Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 223 pages of information about Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough.

Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 223 pages of information about Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough.

But if I were asked to name the instance of individual action which had most impressed me I should find the task more difficult.  Should I select something that shows how war depraves, or something that shows how it ennobles?  If the latter I think I would choose that beautiful incident of the sailor on the Formidable.

He had won by ballot a place in one of the boats.  The ship was going down, but he was to be saved.  One pictures the scene:  The boat is waiting to take him to the shore and safety.  He looks at the old comrades who have lost in the ballot and who stand there doomed to death.  He feels the passion for life surging within him.  He sees the cold, dark sea waiting to engulf its victims.  And in that great moment—­the greatest moment that can come to any man—­he makes the triumphant choice.  He turns to one of his comrades.  “You’ve got parents,” he says.  “I haven’t.”  And with that word—­so heroic in its simplicity—­he makes the other take his place in the boat and signs his own death warrant.

I see him on the deck among his doomed fellows, watching the disappearing boat until the final plunge comes and all is over.  The sea never took a braver man to its bosom.  “Greater love hath no man than this ...”

Can you read that story without some tumult within you—­without feeling that humanity itself is ennobled by this great act and that you are, in some mysterious way, better for the deed?  That is the splendid fruit of all such sublime sacrifice.  It enriches the whole human family.  It makes us lift our heads with pride that we are men—­that there is in us at our best this noble gift of valiant unselfishness, this glorious prodigality that spends life itself for something greater than life.  If we had met this nameless sailor we should have found him perhaps a very ordinary man, with plenty of failings, doubtless, like the rest of us, and without any idea that he had in him the priceless jewel beside which crowns and coronets are empty baubles.  He was something greater than he knew.

How many of us could pass such a test?  What should I do?  What would you do?  We neither of us know, for we are as great a mystery to ourselves as we are to our neighbours.  Bob Acres said he found that “a man may have a deal of valour in him without knowing it,” and it is equally true that a man may be more chicken-hearted than he himself suspects.  Only the occasion discovers of what stuff we are made—­whether we are heroes or cowards, saints or sinners.  A blustering manner will not reveal the one any more than a long face will reveal the other.

The merit of this sailor’s heroism was that it was done with calculation—­in cold blood, as it were, with that “two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage” of which Napoleon spoke as the real thing.  Many of us could do brave things in hot blood, with a sudden rush of the spirit, who would fail if we had time, as this man had, to pause and think, to reckon, to doubt, to grow cold and selfish.  The merit of his deed is that it was an act of physical courage based on the higher quality of moral courage.

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Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.