14 
LAND & WATER 
Jonathan 
By William T. Palmer 
October 25, T917 
RECRUITINT, work is alwavs grim. One's inihtary 
register mav be, as this of mine, crowded with friends, 
neighbours". ac([uaintances. The casualty hsts are 
daily making tho sur\-ey of Army Book 414 an added 
duty. So many of the bovs have "gone West." Here is an 
entry which arouses memories of happier days. ' Jona- 
than ." He's not " gone West." He is somewhere 
either in France, at Salonika, in Egypt or in Mesopotamia 
(if he is not shinning the peaks of the Tyrol with gunner 
comrades). Pen in hand I pause and recall him. Below- 
stairs the sergeant is wearily explaining some point about 
regimental posting, allowances, leave, medical e.xamination. 
Probably a score of recruits put the question yesterday, 
and to-morrow a fresh score' will demand the same informa- 
tion. There is a faint rustle of feet across the parade, a sleepy 
calling from the jackdaws who, despite the state of war, 
haunt the ancient fortress. There is the click of a typewriter, 
a phrase half heard as a door opens and shuts. My eyes turn 
eastward. Outside the castle wall is a fringe of lofty poplars, 
and behind them a dream of distant, grey hills. They are 
not interesting hills but mere hummocks of grass, yet to-day 
they serve to remind me strongly of Jonathan. 
The ink of that entry is ancient. Jonathan passed beyond 
the Recruiting Office long ago. Every memory of him is 
linked with the fells. One sees again the buttress of clean 
sound rock. One threads again the line of ledges, steep 
gullies, narrow cleavages, exposed terraces and sensational 
traverses, and comes to that well-renowned point where the 
course gives out against a square block' tilted to a slight over- 
hang. Beneath this corner the rock face curves inward 
giving an airy sort of feeling. It's no place for the weak of 
nerve. Assault after assault at that twenty-foot corner 
had failed. The ledge disappears to nothingness ; so without 
a base there was no chance of a human ladder like that which 
conquered the sheer rock-wall on Lliwedd and made possible 
the first storming of Walker's Gully on the Pillar Rock. 
The walls were too obtuse for " backing up." Handholds 
there were none ; the rock seemed perfectly smooth. 
Failure ! But not for Jonathan. Somehow he pulled his 
light form up the sheer crag, here welding his nailed boot-edge 
against some faint rugosity — no, friend Leo, it .was not, as 
you state, balancing on a lichen or against a skin of moss — 
there clinging and hauling by some wee pit which gave 
warrantable hold for a finger-tip. It was a fine bit of climb- 
ing by inspiration; and even now. When the secrets of the great 
rock face are fully known, few storm that problem in the 
direct line of its first conquest. 
A Daring Climb 
Here is another memory of a daring climb. In the heart 
of Scafell is a tremendous rift, known to the elect as Moss 
Ghyll. The climbing of this begins curiously. It is a slant 
up a steep rock face, above which one burrows deep into the 
mountains, conquers cave-pitches and narrow clefts, to find 
the course peter out in a series of minor rents and rifts. 
One of these exits is famous for wet, unsound rock, for 
long runs on the rope, and up this Jonathan essayed to con- 
duct a willing novice. But the rope provided was a mere 
fag-end, and again and again the leader had to help his 
follower up to an inadequate resting place in order that he 
himself might, by means of a second rim-out, reach the head 
of the pitch. It was a dare-devil experiment, entered into 
because the alternative was no climb at all. And this the 
blood of youth could not tolerate. 
One is hurled back to the reality of things to-day by the 
distant wail of a bugle, the drum of feet beyond the build- 
ings. Probably it is Tommy's tea-time. The daws make 
a small flutter, then subside into sleepy remonstrance. Up 
in the sunshine is the faint dragonfly of an aeroplane. Here 
is the nation's work. My brief respite has been well and 
truly earned, but for a moment more one's memory flings 
back through the lowland sunshine to the golden blaze of 
September among the fells. 
The air is full of gold and crimson ; the wastes of bracken 
are minting the bullion of their year. There are . golden 
l)eds and fringes of parsley fern, a droughted stream yields 
silver and diamonds as it splashes down the rocky dale. 
Nearer one's feet is a fan of scree, a few tumbled boulders, and 
overhead is a great outcrop of rock. Here it is smooth, un- 
conquered, may be unconqiierable ; there it is a broken 
rampart tufted with heather, and though steep easy of access. 
There is too a great slash, broken In' cress-terraces and 
chockstones, where a tough little course is possible for the clim- 
ber. Up the slabs and into the gully, into the cave and out 
over the stones which block and overhang, up the narrow 
chimney and along the slender ledge which gives access to a 
liigher. steeper, narrower pitch, the little party goes steadily 
on. .After a tough struggle the climb " goes." To Jonatlian 
it is not new.. A January day of snow and mist and pelting 
rain had shown him the way to victory. 
Mountain Bivouacs 
Memory ranges from the bivouac by a mountain tarn which 
in a night of rain flooded the tent to a calm night w-hen, after 
a long journey, camp had to be fixed in darkness unrelieved 
by the light of a single match. There were bivouacs too by 
windswept cairns and in plantations where the cold night 
draughts trouble one . but little. There were long trudges 
over dull passes and down stony glens in twilight, midnight 
and dawn-^hard gruelling nights preceding keen, strenuous 
days among the rocks. One must have been keen in those 
days when the crags were thirty miles away and neither cycle 
nor motor lifted us on the way. 
Long before war-time Jonathan tutored us to the use of 
a rubber ground sheet, to an eiderdown bag in lieu of blankets, 
and to the tept cloth pegged flat to keep off the soaking 
rain. When good heather was available, one could 
dispense with the ground sheet, and so come nearer the simpler 
life. Scree we avoided : bog we knew ; mosswe hated ; boulder, 
we tolerate — but every one of the Old Gang has gone to 
Flanders to make acquaintance with the general cussedness 
of mud. 
***** 
Th^ ground floor sergeant is arguing a point of ofificers' 
etiquette with his understudy. Their voices rise and fall, 
every word passing through my open windows. The assistant 
who is a new army man, believes that any way it don't matter 
as there ain't half-a-dozen swords in the whole depot — • 
ca.stle and camp together. At my elbow the telephone 
whirrs, is attended to, and relapses into cheerful silence. I 
turn again to the open register and to that entry " Jonathan " 
in healthy ink before me. 
Jonathan went into queer quarters. One has seen him 
scrambling, wriggling along a broken ledge behind a waterfall. 
And there was a day of exploration in an abandoned mine. 
The first gallery smelled like, and was, a fox's haunt, but these 
vermin did not go far into the blackness. A ledge a score 
yards within was almost the limit of their pad-prints. In 
one of the great chambers the way was broken by a mound of 
loose fragments ; surely it was ignorance that senf me up 
and over that pile. The danger was driven home by a collapse 
of rock while I was within, but the way of escape was not 
blocked. One had seen in a deep, ancient copper mine a 
corner of rock suspended on a timber prop so rotten with age 
and eaten through with the threads of fungi that the hand 
plunged deep into the mass with no more effort than forcing 
through a mass of soap suds. 
But this afternoon one wishes for memories of the open 
air, and not of groping through ancient mines and caverns. 
We were on an open pass looking down a famous Yorkshire 
dale, and later passed along beneath Lovely Seat until among a 
reef of flat rock one noticed a rough building, not unlike a 
beehive in shape, entered by a creepy-hole and with another 
hole just above for light and ventilation. The interior was 
plenteously strewn with rushes. It was not for some minutes 
that the object of this erection was clear. In these wild 
countrysides foxes are too plentiful, the hills are full of 
impregnable " earths," and the gun has to be used to keep 
down the marauders. Therefore, on selected" beats," little ' 
covers of this sort are built, and in evening twilight and at 
dawn marksmen wait their possible chance of a shot. 
I wonder, Jonathan, if in your bivouac, your hut or your 
dug-out, you ever talk of our marvellous quarters in the 
North Country— of Wasdale surroiinded by the fells, of farms 
on wind-swept moor, and of a tiny Yorkshire inn, where, on 
a quiet evening you used to say that you heard the rumble 
of underground waters. Though I am looking out into the 
blue haze of late afternoon, my mind is of that wonderful 
night of starlight when the black peaks crowded round and 
liushed to silence the breeze and the moorland rills. I 
wonder whefher, when you come back, you will have the old 
zest for the crannies of the hills. I fear that I shall not ; 
those glorious rock climbs will speak too strongly of the men 
who liave gone for ever. 
