Joy in the Morning Part 21

"It was to me as if the world, seething in its troubles, was suddenly empty--with that man gone. I drifted with the crowd about London town, and the crowd appeared to be like myself, dazed. The streets were full and there was continually a profound, sorrowful sound, like the groan of a nation; faces were blank and gray. Those surging, mournful London streets, and the look of the posters with great letters on them--his name--that memory isn't likely to leave me till I die. Of course, I got hold of every detail and tried to picture the manner of it to myself, but I couldn't get it that he was dead. Kitchener, the heart of the nation; I couldn't comprehend that he had stopped breathing. I couldn't get myself satisfied that I wasn't to see him again. It seemed there must be some way out. You'll remember, perhaps, that four boats were seen to put off from the _Hamps.h.i.+re_ as she sank? I tried to trace those boats. I traveled up there and interviewed people who had seen them. I got no good from it. But it kept coming to me that it was not a mine that had sunk the s.h.i.+p, that it was a torpedo from a German submarine, and that Kitchener was on one of the boats that put off and that he had been taken prisoner by the enemy. G.o.d knows why that thought persisted--there were reasons against it--it was a boy's theory. But it persisted; I couldn't get it out of my head. I was in St. Paul's at the Memorial Service; I heard the 'Last Post' played for him, and I saw the King and Queen in tears; all that didn't settle my mind. I went back to the front, heavy-hearted, and tried to behave myself as I believed he'd have had me--the Sirdar. My people had called him the Sirdar always.

Luck was with me in France; I had chances, and did a bit of work, and got advancement."

"I know," I nodded. "I've read history. A few trifles like the rescue of the rifles and holding that trench and--"

The old soldier interrupted, looking thunderous. "It has a bearing on the episode I'm about to tell you. That's why I refer to it."

I didn't mind his haughtiness. It was given me to see the boy's shyness within that grim old hero.

"So that when I landed in London in 1917, having been stupid enough to get my right arm potted, it happened that my name was known. They picked me out to make a doing over. I was most uncommonly conspicuous for nothing more than thousands of other lads had done. They'd given their lives like water, thousands of them--it made me sick with shame, when I thought of those others, to have my name ringing through the land. But so it was, and it served a purpose, right enough, I saw later.

"Then, as I began to crawl about, came the crisis of the war. Ill news piled on ill news; the army in France was down with an epidemic; each day's news was worse than the last; to top all, the Germans found the fleet. It was in letters a foot long about London--newsboys crying awful words:

"'Fleet discovered--German submarines and Zeppelins approaching.'

"A bit later, still worse. 'The _Bellerophon_ sunk by German torpedo--ten dreadnoughts sunk--' There were the names of the big s.h.i.+ps, the _Queen Elizabeth_, the _Warspite_, the _Thunderer_, the _Agamemnon_, the _King Edward_--a lot more, battle cruisers, too--then ten more dreadnoughts--and more and worse every hour. The German navy was said to be coming into the North Sea and advancing to our coast. And our navy was going--gone--nothing to stand between us and the fate of Belgium.

"Then England went mad! I thank G.o.d I'll not live through such days again. The land went mad with fear. You'll remember that there had been a three-year strain which human nerves were not meant to bear. Well, there was a faction who urged that the only sane act now possible was to surrender to Germany quickly and hope for a mercy which we couldn't get if we struggled. The government, under enormous pressure, weakened. It's easy to cry 'Shame!' now, but how could it stand firm with the country stampeding back of it?

"So things were the day of the ma.s.s meeting in Trafalgar Square. I was tall, and so thin and gaunt that, with my uniform and my arm in its sling, it was easy to get close to the front, straight under the speakers. And no sooner had I got there than I was seized with a restlessness, an uncontrollable desire to see my G.o.dfather--Kitchener.

Only to see him, to lay eyes on him. I wish I might express to you the push of that feeling. It was thirst in a desert. With that spell on me I stood down in front of the stone lions and stared up at Nelson on his column, and listened to the speakers. They were mad, quite, those speakers. The crowd was mad, too. It overflowed that great s.p.a.ce, and there were few steady heads in the lot. You'll realize it looked a bit of a close shave, with the German navy coming and our fleet being destroyed, no one knew how fast, and the army in France, and struck down by illness. At that moment it looked a matter of three or four days before the Huns would be landing. Never before in a thousand years was England as near the finish. As I stood there fidgeting, with the starvation on me for my G.o.dfather, it flashed to me that there's a legend in every nation about some one of its heroes, how in the hour of need he will come back to save the people--Charlemagne in France, don't you know, and Barbarossa and King Arthur and--oh, a number. And I spoke aloud, so that the chap next prodded me in the ribs and said: 'Stop that, will you? I can't hear'--I spoke aloud and said:

"'This is the hour. Come back and save us.'

"The speakers had been ranting along, urging on the people to force the government to give in and make terms with those devils who'd crushed Belgium. Of course there were plenty there ready to die in the last ditch for honor and the country, but the mob was with the speakers.

Quite insane with terror the mob was. And I spoke aloud to Kitchener, like a madman of a sort also, begging him to come from another world and save his people.

"'This is the hour; come and save us,' said I, and said it as if my words could get through to Kitchener in eternity.

"With that a taxicab forced through the crowd, close to the platform, and it stopped and somebody got out. I could see an officer's cap and the crowd pressing. My eyes were riveted on that brown cap; my breath came queerly; there was a murmur, a hush and a murmur together, where that tall officer with the cap over his face pushed toward the speakers.

I felt I should choke if I didn't see him--and I couldn't see him. Then he made the platform, and before my eyes, before the eyes of twenty thousand people, he stood there--Kitchener!"

General Cochrane stared defiantly at me. "I'm not asking you to believe this," he said. "I'm merely telling you--what happened."

"Go on," I whispered.

He went on: "A silence like death fell on that vast crowd. The voice of the speaker screaming out wild cowardice about mercy from the Germans kept on for a few words, and then the man caught the electrical atmosphere and was aware that something was happening. He halted half-way in a word, and turned and faced the grim, motionless figure--Kitchener. The man stared a half minute and shot his hands up and howled, and ran into the throng. All over the great place, by then, was a whisper swelling into a ba.s.s murmur, into a roar, his name.

"'Kitchener--Kitchener!' and 'K. of K.!' and 'Kitchener of Khartoum!'

"Never in my life have I heard a volume of sound like London shouting that day the name of Kitchener. After a time he lifted his hand and stood, deep-eyed and haggard, as the ma.s.s quieted. He spoke. I can't tell you what he said. I couldn't have told you the next hour. But he quieted us and lifted us, that crowd, fearstruck, sobbing, into courage.

He put his own steady dignity into those cheap, frightened little Johnnies. He gave us strength even if the worst came, and he held up English pluck and doggedness for us to look at and to live by. As his voice stopped, as I stood down in front just under him, I flung up my arms, and I suppose I cried out something; I was but a lad of twenty, and half crazed with the joy of seeing him. And he swung forward a step to me as if he had seen me all the time--and I think he had. 'Do the turn, Donald,' he said, 'The time has come for a Cochrane to save England.'

"And with that he wheeled and without a look to right or left, in his own swift, silent, shy way he was gone.

"n.o.body saw where he went. I all but killed myself for an hour trying to find him, but it was of no use. And with that, as I sat at my lunch, too feverish and stirred to eat food, demanding over and over what he meant, what the 'turn' was which I was to do, why a Cochrane should have a chance to save England--with that, suddenly I knew."

General Cochrane halted again, and again he gazed down the little river, the river of England, the river which he, more than any other, had kept for English folk and their peaceful play-times. I knew I must not hurry him; I waited.

"The thing came to me like lightning," he went on, "and I had only to go from one simple step to another; it seemed all thought out for me. It was something, don't you see, which I'd known all my lifetime, but hadn't once thought of since the war began. I went direct to my bankers and got a box out of the safe and fetched it home in a cab. There I opened it and took out papers and went over them.... This part of the tale is mostly in print," General Cochrane interrupted himself. "Have you read it? I don't want to bore you with repet.i.tions."

I answered hurriedly, trembling for fear I might say the wrong thing: "I've read what's in print, but your telling it puts it in another world. Please go on. Please don't shorten anything."

The shadow of a smile played. "I rather like telling you a story, d'you know," he spoke, half absent-mindedly--his real thoughts were with that huge past. He swept back to it. "You know, of course, about Dundonald's Destroyer--the invention of my great-grandfather's kinsman, Thomas Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald? He was a good bit of an old chap in various ways. He did things to the French fleet that put him as a naval officer in the cla.s.s with Nelson and Drake. But he's remembered in history by his invention. It was a secret, of course, one of the puzzles of the time and of years after, up to 1917. It was known there was something. He offered it to the government in 1811, and the government appointed a committee to examine into it. The chairman was the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, said to be the ablest administrator of military affairs of that time. Also there were Admirals Lord Keith and Exmouth and the Congreve brothers of the ordnance department. A more competent committee of five could not have been gathered in the world. This board would not recommend the adoption of the scheme. Why? They reported that there was no question that the invention would do all which Dundonald claimed, but it was so unspeakably dreadful as to be impossible for civilized men.

"There was not a shadow of doubt, the committee reported, that Dundonald's device would not merely defeat but annihilate and sweep out of existence any hostile force, whole armies and navies. 'No power on earth could stand against it,' said the old fellow, and the five experts backed him up. But they considered that the devastation would be inhuman beyond permissible warfare. Not war, annihilation. In fact, they shelved it because it was too efficient. There was great need of means for fighting Napoleon just then, so they gave it up reluctantly, but it was a bit too shocking.

"The weak point of the business was, as Dundonald himself declared, that it was so simple--as everybody knows now--that its first use would tell the secret and put it in the hands of other nations. Therefore the committee recommended that this incipient destruction should be stowed away and kept secret, so that no power more unscrupulous than England should get it and use it for the annihilation of England and the conquest of the world. Also the committee persuaded the Earl before he went on his South American adventure to swear formally that he would never disclose his device except in the service of England. He kept that oath.

"Well, the formula for this affair was, of course, in pigeonholes or vaults in the British Admiralty ever since the committee in 1811 had examined and refused it. But there was also, unknown to the public, another copy. The Earl was with my great-grandfather, his kinsman and lifelong friend, shortly before his death, and he gave this copy to him with certain conditions. The old chap had an ungovernable temper, quarreled right and left, don't you know, his life long, and at this time and until he died he was not on speaking terms with his son Thomas, who succeeded him as Earl, or indeed with any of the three other sons.

Which accounts for his trusting to my great-grandfather the future of his invention. I found a quaint note with the papers. He said in effect that he had come to believe with the committee that it was quite too shocking for decent folk. Yet, he suggested, the time might come when England was in straits and only a sweeping blow could serve her. If that time should come it would be a joy to him in heaven or in h.e.l.l--he said--to think that a man of his name had used the work of his brains to save England.

"Therefore, the Earl asked my grandfather to guard this gigantic secret and to see to it that one man in each generation of Cochranes should know it and have it at hand for use in an emergency. My grandfather came into the papers when he came of age, and after him my father; I was due to read them when I should be twenty-one. I was only twenty in 1917. But the papers were mine, and from the moment it flashed to me what Kitchener meant I didn't hesitate. It was this enormous power which was placed suddenly in the hands of a lad of twenty. The Sirdar placed it there.

"I went over the business in an hour--it was simple, like most big things. You know what it was, of course; everybody knows now. Wasn't it extraordinary that in five thousand years of fighting no one ever hit on it before? I rushed to the War Office.

"Well, the thing came off. At first they pooh-poohed me as an unbalanced boy, but they looked up the doc.u.ments in the Admiralty and there was no question. It isn't often a youngster is called into the councils of the government, and I've wondered since how I held my own. I've come to believe that I was merely a body for Kitchener's spirit. I was conscious of no fatigue, no uncertainty. I did things as the Sirdar might have done them, and it appears to me only decent to realize that he did do them, and not I. You probably know the details."

I waited, hoping that he would not stop. Then I said: "I know that the government asked for twenty-five volunteers for a service which would destroy the German fleet, but which would mean almost certain death to the volunteers. I know that you headed the list and that thousands offered." My voice shook and I spoke with difficulty as I realized to whom I was speaking. "I know that you were the only one who came back alive, and that you were barely saved."

General Cochrane seemed not to hear me. He was living over enormous events.

"It was a bright morning in the North Sea," he talked on, but not to me now. "n.o.body but ourselves knew just what was to be done, but everybody hoped--they didn't know what. It was a desperate England from which we sailed away. We hadn't long to wait--the second morning. There were their s.h.i.+ps, the triumphant long lines of the invader. There were their crowded transports, the soldiers coming to crucify England as they had crucified Belgium--thousands and tens of thousands of them. Then--we did it. German power was wiped off the face of the earth. German arrogance was ended for all time. And that was the last I knew," said General Cochrane. "I was conscious till it was known that the trick had worked. Of course it couldn't be otherwise, yet it was so beyond anything which mankind had dreamed that I couldn't believe it till I knew. Then, naturally, I didn't much care if I lived or died. I'd done the turn as the Sirdar told me, and one life was a small thing to pay. I dropped into blackness quite happily, and when I woke up to this good earth I was glad. England was right. The Sirdar had saved her."

"And the Sirdar?" I asked him. "Was it--himself?"

"Himself? Most certainly."

"I mean--well--" I stammered. And then I plunged in. "I must know," I said. "Was it Lord Kitchener in flesh and blood? Had he been a prisoner in Germany and escaped? Or was it--his ghost?"

The old lion rubbed his cheek consideringly. "Ah, there you have me,"

and he smiled. "Didn't I tell you this was a tale which could be told to few people?" he demanded. "'Flesh and blood'--ah, that's what I can't tell you. But--himself? Those people, the immense crowd which saw him and recognized him, they knew. Afterwards they begged the question. The papers were full of a remarkable speech made by an unknown officer who strikingly resembled Kitchener. That's the way they got out of it. But those people knew, that day. There wasn't any doubt in their minds when that roar of his name went up. They knew! But people are ashamed to own to the supernatural. And yet it's all around us," mused General Cochrane.

"Could it have been--did you ever think--" I began, and dared not go on.

"Did I ever think what, child?" repeated the old officer, with his autocratic friendliness. "Out with it. You and I are having a truth-feast."

"Well, then," I said, "if you won't be angry--"

"I won't. Come along."

"Did you ever think that it might have been that--you were only a boy, and wounded and weak and overstrained--and full of longing for your G.o.dfather. Did you ever think that you might have mistaken the likeness of the officer for Kitchener himself? That the thought of Dundonald's Destroyer was working in your mind before, and that it materialized at that moment and you--imagined the words he said. Perhaps imagined them afterwards, as you searched for him over London. The two things might have suggested each other in your feverish boy's brain."

I stopped, frightened, fearful that he might think me not appreciative of the honor he had done me in telling this intimate experience. But General Cochrane was in no wise disturbed.

"Yes, I've thought that," he answered dispa.s.sionately. "It may be that was the case. And yet--I can't see it. That thing happened to me. I've not been able to explain it away to my own satisfaction. I've not been able to believe otherwise than that the Sirdar, England's hero, came to save England in her peril, and that he did it by breathing his thought into me. His spirit got across somehow from over there--to me. I was the only available person alive. The copy in the archives was buried, dead and buried and forgotten for seventy years. So he did it--that way. And if your explanation is the right one it isn't so much less wonderful, is it?" he demanded. "In these days psychology dares say more than in 1917.

One knows that ghost stories, as they called them in those ignorant times, are not all superst.i.tion and imagination. One knows that a soul lives beyond the present, that a soul sometimes struggles back from what we call the hereafter to this little earth--makes the difficult connection between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter, and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter. When the pull is strong enough. And what pull could be stronger than England's danger? To Kitchener?" The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the rift of light through the curtain of eternal silences.

When I spoke again: "It's a story the world ought to own some day," I said. "Love of country, faithfulness that death could not hinder."