A Lecture on Abyssinia
THE REV. MR. FLAD.
The Rev. Father Daniels, the Roman Catholic priest to whom I have referred, made regular visitation to the camp, and we had, furthermore, occasional ministration from a Protestant divine, the Rev. Mr. Flad. This gentleman appeared in our midst with great suddenness one morning, and there was much ado to beat up a creditable congregation for him. This ultimately being forthcoming, and at the moment when the pastor was inviting us to accompany him with a pure heart to the Throne of Heavenly Grace entered Hans with an urgent and whispered message, which turned out to be an invitation to lunch from the Grand Duchess of Baden. The summons left the good padre obviously preoccupied during the service, and necessitated a postponement of the Communion until the afternoon. This led to a suggestion that the pastor might lecture us in the evening on his experiences in Abyssinia.
The father of Mr. Flad was a missionary in Abyssinia during the reign of King Theodore. His mother, a friend of Florence Nightingale, was a deaconess in the Church. When trouble arose between the King and the British Government—through the ignoring of the former’s letter suggesting a latter-day crusade for the liberation of the Holy Land from the Turks—Flad senior and fifty-eight other Europeans were imprisoned, and many of them had to undergo the punishment of being chained to a native soldier for four and a half years.
The native soldier, it is a relief to learn, was changed every week—a transaction which one can imagine as being welcome as a change of linen!
Ultimately Flad was despatched as Ambassador from King Theodore to Queen Victoria, with whom he had two interviews at Osborne, his wife being meanwhile held as hostage for his return. “I have here your two eyes and your heart,” said King Theodore.
During these difficult and dangerous years Mrs. Flad kept a diary, which was published, but which is now out of print. With the coming of Lord Napier the prisoners were released, and King Theodore came to a tragic end by his own hand. The pastor is hopeful of some day taking up his father’s work and he passed round a book printed in Geëz, I take it, a page of which he reads every day. His father used to tell him how in the native cafés he had heard discussion as to whether the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon was ruler of Abyssinia or Arabia.
One need not be in Abyssinia to be chained to a black mood at least, if not a black man. Sitting in the court at Carlsruhe, watching the barbed wire shake and shiver like a man in an ague to the play of my foot, I have been seized with a sudden fear of the horrors from which I have emerged. This fear in retrospect, so to speak, was greater far than anything I can confess to have felt in actuality; as if one who had boldly and blindly crossed a profound abyss on a tight-rope should faint or falter, grow dizzy and fall, having reached firm ground once more; as if one had all the past still to pass through, and it were not possible that one should safely pass through it.
To me, on such an occasion, appeared my buoyant young Italian friend Cotta, who, passing an arm through mine, haled me off for a glass of the atrocious white wine of the country—or at least of the Kantine. Thereafter we walked together in the Close, Cotta giving his English an airing.
“Yes, I speak English very well, very well. Have you see the donkey?”
The little donkey, which, yoked to a little waggon, brings us on most days a load of parcels, and which has become so friendly to an alien officer that even in charge of a somewhat obdurate driver it will make a sudden detour from its course in order to shove its muzzle into my hand, was grazing in the circular grass plot in the centre of the square.
“It is the better German in the camp!” says Cotta. “Ah, I am very sad, very sad,” he proceeds. “I have no letter from my girl, and the Germans have take from me her photograph. Damn! damn!”
AN ITALIAN MAJOR OF MOUNTAIN ARTILLERY.
PLAYBILL FOR LADY GREGORY’S “THE RISING OF THE MOON”
OUR ORCHESTRA.
IV
Entertainment in Exile
Man cannot live by bread alone—nor may he, even with a supplementary basin of soup! Immediately after dinner on the Saturday evening of my arrival in Carlsruhe, a steady stream of officers set in towards the salon d’appel. Being still without chart or compass as regards the camp, I also drifted in this direction, and found that at the far end of the hall a stage was erected, and that a cosmopolitan audience was already gathered in the expectant dusk of the auditorium. A few rows of forms from the court served as dress circle and stalls; later arrivals brought their own chairs or stools from the dormitories; standing in the background, the orderlies, obviously washed of their week’s labours in the kitchen or the camp, were the gods, and from their Olympus gave occasional encouragement, or passed comment and criticism upon the performance.
On this particular evening, together with various musical and vocal efforts, there was a very capable representation by a cast of French officers, of Max Maurey’s comedy in one act, “Asile de Nuit.” Prior to the enactment, and for the benefit of those in the audience who might be innocent of French, a British officer gave out the motif in English.
As I sat contentedly in my place—the burden of the wearinesses of the last weeks fallen from my shoulders—it was borne in upon me that much of the success of a play is in the eager and receptive mood of the audience; also that in the naïve freshness of an amateur performance is a charm which has too frequently perished in the more finished production of the professional actor. At all events, in “Asile de Nuit”—the “Night Refuge”—I found indeed refuge for the night!
Monsieur the Superintendent of an—uncharitable—institution, is pompous, proud, and overbearing, particularly to his unwelcome clients. It is just on the closing hour of nine, and he is preparing to depart for the business of his favourite café, when one of these waifs blows in. Monsieur storms at the tramp for the lateness of the hour, for the ludicrousness of his name, for anything and everything, and ultimately, after passing him over to a brow-beaten assistant for the condign punishment of a bath, goes off himself for a beer.
He returns almost immediately, quite chapfallen. He has learned that the Superintendent of another “Refuge” has been dismissed for failing to entertain an angel unawares in the person of a disguised journalist. He is persuaded that the piece of ragged illiteracy which he himself is harbouring is a pen also charged and pointed for his undoing. Consequently the amazed vagrant is overwhelmed with clothing from the Superintendent’s own wardrobe, cigars from his private cabinet; he is even finally permitted to escape the last indignity of ablution!
A CARLSRUHE CONCERT PROGRAMME.
Into the service of the theatre I immediately found myself intrigued and impressed, in the somewhat composite character of scene-painter, scene-shifter, poster-artist, actor, prompter, “noises-off,” and playwright. My first essay in this latter capacity was entitled “A Chelsea Christmas Eve,” the scene being a studio, embellished with sundry artistic audacities—nudes and nocturnes, post-impressionisms and cubisms—and from the cardboard window of which was a view of the Thames, including the Tower Bridge!—there entirely for economical reasons, and not geographic.
“A CHELSEA CHRISTMAS EVE,” AS PLAYED AT CARLSRUHE LAGER
So pleasant, nevertheless, was this little make-believe interior that we rarely entered for a rehearsal without discovering and disturbing sundry reading animals who had crept into it as a quiet and congenial environment, and who frequently and regretfully suggested that it would be desirable as a permanency. During the performance the on-coming of a monstrous and realistic pie, built—not baked—in a wash-hand basin, filled with boiling water, and covered with a richly-coloured cardboard crust, was nearly provocative of an assault upon the stage by a hungry and overwrought audience!
Another dramatic effort, devised for the bringing on to the stage of my good friends—and the good friends of all the camp—Bertolotti, Calvi the pianist, and Lazarri the sweet singer, was “An Italian Vignette.” The scenery, which was painted on paper readily reversible, so that one could very literally have “a prison and a palace” on each side, I evolved from pleasant if somewhat untrustworthy recollection of a fortnight’s stay in Venice many years ago.
There is a glorious city in the sea.
The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets—and that after such sort as proved somewhat disconcerting to the two Venetians present in camp. Owing to the circumscriptions of the stage the scene was more suggestive than realistic, the gondola, instead of entering from below the Ponte dei Sospiri, swimming in a canal running parallel with the Bridge of—Sighs—but of no dimensions!
As regards dresses, it was possible to hire through “Hans,” the German orderly, one evening dress suit, one blue ditto, one odd pair of quite unmentionable “unmentionables,” and one Homburg hat. To prevent effort at escape these garments had to be returned to the authorities immediately after each performance. Nothing in anywise approximating to a garb mediæval being obtainable, each man—and “woman”—must dress the part to the best of possibilities.
Clelia (Lieut. Smith), for example, of whom I, as Marco, was supposed to be enamoured, trusted to hide his identity—particularly as disclosed by his feet—in a few yards of chintz, rather unhappily of identical pattern with the stage curtain! A cardigan jacket, frilled and ruffled with an edging of white linen torn from a frayed pocket handkerchief, made a quite presentable doublet for me. Toulon, the French orderly’s béret, turned up at the corners, and bearing red plumes, held in place by a shining tin pipe-top, served as headgear. The lid of a boric ointment box suspended from my black lanyard formed a distinguished-looking decoration of merit; the tasselled cord of a dressing-gown made an admirable sword-belt.
An Italian military mantle completed my costume. A mandolin—an instrument of torture to be dreaded above all others, but which musically was mute in the piece, and pictorially represented a guitar—was borrowed from an orderly.
In passages where “A Venetian Vignette” did not awe the audience it at least amused it. Owing to an eleventh-hour timidity on the part of two of our Italians I had to touch the light guitar and raise my voice in apparent song, while off, Lieut. Calvi, with piano muted with newspapers, and Lieut. Lazarri, with distended larynx, supplied the actualities, and this with such success that the many new-comers among the audience, knowing neither Joseph nor Lazarri, were deceived, and I received a very ill-deserved ovation for Toselli’s “Serenade.”
SCENE FROM “A VENETIAN VIGNETTE”
The Portuguese Captain Teixeira, who had wonderful imitative faculties, so that twice I have seen him hypnotize young birds to within a few inches of his hand, as a nightingale “off,” “trilled with all the passion of all the love songs that have been sung since the world began”—an interpolation made by the dramatist in his dialogue to permit of an effect so original! “Noises off” tolled the bell—the great kitchen poker—which was intended to warn the lovers of the fleet passage of the hour, just about five minutes behind time, making his thus tardy entry on the principle that nothing be lost.
Lieut. H., who had taken part in bull-fighting in Southern America, gave me the coup de grâce in his own fashion, between the shoulder blades, and, judging by the force, with a momentary forgetting of the fact that he was only in Southern Germany. With a “Mio Dio! Io sono morto!” for the sake of local colouring, I and the curtain fell almost simultaneously.
“The Secret: A Shudder in 3 Scenes,” was probably most memorable from the secret fact that it secured me a few inches of forbidden candle, which I used in surreptitious reading after “lights out” for some nights after. “The Brigand: a Musical Absurdity,” written by a versatile Roman Catholic padre, was apparently sufficiently realistic to procure me the first visit next morning from an officer in the audience who had lost his watch! Unrehearsed effects in this performance were the igniting of the cardboard brazier by the toppling over of the candle set within to illuminate it; the rolling across the stage of an empty and otherwise rather suspicious looking bottle, and the violent antipathies evidenced by “Bobby,” a French officer’s adopted fox-terrier, which I had to keep at bay with my double-barrelled cardboard blunderbuss.
A CARLSRUHE PLAY-BILL.
Emerging from the hall within a few minutes of roll-call and with our faces masked by the vigorous colourations of our brigandage “under the greenwood tree,” we discovered to our dismay that the water supply had been cut off. For days afterwards my knees had a brownness unknown to them since I discarded the Black Watch kilt.
POSTER FOR A FRENCH PLAY.
A very creditable performance was given of Bernard Shaw’s one-act play, “How He Lied to Her Husband”; Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” abridged to one act, was essayed with great earnestness. The French players gave us some very adroit performances, particularly of such comedies as Labiche’s “J’invite le Colonel.”
One day there arrived in camp Lieut. Martin, late of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, a little Irishman with a big brogue, a fund of humour and of its concomitant, good humour, and a budget of news of literary import, as that W. B. Yeats was married, and that G. B. S. had taken his place at the theatre.
It was suggested to Martin that we might stage one of the Irish plays. He had had copies of a number of these in his valise when he was captured, but, of course, these were lost. He was able ultimately, however, to write out from memory Lady Gregory’s “The Rising of the Moon,” and for my guidance he gave me a little paper model of the staging as designed originally, I imagine, by Jack Yeats. For the performance the German authorities lent us a huge beer barrel—entirely empty. The cast was an all-Irish one, Lieut.-Colonel Lord Farnham playing the part of Sergeant of the R.I.C., Lieut. Martin playing the supposed ballad-singer.
A week later, when Martin departed for another camp, he slipped into my hand a scrap of paper bearing a scrap of philosophy from “The Rising of the Moon”: “’Tis a quare world, and ’tis little any mother knows when she sees her child creepin’ on the floor what’ll happen to it, or who’ll be who in the end.”
Well, I hope that I may yet chance across the humoursome little Irishman once more before the final—setting of the sun!