Far from this humble pen be it to libel the gentlemen who have professed themselves ready to lay down their lives for the rights of their country. They are good soldiers, brave men, and what is tersely called upon the Continent hardy companions; but sometimes I have found inside a redcoat a parson, an artist, a farmer or a sailor. Whatever dreams may have flitted through the boy’s head, the man Theo Trist never spoke of his unfortunate mistake. It would be better termed a mishap, because he made no choice of the Church, but was urged into it by a zealous and shortsighted mother. He did not, however, reach ordination. Before that final step was taken his mother died, and all Europe stood hushed in the presence of a mighty war impending. The war-clouds rolled up and gathered force. Men spoke in lowered voices of the future; women trembled and concealed the newspapers from their children. A dread thirst for blood seemed to parch the throats of soldiers, and statesmen hesitated upon the brink of a terrible responsibility. Commerce was hindered, and sailors went to sea with uneasy hearts. Then arose in the soul of Theo Trist—the Oxford undergraduate—a strange, burning unrest. As a dog raises his head with quick glance and parted fangs at the approach of game, so leapt this man’s heart in his breast. But no one knew of this: his benevolent brow and gentle eyes misled them all.
When at last the quick defiance was hurled from one nation to another, Theodore Trist disappeared. The sound of battle drew him away from peaceful England to that fair country by the Rhine where blood has been sucked into the fertile earth to grow again into deadly hatred. The din and roar and fury of battle was this mild-eyed man’s element. The sulphureous smoke of cannon was the breath of life to him. His walk was upon the sodden, slippery field of blood. And yet through it all there went the strange incongruity of his being. In the wild joy of fighting (which carries men out from themselves and transforms them into new strange beings), Trist never lost his gentle demeanour. The plucky Frenchmen, with whom he spent that terrible winter, laughed at him, but one and all ended their merriment with upraised finger and grave, assuring eyes.
“Mais,” they said compensatingly, “d’un courage …” and the sentence finished up with a shrug and outspread hands, indicating that the courage of “ce drôle Trist” was practically without bounds.
And yet he did not actually fight with sword and rifle. The pen was his arm and weapon. In two languages he wrote through all that campaign the brave record of a losing fight. While endeavouring to give a somewhat unchivalrous enemy his due, he made no denial of partisanship. The ease and fluency with which he expressed himself in French excluded all hope of that, and Trist frankly arrayed himself on the side of the losing nation. Finally, he occupied with perfect serenity the anomalous position of a noncombatant who ran a soldier’s risk—a neutral totally unprotected, and unrecognised as such—an English war-correspondent who, of his own free will, refused to lay himself under the obligations entailed by protection.
Thus this half-fledged parson feathered his wings. Destined to preach peace, he suddenly turned and taught war. In two countries simultaneously he made a brilliant name, proving that if he could not fight, because the possession of a fighting soul had become known to him too late in life, he could at least watch others battling as no man of his age could watch.
When at length Paris had fallen, an emaciated, pale-faced Englishman turned his back upon the demoralized capital and sought his native land. His groove in life had been found. Theodore Trist was a born chronicler of battlefields, a subtle strategist, a lost general—in three words, an ideal war-correspondent. His great knowledge of his subject, his instinctive divination of men’s motives, and his exceptional good-breeding, saved him from the many pitfalls that usually lie concealed in the path of all who follow an army-corps without occupying a post therein. He was never in the way, never indiscreet, never inquisitive, and, above all, never self-opinionated. He watched war as a lover of war, not as a self-constituted representative of a hypercritical nation. The spirit of competition did not with him override the sense of patriotism, simply because such a spirit in no wise affected him. He went his own way, and struck out a line of his own, never seeking to be before his compeers with news or guesses. Consequently his position was unique—midway between a war-correspondent and a warlike historian, for his writings on the battlefield were nothing less than history.
So Trist returned to England and found himself famous. Upon every bookstall in the kingdom he found a small red volume of his letters collected from the columns of the journal he had represented during the great unfinished war.
In the course of a few days he called upon his various friends—Mrs. Wylie among the first, Alice and Brenda Gilholme, at the residence of their aunt, Mrs. Gilholme, shortly afterwards. It was about this time that Brenda conceived the idea that Theo Trist loved her sister. He was only one among many, but he was different from the rest, and the young girl, for the first time, blamed her sister seriously. She kept these things in her heart, however, and
