Here We Have Tens Of Thousands Of Very
Young Men, Boys In Mind, The Best Fed, Healthiest, Happiest
Crowd Of
Boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing
atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and
temptations,
All mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind
to fill their vacant hours each day and their holidays.
Naturally they take to birds'-nesting and to hunting every
living thing they encounter during their walks on the downs.
Every wild thing runs and flies from them, and is chased or
stoned, the weak-winged young are captured, and the nests
picked or kicked up out of the turf. In this way the
creatures are being extirpated, and one can foresee that when
hares and rabbits are no more, and even the small birds of the
plain, larks, pipits, wheatears, stonechats, and whincats,
have vanished, the hunters in khaki will take to the chase
of yet smaller creatures - crane-flies and butterflies and
dragon-flies, and even the fantastic, elusive hover-flies
which the hunters of little game will perhaps think the most
entertaining fly of all.
But it would be idle to grieve much at this small incidental
and inevitable result of making use of the plain as a military
camp and training-ground. The old god of war is not yet dead
and rotting on his iron hills; he is on the chalk hills with
us just now, walking on the elastic turf, and one is glad to
mark in his brown skin and sparkling eyes how thoroughly alive
he is.
A little after midnight on the morning of June 21, 1908, a
Shrewton cock began to crow, and that trumpet sound, which I
never hear without a stirring of the blood, on account of old
associations, informed me that the late moon had risen or was
about to rise, linking the midsummer evening and morning
twilights, and I set off to Stonehenge. It was a fine still
night, without a cloud in the pale, dusky blue sky, thinly
sprinkled with stars, and the crescent moon coming up above
the horizon. After the cock ceased crowing a tawny owl began
to hoot, and the long tremulous mellow sound followed me for
some distance from the village, and then there was perfect
silence, broken occasionally by the tinkling bells of a little
company of cyclists speeding past towards "The Stones." I was
in no hurry: I only wished I had started sooner to enjoy
Salisbury Plain at its best time, when all the things which
offend the lover of nature are invisible and nonexistent.
Later, when the first light began to appear in the east before
two o'clock, it was no false dawn, but insensibly grew
brighter and spread further, until touches of colour, very
delicate, palest amber, then tender yellow and rose and
purple, began to show. I felt then as we invariably feel
on such occasions, when some special motive has called us
forth in time to witness this heavenly change, as of a new
creation -
The miracle of diuturnity
Whose instancy unbeds the lark,
that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it
were wasted days!
O that unbedding of the lark! The world that was so still
before now all at once had a sound; not a single song and not
in one place, but a sound composed of a thousand individual
sounds, rising out of the dark earth at a distance on my right
hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far and wide even as
the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens - a
sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing
instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not
like the voices of earthly beings. They were not human nor
angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible
world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled
with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to
express the mystery and glory of the morning.
It was but eight minutes past two o'clock when this "unbedding
of the lark" began, and the heavenly music lasted about
fourteen minutes, then died down to silence, to recommence
about half an hour later. At first I wondered why the sound
was at a distance from the road on my right hand and not on my
left hand as well. Then I remembered what I had seen on that
side, how the "boys" at play on Sundays and in fact every day
hunt the birds and pull their nests out, and I could only
conclude that the lark has been pretty well wiped out from all
that part of the plain over which the soldiers range.
At Stonehenge I found a good number of watchers, about a
couple of hundred, already assembled, but more were coming in
continually, and a mile or so of the road to Amesbury visible
from "The Stones" had at times the appearance of a ribbon of
fire from the lamps of this continuous stream of coming
cyclists. Altogether about five to six hundred persons
gathered at "The Stones," mostly young men on bicycles who
came from all the Wiltshire towns within easy distance, from
Salisbury to Bath. I had a few good minutes at the ancient
temple when the sight of the rude upright stones looking black
against the moonlit and star-sprinkled sky produced an
unexpected feeling in me: but the mood could not last; the
crowd was too big and noisy, and the noises they made too
suggestive of a Bank Holiday crowd at the Crystal Palace.
At three o'clock a ribbon of slate-grey cloud appeared above
the eastern horizon, and broadened by degrees, and pretty soon
made it evident that the sun would be hidden at its rising at
a quarter to four. The crowd, however, was not down-hearted;
it sang and shouted; and by and by, just outside the
barbed-wire enclosure a rabbit was unearthed, and about three
hundred young men with shrieks of excitement set about its
capture.
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