Tell England: A Study in a GenerationRaymond, Ernest
General
Tell England: A Study in a Generation
Raymond, Ernest
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Many of the old Colonel's visions of the emancipation of the Arab
world, and the control of the junction of the continents, had thus
been realised. And a nobler crusade than that which he saw in the
Dardanelles campaign had been fought and won by the army which
entered Jerusalem. And, note it well, the men who won these
victories were in great part the men who escaped from Suvla and
Helles. For, like the Suvla Army, the whole Helles Army escaped. And
the Turk was a fool to let them go.
But, before I give you Monty's last word, let me tell you where I am
at this moment. It is early evening, and I am writing these closing
lines, in which I bid you farewell, sitting on the floor of my
kennel-like dug-out in a Belgian trench. There is a most glorious
bombardment going on overhead. It has thundered over our trench for
days and nights on to the German lines, which to-morrow, when we go
over the top, we shall capture, as surely as we captured the one I
am sitting in now. Yes, Turkey is out of the game; Bulgaria is out
of it; Austria is crying for quarter; and Germany is disintegrating
before our advance.
Our bombardment is the most uplifting and exciting thing. So fast do
the shells fly over and detonate on the enemy ground that it is
almost impossible to distinguish the isolated shell-bursts; they are
lost in one dense fog of smoke. Just now we ceased to be rational as
we stood watching it. "That's the stuff to give 'em!" cried a Tommy
in his excitement. "Pump it over! Pump it over!" and, as some German
sand-bags flew into the air: "Gee! Look at that! Are we downhearted?
NO! 'Ave we won? YES!" And I wanted to throw up my hat and cheer.
There seized me the sensation I got when my house was winning on the
football-ground at school. "We're on top! On top of the Boche, and
he asked for it!"
I have now returned to my dug-out, feeling it in my heart to be
sorry for the Germans. I am impatient to finish my story, for we go
over the top in the morning.
Sec.2
It is in a letter just arrived from my mother that we find Monty's
last word--his footnote to this history. She describes a ceremony
which she attended at Kensingtowe, the unveiling of a memorial in
the chapel to the Old Kensingtonians who fell at Gallipoli. Monty,
as an old Peninsula padre, had been invited to preach the sermon. My
mother writes in her womanly way:
"He preached a wonderful sermon. We all thought him like a man
who had seen terrible things, and was passionately anxious that
somehow good should come of it all.
"Calvary, he said, was a sacrifice offered by a Holy Family.
There was a Father Who gave His Son, because He so loved the
world; a mother who yielded up her child, whispering (he
doubted not): 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord'; and a Son Who
went to His death in the spirit of the words: 'In the volume of
the Book it was written of me that I should do Thy will, O my
God; I am content to do it.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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