22 chapters
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22 chapters
MANY FRONTS
MANY FRONTS
BY LEWIS R. FREEMAN LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1918 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED My grateful acknowledgments are due to the several magazines in which these stories and sketches have appeared:— The Cornhill Magazine , Land and Water , and The World’s Work in England; and in America, The Atlantic Monthly , The World’s Work , and The Outlook . L. R. F. October, 1918. MANY FRONTS...
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I
I
I had known F—— through years of hunting and sports in India, but never until the night that our old British-India coaster lay off the Shat-el-Arab bar waiting for the turn of the tide to run up to Bassorah, did I hear him speak of the things that were really next his heart. Then it was that I was vouchsafed transient vision of the outer strands of the previsionary web England was weaving beyond the marches of India against events to come. I will give his story, as nearly as I can remember, in h
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II
II
The following day we caught the river steamer at Bassorah, and four days later arrived at Bagdad, F—— putting up at the grim brown fort which housed the British Consulate, post office, and telegraph station. I saw him on and off for a week, usually at tiffins or dinners given for him by some of his British friends. At other times he was not to be found. “F—— Sahib gone to bazaar,” his Pathan bearer invariably answered my inquiries; and F—— himself volunteered no more than that he was spending a
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III
III
Another letter came from F—— a month later, this being in answer to one I had rushed off on receiving the card announcing his departure for the Persian Gulf:— “You ask what we are driving at here, by which I suppose you mean, ‘What is our plan of campaign?’ This, obviously, is a question I can answer only in the most general way. Our principal purpose in the present campaign will be the occupation of southern and central Mesopotamia up to and including the cities of Bagdad and Kerbela, a region
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IV
IV
My next, and what proved to be my last, letter from F—— reached me in London:— “Our general advance has begun, and we have attained our first important objective in the occupation of the ‘Garden of Eden.’ Not the greater ‘Garden of Eden,’ which name Sir William Willcocks applies to all of Mesopotamia south of Hitt and Samara, but the traditional site of the Garden at the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates. This was surely one of the strangest engagements in history. The country was under water
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V
V
I was still chuckling over F——’s account of his experience with the bees when, opening the latest issue of the Sphere the following afternoon, I saw his familiar face smiling back at me from the corner of one of the first pages. “Been getting mentioned in dispatches,” I said to myself; and then the title of the page, on which appeared a score of other portraits, met my eye: “Dead on the Field of Honour; Officers Killed in Action.” There were no particulars, not even a date; nor was anything furt
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I
I
It had been all of nine years since I first met Horne at an estancia house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly—it was the keen, piercing gl
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II
II
Our fellow diners drifted away as they had come—singly, and in twos and threes—and by ten o’clock Horne and I were alone in the deserted lounge with our cigars and coffee. He was expecting to be rung up at ten-thirty, he said, and as the time approached I could not help noticing that he became distrait and nervous, palpably anxious. The call came promptly, and it was with a look of ill-concealed apprehension on his face that he rose to follow the summoning flunkey to the telephone booth. A minut
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III
III
Horne laughed uneasily, fumbled through his pockets in a vain search for matches, filched a box from the tilted tray of our nodding companion,—leaving a sixpence in its place,—lit his pipe, puffed pensively for a minute or two; and even after all that preparation made his beginning apologetic. “I don’t know that I’ve ever told the yarn from the beginning,” he said, “and I’m dead sure I’ve never said much about the end. If I chatter a bit to-night, you’ll please check it up against the good news
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I
I
On Board Yacht —— en voyage, Wroxham Broad to Hickling Broad. August—. We sailed and poled along the river and canal yesterday, and in the afternoon moored to the bank at this point, which is but a mile or two from the North Sea. The morning papers, which we picked up as we passed through the little village of Potter Heigham, contained an official bulletin telling of a Zeppelin raid on the “Eastern Counties” the previous night; and later in the day word was brought us that Lowestoft, the great t
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II
II
London , September —. Yesterday’s papers had the usual account of an air raid on the “Eastern Counties,” and during the day word was passed round that this had consisted of an attempt to bomb the Woolwich Arsenal. This morning they have finally had to add “and London” to the regular formula, as last night, for the first time, bombs were dropped upon the heart of the city and seven million people watched the whole performance. It was the nearest thing to their promised “big raid” that the Germans
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III
III
From the time of the big raid, in early September, until the second week in October there was not a single night on which the moon, wind, clouds, or some combination of meteorological conditions was not unfavourable to Zeppelin action, and it was not until this date that they tried to come again. Although rather nearer than before to two or three of the explosions, I had no such opportunity to view the progress of the raid as on the previous occasion, and this latest bombing is, perhaps, most me
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TO BRITISH MERCHANT CAPTAINS
TO BRITISH MERCHANT CAPTAINS
All yesterday evening I came upon little knots of sailor men gathered along the quay or at the corners of the streets of Harwich and Dovercourt. Their weather-beaten parchment-brown faces were drawn and troubled, and they spoke in the jerkily lowered voices of men not wont to hold their tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks suggestive of the expressions I had seen on the faces of the sailors at a North Wales port on the evening that a
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THE PASSING OF A ZEPPELIN
THE PASSING OF A ZEPPELIN
In the year that had gone by since the first great air-raid on London we knew that much had been done in the way of strengthening the defences. Just what had been done we did not, of course, and do not, know. We knew that there were more and better guns and searchlights, and probably greatly improved means of anticipating the coming of the raiders and of following and reporting their movements after they did come. At the same time we also knew that the latest Zeppelin had been greatly improved;
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FIGHTING FOR SERBIA
FIGHTING FOR SERBIA
I have had many strange meetings—strange in place and attendant circumstance—in various and sundry odd corners of the world, but, everything considered, I am inclined to think my encounter with Radovitch, toward the end of last March, was the strangest of them all. It was on the gorgeously flower-carpeted slope of a mountain-side in——. But let that transpire in its proper place. There had been hint of gathering activity in the marching troops on the roads, and I knew that some kind of a skirmish
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BEATING BACK FROM GERMANY (As Told by an Escaped Prisoner).
BEATING BACK FROM GERMANY (As Told by an Escaped Prisoner).
I was born on a Wisconsin farm, almost within sight of Lake Michigan and only a few miles from the Illinois State line. My father was Irish and my mother German. Like my name, most of my qualities—both good and bad—were those of my father rather than my mother. He died when I was ten, and within a year my mother married our German hired-man. My mother was never unkind to me, but my stepfather was a brute, and from the day of his coming to live with us I date a steadily growing dislike for his ra
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I
I
There was something just a bit ominous in the brooding warmth of the soft air that was stirring at the base of the towering cliffs of the Marmolada, where I took the teleferica ; and the tossing aigrettes of wind-driven snow at the lip of the pass where the cable-line ended in the lee of a rock just under the Italian first-line trenches signalled the reason why. The vanguard of one of those irresponsible mavericks of mountain storms that so delight to bustle about and take advantage of the fine
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II
II
This befell, as it chanced, during one of my early days on the Alpine front, and the incident of men singing in a blizzard almost strong enough to sweep them from their feet made no small impression on me at the moment. It was my first experience of the kind. A week later I should have considered it just as astonishing to have encountered, under any conditions, an Alpino who was not singing; for to him—to all Italian soldiers, indeed—song furnishes the principal channel of outward expression of
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III
III
As regards the spirits of the Alpini, song is a barometer; as regards their health, a thermometer. An experienced officer will judge the mental or physical condition of one of his men by noting the way he is singing, or refraining from singing, just as a man determines his dog’s condition by feeling its nose to see if it is hot or cold. I remember standing for a half-hour on the wind-swept summit of a lofty Trentino pass with a distinguished major-general who had taken me out that afternoon in h
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BLOWING UP THE CASTELLETTO
BLOWING UP THE CASTELLETTO
It was about the middle of last July that the laconic Italian bulletin recorded, in effect, that the blowing of the top off a certain mountain in the Dolomite region had been accomplished with complete success, and that a considerable extension of line had been possible as a consequence. That was about all there was to it, I believe; and yet the wonder engendered by the superb audacity of the thing had haunted me from the first. There was no suggestion of a hint of how it was done, or even why i
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WONDERS OF THE TELEFERICA
WONDERS OF THE TELEFERICA
“Jolly good work, I call that, for a ‘basket on a string,’” was the way a visiting British officer characterised an exploit of the Italians in the course of which—in lieu of any other way of doing it—they had shot the end of a cable from a gun across a flooded river and thus made it possible to rig up a teleferica for rushing over some badly-needed reinforcements. The name is not a high-sounding one, but I do not know of any other which so well describes the wonderful contrivance which played so
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THE GARIBALDI FIGHT AGAIN FOR FREEDOM
THE GARIBALDI FIGHT AGAIN FOR FREEDOM
Once or twice in every winter a thick, sticky, hot wind from somewhere on the other side of the Mediterranean breathes upon the snow and ice-locked Alpine valleys the breath of a false springtime. The Swiss guides, if I remember correctly, call it by a name which is pronounced nearly as we do the word “fun”; but the incidence of such a wind means to them anything but what that signifies in English. To them—to all in the Alps, indeed—a spell of fun weather means thaw, and thaw means avalanches; a
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