IGNORANCE, APATHY, OPTIMISM.

Press, Volume L, Issue 15157, 22 December 1914, Page 8

IGNORANCE, APATHY, OPTIMISM.

*—■ COUNTRY FOLK ANT> THE WAR. (By Edmund Candler. in the London "Daily Mail"). Our literal and physical insularity is vividly brought home to one landing in this country from France. On the Continent every villager takes a keen, if unintelligent, interest in the war from the day the mobilisation posters are pasted up on tho barns. In tho humblest estaminet in Brittany or Provence there is no other topic of conversation. In Germany the feeding of the public imagination has become an exact science, which w e need not envy, though it is in England alone that whole classes will be found" who arc still apathetic. Tho great towns are hardly yet awakened to the fact fhat tho nation is in tho grip of a life-and-death struggle for existence, a struggle of numbers and tenacity and staying power in which every man who can be thrown into the breach in time must tell. And thero aro many backwaters in the country where folk go about their routine work from day to day without thinking of the war at all, who, if asked to enlist, say that they are ready to fight if their country needs thorn, but who cannot be Persuaded that tho necessity is real. The yokel secirrr troops go by and knaki-clad figures flying past in motorcars remarks, "You can't go nowheres without meeting them soldiers." An old woman pauses by the village pump, puts down her pail, "and asks the young man with the weekly newspaper, "What are them Germans a-doiug now?" "They ain't a-doing much." "Ah, _ tho r-roogues! 1. wish I was arter them," is her cheerful and spirited rejoinder. It is comforting -to think that there are som e peaceful backwaters where the Kaiser has not yet killed happiness. But immunity from invasion has its disadvantages; tho people need a deal of waking up. • • • The forest in which this old woman lived had been marked down by the Spaniards at tho tinio of the Armada as one of the first things to be destroyed when their troops landed in England it being one of the best nurseries of timber for tho Navy in the country. But the Spaniards did nofc corn p. and the p-pop'.e have slept on. Two hundred years later thoir descendants expected another invader, but lie did not come. To-day many of the young nion are playing football and reading , the racing news whilo their wives and children aro gathering acorns for their pigs. Tho tradition of England's security is in their blood. How should, it enter their heads that Germany can threaten thpir peace? I heard a well-to-do farmer's wife in the same district say: "I have had no time to read tho papers this week; I have been so busy making jam." Mentally perhaps they are less insular than their ancestors. They meet the wounded who have come brick from the front, and in some of the neighbouring vilhiges they encounter Belgian refugees. A little girl from Louvain in a remote hamlet who has a mutilated hand has inspired hundreds of recruits. Wherever the imagination is touched tho response is immediate. But mere talk is seldom enough. In an inn near tho villago with the pump there was 0 group listening to a sergeant who had a story of meeting three Zouav-es in a wood with German ears fixed to their bayonets to prevent the blood running down to their fingers. "It's easy to see as 'ow them furrin»rs 'avo been about you," a carter ventured, sympathetically regarding a man's bandaged arm. Zouaves, Uhlans. Gurkhas, French. ar 0 al] furriners conveniently removed from the sphere of village realities by a providential ditch. "They're nasty people, they furriners." In another place a soldier has a story to tell which bears the stamp of truth. ' His regir ment was broken by overwhelming numbers, but in retirement met with reinforcements and camo on again, turning tho tide. He saw a retreating German officer deliberately fire at two wounded Englishmen on tho ground and then throw up his arms and cry. "Prisoner of war." "I hi:* an' extra twist with my bayonet for that," the soldier «iiu. One wns struck by tho entire absence of vindictiveness in the man's account. There was no note of tho Hymn of Hato. • * » One has heard stories like that before, buD for sheer" baroansm it pales before the narrative told by n. lied Cross - man of a subaltern who, shot through 'iho thigh, mai.aged to Withdraw sixteen, wounded men from his trench into the cover of an artificial pit dug for beet. It was early in the morning. The boy kept up his men's spirits all day, and he made a little ! Red Cross flag by drawing. Ins handkerchief twico acrdss his wound and sticking it on a bayonet. Ho tried to make his men believe that it would bo all right whichever side turned up, but they all had their doubts, though this was in the very beginning of things. At last they heard a panting and crawling in the lucerne at the edge of the pit, and a fat Teuton face appeared looking down on them destorted with rage. Tho man broke into the vilest abuse of the "English dogs," and then he began to shoot—"into the brown," as the subaltern put it. He was one of 'the few survivors. Tho group listened sympathetically, but the Ger.man infantry officer was clearly as remote and abstract a conception of evil as the Philistine of the Old Testament. The homely and peaceful scenes in which these stories are related add to their dramatic pathos. In this case it was by a window overlooking an orchard red with fruit, beside a stream overarched with yellow willows and poplars in their full autumn dress. In just euch scenes not forty miles from our 6hores the great world struggle was being fought; but it is the little strip of water which makes these comrades events in the lives of their comrades seam to the men in the inn far-away fantasies which cannot impinge upon reality. If only the Germans did land a force in England; if only our literal and physical insularity could be broken, our mental ineularity would go with it. The menace of a desperate and unscrupulous enemy of immense resources, . a race whose army is their whole male population, united against us by a common hate and envy, would be as real and living a thing to the sleepy English villager as to the French peasant who joins his colours the first day of the war. • • ■ • It is absurd to think of panic in connexion with these stolid, good-humour-ed, unimaginative folk. If the Germans came they would fight them with pitchforks and scythes and shot-guns. To alarm them would be the best way of arming the country. There are many whom nothing short of the tramp of the iron heel is likely to waken. The dogged grit which they show when enlisted is the virtue of their defect—a defect only of the imagination. Liability to panic is not a* characteristic of the Eujjjish nation; aod the cautious serving out of intelligence as to people of too sensitive nerves and weak stomach is a mistake* in which would be humorous if it were not a source of national weakness.