VIII Sons of the Motherland
It is said that the eel is born in the deepest part of the ocean, thousands of miles from any country, and that, urged by an overpowering instinct it begins almost at once to rise towards the light and to head for the land. After slowly swimming thousands of miles it reaches our rivers, and pushes its way up to their sources, and even crawls through the grass out of one stream into another. Here, if uncaught by man, it lives for years gorging an appetite which only developed on reaching the fresh water. Then, the overmastering instinct that brought it out, takes it back. It returns through the illimitable waters until it finds the place where it was born. There the female lays her eggs and there male and female die. The eggs hatch, and the young do as their parents did before them.
I do not think I could kill or eat an eel. I have too much reverence for it now that I have learned its story. When in the fish market I see an eel struggling, I feel that I want to take it and drop it into the sea that it may go to its long home “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” How passionate and wild must be its desire to get back to its own ocean depths where it may perpetuate its kind and die in peace. Its appetite is voracious, but then, what but the mightiest and most elemental instincts and appetites could carry it through achievements so sublime and tragic. Picture it on its lone way through the deep, urged on by it knows not what. Scientists say that man has evolved from a tiny form of life that passed through the fish stage. If so, it explains a lot and I, for one, shall not be ashamed to acknowledge relationship to a fish with a life story as sublime as that of the eel. I know that Genesis speaks truly when it says that God made us out of the dust of the earth and breathed into our souls the breath of His own being thus animating dust with divinity. And if from the other inspired book, the book of Nature, scientists can teach how God mixed the clay when He fashioned man I will accept the teaching with gratitude, for it will help me to understand things that are dark in me and in my fellows. It will throw light on the wild longings, and instincts immature, that baffle the mind, and come into the clear shallow streams of life like eels out of the dark unfathomable depths of the ocean.
Since I went to France I have been amazed at the homing instinct as revealed in the coming together of the sons of the British Motherland. People at home do not quite realize what has happened. Britain’s sons have come back to her—have come back to die that their race may be saved and perpetuated. The British are a roving race. A large number of them yield to an overpowering desire to go out into the world. The South Pole and the North Pole have known the tread of their feet. Their ships have anchored in every creek of every sea. There is no town or country however remote where their voices have not been heard. Even Mecca could not keep the Briton out. He must look upon its Black Stone. All lands call him to come, and see, and conquer. He colonizes and absorbs but cannot be absorbed. He is a Briton still. A friend of mine told me that when visiting Australia strangers who had never seen England, except in and through their fathers, would come to him in railway carriage or ’bus, and ask “How is everything at Home?” And Dr. Fitchett, Australia’s splendid author, confesses that when he first saw the land of his fathers he knelt down and kissed its shore.
Loving the homeland with a passion stronger than death the Briton leaves it, for he hears the call of the world borne on the winds and waves from afar, and cannot refuse it. In foreign lands he lives and labors. He roams their fields and swims in their streams, but always with an ear listening for the voice of the Motherland; for he is hers, and at her service if she calls.
The Declaration of War on Aug. 4, 1914, was the Mother’s call to her children. Swifter than lightning it passed through the waves and on the wings of the wind. The settler left his lonely cabin, the gold-digger his shovel, the prospector his surveying instruments, the rancher his herds, the missionary his church, the teacher his school, the clerk his office, and all made for the nearest port. Within a month there was not a ship on the wide seas but was bearing loyal sons back to their Motherland’s defense. I have met, in France, British soldiers from every country under heaven. I bent over a dying soldier near Arras who was a clerk in Riga, Russia, when the call came. And one night on the Somme a fine young fellow from Africa entered my tent, and slept by my side. He was one of the most charming and handsome men I have ever met, and had come from Durban. He had fought with Botha in Southwest Africa, and at the conclusion of that campaign had shipped for home. Next day I took him to Delville Wood for he wanted to see the place where his brother had died. I found that he was of my own communion and we talked about some of my college friends who had gone out to Natal. Two days later, he died of wounds in a dressing station. Most of the transport officers in our Division have come home from abroad, and have been given their posts because they are accustomed to horses. One was prospecting in Nigeria, another salmon-canning in Siberia, a third on a plantation in South America.
In addition to Canadians, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders, who have come by the hundred thousand at the call of the Motherland, there are hundreds of thousands who have come singly, or in small parties, from remote corners of the earth. For five weeks I was a patient in a Canadian hospital in France. The entire staff was Canadian. Some were Canadian born; others had gone out to that country years ago. All were of British blood. The colonel was a magnificent specimen of manhood from London, Ontario, in which city he had been born. He would sit on the bed and tell us tales of the great snow-land. Sometimes he would scold us for being so blind to the greatness of the Empire and tell us what Canada thought of the Motherland. One of the night orderlies would, on occasion, recite to us some poem such as “Jim Bludso,” before the lights went out. Then he would come to my locker and take “Palgrave’s Treasury of Songs and Lyrics” with which to regale his soul during the long watches of the night. He was of the full stature of men and straight as a pine. He had gone out from Ireland as a boy, and settled on a cattle ranch in the United States. One day there was trouble and one of the other cowboys sent a bullet clean through his chest. The moment war was declared he left his roving herds of cattle, crossed the frontier into Canada and traveled hundreds of miles to Winnipeg to enlist. The doctor looked at him. “What is this scar on your chest?” he asked. “Oh,” replied the cowboy, “I fell off a wagon and knocked the skin off.” The doctor turned him round and put his finger in the scar on his back where the bullet had passed out. “And what is this scar at the back? Did you fall off another wagon?” And the two men understood one another and laughed. The doctor could not find it in his heart to send the cowboy back to his ranch, so he was passed into the Canadian contingent.
One of the nurses we called “the Little Mother.” She had gone to Canada five years before, but the war had brought her back, and well was it for us that it had. Among the patients was a doctor in the American A.M.C. His ancestors had left England generations ago and settled in New England, but he had come back at the call of war—a grandson of the Motherland. Then there was a lieutenant of British stock who had been born and brought up at Antwerp, but as the German guns were destroying his native city he took ship to enlist in the British army. “Anzac” was, as his nickname denotes, an Australian. He was in the Flying Corps. He had heard the call at school and had come “home” to the land of his fathers.
In one regiment I found a bunch of lads who had been born in China. But, out there in Hong Kong, they heard the call of a Motherland they had never seen, and came post haste to her help. Sitting near me as I write, is an officer back from the Argentine, and already, on his arm, is a gold wound-stripe. Another in the mess had been pearl-fishing in Australia, but stored his boats to come and fight. Another at our table was born in Australia. He was with Captain Falcon Scott on his last expedition, and saw him go out to the South Pole and death. He has already been wounded. When the war broke out its tumult seemed to wake our fathers and we felt them stir in our blood; for ancestors are not put into graves but are buried alive in their sons. We felt the call to defend our race as our fathers did in their day. It was a master instinct, and the millions of men who voluntarily left home and business to fight show how deeply nationality is rooted in human nature. Returning from a far land to die—if needs be—that their kind may live, the scattered sons of our Motherland have come by all the seas to defend her, in her hour of need.
“They came as the winds come
When forests are rended;
They came as the waves come
When navies are stranded.”