A Student in Arms by Donald Hankey

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[Illustration: DONALD HANKEY]

A

STUDENT IN ARMS

SECOND SERIES

BY

DONALD HANKEY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J. ST. LOE STRACHEY

EDITOR OF _THE SPECTATOR_

NEW YORK

B.P. DUTTON & CO.

681 FIFTH AVENUE

Published 1917 BY E.P. DUTTON & CO.

CONTENTS

PAGE

SOMETHING ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 1

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 33

I.--THE POTENTATE 37

II.--THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY SERVICE 51

III.--THE GOOD SIDE OF "MILITARISM" 65

IV.--A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 79

V.--ROMANCE 93

VI.--IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS (I) 109

VII.--THE FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR 115

VIII.--IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS (II) 127

IX.--THE WISDOM OF "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 139

X.--IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS (III) 145

XI.--LETTER TO AN ARMY CHAPLAIN 153

XII.--"DON'T WORRY" 165

XIII.--IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS (IV) 175

XIV.--A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 181

XV.--MY HOME AND SCHOOL:

I MY HOME 199

II SCHOOL 216

SOME NOTES ON THE FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY "HILDA" 237

SOMETHING ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS"

BY H.M.A.H.

"His life was a Romance of the most noble and beautiful kind." So says
one who has known him from childhood, and into how many dull, hard
and narrow lives has he not been the first to bring the element of
Romance?

He carried it about with him; it breathes through his writings,
and this inevitable expression of it gives the saying of one of his
friends, that "it is as an artist that we shall miss him most," the
more significance.

And does not the artist as well as the poet live forever in his works?
Is not the breath of inspiration that such alone can breathe into the
dull clods of their generation bound to be immortal?

Meanwhile, his "Romance" is to be written and his biographer will be
one whose good fortune it has been to see much of the "Student" in
Bermondsey, the place that was the forcing-house of his development.
In the following pages it is proposed only to give an outline of his
life, and particularly the earlier and therefore to the public unknown
parts.

Donald Hankey was born at Brighton in 1884; he was the seventh child
of his parents, and was welcomed with excitement and delight by a
ready-made family of three brothers and two sisters living on his
arrival amongst them. He was the youngest of them by seven years, and
all had their plans for his education and future, and waited jealously
for the time when he should be old enough to be removed from the
loving shelter of his mother's arms and be "brought up."

His education did, as a matter of fact, begin at a very early age; for
one day, when he was perhaps about three years old, dressed in a white
woolly cap and coat, and out for his morning walk, a neighbouring baby
stepped across from his nurse's side and with one well-directed blow
felled Donald to the ground! Donald was too much astonished and hurt
at the sheer injustice of the assault to dream of retaliation, but
when they reached home and his indignant nurse told the story, he was
taken aside by his brothers and made to understand that by his failure
to resist the assault, and give the other fellow back as good as he
gave, "the honour of the family" was impugned! He was then and there
put through a systematic course of "the noble art of self-defence."
"And I think," said one of his brothers only the other day, "that he
was prepared to act upon his instructions should occasion arise."
It will be seen from this incident that his bringing-up was of a
decidedly strenuous character and likely to make Donald's outlook on
life a serious one!

He was naturally a peace-loving and philosophical little boy, very
lovable and attractive with his large clear eyes with their curious
distribution of colour--the one entirely blue and the other three
parts a decided brown--the big head set proudly on the slender little
body, and the radiant illuminating smile, that no one who knew him
well at any time of his life can ever forget. It spoke of a light
within, "that mysterious light which is of course not physical," as
was said by one who met him only once, but was quick to note this
characteristic.

Donald's more strenuous times were in the boys' holidays--those
tumultuous of seasons so well known to the members of all big
families! His eldest brother, Hugh, was bent on making an all-round
athlete of him; another brother saw in him an embryo county cricketer,
while a third was most particular about his music, giving him lessons
on the violoncello with clockwork regularity. The games were terribly
thrilling and dangerous, especially when the schoolroom was turned
into a miniature battlefield, with opposing armies of tiny lead
soldiers. But Donald never turned a hair if Hugh were present, even at
the most terrific explosions of gun-powder. His confidence in Hugh was
complete. Nor did he mind personal injuries. When on one occasion he
was hurled against the sharp edge of a chair, cutting his head open
badly, and his mother came to the rescue with indignation, sympathy
and bandages, whilst accepting the latter he deprecated the two
former, explaining apologetically, "It's only because my head's so
big."

He admitted in after years to having felt most terribly swamped by the
personalities of two of his brothers. The third he had more in common
with, for he was more peace-loving, and he seemed to have more time
to listen to the small boy's confidences and stories, which Donald
started to write at the age of six.

Hugh, however, was his hero--a kind of demi-god. And truly there
was something Greek about the boy--in his singular beauty of person,
coupled with his brilliant mental equipment, and above all in the
nothing less than Spartan methods with which, in spite of a highly
sensitive temperament, he set himself to overcome his handicap of
a naturally delicate physique and a bad head for heights. He turned
himself out quite an athlete, and actually cured his bad head by a
course of walking on giddy heights, preferably roofs--the parapet of
the tall four-storied house the children lived in being a favourite
training ground.

Donald was the apple of his eye, and he was quick to note a certain
lack of vitality about the little boy--especially when he was growing
fast--and a certain natural timidity. His letters from school are full
of messages to and instructions concerning Donald's physical training,
and from Sandhurst he would long to "run over and see after his
boxing." He called him Don Diego, a name that suited the rather
stately little fellow, and he used to fear sometimes that Donald
was "getting too polite" and say he must "knock it out of him in
the holidays." Needless to say, his handling of him was always very
gentle.

The other over-vital brother, if a prime amuser, was also a prime
tease, and being nearer Donald in age was also much less gentle.

Before very long these great personages took themselves off "zum neuen
taten." But their Odysseys came home in the shape of letters, which,
with their descriptions of strange countries and peoples and records
of adventures--often the realization of boyish dreams--and also of
difficulties overcome, were well calculated to appeal to Donald's
childish imagination, and to increase his admiration for the
writers--and also his feeling of impotence, and of the impossibility
of being able to follow in the tracks of such giants among men!

His mother, however, was his never-failing confidante and friend.
His love and admiration for her were unbounded, as for her courage,
unselfishness and constant thought for others, more especially for
the poor and insignificant among her neighbours. Though the humblest
minded of women, she could, when occasion demanded, administer a
rebuke with a decision and a fire that must have won the heartfelt
admiration of her diffident little son.

He was not easily roused himself, but there is one instance of his
being so that is eminently characteristic. He had come back from
school evidently very perturbed, and at first his sister could get
nothing out of him. But at last he flared up. His face reddened, his
eyes burned like coals and, in a voice trembling with rage, he said,
"---- (naming a school-fellow) talks about things that I won't even
_think_!"

At the age of about 14 he, too, went to Rugby, and there is an
interesting prophecy about him by his brother Hugh belonging to this
time. Hugh had by now earned a certain right to pronounce judgment,
having already started to fulfil his early promise by making some mark
as a soldier and a linguist. He had been invited to join the Egyptian
Army at a critical time in the campaign of 1897-98, thanks to his
proficiency in Arabic. His work was cut short by serious illness, the
long period of convalescence after which he had utilized in working
for and passing the Army Interpreter's examination in Turkish as
well as the higher one in Arabic and his promotion exam. All of which
achievements had been of use in helping him to wring out of the War
Office a promise of certain distinguished service in China. In a
letter home he writes:--

2ND BATT. THE ROYAL WARWICKSHIRE, REGT.,
THE CAMP,
COLCHESTER.
28th Sept., 1899.

MY DEAR MAMMA,--

I packed Donald off to school to-day in good time and
cold-less.... He was wonderfully calm and collected. He was
more at his ease in our mess than I should have been in a
strange mess, and made himself agreeable to his neighbours
without being forward. Also he looked very clean and smart,
and was altogether quite a success.

That child has a future before him if his energy is up to
form, which I hope. His philosophy is most amazing. He looks
remarkably healthy, and is growing nicely....

Shortly after this letter was written the South African War broke out,
and before six months were over the writer was killed in action, at
the age of 27, whilst serving with the Mounted Infantry at Paardeberg.

It was the first sorrow of Donald's life, but six months later he was
to suffer a yet more crushing blow in the loss of his dearly loved
mother. The loss of his best confidante and his ideal seemed at first
to stun the boy completely, and to cast him in upon himself entirely.
Later on he remembered that he had felt at that time that he had
nothing to say to any one. He had wondered what the others could have
thought of him, and had thought how dreadfully unresponsive they must
be finding him. His sister should have been of some use. But she
can only think of herself then as of some strange figure, veiled
and petrified with grief--grief _not_ for her mother, but for the
young hero whose magnetism had thrilled through every moment of her
life--yet pointing onwards, with mutely insistent finger, to the
path that her hero had trodden. And Donald, dazed also himself by
grief--though from another cause--of his own accord, placed his first
uncertain steps on the road that leads to military glory. No "voice"
warned him as yet, and he had no other decisive leading.

If his sister failed him then, his father did not. Of him Donald wrote
recently to an aunt, "Papa's letters to me are a heritage whose value
can never diminish. His was indeed the pen of a ready writer, and
in his case, as in the case of many rather reserved people, the pen
did more justice to the man than the tongue. I never knew him until
Mamma's death, when the weekly letter from him took the place of hers,
and never stopped till I came home."

At Rugby, Donald was accounted a dreamer. Without the outlet he
had hitherto had for his confidences and his thoughts no doubt the
tendency to dream grew upon him. "Behold this dreamer cometh," was
actually said of him by one of his masters.

Nevertheless there were happy times when youth asserted itself and
boyish friendships were made. In work he did well, for he entered the
sixth form at the early age of 161/2, and was thereby enabled, though he
left young, to have his name painted up "in hall" below those of his
three brothers, and also on his "study" door which belonged to each of
the four in turn.

He entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, straight from
Rugby, and before he was seventeen. We have his word for it that
he was spiritually very unhappy there, finding evils with which he
was impotent to grapple, going up as he did so young from school
and before he had had time to acquire a "games" reputation--that
all-important qualification for a boy if he wishes to influence
his fellows. Nevertheless youthful spirits were bound to triumph
sometimes. He was a perfectly sound and healthy, well-grown boy and a
friend who was with him at "the Shop" says he can remember no apparent
trace of unhappiness, and is full of tales of his jokes and his fun,
his quaint caricatures and doggerel rhymes, his love of flowers and
nature, his hospitalities, and his joy in getting his friends to meet
and know and like each other. Though he made no mark at Woolwich he
did carry off the prize for the best essay on the South African War.
With it he made his first appearance in print, for it was printed in
the R.M.A. Magazine. While he was at Woolwich the family circle was
enlarged by the arrival of a cousin from Australia, and she and Donald
became the greatest of friends. She reminded him in some way of his
mother, and this made all the difference.

The Island of Mauritius, to which he was sent at the age of twenty,
not so very long after having received his commission in the Royal
Garrison Artillery, stood for him later on, he has told us, as
"Revelation"--"for there it was that I was first a sceptic, and was
first shown that I could not remain one." Also towards the end of his
stay there, when he was doubting as to what course he should take,
a sentence came to him insistently, "Would you know Christ? Lo, He
is working in His vineyard." It was these things that decided him
eventually to resign his commission, but of them his letters home
make little or no mention. They are full, on the other hand, of
descriptions of the beauties of the Island which, curious, odd,
freakish and unexpected, held him as did those of no other place. The
curious inconsistencies of the Creole nature also interested him, and
he spent much of his spare time sketching and studying the people. Two
friendships he made there were diverse and lasting, but he complains
very much of feeling the lack of a woman friend--no one to tease and
pick flowers for!

While he was still there, there appeared at home a baby
nephew--another "Hugh"--"trailing clouds of glory," but to return all
too soon to his "Eternal Home." Some years previously, when his eldest
sister had told him of her engagement, he congratulated her warmly,
and said he "had always longed for a nephew"! He never saw the child,
but wrote after his death that he had heard so much about him that
he seemed to know him, and "I think I must have played with him in
my dreams." Possibly the baby nephew, in his short ten months of
life, did more for his uncle than either knew, for no frozen hearts
could do otherwise than melt in the presence of the insistent needs
of that gallant little spirit and fragile little body, and a more
whole-hearted sister was awaiting him on his return home, which took
place at the end of two years, after he had fallen a victim to the
prevalent complaint in the R.G.A--abscess on the liver. It was caused
by the shocking conditions under which the R.G.A. had to live in
Mauritius during that hot summer when the Russian Fleet sojourned
in Madagascan waters, and in Donald's case it necessitated a severe
operation.

His joy in his homecoming was quickly clouded over, for his father
died only a month or two after his return; not, however, before he
had given a delighted acquiescence to Donald's proposal to resign
his commission and go to Oxford in order to study theology--his own
favourite pursuit--with the object of eventually taking Holy Orders.

In the spring of 1907 Donald took a trip to Italy with his sister and
a Rhodes Scholar cousin from Australia. It was the young men's first
visit, and each brought back a special trophy: Donald's, a large
photograph of a fine virile "Portrait of a man" by Giorgione in black
and white, and his cousin, a sweet Madonna head by Luini.

Donald gave his sister her trophy on their return home, in remembrance
of the lectures she had given the two of them on the pre-Raphaelite
painters in Florence. It took the form of a water-colour caricature of
herself, sitting enthroned in a Loggia as a sort of Sybil Saint with
a halo and a book (Baedeker). Behind her, and outlined against a pale
sky as seen through an archway of the Loggia in the typical Florentine
fashion, are the blue mountains near Florence, some tall cypresses,
a campanile and a castle perched on the top of a hill--all features
of the landscapes through which they had passed together. In the
foreground are himself and his cousin as monks adoring, also with
haloes, and expressions of mock ecstasy!

On his return Donald went for a few months to Rugby House, the Rugby
School Mission, in order to cram for Oxford. He thereby made a friend,
and learned to love Browning.

After living so long at Brighton, and then in barracks, the beauty of
Oxford was in itself alone a revelation to him. The work there, too,
was entirely congenial. As a gunner subaltern he had been a square peg
in a round hole. As regards the work there had been far too much to
be accepted on authority for one of his fundamental type of mind; the
relations existing between an officer and his men--in peace time,
at any rate--seemed to him hardly human, and the making of quick
decisions, which an officer is continually called upon to do, was
then as always very difficult to him. His tastes, too, unusual in a
subaltern, had made him rather lonely. He found much more in common
with the undergraduate than with the subaltern. Going up as an
"oldster" (22) was to him an advantage rather than otherwise, for his
six years in the Army had given him a certain prestige which was a
help to his natural diffidence, and helped to open more doors to him,
so that he was not limited to any set.

He gained some reputation as a host, for he had the born host's gift
of getting the right people together and making them feel at their
ease. There was also, as a rule, some little individual touch about
his entertainments that made them stand out. His manner, though
naturally boyish and shy, could be both gay and debonair, quite
irresistible in fact, when he was surrounded by congenial spirits! He
played hockey, and was made a member of several clubs, sketched and
made beautiful photographs. His time he divided strictly between the
study of man and the study of theology, and though he did much hard,
thorough and careful work in connexion with the latter, he always
maintained that for a man who was going to be a parson the former was
the more important study of the two.

He used, however, to complain much at this time of feeling himself
incapable of any very strong emotion, even that of sorrow.

No doubt there is more stimulation to the brain than to the heart in
the highly critical atmosphere of all phases of the intellectual life
at Oxford; also Donald had hardly yet got over the shocks of his youth
and the loneliness of his life abroad. He was, too, essentially and
curiously the son of his father--even to his minor tastes, such as his
connoisseur's palate for a good wine and his judgment in "smokes"--and
this feeling of a certain detachment from the larger emotions of life
was always his father's pose--the philosopher's. In his father's case
it was perhaps engendered, if not necessitated, by his poor health and
wretched nerves.

But can we not trace his dissatisfaction at this time in what he felt
to be his cold philosophical attitude towards life to the same cause
as much of the misery he suffered as a boy! In the paper he calls
"School," which follows with that entitled "Home," he tells us how he
would have liked to have chastised a school-fellow "had he dared,"
and his failure to dare was evidently what reduced him to the state of
impotent rage described on page 9 of this sketch. Again at Woolwich,
what made him unhappy was not so much the evils which he saw but
his impotence to deal with them. So now again at Oxford he feels
"impotent," impotent this time to feel and sympathize as he would
have wished with suffering humanity. But within him was the light,
"the light which is, of course, not physical," which betrayed itself
through his wonderful smile--the same now as in babyhood; and from
his mother, and perhaps also from the young country that gave her
birth, he had inherited, as well as her great heart and broad human
sympathies, the vigour that was to carry him through the experiences
by means of which, in the fullness of time, that light, no longer
dormant, was to break into a flame of infinite possibilities.

Donald's one complaint against Oxford was that the ideas that are born
and generated there so often evaporate in talk and smoke. He left with
the determination to "do," but before going on to a Clergy School he
decided to accept a friend's invitation to visit him in savage Africa
so that he might think things over, and put to the test, far away from
the artificialities of Modern Life, the ideas he had assimilated in
the highly sophisticated atmosphere of Oxford. As he quaintly put it:
"Since Paul went into Arabia for three years, I don't see why I should
not go to British East Africa for six months!" He did not, however,
stay the whole time there, but re-visited his beloved Mauritius, and
also stayed in Madagascar.

The beginning of 1911 found him at the Clergy School. But what he
wanted 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!

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