FOR KING AND COUNTRY
March in England is spring. Early in the month
masses of snowdrops lined the paths in Hyde Park.
The grass was green, the roads hard and dry under
the eager feet of Kitchener’s great army.
For months they had been drilling, struggling with
the intricacies of a new career, working and waiting.
And now it was spring, and soon they would be off.
Some had already gone.
“Lucky beggars!” said the ones who remained,
and counted the days.
And waiting, they drilled. Everywhere there were
squads: Scots in plaid kilts with khaki tunics;
less picturesque but equally imposing regiments in
the field uniform, with officers hardly distinguishable
from their men. Everywhere the same grim but cheerful
determination to get over and help the boys across
the Channel to assist in holding that more than four
hundred miles of battle line against the invading
hosts of Germany.
Here in Hyde Park that spring day was all the panoply
of war: bands playing, the steady tramp of numberless
feet, the muffled clatter of accoutrements, the homage
of the waiting crowd. And they deserved homage,
those fine, upstanding men, many of them hardly more
than boys, marching along with a fine, full swing.
There is something magnificent, a contagion of enthusiasm,
in the sight of a great volunteer army. The North
and the South knew the thrill during our own great
war. Conscription may form a great and admirable
machine, but it differs from the trained army of volunteers
as a body differs from a soul. But it costs a
country heavy in griefs, does a volunteer army; for
the flower of the country goes. That, too, America
knows, and England is learning.
They marched by gaily. The drums beat. The
passers-by stopped. Here and there an open carriage
or an automobile drew up, and pale men, some of them
still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes
was the same flaming eagerness, the same impatience
to get back, to be loosed against the old lion’s
foes.
For King and Country!
All through England, all through France, all through
that tragic corner of Belgium which remains to her,
are similar armies, drilling and waiting, equally
young, equally eager, equally resolute. And the
thing they were going to I knew. I had seen it
in that mysterious region which had swallowed up those
who had gone before; in the trenches, in the operating,
rooms of field hospitals, at outposts between the
confronting armies where the sentries walked hand in
hand with death. I had seen it in its dirt and
horror and sordidness, this thing they were going
to.
War is not two great armies meeting in a clash and
frenzy of battle. It is much more than that.
War is a boy carried on a stretcher, looking up at
God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are
soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that
has been wounded by a shell; war is spirited horses
tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war
is the flower of a race, torn, battered, hungry, bleeding,
up to its knees in icy water; war is an old woman burning
a candle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she
has given. For King and Country!
