The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream

by L. P. Gratacap

It was two days later than the events narrated above, that Leacraft and Thomsen, with Miss Tobit between them, sat in a crowded window on Hammersmith road watching for the enormous procession that had been slowly winding through London, with offices and services, halts and functions, as the King sadly led the departure of the English people from the Mother of Nations.

And the vast pageant approached. Down Kensington road its first glittering sallies were seen, the block of London police, a gorgeous cavalcade behind them of the peers of the realm, and in the immeasurable distance the shimmering parts, that looked stationary, and yet were coming on with ample speed. The blaring trumpets in the bands drew near, the street was cleared from curb to curb, the dense assemblage, covering stoop and roof, and leaning from every window became silent, the reiterated thud of the falling feet was heard, and in an instant the marching host was passing beneath them. The police and the peers of the realm passed in silence or with barely noticeable tokens of recognition. The peers presented a dazzling array, on superbly caparisoned horses, and in the regalia of their separate stations, with a bearing of unmistakable dignity, and possessing in a large measure the impress and gift of English manly beauty, they uttered the note of caste. Behind them came the marshalled Church, a wonderful picture; choirs of boys, surpliced and gowned, in open carriages, priests and bishops, in their robes of office, with flying standards of chapel, church or cathedral, golden lambs, crosses and crowns, figures and mottes on white silk or ruby silk, in wavering confusion, while hymns in wavering sopranos rose petulantly, or again with sustained vitality and strength. It appealed to the people strangely. They became very still, and faces contorted with sobs, or heads bowed to hide the unbidden tears for a few moments drew a veil of gloom over the splendid show. After the Church and the peers, a forest of equipages brought in view the marvellous display of the robed and crowned peeresses, and succeeding this shining cloud of matrons, that gave the touch of tenderness, the atmosphere of feminine companionship, and endurance, as if the mothers of England responded in this untoward hour with an embracing sympathy; after them came the King’s Household and the King, with outriders, equerries, and panoplied footmen, a miracle of ostentatious and ceremonial color. His equipage was drawn by ten jet black stallions, with diapers of the King’s colors on their backs, and a line of ancient guardsmen, with pikes in their hands, hedging them in, and a footman in sparkling white at the head of each horse. The King was himself robed in the gowns of his high estate, and was uncovered, the Crown resting on a cushion in front of him. A cheer rent the air, unfurled flags and fluttering handkerchiefs, turned a sea of faces into an ocean of white and red pennants. The King gravely acknowledged the salute and bowed to right and left. He was alone; the Queen had been enthroned among the peeresses. After the King came the Mayor of London, with all the antiquated grandeur of his office, coach, beef eaters, and all, and the people settled back again to their luncheons, which had been interrupted by the King.

Then came the troops. The display was exhaustive. It was conceived upon a scale of imperial magnificence, and it appealed in the succession of its gorgeous units to the historic sense, to that divine purpose of continuity which every Englishman instinctively appropriates to his race and nation. It represented the chronological development of the English army. As its sonorous length defiled before Leacraft, he saw an objective symbol—nay, the corporeal fact—of England’s growing power; regiment after regiment made a pictorial calendar from 1660 to 1900, and to the informed mind what a vista of martial glory, what a presentation of advance and retreat over the tractless wastes of the world, they made! It was a trampling chronicle of woe and fame, shame and satisfaction; it embodied the progress of ideas, the clash of political tendencies, the spreading domination of English rule; it was a panorama of battles, the tide of victory, the ebbing terrors of defeat; it reflected the pages of political designs, political subterfuge, political confusion; the music that swelled from its ranks now sent the long waves of its solemn processional melody through the thrilled spectators, now in limpid folk-songs, quivered delightfully in their ears, and now again summoned them to their feet with the stately and pious invocation of the nation’s hymn.

The scarlet uniforms of the First Life Guards passed, and Maestricht, Boyne, the Peninsular, and Waterloo, flashed in view—the regiment which was raised in Holland by King Charles the Second, and was composed of eighty gentlemen, whose sobriquet of the “cheeses,” along with other Life Guards, had been acquired from the contemptuous refusal of their veterans to serve in them when remodelled, because they were no longer composed of gentlemen, but of cheesemongers.

Again, the Second Life Guards revived the stained memory of the Stuarts, its own exile in the Netherlands, its return with the restoration; and its sea green facings pleasantly restored for a moment the face of the injured Queen Caroline. Here were the Royal Horse Guards, that inherited, or at least might claim the virtues of the Parliamentary army, which fought with dogmas at the ends of their pike-staffs, and convictions in their hearts. Now passed the First Dragoon Guards, that carried on its proud records the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Oudenarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709, Fontenoy in 1745, Waterloo in 1815, and Pekin in 1860, though to Leacraft’s sensitive mind the last was an inscription of disgrace. The beating hoofs of the “Queen’s Bays,” the Second Dragoon Guards, hurried the reminiscent admirer back to Lucknow and the Indian Mutiny. The nodding plumes of the Prince of Wales, with the Rising Sun, and the Red Dragon which came in view with the Third Dragoon Guards, unfailingly recalled to the custodians of English military renown, that the regiment captured the standard and kettle drums of the Bavarian Guards at the Battle of Ramilies. Trampling on the heels of their horses, the lordly “Blue Horse” defiled past, and the Fifth Dragoon Guards, which supported the vital legend, “Vestigia nulla retrorsum,” and which captured four standards at the Battle of Blenheim. Still the endless lines advanced, wavered, stood still, and again with rattling and shivering harness, passed. Now it was the Second Dragoons, the Scotch Greys, raised in Scotland, and older than any other dragoons in the British army, that started the furious applause, an ovation not unintelligently bestowed—for it was they who captured the colors of the French at Ramilies, and their standards at Dettingen. Now it was the “Black Dragoons,” the Sixth, on its glistening horses—once part of the Inniskilling forces, and still bearing as its crest the Castle of Inniskilling; now the Eighth Hussars, whose Protestant fealty had made their founders defenders of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, and who, with signal power, captured forty-four stands of colors and seventy-two guns at the Battle of Leswarree. Now the Fifteenth Hussars, who bore upon their helmets the dazzling inscription, “Five Battalions of French defeated and taken by this Regiment, with their Colors, and nine pieces of cannon, at Emsdorf, 16th of July, 1760.” Swelling hearts greeted the Grenadier Guards, rich in the legacy of the fame of the defeated French Imperial Guards.

Here were the Dublin Fusileers—the “Green Linnets,” the “Die Hards”—the East Surries—the West Yorks—and Devons, who had been part of that indiscriminate blunder and glory—the Boer War.

And now the infantry, in closing ranks, unrolled the endless phalanxes. Where regiments, as entire units, were absent, companies took their places, and English cheers saluted the swinging standards. The Thirty-fifth, which took the Royal Roussillon French Grenadiers at the Battle of Quebec—the Thirty-fourth, which impregnably covered the retreat from Fontenoy—the Thirty-ninth, which defended Gibraltar in 1780, and captured the insurgents’ guns and standards at Maharajpore, in 1843, along with the Fortieth—the Forty-second, with the red heckle in its bonnets, to commemorate its capture of the French standards of the “Invincible Legion,” in 1801, as well as for its distinguished ardor in the Battle of Guildermalsen, in 1795, and the “Little Fighting Toms” stirred the crowds, and even to those who regarded the pageant with glances of bitterness, as the hollow mask of a cruel abdication, even to their glassy stare, this epic review brought a momentary gleam of gratitude and pride.

Here was the Forty-sixth, whose colonel, with the English nonchalence which always wins so enduring a regard with Englishmen, in spite of a kind of artifice of mere stubbornness in it, preached a sermon to his men, under a heavy fire, about the Lacedemonians and their discipline—and which, at least to an American, awoke only hateful memories—and here the Fiftieth, “The Blind Half Hundred,” who fought with damaged eyes in Egypt, and who shone resplendent with courage and gallant sacrifice at Vimiera—Ah! and here was the Fifty-seventh—“the Die Hards”—which had thirty bullets through the King’s colors, and only one officer out of twenty-four, and one hundred and sixty-eight men out of five hundred and eighty-four left standing at Albuera. The people shouted and stormed, an avalanche of flags suddenly sprang up over the walled street, and at points showers of flowers and bags of fruit descended in a tornado of delight. Surely, if Englishmen had such blood in them, the nation would yet live.

Here were the men from India, the regiments of the Seventy-third, the Seventy-fourth, wearing the badge of the “elephant,” the Seventy-sixth, too, that unfurled its victorious pennants at the Battle of Leswarree, and the Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth, and on, on, straight in the line, brave squadrons, whose illusive recognition in a numeral, connoted glorious deeds, defiant strength, the prodigal powers of the brave. The thundering salutations drowned the rollicking music of “Clear the Way,” the cry at Barrosso, which with fife and drum announced the approach of the Eighty-seventh—the Prince of Wales’ own Irish—and the Eighty-eighth, the Connaught Rangers, whose more loving sobriquet was “The Devil’s Own Connaught Boys,” from its gallantry in action, and its irregularities in quarters. Uniform and vanity with reciprocal enhancement made the Argyleshire Highlanders and the Gordon Highlanders and the Sutherland Highlanders an envious spectacle to manly youth, a vision of ingratiating heroes to feminine beauty. Again India sprang back to memory, perhaps not without, to souls of Leacraft’s fibre, inflicting some stinging stabs of remorse, when the One Hundred Foot, the One Hundred and Second Foot, “the Lambs,” the One Hundred and Third Foot, “the Old Toughs,” the One Hundred and Fourth Foot, and Seventh, and Eighth, and Ninth marched past, with ear shattering dim, in resplendent waves of color, and expressing the English temperament of reserved force, and intelligent determination, with, to the more analytical observer, a suggestion of brutal power in their sturdy and inelastic tramp.

And then came the people of the Earth, from the ends of the world they came; the wild, the exotic, the uncouth, the suave, and treacherous, the mystic, the benign, the terrible, in all garbs, in vestures of wool and silk and cotton, in no small numbers without much vesture. It was a web of hues, a carpet of figures and dyes, a lithe and sinuous and portentous living worm, each zone of its immense length, as it swayed and twisted and halted, and then slipped on with ludicrous indecision and disorder, made up of races, ethnic blotches or flowers from the round prolific globe. The army had been history, the procession now became psychological, a review of temperaments, endowments, climates, proclivities and talents; nay it wore the aspect of a zoological medley, a vast menagery of animal products, that with growl and scream, trumpetings or fluttering wings gave to the congeries of men and women who walked among them, or with them, the sentiment and resemblance of the parade of the beasts before Adam. As if with England’s dislodgement, the shaken countries of the earth emptied out their populations in her wake, disturbed in all their resting places by her calamity; spilled from their hidden corners into the shining light of day, and bringing with them the animals of the fields and the birds of the air. And the air itself was cruelly brilliant. The severity of outlines, the sharp shadows, the nipping frostiness in the shades, where the sun was not found, told the weary story that England had lost her climate, and was swept back in a normal alignment with the cold and feeble countries of the pole.