It was Alfred Harmsworth andThe Daily Mailwhich put up all the prizes for these record-making flights, and the man who was afterward Lord Northcliffe deserved all the honor he gained for his generous and farseeing encouragement of aviation. It was he who offered a big prize for a cross-Channel flight, which then sounded almost beyond the bounds of possibility. Latham was the first favorite for that prize, and was determined to gain it. His first attempt was a failure, and he fell into the sea, and was picked up smoking a cigarette as he clung to the wreckage of his plane. After that, he established himself at the other side of the Channel, at a little place called Sangatte, near Calais, and waited for some improvements to his engine, and favorable weather.
Another competitor and pioneer, named Blériot, was tinkering about with a monoplane on the same strip of coast, but nobody seemed to think much of his chances.
The Daily Mailhad an immense staff of correspondents on both sides of the Channel, and a wireless installation by which they could signal to each other. Without any assistance of that kind, I had to keep my eye on both sides of the Channel, which I crossed almost every day for about a fortnight. Latham was vague about the possibilities of his start. He might go any morning at dawn. But morning after morning passed, and the French destroyers which had been lent by the French government to patrol the Channel, in case he fell in again, prepared to steam away. Several correspondents—English and French—used to spend the night on a Calais tugboat lying off Sangatte, and I joined them there the night before Latham assured us all that he would go next day. Something happened at that time to Latham—I think his nerve gave way temporarily, owing to the strain of waiting and continued engine trouble. He went about looking depressed and wretched, and he was as white as a sheet after an interview with the commander of a Frenchdestroyer, who informed him that he could wait no longer.
I crossed over to Dover, deciding that the English side might be the best place to wait, after all, especially as nobody seemed likely to cross. That very morning Blériot came over in his aëroplane like a bird, and there was not a soul to see him come.The Daily Mailstaff were in bed and asleep, and I and other men of other papers were, by a lucky fluke, first on the scene to greet the man who had done the worst thing that has ever been done to England—though we did not guess it at the time. For, by flying across the Channel, he robbed us for all time of our island security and made that “silver streak,” which has been our safeguard from foreign foes, no more than a puddle which might be crossed in a few minutes along the highway of the air. After Blériot came the bombing Gothas of the German army, and now, without air defense, we lie open to any enemy as an easy target for his bombs and poison gas.
It was in the war that I completed my studies of aviation and its conquest. On mornings of great slaughter, scores of times, hundreds of times, I saw our boys fly out as heralds of a battle. Day after day, year after year, I saw that war in the air which became more intense, which crowded the sky with single combats and great tourneys, as the numbers of squadrons were increased by the Germans and ourselves. I saw the enemy’s planes and our own shot down, so that the battlefields were littered with their wreckage.
In fair weather and foul they went out on reconnaissance, signaled to the guns, fought each other to the death. The mere mechanical side of flight had no more secrets, it seemed. The little “stunts” of the pioneer days, the records of speed and height, were made ridiculous by the audacities and exploits of aviation in war. Our young men were masters of the machine, and flight seemed asnatural and easy to them as to the birds who were scared at their swift rush of wings. They flew through storms of shrapnel, skimmed low above enemy trenches, dropped flaming death into cities and camps. The enemy was not behindhand in courage and skill, not less lucky in human target practice, rather more ruthless in bomb dropping over civilian populations whose women and babes were killed in their beds. After tax collecting by bombing aëroplanes in Mesopotamia, we cannot be self-righteous now. The beauty and the power of flight came very quickly to mankind after Cody went up in that old homemade ’bus, and crashed after a few moments of ecstasy. And mankind has used it as a devil’s gift.
During one of those periods when I deliberately broke the chains of regular journalism in order to enjoy the dangerous liberty of a free lance, I made a bid for fortune by writing some one-act plays, and one three-act play.
I had gained some knowledge of stage technique and of that high mystery known as “construction,” as a dramatic critic, when, for six months, I acted for William Archer, the master critic, during his absence in the United States. This knowledge, I may say at once, was not of the slightest use to me, because technique cannot take the place of inspiration—Barrie and others have exploded its traditions—and I suffered the usual disappointments of the novice in that most difficult art.
To some extent I had the wires greased for me by my brother, Cosmo Hamilton, and it was his influence, and his expert touches to my little drama “Menders of Nets,” which caused it to be produced at the Royalty Theater, with a distinguished cast, including the beautiful Beryl Faber and that great actor Arthur Holmes-Gore. It was well received, and I had visions of motor cars and other fruits of success, which suddenly withered when the announcement was made that the play was to be withdrawn after a few performances. What had happened was an ultimatum presented to Otho Stuart, the manager of the Royalty Theater, by Albert Chevalier who, in the same bill, was playing another one-act drama, called “The House.” My “Menders of Nets” played for something over an hour, and ended in a tragic scene in a fisherman’s cottage. When the curtain rang up again for AlbertChevalier, the second play began with gloom and tragedy in the same key as mine, and the audience had had enough of this kind of atmosphere. “Either ‘Menders of Nets’ must be changed,” said Chevalier, “or I withdraw ‘The House.’” That, anyhow, was the explanation given to me, and off came my piece.
This blow was followed by another, more amazing. Three other one-act plays of mine were accepted by a gentleman reputed to be enormously rich, who took one of the London theaters for a “triple bill” season. Unfortunately, before the production of my little plays, he was overwhelmed in debt, abandoned his theatrical schemes, and departed for the Continent with the only copies of my three efforts, which I have not seen or heard of from that day to this.
Drama seemed to me too hazardous an adventure for a man who has to pay the current expenses of life, and I turned to other forms of writing to keep the little old pot boiling on the domestic hearth. I became for a time a literary “ghost.”
It is ironical and amusing that three books of mine which achieved considerable financial success and obtained great and favorable publicity were published under another man’s name. He wantedkudos, and I wanted a certain amount of ready cash, in order to pay the rent and other necessities of life. I agreed readily to write a book for him—and afterward two more—for a certain fixed sum. As it happened, I think he not only obtained thekudos, but a fair profit as well. As I had been well paid, I was perfectly content.
Some friends of mine, to whom I have mentioned this secret, without giving away the name of the man who assumed the title of author, charge me with having been guilty of an immoral and scandalous transaction. My conscience does not prick me very sharply. As far as I was concerned, I was guilty of no deceit, and no dishonesty.I provided a certain amount of work, for which I was adequately paid, on condition that my name was not attached to it. Journalists do the same thing day by day, and the editor of the journal gets the credit. It is the other man who must have felt uneasy and conscience-stricken, sometimes, because he was a masquerader. But his sense of humor, his charm of personality, and his generosity, made me take a lenient view of his literary camouflage.
I wrote another book, for another man, but in that case he was far more entitled to the credit, because it was actually his narrative, and the record of his own amazing adventures told to me, partly in French and partly in broken English. This was a story of the sea, calledFifteen Thousand Miles in a Ketch, by Captain Raymond Rallier du Baty, published in England by Nelson’s.
This young Frenchman is one of the most charming and courageous souls I have ever met, and I look back with pleasure to the days when we used to motor out to Windsor Forest and there, under the old oaks, he used to spread out his charts and describe his amazing voyage in a little fishing ketch, with his brother and a crew of six, from Boulogne-sur-mer to Sidney, in Australia, stopping six months on the way at the desert island of Kerguelen in the South Pacific, where they lived like primitive men of the Paleolithic age, fighting sea lions with clubs, to obtain their blubbers, and having strange and desperate adventures in their exploration of this mountainous island. The narrative I wrote from his spoken story was widely and enthusiastically reviewed, and I rememberThe Spectatorwent so far as to say that “it was worthy to have a place on the bookshelf by the side of Robinson Crusoe.”
Raymond du Baty, that handsome, brown-eyed, quiet, and noble young seaman of France, felt the call of the wild again after my acquaintance with him, and returnedto the desert island for further exploration. After six months of solitude cut off from all the world and its news, a steamer came to the island and brought with it tidings of a world gone mad. It was Armageddon. Germany and Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria were at war with France, Great Britain, and Russia. Other nations were getting dragged in. The fields of Europe were drenched in the blood of the world’s youth. France was sorely stricken, but holding out with heroic endurance....
Imagine the effect of that news on a young Frenchman who had heard no whisper of it, until its horror burst with full force upon him in his island of eternal peace! He abandoned Kerguelen and went back to France. Within a fortnight he had gained his pilot’s certificate as an aviator, and was flying over the German lines with shrapnel bursting about his wings.
That, however, is later history, and takes me away from that second period of free lancing in London when I did many different kinds of work, and, on the whole, enjoyed the game.
One little enterprise at this time which interested me a good deal and enabled me to earn a considerable sum of money with hardly any labor—a rare achievement!—was an idea which I proposed toThe Daily Graphic—for their correspondence column. My suggestion was to obtain from well-known people their views and ideals on the subject of “The Simple Life.” A further part of my amiable suggestion was that I should be paid a certain fee for every column of the kind which I obtained for the paper. The proposal was accepted, and my wife and I made a careful selection of names, including princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, famous actors and actresses, society beauties, and, indeed, celebrities of all kinds. I then drafted a letter in which I suggested, in all sincerity, that our modern civilization had become too complex and too materialistic, and expressed the hopethat I might be favored with an opinion on the possibility and advantages of a return to “The Simple Life.”
The response to these letters was amazing. Instinctively I had struck a little note which caused a lively vibration of emotion and sympathy in many minds. It was before the war or the shadow of war had fallen over Europe, and when great numbers of people were alarmed by the lack of idealism, the gross materialism, the frivolity, the decadence of our social state. There was also a revolt of the spirit against the artificiality of city life, a yearning for that “return to nature” which was so strong a sentiment in France before the Revolution, especially among the aristocratic and intellectual classes.
Something of the sort was acting like yeast in the imagination of similar classes in England and other countries. I received an immense number of answers to my inquiry, and many of them were extremely interesting and valuable as the revelation of that craving for simplicity in ideals and conduct of life, and for a closer touch with primitive nature and the beauty of eternal things. It was characteristic, I think, that people of high rank and easy circumstances were the warmest advocates of “The Simple Life.” The correspondence continued for weeks and months, and my title became a catchword on the stage, inPunch, and in private society. One of the most beautiful letters I received—it contained more than three thousand words—was from “Carmen Sylva,” describing a day in her life as Queen of Roumania. Afterward a selection of the letters was published in book form, and had a great success.
Another task I undertook more for love than lucre (I received only a nominal fee) was to help in the organization of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee. A considerable sum of money had been bequeathed by certain philanthropists for the purpose of honoring the memory of Shakespeare and encouraging the study of hisworks, by some national memorial worthy of his genius, as the world’s tribute to his immortal spirit. The honorary secretary and most ardent promoter of this scheme was Israel Gollancz—since knighted—a little professor at Oxford and London, with an immense range of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon and mediæval literature, and an insatiable capacity for organizing committees, societies, academies, and other groups devoted to the advancement of learning, and, anyhow, to agreeable social intercourse and intellectual rendezvous. Meeting the professor in a bun shop, I became enthusiastic with the idea of the Shakespeare Memorial, and willingly offered to help him get his first General Committee and organize a great public meeting at the Mansion House, to place the idea of the Memorial before the nation with an appeal for funds.
This work brought me into touch with many interesting people, apart from Sir Israel himself, for whom I have always had an affectionate regard, and among them I remember one of the grand old men of England—Doctor Furnivall, editor of the Leopold Shakespeare. He was over eighty years of age when I first met him, but he had the heart of a boy, the gayety of D’Artagnan, the Musketeer, and the debonnair look of an ancient cavalier. Every Sunday he used, even at that age, to take out an eight of shopgirls on old Father Thames, and once every week he held a reception at the top of a tea shop in Oxford Street, when scholars old and young, journalists, and pretty ladies used to crowd round him, enamored by his silvery grace, his exquisite courtesy, the wit that played about his words like the mellow sunshine of an autumn day. He was always very kind to me, and I loved the sight of him.
I came to know another grand old man—of another type—in connection with that work for the Shakespeare Committee. The first time I met Lord Roberts, that littlewhite falcon of England, whom often I had seen riding in royal processions through the streets of London, with a roar of cheers following him, was in his house in Portland Place when I “touched” him for a donation to the Shakespeare Fund and persuaded him to join the General Committee. He was going to a reception that evening, and I remember him now, as he stood before me, a little old soldier, in full uniform, with rows and rows of medals and stars, all a-glitter, but not brighter than his keen eyes beneath their shaggy brows. After listening to my explanation, he spoke of his love of Shakespeare as a man might speak of his best comrade, and declared his willingness to do any service for his sake.
The next time I saw Lord Roberts was at one of those early aviation meetings which I have described. I stood by his side, and he chatted to me about the marvel of this coming conquest of the air. As he spoke an aëroplane danced over the turf and rose and soared away, and the little old man, cheering like a schoolboy, ran after it a little way with the rest of the crowd, as young in spirit as any man there, sixty years his junior.
Toward the end of his life a shadow darkened his spirit, though it did not dim his eyes or the fire that still burnt in him, as when, half a century before, he blew up the gates of Delhi and brought relief to the beleaguered survivors. He saw very clearly the approach of the German menace to Europe and that war in which we should be involved, unprepared, without a national army, with untrained men. Again and again he tried to warn the nation of its impending peril, of the tremendous forces preparing the destruction of its youth, and he devoted the last years of his life in another attempt to induce Great Britain to adopt some form of compulsory military service, without avail.
I remember traveling down to his house at Ascot on the morning following one of those speeches in the Houseof Lords. I went to ask him to write some reminiscences for a weekly paper. He would not listen to that, and when we sat together in a first-class carriage on the way to town (I had a third-class ticket!) he buried himself behindThe Times, and was disinclined to talk. But I was inclined to talk, because it is not often that I should sit alone with “Our Bobs,” and when I caught his eye over the top ofThe Times, I ventured a remark which I thought might please him.
“Powerful speech of yours, sir, last night!”
He put downThe Times, and stared at me, moodily.
“Do you think so? Shall I tell you what the British people think of me?”
“What is that, sir?”
“They think I’m a damned old fool, scare mongering and raising silly bogies. That’s what they think of my speech.”
And it was true, and to some extent I agreed with them, as I must confess, not believing much in the German menace, and believing anyhow that by wise diplomacy, a little tact, friendly demonstrations to a friendly folk, we might disarm the power of the military caste and insure peace.
“All the same,” said Lord Roberts, “I talk of what I know. Germany is preparing for war—and we have no army such as we shall need when it happens.”
It was to my brother, Cosmo Hamilton, then editor ofThe Worldin London, that Lord Roberts detailed his scheme of military service. A series of articles, published anonymously in that paper, attracted considerable interest among the small crowd who believed in a big army of defense, but no one knew that every word of them was dictated by Lord Roberts to my brother, as his last message to the nation—before the storm broke.
It was fitting that the little old soldier whose life covered a great span of our imperial history in so many wars,which now some of us look back to without much pride except in the ceaseless courage and the gay adventurous spirit of our officers and men, should die, if not on the field of battle, then at least at General Headquarters within sound of the guns. He had been a prophet of this war. Perhaps if we had believed him more, and if our statesmen and people had realized the frightful menace ahead, it might never have happened. But those “ifs” belong to the irrevocable tragedy of history.
I was a war correspondent in France when he died, but I came back to England to attend his funeral and write my tribute to this great and gallant old man who, in spite of a life of war, or because of it, had a great tenderness in his heart for humanity, a love of peace, and the chivalry which belonged, at least in ideal, to the old code of knighthood.
Going back to the subject of the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, it is amusing to me to remember an interview I had which, at the time, was rather painful. We were anxious to obtain the support of Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice, on the General Committee, and I drove up in a hansom to his house in Kensington, to put the request before him.
I wore that day a “topper” and a tail coat, and looked so extremely respectable that I impressed the critical eyes of his lordship’s footman. He explained that Lord Alverstone had been away on circuit but was due back very shortly that afternoon. Perhaps I might like to wait for him. I agreed, and was shown into the Lord Chief’s study, where I waited for something like an hour.
During that time I became aware that if I were of a curious and dishonorable mind, I might learn many strange secrets in this room. Bundles of letters and documents were lying on the Lord Chief’s desk. The drawers were unlocked, as I could see by papers revealedin them. A “crook” in this room might get hold of the seals, the writing paper, the signature, and the private correspondence of the Lord Chief Justice of England, and play a great game with them. It seemed to me extraordinary that a footman should put an unknown visitor, on unknown business, into this private room, and leave him there for nearly an hour.
The Lord Chief thought so, too. Just as I was becoming uneasy at my position to the point of ringing the bell and going away, there was a bang at the front door, followed by heavy footsteps in the hall. Then I heard a deep and angry voice say, “Who is he?” A moment later the door of the study was flung open and the great and rather terrifying figure of Lord Alverstone strode in. He stared at me as though about to sentence me to death, and I blenched under his gaze.
“Who the devil are you?” he asked, with a growl of rage and suspicion. “What the devil do you mean by taking possession of my study?”
“Why did your footman show me in, and what do you mean by speaking to me like that?” I answered, suddenly angered by his extraordinary discourtesy.
It was not a good introduction to the subject of Shakespeare. Nor was it a respectful way of address to the Lord Chief Justice of England. But my reply seemed to reassure him as to my respectability. He breathed heavily for a moment, and then, in a mild voice, requested to know my business. When I told him I wished to enlist his aid on the Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial, a twinkle of humor came into his eyes, and he asked me to sit down and have a cigar while we chatted over the subject. He agreed to give his name and a subscription. Before I left, he made a half apology for his burst of anger at the sight of me.
“There are lots of papers about this room.... I have to be careful.”
Then he put his heavy hand in a friendly way on my shoulder and said, “Glad you came.”
I was jolly glad to go, but I thought in case of any accident that might happen to me later it would be useful to have the favor of the Lord Chief. I thought so when I saw him sitting below the sword of justice, in all his terrible power.
From the little flat in Overstrand Mansions my wife and I and a small boy aged four sent out thousands of invitations on behalf of the committee which included his name, to a general public meeting at the Mansion House. The small boy trundled those bundles of letters in his wheelbarrow to the pillar box and insisted upon being lifted up to thrust them into the red mouth of that receptacle. We stuffed it full, to the great annoyance, I imagine, of the postman.
The public meeting was a splendid success. Israel Gollancz was happy, Beerbohm Tree was brilliant. Anthony Hope made one of his charming speeches. Bernard Shaw was surprisingly kind to Shakespeare. There were columns about it in the newspapers. But though many years have passed, the Shakespeare Memorial is still in the air, the Committee is still quarreling with one another as to the best way of using their funds, and Sir Israel Gollancz is still honorary secretary, trying in his genial way to compromise between a hundred conflicting plans.
In September of 1912 war broke out in the Balkans and, though we knew it not at the time, it was the overture to another war in which the whole world would be involved.
This seemed to be no more than a gathering of semi-civilized peoples—Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro—joined together in military alliance and by an old heritage of hatred against the Turk in Europe. Behind that combination, however, there were Great Powers, watching this affair with jealous hostility, with brooding anxiety, and with racial, dynastic, and financial interests closely touched. Russia was behind Serbia, whose hatred of Austria was equaled only by its fear that Austria might attack it in the rear when it marched against the Turks. Germany was behind the Turks, afraid of a Russian intervention. Serbia’s claim for “an open window,” on the Adriatic would not be tolerated by the Austrian Empire. The Greek claim to Crete and the dream of getting back to Asia Minor would arouse the jealousy of France and Italy. There was in this Balkan business a devil’s brew to poison the system of international relations, and behind the scenes corrupt interests of armament firms, Jewish money lenders, international financiers, were working in secret, sinister ways for great stakes.
Before war was actually declared, I set out for Serbia, on the way to Bulgaria, as “artist correspondent” ofThe GraphicandDaily Graphic, a title that amused me a good deal, as my artistic talent was of a most elementary kind. All I was required to do, however, was to provide the roughest sketches to be worked up by artists at home.
I was excited by this chance of becoming a war correspondent, which seemed to me the crown of journalistic ambition, and the heart of its adventure and romance. I little knew then that my squalid experience in this Balkan campaign would be but the first faint whiff of war with which, two years later, like most other men of my age, I was to become familiar in its daily routine, in the midst of its monstrous melodrama.
Provided with enough notebooks and sketchbooks to write and illustrate a history of the world, and enriched with a belt of gold which weighed heavy and chafed my waistline, I had an uneventful journey as far as the Danube below Belgrade. Then it brightened up a little. After my passports had been examined by a fat Serbian officer in a highly decorated uniform, my baggage was pounced on by a band of hairy brigands who, without paying the slightest attention to me, proceeded to fight among themselves for my bags. They shouted and cursed each other, exchanging lusty blows, and it was full twenty minutes before the victors piled my baggage into a miserable cab drawn by two starved horses, and allowed me to go, after heavy payment. My driver whipped up his bags of bones and started off on a wild career over the roads of Belgrade, that is to say, over rock-strewn quagmires and gaping pits. The carriage lurched from one side to another, with its wheels deep in the ruts, or high on piles of stones, and at times it seemed to me that only a miracle could save me from instant death.
The city of Belgrade, perched high above the Danube, with old, narrow, filthy streets within its walls, was filled with crowds of peasants mobilized for the war which had not yet been declared. Many of them had come from remote villages, and looked as if they had come from the Middle Ages. Some wore sheepskin coats with the shaggy wool inside and the skin decorated with crude paintings or garish embroideries. Others had woolenvests and a loose undergarment reaching like a kilt to their knees. Nearly all of them wore loose gaiters, worked with red stitches, or white woolen buskins. Others wore flat, oval sandals, almost as big as a tennis racquet, or shoes turned up at the toes with sharp peaks.
A wild cavalcade came riding down from the hills, like the hordes of Ghengis Khan. Their black hair was long and matted, beneath sheepskin caps or broad-brimmed hats. Pistols bristled in their red sashes, and they stood up, yelling, above saddles made of fagots tied to a piece of skin, cracking long whips, and urging on hairy little horses with rope reins and stirrups.
I had not been in Belgrade more than a few hours when I was arrested as an Austrian spy. Anxious to begin work as an “artist correspondent,” I made a rough sketch of a crowd of reservists waiting to entrain. Suddenly two soldiers fell upon me, took me prisoner, and hauled me through the streets, followed by a yelling crowd. Speaking only Serbian, they paid no heed to my protests in English, French, and German. In the police headquarters, I had the same difficulty with the commandant, who had one language and perfect conviction that I was an Austrian and a spy. After a weary time, when I thought of a white wall and a firing party, an interpreter appeared and listened to my efforts at explanation in bad German. The sketch was what alarmed them, as well it might have done, if they had any artistic sense. Finally, I was allowed to go, after a close investigation of my papers.
That night news came that the Montenegrins had fired the first shots in a war that was now certain, though still undeclared, and the streets were thronged with crowds drunk with emotion. I went to a café filled with Serbian officers, most of whom were amateur soldiers who had been professors, lawyers, doctors, and business men incivil life. They drank innumerable toasts, shouted and cheered, even wept a little.
At my table one, who spoke English, raised his glass and said, “Here’s to our first meal in Constantinople!” Later, having drunk much wine, he confided to me in a whisper, that he was deeply anxious. No one knew the power of the Turk, and he added gloomily, “War is an uncertain thing.”
There was an immense rally of correspondents, photographers, and cinema men in Belgrade, all desperate to get to the front with the Serbians, or the Bulgarians, or the Greeks. Some of the “old guard” were there, like Frederic Villiers, Henry Nevinson, and Bennett Burleigh, who had been in many campaigns before I was born. Frederic Villiers had a wonderful kit, with a glorious leather coat, and looked a romantic old figure. His pencil, his pocket knife, his compass, were fastened to his waist belt by steel chains. He still played the part of the war correspondent familiar in romantic melodrama. Among the younger crowd was Percival Phillips, afterward my comrade from first to last in a greater and longer war. It was then that I first become acquainted with his rapid way on a typewriter, on which he rattled out words like bursts of machine-gun fire.
After waiting about Belgrade for some days, I left Serbia and traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where I hoped to be attached to the Bulgarian army. It was a horrible experience. Before the train started there was a wild stampede by a battalion of reservists and Bulgarian peasants. I narrowly escaped getting jabbed by long bayonets, as the men scrambled on to the train, storming the doorways and clambering on to the roof. When at last I got on board, I found myself wedged in the corridor between piles of baggage, peasants, and soldiers. I had only a piece of cheese and a little drop of brandy, and I cursed myself for my folly when I foundthat the journey was likely to take two days. We stopped at every wayside station, and were then turned out at night on the platform at Sarabrot, hungry, chilled to the bone, with a biting wind and hard frost, and without a place in which to lay our heads.
Here we waited all night till dawn, and the one room in which there was shelter from the wind was crowded to suffocation by peasants lying asleep on their bundles, and was filled with a foul, sickening heat. One fantastic figure stood among the Serbians with their peaked caps, leather coats, and baggy white breeches. He wore a frock coat and tall hat, and looked as though he had just stepped out of the Rue de Rivoli. He was a French journalist on his way to the front!
Outside the station door there was, all night long, the tramp of soldiers, as battalion after battalion of Serbian troops marched up to entrain for the front. Officers moved up and down the ranks with lanterns which threw pallid rays of light upon these gray-clad men. Presently a long troop train came into Sarabrot, and the soldiers were packed into open trucks, so tightly that they could not move. Their bayonets made a quickset hedge above each truck. They were utterly silent. There was no laughing or singing now. These young peasants were like cattle being carried to the slaughterhouses.
It was a night of queer conversations for me. One man slouched up in the dim light, and said, “I guess you’re an Englishman, anyhow?” I returned the compliment, saying, “You’re an American, of course?” But I was wrong. He was a Bulgarian who had been in America for a few years and had now come back, in a thin flannel suit, and a straw hat, from a township in the Western states.
“I heard the call,” he told me, “and I’m ready to take my place in the firing line. I’ll be glad to give hell to the Turks.”
I was as dirty as a Bulgarian peasant, and exhausted with hunger, when at last I reached Sofia.
Still war had not been declared, but its spirit reigned in Sofia. Outside the old white mosque, with its tall and slender minaret—the one thing of beauty which had been inherited from the Turks—there passed all day long companies of soldiers, heavily laden in their field kit, and bands of Macedonian volunteers. Through the streets there was the rumble of bullock wagons and forage carts, drawn by buffaloes. On the plain of Slivnitza, the old battle ground between the Bulgars and Serbians, there were great camps of the Macedonians who drilled all day long, and at intervals shouted strange war cries, and flung up their fur caps, while, from primitive bagpipes, there came a squealing as though a herd of pigs were being killed. In the ranks stood many young girls, dressed in the rough sheepskin jackets and white woolen trousers of their men folk, and serving as soldiers. Bullocks and buffaloes roamed in the outskirts of their camps, and when darkness crept down the distant mountains the light of camp fires turned a lurid glare upon the scene.
One night in Sofia a few of us heard that the Turkish Ambassador had handed in his papers, and driven to the station, where a train was waiting for him. That meant war. A few hours later King Ferdinand signed a manifesto, proclaiming it to his people, and then delayed its publication for twenty-four hours while he stole away from his capital, leaving his flag flying above the palace, to his headquarters at Stara Zagora. It was as though he was frightened of his people.
He need not have been. Those Bulgarian folk, whose sons and brothers were already on their way to the front, behaved as all people do when the spell of war first comes to them, before its disillusion and its horror. They greeted it as joyful tidings. The great bell of thecathedral boomed out above the peals of innumerable bells with vaguely clashing notes. That morning in the cathedral, a Te Deum was sung before Queen Eleanor and all the Ministers of State. It was market day, and thousands of women had come in from the country districts, with market produce and great milk cans slung across their shoulders on big poles, glistening like quicksilver in the brilliant sunlight. In their white headdresses, short embroidered kirtles, and lace petticoats, they made a pretty picture as they pressed toward the great cathedral. The square was filled with Macedonian peasants, in their sheepskins and white woolen trousers, standing bareheaded and reverent before the cathedral doors. There were remarkable faces among them, belonging to young men with long flaxen hair, parted in the middle and waving on each side, like pictures of John the Baptist. Others were old, old fellows, with brown, rugged faces, white beards, and bent backs, who, in their ragged skins and fur caps, looked like a gathering of Rip van Winkles down from the mountains....
After exasperating delays, the correspondents of all countries—a wild horde—who had come to describe this war, as though its bloody melodrama had been staged as a spectacle for a dull world, were allowed to proceed to Stara Zagora, where King Ferdinand had established his headquarters. A special train was provided for this amazing crowd, accompanied by the militaryattachés, and a large number of Bulgarian staff officers. The journey was uneventful, except for a strange sign in the heavens, which seemed a portent of ill omen for the Bulgarians. As night came over the Rhodope Mountains, there rose a crescent moon with one bright star in the curve of its scimitar. It was the Turkish emblem, and the Bulgarian officers, who had been chatting gayly in the corridor, became silent and moody.
In the town of Stara Zagora, which my humorousfriend Ludovic Nodeau called invariably Cascara Sagrada, I came in touch for the first time with the spirit of the Near East. It was Oriental in its architecture, in its dirt, in its smell, and in its human types. Turkish minarets rose above the huddle of houses. Turkish houses, with their lattice casements and ironwork grilles, high up in whitewashed walls, were among the Bulgarian hovels, shops, and churches. Mohammedan women, closely veiled, came into the market place, and young Turks and old squatted round the fountains, sat cross-legged inside their wooden booths, and smoked theirnarghilein dirty little cafés.
A strange people from the farther East dwelt in a village of their own outside the town—a village of houses so low that I was a head taller than their roofs when I walked down its streets, like Gulliver in Lilliput. Their doorways were like the holes of dog kennels and the inhabitants crawled in and out on their hands and knees. It was a gypsy village, swarming with wild-looking men—black-haired, sunburned to the color of terra cotta, wonderfully handsome—and with women and young girls clad in tattered gowns of gaudy color, with bare arms and legs, and the breast revealed. Children, stark naked, played among heaps of filth, and savage dogs leaped at every stranger, as they did when I went with two friends inside the village. A tall girl, beautiful as an Eastern houri, beat back the dogs and led us to the king of this Romany tribe, an old, old villain who made signs for money and was not satisfied with what I gave him. Presently he called to some women, and they brought out a girl of some fifteen years, like a little wild animal, with the grace and beauty of a woodland thing. She was for sale; and I could have bought her and taken her as my slave, for five French francs. I was tempted to do so, but did not quite know how I should get her back to my little house in Holland Street, Kensington, as a Christmaspresent to my wife. Also, I was not certain whether my wife would like to adopt her. I declined the offer, therefore, but gave the old man the five francs as a sign of friendship—and as a bribe of safety.
We were surrounded, now, by a crowd of tall young Gypsies with long sticks, and I did not like the way they eyed us. Luckily, a Bulgarian police officer rode through the village, and at the sight of him, the Gypsies scuttled like rabbits in their holes. We kept close to his saddle until we were beyond the village, and by expressive gesticulation the man made us understand that, in his judgment, the place behind us was not a safe spot for Christian gentlemen.
One little trouble of mine, and of friends of mine, in Stara Zagora, was the question of food. There was one pretty good restaurant, set apart for the militaryattachésand high staff officers, but after they had dined well, while we hung around, sniffing their fat meats, there was nothing left for us. We were reduced to eating in a filthy little place, where the food was vile, and the chief method of washing plates was by the tongues of the hungry serving wenches, as I saw, through the kitchen door. Our billeting arrangements, also, left much to be desired, and with two inseparable companions, Horace Grant, of theDaily Mirror, and a young Italian photographer named Console, I slept in a pestilential house, so utterly foul that I dare not describe it. One little additional discomfort, to me, was the merry gamboling of a tribe of mice, who played hide and seek over my body as I lay in a coffinlike bed, and cleaned their whiskers on the window sill.
We were heartily glad to move forward from General Headquarters to the Turkish village of Mustapha Pasha, on the river Maritza, which had just been captured by the Bulgarians on their way to the siege of Adrianople.
My most dominant memory of this village, which wasthe headquarters of the Bulgarian Second Army, may be summed up in the two words, mud and oxen. The “roads” were just quagmires, in which endless teams of oxen, with some buffaloes, dragging interminable batteries of heavy guns, ammunition wagons, and forage, wallowed deep. Stones, piled loosely, about a foot broad, at the edge of the track, made the only dry foothold for those who walked. But the Bulgarian army trudged through the slime, battalion after battalion, with flowers on their rifles, led forward by priests, dancing and waving their arms in an ecstasy of war fever, inspired by hatred of the Turk. The oxen snarled and snuffled, and constantly I had to avoid being tramped down by holding on to their curly horns or thrusting myself away from their wet nozzles. Strange groups of volunteers followed the army—family groups, with old grandfathers and grandmothers and grandma-aunties, with uncles and cousins and brothers, laden with tin pots and bundles, and armed with old sporting guns and country knives, and any kind of weapon useful for carving up a Turk.
One night, when the guns were furious round Adrianople, and the sky was lurid with bursting shells, I saw a division of Serbian cavalry pass through Mustapha Pasha. They had traveled far, and every man was asleep on his horse, which plodded on in the track of an old peasant with a lantern. I shall never forget the sight of those sleeping riders in the night.
Horace Grant, Console, and I were billeted in a farmhouse a mile or so outside Mustapha Pasha, kept by a tall, bearded Bulgarian peasant with his wife and mother, and three dirty little children. We slept on divans, as hard as boards, and fed on gristly old chickens killed beyond the doorposts. The family regarded us as though we had come from a far planet—mysterious beings, of incomprehensible ways—and our ablutions in the mornings, when we stripped to the waist and washed in a pail,filled them with deep wonderment. It was our local reputation as “The men who wash their bodies” which liberated us from military arrest.
On the way to Mustapha Pasha and back again to our farmhouse, we had to pass a cemetery which was used as a camp. It was never a pleasant journey at night, because we stumbled over loose boulders, fell into three feet of mud, and were attacked by packs of wolflike dogs whose fierce eyes shone through the darkness. One night I felt a prick in the shoulder, and found I had run up against the sword of a Bulgarian officer who was feeling his way along the wall in pitch darkness. But it was when the Bulgarians were suddenly replaced by Serbians that we were challenged by a sentry and arrested by the guard, which rushed out at the sound of his shots. They could make nothing of us, and suspected the worst, until some peasants in the neighborhood came up and identified us as three men strangely addicted to cold water, but under the protection of Bulgarian headquarters.
Along the valley of the Maritza, on the way to Adrianople, which was closely invested, the Turkish villages had been fired, and we saw the smoke rising above the flames, and then tramped through their ruins. Looting was strictly forbidden, under pain of death, but in one village old men and women were prowling about in a ghoullike way, and filling sacks with bits of half-burnt rubbish. Suddenly an old woman began to scream, and we saw her struggling with a Bulgarian soldier who threatened to run his bayonet through her body. The others fled, leaving their sacks behind.
That night, in a dirty little eating house, a Hungarian correspondent protested to his friends against the ruthless way in which the Bulgars had burned those Turkish homesteads. Upon leaving the restaurant he was arrested by military police and flung into a filthy jail, with the warning that he would rot to death there unless hechanged his opinion about the burning of the villages, and agreed that the Turks had fired them on their retreat. He decided to change his opinion. Later, however, he was riding alone when he was set upon by Bulgarian police, who seized his horse, flung him into a ditch, and kicked him senseless. It was a warning against careless table conversation.
We soon discovered that, instead of being treated as war correspondents, we were in a position more like that of prisoners of war. Strict orders were issued that we were not to go beyond a certain limit outside Mustapha Pasha, and the severity of the censorship was so great that my harmless descriptive articles about the scenes behind the lines, as well as my feeble sketches, were mostly canceled. I have to confess that I became a rebel against these orders, and, with my two companions, not only broke bounds, day after day, but smuggled through my articles at a risk which I now know was extremely rash. I hired a carriage with three scraggy horses, a chime of bells, and a Bulgarian giant, at enormous expense. It had once belonged to a Bulgarian priest, and was so imposing that when we drove out to the open country, toward Adrianople, we used to be saluted by the Bulgarian army.
I remember driving one day to a spur of hills overlooking the city of Adrianople, from which we could see the six minarets of the Great Mosque, and the high explosives bursting above its domes and rooms. A German—Doctor Bauer—and an Austrian—von Zifferer—accompanied us, and we picnicked on the hill with an agreeable excitement at getting even this glimpse of the “real business.” I played a game of chess with von Zifferer, who carried a pocket set, and this very charming young Austrian accepted my lucky victory with good nature, and then asked a question which I always remembered:
“How long will it be before you and I are on opposite sides of a fighting line?”
It was not very long.
My experiences as a war correspondent in Bulgaria were farcical. I saw only the back wash of the bloody business—and I have a secret and rather wicked suspicion that the war correspondent of the old type did not see so much as his imaginative dispatches and thrilling sketches suggested to the public, nor one-thousandth part as much as that little body of men in the World War, who had absolute liberty of movement, and the acknowledged right of going to any part of the front, at any time. In Bulgaria, all we saw of the war was its slow-moving tide of peasant soldiers, trudging forward dejectedly, the tangled traffic of guns and transport, the misery—unimaginable and indescribable—of the wounded and the prisoners, stricken with cholera, packed, like slaughtered cattle, into railway trucks, tossed in heaps on straw-filled ox wagons, jolted to death over the ruts and boulders of unmade roads: Horrible pictures which gave me a little apprenticeship, but not much, for the sights of the war that was to come.
One little scene comes to my mind vividly. It was at dawn, in a way side station. King Ferdinand had arrived with his staff. The fat old man with piggy eyes was serving out medals to heroes of the siege of Adrianople. They were all wounded heroes, some of them horribly mutilated, so that, without arms or legs, they were carried by soldiers into the presence of the King. Others hobbled up on crutches, white and haggard. Others were blind. I could not see any pleasure in their faces, any sense of high reward, when they listened to Ferdinand’s gruff speech while he fastened a bit of metal to their breasts. In the white mist of dawn they looked a ghastly little crowd of broken men.
I have already told, in a previous chapter, how old Fox Ferdinand conversed with me on the bridge over the Maritza at Mustapha Pasha. His friendliness then didnot allow me to escape his wrath a few days later, when he saw me considerably outside the area to which correspondents were restricted, and he sent over a staff officer to tell me that I should be placed under arrest unless I withdrew immediately.
I was arrested, and locked up for a time, with Horace Grant and Console, for the crime of accompanying a colleague to the railway station at Mustapha Pasha! That was when S. J. Pryor, ofThe Times, was leaving G.H.Q. to go back to Sofia. Being, as I thought, the proud owner of a carriage and three horses, to say nothing of my Bulgarian giant, I offered to give him with his luggage a lift to the station. He accepted gladly, but at the hour appointed I discovered that carriage, horses, giant, and all had disappeared from their stables. As I found out later, they had been “pinched” by G.H.Q. Pryor had not too much time to get his train, and Grant and Console and I volunteered to carry some of his bags. We arrived in time, but were immediately confronted by a savage Bulgarian general, who spluttered with fury, called up some hairy savages with big guns, and ordered them to lock us up in a baggage shed. Little S. J. Pryor was extremely distressed at this result of our service to him, but he could not delay his journey.
My friends and I were liberated from the shed after some hours of imprisonment, and conducted, under mounted escort, to Mustapha Pasha. A few nights later we were informed that we had been expelled from General Headquarters and must proceed back to filthy old “Cascara Sagrada.” I had a violent scene with the Bulgarian staff officer and censor who conveyed this order, and told him that I intended to stay where I was, unless I was forcibly removed by the Bulgarian army!
He took me at my word, and that night, when Grant and I were finishing a filthy but comforting meal in our old farmhouse, far outside the village, there was a heavyclump at the door, followed by the entry of six hairy-looking ruffians with fixed bayonets. One of them removed his sheepskin hat and plucked from his matted hair a small piece of paper, which was a written order for our expulsion signed by the General in Command of the Second Army.
I shall never forget Console at the moment of their arrival. Having finished his supper, he was lying asleep on the divan, but, suddenly awakened, sat up with all his hair on end, and grabbed a large loaded revolver from beneath his pillow. We did not allow him to indulge in a private massacre, but adopted a friendly demeanor to our guards—for we were their prisoners, all right—and gave them mugs of peasant wine as a token of good will. After a frightful scramble for our belongings, which were littered all over the room, we accompanied the hairy men to an ox wagon, where we sat in the straw, jolted in every limb and in every tooth, for the three miles back to the old station.
On the way we passed a battalion of Serbian infantry, and one of the officers carried on a cheery conversation with me in German. When he heard that I was a correspondent ofThe Graphic, he was delighted and impressed.
“Come with us!” he shouted. “We will show you some good fighting!”
“I would like to,” I answered, “but I am a prisoner of these Bulgarians.”
He thought I was joking, and laughed loudly.
Guarded by our soldiers—they were really a simple and sturdy little crowd of good-natured peasants—we were taken across a railway line to a dark train. Our guards laughed, shook hands, pushed us gently into the train, and said, “Dobra den, Gospodin!”
Then we had a surprise. The train was pitch dark, but not empty. It was filled with correspondents of allnationalities, who, like ourselves, had been expelled! They were without food or drink or light; they had been there for half a day and part of a night; and they were furious.
That journey was a comedy and a tragedy. The train moved away some time in the night, and crawled forward that day and night toward “Cascara Sagrada,” as Nodeau called that town of filth. We starved, parched with thirst, cramped together. But we laughed until we cried over the absurdity of our situation and a thousand jests.
Marinetti, the arch Futurist, was there, and after making impassioned love to a Bulgarian lady who could not understand his Italian or French, he recited his great Futurist poem, “L’Automobile,” very softly at first, then with his voice rising higher, as the “automobile” gained speed, until it was like the bellow of a bull. In a wayside station, soldiers came running toward our carriage, with their bayonets handy, thinking some horrible atrocity was in progress. Marinetti was delighted with the success of Futurist poetry in Bulgaria!
At Stara Zagora I found wires were being pulled in London and Sofia, on my behalf, through the means of S. J. Pryor, who was a loyal friend, and one of the dearest men in the world. (He is my “Bellamy” inThe Street of Adventure.) In a few days, Grant, Console, and I, alone among the expelled crowd, received permits to return to the Bulgarian headquarters, where our reappearance created consternation among the staff officers and censors, who thought they were well rid of us.
In 1912, to which year I have now come in these anecdotes of journalistic life, England was not without troubles at home and abroad, but nothing had happened, or seemed likely to happen (except in the imagination of a few anxious and farseeing people), to touch more than the surface of her tranquillity, to undermine the foundations of her wealth, or to menace her security as a great imperial Power.
It was a very pleasant place for pleasant people, if they had a social status above that of casual, or sweated, labor. The aristocracy of wealth still went through the social ritual of the year, in country houses and town houses, from the London season to Cowes, from the grouse moors to the Riviera, agreeably bored, and finding life, on the whole, a good game, unless private passion wrecked it.
The great middle class, with its indeterminate boundaries, was happy, well-to-do, with a comfortable sense of ease and security, apart from the ordinary anxieties, tragedies, failures, of private and domestic life. People with “advanced” and extraordinary views made a lot of noise, but it hardly broke into the hushed gardens of the country houses of England. Labor was getting clamorous, with mock heroic threats of revolution, but was no real menace to the forces of law and order. Women were beginning to put forward claims to political equality with men, but their extravagance of talk had not yet been translated into wild action. The spirit of England was, in the mass, rooted to its old traditions, and its social habits were not overshadowed by any dread.
As a descriptive writer and professional onlooker oflife (writing history and fiction in my spare time), I had, perhaps, some deeper consciousness than most people outside my trade, of dangers brewing in the cauldron of fate. I touched English life in most of its phases, high and low, and was aware, vaguely, perhaps a little morbidly, of undercurrents beating up strongly below all this fair surface of tranquility. As I shall tell later, I came face to face with three bogies of threatening aspect. One was Ireland in insurrection. Another was industrial conflict in England, linked up with that Irish menace. A third was war with Germany. Meanwhile, I chronicled the small beer of English life, and described its social pageantry—royal visits, the Derby, Henley, Fourth of June at Eton, the Eton and Harrow match, Ascot, Cowes, the Temple Flower Show, garden fêtes, Maud Allen’s dancing, the opera, the theater, fancy dress balls.
There was a new passion for “dressing-up,” in that England before the war. It seemed as though youth, and perhaps old age, desired more color than was allowed by modern sumptuary laws.
I attended a great fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall—one of many, but the most magnificent. All “the quality” was there, the most beautiful women in England, and the most notorious. I went, superbly, as Dick Sheridan, in pale blue silk, with lace ruffles, a white wig, white silk stockings, buckled shoes, a jeweled sword. It was strange how different a man I felt in those clothes. The vulgarity of modern life seemed to fall from me. I was an eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in appearance, but in spirit. I was my own great grandfather!
London that night was a queer sight anywhere within a mile of Kensington. Sedan chairs, carried by sturdy porters in old liveries, conveyed little ladies in hooped dresses and high wigs. Columbines flitted by with Pierrots. Out of taxicabs and hansoms and old growlers came parties of troubadours, English princesses withhorned headdresses, Spanish toreadors, Elizabethan buccaneers, Stuart cavaliers.
At the ball I saw the faces of my friends strangely transfigured. They, too, were their own ancestors. One of those I encountered that night was a fellow journalist named “Rosy” Leach. He swaggered in the form of a Stuart gentleman, and said, “What a game is this life!” The next time I met him was when he wore another kind of fancy dress—khaki-colored—with high boots caked up to the tabs in the mud of the Somme fields. “Death is nothing,” he said, after we had talked a while. “It’s what goes before—the mud and the beastliness.” He was killed in one of those battles, like many others of those who danced with Columbine and the ladies of the gracious past.
This dressing-up phase was not restricted to London, or rich folks. There was a joyous epidemic of pageants, in which many old towns and villages of England dramatized their own history and acted the parts of their own ancestors. I was an enthusiast of this idea, and still think that for the first time since the Middle Ages it gave the people of England a chance of revealing their innate sense of drama and color and local patriotism. In most of these pageants the actors made their own costumes, and went to old books to learn something of ancient fashions, heraldry, arms and armor, and the history of things that had happened on their own soil and in their own cathedrals, churches, guild houses, and ruined castles, whose stones are haunted with old ghosts. The children in these pageants made fields of living flowers. Youth was lovely in its masquerade. Some of the pictures made by the massed crowds were unforgetable, as in the Oxford pageant, when Charles held his court again, and in the St. Albans pageant, when the English archers advanced behind flights of whistling arrows. If one had any sense of the past, one could not help being stirred by thecontinuity of English life, its unbroken links with ancient customs, its deep roots in English soil. At Bury St. Edmunds there was a scene depicting the homage of twenty-two gentlemen to Mary Tudor. Each actor there bore the same name and held the same soil as those who had actually bowed before the Tudor lady. It is why tradition is strong in the character of our race, and steadies it.
There was a comic and pitiful side to these shows, mainly caused by the weather, which was pitiless, so that often the pageant grounds were quagmires, and ancient Britons, Roman soldiers, Saxon princesses, Stuart beauties, had to rush for shelter from rain storms which bedraggled them. But that was part of the game.
London dreamed not at that time of darkened lights, prohibited hours for drink, the heavy hand of war upon the pleasures and follies of youth. Was there more folly than now? Perhaps vice flaunted more openly. Perhaps temptation spread its net with less need of caution—though I doubt whether there has been much change in morals, despite the park pouncing of policemen. There was more gayety in London, more lights in London nights, more sociability, good and bad, a great freedom of spirit, in those days before the war. So it seems to us now.
I was never one of the gilded youth, but sometimes I studied them in their haunts, not with gloomy or reproving eyes, being tolerant of human nature, and glad of laughter.
One wild night began when the policeman on point duty in Piccadilly Circus thought that the last revelers had gone home in the last taxis, but he was a surprised man when life seemed to waken up again and there was the swish of motor cars through the circus and bands of young men walking in evening dress, not, apparently, on their way to bed, but just beginning some new adventure.They advanced upon the Grafton Galleries singing a little ballad that marks the date: