 
 the abomination of desolation abroad on every 
 hand. 
 
 Noise and stench ! stench and noise ! 
 and again noise and stench ! 
 
 " What happened ? " 
 
 " We took our bread-and-butter and went 
 down into the cellar and finished our breakfasts 
 there," chirped the embryo Englishman. 
 
 " Was anybody afraid ? " 
 
 " Shaw and Jackson were a bit funky. 
 Shaw's the son of an Admiral." Frog seemed 
 to think that in some mysterious way the occu- 
 pation of the father explained and justified the 
 conduct of the son. " His mother always said 
 he would be," he added, by way of confirmation. 
 
 They gathered in the dimness of the cellar, 
 listening to the shrieking horror outside. Some 
 munched their bread-and-butter, and pretended 
 they did not mind. Some teased the frightened 
 maids ; some comforted them. The young 
 master, a trifle flustered, but determined to do 
 his duty and keep his charges calm, continued 
 to babble about the Fleet. The bolder spirits 
 climbed to the grating and peeped out to be 
 driven back by that abominable stench. And 
 Shaw and Jackson whimpered a little in the 
 corner, to a chorus of brutal "O, shut ups ! " 
 from unfeeling comrades. 
 
 4
 
 50 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 Houses were crashing down on every side of 
 them. 
 
 " What happened next ? " 
 
 "Why, Mr. Booth said, 'I think we'll go 
 for a walk on the golf-links.' So we all went 
 out to the golf-links, where there are two 
 hills. And we stood between them for about 
 an hour. And then we went back. And that 
 was all." 
 
 It was all ; but it was enough for the 
 present so, apparently, thought Mr. Booth. 
 
 He packed all the boys home by the next 
 train, sending their trunks after them. 
 
 Most of them carried with them a memory 
 of a noise and stench that will never leave 
 them ; and some a more material trophy of the 
 bombardment. 
 
 " Frog had a bit of shell," said his mother. 
 
 " I haven't got it now," chimed in Frog. 
 
 "What happened to it ? " asked the Woman 
 in her swift way. 
 
 " I swopped it for five bob ! " 
 
 "Frog!" cried his indignant Aunt. 
 
 "Well, you see, I had another bit," said Frog 
 apologetically. 
 
 "And what happened to that?" 
 
 "I lost it in the train." 
 
 It was so human and above all so school-
 
 THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 51 
 
 boyish that we forgave him with laughter that 
 somehow did not seem out of place. 
 
 But he ended his narrative with a little 
 unconscious touch that brought us back to the 
 realities. 
 
 " One fellow got a letter that was sploshed 
 with blood." 
 
 And we remembered that a postman on his 
 rounds, standing talking at the door to a maid 
 to whom he was delivering the letters, had had 
 his head blown off; and the bag, packed with 
 messages of peace and goodwill from all over 
 the earth, had been soaked with the blood of an 
 innocent man, shed deliberately to testify that 
 Hate still ruled the world. 
 
 A strange Christmas ! 
 
 A strange Christmas story, with its gleams of 
 laughter and underlying sense of tragedy ! 
 
 Frog's grandchildren will love him to tell it 
 them. And to tease the old man, they will 
 press to know what happened to the bit of shell. 
 
 Then grandfather will confess with shame, 
 bowing his white head. And the children will 
 all stand round him in their smocks, with bare 
 legs and very round eyes, and chirrup with 
 one accord 
 
 " O grandfather ! "
 
 IV 
 
 THE 
 
 MIND OF 
 AN EMPIRE
 
 THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 
 
 IT is said that we Anglo-Saxons take our plea- 
 sures sadly ; and there is truth in the saying. It 
 might be added with equal truth that we take our 
 sorrows with a peculiar kind of flippancy that only 
 those who understand us can perhaps appreciate. 
 
 England has never been so spiritual as during 
 the last two or three decades. In all her lengthy 
 history she has never been so earnest or so united 
 as she is about the business she has to-day in hand. 
 
 Yet it is to a music-hall song that her young 
 men have been pouring in their thousands to 
 strew the Marches of Flanders with their 
 willing bodies ; hurrying from the quadrangles 
 of ancient public-schools, and the courts of still 
 more ancient Universities ; trooping from 
 office, from factory, from counter, and from 
 mill to trenches filled with icy water, to prisons, 
 privations, wounds unspeakable, and death. 
 
 It's a long way to Tipperary, 
 It's a long, long way to go, 
 It's a long way to Tipper ary, 
 To the sweetest girl I know, 
 55
 
 56 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 is being sung by men not light in spirit nor 
 poor in intellectual equipment, but men who 
 know what they are fighting for as truly as 
 did those troopers of Cromwell who in the 
 dawn before Dunbar chaunted tremendously 
 
 The Lord of Hosts my Shepherd is, 
 
 Fifty years ago men of the same stock were 
 flocking to another standard, to uphold the 
 same ideal, singing in much the same spirit 
 
 We are coming, Father Abraham, 
 We are coming, millions strong. 
 
 Our men sing their battle-song as yours 
 sang theirs with an apparent carelessness 
 that serves as a mask to disguise the real 
 spiritual fervour behind. 
 
 We who stay at home and wait do not 
 sing it. Indeed, we do not sing at all. The 
 horror is always with us ; and the ache 
 that knows no end. We who wait feel it 
 as those who fight do not let us be 
 thankful for it. It is our small share of 
 the universal burthen, never for a moment 
 to be laid aside. 
 
 At night that great ghastly white arm which 
 sweeps over London, taps at your window,
 
 THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 57 
 
 feeling the darkness, searching the uttermost 
 parts of the heavens with probing fingers to 
 find, if it may, its enemy amid the stars, to 
 grapple with him there, and bring him hurling 
 down to earth, will not allow us to forget. 
 And all day, as you go down the street, WAR, 
 with all its terrible associations deep-seated in 
 the memory of the race, is shouted at you 
 from a hundred sides : the recruiting posters 
 on the wall ; the endless tramp of the brown 
 battalions ; the horses picketed in the Parks ; 
 the voice of the drill-sergeant ringing in 
 squares and courtyards long after the few rare 
 lamps which sentinel our streets have been lit ; 
 the ragged urchins in paper cocked hats 
 marching in the gutter banging on empty 
 biscuit-tins ; and, by no means least, those long, 
 gray deadly armoured cars stealing through 
 the misty streets, like squadrons of destroyers, 
 whence no man knows, whither none can say, 
 the lean guns snarling through the shields, 
 one look-out man aloft, and in the shield 
 under the gun a long slit, through which you 
 see a row of eyes ; while behind the cars in 
 ordered clouds, scurrying along bent over 
 their motor-bicycles, come the remainder of 
 the guns' crews. Devilish in their possibilities ; 
 beautiful in their speed and power with a
 
 58 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 terrible beauty that makes you shudder while 
 you must admire, they thrill the spirit. 
 
 Certainly Florence itself at the height of 
 the Renaissance was not fuller of significance 
 than is London to-day. The Red-Cross flags 
 flap overhead ; the Roll of Honour daily 
 lengthens in your Club ; the young widows 
 with the shining eyes, peering out of their 
 black habiliments, startle you as they spring 
 on you out of the fog ; and a soldier with a 
 limp hobbles down the street before you, 
 carrying by its knob the black Pickelhaube 
 of the Prussian he slew at the parapet of his 
 trench. 
 
 The Hun is at the gate ! 
 
 And never for one moment may man, 
 woman, or child forget it. 
 
 Things great and small remind us con- 
 tinually of his presence in our midst. 
 
 Tom cannot come to lunch because he is 
 manning the anti-aircraft gun on the top of 
 a Government building from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. 
 every day. 
 
 And very funny Tom looks, his sister 
 reports, with a delicious little giggle, in his 
 coarse blue uniform that makes people at 
 the station mistake him for a porter Tom 
 of all men ; Tom of the Bachelors' Club who
 
 THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 59 
 
 till July was certainly one of the three best- 
 dressed men in London. 
 
 Margaret has not been seen for months 
 because she has been serving as a probationer 
 in the great house in her village which has 
 been turned, at the owner's wish, into a 
 hospital ; and the ball-room is now a ward 
 the ball-room in which last July she danced 
 with young Forbes of the Scots Guards, who 
 sleeps his last sleep on a steep hillside Ypres-way, 
 with his face to Berlin and his back to Calais. 
 
 And uproarious old Pongo's sword has come 
 home quietly with a label attached. The 
 General, we are told, is riding Dorothy, the 
 rat-tailed bay ; while Lamplighter, the chest- 
 nut, got cut to pieces over a barbed-wire 
 entanglement. Anyway, dear Pongo will not 
 need the horses he loved any more. 
 
 Harry, too, has disappeared from society, 
 not because he has committed a crime, but 
 because he is a Special Constable on duty 
 every other day from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and 
 therefore has to sleep during the day. While 
 Bob, the man of peace, who in spite of his 
 forty-five years preserves the innocent blue 
 eye and merry, bird-like air of the boy of 
 ten, Bob, who spends all his days lecturing on 
 Bankruptcy in London University, passes
 
 60 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 laborious evening hours, that of old he hoarded 
 jealously for his wife and little daughters, 
 in a company of others like unto himself, in 
 a dingy courtyard, forming platoon, turning 
 right, advancing in column, and being asked 
 by a Sergeant-Major in a voice of thunder 
 what the 'ell he thinks he's playing at. 
 
 It is such a Christmas as none of us have 
 known, and such as our children will never 
 know. And that is the thought which com- 
 forts, which strengthens, which abides. 
 
 It is all worth while the sufferings, the 
 suspense, the bereavements if the shadow of 
 the horror that has hung over the earth so long 
 can be lifted for ever from the hearts of men. 
 
 With malice towards none ; with chanty for all; with 
 firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let 
 us strive on to finish the work we are in ; to bind up the 
 nation's wounds ; to care for him who shall have borne the 
 battle, and for his widow and orphan ; to do all which may 
 achieve and cherish a lasting peace. 
 
 The spirit voiced by Abraham Lincoln is 
 the spirit of England to-day. 
 
 We are striving on to finish the work we 
 are in. The 
 
 Stern Daughter of the Voice of God 
 
 is calling us at least as insistently as she called 
 our fathers in Wordsworth's time.
 
 THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 61 
 
 And we are hearkening to her call let us 
 say it in all thankfulness and humility. 
 
 A month back I attended a wedding. In 
 ordinary times it would have been fashionable. 
 Now it was quiet. The father of the bride 
 had snatched a few hours' leave from com- 
 manding his regiment on the East Coast to 
 attend ; and the best man, also in khaki, was 
 enabled to be present because he had been 
 shot through the mouth during the retreat 
 from Mons. 
 
 " I've got my new teeth in to-day," he 
 said. " I feel as if I'd a portmanteau in my 
 mouth." 
 
 Next day he was to join the Special Reserve 
 Battalion, and expected to return to the Front 
 in a month. 
 
 On New Year's Day he went not joyfully, 
 but because he had to. 
 
 " It's a beastly business," he said. " But 
 we've got to see it through." 
 
 And that is the attitude of all these humble 
 men of war who have the work in hand. 
 
 Indeed, there is no swagger about our 
 soldiers of to-day : Ancient Pistol died long 
 ago. There is no rhodomontade about glory ; 
 no affectation of recklessness. Sincerity is 
 the keynote of the hour and the nation
 
 62 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 the sincerity that comes from a spiritual 
 awakening, itself the result of contact with 
 reality. And it has affected us throughout : 
 women as well as men, girls and boys alike. 
 " Everybody's natural now," said a girl 
 the other day. " We've all dropped our frills. 
 It's such a comfort. " 
 
 Since the overthrow of the Prussian Guard 
 on the banks of the Yser somewhere about 
 mid-November last year l every British officer 
 and man who could be spared has been sent 
 home on seventy-two hours' leave. 
 
 And they have made a deep impression 
 on us all, these returning veterans. They 
 were so quiet and so determined ; never 
 doubting the result ; somewhat astonished at 
 the frame of mind of those at home. 
 
 " Why are you all so depressed here ? " said 
 a staff-officer recently returned. 
 
 We are not in fact depressed ; but we have 
 not been living on the spiritual heights of 
 those men who have been fighting up to 
 their throats in mud in Flanders, the odds 
 8 to i against them for most of a month, 
 as the record of the yth Division shows 
 the 7th Division which, landing early in 
 
 1 Written in 1915.
 
 THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 63 
 
 October, had forty officers left out of the 
 original four hundred six weeks later. 
 
 In the British Service officers and men 
 have always been very close : " We were a 
 band of brothers," wrote Nelson of his 
 comrades of the Nile ; but surely they have 
 never been so close as in this last great testing 
 time. And I am not sure which is the more 
 delightful to hear the officers gossip about 
 the men, or the men chat of their officers. 
 
 A corporal, lying wounded in a London 
 hospital, yesterday told a friend a little tale 
 illustrative of the point. He was on outpost 
 duty, and was short of a man for sentry. 
 
 A staff-officer, passing, asked him what 
 was the matter. 
 
 " I've four posts, sir ; and only three men 
 in my relief," the corporal explained. 
 
 " I'll take a turn," said the officer. 
 
 He shouldered a rifle and paced his beat for 
 two hours. 
 
 " Their officers wouldn't have done that, I'll 
 lay ! " ended the corporal. His criticism of 
 their officers may have been unjust, but served 
 at least as a delightful tribute to his own. 
 
 Officers and men alike have returned to 
 the Front now.
 
 64 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 No one of them would have stayed this 
 side the water if he could ; no one of them 
 returned to the trenches with joy or pre- 
 tended to. 
 
 It was necessity that drove : the need to 
 rid the earth of a terror, to exterminate a false 
 ideal that has throttled men and enslaved them 
 for a thousand centuries, to bring an errant 
 nation back to the paths of peace lest govern- 
 ment of the people by the people for the people 
 perish from the earth. For that ideal Americans 
 gave their best yesterday and the day before ; 
 and Englishmen are giving theirs to-day. 
 
 " I felt like a schoolboy going back to the 
 cane," wrote a friend, who has seen War in 
 many lands, as he turned his back on London 
 and set his face towards the sea again. 
 
 And you find the same thought expressed 
 everywhere. 
 
 The modern man does not care for War for 
 its own sake once he has experienced it. 
 
 At Christmas we were staying in a country- 
 house. 
 
 The old Colonel, whose fighting days are 
 done, lay upstairs in a bed from which he will 
 never rise, looking somewhat pathetic in a 
 new-grown beard. His son, commanding now
 
 THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 65 
 
 the Horse Artillery battery his father com- 
 manded twenty-five years ago, is in the trenches, 
 his guns right up alongside the infantry, firing 
 at three hundred yards from what he elegantly 
 describes as funk-pits. The old gardener, who 
 was the Colonel's soldier-servant and followed 
 him over land and sea for thirty years, was 
 somewhat depressed partly because the 
 Colonel would never prune the roses any more, 
 and partly because he, being in his sixtieth 
 year, could not get the Recruiting Officer 
 to believe that he was under thirty-five. The 
 chauffeur, another old soldier, twenty years the 
 junior of the man with the spade, had rejoined ; 
 and a daughter of the house acted as coachman, 
 driving daily an ancient cob into the town 
 and out again. 
 
 We went down to see the wife of the 
 gardener in the lodge. 
 
 One of her sons, a sergeant in the Artillery, 
 had been home on his seventy-two hours' leave. 
 
 " Willie's gone back, sir," she said. " I 
 don't think he wanted to go. He's a man of 
 peace reelly, our Will is." 
 
 We are all that to-day we of the countries 
 west of the Rhine. 
 
 And that is why we are at war.
 
 THE 
 SHADOW
 
 THE SHADOW 
 
 LONDON was in the grip of three epidemics 
 influenza, measles, and, not least, the War. 
 
 Each of the three made a heavy demand 
 upon the nursing community ; and when I 
 went to the telephone and asked Dr. Muir if 
 he could send a nurse, I was pleased when he 
 answered in his curt Scotch way 
 
 " Certainly. I'll send one round at once." 
 
 An hour later the maid announced that the 
 nurse had come. 
 
 She proved a slight young woman with a 
 deliciously rustic air ; and she told me that 
 she nursed only for Dr. Muir. 
 
 Then she disappeared into her room, to emerge 
 again in a few moments white-aproned, in blue 
 uniform, with a sensible cap without tails. 
 
 A more English girt it was impossible to 
 conceive ; with honest plain gray eyes, a scoop- 
 nose, and that wonderful air of simplicity and 
 integrity that had first struck me. A creature 
 more natural, sturdy, and honest, it would have 
 
 been hard to find. 
 
 69
 
 70 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 Nurse Merton was a Guernsey girl, it seemed, 
 one of a family of seven. In her girlhood she 
 had never dreamed of nursing heroes indeed, 
 she was altogether too practical to be very 
 romantic ; but when her father fell ill, in her 
 sensible way she undertook the duty nearest to 
 hand. After his death, when she found she 
 had to provide for herself, she adopted without 
 either reluctance or desire the profession in 
 which she had now some little experience. She 
 crossed the water, came to London, and joined 
 a hospital ; but through all her moving ex- 
 periences in the great city she kept the stubborn 
 prejudices and sound good sense of the country 
 girl, adding to them of necessity something of 
 the worldly wisdom and the judgment that 
 comes from contact with all sorts of men in all 
 kinds of conditions. 
 
 After she had earned her certificate, she had 
 met Dr. Muir, who had asked her to nurse for 
 him. And it was indirectly through the long 
 Scotch doctor that the experience of her life 
 had come. 
 
 In August and September Dr. Muir left 
 London always for his holiday. At the end 
 of July last a matron who was running a nurse- 
 ing home in Paris asked Nurse Merton if 
 she would care to undertake a case out there,
 
 THE SHADOW 71 
 
 while her doctor was away. She had never 
 seen Paris ; had a poor opinion of the French, 
 very poor, and went on July 28th. 
 
 There was talk of war at the time ; but then 
 in Nurse Merton's twenty-six years' experience 
 of life there was always talk of war ; and she 
 let 'em talk. 
 
 In the Paris home there were two or three 
 nurses, one a young Scotch woman, attending 
 some typhoid cases. Busy at her work, she 
 didn't see much of Paris in those early days ; 
 and what she did see she didn't like. 
 
 The French women were not like English 
 women ; and they should have been. 
 
 They were got up ! 
 
 On August 2nd Germany declared war. 
 
 And in the twinkling of an eye Paris changed. 
 
 It became a city of women, who wept ; and 
 of men, who hurried off to the Front. The 
 composed English nurse watched with critical 
 interest the frivolous capital in the first throes 
 of its contact with reality. 
 
 It seemed to her a city balanced on a powder- 
 barrel which might explode at any moment. 
 The Parisians were furiously excited and no 
 wonder. 
 
 Above all, they were panting for a row a 
 row at all costs. And there were rows every-
 
 72 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 where ; small rows : black knots of people 
 at every street-corner centring round a row> 
 Nobody ever knew what the row was about. 
 That didn't matter. It was a row; and it 
 was well. People gathered all day and night 
 in the streets, outside the shops, on their door- 
 steps, and watched the rows come to a head 
 and dissipate again. In those days the beds 
 of Paris knew no occupants. Men and 
 women prowled about with fierce, terrible eyes. 
 There were spies everywhere and of course 
 traitors. Even the milk of the children had 
 been poisoned ! Therefore every shop of 
 every foreigner must be wrecked. A bas les 
 etrangers ! was the cry. 
 
 In those days you must speak French ; and 
 you must look French too or gare a vous ! 
 
 Those were terrible times for the foreigners ; 
 and especially for the English. 
 
 Were the English going to fight ? 
 
 Were they going to betray their ally . . . 
 once more ? 
 
 And the general impression was that they 
 were. 
 
 And if they did. . . . 
 
 Sacre cceur ! 
 
 It was not pleasant to be an English girl in 
 Paris in those first days.
 
 THE SHADOW 73 
 
 Even unruffled Margaret Merton felt so 
 much. 
 
 She and her Scotch colleague did not keep 
 their rooms, however. They walked the streets 
 discreetly and with downward eyes, seeing all, 
 saying nothing, lest their speech should betray 
 them. 
 
 The men had gone. Communications were 
 difficult. Taxis and fiacres were being used 
 for transport purposes. Trams and metros 
 were few and uncertain, and run in the main 
 by women. Food was at famine price, 
 especially meat. The city was put on rations. 
 No man or woman might buy more than 
 a certain fixed amount. So the wealthier 
 families sent out each member of the family, 
 one by one, to buy the maximum permitted. 
 Food was hoarded ; prices rose ; and there was 
 no money. 
 
 Then the sister of the home' summoned her 
 staff, and told them they were free to go 
 unpaid. She could take no further respon- 
 sibility for them. 
 
 Nurse Merton asked for her last week's 
 salary. 
 
 "I haven't got it," said the sister. 
 
 " Can I have my fare back to England ? 
 fifty-three francs."
 
 74 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 "I've only twenty francs in the world," the 
 sister answered. " You can't take the little I 
 have. You've enough of your own to take 
 you home." 
 
 It was true. And the same thing was 
 happening throughout Paris. Dependents 
 were being dismissed on every side unpaid. 
 
 Nurse Merton went out to find the walls 
 posted with a proclamation ordering all 
 women to leave the town. 
 
 But the stubborn English girl would not 
 admit defeat as yet. 
 
 She went to see the head of the British 
 Red Cross. He was somewhat amused with 
 her sang-froid in the tumult. 
 
 " What do you want ? " he asked. 
 
 *' I want to go to the Front," she answered. 
 
 " Wait here twenty-four hours, and you'll 
 be all right," came the grim reply. 
 
 u What do you mean ? " 
 
 " The Front will be here to-morrow." 
 
 " In Paris ? " 
 
 "All over it." 
 
 It was the general belief. 
 
 Nurse Merton was not dismayed. She went 
 on to the American Ambulance, Lycee Pasteur. 
 
 Did they want nurses for nothing ? 
 
 Did they not !
 
 THE SHADOW 75 
 
 Here at last was hope : here was help 
 to be given and received. The American 
 Colony in Paris had been at work from the 
 first. With limitless energy and enthusiasm 
 they had set themselves to face an unpre- 
 cedented situation. They might not fight for 
 the cause in which they believed ; but they 
 might succour the men who were fighting in 
 that cause. 
 
 They must have a hospital of their own 
 and the best in Paris at once. 
 
 Somehow they commandeered, leased, bought 
 outright, begged, or borrowed a vast skeleton 
 edifice that was in the process of building. 
 The roof was on ; the walls were up ; and 
 that was all. The very floors were not so 
 much as down. 
 
 Into that gaunt hulk of a building those 
 citizens of the country of Eternal Hope 
 poured men and money. All through those 
 August days they worked with deliberate 
 fury. . . . The Germans are coming. . . . 
 The Germans were there. . . . German aero- 
 planes were dropping bombs in the next street. 
 . . . German guns could be heard outside 
 the gates of Paris. . . . That didn't matter. 
 Nothing mattered except the turning of this 
 hulk into a hospital.
 
 76 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 And it was done at last. The skeleton 
 began to be clothed with flesh. Floors were 
 down ; bathrooms built. An X-ray room 
 was added, and an operating theatre with 
 a sterilizer such a sterilizer ! Even a little 
 diet-kitchen was not omitted. 
 
 Wards emerged out of the void thirty-five 
 beds to a ward, trim and comfortable, awaiting 
 occupants. And in the wards American 
 doctors and American and English nurses 
 worked, making ready. 
 
 They worked. While Liege and Namur 
 fell ; while the Expeditionary Force landed, 
 and Belgium was drowned in blood ; while the 
 grey Pickelhaubes swept on to the walls of 
 Paris, they worked. 
 
 Early in September they were ready just 
 in time. For the men from the Marne began 
 trickling into Paris in dusty motor-ambulances 
 that bore them straight from the field to the 
 hospitals : Englishmen in khaki, crimson- 
 trousered French, brown men of the desert, 
 and black men from beyond. 
 
 Day and night they trickled in. The 
 orderlies met them at the doors of the hospital 
 and unshipped them from the ambulances. 
 And the orderlies were English in the main 
 society men, simple Nurse Merton thought :
 
 THE SHADOW 77 
 
 one of them even a baron ; Club men, Piccadilly 
 loafers who had never worked before. They 
 worked now. All round the clock they 
 worked ; and it was real work work for men. 
 They received the wounded at the door and 
 carried them in. Close to the door was a 
 bathroom. There, if it was in anywise 
 possible, the orderlies bathed them. If they 
 were past that they were carried straight on 
 into the wards and laid down, bloody, grimy, 
 torn, in their dusty brown uniforms or stained 
 crimson trousers, on green tarpaulins that 
 covered the beds and prevented the sheets being 
 soiled. 
 
 And there all that the love and skill and care 
 of Anglo-Saxon men and women could do was 
 done. 
 
 At first the wounded came in all day and all 
 night. Then Paris, always a city of moods, 
 the woman among capitals, and a neurotic 
 woman at that, began to get an attack of 
 nerves. 
 
 There were so many so many. . . . 
 
 Would they never cease ? 
 
 Cest ajfreux ! effroyable ! 
 
 Why was there War at all ? 
 
 Who wanted War ? 
 
 And after that the wounded came in by night
 
 78 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 only ; the ambulances stealing down the 
 darkened streets, watched here and there by a 
 haggard woman from behind a blind, but in the 
 main unseen. 
 
 There were men dying horribly from 
 tetanus ; men whose wounds had already con- 
 tracted the mysterious and terrible gas-gangrene ; 
 men from the trenches hit in the head and in 
 fits ; men caught in the open and wounded in 
 the legs from hail of shrapnel. 
 
 There was nothing that love could offer, 
 money buy, or skill ensure that was withheld 
 from their charges by those kind Americans. 
 
 And the death-sentence in that hospital was 
 always passed in words that summed up the 
 spirit of the place. 
 
 " Give him champagne," it ran. 
 
 The same illimitable loving-kindness was 
 extended to all Germans included. 
 
 For there were three Germans in one of the 
 small rooms. They talked German to them- 
 selves ; and one of the nurses knew German, 
 and they didn't know she knew it. They were 
 not nice men, she reported. 
 
 Nurse Merton was glad she did not have the 
 nursing of them. 
 
 " Of course, I should have done it if I'd 
 been ordered to but .
 
 THE SHADOW 79 
 
 The word, and the snap with which she said 
 it, was evidence enough of what she felt about 
 it and them. 
 
 The Germans were not in the hospital for 
 long. 
 
 Somehow the Algerians got to hear that there 
 were bodies under the same roof trois officiers 
 boches ! hst ! in the little room above the diet- 
 kitchen. And they whispered among them- 
 selves. . . . When they got about again. . . . 
 True, Yussuf had only one leg now, but he had 
 his hands long and strong and brown. And 
 Suleiman was blind, but Yussuf could lead him ; 
 and Suleiman had his hands too. And Ibrahim, 
 who had no hands now, had feet, big and 
 booted, and teeth. . . . 
 
 It was thought well to remove the boches 
 before the Algerians quitted bed. 
 
 It was not till the wounded were well enough 
 to get up, and begin to hobble about the ward, 
 that Nurse Merton saw War as it was and 
 understood it. 
 
 Then it came to her in a flash. 
 
 She was used to sick men, used to wards, 
 used to accidents. But in the hospitals to 
 which she was accustomed men as a rule when 
 well enough to move about were through their
 
 80 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 troubles and almost whole again. It was 
 different here. Here you had giants, stagger- 
 ing about the wards, blinded for ever and not 
 by accident ; young men who would live, or 
 rather not succeed in dying, for another sixty 
 years ; lithe and beautiful lads who would be 
 helpless and hideous for the rest of their lives. 
 And they were not the victims of disease or 
 mischance. That was the point. They were 
 the victims of the deliberate malice of men, 
 ordered on a gigantic scale. 
 
 It was then that this calm, gray-eyed young 
 English woman began to understand the Spirit 
 of Hate that seethed upon every side of her 
 aye, and in her own despite, to enter 
 into it. 
 
 The woman in her the potential mother of 
 men blazed furiously within at the waste and 
 the wickedness of it all. 
 
 Most of all at night, in charge of a ward, 
 alone with an auxiliary nurse and an orderly, that 
 Spirit possessed her and she understood ; when 
 suddenly in the silence a bandaged man, his 
 black hair a-bristle and the sweat pouring down 
 his ashen face, began to scream 
 
 " Les boches ! Les boches ! " 
 
 And the whole ward woke in a moment, 
 writhed, and tossed, and peered at the night-
 
 THE SHADOW 81 
 
 light, stretching out maimed hands for rifles 
 that were not there. 
 
 " Hola ! " from the man from the Midi. 
 " Est-ce-que c'est un assaut ? " 
 
 And the little Cockney's terrible cry 
 
 " My God ! 'ave the got us ? " 
 
 And then the soothing voice of the big 
 Breton artilleryman from the corner-bed 
 
 " Dormez done, mes enfants. Ce n'est que 
 ce pauvre diable d'un Chasseur qui meurt." 
 
 Les Boches ! 
 
 That was the name of the hideous Ogre who 
 haunted the dying, tormented the living, and 
 desecrated the dead ; whose shadow lay across 
 the face of Europe ; who had snatched men 
 by the million from the plough, the mill, the 
 sheepcote, and the practice of the pleasant and 
 profitable arts and industries ; had taken them 
 from playing with their children and chaffing 
 their girls and put them to the handling of 
 machine-guns and chucking of grenades ; had 
 torn and twisted comely youths; had gorged 
 on women and girls ; and sated his obscene 
 appetites on children and even animals. 
 
 Les Boches ! 
 
 The name that was a nightmare ; that would 
 haunt the dreams of men for centuries ; and 
 stamp upon the mind of humanity such an 
 
 6
 
 82 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 impression of loathing and despair as Alva and 
 the Inquisition had failed to do. 
 
 An atmosphere of hate incredible ! 
 
 And because man is in his essence love, the 
 strain of living in such an atmosphere for long 
 will in the end undo the strongest. 
 
 In time it told even on Nurse Merton. 
 
 She worked on faithfully till the New Year. 
 
 The back of the business then broken, the 
 hospital perfectly organized and volunteers 
 ready to take her place, she said good-bye to 
 the kind American doctors and nurses, and 
 crossed the Channel to England, where under 
 grey skies there was time once more to recall 
 the daffodils beginning to blow on the hills of 
 her native Guernsey.
 
 VI 
 
 THE 
 
 INDIAN 
 
 HOSPITAL
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 
 
 WHEN George the Fourth, then Prince of 
 Wales, designed his Pavilion by the sea and 
 turned the little fishing-village of Brighthelm- 
 stone into the fashionable watering-place we 
 now know, he never surely dreamed of the use 
 to which his great-great-nephew would put its 
 halls and gardens a century later! 
 
 A tall brown stockade surrounds the garden 
 now. Over it you see the domes and minarets 
 and ornate roofs not of an Eastern palace, as 
 you might expect, but of the pleasure-house of 
 an English King. As we drove up to the gate 
 a man in khaki stopped us. Then he saw the 
 Doctor sitting at my side and saluted. The 
 motor slid on through the garden and drew up 
 at the entrance. On the seats by the lawns 
 under the elms figures were sitting, strange 
 indeed and yet not entirely out of place in that 
 semi-Oriental environment : men in blue coats 
 and trousers, brown men with white pugarees 
 bound about their heads. One came hobbling 
 down the path on crutches, swinging a foot big 
 
 85
 
 86 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 as a punching-ball by reason of its bandages. 
 An orderly in khaki passed him, shoving a kind 
 of enlarged mail-cart such as children use- 
 The orderly, a sturdy English youth with the 
 close-cropped bullet-head of the private soldier, 
 bore down on the back of the mail-cart, tilting 
 up the seat of it to balance his charge. And 
 that charge was not a child. At first I thought 
 it was an idol ; then it seemed to me a man 
 without legs ; finally I recognized it for an 
 Indian soldier squatting cross-legged on the 
 seat. 
 
 The Englishman, tilting his brown charge 
 and whistling as he came, made down the hill 
 under the elms in the February sunshine at a 
 little skipping run. 
 
 He was a small man and merry ; thick-set, 
 close-knit, with a kind of robin-redbreast 
 cockiness ; big red hands, swift to help, gray 
 eyes always on the verge of a wink, and lips a 
 little grim and masterful, but ready at a 
 moment to twist into a whistle or a joke. 
 
 He lacked, perhaps, the dignity and repose of 
 his patient ; yet stamped upon him was that 
 solid ugly-cornered something which we call 
 Character, that has won for him and his fathers 
 such Liberty as no other people know and 
 suzerainty over the 350 millions in that far
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 87 
 
 continent from which the brown man on the 
 mail-cart came. 
 
 The little scene compelled my attention ; 
 and well it might. For it was the sum and 
 the symbol of one of the strangest and 
 most significant happenings in history : the 
 East, enthroned, sheltered, and served by the 
 West, which it in its turn had served and 
 sheltered with its body and blood. 
 
 The Doctor, a Major for the purposes of 
 this War, was beckoning me from the door. 
 I followed him, catching as I entered a glimpse 
 of an old board on one side of the entrance. 
 On it, painted in letters dingy with age and 
 weather, were the words : 
 
 ROYAL PAVILION 
 
 These floors which of old answered to the 
 nimble feet of courtiers, the swish of ladies' 
 skirts, and the music of mazurkas and minuets, 
 echoed now to the stump of crutches, the 
 slither of slippered feet, and the shuffle of 
 carrying parties bearing patients to and from 
 the operating theatre set up in what was of 
 old, perhaps, the royal pantry. 
 
 In the entrance-lobby there was a group 
 of brown men. Some were playing cards 
 and some were watching the players. With
 
 88 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 their dark faces, the red scarves bound about 
 their heads, an occasional crutch, or peep of 
 white bandage, they looked like a jolly pack 
 of pirates out of one of Stevenson's books. 
 But surely no cut-throats ever looked quite 
 so happy, or grinned with such utter honesty, 
 as those ugly little men who sat round the 
 table slamming down the cards. 
 
 " Ghoorkas ! " said the Doctor in my ear. 
 " Ripping little beggars ! full of fun and 
 so game." 
 
 " Tenshon ! " came the voice of one of the 
 men, the English word of command emerging 
 drolly from an un-English throat. 
 
 The little group of Mongols, with their 
 high cheek-bones, smear of moustaches, and the 
 Chinese eyes from which all the fun and friend- 
 ship in the world seemed to pour in twinkling 
 torrents, rose on their crutches, those of them 
 who could. Those who could not, raised their 
 hands in salute as they sat. 
 
 We moved down a long passage in which 
 brown men in blue lolled about and limped, 
 and white men in brown bustled. 
 
 For in this Hospital with its hundreds 
 of beds the nursing is of necessity done by 
 the men. 
 
 No woman may touch a patient j and the
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 89 
 
 few sisters on the staff may not be present 
 in the wards during meals, lest their shadows 
 fall across the food and defile it. 
 
 In the passage are two trollies, one 
 labelled Hindoo Corn Store, and one Moham- 
 medan Corn Store. For in matters great 
 and small the British Raj has been faithful. 
 Down to the smallest item it has respected 
 the beliefs and the traditions of its subjects 
 from the East. In the Pavilion- Hospital 
 there are two kitchens and two stoves. 
 And Mohammedans and Hindoos take their 
 food in the certainty that it has been prepared 
 in accordance with the immemorial usages 
 of their fathers. 
 
 At the end of the passage a door opened. 
 
 We passed round a screen. 
 
 The Dome at Brighton to-day is such a 
 sight as our fathers never saw, as our children 
 are little like to see again. 
 
 England needs a Wordsworth to wander 
 through that maze of beds and strike off 
 his impression in an imperishable sonnet. 
 And yet perhaps only a Turner could do 
 justice to that scene, handing down to our 
 descendants, in colours that will never fade, 
 something of the poetry and the passion of this
 
 90 
 
 spectacle, so pathetic in its immediate signi- 
 ficance, so tremendous in its import to the race, 
 and so uplifting to the heart that feels and the 
 eye that sees and understands. 
 
 In that vast gilded room where of old 
 King George gossiped, and Fox drank, and 
 Wilberforce expounded ; where in our time 
 General Booth has preached, and Paderewski 
 played, and Lloyd George spoken, the floor 
 to-day is white with beds. They are under 
 the chandelier, against the organ, on the ter- 
 race, beneath the balcony flocks of them. 
 And in each white bed is a brown face, up- 
 lifted to the banyan-tree that by a happy 
 accident decorates the roof. Men of every 
 race from that great continent which thrusts 
 like a heart into the Indian Ocean are there ; 
 some dark as Othello, some fair almost as 
 you and I ; some with the noses of eagles, 
 some short-faced as pugs ; clean-shaven and 
 bearded ; big men and little ; splendid and 
 insignificant ; tubby and lank. 
 
 At the foot of each bed is hung a board ; 
 and on the board is recorded the man's name, 
 regiment, the nature of his wound, and the 
 like. 
 
 As we thread our way amid the beds, the 
 inmates look at us with their soft brown
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 91 
 
 eyes, so grave, so respectful, so affectionate ; 
 and their hands go to their foreheads. 
 
 " Salaam, Huzoor." 
 
 " Salaam." 
 
 And they give us the impression that we 
 have done them a signal honour in permit- 
 ting them to make of their bodies a living 
 sacrifice for us and ours. 
 
 We move from bed to bed. 
 
 Here a splendid young Sikh, his hair a- 
 loose from its rings and flowing about his 
 neck in glorious black rivulets, is re-winding 
 his long pugaree. 
 
 There a Ghoorka boy, aged eighteen, oil- 
 ing his scalp-lock, grins at us like a friendly 
 bull-pup as we pass. The Dogra in the bed 
 hard by handles a little leather purse that 
 lies at the bedside and beckons us. 
 
 " Bee-ullet," he says, " Bee-ullet " ; and 
 shows us the jagged bit of copper that the 
 Doctor has extracted from his body. 
 
 Under the chandelier a tall man, with both 
 hands bandaged and in splints, is standing by 
 a bed. In it a soldier in a skull-cap, with a 
 sombre Afghan type of face, sits up erect 
 and appears to be praying. He is the one 
 man in the Hospital with a grievance. And 
 this is his grievance : that he saw the man
 
 92 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 who shot him, and they carried him away 
 before he could deal with his enemy. But 
 some day he is going back to find his man : 
 during the war, if God wills ; and if not 
 after. But he is going back. It is not 
 Germany he has anything against, it is one 
 German. An Afridi, he. 
 
 In the corner-bed by the door is a con- 
 valescent. For all his flowing beard and air 
 of dignity he is a joker, and has gathered about 
 him a knot of others lured by the laughter. 
 He points them out to us with pride, telling off 
 their nationalities. 
 
 " Jat Dogra Pathan." 
 
 " Is that man a Pathan ? " asks the Doctor, 
 surprised. 
 
 The others nod. 
 
 " But where are his ringlets ? " 
 
 " Me old Pathan," explains the object of 
 attention, and somehow between them they 
 made us understand that it is only the young 
 bloods who sport ringlets. 
 
 On the floor, at the bedside, squatting on 
 a towel, is a patient figure laboriously cleaning 
 his teeth with a bone. 
 
 The joker in the bed, who is holding a card- 
 board-box in his hand, releases the top. A 
 paper snake springs out and coils about the
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 93 
 
 neck of the man on the towel, to the delight 
 of all. 
 
 Indeed, in spite of the suffering, one is 
 struck by the atmosphere of almost childish 
 happiness prevailing in the place. 
 
 They know nothing of the greatness of the 
 cause in which they have bled ; they care little 
 for what we call Democracy, these men of a 
 race for ever old and for ever young. Militarism 
 does not disturb them. They do not trouble 
 themselves greatly about the rights of smaller 
 States and the sanctity of International Law. 
 They are willing to trust in the judgment of 
 you and me who entered upon this War and 
 asked them to bear their heroic part in it. 
 They were content to fight because we asked 
 them ; and now they are content to suffer. It 
 is a triumph of faith. 
 
 Were you to ask them what it is all about 
 they would answer you that for a time in 
 the bazaar and in the lines there were many 
 rumours. Then one day the Colonel-Sahib 
 rode on to parade and said 
 
 "Come, children. The Sirdar calls." 
 
 And they came across the black waters 
 their fathers feared so terribly. 
 
 They came, not as Cromwell's plain russet-
 
 94 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 coated captains came to him, not as the men of 
 the North came to Abraham Lincoln, because 
 they believed in the cause for which they were 
 to fight, but because they believed in the men 
 who led them. 
 
 They came, and they fought. These men, 
 whose fathers have dwelt for so many ages 
 round about the Tropic of Cancer that the 
 skins of the children have changed under the 
 sun from white to brown, fought under con- 
 ditions which, if they were terrible to the 
 soldiers of our race, were to them appalling. 
 They do not fear the cold, these men of 
 the Punjab and the North- West Frontier 
 Province and the hills beyond. Nights 
 are sharp in the Land of the Five Rivers 
 and the frost bites keen in the Valley 
 of Peshawur. But they tremble at the wet. 
 And as it chanced this was the wettest winter 
 on record. The men of the Bikaneer 
 Desert, and the gaunt Afridi hills, and the 
 sun-dried plains of the Ganges, fought against 
 an enemy they feared far more than any 
 Germans bitter slush up to the knees, sleet 
 like arrows of steel, drenching mist, rain in 
 torrents loud enough to drown even the roar 
 of high-explosive shells ; they fought, until 
 they were sodden to the bone, and the souls
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 95 
 
 of them cried out from the trenches for the 
 sun, the sun, the friendly old sun, who had 
 never failed them before, and now seemed 
 lost for ever in that midnight of murk. 
 
 In spite of the conditions they fought, 
 and they fought well. Kitchener has said it 
 in the House of Lords, and French in his 
 dispatches. For two months, with their faces 
 towards their own country and their backs 
 to ours, they held a line which was never 
 dented more than three hundred yards at any 
 spot. 
 
 Returning soldiers say you could always 
 tell the trenches held by the Indians, because 
 of the silence that prevailed in them. The 
 English trenches were always a-buzz : the 
 Tommies, like a host of sparrows, chirpy, 
 cheeky, taking off their superiors surrepti- 
 tiously, chaffing the Germans over the way, 
 chipping each other. The Indians did not 
 talk : they did not dream. They stood in 
 the wet and died without complaints but 
 without enjoyment. When their white officers 
 said " Follow ! " they rose and followed. 
 When there were no more sahibs to follow 
 they stood until, undermined by frost-bite, 
 they fell on their faces in the mud and were 
 carried over the sea to the Hospital provided
 
 96 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 for them by the Emperor who inspected 
 them on the plains below the Palace of Delhi 
 three years ago. 
 
 And here they are happy. There is no 
 question about it. It may be that throughout 
 the Western world to-day it is in the Hospitals 
 rather than elsewhere that the peace which 
 passeth all understanding is to be found. 
 Certainly it is so here. These Indians in 
 England are not in exile. At least, if they 
 are home-sick they do not show it. Amid 
 those hundreds, lying maimed beneath the 
 Dome, thousands of miles away from their 
 native land, under a wintry Western sun, 
 I saw but one who seemed unhappy : a 
 young Sikh giant, lying with face contorted, 
 and the tears standing on his cheeks. 
 
 The men of his race, splendid as himself, 
 stood by on crutches, apparently unmoved. 
 
 "Is he very bad ? " I asked. 
 
 " No," answered the Doctor. " Hysteria. 
 Slight shrapnel wound and frost-bite." 
 
 The man sat up in bed, the tears streaming 
 down his face, and in his own tongue made 
 a passionate appeal to the Doctor. 
 
 His fellow-countrymen stood by with 
 downward eyes, half-ashamed, half-amused.
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 97 
 
 One of the few sisters steps forward to 
 explain. 
 
 " I called him a baby," she said, " and the 
 men have been teasing him." 
 
 The Doctor passes on with a little smile ; 
 and when we return a few minutes later the 
 man is out of bed chaffing another patient. 
 
 All the Sikhs are not like that. Indeed, 
 of the various races represented here they 
 impress the stranger most by reason of their 
 noble stature and bearing. And it is curious to 
 recall that it is but a few decades since the 
 fathers of these men who are fighting our 
 battles in Flanders were following the Lion 
 of the Punjab in vain assault on the British 
 line at Sobraon and Chillianwallah and 
 Goojerat. 
 
 They are men of religion and the sword, 
 now as then. Like the Nazarenes of old; 
 they never shave the head nor touch strong 
 drink. 
 
 To the practical Western spirit their 
 faithfulness has its disadvantages. 
 
 One man had a depressed fracture which 
 resulted in paralysis of the arm. 
 
 In the Pavilion-Hospital every patient is 
 free free to die if he prefers it to an operation. 
 
 The situation was explained to the patient. 
 7
 
 98 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 An operation on the head could cure him of his 
 paralysis. 
 
 Would he have it done ? 
 
 Would he have to be shaved, O Saviour 
 of the Poor ? 
 
 No ; but in the course of the operation it 
 might be that some of his hair would be cut. 
 
 Then he would not be done. 
 
 Why not?" 
 
 "It is against my religion, Huzoor. Pathans 
 shave their heads ; Sikhs never. What says 
 the Guru ? " 
 
 And he is paralysed still. 
 
 As we passed slowly on a face in a bed 
 beneath the balcony drew me. It was dark, 
 bearded, and full of pain. The man was lying 
 on his back, and from the way he swayed his 
 head it was clear to me that he could not move 
 his body ; and the reason too seemed clear, for 
 his feet appeared to be contained in a kind of 
 barrel, concealed beneath the sheets, which it 
 humped and rounded. 
 
 As I moved, the man's eyes followed me. 
 
 I looked at the board at the foot of the bed, 
 and read the fatal and frequent legend 
 Frost-bite in both feet. 
 
 Something drew me to him ; something drew
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 99 
 
 him to me. Our eyes met and called. I went 
 to his bedside. 
 
 He was a Punjabi Mohammedan and could 
 talk a few words of English. Leaning a little 
 out of bed he drew his hand across my shin- 
 bone about six inches above the ankle, with a 
 gesture horrible in its significance. 
 
 "Froz-bite," he said. "Operation." 
 
 " Better now ? " I asked. 
 
 He rolled his head about, his eyes clouded 
 with pain. 
 
 " Leedly better now. One, two, three opera- 
 tion." 
 
 I asked him when he would be going back to 
 India. 
 
 He didn't know. 
 
 " My job horses. . . . India-rubber leg." 
 
 I asked no more ; and he spoke to me of 
 Ferozabad " in U.P.," where he had lived, and 
 Mhow where he had been quartered, and the 
 ammunition column to which he had belonged. 
 
 Did I know Amritsar ? 
 
 Yes ; I knew Amritsar, and the Golden 
 Temple, and the Holy Book. 
 
 Amritsar was the home of the Sikh Gurus. 
 Doubtless Lon'on would be the home of the 
 Gurus of the Sahibs ? I would be a Guru from 
 Lon'on ? Was it not so ? Clearly : for I had
 
 ioo THE BROWN MARE 
 
 a beard. No Sahib had a beard unless he was a 
 Guru. Would I, the Guru from Lon'on, so 
 wise and world-famous, take two biscuits from 
 AH Mahomed, the driver in the ammunition 
 column ? 
 
 As I left him clutching the English comic 
 paper somebody had given him, he said, with 
 the insinuating courtesy of the East 
 
 " You come again. Not to-morrow. No. 
 Three four day. Friday." 
 
 His face was still with me as I quitted the 
 Dome dark-eyed, patient, full of pain, and 
 above all familiar. I had seen it somewhere 
 before, I was sure in the Louvre, perhaps ; 
 crowned, I think, with thorns. 
 
 We passed out into the garden in the 
 February sunshine. 
 
 Beyond the high brown palisade the trams 
 were sliding up and down Pavilion Parade ; 
 and along the top of the trams you could read 
 the advertisement boards of an old and 
 vulgarized civilization that died suddenly of 
 shock early in August 1914. 
 
 The reminder that Tamplin's Ales are the 
 best, is. 6d. the bottle, and that Selfridge's is the 
 shop for outfits, comes to you as out of another 
 world. And the men and women on the roofs
 
 THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 101 
 
 of those moving trams, most of them immersed 
 in green or pink afternoon papers, seem scarcely 
 aware that one world is falling into ruins about 
 their ears and another springing out of those 
 ruins. Hardly do they trouble to glance over 
 the palisade and see the process of the miracle 
 going on apace within. 
 
 I turn and look back at the building. 
 
 On the balcony, overlooking the lawn, are 
 other convalescents. A young and very hand- 
 some Rajpoot waves to me. I have never seen 
 him before. He has never seen me. But he 
 waves to me ; and I wave back. 
 
 Then a bullet-headed British orderly takes 
 his place on the balcony beside the Rajpoot, and 
 winds his arm about the shoulder of the son of 
 a hundred kings. 
 
 And thinking of those two on the balcony, 
 with their heads in such close conjunction, I 
 have hardly a glance for the magnificent Sikh 
 Havildar with the beard twisted about his ears, 
 who salutes us at the gate as we go out.
 
 VII
 
 THE CONSCRIPT 
 
 His little round cap lay in the hall, blue 
 beside the brown one of the Doctor-Major, 
 as I came down the stairs. 
 
 I entered the drawing-room. 
 
 It was a curious scene, such as you may 
 come upon anywhere in England to-day : 
 two ladies in evening-dress, standing by the 
 fire, a man in khaki, and that other. 
 
 A slight, pathetic figure in the plain uni- 
 form of the conscript, he made : the small 
 blue coat with the brass buttons, the red 
 thread round each sleeve, flannel trousers of 
 that peculiar grey which we associate with 
 young men at Oxford and Cambridge, and 
 boots, solid enough, it is true, but of the 
 kind that have clearly been turned out by 
 the hundred-thousand. 
 
 He was quite a boy, not more than 
 nineteen at the most, his hair brushed back 
 from his forehead in the straight style, 
 guiltless of parting, that would have betrayed 
 
 him to any Englishman as a foreigner ; and 
 
 105
 
 106 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 there was something shy yet ardent about 
 him. 
 
 He was a boy ; but he should have been 
 a girl. And it needed only a glance at his 
 dark eyes, full of fire, humour, and hope, to 
 see that he was one of the sensitive of 
 earth a poet in embryo, maybe. Indeed, he 
 made at once the appeal of that which is 
 patient and at the same time brave. He 
 was a Spirit so much was clear. That is 
 to say, he could suffer. And he had suf- 
 fered, as his story showed, and had emerged 
 from the bottomless pit unconquerable still 
 by no means a hero, but a human being 
 who could enjoy life and laugh about it. 
 His erect, sprightly figure, his sensitive, swift 
 face, his little rounded chin, his girlish 
 mouth, his white, delicate hands, and above 
 all his eyes, told the same tale. There 
 burned in him still the Flame of Youth 
 and Hope and Joy unending. Men and 
 Circumstance had tried to put them out, 
 and had failed. This boy, for all he had 
 been through, was still a boy. He could 
 laugh, and he did laugh. Indeed, throughout 
 dinner and after, he flowed forth in one 
 continuous delicious babble, breaking for 
 ever into little cataracts of mirth. That
 
 THE CONSCRIPT 107 
 
 was his triumph ; and the triumph of 
 Nature, which had made him at once so 
 infinitely sensitive to impression and so 
 capable of recovery when seemingly broken 
 for ever. 
 
 Certainly if ever there was an organism 
 not devised for the battle and the trench 
 and the brutalities of war, it was this little 
 Belgian boy. His place was in the studio, 
 the laboratory, the library, moving among 
 ideas, somewhat remote from the crude 
 fisticuffs of the life of action ; a lad this, 
 clearly, to be loved by women, spoiled 
 perhaps by them ; misunderstood, avoided, 
 tolerated by the average man ... In a word, 
 he was the Eternal Artist. And it was 
 this refined and delicate creature whom 
 the Monster of Militarism had swallowed 
 whole and prostituted to its own terrible 
 purpose. 
 
 His country had stood out against the Mon- 
 ster long after it had engulfed neighbouring 
 France and Germany. Till a few years back 
 the Belgian rabbit had stolidly refused to be 
 swallowed by the python of to-day. Then the 
 Shadow of Death, creeping out of the East, 
 always more ominous, had compelled the stub- 
 born little land to submit to what seemed inex-
 
 io8 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 orable necessity. Belgium girded her reluctant 
 sword about a waist that many years of comfort 
 and good-living had not left slim. 
 
 She raised an Army at first by ballot. But 
 the ballot, so the laughing boy told us, was not 
 satisfactory. There was corruption, gross and 
 obvious. The poor suffered ; the rich escaped ; 
 the honest were indignant. And after that as 
 the Shadow of Death from the East came 
 always closer and grew always more ominous, 
 there was Universal Service. 
 
 Our boy did not escape, nor, to be just, did 
 he wish to. A native of Liege, he was a student 
 at the University there, and became in due 
 course a foot-soldier " dans la compagnie de 
 1'Universite." 
 
 As a student he had only to do fifteen 
 months' service, and I am sure he did not take 
 his soldiering very seriously. Indeed, I do not 
 think Francois took anything more seriously 
 than was good for him just then. Why should 
 he ? He was young enough to be sure that 
 Youth would never pass away from him at all 
 events. He was as full of frolic as an April 
 lamb. And he was a Liegois and a learned 
 man in the making, dabbling deliciously in 
 science and letters. 
 
 His must have been an ideal life in that busy,
 
 THE CONSCRIPT 109 
 
 prosperous, old-world town on the frontier. I 
 do not suppose the boy bothered his young 
 head greatly about the Shadow advancing 
 always from the East, over which his father and 
 the older men shook bald heads of Sunday 
 evenings as they drank their cafe and sucked 
 their cigars. He had most of the things that 
 make life delightful for a boy : abroad his 
 University ; at home, father, mother, and little 
 sister Julie. An ideal life in the little town of 
 an ideal land. And as we dined, and the boy 
 chatted gaily on in his naif, delightful way, 
 he gave us gleams of a country that, to the 
 sophisticated West, sounded almost like Fairy- 
 land. 
 
 The Queen of that land was ill, it seemed, at 
 one time ; and everybody loved her and was 
 very sorry Francois and little sister Julie by 
 no means least. So the boy and girl must 
 needs sit down and write to their Queen " une 
 charmante lettre, s'il vous plait, Monsieur, tout- 
 a-fait charmante." 
 
 He said it so seriously and at the same 
 time with such clear recognition of the 
 humour of the remark, that we accepted it 
 in twinkling silence. 
 
 And if you please the Queen wrote back 
 herself to her faithful Francois and Julie
 
 i io THE BROWN MARE 
 
 " Une lettre, aussi charmante, s'il vous 
 plait, Monsieur." 
 
 After this it was not surprising to be told 
 that the King of such a country is just like 
 everybody else. 
 
 " No state point du tout." 
 
 He comes out of his palace and walks 
 about the market-place, buying his own 
 " bacca " ; and you meet him, and rub 
 shoulders and take off your hat, and say 
 
 "Bon jour, votre Majeste." 
 
 And he answers 
 
 " Bon jour, Monsieur." 
 
 It sounds like an idyll ; and it is true. 
 
 It seemed almost redundant to ask him 
 if such a King was beloved ; but I did so. 
 And the answer, with a smile and a little 
 shake of the head, rewarded if it surprised me. 
 
 " No, Monsieur, he is not beloved. Before 
 the War he was beloved. To-day he is 
 adored" 
 
 That was how things had been. 
 
 Then suddenly they changed. 
 
 The Shadow that had been creeping up 
 from the East for two generations suddenly 
 launched forward and overwhelmed the land. 
 All was pitch darkness ; and in the darkness
 
 THE CONSCRIPT in 
 
 there came the sound of seven million men, 
 women, and children, holding their breath 
 and waiting for the thunderbolt to be hurled. 
 
 The moment passed ; and in the darkness 
 the seven million woke and wrought feverishly. 
 
 Day and night, without sleep, they wrought. 
 
 Francois, the little student, left the lecture- 
 room, ceased his tennis with Julie, and his 
 fooling with his fellow-students, and joined 
 his company. He was a foot-soldier in 
 earnest now. For four days and nights he 
 worked how he worked ! The delicate 
 hands, used to wielding a singularly graceful 
 pen and turning the leaves of Verhasren's 
 poems, were engaged now in desperate navvy 
 work. Liege was being put into a condition 
 of defence. All day Francois carried railway 
 sleepers, which were used in building earth- 
 works. 
 
 "They were heavy, Monsieur too heavy." 
 
 By day and night that slight student 
 laboured under his new burthen with others 
 in his company. 
 
 His officers were kind men and brave 
 mats pas experiment?, si vous comprenez, 
 Monsieur. They did not even know how 
 to build trenches. That they learned later 
 from the English.
 
 ii2 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 Then one night, as they tried to sleep 
 amongst their raw, unfinished work, Francois 
 heard far overhead a faint tap-tapping. He 
 said to his sergeant, rolled in a blanket at 
 his side 
 
 What's that ? " 
 
 The sergeant answered 
 
 " Aeroplane." 
 
 But Francois, the wise, knew better. 
 
 " Zeppelin," he said. 
 
 And as he said it a searchlight was 
 turned on to the sky, and they saw une tnorme 
 cigare sail by above them. 
 
 Next day the thunderbolt fell. 
 
 There were marchings and counter- 
 marchings. To Francois at least it seemed 
 that a battle was the strangest kind of 
 muddle ; but the work was not so hard as 
 that carrying of sleepers that preceded it. He 
 was busy and excited ; too busy to go and 
 inquire how it fared with Papa and Mama 
 and Julie, too excited even to think very 
 much of them. 
 
 Then the retreat began. Francois was in 
 the 1 1 th Infantry. His was the last company 
 to leave. Whether it was the duty of his 
 company to cover the retreat or not he didn't 
 know. He only knew it was all very
 
 THE CONSCRIPT 113 
 
 terrible. There were no officers and no 
 orders. Broken units, hopelessly intermingled, 
 poured along the road that ran beside the 
 railway towards Brussels. 
 
 And the retreat continued day after day 
 from one town to the next in at night, 
 out next morning. 
 
 But in spite of it all there was always hope 
 in the heart of the defeated. 
 
 " Toujours toujours toujours ! " 
 
 It was a nightmare shot with gleams. 
 
 Finally Francois found himself at Antwerp 
 Anvers he calls it. 
 
 By this time his highly strung organization 
 had been strained to breaking-point. Happily 
 in Anvers he found a Liege doctor working 
 in the hospitals. Francois was employed as 
 an orderly and was only in the trenches once 
 or twice. And he was glad : he told us all 
 about it in the frankest way. It was not 
 pleasant in those trenches by no means. If 
 you put your head above them only so much 
 it was bad for your head ! And it grew worse 
 as the days went on. 
 
 Round Anvers ran two ceintures earth- 
 works with barbed-wire entanglements and 
 the like. The Germans brought up guns ; 
 and the shells from those guns flew both 
 
 8
 
 ii4 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 ceintures and landing in the town set fire 
 to it. 
 
 The position became impossible ; and the 
 Army retreated to Ostend. 
 
 Francois went by hospital-train. 
 
 " C'etait plus comfortable, je vous assure," 
 he told us with a delightful little giggle. 
 
 At Ostend the Army reorganized and 
 Francois rejoined his company. 
 
 He was back in the trenches, sleeping in 
 them, head in hands, somewhere in the 
 neighbourhood of Dixmude. 
 
 One morning his company was ordered to 
 advance. 
 
 They started through the town, which was 
 being shelled. As they cleared the church, half 
 the company bolted. The other half went on. 
 
 They reached the outskirts of the town. 
 Before them was the enemy's position. 
 
 "There's no point in all of us getting 
 killed," said the captain, who was something of 
 a philosopher. " No. 2 section stay behind ; 
 No. i section come with me." 
 
 Francois was in No. I section. 
 
 They advanced at the double across the open. 
 
 Suddenly they heard a sound like an 
 enormous swarm of bees buz-z-zing straight at 
 them.
 
 THE CONSCRIPT 115 
 
 " C'etait un obus ! " 
 
 Down they went on their faces. The shell 
 exploded behind them. No one was hit. 
 
 Forward once more ! 
 
 Again that monstrous buz-z-z ! 
 
 Down they went again all but Francois. 
 
 He tells the tale with rivulets of laughter, 
 delighting in it. 
 
 " Me, I could not. I stood erect nerfs tendus. 
 I knew that shell was for me for me only for 
 me absolumentl " 
 
 Poor Francois ! all but his body, stiff with 
 fright, had collapsed. The Man of Imagination 
 suffered where the Men of Earth won through. 
 
 He was the one man hit in the head and 
 arms. 
 
 The rest fled like ants. 
 
 Two men came back and carried him to 
 a cattle-shed in which were other wounded. 
 An English doctor, wounded himself, tended 
 him. 
 
 Francois was put on an ambulance in a long 
 convoy. A German shell killed the horses in 
 the next ambulance. 
 
 " C'etait le signal de depart ! " tittered 
 Francois. 
 
 He was bumped along to Calais ; and from 
 Calais taken to Southampton. The voyage
 
 u6 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 took forty-eight hours ; and there was nothing 
 to eat or drink. One wounded man gave Francois 
 a biscuit and tended him. Otherwise he would 
 have died. 
 
 When he reached the hands of the Doctor- 
 Major he was in a terrible condition, not 
 so much from his wounds as from nervous 
 exhaustion. 
 
 And even now he is not himself. 
 
 " I cannot study, Monsieur le Docteur," he 
 complains. " Directly I try my head goes 
 round. Also I have indigestion, Monsieur le 
 Docteur. And I have a pain here. ..." 
 
 And he recounts his symptoms one by one 
 before us all. 
 
 But since he has been in England Francois 
 has had his little triumphs. 
 
 The King and Queen came down to see him 
 and his wounded compatriots. 
 
 Francois tells his story as always with gusto 
 and wit. 
 
 They were all formed up in the hospital ; 
 and a little sergeant, full of himself, strutted 
 into the ward with his chest out, and shouted 
 
 " His Majest-ee ! " 
 
 The King followed, walking with great 
 dignity, and very slow ; and spoke to Francois.
 
 THE CONSCRIPT 117 
 
 " You are wounded in the arm, I hear ? " 
 
 "Yes, Sire." 
 
 " Are you happy in England ? " 
 
 And Francois answered with a little speech 
 that surely was inspired. 
 
 "I am not happy in exile, Your Majesty. 
 But when I leave England I shall do so as 
 sorrowfully as when I left Belgium." 
 
 After the King came the Queen. 
 
 " I was not afraid of the King, but I was 
 afraid of her," Francois confesses. " Elle avait 
 la figure severe tres severe." 
 
 But she asked him after his people, and 
 whether he had brothers and sisters. And he 
 told her about Julie ; and they were friends at 
 once. 
 
 Indeed, there is only one shadow over the life 
 of Francois to-day, and that concerns his little 
 sister. 
 
 His father and mother are still in what 
 remains of Liege, and so is Julie. The father 
 and mother will stay where they are whatever 
 comes ; but Julie, who is seventeen, must be 
 smuggled across the frontier at any cost before 
 the Great Retreat begins. 
 
 Belgium has known Prussia in attack ; and 
 Belgium has to know Prussia in retreat, and
 
 n8 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 Belgium is not looking forward to the 
 experience. 
 
 The conscript has risen, and with his manners 
 of a little gentleman is thanking infinitely 
 Monsieur le Docteur and his lady for their 
 hospitality. 
 
 But as he goes out, the two brass buttons 
 shining solitary in the hollow of his erect young 
 back, it seems to me that it is rather to him 
 that our infinite thanks are due.
 
 VIII 
 
 THE MAN 
 IN COMMAND
 
 THE MAN IN COMMAND 
 
 I 
 
 WAR, if it tries the men, proves the women 
 no less. It has always been so. The horn, 
 blowing the warriors of the tribe to battle 
 of old, called the women away from the 
 wattled hut, the distaff, and the children, 
 to the handling of the plough and the 
 driving of the mattock. 
 
 And Englishwomen, who for a generation 
 had been waging against men the most 
 ferocious and pertinacious campaign in history, 
 at the first tap of the drum abandoned their 
 struggle for rights to take up duties forsaken 
 by their soldier-mates. 
 
 The change amounted almost to a miracle. 
 
 It was as though a regiment of troop-horses, 
 stampeding in the lines, had, despite themselves, 
 fallen into the ranks at the sound of the 
 trumpet. 
 
 In the days to come, when the Final Peace 
 has been established, a poet will sing or
 
 122 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 an historian record the part that women 
 played in the Great War which made that 
 Peace possible. 
 
 To us in England during the last year 
 the change has come so gradually as to be 
 less perceptible than to a stranger arriving 
 suddenly in our midst. 
 
 But still, in absent moods, you can 
 catch yourself surprised to find at the barrier 
 in the railway station, on lifts at stores, 
 behind the counter of the bank, the face 
 of a woman greeting you. 
 
 And it is not only the girls of the working- 
 class who have taken up the burden laid 
 upon them by their country. 
 
 Women are farming the lands, and running 
 the estates of men who are hanging on by 
 the skin of their teeth to the rocky fringes 
 of the Gallipoli peninsula, sweeping the 
 North Sea, soaking in the trenches. 
 
 Here, in the heart of Sussex, in almost every 
 country-house within hail, a woman to-day 
 reigns supreme in the absence of her lord. 
 
 A year ago our chauffeur was an ex-cavalry- 
 man. He had been through the siege of 
 Ladysmith and come to us as coachman 
 at the end of the war.
 
 THE MAN IN COMMAND 123 
 
 A charming fellow, with a witty tongue 
 and a wide experience of life, he had but 
 one fault : he was a bad coachman. For 
 years he dreamed a dream that the Colonel 
 would abandon horses and take to a motor. 
 
 In July of 1914 the miracle, long prayed 
 for, and long delayed, took place. The 
 Colonel bought a car, and Lingfield learned 
 to drive. There were few happier men. As 
 he sat behind his wheel you saw that he 
 had realized the ambition of a lifetime. The 
 heir had come into his kingdom at last. 
 
 A month later war was declared ; and 
 Kitchener appealed to all old soldiers to 
 rejoin. After a spiritual conflict, the history 
 of which will never be written, Lingfield 
 answered the call. He left his wife and 
 children, and above all his car, and went 
 back to the colours. 
 
 There was no question of engaging another 
 chauffeur. The new car stood unused in 
 the coach-house alongside the station-cart. 
 
 In the stable there was left one cob, 
 young in years, ancient in appearance and 
 in gait. 
 
 Miss Kate, the Colonel's daughter, an 
 athlete and an artist, abandoned her art 
 and became coachman.
 
 124 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 Daily she flogged the old-young cob with 
 the reluctant soul into the market-town 
 six miles away ; shopped, picked up or 
 deposited the rare visitors ; and flogged 
 the six miles home again. 
 
 Then the Colonel, who had been failing 
 long, began to die. 
 
 His eldest son left for France in October 
 in command of the Horse Artillery battery 
 his father had commanded thirty years 
 before. All through October and November 
 he fought with the Immortal Division that 
 had flung itself across the path of the seaward- 
 striving barbarians ; he fought, his guns in 
 action at bow-shot range, to prevent those 
 hordes breaking in on the dying of that 
 old man in that lonely house in the Sussex 
 Weald. 
 
 Those were Napoleonic times. An invasion 
 was possible and prepared for. 
 
 Miss Kate had her instructions and made 
 her arrangements with the bailiff. The cattle 
 were to be driven inland to the castle on 
 the hill. No living creature was to be left 
 on the farm. Horses and carts were to 
 be removed. What forage could not be 
 taken away was to be destroyed. There
 
 THE MAN IN COMMAND 125 
 
 was to be a vast inland trek ; and the enemy 
 on landing was to find the counties on 
 the coast wasted, as Belgium had not been 
 before the war. 
 
 In those days Death crept always closer 
 in that upper room. 
 
 Then one night in February the Colonel 
 came to grips with his enemy. 
 
 Miss Kate was called up at midnight, 
 harnessed the cob, and drove through the 
 lonely country lanes, haunted by creatures 
 of the night, to fetch the doctor and bring 
 out cases of oxygen. 
 
 There was no man to send ; and no maid 
 would dare those lanes. Miss Kate was swift 
 and resolute ; and time was everything. 
 
 During those last few days those same trees, 
 stark against the wandering night, often saw 
 the same valiant little figure making the same 
 pilgrimage at the same hour. 
 
 Her face, always strong, became more 
 spiritual. 
 
 She was suffering ; she was striving ; she was 
 growing. 
 
 Just when the strain was worst, Boam, one of 
 the men in the garden, asked for a rise in 
 wages to meet the enhanced cost of living. 
 
 Miss Kate rated him furiously.
 
 iz6 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 Boam held his peace and withdrew. 
 
 A day or two later the Colonel passed 
 out of the sound of the guns he had loved. 
 
 He was carried to church one brilliant 
 March morning in one of his own Sussex 
 wains lined with moss, and drawn by his 
 own horses : his Horse Artillery busby with 
 its nodding plume, his sabretache and sword, 
 laid on the simple oak coffin. His own 
 men carried him into church, and out again, 
 and lowered him into the grave. 
 
 There were left three women, and a farm, 
 and garden. 
 
 In the garden were two men ; on the 
 farm three. 
 
 A fortnight after the Colonel's death Boam 
 gave notice. 
 
 Miss Kate accepted it, and raised the 
 wages of the other men to meet the rising 
 prices. 
 
 Boam's desertion raised the question of 
 the cob, for one of his duties had been to 
 groom it. 
 
 The young cob was growing older every 
 day. Always more frequently he tumbled on 
 his nose and had to be laid up. And well 
 or ill, he must be fed and groomed. Mean-
 
 THE MAN IN COMMAND 127 
 
 while the big car was standing idle in the 
 coach-house ; and friendly neighbours said that 
 it was suffering accordingly. 
 
 Now there was an infatuated old dealer who 
 every time Miss Kate drove into the market- 
 town stopped her and asked if the cob was 
 for sale. 
 
 " I'll give you 40 for him," said the 
 dealer. 
 
 " I'm not selling," answered Miss Kate 
 firmly. 
 
 When Boam gave notice she reconsidered 
 her decision. Finally she sought the old 
 dealer out. He renewed his proposal and she 
 accepted it. He took the cob ; she pocketed 
 her 40 ; and spent some of it on learning 
 to drive the car. 
 
 Miss Kate now ceased to be coachman and 
 became chauffeur. For many years she had 
 been head-gardener and keeper of the orchard, 
 taking the prize for apples at the local show. 
 And now she added to her labours the superin- 
 tendence of the farm. 
 
 There was already a bailiff, and still 
 more a bailiffs wife. And they had been 
 there for twenty years. The bailiff was a 
 kind man with gentle eyes and bracken- 
 coloured beard ; his wife a red-faced ter-
 
 128 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 magant, who ruled him with tempestuous 
 tongue. 
 
 Twenty years ago King had run the 
 farm single-handed. At the time of the 
 Colonel's death he had two men under 
 him ; and the three together had done Jess 
 than the one of old. For some years past 
 the Colonel had been failing. The men 
 had lain fallow ; so had the land. 
 
 When Miss Kate took charge she found 
 herself resisted on every side by a dull 
 weight of slothful habit. 
 
 All through the winter months the cattle 
 were in the yard. She wished to have them 
 turned out by day in the fields, as did the 
 neighbours. The bailiff shook his head. 
 
 " Can't do it, miss." 
 
 " Why not ? Everybody else does." 
 
 " Never did it in the Colonel's time, miss." 
 
 "Well, it's got to be done in mine," said 
 Miss Kate sharply. 
 
 She was masterful and had her way in 
 that and every other matter. 
 
 The bailiff didn't like it. 
 
 Miss Kate was genuinely sorry for him. 
 
 For many years he had known no master ; 
 and now he had a mistress.
 
 THE MAN IN COMMAND 129 
 
 "When the war's over Mr. John'll come 
 back and settle down here," she said one 
 day, to comfort him. 
 
 He looked up sharply. 
 
 " What's that?" he said. 
 
 She repeated her remark. 
 
 It was clear that he was not well pleased. 
 And later the Colonel's old soldier-servant 
 reported that the bailiff had boasted at the 
 public-house that Mr. John would never 
 come back from the War, from which so few 
 returned. 
 
 He was wrong. Mr. John did come back 
 on a few days' leave. 
 
 All the other men on the place were 
 pleased to see him. The bailiff was not, 
 and his wife still less so. 
 
 Mr. John came and went ; and Miss 
 Kate was left in charge. 
 
 From dawn her slight, athletic figure 
 might be seen marching the fields, scythe 
 on shoulder, working in the hay, bind- 
 ing the corn, pulling the heifer out of 
 the stream, ordering here, stimulating there, 
 checking somewhere else. And at dusk she 
 took her gun and walked the hedgerows, 
 keeping down the rabbits. 
 
 The fields that had fallen into a drowsy 
 9
 
 130 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 sleep began to stir again, and the men to 
 move. 
 
 She learned rapidly, gathering the reins of 
 government into her hands, and finding out 
 things all the time unpleasant things, many of 
 them, which made her unhappy : for the bailiff 
 was an old servant, and she had believed in 
 him. She had believed in human nature too. 
 Contact with the realities of the struggle for 
 life brought disillusionment. And when her 
 mother asked in despair if there was no such 
 thing as an honest human being, Miss Kate met 
 her with a grim, dogmatic No. 
 
 The cows, she discovered, were giving only a 
 fraction of the milk they should. 
 
 She tackled the bailiff about it. 
 
 " I'm not satisfied," she said. 
 
 To her amazement the man met her with a 
 feeble 
 
 " Don't be 'ard on me, miss." 
 
 Thereafter, quite suddenly, and for no reason, 
 the milk-return increased by 50 per cent. 
 
 The bailiff was too simple a soul to be 
 a successful rogue. 
 
 What happened to the surplus milk ? 
 
 Miss Kate did not inquire too closely : she 
 liked old King too much. 
 
 Then it turned out that Mrs. King was
 
 THE MAN IN COMMAND 131 
 
 charging 2d. a dozen for eggs supplied to the 
 house from the farm. 
 
 " Our own eggs, if you please ! " commented 
 Miss Kate. 
 
 She stopped that practice summarily. 
 
 Thereafter the bailiff's wife was insolent to 
 Miss Kate's mother, a little old lady of nearly 
 eighty. That angered Miss Kate. She went 
 and talked to the woman. 
 
 u Expect to farm for nothing, I suppose ! " 
 said the woman impudently. 
 
 " I don't expect to lose ^300 a year on the 
 farm, Mrs. King," retorted the other. 
 
 Two days later in a sudden fury the bailiff 
 gave notice. 
 
 To his obvious surprise it was accepted. 
 
 Miss Kate went round the farm to take 
 the inventory. 
 
 In the scullery was a huge earthenware 
 porringer. 
 
 Miss Kate looked at it. 
 
 " Useful for butter-making, I suppose," she 
 said. 
 
 The red woman went white. 
 
 She answered nothing. 
 
 A month later, when I returned, the last of 
 the corn was being carried.
 
 132 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 I went down to the farm. 
 
 Miss Kate was standing on the top of a stack 
 in her short skirt, her dog-leash girt about her 
 waist, her hair ruddy against the sky, her big 
 blue sheep-dog prowling about the foot of the 
 stack. A man in the cart below was pitching 
 the sheaves up to her ; and she was laying 
 them methodically. 
 
 That evening I wrote to brother John who is 
 still Ypres-way 
 
 Kate is master of the situation, and thoroughly enjoying 
 herself.
 
 IX 
 
 THE HOUSE 
 ON THE CLIFF
 
 THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 
 
 I SHALL not easily forget that^brilliant evening 
 last September when our motor climbed the hill 
 out of the town and rolled towards the setting 
 sun. 
 
 Beneath us the sea lapped against the white 
 cliffs as of old ; but the Gap, down which the 
 children used to race to the beach, shouting in 
 their glee, bristled now with wire entanglements 
 and was blocked with impedimenta, while at the 
 top was a wooden guard-house, a sentry-box, 
 and men on duty. 
 
 Beyond the Gap houses grew scarce. We 
 climbed a hill and dropped down a steep pitch. 
 At the bottom of the hollow, standing alone, 
 was a low, white house with a tiled roof that 
 looked like a coastguard station ; and beyond 
 it across the plough a flint-wall, running down 
 to the cliff and enclosing the wooded grounds 
 of a great house, blocked the way. * 
 
 Against that wall, a hundred yards away, 
 paced a man in khaki with a flashing bayonet. 
 
 In that little white house on the edge of
 
 136 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 the cliff, whence a hundred years ago men 
 had watched for Napoleon, we were to pass 
 our winter. 
 
 Our host, the Colonel, greeted us, and 
 took us on to the lawn, where a telescope 
 pointed seaward like a gun. The day was 
 fading fast ; and in the Downs over against 
 us began to twinkle the lights of a vast City 
 of Ships. 
 
 I knew the coast of old in times of peace, 
 and had never seen the like before. As the 
 dusk deepened, those lights flashed like a 
 Piccadilly on the waters. 
 
 " What are they ? " I asked. 
 
 "Neutrals mostly," answered the Colonel, 
 "waiting to be searched." 
 
 We were in a prohibited area : that is to 
 say an area which no alien might inhabit 
 or enter without special permission. And 
 it was not only the sentinel with the bayonet 
 and the rifle loaded with ball-cartridge who 
 was a standing reminder to us of the fact. 
 A few minutes after we had gone to our 
 rooms the Colonel came up and knocked. 
 
 " You're showing a streak of light through 
 the curtains," he said anxiously. " Do you 
 mind if I arrange them ? " He stood on 
 a chair and made certain delicate adjustments,
 
 THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 137 
 
 setting to work as a dressmaker goes about to 
 fit a lady's gown. "They fine you 10 for 
 the first offence," he said, his mouth full 
 of pins. " The occupant of the room pays," 
 he added with quiet gusto, " not the 
 owner . . . and for a second offence you 
 get time." 
 
 Outside my window there was a great 
 balcony. In those early autumn nights when 
 I could not sleep, I often stepped out of my 
 room to enjoy the calm and beauty of the 
 sky. A slip of moon sailing across the deep 
 star-strewn spaces, the ruffled clouds, the still 
 and silent earth, the shining wastes of sea, 
 lit by the twinkling of that far City of Ships, 
 possessed and soothed my spirit. Out there 
 I could forget. Rather I could no longer 
 believe in that day-world of terrors and 
 darkness. 'This was the reality ; that a dream 
 or, to be more exact, a nightmare which 
 the feverish brain of man could not throw off. 
 
 Then the glint of the moon on the bayonet 
 of that sleepless watchman pacing up and 
 down in the shadow of the wall across the 
 plough recalled me to myself. 
 
 He was always there, day and night, wet 
 or shine. 
 
 You could not get away from him.
 
 138 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 One night when I could not sleep I turned 
 on my electric light. The window was wide, 
 and the curtains lifted occasionally in the wind. 
 
 As I read Motley's Dutch Republic, draw- 
 ing faint comfort from the fact that even the 
 Germans had not as yet out-done the Sack of 
 Antwerp by the Spanish Furies, I was startled 
 by a stern and peremptory voice from across 
 the paling 
 
 " Put out that light, please ! " 
 
 It went out with a snap. 
 
 " Thank you," came the voice out of the 
 night ; and the man retired across the plough 
 to his post beneath the wall. 
 
 All through the winter our lights were the 
 Colonel's hobby, his anxiety, and delight. He 
 was past soldiering, but his keen spirit drove 
 him to do whatever he could do with all his 
 might, fie was terribly thorough. From 
 bathroom, lavatories, passages, and halls the 
 bulbs were removed to guard visitors against 
 temptation and servants against carelessness. 
 You washed in the dark ; and you said good- 
 bye to your friends by the light of the moon. 
 And every night when the blinds were down 
 and the curtains drawn, the Colonel went his 
 rounds prowling outside the house to espy if
 
 THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 139 
 
 there were any crannies through which the 
 prisoned light was filtering, and then going 
 from window to window indoors, making good. 
 And if about the hour of dark you went into 
 one of the seaward rooms you would be pretty 
 sure to be greeted by a spectral voice from the 
 ceiling 
 
 " I'm not very happy about this curtain." 
 
 And you would be aware of a gaunt and 
 vulture-like figure perched on a table or chair, 
 safety-pin in mouth, adjusting a chink. 
 
 And there was method in the Colonel's 
 madness. For in those days there were eyes 
 everywhere, in the sky and on the sea, the eyes 
 of enemies and of jealously watchful friends. 
 
 Day and night the sea was whitened by the 
 furious passage of ships driven through the 
 foam on some tremendous and mysterious 
 errand, or darkened by the shadow of merchant- 
 fleets at anchor, stayed by the same invisible 
 hand. 
 
 The dockyards of England were belching 
 forth streams of the strangest craft that ever 
 took the waters ; and sooner or later most of 
 them came our way, and many others too : 
 great grey monitors, steaming to bombard 
 Zeebrugge, their single fighting-tops ugly as a 
 bunch of mistletoe on a pole ; little beetle-boats
 
 HO THE BROWN MARE 
 
 the use of which no man could guess ; neutral 
 ships with their flags painted hugely on their 
 sides ; and fleets of mine-sweepers from the 
 seaport town beyond the wall. 
 
 Trawlers these last, out to catch other fish 
 than herrings. And gallant little craft they are. 
 We used to watch them bucketing along under 
 the cliff", proud to be King's ships and used in 
 the King's service, squadrons of them, their 
 3-pounders in their bows, their sweeping-gear 
 on a boom a-stern, buffeting out at dawn and 
 home again at dusk. No weather daunts 
 them ; and their crews are of the old sea-dog 
 stuff. In the steep streets of the little seaport 
 town you may meet them : men in great 
 sea-boots and tan-coloured breeches, their white 
 stockings tucked over their boot-tops, rolling 
 along, battered and brown, sometimes with 
 earrings in their ears, and always with the mark 
 of their calling stamped as clearly upon them 
 as had their forefathers in the days of Amyas 
 Leigh. They had a rough time in those 
 wintry seas too. During the great gale in 
 February one of them got her screw over a 
 submarine net. She could not clear herself, 
 and the seas bombarded her. Slowly she 
 foundered. The lifeboat put out to the wreck, 
 and saved all the crew but one.
 
 THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 141 
 
 They brought the men into our little 
 harbour. The Colonel met them as they 
 landed and took them into the old Tartar 
 Frigate, that in its life of centuries has seen 
 many strange happenings. 
 
 " Glorious chaps," he reported. " Like 
 pirates. We put 'em in front of the fire and 
 poured whisky down 'em. And they went 
 home merry as grigs." 
 
 Early in the War Zeppelins raided the 
 seaport town beyond the wall where the mine- 
 sweepers find harbourage. 
 
 Indeed, this corner of the coast has been a 
 favourite haunt of enemy aircraft, as is after all 
 but natural, for it is nearer to the fighting-line 
 than any other part of England. 
 
 The sound of guns was in our ears by day 
 and night. On the one hand we could hear 
 the bombardment of the Belgian coast ; and 
 on the other was the continuing rumble of our 
 own big guns being tested at arsenals near by. 
 While once on a Sunday afternoon we heard 
 the sudden phut-phut of a quick-firer in action 
 near by, and running out on to the lawn saw a 
 scurrying flotilla of destroyers beating off a 
 seaplane attack. 
 
 Perhaps, then, it was little wonder that when
 
 142 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 first we came to the House on the Cliff we 
 used to hear the hum of the engines of the 
 Zeppelins overhead every night. They came 
 with astonishing regularity at intervals of a 
 quarter of an hour and stopped automatically 
 as it were and, to be just, somewhat con- 
 siderately, at midnight sharp. We used to lie 
 in bed with clenched teeth, grimly enduring. 
 And it was not till one day we climbed the hill 
 at the back of the house and saw the main road 
 with the tall standards of the electric tram 
 running along it that we modified our letters 
 to our friends. 
 
 When the Zeppelins really passed on 
 their way to raid London they passed far 
 out to sea over the Goodwins. We did 
 not see them ; and only the more imaginative 
 heard their engines. 
 
 There was no imagination, though, about 
 the uproar which woke us at midnight on 
 New Year's Eve. It came from the sea, 
 and was like the sound of a million Leviathans 
 stampeding through the deeps. I crept to 
 the window and peeped out. A heavy 
 fog obscured the waters. And out of that 
 white darkness came those bellowings of 
 unimaginable terror. There was no mistaking 
 what had happened. The German submarines
 
 THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 143 
 
 were at work on the City of Ships from 
 below, and the Zeppelins were bombing it 
 from above. No wonder the unhappy victims 
 bawled ! The carnage lasted some fifteen 
 shattering minutes. Then all was still. . . . 
 
 Next morning I sent for the doctor, and 
 little wonder after what I had gone through. 
 
 " Did you hear that caterwauling in the 
 night?" he asked in his jolly laughing way. 
 
 " I did," I answered faintly. " What of 
 it?" 
 
 " It was the ships in the Downs blowing 
 off their syrens to welcome the New Year, 
 of course," he said, and chuckled as he washed 
 his hands. " A fool of a sentry thought 
 it was Zeppelins and loosed off his rifle 
 and nearly shot a donkey." 
 
 "Just like 'em!" I said, and laughed 
 uproariously at the fellow's folly. 
 
 Then, two days before we left the House 
 on the Cliff came the dark reality. 
 
 It was a February afternoon of the fairest. 
 I was slowly climbing the last hill home, 
 when of a sudden I was aware of I knew 
 not what. 
 
 Some primeval instinct warned me to 
 beware.
 
 144 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 I stood with ears alert and sniffed. 
 
 There was a faint, strange smell in the 
 air, and a faint, far humming. 
 
 I looked seawards. Nothing was visible 
 but a remote destroyer. I gazed up into 
 the heavens. Not a speck darkened the 
 brilliant blue. 
 
 Then a man on the crest of the hill, fifty 
 yards above me, a woman at his side, cried 
 suddenly 
 
 " There she goes ! " 
 
 I looked again. And sheer overhead I 
 caught a flash and sparkle. It was infinitely 
 far, a part of the blue; as though a tiny 
 patch of heaven had suddenly crystallized. 
 
 For a moment I was astounded. The 
 loveliness of that remote and shining something, 
 on whose under-wings the westering sun 
 was beating up, possessed and dazzled me. 
 For one brief second I thought of a creature 
 from another world, so bright it seemed, 
 so Blake-like, and above all so unimaginably 
 remote ; and I was afraid. 
 
 " What is it ? " I cried to the man on 
 the crest, my heart still full of awe and 
 ecstasy. 
 
 "Just what I ean't make out," he shouted 
 back*
 
 THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 145 
 
 We had not long to wait for an answer. 
 
 There was a bang bang bang ! And 
 out of the green hillside across the valley, 
 two hundred yards away, suddenly spurted 
 great black mushrooms of smoke, one after 
 another. Bang bang bang ! and one of 
 the houses skirmishing on the outskirts 
 of the town was enveloped in a dirty 
 cloud. 
 
 " Take cover ! " called a fierce, authoritative 
 voice near by. 
 
 The man on the crest, who was lame, 
 limped swiftly into his house, the woman 
 scuttling before him. 
 
 I was left on the bare road, conscious of 
 that fatal and beautiful thing poised plumb 
 overhead. 
 
 I dared not look up. Were I to do so 
 the falling bomb would surely catch me in 
 the face ; and I preferred to take it on the 
 neck. 
 
 I made for the house opposite ; it was 
 empty and locked. 
 
 Then the lame man came running out. 
 
 " Come in here, sir ! " he called. 
 But it was all over. And the creature 
 from another world was flying homewards in 
 the light of the sinking sun, the smoke of 
 
 10
 
 146 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 its handiwork pursuing it leisurely across the 
 waters in pillars of soot. 
 
 A few minutes later I was standing on 
 the hillside amid the little crowd of men in 
 khaki, of women and children, gathered 
 about the superficial craters caused by the 
 bombs, and souvenir-hunting. 
 
 They were all very merry ; congratulating 
 themselves inwardly ou their heroism ; full 
 of that flatulent joy, and false bonhomie ', 
 which escape from sudden death engenders 
 in all but the humble of heart. 
 
 One bomb, it seemed, had fallen through 
 the roof of a girls' school, and passed 
 through a room in which fourteen children 
 were gathered, hurting none. Two had fallen 
 in the playground ; one had plumped through 
 a house hard by. 
 
 A woman gashed by splintered glass, and 
 a score of frightened children ; these were 
 the raider's harvest. 
 
 It all seemed incredibly trivial, spiteful, 
 and silly. And it was War.
 
 X 
 
 THE COST
 
 THE COST 
 
 HE was one of the men I had somehow 
 believed could not die. 
 
 And when that May morning, with Eng- 
 land at her loveliest, I read the notice in the 
 always lengthening obituary of the Times I 
 was amazed. 
 
 The torpedoing of the Lusitania, recorded 
 in the same paper, seemed to me somehow 
 as nothing beside that other intimate catas- 
 trophe. 
 
 Then I took up the paper and re-read the 
 notice. 
 
 It was not particularly to the point ; for 
 it dealt with him simply as an athlete. The 
 real Ronald was clearly quite unknown to 
 the writer ; but there was one sentence in 
 those half-dozen lines that lingered in my 
 mind. 
 
 He was probably the greatest Rugby three-quarter back 
 of all time. 
 
 He was : and he was much more. 
 149
 
 150 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 And as I puzzled it all out our hopes, his 
 opportunities, this sudden catastrophe I found 
 myself dully butting my head against the hard 
 wall of the simple facts : 
 
 Ronald was no more. He had not died. 
 He had been killed deliberately this boy who 
 never had an enemy, and who so loved his life. 
 
 Cest trop bete, la guerre, say the wise French 
 peasants in their simple way as they till their 
 fields up to the very trenches. And surely 
 they are right. It is the stupidity of the thing, 
 and not its wickedness, that staggers the modern 
 mind. 
 
 And of all the stupidities of the war, this for 
 the moment seemed to me the most crass. 
 
 Here was a beautiful creature 
 
 A dust that England bore, shaped, made aware, 
 Gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
 
 A body of England's, breathing English air, 
 Washed by her rivers, blessed by suns of home, 
 
 with the youth in his limbs, the light in his 
 face, the hope in his heart, stopped dead. 
 
 As I revolved the matter in my mind the 
 occasion on which I had last seen him kept 
 recurring to me. 
 
 It was at the time of the Irish match in the 
 March before the War. He was Captain of the 
 English team. I think the King was present,
 
 THE COST 151 
 
 but I forget the King ; though I have a hazy 
 memory of seeing Ronald tripping down the 
 steps from the dressing-room at the head of 
 his team and standing in his football shorts and 
 white jersey shaking hands with a little man in 
 a round hat before the Grand Stand. 
 
 It was very much Ronald's game that day. 
 The thirty-thousand gathered to watch him 
 were all agreed on that. His playing was as 
 always original. It was as different from that 
 of other men as he was different from them. 
 It was spiritual ; and its quality effortlessness. 
 The strain, the ferocity, the contortions and 
 grimaces, of others who indulge in that heroic 
 and elemental tuzzle which is Rugby football 
 were not for him. 
 
 Nobody ever saw him gnash his teeth on the 
 football field ; I doubt if anybody ever knew him 
 cross ; certainly nobody ever heard him swear. 
 And I for one rarely knew him issue a com- 
 mand certainly never a hortatory one though 
 he was usually Captain. A steady brilliance 
 pervaded his play and personality alike. 
 Always master of the game, he was consum- 
 mately master of himself. And he handled 
 his men with the same unconscious ease with 
 which he swooped and swerved through the 
 enemy towards the goal.
 
 152 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 An incident in the game comes back to me. 
 It spoke to me at the moment of Ronald and 
 his capacity for winning men. He had 
 tackled an enemy three-quarter in full career. 
 The pack was on them in a moment as they 
 struggled and had smothered them. The two 
 men emerged from beneath the worry at last ; 
 and the enemy three-quarter, as he withdrew 
 towards his own line, gave an intimate little 
 pat on the shoulder to the man who had 
 wrought his headlong ruin and crushed in a 
 moment the fruition of his plans. 
 
 / love you, it said. 
 
 And it was not only on the football field that 
 his genius for government appeared. At Rugby, 
 at Oxford, in those camps of working-men by 
 the sea which he loved, in Boys' Clubs in mean 
 quarters of great towns, it was always the same. 
 He led, I think as much as anything, because 
 he never sought to lead. Authority clothed 
 him naturally as the grass the field. Men and 
 boys acknowledged allegiance to a power they 
 could not define and of which the user was 
 unconscious. The root of the matter lay per- 
 haps in this : that there was no egoism in the 
 man. He was one of the humble of heart, 
 without a trace of morbid diffidence. 
 
 Therefore some believed that he had in him
 
 THE COST 153 
 
 a power for bettering the affairs of men which 
 none of his more brilliant Balliol contempor- 
 aries, greedy of power, voraciously ambitious, 
 wearisomely successful, possessed. 
 
 Four months after his last International, 
 War was declared. 
 
 At Oxford he had joined the Officers' Train- 
 ing Corps ; but when the authorities urged him 
 to become an officer he refused. Later, when 
 he had left Oxford, it seemed to him his 
 unpleasant duty to accept a commission in his 
 county Territorial Battalion. 
 
 The adventure and romance of War made 
 no appeal to him. It was a dirty business that 
 had to be got through. 
 
 It may have been because his mother came 
 of Quaker and his father of Nonconformist 
 stock ; it may have been that he had been 
 brought up in the academic and not the im- 
 perial tradition ; whatever the cause, it is surely 
 worthy of record that perhaps the greatest 
 athlete of his generation hated soldiering from 
 his heart although he died in battle. 
 
 He hated soldiering and never took his sport 
 in killing. As a tiny boy he protested against 
 what seemed to him the wanton destruction 
 of flies. Later in life, when he was one of the
 
 154 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 richest young men of his day, and the owner 
 of a great estate, the pursuits of the jeunesse 
 dor&e only bored him. He never hunted, 
 never shot ; and never wished to do so. 
 
 a The horse was very fierce," he writes in 
 his simple way, of a ride he once took. 
 
 It was not that he thought killing for 
 pleasure wrong ; it was that he disliked it. 
 
 He loved life himself, and in his large and 
 sunny way he wished others to enjoy what he 
 found so dear the lower creatures too. 
 
 And it is a bitter commentary on things as 
 they are that this young man, whose heart was 
 brimming with loving-kindness, never killed 
 anything deliberately save perhaps other men. 
 
 All through the hot and terrible days of 
 August 1914, Oxford and Cambridge poured 
 their best into the ranks of Kitchener's Army. 
 
 The Expeditionary Force was flung into 
 France. The Territorial battalions were 
 mobilized, and might follow at any moment. 
 
 Ronald was an officer in one of these. As 
 such he had taken on for Home Service alone, 
 and had therefore the right to refuse to serve 
 abroad. 
 
 At the outbreak of the War his father and 
 mother were abroad ; and two of his friends
 
 THE COST 155 
 
 embassied half across England to urge him to 
 consider his responsibilities and exercise his 
 rights. 
 
 He was furious with them. 
 
 In fact, his battalion did not leave for the 
 Front for another six months. And that six 
 months did not make the profession that had 
 been forced upon him any dearer. 
 
 " I had rather be making biscuits," he wrote 
 to a friend. 
 
 In those days he changed. Something of the 
 old radiance was departing from his face ; and 
 little wonder. His friends were falling like 
 autumn leaves. The boys who had stormed 
 across Bigside at Rugby in his victorious wake, 
 the men who had followed him to victory in 
 many a University match, were going down in 
 swathes. It was the platoon-leaders, the men 
 of his own age, who were catching the full 
 blast of lead and steel, that was sweeping over 
 Europe. And his turn would come. He 
 never doubted it. 
 
 " It's not what I should have wished," he 
 admitted just before he went. 
 
 For he was happy in his life, happy in his 
 opportunities, as are few. 
 
 His uncle, a great Captain of Industry, had 
 made him his heir. And labouring as a
 
 156 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 common hand among the working-men he 
 understood so well, in the immense biscuit 
 factory which he was one day to control, he 
 was quietly dreaming of the work to which he 
 meant to devote his life. 
 
 He had the chance, and he had the capacity 
 and the desire to make the most of it. 
 
 For his heart was set not on adding to his 
 fortune, or going into Parliament, but on 
 adjusting the relations between Master and 
 Men. 
 
 Here was the task ; and here apparently a 
 soul supremely adapted by nature and oppor- 
 tunity to undertake it with success. 
 
 A casual bullet at midnight as he stood 
 on the parapet of a trench directing a fatigue- 
 party ended his dreams and our expectations. 
 
 " We shall win in this war," said a 
 soldier-friend to me the other day, " because 
 in the end Love always wins." 
 
 It does ; and the price is Calvary. 
 
 And he does not stand alone. 
 
 In the minds of many his name will be 
 recorded with that of another youth, so like 
 him, and yet so unlike. 
 
 The two were at Rugby together ; of 
 singular beauty and athletic excellence.
 
 THE COST 157 
 
 I do not know if they were friends at 
 school. I should say probably not. For 
 Rupert from boyhood was a poet, and 
 Ronald a man of action. 
 
 The names almost betray the men and the 
 difference between them. 
 
 After schooldays I doubt if they ever 
 met : for the poet went to Cambridge, and 
 the engineer to Oxford. * 
 
 And it was typical that the one became 
 a Fabian and lectured on the Minority 
 Report, while the other plunged into the 
 practical labours of Boys' Clubs. Ronald 
 remained a stout Churchman while Rupert 
 was writing ironical verse about the creed of 
 his fathers. 
 
 Again after they had left their Universities 
 the one was sweating as a mechanic in the 
 engine-room of a factory, while the other 
 was sailing the South Seas and bursting into 
 song in honour of dusky maidens. 
 
 Of the two youths it was difficult to say 
 which was the more beautiful. Certainly I 
 know no two young Englishmen who would 
 have been more loved by the Greeks. 
 
 Rupert I saw but once ; but I recall him 
 well his fair hair, rather longer than that 
 of other men, his collar rather lower, his
 
 158 THE BROWN MARE 
 
 attire rather more neglige sitting with his 
 blue eyes and spiritual face in the window of 
 a room overlooking the river at Chelsea, 
 reading to a little Bohemian gathering a 
 paper on what appeared to him the most urgent 
 of Social Reforms the guaranteeing by the 
 State of a pension of ^500 a year to every 
 minor poet. 
 
 He was something more than a mere 
 poetaster himself; though, apart from his 
 personal beauty which gave him an unfair 
 advantage, for long he by no means out- 
 shone his multitudinous rivals. Men and 
 women still more recognized in his face 
 the poet of their dreams, read his verses in 
 the light of that vision glorious, and trum- 
 peted him as the master he was not. 
 
 The War touched him to immortality. 
 
 Contact with the brutalities of life stripped 
 his fine spirit of its frills and furbelows. 
 
 It stood forth naked and radiant and un- 
 ashamed. 
 
 He joined the Royal Naval Division, and 
 the bombardment of Antwerp made a man 
 and a poet of him. 
 
 Between the declaration of War and his 
 death he wrote a handful of sonnets that 
 will endure as long as English poetry.
 
 THE COST 159 
 
 And he lived just long enough to taste 
 his fame. 
 
 A few weeks before he died Dean Inge 
 quoted from the pulpit of St. Paul's his 
 incomparable lines 
 
 If I should die, think only this of me 
 
 He did die almost immediately ; perhaps 
 a month before his school-fellow. 
 
 The one lad sleeps in a wood in Flanders 
 on the hither-side of our trenches ; the other 
 under an olive-grove on an island in the 
 /Egean Sea within sound of the guns wrang- 
 ling over the Dardanelles. 
 
 And thousands of their peers the boys 
 they knew and sported with at school and 
 University sleep at their sides. 
 
 Let their just epitaph be 
 
 They went to War in the cause of Peace, and died with- 
 out Hate that Love might live.
 
 Printed in Great Britain by 
 
 t'NWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED 
 
 WOKING AND LONDON
 
 tWKAK!