Through the Magic Door | Page 7

man and of either party, in the few stern words, which haunt
your mind. "Bows and Bills!" cry the Saxon Varangians, as the Moslem
horse charges home. You feel it is just what they must have cried. Even
more terse and businesslike was the actual battle-cry of the fathers of
the same men on that long-drawn day when they fought under the "Red
Dragon of Wessex" on the low ridge at Hastings. "Out! Out!" they
roared, as the Norman chivalry broke upon them. Terse, strong,
prosaic--the very genius of the race was in the cry.
Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they are
damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited?
Something of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as a
young signal midshipman, had taken Nelson's famous message from
the Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the ship's company. The
officers were impressed. The men were not. "Duty!" they muttered.
"We've always done it. Why not?" Anything in the least highfalutin'
would depress, not exalt, a British company. It is the under statement
which delights them. German troops can march to battle singing
Luther's hymns. Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy by a

song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial poets need not trouble to
imitate--or at least need not imagine that if they do so they will ever
supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors working the heavy guns
in South Africa sang: "Here's another lump of sugar for the Bird." I saw
a regiment go into action to the refrain of "A little bit off the top." The
martial poet aforesaid, unless he had the genius and the insight of a
Kipling, would have wasted a good deal of ink before he had got down
to such chants as these. The Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I
remember reading of some column ascending a breach and singing
lustily from start to finish, until a few survivors were left victorious
upon the crest with the song still going. A spectator inquired what
wondrous chant it was which had warmed them to such a deed of
valour, and he found that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly
repeated, was "Ivan is in the garden picking cabbages." The fact is, I
suppose, that a mere monotonous sound may take the place of the
tom-tom of savage warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.
Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during
the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged--the
only war in which it could have been said that they were stretched to
their uttermost and showed their true form--"Tramp, tramp, tramp,"
"John Brown's Body," "Marching through Georgia"--all had a playful
humour running through them. Only one exception do I know, and that
is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an outsider in time
of peace can hardly read it without emotion. I mean, of course, Julia
Ward Howe's "War-Song of the Republic," with the choral opening line:
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." If that were
ever sung upon a battle-field the effect must have been terrific.
A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts at the
other side of the Magic Door. You can't pull one out without a dozen
being entangled with it. But it was Scott's soldiers that I was talking of,
and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical, no posing, no heroics
(the thing of all others which the hero abominates), but just the short
bluff word and the simple manly ways, with every expression and
metaphor drawn from within his natural range of thought. What a pity
it is that he, with his keen appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little
of those soldiers who were his own contemporaries--the finest, perhaps,

that the world has ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the great
Soldier Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career.
How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon
Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the
Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could
have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a
portrait of one of Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of the
Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister of
Gustavus or the archers of the French King's Guard in "Quentin
Durward"?
In his visit to Paris Scott must