A Student in Arms: Second Series. Donald Hankey
he did not find there. During his Oxford vacations he had made many expeditions to poorer London, at first to Notting Dale where was the Rugby School Mission, and afterwards to Bermondsey. But these expeditions had not been entirely satisfactory. He had then gone as a "visitor." The lessons he wanted to learn now from "the People" could only be learned by becoming as far as possible one of them. The story of his struggles to do so in his life in Bermondsey, and of his journey to Australia in the steerage of a German liner and of his roughing it there, always with the same object in view, cannot be told here. The first outcome of it all was the writing of his book, The Lord of All Good Life. Of this book he says, in a letter to his friend Tom Allen of the Oxford and Bermondsey Mission:
"The book I regard as my child. I feel quite absurdly about it; to me it is the sudden vision of what lots of obscure things really meant. It is coming out of dark shadows into—moonlight … I would have you to realize that it was written spontaneously in a burst, in six weeks, without any consultation of authorities or any revision to speak of. I had tried and tried, but without success. Then suddenly everything cleared up. To myself, the writing of it was an illumination. I did not write it laboriously and with calculation or because I wanted to write a book and be an author. I wrote it because problems that had been troubling me suddenly cleared up and because writing down the result was to me the natural way of getting everything straight in my own mind."
The book was written not away in the peace of the country, nor in the comparative quiet of a certain sunny little sitting-room I know of, looking on to a leafy back garden in Kensington, where Donald often sat and smoked and wrote, but in a little flat in a dull tenement house in a grey street in Bermondsey, where I remember visiting him with a cousin of his.
Here the Student lived like a lord—for Bermondsey! For he possessed two flats, one for his "butler"—a sick-looking young man in list slippers, and his wife and family—and the other for himself.
The little sitting-room in which he entertained us was very pleasant, with light walls, a bright table-cloth, a gleam of something brass that had come from Ceylon, one or two gaily painted dancing shields from Africa, and two barbaric looking dolls, about a foot high, dressed chiefly in beads and paint, that he had picked up in an Antananarivo shop in Madagascar. They came in usefully when he was lecturing on Missions!
His bedroom he did not want us to see. It struck cold and appeared to be reeking with damp!
The weather had been rather dull when we arrived, but suddenly there was a glint of sunshine, and a grind-organ that had wandered up the street started playing just opposite. Two couple of children began to dance. A girl with a jug stopped to watch them, and mothers with babies came to their doors. A window was thrown open opposite and a whole family of children leaned out to see the fun.
Bermondsey was gay, and after we had gone the "Student" perpetuated the fact in a water-colour drawing which he sent to his cousin afterwards.
In the evening, however, the sounds would be more discordant, also the Student was running a Boys' Club, taking several Sunday services at the Mission, visiting some very sick people, and attending to a multifarious list of duties which left me breathless when I saw it, knowing too how many casual appeals always came to him and that he never was known to refuse a helping hand to any one! Nevertheless it was there, and in six weeks, that the Lord of All Good Life was written!
"Then came the war," and the Student shall tell us in his own words what it meant to him. Writing still to Tom Allen, who had also enlisted, and afterwards also gave his life in the war, he says:
"For myself the war was, in a sense, a heaven-sent opportunity. Ever since I left Leeds I have been trying to follow out the theory that the proper subject of study for the theologian was man, and had increasingly been made to feel that nothing but violent measures could overcome my own shyness sufficiently to enable me to study outside my own class. Enlistment had always appealed to me as one of the few feasible methods of ensuring the desired results. …
"I was interested to hear that you found the—— so illuminating as regards human potentialities for bestiality. I think that I plumbed the depths between sixteen and a half and twenty-two. I have learned nothing more since then about bestiality. In fact I am hardened, and, I am afraid, take it for granted. Since then I have been discovering human goodness, which is far more satisfactory. And oh, I have found it! In Bermondsey, in the stinking hold of the Zieten, in the wide, thirsty desert of Western Australia, and in the ranks of the 7th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. I enlisted very largely to find out how far I really believed in the brotherhood of man when it comes to the point—and I do believe in it more and more."
Donald Hankey enlisted in August, 1914, and after a period of training, part of which was certainly the happiest time of his life, he went to the front in May, 1915, coming home wounded in August, when he wrote for the Spectator most of the articles that were published anonymously the following spring under the title of A Student in Arms. Before he left hospital he received a commission in his old regiment, the R.G.A., but still finding himself with no love for big guns, he transferred to his eldest brother's regiment, the Royal Warwickshire, hoping that by doing so he might get back to the front the sooner. He did not, however, leave until May, 1916, after he had written his contribution to Faith or Fear.
Most of the numbers of the present volume were written in or near the trenches, and a fellow-officer gave his sister an interesting description of how it was done. "Your brother," said he, "will sit down in a corner of a trench, with his pipe, and write an article for the Spectator, or make funny sketches for his nephews and nieces, when none of the rest of us could concentrate sufficiently even to write a letter."
On October 6th, Donald Hankey wrote home: "We shall probably be fighting by the time you get this letter, but one has a far better chance of getting through now than in July. I shall be very glad if we do have a scrap, as we have been resting quite long enough. Of course one always has to face possibilities on such occasions; but we have faced them in advance, haven't we? I believe with all my soul that whatever will be, will be for the best. As I said before, I should hate to slide meanly into winter without a scrap. … I have a top-hole platoon—nearly all young, and nearly all have been out here eighteen months—thoroughly good sporting fellows; so if I don't do well it will be my fault."
Six days after this the Student knelt down for a few seconds with his men—we have it on the testimony of one of them—and he told them a little of what was before them: "If wounded, 'Blighty'; if killed, the Resurrection." Then "over the top." He was last seen alive rallying his men, who had wavered for a moment under the heavy machine gun and rifle fire. He carried the waverers along with him, and was found that night close to the trench, the winning of which had cost him his life, with his platoon sergeant and a few of his men by his side.
What wonder that his cousin and best friend, when asked a short time previously what he was like, had replied, "He is the most beautiful thing that ever happened."
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
(Being Extracts from Letters to his Sister)
"I am very much wondering whether you will receive 'A Diary' in four parts. It is very much founded on fact, though altered in parts. You will probably be surprised at a certain change in tone, but remember that my previous articles were written in England, while this was written on the spot. … The Diary was not my diary, though it was so very nearly what mine might have been that it is difficult to say what is fiction and what is actuality in it. With regard to the 'conversation' during the bombardment, it represents in its totality what I believe the ordinary soldier feels. He loathes the war, and the grandiloquent speeches of politicians irritate him by their failure to realize how loathesome war is. At the same time he knows he has got to go through with it, and only longs for the chance to