Nicky-Nan, Reservist Part 25

"Let me catch you tryin' it!"

"Now, we're comin' to business," said Corporal Sanderc.o.c.k.

"_That's_ what the O.C. told me--Captain Whybro, commandin' Number 4 Works Company, Cornwall Fortress Royal Engineers. 'Here's where we carry our first trench,' says he; 'an' here, if wit o' man can grasp the why or the wherefore,' says he, 'is a filthy potato-patch lyin'

slap across our line. Corporal,' says he to me, 'you're a family man an' tactful. I detach you,' says he, 'to search the blighter out an'

request him to lift his crop without delay. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again,' says he, 'an' the more you run around the better it'll be for your figure, an' the more you'll thank me,' he winds up, 'when we march together into Berlin.' So now you understand how welcome you dropped in. . . . 'Tis a terribly hilly country hereabouts."

"If there's law in England," Nicky-Nan threatened, "you'll keep clear o' this here patch o' mine, or it'll be the worse for 'ee!"

Corporal Sanderc.o.c.k seated himself leisurably on a hillock of thyme, began to knock out his pipe against the edge of his boot-sole, and suddenly exploded in laughter so violent that he was forced to hold his sides. The exhibition took Nicky-Nan right aback. He could but stand and stare.

"Oh, oh!" panted the corporal. After another paroxysm he gasped, "You'll excuse me, but that's how I get taken. 'You've got no business here' was your words." (Another paroxysm.) "You can't think how comical you said it, either."

"Comical or not, I mean it," Nicky-Nan a.s.sured him, with a saturnine frown. "If you can give over holdin' your belly an' listen, I don't mind tellin' you my opinion o' this here War; which is, that 'tis a put-up job from start to finish, with no other object than to annoy folks."

The corporal sat up, wiping his eyes. "That's a point o' voo," he admitted, and added guardedly, "I don't say as I agree: but I'd like to know how, comin' upon all of us so suddent, it strikes a man like you, dwellin' in these out-o'-the-way parts. My wife declares she've seen matters workin' up to it for years."

"I never thought about it, one way or t'other, an' I don't want to think about it now. Who in the world _wants_ war? Not I, for one."

"Me either, if it comes to that," Corporal Sanderc.o.c.k allowed, refilling his pipe. "If the matter had rested with me, I'd ha' gone on forming fours every Wednesday an' Sat.u.r.day, contented enough, all the rest o' my life. But the great ones of earth will have it, the Kaiser especially: and, after that, there's no more to say.

The Kaiser wants a place in the sun, as he puts it; an' 'tis our bounden duty as true Britons to see he don't get any such thing."

"I never heard tell as he expressed a hankerin' for my 'taty-patch,"

answered Nicky Nan sourly. "The way I look at it is, _he_ leaves me alone in quiet, an' you don't. A pack o' sojers messin' about a spot like this!" he added with scorn. "It affronts a decent man's understandin'. But 'tis always the same wi' sojers. In the Navy, when I belonged it, we had a sayin'--'A messmate afore a s.h.i.+p-mate, a s.h.i.+p mate afore a dog, an' a dog afore a sojer.'"

"To judge by your appearance," said the corporal with no sign of umbrage, "that was some time ago, afore they started the Territorial movement. . . . Ever study what they call Stradegy? No?--I thought not. Stradegy means that down below your patch there's a cove o'

sorts: where there's a cove there's a landin'-place; where you can get a light gun ash.o.r.e you can clear the sh.o.r.e till you find a spot to land heavy guns. Once you've landed heavy guns you've a-took Plymouth in the rear. You follow me?" Corporal Sanderc.o.c.k stood up and picked up a crumb or two of tobacco from the creases of his tunic. "I'll go fetch a fatigue party to harvest these spuds o'

yours," said he. "There'll be compensation for disturbance. If you like, you can come along an' bargain it out wi' the O.C."

"No," said Nicky-Nan, s.n.a.t.c.hing at this happy chance. "I'm a lame one, as you see. What must be, must, I suppose: but while you step along I'll bide here."

"So long, then!"

The corporal had no sooner turned his back than Nicky began to unwrap his bundle in a fumbling haste. He watched the rotund figure as it waddled away over the rise; and so, dropping on his knees, fell to work furiously. The sun was already making its warmth felt. In less than five minutes the sweat trickled off his forehead and dropped on his wrists as he dug with his unhandy trowel and grabbed at the soil.

Something more than a quarter of an hour had pa.s.sed when, looking up for the fiftieth time, he spied the corporal returning down the gra.s.sy slope, alone. By this time his job was nearly done; and after finis.h.i.+ng it he had the presence of mind to dig up a quart or so of potatoes and spread them over the gold coins in his sack.

"What in thunder's your hurry?" demanded the corporal, halting for a moment on the crest of the rise and gazing down. "I told you as I'd fetch a party to clear the patch for you; an', what's more, the spuds shall be delivered to your door sometime this very day. But the Captain can't spare a man this side o' nine o'clock, an' so I was to tell you." He descended the slope, mopping his brow. "Pretty good tubers?"

Nicky-Nan hypocritically dived a hand into the sack, drew forth a fistful, and held them out in his open palm.

"Ay, and a very tidy lot," the corporal nodded. "And what might be the name of 'em?"

"_d.u.c.h.ess o' Cornwall_ they're called: one o' the new Maincrops, an'

one o' the best. East-country grown. You may pull half a dozen or so for yourself if you'll do me the favour to accept 'em."

"Thank 'ee, friend. There's nothin' I relish more than a white-fleshed 'taty, well-grown an' well-boiled. Not a trace o'

disease anywhere," observed the corporal, running his eye over the rows and bringing it to rest on the newly-turned soil at his feet.

"Eh? Hullo!"

He stooped and picked up a sovereign.

"That's mine!" Nicky-Nan claimed it hastily. "I must ha' dropped it--"

"Well, _I_ didn', anyway--an' that's honest." The corporal handed it over with just a trace of reluctance. "But it only shows," he added, eyeing Nicky-Nan thoughtfully, "as there's nothing in this world so deceptive as appearances."

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SECOND SERMON.

"For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth."

". . . And thou shalt be called by a new name. . . . Thou shalt no more be termed _Forsaken_; neither shall thy land be termed _Desolate_: but thou shalt be called _Hephzi-bah_, and thy land _Beulah_: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. . . ."

". . . I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night."

". . . The Lord hath sworn by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength, 'Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast laboured. But they that have gathered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have brought it together shall drink it . . . in the courts of my holiness.'"

"Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people."

"Behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, 'Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh; behold, his reward is with him,' and his work before him.

And they shall call them 'The Holy People, the Redeemed of the Lord,' and thou shalt be called, '_Sought out, A City Not Forsaken_.'"

Mr Hambly closed the great Book upon the cus.h.i.+on and leaned forward, resting his arms over it.

"I want you," said he after a pause, very solemnly and slowly, "to apply those words not only to ourselves, of whom we are accustomed to think, too particularly and too complacently, as a chosen people; but to the whole as the free peoples of Western Europe, with whom to-day we stand in alliance and as one. If you apply them at all particularly, let France and Belgium be first in your minds, with their harvest-fields and vineyards, as you listen to the Lord's promise, '_By the arm of my strength, surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies, and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine for which thou hast laboured_.'

"For our own land, England, if we are really to vindicate it out of this struggle as Beulah--that is, 'married,' the bride of the Lord--I wish you to consider how far the G.o.d of this n.o.ble oath has advanced upon the old bloodthirsty Jehovah of the book of Joshua. He is not yet, in Isaiah, the all-living, all-comprehending G.o.d the Father of the Gospel: but if we halt on Him here, we are already a long way advanced from that tribal and half-b.e.s.t.i.a.l conception of the Deity which Joshua invoked and (as it seems to me) the German Emperor habitually invokes.

"I see no harm in priding ourselves that we have advanced beyond the German Emperor's schoolboyish conception of Jehovah. As a greater and far more highly bred and educated Emperor--an Emperor of Rome-- once warned us, 'The best part of revenge is not to be like them.'

"Well, that is the point on which I would specially caution you this morning. When an adversary suddenly and brutally a.s.saults us, his ferocity springing from the instinct of a lower civilisation--as when a farm-dog leaps upon us in the road--our first instinct is to fall back and meet him on the ground of his own savagery, to give him an exact t.i.t for his tat. But can you not see that, as we do this, and in proportion as we do it, we allow him to impose himself on us and relinquish our main advantage? It is idle to practise a higher moral code, if we abandon it hurriedly as soon as it is challenged by a lower.

"Bearing this in mind, you will not in the next few minutes say to yourselves, 'Our minister has ill chosen his time--now, with the enemy at our gates--to be preaching to us that we should be confirming what little hold we have on the divine purpose, to advance upon it; to counsel our striving to pierce further into the mind of G.o.d; when all the newspapers tell us that, for success in war, we should enter into the minds of our enemies.'

"For, let me tell you, all knowledge is one under G.o.d; and the way of theology--which should be the head and crown of the sciences--not different from the way of what we call the 'natural' sciences, such as chemistry, or geology, or medicine. Of wisdom we may say with Ecclesiasticus: _The first man knew her not perfectly, neither shall the last man find her out_. But that does not matter. What matters for us, in our generation, is that we improve our knowledge and use it to make ourselves _comparatively_ wiser--comparatively, that is, with our old selves as well as with our enemies. 'Knowledge,' they say, 'is power'; which, if it mean anything, must mean that A, by knowing a little more than B, has made himself, to that extent, more powerful than B.

"Now by saying that the way of all the sciences is one, I mean just this: that the true process of each is to refer effects to their real causes, not to false ones, and in the search to separate what is relevant from what is irrelevant and--so far as we can discover-- quite accidental. For example, when a pestilence such as typhoid fever broke out in Polpier five or six hundred years ago, your forefathers attributed it to the wrath of G.o.d visiting them for their sins: and to be sure it is good that men, under calamity, should reflect on their sins, but only because it is good for them to reflect on their sins at all times and under any circ.u.mstance.

Nowadays you would have your well-water a.n.a.lysed and ask what the Sanitary Inspector had been about. Or, again, if a fire were to devastate our little town, we should not smite our b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the manner of those same forefathers, and attribute it to what there is amongst us of sloth and self-indulgence, to G.o.d's wrath upon our drinking habits or our neglect of Sunday observance: we should trace it to a foul chimney and translate our discovery into a Bye-law, maybe into a local Fire Brigade. That is how men improve their knowledge, and, through their knowledge, their wellbeing--by sifting out what is relevant.

"Do you suppose that irrelevances account for this war any more than they account for a fire or a pestilence; or that they will any more help us to grapple with it? Truly it would seem so," sighed Mr Hambly. "A great deal of fervid stuff was uttered in England last Sunday by archbishops, bishops, presidents of this and that Free Church; and the 'religious newspapers' have been full of these utterances. G.o.d forgive my presumption that, as I walk the streets of Polpier, I seem to hear all these popular men preaching with acceptance about nothing in particular!

"They all start by denouncing or deploring Germany's obvious sins: her exaltation of Might against Right, her l.u.s.t of world-dominion, the ruthlessness of her foreign policy, the vainglorious boastings of her professors. No great harm in this!--for all these have contributed to bring this war about, and are therefore relevant.

But when the preacher turns to the examination--for us so much more profitable--of _our own sins_, what has the preacher to say? Why, always in effect that, though it pa.s.seth comprehension why Germany should be chosen to punish us (being so much worse than ourselves), we deserve punishment somehow for our drinking, swearing, and gambling habits, for the state of the poor in our cities, for our wors.h.i.+p of wealth, for having a Liberal Government. . . .

"Absurd as it may seem, that last gets nearest to sense; for wars are made, or at any rate accepted by, governments; and in a democratic country the government of the day represents the nation, or the nation is to blame. But believe me, my friends, G.o.d does not punish in this haphazard way. He punishes scientifically; or rather he allows men to punish themselves, by reaping the evil from the cause they have planted or neglected to remove: and the harvest comes true to the seed.