The Cost

I

HE was one of the men I had somehow believed could not die.

And when that May morning, with England at her loveliest, I read the notice in the always lengthening obituary of the Times, I was — amazed.

The torpedoing of the Lusitania, recorded in the same paper, seemed to me somehow as nothing beside that other intimate catastrophe.

Then I took up the paper and reread the notice.

It was not particularly to the point, for it dealt with him simply as an athlete. The real Ronald was clearly quite unknown to the writer; but there was one sentence in those half dozen lines that lingered in my mind: —

He was probably the greatest Rugby three-quarter-back of all time.

He was; and he was much more.

And as I puzzled it all out — our hopes, his opportunities, this sudden catastrophe — I found myself dully butting my head against the hard wall of the simple facts: —

Ronald was no more. He had not died. He had been killed deliberately — this boy who never had an enemy, and who so loved his life.

‘C’est trop bête, la guerre,’say the wise French peasants in their simple way, as they till their fields up to the very trenches. And surely they are right. It is the stupidity of the thing, and not its wickedness, that staggers the modern mind.

And of all the stupidities of the war this for the moment seemed to me the most crass.

Here was a beautiful creature —

with the youth in his limbs, the light in his face, the hope in his heart, stopped: dead.

As I revolved the matter in my mind, the occasion on which I had last seen him kept recurring to me.

It was at the time of the Welsh match in the April before the war. He was captain of the English team. I think the King was present. But I forget the King; though I have a hazy memory of seeing Ronald tripping down the steps from the dressing-room at the head of his team, and standing in his football shorts and blue jersey shaking hands with a little man in a round hat before the grand stand.

It was very much Ronald’s game that day. The thirty thousand gathered to watch him were all agreed on that. His playing was, as always, original. It was as different from that of other men as he was different from them. It was spiritual; and its quality, effortlessness. The strain, the ferocity, the contortions and grimaces of others who indulge in that heroic and elemental tussle which is Rugby football were not for him.

Nobody ever saw him gnash teeth upon the football field; I doubt if anybody ever knew him cross; certainly nobody ever heard him swear. And I for one rarely knew him to issue a command — certainly never a hortatory one — though he was usually captain. A steady brilliance pervaded his play and personality alike. Always master of the game, he was consummately master of himself. And he handled his men with the same unconscious ease with which he swooped and swerved through the enemy toward the goal.

An incident in the game comes back to me. It spoke to me at the moment of Ronald and his capacity for winning men. He had tackled an enemy threequarters in full career. The pack was on them in a moment as they struggled, and had smothered them. The two men emerged from beneath the worry at last; and the enemy three-quarters, as he withdrew toward his own line, gave an intimate little pat on the shoulder to the man who had wrought his headlong ruin and crushed in a moment the fruition of his plans.

I love you, it said.

And it was not only on the football field that his genius for government appeared. At Rugby, at Oxford, in those camps of workingmen by the sea which he loved, in boys’ clubs in mean quarters of great towns, it was always the same. He led, I think as much as anything, because he never sought to lead. Authority clothed him naturally as the grass the field. Men and boys acknowledged allegiance to a power they could not define and of which the user was unconscious. The root of the matter lay perhaps in this: that there was no egotism in the man. He was one of the humble of heart, without a trace of morbid diffidence.

Therefore some believed that he had in him a power for bettering the affairs of men which none of his more brilliant Balliol contemporaries, greedy of power, voraciously ambitious, wearisomely successful, possessed.

Three months after his last International, war was declared.

At Oxford he had joined the Officers’ Training Corps; but when the authorities urged him to become an officer, he refused. Later, when he had left Oxford, it seemed to him his unpleasant duty to accept a commission in his county Territorial battalion.

The adventure and romance of war made no appeal to him. It was a dirty business that had to be got through.

It may have been because his mother came of Quaker and his father of Nonconformist stock; it may have been that he had been brought up in the academic and not the imperial tradition; whatever the cause, it is surely worthy of record that perhaps the greatest athlete of his generation hated soldiering from his heart, though he died in battle.

He hated soldiering and never took his sport in killing. As a tiny boy he protested against what seemed to him the wanton destruction of flies. Later in life, when he was one of the richest young men of his day, and the owner of a great estate, the pursuits of the jeunesse dorée only bored him. He never hunted, never shot; and never wished to do so. ‘The horse was very fierce,’ he writes in his simple way of a ride he once took.

It was not that he thought killing for pleasure wrong; it was that he disliked it.

He loved life himself and in his large and sunny way he wished others to enjoy what he found so dear — the lower creatures too.

And it is a bitter commentary on things as they are that this young man, whose heart was brimming with lovingkindness, never killed anything deliberately save other men.

All through the hot and terrible days of August, 1914, Oxford and Cambridge poured their best into the ranks of Kitchener’s Army.

The Expeditionary Force was flung into France. The Territorial battalions were mobilized, and might follow at any moment.

Ronald was an officer in one of these. As such he had enlisted for home service alone, and had therefore the right to refuse to serve abroad.

At the outbreak of the war his father and mother were abroad; and two of his friends embassied half across England to urge him to consider his responsibilities and exercise his rights.

He was furious with them.

In fact his battalion did not leave for the front for another six months. And that six months did not make the profession that had been forced upon him any dearer.

‘I had rather be making biscuits,’ he wrote to a friend.

In those days he changed. Something of the old radiance was departing from his face, and little wonder. His friends were falling like autumn leaves. The boys who had stormed across Bigside at Rugby in his victorious wake, the men who had followed him to victory in many a university match, were going down in swathes. It was the platoon-leaders, the men of his own age, who were catching the full blast of lead and steel that was sweeping over Europe. And his turn would come. He never doubted it.

‘It’s not what I should have wished,’ he admitted just before he went.

For he was happy in his life, happy in his opportunities, as are few.

His uncle, a great captain of industry, had made him his heir. And laboring as a common hand, among the workingmen he understood so well, in the immense biscuit factory which he was one day to control, he was quietly dreaming of the work to which he meant to devote his life.

He had the chance, and he had the capacity and the desire to make the most of it. For his heart was set, not on adding to his fortune or going into Parliament, but on adjusting the relations between master and men. Here was the task; and here apparently a soul supremely adapted by nature and opportunity to undertake it with success.

A casual bullet at midnight, as he stood on the parapet of a trench directing a fatigue-party, ended his dreams and our expectations.

4 We shall win in this war,’ said a soldier friend to me the other day, ‘because in the end Love always wins.’

It does; and the price is Calvary.

II

And he does not stand alone.

In the minds of many his name will be recorded with that of another youth, so like him, and yet so unlike.

The two were at Rugby together; of singular beauty and athletic excellence.

I do not know if they were friends at school. I should say probably not. For Rupert from boyhood was a poet, and Ronald a man of action. The names almost betray the men and the difference between them.

After school-days I doubt if they ever met, for the poet went to Cambridge, and the engineer to Oxford.

And it was typical that the one became a Fabian and lectured on the Minority Report, while the other plunged into the practical labors of Boys’ Clubs. Ronald remained a stout Churchman while Rupert was writing ironical verse about the creed of his fathers.

Again, after they had left their universities the one was sweating as a mechanic in the engine-room of a factory, while the other was sailing the South Seas and bursting into song in honor of dusky maidens.

Of the two youths it was difficult to say which was the more beautiful. Certainly I know no two young Englishmen who would have been more loved by the Greeks.

Rupert I saw but once; but I recall him well — his fair hair, rather longer than that of other men, his collar rather lower, his attire rather more négligé — sitting with his blue eyes and spiritual face in the window of a room overlooking the river at Chelsea, reading to a little Bohemian gathering a paper on what appeared to him the most urgent of social reforms — the guaranteeing by the state of a pension of five hundred pounds a year to every minor poet.

He was something more than a mere poetaster himself; though, apart from his personal beauty, — which gave him an unfair advantage, — for long he by no means outshone his multitudinous rivals. Men — and women still more — recognized in his face the poet of their dreams, read his verses in the light of that vision glorious, and trumpeted him as the master he was not.

The war touched him to immortality.

Contact with the brutalities of life stripped his fine spirit of its frills and furbelows.

It stood forth naked and radiant and unashamed.

He joined the Royal Naval Division ; and the bombardment of Antwerp made a man and a poet of him. Between the declaration of war and his death he wrote a handful of sonnets that will endure as long as English poetry.

And he lived just long enough to taste his fame.

A few weeks before he died Dean Inge quoted from the pulpit of St. Paul’s his incomparable lines, —

If I should die, think only this of me —

He did die - almost immediately; perhaps a month before his school-fellow.

The one lad sleeps in a wood in Flanders on the hither side of our trenches; the other under an olivegrove on an island in the Ægean Sea, within sound of the guns wrangling over the Dardanelles.

And thousands of their peers — the boys they knew and sported with at school and university — sleep at their sides.

Let their just epitaph be: —

They went to war in the cause of peace and died without hate that love might live.