AUTHORS AND THE WAR.

Press, Volume L, Issue 15137, 28 November 1914, Page 7

AUTHORS AND THE WAR.

(moil h CORHISPOKDENT.) j LONDON, October 10. '■Booted and spurred, with a heavy. stride," like Paul Revere, as described j by the poet, and looking intensely martial in a brand-new khaki uniform, Charles G. 1). Roberts, whose novels and stories of wild life are famous on both sides of the Atlantic, strode out of | my office, some fifteen minutes ago, oil his way to play his part, whatever it i may prove to bo, in the great work! drama of war that is holding the boards to-day. Roberts, who is a Canadian by birth, and, as ho says, "an old backwoodsman,"' is a member, it appears, of the renowned Legion of Frontiersmen, whose services have just been accepted by the British War Office, having joined its ranks at the outbreak of the war. Now, with a score or more of his fellow frontiersmen, ho has been ordered off to Shrewsbury, where there is a big cavalry concentration camp, and where they expect to be employed, during tho next few weeks, in breaking in the raw mounts. After that, in all probability, they will be off to France. After many years of successful authorship hi his own land, Roberts, who is just fifty, came over here in 1907, with the idea, ho says, of extending his public. Intending to stay a year, ho has remained ever since, like a lot of his fellow-countrymen. Roberts has lived' in both France and Germany, as well as in England, having spent nearly a year in Munich, and known intimately many Bavarian officers, whom ho describes as "fine fellows." They, one and all, ho says, stigmatised the Prussians as "brutes," a feeling, indeed, which he found universal in Southern Germany. I asked the author of ""Wild Lives" how long it was since ho had sat a horse, and he remarked, with a rueful smilo, that it was a long while. Ho looked uncommonly serviceable as he sat tapping his leathern putties with his cavalry whip, but was'quite modest about' his future activities. "I am just going to do what I can," he said with tho universal, imboastful spirit of these sons of the Empire, many or them, like him beginning to go grey. His income from his writings must be something handsome. That, needless to say, he is sacrificing, for how long ho has no idea. Arthur Morrison, who gave us "Tlie Child of tho Jago," 'Tales'of Mean Streets," and a lot of other well-known novels, and who is almost as distinguished as a writer and general authority on Oriental art, is the latest British author who, being beyond the age limit for service in the field, has taken on the by no means light or unhazardous duties of that new arm of tho police force, tho special constable. Robert Hichens has been one for some time, and so has Charles Garvice, and neither is finding i_t anything like a, "snap." These special constables, a regular army of whom are being employed, and who. of course. Ret no pay whatever, are chiefly used in guarding: such vulnerable points as railroad bridges, etc., and where*? tho German emissaries whose machinations aro feared are JikeJy to be armed, the special constables are not supposed to carry so much as a cap-pistol, though I believe a few of them actually have good, honest "barkers" concealed somewhero aboufc their persons. They relieve one another all through the day and night, each being on guard for four hours at a time, and one of them, who had, just come off duty when I talked with him the other might—he is a man from Burmah on holiday leave!—told mc that this is the most boring and generally tiresomo job he ever undertook. It "says a, lot for the British nation that N hai-d-worked business men are willing to undertake these duties. They work in pairs. Reno rally, and another of them who had been on duty from midnight until four in the morning told mc that Ins companion was a man who had to report for his ordinary work at six! Among the literary women who are "helping," as the phrase goes, with all their might and main, are Mrs Flora Annie Steel, Baroness yon Hutten, and Madame Elsa d'Esterre. Mrs Steel, in the intervals of work in the Women's Emergency Corps, is denouncing tho "slackers* 5 in characteristically vigorous terms. Women's work in war time, she declares, is the work +hat some men are doing and ought not to dn. "Men, to-day," she says, '"have no business to be in drapers' shops, no business to be selling face powders to women. It would bo considered a shame for a man abroad to" do these things, and, moreover, women cau do them much better." • Baroness yon Hutten. the author of "Pam." with Madame d'Esterre as her first lieutenant, and many assistants, is meanwhile engaged in the highly-useful work of teaching French to the men who are cjoing to fight side by side with tho soldiers of France. At present their pupils are members of tho London Engineers and the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the hip; drill hall at the Duke of York's headquarters, when I looked in there yesterday, was full of "keen" young men, about 200 in all. grouped in classes of eight or ten around their different teachers. "They aro extremely onick," said Bnroness Yon Hutten. "We give oral instruction only, and no nttem"*, is madr> to teach eramniar. The Tbune Men's Christian Association is workinc with us. and branches are beJn<r started in the provinces." Out of f>oo men in tho 2nd Division Lord on Territorials 500 volunteered to take lessons.