"ROLL OF HONOUR."

Sun (Christchurch), Volume II, Issue 457, 28 July 1915, Page 6

"ROLL OF HONOUR."

THE VILLAGE CHURCH DOOR. j "AS IN ADAM ALL DIE." | If one of a pseudo-scientilic novelist's Martians dropped from the sky and began to walk amongst the English—or if, merely, a traveller returned suddenly from the Antarctic —how long, you may ask, would it I take him to divine that any unaccustomed condition prevailed here, how long would it be before he realised the fact of our engagement in the biggest war of our history? asks a writer in an English exchange. Well, in London he would see swiftly enough by the placarded moral suasion, in coloured posters, of the War OHice. The taxi-cabs would tell him. There would be the newspaper bills. It would therefore be a finer test for his powers of deduction if we were to place him in the "unspeakable rural solitudes," amongst the white-starred meadows and chest nuts in full bloom. He should be set down for a day's ramble near no considerable town, but in a region, rather, of thickly scattered small villages, whose grey towers, in the divinest month, rise over stretches of blossom. Like all good tourists, he would make at once for the village church, since even the profanest, who never enter churches in the ordinary course, have a habit of visiting them, we will not say religiously, but at least■ arcbaelogically, during a . holiday. And it would be in the church porch that our Martian, or our Antarctic visitor,, .would first find his peace disturbed.

I Obscure Yet Glorious. I For there, in every village of a ! certain blossoming land I recently Visited, hangs the list named "Roll of Honour," scratched in the rector's hand, and giving one by one the obscure yet glorious names of the youths of that countryside. They are now with the colours at the front. Rough names, sounding of Earth, most of them—local names that are a human equivalent of the thjings seen outside in the June weather. The baptismal half is given, in many cases, bluntly—"Mike, Jack, Tom"—because just > so, and not "Thomas" and "John," were they named by rather obstinate parents who would have it as they wanted it, or not at all. And one is glad that they are so called, because these monosyllables better express a certain racy flavour ii\ the fashion of the place—a grey-and-green place, deep in leaves, with fat cattle roaming its acres. Those grey cottages and barns, that yellowish fine house of the great people, with its Inigo Jones gateway and its smooth lawn, those chestnuts and poplars and yews toppling over the churchyard wall, that dusty line of white road leading to the market town, were what for 20 years or so those "Mikes" and "Jacks" saw and knew, before their birthplace became, even to passing people, more lovely through their going—before they left those farms and cottages and fields and had their names put down upon a Roll of Honour in the porch. Poor visible consolation, at a first thought, this Roll, thus written in the rector's not very legible hand! But are we not like that in England? Don't we leave it, in that offhand way, to "private enterprise"—to the rector? He knew these boys pretty well whom he now notes down for recognition; he knew them without idealisation. Perhaps he may have thought, even, that enlistment was the best of cures for one or two of them, who were lounging about, exhibiting rural "nuttish" and towncraving energies, and getting now and then into unnecessary scrapes. So they went off; and now only this remains, memorable, in the twilight, shadowed by these trees. . . .

War is Here. One pushes the half-open door and goes in. Familiar, unanalysable odour of half-mouldy sweetness, in pews and damp hymn-books and dusty bellrope hanging! Those boys' forefathers sleep here; as now, on Sunday, their people stiffly worship still. One cannot forget their names as one "does" the church perfunctorily —those rough syllables turn and return in the head, with insistence, like whispers in the silence, like the flies' dreamy buzzing over that leaded pane yonder. The war is here, then, horribly!—where one came, perhaps selfishly, to get«away from it. It sounds in these now clamorous absences. It takes voice amongst those very trees" towards which the young men's idle faces turned, as the leaves beat against the windows on Sunday, during sermon: . . . And then, by one of those contrived coincidences that are 'meant to point the moral, one is led to look up towards the farthest window, and midway catching one's eye over the chancel, in painted lettering, the majestic intimation meets one—"As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." "As in Adam all die!" The writing was there long years before these boys went on their unexpected journey to France. But with what new sight and new craving, with what new hope or new despair, do the eyes of stiffly-clad worshippers read them and re-read them, during sermon on Sunday, now!