c
 
 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY
 
 Author of 
 " The Unveiling of Lhasa," 
 " The Mantle of the East," 
 "The General Plan," 
 
 etc.. etc.
 
 THE YEAR OF 
 CHIVALRY 
 
 By 
 
 EDMUND CANDLER 
 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, 
 HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LIMITED 
 
 1916 
 
 Cy 
 
 o\
 
 Copyright. 
 First published 19 16.
 
 TO 
 
 MAJOR WALLACE DUNLOP, "Pompey,' 
 
 IN MEMORY OF MANY CAMP FIRES.
 
 NOTE 
 
 The greater number of these sketches have appeared 
 in The Times or the Daily Mail. The author's 
 grateful acknowledgments are due to the Proprietors 
 of these journals for their permission to reprint 
 them.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 The Caravanserai 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 9 
 
 The Courage of William Mobbs 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 With the Sikh in Flanders 
 
 
 
 34 
 
 Truces .... 
 
 
 
 
 • 41 
 
 The Sappers' War 
 
 
 
 
 . 46 
 
 The Hospital Ship 
 
 
 
 
 51 
 
 France without a Smile . 
 
 
 
 
 60 
 
 The English in Boulogne 
 
 
 
 
 65 
 
 Winter Days in Picardy . 
 
 
 
 
 70 
 
 The Indians in Montreuil 
 
 
 
 
 76 
 
 The Indians at Hardelot 
 
 
 
 
 81 
 
 His First Trench 
 
 
 
 
 . 86 
 
 The Norfolk Housewife . 
 
 
 
 
 91 
 
 The Subaltern's Vigil 
 
 
 
 
 98 
 
 The Drabi 
 
 
 
 
 103 
 
 The Mahabharata of the West 
 
 
 
 108 
 
 Solitude and the War: 
 
 
 
 
 I. Spring in the Mountains. 
 
 
 
 113 
 
 11. Spring in the Valley 
 
 
 
 
 117 
 
 After Neuve Chapelle 
 
 
 
 
 121 
 
 " Ratting "... 
 
 
 
 
 126 
 
 The Commission . 
 
 
 
 
 131 
 
 May in War Time 
 
 7 
 
 
 
 
 152
 
 8 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Shaitan's War 156 
 
 The Old School 
 
 
 
 161 
 
 The Power of a Walk 
 
 
 
 167 
 
 Misery's Bedfellows 
 
 
 
 176 
 
 The New Courage 
 
 
 
 181 
 
 The Professor and the Policeman 
 
 
 
 186 
 
 Philosophy on the Land . 
 
 
 
 192 
 
 BURIDAN 
 
 
 
 197 
 
 The Pathan .... 
 
 
 
 203 
 
 The Willing " Old Buster" . 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 The Mannequin .... 
 
 
 
 213 
 
 The Airman .... 
 
 
 
 218 
 
 The Education of Lahori 
 
 
 
 223 
 
 The Gurkha .... 
 
 
 
 232 
 
 The Spy ..... 
 
 
 
 237 
 
 The Franc-tireur 
 
 
 
 243 
 
 The Dragon Kultur . 
 
 
 
 251 
 
 The Zeppelin . . . . 
 
 
 
 256 
 
 The Earthly Paradise 
 
 
 
 261 
 
 The Boy of To-day . 
 
 
 
 265 
 
 Tegh Bahadur .... 
 
 
 
 271 
 
 The Jap on the Western Front 
 
 
 
 275 
 
 The Care of the Sepoy : 
 
 
 
 
 I. White Magic 
 
 
 
 280 
 
 II. The Black Water 
 
 
 
 . 285 
 
 Baghdad 
 
 
 
 290 
 
 The Man who Woke up 
 
 
 
 295
 
 THE CARAVANSERAI 
 
 IN the smoking-room of the at Boulogne you 
 will meet at some time or other nearly every 
 one who has gone to the war. The hotel is a per- 
 manent barracks for the Army Service Corps, Red 
 Cross and naval transport men, and staff officers at 
 the base ; it is frequented sometimes by convalescents 
 from the hospitals before they return to the front ; 
 and it is right in the track of the ebb and flow of the 
 ninety-six-hours-leave men. 
 
 There are few countries, few kinds of sport, few 
 modern campaigns which are not familiar to at least 
 somebody in this caravanserai. Men who go to 
 Cyprus for moufflon, shoot ibex in Persia, and markhor 
 in Baltistan are not likely to miss the biggest show 
 in history in spite of gout or indigestion or grey 
 hair. 
 
 Many of them are " dug-outs " who are playing the 
 game " for love." They have given their leisure, and 
 sometimes their motor-cars, and are grateful for any 
 appointed task however tedious or depressing it may 
 be. They censor letters, answer Red Cross inquiries, 
 carry wounded from the front, and put themselves 
 and their cars at the daily call of hospitals. Some 
 become chauffeurs to staff officers, and thus by coming 
 
 9
 
 10 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 within range of an occasional " coal-box " satisfy the 
 general craving not to be left out. It adds to one's 
 self-respect to have been under shell-fire, however 
 jumpy one may have felt at the time. 
 
 There are young men, too, doing the same sort of 
 thing who on account of bad eyesight or other reasons 
 cannot play a more exciting part. There are City 
 men and professional men who have left their business 
 to take care of itself. And there are the restless 
 spirits who are soldiers in war time only, who threw 
 up the Army after South Africa and have come back 
 from their ranch or farm or plantation. They gener- 
 ally manage to rejoin their old regiments. 
 
 Some of the men who frequent the smoking-room 
 have been wounded and have not yet been passed as 
 medically fit for the front. They are put on to " base 
 details," courts-martial, and the like ; and some of 
 them are mortally afraid that they may be called home 
 to train Kitchener's Army. There is one boy who 
 you would swear was not seventeen, a mere infant, 
 with the dint of a shrapnel splinter in his head. 
 
 Sipping his cognac by the door is another youngster 
 just going up to headquarters to fill in the gaps. He 
 is not quite sure what he is going to be attached to, 
 but he is pleased with himself and his new accoutre- 
 ments, and one almost envies him his " swank." If 
 he comes back he will be purged of the too pervasive 
 " ego." In the meanwhile assurance is comforting. 
 He surveys the dug-outs with bland interest. 
 
 " Who is that funny old bird masquerading as a 
 colonel ? " he asks. 
 
 The " funny old bird " who stands in the doorway
 
 THE CARAVANSERAI ii 
 
 wrapped up in a coat which hides his decorations 
 once commanded a crack rifle regiment. 
 
 One wonders if the boy will live to make history 
 in the same way. The dug-outs, with all their rich 
 and varied experience, are probably wishing they 
 had been born into the same decade as he — an iron 
 age, perhaps, but a touchstone for strength, spirit, 
 and endurance. 
 
 ^m ^% ^^ ^^ 
 
 My neighbour on the left, a retired major in the 
 Blues, is telling me about Don Carlos. 
 
 " I sent my orderly on with our horses to Tarbes. 
 We crossed the Pyrenees by — I forget the name of 
 the pass. I remember my guide pointing to a corner 
 of the rock where he had shot a Republican. The 
 man came loping round on a mule ; his chest almost 
 touched the barrel of our friend's rifle." 
 
 " He never had a chance, did he ? I mean Don 
 Carlos." 
 
 " Not the ghost of a chance." 
 
 " How did you get into the show ? " 
 
 " Oh, I was on leave." 
 
 There is a great unwTitten book in the campaigns 
 of British officers on leave. 
 
 Two or three French officers stroll in. There is a 
 movement to give them seats. Every one is anxious 
 to show them friendliness and regard, but there is very 
 little fraternizing among the Allies. The shyness of 
 approach seems to have increased on both sides 
 during the war. Most of the Englishmen in the hotel 
 have a little French, but no one has the courage to 
 turn to his neighbour in a room crowded with his com-
 
 t2 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 patriots and say : " Que pensez-vous de la guerre ? " 
 or "La guerre traine en longueur, n'est-ce pas ? " 
 
 On the other hand one often sees in French hotels 
 now that exaggerated and almost embarrassing poHte- 
 ness of the untravelled Englishman who has still a 
 notion at the back of his head that the Frenchman's 
 ideas of ceremony resemble those of the Chinese 
 mandarin. 
 
 I try to get the ex-guardsman to tell me more about 
 Don Carlos or the Egyptian campaign of '82 — he wears 
 the blue and white ribbon — but he is away in Rome 
 describing a run in the Campagna. 
 
 " The country is spoilt now by cultivation. If your 
 horse leaves a hoof mark anywhere they make you 
 pay through the nose." 
 
 Presently the conversation is punctuated by the 
 painfully laborious accents of an EngHshman's French. 
 A subaltern, feeling that somebody must say some- 
 thing to maintain the semblance of an entente, has 
 decided that he is the man, and on the strength of a 
 single college vacation in Brittany not so very long 
 
 ago has pushed himself bravely into the breach. 
 ***** 
 
 " Esquavoos avez remarque la coutume Anglaise 
 de " 
 
 One wondered if it were chivalry or conceit. An 
 awful stillness fills the room. The much-beribboned 
 general bends over to catch the boy's accents as if he 
 were listening to an Ambassador. A providential waiter 
 with a tray of clattering cups and glasses intervenes. 
 
 " Poisonous coffee ! " a young A.S.C. man remarks, 
 
 pushing away his cup. " Let's try the M 
 
 to-morrow. They do things better there."
 
 THE CARAVANSERAI 13 
 
 An ironic staff major turns on the youth and says : 
 " Alleviate the hardships of campaigning, eh ! " 
 and orders a whisky-and-soda for himself. 
 A man comes in with a double row of ribbons. 
 " Who is that ? " I ask a captain in the Indian 
 Army on my right. 
 
 " A Gippy, I should say by his medals," 
 My friend spoke a little enviously of the Egyptian 
 Army. The North-West Frontier medal on his own 
 breast did not cover a third of the expanse, but it 
 represented more active service. There is an economy 
 of decorations in India, where one medal is awarded 
 for different expeditions within the same area. He 
 had fought in one campaign which was called a block- 
 ade and no medal was given for it at all. 
 
 We were talking about carrying the guns through 
 the snow over the Shandur Pass into Chitral when we 
 heard : 
 
 " Napoleon a dit . . . Wellington a dit . . ." 
 The impenitent boy was launched again. Cer- 
 tainly it was conceit. One blushes to think of the 
 subalterns the war has produced who have never 
 known the discipline of a mess. Most of them will 
 learn in a harder school. That bandaged infant in 
 the corner who has been in a bayonet charge, dodged 
 mortar-fire, and lived for weeks in the trenches, is 
 already modest. 
 
 II 
 
 Often there are as many naval uniforms in the 
 room as military. Many of these are " dug-outs." 
 One is wondering why they are not more tanned by
 
 14 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 wind and weather when one looks up and sees a man 
 standing by the door who has a naval uniform but 
 not a naval face. One notices something unfamiliar 
 about his cap and that he is wearing black gaiters ; 
 but the unmistakable cachet of the man is in the eye. 
 
 He stands by the door talking to a naval transport 
 man. 
 
 " Dropped down to within five hundred feet . . . 
 forty bullet marks on the plane. . . . No, I didn't 
 bother about their anti-aircraft guns ; they couldn't 
 do much at that height ; might as well shoot snipe 
 with a rifle." 
 
 " Fhght-Lieutenant ," somebody whispers. " The 
 
 man who led the raid at " 
 
 One catches something about fog and hghts and a 
 bomb with a propeller and a safety catch, and bolts 
 shearing ; and one would give a great deal to hear 
 more, for the man and his high adventures are as 
 remote from common life as the Archangel Gabriel. 
 One wishes profanely he would stay and have a drink ; 
 but already he has vanished. It is too much to expect 
 that one so initiated should lounge on a settee 
 gossiping with groundhngs. Wherever he goes things 
 happen. The man is a flail ; he carries destruction. 
 
 Two boys are visible in the courtyard outside, earth- 
 coloured from wind and rain in the trenches. Their 
 motor broke down and they have missed the afternoon 
 boat. But there are compensations. One hears 
 them in the bureau : 
 
 " Em bagn, si voo play. Ah, oui, madame ! Man- 
 tenong, tout de suite." 
 
 It is always a bath they hunger for. 
 
 •^ *^ #^ #I»
 
 THE CARAVANSERAI 15 
 
 Three Indians stroll in. To the uninitiated they 
 add one new element to the heterogeneous crowd. 
 In reality they represent widely diverse races. One 
 is the son of a Sikh ruling chief ; another of a Hindu 
 Rajah ; the third of a Mahommedan Nawab — peoples 
 as separated by faith, lineage and tradition as Rus- 
 sians, Dutch and Portuguese, but brought into har- 
 mony by an English education. It is odd that ruling 
 families of the three great Indian communities should 
 be represented in the caravanserai. Their comrade- 
 ship here is an implicit comment on the intrigues 
 of Kultur. The Sikh was educated at the College 
 de Normandie, near Rouen, and is now at Christ 
 Church. He speaks French as well as any English- 
 man in Boulogne. The Hindu was at Harrow and 
 Clifton, and the Mahommedan at an Indian chiefs' 
 college and Downing. All three have been gazetted 
 at the India Office as interpreters and are waiting for 
 orders to join their units. 
 
 An Indian Civil Service man just in from the front 
 crosses over and talks to them. He too has inter- 
 preted. He lent a hand one night at hasty digging 
 when officers were short. An Indian Imperial Service 
 cavalry regiment had to dig themselves in. They 
 were new at the game, and the civilian supervised 
 thirty yards of trench work and taught them the 
 mysteries of traverse, loophole and parapet. The 
 very junior subaltern who told me this was immensely 
 delighted at having put a " heaven-born " on to 
 jemadars' work in drenching rain until three o'clock 
 in the morning. 
 
 " He asked me if he could help and worked like a 
 good 'un and kept them at it. It was a good bit of
 
 i6 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 trench, and he seemed quite bucked to get the job." 
 
 Behind us a " dug-out " is talking of Boulogne 
 
 in the 'seventies. He was at school at , which, 
 
 Hke most of the other good old schools and the old 
 English colony, has long passed away. He tells how 
 he and two other English boys locked and barred 
 all the gates of the Haute Ville and how the prefet 
 de police raged and stormed and how they were all 
 within an ace of being deported. 
 
 Among the blue and khaki uniforms there is a 
 sprinkling of civilian grey and black. Mufti in Bou- 
 logne must be a Nessus shirt to the sensitive. A 
 young, able-bodied, non-combatant with the least 
 combative potentialities will feel very uneasy in this 
 crowd. There is a journaKst in the corner who told 
 me he felt like a burglar. 
 
 " Been to the trenches ? " I asked. " Good 
 Heavens, no ! It is bad enough not being able to 
 do anything to help. I'd rather be knocked on the 
 head than get in the way." 
 
 He had left a part of his foot on another frost- 
 bitten frontier. The man was a " caster," as they 
 say in the cavalry. Another civilian bird of passage, 
 asked the same question, said : 
 
 " Shure. I am going to circulate round that way." 
 
 His idea was that two or three Bavarian helmets 
 "picked up first ha-and" in the trenches would look 
 well in the hall at Smithstown, Pennsylvania. 
 
 Then there was a mysterious specialist who had 
 come to write a report on some abstruse and complex 
 question of engineering. He did not confide his views 
 to me, but I gathered that they were advanced, if not
 
 THE CARAVANSERAI 17 
 
 revolutionary, for I heard him repeat with grave 
 emphasis two or three times : 
 
 *'' That is what I've told them. They can take it, 
 OR — they can darn well leave it." 
 
 As he said " They can take it " he lifted his right 
 hand impressively, paused at the "or," and brought 
 it down with a dramatic flourish at the alternative. 
 
 One felt absolutely sure that they would " darn 
 well leave it." 
 
 *«!<• *!■ *lf *k 
 
 9fm "p *i* ^i 
 
 Other civilians who pass in and out have come 
 over to visit sick friends. They introduce a more 
 fluent element into the place. In a small room the 
 other side of the door are ladies — mothers, sisters, 
 wives. Some have come on the same errand ; others 
 to work ; others to ask about the missing. This is 
 the saddest part of the war. They feel that the 
 nearer they get the more they are likely to find out, 
 and the hotel is only two hours by motor from the 
 trenches. 
 
 There is a philanthropist who has come out to 
 arrange a home for the dogs of the invaded countries 
 who have attached themselves to British soldiers 
 and are prevented from accompanying their new 
 masters home on leave. He probably stands for 
 the most exclusively British phase of the British 
 spirit manifest in the room. 
 
 Another man to whom one's sympathies go out 
 is trying to awaken the authorities to the necessity 
 of the protection of trees. Nearly every farm in 
 Flanders and the north of France has its little orchard, 
 and if horses are tethered to the trunks they ring 
 the bark and the trees die. It is hard to teach an 
 
 u
 
 i8 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 army in the field the elements of arboriculture. The 
 bOlets are always changing ; what one spares another 
 destroys ; and officers repeat that horses should be 
 tethered in orchards as a protection against aeroplanes. 
 Many orchards are doomed ; it is part of the wastage 
 of war. No doubt the Base Commandant spares for 
 trees and dogs the tribute of a sigh. In the mean- 
 while the army itself has to be fed and nursed and 
 supplied with all the machinery of destruction. 
 
 It occurred to me, as one by one soldiers, sailors, 
 and civilians got up and slipped quietly out of the 
 room without saying good night, that nobody had 
 said anything about the war. One seldom does now. 
 It would be too much like discussing the weather in 
 the Red Sea.
 
 THE COURAGE OF WILLIAM 
 MOBBS 
 
 THE war dragged on, but with all his dreams 
 it had not occurred to Mobbs that he could be 
 in it. It was not that he lacked imagination ; he 
 had more than most minor poets, yet he could not 
 conceive of himself in the firing line. The War Office 
 advertisements moved him, but not with emulation. 
 He was fascinated by the poster of the recruit standing 
 foursquare on his mound, his crimson bayonet fixed 
 for further execution. The man's bloodshot eye 
 called up the wildest images. Still, it never entered 
 his head that he was cut out by nature for the part, 
 or that his King and country stood in genuine need 
 of the hairdresser's assistants of Putney, or of himself, 
 William Mobbs, in particular. 
 
 And seeing Mobbs, a tall, thin young man with 
 soft white hands and glasses and a complexion like 
 faded foolscap, one might well endorse his diffidence. 
 A young man who had never taken any exercise beyond 
 a Sunday walk in Kew Gardens or Epping Forest. 
 The only weapon familiar to him was a razor. When 
 he drew blood it was on the chin of a customer owing 
 to some fit of abstracted reverie, or through timidity 
 under the unsympathetic eye of Mr. Banks, his em- 
 
 19
 
 20 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 ployer. Then the red trickle unnerved him ; his only 
 weapon became less steady in his hand. 
 
 For ]\Iobbs was a dreamer, H his physical vagaries 
 were confined he travelled far on the wings of imagina- 
 tion. He read poetry mainly and affected the epic 
 vein in prose and verse. His permanent library was 
 fined down to Pope's Homer, Scott, The Faery Queen, 
 Ossian, The Seven Seas, and shilHng reprints of voyages. 
 Modern fiction did not hold him. He had seldom 
 glanced at a newspaper until the war, and then it 
 took six weeks of posters and headhnes to wake him 
 to the fact that battles transcending the sagas had 
 become the every day facts of life, that an epic was 
 
 on foot that dwarfed Troy. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Soon the ripple of the war reached him in Putney. 
 A subaltern came into the shop with a bullet in his 
 heel. Then a sergeant with his arm in a sling. This 
 was not a bullet wound but a bayonet thrust. " I 
 got mine in his throat," he said, " and gave him a 
 twist." This set Mobbs thinking. Steel is more 
 epic than lead. The sergeant brought things home 
 to him and materialized his dreams. In his abstrac- 
 tion he inflicted another wound, which the man of 
 war received good-naturedly. " Here, young feller, 
 keep your blade for the sossidges — if it's blood you're 
 after." Mobbs followed him to the street door. 
 " Will they take men with glasses ? " he asked. 
 " Shure. Why not ? You go along straight. I have 
 six of them in my company." 
 
 Then a young Belgian airman came in, a mere boy, 
 who had been dropping steel arrows on Termonde 
 and Liege. His escort, a fresh-blossoming English
 
 THE COURAGE OF WILLIAM MOBBS 21 
 
 girl with the most palpable hero-worship glancing 
 in her eyes, was part of his reward. 
 
 Mobbs thought of her the next day in Kew Gardens. 
 He spent all his Sundays there now. It was an old 
 haunt of his before the war, full of suggestion, the 
 complement of his fireside voyages. In the palm 
 house he would break virgin jungle with Stanley ; 
 the orchids carried him far away to the Amazon, 
 where he steered his canoe among the scaly backs of 
 alhgators ; the oranges made him think of Samarcand. 
 He used to read the labels on the trees, and he would 
 see the stone-pines on the Mediterranean coast, the 
 cedar on Lebanon, the willow weeping over the Baby- 
 lonian plain. 
 
 William Mobbs was not contentedly a hairdresser's 
 assistant ; he had too much spirit to endure the 
 bonds without recompense. Mixed up with his 
 dreams there was a very definite ambition. He was 
 saving money to rent a barber's shop in a P. and O. 
 liner. In this way he would see the East. One day, 
 perhaps, he would descend from his boat on a palm- 
 fringed island to embark no more ; to some dark host 
 he would become an avatar. Musing in the Rhododen- 
 dron Walk he would hum " Ship me somewhere east 
 of Suez," or he w^ould murmur darkly in Tulip-tree 
 Avenue : 
 
 The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandu, 
 And the crimes of Clapham chaste at Martaban. 
 
 Now all these dreams were broken, the picture 
 dissolved. The subaltern and the sergeant and the 
 Belgian airman and his young woman with the violet
 
 22 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 eyes had translated them. Every adventure of the 
 spirit outside the radius of war was a backing away 
 from reahty ; and there was more poetry in the new 
 reahsm than in tlie old romance ; wilder dreams in 
 Lille and Arras than in Khatmandu ; grimmer tragedy, 
 more stark and primitive crime in Louvain than in 
 Martaban. 
 
 Mobbs had slept ill under the weight of responsi- 
 bility. It had been slowly borne in on him that 
 his King and country needed him, William Mobbs, 
 after all. He was just broad enough in the chest and 
 his glasses did not matter. He had an inward con- 
 viction that he would never be able to shoot or to 
 stick a man with a bayonet. A motor-horn made 
 him jump ; it taxed his nerves to put a match to a 
 gas stove. But his body was the weaker partner ; 
 his mind was quite capable of carrying it along. 
 
 He thought it all out as he stood before Chokusi- 
 mon, the gateway of the Imperial messengers, on the 
 mound among the cedars staring at Choryo's dragon 
 and the heavenly dogs. He would come in with the 
 weight of numbers. The subaltern had told him about 
 the thin Une. There had been one rifle to a front 
 of five yards, when every man who could hold a gun 
 and pull a trigger would have helped. And then in 
 the attack he could have come on with the others ; 
 his carcase could stop a bullet as well as a better 
 man's. Like most nervous, highly strung, sensitive 
 youths, Mobbs was as brave as a lion. One half of 
 his brain suspected this, while the other half was 
 afraid that he would run away. 
 
 At the very moment of resolution he fell into one
 
 THE COURAGE OF WlLLlAM MOBBS 23 
 
 of his incurable fits of dreaming. Germany had be- 
 come a huge devouring dragon, and it would take 
 a thousand men to every scale of the beast to slay it. 
 William Mobbs found for himself a new value ; he was 
 worth to England the thousandth part of the scale of 
 a dragon. The calculation was too much for his 
 humility ; he was uplifted. Anyone passing might 
 have taken him for a young Japanese devoting himself 
 at the temple. 
 
 In the story on the panel the disciple Choryo had 
 plunged into the troubled waters to save his master 
 Kosekko's shoe, and the dragon, touched by the 
 young man's faithfulness to his purpose, had come to 
 his aid. The kindly beast had rendered Mobbs a like 
 service. 
 
 There are two kinds of men — those who have been 
 under the enemy's fire and those who have not. And 
 there is a third, or between, state — those who have 
 volunteered to go. Thanks to the sergeant and the 
 subaltern and the Belgian airman and his girl and to 
 Choryo's dragon, and not a little to his own imagina- 
 tion, William Mobbs is now one of these. As he 
 descended the mound he felt a great pity for the men 
 in mufti streaming out of the palm-house — potential 
 dragon-slayers, not yet initiate. 
 
 II 
 
 In the first phase of his training with the Wessex 
 the poetic leanings of William Mobbs were unsatisfied- 
 The drill-master spelt prose. He was brought into 
 closer touch with Mother Earth, but it was the mud 
 of Aldershot. He lay prone in it on field days, and
 
 24 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 it oozed through his sliirt and putties and was damping 
 to the spirit. He was weak in the arm, and he could 
 not hold his rifle in the firing position forty seconds 
 at a stretch. Route marches, bayonet exercise, and 
 night alarms exhausted him, yet he never fell out. 
 As he lay on a cold bank waiting for a night attack 
 his imagination ran riot. The rattle with its realistic 
 imitation of musketry was more terrifying than the 
 real thing, but he listened to the consciousness that 
 told him he was brave as a lion, or could appear so 
 under trial, and he resolutely quelled all doubts. He 
 thought of Dimmer, Drummer Bent, and Private 
 O'Leary, and he knew that he would have his teeth 
 torn out one by one for the glory that haloed them to 
 rest on his head a single minute. He had heard, and 
 he could beheve it, that rifle fire was child's play to 
 the dentist's chair and his forceps a more unnerving 
 weapon than the bayonet. 
 
 At first when he heard that the war might be over 
 in six months he was inwardly relieved that he was 
 to escape the ordeal. Afterwards he became more 
 martial. He wished to prove himself. He was 
 sensitive to the War Office posters ; they were a 
 challenge. It did not concern him that in any physical 
 impact with his spindle legs and delicate arms he was 
 likely to be overborne. 
 
 Landed on French soil as an avenger, the atmosphere 
 helped him. The troop train was cheered as it left 
 the quay, and half through the night, packed closely 
 in the dark carriages, his regiment was singing. The 
 train did not take him to the front as he expected. 
 There were more delays, and he was two weeks in a 
 tent by the sea, where an inimitable beet field fringed
 
 THE COURAGE OF WILLIAM MOBBS 25 
 
 the heather. He never quite got hold of the name of 
 
 the place, but he imagined the Germans very near. 
 
 He could picture them in the gorse ; the enemy seemed 
 
 more possible and less formidable on this soil. 
 
 Then he was billeted in an old town within sound 
 
 of the guns, and he saw a Montmartre omnibus-load 
 
 of Senegalis disgorged in the street, black as ebony. 
 
 He himself had become something of a hero. Little 
 
 boys came up and touched his accoutrements as he 
 
 gazed into the shop windows ; a girl gave him an early 
 
 daffodil. He went into a church, and was ushered to 
 
 a front seat. They were singing the salut. He was 
 
 carried away by the tremendous earnestness of it 
 
 all. He bowed the knee and came out humanized, 
 
 with an increased liking and respect for the French. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 The first visible missile of hate came out of the 
 air. He was going into his billet when he heard 
 shouts and hurrying feet and an explosion quite 
 close, hke a punctured motor tyre. He ran out, 
 and found everything confusion. It was market 
 day. An old woman rushed past him into the 
 house, dropping everything she had. Another threw 
 down her bundles and crawled under her rickety, 
 ramshackle stall. He saw her scared face peeping 
 out, unbonneted, from among her cabbages and flowers, 
 and he knew that he was watching something humor- 
 ous, though he had lost the faculty of being amused. 
 He was not sure for a few seconds if it was an air raid 
 or if the town was being shelled. He hoped he was 
 being shelled ; it was more in the nature of a baptism. 
 In the meantime the bunches of violets, mimosa and 
 daffodils which the market woman had upset gave
 
 26 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 him a clear vision of Kew, and he found himself won- 
 dering whether the willow leaves were budding yet 
 by the lake, whether the fruit trees were in blossom. 
 He saw the man on the hcffroi hoist a flag ; some one 
 was blowing a bugle in the street. Two horses had 
 taken fright, and started off running into the curb- 
 stones with their carts and colliding with each other ; 
 an odd phase of apprehension was the closing of shut- 
 ters everywhere. He was wondering at his detach- 
 ment when another explosion made him jump so 
 violently that his cap fell off. He picked it up ashamed. 
 There were men and women by his side who had not 
 budged. They were staring up at the sky, fascinated, 
 as the angry, buzzing Taube sailed over. The bomb 
 had fallen in the corner of the market place and killed 
 an old lady, mixing up her legs and arms with her 
 basket of onions among other debris in a three-foot 
 pit in the pavement. She was the first victim of the 
 war William Mobbs had seen. 
 
 At last he had entered the zone of destruction. He 
 felt a kind of joy that he had not been more afraid. 
 The smell of the fumes were still in his nostrils when 
 he entered a barber's shop and demanded a shave, 
 hair cut and shampoo. The frightened staff stood 
 at the door ; he wished them to admire his coolness. 
 Even on ordinary days it was a proud occasion to 
 walk into a coiffeur's in his uniform, though only a 
 private's, to submit his chin to the blade of a man of 
 peace, to receive his civilities as a matter of course, 
 and to tip him when he went away. He saw himself 
 after the war in the chair of his employer, Mr. Banks, 
 of Putney. He wondered if he dared tip " the boss." 
 
 Mobbs had only enlisted for service till the end of
 
 THE COURAGE OF WILLIAM MOBBS 27 
 
 the war, but in this new access of mihtary ardour he 
 thought of making arms a profession. He had reason 
 to be elated. His friend Barker had bolted into the 
 house and hid in the cellar all the time — the superior 
 Barker who had confided to him that he did not think 
 much of the corps, that they were no class, and that 
 when he enlisted he had not meant to get mixed up 
 with "Tom, Dick and 'Arry." Barker, the estate 
 agent's clerk, had crouched in his funk-hole while he, 
 Mobbs, had looked on with a gentlemanly curiosity. 
 In a day or two the battalion would be moved up in 
 support. Shells were no worse than bombs, he 
 argued, but he must remember not to jump. Jump- 
 ing and ducking were " dam silly." You were just as 
 likely to jump into a bullet as out of the way of it. 
 Besides, it did not look well. Bobbing about was a 
 recruity's game. A fellow had to take his chance, 
 and if a shell hit him he would know no more about it. 
 Under the AlUed barber's hand Wilham Mobbs 
 fell into contented dreams. In no other century, 
 in no other generation, could a young barber-poet 
 take his life in his hands and pass in a day from the 
 security of Kew to these wild adventures. He had 
 seen panic unmoved. In his vision he slew dragons, 
 he scaled the crags to the high tablelands amid in- 
 effectual fire. Then the mimosa and the ebon-black 
 Senegalis opened out the avenue to the tropics, to 
 Khatmandu and Martaban — to that enchanted coast 
 where the crimes of Clapham and the dreams of Kew 
 were transcended. He thought of the hairdresser's 
 shop in the P. and O. boat which a friend had shown 
 him one Sunday at Tilbury. That way lay the road 
 to the East. Perhaps after the war But the
 
 28 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 coiffeur was untucking his sheet ; he was shorn, 
 trimmed and perfumed — it was an end to dreaming. 
 Mobbs gave him a penny. 
 
 Outside in the street he met Barker. This youth 
 of doubtful courage accosted him, affecting indiffer- 
 ence. 
 
 " Have you heard the news ? " he said. " We are 
 off to railhead to-night. Entrain at eight. It is in 
 orders." 
 
 Ill 
 
 There was a rumour that they were to attack at 
 dawn. At two in the morning Mobbs was look-out 
 man ; it was the chilliest vigil he had kept. In spite 
 of the cold he sweated. Coming by the communi- 
 cation trench as the stray bullets whistled over, he 
 had discovered himself, or imagined that he had, 
 and shuddered at the revelation. This was the real 
 William Mobbs. At the first proof he was unnerved ; 
 his chivalrous vapourings dissolved, leaving him a 
 starveling husk of manhood. He had been glad it 
 was dark, and that the others could not see him wince. 
 
 He remembered a kindly old sergeant he had met 
 in the train going to Shoeburyness. The veteran 
 had gauged Mobbs in two minutes' talk. He had dis- 
 cussed fear in an easy, natural way which was balm 
 to the lad's self-respect. " Waiting is hell," he had' 
 said. " At first you think it is you they're after, 
 but that's a mistake. You are one in thousands, 
 remember, and they are lucky if they hit one in twenty. 
 And remember, when you get the funks on board, all 
 your mates are the same, but they don't let on. It's
 
 THE COURAGE OF WILLIAM MOBBS 29 
 
 waiting that makes you feel heavy in the stomach 
 and Hght and cold in the feet, but when you're in it 
 you don't care. You'd bayonet the devil for tup- 
 pence." 
 
 They were alone in the carriage. 
 
 Mobbs admitted misgivings as to the sticking-point 
 of his valour, but the sergeant reassured him. 
 
 " Forget yourself, my lad, when you feel the funks. 
 Let yourself go, then you won't worry. You can do 
 a good deal when you've made up your mind you're 
 wiped out, and you'll find it's the safest way too. 
 It's not so easy for them to wipe you out as it seems. 
 You'll do all right. I can see you've got the spirit. 
 It's fear you're afraid of — nothing else." 
 
 Mobbs remembered that the sergeant had repeated 
 two or three times, as if through some poignant reminis- 
 cence — " But waiting is hell." 
 
 •I* T» "t* T* T 
 
 Waiting for dawn he pursued self -forget fulness 
 with the application of an Indian yogi, but the ego 
 was paramount. It floated through the mists of his 
 apprehension like a naked, lonely hulk on a grey sea. 
 
 Dawn came, and they waited for the word to be 
 passed along the line, but instead of the attack the 
 enemy began shelling them. At first the siege-gun 
 shells went over — a terrifying sound like a hidden train 
 coming into a station in the "Tube." The captain 
 of the company came along, giving them work to do 
 to keep them busy. Philosophy was demoralizing ; 
 anything was better than taking thought. He spoke 
 to Mobbs, observing his pale face. " It's all right 
 when you can hear them — means they're gone over 
 — harmless — mere noise." His comfort was terse
 
 30 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 because of the din. As he spoke a shell fell short 
 with an earth-shaking crash, bursting in the parapet 
 and burying five men the other side of the traverse. 
 They were dug out half suffocated, shaken, but alive. 
 The siege guns had found the range and were flatten- 
 ing the walls of the trench ; the shrapnel burst round 
 them, flashes of yellow Hght. The state of mind of 
 William Mobbs was like nothing that can be con- 
 ceived. His eyes and mouth were full of earth. In 
 place of thought he was conscious only of sensation, 
 quickened and dulled in turn. His captain put him 
 on to digging. For some minutes the line of trench 
 where he was at work was exposed to machine-gun 
 fire from the flank, and the men lay flat, scratching 
 up the loose earth with their hands and scattering it 
 behind them like terriers until they had made them- 
 selves a hollow. The bullets passed over with a 
 sickening rhj^hm ; Mobbs felt the wind of them on 
 his neck and spine. His neighbour, who had heaved 
 himself into a loop with desperate digging, was hit ; 
 his arm and knees supported his body in an arc, so 
 that the men by his side could see the daylight under 
 him. A subaltern crawled up and laid out the corpse 
 reverently level with earth ; the man's posture, like 
 a stricken caterpillar in pain, was too disheartening. 
 Soon they were deep enough for spade work. No 
 one else was hit. Farther down the line another 
 shell crater had filled and bridged the trench. Mobbs 
 sweating — this time with the toil of his hands — watched 
 them with singular detachment digging themselves 
 in. At nine o'clock the bombardment ceased sud- 
 denly, and for no apparent reason. They prepared 
 for the attack which must inevitably follow ; they
 
 THE COURAGE OF WILLIAM MOBBS 31 
 
 waited hours, it seemed ; the lull was interminable, 
 
 but nothing happened. 
 
 ***** 
 
 For some obscure reason the enemy were leaving 
 them alone. An occasional rifle bullet spattered 
 against a loop-hole from their trenches three hundred 
 yards away. Then our own artillery came into play. 
 
 " We're giving 'em 'ell," a corporal said. " That 
 means we are going to attack just as it's getting dark. 
 You see if it don't." 
 
 At sunset hot tea and rum were warming to the 
 spirit. Mobbs felt that he had a grip on himself. 
 He was a very different Mobbs from the poltroon who 
 had sweated and shivered in the night. 
 
 It was true ; the corporal was right. They 
 were advancing. Not at a double, as on the road at 
 Aldershot, but at a slow, laborious walk, floundering 
 in a boggy field, a chunk of mud on each foot as big 
 
 as a coal-box. The Royal s on the left on slightly 
 
 drier ground were forging ahead ; they had breath 
 to sing and swear and shout. It became a race to 
 keep up with them, to keep the line straight. When 
 the Royals threw themselves down the Wessex strug- 
 gled on a few seconds longer and so made up the 
 ground. This was his realization of the advance 
 by quick brilliant rushes under fire. 
 
 After the first spurt he found himself lying by the 
 side of Barker. There was a certain comfort in being 
 near a man who, he suspected, was more frightened 
 than himself. When they rose for another lap Barker 
 lay still. Mobbs prodded him ; he lay so naturally 
 in such an easy pose he might have been feigning 
 sleep. Mobbs pulled at his sleeve angrily ; the man's
 
 32 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 head rolled to one side, his cap fell off, one eye and 
 half his face were gone. 
 
 In the next lap fear left him. The gross and earthy 
 part of him fell away. A bullet in his shoulder was 
 like an angry tap with a cane. He wondered why 
 it did not hurt ; the wound only gave him confidence. 
 
 3f! 5JC 3jC »p •!» 
 
 Would they halt again ? They were spent, but 
 it would be suicide ; the trench was too near and there 
 was no vestige of dead ground. Mobbs saw the parapet 
 in a haze like the red line he had struggled towards 
 in the quarter-mile in the Y.M.C.A. sports at Putney. 
 He believed that he would reach it, he could see no 
 farther, fate had narrowed down to that. The line 
 was thinning round him ; he thought he was almost 
 alone ; another bullet grazed his sleeve as he gathered 
 himself to leap. His rifle was knocked out of his 
 hands. He lay in the mud at the bottom of the 
 trench under a German heel. 
 
 When he came to, the enemy were binding his 
 wounds. They gave him water and he fell asleep 
 again. 
 
 The next morning, when he was half conscious, 
 they put him out of the trench like a sandbag in the 
 line of fire. The Wessex were attacking again. He 
 was hit in the calf by his own men. They recaptured 
 the trench and Mobbs. 
 
 The name of William Mobbs is not in the honours 
 list. He was not mentioned in despatches. He 
 found that the courage he had dreamed of as an almost 
 unattainable goal went without comment in the Army 
 as a matter of course. He had taken part in an every- 
 day affair. In every brigade there are at least three
 
 THE COURAGE OF WILLIAM MOBBS 33 
 
 thousand men as handy in action as Mobbs, though 
 few so genuinely brave. For he had a monster to 
 slay in himself. It is part of the compensating order 
 of things that Providence supplies for these encounters 
 a keener spear. The timid, visionary dragon-slayer 
 is seldom shamed. The prestige of the Wessex will 
 be the brighter for the spirit of William Mobbs.
 
 WITH THE SIKH IN FLANDERS 
 
 I WAS passing through the Place , at , when 
 I ran into the tail-end of a weather-worn company 
 of Indians filing into the railway station. I asked the 
 last of them, a strapping young sowar, what the regi- 
 ment was. It was a Sikh squadron of 's Horse, 
 
 but the horses were not in evidence. 
 
 " Where are you going ? " I asked. 
 
 " I do not know." 
 
 " Where are you coming from ? " 
 
 " I do not know." 
 
 Then I asked for Rissaldar Sundar Singh of the 
 regiment, the famous polo player, who ten years ago 
 had been the best Indian No. i, perhaps the best 
 No. I in the Punjab. 
 
 " Sahib," he said, " you know him ? He is my 
 father. I am Sampuran Singh. He is very sad not 
 to be in this war." 
 
 I told the young man that I had been to his village, 
 Ramgarh, and drunk milk with his father in his house. 
 The Rissaldar had invited us to come and shoot black 
 buck. I remembered riding with him in the evening 
 and how he carried a rifle, and dropped his reins when 
 we started a ravine-deer and shot it. He even fired 
 at a hare from his pony. 
 
 I took Sampuran Singh into the buffet and gave 
 
 34
 
 WITH THE Sn<:H IN FLANDERS 35 
 
 him a poisonous-looking red temperance drink. He 
 removed the soaked cowl with which he had covered 
 his turban and showed me with a proud smile two 
 bullet-holes in the peak. 
 
 " Don't lose that," I said ; " you will be a great 
 Bahadur in the village." 
 
 " Sahib, there is little izzai ^ in it," he said. " All 
 our clothes are rent like this. After a time the lice 
 enter them and we throw them away." 
 
 I remembered hearing his father, fine soldier and 
 horseman as he was, curse his ill-fortune that he had 
 never been in a campaign. 
 
 " The Rissaldar Sahib will be pleased to have the 
 cape," I said. " Have you news from him ? " 
 
 Sampuran Singh disinterred a roll of wet pulp from 
 his pocket and held it towards me. 
 
 " He complains that I do not write," he said, " but 
 I have written twice and there is an unfinished letter." 
 
 He unfolded his father's script and slowly intoned 
 it. " Praise be to the Guru. Your father Sundar 
 Singh here writes a word to his dear son Sampuran 
 Singh. It is meet for a young man to be in the battle 
 and on this account I am not taking thought. I am 
 well and happy, and I pray to the Guru for your welfare 
 and happiness. When you receive this letter answer 
 it and relate to me the full conditions of the war. It 
 is said that Gurdit Singh and Fateh Singh have gone 
 
 with their company to the Sikhs. Is this true ? 
 
 Take no thought for your life in the battle, for it is 
 right to fight for the King, and great glory will come to 
 Hindustan and the Sikhs and fame to the regiment. 
 Here everything is well. There is good rain for the 
 
 1 Honour.
 
 36 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 sowing. Write me quickly a letter saying who is alive 
 and who is dead. Salute the Rissaldar in the name of 
 the Guru and Sardar Singh and Thamman Singh. 
 Yourself be strong, that the name of the puUan may in- 
 crease. Your brother, Piyara Singh, is living in the 
 house as is his right, and the money you have left with 
 Mool Chand I have taken back. I will write all about 
 the land. All is well here. The servant, Jati, fell 
 asleep in the machan and the pigs broke into the melon 
 field, doing great damage. The nilghai also have 
 done great damage. Many thousands of begars of 
 land beside the canal are being prepared for the 
 Sepoys on their return. I will speak a word in the ear 
 of the Commissioner Sahib concerning the allotment. 
 
 There followed a complaint that the boy had not 
 written. I explained that it took two months to 
 write and get an answer, and he showed me his un- 
 finished letter. " I was writing it in a godown," he 
 said, " when the boom-golies came." 
 
 " Praise to the true Guru," he wrote. " This letter 
 is written to the Father Sahib, Rissaldar Sunda Singh, 
 
 by his son Sampuran Singh, sowar, 's Horse. 
 
 I am well and happy and pray to the Guru for your 
 welfare and happiness. I have received your letter 
 and my heart is made glad. Take no thought of me. 
 A great battle has been fought. By the mercy of the 
 Guru my life is saved. ..." 
 
 So far he had written when the shells struck the 
 barn. I offered to finish the letter, but feared the 
 Rissaldar Sahib would not be able to read my script. 
 
 "Write in Angrezi^ Sahib," Sampuran Singh 
 
 1 Englsh,
 
 WITH THE SnCH IN FLANDERS 37 
 
 suggested, " the schoolmaster will render the mat- 
 ter in Gurmukhi, or, maybe, Chanda Singh, who is 
 at the Model School, is now sufficiently advanced." 
 
 So I wrote the Rissaldar Sahib a letter in English, 
 such a letter as Sikh fathers do not usually receive 
 from their sons. The Sepoy's communications are 
 all of a piece, void of reflection, concerned only with 
 ultimate things ; and the formulae are unalterable. 
 A patient lying in a hospital will write : — " All is well 
 here. I am very well and happy. Take no thought. 
 The bullet is in the centre of my stomach. The doctor 
 cannot get it out." But in talk the Sepoy is some- 
 times less laconic ; give him a text for his comment 
 and he may become communicative. While waiting 
 for the " terain " I discovered Sampuran Singh's 
 opinions on all things, not without much cross-examin- 
 ation, and wrote them down for the old Rissaldar's 
 benefit, posted them, and added my greetings. 
 
 " This is a good war. Here we are near the sea and 
 the Germans are extended to the east almost as far as 
 Hindustan ; but against them the English and other 
 nations are drawn up in increasing numbers, so that 
 they cannot now move further into the lands they 
 covet." 
 
 " Sahib, what more is there to write ? " 
 
 " Tell him what you told me of the tree and the 
 great battle." 
 
 " The boombs first broke down the mud walls in 
 front, destroying many ; the trenches were rendered 
 nearly flat. Sardul Singh was killed by the wind of 
 one without being hit. Then the Germans came in 
 great numbers and we slew them One or two fell 
 into the trench. Outside they were lying one on the
 
 38 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 top of the other so high that we could not see for the 
 corpses. At night they came again, filUng the sky 
 with hghtnings — a kind of magic the secret of which 
 they possess. Again we slew all. They have too 
 many machines, and these are too cunningly contrived. 
 Otherwise they are not equal to the Sikhs. They are 
 slow with the bayonet and move heavily. Often they 
 have no fear. 
 
 " I was for a long time outside a village named 
 Festu-Shah, where there is always much fighting, and 
 there is a tree on which hang pieces of the soldiers of 
 different nations all blown into the air by boombs and 
 mines. Sahib, what are the names of the five nations ? " 
 I inserted them. " You may see Indians' turbans 
 hanging there and different kinds of caps and boots. 
 
 " I sent Kour Jan by the post a money order for 
 fifteen rupees. Six weeks have passed and I have had 
 no word. You will please inquire. I fear she may 
 be in a narrow place. Stroke the head of my dear 
 Suntri for me. 
 
 " The memsahibs of this country do not cover the 
 face, not only the old, but the young women. They 
 have strange customs, but they intend no evil. They 
 do not fear the boombs. Two were tending cattle 
 behind our lines where the boombs were bursting. 
 Broun Sahib sent me to remove them from this peril. 
 They not understanding, I pointed my ' ruffle ' as one 
 who shoots, crying ' boom-boom ' and shaking my 
 head. At length they crjdng ' Merci, merci ' (merci- 
 merci-kerke), fled. In the cities they give us flowers 
 and little flags, and offer us tobacco, not understanding 
 the law of the Khalsa ^ — Sahib, what more is there to 
 write ? " 
 
 ^ Sikh community.
 
 WITH THE SIKH IN FLANDERS 39 
 
 " The Rissaldar asked you to write of the country 
 and the soil." 
 
 " You ask me of the country and the soil. This is 
 a good country. It is very dark. No day or night 
 passes without rain, and the sun does not appear, but 
 is hidden always behind a cloud." 
 
 "Tell him about the snow and the horses," I sug- 
 gested. 
 
 " The snow, instead of lying on the hills, comes 
 down under our very feet and then it becomes 
 water. They do not employ cattle with the plough in 
 this country, but horses. These are of a commanding 
 height and have tufts of hair on their feet. I cannot 
 speak of the crops, as it is not the season. 
 
 " The Padshah came to see the Indians all the way 
 over the black water. He spoke with all, regardless of 
 rank. It was not my fate to see the King, being in the 
 trenches. I am told that though chosen by the All- 
 Powerful to be seated on the Throne, he does 
 not hold himself distantly from the poorest. On 
 the Sahib's burra-din ^ he sent every Sepoy in the 
 Army a gift. In Jai Singh's regiment all the English 
 officer Sahibs, save two, are dead or wounded. They 
 wear turbans as we, but they ever run a little ahead. 
 A lieutenant has become a major ; but every German 
 that crosses our path is slain. Nathu Singh, Kishem 
 Singh, Kanwar Singh of the village are dead. All is 
 well here. I am well and happy and I pray to the 
 Guru ." 
 
 " Don't you want to write more about Festu-Shah ? " 
 
 " No, Sahib. Ask him if he received my letter and 
 if the land is redeemed." 
 
 * Christmas Day.
 
 40 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 A civil train was drawn up on the opposite side of the 
 platform to the troop train, and " the uncovered mem- 
 sahibs " regarded the Sikh squadron of 's Horse 
 
 with looks of amused admiration. The last words Sam- 
 puran Singh said to me as I left the platform were : — 
 " Tell the Rissaldar Sahib to send his letter without 
 stamps. It will then surely reach me." 
 
 The " terain " took him to railhead and he is now 
 among the " boom-golies " again, probably quite un- 
 impressed. I should like to hear the epic of " Festu- 
 Shah " related at Ramgarh. No doubt the Battle of 
 the Seven Nations '^ill be dismissed in as many phrases.
 
 TRUCES 
 
 THERE were one or two brief and spontaneous 
 renewals of the Christmas truce of 1914 for 
 some weeks following ; but the authorities on both 
 sides set their faces sternly against any relaxation of 
 the fibre of war. 
 
 The overtures were mainly from the other side. 
 In analysing the motives that prompted them one must 
 be on one's guard against too much idealism. There 
 was, of course, a very natural desire for a little comfort 
 and ease after strain. If it had not been for the common 
 veto there is no doubt that these truces would have 
 become more frequent during the weeks that were 
 spent in the mud of Flanders before the nature of the 
 ground permitted us to come to serious grips again. 
 
 The damage done by rifle fire on our front for those 
 last few weeks, if we except sniping, had not been 
 great, and where Httle is doing and progress is almost 
 out of the question on account of the mud there must 
 be a general inclination to have one's feet out of ice 
 or water, avoid cramp and improve the circulation. 
 
 It was not the suspension of hostilities that was 
 remarkable so much as the spirit in which the truce 
 was observed and the complete absence of rancour, the 
 " sporting " attitude of both sides — to use a word 
 obnoxious to the Germans through the supposed levity 
 of its associations. In places the truce was confmed 
 
 41
 
 42 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 to the trenches, the artillery being outside the area of 
 good will. But " gun practice " was naturally avoided 
 where the short distance between the positions added 
 to the danger of shelling our own men in the neutral 
 zone. 
 
 In one area snipers, English and German, were out- 
 side the pact. This led to a temporary misunder- 
 standing. One of our men fired at a sniper in a tree. 
 Whereupon the Germans, thinking that we had broken 
 the tiTice, opened fire from the trenches. We replied. 
 There were one or two casualties, but somehow the 
 situation cleared itself, explanations were exchanged, 
 and the truce was resumed. 
 
 *Tfi ^* »J» #|» ^^ 
 
 An English officer, unwisely perhaps and for want 
 of something to say, complained to a German com- 
 panion in misery of the boredom and discomfort of life 
 in the trenches, and said what a pity it was that such 
 good fellows should be shooting one another for no 
 particular point. 
 
 The German agreed. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " but it is odd that you should com- 
 plain. It is all the fault of your Government." 
 
 " Our fault ! " 
 
 " You began it." 
 
 The " lie courteous " passed into the " lie circum- 
 stantial," and in the end the two had to be separated 
 by their friends. So the great drama was played out 
 in miniature. 
 
 But in the main there was peace and understanding. 
 Instead of " Schweinhund " and the hysterical chant- 
 ing of the Hymn of Hate it was " A happy Christmas 
 to you, Englishmen " ; and it was more than the spirit
 
 TRUCES 43 
 
 of Noel that prompted the fraternizing between the 
 Hnes. It was the fellow-feehng that is bred in a man 
 in any struggle that taxes his best resources — the feehng 
 expressed in a really genuine pugilist's handshake. 
 
 This humane trafficking with the enemy is no new 
 thing in war. An old Army chaplain tells a story in 
 " L'Orme du Mail " of the French lines at St. Privat, 
 where " a great devil of a sapper " brought him a sack 
 of potatoes every day from the enemies' lines. They 
 were given him by a soldier in a German picket. The 
 two were neighbours on the frontier. They embraced 
 and spoke of parents and friends, and the German said, 
 " You can take as many potatoes as you need." " This 
 simple incident," said L'Abbe Lalande, " made me 
 realize more than any reasoning how unjust and cruel 
 war is." 
 
 Long before Christmas there were little impromptu 
 truces in parts of the German and French lines, not 
 merely for burying the dead or the mutual need of 
 water, but out of ennui and the desire for a little tem- 
 porary diversion. 
 
 " Camarade Boche ! " a French corporal would cry 
 with friendly irony. " I want to get out, will you 
 shoot ? " 
 
 " Come out, Kamarade Frangais, I will not shoot. 
 Leave your rifle in the trench." 
 
 And they would both shuffle out and exchange cheer- 
 ful badinage. 
 
 " You have heard the news ? London has fallen. 
 The English Fleet is sunk. Our right wing is walking 
 into Paris."
 
 44 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 And the Boche would point to the authoritative 
 newspaper. 
 
 " The Russians are in Berhn. Your Kaiser has got 
 a stroke. It was time." 
 
 Soon the air would become too charged for safety and 
 they would pop down again." 
 
 Here is a story of the British lines. In the trenches 
 the other day opposite one of our Rifle Battalions, near 
 Ypres, a certain Fritz was very much in request. The 
 first morning after they had taken up their position 
 our men heard voices calling him all along the line : 
 " Fritz ! " " Fritz ! " " Fritz ! " And there was some 
 curiosity to see what this redoubtable Fritz was like. 
 Presently a big head commanding a very portly pres- 
 ence — portly even as Fritzs go — lifted itself out of the 
 end of the trench, and was carried at a speed quite in- 
 commensurate with the supporting bulk to the adjoin- 
 ing trench. A few bullets greeted this extraordinary 
 apparition, but he escaped intact. In the afternoon 
 equally insistent voices called Fritz back, and again 
 he ran the gauntlet successfully. The next morning 
 only one man fired at him. After that they simply 
 drew a bead on him and laughed. They laughed so 
 much that it is doubtful if they could have hit him if 
 they tried. Exactly who Fritz was nobody ever dis- 
 covered. Owing to his figure and the fact that he was 
 in such constant demand, he was believed to be the 
 cook. When the battalion was relieved, the word was 
 passed to the new-comers, " Don't shoot at Fritz." 
 
 A pacifist would argue that the Christmas truce and 
 other such promptings are the assertion of individual 
 reason against the great collective unreason of the
 
 TRUCES 45 
 
 State. A more obvious reflection is that the men who 
 are in the real thing doing the work do not hate one 
 another. Venom is a civihan vice, and it would clear 
 the air for venomous civilians if they could be made to 
 fight with sticks and gloves. The actual waging of 
 war — not the ravaging of cities and villages — would 
 seem to have a humanising effect. Any chaplain at 
 the front or Red Cross nurse will tell one this. It is 
 even conceivable that five months of campaigning may 
 have developed the germs of a soul in the spoilers of 
 Lou vain. 
 
 There is an old lady in Tooting who says : "I think 
 that something ought to be done. The Kaiser is not 
 in his right mind. I feel sure that he ought to be 
 examined." 
 
 Possibly before Europe is drained of a generation 
 of her best blood the people of Germany will take 
 thought and " examine " the Kaiser, and discover the 
 great hallucination.
 
 THE SAPPER'S WAR 
 
 THE siege, not of cities but of countries, continues 
 on a two-fifty-mile front from the Yser to the 
 Argonne. Ten departments of France are invaded. 
 But France is calm, and she has reason. There is 
 nothing in the world so demoralizing as the sense of 
 impotent aggression, and the Boches have been knock- 
 ing their heads against a wall for weeks. The whole 
 line is one fortress. 
 
 The cavalry have gone into the trenches like moles 
 and their horses are eating their heads off picketed in a 
 sufficiently extended Hne far in the rear. Their time 
 will come. In the meanwhile the sapper emerges and 
 takes the place that was his when the British Army 
 last fought and swore in Flanders. 
 
 The sapper is too much preoccupied to swear much 
 now unless he is left at the railway base to run trains. 
 This is perhaps the most unwelcome variety of work 
 that can fall to an engineer in war time, especially when 
 the railway is in a foreign country and civil trains cross 
 the lines of communication. The Railway Traffic 
 Superintendent is the most preoccupied of officers, but 
 he is not too much preoccupied to swear. The com- 
 pHcations are enough to tie a man in knots, and a 
 mistake may mean no bread, or stale bread, to a division 
 at the front. When he finds horses destined for three 
 
 46
 
 THE SAPPERS' WAR 47 
 
 different rail-heads in the same truck his language is 
 worthy of the traditions of Flanders. Orders to report 
 himself at Headquarters for work at the front come as a 
 most welcome release. 
 
 This new phase of the war is the sapper's own 
 particular " show." Spades are trumps ; it is a 
 guerre taupiniere. His is the kind of fighting that calls 
 for a peculiar quality of nerve. He is not given 
 trenches to hold under heavy fire. He is seldom called 
 up to take a position. He carries a rifle, but he rarely 
 uses it. His weapons of attack are bombs and hand- 
 grenades and mortars. He sleeps in the day, when he 
 has time, and is at work all night. It is half -blind, 
 stealthy work in the dark, almost feline, generally 
 over the ground between the enemy's trenches and our 
 own. It requires the least common kind of courage. 
 As the months pass the spade-work is becoming less. It 
 fell heavily on the sappers at first. But the infantry 
 make their own trenches and know how to dig them- 
 selves in. They have not moved much lately. Even 
 the cavalry have become adept. The art of loopholes 
 and parapets is well understood. The steel head- 
 shield, such as the French have been using, is a great 
 resource. 
 
 IMines have not played such an important part in 
 this mole-work as might have been supposed. We 
 have heard the enemy mining and we have tried it 
 ourselves, but one strikes water in this country between 
 seven and eight feet down. The enemy's sapping is 
 mostly approach work. We sap out to meet them, 
 but the deep shaft undermining a position is rarely 
 possible \dth the water so near the surface. 
 
 There have been the shallow trench mines of which
 
 48 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 one has heard a great deal, but that ruse is nearly 
 played out. One docs not occupy an empty trench 
 now, one jumps it. " A month ago we lifted them," 
 an engineer told me. " It was not a proper trench we 
 had been holding, but a low natural ditch with a small 
 bank to it. It was rather a salient point, and we were 
 glad to clear out. We left it mined, and in the evening 
 the enemy came in. We made them jump." The 
 Indian Army have played the same trick. 
 
 Every night there are wire entanglements to be 
 put up which have been broken during the day. How- 
 ever stealthily the sapper sets to work it will only be a 
 few seconds before he draws the enemy's fire. Word 
 has been passed to the look-outs in the trenches to 
 expect him, but he does not always get the benefit of 
 the doubt. It is jumpy work for the sentries too. 
 
 Then there are buildings to destroy. The enemy 
 will have occupied some house from which they can 
 snipe our trenches, having sandbagged the windows 
 on the second floor. They are too near to make it safe 
 to shell the building. So the work of destruction falls 
 to the sappers. This is another night job. If it is a 
 cottage three or four charges will generally suffice, 
 which means only one expedition. But the country 
 is islanded with farmhouses with enclosed courtyards 
 like Arab caravanserais. These are a more difficult 
 matter. After the first explosion one has to return 
 again and lay more charges. The enemy are tho- 
 roughly on the alert. If there is a flashlight it will be 
 turned on, and the proportion of casualties will be 
 heavy. 
 
 All this is part of the night's work. But the sapper 
 is doing a great deal just now that is not being talked
 
 THE SAPPERS' WAR /,9 
 
 about — the kind of old-fashioned fighting in which a 
 man does good work if he can suppress his nervous 
 system and embody the physical virtues of a terrier 
 and a ferret. 
 
 For instance, during a day of desperate fighting, 
 three Indian regiments and one British had been 
 shelled out of their trenches by mortars, and in the 
 darkness had recovered them — or it was believed 
 that they had recovered them. Nobody was quite 
 sure. A sapper was sent to find out. 
 
 He found the Indians in their trench ; in the melee 
 the three regiments had become mixed. There had 
 been a great deal of bayonet work. It was a long 
 trench, and he knew every inch of it. He found it 
 thinly held. Towards the far end the dead alone were 
 in possession ; he had to step over them. There was 
 an unnatural stillness, and the smell of unburied 
 corpses from a neighbouring field poisoned the air. 
 He came to an empty space between two traverses ; 
 beyond this he heard men whispering, but could not 
 distinguish whether it was German or Hindustani. 
 At a low pitch of the voice the two intonations are 
 strangely alike. As he stooped and listened, a bomb 
 struck the earth at his feet and he was thrown to the 
 ground. He thought he was blinded. A fragment 
 had struck his eyebrow, another his chest ; he had 
 wounds in his neck and ribs. But he rolled over and 
 crawled back through the dead bodies again to his men. 
 He directed the attack lying on his side till he was 
 carried away. The last Germans were driven out of 
 the trench afterwards by bombs and hand grenades. 
 
 " It's jumpy work," I suggested. 
 
 " Yes, but one keeps reminding oneself that the 
 
 D
 
 50 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 enemy are just as frightened as we — more frightened 
 perhaps, as the Indian is an unknown quantity. One 
 night when we had blown up their saphead I found an 
 officer quaking with terror, all in a heap. He thought 
 the Pathans would cut him up alive into small bits." 
 
 Nerve in the . trenches under shrapnel or in the 
 attack is, to some degree, collective. Every one who 
 is in with you helps. The weakest is sustained by that 
 strong fountain of courage, regimental prestige. He 
 soon finds himself shaken down into familiar and 
 neighbourly relations with death. He may even be- 
 come used to siege-gun fire, though it is not an acquired 
 taste. But in these lonely night-reconnaissances one 
 has to find the stimulus in oneself. Darkness, isolation, 
 uncertainty, suspense — all the ordinary concomitants 
 of fear. It needs a strong spirit to quell these. 
 
 " You must feel a bit jumpy," I said to the sapper. 
 
 " Oh no. It's all right when you are wide awake and 
 don't start too tired. Of course when one is wakened up 
 in the small hours before one has the grip of things, 
 one has not alv/ays got the stomach for it — not right 
 off."
 
 THE HOSPITAL SHIP 
 I 
 
 THE hospital fleet at Boulogne comprises the first 
 ships of its kind, if we except the Gwalior and 
 Carthage, which were equipped for the China War. 
 The vessels used for South Africa were transports 
 only, and the wounded did not embark on them until 
 they were more or less convalescent. 
 
 These ships are easily distinguishable by the broad 
 green band on a white surface, with the Red Cross 
 fore and aft ; sailing with light ballast, they stand 
 high out of the water. 
 
 They are models of finish and have been provided 
 with every new accessory, from rocking beds fixed to 
 the floor which swing with the motion of the vessel 
 to an X-ray installation and the most specialized 
 details of modern surgery in the operating room. 
 
 From the moment he reaches the quay, the patient 
 is made to feel that the most careful machinery is 
 being put in movement for his comfort. As soon as the 
 Red Cross motor-car arrives, the bed he has travelled 
 in is laid gently on a stretcher, swung up to the deck 
 by a smooth running crane, placed in the lift and 
 lowered down into the ward. The " lying down " 
 patient need not stir from the stretcher on which he 
 receives first aid until he is lifted on to his bed on the 
 
 51
 
 52 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 ship. And to soften the ordeal of the somewhat 
 formidable ascent by crane, provision has been made 
 for a stretcher wide enough to carry two. To the 
 Indian this is very important. He likes to have a 
 hhai-hand, brother or comrade — a co-religionist, for 
 choice — by his side in a tight place, and more especially 
 when he is sick. A convoy of wounded arrived 
 before I left the ship and I saw two great Sikhs make 
 the ascent to the deck. One who had a slight bullet 
 wound in the finger held the other's hand. 
 
 The patient finds himself in a roomy ward, spot- 
 lessly clean, well-lighted and ventilated. It is pro- 
 bably more palatial than any room he has seen before, 
 and for the first time he knows the comfort of a spring 
 cot. The cabins have been gutted on both decks, 
 so that the ward stretches the whole breadth of the 
 ship. By his bed he finds a table, a spittoon, and a 
 life-belt. Everything is ship-shape, or tik-tak, to 
 use the Indian's expressive word. Each ward is a 
 unit in itself, both in establishment and equipment, 
 so that there is no confusion or bustling about between 
 one deck and another. Each ward has its own electric 
 sterilizer, and there is a constant supply of sterilized 
 dressings ready packed. Everything is prepared, even 
 the electric punkahs which suggest that the vessel 
 may be used for transport to India at the end of the 
 war. 
 
 The arrival of a convoy of wounded is the occasion 
 for a kind of 5 o'clock tea. Special sweetmeats are 
 distributed of which all Indians are fond, halwa made 
 up with atta, and different forms of metaie prepared 
 by the Hindu Mohammedan cooks for their own com- 
 munities. There are depots in France now of Indian
 
 THE HOSPITAL SHIP 53 
 
 spices brought over from the bazaars of Bombay — 
 some of those essential ingredients of native dishes 
 which have no equivalent in Europe. 
 
 The most remarkable thing about the ship is the 
 meticulous care which has been taken to respect caste 
 observances. Fore and aft there are two kitchens, 
 one Hindu and one Mohammedan, the Hindu on 
 the port side, the Mohammedan on the starboard. 
 From the moment foodstuff or cooking or eating 
 utensils are bought they are kept apart in separ- 
 ate stores duly labelled. The kitchen ranges have 
 been specially prepared in accordance with expert 
 Indian advice ; the right kind of urn for the tea, 
 the necessary chapattie girdle for cooking flat cakes, 
 the brass pestle and mortar for pounding curry 
 powder. There is no margin for mistake. When the 
 Hindu cook, who is generally a Brahmin — a caste 
 whose touch cannot defile — has prepared his dish he 
 brings it into the ward himself and doles it out to his 
 co-religionists with his own hands. Needless to say, 
 the same precautions with regard to meat are observed 
 as at the railhead. The Mohammedan butcher kills 
 by the halal, or throat-cutting stroke, and the Sikhs 
 by the jatka, or stroke at the back of the neck. In 
 the slaughter-house this morning a goat's head fell 
 to a blow of a Sikh officer's sword. 
 
 The washhouse and lavatory are designed with 
 the same care, for the Hindu is as fastidious in his 
 ablutions as in his diet. The Indians are perhaps the 
 cleanest people, but they must wash in their own way. 
 On the starboard side is the Mohammedan tap, on the 
 port the Hindu, with notice boards attached in Urdu 
 and Hindu as in all the railway stations in India,
 
 54 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 lest there should be any mistake. There are ordinary 
 English baths, but these are regarded with suspicion 
 by the Indians, who squat on the floor as in their own 
 country, a bowl in the hand and a tap playing on the 
 small of the back at a foot and a half from the ground. 
 The sanitary requisites are an exact replica of those 
 which obtain in the East. It was the perfection of 
 these more than anything else which moved a venerable 
 Khan Bahadur who visited the hospital last week 
 to say in admiration, " All India should see this." 
 
 We were shown over the Mohammedan cookhouse, 
 which exhaled the comfortable smell of dhal and rice, 
 and peered into the Hindu kitchen, the door of which 
 would be profaned by infidel feet and the food polluted. 
 The lower deck, also gutted of all accessories, is set 
 apart for the subordinate staff. Here is the laundry 
 and the Indian dhobie, or washerman, who is denied 
 the familiar stone on which he beats his linen in Hindus- 
 tan. This is perhaps the only failure in the way of 
 concession to the immemorial usages of the East. 
 
 The hold is converted into a series of store rooms 
 for medicinal and ward necessaries, cooking utensils, 
 and the like. There is a plentiful supply of warm 
 clothing, sweaters, scarfs, overcoats, Cardigan jackets, 
 shirts, underclothing, and pyjamas, contributed by 
 the Indian Soldiers' Fund, the Red Cross, and the St, 
 John Ambulance, in addition to Government supplies. 
 These are thickly-knitted, of a fine quality of wool. 
 They will, of course, be the personal property of any 
 Indian who finds himself in the ship. The choice of a 
 fancy waistcoat and a woollen overcoat in the warm 
 clothing department will persuade the Indian that he 
 is weU cared for. But it is the provision that has
 
 THE HOSPITAL SHIP 55 
 
 been made for the continuance of his daily rites and 
 observances exactly as in the East that will most win 
 his gratitude. He deserves every comfort we can 
 give him. 
 
 The staff of the Hospital Ship is drawn from officers 
 of the Indian Medical Service. It is always most 
 important that Indians serving in our army overseas 
 should be in direct contact with men who understand 
 
 their needs. The officers of the " " 
 
 have made the sepoy literally at home. There is 
 nothing wanting in the ship that the orthodox Hindu 
 could miss unless it be the holy water of the Ganges. 
 
 II 
 
 One would not have recognized the tired, v\'ar-worn 
 crew who came in yesterday in a hail of pelting sleet. 
 Most of them were sitting up in their beds chatting and 
 laughing ; pears, apples, cigarettes, chocolate, and 
 war pictures were strewn on the table by their side. A 
 hot scrub-down and the oiling and massage of the 
 head, which the Indian loves, had altered the colour 
 of life for them. A Mussulman from the Khyber whom 
 I had seen lifted in the day before on the shoulders of 
 two orderlies, his face pitted with the debris thrown 
 up by a shell, was lying back peacefully smoking a 
 cigarette. 
 
 It is not always easy to get the sepoy to talk, but 
 to-day I found him communicative. Ease after strain, 
 and the unfamiliar warmth and brightness and comfort 
 all round had loosened his tongue. I found the 
 Dogras and Gurkhas together. They had come from 
 the same part of the field.
 
 56 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " How were you hit ? " I asked one. 
 
 " By a pataka, Sahib." 
 
 " A. cracker ! " At first I did not understand. A 
 pataka is the cracker which is thrown about the 
 streets when the rehgious processions pass in the 
 bazaar. 
 
 " A boomb," he explained. 
 
 It slowly dawned on me that the man thus lightly 
 dismissed a " Jack Johnson " or a " Black Maria." 
 " The war is not like the war in old times," he added 
 regretfully. 
 
 Some of the wounded had not seen the Germans. 
 Those who had did not speak respectfully of them. 
 One man who had come to grips with a fat Prussian 
 complained that he could not get the fingers of both 
 hands round his opponent's throat. " They are not 
 bony men," he added. But this would mean less 
 resistance to the kukri. While he was struggling and 
 rolling on the ground he was shot point blank through 
 the lung and the bullet had come out through his 
 shoulder. 
 
 I noticed on his table a dainty little enamelled puff- 
 powder box with a mirror on the lid ; a faint perfume 
 still clung to it. 
 
 " Where did you get this ? " I asked. 
 " A memsahib gave it me," he said proudly, " in 
 the street." 
 
 It was the spontaneous gift of a French lady in 
 Arras — presented in the spirit in which favours were 
 thrown to knights by ladies in old times. The man's 
 cheery, confident face might well have attracted her in 
 a crowd. 
 Another man told me how his company and another
 
 THE HOSPITAL SHIP 57 
 
 were enfiladed by machine-gun fire in the trenches 
 and lost all their British ofiicers. A havildar got the 
 men together and led them back in the dark to the 
 lines behind. They had been badly pounded and felt 
 a little lost and uncertain where they would find them- 
 selves. By a piece of good fortune they hit on the 
 trenches of the Seaforths. The Highlanders and 
 Gurkhas are old comrades in arms. The Seaforths in 
 particular have a tradition of good fellowship with 
 these Nepalese hill men which dates back to Mutiny 
 days ; they have fought side by side in many a North- 
 West Frontier campaign. In India one often hears 
 picturesque incidents of the entente. The Gurkhas 
 were dehghted to find themselves among their old 
 friends. 
 
 There was a story in the ward of a wounded havildar 
 who fell into the hands of a Good Samaritan. The 
 German officer spoke to him in Hindustani, asking him 
 the number of his regiment and where he came from. 
 He bound up his wounds, gave him a drink, and brought 
 him a bundle of straw to support his head. This will 
 be remembered on the credit side of our German 
 account. 
 
 The Gurkha as a rule is direct and matter-of-fact, 
 more interested in physical than abstract affairs, as 
 when he complains of the thickness of the German's 
 neck. But a more Dumasesque type is met with 
 sometimes among the Sikhs and Mohammedans. I 
 asked a Pathan how many of the enemy he had 
 killed. 
 
 " A great many," he said, " one cannot count." 
 
 " But about how many ? " 
 
 After a little consideration he replied, in his own
 
 58 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 expressive argot, " So many bullets, so many dead." 
 
 The Sikh often has the Homeric touch. An orderly 
 exclaiming at the devastation of a village near Haze- 
 brouck asked his British officer — 
 
 " Sahib, is it a true word that the German Padishah 
 wishes to make the same ruin in Hindustan ? " 
 
 " Perfectly true." 
 
 " Then, if he comes to India, it will be over the 
 dead bodies of us all." 
 
 A simple and genuine speech, very characteristic. 
 It reminds one of the story of the sepoy who asked the 
 embarkation officer at Bombay how many were coming 
 back. 
 
 " Ten thousand, Sahib ? " 
 
 " I cannot say." 
 
 " A hundred ? " 
 
 " I think I can promise you that." 
 
 "It is good. They will be enough to carry word 
 to our homes that we have died fighting honourably." 
 
 In the native officers' ward there were two patients. 
 One of a distant Portuguese origin ; we will call him De 
 Souza. He came out as hospital assistant to a battery. 
 The other a Sikh Jemadar, of the Bombay Sappers and 
 Miners. The Jemadar spoke Urdu and Gurmukhi ; 
 the hospital assistant English, Tamil, Telegu, Malaya- 
 lam, and Burmese. They had no common language, 
 and could only communicate through the official 
 interpreter, an Englishman. 
 
 De Souza, a delicate cultured youth, who was laid 
 up with a slight attack of pneumonia, gave me a vivid 
 picture of life in the trenches. The German trenches 
 were not 200 yards from his own, and he lay awake 
 at night listening to their accordions and concertinas
 
 THE HOSPITAL SHIP 59 
 
 He seemed rather to like the music. One morning 
 they hoisted up a huge placard on a pole with the 
 inscription in large letters : 
 
 Holy War. 
 
 Indians fight on oiiv Side. 
 
 Woe to the British. 
 
 It at once became a target. 
 
 If it ever entered one's head that the Indians had 
 drifted into this war lightly and were now depressed 
 by their hardships and losses, half an hour among these 
 sepoys would dispel the idea at once. Where there is 
 discouragement or discontent it must find expression, 
 directly or indirectly, especially among the sick. 
 But there is the same story of cheerful patience and 
 endurance everjrwhere. Our cause is theirs ; they are 
 proud to be fighting for us ; and they do not count the 
 cost. I have had it at first hand from sepoys of all 
 castes and creeds, and I have not met an Indian 
 Medical Service man or a regimental officer who does 
 not tell me the same thing.
 
 FRANCE WITHOUT A SMILE 
 
 THE taciturnity of the Englishman is a myth that 
 one might have thought would die hard in 
 France. Nevertheless it is dead, and the obsequies 
 have not everywhere commanded our Ally's sym- 
 pathy and respect. The tradition of French levity is 
 also dead, but the manner of its passing can only 
 command reverence. 
 
 For an Englishman to carry golf clubs through the 
 streets of Boulogne needs a deal of courage or little 
 penetration. If he is wearing a uniform and bears the 
 marks of hard weather much may be conceded. A 
 visible bandage, a scrap of white lint appearing under a 
 Balaclava cap, will perhaps disarm criticism But, 
 even so, the spirit of the officer who carries his clubs to 
 Wimereux in war-time will not be easily intelligible 
 to the French. Wimereux is only two hours by 
 motor from the trenches, and the officer must know 
 that serious work is going on there involving grave 
 issues for mankind. He himself has apparently lent 
 a hand in it, yet he is not put off his game. 
 
 A fellow-countryman meeting the English golfer 
 would probably smile at the man's impermeability to 
 environment, and, observing the lint, wonder if he 
 were quite " strong enough yet on his pegs " for a game. 
 He might admire the man's capacity for diversion. 
 
 60
 
 FRANCE WITHOUT A SMILE 6i 
 
 " Anyhow, he has earned it," he would say, " and it 
 is better to keep fit than to sit moping in the hospital 
 or hotel.' 
 
 Certainly the Englishman owes much to his power 
 of detachment. It is a kind of safety valve and pro- 
 tection against strain. But the instinct for survival in 
 it is obscure to one not born of the soil. 
 
 The French attitude is perhaps more intelligible 
 to us than ours is to them. They have definitely 
 banned gaiety. Those who do not fight keep vigil, 
 and any temporary unbuckling of the armour of reso- 
 lution is discouraged as a weakening of the fortress. 
 On the first day of the war an EngHshwoman in 
 Dinard was made to feel her want of sensibility when 
 she asked an attendant at the Casino if play would 
 continue just the same. Diversion is not good form. 
 Interests outside the war are not conceivable. If 
 they exist there is no one to serve them. All the 
 museums of France were closed at once, all the chat- 
 eaux on the Loire. Where there is a place of amuse- 
 ment open now there is some patriotic or charitable 
 motive behind it. The Venus of La Vie Parisienne 
 has become a Bellona. 
 
 The whole face of France seemed to change in a day 
 and took on one set expression, which it has preserved 
 since. The country was inspired with one mind. The 
 individual life was forgotten. The spirit of France 
 became as the spirit of Joffre and was no doubt in- 
 spired by him. The face of the general is itself an in- 
 spiration. One reads in it the qualities celebrated in 
 the President's discourse of November 27 when he 
 presented the military medal — the cool and deliberate 
 wisdom which is never taken unawares, the strength
 
 62 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 of spirit which nothing daunts, the serenity of which 
 the example spreads everywhere confidence and hope. 
 
 Enghsh readers of French newspapers at the out- 
 break of the war were struck by their insistence on the 
 national tranquillity and sangfroid, and they soon came 
 to realize that this was no mere figure of speech. Nearly 
 five months later M. Viviani declared in the Chamber 
 that the war had brought out virtues which the French 
 people were not supposed to possess — endurance, 
 patience, and stoicism. The claim was received as 
 the plainest statement of fact. 
 
 But it would be as great a mistake to imagine that 
 the spirit of France had undergone a radical change 
 as it would be to think that the English had in this 
 war quitted an inherent taciturnity. France has not 
 changed ; only contact with ultimate things has laid 
 bare the bedrock of national character. 
 
 Joffre's laconic despatches, the quiet exodus to 
 Bordeaux, the equally quiet bearing of the people of 
 Paris when the German advance was turned at the 
 Marne, Gallieni's terse proclamation, the sacrifice of 
 individual and regimental glory in the grand, collective 
 anonymity of the nation, the suspension of political 
 intrigue, the united front of resoluteness, the universal 
 banning of self, of comfort, of pleasure and ease so 
 long as the struggle wears — all this springs from 
 qualities which go to make the indestructible spirit of 
 France. 
 
 " France is a person," Michelet said ; " England an 
 Empire ; Germany a country or race." And he had 
 faith in the predominance of France, as it was the 
 country of all others in which the national personality 
 approached most nearly to the character of individual
 
 FRANCE WITHOUT A S]\IILE 63 
 
 personality. Germany had not then become the 
 embodiment of the virtues to which " Kultur " lays 
 claim. 
 
 If France is a person she is for that reason more 
 difficult to understand. To the Englishman she has 
 always possessed a personality more complex, para- 
 doxical, and subtly individualized than that of any 
 other nation. Perhaps in the thoroughness with 
 which she throws herself into the essential part, even 
 to the last minutiae of costume, lies the secret of her 
 resilience. 
 
 The word has gone out for patience, endurance, 
 stoicism, and grim resolution. These are the qualities 
 that can see her through, and these she has called up. 
 If we did not recognize her in the part at first, it was 
 because she has never in our times had exactly the same 
 part to play. Our ideas of French psychology are still 
 borrowed from the Revolution, when patience was the 
 last virtue that could have stood her in good stead. 
 
 The convalescent subaltern of horse with his golf 
 clubs ; the young British officer billeted in Rouen who 
 danced a tango in the hotel shocked the people of the 
 city, as the hideous seriousness of the " Carmagnole " 
 would have shocked our ancestors a hundred and 
 twenty years ago. No doubt they are forgiven ; and 
 it is perhaps realized that this power of detachment 
 makes for staying power and does not preclude the 
 high sacrifice that a more conscious idealism demands. 
 Comradeship in arms will prove this, if it has not al- 
 ready proved it. 
 
 One feels, perhaps, that if the myth of the phlegmatic 
 Englishman might have been allowed to die more 
 decorously, the legend of the mercurial levity of France
 
 64 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 could not have been more honourably interred. We 
 see mirrored in France again — 
 
 The shape of glad array, 
 The nervous hands, the front of steel. 
 The clarion tongue, the proud, bold face. 
 
 No doubt France will discover beneath the carelessness 
 of young England a hidden and indomitable spirit. 
 Both nations have proved in dark hours that their 
 springs of life are indestructible.
 
 THE ENGLISH IN BOULOGNE 
 
 THE windmills of Boulogne and the poplars of 
 Picardy are always a cheering sight after a 
 long absence from France. Landing in the country 
 for the first time since war was declared one thanks 
 God that we are fighting the same fight as the folk 
 who have made these ancient landmarks memories 
 to conjure with. 
 
 The Englishman is welcome everywhere in France 
 now, but one does not expect to surprise the same 
 look of conscious sympathy in Boulogne as elsewhere. 
 Our presence is too familiar. Franco-English rela- 
 tions date back to the legendary thousands who had 
 to reside here because they persisted in not leading 
 trumps, and further back still, by suggestion, to the 
 days commemorated by the Colonne de la Grande 
 Armee, which is altogether too high and dominating 
 for the Boulonnais to forget. Between those days 
 and these we had a camp here during the Crimea ; 
 but the new alliance strikes deeper roots. 
 
 The aged porter who carried my baggage from the 
 boat told me that nearly all the hotels were full. " The 
 rooms are all taken," he said, adding apologetically, 
 " by your compatriots," as if it were necessary to 
 gloss over the least hint of inhospitality. French 
 staff officers will do anything for " our friends the 
 
 65 E
 
 66 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 English." In the Cathedral a khaki uniform is con- 
 ducted to a front seat. 
 
 Boulogne is almost entirely English. The Casino 
 and nearly all the hotels facing the front have been 
 converted into hospitals. The Hotel de Paris has 
 been given over to the Red Cross. Other hotels inside 
 the city have become to all intents and purposes Eng- 
 lish barracks overflowing with the men who work 
 the machinery of supply, transport, ambulance, and 
 hospitals. Most of the cafes and lodging-houses have 
 orderlies and chauffeurs billeted in them. The streets 
 are packed with men in khaki and nurses, English 
 and Canadian, French refugees from Lille, Armen- 
 tieres, and Arras, Indian orderlies, and Post Office 
 babus. Mud-coloured London omnibuses filled with 
 soldiers from the front descend the Grande Rue and 
 the Rue de Faidherbe. 
 
 One cannot move without meeting Red Cross 
 motors ; there must be a thousand of them in and 
 out of the city. 
 
 Industries of course suffer by the war, and the 
 fishermen lose by the restriction of the area open to 
 them, and by not being allowed to move at night, 
 but the shops and hotels are making up for a lost 
 season. Tobacconists, chemists, cafes, grocers, sta- 
 tioners, newspaper-vendors, are doing a good trade. 
 A toy shop derives an income from a continued sale 
 of the crown and anchor game which is much in de- 
 mand in the trenches. At four o'clock Caveng's, the 
 tea shop at the corner of the Rue Victor Hugo, is a 
 hive of nurses and soldiers. 
 
 In the Haute Ville all is peaceful. Once climb the 
 Grande Rue and pass through the Porte des Dunes
 
 THE ENGLISH IN BOULOGNE 67 
 
 and you are in a different atmosphere. Motors cross 
 the Place Godefroi de Bouillon to the Etat-Major's 
 Ofhce for their laisser-passer ; high up on the belfroi 
 one can see the guard searching the sky for hostile 
 aircraft ; otherwise there is no ripple here of the war. 
 That quiet old hostelry, the Hotel de Bourgoyne, 
 frequented, according to local tradition, by Thackeray, 
 attracts its usual clientele, mostly officers of the Terri- 
 torial Force. The ramparts are not so crowded as 
 one might expect. The English are too busy for a 
 constitutional ; the citizens do not promenade much 
 in winter. One meets a nurse with a bandaged 
 patient, a maid with children, an abstracted-looking 
 priest. A perambulator by a green seat recalls the 
 most historic picture of the old city — Doyle's illustra- 
 tion in the second volume of The Newcomes, where 
 Pendennis finds the old colonel sitting on what might 
 be this identical chair peering out over that wide 
 landscape in which as a child one looked vainly for 
 the sea. The great wireless installation has since 
 come into the picture. 
 
 It was here that Lady Burton met her husband. 
 She has immortalized the encounter in her life — the 
 most romantic story of devotion and love at first 
 sight that will be found in biography. Even Smollett 
 on his cantankerous journey spoke of the ramparts as 
 a delightful walk. The place is full of English memories, 
 which do not relieve the impression of its emptiness. 
 The tennis courts beneath the bastions look singularly 
 naked now. One cannot imagine anyone playing there 
 even in summer. A perennial frost seems to have 
 destroyed the sap in things, and there is no place for 
 anything less purposeful than steel or oil or coal.
 
 68 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Notre-Damc within the ramparts will probably be 
 a target for the first bomb of raiding airmen. It is 
 not beautiful with its front of a bank and dismal 
 interior, and one could well have spared the whole 
 of it for a fragment of the mutilated fagade of Notre 
 Dame de Rheims. Still, one grows fond of it ; it has 
 become part of the old place ; and one even sees a 
 certain beauty in the dome viewed from a distance 
 between the elms against the evening sky. The crypt 
 is closed, as is the museum, in obedience to the in- 
 stinct that has closed ever3rthing since the first day of 
 war. Our neighbours feel that curiosity is indelicate in 
 wartime. No interest outside the war — aesthetic, liter- 
 ary or academical — can live ; nor would any be toler- 
 ated. Music is banned, and a light tune, perhaps 
 any tune at all, heard in the street would bring an 
 angry protest, perhaps broken windows. 
 
 What one most envies France is the system that 
 ensures the total absorption of her manhood as a 
 matter of course in the one issue at stake. The first 
 thing one notices on landing in the country is the 
 absence of recruiting advertisements. Instead of 
 warnings almost amounting to threats and cajole- 
 ries prepared with every device of vulgar rhetoric 
 we have the simple mobilization order. It is diffi- 
 cult for refugees in England now who read our 
 posters to reconcile them with what they know of 
 the national spirit. One has to explain to them 
 that there is nothing wrong with the heart of the 
 country ; but only the system. 
 
 One does not see a French Regular in Boulogne 
 who is not wounded. The Territorial units are much 
 in evidence, and in the new generation there are the
 
 THE ENGLISH IN BOULOGNE 69 
 
 Boy Scouts, " Bwa-Skoo " is the Parisian pronuncia- 
 tion. They run errands, hold your horse, chop wood, 
 and get into mischief if left without anything to do. 
 One of them started a motor-lorry the other day and 
 charged into the wall of a garage. I know another 
 whose love of adventure takes him every day to an 
 Indian hospital ship where a convalescent Gurkha 
 orderly hangs about the deck. The boy sits and 
 gazes at the Gurkha and the Gurkha grins at the boy. 
 The boy brings him fruit. Sometimes the Gurkha 
 takes his kukri out of its black sheath, and lets the 
 " Bwa-Skoo " feel the edge. At the end of the hundred 
 years' peace, if it is to be, the "*Bwa-Skoo's grandson 
 will tell how his ancestor used to fraternize with a 
 fierce Indian on the quay. Possibly the kukri will 
 be the most intimate legend of the war in the family. 
 Outside the Porte des Degres is a monument, Le 
 Souvenir Frangais, erected in honour of the Boulonnais 
 who have died on the battlefield. The names are 
 inscribed of all who have fallen since the Crimea on 
 fields as widely scattered as Senegal and Tonkin. 
 Fresh wreaths have been placed there by the veterans 
 of 1870-71. But there is no margin on the plinth for 
 those who have given their lives for France in this 
 war ; and it is difficult to conceive how the present 
 sacrifice can be rendered in marble, in Boulogne or 
 elsewhere, in due perspective with any monument of 
 the past.
 
 WINTER DAYS IN PICARDY 
 
 THEY are not going to lose the harvest in Picardy, 
 though they are ploughing within sound of 
 the guns. One sees the teams silhouetted against the 
 skyline at dusk, and they toil on until it is so dark that 
 one can only distinguish the white horses. The 
 illimitable horizons, the absence of hedges, the long 
 furrows leave the stranger with an idea that the 
 cultivation of the land is on too large a scale for the 
 resources at hand. 
 
 The small town where we stayed last night 
 increased my pessimism. It was market day ; the 
 courtyard of the inn was full of carts and gigs ; 
 tables were laid in the large dining-room for at least 
 fifty ; but my friend and I and a solitary French 
 Territorial ofhcer were the only guests. The patronne 
 explained that the farmers would not spend money 
 because of the war. No, they were not poor, she said ; 
 it was thrift. On the day of the revision a hundred 
 had dined at her inn. 
 
 This morning we thought we would descend 
 on one of the neighbouring farms to buy some 
 honey and find out for ourselves. It was one 
 of those old castellated granges in the valley of 
 the Authie. A poplar avenue leads up to the moat 
 and one enters by a massive stone gateway with ar- 
 
 70
 
 WINTER DAYS IN PICARDY 71 
 
 morial bearings over the groove for the portcullis and 
 a pepper-box tower on one side. Entering one 
 encounters the three smells familiar to troops who 
 forage in Picardy. First the earthed beet and pulp 
 in the field outside ; then the homely midden in the 
 courtyard, with the colomhicr plumb in the centre 
 round which the pigs and chickens increase under the 
 windows of the farm ; then the sour milk smell of the 
 interior. Magpies, mistletoe, poplars, lichen, elms 
 will be the features that will recur most often in one's 
 memories of the country. And now every tree in the 
 valley is black with rooks. The farmers say that 
 these too are evacues, scared by the guns, like tiie 
 French partridges of the Revolution. A double 
 row of hives in the garden promised success in 
 the ostensible object of our errand, and our minds 
 were soon set at rest about the land. The harvest is 
 all right so far as a harvest can be assured in the spring. 
 There was some anxiety at first. The railways were 
 all taken up with the mobilization. This affected 
 the autumn cattle sales and the farmers found they 
 could not get rid of their beet. Labour was short, 
 and they dared not lay in a large stock for fear of 
 invasion. The value of the crop fell in consequence 
 and a good deal of it was wasted. The more prudent 
 banked up their roots carefully until there was a 
 demand. The whole of last year's harvest was 
 gathered without outside labour. Old men and women 
 worked in the fields far into the night. They were 
 three weeks late with the crop, but they got it all in. 
 This year they have the evacues, who, here at any 
 rate, have saved the situation. There were four in 
 the chateau farm and seven across the valley. Thus
 
 72 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 the invaded departments have contributed towards 
 the regularization of labour. The stream of evacues 
 has percolated into the heart of France, restoring the 
 system. Many were shipped South. The Maubeu- 
 geois embarked at Boulogne for the Charente early in 
 August. Large numbers from Lille embarked at 
 Gravelines. How far this migration has neutralized 
 the dislocation of labour in other departments of 
 France would be an interesting question. Govern- 
 ment has passed an order allowing cultivators 
 in the Territorial Army to return to their farms for 
 the sowing. This does not apply to the zone of 
 hostilities, but here the land is all under cultivation. 
 A large proportion of wheat has been sown ; prices 
 are good ; railway freights normal ; and the farmers 
 are doing well. If they do not dine at the inn on 
 market day it is more through prudence than necessity. 
 The French instinct is to give expression to things, to 
 mark any new phase through which they are passing 
 by a corresponding change in their way of living. Our 
 English habit is to avoid so long as we can any ad- 
 mission of pressure brought to bear on us, physical 
 or otherwise. Hence our unfortunate catchword 
 " Business as usual." 
 
 The stream from the north and the east contained 
 many who were refugies in the ultimate sense of the 
 word and had already found their haven in Govern- 
 ment almshouses. The Chartreuse Notre Dame-des- 
 Pres at Neuville, for instance, sheltered, in addition 
 to its ordinary pensionnaires, refugees from the Hotel 
 Dieu of Arras and many of the poor of Maubeuge. A 
 picturesque group these, sunning themselves in the 
 peaceful garden of the monastery — faces which suffering
 
 WINTER DAYS IN PICARDY 73 
 
 has not hardened, though the struggle of Hfe has left its 
 dint. The friendliness and courtesy of these old folk, 
 who seem so contented in their new refuge, hardens 
 one's heart more than anything against the Boches. 
 On a still morning one can hear the guns from the 
 Chartreuse, but they no longer carry any menace 
 to this asylum. The peacefulness of the place is 
 impenetrable. 
 
 On Friday we were at IMontreuil when the Mass was 
 held at St. Saulve for the repose of the souls of the 
 soldiers who had fallen on the field of honour. The 
 British officers in the town had cards of invitation 
 issued by the Societe Frangaise de Secours aux Blesses 
 Militaires. All honour was done to " the brave Allies " 
 in the seats reserved for them, in the address of Mon- 
 sieur I'Aumonier, and in the decoration of the cata- 
 falque, under which the Tricolour rested, with the 
 British flag. Possibly French and English flags were 
 blended in St. Saulve during the Crimean War ; for 
 an earlier precedent one must go back to the alliance 
 with the Dukes of Burgoyne. 
 
 It was an impressive service. The names of the 
 fallen of Montreuil and the arrondissement were read 
 out amidst the sobs of the relatives. Wounded French 
 soldiers left their beds in the hospital to attend, many 
 on crutches, others supported. The Tricolour with its 
 streamer of crepe was borne back through the streets 
 to the citadel by the veterans of 1870. Among the 
 crowd that thronged the church were many with the 
 observant air of men in an unfamiliar part. There is 
 no doubt that the war has awakened a dormant reli- 
 gious feeling in whole classes who have been widely 
 separated from the Church.
 
 74 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 The priests insist very strictly on the outward 
 expression of the consciousness of the national struggle. 
 In the porch of a neighbouring church the vicar has 
 posted a notice in which young women are warned not 
 to enter the maison dc Dieu save in a rohe montante et 
 jcrmee. 
 
 "All moment si grave 6u nous sommes quand le 
 sang Frangais coule, Ics dames et les jeunes filles 
 Chretiennes ne doivent pas porter que de toilettes 
 modistes et siveres." The notice seems hardly neces- 
 sary amidst the almost oppressive sombreness in which 
 the women of France move. It is one more expression 
 of the uncompromising side of the French spirit during 
 the war due probably to the pastor's apprehensive 
 watchfulness, his desire to point the way, rather than 
 to any vagaries of the flock. 
 
 Among the British contingent who attended the 
 service at St. Saulve were two Indians. One wondered 
 how the incense, the candles, the vestments, the ritual, 
 impressed them. The Oriental has become a familiar 
 figure in France now ; he does not attract the same 
 attention as he did a few months ago. Still a certain 
 class retain that incurably romantic attitude towards 
 the East which lends such picturesqueness to the 
 narratives of French travellers. 
 
 I was making a call on a French family the other 
 day with a British officer in an Indian regiment when 
 my friend's orderly was announced, and our hostess 
 would insist that he should deliver his message in the 
 room. A very ordinary and somewhat untidy Punjabi 
 Mussulman presented himself and stood to attention. 
 The lady of the house admired his inscrutable solemnity, 
 his dark and intelligent eyes, the dignity of his salute,
 
 WINTER DAYS IN PICARDY 75 
 
 his immobility " as of an idol." She spoke of him as my 
 friend's esclave, and then as a mage. She was struck 
 with his pensiveness, was convinced that in solitude 
 he would deliver himself to " the meditations mysteri- 
 ous." He had the beard majestic, the turban of the 
 Thousand and One Nights. 
 
 The attitude of the peasant in these parts to the 
 Boches is one of quiet confidence. As he ploughs he 
 listens to the bark of their guns, but he no longer fears 
 their bite. I met a motley crew of labourers with 
 packs on their shoulders trudging heavily down the 
 street. Many of them were too old for territorials. 
 They were the garde du chemin de fer to be posted at 
 crossings and railway stations down the line. I asked 
 one of them, a grey-whiskered veteran, where they were 
 going and he said quite gravely without a smile — 
 " Nous allons f outre sur le gueule de Guillaume." 
 The Boche is an incubus to be lifted in the spring.
 
 THE INDIANS IN MONTREUIL 
 
 THERE must be something homely and famihar 
 to an Indian in entering an ancient walled 
 city by a gate. Among the convoy that swung through 
 the archway into Montreuil last night in the dusk 
 there must have been Rajputs thinking of Chitore, 
 Dogras of Haripur, Jammu of Kangra, and Pathans of 
 Peshawar. The old town hes as snugly in its ramparts 
 as any city in the East. 
 
 This morning, clear, fresh, and sunny after a slight 
 frost with a pleasant nip in the air, recalls a February 
 morning in the Punjab. That thin white distant 
 shaft, the Phare of Etaples, faintly distinguishable 
 in the haze, might well be a minaret. One looks down 
 from the ramparts over wide horizons unbroken by 
 enclosures, and is reminded of the sweeping country 
 about Campbellpur ; only the undulations are smoother 
 and there are no nullahs or rocks. North of the 
 Indus in the patches that can be cultivated the young 
 green of the wheat will be showing, with here and 
 there a mustard field flung over the brown soil like a 
 bright yellow scarf. Here in Europe everything is 
 soft ; there hard, both to the touch and the eye. This 
 thick matted turf contrasted with those niggard blades 
 of grass is the measure of the difference, and as spring 
 approaches the measure increases. The Anglo-Indian 
 
 76
 
 THE INDIANS IN MONTREUIL 77 
 
 returned to the West loves to thrust his stick into the 
 turf of a lawn and feel the soft resistance of fibre and 
 root. There the ferrule strikes rock or grit or some 
 equally ungrateful soil to which stalks cling like alien 
 parasites. ._ 
 
 In the Church of Saint Saulve I found an autel de 
 Noel which had been left over Candlemas. The dark 
 green walls of the grotto resembled lichened rock ; 
 the straw was spotlessly clean, like bright-coloured 
 butter ; the Sacred Babe was white as an e^g ; the 
 ass and the cow had that perfect air of gentle inquisi- 
 tiveness which is required. The whole tableau was 
 inspired with the spirit of Noel, and I could not help 
 thinking of those hard, bright taziahs which the Mos- 
 lems carry through the bazar in the Mohurrum, and 
 seeing in the contrast a reflection of the religious senti- 
 ment which is born of the hardness or the kindness of 
 earth. 
 
 The high twigs of the poplars in the valley of the 
 Canche have already a yellowish tinge ; leaf buds 
 are showing on the ashes under the ramparts ; soon 
 the Indians will be feeling in their bones the unfamiliar 
 sense of spring. In the hospital I found that they 
 had come out like lizards into the sun, and were sitting 
 peacefully on the benches in the barrack square. The 
 more convalescent were in khaki, others in their blue 
 dressing gowns. A bugle blew for drill, and they 
 formed companies. It was odd to see a group of 
 bandaged warriors in caps and hoods and dressing 
 gowns of every conceivable colour — gifts to the wounded 
 — stand to attention and form fours. Three smart 
 Indian officers of a Gurkha regiment, detached from 
 this motley herd, were taking an aristociatic constitu-
 
 78 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 tional, cane in hand, round the yard. Another group 
 in a shed were strapping up their kit ; they were off 
 to the front again, passed medically fit. 
 
 After drill the fittest joined a group of English 
 ambulance men in a desultory game of football. A 
 high kick lodged the ball at the top of one of those 
 lime trees cut and trained candelabra-wise after the 
 manner of Picardy, and I wondered who would " shin 
 up " and get it down. A Pathan and a Gurkha tried 
 to shake the trunk and then stood back and gazed at 
 the ball in a resigned way as if hope would do it. 
 Tree climbing does not come into the Indian's drill 
 unless he is of the arboreal caste who extract toddy 
 from the palm. It was a " Tommy " whose resource 
 served the situation. He " shinned up " the trunk 
 with an easy grip which would have defeated a flag- 
 staff or a telegraph pole. 
 
 One cannot help moralizing when one sees the 
 English and the Indians in Montreuil and finds the 
 shutters of the old town scribbled over by French 
 schoolboys with vivats for them both — " hourah for 
 Indian," " hourah for English." One remembers 
 how in the fourteenth century the people of the 
 countryside by reason of the 'English " se nourrissaient 
 de betes immondes " and one wonders how many English 
 Sovereigns have knelt in prayer in the Church of St. 
 Saulve and when last an English soldier set foot in 
 these cobbled streets on duty for his King. The local 
 historian told me that the funeral car of King Henry 
 V. passed through Montreuil with great pomp, drawn 
 by four horses and accompanied by princes of the 
 blood-royal, halting before the Church of Notre Dame, 
 where the King was given absolution.
 
 THE INDIANS IN MONTREUIL 79 
 
 In the afternoon a squad of convalescents went 
 sight-seeing personally conducted by a N.C.O. It 
 was market day, and they mixed oddly with the 
 drab-suited peasants in the Place. Neither Indian 
 nor peasant seemed particularly interested in the 
 other. One notices a certain phlegm in Picardy 
 after Orleans and Marseilles. The tented stalls must 
 have reminded them of the awnings in the bazars. 
 They bought oranges and pipes and walnuts and were 
 given honest change. They stared at the pink and 
 white pigs in the pig market and up at the Virgin in 
 the niche beneath the window of my hotel. 
 
 It was in this old hostelry, with its double gallery 
 of undulating passages looking out over the vine-roofed 
 courtyard, that Lawrence Sterne stayed a hundred and 
 fifty years ago. It was here that he engaged the immor- 
 tal La Fleur. Outside in the street he doled out his 
 last sous to the beggars. A league down the road his 
 valet was thrown by the hidet which w^ould not pass 
 the dead ass. It was at Nampont twelve kilometres 
 from here that he met the owner of the beast mourn- 
 ing that he could no longer share his crust with the 
 creature he loved. " Shame on the world," moralized 
 Sterne. " Did we love each other as that poor soul 
 but loved his ass — t 'would be something." And this 
 classic embodiment of all tender and sensible virtues 
 was a German. There is a text for further moralizing 
 in that. What large draughts " the poor Indian " 
 would have drawn from the fount of his pity it is not 
 easy to conceive. 
 
 Montreuil can have changed very little since Sterne 
 passed through. The elms on the ramparts may have 
 grown a little taller, the beautiful old Church of Saint
 
 8o THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Saulve a little greyer, the roofs and mansardes a little 
 browner or yellower, but the compactness of the little 
 town within its ramparts has left no room for new 
 streets or buildings, and it has been spared the garish 
 thoroughfares — the Rue de la Republique and the 
 like — which deform so many of the beautiful old cities 
 of France.
 
 THE INDIANS AT HARDELOT 
 
 HARDELOT has become for the moment to all 
 appearances an Indian cantonment. In other 
 towns of France the sepoy's khaki turban blends 
 oddly with the mixed headgear of the pavement ; 
 in Hardelot the Indian convalescent and the Indian 
 Medical Service staff have the sea-front to themselves. 
 
 There is a certain irony in the occupation by the 
 Indians of this bijou seaside resort. Coquet and 
 pimp ant like a new model with the paint still on it. 
 The place is the creation of a societe who are artists 
 in the exploitation of pleasure. Architects have been 
 moulding its features into the expression of a person- 
 ality. It is still in the making, but the genius of the 
 place has been docile. It has an air of calculated 
 seductiveness. It is a place to lounge and flirt and 
 bask and bathe in, untouched by any of the realities 
 of life. The villas have grown out of the sands like 
 an exhalation. They are artistic, built after a some- 
 what elaborate Dutch pattern, with great variety of 
 design and a quieter colouring than is usual in resorts 
 of the kind. 
 
 Entering the town by its one road of access, one 
 finds the streets empty. The caretakers must be 
 lurking somewhere for the spruce villas look singu- 
 larly clean, but the first sign of life is the blue 
 
 81 F
 
 82 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 dressing gown of the convalescent sepoy. One sees 
 it on the digue, on the sands, and on the fringe of 
 the pine woods. As one nears the hotel one meets 
 the first group among the scattered villas. A Gurkha is 
 peering into the unresponsive windows of " Aurore," 
 a Pathan is inspecting a stuffed heron in the hall of 
 " Crepuscule." The very names of the houses, pious, 
 frivolous and sentimental, add to the incongruity of 
 the scene. Some of them have affected an Oriental 
 nomenclature with a quite inadequate prevision of 
 the milieu in which they stand. The poetry of 1910 
 halts behind the prose of 1915 ; imagination has been 
 eclipsed by fact. 
 
 The Indians have occupied the Hotel Hardelot, 
 the shrine and citadel of this cult of pleasure. The 
 convalescents are in the annexes ; the sick in the 
 main building, the walls of which are hung with the 
 company's maps of the forest and lakes and plans of 
 the sites to be sold. The dining-room and restaurant 
 have been converted into the principal wards, the 
 ladies' salon into the operating theatre, the smoking- 
 room into the X-rays room. In the bureau you 
 will find the Commandant ; in the " Direction " the 
 Babus. 
 
 The kitchens downstairs still remain kitchens, 
 but instead of the incense of bouillon de veau there 
 ascends the familiar fumes of dhdl-bdt and ghi. The 
 coffee-grinder grinds the ingredients of curry powder. 
 The range, its surface scraped of black lead, lends 
 itself to the deft manipulation of the chapatti. As we 
 enter the Brahmin cook is turning the flat cakes and 
 the store Babu is admiring their lightness. In the 
 washhouse the dhobie, after the manner of the East,
 
 THE INDIANS AT HARDELOT 83 
 
 still beats his linen on a board, pending the arrival 
 of the mangle ; and in the same ' ' godown ' ' irons it 
 with an electric iron attached by a switch to the main 
 current. 
 
 In the wards Hira Singh and Ram Lai and Tegh 
 Bahadur enjoy the particular view of the ocean which 
 has been prepared for the tired Parisien by the guardian 
 spirit of the place. From their beds they look out 
 on the white and yellow sands and the blue sea, and 
 watch the steamers trailing their smoke on the horizon. 
 As we pass through the principal ward a packet of 
 illustrated papers arrives, and hands are stretched 
 out as the Commandant with a jolly word for every- 
 body moves from bed to bed. The arrival of the 
 Tazwir-ka-Khargiz^ is an event of the week. 
 
 Hardelot will be a pleasant place for a sick man 
 in the spring. The unaccustomed warmth of the 
 sun and the blueness of the sea and sky had put the 
 ward in content with the climate. " You will be 
 able to bathe soon," I suggested to a hospital orderly ; 
 " you will like that." 
 
 The Commandant turned to a Gurkha and pointed 
 to the sea — samandra is the Hindustani word, pictur- 
 esque and sounding as the Greek. " You can bathe 
 as soon as you like," he said ; " but I can't warm the 
 sea for you, you know." 
 
 The Gurkhas laughed like spoilt children at this 
 implication of unfamiliar cosseting. The Babu said, 
 " No doubt, after all, the Government would warm 
 the sea if it were possible." The Sircar, he said, 
 were very kind and took very much trouble. Only 
 he feared the resources of science were " impotential." 
 
 1 Picture paper,
 
 84 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 At my request the Babu submitted his views about 
 the war and hostihties in general. He thought that 
 white races should not fight one another. War 
 should only be carried on between civilized troops 
 and savages where the strength is all on one side and 
 the weaker party can yield after a little honourable 
 resistance and " subsequently ameliorate his con- 
 dition," But the state of war between two Great 
 Powers was a very dreadful thing ; it was also " im- 
 poleetical," for where both are adepts in destruction 
 neither can secure any advantage. 
 
 The Babu was an imperfect student of Mill ; his 
 common sense was better than his ethics. 
 
 Hardelot is a happy spot for the convalescent : 
 it combines the charm of the pine forest and the sea. 
 In the woods I came across a Garhwali who was trying 
 to snare rabbits. After that it seemed quite natural 
 to meet a file of natives — of Picardy — winding slowly 
 up a sandbank with heavy bundles of firewood on their 
 backs, women and children, stooping under the load. 
 Some with bare feet, like Himalayan coolies poised 
 against the wind on the slope. I passed half a dozen 
 before it occurred to me that I was in France. 
 
 Then I saw a great stone cross like that raised to 
 John Nicholson in the ghat beyond Rawal Pindi. I 
 wondered who could have preceded the Indians here ; 
 what human drama could have been played in these 
 dunes where the mushroom watering-place had 
 sprouted out of the sand. It was all jungle, as the 
 sepoy would say, undulating pine forest bayed with 
 amphitheatres of white sand swept up by the wind 
 like the drifts in the desert, burying young trees to 
 their top branches. There were marshy depressions
 
 THE INDIANS AT HARDELOT 85 
 
 where the moss was a greeny gold, more gold than 
 green ; the kind of place where one might flush a 
 snipe or a woodcock, where the white trunks of the 
 birch end in a brush the colour of osiers in spring. 
 
 The date on the cross, 596, visible at three hundred 
 yards, made me sit down and think. It was the last 
 place in the world where one would expect a monu- 
 ment ; a battle here could only have been fought 
 against an invasion from the sea. I approached and 
 read. Squatting against the plinth I found the ubi- 
 quitous blue dressing-gown. 
 
 " An Englishman who loves France " had erected 
 the monument in the memory of Saint Augustine, 
 first Archbishop of Canterbury, who embarked from 
 this coast in the year 596 for the evangelization of 
 England. 
 
 " Sahib," the blue dressing-gown asked, " \Vliat 
 is this yaiad-garh ? " 
 
 " It is to the great nabi," I said, " who made us all 
 Christians." 
 
 Perhaps, if the word goes round, some Indian will 
 do puja^ here, and if there is any efficacy in prayer 
 the avatar should be a tower of strength where the 
 resources of science are " impotential." 
 
 ^ Worship.
 
 HIS FIRST TRENCH 
 
 THE struggle drags on, and for many of us it has 
 been, and will be, impossible to lend any 
 physical aid. 
 
 In the mornings, with our feet on the fender, we 
 read the news from the front. " The Allies have made 
 
 sensible progress at " " The enemy's position 
 
 has been taken at " But what of the cost ? We 
 
 wake up sometimes in the night and think of our 
 friends in the trenches. A kind of shame fills us. 
 We remind ourselves that but for some defect of eye or 
 limb, or that if we had not been born a decade too 
 soon, we too should be in the firing line playing our 
 part with them. 
 
 Perhaps. But it can never be proved. And it is 
 something of a boast for a man, who has not been 
 tried, that he is able to live up to the traditions of the 
 British Army. Especially boastful now, when all that 
 the tradition is demanding of our men is not realized 
 in England and is not realizable. 
 
 It was a very thin line that held the German Army 
 back from Calais. It is no secret now that the enemy's 
 heavy guns outranged and outnumbered ours, and for 
 days we could give them little or no adequate reply. 
 The men who played their part in this inferno knew 
 that they were holding the gate against the Hun. 
 
 86
 
 HIS FIRST TRENCH 87 
 
 If the line had broken anywhere the inundation would 
 have swept through. 
 
 The orders sent to the trenches were to " Hold on 
 at all costs," and the company commander thanked 
 God that the appalling uncertainty was over. It made 
 ever}i:hing simple. He had only to hang on. His 
 company might be wiped out, but it would have served 
 its purpose and held the enemy back. The wounded 
 and dying could have no reproach for him. It is 
 not an easy alternative that for a young officer — either 
 to yield ground, which is perhaps essential, or to 
 sacrifice eighty per cent, of his men. 
 
 A shell struck the front wall of the trench and buried 
 five men. They cried out, " We are buried alive." 
 The subaltern's face was pitted by the debris, but he 
 crawled to the men, whose nerves were shattered for a 
 moment by the explosion, and spoke to them like a 
 father. A young giant cried and laughed and swore 
 and then pushed his head over the parapet again. He 
 was look-out man of his platoon. 
 
 Eight days on end in the trenches. Shrapnel fire 
 from dawn till night. After a few rounds the enemy 
 would find the range. Machine-gun fire enfilading 
 them ; men sniping them from among the trees in a 
 wood. The great shells from the siege guns tear the 
 earth up all round, great yawning graves, sixteen feet 
 broad. The subaltern takes out his watch. Twenty- 
 four shells in a minute. He reckons that there are 
 eight howitzers and four siege guns playing on his 
 trench alone. They fall with a nerve-racking con- 
 cussion. The men stoop and squat in the filth and 
 mud ; they are cramped and cold. The days drag 
 on ; they can do nothing.
 
 88 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Luckily they are dug deep in. They had time in 
 the night for that after their long march, though they 
 were dead beat and wanted to lie down in a two-foot 
 trench. They said they could do no more. 
 
 " We're done in, sir." 
 
 The subaltern was a boy just commissioned to 
 fill in the gaps. It was his first trench. 
 
 " We are three feet down now, sir. The captain 
 never had them deeper." 
 
 But he kept them at it. He lent them a hand. It 
 needs a " touch " to make tired men dig when they are 
 falling asleep over their spades. 
 
 Then at three, before they had slept, there was a 
 night attack. It was the usual thing, the enemy 
 crawling up to the barbed-wire entanglements, which 
 had been broken by shell-fire during the day. The 
 night is dark and misty. Suddenly the machine- 
 gun opens fire. Three hundred rounds. Then a lull, 
 just time enough to fall asleep. Then it is turned on 
 again like a hose slowly sweeping the trench. The 
 observation man is hit. He and one man who is 
 sniped are the only casualties during the night. The 
 enemy's tactics are to murder sleep, to exhaust and 
 unnerve the men who are holding the trenches, to wear 
 down the resistance of the thin line before their 
 masses are poured in to the attack. 
 
 But it was the lot of this company to attack. After 
 sitting still under shell-fire for eight days in the same 
 trench they were relieved for billeting in a village. 
 Behind the trench they passed one of the batteries 
 that had been brought up to hold the enemy's fire, 
 broken and out of action, and the gunners lying dead 
 behind the guns. They had fought to a standstill.
 
 HIS FIRST TRENCH 89 
 
 They moved out at ten at night, but at five in the morn- 
 ing they are standing to arms. Orders had come for 
 them to attack a strong position of the enemy at day- 
 break. They advanced crawhng on their stomachs or 
 making Httle rushes of five yards at a time under a 
 withering fire of rifles, machine-guns, and shrapnel. 
 There was little or no dead ground. At two o'clock 
 the subaltern found himself with what remained of his 
 company, eighteen strong. The regiments on each 
 side had retired, but he had received no orders. He 
 sent a man back, but he did not return. At twilight he 
 mustered his men at the edge of a wood. They were 
 moved on to entrench in another spot. Rations and 
 a dollop of rum put new strength into them. They 
 had had no time to think about food all day. They 
 were digging most of the night. In the morning they 
 were shelled out of their new position. They retired 
 and advanced and retired again. At night the shattered 
 brigade rallied and came on once more and reoccupied 
 the trenches, driving the Germans out at the point of the 
 bayonet. 
 
 But the subaltern was not in this. He had a bullet 
 through his cheek and the fragment of a shrapnel in his 
 left arm. As he lay in the trench waiting for night 
 and the stretcher-bearers — men of his own regimental 
 band — he thought of death for the first time. One of 
 his men had described the action as " hell," thinking of 
 the presence of the dead by his side all day, or worse, 
 of comrades mutilated and in pain. It was a hell 
 worth dying in, or having lived through. 
 
 When England emerges from her trial it will be a 
 grand thing to remember that one was among the 
 " happy few."
 
 go THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 The subaltern is back in the trenches. He has 
 seen the heedless crowds in the Strand. Officers who 
 have been in the firing line for months are passing back- 
 wards and forwards now on ninety-six hours' leave. 
 They see the kinema-booth disgorge its crowd ; they 
 read the racing and football news in the papers, and 
 pray for an invasion on the east coast. One man in 
 the Indian Army, who had not seen Europe for eight 
 years, had five hours at home. " I don't think I could 
 stick it again," he said, " even if I get leave." 
 
 The line is closer now ; the supports deeper ; the 
 artillery reinforced ; the men refreshed by good food 
 and sleep. But the wave will spend itself again and 
 we shall want every man who can hold a rifle to stand 
 in the breach. 
 
 Every man who is training in England now to fill 
 in the gap is playing his part in his own degree. When 
 the war is over he will feel happy in his mind. But 
 what of the young man who is keen of sight and sound 
 of limb, who is bound by no ties and who yet stands by ; 
 the man who is of too dull and stockish a mind to be 
 awakened; " the gentleman in England now abed " ? 
 Perhaps only when he reads in the History of the War 
 the bald uncensored facts will he realize that he was 
 needed, that when his country was bleeding he did not 
 come to her aid.
 
 THE NORFOLK HOUSEWIFE 
 
 THE Norfolk labourer is not easily carried off his 
 feet. He can take a blow impassively and 
 stomach a succession of reverses without losing his 
 head. There was no excited rush to the colours in 
 the first week of August. The response was gradual. 
 The men came forward thoughtfully in batches as it 
 slowly sank into their minds that England was in a 
 tight place. It is not easy to persuade men of this soil 
 that their island is in peril, but, once persuaded, they 
 afford the strongest material of defence. In whatever 
 direction the English character may evolve they will 
 stand for the type of the original stock with all its 
 virtues and limitations, dogged, unimaginative, and 
 tenacious. 
 
 " Do they realize the war down in Norfolk ? " 
 some one asked me. I do not think they do. Does 
 anyone realize it in Cumberland, Manchester, Cornwall, 
 or Kent ? Their very powerlessness to realize is part 
 of their strength. These folk have made their sacrifice 
 with an easy confidence. Things may not be going well, 
 but " them Jairmans " are " furriners " after ah, and 
 so cannot do much. 
 
 The lads may have to dig their heels in deeper, 
 stiffen their backs more, but there has never been any 
 
 91
 
 92 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 notion of the possibility of giving ground. In the 
 villages they speak of the war as people speak of an 
 epidemic that must run its course like other epidemics. 
 The Germans are a pest, like the flies of Egypt, and 
 no doubt equally evanescent. 
 
 The women bear the infliction with a kind of mild 
 impatience, though the ravage has called away the best 
 of their men. The wife of a Norfolk labourer is a 
 soothing person to talk to in days of national stress. 
 Yesterday I was in Thrutton Parva, a village I had 
 known twenty years ago, and found the place out- 
 wardly unchanged by the most lamentable year in the 
 history of the world. 
 
 Old Mrs. Pegler, of the inn, told me that the war 
 was causing " quite a distarbance. . . . Folk here are 
 allers talking about it." She had heard that a lot of 
 people had been killed and that it was going to be 
 " a very terrubul thing." All the young men from 
 the village had gone. 
 
 I called on Mrs. Jay, of the Green. She had a son 
 enlisted, and disapproved of the enemy's conduct of 
 the campaign. 
 
 " I don't hold with them Jairmans coming over in 
 their flying machines and interferin' with folk," she 
 said. " Of course we've got to kill 'em all," she added. 
 " They're a raare na-asty people." 
 
 Everyone was agreed upon the necessity of exter- 
 mination. This was mere policy, as in the case of a 
 wasps' nest over the church door or rats in a barn. 
 And to their implicit faith the need presupposed the 
 means. They spoke of the apostles of Kultur without 
 resentment, as of some irrational nuisance that must be 
 removed. The Berlin professors would have been per-
 
 THE NORFOLK HOUSEWIFE 93 
 
 plexed at the absence of rancour. The Norfolk spirit 
 is an attitude outside their psychology. 
 
 The Kaiser alone has impressed their imagination. 
 They seem to have visualized him. In Thrutton 
 Parva he is as real as the devil. 
 
 I spoke of him to the sexton who was digging a 
 grave. " He's no man, he's a devil," he said. " I 
 should like to get 'im into this here hool with my 
 spade on the top of him. He wouldn't git out, I lay you, 
 didd or alive." 
 
 In a cottage on the Green I found a spirited old lady 
 of seventy-five. I tried her with the same bait. 
 
 " The brute, the ra-ascal ! "she said. " I'd Hke to 
 punch him and I should dew if I could git hold of the 
 r-rugue. If my son was alive he would be the first to 
 fly at him. 
 
 " Wot our pore soldiers are sufferin' over there ! " 
 she went on. " If I were younger I'd goo out and 
 help the pore things. I couldn't dew much valable, 
 but I'd lift them up after the battle when they haven't 
 got no mothers to narse them. I'd dew the dairtiest 
 wark. Them Jairmans wouldn't scare me." 
 
 Then she told me of a weaker vessel, Mrs. Ebbs, next 
 door. " She's scared of them acepolines," she said, 
 " One come over here last month and made a ra-are 
 noise. ' What are we to do,' she sez, ' if they come 
 down next time ? ' ' Hev your clothes ready to slip 
 on,' I sez, ' and all your money by.' She gits five 
 shillings from the parish. I can't help mocking the 
 old dear, ' They've got the caart ready to take us all 
 to the mid lands,' I sez, ' when the Jairmans come.' " 
 
 " An acepoline did come down by Thrutton Magna 
 Church last week, but that belonged to the Alleys.
 
 94 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 I ran arter it. I wasn't scared, but I had to give over. 
 I haven't got the breath. I didn't get no farther than 
 Bulmer's pightle. What amazin' things we dew see in 
 modern times to be sure. That shoo we are not so far 
 away from the battle here." 
 
 Far away. I thought of the refugees in the valley 
 of the Canche, in the monastery of Notre-Dame du Pre ; 
 women who had seen ghosts. Thrutton Parva lies in 
 just such a valley among the same alders and poplars 
 and willows with their pink roots in the stream, and the 
 marshy dykes fringed with the foxy-coloured osier 
 brush, only everything is a month earlier there and 
 the villages are grey instead of red, and Thrutton 
 Parva has not been touched by the war. 
 
 ^tf ^If ^tf ^If ^l£ 
 
 In contrast with the rally of the labouring classes 
 and the sons of tradesmen in the towns and villages, 
 there is a general feeling that many farmers' sons who 
 might go are hanging back. " They all seem to think," 
 a parson told me, " that it is somebody else's job." A 
 young man whose father farms a few acres was speak- 
 ing of the Indians. " It was a good move bringing 
 them over," he said. " We don't want no more Gar- 
 mans. We've got to do them in." It never occurred 
 to this 3^oung man that it was up to him, even more 
 than the Indians, to lend a hand, and to " do them in " 
 himself. If asked why he has not enlisted he says he 
 has to mind the land. Labour is short, and there is 
 something to be said for his point of view. 
 
 In nearly every district in the eastern counties the 
 agricultural labourer has come forward. There are 
 local exceptions, of course, in Norfolk as elsewhere. 
 Thrutton Parva has sent every available man ]
 
 THE NORFOLK HOUSEWIFE 95 
 
 Thrutton Magna has mustered only twenty. Spirit 
 and tradition vary with the soil, as primroses and 
 Lent lilies. In some villages the awakening influences 
 are weaker, in others the young men are too dull and 
 stockish to understand. No meetings, no placards, 
 no bands or singing of " God Save the King " or 
 " Rule, Britannia " can move them. To all appeals 
 they have the same answer : " I'll goo when they fetch 
 me," or " If they want me, let 'em come arter me." 
 
 The shirker does not lead an easy life in Norfolk. 
 A shepherd's wife in the Waveney Valley told me there 
 were two lads in her parish who had not joined. 
 
 " I am always going on at 'em," she said. " All the 
 folk here mock at 'em. One's a great, big, strapping 
 boy in the farm over there. He is over six foot and 
 good for ten Jairmans." 
 
 " Isn't he ashamed ? " I asked. " What excuse has 
 he?" 
 
 " He sez he's got the pig to mind. The other sez 
 he ain't got the nairve." 
 
 I encountered this youth, and drew from him some 
 of his political convictions. He had seen it said in 
 the paper that the war would not last after June. Also 
 he had just read on a poster outside the shop that we 
 had sunk a German submarine. 
 
 " There's another gone," he said. " We'll soon 
 finish them now. We've got to wipe them Jairmans 
 off the face of the airth." 
 I drew him with the Kaiser. 
 
 " He's a bad 'un ! Summun orter to take his hidd 
 off." 
 
 " Why don't you try ? " I suggested. " Lend a. 
 hand, anyway."
 
 q6 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " Wot, oi ! I ain't got the nairve." 
 
 This, it appears, is the man's permanent formula. 
 He meets all taunts with it. As a physiological fact, 
 it is incontrovertible. 
 
 It is to be hoped that a lad with such an impene- 
 trable cuticle will ply his horny hands to good pur- 
 pose on the farm. 
 
 In the keeper's lodge I found a tall, fair, Saxon- 
 looking girl who had five brothers at the front. She 
 told me how the eldest had held up three " Huns " 
 in a mill and taken them prisoners. She used the word 
 " Hun " quite naturally, with no hint of contempt or 
 bitterness. On the table there were a bright Prussian 
 helmet and a button from a Bavarian coat. 
 
 Two cottages within a hundred yards have sent 
 nine men. Nearly every house has its relic, a helmet 
 or a button, photographs of sons, husbands, and 
 brothers in uniform, and Princess Mary's Christmas 
 gift, the brass cigarette box and the portrait with the 
 greetings seasonably framed in holly. One woman 
 showed me a French Prayer Book bound in leather, 
 given her son by a dying piou-piou ; another a bit of 
 shrapnel torn from her boy's side. In one cottage the 
 son was home on three days' leave, and had gone out 
 to gather his mother primroses and moss. 
 
 " The Jairmans can't stop them a-growin'," she 
 said. She was a woman of imagination, and realized 
 the appalling malevolence of the Hun. 
 
 These Norfolk housewives come of an indomitable 
 breed. 
 
 Bearing in mind that the country is not invaded, 
 that all physical menace is remote, and that there is no 
 obligatory service, one must admit there is as fine a
 
 THE NORFOLK HOUSEWIFE 97 
 
 spirit in Thrutton Parva as in Picardy or Lorraine. 
 
 What would they do if the " Jairmans " did come ? 
 One wonders. It is not easy to conceive of this 
 country disturbed, even by a raid. After the wave had 
 passed I can imagine one gossip calHng to another 
 across the road : 
 
 " Hev you seen what a mess they've made of old 
 Garge Borett's ba-arn ? I've heard say the old man 
 had both his legs blown off — koind of explosion like. 
 The old lady hid in a holl till they'd gone by. They're 
 ra-are na-asty people, them Jairmans. Good thing 
 we tarned them off. We don't want no more of the 
 likes of them coming round where they have no busi- 
 ness, interferin' with folk."
 
 THE SUBALTERN'S VIGIL 
 
 THE subaltern lay in bed listening to the heavy 
 grinding of the dray wheels on the cobbled 
 stones. When he dozed off he was still conscious of 
 them. The wagons passed in a harsh, unceasing 
 current all night. Sleep only meant that the sound 
 became a vague oppression which did not need trans- 
 lating into thought. No orchestra could symbolize 
 better the incubus of war. 
 
 The subaltern was very tired. Six weeks before 
 a bullet had made a clean hole in his chest and he had 
 lain in the same ward listening to the drays. He had 
 gone back to the trenches. This time a shrapnel 
 splinter had grazed his scalp, and his head ached a 
 good deal and he could not sleep. He had forgotten 
 the grinding of the wheels. Now it had become a 
 burden again. -<• 
 
 His neighbour in the next bed talked in his sleep, 
 calling to some one he wished to stay by him. In 
 the daytime he seldom spoke. The man was a gunner. 
 A shell had burst near him, and his eyes were bandaged. 
 When the nurse brought him his basin or his cup of 
 tea he would say in a far-away voice, "you are too 
 kind." No one knew his thoughts. No one was quite 
 sure if he knew that he would never see. 
 
 The subaltern lay awake trying to think of happy 
 things. He walked down Jermyn Street to his club. 
 
 98
 
 THE SUBALTERN'S VIGIL 99 
 
 He thought of a peak he had meant to chmb in the 
 Tyrol, of a horse he had meant to buy, a certain face, 
 a certain voice. But the zest had gone out of every- 
 thing. He could not conjure up the ghost of happiness. 
 Whenever he opened his eyes he saw the yellow 
 face of the clock of the Hotel de Ville on which the 
 shadow of the minute-hand seemed always on the 
 half-hour. The night dragged on as slowly as the 
 carts which were carrying food to the front to keep 
 men alive to kill other men. 
 
 And the men who were to be destroyed were not 
 so very different from the men who were being sent 
 out to destroy them. They too felt the cold and 
 liked good warming drink, and loved women and 
 children. 
 
 His thoughts wandered to St. Nazaire. He had 
 entrained there straight from Marseilles when he 
 arrived from India. There was a most wonderful 
 snipe bog near the camp. He had walked round it 
 with his colonel one Sunday afternoon, flushing birds 
 at every step. They rose with that ironic " gluk " 
 — like a boot pulled out of mud — which moves the 
 heart of a shikari as nothing else can. He had raised 
 his stick to his shoulder instinctively every time. 
 Both swore to come back to the swamp directly it 
 was all over. Meanwhile there was " the show " — the 
 great game the boy had always dreamed of. When 
 it became realizable he forgot the snipe. He had 
 lived golden moments, and leaden too, mostly waiting 
 under fire and inactive and cold. Yet he had often 
 thought of the bog as he lay in the trenches. He 
 had seen the colonel killed before his eyes. 
 Somehow the hope of shooting snipe at St. Nazaire
 
 100 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 had become remote, and, what was worse, he did not 
 very much care. He was chilled by his own apathy. 
 
 " Damn the Kaiser," he said half aloud. " He 
 has spoilt everything ! " 
 
 The man in the next bed moved uneasily in his 
 sheets and said, " Don't go." 
 
 As he lay awake he thought of all the other things 
 that the Kaiser had killed — among them happiness 
 in nearly every home in the world, in the desolate 
 huts of peasants in the Siberian pine forests, the 
 mountain chalets of Dauphine and Savoy, the 
 cottages of fisher-folk on the East coast, the mud 
 hovels on the Euphrates, Park Lane mansions, and 
 Bedouin' tents. In his tired inventory he forgot the 
 scrapheap that had been Belgium. The pictures he 
 called up had no end and became blurred in his mind, 
 but in nearly every one there was a child crying. 
 
 He had had a letter from a small sister. Her 
 Christmas had been spoilt. The aunt she was living 
 with was wearing black and had been crying all the 
 time, and she could not do anything to help. 
 
 Ever3rwhere a human solitude — people necessary 
 to other folk as life itself torn from them unnecessarily, 
 many lost and buried in heaps in unknown graves 
 — half one's friends dead. 
 
 Morbid ! Perhaps. But in the small hours, when 
 our vitality is low, our sense of proportion — especially 
 if^we are sick — is seldom true. If the grey and dismal 
 values of three in the morning held at noon there 
 would be an end of all aspirations M'on through strife. 
 That incessant grinding of the wheels would cease. 
 
 On the other side of the frontier convoys were 
 bringing in food to keep men alive to kill those others
 
 THE SUBALTERN'S VIGlL lol 
 
 for whom the creaking drays under the subaltern's 
 window were pouring in supplies. To a sick mind 
 there seemed no point in it, and no end. 
 
 And this was only one of the many thousands 
 of arteries which were feeding the armed manhood 
 of Europe. Asia and Africa were embroiled. Not a 
 home from Vladivostock to Cape Clear in which the 
 germs of Kultur had not killed happiness or kindness. 
 Every\vhere the same rumbling and creaking and 
 grinding of wheels, the rattling of trucks and coup- 
 lings, disturbed the night. Under the Indian stars 
 the crazy whine of bullock carts. Long files of earth- 
 coloured camels and asses in Egypt and Mesopotamia 
 carried the provender of war. It was no great tragedy 
 that the boy dwelt on, but the multitudinous little 
 things that collectively darkened the world — fleeting 
 glimpses of happiness so quickly brushed away, youth 
 all over the world just old enough to think it wrong 
 to be happy, middle age just young enough to feel 
 lost and futile because they can lend no physical aid. 
 
 A week before he had lain in a wood all day. The 
 sun came out and the sweet smell of wet oak leaves 
 drying, the foxy-brown of the under-growth, the 
 violet haze in the high twigs of the birches brought 
 home to him other woods in which the same scents 
 lingered and the same hghts played. He had felt 
 very martial when he entered it in the morning. 
 But the long hours had passed by and he had not 
 seen anything all day but blackbirds and magpies 
 and little bushy-tailed squirrels vibrating with life 
 who sat up peeling their chestnuts within a stone's 
 throw of his rifle. Before evening a most degenerate 
 longing for peace had entered his soul and he had had
 
 102 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 no wish to pull a trigger against any living thing. 
 When it was still dark in the room with the drawn 
 blinds he heard the cry from the street, " Maquereau ! 
 Maquereau ! " that strange fish call with the high note 
 — something between the cry of a cat and a cock. 
 
 The man in the next bed was awake. The subaltern 
 knew it by his stillness. He had not said, " Don't 
 go ! Don't go ! " for an hour. 
 
 A nurse came into the room, drew the curtains and 
 threw up the blinds. In the flood of light the spectre 
 faded. The smell of fresh, hot tea warmed him 
 physically. Some chrysanthemums in a vase and a 
 newspaper on the table by his bed in which he had 
 seen his name in despatches and the dear old regiment 
 praised by the commander-in-chief changed the colour 
 of Hfe. 
 
 " Have you had a good night ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, thank you ! A bit of a head, but it has 
 gone now." 
 
 He remembered that he had ninety-six hours' 
 leave and the doctor had said he might go in a day or 
 two. London held great fascination ; he had not 
 seen England for five years. He had promised to 
 take that small sister to the " Zoo " and to try to 
 make the llama spit. Then the trenches again. It 
 was a good life. As a double-company commander 
 with his fine Pathans he would make a hole in the 
 enemy's front. Happiness lay on that road — for him- 
 self and all the world. It was a grand time for young 
 men — an age for giant-slayers. 
 
 Then he thought of St. Nazaire. Things seemed 
 possible again. When it was all over he would come 
 back and have a go at the snipe.
 
 THE DRABI 
 
 THE best-fed Army in history owes the super- 
 excellence of its canteen to the motor-lorries 
 which feed the trenches on nearly the whole line of 
 the front from the sea to Nancy. But there are com- 
 binations of the elements which defeat the last word 
 of scientific transport. And that is where the Indian 
 mule cart comes in. 
 
 I was surprised to see three of them swinging down 
 the road the other day, the mules leaning against 
 each other as pack mules will do when trained to the 
 yoke. The little convoy pulled up outside the court- 
 yard of an abattoir in an old town in France where 
 it had been raining in torrents for days until earth 
 and water had produced a third element which re- 
 sembled neither. The red-peaked knla protruding 
 from the khaki turban of the drabi proclaimed a Pun- 
 jabi Mussulman. Little else was distinguishable in 
 the mist and rain, which enveloped everything in a 
 dismal pall. The inert bundle of misery unrolled 
 itself and, seeing a Sahib by the gate, saluted. 
 
 " Bad climate," I suggested. 
 
 " Yes, Sahib, very bad climate." 
 
 " Bad country ? " 
 
 But the man's instinctive sense of concihation was 
 proof against dampness, moral or physical. 
 
 " No, Sahib. The Sircar's country is ever3rwhere 
 
 103
 
 104 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 very good." The glint of a smile crept over the dull 
 whites of his eyes. 
 
 To the drabi there are only two kinds of white 
 people. The Sircar or British Raj and the enemy. 
 The enemy is known to him only by the ponderous 
 and erratic nature of his missiles, for the mule cart 
 corps belongs to the first line of transport. 
 
 " Where is your home ? " I asked. 
 
 " Amritsar, Sahib." 
 
 I wondered whether he were inwardly comparing 
 the two countries. Here, everything drenched and 
 colourless ; there, brightness and colour and clean 
 shadows. Here, the little stone church of a similar 
 drabness to its envelope of mist ; there, the reflection 
 of the Golden Temple sleeping in the tank all day. 
 The minarets of his Mosque and the crenellated city 
 walls would be etched now against a blue sky. I 
 looked at his mules. They did not seem at all depayses. 
 
 " How do they stand the damp ? " I asked. " Much 
 sickness ? " 
 
 " No, Sahib. Only one has been sick. None have 
 died except those destroyed by the bo-ombs." 
 
 I wondered what the carts were doing at . They 
 
 were of the first line ; a first line transport carries 
 the food into the very mouth of the Army. Being the 
 last link in the line of communications it is naturally 
 the most vulnerable. Other links are out of range of 
 the enemy's guns and immune, in this phase of the 
 operations, at least, from attack except by aircraft. 
 The drabi explained that they had been detailed for 
 forage work. 
 
 As he lifted the curricle bar from the yoke one of 
 the mules stepped on his foot, and he called it a name
 
 THE DRABI 105 
 
 that reflected equally on his own morals and those 
 of the animal's near relations. He did not address 
 the beast in the tone an Englishman would use, but 
 spoke to it with brotherly reproach. Just then an 
 officer of the Indian Army Supply and Transport 
 Corps rode up, and I got him to talk, as I knew I 
 could if I praised the mules and carts enough. He 
 enlarged on the virtues of the most adaptable, adjust- 
 able, and indestructible vehicles that had ever been 
 used in a campaign, and of the most hardy, ascetic, 
 and providentially accommodating beast that had 
 ever drawn or carried the munitions of war. These 
 light transport carts are wonderful. They cut through 
 the mud like a harrow over thin soil. The centre of 
 the road is left to the lorries. " They would be bogged 
 where we go," the S. and T. man said proudly. " They 
 are built for swamps and boulder-strewn mountain 
 streams. If the whole show turns over you can right 
 it at once. If you get stuck in a shell hole you can 
 cut the mules loose, use them as pack transport, and 
 man-handle the carts. Then we have got component 
 parts. We can stick on a wheel in a minute, and we 
 don't get left like that menagerie of drays, furnishing 
 vans, brewers' carts, and farmers' tumbrils, which 
 collapse in the fairway and seem to have no extra 
 
 parts at all unadaptable things, some of them, 
 
 like a lot of rotten curios. And, of course, you know 
 you can take our carts to pieces and pack them ; you 
 can get " — I think he said fourteen — " of them into a 
 truck. And if you ..." 
 
 Then he enlarged on his beasts. Nothing ever 
 hurts a mule short of a bullet or shell. Physical 
 impact, heat or cold, or drought, or damp, it is all
 
 io6 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 the same. They are a httle fastidious about drink, 
 but they deserve one indulgence, and a wise Staff 
 officer will give them a place up stream for watering 
 above the cavalry. For hardiness nothing can touch 
 them. They are as fit in Tibet as in the Sudan, as 
 composed in a blizzard on the Nathu-la as in a sand- 
 storm at Wadi Haifa. And I knew that every word 
 he said was true. I had sat a transport cart through 
 the torrents of Jammu and had lost a mule over a 
 precipice in a mountain pass beyond the Himalayas. 
 It lay half buried in the snow all night with the ther- 
 mometer below zero. In the morning it was dragged 
 up by ropes and began complacently grazing. 
 
 " And look at them now in this slush ! " They 
 certainly showed no sign of distress or even of depres- 
 sion. 
 
 "And the drabis ? Do they grouse?" 
 
 "Not a bit. They are splendid. They have no nerves, 
 no more nerves than the mules. You ought to have seen 
 Muhammad Alim come back from Neuve Chapelle. 
 When Hell began the order had gone round, ' All 
 into your dug-outs,' and the bombardier of his cart had 
 buried himself obediently in the nearest funkhole. 
 He stuck it out there all day. The next morning he 
 rolled up at the Brigade Column and reported his 
 cart as lost. Nothing could have lived in that fire, 
 so it was struck off. 
 
 But Drabi Muhammad Alim had not heard the 
 order. He sat through the whole of the bombard- 
 ment in his cart. After two days not having found 
 his destination he returned. " Sahib," he said, " I 
 have lost the way." When asked what the fire was 
 like he said that there had been a wind when the
 
 THE DRABI 107 
 
 boom-golies passed, which reminded him of the mon- 
 soon when the tujdn catches the pine trees in Dagshai. 
 
 It occurred to me that the Asiatic driver assimilated 
 the pecuhar virtues of his beast. The man with a 
 camel or bullock or mule is less excitable, more of a 
 fatalist than the man who goes on foot alone. The 
 mule and the drabi would rattle along under shell 
 fire as imperturbably as they run the gauntlet of 
 falling rocks on the Kashmir road in the monsoon. 
 
 When his neighbour is hit by his side, the dravie 
 buries himself more deeply into his wrappings. He 
 does not want to pick up a rifle and kill somebody 
 for shooting his " pall " as a Tommy would, but says, 
 " My brother is dead. I too shall soon die." And 
 he simply goes on prepared for the end, neither de- 
 pressed at its imminence, nor unduly exalted if it be 
 postponed. He is a worthy associate of those wonder- 
 ful carts and mules. 
 
 In the evening I passed the abattoir again and 
 looked over the gate. Inside there was a batch of 
 camp followers, who had come in from fatigue duty. 
 I saw the men huddling over their fires in groups in 
 that humped attitude of contented discomfort which 
 only the Indian can assume. Their families in the 
 far villages of the Punjab and the United Provinces 
 would be squatting by their braziers in just the same 
 way at this hour. Perhaps the drabi would be think- 
 ing of them — if thought stirred within his brain — and 
 of the golden slant light of the sun on the shisJuim 
 and the orange siris pods and the pungent incense 
 that rises in the evening from the dried cow dung fire 
 a product, alas, which France with all its resources, 
 so rich, varied, and inexhaustible, cannot provide.
 
 THE MAHABHARATA OF THE WEST 
 
 I FOUND the Indian Hospital at the College des 
 Jesuites transformed. Roads had been made in 
 the quagmire between the blackened ruins, walls 
 demolished, flower borders laid along the paths, and 
 thousands of bulbs, crocuses, daffodils, narcissus, had 
 been planted to gladden the spring. In this work the 
 convalescents had lent a hand. A recreation ground 
 with a pavilion was being prepared for them in the 
 summer. It is to be hoped that before June the 
 Indians will have reason to appreciate the climate of 
 France, which they compare now with the monsoon in 
 an Indian hill station. 
 
 Inside the new sheds' and the habitable part of the 
 building — the greater part of it was burnt down when 
 the Jesuits left — one finds the same reformation. 
 Thresh, laundry, X-rays and electric light installation, 
 fire-escape, bathrooms are all spick and span with the 
 paint on them and ship-shape. 
 
 In the great theatre, now a ward, with its gallery 
 hung with the flags of the seven Allies, I wandered 
 among the beds looking for men of the — th Infantry, 
 one of the hardest-hit Indian regiments in the war. 
 They would be able to tell me how a certain officer 
 — not one of them, though I had reason to believe 
 that he was near them at the time — had fallen in the 
 
 108
 
 THE MAHABHARATA OF THE WEST 109 
 
 trenches. The doctor led me to the bed of Zorawar 
 Singh, a naik of the regiment. He was considered one 
 of the most intelhgent men in the ward and more 
 Ukely than others to give me a clear account. He 
 had lost one arm. 
 
 " It is of no account, Sahib," he said in response to 
 my expression of sympathy, " we are soldiers. We 
 are ready always to give an arm or a leg of life for 
 the Sircar. It is our calling." 
 
 The Indian always says the correct and proper thing. 
 Until one knows him one suspects these formulas as the 
 trail of the Moral Reader. In reality they are quite 
 genuine, and spontaneous. He delivers a platitude 
 as impressively as if it were an epigram. It is the 
 Sahib's decadence that fears the commonplace. 
 
 I ask him about Fleming Sahib — I do not give the 
 officer's real name. Zorawar Singh had seen him fall 
 when the enemy reached the trench. " Marie, marte, 
 murgya," he said. " He died beating, beating." He 
 sat up in bed and waved his one arm. "And his hand 
 was red," he added. That was all he could tell me ; 
 but it was enough. It was like a village bard describ- 
 ing the death of Rustum. 
 
 Then he told me about Wariam Singh and his bat- 
 talion who would not surrender. He was on leave when 
 the regiment was mobilized and the news reached him 
 in his village. It was a very hot night. They were 
 sitting by the well, and when Wariam Singh heard 
 that the — th Infantry were going to Wilayat to fight for 
 the Sircar against a different kind of white man, he 
 said that, come what might, he would never surrender. 
 He made a vow then and there, and, contrary to all 
 regimental discipline, held by it.
 
 no THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 I can picture the scene, the stencilled shadows of 
 the kikar in the moonlight, the smell of baked flour and 
 dying embers, the almost motionless group in a ring 
 like birds on the edge of a tank, and in the back- 
 ground the screen of tall sugar-cane behind the dry 
 thorn hedge. The village Kahne-wallah (recounter of 
 tales) would be half-chanting, half-intoning, with little 
 tremulous grace notes the ballad about " Wa-ar- 
 button Sahib," or Jan Nikalsain, when the lumbardar 
 from the next village would appear by the well and 
 portentously deliver the message. 
 
 The scene may have flickered before the eyes of 
 Wariam Singh, lying stricken beside his machine-gun, 
 just as the cherry blossom of Kent is said to appear to 
 the Kentish soldier. The two English officers in his 
 trench had fallen ; the Germans had taken the trenches 
 to the left and the right, and they were enfiladed up 
 to the moment when the final frontal wave broke in. 
 The order came to retire, but Wariam Singh said, " I 
 cannot retire, I have sworn," and he stood by his 
 machine-gun. 
 
 "If he had retired no doubt he would have been 
 slain. Remaining he was slain, but he slew many," 
 was Zorawar Singh's comment. 
 
 Afterwards the trench was taken back and the body 
 of Wariam Singh was found under the gun. The 
 corpses of the Germans lay all round " like stones in a 
 river bed." 
 
 But even so the enemy did not command Zorawar 
 Singh's respect. 
 
 " They are children in battle," he said. " At thirty- 
 five yards they lifted their rifles to fire, then all at 
 once the earth became empty of them. Others came,
 
 THE MAHABHARATA OF THE WEST iii 
 
 and again all the earth became empty. They under- 
 stand nothing." 
 
 An officer told me that many of these brave men 
 had felt the clutch of panic the first day they were in 
 the trenches. They had stared placidly at the great 
 caverns made in the ground behind them by the shells. 
 Then a Taube came buzzing over and dropped a green- 
 smoke puff directly above their heads like some 
 hideous dragon belching fire. It was the first aircraft 
 they had seen. 
 
 I asked Zorawar Singh to tell me his impressions of 
 France. It is a clean country, he said, and the people 
 are kind. All along the railway he had seen cities, 
 and one city joined another, so that you could not tell 
 where one began and the other ended, and it seemed all 
 like one street ; and the land was ever3rwhere cultivated 
 and rich. He had been surprised to see dogs drawing 
 carts and turning churns, and he noticed that there 
 were no buffaloes or camels and no dung in the country. 
 The chickens were very dear — instead of fourpence 
 one paid six times this sum ; but, on the other hand, 
 the people of the country were very honest and had 
 only one price. He knew the words for " chicken " 
 and " thank you " and " trenches " and " salaam." 
 The France-wallah Sahib^ had taught him these. As 
 to the war, it was not like any ordinary war, but 
 more like the IMahabharat, in which the gods came 
 down and fought with men. 
 
 Zorawar Singh will carry away kind memories of 
 France, the kindest of all countries to men from 
 strange lands. Especially will he remember an old 
 
 1 Interpreter.
 
 112 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 lady in a farm who used to sit knitting in the evening 
 teaching him to count, and how her granddaughter, 
 a small child whose hair was almost white, was allowed 
 to sit on his knee.
 
 SOLITUDE AND THE WAR 
 
 Spring in the Mountains. 
 
 SPRING in the valley was in its friendliest mood of 
 promise, but up on the pass there was nothing 
 to tell that it was not autumn until one woke up in the 
 night and heard a snipe drumming in the bog across 
 the road, or in the early morning the soft, rippling 
 whistle of the curlew. 
 
 I had covered sixty miles of high moorland without 
 seeing a flower until I came upon some patches of 
 purple saxifrage on a sun-steeped buttress of Crib Goch, 
 And there was hardly a sign of hfe. Sheep and lambs, 
 but no shepherds. Not a living soul in three days' 
 tramp, and only one on the fourth. And one could 
 count the birds. A raven on a crag watching a sickly 
 lamb ; he flew over the combe with a sharp, dog-like 
 bark as I turned the corner of the gully. A pair of 
 twites flirting among the slates of a sheepfold ; two 
 wheatears singing to each other; a sandpiper on a stone, 
 vibrating with the emotions of the season ; a few 
 meadow-pipits, that soared and dived into the heather ; 
 and a ring-ousel, which alighted on a dead mountain 
 ash in the cleft of a rock. The bird cannot have been 
 solitary; its frightened whistle, the signal of alarm, 
 
 113 H
 
 114 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 like the pipe of a marmot on an Alpine pass, betrayed 
 the neighbourhood of a mate and a nest. And then, 
 at dusk, a flight of herring-gulls passed high overhead 
 from the sea with their weird, harsh clangour. 
 
 On the fourth day I met a man. He wore a scarlet 
 uniform. I saw his bayonet glitter in the sun. He 
 headed me from the floor of the valley up into the snow 
 and cloud on a splintered ridge of Crib Goch. 
 
 Never since these ancient hills heaved themselves 
 out of the fiat has the race of man been so embroiled ; 
 yet I had been thinking when I met the sentry that 
 they were more remote from the ebb and flow of the 
 war than many ranges of Asia and Europe. Down in 
 the farms perhaps a shepherd lad had gone here and 
 there, and over that third ridge on the horizon a few 
 men from the quarries. I thought of the Vosges, the 
 Ardennes, the French Alps, Jura, and Pyrenees. The 
 Carpathians, Urals, Caucasus, Himalaya, would be 
 sending their steady flow, and the roads over all the 
 passes groaning with the munitions of war. But these 
 moors are barren, houseless, treeless, detached from 
 the life struggle. The shepherds who follow the cairns 
 that mark the sheep tracks are protected from dis- 
 quieting thoughts at night by our guarded coasts and 
 the system of a voluntary Army. The hills they live 
 in must have been more shaken by the campaigns of 
 the first Edward, himself an apostle of frightfulness, 
 than by this world-earthquake of the Hun. 
 
 I asked the sentry who was wearing out the scarlet 
 coat if there were any news. He had seen a news- 
 paper, he said, the day before, but he had had no time 
 to read it. He believed there had been a battle some- 
 where in the north of France. His own small rood of
 
 SOLITUDE AND THE WAR 115 
 
 Cymric soil was safe in his keeping, and he was dis- 
 turbed by no doubts as to the staunchness of his 
 mates to hold their ground, wherever that might be, 
 overseas. 
 
 The sentry guarded the approach to the pipes that 
 fed a certain power house. He was one of a squad. 
 Every now and then, as the veil of clouds drifted apart, 
 I could look down from my perch in the crags on one 
 of the most desolate outposts in the kingdom. The 
 wind whipped the surface of the tarn and threw the 
 spray against the corrugated iron resthouse with the 
 violence of an Atlantic gale. A year or two ago a 
 strong man was blown bodily off the causeway into the 
 lake and drowned. These men had been here since 
 the beginning of the war. They hated it at first. 
 Nothing but stones baked in the fire could keep their 
 feet warm. They used to follow their officer longingly 
 with their eyes as he turned his back on the lonely post 
 after an inspection, bound for his warm inn. Now 
 the place has grown on them and they want to stay. 
 
 In escaping from the valley I passed under the live 
 wires from the power house which carry their 20,000 
 volts. Every pole, besides being defended by down- 
 ward curling spikes, has a warning notice of danger in 
 Enghsh and Welsh. Beryglus, the Cymric word, is 
 the same adjective perhaps (periculosus) that the 
 Romans applied to these mountains when the early 
 Britons carried their copper over the pass. 
 
 The birds of the air being short of stature in these 
 islands can settle on the live wire as a rule without hurt, 
 but two birds on adjacent wires may be betrayed into 
 contact by anger or endearment, and then all is lost. The 
 sentry had a story of a mother-crow who perched on the
 
 ii6 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 top wire, and her nestling on the wire beneath. It was 
 a worm that brought about their fall. If the mother 
 bird had dropped the worm and the young bird had 
 caught it all would have been well. Instead, she bent 
 over tenderly, and the worm passed from beak to 
 beak, and the 2o,ooo-volt current passed through the 
 worm from the old bird to the young, and in an infin- 
 itesimal fraction of a second roasted and shrivelled 
 them, mother and child, beak and claw, to an ash. The 
 sentry who told me the story of the electrocuted crow 
 must have been a bard. There was something elegiac 
 in the soft, melancholy intonation of the man. I could 
 see that the pathos of the tale loomed larger in his mind 
 than the more distant tragedy of Flanders. 
 
 It would have been natural for him to visualize that 
 bloody rout. He belonged to these hills where the 
 bards hear strange voices in the silence which is broken 
 to profane ears only by the call of the chough or the 
 raven and the murmuring of the rills. 
 
 Spring came while I was still on the ridge, and the 
 sentry was still wading in the soft, deep green and 
 golden moss. In an hour the sun flooded the red screes 
 and the snow and the glittering quartz-seamed preci- 
 pices and the lakes, and I saw the shadow of the last 
 cloud sweep reluctantly over the combe. I stayed 
 on my rock-row until all the low hills crouched like 
 monsters with ribs and fins, and a golden light suffused 
 the dun heather. Ever since the sky has been clear 
 and the days warm. Under the rock the young shoots 
 of the bracken are uncoiling the brown tissue of. their 
 sheath. Everything whose nature it is to bleat or 
 sprout or sing has felt the invitation. 
 
 At the small junction where the railway sends a feeder
 
 SOLITUDE AND THE WAR 117 
 
 into the mountains I encountered a batch of Terri- 
 torials. They were speaking a shibboleth which, if 
 they could have been transplanted to our Eastern 
 shores, would have carried confusion in their wake. 
 Among the unintelHgible flood of gutturals proper 
 names detached themselves like islands — Dardanelles, 
 Dixmude, Neuve Chapelle. I heard the words " Hill 
 No. 60 " five times in as many minutes, and I knew 
 that the ripple of the war had reached these old Cymric 
 hills. 
 
 II 
 
 Spring in the Valley 
 
 There is little in the neighbourhood of the old 
 stone inn on the pass to tell of the coming of 
 spring. The three trees in the garden, a beech, a 
 birch, and an ash, have hardly put out a leaf-bud. 
 The autumn tints on the moors remain ; only they are 
 a little duller. The dead flowers of the heather dried 
 up to an ashen grey, the rusty-coloured, chopped stalks 
 of the whortleberry, the bronze and copper bracken 
 have the same shades as in December. One may look 
 in vain under the most sheltered rock for a green shoot. 
 
 In the small copse down in the valley nearly a 
 thousand feet beneath the inn, primroses, violets, and 
 celandines are in flower, and the dainty white wood- 
 sorrel, the most fragile blossom of the year. The 
 round leaves of the pennywort are thrusting out of the 
 chinks in the rock among the skeletons of last year's 
 bells. The black buds of the mountain-ash quiver 
 in the sunlight against the white twigs like clusters of
 
 li8 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 bees. Hawthorn, hazel, and elder mingle their various 
 shades of green ; and all along the banks of the stream 
 are blended the white and gold of blackthorn and gorse. 
 
 In the copse we are not yet out of the mountains. 
 The winds from the sea blow through this valley like 
 a funnel. The grass slopes above lead up to bluffs and 
 screes haunted by the buzzard and the falcon. A pair 
 of peregrines have their nest somewhere in that sphn- 
 tered curtain of rock. The white lambs which have 
 not yet harmonized, like the ewes, with the colour of 
 the hills are watched by eagle e3^es from the precipice. 
 It is not untn we have left the lake behind and the 
 3'oung larch plantation that w^e have passed through 
 the gap of the hills into the plain. Here spring is 
 further advanced ; the road is overarched with the 
 tender green of the maple and lime ; but the bank of 
 celandine and dog's mercur}^ by the copse has a gloss 
 and sheen that are not repeated during the year. 
 
 The thick larch wood thrown across the v^aUey 
 like a vi\id scarf of green draws one away from the 
 road. The beaut}' of the plantation is all from without ; 
 and it is the more welcome as the larch is the only coni- 
 fer that adds freshness to the spring. Inside, the wood 
 is dark. It shelters no birds or flowers, but the fringe 
 of it offers a pleasant, shady look-out. Through its 
 dark screen one may watch the hght on the gorse ; 
 the sunshine is intensified on the small tortoiseshell's 
 wing ; a whinchat on a stone in the field seems to be 
 bathing in the warm hght ; its bright f awTi-coloured 
 breast quivers with a luxurious agitation. A squir- 
 rel sits up on its haunches and regards me with a 
 beady eye. A stoat shps out of the wall carr}ing 
 a shrew'-mouse in its teeth ; it leaps from rock to rock
 
 SOLIirDE AND THE WAR 119 
 
 across the stream as lightly as a shadow and disappears 
 with its qiiarn,-. Th.e live things that come into the 
 wood make no sotind ; Nature pursues her plan undis- 
 turbed. 
 
 Spring is late in Flanders, they say. It is difficult 
 to believe that it will come at all. The birds of the 
 soU have long ago joined the evacues ; the migrants 
 who came in from the south have turned away be- 
 wildered and made their home elsewhere. The fruit 
 trees are scored and whittled with shot, fragments of 
 human flesh and bones have been thrown up into them. 
 Many of the trees that have escaped have been ringed 
 by tethered horses, and if they blossom this spring it 
 will be for the last time. Here and there a celandine 
 or \'iolet may wear through the term of its natural life 
 on the brink of a crater ; a few prinoroses may poke 
 their heads above the mire ; but the earth is broken 
 by hoof and wheel and mine and shell, and Xature is 
 given over to man's ravage. 
 
 There is a field in Flanders like the one outside the 
 larch wood in which hundreds have fallen and much 
 labour has been spent in digging graves. In one 
 comer a sheU had buried its own dead, saving " A " 
 Company an hour's spade work. Only the work was 
 not complete. A German hand stuck out grotesquely 
 through the clay, looking so pathetically limp and 
 lifeless that ever\' Tommy shook it as he went by. 
 Many had a ready quip with no unkindness in it for 
 the man beneath the soil One stuck flowers between 
 his fingers. After that he was left alone. 
 
 The men who fight in Flanders that we may enjoy 
 an Enghsh spring make a joke of grimness. They 
 dare not allow themselves to lament too much what
 
 120 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 man has made of man. They die for the dear soil of 
 England — to keep it pure. Without their sacrifice 
 the cherry trees and the bracken and the primroses 
 and the starwort would become as foul weeds. Spring 
 would bring with it nothing but ugliness and shame. 
 
 rfi 3|* #jC 5J» ^% 
 
 I left the larch wood and followed the road past the 
 lake into a flat country. A hornbeam with its dainty 
 brown tassels and drooping boughs seemed the most 
 beautiful thing in the valley until I came upon a 
 solitary wild cherry tree in a wood, its blossoms heavy 
 and white as snow, against a background of green 
 holly. 
 
 But I had forgotten the wallflower. I found the 
 first bloom of it on the old garden wall of an inn. It is 
 the best thing in May. Its homely, modest, sweet 
 dignity gives it a character apart from other flowers. 
 To every one the smell of the blossom is redolent of 
 some particular place, generally a home — a cottage 
 garden, or perhaps an old castle or crumbling cathedral 
 walls. The Englishman in parched lands thinking of 
 spring remembers the lovely brown dappled velvety 
 flower that throws its warm fragrance across the road. 
 To Frenchmen and Belgians in England now it will 
 bring sad thoughts of the Rue St. Augustine or the 
 Rue des Carmes. Perhaps amid the ruins of churches, 
 the debris of stones, it still lifts an unobtrusive head 
 and sweetens the tainted air.
 
 AFTER NEUVE CHAPELLE 
 
 THE Indians are coming in from Neuve Chapelle. 
 Nearly a thousand have arrived here in the 
 last few days who have taken part in this great fight, 
 and the convoys still pour in. It would be difficult 
 to piece together from their narratives a connected 
 account of the action. The sepoy is not as a rule 
 expansive. For all I could learn from Man Singh 
 or Ram Lai, Neuve Chapelle might have been an affair 
 of outposts or a scrum in the ward. The most inarti- 
 culate north country pitmen would have been more 
 communicative. " We fought and I was wounded. 
 We slew many. They ran before us," is the usual 
 story. Nevertheless they are quietly elated. 
 
 Then one comes across a man who wants to talk 
 and is glad of an audience ; with such imagination 
 often runs riot. A man told me of a sepoy in his 
 regiment who carried a British officer on his back 
 all the way from the spot where he had fallen in front 
 of the German trenches to Headquarters, and was 
 made a subadar on the spot. 
 
 " Did you kill many yourself ? " I asked, knowing 
 my man. 
 
 " As many times as I drew the trigger, one of 
 the enemy fell." 
 
 " Did you bayonet many ? " 
 
 121
 
 122 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " Sahib, I went on bayoneting them until my officer 
 told me to stop." 
 
 This roused the man by my side, who gave me a 
 more connected account of Neuve Chapelle than any 
 of the others. He was a Punjabi Mussulman. 
 
 " We bombarded them from six in the morning 
 until two," he told me. " Then we advanced at a 
 double. There was a line of support and a third line 
 behind that ; in the advance the first two lines became 
 mingled. Great numbers of the enemy were already 
 slain. They lay everywhere like stones." 
 
 " Like stones " is a favourite simile. The picture 
 in the sepoy's mind is the boulder-strewn ravine of 
 the Indian plains in the dry season. 
 
 " By six o'clock we were in their trenches. As we 
 approached they threw down their rifles and clasped 
 their hands, crying ' Ram ! Ram ! ' whereupon the 
 skirted soldiers^ took them and marched them off to 
 Headquarters. In a few days the Indian sepoys will 
 have taken all the other trenches, and the war will 
 be at an end." 
 
 Many of the Indian wounded who fell during the 
 week regard Neuve Chapelle as the beginning of 
 the end, and think of the " German-log " as still 
 running, pursued to their farthest frontiers by all the 
 chivalry of the East. 
 
 " Why did they cry ' Ram ! Ram ! '" I asked, " to 
 you, a Mussulman ? " 
 
 Ram, Ram 2 is a salutation which Hindus use among 
 themselves. It has become a formula of propitiation 
 employed by beggars on the roadside ; a convict will 
 
 1 Highlanders. 
 
 2 Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu.
 
 AFTER NEUVE CHAPELLE 123 
 
 mutter it on the way to the gallows. The Teutons, it 
 seems, with their usual thoroughness, had memorized 
 the phrase as part of their stock-in-trade — an alter- 
 native for the " Brisoner of war " with which the 
 yielding Boche appeases Jock, Pat or Tommy. 
 
 " Sahib. They do not know," the sepoy said. 
 " They employ the word to Mussulman and Hindu 
 alike. With them it signifies ' Do not kill.' " 
 
 To the Indian mind in many cases it is the Indian 
 brigades alone that are waging this war. The French, 
 Belgian and the other details of the British Expedi- 
 tionary Force are no doubt playing their part ; but 
 it is the Indian Contingent — British regiments, of 
 course, included — which has held the gate so far against 
 the Hun, and which is to be the veritable hammer of 
 the enemy when the wedge is driven in. 
 
 Trophies of victory are not wanting. On the table 
 of a little Gurkha, a Gurung from Eastern Nepal, there 
 is a bottle of aspirin picked up in the German trenches, 
 a shoulder strap of the 15th Regiment, and an excellent 
 warm pair of fur-lined gloves. And there is another 
 trophy — a shrapnel splinter the size of a pea which 
 had completely shattered his elbow. " Two men 
 standing by my side were blowTi to pieces," he said. 
 
 In another cot a sepoy, wounded in the buttocks, 
 is anxious to explain that he was hit by a shell bursting 
 over and behind him and that he was not running 
 away. He is a typical Dogra — a keen, intelligent 
 face, bright eyes, clean-cut features, thick gold ear- 
 rings, and short cropped hair with the little tuft or 
 hodi, which all Hindus wear, hanging from his crown. 
 His home is in Jammu, and the great banqueting hall 
 where he lies in the pavilion, with the massive chan-
 
 124 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 deliers suspended from the ceiling, must have reminded 
 himof hismaharajah's Durbar hall on the banks of the 
 Tawi, where the road passes through the foothills into 
 Kashmir. 
 
 The poor fellow will need a large loin-cloth to cover 
 the track of the shrapnel if he is to escape chaff when 
 next he performs the prescribed ablutions in his village 
 tank. " My regiment took 300 prisoners," the Dogra 
 said, " and the boom-golies destroyed thousands." 
 
 To-day for the first time I heard an Indian say that 
 our artillery is superior to the Germans'. There is 
 significance in this. Crouching in their trenches 
 all these months, they have never been able to realize 
 that we are subjecting the enemy to the same cannon- 
 ade. Until now they have always said that we are 
 better in the attack, but that the Boches have the 
 command in all the apparatus of war. 
 
 The terrific bombardment which broke up the 
 German lines at Neuve Chapelle has enlightened them 
 as nothing but the visible operation of these resources 
 could do. The same group with whom I was talking, 
 who now admit the superiority of our artillery, believe 
 the British air service inferior to the enemy's because 
 they have feelingly experienced the accuracy of their 
 range-finding, and I could see that my argument that 
 our own machines were at least equally effective did 
 not really convince them. 
 
 With the Indian optimism and pessimism are 
 equally infectious. The presence of this fresh detach- 
 ment of wounded from Neuve Chapelle, men who 
 have come in fresh-blooded from a victorious force, 
 has inspired new spirit in the wards. After weeks 
 of apathy and depression there is a more genial spirit
 
 AFTER NEUVE CHAPELLE 125 
 
 everywhere ; it is all the difference between winter 
 and spring. To-day a large party of convalescents 
 went off to the New Forest — or, as they thought, to 
 the front. They were given a tremendous send-off. 
 Such shouting and cheering and shaking of hands 
 with doctors and orderhes and comrades-in-arms 
 had not been seen since the inauguration of the hos- 
 pital. 
 
 The beds of the convalescents are wanted now 
 for the new-comers — these men who are carriers of 
 the contagion of optimism. They had been in the 
 area of Neuve Chapelle since October, facing that 
 apparently impregnable village. The position of 
 their firing trenches had not changed since then ; 
 the men had not been in action since December 20, 
 and it did them good to see the Germans run, to be 
 let loose to play havoc on them after that terrible 
 bombardment of the loth, and to listen to their sup- 
 pliant " Ram ! Ram ! " 
 
 To my " May your wounds soon be eased " the 
 Dogra of Jammu answered, " Salaam, sahib. May 
 they be healed so that I may return to fight against 
 the sahib's enemies. Soon the German-log will be 
 utterly destroyed."
 
 " RATTING " 
 
 THEY 'ratted/ didn't they? Did a bolt? 
 Somebody told me they let you in." 
 
 The subaltern looked at his host sadly. 
 
 " The 140th ? You mean they left their trenches. 
 Well, that's hardly accurate. As a matter of fact 
 there were no trenches — not at the end. I was only 
 about two hundred yards off and saw what happened." 
 
 The comfortable arm-chair critic settled himself 
 more comfortably in his arm-chair and cut a new section 
 in the cherry cake. There seemed every probability 
 of a good story. The young Highlander with his 
 arm in a sling had been through that unholy prelude 
 to Christmas on the igth and 20th of December. I 
 wondered that my host, an unimaginative civilian, 
 could regard his brown knees without shame. 
 
 " It was those infernal minenwerfers " the youth said. 
 " There are minenwerfers and minenwerfers. These 
 throw a 225 lb. shell at 350 yards. They bring the 
 mortar up to their trench in sections and put it to- 
 gether — or to a spot behind the trenches. They dig 
 them in deep and you can't spot them. It's a soft- 
 spoken machine — very little sound — no flash. Then 
 they enfiladed us." 
 
 " Enfiladed you ! How on earth did you manage 
 to let them enfilade a line of trenches with a howitzer ? 
 
 126
 
 " RATTING " 127 
 
 Don't drink that tea ; it's cold. I'll have some 
 more made." 
 
 Our host, besides being a connoisseur, a horse- 
 breeder, a hunter of big game, and an artist, gave 
 one to understand that he was also a student of 
 strategy. He was just over military age ; otherwise 
 the country might have benefited by his resources. 
 
 " You don't know La Quinque Rue — ' Kangaroo,' 
 as Jock calls it — or ' Hell Fire Corner.' 
 
 " It is straightened out now, but in the third week 
 of December there was a very big kink in it. At one 
 point the German trenches were fifty yards from ours ; 
 at another three hundred. They could get their 
 mortar quite close up and drop shells on us in the 
 orchard three hundred and fifty yards down the line, 
 and our guns, of course, couldn't touch it. 
 
 " The 140th Rifles were holding the salient that 
 day, and, as luck would have it, two double companies 
 were relieving each other, when the mortar let hell 
 loose on them. I saw sixteen shells fall in twenty-five 
 minutes in an area of a quarter of an acre. You can 
 see the shell coming through the air, a wibbly-wobbly 
 thing like a huge bottle. When it falls you've got 
 about three seconds to clear. It carries a time fuse 
 — a percussion fuse wouldn't do, as the muzzle velocity 
 is so low you cannot be sure if it will fall butt-end or 
 nose-end forwards. Sometimes it comes along in a 
 drunken way sideways. 
 
 " You can guess what it was like in the orchard. I 
 could feel the ground quake two hundred yards away. 
 Each shell leaves a ten-foot crater with a diameter of 
 anything up to twenty feet. When you see it coming 
 you have five seconds to clear, or you would have if
 
 128 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 there were anjrwhere to clear to — but there wasn't. 
 We were particularly heavily traversed in the orchard, 
 as they had been hand-bombing us for weeks, and 
 we were well roofed in with doors and beams. All this 
 came down on the poor devils and buried them alive. 
 They had no bolt holes. The minenwerfer makes a 
 clean job of it ; executioner, undertaker, grave-digger 
 in one. The trenches were filled in and flattened 
 out every twenty yards or so and all communications 
 cut. You couldn't get to one side and you had a 
 poor chance if you put your head up. 
 
 " ' Ten Waterloos in a week,' somebody said, and 
 he might have added, ' half a dozen Pompeiis be- 
 tween three and four.' Only the human debris that 
 was not buried was thrown upward. 
 
 " At three o'clock the trees in the orchard of La 
 Quinque Rue were bare ; at four they bore strange 
 fruit — a man's drawers with a foot hanging on, sand- 
 bags, blankets, forage caps, turbans, charred hands 
 beckoning, shreds of wire. 
 
 " There was one entire corpse in the fork of an 
 apple tree." 
 
 The bones of the man had been so pounded and 
 " splintered in his clothes that the sharp white points 
 stuck out through his skin and khaki." 
 
 The boy broke off and stared into the logs. On the 
 lawn outside a cock pheasant pecked the grass ; one 
 could hear them calling in the wood. The evening 
 glow fell across the park lighting up the squadrons 
 of daffodils in the open spaces between the trees. I 
 looked up into a naked oak, clothing it in my imagina- 
 tion with that human embroidery. Everywhere was 
 peace — comfort that amounted almost to an offence.
 
 " RATTING " 129 
 
 A servant came in to take away the tea. Our 
 host rose uneasily and laid a new log on the fire. " It 
 must have been hell," he said. 
 
 "The Terai Rifles are such gallant little fellows," 
 the subaltern went on ; " pitcca Highlanders. I served 
 with them on the North-West Frontier. They are 
 not quick-witted, but you won't find a friendlier crowd 
 east of Suez. They are as jolly as crickets and love 
 a joke or a scrap, and they'll stand up to almost any- 
 thing. 
 
 " They finger cold steel lovingly, but here the God 
 of Wrath and all the elements entered in. Or, as the 
 Pathan put it in his Biblical phrase, ' The floor of the 
 earth rose up and the roof of heaven descended upon 
 our heads,' It was the worst three-quarters of an 
 hour I've seen. Our bombardment of Neuve Chapelle 
 must have been something like it — only on a more 
 extended front." 
 
 I was almost sorry for our host, the wind had gone 
 so completely out of his conceit. These were the men 
 he had disparaged. I learnt my lesson vicariously as 
 ■the subaltern with seeming unconsciousness rubbed 
 it in. It is never good to talk of a regiment " ratting " 
 unless one has been there oneself and held the ground 
 they have lost. Even then it is unwise. 
 
 " The poor devils had a rotten time," the boy con- 
 tinued. " I don't think one has any right to grouse 
 because they gave ground. They were literally blown 
 out of it. They lost all their officers. The next 
 morning the little strip of lost ground was mined. I 
 was near enough to be blown out of my trench into a 
 dug-out behind. My new stable-companion was so 
 startled he nearly bayoneted me.
 
 130 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " Remember, they had no cover to dig themselves 
 in again. Besides you can't dig through a mess of 
 barbed wire, sandbags, bones, beams, clothes and 
 broken doors. It was the kind of mess you see on a 
 butcher's block when the man has been cutting up 
 meat with a chopper. Even if they had dug themselves 
 in for a time the soil was too broken up for the walls 
 of the trench to stand. 
 
 " No. It is not fair to say they * ratted.' About 
 forty got away. The others are in the trench now ; 
 they stuck their ground all right. I don't envy any- 
 one who has to dig a sap through it. What would you 
 have done ? " 
 
 The arm-chair critic had no ready reply.
 
 THE COMMISSION 
 
 IT was nice seeing people about again — ordinary 
 people peacefully preoccupied. A bevy of girls 
 scurrying to an island in Piccadilly was the only thing 
 that reminded Sergeant-Maj or Roland of taking cover. 
 The rows of windows all down a street in Mayfair, with 
 tulips in pots and neat lace curtains, fascinated him. 
 He had not seen England for ten years, he had to shake 
 himself out of his abstraction to remember what it 
 was that made things look strange. It was only that 
 everything was so clean; there was no debris; the roads 
 were not broken up by shell craters ; none of the 
 windows were shattered. 
 
 One of the people Roland had seen that morning 
 was the King, who had pinned the Mihtary Cross 
 on his coat and talked io him like one of his own 
 officers, asi.dng him questions about the night of the 
 action for which he had been commended, the hand- 
 grenades he carried, and how he had broken through 
 the German barbed wire entanglements. It was one 
 adventure among many. He had " put his head into 
 it " as he would say, ten times a week, living at grips 
 with death— he and the others. It might have been 
 any of them, but this counter-attack at night was a 
 
 131
 
 132 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 determining effort. He led it, and it had turned the 
 scale. He had picked up one of their bombs and 
 thrown it back and cleared a traverse with it, and 
 worked down the trench with his grenades, scattering 
 death as coolly as if he had been sowing a furrow. It 
 meant fifty yards of Belgian soil redeemed along a 
 hundred yards front. Half the battalion had been 
 wiped out ; ten of his officers had fallen. 
 
 There had been a brief paragraph about it in all the 
 morning papers, in the column which told what each 
 man had done who was summoned that day to the 
 King. A dozen cameras snap-shotted him as he left 
 the Palace. A reporter jumped between him and a 
 taxi with a note-book. 
 
 " Go in yourself, young man," Roland had said to 
 him. " It's nothing to talk of. It's what they are all 
 doing, but there is not enough — not nearly enough." 
 
 The smell of the tar and the wood pavement was 
 sweet to the exile. It was ten years since he had seen 
 a London crowd. He wanted to shake hands with 
 everybody. There was friendliness even in his con- 
 tempt. The green of the parks was very satisfying, and 
 the tulips and the white horse-chestnut spikes. He 
 had forgotten how all the trees came out at the same 
 time and how one looked up through a canopy of 
 leaves that was almost transparent. He had forgotten 
 where Liverpool Street was. He wished his taxi 
 would go on for hours. 
 
 Even the glum old station pleased him when he 
 reached it. In all his early memories it had been the 
 beginning or end of the road. One had to pass through 
 those gates to get to Foxden and Anglewood. They 
 had once dominated his boyish vista of the great world.
 
 THE COMMISSION 133 
 
 He had passed out of them the first day he had put on 
 uniform. 
 
 He had three days in England, of which a day and 
 part of the night would be spent in the train. 
 
 He searched for a corner seat the better to see the 
 landmarks ; but the train was full. In his carriage 
 the corner seat was taken by a fat young man, with 
 soft white hands, which looked as if they had never 
 done any work — a palpable drone and shirker. He 
 was reading a daily paper, which had a picture of Ser- 
 geant-Major Roland in it, but he was too dull to dis- 
 cover the original. A stubby little man, with side 
 whiskers, had the corner opposite. He gazed im- 
 passively in front of him like a ruminant until his 
 leisurely roving eye Hghted on Roland. 
 
 " Ye're from the Front, maybe ? " he suggested sadly. 
 
 Roland nodded. 
 
 " And how long might they be sparing ye ? " 
 
 " Three days." 
 
 " Eh, well ! Three days ain't three weeks, remem- 
 ber," he said, with the air of a philosopher whose 
 business it is to chasten expectation. 
 
 Two days in a green English home after ten years 
 of the East. Roland had enlisted at twenty during 
 the South African War. Then he had gone out with 
 his regiment to India, after a short month at Angle- 
 wood — just long enough to unsettle him. He loved 
 the old place and felt drawn to the soil. It was hard 
 to leave, but he had ambitions. 
 
 The woods were mellowing for October ; the beeches 
 were turning, and the maple was already golden. 
 Three days a week he had been out in the early morn- 
 ing cub-hunting, when the dew lay thick on the
 
 134 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 stubble. There were two young horses on the farm 
 which he was just getting into hand, and the week 
 after his transport sailed the real hunting began. 
 
 His father had been sullen and angry. With the old 
 man the land came first. He was of solid yeoman 
 stock, the kind of stock that does not run easily to 
 seed. The family had held and farmed Anglewood 
 since the days of Henry VHI. That was perhaps the 
 secret of Roland's ambitions. The farmer cared 
 nothing for his long yeoman ancestry. He was proud 
 of the land, of its yield, of his breed of shorthorns, and 
 of his family only so far as it was bound up with the 
 efficient guardianship of Anglewood. Other traditions 
 might rust ; the suspicion of a wider vision in his son 
 disturbed the old man. 
 
 Some hunting friendships and a tablet in the church 
 to a Roland who fought and died in 1569 were unsettling 
 to the boy, who had often dreamt of a commission 
 through the ranks. Five different families of squires 
 had succeeded one another at the Hall since the bones 
 of this ancestor had been laid to rest under the slab 
 in the aisle. Young Roland did not make a confi- 
 dant of his father. The farmer had pleasant relations 
 with gentlefolk of the old school, but he would have 
 scorned any blossoming out in his son. 
 
 The boy had once modestly flowered into a hunting- 
 stock and a gold pin ; the father had sent him off 
 from the breakfast-table to change " the damned new- 
 fangled thing." He himself, except for his authorita- 
 tive air, was not distinguishable from a labourer. 
 His coat had the broad agricultural cut ; he spoke 
 the broad, thick accent of the country. He resembled 
 the old pollard hornbeam by his gate — a hard, stubby,
 
 THE COMMISSION 135 
 
 clipped, knotted growth, shorn of its potential grace, 
 with its roots fast in the soil. 
 
 When Roland's regiment left India he had got him- 
 self transferred to the new battahon. Three years 
 afterwards he had landed with the Indian contingent 
 at Marseilles. In the last week of October he was in 
 the trenches. He had been through nearly every 
 action at Festubert, Givenchy and Neuve Chapelle, and 
 he had most miraculously survived. Now he had 
 come home for two days. 
 
 Late in the afternoon the express became a slow 
 train stopping at every station. Homely names were 
 called out by porters in homelier accents. Baulked of a 
 view of the land by the leaves of his neighbour's 
 Sporting Life Roland stood up, threw down the 
 window and looked out on familiar fields. There was 
 the mill at Medlingway ; they had cut the alder where 
 he had landed the two-pound perch, the fields were still 
 bright with marsh marigolds. He trod on the philo- 
 sopher's toe in his efforts to catch a glimpse through 
 the other window of the inn at the cross roads. The 
 sign had gone, and there was an ugly new red villa 
 like a blister on the brow of the hill. On the slope 
 down to the brook was the small farm, half-composed 
 of pig-sties. The smell or grunt of a sow had always 
 called up the picture in far lands. Slowly the church 
 spire of Foxden unfolded itself through the elms ; 
 Anglewood lay over the dip hidden by the larch coppice. 
 As the train drew into the station he recognized his 
 father's old-fashioned market gig outside. The horse 
 was tied by a rope to the rails, munching the lilac. 
 
 The old man was on the platform, not aged a day. 
 He gave Tom his horny hand and surveyed him
 
 136 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 steadily. He was the first to let his eyes fall, feeling 
 perhaps that his glance was too dangerously like 
 approval. 
 
 " So yer bin wi' the King this morning," he said. 
 " I seed it in the papers. Ah, well, lad, you haven't 
 done so bad." 
 
 II 
 
 In the evening old Roland showed Tom over the 
 farm. They were clearing the summer fallow and 
 putting in the root. He pointed out with pride a 
 meadow he had reclaimed. Tom remembered it all 
 gorse and broom and bracken. 
 
 " There's feed for three score head of cattle," he 
 said, " and now we're draining t'other slope ; but we're 
 wonderful short of hands. We can't git labour nowhere 
 and the women won't wurk. They're all ladies now, 
 with their pianners and separation allowances — only 
 good for the hay. Thought I could git a few for the 
 singhng, but seems they're too fine to soil their hands 
 — it ain't reckoned genteel. I tell ye, Tom, the country's 
 rotten. Half the lads hev gone off to the war. There's 
 three of ours." 
 
 " They've got to go, father." 
 
 " Terrubul affair. Terrubul, I call it. One cut 
 down after another. I hear as it's like mowin'. I 
 wonder you was spared. You'll be done with th' Army 
 after the war, lad ? " 
 
 They were following a narrow path in the young 
 corn. The old man flung his words over his shoulder. 
 Tom could not see his face ; his back and neck were 
 stiff as a trunk, unyielding to age, but his voice was
 
 THE COMMISSION 137 
 
 mellower, more human. Tom knew that he was 
 moved. To have him at Anglewood " minding the 
 farm " was his dearest wish. 
 
 " I am up for a commission, father," he said. " It 
 is as good as certain. The Colonel has asked for me. 
 We've lost twenty-three officers in the battalion, and 
 the new ones have all their work to learn." 
 
 Old Roland did not speak till they got to the stile- 
 Then he turned and laid his hand on his son's shoulder. 
 
 " What ud ye get, lad ? " he asked. 
 
 " It's ten shillings if commissioned from the ranks." 
 
 " And you're getting five shillings now. Don't 
 be a fule, Tom ; you'll hev to spend more'n double." 
 
 " I wouldn't stay long as a second-lieutenant, 
 father." 
 
 " You put your money by, my lad, and don't go 
 after living the way of gentlefolk." 
 
 And he warned Tom against extravagance in dress : 
 " My clothes heven't cost me five pun a year these fifty 
 years. These young officers " 
 
 Tom smiled. His father's short black tail-coat, 
 bowler hat and cord breeches might have been the 
 identical rig-out in which the old man had met him 
 after South Africa. Only that eccentric up and down 
 collar of his, which must have been antique in the 
 sixties, had suddenly come into fashion. It was 
 " new-fangled." 
 
 Old Roland deplored the rise in wages and foodstuffs 
 at the same time. He had sold his wheat early, when 
 prices were low. Now some of the men were getting 
 eighteen shillings a week. James Matthews, he said, 
 was beyond work. There was a call for young blood 
 at Anglewood. Tom was made to feel that the soil
 
 138 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 would not respond to rheumaticky joints and sinews. 
 
 When they reached the Grange they leant on the 
 drive gate while old Roland pursued his moralizings. 
 The broad chimney stacks of Anglewood, its curious 
 leaded windows and unspoilt Tudor front, attracted 
 sightseers from the neighbouring county towns. The 
 old bridge over the moat was sketched by a dozen 
 artists in the year. 
 
 The homely beauty of the place stirred in Tom a 
 physical sense of longing more subtle than his father's 
 appeal. The lawn had become a flower-meadow ; 
 the box-edge of the paths was untrimmed ; the cocks 
 cut in the yew had grown out of all shape. The 
 garden on the moat side of the house was the only part 
 of his land that old Roland neglected. " Run wild a 
 bit, Tom," he explained, " but I can't spare the 
 labour." 
 
 It must have been an accident that the wallflowers 
 and forget-me-nots in the beds made as lovely a pattern 
 as spring could devise. The warm scent of the border 
 mingling with the lilac called up the concentrated 
 homesickness of the hot weather in the Indian plains. 
 The forest of sheep's parsley, waist-high under the 
 limes, was putting forth the coolest of the year. Over 
 the ferny garden wall the fruit trees lifted their masses 
 of snow-white blossom. 
 
 It would be a difficult place to leave. Tom thought 
 of the old crabbed philosopher in the train who had 
 said " Three days ain't three weeks, remember." 
 And one day was nearly spent. He had to remind him- 
 self that he and his comrades across the Channel were 
 " putting their heads into it " to save Anglewood. 
 English houses should be no part of the universal
 
 THE COMMISSION 139 
 
 scrap-heap. He had seen granges in Flanders which 
 the Hun had visited. 
 
 But the morahzings of the old man by his side were 
 not chivalrous or romantic. 
 
 " You get five hunerd pun into the bank, Tom," 
 he was saying. " Then you can call any man on 
 God's airth a fule." 
 
 Ill 
 
 In church the next morning every one was em- 
 barrassingly interested in him. The curate's daughter 
 sat in the same pew. She had large blue eyes, the 
 colour of speedwell, which dwelt on him without shy- 
 ness. There was an admiring gratitude in them too 
 frank for personal admiration. In this small congre- 
 gation Roland embodied a great deal. He stood for 
 the Flag. 
 
 In ten years he had forgotten the part the mist and 
 rain of the uplands can play in an Enghsh girl's beauty. 
 He thought of the parchment-hke faces of the ladies of 
 ]\Iultan. The softness of her chin was almost sensible. 
 He reckoned twenty-one daffodil seasons in the mould- 
 ing of it, the fragrance of twenty-one May days em- 
 balmed in the girl's face. Her cheeks were like apple- 
 blossom. In the fly-leaf of her prayer-book he read 
 the name Rosahe. He thought of her as an officer's 
 wife, of himself as an officer. Anglewood floated into 
 the picture. 
 
 In the high, oak-panelled pew across the chancel 
 the dapper, grey-bearded little man was the new 
 squire. He had bought the Hall. His was the fifth 
 family at Foxden, the third in the last hundred years. 
 Among the Roland tablets on the wall behind was the
 
 140 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 one of 1569. The family had been at Anglewood in 
 the days of the original Foxdens. They had ridden to 
 hounds ever since there had been a pack in the county. 
 Tom felt the old pride in his stock. His father would 
 have been alarmed if he could have read his mental 
 reconstruction of the Grange. 
 
 In the churchyard after the service Roland was sur- 
 rounded. He recognized two or three of his contem- 
 poraries who seemed to him a little shame-faced in their 
 black coats. They were ready with their congratu- 
 lations. " I had thought of going," one of them said, 
 " but I was wanted on the farm." 
 
 " You are wanted more out there, I can tell you," 
 Roland said. " We haven't nearly enough." 
 
 The Squire wished to be made known to him. The 
 little man's painful, though genuine, efforts to escape 
 the suspicion of patronage ended in an embarrassing 
 familiarity. He had done " his bit " for the country 
 and vaunted it. His three sons had joined the New 
 Army. One of them, a painfully self-conscious second- 
 lieutenant, was at home for the week-end. He returned 
 Roland's salute with a blushing deference. 
 
 Then Roland was introduced to Rosalie. The 
 softness of her hand was in keeping with the gentleness 
 of his picture. She walked down the path with him. 
 She asked him if he had been at Neuve Chapelle, and 
 Roland explained in his easy, modest way what 
 might have happened there, and the accidents by which 
 the affair was shorn of so much of its effectiveness. 
 She wondered what his own part had been, and which 
 was the ribbon on his breast. She wanted to thank 
 him. The brightness in her eyes reflected much pent- 
 up homage.
 
 THE COMIMISSION 141 
 
 It was a perfect May day, and they spoke of the 
 spring. Roland pointed to the horse-chestnut trees 
 in the avenue. 
 
 " I had forgotten what spring was hke," he said. 
 
 " How you must have missed Anglewood. The 
 daffodils in the orchard " 
 
 " I haven't seen them since I was a boy." 
 
 " They were glorious this year — masses of them, like 
 a flood. Your father let me paint them. When I 
 heard you were in the trenches, I wondered if you were 
 thinking of them." 
 
 Roland smiled. 
 
 ' It does not do to think too much in the trenches," 
 he said. 
 
 They parted. In spite of herself her eyes thanked 
 the British Army in the person of Sergeant-Major 
 Roland. Roland longed to turn and watch her out of 
 sight. It was with an effort that he obeyed the in- 
 ward command " Eyes front." As a reward he heard 
 her voice calling him. She was coming back. 
 
 " Sergeant-Major Roland," she said, " I wonder if 
 you would care for the orchard picture ? You couldn't 
 have the daffodils, so you ought to have the sketch, 
 though I am afraid it is only a daub. May I send it to 
 you ? " 
 
 Roland was in luck. He told her that he would 
 value her orchard sketch above all things, but he 
 could not think of her sending it. "I will come my- 
 self for it," he said. " May I go back with you now ? " 
 
 Roland thanked his good star now in the ascendant, 
 yesterday it had been the King and the Military Cross. 
 To-day it was Rosalie, whose sympathetic presence 
 was in itself a decoration. Somehow he had earned
 
 142 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 half-an-hour with her alone. He had an absurd idea 
 that she was going to say : " For valour in the field." 
 
 The suddenness of the alliance left them both a little 
 shy. But in the studio she had her sketches to show 
 him. All landscapes. He knew every gate and tree 
 and w^ood. It was like going round the old place 
 with her as a guide. There was the mill at Medling- 
 way, with the yellow lichen on it, just as he remembered 
 it, and the hounds in Buckley Gorse. 
 
 " I wish I had time to get round to Angle Lea," 
 he said, " now that the bluebells are out. You have 
 got that haze on the trunks at sunset perfectly." 
 
 " You like the sketch ? Please keep it." 
 
 Roland laughed. " No, you've given me the 
 orchard," he said. " Besides, I have been to Angle 
 Lea now. You've taken me." 
 
 She was evidently disappointed. " I wish you 
 would take it," she said. 
 
 The impulse to give would have been natural in any 
 generous-minded girl. It was so with Rosalie. For 
 months she had been eating her heart out because she 
 could do so little. She had sold some pictures and sent 
 the money to the Red Cross, but she wanted to see one 
 man on active service made positively happy by her 
 work. 
 
 " But you must have the one of the Mill and Bentley 
 Gorse. You will, won't you ? That was where your 
 last meet was. Wasn't it ? Ten years ago ? " 
 
 Roland understood her mood, that he was for the 
 moment the embodiment of the collective chivalry of 
 the race. There were new relations between girls and 
 men now, between girls and the men who fought. 
 They were all tip-toe to give, as if a too sensitive
 
 THE COM]\IISSION 143 
 
 modesty were ungenerous, mean. They were ready 
 to give all, every resource which they felt might help 
 or please — sympathy, comradeship, work, aid, com- 
 fort, love, if need be. If they had beauty or charm they 
 must throw that, too, ungrudgingly into the scale. 
 The man would be a cad who could exploit such grati- 
 tude. Still, it would be churlish to let it go. 
 
 Roland only knew that they made each other happy 
 and that he had one more day. 
 
 She would make another sketch of the bluebells at 
 Angle Lea, she said ; and he asked if he might see her 
 at work. She smiled her assent with a kind of modest 
 eagerness. Roland's voice and eyes betrayed him. 
 He could not disguise how much the meeting meant. 
 
 He carried off the four sketches. They were to meet 
 in the morning at nine, in the wood. His train left 
 Foxden in the afternoon. 
 
 Neither of them slept. All through the night 
 Rosalie lay awake. She knew that she had made 
 herself necessary to this man. She had no regrets. 
 Somehow it had been inevitable. It was a kind of 
 dedication. If he asked for her she would give herself 
 to him wholly. She was happy. After months of 
 standing aside, it soothed her to think of herself as a 
 gift. 
 
 Only in the morning it dawned on her slowly, with 
 the earliest twitterings of the birds, that she needed 
 him. She was no gift at all. She was holding out 
 both hands to him for happiness. Then she fell 
 asleep, a smile on her lips.
 
 144 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 TV 
 
 At Angle Lea the wild .hyacinths were in their full 
 splendour. The river of blue had broken through the 
 edge of the wood and flooded the meadow with an 
 azure stream which was held up under the shadow of 
 the oaks. 
 
 The scattered trees islanded the slope of the hill. 
 The gold-foil of their young leaves hanging over the 
 bluebells glistened in the sun. 
 
 Roland lay among the buttercups by the edge of the 
 wood drinking it all in ; the buzz of the bees, the 
 scent of the may, the comfortable smell of the cattle, 
 the sheen of the carpet in the wood. He had never 
 hoped to see Anglewood again. For months he had 
 lived only for the moment, expecting every day to join 
 the ghosts of his companions. Few of his friends had 
 survived. He had lost the habit of brooding over the 
 pleasant things of the earth. This wide glimpse of 
 Eden vouchsafed between the acts was almost cruel. 
 He had seen in the paper at breakfast that his brigade 
 were engaged in another desperate action at La Quinque 
 Rue — one of those long-drawn struggles for an acre of 
 ground. His regiment, perhaps, were in the poisoned 
 smoke belt now. There would be more gaps, more 
 friends gone. It was a pity that earth had become 
 so dear to him. 
 
 It would not do if he began to count on things too 
 much now, but Rosalie had changed everything. He 
 looked up and saw her coming down the overgrown 
 path in the wood, her blue skirt brushing the blue- 
 bells, her blue hat entangled a moment in the young 
 hazel boughs. She bent to brush them aside and he
 
 THE COMMISSION 145 
 
 saw her face Her eyes were a lighter bhie. She smiled 
 at him in his ambush as he rose to help her through 
 the brambles into the field. 
 
 They talked of the war first and La Quinque Rue. 
 " You would have been there," she exclaimed, and her 
 eyes clouded. She asked him a dozen questions and 
 he made light of things, remembering, for her sake, 
 only the joys and humours of the war. She put up her 
 easel, sketched in the woods and the meadow and the 
 islands of oak, but she never wetted her brush. They 
 had too much to say. 
 
 They talked of Anglewood and old Roland, and he 
 told her about the commission he expected. She smiled 
 at his picture of the old farmer's disgust. She had had 
 long talks with him, she said, when she was painting 
 the daffodils in the orchard, and he had often spoken of 
 Roland with a kind of disparaging pride. He could 
 never quite forgive his son's desertion of the land. 
 Evidently Rosalie had penetrated the defensive rind of 
 the old man. She was touched by his loneliness at the 
 farm. She promised to see him often and to write to 
 Roland. She would paint the garden and the woods 
 on postcards and send them to him so that he could 
 follow the seasons, since he could not take her can- 
 vases to the Front. 
 
 " Why are you so kind ? " Roland asked. 
 " Kind ! Why, we owe you everything. Every- 
 thing," she said. "Oh, I wish I could help. Why 
 should all we women be soft and helpless, protected, 
 standing aside while men suffer these things ? I was 
 in a hospital last week and saw a man, a mere boy, who 
 had been through the suffocating gas." 
 " You take it too much to heart," Roland said.
 
 146 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " It's our trade. We join the Army to fight. We 
 like it. We must take our chances as they come. . . . 
 Besides, you help tremendously," he added. " We 
 have you to think about. You are here when we come 
 back." 
 
 Another hour passed. Spring had laid her bene- 
 diction on them. Rosalie made no pretence of painting. 
 They sat side by side among the buttercups. The 
 precious minutes flew. At the most, Roland could 
 steal another quarter of an hour. 
 
 " I haven't made it harder for you," she was saying. 
 
 " It wasn't hard, but you could make it easier, 
 ever so much easier." 
 
 " Do I really make so much difference ? " 
 
 " Look at me. Look at me — and see." 
 
 She could hear the pulse of May beating as they 
 looked into each other's eyes. Neither spoke. They 
 gazed smilingly at first like children, then more in- 
 tensely, as if it were a game — dreamily, until every- 
 thing else faded away except the reality of their two 
 selves — their one self, as he drew her nearer and nearer. 
 Their eyelashes touched, and then their lips. 
 
 They were so still that a cuckoo flew into the tree 
 in the hedge and poured out its soft note for them. 
 A butterfly settled on her hand. 
 
 " It thinks you are a flower," Roland said. 
 
 " You've mesmerized me," she panted. " How 
 did you do it ? " 
 
 Roland laughed with joy. " / mesmerize you ! " 
 
 They searched for the secret of it with the old 
 childish wonder. 
 
 " And yesterday I had never seen you."
 
 THE COMMISSION 147 
 
 " Darling, we had only one day." 
 
 Rosalie laughed aloud and frightened the cuckoo. 
 " You are splendid," she said. " Please don't apologize. 
 How deHghtfully soldier-hke. I feel Uke a Sabine 
 woman." And Roland felt as proud as Mars. He 
 took her up the lane to Anglewood to his father. The 
 old man received them with a glance of apprehensive 
 inquiry. 
 
 " We're engaged, father," Roland explained. 
 
 He surveyed Rosalie with his accustomed severity, 
 and turned to his son. 
 
 " Then, maybe, you'll come back to the land," he 
 said. 
 
 RosaHe smiled at the implicit compliment to herself. 
 Old Roland was not versed in pretty speeches, yet he 
 had paid her unconscious tribute with his first words. 
 
 Roland's Colonel called him into the regimental 
 headquarters hut one night as he was going back to 
 the trenches after his turn in billets. " The commission 
 has been put through all right," he said. " I hear it 
 will be gazetted to-morrow." There was nobody in 
 the room but the adjutant and the telephone clerk. 
 
 " I need not tell you, Roland," he added, " how glad 
 we all are to have you one of us. We couldn't have a 
 better officer — or friend." 
 
 The Colonel stumbled a little over the " all." There 
 were only five officers left of the original battahon. 
 It was the first time his Colonel had called him Roland. 
 The words startled him, coming as they did from the
 
 148 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 most reticent of commanding officers. His simple 
 " Thank you, sir," was difficult of utterance. 
 
 He left the hut deep in thought, scarcely noticing 
 the stray bullets that stripped the leaves overhead. 
 There had been a lull for ten days all along the Front, 
 and he expected another day of small activities — 
 the routine which had become almost mechanical, 
 through which he was able to preserve the happy 
 picture of the blue-bells and the blue hat and skirt and 
 the lane winding up to Anglewood. 
 
 Then he would think of his new relations with his 
 officers. He had no doubts. He and they were bound 
 by the strongest tie that exists — ^the regiment. The 
 daily, hourly comradeship in strain would have drawn 
 any chance companions together ; but it was the 
 prestige of the regiment, the sense of their tried and 
 invincible front, the regimental name — a spell un- 
 broken, that had tempered these links into the finest 
 steel. Roland knew how they would greet him as if 
 he had always been one of them, and he was sure of 
 himself. 
 
 So he mused all night, but before dawn he had 
 forgotten Rosalie and his commission. The fires of 
 hell were let loose on him ; the surface of the earth 
 was churned like the sea ; the wire entanglements were 
 blown overhead like hail. Then the smoke came curling 
 slowly towards them, enveloping everything ; little 
 snake-like coils preceding, surmounting hummocks, 
 searching hollows, with an almost animate malice. 
 
 To Roland and his men the cloud was the visible 
 expression of the powers of darkness — a satanic 
 challenge. It nerved them for bloody retribution. 
 Fifty yards from their trench it banked up and re-
 
 THE COMMISSION 149 
 
 coiled. Then the Royals waited the charge, calm but 
 exulting inwardly, sure of themselves. Their machine 
 guns were untouched. When the enemy came on in 
 their masses it was the finest mowing Roland had seen. 
 It is better shooting fiends in respirators than ordinary 
 flesh and blood. There is an added satisfaction in 
 the futility of the devil. 
 
 '' It's better than rabbits," a corporal remarked as he 
 tore the mouthpiece from a face that lolled inertly over 
 the parapet. 
 
 The words brought back the forgotten picture of a 
 week ago, the scurrying of the rabbits under the beech 
 trees as he climbed the knoll with Rosalie, the tiny 
 little ball of fur, no bigger than a mole which had 
 tumbled into its burrow at her feet. She had stooped 
 to touch it. There was no lady like her in the Royals. 
 
 That was the first heat. Three more waves spent 
 themselves on the broken trenches. Then there was 
 a lull, but Roland saw that things were not going well 
 with the battalion on the left. The smoke had gone 
 through them, they had fallen back. 
 
 The telephone wire was broken. Roland could see 
 through his glasses where it had snapped. It must be 
 joined, or they would be cut off. He called for volun- 
 teers. It was a desperate venture. A hundred yards 
 of open ground swept by rifle fire from the trenches 
 on the left. There was but one small depression which 
 offered any cover — one had to crawl all the way. The 
 first man who offered was hit twenty yards from the 
 trench. The next reached the hollow, but was laid 
 out as he emerged. A third did not return. 
 
 Roland would not send another man until he had 
 tried himself. "I've got more luck than most of you,"
 
 150 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 he said, but a bullet smashed his ankle before he had 
 gone ten yards. In a quarter of an hour he had dragged 
 himself to the little patch of dead ground without 
 another wound. Here he lay and panted. He had 
 time to think. He had dispelled the happy vision, 
 casting over it a deliberate purposeful film. Now it 
 came flooding back, the blue of the wild hyacinths and 
 of Rosalie's eyes. Rosalie was soothing his pain, 
 playing her part if only she knew it, far away at 
 Anglewood. Roland was happy. He had given up 
 the thought of his reward. It made things easier, and 
 he knew she would be proud of it. No heart breaks 
 utterly for the dead by whom England lives. 
 
 The broken wire was now but fifteen yards away. 
 He saw there was a protective hummock behind which 
 he could work if only he could reach it. His head 
 swam. To regain his ebbing strength he fixed his 
 mind intently on Rosalie and played a game, pretend- 
 ing like a child that she was in peril, and that if he 
 could reach the wire she would be safe. This re- 
 freshed him like a mountain stream. 
 
 As he left the hollow he heard a groan. It was the 
 second volunteer. The man called to him weakly. 
 " Let me crawl aside of you. I may turn a bullet. 
 I'm done in." He dragged himself with his hands a 
 foot or two in pursuit. But he was spent. Roland 
 soon outdistanced him, calling back a heartening 
 word. 
 
 He reached the coil. As he drew in the two ends of 
 the wire he was hit again in the side. He was fighting 
 now against an invading numbness, but he held it back. 
 He joined the wire, and the message went through. 
 
 He was found lying there when the supports came up,
 
 THE COMMISSION 151 
 
 with his pincers in his hand and a torn leaf of a note- 
 book on which he had written : " RosaHe, you made 
 me happy — poor RosaHe." 
 
 RosaHe was writing in the garden. A finished sketch 
 lay beside her on the grass. " Here is June," she wrote, 
 " you will like the irises. Next week the peonies will 
 be in full bloom. The early roses are budding on the 
 north wall. Your father is so kind. He comes to 
 watch me paint every morning. He has had the 
 garden trimmed. He has taken a man off the farm 
 for it — a whole week's work ! I think it is because— — " 
 
 She looked up and saw old Roland watching her from 
 the gate. She picked up the sketch and waved it at 
 him, but there was something in the way he stood which 
 frightened her. He was so motionless — like a dead 
 trunk. She dropped the sketch and ran towards him. 
 When she saw the large tears rolling down his cheek 
 her heart stopped beating. The old man did not 
 speak. Between the sobs which she could not stifle 
 she called up broken words of comfort. 
 
 " We are proud to have given him." 
 
 Still he did not speak. He drew from his waistcoat 
 pocket the crumpled leaf of Roland's notebook. She 
 read it and led him like a child into the empty house.
 
 MAY IN WAR TIME 
 
 To the poets Nature in her pathetic relations 
 with man plays on two alternate pipes. In one 
 key the pulse of life beats in harmony with man's 
 emotions. The sky and clouds, hills, valleys, flowers, 
 trees, birds, and running streams form a kind of 
 chorus in symphony with his rapture or distress. 
 
 For so to interpose a little ease 
 
 Let our frail thoughts daUy with false surmise. 
 
 Or Nature is austerely aloof. We are born and die, 
 and suffer pain and bereavement, and then are " rolled 
 round in Earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones 
 and trees." We love and lose, strive and fail, but 
 Nature is unconcerned. The sun shines ; the seasons 
 repeat themselves ; the song of the thrush is as sweet ; 
 the murmur of the brook as musical ; the sea breaks 
 on the cold grey stones. These are the two imme- 
 morial notes in lyric verse from Milton to Rupert 
 Brooke. Man stands in the foreground ; and the 
 rest of God's handiwork linked to, or divorced from, 
 him is invoked as his partner or his foil. 
 
 In these hard years the comfortable myth of a 
 sympathetic nature, " the pathetic fallacy " as the 
 pedants call it, must yield to the sterner theme. 
 
 152
 
 MAY IN WAR TIME 153 
 
 The willows and the hazel copses green 
 
 Shall now no more be seen 
 
 Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. 
 
 It is useless to call on the " valleys low " to bring 
 every flower that sad embroidery wears to strew the 
 laureate hearse where Lycid lies. This Earth " of 
 the beautiful breasts " has become a universal hearse, 
 and the flowers " mock the merry worm that wakes 
 beneath." It is impossible to bring man and his 
 engines sympathetically into the picture without 
 irony. Nor can one conceive of a scene austere and 
 forsaken enough to envisage his troubled spirit. The 
 havoc of Flanders, perhaps — but it is his own ravage. 
 If there, as in Wordsworth's picture, every flower 
 enjoys the air it breathes, and the budding twigs 
 stretch out their fans to catch the breezy air and the 
 least motion that the birds make is a thrill of pleasure, 
 the poet has the more reason 
 
 to lament 
 What man has made of man. 
 
 In May, 1915, the " pathetic fallacy " of the poets 
 might well seem as dead as the essential humanity 
 of civilized man. Poetry will revert to the old cry 
 of an unresponsive nature, the consciousness of loss 
 and change intensified by the immutability of the 
 seasons, the indifference of herb and beast and bird 
 and stone, the " Change in Recurrence " of Meredith's 
 beautiful, inadequately-entitled poem. 
 
 But the blackbird hung pecking at will ; 
 The squirrel from cone hopped to cone. 
 The thrush had a snail in his bill, 
 And tap-tapped the shell hard on a stone.
 
 154 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 The "scene of the frame" is there, the dear Hfe 
 of it fled. 
 
 The only difference is that the change and loss 
 are no longer individual, but universal. The poig- 
 nancy is shared by all in the remembrance of other 
 springs when we heard with no envy " the call the 
 blessed creatures to each other make," and our hearts 
 kept with them their innocent festival. 
 
 Yet the may and the lilac, and the palpitating 
 blue floor of the woodland where the wild hyacinth 
 grows, and the tender transparent green of the young 
 beech leaves have never seemed so beautiful as in 
 this year of iron when the least encumbered spirits 
 amongst us are giving up their lives and their inherit- 
 ance of " the splendour in the grass " and " the glory 
 in the flowers." The poet cannot feign that 
 
 Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down 
 Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were, 
 Or they dead leaves. 
 
 It may be that spring has come with an almost 
 unexpected radiance, like the rainbow over the waste 
 of waters, as a sign that the Eternal wrath is ap- 
 peasable, as a symbol of hope, 
 
 hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays 
 For its own honour on man's suffering heart. 
 
 It is only in prospect now that sentient nature can 
 be interpreted as sympathetic with man ; the sun- 
 steeped bank on the downs which the purple orchid 
 loves, and the shadow of the fruit blossom in the still 
 waters, mirroring the calm that will be the reward 
 of a faith put on trial. We need the faith of Mere- 
 dith to follow the bright procession of the year and
 
 MAY IN WAR TIME 155 
 
 to take comfort in the evolutionary necessity of waste 
 in the sap of Hfe, the falling into " the breast that 
 gives the rose." 
 
 For love we Earth, then serve we all ; 
 
 Her mystic secret then is ours ; 
 We fall, or view our treasures fall, 
 
 Unclouded, as beholds her flowers 
 Earth, from a night of frosty wreck 
 
 Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, 
 When lowly, with a broken neck. 
 
 The crocus lays her cheek to mire. 
 
 Meredith, the optimist, would have sung of an 
 Earth fairer for the sowing in Flanders and the 
 Dardanelles ; but it is a hard discipline for those 
 who have not sowed to reap of the fairness. And he 
 would have sung no doubt of the happiness of those 
 who have had the gift ready in their hands to give, 
 and given it without turning aside or lingering among 
 the treasures which they have redeemed ; and of 
 the sadness of those with the empty purse, who have 
 been rich at the wrong season, who can only stand 
 by and say " I would have given." 
 
 The small celandine was the " herald of a mighty 
 band " which these brave will not see. The crocus, 
 daffodil, primrose, cowslip, wallflower, the warm blue 
 carpet of ground-ivy, the milky way of the water- 
 buttercup among the reeds — these things have a 
 beauty through their sacrifice which they have not 
 had before. The commonest flowers of the English 
 hedgerows, the plainest green of the ash and elm, are 
 the more precious and English for their sake. May 
 the glades be green which their spirits haunt, and 
 the blossoms fall on the grass like snow.
 
 SHAITAN'S WAR 
 
 " TT is not a man's war they make," a sepoy of the 
 X 40th Pathans said to me, " it is a devil's war." 
 Shaitdni is the expressive word they use for 
 " devils," and " a man's war " does not quite 
 translate the Hindustani hahadri, which means the kind 
 of war which brave men wage, the kind of chivalrous 
 contest that was fought by the heroes of the ancient 
 epics of Hindustan when Krishna stayed the battle to 
 put his bell over the lapwing's nest lest the unfledged 
 brood should be trampled underfoot. 
 
 At first the sepoys regarded the Germans merely as 
 an abstract evil, their sahibs' enemies whom it would 
 be sport to fight. Now " frightfulness " has taken 
 shape and inspired a disgust among the Indians quite 
 as lively as the loathing felt by the Allies. 
 
 The Pathan had just arrived with his regiment from 
 Ypres. They had disentrained near the zone where the 
 poison gas was unloosed, and had been sent forward 
 in support of the Canadians. 
 
 " We got between two machine-guns, sahib," he said. 
 He interlocked the fingers of both hands to show in 
 what a tight place they had been. " It was the day 
 they used the stupefying smoke." 
 
 One of the men whom I saw had been overwhelmed 
 by it. He had lain in the trench unconscious for four 
 
 156
 
 SHAITAN'S WAR 157 
 
 hours and wakened up in hospital with two bayonet 
 wounds in his thigh. He had continual pain in his 
 head, restlessness, watery eyes, dilated pupils, but none 
 of the horrible lung symptoms discovered in many 
 victims. The man was still suffering, though his was 
 only a slight case. One of the hospital orderlies who 
 had been in a miners' ambulance corps said that it 
 reminded him of the effects of choke-damp, 
 
 I asked him what he thought of the Germans. 
 
 " Sahib," he said, " they are very strong and cun- 
 ning." The man was a Jat, one of the melancholy 
 fatalistic type. He accepted the situation resignedly 
 as part of the machinations of the Evil One who 
 normally stalks the earth. One felt that a front seat 
 in the spectacle of a universal holocaust could not 
 make this sad-eyed man any sadder or more resigned. 
 
 A group on the lawn whom I found basking in long 
 chairs among the hyacinths, wallflowers, and tulips 
 showed a more genial spirit. One of them had a silver 
 coin of unknown value. He thought it might buy him 
 a watch. Watches are cheap in Wilayat. " What is 
 it, sahib ? " he asked, handing it to me. " Is it a rupee 
 of the France-wullah sahibs." 
 
 It was a German mark. 
 
 " No," I said. " It belongs to the dushman, the 
 enemy. It is a German shilling." 
 
 The man threw it from him with a vivacious gesture 
 of disgust worthy of our Allies and made a kind of 
 spitting noise, at which all the others laughed. It 
 fell on the grass and rolled slowly into a flower-bed 
 and lay there, and nobody deigned to pick it up.:|:i^? 
 
 I was glad that these men had discovered the iniquity 
 of the Boche.
 
 158 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 There is a Dogra in one of the wards with a hole in 
 his side. You could shove your fist into it. The 
 colonel told him he hoped that in a month's time 
 he would be mended sufficiently to go back to India 
 in a hospital ship. 
 
 " Why should I go to India, sahib ? " he said. " I 
 shall go back to the regiment in France when I am 
 
 well and kill some more of those Germans." 
 
 The adjective he used was untranslatable. 
 
 One man, who had been in the hospital in December 
 with a slight frostbite, has returned with five wounds 
 all from the same bullet. The ball had glanced in and 
 out of his right cheek, passed through his gums, struck 
 his left chin and shoulder, and grazed his forearm. 
 He had been detailed for the New Forest, but was 
 homesick for Brighton, and begged to be sent back. 
 
 " I am glad to be back in Bri-toun, sahib," he said. 
 " It is the best town in Wilayat." He told me the 
 hospital reminded him of a mosque. 
 
 Many of them want to see London. They cannot 
 conceive of a city bigger than this. They are taken 
 out for tours of inspection in squads or in motor- 
 omnibuses. They have seen the wonders of the 
 Aquarium, and the kinemas on the pier, and the Belgian 
 Art Gallery. They admire the hons of the place, but 
 more than anything its cleanliness and the absence of 
 dung. 
 
 Brighton is a pleasant interlude for the sepoy ; 
 after the winter in the trenches May in these gardens 
 must be a veritable Eden. One meets the disabled 
 propelling themselves along the shady gravel walks in 
 bath chairs and hand tricycles, wrapped in the manipu- 
 lation of these machines as if they were playthings and
 
 SHAITAN'S WAR 159 
 
 locomotion a game. There is a holiday air among 
 the men, a consciousness of consideration. Their 
 izzat ^ has never been higher. Everybody is very 
 kind. 
 
 4c 4c 4c H: H: 
 
 Groups of them are sitting on the grass chatting 
 and conning the illustrated papers, which they revolve 
 so as to get a view of the picture upside down and at 
 every angle. If you pause as you go by they will 
 probably appeal to you for an interpretation. The 
 names of the Allies and their uniforms are very con- 
 fusing. " There are the Germans we know," I heard 
 one of them say, " and there is also another kind of 
 German — the Australia-wallah sahib." 
 
 Every detail of these war pictures is accepted as 
 literal fact, and an artist with the least imaginative 
 touch might prove an inspiration. I was asked to 
 explain a fight between Russians and Germans in a 
 Polish cemetery. " Who is that man down, sahib ? " 
 one asks. " A Russian." A commiserating sigh 
 proceeds from the group. " And who is the man who 
 is being bayoneted ? " "A German." " Can't you 
 see," another sepoy says. " Look at his helmet." 
 There is a murmur of appreciation all round. They 
 count the fallen on both sides, and when it totals up 
 to the Alhes' advantage they have all the gratification 
 of an authentic victory. 
 
 The prostrate form in the cemetery whets a dormant 
 appetite. A crutch is driven deep into the turf crushing 
 the daisies. It is evident that they want " to have 
 another dig " at the Boches themselves. 
 
 The sepoy is not easily frightened. He has faced 
 
 1 Honour.
 
 i6o THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 the most scientific machinery of destruction and he is 
 not cowed. As a diplomatic resource frightfulness 
 has not been a success. Instead of inspiring fear among 
 the Indians it has awakened the most hvely resentment. 
 The Boche is not merely the sahibs' enemy now ; he 
 is their own.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 
 
 As I watched them swinging down the aisle out 
 of chapel I saw the old generation repeated. 
 
 There was Tubby K , still in Etons, Pi Menzies, 
 
 Mouse Simmonds, Bunny Pocock — a happy perpetua- 
 tion of the old " Bunny," with his face illumined by 
 everything but thought. I missed his confederate 
 " Jiffer." That lanky, freckled youth with the glasses 
 was the exact replica of Hayden, the mysterious 
 nonentity who had been no good at any kind of game 
 until he went up to Oxford and stroked the 'Varsity 
 boat. 
 
 The original Hayden was dead in Flanders. Tubby 
 K had run into a hidden machine-gun some- 
 where in the jungles of East Africa. Bunny Pocock 
 had been in the casualty list, but was back with his 
 battery in the Dardanelles. Mouse Simmonds had 
 died of sunstroke in the Gulf. 
 
 After twenty-five years I had come back for the 
 first time, and I saw it all as I did when a boy — not 
 in the leaving stage, but as a boy of thirteen, thirty 
 years ago, when I used to fall into the procession 
 from the last pew, the godHngs of the upper school 
 preceding. 
 
 The masters sat in their stalls until the last boy 
 had filed out. There were still many familiar faces. 
 
 161 L
 
 i62 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 I looked for the one who was most feared. It was a 
 spectre that had haunted the dreams of old boys 
 scattered over the earth, even as the master of the 
 Slaughterhouse long disturbed the sleep of the author 
 of Pcndcnnis. I caught his eye and dropped mine 
 with the habit of years. I wondered if he still com- 
 pelled fear — if young soldiers dream of him now in 
 the trenches of Flanders and are hap py to wake up 
 from that paralysing nightmare of a forgotten " prep." 
 I knocked at his door the next day for the first time 
 without apprehension and found him singularly human 
 and benign. 
 
 The voluntary gave me a feeling of the last Sunday 
 in the term when the roof and windows had vibrated 
 to the roar of Nunc dimittis or " Lord, dismiss us with 
 Thy blessing," and we kids had played footer with 
 our toppers in the passage of the chapel until an angry 
 prefect had emerged out of his study and given us all 
 " a dozen " for our pains. 
 
 I had come down to the school confident of finding 
 the jolly, careless, amused attitude of boys with no 
 consciousness of being engulfed or overshadowed. 
 The high spirits were there. The war was on the 
 horizon, but it did not seem to impinge on happiness, 
 though every one was leaving, or had left, a term or 
 two earlier and was going up to Sandhurst or straight 
 into a commission through the Officers' Training 
 Corps. The university scholarships lapsed as a matter 
 of course. The Army absorbed all. 
 
 I had seen in the school register that 8i per cent, 
 of the entries of the years 1908-9 were serving. The 
 other 19 per cent, would be Government servants, 
 parsons, doctors, or men who could not pass the doctor.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 163 
 
 I had not realized how quickly the senior boys were 
 being sucked into the maelstrom. I arrived on a 
 Saturday afternoon, when the school were playing 
 the M.C.C., and was introduced to the head of my 
 old house as he was taking off his pads. He was 
 " out for a blob." 
 
 " Yes, the ball swerved a bit," he said, " but I 
 ought to have played it — deceived in the pace. I 
 am afraid we won't put up much of a show. They've 
 come down pretty strong, and ours is practically a 
 second eleven." 
 
 There was only one boy left of last year's team. The 
 others had " gone." Some had already appeared in 
 the casualty list. One was killed. Brown was in 
 the Fl57ing Corps." You knew him, of course," the 
 head of the house went on. " A priceless fellow. 
 He made ' 140 not ' in this match last year. Did 
 you see his photo in the Sporting Dram, last week ? " 
 
 In the next quarter of an hour two more wickets 
 fell. 
 
 " If only we had Brown and Jameson," the head 
 of the house said, " it would have given us a bit of 
 a stiffening." 
 
 Every one except the eleven and the unfortunates 
 let out of " San " was in khaki. The O.T.C., or 
 K.L.H. — Kitchener's Last Hope, is their modest title 
 — were to drill at five. All the school belonged. 
 One boy had a wooden leg ; he was a signaller. An- 
 other had lost his left arm ; he played the cornet with 
 his right. There was no compulsion except the 
 strongest compulsion of all — tradition. 
 
 The general, himself an old boy, was coming down 
 to inspect on what should have been Speech Day,
 
 i64 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 only there was not going to be any Speech Day this 
 year. Last year, when it did not matter quite so 
 much, his verdict had been " slack on parade." No 
 one could call the corps slack on field days or at the 
 butts. A year or two ago they won the Public School 
 Shield at Bisley. But ceremonial parade on half- 
 holidays is not " cricket." Still, it has to be done, 
 and it is all part of the great sacrifice. I saw the 
 drill and the very ragged march past and listened to 
 the commandant's patient irony. There are some 
 dreadful hours to be put in before the great man 
 comes. 
 
 The head of the house showed me my old study. 
 The chairs and the tables were all in the same place, 
 and there was a boy who seemed oddly famiUar. 
 " Aren't you Farrow ? " I asked. He was Farrow — 
 not my Farrow, but his son. He sat in the same 
 corner in the same huddled attitude reading a maga- 
 zine. I had been his father's fag. Old Farrow had 
 floored me with a blow for being late for early chapel 
 my first term. I had fallen on to the coal-scuttle and 
 my nose had bled for half an hour. I gave young 
 Farrow half a crown. 
 
 Farrow was reading Flight. Ever since Stokes 
 had come down on the cricket field in his aeroplane 
 out of the blue — it was the term after he left — the 
 R.F.C. had been " the top arm " in the school. 
 
 " It is priceless," Stokes had said. " This machine 
 is practically my own." 
 
 " How long did it take you from Aldershot ? " 
 somebody asked. 
 
 " Oh, about an hour," he said carelessly. It was 
 eighty-six miles.
 
 THE OLD SCHOOL 165 
 
 I saw Farrow pass with the stream down the aisle. 
 I watched him as I had watched his father — a callow, 
 unprepossessing youth. But to me at thirteen half 
 the school were heroes. I dowered them with super- 
 normal gifts. I remember the Prime Minister that 
 was to be, the budding Archbishop, the first gentle- 
 man jock of his day, the captain of county cricket, 
 the Poet Laureate, the potential Astronomer Royal, 
 who had burnt his blind and nearly set our house on 
 fire while gazing at the stars. 
 
 All these heroes had suffered eclipse or they had 
 never emerged on to the high plane that was theirs 
 by right of worth, whereas many of the obscure had 
 been exalted. The " Prime Minister that was to be " 
 is an unsuccessful stockbroker ; the Astronomer 
 Royal teaches in a country grammar school ; but the 
 colourless youth who used to be carried along unno- 
 ticed in this stream is one of the most valued lives 
 of the nation. Another weakling of the early 'eighties 
 has become a bulwark of the State. I must have 
 often tramped out after him in the voluntary, though 
 I never gave him a thought. 
 
 And here, perhaps, in this new living current of 
 young England there is gathering strength — young 
 leaders of men ; dragon-slayers, statesmen of the 
 coming generation, inspired builders of the new Eng- 
 land, the source from which the country, spent in this 
 long struggle, is to draw revivifying sap. 
 
 How different were those easy, happy-go-lucky, 
 vaguely ambitious days of ours from the present, 
 when youth works within sound of the tocsin, leaves 
 the classroom for the field, and graduates in the 
 trenches — going, not into the happy lists as of old
 
 i66 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 with hours of dalliance, but armed, into the pit to 
 fight the Evil One in all his panoply of hate. 
 
 And with all its tragedy and loss and disillusionment, 
 what an age of purgation 1 There can be little ques- 
 tion that the ordeal of iron and sacrifice is tempering 
 the spirit of young England now as in no other age. 
 I felt that this stream of youth I was watching was 
 the best the school had poured out in all her long 
 history to prove " the mettle of her pastures."
 
 THE POWER OF A WALK 
 
 BEFORE breakfast cheerfulness is unattainable ; 
 no honest man in Europe, friend or alien enemy, 
 wakes up in the mornings with a light heart. After 
 breakfast it may be attained. 
 
 There is only one thing to be done. If it is a free 
 day go for a walk, an all-day walk, with lunch in your 
 haversack, strong, nailed boots, and a stout stick. 
 Any leavening of depression is a virtue. The faith 
 that comes of cheerfulness, or the comfort that comes 
 of faith, is a virtue. And these are virtues that may 
 be physically compelled. The more one labours and 
 sweats in the sun, breasts the wind and the rain, the 
 more purged of humours will one return. 
 
 There must be an objective, and it should not be 
 an easy one. Our plan was to follow the stream up 
 from Watersmeet to its source on the moor. It was 
 one of the many rivers that go to make up that black, 
 spidery web in the map of Dartmoor, flowing south 
 and east in the country between Ashburton and 
 Chagford. The first part of the walk would be through 
 woodland, the second over the moor. Happily we 
 made no vow, but we thought we might compass it 
 in a day. 
 
 It was a smooth beginning. In spite of the rain 
 
 167
 
 i6S THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 the woods were beautiful. The foxgloves came down 
 the hill in troops to Watersmeet. Every now and 
 then the sun came out, and one looked up through the 
 glistening leaves into the clear washed blue. 
 
 Where one sees foxgloves one thinks of fairies. 
 They seem so conscious of the glades, drooping, 
 listening, waiting intently. " Folks' gloves " they 
 were called once by the country people or " fairies' 
 gloves." But the name implies a race of elves almost 
 as tall as the stalks. Titania's messengers whom she 
 bade go, 
 
 War with rear-mice for their leathern wings 
 To make my small elves coats. 
 
 were of a more ethereal birth, gossamer creatures 
 who would crouch within the bell wrapped in a coverlet 
 which, like Milton's " Sanguine flower," is beautifully 
 " inscribed with woe." 
 
 The gamekeeper had been cutting the undergrowth 
 along the fishing path by the stream. For fully half 
 a mile the foxgloves were lying in swathes, their purple 
 heads trodden in the mire. It was profane work. 
 There must be something hunnish in the man who 
 can run his scythe through their proud ranks. I hope 
 the elves will have him by the heel. 
 
 More elvish than these open glades were the dark 
 tunnels of alder and oak. Most fairy-like the yellow 
 toadstool and the little scarlet trumpet fungus on the 
 rocks under the hazel cover. Among the moss-grown 
 slabs one recognizes table or dais, for banquet or 
 tribunal. These are the immemorial walks of " the 
 little people " ; the open spaces ringed with the 
 conscious foxglove are their dancing green.
 
 THE POWER OF A WALK 169 
 
 It is a day of sun and rain quickly alternating, but 
 the light showers do not penetrate the forest roof. 
 Above the stream the oaks " high overarched em- 
 bower." 
 
 It is a moist valley. Every trunk has its coat of 
 green. The under-boughs are heavy with lichen and 
 golden and green moss and hanging ferns, and here 
 and there where the sun breaks through wreaths of 
 honeysuckle. The air is so damp and steamy ; the 
 trees so thickly coated with parasitic moss that one 
 might expect to find tropical orchids here with curious 
 fleshy leaves. It is a relief to come upon a sunny 
 space, an island in the stream where the pink wild 
 rose is in blossom, smelling of June, the cleanest, 
 freshest flower that blows. Where the gorge opens 
 out and the stream is broken into two channels these 
 ferny islands catch the sun, and you will find gardens 
 of columbine, foxglove, campion, valerian, great 
 masses of osmunda. 
 
 Soon the path ended and the rocky banks became 
 so steep that we were forced up the chff into a lane — 
 a Devonshire lane with a sunk bank on one side and 
 a wall on the other. Here, too, the foxgloves are the 
 genii of the place, standing sentinel row upon row or 
 clambering over the wall. One measures oneself 
 with them, heel to heel. Many of them top six feet, 
 and every crevice in the stone which they do not 
 occupy is invaded by the pennywort or the white 
 stonecrop, with the purple buds and sepals. 
 
 We spent half an hour among the foxgloves crouch- 
 ing under a holly against the pelting rain, and I under- 
 stood how the simple folk of old times, passing many 
 a silent day in their company, would come to think of
 
 170 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 them as neighbours. They are more Uke persons 
 than any other flower. In the long midsummer twi- 
 light they would take hold of the shepherd's fancy 
 peeping at him from over the wall, only waiting some 
 spell, the rustle of " night's horses " in the sycamore, 
 the passing of the moon's " dragon yoke," to cast their 
 purple raiment and break loose. 
 
 And wherever you find the foxglove on a Devonshire 
 wall you will find the pennjn^rort, her obvious satellite, 
 modelling herself on the same pattern, a spire of 
 hanging bells all leaning one way, though not so bent 
 over with their own weight, of the same fairy world, 
 but drab and pale, an attendant servile band, for- 
 bidden the purple, skirt-holders in the dance of the 
 fays. In folklore the pennywort would play Pease- 
 blossom to the foxglove's Titania. The Greeks would 
 have woven a m3^h out of them, embodying the spirit 
 of the lane and the wall. 
 
 We gained the stream again where it comes clatter- 
 ing down the hill, and fought our way up through a 
 tangle of maple and young oak, beside waterfalls, on 
 to the common. This is the borderland between the 
 forest and the moor — fine springy turf, good grazing 
 for sheep. We have left the chattering jay in the 
 valley ; the wood-pigeon and the ringdove give place 
 to the curlew and the snipe. About the stream there 
 is the same wealth of flowers. Battalions of yellow 
 iris flank it. There is an air of island strength in this 
 stout-bladed plant. On the open, wind-swept down 
 we have a hardier generation. We have left behind 
 the delicate yellow loosestrife and all shade-loving 
 blossoms. Soon we shall reach a soil in which the 
 iris cannot thrive.
 
 THE POWER OF A WALK 171 
 
 II 
 
 In a real long walk with an objective there should 
 be moments of doubt. Misgivings as to distance, 
 time, endurance, weather, are necessary if one is to 
 obtain that warming sense of miles overcome. 
 
 We had followed the stream up from the valley to 
 the common, but it had not dwindled with the miles 
 as we expected ; we were comfortably tired with our 
 scramble through the woods ; the intervals of sunshine 
 became fewer ; the labouring clouds were gathering 
 in weight, sinking heavily over the ridge of the moor 
 that made the skyline. 
 
 As the day wore on and the stream became infinitely 
 broken we had to admit defeat, or compromise, in the 
 approach to our objective. It would take another 
 day at least to follow the main channel up to its source. 
 In the map the thin line of its course disappeared in 
 the valley beneath Grimspound and the tin mines of 
 Vitifer. 
 
 So we forsook the stream in its youth and made a 
 bee line by compass for its cradle. We had seen 
 Hamildon Tor disappear in cloud on the horizon. 
 Hookney Tor, a lesser eminence, lay behind, and under- 
 neath it the stone circle of Grimspound, near which 
 the stream had its mysterious birth. 
 
 We were soon trudging through the stag-moss and 
 whortleberry, bracken and ling, pulled up every now 
 and then by a quaking bog, where the moss was starred 
 with the white cotton grass, purple and white orchis, 
 purple lousewort, and patches of bell heather. 
 
 On the outskirts of the moor there are scattered 
 sheep farms islanding the desolation. The sycamore
 
 172 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 is the tutelary tree of these homesteads. Seen through 
 the mist or in the sunhght over vast distances, standing 
 out strong and compact with its promise of shelter, 
 it must lengthen the shepherd's stride as he turns 
 towards home. One needs some such uncompromis- 
 ingly bleak and inhospitable setting as Dartmoor to 
 conjure up the positive genius of the hearth, and the 
 sycamore with its wide-spreading protective branches 
 overshadowing the grey and lichened roofs, the grey 
 stone of the farm, embodies the indwelling spirit of 
 homeliness. It is one with the gods of the byre and 
 the barn. 
 
 We descended to one of these farms to make sure 
 of the way, and were met by a stubby little man with 
 a black bowler hat and a purple face. He asked us 
 for news of the war, but did not wait to hear the small 
 details we could give. 
 
 " I seed it coming these twenty year," he bawled 
 at us in a voice tuned to the moors, pitched to a note 
 that outbrawls mountain streams. " And what was 
 Govment doing ? Nonsensing around for votes. I 
 sez to Emma " 
 
 He explained that though he was not in the hub 
 of things he read the papers and could see "a deal 
 farther than what was written down." Neither the 
 spy peril, nor the shortage of munitions, nor the 
 submarine menace had taken him unawares. He had 
 foreseen everything and for twenty years his jeremiads 
 had gone out to Emma and the heedless sycamores. 
 
 An honest but terrible man, adhesive as the Ancient 
 Mariner. He followed us, as we receded, charged with 
 much pent-up eloquence, denouncing all men as if 
 every Briton were culpable but he.
 
 THE POWER OF A WALK 173 
 
 Seeing it in his eye that he had marked us down 
 for the part of the patient and acquiescent Emma, 
 we made off, and were half way up the combe before 
 we remembered that we had forgotten to ask the way. 
 His voice pursued us in the wind crying after us — 
 
 " What I want to know is, ' Where is God ? ' " 
 
 We had expected an altar of peace, but came near 
 to being infected with the depression we were exorcis- 
 ing with such pains. We approached no other human 
 habitation until we found the cradle of our stream. 
 
 We discovered its source, or one of its many sources, 
 under Hookney Tor, a succession of small pools where 
 it had bored into the peat, transparent as air, some- 
 times burrowing, sometimes gliding beneath the firm 
 edges of the turf, which closed over it like a lid. It 
 rattled under the stones of Grimspound, giving that 
 great mystery a voice, murmuring the same tune it 
 used to sing to the rude settlers of the camp and to the 
 little men who lived in the stone circles and made 
 honest war with flints. 
 
 Tired as we were we climbed Hookney Tor, and 
 looked down on the great circle and up at Challacome 
 stone avenue the other side of the combe. The 
 clouds were racing inland, and blue sky appeared 
 in the direction of the sea. We leant on the purging 
 wind, the clean breath of it in our throats. There is 
 nothing like these solitudes to reconcile us with the 
 conflict that is waging between spirit and matter. 
 Here nothing is visible save stark nature, and the 
 rude stones piled together by man in the dawn of life. 
 Material things are immaterial. The hypercivilized 
 dross of cities, the inane accretion of wealth, brandings 
 of nature, all the fruit of " the getting and spending,"
 
 174 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 by which we lay waste our powers, can well be spared 
 for the universal scrapheap. It is of httle worth when 
 weighed against this naked soil of England, which 
 we hold by virtue of the invincible spirit that is her 
 dower. 
 
 We followed the small stream back for half a mile, 
 where it met us again on the straight road home. 
 The rippling'water was now blue in the sun. The 
 light forget-me-not sparkled among the water-cress. 
 The insects had all come out of their shelter. The 
 bees were making good lost time ; a red admiral 
 was airing himself in the meadow-sweet ; the dragon 
 flies dried their green wings over the stream. 
 
 The stream led us to a small farm; where a kettle 
 boiled on a turf fire. Here, too, there were sycamores, 
 and the housewife was a quiet, cheerful soul. She 
 gave us bread to toast over the peat. The faint savour 
 of the smoke lent it the appropriate rehsh. Earth is 
 good fuel. And she was not disturbed by the price 
 of coal. The rain had been good for the pasture ; 
 it had put gold into the pocket of the husbandman. 
 Here, it appeared, all was well with the world. She 
 was a contented woman. The price of sheep was high. 
 Her weekly newspaper breathed a genial optimism. 
 
 And she told us other cheerful things. The 
 " Emma " of the purple man was deaf, or next door 
 to it. Perhaps that explained his insistence upon 
 being heard. We had spared much pity for Emma, 
 none for the unhappy man who suffered from a dropsy 
 of talk. To him no doubt a sympathetic audience 
 was the one essential of happiness. Yet the wise 
 Providence, who looks all ways, had denied it. 
 
 It was dusk when we reached home. We heard
 
 THE POWER OF A WALK 175 
 
 the churring of the nightjar in the oak, the almost 
 human cry of the tawny owl. The cows loomed in 
 the mist like huge black barges silhouetted in cotton- 
 wool. 
 
 There is an odd satisfaction in being honestly tired. 
 There is power in a walk ; virtue in miles overcome. 
 The light of one's inn, as one returns, dissipates all 
 humours. And in the egoism of our senses the pro- 
 cess that has taken place in ourselves has a wider 
 application. We had been wet, tired, threatened with 
 failure ; we were dry, refreshed, warmed with victory. 
 We had quite forgotten the compromise by which we 
 had gained our end.
 
 MISERY'S BEDFELLOWS 
 
 IN a small auxiliary hospital in France, not far 
 from the sea, there lay three wounded men, an 
 Englishman, a Frenchman, and a German. The 
 ward was so cramped that it was difficult for the nurse 
 to move between the beds. 
 
 The Englishman's bed was next the door. He had 
 been wounded near Ypres and left out all night in 
 the rain. He had saved his life by lying on two dead 
 Germans whom he had just strength enough to draw 
 together into a kind of mattress. He had felt apolo- 
 getic at first for using them as a mat, but after a while 
 got it into his head that the men had rendered him 
 some kind of hospitable rite. The stretcher-bearer 
 who took him from the field twenty-four hours after- 
 wards had a story of his thanking the corpse. 
 
 Next him was the German. He had been crushed 
 by the debris of a falHng house near La Bassee in which 
 he had taken cover from shell fire. He was sniping 
 a trench from an upper window when the house was 
 hit, and he fell with part of the ceihng into the dairy 
 underneath, where he lay pinned to the floor. The 
 only other living thing in the building was a dog 
 tied by a chain which he could just reach. When he 
 unloosed the beast it went straight to the churn and, 
 out of some disciplinary sense of reward and service, 
 
 176
 
 MISERY'S BEDFELLOW 177 
 
 began turning it. The German called it away and 
 gave it some of his rations. The poor beast was half- 
 famished. It devoured them, and then went back 
 gratefully to the empty churn. The man soon lost 
 consciousness. 
 
 The Frenchman on the other side was a frostbite 
 case. He had left a boot in the mud between the 
 enemy's trench and his own during a night attack. 
 He had also a bullet wound in his right hand. 
 
 They were all good and sincere men. The German 
 was in the Landwehr, a professor of Metz, a kindly 
 man, the son of a Prussian immigre of 1871, a man 
 with a very strong sense of duty and a blind devotion 
 to the Fatherland, but a dull and unimaginative 
 pedant with no sense of humour or proportion at all. 
 He was a large-built, florid man, after the style which 
 the Frenchman would have called in architecture the 
 "Neo-Schwab." 
 
 The Frenchman, too, was a man of education. He 
 was a civil engineer, a reservist from Nancy, a man of 
 sensibility, subtlety, wit, and spirit, by caste and 
 tradition destined to be a flail of the Boches. 
 
 The Englishman was just an ordinary Englishman. 
 Like his neighbours in the ward he would go into the 
 tightest of tight places as a matter of course, but he 
 was quite unconscious of having a code. It was 
 merged in habit. If any one had stripped and ex- 
 hibited his ideahsm in its naked propriety he would 
 have been very uncomfortable indeed. 
 
 All three had been brought into the ward at the 
 end of the same week in December ; all three had 
 kept pace in convalescence and could now read and 
 smoke and talk. 
 
 M
 
 178 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 For a few days there was a natural stiffness in the 
 ward, but gradually after some exchange of courtesies 
 and inquiries the rigidity of relations thawed. The 
 Prussian, probably the most constrained of the three, 
 was the first to throw off constraint. 
 
 He spoke to the Englishman of England and to 
 the Frenchman of France. There was an English 
 lady to whom he wished the Englishman to convey 
 his respects when he returned to London, implying 
 that these would be received with a tender interest. 
 And he spoke to the Frenchman of his birthplace, 
 Nancy, compHmenting him on the Place Stanislas 
 and the architectural elegance of the old city. 
 
 The Frenchman met these approaches with ironic 
 reserve. The Englishman threw out an occasional 
 encouraging word. In his own circle he was something 
 of a raconteur, and he did not wish to miss anything 
 that might lend point to a good story. 
 
 The German was encouraged. He felt that he had 
 broken the ice with commendable delicacy, and he 
 began to enlarge on his political ideals. He did not 
 speak openly at first of all the benefits that the Greater 
 Germany would bring to his neighbours in the ward, 
 but there was an implicit conviction in everything he 
 said that the great civilizing World Power would, 
 with the help of the War Lord and his legions, regener- 
 ate England, introduce kultur into her ancient uni- 
 versities, and inspire France with a more virile idealism. 
 
 Then, pleased with his tact and feeling that he had 
 a sympathetic and intelligent audience, he allowed his 
 missionary zeal to override a too nice delicacy. The 
 centre bed became a pulpit ; the habit of Metz pre- 
 vailed. The Englishman wished that he had a note-
 
 MISERY'S BEDFELLOW 179 
 
 book. The French engineer felt Hke a small child at 
 the lycie. 
 
 The next morning all pretence of peace was dissi 
 pated. The argument began with the ethics of the 
 Christmas truce, and reverted to the origin of hostilities. 
 Belgium, according to the Teuton, was the aggressor. 
 Fragments of blue books, white books, yellow books, 
 hustled from bed to bed. The carnage of the battle- 
 field was repeated in the ward. The Englishman 
 heard the German say that the conquerors would 
 purge French Lorraine of its anti-Teutonic prejudice 
 and make of Nancy another Metz. When the nurse 
 came into the room the Frenchman was sitting up in 
 bed waving a formidable splint, under the menace 
 of which the German guarded himself gravely with 
 a bandaged hand. 
 
 The nurse reported the case to the doctor ; it looked 
 too much like war. The patients were separated 
 and put into different wards, but they both became 
 so miserable, and they implored so penitently and 
 with such promises of amendment to be restored to 
 each other's society, that the doctor relented. Each 
 had so much to say that he was sure it must carry 
 conviction to the other. 
 
 They say it now every day with some heat, but 
 without physical violence. The Englishman looks 
 on and listens and laughs, and, when appealed to, 
 says that both are right according to their convictions, 
 but that the German has been deceived. He thinks 
 them both very good fellows. They have become 
 friends in controversy, and will no doubt carry away 
 touching mementoes of their passing entente. 
 
 In this little story there are, no doubt, many in-
 
 i8o THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 accuracies. Some of the conversations were repeated 
 to me by another patient, who had them from the 
 nurse, and I cannot be quite sure how each of the men 
 came by his wounds. I may have confused the three 
 cases ; but that is immaterial. The story is true in 
 the only sense that matters. Bald fact is of secondary 
 importance. The point is that this small ward was 
 a microcosm of Europe, and one read in it the history 
 of a hideous and unnecessary wastage.
 
 THE NEW COURAGE 
 
 WHO in August, 1914, foreseeing the events 
 of the next twelve months, would have 
 beheved in the survival of happiness ? Yet one of 
 the things the war has taught us is the resiliency of 
 the human spirit. Permanent depression is a germ 
 against which a clear conscience and a good digestion 
 are proof. 
 
 My friend had not been in the trenches much, he 
 said, though part of the particular trench he had left 
 the day before was occupied by the Germans, and it 
 had become the normal evening's pastime to throw 
 hand grenades at one another over the scrap of no- 
 man's land in between. He had spent most of his 
 time burying his pals, and now two afternoons out 
 of his short four days were to be taken up with seeing 
 the people of fellows in the regiment who had been 
 killed. 
 
 Yet I doubt if he had ever been happier. It was 
 so jolly seeing people about again, he said, as he drifted 
 from island to island in Piccadilly Circus, with the 
 mingled alertness and abstraction of the man who 
 is used to taking cover. He was afraid he would 
 have to give up the idea of going on the river, but he 
 
 181
 
 i82 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 hoped to be over again in four months' time, if leave 
 vv^ere not tied up, and we would have a jolly day in 
 Sonning. " If the Boches don't pick me off in the 
 meantime," he might have added. We both knew 
 it was an even chance, but it would have been the 
 worst of bad taste to have so much as hinted at it. 
 
 I remembered — it was only a year ago — the exag- 
 gerated importance one used to attach to being alive. 
 In old memoirs and romances one followed the hero 
 through a succession of campaigns and hair-breadth 
 escapes until one wished that he would lay aside his 
 sword, feeling that he had had his fill of shocks and 
 adventures, and that it was time he went back to the 
 beautiful dame in the castle and spent his remaining 
 days in the gentler pleasures of the chase. The thought 
 of sudden death with so much of life waiting to be 
 enjoyed seemed perverse and abnormal. Now one 
 understands that these hesitations implied a want 
 of perspective. Death is poignant still, but not so 
 ugly as it was ; it is a triumph more often than a 
 checkmate. Instead of a hearse and black plumes, 
 one sees a bright ensign, hears the beat of drums. 
 
 Everything that was normal a year ago has become 
 abnormal, and what was abnormal has become normal. 
 It is abnormal to go out to dinner and have a good 
 time ; it is normal to have one's appetite spoilt by the 
 neighbourhood of the unburied bodies of one's friends. 
 It is only a question of adapting oneself to a new 
 plane. 
 
 The soldier's faculty for happiness is not strange, 
 it springs from natural sources. The phenomenal 
 thing is the civilian who has not been in the firing 
 line and who yet, after a year of wastage, which seems
 
 THE NEW COURAGE 183 
 
 only the beginning of things, can enjoy his meals, the 
 pleasures of exercise, intercourse with his friends, and 
 the beauties of nature — provided, of course, that he 
 is sure in his own mind that he would be fighting if 
 he could or ought. 
 
 The faculty for happiness is organic. It does not 
 imply insensibility, as one's increased capacity for 
 receiving bad news without a proportionate fall of 
 spirits might lead one to suppose. I heard a civilian 
 admit, a little shamefacedly, that a depressing news 
 summary did not leave him with " the same empty 
 feeling in the stomach " as it did last year. " I am 
 glad to hear you say that," a friend remarked. " I 
 had an uncomfortable feeling that I was getting 
 callous." 
 
 In a certain respect we are more callous than we 
 were, but this does not imply dulled sympathies, 
 slackened sinews, or weakened resolution. It is a 
 protective callosity, a faculty for mental and spiritual 
 endurance evolved through strain. We accustom 
 ourselves to a new order of things like creatures whose 
 eyes are adapted for evolutionary needs to lack of 
 sunlight. Normal respiration in what have hitherto 
 seemed abnormal conditions is made possible by the 
 same process of acclimatization which enables us to 
 breathe at high elevations. To have this so is worth 
 many victories. The marvel of 1915 is not the sub- 
 versal of everything which we used to think made life 
 worth living ; it is the survival of the organic optimism 
 of man in the new conditions. 
 
 Some one has argued that as happiness and pain 
 are relative and the reaction from one to the other 
 proportionate, it must follow that they are evenly
 
 i84 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 balanced in all. Possibly the sum of happiness is 
 not so greatly depreciated as one might believe. It 
 is true that civihzed man is now mainly occupied in 
 the destruction of human life or in the preparation 
 of the means for it. We have scrapped all our old 
 toys, half the things we used to care for, or put them 
 aside in a dark cupboard, and we cannot imagine 
 taking them out again. Books have lost their savour, 
 novels are flat ; the fiction of 1914 is as remote from 
 reality as Richardson, or Madame d'Arblay, or " The 
 Castle of Otranto " ; the highways of the year before 
 last as unfamiliar as the underworld explored by 
 iEneas. But we have not lost the knack of faith, or 
 hope, or cheerfulness, or quiet enjoyment. 
 
 And it is not the weak and slothful optimism of the 
 wilfully blind, the ostrich trick of the poltroon who 
 dare not look in the direction whence danger comes ; 
 it is a faith born of new proofs of the unconquerable 
 spirit of man, and it will carry us through the darker 
 days that are yet to come. 
 
 In nearly every contact of life one meets the new 
 courage. The father of a family beams across the 
 breakfast table at his wife. " They think Guy will 
 have the complete use of his right hand after all," 
 he says. Or there will be a glow of satisfaction at the 
 recovery of the lost hne at Hooge. Yesterday's post 
 may have brought news of the amputation of Guy's 
 left hand, reports of further victories of von Mackensen 
 and Hindenburg on the eastern front and no news at 
 all of the son who was reported missing three months 
 ago in the Dardanelles. Yet the cloud has hfted. 
 
 Or take our young friend in Piccadilly after his 
 visits of condolence. What assurance for the future
 
 THE NEW COURAGE 185 
 
 happiness of the race may be read into his pious 
 ejaculations ! 
 
 " I had the most topping bath this morning — first 
 for four months. By Jove, it is jolly seeing people 
 about again ! "
 
 THE PROFESSOR AND THE 
 POLICEMAN 
 
 THERE were a number of people in Erpington 
 and Little Sconning who were eager to "do 
 their bit." The notices about aeroplanes and lights 
 and the instructions as to how to behave in the pres- 
 ence of unexploded bombs gave a touch of reality to 
 the war-cloud which, so far, had cast no shadow on 
 the two villages. 
 
 In the case of Jarge and Constable Pike patriotism 
 was quickened by the hope of reward. Rumour had 
 reached Erpington of a policeman near Bungay who 
 had earned the fifty pounds for " copping " a spy. It 
 was a belated young lady with impossibly large feet 
 who had been asking questions about troops in the 
 park. The constable attracted by the feet had thrown 
 his arms round the young woman's waist in the most 
 professional manner and encountered a hardness in 
 the ribs that was not of whalebone. The next morn- 
 ing the disguised Uhlan was shot in the summer-house 
 of a neighbouring J. P. 
 
 " Fifty punn. That's hans'm, I call it. You don't 
 git a war like this every day," was Constable Pike's 
 comment. 
 
 " It's a pity we don't git no furriners these parts," 
 
 186
 
 THE PROFESSOR AND THE POLICEMAN 187 
 
 Jarge was saying, but even as he deprecated the 
 scarcity of potential spies in the Eastern Counties, 
 Tobias Bugg joined the group at the corner of the " Red 
 Lion." 
 
 " There's a rare furrin-Iooking ole genulman bin at 
 the poost arfis," he said. " If you cut down Lope's 
 Lane maybe you'll ketch him at the Staithe." 
 
 Constable Pike made dowTi Lope's Lane after the rich 
 spoil as fast as portliness would allow. " Fifty punn " 
 meant a lot of things — a chicken run, a rabbit hutch, 
 a prime sow, a new chaff-cutter. The mental inven- 
 tory had assumed the proportions of a sale when he ran 
 into the professor on the boat-house steps. He had 
 his catechism by heart. 
 
 " Beg pordon, sir," he panted, " but where might 
 you have slep' last night ? " 
 
 The professor admitted to having slept in London. 
 " Lunnon — ooh ! " The constable's interjection im- 
 plied an unfathomable knowingness. He looked at 
 Jarge. " Lunnon ! " he repeated in an aside that 
 might be heard across the river. " That's where they 
 all come from." 
 
 " And might I make so bold as to ask your trade ? " 
 
 The " furriner " feigned innocent surprise. " I am 
 a professor," he said meekly. 
 
 " A professor — ooh ! " Pike made no direct reply, 
 but turned again darkly to Jarge. " They doo say as 
 how most of 'em is professors." 
 
 "And perhaps you will oblige with your name." 
 The constable employed the ironic courtesy appro- 
 priate to the situation. 
 
 " Mare. I am Professor Mare." 
 
 It was an unlucky name. Mare or Meyer, the only
 
 188 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 German name known in those parts, the name of 
 " the fm-rin' genulman as had hved up at the House." 
 
 " And what might you be arter ? " the constable 
 asked. 
 
 The professor explained that he was an entomologist. 
 He had come to Sconning Fen to collect moths. He 
 was lodging with Mrs. Emms at the post office. He 
 showed great patience under this catechism, answering 
 abstractedly as if unconscious of the deep pit into 
 which he was walking. 
 
 Constable Pike's dispositions were worthy of the 
 best traditions of the force. He committed the 
 " furriner " to Jarge. " You take him along to the 
 fen in the boat ; and doon't let go of him," he said. 
 "I'm a-goin'to the poost arfis. You'll hev your bit." 
 
 In the village the professor had excited the interest 
 of a touring lady on a bicycle, also anxious to do her 
 bit. He had sent a telegram from Erpington Station 
 to the editor of " Nature," remembering two slips in a 
 proof : " For monotropa read neoUia, for erigeron read 
 ageratum." That was the first ring of the coil he had 
 wound round himself. Then he had next to no lug- 
 gage. Another mistake was the large geological map 
 which it was his habit to consult in all public places. 
 He had affected a rucksack and a Tyrolese hat since 
 the early seventies, and the horn spectacles of the stone- 
 breaker. The butterfly net which he carried appeared 
 the most childish device to disarm suspicion. 
 
 In the boat Jarge tried to " draw " the professor 
 about the war. But, strange to say, he took no interest 
 in the war. He was only dimly aware that there was 
 a war. The really scientific mind is impervious to 
 what newspapers call events. War the professor
 
 THE PROFESSOR AND THE POLICEMAN 189 
 
 would define as the sporadic destruction of man by 
 fellow-man brought about by the artificial grouping of 
 races and the consequent error and unevenness in dis- 
 tribution and the necessity of readjustment. Such 
 issues, he would argue, are transitory and incidental. 
 The things that matter are the small primal truths 
 which afford us data for permanent laws, more general 
 speculations ; the distribution of rare plants by the 
 fertilization of insects, or the gradual extinction of cer- 
 tain species of lepidoptera through the growing scarcity 
 of the herb upon which the caterpillar feeds. In the 
 circumstances it was natural that the small village of 
 Little Sconning in Norfolk, the habitat of Nonagria 
 hrevilinea, should loom larger in the Professor's mind 
 than Ypres or Lemburg. The capture of hrevilinea was 
 certainly more vital at the moment than the fall of 
 Przemysl. 
 
 Professor Mare, though not a strong man, was 
 obstinate and of considerable bulk, and Jarge would 
 have found it difficult to carry him bodily back to the 
 boat. So at ten o'clock at night the man of science 
 was occupied in his normal pursuits, brushing the 
 moths from his lamp into the killing bottle and examin- 
 ing the lure of rum and treacle which he had spread on 
 the dark alders. 
 
 It was nearly eleven when the supperless Jarge 
 heard approaching rollocks. Constable Pike had be- 
 come anxious. The cipher telegram had been inter- 
 preted by the dishevelled-looking young woman in 
 divided skirts who was determined at all costs '• to 
 do her bit." It was most certainly " Jarman." She 
 had come in the boat ^^dth the poHceman and the post- 
 man and Tobias Bugg.
 
 igo THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Jarge heard the voice of the constable across the 
 water. 
 
 " What's Jarge doing, I wonder. Look at the fur- 
 riner's lights ; that's what the squoire told us to look 
 out for. He'll be arter bringing'down them acepolines." 
 ? It was decided upon disembarkation that it was too 
 late to return that night and that it would be better 
 " to clap the furriner into the ba-arn." The professor 
 offered no resistance. He packed up his guilty para- 
 phernalia with a submissiveness that implied know- 
 ledge of the end. Jarge and the postman and the con- 
 stable and Tobias Bugg were to mount guard in turn. 
 The female detective was found a room in the farm. 
 
 " He seems a ra-rare peaceable old bloke," Tobias 
 Blugg ventured to Mr. Pike, as they kept watch. 
 
 " He peaceable ! We'll see what the squoire hev to 
 say to him in the marning." 
 
 " He's fairly trapped, he is. You've got him clever 
 and no mistake," Bugg emended with a desire to pro- 
 pitiate. 
 
 " I reckon he knows he's for the ro-ope," the con- 
 stable said, and added enigmatically, " I'll hev a fine 
 fat sow." He fell asleep while he was completing the 
 inventory. ?:j 
 
 At eight o'clock the squire arrived and the doors 
 of the barn were thrown open. The professor emerged, 
 covered from his beard to his boots with chaff and cob- 
 webs, but glad and impenitent and brandishing a small 
 green bottle. 
 
 He was much too Teutonic-looking to deceive the 
 squire. Moreover, that enlightened magistrate recog- 
 nized the well-known features of a Fellow of the Royal 
 Society.
 
 THE PROFESSOR AND THE POLICEMAN 191 
 
 " Of course, of course. Yes," the professor said, 
 brushing aside the magistrate's apologies. " A very 
 natural mistake — commendable if misguided zeal. 
 But I've had the most astounding piece of good for- 
 tune. I have found a specimen of brevilinea in 
 the loft — a female in good condition with eggs." 
 
 The^ constable's face fell half an inch. " Well," 
 he said, " if he ain't a Jarman I don't know no more'n 
 the Poop of Rome." 
 
 The odd thing is that Providence should have em- 
 ployed the interested patriotism of Jarge and Mr. Pike 
 and Tobias Bugg for the furtherance of science.
 
 PHILOSOPHY ON THE LAND 
 
 A FARM of fifty acres in the old fen country. 
 Rushes for grazing and poppies in the corn. 
 And on the slope down to the river a gravelly soil exud- 
 ing flint and overgrown with white campion and viper's 
 bugloss. 
 
 As poor land as you will find in the country. Old 
 Jordan makes as much by carting gravel as he does 
 by his wheat. Nevertheless there is a harvest of 
 kinds, and the reaping of it calls for strong men, as 
 many as the fat fields across the valley. It is the most 
 essential crop the Jordans have ever had the harvest- 
 ing of ; and, as luck will have it, " Albert " is the only 
 healthy young man of military age left in the parish. 
 
 The drain of the youth of Thrutton Parva into the 
 services dates from before the war. A generation or 
 two ago, when the " fen rights " existed, they were 
 reckoned a rabbit-killing, poaching, eel-catching, fish- 
 netting, out-at-night crew, looked upon as scamps by 
 more settled folk, and making better soldiers in war 
 time than in times of peace. When the land was 
 drained and cut up into allotments and sold by the 
 Enclosure Commissioners they did not take kindly to 
 the plough. They took to " soldiering " or went to 
 sea. The inherited spirit died hard. Buckle might 
 have made a whole chapter out of Thrutton Parva 
 
 m
 
 PHILOSOPHY ON THE LAND 193 
 
 to illustrate the influence of physical environment on 
 character 
 
 The call to arms in August made a clean sweep 
 of the young men in the village. Albert alone 
 stood firm and shameless. He and Adam, who will 
 be drawing his old-age pension next year, and a con- 
 sumptive youth named Borett, and Jordan himself are 
 doing all the work of the farm. The women do not 
 turn out, except to carry the men their dinner and 
 " fourses." Thrutton Parva is neither old-fashioned 
 nor new-fashioned enough for that. 
 
 At a quarter to twelve you miay see them filing down 
 the path, Albert's mother, Jordan's daughter, Borett 's 
 sister, Adam's wife, with their cans and baskets and 
 bottles. The horses are taken out of the machine ; 
 they have cut as much as the men can bind for hours 
 to come. Adam and Jordan have been stooping all 
 the morning, lifting the sheaves and building up the 
 shock. It is hard work for old bones. The consump- 
 tive youth has had an easy job on the gleaning rake. 
 
 Seeing strangers Adam doffs his hat and holds it 
 out for " largess " with the assurance of a church- 
 warden with the plate. " You're the first genulmen 
 as I've seen on the land this harvest," he says. The 
 old custom and the good old name have survived from 
 feudal times into the days of self-binders and gleaning- 
 rakes — an immemorial toll upon visitors to the harvest 
 field. 
 
 Adam and Jordan between them have five sons with 
 the colours, Adam could not remember the names 
 of his boys' regiments, or whether they were in Eng- 
 land or France. He had " reared " them and they 
 were serving. He had done his part without thinking
 
 194 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 of it — as much as a man can do ; and the war had not 
 cast a shadow over his peace of mind. 
 
 He had heard things were not going " ower well." 
 There were " them Dardanelles they talk of as likely 
 to let out a lot of corn just when the price of wheat be 
 high. Didn't seem right." Adam had heard of them 
 from Jordan. Who or what they were he did not 
 know ; but he " hoped they'd hould their corn in a 
 tidy bit arter the ha-arvest." If Adam could visualize 
 these unknown quantities as narrow straits of sea 
 behind which corn was locked he would naturally 
 think we were fighting to keep them shut. 
 
 Old Jordan, too, went in constant fear of " them 
 Dardanelles." Some one had frightened him about 
 them in the spring. For a month they loomed large 
 at Thrutton Parva as a tribe of mercenary Huns who 
 threatened to make capital out of the instability of 
 things. 
 
 " So far no ha-arm's done," he said cheerfully ; " but 
 we don't want that dratted corn through — not yet." 
 
 A true patriot with all his muddled philosophy. He 
 has given his three strong lads, and he toils from sun- 
 rise till dusk to make the most of an ungenerous soil. 
 The barley field by the gravel pit is a sad wilderness. 
 A jungle of wild flowers has encroached unchecked. 
 The land is too foul to be worth the feeding. August 
 here is a yellow month — toad-flax, ragwort, tansy, 
 and fleabane thrive in this thin crop with an opulence 
 that is almost cynical. Climbing growths, like the 
 black bindweed and field convolvulus, strangle the 
 corn. Thistles seed before the oats are ripe. It is 
 difficult sometimes to distinguish what has been sown. 
 
 A scarlet field of poppies running down to the river
 
 PHILOSOPHY ON THE LAND 195 
 
 is reflected in the stream. It makes such a blaze of 
 colour that I came near to complimenting old Jordan 
 on his crop, but remembered in time they were weeds 
 to be deplored, and commiserated with him instead. 
 
 "They draw the land," he explained, "and suck 
 the moisture out of it." I learnt that the scarlet field 
 had an unhappy history. The rabbits had eaten half 
 an acre of oats, and the showery weather had kept 
 the men from reaping it until the wind came and 
 blew the heads off the crop. 
 
 In spite of the tradition that the farmer is given to 
 grumbling one generally finds him of a more even 
 mind than other folk. Mr. Jordan takes the unre- 
 sponsiveness of his land very philosophically ; he is not 
 easily elated or depressed. Like most Norfolk men 
 who work on the soil he is sparing of superlatives. 
 Understatement as a figure of speech has become with 
 him an art. He seldom uses a positive when a negative 
 will do. 
 
 In the wheat field which he was cutting the wind 
 and rain had flattened the corn down so that the 
 machine caught the stalk just below the ears, leaving 
 a stubble eighteen inches high. 
 
 " The wind hevn't made that lay too easy," was his 
 comment. 
 
 And the same moderation of speech is provoked 
 by more remote ills — the " Kayser " and the " Jar- 
 mans." Little Thrutton wastes no bitterness on them. 
 " I reckon if he did anybody any gude, he'd be sorry 
 for 't," was Jordan's summary of the instigator of the 
 war. 
 
 The most positive expression of disapproval I heard 
 was from Mr. Jordan's wife. A Zeppelin had dropped
 
 196 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 a bomb within seven miles of the farm and she thought 
 it a most scandalous thing that the Germans should 
 make their excursions at night. 
 
 " They seem a ra-are vicious kind of people," she 
 said. " The old Kayser, he's a bad 'un. I should 
 like to git hould of him with my roolin pin." 
 
 No one in these farms is kept awake at night worry- 
 ing about the war. They barely glance at the paper ; 
 they have little time to think. But in harvest time 
 this work has its reward. The freshly cut wheat 
 straw, though not so sweet as hay, has a good, satisfy- 
 ing, earthy smell, and after three days' sun it must 
 carry with it the comforting sense of a Providence 
 reasonably responsive to a full year's toil. It requires 
 backbone and patience to coax a crop out of a soil 
 like this, and the struggle, without adding to the 
 delicacy of one's perceptions, brings a certain philo- 
 sophic calm. 
 
 But it was not until I heard the dehghtfully mud- 
 dled logic of Albert's mother that I reahzed the im- 
 perviousness of these folk to events from without. 
 It is an existence into which no kind of mental or 
 spiritual strain can enter. 
 
 Some one — I think it was the curate's wife — had 
 suggested that a strong, hearty lad like her son might 
 be better employed killing Germans. But she didn't 
 see it. 
 
 " The ole Kayser, he begun the war," she said. 
 " Let 'im finish it isself. I don't see no call to send 
 Albert." 
 
 And that is the reason why this strapping young 
 man of twenty-five is placidly and unashamedly help- 
 ing Mr. Jordan to bring in his corn.
 
 BURIDAN 
 
 A LITTLE, timid, sandy-haired soldier with washy 
 blue eyes and a limp — a piou-piou who looked 
 much too frail for the shock of war and yet had evi- 
 dently emerged from it, forlornly occupied the deserted 
 platform at Versailles. 
 
 He had been left behind, it seemed, or had left 
 himself behind, which was worse. His ambulance 
 train was bound for somewhere in Brittany — it was 
 Rennes or Fougeres — where he was to convalesce 
 obediently, but he had given it the slip. I had heard 
 the angry official who had just strutted into the chef- 
 de-gare's office rating him. 
 
 " You stay on the platform here and do not budge. 
 If you move out of the station I will have you arrested. 
 You will follow by the next train, do you hear ? There 
 is now two hours." 
 
 The pioti-piou stood abjectly on the platform follow- 
 ing the man with his eyes, his head hanging forward, the 
 scanty bristles of his beard flattened against his chest. 
 Then he limped to a seat. One expected him to burst 
 into tears, and wondered what inward stimulus could 
 have whipped such meekness into insubordination. 
 No one could look less like a law-breaker. 
 
 I was moved to cross the line and ask if I could help. 
 Here is his simple story. He is patron of an estaminet 
 
 197
 
 198 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 in the outskirts of Versailles ; it is but four kilometres 
 from where we stand. He has not seen his wife — it is 
 now six months, and there is a baby he has not seen 
 at all. He had sent a letter two days ago. He had 
 looked for them out the window, searching vainly for a 
 certain red shawl. Such was his faith in the benignly 
 ordered system of things — and then descended on to 
 the incredibly empty and abandoned platform. Cross- 
 examined, his name was Buridan. The lady's name 
 was Celeste, the child's Celestine. I took down the 
 address — the Cafe de la Tour de Nesle, 5, Rue du 
 Petit Coquempot, Versailles. 
 
 " Wait, Buridan," I said, " I will bring you Celeste 
 and also Celestine." 
 
 In the Place outside there was no vestige of a cab 
 or taxi. The two nearest hotels yielded nothing. As 
 I ran I was haunted by the trustful eyes of Buridan — 
 the blue of skimmed milk, and the score of red hairs 
 that formed his beard. The fate of Empires was for- 
 gotten. It was a point of pride. Nothing in the 
 world mattered save the capture of Celeste. 
 
 There was a sudden report like a gun ; the plan it 
 signalled followed, quick as the recoil. The car was 
 coming down the road at forty miles an hour ; I leapt 
 in front of it, threw up my arms like a semaphore, 
 and held it up. 
 
 The man's face was hopeless — vindictive almost. 
 In my first revulsion I made a false start, assuming 
 that the car would be at the service of the wounded 
 piou-pioii as a matter of course. My apologies were 
 conventional. It was as if I were commandeering it and 
 had the right. This was a mistake. I should have 
 assumed the enormity of the favour to begin with, then
 
 BURIDAN 199 
 
 a pleased and grateful surprise at the first suspicion 
 of unbending. Probably no method of approach 
 would have succeeded. 
 
 He looked at me coldly. " Eh, hien quoi ! "he said 
 with a gesture of impatience, and stretched across his 
 companion to let down the window on the other side. 
 
 I turned to the woman. 
 
 " I appeal to you, madam. He is wounded, a sol- 
 dier of France. He has been in the firing line six 
 months. He is passing now from the trenches by the 
 very door of his house and he has not seen his own 
 child." 
 
 She had a soft face, though with marks of strength 
 and suffering in it, a kind of dehcate hothouse beauty, 
 and a gentle reserve. Until I spoke to her she had 
 been listening abstractedly in a way that made me 
 suspect she was more interested in the effect of the 
 incident on her husband than in the misfortunes of the 
 poor piou-piou. 
 
 I was mistaken. She told her chauffeur to drive 
 to the Caf6 de la Tour de Nesle, 5, Rue du Petit 
 Coquempot, and invited me in a very sweet voice to 
 take the seat by his side. 
 
 Celeste received the aristocratic lady in her sanded 
 bar as if such visits were in the natural order of things. 
 Celestine was audible from an inner apartment. Mme. 
 Buridan was a handsome woman with pretty violet 
 eyes and black hair. She wore a blue blouse d la 
 Chanticleer, embroidered with gay cocks. She was an 
 attractive, capable-looking woman, with the easy 
 grace and assurance of her class. 
 
 Madame, the protector, took over charge ; Monsieur 
 remained in the car outside.
 
 200 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " You are Madame Celeste Buridan ? Is it not so ? 
 And this lady ? " 
 
 Celeste presented her belle sceur. 
 
 " Your husband is going to my hospital at Nantes," 
 Madame said. " He sleeps at Rennes to-night. You 
 will perhaps like to accompany him. He is especially 
 anxious to see C^lestine. . . . Yes. He is in good 
 health, only a little fatigued and lame in one leg. He 
 wants you now at the station. How long will suffice 
 you to pack ? " 
 
 Celeste could pack in ten minutes. 
 
 " You have twenty," Madame said. "I see you 
 can leave the cafe in good hands." And she smiled 
 at the sister-in-law. " For myself I have purchases to 
 make." She returned to the motor. The interview 
 had been an affair of five minutes. While Celeste 
 packed and Madame pursued her shopping I talked 
 with the belle sceur. 
 
 "It is a pity," I said, " that Monsieur Buridan 
 cannot be sipping his own cognac. But, tell me — 
 Why do you call your cafe La Tour de Nesle ? " 
 
 The belle sceur smiled and directed me to the prints 
 on the wall. " You do not know the history ? " she 
 said. " It was Madame's thought. As Monsieur is 
 named Buridan she called his house La Tour de Nesle." 
 
 The dim associations which had puzzled me in the 
 motor took shape, and I remembered how Queen 
 Marguerite de Bourgoyne and Jeanne, and Blanche 
 Comtesse de la Marche, lured their lovers into the old 
 tower and there had them despatched and thrown 
 into the Seine. The grisly series of prints depicted 
 the whole story. In one the lovers were in the em- 
 braces of the three grandes dames, the floor strewn
 
 BURIDAN 201 
 
 with the debris of swords, cloaks, bottles, plumed 
 cockades, while the hourreau lurked behind the cur- 
 tain with raised battle-axe. In the next scene the 
 heavy axe is descending upon vainly suppliant hands 
 while Marguerite with flinty looks holds a torch to 
 the assassins. " When night fell the Seine became 
 the tomb of the victims of Marguerite de Bourgojme." 
 But Buridan escaped out of the window and denounced 
 the queen to her king. I gazed fascinated at this 
 gay Lothario, the literary ancestor of our piou-piou, 
 and more than ever admired the esprit of Celeste. 
 
 In the last scene Marguerite is about to be strangled 
 with her own hair. Two executioners, each with a 
 rope-hke wisp of it in his hand, stand ready on either 
 side to pull at the signal. The gaoler is Hfting his 
 finger 
 
 While I was regarding these horrors Celeste entered 
 with Celestine wrapped in the corner of her red shawl, 
 and my thoughts turned to the other Buridan. His 
 daughter had certainly inherited the piou-piou' s plain- 
 ness. 
 
 The engine of the car throbbed outside. Madame 
 had returned with parcels innumerable. There re- 
 mained sixteen minutes to catch the train. I handed 
 in Celeste, that Jemme d'esprit, thinking of Buridan 
 and the strange adjustments by which Providence com- 
 plements the weak. The belle sceur was left in charge 
 of La Tour de Nesle. 
 
 Just as the train was starting the red shawl and 
 the bundles and the babe were pushed into the car- 
 riage with the piou-piou at Madame's instance by the 
 same irascible official who had rated him two hours 
 before.
 
 202 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Madame waved a glove at Celeste. " I will call for 
 you and the hlessS to-morrow at Rennes," she said. 
 Then she turned to me and thanked me graciously for 
 my " assistance."
 
 THE PATHAN 
 
 A YOUNG blade of a Pathan, with his loose, well- 
 oiled locks hanging down with a stiff upward 
 curl, a cloak flung over his shoulders, and his smart 
 kula set at a jaunty angle in his turban, swaggered 
 into the receiving-room, a cigarette in his mouth, and 
 grinned at the medical ofHcer. He had an air which 
 made the hospital followers yield him place. 
 
 " What is the matter with you ? " the doctor asked. 
 
 " I was sick outside." 
 
 " Since when," he said, " has it been the custom 
 for a sepoy to speak to an officer smoking a cigarette ? " 
 
 " I would take it out, sahib," he said, smihng, " but 
 both my arms are broken." The doctor lifted the 
 man's cloak from his shoulder. A machine-gun bullet 
 had smashed his left wrist, tearing three tendons, and 
 penetrated his right upper arm. There was a com- 
 pound fracture in each wound ; and he was glad of 
 the excuse to smoke. 
 
 He ought to have ejected the cigarette before he 
 came into the room, but it was a touch of impudence 
 that one could forgive. For a month he slept and 
 smoked and smiled, in spite of an exposed nerve which 
 made the dressing of the wound painful. At the end 
 of it the doctor was sorry to lose him. 
 
 In one of the wards I found another Pathan sur- 
 
 203
 
 204 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 rounded with all the comforts of life, a blue dressing- 
 gown, red blankets, soft green felt slippers — the gift 
 of the Indian Soldiers Fund — and a table strewn with 
 cigarettes, 
 
 " The Sircar is looking after you all right," I said 
 to him. 
 
 " Ha, sahib," he answered, with a smile, pointing 
 to this throat, " Sirkar-ke gole yahan khaia " — " I 
 have [literally " eaten "] a Sircar's bullet here." 
 
 I doubt if any Sikh, Gurkha, Dogra, Rajput, or 
 Punjabi Mussulman would have been capable of this 
 repartee. The Pathan's humour is subtle, with a hint 
 of irony in it ; the Gurkha has an almost childlike 
 bonhomie ; he enjoys the same happy relations with 
 his regimental officer as exist between a housemaster 
 at one of our public schools and the big boys in his 
 house. When the doctor comes into the ward with 
 the cigarette rations he fixes some Gurkha with a 
 stern eye and says : 
 
 " The Gurkhas have become as Sikhs, I hear, and 
 no longer smoke. Therefore the others will receive 
 a larger portion." 
 
 This sally is greeted with much laughter, and merri- 
 ment increases with repetition. One seldom hears 
 other Indian soldiers laugh aloud. 
 
 The Pathan can vent his humour in a well-conceived 
 practical joke. There was a company of them in 
 some cottages near Hazebroucke at the beginning of 
 the war. They had come up in support and were 
 waiting their turn. The place was being heavily 
 shelled, and one of them was seen to come out of the 
 kitchen where they were cooking their chapatties and 
 stroll into a beet field. He stood upright for a mo-
 
 THE PATHAN 205 
 
 merit, studying the effect of shrapnel in his immediate 
 neighbourhood, and then stooped, unobserved, as he 
 thought, tore up a huge beet, and heaved it through 
 the window at his friends. As they came scurrjdng 
 out thinking that the roof was about their ears he 
 doubled up with laughter. 
 
 " The Pathan is a sportsman," a subaltern in a class- 
 company regiment said to me. " He never saves 
 money but spends more than he earns. He likes a 
 bright waistcoat, and he carries it with a devil-may- 
 care, swashbuckling air." There was much in com- 
 mon between the subaltern and his havildar. 
 
 Though his code is separated by a wide gulf from 
 the Englishman's, the Pathan has probably more in 
 common with him than any other Asiatic. Within 
 this code he is to be trusted absolutely. Only a few 
 Politicals and Indian Army officers understand it, 
 but they swear by him. He is capable of certain cold- 
 blooded atrocities in his blood feuds, but these are part 
 of a recognized retributive system, and it is not really 
 difficult for us to reconcile our liking for the tribesman 
 who has a " f rightfulness " of his own with our dis- 
 taste for the new phase of the German spirit. One 
 could respect the Prussian more if he were frankly 
 primitive. But he is disingenuous ; he forfeits con- 
 sideration because he is devolving while he pretends 
 to evolve. The subaltern of the class-company regi- 
 ment would say that the Pathan is a sportsman and 
 the German is not — which, of course, is no argument. 
 But, after all, it is not the code so much that is the 
 touchstone of worth as the way, having once accepted 
 it, one lives up to it and submits to its disabilities with 
 an equal mind. The Pathan has probably too much
 
 2o6 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 sense of proportion for a hymn of hate, though, as 
 
 his blood enemy knows, he can be ruthless enough. 
 * * »: * « 
 
 The kind of stalking for which we take merit in war 
 is a pastime with the Pathan in peace. Consequently 
 he starts on a campaign with advantages. He is out 
 to get his man ; he keeps a cool head, and never wastes 
 his ammunition. A cartridge costs anything from 
 fourpence to a rupee across the border. He neither 
 understands the enemy's vain holocausts nor his futile 
 expenditure of heavy missiles. It must be a mortal 
 blow to his humility — if he ever had any — to have seen 
 the Boches fall in masses in front of his thinly held 
 trench. 
 
 And he is wonderfully hardy. The young blade 
 who swaggered into the receiving-room was a type. 
 That double fracture would have put the average man 
 out of action. An Afridi who died in the hospital last 
 week at three in the morning was smoking at one. 
 They will smoke literally in articulo mortis. 
 
 But patience, hardiness, endurance are not confined 
 to the Pathan. They are the note of all these wards. 
 A Dogra with a bullet in his back and total paralysis 
 below the hips was smoking a pipe. I asked him how 
 he was, and he said, " Accha, sahib ! " — " I am well." 
 A Jat with pneumonia said, " Aram hai " — " There is 
 relief." Another man with a hole in the back of his 
 head — the doctor told me the brain was exposed and 
 that he could see it throbbing when he dressed the 
 wound — put out his hand for a cigarette. On the 
 table by his side there was a recently smoked pipe 
 and some coarse French tobacco. A Gurkha had a 
 bullet through his chin which had cut down through
 
 THE PATHAN 207 
 
 the throat into the lung. He gurgled some phrase of 
 gratitude as we passed. 
 
 A French Army doctor, going round the wards with 
 us, asked whether it was insensibility or self-control. 
 The Indian Medical Service man smiled. He had 
 worked in Indian hospitals for twenty years, but he 
 would not be led into generalizations. So we were 
 left to form our own conclusions out of an impression, 
 that will abide with us, of double rows of beds filled 
 with wounded men, all of whom had the same tale, 
 " Aram hai"—" There is relief " ; " Accha, sahib "— 
 " I am well."
 
 THE WILLING "OLD BUSTER 
 
 jj 
 
 MILLWARD'S case is all the fault of the System. 
 The same little tragedy of the weak flesh and 
 willing spirit is being played in other homes. Most 
 of one's friends could point to a variant of it. 
 
 He had been ill, but a year's careful dieting had 
 set him on his legs. He was forty-five but looked 
 older. To all appearances he was fit. He could not 
 be sure that he would not stand the training. He 
 had very shrewd doubts, but he kept them under. 
 
 " You see," he explained to me, " a fellow can't 
 take it for granted that he is no good until he has 
 tried. And supposing " 
 
 He sat down on a settee in the hall and panted. 
 
 " It is a bit of a pull up from the station," he ex- 
 plained, "and I am out of training." 
 
 Millward was a peace-loving man. His hobbies 
 were fly-fishing and the collection of old prints. He 
 had a taste for the poetry of Robert Bridges. He 
 was married. His wife Eleanor was a delicate little 
 lady of the Rossetti type, dainty and aesthetic. She 
 looked as if she had always gone about in an electric 
 brougham and obviated discomfort with a cheque 
 book. She would not dissuade him by so much as a 
 suggestion. H he enlisted, she said, she would be 
 trained as a nurse. She did not know anything about 
 
 208
 
 THE WILLING "OLD BUSTER" 209 
 
 the suppressed ailment he was combating ; she had 
 not even heard its six-syllable scientific name. 
 
 He had a fair income from his work, but had lived 
 beyond it. There were two daughters and a son. The 
 son was at an expensive preparatory school. The 
 daughters had a governess. Here personal inclinations 
 squared with what he thought was his duty to the 
 country. He had ;^900 capital. He would raise it 
 for their education and gamble on the war only lasting 
 two years. 
 
 In August he had applied for a commission at the 
 War Office. Eleanor had felt sure that they would 
 not take him. " Of course, I am not going to say 
 anything about my ' what-do-ye-call it,' " he explained 
 to me, and I argued with him for an hour. 
 
 " My dear fellow, you are doing an unpatriotic 
 thing," I said, rubbing it in. " You'll crock up to a 
 certainty. You'll be letting your CO. in, and he 
 won't thank you for it." 
 
 However, the dilemma of frankness or duplicity 
 was taken out of his hands. A form was given him 
 on which he had to declare on his word of honour 
 that he had never suffered from any serious illness or 
 injury "except as stated below." 
 
 The catalogue he subscribed under this head was 
 too much for the Medical Board, who very sympathetic- 
 ally pronounced him unfit. 
 
 3ii   4: 4c :(: 
 
 He wouldn't take a sheltered job or drug his con- 
 science with the mere wearing of a uniform. 
 
 " There are only two things to be done," he said : 
 " to go out and kill Germans or to carry on with one's 
 own work as normally as may be." 
 
 o
 
 210 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 But it isn't easy being normal so long as there is 
 a troublesome little ghost of a doubt that one is not 
 doing all one can. He " stuck it " till the morning 
 of the poisoned gas. Then he went to a recruiting 
 office. He was rejected. 
 
 Like many another good fellow who is an enforced 
 civilian, he became a little testy and irritable. But 
 he did not fuss or go about with a long face or talk 
 about " doing his bit " or preen himself on the honorary 
 work he was putting in for a committee. There are 
 two kinds of men, he argued : those who have been 
 in the firing-line and those who have not. And in his 
 mind the question of opportunity did not affect the 
 distinction. 
 
 I met him one night at H , the school where 
 
 we had been contemporaries. There had been a sort 
 of speech day and we were dining with the master of 
 our old house. Did we know anything about one 
 Campbell, the master asked, who had entered in '65 ? 
 " I have just got this form and have to certify that 
 ' he has attained a suitable standard of education.' 
 He was here one term." 
 
 None of us could disinter the antecedents of Campbell, 
 but our talk naturally turned to other Hittites — as 
 the fellows in our house used to be called. Campbell 
 must have been a sexagenarian, and there was an 
 ancient stockbroker to whom no recruiting officer in 
 England " would give the glad eye." He had shaved 
 his grey beard and joined the French Army in the 
 Foreign Legion. It seemed that no physical bar 
 really mattered if one meant business. Young Gregg, 
 who had had his ankle smashed at Ypres, had joined 
 the Flying Corps. He had got a Military Cross on
 
 THE WILLING "OLD BUSTER" 211 
 
 foot and a D.S.O. in the air. If one can't walk one can 
 at least fly. 
 
 On the way to the station Millward said something 
 about not being able to " stick it." In the morning 
 he went to another recruiting ofhce. This time he 
 was accepted — on conditions. He must have an 
 operation for varicose veins and he must come again 
 with a set of false teeth. This meant another month 
 of domesticity, which he was philosopher enough to 
 enjoy with a quiet conscience. 
 
 4c 4: 4: 4c * 
 
 Eleanor had the knack of comfort. The fond little 
 woman made much of her Quixote, and they had 
 many little jokes about the separation allowance 
 she would draw for herself and the children, and the 
 luxuries she would buy with it. 
 
 Millward as a private was rather a pathetic figure, 
 undersized, but game as a bantam cock. His move- 
 ments were more spasmodic and brusque than those 
 of the jerkiest, new-fledged sentry. And he had a 
 look of perpetual forced alertness in his eye, the look 
 a conscientious fish might have who, though landed, 
 was determined to catch the trick of the new respira- 
 tion. 
 
 The general inspecting the brigade was interested 
 in the odd-looking little man. He asked him his age. 
 
 At Millward's " 38, sir," jerked out with an exag- 
 gerated, hyper-military briskness, an inaudible but 
 sympathetic titter expressed itself on the features of 
 B Company. 
 
 " These sporting old fogies mean well," a junior 
 subaltern was heard to say afterwards, " but they
 
 212 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 are a bit of a nuisance. I wonder if this old buster 
 will stick it out." 
 
 Millward did not " stick it out." Route marches 
 and rations took their gradual toll and the flesh de- 
 feated the spirit. The peculiar complaint with the 
 long scientific name reasserted itself, and Eleanor's 
 training as a nurse came in usefully at home. 
 
 I asked the doctor for a truthful bulletin. 
 
 " I am afraid he will never be good for any work," 
 he told me. 
 
 1 shuddered inwardly at the thought of the sensitive 
 pride of Millward and a future of dependence, benevo- 
 lent funds, associations. 
 
 But Millward does not know anything about this. 
 The galling thing is that his peace of mind is disturbed 
 by something I once put into his head. He has an 
 idea that he has not done " the patriotic thing," 
 
 " I haven't killed a German," he said. " I have 
 
 cost the country " And he began solemnly to 
 
 add it all up.
 
 THE MANNEQUIN 
 
 A STRONG, broad-shouldered young man thrust 
 through the crowd in the Underground into 
 the Tube. He embraced the upper part of a milHner's 
 mannequin, a wooden female bust with the last new 
 spring bodice on it. 
 
 And he had no shame. He had not even taken the 
 pains to wrap it up. His neat, waxed moustache, his 
 carefully parted hair, his fatuous smirk of self-suffi- 
 ciency, bespoke a sense of uninterrupted well-being. 
 The people in the house where he rose and breakfasted, 
 his employers, customers, the girls in the shop, evi- 
 dently had not laid the lash of their scorn on him, or, 
 if they had, he was unchastened. 
 
 He placed the dummy carefully on his knee, bal- 
 anced it with his hands, and gazed upon the waxen 
 neck complacently. Yet to the sensitive his public 
 burden would have been a cross, an infliction more 
 hideous than the albatross tied about the mariner's 
 neck. 
 
 Presumably this young man lived somewhere and 
 came into daily contact with human flesh and blood. 
 There were men in khaki in the carriage with him and 
 ladies in black speaking French. I guessed that they 
 were refugees from Lille or Arras with menkind of their 
 own, and I dare not look at them because of the shame 
 
 213
 
 214 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 I felt for the young man. His neck was thick ; his 
 arms filled his sleeves ; he could have crushed the 
 little corporal by his side ; he could have floored two 
 ordinary Boches with the portentous weapon in his 
 hand. 
 
 An objectionable young Teuton of the same class 
 would have had patriotism rubbed into him at an 
 early age with a stick. A poor privilege, but doctored 
 and disciplined ideahsm is better than none. This 
 youth had no country ; his birthright was a matter 
 of course ; his suburb the centre of a universe of 
 suburbs spreading concentrically round him in a pro- 
 tective network, into which hostile penetration over 
 the heads of the police and subversive to the estab- 
 lished order of things was outside the bounds of 
 thought. 
 
 You may see his kind in the railway carriages every 
 morning skimming over the picture magazines, or if 
 it is a newspaper the young man will be absorbed in 
 the case of the brides in the bath. A picture of the 
 bride will please him ; a picture of the bath will please 
 him more. In the evening you will find him waiting 
 patiently in the queue of the pit. The war has not 
 touched him as yet except that it has brought a Httle 
 more gore into the kinemas. As for being drawn into 
 it, the whole thing is too remote to enter his head. 
 It is a reality no doubt, but it concerns a different 
 species of man. When he sees the bands playing the 
 recruits down Parliament Street to Whitehall he will 
 look up and say, " They have got a lot to-day." 
 
 Will they ever get him ? Not until universal
 
 THE MANNEQUIN 215 
 
 military service becomes a portion of beadledom. 
 Then he will be drilled and impressed with the mould 
 of manhood. Probably without protestations. The 
 man who hugs his yoke respects the law and does not 
 kick at established facts. 
 
 Will he be worth the getting ? Most certainly he 
 will. The machine will mould him. At present he 
 is a parasite. The abstract thing called England 
 exists for him, not he for it. The Motherland affords 
 him pap. To him the soil of England is like any other 
 kind of rubble, without essential virtue ; not lovely 
 for itself or endeared by wrongs as is the soil of France, 
 which is being redeemed day by day, inch by inch, 
 furrow by furrow, sanctified by her best blood. 
 
 Death in the field for England is not a sacrament, 
 not even an obligation. It is the price men have paid 
 after certain vaguely understood calculations for the 
 stability of the Empire. The spilling of their blood 
 is like the oiling of the lift by which he ascends to the 
 fitting-on room. The mannequin speaks glibly of 
 heroes, but here again he is treading unfamiliar, meta- 
 physical fields. His hero is a kind of sublimated 
 half-back in this new and uncomfortable game of war 
 — the rules of which he has not studied, as there are 
 no excursion trains to the front or grand stands from 
 which he can look on. 
 
 Why should he fight ? He has no inheritance, 
 nothing to lose, no roots in the soil. Islanded, pro- 
 tected, without imagination, he does not understand 
 that the invasion of England would be a defilement 
 and the presence of an armed, authoritative Boche
 
 2i6 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 in his shop or street the abdication of all spiritual and 
 temporal rights. 
 
 At Victoria among the crowd that emerged into 
 the upper world I saw a phlegmatic-looking young 
 man in a neat knickerbocker suit with light grey spats. 
 He carried a bag of golf-clubs and seemed to be admir- 
 ing the elegant tartan braid on his stocking. Just 
 then I heard a great roar — the roar of a British crowd 
 when it lets itself go. It was a train of bluejackets 
 coming in from the Crystal Palace ; they were march- 
 ing across London to Euston to catch their train to 
 the north. All the world was cheering them and 
 waving hats and sticks and umbrellas. As they passed 
 under the hotel the maids and waitresses leant out of 
 the windows and waved their handkerchiefs to them, 
 and the bluejackets looked up and kissed their hands, 
 laughing and singing and stepping out with a joyous 
 easy swing that must have mspired the dullest spirits 
 in the crowd. It was one of those moving, unfor- 
 gettable scenes which will recur to one for months at 
 any mention of a ship or the sea. 
 
 I looked round for the phlegmatic young man with 
 the clubs. He was gone. I would have given a 
 great deal to have nailed the mannequin to that pro- 
 cession and seen him pass under the laughing girls 
 with his badge of shame. I am sure that they would 
 have emptied their jugs on him, and that no loose 
 crockery could have been safe in their hands. Yet 
 the man must be capable of redemption though he 
 does woman's work. 
 
 As a conscript no doubt he would find himself. The 
 hardest cuticle is sensible to environment, and this 
 war has proved that courage— collectively, at any
 
 THE MANNEQUIN 217 
 
 rate, and under the menace of death — is common 
 to all. It is improbable that he is a coward ; cowardice 
 presupposes imagination. An apter term for the 
 mannequin is " clod." In poetic definition " a finished 
 and finite clod untroubled by a spark."
 
 THE AIRMAN 
 
 UNTIL this war upset all values and standards 
 the airman was the only great adventurer. He 
 had a world to himself as new as the one the Eliza- 
 bethan seamen conquered and infinitely more perilous. 
 There had been no such career for youths since Drake 
 and Raleigh. To come under the enemy's fire must 
 have been a mere bagatelle to him. 
 
 The experience of the " Terrier " who a few months 
 after he has left a sohcitor's office finds himself in the 
 first line at Ypres or Dixmude must be abnormal, but 
 the airman's nursery is peril. 
 
 " When one takes to the air I suppose one lets things 
 go." I talked, hoping the pilot would give me his own 
 views. " Of course, every fighting man has his job, 
 but you fellows do a little more than the day's work. 
 It must be a bit of a strain." 
 
 But the airman did not see it. "In the trenches," 
 he said, " you have got to carry on and keep your end 
 up and keep your company together, however cold 
 feet you may have. I have tried both, and I would 
 rather run the gauntlet in my machine any day than 
 squat cramped up in ice and water under shell fire." 
 
 " Aviators have no nerves," I suggested. 
 
 " Haven't we ! I often get cold feet. That is what 
 
 218
 
 THE AIRMAN 219 
 
 draws one. You never enjoy anything if you are not 
 afraid. If you had no nerves you wouldn't really 
 enjoy a big blind fence on a strange horse before your 
 blood is up." 
 
 " Besides, one is preoccupied," he added. " One's 
 got one's machine to run. One hasn't time to think." 
 
 " Haven't you ! I have." 
 
 The interruption came from the observer. An ob- 
 server is sometimes an airman who has lost his nerve ; 
 and the more he knows about aircraft the more nervy 
 he is. Every aviator loses his nerve in time. In some 
 cases confidence wears away slowly ; in others things 
 happen, and it is a matter of a moment like the prick- 
 ing of a bubble. 
 
 " My dear fellow," the observer continued, " I can 
 tell you when I was trying to make out whether those 
 mud heaps were gun-emplacements or beet stacks I 
 felt like tossing for it and turning tail. I hate the 
 air." 
 
 And he explained to me that aeroplanes were fragile 
 things put together with gum and that continued ex- 
 posure to rain and damp played the devil with them, 
 and in war time they sometimes condemned them- 
 selves with their pilot and observer before they had a 
 chance of being condemned by an official. 
 
 " I don't like your controls," he said to the pilot. 
 
 As an airman the observer had been literally in 
 the first flight. Before he lost his nerve he had had 
 the instinctive " touch " which is as necessary in a 
 high-class machine as hands on a horse. There is as 
 much difference between a floundering old " box-kite " 
 and an Avro biplane as between a 'bus-horse and a 
 thoroughbred three-year-old. And it is agony for a
 
 220 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 man like the observer to sit still and be driven by some 
 one else. 
 
 It is not the enemy's fire the airman fears so much as 
 his own machine — the bolts and nuts and controls put 
 together by some unknown mechanic upon whose 
 efficiency his life depends. 
 
 And it is not the enemy's fire that makes him feel 
 cold inwardly so much as the fire of his own men. 
 
 '' It's annoying," the pilot said ; " every one looses 
 off at us — Belgians, French, and our own people, too." 
 
 "Terriers, you mean." 
 
 " Not a bit of it — Regulars. It is in orders now that 
 no one may fire at an aeroplane without orders from 
 an officer, but it doesn't seem to make any difference." 
 
 " Nerves ? " 
 
 " No. They think it is sporting. A fellow draws 
 a bead on us and pops off as we go over. Can't help 
 it, I suppose. It is irresistible, like a cock pheasant 
 topping a covert. Still, it makes one feel a bit sick 
 inside. One doesn't mind the Germans so much." 
 
 " I was flying quite low the other day over the road 
 at Poperinghe when a damned fellow in a transport 
 cart — an English officer, if you please — stands up 
 and looses off at me ! I should like to have downed 
 him." 
 
 The observer told me how had been brought 
 
 down in our own lines with his passenger after a daring 
 bit of reconnaissance work. Both were killed. This 
 led to " shop," and they talked of spirals, side-slips, 
 air-pockets, banking, and doping in an argot full of 
 infinite suggestions of new perils, risks, and adventures. 
 They spoke of fatal accidents in a quiet, casual way as 
 one might discuss the spills after a day's run with the
 
 THE AIRMAN 221 
 
 hounds. One man's elevator bent and his wings col- 
 lapsed in the air ; another's petrol caught fire ; another 
 side-slipped and dived into the ground in a fog ; another 
 misjudged his landing. And they used the new slang — 
 which is a kind of first-line defence among Englishmen 
 against any possible invasion of the melodramatic — 
 speaking of " being done in," " having cold feet," 
 and " getting it in the neck." 
 
 The pilot talked of being burnt in one's machine as 
 one might speak of being bunkered at golf. He was 
 very young. He had clearly " let things go," and did 
 not worry about survival. The observer was an older 
 man and married. He had no illusions about the air. 
 He had been in the cavalry. All he wanted now was 
 a good horse under him — to change his bullet-proof 
 seat for pigskin. 
 
 " I hate the air," he repeated. They had been 
 
 up in the morning and again in the afternoon. 
 
 " We got into the clouds behind the German fines, 
 had to come down low because of the wind, couldn't 
 make headway, came in for hot fire. One is a standing 
 mark in a gale like that. We got a lot of bullets in 
 the wings and a shell almost upset us without hitting 
 the machine. We dived and jinked so as to put them 
 
 off the range. O (the observer) was seasick over 
 
 the edge — into the German trenches, I hope. I dare 
 say I should have been if I had not been too busy." 
 
 " Of course, the seat is a protection. You have got 
 to sit up straight or you will be hit. I must have 
 been leaning back a bit yesterday, for I found a bullet 
 hole in my muffier when we came in." 
 
 It is all in the day's work, and one hears very little 
 about it. When the aerial navy brings off one of their
 
 222 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 splendid and daring raids the whole country rings with 
 it, but the drudgery of this reconnaissance work over 
 the enemy's lines, which calls for equal nerve, initia- 
 tive, and endurance, passes almost unnoted. Listen- 
 ing to the young airman, one felt something of a worm 
 — a veritable groundhng. He had the true modesty 
 of greatness. 
 
 Those sailings of the Elizabethan seamen into the 
 unknown world — glimpses of the Peak of Darien — 
 were romantic enough in their day, but the military 
 aeronaut has discovered the refinement of adventure. 
 The eagle on his breast is a true cognisance. That 
 gorged vulture of the Teuton is a very different kind 
 of fowl. 
 
 One meets faces among the airmen such as Childe 
 Roland might have had if he had come to the Dark 
 Tower and stayed there and blown the slug-horn in 
 derision of his foes.
 
 THE EDUCATION OF LAHORI 
 
 I 
 
 WE met by accident in a hospital in the New 
 Forest and then by appointment in London. 
 It was quite the oddest change of milieu I could have 
 imagined. 
 
 When I first knew him he was plain Lahori and 
 had not taken the pahul in the ceremony of initiation 
 by which one enters the community of Sikhs. To 
 find him we left our motor-car on the Trunk Road 
 and made for a distant clump of trees, balancing our- 
 selves as well as we could on the baked and shppery 
 Httle banks that divide the illimitable wheat fields 
 of the Punjab. 
 
 The lad had no real name then. He was referred 
 to as Lahori because he had been born in Lahore. 
 He was a babe in arms when his mother brought him 
 to the village, and he had seldom left his father's fields. 
 The little hamlet, after the manner of such hamlets, 
 was completely self-contained. There was no need 
 for market-going or jaunts of any kind save to the 
 shrine of Sitla, the small-pox goddess, in a similar 
 clump of trees about a horizon's breadth from the 
 farm. There was nothing to encourage adventure 
 in Piyarigarh. The Grand Trunk Road in the oppo- 
 site direction was the verge of the unknown. To us, 
 
 223
 
 224 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 on that sweltering April morning, the path seemed 
 long enough. 
 
 Lahori was the only candidate for enlistment. He 
 stood bashfully by the well until his companions 
 thrust him forward into the centre of the group. 
 He trembled all over like a wild creature, breathing 
 hard, as the havildar drew the tape round his chest. 
 He wanted to be taken, yet he felt like a hare in a 
 trap. Tears started to his eyes. He had hardly ever 
 seen a white man before. 
 
 "Thirty-three and a half inches, sahib," the havil- 
 dar said. His father, the owner of 120 bighas of land, 
 explained that the boy was lean because of the scarcity. 
 With two full meals a day he would fill out three inches 
 in a month. The old fellow was probably right, but 
 the sahib said that he must stand over until next year 
 and in the meantime he must eat plenty of ghee and 
 have two full meals a day. A real tear — more of 
 excitement than anything else — trickled down Lahori's 
 nose, and the village followed us back to the Trunk 
 Road as Indians will follow a white man in groups 
 to his starting-off point. 
 
 It was early then in the days of motor-cars and 
 Lahori's father had never seen one before. 
 
 " Where are the horses ? " he asked. 
 
 " There are no horses," a pert youth explained. 
 
 " Then how does it go ? " 
 
 " It goes by water and oil." 
 
 The old man turned on the knowledgable youth to 
 cuff him, just as the internal anatomy of the machine 
 began to groan and the wheels moved slowly forward. 
 I shall not forget his face or the staring, open-mouthed
 
 THE EDUCATION OF LAHORI 225 
 
 group. He regarded the machine with mixed pain 
 and surprise as if it had joined in an impudent con- 
 spiracy to hoax him. 
 
 Lahori filled out and joined my friend's regiment 
 the next year. He has now seen many cities and is 
 a critic of men. He has travelled in De Dions and 
 Fiats, seen the King's horses, threaded the streets of 
 London, been to the Zoological Gardens and Bucking- 
 ham Palace, and carries himself with an air. He has 
 also visited France and Flanders, grappled with the 
 enemy in their own trenches, and received a slight 
 wound and the Order of Merit. He is now known as 
 Subadar Piyara Singh. 
 
 The subadar is a searching critic of men, morals, 
 art, and the Administration. In the National Gal- 
 lery we stood before Van Dyck's " Charles I." He 
 admired the Cavalier, but discovered faults in the 
 impossible barb. 
 
 " It is a very good sahib," he said, " but the tattoo's 
 head is too small." 
 
 He preferred Lord Hothfield's horse in Copley's 
 " Siege of Gibraltar." He stood a long while before 
 the canvas trying to unravel the confused melee in 
 the boats. The knack of observation had come to 
 him through field training ; in his " recruity " days he 
 would have looked at any picture or map upside down. 
 The subadar regretted that there were not more battle 
 scenes. He passed Rubens by with a dignified detach- 
 ment. Flora and her nymphs were shghted. The 
 public inspection of their ample charms was not to his 
 taste. 
 
 Rembrandt or Van Dyck would have made a fine 
 
 1 Horse's.
 
 226 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 canvas out of Piyara Singh with his grave eyes and 
 regular features, and his strong beard curling upwards 
 at the chin towards the turban and framing with it 
 a visage in which there was much simple strength and 
 repose. There was character even in his stiff white 
 turban, which looked as if it had been tied with one 
 fold. The small crowd that had gathered round us 
 were more interested in the Sikh than in the pictures. 
 
 ^tc dif slfi ^k sfe 
 
 And Piyara Singh was imperturbably at home, 
 unconscious of curious eyes, not outwardly impressed 
 by the immemorial stability of houses and monu- 
 ments, the discipline of the traffic, the ordered intent- 
 ness of the crowd, the apparent illimitability of London. 
 He had learnt that these streets stretched for twenty 
 kos from where we stood to every point of the compass. 
 But it was not in his nature to show surprise. His 
 cradle might have been the hub of the Empire instead 
 of that byre-like mud hutch in Piyarigarh. 
 
 He asked me many shrewd questions about " the 
 sahibs' bazaar," as he called the network of shops 
 between Charing Cross and Portland Place, and he 
 wondered what could be the occupation of those who 
 lived in the great houses by Regent's Park. 
 
 " In this country," he said, " it is not always easy 
 to distinguish a baya sahib from a chofa sahib (a big 
 man from a small). It appears that there is no dis- 
 tinction in dress." 
 
 " None whatever, subadar sahib." 
 
 " And where are the coolies, sahib ? Who sweeps 
 and carries water ? 
 
 The wealth of the humblest puzzled him. 
 
 We lunched at a good restaurant, and I pledged
 
 THE EDUCATION OF LAHORI 227 
 
 Piyara Singh that none of his dishes should contain 
 any insidious mixture of beef. I asked him what he 
 would drink. 
 
 "What the sahib pleases." 
 
 " But name something," I urged. 
 
 His eyes wandered round the tables in a leisurely 
 search for some nectar known to himself. 
 
 " Rum is an excellent drink, sahib," he suggested. 
 It had been served out to him as rations in Flanders 
 and Chitral, dispelling damp and cold. 
 
 He looked for the warm, brown fluid in vain. The 
 waiter's solemn, unapologetic denial of rum in Picca- 
 dilly brought no shadow of disappointment. " It 
 is a war drink," I explained, and that set us off on the 
 eternal theme and more philosophy concerning the 
 ways of life in East and West. 
 
 II 
 
 Piyara Singh's ideas of government were drawn 
 from a Native State. Where there was a Padshah^ 
 he argued, there must be musahihs,^ and where 
 there are musahihs there is necessarily evil. Did 
 he not know ? Part of his father's land had been 
 taken from him by the ruler of the State and given 
 to a musahih at the instance of a dancing girl who 
 had received gold. 
 
 In the Majestic in Piccadilly Piyara Singh, toying 
 with his napkin, poured out a tale of intrigue and cor- 
 ruption of a darkness beside w^hich the evil doings 
 recorded in the Old Testament seemed colourless and 
 pale. It was all very far away, but I felt that I was 
 ^ King. 2 Courtiers.
 
 228 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 lunching with a man who had hobnobbed with Naboth 
 and Ahab. Since my visit to Piyaragarh the whole 
 village had been sold to the protege of a courtesan. 
 
 " Was it a money-lender," I asked, " or a vakil ? " ^ 
 
 " A vakil, sahib." 
 
 I deplored the family misfortune. 
 
 " There is no beef in this dish, sahib ? " he asked 
 anxiously. 
 
 " None, subadar sahib. The black substance is 
 prepared from the liver of a goose." 
 
 " Of course, sahib," he went on, "in England there 
 is just dealing. King Jarge is a father and mother 
 to his people. But great princes cannot always see 
 into the hearts of small men." 
 
 He asked me about the King and Parliament and 
 what he imagined were the secret influences behind the 
 throne. From words he had heard spoken he had 
 a suspicion that all was not well with the Adminis- 
 tration. A dresser in his ward, a Bengali educated 
 in this country, had been translating passages in the 
 newspapers. Was it not true, he asked, that certain 
 musahibs, who had trifled with responsibilities and 
 played into the hands of the enemy, would be dis- 
 graced after the war ? "No doubt," he added, 
 " they have enriched themselves." 
 
 I had to explain that if there had been any betrayal 
 it had been through folly and not corruption. 
 
 " But, sahib," he objected, " fools can be replaced." 
 
 " It is not always easy, subadar sahib." 
 
 5j» 5|» 5js *I» s^ 
 
 I asked him his impressions of England, which I 
 drew from him with difficulty. The things that had 
 
 1 Lawyer,
 
 THE EDUCATION OF LAHORI 22^ 
 
 struck him most on his travels were the giraffe and the 
 cow. 
 
 " Sahib," he said, " the giraffe is the finest of all 
 things I have seen in England. It would be a beauti- 
 ful beast to shoot. But, sahib, the EngHsh cow is, 
 after all, the most marvellous of God's productions. 
 It gives twenty seers of milk daily, and with one cow 
 a whole family might live." 
 
 Piyara Singh spoke of the milch cow as the Brah- 
 min speaks of the kama-dhuk, the legendary cow of 
 the Vedas. The very possession of such a beast must 
 have seemed to him a proof of merit. 
 
 I asked him if he thought the soil produced men on 
 the same scale as the kine. 
 
 " The people of England are honest," he said simply. 
 
 " And the people of France ? " 
 
 " The people of France are so honest that if you 
 were to drop a gold mohur on the ground in a railway 
 station or in any public place it would lie there and 
 nobody would touch it, and if you went back the next 
 morning you would find it still lying where it fell." 
 
 " But aren't the people of England equally honest ? " 
 
 Piyara Singh solemnly dissected a banana with 
 his coffee-spoon. 
 
 " The sahibs are honourable in all countries," he 
 said, " but in France even the cooHes are to be trusted. 
 In France there is only one price. There is no difficulty 
 in buying and selling. There are no thieves, and the 
 doors of the houses may be left open day and night." 
 
 " But here, too, there is only one price," I argued, 
 " and thieves are not common." 
 
 " True, sahib. But I hear the people of England 
 are more easy with wrong-doers. The reason why
 
 230 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 there is no theft in France is that the punishment 
 is more severe in that country than in any other coun- 
 try in the world. Malefactors are not hanged or 
 shot, but are nailed by their hands and feet to a wall 
 or tree and are there left to die. I have not seen any 
 so put to death, but as a reminder to the people human 
 figures in wood and stone are exposed in the streets 
 and at the corners where roads meet. These are 
 nailed and bound to cross-pieces in the attitude of 
 their suffering. By this example all are afraid to 
 commit any act of dishonesty. 
 
 tj% »}• 3j» SJ? 5|5 
 
 " In France the Government is more zabba- 
 dasti ; ^ in England the people are more strong 
 and the Sircar ^ must deal cautiously with them. 
 In this country there are two opinions about the 
 war — is it not so, sahib ? Many of these young 
 men — we were leaving the restaurant and he 
 pointed out of the window into the street — do not 
 approve of it and will not fight, and the Sircar has 
 not the power to enforce them." 
 
 In Trafalgar Square Piyara Singh created quite a 
 stir. Under Lord Nelson's column the band of a 
 Highland regiment were playing to those youths who 
 " do not approve of the war." The skirl of the pipes 
 and the magnetically vitalized drum-major were 
 enough to make any young man with a drop of gener- 
 ous blood in him tear off his mufti and join the colours 
 on the spot, but I noticed that some of them turned 
 their backs on the band and gazed at the Sikh. With 
 his head erect and his broad breast covered with medals 
 ^ Oppressive. * Government.
 
 THE EDUCATION OF LAHORI 231 
 
 he looked more at home in this atmosphere than many 
 of the mob. 
 
 " Colonel Broun, sahib, told me that the bands 
 were playing to entice the young men to the war. 
 Is it not so, sahib ? It is good music and inspires a 
 craving for honour. Youth cannot hear such music 
 unmoved." 
 
 I could only agree with my friend's moralizings 
 and forbear reservations. 
 
 He walked with me down Parliament Street and 
 I was pleased to have his company. It occurred to 
 me that the subadar was more of a bahadur, 
 if that were possible, in Piccadilly than in Piyaragarh.
 
 THE GURKHA 
 
 MOORE, who was over on three days' leave, asked 
 me to look up Nain Singh in the PaviHon at 
 Brighton. I knew the little man, a typical Gurkha, 
 ingenuous, friendly, a born shikari, full of jungle lore, 
 and cheerful as a cricket. It would be pleasant to 
 spend an afternoon with him and show him all the 
 sights. 
 
 In the native officers' ward Nain Singh beamed 
 recognition. We had met in Chamba, and he had 
 guided me to my first bear. I had gone on two 
 marches with his sahib. I remember Nain Singh 
 carried a huge pumpkin under his arm all day as big 
 as his own head and mine. He had been everywhere 
 with Moore in the Hills, from Sikhim to Suru, and 
 had marked down many a head for the sahib : ibex, 
 burrhel, markhor, mountain sheep. Now he has a 
 limp which threatens to be permanent, and it is doubt- 
 ful if he will ever cross the great watershed again. 
 But his cheerfulness is unimpaired. 
 
 " Where shall we go ? " I asked. " The platform 
 over the sea, the wonder-house of the fishes, the sahibs' 
 bazaar, or the kinema-garh to see the adventures told 
 in pictures ? " 
 
 My programme was so embarrassingly rich in alter- 
 native that it was decided to include all. Another 
 
 232
 
 THE GURKHA 233 
 
 officer in his ward, a Sikh from Ferozepur, looked'at 
 us with envy, and I offered to take him too. 
 
 Nain Singh was at home among beasts, even among 
 fishes, and the Aquarium threatened to take up the 
 whole of our afternoon. He had the knack of analogy, 
 and everything reminded him of something else. He 
 paused before the salmon and said he had netted 
 them in Himalayan streams. He recognized the 
 species as the best of all fish when cooked. Nain 
 Singh's natural history is sketchy. . He was thinking, 
 perhaps, of the mahseer, but no sepoy save a Gurkha 
 could have been so near the mark. 
 
 The sea-wolves, he said, he had seen in the Brah- 
 maputra, where they were called " gonsh." The eels, 
 he remembered, were bad to touch ; they stung or bit, 
 and then one had to lie up for weeks with a feverish 
 ague. 
 
 The Sikh from Ferozepur, moved to emulation, com- 
 pared the spotted dogfish to a " weskit " ^ and said 
 that the black bream swam through the water like 
 an aeroplane. 
 
 4« * :N 4: He 
 
 " A German aeroplane," Nain Singh amended. 
 " Look at his tail ! " 
 
 * 4c H: lie « 
 
 The Brighton shops, " the sahibs' bazaar," had 
 the same fascination for my observant friend. All 
 down the street Nain Singh was peering through 
 the plate-glass windows at the mysteries and ela- 
 borate refinements of our civilization with the 
 wonder of a child. A coiffeur's shop held him 
 entranced with its extraordinary exhibition of 
 
 ^ Waistcoat.
 
 234 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 ladies' hair of all hues hanging from the most lifelike 
 scalps. 
 
 We went into a toyshop. It was a veritable won- 
 der-palace, a labyrinth of chambers in which nothing 
 ordinary was to be seen. There was one room in which 
 every box you opened played a tune, every chair you 
 sat down on laboured with song. Ghoulish faces, 
 fuzzy-wuzzies, gollywogs, totems, stared at you from 
 the shelves. In a dark recess there was a string of 
 cow-bells hanging from wall to wall. We set them 
 jingHng, and they brought back old memories — the 
 smell of deodars and camp fires, where the cold breath 
 of the glacier invades the circle round the burning 
 pine log ; alps where the humped cattle browse lazily 
 all day long, wrenching up the gentian and columbine 
 with the grass. 
 
 " Cow-bells, sahib," Nain Singh exclaimed. 
 
 " You have them in Nepal ? " 
 
 " Yes, sahib, and in Assam." 
 
 The little man must have been abysmally home- 
 sick. It was eleven months since he had smelt the 
 Himalayas or seen his own folk, and he was going back 
 to France. 
 
 I dreaded the kinema, but fortune was with us all 
 
 through. We escaped the amorous interlude in which 
 
 a lady of the people became enriched to the extent of 
 
 an 
 
 'Ous in the country, 
 And willar up-to-daite, 
 
 Horl for a-winkin' at the magistraite. 
 
 — and we came in for a jungle scene, with a leopard 
 and her cubs tumbling over one another in the long 
 grass among the bamboos. The leopard entered a
 
 THE GURKHA 235 
 
 house in which there were a woman and a child, and 
 there was much melodramatic shikar. In the end 
 Nain Singh and the Sikh of Ferozepur tore themselves 
 away reluctantly. Roti-khana (the evening meal) was 
 at six, and we had only half an hour for the pier. On 
 the pier we played with abortive penny-in-the-slot 
 machines, tried our strength and our weight, raced 
 horses, made dummies kick and fight. Nain Singh 
 was much taken with a mechanical astrologer who on 
 receipt of a penny commanded the services of a yellow 
 duckling, which waddled solemnly to the slot with 
 your authentic card of destiny in its bill. 
 
 *p »)• •(• ?J? SJ» 3(5 
 
 He gave me the ticket. " What does it say, sahib ? " 
 he asked. 
 
 " Your destiny is a happy one," I translated. 
 
 " Ha, sahib, that is according to the horoscope." 
 And he beamed as if I had handed him the elixir of 
 life. 
 
 " But," I continued, " a dark person is seeking to 
 do you harm and will cause you serious trouble." 
 
 " That is Bhim Singh Thapa," he said, still smihng, 
 though it cost him an effort. " Through him I lost 
 promotion for one year." 
 
 Bhim Singh Thapa was the O.C's orderly, and was 
 beheved to possess the colonel's ear. His relatives 
 and friends obtained quick promotion ; his enemies 
 did not prosper. He was a " dark person " both in 
 the literal and figurative sense of the word. Even the 
 British officers in the regiment regarded him with the 
 eye of suspicion. 
 
 " However," I continued encouragingly, " the Card 
 of Destiny says : ' Do not despair. A fair person will
 
 236 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 be your friend, and be the means of your passing your 
 declining years in a position of affluence.' " 
 
 Tlie broad face of Nain Singh became wreathed in 
 smiles. 
 
 " Ha, sahib," he said ; " that is the adjutant sahib 
 
 " Moore Sahib, without doubt," I repUed. " He 
 is exceedingly fair and his influence is far-reaching. 
 You will be subadar-major before the end of the war." 
 
 Nain Singh laughed aloud — a boyish, infectious 
 laugh. An afternoon with the Gurkha makes the 
 dullest dog feel witty. 
 
 I have a feeling that the little astrologer knew 
 what he was about, and that in spite of the machina- 
 tions of Bhim Singh Thapa, honour awaits our friend. 
 I hope it may be the crown on the shoulder-strap. 
 When Moore Sahib is colonel the path should be clear.
 
 THE SPY 
 
 ONE could not withhold one's respect. The man 
 was a spy. He was unarmed, in mufti, the 
 centre of a squad of bayonets, and he kept step with 
 his guard, marching as resolutely and looking as smart 
 and unconcerned as they. In a few minutes he would 
 be in a forbidding-looking whitewashed room. A 
 brief tribunal, a court hostile and severe, then his back 
 against the wall of the barrack square — and quick 
 execution. 
 
 It needs some pluck, this prying about docks and 
 arsenals or in the country behind the enemy's lines in 
 mufti or a false uniform with a fictitious passport. 
 The average man when asked to carry a dispatch 
 through heavy fire, to lay a fuse under a house occupied 
 by the enemy, or to lead a frontal attack against 
 machine-gun fire is generally afraid to argue his peculiar 
 unfitness for the choice. But told to wander about 
 among the enemy's pickets in disguise to try and locate 
 his batteries and signal his discoveries by manipulating 
 the hands of the village clock, he might well ask, like 
 the Irishman, if he might be shot before he started. 
 
 And it is generally to so little purpose. What, for 
 instance, could the spy hope to achieve who arrived in 
 Boulogne in the uniform of a trooper of the 3rd Dragoons 
 
 237
 
 238 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 with his belt awry, a German accent, and no knowledge 
 of where his regiment was or what it had been doing ? 
 So marked a fraud that he fell a prey to the first Cana- 
 dian policeman on the bridge. 
 
 Others are better employed. Pierre Simoneau, for 
 instance — it was not his real name — stood at the 
 street corner counting, and checked the number of the 
 troops that passed. Of course, it is natural to stand 
 at street corners and to stare at soldiers as they go by. 
 Everybody does it. But when one has done it for ten 
 days and has no other apparent business in the place 
 one is apt to attract attention, and attention means 
 some very unpleasant interviews and a marked lack 
 of sympathy in one's environment at a moment when 
 one most stands in need of a hand-shake or a little 
 human kindness. 
 
 Simoneau must have been waiting for the touch on 
 his arm, the voice in his ear asking him to step aside 
 and answer certain questions. When at last he felt 
 the tap on his shoulder, the thirty-two pieces of gold 
 in his pocket, thirty Louis d'or and two English pounds 
 sterling, cannot have been any great consolation. 
 Simoneau, it appears, was not a patriot, but a bought 
 man. 
 
 The informer told me that he had sometimes seen 
 him smile as he stood at the street corner counting. 
 The interpreter, who arrested him, did not see this 
 smile. The man's face, keen, hard, and foxy, with 
 bushy whiskers starting almost from the nose, and a 
 small, red, pointed beard, did not look as if it could 
 contain one. No doubt it was an artificial smile, sum- 
 moned up to the surface from the depths. It will not 
 do for a spy to look self-conscious, hunted, or de-
 
 THE SPY 239 
 
 pressed. A man with a smooth, round face and a jolly 
 grin will escape suspicion longer. 
 
 In the Sous-Prefet's office he preserved his sang- 
 froid. He described himself as a time-expired reser- 
 vist of the Marine. He had his papers of discharge ; 
 and his weather-beaten face and his clothes — the 
 peaked cap and cape like a longshoreman's — bore him 
 out. The interpreter, while introducing himself and 
 his business to the Sous-Prefet, had hinted his sus- 
 picions deHcately in a low voice. " Ah, yes, monsieur, 
 I understand. A spy ? " he had repeated with all the 
 callousness of a hanging judge, as if it were one more 
 page in a tedious file. The longshoreman threw open 
 his coat and waistcoat, plunged his hands into his 
 trousers pockets with expansive gestures implying 
 that he wished to be searched and to have done with 
 this comical blunder of officialdom. 
 
 He was searched. 
 
 A loaded revolver was found in a bulging waistcoat 
 pocket and a German military passport allowing him 
 to leave Lille. The evidence was already sufficiently 
 damning. 
 
 " What are you doing here ? " 
 
 " I have come to look for relations." 
 
 " What relations ? " 
 
 Cross-examined, the man failed to establish any 
 association with the neighbourhood. He was marched 
 off to the gendarmerie, still looking unconcerned. 
 
 In his room, a garret in the Rue des Echevins, they 
 found some pieces of unburnt cordite carefully wrapped 
 up in his bedding. " They are souvenirs," he ex- 
 plained. Nobody could look less like a souvenir 
 hunter than the longshoreman.
 
 240 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " Where did you get them ? " 
 
 " I picked them up." 
 
 The interpreter looked puzzled. The gendarme 
 explained. 
 
 " He can tell his friends the Boches there was a 
 battery of such and such a calibre in such and such a 
 place." 
 
 Each piece was the full section of a shell. 
 
 It was necessary to take the longshoreman to British 
 Divisional Headquarters, and the interpreter turned 
 out a guard of Sikhs, a formidable crew, rain-sodden, 
 fierce-looking, unkempt, fresh from the trenches. Be- 
 tween their fixed bayonets he showed the first signs 
 of uneasiness. They showed no respect for his white 
 skin. Once when he stopped they prodded him, calling 
 out " hcimdn admi," words that he did not understand. 
 The remoteness of his guard from all conceivable 
 human relations, their hopeless inaccessibility seemed 
 to cut him off entirely from the promise of life. It was 
 like being handed to the powers of darkness. 
 
 He called out to the interpreter, saying that he was 
 cold and asking for a cognac. Darkness was falling ; 
 they were passing the last lights of the town ; the 
 camp was seven kilometres along the road. He was 
 allowed to go into an estaminet. He drank three cog- 
 nacs — one after another. The interpreter paid. 
 
 Outside in the street little boys danced in panto- 
 mime, drawing the back of the thumb across the throat, 
 crying " Coupe z la gorge." Others pointed sticks and 
 mimicked the firing-squad, crying " pong-pong " and 
 laughing merrily. 
 
 He heard a woman say " Voila un prisonnier ! " 
 " Prisonnier ! " her escort repKed. " Not for long.
 
 THE SPY 241 
 
 It is not worth the pains to fill the mouths of ces-gens- 
 la." 
 
 In the darkness which rendered the presence of the 
 guard less oppressive the spy took thought. Why 
 had he not taken the thirty-two pieces of gold to his 
 family ? It had all been for nothing. He would die 
 and they would not profit. 
 
 At last, blundering along a muddy drive, they 
 reached a farm with a pennon fluttering above the 
 door and a naked flagstaff cutting the grey light be- 
 tween two elms. Here the spy showed a momentary 
 sense of relief when he was handed over by the Sikhs 
 to a British guard. 
 
 But the end was not yet. A sapper in the staff 
 mess recognized Simoneau. He had been D.A.D.R.T. 
 at a railway station at the base when a man hur- 
 riedly opened the door of his oflice, stood there dazed 
 for a minute with his eyes fixed on the wall, and when 
 asked his business said that he had been told he would 
 find a doctor there. A man had been run over by a 
 motor-car outside the station. He apologized, saying 
 the doctor must be on the platform on the other side, 
 and then bolted across hurriedly. Nothing more was 
 heard of him or of the supposed accident. Gradually 
 it dawned on the men in the office that he had been 
 reading the list of trains, with their destinations and 
 the complements of troops for the different rail-heads 
 inscribed on a slate on the wall. This man was Sim- 
 oneau. 
 
 There was another count, and that is why the man 
 was sent south to clear things up. In a certain bakery 
 at the base a loaf of bread was issued daily for every 
 unit at the front. The output of loaves tallied exactly 
 
 Q
 
 242 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 with the total strength in the firing hne. A pseudo- 
 Frenchman in the employ of the bakery had shown 
 too keen an interest in the tally. He asked some 
 questions which excited suspicion and then mysteri- 
 ously disappeared before pay day. Whether this 
 third count was definitely brought home to Simoneau 
 I cannot say. In any case he could only be shot once. 
 After the court-martial, in the few brief moments 
 before the execution of sentence, a student of human 
 nature asked the man what his motives were. He 
 answered simply, 
 
 " One owes it to one's infants to support them." 
 It appears that the man was a kind of hybrid from 
 the frontier with no strong roots in any soil. He had 
 lost his trade in the war. It is true he does not deserve 
 one's pity, yet one must respect his courage. Also 
 one could wish — though this is not good ethics — that 
 the thirty Louis d'or and the two pounds EngHsh 
 sterling might find their way to " the infants," who 
 are perhaps untainted by hereditary sin.
 
 THE FRANC-TIREUR 
 
 JEAN BAUDIN was the last out of Le Petit Paradis. 
 He had seen his mother bury the cask of cognac 
 among the cabbages. The villagers had swallowed 
 their last glasses of gin. No one thought of wiping 
 his mouth or bothered to pay. Some half-empty 
 flagons were thrown into the cart ; others were smashed 
 over the trestles as too good for the gorge of the 
 Schwab. 
 
 In the street they joined the long procession of 
 wagons, wheelbarrows, donkey carts, farm gigs, peram- 
 bulators, laden with household goods. Jean followed 
 a wagon, fascinated by the variety of its contents. 
 He made an inventory of them, which he repeated 
 absent-mindedly as he went along, quite forgetting 
 why he was on the road and where he was going. 
 There was a bird-cage, a doll, a Bible, a cat, a crucifix, 
 a mattress, a commode, chickens tied in bunches by 
 the leg, a bed, a calf. The load became top-heavy 
 as the wagon jumbled over the cobbles. A clumsy 
 armoire which rattled on the top fell sideways and was 
 relinquished in the street. Hidden away in his own 
 bundle of clothes he had a very wonderful possession. 
 The knowledge that it was there made him feel quite 
 different from all the others. Sometimes he wanted 
 to shout his secret out aloud. He nearly did. It 
 
 243
 
 244 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 needed some self-restraint to enjoy his importance 
 quietly. 
 
 " Mother, where are we going ? " 
 
 " We are going away, out of this." 
 
 " But where ? " 
 
 " I do not know." 
 
 Jean shook the pack further on to his shoulder and 
 felt it anxiously with his right hand until his finger 
 encountered something hard and protruding. 
 
 " I will kill a Boche. I will clean one of them," 
 he said. 
 
 Madame Baudin put out a hand as if to stop his 
 chatter. She plodded on mechanically, her chin 
 hanging forward, her eyes intense and strained. 
 Grey wisps of hair, escaped from under her cap, made 
 her look increasingly feeble. Jean carried himself 
 loftily. He felt that he could not impress any one 
 without having the thing taken away from him. 
 
 y|» yj* »|5 0^ *l* 
 
 Two days before the news had come that the Ger- 
 mans were in Plessix Saint-Pierre. A farmhand 
 had stuck a fat German corporal in the buttocks with 
 his pitchfok, and they had gutted the whole place. 
 A woman who had left the burning village had been 
 brought in to Le Petit Paradis. Jean sat in the 
 corner of the bar and listened to the horrors, A yokel 
 said that the mayor and the schoolmaster had been 
 dragged out and shot against the wall of the church ; 
 women had been pounded with the butt end of rifles ; 
 children pitted on bayonets. 
 
 " They will be here in an hour," somebody said. 
 
 Jean's shrill voice penetrated the hubbub : "I 
 will kill a Boche. I will clean one of them,"
 
 THE FRANC-TIREUR 245 
 
 But no one listened to him except the miller. 
 
 " He is right," he said, " He is a brave boy. Let 
 us all kill a Boche. If everybody kills one they will 
 not go far." 
 
 " Don't make any mistake," another said. " If 
 you kill one, they will do for a hundred. Poor old 
 Veuve Godet was bayoneted. They are devils. They 
 rip up Httle girls." 
 
 So it had come. Jean had stolen out into the 
 street quite dazed, and wandered about all night. 
 His instinct drew him north against the human current. 
 He had slept in a wood where he could hear the firing, 
 and in the morning he had come upon the dying Uhlan's 
 horse peacefully grazing. 
 
 He found the beast's master in a ditch ; the blood 
 was trickling from his mouth. He was clearly dying. 
 
 Jean approached him fearfully. At the touch of 
 his still warm body he started back ; the eyes were 
 open, looking at him and behind him. They were soft 
 eyes. He did not look a devil. Jean unbuckled 
 the man's revolver and fastened it round his chest 
 under his loose shirt. Then he started back, running 
 all the way. 
 
 { When he reached the Petit Paradis they were pack- 
 ing. Now he was on the road again and very tired. 
 
 As the procession breasted the broad back of a hill 
 he fell out, unseen by his mother, and rested his pack 
 against the trunk of a tree. He watched them go 
 by. It was a pitiable crowd. But it was not pity 
 that he felt. He was too full of the adventure of it 
 all and a real hatred of the Boches and the sense that 
 he might do something and was going to do it. In all 
 the books he had read the boy-hero had always been
 
 246 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 equal to the crisis, and this was just the drama he 
 and his brother Jules had always pictured in their 
 robbers' stronghold in the pollard tree — an invasion 
 of the Boches, in which they would cover themselves 
 with glory. Jules had died at sea of some tropical 
 disease. There had been a certain glamour mixed 
 with Jean's grief. He had seldom visited the pollard 
 since. He felt sure that if Jules were with him they 
 would both live up to their dreams. 
 
 And it seemed so simple. If everybody killed one 
 the soil of France would be clean of them. There 
 were six bullets in his revolver. Of course he would 
 be killed — ^but then every one would know. 
 
 He thought of the reprisals they had talked about 
 in the bar ; but every one had gone. There was no 
 one in the village or the farms. 
 
 A cold doubt came over him. Suppose he were 
 left in a ditch like the Uhlan and nobody ever knew 
 he had been a hero. He looked up the road. His 
 mother and the cart must be miles away now. He 
 would never catch them up. He remembered that 
 there was always something like that — something 
 noble and difficult. The hero sacrificed himself, 
 knowing all the while that his achievement would be 
 hidden — but then afterwards some accident revealed 
 everything and he did not die. In his case he was sure 
 he would die and nobody would know. 
 
 He was just starting on the road when suddenly 
 the whole plot dawned on him. It was irresistible. 
 The Boches would go to old Pellereau's farm, and 
 they would have to go down the lane right under the 
 robbers' stronghold. 
 
 He shouldered his pack and bored through the
 
 THE FRANC-TIREUR 247 
 
 hedges in a dream, making a bee-line over the meadows 
 to the old hornbeam. 
 
 He climbed up a steep, sandy bank over a ditch 
 broken up by rabbit holes. He was taller now, and 
 it was no effort to swing himself up into the shelter. 
 The ivy made a screen for him, and he looked down 
 into the narrow lane. The tree hung right over the 
 bridle-path and he could have touched the head of 
 anybody riding underneath. He lay against a withered 
 branch, his legs dangling in the bole, dislodging flakes 
 of the decaying wood. 
 
 He looked out through his leafy screen. It was an 
 almost perfect sangar. For a long time he was too 
 excited to think. His heart beat violently ; the sweat 
 poured from his face. The day was hot, still, and 
 peaceful. The village and the farm were deserted. 
 The sound of the guns was still far distant. At the 
 end of the meadow he saw two of old Pellereau's 
 farm horses, and wondered why he had not taken 
 them away. 
 
 Hours passed. As he struggled to change his posi- 
 tion the nail of his boot struck something metallic. 
 He dug his hand into the decaying powder of the old 
 tree. The musty, dry, familiar smell brought back 
 many memories. It was the lid of a tin chocolate- 
 box. Jules had bought it for him on his birthday. 
 He remembered they had played Du Guesclin, and 
 they had quarrelled, and Jules had cried and they had 
 made it up. It must have been six years ago. He 
 could not persuade himself that he was not still playing. 
 
 The day wore into afternoon. The two farm horses 
 had come across the meadow into the shade of the 
 hedge. The sunlight fell aslant tlirough the high
 
 ^S THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 hazel branches on to their coats, dappHng them all 
 over with the dark shadows of leaves. They stood 
 each with its neck leaning on the other's quarters, 
 brushing each other's flanks with their tails, an un- 
 questioning trustfulness in their eyes. The warm 
 smell of their coats reached him in the tree. Their 
 homely gentleness and strength made him want to 
 live. He wondered why the dead Uhlan had looked 
 so kind. 
 
 There was a great stillness everywhere. The hot 
 scent of eglantine rose up from the bank. Thistledown 
 floated over the fields borne on a light breeze. Jean 
 could see a rabbit sitting by its burrow sensitively 
 alert. The purple of a late sheltered foxglove glinted 
 through the leaves. He hoped that the Boches would 
 not come. Death and steel and hostile faces seemed 
 more terrible but less real than they had ever seemed 
 before. He could not believe that they would come. 
 " If they do not come," he asked himself, " shall I 
 come to-morrow ? " He knew that he would not. 
 
 Suddenly the horses lifted their heads and seemed 
 to be listening intently. They whinnied and ran down 
 the field looking through the hedge. Jean could 
 hear the faint, distant sound of hoofs. It seemed 
 ages before he could see any movement. At last a 
 man came cantering along the field under him ; he 
 heard another on the other side. Then he saw a 
 dozen troopers coming slowly down the lane, looking 
 stealthily to east and west as if expecting ambush. 
 Jean cocked his revolver. He thought they must 
 hear the click and his heart beating. He had an im- 
 pulse to curl up in the bole and let them pass under. 
 With a catch in his throat he stretched his hand down
 
 THE FRANC-TIREUR 249 
 
 through the leaves and laid the barrel almost on the 
 shoulder of the first as he bent low to avoid the boughs. 
 At the report man and horse fell in a heap. Jean had 
 tasted the transports of battle. He thought of him- 
 self as already dead and almost ceased to be frightened, 
 wondering all the time why he was not more afraid. 
 
 The troopers had stopped and were pouring a fusil- 
 lade into the tree. Jean, shpping round the dead 
 branch, had barely a finger exposed ; as the bullets 
 spattered against the wood and cut up the twigs just 
 over his head he felt that he would be shaken down 
 like fruit. 
 
 At first they hesitated to ride under, then two 
 spurred their horses and galloped under, over the 
 body of the first, and began firing from the other side. 
 Jean shot at a third who tried to do the same thing 
 and heard him fall. Then he was hit, but he hung 
 on ; it was only his foot. Soon the firing increased. 
 Jean could not understand; there were many more shots, 
 but none hit the tree. Could it be a French patrol ? 
 Hope brought with it fear. He was more frightened 
 now he thought he might live. He felt a blow in the 
 arm and wondered what it was. It was as if some 
 one had come up behind and struck him. He did not 
 know bullets felt like that. Then he fell down into 
 the lane. 
 
 The German wave is bent back far beyond Plessix 
 St. Pierre. Jean sits at his mother's estaminet fondling 
 a Bavarian helmet. He will never " march " or draw 
 trigger again. 
 
 An English officer billeted in Le Petit Paradis
 
 250 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 asked the miller who was the happy looking lame 
 boy with the bright eyes. 
 
 " Ah ! He is a little Brave. He is no pSkin, he ! 
 Ask him the history of the Uhlans in the lane." 
 
 Jean has to repeat the story many times a day to 
 all who enter the inn. He has become laconic as a 
 despatch. 
 
 " I killed two Boches. Ten ran away." He has 
 quite the Joffre touch.
 
 THE DRAGON KULTUR 
 
 WE have gone back to the legendary days. 
 Material evolution has produced the dragon 
 that is wasting Europe, belching Hquid fire and poisoned 
 gas, and breathing spiritual corruption, a monster of 
 hypocrisy and greed, blinded by envy. 
 
 Those early weavers of mjrths, saga-writers, con- 
 ceivers of strange gods, whose legends have come down 
 to us, must have had stimulus for the imagination, 
 visions of naked good and evil, but no such stuff for 
 dreams as could envisage the beast that has come out 
 of Potsdam. 
 
 How different were the ideals of Troy and the Hindu 
 Mahabharata, where the gods fought on either side. 
 Among our Indians in the field are descendants of 
 the Kurus and Panda vas, men of the same race as the 
 poet, who evolved the code of Arjun and that strong, 
 merciful God, who stayed the battle to lay the bell 
 over the lapwing's nest. 
 
 Milton, in his Pandemonium, has conceived diverse 
 spirits of evil, but none with the parts of Kultur, that 
 embodiment of lust and pride and hate which has 
 ravaged Belgium and Poland and soiled the fair land 
 of France. 
 
 It would show a lack of humour, almost Teutonic, 
 to range ourselves in a close parallel with Milton's 
 
 251
 
 252 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 elect spirits battling with the fallen host. But, elimina- 
 ting the question of electness or the reverse, there are 
 passages in Paradise Lost which are very apposite 
 in this new conflict of principles. Take Satan's resolve, 
 the authentic voice of Berlin : 
 
 Our better part remains 
 
 To work in close design by fraud or guile 
 
 What force effected not. 
 
 Or Moloch's demand of 
 
 The millions who stand in arms and longing wait 
 The signal to ascend, 
 
 whether they will accept for their dwelling place 
 
 This dark opprobrious den of shame. 
 The prison of his tyranny who reigns 
 By our delay. 
 
 Moloch might be Moltke or Bernhardi demanding 
 the place in the sun occupied by that hated and envied 
 host, the bandit possessors of the earth. 
 
 And Berlin might find a precedent for her political 
 
 missionaries in the harangue of Beelzebub : 
 
 This would surpass common revenge . . . 
 
 . . . and our joy upraise 
 
 In his disturbance, when his darling sons 
 
 Hurled headlong to partake with us shall curse 
 
 Their frail original, and faded bliss 
 
 Faded too soon. 
 
 As for the mere material shock of battle, the world 
 earthquake of Ypres or Neuve Chapelle, no twentieth- 
 century poet could improve Milton's artillery : 
 
 Immediate in a flame. 
 But soon obscured with smoke, all heav'n appeared 
 From those deep-throated engines belch'd, whose roar 
 Embowell'd with outrageous noise the air.
 
 THE DRAGON KULTUR 253 
 
 And all her entrails tore, disgorging foul 
 
 Their devihsh glut, chain'd thunderbolts and hail 
 
 Of iron globes. 
 
 But if Milton were living now how would he sym- 
 bolize the new principle of evil, in what new dragon- 
 shape would the twentieth-century allegory or epic 
 embody Kultur ? Spenser's Blatant Beast, who 
 might be 
 
 " followed by the tract of his outragious spoile," 
 
 was a primitive monster of stings and fangs and 
 tongues, a familiar of Orcus or Hydra. Milton's fallen 
 angels were each the impersonation of some single 
 aspect of evil. His Kultur would be a composite 
 picture of them all, in whose features you could trace 
 the guile of Satan, the cruelty of Moloch, the envy 
 of Mammon, the pride of Beelzebub, the hypocrisy 
 of Behal, whose tongue 
 
 Dropp'd manna, and could make the worse appear 
 The better reason. 
 
 The Faerie Queene tells how 
 
 Calidore doth the Blatant Beast 
 Subdew and bynd in bands. 
 
 and afterwards how 
 
 — whether wicked fate so framed 
 Or fault of men — he broke his yron chaine, 
 And got into the world at liberty againe. 
 
 Thenceforth " more mischief e and more scath he 
 wrought." 
 
 The Spenserian incarnation of the dragon was armed 
 with
 
 254 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 tongues of serpents with three-forked stings 
 That spat out poyson, and gorc-bloudy gere. 
 At all that came within his ravenings : 
 And spake licentious words and hatefull things 
 Of good and bad alike, of low and hie. 
 
 Here the analogy ends. Those happy, spacious days 
 were spared the vision of the Berhn beast, the gross god 
 Kultur, a monster hideously evolved, savage and 
 savant, scentifically, academically and theologically 
 sanctioned by the universities and churches, nourished 
 by chemical food instead of green pasture, armed in 
 its primitive wallow with the subtlest distillations of 
 the laboratories, its hide indurated against attack by 
 moral callousness, its scales hardened by pride, its 
 eyes protected by lids and films against honest vision, 
 its intelligence drugged against spiritual hamperings 
 of interest, yet given the instinct to discern and strike 
 at any vulnerable part in the foe laid bare by chivalry 
 or loyalty or faith. 
 
 The evolution of the Blatant Beast demands a new 
 Spenser ; the vindication of Providence in the eternal 
 conflict of soul and matter a new Milton. All periods 
 of action and change, in which the generations are 
 shaped anew in the mould, have called forth their own 
 bards. In this the greatest age of spiritual adventure 
 since Elizabeth we have no prophet. 
 
 We have had lyrics in plenty of late, but is the epic 
 dead ? We have not heard the sustained authentic 
 battle note, the thunderous epic roll, since Milton. 
 Surely in the darkest days of spiritual stress that 
 earth has known, the springs of inspiration will not 
 remain dry. Some other mind will rise to the height 
 of this great argument. Some poet allegorist will 
 Qonceive for us the image of the Unclean Beast and
 
 THE DRAGON KULTUR 255 
 
 sing of the slow subduing of the monster, the paring 
 of its scales, the pricking of it to death. Another seer 
 will rise who will assert again 
 
 Eternal Providence, 
 And justify the ways of God to man.
 
 THE ZEPPELIN 
 
 OF all the unlikely things that might happen in 
 the war one of the most unlikely was that Mrs. 
 Weggs's cottage should be singled out for the visitation 
 of Imperial wrath ; another, that the engines of the 
 " All-highest " should be despatched to " strafe Eng- 
 land " in the person of the old pensioner who fetched 
 her water from the pump. 
 
 Only a few months ago I assured her positively that 
 she might lie in her bed with an easy mind. 
 
 " Doo you think they'll be comin' here ? " she asked. 
 " The policeman, he tell me they may come if I show a 
 light. So I'll put me candle out and darken the 
 winders. It doesn't do to take no risks. Mrs. Ibbets 
 next door, she goo to bed at lightin' up time and gits 
 up airlier for her wark. That come to the same if you 
 don't lay so long." 
 
 I reassured Mrs. Weggs again. It seemed the un- 
 likeliest thing in the world that the Huns would pick 
 out this dingy little street in this peculiarly innocent 
 little town. Fortunately, she sleeps in her parlour, for 
 the landing and the room upstairs where her son had 
 lived were exposed, with her china dogs and certain 
 other of her household gods, in mid-air. 
 
 A 2501b. high-explosive bomb had fallen from a 
 height of 6,000ft. in the street where she lived and made 
 
 256
 
 THE ZEPPELIN 257 
 
 a hole in the ground in which yon could bury a horse 
 and trap. 
 
 It was a very mean street, hardly a street at all, and 
 pretentiously built with a studied ugliness. How 
 pretentiously the bomb alone could show, with its 
 revelation of flimsy lath and plaster and fallen stucco 
 and parti-coloured brick. The bisected room in mid- 
 air, with its bulging plaster and yellow glazed wall- 
 paper, was the most melancholy witness of the jerry- 
 builder's art. 
 
 The walls of the houses where they had not fallen 
 were pitted with holes into which you could put your 
 hand. Imagine yourself standing in the street ; judg- 
 ing by the spread of shot there could not have been an 
 unriddled foot of space anywhere. The iron railings 
 had been torn and rooted up. Every pane of glass in 
 the street was shattered. The whole scene was very 
 much like the wreck an earthquake might leave if 
 inspired with rational malevolence. 
 
 It was noticed that Kitchener's face on a recruiting 
 poster at the corner was pitted with debris, which gave 
 the strong features an added strength, the eyes a more 
 searching prevision, and the whole message written 
 under it a new reality. On the same square of wall a 
 few months before had been posted the placard " Re- 
 member Scarborough " ; but Scarborough had been 
 forgotten long ago. 
 
 The raid had brought all the countryside gaping to 
 the spot. Before ten o'clock in the morning the Green 
 Dragon had sold every drop of hquor on the premises. 
 The houses in the street were already evacuated ; the 
 ambulances had long ago taken away the human 
 wreckage. 
 
 R
 
 258 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 A young man leaning against the door of the inn was 
 sajdng, " They heven't ha-af made a hole in old Mrs. 
 Weggs's cottage ! " 
 
 Only two had been killed outright. Mrs. Weggs was 
 not much hurt, though " whoolly shaken " ; but Elsie, 
 the little girl in the house next Mrs. Ibbetts's, had been 
 killed ; also Mr. Goshawk. He had been in the street. 
 It was said that there was nothing left of him bigger 
 than a part of his boot. 
 
 Mr. Goshawk was an old Crimean pensioner, and it 
 had been his custom on a fine day to stand by the corner 
 outside Mrs. Weggs's and discuss current events with 
 passers-by. Owing to his military antecedents he was 
 listened to with respect. 
 
 He had been there the morning I visited the old lady 
 in May and was just setting down her pail, which he had 
 fetched from the pump. " How do you think the war 
 is gitting on, sir ? " he asked. " We don't seem to be 
 going any forrader ; we seem to be going backwards 
 sometimes. What we wanter do is to make a siege 
 of them, same as Sebastopol." 
 
 I suggested they were too many. 
 
 "Ah, they doo seem to be wonnerful numerous," he 
 said. 
 
 " My son, when he come back from Amen-tears, he 
 tell me we've shifted a few," Mrs. Weggs interposed ; 
 " I dare say it was Amen-tears for them." 
 
 Mrs. Weggs herself was by no means innocent of the 
 British spirit that had brought down the Zeppelin 
 bombs on our heads. 
 
 " Ah ! the br-rutes ! " she said of the German sea- 
 men. " Not lettin' us draw 'em from the place they've 
 bin hiding in all along. We'd soon do for 'em if we
 
 THE ZEPPELIN 259 
 
 could git at 'em, and it's my belief they knows it and 
 that's why they dassent come out. And them Sepolins, 
 they're cowards too. They dassent come out in the 
 light." 
 
 " Hangin's too good for their likes," Mr. Goshawk 
 interposed. "If we ketch the ould Kayser we'll do 
 best to make a ca-ast of him and show him round in a 
 motor-car." 
 
 " Ah, the rascal ! To think what our pore dear 
 soldiers are suffering at Amen-tears ! " Mrs. Weggs 
 continued. Ever since her son's return the struggle 
 has been localized in her mind at the place with this 
 elegiac name. " And them Alleys, what fine fellers 
 they be too ! I can't help feelin' sorry for 'em. 
 They've got fathers and mothers and wives and the 
 like, same as we. I'm allers one for the news. First 
 thing when the baker come round in the morning, 
 whether I takes a loaf or no, I sez to him, ' What's on 
 the boord ? ' ' Why, ]\Irs. Weggs,' he ses, ' I forgot 
 to look.' So I goo down misself a parpose to see." 
 
 ^^ ^* *(S «|> t^fi 
 
 And now Mrs. Weggs is news herself. The infernal 
 drama has come to her. But for the all-wise restric- 
 tions of the Censor her honest, wrinkled face would 
 be in the illustrated papers with the V.C.s and generals 
 and poilus and moujiks and Huns, and the dismal little 
 doomed street would be as celebrated for a day as 
 Rheims Cathedral. She has been under fire, but her 
 speech is none the more impressive for that. Reahties 
 have but confirmed her sentiments ; her outlook is 
 unchanged. 
 
 She told me it was hke " the end of the wa-arld," 
 onlyTyou hadn't time to know it was coming. " I was
 
 26o THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 come ower," she said. " I was that sca-ared I jes lay 
 where I was. There wasn't a minute to do norfin or to 
 git anywhere. And to think of them taking Elsie 
 Borett and old Mr. Goshawk — the dairty r-rougues ! " 
 
 And now, she says, she knows what it is like " ower 
 there." She believes that 2501b. shells fall incessantly 
 like hail day and night at " Amen-tears." 
 
 The word is more than ever like a knell on her lips, 
 conveying sorrow and indignation that these things 
 should be.
 
 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 
 
 " T F there is a Paradise in the world, sahib, it is 
 
 X London." 
 
 Such is the verdict of Jagat Singh, a Sikh sowar who 
 has enjoyed the opportunity which is being offered 
 convalescent Indians of seeing London. 
 
 " When we arrived at the station," he said, " we 
 were taken to a motor-cart by a sahib in civilian clothes 
 whom everybody addressed as colonel, and wherever 
 we drove all day the whole of the traffic was stopped 
 and we were allowed to go on so as not to waste any time, 
 and nowhere was any money paid or passes asked for 
 or shown. 
 
 " Sahib, this was a great honour. In Hindustan 
 they do not stop the carriages of big men to let little 
 men pass. 
 
 " And never, sahib, have I seen so many vehicles, 
 great and small. In some places four lines of carriages 
 passed continually, and I did not observe a single collision 
 in the whole day or any injury to the passengers who 
 were walking in the streets. 
 
 " We were shown the Houses of Parliament and a 
 great bridge which might be separated into two pieces 
 only by pressing a button, also a fortress which con- 
 tained the King's crown and much ancient armour. 
 Thence we drove to the palace of the Padshah him. 
 
 261
 
 262 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 self. We stood outside and did not enter. I was 
 told that the King was not within but that he was 
 living somewhere underground. Why this is so, I 
 cannot say, but Sant Singh tells me it is desirable 
 that it should be kept secret where the King moves, 
 and that nobody should know, on account of the 
 many evil-minded persons who enter the country from 
 enemy lands. 
 
 " Near the King's palace there is a great shop which 
 is itself a city, having openings into many streets. 
 One-half of this is given over to the memsahibs, 
 who were present in great numbers purchasing clothes. 
 Every object that man can desire is obtainable here 
 in large quantities, whether it be motor-carts and 
 engines or merely cotton and thread. There was a 
 room in which the sahibs sat reading newspapers and 
 WTiting letters, and the Colonel Sahib told me that no 
 payment was demanded for this. The material is 
 free to all who come and go. I myself was permitted 
 to sit down and write a letter to my brother Gunga 
 Singh, who is in the trenches, and to my father, Sarup 
 Singh, who is in the village of Mograon, in the district 
 of Jullundur. For this purpose the owner of the shop 
 gave me cards, on one side of which were pictures of the 
 outside of the shop in which we were gathered. When 
 I had wTitten the colonel wrote in the English hand the 
 names of the persons to whom greetings were sent 
 and of the places in which they were dwelling. These 
 messages also were despatched without any money 
 being paid. 
 
 " We passed from the great shop to Westminster 
 Abbey to see the graves of all the great generals. After
 
 THE EARTHLY PARADISE 263 
 
 this we took our meals in an Indian restaurant, where 
 all the dishes were such as are familiar in my own 
 country and prepared by a Brahmin cook. 
 
 " When we had finished our meal we went to the 
 garden of the animals and saw a tortoise that had lived 
 eight hundred years and a snake which could eat a goat 
 and sleep for a month afterwards, and a deer with a 
 neck two yards long which could feed off the branches 
 of high trees, and besides lions and tigers and camels a 
 mouse that could live easily upon the bark of trees. 
 
 " But, sahib, the most wonderful event which hap- 
 pened was this. At a certain place we left our motor 
 in the street and entered a small room full of pictures, 
 which at a moment when I was thinking of other things 
 began to move, sinking downwards into the earth, and 
 suddenly we were surprised to find ourselves under- 
 ground. I had a very terrible feeling when the room 
 began to go down, for I could not believe that such 
 things could happen out of dreams. 
 
 " And when we had descended a train came towards 
 us with no engine. Sahib, how could it move ? We 
 went a long way in the train, and when we came out, 
 merely by climbing a few steps and without ascending 
 again into the moving room, we found we were back 
 at the same place where we had left the motor. 
 
 " And when Sant Singh expressed wonder that the 
 houses of London were so adapted as to save the 
 sahibs who dwelt in them the trouble of walking up and 
 down, the Colonel Sahib said that this was not only the 
 case with rooms, but there were stairs also which never 
 stopped, but moved ceaselessly as if alive, one step 
 taking the place of another, so that by standing still 
 on the lowest one was lifted easily to the highest. It
 
 264 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 appears, sahib, that nothing is impossible in London, 
 and the smallest man in the city possesses powers 
 which in my country pertain only to those who are by 
 profession purveyors of magic. 
 
 :!: ^5 * * * 
 
 " To indulge our wonder, the Colonel Sahib consented 
 that we should leave the motor and return to the big 
 station by means of one of these staircases which move 
 silently by consuming steam and oil, and we found 
 everything as he had said. In all these moving houses 
 one must stand and not sit. The highest no more than 
 the lowest is permitted a seat, but pains are taken by 
 those in authority to provide entertainment for such 
 as come and go. Many curious pictures are attached 
 to the walls ; nevertheless one is not permitted to 
 stand and observe these for any length of time, but is 
 always carried forward hurriedly. For the English 
 sahibs in their own country are all busy workers. It 
 is a city without rest. Sahib, is it true that in all 
 London there is no idle man ? 
 
 " In the big station we entered a room full of sahibs 
 and memsahibs drinking tea. Here we were allotted 
 two tables and similar entertainment, and the Colonel 
 Sahib sat down and drank with us. When it had grown 
 dark we returned very rapidly in the train to the hos- 
 pital. Sahib, I have seen London now. More than I 
 have seen cannot exist elsewhere, and I do not wish 
 to see any other city."
 
 THE BOY OF TO-DAY 
 
 No one who has done anything ever has an ounce 
 of side. Even young men who have been at 
 grips with first causes are modest. They develop a 
 sense of proportion. The modesty of the V.C. is 
 proverbial. 
 
 Take the boy Graham's case. His V.C, he told 
 me, was an inconceivable piece of good luck. He 
 had stuck to his machine gun all right ; he admitted 
 that. But it was the only thing he could do. " They 
 had stopped shelling us," he explained, " and were 
 coming on thick as hornets. Naturally I hung on. 
 It was the one chance. The other fellows were down. 
 What else could I do ? 
 
 " Skedaddle, I suppose ? I never thought of it. It 
 would have wanted some pluck. ' Stuck to my 
 gun ' ? I stuck to it to save my skin. It was all 
 I had to hang on to. I can tell you, I should have 
 had cold feet without it. But, of course, one doesn't 
 think of all this ; the whole thing's mechanical." 
 
 But Graham saved the trench, and if there is any 
 truth in despatches he did the job alone. 
 
 " That was luck too," he explained. " The Boches 
 didn't know we were done in. They got fed up and 
 turned just at the right mo'." 
 
 265
 
 266 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 " And you were badly hit ? " 
 
 " I discovered that afterwards," 
 
 Graham's modesty was impregnable. 
 
 " If every one got a decoration," he said, " for 
 doing his job the ribbons wouldn't be worth taking 
 home." 
 
 And he argued that the selection was all luck. 
 " They've got to pick out somebody. My little 
 show was a bit dramatic as it was such a close shave. 
 It was an important bit of trench, too, and there 
 happened to be a Staff officer looking on." 
 
 It occurred to me that what the Staff officer saw 
 must have been Homeric — a single man with a shat- 
 tered leg holding back a wave of Boches, and then 
 settling down to nurse his gun like a child. Half a 
 dozen different things were going wrong with it. The 
 feed-belt was wet, the pockets getting tight. In 
 another minute the cartridges would have jammed. 
 He had his first-aid box out, with its duplicate pieces, 
 and was nursing the machine which " had saved his 
 skin " when the loss of blood made him faint. 
 
 •I* T* T* 'l^ H^ 
 
 " An extraordinary feehng going off," he said. 
 " Like taking gas. I never dared have a tooth out 
 without gas. 
 
 " I nearly fainted again when I heard about the 
 V.C. I was in a base hospital in Boulogne and was 
 taking a morning stroll to see the Folkestone boat 
 come in. I bought a paper and took it into the buffet, 
 and was just leaving it behind when my eye caught 
 a headline, ' Lieutenant Graham, V.C Even then, 
 though the fellow had my name, I did not associate
 
 THE BOY OF TO-DAY 267 
 
 it with myself until I found my own ugly phiz under- 
 neath. 
 
 " All the gush they had written made me feel quite 
 sick," he went on. " ' England's wounded hero,' 
 and that sort of thing. My first feeling was shame. 
 I wondered what the fellows in the regiment would 
 think. Most of them were dead ; I was glad they 
 wouldn't see it. But there were Brown and Holder 
 and Mayes, a ripping good crowd — they'd had their 
 necks in it for months and only one Military Cross 
 and a D.S.O. between them, and I, who had just 
 joined, got this merely for blazing away with my 
 machine gun when somebody happened to be looking 
 on. They looked on me as a rotter at the game, 
 ' not cut out for soldiering,' as the major said, though, 
 I will say, they didn't rub it in. 
 
 " When I left the buffet I had a feeling in the pit 
 of my stomach which I only remember having once 
 before. It reminded me of a thing which happened 
 to me at school. It was Speech Day and the hall 
 was crowded with everybody's people and all the 
 masters and governors of the place. I suddenly heard 
 my name called and had to march up and receive a 
 prize I did not expect — for good conduct, or something 
 silly. I was a miserable, sensitive, self-conscious little 
 brat, and blushed Hke a fool, and felt that all the 
 fellows were sniggering at me. 
 
 " But what put the lid on was, somebody had 
 fished out a letter of mine and sent it to the editor 
 of the rag, and they had printed it just under the 
 photograph, as if I had been bucking about myself, 
 and how I won the V.C. I can tell you I was not 
 amiable when I got back to the hospital."
 
 268 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Graham was still something of a child, a good bit 
 younger than his nineteen years. His modesty soon 
 recovered from the shock of the V.C. When he dis- 
 covered that exactly the same thing had happened 
 to other fellows he didn't mind. The Hon's skin 
 sat more easily on him. He found that a V.C. has its 
 compensations. 
 
 4: ^ Hi 4: * 
 
 Life was made very pleasant for Graham. There 
 had been an impossible, unapproachable " she." 
 She had laughed at him kindly before the war. And 
 now she took him. The glamour of the bit of ribbon 
 made half the difference ; the boy's delightful modesty 
 the other half. She was dowered with the fairness 
 which is the proverbial reward of the brave. He had 
 six months' convalescence at home, the time of his 
 Hfe, in a beautiful old house by the river, and she was 
 with him all the while, and everybody was as nice as 
 he could be. 
 
 It would be difficult not to be nice to them. To 
 see them together was a cure for depression. I often 
 used to go down, to the house, and Graham would 
 talk to me about his plans, what he and Mary were 
 going to do after the war. It was always " after the 
 war." In spite of his V.C. he was not drawn to the 
 Army. His diffidence about his value as an officer 
 was incurable. He told me he had none of the qualities 
 of a soldier, that he hated the whole business, was 
 essentially a man of peace, and had great misgivings 
 whether he would be able to live up to the part or 
 even " to stick it out " at all. 
 
 " Nonsense," I said. " It is instinctive iu you to 
 do the right thing."
 
 THE BOY OF TO-DAY 269 
 
 " Oh, I suppose I'll keep my end up," he said doubt- 
 fully. 
 
 Early in the autumn he went out again. This 
 time to the Dardanelles, attached to another battalion 
 of his regiment. He had not been at the front a 
 week when his name was in the casualty list 
 " Wounded," and then again, in a few days, " Died of 
 wounds." 
 
 It was a machine gun again. This time the thing 
 was steaming and they were short of water, and some- 
 body had to get it. The nullah was a death-trap in 
 the daylight, enfiladed by snipers, and the odds against 
 coming back were more than two to one. I wonder 
 how Graham would have explained away this second 
 act of heroism. The " to save my skin " argument 
 would not hold here. It was done in cold blood 
 when spirits are lowest after hours of squatting under 
 shell fire in shelter, and the strain of days and nights 
 without relief or sleep. Also life meant very much 
 more to him, as much as it can ever mean to a young 
 man. 
 
 He was hit directly he left the trench and was seen 
 to wriggle into cover and then out again. He was 
 hit a second time and lay still. 
 
 He had time for reflection. The old garden, with 
 its late October flowers, the red beeches, the yellowing 
 avenue of limes, and the flicker of the fire seen through 
 the window from the drive and the shadow of the girl 
 knitting beside it — all this must have come over him, 
 gently tugged him back, and then as surely, more 
 irresistibly, driven liim on. 
 
 He must have seen the old house which would have 
 been his and hers — ^if he came through ; a haunt of
 
 270 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 peace to pass quiet days in. For it was agreed he 
 would never serve after the war. He hated noise, 
 loathed routine, shrank from pain and blood. And 
 he was quite sure he had none of the qualities that 
 make a soldier.
 
 TEGH BAHADUR 
 
 MOORE, of the 12th Gurkha Rifles, was dining 
 with me last night. His wounds have been 
 patched up for the second time, and he is going back 
 to France, where he will find none of the original 
 officers of his own battalion left, save possibly the 
 colonel. 
 
 " I am a bit pipped," he said, " I have just heard 
 that my orderly, poor old Tegh Bahadur, is dead — 
 blown up by a hand grenade in a night attack. He 
 was such a top-hole fellow." 
 
 And he began to tell me of the shooting trips they 
 had had together and how Tegh Bahadur had turned 
 a bear out of a cave and tackled a huge wounded 
 boar in the forest with his kukri. 
 
 There are many races, castes, and creeds in the 
 Indian Army ; but every British officer, whether 
 it be through love or conviction, swears by his own 
 men. This is as it should be, but speaking as an out- 
 sider who knows a little of most of the Indian fighting 
 .stocks and not a great deal of any, I have always 
 envied the man who commands the " Gurk." 
 
 He is first of all a soldier and a shikari, and honours 
 his British officer as such — not because of his white 
 skin, but because of the steadfast virtues of his class. 
 There is no sophisticated twentieth-century race-feeling 
 
 271
 
 272 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 about the " Gurk." He can be perfectly at his 
 ease with his regimental officer without any encroach- 
 ment upon respect. 
 
 " He was an ugly little devil," Moore said, " and a 
 chunk had been torn out of his face by a leopard. I 
 didn't take to him at first until one day I was in the 
 jungle at Ghoom and heard woodcutting in a forest 
 reserve where woodcutting is forbidden. It was in 
 the leave season and everybody had cleared out and I 
 was left in command. When I appeared in the clearing 
 I saw three pairs of heels scurrying away. I recog- 
 nized Tegh Bahadur and called him to the orderly 
 room, 
 
 " You were cutting wood," I said. 
 
 " Yes, sahib." 
 
 " You know it is against orders ? " 
 
 " Yes, sahib." 
 
 " Why did you run away ? " 
 
 " When we saw the captain sahib coming we were 
 frightened and had to bolt." 
 
 " Is there any reason why you should not be 
 punished ? " 
 
 " Yes, sahib ; it is a first offence. The colonel 
 sahib never punishes a first offence." 
 
 " There were two others ? " 
 
 " Yes, sahib." 
 
 " Tell me their names." 
 
 " No, sahib. I cannot tell you their names. We 
 do not betray one another. . . . Perhaps if I talk 
 a httle to them in the canteen they will come to you 
 themselves and confess." 
 
 The next day the two men came and confessed and 
 were forgiven.
 
 TEGH BAHADUR 273 
 
 A simple story with no point in it to one unversed 
 in the evasiveness of the more sophisticated East. 
 
 " Soon afterwards," Moore continued, "we were in 
 Waziristan, Wana way, when the country was dis- 
 turbed. I went out after markhor one afternoon 
 without an escort, and I had an uncomfortable feeling 
 all the while that I was being stalked. It was five 
 in the evening when I noticed that a pointed rock 
 near me cast an unnaturally bulging shadow. I 
 covered it with my rifle and waited. Soon a voice 
 came from behind it : " Don't shoot, sahib, it is 
 me," and after the voice there appeared the forage 
 cap and scarred face of Tegh Bahadur. 
 
 " He was ashamed at being discovered. He didn't 
 want the sahib to be scuppered, he said, and seeing 
 that I was not angry he grinned sheepishly. But 
 just think of it ! He had been shadowing me the 
 whole afternoon and I had not twug it, and I was 
 drawing my pay for training him, teaching him to 
 stalk and scout ! " 
 
 The fidelity of the man Moore took as a matter of 
 course, but his story reminded me of a tradition that 
 holds in most Gurkha battalions. In the attack the 
 British officer always runs a little ahead. That is 
 the custom whatever troops he leads, but it is not 
 always easy to keep the lead ; two men in a company 
 of Gurks are told off to stand by him on either side. 
 Against steel at least he must not fall. But, of course, 
 this has to be a very furtive proceeding. 
 
 There is a long-standing alliance between the High- 
 land regiments and the Gurk. The Highlander is 
 attached to him because of his cheery face, and the 
 face of the Gurkha is the index of his soul. He has
 
 274 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 the heart of a hon and the head of a child. No sepoy 
 is so dependent on his sahib. 
 
 In the trenches of Flanders he is thinking all the 
 while " This is the country of the white man ; these 
 are the ways of the white man," and when all his 
 officers are killed he is a little lost and bewildered. 
 He is a cheery, but not a calculating, fighter. He 
 loves a scrap, and likes to look into the whites of his 
 enemy's eyes ; but an enemy composed of terrible 
 sounds, unseen shocks, and tortuous forms of death 
 is a manifestation of the devil with which it is hard 
 to cope alone. If there is one place where Tegh Baha- 
 dur is the better man it is in the listening gallery of 
 a mine. For his ear is as good as his eye. Here one 
 is happiest without imagination as one sits waiting 
 in the dark for sounds in the neighbouring sap, subtle 
 as the footfall of a bear on wet leaves. The Gurk's 
 ear is true ; he does not hear sounds that are no sounds ; 
 he is not haunted with the thought that the hole 
 where he squats is the shape of a tomb. 
 
 But in the white man's war as a rule, in the trenches 
 under the night flares, Tegh Bahadur is as dependent 
 on Moore, as Moore is dependent on him in the Hima- 
 layan jungle, his home. 
 
 And apparently Tegh Bahadur was a very lovable 
 little man. Moore, who has lost most of his pals, 
 was sunk in depression half the night. He was think- 
 ing of camp fires in Suru and Baltistan and his trusty 
 little friend squatting over the hot rhododendron 
 ashes in his Gilgit boots and Balaclava cap, blowing 
 the embers into a flame and chattering between puffs, 
 of red bear and big sheep, and the monster ibex which 
 he has marked down for the sahib on the morrow. 
 One more of the bright visions blotted out by the Hun,
 
 THE JAP ON THE WESTERN FRONT 
 
 THERE is, or was, one Japanese fighting on the 
 Western front. I found him among the Indians, 
 a shp of a boy with the face of a " Gurk " and the 
 laughing eyes of a Celt. His name was Hara, and, 
 oddly enough, his last initial was " O." In a Highland 
 regiment he would no doubt have answered to the name 
 of " Pat." In a Gurkha battalion he might have 
 passed to the eyes of a casual observer as true to type — 
 only sublimated. But among these swarthy, bearded, 
 Mazbi Sikhs with whom he saw battle, men of heavy 
 build, slow of gait, and slower mind, you would have 
 taken him for the regimental mascot. Between him 
 and his companions there was the elemental difference 
 of earth and fire. I was reminded of an old print of a 
 leprechaun sporting among the shaggy cave men. 
 
 Kipling's Namgay Doola, that red-haired, blue-eyed 
 Irish half-breed, must have presented just such a con- 
 trast to his fellow subjects of the Himalayan Rajah's 
 State, as Hara to the Mazbis. A contrast stronger 
 even in the inward springs of the spirit than in the 
 outward physiognomy. 
 
 When you have left the Mediterranean behind, you 
 do not come across this type until you reach Japan. 
 There must be something mercurial in an island soil, 
 or perhaps it is that beyond Hong-kong you have over- 
 
 275
 
 276 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 shot the East. In no Arab, Hindu, Chinaman, or 
 Asiatic Mahommedan will you find the insatiable 
 curiosity which drives men forth to wander for the 
 mere sake of adventure, seeking no concrete reward and 
 having no material pivot to turn on. 
 
 When he was seventeen Hara, with some thirty 
 fellow-students and an old man in command, sailed 
 in an eighty-ton schooner from Tokio to Hawaii. It 
 was a vacation cruise. Two professors went with 
 them, and the old man, who had retired from the 
 Japanese Navy as a lieutenant many years before and 
 had not since been to sea, instructed them in mariners' 
 lore. But Hara learnt more than the professors or 
 the old man could teach. Twenty-three days out they 
 were driven on a reef, lost the ship, took to the boats 
 and landed on a desert island. They lived mainly on 
 turtles and unsuspicious gulls which they killed with 
 their oars, and drank the blood of turtles eked out with 
 rain-water caught in shells from an occasional providen- 
 tial squall. One of them died ; they burnt him on a 
 stack of marram grass ; when they were picked up by 
 an American ship many weeks afterwards they carried 
 the charred bones home. 
 
 On leaving college, a boy of nineteen, he offered 
 himself as a wandering correspondent to a newspaper 
 in Tokio. There was not a living wage in it ; but a 
 hungry curiosity is the mother of contrivance, and 
 Hara was hungry in every sense of the word. China, 
 the Philippines, Siam, Singapore, Ceylon, India, received 
 him in turn. When the great war broke out he was 
 instructor of ju-jitsu to the men of the King's Own 
 Scottish Borderers at Lucknow. 
 
 Ju-jitsu was of course abandoned for the greater
 
 THE JAP ON THE WESTERN FRONT 277 
 
 game, but it was not easy for a vagabond Japanese to 
 become enrolled on the spot in the British or Indian 
 Army, The search for a way was a small Odyssey in 
 itself, and carried Kara from Calcutta to Peshawar, It 
 was at Bombay that he met the sympathetic " O.C," 
 of a regiment of Sikhs. 
 
 I knew the man — he is dead now — ^we will call him 
 Rorke. He was the kindliest of Irishmen, just the kind 
 of man to lend an ear to a boy in search of a scrap, 
 " Can you cook ? " he asked the odd little figure whom 
 he found standing in the verandah outside his room. 
 Hara said that he had not cooked for Europeans, but 
 that he would like to try. He was taken in the trans- 
 port the next day. As a cook he was not a success. 
 He could boil things which he had first extracted from 
 tins, he told me, but beyond this he was not trusted. 
 As a seaman he had more experience, and he has a 
 story of being given the wheel in the Red Sea, 
 
 Thus he passed through the gates of the East in an 
 Indian troopship, a favourite with all by reason of his 
 zeal. He landed at Marseilles and entrained with the 
 Sikh regiment, going north to other fields of romance, 
 marching through the streets of Orleans, past the 
 cathedral, under the statue of Joan of Arc, to the camp 
 by the Loire, 
 
 In a few days the regiment was at the front, lighting 
 at Festubert. In the recapture of the lost trenches 
 they displayed their mettle, the same dogged, stead- 
 fast, unimaginative breed who entered the breach at 
 Delhi, a race apart, who, in spite of their great military 
 traditions, will ever be outcasts in the eyes of the ortho- 
 dox Sikh. Most of the officers were killed ; the others 
 wounded. Half the battalion was wiped out, but they
 
 278 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 held their ground. The colonel was shot through the 
 head. Hara has his pipe which was picked up where 
 he fell — a sacred treasure. 
 
 The Jap, being a mere camp-follower, was not in this, 
 though afterwards he obtained his wish and by the 
 exercise of much cajolery found himself in the trenches 
 and fired off many rounds at the Boches. But it was 
 not in the firing-line that Hara received his wounds. 
 He was back in regimental headquarters, occupied in 
 some unromantic routine, scraping pans or drying 
 plates, and staring up at a German Taube, when a fall- 
 ing bomb killed a man a few yards from his feet. 
 
 Hara stripped off his shirt and showed me a skin 
 clouded blue and grey with wounds, rayed and blotched 
 like the inside of a scallop shell fresh from the sea. He 
 looked as if he had been held down and tattooed all 
 over by some brutal and drunken Hun. 
 
 He has passed his summer in pleasant quarters in 
 an old Hampshire manor house, now a hospital, on the 
 cliffs by the sea. But here again the spirit of adventure 
 has brought him very near death. None of the Indians 
 in the camp would bathe in the Kala pani (black 
 water) ; but the Jap, who is a strong swimmer, used to 
 take his morning dip throughout the summer. He was 
 defeated one day in a wrestle with the tide and was 
 picked up exhausted far out at sea. 
 
 Hara has found a new profession. He is now a 
 masseur. But he is not likely to endure this peaceful 
 role for any length of time. His present hankering 
 is for flight. He once piloted an aeroplane in Japan 
 in the early days of flying. But whatever element 
 he chooses to disport in, he is sure to find adventure. 
 A mere boy, with all the world in front of him and a
 
 THE JAP ON THE WESTERN FRONT 270 
 
 few crowded years behind, he is born into an age in 
 which sober fact transcends the old-time legends of his 
 race — the age of the new chivalry in East and West, 
 prolific in real dragon spawn on which to blunt his 
 Samurai sword.
 
 THE CARE OF THE SEPOY 
 
 I 
 
 White Magic 
 
 THE hospital on the hill, a landmark for miles 
 across the Sussex downs and far out at sea, is a 
 small city in itself. In mere size there is no precedent 
 to it, for it consists of three general Indian hospitals 
 joined together under one command. 
 
 It covers many acres. It has its own travellers' 
 mosque and Gurudwara, or Sikh temple, its own shops, 
 stores, laundry, asylum, isolation hut hospitals, kinema 
 shed, miniature rifle range, and common room for 
 Indian officers. Apart from the blocks which hold 
 accommodation for two thousand beds, the quarters 
 of the seven hundred Indian personnel of the hospital 
 make up a considerable little village. 
 
 In this miniature city the immemorial uses of the 
 East continue. The Mahommedans in Ramazan fast 
 between the rising and the setting of the sun, and the 
 cooks are at work all night ; the Brahmins are pre- 
 served from contact with the unclean ; the butchers 
 of the two communities kill by the haldl and jatka, 
 the stroke that is prescribed by religious rite, the 
 Mussulman striking at the throat and the Sikh at the 
 back of the neck ; the water from the Hindu and 
 
 280
 
 THE CARE OF THE SEPOY 281 
 
 Mahommedan taps cannot conceivably intermingle ; 
 and a caste committee of Indian officers has been 
 appointed to see to it that the least minutiae of ritual 
 are observed. 
 
 But in the mere mechanical world the West is 
 impinging. The cook has adopted a rolling-pin and 
 no longer flattens out his food with the palm of his 
 hand. He cooks on a gas-stove and has learnt not to 
 blow out the jet when his work is done ; the dhobi 
 sadly manipulates an up-to-date laundry plant and 
 sighs for the flat stone by the village tank ; and the 
 sepoy changes his clothes at night when he goes to 
 bed. 
 
 :ic 4: ^ :|! % 
 
 The way in which the complexities of administra- 
 tion have been reduced to smoothness by the com- 
 mandant and his staff, the disciplined compromise 
 between East and West, would provide material for 
 a small book. All this is taken as a matter of course 
 by the casual visitor whose first interest is the patient. 
 Statistics will show him that 70 per cent, of the wounded 
 cases have returned to the front, 29 per cent, have 
 been passed as unfit for active service and returned 
 to India, and i per cent, has died. The percentage of 
 deaths among all admissions, sick as well as wounded, 
 is only -9. Yet the glass cases filled with fragments 
 of projectiles extracted from wounds make up a small 
 museum in the commandant's office. 
 
 In the X-rays rooms negatives, which run into 
 thousands, point to the amount of work which has 
 been put in since the hospital was opened in January. 
 Every case is examined as a routine measure. In the 
 operating rooms the new telephone-probe has brought
 
 282 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 down the percentage of mortality. Directly the 
 needle touches metal it sends the message through to 
 the ear, a jarring vibration like the buzz of a bee. It 
 distinguishes bone and lead in the most uncanny 
 manner. But the most specialized work will be found 
 m the orthopaedic wards. The Indian, with his 
 fatalistic resignation and tendency to let things mend 
 themselves, is apt to allow his joints to stiffen, and 
 constant vigilance is required, especially in cases in 
 which the tendons of the hand are shattered, to pre- 
 serve for the patient the use of his limb. The ortho- 
 paedic specialists employ four distinct processes, and 
 the patient is subjected to one or all of them. 
 
 First there is the process of ionization. The sepoy 
 seats himself gravely in a kind of dentist's chair and 
 dreams away twenty minutes with his four limbs 
 dipped in four cells, while a solution highly charged 
 with electricity is driven through the skin, infiltrating 
 the bones. 
 
 " Do you feel it ? " I asked a Pathan. 
 
 " Ha, sahib. It is like small thorns," he said, 
 thinking perhaps of the prick of the camel-thorn on 
 bare feet in his native hills. 
 
 And by reason of the thorns he had faith, the virtue 
 of the drug being sensible. 
 
 The next process is the electro-radiant treatment. 
 The patient basks on a bed in the centre of glowing 
 cylinders, which are heated up to 350° Fahrenheit. 
 Here, too, he is subject to some mysteriously bene- 
 volent agency. 
 
 It is the third process which he abhors — the special 
 drill and exercises and the scientific apphances by 
 which the affected joints are kept in motion and saved
 
 THE CARE OF THE SEPOY 283 
 
 from stiffening, the calf exercises, and the Hfting of 
 weights on the end of a string by the finger. To the 
 sepoy this is meaningless monotony without visible 
 reward. 
 
 The fourth process is the massage, a treatment well 
 understood and practised in the East. It is the most 
 grateful of all. There is nothing the convalescent 
 sepoy enjoys more than lying back in a chair at his 
 ease and being rubbed down by a British orderly. 
 At such moments his face is wreathed in visible content. 
 The bliss is partly physical, partly gratified prestige. 
 One sees the same look on the faces of men who are 
 being wheeled about on the pier in bath-chairs. 
 
 The sepoy has ceased to be surprised at the miracles 
 of healing. A Gurkha told me that the most wonderful 
 thing he had witnessed in Wilayat was a blind man on 
 a bench by the sea who was reading a large white book 
 on which there was no visible print. 
 
 " Sahib," he said, " in Wilayat the blind are given 
 eyes in their fingers. There is no miracle which the 
 doctors cannot perform unless it be to bring back the 
 dead." 
 
 Next door to the orthopaedic wards an eminent 
 bacteriologist is installed. The sepoy does not see 
 the ringed and spotted parasites and bacilH revealed 
 by the microscope, the little enemies more insidious 
 than the Boches. But the special and peculiar invader 
 of the organism of Ram Singh or Tegh Bahadur is 
 duly recorded, docketed, and filed in accordance with 
 the neat carded system which prevails through the 
 whole institution, and the diagnosis is passed on to 
 the regimental medical officer.
 
 284 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Then there is the asylum. Every mental case 
 among the Indians in France comes to the hospital on 
 the hill. There was only one patient in the wards 
 when we visited it, a lonely figure standing by the 
 window stroking his left hand gently with his right. 
 The man was a Mahommedan, with all the native 
 melancholy of the East in his eyes, to which was added 
 a very present and poignant grief. 
 
 " Sahib," he said to the commandant, who asked 
 him why he was so sad, " all that I have is gone, 
 looted ! The savings of a lifetime ! " 
 
 The commandant laid his hand kindly on the man's 
 shoulder. " Keep a good heart," he said. " All will 
 be recovered." 
 
 But there was no answering gleam in the man's 
 eyes. I met him the next day and he repeated the 
 same formula with a gesture of despair. He had the 
 fixed gaze of a prophet and a prophet's dignity, and 
 seemed to be looking into the bottomless pit. 
 
 " Many of these cases get cured," the commandant 
 said to me. 
 
 And I knew that if science, or care, or kindness is 
 of any avail the man would come into his own.
 
 THE CARE OF THE SEPOY 
 
 II 
 
 The Black Water 
 
 EARLY in the year an old Hampshire manor- 
 house \vith a \\dde lawn in front, overlooking 
 the sea, was converted into a home for convalescent 
 Indians. 
 
 Here the sepoy comes for rest and refreshment 
 until such time as he is fit to return to the trenches 
 or, if Fate has dealt hardly with him, to his own 
 country. The crumbHng cliffs are falling away on all 
 sides down to the beach. In a few years the house 
 itself will disappear. In the meantime this little plot 
 of vanishing England has lent itself to hospitable uses. 
 
 From their windows the sepoys overlook " the black 
 water." Somewhere beyond the open space between 
 the Needles and Christchurch Tower lies Hindustan, 
 or so it seems to them, separated from the land of 
 their birth by vague distances. 
 
 " The water under the cliff is one end of the road 
 home." Most of the Indias are reserved ; a few unburden 
 themselves ; but this thought must often occur to all. 
 A Sikh in one of the wards is looking wistfully out to 
 sea. As the doctor passes on his round he detaches 
 him and pours out his tale. 
 
 285
 
 286 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 It is well known in the hospital that it has been a 
 dry season in the Punjab — one of the driest for many 
 years — and his land which he has left in charge of a 
 small brother, Kartar Singh, a weakling, is fed by 
 wells, and lies far from any stream or canal ; and now 
 there has come news from a maternal uncle that a 
 cousin, Bhagwan Singh, is drawing the water off on 
 to his own land. The soil is as iron ; the thin crop 
 is withered by the drought. Will the doctor sahib 
 write to the Deputy Commission Sahib at Bahadurgarh 
 and see that justice is done. The doctor spoke com- 
 forting words to the Sikh. 
 
 "Be of good cheer," he said, " you will look into 
 this matter yourself. To-morrow you go before the 
 board, who will decide that the cure for your rheuma- 
 tism is the dry air of Hindustan. In ten days you 
 will be on board a ship, A month later you will see 
 Bahadurgarh and Kartar Singh, and you will be able 
 to take such measures against the thievish cousin as 
 you may think fit. Be sure that the Deputy Com- 
 missioner Sahib will not permit any injustice to be 
 done upon the estate of a sepoy who is fighting for the 
 Raj." 
 
 The Sikh had not an expressive countenance, but I 
 guessed that the grey sea under his window had become 
 a pathway of light. 
 
 It would be interesting to know what waking or 
 sleeping thoughts, if any, this open roadway of the 
 sea brings to the Pathan. In the case of Mir Ashgar 
 it is probably revenge. He carries a bit of the East 
 in his ribs beside a splinter of Prussian shrapnel. The 
 X-rays man discovered it deeply embedded, and there 
 it remains, an old wound, and an old score to pay in
 
 THE CARE OF THE SEPOY 287 
 
 a little family disagreement which arose out of the 
 infidelity of a woman. 
 
 " It is Madghah's bullet," Mir Ashgar explained. 
 " I knew it was there somewhere. I have not for- 
 gotten." 
 
 Madghali had stalked him one night as he was 
 shpping back over the border into British territory 
 to join his regiment at the end of his leave. But there 
 were consolations ; he had accounted for Madghali's 
 father, two brothers, and one son, whereas only two 
 of his own kin had so far fallen. When Mir Ali goes 
 East Madghali will have to lie low, keep an eye on his 
 loopholes, and cut the communication trench deeper 
 between his tower and his field. 
 
 Madghali's son whom Mir Ashgar slew was a boy of 
 five, but honour required it, and this Pathan has the 
 polished, genial manners of the brave. " May you 
 never grow tired," he said to me, as I left him, with a 
 salaam. " You are the most welcome person." 
 
 Another tribesman who is to sail by the next east- 
 ward-bound transport is a magnificent young Afridi 
 from the territory beyond our border. He stands 
 6 ft. 2 in. in his socks, is uncommonly fair, and carries 
 himself with the easy, careless grace of the frontier. 
 He was in the very first affair in which Indian troops 
 were engaged, at Neuve Chapelle, at the end of October 
 last year. Here he was slightly wounded, but returned 
 after a short interval. An attack of pneumonia in 
 March meant a longer convalescence. In May he 
 sustained the injury to his right hand which has put 
 him out of action. 
 
 In the meantime, his folk have been raiding our 
 Indian frontier while he has been fighting for us in
 
 288 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 Flanders. But this is all in the ordinary day's march, 
 a sporting event on the border as regular almost as 
 the Derby. The independent tribesman, once enrolled 
 in the Indian Army, is true to his salt, even if he finds 
 himself taking the field, as often happens, against his 
 own kin. 
 
 The corrugated iron recreation room on the cHff 
 is a very British-looking affair, with its billiard table 
 and stage and the sporting pictures hung on the wall ; 
 but there is nothing hybrid in the group within. The 
 settee by the wall is admirably adapted for a praying- 
 mat, and on it a wild-looking Beluchi, with loose, 
 hanging, elfin locks, is swaying rhythmically, gazing 
 Mecca-wards, repeating his evening prayer to the 
 setting sun with that rapt and blind absorption which 
 looks so odd in a cold English setting — more especially 
 odd in a building which might have been constructed 
 for a Bethel or a parish meeting-room. 
 
 Mir Ashgar has descended and is buying cigarettes 
 at the little stall in the corner, and a Sikh has a covetous 
 eye on a row of bottles — hair restoratives of different 
 kinds. He buys three of them, counting his English 
 pennies, and retires prepared for an orgy of oil. He 
 cares not for corks or pin-prick apertures, but will 
 strike the neck off each bottle in turn and pour the 
 contents over his long loose locks until they glisten 
 in the lamplight in a manner dear to his heart. 
 
 The Gurkhas, children of the hour, are playing on 
 the carpet. Things they have seen and endured in 
 blood-stained Flanders, and homelier far-away things 
 which are hidden from them for a time, have left no 
 trace of wistfulness on their happy Mongol features.
 
 THE CARE OF THE SEPOY 289 
 
 One of them has a gash on his cheek, a cicatrice Uke a 
 starfish with rays covering the whole side of his face. 
 The disfigurement only adds to the broadness of his 
 smile as he squats happily on the carpet absorbed in 
 a game of dice with cowrie shells. A crutch by his 
 side shows that this wound is not his only injury. 
 His next voyage will take him to his native hills. 
 
 He and his three comrades in turn throw the six 
 cowTie shells on a piece of sacking, and the game is to 
 make them fall with the aperture upwards. A fifth 
 scores with an Oriental cloth draught-board the shape 
 of a Maltese cross. I asked them if it was a game of 
 skill or a game of chance. The Gurkha who was 
 winning told me it was a game of skill, and the Gurkha 
 who was losing that it was a game of chance, and the 
 five of them smiled broadly. 
 
 Gurkha mirth, Sikh and Moslem melancholy seemed 
 equally remote from the genius of the tin shed, and 
 one wondered how much of the stereotyped west the 
 sepoy would carry home with him. Little, it is to 
 be hoped, beyond the picture postcard and the gramo- 
 phone, which is already established in the village 
 bazaar. 
 
 One cannot help moralizing when one meets the 
 Indians in the forest. It is good to think that this 
 plot of old Wessex, trodden once by Roman, Jute, and 
 Norman, should be tenanted by them for however 
 brief a time before it is swallowed up in the purging 
 sea. They have come from the land of their early 
 conquest, back into the west, fighting beside us to 
 hold the pure soil of England free from the last con- 
 tamination of the Hun.
 
 BAGHDAD 
 
 AN ancient though hardly a beautiful city, yet 
 possessing an indefinable charm of its own. 
 Entering it from the east, after having spent years 
 in the other easts, I felt that I was coming into the real 
 East for the first time, the dry, parched and crumbling, 
 unluxuriant, biblical East, the East of Sir Richard 
 Burton and Nebuchadnezzar, the original and essen- 
 tial East that is printed on the mind in childhood 
 through the Bible and the Book of Hours. 
 
 One sees date palms, domed Arab tombs, and 
 veiled women going to the well with pitchers, in other 
 Oriental cities scattered far and wide ; but one has 
 to come back to the Arab to evoke the familiar scene, 
 the Bedouin walk, the desert gaze, the peculiar hang 
 of the turban and poise of the head. 
 
 Baghdad, or Ba-a-agh-dad as the Arabs style it — 
 the two " a's " are rolled and the " h " is sounded — is 
 a city devoid of any kind of grandeur. The narrow, 
 tortuous alleys are impassable to carriages. The 
 saddle-bags of the camels rub against the walls of 
 yellowish brick and jam uncomfortably at the corners. 
 Many of the streets are too narrow for beasts of burden 
 other than the mangy, ragged little mules and asses 
 which descend in a continual stream with their empty 
 water-skins to the Tigris bank. Following them 
 
 290
 
 BAGHDAD 291 
 
 through the maze one need never lose the way. The 
 pariah dogs which one meets everywhere are the scav- 
 engers ; each has his own quarter, and if he passes 
 his neighbour's landmark he is attacked and driven 
 out. Lean and starved-looking as some of them are, 
 the reek that goes up from the garbage of the city 
 proclaims that their work is ill done. 
 
 The bazaars are often roofed, and the houses, ex- 
 cept in the upper stories, present a blank wall to the 
 street. Here the high-gabled windows on either side 
 almost meet, and one catches a glimpse of an arm 
 and sometimes a face of a surprising paleness, which 
 is hurriedly or reluctantly veiled according to the 
 degree of modesty that impels the action. These 
 fretted Jezebel windows are in keeping with the hoarded 
 romance of the city. It is the architecture of the illus- 
 trations in Lane's " Arabian Nights." One feels that 
 a black slave may appear behind the curtain with a 
 naked scimitar, or an afrit peep out of a neighbour- 
 ing mndow. I saw the girl, fair as a Circassian, 
 violently seized by the shoulder from behind and 
 drawn back into the room by a jealous hand, and 
 hoped that it would not be her fate to be sewn up in 
 a skin and cast into the Tigris. 
 
 There was no hotel in those days — sixteen years 
 ago — in the European sense of the word. Only a 
 shanty kept by an Armenian. Turkish cooking and 
 accommodation and no bath. One is supposed to go 
 to the hamman, but I commandeered a monster 
 cooking vessel, a kind of Arabian Nights cauldron, 
 and sent it sailing down the Tigris when I left, lest 
 any other European should come along. 
 
 My companions in the hotel were a Greek, a Jew,
 
 292 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 a Turk, an Armenian, a Levantine, a Bombay Eura- 
 sian, and an Italian-Abyssinian half-caste, who told 
 me that he had had French lessons from General 
 Gordon in Khartum. He dealt in liquorice, and I 
 remember a seUer of roots coming into the city, an 
 Arab, a dweller in black horse-hair tents driven to 
 Baghdad by hunger, as distrustful of walls as of a 
 cage, and afraid to enter the door of a house with his 
 wares. He struggled and spat when the Abyssinian, 
 who wanted to buy his stock, dragged him over the 
 threshold. 
 
 My bedroom window opened into a verandah over- 
 looking the river and the Bridge of Boats. Here 
 every morning I was reminded of the antiquity of 
 the city as I watched the gufas,^ described by 
 Herodotus, " round like a buckler and freighted with 
 casks of palm wine." He tells how they floated down 
 stream from Armenia each with a live ass on board, 
 and how when they arrived at Babylon the vessels 
 were taken to pieces and the ribs of willow, date-palm, 
 and pomegranate sold with the merchandise, and the 
 covering of skin carried back on the asses to the mer- 
 chant's own country. 
 
 Afterwards I saw the bitumen wells of Hitt on the 
 Euphrates, where the pitch is exuded with which the 
 gujas are plastered over to-day as in old times. They 
 are still belching forth the clouds of dense smoke 
 which made the ancients believe them the mouth of 
 hell. 
 
 No doubt the Turks, who will have commandeered 
 all the craft of the Tigris, have a fleet of these caul- 
 dron-like boats freighted with supplies and munitions 
 
 ^ Coracles.
 
 BAGHDAD 293 
 
 of war spinning dowTi stream from above Nineveh, 
 each with " the two navigators standing upright," 
 who will be lashing the stream furiously to reach 
 Baghdad against the day when our first armoured 
 motor-cars invade the palm-groves of the city. 
 
 I remember evenings spent in the house of an Ar- 
 menian, K Effendi — it is not safe to give his name 
 
 — when with shutters barred and doors closely guarded 
 a servant would stand by the glowing brazier and 
 sing national songs. 
 
 The Turk is not loved by subject races. The Jews 
 and Armenians in the city, if they escaped with their 
 lives, would no doubt welcome the sound of the British 
 guns. Yet in all social relations the traveller will 
 find the well-bred Osmanli of the old school what the 
 German eminently is not — a gentleman. Like the 
 Bedou, he has a code. There are things which are 
 done and things which are not done, and expediency 
 does not juggle with the rules. 
 
 The most picturesque figures in the city are the 
 Arabs ; the Bedou, with his keen eyes cast from long 
 habit on the horizon ; the grave sheikh with his staff, 
 his long grey beard and steadfast gaze, and turban 
 bound with the black aagal. 
 
 The Bedouin distrust the Turks, and their antipathy 
 is seasoned with contempt. Outside the city they 
 were free as the wind. There was no armed control 
 beyond a gunshot from the walls. The sheikhs of the 
 tribes were subsidized to let the camel post go through 
 to Damascus, and the Turkish Government had no 
 hold on them unless one of their number came into 
 the bazaars of Baghdad for supplies. I made the 
 journey across the desert with an old haji, who guided
 
 294 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 himself by the stars. Twelve days on a fast drome- 
 dary, riding eighteen hours at a stretch with two short 
 halts for meals, and the beast had only one drink be- 
 tween the Euphrates and Damascus. I was held up 
 and robbed a day and a half from Hitt, and owed it 
 to the haji that I got through alive. 
 
 When we entered Damascus we found the old city 
 turning in its sleep after an imperial visit. We saw 
 painted on all the facades of the houses what I should 
 have recognized, if I had been wise, as " the writing 
 on the wall," the mark of the beast, the beginning of 
 all this coil, the finger pointing to Baghdad. Hori- 
 zontal stripes of red, black, and white, the brand of the 
 Hohenzollern. William, the friend of Abdul, had 
 visited the oldest city in the world. The Sultan was — 
 literally perhaps, figuratively certainly — to be clasped 
 in a tight and, as after events may prove, a suffocating 
 embrace. Not a sacred dwelling was spared, not even 
 the house of Ananias or the house where St. Paul was 
 let down in the basket ; and the little mountain train 
 that takes one on to Lebanon and the sea wore on 
 every carriage the same livery. And, last profanity 
 of all, even at Baalbec on the temples of Jupiter and 
 the Sun was inscribed the legend, " Imperator Gcr- 
 mmtorum visitavit."
 
 THE MAN WHO WOKE UP 
 
 HE lived in a kind of upright coffin underground 
 — a wooden fortress on an isthmus between 
 two tunnels, which shook wdth the vibration of the 
 incoming and outgoing trains. At night, when he 
 rose into the upper air, he was guided to his home by 
 the same artificial rays which lighted him in the 
 underworld. The war did not affect him at first, 
 except that he emerged into a more Stygian darkness. 
 
 The mission in life of Arthur Husk was to distribute 
 small packets out of a glass window. An uncle who 
 was a retainer in the household of a tobacco magnate 
 had secured him the berth in the wooden box, and 
 his parents had impressed him so deeply with a sense 
 of his unworthiness that he accepted his lot as a special 
 intervention of Providence. He had unquestioning 
 belief in his star, which is the privilege of those who 
 secure promotion through influence. At thirty-two 
 he believed his position in the subterranean stronghold 
 to be impregnable. He clung to it when every other 
 citadel of the kind was occupied by girls and matrons. 
 
 His complacency had first been disturbed by an 
 extraordinary old gentleman of mountainous propor- 
 tions with a coffee-coloured skin and eyebrows like 
 
 295
 
 296 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 small birds' nests who had demanded a brand of cigar 
 unknown to his employers. This particular weed, it 
 seemed, was affected by every one remotely con- 
 nected with the planting of tea, coffee or rubber on 
 the coast that had given the old gentleman his indivi- 
 dual complexion. The ignorance of Arthur Husk 
 concerning the elementary business of his trade had 
 annoyed him even more than the infrequency of the 
 Richmond non-stop trains. 
 
 " You don't keep them ? What do you keep ? " 
 
 The old man glared at him so fiercely from under 
 his beetling brow that Husk felt personally at fault. 
 
 Another Ealing train passed. 
 
 " You live here, do you ? — underground — in the 
 dark — all the year round ? " 
 
 This also seemed a cause of offence. The man 
 spoke with such conviction that Husk felt something 
 like a sense of guilt. 
 
 " You should get out of it — do you hear ? — into 
 the light." 
 
 Husk was too confused for resentment. 
 
 " I can't be hanging about for a job," he said 
 sheepishly. 
 
 The intruder overshadowed and dwarfed his citadel 
 as some gross pagan god a little lighted shrine. 
 
 " This is not a job, it is an interment," he bellowed. 
 " What do you think the sun shines for ? Never seen 
 a flamingo, I suppose ? " 
 
 The word recalled to Husk a picture on an ephemeral 
 brand of cigarettes he had once sold — a white paper 
 box with a row of pink, long-legged birds by the 
 water's edge and a pink sun setting behind a palm. 
 
 " Go and see one at the Zoo. Can't get away, I
 
 THE MAN WHO WOKE UP 297 
 
 suppose. Sundays, gardens closed, eh ? " The huge 
 man's brows puckered as if Providence were given 
 a poser. " You have fifty-two days in the Hght, say 
 sixty-five in the year. That leaves three hundred 
 underground — in the grave. You inhabit the box 
 with the glass lid until the other box comes along. 
 Same thing — one vertical, the other horizontal." 
 
 The man had forgotten the little tobacconist who 
 cowered at his feet. The case of Husk had become 
 one of abstract WTong — a quite impersonal problem. 
 It was only the rumbling in the tunnel that brought 
 home to him again its personal application. 
 
 " This can't go on," he said. " We must arrange 
 something. You will see me some time to-morrow." 
 
 An arrow of silver light pointed to the Richmond 
 non-stop train, and the great impulsive Providence 
 was borne away like any ordinary mortal. 
 
 Husk spent a disturbed night. He repeated to 
 himself as he walked home that it was no business 
 of the stranger's, that he had no call to interfere or 
 to make little of a man's honest caUing. He resented 
 the intrusion as soon as the shadow of authority passed. 
 He could not deny the authority. This was not a 
 person one could tell to mind his own business. One's 
 own affairs and other people's might well be pertinent 
 to such a man. 
 
 The next morning the walls of his case seemed 
 narrower. His shop was ablaze with the same cryptic 
 insignia ; the cigarette-boxes exuded the same Oriental 
 perfume ; but the pyramids, the camels, the palms, 
 the sand reminded him of the stranger. The Sphinx 
 intrigued him. Those lustrous-girdled women of the 
 East, Salome and Semiramis, \\dth the twin plaques
 
 298 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 fastened Cleopatra-wise over their bosoms, gave his 
 visit a quite illogical importance. 
 
 At noon the Providence reappeared out of the 
 Cimmerian tunnel. An almost empty train dis- 
 gorged him. He blocked the aperture through which 
 Arthur Husk ministered to the underworld. 
 
 " Take these," he said. " Members' tickets for 
 Sunday. Got a wife ? No ? Very good thing. 
 Don't marry until you get out of this — into the light 
 I am arranging something. Don't forget the flamin- 
 goes. See the penguins fed. Visit the eagle-owl. 
 He's a bird of the dark like you — but he has vision." 
 
 The plan that was hatching for the deliverance of 
 Arthur Husk was never disclosed. Another train 
 appeared from the opposite tunnel and carried the 
 Providence off on his erratic orbit. Husk never saw 
 him again. 
 
 No doubt he is playing providence on a larger scale. 
 The need of millions is engaging his foresight, and 
 Husk is forgotten ; for three days after this visitation 
 England declared war. Even the underworld was 
 affected. One man in every four who came to the 
 glass box was wearing khaki. 
 
 Husk, holding the members' tickets in his hand, 
 was disconsolate. He did not know that these cards 
 provided him with the entree to life. " The light " 
 that he was to " get out into " meant nothing to him. 
 Yet he was profoundly dissatisfied with his under- 
 world. All his values were upset. He had lost caste. 
 It irked him to think that there were people going 
 about who could make light of a permanent job, an 
 appointment secured and held by influence, carrying 
 a salary sufficient to ensure respectabihty in the tenant
 
 THE MAN WHO WOKE UP 299 
 
 of the subterranean box. He tried to persuade himself 
 that his visitor was a crank with a prejudice against 
 the dark. He consulted the bookstall man. " A 
 queer customer indeed," his neighbour said. " I 
 shouldn't wonder if he hadn't been in prison." 
 
 The analogy was distressing with its suggestion 
 that he too, viewed from a different angle, had the 
 appearance of serving his term. Husk was not con- 
 vinced, but there was little comfort left him in the 
 impregnability of his citadel. 
 
 Arthur Husk was a native of Pimlico. He had 
 never travelled so far north as Regent's Park until he 
 found himself alone one Sunday morning outside the 
 Zoological Gardens with two members' tickets in the 
 brim of his black bowler hat. The bookstall clerk 
 had " cried off." He was a Sunday habitue of Water- 
 low Park and Finsbury. The Sabbath was for ozone, 
 he argued, and at his time of life he was not going to 
 risk the breathing of tainted air. 
 
 In this crisis Husk could think of no one to share 
 his adventure. His citadel in the Underground stood 
 in a moving human sea. His fellow-creatures were 
 carried past him in a continual ebb and flow, but he 
 inhabited his small cofhn-like box as if it were a shell 
 that had hardened round him. The integument was 
 impermeable. The average mollusc or mole has 
 probably more mates to pass the time of day with 
 than had Arthur Husk in his subterranean cell. 
 
 Standing outside the gate he was conscious of 
 privilege. He had obtained his tickets through in- 
 terest. It was more his habit of nailing down 
 opportunity than any sociable bent that made him 
 look round for a companion. It was the merest
 
 300 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 chance that a soldierly-looking old gentleman should 
 be pursuing his leisurely way down Albert Road at 
 the very moment when Arthur Husk was waiting 
 irresolutely by the north gate. There was something 
 in the stranger's eye and bearing, a benevolence en- 
 chanced by his thick white hair and brown skin, that 
 made the offer of the ticket easy and its acceptance 
 the most natural thing in the world. 
 
 "It is most kind of you ; very kind, indeed," he 
 said, in answer to Husk's explanation. " To tell you 
 the truth, I was wondering on whom I should descend 
 for a ticket. Sunday in town is a dismal affair, isn't 
 it ? I was due in Hampshire this morning, but half 
 an hour ago I had a message putting me off ? " 
 
 Husk was puzzled by this modest courtesy. He had 
 never spoken to a gentleman before save in the way 
 of business. Now it seemed that the stranger wished 
 for his company. 
 
 " I am interested in beasts myself," he said. " I 
 have done a bit of shooting in odd places. We can 
 compare notes." And he insisted that the tobacconist 
 should be his guest at lunch. 
 
 Husk blinked at him uneasily. He followed him 
 with some suspicion, but before noon he was less 
 tongue-tied with his retired sapper colonel than he 
 could ever have been with the bookstall man. He 
 offered few comments, but such as he made puzzled 
 the kindly old officer, who studied men as well as 
 beasts and wondered what kind of human mole he 
 had unearthed in Regent's Park. The sun shone. 
 Brightness and colour flooded the gardens. The 
 flamingoes danced for him and spread their wings. 
 The eagle owl flushed an eye of vision. The king
 
 THE MAN WHO WOKE UP 301 
 
 penguin in his orange stole bowed gravely at his feet. 
 Everything conspired that he should see day. Those 
 gorgeous Himalayan fowl the monaul and tragopan 
 carried light on their wings. 
 
 Husk learnt from the colonel how he had shot the 
 monaul in the rhododendron forest, where the birds 
 would fall among the crimson blossoms that stained 
 the snow ; how he had had his thumb nearly bitten 
 off by a wounded hornbill — " that red-eyed villain 
 who affects the blue tie " — somewhere on the Siamese 
 side of the Tennasserim River ; how he had fallen 
 down a cliff in the close embrace of one of those white- 
 cravated bears and seen a brown mother emerge 
 with her young from her winter lair — the hollow 
 bole of a tree into which he had climbed and looked 
 across abysmal valleys at the white peak of Siniolchum. 
 He heard of fighting widgeon and pink-footed geese 
 stalked in the frosty reed-beds at dawn. The colonel 
 spoke of these things with the zest of a child. He 
 could tell what wild fowl were passing over at night 
 by their cries and the sound of their wings. He had 
 watched the ibex in their native precipices of Baltistan, 
 He made Husk wait nearly an hour by the flamingo 
 pool to see ho\v the markhor would come down. 
 
 Husk thought he would hke to handle a gun. He 
 had made a bull's-eye once, he said, in a shooting 
 gallery in the Strand. 
 
 " Have you ever thought of joining the Army ? '^ 
 Husk explained that he was a tobacconist. The 
 colonel said kind and complimentary things about 
 the uses of nicotine. He spoke of Husk's trade as if 
 he were a philanthropist dispensing solace a,ll day long 
 to the harassed denizens of cities. Then he returned
 
 302 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 to the East. ]\Iappin's terraces seen across the gar- 
 dens reminded him of the mud walls of a citadel far 
 away on the banks of the Indus in Chilas. There was 
 one narrow gully overshadowed by walnut trees. The 
 rest was earth — " just that colour." It was hard to 
 distinguish the fortress from the rock. 
 
 Husk said nothing of where his own citadel was 
 pitched. For the first time in his life the thought of 
 it depressed him. On parting the colonel gave him 
 his card and begged him to come and see him should 
 he think of the Army as a profession. It really looked 
 as if there were going to be war. "If so," he said, 
 " we shall all have to lend a hand." 
 
 For six weeks Husk looked out of the window of his 
 box. When he was not too busy he felt strangely 
 cramped, and wished that the Providence who had 
 come like a purging wind into the dim underworld 
 would be swept with some human eddy on to his 
 island again. 
 
 A great war placard had been posted in front of his 
 Tdox ; it blocked all space, filled his whole horizon. 
 The appeal had become almost personal. He could 
 not sleep easily at night. 
 
 He sought the colonel out and found the old gentle- ^ 
 man in uniform. His white hairs were relieved by the ^1 
 red band over the peak of his cap, and he was wearing ^B 
 red tabs like the flamingo. Husk profited by the 
 visit. In six weeks he had learnt to walk like a soldier 
 and a gentleman. 
 
 Another month passed, and he saw the flamingoes 
 from the deck of the troopship. They stood in solemn 
 row by the margin of the pools and the salt lakes. The 
 sun was setting behind them just as it had done in 
 
 S
 
 THE MAN WHO WOKE UP 303 
 
 the panorama on the cigarette-box, touching the dis- 
 tant sandhills with a delicate tulip tint. He looked 
 for the palm tree which used to break the disc in the 
 picture. Nature had not provided it. He saw in- 
 stead the human throng in the Underground passing 
 eternally up the narrow stairway into the light. 
 
 Husk was a useful recruit. He had great applica- 
 tion. It seemed that the chrysalis stage had had a 
 steadying influence on him. Not that the full-blown 
 product of so prolonged a hibernation did in any way 
 especially shine ; but he could form fours, slope arms, 
 and fix bayonets with the best of them, and he was a 
 cool, deliberate marksman, at one time the best in his 
 company. He was a frequent butt, and so resignedly 
 so that he became almost popular. He felt much 
 inward satisfaction that he was accepted by the others 
 as of the same currency. The first time he was called 
 " Husky " was a kind of baptism into humanity, and 
 he became more human as the name clung to him. 
 
 In India he saw more concentrated light in a day 
 than he had seen in all his brief seaside holidays. 
 Every Thursday and Saturday were his own in a land 
 where adventure is respectable. He kept goal in a 
 regimental tournament and won the match for his 
 company ; he killed two cobras with his bayonet on a 
 morning's route march ; he shot a barking deer in the 
 jungle of the foothills ; he saw the crimson dhak 
 forest burst into bloom; he even collected "bugs" 
 in a furtive way, though he could count the butter- 
 flies he had seen in England on the fingers of one 
 hand. After a month of the hot weather he was sent 
 up with some other men of his compan57 to a depot
 
 304 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 in the hills. In a few weeks he had seen a Tibetan 
 devil dance on the mall and ridden through a Hima- 
 layan forest by moonlight on a Bhutia tat. 
 
 Husk was not a student of Indian character. He 
 knew the natives of the bazaar as folk of elastic prices 
 with whom it was amusing to haggle. For the rest 
 his regiment had been indoctrinated with a vague 
 but wholesome idea of Hindu susceptibilities. The 
 Territorials were warned that there must be no " in- 
 cidents." 
 
 The " incident " that gave Husk his chance was 
 not of his seeking. It was thrust upon him, and he 
 accepted it with the same eye for opportunity with 
 which he had accepted his billet in the Underground 
 and his members' tickets for the Zoological Gardens. 
 The only difference was that he was now his own 
 Providence ; in the last few months he had attained 
 manhood. 
 
 Husk had gone down to the plains again at a season 
 when heat and light become a weariness to the spirit 
 and nerves are highly strung. The brain-fever bird 
 in the neem tree outside the barracks had become a 
 burden. Husk laid down his newspaper and listened. 
 He thought he heard distant firing. It was three 
 o'clock, the hottest hour of the afternoon, and the 
 men were lying listlessly under a punkah which dis- 
 turbed the stillness of the room with fiery currents of 
 air. 
 
 " Who's that loosing off ? " somebody said casually. 
 " This ain't Noov Chapelle." A rifle shot outside 
 the barracks made those who were awake sit up in 
 their beds They became aware of shouting and hurry- 
 ing feet. The Store-Babu bolted into the room in a
 
 THE MAN WHO WOKE UP 305 
 
 panic-fright \\dth a story of a sepoy who had seen 
 fairies and run amok. He had killed his havildar, 
 winged a British ofificer, shot Private Deedes in the 
 foot, and was now taking cover behind a water-butt 
 at the back of the Fives Court. 
 
 As Husk ran out into the verandah with the others 
 he saw a huge coil of unrolled matting at the foot of 
 the stairs. He shouldered it and struggled after his 
 mates to the quarter guard, demanded and obtained 
 ammunition. 
 
 In the blinding glare after the darkened room and 
 \vith the sweat pouring over his eyes he could hardly 
 distinguish the figures by the Fives Court. He heard 
 a man say, " He's the other side of the wall," and then 
 a voice of command. 
 
 " Hold back there ! We are not going to lose any 
 more men over this." 
 
 Husk panted up with his improvised cover, 
 
 "I've got this, sir," he said. " Let me settle him. 
 I'll fix it at the corner. I'll get him when he puts his 
 head up." 
 
 The officer surveyed his dispositions. Husk's coco- 
 nut matting was better than the trees, and he knew 
 the man for a cool shot. 
 
 " All right. Go in there. We'll rush him from 
 behind when you draw his fire. Keep your head 
 down." 
 
 " How many rounds has he fired ? " 
 
 Nobody knew. 
 
 " I'll sing out, sir, when he reloads." Husk pro- 
 ceeded to roll his bundle to the corner of the wall. 
 
 Through the chink between the hairs of the mat 
 and the brick he caught a glimpse of the man's blood- 
 
 u
 
 o 
 
 06 THE YEAR OF CHIVALRY 
 
 shot eye. His turban had fallen over the butt, and 
 his' long, loose, cavalier-like locks added to his air of 
 wildness. 
 
 Husk laid his rifle on the top of the matting, covering 
 the spot where the head had appeared, and then waited 
 his time. It was a duel. The Pathan got in the first 
 shot ; it grazed the top of the matting an inch from 
 his head. Husk saw from his chink that the man was 
 aiming again. " Hold on," he called to his party ; 
 " he's got another round." He gradually raised his 
 eye to the stock of his rifle and drew a bead on the 
 inch of forehead visible over the butt. As he fired 
 he fell back and put his hand to his neck. 
 
 As he lay on the brink he thought of first and last 
 things. His bed was an isthmus ; his spirit might go 
 either way. Over there by the window was the light ; 
 the wall behind him screened an abyss. He was 
 determined he would not sink down into it — down 
 the steps into his wooden cage with its glass window 
 and lid. He clung with both hands to the iron post 
 of his bed lest he should slip down the incline and be 
 carried along with the black-suited tribe into the 
 underworld. The regimental doctor tried to unloosen 
 his fingers but desisted, perceiving that he had found 
 some stay which he could not guess. 
 
 When he came to he smiled. He had fought at 
 grips with death and conquered. He smiled now at 
 his fears. He would never be afraid of death again, 
 and he knew now that if he had let go, if he had gone 
 under, it would not have been into the darkness but 
 into the light. 
 
 He thought of his shop. Supposing he had died 
 in the little wooden box in which he had sold cigarettes
 
 THE MAN WHO WOKE UP 307 
 
 before he had come out into the Hght, his uninformed 
 ghost, if it walked at all, would haunt the Underground. 
 Not only would he have buried his body for the term 
 of his natural life, he would have contracted ties by 
 which his earth-bound spirit would have hovered in 
 the artificial light, in that chill, uncanny draught 
 in which one is swept along with the tide between the 
 incoming and outgoing train. 
 
 He looked up and saw his colonel standing over 
 him, and for the first time remembered the Pathan. 
 
 " Did we get him, sir ? " he asked faintly. 
 
 The colonel smiled, " You got him all right ; straight 
 through the brain-pan. I wish it hadn't been quite 
 so clean a shot. He'd have been better hanged. But 
 lie still now. You mustn't talk ; you've got to keep 
 quiet. We're going to send you up to the hills." 
 
 Husk heard him say to the doctor in the verandah, 
 " Good fellow, that ! I wish we had more like him." 
 
 The throbbing of his pulses was a beat of triumph. 
 He had learnt the meaning of pride. 
 
 EuUcr & Tanner, Frome an<i LomlJiu
 
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 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
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