XI
BRITISH ARE BRAVE IN SORROW
THE iron has certainly pierced the heart of British homes, and is entering deeper and deeper every day; but braver and more determined people do not live. The time is at hand when American homes may look forward to the same destiny. Daily, almost hourly, I have been brought into touch with the sorrows of British hearts, and the heroism. Perhaps some of their stories may strike responsive chords in American breasts and tune them for the same high courage.
He was a tall bearded Australian. We were sitting together, after breakfast, in the "lounge" of a London hotel. He was in the uniform of an officer of the Red Cross. We fell into conversation, and I naturally called him "doctor."
"No," said he, "I am not a physician, but a plain business man." Then he told me how it all came about. His son was in the army, had been wounded at the Dardanelles; and the father had come all the way to watch over him. The lad recovered, rejoined his battalion and was killed at the Somme. "Then," said the father, "there was nothing for me to do but to stay here. Oh, yes, I have another son, and a daughter, but why should I go back? He was all in all to me, my comrade, my best friend. He was such a cheery, amiable boy, and he loved me as a companion better than any other. We were more like brothers. So I joined up, in the medical corps, to do what I could among the wounded lads in the hospitals." Then we compared photographs of our sons, a very common procedure over here.
I fell to thinking, though I did not tell him of it, about two Australian boys I had seen on the battlefield of the Somme, about a quarter of a mile from the famous sugar factory. They were busy about something at the side of the crater filled road. They hailed us and told us it was no good trying to get through with our motor, so we alighted and went over to talk with them. Then we saw what they were engaged upon. It was a slab of sandstone; and they were carving with their jack-knives, in beautiful regular letters an "in memoriam" for a comrade whose young head lay somewhere in the storm-tossed earth close at hand. Officers and all, we stood there silent, rather awestruck; and, though we said nothing, afterwards our thoughts all went back to that far away shore where only a few months before, no doubt, for these soldiers were beardless boys, they had played in field and forest, in country lane, or rolling surf, or city street, with that other boy hero, who lay asleep under the fast greening earth. Yes, birds sing over those battlefields. I heard skylark and thrush above that young lad's grave. I heard them and saw them, even, in the smoke and thunder of the guns.
There was a young lad at work in the kitchen of the Y. M. C. A. canteen. He was in "civics," but there were gold stripes on his sleeve, the little gold stripes that tell the story of deep danger and suffering. They are not given unless the wound puts one into hospital for a prolonged stay. A closer glance betrayed the scars in face and neck; but he was such a slip of a boy to be a veteran, disabled, unfit. I made inquiries and found he was not yet seventeen. He had enlisted in the navy, expecting, of course, to be sent to sea; but in the press of affairs and the shortage of men, marines were sent into the trenches and he was among them. He got his, and got it badly. He was recovering, however, and, anxious to serve, was at work washing cups and cooking until the time came when he could go back. They will not, of course, let him go again into trench work until he is nineteen.
"They need such a lot of loving," said a fat, middle aged matron in a hospital to me, half apologetically, the other evening as she came bustling a bit late into the canteen. "You see, some of these lads have never been away from home before; and there is a world of love in their homes; we don't realize, I think, how, in the poorer homes, there is so much love. I sometimes think the poorer they are the more there is. Anyway, they need a lot, and I try to give it to them."
Most of these had come back from Salonika, Egypt, East Africa, with fevers, especially malaria. Some had been in hospitals months, nearly or quite a year. They did their best to sing and cheer, but their faces were drawn and yellow and their brows damp. One lad looked infinitely sad in the second row. I could not make him out. Then they told me that he was deaf from fever, and had been so for months. Of course, he could not sing and he would shake his head now and then and wrinkle his forehead. One fine young Canadian, with hollow cheeks, I was talking to, and asked him to come and sit nearer the front. He shook his head and smiled and pointed to the window. His heart goes back on him and he needed air.
One night, in a hospital, while the singing was most uproarious, I noticed a big, burly patient take a smaller comrade on his back and carry him out. Afterwards the nurses said the smaller one had had all the fun he could stand for the present. He was going hot and cold by turns, and chilling. Was he shot through the legs or spine? Oh, no, no wound at all, only shell-shock; but he could not walk, hardly speak. Months some of them are like that, no wound, but loss of memory, speech, hearing, even motion of any kind sometimes.
On a Sunday night I was speaking in a suburban chapel, in London, when I saw a young soldier lying flat in a long basket upon wheels rolled up beside the pulpit. By and by it was announced that Private So-and-So would sing. A little plain woman, his wife, they told me, stepped up to the recumbent boy—he was no more than a boy—raised him to a sitting posture, put pillows at his back and sat down at the piano. Then he sang in a sweet, clear tenor an old gospel song, simple and unostentatious, "And I shall See Him Face to Face." They afterwards told me a machine gun ball had lodged in his spine; surgeons all feared to operate. He was paralyzed from the waist down. One surgeon said if the boy was willing he would take a chance. When he talked with the patient the latter said, "Well, doctor, I am not in your hands, but the good God's. Do as you think best." The bullet was removed, but whether the lad will ever walk again nobody knows except Him in whose hands he is.
An old dock laborer, his hair white as snow, took me aside the other day after a meeting at a certain port. I had made some reference to our sons. He only wanted to tell me about his own, his only boy, who lay out yonder at Bethune. "His grave is marked, too. My nephew saw it. I shall go there, of course, when the war is done. I'd a great deal rather be lying there now in his place if I could. Reconciled? Oh, yes, sir, I'm growing reconciled. After all, it was a noble death for the boy, and he'll miss all the trouble of this world. He went away so happy and brave." Everywhere I see something of that father love that would rather take the son's place if it could. Much is said about mother love, and it is quite the most beautiful thing in the world, but there is something to be said, too, for father love, for it has little to say for itself.
In a home of wealth and luxury, we sat talking, when a man of sixty made the first reference to his boy. I was wondering if there were any sons. I saw two daughters. When it came it was about like this: "That was before Harry was killed." There was an involuntary movement of hand to forehead, and a wrinkling across the brow, then the conversation went on.
Another little short Scotchman with white mustache, a manager in a great shell factory, was showing us through. By and by, when he and I were alone, some reference to sons fell from my lips. "Ay," said he quickly, "I have a son out there, he is under the ground—this way gentlemen!"
Do not think, however, that they are all under the ground. One lovely white-haired woman in a canteen hut told me of five sons she has given to her country. All have been in the service. One, the youngest, lost his right arm, the eldest is a mighty pilot in the flying corps. "Oh, yes, I'm proud of him. He is a flight commander, yes, captain is his rank. He was home on leave last week. He has just shot down his sixth plane and killed the eighth Hun. He is a fine lad!"
Another woman in a neighboring hut told how her son had had his twenty-second operation, and she felt sure he would now get well. She had just been to see him in the hospital, on the South Coast. "He was an officer, you see; and was hit in the leg below the knee. His servant tried to carry him back to the trenches, when the Germans saw them and turned a machine gun on them. The servant was killed and my son received nine bullets in his back. Then he lay out five days and five nights in a shell hole." I have known of wounded men lying out six days, subsisting on their emergency rations of hard tack and bully beef and a canteen of water. These long waits for help are not at all uncommon. Then she continued: "Oh, no, it was not the wounds in his back that gave all the trouble. They easily got those bullets out, but it was the leg. Gangrene set in and they have been amputating a little more and a little more, and it seemed as if they could never check it. Really, I believe a little American nurse saved him, for after the last operation, as the doctors stood about, she said, If this was out in France they'd use so and so.' What's that?' said the chief surgeon, sharply. She repeated her remark. The surgeon said he'd never heard of it, asked if she had the formula and knew how to use it. She did, 'and my son has been improving right along.'"
I'm sure I don't know whose conduct was the finer in this case, the nurse's or the doctor's.
All the heroes are not in the army, either. I saw one four years old, or thereabouts, standing by the trainside with his mother the other day. Dad was already in his seat and his kit was in the rack, and the train was about to bear him back to the front. The mother was tearless and brave, as every one of these English women are, but it was just a bit too much for the little four-year-old. He would look at his dad, then look away and choke and swallow, and catch the sob half-way between breast and throat. He would make believe to be interested in baggage trucks and passing people, and his hand worked convulsively in his mother's, but he simply could not look into that compartment and play the man, so he did not trust himself to look. I have seen no finer bravery and self-control in this brave island.
A tall, red-headed, freckled, angular young fellow whispered in my ear the other night as the men filed by to shake hands. The gold stripes were on his arm, two of them, though evidently he was fit again, built like a race horse. This is what he whispered:
"I had made up my mind, sir, to pop off"—vernacular for suicide—"I've been out to France twice, and hit twice; now I'm about ready to go again, and I thought I couldn't stand it; but after this meeting I've decided to stick. Good-night!"
He hurried away in the crowd. You cannot tell by the faces of these men where the sensitive spots are. Some that look most unresponsive have the livest and most quivering hearts, so it never does to run the risk of a cold and formal meeting; better give every one of them a God bless you, and God be with you, or good luck, my son. You never know which one needs it most.
Now the last little story of this kind is the tale of a twilight in a little room back of a hut. The old man, leader of that hut, was seventy-five if a day. Twilights come late in England in the summertime, even as they come late in life, sometimes. We two were alone, and he brought out his little treasures, all he has. One was a photograph in a frame of a fair-haired, open faced, handsome youth. "My son," said he. Someone else told me the mother had died from the shock when the boy was killed. "My only son. Nothing was ever found of him, except the pocket of his tunic, and the Testament that was in it. See where the shell cut the book and marked this passage?"
Then he drew out his spectacles to examine it again. "You see, I only got this pocket and Testament last week." Sure enough, the fragment of shell had torn through and marked, "Henceforth there is laid up for you a crown of righteousness which the King, the righteous judge, shall give you." I saw those same words in the window of a great cathedral to-day, under the figure of Chinese Gordon, the most daring and most selfless Englishman in modern history.
It was little that the shell should have marked this one particular passage or any one of a hundred others. The old man would have found something significant somewhere. He couldn't help it. It gave him comfort in the twilight alone with his treasures, alone. Absolutely alone in the world in his last years as he sought with the feeble remnant of his days to lend aid to other people's boys, he who no longer had a boy of his own.
It is not all so dark, however, for many go through unscathed. I wish, for instance, I could give you a picture of the young flying corps sergeant, just going up for his lieutenancy, whom I talked with last night. This is considered the most dangerous but most enviable branch of the service. Smooth, slender and supple, he stood there, flicking his puttees with his swagger stick; his little fore-and-aft cap that gives such a dare-devil look to these lads of the air, not hiding at all, but rather emphasizing, the sleek and shining brightness of his hair. He was scarcely twenty-one, yet he said, "I have been flying, sir, for two years and a half all up and down the lines and never had a scratch. Oh, yes, machine gun bullets have pierced my planes. I counted two hundred holes once. And one day a shell passed through the body of the plane and ripped off the back of my seat, but I scarcely knew it had happened, felt the plane lunge and vibrate, that was all. You see the shell was on its upward trajectory, and going very fast. I saw one of our boys fighting a Hun when his plane took fire. He knew he was gone, so he just took a plunge at the Hun and rammed him and both of them went whirling down in a stream of fire. They have taken me off the firing line, though I'm perfectly fit, and put me on home defense. They say that two years is long enough, though I have not lost my nerve and my heart is unaffected. I'm sorry, I wish I were back at the front. People in England don't take the war half seriously enough. I'd rather be out there."