Leaves in the Wind - Gardiner Alfred George

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than any known to the kitchens of Lucullus; pools of silence where grave scientific men are at their calculations and their tests, and where mechanics who are the princes of their trade show you delicate instruments gauged to the hundred-thousandth of an inch that are so precious that they will scarcely let you handle them; mysterious chambers where the high explosives are handled and where the shells are filled, where you walk in felt slippers upon padded floors and dare not drop a pin lest you wake an earthquake, and where you see men working (for what pay I know not) with materials more terrible than lightnings, themselves partitioned off from eternity only by the scrupulous observance of the stern laws of this realm of the sleeping Furies.

      A great town – a town whose activities alone are equal to all the labour of a city like Leeds – all devoted to the service of the god who lies there, mystic, wonderful, waiting to speak his oracles to men. I see the poor savage growing more and more ashamed of his wood and stone. And this, good savage, is only a trifling part of our devotions. All over the land wherever you go you shall find furnaces blazing to his glory, mountains shattered to make his ribs, factories throbbing day and night to feed his gigantic maw and to clothe his servants.

      You shall go down to the great rivers and hear a thousand hammers beating their music out of the hulls of mighty ships that are to be the chariots of the god, in which he will go forth to preach his gospel. You shall go down into the bowels of the earth and see half-naked men toiling in the blackness by the dim light of the safety lamp to win that wonderful food which is the ultimate food of the god, power to forge his frame, power to drive his chariots, power to wing his bolts. You shall go to our temples of learning and the laboratories of our universities and see the miracles of destruction that science, the proudest achievement of man, can wring out of that astonishing mystery coal-tar. You shall go to our ports and watch the ships riding in proudly from the seas with their tributes from afar to the god. And behind all this activity you shall see a nation working day and night to pay for the food of the god, throwing all its accumulated wealth into the furnace to keep the engines going, pawning its future to the uttermost farthing and to the remotest generation.

      And wherever the white man dwells, good savage, the same vision awaits you —

                  … where Rhine unto the sea,

      And Thames and Tiber, Seine and Danube run,

      And where great armies glitter in the sun,

      And great kings rule and men are boasted free.

      Everywhere the hammers are ringing, the forests are falling, the harvests are being gathered, and men and women toil like galley slaves chained to the oar to build more and more of the image and feed him more lavishly with the food of death. You cannot escape the great traffic of the god though you go to the outposts of the earth. The horses of the pampas are being rounded up to drag his wagons, the sheep of Australia are being sheared to clothe his slaves, the pine trees of Lapland are being split for his service, the silence of the Arctic seas is broken by the throbbing of his chariots. As a neutral, good savage, you shall be free to go to Essen and see marvels no less wonderful than these you have seen at Woolwich, and all through Europe from Bremen to the Golden Horn the same infinite toil in the service of the Great God Gun will greet your astonished eyes.

      Then, it may be, you will pass to where the god delivers his message; on sea where one word from his mouth sends a thousand men and twenty thousand tons of metal in one huge dust storm to the skies; on land where over hundreds of miles of battle front the towns and villages are mounds of rubbish, where the desolate earth is riven and shattered by that treacly stuff you saw being ladled into the shells in the danger rooms at Woolwich or Essen, where the dead lie thick as leaves in autumn, and where in every wood you will come upon the secret shrines of the god. At one light touch of the lever he lifts his head, coughs his mighty guttural speech and sinks back as if convulsed. He has spoken, the earth trembles, the trees about him shudder at the shock. And standing in the observatory you will see far off a great black, billowy mass rise in the clear sky and you will know that the god has blown another god like unto him into fragments, and that in that mass that rises and falls is the wreckage of many a man who has looked his last upon the sun and will never till the home fields again or gladden the eyes of those he has left in some distant land.

      And then, to complete your experience, you shall hear from the prophets of the Great God Gun the praises of his gospel, how that gospel is an abiding part of the white man's faith, how it acts as a moral medicine to humanity, purging it of its vices and teaching it the higher virtues (a visit to the music halls and the Strand at midnight will help your simple mind to realise this), and how the words of the poet, uttered in satire —

      That civilisation doos git forrad

      Sometimes upon a powder cart —

      were in truth the words of eternal wisdom.

      I see the poor savage returning sadly to his home and gazing with mingled scorn and humiliation at his futile image of wood and stone. Perhaps another feeling will mingle with his sadness. Perhaps he will be perplexed and puzzled. For he may have heard of another religion that the white man serves, and it may be difficult for his simple mind to reconcile that religion with the gospel of the Great God Gun.

      ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR

      I was going down to the country the other night when I fell into conversation with a soldier who was going home on leave. He was a reservist, who, after leaving the Army, had taken to gardening, and who had been called up at the beginning of the war. He had many interesting things to tell, which he told in that unromantic, matter-of-fact fashion peculiar to the British soldier. But something he said about his cousin led him to make a reference to Lord Kitchener, and I noticed that he spoke of the great soldier as if he were living.

      "But," said I, "do you think Kitchener wasn't drowned?"

      "Yes," he replied, "I can't never believe he was drowned."

      "But why?"

      "Well, he hadn't no escort. You're not going to make me believe he didn't know what he was doing when he went off and didn't have no escort. It stands to reason. He wasn't no stick of rhubub, as you might say. He was a hard man on the soldier, but he had foresight, he had. He could look ahead. That's what he could do. He could look ahead. What did he say about the war? Three years, he said, or the duration, and he was about right. He wasn't the man to get drowned by an oversight – not him. Stands to reason.

      "Same with Hector Macdonald," he said, warming to his theme. "He's alive right enough. He's fighting for the Germans. Why, I know a man who see him in a German uniform before the war began. I should know him if I see him. He inspected me often. He made a fool of himself at Monte Carlo and that sort o' thing, and just went off to get a new start, as you might say.

      "And look at Hamel. He ain't dead – course not. He went to Germany – that's what he did. Stands to reason."

      "And what has become of Kitchener?" I asked. "Is he fighting for the Germans too?"

      Well no. That was too tall an order even for his credulity. He boggled a bit at the hedge and then proceeded:

      "He's laying by – that's what he's doing. He's laying by. You see, he'd done his job. He raised his army and made the whole job, as you may say, safe, and he wasn't going to take a back seat and be put in a corner. Not him. Stands to reason. Why should he? And him done all what he had done. So he just goes off and lays by until he's wanted again. Then he'll turn up all right. You'll see."

      "But the ship was blown up," I said, "and only one boatload of survivors came to shore. There were 800 men who perished with Lord Kitchener. Not one has been heard of. Are they all 'laying by'? And where are they hiding? And why? And were they all in Lord Kitchener's secret?"

      He seemed a little gravelled by these considerations, but unmoved.

      "I can't never believe that he's dead," he said with the air of a man who didn't want to be awkward and would oblige if he possibly could. "I can't do it… With his foresight and all… And no escort, mind you… No, I can't believe it… Stands to reason."

      And as he sank back in his seat and lit a cigarette I realised that the legend of Kitchener had passed beyond

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