home  >  books by FWB >  1929, The Three Half Moons > THE REAR-GUARD

PART I

II

THE REAR-GUARD

The great timber mills of Wharetangi are away at the Other End of Nowhere. In the old days, John Broadbanks and I visited them occasionally, partly for the sake of a few days outback, and partly in order to conduct a service or two for the workers, their wives and families. It was a sensational experience to see the giant trees felled, dragged by bullock teams down to the stream, borne by the stream to the mills, and there handled as deftly as a Chinaman handles chopsticks. And, when the hour for service came, it was a sight for sore eyes to mark the avidity with which the families gathered in the great timber-shed, and, sitting on logs, benches, machines, boxes, or anything that offered, listened as though their lives depended on it.

On the day of which I am now thinking, the rain was falling in torrents. John and I — the guests of the manager — were ensconced in armchairs beside the fire, reading, John was immersed in Stewart White’s Blazed Trail.

‘I knew it was a tale of the lumber camps,’ he explained, ‘so I thought it would be just the thing to read up here. What have you got hold of?’

As a matter of fact, I had brought no book with me. But I had picked up a magazine from the side-board, and had been engrossed in an article by Colonel L. A. Mainwaring, on The Duties of the Rear-Guard. The Colonel shows the numerous ways in which an effective rear-guard serves a retreating army. It hampers and hinders the advance of the pursuers; it gathers up and brings in the wounded, the stragglers, and those who have fallen out of the forces in retreat; it enables the army that it guards to retire in good order and to prepare for a resumption of hostilities and, very often, its good offices turn a temporary defeat into an ultimate and complete victory. Colonel Mainwaring quotes Mr. Bennett Burleigh’s description of the retreat of the Turkish forces after the disastrous battle of Lule-a-Burgas. The Turks had no rear-guard. ‘After the battle,’ Mr. Burleigh says, ‘the strongest of the retreating Turks speedily got to the front; and the weak, the sick, the wounded struggled painfully behind. Thousands of the wounded made pathetic efforts to keep up with their comrades, but many fell by the roadside, crawled off the track, and died. For three days all were without food; and every stream was turned into a mud-puddle in the fearful struggle of the sufferers to quench their thirst.’ Colonel Mainwaring adorns his article with some thrilling recitals of rear-guard actions. ‘There is a glory about the rear-guard,’ he says, ‘that cannot be eclipsed by any other form of military exploit.’

The idea had captivated my mind, and I read the passage to John.

‘Well,’ replied my companion, ‘that’s odd! I was reading, not ten minutes ago, Stewart White’s eulogy on the value and importance of the Rear-Crew. I’ll mark the passage, and, when you’ve had enough of Colonel Mainwaring, you can refresh your memory.’

II

Those who have read Mr, White’s stirring story will probably recall the page that John had reached. In the later chapters of this book, Mr. White describes the great drive on the river. For months the vast solitudes have resounded with the ringing of axes, the tearing of saws, and the thunder of the falling trees. The huge logs are stacked up in enormous heaps all along the banks of the river, waiting for the spring-time and the thaw. At last the winter comes to an end. The ice breaks up; the waters are open; and the accumulated hoard is committed to the tide. From bank to bank the river is one vast carpet of timber. The agile and sinewy workers, trained to the hazardous task, leap from log to log, giving a push here and a pull there, directing the course of the drive and guarding the whole immense mass from becoming jammed. But Mr. Stewart White says that, if you would see the best work of the drive, you must go, not to the front, but to the rear. He explains that, along either bank of the river — among the bushes, on sandbars and in the roots of trees — hundreds and hundreds of logs became stranded when the main drive passed. These logs — and they include some of the best — are restored to the current by the labors of the Rear-Crew, And, since their task is the most difficult and most dangerous of all, every man in the camps aspires to a place in the Rear-Crew. ‘It was considered the height of a log-man’s glory to belong to the Rear-Crew,’ Mr. White tells us. A member of the Rear-Crew had to be able to ride any kind of log in any water ; he had to be able to propel that log by jumping on it, by rolling it squirrel-fashion with his feet, by punting it as one would punt a canoe; he had to be skilful in pushing, prying, and poling other logs from the quarter-deck of the same cranky craft; he had to be prepared at any and all times to jump waist-deep into the river, to work in ice-water for Hours at a stretch; and, just because all this and much more was expected of him, it was considered the height of a logman’s glory to belong to the Rear-Crew. Here were the pick of the Fighting Forty — men renowned among men — men who were afraid of nothing!’

Now, this struck me as wonderfully suggestive. It put an idea into my head, and I followed it with the avidity with which a detective follows a clue.

The Rear-Guard! The Rear-Guard! There is no glory like the glory of the Rear-Guard!’ says Colonel Mainwaring.

The Rear-Crew! The Rear-Crew! ‘There is no glory like the glory of the Rear-Crew!’ says Mr. Stewart White.

I seemed to hear, as I sat back in my chair, a thousand sinister voices muttering contemptuously: ‘The hindmost! The hindmost! The devil take the hindmost!’ But, helped by Colonel Mainwaring and Mr White, I saw that there is a glory about the hindmost that such mutterers are too blind to see. I saw, as I had never seen before, that the struggle of the ages is the struggle for the straggler. The battle that the very stars in their courses are fighting is, not the battle of the foremost, but the battle of the hindmost The man who forges his way to the front determines his own destiny. But millions of covetous eyes are turned upon the man who lags behind.

The hindmost!

The hindmost!

What is to become of the hindmost? The hindmost is the prize for which all earth’s forces are contending.

III

If, from some dizzy, aerial eminence, one could listen to the confused and jangling discords of earth, they would fall upon the ear in a dull wave of meaningless sound. It would be a deep, monotonous roar, like the sad and voiceless murmur of the ocean as it beats itself to spray upon the crags. Into that melancholy monotone all the screams of the world’s pain, and all the songs of the world’s joy, would be merged. It is like a witch’s cauldron: every laugh and every sob have been tossed into it. The voices of good men and the voices of bad men are indistinguishable. The oath of the scoundrel and the silvery laughter of the little child are as one.

But if one could analyze that confused roar, what a revelation would stand forth! Like mingled fluids that, beneath the witchery of the alchemist, separate from one another, the babel beneath would fall into two distinct parts. The one half utters itself in a cry that is as terrifying as an Indian warwhoop. The other half becomes vocal in a chant that is as sweet as a vesper chime.

‘The devil take the hindmost f cries the one.

The best for the hindmost!’ cries the other.

And, as I listen to those first voices — the sinister voices — I fear that among them, I can clearly distinguish the voice of Nature. Nature has no pity for the hindmost. Her watchword is efficiency. Here, for example, is a great beech forest! Nature wishes these woods to be the home of some lovely feathered songster. She therefore takes the trouble to produce a hundred times as many birds as she really needs. And then she turns into the forest a few hawks and owls, cats and weasels. And, when you see these swooping, prowling, preying things tearing some poor bird to pieces, you may be sure that it was the hindmost that fell into the cruel creature’s clutches. And it will be the hindmost again to-morrow that will be caught ; and so on day by day. Each day the hindmost will fall a victim, and only the foremost will survive. And then the hawks and the owls, the cats and the weasels will be threatened with starvation. Only the foremost among them will be cunning enough to capture the surviving birds; and the hindmost among them, catching no birds, must perish. It is Nature’s way. Nature is as fond as I am of gentle and shapely and lovable things. See, for example, how she covers this broad African plain with elands, gazelles, springboks and other beautiful antelopes. But Nature insists that her graceful things must be of the finest texture. They must be lissome and agile and swift as well as delicate and dainty. So she turns a few hyenas in among them. And, whenever you see a striped hyena greedily crunching the bones of a limp and lifeless gazelle,, you may be sure that it is with the blood of the hindmost that its hideous fangs are imbrued. The markings of the pretty but unfortunate victim were slightly defective, and therefore treacherously conspicuous or perhaps its ears were a trifle heavy, or its gait a shade too clumsy, or its pace a little too slow. The hyenas weed out the hindmost; the foremost survive to produce a new generation. And so the antelopes become fewer and the hyenas multiply. And, in the process, the rivalry among the hyenas themselves becomes more intense. Only the foremost antelopes are left: they are difficult to catch; there are not enough of them to satisfy the ravenous hunger of all these ugly brutes. Moreover, since only the foremost antelopes survive, it follows that the hindmost hyenas cannot catch them; one by one, therefore, the hindmost hyenas must starve. And so, among things beautiful and among things terrible, Nature is always at work weeding out the hindmost. Darwin called it the Law of Natural Selection; Herbert Spencer called it the Law of the Survival of the Fittest; but, by whatever name you call it, there it is!

But, although, amidst the babel of voices that mutter The devil take the hindmost! I happen to have distinguished the familiar voice of Nature, I do not mean to imply that hers is the most clamant and insistent of those voices. By no means ! From the bustling halls of commerce and the busy looms of industry the same shout rises- ‘The devil take the hindmost? The weak must go to the wall: the strong alone survive. The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. A thousand voices blend in the glorification of the foremost and a thousand forces conspire to relegate the hindmost to obscurity and perdition.

IV

Then, all at once, as I reflected on Colonel Mainwaring’s tribute to the Rear-Guard, and on Mr. Stewart White’s enthusiasm about the Rear-Crew, it flashed upon me that I had met some such sentiment before. Where was it? Ah, to be sure! It was in the great triumphant proclamation of the deliverance of Israel from Babylonian captivity. Awake, awake! put on thy strength. O Zion! put on thy beautiful garments, O captive daughter of Jerusalem! for ye shall not go out with haste nor go by flight; for the Lord will go before you and the God of Israel will be your rear-guard! The captives were to issue from Babylon, that is to say, not as a mob, but as an army. They were not to rush out pell-mell, helter-skelter, exposed to the assaults of any marauding bedouins who cared to prey upon them; but they were to cross the desert in orderly rank and in battle formation. The Lord will be your vanguard — guarding the foremost. And the God of Israel will be your rear-guard — shielding the hindmost. The Lord will be your vanguard — He is as jealous as is Nature for the preservation of the foremost. And the God of Israel will be your rear-guard — He feels a solicitude such as Nature never knows for the weakling, the straggler, the hindmost.

V

Now, within the entire compass of Christian revelation, there is nothing more striking or more beautiful than that. It is the very essence of the gospel. In the history of the pilgrimage of the Children of Israel, there is nothing more dramatic than the way in which, when the Egyptians pursued them, the Pillar of Cloud, which, until then, had always gone ahead of them, moved to the rear and stood in gloomy splendor between the pursued and the pursuers. In that critical hour Jehovah placed himself between Egypt’s foremost chariots and Israel’s hindmost stragglers. Which reminds me.

I remember, as a boy, going to hear Mr, Spurgeon preach. It was a hot summer’s morning. The cavernous immensity of the huge tabernacle took my breath away. To my childish fancy the preacher seemed miles and miles from me, and I imagined that his superiority over other preachers must consist in his ability to throw his voice such enormous distances. He preached that morning on this very episode — the Pillar of Cloud moving in solemn grandeur to the rear of the pursued people. His point, as far as I can recall it, was that our worst enemies always pounce uffon us from behind — the ghosts that rise out of the vanished years, the sins that we have left in the days gone by. He pictured the Saviour intervening between ourselves and these sinister assailants, and described, as he so well could, the Christian triumph over such menacing pursuers. ‘The Lord stands between his people and their sins!’  he cried. ‘Jesus, who veiled the glory of his divinity in the cloud of our humanity, interposes between us and our transgressions! The Egyptians shall not come near us; and, when morning breaks, we shall see them dead upon the shore! Then shall we sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; our sins and iniquities hath he cast into the sea!’ The passage made a deep impression upon me when I first heard it, and it rushes vividly back upon my mind to-day.

VI

No wise general regards with equanimity the loss of his hindmost straggler. The weakest, the weariest, the most terribly wounded cannot safely be left upon the road. Let me enforce this contention by telling a couple of stories.

The first is from the Old Testament. It concerns a young slave whom the Amalekites allowed to fall away from their forces. David captured the lad, treated him kindly, and obtained from him the information that enabled him to locate and destroy the Amalekites.

The second is from Rab and His Friends. Old Dr. John Brown, of Haddington, was visiting an aged parishioner on her deathbed. She seemed wonderfully serene and confident. Wishing to test her faith, he said to her, ‘But, Janet, what would you say if, after all he has done for you, God should let you drop into hell?’ ‘If he does,’ replied Janet, ‘He’ll lose mair than I’ll do!’ As Doctor Brown so justly observes, there is, in that rejoinder, a spiritual insight that is almost sublime. What is the loss of a human soul compared with the forfeiture of the divine honor?

The Lord will be your vanguard! the prophet cries, as the emancipated people set out on their pilgrimage, The Lord will be your vanguard — protecting the foremost! And the Lord will be your rear-guard — shielding the hindmost! And so, with a place in his great heart for the weak as well as for the strong, for the hindmost as well as for the foremost, the Most High gathers up all his stragglers and brings them safely to Jerusalem.

F.W. Boreham.