Читать книгу Sonia: Between Two Worlds - Stephen McKenna - Страница 16

Once I came near my sole acquaintance with martyrdom. It was in the early weeks of the South African War, when to be a pro-Boer was not healthy. The wholeness of my skin and the peace of our rooms were due in equal measure to the fact that I had many friends and that those who knew me not agreed with Loring that I could not really mean what I said. My fellow-rebel Manders, who knew no one and only left his garret in Meadows to bicycle hotly round outlying Oxfordshire villages preaching sedition, was incontinently divested of his trousers and hurled into Mercury.

"These damned farmers!" Loring exclaimed, as he returned to our rooms, leaving Manders to retrieve his spectacles and wade inshore. "They've got to be taught a lesson."

"It'll cost you a hundred million pounds," I answered. "God knows how many men. And all because the said farmers claim the right to keep their own territory to themselves."

"A hundred million pounds!" he snorted.

"That's what Labouchere said the other night in the House," I retorted, with an undergraduate's faith in the figures and opinions of others.

"Oh, of course, if you believe a man like that! A man who frankly doesn't believe in the Empire. A Little Englander ..."

"I shouldn't be surprised if he was right," I said.

"Just for a few pounds you'd rather like to see us beaten," he cried. To this hour I recall with amazement the passions aroused by that war.

"I'm not in favour of a war against a free people conducted on behalf of Illicit Diamond Buyers. Besides the few pounds there are men's lives—and a little question of right and wrong."

"You ought to support your country right or wrong."

"I beg to differ," I said, and we carried the discussion heatedly back to Majuba and the question whether or no Mr. Gladstone's body should be exhumed and hung in chains.

The war was to come very near home before many weeks had passed. After Black Friday, Roger Dainton raised a troop of horse and took them out; Tom Dainton was given a university commission and followed a few weeks later. In the Easter term "The Earl of Chepstow" was painted out and "The Marquess Loring" substituted. The "damned farmers" had added a very pleasant, easy-going, undistinguished man to the lengthening list of casualties.