Mr. Standfast | Page 5

to have been fairly well treated, though he had always a low standard of
what he expected from the world in the way of comfort. I inferred that
his captors had not identified in the brilliant airman the Dutch
miscreant who a year before had broken out of a German jail. He had
discovered the pleasures of reading and had perfected himself in an art
which he had once practised indifferently. Somehow or other he had
got a Pilgrim's Progress, from which he seemed to extract enormous
pleasure. And then at the end, quite casually, he mentioned that he had
been badly wounded and that his left leg would never be much use
again.
After that I got frequent letters, and I wrote to him every week and sent
him every kind of parcel I could think of. His letters used to make me
both ashamed and happy. I had always banked on old Peter, and here he
was behaving like an early Christian martyr--never a word of complaint,
and just as cheery as if it were a winter morning on the high veld and
we were off to ride down springbok. I knew what the loss of a leg must
mean to him, for bodily fitness had always been his pride. The rest of
life must have unrolled itself before him very drab and dusty to the
grave. But he wrote as if he were on the top of his form and kept
commiserating me on the discomforts of my job. The picture of that
patient, gentle old fellow, hobbling about his compound and puzzling
over his Pilgrim's Progress, a cripple for life after five months of
blazing glory, would have stiffened the back of a jellyfish.
This last letter was horribly touching, for summer had come and the
smell of the woods behind his prison reminded Peter of a place in the

Woodbush, and one could read in every sentence the ache of exile. I sat
on that stone wall and considered how trifling were the crumpled leaves
in my bed of life compared with the thorns Peter and Blaikie had to lie
on. I thought of Sandy far off in Mesopotamia, and old Blenkiron
groaning with dyspepsia somewhere in America, and I considered that
they were the kind of fellows who did their jobs without complaining.
The result was that when I got up to go on I had recovered a manlier
temper. I wasn't going to shame my friends or pick and choose my duty.
I would trust myself to Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say,
Providence was all right if you gave him a chance.
It was not only Peter's letter that steadied and calmed me. Isham stood
high up in a fold of the hills away from the main valley, and the road I
was taking brought me over the ridge and back to the stream-side. I
climbed through great beechwoods, which seemed in the twilight like
some green place far below the sea, and then over a short stretch of hill
pasture to the rim of the vale. All about me were little fields enclosed
with walls of grey stone and full of dim sheep. Below were dusky
woods around what I took to be Fosse Manor, for the great Roman
Fosse Way, straight as an arrow, passed over the hills to the south and
skirted its grounds. I could see the stream slipping among its
water-meadows and could hear the plash of the weir. A tiny village
settled in a crook of the hill, and its church-tower sounded seven with a
curiously sweet chime. Otherwise there was no noise but the twitter of
small birds and the night wind in the tops of the beeches.
In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had
been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was peace, deep and
holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which would
endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares. It was
more; for in that hour England first took hold of me. Before my country
had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been the
wide sun-steeped spaces of the veld or some scented glen of the Berg.
But now I realized that I had a new home. I understood what a precious
thing this little England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how
wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil was
cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us. I knew what it meant to

be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have made a line of
verse. For in that hour I had a prospect as