Part 20 (1/2)
Ward's first visit, some other ladies, reading _England's Effort_, had been clamorous for the same privileges, so that the much-tried War Office had been obliged to lay down a rigid rule against the admission of ”any more ladies,” as Sir Edward Grey wrote, ”within the military zone of the British Armies.” Sir Edward did not think that any exception could be made, but not so General Charteris. On November 9, Lord Onslow, then serving in the War Office, wrote to Mrs. Ward that:
”General Charteris fully recognizes the valuable effect which your first book produced upon the public, and would consequently expect similar results from a further work of yours. He is, therefore, disposed to do everything in his power to a.s.sist you, and he thinks it possible that perhaps an exception to the general rule might be made on public grounds. But it would have to be clearly understood that in the event of your being allowed to go, it would not const.i.tute a precedent as regards any other ladies.”
Permits, in the form of ”Adjutant-General's Pa.s.ses,” were therefore issued to Mrs. Ward and her daughter for a visit to the British Military Zone from February 28 to March 4, 1917. They crossed direct to Boulogne, and were the guests of General Headquarters from the moment that they set foot in France.
Since their last visit, the Battle of the Somme had come and gone, and the German Army was in the act of retreating across that tortured belt of territory to the safe shelter of the Hindenburg Line, there to resist our pressure for another year. But, in these weeks of early spring, the elation of movement had gripped our Army; the Boche was in retreat; this must, this _should_ be the deciding year! Mrs. Ward's letters from the war zone are full of this spirit of hopefulness; not yet had Russia crumbled in pieces, not yet had the strength of the shortened German line revealed itself. Once more she was sent on two memorable days, from the Visitors' Chateau at Agincourt, to points of vital interest on our line, first through St. Pol, Divion and Ranchicourt, to the wooded slope of the Bois de Bouvigny, whence she could gaze across at the Vimy Ridge, not yet stormed by the Canadians; then, on the second day, to the very centre of the Somme battlefield, where she stood in the midst of the world's uttermost scene of desolation. Of the Bois de Bouvigny, Dorothy's narrative, written down the same night, gives the following picture:
”The car b.u.mped slowly along a very rough track into the heart of the wood, and stopped when it could go no farther. We got out and walked on till soon we came to an open piece of gra.s.s-land, a rectangular wedge, as it were, driven from the eastern edge of the hill into the heart of the wood. We walked across it, facing east, and saw it was pitted with sh.e.l.l-holes, mostly old--but not all.
In particular, one very large one had fresh moist earth cast up all round it. Captain Fowler [their guide] asked Captain Bell a question about it, lightly, yet with a significant _appui_ in his tone--but the young man laughed off the question and implied that the Boches had grown tired of troubling that particular place.
Meanwhile, the firing of our own guns behind and to the side of us was becoming more frequent, the noise greater. Just ahead, and to the right, the ground sloped to a valley, which we could not see, and where we were told lay Ablain St. Nazaire and Carency. From this direction came the short, abrupt, but quite formidable reports of trench-mortars. Over against us, and slightly to the right, three or four ridges and folds of hill lay clearly distinguishable--of which the middle back was the famous _Vimy Ridge_, partly held to this day by the Germans. Captain Bell, however, would not let us advance quite to the edge of the plateau, so that we never saw exactly how the ground dropped to the lower ground, neither did we see the crucifix of Notre Dame de Lorette at the end of the spur. All this bit had been the scene of terrific fighting in 1915, when it still formed part of the French line; it had been a fight at close quarters in the beautiful wood that closed in the open ground on which we stood, and we were told that many bodies of poor French soldiers still lay unburied in the wood.
We turned soon to recross the bare s.p.a.ce again, and as we did so, fresh guns of our own opened fire, and once more I heard that long-drawn scream of the sh.e.l.ls over our heads that I got to know last year.”
On both these days, the ”things seen,” unforgettable as they were, were filled out by most interesting conversations with two of our Army Commanders--first with General Horne and then with Sir Henry Rawlinson, who entertained Mrs. Ward and her daughter with a kindness that had in it an element of pathos. Not often, in those stern days, did anyone of the gentler s.e.x make and pour out their tea! And in the Chauffeurs'
Mess, the Scotch chauffeur, Sloan, who for the second time was in charge of Mrs. Ward, found himself the object of universal curiosity. ”He told Captain Fowler,” wrote Mrs. Ward to her husband, ”that they asked him innumerable questions about the two ladies--no one having ever seen such a phenomenon in these parts before. 'They were varra puzzled,' said Sloan, 'they couldna mak' it out. But I didna tell them. I left them thinkin'!'”
Mrs. Ward left the British zone for Paris on March 4, and after three days of comparative rest there--renewing old acquaintance under strange new conditions--she put herself under the charge of a kind and energetic official of the ”Maison de la Presse,” M. Ponsot, for her long-planned visit to the devastated regions of the Centre and East. Soissons, Reims and Verdun were p.r.o.nounced too dangerous for her, but she went north to the ruins of Senlis, and heard from the lips of the old cure the horrible tale of the German panic there, in the early days of September, 1914, the burning of the town, the murder of the Maire and the other hostages, and of the frantic, insane excitement under which many of the German officers seemed to be labouring. Then it was the battlefield of the Ourcq, the scene of Maunoury's fateful flank attack, which forced Von Kluck to halt and give battle at the Marne; a string of famous villages--Marcilly, Barcy, Etrepilly, Vareddes--seen, alas, under a blinding snow-storm, and at length the vision of the Marne itself, ”winding, steely-grey, through the white landscape.” Mrs. Ward has described it all, in inimitable fas.h.i.+on, in the seventh and eighth Letters of _Towards the Goal_, and has there told also the ghastly tale of the Hostages of Vareddes, which burnt itself upon her mind with the sharpness that only the sight of the actual scene could give. Then, leaving Paris by train for Nancy, she spent two days--seeing much of the stout-hearted Prefet, M. Mirman--in visiting the regions overwhelmed by the German invasion between August 20 and September 10, 1914--a period and a theatre of the War of which we English usually have but the dimmest idea. From the ruined farm of Leaumont she was shown, by a French staff officer, the whole scene of these operations, spread like a map before her, and became absorbed in the thrilling tale of the driving back of the Bavarians by General Castelnau and the First French Army.
Then southward through the region from which the German wave had receded, but which still bore indelible marks of the invaders' savage fear and hatred. In _Towards the Goal_ Mrs. Ward has told the tale of Gerbevillers and of the heroic Sur Julie, who saved her ”gros blesses” in the teeth of some demoralized German officers, who forced their way into the hospital. Here we can but give her general impressions of the scene, as she recorded them in a letter to Miss Arnold, written from Paris immediately afterwards:
”Lorraine was in some ways a spectacle to wring one's heart, the ruined villages, the _refugies_ everywhere, and the faces of men and women who had lost their all and seen the worst horrors of human nature face to face. But there were many beautiful and consoling things. The marvellous view from a point near Luneville of the eastern frontier, the French lines and the German, near the Foret de Paroy--a group of some hundreds of French soldiers, near another point of the frontier, who, finding out that we were two English ladies, cheered us vigorously as we pa.s.sed through them--the already famous Sur Julie, of Gerbevillers, who had been a witness of all the German crimes there, and told the story inimitably, with native wit and Christian feeling--the beautiful return from Nancy on a spring day across France, from East to West, pa.s.sing the great rivers, Meurthe, Meuse, Moselle, Marne--the warm welcome of the Lorrainers--these things we shall never forget.”
A rapid return to England and then, in order that her impressions of the Fleet might not be behindhand, she was sent by special arrangement to see Commodore Tyrwhitt, at Harwich, there to realize the immense development of the smaller craft of the Navy, and to go ”creeping and climbing,” as she describes it in _Towards the Goal_, about a submarine.
Returning to Stocks to write her second series of ”Letters”--now addressed without disguise to Mr. Roosevelt--it was not long before the news of America's Declaration of War came in to cheer her, with an eager telephone-message from a daughter, left in London, that ”Old Glory” was to be seen waving side by side with the Union Jack from the tower of the House of Lords. Now surely, the happy prophecies of her soldier-friends in France would be fulfilled: this _must_ be the deciding year! But the months pa.s.sed on; Vimy and Messines were ours, yet nothing followed, and in August, September, October, the agonizing struggle in the mud of Pa.s.schendaele sapped the endurance of the watchers at home more miserably than any other three months of the War. And there, on October 11, perished a lad of twenty, bearing a name that was heart of her heart to Mrs. Ward, Tom Arnold, the elder son of her brother, Dr. F. S.
Arnold. He had lain wounded all night in a sh.e.l.l-hole, and when at length they bore him back to the Casualty Clearing-station, the little flame of life, though it flickered and shot upwards in hope, sank again into darkness. Tom was a lad to whose gentle soul all war was utterly abhorrent, yet he had ”joined up” without question on the earliest possible day. Already Christopher and Arthur Selwyn, the splendid twins, were gone, and the sons of so many friends and neighbours, gentle and simple! About this time General Horne had invited her to come once more to France. ”But it is not at all likely I shall go (she wrote)--though, perhaps, in the spring it might be, if the War goes on. Horrible, horrible thought! I am more and more conscious of its horror and hideousness every day. And yet after so much--after all these lives laid down--not to achieve the end, and a real 'peace upon Israel'--would not that be worst of all?”
CHAPTER XV
LAST YEARS: 1917-1920
a?t?? ?e? s?ed??e? ???? ?stata? ?? ?fe??? ?e ?e?? f???? t?? s?? ?e??a ?a??sa ?a?e??.[35]
DAMAGETUS.
Those who visited Mrs. Ward at Stocks during the later years of the War were wont to fasten upon any younger members of the family who happened to be there, to declare that Mrs. Ward was working herself to death and to plead that something must be done to stop her. And even as they said it they knew that their words were vain, for besides the perennial need to make a living, was not her country at war and were not the young men dying every day? Mrs. Ward was not of the temperament that forgot such things; hence her desire to throw her very best work into her ”War books”--which owing to their low price and the special terms on which she allowed the Government to use them could never bring her anything like the same return as her novels.[36] She regarded them therefore almost as an extra on her ordinary work, so that the pressure on her time was increased rather than diminished as the War years went on and her own age advanced. And the last of the series, _Fields of Victory_, was to make on her time and strength the greatest demands of all.
But the lighter side of her War labours was the intense and meticulous interest she took in the ”War economies” devised by herself and Dorothy at Stocks. How they schemed and planned about the cutting of timber, the growing of potatoes, the making of jam and the sharing of the garden fruit with the village! Labour in the garden was reduced to a minimum, so that all the family must take their turn at planting out violas and verbenas, if the poor things were to be saved for use at all, while Mr.
Wilkin, the well-beloved butler who had been with us for twenty years, mowed the lawn and split wood and performed many other unorthodox tasks until he too was called up, at 47, in the summer of 1918. Mrs. Ward could not plant verbenas, but she armed herself with a spud and might often be seen of an afternoon valiantly attacking the weeds in the rose-beds and paths. The links between her and the little estate seemed to grow ever stronger as she came to depend more and more directly on the produce of the soil, and when, in 1918, she established a cow on what had once been the cricket-ground her joy and pride in the productiveness of her new creature were a delight to all beholders. Her daughter Dorothy was at this time deep in the organisation of ”Women on the Land”--a movement of considerable importance in Hertfords.h.i.+re--, so that Mrs. Ward could study it at first hand and had many an absorbing conversation with one of the ”gang-leaders,” Mrs. Bentwich, who made Stocks her headquarters for a time and delighted her hostess by her many-sided ability and by the picturesqueness of her attire. All this gave her many ideas for her four War novels--_Missing_, _The War and Elizabeth_, _Cousin Philip_ and _Harvest_, the last of which was to close the long list of her books. _Missing_ had a considerable popular success, for it sold 21,000 in America in the first two months of its appearance, but _Elizabeth_ and _Cousin Philip_ were, I think, felt to be the most interesting of this series, owing to the admirable studies they presented of the type of young woman thrown up and moulded by the War. Mrs. Ward was by no means ashamed of her hard work as a novelist in these days.
”I have just finished a book,” she wrote to her nephew, Julian Huxley, in April 1918, ”and am beginning another--as usual! But I should be lost without it, and it is what my betters, George Sand and Balzac--and Scott!--did before me. Literature is an honourable profession, and I am no ways ashamed of it--as a profession. And indeed I feel that novels have a special function nowadays--when one sees the great demand for them as a _dela.s.s.e.m.e.nt_ and refreshment. I wish with all my heart I could write a good detective--or mystery--novel! That is what the wounded and the tired love.”
But, side by side with this immense output of writing, Mrs. Ward never allowed the springs of thought to grow dry for lack of reading. The one advantage that she gained from her short nights--for her hours of sleep were rarely more and often less than six--was that the long hours of wakefulness in the early morning gave her time for the reading of many books and of poetry. ”There is nothing like it for keeping the streams of life fresh,” she wrote to one of us. ”At least that is my feeling now that I am beginning to grow old. All things pa.s.s, but thought and feeling! And to grow cold to poetry is to let that which is most vital in our being decay. I seem to trace in the men and women I see whether they keep their ideals and whether they still turn to imagination, whether through art or poetry. And I believe for thousands it is the difference between being happy and unhappy--between being 'dans l'ordre'
or at variance with the world.”
In addition to her novels and her two first War books, Mrs. Ward had been writing at intervals, ever since the summer of 1916, her _Recollections_, and brought them out at length in October 1918. They covered the period of her life down to the year 1900, giving a picture of things seen and heard, of friends loved and enjoyed and lost, of long-past Oxford days, of London, Rome, and the Alban Hills, such as only a woman of her manifold experience could offer to a tired generation. The reception given to the book touched her profoundly, for it showed her, beyond the possibility of doubt, that her long life's work had earned her not only the admiration but the love of her fellow-countrymen. As an old friend, Mrs. Halsey, wrote to Dorothy, ”I remember Mlle Souvestre saying more than thirty years ago, 'Ah! the books I admire--but it's the woman Mary Ward that I love.'” ”Mrs. Ward's Recollections are of priceless value,” said the _Contemporary Review_; ”all the famous names are here, but that is nothing; the people themselves are here moving about and veritably alive--great men and women of whom posterity will long to hear.” And another reviewer dwelt on a different aspect: ”She has lived to see the first social studies and efforts of her Oxford days grow into the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement, the Schools for the Physically Defective, the Play Centres and a great deal else in which she has reaped a harvest for the England of to-day or sown a seed for the England of to-morrow.” The reviews generally ended on a note of hope for a second volume, to complete the story--, but the story remained, and will always remain, uncompleted.
Perhaps part of the affectionate admiration with which her _Recollections_ were received was due to the wider knowledge which the public at last possessed of all that she had been able to accomplish, through twenty years of toil, for the children of England. For it so happened that during the two years that preceded the appearance of her _Recollections_--years of war and difficulty of all kinds as they were--Mrs. Ward had seen her labours for the play-time of London's children crowned by that State recognition towards which she had always worked, and her hopes for the extension of Special Schools for crippled children to the provinces as well as London very largely realised. After an immensely up-hill struggle to maintain the funds for her Play Centres during the first two years of the War, it was at length the War conditions themselves that convinced the authorities that all was not well with the child-population of our big cities and that such efforts as Mrs. Ward's must be encouraged and a.s.sisted in the fullest possible way. ”Juvenile crime”--that comprehensive phrase that covers everything from pilfering at street corners to the formation of ”Black-Hand-Gangs”
under some adventurous spirit of ten or eleven, gloriously devoted to terrorising the back streets after dark--was the portent that convinced Whitehall, that set the Home Office complaining to the Board of Education and the Board of Education consulting Mrs. Ward. The result of these consultations, carried on in the winter of 1916-17 between Mrs.