XVI have been reading over your last letter and find that my impassioned tirade about Food left many of your questions unanswered.What you tell me about the present state of your war activities takes me back about three years to the time when we were at the same stage. Have you noticed that one woman's matrimonial experience is not of the slightest use to another? It doesn't even help her to avoid quite obvious pitfalls. War seems to me to be a little like that. Every country has to "dree her own weird" in it—grope for her soul in her own particular way.One of Lloyd George's speeches put the matter in a nut shell: "To peace-loving peoples war is a trackless waste—an undiscovered country through which a pathway has to be made."That being so, there must of necessity be side tracking. I see your George stamping about in righteous indignation because things are not being "put over" with the rapidity and despatch which seem to him essential. Tell him he'll just have to possess his soul in patience, and don't let him do anything foolish. He'll only hinder thereby.I do hope and pray most fervently, however, that you are exaggerating the state of affairs. I wonder why it is that the war machine has such a tendency to become unwieldy. It needs not any vivid imagination, nor a particularly brilliant intelligence to grasp the magnitude of your war task.You have almost everything the old world now lacks, your trouble is to co-ordinate your forces from sea to sea, and get them into line. Colossus can't move with the agility of his lesser brethren, we must comfort ourselves and stay our impatience with that reflection. I am sure you will hate leaving your lovely home, but Washington will have compensations. I could not, somehow, imagine or contemplate existence for myself very far from London, in wartime, at least for any length of time.I don't agree with all you say about the mobilisation of your women for war.There is no other way of doing it; and the things you tell me are only the excrescences of a great forward movement, the shock of which will soon make itself felt throughout the entire country.We, too, had the kind of women you criticise so severely. I knew one whose first act of war service for her country was the purchase of a red cross of rubies to wear with her uniform. She went to France with it, but abandoned it before very long. The real cross, when she came up with it, red with the blood of brave men, put her to shame. She has won the saint's crown out there, and her name has been on a hundred dying lips.So don't worry about these little things, Cornelia, they will pass as a tale that is told. The best will remain—the things that cannot be shaken, and which are the same in all countries, and of all peoples.God, how I cling to that text. I have to say it over and over a hundred times a day. We are getting so badly shaken here that sometimes we feel as if we had no foundation whatsoever.I don't know whether I have made you understand that a big section of England now is as truly the war zone as that across the Channel.The air raids are increasing in number and intensity; this week we had four nights in the cellar.There are not so many oddities about the proceedings now we have settled in to the game in dead earnest. When we get the warning we act with as little delay as possible, seek one nearest available shelter, where we sit down to endure the strain as best we can.There is precious little badinage now about the Zeppelin parties; we all feel that they have long passed the amusing stage.Can you read between the lines? I wonder have you grasped the fact that the strain is becoming almost more than we can bear? I have the dreadful feeling that perhaps I myself will not be able to hold out.You know I never could do without sleep; my too active brain has always demanded its full measure, and rebelled when cheated of it.A Zeppelin night means anything from seven or eight o'clock at night till four in the morning—the strain of tension and fear never relaxed for a moment. Always you are listening, listening—and the gunfire never ceases. It is punctuated by the noise of the explosions following the bomb dropping, which means, though it may be a good many miles from you, that somebody is being punished.We still speak about the Zeppelins, though they don't come any more. Their successors, the Gothas, are not less terrible; in fact they seem to be more daring, more destructive, faster and less vulnerable.Also they are equipped with all kinds of new and terrible death-dealing weapons.A very strange one descended on our little town night before last. We heard a noise like a rushing mighty wind or an express train, going at lightning speed through the air. It was not the usual steady whir of the Gotha's engine. The thing fell in a garden at the top of Queen's Hill and then exploded, doing much damage to houses, though mercifully no one was killed. They say it was an aerial torpedo which travels through the air by its own momentum. If this is true, imagine what magnitude this form of attack might achieve and how much we may yet have to suffer!How often one is appalled by this dedication of human will and mind power to the devil's service. Is there to be no limit set to it? Is it the beginning of the terrors which will make men call on the rocks to cover them? You have no idea, Cornelia, what a weak helpless thing humanity is until it is subjected to this sort of thing. It isn't clean fighting; it makes brave men desperate.I think on the whole the women bear it better. They are more used to suffering and never forget to be protective. All sorts of moving things happen about the children. One poor woman stretched herself over her two children on the floor as the torpedo was coming, hoping to receive the brunt herself. None of them were hurt.But these things are getting home, Cornelia, they are telling on us all. Little portents show the weakening of the fibre here and there. I am feeling it myself, while all the time fighting against it.Of course the chief object of these diabolical visitations is just that, so to weaken the moral stamina that we people will cry for peace at any price. That cry will never be heard in this country, Cornelia, not if he sends his aerial torpedoes hurtling through the sky, world without end.There is no grumbling, surprisingly little protest anywhere. Our people accept these things as part of the horrible business in which we are presently engaged. They don't even know how to hate properly. We have a German prison camp nearby, the men being employed in the woods, cutting and preparing the timber of which so many of our finest properties are now being denuded. These men are scared to death in the raids, but though you may hear an occasional hope expressed that a bomb might fall on the prison camp, I question whether, if you drove it home, you would find they really desired such a thing to happen. We are not successful haters; we are only clean fighters, and desperate lovers of peace.Can you accept that paradoxical presentment which is an actual description of our mental attitude?The children in the war zone here are beginning to exercise us; some of them are really subnormal now, like their poor little brothers and sisters in the other countries. Those who can, remove them to safer places, sending them often to relations in remote parts of the country. Children quickly droop when their sleeping hours are shortened or much disturbed.The school teachers find them either restless or extremely languid after an air raid; and cannot urge them to concentrate on their lessons. One wee chap in our cellar, in his pajamas the other night, said pathetically to his mother, with eyes heavy with sleep: "Mummy, you won't get me up next night, will you, till they are really here?"No, I am not hearing regularly from Himself. There has been no letter for weeks and weeks. Whether they are being torpedoed when written, or not written at all, I don't know. There is only the blank wall of silence. How much can the human heart stand, I wonder? We are amazing creatures, bound by "cords which come from out eternity."XVIYes, I have read Sir Oliver Lodge's book and had some correspondence with him about it. Somehow he got it into his head that I had written a rather brutal, unsigned article on it in theDaily Mail. Writing to refute this, I set forth my views on spiritualism and the intervention of mediums between us and those who have passed on. We say "gone away" in Scotland, and I think I like it better. He sent me a long letter in reply. I will enclose you a copy.I don't think there is any road that way. The only key to the grave was left on the stone of the sepulchre on the Resurrection morning.Do you remember the Leightons—Robert and Marie? They lost their beautiful son, not the only, but the favourite one, in France, and she has written a beautiful book about him, called "Boy of My Heart." It is the best thing by far she has ever written, and immensely worth reading. She is now side-tracking with the rest along these doubtful and bewildering paths. Oh, I wish people wouldn't. To me it seems a kind of desecration.If I can have any communication with my son, I don't want to have it through some strange, odd freak of a person, who has to go into a trance for the purpose. If God means me to hear from the other side, He will send the Boy to me direct. That I most firmly believe, and am content to wait that day. If it never comes, why then I can go on waiting for the day which can't be so very far distant, when I shall cross the narrow sea between that happy land and ours. I wrote as strongly and convincingly as I could to Mrs. Leighton, but I don't think it availed much. There is a little group of the intellectuals just now all heading in the same direction, names familiar all the world over.To me it is all intensely pathetic. It is the cry of lost youth, the admission that they have no real city or abiding place, and no sort of surety about what is going to come.I remember Himself coming in one day and sending me out to a dying woman with the words: "I'm through with my job. It's yours now." When I got to her she looked at me so wistfully, saying: "Doctor says you are so sure."You have no idea how these words thrilled me. Thank God I am sure. We are all sure, who know in Whom we have believed.Since I wrote to you last I have had disquieting news about Effie. She was knocked down, while standing beside her car, by a big French military motor. The officers riding in it did not even stop to pick her up. Possibly they were not even aware that anything had happened. One must be charitable enough to suppose so. Some one came along and took her to a hospital, from which she is now able to send a few pencilled lines. She escaped with a few good bruises and it was quite a few days before I could discover whether there was any facial injury. Nobody seemed to reflect that I might be worrying about that. I applied for permission to go over to see her, but was refused. Nobody is permitted to cross the Channel to visit wounded or sick relatives unless the case is hopeless.Her temperature kept up obstinately for longer than they liked, but I am thankful to say she is now convalescent.I have had shoals of letters from all kinds of people over there, from the Brigadier to the orderly, expatiating on her absolute indispensability at the Base. They seem terrified in case we order her to come home.It is very sweet to hear that she is so greatly beloved, and doing efficiently and cheerfully so much useful service. What experience she must have locked in her too uncommunicative bosom! She has had three years of it now, and has really told us very little. If she never tries to express it in writing, well, it surely will inform and colour all her after life. I should not dare to bid her home on my own responsibility, though there are days when I not only want, but need her desperately.Talking of the modernity of these inaccessible, mysterious young creatures, I don't think I told you of a friend of mine, mother of four, who soon after the outbreak of war, received from her family a letter signed by each member, thanking her for permitting them to be born at the psychological moment of history.Another friend of mine who had the misfortune to marry a full-blooded and very German German, who, however, conveniently departed this life the year before the war, told me her sons passionately reproached her for giving them a German father.One gets bewildered in this strange hurly-burly where every mask seems to be torn off and the decencies of life hardly respected any more.I am so glad you are easier in your mind about Anne. Effie was tremendously interested. All she said was "Anne will never marry that one; he's only experimental." Perhaps that may comfort you a little. Presumably, these birds of a feather understand one another!Sometimes I have the awful feeling that Effie has passed out of the region of my love and care. Yet how dare I intrude these little personal fears upon a world's sorrow?Every day I am writing letters to fathers and mothers whose darlings have gone forever "where, beyond these voices, there is peace."One grows heart weary of the task, and even the balm of Gilead seems to have lost its power to soothe or heal.Yet often and often I am thrilled by the courage and calmness and faith of those who have given the most. They are upheld and illumined by some white and lovely flame which surely emanates from the secret place of the Most High.Never has there been such glory of sacrifice ennobled by that passion for the right which lifts those whom it inspires very high, above ignoble things.My country was never greater than now, Cornelia. Shorn and blood-stained, she is worthy to be numbered with those who are arrayed in white robes and have come out of great tribulation.A wonderful, wonderful thing has just happened. I don't know quite how to tell you.I have been asked by our Foreign Office to go to America and tell part of the story of what we have done in the war and what the war has done for us.Do you understand, Cornelia, I am coming to you, right now, by the very earliest boat?God has undoubtedly opened this door. I shall be so glad to leave the tired Old World for a spell, and drink at the Fount of your glorious youth.Even the submarines can't scare me away from this great Adventure.At this moment America means only you and George and dear little Anne, and the heavenly rest under your roof tree.Perhaps it may prove to be something very different, but that is how I am feeling at the moment.God will surely forgive me for this momentary slackening.I am so tired, Cornelia.Only God knows how tired I am!THE END*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKAN ENGLISHWOMAN'S HOME***
XV
I have been reading over your last letter and find that my impassioned tirade about Food left many of your questions unanswered.
What you tell me about the present state of your war activities takes me back about three years to the time when we were at the same stage. Have you noticed that one woman's matrimonial experience is not of the slightest use to another? It doesn't even help her to avoid quite obvious pitfalls. War seems to me to be a little like that. Every country has to "dree her own weird" in it—grope for her soul in her own particular way.
One of Lloyd George's speeches put the matter in a nut shell: "To peace-loving peoples war is a trackless waste—an undiscovered country through which a pathway has to be made."
That being so, there must of necessity be side tracking. I see your George stamping about in righteous indignation because things are not being "put over" with the rapidity and despatch which seem to him essential. Tell him he'll just have to possess his soul in patience, and don't let him do anything foolish. He'll only hinder thereby.
I do hope and pray most fervently, however, that you are exaggerating the state of affairs. I wonder why it is that the war machine has such a tendency to become unwieldy. It needs not any vivid imagination, nor a particularly brilliant intelligence to grasp the magnitude of your war task.
You have almost everything the old world now lacks, your trouble is to co-ordinate your forces from sea to sea, and get them into line. Colossus can't move with the agility of his lesser brethren, we must comfort ourselves and stay our impatience with that reflection. I am sure you will hate leaving your lovely home, but Washington will have compensations. I could not, somehow, imagine or contemplate existence for myself very far from London, in wartime, at least for any length of time.
I don't agree with all you say about the mobilisation of your women for war.
There is no other way of doing it; and the things you tell me are only the excrescences of a great forward movement, the shock of which will soon make itself felt throughout the entire country.
We, too, had the kind of women you criticise so severely. I knew one whose first act of war service for her country was the purchase of a red cross of rubies to wear with her uniform. She went to France with it, but abandoned it before very long. The real cross, when she came up with it, red with the blood of brave men, put her to shame. She has won the saint's crown out there, and her name has been on a hundred dying lips.
So don't worry about these little things, Cornelia, they will pass as a tale that is told. The best will remain—the things that cannot be shaken, and which are the same in all countries, and of all peoples.
God, how I cling to that text. I have to say it over and over a hundred times a day. We are getting so badly shaken here that sometimes we feel as if we had no foundation whatsoever.
I don't know whether I have made you understand that a big section of England now is as truly the war zone as that across the Channel.
The air raids are increasing in number and intensity; this week we had four nights in the cellar.
There are not so many oddities about the proceedings now we have settled in to the game in dead earnest. When we get the warning we act with as little delay as possible, seek one nearest available shelter, where we sit down to endure the strain as best we can.
There is precious little badinage now about the Zeppelin parties; we all feel that they have long passed the amusing stage.
Can you read between the lines? I wonder have you grasped the fact that the strain is becoming almost more than we can bear? I have the dreadful feeling that perhaps I myself will not be able to hold out.
You know I never could do without sleep; my too active brain has always demanded its full measure, and rebelled when cheated of it.
A Zeppelin night means anything from seven or eight o'clock at night till four in the morning—the strain of tension and fear never relaxed for a moment. Always you are listening, listening—and the gunfire never ceases. It is punctuated by the noise of the explosions following the bomb dropping, which means, though it may be a good many miles from you, that somebody is being punished.
We still speak about the Zeppelins, though they don't come any more. Their successors, the Gothas, are not less terrible; in fact they seem to be more daring, more destructive, faster and less vulnerable.
Also they are equipped with all kinds of new and terrible death-dealing weapons.
A very strange one descended on our little town night before last. We heard a noise like a rushing mighty wind or an express train, going at lightning speed through the air. It was not the usual steady whir of the Gotha's engine. The thing fell in a garden at the top of Queen's Hill and then exploded, doing much damage to houses, though mercifully no one was killed. They say it was an aerial torpedo which travels through the air by its own momentum. If this is true, imagine what magnitude this form of attack might achieve and how much we may yet have to suffer!
How often one is appalled by this dedication of human will and mind power to the devil's service. Is there to be no limit set to it? Is it the beginning of the terrors which will make men call on the rocks to cover them? You have no idea, Cornelia, what a weak helpless thing humanity is until it is subjected to this sort of thing. It isn't clean fighting; it makes brave men desperate.
I think on the whole the women bear it better. They are more used to suffering and never forget to be protective. All sorts of moving things happen about the children. One poor woman stretched herself over her two children on the floor as the torpedo was coming, hoping to receive the brunt herself. None of them were hurt.
But these things are getting home, Cornelia, they are telling on us all. Little portents show the weakening of the fibre here and there. I am feeling it myself, while all the time fighting against it.
Of course the chief object of these diabolical visitations is just that, so to weaken the moral stamina that we people will cry for peace at any price. That cry will never be heard in this country, Cornelia, not if he sends his aerial torpedoes hurtling through the sky, world without end.
There is no grumbling, surprisingly little protest anywhere. Our people accept these things as part of the horrible business in which we are presently engaged. They don't even know how to hate properly. We have a German prison camp nearby, the men being employed in the woods, cutting and preparing the timber of which so many of our finest properties are now being denuded. These men are scared to death in the raids, but though you may hear an occasional hope expressed that a bomb might fall on the prison camp, I question whether, if you drove it home, you would find they really desired such a thing to happen. We are not successful haters; we are only clean fighters, and desperate lovers of peace.
Can you accept that paradoxical presentment which is an actual description of our mental attitude?
The children in the war zone here are beginning to exercise us; some of them are really subnormal now, like their poor little brothers and sisters in the other countries. Those who can, remove them to safer places, sending them often to relations in remote parts of the country. Children quickly droop when their sleeping hours are shortened or much disturbed.
The school teachers find them either restless or extremely languid after an air raid; and cannot urge them to concentrate on their lessons. One wee chap in our cellar, in his pajamas the other night, said pathetically to his mother, with eyes heavy with sleep: "Mummy, you won't get me up next night, will you, till they are really here?"
No, I am not hearing regularly from Himself. There has been no letter for weeks and weeks. Whether they are being torpedoed when written, or not written at all, I don't know. There is only the blank wall of silence. How much can the human heart stand, I wonder? We are amazing creatures, bound by "cords which come from out eternity."
XVI
Yes, I have read Sir Oliver Lodge's book and had some correspondence with him about it. Somehow he got it into his head that I had written a rather brutal, unsigned article on it in theDaily Mail. Writing to refute this, I set forth my views on spiritualism and the intervention of mediums between us and those who have passed on. We say "gone away" in Scotland, and I think I like it better. He sent me a long letter in reply. I will enclose you a copy.
I don't think there is any road that way. The only key to the grave was left on the stone of the sepulchre on the Resurrection morning.
Do you remember the Leightons—Robert and Marie? They lost their beautiful son, not the only, but the favourite one, in France, and she has written a beautiful book about him, called "Boy of My Heart." It is the best thing by far she has ever written, and immensely worth reading. She is now side-tracking with the rest along these doubtful and bewildering paths. Oh, I wish people wouldn't. To me it seems a kind of desecration.
If I can have any communication with my son, I don't want to have it through some strange, odd freak of a person, who has to go into a trance for the purpose. If God means me to hear from the other side, He will send the Boy to me direct. That I most firmly believe, and am content to wait that day. If it never comes, why then I can go on waiting for the day which can't be so very far distant, when I shall cross the narrow sea between that happy land and ours. I wrote as strongly and convincingly as I could to Mrs. Leighton, but I don't think it availed much. There is a little group of the intellectuals just now all heading in the same direction, names familiar all the world over.
To me it is all intensely pathetic. It is the cry of lost youth, the admission that they have no real city or abiding place, and no sort of surety about what is going to come.
I remember Himself coming in one day and sending me out to a dying woman with the words: "I'm through with my job. It's yours now." When I got to her she looked at me so wistfully, saying: "Doctor says you are so sure."
You have no idea how these words thrilled me. Thank God I am sure. We are all sure, who know in Whom we have believed.
Since I wrote to you last I have had disquieting news about Effie. She was knocked down, while standing beside her car, by a big French military motor. The officers riding in it did not even stop to pick her up. Possibly they were not even aware that anything had happened. One must be charitable enough to suppose so. Some one came along and took her to a hospital, from which she is now able to send a few pencilled lines. She escaped with a few good bruises and it was quite a few days before I could discover whether there was any facial injury. Nobody seemed to reflect that I might be worrying about that. I applied for permission to go over to see her, but was refused. Nobody is permitted to cross the Channel to visit wounded or sick relatives unless the case is hopeless.
Her temperature kept up obstinately for longer than they liked, but I am thankful to say she is now convalescent.
I have had shoals of letters from all kinds of people over there, from the Brigadier to the orderly, expatiating on her absolute indispensability at the Base. They seem terrified in case we order her to come home.
It is very sweet to hear that she is so greatly beloved, and doing efficiently and cheerfully so much useful service. What experience she must have locked in her too uncommunicative bosom! She has had three years of it now, and has really told us very little. If she never tries to express it in writing, well, it surely will inform and colour all her after life. I should not dare to bid her home on my own responsibility, though there are days when I not only want, but need her desperately.
Talking of the modernity of these inaccessible, mysterious young creatures, I don't think I told you of a friend of mine, mother of four, who soon after the outbreak of war, received from her family a letter signed by each member, thanking her for permitting them to be born at the psychological moment of history.
Another friend of mine who had the misfortune to marry a full-blooded and very German German, who, however, conveniently departed this life the year before the war, told me her sons passionately reproached her for giving them a German father.
One gets bewildered in this strange hurly-burly where every mask seems to be torn off and the decencies of life hardly respected any more.
I am so glad you are easier in your mind about Anne. Effie was tremendously interested. All she said was "Anne will never marry that one; he's only experimental." Perhaps that may comfort you a little. Presumably, these birds of a feather understand one another!
Sometimes I have the awful feeling that Effie has passed out of the region of my love and care. Yet how dare I intrude these little personal fears upon a world's sorrow?
Every day I am writing letters to fathers and mothers whose darlings have gone forever "where, beyond these voices, there is peace."
One grows heart weary of the task, and even the balm of Gilead seems to have lost its power to soothe or heal.
Yet often and often I am thrilled by the courage and calmness and faith of those who have given the most. They are upheld and illumined by some white and lovely flame which surely emanates from the secret place of the Most High.
Never has there been such glory of sacrifice ennobled by that passion for the right which lifts those whom it inspires very high, above ignoble things.
My country was never greater than now, Cornelia. Shorn and blood-stained, she is worthy to be numbered with those who are arrayed in white robes and have come out of great tribulation.
A wonderful, wonderful thing has just happened. I don't know quite how to tell you.
I have been asked by our Foreign Office to go to America and tell part of the story of what we have done in the war and what the war has done for us.
Do you understand, Cornelia, I am coming to you, right now, by the very earliest boat?
God has undoubtedly opened this door. I shall be so glad to leave the tired Old World for a spell, and drink at the Fount of your glorious youth.
Even the submarines can't scare me away from this great Adventure.
At this moment America means only you and George and dear little Anne, and the heavenly rest under your roof tree.
Perhaps it may prove to be something very different, but that is how I am feeling at the moment.
God will surely forgive me for this momentary slackening.
I am so tired, Cornelia.
Only God knows how tired I am!
THE END
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKAN ENGLISHWOMAN'S HOME***