As luck would have it, I found a note asking me to go over next evening to the Terrace Garden to see an old-fashioned parish party, and I went.  I was half-an-hour after the time, but already a hundred guests had had their cup of tea on the terrace, and were making way for a second hundred, the host and hostess bidding them, as they went off to saunter among the roses or sit under the limes, that in half-an-hour’s time strawberries and cream would be waiting for them. (p. 194)

It did one’s heart good to see the ease with which the town’s folk and the country folk, and men and women of all classes mingled and were glad.  There was no division of guests into rich and poor.  All felt they were equal this evening, and pleasant it was to see with what simple courtliness each did the honours one to the other as they ‘supped’ their teas, and laid their pocket-handkerchiefs on their laps, and cracked on of the year’s doings since last they met. (pp. 194-5)….

The conversation was fast and furious, and the tea-drinking kept pace.  Then the voices of a choir broke out into an Elizabethan madrigal beneath the shadow of the laurels, and the never-resting bees might well have ceased their hum to listen.  The voices died away, and fiddle and harp and flute struck up an old English air, and the people drew round in a ring to listen. (p. 196)

More arrivals, more tea, more folk streaming down through the roses and walking by the yew tree hedge to gaze upon lupin, larkspur, delphinium and Madonna lilies, whilst younger folk lay about on rugs and plaids on the fresh green lawn, waiting their call to strawberries and cream. (p. 196)

More songs, more music, and the long day still gleamed on Skiddaw from the west, for the afterglow was as bright as a new dawn.  But the deep purples had crept into all the hollows, and Borrodale was filled with blue cobalt.  The last light failed from the valley meadows, and the corncrakes began their conjuring tricks, and ran from their own voices with rare ventriloquist cunning. (pp. 196-7)

‘I think we may light up,’ said a young fellow who seemed a kind of master of assemblies, and whilst two glees were being sung, and the band was busy, men moved about unseen, and touched the fire flowers in the beds, the fire flowers on the trees, into life.  The whole garden became jewelled from end to end, and such a feast of lanterns was here as only in Arabian Nights were read of or seen alone in dreams. (p. 197)

Just then a gong sounded, and two bands of children converged at the head of the terrace steps, holding a long continuous garland of roses in their one hand, and in the other alternately fairy bells and fairy lights.  Their leader carried a standard from which hung many starry lamps, and as they came down the steps red Bengal fire burned up from below and enveloped them in its rosy glow. (p. 197)

Down they came, wound in and out of the flower beds a sparkling chain of happy child life, and gaining the level lawn beneath the limes, they broke into dance, and as they danced sang the National Anthem.  Then winding in and out of the rhododendron bushes, a maze of light and garlanding, they disappeared behind the Irish yews, but not before the whole lawn had been lit by white light which turned the lime trees into silver, and made the flowers and happy faces shine out as at the noonday. (pp. 197-8)

‘What, it’s nivver time to be gaen?’ said a young fellow at my side.  ‘We hev’ t’best of t’evening yit.  What, what, we must aw hev oor dance.’ (p. 198)

‘Nay, nay,’ shouted the host.  ‘That is not signal for farewell.  Now then, get your partners and we’ll start the dance with an old-fashioned reel.’  And without more ado the band struck up, and dancing such as one can only see in Cumberland began in real earnest. (p. 198)

I have never seen a happier sight than that moving merry throng beneath the trees as they footed it, and bowed and scampered and twisted and twirled to the good old tune.  Dance succeeded to dance.  The elders looked on, but now and again a sense of past days would seize this or the other, and saying, ‘What, what, I feel mysel in fettle yit,’ a grey-haired dame or white-haired man would catch hold and be off to the squeal of flute and thrum of harp and fiddle. (p. 198)

Behind the dancers as they moved gleamed quiet vale and tranquil lake, and beyond towering up to a single star the blue-black background of Grisedale Pike and the Grassmoor range.  And still the fiddle went, and still the dancers danced, and still in and out of the jewelled flower borders and the flame-lit trees the people walked and talked, till at last ‘God Save the King’ was played in solemn earnest, and a good-night to all was wished by host and hostess. (pp. 198-9)

But that was not the end, for a band of singers had remained unobserved in the shadow of the limes, and ere the happy guests had left the garden ground there rose upon the dewy fragrant air the old familiar evening hymn, and we all went home with a sense of something ‘far more deeply interfused’ with an evening’s rest than mere tea and talk and strawberries and fairy lights could give us; went home with the love of God and love of man a great reality. (p. 199)

(Chapters at the English Lakes, pp. 191-199)

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Orderly Sergeant W. Tod,
   When next I lie in a tightish place,
With the enemy’s bullets raining down—
    Shot thro’ the arm—and blood on my face
From the man whose brains to the winds are blown,
    With nothing to help but the love of God,
I shall pray he will send to mend my case,
    A second Orderly-Sergeant Tod.

For Orderly-Sergeant W. Tod,
    It was you who saw when the Captain fell;
It was you who, in the face of the fusillade,
    Gathered the boulders and placed them well,
As fence from the bullets to lend him aid;
    You built up the stones, you packed the sod,
And there by his side, to cheer him,
    Your own brave body’s length, Sergeant Tod 

(Ballads of the War, p. 32)

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Armenia is cast to the dogs.  The love of Christ and the love of man have no longer it seems any power of appeal to the heart of civilised Europe.  Many of us are ashamed of being Englishmen.  We think it is a mockery that the British flag, with the red cross of St. George upon it, should continue to fly above our heads; for England, in conjunction with her fellow Powers, has broken her pledges; and, not content with standing, hands behind her back, to watch a defenceless Christian people torn limb from limb in the shambles of the Sultan, is actually still upholding the butcher at his unholy work.  And all this because she is, for politic reasons, afraid of precipitating a crisis which will come, so some think, and come with dishonour, at the last. (p. 5)

This people, 30 millions in old time, had been reduced to 3 millions by constant persecution under Musselman rule.  Then came the Berlin Congress in 1878….  Since that time to 1891, by a slow process of most cruel exaction, the lives of the Armenians had been made intolerable (pp. 6-7)

[This] people was to be wiped from the face of the earth at the will of the rottenest government that has ever disgraced the civilised world (p. 8)

So well has the “Shadow of God,” with apparently the full consent of Christian Europe, succeeded in his cruel work of extermination, that a country, 500 miles long by 300 miles broad, has been devastated by brigands and soldiers, whose inhuman deeds can only be described as the deeds of fiends from hell.  50,000 men, some say 100,000, mostly breadwinners, have perished; 47,000 houses and shops have been plundered or burned to the ground; 40,000 Christians have been forced by fear of torture and worse to embrace Islam; half a million, mostly women and children, are left without sufficient food, clothing, or means of support.  This exclusive of 6,000 massacred and 1,000 missing in the butcheries in Constantinople (p. 8)

The nation of 30,000,000 (some say 8,000,000) has been reduced to 1,000,000 (p. 9)

But there are some English people who think that there may be another way of escape than this of suicide for some of the widows and orphans of Armenians.  They have obtained a house and land which can be turned into an industrial farm, under British protection, and they are assured by employers of labour in the place that there is a demand for such labour as these Armenian refugees might perform (pp. 12-13)

(The Darkened West. An Appeal to England for Armenia)

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I am so persuaded that the very men we need to help the Empire in this supreme crisis—the men of the country side—are not coming forward as they should do, because they do not know the facts that went to the making of this war, or the absolute certainty that, unless we win through we must eventually have the German flag flying in place of the Union Jack, that I urge every effort should be made to hold meetings, not only in the large towns, but in the villages and smaller rural towns, and that appeals should be made to the public spirit of young Cumberland.  There are no men who can sustain the arduous work at the front better than the dalesmen, the long-limbed lads who have supped poddish, breathed the air of Cumberland, and strengthened their limbs in the hard work of the farm or mine.  It is to these countrymen more than the city lads that any commanding officer would look.  But to send them untrained and untaught to use a rifle against a trained Continental army would be murder.  What we want is to get these fine young fellows to so understand the crisis and the Empire’s danger as to feel that they must come forward and undergo this training.  I believe that if they will get hold of Blatchford’s pamphlet, “The War that was Foretold,” one penny, and if stirring addresses can be given to young men who have read that pamphlet they will rise to the occasion.  I know what the effect of such an appeal made to our young Keswick men has been.

(Carlisle Journal, 1914, 1 September, p. 5)

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Where all have blundered, why apportion
            blame?
    Rather with clarion-call to brotherhood
    Let each bethink him of the common good,
And hold to Freedom as no empty name;
This is no time each other to defame
    Seeing we are all made of common blood,
    Let not Conciliation’s nobler need
Yield to the fierce threat and passion none can
            tame.

All to the ropes! or else our barque will drive
    Straight for the rocks and we be ship-
            wrecked all
        In this overwhelming catastrophic tide.
Sirs, we are brethren! wherefore should we
            strive?
    Hark! from how many a grave there comes
            the call—
    “For Peace we hoped; for Right not
            might we died.”

(Carlisle Journal, 3 October 1919, p. 7)

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