June 22, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
1=^ 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
By the Author of " Aunt Sarah and the War " 
MY DEAR YOU, — There was a famous party 
at which we were invited to cite the most 
surprising saying of any great modern. 
Somebody quoted Gladstone's declaration, 
at the beginning of the American Civil War, that the 
South had made herself an army, had made herself 
a navy, had made herself a nation. Then followed 
from across the table the great rival's fretful allusion to 
the Colonial millstone hanging about a bothered mother's 
neck. Next, the creator of Richard Feverel and of 
Lucy was summoned to the bar for favouring (in an 
interview he later foreswore to his friends) a term of ten 
years' matrimonial trial. Or was it seven ? Fancy 
Richard asking Lucy to mate him till she was twenty- 
three ! Frederick Myers (whose essay on Virgil George 
Wyndham bracketed with Francis Thompson's Shelley 
for the finest modern instances of creative criticism), 
was quoted as declaring that the two faultless authors 
in all literature were both of them women — Sappho and 
Jane Austen ! These, and a score of other such samples, 
some of them easily discounted as due to the fervour of 
a moment or the melancholy of a mood, seemed to make 
easy records among unexpected issues of speech. 
But now that I think it all over, I confidently put 
Bismarck into the box. When Italy and Austria were at 
war, in 1859, the maker of Modern Germany (himself, of 
course, a Major as well as a Politician) foresaw that, 
sooner or later, war must be waged between Austria 
and Prussia, and between France and Prussia. And he 
had great misgivings for his Prussia. " The German 
troops," he says, " on whose support we reckon, are for 
the most part quite wretched ; and, if things go ill with 
us, their leaders will fall away from us like dry leaves 
in the wind." O what a welcome rustle could we hear 
it this autumn ! Then the Major turns Philosopher, and 
the Philosopher, Ideahst ; and he writes calmly and 
•irnfidentially to his wife : 
" As God wills : It is, after all, only a question of time. 
Nations and peoples, folly and wisdom, war and peace — 
they come and go like waves, and the sea remains. What 
are our States, and their ])ower and honour, before God, 
but ant-hills and bee-hives, which the hoof of an ox 
tramples down, or fate, in the form of a honey-gatherer, 
overtakes ? . . . Farewell, my sweetheart, and learn 
to take a melancholy pleasure in, life's folly; there is 
nothing in this world but hypocrisy and jugglery, and, 
whether fever or grape-shot shall tear away this mask of 
flesh, fall it must sooner or later, and then such a resemb- 
lance will become apparent between a Prussian and an 
Austrian, if tliey are of the same size, that it will be 
difficult to distinguish between them ; the stupid and the 
clever, too, properly reduced to the skeleton state, look a 
good deal like each other. Patriotism for a particular 
country is destroyed by this reflection, but in any case 
we should hayc to despair, even now, if our happiness 
were built upon it." 
\nd that was the word of the greatest war-maker but 
Dne of the modern world — the world which to him was 
all jugglery and hypocrisy, never a battlefield between 
real right and real wrong. Slaughter counted not. Leave 
out that preliminary capital letter, and what is left is — 
laughter, the laughter of a cynic. Wars achieve 
nothing, but let Prussians at least achieve wars ! 
Private Secretaries of Ministers are just now the 
busiest of men. They do their work behind the screen, 
and are themselves perhaps the only people who know 
how important their services — and their silences — are. 
Lord Rowton will always remain the pink and pattern of a 
Prime Minister's secretary, so it must needs be a bit of a 
disappointment to find but little light 'thrown, in the 
new volume of the Disraeli biography, on the relations 
between " Monty " and his Chief. " Of the (first) 
meeting with Montague Corry, Disraeli has left no 
account," says Mr. Buckle. But he refers to a " tra- 
dition " about that memorable coming together which so 
perfectly illustrates the characters of the two men that 
I like to tell it to you as Lord Rowton himself told it to 
an intimate friend. Disraeli went visiting the Duke of 
Cleveland at Raby Castle— where, by the way, some- 
body had just written in the Visitors' Book ; — 
What a pity at Raby 
There isn't a baby ! 
And at Raby there were other pities. The girls of 
the house-party thought it a pity, one hot wet afternoon, 
that everybody artd everything should be so dull. They 
really must be amused ; and, accordingly, they seized on 
a young man with a reputation for wisdom and gravity, 
and insisted on his becoming a baby for their sakes. 
So he was commandeered to sing a comic song to the 
accompaniment of the rattle of his heels. The very 
incongruity between the Wise Youth and his fooling 
gave licence to the fun. In the midst of the frolic he 
looked up and saw the Sphinx-face of Disraeli in the 
doorway. His first- meeting with the Minister the night 
before had been the event of the young man's life. " I 
had a great respect for your father," said the Minister. 
And now, on this afternoon when he was supposed to 
have gone to his apartment to write letters (one to his 
devoted sister Sarah, be sure !) he was witness of this 
farce ; and the willing yet unwilling pei-former heard in 
memory one sentence that choked his song : "I had 
a great respect for your father." " And what a fool he 
must think me ! " was his reflection as he stopped short 
in his dance and shout with a deferential gesture towards 
the onlooker. The girls, bent with laughter, cried out to 
him to go on ; and on he went. The Minister remained 
for another minute or two, his face-mask betraying 
neither amusement nor vexation. Then he turned his 
back on the resumed revels, and took refuge in his room. 
After dinner that evening, when others passed on, Disraeli 
waylaid the young man, now grave even beyond his 
custom. He expected to be candidly accepted as a 
farceur. The Minister's hand was on his shoulder, and 
the words came : " I think you must be my Impresario." 
The Minister had seen in him one who was sensitive yet 
compliant ; and he knew his man. 
My last American mail is a weighty one, and rather 
a weight , too, on my spirits. What bothers me most is that 
people over there are themselves badly bothered about 
the Irish executions. " The military lynching of a band 
of melancholy poets and mystics in a part of the world 
many have regarded as the source of civilisation makes 
us greatly content to be Americans." What a mis- 
understanding ! Perhaps an inevitable one following on 
the English official forbearance and good feeling which 
minimised and otherwise censored in the reporting of them, 
the horrors and cruelties of the rebelHon. This was 
kindly and tactfully done lest England should be further 
incensed against Ireland, and the position of Redmond 
(your hat off to him, please !) made more difficult 
than ever. 
Thus is England punished for her reticence. As for 
" lynching " the word is surely too native and too reminis- 
cent to have been prudently launched against us from 
overseas. And friends of W. D. Howells here have 
written to beg him to talk no more of our shooting of 
" prisoners of war." Unthinkable ! He of all men should 
know it is " A Foregone Conclusion " (how I delighted 
in his story of the name when it was possible and even 
easy to be delighted) that rebels who rise in arms against 
their fellows, without even the decency of a declaration 
of war, take their lives in their hands. That is why 
they take also our hearts in their hands. Deprive the 
rebel of his sacred right to sacrifice himself, and you 
cheapen his name and his calling. Already the name 
of the pirate, joy of our youth, has been wasted by its 
application to the Kaiser. What are the nurseries of the 
near future to do when rebels and pirates are robbed of 
the romance with which their close dealings with death 
endowed them ? W. 
Mr. F. W. Lanchester's contribution on the Air Board, in 
continuation of his article of last •^•cck, is unavoidubly 
postponed to our next issue. 
