The Last Post

DARLING MY MOTHER, —

There’s a dispatch-rider just going to the earth. He will take my word to you. He waits silently by, while my message is framed from my mind and my heart. In your sleep he will stand silently by while your mind and your heart receive it. It is an allowed grace so, when an only mother and an only son have been as you and I.

A queer old chap just floated by, beard awaft in the breeze. My dispatch-rider saluted smartly with an audible ‘Major!’

‘Major who?’ I asked, amazed, for the old fellow scurried along in a robe of sorts, with neither military uniform nor a crown on his cuff.

‘Major Prophet,’ twinkled the trim messenger — then joined in my grin. You’d like this dispatch-rider.

You’ll know by now, dearest, of Fresnoy? You’ll know that I could n’t leave Mark out there, broken and alone? You’ll know of the shell that sent me out in a smother of smoke? Mark did n’t come with me, so he’s surely in a clean hospital now, being ministered to. I think it’s because I sit apart often, not so eager, because of the pressure of your grief, to savor the new life with the others — I think that is why the dispatch-rider is being allowed to take my thought to you. They know what we feel here without our putting it into the shell of words.

I don’t know how long it was after Mark on my shoulder and the scream of the shell and the bite of the smoke, that I came into some new consciousness and a feeling of warmth and protection as if — does it sound strange? — as if I were in the safe hollow of a sheltering Great Foot.

A chap paused beside me just now (I told you of the luminous quality of our thoughts?) — a wan, lit sort of fellow, strapping tall, with brick-dust curls.

‘But I,’ he said, ‘ I awakened on The Great Bosom.’ His voice thrilled.

‘But he,’ said the dispatch-rider, husky with pity, ‘he died a prisoner of war.’

Oh, it’s bad to die unmothered. But to die harshly among one’s foes, the loneliness of it! Perhaps a companion prisoner curved a shoulder to the other’s pain. Think of his great, gaping need for comfort, and the long solace of The Great Bosom!

From my new edge of consciousness I looked about. Back in the distance, leaning against a wind, went old Sergeant Death through the blown powder-smoke mounting to the posts of cinnabar. ‘The Father of the Regiments ’ —how we had walked with him and talked with him, chaffed with him and laughed with him, until we had learned the goodness beneath his grim old face and he had bared our soldiersouls! He was a comrade going, and I saluted his back with sorrow. I’ll see him again perhaps, parading the souls trooping here from the war. (The dispatch-rider says not; says I’ve looked my last on Sergeant Death, who never comes past the portals; says that always now I ’ll be going farther from those portals.)

War-worn souls were crowding behind me into the refuge. One beside me whispered over and over gaspingly, ‘From a red place to a white one, a white one, a white one,’ and so sighed himself to sleep. That was the feeling of it all — whiteness and morning.

‘Is this Heaven? Where is this?’ I asked of a white horseman on a white charger.

‘This?’ He looked down at me thoughtfully. ‘This is Afterwards,’ he smiled; and wheeled off toward a waiting squadron of fair chivalry.

In this Afterwards I’ve found the boys. Wee Timmy is here, the baby of my platoon. How the fellows used to rag him, singing ‘Rock-a-bye, Baby’! How they dug when a shell took the parapet right in front of him! And how the great things sobbed unashamed when he went home fifteen minutes after they got him out! With Timmy are his brothers who went down in the Dardanelles. You know who everyone is here without being told, just as the dispatch-rider answers my thoughts. I knew Timmy’s brothers. I knew the great hulking chap who shouldered into the story-telling one day.

‘Hello, London Irish!’ I said. ‘Is the football you kicked into the trenches at Loos here, too?’

‘Is it yersilf at all, Gordon Highlander?’ he brogued back. ‘Are ye aal here? Bedad, the leather itsilf ran out across the fields no faster than yer old Scottish love-songs as ye stepped.’

I knew the Canadian padre who captured several prisoners with his emptied pistol, the martial instinct cropping up queerly in these men dedicate to peace. I knew the American paymaster over sixty, who went into action with a very effective walking-stick. They were none too young, these two, the one little, the other fat. The boys make a great fuss about these two, and a wonderful old German physician, and a lot of Serbian cheechas, brave, ragged old things from the trenches of a savage Balkan winter. The boys of the air and of the sea, you meet them; light thrills — you know them and their legend; they know you.

There’s Geordie Carmichael. You remember how slack he was about the hips, yet insisted on a kilt over his architecture— or lack of it? You remember how heather grew in his fiery hair? He sprouted a fiery horizontal sort of moustache and looked out at you over the top of it as if he had good reason to be proud of himself. He was meat for the cartoonist, and added daily to the gayety of the gay Gordons. Well, one day Geordie quietly turned himself into a human tripod for a machine-gun, while his officer fired two belts of cartridges from the dismounted quick-firer into the ranks of the enemy. Later, Geordie found himself in a church, among the wounded placed in rows clear up to the altar.

‘Yon,’ said Geordie, awe in his burrs for once in his life, ‘yon was the Virgin Mary an’ them a’ luikin’ down on us maimed and wounded.'

He had been a poor, brave, grotesque wonder of a boy going down the long trail alone, when he was thus halted and mothered on his way by the sweet ej es of the Lady Mary. His sandy effrontery is overlaid by a diffident line pride at the wee cross cuddled in his palm.

Do you remember how my first casualties were all hard cases? The best poker-player went west first, up in the air as we sat tight to the parapet; then the funny man. He sauntered in, following the stretcher-bearers after a bombardment, his cheek grazed by a rifle-bullet. He was carrying a piece of metal, half of an ’auntie’ (a twelveinch shell, you remember—the fifteeninch ones were ’grandmothers’), and he spoke blandly, saying, ’Here is the culprit.’ Then there was a noise like the end of the world and, incidentally, the end of the funny man. The one has still his air of gamin, the other of Punchinello. For the thing that makes each man himself is not extracted by any death, but becomes more fully emergent.

How they talk and talk and revel in reminiscence! For the thought transmission has not yet stopped the joy of speech. Red brick estaminets; devil mules; gay and careless faces; pruning wire entanglements; gas torture; sheeny circles of water scooped by Jack Johnson and his brother, the Woolly; murky roads through the heavy clay lands of Flanders; army dubbin in your hair and varnish on your legs; the screaming of the pipes; the numbed sleep of winter trenches; deeds of flawless Valor — the memories flash. The Anzacs have their sinister legends of Gallipoli. The laughing lucidity of the Frenchman follows the epic wildness of Hwfa Williams. The boys used to say they could n’t pronounce his name unless the wind were blowing. He was a past master of infelicitous theological argument, his blue eyes blazing and his hair filled with wrath. The high, gobbling note of an enemy shell one day out-argued Hwfa. He is no longer infelicitous, but goes about like an excited psalm.

They roar in groups over the priceless old stories, ‘ loaded ’ stories, stories presented suavely or tinged with unmistakable army humor: the absentminded thrower of grenades who threw his matches at the enemy’s trenches and carefully put into his pocket the jam-tin bomb with the fuse lit; the time that the officers for vaccination and honors were mixed; the unexploded shell in the chimney of the old French dame who was afraid to leave it in and afraid to have it taken out; the Dismounted So-and-So Horse who attacked a gleam in a trench, only to come back with busted heads from the picks and shovels of their own engineers, gathering up their tools after a hard night’s work in a sap; the teriified raw Lancs., who surrendered on sight to some husky, jabbering foreigners who turned out to be delighted French-Canadians; Sheumas O’Brien, who always saved his rum ration until he had enough to send him blazing on to the parapet, where he ran derisively up and down, steady enough on a tight old pair o’ legs, but rancorous of speech and miraculously escaping bullets — Sheumas O’Brien, hardened sinner, who, without any rum ration at all, scrambled over the top as cavalierly and unrestrainedly and took chances again to put his cross, two little pieces of wood, beside the dead, patting down to them, with the sticks, his loving old Irish blarney; and the Tango Army and Veil and Goggle Campaign of South West Africa, the sand muffling everything but profanity.

Wise old saints look on and listen, smiling at the laughter, looking sometimes at one another with a question in their eyes, then shaking their wise old heads with a soft ‘Not yet.’ Often we look up and find Lord Michael himself, leaning on his sharp, subduing sword, listening when the yarns are precipitous and there is through them the wif-waf of guns and the gleam of bayonets. He is all ruddy and very handsome, the Archangel of War, with level-lidded eyes. Once he sang for us a sword-song, a sharp, winged song.

Once the Mad Major asked him, with his high Oxford manner and drawl, ‘I say, sir, did you really pull up the mountains by the roots and throw them about, that time of your close-in with Lucifer and the rest?’

‘Does not my old friend Milton say so?’ reproached Lord Michael, with a sort of gleaming gravity.

I wish I might tell you how beautiful all these men are, how cleansed are all words, what new values there are everywhere. It is good to have all words walking cleanly here, naked and unashamed, vital with the sap and flow of life. It is good to know the wonder and beauty of one’s comrades and the glory of the fire in their hearts. It is wonderful to be beginning to see with more enlarged vision and a more correlated interpretation.

There is War, for instance, and the Crosses. If a cross has any meaning at all, it must mean a crucifixion. ‘For Valor,’ we men have ours. We brought them with us for comfort and companionship and pride. They shine on us in some intangible way. It was our bodies that we crucified, our youth, all that a man holds dear in his flesh. But, as we break a little away from our soldier-groups, we note the shine and pride of the cross on the most astonishing folk, and learn of crucifixions before which ours are abashed. Did Lord Michael tell us, or did we come somehow to know it, that all life and lives and worlds are war and conflict; that nothing is alive, bodily or spiritually, but in strife and victory; that trees and gentle flowers and brave stones are but conquests, that war is growth and growth is war, in Europe or among souls? I begin to see dimly what some of the crosses must mean on the breasts and foreheads of these amazing folk walking always more and more assured. Sometimes, when the light is violet, a great gold Cross shows misty through — everything and everyone is hushed and bowed and strangely glad, and one’s own little cross throbs exultingly. I can’t somehow seem to get this to you; I can’t somehow seem to get much more to you. The dispatch-rider will soon be peppering to the earth where you sleep.

I am disquieted just one bit. They have silvery names, those who pass by with the gleam of their cross. O mother, I don’t want a new name, but just to keep my fine old Scottish name, Alastair Geddes.

O my mother, you who are in life, say to all the women in the homesteads, dwelling with the ghosts of their slain, say that the boys whose arms were once strong around them are now no army of silent, boys lying beneath the crooked, wooden crosses. Say that the bugles are sounding magic notes, and the trumpets calling to the spirit, and the striding, comely boys footing it straight and proud on some new way, where something enormous, prodigious, full of stir and excitement, is waiting.

We must not have you mothers back there, blind with the years of your weeping, while we press eagerly on with new knowledge and new powder at every pause.

Now the great days of Life begin!

O mother, mother, mothers, hang on to the step!