Chapter III (5)

Marched to our old bivouac at the swampy wood, but were
allotted a reasonable space outside it this time. Fell into
bed, beat to the world, at 3.30 A.M.

_July 19._—Much to do, though men and horses are tired to
death. Moved off at 6 P.M. and did a twenty-mile night march,
arriving at another bivouac at 2 A.M. Horses just about at
their last gasp. Poor old things, they have been in harness
almost continuously throughout the battle bringing up load
after load of ammunition at all hours of the day and night.

_July 20._—Took over a new position (trench warfare style) just
out of the battle area as now constituted, and settled down
to—rest.

The above is an accurate, though, I fear, far too personal, record of the doings of one particular unit during a fortnight’s continuous fighting. It is in no way an attempt to describe a battle as a whole. That is a feat beyond my powers—and, I think, beyond the powers of anyone actually engaged. Thinking things over now in the quiet of a well-made dug-out, I realise that the predominant impressions left upon my mind, in ascending order of magnitude so to speak, are: dirt, stink, horrors, lack of sleep, funk—and the amazing endurance of the men. In the first article of this series I wrote: ‘But this I know now—the human material with which I have to deal is good enough.’ It is. I grant that our casualties were slight (though in this respect we were extremely lucky), and that compared with the infantry our task was the easier one of ‘standing the strain’ rather than of ‘facing the music.’ But still think of the strain on the detachments, serving their guns night and day almost incessantly for fourteen days on end. In the first week alone we fired the amount of ammunition which suffices for a battery in peace time for thirty years! They averaged five hours’ sleep in the twenty-four, these men, throughout the time; and they dug three separate positions—all in heavy ground. Nor must one forget the drivers, employed throughout in bringing up ammunition along roads pitted with holes, often shelled and constantly blocked with traffic.

The New Ubique begins to be worthy of the Old.

FOOTNOTES

[2] Battery Commander.

[3] This jar was afterwards found to contain lime-juice!

_THE BICENTENARY OF GRAY._

_BORN DECEMBER 26, 1716._

BY THE DEAN OF NORWICH.

It is a mere chance, but none the less suggestive, that Shakespeare’s commemoration this year should be followed by that of Gray. Shakespeare, of course, would cut up into many poets, but one of them would have been not unlike Gray; a man of a fastidious and somewhat melancholy temper but with a rare affectionateness, and a sincere love of his kind, which mingled with his critical faculty to produce a fresh and very delightful humour. However this may be, the lesser poet was drawn to the greater by a sure instinct from school-days. In a letter to Horace Walpole, written when he was just eighteen, he finds it natural to disguise his boyish affection in terms borrowed from Mrs. Quickly: ‘I have born and born, and been fub’d off and fub’d off,’ &c.; and he does so again later: ‘If I don’t hear from you this week, I shall be in a thousand Tyrrits and Frights about you.’ To his more literary friend, Richard West, another member of the ‘Quadruple Alliance,’ whose early death he was to mourn in the most exquisite of elegies, he writes with enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s language.

‘Every word in him is a picture. Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics:

“But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass:
I, that am rudely stampt, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph:
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up”—

and what follows. To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the case our language is greatly degenerated.’

‘Every word in him is a picture.’ He said the same thing in a fine quatrain of the poem to Richard Bentley, contrasting the great masters of old with the poets of his own day, especially with himself, whose poems Bentley was illustrating:

‘But not to one in this benighted age
Is that diviner inspiration giv’n
That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,
The pomp and prodigality of heaven.’

In another letter to West of the same year he defends the practice of ‘judiciously and sparingly’ inserting phrases from Shakespeare into modern poetry because of their greater energy; a practice which he himself was to adopt in his later odes. Gray’s Shakespearian borrowings are always judicious, but it may be questioned whether the effect of such quotations from a greater writer by a less is not to create an impression of poverty in the borrower. It is more important to inquire how far Gray was successful in emulating the Shakespearian ‘pomp and prodigality’ of imagination. The prodigality clearly was beyond even his ambition. His Pegasus always required the spur rather than the reins. But the pomp, it must be admitted, he did not infrequently achieve. No one can be blind to the magnificence of the lines about Pindar in the ‘Progress of Poesy’:

‘Oh! Lyre divine, what daring Spirit
Wakes thee now? Tho’ he inherit
Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,
That the Theban eagle bear
Sailing with supreme dominion
Thro’ the azure deep of air.’

And in the ‘Elegy’ we have many imaginative pictures that have the true Shakespearian quality:

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’

‘And shut the gates of Mercy on mankind.’

‘Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death.’

‘Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.’

‘Left the warm precincts of the chearful day,
Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind.’

‘Even in our Ashes live their wonted Fires.’

It will be remembered that in the ‘Progress of Poesy’ English poetry is represented by three names—Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Dryden is praised for the energy of his heroic couplet, symbolised by the

‘Two coursers of ethereal race
With necks in thunder cloath’d and long-resounding pace,’

who draw his car, and also for his one great lyrical achievement, the Ode on St. Cecilia’s day. Gray’s admiration for Shakespeare and Milton as models was tempered by his recognition of what Dryden had done for the English language, in rendering it more ‘refined and free.’ To Beattie he wrote, ‘Remember Dryden and be blind to all his faults,’ and he told him in an interview (according to Mason) that ‘if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet; and pressed him with great earnestness to study him, as his choice of words and versification were singularly happy and harmonious.’ If Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ be compared with the ‘Progress of Poesy’ we can see how successfully Gray has blended the qualities he most admired in his several masters. From Dryden he has caught the smoothness and strength of his line; but Gray’s rhythm owes more to ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Comus’ than to the commonplace movement of Dryden’s ode; while the imaginative beauty of its many pictures was part of his debt to the greatest of them all. There is one other great English poet to whom Gray was ready to acknowledge a debt. He told Norton Nicholls that he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously. I do not remember that Gray ever incorporates a Spenserian phrase in his own verse; his instinct would have told him that the two styles would not agree. But his instinct would also tell him that to bathe himself in Spenser before entering the temple of his Muse was a sure way of freeing himself from any pollution of mind or spirit.

The ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ was composed at intervals between 1746 and 1750, and sent to Walpole in June of that year. Walpole showed it to many friends and in some way it got into the hands of a publisher, who wrote to Gray announcing his intention of printing it, and begging his ‘indulgence.’ Gray wrote at once to Walpole desiring him to let Dodsley print it without delay from his copy, and it accordingly appeared in February 16, 1751, in a quarto pamphlet, priced sixpence, and entitled ‘An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard.’ The fashionable solecism must be attributed to Walpole, who saw the poem through the press, and prefixed this short ‘advertisement’:

‘The following Poem came into my hands by Accident, if
the general Approbation with which this little Piece has
spread, may be call’d by so slight a Term as Accident. It is
this Approbation which makes it unnecessary for me to make
any Apology but to the Author: As he cannot but feel some
Satisfaction in having pleas’d so many Readers already, I
flatter myself he will forgive my communicating that Pleasure
to many more. The Editor.’

In his letter thanking Walpole for his ‘paternal care’ of the poem Gray speaks of the advertisement as ‘saving his honour’; which can only mean that he thought the poem unworthy of being offered to the public by its author. That this was not a mere affectation is shown by his annoyance at its instant popularity, which he thought to be due to its subject. He said it would have been equally popular if written in prose. He writes to his friend Dr. Wharton, after speaking of ‘A Long Story,’ which had been ‘shew’d about in Town, and not liked at all’:

‘On the other hand the Stanzas have had the Misfortune by
Mr. W.’s fault to be made still more publick, for wᶜʰ they
certainly were never meant, but is too late to complain. They
have been so applauded, it is quite a Shame to repeat it. I
mean not to be modest; but I mean it is a Shame for those, who
have said such superlative Things about them, that I can’t
repeat them.’

Gray’s modesty was still further tried in the autumn of the same year by Walpole’s insistence that he should allow his still unpublished odes, on Spring, on Eton College, and on Walpole’s cat, with whatever else he had to furnish a volume, to appear with illustrations by Walpole’s _protégé_, Richard Bentley, a son of the great Master of Trinity. The negotiations, so far as we have them in Gray’s correspondence, are diverting. Gray discovered that it was in contemplation to prefix his own portrait; this he forbade, though it was already half engraved. He objected to the proposed title and insisted that it should be ‘Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for six poems of Mr. T. Gray,’ on the ground that ‘the verses were only subordinate and explanatory to the Drawings and suffered to come out thus only for that reason.’ Lastly, he objected to Dodsley’s proposal to omit the ‘Mr.’ before the names of the poet and artist, as being ‘an uncommon sort of simplicity that looks like affectation.’ This modesty may have been excessive, but it is not ridiculous when we reflect that Gray had not yet produced his finest work, and knew that he had it in him to write something more worthy of himself and English poetry than the occasional pieces which Walpole wished to publish, or even than the deservedly popular Elegy.

In 1757 Walpole issued, as the first book from his new printing-press at Strawberry Hill, a quarto pamphlet entitled ‘Odes by Mr. Gray,’ with a vignette on the title-page of his Gothick castle, and a motto from Pindar ΦΩΝΑΝΤΑ ΣΥΝΕΤΟΙΣΙ which Gray englished as ‘vocal to the intelligent alone.’ It contained two odes, here called simply Ode I and Ode II, ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard.’ The first of these odes is undoubtedly Gray’s masterpiece, and deserves all the study that can be given to it. The subject, that of the great power of poetry, was one very near to Gray’s heart as well as to his mind, and the scheme is well thought out. There is no feeling of strain in any part of it. Personification, with Gray generally a sign of strain, is kept within the limits approved by the great masters. Thus we have ‘antic Sports and blue-eyed Pleasures’ just as in the ‘Allegro’ we have ‘Jest and youthful Jollity’; but there is no elaborate series of abstract figures like that in the two stanzas on the Passions in the Ode on Eton College. This fashionable personification perhaps justified itself to Gray as a combination of the imaginative method of Shakespeare with the clear definition of Dryden. What in Shakespeare would have been a metaphor, hinted at and immediately succeeded by another, becomes too often with Gray a substantial allegorical personage. There seems to us to-day something essentially unpoetical, because artificial, in the posturing groups of Furies and Graces, and we wonder that Gray with his fine critical sense did not feel this. We must recognise, however, that whenever he is deeply moved he escapes from the snare. Two consecutive stanzas in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude’ show how his verse becomes more direct as it deepens in feeling.

‘Still, where rosy Pleasure leads,
See a kindred Grief pursue;
Behind the steps that Misery treads,
Approaching Comfort view:
The hues of Bliss more lightly glow,
Chastised by sabler tints of woe,
And blended form, with artful strife,
The strength and harmony of Life.

See the Wretch, that long has tost
On the thorny bed of Pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest flowret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common Sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening Paradise.’

When the two odes were reissued they were styled Pindaric, and they justify their title, being constructed in a series of strophe, antistrophe, and epode like the odes of Pindar. Ben Jonson had furnished one example in the ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, one strophe of which is the often-quoted stanza beginning, ‘It is not growing like a tree.’ But the name ‘Pindarique’ had been abused by Cowley, who, holding the theory that ‘the lost excellences of another language’ should be supplied by others of our own, had substituted an expansive eloquence, one might almost say loquacity, for the terse musical phrase of his model, and had entirely ignored the interrelation of strophe and antistrophe. Gray recovered for the Pindaric ode both the music of phrase and the balance of its parts.

Gray’s second ode cannot be reckoned as unequivocal a success as its companion. It is founded on a tradition of the murder of the Welsh bards by Edward I, and the earlier portion, which consists of the spirited and justifiable curses of the last survivor on the king’s progeny to the third and fourth generation, is proper to the subject, and contains much fine rhetoric and a few passages of a nobler quality. But having written the first three groups of stanzas, Gray held his hand for a couple of years; and the conclusion does not carry out the scheme originally proposed. From the argument, which Mason printed from Gray’s commonplace book, we learn that the Bard was to predict that all the king’s cruelty ‘shall never extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppression.’ When Gray resumed the Ode he had changed his plan, and the present conclusion can appeal to none but Welshmen, for whom it is certain that Gray did not specially write. The consolation which the Bard finds in the future is the prospect of a line of Welsh kings, the Tudors, culminating in Elizabeth:

In the midst a Form divine
Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line;
Her lyon-port, her awe-commanding face,
Attemper’d sweet to virgin-grace.’

Elizabeth’s reign is to be marked by a revival of poetry in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and an unending line beyond them. It must be allowed that the skill of the poet has disguised the weakness of the argument. For to make the consolation effective the efflorescence of poetry should have occurred under the first Tudor sovereign, in which case it might poetically have been presumed to be due to him; and the Bard should not have overlooked Chaucer, who flourished under the sway of Edward’s direct descendant Richard II, of whose accession the Bard sings in the only passage of the Ode which has passed into popular currency:

‘Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows,
While proudly riding o’er the azure realm,
In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes;
Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway,
That, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.’

The ‘Elegy’ is an expression of the common heart, though of that common heart purified and ennobled, and therefore it is of universal appeal; of the Odes it is true to-day as in Gray’s lifetime that they are vocal only to the intellectuals. But apart from its merits all Gray’s poetry has a special interest owing to its place at the meeting-point of the Augustan and Romantic schools. On the one hand it retains the notion of poetry as a happy combination of words. Gray, in a letter to Mason, says: ‘Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry’; adding ‘this I have always aimed at and could never attain.’ Gray’s instrument was always the file; he had no taste for the verse cast at a jet; and so he could accuse Collins of having a bad ear. In the second place, there are signs in Gray of that first-hand interest in nature and that respect for the whole of human nature, and not only its intellect, which was soon to inspire Cowper and Wordsworth. Perhaps Gray is at his modernest in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude,’ and in that impromptu couplet which Norton Nicholls preserved:

‘There pipes the woodlark, and the song-thrush there
Scattering his loose notes in the waste of air’—

if not most modern of all in that quatrain of the ‘Elegy’ which Gray’s feeling for unity expunged, but which we cannot spare:

‘There scatter’d oft the earliest of the year,
By Hands unseen, are show’rs of violets found:
The red-breast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.’

Leslie Stephen says happily about Gray and his friends that ‘they were feeling round vaguely for a new mode of literary and artistic enjoyment.’ This feeling after something more satisfying to the whole range of thought and emotion than was afforded by the critical school of Pope had already given evidence of itself in several ways. Thomson and Dyer, following each his particular bent, had found inspiration for poetry in country life and landscape. Gray welcomed the venture of both these poets. We know from his letters how attentive was his own observation, and how he took long journeys in search of the picturesque, especially in mountain scenery; but the evidence of this in his poetry is only incidental, as in the reference to ‘Snowdon’s shaggy side.’ Another form taken by this dissatisfaction was the revival of interest in the popular ballad literature. The discovery by Thomas Percy of his famous folio started a new form of poetry in which Goldsmith led the way. But though Gray had seen Percy’s book as early as 1761, it came too late to influence his production; and we may guess that his mind was too erudite to have found expression in the simplicity of the ballad. Of far more interest to him was Macpherson’s discovery of fragments of Highland poetry. He describes himself as ‘_extasié_ with their infinite beauty’; on which the late Mr. Tovey, to whom a great debt is owed for his scholarly edition of Gray’s letters, makes the dry comment that some of the fragments were worked up from passages in ‘The Bard.’ We may be glad that Macpherson’s discovery came, like Percy’s, too late to influence Gray’s own poetry. His interest in the early literature of the European nations has given us a few fragments from the Norse and Welch. The remark of Leslie Stephen quoted above referred to the interest that Gray and Walpole took in Gothic architecture. This influenced Gray’s poetry only indirectly; but it had some effect in the way it was presented to the public. When Walpole undertook to convert his newly purchased house at Twickenham into a Gothick castle, the artist he employed to help him in his designs was Richard Bentley; and when Gray had sprung suddenly into fame by the ‘Elegy,’ Walpole urged him to publish his other poems with designs by Bentley. Whether these deserve the poetical encomium Gray made upon them, I will not presume to say; but they are undoubtedly very ‘Gothick.’

It is as a poet that we celebrate Gray’s bicentenary, but those persons who do not care for poetry may celebrate him as a man and a letter-writer. As a man he is secure of our affection as soon as we get to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters, of which there is a great store; and still more have come to light lately, and have been well edited by Mr. Paget Toynbee. There are few men of letters of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences, he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures living a recluse life, in the world but not of it, their best companions among the dead; they were both exquisite critics; they were both a prey to melancholy, or rather, as Gray said, to ‘leukocholy’; white bile not black; they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both the soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that the letters of both, in which they live to us, are among the few external goods which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray’s lies partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect felicity with which everything is said. There is nothing slovenly, or far-fetched, or pompous, or makeshift; even in the shortest and apparently most hasty note, his touch is perfectly sure and his taste faultless; if we except some Hogarthian passages which smack of the age rather than the individual. It might not seem probable beforehand that the letters of a man whose days went ‘round and round like the blind horse in the mill’—‘swinging from chapel or hall home and from home to hall or chapel’—could have much to say that would be of general interest. Occasionally, indeed, he goes a journey—the grand tour with Walpole, or to the Highlands, or to see his friend Wharton at Old Park, or to Stoke Poges to his relations, and then we get lively enough descriptions. But these are episodes. The main topics of his every-day correspondence are his melancholy or his indolence, Mason’s poetry, Cambridge and Church news, the British Museum, politics, criticism of current literature,—Rousseau, or Sterne, or Dodsley’s poets,—his dab of musick and prints,’ gothick, hyacinths, and the weather. Occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to slip out a little town gossip, ‘as a decayed gentlewoman would a piece of right mecklin or a little quantity of run tea, but this only now and then, not to make a practice of it.’

_THE REAL THING: ‘S. O. S.’_

BY WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON.

Copyright, 1917, by William Hope Hodgson, in the United States of America.

‘Big liner on fire in 55.43 N. and 32.19 W.,’ shouts the Captain, diving into his chart-room. ‘Here we are! Give me the parallels!’

The First Officer and the Captain figure busily for a minute.

‘North, 15 West,’ says the Master; and ‘North, 15 West,’ assents the First Officer, flinging down his pencil. ‘A hundred and seventeen miles, dead in the wind!’

‘Come on!’ says the Captain; and the two of them dash out of the chart-room into the roaring black night, and up on to the bridge.

‘North, 15 West!’ the Master shouts in the face of the burly helmsman. ‘Over with her, smart!’

‘North, 15 West, Sir,’ shouts back the big quartermaster, and whirls the spokes to starboard, with the steering-gear engine roaring.

The great vessel swings round against the night, with enormous scends, smiting the faces of the great seas with her seventy-feet-high bows.

Crash! A roar of water aboard, as a hundred phosphorescent tons of sea-water hurls inboard out of the darkness, and rushes aft along the lower decks, boiling and surging over the hatchways, capstans, deck-fittings, and round the corners of the deck-houses.

The ship has hit the fifty-mile-an-hour gale full in the face, and the engine telegraph stands at full speed. The Master has word with that King of the Underworld, the Chief Engineer; and the Chief goes below himself to take charge, just as the Master has taken charge on deck.

There is fresh news from the Operator’s Room. The vessel somewhere out in the night and the grim storm is the S.S. _Vanderfield_, with sixty first-class passengers and seven hundred steerage and she is alight forrard. The fire has got a strong hold, and they have already lost three boats, smashed to pieces as they tried to launch them, and every man, woman, and child in the boats crushed to death or drowned.

‘Damn these old-fashioned davits!’ says the Master, as he reads the wireless operator’s notes. ‘They won’t lift a boat out clear of the ship’s side, if she’s rolling a bit. The boats in a ship are just ornaments, if you’ve not got proper machinery for launching them. We’ve got the new derricks, and we can lower a boat, so she strikes the water, forty feet clear of the side, instead of bashing to pieces, like a sixty-foot pendulum, against our side!’

He shouts a question over his shoulder, standing there by the binnacle:

‘What’s she doing, Mister Andrews?’

‘Twenty and three-quarter knots, Sir,’ says the Second Officer, who has been in charge. ‘But the Chief’s raising her revolutions every minute.... She’s nearly on to the twenty-one now.’

‘And even if we lick that we’ll be over five hours reaching her,’ mutters the Master to himself.

Meanwhile the wireless is beating a message of hope across a hundred miles of night and storm and wild waters.

‘Coming! The R.M.S. _Cornucopia_ is proceeding at full speed in your direction. Keep us informed how you are....’

Then follows a brief unofficial statement, a heart-to-heart word between the young men operators of the two ships, across the hundred-mile gulf of black seas:

‘Buck up, old man. We’ll do it yet! We’re simply piling into the storm, like a giddy cliff. She’s doing close on twenty-one, they’ve just told me, against this breeze; and the Chief’s down in the stokeholds himself with a fourteen-inch wrench and a double watch of stokers! Keep all your peckers up. I’ll let you know if we speed-up any more!’

The Operator has been brief and literal, and has rather under-stated the facts. The Leviathan is now hurling all her fifty-thousand-ton length through the great seas at something approaching a twenty-two knot stride; and the speed is rising.

Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, the Chief, minus his overalls, is a coatless demi-god, with life in one hand and a fourteen-inch wrench in the other; not that this wrench is in any way necessary, for the half-naked men stream willing sweat in a silence broken only by the rasp of the big shovels and the clang of the furnace-doors, and the Chief’s voice.

The Chief is young again; young and a King to-night, and the rough days of his youth have surged back over him. He has picked up the wrench unconsciously, and he walks about, twirling it in his fist; and the stokers work the better for the homely sight of it, and the sharp tang of his words, that miss no man of them all.

And the great ship feels the effect. Her giant tread has broken into an everlasting thunder, as her shoulders hurl the seas to port and starboard, in shattered hills of water, that surge to right and left in half-mile drifts of phosphorescent foam, under the roll of her Gargantuan flanks.

* * * * *

The first hour has passed, and there have been two fresh messages from that vessel, flaming far off, lost and alone, out in the wild roar of the waters. There has been an explosion forrard in the burning ship, and the fire has come aft as far as the main bunkers. There has been a panic attempt to lower two more of the boats, and each has been smashed to flinders of wood against the side of the burning ship, as she rolled. Every soul in them has been killed or drowned, and the Operator in the burning ship asks a personal question that has the first touch of real despair in it; and there ensues another little heart-to-heart talk between the two young men:

‘Honest now, do you think you can do it?’

‘Sure,’ says the Operator in the _Cornucopia_. ‘We’re doing what we’ve never done at sea before in heavy weather. We’re touching within a knot of our “trials” speed—we’re doing twenty-four and a half knots; and we’re doing it against _this_! Honour bright, old man! I’ll not deceive you at a time like this. I never saw anything like what we’re doing. All the engineers are in the engine-room, and all the officers are on the boat-deck, overhauling the boats and gear. We’ve got those new forty-foot boat derricks, and we can shove a boat into the water with ’em, with the ship rolling half under. The Old Man’s on the bridge; and I guess you’re just going to be saved all right.... You ought to hear us! I tell you, man, she’s just welting the seas to a pulp, and skating along to you on the top of them.’

The Operator is right. The great ship seems alive to-night, along all her shapely eight hundred feet of marvellous, honest, beautiful steel. Her enormous bows take the seas as on a horn, and hurl them roaring into screaming drifts of foam. She is singing a song, fore and aft, and the thunder of her grey steel flanks is stupendous, as she spurns the mutilated seas and the gale and the bleak intolerable miles into her wake.

* * * * *

The second and third hours pass, and part of the fourth, in an intermittent thunder of speed. And the speed has been further increased; for now the Leviathan is laying the miles astern, twenty-nine in each hour; her sides drunken with black water and spume—a dripping, league-conquering, fifty-thousand-ton shape of steel and steam and brains, going like some stupendous Angel of Help across the black Desolation of the night.

* * * * *

Incredibly far away, down on the black horizons of the night, there shows a faint red glow. There is shouting along the bridge.

‘There she is!’ goes the word fore and aft. ‘There she is!’

Meanwhile the wireless messages pulse across the darkness: The fire is burning with terrible fury. The fore-part of the _Vanderfield’s_ iron skin is actually glowing red-hot in places. Despair is seizing everyone. Will the coming _Cornucopia_ never, never come?

The young Operators talk, using informal words:

‘Look out to the South of you, for our searchlight,’ replies the man in the wireless-room of the _Cornucopia_. ‘The Old Man’s going to play it against the clouds, to let you see we’re coming. Tell ’em all to look out for it. It’ll cheer them up. We’re walking along through the smother like an express. Man! Man! we’re doing our “trials” speed, twenty-five and a half knots, _against this_. Do you realise it—_against this_! Look along to the South. Now!’

* * * * *

There is a hissing on the fore-bridge, quite unheard in the roar of the storm; and then there shoots out across the miles of night and broken seas the white fan-blaze of the searchlight. It beats like an enormous baton against the black canopy of the monstrous storm-clouds, beating to the huge, thundering melody of the roar and onward hurl of the fifty-thousand-ton rescuer, tossing the billows to right and left, as she strides through the miles.

And what a sight it is, in the glare of the great light, as it descends and shows the huge seas! A great cliff of black water rears up, and leaps forward at the ship’s bows. There is a thunderous impact, and the ship has smitten the great sea in twain, and tossed it boiling and roaring on to her iron flanks; and is treading it into the welter of foam that surrounds her on every side—a raging testimony, of foam and shattered seas, to the might of her mile-devouring stride.

Another, and another, and another black, moving cliff rises up out of the water-valleys, which she strides across; and each is broken and tossed mutilated from her shapely, mighty, unafraid shoulders.

* * * * *

A message is coming, very weak and faint, through the receiver:

‘We’ve picked up your searchlight, old man. It’s comforted us mightily; but we can’t last much longer. The dynamo’s stopped. I’m running on my batteries....’ It dwindles off into silence, broken by fragments of a message, too weakly projected to be decipherable.

* * * * *

‘Look at her!’ the officers shout to one another on the bridge; for the yell of the wind and the ship-thunder is too great for ordinary speech to be heard. They are staring through their glasses. Under a black canopy of bellied storm-clouds, shot with a dull red glowing, there is tossed up on the backs of far-away seas, a far-off ship, seeming incredibly minute, because of the distance; and from her fore-part spouts a swaying tower of flame.

‘We’ll never do it in time!’ says the young Sixth Officer into the ear of the Fifth.

* * * * *

The burning ship is now less than three miles away, and the black backs of the great seas are splashed with huge, ever shifting reflections.

Through the glasses it is possible now to see the details of the tremendous hold the fire has got on the ship; and, away aft, the huddled masses of the six hundred odd remaining passengers.

As they watch, one of the funnels disappears with an unheard crash, and a great spout of flame and sparks shoot up.

‘It’ll go through her bottom!’ shouts the Second Officer; but they know this does not happen, for she still floats.

* * * * *

Suddenly comes the thrilling cry of ‘Out derricks!’ and there is a racing of feet and shouted orders. Then the great derricks swing out from the ship’s side, a boat’s length above the boat-deck. They are hinged, and supported down almost to the draught line of the ship. They reach out forty feet clear of the ship’s side.

The Leviathan is bursting through the final miles of wild seas; and then the telegraph bell rings, and she slows down, not more than ten or twelve hundred yards to wind’ard of the burning hull, which rises and falls, a stupendous spectacle on the waste of black seas.

The fifty-thousand-ton racer has performed her noble work, and now the work lies with the boats and the men.

* * * * *

The searchlight flashes down on to the near water, and the boats shoot out in the ‘travellers,’ then are dropped clear of the mighty flanks of the Mother Ship.

The Leviathan lies to windward of them, to break the force of the seas, and oil bags are put out.

The people in the burning ship greet the ship with mad cheers. The women are hove bodily into the seas, on the ends of lines. They float in their cork jackets. Men take children in their arms, and jump, similarly equipped. And all are easily picked up by the boats, in the blaze of the rescuer’s searchlights that brood on leagues of ocean, strangely subdued by the floods of oil which the big ship is pumping on to the seas. Everywhere lies the strange sheen of oil, here in a sudden valley of brine, unseen, or there on the shoulder of some monstrous wave, suddenly eased of its deadliness; or again, the same fluorescence swirls over some half-league of eddy-flattened ocean, resting between efforts—tossing minor oil-soothed ridges into the tremendous lights.

Then the Leviathan steams to leeward of the burning ship, and picks up her boats. She takes the rescued passengers aboard, and returns to windward; then drops the boats again, and repeats the previous operations, until every man, woman, and child is saved.

As the last boat swings up at the end of the great derricks aboard the _Cornucopia_ there is a final volcano of flame from the burning ship, lighting up the black belly of the sky into billowing clouds of redness. There falls the eternal blackness of the night.... The _Vanderfield_ has gone.

The Leviathan swings round through the night, with her six hundred saved; and begins to sing again in her deep heart, laying the miles and the storm astern once more, in a deep low thunder.

_THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE._

BY DR. W. H. FITCHETT.

The present war is the biggest event in secular history—so big indeed that its scale evades the imagination. Its cause cannot be condensed into a formula or its story told in a volume. But every war, sooner or later, finds literary expression; and the present gigantic struggle needs, and will create, a new literature of its own, beside which all the rest of secular literature will seem petty. A hundred years hence professional soldiers will be spelling out its strategy; toiling historians will be collating and recording its events; philosophers will be analysing its causes, moralists in spectacles will be assessing its spiritual elements. What a literature—strategic, scientific, political, financial, geographical, legal, medical, personal—it will be!

And when all such questions are dealt with there will yet remain that aspect of the war which has nothing to do with strategy, or politics, or finance. It deals with the purely human interests and emotions of the struggle; its picturesqueness; its dramatic incidents; the strophe and antistrophe of moral forces it reveals; its literary aspects, in a word; things in it which would have arrested the imagination of Shakespeare, and supplied the text for mightier dramas than ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Hamlet’; incidents that Scott would have woven into romance; follies which might have given Swift the text for keener satire than even his ‘Tale of a Tub’; heroisms that a greater Byron may set to more resounding music than even those famous lines which tell of Waterloo. And, it may be added, it is possible already to see in this amazing war some aspects which will do more than merely challenge the literary imagination, the sense of the wonderful.

To begin with what is nearest: the new scale of the war, the strange temper, the terrific weapons with which it is being fought, will certainly prove, for centuries to come, an irresistible challenge to the literary imagination. When the first shot in this war was fired, the whole familiar and accepted arithmetic of battle went suddenly to wreck. It was a war, not of armies, but of nations. As a result we have to think of the contending forces in terms of millions.

Australia, for example, supplies a proof of the enormously expanded scale of this war. The standing army of Imperial Rome consisted of 260,000 men. Australia is a community of only five million people; war to it is a totally new experience. Yet it has raised, equipped, and sent to a battlefield 12,000 miles distant an army equal in number to the standing army of the Caesars, at the time the Caesars were the masters of the civilised world. Great Britain affords another example of the amazingly expanded realm of the war. She hates standing armies, hates them so much that she will only pass the Mutiny Act, which makes an army of any sort possible, for a year at a time. The British formula is a big fleet and a little army. When this war broke out the regular forces of Great Britain consisted of only 186,000 men. When the war was not yet two years old, the British fleet had taken a scale without precedent in history; in addition Great Britain had raised an army which approached 5,000,000 and in which every man was a volunteer. If the average Liberal member of Parliament had been told, say, three years ago, that Great Britain, in addition to having a fleet in scale so tremendous, would have a land force of 5,000,000, he probably would have assaulted his interlocutor. But Great Britain, having raised by voluntary effort those 5,000,000, has actually passed a Conscription Bill for the remainder of its population.

The battles of to-day take such a scale, last so long, and are fought under such strange conditions, that we have to invent new names for them. They are neither ‘sieges’ nor ‘battles,’ but a combination of both; and so we call them siege-battles. That ‘first and last of fights, king-making Waterloo,’ when set against the arithmetic of the present war, dwindles into a skirmish. The little shallow valley outside Brussels, where Napoleon and Wellington measured swords with each other, and one of the greatest soldiers in history ended his career, is in area three miles by two, and lies open to a single glance. Waterloo itself began at 11 o’clock in the morning, and ended before 9 o’clock at night; it might have been fought under the Factories Act.

Let there be set beside it the great siege-battle of the Aisne, which began on September 15, 1914, and is going on still, with louder thunders and vaster slaughter than ever. Its field has lengthened into a ribbon of contorted trenches stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, a distance of 500 miles, and from, or in, those strange, vast, far-running ditches, now for nearly two years, some 3,000,000 men, the best fighters in history, armed with an artillery which suggests nothing so much as the weapons with which Milton equipped Satan and his hosts in their war with the angels, have been slaying each other. The deep thunder of the guns, the tumult of fighting men, have never ceased to sound at one point or another along those five hundred miles for nearly two years. Verdun, with all its passion and slaughter, its six months’ wrestle of guns and infantry, is a mere episode in this tremendous siege-battle; a score of Waterloos and Marengos have been fought during its progress, and have scarcely found a record.

The most brilliant chapter in British military history before the present war was certainly Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsula. They lasted six years. The British forces under Wellington seldom approached, and never exceeded, 50,000 men. Napier condenses the story into a single sentence of stately and resonant prose. In that great struggle the British forces ‘fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or sustained ten sieges, took four great fortresses; killed, wounded, and took 200,000 enemies, etc.;’ and the cost of all this is to be found in ‘the bones of 40,000 British soldiers’ which ‘lie scattered on the plains and mountains of the Peninsula.’ But Sir John French’s army in France lost in three weeks more than Wellington’s armies in the Peninsula lost in six years! In a single episode of the siege-battle beyond the Aisne Valley—say, the second battle of Ypres, which lasted four days—the British employed greater forces, and sustained greater losses, than in Wellington’s six campaigns in the Peninsula.

The most brilliant, desperate, and bloody siege of those campaigns was that of Badajos, in 1812. No one who has read the story Napier tells of how, on the night Badajos was stormed, the men of the Light Division died on its dark breach, can ever forget the tale. Now the siege of Badajos lasted twenty days; it cost Wellington 5000 men. The storming parties were let loose at 10 o’clock on the night of April 6; when morning dawned Badajos was won. Compare this with Verdun. The German attack began on February 23. Some 3000 guns—amongst them the great howitzers that destroyed Namur—poured for days and nights an unceasing tempest of high explosives on the French lines. Then the assault was launched. For nearly six months the thunder of the German guns has risen and sunk, but never ceased; again and again, now on one point, now on another, the vast grey waves of the German infantry have flung themselves in bloody ebb and flow on the French position. What the German losses have been can only be guessed; they must reach half a million men. And still the tricolour flies over Verdun.

If we take the fighting on the sea, again, there is the same tremendous increase of scale. Trafalgar is—or _was_, till May 31 of the present year—the greatest sea-fight under the British flag, and it is curious to set it in contrast with the fight in the North Sea. The resemblances and differences of the two great battles are alike most striking. That little, one-eyed, one-armed, weather-beaten, sun-tanned figure, Nelson, is the dominating figure in Trafalgar; and he is still the most famous of all who have led the fleets of Great Britain into battle. But if we turn to the recent battle in the North Sea—a battle so splendidly fought, and so ill-told—it is clear that, in quickness of vision to read the iron alphabet of sea-battle, and in the dash and fire with which he dared all risks to turn and hold his enemy, Sir David Beatty is of Nelson’s school, and has ‘the Nelson touch.’ Nelson himself, indeed, could hardly have done better on that foggy afternoon in the North Sea than Sir David Beatty did. For seamanship, for technical skill, and for pure valour, the North Sea fight, in brief, will compare with Trafalgar. But in its general aspect, in the scale of the forces engaged, and in the amount of destruction achieved—and the terrifying speed of that destruction—the two battles are utterly unlike each other. A comparison betwixt them shows how completely the whole physiognomy of sea-battle is changed. Beatty’s six battle-cruisers carried only 9-inch armour, but they had the hitting-power of Dreadnoughts and the pace of destroyers; and _speed_ was the great feature of the North Sea fight. The ships engaged under both flags were amongst the swiftest afloat, and the battle was fought at full speed. At the critical moment of the fight the ships of Beatty’s squadron were travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, firing as they raced. They could head, and turn, the line of German ships because they outpaced them. But if the ships were swift, death was swifter. It was as they whirled around across the head of the German line that the _Queen Mary_ and the _Indefatigable_, in turn, were destroyed, and destroyed in a space of time to be reckoned in minutes—whether by the concentrated fire of the big German Dreadnoughts, or by the misadventure of striking a floating mine, is not clear.

It is exactly at the two points of furious speed and of destructive energy that the contrast betwixt Trafalgar and the fight in the North Sea is greatest. At Trafalgar, as everyone knows, the Franco-Spanish fleet was drawn up, or had drifted, into a straggling crescent four miles from tip to tip—thirty-three great line-of-battle ships, armed with more than 3000 guns, a curving forest of masts and flags. The British in two columns—Nelson in the _Victory_ leading one column, Collingwood in the _Royal Sovereign_ the other—bore down on the enemy, but there was no speed in the movement. They drifted, rather than sailed, at the rate of less than two miles an hour—less than a walking-pace, that is—into this curve of hostile guns; and the coolness of the British crews and their officers was in keeping with the deliberation with which their ships approached the enemy. The _Royal Sovereign_ was a quarter of a mile ahead of its column, and was certain to receive the concentrated fire of the enemy’s line for nearly half an hour without support, yet Collingwood was not only nibbling but _paring_ an apple on the quarter-deck while waiting for the great game to begin.

Nelson’s three-deckers, compared with the modern Dreadnought or battle-cruiser, were tiny ships. They had an average tonnage of a little over 2000 tons—the _Victory_ herself was of 2223 tons. Now, a ship of the _Queen Elizabeth_ class is of 27,000 tons, equal to the tonnage of the whole column of Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar. The _Victory_ carried 101 guns, about one-third being 32-pounders; there were only two carronades firing a shot of sixty-two pounds. If every gun on the _Victory_ had been fired in one sudden broadside, the entire weight of metal would have been 2296 pounds, or a little over one ton of iron, and the effective range would be less than half a mile. But the _Queen Elizabeth_, with her 15-inch guns, could discharge, in a single broadside, _twenty-seven tons_ of steel, and could strike her mark with that tempest of flying metal—a swarm of aerolites—once every thirty seconds, a dozen miles away.

The number of men killed at Trafalgar, leaving out the wounded, was only 449. On the _Victory_ itself 57 were killed, on the ‘Fighting’ _Téméraire_ 47, on the _Royal Sovereign_ 47, on the _Belle Isle_ 33, or a total of 184 killed in the four leading ships. But the _Cressy_, the _Aboukir_, and the _Hogue_ were sunk in fifteen minutes—without seeing the submarine that sank them—and 680 seamen were drowned, a loss fifty per cent. greater than that of the whole of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar. Sir David Beatty’s two battle-cruisers, the _Queen Mary_ and the _Indefatigable_, were sunk in a time as brief as the three unfortunate cruisers, and sunk when travelling at their highest speed, and firing as they raced. Each carried a complement of 900 men, and when they went down the loss of life was four times as great as that of Trafalgar.

A century hence what may be called the German psychology, as revealed in this war, will still puzzle the curiosity and challenge the imagination of unborn generations. For the first time in history we have the spectacle of a nation of seventy million people, Christian in faith, highly civilised, strong on the practical side, of shrewdest business capacity, with a genius for business and for organisation, a nation that has given to education, or what it thinks is education, a larger place in its life than any other in history, yet which somehow is smitten with a sort of insanity, an insanity partly moral and partly intellectual. And what heightens the wonder is the circumstance that it mistakes its very lunacy for culture. To make the tragedy complete, it is an insanity organised, armed, disciplined, terrible, equipped with all the resources of science, and having borrowed from science new engines and subtleties of destruction without precedent in the history of war.

In its essence what we are watching is the spiritual bankruptcy of a great nation; but the whole story bristles with psychological problems. Its spiritual landmarks have shifted. Good and evil are terms in its politics which have not merely lost, but—a much more terrible thing—have _exchanged_ their significance. It mistakes might for right. It labels its vices as virtues.

In one sense, Germany is rich in intellectual ability—the Germany to which Beethoven sang, and Goethe discoursed philosophy, for which Kant moralised, and at which Heine jested. It has a list of names great in poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. Germany, too, has done great things in science, though not so much in the realm of scientific discovery. It adapts rather than discovers; it excels in translating the scientific discoveries of other races into practical terms. Noticeable, also, is the fact that the great names in German literature, philosophy, and scholarship are not Prussian; and it is Prussia, and the Prussianised form of Germany, which is troubling the world. Luther came from Eisleben; Leibnitz was a Czech; Kant was of Scottish blood; Bismarck, it is amusing to remember, told Prince Napoleon, ‘I am _not_ a German; I am a Prussian, a Wend’—that is, a Slav. Both Nietzsche and Treitschke came of a Slav stock; most of the great ‘German’ musicians came of a Jewish strain; Heine was, of course, a pure Jew.