Characteristic of the unchanged romantic mysticism that lies deep in the hearts of the Scots—Scots of the glens and hills—are the words in which the local paper refers to the loss which had befallen the country in the death of the gallant young officer: “He died like a Stewart: he dreed his weird, he drank the cup of his race!”
It is the fine flower of our young manhood that is being mown down. What is to become of England, robbed of her best? It seems such waste and loss; we who cannot fight feel at times as if the pressure of such calamity “doth make our very tears like unto bloode.” But we must believe that it is not waste, but seed; that the nations who sow in tears will reap in joy; that each of these young lives, so gladly given, shares in the redemption of the country; that, in all reverence, in all faith, that they are mystically united to Calvary; and that their glory will be presently shown forth even as in the glory of resurrection!
A correspondent writing from the front describes the expression in the eyes of the friendly officer, who has been his guide, as he pointed out the myriad crosses of the burial-ground. “He looked envious,” he says, and adds that he noticed that all out there “speak with envy of the dead.”
Is not the nation’s honour sharpened to its finest point when the ideal of its manhood is to die for the country? Dulce et decorum....
We were very glad, nevertheless, when, in spite of his repeated applications to return to his own men, H. was ordered to take a command in the Persian Gulf. The link that binds a man to comrades with whom he has shared every possible danger and hardship, to those who have faced death with him, whom he has himself led on to peril and agony, the while they have been to him as his children—such a link is indeed one that is hard to break! Their peril has been his; their glory is his pride.
“If I can single out one regiment for special praise,” said the Commander-in-Chief, “it is the Worcesters.”
And again:
“I consider the Worcesters saved Europe on that day.”
It is no wonder that H. should be proud of them; that the thousand fibres should draw him back to them.