August 14, 19 1 5 
LAND AND WATER 
THE ROMANCE OF THESE DAYS 
By J. D. 
THE only rule for times of stress, as Horace told 
us long ago, is to preserve a calm and equal 
mind, and this rule a sane public opinion has 
been endeavouring to follow, not wholly with- 
out success. Alarums and excursions not- 
withstanding, the public mind has never lost its balance, 
and any symptoms that would seem to point another 
way, such as the Lusitania riots, are merely the result of 
local hysteria, and do not affect the general mind of the 
community. But while Great Britain maintains her 
wonderful and not apathetic calm, it is obvious that her 
mental state is far from ordinary and is utterly unlike 
what it was this time last year. As yet we cannot hope 
to analyse with any accuracy or with any satisfactory 
result this mental attitude, but after a year of war it may 
be possible to catch at least some glimpses of what we 
have become psychologically. We may be permitted to 
believe — not, we hope, without just grounds — that we are 
still British, by which it is to be understood that we have 
Horace's capacity for remaining calm although the 
heavens should fall. 
Twelve Months' Ordeal 
Without foolish optimism, but in pure justice, it 
may be claimed that the nation has endured very well 
its twelve months' ordeal. It will continue so to endure, 
with the same national refusal to be hustled or flurried, 
or blown about by every wind of doctrine. But this 
calm, although characteristically British, is by no means 
brutish, for side by side with the steadfast purpose that 
will not waver until the end — be that as distant as it may 
— there is withal a tingling of the nerves, a sense of 
exhilaration ; the nation is like an athlete who faces his 
task and finishes his course with joy. 
The athletic mood is everywhere present, and is all 
the keener that it is so often restrained. Men and women 
have braced themselves without conscious effort to face 
the final issues of life and death, and to live in the con- 
stant shadow of irreparable loss, but even in arduis there 
are compensations. Warfare waged upon a new plan 
has lightened in part the burden of separation. In 
ancient wars, when once the soldier had gone forth to the 
field, there was either no return or return only with the 
day of peace. But in these curious times of ours many 
who have gone out to battle are permitted to make a brief 
and unexpected return. They stay their cheerful hour 
or two, and then go out once more to uncertainty. The 
parting has to be faced again, and although some may 
say they almost wish their soldier had not come, they 
would not have it otherwise, for even the most fleeting 
visit from the campaigner brings into life a new glamour, 
a new significance; it is something apart and, for all its 
little touch of festivity, something infinitely sacred. It 
is in such incidents as this that we trace the underlying, 
unconfessed romance of these days. 
The Heroic Impulse 
Romantic these days ^re — how romantic we who live 
in them shall never know.' It is our grandchildren who 
will thrill to the heroic impulse of the time ; they alone 
at length, with the historian's aid, will see this combat 
steadily and see it whole. 
Something, perhaps, we have lost of the conven- 
tional view of war through a necessary obscuration of 
war's accepted pageantry. Much of that was modified 
during the South African struggle, but even there, at 
home at least, we held to something of the spectacular. 
But in this greatest of all conflicts the tumult and the 
shouting have been reserved for the field itself. There 
has been no public going forth of armed men, borne on 
huge waves of popular emotion, no excitement of long 
sieges or dramatic reliefs, no breaking of cities into 
sudden illumination over decisive victory, no panic or 
even numbness of disaster. The word disaster has been 
avoided. Misfortunes, colossal and overwhelming at any 
other time, have here by sane public intuition been 
Symon 
measured in their true relation to the general scheme of 
continents at war. There could be no better proof of 
the national sanity and intelligence than this intuitive 
seizing upon the essential fact that, to speak Ameri- 
canese, we are up against the biggest thing in history. 
Any check which could in just proportion to the 
present scheme of operations be termed a disaster would 
hardly escape finality and would come near deciding the 
contest one way or another. At the present moment 
such a catastrophe transcends imagination. The retreat 
from Moscow would be a bagatelle by comparison. 
Therefore, even when hardest hit, we have not spoken of 
disasters, nor have we behaved as those whom disaster 
has overtaken. Yet should such a thing befall us, 
neither the spirit nor the resource of Britain would be 
crushed ; she might reel and halt for a time, but she 
would rise to conquer as she rose in the dark days when 
she stood alone in Europe against Napoleon. 
The national consciousness has given an extended 
application to the ancient proverb of the omelette and 
the eggs. It has recognised that the loss must be pro- 
portional to the forces engaged, and in its calmness 
under this sore stress lies, perhaps, the fullest assurance 
that it has counted the cost and will persevere unshaken 
to the end. This epic in which we live is to be unrolled 
to its rightful close, nor will it be cheated of its poetic 
justice. 
Although we cannot fully realise what it means to 
be actual spectators of this world drama, we have as a 
people understood that great things are toward and have 
with one impulse, conscious or not, faced the crisis 
in the proper spirit. That the nation has not rushed 
after this nostrum or that is another proof of its recogni- 
tion that an undertaking so vast in space and numbers 
must consequently proceed upon the vastesf temporal 
scale. Time, in a very special sense (not that of the 
commercial formula), is of the essence of the contract.. 
Mingling of Joy and Sorrow 
So much, then, for the march and movement of the 
struggle in the abstract. There we have a large 
romance indeed, but individual life is finding a romance 
no less real. What of that new and strange product of 
our times, that almost terrible mingling of joy and 
sorrow which we call so lightly the War Wedding? 
This adventure has brought back to ordinary life some- 
thing of that eager zest with which man clung to love 
and beauty amid the distractions and cruelties of the 
Renaissance. These war brides and bridegrooms 
realise, in a more poignant sense than Omar dreamed, 
that " the bird of time is ever on the wing," but he who 
goes and she who stays are alike content with their 
romantic hazard. It may be to some extent a gamble 
with fate, but the dice have not been thrown lightly, 
and the affair is for both, in the phrase of Petrarch, " a 
remedy of good and evil fortune." 
But to quit these pseudo-philosophisings, which 
would certainly bore the high contracting parties, there 
is an amiable and very human interest in the mere 
piquancy of the war marriage itself. The wedding of 
the girl whose soldier or sailor comes to her from the 
front of war would on that account alone possess irre- 
sistible qualities, but in many eases there have been 
moving incidents to give the event a glamour before 
which that of fiction seems a tame and manufactured 
thing. Neither beyond belief nor beyond fact is the 
bridegroom who survived the wreck of two vessels, and 
who, a few days after his second escape, being by that 
time immune to all sense of risk, snatched a brief leave 
to rush home and take the greatest risk of all. These 
things are the warp and woof of the romance that lies 
about us in these subversive times, a romance only 
partially realised but still keenly present to the sub- 
conscious sense of the nation. It is, perhaps, one of our 
chief supports under a burden that might otherwise 
prove overwhelming. 
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