In the afternoon of a glorious summer's day, exactly three weeks after leaving London, I stood beside the newly filled grave of my mother in the moss-grown old churchyard of Davenham Minster.

My dear mother was not one of those whose end was hastened by the shock of England's disaster. Doctor Wardle gave us little hope of her recovery from the first. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia; but I gathered that my mother had come to the end of her store of vitality, and, it may be, of desire for life. I have sometimes thought that her complete freedom from those domestic cares of housekeeping, which had seemed to be the very source and fountainhead of continuous worry for her, may actually have robbed my mother of much of her hold upon life. In these last days I had been almost continuously beside her, and I know that she relinquished her life without one sigh that spelt regret.

Standing there at the edge of her grave in the hoary churchyard of the Minster, I was conscious of the loss of the last tie that bound me to the shelter of youth: the cared-for, irresponsible division of a man's life. The England of my youth was no more. Now, in the death of my mother, it seemed as if I had stepped out of one generation into another. I had entered a new generation, and was alone in it.

I was to sleep at my sister's house that night, but I had no wish to go there now. Doctor Wardle's forced gravity, his cheerful condolences, rather worried me. So it happened that I set out to walk from the churchyard, and presently found myself upon the winding upland road that led out of the rich Davenham valley, over the Ridgeway, and into the hilly Tarn Regis country, where I was born.

I drank a mug of cider in the quaint little beerhouse kept by Gammer Joy in Tarn Regis, and read again the doggerel her grandfather had painted on its sign-board, in which the traveller was advised of the various uses of liquor, taken in moderation, and the evil effects of its abuse. Taken wisely, I remember, it was suggested that liquor proved the best of lubricants for the wheels of life. Mrs. Joy looked just as old and just as active and rosy as she had always looked for so long as I could remember; and she hospitably insisted upon my eating a large slab of her dough cake with my cider—a very excellent comestible it was.

The old dame's mood was cheerfully pessimistic—that is to say, she was garrulous, and spoke cheerily of generally downward tendencies. Thus, the new rector, by her way of it, was of a decadent modern type, full of newfangled "Papish" notions as to church vestments and early services, and neglectful of traditional responsibilities connected with soup and coal and medical comforts. Cider was no longer what it used to be, I gathered, since the big brewers took it in hand, and spoiled the trade of those who had hand-presses. As for farming, Gammer Joy held that it was not near so good a trade for master or man with land at fifteen shillings the acre, as much of it was thereabouts, as it had been with rents up to two or three pounds, and food twice as dear as now.

"But there, Master Dick," said the old lady; "I suppose we be all Germans now—so they do tell me, however; an' if we be no better nor furriners here in Darset, why I doan't know as't matters gertly wha' cwomes to us at all. But I will say things wor different in your feyther's time, Master Dick—that they was. Ah doan't believe he'd ha' put up wi' this German business for a minute, that ah doan't."

I gathered that the new rector was an earnest young man and a hard worker; but, evidently, those of Gammer Joy's generation preferred my father's aloofness in conjunction with his regular material dispensations, and his habit of leaving folk severely to themselves, so far as their thoughts and feelings were concerned.

The cottagers with whom I talked that summer's evening cherished a monumental ignorance regarding the real significance of the events which had shaken England to its very roots since I had last seen Tarn Regis. Gammer Joy's view seemed to be fairly typical. We had become German; England belonged to Germany; the Radicals had sold us to the Kaiser—and so forth. But no German soldiers had been seen in Dorset. The whole thing was shadowy, academic, a political business; suitable enough for the discussion of Londoners, no doubt, but, after all, of small bearing upon questions of real and intimate interest, such as the harvest, the weather, and the rate of wages.

"Sims queer, too, that us should be born again like, and become Germans," said one man to me; "but ah doan't know as it meakes much odds to the loike o' we; though ah hev heerd as how Farmer Jupp be thinkin' o' gettin' shut o' his shartharn bull that won the prize to Davenham, an' doin' wi' fower men an' a b'y, in place o' sevin. Well, o' course, us has to keep movin' wi' the times, as sayin' is; an' 'tis trew them uplan' pastures o' Farmer Jupp's they do be mos' onusual poor an' leery, as you med say."

Twilight already held the land in its grave embrace when I made my way along Abbott's Lane (my father had devoted months to the task of tracing the origin of that name) and began the ascent of Barebarrow, by crossing which diagonally one reaches the Davenham turnpike from Tarn Regis, a shorter route by nearly a mile than that of the road past the mill and over the bridge. And so, presently, my feet were treading turf which had probably been turf before the Christian era. Smooth and vast against the sky-line, Barebarrow lay above me, like a mammoth at rest.

On its far side was our Tarn Regis giant, a famous figure cut in the turf, and clearly visible from the tower of Davenham Minster. Long ago, in my earliest childhood, village worthies had given me the story of this figure—how once upon a time a giant came and slew all the Tarn Regis flocks for his breakfast. Then he lay down to sleep behind Barebarrow, and while he slept the enraged shepherds and work-folk bound him with a thousand cart-ropes, and slew him with a thousand scythes and forks and other homely implements. And then, that posterity might know his fearsome bulk, they cut out the turf all round his form, and eke the outline of the club beside him, and left the figure there to commemorate their valour and the loss of their flocks. Some three hundred feet long it was, I think, with a club the length of a tall pine-tree. In any case, the Tarn Regis lad who would excel in feats of strength had but to spend the night of Midsummer's Eve in the crook of the giant's arm (as some one or two did every year), and other youths of the countryside could never stand a chance with him.

I paused on the ledge below the barrow beside a ruined shepherd's hut, and recalled the fact that here my father had unearthed sundry fragments of stone and pieces of implements which the Dorchester Museum curator had welcomed as very early British relics. They went back, I remembered, to long before the Roman period; to days possibly more remote than those of ancient Barebarrow himself. If you refer to a good map you will find this spot surrounded by such indications of immemorial antiquity as "Tumuli," "British Village," and the like. The Roman encampment on the other side of Davenham Minster was modernity itself, I thought, compared with this ancient haunt of the neolithic forerunners of the early Briton; this resting-place of men whose doings were a half-forgotten story many centuries before the birth of Julius CÆsar.

I sat down on the grassy ledge and looked out across the lichen-covered roofs and squat, rugged church tower of Tarn Regis; and pictures rose in my mind, pictures to some extent inspired, perhaps, by scraps I had read of learned essays written by my father. He had loved this ancient ground; he had been used to finger the earth hereabouts as a man might finger his mistress's hair. I do not know what period my twilit fancy happened upon, but it was assuredly a later one than that of Barebarrow, for I saw shaggy warriors with huge pointless swords, their hilts decorated with the teeth of wild beasts—a Bronze Age vision, no doubt. I saw rude chariots of war, with murderous scythe-blades on their wheels—and, in a flash then, the figure of Boadicea: that valiant mother of our race, erect and fearless in her chariot—

"Thy posterity shall sway!" If you repeat the lines to yourself you may see the outline of my vision. There at the foot of Barebarrow I saw that Queen of ancient Britons at the head of her wild, shaggy legions. "The Roman Army can never withstand the shouts and clamour of so many thousands, far less their shock and fury," said the Queen. I saw her lead her valiant horde upon Colchester, and for me the ancient rudeness of it all was shot through and through with glimpses of the scientific sacking of Colchester, as I had read of it but a few weeks ago. I saw the advance of the Roman Governor; the awful slaughter of the British; the end of the brave Queen who could not brook defeat: the most heart-stirring episode in English history.

"Thy posterity shall sway!" I recalled the solemn splendour of another great Queen's passing—that which I had seen with my own eyes while still a lad at Rugby: the stately gathering of the great ships at Spithead; the end of Victoria the Good. No more than a step it seemed from my vision of the unconquerable Boadicea. But to that other onslaught upon Colchester—to General von FÜchter's slaughter of women and children and unarmed men in streets of houses whose ashes must be warm yet—O Lord, how far! I thought. Could it really be that a thousand years of inviolability had been broken, ended, in those few wild days; ended for ever?

Lights twinkled now among the nestling houses of the little place where I was born. They made me think of torches, the clash of arms, the spacious mediÆval days when Davenham Minster supported a great monastery, whose lordly abbot owned the land Tarn Regis stood upon.

And then the little lights grew misty and dim in my eyes as glimpses came of my own early days; of play on that very ridge-side where I sat now, where I had then romantically sworn friendship with George Stairs on the eve of my departure for Elstree School, and his leaving with his father for Canada. How had I kept my vow? Where was George Stairs now? There was not a foot of that countryside we had not roamed together. My eyes pricked as I looked and listened. Exactly so, I thought, the sheep-bells had sounded below Barebarrow when I had lain listening to them in that low-pitched back bedroom of the Rectory which I had been proud to hear called "Dick's Room," after my first experience of sleeping alone.

Then for a space my mind was blank as the dark valley beyond the village—until thoughts and pictures of recent happenings began to oust the gentler memories, and I lived over again the mad, wild, tragic week which culminated in the massacre of the North London trenches. But in the light of my previous musings I saw these happenings differently, more personally, than in the actual experience of them. It seemed now that not my country only, but myself, had been struck down and humbled to the dust by the soldiers of the Kaiser. I saw the broad fair faces of the German cavalry as they had sat their horse in Whitehall on the evening of Black Saturday. I heard again the clank of their arms, the barking of guttural orders. Could it be that they had mastered England? that for nine long years we were to be encircled by their garrisons? Nine years of helotry!

A sudden coolness in the air reminded me of the lateness of the hour, and I rose and began to cross Barebarrow.

But this ancient land was British in every blade of its grass, I thought—root and crop, hill and dale, above and beneath, no single sod of it but was British. Surely nothing could alter that. Nine years of helotry! I heard again the confused din of the Westminster Riot; the frantic crowd's insistent demand for surrender, for unconditional surrender. And now the nation's word was pledged. Our heads were bowed for nine years long.

Suddenly, then, as I descended upon the turnpike, a quite new thought came to me. The invasion had overridden all law, all custom, all understandings. The invasion was an act of sheer lawless brutality. No surrender could bind a people to submission in the face of such an outrage as that. The Germans must be driven out; the British people must rise and cast them out, and overthrow for ever their insolent dominion. But too many of the English people were—like myself! Well, they must learn; we must all learn; every able-bodied man must learn; for a blow had to be struck that should free England for ever. The country must be awakened to realization of that need. We owed so much to the brave ones who gave us England; so much could be demanded of us by those that came after. The thing had got to be.

I walked fast, I remember, and singing through my head as I entered Davenham Minster, long after my sister's supper hour, were the lines to which I had never till then paid any sort of heed: