LXXXVIII
About this time a new voice began to be heard in England, a big insistent voice that the deafest ears could not shut out. It spoke with candid fearlessness and direct simplicity. It painted, with rough, sure touches, in the very colors of life, pictures that were living and real. It gave praise where praise was due. It pointed out neglects and denounced abuses, having begun by drawing the attention of Britannia to the fact that the sick among her troops—and we had brought the Cholera with us from England—had been landed without blankets or nourishment at Gallipoli.
Looking back through many yellowed, time-faded columns of this date, one sees the formless, weltering confusion upon which the Cimmerian darkness that is dear to Officialdom heavily brooded, pierced by a ray of pure dazzling light. And presently the thick mists were to be scattered—the bat-winged demons of Ignorance, Incapacity, Meanness, Neglect, Indifference, and Carelessness, Mismanagement, Corruption, Greed, and Venality, exorcised and—if not absolutely banished—at least deprived of power to work unlimited misery and ruin upon Humanity, by the timely intervention of that beneficent Genius, the Influence of the Daily Press.
What time the Brigade of Guards were encamped upon the grass-slopes of Scutari, near the great Cemetery where the wild dogs and the nightingales sang all the night through, a little blue striped tent had sprung up on the flank of the Cut Red Feathers. Between 2 and 6 a. m., Tussell, War Correspondent ofThe Thunderbolt, was occasionally to be found inside, writing, upon a saddle, and by the light of a tallow dip stuck in an empty whiskey-bottle, the letters that were presently to wake all England up.
When the cases containing the new Minié rifles were opened, and the weapons they contained served out tothe Cut Red Feathers and their neighbors, the Bearskins Plain, in lieu of the old smooth-bore Brown Bess, this intrusive person—destined to earn an unfading halo of popularity by telling unpleasant truths with force and vigor—happened, by the merest accident, to be upon the ground.
The odor of cabbaging was rank in the nostrils—not only of young Mortimer Jowell—as the contents of the cases were distributed. For only the top layers consisted of Miniés. Removing these new and serviceable weapons of warfare, the Armorer-Sergeant and his minions laid bare—what a heterogeneous collection of obsolete and discarded firelocks, bearing the marks of no less than fifty different corps!
Roars of Homeric laughter went up from the ranks as the men stood at ease and handled the interesting relics. And Morty’s C. O. promptly returned Brown Bess to her original owners, conferred the Miniés upon certain Regimental sharpshooters, tumbled the rusty relics back into their cases, and returned them whence they came. And the War Office—which had contracted with Crowell for the supply of the new rifles, maintained a Rhadamanthine silence—and Crowell, a member of the great fraternity not previously mentioned, preserved a discreet opaqueness.... Of his blunt iron swords that would not cut through Russian helmets and great-coats; of his soft-iron, short-handled picks and mattocks, that bent and buckled and broke in the frost-bitten hands of the soldiers toiling at the trenches before Sevastopol—Tussell, War Correspondent ofThe Thunderbolt, told us later on.
The myrmidons of other Fleet Street rags, following Tussell’s lead, presently took to telling the truth in ladlefuls. There was no silencing them. They would write home. And Jowell, Cowell, Sowell, Crowell, Dowell, Bowell, and Co., danced and popped like chestnuts on a red-hot shovel as they perused the columns containing their latest revelations. And when one ink-smeared varlet presumed to weigh in with a copy of the official statement regarding thepersonnelof the Medical Department of the Eastern Expedition—which afforded for the comfort and relief of twenty-seven thousand men of all arms, two hundred and four medical officers; including one chief Apothecary and three dispensers of medicines—andprovided no ambulance-corps, beyond the stretcher-carrying bandsmen—and revealed the fact that three out of the four Divisions of troops landed in the Crimea had been without their knapsacks since the day of disembarkation—even Officialdom wriggled uneasily in its well-stuffed chair at the War Office Council Board; and Britannia, lulled to hypnotic slumber by the mellifluous voice and snaky eye of Sire my Ally, drowsily wondered whether it would not be as well to think about waking up?
Those Letters from the Seat of Hostilities, how eagerly they were devoured by the British Public! How they were welcomed, discussed, denounced, and praised! And presently, when sorrow and bereavement came knocking at the doors of people of all ranks and classes, and every hour added to the huge roll of Deaths issued from the War Office—even Routine and Red Tape were powerless to silence those voices that clamored in Britannia’s drowsy ears....
“Wake up!” they cried, “wake up! for your sons are dying! On the stinking, earthen floors of the hospital-tents—on the naked, filthy planks of the hospital-ships, they lie unhelped, unfed, unclothed, unpitied! Doomed to be the food of vermin, flies, and maggots!—sealed as the victims of Fever, Gangrene, and Cholera, unless you wake and come speedily to the rescue!”
And so, with a tremendous start, BritanniaWOKE UP.
Over the United Kingdom broke a cyclone of indignant grief and generous emotion. Not a woman but was enveloped and carried off her feet. From the seamstress in the attic to the Queen in her palace the wave spread, the thrill was communicated, the magic worked its wonder.... Do you remember when that cry of pity came from the heart of Victoria? She was more a sovereign in the true sense of the word, at that moment, than any Queen that had ever reigned before her on the throne of England.... She atoned for a thousand faults, she reached the hearts of her people once and forever, with those outstretched, womanly hands of sorrow and compassion and love.
Perhaps you can see my grandmother rushing to her store-cupboards, filling boxes with pots of home-made jam, pound-cakes, bottles of calf’s-foot jelly, potted meats, andpickled shalots. Imagine how my Aunts—typifying the younger generation of Britain’s daughters—pitchedThe Ladies’ Mentor—always gracefully reticent about the War—behind the fire—tore up their Berlin-woolwork patterns—threw the green baize cover over the canary’s cage—boxed the King Charles spaniel’s ears—had hysterics—came out of them—and set to scraping lint with a vengeance. The most rigorous spinster knitted waistcoats and socks and undervests. Professed man-haters compromised on helmet-caps and muffetees.
My Aunt Julietta bottled broth, scraped lint, cut out and made Hospital shirts in a kind of sacred frenzy. Her Captain Goliath was not amongst the wounded, but any day—who knew?... Her round face grew puckered, and her pretty eyes dim by dint of searching through War Office Casualty Lists. She pictured her hero on outpost-duty on the snowy plains, knee-deep in the freezing slush of the muddy trenches—many a time when he was sheltered by a roof of ragged canvas, and warmed by a scanty fire of grubbed up-roots. She dreamed of him as starving when he had cleared his tin platter-full of hot fried biscuit and scraps of salt pork, it may be. And how often she saw him brought back dead and bloody from a sortie, when he was roaring some stave of an Irish song over the punch-bowl, I leave you to guess. Yet for all that, the Captain took his manly share of peril, privation, suffering and hardship with the best of them; and a day dawned when—oh! with what tears of anguish, and delight, and rapture—my Aunt got him back again....
You have heard how the call came to the less heroic daughters of England.... To Ada Merling, dreaming one gold October noon under her Wraye Rest cedars, it came, as of old, to the virgin Joan of Arc. If Tussell of the roaring bull-voice and the pronounced Hibernian brogue was herSt.Michael, who shall wonder?... God chooses His Messengers when and where He wills.
For as the Sainted Maid was chosen, consecrated, inspired, and sped, nearly five hundred years before upon the errand that was to end in the deliverance of her dear land of France; so certainly the path this woman was to tread was pointed by a Hand from Heaven; so surely the words she was to utter, the deeds that were to be done byher—were prompted and helped by the Angelic Messengers of God.
One wonders whether any foreknowledge of her high fate, her great and wonderful destiny, the sufferings she was to alleviate and soothe; the sorrows she was to pity and console; the crying wrongs she was to redress; the prim and mean and narrow Officialism her generosity was to put to shame,—may have been vouchsafed her, ere that sunset hour?
I do not think she ever dreamed of what was coming. Her path was set about with homely duties; her mild, beneficent influence was exercised in a comparatively narrow sphere. She would have smiled if it had been told her that a time was at hand when the demands upon her trained skill, her fertile brain, her vast genius for organization were to be varied and innumerable; when the road before her was to widen out into a vast Field of Battle where nations strove with nations in bloody combat; where the smoke of cannon blotted out Heaven, and Earth shook with the roll of iron-shod wheels and the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and was furrowed deep with trenches and honeycombed with mines, and mines yet more; though the picks and shovels of the haggard men who dug them tunneled their dreadful way through the festering bodies of the buried dead, whom Famine and Pestilence—no less than steel and shot and shell—had slain.
With her to decide was to act, swiftly and certainly. To Bertham, once again in divided, incomplete authority at the War Office, the quivering butt for every shaft launched at Officialdom, she wrote in words like these:
“It is asked whether there is not at least one woman in England who is fitted by knowledge, training, character, and experience to organize and take a Staff of nurses to the East, in aid of these suffering soldiers? I know that I am capable of undertaking the leadership. If you think me worthy, say so, and I will go!”
Twenty-four hours before, as the Emergency Sitting had ended, and friend and foe had passed out into the cool of the Westminster night air, a pale man with long black hair and a markedly sarcastic cast of countenance, had said in Bertham’s hearing to a colleague of the Opposition benches:
“The Government needs three remarkable men to save the country at this crisis. It has not got them, and thatThunderboltfellow knows it has not! Therefore he appeals to the nation, on the principle that if nine tailors go to the making of one ordinary son of Adam, nineteen millions of average Britons of both sexes may produce a reliable Prime Minister, a capable Commander-in-Chief, and an efficient Secretary at War!”
Disraeli’s gibe failed to wound. Bertham was devoid of the base quality of vanity. Single-handed he had striven against colossal and venerable prejudices, moss-grown abuses, corruption wide-spreading as unsuspected and unseen. He had fought a good fight against overwhelming odds, and he knew it. As he walked home with his long light step and through the graying gaslit streets, he repeated the beginning of the wit’s poisoned sentence:
“‘We need three remarkable men to save the country. We have not got them.’” And then he added: “But we have one woman who might help us! Why have I not thought before of Ada Merling? I will write and ask her now!”
No answer came to his letter. We may know she had not received it. She was hurrying to London, to beg him to let her go. Ignorant of this, unable to endure suspense longer, he went next morning early to the house in Cavendish Street, and found that she was there.
She had arrived on the previous night. She expected him—came hurrying into the hall at the sound of his voice, speaking to the servant. And her air seemed so gallant, her eyes were so beautiful and calm and courageous, that the sick heart of Robert Bertham lifted on a wave of hope as he looked at her, and said, taking her hand in his courtly way:
“In this my hour of sorrow and humiliation I have turned to you, dear Ada. Give me your answer. Decide—not as friendship dictates, but as reason counsels, and let your great heart have the casting-vote. It is tender to those suffering men, I know!”
She had answered in that voice of warm, human kindness:
“It would break for them, if it could not serve them infinitely better by keeping in working-order. But you speak of your letter. Has not mine?—no!—mine musthave traveled up in the very train by which I came. You will find it on your table when you go home presently, asking you to lay upon me if you think fit, this burden of duty. Ah! if you do, God knows that I will bear it faithfully as long as He gives me strength.”
So she had entreated to be let help when her help was the one thing needful! A passionate gratitude dimmed his brilliant eyes as he looked at her. He had no words, who was usually eloquent. But he took her white, strong, slender hand, and stooped low over it and reverently kissed it. Then he threw on his hat in his careless, breezy fashion, and, hardly speaking, and with his face turned from her, went upon his way.... And so out of the story, taking with him the love and respect of all true men and women, for one of whom, in the best and most chivalrous sense of the words, it may be written:
“He loved and labored for his fellow-men!”