The Human Boy and the War Part 2

We didn't much envy Fortescue his feelings when he read these stirring lines, and in fact, I, in my hopefulness, believed they would actually win our object and start Fortescue on the path of duty and rouse him from his lethargical att.i.tude to the war; but, strange to say, they went off him like water off a duck's back. Not a muscle moved, so to speak, or if it did n.o.body saw it do so. He went on his way for all the world as if civilisation was not in its death throes. And then Rice--to show you what Rice still felt about it--offered Mitch.e.l.l a week's pocket-money if he would write yet another poem of even a more fiery and stinging character. And Mitch.e.l.l gladly agreed, and took enormous trouble and burnt the midnight oil, as the saying is, and produced certainly a poem full of rhymes and great abuse of Fortescue, yet not nearly such a fine poem as the first. And Rice said it wasn't up to the mark and wouldn't pay for it, and Mitch.e.l.l said it was a contract and written on commission and must be paid for by law. But Rice knew no law and he showed the poem to Travers major, who instantly tore it up and kicked Mitch.e.l.l next time he met him and told him he was a dirty little cad.

So Mitch.e.l.l cooled off to Rice, and, in fact, his next poem was actually about Rice--not written to order, but for pure hate of Rice--and it was undoubtedly a bitter and powerful poem; but Rice, being far stronger than Mitch.e.l.l, made him eat it and swallow it in front of his cla.s.s, though it was written in red ink. And Mitch.e.l.l said if he died, Rice would be hung. But he felt no ill effects, though he rather hoped he would.

At this season, however, a far greater and more splendid poem than any Mitch.e.l.l could do had appeared in England. In fact, it was set to music and England rang with it--also Ireland. At least, so Rice said, because his mother had told him so in a letter. There was a special mention of Ireland in it, and Rice's mother told him that it had made more recruits in Ireland than Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson put together.

Rice never does anything by halves, and he actually learnt the poem by heart, and also found out the tune somehow and sang it when possible.

Once, in fact, he woke up in the night singing it from force of habit, as the saying is, and his prefect, who happened to be Mactaggert, said there was a time for everything, and threatened to report Rice if he did it again.

I asked Rice why he had made such a great effort and learnt anything he wasn't obliged to learn, and he said, firstly, because it was the grandest poem he had ever heard, and, secondly, because he had a great idea some day to sing it to Fortescue, as it applied specially to him by dwelling on the fearfulness of hanging back when the Empire cried out for you.

The poem said the Empire was calling to every one of her sons of low and high degree, and so, of course, it was also calling to Fortescue; and Rice thought that as it was pretty certain Fortescue wouldn't read it, and, no doubt, fought shy of patriotic poetry in general just now, he meant to wait for some happy opportunity when Fortescue was not in a position to get out of earshot and sing it to him.

But the opportunity did not come, so Rice adopted the former plan of leaving the poem in Fortescue's room. He had plenty of printed copies of the words, because the poem, after first appearing in a London newspaper of great renown, had been copied, at the special wish of the author, into hundreds and thousands of other papers; and to show you the tremendous liking people had for it, even the _Merivale Weekly Trumpet_ printed it and Milly Dunston found it there.

She, by the way, had another pretty bitter cut at Fortescue, which cost more money, and she told Rice she had paid five shillings and sixpence for her great insult. In fact, she sent Fortescue a shawl and a cap, such as is worn by aged women, with red, white, and blue ribbons in it.

Which, of course, meant that Fortescue was an old woman himself. It was frightfully deadly if you understood it, and Rice said that only a girl could have thought of such a cruel thing.

The parcel was sent by post, but once more we were doomed to disappointment, as they say, for nothing came of it except slight advantage to the matron in Fortescue's house. In fact, he gave her the five shilling shawl, but the cap we never saw again, and doubtless it was burnt to a cinder in Fortescue's fire.

Then Rice tried the patriotic poem, and so as there should be no mistake he covered the back of it with paste, and in this manner fastened it very firmly to the looking-gla.s.s, just behind the spot where Fortescue kept his pipes on the mantelpiece.

We didn't hope much from it, and expected he would merely sc.r.a.pe it off and take it lying down in his usual cowardly manner. But imagine our immense surprise when we found he had sneaked to the Doctor! And even that was nothing compared to the extraordinary confession that he had made to the Doctor. And it all came out, and, as Mitch.e.l.l said, a bolt from the blue fell on him and me and Rice.

After stating the facts of the case, which were that Mr. Fortescue had been from the beginning of the term subject to a great deal of annoyance from boys, who laboured under the offensive delusion that he ought to go to the Front, the Doctor said--

"It is my honoured friend, Mr. Fortescue's wish that I inform you of the circ.u.mstances which prevent an action which he would have been the first to take did his physical welfare permit of it. But unhappily he suffers from an enlarged aorta and it is impossible for him to take his place in our line of defences, though that impossibility has caused him the sorrow of his life. It happens, however, that Nature has blessed Mr.

Fortescue with abundant gifts while denying him his health, and in the pages of that work of reference known as 'Who's Who'--pages that I fear few among you will ever adorn--may be found the distinguished name of the Honourable Howard Fortescue in connection with notable achievements.

For Mr. Fortescue is a votary of the Muses. Already he has two volumes of verse to his credit and three works of fiction; while in a subsequent edition of the volume, it will doubtless be recorded that he was the author of a certain admirable poem which has recently stirred the United Kingdom to its depths and sent more young men to the enlisting stations than any other inspiration of the time. But it was, it seems, left for one of my pupils to combine idiocy with insolence and affix a copy of his own immortal composition to Mr. Fortescue's looking-gla.s.s! This was positively the last straw, and my esteemed colleague who, up to the present time has allowed his sense of humour to ignore your insufferable impertinences, felt that it was bad for yourselves to proceed further upon so perilous a path. Very rightly, therefore, he called my attention to a persecution I should have thought impossible within these walls. He has no desire to give me the names of the culprits, and it is well for them that he has not; but having placed the whole circ.u.mstances in my hands, I cannot permit the outrage to pa.s.s without recording my abhorrence and shame. I may further remind you that Wednesday next is our half-term whole holiday, and if before that date no private and abject apology is committed to the hands of Mr. Fortescue by those who have disgraced themselves and put this affront upon him--if that is not done, and if I do not hear from him that he is thoroughly satisfied with the nature of that expression of regret, then there will be no half-term whole holiday and righteous and guilty alike will suffer."

Needless to say this tremendous speech made a very great impression on me and Rice and Mitch.e.l.l. Milly Dunston did not hear it, but it made a great impression on her too, when she heard the facts, and we felt, in a way, that she was a good deal to blame, because she could easily have looked up "Who's Who," being free of the Doctor's library, which we were not.

Of course, there was no difficulty about the apology, which I wrote with help from Mitch.e.l.l; but, showing what girls are, though she had invented most of the things we did to Fortescue, she calmly refused to sign the apology and said she should apologise personally to him. No doubt she didn't, and Rice chucked her afterwards.

Rice was the most cut up. He said he should never feel the same again after being such a simple beast, and he changed over from hating Fortescue to thinking him the most wonderful and splendid man in the world, and far the best poet after Shakespeare. And to show how frightfully Rice feels things and the rash way he goes on, I can only tell you that when we signed the apology, he cut himself on his arm, just above the wrist, and got two drops of blood and signed with them.

And after his name he wrote the grim words "his blood," so that Fortescue shouldn't think it was merely red ink.

The apology went like this:

We, the undersigned members of the Lower Fourth form of Merivale beg to express our great regret for having tried to make the Honourable Howard Fortescue go to the Front. We freely confess we ought not to have done so and that we were much deluded. We utterly did not know that he had got an aorta, and we are very sorry that he has, and we hope that he will soon recover from it. And we beg to say that we think his poem the best poem we have ever read and also better than Virgil. And we hope that he will overlook it on this occasion and are willing to do anything he may decide upon to show the extent of our great regret.

(Signed) RUPERT MITCh.e.l.l, PATRICK RICE (his blood), ARTHUR ABBOTT.

But nothing came of it. The Honourable Fortescue went on his way quite unmoved and treated us just as usual, without any sign of forgiveness or otherwise. And whether he ever reported our names to Dunston or not, we never knew. But I don't think he did. At any rate, he must have said the apology was enough; which it certainly was. And the end justified the means, as they say, because the whole holiday at half-term pa.s.sed off as usual.

THE COUNTRYMAN OF KANT

Dr. Dunston had a way of introducing a new chap to the school after prayers. The natural instinct of a new chap, of course, is to slide in quietly and slowly settle down, first in his cla.s.s and then in the school; but old Dunston doesn't allow this. When a new boy turns up, he jaws over him, and prophesies about him, and says we shall all like him, and so on; and if the new chap's father is anybody, which he sometimes happens to be, then Dunston lets us know it. The result is that he generally puts everybody off a new chap from the first; but the Fifth and Sixth allow for this. As Travers major pointed out, it's a rum instinct of human nature to hate anything you are ordered to like, and to scoff at anything you are ordered to admire; so, thanks to Travers, who is frightfully clever in his way, and, in fact, going to Woolwich next term, we always allowed for the Doctor's great hope about a new boy, and didn't let it put us off him. As a matter of fact, Dunston often withdrew the praise afterwards, and we noticed, for some queer reason, that if a boy had a celebrated father, he always turned out to be the sort that Dunston hated most; and often and often, when he had to rag or flog that sort of boy, the Doctor fairly wept to think what the boy's celebrated father would say if he could see him now.

When Jacob Wundt came to Merivale, Dunston just went the limit about him; and it was all the more footling because Wundt grinned, and evidently highly approved of what was said about him. He was the first German the Doctor had ever had for a pupil, I believe--anyway, the first in living memory--so, perhaps, naturally he got a bit above himself about it; and Wundt got a bit above himself, too.

"In Jacob Wundt we embrace one from the Hamlet among nations," began Dr.

Dunston. "In Jacob Wundt we welcome the countryman of Kant and Schiller, the contemporary of Eucken and Harnack! Moreover, Colonel von Wundt, his esteemed parent, occupies a position of some importance in the Fatherland, and has done no small part to perfect the magnificent army that great nation is known to possess."

Well, we looked at Jacob Wundt, and saw one of the short, fat sort, with puddingy limbs and yellowish hair close-cropped, and a fighting sort of head. He looked straight at you, but he never looked at anybody as though he liked them, and we jolly soon found he didn't.

As to Dr. Dunston's German heroes, we only knew one name, and that was Schiller; but as the Fifth and Sixth happened to be swotting "The Robbers" for an exam., and as "The Robbers" happens to be a ripping good thing in its way, we were not disinclined to be friendly to Wundt, as far as the Fifth and Sixth can be friendly to a new boy low in the school.

We soon found that Wundt was very un-English in his ideas, also in his manners and customs. He could talk English well enough to explain what he meant, and we soon found that he thought a jolly sight too well of Germany and a jolly sight too badly of England. At first we thought he had been sent to Merivale to make him larger-minded, so that he could go back and make other Germans more larger-minded, too. But he said it was nothing of the kind. He hadn't come to England to learn our ways--which were beastly, in his opinion--but to get perfect in our language, which might be useful to him when he became a soldier.

He was very peculiar, and did things I never knew a boy do before. And the most remarkable thing he did was always to be looking on ahead to when he was grown up. Of course, everybody knows they're going to grow up, and some chaps are even keen about it in a sort of way, but very few worry about it like Wundt did. I said to him once--

"What the d.i.c.kens are you always wanting time to pa.s.s for, so that you may be grown up? I can tell you it isn't all beer and skittles being a man. At any rate, I've often heard my father say he wishes he was young again."

"He may," answered Wundt. "You've told me your father was an 'International' and a 'Blue,' and no doubt he'd like to excel at football again. But I despise games, and I've got very good reasons for wanting to grow up, which are private."

Of course, he didn't put it in such good English as that, but that was the sense of it.

He wasn't what you call a success generally, for he didn't like work, except history; and he hated our history, and there wasn't much doing at Merivale in the matter of German history. But he took to English well, and would always talk it if he could get anybody to listen, which wasn't often. He said it was all rot about English being a difficult language.

He thought it easy and feeble at best. All his people could speak it--in fact, everybody in Germany could, when it suited them to do so.

As for games, he had no use for them; but he was sporting in his own way. His favourite sport consisted in going out of bounds; and he showed very decent strategy in doing so, and gave even Norris and Booth a tip or two. Norris and Booth had made a fair art of trespa.s.sing in private game preserves, at the Manor House and other such places round about Merivale. In fact, game preserves were just common or garden Sunday walks to them. But they had been caught by a gamekeeper once and both flogged; and Wundt showed them how a reverse like that need never have happened. He could turn his coat inside out, and do other things of that sort, which were very deceptive even to the trained gamekeeper eye; and, finding a scarecrow in a turnip field, he took it, and as it consisted of trousers and coat and an old billyc.o.c.k hat, Wundt was now in possession of a complete disguise. He hid the things in a secret haunt, that really belonged to Norris and Booth; and they liked him at first and helped him a good deal; but finally they quarrelled with him, because he said England was a swine's hole, and told them that a time was coming--he hoped not till he grew up--when England would simply be a Protectorate of Germany, whatever that is. So they invited him to fight whichever he liked of them, and when he refused, though just the right weight, they smacked his head and dared him to go to their secret cave again.

When they smacked his head, his eyes glittered and he smiled, but nothing more. He never would fight with fists, because he said only apes and Englishmen fought with Nature's weapons. But at single-stick he was exceedingly good, and, in fact, better than anybody in the school but Forrester. He much wished we could use swords and slash each other's faces, as he hoped to do when he became a student in his own country, and he said it was a mean sight to see old Dunston and Brown and Manwaring and Hutchings and the other masters all without a scratch. He said in Germany every self-respecting man of the reigning cla.s.ses was gashed to the bone; and decent people wouldn't know a man who wasn't, because he was sure to be a shopkeeper or some low cla.s.s thing like that. As to games, he held them in great contempt. It seems people of any cla.s.s in Germany only play one game and that's the war game--_Kriegspiel_, he called it.

I said: "What the deuce is the good of always playing the war game if you're not going to war?"

And he said: "_Ach!_"

It was a favourite word of his, and he used it in all sorts of ways with all sorts of expressions. Forbes, who, like me, had a kind of interest in Wundt that almost amounted to friendship, asked him if women played the war game, and he said he didn't know what they played except the piano. All women were worms, in his opinion. Of course, he ga.s.sed about everything German, and said that, from science and art and music to matchboxes and sausages, his country was first and the rest nowhere. He joined our school cadet corps eagerly, and became an officer of some sort in a month; but he was fearfully pitying about it, and said that English ways of drilling were enough to make a cat laugh, or words to that effect. After he became an officer, he put on fearful side, though as just one of the rank and file he'd been quite humble; and then, when he ordered Saunders, who wasn't an officer, to do something out of drill hours, and Saunders told him to do it himself, he turned white and dashed at Saunders, who, of course, licked him on the spot and made his nose bleed. He was properly mad about that, and said that if it had happened in Germany, Saunders would have been shot; but as it happened in England, of course Saunders wasn't. Travers major tried to explain to Wundt that we weren't real soldiers, and that, when not with the cadet corps, he was no better than anybody else, but he couldn't see this. He said that in his country if you were once an officer, you were always an officer, and that there was a gulf fixed between the men and their officers; and he called Saunders "cannon fodder" to Batson; and when Batson told Saunders, Saunders made Wundt carry him on his back up to the gym., and there licked him again and made his nose bleed once more, much to his wrath.

On the whole, owing to his ideas, which he wouldn't keep to himself, Wundt didn't have too good a time at Merivale. He couldn't understand us, and said we were slackers and rotters, and that our mercenary army was no good, and that Germany was the greatest country in the world, and we'd live to know it--perhaps sooner than we thought. Travers major tried hard to explain to him how it was, but he couldn't or wouldn't understand.

Travers said: "It's like this. Germany takes herself too seriously and other countries not seriously enough. An Englishman is always saying his own country is going to the dogs, and his Army's rotten, and his Navy only a lot of old sardine tins that ought to be sc.r.a.pped, and all that sort of thing. That's his way, and when you bally Germans hear us talk like that, you go and believe it, and don't understand it's our national character to run ourselves down. And you chaps always go to the other extreme and brag about your army, and your guns, and your discipline, and your genius, and all the rest of it; and, of course, we don't believe you in the least, because gas like that carries its own reward, and n.o.body in the world could be so much better than all the rest of the world as you think you are. And if you imagine, because we run ourselves down, we would let anybody else dare to run us down, you're wrong. And if you think our free army is frightened of your slave army, and would mind taking you on, ten to one, on land or sea, you're also wrong."

It was a prophecy in a way, though Travers little knew it, for the war broke out next holidays, and when we went back to school, it was in full swing. And so, naturally, was Wundt. He wasn't going home for the vac.

in any case, but stopping at Merivale, and he had done so. He told me the Doctor had talked some piffle to him about the duties of non-combatants; but, as Wundt truly said, every German in the world is a combatant in time of war, and if you can't do one thing, you must try and do another. In fact, old Dunston little knew the German character, and when he found it out, he was a good bit astonished, not to say hurt.

He, however, discovered it jolly quickly, and I did first of all, because, owing to being rather interested in human nature, I encouraged Wundt in a sort of way, and let him talk to me, and tried to see things from his point of view, as far as I could--that is, without doing anything unsporting to England. The great point was to keep your temper with Wundt; and, of course, most chaps couldn't, because he was so beastly sure he was right--at least, his nation was. But I didn't mind all that humbug, and found, by being patient with him, that, under all this flare-up, he was what you might call deadly keen on his blessed Fatherland. He fairly panted with patriotism, and in these moments, quite ignored my feelings.

"Now you know why I wanted to grow up," he said to me. "I hoped this wouldn't have happened till I could be in it. But it will be all over and your country a thing of the past before I'm sixteen--worse luck!"

As he was going to be sixteen in October, that was a bit hopeful of Wundt. His father or somebody had stuffed him up that Germany was being sat on by the world, and couldn't stand it much longer; and after the war began, he honestly believed that it was the end of England, and, in a way, he was more decent than ever he'd been before. When we came back at the end of the holidays, Wundt welcomed me in a very queer sort of manner. Somebody had treated me just the same in the past, and, after trying for a week to think who it was, I remembered it was my Uncle Samuel, after I'd lost my mother. Wundt evidently felt sorry for all of us in general and for me in particular as his special friend.