14 
LAND & WATER 
June 15, 1016 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
By the Author of "Aunt Sarah and the War" 
MV DEAR YOi;.— Kitchener in his death has 
-ulved, at least for me. one of the minor and 
later enigmas of his hfe. Early in .March he 
u;-s>ired a Cabinet Colleague that the War 
\Mnikl be over in three months. That Cabinet Colleague 
foiild not at all tell what " K " meant— he was even 
^'ainsaying his own famous forecast of a three years' term 
III fighting. Again, dining with friends in St. James's 
Square a day or two later, " K " solemnly assured a 
fellow-guest : " It will all be over in June." Everyone 
who heard it wondered at a forecast which facts seemed 
to falsify on the very face of it. And now we have the 
only conceivable clue. For June has come, and all iS 
over — for liim. 
Kitchener's most noticeable features were his eyelids. 
Eyes may dull or may brighten ; but it is the lids that 
really lend e.xpression.by their shape and bv their minute 
muscular contractions. In shape, his were quite the 
most soldierly ever seen. The cut of his lids proclaimed 
war — they made weapons of his eyes. The upper lids 
weighed thoughtfully upon the iris; and the grave 
eyesight of the man — of the miUtary man — looked from 
a kind of ambush — not a stealthy ambush, but a coura- 
geous and strategic. I have heard people liken his eye 
--must one really say his eyelid ? — to a tiger's. That 
illusion was a little helped by the colour-scheme of cold 
blue orbs set in a dark ruddy face — the deepened palette 
to which the earlier pink of his complexion had given 
place. His smile further flattered the fancy. Someone 
who told a funny story at a party at whicl: " K " was 
present, and wlio was asked afterwards if " K " had 
laughed, replied : " O yes, he just showed a fang." 
So laconic was his speech he could not ha\e borne more 
than a single word— (" Thorough " was the one word 
chosen) — for the underline of his heraldic device. His 
utterances were so simple as well as so brief as to be at 
times doubly disconcerting. " What are they doing ? ' 
he would ask, when a crowd came out to welcome his 
entry into a town, or his arrival at a port. " What a 
lot of people ! " became quite a formula with him on 
such occasions and even at private gatherings, ^^'hcn a 
Mayor read an address which informed him of things 
(things he had done !) his expression became that of a 
scolded schoolboy. It was a frankly bored expression 
when, early one May morning, he was taken prisoner to 
the Academy by a picture-adoring Duchess. Con- 
noisseur of china though he was, he brought to Burhngton 
House — say the soldier's eyelid, rather than the artist's 
eye ! Sometimes the sejitiment. behind those bare sen- 
tences of his, was itself a little bit of a surprise. Once, 
when he had desired a girl to continue dancing in his 
presence, he explained : " She is so like a figure on a 
vase ! " 
"Thorough " in life, in death he was a Man of Four 
Mitigations. Long since he said to a friend, with a 
shyness which in him was never unmanly : " A soldier 
.should not marry— he doesn't knon- what may happen to 
him." And now the comfort is that the close company 
of his private mourners do not incLude a father, a mother, 
a wife, or a child. 
As you may imagine, Ostedey Park made altogether 
welcome the baby-girl that has-, been born to Lady Jersey. 
War-time vastly changes ma nv an expecting motlicrs 
anticipatory sex-preferences : sc iiiic will say it changes them 
unpatriotically. The coining event is "itself shadowed 
nowadays by the blackness of 1 )attlc ; and the ancient joy 
of a man child being born into the world gives place to a 
new delight in the arrival of one of thcsrt/V/sex. Is it really 
true, I wonder, that bi)\ s gai n on giris in the birthrate 
after a big war ? Anywa\-, th' 2 time is at hand when that 
popular superstition can be put to a decisive test. In 
so long a war, we need not ev en wait till the end to dis- 
cover whether the heroism th: it tills the air does or docs 
not fill the cradles with jwten tial heroes. I own to being 
incredulous ; and the latest figures of the Registrar- 
(icncral do not reprove my lack of faith in this particular 
display of Nattire's obliginglj'- benign opportunism. 
Very old people still recall that a bygone Lady Jersey 
was si'milarh- pleased, in the middle of the last century-, 
by the dibii't of a baby— that time a boy, and not even 
her own ! .\ telegram from France told her, one morning, 
that her friend, the beautiful Empress Eugenie, was 
" expecting " that day. Hour after hour was passed in 
eager anticipation of "the final bulletin ; and dinner was 
prolonged that night by the Jerseys into an era. But 
not till six the next morning did the message come which 
might mould history. Do you quite realise that the 
Empress-mother of that morning is now at Farnborough — 
she, too. in her turn, anxiously waiting bulletins from 
France, but, alas, of death instead of birth ? A woman 
who kept her ninetieth birthday a month ago coaching 
herself in the most alert methods of modern aviation ! 
And can yoii imagine the Prince Imperial the man of 
.sixty he might now be ? 
r'm sure I can't. The Zulu assegai gave him im- 
mortal youth— in some poor way the compensating 
.gift conferred, during these last months, on so many an 
English mother's sacrificed son. 
Stevenson, you remember, knew a middle Lady Jersey 
— the grandmother of the four little Villiers children in 
the Osterley nursery to-day. In an impublished letter, 
written by Stevenson's wife from Samoa to a friend in 
P-ngland, she says : " People wonder how we can bear tlie 
dullness of our life here. In truth we live in a whirl of 
excitement. To be part of a living Opera is not dull, 
nor do I believe you would find it so. Lady Jersey has 
just been visiting Mr. Haggard, brother of the novelist. 
I believe she intends publishing her impressions of 
Samoa- -it would be an amusing paper. She has turned 
the heads of all the male population of the Island, and 
leaves us, I should think, well pleased." And as, in 
the magazine article this Lady Jersey did afterwards 
publish about Samoa, she inodestly omits all mention of 
this concerted movement of male heads. Mrs. Stevenson's 
letter adds a completing Footnote to History. 
One of the things which first made me your friend was 
your saying that you didn't know the woman with whom 
you'd not been a little in love. Women, you said, never 
seem to know how nice they are — how nice men find 
them ; and men, though they feel the thrall, don't care 
to talk of it. I think that's true. If men said all they 
felt (and a little more), they might subject themselves 
to a reproof I once, in youth, received at the tongue of 
the great Gladstone. Other topics failing, I was remind- 
ing him of a party at which I had first met, among others, 
himself, his wife, and the Hayters ; and I said, " I fell 
in love, at sight, with Lady Hayter." " I grant you 
she's very intelligent," deprecated this great literaiist, 
whose voluminous speeches you may search in vain for 
an image. " But I fell in love with her," I insisted. 
" O, well, she's a charming woman, and hey husband — " 
but luckily, before the last significantly accentuated 
sentence was comf)leted, soincbody came along, or a 
Commandment had been quoted ! Lady Hayter later 
became Lady Haversham, but she remained in dark 
ignorance, as women commonly will remain, of a conquest 
made across a dinner-table I " 
"The country has a right to have me, but not to shave 
me," remarked the least foppish of men to me the other 
day in view of his coming conscription. Middle-aged, he 
has never yet used a razor. Why should that weapon 
be compulsory ? I think bearded Lord Latymer might 
reasonably have put shaving soap down oii his list of 
minor war economies, even for the civiUan. For the 
soldier, with all the discomforts of camp and trench, the 
razor, in novice hands, is an instnmicnt of torture which 
Parliament really should abolish. In different places 
and times, shaving has been variously considered a sign 
of effeminacy, of servitude, of liberty, of renunciation of 
the world. It is as a mark of servitude only that it is 
regarded by my bearded friend. In the Crimea our men 
were liberated from the lather ; and, in this war, the 
French soldier's very name indii atcs his full freedom to 
be hairy— he is now the poilu. W. 
