A WORD FOR THE ARMY
“Roberts is nothing but a soldier. He naturally sees as a soldier....
“The military spirit is the very child of the sex-devil—dividing into
dualistic ranks class against class, and nation against nation, and sex against sex! ...
“I believe in a former letter I referred to a future life in which the Ego
would no longer see, through sex bias, the ‘things that belong to God.’”
—English lady, and would-be voter.
“To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as to Thucydides, four
centuries before Christ, war is the supreme expression of the energy of a
State as such, the supreme, the tragic hour, in the life-history of the city,
the nation, as such....
“In the light of History, universal peace appears less as a dream than as a
nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has crept to the heart of
the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless, start from their orbits....
“With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this generation.
Never since on Sinai God spoke in thunder has mandate more imperative
been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this nation and to
this people.”
—“Reflections on the Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain.”
By J. A. Cramb, M.A., Professor of Modern History, Queen's
College, London.
I
1
Hark to a patriot's warning, worthy to store and keep
In our minds as a boon for ever, a prophecy sage and deep!
—“‘Roberts sees as a soldier’: this and nought else is he.
I am a woman-voter. As I woman, I think and see.
‘Roberts is only a soldier.’ I am for love and peace:
So I war with the old sex-devil, the devil of Rome and Greece,
The devil that so divides us. When sex with sex is one
The unified human creature will arise and shine as the sun.
2
“We must be unisexual. One sex, one alone,
Stands erect in the heavens, and stares at God on his throne.
All will be well when woman, with power and victory shod,
Destroys the division of sexes and blends with the sexless God.
From this division of sexes evil and sin had birth.
If man had been woman, and woman had never been woman on earth,
All had been well with the peoples, clothed in beauty and grace:
Bearded and moustached woman will save and exalt the race.
3
“The old mere masculine error of worship of form must cease.
Our booted and tight-laced beauty eclipses the beauty of Greece.
We are the form triumphant: no forms that Phidias saw
Could stir the beholder to terror, shaped by a loftier law
Than the law of sex we abolish, the law of the man and the maid,
Fit for the animal two-sexed, the law whose lessons degrade,
The law of the flowers' obsceneness, the law of the birds' loose joy,
The law that our teachers have given us the mandate now to destroy.
4
“Why will you understand not that sex shall be overthrown
And the perfume of blossoms scattered, and the scent of a rose unknown?
For our sanctified nostrils smell not, and our glorified nerves are vexed
No longer by dreams of passion, that thrill not the forms unsexed.
Vast is the pure deliverance. Chain upon chain might fall;
But the chain of the old sex-devil was the firmest chain of all.
Following scent, the senses will drop from us one by one
Till we hear not music, and feel not the lewd male warmth in the sun.
5
“Men will be lifted and gladdened when intellect keen they find
In woman. The soul's embraces, the kisses of mind and mind,
Will wholly supplant the kisses from lip to lip that flew
When the young world laughed like a satyr, and its passionate young lusts grew.
From the graze of the tiniest pin-point to the thrust of the savagest sword
Every pain is by reason of man the reasonless lord.
Change but man to a woman, pare but his tiger claws:
Then Eve may re-enter her Eden, as man the devil withdraws.”
II
1
But the birds and the blossoms answered, and the universe of God,
Fair as when never a woman with womanless fool's feet trod
Its hills and its flower-sown valleys—“If sex were lonely and one
The stars and the moon would perish, and night would involve the sun.
Not a star could gaze at its Maker, nor could God's eyes gaze at a rose,
If the glory of sex were abolished, the splendour of love that goes
Flaming from planet to planet, flashing from height to height,
For the passion of woman for man is the passion of God for light.
2
“The passion of man for woman is the passion of God for the rose,
His love for the soul of its sweetness, the marvellous scent that grows
Pure and soft on the senses till we know that the rose is one
With the passion of woman the blossom, with the passion of man the sun.
If the sexless lie and murderous that the sexless women have told
Could be true, were it but for a moment, God's heart would be changed and old:
All things sweet must vanish, flowers no more could be:
And the radiance purple or sapphire would fade from the fields of the sea.”
3
Love and battle together: this is the law of the race.
Strength and the masculine sword-arm: feminine curves and grace.
So hath the Lord designed it: so are his strange thoughts hurled
From man to woman, from woman to man, and from world to world.
Conflict, war, for ever! Palestine, Rome and Greece!
Conquering Goths and the Vandals! Races never at peace!
One thing only is certain: that Mars was armoured and shod
With fire and his red sword sharpened by the hand of actual God.
4
Nobler the ends for ever of the desperate strifes may be:
Loftier England's message as her hand grows firm on the sea:
Clearer her voice and her mandate as Nelson and Wellington meet:
The one with his word to our army, the other guiding our fleet.
But never till all stars darken and a sunless sky grows cold,
Never while morning's mantle is broidered on boundless gold,
While lives and the honour of women turn on the stroke of a sword,
May we put the steel and the scabbard back in the hand of the Lord.
5
Never—as Ruskin told us—can we draw diviner breath
Than in that great game of battle “where the stakes are life and death.”
So hath the Lord ordained it: so must this great thing be:
While a sword can flame in the sunlight, or a ship's gun flash on the sea.
Deep in the heart of our nation is love of the true and right;
Sternest passion for justice, passionate search for light.
While in the world are falsehood, treachery, craft and crime,
Armies of unseen warriors call on the sons of time.
III
1
Hear not the voices of women, sent to cajole and mislead,
The elder deceiving the younger, spreading a sexless creed:
Wholly divorced from England, a danger and curse to the land,
For their craft would weaken our manhood, and wheedle the sword from the hand.
For the sake of the nobler woman, the woman whom Dickens drew,
Milton and Shelley and Shakespeare, the woman tender and true,
Pure and divine and gentle, the woman whom England breeds,
England, England only, hear not the false-tongued creeds.
2
For the sake of the women of England, silent, loving unheard,
Those who have not yet spoken the sweet imperative word;
For the sake of the trust reposed in us, never reposed in a land,
In an old-world race or nation, direct from destiny's hand;
While the golden chance is given us, before the hour has fled,
Vote, ordain, that an army, noble and nobly led,
Shall spring from the manhood of England, armoured in truth and light
Passionate only for justice, stern alone for the right.
3
Once to a race, once only, Time speaks the imperial word.
There are other races ripening: there are other clarions heard.
Still the chance is before us, and evil counsellors call,
Saying, “What do we want with an army? Our ships can answer for all!”
If we heed the smooth-tongued pleaders, whether men or women they be,
If we add not a nation's army to a nation's strength at sea,
Destruction huge, undreamed of, on a craven land may leap;
Our fathers won at the sword-point, and the sword alone can keep.
4
But surely the call will be answered. Surely from hand to hand.
The signal torch will hasten, till its bright flame fills the land.
Surely from woman to woman the clear strong word will fly:
“To part from the love of England is worse, far worse, than to die.”
To say that the old Field-Marshal, urgent for England's sake,
Was talking but as a soldier, to sneer when a world is at stake,
This—and a woman did it—is worse, ignobler far,
Than war, though war be a demon, and war's red crown be a scar.
5
How if God “sees as a soldier”? How if from height to height
The bugle of endless battle peals for the endless right?
How if thunders the thunder, lightens the lightning's flame
Ever in scorn of meanness, ever in Love's own name?
How if an army knightly, strong through love of the land,
Gains from God in the highest might to war and withstand?
How if an army defending fields no foeman has trod
Strikes with the force stupendous of the sword and the passion of God?
