BOOK II:  AND THE REST—­WAR

  Part I:  “Rangoon” Nights

      I the eternal waterway
     II padre Monty and major hardy come aboard
    III “C.  Of E., Now and always”
     IV the vigil
      V penance
     VI major hardy and padre Monty finish the voyage

  Part II:  The White Heights

    VII Mudros, in the Isle of lemnos
   VIII the green room
     IX proceeding forthwith to gallipoli
      X Suvla and helles at last
     XI an atmosphere of shocks and sudden death
    XII sacred to white
   XIII “Live deep, and let the lesser things live long”
    XIV the nineteenth of December
     XV transit
    XVI the hours before the end
   XVII the end of gallipoli
  XVIII the end of Rupert’s story

TELL ENGLAND

A PROLOGUE BY PADRE MONTY

Sec.1

In the year that the Colonel died he took little Rupert to see the swallows fly away.  I can find no better beginning than that.

When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert Ray’s book, “Tell England,” I carried the manuscript into my room one bright autumn afternoon, and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark.  I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas.  Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness.  There are times when one prefers the twilight.  Doubtless the tale held me fascinated because it revealed the schooldays of those boys whom I met in their young manhood, and told afresh that wild old Gallipoli adventure which I shared with them.  Though, sadly enough, I take Heaven to witness that I was not the idealised creature whom Rupert portrays.  God bless them, how these boys will idealise us!

Then again, as Rupert tells you, it was I who suggested to him the writing of his story.  And well I recall how he demurred, asking: 

“But what am I to write about?” For he was always diffident and unconscious of his power.

“Is Gallipoli nothing to write about?” I retorted.  “And you can’t have spent five years at a great public school like Kensingtowe without one or two sensational things.  Pick them out and let us have them.  For whatever the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is certainly to tell stories.”

“But I thought,” he broke in, “that you’re always maintaining that the greatest fiction should be occupied with Subjective Incident.”

“Don’t interrupt, you argumentative child,” I said (you will find Rupert is impertinent enough in one place to suggest that I have a tendency to be rude and a tendency to hold forth).  “Surely the ideal story must contain the maximum of Objective Incident with the maximum of Subjective Incident.  Only give us the exciting events of your schooldays, and describe your thoughts as they happened, and you will unconsciously reveal what sort of scoundrelly characters you and your friends were.  And when you get to the Gallipoli part, well, you can give us chiefly your thoughts, for Gallipoli, as far as dramatic incident is concerned, is well able to shift for itself.”