"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be tee-total till the end of the war."
"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost soul!"
My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long flight of stone steps that leads to the road above. On the top of the first flight I turned and looked after them. When they came opposite the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went resolutely past, down into the hollow. The two of them have probably resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."
I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed. It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised its queerness before. A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that lay twice a day under my feet—the problem of the Cities of the Plain. A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime hazy. Events stand out luridly and arrestingly. Here is one. I was in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out. All of a sudden there sounded the drum,
"Saying Come,
Freemen, come,
Ere your heritage be wasted! said the
quick alarming drum."
And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet. Mothers gave their sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God.
On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with men and horses, going out to fight and die. The hawsers were loosed. The steamer churned and backed and crept away. A girl stood near me crying softly. A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?" And she wiped her cheek with the moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I am not crying." And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into the drizzle and the haze. Weeks later I read how one man of that regiment—the regiment of my own county—killed another ... and a few days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl. He was not from the island, that man, and I know not who he is. His mother doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became a murderer under the fostering of the State.
Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with temptations. Away from the influence of mother and sister and sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did so. The Secretary of War made appeals to them. "Be sober," said he, "avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live." But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that you may disregard the noble advice my servant gives you." They came in their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call of their mother—clean and sober—and their mother opened the canteen for their benefit on the plain. Such a world as that dwelt in the imagination of Dean Swift—I never imagined that it could exist here and now. And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are we preparing for the men who are baring their breasts to the arrows, standing between us and death? When they come back, war-worn, to what will they return? To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children famished and neglected? Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice; is it for that that they have gone down into hell? Surely it cannot be for that! A wave has passed over us, raising us to the realisation of the higher values of things. Words live for us now which were dead yesterday. A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and the word Temperance has risen from the couch on which it lay dying, and it claims us for its own. Through it we can make the world know that we are worth fighting for—worth that the young, the strong, and the brave should take everything they hold dear—their ideals, their love, their little children unborn—and throw them into the trench, and there give themselves and their dreams to death for us. We must see to it that we are worthy the sacrifice.
***