Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenOf stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,Have forfeited their ancient English dowerOf inward happiness. We are selfish men.Wordsworth.
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenOf stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,Have forfeited their ancient English dowerOf inward happiness. We are selfish men.
Wordsworth.
Inthe afternoon of Black Saturday, General von Füchter, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in England, took up his quarters, with his staff, in the residence of the German Ambassador to the Court of St. James in Carlton House Terrace, and, so men said, enjoyed the first sleep he had had for a week. (The German Ambassador had handed in his credentials, and been escorted out of England on the previous Monday.)
Throughout the small hours of Saturday morning I was at work near Romford as one of the volunteer bearers attached to Constance Grey's nursing corps. That is one reason why the memory of the north of London massacre will never leave me. One may assume that the German Army had no wish to kill nurses, but, as evidence of the terrible character of the onslaught on the poor defences of London, I may recall the fact that three of our portable nursingshelters were blown to pieces; while of Constance Grey's nurses alone five were killed and fourteen were badly wounded.
Myself, I had much to be thankful for, my only wound being the ploughing of a little furrow over the biceps of my right arm by a bullet that passed out through the back of my coat. But a circumstance for which my gratitude was more deeply moved was the fact that Constance Grey, despite a number of wonderfully narrow escapes, was entirely uninjured.
The actual entry of General von Füchter and his troops into London has been so often described that nothing remains for me to say about that. Also, I am unable to speak as an eye witness, since Constance Grey and myself were among those who returned to London, in the rear of the German troops, with the ambulances. The enemy's line of communications stretched now from the Wash to London, and between Brentwood and London there were more Germans than English. I believe the actual number of troops which entered London behind General von Füchter was under forty-eight thousand; but to the northward, northeast, and northwest the huge force which really invested the capital was spread in careful formation, and amply provided with heavy artillery, then trained upon central London from all such points as the Hampstead heights.
Although a formal note of surrender had been conveyed to General von Füchter at Romford,afterthe annihilation of our entrenched troops, occasional shots were fired upon the enemy as they entered London.Indeed, in the Whitechapel Road, one of the General's aides-de-camp, riding within a few yards of his chief, was killed by a shot from the upper windows of a provision shop. But the German reprisals were sharp. It is said that fifty-seven lives paid the penalty for the shooting of that aide-de-camp. Several streets of houses in northeast London were burned.
By this time the Lord Mayor of London had been notified that serious results would accrue if any further opposition were offered to the German acceptance of London's surrender; and proclamations to that effect were posted everywhere. But the great bulk of London's inhabitants were completely cowed by hunger and terror. Practically, it may be said that, throughout, the only resistance offered to the Army of the invaders was that which ended so tragically in the trenches beyond Epping and Romford, with the equally tragical defence of Colchester, and some of the northern towns captured by the eighth German Army Corps.
In London the people's demand from the first had been for unconditional surrender. It was this demand which had culminated in the Westminster Riot. The populace was so entirely undisciplined, so completely lacking in the sort of training which makes for self-restraint, that even if the Government had been possessed of an efficient striking force for defensive purposes, the public would not have permitted its proper utilization. The roar of German artillery during Friday night and Saturday morning, with the news of the awful massacre in the northern entrenchments,had combined to extinguish the last vestige of desire for resistance which remained in London.
Almost all the people with money had left the capital. Those remaining—the poor, the refugees from northward, irresponsibles, people without a stake of any kind; these desired but the one thing: food and safety. The German Commander-in-Chief was wise. He knew that if time had been allowed, resistance would have been organized, even though the British regular Army had, by continuous reductions in the name of "economy," practically ceased to exist as a striking force. And therefore time was the one thing he had been most determined to deny England.
It is said that fatigue killed more German soldiers than fell to British bullets; and the fact may well be believed when we consider the herculean task General von Füchter had accomplished in one week. His plan of campaign was to strike his hardest, and to keep on striking his hardest, without pause, till he had the British Government on its knees before him; till he had the British public—maddened by sudden fear, and the panic which blows of this sort must bring to a people with no defensive organization, and no disciplinary training—cowed and crying for quarter.
The German Commander has been called inhuman, a monster, a creature without bowels. All that is really of small importance. He was a soldier who carried out orders. His orders were ruthless orders. The instrument he used was a very perfect one. He carried out his orders with the utmost precision and thoroughness; and his method was the surest, quickest,and, perhaps, the only way of taking possession of England.
At noon precisely, the Lord Mayor of London was brought before the German Commander-in-Chief in the audience chamber of the Mansion House, and formally placed under arrest. A triple cordon of sentries and two machine-gun parties were placed in charge of the Bank of England, and quarters were allotted for two German regiments in the immediate vicinity. Two machine-guns were brought into position in front of the Stock Exchange, and all avenues leading from the heart of the City were occupied by mixed details of cavalry and infantry, each party having one machine-gun.
My acquaintance, Wardle, of theSunday News, was in the audience chamber of the Mansion House at this time, and he says that he never saw a man look more exhausted than General von Füchter, who, according to report, had not had an hour's sleep during the week. But though the General's cheeks were sunken, his chin unshaven, and his eyes blood-red, his demeanour was that of an iron man—stern, brusque, taciturn, erect, and singularly immobile.
Food was served to this man of blood and iron in the Mansion House, while the Lord Mayor's secretary proceeded to Whitehall, with word to the effect that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in England awaited the sword and formal surrender of the British Commander, before proceeding to take up quarters in which he would deal with peace negotiations.
Forster's great work, "The Surrender," gives thefinest description we have of the scene that followed. The Field Marshal in command of the British forces had that morning been sent for by a Cabinet Council then being held in the Prime Minister's room at the House of Commons. With nine members of his staff, the white-haired Field Marshal rode slowly into the City, in full uniform. His instructions were for unconditional surrender, and a request for the immediate consideration of the details of peace negotiations.
The Field Marshal had once been the most popular idol of the British people, whom he had served nobly in a hundred fights. Of late years he himself had been as completely disregarded, as the grave warnings, the earnest appeals, which he had bravely continued to urge upon a neglectful people. The very Government which now despatched him upon the hardest task of his whole career, the tendering of his sword to his country's enemy, had for long treated him with cold disfavour. The general public, in its anti-national madness, had sneered at this great little man, their one-time hero, as a Jingo crank.
(As an instance of the lengths to which the public madness went in this matter, the curious will find in the British Museum copies of at least one farcical work of fiction written and published with considerable success, as burlesques of that very invasion which had now occurred, of the possibility of which this loyal servant in particular had so earnestly and so unavailingly warned his countrymen.)
Now, the blow he had so often foreshadowed had fallen; the capital of the British Empire was actuallyin possession of an enemy; and the British leader knew himself for a Commander without an Army.
He had long since given his only son to the cause of Britain's defence. The whole of his own strenuous life had been devoted to the same cause. His declining years had known no ease by reason of his unceasing and thankless striving to awaken his fellow countrymen to a sense of their military responsibilities. Now he felt that the end of all things had come for him, in the carrying out of an order which snapped his life's work in two, and flung it down at the feet of England's almost unopposed conqueror.
The understanding Englishman has forgiven General von Füchter much, by virtue of his treatment of the noble old soldier, who with tear-blinded eyes and twitching lips tendered him the surrender of the almost non-existent British Army. No man ever heard a speech from General von Füchter, but the remark with which he returned our Field Marshal's sword to him will never be forgotten in England. He said, in rather laboured English, with a stiff, low bow:
"Keep it, my lord. If your countrymen had not forgotten how to recognize a great soldier, I could never have demanded it of you."
And the man of iron saluted the heart-broken Chief of the shattered British Army.
We prefer not to believe the report that this, the German Commander's one act of gentleness and magnanimity in England, was subsequently paid for by the loss of a certain Imperial decoration. But, if the story was true, then the decoration it concerned was well lost.
It was a grim, war-stained procession that followed General von Füchter when, between two and three o'clock, he rode with his staff by way of Ludgate Hill and the Strand to Carlton House Terrace. But the cavalry rode with drawn sabres, the infantry marched with fixed bayonets, and, though weariness showed in every line of the men's faces, there was as yet no sign of relaxed tension.
Throughout that evening and night the baggage wagons rumbled through London, without cessation, to the two main western encampments in Hyde Park. The whole of Pall Mall and Park Lane were occupied by German officers that night, few of the usual occupants of the clubs in the one thoroughfare, or the residences in the other, being then in London.
By four o'clock General von Füchter's terms were in the hands of the Government which had now completed its earning of the title of "The Destroyers." The Chief Commissioner of Police and the principal municipal authorities of greater London had all been examined during the day at the House of Commons, and were unanimous in their verdict that any delay in the arrangement of peace and the resumption of trade, ashore and afloat, could mean only revolution. Whole streets of shops had been sacked and looted already by hungry mobs, who gave no thought to the invasion or to any other matter than the question of food supply. A great, lowering crowd of hungry men and women occupied Westminster Bridge and the southern embankment (no German soldiers had been seen south of the Thames) waiting for the news of the promised conclusion of peace terms.
There is not wanting evidence that certain members of the Government had already bitterly repented of their suicidal retrenchment and anti-defensive attitude in the past. But repentance had come too late. The Government stood between a hungry, terrified populace demanding peace and food, and a mighty and victorious army whose commander, acting upon the orders of his Government, offered peace at a terrible price, or the absolute destruction of London. For General von Füchter's brief memorandum of terms alluded threateningly to the fact that his heavy artillery was so placed that he could blow the House of Commons into the river in an hour.
At six o'clock the German terms were accepted, a provisional declaration of peace was signed, and public proclamations to that effect, embodying reference to the deadly perils which would be incurred by those taking part in any kind of street disorder, were issued to the public. As to the nature of the German terms, it must be admitted that they were as pitiless as the German tactics throughout the invasion, and as surely designed to accomplish their end and object. Berlin had not forgotten the wonderful recuperative powers which enabled France to rise so swiftly from out of the ashes of 1870. Britain was to be far more effectually crippled.
The money indemnity demanded by General von Füchter was the largest ever known: one thousand million pounds sterling. But it must be remembered that the enemy already held the Bank of England. One hundred millions, or securities representing that amount, were to be handed over within twenty-fourhours. The remaining nine hundred millions were to be paid in nine annual instalments of one hundred millions each, the first of which must be paid within three months. Until the last payment was made, German troops were to occupy Glasgow, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Devonport, Chatham, Yarmouth, Harwich, Hull, and Newcastle. The Transvaal was to be ceded to the Boers under a German Protectorate. Britain was to withdraw all pretensions regarding Egypt and Morocco, and to cede to Germany, Gibraltar, Malta, Ceylon, and British West Africa.
It is not necessary for me to quote the few further details of the most exacting demands a victor ever made upon a defeated enemy. There can be no doubt that, in the disastrous circumstances they had been so largely instrumental in bringing about, "The Destroyers" had no choice, no alternative from their acceptance of these crushing terms.
And thus it was that—not at the end of a long and hard-fought war, as the result of vast misfortunes or overwhelming valour on the enemy's side, but simply as the result of the condition of utter and lamentable defencelessness into which a truckling Government and an undisciplined, blindly selfish people had allowed England to lapse—the greatest, wealthiest Power in civilization was brought to its knees in the incredibly short space of one week, by the sudden but scientifically devised onslaught of a single ambitious nation, ruled by a monarch whose lack of scruples was more than balanced by his strength of purpose.
Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed,And feeds the green earth with its swift decay,Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.Lowell.
Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed,And feeds the green earth with its swift decay,Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.
Lowell.
General von Füchterand his splendidly trained troops were not the only people in England for whom the mere fatigue of that week was something not easily to be forgotten. My impression of its last three days is that they brought no period of rest for any one. I know that there were as many people in the streets by night as by day. The act of going within doors or sitting down, seemed in some way to be a kind of cowardice, a species of shirking, or disloyalty.
I remember Constance Grey assuring me that she had lain down for an hour on Thursday. I can say with certainty that we were both of us on our feet from that time until after the terms of the surrender were made known on Saturday evening. I can also say that no thought of this matter of physical weariness occurred to me until that period of Saturday evening—soon after seven o'clock it was—when the proclamations were posted up in Whitehall, and the special issues of the newspapers containing the peace announcements began to be hawked.
An issue of theStandard, a single sheet, with broad black borders, was the first press announcement to reach the public; and it contained a grave, closely reasoned address from the most famous statesman of the Opposition, urging upon the public the need vital of exercising the utmost cautiousness and self-restraint.
"England has been stricken to the earth," said this dignified statement. "Her condition is critical. If the injury sustained is not to prove mortal, the utmost circumspection is required at this moment. The immediate duty of every loyal subject is quietly to concentrate his energies for the time upon the restoration of normal conditions. In that way only can our suffering country be given that breathing space which is the first step toward recuperation. For my part, I can conceive of no better, quicker method for the individual of serving this end than for him to make the speediest possible return to the pursuit of his ordinary avocation in life. It is to be hoped that, bearing in mind our urgent need, all employers of labour will do their utmost to provide immediate occupation for their work-people. It is not in the tragic catastrophe of the past week, but in the ordeal of this moment, of the coming days, that the real test of England's endurance lies. Never before was her need so great; never before has Nelson's demand had so real and intimate a message for each and every one of us. I pray God the response may ring true. 'England expects that every man will do his duty!'"
I must not omit my tribute to those responsible forthe salient fact that this important issue of the journal whose unwavering Imperialism had been scoffed at in the mad times before the Invasion, was not sold, but distributed. Employment was found for hundreds of hungry men, women, and children in its free distribution; their wage being the thing they most desired: bread, with soup, which, as I learned that night, was prepared in huge coppers in the foundry of the printing works.
I was with Constance Grey in Trafalgar Square when the news of the accepted terms of peace reached us. We had just secured admission into Charing Cross Hospital—not without considerable difficulty, for its wards were crowded—for two wounded nurses from Epping. Together we read the news, and when the end was reached it seemed to me that the light of life and energy passed suddenly out of my companion. She seemed to suffer some bodily change and loss, to be bereft of her spring and erectness.
"Ah, well," she said, "I am very tired, Dick; and, do you know, it occurs to me I have had nothing to eat since yesterday afternoon. I wonder can we get away from these men, anywhere?"
The streets between Victoria and Hyde Park were lined by German cavalry men, who sat motionless on their chargers, erect and soldierly, but, in many cases, fast asleep.
We began to walk eastward, looking for some place in which we could rest and eat. But every place seemed to be closed.
"How long have you been on your feet?" said Constance, as we passed the Law Courts.
"Only since Thursday evening," I said. "I had a long rest in that cart, you remember—the one I brought the lint and bandages in."
Just then we passed a tailor's shop-window, and, in a long, narrow strip of mirror I caught a full-length reflection of myself. I positively turned swiftly to see who could have cast that reflection. Four days without shaving and without a change of collar; two days without even washing my hands or face; four days without undressing, and eight hours' work beside the North London entrenchments—these experiences had made a wild-looking savage of me, and, until that moment, I had never thought of my appearance.
Smoke, earth, and blood had worked their will upon me. My left hand, from which two fingers were missing, was swathed in blackened bandages. My right coat-sleeve had been cut off by a good-natured fellow who had bandaged the flesh wound in my arm to stop its bleeding. My eyes glinted dully in a black face, with curious white fringes round them, where their moisture had penetrated my skin of smoked dirt. And here was I walking beside Constance Grey!
Then I realized, for the first time, that Constance herself bore many traces of these last few terrible days. In some mysterious fashion her face and collar seemed to have escaped scot free; but her dress was torn, ragged, and stained; and the intense weariness of her expression was something I found it hard to bear.
"I was on My Knees and Kissing the Nerveless Hand"
Just then we met Wardle of theSunday News, and he told us of the bread and soup distribution in theStandardoffice. Something warned me that Constance had reached the limit of her endurance, and, in another moment, she had reeled against me and almost fallen. I took her in my arms, and Wardle walked beside me, up a flight of stairs and into the office of the great newspaper. There I walked into the first room I saw—the sanctum of some managerial bashaw, for aught I knew—and placed Constance comfortably in a huge easy chair of green leather.
Wardle brought some water, for Constance was in a fainting state still; but I hurried him off again to look for bread and soup. Meantime I lowered Constance to the floor, having just remembered that in such a case the head should be kept low. Her face was positively deathly—lips, cheeks, all alike gray-white, save for the purple hollows under both eyes. One moment I was taking stock of these things, as a doctor might; the next I was on my knees and kissing the nerveless hand at her side, all worn and bruised and stained as it was from her ceaseless strivings of the past week. I knew then that, for me, though I should live a hundred years and Constance should never deign to speak to me again, there was but one woman in the world.
I am afraid Wardle found me at the same employ; but, though I remember vaguely resenting his fresh linen and normally smart appearance, he was a good fellow, and knew when to seem blind. All he said was:
"Here's the soup!"
He had brought a small wash-hand basin full to the brim, and a loaf of warm, new bread. As the steam of the hot soup reached me, I realized that I was a very hungry animal, whatever else I might be besides. It may have been the steam of the soup that rallied Constance. I know that within two minutes I was feeding her with it from a cracked teacup. It is a wonderful thing to watch the effect of a few mouthfuls of hot soup upon an exhausted woman, whose exhaustion is due as much to lack of food as need of rest. There was no spoon, but the teacup, though cracked, was clean, and I found a tumbler in a luxurious little cabinet near the chair one felt was dedicated to the Fleet Street magnate whose room we had invaded. A tumbler is almost as convenient to drink soup from as a cup, but requires more careful manipulation when hot. If the side of the tumbler becomes soupy, it can easily be wiped with the crumb of new bread.
Wardle seemed to be as sufficiently nourished as he was neatly dressed; but he found a certain vicarious pleasure, I think, in watching Constance and myself at the bowl. We sat on the Turkey carpet, and used the seat of the green chair as a table—a strange meal, in strange surroundings; but a better I never had, before or since. There was a physical gratification, a warmth and a comfort to me, in watching the colour flowing gradually back into Constance's face; a singularly beautiful process of nature I thought it. Presently the door of the room opened with a jerk, and a tallish man wearing a silk hat looked in.
"H'm!" he said brusquely. "Beg pardon!"And he was gone. I learned afterwards that the room belonged to him, and that he came direct from a conference of newspaper pundits called together at Westminster by the Home Secretary. I do not know where he took refuge, but as for us we went on with our soup and bread till repletion overtook us, as it quickly does after long fasts, and renewed strength brought sighs of contentment.
"Wardle," I remember saying to my journalistic friend, with absurd earnestness, "have you anything to smoke?"
"I haven't a thing but my pipe," he said. "But wait a moment! There used to be—yes. Look here!"
There was a drawer in a side-table near the great writing-table, and one division of it was half-full of cigarettes, the other of Upman's "Torpedoes."
"I will repay thee," I murmured irreverently, as I helped myself to one of each, and lit the cigarette, having obtained permission from Constance. It was the first tobacco I had tasted for forty-eight hours, and I was a very regular smoker. I had not known my need till then, a fact which will tell much to smokers.
"And now?" said Constance. Her eyelids were drooping heavily.
"Now I am going to take you straight out to South Kensington, and you are going to rest."
I had never used quite that tone to Constance before. I think, till now, hers had been the guiding and directing part. Yet her influence had never been stronger upon me than at that moment.
"Well, of course, there are no cabs or omnibuses," said Wardle, "but a man told me the Underground was running trains at six o'clock."
We had a long, long wait at Blackfriars' station, but a train came eventually, and we reached the flat in South Kensington as a neighbouring church clock struck ten. The journey was curious and impressive from first to last. Fleet Street had been very much alive still when we left it; and we saw long files of baggage wagons rumbling along between Prussian lancers. But Blackfriars was deserted, the ticket collector slept soundly on his box; the streets in South Kensington were silent as the grave.
London slept that night for the first time in a week. I learned afterwards how the long lines of German sentries in Pall Mall, Park Lane, and elsewhere slept solidly at their posts; how the Metropolitan police slept on their beats; how thousands of men, women, and children slept in the streets of South London, whither they had fled panic-stricken that morning. Conquerors and conquered together, the whole vast city slept that night as never perhaps before or since. After a week of terror, of effort, of despair, and of debauchery, the sorely stricken capital of the British Empire lay that night like a city of the dead. England and her invaders were worn out.
At the flat we found Mrs. Van Homrey placidly knitting.
"Well, young folk," she said cheerily; "I've had all the news, and there's nothing to be said; and—there's bath and bed waiting for you, Conny. I shall bring you something hot in your room."
Ah, the kindly comfort of that motherly soul's words! It was but a few hours since her "Conny" had stood by my side on ground that was literally blood-soaked. Since the previous night we had both seen Death in his most terrible guise; Death swinging his dripping scythe through scores of lives at a stroke. We had been in England's riven heart throughout the day of England's bitterest humiliation; and Mrs. Van Homrey had bed and bath waiting, with "something hot" for Constance to take in her room.
"But, Aunty, if you could have seen——"
"Dear child, I know it all." She patted her niece's shoulder, and I noticed the rings and the shiny softness of her fingers. She saw at a glance—indeed, had seen beforehand, in anticipation—the wrought-up, exhausted condition Constance had reached. "I know it all, dear," she said soothingly. "But the time has come for rest now. Nothing else is any good till that is done with. Come, child. God will send better days for England. First, we must rest."
So Constance turned to leave the room.
"And you?" she said to me.
"I will see to him. You run along, my dear," said her aunt. So Constance took my hand.
"Good night, Dick. You have been very good and kind, and—patient. Good night!"
There was no spare bedroom in that little flat, but the dear old lady had actually made up a bed for me on a couch in the drawing-room, and before she retired for the night she made me free of the bathroom,and supplied me with towels and such like matters, and gave me cake and cocoa; a delicious repast I thought it. And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past forty-eight hours.
England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh, Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's heel—that ancient England slept.
Exoriare aliquis de nostris ex ossibus ultor.—Virgil.
The river glideth at his own sweet will.Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;And all that mighty heart is lying still!
The river glideth at his own sweet will.Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Without Thee, what is all the morning's wealth?Come, blessed barrier between day and day,Dear Mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!Wordsworth.
Without Thee, what is all the morning's wealth?Come, blessed barrier between day and day,Dear Mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
Wordsworth.
Itis safe to say that England's exhausted sleep on the night of Black Saturday marked the end of an era in British history. It was followed by a curious, quiescent half-consciousness during Sunday. For the greater part of that day I should suppose that more than half London's populace continued its sleep.
One of the first things I realized after Monday morning's awakening in my Bloomsbury lodging was that I must find wages and work speedily, since I possessed no more than a very few pounds. As a fact, upon that and several subsequent days I found plenty of work, if nothing noticeable in the way of wages. I was second in command of one of the food and labour bureaux which Constance Grey helped to organize, and all the workers in these bureaux were volunteers.
Another of my first impressions after the crisis was a sense of my actual remoteness, in normal circumstances, from Constance. Her father had left Constance a quite sufficient income. Mrs. Van Homrey was in her own right comfortably well-to-do. But, despite the exiguous nature of my own resources, it was not the money question which impressed me most in this connection, but rather the fact that, while my only acquaintances in London were of a more or less discreditable sort, Constance seemed to have friends everywhere, and these in almost every case people of standing and importance. Her army friends were apt to be generals, her political friends ex-Ministers, her journalistic friends editors, and so forth. And I—— But you have seen my record up to this point.
Nobody could possibly want Constance so much as I did, I thought. But an astonishing number of persons of infinitely more consequence than myself seemed to delight to honour her, to obtain her coöperation. And I loved her. There was no possibility of my mistaking the fact. I had been used to debate with myself regarding Sylvia Wheeler. There was no room for debate where my feeling for Constance was concerned. The hour of her breakdown in Fleet Street on Black Saturday had taught me so much.
In the face of my circumstances just then, the idea of making any definite disclosure of my feelings to Constance seemed impracticable. Yet there was one intimate passage between us during that week, the nature of which I cannot precisely define. I know I conveyed some hint to Constance of my feeling towardher, and I was made vaguely conscious that anything like a declaration of love would have seemed shocking to her at that time. She held that, at such a juncture, no merely personal interests ought to be allowed to weigh greatly with any one. The country's call upon its subjects was all-absorbing in the eyes of this "one little bit of a girl from South Africa," as Crondall had called her. It made me feel ashamed to realize how far short I fell (even after the shared experiences culminating in Black Saturday) of her personal standard of patriotism. Even now, my standing in her eyes, my immediate personal needs, loomed nearer, larger in my mind than England's fate. I admitted as much with some shamefacedness, and Constance said:
"Ah, well, Dick, I suspect that is a natural part of life lived entirely in England, the England of the past. There was so little to arouse the other part in one. All the surrounding influences were against it. My life has been different. Once one has lived, in one's own home, through a native rising, for instance, purely personal interests never again seem quite so absorbing. The elemental things had been so long shut out of English life. Why, do you know——?" And she began to tell me of one of the schemes in which she was interested; in connection with which I learned of a cable message she had received that day telling that John Crondall was then on his way to England.
The least forgiving critics of "The Destroyers" have admitted that they did their best and worked well during those strange weeks which came immediatelyafter the invasion. One reason of this was that party feeling in politics had been scotched. The House of Commons met as one party. There was no longer any real Opposition, unless one counted a small section of rabid anti-Britishers, who were incapable of learning a lesson; and even they carped but feebly, while the rest of the House devoted its united energies to the conduct of the country's shattered business with the single aim of restoring normal conditions. Throughout the country two things were tacitly admitted. That the Government in power must presently answer for its doings to the public before ceasing to be a Government; and that the present was no time for such business as that of a general election.
And so we had the spectacle of a Government which had entirely lost the confidence of the electors, a Government anathematized from the Orkneys to Land's End, carrying on its work with a unison and a complete freedom from opposition such as had not been known before, even by the biggest majority or the most popular Administration which had ever sat at Westminster. For the first time, and by no effort of our own, we obtained the rule of an Imperial Parliament devoted to no other end than the nation's welfare. The House of Commons witnessed many novel spectacles at that time—such as consultations between the leading members of the Government and the Opposition. Most of its members learned many valuable lessons in those first weeks of the new régime. It is to be supposed that the Surrender Riot had taught them something.
It must also be admitted that General, or, as henow was, General Baron von Füchter, accomplished some fine work during this same period. It has been said that he was but consulting the safety of his Imperial master's armed forces; but credit may safely be given the General for the discretion and despatch he used in distributing the huge body of troops at his command, without hitch or friction, to the various centres which it was his plan to occupy. His was a hand of iron, but he used it to good purpose; and the few errors of his own men were punished with an even more crushing severity than he showed where British offences were concerned.
The task of garrisoning those English ports with German soldiers was no light or easy one; no task for a light or gentle hand. In carrying out this undertaking a very little weakness, a very small display of indecision, might easily have meant an appalling amount of bloodshed. As it was, the whole business was completed in a wonderfully short while, and with remarkable smoothness. The judicial and municipal administration of these centres was to remain English; but supreme authority was vested in the officer commanding the German forces in each place, and the heads of such departments as the postal and the police, were German. No kind of public gathering or demonstration was permissible in these towns, unless under the auspices of the German officer in command, who in each case was given the rank of Governor of the town.
We had learned by this time that the Channel Fleet had not been entirely swept away. But a portion of it was destroyed, and the remaining ships hadbeen entrapped. It was strategy which had kept British ships from our coasts during the fatal week of the invasion. "The Destroyers" were responsible for our weak-kneed concessions to Berlin some years earlier, in the matter of wireless telegraphy. In the face of urgent recommendations to the contrary from experts, the Government had yielded to German pressure in the matter of making our own system interchangeable, and had even boasted of their diplomacy in thus ingratiating themselves with Germany. As a consequence, the enemy had been able to convey messages purporting to come from the British Admiralty and ordering British commanders to keep out of home waters.
That these messages should have been conveyed in secret code form was a mystery which subsequent investigations failed to solve. Some one had played traitor. But the history of the invasion has shown us that we had very many traitors among us in those days; and there came a time when the British public showed clearly that it was weary of Commissions of Inquiry. Where so many, if not indeed all of us, were at fault, where the penalty was so crushing, it was felt that there were other and more appropriate openings for official energy and public interest than the mere apportioning of blame and punishment, however well deserved.
The issue of what was called the "Invasion Budget" was Parliament's first important act, after the dispersal of the German forces in England, and the termination of the Government distribution of food supplies. The alterations of customs tariff werenot particularly notable. The House had agreed that revenue was the objective to be considered, and fiscal adjustments with reference to commerce were postponed for the time. The great change was in the income-tax. The minimum income to be taxed was £100 instead of, as formerly, £160. The scale ran like this: sixpence in the pound upon incomes of between £100 and £150, ninepence from that to £200, one shilling from that to £250, one and threepence from that to £500, one and sixpence from that to £1,000, two shillings upon all incomes of between £1,000 and £5,000, and four shillings in the pound upon all incomes of over £5,000.
It was on the day following that of the Invasion Budget issue that I received a letter from my sister Lucy, in Davenham Minster, telling me of my mother's serious illness, and asking me to come to her at once. And so, after a hurried visit to the South Kensington flat to explain my absence to Constance, I turned my back upon London, for the first time in a year, and journeyed down into Dorset.
Then the progeny that springsFrom the forests of our land,Armed with thunder, clad with wings,Shall a wider world command.Regions Cæsar never knewThy posterity shall sway.
Then the progeny that springsFrom the forests of our land,Armed with thunder, clad with wings,Shall a wider world command.
Regions Cæsar never knewThy posterity shall sway.
Cowper.
Cowper.
Cowper.
Inthe afternoon of a glorious summer's day, exactly three weeks after leaving London, I stood beside the newly filled grave of my mother in the moss-grown old churchyard of Davenham Minster.
My dear mother was not one of those whose end was hastened by the shock of England's disaster. Doctor Wardle gave us little hope of her recovery from the first. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia; but I gathered that my mother had come to the end of her store of vitality, and, it may be, of desire for life. I have sometimes thought that her complete freedom from those domestic cares of housekeeping, which had seemed to be the very source and fountainhead of continuous worry for her, may actually have robbed my mother of much of her hold upon life. In these last days I had been almost continuouslybeside her, and I know that she relinquished her life without one sigh that spelt regret.
Standing there at the edge of her grave in the hoary churchyard of the Minster, I was conscious of the loss of the last tie that bound me to the shelter of youth: the cared-for, irresponsible division of a man's life. The England of my youth was no more. Now, in the death of my mother, it seemed as if I had stepped out of one generation into another. I had entered a new generation, and was alone in it.
I was to sleep at my sister's house that night, but I had no wish to go there now. Doctor Wardle's forced gravity, his cheerful condolences, rather worried me. So it happened that I set out to walk from the churchyard, and presently found myself upon the winding upland road that led out of the rich Davenham valley, over the Ridgeway, and into the hilly Tarn Regis country, where I was born.
I drank a mug of cider in the quaint little beerhouse kept by Gammer Joy in Tarn Regis, and read again the doggerel her grandfather had painted on its sign-board, in which the traveller was advised of the various uses of liquor, taken in moderation, and the evil effects of its abuse. Taken wisely, I remember, it was suggested that liquor proved the best of lubricants for the wheels of life. Mrs. Joy looked just as old and just as active and rosy as she had always looked for so long as I could remember; and she hospitably insisted upon my eating a large slab of her dough cake with my cider—a very excellent comestible it was.
The old dame's mood was cheerfully pessimistic—thatis to say, she was garrulous, and spoke cheerily of generally downward tendencies. Thus, the new rector, by her way of it, was of a decadent modern type, full of newfangled "Papish" notions as to church vestments and early services, and neglectful of traditional responsibilities connected with soup and coal and medical comforts. Cider was no longer what it used to be, I gathered, since the big brewers took it in hand, and spoiled the trade of those who had hand-presses. As for farming, Gammer Joy held that it was not near so good a trade for master or man with land at fifteen shillings the acre, as much of it was thereabouts, as it had been with rents up to two or three pounds, and food twice as dear as now.
"But there, Master Dick," said the old lady; "I suppose we be all Germans now—so they do tell me, however; an' if we be no better nor furriners here in Darset, why I doan't know as't matters gertly wha' cwomes to us at all. But I will say things wor different in your feyther's time, Master Dick—that they was. Ah doan't believe he'd ha' put up wi' this German business for a minute, that ah doan't."
I gathered that the new rector was an earnest young man and a hard worker; but, evidently, those of Gammer Joy's generation preferred my father's aloofness in conjunction with his regular material dispensations, and his habit of leaving folk severely to themselves, so far as their thoughts and feelings were concerned.
The cottagers with whom I talked that summer's evening cherished a monumental ignorance regardingthe real significance of the events which had shaken England to its very roots since I had last seen Tarn Regis. Gammer Joy's view seemed to be fairly typical. We had become German; England belonged to Germany; the Radicals had sold us to the Kaiser—and so forth. But no German soldiers had been seen in Dorset. The whole thing was shadowy, academic, a political business; suitable enough for the discussion of Londoners, no doubt, but, after all, of small bearing upon questions of real and intimate interest, such as the harvest, the weather, and the rate of wages.
"Sims queer, too, that us should be born again like, and become Germans," said one man to me; "but ah doan't know as it meakes much odds to the loike o' we; though ah hev heerd as how Farmer Jupp be thinkin' o' gettin' shut o' his shartharn bull that won the prize to Davenham, an' doin' wi' fower men an' a b'y, in place o' sevin. Well, o' course, us has to keep movin' wi' the times, as sayin' is; an' 'tis trew them uplan' pastures o' Farmer Jupp's they do be mos' onusual poor an' leery, as you med say."
Twilight already held the land in its grave embrace when I made my way along Abbott's Lane (my father had devoted months to the task of tracing the origin of that name) and began the ascent of Barebarrow, by crossing which diagonally one reaches the Davenham turnpike from Tarn Regis, a shorter route by nearly a mile than that of the road past the mill and over the bridge. And so, presently, my feet were treading turf which had probably been turf before the Christian era. Smooth and vast against the sky-line,Barebarrow lay above me, like a mammoth at rest.
On its far side was our Tarn Regis giant, a famous figure cut in the turf, and clearly visible from the tower of Davenham Minster. Long ago, in my earliest childhood, village worthies had given me the story of this figure—how once upon a time a giant came and slew all the Tarn Regis flocks for his breakfast. Then he lay down to sleep behind Barebarrow, and while he slept the enraged shepherds and work-folk bound him with a thousand cart-ropes, and slew him with a thousand scythes and forks and other homely implements. And then, that posterity might know his fearsome bulk, they cut out the turf all round his form, and eke the outline of the club beside him, and left the figure there to commemorate their valour and the loss of their flocks. Some three hundred feet long it was, I think, with a club the length of a tall pine-tree. In any case, the Tarn Regis lad who would excel in feats of strength had but to spend the night of Midsummer's Eve in the crook of the giant's arm (as some one or two did every year), and other youths of the countryside could never stand a chance with him.
I paused on the ledge below the barrow beside a ruined shepherd's hut, and recalled the fact that here my father had unearthed sundry fragments of stone and pieces of implements which the Dorchester Museum curator had welcomed as very early British relics. They went back, I remembered, to long before the Roman period; to days possibly more remote than those of ancient Barebarrow himself. If yourefer to a good map you will find this spot surrounded by such indications of immemorial antiquity as "Tumuli," "British Village," and the like. The Roman encampment on the other side of Davenham Minster was modernity itself, I thought, compared with this ancient haunt of the neolithic forerunners of the early Briton; this resting-place of men whose doings were a half-forgotten story many centuries before the birth of Julius Cæsar.
I sat down on the grassy ledge and looked out across the lichen-covered roofs and squat, rugged church tower of Tarn Regis; and pictures rose in my mind, pictures to some extent inspired, perhaps, by scraps I had read of learned essays written by my father. He had loved this ancient ground; he had been used to finger the earth hereabouts as a man might finger his mistress's hair. I do not know what period my twilit fancy happened upon, but it was assuredly a later one than that of Barebarrow, for I saw shaggy warriors with huge pointless swords, their hilts decorated with the teeth of wild beasts—a Bronze Age vision, no doubt. I saw rude chariots of war, with murderous scythe-blades on their wheels—and, in a flash then, the figure of Boadicea: that valiant mother of our race, erect and fearless in her chariot—