Blake.
I should now like to tell you something of our great ally, Russia, and of the gallant deeds performed by her soldiers in this war.
Valour does not belong to one nation more than to another, but each country, and this is rather a curious fact, has its own kind of valour. The British excel in what I should call the “forlorn hope”—the kind of valour that stood our soldiers in such fine stead at Mons, and during Sir John French’s magnificent retreat. The Marquis of Montrose embodied the spirit of England and this peculiar stoical type of valour when he wrote:
“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.”
The Briton never fears his fate too much to put it to the touch—that is why he generally gains it all!
Now the Russian has a singularly splendid kind of valour. It is the kind that faces certain death for love of country, with joy rather than with resignation. Never in the history of mankind was a finer thing done than the sailing of the Russian Fleet to certain doom, during the Russo-Japanese War. Every man, from admiral to stoker, knew of the fate awaiting him, and every man went cheerfully to the encounter for the sake of “Holy Russia.”
This courage of the Russians is part of their grand passion for romance, or what people now call idealism. A great many years ago a writer quaintly and truly wrote in Blackwood’s Magazine: “I have seen the unromantic drop like sheep under the rot of their calamities, while the romantic have been buoyant and mastered them.” So never let anyone laugh us out of being romantic. Too often those who try to do so are in the sad case of the fox who, having lost his tail, could not endure to see any other fox with one.