The Undefeated

by J. C. Snaith

For years it had been freely declared that Britain was past her zenith, that disintegration had already begun, that England herself was enervated with prosperity. At the outset the enemy in making war had counted on the fact too confidently. Britain would not dare to enter the struggle, she who was suffering from fatty degeneration of the soul, or if in the end she was driven into the whirlpool in spite of herself she would prove a broken reed in this strife for human freedom.

These were dangerous heresies, even for a race of supermen, and nowhere in the oldest of free communities was the task of dispelling it undertaken more vigorously than in Blackhampton. As its archives bore witness it had a long and proud record. No matter what great national movement had been afoot in the past, Blackhampton, the central city of England, geographically speaking, had invariably reacted to it with force and urgency.

Among the many virile men who strove to meet a supreme occasion, none deserved better of his country, or of his fellow citizens than Mr. Josiah Munt. He was of a type suited beyond all others to deal with the more obvious needs of a time that called for the unsparing use of every energy; he had a genius of a plain, practical, ruthless kind; he was the incarnation of “carry on” and “get things done.”

From the first hour he took off his coat and buckled to. He worked like a leviathan. No day was too long for him, no labor too arduous; his methods were rough and now and again the clatter he made was a little out of proportion to the amount of weight he pulled in the boat. His life had been one of limited opportunity, but he had a knack of seeing the thing to be done and of doing it. People soon began to realize that he was the right man in the right place, and that as a driving force he was a great asset to the city of Blackhampton.

The war was about fifteen months’ old when Alderman Munt was chosen mayor of Blackhampton. He took up an office that was by no means a sinecure at a very critical moment. But it was soon clear that a wise choice had been made; a certain Britishness of character of the right bulldog breed did much to keep a population of two hundred and eighty-six thousand souls “up to the collar.” Somehow, the rude force and the native honesty of the man appealed to the popular imagination; if a prophet is ever honored in his own country it is in time of war.

During his mayoralty Josiah Munt came to occupy a place in the minds of his own people that none could have predicted. When the grim hour struck which altered the face of the world and changed the whole aspect of human society few could have been found to say a word in favor of the proprietor of the Duke of Wellington. He had begun low down, in a common part of the town; and, although there was really nothing against him, his name was never in specially good odor, perhaps for the reason that he bore obvious marks of his origin and because the curves of his mind were too broad for him to care very much about concealing them. In the general opinion he had been a very “lucky” man, financially successful beyond his merits, and for that reason arrogant. But in the throes of the upheaval preconceived ideas were soon shed if they did not happen to square with the facts; and it took considerably less than a year for Josiah to prove to his fellow townsmen that the goddess Fortune is not always the capricious fool she has the name of being.

Even in the stress of a terribly strenuous twelve months the Mayor of Blackhampton, like the wise man he was, insisted upon taking his annual fortnight’s holiday at Bridlington. He had not missed his annual fortnight at Bridlington once in the last thirty years. It did him so much good, he was able to work so much the better for it afterwards, that, as he informed Mr. Aylett the Town Clerk, on the eve of departure in the second week of August, “it would take more than the likes o’ the Kaiser to keep him from the seaside.”

Like a giant refreshed the Mayor returned to his civic duties at the end of the month. His leisure at Bridlington had been enlivened by the company of the Mayoress, by Mrs. Doctor Cockburn and her two children, and also by Miss Gertrude Preston, who for quite a number of years now had helped to beguile the tedium of her brother-in-law’s annual rest cure.

As soon as the Mayor returned to the scene of his labors he found there was one very important question he would have to decide. In his absence the City fathers had met several times to discuss the matter of his successor and had come, in some cases perhaps reluctantly, to the conclusion that none but himself could be his peer. According to the aldermanic roster, Mr. Limpenny the maltster was next in office, but that wise man was the first to own that he had not the driving power, or the breadth of appeal of the present mayor.