Escape and Other Essays | Page 2

called Horningsea, with a battlemented church among orchards
and thatched houses, with its own disused wharf--a place which gives
me the sense of a bygone age as much as any hamlet I know. Then
presently the interminable fen stretches for miles and miles in every
direction; you can see, from the high green flood-banks of the river, the
endless lines of watercourses and far-off clumps of trees leagues away,
and perhaps the great tower of Ely, blue on the horizon, with the vast
spacious sky over-arching all. If that is not a beautiful place in its width,
its greenness, its unbroken silence, I do not know what beauty is!
Nothing that historians call an event has ever happened there. It is a
place that has just drifted out of the old lagoon life of the past, the life
of reed-beds and low-lying islands, of marsh-fowl and fishes, into a
hardly less peaceful life of cornfield and pasture. No one goes there
except on country business, no armies ever marshalled or fought there.

The sun goes down in flame on the far horizon; the wild duck fly over
and settle in the pools, the flowers rise to life year by year on the edges
of slow watercourses; the calm mystery of it can be seen and
remembered; but it can hardly be told in words.
2
Now side by side with that I will set another picture of a different kind.
A week or two ago I was travelling up North. The stations we passed
through were many of them full of troops, the trains were crammed
with soldiers, and very healthy and happy they looked. I was struck by
their friendliness and kindness; they were civil and modest; they did
not behave as if they were in possession of the line, as actually I
suppose they were, but as if they were ordinary travellers, and anxious
not to incommode other people. I saw soldiers doing kind little offices,
helping an old frail woman carefully out of the train and handing out
her baggage, giving chocolates to children, interesting themselves in
their fellow- travellers. At one place I saw a proud and anxious father,
himself an old soldier, I think, seeing off a jolly young subaltern to the
front, with hardly suppressed tears; the young man was full of
excitement and delight, but did his best to cheer up the spirits of
"Daddy," as he fondly called him. I felt very proud of our soldiers, their
simplicity and kindness and real goodness. I was glad to belong to the
nation which had bred them, and half forgot the grim business on
which they were bent. We stopped at a junction. And here I caught
sight of a strange little group. There was a young man, an officer, who
had evidently been wounded; one of his legs was encased in a surgical
contrivance, and he had a bandage round his head. He sat on a bench
between two stalwart and cheerful-looking soldiers, who had their arms
round him, and were each holding one of his hands. I could not see the
officer clearly at first, as a third soldier was standing close in front of
him and speaking encouragingly to him, while at the same time he
sheltered him from the crowd. But he moved away, and at the same
moment the young officer lifted his head, displaying a drawn and
sunken face, a brow compressed with pain, and looked wildly and in a
terrified way round him, with large melancholy eyes. Then he began to

beat his foot on the ground, and struggled to extricate himself from his
companions; and then he buried his head in his chest and sank down in
an attitude of angry despair. It was a sight that I cannot forget.
Just before the train went off an officer got into my carriage, and as we
started, said to me, "That's a sad business there--it is a young officer
who was taken prisoner by the Germans--one of our best men; he
escaped, and after enduring awful hardships he got into our lines, was
wounded, and sent home to hospital; but the shock and the anxiety
preyed on his mind, and he has become, they fear, hopelessly
insane--he is being sent to a sanatorium, but I fear there is very little
chance of his recovery; he is wounded in the head as well as the foot.
He is a wealthy man, devoted to soldiering, and he is just engaged to a
charming girl . . ."
3
Now there is a hard and bitter fact of life, very different from the story
of the fenland. I am not going to argue about it or discuss it, because to
trace the threads of it back into life entangles one at once