LAND AND WATER 
May k:z, lyijj. 
THE HAPPY WARRIORS. 
By J. D. SYMON. 
IN this war of surprises, itself so great a surprise to the 
unready majority, the private soldier has come into 
liis own in a way that not even his growing recogni- 
tion during tlio South African War seemed to fore- 
tell. It is little more than twenty years since Kipling 
could write with bitter irony : 
" It's ' Tommy this ' and ' Tommy that ' and ' Tommy, go 
away ' ; 
But it's ' Thank j-ou, Mister Atkius,' when the baud begins 
to play." 
And the balladist went on, not without truth, to enlarge 
upon the private's unacceptability in public places, which he 
summed up in the ugly phrase, " Chuck him out, the brute ! " 
That scorn of the common soldier was a legacy from the 
bad old days of the Press Gang. Our grandfathers 
and great-grandfathers, in spite of their debt to 
the fighting man, thought no shame of their dismal old 
saying that the rank aud file of the Army was the " off- 
scourings of the earth." The feeling lingered on through 
piping times of peace, until the author of " Soldiers Three " 
and the " Barrack Room Ballads " pulled us up sharp and 
showed us in Learoyd, Ortheris, and Mulvaney, the modern 
Porthos, Athos, aud D'Artagnan (the exquisite Aramis has 
no counterpart here), the gold that we were trampling under 
foot. The movement was distinct from the outset. Almost 
as soon as the new point of view had been indicated a song in 
one of the earliest of the musical comedies ran riot through 
the country. Every barrel-organ and every whistling errand- 
boy united in the praise of " Tommy, Tommy Atkins." It was 
a poor thing of a song, jejune and spasmodic, not to be com- 
pared for a moment to the verse that inspired its sentiment ; 
but it did its work, and before its Cockney accents, verbal and 
musical (for there is a Cockney accent in music as well as in 
words), had been quite forgotten, South Africa went ablaze, 
and the public shouldered for the first time with real purpose 
and conviction its duty to the soldier in the field. In the 
Crimea, it is true, after many scandalous initial blunders, a 
great work had been accomplished; but the soldier of the 
'fifties was still, in the popular view, a fellow who risked his 
none too valuable life for sixpence a day. It was his job, like 
any other man's, and there the matter ended. No man cared 
overmuch for the soldier's soul or took the trouble to realise 
that he had one. And his body did not cause much concern 
until it had been wounded. 
To-day we have changed all that ; and the change has re- 
acted with the happiest results upon the soldier himself. Ho 
has always been a cheerful being, even in the times when he 
had least encouragement he was a mad wag, but his present 
light-heartedness is a finer thing. He showed it from the 
first moment of his landing, when his daft, inconsequential, 
and quite unwarlike ditty about an Irishman adrift in 
London won the heart cf La Belle France and atoned to her 
for the loss of the expected red-coat. Since then a new 
development of the happy warrior has risen into view, an 
amiable by-product of the altered personnel of our new 
armies. A phrase, old as the times of Gustavus Adolphus, has 
come back to its own. We forget that the word " private " is 
an abbreviation. It has become almost a noun. Historically, 
it is an adjective, and its originally attendant noun is full of 
meaning for us to-day. No; it is not " soldier," as the 
majority suppose. Let us hear what that doughty free-lance 
and former follower of Gustavus, Captain Dugald Dalgetty, 
has to say on the subject: " My lord, I found myself trail- 
ing a pike as a private gentleman under old Sir Ludovick 
Leslie, where I learned the rules of service so tightly that I 
will not forget them in a hurry." And again, " Sir, I was 
six years first private gentleman of the company and three 
years lance-speisade." Promotion came "dooms slow" to 
Dalgetty, partly because the " private gentleman " had nice 
ideas of his own dignity and " disdained to receive a halberd." 
This by the way. Our present point is the originally 
honourable position of the rank and file and the wonderful 
return to that gentlemanly ideal in the bearing and character 
of the men who have flocked, in what numbers we are not 
told, to answer Lord Kitchener's call. They are the blithest 
lads that you could meet on a spring holiday, if a Words- 
worthian parody be permissible; happy warriors, indeed, and 
in their chance intercourse with the civilian world most 
gentle and courteous comrades of the way. Tliere is no better 
tonic than an hour, or hours, for choice, spent with them in 
the railway carriage. Fun, as refreshing as it is clean, goes 
rollicking from side to side, and their laughter, that 
revealing thing, is heart-whole and wholesome. The diverse 
elemeuts that go to the composition of the new forces have 
produced a curious amalgam. The man of little education 
and the man of much education act and react on one another 
with the happiest results and often with unexpected effect. 
The talk that ranges over pay and accoutrements, the peculi- 
arities of comrades and of the powers that be, sometimes takes 
a higher flight, and one is reminded of that young Scottish 
sailol-, a brother of Robert Ferguson, the poet, who 
discussed with so much knowledge and insight technical 
questions of verse-making. Only the other evening, in 
the last train, I fell among artillerymen returning 
in force after a few hours' leave to the pretty village of which 
they are at present the everlasting wonder and delight. They 
were all delightfully young, full of " push and go " enough 
to satisfy even the Chancellor himself, alive to every passing 
humour, and still schoolboys at heart. Every type was there 
— the ex-clerk, the Board school boy, the public school boy, 
the man who had gone further than tlie public school before 
his release from tutors and governors. At first the talk was 
professionally critical, of careless driving on somebody's part 
and an overturned limber, wherein lurked jokes hidden from 
the layman; there was sport, too, of some non-com. whose 
speciality, amounting to a craze, was extra stable orderlies. 
But the plum of the talk came with a reference to the 
battery's tame poet. Whether the bard was of the company 
one could not discover. If he were, he restrained his blushes 
nobly. He had reason to blush. Hearty admiration of his 
powers did not prevent ruthless quotation for the ears of all 
and sundry of his priceless lines. As a lampoonist he seemed 
to shine. Most of his couplets were strictly personal and 
carried a sting in their tail, but they were never coarse or ill- 
natured. The rhymes to difficult names clinked ingeniously. 
If not always perfect, they were at least adequate to the pur- 
pose and so far promising of immortality that they seemed to 
bear endless repetition. But the short epigram, it appeared, 
did not exhaust the powers of genius. The corporal in the 
corner had recently caught the sacer rates in the awful act of 
composition. In less than no time the poet had slung off 
something of almost epic dimensions. " And jolly good versa 
it is, too; not a bit broken in the what d'ye call it? " " The 
rhythm," interposed a gunner with the indefinable hall-mark 
of the university upon him. " Yes, the rhythm; that's the 
bally thing I mean. It just streams from him " 
"As fast as he can put it down!" said another 
voice. And therewith they praised their famous man 
once more and bandied his glowing lines about until 
their station came past the window and it was time 
to say good-night. Singing, they left the station, and so to 
billets and to bed. Enviable fellows ! If the young shirkers 
knew what they are missing they would be with you to-day. 
The songs may have nothing to do with war; perhaps our 
happy warriors themselves do not consciously realise why 
it is that they cannot keep from singing at every ' ' march 
at ease." But it is the light-heartedness of men who 
have found a work lying to their hand and are doing 
it with their might. Equally determined are those over-age 
men who fill the ranks of the volunteer training corps. They 
have not the younger men's blessed sense of certain usefulness, 
but, on the chance, they mean to be ready in their limited way. 
And the greybeards, too, count kin with the happy warriors 
and have still a good song left in them to cheer the route 
march. But it is the day of the young men, and such 
young men I Already the enemy knows that the 
tale of guttersnipe recruits is a lie. We have got 
the very best. Salute them as they go singing by. The 
toll is fearful and will be heavier still, but they do not think 
of that, for they are, as never before in our history, " gentle- 
men unafraid." These notes began with Kipling; with 
Kipling, it seems, they are to end. Again a phrase of his, 
taken from a different context, has supplied just the right 
description for our happy warriors from the highest to tho8« 
who trail the rifle as " private gentlemen." 
PriuleU by Xus VicioiUA UouSE PaiHiiNO Co., Ltd., Tudor Street, Whileiriara, LoQdou, E.G. 
