“ALIEN’S” LETTER FROM ENGLAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3215, 27 October 1915, Page 69

“ALIEN’S” LETTER FROM ENGLAND.

THE SOUL OF August 31. There is great activity in support of National Service, and at the Queen’s Hall on Friday afternoon there is to be held a mass meeting of women. Applications for tickets will represent about 15,000 men now serving in France, the Dardanelles, and the North Sea, as every woman who is granted a ticket must have a man serving. The women of the nation whose husbands and sons and brothers are fighting for King and country resent the fact that there are young men fit and free who do not share in the defence of their own homes. This great meeting will be a woman’s plea for justice. A number of pathetic letters from wives and mothers place the injustice of the voluntary service very vividly before the public; mothers of young children, and mothers of boys from 16 to 18 who have joined, complaining that young unmarried men of full health and strength are doing work that could be done by women in banks and offices. And the question is being asked, Are many of the men “unfit” more unfit than the soldiers who have been wounded and are sent back again, many of them with shattered nerves and constitutions? It is pathetic to see them in their hospitals enjoying their petting like children, taking the keenest interest in their outings, talking of everything of their own accord save the -war and their experiences; but when they do speak of the trenches all the hoy has gone, and into the eyes of some comes a terrible remembrance which rasps their voice and deepens the furrows the last year has hacked upon their face. To me one of the most convincing reasons why there should be compulsion is to do away with the necessity of sending the men who have been through the horrors and agonies of the trenches and have been nursed back to comparative health a second time while there are men still absorbed in playing cricket and tennis, football and golf. And who are to be the fathers of the next generation? The slackers ? While many of these are undisturbed in their ordinary avocations there are war-worn troops in France who have been at the front since the first month of the war without a spell of leave to visit home and dear ones. Many who at first backed up the voluntary system did so in the full belief that the voluntary system would serve our ends, and that the war would be over in a year. The voluntary system has raised a most magnificent army —too magnificent for the target of the Hunnish shells. It is skimming the cream from the Empire’s manhood, and many who once were opposed to compulsory service on the grounds that the system interfered with the liberties of the people now think that unpatriotic liberty should he curtailed for the duration of the war. Many who, at the beginning of the war, did not think Germany could hold out financially for more than a year have learned otherwise. Whether the coming winter will try German endurance past its strength is yet to learn ; but one thing Germany is learning — that England can neither be bullied nor terrorised from her stern undertaking. And the heart of the nation is bracing for a longer contest than in the first enthusiasm seemed possible. Many who were at first opposed to anything but kidglove methods have realised that we are fighting brutes and braggarts and liars on whom courtesy is w-asted. The whole world knows that we are incapable of the monstrosities of Belgium and France and the Lusitania. When the day comes that will need friends badly she is not likely to. find them in any neutral country in the world. The great “Liberator” of the world, as Germany boasted herself to be, is likely to find herself in shackles it will take centuries to break. But what a titanic task still lies before the Empire. We need and must use all our great hearts, men and women—must use them. We want all the muscle and the brain, the working-genius of the nation, unticketed by sex, unshackled by politics, unhampered by prejudice; while one part pulls at the horns of the Empire and another at the tail, Germany will milk the cow. We want our young men for soldiers and our young women for nurses, clerks, motor-drivers, car-women, everything that demands the steady nerve of youth, and we want the older men for offices and warehouses and shops, and for the home-care and policing of the women and children; and we want every woman w-ho can sew and knit, organise, obtain funds, cook, do anything that will help along the Empire’s one great cause, or help those who can help it. Many people have given their summer holidays, both men and women, in another form of work filling in the blanks left by those who have gone. England is evolving a new soul, the soul of earnestness and sincerity, that has been hidden under garments of peace, prosperity, and the pleasures born of peace and prosperity. Frivolity has fallen away even from its literature. Face to face with the facts of life tho truth only can arrest and satisfy. No great new war novel has appeared yet—it is too soon; —while we are living any great experience we cannot criticise or analyse it. Before the writer can write “finis” to a phase the phase must be past. The great lesson that we shall nearn from the war cannot be learnt till the end has been reached ; cannot be told in its completeness, and the men who are among those who can tell it best, who will tell it best should they return, are gone to the fighting. And the world will listen

(Specially Written for the Ladies’ Page.)

THE NATION. j to the men who know, as they have listened to the letters of the soldiers, graphic with facts, eloquent with true feeling, tragic with grim reality. Cheap sentimentality and second-hand reasoning, dried and dusty theory have no use jn ! a vital hour, except to irritate and to | clog. . A great experience in life of love, hate, joy despair, hope, fear, success, or failure teaches Us more of the realities than all our book study. The murderer with his own neck in the noose understands the value of life as never before, and that “mercy is twice blessed” that in sparing his victim he himself had been j saved. Only tho.e who have fought I through great odds in face of possible j failure know the full sweets of success, j and the success that has been won at ' the cost of earn and pleasure by the best of striving, by the best of individual muscle and endurance, brain and soul, is the success in which a man or woman may legitimately pride. This is the success that the Empire will win, paid for dearly; a success made sacred to posterity by noble sacrifice and honourable death, by loss and suffering and labour; a success made possible by the nation’s women no less than by her men. Joan Coquelin writing of the great drama of the war says: “Heroes and heroines ? . . . I defy any writer to show me a drama with pictures of heroism more poignant than those presented by Serbia, Poland, and immortal little Belgium. . . You see arising a new France no longer rent by party cries upon which the enemyhad counted so much. Yon see a new Russia arising, no longer tyrannical, but with the promise of a new liberty to Slav and Magyar and Pole. The rise of a new Britain such as y r ou yourselves hardly- dreamt was possible. . . . Never was a European war less a war of nations. No longer is it a question of personal, geographical, or racial differences, but a conflict of ideals, upon the safety? or fall of which .all civilisation depends. . . . The drama of it all! It haunts me night and day. It haunts me in the street and on the stage, and I ask myself, How can I act and how can people come to see me when in the daily newspapers is recorded the greatest drama which I verily believe the world will ever see.” It is too big for half the world. They don’t see it. They only see their local part of it. The great spectacle is lost. The nations are being put to their supreme test. “It is a drama of fact which none of the dramatists of fiction can touch —Sophocles, Corneille, Shake speare, or Ibsen. It is not only in the situations, however, that we see this rule of drama. The simile extends to charactei as well. Thus we have the nations like so many ‘dramatis personae’ put to the greatest tests. Britain, for example, could not be said to have been directly concerned with the issues at the beginning; hut as soon as' the violation of a treaty she had signed made it a point of honour, not interest, then Britain came out in her true colours, though everyone can see at what a sacrifice.” And everyone, the pessimists more particularly, must keep that fact close to their eyes. For nothing else but Britain’s honour has this war been fought; for nothing else is this terrible cost in precious and lovable life—the gallant sons of the Empire what could make their loss worth while, in dividually or to the nation, except that they- have helped to save the nation’s honour. And wherever they lie there is honourable British dust. No added territory to our dominions would have made our losses and our sacrifices and sufferings worth while. But Britain has saved its soul; saved it in the eyes of the nations; saved faith in the honour of its bond; saved it more than all to itself. It is not a struggle for supremacy, but for a supreme ideal. It is not greed that has made these millions of sons of Britain dare and suffer and die as Britains have never dared and died before, or women sacrificed, and toiled, and suffered before. It is for the honour, for the soul of the nation, for the freedom of the nation. And for this, if dead souls must be forced, how can compulsion of a man’s service affect the larger freedom of the nation? Times and circumstances alter cases, and those who with changing circumstances never change their opinions, but hold fast to their pet theories formed in times that the ouick happenings, the tremendous issues of this last year haye made obsolete, have very 7 little mind to change or. very little soul to grow. The theories that filled the case before the war are like old garments folded away and brought out again after a drastic change of fashion They will not do duty. The narrow skirt of a year ago cannot ho made into the wide skirt of this. In one year the face of the globe has changed. Every nation is declaring itself for what it really is. The old opinions cannot he held unless the new deeds reestablish the old facts. Not to watch the drama as a whole, but only as it affects us individually-, or our victories aud defeats as a nation, is to miss the most tremendous thing that history has given us, will ever give Us in our time. It is the battle of Rt. George and the Dragon over again. The Beast is rampant to the destruction of helplessness and honour. Every penny In money wo give, .every talent wo use, every soldier nursed, every stocking or shirt or garment we make, every bullet, every post that women fill to free a man for fighting, so the women of the Empire are fighting, too. for the vanqnishmcnt of the Beast. Men and women both have been splendid the Empire over, although many do not realise ■Ko lift fnll the tremendous drama that is

being enacted. The means of helping forward our act in it are variously taken according to temperament, or strength, or ability, or means. Some use farce to hide tragedy and picturesqneness to cover wounds. But the one grim, great fact is there under the flowers and the flags and the make up—war. Britain is in throes of agony; striving, struggling, bleeding to save its soul alive, and the man or woman who can take it tamely, greedily looking on for the spoil of the agony is dead of heart, dead of mind, dead of honour, and deserves the bullet of the traitor. And there are some—not many —but there are some, both here and with you, who talk of what England has done’ what the dominions have done, and who do nothing themselves Loafers who lie on the grass and watch their companions tramp past in khaki in the rain, the dust, and the heat of the long, long way; who do not offer even the cup of cold water in the name of the nation’s right, a right that has brought the mighty down from their seat and sent them into the trenches, and exalted the humble and meek into heroes and heroines, sent ministers of the Gospel of Christ into the munition factories, and delicate women to face and endure and to conquer the horrors of battlefield and hospitals, and titled and refined women to rough, uncongenial, unknown, and nnthanked tasks. There are women faint and sick with sewing who must begin over again ; women worn with nursing whose youth will never return to them, who have spent it in reviving life and courage exhausted. There are middle-aged and old men and women who are re-discovering themselves and their vigour, who have left their easv chairs and cushions, and are no longer old in their accomplishment. I asked about one such the other day. I had noticed her for davs always at the same time, a frail, pale, slim, delicate old lady dressed in grey going feebly past in the broiling noon sunshine, and entering the hospital gates, returning wearily in the late afternoon. “Who is she? What does she do?” That is always the question now, what do you do? “She walks a mile and a-half there and back from every day, and washes the dinner dishes for the hospital.” Fifty patients and the staff of nurses. She is the mother of an only son, an officer in France. Inquiring of another old woman who was scrubbing the hospital scullery one night I was told: “She does that often at night. She works in the fields from 5 in the morning all day. Her only son went (there is only one destination now) last August, and has been “missing” for a year. No trace can be found of him. Her poor old heart is breaking.” How many women whose sons and husbands, brothers and lovers have gone find vent or balm for their aching or breaking hearts in doing something for the men who need all that women can do. There is a fine unity in all our labour, it is absoi’bed in the one great upholding of our ideal. I cannot attend the doctors in the operating theatre where a soldier’s limb is to be restored to use, or dress his wounds to his healing, but I can clean the paint and scrub the floor of the operating theatre to have it anticeptic for use. And one at a distance—you perhaps—made the clean, white nightshirt that he will wear after his operation, and another gave his bed, another his pillow, another his blankets and sheets. To where or for what use, or how honourably obtained the contributions go, what does it matter so long as the soldiers have their needs supplied? New hospitals are springing up even'where. There are daily appeals for more beds, bedding, underclothes, and night clothes for the wounded men in hospitals. It must be heaven to get into a hot bath, the first thing on arrival at a hospital by men who are able, and don the clean vmderclothes and bine linen. Their khaki and c’othes worn at the front or in camp are all sterilised on reaching Shorncliff. or elsewhere. But I had a job the other day of ticketing and folding away for future use the khaki of a batch of wounded and sorting their underwear for the laundry. It was not a dainty lob, and every woman among you who have had anything to do with the providing of clean linen or knitting of socks will know. The whole of England is becoming a vast hospital, recreation ground, and parade ground for soldiers. During this strange, sad summer recruits or wounded are everywhere. A letter from beautiful Surrey speaks of its piue woods and hills as camping grounds. “This place is surrounded with soldiers. Poor fellows. It is sad to see them marching in the heat. The other morning they were two hours passing this house, and after they had passed many of them were lying by the roadside too exhausted to go on. Some of them looked poor, delicate fellows, but I suppose now they mirst just take anyone who will enlist.” While fine and fit young men wait till they are compelled ! From where I write—the observatory, high up in the tower of the house which is now a military hospital—a beautiful,

typical English scene spreads around. This observatory has been retained for a private retreat by the family, the one coiner of the mansion which is not under hospital regulation, but is a lounge for writing or afternoon tea or reception by those nurses who are members of the family, and who have no other corner they can claim in their old home. Here I have been bidden to come by a nrivate entrance whenever I want to get away fro i the small cottage which is on the oppo ite side of the road that leads to London, and which is my temporary home. Immediately below, on the green lawns,

convalescent soldiers are playing bowls or lounging under the shade of the ancient elms and oaks, and Kent is spread around, and as far as the eye can reach north, south, caut, and west the peaceful English landscape stretches laden under the sunlight with wheat and barley in the ear right to the ridge of the blue Channel on which ride grim craft that separate and protect us from the enemy’s guns. Here and there the quiet windmills go lazily in the breeze; upon the road a party of gipsies jog in their donkey cart, their children, barefooted and brown, with sheaves of poppies in their hands, run free,