by John Buchan
Politics were a different matter. Before the War he was adopted as Liberal candidate for Derby, and made a profound impression by his platform speeches. He had every advantage in the business — voice, language, manner, orderly thought, perfect nerve. The very fact that he sat loose to party creeds would have strengthened his hands at a time when creeds were in transition. For, though he might scoff at dogmas, he had a great reverence for the problems behind them; and to these problems he brought a fresh mind and a sincere good will. His colleague at Derby, Mr. J. H. Thomas, believed, I know, most heartily in his future, and he won golden opinions among the Labour men with whom he came into contact. It was natural, for he was the spending type in life, the true aristocrat who prefers to give rather than to take, and makes no fetish of a narrow prudence. Democracy and aristocracy can co-exist, for oligarchy is their common enemy. I am very certain, too, that in Parliament he would have won instant fame. His manner of speaking was as perfectly fitted for the House of Commons as that of his father. I can imagine in some hour of high controversy Raymond’s pale grace kindling like a fire.
. . . . .
The War did not produce a new Raymond; it only brought the real man to light, as the removal of Byzantine ornament may reveal the grave handiwork of a Pheidias. He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply. He most sincerely loved his country, but he loved her too much to identify her with the pasteboard goddess of the music-halls and the hustings. War meant to him the shattering of every taste and interest, but he did not hesitate. It was no sudden sentimental fervour that swept him into the army, but the essential nature of one who had always been shy of rhetorical professions, but was very clear about the real thing. Austerely self-respecting, he had been used to hide his devotions under a mask of indifference, and would never reveal them except in deeds. Raymond, being of the spending type, when he gave did not count the cost, and of the many who did likewise few had so much to give.
He began his training in the Queen’s Westminsters, from which after a few months he was transferred to the Grenadier Guards. There he was perfectly happy. He was among young men again — the same kind of light-hearted and high-spirited companionship in which he had delighted at Oxford. In London I think the young Guardsman had held him in some awe, and to his friends it seemed not the least surprising result of the War that it should have made Raymond a second-lieutenant in the Grenadiers. He himself used to say that it was an odd trick of Providence to send a “middle-aged and middle-class” man into the Guards. Yet he had never found a circle where he was so much at home, and his popularity was immediate and complete. He was an excellent battalion officer, and so much in love with his new life that he sometimes spoke of going on with the army as his profession. That, I think, he would not have done, for the army in peace time would have bored him; but in the mingled bondage and freedom of active service he was in his proper element.
For a few months he was a member of the Intelligence Staff at General Headquarters. It was just before I joined that section, and when I went there the memory of him was fresh among his colleagues. But he did not like it. He missed the close comradeship of his battalion, and he felt that it was too cushioned a job for an active man in time of war. So he went back to the Guards before the Somme battle began.
It is my grief that I never saw him during these months, and I was temporarily back in England on the day when he fell. In the great movement of 15th September the Guards Division advanced from Ginchy on Lesboeufs. Their front of attack was too narrow, their objectives were too far distant, and from the start their flanks were enfiladed. It was not till the second advance on the 25th that Lesboeufs was won. But on the 15th that fatal fire from the corner of Ginchy village brought death to many in the gallant Division, and among them was Raymond Asquith. In his letters he had often lamented the loss of others, but his friends knew that he had neither fear nor care for himself.
Our roll of honour is long, but it holds no nobler figure. He will stand to those of us who are left as an incarnation of the spirit of the land he loved. “Eld shall not make a mock of that dear head.” He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.
The other is Auberon Thomas Herbert, commonly known as Bron. I have met a fair number of gipsies in my life, often in most unfitting professions. Sometimes fate was kind to them and gave them scope for vagrancy; pencilled scrawls with odd outlandish postmarks were all we heard of them; and once in a blue moon they would turn up with brown faces and far-regarding eyes to tantalise us homekeepers with visions of the unattainable. Oftener their gipsyhood was repressed, and only the old fret in spring told where their thoughts lay. But I have never known a more whole-hearted, hard-bitten nomad than Bron. Nomad, indeed, is not the word, for he did not crave travel and change; a Hampshire meadow gave him all that he wanted. But he was a gipsy to the core of his being, a creature of the wayside camp, wood-smoke and the smell of earth. Some very ancient forbear was reborn in him; as in his cousin Julian Grenfell, who wrote of himself as one “who every year has an increasing desire to live in a blanket under a bush, and will soon get bored with the bush and the blanket.”
At Oxford he was the link of his Balliol set with the world of sport, for his perfect physique made him a great athlete, and he rowed for his last two years in the University boat. But Bron had uncommonly little of the ordinary sportsman about him, being, as I have said, a gipsy. Far better than the ritual of games he loved his own private adventures in by-ways of the countryside. He had an astonishing knowledge of birds and beasts and all wild things. Most of his friends were fine scholars, but he did not essay the thorny path of academic honours, having better things to think about. We were all lovers of poetry and contemners of music. Bron loved poetry, but he had also a passion for music. I once induced him to make a speech in the Union; but after an excellent beginning he grew bored and stopped to yawn in the middle of a sentence. For politics he cared not at all. He was most pleasant to look at, and most gentle and courteous in manner, but his petulant mouth and great wondering eyes gave him a changeling air, as of one a little puzzled by life. He was like some wild thing tamed and habituated to a garden, but still remembering “the bright speed it had in its high mountain cradle.”
On the outbreak of war in 1899 he was off at once to South Africa, taking the first chance he got, which was that of Times correspondent. There he was abundantly happy. He was not specially interested in military affairs, but he loved the spacious land and the adventurous life. His letters to me at the time were one long chant of praise. “When I think of the dull things I was doing last year,” he wrote, “I am simply staggered at the luck that has brought me here.” Presently, advancing too far forward in an action (for those were the days when the trade of war correspondent was still an adventure), he got a rifle bullet in his foot. The wound was badly mismanaged, and when he came back to England his leg had to be amputated below the knee.
To a man of his tastes such a loss might well have been crippling. To Bron it simply did not matter at all. He behaved as if nothing had happened, and went on with the life he loved. It cannot have been an easy job, but he never showed the strain of it. He was just as fine a sportsman as before, and his high spirits were, if anything, more infectious. During the later stages of his convalescence I used to stay with him at his uncle’s house of Panshanger, and catch trout with the dry-fly in the Mimram. He was a wonderful fisherman, but that gentle art was only one of his accomplishments. Soon he was scampering about in the New Forest, and hunting, and playing tennis, and stalking on some of the roughest hills in Scotland. He must have had bad hours, but he held his head high to the world and his friends. He was not going to be depressed even for a moment by a small thing like the loss of a leg.
His uncle, the last Lord Cowper, died in the summer of 1905, and Bron became Lord Lucas and the owner of several great houses. He got
them off his hands as fast as he could, for the only place he really cared for was his home at Picket Post in the New Forest. A lesser man might have been oppressed by his possessions, but Bron was too unworldly to feel any oppression. They mattered nothing in his scheme of life. For he was still the gipsy, careless of a sedentary world, and with all the belongings he needed in his wallet.
Then there befell him the most fantastic fate. In 1906 a Liberal Government came into power, and Bron, as one of the few Liberal peers, was marked down for preferment. He became Mr. Haldane’s private secretary at the War Office. In 1908 he was Under-Secretary for War, and rebutting in the House of Lords Lord Roberts’ plea for national service. He was not a good speaker, but his boyish charm and gallantry pleased people, and even his opponents wished him well. In 1911 he was for a short time Under-Secretary for the Colonies. That same year he went as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, where he was a real success, for he was a true countryman, knowing at first hand what most politicians are only told. In 1914 he entered the Cabinet as President of the Board of Agriculture, and held the office till the formation of the Coalition in May 1915, when he most thankfully laid it down.
Was there ever an odder destiny for a gipsy than to be a Cabinet Minister in spite of himself at thirty-eight? No man could have wanted it less. He did his work well — the agricultural part extraordinarily well — but his heart was never in it. He had no ambition, and the long round of conferences, deputations, unmeaning speeches, idle debates, was wholly distasteful. He disliked London, shunned ordinary society, and was happy only in the company of his friends. At a ball, when by any rare chance he attended one, he had the air of a hunted stag. To see him at a party was to get some idea of how Marius looked among the ruins of Carthage. But at Picket or in Scotland, shooting, hunting, fishing, or bird-watching, he was the old Bron again, with the old zest and simplicity. When I met him in London in those days I used to think that he looked more puzzled than ever. He seemed to find the world rather tarnished and dusty, and to be longing for a clearer air.
When he left the Cabinet in 1915 he found what he had been seeking. Though he was many years over the age, he managed to join the Royal Flying Corps and trained for his pilot’s certificate. Here his wonderful eye and nerve stood him in good stead, and presently he became a most competent pilot. He was sent out to Egypt, whence stories came back to us of strange adventures — crashing in the desert many miles from help, and such like. He was back in England in the spring of 1916, engaged in instructing recruits, and more than once came very near death. But Bron had risked his neck all his days, and his friends hoped that his standing luck might carry him through.
In May of that year to my surprise I found him at a party — almost the last given by Count Benckendorff at the Russian Embassy. He asked me if I thought that the old political game would ever start again. “If it does,” he said, “it will start without me.” He was a picture of weatherbeaten health, but I noticed that his eyes were different. They had become more deeply set, as happens to airmen, and also they had lost their puzzled look. He had found something for which he had long been seeking. Up in the clouds he had come to his own and discovered the secret of life. He never spoke of it, for he was as shy and elusive in these things as a young girl, but it could be read in his eyes.
It had always been his desire to serve on the Western Front, and he went there half-way through the battle of the Somme. I am glad to think that I saw something of him during his last weeks on earth. His camp was beside the road from Amiens to Doullens: his friend Maurice Baring was at the R.F.C. Headquarters, and I was at General Headquarters at Beauquesne; so we were all three only a few miles from each other. The concluding days of October and the first week of November were full of strong gales from the southwest, which gravely hampered our flying, for our machines drifted too far over the enemy lines, and had to fight their way back slowly against a head wind. It was an eery season on the bleak Picardy downs, scourged and winnowed by blasts, with the noise of the guns from the front line coming fitfully in the pauses like the swell of breakers on a coast. One evening, I remember, I rode over to have tea with Bron, when the west was crimson with sunset and above me huge clouds were scudding before the gale. They were for the most part ragged and tawny, like wild horses, but before them went a white horse, the leader of the unearthly cavalry. It seemed to me that I was looking at a ride of Valkyries, the Shield Maids of Odin halting eastward to the battle front to choose the dead for Valhalla.
Two days later Maurice came to me and told me that Bron was missing. The chances were about equal that he was a prisoner, and for some time we dared to hope. Then, early in December, we heard that he was dead. When our troops advanced to victory in the autumn of 1918 they found his grave.
There could be no sorrow in such a death, though for his friends an undying regret. The homely English countryside, the return of spring, the sports which he loved are the emptier for his absence. Maurice Baring has written of this in his beautiful elegy.
“So when the Spring of the world shall shrive our stain
After the winter of war,
When the poor world awakes to peace once more,
After such night of ravage and of rain,
You shall not come again.
You shall not come to taste the old Spring weather,
To gallop through the soft untrampled heather,
To bathe and bake your body on the grass.
We shall be there. Alas!
But not with you. When Spring shall wake the earth,
And quicken the scarred fields to the new birth,
Our grief shall grow. For what can Spring renew
More fiercely for us than the need of you?”
But Bron had been gathered into these things, for he belonged to them. He was not quite of this world; or, rather, he was of an earlier, fairer world that our civilisation has overlaid. He lived close to the kindly earth, and then he discovered the kindlier air, and that pure exultant joy of living which he had always sought. “In the hot fit of life” — the words are Stevenson’s—”a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, the happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.” But he had never been very far from it. Death to him was less a setting forth than a returning.
IV
On foot, on a bicycle, or on horseback I explored Oxfordshire far afield, from the Chilterns in the east to the Cotswolds, from the Berkshire downs to Edge Hill field, and many a desperate rush I had to get back to college before midnight. A man is only truly intimate with the countryside which he has known as a child, for then he lived very near the ground, and knew the smell of the soil and the small humble plants and the things that live at the roots of the grasses. He explored it on all-fours, whereas he strides or gallops over later landscapes. I have a host of memories of places which have strongly captured my fancy, and sometimes my affection — in Europe, in the Virginian and New England hills, above all in South Africa and in Canada. But I have never “taken sasine” of them as I did of the Tweedside glens and in a lesser degree of the Oxfordshire valleys. For with the first I had the intimacy of childhood, and with the second of youth.
No one can understand Oxford unless he knows the Oxford countryside. Half her beauty lies in her setting. Cambridge, which has many special lovelinesses, is a city of the plains, and over what she calls her hills one is apt to walk without noticing them. But Oxford has a cincture of green uplands and a multitude of little valleys. It is only from her adjacent heights that her charms can be comprised into one picture and the true background found to her towers. Her history, too, or much of it, was moulded by her environs. Oxfordshire was a famous place when there were no human dwellings on the spit of gravel between the Cherwell and the Isis. The Romans built their villas on these uplands long before the Double F
ord was discovered. The city, as it developed, drew much from its neighbourhood and gave back much in return, and the records of the two are closely interwoven.
A view from one of Oxford’s hills shows at a glance how her importance came about. The site at the Double Ford was an inspiration, for it was the meeting-place of the great routes of southern England. If we take our stand, say, on the Elsfield ridge, we can reconstruct the past. Here from Saxon times was a clearing, but for the Middle Ages we must see the rest of the landscape as a great mat of forest with the only bare patches the tops of the Berkshire downs and the far Cotswold, and with a much bigger Isis and Cherwell making bands of light among the narrow meadows.
The key is the Isis itself, for from very early days the valley of the Thames was a main route for traffic between London and the west. The slow- flowing river, with weirs from the start, and with locks after Henry VIII, was the cheapest and easiest way for merchandise to the towns and abbeys of the valley, and, with a short portage, to the Severn and Wales. Up it London wares travelled in slow barges, and down it came the wool and stone of Cotswold, the produce of the farms, and the craftsmen’s work from the religious houses. At Oxford this trunk route was cut by a road from south to north, from Southampton and the ports to the Midlands. Oxford, walled and castled, with the mighty house of Oseney at her western gates, would have been a place of importance though she had never known a collegiate foundation, for apart from her merchants was she not the chosen resort of royalty, the centre of a famous monastic life, and a place of strategic value in any inland war?