The Adventure of Living Part 30

I want to say quite plainly and clearly that, though it would be out of place and wearisome to discuss the War and its origin here, I refuse absolutely and entirely to apologise for the War, or to speak as if I were ashamed of it, or of the part which, as a journalist, I played in regard to it before it came or while it was in progress. The War was not only necessary to secure our safety, but it was, I am as fully convinced as ever I was, a righteous war. Unless we had been willing to run the risk of being enslaved by Germany, or, if you will, unless we had been prepared to fight for our lives and liberties at the most terrible disadvantage, we were bound, both by reasons of safety and by reasons of honour, to prevent France being destroyed by Germany. If after all that had happened in the ten years before the war we had remained neutral, France and Russia would have felt, and with reason, that we had deserted them. It is, therefore, quite possible that, if Germany, after a rapid initial success, had proposed very generous terms, they might have patched up a peace at our expense, and in effect told Germany that she might have as much of the perfidious British Empire as she required.

Germany would almost certainly have been willing to agree to such an arrangement. Her rulers, like Napoleon, knew that they could not rule Europe unless the naval supremacy of the British Empire was destroyed.

In a word, it was quite clear that if we, France, and Russia did not hang _together_, we should hang separately.

That was the argument of convenience. The argument based on honour and justice was stronger still. The notion of allowing Belgium and France to be exposed to the risk of destruction while we watched in fancied security was absolutely intolerable. We could not say to France, though some people actually thought it possible, "This is not our quarrel. You must decide between Russia and Germany as best you can. We refuse to fight Russia's battles; though we would fight yours if you were wantonly attacked." But that was as foolish as it was selfish. France and Russia were bound to support each other against the foe they found so potent and so menacing;--a foe willing, nay, eager, to support that "negation of G.o.d erected into a system" called the Austrian Empire.

To be concise, France was bound in honour not to leave Russia in the lurch when she was attacked, and we were also bound in honour not to desert France. We had pursued, in the past, a policy which directly encouraged France, not only to make a stand against Germany, but to commit herself more and more to her Russian Allies and to regard, indeed, that alliance as part of the security of the world, part of the insurance against a German domination of Europe, part of the joint peace premium. First to back up France, as we did at Agadir and afterwards, and then suddenly to step aside with the cry of "Angela, there is danger. I leave thee," would have been so base that, had we perpetrated it, we could never have recovered our national self-respect. But self- respect is as essential to the welfare of nations as it is to the welfare of the individual.

The War was a terrible evil, and we have suffered very greatly, but I refuse absolutely to be apologetic in regard to our method of carrying it through. On the contrary, I think there is nothing in human history more magnificent than the way in which people in the British Empire steadily kept to their purpose and were willing to make any and every sacrifice to maintain the right. Here I appeal to a contemporary judgment which happens to be as impartial as the judgment of any future historian is likely to be. I mean the judgment pa.s.sed on us by the firm if friendly hand of the American Amba.s.sador, Mr. Page. Wonderful and deeply moving are his descriptions of the way in which the English people of all cla.s.ses and of all political creeds and temperaments withstood the shock of the declaration of war and of its first dreadful impact. Speaking generally his descriptions of the years '14, '15, and '16--"Years which reeled beneath us, terrible years"--are as great and as memorable as anything ever recorded in human history. As a picture of a people undergoing the supreme test and seen in the fullest intimacy and absolutely at first-hand, it is equal to anything even in Thucydides. A n.o.ble pa.s.sion inspires and consecrates the narration-- vibrant with the sense not only of sorrow but also of exaltation and complete understanding. It was the happiest of accidents that one of our own race, and blood, and language should have been able to view the nation's sacrifice as he viewed it, and yet be able to speak as could only a man who was not actually partic.i.p.ating in the sacrifice, and was not actually part of the nation. An American citizen of pure English language and lineage, like Mr. Page, could say things, and say them outright, which no Englishman could have said. The Englishman would have been checked and tongue-tied by the sense that he was plucking laurels for his own brow. _Page's immortal letters--I am using the words with sober deliberation and not in any inflated rhetoric--stand as the best and greatest national monument for Britain's dead and Britain's living_.

That n.o.ble att.i.tude of the British people, that gallantry without pose or self-glorification, that valour without vain glory, that recognition that pity and truth must be shared by the conqueror with the conquered all were maintained by our people in war as in peace. There were tears for the sons of the enemy as well as for our own. In spite of endless provocations we kept our humanity and so our honour.

If our battle spirit became us, our spirit since then has been as worthy of the best that is in mankind. It is true that while making the Peace, we said and did many foolish things, both as far as the rest of the world is concerned and also in regard to our own interests; but we have a perfect right to say that all was done in honour and nothing in malice, in selfishness, or in that worst of all crimes and follies, the spirit of revenge. There is no justice in revenge. It is a hateful and premeditated negation of justice, the creature of ign.o.ble panic, and not of faith and courage. It is pure evil.

I even refuse to bemoan the legacies of the War. The War has left us in poverty and in peril. But even though that poverty and that peril are largely the result of the mismanagement of those to whom we have entrusted the work of reconstruction, I am not going to sit down by the international roadside and rave about it. The way in which that social peril and that poverty have been borne by the vast majority of our population has been wholly admirable. I am optimist enough to see and salute a n.o.bility of sacrifice in all cla.s.ses which to my mind is earnest that the future of our half of the English-speaking race--of the other half no man need have any doubts--will be as great as was its past.

Could anything have been better than the way in which the rich, opulent, well-to-do cla.s.ses of this country have taken the tremendous revolution in their lives and fortunes accomplished by the War? The economic and social change has been as great and almost as shattering as those wrought by any social revolution in the world's history. Yet they have hardly caused a murmur among those who have had to endure them.

The great country-houses of England, only some eight years ago its architectural and social glory, are pa.s.sing rapidly out of the hands of their old owners. Some are destined to fall actually into ruin, some to become inst.i.tutions, schools, hospitals, or asylums, and a few--but only a few--to pa.s.s into the hands of the new possessors of wealth--a body much smaller in numbers than is usually represented. There are thousands of families whose members, once rich, have now pa.s.sed into a condition so straitened that only ten years ago they would have regarded it as utterly insupportable--a position to which actual extinction was preferable. Yet, Heaven be praised! this great social revolution has not caused one drop of blood, and very little bitterness or complaint.

Coming, as it has come, as the result of a great national sacrifice, it has been accepted with a patriotism as great as that which accepted the sacrifice of the War. English people of all cla.s.ses are tenacious of their rights, and one may feel certain that the cla.s.s of which I am speaking, if they felt an injustice was being done them, would not have forfeited their property without a struggle. Of such civil strife, however, there has never been a thought. In a word, our revolution has come in the guise of a patriotic duty and sacrifice.

It was accompanied, strange to tell, by a sudden, and therefore unsettling, temporary great increase of material prosperity among the poorer part of the community. The sacrifices, moral and physical, though not material, made by the manual workers were, though not greater, every bit as great as those made by the rich and the well-to-do. They were borne by the working-cla.s.ses with what one must admit showed, in one sense, an even greater n.o.bility of conduct. Education made matters explicable to the prosperous, and especially to their women, whereas the greater part of the women of the manual workers, and a very large part of the men, had to take the reasons for the War wholly on trust. They had not been sufficiently forewarned of the danger, and the War burst upon them literally as a horrible surprise--a surprise which so soon meant for the women the sacrifice of all they held most dear.

Though there seems a likelihood that proportionately the material sacrifice may remain less great for the manual workers than for those who are above them in the economic scale, the loss caused by the world's dest.i.tution is bound to be great, even though it will not be revolutionary. Still, I am convinced that it will be met with equal courage, provided our rulers, through panic or through false ideas of expediency, do not feed the manual workers of the nation on a diet of mere flattery, sophistry, and opportunism, but rather instruct and inspire them to play a worthy part.

But, though I see how many and how great are the dangers that surround us, I believe that as a nation and an Empire we shall pa.s.s through the fiery furnace with unsinged hair. It has been said that the Almighty must favour the British Empire, for again and again some event which it is difficult to regard as a mere accident has saved it from destruction, or turned its necessity to glorious gain. I find no difficulty in agreeing and also have no desire to apologise for calling it the Will of G.o.d that our nation shall not perish. I admit, however, it would be more in the philosophic fashion to describe it as the resultant of the Life- Urge, or of "the Something behind the Somebody"--a formula which is possibly destined to take the place of Matthew Arnold's more polished "stream of tendency making for righteousness."

But when I say this of the new voices, I hope that no one will imagine that I speak cynically or even in sympathetic irony. It may well be that those who use the phrase "Life-Urge" in reality mean very nearly what I mean when I speak of "the Grace of Heaven." They, indeed, may be more honest and more sincere than I am in their reticence of language and in their determination not to deceive themselves, even by an iota. Their fierce preservation of the citadel of agnosticism, till they are sure, may make them unhappy and hard-pressed in spirit. It can never make them ign.o.ble.

For myself, I am convinced that there is no better way of serving G.o.d, or of acknowledging the greatness of the issues of life and death than that splendid devotion to truth which will not allow even the minutest dilution,--which demands, not only the truth, and the whole truth, but nothing but the truth. Who dare blame these young "Knights of the Holy Ghost" who make their Gospel a demand for an absolute purity, who ask for the thing which has no admixture?

Does not our Lord Himself tell us, "_Blessed are the pure in hearty for they shall see G.o.d_"? And does not purity of heart mean no mixed motives, no subst.i.tutes, no easy concessions, no compromises, no arrangements, but only the truth and the light, single and undefiled?

But I fear I may seem to be losing touch with that of which I speak, or claiming some sort of monopoly of Divine guidance for my race and country. Nothing could be further from my thought. All that I do is to cherish the belief that the trend of events is towards moral and spiritual progress, and that the chief instrument of salvation will be the English-speaking race. In speaking thus, as a lover or a child, I am certainly not pointing to the road of selfishness. If the English- speaking kin is to take the lead and to bring mankind from out the shadow and once again into the light, it can only be through care, toil, and sacrifice-things little consistent with national selfishness or national pride.

CHAPTER XXVIII

UNWRITTEN CHAPTERS

The writing of memoirs is a pleasant exercise. At any rate, I have found it so. It has led me back to many curious and delightful things which I had wholly forgotten. They came unbidden in the train of events which I had always remembered "in principle" and was at pains to evoke in detail. But though the process has obvious advantages, it has had one drawback. My recollections, and still more my reflections, and what I may call my self-comments Conscious and Subconscious, have been so many that at times I have felt like a man struggling in a mighty torrent.

The result has been that, though I have written more than I intended to write, I have not covered anything like the amount of ground which I hoped to cover. I am left staring at a list of unwritten chapters. A list as long as that of those chapters included in my book or else eliminated lest the volume should swell to the size of the London Directory or to one of those portentous catalogues which Mr. Bernard Quaritch used to put forth in the days when I first began to love books, not merely for their contents, but as books.

The t.i.tles of the unwritten chapters have, however, so fascinated me, and seem so necessary to my life and, therefore, to my book, that I must, at any rate, put their names on record, together with some faint indication of their nature, lest my readers should think there is some deep reason why I do not touch them. It is, I feel, only natural that people should think the worst of an Autobiographer.

The unwritten chapter which I most deeply regret is that chapter on the War Hospital which we opened in the house in which I am writing--a Hospital which my wife, though I suppose I ought not to say this, managed, in spite of ill-health and many difficulties, with extraordinary success. Though physically disabled, she, for nearly five years, maintained practically single-handed, the organisation and direction of a well-equipped surgical and medical inst.i.tution in a house not built for that purpose, though, oddly enough, one which in certain ways lent itself to hospital purposes. The Newlands Corner Hospital had an average of forty beds.

Four and a half years is a long time to be out of one's house. It is a still longer time in which to turn your home into an inst.i.tution and yourself into a matron. Altogether some eight or nine hundred men pa.s.sed through the hospital. The doctors of the Royal Herbert Hospital, Woolwich, with which we were affiliated, and Colonel Simpson, the A.D.M.S. of that Hospital,--a man of marked ability in his profession and with a natural gift for administration,--soon found out that Newlands air and Newlands care were excellent things for difficult and anxious cases. Therefore we had our full share of bad, or, as the Sisters and nurses put it, good, cases.

As I had nothing to do with the hospital except on the proprietory side-- I was very busy with war--work of my own--I cannot be accused of self- laudation if I say that my wife won the praise, not only of the Medical Authorities, but, which was still more to her and to me, the confidence and grat.i.tude of her patients. No small part of her success was due to a very simple fact. She early saw the necessity of dividing the administrative side of the hospital from the nursing side. Nursing is so fascinating in itself that many Commandants were drawn from their proper sphere of administration into surgical and medical work. My wife, partly from an instinct for sound administration, and partly also because at the moment she lacked the physical strength, confined herself strictly to her own side. In a hospital in which the patients were continually changing, which was four miles from a town and two miles from a railway station, that side was in war-times and during the period of rationing, by no means a light job. But the fact that there was one person, and that the person in supreme charge of the inst.i.tution, who did nothing else except attend to the smooth running of the machine, meant that there were no arrears of correspondence, that all Army forms were filled up exactly and not, as many Commandants were inclined to think was far better, in accordance with what they themselves judged to be reasonable and necessary. Indeed, I was wont to tell my wife that I was appalled at the bureaucratic spirit which she developed! I believe I am right in saying that she never got an Army form wrong, though on several occasions she was able to point out to her official superiors that they had mistaken, or at any rate forgotten, their own elaborate rules.

The result was an extremely easy functioning of the official engine.

While other Commandants could be heard complaining that they could not get answers from the authorities, or get the Army payments made properly, my wife, I believe, never once failed to get the War Office cheque, on the day it was due. There were never any complaints that she was in arrears with her correspondence or with necessary information.

But then, instead of raging, as no doubt, she might have been quite as much inclined to do as anyone else, at the absurdities of "red tape" and so forth, she accepted them as necessary evils, like hailstorms and the "all dreaded thunder-stroke."

Six months before the War, believing the catastrophe was coming, she took instructions from an R.A.M.C. staff sergeant-major in all the intricacies of yellow, blue, and red tickets, and of forms from A to Z, or rather, from the first wound to the burial, required by the R.A.M.C.

The result was that when the War broke out she knew a great deal more about the details of the Army Medical system than did many Staff or Regimental Officers, and even more than many Medical Officers.

But I am breaking my rule of not writing about living people, and I must stop. I may, however, say something about my own place in the hospital, for my position was curious, and of very great interest to me. During the four and a half years that the hospital was open, I lived in it as what might be called a parlour-boarder. I kept my own bedroom, but my house contained, as it were, forty guests, and guests of a very fascinating kind. Our family life was embedded in the hospital. My daughter was working in the wards, and my son used to come back from Eton to spend his holidays in his hospital home. I was working at the time, not only at _The Spectator_, but also at recruiting for the Regular Army, which I regarded as my special duty, for I happened that year to be Sheriff of my county. In addition I was at the head of a curious little corps called the Surrey Guides and further was a member of the Executive Committee for the Volunteer Training Corps--a body whose activities alone would be well worth a chapter.

But though my work lay outside Newlands, and though I always spent two nights a week in London, conducting, besides my editorial duties at _The Spectator_ office, the duties I have already described in connection with the American Correspondents, I gained a most valuable experience from the hospital. In the first place, I did something which was almost unique. I lived for four and a half years in a community of women-the only man amongst nine. The house, of course, was full of male patients, but I lived with the staff.

Besides my wife and daughter, there was a Sister-in-Charge, and, when needed, an additional professional nurse, a staff of _ma.s.seuses_ which varied in number in accordance with the nature of the cases sent to us, and four or five resident V.A.D.'s, including the night nurses.

In a house in such an isolated position as ours it was not possible for the V.A.D.'s to live at home and come in for their duty hours.

I suppose the conventional cynic will expect me to say that I found out how much more quarrelsome, jealous, and feline is a community of women than one of men. Though I amused myself very much by watching how women work in a.s.sociation, I am bound to say that I saw nothing which led me to any such conclusion. I have seen plenty of men's quarrels in offices, in clubs, in the common rooms of colleges, at schools, and still more, perhaps, in mess-rooms and barracks, and I am bound to say that, according to my experience, my s.e.x is quite as bad as, and, on the whole, rather worse than, women at the communal quarrel. Women are a little less noisy in their quarrels, and little more ingenious, but that is as far as I should care to generalise.

"They did not let you see."--That will not do as an explanation, for I am sure that after the first seven or eight months, the ladies of the staff came to ignore me completely, or to regard me rather as a part of the furniture. Consequently, I saw them in what, if they had been men, one might have called their shirt-sleeves. When you see hard-worked and anxious people, as they come down to breakfast in the morning, when they rush in to lunch, and when they sink, tired, into their chairs at dinner, you have a pretty good opportunity for finding out all about them. Under such conditions they cannot keep up the veil of convention and of company manners. However, I cannot go into all these details, much as I should like to, but must give only a general verdict.

I ended up my four and a half years as a parlour-boarder in a semi- convent with a respect for women and their work, which had always been very high, made still higher. If perhaps I found women a little less sensitive than I thought, I certainly found them a great deal more sensible, and, of course, as I suppose is the universal experience, a great deal less easily shocked by things that ought not to shock them than they are supposed to be. I mean by this that women are much less afraid to look life full in the face and much more willing to understand and to pardon, than is supposed. Also, I came to the conclusion that women, though great disciplinarians, and often hard upon each other, are not essentially merciless.

They are certainly, on the whole, less lazy than men, which is probably a misfortune. I think Matthew Arnold was right when he spoke of women being "things that move and breathe mined by the fever of the soul." The fever of the soul, especially in a Sister, who, as is the case with most of them, was grossly overworked in the hospital where she was trained, is apt to prove a great evil.

If I learned a good deal about women at the hospital and if the result of that learning was respect and admiration, I acquired an equally great respect and admiration for the British soldier. I had always loved those "contemptible regiments" who, as Sir Thomas Browne says, "will die at the word of a sergeant," but I loved them still more when I saw their good-natured, unostentatious way of life. They were, above all things, easy and sympathetic livers. Almost the only thing that shocked and disgusted them was being treated as heroes. Dr. Johnson talked about the "plebeian magnanimity of the British common soldier" and meant the right thing, though, in truth, there was nothing plebeian in the said magnanimity,--nothing which would not have been worthy of the highest birth and the highest breeding.

But the hospital did not raise my admiration merely for the soldier. It raised it equally for the British working-man, who composed by far the larger part of our patients. Ours, remember, was a soldiers' hospital, not an officers'. We had, I think, in the whole course of our hospital not more than four men who had been public-school boys or University men. All the rest were labourers or artisans. When the hospital doors closed, I respected the English working-man as much as ever, and added to that respect a love and sympathy which I may record, but shall not attempt to explain or to express in detail. I could fill a book with stories and studies of our friends, for so they became, and so they still remain.

My wife is constantly in touch with her old patients, and this does not mean applications for help or for work, but letters and visits of pleasure. That is good, but what is even better is that we constantly come across references to the Newlands feeling, for around it quickly grew up an indefinable _esprit de corps_. For example, on the day on which I write these pages, one of our local newspapers contains a letter from a Yorkshireman who had somehow seen an article in the aforesaid paper in regard to some Red Cross work done by my wife. He talks of the happy hours he spent at Newlands Corner, "hours which will live for ever in my mind." That, of course, is commonplace enough and sounds trivial, but it is repeated often enough to provoke a sense of true communal fellowship.

One of the things with which I think my wife and I were specially pleased about the hospital was the rapid way in which this sense of _esprit de corps, i.e._, the public-school feeling, grew up. After the first month or two, patients talked quite seriously and candidly about "the old hospital." Again and again men told us that they should never forget Newlands. Like the true Englishmen they were, they partly loved Newlands because of the beauty of the scenery. The Englishman, though generally insensible of, or at any rate irresponsive to, the arts, is never irresponsive to a view. (John Stuart Mill's Autobiography contains, by the way, a curious pa.s.sage in regard to this point.) I remember my wife telling me, the day after she had admitted a very bad case, that the patient had said to her, "I am sure I shall get well here, Commandant. It's such beautiful scenery."

But no more of the hospital here. I live in the hope that some day I may write its history, and may be able to say something which will not be open to the charge of, "Oh! Another boring book about the War!" As I conceive it, my hospital book will be an a.n.a.lysis of the mind and character of the British working-man with his defensive armour off, and not an attempt to give any views on military or medical reform and so forth.

One word more. My position in the hospital with the men was a strange one. They soon saw that I played the game, and that if I saw them breaking rules, met them, when I was riding, out of bounds, or discovered them at any other of their wicked tricks, I never told tales, or got them into trouble, or evoked any disciplinary reprisals. This intensive cultivation of the blind eye raised me to the position of a friendly neutral and gained for me their confidence. Besides, I believe it soothed them to think that I, too, had to endure the regiment of women to which they were exposed. They suspected that I also quailed, as they must, before "the Sister in charge."

Their manners, by the way, were always perfect without being formal or absurd. They seemed to have an instinct for absolute good breeding. Yet they were all the time what Whitman called "natural and nonchalant persons." Neither my wife, nor her staff, nor I ever made any pretence to ourselves that they were plaster saints because their manners were good. They were as wicked as demons and as mischievous as monkeys, and seized every occasion for natural wrong-doing. In fact, they were just like schoolboys, but they observed always the schoolboy law. Quarrel they might, and dislike each other as they often did very bitterly, they never told tales of each other. The Belgians, of whom we had some at the beginning, were very different. They, curiously enough, gave each other away quite freely, and complained of each other to the Commandant. But, as one of our men said to me in excuse for the bad behaviour of the Belgians, "They was never taught any better. They hadn't the training we've had."

Another unwritten chapter, which I desire particularly to write, is a chapter on Newlands, the history of the house which I love only less than I love Sutton Court,--the house which I and my wife built, if not with our own hands, at any rate with our own heads,--the house in which my children were born, and two of my grandchildren,--the house from which my daughter was married,--the house which I have seen grow like a tree out of the ground,--finally, a house sanctified by the sufferings of brave men, who had fought for a great cause and laid us all under an obligation never to be expressed in words. Newlands, with its keen, almost mountain, air, its views, its woodlands, its yews, its groves of ash, and oak, and thorn, its green paths winding through the greyer and deeper-toned gorse, heather, and bracken, is a thing to live for. If one can be grateful, as certainly one can, to things inanimate, I am grateful for the health and strength which Newlands has given me. But this must be told, if I ever write it, in the history of the house.

Still, I regret not to have done more honour to Newlands here, as I regret not to have been able to make my salute to the wounded in better form.

Another chapter "arising out of" Newlands, which I should like to have written, would have been on my work as Chief of the Surrey Guides. My readers need not be afraid of some burst of amateur militarism. I should have treated the Surrey Guides simply as a kind of "new model" version of Cobbett's Rural Rides. It was my duty to explore all the paths and roads of the county, and delightful work it was. My experiences must certainly be put on record somewhere and sometime, for, alas! the horse is dying out and with him will die the bridle-paths and the pack-roads.

The night-riding part of my Surrey Guide work was to me particularly attractive. No one who has not tried night-riding across country will realise how fascinating it is and, comparatively speaking, how easy.

Provided you ride a pony, instead of a huge, long-legged, heavy- weighted, badly-balanced horse, there is neither danger nor difficulty.

I will not say that the secret of night-riding is to give yourself up to your horse, for your horse may be as big a blunderer as you, and become a mixture of stupidity and anxiety. What I advise is, give yourself up to your sub-consciousness, if you can, and this will lead you through the darkest places and the roughest roads in ample security.