XV The Children of Our Dead
There are times when we get away from the Front for a rest. We hear no more the sound of the guns, but give ourselves up to the silence and charm of the country. Before going into the Somme fighting we were billeted for ten days in the neighboring village to Cressy; and as the anniversary of the battle came that week the colonel chose the day for a march to the battlefield. The owner of the field, when the old windmill stood, from which King Edward III directed his army, came to meet us and describe the battle. When the war is over he is going to erect a monument on the spot to the memory of the French and British troops who in comradeship have died fighting against the common foe.
They were happy days that we spent around Cressy. The last that some were destined to know this side of the Great Divide. The bedroom next to mine was occupied by two fine young officers of utterly different type. One was a Greek whose father had taken out naturalization papers and loved the country of his adoption with a worshiping passion that would shame many native born. The other was a charming, argumentative, systematic, theological student of Scots parentage. The night before we left, the Greek accidentally broke his mirror and was much upset. It was, he said, a token that Death was about to claim him. The Scot laughed heartily, for he had not a trace of the superstitious in him; or, if he had—which was more than likely—it was kept under by his strong reasoning faculties.
“If you are to be killed,” he replied, “I am to be killed too, for I also have broken my mirror.”
He spoke the words in jest, or with hardly a discernible undercurrent of seriousness; but they were true words nevertheless. The two bed-mates were killed in the same battle a week or two later. I had tea with them in their dug-out on the eve of the fight. They were to take up their positions in an hour, but the student could not resist having just one more argument. He directed the conversation to the New Theology, and to German philosophers and Biblical scholars. He simply talked me off my feet, for he possessed the most brilliant intellect in the regiment, combined with self-reliance and perfect modesty. Then the conversation turned to the question of taking a tot of rum before going over the parapet. He was a rigid teetotaler, “for,” said he, “drink is the ruin of my country.” He was opposed to the idea of taking rum to help one’s courage or allay his fears. He would not, he said, go under with his eyes bandaged. He would take a good look at Death and dare him to do his worst. He was superb, and Death never felled a manlier man. Browning would have loved him as his own soul for he had Browning’s attitude to life exactly, and could have sung with him,
“Fear death?...
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light...
And with God be the rest!”
He was found with his “body against the wall where the forts of folly fall.” His brave, intelligent face was completely blown away. His Greek friend was wounded, and while being dressed in a shell-hole by his servant, was hit again and killed.
Some weeks later all that remained of the regiment was drawn out to a little village some miles from Amiens, and very similar to the one we had occupied near Cressy. We were taken to it in motor-‘buses for the men were too exhausted to march, and the days spent there were days of great delight. We had a glorious, crowded-out service on the Sunday. It was both a thanksgiving and a memorial service, and I spoke to the men on “The Passing of the Angels.”
“When the music ceased,” I said, “and the herald-angels departed, the sky became very empty, cold and gray to the Shepherds; and they said one to another, ‘let us now go even unto Bethlehem.’ And they went and found out Jesus. If the angels had stayed the shepherds would have stayed with them. The angels had to come to point them to Jesus but, that done, they had to go away to make the shepherds desire Jesus and seek Him. ‘When the half-gods go the gods arrive.’ The angels had to make room for Jesus and the second best had to yield place to the best. When John the Baptist was killed his disciples went in their sorrow to Jesus; and having lost our noble comrades, we must go to Him also. The best in our friends came from Jesus as the sweet light of the moon comes from the sun; and we must go to the Source. If we find and keep to Jesus, sooner or later we shall find our lost friends again, for ‘them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him!’”
In some such words I tried to comfort those who had left their comrades behind in the graves on the Somme; for I know how deeply they felt the loss. During the week we had dinner parties, and all kinds of jolly social intercourse. It was amusing to see the delight everyone felt at having a bed to sleep in. “Look Padre, at these white sheets,” an officer cried as I passed his window. He was as merry over them as if a rich maiden aunt had remembered him in her will. Some got “leave” home, and were so frankly joyful about it that it made the rest of us both glad and envious. We made up for it somewhat by getting leave to spend an occasional day in Amiens. There I went into the glorious cathedral. Almost the whole of the front was sandbagged, but even thus, it was a “thing of beauty” and has become for me a “joy forever.”
Except Rouen Cathedral I have seen nothing to equal it. Notre Dame, with its invisible yet clinging tapestry of history, is more deeply moving. But it is sadder—more sombre. Something of the ugliness and tragedy of by-gone days peep out in it; but Amiens Cathedral is a thing of pure joy and beauty. It suggests fairies, while Notre Dame suggests goblins.
While I was looking at its glorious rose-windows which were casting their rich colors on the pillars, a father and his two children came in. The man and son dipped their fingers in the shell of holy water, crossed their foreheads and breasts with the water, and were passing on; but the little girl who was too short to reach the shell, took hold of her father’s arm and pulled him back. She, too, wished to dip her fingers in holy water, and make the sign of the cross over her mind and heart. The father yielded to her importunity and touched her hand with his wet fingers. She made the sacred sign and was satisfied. The father and son had remembered their own needs but forgotten the child’s.
After all the tragic happenings on the Somme why should this little incident linger in my memory like a primrose in a crater? Did it not linger because of the tragedy of the preceding weeks? I had been living weeks together without seeing a child and after the slaughter of youth which I had witnessed the sight of a child in a cathedral was inexpressibly beautiful. The father’s neglect of its finer needs gave me pain. We have lost so many young men, that every child and youth left to us ought to be cared for as the apple of our eye. We have lost more than our young men. We have lost those who would have been their children. The little ones who might have been, have gone to their graves with their fathers.
The old recruiting cry, “the young and single first” was necessary from a military standpoint but, from a merely human point of view, I could never see much justice in it. The young had no responsibility, direct or indirect, for the war. They were given life and yet before they could taste it, they were called upon to die in our behalf. We who are older have tasted of life and love; the residue of our years will be much the same as those that have gone before; there will be little of surprise or newness of experience. Perhaps, too, we have living memorials of ourselves, so that if we die, our personality and name will still live on. Our death will only be partial. While William Pitt lived could it be said that Lord Chatham had died? His body was dead, truly, but his spirit found utterance in the British House of Commons every time his son spoke, and Napoleon felt the strength of his arm as truly did Montcalm on the Heights of Abraham. I should not have mourned the loss of the young Scot and the Greek so much, had they left to the world some image and likeness of themselves. In dying, they gave more than themselves to death;
“Those who would have been
Their sons they gave—their immortality.”
After a summer on the Somme, I have come to understand something of how fear of the devouring maw of Time became almost an obsession with Shakespeare. Death had taken from him some of the dearest intimates of his heart, and taken them young. And so, like the sound of a funeral-bell echoing down the lane where lovers walk, there is heard through all his sonnets and poems of love the approaching footsteps of death. Sometimes the footsteps sound faintly, but they are seldom absent. How then would he have felt in a war like this, in which the “young and single” have gone out by the hundred thousand to prematurely die?
Others, however, who have given their lives were married men, and they have left images of themselves in trust to the nation. We know the last thoughts of a dying father. Captain Falcon Scott as he lay dying at the South Pole has expressed them for all time. “Take care of the boy,” he said, “there should be good stuff in him.” He found comfort in the reflection that he would, though he died, live on in his son; but he was saddened by the thought that the son would have to face the battle of life without a father to back him up. The boy would therefore need special “care.”
On the evening of the first battle of the Somme I spoke to a young officer as he lay in a bed at the Field Ambulance. He had lost his right arm and he told me how it had happened. He was charging across No Man’s Land when a shell cut it off near the shoulder, and flung it several yards away. As he saw it fall to the ground the sight so overcame him that he cried aloud in distress, “Oh my arm! My beautiful arm.” He was still mourning its loss, so, to comfort him, I told him that Nelson lost his right arm and won the Battle of Trafalgar after he had lost it. Like Nelson, I told him, he would learn to write with his left hand and still do a man’s job. He would not be useless in life as he feared. When the children of our dead soldiers charge across No Man’s Land in the battle of life they will think of their lost fathers, and the agonizing cry of the young wounded soldier will rise to their lips, “Oh my arm, my beautiful arm.” The State is providing artificial arms for our wounded soldiers. Will it be a right arm to the children of its dead? Will it be a father to the fatherless and a husband to the widow? Unless it is ready for this sacred task, it had no right to ask for and accept the lives of these men.
The State, with the help of the Church, must resolve that no child shall suffer because its father was a hero and patriot. The State must help the child to the shell of holy water without the little one having to pull at its arm to remind it of its duties. If the children of our dead soldiers lack education, food, moral and spiritual guidance, or a proper start in life, no words will be condemnatory enough to adequately describe the nation’s crime and ingratitude. They are the sons and daughters of heroes and there “should be good stuff” in them. It is the nation’s privilege, as well as its duty, to take the place of their fathers.
A few days later I walked into Arras from the neighboring village. There were guns all along the road, and there was not a house but bore the mark of shells. Some of the civilians had remained, but these were mostly old people who could not settle elsewhere, and who preferred to die at home rather than live in a strange place. One house impressed me greatly. It had been badly damaged but, its garden was untouched and in it were half a dozen rose-trees. It was the beginning of spring, and each tree was covered over with sacking to preserve it from the cold and fragments of shells. The owner did not care sufficiently for his own life to move away, but he cared for the life of his roses. And so, when the summer came there were roses in at least one garden in Arras.
The noise of the guns was terrific and the old man had to live in the cellar, but he found leisure of soul to cultivate his roses. His action was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in the entire war. The children of our homes are more beautiful than Arras roses, and more difficult to rear. May we trust our country not to neglect them? Will she save them from the mark of the shell, and help them to grow up to a full and perfect loveliness? Our dying soldiers have trusted her to do it. From their graves they plead,
“If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies blow
In Flanders fields.”