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L A N D c<v W A T E R 
June S, 1916 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
[These hi/ers. which will appear weekly, are from the 
pen of him who wrote "Aunt Sarah and the W'lir." 
MY Di:ak You,— Every " Lonely OfliciT " has 
liis letter-bag — even the \er>' Lonely One who, 
in some odd romantic. moment is driven to 
advertise for it ! And there seemed to be just 
ii tinj,'o of envy in your tone when you — a Lonely Civilian, 
often far afield inthe service of the State — si)uke of tho 
snowing-under of a Soldier-Solitary who had thus publicly 
appealed to a benevoletice he found, to his confusion, 
he had underrated. So I made the ready promise of 
the rash ; an.d passed my word that you should hear from 
nie weekly in your favourite paper. 
You told me you had e\en more than your usual 
leisure for reading just now, being a diplomatist and 
therefore a bit out of a job NVhereuixm I quoted 
('arlyle pat : " Diplomacy is clouds : beating of your 
enemies is land and sea." And then, little fore-knowing, 
I sat down and wrote to you an every-day letter, with a 
])un here, and a parado.x and pretty bit of gossip there-— 
all in ink that has a little gall for an ingredient- -or my 
chemistry has gone rusty. Then, before I could post my 
missive, the news came. The North Sea blotted out my 
characters, as though they were sins. 
Of course I spare you recapitulations. All other 
papc^rs shall be taken as read ; and for me remain only 
such domestic episodes as those that may Iwlp to bring 
home the big issues— elusive by their very size ; such 
episodes, too. as may easily miss any other recorder. 
Ascension Day passed, and we did not know. The 
next daj' brought rumours — but we had heard so many 
of their sort. On that evening, however, came the 
Admiralty announcement. 1 read it o\er three times, 
and I read it \et again. So it was really true ! Then 
I passed fromthe general, itself overwhelming, to the 
particular — overwhelming too. For I had just left a 
friend— the bearer of a familiar name — who, when the 
war began, was the devoted father of four sons. One, 
when that fateful Fourth of August caihe, was already 
in the Welsh Fusiliers ; another, an Oxford undergradu- 
ate, loving life, loving poetry, instantly transformed him- 
S'.>lf into a subaltern in the Koyal Scots. Quite early in 
the war — within the short space of one week — these two 
boys gave us their young lives. Now the anniversary 
of their deaths had passed ; those who lovexl them, and 
could never cease to lament them, had entered ujion ■ 
outwardly normal ways — even an unbroken night's slecj) 
had begun to re\-isit their pillows. For they had even 
this to reconcile them to life — a third son, sixteen years 
young, a gay and guileless middy on the Iiuicfati'^ablc. 
'• Your haj^py son " had been the signature of his last 
letter home. How strange that I should be writing 
it ! He could not have brooked so much ])ubli( ity. His 
fellow middies would never have let him hear the last of it 
—and that Lieutenant, whom he had to wake for the 
morning watch ! I have to pull myself together to 
realise that these too, are gone — they will read no more 
any human writing. And what it means for these now 
thrice bereaved parents— you will understand. I leax'c 
it at that. It may be I have said too much ; but private 
griefs are now no more. Into the larger family of the 
nation merges each one of those five thousand households 
to-day united in a coirimon loss. 
Politicians, who used to shake their heads over the 
arbitrariness of our laws of primogeniture, might now feel 
altogether at ease. Prti|)ertv now passes by right of a 
sad rotation to the younger born ! The lifty lighting heirs 
of peerages who have made way for their juniors are only 
part of a multitude of other elder sons of answering 
renunciations. 1 know cases where two, and even In the 
instance already quoted where three, brothers, heirs to an 
estate, have in turn laid down their inheritance, lea\-ing 
the succession to a boy not yet emerged from the nursery : 
a family tragedy, but wliat a memory for that young 
heir, and for England ! 
^'ou will have seen that some other friends of yours 
and mine already advertise for sale their lovely house in 
which we were so happy as fellow-guests — among its 
beauties that \-ision of the sea from the front windows.* 
Their son, their only son, has passed away witli his 
ship ; and the sight of the sea has become unendiuable 
to those who li\ed by the lo\-e of him. You remember 
how Mrs. hJrowning, while yet Elizabeth Barrett, lost her 
brother, Edward, through the foundering of his boat in 
Babbicombe Bay ? Henceforth "even the sound of the 
sea becauK! a horror to her." I suppose these are things 
that cannot in any useful way be argued about. But the 
earth is still beloved of UK-n and women, though plotted 
out in unforgotten gra\'es ; and the sea may claim to be 
in some sort the kindest and most decent place of sepul- 
chre. Anyway, the Angel of the Resurrection was as 
cognizant of the elemental water that shall gi\e up the 
Dead that are in it, as he was of the closer clasping arms 
of .Mother Earth : and that's what most matters. How 
have the waves of the sea been likened, by the poets we 
both li\e by, to a hundred things, from a lamb's fleece 
and a horse's mane to human wrinkles ! But to many 
all eye those billows will henceforth stand up as grave- 
stones. Nameless, yes ; but the names of those who 
die at sea for lingland are writ on that water. 
Talking of names, somebody said to me the other day 
an ob\ious thing, which yet might easily escape unie- 
marked. The Kaiser does not know the names of our Dead : 
but our Dead know the name of the Kaiser. What 
ghosts will yet arraign him when he reaches the shades ! 
Not his will be " the sprightly port " that makes the 
ghosts gaze. Napoleon will need to cower no more — 
he will hold up his head — amid his comparati\'ely in- 
sjgnilicant cohort of accusers. 
I. ike me, I'm sure you scanned with mixed feelings the 
Honours' List last Satmday — that morning of Deathday 
rather than of Birthday Honours. 1 own I saw all the 
time between the lines the name of the man who had given 
three sons to England, but I knew it was not on the 
printed list, and I knew, too, that no name there could 
rank with his in equality of sacrifice. A new irrelevance 
seemed to have sudclenly entered into all human 
reckonings of distinction. AH the same, I didn't lind 
myself at all among the cynics when I saw that an 
O.M. had gone to Mv. Balfour in recognition of 
his distinguished services to Literature and Philosophy. 
Why not ? An unlucky moment, I grant, for the an- 
nouncement ; but the time wasn't of his own choosing ; 
it was all in the ordintuy course ; and so I couldn't 
waste that still strangely conjmon commodity, a smile, 
on the man who surfeited my ear with the stale W'histler 
persiflage about Leighton, the master of so many other 
roles, also " a bit of a painter." I'm only glad we have a 
First Lord who is also a lover of Letters and of Philosophy 
-the things which really do count for Mankind-in-t he- 
making. 
Ordiinuiiu'ss is ind(x'd a great need for us all just now ; 
and in defence of the exercise of it even in the date of 
publishing a list of Birthday Honours, battle or no battle, 
just because it's due,. I will tell you a not tod outlandisli 
story. There was a great Italian Saint (at least one 
church in London bears his name in its English version) 
who was jjlaying cards with his friends when a question 
arose— how really mucli more to the j)oint than any ever 
asked in Parliament ! "If you had only a minute to 
live, what would you do with it ? " That was the in- 
stant proposition. One card-player said he would hasten 
into church, another he would kneel down right there ; — 
but the Saint : " And I would go on with my game ! " 
On this same ])arallel of ordinariness. I could not be 
severe on the ('iramnKuian of the family who i)outed a 
us\ial jKiut over a little lapse of the language he loves 
e\en in an affecting Admiralty notice. So and so, it 
said. " was not on board. All the other officers on board 
were lost." Had Literature's O.M. (affectionately hailed 
" Old Man " that day by a friend never before so 
familiar !) passed an Admiralty clerk's superfluous and 
even rather misleading " other " ? 
How shall I sign myself to you ? Y'mi said, when last 
we talked far into the night"-(there are no fri«?nds like 
new friends)— tliat I was your double in many of my 
reflections ! So let me sign DovBi.E-Yor, whicli is more 
concisely written as what hajipens to lie also mv own 
Christian initial— w 
