July JO, 191G 
LAND & WATER 
17 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
By the Author of " Aunt Sarah and the War " 
MY DEAR YOU,— Yes, I agree that the men 
who fell at Fricourt or died in hospital at 
Abbeville leave behind them the very women 
who are worthy of them. " I holp to frame 
thee." What Volumnia said, other mothers now say ; 
and wives and sisters, in their measure, may say it too. 
The makers of heroes are surely themselves potential 
and practised heroines. I speak of what I know ; having 
been with one such these last days of long Rolls of Honour 
Such women, I comfort myself, cannot finally falter in 
their " great task of happiness." 
* « IK IE * 
And you must bear to hear that there are girl-graduates 
out for honours in the actual school of physical suffering. 
You know Lady Sybil Grey's case. But hundreds like 
it go unreported. Many perils await the hitherto guarded 
girl in her new onrush into activities ; and her lack of 
apprenticeship to life's roughnesses her bravery will not 
replace. Danger may lurk in the mere unaccustomed 
boarding of a motor-bus in motion, in the jerk of a sudden 
start before the clambering passenger has attained the 
security of an outside seat. That is why the Duchess of 
Leeds' is now] nursing a daughter who had herself been 
nursing others at Guy's. She fell, she fractured her 
skull, and had just wit enough left to say " Guy's 
Hospital." So she was taken back to the scene of her 
own benevolence and was there trepanned, with wkat 
results time will show. Such is one of the home 
casualties that win for our women a share in the actual 
bodily wounds inflicted by the war. 
***** 
Even a very little bit of good news in these days gets 
an importance greater than its own. It is the fir- 
tree that the war has specially befriended. I never did 
love, or even like, that tree. All the same, it has done 
a good turn to the man who most deserved it — Lord 
Lovat. For now the most remote fir-tree has found a 
market. Before the war these trees could grow and 
cluster and look Christmas-tree-like out of season, and 
be secure of their personal safety. A forest army, they 
seemed to stand in battle-array ; but it was not worth 
the woodman's while to go out, hatchet or saw in hand, 
against them. Felling and wagoning and freightage cost 
all the gold that they would finally fetch. But the war, 
which has scrapped so many things, made a market for 
the firs. They have their profitable price ; and a 
Scottish peer, who is so popular that even his good luck 
makes him no enemies, has had a couple of hundred 
Germans told off to him as woodmen to hack, and hew, 
and saw asunder, until the number of feet of tmiber 
sold reaches seven figures, and frees from worse en- 
cumbrances a hitherto heavily mortgaged estate. 
* * , * * * 
Lady Butler, who decided some time ago that she 
would paint no more large, oil pictures, has been per- 
suaded to depart from this pre-war resolution. She is 
to paint for the county of Dorset the cavalry charge of 
the Dorset Yeomanry against the Senussi. Hers was 
a very firm purpose ; but the persuasions for a breach of 
it were many and imperative. There was the lure of 
the Des-rt she has always loved ; and the sound of the 
horses' feet, almost to be heard in her " Scotland for 
Ever ! " And there was the irresistible invitation of 
British soldiers to paint once more British soldiers in a 
deathless deed of daring. Lady Butler knows the scene, 
the horse, the men ; and, having yielded the time she 
his " the time and the place and the loved one all to- 
gether " The vision of the golden light and the golden 
sand remain with her. She learned it by heart when 
her husband had an Egyptian command. At Aldershot 
in earlier days, cavalry charges were made for her special 
benefit She stood alone confronting the horses in lull 
gaJlop ■ and thundering past her they shook the ground 
on which she stood ; she, intrepid, taking notes of their 
action while the paper in her hand fluttered .and wingea 
itself in the wind of their flight. All these experiences 
and memories will pass into the canvas which, wnen 
completed next spring, is to hang in the Shire Hall at 
Dorchester. That is the sort of local home an artist 
most wishes for his work. He, or she, is not always so 
happily placed. Years ago King Edward gave an 
engraving of Lady Butler's " Quatre Bras " to the Kaiser ■ 
as a birthday present. What" a difference has this war 
made. Lady Butler could not paint that subject now ; 
and gladly would she wrest that reproduction from the 
walls of the Castle at Potsdam. 
A friend of mine has just come from Bethlehem 
It is a Bethlehem in what is indeed sometimes called 
" The Land of Promise," but very far away, in space and 
spirit, from its namesake in Palestine. That it should 
be in Pennsylvania, so called after Quaker Penn, is 
another of the little geographical ironies that crop up 
the oftener the older the world grows. For, of course, 
the new Bethlehem is the site of the gun and munition 
works owned by the Steel Corporation — " the Krupps' 
of America." Day and night it labours to provide 
England with her most effective weapons. The works 
are three miles in length. They contain three million 
panes of glass, and you can begin to get at what that 
means if you remember that you will take a fortnight 
merely to count a million. The ironies do not end with 
the naming of this place of no peace. The head is a 
man of German origin, the multi-millionaire Mr. Charles 
M. Schwab. Many of his men are of the same descent ; 
and they discuss morals and munitions with a multitude 
of Irish fellow-workers. Not that there is much time 
for talk at the new Bethlehem, where the Bonus system 
for the quickest, the most inventive, and otherwise the 
best workers is in full play— if play, again, is not a too 
ironical word. Not many years ago two Chinese Princes . 
visited the States and Mr. 'Schwab motored them over a 
few tens of thousands of miles. They went home, and 
in due time a message came to Bethlehem (the word 
sticks in the pen), summoning Mr. Schwab to the Presence 
Chamber of the Emperor of China. He went ; and one 
of the curiosities of the new Bethlehem is the order he 
brought back with him, signed on the dotted line in Chinese, 
for nearly two million pounds worth of steel products. 
That order counted as even a mammoth one in its day. 
Needless to say, it is a mere bagatelle beside those that 
bombard Bethlehem for our purposes to-day. 
* * * * * 
I watched, the other day; the arrival of the Wounded 
at Charing Cross, and I could not help feehng that if 
we take our pleasures sadly, we take our sorrows gaily— ^ 
we English. Here again I found Happy Men ! Men in all 
stages of physical loss all laughing ! But I will give 
you the scene in the words of our most famous battle- 
painter, also a looker-on, with an eye to a final detail 
I myself had missed : " The sitting-up ones were laugh- 
ing and shaking hands with the crowd. Those on 
stretchers could hardly be seen in the twilight of the 
ambulances, but they waved their arms and tried to 
catch the flowers the women threw in. One poor fellow, 
who could only move his foot, shook it in acknowledg- 
ment of the cheers." 
* ♦ ♦ * • ♦ 
Some wounds almost deserve a private history. I 
have even heard them called amusing. There is the son 
of Mr. James Fitzalan Hope, M.P., through both of whose 
cheeks a bullet passed without injuring his jaw or loosen- 
ing a tooth. Perhaps you will ask : " Was he yawning ? " 
for you have lately read how another young guardsman 
said his predominant feeling in his first action was^ 
boredom. But, of course, the young Coldstreamer was 
calling his men onward. I know of at least three claimants 
to the eminence of being the tallest man in the British 
army. One of these I lately met. Everyone had said 
to him, before he went out, that his getting-OQ-for seven 
feet gave the enemy a great advantage ; and a sentient 
target was how he himself felt. Well, he came back from 
the fight wounded— in the foot. VV. 
