Old Sam scratched his chin.
“I want to get back ’ome,” he said.
“Well, even that might be arranged.”
“I want to get back ’ome in toime for tea.”
“What time do you have tea?”
“Foive o’clock or thereabouts.”
“I see.”
A kindly smile came into the eyes of the colonel. He turned to another officer standing by the table and said:
“Raikes, is any one going across this afternoon with despatches?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the other officer. “Commander Jennings is leaving at three o’clock.”
“You might ask him if he could see me.”
Within ten minutes, a young man in a flight-commander’s uniform entered.
“Ah, Jennings,” said the colonel, “here is a little affair which concerns the honor of the British army. My friend here, Sam Gates, has come over from Halvesham, in Norfolk, in order to give us valuable information. I have promised him that he shall get home to tea at five o’clock. Can you take a passenger?”
The young man threw back his head and laughed.
“Lord!” he exclaimed, “what an old sport! Yes, I expect I can manage it. Where is the God-forsaken place?”
A large ordnance-map of Norfolk (which had been captured from a German officer) was produced, and the young man studied it closely.
At three o’clock precisely old Sam, finding himself something of a hero and quite glad to escape from the embarrassment which the position entailed upon him, once more sped skyward in a “dratted airyplane.”
At twenty minutes to five he landed once more among Mr. Hodge’s swedes. The breezy young airman shook hands with him and departed inland. Old Sam sat down and surveyed the familiar field of turnips.
“A noice thing, I must say!” he muttered to himself as he looked along the lines of unthinned turnips. He still had twenty minutes, and so he went slowly along and completed a line which he had begun in the morning. He then deliberately packed up his dinner-things and his tools and started out for home.
As he came round the corner of Stillway’s meadow and the cottage came in view, his niece stepped out of the copse with a basket on her arm.
“Well, Uncle,” she said, “is there any noos?”
It was then that old Sam really lost his temper.
“Noos!” he said. “Noos! Drat the girl! What noos should there be? Sixty-nine year’ I live in these ’ere parts, hoein’ and weedin’ and thinnin’, and mindin’ Charlie Hodge’s sheep. Am I one o’ these ’ere storybook folk havin’ noos ’appen to me all the time? Ain’t it enough, ye silly, dab-faced zany, to earn enough to buy a bite o’ some’at to eat and a glass o’ beer and a place to rest a’s head o’ night without always wantin’ noos, noos, noos! I tell ’ee it’s this that leads ’ee to ’alf the troubles in the world. Devil take the noos!”
And turning his back on her, he went fuming up the hill.
A PATRIOT
JOHN GALSWORTHY
HIS REPUTATION may have diminished some after his death, but John Galsworthy’s (1867–1933) place in the history of English literature is assured. After a short story collection and three immature novels were published under the pen name John Sinjohn between 1897 and 1901, he had learned his craft and began to release books under his own name, which, most significantly, illustrated his view of life. Patrician by birth and education, he was nonetheless aware of and sympathetic to the poor and victims of cruelty and injustice, a philosophy evident in all his work.
In 1903 he began to write the first volume of what became known as “The Forsyte Saga.” The Man of Property (1906) introduced his most fully developed character, Soames Forsyte. The novels and stories about the Forsytes showed Galsworthy’s contempt for the privileged and propertied, who carried their unthinking distaste for the underclasses so comfortably.
It was as a playwright that Galsworthy first achieved success, beginning with The Silver Box (1906), which showed the different ways that justice was meted out to the rich and the poor. Strife (1909) brought the challenges of the new industrial age out of the realm of statistics to its effect on individuals. Justice (1910) depicted the horrors of prison life so powerfully that it impelled several reforms.
The immeasurable success of “The Forsyte Saga” resulted in the offer of a knighthood, which he declined, declaring that a writer’s reward was the writing itself. He did accept the Order of Merit in 1929, often regarded as the greatest of British honors. In 1932, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to him but he was too ill to attend the ceremony and he died seven weeks later. The fame and success of the three major novels in “The Forsyte Saga,” along with the short stories and cameo appearances of members of the Forsyte family in other works, did not outlast Galsworthy’s life until Granada Television produced a miniseries that was shown on America’s PBS stations in 2002–2003. The Forsyte Saga starred Damian Lewis as Soames, Rupert Graves as Jolyon Forsyte, and Gina McKee as Irene Forsyte. Emmy-winning, the ten-part drama became must-watch television and was once ranked as the second most popular program in the history of Masterpiece Theater. Galsworthy’s series has also served as the basis for That Forsyte Woman (1949), which starred Errol Flynn, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young, and for a 1967 BBC twenty-six-episode series that starred Eric Porter, Margaret Tyzack, Nyree Dawn Porter, and Kenneth More.
“A Patriot” was originally published in Forsytes, Pendyces and Others (London, William Heinemann, 1935).
A PATRIOT
JOHN GALSWORTHY
THE OTHER DAY I was told a true story, which I remember vaguely hearing or reading about during the war, but which is worth retelling for those who missed it, for it has certain valuable ironic implications and a sort of grandeur. it concerns one of those beings who, when they spy upon us, are known by that word of three letters, as offensive as any in the language, and when they spy for us are dignified by the expression “Secret Service,” and looked on as heroes of at least second water.
You will recollect that when the war broke out, the fifteen hundred persons engaged in supplying Germany with information, mainly trivial and mostly erroneous, concerning our condition and arrangements, were all known by the authorities and were put out of action at a single swoop. From that moment there was not one discovered case of espionage by spies already resident in England when war was declared. There were, however, a few and, I am told, unimportant discovered cases of espionage by persons who developed the practice or went into England for the purpose, during the war. This story concerns one of the latter.
* * *
—
In August 1914 there was living in America a business man of German birth and American citizenship, called—let us say, for it was not his name—Lichtfelder, who had once been an officer in the German Army; a man of about fifty, of square and still military appearance, with rather short stiff hair, a straight back to his head, and a patriotic conscience too strong for his American citizenship. It was not long then before an American called Lightfield landed in Genoa and emerged as Lichtfelder at the German headquarters of his old regiment, offering his services.
“No,” they said to him, “you are no longer a young and active man, and you are an American citizen. We are very disappointed with our Secret Service in England; something seems to have gone wrong. You can be of much greater service to the Fatherland if, having learned our codes, you will go to England as an American citizen and send us all the information you can acquire.”
Lichtfelder’s soul was with his old regiment; but, being a patriot, he consented. During the next two months he made himself acquainted with all the tricks of his new trade, took ship again at Genoa, and reappeared as Lightfield in the United States. Soon after this he sailed for Liverpool, well stocked with business addresses and samples, and supplied with his legitimate American passport
in his own American name.
* * *
—
He spent the first day of his “Secret Service” wandering about the docks of a town which, in his view—if not in that of other people—was a naval station of importance; he also noted carefully the half-militarized appearance of the khaki figures in the streets; and in the evening he penned a business letter to a gentleman in Rotterdam, between the lines of which, devoted to the more enlightened forms of—shall we say?—plumbing, he wrote down in invisible ink all he had seen—such and such ships arrived or about to sail; such and such “khaki” drilling or wandering about the streets; all of which had importance in his view, if not in fact. He ended with the words: “Morgens Dublin Lichtfelder,” and posted the letter.
Now, unfortunately for this poor but simple patriot, there was a young lady in the General Post Office who was spending her days in opening all letters with suspected foreign addresses, and submitting them to the test for invisible ink. To her joy—for she was weary at the dearth of that useful commodity—between the lines of this commercial screed, which purported to be concerned with the refinements of plumbing, out sprang the guilty ink. To a certain Department were telephoned the incautious “Morgens Dublin Lichtfelder.” Now, no alien in those days was suffered to leave for Ireland save through a bottle-neck at Holyhead. To the bottle-neck then went the message: “Did man called Lichtfelder travel yesterday to Dublin?” The answer came quickly: “American called Lightfield went Dublin yesterday returned last night, is now on train for Euston.” At Euston our patriot, after precisely three days of secret service, was arrested, and lodged wherever they were then lodged.
“I am,” he said, “an American citizen called Lightfield.”
“That,” said the British Cabinet, not without disagreement, “makes a difference. You shall be tried by ordinary process of law, and defended by counsel chosen by the American Embassy at our expense, instead of by court martial.”
* * *
—
Speedily—for in those days the law’s delays were short—the American citizen called Lightfield, alias Lichtfelder, was put on his trial for supplying information to the enemy; and for three days, at the Government’s expense, a certain eminent counsel gave the utmost of his wits to preparing his defense. But a certain great advocate, whose business it was to prosecute, had given the utmost of his wits to considering with what question he should open his cross-examination, since it is well known how important is the first question; and there had come to him an inspiration.
“Mr. Lichtfelder,” he said, fixedly regarding that upright figure in the dock, “tell me: have you not been an officer in the German Army?”
The hands of the American citizen went to his sides, and his figure stiffened. For hours he had been telling the Court how entirely concerned he was with business, giving his references, showing his samples, explaining that—as for the lines in invisible ink in this letter, which he admitted sending—well, it was simply that he had met a Dutch journalist on board the ship coming out, who had said to him: “You know, we can get no news at all, we neutrals—do send us something—not, of course, harmful to England, but something we can say.” And he had sent it. Was it harmful? It was nothing but trifles he had sent. And now, at that first question, he was standing suddenly a little more erect, and—silent.
And the great advocate said:
“I won’t press you now, Mr. Lichtfelder: we will go on to other matters. But I should like you to think that question over, because it is not only the first question that I ask you—it will also be the last.”
* * *
—
And the Court adjourned, the cross-examination not yet over, with that question not yet asked again.
In the early morning of the following day, when the warder went to the cell of Lichtfelder, there, by his muffler, dangled his body from the grating. Beneath the dead feet the cell Bible had been kicked away; but since, with the stretching of the muffler, those feet had still been able to rest on the ground, the patriot had drawn them up, until he was choked to death. He had waited till the dawn, for on the cell slate was written this:
I am a soldier with rank I do not desire to mention…I have had a fair trial of the United Kingdom. I am not dying as a spy, but as a soldier. My fate I stood as a man, but I can’t be a liar and perjure myself….What I have done I have done for my country. I shall express my thanks, and may the Lord bless you all.
And from the ten lawyers—eight English and two American—who, with me, heard the story told, there came, as it were, one murmur: “Jolly fine!”
And so it was!
JUDITH
C. E. MONTAGUE
BETTER KNOWN AS A JOURNALIST than as a fiction writer, Charles Edward Montague (1867–1928) still managed to produce several outstanding novels and short stories, mostly about World War I.
Soon after his graduation from Balliol College, Oxford University, he went to work for The Manchester Guardian, working as the newspaper’s editorial writer and drama critic. When C. P. Scott, the paper’s editor, was elected to Parliament, Montague took over as the editor from 1895 to 1906. He was politically active in the areas of Irish Home Rule and pacifism, speaking and writing powerfully against British involvement in World War I, as Scott did.
Once war became inevitable because of German aggression, however, he accepted the reality that German militarism needed to be thwarted and joined the army, serving in the Royal Fusiliers, dyeing his gray hair to black in order to gull the recruiter into thinking he was younger than his forty-seven years. He served well, moving through the ranks quickly, ending as a captain in British Intelligence by 1915.
He returned to the Guardian after the war and resumed his antiwar writings, most notably his collection of newspaper articles titled Disenchantment (1922). His most memorable line is undoubtedly “War hath no fury like a non-combatant.” He also wrote satire and literary pieces until 1925, when he retired to devote himself full-time to writing fiction, producing several books in quick succession: Rough Justice (1926), Right Off the Map (1927), and Action and Other Stories (1928).
“Judith” was originally published in the September 1928 issue of The Red Book Magazine; it was first collected in Action and Other Stories by C. E. Montague (London, Chatto & Windus, 1928).
JUDITH
C. E. MONTAGUE
I
THE AVERAGE YOUTH of twenty may expect to live for some thirty-six years. But if he was an infantry subaltern marching up into the Somme battle front in the Summer of 1916, his expectation of life was thirteen days and a bit. Some men took this contracted horizon in one way, and some in another. One virgin youth would think, “Only a fortnight? Wouldn’t do to chuck it in the straight.” Another would think, “Only a fortnight? And life scarcely tasted! I must gather a rose while I can.”
Phil Gresson thought that he was, on the whole, for the rose. So he got a night’s leave from Daours, where his Company lay for two days on its way to the mincing machine at Pozières. Then he borrowed the winking Medical Officer’s horse and trotted off into Amiens, pondering what sort of wine to have with his dinner at Gobert’s famed restaurant. Burgundy, he concluded: Burgundy was the winiest wine, the central, essential, and typical wine, the soul and greatest common measure of all the kindly wines of the earth, the wine that ought to be allowed to survive if it were ever decreed that, after thirteen days and a bit, only one single wine was to be left alive to do the entire work of the whole heart-gladdening lot. He thought it all out very sagely.
Gobert’s was full: Gresson just bagged the last single table. Soon the rising buzz of talk drew its light screen of sound in front of the endless slow thud of the guns in the East. Soon, too, the good Burgundy did its kind office, and Phil’s friendly soul was no longer alone: all the voices at the other tables had melted into one mellow voice: he recognized it as the genial voice of the whole of ma
nkind, at its admirable best—not stiff, or cold, or forbidding, as some voices seemed at some times. It set him all a-swim in a delicious reverie about the poignant beauty of this extreme brevity that had come upon life. Thirteen days and a bit—and then all love, all liking, all delight to lie drowned for ever at the bottom of an endless night. Lovely, lovely. The individual life just a mere wisp of an eddy formed and re-formed on the face of a stream, and then smoothed away. Oh! it was good Burgundy. And Phil, a modest and a sober youth, drank more of it than he had ever drunk of any wine at a sitting.
At ten he strolled out of Gobert’s, full of beautiful thoughts, and decided first to have a look at the celebrated Cathedral. He was quite an intelligent boy and had read that the great Ruskin thought it, all round, the most topping cathedral in France. So he worked northward, along the Rue St. Denis, to its end and then to the left, to reach the West Front. The West Front looked all right, as far as he could see. But it was a very dark night; no moon, no lamps lit in the streets, all the shops shut. And not many people about. Far over the southern suburbs one enemy aeroplane was on duty after another, bombing the railway; and bombs addressed to a railway may be delivered anywhere else.
One ancient trade, all the same, did not slacken, bombs or no bombs. Wherever a British soldier walked, after dark, in the streets of Amiens in that year, a kind of fire-fly lamps would kindle their tiny electric lights in his path; and out of the deepened darkness that each of these made in its rear there would come a whispered assurance that some rose was there and only asked to be gathered.
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