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XV. "The Bells o' Banff." By Neil Munro BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE
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THE GUARDS CAME THROUGH.

Men of the 21st

Up by the Chalk Pit Wood, Weak with our wounds and our thirst, Wanting our sleep and our food, After a day and a night

God, shall we ever forget! Beaten and broke in the fight,

But sticking it-sticking it yet.
Trying to hold the line,

Fainting and spent and done,
Always the thud and the whine,
Always the yell of the Hun!
Northumberland, Lancaster, York,
Durham and Somerset,
Fighting alone, worn to the bone,
But sticking it-sticking it yet.

Never a message of hope!

Never a word of cheer!

Fronting Hill 70's shell-swept slope, With the dull dead plain in our rear. Always the whine of the shell,

Always the roar of its burst, Always the tortures of hell,

As waiting and wincing we cursed Our luck and the guns and the Boche, When our Corporal shouted "Stand to!"

And I heard some one cry, "Clear the front for the Guards!"

And the Guards came through.

Our throats they were parched and hot,
But Lord, if you'd heard the cheers!
Irish and Welsh and Scot,

Coldstream and Grenadiers.
Two brigades, if you please,
Dressing as straight as a hem,
We-we were down on our knees,
Praying for us and for them!
Praying with tear-wet cheek,
Praying with outstretched hand,
Lord, I could speak for a week,

But how could you understand!
How should your cheeks be wet,

Such feelin's don't come to you. But when can me or my mates forget, When the Guards came through!

"Five yards left extend!"

It passed from rank to rank.

Line after line with never a bend,

And a touch of the London swank A trifle of swank and dash,

Cool as a home parade,
Twinkle and glitter and flash,
Flinching never a shade,

With the shrapnel right in their face
Doing their Hyde Park stunt,
Keeping their swing at an easy pace,
Arms at the trail, eyes front!
Man, it was great to see!

Man, it was fine to do!

It's a cot and a hospital ward for

me,

But I'll tell 'em in Blighty, wherever I be,

How the Guards came through.
Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Times.

"THE BELLS O' BANFF."

As I gaed down the water-side
I heard a maiden sing,
All in the lee-lone Sabbath morn,
And the green glen answering,
"No longer hosts encountering hosts
Shall clouds of slain deplore,
They hang the trumpet in the hall,
And study war no more."

Dead men of ancient tumults lay
In dust below her feet;
Their spirits breathed to her but scents
Of mint and the meadow-sweet;
Singing her psalm, her bosom calm

As the dappled sky above,
She thought the world was dedicate
For evermore to love!

O God! my heart was like to break,
Hearing her guileless strain,
For pipes screamed through the High-
land hills,

And swords were forth again;
And little did the lassie ken

Banff's battle bells were ringing; Her lad was in the gear of war While she was happy singing! Neil Munro.

Blackwood's Magazine.

WOODROW WILSON: MAN AND STATESMAN.

Here in Britain diplomatic messages, great national appeals, proclamations, fine in their idea, mighty in their import, sentences which, lighted with a reader's imagination, blaze in the being, are often stodgy, complicated stuff of words. They smell of clerks and silken gowns, of old chambers and ancient precedents. They are hardly complete in themselves; the beauty of their intention is only revealed when imagination is applied. In such cases there seems a certain insincerity when indeed there is none. However, one comes to the understanding that this is a necessary governmental way; that in the highest places it is unusual and, maybe, impolitic to speak one's mind in simple terms; and that somehow constitutions and history demand a certain dullness and obscurity. If we reproach our enemies, praise the good Allies, encourage the little peoples who lean upon us, exhort our citizens to effort still higher, there are complications of terms, reservations, restraint, some coldness. The Americans come nearly new to such a business; it has been a rare affair with them, and they have no regard for precedents and forms. Truly, Lincoln was an influence, but the national messages of Lincoln had simplicity and frankness for their chief feature. They were not the European kind of thing. President Wilson's are the same in circumstances of even greater difficulty and greater moment. In their simplicity, their honesty, their idealism, and, above all, in the human sympathy they exhibit for the Old World in its agony, for poor suffering humanity, the appreciation of the sorrow and the pathos of it all, the pity of man for his poor brother, the wish to help, such messages are like draughts of cold water from a mountain spring to

parched lips. By them we feel a new force; we feel the youth and earnestness behind them. Even more than by the multiplied millions of dollars, the making of American arms, the coming of American ships, do we sometimes feel in these new and simple thoughts, so plainly expressed, setting forth the nobler principles of national and international life, the grand, the startling, effect of American idealism. Mr. Wilson has been well inspired in the simplicity of his messages. The full spirit of Lincoln's frankness has come upon him, and his sppeals to Congress, to his countrymen, to the peoples of other lands, make a series which is matchless in plain impressiveness. We see the new hope, the new idealism, shining in them; we hear the call to man to be brave and strong that the end may be good for all. They are the words of man to man in the supreme crisis of the world. No conventions here! The proclamations of the President of the United States to his fellow-citizens and their foreign friends are not drafted by lawyers, considered by committees, altered and amended and given a Tudoresque finish. Instead of such a process, one likes to think of the President pacing in his garden, writing down, as is his habit, a note or two in shorthand, and then in the watches of the night, with the inspiration aflame in him, seating himself as he does before his little typewriter and with his own fingers keying the thoughts and words to their existence on paper almost as rapidly as they are shaped in his mind. That new tone in his messages, that simple frankness, that magnetic touch of hope and comfort and idealism, impress each reader at the first glance. Here is something that is not of the old way, not of

Europe. It is of the new land, the will read, "seems to be in the balance;

golden West stretching from the "Liberty" borne by New York like a charm upon her bosom to the Pacific on the farther shore.

There was a good example in those few timely, kindly words spoken to faltering Russia, so much harassed, SO much tempted by an illusory prospect of peace that had been suggested to her. In the first moments of America's entry into the war her thoughts were of Russia. That was very noticeable. Britain was pleased with the Russian Revolution, but that tremendous event seemed to strike the American imagination more forcibly than ours. At the first moment America flew to Russian assistance with kind, encouraging words and offers of vast supplies. She strove earnestly to make Russia feel that all the body and all the free spirit of the United States were with her. When Russia hesitated, when the way before her began to seem too hard, the President sent a special message to the Provisional Government. It was to give the Russians hope, to stimulate them, and to direct aright their philosophy on the subject of annexations and territorial adjustments, which seemed, amid revulsions of feeling, to be falling into some state of confusion. There was a glow in the words that is not to be found in proclamations from Old-World cabinets. A new conception of America's President suddenly rose in the minds of Europeans when they read, and read a second time, the close of the mighty address to Congress in which he first declared for war. In time so distant that even the history of this ghastly and fateful world convulsion will be condensed by the historians to a page or two, the peroration of Woodrow Wilson's address to Congress will be given in full. "Civilization itself," those men of a new age

but right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for the universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as will bring peace and safety to all nations, and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, everything we are, everything we have, with the pride of those who know the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and might for the principles that gave her birth, and the happiness and peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other." Unforgetable words. But in many minds the strongest impression will remain of the address, so wonderful in its intimacy, in its earnestness and simplicity, that the President made in the form of a personal appeal to his fellow-citizens, soon after the American entry, to join together to unite the nation for the preservation of its ideals and for the triumph of democracy in the world war. In no other country since the war began has an appeal so direct and intimate been made to the people; perhaps in no other country would it have been possible. And yet it seems a possible, an obvious, measure. "Fellow-countrymen," said he in this printed address, "I hope you will permit me to address to you a few words of earnest counsel and appeal." And then, one by one, he spoke to all classes in that great and diverse community. Thus: "To the men who run the railways of the country, whether they be managers or operative employees, let me say that railways are the arteries of the nation's life, and upon them rests the immense

responsibility of seeing to it that these arteries suffer no obstruction of any kind, no inefficiency or slackened power. To the merchant let me suggest the motto, "Small profits and quick service"; and to the shipbuilder the thought that life and the war depend upon him. Food and war supplies must be carried across the seas no matter how many ships are sent to the bottom. The places of those that go down must be supplied, and supplied at once. To the miner let me say that he stands where the farmer does. The work of a world waits on him, and if he slackens or fails armies and statesmen are helpless. He also is enlisted in the great service of the army. . . . Let me suggest that every one who creates and cultivates a garden helps greatly to solve the problem of feeding the nations, and every housewife who practises strict economy puts herself in the ranks of those who serve the nation. This is the time for America to correct her unpardonable fault of wastefulness and extravagance. Let every man and every woman assume a duty of careful and provident use of expenditure, as a public duty and as the dictate of patriotism, which none can now expect ever to be excused or forgiven for ignoring. . . . The supreme test of the nation has come, and we must all speak, act, and serve together." With time the impressiveness of such appeals increases. coln's words ring through America and the world now as ever they didnay, more than ever; words of freedom and liberty and great sincerity. Mr. Wilson's have even a greater task to perform, and they have a loftiness fitted to the endeavor. We now see the President as the practical man and the idealist at once, a marvelous statesman who achieved the masterpiece of bringing round his hundred millions of fellow-countrymen to the

...

Lin

one way of thinking at the right moment. He did it not by hard instruction and stern exhortation from the beginning-thus he would have failed-but by gentleness and extreme sympathy always. At the supreme

moment of the crisis he had his hundred millions of Americans ready.

It happened that I was in different parts of the United States, East and West, when Mr. Wilson was in the full flood of his first campaign for the presidency in 1912, and circumstances inevitably led a wanderer to take a new and acute interest in this once university professor, who at first glance and thought seemed to be of even drier stuff than one of his opponents, Taft, and to lack all the color and impulsiveness that made the other, Roosevelt, such an attractive figure. But the first examination of the man and his career forced a revelation. Here was a new creation in statesmanship, something not regarded before, in the Old World at all events, as being among the possibilities or practicabilities. This man with a straight American mouth, and one of the deepest, strongest chins to be seen on any man of consequence, was a soaring idealist who sternly bent his ideas to the practical cases of the time, but in doing so discarded old conventions and broke old moulds, making new ones for his purpose. Hitherto in his career he had been springing surprises continually, causing commotions in his communities, a disturbing element frequently; but invariably, by common acceptance in the end, working with a mighty energy and determination for the public good, loving democracy and struggling always for the good of the people against those who would oppress them, reforming without ceasing. Here, it seemed, was a paladin for a new liberty. I followed

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