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The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days Scenes In The Great War - 1915, a non-fiction book by Hall Caine |
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"But Liberty Must Go On, And... England" |
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_ What startling surprises! We of the lower, the middle, or the upper-middle classes had come to believe that too many of the young men of our nobility had grown effeminate in idleness and selfish pleasure indulged in on the borderland of a kind of aristocratic Bohemia, but, behold! they were fighting and dying with the bravest. We had thought too many of their young women (as thoughtless and capricious creatures of fashion) had sacrificed the finest bloom of modest and courageous womanhood in luxury and self-indulgence; but, lo! they were hurrying to the battlefields as nurses, and there facing without flinching the scenes of blood and horror, of foul sights and stenches, which make the bravest man's heart turn sick. Some of the scenes at home in those last days of August and early days of September were yet more affecting. The first of our casualty lists had been published, and they were terrible. They hit the old people hardest, the old fathers and old mothers who had given all, and had nothing left--not even a little child to live for. At the railway stations, when fresh troops were leaving for the front, you saw sights which searched the heart so much that you felt ashamed to look, feeling they opened sanctuaries in which God's eye alone should see. Old Lady So-and-So seeing her youngest son off to Flanders. She has lost two of her sons in the war already, and Archie is the last of them. The dear old darling! It is pitiful to see her in her deep black, struggling to keep up before the boy. But when the train has left the platform and she can no longer wave her handkerchief she breaks down utterly. "I've seen the last of him," she says; "something tells me I've seen the last of him. And now I've given everything I have to the country." Ah! that's what you have all got to do, or be prepared to do, you brave mothers of England, if you have to defeat a desperate enemy, who stoops to any method, any crime. Then old Lord Such-a-One at Victoria to meet the body of his only son being brought back from the hospital at Boulogne. How proud he had been of his boy! He could remember the day he captained for Eton at Lord's, or perhaps rowed stroke--and won--for Cambridge. And now on the field of Flanders.... He had seen it coming, though. He had thought of it when the war broke out. "Ours is an old family," he had told himself, "four hundred years old, and my son is the last of us. If I let him go to the war my line may end, my family may stop... but then liberty must go on, civilization must go on, and... England!" Yes, it must be night before the British star will shine. _ |
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