Various

“ Connie’s mind was steeped in passionate feeling. Till now Falloden had touched first her senses, then her pity. Now in these painful and despondent attempts of his to adjust himself to Otto’s weakness and irritability, he was stirring sympathies and enthusiasms in her which belonged to that deepest soul in Connie which was just becoming conscious of itself. And all the more, perhaps, because in Falloden’s manner towards her there was nothing left of the lover. For the moment at any rate she preferred it so. Life was all doubt, expectation, thrill—its colour heightened, its meanings underlined. ”

“ For nothing surely in the world can be so utterly and simply moving as the record of dead greatness—unless perhaps it be the oblivion which is the end of all greatness at the last. There is a place on the bleak top of the South Downs, a great tumulus, with an earth-work round it, all grassy now and tufted with gorse, the sheep grazing over it, which looks for miles north and east and west over the fertile weald, with shadowy hills on the horizon; and to the south, where the great ridges fold together, you can catch through the haze a golden glint of the sea. ”

“ Stay by me, Brownlow. See me through. Before God, I want to do right. Your worthless pupil wants for once to be a credit to you. But I cannot stand alone. I am afraid of myself. I distrust my own nature. If I go to her—to Fédore—with those empty jewel boxes of my mother’s in my hand and she lies to me, I shall want to kill her. And if she tells we what I can’t but believe is the truth, I shall want to blow my own brains out. ”

“ How could these precious things of my mother’s have found their way into the drawer of Fédore’s worktable—unless? The conjunction of ideas would be positively grotesque if—if it were not so damnable.—Does not it occur to you what horrible possibilities are opened out?’
It did. I gauged those possibilities far more clearly than he, indeed, remembering my conversation with Warcop in the stables at Hover but a few weeks back. For was not Warcop’s theory in process of being proven up to the hilt? But how could I speak of either theory or proof to Hartover, distracted and tortured as he was? ”

“ We are not likely to forget the war; but what we may forget is that the result of it is the outcome of modest, faithful, loyal services done with no flourish or vanity, by thousands of very simple, straightforward people, who did not argue themselves into indignation, or reflect much about what they were doing, but came forward, leaving comfort and home and work and love, without any balancing of motives, but just because they felt that they must take their place in the battle of liberty and right with intolerable pride and aggression. ”

“ Throwing himself on his face, he insinuated his head beneath the rafters, and by herculean efforts forced his shoulders to follow. Tearing away the loose stuff with his hands, whilst the orderlies endeavoured to ease the weight above him, he at length was able to gauge the situation accurately. A great beam lay across the chest of the officer, whose body supported it.
Tim Hagan sweated in an agony as he looked. He had seen hundreds of men killed in action, but to see his late persecutor being slowly crushed to death before his eyes was more than he could bear. ”

“ So in the early morning, when trams are few and other traffic is non-existent, they may be met, eight of them, stepping proudly along, with arched necks and haughty expressions, quite unaware that the grooms holding to their bridles are in mufti, that their trappings are of plain wood, and that the royal coach they imagine to be rumbling behind them resembles nothing so much as an empty jail van! The King in the fairy tale was not better pleased with his imaginary fine raiment than the Cream Colours with their phantom state. ”

“ Alone among the nationalities of Europe has the British officer hitherto treated his uniform as if it were something to be ashamed of in private life. It is an unseemly, even an unhandsome practice, seeing that non-commissioned officers and privates are not allowed to disport themselves in what they call ‘private clothes.’ Nor was it the custom among officers in the eighteenth century, when uniform was as easy and becoming as any other dress. The usual dress of an officer, even when on leave, was then his undress uniform, just as it is now in Continental armies. ”

“ It seems impossible to us now, just as it seemed to the old hill-men who raised that tumulus, that as the world welters and widens onward, the great tragedies and losses and sacrifices which we have seen with our eyes, and the thought of which has so possessed our souls with a sense of grief and glory combined, should become but a tale that is told. ”

“ The fact is that the feather-bonnet, and all other exaggerated and expensive head-dresses, should be as resolutely relegated to limbo as the hideous masks worn by the fighting men of Old Japan. Both were designed to overawe the enemy; but, as modern fighting is done in forage-caps, that naïve purpose cannot be carried into effect, and the object should be to provide such clothing as will best enable a man to keep himself, in the Duke of Wellington’s words, ‘clean and smart, as a soldier ought to be.’ And no headgear is smarter, none more easily kept clean, than the Glengarry bonnet. ”

“ In France, whom we sincerely pity, and whom this war will crush, one hears a united cry that she is ready for peace. In Russia it was only the aristocratic party that has forced on the war, and they will seize this opportunity to steal. That party of course owns the anti-German press, such as the Nowoje Wremja and other papers, which are financed by England. England alone was thirsting for war, and has pressed the other nations into war against us. For years she has seen how we have excelled her more and more in the industrial world. ”

“ How could I do otherwise than marry her, and love her, out of the merest decency of ordinary gratitude? I owe her so much—— And now’——
Here Hartover gave way completely. I felt rather than saw him—there was no light in the room save that thrown upward from the lamps in the street—fling himself sideways in the chair, crushing his face down upon the arm of it in a paroxysm of weeping.
Only a woman should look on a man’s tears, since the motherhood resident in every woman—whether potential or as an accomplished act—has power to staunch those tears without humiliation and offence. ”

“ It will seem ludicrous to put our guns into pits again—the guns that we have seen bounding over rough ground behind the straining teams. To be cooped up in a brick O.P. staring at a strip of desolation will be odious after our bivouacs under the stars and our dashes into action under a blazing sun. Worst of all, perhaps, is the thought that the battery will be split up again into ‘gun line’ and ‘wagon line,’ with three miles or more separating its two halves, instead of its being, as it has been all these weeks, one complete cohesive unit. ”

“ In an era when war has become more terrible and more intensely destructive than in any previous age, and at a time when the whole resources of the nation are strained for the country to hold its own, it may well be asked whether money might not be more profitably employed than in causing the splendid men of the Household Cavalry to masquerade in such attire as would be grotesque to imagine them wearing in modern warfare. ”

“ Your soldiers who oppose us in the field will yet learn something of the loathing which our army has for anything that is English. Our sailors look forward eagerly to the time when your fleet, of which you talk so much, appears in German waters. You may be quite sure that a large part of it will never again see the shores of England, even if we lose the whole of our navy. It is to be hoped that your fleet will at last summon up courage to attack us. If they come under the guns of Heligoland and Kuxhaven, your battleships will share the same fate as befell the forts at Liège and Namur. ”

“ A feeble, muffled call for help, emanating from the very centre of the wreckage, arrested his attention. He knew that bland, cool voice only too well. The available orderlies were already struggling to remove the wounded and unearth their officer.
Hagan dashed forward. He was a strong man, and in the best of condition. Without argument, he took command.
To remove the smaller masses of mortared brick was the work of but a few moments. The men worked at fever heat. The cries from beneath grew feebler, almost ceased. It was the weight of long rafters which formed the main obstruction. ”

“ It required nearly one hundred years of painful experience to convince the War Office that it was cruel stupidity to put men in the field in clothing so tight as to fetter the limbs and compress the chest. That was the legacy of George IV. to the British Army.
Although, to one looking back over the history of what is now the United Kingdom, the most salient features seem to be campaigns and battles, invasion and counter-invasion, it was not until the Civil War that any attempt was made towards a uniform dress for any army. ”

“ This nation who wishes to be so great conspires with the most barbaric race which the world has ever seen, the Russians, and is the brother-in-arms of the most treacherous, most contemptible, most ungrateful people that the earth holds, the Japanese. ”

“ It is not that I think of a memorial as being in any sense a reward for the honoured dead. If there is one thing which our heart tells us, it is that they have a nobler reward than that. A new life, doubtless, a passing from strength to strength. ”

“ Learned the truth of the apostle’s dictum, that although ‘all things are lawful,’ yet, for some of us, many things, however good in themselves or good for others, are ‘not expedient.’ Learned, too, the value of the second best, learned to accept the lower place. Learned to rejoice in friendship, since the greater joys of love were denied me, schooling myself to play a brother’s part; play it fearlessly and, as I trust, unselfishly, watchful that neither by word, or deed, or even by look, I overstepped the limit I had set myself and forfeited the trust and faith Nellie reposed in me. ”

“ Constance descended. Falloden turned back with her towards Oxford. The pony-carriage followed at some distance behind.
Then Falloden talked freely. The presence of the light figure beside him, in its dark dress and close-fitting cap, seemed to thaw the chill of life. He began rapidly to pour out his own anxieties, his own sense of failure.
‘I am the last man in the world who ought to be looking after him; I know that as well as anybody,’ he said, with emphasis. ‘But what’s to be done? Sorell can’t get away from college. And Radowitz knows very few men intimately. ”

“ Dawson laughed again. ‘You are a dear simple soul, Mr. Cary; it does one good to meet you. Why on earth do you suppose I came here to-day if it were not to enlist your help? Hagan is going to take all the risks; you and I are not looking for any. He is going to steal some Naval Notes, but they will not be those which lie on this table. I myself will take charge of those and of the chapters of your most reprehensible book. You shall prepare, right now, a beautiful new artistic set of notes calculated to deceive. ”

“ Facing them is a great altar, its gold shining dully in the light of a thousand lighted candles. The flags of France droop motionless about the altar; upon it the carved figure of a soldier [Pg 311] lies prone. The pavement of the temple is invisible under the feet of the silent crowd. Mighty columns rush upward and are lost in the sweep of the dim roof. The air begins to pulsate with the heavy notes of an organ. Anthony and The Woman are floating above the heads of the multitude. ”

“ The area lying between the wood and the village where the Field Ambulance had located its post was alive with troops. The pavé of the road, upheaved by continuous traffic and an occasional shell, was not a healthy place for evening exercise, but there was no order against it. The danger of being shot during the journey had long become a negligible quantity. A church tower, shell-riddled and tottering, was the landmark. Behind it Hagan knew he should find the red-cross flag hanging limply from its pole. ”

“ But the divergences between them were great; the possibilities of friction many. Falloden was astonished to find that he disliked Otto’s little fopperies and eccentricities quite as much as he had ever done in college days; his finicking dress, his foreign ways in eating, his tendency to boast about his music, his country, and his forebears, on his good days, balanced by a brooding irritability on his bad days. And he was conscious that his own ways and customs were no less teasing to Radowitz ”

“ But it is one of the thoughts which lie deepest and noblest in the mind and soul of man, the thought of old and infinite strife and endeavour, pain and death, courage and hope so richly blended, till it seems too great for the heart to hold. ”