To whom through life his glove was thrown,
Would know a sister spirit to embrace.”
You must never think of the past as if it were something quite different from the present. In some ways this great war brings us much nearer the glorious old England which was always at war in Flanders, as Belgium was then called.
Those old heroical conflicts of long ago produced some wonderful books. Let us hope that the time will come when some great writer of the future will create as vividly real a man as Sterne’s Uncle Toby.
After being wounded at the siege of Namur, Uncle Toby spent his peaceful old age in following Marlborough’s army on his bowling-green. Sterne describes how the old man set up model fortifications with batteries, saps, ditches, and palisadoes, and so, with the help of maps and books as well as of Corporal Trim, his soldier servant, he was able to fight over again, not only his old battles but those that were still going on.
The Uncle Toby of the future will set up miniature pieces of artillery and tiny trenches in place of the batteries and palisadoes of the past. Let us hope, however, that he will be as noble-hearted and kindly a man as his famous predecessor.
When you are older, I hope you will read and re-read this wonderful book, which is called “Tristram Shandy.” I will only add here Uncle Toby’s defence of Britain at war, because it applies so well to the present War with Germany.
“What is War,” he asked, “what is it, when fought as ours has been, upon Principles of Liberty and Principles of Honour, what is it but the Getting together of Quiet and Harmless People with their Swords in their Hands, to keep the Ambitious and Turbulent within Bounds?”
I cannot help feeling rather sorry that most of you will not remember what the British Army was like before the days of khaki. I am rather sorry for myself that I cannot remember the time when our troops wore the occasionally beautiful, the always quaint, and the sometimes grotesque uniforms which you see in old pictures and engravings. At the Naval and Military Tournament every year some of the old picturesque uniforms and the curious old drill are revived. I remember, in particular, how Sir Mark Sykes with wonderful skill brought to life again before us in this way a company of the famous “Green Howards.”
Not much more than a hundred years ago, soldiers all wore pigtails, but both officers and men hated them, and when at last they were abolished, in 1808, some of the regiments actually made bonfires of their pigtails while others buried them!