Within the Rim, and Other Essays, 1914-15 — John Shaqi
Within the Rim, and Other Essays, 1914-15James, Henry
History
Within the Rim, and Other Essays, 1914-15
James, Henry
World War, 1914-1918
otherwise too much preoccupied young doctor with the possession of a car
and the ability to drive it, above all the ability to offer it, as his
crowning attribute. Perhaps I sketch in such terms a slightly fantastic
figure, but there is so much of strenuous suggestion, which withal
manages at the same time to be romantic, in the information before me,
that it simply multiplies, for the hopeful mind, the possibilities and
felicities of equipped good-will. An association of the grimmest reality
clings at the same time, I am obliged to add, to the record of success I
have just cited--the very last word of which seems to have been that in
one of the houses of the little distracted town were two French Sisters
of Mercy who were in charge of an old bedridden lady and whom, with the
object of their care, every effort was made in vain to remove. They
absolutely declined all such interference with the fate God had
appointed them to meet as nuns--if it was His will to make them martyrs.
The curtain drops upon what became of them, but they too illustrate in
their way the range of the Frenchwoman's power to face the situation.
Still another form of high usefulness comes to our Corps, I should
finally mention, in its opportunities for tracing the whereabouts and
recovering the identity of the dead, the English dead, named in those
grim lists, supplied to them by the military authorities, which their
intercourse with the people in a given area where fighting has occurred
enables them often blessedly to clear up. Their pervasiveness, their
ubiquity, keeps them in touch with the people, witnesses of what happens
on the battle-swept area when, after the storm has moved on, certain of
the lifeless sweepings are gathered up. Old villagers, searched out and
questioned, testify and give a clue through which the whereabouts of the
committal to thin earth of the last mortality of this, that, or the
other of the obscurely fallen comes as a kind of irony of relief to
those waiting in suspense. This uncertainty had attached itself for
weeks to the fate in particular of many of the men concerned in the
already so historic retreat of the Allies from Mons--ground still
considerably in the hands of the Germans, but also gradually accessible
and where, as quickly as it becomes so, Colonel Barry pushes out into it
in search of information. Sternly touching are such notes of general
indication, information from the Curé, the village carpenter, the
grave-digger of the place, a man called so-and-so and a gentleman called
something else, as to the burial of forty-five dead English in the
public cemetery of such and such a small locality, as to the interment
somewhere else of 'an Englishman believed to be an officer,' as to a
hundred English surprised in a certain church and killed all but forty,
and buried, as is not always their fortune for their kindred, without
removal of their discs of identification. Among such like data we move
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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