Most melodious of rhetoricians, and most whimsical of prose-poets, I bid you a good-night. For by a coincidence which you would be the first to appreciate, twelve o’clock is striking even as I copy your last line, and I light a bedroom candle with the sound of those dim prognostications, and thunderous conjectures of yours still ringing sonorously about my ears. They do not alarm me, however; nay I would gladly carry them with me past the ivory gate. For, as you yourself say——
“Happy are they that go to bed with grand music like Pythagoras, or have ways to compose the fantastical spirit, whose unruly wanderings take off inward sleep, filling our heads with St. Anthony’s visions, or the dreams of Lipara, in the sober chambers of rest.”
March 20, 1900
FROM the defence of Vanity, to the defence of England! “Attend to your transitions, my boy,” is said to have been the reply of a veteran orator, when pressed by a junior for some axiom that would sum up the whole art of oratory in a sentence. Literature also, like oratory, has to attend to her transitions, else dire confusion, and the just indignation of her readers, is the result. The diarist stands upon a slightly different footing. If there is such a being as a literary libertine, or harmless law-breaker, he perhaps is entitled to the name. His pages are filled up according to no settled plan, and with an eye to no particular convention. He claims to be free as the wind upon the tree-tops, free as all our unwritten moods, which are rarely quite the same for many consecutive hours. Such at least, is the claim of this particular diarist. To-day, for instance, leaving the garden, and all that relates to it, to take care of themselves, he has wandered away upon the theme, of all things in the world, of Invasion, moved thereto, partly by the desire which assails us at all times, of dilating upon what one knows least, partly by the equally inborn desire of running counter to conventions upon which one has been brought up, and which have been instilled into one’s mind ever since one could walk unaided.
That the difference between soldiers and civilians is an absolute difference, clear as glass, hard as adamant, is one of those conventions. Until the other day I never remember hearing it so much as questioned. Yet how does that fact now stand in the face of all that we have been hearing, seeing, reading about, during the last five months? If one thing more than another has been brought home to us by this present struggle it is that under modern conditions a civilian—without the slightest pretensions to be anything else, so long only as he is a good marksman—is not only as valuable, but under many circumstances, far more valuable than the average soldier, who as a rule can just shoot, and nothing more, who has all the finer parts of his art still to learn, and is not at all likely to learn it when he has no more leisurely target to practise upon than the living man.
It is upon the strength of this revolution that I have been indulging this morning in a private Invasion of my own, specially designed for the exaltation of the rifle-shooting civilian, in whose doings I take a natural interest. Plans of Invasion are always rather fascinating, whatever the realities are likely to be. On this occasion I have only allowed myself a very small and cheap Invasion, just enough to put our rifle-shooting civilian standing in it and asking how he is to behave himself. It is not coming off in the orthodox place, which I take to be nearly opposite the bathing sands of Boulogne, but upon quite a new theatre, namely upon the shores of Dublin Bay. My invaders are probably French, but may be anything else, it does not in the least matter. Whoever they are they have succeeded in evading the Channel Fleet, have run the gauntlet of the forts—no impossible feat—and have disembarked some forty or fifty thousand strong somewhere between the Bailey of Howth and the foot of Bray Head.
As for their purpose in landing, so far as my information extends, it is simply to do as much damage as can be conveniently accomplished within a given time. If the defending fleet remains entangled elsewhere, and they can be reinforced, so much the better. In any case France can afford to lose some twenty or thirty thousand recruits in a good cause. Moreover he would be a poor sort of Frenchman who for the sake of burning, harassing, shooting, raiding, racking, ruining, and generally running amuck, amongst British possessions, would not run the risk of capture, and the, not after all, very uncomfortable, entertainment of a prisoner of war. Here, then, stands our military position; and now comes the question of what in such a case, are the rights and duties of the ordinary, peaceable but rifle-shooting civilian?
First let me clear the ground for myself a little. In the course of certain profound researches upon the whole art and practice of war as laid down in the Débâcle, La Guerre et la Paix, and other recondite manuals, I have learnt that in the case of invasion the barrier between civilians and professional soldiers is even stricter and more menacing than at other times. The soldier, let his capacity or incapacity be what it may, is entitled in case of capture to honourable treatment. He may be nearly starved to death, if provisions run short, as the French soldier-prisoners were after Sedan. He may be shot out of hand, if he endeavours to escape, but with these trifling exceptions he is a person having definite rights and a definite status; a person the cold-blooded slaughter of whom would stamp the perpetrator of such a deed as a brute, no gentleman, and a man generally to be avoided, even by his own side. Turning now to the position of a civilian during invasion, I learn, by studying the same authorities, that he is an individual without rights of any kind should he attempt—no matter upon what provocation—to touch a weapon in war time. Although the weapon in question be his own familiar rifle or fowling-piece; although the spot he proposes to defend with it is his own hearth, with his own wife and daughters standing beside it, he is liable—legally and honourably liable, for that is the whole point—to be led away from that hearth, settled comfortably with his back against the nearest wall, and then and there uncomplainingly shot, his wife and the rest of his family looking on. This I am assured, or used to be assured, is the whole law and the gospel, as the law and the gospel is laid down for military purposes; a law the carrying out of which is not only permitted, but is the bounden duty of every honourable soldier and Christian officer. In no other way, so I have always been told, could the protection of the civil population be guaranteed during invasion. If a man, merely because the property destroyed is his own, were free to pot—we call it nowadays to snipe—at the destroyer of that property, what in such a case would become, one was asked, of the poor defenceless soldiery?
So much for the old rule, now for its modern application. Bearing all this in mind, I look away to South Africa, and what do I see? I see a crowd of fighting men, upon hardly one of whom—our own regulars and militia of course excepted—can I succeed in discovering any of the recognisable marks of a soldier. Here and there one or two such may be discerned, but the bulk are purely and avowedly civilian. They have walked out of their shops, their farms, their offices, their counting-houses, their clubs, or wherever else they come from, precisely as we see them. They can shoot, or they think so; they can ride—more or less—but in spite of these accomplishments they are no more soldiers than is the diarist who dips this eminently civilian pen into this utterly unmilitary inkpot. If the German commanders of 1870 refused to see in the francs tireurs anything but unrecognisable freebooters; if Napoleon declined to accord the Tyrolese marksmen and their heroic leader decent treatment, mainly on the grounds that the latter was an innkeeper, what would either of them have said to the bulk of those fighting upon both sides to-day in South Africa?
All this, however, is merely preliminary. Our invasion is no problematic peril this time, but a peril that has actually arrived. They have come, the aggressors! they are already standing upon our sacred shore! the question now is what are we to do with them? Can there be any doubt upon that subject? Up, arm yourselves, and away! high and low, young and old, brave and the reverse—women first, as befits their daring! Up, and at the villains! Let them not carry their purpose an inch further. Let not one of them return to boast of where he has been! Yet hark! what sound is that? Surely it is not the luncheon bell? How exceedingly inconvenient! Well, our invasion must be postponed for the moment. After all, as Peter Plymley wrote to his brother Abraham, “It is three centuries since an English pig has fallen in a fair battle upon English ground”; so, though this particular struggle is coming off not on English but Irish ground, it is not likely to be all over before this afternoon.