Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 34
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Night and Reflections.
The din of arms was past, and night settled down on the bloody field whereon lay shattered for ever—it would be absurd to say a hated tyranny, for, in spite of the Bungler reaction, there remained nowadays not a vestige of that—but a whole political and social system which had played its part and had its day, and which had how become a nuisance and a pest, blocking the way of a more enlightened civilisation which was waiting to spread far beyond the shores of Great Britain and Ireland.
The fight was over; the brave defenders of the lost cause were slain or dispersed, or worse, were lying huddled together in agonised and moaning heaps. The heavy pall of the battle smoke had even yet not lifted from the hills, but had become mingled with a sea fog, which melted down in a mild drizzle. There was no moon, but a lurid, flickering glare was thrown far and wide over the ghastly scene from the flames of burning Trabolgan, which, in the morning, had been a mansion, and was now a bonfire. The squat, round lighthouse, Roche’s Tower, was no more; its stump showed a few feet above its surrounding ruins, laid low by the artillery; and the tall flagstaff by which our two friends had stood in their excursion a year ago [ref. Chap. XIII.] lay this night across a shoal of corpses. The flickering red light was in this spot unobstructed, for the fringe of pines on the hillside below had been shorn close by the shot and shell; and that light fell upon the wan features of the fallen, and upon their gory stains; while their groans, and the faint plash of the high tide against the rocks below, were the only sounds to break the stillness which had succeeded to the tumult of that fateful day.
Hard by the ruins of Roche’s Tower, in the thick of the slaughtered, with his head resting on a part of the prostrate signal-staff, an English private of powerful build spoke in accents of pain to an equally stalwart comrade, who was doing his best to staunch the gash that was making a pool around him.
‘Ah, Bill, my boy—beggared if this ain’t sarve us roight for goin’ a soldierin’. Why couldn’t we stop at ’ome and do jobs loike about the river, and live a quiet life, instead o’ listenin’ like fools to your recruitin’ sergeants a standin’ drink and gettin’ round a feller with a lot o’ lies!’
‘Oi’d never no more, Joe, dimd if a would,’ groaned the other, in reply. ‘This is what they calls milipery glory, this is. To lie ’ere with my ‘ip smashed, and bleedin’ to death as fast as fast, and moy poor Betsy a-thinkin’ of me all the while, and ’opin her Bill’s a-comin back to her after the war! Dim the war, and them that makes war, oi say. It makes _ lots of honest folks miserable, and does no good to no one. If ever oi gets well—but per’aps oi never shall, Joe—call me a turnip if ever yer sees me a-fightin’ battles agin.’
‘Curse them doctors, why don’t ’ee come round?’ gasped his comrade. ‘Oi can’t be a settin’ my broken arm and rib for myself, can oi? Bother them chaps! they’re no good.’
‘Doctors wun’t be o’ no use to me, Joe,’ whined the other, more faintly than before. ‘Oi’ma goin’, oi feel oibe. Oi’m a losin’ all my blood, and oi can’t stop it, and oi can’t do without it, not even for my Betsy’s sake— Who’s this a-comin? Here! help!’
The hooded form of a Catholic Sister of Mercy was beside him, and in a moment she was kneeling on the gory turf and supporting his head in one hand, while with the other she moved him gently into a position adapted for an attempt to check the hemorrhage. But he was too far gone. Her companion had turned off to tend other piteous implorers among the hideous mass of human wreck. We cannot depict the heavenly compassion of these women, which soothed, where it could not stay, the departure of many a sufferer; suffice it to give poor Bill’s last words.
‘Oh, lady, yer be a angel, yer be indeed. I sees a many ladies like yer a-gatherin’ round me, they’re angels too. Yer'll find my Betsy, and comfort her—keep yer sweet ’and on my ’ead, lady—yes, just so—then I be ’appy and not afeard—’
And, under the wing of the Sister, the spirit of poor Bill, ex-bargee, passed into its next state, under the wing of the priestess of nature, the only true priestess, the only true Saviour. The other man next claimed her attention.
‘Couldn’t yer get me away into a ’orspital, ma’am?’ groaned Joe, while the Sister, her garment lying across his brow, occupied herself in setting and binding his fractures.
‘Yes, we will, my man,’ she said soothingly, ‘as soon as the ambulance comes round; but you must lie still and keep yourself quiet. There now, stay just as I have put you; take a drop out of this flask—that’s enough for you just now; now lie still till I come again.’
Subsequently, Joe was removed, with a host of other wounded, to Cork, where he recovered, but, although in the prime of life, never was again the same strong working man that he had been.
We have thus described briefly two cases—and those by no means the worst—out of the thirty-three thousand—the loss of the Allies had been about six thousand—which were spread that night, either dead or in various stages of suffering, about the dreadful field; and even that list excludes the fallen on board the ships. It is a very, very old story, the horrors of a battle-field after the fight. It has been witnessed thousands of times, and who shall say that it may not have to recur many times yet? And still we boast of our civilisation; we are thankful that we are not as our fathers were, that the public mind is more sympathetic, and that philanthropic associations are doing much to alleviate the sufferings which in past times were simply neglected. There is something in this contention, no doubt; but nevertheless we have as yet failed to eradicate the passions which provoke, and those which find their vent in, war. Nations do not trust one another; and so long as the existing social basis lasts, it is not likely that they ever will. Make believe as much as you please that the masculine half of society is the working and the ruling portion, this respectable fiction will not succeed in the future, any more than it has in the past, in neutralising the influence exerted by the other half. For better or worse, the moral character of men will continue to be moulded by the ideals which are set before them by women. The question then arises—what is the quality of those ideal? Is it of a kind tending to promote the common welfare, to merge international jealousies in community of properly human aims and interests, and to foster the love of peace? Is it not rather that of an artificial system of superstition and meanness; the falsification of spiritual truth, and the consequent perversion of the religious instinct, ramifying, like a poison in the blood, through every department of life, even the most secular, and discolouring the thoughts and emotions of all sorts of persons, even the most worldly? No man can be so absorbed in the cares of business that the influences of his home will have no effect on his character; even if he have no settled home, the female society he consorts with elsewhere will have much the same effect. And so long as his relations with that society are falsified, how can their effect be a good one? how can it be expected that the atmosphere of a subjected and distorted womanhood should be wholesome? The so-called virtues which it is the fashion to patronise when exhibited by women, are the virtues of the slave, not of the citizen; they borrow a little grace from being labelled womanly, but their real name is servile. And, after all, those who thoughtlessly foster this sort of thing, do not really admire it. They let it pass as a drawback of nature,—one of those things that cannot be helped, and give their attention only to picking out the few sweet plums which are to be found in the very unsavoury dish. But man cannot live on plums alone.
Nor is it any escape from responsibility to say that we must sit and wait until feminine nature changes and becomes something else than what it is. After all said and done, men must be here for something. If they had no business in the world, surely they would not have been put into it. Surely it is obvious enough that if on the one hand woman’s influence is to determine, and does determine, the moral character of society, men, on the other hand, have their part to play in educating the source of that influence. There is no evidence to show that so long as two sexes are needed to propagate the race, the part of the father, the brother, or other male companion, is likely to count for nothing or little in the training of girls. On the contrary, we know that—for the present, at all events—it counts for much. Then our contention is that in order to be improved and elevated by feminine influence, men must feel women to be in all things without exception their equals—let alone the question of superiority—and that in order to feel them their equals, they must learn to make them so. They have not learnt it yet, though some feeble steps are being made in the right direction, and even these few steps already show splendid results. Whole-heartedness is requisite in this all-important matter; every prejudice must be uprooted, every morbid predilection scoured off; it must be recognised that ‘womanliness’ is not a harem superstition, to be set up as a standard of conduct and blindly adhered to, it is rather an attribute concerning which, owing to the world’s past folly, we know very little indeed, but which is now to be revealed and developed as the goal of all knowledge whatsoever. By misuse of their opportunities given to educate their womankind to physical and intellectual equality with themselves, men have been hitherto held down in a condition where they are helplessly bound to expend in mutual enmity and destruction those energies which would have gone far to establish universal contentment; because there is a greater scourge even than war, that is, disease; and had women’s capacities been made the most of, medical science must have been vastly in advance of the stage it has reached, and a sound mind in a sound body having become a general instead of an exceptional blessing, the soil from which war springs would have been cleared of that weed. It may still not be too late to make up lost time—the good signs already alluded to seem to indicate that it is not; but prolonged indifference would be fatal, because the day of salvation is limited, and when a people—especially a great and powerful people—has let it slip by unused, the beyond is not an automatic millennium, but a catastrophe.
The hackneyed word salvation reminds one that there remains another consideration which may be worth weighing by those who have not established to their satisfaction that there is no future life, and no judgment to come for waste of the present one,—no (metaphorical) ‘lake of fire which is the second death.’ If—whether by a series of more or less distressful lines in other forms, or by some other equally rational and natural mode—the Hereafter is to readjust by its rewards and punishments the seemingly unjust distribution of good and evil here—then those among us, men or women, who instead of helping purposely do what in them lies to hinder this work of the regeneration of human society by its female portion, may reasonably fear lest the authorities they will have to settle with there hold them personally responsible, in their degree, for the plagues of disease and war in the earth.