in good company 8

in good company 8

For instance, I was asked to give an address on National Defence to

a great gathering of men--some 1500 or more as it turned out--at

an Assault-at-Arms in the Kursaal at Worthing. Naturally I never

trespassed upon such a busy man’s time by writing to him, unless in

answer to a letter from himself, or unless I had something important

of which to speak. So as I had not heard from Lord Roberts for some

time, and had had no cause to write to him, I did not suppose he as

much as knew of the Worthing meeting. Yet in opening the proceedings,

the Mayor announced that he had just received a telegram from Lord

Roberts to the effect that he was delighted I was to be the speaker

that night, and warmly commending what I had to say to the attention

of the audience.

 

Such a message and from such a quarter, did more to assure me--an

entire stranger to my audience--a welcome and a friendly hearing than

I could otherwise have hoped to receive.

 

One “Lost Chord” in the way of an unread message from Lord Roberts I

often regret.

 

In the company of Mr. Neville P. Edwards, then an organising

secretary of the National Service League, I went as an Honorary

Helper of the League on three caravan tours in Kent and Sussex.

 

The last tour closed only a week or two before the outbreak of

war, and Lord Roberts, who followed our progress with the keenest

interest, sent us on several occasions by letter or by telegram

a special message to deliver in his name to our audiences. These

messages directly warned his fellow-countrymen of the imminence of

war and of the necessity for preparation. Remembering that in the

towns we often had an audience of one or two thousand, and even in

the villages, of some hundreds, there must be many persons who now

recall the weightiness and the gravity of the great soldier’s words.

And I venture to add that no one whose privilege it was to hear them

is likely ever to forget the equally grave, eloquent, and memorable

words which fell from the lips of Mr. Rudyard Kipling--who by his

single pen has done more to awaken the young manhood of the nation

to England’s needs than any other writer living or dead--when he

presided over one of our meetings. It seemed to me one of the ironies

of fate that in the very caravan from which Lord Roberts’ message

and Mr. Kipling’s words--both urgent warnings of imminent war--had

been delivered, I should a few weeks later set forth as an Honorary

Recruiting Officer in search of men to fight in the very war which

Lord Roberts and Mr. Kipling had so faithfully foretold.

 

Before taking the chair and introducing Mr. Edwards and myself to our

audience, Mr. Kipling said to me:

 

“I have just had a telegram from the Chief. He sent his thanks to

me for presiding at the meeting, and asks that I convey his thanks

to Edwards and to you. It is a very interesting and characteristic

message, and I will read it when making my closing remarks to the

meeting at the end.”

 

It so happened that the latter part of the meeting was a Lantern

Slide Lecture by Mr. Edwards. His last slide was a portrait of the

King, seeing which some one started “God Save the King,” and the

audience, taking this as ending the meeting, broke up, and so we lost

not only Lord Roberts’ telegram, but Mr. Kipling’s equally coveted

closing words.

 

In nothing that I attempted for the cause that was so near to his

heart, was Lord Roberts more keenly interested than in a controversy

in the spring and summer of 1914 between an opponent of National

Service, a very distinguished divine and scholar, and myself. My

opponent’s article was headed, “Why we cannot accept conscription,”

and mine “Why we support Lord Roberts.” To a reprint of the

controversy in booklet form, published immediately after the outbreak

of war, the Rev. John Telford, B.A., contributed an Editorial

Foreword, in which he said:

 

“This discussion of the question of national armaments aroused

extraordinary interest among a very wide circle of readers, as

it appeared in _The Magazine of the Wesleyan Methodist Church_

in March, April, May and June of this year. It also led to much

correspondence in other journals. No one then dreamed of the terrible

significance which events were to attach to the subject.... Here

are Mr. Kernahan’s words, printed last March, before any shadow had

fallen across the sun. He says: ‘I have studied the question at home

and abroad with as much closeness as was possible, and the more

closely I study it the more convinced I am that we are well within

the possibility of one of the most awful disasters that ever befell a

great nation.’ In the light of to-day that is a remarkably verified

warning.”

 

This controversy, on account of the importance attached to the issues

involved, Lord Roberts followed with exceptional interest. One

passage of arms between my opponent and myself I may be permitted to

quote, since it centres around Lord Roberts himself.

 

“Mr. Kernahan proves,” my critic wrote, “that his special hero,

Lord Roberts, is a truly Christian man. I would not question it for

a moment. And yet--so terrible a power has familiarity with war to

blind men’s eyes to its satanic wickedness--it was Lord Roberts who

uttered in our Free Trade Hall at Manchester the cynical sentence

about Germany’s right to strike when her hour came, which shocked

even convinced conscriptionists on his platform. I wonder whether

Lord Roberts approved of the way Germany struck when her hour came

in 1870! Strange indeed to hear a Christian man echoing the very

sentiments of Bismarck, who was so proud of the cunning lie by which

he tricked France into a disastrous war!”

 

My reply I venture to quote, since Lord Roberts was so good as to say

it exactly interpreted his views and his position.

 

“Lord Roberts,” I wrote, “claimed no such ‘right’ for any nation

wantonly and wickedly to force war upon another. He pointed out that

when one nation has decided, for reasons of her own (possibly because

she is ambitious and determined to play a great part in history), to

force a war upon another nation, which possibly may decide to resist,

if only because she is determined to hold to her own--the policy

is that adopted by Germany. That policy--as a student of history

as well as a soldier, Lord Roberts had to admit that it is often a

winning policy--is to strike at what has been called the selected

moment, or in other words, when she (Germany) is at her strongest,

and the nation which she wishes to overthrow is weak. It was because

Lord Roberts knew that this was and is Germany’s policy, and because

he wellnigh despairs sometimes at the criminal apathy of his

fellow-countrymen, and because he knows the consequences which must

almost inevitably follow, that he felt compelled, under a terrible

sense of responsibility, to speak out thus plainly. Had he, knowing

what he does of Germany’s ambitions, intentions, and strength, and

of England’s ignorance, weakness, and unpreparedness, elected to

maintain a cowardly and traitorous silence--then, and not till then,

would he be guilty of the ‘cynical’ and ‘satanic’ wickedness of which

my opponent speaks.... For the latter cannot deny that Germany has

not gone back in her ambition or in her strength since 1870. On the

contrary, she has gone on, not only in piling up an army which, as

Mr. Churchill warned the nation, is now four and a half millions in

number, but also in the most strenuous effort to create a vast Navy,

which she has said must be, shall be, greater than ours. With her

huge army she needs no Navy for defence. It is, as has been said, a

‘luxury’ and is meant for attack, whereas to us a Navy is a matter of

life and death. And my opponent knows that we have twice held out the

hand of friendship to Germany with proposals to stay this insane race

in armaments, and that her reply was more battleships, more soldiers,

more guns.”

 

I do not print this passage here to reopen an old controversy, but

because--though the details of Lord Roberts’ proposals will, in the

light of recent events, require considerable modification--the main

issues raised by him abide and must be reaffirmed. Here in England

we have short memories. It is possible that in the bewildering

happenings of the war and in the breathless interest with which, at

its end, the shifting of frontiers and the striking of great balances

will be watched, there is the danger, if only from reaction, that we

slackly fall back into our previous national inertia and national

apathy, and that the little puddles of party politics (dirty puddles

for the most part) once again matter more to us than to hold sacred

and inviolate the great Empire and these world-trusts which God has

seen well to commit to Britain’s charge.

 

 

II

 

I have heard many noble tributes paid to Lord Roberts, but I remember

none which touched him more than that of Sir William Robertson

Nicoll at the Whitefriars’ Club. Lord Roberts was the club guest,

that brilliant author and journalist Mr. John Foster Fraser being

Chairman. I had the honour of being in the Vice-Chair.

 

The toast of Lord Roberts’ health was seconded by Sir William

Robertson Nicoll, who was meeting the Field-Marshal for the first

time. The Whitefriars’ dinner to Lord Roberts was merely a compliment

to a great soldier. Not all of those present would have shared the

views he entertained upon the question of National Service, and

controversial issues were carefully excluded. Speaking, therefore,

of Lord Roberts as a soldier, as a writer, and as a man, Sir William

Robertson Nicoll, in one of the most graceful and generous tributes

to which I have ever listened, assured him that by no class was our

guest held in greater honour and affection than by the Nonconformists

of this country and of every denomination. Lord Roberts knew that

many Nonconformists differed from him in politics and upon the

question of National Service, of which he was the acknowledged

champion, and Sir William’s tribute so gracefully phrased, so

obviously sincere in its __EXPRESSION__ of personal reverence and

affection, touched and gratified him deeply.

 

That he felt a little sore, in regard to the misunderstanding of his

views by some Nonconformists, is clear, I think, from a letter to me

which lies before me as I write.

 

I happen to be a Churchman myself, but for the last eight or nine

years before the war I devoted no inconsiderable portion of my time

in trying to put the case for National Defence, as advocated by the

Field-Marshal, before my many friends in the Nonconformist Churches,

and I am glad and grateful to remember that, while not sharing my

views, the editors of the great Nonconformist and Free Church organs

gave me for the most part--there were excep