ADMIRAL DUGOUT. He had done with fleets and squadrons, with the restless roaming seas, He had found the quiet haven he desired, And he lay there to his moorings with the dignity and ease Most becoming to Rear-Admirals (retired); He was bred on "Spit and Polish"-he was reared to "Stick and String" All the things the ultra-moderns never name; But a storm blew up to seaward, and it meant the Real Thing, And he had to slip his cable when it came. So he hied him up to London for to hang about Whitehall, And he sat upon the steps there soon and late, He importuned night and morning, he bombarded great and small, From messengers to Ministers of State; He was like a guilty conscience, he was like a ghost unlaid, He was like a debt of which you can't get rid, Till the Powers That Be, despairing, in a fit of temper said, "For the Lord's sake give him something" and they did. They commissioned him a trawler with a high and raking bow, Black and workmanlike as any pirate craft, With a crew of steady seamen very handy in a row, And a brace of little barkers fore and aft; And he blessed the Lord his Maker when he faced the North Sea sprays And exceedingly extolled his lucky star That had given his youth renewal in the evening of his days (With the rank of Captain Dugout, R.N.R.). THE PASSING OF THE SUPERMAN. The greatest of all wars has so far thrown up no supremely great Personality. We have got rid of what Mr. Wells, with one of his irradiating flashes of insight and description, calls the Effigy: the great, caracoling, threatening, overbearing figure that looms so large in the foreground of all the wars and conquests of the past. Always when you turn back to these things the interest centers dramatically round an individual. The Man has 80 overshadowed the Event that most often we have forgotten the latter and remember only the former. It is of Rameses or Sesostris, Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, Attila, Charlemagne Genghis Khan, Charles XII, Peter the Great we think rather than of the kingdoms they devoured, the empires they founded or destroyed, the hosts they led to the slaughter. History flattens out before many minds a rather dull, level expanse, like the plain of Thebes with the Colossi towering above it to catch the sunbeams. It is the big man who often gives his name to the epoch: the age of Augustus, the age of Mohammed, the Napoleonic period, the Bismarckian era, and so forth. But this marvelous stretch of time through which we are passing will not, it seems, be known as the Age of Anybody. We have no Effigy really worth a show-case in the historic museum, though several of the nations engaged have made some well-intentioned efforts to create one. We have felt somehow that we "want a hero," like Byron when he started upon "Don Juan." The research after this object of desire has not been conspicuously successful. The Germans do their best with Hindenburg: but it is surmised that the strategy and battle-schemes are really worked out by Ludendorf and other useful subordinates, and that Hindenburg himself may be only a clumsy wooden image "made in Germany" to order and scale. In France there was at first some disposition to cast Joffre for the part; but that modest, methodical, painstaking, and unimaginative commander is not of the stuff whereof effigies are made, and he showed an absolute disinclination to appear in this rôle. Among ourselves a conscientious endeavor was made for a time to find what we wanted in Kitchener, the strong, silent man, the organizer of victory. But, alas! the Dardanelles Report is out; and whatever may be said of that inconvenient, and inconveniently timed, document, it must be acknowledged that it makes sad havoc with the Kitchener legend. Our Superman fades before our eyes, and leaves us instead with the likeness of a most patriotic, self-confident, hardworking, high-minded gentleman, overburdened by a task of unparalleled difficulty. And the Effigy-Statesman is apparently as obsolete as the EffigyWarrior. In this department, too, we move among the mediocrities: and here also we are in contrast with the past. The massive political personage, who awed the listening senate to obey, roused the multitude to fevered passion, and played his subtle game with potentates and powers like pieces on the chessboard, as he swept resplendent through the historic page—he likewise has disappeared. We look in vain for the Cromwell, the Lincoln, the Cavour, the Chatham, even the Choiseul or the Alberoni, of the Great War. Instead, we have had to be content with Mr. Asquith, Viscount Grey, M. Briand, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, Baron Sonnino, M. Per Sazonoff; and I scarcely think that the admirers of these eminent public men would claim that any of them was cast in the heroic mould. haps that is one reason why we hailed the advent of Mr. Lloyd George with so much effusion. We are still conscious of the old tradition which tells us that when great things are being done there should be a Great Man somewhere to see to the doing of them. So we are hoping that the Prime Minister may fill the void. We have no hero; but a superabundance of heroes. We live, as Mr. Wells says, amid a torrent of heroism. But it is the heroism of the common unregarded human being, the man who was just food for powder or food for pikes in the olden wars. It may be that in the multitudes who dimly trail through the battles and the marches, the mud and blood, of the campaigns of the past, there were soldiers as brave, as loyal, as generous as those who have been sent forth these three years past from the cottages and mean streets of Europe. It may be so; for they do not figure in the annals. The Historic Muse, gathering her skirts about her as she trips daintily over their plebeian bodies, treats them only as an entry in her catalogue. So many thousands of their corpses, she notes coldly, left to fester on the field: so many dragged off to prison or to slavery: so many, it may be, butchered in the market square or built up alive into the walls of the fortress. Non raggionam di lor. We pass on to objects of more interest. Clio sharpens her pencil to set down in suitable detail the acts and words of kings, sultans, commanding generals, valiant knights, and other persons of dignity. Their heroism is on the record, and we know all about it; but save in a few rare instances the others are a gray mass, twanging away steadily at their bowstrings, hacking and prodding victoriously with sabre and bayonet, or perhaps driven into rout and confused slaughter but in any case as individuals indistinguishable. So most of the great stories of valor and sacrifice in war, that used to thrill us like the sound of a trumpet, relate to the selected, the socially superior, warriors. The hero has usually been "an officer and a gentleman," with one of the qualifications, if not both. Do the Homeric poems pause to tell us about anybody but the chiefs, the princes, and the kings, like Agamemnon and Menelaus and Odysseus and Hector, and the illhumored but most nobly-born Achilles? Are the medieval chroniclers and singers-Froissart, William of Tyre, Mallory, and the rest-concerned with the multitude in leather jerkins? It is the knights and barons that interest them, as they push about, encased in steel, among the half-armed, halfnaked serfs of the feudal levy; and if these poor fellows were often brave, as I have no doubt they were, their valor is not worth recording. We have all been brought up to regard heroism in battle as a special attribute of patrician birth, or of high rank, civil or military. That is one of the reasons why we have found war ornamental, spectacular, romantic. But this war has changed our orientation. Heroism has become so common that it has long ceased to be picturesque and theatrical, though it tugs at our heartstrings none the less on that account. We have discovered that the quite average, ordinary man can do deeds which would have seemed notable enough to fill half a canto of sounding verse, or half a chapter of reverberant prose, in the days of the effigy-hero. For him-it may be he will get a line in a bald telegram or a bit of ribbon and a metal cross. It is much more likely he will get nothing, and nobody but a comrade or two will know how he lived and died. He goes about all this work with an amazing modesty, calmness, and selfeffacement, as though to suffer appalling torture, to be mangled, ripped open, maimed, blinded, killed, were just an incident in the day's doings. In the years before the war we used to write solemn pages showing how the world was losing the manlier virtues; how civilization, and particularly urban civilization, had slackened our fibre; how our young men no longer possessed the robust fortitude of their forefathers. And it is these same young men who have stepped from behind their counters, or out of little black workshops, to do deeds any hour of almost any day that once would have given them an immortality of fame. Arnold von Winkelried, you remember: gathering a sheaf of enemy spear-points into his own breast to make a way for his friends into the hostile square. A fine thing to do! But no whit finer than that of the soldier who throws himself upon a live bomb and so deliberately risks being blown to shreds in order to save his comrades.* has been done again and again in the trenches: this and other things which need a tougher nerve, and a better allowance of sheer physical resolution than they had "any, use for" at the battle of Sempach. It They do it all so quietly, with so complete an absence of pose! In all the armies I think that is so, but most in our own. I cannot imagine any but a British regiment rushing into the hell of the machine-gun fire with the cry of "Early doors sixpence extra"; or with the men kicking a football before them through the zone of sputtering bullets. The established hero gives one the impression of being conscious that the eyes of the world are upon him. "For God and the King," he cries, or "For the lilies of France," or something of that kind, as he charges gloriously, with white plume waving, and a magnificent flutter of laced cloak or flying hussarjacket. One suspects that even in dying he faces his audience, feeling that he owes it to himself and his order to make his exit with a sense of style. I remember that when I was a boy the story of Sir Philip Sidney at the battle of Zutphen bit deep into my imagination. I derived it from a large, popular History of England, in which the incident was made the subject of a full-page engraving over which I used to linger with delight. For years afterwards the picture, with additions and embellishments, would come back at intervals to my mind. The scene, as I envisaged it, was replete with an ornate dignity. The battle raged decorously in the background; men, in correct attitudes, with corselets and bright lances, stood about; in the center lay the dying hero, an arresting figure, with his curled and, I suppose, perfumed ringlets, his elegant sword-hilt, his white and spotless ruff, his slashed jerkin, his Elizabethan hose and stockings. One saw the draught of water offered (in a silver goblet); the knight, about to raise it to his lips, turning to the wounded soldier at his side, with his "Friend, thy necessity is greater than mine." A grand thing done in the grand manner! In the earlier days of the war I came a newspaper upon a paragraph in Lauder, correspondent's letter about the fighting near Festubert. A British soldier was lying wounded on the ground, fevered with thirst, close by a German *"Lauder, V. C.-Pte. D. R. Royal Scottish Fusiliers, decorated with the V. C. by the King on Saturday. A bomb failing to clear the trench. Lauder covered it with his foot, which was blown off, thereby saving injuries to all except himself. He is now a munition worker."-Extract from daily newspaper. even more desperately hurt. Stretcherbearers arrived and offered the Briton a tin of water. The man was reaching for it eagerly, when his glance fell on his tormented enemy. "After 'im," he said, and handed back the vessel for the German to drain. So now, when I seek to recall my old vision of Sidney at Zutphen, it is blotted out by another: a vision of a man in drabbled khaki, lying in the horrible crimsoned filth of No Man's Land; of another man in a torn gray tunic, drenched with blood, staring with wolfish eyes at the water; of the former shutting his own parched lips tight over his teeth and putting the precious draught by with a short, ill-said word of refusal. Surely a greater hero, that nameless cockney, than the sworded and scented courtier! "After 'im!" It is better than the nobly mellifluous phrase that made Philip Sidney immortal. But all the blazoned deeds of the past are outshone daily. There was Sir Richard Grenville, of the Revenge and here is Captain Loftus Jones, of H. M. Destroyer Shark. In the battle of Jutland ten German ships were pouring their fire into the Shark at short range. Steering gear, funnels, superstructure were blown away. Half the crew were dead, the commander himself was severely wounded. Another destroyer, the Acasta, pushed in front of the helpless ship to shield her and brave destruction herself. Loftus Jones, who was the Commodore of the division, refused any aid, and signaled the Acasta to keep out of the way. Then a splinter of shell came which took off the captain's leg above the knee; still he sat on the shattered deck and gave his orders and fought on. He noticed that the flag had been shot down, and ordered that another should be run up; and this was done, so that the Shark went under with colors flying. When they were all in the water the few survivors pulled their dying chief on board a raft. "Let's have a song, boys," he said; and they sang "Nearer, my God, to Thee" till that indomitable soul passed away. It would be easy to multiply the examples. Courage, self-sacrifice, magnanimity are no longer the prerogative of the honored Few. They are the common heritage of the common man -and, let us hasten to add, the common woman. The war has raised the standard all round; it has shown that if our civilization is not prolific of geniuses, it has produced a race of ordinary men and women who are braver and more generous than the dominating aristocracies and high chivalric groups of the Past. It is the answer to the scientific sentimentalists, like Nietzsche and his followers, who talk about slave morality and crowd instincts. Mr. Wells suggests that this glorification of the Effigy, this passionate research for the Superman, with its implied worship of mere brutal fighting force, is a by-product and misunderstanding of Darwinism. "Nature," said the hasty student of the evolution theory, "is 'one with rapine.' Progress is an unending struggle; the stronger species prevails by crushing, killing, or starving out the weaker. Hence, also, you can breed up to the survival of the higher type by the enslavement, if not the extinction, of the lower; hence nothing really matters but the successful self-assertion of the favored individuals and classes. To that everything must be sacrificed, especially the masses of mankind. This misreading of the evolutionary process helped the preachers of the Will-to-Power gospel; but it was being spread abroad before they went to the pulpit with pseudoscientific texts. Before Nietzsche there was that |