June 39, iyi6 
LAND & WATER 
15 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
Sy the Author of '* Aunt Sarah and the War " 
MY DEAR YOU,— If you don't see The Free- 
man's Journal, you missed|"a letter of Stephen 
Gwynn's, which I know you would have found 
well worth reading. In comparing the Sinn 
I'^einors \\ith the Irishmen in the trenches (from which 
Ciwynn himself has just returned) he says, " The only 
thing in common between these two bodies of men was their 
willingness to risk their lives in pursuit of the ideal they 
believed in. What is it that the Irish troops have done ? 
The hope of every thinking man among them was by 
making war abroad to end strife at home." He knows that 
if there were not fifty Irish Nationahsts in the 
trenches for every one Sinn Feiner who fired a shot 
against England, " no English Minister could have come 
to Parliament with a proposal to set up immediately an 
Irish Government in Ireland." 
" When I think of my own dead," he adds, "it 
is hard not to be indignant. I remember vividly 
when I buried the first of them, a Donegal man 
who had been brought up within sight of my old 
home. Early in the day, when a bombardment was 
beginning, he took me round his section of the 
trench — for he was a sergeant — telling me how this 
man had behaved courageously, and never saying a word 
of himself. An hour later I found him lying on his 
back, and did not know him, he was so blackened with 
the explosion. His legs were shattered, but he was 
cheerful and uncomplaining, only asking for water — 
and I could not get it for him. He lay for many hours 
till night, and then, as they carried him down, he died of 
the pain. I never met a better man, and he had come 
there for the sake of Ireland. They buried the last I 
saw dead before I came home — two poor lads who were 
blown to pieces as they sat at their breakfast. Three 
others were in that same fire-bay, and I liked ill leaving 
them there. These are the silent heroisms, day-long 
and night-long endurance, of men whose name no one 
hears, nor recognises, save their own kindred, in the 
casualty list. For them no High Masses are sung ; 
there is no crowd to welcome them to the landing-place." 
The Duke of Connaught has one early memory which 
no Canadian nor other experiences, not even the over- 
whelming sentiments awakened by the war, are able to 
efface. The friend who told me the story will publish 
his reminiscences, but he won't grudge me the anticipation 
of one minor particular. At King Edward's wedding 
in the 'sixties, the future Kaiser was entrusted to the care 
of the Duke of Connaught, who, on that occasion, wore 
kilts. In the course of the service he had a surprising 
experience — bitten into his memory. His amiable young 
nephew had crawled low to bite him on the leg. 
The other day Sir Thomas Beecham ventured the first — 
I think the first — Wagner opera given in London since 
the beginning of the war. It was a characteristic venture 
but, musically speaking, the spirit of reconciliation was 
far to seek. The music was too big for the theatre ; 
it was an alien spirit trying to burst its bonds. But 
even if " Tristan and Isolde " itself seemed fretful and 
uneasy, the Beecham audience was content- — content to 
think about art instead of nationality. In this attitude 
we are unlike the German audience that claims Shake- 
speare for its own, calls him Wilhelm Speerschuttler, 
and, wherever their own experience coincides with all- 
embracing statement, imagines him a German. But 
what of that other Englishman of their admiration, 
Oscar Wilde ? Is he still the inspiration of the young 
poets of Munich ? If he is, here is a rebuke for them— 
a few disjointed words from an unpubhshed letter of 
Wilde's : " The Tower of Babel, that dreadful structure 
by whose monstrous walls the German language was 
first heard." How much he must suffer in the German 
version ! 
Happy men ! I am not ironical. At last they have 
been found, and where do you think ? In the front 
trench. Such is the testimony of a Man of Affairs just 
returned from a visit to the vanguard of the B.E.F. 
in France. " I have been all over the world," he said, 
" but now for the first time, have I found happy men. 
And, mind you, only in the first trench. In the .second, 
they have a quiet grievance about the rations or the rats. 
In the third, they want plum and apple jam. At the 
Base they turn up their noses at plum and apple, and 
want strawberry ! " And so, he says, all the way back 
to London, the murmurs go on gathering as you get 
further away from the elation of being in the forefront. 
1 suppose it is a sense of the luck of being alive at all — a 
sense deadened in the daily citizen. The joy of danger 
is a commonplace with the hunter and the swimmer and 
the footballer and the alpinist in some milder degree. 
It rises, says my friend, to something of an ecstasy when 
experienced in the front trench. There they meet " the 
bright face of Danger " at its most alluring. 
Letters from the finest address in all the world — from 
the trenches— are all very much alike — and likeable ! 
" Last night a party (bang) went out (bang) to look at 
our barbed wire (bang, bang). They were seen and 
fired on (bang), one man was wounded. I put a first 
field-dressing on him (bang) and stayed with him (bang) 
till the stretchers came. The dug-out is full of rats 
(bang). We see and hear them between the bangs, at 
their <-arious little affairs. It is wonderful (bang) what 
a lot of (bang) different and strange sounds a rat can 
make. I have been up each night from 8 to 12, from 
2 to 3, from 5 to 7. Of course (bang) there is no un- 
dressing, and practically (bang) no washing, as water 
(bang) is very scarce. Thanks for the mar (bang) ma 
(bang) lade (bang, bang, bang)." How topsy-turveyly 
reminiscent of Corot it reads, and of that unforget- 
table description of the day of the landscape painter. He 
rises before dawn, and almost hears the buds popping, 
and listens to the oncoming of light. " The sky brightens. 
(Bing). The first ray of the sun (Bing, bing, bang), 
everything is alight, everything burns." And then 
after sunset : " Bing ! a star dives from the sky into the 
pond." By the way, Corot's own account of the end of 
his day was all in keeping with our altered time-table : 
" I must stop — my Heavenly Father has put out the 
lamp." 
I hear from Miss Julia Marlowe, that she and her 
husband, Mr. Sothcrn, have taken their last calls in 
New York. By these farewell appearances they have 
earned over £6,000 for the British Red Cross, for the 
French wounded, and for the families of English actors- 
actors indeed — killed in action. All partings are the 
more poignant in war-time ; and many tears fell at the 
Shubert Theatre with that final curtain. It made a 
little for happiness to hear from Julia Marlowe that she 
had boldly recited before a great and spell-bound audience 
Helen Cone's " Chant of Love for England " — that 
splendid rebound from the " Hymn of Hate." And 
another bit of good news remains ; for Juha Marlowe and 
her husband, I am told, have a notion of taking a 
house over here. 
A hundred-and-a-half of wounded soldiers, with 
cigarettes, could hardly have been amused in a typica,! 
London house, however palatial, before 1877, for that 
house was, in a literal sense, stuffy — it was carpeted, 
curtained, cushioned. Even after that date, the Queen 
Anne rooms, with their slender black furniture and their 
poli.shcd floors, having thick curtains and Morris papers, 
were not, strictly, smoking rooms for a multitude. It 
is the house of to-day, the very daj'.lhat meets the wants 
of the war. The stone floor, the marble, the painted 
instead of papered walls, the wide stained-glass window, 
tlie hostess fearless of wind, dust, and sim, her un- 
tarnishable gold, her clear silver tissues — here are con- 
ditions for the reception of soldiers. Sir Ian and Lady 
Hamilton have throughout the war given the welcome 
of their brilliant house, and of the terrace that divides 
it from Hyde Park, to such a company from the hospitals. 
.'\s the omnibuses, heavily laden with men of the lightest 
spirits, start on the return journey to the wards a cheer 
rends the air,such as might, in other days, have disturbed 
even the reverie of the Statesman who confessed tliat he 
went to Kensington Gardens to prepare his ne.xt Parlia- 
mentary impromptu ! W 
