I have always looked forward to the romance of a European war,” he said.
There still hangs in his room in Mortimer Street an old Flemish picture, which he had picked up somewhere, of horsemen in doublets and plumed hats, fighting beneath the walls of a city. It was, I think, the only painting in his possession. Perhaps it was this picture that represented to him the romance of which he spoke; but he did not hide from himself the terrible side of war. Happily thoughts about war can be given in his own words. The following piece appeared in the first edition of the Morning Post of April 23, 1915, under the title, An Old Love—
“ ‘I know nothing about war,’ a boy of nineteen said to me two days ago, ‘except, of course, that I’ve heard of its horrors; yet, somehow, in spite of the horrors, there seems to be something in it different to anything else in the world, something a little bit finer.’
“He spoke wistfully, as one who feared that to him war would always be an unreal, distant, second-hand thing, to be read about in special editions, and peeped at through the medium of cinematograph shows. He felt that the thing that was a little bit finer than anything else in the world would never come into his life.
“Nearly every red-blooded human boy has had war, in some shape or form, for his first love; if his blood has remained red and he has kept some of his boyishness in after life, that first love will never have been forgotten. No one could really forget those wonderful leaden cavalry soldiers; the horses were as sleek and prancing as though they had never left the parade-ground, and the uniforms were correspondingly spick and span, but the amount of campaigning and fighting they got through was prodigious. There are other unforgettable memories for those who had brothers to play with and fight with, of sieges and ambushes and pitched encounters, of the slaying of an entire garrison without quarter, or of chivalrous, punctilious courtesy to a defeated enemy. Then there was the slow unfolding of the long romance of actual war, particularly of European war, ghastly, devastating, heartrending in its effect, and yet somehow captivating to the imagination. The Thirty Years’ War was one of the most hideously cruel wars ever waged, but, in conjunction with the subsequent campaigns of the Great Louis, it throws a glamour over the scene of the present struggle. The thrill that those far-off things call forth in us may be ethically indefensible, but it comes in the first place from something too deep to be driven out; the magic region of the Low Countries is beckoning to us again, as it beckoned to our forefathers, who went campaigning there almost from force of habit.
“One must admit that we have in these Islands a variant from the red-blooded type. One or two young men have assured me that they are not in the least interested in the war—‘I’m not at all patriotic, you know,’ they announce, as one might announce that one was not a vegetable or did not use a safety-razor. There are others whom I have met within the recent harrowing days who had no place for the war crisis in their thoughts and conversations; they would talk by the hour about chamber-music, Greek folk-dances, Florentine art, and the difficulty of getting genuine old oak furniture, but the national honour and the national danger were topics that bored them. One felt that the war would affect them chiefly as involving a possible shortage in the supply of eau-de-Cologne or by debarring them from visiting some favourite art treasure at a Munich gallery. It is inconceivable that these persons were ever boys, they have certainly not grown up into men; one cannot call them womanish—the women of our race are made of different stuff. They belong to no sex and it seems a pity that they should belong to any nation; other nations probably have similar encumbrances, but we seem to have more of them than we either desire or deserve.
“There are other men among us who are patriotic, one supposes, but with a patriotism that one cannot understand; it must be judged by a standard that we should never care to set up. It seems to place a huckstering interpretation on honour, to display sacred things in a shop window, marked in plain figures. ‘If we remained neutral,’ as a leading London morning paper once pleaded, ‘we should be, from the commercial point of view, in precisely the same position as the United States. We should be able to trade with all the belligerents (so far as war allows of trade with them); we should be able to capture the bulk of their trade in neutral markets; we should keep our expenditure down; we should keep out of debt; we should have healthy finances.’
“A question was buzzing in my head by the time I had finished reading those alluring arguments:
“Some men of noble stock were made;
Some glory in the murder-blade:
Some praise a science or an art,
But I like honourable trade.
“The poet has given a satiric meaning to the last word but one in those lines; perhaps that is why they flashed so readily to the mind.
“One remembers with some feeling of relief the spectacle last August of boys and youths marching and shouting through the streets in semi-disciplined mobs, waving the flags of France and Britain. There is perhaps nothing very patriotic in shouting and flag-waving, but it is the only way these youngsters had of showing their feelings.”
When at last Munro managed to enlist in the 2nd King Edward’s Horse, he was supremely happy. He put on a trooper’s uniform with the exaltation of a novice assuming the religious habit. But after a few months he found that he was not strong enough for life in a cavalry regiment and he arranged to exchange into the 22nd Royal Fusiliers. He chafed at the long months of training in England and longed to get to the front, but military discipline was to him something sacred and, whether in England or in France, he did his utmost to conform himself to it and to force others to do the same. One of his comrades told me that at the front they would sometimes put their packs on a passing lorry; it was against orders, and Munro refused to lighten the strain of a long march in this way, although the straps of the pack galled his shoulders.
Twice he was offered a commission, but he refused to take one. He distrusted his ability to be a good officer and also he desired to go on fighting side by side with his comrades, one of whom, now an officer and a prisoner in Germany, had been his friend before the war. I was told by a man of his company that one day a General was conducted along the trenches by the Colonel commanding the regiment and recognised Munro, whom he had met at dinner-parties in London. “What on earth are you doing here?” he asked, and said that he had a job to be done at the rear which would be the very thing for him. Munro excused himself from accepting it. Another opportunity of less arduous work was offered him. Men who could speak German were ordered to report: interpreters were wanted to deal with prisoners. Munro reported, but urged that it had taken him two years to get out to the front and that he desired to remain there. He was allowed to do as he wished. And his gaiety never left him. Those who were with him speak of the tales with which he amused them. He even founded a club in one place at which they were stationed, and called it the Back Kitchen Club, because the members met in the kitchen of a peasant’s cottage.
When he came home on leave, it was evident that the strain of military life was telling on him. He was thin and his face was haggard. But the spiritual change wrought in him by the war was greater than the physical. He told me that he could never come back to the old life in London. And he wrote asking me to find out from a person in Russia whether it would be possible to acquire land in Siberia to till and to hunt, and whether a couple of Yakutsk lads could be got as servants. It was the love of the woodlands and the wild things in them, that he had felt as a child, returning. The dross had been burnt up in the flame of war.
Munro fell in the Beaumont-Hamel action in November 1916. On the 12th he and his comrades were at Beldancourt. At one o’clock in the morning of the 14th they went to Mailly. As the men were crossing No-Man’s-Land to occupy trenches evacuated by the enemy, Munro was shot through the head.
“Poor Saki! What an admiration we all had for him,” wrote the officer in command of the 22nd Royal Fusiliers. “I always quoted him as one of the heroes of the
