Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

But in all her timeless journeyings around this flying ball to which we cling with our feet she has never been a subject of such painful concern as now. Love-sick poets have sung of her, and learned men have studied her countenance and made maps of her hills and her valleys, and children have been lulled to sleep with legends of the old man in the moon and the old woman eternally gathering her eternal sticks. But for most of us she had no more serious import than a Chinese lantern hung on a Christmas tree to please the children.

And suddenly she has become the most sensational fact of our lives. From the King in his palace to the pauper in his workhouse we have all been talking of the moon, and watching the moon and studying the phases of the moon. There are seven millions of Londoners who know more about the moon to-day than they ever dreamed there was to be known, or than they ever dreamed that they would want to know. John Bright once said that the only virtue of war was that it taught people geography, but even he did not think of the geography of the moon and of the firmament. But in the intense school of these days we are learning about everything in heaven above and in the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth. Count Zeppelin taught us about the stars, and now Herr von Gotha is giving us a lesson on the moon. We are not so grateful as we might be.

But the main lesson we are all learning, I think, is that Nature does not take sides in our affairs. We all like to think that she does take sides—that is, our side—that a special providence watches over us, and that invisible powers will see us through. It is a common weakness. The preposterous Kaiser exhibits it in its most grotesque assumption. He does really believe—or did, for dreadful doubts must be invading the armour-plated vanity of this jerry-built Cæsar—that God and Nature are his Imperial agents.

And in a less degree most of us, in times of stress, pin our faith to some special providence. We are so important to ourselves that we cannot conceive that we are unimportant to whatever powers there be. Others may fall, but we have charmed lives. Our cause must prevail because, being ours, it is beyond mortal challenge. A distinguished General was telling me not long ago of an incident in the second battle of Ypres. He stood with another General, since killed, watching the battle at its most critical phase. They saw the British line yield, and the Germans advance, and all seemed over. My friend put up his glasses with the gesture of one who knew the worst had come. His companion turned to him and said, "God will never allow those —— to win." It was an odd expression of faith, but it represents the conviction latent in most of us that we can count on invisible allies who, like the goddess in Homer, will intervene if we are in straits, and fling a cloud between us and the foe.

This reliance on the supernatural is one of the sources of power in men of primitive and intense faith. Cromwell was a practical mystic and never forgot to keep his powder dry, but he saw the hand of the Lord visibly at work for his cause on the winds and the tempest, and that conviction added a fervour to his terrible sword. In his letter to Speaker Lenthall on the battle of Dunbar he tells how in marching from Musselburgh to Haddington the enemy fell upon "the rear-forlorn of our horse" and "had like to have engaged our rear brigade of horse with their whole army—had not the Lord by His Providence put a cloud over the moon, hereby giving us opportunity to draw off those horse to the rest of our army."

In the same way Elizabethan England witnessed God Himself in the tempest that scattered the Armada, and a hundred years later the people saw the same Divine sanction in the winds that brought William Prince of Orange to our shores and drove his pursuers away. "The weather had indeed served the Protestant cause so well," says Macaulay, "that some men of more piety than judgment fully believed the ordinary laws of nature to have been suspended for the preservation of the liberty and religion of England. Exactly a hundred years before, they said, the Armada, invincible by man, had been scattered by the wrath of God. Civil freedom and divine truth were again in jeopardy; and again the obedient elements had fought for the good cause. The wind had blown strong from the east while the Prince wished to sail down the Channel, had turned to the south when he wished to enter Torbay, had sunk to a calm during the disembarkation, and, as soon as the disembarkation was completed, had risen to a storm and had met the pursuers in the face."

If we saw such a sequence of winds blowing for our cause, we should, in spite of Macaulay, allow our piety to have the better of our judgment. Indeed, there have been those who in the absence of more solid evidence have accepted the Angels of Mons with as touching and unquestioning a faith as they accepted the legend of the Army of Russians from Archangel. Perhaps it is not "piety" so much as anxiety that accounts for this credulity. In its more degraded form it is responsible for such phenomena as the revival of fortune-telling and the emergence of the Prophet Bottomley. In its more reputable expression it springs from the conviction of the justice of our cause, of the dominion of the spiritual over the material and of the witness of that dominion in the operations of Nature.

Then comes this wonderful harvest moon with its clear sky and its still air to light our enemies to their villainous work and to remind us that, however virtuous our cause, Nature is not concerned about us. She is indifferent whether we win or lose. She is not against us, but she is not for us. Sometimes she helps the enemy, and sometimes she helps us. She blew a snowstorm in the face of the Germans on the most critical day of Verdun, and helped to defeat that great adventure. In August last she came out on the side of the enemy. She rained and blew ceaselessly, and disarranged our plans in Flanders, so that the attack on which so much depended was driven perilously late into the year. And even the brilliant moon and the cloudless nights that have been so disturbing to us in London speak the same language of Nature's impartiality. They serve the enemy here, but they are serving us far more just across the sea, where every bright day and moonlit night snatched from the mud and rain of the coming winter is of priceless value to our Army. That consideration should enable us to bear our affliction with fortitude as we crowd the "tubes" or listen to the roar of the guns from under the domestic table.

But we must admit, on the evidence, that Nature does not care twopence who wins, and is as unconcerned about our affairs as we are about the affairs of a nest of ants that we tread on without knowing that we have trodden on it. She is beyond good and evil. She has no morals and is indifferent about justice and what men call right and wrong. She blasts the wise and leaves the foolish to flourish.

Nature, with equal mind
Sees all her sons at play;
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away;
Allows the proudly riding and the found'ring barque.