America To-day, Observations and Reflections

William Archer

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America To-day, Observations and Reflections by William Archer

Chapter 10 No.10

08-13 18:35

America To-day, Observations and Reflections Chapter 1 No.1

In Washington, on the 6th of April last, business was suspended from mid-day onwards, while President McKinley and all the high officers of State attended the public funeral at Arlington Cemetery of several hundred soldiers, brought home from the battlefields of Cuba. The burial ground on the heights of Arlington-the old Virginian home, by the way, of the Lee family-had hitherto been known as the resting-place of numbers of Northern soldiers, killed in the Civil War.

But among the bodies committed to earth that afternoon were those of many Southerners, who had stood and fallen side by side with their Northern comrades at El Caney and San Juan. The significance of the event was widely felt and commented upon. "Henceforth," said one paper, "the graves at Arlington will constitute a truly national cemetery;" and the same note was struck in a thousand other quarters. Poets burst into song at the thought of their

"Resting together side by side,

Comrades in blue and grey!

"Healed in the tender peace of time,

The wounds that once were red

With hatred and with hostile rage,

While sanguined brothers bled.

"They leaped together at the call

Of country-one in one,

The soldiers of the Northern hills,

And of the Southern sun!

"'Yankee' and 'Rebel,' side by side,

Beneath one starry fold-

To-day, amid our common tears,

Their funeral bells are tolled."

The artlessness of these verses renders them none the less significant. They express a popular sentiment in popular language. But, as here expressed, it is clearly the sentiment of the North: how far is it shared and acknowledged by the South? Happening to be on the spot, I could not but try to obtain some sort of answer to this question.

Again, as I stood on the terrace of the Capitol that April afternoon, and looked out across the Potomac to the old Lee mansion at Arlington, while all the flags of Washington drooped at half-mast, a very different piece of verse somehow floated into my memory:

"Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor,

For 'alf o' Creation she owns:

We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword and the flame,

And salted it down with our bones.

(Poor beggars!-it's blue with our bones!)"

The association was obvious: how the price of lead would go up if England brought home all her dead "heroes" in hermetically-sealed caskets! My thought (so an anti-Imperialist might say) was like the smile of the hardened freebooter at the amiable sentimentalism of a comrade who was "yet but young in deed." But why should Mr. Kipling's rugged lines have cropped up in my memory rather than the smoother verses of other poets, equally familiar to me, and equally well fitted to point the contrast?-for instance, Mr. Housman's:-

"It dawns in Asia, tombstones show,

And Shropshire names are read;

And the Nile spills his overflow

Beside the Severn's dead."

Or Mr. Newbolt's:

"Qui procul hinc-the legend's writ,

The frontier grave is far away;

Qui ante diem periit,

Sed miles, sed fro patria."

The reason simply was that during the month I had spent in America the air had been filled with Kipling. His name was the first I had heard uttered on landing-by the conductor of a horse-car. Men of light and leading, and honourable women not a few, had vied with each other in quoting his refrains; and I had seen the crowded audience at a low music-hall stirred to enthusiasm by the delivery of a screed of maudlin verses on his illness. He, the rhapsodist of the red coat, was out and away the most popular poet in the country of the blue, and that at a time when the blue coat in itself was inimitably popular. Nor could there be any doubt that his Barrack-room Ballads were the most popular of his works. Not a century had passed since the Tommy Atkins of that day had burnt the Capitol on whose steps I was standing (a shameful exploit, to which I allude only to point the contrast); and here was the poet of Tommy Atkins so idolised by the grandsons of the men of 1812 and 1776, that I, a Briton and a staunch admirer of Kipling, had almost come to resent as an obsession the ubiquity of his name!

It seemed then, that the rancour of the blue coat against the red must have dwindled no less significantly than the rancour of the grey coat against the blue. Into the reality of this phenomenon, too, I made it my business to inquire.

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