CHAPTER III.
‘You know not the limit of this kingdom, still you are its queen.’
Rabindranath Tagore.
Miss O’Neill, as might be supposed, proved no easy subject for diplomatic manipulation. Long before they had made an end of their picnic-lunch, in a glen of rocks and birches and purple cushions of heather, she had effectually given Mr. Lenox to understand that she was neither to be deceived nor coerced by his tactful attempts to detach her from the other two. Years of pushing and shouldering through obstacles, in the Suffrage campaign, had so far blunted her finer sensibilities that she could smilingly hold her ground even among those who obviously wished her elsewhere: and she held it to-day, till Mark lost patience and frankly took the bull by the horns.
‘I say, Miss O’Neill, you might take pity on Lenox and honour him with your company up the glen,’ he said; and beneath his engaging tone there lurked a faint note of command. ‘He’s no fisherman, and he can’t keep himself to himself for ten minutes on end. So you see, it would be a real act of charity to remove him.’
‘Yes, Sir Mark, I can see that without spectacles,’ answered the redoubtable Harry, challenging him with her greenish-brown eyes.
‘Good business!’ Sir Mark retorted unabashed. ‘When you reach the high moor you’ll be rewarded by a view that’s worth some climbing to see. Of course, if Miss Alison would prefer to go with you⸺’
‘Miss Alison’s far too comfortable where she is, thanks!’ Bel interposed with her deliberate drawl. She had settled herself on a low rock and sat dreamily watching the river, elbows on knees, chin cradled in her hands. Without changing her attitude, she glanced up at Sir Mark and her smile seemed to link them in completest understanding. ‘If the necessity for silence becomes too overpowering I can always go to sleep. I’ll be as good as gold, Harry dear⸺’ She shifted her gaze to Miss O’Neill’s resolute, rebellious face. ‘And I think Sir Mark can be trusted not to let me fall into the river!’
The upward jerk of Harry’s head implied wholesale distrust of the species; but finding herself cornered she surrendered at discretion. ‘Well, Mr. Lenox,’ she said, ‘since it’s a case of obeying orders, we must make the best of each other. This way, I suppose?’ She strode on before him up the narrow, stony path; and Maurice, with an abortive grin at Mark, followed in her wake.
Keeping well ahead of him, she toiled on indomitably till trees were dwarfed to bushes and the primeval splendour of the high moors came suddenly into view. Before them, and upon either hand, the heather and the heavens were all. It was as if they stood upon the shore of an amethystine sea, studded with islands of granite and juniper, and shadowed only by slow-moving continents of cloud. For Maurice, with the blood of Eldred and Quita Lenox in his veins, such a vision was among the rare things that could smite him to silence. He drew a great breath and stood very still, his young, expressive face glorified, passingly, by the artist’s pure joy in colour, and the Scot’s love of the land.
Miss O’Neill, a townswoman by taste and habit, would have preferred a throng of human faces, any day, to the sublime emptiness around them. Hot, breathless, and in a ferment of anxiety, she sank gratefully on to the nearest rock and looked up at her companion; but the light on his face checked her ever-ready tongue. She liked the boy. He was more than ‘a mere he-thing,’ and that streak of the woman in him appealed strongly to the masculine strain in herself. But protracted silence irked her; and very soon anxiety goaded her into speech.
‘Mr. Lenox, how long have you known Sir Mark Forsyth? Are you acquaintances or friends?’
Maurice considered that point without removing his eyes from the heather. ‘Rather more than acquaintances, I should say, and on the way to becoming friends. I’ve known him two years on and off. But I’ve never yet been to Wynchcombe Friars, his Hampshire place. He’s crazy about it. They say you never know the real Forsyth till you’ve seen him there. I’m going there this autumn, to be converted from Futurism and Experimental Art in general! At least that’s his notion. He’s a splendid chap. Chock-full of ideas. A bit reactionary, some of them. He’s dead against what we should call industrial progress, and what he calls sacrificing the man to the machine. They’ve got a great scheme on, he and his mother and Macnair, for joining up all the scattered attempts at reviving handicrafts and guilds⸺’
‘Oh, bother their crafts and guilds!’ Miss O’Neill broke in with scant ceremony. ‘Sheer fads! Result of riches and idleness. I want to know is he the kind of man to take up a girl violently—you see how it’s been—just to pass the time?’
‘No!’ Maurice rapped out the negative with unusual vehemence. ‘As a matter of fact, I believe he intends to offer her his heart and his title and all his worldly goods before we get back to them.’
Miss O’Neill started visibly. ‘What—on a fortnight’s acquaintance?’
‘Yes. A trifle steep, isn’t it? And, for a man in his position, a wife’s a rather important item.’
‘Something more than an amiable housekeeper—is that your meaning?’ Miss O’Neill rounded on him, a flash of temper in her eyes. ‘I thought better of you, Mr. Lenox. But you’re all alike in the grain. A man in Sir Mark’s position must have a beautiful figure-head for his dinner-table: a graceful, accommodating doll, that he can hang with jewels and silks and satins. But my Bel’s no doll-woman, for all her soft manners and sweet temper. No doubt he flatters himself that, in a fortnight, he’s read her from cover to cover: and he’ll be telling her, sure as fate, that he’s the one man on earth to make her happy, and think he’s paying her the compliment of her life into the bargain!’
Good-natured Maurice began to feel that Forsyth had been a trifle inconsiderate, saddling him with a virago whom he was quite at a loss how to appease.
‘Well—compliment or no, she’s free to refuse him,’ he remarked soothingly; ‘and after all, it’s the natural thing.’
Miss O’Neill pounced on the words almost before they were out. ‘Of course it’s the natural thing for a man like Sir Mark—spoilt by his mother, one can see with half an eye—to snatch at a beautiful woman. And where does a girl’s freedom come in when a man dazzles her brain with extravagant lover’s talk? Besides—he’s rich. She’s poor. It almost amounts to bribery. I hate the whole thing. I came away for her sake, to give her a chance of knowing him better, just in case⸺But if it’s true, what you say, I shall go straight down again⸺’
She sprang up from her rock and faced about; but Lenox, smilingly, determined, stood astride across the narrow path.
‘Excuse me, Miss O’Neill, not if I can prevent it,’ he said. ‘Forsyth’s going to have his chance fair and square. Of course if you’re game for a free fight—well, come on!’
For a second she looked him up and down, a sudden flicker of humour in her eyes. ‘I tackled a policeman once. A bigger fellow than you. And he was very glad to get rid of me.’
‘I can well believe it,’ Maurice answered with becoming gravity. ‘But look here, just consider, what earthly good would you do by deferring the inevitable—say, twenty-four hours—and probably annoying Miss Alison into the bargain?’
The last shot told. Harry let out her breath in a great sigh. ‘Life’s a bewildering business,’ she mused aloud. But common sense told her he spoke truth; and she liked him none the less for backing up his friend. ‘Very well, Mr. Lenox, I give it up. You evidently have instructions from head-quarters, and I’ll stay here till you give the word. But scenery bores me stiff; so please make yourself as interesting as you know how.’
‘Right you are,’ said Maurice; and indicating her deserted rock he flung himself on the heather at her feet in such a position that her prosaic figure in its knitted coat and rough skirt should not intrude upon his vision of the landscape. Then he proceeded, in his fluent fashion, to enlarge on the subject uppermost in his mind—Sir Mark’s queer conviction that a wide-spread revival of handicrafts and guilds would go far to solve the strike problem by restoring the creative sense in labour and renewing the broken link between art and life⸺
For Sir Mark himself, at that moment, life held only one purpose, one achievement worthy of serious consideration—the linking of his own destiny with that of the girl who seemed capable of maintaining indefinitely her graceful pose of contemplation. It was a pose that revealed to admirable advantage the long lines of her figure and the beauty of her small head with its close-fitting coils of hair. Her discarded hat lay on the heather at her feet. Close to her chosen rock sprang a young birch, its supple grace a reflection of her own; its drooping plumes, stirred by the breeze, dappling her blue dress with tiny restless shadows.
Was it some day-dream that so held her, Mark wondered, or pure consideration for the trout that he had presumably come out to catch? Either way, her silence and abstraction had the effect of so intensifying his own emotion that speech seemed desecration. Besides—he had spoken already. Could there really be any need to tell her again how swiftly and strangely she had swept him from his moorings, so that life held nothing, momentarily, but his glorified vision of herself? Last night the sound of her voice, echoing his own confession, had silenced, for good, the whispers of prudence that strove to curb his impetuous spirit, counselling delay. If only that confounded Miss O’Neill had given him a chance while the glamour was on them both, the whole thing might have seemed less egregiously precipitate. Now that he had schemed for half an hour’s privacy; now that she sat there, only a few yards away, seemingly unaware of his existence, a shiver of uncertainty chilled him. A fortnight ago to-day, while he and Maurice were rambling in search of subjects, he had beheld her for the first time. For him that fortnight was an indefinable age. For her it might simply be fourteen days⸺
But this sort of havering would never do. He was a strong man, not unschooled in suffering, but little used to be thwarted in his desire. And he did not seriously expect to be thwarted now. Deliberately he laid aside his fishing tackle, and leaning on one elbow looked up at the girl, whose rock was set a little higher along the sloping bank of the stream. For a few seconds he took his fill of her, from the coronet of her hair to the seductive curves of her mouth and chin that made such tender atonement for the cool directness of her eyes.
Still she did not move; but her lips parted in a small sigh, and the spell was broken. Mark rose and planted himself before her.
‘Miss Alison,’ he began—and could get no further.
‘Well?’ she asked with that distracting lift of her lashes. ‘Is the precious tackle out of gear?’
Her coolness almost angered him and gave him sudden command of his tongue. ‘Tackle? D’you really suppose I came out here to catch trout?’
‘You said so last night. And you seemed to be making elaborate arrangements⸺’
‘So I was—to get half an hour alone with you,’ he announced bluntly, and saw the ghost of a blush creep up under her skin. He wanted simply to take her in his arms without more ado. Instead, he sat down close to the rock, plunged his hands in the heather, and leaned towards her.
‘I was trying to tell you last night. Didn’t you understand?’
‘N-no. I thought the music and—the sentiment had rather carried you away.’
‘It was you who carried me away. The music was a kind of safety-valve, that’s all.’ He leaned still nearer. ‘Bel—is there a ghost of a chance for me? Is it sheer conceit and impertinence on my part to ask—so soon?’
‘No—oh no.’ And suddenly she covered her face as if the intensity of his gaze affected her like strong sunlight.
He was silent a moment, watching her and crushing the heather in his strong fingers. Then, very gently, he laid a hand on her knee.
‘What is it? Tell me. I must know.’
At that she dropped her hands. By chance or design, one of them fell on his own and rested there. The light contact sent electric thrills up his arm.
‘That’s just it,’ she said with her slow smile. ‘You must know. But we neither of us do—yet. It’s been a wonderful fortnight. And if I haven’t travelled quite so fast or so far as you, that doesn’t mean⸺’
‘Of course it doesn’t. I’m not such a conceited ass as to suppose you could fall in love with me at sight. But now I’ve spoken—isn’t there any response?’
‘Haven’t you felt any?’ she asked lightly, and the hand that rested on his moved in a just perceptible caress.
‘For God’s sake don’t play with me!’ he broke out, half angry again. ‘I’m in deadly earnest.’
‘I know. That’s just why one of us must try to keep a cool head.’
‘Nonsense! You’re simply fencing. And you haven’t answered my question.’
‘I’m trying to. But I’m half afraid ... to let myself go. No—don’t!’ She warded him off with a gesture, but deliberately replaced her hand over his. ‘It’s too sudden altogether. Wouldn’t it be wiser—for both of us—to wait a little? You don’t really know me one bit.’
He bowed his head and kissed the fingers that covered his own. ‘I know I love you,’ he said simply, his deep voice low and controlled. ‘And if you can say the same, that’s enough for me. The rest will be an enchanted voyage of discovery.’
‘Voyages of discovery are rather risky things,’ she reminded him. ‘And sometimes—they end in smoke. You see, you’re not just anyone. I’m outside your world; and—your mother doesn’t like me.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said again, with less conviction than before.
‘It isn’t. I’m sure she wants you to marry Miss Melrose. And I thought at first—you seem very intimate.’
‘Naturally. Our intimacy began when she was eight and I was twelve.’ He spoke looking out across the stream. Something in him winced at her allusion to Sheila in that connection. But it was only fair on her to explain things; and he forced himself to proceed. ‘Her people are our nearest neighbours in Hampshire. Her mother’s the sort of person who subsists chiefly on fads and philanthropy—the kind of philanthropy that makes you abominate charity and all its works. When we lost ... Ailsa, my little sister, Mother sort of annexed Sheila, unofficially. But that doesn’t imply—that she expects me to do likewise. We’re devoted to her—both of us. She’s a splendid little person;’ he turned now and spoke with greater naturalness and warmth. ‘Not very easy to know. But real, right through. You’re bound to love her. There—are you satisfied?’ Without warning he slipped an arm round her. ‘Will you give me my answer now?’
He felt her yield under pressure of his hand: then, with a sudden enchanting simplicity, she lifted her face to his⸺
Presently she sighed; pushed him from her a little and looked steadily into his eyes—blue, like her own, but a deeper, tenderer shade, shot through with fine radiations of orange. Hers seemed still to hold a question. His were purely exultant.
‘Darling, we’ve done it now,’ he said under his breath.
‘Yes. I suppose—we have,’ she answered in the same key.
‘Suppose? You’re not going back on things, after that. Next question is—when will you marry me? Next week?’
Her flush, that had died down, mounted again, clear carmine, beautiful to see. ‘Oh, Mark! Give me a few minutes to realise it all. You’re so impatient. Such a boy. You make me feel ... ages old’⸺
‘Look here, I can’t have you talking that sort of rot,’ he protested; incorrigibly blunt, even in love. ‘It’s morbid sentimentalism. You see, I’m the son of a mother who doesn’t know how to feel old at fifty. “Boy,” indeed! You’re a mere child yourself—the dearest in creation.’
‘No—no. I’m not a child.’ Her emphatic protest rang true. ‘Perhaps your mother has kept the bloom on life. Mine has never had any bloom on it, worth mentioning. I was reared in a groove; a very virtuous groove; and ... I didn’t fit. I wanted to feel and know and live; to be something more than a vegetable in a Wiltshire village. I knew I had talents of sorts; and I felt, if I could only get away and have a fair chance, I might achieve something worth doing, or, at least ... meet a man worth marrying.’ She spoke looking away from him across the sun-splashed water. ‘The only brother I cared about went off to the ends of the earth before he was twenty. If I’d been old enough to go with him, I wouldn’t be here now!’
‘Poor darling!’ He tightened his hold of her. ‘Dreadful calamity—isn’t it?—to be here now! But didn’t your mother understand you—help you?’
‘Poor little mother. She did her best. My unconventional streak comes from her side. But she’s a very tame edition; watered down by an early marriage with father, who’s as conventional as a high road, but unfortunately not as broad! Privately, I think she was half proud of me and half terrified of what I might do next, like the hen in Hans Andersen. It was father’s pharisaical attitude towards my mild vagaries that made me worse, till at last I kicked clean over the traces, demanded a reasonable allowance (to my amazement, I got it), and went off to London, to take the world by storm!’
‘To Miss O’Neill?’ Mark queried, a faint anxiety in his tone.
‘Oh no. Harry’s a fairly recent phase. I boarded with a friendly family in the second-rate theatrical line. That was my chosen road to achievement. But it didn’t come off—worse luck!’
‘Nor the man worth marrying?’
Her eyes lingered in his. ‘Not to any great extent! They were rather a mixed lot. And everything seemed in league against me. I made no headway anywhere. Still—it was experience. It was life. One was too busy, either hoping or despairing, to be dull. Each new phase seemed to be the discovery of a new kingdom, till you found—you hadn’t the key. There was the writing phase, the acting phase, the American phase⸺’
‘America? Why on earth⸺?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. The chance came. And the notion attracted me. A bigger, fresher world; experience⸺’
‘You seem mighty keen on experience,’ Mark struck in. ‘D’you mean knowledge—or simply new sensations?’
She hesitated. ‘After all—new sensations are a form of knowledge. The most interesting on earth. I’d go almost anywhere to discover the feel of things⸺’
She stopped short, and Mark frowned into vacancy. For the first time he caught himself wondering how old was she.
‘I should say better be an ignoramus than a mere connoisseur in sensations,’ he remarked quietly. ‘But perhaps I missed your meaning?’
‘Perhaps there wasn’t any meaning to miss! I was talking—rather at random.’ Then very lightly she leaned her head against his. ‘Mark—dearest, don’t look like that.’
‘Well, you mustn’t talk like that,’ he said with decision. ‘How long were you in America?’
‘Eighteen months. Not very pleasant always. But it did me no end of good. I even went home for a time, full of fine resolves. But the poor things soon shrivelled up in father’s atmosphere. Then—it was Harry to the rescue.’
‘And now it’s Mark!’ With sudden fervour he caught her to him. ‘No more “phases” after this, my Bel. You shall have your freedom and your chance. I’ll make up to you, all I can, for the bad years. Mother will love you⸺’
Bel shook her head. ‘She doesn’t like me.’
‘Darling, she doesn’t know you. Mother may have her cranks and prejudices. But if there’s one woman on earth she can be trusted to love—it’s my wife. I’ll take you to her to-night.’
‘No—no. To-morrow. To-night—there’s Harry. It’ll be a blow. You see, when I first came to her, I was so sick—with everything, I swore I’d never marry. She’s jealous already—’
‘Poor soul!’ Mark said tenderly. ‘But I’m jealous too. I can’t share you with Miss O’Neill. If it comes to a tug, you’ll have to choose between us.’
‘I have chosen.’ She spoke with genuine fervour; and leaning against him, she closed her eyes. So seen, her face looked years younger and of a saint-like purity. Doubts and qualms seemed sacrilege. Without a word he kissed her lowered lids, and found, to his surprise, that her lashes were wet.
(To be continued.)
THE BATTLEFIELDS OF THE OURCQ.
BY EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
In the midst of the delicious Ile de France there lies an open piece of country roughly bounded by three rivers—the Marne, the Ourcq, and the Nonette. It is a high plateau, with rolling hills and winding valleys, fertile and smiling. It forms the northern extremity of the famous district of Brie, richly productive, the kitchen-garden of Paris, which lies to the west of it—surprisingly, alarmingly near. This is the battlefield of the Marne, or more exactly of the Ourcq, and was the scene, in September 1914, of what will probably be looked upon in history as one of the most portentous, and most obscurely enthralling, of the combats of the world. At the courteous invitation of the French Government, and under the charge of a distinguished staff-officer, Captain Gabriel Puaux, I paid a visit to these battlefields towards the end of last September. It was a pilgrimage wholly objective and sentimental, for I have no pretensions of any kind to a knowledge of the arts of war. I can but give a visual impression of what the scenes looked like two years after the stupendous event.
We proceeded in a War Office car almost directly east from the gates of Paris, along the great high road towards Strasburg. We reached in some seventeen miles the point, at Claye-Souilly, which marks the extreme advance of the German armies. Their outposts came within sight of the village of Claye, where they found the French awaiting them, but they did not cross the bridge over the Ourcq canal. It overwhelms the imagination to realise, on the spot, how close the Germans were to the zone of Paris on this 5th of September 1914. Civilisation, as observed by the angels in Mr. Hardy’s drama, might well then seem to hang by a single thread over the abyss. At this moment, as Mr. Belloc says, ‘at the maximum of its developed energy, at the highest degree of its momentum,’ the horrible German machine was first checked and then put out of gear by the splendid genius of the French Higher Command. We were eager to see the places where France earned for herself this endless meed of glory.
Soon after passing Claye we left the high road, and turned north into a labyrinth of byways. The weather was superb; it was one of those blue days of late September, which are apt to collect to themselves all the best beauty of the year in France. From dawn to sunset not a cloud rose in the sky; there reigned a soft continual radiance in which the colour of every object took peculiar intensity. The first hamlet we reached, Charny, brought us to the only disappointment of our day; for we failed, after much inquiry, to find the place of death, or even of burial, of the poet Charles Péguy, who has been the intellectual mascot of this war to France. His gallant death opened the battle of the Marne. Under the shelter of a slope, he and his men fought until they were driven into the open. The officer who led them, and his lieutenant, were soon killed; Péguy then had no sooner taken the command than a ball struck him full in the forehead. His death marked the moment of transition between France in danger and France redeemed. We endeavoured to follow his track, and we drove through Villeroy, where there is little or nothing left to see. The rustic calm of these grey hamlets is unbroken, and at first all that tells us of the tragedy is the appearance from this point onwards of the flags which mark where the French soldiers lie.
The dominant feature of these rural battlefields, as we saw them in the full upland sunshine on that long splendid September day, was the scattered profusion of little tricolor flags. A long blue horizon, broken by golden haystacks against the sky, gave a general tone of greyness to the earth, which, green with oats, livid with beetroot, brown with parched lucerne, rolled beneath that vast expanse. In the midst of this harmony of tender hues there stood out sharply the hard red, white, and blue of the little flags, planted now solitary and now in clusters, without arrangement or system—the bright flags flapping and fluttering in the wind as far as the eye could reach, like charming indigenous flowers, like brilliant ixias on some pale South African veldt; and each marking the spot where a hero fell. At first, a stick with a képi on the top of it, or even a cravat or a medal, had to serve for a provisional mark, but now the little splendid flag seems to be a permanent memorial. It leaps from a corner of the beetroot field, from a slope of the harvest, from the turn of an apple-orchard, from the edge of the road, and in its singleness and in its multitude alike, it marks this district of the Brie a holy land for ever.
But this is to anticipate a little. We passed north through Iverny, where there was a great deal of fighting, and then eastwards, skirting Montyon, where the Germans, pressed hard in their retreat, threw nine hundred bombs into a duckpond. It was only in the neighbourhood of the graceful hill of Montyon that the flags began to be noticed. In Montyon we observed the first ruined cottage; but it is at Barcy, the next hamlet to the north-east, that the vestiges of war begin to be numerous. Barcy was the centre of the enemy’s line on September 6, and this village has not made much effort to recover from its heavy devastation. These little communes of the Ile de France possess nothing of the architectural charm which gives so exquisite and tender a beauty to many a village of Southern England, but most of them have a single feature, the church. In the case of Barcy, the broad village street forms an avenue closed, at its northern end, by the graceful parish church, with its short pointed spire. This building is violently injured by the bombardment, and looks as though some monster had bitten large pieces out of it; while no attempt has yet been made to restore it.
Other buildings at Barcy have been patched or mended. It is probable that this work of restoration has been delayed by the uncertainty which has prevailed as to the part which the State was prepared to take in this rehabilitation. Only ten days after my visit the French Government, for the first time, assumed the full responsibility for the rebuilding of private property destroyed in the war, and now, therefore, so soon as labour is forthcoming, the work may be expected to go merrily forward. What is involved is so enormous that the imagination fails to follow the course which it must take. Up to the present time it has been left to private enterprise, and as regards these villages of the Marne and Ourcq, except where the owner has been in a hurry to resume his normal life, the bombarded villages have been left in a deplorable disarray.
On the open down above Barcy, and quite close to the road, a peasant was loading a hay-cart with the help of two sullen-looking men in rough white clothes. These were German prisoners, and we were moved by curiosity to stop and talk to the peasant. He, from his half-built rick, replied with stolidity to our questions. ‘He had no complaints to make of the prisoners,’ he said; ‘that one’, indicating a burly captive, ‘really works quite well.’ ‘Had they learned to speak French?’ we asked. ‘Oh no!’ ‘How, then, did the work get on?’ ‘Ah,’ said the master, ‘we show them what they have to do, and they point at what they want.’ During this, and more, conversation the prisoners pursued their slow labour, not glancing at us or taking more notice than cattle would. Strange it seemed, and almost inhuman, that these Germans should have lived two years in this sequestered French village and that neither on the one side nor on the other should there have been the smallest approximation of language. The peasant ‘had no complaints to make,’ and that was the sum of their relations.
It was beyond Barcy that the bright flags began to be abundant. The eye had no longer any need to seek for them; the garden of death was now lavish of its bouquets of flowers. They were difficult to distinguish among the beetroot, easy among the oats, insistent on the grey expanse of stubble. Soon after leaving Barcy, at the corner where the road turns abruptly south, there is a great cluster of them, and, always at a little distance off, the plain black crosses which mark the spots where Germans are buried. Presently we paused to examine the great monument raised to the memory of officers and men who fell in the battle of the Ourcq. It is garish in colour, and too much adorned with symbols in silvered cardboard and wreaths of arsenical green. No doubt it is provisional; a memorial in severer taste will ultimately testify to the riper genius of France. We descend to Chambry, another tiny village of Brie, and here we meet with a feature of poignant importance. In the great ‘push,’ the retiring Germans occupied the cemetery of Chambry, a walled enclosure at the summit of the village; this was a position of great strength, commanding the countryside in every direction.
The Germans used this cemetery as a citadel, and the holes which they made for their guns in the wall, and the breaches in the parapet, are still untouched. As their army retired the enemy were obliged to withdraw from this position, and there was a violent struggle, in the course of which the French regained the enclosure, and used it in their turn. They fired with full effect from behind the granite tombstones. After the battle the whole cemetery was a scene of ruin and confusion, but of this nothing remains now, except the gun-holes and breaches in the wall, which have not been repaired. All the monuments of the dead, on the other hand, have been replaced with extreme piety, and, the cemetery not having been nearly full before, its free spaces have been used to hold the tombs of officers and men who fell in the battle. I noted, among many of pathetic interest, the stone erected in memory of Lieut. Quiliquini, who brought his Tunisian troops, the 8th Tirailleurs, from Sfax. There seemed something which moved the fancy sorrowfully in the idea of these loyal Africans who fell to ward off the barbarians’ blow at Paris. Outside the cemetery local patriotism has fitted up, in a barn, a sort of rough museum of objects found on the battlefields. No doubt this will be a great attraction when once the tourist reassembles in his myriads. At present the solitude is broken only by occasional privileged mourners, ‘brisés d’émotion et de tristesse.’
Proceeding south, we were soon out of the battlefield of the Ourcq, the frontier being marked at Penchard by another rather garish monument to the fallen officers. This is the place where three thousand Morocco troops dashed with memorable fury of attack up the Penchard hill. At this point the road turns, revealing, far below, to the left, the clustered houses of Meaux, with its cathedral, seated in a rich glade across a curve of the silver Marne. The first stage of our pilgrimage was over, and we paused an hour in the exquisite city of which Bossuet was the Eagle-bishop. Meaux is celebrated for the miracle which snatched it from the very jaws of the dog, and prevented it from becoming another Arras, another Reims. The catastrophe seemed inevitable, when at six o’clock on September 5 a patrol of Uhlans appeared in the city. All day long they were close to Meaux, the population of which had given themselves up for lost three days before. The bombardment of the cathedral actually began, but, as by the direct interposition of God, no shell touched the building, and then, under the pressure of the English army, the Germans retired altogether. The situation of Meaux, with its row of great seventeenth-century mills on a stone bridge spanning the river—mills which still produce immense quantities of flour for Paris—is as picturesque as that of any provincial city in France, and on the occasion of our recent visit, with its brimming river, its ancient russet mills, its noble church, all bathed in the liquid gold of September, it seemed lovelier than ever before. The only sign of disturbance is the modern bridge, which the English blew up for strategical purposes, without hurting the old town in any respect.
In leaving Meaux to return to the battlefields we took a northward road almost parallel with that by which we had entered, but somewhat to the east of it, thus crossing the battlefields at a point a couple of miles farther on in the German retreat. There is little to see close to Meaux, but presently the graves begin, many of them gay with dahlias and chrysanthemums. We descended to the village of Varreddes, which takes a prominent place in the chronicle of the fighting. The struggle here was very heavy. Varreddes is a rather large village, built a little distance to the south of the canal of the Ourcq, which makes at this place a great bend, surrounding the village on three sides, while the Marne nearly isolates it on the fourth. Hence it was held by the enemy with determination as long as possible. At Varreddes the Germans did dreadful things. They ordered the population of the village to leave it at once, and a group of seventeen very old men, who were too infirm to move quickly, they set up against a wall and shot in cold blood. The priest, a venerable man of seventy-six years, they seized as a hostage, and killed in their retreat.
Many bright new roofs and walls testify in the village of Varreddes to the enterprise of the inhabitants, who have ventured to rebuild their ruined houses. The church, which has some good thirteenth-century features, seems to be intact. And yet it is precisely at Varreddes that the scheme of the battle, as it swept from west to east, is most intelligible to a civilian. The intensity of the fighting is proved by the profusion of graves, whose flags glitter and shimmer, with their petals of red, white, and blue, in every direction. Farther on, above Etrépilly, a large turfed reservoir, perched on a hillock, forms a landmark, from which the eye explores in every direction the rolling country, intersected by scarcely visible glens or trenches, through which the rivers wind. On the summit of this commanding height we found a curious monument, which called for an explanation which no one seemed competent to give. It consists of a metal shield of brilliant vermilion and azure, surmounted by seven flags—one of them the American flag—and addressed in large letters, ‘Les Prisonniers de Guerre aux Héros de la Marne.’ What prisoners these were we asked one another in vain. But it made our hearts, with a touch of added mystery, thrill in fresh response to those myriads of memorial flowers that twinkled and sparkled on the circle of brown fields around us. There is one object of horror that attracts attention here. It was a great barn or hangar, in which the bodies of the fallen Germans were heaped up after the battle, and then burned by their comrades. It is now nothing but a huge skeleton of twisted iron, grimacing at the sky.
Between Varreddes and Etrépilly, as we prepare to cross the Ourcq, we pass a little tavern at the left-hand side of the road, which carries on a newly painted sign the name ‘À l’Obus.’ The excuse for this is that on its gable-end, close to a window, it displays an unexploded German shell, rusty and red, which half penetrated the wall and stuck there, without bursting. Similar bombs are already pointed out as curiosities in tree-trunks, and will doubtless be much exploited when tourists begin to be admitted. On the east from Varreddes we had seen, through a screen of trees, the Marne below us, and the great bridge at Germigny-l’Evêque, which the Germans blew up behind them in their final retreat. We are now in the very midst of the worst slaughter of September 6 and 7, 1914, but it is very curious to see how little sign of it is left in the countryside. Occasional remnants of barbed wire, and here and there the trenches of defence, might easily be overlooked by a hasty traveller. He will more readily notice that here are orchards, starred with the rose-colour of ripening apples; there feathery boskage of acacias delicately green; here we run between violently contrasted fields, with the sulphur of mustard on one side, the purple of beetroot on the other; there the oat-harvest descends to little copses of chestnut and beech, that brood over some unseen rivulet. Everywhere the peace of uniform rustic experience, unaltered through the sober centuries, would seem stamped upon the landscape, if the little occasional groups of flapping tricolors were not there to remind us that only two brief years ago the question whether European liberty should or should not be overwhelmed for ever was fought out here with unsurpassable fury and tenacity.
The winding walled hamlet of Etrépilly is bright with the sunshine on its new orange and velvet-brown roofs, by which the damage done by the German shells is concealed. This is not the case with the little village of Vincy-Manœuvres, through which we pass next on our northward course. Vincy was heavily shelled on September 7, and still presents an appearance of dismal dilapidation. Without doubt, this is a matter which depends on the enterprise or wealth of individual proprietors, and it will be curious to see what immediate effect the decision of the Government to repair all private property at the cost of the State will have in these remote communes. It was on September 9, 1914, that the German army made a final stand on the wooded height between Vincy-Manœuvres and Acy-en-Multien, from which they were dislodged next day by the army of Manoury. This was the third and conclusive stage of the great struggle, in the course of which the sixth French army pushed back the half-encircling corps of Kluck’s reinforcements, and here we felt it necessary to bear in mind, as much as the peaceful uniformity of the landscape would permit, the great double line of attack and retreat which we had now twice traversed.
We sped on north, and were now no longer in the department of the Seine-et-Marne, but in that of the Oise. No place was more prominent in the battle than Acy-en-Multien, which we now approached. This must have been, and indeed still is, much the most attractive and picturesque of the villages which the battle of the Ourcq has immortalised. Acy lies in a wooded dimple of the high plateau, and it is scattered broadly over its site, more like an English than a French township. When it is considered with what violence the Germans were hunted out of Acy, it is surprising how few marks of their presence are left. One large house, of château pretensions, is a complete wreck, having been bombed out of existence by German shells, but the beautiful and curious church, with its twelfth-century octagonal tower and its rudiments of earliest Gothic ornament, is, so far as the eye can judge, intact. At Acy a prodigious number of French soldiers are buried in a vast cemetery, which seems to have been improvised for the occasion. The piety of relatives and friends keeps these graves so lavishly covered with nosegays that the cemetery looks like a flower-garden. The epitaphs and sentiments on the tombstones are poignant, and we lingered long and with great emotion in this sacred melancholy place. I was particularly struck by one inscription—that on the tombstone of a certain Charles Schulz, who died as a corporal, leading on his men. He had been, till the war broke out, a Protestant pastor, but in what locality the epitaph does not say. The text chosen for his place of burial—‘il tint ferme, parcequ’il voyait celui qui est invisible’—may well have been the echo of his own sentiments when he exchanged his ministry for the terrible duty of fighting for his fatherland. By his name, he was doubtless an Alsatian, and curiosity was eager to know more of this Protestant pastor-corporal who sleeps in the pretty cemetery of Acy-en-Multien.
In leaving Acy, our motor lost its way up a lane that led only to a farmyard. By this happy chance, in our descent or retreat, we enjoyed an exquisite view of the village, nestled in its grove of chestnuts around the spire of its rather fantastic church—a view which in other conditions we should have missed, since these villages, sunken in folds of the upland, have a strange faculty for making themselves invisible at a little distance. Recovering our route, we continued northward, over the high rounded plateau of the Multien, which is the local name for this part of the department of the Oise. The character of the landscape now changes, and becomes very English. Proceeding from Acy to Nanteuil-le-Hardouin is like traversing the high parts of Gloucestershire; the lie of the land exactly resembles that of the Cotswolds, and I could easily have persuaded myself that we were driving from Stow-in-the-Wold to Burford. It is obvious that this rolling country, here entirely deprived of streams and glens, offers an extraordinary opportunity for the evolutions of troops, but remarkably little shelter for them.
Nanteuil, a gloomy village, almost a town, with winding narrow streets, severely grey, and a great church which towers over the wayfarer, marks the limit of the battle north-eastwards. Although there was a good deal of fighting around Nanteuil, it shows, so far as we could perceive, no trace of injury, even on the picturesque façade of the church. We left it to enter a long avenue of oaks, and there was no mark of any kind to indicate where the battle ended. My companion humorously remarked that it was the duty of the Government to put up a poteau with the inscription, ‘Ici finit le champ de bataille de l’Ourcq’! But in the absence of such a guide-post to aid the imagination of the traveller there was nothing in the rolling agricultural landscape, from which the little flowery flags had now disappeared, to indicate that here there had been any disturbance of the peace of the world.
At this point, therefore, a picture of the battlefields of the Ourcq as they now exist should end. But an impression was awaiting us at the threshold of the very next village, Baron, which was perhaps the most poignant and certainly the most extraordinary of our whole day. As we motored along we noticed, just before reaching Baron, a high wall on the left hand containing a marble plaque, with an inscription in gold letters. Curiosity prompted us to stop and read this inscription, which stated that in the house behind this wall the musical composer, Albéric Magnard, was shot and burned on Wednesday, September 3, 1914. A funereal poem by M. Edmond Rostand described how
Celui-là, qui, rebelle à toute trahison,
had lived there, died to preserve the honour of his art. We were therefore close to the scene of a horrible crime, which the magnitude of the events that closely followed it has somewhat obscured in memory. Albéric Magnard, the author of ‘Guercœur’ and other operas, born on June 9, 1865, was one of the most eminent and successful musicians of France. He had for many years possessed a country-seat at Baron, where he had built a little château, Le Manoir des Fontaines, in which he had brought together a collection of musical instruments and books which was famous.
We were reading the inscription on the wall, when a door in the latter opened and a sad woman appeared, asking us if we would like to see the place where Monsieur Magnard died. She led us through a pergola of climbing plants to a point where we suddenly saw before us what resembled a scene in some opera—a garden blazing with begonias and African marigolds, surrounded on three sides by a graceful balustrade, and velvety with green sward. Below the balustrade a little park, beautifully kept, testified to the elegant taste of the proprietor. But in the midst of this brilliance and neatness the livid shell of the house itself stood untouched since the disaster, producing in the midst of the bright parterres and trim lawns an extraordinary effect of sinister and ironic horror. It was like seeing a skeleton in a ball-dress, or a wreath of roses round a skull.
The good woman, who herself had lost in the fighting her two sons, described to us the murder. A troop of Germans was marching down the road and, attracted by something in the Manoir des Fontaines, they had insisted on being admitted by the door at which we entered. M. Magnard was in his bath-room, at the back of the house. He is believed to have appeared at the window, and a German soldier immediately shot him dead. They then set fire to the house, and they watched it till the half-calcined body of the composer fell through the rafters on to the floor of the room below. Meanwhile, they took his son and tied him, facing the scene of his father’s murder, to the trunk of a tree in the garden, and prepared to shoot him. But three peasants out of the village of Baron swore that he was not the son of M. Magnard, but of the gardener; and so, when their work was done, the Germans went off, leaving the boy alive, to be released by the villagers. The exact conditions under which the famous composer was killed are mysterious, and are likely to remain so, since no French eye witnessed the actual commission of the crime. It is possible that he offered, or appeared likely to offer, some resistance to the aggressors.
M. Rostand’s verses suggest that, in the version of the event which reached him, Magnard was attempting ‘to preserve the honour of his art.’ Whether he obeyed an instinct of self-preservation, or whether he fell a passive victim, matters very little. The incident in any case illustrates that Teutonic spirit of anarchism which Viscount Grey has stigmatised as a menace to the future of civilisation.
TWO MONUMENTS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
BY SIR CHARLES P. LUCAS, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.
In Westminster Abbey, towards the western end of the nave, on the northern side, stands a monument of rather special interest at the present day, upon which there is this inscription:
‘The Province of Massachusets Bay in New England, by an order of the great and general Court bearing date Feb. 1st, 1759, caused this monument to be erected to the memory of George Augustus Lord Viscount Howe, Brigadier General of His Majesty’s forces in America, who was slain July the 6th, 1758, on the march to Ticonderoga, in the 34th year of his age: in testimony of the sense they had of his services and military virtues, and of the affection their officers and soldiers bore to his command. He lived respected and beloved, the public regretted his loss, to his family it is irreparable.’
Dean Stanley, in his ‘Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey’ (1869 ed.), makes the following reference to this monument, which apparently stood, at the date when he wrote, in the south aisle of the nave: ‘Massachusetts and Ticonderoga, not yet divided from us, appear on the monument in the South aisle of the Nave erected to Viscount Howe, the unsuccessful elder brother of the famous Admiral.’ It is difficult to understand why the Dean used the curiously infelicitous term ‘unsuccessful’ in this case. The word might have been applied with some accuracy to the younger soldier brother, Sir William Howe, most successful in his early military career, but not so in the War of American Independence, though even in that war he was a constant winner of battles; but unless to die young is, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, to be considered a mark of failure, no word could be more inappropriate to a man whose life, according to the notice of him in the Annual Register for 1758, presumably written by Edmund Burke, ‘was long enough for his honour, but not for his country.’
He was the eldest of three brothers. The second was the famous Admiral, ‘Black Dick,’ the hero of ‘The Glorious First of June,’ which we recalled on the occasion of the late great sea-fight in the North Sea. The third was the general already mentioned. They were a notable trio, but the eldest, the shortest lived, the ‘unsuccessful’ one of the three, had in him the promise of greatness of the rarest kind. It would be difficult to pick out any man whose death called forth such a consensus of eulogy. Possibly he was felix opportunitate mortis. Possibly the same might be said of his friend Wolfe, who was killed in his thirty-third year, as Howe in his thirty-fourth. But assuredly, had these two men lived on, there would have been a different story to tell of England and America.
Dean Stanley writes of Wolfe’s friendship for Lord Howe the Admiral, quoting Horace Walpole’s words, that they were ‘friends to each other as cannon to gunpowder’; but Wolfe’s friendship for the ‘unsuccessful’ brother must have been as great; his admiration for him at any rate was unbounded. Wolfe was no great respecter of persons; he was somewhat impatient and critical of other commanders, but—‘If my Lord Howe had lived, I should have been very happy to have received his orders.’ In Wolfe’s eyes Howe was ‘the very best officer in the King’s service,’ ‘the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time.’ And so said they all: there was no dissentient voice, no whisper of criticism, no trace of jealousy. General Abercromby, to whom Howe was second in command, in reporting his death, wrote, ‘He was, very deservedly, universally beloved and respected throughout the whole army.’ Pitt’s testimony ran that ‘he was by the universal voice of army and people a character of ancient times, a complete model of military virtue in all its branches.’ Robert Rogers, the bold leader of the Rangers, in whose company Howe learnt the art of North American bush fighting, wrote of him as a ‘noble and brave officer,’ ‘universally beloved by both officers and soldiers of the army’; while the members of the Massachusetts House of Assembly, no great lovers of the redcoats from home, and close-fisted enough in ordinary dealings, voted £250 for a monument to the Englishman, whose character had impressed them all, and whose person their soldiers dearly loved.
Howe had been made colonel of the lately raised Royal Americans, the ancestors of the 60th Rifles, the famous King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the command of the 55th Regiment. Pitt then appointed him to be brigadier to General Abercromby, who, in 1758, was placed in chief command of the Central Advance on Canada, along the line of Lake George and Lake Champlain. Abercromby neither was, nor had the reputation of being, a first-rate general, and Lord Chesterfield was no doubt roughly accurate when he wrote, ‘Abercromby is to be the sedentary and not the acting commander.’ The inspiration and the motive force were to come from Howe. Early in July 1758 the army, consisting of over 6000 regulars and some 9000 provincials, was carried on bateaux and whaleboats to the northern end of Lake George, where, near the outlet of that lake into Lake Champlain, stood the immediate objective, the French fort of Ticonderoga. The force was landed, an advance was made through dense forest and scrub, Lord Howe with a party of Rangers was leading the principal column, they stumbled across a French reconnoitring party, there was a skirmish, and Howe was killed. ‘The French lost above three hundred men, and we, though successful, lost as much as it was possible to lose in one.’ That is one of the many comments made upon the incident, all on the same note. Here is another: ‘In Lord Howe the soul of General Abercromby’s army seemed to expire.’ Two days later Abercromby ordered a headlong, blundering assault upon the works of the fort, which ended in terrible losses and complete repulse.
In his dispatch of August 26, 1915, reporting upon the operations at the Dardanelles up to that date, Sir Ian Hamilton wrote:
‘Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood has been the soul of Anzac. Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post. Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours of each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front trenches, and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least every soldier in the force believes he is known to his chief.’
Here we have something like a modern counterpart, happily still with us, of Lord Howe.
It is at once the glory of the British Empire, and its chief source of strength, that it contains within it so many diverse elements, all co-operating for the common weal, all owing free and willing allegiance to one sovereign. Many races combine to make the great community which we call by the strangely inaccurate term of Empire; and the British race itself, in the process of transplantation, has developed different types in differing lands, climates, and surroundings. The home Briton, born and bred within the four seas of the United Kingdom, necessarily differs somewhat in character and physique from the Briton of the Canadian prairies or the Australian backblocks. The Canadian Briton again differs from the Australasian or South African, while among Australasians the Australian is of one type, the New Zealander of another. All supplement each other; all contribute to the common stock some ingredient which the others have not, and the sum total is greater and richer than if the units of which it is composed were all alike and uniform. On the other hand, diversities demand wise handling, or they may become a source not of strength, but of weakness. It is as easy to drift farther apart as to come closer, to exaggerate differences as to minimise them. Every citizen of the Empire is a missionary of the Empire, for by the individual citizens the types are judged. The home Briton who visits Australia leaves behind him a good or bad taste for England among the Australians with whom he has been brought into contact. The Australian who comes to the Old Country gives to Australia among the people of the Old Country a better or a worse name. But of necessity the leaders are most potent in mission work, and among the leaders those who lead armed men on active service; who are in touch with them day by day in the camp, on the march, in the trenches or on the open battlefield; on whom it devolves to enforce discipline, and with whom it rests whether or not discipline means friction. It is impossible to measure the amount of lasting good which is wrought when overseas soldiers associate tact and sympathy with home leadership or, on the other hand, the mischief which results from want of personal assimilation. It is not by any means military capacity alone that makes the soul of an Empire army. We are all beginning to know each other, to value each other, to make allowances for each other, to an extent which was impossible before steamers multiplied the coming and going of men, and turned uncertain and spasmodic into regular and assured communication. Doubts can be at once set at rest and misapprehensions promptly removed by the use of the submarine cable. Moreover, this familiarising process, and the annihilation of distance, is a progressive matter. Every year leaves us rather closer to one another than we were the year before. If, even under these favourable modern conditions, the personal element still plays a most important part, it was all-important in the middle years of the eighteenth century.
In the Seven Years’ War, when, in the words of Frederick the Great, England, having been long in labour, had at length brought forth a man, that man, William Pitt, set himself to fight France in America, and sent out what were for the time comparatively large armies to conquer Canada. He called upon the British North American colonies to co-operate and raise their levies; and inasmuch as his appeal was made in wise and tactful terms, and the colonies realised that for once England would not leave them in the lurch, they, or some of them, answered to the call with patriotism and goodwill. Thus regular soldiers from England, in greater numbers than ever before, came among the colonists, and provincial regiments were raised to march and fight side by side with the troops of the line. Then was seen and felt in its fullest extent the difference between the home Briton and his brother beyond the seas, at a time when the divergence was most pronounced. The regulars were very regular, the Provincials were very provincial; from a military point of view the two bodies of men were at opposite poles. The Provincials knew nothing of training or discipline; they were nondescript, temporary soldiers of small democracies; they were farmers enlisted for the campaign, their term of service in any case not exceeding one year: few had uniforms, some brought guns with them, some had none to bring: the officers were in effect chosen by the men. The troops of the line, on the other hand, imported into the backwoods of North America the stiffness and rigidity of European dress, discipline, and tactics in the eighteenth century, and between the officers and soldiers there was a great gulf fixed, as between the ranks of society in Europe.
It was but natural that these officers should regard the provincial soldiery with disdain, and that a corresponding resentment should be felt in the provincial ranks. Some of the greatest soldiers of the day were not exempt from this partisan feeling. After the disaster to Braddock’s force in 1755, Washington, who had been present on the field and who contrasted the conduct of the Virginians in the fight with that of the regulars, wrote in the bitterest terms of the latter. Wolfe, on the other hand, had, in 1758, no words strong enough to express his disgust at the shortcomings of the American soldiers. ‘The Americans are in general the dirtiest, most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive.’ If these were the views of the foremost men of the day in the colonial levies and in the regular army respectively, it must be presumed that the lesser men felt at least as strongly. Mrs. Grant, the authoress of ‘Memoirs of an American Lady,’ a book which was published at New York, in 1809, speaks of the ‘secret contempt’ with which ‘many officers justly esteemed, possessed of capacity, learning, and much knowledge, both of the usages of the world and the art of war ... regarded the blunt simplicity and plain appearance of the settlers’; and among the officers who came out from England there must have been a large proportion whose contempt was not unspoken or unnoticed.
It was not merely a case of friction between the professional soldier and the amateur, the one looking down upon the other, and the other resenting the airs of the superior person. The mischief was deeper seated. The northern colonies of British America were cradled in centrifugal traditions: a large proportion of the first colonists had come out to be rid of the Home Government, its discipline and its control. Puritanism was the dominant religious and political creed; and the surroundings, except at a few town centres, were of a stern and simple kind. Among men and women born and reared on these lines, and into their family circles, came regimental officers from England, many, if not most, of whom had been bred in the ways of fashionable English Society, which, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was not, to say the least of it, characterised by high tone or scrupulous refinement. The settlers in the New World, by the mere fact of their removal out of the Old World into the wilderness, had preserved for themselves and their descendants the old-time feeling and modes of thought in the Old World, and to them the new leaven from an up-to-date Old World was a leaven of unrighteousness. Mrs. Grant was the daughter of an officer in the 55th Regiment, Howe’s own regiment, but she had spent her childhood in the American atmosphere, and had been mainly brought up in a Dutch family. Consequently she tells us that she was ‘a little ashamed of having a military father,’ and writes of ‘the scarlet coat, which I had been taught to consider as the symbol of wickedness.’ It was to some extent as though Cavaliers and Roundheads had come to life again, and were jostling one another, while fighting under the same flag and for the same cause, as a prelude to once more springing at each other’s throats.
At this time and place a man of the type of Lord Howe was an almost priceless asset to the cause of Imperial Unity—a cause which can never stand still, but either declines or goes forward, and goes forward only through intelligent appreciation of existing conditions and active sympathy with living men. Of high social standing in England, and acknowledged military reputation, he set himself, by precept and still more by personal example, to the work of assimilation.
‘This gallant man,’ says the Annual Register for 1758, ‘from the moment he landed in America, had wisely conformed and made his regiment conform to the kind of service which the country required. He did not suffer any under him to encumber themselves with superfluous baggage; he himself set the example and fared like a common soldier. The first to encounter danger, to endure hunger, to support fatigue; rigid in his discipline but easy in his manners, his officers and soldiers readily obeyed the commander, because they loved the man.’
Wolfe wrote of him as a man ‘whom nature has formed for the war of this country,’ and Mrs. Grant, that he was ‘above the pedantry of holding up standards of military rules, where it was impossible to enforce them, and the narrow spirit of preferring the modes of his own country to those proved by experience to suit that in which he was to act.’ She christens him ‘This young Lycurgus of the camp.’
Under Howe everything was literally cut down to meet the exigencies of American warfare. Gold and scarlet was laid aside: baggage was reduced to a minimum: the muskets were shortened: their barrels were darkened: the skirts of the long regimental coats were cut off: Indian leggings were brought into use. Wolfe writes in May 1758, ‘Our clothes, our arms, our accoutrements, nay even our shoes and stockings are all improper for this country. Lord Howe is so well convinced of it that he has taken away all the men’s breeches.’ A French writer tells us that the officers and men were only allowed one shirt apiece. ‘Lord H. set the example, by himself washing his own dirty shirt, and drying it in the sun, while he in the meantime wore nothing but his coat.’ And here is the unkindest cut of all—in Mrs. Grant’s words:
‘The greatest privation to the young and vain yet remained. Hair well dressed, and in great quantity, was then considered as the greatest possible ornament, which those who had it took the utmost care to display to advantage, and to wear in a bag or queue, whichever they fancied. Lord Howe’s was fine and very abundant; he, however, cropped it and ordered every one else to do the same.’
In all things the commander set the example: he never asked his officers or men to do anything or to give up anything which he did not do or give up himself. Thus his regiment of regulars was set in order for backwood fighting and, what was more, it was attuned to the ways of the land and of the people of the land. ‘They were ever after considered as an example to the whole American Army.’
Mrs. Grant tells a story, which Francis Parkman has repeated in his delightful ‘Montcalm and Wolfe,’ of Lord Howe giving a dinner to his officers in his tent. The furniture consisted of logs of wood and bearskins, ‘and presently the servants set down a large dish of pork and pease.’ Howe pulled a sheath with a knife and fork in it out of his pocket, and proceeded to carve the meat. The officers ‘sat in a kind of awkward suspense’ for want of knives and forks, until Howe, after expressing surprise that they did not possess ‘portable implements’ of the kind, ‘finally relieved them from their embarrassment, by distributing to each a case the same as his own, which he had provided for that purpose.’ The real point of the story is that, if Howe had been an ordinary man, his dinner would probably have been resented by the officers as an impertinent practical joke. But he was not an ordinary man; among his officers and soldiers he was like King David: ‘Whatsoever the king did pleased all the people.’
Albany in New York State was always the base for expeditions against Canada, by the central route, which lay along the line of water communication. In war time through Albany regiments came and went, and in and around it they congregated and encamped. Albany was pre-eminently a centre for the old New York families of Dutch descent. On the upper waters of the Hudson and the lower reaches of the Mohawk River, which joins the Hudson a little above Albany, were the estates of the ‘patroons’ of the Dutch régime, and here their descendants lived and thrived. Mrs. Grant, in her Memoirs, tells of the lives and surroundings of one of the foremost of these families, the Schuylers, whose homes were in Albany and to the north of it in the district known as ‘The Flats.’ In her book an old Mrs. Schuyler (‘Aunt Schuyler’) is the central figure, as she was in the year 1758 the central figure of the Schuyler clan. The book tells of Lord Howe’s intimacy with the family, though he never took up his quarters with them, for he ‘always lay in his tent with the regiment which he commanded’; how the old lady loved him almost as a son, how sadly and affectionately she sped him on his last advance, and her grief when the news came that he was killed. ‘Aunt Schuyler ... had the utmost esteem for him, and the greatest hope that he would at some future period redress all those evils that had formerly impeded the service; and perhaps plant the British standard on the walls of Quebec.’ We have drawn for us the contrast between the good and bad type of officer, the gentleman and the bully, though both may be efficient fighting men. Returning to his friends on one occasion, Howe found to his great indignation that in his absence Captain Charles Lee had come through and, ‘as if he were in a conquered country,’ commandeered the loyal old lady’s stock and property, without having the necessary warrants for his high-handed proceedings. Lee’s next visit was after the fight at Ticonderoga, when he was brought back a wounded man to be nursed by those whom he had browbeaten and robbed. He was a king’s officer; but it is difficult to deduce from his case the moral that conduct such as his brought on the Revolution, seeing that he became a general in the Revolutionary army, of great though somewhat dubious reputation.
In 1757 and 1758 Lord Howe was winning the love and esteem of all who came into contact with him in America. In 1759 the Assembly of Massachusetts voted the monument to his memory. In 1765 the men of Boston were rioting against the Stamp Act, and in 1773 throwing cargoes of tea into Boston harbour. In 1775 came open war with the Mother Country and the fight of Bunker Hill. At Bunker Hill hardest of hard fighters among the Americans was Israel Putnam: he had been by Howe’s side when the latter was killed. The night before his death Howe had been in company with John Stark, noted among the New Hampshire Rangers who followed Robert Rogers. It was Stark who, in 1777, planned and won the fight at Bennington, which was the beginning of the end of Burgoyne’s army. A young member of the Schuyler group, who had taken Howe to their hearts, was Philip Schuyler, afterwards one of the best known and most trusted of the Revolutionary leaders. Probably England and America had drifted too far apart at the time of the Seven Years’ War for any human influence to bring them wholly into line again. Yet, had Howes been multiplied and English statesmen and commanders been modelled on his lines, the parting might well have been postponed and been less bitter when it came. He stands out in history as one who in his day did all that man could do to bring the Colonies and the Mother Country closer together; and he is a type of the Englishmen who are still wanted to-day, and who happily are not wanting, as shown by the love and confidence borne towards Sir William Birdwood by the splendid fighting men from the Southern Seas, whom he led to less and yet to more than victory.
Just over a year from the date of Lord Howe’s death and Abercromby’s repulse at Ticonderoga, a much abler general than Abercromby, Jeffrey Amherst, marched once more against the fort. The French abandoned their entrenchments in front of it, of which Amherst promptly took possession; and a rearguard, left to hold the fort itself, after two or three days’ artillery fire, blew it up and left the ruins to be occupied by Amherst’s army. As the death of Lord Howe had immediately preceded Abercromby’s attack, so a day before the second enterprise ended successfully, another officer, well known in the army and in English Society, though not comparable with Lord Howe, was killed. An entry in Knox’s Historical Journal runs: ‘The Honourable Colonel Townshend was picked off to-day in the trenches by a cannon shot; he is very deservedly lamented by the General and the army’; a later entry mentions that his body was taken to Albany for burial. On the south side of the nave of Westminster Abbey, much farther up towards the Chancel than the place where the monument to Lord Howe stands, will be found a monument—
‘erected by a disconsolate parent, The Lady Viscountess Townshend, to the memory of her fifth son, The Honble. Lt.-Colonel Roger Townshend, who was killed by a cannon ball on the 25th of July 1759 in the 28th year of his age, as he was reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderagoe in North America ... tho’ premature his death, his life was glorious, enrolling him with the names of those immortal statesmen and commanders whose wisdom and intrepidity in the cause of this comprehensive and successful war have extended the commerce, enlarged the Dominion, and upheld the Majesty of these Kingdoms beyond the idea of any former age.’
The monument is an elaborate one, and the eulogy is obviously exaggerated. Horace Walpole would evidently have had it otherwise. In his ‘Short Notes of My Life’ he tells us, ‘I gave my Lady Townshend an epitaph and design for a tomb for her youngest son, killed at Ticonderoga; neither was used.’ He also gives us to understand that the mother was not so disconsolate as the monument asserts:
‘My Lady Townshend, who has not learning enough to copy a Spartan mother, has lost her youngest son. I saw her this morning—her affectation is on t’other side; she affects grief—but not so much for the son she has lost, as for t’other that she may lose.’
And again, ‘Poor Roger, for whom she is not concerned, has given her a hint that her hero George may be mortal too.’ Whatever may have been the mother’s preferences, the two brothers loved each other dearly. A few weeks before he was killed, Roger Townshend wrote to George Townshend’s wife to tell her of her husband’s safe arrival at Halifax from England in the best of health, and how he had sent him supplies of fresh vegetables to make up for the long sea-voyage. The letter continues:
‘My opinion of General Amherst as an honest good man, and my attachment to him as a soldier I thought would never allow me to wish that I might serve under any other person in America, but the tie of brother and friend united is too powerful, and I confess nothing ever gave me more real concern than not being employed on the same expedition.’
In turn we have George Townshend writing sadly before the fall of Quebec of the news of his brother’s death; and after Quebec had fallen, on the eve of his return to England, he writes to Amherst:
‘I hear I have got Barrington’s regiment. Alas, what a Bouquet this had been a year or two hence for poor Roger. I assure you I return thoroughly wounded from America. I loved him sincerely.’
George Townshend, the eldest son, whom Walpole clearly did not love, was Wolfe’s well-known brigadier, to whom Quebec capitulated, and around whom so much controversy gathered. He ended as a Marquess and a Field-Marshal, and there is no reason to doubt that he was a competent soldier. So also evidently was the younger brother. Amherst appointed him to be one of the two Deputy Adjutant-Generals of his army, his own brother, Colonel Amherst, being the other. We read of him in connection with the training of the Provincial regiments, and as commanding a detachment of Rangers sent to reconnoitre along Lake George. Amherst wrote to Wolfe that he had intended to send him home with dispatches after the fall of Ticonderoga, that his loss ‘marred the enjoyment I should otherwise have had in the reduction of the place.’ We may set him down as one of the might-have-beens, and Dean Stanley would presumably have classed him as the unsuccessful brother. If he had marked military ability, it has assuredly remained in the family; for those who read the epitaph upon his monument in Westminster Abbey, with its reference to a comprehensive war and upholding the majesty of these kingdoms, will carry their thoughts across the seas from North America to Mesopotamia, from Ticonderoga to Kut.[1]