against the Afghans and their ruler. The next day there was a startling incident. To quote my diary bustibles went on more merrily I have the sketch still. It was perhaps fortunate for me that I was not in the Residency when the explosion occurred, for when I went there later I found it had "covered the Residency with bullets and stones," and done some damage. My diary goes on: "This business has determined the General on totally destroying the Bala Hissar, and moving the force for the winter into the Sherpur cantonment under the Bemaru heights. He fears the Lower Bala Hissar may have underground stores of powder. We shall thus be near the site of our old cantonment of 1842. Absit omen. The cantonment is strongly fortified this time, and may, according to the General, be made unapproachable. There is cover for us all, he says, and good water. "I had arranged to go down to the Residency at 2 and sketch. At 16 minutes past one there was a report in camp as if the signal gun had gone. I stepped out of my tent to find out what had happened, and saw an immense column of dense brown smoke rising many hundred feet into the air above the Bala Hissar. From its base volumes of a still denser colour were rolling out horizontally over the city. It was obvious that a big magazine had gone-and as the place was known to be full of powder and ordnance stores and small-arms ammunition, it seemed probable that the damage done to the Citadel and town would be tremendous. . . . From the time of From the time of the first explosion the rattle of rifle cartridges, shells, small quantities of powder, and This scheme was in fact other stores, was incessant. carried out a few weeks later, It sounded like a very severe but, as Lord Roberts has exgeneral action. In the after- plained in his book, the change noon I went out to try for a of plan was due not so much sketch. I was just finishing to the explosion as to the fact the eastern line of rampart that the continued occupation when a second and still more of the Bala Hissar entailed a violent explosion took place, separation of our little Force and half the line disappeared into two detached portions. before my eyes. I caught The disasters of the first the shape of the smoke column Afghan War afforded a warnas rapidly as I could, and have ing of the danger of such a a very accurate pencil sketch step, and the sequel proved of the actual explosion. that the General was wise in From this time-4 o'clock- keeping his troops together. the discharges of small-arms This sequel I must leave for ammunition and other com- another chapter. ... ... (To be continued.) THE SCENE OF WAR.-VII. FRANCE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. "The sea of civilisation and all history." To go from the North of France on a late day of November, with the early snow lying thin upon the fields, and the long roads where the traffic of War rolls endlessly upon its course, churning the mud; to pass from the grey skies weeping with rain and the winter chill, into the South, where the Mediterranean suns herself under the Maritime Alps, is to change one's soul. It is another world; and the poet who said this thing could not be done was wrong. Insensibly one's spirit takes on a new complexion, and Life and Death rise up before one envisaged in other forms. The stern purpose of War, its unbending rigour, and implacable devotion to one single end, relax their grip. There is space here in the sunlight for softer things. If you could move the whole line of the contending armies for but one winter day from the northern trenches, into this blue and gold country by the sea, Capua would have its way, and the War would surely end. At least the reflection that it might, showed me how much my own spirit had changed in the transit. There was another transition too. East and West, we are told, can never meet. But, indeed, they are meeting all the time. Where, I wonder, does the one end and the other begin? The bright warm sunlight in the Cannebière, the autumn gold that still lingered in the trees,—bare skeletons up there in the North,-the palmtrees and the cypresses, the splashes of bright colour in the streets: these were enough to tell one that the East was near at hand. Facing me at the Station Restaurant, as I took my morning coffee, there sat a little man, with the band of a munition worker on his arm, bright-eyed, with small hands and feet, supple, oliveskinned, intelligent: the Oriental. You may be sure that if you had seen him as an infant, clotheless, happy in the dust of some Eastern byway, you would never have labelled him French. He was neither Jew nor Arab, but just a little man of the South. More obvious were the dark-skinned folk, whom France has summoned across the waters to her standards. Here were the Arab of princely mien, his desert burnous flowing about him, the Turco, the Spahi, the jet-black nigger from Senegal; and colour was with all these people, and the East in their poise. The nigger is so frankly of Africa that you hesitate a moment at the thought of him in this war, in which the best blood of the world is en gaged. But then you harden your heart. If the brute-force of Prussia is to govern the ideals of men, the nigger from Senegal is more than justified. From Marseilles I went to Toulon, to the headquarters of the French Fleet. The Mediterranean rolled lazily at the foot of the mountains; the vineyards lay like a crimson carpet upon the lower hills; the olive groves were grey in the wind; and upon the green meadows the shepherds grazed their flocks of slowly wandering sheep, as if 'twere still midsummer. Death is not so bad when Nature is harsh and overbearing; but it must be hard for one born to these things to willingly surrender any fraction of his life before the appointed hour. . . Flowers abound even at this late hour of the year; and the "beaux palmiers," the "vues très belles sur la mer," and the other distracting joys to which the little guide-books of the coast draw attention, are much in evidence. But even here there is a whisper of graver things. "On y cultive, say the books, "la fleur d'immortelle dont on fabrique des couronnes. There is need for such in France to-day. It was twenty years since I had seen anything of the French Fleet. Twenty years ago, from my father's house in a western seaport of France, I had become familiar with its coming and going. I had, like others, visited the Admiral's flagship, met some of the younger officers, shared in their hospitalities. In the cold spring days I had seen the fishermen of the coast-the Pécheurs d'Islande, the backbone of the Navy-assembling for the voyage to the Newfoundland Banks, singing their endless ditties Femmes pour être heureuses Jamais d'humeurs fâcheuses, I had seen them sail away with ritual and ceremony into the grey wastes of the Atlantio on this voyage, from which there were always some who never returned; and I had come to know some of them very well in the course of my own little voyages about that iron coast. There was Eugène Bézard, who helped with the boat, ever bragging of his skill as a sailor; and Marie Rose, his wife, who frowned upon her man's vaingloriousness; and Pierre and Henri, their sons, both of whom were drowned in after years at Miquelon. But why should I dwell upon these personal memories, except that they belong to the category of days spent in France-some of the happiest days of one's life. At Toulon I found the ViceAdmiral at work in a quiet room skied away under the roof of the Préfecture Maritime. It is an old place this, stamped with Heaven knows what memories of the past of France. The present building, "preceded by a garden of beautiful palm-trees," dates to the year 1786. Much has happened to France since then. Outside the Admiral's room, after I had passed the shrewd mariners in the vestibule, I found a naval officer at a little table, with the gold aiguillettes of an aide-de-camp upon his breast, and within, in the dimly-lighted room, the Admiral himself. No sea-dog this with hard, fighting jaw; but a man with a gentle and rather fragile air, such as Nelson might have worn had one found him seated beside a table. - The Admiral has played his part. On the 2nd of August 1914, when the succour of the British Fleet was yet uncertain, he moved out with his small array of six old oruisers for the strength of France had been concentrated in the Mediterranean-to close the Channel to the Boche. It was a brave adventure that happily did not mature. And now he sits here as Prefect Maritime, Governor of Toulon, Commander-in-Chief, and I know not what other titles, that linger about his office from the days of Louis Quatorze. Upon the great coloured map on the wall, with its wide spaces of blue sea, its fringe of shore-so different to the staff maps of the land - fighters- there are pinned the movable labels that mark the voyages of the French Fleet. The enemy would give a good deal to penetrate into this innermost sanctuary. In France it is the Army that has always counted for most in the affections of her people; but the French are proud of their seamen the little blue-eyed Bretons of the West, the yellow-haired Flemings of the North, the Latins of the South; of their dead admirals, whose names still live in the nomenclature of their ships; of the gallant and chivalrous record of their people upon the seas. They know that in this vast War the Fleet of France must of necessity play a minor part, but they are glad to think that it has been an honourable and an effective one. It is possible that we, who own the greatest Fleet in the world, do not realise how much our friends have done. Long before the War they released the British Fleet for service in the North Seas and made possible that ascendancy which from the first day of the conflict has controlled the destinies of the German Fleet and the ultimate issue of the War. In the Mediterranean they have played a capital part. During the long months that preceded the entry of Italy into the War, they sealed the Gulf of Otranto to the Austrian Fleet. It was no sinecure this. Up and down they went, night and day, ceaselessly vigilant, straining for the fight that never came their way, patient, obstinate, enduring. For the gallant French spirit, imaginative, sensitive to the impressions of the hour, borne down by the griefs of their invaded land, eager to attack, fretting for glory and honour, those long months were period of travail nobly borne. Far from France, from any But the Admiral who wrote these words had fought his last fight, and the ungrateful seas were to close over him in silence. base of their own, exposed off my neck. There one was to the insidious attack of filled with a sort of intoxicathe submarine, the mine, and tion at feeling oneself alive the torpedo, their task was in the midst of that hell, necessarily one of peril as well whereas here!" as of endurance. The Léon Gambetta, struck by a torpedo at midnight in the light of a pale moon, went down with all but 137 of her crew. The Vice-Admiral and all her officers, without a single exception, were lost. Some of the letters of those brave men have been published. It was no unlooked - for death that overtook them. "One day," wrote a young officer, the son of an Admiral of France, "they will probably get us. But we have all offered up our lives to our country in advance, and are no more troubled. I only pray God not that he will spare me, but that He will sustain me in the moment of battle and in the hour of death." "Always en l'air, never at rest," wrote the Admiral; "we have an ungrateful task that never comes to a head, and is profoundly monotonous. Never even to see one's enemy when one is at war, that is too cruel a trial. So it is that, in spite of all the physical and moral suffering we endured there, my thoughts go back to those days at Tuyen-Quan when I was in command of the little gunboat Mitrailleuse, when the shells and bullets sang night and day in my ears, and I asked myself if on the morrow the Chinese would not get hold of me and saw The share of France in our own tragic failures at the Dardanelles is more widely known. We remember how the Gaulois and the Suffren1 brought their guns to bear upon the Turkish fortresses, how the Bouvet went down in something less than minute after taking a gallant part in the attack on The Narrows. Of the very few who survived her loss there was one whose company made pleasant my stay at Toulon, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Qan aide-de-camp of the Admiral, who was picked up, smiling, out of the water. He retains that cheery smile. And since then the French have taken their share in guarding the waters of the Mediterranean, in fighting the submarine, conveying the expeditionary force to Salonica and their own colonial troops to France, upholding the Allied cause in Greece, refitting the Servian Army; in this, as in all things, heart and soul with us in the common cause; good neighbours and chivalrous and gallant friends. The morning after my visit to the Préfecture Maritime, De V- came over to my hotel, 1 Both these ships have since been lost. |