THE RAID ON LONDON
A Modern Chronicle by Private PAT RIOT
England has been conquered by Julius Cæsar, William of Normandy, nearly (but not quite) by William of Germany, and, lastly, by plain Bill of Australia. And of the three it is clear that the conquest of Australian Bill was the most successful of all, when it is remembered that at the time of his triumphant entry into London he was not the man he is; he was sick and wounded. He did not invade the city with his shield in front of him. He was carried on it; he came a conqueror on crutches.
Private Bill Kangaroo was a lanky, sawny bushman who, when a certain foreign militarism went mad and the band began to play the concert of Europe, read between the lines of his newspaper, thought a bit, saddled his brumby, and rode for the nearest town that ran a railway, staying there just long enough for a final shout. He passed the doctor easily, took a quite insanguinary oath (for once) to do his job as a soldier, and went into camp.
How Private Bill made his kangaroo-like leap up the ridges of Gallipoli has been told by a war correspondent to a public which had, up till then, been vaguely aware of his existence as a poor relation from a South Sea Island. It is fairly certain that future historians will teach that Australia was discovered not by Captain Cook, explorer, but by Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, war correspondent. Anyhow, the finding and exploration of the territory is not in the same continent as the discovery and exploration of its people, and Bill has seen the correspondent in the trenches, and regards him with much more curiosity than ever he regarded the quondam explorer. But he was unconcerned with these things, and was acting co-respondent in the case of Crescentv.Southern Cross when asniper’s bullet hit him in the neck and put him out of court. A hospital ship brought him to the City of London.
London first came to know him through the medium of its most useful person, the policeman. Bill had no love for a policeman as a reader of Riot Acts, but he developed quite an affection for him as a Pointer of the Way. “I’m bushed” became a familiar greeting between them, and the Kangaroo was never disappointed when he strolled across the street to ask P.C. 49 the way he should go. A London motor-bus might have done what a Turkish bullet failed to do if the man in blue had not stopped the traffic and played the part of pilot to him. The raised hand that held up the stream only for royal persons was lifted for the strolling soldier from the South, and the busmen laughed at the bushman. To be “bushed” in the heart of London became a common experience with him, and one had a suspicion that nefarious taxicab drivers often took advantage of his innocence of locality to drive him in circles before dropping him at his destination, perhaps five minutes from the starting place. It was the shortness of city distances that puzzled him, and he was amazed to find names that were historical and household words 12,000 miles away borne by quite unpretentious streets and lanes. When English people learned that he had travelled 1,000 miles to pass a doctor and join the Army, they gasped and said he must be joking.
What a class war failed to do, a race war has done. The poor and their patrons, noblemen gentle and simple, vied with each other in dealing hospitably by the private soldier who had climbed the heights that commanded a view of the Past and the Future. In the stately homes of England, Bill (in the servant’s phrase) met the “big guns” as “one of themselves,” and was astonished at the surprise thus caused. But he was amazed, in turn, when the servants told him they had been in the house ten years. With many embellishments, he assured them that a girl in service in Sydney would think she owned the house if she stopped so long in one place.
To Bill, going into the Carlton or the Hotel Cecil wasn’t sitting in the seats of the mighty, but just the same as entering the pub at Yungaburrah, and he wandered in these places without any desire to “cut a dash.” He approved of the costly surroundings, but when he saw the smallness of the glasses put before him, Bill sat in the seats of the scornful. He really enjoyed himself better in that inn where he found a group of Cockney cronies. The landlord had to respond repeatedly to his “Fill ’em up again,” and Bill afterwards declared it to be the cheapest night’s fun in the town.
Parsimonious people would say that Bill Kangaroo didn’t know the value of money, for it took him some time to appreciate the small coins of the realm at their face value. He thought it looked mean to keep on asking, “How much?” and when seeing the sights of the city he always pulled out silver more than sufficient to cover expenses. The pennies he received in change soon filled his pocket, and at first he gave them away; but as he saw that he would soon be penniless, he would go into one of those places described as being “strictly within the meaning of the Act,” and surreptitiously ask thebarman if he could do with change. His dislike of the base metal and a habit of tipping in silver bade fair to earn for him the nickname of the “Silver King.” Tipping he reckoned a curse, but, knowing that many men lived by tips alone, he passed the coin quite as cordially as he disliked the practice. Bill never bought in the cheapest market to sell in the dearest; he didn’t think it “on the square.”
His greatest adventure was the Zeppelins. Seated in a theatre one evening, he heard a woof! And just after that a second one, closer a third, a fourth, and then a fifth just outside. Woof! Crash! Men and women began to rush for the doors, until the man who rose to the occasion on that memorable 25th rose to this one, and shouted above the tumult of falling glass and tramping feet that it was safer in than out, and that if they kept their seats all would be well. The actresses on the stage, though quaking with fright, stuck pluckily to their parts until the final act. Bill himself wanted dearly to go out and see the infernal machines and their effect, but, for example’s sake, he stayed till order was restored, when he slipped out of the building.
What he saw outside filled him with thankfulness that he was a soldier, helping to smash the raiders and their kind. Wandering down the street, past great gaping holes in the roadway, an overturned motor-bus and some wrecked buildings, he found himself on the Embankment, and then on the bridge, where he saw a damaged arch of masonry. He sat down to think, little dreaming that he was fulfilling Macaulay’s prophecy concerning the man from “down under” sitting on the ruins of London Bridge.
Bill’s furlough was finished shortly after this; his raid terminated with that of the Zeppelins. He was glad to return to the front; and he knows now that, in assisting in the pruning of Prussia, he is fighting for more things than ever he thought of when he took the oath of allegiance.
But he swears that when the job is done he will again visit the land of his father’s fathers, and toast it in a big, big toast.
9th Battalion.