The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere

by M. A. Stobart

The camp was asleep; and silence was only broken by the croaking of bull-frogs in a mud pond, half a mile away. There was no moon, and dark clouds hid the stars. For those who kept watch, the whole world was in darkness, except that at intervals, almost as regular as pulse-beats, flashes of summer lightning illumined the inside of the death tent; the camp bed, with its still and silent occupant; the figure bending low, and whispering in prayer, snatches of "Our Father," his hand in hers—companions since boy and girlhood, now to part for ever? Oh, no! Their sons were at the front (one of them has now joined his mother). Could they, I wondered, feel that this was happening?

I sat a little apart from the other watchers, and prayed—not now that she should live—life seemed too small a thing to pray for, but that our souls should be illumined to see the meaning of death. Another flash of lightning, and I saw that there is no such thing as death. Death is a misunderstanding of the mind. The body does not die, for the body has never lived; the body is matter, and inert. Life is a force, and forces do not die. The body is the habitation of the life-force, but the quitting by the life-force of the body, is not death. Nothing has died, since nothing has ceased to live. The life-force cannot die, or it would not be a life-force. The body cannot die—it has never lived; yes, yes—death is a misnomer. The word death, together with the sister words, sunrise and sunset, all perpetuate ancient ignorance. The sun does not rise, the sun does not set, and—the body does not die. Why then talk of death as though it were an ending? It is a transference of life-force from the seen to the unseen. As soon as matter begins to disintegrate, the life-force passes on—that's all. I understood.

In the early morning, as a gust of wind swept through the tent—her tent—the life-force passed; in our stupid, misleading, blundering language, Mrs. Dearmer—mother, wife, poet, artist, dramatist, and last, but not least, camp orderly—was dead. But I knew that the life-force had carried with it all that was real; it had taken to the Beyond Land the idea, the logos, the norm, the soul, of which the body that was left, was only a graven image.

Again a public funeral, but this time—a graceful compliment by Dr. Dearmer—the service was to be conducted by the priests of the Greek Church, officiating in their own cathedral. A chapel in which to lay her, with altar, was improvised in the doctors' reading tent, and was filled with wreaths and crosses of beautiful flowers, sent by friends and sympathisers.

The military attachés, medical and military officials, public representatives, members of other units, and general sympathisers, assembled at the chapel tent at 5 p.m. Four priests, with long hair and gorgeously embroidered robes, three of blue and one of red, said preliminary prayers round the altar. Strange that when men symbolise religion they adopt the garb of women?

The Crown Prince's band played whilst the coffin was lifted to a hearse-carriage—generally reserved for dead officers—and the procession, in the same order as before, moved slowly across the racecourse to the road, and on to the cathedral. Alternately with the music of the band, a choir of men and women from Kragujevatz, sang beautiful funeral anthems. We had persuaded Dr. Dearmer to evade the procession and the cathedral service, and, with Dr. Marsden, to join us at the grave-side.

Again the same frenzied clanging of discordant bells greeted our arrival at the cathedral; but inside God's house, harmony and reverence reigned.

The coffin was placed on trestles in the centre of the nave; the mourners, as before, standing at a little distance all around. In Greek churches it is the custom always to stand, at all services; there are no chairs, no kneeling cushions, no compromises with comfort.

The service lasted an hour; the heat was terrific, and I was thankful we were not mid-Victorian women, or we should have had sensational fainting scenes. These would have spoilt the service, which was extremely beautiful; more sympathetic and compassionate than the cold, callous, burial prayers of our English ritual, with its theories of dust and ashes.