i6 
LAND & WATER 
October i8, 1917 
He like Mr. Hewlett, ends with the war and the transfigura- 
tion of ttie common disinherited man, called npon at last to 
confront the nation which above all others liad been praised 
t>V his professors and his politicians as a pioneer of civihsation : 
He in whose honour all has been said and sung stirred and 
stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out 
before men's eves all the beauties of his culture and all the 
benefits of his organisation ; then we beheld under a liltmg 
daybreak what light we had followed and after what image 
we" had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor m any story 
of mankind has the ironv of God chosen the foolish things so 
catastrophicallv to confound the wise. h"or the common 
crowd of poor'and ignorant Englishmen, because they only 
knew that thev were Englishmen, burst through the hlthy 
cobwebs of four hundred vears and stood where theu- fathers 
stood when thev knew that thev were Christian men. the 
]£nglish poor, broken by every revolt, bullied by everv 
fashion. long despoiled of propertv. and now being despoiled 
of liberty, entered historv with a noise of trumpets, and 
turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies ot 
the world. And when the critic of politics and literature, 
feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to 
find the liero. he can point to nothing but a mob. 
This also the scienjtific materialist will call rhetoric, and look, 
for his explanations elsewhere, not seeing, or blind to their 
beauty if he does' see them, the multitudinous idealifms and 
loves and loyalties in the host of inarticulate breasts whose 
only speech is action—and a misleading jest. But there is ; 
truth in ,the rhetoric, and the , truth will be told about no 
large movement of humanity unless the imagination and the 
emotions are 'brought to bear upon the facts. W at Tyler s 
followers, usually described as " a peasantry resentful of an 
unjust poll-tax," cannot be. comprehended by that phrase;- 
a whole novel would not be too long to display the confused ■ 
minds of those resentful and then briefly , exhilarated men 
who, though illiterate and not capable no doubt of formu- 
lating a system which would establish and secure what they 
wanted, liad a Utopia. of a sort in their hearts and knew 
what thev immediately wanted, and that injustice they should 
have it, and were prepared torisk their Mves that their class 
might have it. Mr. Chesterton's short passage on the Pil- 
grimage of Grace, lets far more light in on the state of mind 
behind that rebellion than any amount of " facts " about it 
backed by lifeless references to"" those whose sympathies still 
clung to "the old regime." But one might come nearer. I 
happen to remember the iqo6 election and the campaign 
in the rural constituencies of which I saw a good deal. A 
great and successful appeal was made to the agricultural 
labourer. The outcome of it was a largely unworkable and 
unworked Small Holdings Act. The Act will get a few lines 
in the histories; the appeal will probably get none at" all. 
Moreover few, even of the men who made that appeal, and 
dangled before the labourer the realisation of his age-long 
hope of work in liberty with a proper reward on the land 
which is in his bones, exercised their imaginations sufficiently 
to realise what the promise and the disappointment meant 
to him. For he does not write books, he is slow of speech, 
he can only vote, after all, for one side or the other, and — 
in the end— centuries of frustration have made him resigned, 
and he is quite prepared, as often as necessary, to submerge 
his useless aspirations in a pint of beer. If the history of 
England still remains unwritten Mr. Chesterton's book will 
teach the next generation of historians their business. 
Books of the Week 
A Literary Pilgrim in Efigland. By Edward Thomas" 
(Methuen, 7s. 6d. net.) 
Tommy's Tunes. By 2nd Lieutenant F. T. Nettleingham, 
R.F.C. (Erskine Macdonald, 2s. 6d. net) 
NEVER has there lived a more devout lover of 
England than Edward Thomas, that shy man of 
letters who, putting behind him all that had 
hitherto attached him most closely to life, joined 
the Royal Regiment of Artillery and gave his life for England. 
His greatest joy was to wander about the country-side with a 
friend — erne of those rare companions with whom a man 
communes more in silence than in speech. To recline upon a 
Wiltshire down on a summer day and watch the play of sun 
and shadow, of breeze and cloud, was to him exquisite 
pleasure. This sense of happiness finds reflection in these 
essays on men of letters. But it is a work that suggests a 
weakness in the character of Edward Thomas. Difhdent of 
his own powers, he turned to others for that expressic^n whicli, 
in truth, he was perfectly adequate himself to utter. And one 
cannot help feeling passing regret that he did not in his brief 
life read less and write more. These few words, from his 
essay on Meredith, may be said to define his own attitude. 
Nature to him was not merely a cause of sensuous pleasure, 
nor on the other hand an inhuman enchantress ; neither was 
she both together When'he spoke of earth, he meant more 
than most men who speak of God. He meant that powei 
which in the open air, in poetry, in the company of noble men 
and women, prompted, streng|hened, and could fulfil the desire 
oi a man to make him.self, not a transitory member of a 
parochial species, buf a citizen of the earth. 
The truth enshrined here has been made manifest in the finest 
poetry uttered by our fighting men during the war. 
* * # * * 
The title is a bad one. A pilgrim is one mainly concerned 
with the object of his journeying, not with the incidents 
surrounding it. It is one of those curious silences in the 
English language, as it were a dumb note on the key-tx)ard of 
our speech, that we have no one word to denote a human 
being who uses his own muscles to explore the glories and 
mysteries of the earth's surface. To speak of such a one as 
a tramp connotes dirt and vermin, a pedestrian is impossibly 
horrible, perhaps a wayfarer comes nearer the mark, but 
hints at dust and highways, and so it would have been better, 
had this title not attempted an accurate description but had 
followed the example of Borrow, with The Bible in Spain, 
and left to the imagination of the reader its true import. 
The book itself is a series of essays on literary men, mostly 
poets, living and dead, who had shown special interest in 
Nature. How varied is its character may be judged from 
the fact that it includes William Blake, Shelley, Tennyson, 
John Clare, Matthew Arnold, Keats, Meredith, also Thomas 
Hardy, W. H. Hudson and Hilaire Belloc. 
9fC SfC ^ SfC ^ 
Belloc was evidently Thomas's favourite living writer; 
his essay on him is the most intimate in the book. Nor 
does he hesitate to chasten him mildly even while he praises. 
" He (Belloc) is just too much concerned with what England 
has been and may be again ... to leave us quite a 
clear vision of England as he has known it." Not a bad fault, 
seeing it arises from the faith that earth was made for 
man, not man for earth. Thomas quotes these pregnant 
sentences of Belloc, " The love of England has in it 
the love of landscapes as has the love of no other country ; 
it has in it as the love of no other country, the love 
of friends." Most true, but one who has found this same 
love of landscape and of friends in lands other than 
England questions whether it arises from England herself 
but is not rather due to a deeper cause. This reviewer 
attributes it to the Authorised X'ersion of the Bible. It is 
through the poetry of the English Bible that Englishmen's 
eyes and hearts have been opiened to the soul of earth. Take 
the 23rd Psalm, easily the best known and most popular 
poem in our tongue. For the dullest brain that has once 
mastered it, the least meadow ever afterwards is touched by 
thelight of heaven. Belloc is indubitably right when he attri- 
butes to Englishmen a deeper love of Nature than to men of 
other countries ; but one who has recognised this truth and 
in exile sought to probe it, has always found beneath this 
deep devotion early delight in the rhythm and the Nature 
pictures that abound in the Bible. We should like to have 
seen this discussed by Edward Thomas in this volurt)^, to 
which all lovers of England will turn with gratitude. 
***** 
It is possible that in course of time books may be made over 
the already disputed place oi Tipperary as the marching song 
of The Old Contemptibles. There are soldiers who declare 
its position in the popular mind is justified by facts ; others 
assert it was fictitious, accidental, Press- created. Of such 
is Lieutenant Nettleingham who in Tommy's Times derides 
Tipperary as a marching song, and declares that Annie 
Laurie and Home Sweet Home have from first to last been 
most popular songs in the British Army on active service. 
It is a big score for the Early ^'ictorians. This little volume 
is a really valuable collection and will no doubt be added to 
and amplified as time goes on. Woidd that we knew equally 
well what our soldiers sang in Flanders in my Uncle Toby's 
days, or again when they crossed the Pyrenees under Welling- 
ton, for no doubt they sang as well as swore. Certain ballads 
and tunes seem to he endued with immortality. Sullivan's 
" Onward Christian Soldiers" is an example of the latter; 
any doggerel is good enough to carry its swinging music ; and 
of the former there is no better example tlian The Dyins, 
Lancer. Where did it originate ? There is not a spot on eart ji 
where the English tongue has spoken which has not listened 
to its mournful tones. And now the Royal Flying Corps 
has adapted it and the new version echoes the splendid 
spirit of that gallant band of brothers. This is how it runs , 
A handsome young airman lay dying (Chorus : Lay dying): 
And as on the aer'drome he lay (he lay). 
To the mechanics who round him came sighing (came sighing) 
These last dying words he did say (he did say) ; 
"Take the cylinder out of my "kidneys (ofhis kidneys). 
The connecting rod out of my brain (of his brain). 
The cam box from under my backbone (his backbone), 
And assemble the engine again, (again)." 
