The weeks of Michael’s passing witnessed the passing of the age to which she belonged, for they were those in which the Great War began. It is clear that Michael Field, in the noble unity of her life and work, represented something that was finest in the dying era; and yet she was, in certain respects, aloof from that Victorian Age, and in advance of it. It is profoundly moving to see how, even in extremity, her genius remained true to itself. It was so true, indeed, that in her pitiful, scanty record of those days one may catch a glimpse, through her winging spirit, of the moments of greatness to which the spirit of England rose in that crisis.
She was desolated at the thought of the killing, the suffering, the destruction of beauty. But she too felt the stimulus which the vastness of the danger gave to the national spirit, and she longed to serve. “I want to live now the times are great,” she wrote to Mrs Berenson. “There are untended wounds to think of—;that makes me ashamed”—;ashamed, she meant, of the tendance that her own wound was receiving. Again, on August 13th:
But Michael cannot join with Jenny the cook. “What news of the war, Jenny?” ... “Good news; fifty thousand Germans killed!”
She followed with desperate anxiety the calamitous events in Belgium, writing on August 28th:
I am suffering from the folly of our English troops being wasted, and making fine, orderly retreats.... Namur gave me a shock from which I cannot recover.
And finally, on September 19th:
Father Prior mourns Louvain even worse than Bernard—;the destruction of the precious beauty. Tell me, is Senlis safe?
After that day little or nothing more was written. Every morning she rose at seven o’clock, and, assisted by her nurse, dressed and was wheeled in a chair through the Priory park to hear Mass at the chapel. On September 23rd the nurse wrote at Michael’s bidding to Miss Fortey:
Miss Bradley is anxious about you: she fears you may be ill. She is frightfully weak to-day, but had a splendid night and is very happy.
On September 26th Michael for the first time did not appear in the chapel at her usual early hour. Father Vincent, seeing her vacant place, had a sudden certainty of the end. “Consummatum est” rushed to his lips as he ran down the grassy slopes to the house. He found Michael stretched on the floor of her room, dead, with her head on the bosom of the kneeling nurse. She had sighed her last breath one moment before. She had succeeded in dressing ready to go to Mass, but the effort to step into the carriage had been too much. She sank down and died quietly in the nurse’s arms.