Sir Hall Caine

“ If Jesus died of His own free will, if He died for love, why shouldn’t she? And if by dying He saved the world, would it not be the same with her also?
In the dizzy whirl of her brain she can see no difference. What she intends to do ceases to be a sin and becomes a sacrifice. If the world is full of hatred, as the consequence of the war, her death may save it. She is only a poor girl, and nobody on earth may ever know what she has done and why she has done it, yet God will know.
But Oskar? She had not intended to tell Oskar. ”

“ Looking out of her bedroom window in the morning, Mona sees nothing but a desolate black waste where the crowded compounds have been. Four unborn springs and summers buried in the bosom of the blackened fields—when, oh when will they grow green again?
Only in the Third Compound is there any activity. Few men are left even there. Oskar has told her he is to leave with the last batch, but the time for him to go is coming on inexorably. ”

“ In the face of what he, in common with countless pre-war pacifists, believed to be a deliberate plot whereby liberty was to be violated, civilization was to be outraged, religion was to be degraded, the right was to be wronged, the weak were to be oppressed, the helpless were to be injured, and before the iron arm of a merciless military tyranny, justice and mercy and charity were to be wiped out of the world, he became one of the most passionate supporters of the war of resistance. The Great War stood to him, as to others, as a war to end war. ”

“ One day passes, then another. Every morning Mona sees a fresh batch of prisoners leaving the camp, and her heart sinks at the sight of them. Oskar’s turn will come some day. It tears her to pieces to think of it—Oskar going off at that melancholy pace, down the avenue and round by Kirk Patrick.
At length a spirit of defiance takes possession of her. Knockaloe is dear to her by a thousand memories, but it is not the only place on the island. She has heard of a farm in the north that is to be let in November. ”

“ Mona feels as if a knife has gone to her heart, but she rises hastily and says sharply: “You may take it away. I’ll have nothing to do with it,” and Oskar goes off, but he leaves the box behind him.
All day long she tries not to look at it, but it is constantly meeting her eye, and in the evening, when her work is done and everything is quiet, she picks up the box, puts it under her cloak and turns towards the gates of the encampment.
“Better have it out of my sight,” she thinks as she goes into the churchyard of Kirk Patrick. ”

“ Half a year has passed. Mona has seen nothing of Oskar since Christmas. With a thrill of the heart she hears of the wide liberty he has won by his ability and good behaviour. But even in that there is a certain sting. He is free of the camp now as far as the barbed wire extends; why does he not come to see her? Sometimes she feels bitter that he does not come, but again the strange thing is that sometimes she is sure that if he did come she would run away from him. ”

“ Mona has been fighting a hard battle with herself. Some evil spirit seems to have found its way into her heart and she has had to struggle against it all day and every day.
“It can’t be true! It’s impossible! I should hate myself,” she thinks.
To fortify herself against her secret enemy she spends as much time as she can spare with her father. The old man is now bitterer than ever against the Germans. They have killed his son, and he can never forgive them. ”

“ Oskar comes towards bed-time. He is biting his lips and his eyes are bloodshot. She looks up at him helplessly—all the strength of her soul has gone out of her.
“You’ve heard the result?”
“Yes, I have heard,” he says, speaking between his teeth.
[Pg 150]
“I can’t think how people could be so unkind.”
“Unkind!”
He is laughing bitterly, fiercely.
“One’s nearest neighbours—the people one has known all one’s life.”
“Oh, your people are no worse than any other—not an atom. People are the same everywhere. It’s the war, Mona. It has drained every drop of humanity out of them.” ”

“ A dim, mysterious, divine majesty seems to have come down on all the troubled world. The moon is shining full on her face. She hears marching on the crinkling snow—the band of the guard are crossing the avenue to take up the place assigned to them on the officers’ tennis-court. Behind them there is the shuffling of irregular feet—her farm-hands are following. ”

“ They are laughing and singing at the top of their lungs, punching each other and boxing, playing leap-frog and turning cart-wheels. What does it matter about country? Who cares about the Fatherland, anyway? All the world is their country—all the world and the sea.
Mona is standing at the door of her dairy, quivering with emotion. She is like a woman [Pg 108] possessed. What she has hoped for and prayed for has come to pass at last. Peace! Peace! Peace over all the earth! Never has the world had such a chance before. ”

“ Looking beyond the barbed wire boundary of the encampment, Mona sees country carts rattling down the high road at a fast trot as if going to a fair. Somebody is on the church tower of Kirk Patrick doing something with the flagstaff.
At half-past ten the world seems to be standing still. The camp is on tiptoe. All over it men are looking towards Douglas. Their faces are grim, almost ghastly. They seem to be rooted to the ground. Sometimes one of them digs his foot into the earth like a restless horse tired of waiting, but that is the only movement.
Where is Oskar? ”

“ There are five compounds in it now, and twenty-five thousand civilian prisoners, besides the British Commandant and his officers and guard—two thousand more. It is a big ugly blotch of booths and tents and bare ground, surrounded by barbed wire and covering with black ashes like a black hand the green pastures where the sweet-smelling farm had been. In the middle of the camp, cut off from the compounds, is the farm-house, and its outhouses, with their many cows, and its farm-servants who sleep in the rooms over the dairy.
Mona is the only woman among twenty-seven thousand men. ”

“ For their work in the workshops and on the land the prisoners are paid, but their small earnings (less a tax to the camp and a small sum for “fag-money”) go into the camp bank, to be distributed when the war is over. Once more an inquiry is fruitless. The men refuse to speak, and the captain of the guard is bewildered.
One morning, on rising, Mona sees Oskar Heine in the avenue talking through the barbed-wire fence to a group of sailors in the Second Compound. The men are behaving like infuriated animals, clenching and shaking their fists as if vowing vengeance. ”

“ Mona’s hatred of the Germans is deepening every hour, yet twice a day she has to meet with some of them. Morning and evening she serves the regulated supply of milk to the men who come from the compounds, attended by their guard. They try to engage her in conversation, but she rarely answers them, and she tries not to listen.
Always the last to come is a pale-faced young fellow from the Third Compound. He has a hacking cough, and Mona thinks he must be consumptive. An impulse of pity sometimes seizes her, but she fights it down. ”

“ On the other hand will it not be agreed that the Christian ideal of the forgiveness of injuries and the brotherhood of man is the only remaining hope of the redemption of the world from the lamentable condition into which the war, and the passions provoked by the war, have plunged it; that without this ideal, politics are a meaningless mockery, religion is an organized hypocrisy, and the churches are a snare, and that, however hard it may be to learn the lesson, and however cruel the pain of it, there never was a time when it was more needed than now? ”

“ The court having risen, the prisoners are taken out between their guard. Oskar Heine passes close to the place where Mona is standing, but he does not raise his eyes to her.
Only then, her excitement being over, does Mona realize what she has done for herself. The townspeople are surging out of the court-house, and, as they go, they are casting black looks at her. She awaits until she thinks they are gone, and then, venturing out, she finds a throng of them, women as well as men, on the steps and about the gate, and they fall on her with insults. ”

“ The glass is cracked, no doubt by the snow and frost of winter, and the white flowers have perished. Poor [Pg 154] father! Who knows but in a little while his dust may mingle with that of the German boy in the mother-bosom that bore them both! Oh God, how wicked is war, how cruel, how senseless!
Mona is coming out of the churchyard when she hears the tapping of a mason’s chisel and then sees the mason himself behind a canvas screen, which shelters him from the winnowing of a light breeze that is blowing up from the sea. ”

“ Snow falls, then comes frost, and on Christmas Eve the ground of the black camp is white and hard, and a moon is shining—a typical Christmas.
Mona has had a bustling day, but at nine she is finished and goes upstairs to sit with her father. The old man, who is in bed, has heard something of her activities, and is not too well pleased with them. ”

“ To-day they have built over the spot a broad and lofty cairn, which will henceforth be the first thing seen by the passengers on the great liners who are coming in from the New World to the Old, and the last by those who are going out from the Old World to the New.—The Times.
“Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.... Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” ”

“ From that time forward Mona hates the prisoners as she had never hated them before. She cannot bear to look into their German faces or to hear the sound of their German voices. All the same she has to live among them for her father’s sake and even to serve them twice a day with the milk from the dairy.
Late in the year, at seven in the morning, she is measuring the milk into the cans, which are marked with the numbers of the various compounds. The prisoners come to carry them away, saluting her with the mist about their mouths as they do so, but she makes no answer. ”

“ Hall Caine has lived long enough since to see the falseness of that judgment. No one can have suffered more from the disappointments and disillusionment of the war, its political uselessness, its immeasurable cruelty, its limitless waste, its widespread wretchedness, and above all its inhuman demoralization. That the Great War has been in vain, that so much sacrifice, so much heroism, so many brave young lives have been thrown away, he would not for one moment say, being sure that in the long review of a mysterious Providence all these must have their place. ”

“ But he is none the less sure that the late war has left the world worse than it found it; that the after-war, which we call The Peace, has been more productive of evil passions than the war itself was; that violence has never been more rampant or faith in the sanctity of life so low; that the poor have never been poorer, or the struggle to live so severe ”

“ As Oskar steps out of the dock Mona feels hot and dizzy. Being a prisoner he is not sworn.
He stands at the foot of the witness-box, but his head is up, and when he answers the questions of the advocate appointed to represent the prisoners he does not seem to be afraid. ”

“ They carry him back to bed, limp and unconscious. Mona stands for some moments as if smitten by a blow on the brain. A horror of great darkness has fallen on her. When she recovers self-possession she looks round for Oskar. ”

“ There is no other sound except a kind of smothered hum from the inside of the booths, where twenty-five thousand men are waiting for the first hour of Christmas Day—only this and the rhythmical throb of the tide on the distant shore. ”

“ Robbie has fallen in action.
The truth dawns on the old man in a moment. An unseen flash as of lightning seems to strike him, and he reels as if about to fall. Mona calls to some of the farm hands, and they help her father indoors and up to bed, and then run for the nearest doctor—the English doctor of the First Compound. ”

“ Mona enters her father’s bedroom just as the babbler is finishing his story. The old man, who is quivering with rage, has struggled to his feet and is stamping his stick on the floor and swearing—nobody ever having heard an oath from his lips before. ”

“ Huge wagons, full of bricks and timber and other building materials, with vast rolls of barbed wire, have been arriving at the farm, and a multitude of bricklayers and [Pg 19] carpenters have been working all day long and half the night. Ugly stone-paved paths have been cut through the green fields; the grass-grown lane from the farm-house to the high road has been made into a broad bare avenue; gorse-covered hedges, already beginning to bloom, have been torn down, and long rows of hideous wooden booths have been thrown up and then tarred and pitched on their faces and roofs. ”