The Specimen Case/The Dead March
iii
The Dead March
I woke very early that morning with the sound of music in my ears. It was a band, a distant band; evidently, I thought, some troops are changing camp, and I lay awake listening until the strains exercised a strange possession over me, for never, I declare, had I heard a melody so haunting. It was all things. From the wail of lament it rose to the blazonry of triumph, from joy passed to sorrow, spoke now of hope and now of despair, shrilled victory in defeat and relentlessly voiced the barrenness of conquest. It was of pagan grandeur, of Arcadian simplicity, of cities and of glades. A mother with her laughing child; Cæsar to his victorious army; a shepherd fluting at a spring; a dead warrior lying stark by night on a desolate waste. Sometimes I thought that it was approaching, sometimes receding, but this I discovered was nothing but the vagarity of the wind, and presently the music was no more and the night was empty of sound and cold with the loneliness of bereavement.
It was still very early when I rose and went out. Day was just breaking, like day at the beginning of time before things were. The villages of Preston and Sutton Poyntz lay beneath me in the valley, but they were as a picture that is limned and no smoke came from the chimneys of their hearths, nor was there any sound save that from the more distant water-meadows beyond; at intervals a sheep-bell gave a note. About me lay the grave-mounds of the ancient dead and the wide, open spaces of the wind-shorn heights.
By the time I had reached the cleft of the valley the sun had risen and what had hitherto been a particle of eternity had become a day. The earliest mushroom-gatherer was swinging along the beach on his way to the salted downs, as his daily custom is, and the melodious confusion of the sheep-bells told that the flock was being driven from its nightly harbourage in the enclosed pasture to the hazardous freedom of the cliffs. Presently they swung past me in a billowy mass, and leaping at a gap debouche into a barley stubble. An urchin and a tousled hound accompanied and controlled them; when they reached the heights the child dropped a careless word to the wistful dog, and throwing himself down on the turf by the very edge of the sheer precipice, drew a volume from a pocket of his ragged coat.
The little bay here has this peculiarity: that at one point all the lighter kinds of wreckage come ashore, while further along one may find (especially after a storm) bolts and nails, cannon balls and parts of strange and obsolete weapons, coins of all ages, and odd and unexpected things—all these, I say, may be found along this stretch, but never by any chance wreckage that will float. It was here on this morning that I picked up an ancient bit of silver, a denarius of Rome, lying among the stones. It was somewhat encrusted with pitch, and as I walked I rubbed it with a little moist sand to clear the lettering.
The mushroom-gatherer had gone by now, passing me with a word after the friendly custom of these parts, and I had fancied that I had the beach to myself, until, happening to look up, my eyes were attracted by a striking figure. Doubtless I should have noted his approach had I not been so engrossed in rubbing my find and trying to decipher its inscription, for he was now standing directly in front of me. I took him to be a visitor who had come out for an early bathe, probbaly a sojourner at one of the old coastguard cottages just beyond the hills, where people stay in summer, for he wore sandals and a shapeless dressing-gown or robe of purple. He was a man well advanced in years and his expression, without being in anyway distinguished, was dignified and shrewd. His odd attire might be excused in circumstances where men relax, but his salutation challenged resentment, until I remembered that the ground on which we stood and the eternal hills around were an enduring memorial to those dim ages when our race was shaping in the mould. Here on every side the landmarks are the temples or the citadels, the graves or the pleasances of contending races who achieved their destinies and are no more, while to this day that ancient leveller, the ploughman, mixes their bones impartially and lays bare their household gods without reverence and scarcely with curiosity.
"Hail, Briton!" had been his greeting.
I stared for a moment and then smiled to myself. "Here," I thought, "is one of those enthusiasts who lose themselves in the past. Doubtless he has a theory about some obscure fosse or vallum, and in the everlasting consideration of it he has become absent-minded." For the moment, I say, I was taken aback; then, observing that the lines of his face were not destitute of humour, I had the impulse to recall him to the present by responding in like strain.
"Greetings," I accordingly replied with fitting gravity. "Greeting, Imperial Rome!"
Instead of betraying any confusion or surprise, my new acquaintance inclined his head slightly, as though receiving homage that was due.
"This spot pleases me well, as it ever did," he mused aloud. "It was here that our prows first touched after voyaging across from Vectis" (his glance indicated the single gleaming shoulder that the Isle of Wight raised above the thin sea mist), "and in my tent, pitched in yon meadow just beyond the stream, I composed at nights the march that was on your lips."
"A march—on my lips just now?" I stammered.
"Assuredly, or I should not have spoken you. You know the music of it? Nay, then listen."
I listened, and very faintly in the distance I heard the refrain of the melody that had so impressed me. Possibly I had been humming it, as he said, but quite unconsciously.
"It lacks the plaintive quality of flutes," he remarked critically as we listened. "But that is an instrument for which our martial bands made no provision."
"You are a musician then?" I said.
"An amateur," he admitted carelessly. "Still, one who as a mere proconsul turned his back on a despot, rather than endure his discords, may be allowed to claim an ear."
My knowledge of music—or of despots—did not enable me to identify the particular ruler he alluded to. I sought enlightenment obliquely.
"Was he indeed so very poor a player?"
"He was not only that. After making due allowance for his exalted rank, he was, I would assert, the very worst player who has ever ventured to confront an audience. Moreover, he was partial to the fiddle, of all instruments, and prone to resort to it at inopportune moments."
"Your own composition" I ventured.
He waved his hand in deprecation.
"I do not seek comparison," he said. "In my opinion the arts are scarcely the fit attribute of a soldier, except perchance, as in the case of the first Cæsar, to record his victories. But I was younger then and not long married. Around and before me lay the doubts and dangers of an arduous campaign in an unknown land; so that, under the stars at times, and ever to the accompaniment of the breakers on this rocky shore (it has changed but little), I felt inspired to voice the hopeless valour of the Durotriges."
I suppose my look indicated the blankness of my mind on the subject of the Durotriges.
"The inhabitants of this region—Belgæ our historians deemed them," he explained. "Less capably armed than the similar tribes of Gaul, they vied with them in desperate courage. For three days and three nights the tribesmen here withstood the Second Legion, yielding only foot by foot until they had covered their retirement to their great hill-fortress, two hours' march yonder to the north."
"Maiden Castle!" I exclaimed; for, about eight miles distant from the place we stood on, there exists to this day a stronghold such as he described, a camp so colossal in its scope, so ambitious in its scheme of ramparts, that it is scarcely credible as the achievement of a primitive people, toiling almost literally with their hands alone. Inferior, neither to the Pyramids nor the Sphinx in its solitary grandeur, it would certainly be much visited by our tourists were it but placed say in China or Peru.
"Dunium we called it. There the entire tribe assembled with their flocks and herds well secured, and there they might have held us at bay until we wearied of the siege or until Claudius recalled us, had it not been for one weakness to which the inhabitants of this island were ever prone."
"And that was?" I inquired.
"They were too late, being over-sanguine in a false security. Dunium was feverishly begun, it would appear, under the threat of Julius Cæsar's invasion, but he failed to penetrate these wilds and, the danger passing, Dunium was never finished. There existed, we discovered, a weakness in the ramparts to the south. Between our landing and the investment of their camp there was not time to repair the deficiency. It proved fatal. Once our velites had gained the higher plane the most devoted valour, backed only by flint-heads, availed the defenders nothing. Dunium was ours. A great fight. We gave them martial honours. Væ victis! it must ever be, but a conqueror should know how to be magnanimous in victory. Their dead rest in peace under their own rites."
Far out at sea a great bird, poised in swift flight aloft, spied what it sought and flashed its message shoreward. In one of the hidden forts that stud the coast a single cannot cleared its throat.
"Thunder of Jove! but that was a shrewd bolt!" exclaimed he of the purple. "The tribe still follows Mars?"
"There are no young men in the valley now," I made answer. "They carry their standard on many an alien field."
"It is known to us; we, too, have met the Hun. . . . . Yes, this spot was often in my thoughts in after years, and whenever our arms encountered outmatched valour I again saw the terraced heights of Dunium. Ofttime, when a report of some deed of fitting worth reached my ears, I would have one of our bands perform my march—though they knew not it was mine—to the memory of the brave. It was set to eighteen instruments of brass—six trumpets, six horns"
The mist from the land had been stealing down the valley as we talked. Quite suddenly it enveloped us, shutting out all things beyond and even each one from the other. I called aloud but there was no reply; took a few steps blindly forward only to meet the grey earth of the cliff. Then the wind from off the sea lapped back the mist and I found that I was again alone on the deserted shore.
I walked back along the winding stream and past the spot where once a leisured gentleman of Durnovaria built for himself a villa. Its tesselated pavement still remains in situ. On the highway I fell in with a soldier and we walked along together.
"I suppose a draft of the 4th moved out of Upton Camp about three o'clock this morning," I remarked when the occasion offered. "I heard what I took to be their band."
"The 4th left two days ago," he answered. "There's no one in at Upton now."
"Then the band?" I persisted. "What band was there about?"
He looked at me a little curiously—or perhaps I fancied it.
"I heard no band," he said, "and I was out on guard duty up at Bincombe then. If there had been a band," he decided with the doggedness of simple conviction, "I reckon I should 'a heard it."
When I reached home again the morning papers had just arrived. You will recall that day perhaps. This was what their head-lines blazed forth:
Heroic stand at Mons
British desperately outnumbered
A little later I took an opportunity to complete the scouring of my coin. It disclosed the head of an elderly man, dignified without being distinguished, and wearing a wreath of laurel. The inscription around it was this:
IMP. CÆSAR VESPASIANVS AVG.
Vespasian? Well, certainly, if any emperor were destined to become a Slave of the Coin it might—despite his many virtues—well be Vespasian.
Ravenscourt Park, 1919.