On both these days, the “things seen,” unforgettable as they were, were filled out by most interesting conversations with two of our Army Commanders—first with General Horne and then with Sir Henry Rawlinson, who entertained Mrs. Ward and her daughter with a kindness that had in it an element of pathos. Not often, in those stern days, did anyone of the gentler sex make and pour out their tea! And in the Chauffeurs’ Mess, the Scotch chauffeur, Sloan, who for the second time was in charge of Mrs. Ward, found himself the object of universal curiosity. “He told Captain Fowler,” wrote Mrs. Ward to her husband, “that they asked him innumerable questions about the two ladies—no one having ever seen such a phenomenon in these parts before. ‘They were varra puzzled,’ said Sloan, ‘they couldna mak’ it out. But I didna tell them. I left them thinkin’!’”
Mrs. Ward left the British zone for Paris on March 4, and after three days of comparative rest there—renewing old acquaintance under strange new conditions—she put herself under the charge of a kind and energetic official of the “Maison de la Presse,” M. Ponsot, for her long-planned visit to the devastated regions of the Centre and East. Soissons, Reims and Verdun were pronounced too dangerous for her, but she went north to the ruins of Senlis, and heard from the lips of the old curé the horrible tale of the German panic there, in the early days of September, 1914, the burning of the town, the murder of the Maire and the other hostages, and of the frantic, insane excitement under which many of the German officers seemed to be labouring. Then it was the battlefield of the Ourcq, the scene of Maunoury’s fateful flank attack, which forced Von Kluck to halt and give battle at the Marne; a string of famous villages—Marcilly, Barcy, Etrépilly, Vareddes—seen, alas, under a blinding snow-storm, and at length the vision of the Marne itself, “winding, steely-grey, through the white landscape.” Mrs. Ward has described it all, in inimitable fashion, in the seventh and eighth Letters of Towards the Goal, and has there told also the ghastly tale of the Hostages of Vareddes, which burnt itself upon her mind with the sharpness that only the sight of the actual scene could give. Then, leaving Paris by train for Nancy, she spent two days—seeing much of the stout-hearted Préfet, M. Mirman—in visiting the regions overwhelmed by the German invasion between August 20 and September 10, 1914—a period and a theatre of the War of which we English usually have but the dimmest idea. From the ruined farm of Léaumont she was shown, by a French staff officer, the whole scene of these operations, spread like a map before her, and became absorbed in the thrilling tale of the driving back of the Bavarians by General Castelnau and the First French Army. Then southward through the region from which the German wave had receded, but which still bore indelible marks of the invaders’ savage fear and hatred. In Towards the Goal Mrs. Ward has told the tale of Gerbévillers and of the heroic Sœur Julie, who saved her “gros blessés” in the teeth of some demoralized German officers, who forced their way into the hospital. Here we can but give her general impressions of the scene, as she recorded them in a letter to Miss Arnold, written from Paris immediately afterwards:
“Lorraine was in some ways a spectacle to wring one’s heart, the ruined villages, the réfugiés everywhere, and the faces of men and women who had lost their all and seen the worst horrors of human nature face to face. But there were many beautiful and consoling things. The marvellous view from a point near Lunéville of the eastern frontier, the French lines and the German, near the Forêt de Paroy—a group of some hundreds of French soldiers, near another point of the frontier, who, finding out that we were two English ladies, cheered us vigorously as we passed through them—the already famous Sœur Julie, of Gerbévillers, who had been a witness of all the German crimes there, and told the story inimitably, with native wit and Christian feeling—the beautiful return from Nancy on a spring day across France, from East to West, passing the great rivers, Meurthe, Meuse, Moselle, Marne—the warm welcome of the Lorrainers—these things we shall never forget.”
A rapid return to England and then, in order that her impressions of the Fleet might not be behindhand, she was sent by special arrangement to see Commodore Tyrwhitt, at Harwich, there to realize the immense development of the smaller craft of the Navy, and to go “creeping and climbing,” as she describes it in Towards the Goal, about a submarine. Returning to Stocks to write her second series of “Letters”—now addressed without disguise to Mr. Roosevelt—it was not long before the news of America’s Declaration of War came in to cheer her, with an eager telephone-message from a daughter, left in London, that “Old Glory” was to be seen waving side by side with the Union Jack from the tower of the House of Lords. Now surely, the happy prophecies of her soldier-friends in France would be fulfilled: this must be the deciding year! But the months passed on; Vimy and Messines were ours, yet nothing followed, and in August, September, October, the agonizing struggle in the mud of Passchendæle sapped the endurance of the watchers at home more miserably than any other three months of the War. And there, on October 11, perished a lad of twenty, bearing a name that was heart of her heart to Mrs. Ward, Tom Arnold, the elder son of her brother, Dr. F. S. Arnold. He had lain wounded all night in a shell-hole, and when at length they bore him back to the Casualty Clearing-station, the little flame of life, though it flickered and shot upwards in hope, sank again into darkness. Tom was a lad to whose gentle soul all war was utterly abhorrent, yet he had “joined up” without question on the earliest possible day. Already Christopher and Arthur Selwyn, the splendid twins, were gone, and the sons of so many friends and neighbours, gentle and simple! About this time General Horne had invited her to come once more to France. “But it is not at all likely I shall go (she wrote)—though, perhaps, in the spring it might be, if the War goes on. Horrible, horrible thought! I am more and more conscious of its horror and hideousness every day. And yet after so much—after all these lives laid down—not to achieve the end, and a real ‘peace upon Israel’—would not that be worst of all?”
CHAPTER XV
LAST YEARS: 1917-1920
αὑτἁρ ἑμεὑ σχεδὁθεν μὁρος Ισταται ὡς ὁφελὁν γε
χερἱ φἱλην τἡν σἡν χεἱρα λαβοὑσα θανεἱν.[35]
DAMAGETUS.
THOSE who visited Mrs. Ward at Stocks during the later years of the War were wont to fasten upon any younger members of the family who happened to be there, to declare that Mrs. Ward was working herself to death and to plead that something must be done to stop her. And even as they said it they knew that their words were vain, for besides the perennial need to make a living, was not her country at war and were not the young men dying every day? Mrs. Ward was not of the temperament that forgot such things; hence her desire to throw her very best work into her “War books”—which owing to their low price and the special terms on which she allowed the Government to use them could never bring her anything like the same return as her novels.[36] She regarded them therefore almost as an extra on her ordinary work, so that the pressure on her time was increased rather than diminished as the War years went on and her own age advanced. And the last of the series, Fields of Victory, was to make on her time and strength the greatest demands of all.
But the lighter side of her War labours was the intense and meticulous interest she took in the “War economies” devised by herself and Dorothy at Stocks. How they schemed and planned about the cutting of timber, the growing of potatoes, the making of jam and the sharing of the garden fruit with the village! Labour in the garden was reduced to a minimum, so that all the family must take their turn at planting out violas and verbenas, if the poor things were to be saved for use at all, while Mr. Wilkin, the well-beloved butler who had been with us for twenty years, mowed the lawn and split wood and performed many other unorthodox tasks until he too was called up, at 47, in the summer of 1918. Mrs. Ward could not plant verbenas, but she armed herself with a spud and might often be seen of an afternoon valiantly attacking the weeds in the rose-beds and paths. The links between her and the little estate seemed to grow ever stronger as she came to depend more and more directly on the produce of the soil, and when, in 1918, she established a cow on what had once been the cricket-ground her joy and pride in the productiveness of her new creature were a delight to all beholders. Her daughter Dorothy was at this time deep in the organisation of “Women on the Land”—a movement of considerable importance in Hertfordshire—, so that Mrs. Ward could study it at first hand and had many an absorbing conversation with one of the “gang-leaders,” Mrs. Bentwich, who made Stocks her headquarters for a time and delighted her hostess by her many-sided ability and by the picturesqueness of her attire. All this gave her many ideas for her four War novels—Missing, The War and Elizabeth, Cousin Philip and Harvest, the last of which was to close the long list of her books. Missing had a considerable popular success, for it sold 21,000 in America in the first two months of its appearance, but Elizabeth and Cousin Philip were, I think, felt to be the most interesting of this series, owing to the admirable studies they presented of the type of young woman thrown up and moulded by the War. Mrs. Ward was by no means ashamed of her hard work as a novelist in these days.
“I have just finished a book,” she wrote to her nephew, Julian Huxley, in April 1918, “and am beginning another—as usual! But I should be lost without it, and it is what my betters, George Sand and Balzac—and Scott!—did before me. Literature is an honourable profession, and I am no ways ashamed of it—as a profession. And indeed I feel that novels have a special function nowadays—when one sees the great demand for them as a délassement and refreshment. I wish with all my heart I could write a good detective—or mystery—novel! That is what the wounded and the tired love.”
But, side by side with this immense output of writing, Mrs. Ward never allowed the springs of thought to grow dry for lack of reading. The one advantage that she gained from her short nights—for her hours of sleep were rarely more and often less than six—was that the long hours of wakefulness in the early morning gave her time for the reading of many books and of poetry. “There is nothing like it for keeping the streams of life fresh,” she wrote to one of us. “At least that is my feeling now that I am beginning to grow old. All things pass, but thought and feeling! And to grow cold to poetry is to let that which is most vital in our being decay. I seem to trace in the men and women I see whether they keep their ideals and whether they still turn to imagination, whether through art or poetry. And I believe for thousands it is the difference between being happy and unhappy—between being ‘dans l’ordre’ or at variance with the world.”