Chapter Ten.
The Khaki Cult.
Twenty-four hours later Lewin Rodwell was standing upon the platform of the big Music Hall, in George Street, Edinburgh, addressing a great recruiting meeting.
The meeting, presided over by a well-known Scotch earl, had already been addressed by a Cabinet Minister; but when Rodwell rose, a neat, spruce figure in his well-fitting morning-coat, with well-brushed hair, and an affable smile, the applause was tremendous—even greater than that which had greeted the Minister.
Lewin Rodwell was a people’s idol—one of those who, in these times, are so suddenly placed high upon the pedestal of public opinion, and as quickly cast down.
A man’s reputation is made to-day and marred to-morrow. Rodwell’s rapid rise to fortune had certainly been phenomenal. Yet, as he had “made money in the City”—like so many other people—nobody took the trouble to inquire exactly how that money had been obtained. By beating the patriotic drum so loudly he stifled down inquiry, and the public now took him at his own valuation.
A glib and forceful orator, with a suave, persuasive manner, at times declamatory, but usually slow and decisive, he thrust home his arguments with unusual strength and power.
In repeating Lord Kitchener’s call for recruits, he pointed to the stricken fields of Belgium, recalling those harrowing scenes of rapine and murder, in August, along the fair valley of the Meuse. He described, in vivid language, the massacre in cold blood of seven hundred peaceful men, women and young children in the little town of Dinant-sur-Meuse, the town of gingerbread and beaten brass; the sack of Louvain, and the appalling scenes in Liège and Malines, at the same time loudly denouncing the Germans as “licentious liars” and the “spawn of Satan.” From his tongue fell the most violent denunciations of Germany and all her ways, until his hearers were electrified by his whole-souled patriotism.