EDITH M. THOMAS

Sweetas the lawn beneath his sandalled treadOr the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar,For its still, channelled current constant more,His life was, and the few blithe words he said.One or two poets read he, and reread;One or two friends in boyish ardour woreNext to his heart, incurious of the loreDodonian woods might murmur o’er his head.Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a careWhat, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo!The earth once won, begins your long despairThat never, never is his bliss for you.He breathed betimes this clement island airAnd in unwitting lordship saw the blue.George Santayana

Sweetas the lawn beneath his sandalled treadOr the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar,For its still, channelled current constant more,His life was, and the few blithe words he said.

One or two poets read he, and reread;One or two friends in boyish ardour woreNext to his heart, incurious of the loreDodonian woods might murmur o’er his head.

Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a careWhat, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo!The earth once won, begins your long despairThat never, never is his bliss for you.He breathed betimes this clement island airAnd in unwitting lordship saw the blue.George Santayana

Oxford, August, 1915

WALTER GAYINTERIORFROM AN ORIGINAL WATER-COLOUR SKETCH

WALTER GAY

INTERIOR

FROM AN ORIGINAL WATER-COLOUR SKETCH

The little children in my country kiss the American flag.MADAME VANDERVELDE

Whatof those children over the seaThat are beating about the world’s rough ways,Like the tender blossoms from off a treeThat a sudden gale in Spring betrays?The children? Oh, let them look for the signOf a wave-borne flag, thou land of mine!On the old gray sea its course it holds,Life for the famished is in its gift....And the children are crowding to kiss its folds,While the tears of their mothers fall free and swift.—And what of the flag their lips have pressed?Oh, guard it for ever—That flag is blest.Edith M. Thomas

On the old gray sea its course it holds,Life for the famished is in its gift....And the children are crowding to kiss its folds,While the tears of their mothers fall free and swift.—And what of the flag their lips have pressed?Oh, guard it for ever—That flag is blest.Edith M. Thomas

Warmvines bloom now along thy rampart steepsThy shelves of olives, undercliffs of azure,And like a lizard of the red rock sleepsThe wrinkled Tuscan sea, panting for pleasure.Nets, too, festooned about thine elfin port,Telaro, in the Etrurian mountain’s side,Heavings of golden luggers scarce distortThe image of thy belfry where they ride.But thee, Telaro, on a night long goneThat grey and holy tower upon the moleSuddenly summoned, while yet lightnings shoneAnd hard gale lingered, with a ceaseless tollThat choked, with its disastrous monotone,All the narrow channels of the hamlet’s soul.

For what despair, fire, shipwreck, treachery?Was it for threat that from the macchia sprangFor Genoa’s feud, the oppressor’s piracy,Or the Falcon of Sarzana that it rang?Was the boat-guild’s silver plundered? Blood should pay.Hardwon the footing of the fishers’ clanThe sea-cloud-watchers.—Loud above the sprayThe maddening iron cry, the appeal of man,Washed through the torchless midnight on and on.Are not enough the jeopardies of day?Riot arose—fear’s Self began the fray:But the tower proved empty. By the lightning’s rayThey found no human ringer in the room....The bell-rope quivered out in the sea-spume....

A creature fierce, soft, witless of itself,A morbid mouth, circled by writhing arms,By its own grasp entangled on that shelf,Had dragged the rope and spread the death-alarms;Insensitive, light-forgotten, up from slime,From shelter betwixt rocks, issuing for preyDisguised, had used man’s language of dismay.The spawn of perished times had late in timeEmerged, and griefs upon man’s grief imposedIncalculable.But the fishers closedThe blind mouth, and cut off the suckers cold.Two thousand fathoms the disturber rolledFrom trough to trough into the gulf Tyrrhene;And fear sank with it back into its night obscene.Herbert Trench

But the fishers closedThe blind mouth, and cut off the suckers cold.Two thousand fathoms the disturber rolledFrom trough to trough into the gulf Tyrrhene;And fear sank with it back into its night obscene.Herbert Trench

THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHEPORTRAIT OF ÉMILE VERHAERENFROM A PENCIL DRAWING

THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE

PORTRAIT OF ÉMILE VERHAEREN

FROM A PENCIL DRAWING

Tume disais de ta voix douce,Tu me disais en insistant:—Y a-t-il encore un PrintempsEt les feuilles repoussent-elles?La guerre accapare le cielLes eaux, les monts, les bois, la terre:Où sont les fleurs couleur de mielPour les abeilles volontaires?Où sont les pousses des ronceroisEt les boutons des anémones?Où sont les flûtes dans les boisDes oiseaux sombres aux becs jaunes?—Hélas! plus n’est de floraisonQue celle des feux dans l’espace:Bouquet de rage et de menaceS’éparpillant sur l’horizon.Plus n’est, hélas! de splendeur rougeQue celle, hélas! des boulets fousÉclaboussant de larges coupsClochers, hameaux, fermes et bouges.C’est le printemps de ce temps-ci:Le vent répand de plaine en plaine,Là-bas, ces feuillaisons de haine;C’est la terreur de ce temps-ci.Émile Verhaeren

Tume disais de ta voix douce,Tu me disais en insistant:—Y a-t-il encore un PrintempsEt les feuilles repoussent-elles?

La guerre accapare le cielLes eaux, les monts, les bois, la terre:Où sont les fleurs couleur de mielPour les abeilles volontaires?

Où sont les pousses des ronceroisEt les boutons des anémones?Où sont les flûtes dans les boisDes oiseaux sombres aux becs jaunes?

—Hélas! plus n’est de floraisonQue celle des feux dans l’espace:Bouquet de rage et de menaceS’éparpillant sur l’horizon.

Plus n’est, hélas! de splendeur rougeQue celle, hélas! des boulets fousÉclaboussant de larges coupsClochers, hameaux, fermes et bouges.

C’est le printemps de ce temps-ci:Le vent répand de plaine en plaine,Là-bas, ces feuillaisons de haine;C’est la terreur de ce temps-ci.Émile Verhaeren

Saint-Cloud, le 31 Juillet 1915

Sadly your dear voice said:“Is the old spring-time dead,And shall we never seeNew leaves upon the tree?“Shall the black wings of warBlot out sun, moon and star,And never a bud unfoldTo the bee its secret gold?“Where are the wind-flowers streaked,And the wayward bramble shoots,And the black-birds yellow-beakedWith a note like woodland flutes?”No flower shall bloom this yearBut the wild flame of fearWreathing the evil nightWith burst of deadly light.No splendour of petals redBut that which the cannon shed,Raining their death-bloom downOn farm and tower and town.This is the scarlet doomBy the wild sea-winds hurledOver a land of gloom,Over a grave-strewn world.Émile Verhaeren

Sadly your dear voice said:“Is the old spring-time dead,And shall we never seeNew leaves upon the tree?

“Shall the black wings of warBlot out sun, moon and star,And never a bud unfoldTo the bee its secret gold?

“Where are the wind-flowers streaked,And the wayward bramble shoots,And the black-birds yellow-beakedWith a note like woodland flutes?”

No flower shall bloom this yearBut the wild flame of fearWreathing the evil nightWith burst of deadly light.

No splendour of petals redBut that which the cannon shed,Raining their death-bloom downOn farm and tower and town.

This is the scarlet doomBy the wild sea-winds hurledOver a land of gloom,Over a grave-strewn world.Émile Verhaeren

Thoughdesolation stain their foiled advance,In ashen ruins hearth-stones linger whole:Do what they may, they cannot master France;Do what they can, they cannot quell the soul.Barrett Wendell

Isaidto the woman: Whence do you come,With your bundle in your hand?She said: In the North I made my home,Where slow streams fatten the fruitful loam,And the endless wheat-fields run like foamTo the edge of the endless sand.I said: What look have your houses there,And the rivers that glass your sky?Do the steeples that call your people to prayerLift fretted fronts to the silver air,And the stones of your streets, are they washed and fairWhen the Sunday folk go by?My house is ill to find, she said,For it has no roof but the sky;The tongue is torn from the steeple-head,The streets are foul with the slime of the dead,And all the rivers run poison-redWith the bodies drifting by.I said: Is there none to come at your callIn all this throng astray?They shot my husband against a wall,And my child (she said), too little to crawl,Held up its hands to catch the ballWhen the gun-muzzle turned its way.I said: There are countries far from hereWhere the friendly church-bells call,And fields where the rivers run cool and clear,And streets where the weary may walk without fear,And a quiet bed, with a green tree near,To sleep at the end of it all.She answered: Your land is too remote,And what if I chanced to roamWhen the bells fly back to the steeples’ throat,And the sky with banners is all afloat,And the streets of my city rock like a boatWith the tramp of her men come home?I shall crouch by the door till the bolt is down,And then go in to my dead.Where my husband fell I will put a stone,And mother a child instead of my own,And stand and laugh on my bare hearth-stoneWhen the King rides by, she said.Edith Wharton

I said: What look have your houses there,And the rivers that glass your sky?Do the steeples that call your people to prayerLift fretted fronts to the silver air,And the stones of your streets, are they washed and fairWhen the Sunday folk go by?

My house is ill to find, she said,For it has no roof but the sky;The tongue is torn from the steeple-head,The streets are foul with the slime of the dead,And all the rivers run poison-redWith the bodies drifting by.

I said: Is there none to come at your callIn all this throng astray?They shot my husband against a wall,And my child (she said), too little to crawl,Held up its hands to catch the ballWhen the gun-muzzle turned its way.

I said: There are countries far from hereWhere the friendly church-bells call,And fields where the rivers run cool and clear,And streets where the weary may walk without fear,And a quiet bed, with a green tree near,To sleep at the end of it all.

She answered: Your land is too remote,And what if I chanced to roamWhen the bells fly back to the steeples’ throat,And the sky with banners is all afloat,And the streets of my city rock like a boatWith the tramp of her men come home?

I shall crouch by the door till the bolt is down,And then go in to my dead.Where my husband fell I will put a stone,And mother a child instead of my own,And stand and laugh on my bare hearth-stoneWhen the King rides by, she said.Edith Wharton

Paris, August 27th, 1915

P. A. J. DAGNAN-BOUVERETBRITTANY WOMANFROM A DRAWING IN COLOURED CRAYONS

P. A. J. DAGNAN-BOUVERET

BRITTANY WOMAN

FROM A DRAWING IN COLOURED CRAYONS

Othaton some forsaken strand,Lone ending of a lonely land,On such an eve we two were lying,To hear the quiet water sighingAnd feel the coolness of the sand.A red and broken moon would growOut of the dusk and even soAs here to-night the street she faces,Between the half-distinguished spacesOf sea and sky would burn and go.The moon would go and overhead,Like tapers lighted o’er the dead,Star after silver star would glimmer,The lonely night grow calmer, dimmer,The quiet sea sink in its bed.We, at the end of Time and Fate,Might unconcerned with love or hateAs the sea’s voices, talk together,Wherefore we went apart and whither,And all the exiled years relate.Thus were life’s grey chance-’ravelled sleave’Outspread, we something might perceiveWhich never would to chance surrender,But through the tangled woof its slenderGolden, elusive pattern weave.Then while the great stars larger shoneLeaned on the sea, and drew thereonFaint paths of light, across them faringMight steal the ship that comes for bearingSore-wounded souls to Avalon.Margaret L. Woods

Othaton some forsaken strand,Lone ending of a lonely land,On such an eve we two were lying,To hear the quiet water sighingAnd feel the coolness of the sand.

A red and broken moon would growOut of the dusk and even soAs here to-night the street she faces,Between the half-distinguished spacesOf sea and sky would burn and go.

The moon would go and overhead,Like tapers lighted o’er the dead,Star after silver star would glimmer,The lonely night grow calmer, dimmer,The quiet sea sink in its bed.

We, at the end of Time and Fate,Might unconcerned with love or hateAs the sea’s voices, talk together,Wherefore we went apart and whither,And all the exiled years relate.

Thus were life’s grey chance-’ravelled sleave’Outspread, we something might perceiveWhich never would to chance surrender,But through the tangled woof its slenderGolden, elusive pattern weave.

Then while the great stars larger shoneLeaned on the sea, and drew thereonFaint paths of light, across them faringMight steal the ship that comes for bearingSore-wounded souls to Avalon.Margaret L. Woods

Ithinkit better that at times like theseWe poets keep our mouths shut, for in truthWe have no gift to set a statesman right;He’s had enough of meddling who can pleaseA young girl in the indolence of her youthOr an old man upon a winter’s night.W. B. Yeats

JACQUES-ÉMILE BLANCHEPORTRAIT OF IGOR STRAVINSKYFROM A STUDY IN OILS

JACQUES-ÉMILE BLANCHE

PORTRAIT OF IGOR STRAVINSKY

FROM A STUDY IN OILS

MUSICAL SCOREIGOR STRAVINSKYSOUVENIR D’UNE MARCHE BOCHE

MUSICAL SCORE

IGOR STRAVINSKY

SOUVENIR D’UNE MARCHE BOCHE

THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHEPORTRAIT OF VINCENT D’INDYFROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING

THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE

PORTRAIT OF VINCENT D’INDY

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING

MUSICAL SCOREVINCENT D’INDYLA LÉGENDE DE SAINT CHRISTOPHEPAGE OF SCORE OF UNPUBLISHED OPERA[ACTE I, SCÈNE III]

MUSICAL SCORE

VINCENT D’INDY

LA LÉGENDE DE SAINT CHRISTOPHE

PAGE OF SCORE OF UNPUBLISHED OPERA

[ACTE I, SCÈNE III]

II PROSE

MAURICE BARRÈSSARAH BERNHARDTPAUL BOURGETJOSEPH CONRADELEONORA DUSEJOHN GALSWORTHYEDMUND GOSSEPAUL HERVIEUGÉNÉRAL HUMBERTHENRY JAMESMAURICE MAETERLINCKEDWARD SANDFORD MARTINPAUL ELMER MOREAGNES REPPLIERANDRÉ SAURÈSMRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Jen’aime pas raconter cette histoire, dit le Général, parce que à chaque fois, c’est bête, je pleure. Mais elle fait aimer la France.... Il s’agit de deux enfants admirablement doués, pleins de cœur et d’esprit et qu’aimaient tous ceux qui les rencontraient. Je les avais connus tout petits. Quand la guerre éclata, le plus jeune, François, venait d’être admis à Saint-Cyr. Il n’eut pas le temps d’y entrer et avec toute la promotion il fut d’emblée nommé sous-lieutenant. Vous pensez s’il rayonnait de joie! Dix-neuf ans l’épaulette et les batailles! Son aîné Jacques, un garçon de vingt ans, tout à fait remarquable de science et d’éloquence, travaillait encore à la Faculté de Droit dont il était lauréat. Lui aussi il partit comme sous-lieutenant.

Les deux frères se retrouvèrent dans la même brigade de “la division de fer,” le plus jeune au 26ᵉ de ligne et l’aîné au 27ᵉ. Ils cantonnaient dans un village dévasté et chaque jour joyeusement se retrouvaient, plaisant à tous et gagnant par leur jeunesse et leur amitié une sorte de popularité auprès des soldats.

Bientôt on apprit que le régiment du Saint-Cyrien allait avoir à marcher et que ce serait chaud. En cachette Jacques s’en alla demander au colonel la permission de prendre la place de son petit François qu’il trouvait trop peu préparé pour une action qui s’annonçait rude.

Le colonel reconnut la générosité de cette demande mais coupa court en disant:

—On ne peut pas faire passer un officier d’un corps à un autre corps.

Le jour fixé pour l’attaque arriva. La première compagnie à laquelle appartenait François fut envoyé en tirailleurs. Elle fut fauchée. Une autre suivit. Et puis une autre encore. Leurs ailes durent se replier en laissant sur le terrain leurs morts et une partie de leurs blessés. Le petit sous-lieutenant n’était pas de ceux qui revinrent.

Le surlendemain nous reprîmes l’offensive. L’aîné en enlevant avec son régiment les tranchées allemandes, passa auprès du corps de son petit François tout criblé de balles. Un peu plus loin il reçut une blessure à l’épaule.

Son capitaine lui ordonna d’aller se faire panser. Il refusa, continua et fut blessé d’une balle dans la tête.

Les corps furent ramassés et ramenés dans les ruines du village. Les sapeurs du 26ᵉ dirent alors:

—On n’enterrera pas ce bon petit sous-lieutenant sans un cercueil. Nous allons lui en faire un.

Ils se mirent à scier et à clouer.

Ceux du 27ᵉ dirent alors:

—Il ne faut pas traiter différemment les deux frères. Nous allons, nous aussi, faire un cercueil pour notre lieutenant.

Au soir, on se préparait à les enterrer côte à côte quand une vieille femme éleva la voix.

C’était une vieille si pauvre qu’elle avait obstinément refusé d’abandonner le village. “J’aime mieux mourir ici,” avait-elle dit. On l’avait laissée. Elle gîtait misérablement dans sa cabane sur la paille et n’avait pas d’autre nourriture que celle que lui donnaient les soldats. Quand elle vit les deux jeunes cadavres et les préparatifs, elle dit:

—Attendez un instant avant de les enfermer. Je vais chercher quelque chose.

Elle alla fouiller la paille sur laquelle elle couchait et en tira le drap qu’elle gardait pour sa sépulture. Et revenant:

—On n’enfermera pas, dit-elle, ces beaux garçons le visage contre les planches. Je veux les ensevelir.

Elle coupa la toile en deux et les mit chacun dans son suaire, puis elle leur posa un baiser sur le front, en disant chaque fois:

—Pour la mère, mon cher enfant.

. . .

Nous nous tûmes quand le Général eut ainsi parlé et il n’était pas leseul à avoir des larmes dans les yeux. Une prière d’amour se formait dans nos cœurs pour la France.

Maurice Barrèsde l’Académie Française

1915

I’mnot fond of telling this story, said the General, because each time, like the old fool I am, it brings tears to my eyes ... but the best of France is in it.

It’s about two boys, astonishingly gifted, full of heart and brains, that nobody could meet without liking. I knew them when they were tiny little fellows. At the time war broke out, the younger one, François, had just passed his examinations for St. Cyr. He had no time to enter; he was rushed along in the wholesale promotion and made second lieutenant then and there. Fancy what it meant to him—epaulettes and battles at nineteen! His elder brother, Jacques, a boy of twenty,—a really remarkable fellow in his studies, was hard at work in the Law School, where he had taken honors. He went off to the front as second lieutenant, too.

The two brothers were thrown together for the first time in the same brigade of the “iron division,” as it was called—the younger in the 26th of the line, the other in the 27th. They were quartered in a ruined village, and each day they met, making themselves liked everywhere and enjoying a great popularity with the soldiers on account of their youth and friendliness.

It soon got round that the St. Cyr boy’s regiment was going to get some hot fighting. Jacques said nothing, but he went to his colonel and asked for permission to take the place of his brother, whom he considered too little prepared for what promised to be a violent engagement.

The colonel recognized the generosity of this request, but he cut the young man short.

“An officer can’t be transferred from his own corps to another,” he said.

The day fixed for the attack came. The first company—François’ company—was sent ahead to skirmish. It was simply mowed down. Another followed, and then another. They finally had to fall back, leaving their dead and part of the wounded on the field. The little second lieutenant was not among those who returned.

Two days later our men took the offensive again. The elder brother, storming the German trenches with his regiment, passed close by the body of his little François as it lay there all shot to pieces. A bit farther on, a bullet caught him in the shoulder.

His captain ordered him back to have the wound dressed; he refused, kept on, and was hit full in the forehead.

The bodies were taken up and carried back to the ruins of the village. The sappers of the 26th said:

“He was a fine fellow, that little second lieutenant. He shan’t go underground without a coffin, at any rate. Let’s make one for him.”

And they began sawing and hammering.

Then the men of the 27th put their heads together and said:

“There must be no difference between the two brothers. We might as well make a coffin for our lieutenant, too.”

By nightfall, when they were ready to bury the brothers side by side, an old woman spoke up. She was a wretched old creature, so poor and broken that she stubbornly refused to leave the village. “I’ve lived here, I’ll die here,” she kept on saying. She lay huddled up on some straw in her little hovel, and her only food was the leavings of the soldiers. When she saw the bodies of the two lads and understood what was going on, she said:

“Wait a minute before you nail the covers on. I’m going to fetch something.”

She hobbled away, fumbled around in the straw she slept on, and pulled out a piece of cloth that she was keeping for her shroud.

“They shan’t nail those boys up with their faces against the boards. I want to shroud them,” she said.

She cut the shroud in two and wrapped each in a half of it. Then she kissed each one of them on the forehead, saying,

“That’s for your mother, dearie.”

. . .

No one spoke when the General ended. And he was not the only one to have wet eyes. In each of our hearts there was a prayer for France.

Maurice Barrèsde l’Académie Française

1915

Séchezvos larmes, Enfants des Flandres!

Car les canons, les mitrailleuses, les fusils, les sabres et les bras n’arrêteront leur élan que lorsque l’ennemi vaincu vous rendra vos foyers!

Et ces foyers; nous, les femmes de France, d’Angleterre, de Russie et d’Italie, nous les ensoleillerons.Sarah Bernhardt

1915

Childrenof Flanders, dry your tears!

For all the mighty machinery of war, and the stout hearts of brave men, shall strive together till the vanquished foe has given you back your homes!

And to those homes made desolate, we, the women of France, of England, of Russia and of Italy, will bring again happiness and sunlight!

Sarah Bernhardt

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RÉNOIRPORTRAIT OF HIS SON, WOUNDED IN THE WARFROM A CHARCOAL SKETCH

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RÉNOIR

PORTRAIT OF HIS SON, WOUNDED IN THE WAR

FROM A CHARCOAL SKETCH

Jeme trouvais, au début de ce mois d’août 1915, voyager en automobile dans une des provinces du centre de la France, que j’avais traversée de même, juste une année auparavant, quand la mobilisation commençante remplissait les routes de camions, de canons, de troupes en marche. Une année! Que de morts depuis! Mais la résolution demeure la même qu’à cette époque où le Pays tout entier n’eut qu’un mot d’ordre: y aller. Non. Rien n’a changé de cette volonté de bataille. J’entre dans un hôtel, pour y déjeuner. La patronne, que je connais pour m’arrêter là chaque fois que je passe par la petite ville, est entièrement vêtue de noir. Elle a perdu son frère en Alsace. Son mari est dans un dépôt à la veille de partir au front. “Faites-vous des affaires?” lui demandé-je.—“Pas beaucoup. Personne ne circule, et tous les mobilisés s’en vont. La caserne se vide. Encore ce matin—”—“C’est bien long,” lui dis-je, pour la tenter.—“Oui, monsieur,” répond-elle, “mais puisqu’il faut çà—” Et elle recommence d’écrire ses menus, sans une plainte. Dans la salle à manger, deux servantes, dont une aussi tout en noir. Je la questionne. Son mari a été tué sur l’Yser. Son visage est très triste. Mais pas une récrimination non plus. Elle est comme sa maîtresse. Elle accepte “puisqu’il faut ça.” Un sous-officier ouvre la porte. Il est suivi d’une femme en grand deuil, d’un enfant et d’un homme âgé.—Sa femme, son fils et son père, ai-je su depuis. Je le vois de profil, et j’observe dans son regard une fixité qui m’étonne. Il refuse une place dans le fond, et marche vers la fenêtre: “J’ai besoin d’avoir plus de jour maintenant,” répète-t-il, d’un accent singulier. A peine est-il assis avec sa famille, qu’un des convives de la table d’hôte, en train de déjeuner, se lève, et vient le saluer avec une exclamation de surprise. “Vous ici! Vous êtes donc debout? D’ailleurs, vous avez très belle mine.”—“Oui,” dit le sous-officier, “çà n’empêche pas qu’il est en verre—” Et il montre son œil droit. En quelques mots, très simplement, il raconte qu’une balle lui a enlevé cet œildroit en Argonne. “C’est dommage,” continue-t-il, “on était si bien, si contents de n’être plus dans l’eau et dans la boue.” Et l’autre de s’écrier: “Vous êtes tous comme çà, dans l’armée, si braves, si modestes! Nous autres, les vieux, nous n’avons été que de la Saint-Jean à côté de vous. 70, qu’est-ce que c’était? Rien du tout. Mais çà finira autrement.”—“Il le faut,” dit le sous-officier, “et pour nous, et pour ces pauvres Belges à qui nous devons d’avoir eu du temps. Oui,” insiste-t-il, en posant sa main sur la tête de son enfant, “pour ceux-là aussi il le faut.”—“Qui est ce monsieur?” dis-je à la servante.—“Ce sous-officier?” répond-elle, “un négociant de Paris. Le frère de sa dame a été tué.” Je regarde manger ces gens, si éprouvés. Ils sont bien sérieux, bien accablés, mais si dignes. Les mots que ce borgne héroïque a prononcés, cet “il le faut” donne à tous leurs gestes une émouvante gravité.

Je reprends ma route, et je le retrouve cet “il le faut” du sergent, ce “puisqu’il faut çà” de l’hôtelière, comme écrit dans tous les aspects de cet horizon. C’est le moment de la moisson. Des femmes y travaillent, des garçonnets, des petites filles. La suppléance du mari, du père, du frère absents, s’est faite simplement, sans qu’il y ait eu besoin d’aucun appel, d’aucun décret. Sur deux charrettes que je croise, une est menée par une femme. Des femmes conduisent les troupeaux. Des femmes étaient derrière les guichets de la Banque où je suis descendu chercher de la monnaie, dans la petite ville. Un de mes amis, qui a de gros intérêts dans le midi, me racontait que son homme d’affaires est aux Dardanelles: “Sa femme gère mes propriétés à sa place. Elle est étonnante d’intelligence et de bravoure.” Oui, c’est toujours ce même tranquille stoïcisme, cette totale absence de plainte. Un bataillon de territoriaux défile. Ils ne sont plus jeunes. Leur existence était établie. Elle est bouleversée. Ils subissent l’épreuve sans un murmure et marquent le pas sur la route brûlée de soleil avec une énergie qui révèle, chez eux aussi, le sentiment de la nécessité. C’est, pour moi, le caractère pathétique de cette guerre. Elle a la grandeur auguste des actions vitales de la nature. Elle est le geste d’un pays qui ne veut pas mourir, et qui ne mourra pas, ni lui ni cette nobleBelgique, dont parlait le sous-officier, et qui, elle, a prononcé avec autant de fermeté résolue son “il le faut,” quand l’Allemand l’a provoquée, et plus pathétiquement encore. Ce n’était pas pour la vie qu’elle allait se battre, c’était pour l’honneur, pour la probité. Il n’est pas un Français qui ne le sente, et qui ne confonde sa propre cause avec celle des admirables sujets de l’admirable Roi Albert.

Paul Bourgetde l’Académie Française

Duringthe first days of August, 1915, I found myself motoring in one of the central provinces of France. I had crossed the same region in the same way just a year before, when the beginning of mobilization was crowding the roads with waggons, with artillery and with marching troops. Only one year! How many men are dead since! But the high resolve of the nation is as firm as it was then, when all through the land there was only one impulse—to go forward. The willingness to fight and to endure has not grown less.

I went into an hotel for luncheon. I know the woman who keeps it, because I always stop there when I go through the little town. I found her dressed in black: she had lost her brother in Alsace. Her husband was waiting to be sent to the front. I asked her if she were doing any business. “Not much,” she answered. “Nobody is travelling, and all the mobilized men are gone. The barracks are empty; why, only this morning—” “It seems a long time,” I said, to draw her on. “Yes,” she said, “but since we must ...” and she went back without complaint to the task of writing her bills of fare. There were two maids in the dining-room, one of them also in black. I questioned her and learnt that herhusband had been killed on the Yser. Her face was full of sorrow, but like her mistress she blamed no one, and accepted her loss because it “must” be so.

Soon a non-commissioned officer came in, followed by a woman in deep mourning, a little boy, and an elderly man; I learnt afterwards that they were the sergeant’s wife, his son, and his father. I saw his profile, and noticed that he seemed to stare fixedly. He declined a place at the back of the room, and came toward the window. “I need plenty of light now,” he said in an odd voice. He and his family had just seated themselves when one of the guests at the longtable d’hôterose with an exclamation of surprise and came over to him, saying: “Why, are you out again? How well you look!” “Yes,” said the sergeant; “but all the same this one is glass,” pointing to his right eye, and in a few words he told how it had been knocked out by a bullet in the Argonne. “It was such a pity,” he said, “for we were all so glad when the fighting began, and we got out of the mud and water in the trenches.” “You are all just like that in the army!” said his friend, “all so plucky and so simple! We old fellows were only amateurs compared to you! What was the war of 1870 to this one? This time there will be a different ending.” “There must be,” said the sergeant, “not only for us but for the Belgians, who gained us so much time.” And he repeated, laying his hand on his boy’s head, “Yes, for these little chaps also it must be so.”

Presently I found a chance to ask the maid what she knew about the soldier who had been speaking. “That sergeant? He is a Paris shopkeeper. His wife’s brother has been killed.” I watched these people at table, so serious, so sorely tried, but so full of dignity, and the words which the half-blinded man had pronounced seemed to make even his ordinary gestures impressive.

All along the road, for the rest of that journey the “it must be” of the hotel-keeper and the sergeant seemed to be written over the whole country-side. It was harvest-time, and women, lads and little girls were working in the fields, replacing absent husbands, fathers and brothers.They were doing it quite simply, not drawn by any appeal, nor compelled by any order. Every other cart I met was driven by a woman. Women were herding the cattle. There was a woman at the cashier’s desk of the bank in the town where I went to get some money changed.

One of my friends, who has large interests in the south of France, told me that his man of business was at the Dardanelles. “His wife looks after my property in his place. She is astonishingly intelligent and capable.” Everywhere the same tranquil stoicism, the same entire absence of complaint.

A battalion of territorials marched past. They were not young men. All of them had had fixed duties and habits which were now broken up. Yet they submitted without a murmur, marching along the hot and dusty road with an energy which revealed in them also the same sense of compelling necessity. That, to my mind, gives to this war its pathetic side. It has all the imposing grandeur of the vital forces of nature; it is the heroic movement of a country which defies death, which is not meant to die. Nor will she allow Belgium to die—the Belgium to whom the sergeant paid his tribute, and whose “we must” rang out with such poignant firmness under the German menace. It was not for life alone that Belgium fought, but for honour and for justice. No Frenchman lives who does not feel this, and who does not merge his own cause in that of the indomitable subjects of Belgium’s indomitable King.

Paul Bourgetde l’Académie Française

LÉON BONNATPEGASUSFROM A PENCIL AND PEN-AND-INK SKETCH

LÉON BONNAT

PEGASUS

FROM A PENCIL AND PEN-AND-INK SKETCH

Ihavenever believed in political assassination as a means to an end, and least of all if the assassination is of the dynastic order. I don’t know how far murder can ever approach the efficiency of a fine art, but looked upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient either of impatient hope or hurried despair. There are few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper stream of causes depends not on individualities which, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by the destiny which no murder had ever been able to placate, divert or arrest.

In July of [1914] I was a stranger in a strange city and particularly out of touch with the world’s politics. Never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in that particular atmosphere-less, perspective-lessness of the daily papers which somehow for a man with some historic sense robs them of all real interest. I don’t think I had looked at a daily for a month past.

But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to a friend who had travelled there with me out of pure kindness, to bear me company in a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying.

It was this friend who one morning at breakfast informed me of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.

The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man existed. I remembered only that not long before he had visited London, but that memory was lost in a cloud of insignificant printed words his presence in this country provoked. Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance had been archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an archduke? And now he was no more, and with a certain atrocity of circumstance which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. I knew nothing of his journey. I did not connect that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations. I asked where it had happened. My friend told me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences of that grave event. He asked me what I thought would happen next.

It was with perfect sincerity that I said “Nothing,” and I dismissed the subject, having a great repugnance to consider murder as an engine of politics. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy archdukes in the background out of which one would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the sun of European politics. And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgement who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that time. What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was fixed on my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their fascinating, holiday promising aspect. I obtained my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough to come down now and then to see us with their pockets full of crumpled papers, and who imparted it to me casually with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one’s attention. Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the powers of the Old World? Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility while watching the collective Europe stage managing a little contemptuously in a feeling of conscious superiority, by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its awaiting fate. Itwas wonderfully exact in the spirit, same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air: race, liberation, justice, and the same mood of trivial demonstration. You could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg, however roundabout the route. “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking-clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some “café turc” at the end of his lunch.

—“Monsieur veut dire café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.

I will not say that I had not seen something of that instructive aspect in the war of the Balkans, both in its first and even in its second phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of an alarmist cynicism. As to alarm I pointed out that fear is natural to man and even salutary. It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must be carried off by a jaunty bearing—a sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought to be a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It had been pointed out to me that those were nations not far removed from a savage state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding pigs. The complex material civilization of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by war. The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of the idle class or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.

Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been even a book written on that theme—an attempt to put pacifism on a material basis. Nothing more solid could have been imagined on this trading and manufacturing globe. War was bad business! This was final.

But truth to say on this fateful July I reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world. Whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire to notice the signs, or to interpret them correctly. The most innocent of passions takes the edge off one’s judgement. The desire which obsessed me was simply the desire of travel. And that being so, it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future—the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession, the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.

In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow but on the other side of the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first seemed to be considerable. Since leaving the sea to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made. I confess it with shame, my first idea about a projected journey is to leave it alone.

But that invitation, received at first with a sort of uneasiness, awoke the dormant energies in my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life. It was in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, knew the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignation of that age. It was between those historic walls that I began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated life which permitted me but seldom to look back that way. The wings of time were spread over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I would find that I who have evoked so many imaginary lives had been embracing mere shadows in my youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have gone alone, trembling, into graveyards at midnight—just to see what would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe. My present, all that gave solidity and value to it at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased to show my companions what Polish country life was like and the town where I was at school, before my boys got too old, and gaining an individual past of their own should lose the fresh sympathies of their age. It is only in this short understanding of youth that perhaps we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the trouble of another soul. For youth all is reality, and with justice; since they can apprehend so vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless heredity is merely a phantasy, there should have been fibre which would quicken at the sight, the atmosphere, the memories, of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood received its first independent impressions.

The first of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue-books, yellow-books, white-books and rouse the wonder of the world, was taken up with light-hearted preparation for the journey. What was it but just a rush through Germany to get over as quickly as possible?

It is the part of the earth’s solid surface of which I know the least. In my life I had been across it only twice. I may well say of it, “Vidi tantum,” and that very little I saw through the window of a railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys were more like pilgrimages when one hurries on towards the goal without looking to the right or left for the satisfaction of deeper need than curiosity. In this last instance, too, I was so uncurious that I would have liked to fall asleep on the shores of England and open my eyes only, if it were possible, on the other side of the Silesian frontier.

Yet in truth, as many others have done, I had “sensed it,” that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that raceplanted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or mere niggers, and with a feeling of superiority freeing their hands of all moral bonds and anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the “perfect man’s burden.” Meantime in a clearing of the Teutonic forest their sages were rearing a Tree of cynical wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may be seen lying now over the prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that they laboured open enough, watering it from the most authentic sources of all evil, and watching with bespectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. The sincerest words of peace, words of menace, and I verily believe, words of abasement even, if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them, would have been wasted on their ecstasy. For when a fruit ripens on a branch, it must fall. There is nothing on earth that can prevent it.

For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels should begin in an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea. We should proceed from Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being thirty-six times longer than the usual Dover-Calais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey, which for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but always retreating, elusive, like an enticing mirage.

And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were excited. It’s no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. The day of departure had come, the very hour had struck. The luggage was coming downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland then, if erased from the map, yet existed in reality; it was not a mere “pays du rêve,” where you can travel only in imagination. For no man, they argued, not even father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of thenovelist’s art of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a voyage “au pays du rêve.”

As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the parched fields. A pearly blurr settled over them; a light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies. All unconscious of going towards the very scenes of war, I carried off in my eye this tiny fragment of Great Britain: a few fields, a wooded rise, a clump of trees or two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a woman is conquered—by love, which is a sort of surrender.

Those were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And I am certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The forms and the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not their conquest—which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the more precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness, rather than possessed by you. Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more and more plainly that what I had started on was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent, but to him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and continuity of his life—so that at times it presented itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals—still more dreadful.

I confess here my thoughts so exclusively personal to explain why there was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war. I don’t mean to say I ignored the possibility. I simply did not think of it. And it made no difference; for, if I had thought of it, it could only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual certitude—obviously unattainable by the man in the street—could have stayed me on that journey which now that I had started on it seemed an irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.

London—the London of before the war, flaunting its enormous glare as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky—received us with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet, asphalted streets lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark like empty palaces above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway.

Everything in the subdued incomplete night life around the Mansion House went on normally, with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable night life of millions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous line of taxicabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets pouring in the passengers, and dipping them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace. It was the hour of the boat trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places. The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands, there were no signs of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of my existence. For this was the station at which, thirty-six years ago, I arrived on my first visit to London. Not the same building, but the same spot. At eighteen years of age, after a period of probation and training I hadimposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft—my first long railway journey in England—to “sign on” for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have been more lonely. I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets. I cannot say I was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one’s feelings are simple. I was elated. I was pursuing a clear aim. I was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge. Both these aims were to be attained by the same effort. How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for the first time.

From that point of view—youth and a straightforward scheme of conduct—it was certainly a year of grace. All the help I had to get in touch with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than the palm of my hand—in which I held it—torn out of a larger plan of London for the greater facility of reference. It had been the object of careful study for some days past. The fact that I could take a conveyance at the station had never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the street and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand cabs. A strange absence of mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one’s life by means of a hired carriage? Yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding. And indeed I was to make an Australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom.

Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of an obscure agent, was in my pocket. And I needed not to take it out.That address was as if graven deep in my brain. I muttered its words to myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart concealed in the palm of my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from any one. Youth is the time of rash pledges. Had I taken a wrong turn I would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge I might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel district, as had happened to lonely travellers lost in the bush. But I walked on to my destination without hesitation or mistake, showing there, for the first time, something of that faculty to absorb and make my own correctly the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground. And the place I was bound to was not so easy to find, either. It was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost amongst the thick growth of houses, like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway, as if by a secret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder-city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy which the great Master knew so well how to bring out by magic of his great and understanding love. And the office I entered was Dickensian too. The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a big nose, thick lips, and broad shoulders. His longish white hair and the general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the “barocco” style of Italian art. Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton chop, which had been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner.

Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his barocco apostle’s head with an expression of inquiry.

I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech; for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.—“Oh it’s you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”

I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can’t remember a single word of that letter now. It was my very first composition in the English language. And he had understood it; because he spoke to the point at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers. But he gathered that this was not my object. I did not desire to be apprenticed. Was that the case?

It was. He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a gentleman too. But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able Seaman if possible. Is that it?”

It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could not help me much in this. There was an Act of Parliament which made it penal to procure ships for sailors. “An Act—of—Parliament. A law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.

I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However, the barocco apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen. And in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin. For this Act of Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the mid-Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me. For many years it had regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling. It isn’t such abad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four corners of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to say that its severities have never been applied to me.

In the year 1878, the year of Peace with Honour, I had walked as lone as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the year of the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendship secured. It was like the closing of a thirty-six years’ cycle.

All unaware of the War Angel already waiting with the trumpet at its lips the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.

I felt, too, that this journey so suddenly entered upon was bound to take me away from daily life’s actualities at every step. I felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship’s passengers. That sea was to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name. It had been for a time the schoolroom of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was that fine, narrow-waters academy of seamanship from which I launched myself on the wide oceans. My teachers had been the coasting sailors of the Norfolk shore. Coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice. Men of very few words, which, at least, were never bare of meaning. Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all as far as I can remember.

That is what years ago the North Sea, I could hear growling in the dark all round the ship, had been for me. And I fancied that I must have been carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be morefamiliar than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile of affectionate recognition.

I could not guess that before many days my schoolroom would be desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding under the waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in drifters under the naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.

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