“One can always go back!” she returned, though her sigh for all the distant sweetness had echoed his, “either to my dear Wraye Rest or your own peculiar Eden of Wraye Abbey.”
“Taking our respective loads of aims and ambitions and responsibilities with us,” said Bertham. “My badly-housed Military Invalid Pensioners for whom I want tight roofs, and dry walls, and comfortable beds. My Sandhurst Cadets, trussed up in absurd trappings, and harassed with rules as trumpery—hide-bound with conditions quite as detrimental to health as their cut-and-dried discipline, and innumerable supererogatory belts, straps, and buckles. My Regimental Schools, where illiterate soldiers and their wives are to learn to read and write and cipher; and my Infants’ Classes, where the soldier’s children may be taught as well. My Improved Married Quarters, which should—but do not, more’s the pity!—occupy a separate block in every Barracks in the Kingdom, where the women and their men may live in decent privacy, and not under conditions not at all distantly recalling—to our shame! and the Red Tapeism that preserves these conditions in their unadorned and ancient ugliness ought to blush the redder for it!—the primitive promiscuities of the Stone Age. With a distinct bias in favor of that period!”
His handsome face was bitter and dark with anger; his voice, though barely raised above the level of ordinary fireside chat, rang and vibrated with passionate indignation.
“It has been borne in on me, Ada, in God knows how many hours of weariness and bitter disappointment, that our Peninsular triumphs—achieved in what we are accustomed to call the good old days—are a heavy clog upon our advancement as a nation now, and a cloud upon our eyes. They were not good old days, Ada, as windbaggy orators like to call them; they were bad old days, inhuman old days, cruel old days, when Napoleon Bonaparte possessed France upon a bridal bed of bloody corpses; and ragged, underfed, untaught, unsheltered soldiers upheld, in what neglect, what misery and suffering, you and I can barely realize, amidst Famine and Slaughter and Pestilence and Devastation hideous and indescribable, the traditional glory of the British nation, the strength and fire and power of British Arms. Let us have done with the pride of those days! Let us cease to boast of them! Let us prove our advancement in Civilization, Humanity, and Science by no longer treating these our fellow-creatures as human pawns in a devilish game of chess, or as thoughtless children treat toy-soldiers; to be moved hither and thither at will, swept off the board when necessary, and jostled promiscuously into dark and stuffy boxes until we are pleased to call for them again! Since Great Britain owes so much to her Army and her Navy, let her treat the men who serve her by land and sea with respect, and decent consideration. And in so far as Governments and Administrations of the old days ignored their rights to honest, humane, and Christian usage, let us have done with those damned old days forever, and while the life is red in us, hurry on the new!”
“They cannot come too quickly!” she said, giving back his earnest look. “Surely by raising the moral tone, cultivating the mental faculties, and improving the social condition of the private soldier, he is nerved and tempered, not softened and unstrung.”
“As it is we owe him honor,” said Bertham, “that, with so many disadvantages as he labors under to-day, and in the face of the bad example too often set him as to moral conduct and neglect of duty by his superiors, he is what we know him to be!”
“Ah, that is true—most true!” she answered, breaking the silence in which she had sat listening to the silvery voice of which even Bertham’s enemies admitted the singular charm. “May the day soon dawn when we shall see him what we hope he will become!”
“There will be a dark night before its dawning,” Bertham returned, and his smile had sadness in its very brilliancy. “For England must lose much to win that more, be assured.”
He added as his look met hers, seeing the slight bewildered knitting of her eyebrows: