Frank Fox

“ The Swiss Alps have their chief worshippers in the summer for the climbing, in the winter for the sports. A few insist that the rich colouring of autumn is the best season of all. A larger and a growing number visit the Alps in the spring for the flowers. They are wise, for truly the sight of an Alpine meadow in bloom is the most joyous manifestation of Nature in a sunny mood that man can know. ”

“ Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, facing the great Stone of Remembrance, and compassed by these sternly simple headstones, we remember, and must charge our children to remember, that, as our dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in honour, for the greatest and the least of them have proved that sacrifice and honour are no vain things, but truths by which the world lives. ”

“ That fantastic life at G.H.Q., so greatly detached from the normal—the life of the men whose words had power to send Armies into and out of action, to give this Division rest and surcease from the agony of the struggle, to assign to that Division the stress of a new effort; the men into whose hands the nation poured millions without stint and at whose call the whole world moved to spin or dig or forge—will it be of interest now to recall some of its memories, to attempt an intimate picture of its routine? ”

“ I have never yet met a British man or boy who was of the right manly type who did not love Australian life after a little experience. The great distances, the cheery hospitality, the sunny climate, the sense of social freedom, the generous return which Nature gives to the man who offers her honest service—all these appeal and make up the sum of that strong attraction Australia has to her own children and to colonists from the Motherland. ”

“ We celebrate this victory by numbering not our slaughtered foes but our living and tamed antagonists. If we regret to hear of the entire destruction even of any kind of animal, if we mourn that elephants should be disappearing from the province of Africa, lions from Thessaly, and hippopotami from the marshes of the Nile, how much rather, when a whole nation of men, barbarians it is true, but still men, lies prostrate at our feet, confessing that it is entirely at our mercy, ought we not instead of extirpating, to preserve it, and make it our own by showing it compassion? ”

“ Those proofs of virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout the world and its waters—since we can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through Eastern Europe in wellnigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing over the holy mount of Olives itself to the farthest shores of the Indian and Pacific Oceans—from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa. ”

“ Each little fragment of ice has a separate glitter of its own, so that the whole surface sparkles with a frosted radiance. It is not the same at dawn after a cold night, for then there is no water between the fragments, but all is hard and solid. No sooner, however, does the sun shine upon them, than the bonds are released and the ice-crystals begin to break up with a gentle tinkling sound and little flashes of light reflected from tiny wet mirror-surfaces. One can spend hours watching these small phenomena as happily as gazing upon the great mountains themselves. Size is a relative term. ”

“ In an age when a fog of dreary sameness comes over all the civilised world, the Balkans have a great asset in their primitivism. Theirs is not a wholly European civilisation; indeed, except in the capital cities, it is not chiefly a European civilisation. Everywhere there is a touch of the mystery, the fatalism, the desert-bred wildness of the Asiatic steppes. For centuries the hand of the Turk has been heavy on the land, and a strong stream of his blood courses still through the veins of most of the Balkan peoples. ”

“ Painters from all over the world used to come to Montreuil to attempt to put on canvas the glow of its summer scenes, the wild grandeur of its winters. No day was without its special beauty, and the beauty was ever renewed afresh. ”

“ Children respect their parents, wives look at their husbands almost as gods, and at the tent door elders administer what they imagine justice, stroking their long white beards, and as impressed with their judicial functions as if their dirty turbans or ropes of camels' hair bound round their heads, were horse-hair wigs, and the torn mat on which they sit a woolsack or a judge's bench, with a carved wooden canopy above it, decked with the royal arms. ”

“ The Bulgarian mobilisation—effected after lengthy preparation with perfect success and complete secrecy—was a triumph of military achievement. It emphasises a point often urged, that when a whole nation is wrapt up in the colours, when every citizen is a soldier and taught the code of patriotic honour of the soldier—then at a time of crisis, spies, grumblers, critics are impossible. Bulgaria, as I have said, is very democratic. Unlike Roumania, where a landed aristocracy survived Turkish rule, the whole nation is of peasants or the sons and grandsons of peasants. ”

“ The nearness to the snow has certainly an effect in enhancing the charm of these Alpine meadows. The flowers, wearing the colours of the sun, rush bravely to the very edge of the snow-fields as though they were jostling the winter aside. The white has barely disappeared before there is green and gold and red to give cheerful greeting to the spring sky, and declare another foot of territory won from the frost. ”

“ But in this fair land of France, which sustained the utmost fury of the long strife, our brothers are numbered, alas! by hundreds of thousands. They lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend, a resolute and chivalrous comrade-in-arms, who with ready and quick sympathy has set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, so that we ourselves and our descendants may for all time reverently tend and preserve their resting-places. And here, at Terlincthun, the shadow of his monument falling almost across their graves, the greatest of French soldiers—of all soldiers—stands guard over them. ”

“ Yet we ate, drank, slept, played a little and talked, very much as if we were workers in some commercial house, directing coffee from a plantation to a warehouse and then to a breakfast table, instead of dealing in blood and tears, drawing without stint on human life and human hope so that the idea of Right and Liberty might be saved in the world. ”

“ The night is dying. Her rich darks and whites grow pallid. Each moment a layer of darkness peels off. The sky turns blue before one knows it: the rocks grow brown: there is blue in the crevasses, and green upon the swards—all low-toned yet distinct. Faint puffs of warm air come, we know not whence, touch our faces, and are gone. The lantern has been extinguished; we stride out more freely; the day awakens within us also. ”

“ There are no drones, and none who spend their lives in the pleasures, refinements, luxuries, vices, the idle amusements of the great cities of Europe. The buildings represent utility, means fairly adapted to ends, but with no cumbrous decoration or ponderous display. These capitals are bureaucratic settlements, devoted to the deliberate ends of national government with a minimum of waste, strictly appropriated to use alone, rendering their service to the nation as a counting-house renders its service to a great factory. Peasants walk their streets in brilliant village dresses. ”

“ In pre-war days an Australian in England might have felt himself a little of the barbarian in so smooth a comity, where people loved moderately and hated very moderately; walked always by paths; were somewhat ashamed of their own merits and suavely tolerant of others' demerits; and were nervous of allowing patriotism to become infected with the sin of pride. But England at war understood them better—the Anzacs, the young of the British. The young of the British, not of the English only, though that is the master element of the breed. ”

“ For some six weeks I had been following an army in breathless anxious chase of facts: wheedling censors to get some few of those facts into a telegraph office; learning then, perhaps, that the custom at that particular telegraph office was to forward telegrams to Sofia, a ten days' journey, by bullock wagon and railway, to give them time to mature. Now here, piping hot, were the stories of the war. There was the touching prose poem about King Ferdinand following his troops to the front in a military train, which was his temporary palace. ”

“ The mountain, judged by the scale of remembered toil, grows wonderfully in height. The eye thus trained begins to realise and even to exaggerate the vast scale on which peaks are built. But along with this gain in the truthful sense of scale comes the loss of mystery. The peak which was in heaven is brought down to earth. It was a mere thing of beauty to be adored and wondered at; it has become something to be climbed. ”

“ At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways already marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I should like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to them in the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day, amidst these surroundings so wonderfully typical of that [Pg 91] single-hearted assembly of nations and of races which form our Empire. For here, in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion of that Empire, across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which they guarded that Freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the earth. ”

“ The railway got choked, and even the horse failed, but the ox never failed. There were thousands of ox wagons crawling across the country. They do not walk, they crawl, like an insect, with an irresistible crawl. It reminds you of those armies of soldier ants which move across Africa, eating everything which they come across, and stopping at nothing. I had an ox wagon coming from Mustapha Pasha to Kirk Kilisse, and we went over the hills and down through the valleys, and stopped for nothing—we never had to unload once. And one could sleep in those ox wagons. ”